Talat Jonathan Phillips Interview
Summary:
- Introduction: Rick Archer introduces Talat Jonathan Phillips, mentioning his book “The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic” and his roles in founding Evolver.net and Reality Sandwich.
- Background: Talat shares his journey from a countercultural media activist to exploring mystical experiences, including ayahuasca ceremonies, kundalini awakenings, and extraterrestrial encounters.
- Themes: The conversation covers themes like bioenergetic practice, quantum healing technology, shamanic healing, and the connection between science and art.
- Spiritual Practices: Talat discusses the importance of direct experience, skepticism, spiritual practice, and the activation of God consciousness.
- Christian Mysticism: He delves into his Christian background, uncovering secret meanings behind biblical symbols and how early Christians used initiation processes for divine energy.
- Personal Transformation: Talat emphasizes the potential for personal and societal evolution through raised consciousness and mystical experiences.
- Extraterrestrial Encounters: The interview touches on Talat’s experiences with extraterrestrial beings and their significance in his spiritual journey.
Full Transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Jonathan Talat Phillips. Welcome Jonathan.
Talat: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be here. Real pleasure.
Rick: I have a fairly long written bio of Jonathan in front of me here, but we decided I’m not going to read that. I’m just going to make a few points and then he’ll fill us in on the details. I became acquainted with Jonathan when he emailed me.
Talat: It’s Talat.
Rick: I’m sorry. Yeah, I know.
Talat: That’s okay. Everyone does it Rick, don’t worry about it.
Rick: Talat is your Sufi name and we’ll get into why you have that. But I became acquainted with you when you emailed me and sent me a copy of your book, “The Electric Jesus, The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic.” I get a lot of books and I didn’t even look at it at first. Eventually I read a little bit and I thought, “Oh, this guy is interesting. I’m going to schedule him.” Then, as I do with various authors, I asked for certain chapters that I should read if I don’t have a chance to read the whole thing. But I really enjoyed the book so I ended up reading it cover to cover and just finished it last night.
Talat: Oh, nice.
Rick: Yeah, great story, interesting stuff and we’ll get into a lot of what you discussed in the book.
Talat: It’s a pretty quick read too.
Rick: It is. It’s not like War and Peace.
Talat: No.
Rick: Now, you are the co-founder of Evolver.net and Reality Sandwich. It’s funny, just this morning I was looking up something from the Yoga Sutras that I wanted to bring into the conversation today and the best reference I found for it was on Reality Sandwich. It just happened to be.
Talat: Nice.
Rick: Yeah. So we’re going to get into what Evolver.net and Reality Sandwich are. I just wanted to say, doing this show stretches me a lot because I talk to a different person each week and I get into their world and read their book, listen to their interviews and stuff. It never fails to clear away some hidden assumptions that I had or expand my perspectives in different ways. Your book did that for me in spades. I was reminded of that line from Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So I would encourage people listening to just suspend any sort of rigid attachment to an understanding of the way things necessarily are, if you have such attachments, and just let yourself get into Talat’s world and consider the possibilities of what he’s talking about. He’s not talking about them, won’t talk about them as absolutes, but as possibilities. “I don’t know what this is, but it sure seemed real to me.” “Wow, what are the implications of it?” That kind of thing. So where should we start?
Talat: I could just add, because it will be part of the conversation too, is part of my bio is that I’m a bio-energetic healer. I’ve been working for six years, Reiki master, and so a lot of bio-energetic healing is like it’s therapy with energy healing, and using spirit actually to help with the therapeutic process. So I really believe in that, and I have a website, talathealing.com, if people are interested in checking that out.
Rick: I’ll be linking to all that stuff, Evolver and Reality Sandwich and Talat Healing, all from batgap.com. So people, you don’t have to stop your car and write this down, you can follow it later. And obviously you didn’t start out as a bio-energetic healer, you started out as a typical hedonistic agnostic young fellow in Colorado, and then one thing led to the next.
Talat: Yeah, I mean, when you were talking about suspension of disbelief, I can relate. If any topic that we talk about here is weird, let it be weird. I really love the skeptics’ path. It was my path and still is to some degree, but the great thing about gnosis is it’s a word meaning direct knowledge, direct experience, so it’s a different kind of wisdom where a preacher, a teacher, they can’t just tell you what it is and you believe it. I’ve never done that. I’ve never believed church or any of these things, but having direct experience, you start to come to understand what a lot of initiates from the different traditions across the planet have really been saying throughout the centuries.
Rick: And so, not only should you not worry about taking things with a grain of salt, you should take things with a grain of salt, and let experience be the final arbiter of their truth or falsehood. Don’t take anything on faith.
Talat: Exactly, and the great thing about the skeptics’ path is any truth they own, they really owned it. It’s not like these new agey folks who are like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds great,” and they just accept it. It’s like a battle.
Rick: Yeah.
Talat: So, those little lights of truth that come in and then they get bigger and bigger. So, I really love the skeptics’ path, but it’s probably because it’s my own.
Rick: I think it’s, in a way, it’s a scientific path. A scientist is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe something because somebody told him. He believes it when it can be experientially verified. And even then, he’s open to the possibility that some new experiment is going to refute his findings and he might have to throw the whole thing out and start over again.
Talat: Yeah, and that’s a good scientist. That’s an open-minded scientist that hasn’t been stuck in his dogma and the paradigms that he was trained in. I had a real frustration of Jade in the book. She’s one of the main characters. She’s super fun, but her brother was a doctor. When I started seeing energy fields, I had told him this, and he just did not believe me. He did not believe there was human energy fields. So, I just told him, “Well, okay, if you don’t believe me, let me show you. There’s a very easy way to show people energy fields.” He’s like, “I don’t want to see that.”
Rick: So, he’s not a scientist.
Talat: Yeah, well, wait. If the human body is actually energetic and electric and you’re a doctor, it has a great significance. I actually think we can’t heal so many diseases, especially things like depression, even cancers, without that knowledge. He just was like, “No, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to look at it, and I don’t want to find out.” That doesn’t seem like the scientific path to me.
Rick: No, it really isn’t. It’s kind of a diluted version of it. But if you’re really true to the spirit of science, then you’re open to all possibilities.
Talat: Yeah, and something I love about bioenergetic practice is it’s a little bit of a game, and you have to play by the rules. One rule is you have no idea where it’s going. Everything’s an experiment, and somehow by this unfolding process, the healing will emerge. It’s actually you’re kind of lost and experimenting throughout the whole time until you connect with the energy, the shadow component that needs to be brought in for union, and then the healing reveals itself to you. It’s so beautiful, but it is that kind of surrender to experience.
Rick: On this theme of science, I like to think that everything is a valid scientific theory. Does God exist? Do angels exist? Do aliens exist? Anything, any question you could ask, it can be explored really in accordance with the principles of the scientific method. Repeatable experiment, having others be able to follow the steps you took and arrive at the same conclusion. It’s just that you have to bring into the equation the human nervous system as a scientific instrument and not just limit yourself to instruments external to the nervous system.
Talat: Right, which I feel like quantum physics is now showing that with the observer affecting the observed. Rick, when you’re saying this, I’m thinking about my book. I talk a lot about the ancient mystery schools because they tracked this science. They were studying astronomy. They were studying mathematics. Look at Pythagoras. He was a mystery school initiate. They were studying all these things about what we would call science, but part of that science, probably the most important part, was the science of consciousness and the science of the universe. It was the initiate’s path. If you’re going to study the universe, you’ve got to study energy.
Rick: Yeah.
Talat: Because the whole universe is energy. I think it’s spiritual energy. There’s consciousness to it, to us. This being that’s the universe is constantly changing and present with us. The mystery schools had a real path and a trajectory to go through that. Right now, I’ve been working with the Santo Daime church. Do you know them?
Rick: I know them through listening to you. I had heard of them, but I learned more about them listening to you.
Talat: I just think it’s incredible because I was reading the ancient Gnostics. Now I don’t read the ancient Gnostics anymore because I practice with modern day Gnostics. The hymns that come through, they’re actually received. I didn’t believe that for the longest time. I thought people wrote these hymns down. They’re the medicine songs that come in. But then you start seeing your friends actually receive the hymn. You’re like, “Oh, okay. They’re delivered. They’re these gifts from higher dimensional beings.” At least that’s what the Daime would say.
Rick: So it’s received and actually sung spontaneously, extemporaneously? It’s not like cognized and then written down and then sung later?
Talat: It could be. However you track it. A lot of times they receive it and they do it into an iPhone recorder.
Rick: Just like that? Yeah. Then you bring it to the works. They’re not called ceremonies. They’re called works because, man, they really are works. We sing them, but they each call in different beings to come and help us. It’s this ayahuasca church where the men are on one side, the women are on the other. There’s no shaman because we’re all supposed to be training to be our own shamans and help each other. They call in what’s called the force, this high vibrational energy. It’s very Star Wars-like in that sense. The force is what they would also call the Holy Spirit, the Holy Light. It comes in and it circulates. So they’ve created a magnet. It’s very quantum physically. It’s a very smart spiritual healing technology. Masculine pole on one side, the feminine on the other. Bring in the high vibrational energy and it circulates through the singing and the opening of the hearts. It clears us out and it illuminates the human energetic body. It’s a pretty powerful thing. In this church, it’s a mystery school. They’re always talking about everything’s a lesson. It’s constantly talking about the science of the universe and learning the science. And part of the science, they say it’s just what you’re saying. It’s like opening it up to the potential of angelic forces or celestial beings. Even the power of the stars to heal us if we can connect with them. Stuff like in the earth.
Rick: Did this church exist 100 years ago or is it some kind of new thing that just developed? It’s new. That’s actually something that really surprises me. It’s the depth and breadth of the work for how short it is.
Rick: Who founded it?
Talat: In 1935, I think, well 1930s, there was this 6’5″ black rubber tapper named Master Irineu. He was drinking with some shamans and he had this vision where he was taken up into the celestial realms. These beautiful heavenly realms. The Gnostics would have called that the pleroma. He met this kind of fusion of the Virgin Mary with the Divine Mother of the cosmos and the Queen of the Forest, the Queen of Nature, this Mother Spirit. She said to him, “The Christian doctrine has been corrupted across the planet. We want you to replant the sacred doctrines in the holy light.” That’s where the Daime ceremony started. I want to make a note on replanting the doctrine because that’s constantly said throughout Master Irineu’s hymns. I wondered what that meant until I met another Daime friend that had been studying Christianity and mushrooms. There’s some great books about that. John Allegro writes a really good book about that. Do you know the name of that, Rick?
Rick: John Allegro?
Talat: Yeah, the name of the book.
Rick: I could look it up.
Talat: I don’t know it either. If you look up John Allegro, you’ll find a book about mushrooms and the cross. He started showing me this friend, all these ancient paintings of Jesus with mushrooms. Sometimes it would be on the Last Supper table as the body of Christ. Often what they would do is they would hide them. They would hide them in, if you look at the top of a jar, it’ll be very obvious that it’s a mushroom shape. Or in his robes, in a lot of St. Michael’s robes, there’ll be mushrooms. Some of these are not too subtle.
Rick: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 40th, that’s the name of the book. John Allegro, A-L-L-E-G-R-O.
Talat: Yeah, that’s probably the most famous book on that topic. In these images, it’ll actually have somebody leaning down at the mushroom and winking at you, the viewer, saying, “Pay attention to this.” I did get a download in the ceremony once of, “Yes, this is an ancient practice.” The initiates through the other traditions too have also been using plant medicines. I call them plant amplifiers to accelerate their evolution. But they’re also dangerous, so you’ve got to do it in a really good setting.
Rick: I was going to say, I have a young friend who lives in my town who took an ayahuasca trip, I think in New York City. It could have been with you guys, I don’t know. But it totally destabilized her. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals and having all kinds of problems. So this stuff is not to be approached without caution.
Talat: Yeah. Daime is not ayahuasca. If, she said she went to ayahuasca, it was probably ayahuasca.
Rick: Apparently so, yeah.
Talat: I don’t even do ayahuasca ceremonies anymore, because even those are too Wild West for me. Daime drives people crazy because we wear white outfits, we wear little ties, it’s very rigid.
Rick: So you’re not actually ingesting any substances during a Daime ceremony?
Talat: Oh, yeah. We do, but it’s a version of ayahuasca. It’s got more of the chacruna, more of the DMT plant to take you up. You don’t have these visions of the vine like you do on ayahuasca. There’s different beings you work with, there’s different prayers. I like the rigidity of it, because it’s so safe. I go to all these festivals and all these kids are like, “Yeah, man, I’m just doing mushrooms, I’m just ecstasy and this and that.” Meanwhile, they’re totally ungrounded, their fields are open, stuff can get in. I’m kind of like, “Have you eaten today?” Maybe do a little stretching or get grounded.
Rick: Yeah. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Talat: I just wanted to say with the Mystery Schools, they knew how to create safe containers for this. It’s across the planet. I get a little frustrated with yoga classes saying you should not do any entheogenic substances, but yoga probably started with entheogenic substances, with Soma, that magical elixir. There’s some evidence, it may have been mushroom tea, that when that was lost, they then needed to develop this amazing scientific system for getting back to those states of consciousness.
Rick: That’s what I was looking up that I actually found on Reality Sandwich, because I knew that there was a verse in the Yoga Sutras, and I found it. “Siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs,” emphasis there, “mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi.” That’s by Patanjali, who’s the founder of yoga, whom any self-respecting yogi would respect and acknowledge as an authority. As an interesting little aside, which will kind of pique your interest, Patanjali was said to be an incarnation of a divine serpent. He was an incarnation of Shesha, who you see in those Hindu iconographies, that thousand-headed snake and Vishnu is reclining on him. Anyway, that’s who Patanjali is supposed to be.
Talat: He’s churning the cosmic energy, he’s like churning the milk of the cosmic sea, that energy. Rick, that’s a pretty good concoction for transformation, that one line you read there, with the different modalities to get there. I think that’s powerful.
Rick: Yeah, which is not to say you have to do them all. I mean, I interviewed people who just awoke one day, they were minding their own business and poof, and I often suspect there had been progress made in past lives, which culminated in this awakening. Mantra practice over time, or mantra meditation of the right kind, can unfold profound degrees of awakening. So there’s a number of different paths to the same thing. Would you agree, would you say that we should have Ayahuasca 101 in high school, or is it more like, if that’s your path, maybe you’re going to gravitate to that, but it’s not necessarily for everybody?
Talat: Oh, God, ayahuasca is not for most people. I mean, that’s high octane evolution. It’s like rocket fuel, you can get from LA to New York a lot quicker, or you can blow up in the sky. It’s only people that feel called, and you always know it when they’re called for ayahuasca, they’re like, “I need to do this.” If it’s like, “Oh, I’m sort of thinking about it,” don’t do it.
Rick: A few months ago, some guy actually offered to buy me a plane ticket to Peru, because he was going down there to take Ayahuasca, and he wanted me to go with him. I just felt like, “Safety first, it’s not my trip. I’m not closed to the possibility for all time.” But I just didn’t feel the pull, as you say. I’ve been meditating for 44 years, that’s been serving me well. I just didn’t feel like throwing some unknown thing into the mix.
Talat: Yeah, it’s pretty special.
Rick: I mean, I might totally love it, I have no idea, but it might also fry some circuits. I’m a child of the ’60s, and there were a lot of LSD casualties. As I read your book, it struck me that ayahuasca must be different than LSD, because if anybody took as much LSD as you’ve taken ayahuasca, I wouldn’t be able to conduct an interview with them. They’d be all over the place.
Talat: I’m so grateful I’m not in the ’60s. I used to wish I was in that time period, because it seems so exciting. But man, LSD, I think, it’s not like when you go to LSD. I just saw Magic Trip, or Magic Bus, the documentary about Ken Kesey.
Rick: I haven’t seen it, but I know about Ken Kesey, sure.
Talat: There was not one word about healing through that entire movie. And they’re all like, “Yeah, we’re going to trip. We’re going to see these cool things. We’re going to do this.” I always thought I wanted to be on that bus. There’s no way. I would much rather be in a Daime ceremony, where it’s safe, it’s healing. I got my life back through Daime, though. Maybe we’ll get into this, but I realized my whole next book’s going to be called “Warrior Healing, How I Illuminated My Demons,” because the black bowling ball that I talk about in The Electric Jesus, my next book is discovering what that is, which was an energy healing. We call this a parasitic astral attachment. It’s an energy parasite that’s stuck in the human body and is spirit possession, quite literally. I think a lot of people suffering from depression, from anxiety, bipolar, especially schizophrenia, I was hearing voices, was because of this astral attachment. It was a three and a half year battle. I was in panic attacks eight to ten hours a day. Through the Daime, through yoga, through deep tissue work, and actually, you know what really helped? Yoga and deep tissue with the plant amplifier of what we would call Santa Maria, which is sacralized cannabis. In the Daime, you pray, you do the rosary to Santa Maria, and it sacralizes it, and you can connect with this being. I was able to get my life back and get my energy body back. The voices went away, and the depression, and all these things as I illuminated this demon, and they become an ally. It’s a little bit, we’re going deep here, but I feel really called to this work because I see all these people suffering, and they don’t even have a spiritual perspective, so there’s no way to actually treat and address and treat it. Whereas, I think if you went to a psychiatrist and said he was suffering bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, the eight panic attacks, and they’re gone, that’s pretty phenomenal.
Rick: Yeah, if you went with those symptoms, you’d just be loaded down with a lot of drugs.
Talat: Yeah, and I tried that route, Rick, I did. I tried some Xanax and some antidepressants. It was just deadening.
Rick: I remember just one time during my drug days in the 60s, a friend and I took a tranquilizer just for fun because we didn’t have anything else. God, it was so, I didn’t take a lot, I just took a regular dose, and I just felt so numb. God, people live like this?
Talat: But there was a time where numb was good. If I could have gotten numb, that would have been okay, but it didn’t work.
Rick: It took all the bliss out, even though I didn’t have a lot of bliss in those days, but it was sort of like this flatness that was very distasteful to me.
Talat: It’s very of our culture. The more I get into healing, the more I realize it’s multidimensional and creative. It’s artistic, it’s nature-based, and we live in such a flat world that doesn’t honor so much of the different energetic centers in the body, the sex chakra, the creative chakra. It’s like, you brought up high school, should we be teaching the ayahuasca 101? I definitely think we need to bring drama back, and music, because the math and science is actually killing our souls. Another thing on top of that is we’re just not taught how to be human, how to listen to another person. The bullying and the psychopathic popularity contests and the shootings for me, it’s all just endemic of uninitiated culture.
Rick: I would say that for some, for those for whom it’s their dharma, math and science can be a wonderful, exhilarating, beautiful, mystical thing, if you’re cut out for it. But obviously that becomes the mainstay of education, and the more artistic things get budgeted out, and that’s deadening for a lot of people.
Talat: I think the science is artistic, too. There’s a whole connection between… All the Reality Sandwich people are nuts about science, because it’s so much about consciousness, especially design scientists like Buckminster Fuller. What I’m seeing a little bit is we’re segregating and isolating the sciences. It’s almost like how we create aspirin or something, whereas we could actually just eat the whole… Does aspirin come from a bark or something like that?
Rick: Yeah, it does. It comes from a tree bark.
Talat: Some of these cultures will actually have a tree bark, and it’ll cure the headache versus isolating and separating. Because I think you really need scientists and artists connecting more, and the scientists are artists. I really like the Renaissance construct of having a complete education.
Rick: It’s an interesting point you make about the plants, and extracting their essence and turning it into a pharmaceutical, because it’s argued in Ayurveda that to really get the intelligence of the plant, you need the whole thing in a synergistic, holistic way. If you just try to extract the chemically active component and use that as a drug, you miss the whole point. You lose the overall… the intelligence to the plant is lost.
Talat: Yeah. I’m sure there’s some DMT enthusiasts. Do you know DMT?
Rick: Only through you, mainly. You’re corrupting me, man.
Talat: I know. I’m sure there’s some DMT enthusiasts out there that would argue against that. I have a friend, my buddy Mitch Schultz, he directed this movie called DMT the Spirit Monk. It’s getting a lot of traction out there in the certain festival and spiritual counterculture circuits. I think it’s got over a quarter of a million Facebook views now. A lot of people are smoking DMT, and what happens is it shoots you out of this cannon across the universe. The realms are almost always animated and wild. They meet spirits. The machine elves are quite popular, but it’s all visual and quick and over. I’ve done DMT twice with very positive experiences, but I don’t know if I’d do it again. I like ayahuasca, well, Daime and ayahuasca, they have DMT in it, but it’s not synthesized. You’re going through this cooking process with a vine that has MAO inhibitors, so you can process the DMT and stuff. Instead, you get these much longer journeys where healing happens. I asked Mitch, “DMT or ayahuasca, what do you prefer?” He’s like, “Oh, ayahuasca,” even though he did a whole movie on DMT.
Rick: One doubt that comes up in my mind, and I thought of it a lot as I read your book, is that …
Talat: That sounds great.
Rick: For instance, ecstasy, MD, whatever it’s called.
Talat: MDMA.
Rick: That acronym. I’ve heard that it mimics serotonin, and it locks up the serotonin receptors in your nervous system, but somehow afterwards you’re less capable of producing your own serotonin. I might be wrong about this, but I’ve heard that. I wonder if the body can’t be its own pharmacopoeia to a much greater extent than we’re giving it credit here, and that maybe the yogis are right that natural techniques of meditation and other types of things can induce the secretion or the production of these things from within us without having to rely on external substances. That sounds like too absolute a statement, because I wouldn’t rule out the external substances, but I’m wondering if you pay a price in terms of weakening your ability to produce them naturally from within if you get in the habit of taking them from without.
Talat: I think you’ve asked a really great question. Maybe we could give it a couple parts and have a little dialogue around this. What I would like to do is give a little context to the MDMA section in that book and why it was so important to me. I think they can maybe relate with my story a little more too. I had been a political activist, really fighting in very flamboyant ways, as you know, Rick, from reading the book.
Rick: Johnny America.
Talat: Johnny America, leading an American revolution against King George II. We dressed as these very flashy, kind of like Bootsy Collins meets Benjamin Franklin Patriots. When Bush won that second election, I fell into a dark night of the soul. I was looking at the planetary situation, three species dying per hour on the planet, and I was really stuck. It was too big, I knew, for governments, for economies, for any of the systems we had. I was looking for some type of paradigm shift, a way of seeing things differently. I looked in all sorts of places, and it wasn’t until my 30th birthday where the line where Jamie says, “You need to take some MDMA and get your ass on the dance floor,” that I finally got out of my head and in my heart and connected with community in this higher vibrational way. It was like the red pill in The Matrix, deprogramming me from this parasitic, hierarchical, dominant, very cruel paradigm that we’re brought up in and unconscious of in this society. There’s a lot of joy and beauty here, too, but it’s a death system, generally speaking, of the way these systems are set up, at least where we’re at in this stage of societal evolution. And the MDMA activated my heart chakra, it activated my third eye.
Rick: It was a catalyst, it kick-started you.
Talat: It’s a catalyst, but that said, do I do MDMA anymore? No.
Rick: That was my experience back in the 60s. The first time I smoked grass, the first time I dropped acid, it was a major shift. But after a year of doing it, I had dropped out of high school, I was a total mess, I was paranoid, I was confused. You can see why I have a little bit of skepticism, at least about continuing usage. I think a lot of people, they get started and they don’t stop until they’ve done a lot of damage to themselves.
Talat: Yeah, and then a lot of people use it responsibly. Some of the most magical moments of my life are entheogens and sex. Those are just awesome moments in my life that I keep going back to.
Rick: Have you met people who have been doing ecstasy for years now and it’s obviously taken a toll?
Talat: Not so much. The ones I’ve seen are some of the kids in the 90s that were doing meth at raves.
Rick: Oh, meth, of course.
Talat: I really think meth and cocaine have a very demonic, there’s demonic energies associated with them. And heroin too. And to get off of those, the irony is sometimes to get off of them you need to do entheogens. Not MDMA, but ayahuasca, iboga, the root bark in the Amazon is very good at getting people off heroin addicts. There’s a great movie called “I’m Dangerous with Love”, my buddy Dimitri. This guy’s like a classic New Yorker and he was going to kill himself because he couldn’t beat his heroin addiction. He’s like, “I’m flying to Greece, I’m doing iboga, and then I’m going to kill myself.” Well, guess what? Three days of iboga, he was off. And then he started doing iboga ceremonies with other addicts with some success and some couldn’t break the habit. But I want to talk about MDMA because there’s something really cool going on with it right now. MAPS is tracking this a lot, the Multiple Association of Psychedelic Studies. I think I messed that up, but it’s MAPS. And they’re helping fund research with Iraq veterans that came back with PTSD, very serious. And they’re working with MDMA therapy for healing that and the results are off, it’s just off the hook. As the young kids would say, it’s off the hook and there’s a lot of healing, very positive results. But I think that’s the thing that I love. I don’t do entheogens in a recreational manner anymore. In a therapeutic or ceremonial context, I think it can be really great. And Rick, I want to say one more thing is I have a very serious spiritual practice. Yoga, meditation, and the Daime is a very serious spiritual practice.
Rick: I gather that, yeah, sure. You’re not goofing around.
Talat: We do meditations, there’s all sorts of spiritual work that goes on in there.
Rick: Yeah, I’m not accusing you of just being some kind of druggie. I’m just saying, I’m concerned that probably most of the people who would listen to this aren’t going to go off the deep end, but I’m just concerned about the general notion out there in the culture that you can just do this stuff indiscriminately without any consequences. It has to be put into some kind of more serious context, as you were saying.
Talat: The worst results I’ve seen as far as ayahuasca are the basement shamans. They’re going to order this online and do it at home. Fortunately, usually it just doesn’t work.
Rick: Because they get some kind of bogus thing.
Talat: Bogus thing, or maybe the ayahuasca is just like, “No, nothing’s going to happen with this, because it’s the spirit.” Or they get their ass kicked. Those are pretty much the two that I’ve heard. I’m sure there are some people that have had good experiences, but generally I’ve not heard of that many great experiences from them.
Rick: Incidentally, I just want to mention in passing that the Department of Defense just awarded a $2.5 million grant to the TM researchers for using TM to deal with PTSD, also transcendental meditation.
Talat: Yeah, wow. I just read this quote from the Dalai Lama that’s probably pretty famous. He said, “If we taught every child meditation, war would be over in a decade or two.”
Rick: Yeah, I interviewed someone last week and she was saying how after her awakening there was such a huge change in her health. She just didn’t get stressed. She’s from Florida, but she found she could drive in a snowstorm alongside big trucks and not be in the least bit tense or stressed and feel totally relaxed when she got home. The pain that she had from an old skiing accident completely disappeared. I commented, “Boy, think what that could do to the health care budget if everyone could be like you.” But then afterwards I thought, “Yeah, but what could it also do to the military budget?” A lot of these other budgets where huge amounts of money are wasted on stuff that wouldn’t even be happening if people were living in higher consciousness.
Talat: Yeah, and it feels like these things are transforming. I love to see the gun laws. I was in a ceremony and one of our leaders prayed that the gun laws transform. I’ve never heard “transform” and “gun laws” put together in the same sentence. He’s not saying, “We’re going to get rid of this or move this or put this.” We’re going to transform the consciousness around it.
Rick: Well, you know, on your theme that you mentioned in the book at times of feeling perhaps pessimistic because the powers that apparently be are so dominant and so intractable and what can little tightly isolated outcroppings of awakening people do about them.
Talat: You cut to the end really, right? But also negative at the same time.
Rick: Well, I just wanted to mention that subtle is more powerful. That if you’re operating from a deeper level, you have a lot more leverage than if you’re operating on the surface. We’ve seen throughout history radical changes take place time and again in society. I don’t know if we can exactly say why they took place, but they do take place. If we went back 150 years, none of the people living then could have imagined what life was going to be like today. In many respects it’s a lot better today than it was then. There are obviously some bad things, but try having a tooth extracted 150 years ago or something like that.
Talat: Or try being a woman, try being black in the US.
Rick: So these monumental changes have taken place and everyone seems to say the pace of change is accelerating. So within even my lifetime, what to say of yours, we could see a world which we can barely imagine now.
Talat: I’d like to think so. I am living in a world I never imagined. I always wondered. Now I’m doing healing works where a multi-dimensional guide that feels angelic comes in and shoots energy through my heart to put through my hands to someone else. For me, it’s not just spiritual, it’s sci-fi stuff. That’s my daily practice. I know a lot of people are waking up and experiencing God consciousness or whatever they might call it in their lives. In the Daime church, what’s coming through now is one of the heads of our church. He’s not like the pope or anything. He’s like a guy that plays guitar with you in ceremonies. But his new Inario, his hymn book that’s come through is called Nova Dimensau, New Dimension. It’s literally a study of a new energetic dimension that is coming into the planet. In my book, I hinted this, but I hadn’t really got a taste of what it was too much. A lot of yogis say we’re in the third chakra right now. This yellow chakra, it’s masculine, it’s achievement, willpower. We went 10,000 years from planting seeds in the ground to splitting the atom, seeing Hubble telescopes showing us all this crazy stuff about the universe. But now these fires of this masculine charge are pushing us into the heart center where healing is and integration, love. That’s the gateway to spirit. This is where spirit and matter connect. What I’m seeing is we’re getting a lot of help coming now in esoteric circles. It’s just like you said, Rick, it’s subtle. When I can really get out of my head and into my heart, that’s when the guide will come in and work with my hands. But if I’m even just a little bit in my thought process, he won’t come in. I’m a much worse healer when that happens. Much better when it’s quiet and in the heart and centered and subtle. But I feel a lot of people are activating like this. Things they never thought would happen are happening now. I’m sure there’s folks out there on this call. Some may be like, “This guy is a little crazy,” and others are like, “Wow, I’m going through this.”
Rick: Yeah. I’ve had people get in touch with me, as you have, who have never even thought about this kind of stuff. All of a sudden they’ll wake up one morning with some strange energy starting to rise up their spine and it’s getting more and more powerful. I’m referring to a woman named Sarojini, whose interview you can find on my site. They’ll start researching on the internet and they’ll stumble across Kundalini and they’ll think they have Kundalini disease. Then they’ll realize, “No, it’s not a disease. It’s something spiritual.” “Spiritual? I was never spiritual. Why is this happening to me?” But anyway, this kind of stuff is just cropping up in people who sometimes have no thought of it. They’re waking up.
Talat: Yeah. I bet you do a real service for providing. Isn’t it great we have this alternative media? If we just had to go through the mainstream mechanism, this wouldn’t be out there. But this is where science and consciousness are really good friends.
Rick: Absolutely.
Talat: Technology. When I was researching my book, I’m looking at all these Gnostic texts, which would have got me killed reading.
Rick: Burned at the stake.
Talat: Burned at the stake just a few centuries ago. You know where I did most of my research?
Rick: What?
Talat: ChristianWritings.com. You can find all these ancient texts that would have got you killed for free right there on the web.
Rick: I was reading this just the other day about this Christian priest who got burned at the stake for suggesting that maybe the little wafer they use in Catholicism wasn’t literally the body of Christ, it was just symbolic in some way. They burned him at the stake for suggesting that.
Talat: Oh my God! And that gets into a huge theme of my book, which is this literalist Christianity that’s just so narrow and unforgiving and unchristian.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Talat: And how frustrated the Gnostics were in this, because they were the torchbearers holding this ancient lineage. And then, as I say, because of these historical reasons, mainly the second Jewish revolt in Israel and the Roman Empire clamping down and then everyone scattering, a third of the population died, that this mystery school got fractured and you had all these literalist churches that came up out of it. That’s where you get the Roman Catholic Church. And eventually you have the bishops calling the Gnostics the ones that were actually holding that Christ consciousness heretics. And the Gnostics were really upset by this, saying they’re frustrated. The text, it just seems they’re frustrated. These people are claiming the name of Christ without knowing the Christ within.
Rick: I think the problem is that mystics don’t make good administrators. So non-mystics always rise up into administrative positions and start to throw their weight around and make it hard for the more sensitive, deep people.
Talat: Okay, that’s a weird thing to say and I think about it all the time, because the right-wingers are very good at powers and structures, and creating giant conventions with 100,000 people and mega-churches with 10,000 people. I even look at the Daime, we’re like scattered groups of centers here and there.
Rick: Yeah, and the best the lefties can do is Zuccotti Park, sitting around beating drums.
Talat: Yeah, and then eventually they get the cops there and plow them out. But we keep coming back and we get stronger and I think we need to start creating these systems. Something I see very powerfully, maybe you’ve been tracking this too, Rick, is the festival culture.
Rick: You mean like Burning Man and stuff?
Talat: Burning Man, Lightning in a Bottle, transformative festivals are exploding across the planet right now. People are going there and seeing a whole different way to be human. What I love about Burning Man is, one of my favorite chapters is that Burning Man scene called the first extraterrestrial city on Earth. For those that haven’t gone, I’d like to just give you a vision of Burning Man, which is now I think it’s 50,000 people that go and it’s not about commerce, there’s no commerce, no logos. There’s not even barter, it’s a gift economy. You give things from your heart and people go and create these camps that are the camps of their dreams. You can go into any of these camps and there might be a yoga camp, there might be a dance camp, a maze camp. I’ve seen homemade roller coasters, it’s crazy what people come up with.
Rick: A whiskey camp?
Talat: Whiskey and oars.
Rick: Seems like you have a whole spectrum out there.
Talat: Probably the grossest is there’s one called Porn and Eggs. You really can choose your own adventure. You can get a good massage or you can go to Porn and Eggs and you might get what you’re looking for. There’s not so much judgment. It’s just the synchronicities out there because it’s such a higher vibrational consciousness. There’s not these walls and limits and competition. It just flows and it’s crazy. You’ll be like, “Man, I wish I had an orange right now.” Some dude on a tricycle juggling oranges will throw you one. It happens all the time. It’s like magic out there.
Rick: I’ve experienced that kind of thing, just really unusual things. I’ll tell you a quick story just for kicks.
Talat: I was actually going to hit you up for a story.
Rick: I was in this meditation facility in upstate New York. I had moved and didn’t have any things. I wanted certain things. I wanted a little bit of a brasso to clean my Pooja set and a few odds and ends. But one really unusual thing, I also wanted a pair of decorative shoe buckles for a pair of Florsheim shoes because I had gotten them wet and they had expanded and the buckles had broken off. So I was moved from one room to another. In that room, the previous occupant had left behind everything I wanted except for the decorative shoe buckles, which would have been pretty weird if he had left a pair of those behind. That night I was walking to dinner and something caught my eye on top of an air conditioner in the hallway. I looked up there and there was a pair of decorative shoe buckles that I was able to attach to my shoes. Boom! They weren’t the buckles I had lost. It was like, why would those have been there? Wasn’t that an interesting experience?
Talat: I’m not even sure what decorative shoe buckles are.
Rick: It was a pair of dressy shoes that had these little metal buckles on them, the Florsheim shoes. I was wearing a suit and tie back in those days as a TM teacher back in the 70s. But that was like, “Okay, who organized that for me?”
Talat: I hear that, I’m like, “Synchronicity and skepticism.” My girlfriend would be like, “100% synchronicity.” I know her life opens up more than mine because if you believe everything is a synchronicity, I think it rolls better. But where do you lie on the synchronicity, skeptical realm as far as that situation?
Rick: In that particular instance, I almost envisioned magical little gremlins running around doing things and laying trips on people. They had somehow picked up on my thought and somehow it had been organized to put a little pair of shoe buckles on top of that air conditioner. Obviously a human being probably put them there, but why? What motivated the human being to do it? Perhaps the little gremlins that picked up on my thought.
Talat: For some reason this reminds me of bioenergetic therapy, it’s the same as dream therapy. The rules work the same because it is the same. This is the waking dream. I hear that and I’m like, “Wow, this co-creative waking dream.” Maybe it really is manifesting these things and the universe is co-conspiring with you. I actually think that’s what’s happening on this planet right now. If you pay attention to the news, things can seem pretty dire, but the universe is co-conspiring to help us wake up and really bring the light to this planet. The amount of beings. I also think there are a lot of shadow beings that need illumination and are causing suffering. Actually, could I share a story about shadow beings and the Santo Daime?
Rick: Absolutely. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to ask you more about that, so let’s do that.
Talat: The reason I went to Santo Daime is because I realized there was this astral attachment and I wanted to heal. They have this tradition where one of the formalizers of the church, Padrinho Sebastião is his name. He actually died on Saint Sebastian Day. He’s kind of a mythical guy in a way. He has this giant, almost like Fu Manchu beard going on. Fu Manchu, is that right?
Rick: Yeah, I know what you mean. Big beard.
Talat: Yeah, big white beard.
Rick: Let’s think, what’s that group from Texas?
Talat: ZZ Top.
Rick: ZZ Top. One of those guys incidentally is a meditation teacher, ZZ Top guy.
Talat: You’re kidding.
Rick: Billy Gibbons. He was on a TM teacher training course in Mallorca, Spain back in the early 70s. Anyway, I’m getting you off the track.
Talat: The same guys that were singing “Legs”?
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Talat: Meditating and appreciating legs. We’re not getting off topic because seriously, Sebastião looks a little bit like he’s moonshining. It’s weird to be like, that’s my spiritual mentor because he passed through such a difficult path and he gave me hope where no one else could give me hope. I’ve been to so many healers, “Yeah, we’ll get this attachment out.” I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars on hypnotherapy. Name the modality, I’ve done it. In Sebastião, the story is in the early 80s, there was a sorcerer in the Amazon. If people have been to the Amazon with ayahuasca, especially be very careful. There are so many sorcerers and dark shamans and there’s a lot of great healers too. There was a sorcerer who was possessed by a demon called Mr. Trunkarua. Trunkarua means “blocked path.”
Rick: Hang on one second. I just want to provide a context for this discussion of demons, okay?
Talat: Okay.
Rick: Because it might be pushing some buttons or stretching some boundaries for some of my listeners who might think of all that as just fanciful, imaginary stuff. I’m always talking about intelligence in these interviews and how intelligence permeates the universe and orchestrates and conducts everything. But obviously if we’re talking about a manifest universe, we’re talking about polarities and opposites. If there is positive intelligence, then there’s also negative intelligence. Even traditionally, mythologically, you have the gods and the demons battling with each other and so on. Those stories are relating to, we could say, organizing principles or laws of nature which are functioning at subtle levels and keeping the universe rolling. There are always these polarities. When you ask, “How could children be sold into sex slavery?” There’s obviously some dark energy, some dark intelligence influencing that kind of behavior. Anyway, that’s my context for understanding when we talk about demons and light beings and all this stuff. There are subtler levels of creation which don’t ordinarily meet the eye but are nonetheless as real as trees and cars and people that we see walking around. This stuff is all across the spectrum in terms of positivity and negativity. It all serves a function. It’s not like you could have all positivity and have a universe. It all serves a function. Anyway, that’s my context. Go for it.
Talat: I think that was a great explanation. It really aligns with the Daime cosmology as well. So, yeah. We are going into some strange territory. It was definitely strange for me. Just so you know, the Daime, the first thing is understanding what’s a being and what’s you. Discernment is the number one thing. It’s where the being and you connect, where your stuff and where your stuff meets. That’s where the battle is fought for light and love because it’s a fight of reunion. Because I could actually discern there was another being or energy consciousness or dark energy intelligence attached to me, I could finally work with it. That was the changing point. That’s a changing point for a lot of my healing practices is recognizing these forces. But anyways, there was this sorcerer that’s possessed by Trunkarua and very powerful demons. What we see in the Daime is they run in phalanxes quite often. There’s kind of like a head one and there’s other ones that are in this line. R
Rick: Gangs.
Talat: Gangs. Just like I live in New York City. There’s gangs here and often they have leaders. In fact, they act in a similar way. They’re just beings like we’re beings. In fact, the being I was working with was much like a gangster, a little bit like a pimp in a way. So Trunkarua came in with this sorcerer. The sorcerer was drinking Daime for this being but it was too intense and he actually died in this process.
Rick: The sorcerer.
Talat: The sorcerer did. So Trunkarua then possessed Sebastião. It was a nine and a half month battle where Sebastião was puking up blood.
Rick: Trunkarua is the demon, the bad guy.
Talat: Yeah, in this moment in time he’s the bad guy.
Rick: Right, okay.
Talat: It’s the light and the dark coming to meet. Sebastião is the formalizer of the Daime. Trunkarua over a series of… Sebastião got hospitalized, all these things, but over time Trunkarua eventually illuminated. It was a process. It wasn’t overnight but he healed some and healed some more. Then when he illuminated he said, “I’m illuminating and I want you to help my other lost brothers and sisters out there.” That’s where the mediumship work started of illuminating dark beings. When you illuminate a dark being it heals yourself. It heals them and it heals you. The Daime is constantly talking about the spiritual war we’re in. It’s unlike any other war we’re used to because it’s a war of love. It’s a war where the loser heals and wins. They call it a war of the great unification. There are lines, there’s actually illumination works and some of the hymns will talk about uniting the positive and the negative, just like you said, to become friends.
Rick: Very interesting.
Talat: It’s spiritual alchemy. Just like the old ancient mystery schools, they were all about spiritual alchemy of the light and the dark.
Rick: In the Vedic tradition they have a lot of stories like that where some rather highly evolved being, maybe even close to enlightenment, will be born as a demon in order to be Krishna’s enemy, let’s say. There will be this big battle and Krishna will finally kill the demon and in that moment the demon will get enlightened. Ravana in the Ramayana, Ravana was this great highly evolved being, master of all this wisdom and knowledge, but he was demonic. Yet when he was finally killed by Rama, that was his full enlightenment. That was just the path he took to finish the journey.
Talat: That is an integrated approach. That’s holistic right there. Even the demons. The dark guide, and I have to say, for two years I woke up and wanted to kill myself. My whole mission every day was do not kill yourself because what we see in the Daime is worse things can happen.
Rick: Than killing yourself you mean?
Talat: If you kill yourself you can end in worse states. We’ve done a lot of work in helping those beings out of those spaces. What a guide, what a teacher. I learned so much. My healing practice is not, I would have been probably one of these cheesy, Reike guys that, “Oh, we’re going to channel in the dolphins now,” Because I had such a deep, difficult teacher, I feel like my healing practice is that much more rewarding now.
Rick: The difficult teacher was this demonic intelligence that you had?
Talat: Yeah, outside of my guide, it was the most powerful guide I’ve had in my practice. When I do bioenergetic healing work, we start with finding what the light guide is and the shadow guide for the evolution of each person.
Rick: That kind of puts all traumatic and difficult experiences that human beings go through in a different context, doesn’t it? If we do live in a benign universe that’s a giant evolution machine that really wants all life forms to move along toward higher consciousness, then why does all this negative stuff happen? Is that thwarting the purpose? Maybe in the big picture it’s actually serving the purpose by strengthening us or giving us certain knowledge and wisdom that we wouldn’t have if everything were just smooth and rosy.
Talat: Did you know Alex Grey, the visionary?
Rick: Yeah, I’ve looked at his pictures and heard that you’re a friend of his.
Talat: Yeah, I was just, I spent a weekend up at his chapel Sacred Mirrors. He has a beautiful, it’s very scary, but also beautiful painting about spirit possession. We were talking about it as an evolutionary force when we were looking at this painting and he was describing it as a slingshot. Because that negative energy, you pull it back like this, but then when it’s ready to go, it’s a very powerful evolutionary force. If you don’t fall under the victimization of it.
Rick: Yeah, well that’s interesting. You hear about alcoholics bottoming out and I kind of bottomed out in my own experience before I turned around. I really did slingshot back in the other direction. I mean within a couple of months after giving up drugs and learning to meditate, I had gotten back into school and gotten into college and gotten a job and reconciled with my father and just all this positive. It was much more contrasting than it might have been if I had just been kind of muddling along.
Talat: Yeah, it’s the challenge too. We don’t hear this. Our medical system has a very victim mentality. You come in, the doctor knows everything. I get very frustrated with a lot of doctors because they don’t even ask questions sometimes. It’s a very victim based. It doesn’t empower people. That’s why my next book is going to be called Warrior Healing because that’s my healing practice. If I didn’t step up into some sense of spiritual warriorship, I don’t think I would have got through that passage. I just see it with a lot of clients I work with these days. I thought it was just me, just the vast amount of suffering. Then that there’s actually a trajectory to get out of it is pretty incredible.
Rick: All the myths support this, don’t they? There’s always a sort of a rite of passage. It’s actually institutionalized in certain cultures where the young man has to go through these trials and tribulations and fasting and sun ceremonies and all kinds of things in order to pass into adulthood. I mean, even birth is a rite of passage. You go through a rough time.
Talat: It is. We live in a mythic realm and we don’t realize it. When I started hearing and reading the hymns about Sebastião and here’s the Saint Sebastian and here’s Truncarua. Saint Sebastian in the past was tortured by a being. He was tortured, right? He died horrifically. Here’s the light and the dark come into this epic battle of union. Then this happens and then he dies on Saint Sebastian Day. I was like, “This is mythic territory.” But just like you say, it’s in our own lives. Our own lives are these mythic, epic journeys. Sometimes we don’t even realize it. Like with bioenergetics, say someone gets in a fight with their wife. You think it’s just this mundane thing. When you slow down the energy and look at it, it’s drama. There’s so much going on. It’s such actually a beautiful learning landscape, a playground to evolve with if you start paying attention.
Rick: If you don’t run out the door and slam it behind you and go off and find a new wife and do that a dozen times over and over again. If you actually anchor yourself and face the music and learn the lessons that are being presented to you, some real growth can come out of it.
Talat: You’re married, Rick, right?
Rick: Yes.
Talat: How long have you been married?
Rick: 26 years almost.
Talat: You sound like you’ve done a lot of work. Just recognizing that is pretty incredible. You don’t keep perpetuating the wound and projecting it on different partners.
Rick: Yeah. I always, well not always, but over time I’ve grown more and more appreciative of the fact that everything I’m experiencing is my teacher. It has some lesson, some valuable lesson if I can only take it to heart.
Talat: Yeah. Can I ask you a question? 26 years here. How have you learned to accept and love yourself in a long-term relationship like that?
Rick: Well, I don’t know. Firstly, I have a spiritual practice which I find very nourishing and I feel like I’ve learned a lot of patience. You can react to something in a moment of impatience that can have repercussions for days, or you can just be patient and within five minutes the whole thing is completely gone. I do have a spiritual practice, as I said, which I find extremely rejuvenating and it gives me a clean slate twice a day. So, as far as I’m aware, there’s not a tendency to accumulate and harbor resentments and things. It’s like every moment is new. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question, but that’s what comes to mind.
Talat: Yeah, I think that answered it really well. I think those five minutes of patience, that’s part of it.
Rick: Even five seconds sometimes is all it takes. That saying, “This too shall pass,” it does. Which is not to say that a person should hang, if they’re in an abusive relationship or something, that they should just hang in there for decades. There can be situations that action needs to be taken, but I’ve just always had a deep intuitive sense that I’m where I’m supposed to be. The course of my life is almost, I could say, divinely guided. If I look back a decade ago, two, three, four decades ago, I never could have anticipated what I would have been doing a decade later, but it’s always worked out better than if I had been the guy that was working out all the details. With my limited perspective, like a traffic cop can see the whole flow of traffic and can tell the cars to go this way and that, whereas each individual driver might not make the best decisions. I just feel like there’s some kind of cosmic traffic cop that’s calling the shots to a great extent in my life, and I’ve learned to trust that and flow with it, and I’m always pleased with the outcome.
Talat: Cosmic traffic cop, that’s a good line for the teaser of the podcast right there. Rick and Talat talk about DMT, cosmic traffic cop…. I’m also just asking because, suffering from possession for so long, I had a violent mother growing up.
Rick: I had an alcoholic father.
Talat: Yeah, and so I project all these no’s onto my girlfriends still, but they’re turning into yes’s. It’s just like I’m having a relationship like I’ve never had before, having cleared beings and that. There’s this beautiful opening happening of changing the whole construct of what relationship is to me. But sometimes, Rick, I still don’t win that five minutes.
Rick: Oh yeah, neither do I. We’re all bozos on this bus, as Fireside Theater, who was before your time, used to say.
Talat: Who?
Rick: There was this great comic comedian group called the Fireside Theater. You can probably find old recordings of them or something, and they’re back in the ’60s. That was one of their lines, “We’re all bozos on this bus.”
Talat: Was it actually televised?
Rick: They had record albums out, and I imagine they did actual shows where they presented their shtick on stage. What about, do you have anything? I have a question that could lead us off in a whole new direction.
Talat: Let’s go.
Rick: So the whole idea of…
Talat: You’re the cosmic traffic cop.
Rick: I just have a remnant question from what we have been talking about before I take us off in another direction. You’ve talked about actual possession by some negative entity in your own experience. Do you feel like everyone has that, almost, to some extent? Maybe some major, some minor, but do you feel like we’re, as a species, riddled with little… Just as they say, we all have cancer in our body, but for most of us, our immune system takes care of it. Do you feel like there are negative impulses of intelligence ingrained in everyone’s makeup, which makes us the mixed bags that we are? Would you say that’s the way it works?
Talat: I think everyone’s got light and shadow, and so there’s the light and the dark intelligences. The beings, another being is a little different. It’s like a pest.
Rick: Yeah, a parasite.
Talat: I don’t think we think of our energetic system as like… There’s dimensions. The amount of space and complexity in the energetic body is huge. It’s like ecosystems, and so there could be many beings in an ecosystem, and we see that with our body anyways, with bacteria and stuff like that. In some ways, to be honest, I feel frustrated. I feel like I’m a doctor in the 1850s with an electron microscope, telling people there are these invisible things that are causing illness. You can’t see them, but from the evidence, it’s making this happen, and they’re called germs. On the quantum level, there are these parasitic forces that we can’t see yet because we don’t have the spiritual or advanced technology. I think one day we’ll have the technology to invite frequency things. This is a little more star-trekky, but they can change the frequency of these intelligences much quicker. I feel like I had to do a little bit of the medieval approach to get through this, like a bloodletting or something like that.
Rick: Like you yourself, you began seeing auras and subtle energies quite a few years ago. There must be a whole range of potential development in that kind of thing. There could be a very first inklings of it, and then there could be full-blown capability, which you might see God knows what. Then there could be the whole dimension of actually being able to do something about it, not just seeing it, but being able to do something about it. Somebody like Christ, who could cast out demons or someone just touches his cloak from behind and gets healed, obviously he’s well beyond just seeing the subtle realms of life. He’s in a position to actually be master of those realms. In terms of healing and the kind of thing you’re mentioning…
Talat: Yeah, he’s a true divine son. He understands himself in his divine inheritance. There’s no fear. In the Daime, “the connection is the protection.” He’s connected. I think most people have them, honestly from the work in the Daime. It happens every time. New people come in, they see the mediumship work, they’re like, “That’s your own stuff. You’re crazy.” That being’s not really… because they come through people and speak. The beings are like, “Fuck you. I hate you. I’m going to kill all of you.” Then a Daime person will come up and say, “Welcome, brother. Welcome for your healing. We’re here to help you.” They don’t believe it for a long time. Then suddenly they start to heal. What my being did is he started bowing at the cross and crying and saying he fucked up and he’s really sorry. It’s a process of redemption. It was weird. One being came through and he was fighting and angry. Then he goes to the cross and he starts picking himself up.
Rick: He came through you?
Talat: Through me. He’s in my body doing this. He sees the cross, he picks himself up. Then he just starts illuminating himself. Out of joy he starts jumping up and down, out of the freedom of the spiritual symbol and the power of it, and illuminated himself. I still have Jesus issues. I’ve never thought of the cross as a fun, liberating force until that moment. Then I saw the joy of spiritual freedom. These beings in these hell realms are really trapped and locked up and damaged. They’re traumatized beings. You see them into the slough and you have so much compassion for them. You just see, even though they’re hurting other people, they’re suffering so much. They’re so shut down. They’ve been in really bad spaces. Where they needed nurturing, they found punishment and torture in these things. So, you help them open and turn the no to a yes. What I’m saying with this is, people that first come into the Daime, they’re like, “No, that’s you and your stuff. There’s no way.” Eventually their mediumship opens up and that weird tick they have, the depression, the eating disorder, the addictions. That’s such a big one with these entities. They come out and speak. The great thing about bringing an entity into the room in a safe context is now you can work with it. Now you’re bringing light. When it’s back there, man, it can really mess your stuff up. When you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to bring you in and work with you.” You can see what they’re doing, what their intentions are. You can start sending them love. They lose their power in the light and they gain a different kind of beauty. I thought of it like an art project. You start turning death into life and beauty, flowers, energetic flowers.
Rick: An interesting analogy is how do you get rid of the darkness in a room? Do you analyze it? Do you fight it? Do you try to push it out somehow? You flick the light on and where did it go? It’s gone. You just brought light to it and that’s the end of the darkness.
Talat: I wrote a Facebook post saying, “I think I’m starting to understand spiritual alchemy better. The light, as they say in the Daime, is way more powerful than the dark.” Many people agree with me, but so many people are like, “No, that’s an ignorant statement. Light and dark are even in this,” but I think your analogy shows a point.
Rick: Join me, Luke, and together we will rule the universe.
Talat: I think of Star Wars all the time on the journey. You know how Luke was like, “I have to face Vader again. I had to go back to ceremony to face my Vader.” What happens in the end, you take off the mask and he’s like a crumpled old wounded guy. That’s what they found with Trunkarua. He was crippled. He was a crippled old guy that needed a lot of healing underneath the demonic mask that he was wearing.
Rick: I heard a Bill Moyers show in which Joseph Campbell talked about that scene. Joseph was friends with George Lucas and it’s a treat. I have to go back and listen to Bill Moyers’ conversations with Joseph Campbell.
Talat: Were you going to say what they said though?
Rick: No, I’m just commenting. I don’t even remember the specifics, but there was so much wisdom and mythology in the Star Wars series and so many profound symbols that took place throughout the whole thing.
Talat: Yeah, at least the first three.
Rick: Yeah, it got a little weird afterwards, maybe because Joseph Campbell died. I don’t know.
Talat: Probably, you know when you can see those Joseph Campbell ones? Every time they do a fund drive for PBS, they play him because they know it’s just gold.
Rick: Now, one theme that comes up prominently in your book is the whole theme of extraterrestrials, which again, there’s all kinds of silly New Age ooga-booga about that, but I think you treat it in a responsible fashion. In my own experience, it was something that dawned on me around 1980 or so that this is part of the equation in terms of the evolution of our planet and that there actually is something going on there, not through any direct experiences like you’ve had, but it just kind of hit me and rang true. So how does that tie in with everything else you’ve been talking about?
Talat: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because the last three years, maybe four years, that has not been my journey. But for that entire book…
Rick: It was a phase.
Talat: Yeah, it was very prominent, and I didn’t put it in the first five drafts of the book. It was only–the book had been accepted, and Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he was one of my editors, he still told me, “We can’t publish it because you’re not being honest enough.” He’s like, “You’ve got to put in your shadow stuff, your messy relationships. Everything you don’t want to put in the book is what’s going to make it interesting.” And I’m glad I did it because I think it’s a much more relatable book, but the hardest thing was coming out of the galactic closet. Because people can handle spirituality and consciousness, but as I say, when you drop the A-bomb, you just–the alien–you become one of those freaks. That was my perspective. Yeah, the first time I started seeing energy fields, and I took MDMA, I was in my room, and as soon as it clicked on, I felt myself realizing, “Oh, you can see things this way.” And then I was given one word, and the word was “alien.” And so throughout the experience, it’s kind of this opening to some type of galactic guidance of perhaps beings that may have been initiated in another planetary realm and are helping the ascension process here on this planet. I don’t know. I mean, my theory–I have various theories, but one is if you can believe in reincarnation or transmutation of the souls, then it’s very probable, just like you’ve had many lifetimes here, maybe as like an Eskimo and a European and a potato farmer or whatever it is, you may have had some experiences on some other planets. Guidance I do keep getting is that the universe is just so much weirder than we possibly imagined. I also think we may have connections to these different lineages, if you will. In my book, there’s a huge thing about lineage that comes up in it that you never– you don’t hear an extraterrestrial phenomenon. It’s usually this kind of 1950s abduction story. And this was more of like inheriting certain genetic or energetic coding that makes you– it’s like ancestral. And just like in the U.S., we could be–we’re really big mutts. It’s Irish, German, English, Kenyan, Cherokee, whatever. We may have these different associations to certain other star systems, if you follow the lineage back far enough. And I think the Earth is a very magical planet that’s connected to the rest of the cosmos.
Rick: And how much of all that you just said and other things you might say are just speculations that you have been playing with or maybe gleaning from various books? And how much of it was inspired by your direct experience?
Talat: I’d say most of that–not too much from books. I can’t think of many books that are like this. Can you?
Rick: I’ve read things along the lines of what you were just saying. I couldn’t name you a book. But there are people who kind of posit, for instance, that human beings are basically from another planet in general, and that some early explorers from someplace else colonized the Earth and maybe interbred with the beings that were here and so on. And that’s what we are today. But who knows?
Talat: Most of those books I’ve read, though, seem like really woowoo, sloppily channeled books. I love Barbara Hanklau, but she basically says the moon is made of things that it’s not made of.
Rick: Green cheese.
Talat: There’s green cheese. And so I lose my confidence. Because for me, it’s still scientific, it’s still energetics. It’s complicated, advanced string theory stuff, but it’s there. I think a lot of it was intuitive. Maybe Daniel’s 2012 book with crop circles inspired it. Most of it was experiential.
Rick: So do you feel now, then, that some sort of–not only subtle– there’s various ways you can classify this stuff. It could be subtle beings who dwell on the Earth, just as we do. It could be that the whole issue of Earth versus somewhere else is meaningless when you get to a subtler level. There’s not this space-time rigidity that we have on the surface level. Or it could be that they’re beings that are actually from the Pleiades or someplace. Then we have to solve the issue of how they got here, the distance of 400 light years or something. But maybe there’s wormholes or some advanced technology. So there’s all these things in the mix. But the essential question is, to what extent do you feel that all of that is pertinent to the spiritual awakening of the planet now?
Talat: Well, don’t we want to meet the neighbors?
Rick: Sure, yeah, absolutely. As my screensaver, I have NASA’s latest picture of the day, which is constantly rotating, different galaxies and all. I’m out there, man.
Talat: I mean, I reminded of the scene last winter where we were driving– my girlfriend’s from Jersey, and we were driving through Jersey strip mall lands. We were both getting so depressed. I kind of looked around, and I just said, “One alien.” She’s like, “What?” I’m like, “All it would take was one alien on this planet to change all of this, change our perspective on everything.” That’s not how I see it’s happening. I don’t think we’re going to have someone land. What I see is we shamanically wake up. It’s artistic. It’s mathematical. But it’s like this mystery, just like we follow the synchronicities in our lives, and it opens up. The number one thing– There’s two things I really get responses on in my book, because people resonate. The black bowling ball in their stomachs, because so many people have the black bowling ball that holds their life down. I think a lot of that probably is entities for people. And the aliens, because there’s so many people that are having awakening experiences with that right now. They’re so grateful that I’m actually writing about this stuff in an intelligent way, a grounded way. I didn’t lose my wit and my intelligence writing about this, or my humor. But there seems to be a waking up that’s happening. Now, what I’m getting recently in the Daime is we are these star beings, that we are actually star beings. If you ever read Graham Hancock, and he talks about the ancient mysteries of Egypt– Graham Hancock wrote the foreword for my book. He’s a mentor. I just talk about a man that’s grounded and can write about esoteric topics in a very– He just did a TED Talk, so I’m very happy about that. But he says the ancient mysteries in Egypt, it’s basically saying one thing, that they were waking up initiates to understand themselves as star beings. We’re made from the stars. This whole planet is star powered. We say solar power is star powered. In the Daime, they’re constantly talking about being healed from the stars, and that we are the stars. But a star that doesn’t illuminate can’t shine. So the process of, I think, most initiatic paths is to clean out and illuminate the star body, and connect with that star energy. So that’s a little wilder, but if you start thinking of it like that, then when you meet people– I feel like life is very psychedelic now without taking anything, but I just meet so many interesting people with these different– If it’s star energy, they’re holding different energetic frequencies. Sometimes I’m just like, “What planet is this person from?” I almost mean it literally, but–
Rick: So when you say star energy, you mean actually some energy from some other place that they’re embodying here. Is that what you mean?
Talat: I think that’s possible. Or it’s being held in their DNA’s energy, or it’s being held in just their energetic body. I met a person that believes she’s a Syrian channel, and she believes there are certain types of music that we’re attracted to based on our lineages back to places. When she said that, it just felt true to me, because I’ve always been into weirder music, music that was challenging mainstream ideas. I was never into Bon Jovi. I was into Velvet Underground, and people like Daniel and Wah that are very haunting, and have these frequencies that are a little different than mainstream music. Rick, what are your thoughts on this stuff?
Rick: You’re expressing some of them pretty well. I just feel like the parts in your book where you talked about ancient pictures of Mary with some starship beaming down energy into her womb, and various other paintings from hundreds of years ago where they actually depicted this stuff, kind of corroborates what I’ve been thinking, which is just that we’re part of a much larger family, and that we’ve kind of forgotten our membership in that family, because frankly we don’t really deserve to be an active member. We just don’t have the consciousness to participate in a cooperative, friendly way. First thing we’d do is if we had the ability to go to some other planet, it’s sort of like what we did in Avatar, start raping the environment and killing the natives, based upon our track record.
Talat: Yeah, we’ve already had this experience of meeting foreign lands with Columbus, and we really screwed the pooch on that one.
Rick: Right, I mean read Howard Zinn, The People’s History of the United States. So I’m saying, I sort of feel like, again, along the theme that the whole universe is permeated by intelligence, it’s not only intelligence in an absolute sense, but intelligences, and that they’re kind of looking over us and waiting for us to grow up enough to be a more equal participant, rather than just some little bad boy that has to be kept in the dark.
Talat: Yeah, I’m glad you said that. There’s a couple of things that I’d like to address. One is the Christ line and its galactic things, so maybe we can talk about that next. I wanted to talk about this thing about them watching us. One of my favorite scenes in the book, and there’s probably something in me that’s very attracted to it, is I believe I call him Don in the book. I changed all the names. Don at Burning Man, he’s this guy that – Don and Sarah.
Rick: Yeah, he’s a successful businessman at an $800 million company and so on.
Talat: It’s probably worth a billion now. He’s got this amazing apartment. He’s like all these things, very grounded guy. But he, at Burning Man his first year, had this experience of, one, taking mushrooms and seeing his girlfriend’s face turn into this kind of alien face, which I then saw that night I met them at Burning Man. She said something to me in her face about how I brought out her shaman side. In that moment I saw her face change into this kind of sexy, grayish alien figure, but it didn’t look like these mean grays that you see on the TV and stuff. Then Don tells me this story of how the first year he met, he saw her face change when they were on some art pyramid out there. Then when he went to bed for three nights in a row, his consciousness was taken up to what he would say was a mother ship. I think his line is it was full of these really fun creatures. It wasn’t these boring creatures we hear about. It was like a carnival of androgyny and David Bowie kind of like people. They had really cool tattoos, a lot of them. When I hear that, it sounds to me like they probably loved themselves a lot and were doing a lot of creative expression. What he saw is he looked out this mother ship and he said what he saw were these thousands of ships beaming down high vibrational lights of indigo to help the frequency, like there’s intention. He also said he saw a few ships that were beaming down black energy or negative energy. He was told by these other beings that some of those were reptilian based, but the majority were there kind of helping in a very subtle way. That’s been kind of the guidance in my whole The Electric Jesus, there is this galactic shamanic assistance that takes place throughout the book.
Rick: And emphasis on the word subtle by the way because obviously if they were gross metallic ships, we would be able to detect them. Some of them are. Some of them come into this dimension and can be seen and have been seen and so on. I think you’ve got to sort of bring into the mix the understanding of subtle realms and that beings and even objects can exist on subtle realms which aren’t going to be visible through a telescope or something.
Talat: Yeah, and these subtle realms are in perception of dimensions. So if our consciousness, like you’re saying, if we’re not at that state, you can’t reach that.
Talat: Ben, oops, I’m sorry, I just gave away his name, Don in the book is very…
Rick: It’s Ben and Jerry’s.
Talat: Very technically connected. You know what happened about a year later is I actually told Don and Sarah when they were at a dinner party, I was like, “Hey, Don, you know…” They were talking about aliens because they love to talk about aliens. It’s their favorite topic. I was like, “You know what, Don? That night we met you at Burning Man, I saw Sarah’s face change into an alien.” He just turns to her and goes, “Honey, draw him a picture.” She drew a picture of exactly what I saw with a little alien’s heart NYC next to the picture. Does it make it real? No. It corroborates, yes. But Rick, I want to go with what you were saying. I think it’s just so important.
Rick: Which was that?
Talat: Which is this… we’re just holding possibilities.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to hell if you don’t believe that Sarah was an alien. It’s like, who knows? But boy, you had the experience. What does it mean? Who knows?
Talat: Yeah. I really want to say, I’m not saying this stuff is true. I’m saying these are experiences I had. Folks out there don’t even have to decide if it’s true or not. Those are experiences to consider.
Rick: I’m all for throwing everything into the mix and not coming to firm conclusions or needing to, but keeping open to all possibilities because, as you say, it’s a very magical, mysterious universe out there. Like I said, quoting Shakespeare earlier in The Thing, where I lost the quote, “There are more possibilities in this heaven and earth than are imagined in your philosophy.” So, it’s like, again, harkening back to 150 years ago, 1,000 years ago, people’s imaginations, except for a few outliers like Jules Verne, wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the stuff that we take for granted today. So that’s just going to keep happening. It might be that 200 years from now, people will think, “What? They had a problem believing aliens? Go to the supermarket. They are shopping with us.”
Talat: I would love to try some alien cuisines. I love Italian and Thai. It’s like, Latvian and Arcturian. Or maybe they’re all like, solarians. They just breathe heavenly energy.
Rick: So, playing with possibilities here again, and based upon the glimpses that you have had, do you feel like maybe there’s a lot of people among us who aren’t actually people?
Talat: I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like what my experience has been is we’re more people. There might be first timers to Earth. I see that with a lot of young generations. I think a lot of autism, I think some of it’s environmental factors and they have a sensitivity. But I also think it’s just a weird planet for them. I do think you’re seeing more of the crystalline energy generations come in to heal us, which is good. I wrote this comment about young people. When I was in my 20s, counterculture was drinking too much Rolling Rocks, smoking Marlboro Reds, reading Charles Bukowski, listening to Tom Waits and hanging out at coffee shops way too long. That was the counterculture. There wasn’t much light. Now the counterculture is like, go to these awesome festivals, do a Reiki healing, do some yoga, wear a crop circle shirt, go to an Alex Grey exhibit and talk about sacred geometry.
Rick: Yeah, that’s encouraging. It’s funny you talk about young people. To me you’re just like this little bean sprout.
Talat: How old do you think I am, Rick?
Rick: You’re in your 30s, just based on hints you’ve given me in the book. But you could be in your 20s for all I know.
Talat: Some people think I’m 25. I’m 38, two years from 40.
Rick: There you go. I’m 63, but I have to actually think to remember because I don’t really relate to it.
Talat: This is actually, the audience doesn’t know here, but Rick knows that I’m having a big birthday party today. So I feel like this is just a great kickoff for a really magical day.
Rick: Yeah, you’re having a party tonight. I mentioned to you yesterday, it’s a good thing we’re not doing this interview the morning after that.
Talat: Yeah, and you know what the theme of the party is? It’s 2013, the space oddity. So people are going to come as very futuristic, more like a Barbarella kind of sexy futuristic costume. I’m going to go with Han Solo, and my girlfriend’s going to be a sexy Princess Leia.
Rick: Now one thing I’m wondering, and I bet you I’m anticipating the questions a lot of listeners are having if they’ve stayed with us this long, is that there are a lot of people who listen to this show, and a lot of people I’ve interviewed on this show who are in the non-dual world. Their whole emphasis is, they would consider most of the stuff we’ve been talking about today to be just distraction. Possibly true, but who cares, because it’s just all a lot of mind candy that’s not pertinent to actual self-realization. Their whole emphasis may be that when you get right down to it, there is no individual self. We’re just pure presence, or pure being, and so on. When they hear us talking and read a lot of, perhaps read your book, they hear a lot of, “Well, I experienced this, and I experienced that, and then this happened to me.” Their question would be, “Well, who is this ‘me’? Who is this ‘I’ who is having these experiences?” That’s the real important question. So in your path and in your study in Santo Daime, is there very much emphasis on that? A lot of people when they awaken, they think, “I am really not ultimately an individual. That’s just a superficial facade. I am universal awareness.” So they lose the whole emphasis on individuality.
Talat: Yeah, well, the whole practice of the Daime is to re-enter the celestial kingdom.
Rick: Which is?
Talat: Reconnected with God consciousness and to let go of illusion. There’s all these things, “Let go of illusion, let go of the separateness.” But you’re right, because we’ve been talking, the shamanic world is very much about duality. And the Daime is this weird mix of the shamanic and the Godhead, the God consciousness, the oneness, the reunion. And it’s a real study. I know the Daime tells us, when they’re talking about the celestial kingdom, “Those who are not clean do not go.” “Those who are clean go. Those who are not clean do not go.” So if you have beings attached to you, and you can’t illuminate them, it’s really hard to get to that God consciousness. It was hard for me to meditate. Meanwhile, I’ve got this thing in my back that’s saying, “Kill yourself, kill other people, die.” But the meditation helped. So for me, I think it’s kind of a both and. A perfect example would be New York City here. I try to live in this non-dual world as much as I can and meditate in that. But when I’m walking down a street at night, if I don’t have an awareness of the dual world, and this did happen to me, I got mugged and almost hurt really bad. So I think there’s the God consciousness in there, there’s the awareness that we’re here. And also, a lot of my healing practice, I work with what we would call bioenergetics, a lot of schizoids, because that’s mine. And schizoids love to be spiritual, because that’s where, you know, it’s nice up there, it’s beautiful. The hard part for them is being here, because it’s terrifying. And to be in the illusion and help bring light. And so huge amounts of my practice is actually to ground people, to bring in that higher consciousness energy and then spread the love. But the Daime says we are in a spiritual war, fighting it with… What do they say? With the certainty that we are going to win. Meaning God’s not going to lose. It’s all coming back into… and it already is there, you know. But I think you’re right, I’m glad you brought that up. And I think it’s a study, I think it’s a study for everyone. And to me, if you’re only looking at the non-dual world, it might be good to pay attention to the dual world we’re in as well, and just notice where you might not be paying attention.
Rick: Well, you know, that’s actually a trend in so-called non-dual circles. There are a number of teachers and speakers whose whole emphasis was on the non-dual to the exclusion of the dual, to the exclusion of the personal. And after some years of that, they began to mature and began to realize that it had been lopsided, or only partial. So there’s this whole embodiment movement taking place in the non-dual teachings. And to my way of thinking, mature spirituality is an incorporation of the full spectrum and a facility in functioning at all levels of the spectrum, at all levels of manifestation, from the unmanifest to the most gross and practical, like walking through a street in New York at night. And if there’s any deficiency on any of those levels, then that’s an area that needs growth. For most people, of course, they’re so hung up in the dual that the non-dual is really a necessary focus and a breath of fresh air when it begins to dawn. And sometimes they become fundamentalist in that orientation, but then over time they can’t stay there. It’s got to start bleeding into the manifest again and enriching the whole thing.
Talat: Yeah, sounds like a study. I mean, the healing work I do is so much about the chakras and finding where the blocks are in the chakras. So it’s very weird for a very spiritual person to come in and I’m like, “You need to work on being sexy a little bit.” Like, “We need you”–and I’ll actually put on music where they can dance their second chakra and feel it, sometimes for the first time, really.
Rick: Yeah. Do you see the chakras when you’re doing energy work with people, or how do you know what they need?
Talat: Mostly with my eyes closed I’ll see the chakras. Well, if someone’s really rigid, like this, you know they’re going to need some heart opening and they’re going to need some first and second chakra. Most people, if you look, I think the major woundings happen in the second and the fifth chakras. The feminine–the heart–or the second and the fourth, the heart and the sex chakra, it just seems like they’re so vulnerable for people. And of course, people say, like, someone has a throat issue and they’re not expressing themselves. So you’ve got to do all this fun, like, color therapies. I love it. But our idea of healing is so boring to me sometimes. It’s very clinical. I think when we start understanding it as a beautiful art project, and these colors, these expressions need to come into being, it just becomes much more rich. That’s the creative energy. So, yeah, it is tracking. But usually it’s not me. It’s the guides that tell me.
Rick: And I guess you do these sessions over Skype as well as in person. So are you able to do them just as effectively over Skype?
Talat: In some ways, Skype can be a little more effective because there’s something– say, like, someone’s gone through sexual abuse, right? And you’re sitting in a room together. That can be a little stressful for somebody. Sometimes there’s a safety having that Skype. It’s like an extra boundary for them to go into these spaces. I haven’t found one more at least less effective that I have noticed. Sometimes it’s actually not a bad thing, the Skype. Of course, there are–sometimes I’d like to do hands-on work, and I can’t do that. But that’s when you train people to do the hands-on work for them. Mine is more like–I call it warrior training. That’s more of what it is.
Rick: And if you’re being assisted in this work by guides, then I guess those guides aren’t restricted by geographical distance. They can help facilitate it regardless of where the person is.
Talat: Yeah, and there’s been quantum physics studies on that too, right? Of how these different particles in very different locations will affect each other. So, like–what’s that called? Non–
Rick: I know exactly what you’re talking about. There can be particles on opposite sides of the galaxy, and as soon as one takes an up position, the other takes a down position. It’s without any limitation in terms of the speed of light and all that. But I forget what it’s called.
Talat: Yeah, but that’s the thing.
Rick:And who are these guides that are helping you with the healing thing? We’ve talked about all kinds of subtle beings and all, but is this like the guys that used to call you “cowboy,” or is this a different gang?
Talat: I do not know.
Rick: You just definitely feel there’s some kind of guiding entities.
Talat: Yeah, yeah. Now that you said it, it actually might be a group of guides, but I always feel it is one. And it may be the same guides, because they used to actually do some heart opening, hand–moving like hands.
Rick: And how do you know it’s guides and not just your own imagination or your own kind of subtler intelligence or something?
Talat: Rule number one of mediumship, don’t make anything up. Rule number one.
Rick: What’s rule number two?
Talat: Great question.
Rick: Rule number two might be how do you know if you’re making it up or not.
Talat: Rule number two is probably know who’s coming in and be responsible. And three is open and close. There’s a beginning, there’s a middle, and there’s an end to mediumship. And what happens is a lot of people are unconscious mediums throughout the day. These dark entities will come through and yell at their partner and create separation and stuff like that. But as far as who these guides are, I want to share on my birthday last year in February, the Daime had been saying, “Call on your guides. Call on your guides.” I could very easily be a medium for this demonic entity. I could never get a guide, and I didn’t even believe in guides. I was just like, “The Diame is making this up. There are no guides.” Because what the guides do, there’s a process. You bring in the dark being for the healing, and then he’ll usually drink the Diame or she, and then you call on a guide, and the guide will do these things to clear you out. But I never had guides. And then on my birthday last year, that’s when one of the facilitators, she said– it’s actually a daughter of Sebastião down in Brazil. She said, “Call on your guides.” And for the first time ever, my hand lifted, and it just started moving. It started doing these Tai Chi moves, and it was moving energy into my system and cleaning me out. And what I really got out of it was saying, “Here he is, and help him.” And it was funneling energy through me. And ever since that moment in mediumship, my guides come in, and this guide comes in and heals me after I bring in dark beings. And sometimes he just comes in anyways and heals not just myself, but– This is what I love. It’s not just us. We’re part of a team. So we’re here in physical space, and we have a really important role because we’re the bridge between the lower and the upper. These high vibrational beings cannot reach to the dark astral stuff. They have to have a tunnel, and so they can grab the dark beings and bring them to the light. And some of the dark beings even come bound. They come tied up because they’re too violent. So this guide, what he’s now doing in a lot of works is he will– It’s white magic. That’s what this is. And he will heal this aloud too, the healing space. He’ll send golden energy to the entire room to heal people, lights and stuff. But you have to surrender because as soon– You know what I did in the last work? For the first time, he was sending out beautiful gold energy to the whole room, and I got in my head. I’m like, “That’s so cool.” Immediately I lost the connection. That’s also a rule. Not number one, but if you go in your head, you lost the mediumship. I cut the connection. And so on that day, I was also told, “You’ve been hesitating. It’s time to take the name Talat.” I was initiated through the International Sufi Order. It means the rising sun. Having been through so much darkness, I feel like it’s an appropriate name for me. And so from that moment on, I’ve been using that as my name.
Rick: So the Sufi Order is one thing, then the Santo Daime Church is another thing. But now you feel strong enough about the Sufi thing to have taken on a Sufi name. Is your Sufi teacher cool with the whole Santo Daime thing?
Talat: I left the Sufi Order after being initiated.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Talat: Because they didn’t know how to deal with a demon. They’d love him, help transform, but there’s no techniques, there was no process. I have a great respect for the Daime, for being able to do what no other modality I’ve run across, even ayahuasca, has been able to do.
Rick: Okay. And this Daime thing, is this something you have to go to Brazil to participate in, or are there little chapters in the States?
Talat: There’s some around the world. It’s legal in Oregon. They fought for it there, so people can probably find out about it in Oregon and do it there.
Rick: So what do you do? Commute to Brazil or Oregon?
Talat: You know, no comment.
Rick: I see what you mean. Okay. Tell us about Evolver and Reality Sandwich.
Talat: Okay, yes. So at the end of The Electric Jesus, I used to be this activist, and I wanted to get into what might be called mystical activism. I didn’t want to just be an issue, I wanted to put this into the world, and also maybe help other people that were going through similar processes. And so I met Daniel Pinchbeck, Ken Jordan, and Michael Robinson, right as they were starting up this web magazine, and it was exactly what I was looking for. It’s like an intersection of all things consciousness, because I feel like a lot of people have one branch, and we wanted something that tracked all of them. So it was like digital democracy, alternative currency, yoga, shamanism, plant medicine, design science, visionary science. All these things come together in this one place. So that’s the web magazine, and being a media activist for my book, I was really sick of sending things to the mainstream and having them crush the essence, and being really cynical. And I’m just really grateful we now have these cheap open source platforms and stuff. You don’t have to pay $10,000 to do a print run of a magazine anymore. So that was Reality Sandwich, and very quickly an activated community was developed. A bunch of leaders and writers started rising up. Maybe one of the bigger ones is Charles Eisenstein, who wrote this great book, Sacred Economics. I don’t know if he’s been on the show, but he’d be a good one. He’s brilliant. And then we ended up having a book print, too. It’s called Evolver Editions with a lot of these leaders. But what we saw is people wanted to meet in physical space. They didn’t want to just do this online. They wanted to create these transformational communities. So Daniel came up with the name Evolver Spores, which is this mycelial interconnected network where we share. It’s intelligence sharing across this network. And we host monthly events on all the different topics I’ve mentioned. A lot of them will do things like permaculture gardens or startup time banks. Baltimore started up their own local currency called the B-Note. It’s now in, I think, 200 stores. We have 50 regional groups that do this. If people are interested in starting one up, you can just find me through the Evolver Network site, and we’d be happy to get you started. Can I say one more thing on that, Rick?
Rick: Yeah, sure, anything.
Talat: Being a first-time author and having these spores is a blessing. And I welcome you. I’m not sure where you live, so I’d love to hook you up with one of the spores for some speaking engagements. But I have pretty much packed houses.
Rick: I live in Iowa, Fairfield, Iowa.
Talat: Iowa, yeah, that’s a little tougher.
Rick: Probably Chicago would be the closest thing.
Talat: Yeah, yeah. Our Chicago spore isn’t as strong as some others. But it gave me — I got to travel and have full houses every night because of this. And I’m not the only one. All these film screenings and book tours, we’ve created an alternative distribution network for this, which I’m very excited about.
Rick: Cool. What was I going to say? I don’t remember. Anything else in your head? Because I just went blank.
Talat: I think we’ve covered a lot of great topics in this time period.
Rick: Yeah, really. Oh, I know what I was going to ask you. Do you know Dr. Kurt Johnson, who lives in New York?
Talat: No.
Rick: He’s a great guy. I interviewed him a few weeks ago. You might want to check out his interview. He has just written a book called “The Coming Interspiritual Age.” He’s like a 30-year-old version of you in terms of wanting to — maybe minus the ayahuasca — wanting to bring together all these different things and recognizing that all the types of things you just mentioned, like permaculture and different monetary systems and all that, are symptomatic of a new type of spirituality. You’re saying towards the beginning of your book, and I experienced this back in the Vietnam era when I was a new meditator and people were protesting against the Vietnam War, and I thought, “Eh, it’s so superficial. They’re not really going to have much of an effect. These people just seem to be egotistical and crazy, a lot of them, and everyone should meditate,” because that’s the level at which change really occurs. Of course, they would look at me and my type and think, “Eh, you’re just sitting on your butt. You’re not going to affect any sort of change.” You kind of went through that with your activist phase. Now I kind of realize all levels are needed, and that spirituality is not exclusive of political action, for instance, and vice versa. Political action without the spiritual foundation can become ineffectual and you’re just angry and you’re not really getting much done. So in terms of wrapping up this point, I think we’re evolving into a time now which is inclusive and which recognizes, and your Evolver.net is an example of this, which recognizes that a very multifaceted approach to spirituality is needed. So you can riff on that a little bit.
Talat: Yeah, you know where I see this, like you were talking about where activism meets spirituality too, is Occupy Movement.
Rick: Exactly, yeah. Kurt was very involved in that, by the way.
Talat: Yeah, I remember 2004, activists did not talk about spirituality. That was no-no, that was for the freaks, that was not serious work for them.
Rick: Exactly.
Talat: Now they were doing meditation flash labs. I heard tons of people talking about ayahuasca in Zuccotti Park.
Rick: Yeah, Deepak Chopra came there and spoke and all.
Talat: Yeah, but there’s still a lot of work to be done because the confrontation with the police, this cat and mouse that they’ve been playing for years was still going on. I don’t think they had to get kicked out of Zuccotti Park. I think all these people didn’t need to get arrested, but they just, if someone, and of course I could be that person, so I am just as guilty because I’m busy with Evolver and this. I didn’t say, “You know what, we need to have some non-violent communication workshops between police and organizers. There’s forgiveness circles you can do,” which I’m not sure police would be open to it, but man, it’s basic stuff. You talked about, we’re talking about the dual world. Maybe this is something I want to end the call on is we’ve been in a civil war for so long. The angels and the demons, this race and that race. The Daime, it’s a real lesson. I think this is every spiritual tradition, it is authentic spiritual tradition, is we’re family. We’re here to heal. We need to end the civil war between the family and create union. That’s what I think, and within ourselves, the civil war in ourselves. I think that’s a great project of this unification. What I see it as a dimensional shift of the heart, is that union of the family, and seeing ourselves as brothers and sisters.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a Sanskrit phrase which I can’t pronounce, but it’s basically, “The world is my family.”
Talat: Awesome.
Rick: Cool, that is a good note to end on. This has been a lot of fun as I knew it would be. I’m very impressed with the work you’re doing and I hope it continues to thrive, and I’m sure it will. I will be linking to your various websites, I guess, Evolver.net, Reality Sandwich, if you want me to link to that one, and Talat Healing. People listening to this, if they happen to be listening while driving in their car or something, and can’t write it down, if you just go to batgap.com, you’ll see Talat’s section on my site, and a bio of him and links to his various sites through which you can get in touch with him, if you wish. Any more comments before I make some general concluding remarks?
Talat: No, I’ll conclude here with me and just say, Rick, thank you so much. It’s nice to have someone that’s, I feel like a little bit of a mentor. I’m going to check out Fireside Theaters. I just like how you’re holding the flame for us and the space you hold. It’s been really fun. I’ve learned a lot. So, thank you for readers, for listeners out there. If you pick up a copy of The Electric Jesus, I’ll send you, just make sure to say it’s through this program. Send me an email, and as a gift I’ll send you a 25-minute chakra activation MP3. It has sound healing, it has breath work, it works with the chakras. I think it’s a nice little gift. I think you’ll enjoy the book. It seems like Rick did.
Talat: Cool. I’ll link to your book on Amazon from batgap.com. So, if somebody buys it, you want them to get in touch with you and say, “I bought the book because I heard about it on BatGap.” Is that what you’re saying?
Talat: Yeah, just send me an e-receipt and I’ll send you the chakra activation.
Rick: Okay, great. So, to conclude then, you’ve been listening to or watching an interview with Jonathan Talat Phillips. This is one in an ongoing series of interviews. I do a new one each week. If you’ve enjoyed this and would like to listen to others, go to batgap.com and you’ll see all 160-something of them archived. You could also subscribe to the YouTube channel and you’ll see them all on that channel. Although, the early ones I did were all split up into 10-minute segments because I had that limitation on YouTube. Now I can put the whole shebang up there in one chunk. If you’d like to subscribe to the channel, YouTube will notify you every time I put up a new one. Or you can go to batgap.com and click on the tab and subscribe to email notification for each new interview. There’s also a discussion group on BatGap that crops up around each interview and those become quite lively and stimulating sometimes. There is also a link to an audio podcast if you’d like to just get things on your iPod and listen while you ride your bike or whatever. All kinds of interesting stories about what people do while they listen to this. One guy tells me he hikes in the Himalayas on a regular basis and listens to BatGap. Another guy rides a horse in Arizona. I’m sure there are plenty of dishes washed while listening to this program. There’s that and there’s also a donate button which I don’t make a big fuss about but it really is important. It’s actually hopefully enabling me to shift into doing this more full time and not eat up all my time just making a living. Click on that and donate if you feel inclined. Thanks for listening and watching and we’ll see you next week.