Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Matthew Schultz
http://www.sweatlodge.love/about.htmlDate this lecture was recorded: May 15, 2019.
Today’s podcast features a conversation between Michael Kokal and avant-garde musician and artist Matthew Schultz. He was a founding member of the dark ambient band Lab Report, which included such diverse musicians as Genesis P-Orridge, Lydia Lunch and Chris Connelly. Schultz also invented the A.T.G. or Anti Tank Guitar and utilized this instrument with the Lab Report and Pigface. In total, Schultz has appeared on over 29 cds with 9 solo productions and 2 feature film soundtracks. Matt has also spent time in Peru working at an Ayahuasca healing center as a facilitator. He has worked extensively with Lakota and Mayan Elders for over 15 years and is a water pourer for sweat lodges. He continues to be involved in indigenous medicine ceremonies of many varieties.
More information about Matt’s art
More information about Matt’s SweatLodge
More information about Matt’s music and Lab Report
End of the Road Podcast with Michael Kokal
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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Several years ago, as the long-time salonners will remember,
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I was asked to mention it whenever there was a coincidence connected with one of these podcasts from the salon.
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Well, I’ve never been clear about the distinctions between a coincidence and a synchronicity,
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but to me, I’ve always thought of a synchronicity
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as a coincidence on steroids.
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And this podcast today seems to have some synchronicity involved with it.
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To begin with, I learned about this interview through an email message that came to an old
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address that I hadn’t checked for a while.
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As our long-time salonners know, I’m usually running a few months behind in
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reading email because, well, right now I need to be using most of my time working on my two writing
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projects. But somehow an email popped up out of the sea of unread messages I have and it has led
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to today’s program. Now, if I told you that the interview that I’m about to play was between an Illinois-born
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lawyer who was also an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Notre Dame,
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and he was talking to a man named Matt, who, after many adventures, is now a musician who
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works with psychedelic medicines, and both of them are experienced with ayahuasca. Well, if I told you
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that, you would most likely think I’m talking about myself and my friend Matt Palomary. As you recall,
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it was only a few weeks ago that I played an interview in which Matt talked about his music
00:01:56 ►
and medicine work. But here’s the synchronicity. I’m talking about two other people. The lawyer, engineer, podcaster is Michael Koko, and the person he’s interviewing is the avant-garde musician and artist Matthew Schultz.
00:02:14 ►
When I first listened to this conversation, I was impressed with the path that Schultz has taken to, well, basically arrive at a place that, in my opinion, any of us would be proud to have reached.
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Now, Schultz’s path isn’t one that holds a lot of attraction for me,
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but then let’s be honest, I’m almost twice his age.
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What does attract me are his ideas.
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Because this isn’t somebody who drank ayahuasca one night
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and then became an evangelist for the experience with,
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well, without deeply understanding what’s taking place.
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And while you may not agree with everything he says, although for the most part I do,
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nonetheless, it’s really refreshing to hear someone coming back from observing ayahuasca
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tourism up close and who also has a much deeper understanding of the problems that now seem
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to be growing in that area.
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So I’m going to turn it over
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to Michael, which by the way was my little brother’s name also. Another coincidence to me at least.
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Anyway, here’s Michael and Matt and I’ll be back after this with a few more words.
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Welcome to the End of the Road podcast. I’m here tonight with Matt Schultz. Matt’s a multimedia
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artist, musician, inventor, and sculptor. That’s his official bio, but I think we’re going to be
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talking a lot about his work as a mystic shaman and maybe even a medicine man.
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Matt, welcome to the End of the Road. Hey, thanks for having me on, Michael. I really appreciate it.
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Oh, man. You know, I’m so grateful that Ronnie introduced each other because the more I get exposed to your work,
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I mean, you’ve got tentacles in all different aspects of art.
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I’m just very, very fascinating stuff.
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Thanks.
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Yeah, I mean, I’ve been doing it for, you know, almost my whole life.
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And, again, I just, yeah, you can go to MattSchultz.com and check out all the different things that I make.
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You know, you were just there looking at stuff.
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Yeah.
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Well, let’s start with some of your early music.
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Do you want to start off with a lab report and kind of what your project was involving that?
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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I think that’s a great place to start.
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So, yeah, you know, back in the 80s, I started, I kind of started working with experimental sound.
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I really did as a kid, which is tonalities.
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I like to just create kind of almost steady tones.
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And it took a long time to realize what I was doing was just kind of trying to create,
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which now I think is completely like the chakra tones and alignment tones in that sense.
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And so as a child, I would play with these just steady tones as opposed to being a music, you know, like playing music, quote unquote.
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And I’m not a musician at all, so I don’t know when people tell me to play in the key of G really what that means.
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You know, but with that said, I’ve been on like 35 albums and I started with Lab Report.
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And it was a really dark, ambient kind of shadow practice band.
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Yeah.
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Well, I know your heroes must have been like Throbbing Gristle
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and some of the other early pioneers of that space.
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Yeah, without a doubt, that’s the truth.
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You know, Genesis Peorage was always a strong influence, Throbbing Gristle, you know, Zev, some of these really early industrial.
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I mean, you know, they started like really the identifiable industrial of the 70s would have been Throbbing Gristle.
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80s, you know, we had Einstreich’s and the Neubauten and the Swans, I even consider in a weird way, kind of that new movement of sound that we were all coming out of punk rock.
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I think we were exhausted with the energy of punk.
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To me, punk seemed kind of almost limited, obviously.
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It was very simple and it got boring very quick.
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And I don’t think, although it was a combative music or art form, you know,
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let’s address these social issues with music,
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I honestly think that, like, the early industrial did a greater job of that,
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maybe on a more mystical realm or something, you know?
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Yeah.
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So what was this?
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I mean, you invented the anti-tank guitar,
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and you were involved in some movie soundtracks
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and kind of creative ventures on your part.
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Yeah.
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Again, getting back to the experimental sound design from my youth, you know, I was constantly, you know,
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I used to take like hemostats, you know, like the actual hemostat like a doctor used,
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and I would clip it onto the next string down on a guitar.
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I had this old guitar.
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And then I would use the agitation of the teeth of the one side of the hemostat to just cycle through.
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I could just kind of do a circle with this, right?
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You know, it’s clipped on and it’s agitating the top string, like say it was tuned to D or whatever.
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And I could just create these like monolithic tones.
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And for some reason, I’ve always been driven by this. And I think back then I didn’t really know what I was doing.
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And like I said, I’m really into this kind of the chakra alignments. I have new albums now that are
00:07:14 ►
dealing with frequency and binaural beat systems. But back then it was about creating these just
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frequency tones. And I ended up building this instrument, this anti-tank guitar,
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tones. And I ended up building this instrument, this anti-tank guitar, you know, that had 10 strings and used single gauge wire. It was just a colossal behemoth of a machine. It had a bridge
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to bridge was five feet, you know. So the first instrument was eight feet long. And so, you know,
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I was getting nearly subsonic tones with 18 gauge wire strings, and I used garage door cables as strings.
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It was very percussive and very subsonic, low-frequency instrument.
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Yeah.
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Well, and it must have been gratifying that your heroes, you know,
00:07:57 ►
that Robin Grissel and Genesis Bjoric actually played on some of your work.
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Yeah, I think that is something lucky is when your influences, you know,
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later as I grew and put out albums,
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we’d have put out one album on Invisible Records under Lab Report,
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and I was touring with Pigface, so I was playing in the band,
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the industrial band Pigface, and Lab Report was opening up for Pigface.
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So, you know, Martin had brought in the head of Pig Face, Martin Atkins.
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He had brought in Genesis Peoria and Lydia Lunch, I remember that,
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to play with Pig Face.
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And as Lab Report was warming up, Genesis, they said like, you know,
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oh, my God, this is exactly like Throbbing Gristle, you know,
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influenced, very obviously influenced by Throbbing Gristle, you know, influence,
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very obviously influenced by Throbbing Gristle.
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And then they were like, how about I come play with you?
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So, of course, for us that was the supreme compliment.
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And then I think the icing on the cake there was just that Lydia Lunch refused
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to play with Pigface because she heard them sound check,
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and she’s like, but I’ll play with Lab Report.
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So, to me, yeah, that was a pretty pinnically winning moment in my music career.
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Yeah.
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But then you kind of evolved into The Division,
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and that was a much more ambitious project in a lot of ways.
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Yeah.
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So the way it kind of, you know, I was on Invisible Records for years,
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five years I think we were on Invisible Records for years, five years, I think we were on Invisible.
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And then Lab Report broke up after so many records.
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I mean, we were really not doing well on that label.
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Not that we weren’t selling.
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We weren’t getting paid, really, is the truth.
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And so I had to get off of the label.
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It cost me a lot of money to get off that label.
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And then I kind of started my own productions.
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And this is pre kind of right at the beginning of internet, you know, the internet.
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And so, you know, we saw like we’d still manufacture CDs and I went solo and I started doing stuff
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under Matthew Schultz and I did several solo albums under Matthew Schultz.
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And then as the internet came on and if we remember, I think it was Napster back then
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was just bootlegging everything.
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Like we could just see all CD sales drop, you know, like the entire industry collapsed in front of our eyes, you know.
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And so it changed to an Internet based industry.
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And and I kept doing solo records for, you know, a long time, 15 years, probably.
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I think I’ve got nine solo records now.
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I think I’ve got nine solo records now.
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And then I would say in 2005, I started kind of doing a little esoteric studying and practice,
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the alchemy, kind of all these, like Rosicrucianism, you know, all of this stuff, Freemasonry.
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I was getting interested in all this, right? And so I was pursuing it from every angle.
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and I was getting interested in all this, right?
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And so I was pursuing it from every angle,
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and I started realizing this kind of more of these aspects of, like,
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you as your own magician, if that makes sense.
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You know, like we’re all our own great magician.
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Right.
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And you can kind of manifest.
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You know, I started kind of believing. So I was on the way to coming kind of from an atheist into agnosticism in my
00:11:07 ►
practice of magic, if that makes sense. And it was a very esoteric practice, you know, and kind of
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also self-guided and very chaos magic. So I kind of was working very intuitively. And by 2007,
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that’s when I really started delving into it.
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And I created the Hermetic Order of the Division at that time.
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And then I recorded three albums to support that Hermetic Order.
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So the Mantras was the first album I came up with.
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And so are these overtly religious in nature in some sense?
00:11:48 ►
No, it’s weird. See, cause I think now too, like my spiritual practice now, um, and I’m not,
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I don’t consider myself a shaman at all. I just really save that definition for, for people that,
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uh, you know, indigenously born with life traditions and practices.
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So I certainly would never put myself in that same realm.
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But I did study for years with a Lakota and Mayan elders almost at the same time.
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And I was a fire tender for sweat lodges, and I was given the peace pipe by a Lakota elder,
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so I’m a pipe carrier.
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And I, you know, did my vision vision quests and I pour sweat lodges now.
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So I consider myself more of a water pourer when it comes to the sweat.
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Outside of that, I hate to even put any definitions on it because I don’t want it to be dogmatic
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or identifiable because I don’t think it should be.
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Once you touch it, it becomes tainted, if that makes sense.
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Do you know what I mean?
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Like if I identify this, I’m doing this, it kind of narrows it down
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and it doesn’t allow the flow to work for me in a way.
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I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.
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Sure, but, you know, the CDs you were putting together with the division,
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I mean, they’re called mantras and, and, and things like that. I mean,
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so definitely resonances of belief systems that you were exploring at that
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time.
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Yes. But I also consider it very much like a chaos magic in that sense,
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where it’s like, you’re kind of pulling this thing from that thing.
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And then working intuitively to build your own magic.
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And again, and then they quite literally manifested into my own hermetic order.
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Now, granted, I do not deny that the art aspect of the division is a farce and presented farcically as a joke in a way.
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It’s simulacra or something.
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It’s this idea of what would it look like if you
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went to a museum and saw all the art created or all these components used to express the history
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of this hermetic order, which is, it’s called the division. Now, ironically, and the twist to that
00:14:01 ►
is I kind of believe it all. So it is my own practice, but I presented it as a farcical front, I guess.
00:14:09 ►
Is there, are there resonances to, you know, when I’m looking at the design of the cross
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and the motorcycle you designed as somewhat reminiscent of what was going on in Germany
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in the early part of the 20th century.
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Or maybe Pink Floyd’s the wall in a way.
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I think you’re dead on accurate on both of those, right?
00:14:33 ►
So, again, you know, I grew up, some of the first early music I ever listened to
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was Pink Floyd, that older brother who turned me on to that.
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And somehow the emotional quality of Pink Floyd and the authenticity and the energy of that band resonated with me most of all.
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You know, I mean, here’s Rolling Stones or, you know, this.
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And I just didn’t care about that other stuff.
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I was really into Pink Floyd and that kind of 60s psychedelic trip music.
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And The Wall was extremely influential, you know.
00:15:03 ►
And also, I mean, this gets into weird things too,
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which is the chicken or the egg.
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You know,
00:15:07 ►
I,
00:15:07 ►
I went through a addictive period in my life in the nineties,
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uh,
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whilst in the,
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like those rock bands and stuff.
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So again,
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you know,
00:15:15 ►
there was kind of this aspect of like romanticizing William S.
00:15:19 ►
Burroughs or the wall or Bukowski,
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you know,
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and it’s kind of debaucherous boozing heroin using artists, you know, or
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Pink himself, you know.
00:15:28 ►
And so that does resonate with me a lot, you know.
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And the division, you know, is kind of the narrative is becoming aware of your past reincarnate
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lives, right?
00:15:48 ►
reincarnate lives. Right. So I believe, uh, through sacred medicine practice like ayahuasca, I have seen my past lives and these were represented as characters in the division.
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Do you know what I mean? If that makes sense. So, so, so did you go to Peru, uh, and explore
00:16:00 ►
down there before you, uh, you created the division?
00:16:08 ►
No, I didn’t go to Peru before the division.
00:16:10 ►
Peru was after the division.
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But medicine was before the division.
00:16:17 ►
Right, okay, okay. Yeah, because I just, you know, my sense of it is that the division is,
00:16:24 ►
the vision and sort of the texture of the division are
00:16:28 ►
much different than, say, an ayahuasca experience or the icarus that might be in there.
00:16:33 ►
So I’m just wondering if there’s been a transition in your work since then, occasioned by ayahuasca
00:16:42 ►
and other things.
00:16:43 ►
Well, the thing is, yes, there’s plenty of different medicines,
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and there’s different modalities of also acquiring that information,
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like, again, shamanic breath work or any of these.
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You can pick this meditation.
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All of this stuff is all a means to the end, right?
00:17:00 ►
And believe me, I mean, I had used thousands and thousands of hits of LSD through college.
00:17:09 ►
So my hallucinogenic medicine practice has been a lifelong endeavor.
00:17:15 ►
And then it was until in 2010 when I started working with the Mayans,
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and their medicine is different.
00:17:23 ►
It’s not ayahuasca either.
00:17:25 ►
It was bufo.
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It’s the frog DMT.
00:17:29 ►
Yeah.
00:17:31 ►
And then the other really more important was just that, and honestly,
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I kind of always thought, you know, that it was maybe the frog we would smoke the DMT,
00:17:41 ►
but it was really, in my opinion, the Tura that was the main medicine that we were using.
00:17:48 ►
And it was always kind of, especially with the Mayans,
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it was always kind of hidden in there.
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You know, like they would acknowledge it like, yeah, we’re doing this,
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you know, this, and it’s mixed with a bunch of other stuff.
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You know, it’s kind of, okay.
00:18:01 ►
And the more I did research after the fact and what correlated to my experience was more of using Datura or Toei.
00:18:09 ►
Sure, sure.
00:18:10 ►
Which to me, in retrospect, now having done a lot of ayahuasca as well, is considerably greater than an ayahuasca or DMT smoking experience. Because, again, the ayahuasca, you know, is a four-hour, whatever, six.
00:18:29 ►
I mean, sometimes I can go much longer.
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Now I’m at the sensitivity to it.
00:18:34 ►
But, you know, that’s a relatively four- to six-hour experience,
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you know, a couple cups.
00:18:39 ►
Whereas DMT, you know, it’s your 20, 30-minute kind of experience.
00:18:42 ►
That the Tura, you know, I was literally on the other side for over a week.
00:18:48 ►
And, you know, they had like a babysitter.
00:18:51 ►
I didn’t sleep for three days.
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I didn’t sleep or eat for three days after that medicine, you know.
00:18:56 ►
So, again, I had really no, say, steadfast understanding of the specifics of that ceremony
00:19:06 ►
and the initiation that I received from them until much later when I started doing it.
00:19:11 ►
I always just kind of misinterpreted it as bufo.
00:19:16 ►
You know, that’s really it.
00:19:17 ►
And now I have to say it’s honestly detour, which I would also say don’t ever do.
00:19:25 ►
Well, you know, something’s occurring to me that since you’ve got your feet both in Western esoteric occult mysticism
00:19:37 ►
and this, you know, like it or not, it sounds like the South American, you know, shamanic experiences.
00:19:46 ►
You know, there’s a lot of, you know, that’s how they’re interfacing is very, is going to be very interesting in the future.
00:19:54 ►
I mean, do you think that they are compatible?
00:19:56 ►
You know, can somebody go down there, you know, and experience both?
00:20:02 ►
Or are the visions just incompatible and not at all.
00:20:08 ►
I guess, you know, I’ve just heard very recently that, you know,
00:20:12 ►
that one of the people that I’ve interviewed on the podcast, James Kent,
00:20:16 ►
is basically, and I’m probably taking this out of context,
00:20:21 ►
but basically the Western mind and the Western setting cannot,
00:20:27 ►
you know, the ayahuasca experience is just not right.
00:20:30 ►
The setting of it is just not compatible with it at all.
00:20:34 ►
And I was just wondering, since you’ve done both, if you have any thoughts on that.
00:20:38 ►
Because the vision is so much different.
00:20:40 ►
I mean, you know, even the metamorphosis of your art from one, from the mandalas and the chakras, you know, coming from the division, coming from lab report.
00:20:52 ►
I mean, you’ve gone under with some fairly dramatic changes.
00:20:56 ►
Yeah.
00:20:57 ►
So, I mean, that’s a great question.
00:20:59 ►
And I think this is, you know, I’m writing a book now and it’s being edited. And part of the book is it’s a memoir and tales of the debauchery and kind of how I got this space.
00:21:10 ►
And also this kind of ideas of inducing trauma or causing trauma or dealing with trauma.
00:21:16 ►
But really, one of the components that I’m trying to get across in that book is this idea that I really think we need to step back.
00:21:26 ►
This is very ironic, but we need to step away from doing ayahuasca.
00:21:29 ►
I don’t think these things are compatible, to be quite honest.
00:21:36 ►
I think they have their benefits.
00:21:37 ►
I think they’re for some people.
00:21:39 ►
I think they’re for serious practitioners.
00:21:41 ►
But I was just listening to Jamie Wheel,
00:21:51 ►
you know, and he just recently came out with his book Stealing Fire,
00:21:55 ►
and he’s talking a lot about this idea of just, you know, kind of almost stopping, like just stop doing ayahuasca
00:21:59 ►
because it doesn’t correlate over.
00:22:02 ►
I mean, it’s for the shaman in the jungle where they grew up, you know.
00:22:07 ►
And I like it’s the same with the Mayan initiation.
00:22:11 ►
Out of six people, you know, I saw four of them crash and burn.
00:22:15 ►
And I mean crash and burn.
00:22:18 ►
You know, we’re not talking this was a wonderful trauma-releasing experience.
00:22:22 ►
These people had mental psychotic breaks that some of them disappeared for over a year.
00:22:29 ►
And so I would always wonder about what their training was.
00:22:32 ►
Now, my training before being initiated by the Mayans, I was doing fire tending for the
00:22:41 ►
Lakota Elder in Southern Illinois.
00:22:43 ►
We did like, I remember we did 52 sweat lodges in a year.
00:22:47 ►
Every Sunday we did a sweat lodge.
00:22:49 ►
You know, I had different vision quests.
00:22:51 ►
I was working with him, all his teachings,
00:22:54 ►
and even I had a troubling time dealing with the Mayan initiation.
00:22:57 ►
And I swear he knew it was coming better than I did, you know.
00:23:02 ►
So there is, like, you know, I think part of the reason people crashed and burned, you know, and I saw this, I worked in Peru and outside of Iquitos at a ayahuasca center there.
00:23:14 ►
You know, there’s terrible accident, you know, somebody committed suicide at that center.
00:23:19 ►
You know, like I was, I haven’t been there for years, but apparently very recently. You know, there’s a lot of things happening in this movement.
00:23:28 ►
And I always kind of say like the white clothed yoga, you know, kind of Northern California New Ager who is all filled with love and light, which is beautiful, you know, more power to you.
00:23:41 ►
more power to you,
00:23:41 ►
but you know,
00:23:42 ►
they’re,
00:23:43 ►
they would go down there and just be like,
00:23:44 ►
you know,
00:23:44 ►
whether,
00:23:44 ►
you know,
00:23:46 ►
sitting Lotus style, uh,
00:23:46 ►
with their index finger,
00:23:48 ►
touching their thumb,
00:23:49 ►
you know,
00:23:49 ►
in this mudra and,
00:23:50 ►
and like,
00:23:51 ►
uh,
00:23:51 ►
you know,
00:23:52 ►
oh,
00:23:52 ►
it’s also beautiful.
00:23:53 ►
And you’re like,
00:23:54 ►
you don’t realize the,
00:23:55 ►
the level of magic going on down there.
00:23:59 ►
It’s just,
00:23:59 ►
it’s incomprehensible to these gringos.
00:24:02 ►
And honestly,
00:24:03 ►
you know,
00:24:03 ►
I’ve had Latinos tell me that a lot of it is just they’re just laughing at the gringos.
00:24:08 ►
It’s just – and I’ve heard this.
00:24:11 ►
I mean, I hate to present this out there, but a lot of them are saying this is payback.
00:24:15 ►
It’s payback for the Inquisition or the Inquisitors that showed up and killed their ancestors.
00:24:21 ►
So I have a completely different take on those people going down to,
00:24:26 ►
you know, Peru to do Aya and it being a loving light, beautifully built, filled ceremony. I mean,
00:24:33 ►
again, I just don’t think people have the right training. You know, they don’t have the,
00:24:37 ►
they haven’t prepped as I believe they should have in a myriad of ways. And then I think the
00:24:44 ►
shamans they’re working with may be more brujo than pleasant.
00:24:48 ►
You know, it’s brujo, it’s like a black magic practitioner, you know, a little more voodoo-esque.
00:24:55 ►
And, you know, they don’t know what they’re putting into the brews.
00:25:00 ►
I mean, you know, I used to cook brew all the time with different shaman in the jungle,
00:25:13 ►
I mean, I used to cook brew all the time with different shaman in the jungle, and they’re adding all sorts of other things other than the vine and the DMT, whichever leaf substance they’re using.
00:25:14 ►
Right.
00:25:19 ►
So I’m sorry to be long-winded on it, but so does it correlate?
00:25:24 ►
Like, I think all roads are the same, that lead to the same point in that sense.
00:25:27 ►
All religions are saying the same thing,
00:25:29 ►
just they have different ways of saying it.
00:25:30 ►
They’re all leading to the same point,
00:25:32 ►
but they have different ways of getting you there.
00:25:36 ►
And I think that the West can unite,
00:25:40 ►
the esoteric somewhat can unite with the medicine because one of my practices was to go use ayahuasca
00:25:44 ►
outside of a Latino culture.
00:25:47 ►
You know, so I practiced in South Africa with some British people that sing straight mantras,
00:25:56 ►
you know, like from India, you know what I mean?
00:25:59 ►
Like Kirtan practicing songs, right?
00:26:02 ►
You know, and it was fantastic.
00:26:04 ►
And I met Shiva, you know, so I believe the medicine can be used and guided by the shaman
00:26:10 ►
or the, you know, the deliver, say the guide, given the right energy field can manipulate
00:26:19 ►
the elements of ayahuasca to correlate to the songs they’re singing.
00:26:28 ►
Does that make sense?
00:26:30 ►
Yeah.
00:26:30 ►
I mean, that’s what you’re talking about is basically consistent with your esoteric cult practice.
00:26:37 ►
Yeah, I mean.
00:26:38 ►
To manipulate the environment.
00:26:39 ►
Yeah, I mean, and to exert control over it.
00:26:44 ►
Yeah, no, I’m with you.
00:26:45 ►
I’m with you on that because I think that, you know, once you enter medicine space, you don’t change.
00:26:51 ►
I mean, if you’re coming to medicine space presenting with, you know, some issues,
00:26:56 ►
I mean, those issues aren’t going to go away in the medicine space.
00:26:58 ►
If anything, they’re going to become more manifest and obvious and inescapable.
00:27:03 ►
manifest and obvious and inescapable.
00:27:04 ►
Yes. And so, you know, I think that that’s – it’s just very – I just find it very
00:27:11 ►
fascinating that, you know, your work and when you’re talking about – because I
00:27:16 ►
think that, like, you’re analyzing belief structures and you’re – but, you know,
00:27:21 ►
in a way you’re mocking them, but in a way you’re kind of representing them,
00:27:24 ►
like you said.
00:27:26 ►
And so it’s it’s it’s it’s really interesting how the you know, how that is coming forward in your art.
00:27:34 ►
Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at like the stamp art stuff that I’ve done and certainly aspects of the division are satirical and mocking.
00:27:44 ►
Without a doubt, I don’t deny that I’m doing that.
00:27:46 ►
So, again, I play the trickster a lot where I’m going to present things to you in one way
00:27:51 ►
when I’m trying to evoke an emotional response the other way.
00:27:55 ►
Lab Report, without a doubt, was clearly that kind of aspect.
00:28:00 ►
I mean, I really was trying to create a music so horrific that you would go like,
00:28:04 ►
I can’t listen to this. I don’t want to listen to this. I need to go turn my life around and
00:28:08 ►
figure something else out. Now, whether that was, yeah, go ahead. No, no. So, so, so what’s the,
00:28:14 ►
what’s the sense behind that? Because, you know, it’s, you know, I, or is that,
00:28:18 ►
is you, have you sort of gotten away from that now? Because, you know, you, you, you were just
00:28:21 ►
talking about Kurtan and, and creating the, the, the, the, the space to, you know, you were just talking about Curtan and creating the space to, you
00:28:27 ►
know, for people to, you know, to do whatever in this.
00:28:31 ►
And so where does the satire come in or have you kind of left that behind and are now embracing
00:28:37 ►
the possibility of, you know, something more with your, you know, your work with, you know,
00:28:43 ►
brainwave entrainment and things like that.
00:28:45 ►
Yeah, I think definitely it’s split.
00:28:48 ►
And I don’t deny the polarity of approaches and opinions that I might have, some even
00:28:56 ►
contradictory and hypocritical.
00:28:58 ►
So when I run a porous sweat lodge for people, believe me, I’m trying to engage in the most neutrally beautiful
00:29:05 ►
space possible to create a container safe enough for my participants to get whatever
00:29:11 ►
they need from that event.
00:29:12 ►
That’s literally where I’m at.
00:29:14 ►
Like, you know, I’m not a healer.
00:29:16 ►
You know, I’m not a light worker, you know, whatever this kind of maybe more woo-woo terms
00:29:21 ►
might be.
00:29:22 ►
I’m just a water pourer creating a space for you. And that’s a
00:29:25 ►
very neutral space. So I really pride myself on creating that space. And it works really as a
00:29:34 ►
mindful meditation practice. So I go to the Buddhist temple here in my town and I practice
00:29:40 ►
meditation with them. And it’s just different forms of meditation. So, again, that’s not satirical, right?
00:29:47 ►
You know, whereas I still might dress up as Krishna, which I do regularly.
00:29:53 ►
And then I have the crow, which is another character archetype that I created a costume,
00:29:57 ►
which is very based on the plague doctor and predates all the popularity of the plague doctor.
00:30:02 ►
I mean, this is 10 years ago, but it’s doing this.
00:30:04 ►
But we would go around, you know, I would go around dressed as Krishna
00:30:07 ►
and I’d have the crow with me and I would just sage cleanse people in public.
00:30:11 ►
And it really was like very tongue in cheek where people were like,
00:30:15 ►
oh, I can engage with this, what is, you know, kind of a Heyoka clown almost.
00:30:20 ►
You know what I’m saying?
00:30:21 ►
Like, you know, I was just like this crazy character.
00:30:23 ►
I could do that.
00:30:24 ►
But then when I got in their face with heart open space, you know, looked them in the eye with my nose an inch from their nose and said, this is for protection.
00:30:33 ►
Within that second, people would melt.
00:30:36 ►
I mean, just start-oker, the clown, the satire of this very tongue-in-cheek kind of component allowed me to kind of secretly educate or help or move people, you know, in a, say, more positive direction.
00:30:57 ►
Yeah.
00:30:57 ►
Well, the trickster archetype is fairly universal in many cultures, too.
00:31:02 ►
I guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I mean, maybe it does have a role in sort of getting people out of their default modes
00:31:09 ►
and opening up a space for them to have something more, maybe.
00:31:15 ►
That’s exactly it.
00:31:16 ►
I mean, and the trick is it is universal lacrosse, you know.
00:31:19 ►
And I think, you know, even like Krishna was considered somewhat of a trickster, right?
00:31:23 ►
The crow is very much of a trickster.
00:31:25 ►
I work with coyote and owl medicines, which a lot of indigenous peoples don’t appreciate or work with.
00:31:31 ►
They don’t like.
00:31:33 ►
I do.
00:31:34 ►
I appreciate the trickster.
00:31:37 ►
And I kind of think of that with the lodge.
00:31:41 ►
Again, people can come and I say you don’t have to say anything.
00:31:44 ►
They can just sit there and use it like it’s a gym, you know, like they’re at the gym and they’re getting a sauna after a workout, right?
00:31:51 ►
Because I like to approach it from kind of an agnostic, non-denominational point.
00:31:57 ►
And I tell them that.
00:31:58 ►
But, of course, once they get in there, you know, it’s hard to not realize or be engulfed in the spiritual aspects of that event.
00:32:05 ►
You know, so my trickster is, oh, just come on and you’ll enjoy it.
00:32:09 ►
Right.
00:32:09 ►
You know, and then when I’m in there, I’m like, hey, you want to say some words, you know, and I have people who’ve never prayed in their entire life.
00:32:16 ►
And I don’t even call it prayers because, again, that would kind of push them the wrong way.
00:32:24 ►
way, but I’ve had people where I would say, would you like to see some words in here that will admit things in that pitch black, 100 degree space that they would have never said
00:32:30 ►
outside of that space or even to a therapist or, you know, anything.
00:32:34 ►
So, you know, I find the medicine of the lodge is itself medicine.
00:32:39 ►
You know, so we don’t need to do ayahuasca.
00:32:41 ►
You can still get to these places with things like meditation and the sweat lodge.
00:32:47 ►
I mean, even the vision quest with the indigenous Native Americans like the Lakota,
00:32:52 ►
they just draw a six-foot circle on the side of a mountain and they stick you on it.
00:32:56 ►
Like, sit there.
00:32:57 ►
We’ll see you in four days.
00:33:00 ►
Just do a mental exercise of imagining yourself not moving out of a six-foot circle for four days.
00:33:06 ►
You don’t eat.
00:33:07 ►
You don’t drink water.
00:33:08 ►
Nothing.
00:33:08 ►
You just sit there for four days.
00:33:11 ►
That’s some serious medicine.
00:33:13 ►
And again, I think I have these things where ayahuasca is the fast track.
00:33:19 ►
I don’t believe, honestly, that many people doing it should be doing it.
00:33:24 ►
I really don’t. And I was a facilitator
00:33:26 ►
for quite some time in Peru. You know, I worked at a center helping the guests contextualize their
00:33:32 ►
experiences. And I kept thinking, wow, you shouldn’t be here. You know? Um, so yeah, I,
00:33:40 ►
I think there’s a lot of other ways to get there and maybe you should work your way up to Ayahuasca or DMT.
00:33:48 ►
And we talked before about beliefs, and maybe the trickster role that we’ve talked about is about maybe underlining beliefs
00:33:59 ►
and maybe not taking the project seriously. Do you think there’s some element of that?
00:34:06 ►
So that it doesn’t become a belief, but you sort of get out of the belief system
00:34:11 ►
and are more experiencing the more raw reality, maybe.
00:34:16 ►
Not maybe.
00:34:17 ►
I think you’re dead on accurate with that.
00:34:19 ►
The division was created as a farce.
00:34:22 ►
It exists as a farce, but it’s also, for me, true.
00:34:26 ►
I know that sounds contradictory, but so, you know, there are many aspects of that magic spell that are, you know, the entire thing to me was a magic spell.
00:34:36 ►
You know, so, you know, it was a forced construct of ritual supported with belief to obtain an end result, which is by proxy magic.
00:34:47 ►
You know, it’s no different than a Catholic putting on a fancy outfit on a particular
00:34:52 ►
day of the week, you know, going to this beautifully constructed building, having people set frequencies
00:34:59 ►
and tones and sympathetic dialogues or monologues, whatever they want with them.
00:35:04 ►
And then they go eat, you know, some bread and drink a little bit of wine,
00:35:08 ►
and they feel that their entire life up to that point,
00:35:11 ►
all the sins that, quote-unquote, they’ve perpetrated are forgiven.
00:35:15 ►
I mean, that’s magic at the highest order.
00:35:19 ►
You know what I mean?
00:35:19 ►
That is such unbelievable magic that you would do this ritual with these actions, with the expectation of something happening that’s, for all intents and purposes, not scientific.
00:35:33 ►
So, I mean, yeah, I think that one of the ways to maintain a discussion and not become dogmatic or fall into these ideas of like, you know, hey, you’re
00:35:48 ►
a shaman.
00:35:49 ►
I remember I was doing a lodge a couple of weeks ago and one of my new guests, she’s
00:35:52 ►
like, are you a shaman?
00:35:53 ►
I’m like, no, absolutely not.
00:35:55 ►
You know, like I would never want to own that term, you know.
00:36:00 ►
At best, I’m guiding you.
00:36:02 ►
I’m a helping hand, you know.
00:36:04 ►
And I like that. I’m an artist. I’m presenting helping hand, you know, and I, I like that.
00:36:05 ►
I’m an artist.
00:36:06 ►
I’m presenting something.
00:36:07 ►
I don’t know.
00:36:07 ►
I don’t even want to define it.
00:36:09 ►
Like I said, because once you start doing it, it becomes, uh, this object that so, and
00:36:15 ►
I’ve worked with a lot of iOS heroes, you know, and I find some of them virtual cult
00:36:20 ►
leaders, you know, or nearly cult leaders. Because, again, the participants that are regularly using this medicine with this standard
00:36:28 ►
practitioner have a misdirected love affair with the medicine, with themselves.
00:36:35 ►
You know, one of the biggest insights you have is self-love, right?
00:36:37 ►
So, you know, when you do this kind of ayahuasca experience, you know, you realize your trauma
00:36:43 ►
points, you know, you fall in love with yourself again, you realize your trauma points.
00:36:48 ►
You can fall in love with yourself again.
00:36:50 ►
You see your inner child, all these beautiful things,
00:36:53 ►
but that’s also projected onto the facilitator, the ayahuasca.
00:36:57 ►
So it’s these people like, oh, I love this shaman.
00:37:02 ►
And I’m like, yeah, I would like to cut that short of this becoming nearly a cult.
00:37:03 ►
You know what I mean? Like, can we stop short of it?
00:37:05 ►
Right?
00:37:06 ►
And so I approach all of this kind of in a non-definitive way.
00:37:10 ►
Like, I don’t want to define where I’m coming at it from
00:37:12 ►
or who I am or what you expect from me
00:37:14 ►
because what I’m trying to do is either through art
00:37:18 ►
or through spiritual practice or whatever I’m doing through,
00:37:21 ►
you know, whether it be the dark ambient horror movie soundtracks
00:37:24 ►
I did for Bernard Rose, you know, for like his movie Snuff Movie, which is just one of the most disturbingly dark movies that never even got released.
00:37:33 ►
You know, it was so horrific.
00:37:35 ►
Or I’m doing binaural beats with space ambient tones of my newer Mandela’s album.
00:37:42 ►
You know, I mean, the entire Mandela’s project is like the beautiful side of all of this.
00:37:47 ►
You know,
00:37:48 ►
we haven’t even gone into there,
00:37:49 ►
you know,
00:37:50 ►
there’s,
00:37:51 ►
there’s,
00:37:51 ►
there’s,
00:37:52 ►
the universe contains many things,
00:37:54 ►
many things to explore.
00:37:56 ►
Totally.
00:37:57 ►
And I,
00:37:57 ►
and again,
00:37:58 ►
you know,
00:37:58 ►
why would you just pick one and lock into that?
00:38:01 ►
You know,
00:38:02 ►
um,
00:38:02 ►
I,
00:38:02 ►
right.
00:38:03 ►
You know,
00:38:03 ►
I,
00:38:03 ►
I am,
00:38:03 ►
I was just,
00:38:04 ►
I’m putting together a couple of workshops now for a space I have up here in
00:38:09 ►
Chicago. I’ve been working out where my sweat lodge is located, a beautiful ranch.
00:38:16 ►
Right now, I’m working on this idea of archetypal adoption, where you show up,
00:38:22 ►
you make a mask, however you want to express yourself.
00:38:27 ►
It’s not too in-depth.
00:38:28 ►
You can just have fun and make this mask.
00:38:30 ►
And then we dance around a fire at night, you know, in a very Viking-esque way.
00:38:36 ►
But one of the aspects to this was this kind of like anger release, you know.
00:38:41 ►
And I know I’m just starting to become fascinated by this whole thing too this idea of
00:38:45 ►
like how we deal with our repressed emotional states and anger so again like the lab report
00:38:51 ►
was very shadow practice now I’m kind of interested in this idea of like how people
00:38:56 ►
express themselves or don’t because I don’t think they’re allowed to you know in our culture and I
00:39:02 ►
want to build a space where they’re they can have the the safe space to express themselves you know, in our culture. And I want to build a space where they can have the safe space to express themselves,
00:39:08 ►
you know, to go crazy and dance around a bonfire wearing a mask.
00:39:11 ►
How fun is that, right?
00:39:13 ►
You know?
00:39:15 ►
Yeah, that’s – and you would be perfect because you’ve designed some masks yourself.
00:39:23 ►
Exactly.
00:39:25 ►
Exactly. I love it. Exactly. Exactly.
00:39:26 ►
I love it.
00:39:27 ►
I love it.
00:39:27 ►
Like I said, you know, I get dressed up as Krishna and, you know, I do the crow and there’s the bag lady and I have all these different personas, you know, and that I appreciate.
00:39:37 ►
You know, I like the idea that you can kind of, you know, dissolve into these aspects of these characters,
00:39:45 ►
these archetypes.
00:39:46 ►
You know, I think that’s healthy, you know.
00:39:49 ►
And what is it about the ritual itself that facilitates that?
00:39:54 ►
I mean, what have you thought about that?
00:39:59 ►
Because, you know, your art is very ritualistic in a lot of ways.
00:40:03 ►
Even, you know, throughout it, it’s always had sort of a ritualistic element.
00:40:07 ►
I mean, what about that do you think is kind of common?
00:40:12 ►
Well, I mean, you know, when I was in graduate school and building the division,
00:40:16 ►
excuse me, which, you know, took, I mean, three years to build this project.
00:40:21 ►
It has over 50 pieces, you know.
00:40:24 ►
And then I had to develop the mythos foundational history of the division.
00:40:28 ►
And, you know, all is the 20th century version history of this.
00:40:32 ►
So it’s a very complex project that I spent really every waking moment working on.
00:40:37 ►
And what I realized in building this and studying it,
00:40:41 ►
there’s a lot of reading and studying.
00:40:43 ►
You know, I wrote like, you studying. I developed a thesis about de Champ and his correlation to Rosicrucianism
00:40:49 ►
and Freemasonry that hasn’t been defended by anyone else, and I defended it.
00:40:54 ►
And I wrote 80 pages on this.
00:40:56 ►
I mean, this is literally a publishable paper on his reference to the Hermetic orders.
00:41:04 ►
But in all this study, I was reading the psychology of ritual, right,
00:41:09 ►
which is a pretty straightforward psychological study on this idea of what is it about ritual.
00:41:14 ►
And it’s what we already kind of know.
00:41:17 ►
It’s just scientifically defined.
00:41:19 ►
And it goes back to what I was saying about the Catholic Church.
00:41:26 ►
back to what I was saying about the Catholic church. It’s the action that you do with the thought of while you’re doing it creates an outcome that’s desired, right? So for instance,
00:41:34 ►
I very much enjoy my morning coffee made with a French press. It sounds absurd. And I like to
00:41:41 ►
froth my milk in this particular manner. Well, I am keenly aware that it is the ritual itself is more about developing this like
00:42:06 ►
good morning, you know, positive energy start to my day. You see what I mean? So conversely,
00:42:13 ►
like if you have a job that you detest, you know, getting up in the morning and having to get
00:42:18 ►
cleaned up and put on this suit that you hate wearing and going to this job and driving and traffic that you hate is a negatively reinforced ritual of magic that you are perpetuating upon yourself,
00:42:31 ►
creating basically like a shit, horrible magic spell of your life. Do you know what I mean?
00:42:38 ►
No wonder you’re depressed. Your rituals all day long are about you being dissatisfied with your reality.
00:42:46 ►
So if you’re a great magician creating your own reality, right,
00:42:52 ►
if you partake in a perpetual and ongoing daily ritual that is horrible for you,
00:42:59 ►
again, bad job, long driving times, don’t like, you know, your home life, all this stuff,
00:43:05 ►
then you are literally creating a magic spell that makes your crappy life.
00:43:10 ►
Does that make sense?
00:43:12 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:43:13 ►
No, no.
00:43:13 ►
It makes complete sense.
00:43:15 ►
And I think that, you know, that’s in some ways the America has a very different ritual
00:43:23 ►
than some of the other countries.
00:43:25 ►
And in a way, you know, I just think of, you know,
00:43:32 ►
you compare compressed America with Germany or some of those other, you know,
00:43:37 ►
European countries, and our ritual has kind of diluted,
00:43:42 ►
and I think we’re in a way kind of lost
00:43:45 ►
and kind of without ritual, perhaps.
00:43:48 ►
And that, to me, opens up the door to sort of darker rituals
00:43:54 ►
to come in and fill the void, perhaps, if there’s not.
00:43:59 ►
Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent you’re right.
00:44:01 ►
I mean, we have to choose the rituals.
00:44:02 ►
They can be rituals of darkness or rituals of light.
00:44:07 ►
And, you know, but where there’s a void, where there’s no ritual, I mean,
00:44:11 ►
to some degree humans are hardwired to have some sort of structure associated with them.
00:44:17 ►
And to some extent we get to choose what that is and what we dabble in, perhaps.
00:44:23 ►
And, again, I’m not talking about, you know, maybe censorship, but, you know,
00:44:27 ►
this is just consistent with what you were saying about, you know, if you’re,
00:44:31 ►
you know, if you’re in a shitty job and it’s horrible, you know, how that,
00:44:34 ►
how that manifests itself.
00:44:37 ►
Yeah. You know, and, and I agree with you.
00:44:40 ►
And the contrary or the flip side to it too is, is that like,
00:44:44 ►
I find the core, I mean, first of all, we can’t deny just the rise of fascism side to it, too, is that, like, I find the core.
00:44:45 ►
I mean, first of all, we can’t deny just the rise of fascism in general between, you know, Germany inherently this, you know, in the 20th century has this, you know, the stigma of fascism.
00:44:57 ►
Just obvious. It’s obvious. Right.
00:44:58 ►
Well, in America now under Trump, you know, I mean, even back to Bush and a lot of my, you know, I remember it was in a month after 9-11 that I was going like, wow, this flag waving festival in downtown New York City looks a lot like, you know, some German rally.
00:45:13 ►
If you just switched out the red, white and blue flags into the Nazi flag, it’d be the same thing, you know.
00:45:19 ►
And what Fox News was saying was very fascistic.
00:45:22 ►
what Fox News was saying was very fascistic.
00:45:24 ►
And I mean, even before that, this has been existing.
00:45:30 ►
But, you know, with Fox and where we’re at, you know, the rise of fascism is here.
00:45:35 ►
Now, an interesting correlation to that is, is that, back to what you were saying in this idea of ritual and a culture losing itself, is that like in the in-between war periods,
00:45:46 ►
in the in-between war periods, right, in France,
00:45:51 ►
like there were some 10,000 mystical publications being produced a month.
00:45:56 ►
I mean, the esoteric like Blavatsky, right, Theosophical Society, the Thule Society, all of these things were just massively absorbed.
00:46:02 ►
I mean, the culture was thick with it.
00:46:03 ►
We don’t really realize it.
00:46:04 ►
You can see it being reflected now in some of the Marvel comic books, you know what I mean, the culture was thick with it. And we don’t really realize that you can see
00:46:05 ►
it being reflected now in some of the, like the Marvel comic books. You know what I mean? Like
00:46:09 ►
there’s, you know, like the Thule Society will show that are like hell boy, you know, you’re
00:46:14 ►
like, wow, that’s an actual organization that was around, that was fascistic, you know, and worked
00:46:21 ►
with the SS, right? You know, so what’s happening is, is that there is this weird kind of resurgence of the mysticism.
00:46:30 ►
But like you said, I think it’s diluted, and we don’t have, as Americans particularly,
00:46:36 ►
and this might be a difference between the Germans,
00:46:37 ►
but again, the Europeans being kind of lost between wars,
00:46:41 ►
who are as an identity of France, all these people lost, lost, right, man? In that sense, Germany lost. So the idea is that the ritual is so diluted now,
00:46:54 ►
and everybody’s looking everywhere for some level of mysticism. And this country particularly lacks
00:47:00 ►
history, right? So we don’t have, like, say, the Mayans, you know, a traditional
00:47:06 ►
ritual that lasted thousands of years. You know what I mean? We’ve worked on this ritual for a
00:47:12 ►
thousand years. We know what this ritual looks like. You know, we’ve had elders. We’ve partaken
00:47:18 ►
in it. You know, we understand this ritual, okay? Whereas in America now, it’s just like I said,
00:47:23 ►
I really, you know, and again,
00:47:25 ►
God bless him, but you know, the, the kind of new age, white clothed, you know, Guinea going down
00:47:30 ►
to Peru, you know, sitting Lotus style thinking it’s all white light is just asking for trouble.
00:47:37 ►
You know, why is it, why is that though? I mean, because aren’t they, isn’t that trying to,
00:47:43 ►
to manifest the white light in the world and create a positive ritual? I mean, because aren’t they, isn’t that trying to manifest the white light in the world and create a positive ritual?
00:47:47 ►
I mean, what?
00:47:48 ►
I think it might be better done as a meditative practice in Northern California.
00:47:54 ►
I mean, you know, I.
00:47:56 ►
Stay in your where you’re at.
00:47:57 ►
Stay in your set and setting.
00:47:58 ►
Yeah.
00:47:59 ►
Well, yeah.
00:48:00 ►
Yes, exactly.
00:48:01 ►
Kind of what’s, you know, like, you know, or go to India and practice meditation or go to your Buddhist temple, you know, whatever you want to do.
00:48:08 ►
But, you know, I think there is this weird thing about like, you know, there’s a book, I believe it’s called Close Your Mind.
00:48:18 ►
And it’s about the psychedelic movement of the 60s, right? And what it talks about, and this is something that I, you know, there’s a certain kind of
00:48:27 ►
conspiracy theory component to it, but I also don’t deny these aspects, right?
00:48:36 ►
And like MKUltra and that hallucinogens were created as a pacifier for the white, what would have been a white revolution.
00:48:47 ►
So the Black Panthers were very scary in the 60s.
00:48:50 ►
They just absolutely horrified white authority.
00:48:53 ►
They were getting stuff done.
00:48:55 ►
In Oakland, the Panthers were feeding 10,000 kids a day.
00:48:59 ►
I mean, it was unbelievable.
00:49:00 ►
And the white power elite freaked out.
00:49:02 ►
And once Kent State hit and white kids started going like, hey, I’m dropping acid and I kind of agree with these guys.
00:49:09 ►
That was it, man.
00:49:11 ►
How did they shut that down?
00:49:13 ►
And the psychedelic movement, according to this book and certain belief systems, kind of acknowledges that it was a pacifying movement.
00:49:21 ►
So the hippiedom of the 60s was a pacifying movement. So I see that correlative and represented again as the rise of fascism really takes up in America now with the white spiritual kind of elite that to some degree manifests a white light only persona,
00:49:47 ►
manifests a white light only persona, which is not only detrimental politically and spiritually,
00:49:52 ►
because it’s a form of spiritual bypassing in many ways, to our American culture,
00:49:57 ►
but then they’re going down personally and having themselves, you know,
00:50:03 ►
raked over the coals by a possible brujo with ayahuasca in Peru. You know, I mean, I know it’s a lot to put under one roof there,
00:50:07 ►
but do you know what I’m saying?
00:50:09 ►
Like, there’s a lot of levels that’s happening.
00:50:12 ►
Well, don’t you think psychedelics themselves are sort of subversive?
00:50:15 ►
I mean, I think they’re anti-totalitarian in effect,
00:50:20 ►
but are you saying that that’s just another form of more insidious
00:50:23 ►
spiritual bypassing using psychedelics?
00:50:26 ►
I think it’s both.
00:50:28 ►
Again, this is why I don’t want to be binary in anything, and I don’t really want to identify these.
00:50:34 ►
I believe exactly this.
00:50:36 ►
I absolutely don’t want to do that. with talking with you on this podcast and with my book and, and my art and everything that I do is to open up these discussions because it
00:50:48 ►
can be all and both and or nothing.
00:50:50 ►
You know what I mean?
00:50:51 ►
Like it’s everything and nothing.
00:50:52 ►
Right.
00:50:53 ►
And I do think that it is totally subversive.
00:50:56 ►
I think in the sixties it was perceived as subversive,
00:50:59 ►
but the problem is,
00:51:00 ►
is that,
00:51:01 ►
you know,
00:51:02 ►
loving fascism isn’t going to get rid of it.
00:51:04 ►
Like that’s like we, we can love, you know, I was in a ceremony recently,
00:51:08 ►
and after we were contextualizing our experience afterwards,
00:51:12 ►
and one of the participants said, you know,
00:51:13 ►
I really felt this unconditional love for Donald Trump.
00:51:18 ►
And I was just like, you know, and again, I’m like, you know,
00:51:22 ►
I want to keep this positive, but I know the whole group felt my rage, you know,
00:51:27 ►
and I’m just literally like probably still on the medicine at this point.
00:51:30 ►
But I was like, you know, I appreciate where you’re coming from
00:51:33 ►
in the sense of Samadhi and oneness.
00:51:35 ►
Yes, it’s true.
00:51:36 ►
I understand that in the most Dalai Lama level of pure understanding
00:51:42 ►
that if you can approach the world with pure love, nothing matters, right?
00:51:46 ►
But I also don’t think you’re fighting to change the system.
00:51:50 ►
Do you know what I mean?
00:51:52 ►
So, again, we saw that with Kent State and the hippie movement of the 60s and the Black Panthers.
00:51:58 ►
And, you know, it just ended up being a love fest.
00:52:01 ►
And it was kind of like, okay, what did that get us?
00:52:03 ►
Now we’re still, you know, again, we’re the yippie, right. You know, and then the yuppie, right. So it was like,
00:52:09 ►
these people were hippies back then. And then now they’re, they’re just part of the problem now,
00:52:14 ►
you know? So I’m worried that at the same time, ayahuasca brings all these benefits and I think
00:52:20 ►
the whole world should do it. I mean, seriously, I honestly, I think like it should be mandatory
00:52:23 ►
that everybody over like the age of 13 has to do it every week, you know, because we
00:52:28 ►
would be in flying cars and not holding jobs and it would be a spectacular, beautiful world,
00:52:33 ►
but that’s not going to happen. And so, you know, we have to figure out like this idea of like
00:52:39 ►
opening your mind, opening your mind. Go ahead. Go ahead. I’m just laughing at you, Matt, because
00:52:44 ►
like, you know, 20 minutes ago you were saying nobody should take
00:52:47 ►
ayahuasca. Now everybody should take it.
00:52:51 ►
I totally see.
00:52:52 ►
I’m just laughing.
00:52:54 ►
I’m just like feeling your
00:52:55 ►
vibe.
00:52:57 ►
It’s true. I do not deny
00:52:59 ►
the hypocrisy that is me.
00:53:01 ►
You know what I mean? I don’t deny it.
00:53:03 ►
I don’t deny it.
00:53:05 ►
I also would like to clarify that, you know,
00:53:09 ►
if everybody’s taking it every Sunday and that was our new culture,
00:53:12 ►
that we would have an amazing support group of friends and lovers and guides
00:53:18 ►
and all these people helping us contextualize the experiences, you know,
00:53:23 ►
as opposed to, experiences, you know, as opposed to, again,
00:53:25 ►
you know, these like somebody with virtually no spiritual training going to Peru
00:53:30 ►
and having their mind blown open.
00:53:32 ►
No, come on.
00:53:33 ►
Who would do that?
00:53:34 ►
What attorney do you know that would do something like that?
00:53:41 ►
Exactly.
00:53:42 ►
I rest my case.
00:53:43 ►
What did Mother Ayahuasca tell you?
00:53:45 ►
It said, hey, gringo attorney, you better be prepared, amigo.
00:53:53 ►
No, I think it’s a great medicine.
00:53:54 ►
I do, and I just don’t think it’s for everybody.
00:53:57 ►
I do.
00:53:58 ►
I wish everybody did it with the right contextualization, the right experience, the right guides.
00:54:05 ►
But again, I’m finding that most people are doing it without any preparatory training whatsoever.
00:54:10 ►
You know what I’m saying?
00:54:11 ►
I mean, even the diet, you know, like that’s a serious deal to go through the diet even, you know.
00:54:18 ►
And I know people were like, ah, you know, whatever.
00:54:20 ►
I’m eating this chocolate bar and drinking a beer, you know, and then I’ll do ayahuasca tomorrow.
00:54:23 ►
And you’re like, yeah, you know, and you should have been on that.
00:54:29 ►
Like this is the that’s honoring the medicine and stuff, too.
00:54:32 ►
It was the same with working with the Mayan elders.
00:54:36 ►
You know, there was a very strict protocol in dealing with them and stuff, you know.
00:54:42 ►
So, you know, it’s a priestly class in a way.
00:54:45 ►
So, you know, yeah, I just, I do, I see both sides of it, but yeah, I still stick with
00:54:50 ►
both sides too, right?
00:54:51 ►
I’ll stick with my hypocrisy.
00:54:53 ►
Hey, but if it works, man, you got to keep us all honest.
00:54:56 ►
You know, people are going to get all these belief systems and they need some joker to
00:54:59 ►
there, shake them up and like, Hey, that’s exactly it.
00:55:01 ►
shake them up and like, hey.
00:55:03 ►
I think that’s exactly it.
00:55:09 ►
And I think that, you know, that, okay, my take on this is, you know,
00:55:14 ►
if we’re going to actually have any light in our lives,
00:55:19 ►
it has to be through a synthesis of the dark in a way.
00:55:23 ►
And it’s not this that there’s only light and there’s only,
00:55:26 ►
you can only, you know, manifest the white and only think positive things.
00:55:28 ►
I mean, no.
00:55:29 ►
I mean, because I think the big, deep spiritual growth comes when you really
00:55:35 ►
bodily accept and go into some of the uncomfortable areas because that’s the
00:55:43 ►
gateway to growth and evolution, to, to growth
00:55:46 ►
and evolution and in my universe anyway. So that’s what I’m manifesting for you. That’s my, that’s
00:55:52 ►
my ritual, man. I’m, I’m, I’m sticking with that. I agree with you completely. I mean, again,
00:55:58 ►
everything I’ve done is exactly what you’re, you just, what’s that? Oh, but you’re so much darker
00:56:04 ►
than I am. I can’t go there. I mean, I mean i i i got to be honest with you that lab report stuff just creeps me out
00:56:10 ►
yeah me too that’s weird michael i can’t even listen to that myself i mean i kid you not we
00:56:15 ►
we used to record that and it was so cathartic to record it right and then we would go back and
00:56:22 ►
listen to it and i kid you not there were times where I was like, who the fuck listens to this shit? You know, like, I was like, this stuff’s insane.
00:56:29 ►
Like it is totally insane trickster music, you know? And I remember at one point, several albums
00:56:35 ►
into it, somebody came to me and they said like, Hey man, you know, I really enjoy having sex
00:56:39 ►
with my girlfriend to your album. And I looked at him and I said, you’re a sick fucker. Like you
00:56:43 ►
are a sick fucker and you need to go get help
00:56:47 ►
because that’s not what that was intended for.
00:56:49 ►
Like it just was not it.
00:56:52 ►
And I kind of like one of the reasons we dissolved that project,
00:56:56 ►
I mean, there were several,
00:56:57 ►
but one of the reasons I dissolved it was because it was becoming worship.
00:57:01 ►
It was being interpreted, in my opinion, incorrectly. And I was like,
00:57:06 ►
people are, it wasn’t to go through the dark side adventure and come out healthy. It was,
00:57:12 ►
let’s stay here and diddle shit in the corner, like just horrible stuff. And that’s where I
00:57:19 ►
really realized in that practice that I’d kind of gone as far as I could and I needed to learn more. Because again, this was in the 90s, you know, early 90s. Whereas now I can see that,
00:57:31 ►
you know, like taking somebody on an ayahuasca experience and helping guide them through that
00:57:38 ►
dark path. And when they come back, offering them support, you know, and that’s a big thing, too. I’m a really big proponent of trying to offer support on every realm for anyone, like for
00:57:50 ►
anything that I do.
00:57:52 ►
Because I’ve gone and done a lot of this stuff.
00:57:54 ►
And I’ve seen this with Ayahuasqueros.
00:57:56 ►
And you’re done.
00:57:58 ►
They got their money.
00:57:59 ►
And four days later, you’re trying to reintegrate into society, man.
00:58:03 ►
And you can’t.
00:58:05 ►
And you call them and they’re just nowhere to be found, you know.
00:58:09 ►
And that’s a big problem I have with the medicine practice, too,
00:58:12 ►
is that I don’t think there is enough support structure.
00:58:14 ►
So, again, I offer myself through, like, sweatlodge.love,
00:58:18 ►
my website for my sweat lodge,
00:58:20 ►
and all these kind of more spiritual events I do.
00:58:24 ►
I’m always there, man.
00:58:25 ►
Find me at – find Matthew John Page on Facebook.
00:58:28 ►
If you need to talk about stuff, I’m there.
00:58:30 ►
Like, because I don’t think we’re offering – we’re not contextualizing it enough, you know.
00:58:36 ►
Yeah.
00:58:36 ►
Well, you would be the person to do that.
00:58:40 ►
You’re a master of contextualizing things.
00:58:43 ►
Well, I appreciate that. I hope I can help people. That’s where I’m coming things. Well, I appreciate that.
00:58:45 ►
I hope I can help people.
00:58:46 ►
That’s where I’m coming from.
00:58:48 ►
Well, it’s your work.
00:58:49 ►
I mean, your whole life is different contexts and playing with them.
00:58:53 ►
I mean, that’s what’s awesome.
00:58:55 ►
That’s what I like about your art so much.
00:58:57 ►
Well, thanks.
00:58:58 ►
Thanks.
00:58:58 ►
Yeah.
00:58:59 ►
So tell me, what is next on your agenda?
00:59:03 ►
I mean, are you going back to Peru?
00:59:07 ►
Are you going to be sticking around here?
00:59:08 ►
What’s going to be happening with you and your art?
00:59:10 ►
Well, yeah, it’s weird.
00:59:12 ►
I did the Mandala Project.
00:59:16 ►
That was still a while ago, which was the more kind of –
00:59:20 ►
the division is kind of more a Western esoteric dark version of spirituality or alchemical practices, right?
00:59:29 ►
The Mandala Project and the music there was, I can see, really not even close to Android Jones’s beautiful psychedelic interpretations of DMT experiences.
00:59:40 ►
They’re more just meditative mandalas that you can use.
00:59:45 ►
experiences. They’re more just meditative mandalas, you know, that you can use. And I considered them more for lay people, to be honest, like a starter mandala, you know, to start
00:59:49 ►
practicing your mindful meditation. Where I’m at now is this, you know, I have the sweat lodge
00:59:55 ►
space. I’m starting to build retreats. Again, I’m doing shamanic breath work, you know, all sorts
01:00:01 ►
of kind of different things is really coming to fruition because I found some great land up here in a beautiful center up in the Woodstock area of Illinois.
01:00:12 ►
And I’m working there.
01:00:14 ►
And then the irony to it, again, the contradiction, I may be phasing out my I’m a college professor by day and they may be phasing out my department. And so if I lost
01:00:27 ►
my main source of income, I would actually consider moving back to Peru.
01:00:33 ►
So again, we’ll see how things stay here. You know, I’m still, they haven’t dissolved the
01:00:37 ►
department yet. I like what’s going on. I like my retreats, all this stuff. But at the same time,
01:00:42 ►
if they do dissolve it immediately, I have this joke I tell my students all the time. There’s 5,000 species of potatoes in Peru, and
01:00:50 ►
that’s a lot to learn. There’s probably even 5,000 plants that go into the ayahuasca ad
01:00:58 ►
mixture that nobody knows about. Oh, my God. Michael, that is so true. Seriously,
01:01:04 ►
I worked with so many shamans.
01:01:06 ►
I’m like, what’s that thing you’re putting in there now?
01:01:09 ►
And, you know, some of them are more truthful.
01:01:10 ►
Some of them would just look at you and kind of be like, shut up, gringo.
01:01:13 ►
You know, I don’t care.
01:01:14 ►
And they’d throw it in.
01:01:15 ►
Other ones told me that, you know, there’s, and I forgot the name, there’s a love plant down in the Amazon.
01:01:20 ►
And, I mean, it’s a for real love plant.
01:01:22 ►
Like if you process it and you give it to a
01:01:25 ►
person, they will fall in love, right? And they’ll either fall in love with themselves or with the
01:01:29 ►
medicine or with the shaman or all the above. And that the ayahuasca arrows regularly add that to
01:01:36 ►
their ayahuasca because it’s building a returning customer, you know? And again, maybe there’s some
01:01:44 ►
not, maybe it’s not negative. Maybe falling
01:01:46 ►
in love with yourself is a great thing, but I start worrying about it when I saw people treat,
01:01:50 ►
you know, ayahuasqueros like cult leaders kind of, you know, I mean, it’s one thing to have
01:01:55 ►
respect and admiration for them. Absolutely. I’m all for that, you know, but once you start
01:01:59 ►
getting into like, you know, uh, mother, I had told me and my Aya Waskero told me, it’s like,
01:02:05 ►
you know, at this point we probably need to step back and apply our agnosticism, you know, agnosticism, right?
01:02:17 ►
And look at it through a different lens.
01:02:20 ►
It’s all about playing with beliefs and choosing.
01:02:23 ►
It is.
01:02:24 ►
Yep. Absolutely. It is. Yep.
01:02:25 ►
Absolutely.
01:02:26 ►
All right.
01:02:27 ►
So tell me, you know, you’ve mentioned a lot of things.
01:02:31 ►
MatthewSchultz.com is the art manifestation of your reality.
01:02:35 ►
But tell me more about, you know, if people want to get to your sweat lodges and your other, your shamanic breath work,
01:02:44 ►
what’s the vehicle that you would recommend that they connect with you?
01:02:48 ►
Well, yeah, so to start with, to go back, it’s actually Matt Schultz.
01:02:52 ►
So it’s M-A-T-T-S-C-H-U-L-T-Z.com is the URL for that one.
01:02:57 ►
So, yeah, that’s my fine art site, and the division is through there.
01:03:03 ►
And then if you go to sweatlodge.love, so we have new suffixes, right?
01:03:08 ►
It’s not.com.
01:03:09 ►
It’s.love.
01:03:11 ►
You can go there.
01:03:12 ►
And that is particularly for my sweat lodges because, like I said, I’m a water pourer.
01:03:17 ►
And then through there, if you sign up through the email,
01:03:20 ►
I can send you more information about the retreats that I run and stuff up here.
01:03:23 ►
I can send you more information about the retreats that I run and stuff up here.
01:03:28 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:31 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:36 ►
And while I paused Michael’s podcast just now,
01:03:40 ►
I’m still going to play the rest of it, well, after a few brief comments here.
01:03:45 ►
The reason that I’m doing this is because it ended with some of Matt’s meditation music, and I thought that would be a perfect way to close the salon for tonight. But before I go,
01:03:52 ►
there’s one more brief observation that I’d like to make. For a while now, I’ve been trying to
01:03:57 ►
avoid calling this new widespread interest in psychedelics a renaissance. But after thinking about all of the little coincidences
01:04:06 ►
between Michael’s path and my own, something became clear to me for the first time. What it is,
01:04:13 ►
happens to be the fact that Michael and I are essentially a generation apart. Yet, here we are,
01:04:19 ►
basically thinking the same way about psychedelics. A topic that now it’s perfectly okay to discuss in public.
01:04:28 ►
So maybe it is true. A psychedelic renaissance has begun. And if that’s the case, guess what?
01:04:37 ►
Just by being here in the salon, you are a part of this psychedelic renaissance.
01:04:43 ►
And I’m glad that you’re here.
01:04:49 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:04:53 ►
Be well, my friends, and enjoy the end of Michael’s podcast.
01:04:55 ►
Sounds good.
01:05:00 ►
Should we go out on one of your songs, one of your 30-plus CDs?
01:05:01 ►
Please.
01:05:04 ►
Which one should we go out on?
01:05:05 ►
I think you have Angels, and what else do you have?
01:05:07 ►
A Medicare.
01:05:09 ►
Okay, which one?
01:05:10 ►
I like the Angels.
01:05:11 ►
Angels is a beautifully scored piece.
01:05:14 ►
I scored this for Ayahuasca Ceremony.
01:05:17 ►
So I have a couple hours of scored music that I use instead of, say, the actual sung Icaros.
01:05:24 ►
Awesome.
01:05:25 ►
So here we go.
01:05:26 ►
Angels, Matthew Schultz.
01:05:28 ►
Matt, thanks for being on here,
01:05:29 ►
and I look forward to continuing to bathe in your exuberance here.
01:05:36 ►
Well, Michael, thank you so much for having me on.
01:05:38 ►
I appreciate it.
01:05:39 ►
I love what you’re doing here.
01:05:40 ►
I really do.
01:05:41 ►
I really do.
01:05:41 ►
So thank you so much.
01:05:42 ►
And leave your browser open because it takes
01:05:46 ►
a little bit to upload with this program.
01:05:48 ►
Sounds good. Much love, brother.
01:05:50 ►
All right. Same to you.
01:05:53 ►
Much love
01:05:54 ►
with this program.
01:05:55 ►
Sounds good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. © transcriptF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. Thank you.