Lessons from Escaping a Cult and Unveiling Ancient Wisdom

Welcome back to the Alchemist Library podcast. Today on the show, we have Orpheus. Orpheus is an online writer who holds some deep, fascinating knowledge and has a quite crazy backstory, which includes escaping a cult, and we get into all that information today and much more. I'll catch you guys inside Peace, are you doing?

this work to facilitate growth or to become famous. Which is more important? Getting and letting go.

Orpheus. Thank you for being here today, brother, it's fun. It's exciting to find the guy on the call.

Yeah, it was a little bit in the in the waiting. We tried to do it a couple of times and it didn't quite materialize. But I'm glad, Very happy to be there now Me as well.

Yeah, so I wanted to start with if there was one, or what do we need to know about you to make sense of the content you put out? Now? You're very prolific on Twitter and we catch each other in Twitter spaces a lot, and your thoughts are always so well articulated and you have a very complete mind. So how'd you get to this point, to where what you're doing today?

So kind of like we spoke about just before we came on. I've had a bit of an interesting life story so far. I'm 30 years old. It started off in a pretty normal fashion like quite an idyllic little upbringing in the countryside in England little villages, hedge rows, fields, playing football and whatever. And when I was 18, I went to university in the States. I got there on a rugby scholarship, went to a school which was quite good For rugby and I was fortunate enough the coach of my high school knew the coach of the college and managed to like set up a situation to go to Virginia. So then I was in America for five years. I was the only person in my school to go so bored. So it kind of like set me apart a bit at a bit of a different, very different experience and I loved it. But also it was eye-opening. I went there with rose-tinted spectacles and what I mean by that is I loved America, like this sort of Americana by freedom guns like doing whatever you know. It's like sort of the frontier going west pioneers, that kind of stuff. It's not particularly the mentality of England these days, so maybe in a former life I would have been one of the people that moved to America in the 1700s or something. But anyway, this interesting thing happened to me where my rose-tinted spectacles sort of went away because I found that there was this thin sort of veneer over like a sort of film, like a layer like you have on custard or something over the top of American culture and it was like corporate culture. Essentially. It was brands and everything that came with that and that made me disillusioned. I got arrested a couple of times for stupid stuff as well, almost got kicked out of the country. You know just being in the wrong place at the right in the wrong time. You know being arrested for things that now are legal. So. But back then in 2012, it was like a major slap on the wrist 100 hours community service and potentially getting my visa revoked and that kind of stuff. So I put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and there was this dichotomy between, like, the Americana culture that I loved and then this sort of layer of corporatism over the top that I really didn't like. So I graduated, moved back to the UK and I graduated with a degree in journalism. So I was a journalist, so I went to be a journalist and I worked in North Africa for a year and in Tunisia, and I was writing. I was working for a newspaper that wrote specifically on Libya, and so there was this sort of crisis in Libya in 2014, the Arab Spring, and I went out there in 2017. And you know, I thought I was going to be some sort of Donzo journalist, journalist in like war zone, right but instead I was in an office in Tunis having to bring up fixes and being like you got any stories for me and the political situation there was very touchy, especially like from the Western support standpoint. So I wasn't really allowed to talk about what I wanted to talk about, you know, and especially anything that was pro-Gaddafi At all, or saying like maybe you know, taking Gaddafi out wasn't the best idea, but excuse me. But so they put me on the cultural desk and I was writing about random stuff, having a tripple and camel races and stuff and I was just kind of like, all right, fuck this, like I'm not interested anymore. So I moved back to the UK, bathed around doing little jobs here and there, but there was something telling me like don't settle down, don't get a job like a career job, don't get a mortgage, don't settle for something that you that makes you feel uneasy. And so I did it, but it was a tough time. You know, I spent sort of three years in London. My friend and I had this van and we were doing removals in the Chelsea and Kensington area, which was quite fun because these beautiful houses, you just move that furniture and whatever, but it was fleeting, you know, nothing was sensed and I was, like all my friends, developed like a life and I'm kind of drifting and so that wasn't very comfortable, but something was telling me it's not the right time. And then COVID came around and that was the kind of confirmation for me that I did the right thing by not settling in to an institution, you know, and digging my heels in and my roots in and saying this is the normal path, let's go down. Because you know when COVID first happened and you can search this up on Twitter because this is when I particularly came like alive on Twitter. I was. I called it out right from the beginning. I don't know what your listeners' views are on it, so I went to go into it, but I was basically like this is fake and gay and because of that I lost. I lost quite a lot of friends, which was a shame, but it is what it is. And then, in 2021, I moved to Paraguay in December 2021. Okay, this is where the story gets particularly strange and maybe this will inform, like you know, the people who read my content on Twitter or whatever, like, why I'm, why I think the way I do, or whatever, although it was building ever since university in America. Anyway, I moved to Paraguay to join a intentional community. Okay, and so it's like this there was a community being started by some Europeans, some Germans and Austrians in Paraguay with the idea of, like, setting up your own town, basically building houses, you know, eventually, like they had a school and they were going to have a university, and like enterprise, and it would be like your own proper town, starting from the fresh and during the COVID lockdowns. This seemed like a very attractive thing, because it was pretty apocalyptic at the time in the UK, like you're not really allowed to leave your house, although I didn't abide by any of that, I just did whatever I want and it seemed to have some sort of force field around me that allowed me to do that, which was interesting. Anyway, I moved to Paraguay, moved to this community with my ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend of the time, and my mum Right, because my mum was kind of on the same wavelength as I was. She was like I hate this, this is horrible. Like everyone is acting like the terrified moron. And so we actually, like I took the money that I had, she sold her house and her business and it was like all right, new life. This seems amazing and it seemed like a very sophisticated project. It was not a hippie commune or anything of that description. They had a 3D printer to print walls. You know they had companies coming in from Canada with special building designs. There was about 300 families there. So we went and you know I won't get into too much of the details, but the long and the short of it is that we went and we invested money. Firstly because you kind of have to invest to go there, because you're buying in, you're committing. Anyway, turns out it was a scam and a cult and involving mafia and politicians and money laundering and potential drug trafficking and like insane manipulative behaviour. You know, with people that were Scientologists and this Jesuit Argentinian gangster pretending to be a priest, but actually he's like this, like a gang literal gangster. And I started working in construction. While I was there and when I was doing that, I was running a small construction construction project and while I was doing that I discovered a lot of things that didn't make sense, you know, and at first I just thought, well, it's a complicated project. You know, it's not just a construction project, it's setting up a community with its own laws and you know, there's food production and there's families and a school, like commerce, and this and this and this. I can see why it's complicated. So I understand why maybe it's not going perfectly right now. But anyway, the more I worked, the more I dug into what was going on, the more I realised things weren't adding up in a big way and I thought this was initially just because of middle management's corruption. I mean, the way things are done in Latin America is, it's like, not necessarily a bad way, but it's corrupt. Oh yeah, you know, maybe it's not the same wine and dine before they fuck you, kind of corruption that we get in the States or or in England, but it's like all the way down the down the chain of command is corrupt. So if you've got the middleman taking metal home every day from the job site because he can sell it on. Or you've got like the middle management striking deals with the manufacturers when they bring in bricks and cements, whatever. So there's corruption through the board and I thought it stayed at this level. Over time I realised it sort of goes all the way to the top you know, and so I realised that we were in deep shit because we committed the considerable, considerable amount of money to this project, making up like the vast, vast, vast majority of my nest egg that I built up and my mum's money that she had made. So I like, and I made a decision Okay, well, we can't leave now, because you know that would seem very strange, because we're very good friends of people that are running this, but I know, I know that they're fucking everyone. So I basically played like this double agent role for six months where I was working, running construction projects, also so gathering evidence as to like everything that was going on. I'm talking about, like you know, money laundering politicians involved, like payoffs for police chiefs and and during the, the during once called the prosecutors and the judges. You know lots of shady stuff, rumors about drug trafficking, you know. So I had to yeah, I had to be this double agent and I was meeting with my bosses, with the heads of this community, so three or four times a week, you know, and they would be lying to my face. And they came to me.

I knew they were lying.

They didn't know, I knew, but I just knew they were lying and so I had to like out sociopaths, these sociopaths, which was a very weird experience Because I, it turned out, I was like playing there in this way, but not for anything. Not for anything other than like I need to figure out a situation where we can either get the hell out of here and and maybe get our money back, or something like this. So, anyway, it continued, for I was there for about a year and then we ended up having to leave, like under the cover of darkness, in secret, having told nobody, you know, and there's armed gates on it. So there's armed guards on the gates and like it's a very bizarre situation and there's a lot more to it. But you know, there's sort of everything that I was leaving in the outer world is sort of neurosis and psychosis around control and whatever was just like magnified 10 times in this microcosm, you know. So it's insane, like secret people acting like secret police, spying on other people and dobbing them in and, like you know, tribunals being held for people and people having their firearms taken away from them, just completely elite, you know, like proper cold, like anyway. So that was up until. Yeah, we left in January and now we have a lawsuit going on which you know, I'm sure, very positive about, but it's yeah it's pretty big, so how'd you get out? Okay, so basically I had to construct the scenario right where I could get these the heads to give me money, to give me my mom's money and my money essentially Obviously not all of it, but some of it at least like we needed something to live on.

Yeah right.

So I basically was like, okay, well, we're going to build my mom's house now, right, and the usual way of doing it is you, you hire or you like pay, or your investment before you put it is then used and the company has its own building teams or teams. But I was like, look, there's something in the contract that says we can bring in outside contractors. So I'm going to do this all by myself and I'll bring in the outside contractors. This is me talking to the boss, yeah. I was like all you have to do is is, you know, give me the money, you get your 15% or whatever. Give me the money in cash, I'll pay the contractors. And he was like, okay, and so it got. We started the foundations, you know, but we start very slowly, you know, like slowly stretched out over five or six weeks. Meanwhile I was sort of like getting the money paying the contractor contract. It knew I was like we're just doing half this job, just half the foundation, and he would give me the money and then, and then we would take the rest of it. Okay, and it came down to like the very last morning, like the morning I was we plan to leave, okay, the morning off the night that we plan to leave, where I like went into his office and just like, just like, smoked him. Yeah like I was like how's your back? Yeah, you feeling okay, you know, and meanwhile he's getting all this cash out of a safe to give it to me. He doesn't know, you know, but I know I'm, I'm out of here and this cash is my cash, you know. It's like this is just return. It's not like I'm taking any money that wasn't already put in by us, and it wasn't. We didn't manage to get much, you know, it was just like the foundations, but yeah, so all the way to the last day and then, and then he sort of hugged me as I was leaving and it was like we're in this together, and then we left that night, you know, like packed, packed, a container in the dark shipping container in the dark like full of furniture and stuff, and then left and then go hundreds of phone calls which didn't answer any of them. You know, for days on end I just phone calls and I'm like what's going on, what's happening? And yeah, and so that was, that was the situation. And then after that we said look, opportunity, you can, we can just separate ways. Now you can give us the money that we invested, which we know you've you'll use, either spent it or given its politicians, or you're hiding it somewhere. You can give it back to us and we can just separate ways. And they just took us. They took us like a joke. They were like, ah, you know, didn't even answer. Anyway, now, like two weeks ago, we were on national news because our lawyer has got the press involved and so it's moving. And it's going somewhere, but it's going to be very interesting to see what happens is these people are so, yeah, go on. That's the story. Well, with all that said, how does that inform what the kind of content I create? It's like, basically, like when you, when you lose everything because that's the situation we're in now when you lose everything, like it informs you really of who you are. And when you have to start from zero, after not being a zero for the decade, if the start is zero, like it's a different kind of thing. And then so that, like you know, there is only one way, but you have to. You have to have the will to create it, first in your mind and then in reality, and so this is kind of it's kind of informs my content essentially.

So what do you make of the experience now, like in hindsight? Or there's some key things that you've learned, Like what? What is the positive takeaways that you taken out of that learning lesson?

So there was a point in time where I would wake up every morning and then just throw up because I was under so much stress. And, yeah, you realize what you're made of. You realize, like, what you can sort of endure. I mean there's a lot of details that I won't go into, but there's, there's more to the story, consider a lot more. And so, like I don't know, my whole life has been like, oh, what's on the other side of that fence? I'm going to go see what's on the other side of that fence. And when you go there, thinking like it's just another lawn or whatever and it's a risk, and at the beginning I thought like, well, there is no risk. And then you realize, okay, I've lived my whole life like these number of risks. You know, like even going to the University of America was a risk because you only see your family once a year or whatever. And so, yeah, one of the things that I learned was was what were you like? What you can handle? You know like nerves of steel at certain points, but also just an incredibly interesting like evaluation of human psychology. You know, you can't. You can't really understand why some people do things because they're not like you. If you try and rationalize it in a normal human mindset it doesn't make sense. So like there's this element to it where you're like there are people out there who are not like. They are like I don't know, they've got screws in different areas of their brain and so trying to work out their motivations for things doesn't really compute. And then also I got to know about how, how communities function how they're set up what works, what doesn't work. You know what. What like what created communities from the beginning in history. You know certain things. Like you know, in ancient times they would have a monolith or a temple or something like that, in the middle of the. That would be the first building to be built and then houses would be built around it and that's how that sort of a stone age community would turn into a community later down the line and become a society. So I got a glimpse into like what that looks like, how to turn a community into a society. And you know, if corruptions at the top, it'll filter all the ways all the way down, you know, and then people will be pits against each other and then like it's chaos.

What a crazy story. I did not expect. I did not expect to be hearing this, but it almost makes sense when now, in hindsight and looking at your content, there's an underlying questioning to it, right, like there's this sense of don't always trust everything that you hear.

And that's like that's always been my mentality, you know, and that wasn't. You know, certain points in life that's not very beneficial Sometimes. Sometimes you just got to get along, to get along, you know. And so, like, raging against the machine is not always the best approach, but to be able to question things and keep an open mind and have like the positive attitude that will like, you know, maybe this isn't the best of all possible worlds and maybe, like we should be doing things in a slightly different way, but always maintaining like just sheer optimism throughout, of it, throughout, and it's very easy to like, do include, but that's like they're getting absolutely nowhere.

And so, with that said, I wanted to ask you about one concept, concept that's had the biggest tangible difference in your life With that story. Now, I'm particularly curious on what the answer is going to be.

Okay, so the thing that's changed my perception the most recently is something that I call becoming right.

Coming is the coming.

Yeah, I did. I probably know the one that coined that there's. There's also a thing called Jonathan Bowden who has a similar kind of thing. That my perception of this maybe a bit different, but it's this. It's this idea that I believe will be confirmed more and more by science, by physics and quantum physics, and it's the relationship that we have, our internal elements, let's say, with the external fields. To grab it like either, whether it's the magnetic field that we are in permanent contact with at all times. And there's a relationship between these two things. You know, and so like they're the kind of like dummy version of this is the law of attraction, right, and that gets a bad rep and probably probably like good that it gets a bad rep because it's like giving the layman's version of how this actually works out and then selling it and trying to make money from it and it becomes this sort of scam or whatever. But there is certainly a relationship between the external, your external environment the matrix constructs, the holosphere, whatever you want to call it, the electromagnetic field and your internal environment, which is made up of your thoughts, your emotions, your actions. You know, and, if you can bring those, your internal environment into a sort of a congruent union, right, based on a kind of indomitable will and and like positivity, this sort of virtue, that still having hope when all else seems lost, right, and this does something to the vibratory field of your, your body, and, like it, settles it, and you get this congruent resonance. And if you can harness your congruent resonance, then you can bring things into your life that you would absolutely never have assumed would be there. And so, yeah, in a kind of like dumb way, this is the law of attraction. But in a in a more, in a deeper understanding, it's the fact that, like writ large, the matrix let's call it, because that's a popular way of saying it At the moment has this kind of negative default programming Right, and so in that way the outcomes will be negative. But that was a collective, let's say. But that doesn't necessarily mean the outcomes for the individual to be negative, because the matrix, like the how it, how it works, how it's constructed, operates for the collective as it does for the individual. It's this sort of like reflection battery mechanism. So if you are the individual level, don't accept like the doom and gloom, whether whether you're a leftist and it's climate change, or whether you're on the right and it's like political upheaval and communism or whatever. If you yeah, if you accept that to be the frame of reference, then you will create more of it, or you, or the matrix will reaffirm your internal belief systems. Again obviously there's limits to this. We are limited by the physical body, were limited by cause and effect and certain things that are possible, but, like what's being proven by scientists, more and more is this quantum field that we don't really understand, and so it's far better to have the mental attitude of the possibilities are endless, because all scientific discoveries always occur outside of, you know, the sphere of acceptable knowledge, always happen outside of that, and then they like, consume that outside thing and bring it to the bubble. Bubble gets big. But they're always the same. They always think no, no, no, this is impossible, this is impossible. We can't prove it. Therefore it doesn't exist. So that's the wrong way to look at it, because we 100 years ago, 200 years ago, we couldn't improve the visible light spectrum, right, and we would say that all these things outside of our limited band of visible light didn't exist, but we now know they do. So recently that's been the sort of thing that I've anchored inside of myself, which is basically that attitude has everything to do with the outcome, and so if your attitude is indomitable, okay, your external environment will begin to reflect that to you, and that has starting from zero less than four months ago and not being a zero right now, being above zero. I'm happy with progress that I've been considering the initial situation I was in. It's been proven to me like more and more and more.

I love that concept so much because, you know, as we do with all things, I'm running it through the filter of my own experience and I find I kind of call it delusional optimism, where you just convince yourself something to be true when society, or whoever it may be, is telling you it's not true. And the reason from my own experience is like I had an autoimmune disease. I got told immediately that there is nothing you can do and it's only going to get worse, right. And then you look at the power of the diet. You change your diet and then it goes away immediately. It's such a mundane, simple example, but it just speaks to the power of exactly what you're saying. Right Is this concept of when you believe deeply in your heart that something can get done? It almost always will get done?

Yeah, yeah. And if you bring in what ifs, if you set up for, if you have some sort of exit strategy, if this doesn't work and you focus on that too much, that's where your energy will go and you'll give that precedence over what could happen. You double down what can happen when you take these risks and it'll, more often than not, go not exactly the way that you assumed it would. But this is this idea where you don't need to meticulously plan absolutely everything. You just need to have the attitude that when the situation arises, you will have the tools in place to deal with the situation at that time, and then those tools build.

Speaks on that placebo effect and that no-cebo effect and I think the no-cebo effect is the one that hurts so many people is like they just program, whether it's society or themselves who is constantly telling them they can't do X, Y and Z or they can't get this outcome that they're seeking. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you just see that over and over again. Like the Wright brothers, like they said it would be years and years and years till anyone would be able to fly a plane, but they didn't matter of weeks after this major newspaper came out with this article, and that's a story that you hear time and time again and you just have to have that almost like self-belief and understanding that the mind is powerful.

Yeah, yeah, intensely powerful. It's a battery, you know, or it's an emitter of resonance. You've got these three centers the mind, the heart and the gut and they all have their own resonance and their own magnetic field. So biological, electric and magnetic, essentially. And those are three centers. I mean, you know we have seven centers according to the chakra system, but the three main ones would be your mind, your heart and your gut and how they correspond to your biology. And if you can get those in congruent resonance, you know, then you are emitting a stronger resonance and you will bring things into your life that are congruent with you. So it's all about being authentic. If you're authentic, you will have a congruent resonance. If you're inauthentic, you will have a false resonance. You'll still bring things towards you, but they're going to be the things that reflect your false resonance, not your authentic resonance.

And people have such a strong sense of that authenticity and that when those three things are aligned, it's like it's almost like a magnet. People are drawn towards that authenticity, even if it's something that isn't like perfectly aligned with you, like if you see a person that's just being themselves. It's this field of you're just drawn to them in a different way and I don't know if it's if it's the alignment between those three things or if there's just so few people that are actually being authentic that it shines through so much and makes you and makes you more drawn to that person. But there's definitely something to be said about the more authentic you are, the more people are drawn to you.

For sure, I think it's both.

I agree Probably.

Like, yeah, it's very difficult to be authentic in this day and age and you know the people who are, because they have, like this infectious personality, you know. And you want to be around them and you kind of want to have a little bit of what they've got. Yeah, because you feel it when, when you're around them and you're like whoa, I feel more energized, you're building me up and you know it's difficult to maintain that because life will throw lots of different things at you, but you build your qualities, you build your character when you do things that out of the ordinary you know and you can only. Really it's like you have. You have this order, your congruent resonance, and if you want to expand that, you need to then go out into the chaos and and experience the chaos so you're, and then bring it back into the order, and then your order becomes bigger. You know your residence comes bigger, so you can't really play it safe. If you, if you want to grow properly and we're in a time right now I think that people need to take risks because otherwise we're going to build our own little little prison for ourselves, unless we, unless we take risks, unless we have more entrepreneurs, you know business especially yeah.

And that that alignment between those three things. It's almost a risk within its self because our society has this like, or I think we're just so programmed to not want to stand out from the tribe and because of the way that we are programmed as a society, to be in alignment is to stand out, so it's almost a risk to even be yourself.

Yeah, yeah. And it's understandable that we don't want to stand out from the tribe, because the previous times in history, ostracization ostracization equals death essentially, kicked out of the tribe, you're on your own. And then if you're on your own in the wilderness, unless you're fucking Rambo, how long you can survive? So so it is very understandable. It's developed into a sort of negative downward spiral because everyone keeps everyone else. You know, it's like the sheep don't even need a sheepdog, they just hurt themselves. And unfortunately, I'm very bullish on the future. I think it's evident that we're getting people who are breaking the mold and creating things in different ways of doing things. So I'm very optimistic, whereas maybe a few years ago I would have been pessimistic about the future. What do you think about AI? So, from a like, zoomed in perspective, it's pretty incredible. The rate at which it's developed is ridiculous and I think, from the like, it's very useful. You know it has. Now it will effectively. You know all those copywriters who don't really have much skill, they just do what they're doing because they've able to. They were to learn step one to six about to write copy. You know, unless they've got creative potential, they're out the door like that. You know, because AI can just do that like that, you know. So it's going to be very good Creative people with spark, people with originality. It's going to make a bottleneck for creative thought, which is nice, which is good, but sort of the zoomed out perspective, maybe from a spiritual perspective as well, it's essentially a very dangerous If it reaches a level of sentience that is sentience I mean computing, computing power. That's not called a sentience because it's not. You need a soul to be sentient. But if it reaches the level of computing power that exceeds any like conglomerate of human beings, then petitions for its own sovereignty, kind of like Ray Kurzweil said, would happen. You know, as well as maybe the Google predictions for AI and stuff.

No, I feel like I've heard that name, but I don't know. I did not know that about him.

He was the future head of future development for Google and he made a bunch of predictions. I believe it was called the Singularity and he said that the Singularity would happen between 2045 or something, where AI has become sentient to the degree that it petitions for its own sovereignty and basically thinks that human activity is relatively obsolete because it's tainted by emotions and arguments and stuff. It's not just about efficiency. Ray Curzall had a pretty high like. A lot of his predictions have been correct. He made predictions about the dot com like early computer development in the 90s and 2000s, stuff like that. I think he's got 80% of the stuff. But of course he knows these people might make predictions but then fulfill those predictions themselves. But in that respect AI is dangerous. Evidently Elon Musk says it's dangerous and therefore we must consider fusing ourselves with Cyborgs in order to keep up with the development of AI. I think he said that a few years ago. But that is equally, if not more, dangerous than just AI alone, because transhumanism this is my opinion transhumanism, if successful, is the end of the spirit, basically the end of some sort of connection with God, at least for a time period, until it destroys itself. But it's going into pure materialism and we have to straddle the line between spirituality and materiality and one alone will not suffice. We have to have both, and that's these two poles that we walked in. And so if you're all material, if you're like an atheist, materialist individual, what's the purpose of life apart from being the economic man? But then if you're all spiritual and you're just like two eye on your own sort of light and stuff like that, you can't get down in the nitty gritty and make things work, you know. Then you're just you go to an ashram and you check out. It's not the way to do it either. So you got to walk the middle line and, yeah, I think AI, transhumanism, that's going to be going to be the main battleground, not battleground, but it's the main contention point that we're going to have to make sure we don't slip into. And it'll be very attractive with Chris, but with Chris, but stuff like that. No, no, technology like okay like augmenting your, your biology. You know gene sequencing to pick like this is how I want my baby to be. You know like, yeah, I in an idealistic world it's going to look really nice because you can have a beautiful baby and obviously beauty is attractive is like the biggest ROI yeah, in life. So but yeah, I don't know. That's my position. I like the sort of natural idea as well.

I think that there's just unintended consequences to things that we just can't foresee with the gene sequencing and almost like playing God in a way. I don't know what the fallout is going to be, but my intuition says that something will go awry from messing with biology in that way. It's like the, it's like Yellowstone, with the rivers and the and the wolves. Do you know that story? There's just there's something to be said about playing God and the effects of that, for sure?

Well, I mean nature, the human body. They all strive for homeostasis, like at all times. It's like you know you take. You take a certain drug, it gives you a huge dopamine release and then your body readjust for that and you get a, you get the opposite, and then the principle just yeah, it's a hermetic principle, and so it's like you can't really avoid it and, like you said, it's unintended consequences. You don't really know what those consequences will be like. You can try, you can have a bit of discernment, like politically, for example, if you know, let's take like, like, what's going on with the LGBT stuff at the moment? right like 10 years ago, it was like why, why do you? Why are you so angry? Why, like, why do you want to interfere with the people? They just love each other. You know, what they do in their own bedroom is up to them, which is fair point. But then, sort of without addressing certain things about that, then you get like tratties, just as demons, reading books about anal sex to your four year old, you know so which is which is true.

I saw that too. It happens everywhere, but yeah.

So you know, I hope this is this, is fine with me.

Okay, it needs to be said at times, right, but so you mentioned her meta hermetic principles, and the hermetic philosophy or philosophies is one that I haven't done the deep dive into, but it seems like they have some really great ideas and foundations. What have you learned from from studying their hermetic philosophy?

There's sort of these foundational laws that, observably, they observe are true and you can't really get around them. So it began in Egypt with Hermes Joseph, a guestess to. You know. It was the Egyptian deity that looked like the bird's head, and this was hermese justice, and he was sent to be said to be an Atlantean priest Right, and he brought with him the wisdom of the Lantus to Egypt and this became the emerald tablets for the seven hermetic principles and the basic idea, so that there are seven, obviously, and you've got give me one second because I've got to written down.

Yeah, I don't want to get it wrong.

I spent some time.

Okay, oh, that was real quick. That was real quick. You had this. Yeah, there's ready to go.

I was looking at it the other day actually, so it's interesting that you've asked about right? So there's the principle of mentalism, which is all is the mind and the universe is mental. So it's this kind of hierarchy of like flow of celestial hierarchies, for so the mind, the material universe, the phenomenon of life, matter and energy, and it all comes from some ineffable spirit, or or nothingness, if you will. But it's that, like we were saying, the mind is extremely powerful, it's created here first, and then it sort of blooms, blossoms out into the world and materializes. And then the second one is the principle of correspondence, and that's as above so below, and this is essentially that certain things happen on planes of existence that we, that are perceptible to us, and there is a corresponding occurrence on our plane and was advice versa. Well, cause and effect would be direct. Cause and effects would be just on our plane of existence, just on the material plane. But there's a third direct alerts to that. So it's like we go along this line of cause and effect, but then there's a corresponding cause and effect up here as well, in more of like a spiritual realm. That's what you're saying Exactly, yeah, some realm that is not perceptible to the usual five senses. So then there's the principle of vibration, and you know, this has been quantified now by I think it was Max Planck or some physicist back in the 40s or whatever where everything is moving, everything is vibrating, and the difference? between different manifestations of matter and energy and mind and even spirit results largely from the varying rates of vibration. So emotions have different levels of vibration. As light does you know, you've got infrared light and that vibrates in a different quality to different sorts, like different types of light, same for emotions, same for thoughts. And then there's, for instance, polarity, and I think this is one of the most important ones conceptually for people to understand. It's the most accessible. It's the idea that everything has poles and there's a pair of opposites and so, like, the truth is well, if you're taking just one side, it is necessarily a half truth, because there's the shadow of it or there's, like, the opposite side to it. That must be considered and that's why, like you, have this midline, this middle way, and that's where the truth lies and that requires a lot of discernment to figure that out. You know you've got love and hate, and then love and hate are just different degrees of like and dislike, you know, but they're still on the other side. And the next one, seeing as we're almost there, is rhythm, the principle of rhythm, and that's everything flows, everything has its tides. Cool things rise and fall. The pendulum swing manifests in everything. So the measure of the swing to the left is then equal to the measure of the swing to the right. And yeah, that's observable as well. You know, like, if we're like we gave the example with drugs, for example, take drugs they're going to throw you up, to throw your dope, and up there, and then you can have that serotonin completion. I think that as well. And then we got the principle of cause and effect. You know, everything has a cause, or every cause has an effect and every effect has a cause, and there are many planes of causation. This is kind of like what we were talking about, so things can occur at different planes the spiritual plane, the mental plane, causal plane. And then the final one is the principle of gender, and that gender is in everything. Everything has its masculine and feminine principles. Gender manifests on all planes. Okay, and that's good. You know, like obviously we have material gender, sex gender, basically. But then there's the gender principle within lots of different things. Like one thing may be more masculine, I guess, and that could be subjective, but one the metric principles would say is it may be subjective to your current perception of it, but it is there. There is a masculine principle, there is a feminine principle. These run through everything. I mean that makes sense.

So that's the seven home. What's so funny about them is we have somewhat talked about most, if not all, of them in this episode, indirectly In a way. We talked about mentalism, we talked about polarity, we talked about the gender stuff, kind of correspondence, like all these things. It's almost reflected back at us in a way.

Yeah, yeah, well, it's that they are like you know the hermetic laws. they exist, whether you like them or not, you know, and so it's worth being sort of observing them. And the idea of the hermetic initiation or the sycophant in the hermetic principles is that they the adept, rather, this is like if you understand it and you use it to your advantage. So let's say, let's take polarity, for example, the adept would be able to find that midline and unify those poles. Or if you take rhythm, where you've got the pendulum swinging one way, the adept would be able to mitigate the backswing, right. So you know, I don't really know if there are mystery schools that exist in the world now, that that's like teacher depths, how to work with the hermetic principles. But this is what it was like in Egypt.

Yeah, almost reminds me of alchemy in a way, and like becoming the art of becoming like an alchemist, and it seems like you almost have to live life to to figure out how to be that person, versus studying in a school. It seems like it's something that you only figure out through action and through like living a life well lived.

Yeah, yeah, 100% If it remains in the theoretical realm. It doesn't exist.

It has to be actualized in some form, and so if you want to learn about this stuff, is it the Kabbalah? Is that a different set of ideas?

The Kabbalah is different. If they take from each other, like there are certain, you know, the hermetic principles are appreciated and understood in the Kabbalah, but the Kabbalah is different. The Kabbalah is extensively more complex. I'm not an aficionado when I understand it superficially, but yeah, that's it's you know the. Tree of Life or the Sephirot you may have seen it, yeah, and it's basically essentially describing the creation, so coming from nothing and then being sort of emanating down a chain of densities into material reality.

That's what it describes. Do you have any favorite books, because you're clearly a person who is well researched and well read. Is there any that stick out to you? I know it's one of those things that you almost need to know a person personally to be able to recommend a book to them, but do you have any clear cut favorites that you'd recommend to people?

Okay, Well, I think so my like school of thought. I wouldn't say that it's more like what I understand the most, but I've been fortunate enough to learn in a official way. Now, most and almost everything I know is autodidactic, meaning that I talk to myself, but I have had a mentor who was his he's an old man now, which is quite cool Like, oh, what's a weird situation where you have a mentor who's like 50 years old as me, Because it's like just give me like advice for like right now. And he'll be like well, I'll say like well, why is this bad stuff happening? What do I do now? I'm gonna just be like it's good, is it? and then you later find out. Yeah, okay, actually, interestingly it was, but he came from the school of.

Riddell.

Steiner right, which is it's called Anthroposophy and it's the good spiritual science, spiritual science, which is the way it's understood. That's how it Steiner described it, and I guess the books that people can start with is, I believe, school initiations into higher realms, and this is kind of an easy noise. I don't know why I'm lying, it's not easy, but it's an introduction into let me just look it up to make sure I get the name way. It's been a long time since I read it, but it's an introduction into this idea.

So knowledge of the higher woods is all.

the book is cool yeah for how to know higher worlds. So that's a good book to start with. I think you know for the young, like Faustian, aspirational chats they should read. You know they could read Bronze Age Mindset by by back, but once a further. I mean I read that like five years ago now when it first came out and that was pretty influential in my life, like I don't necessarily agree with with all of that assumptions but it's very entertaining and, you know, open the door to a new, new way of looking at it. So I would recommend the young the young lads read that it really depends where you're at. You know, you know, like so, that we have many cycles within bigger cycles, so we might have a cycle where we need to grind and focus on action just like what we're doing right right in front of us and action, and then we have a cycle where we're like now we need some higher knowledge now to inform the next stage of our action.

So you know, yeah, it's hard for me to say it and I think in a way, that's a sign of somebody who like actually gets. It is like understanding that there is like so much nuance there. But you mentioned your mentor, and that's something that always sticks out to me when people talk about their mentors, because it seems like it's one of those things that almost puts you at a fast track to knowledge is is having a mentor. Was that the case for you?

Definitely yeah, but the mentor like the way it works is you don't go looking for a mentor. Yeah, when you're ready, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher appears, or whatever, which is true, like the mentor, like you just fall into a mentorship because it's like the universe constructs it to be the case in that and that sort of way and there are different mentors for different things. You know, this guy is not going to be a business mentor for me, but in terms of, like, a spiritual mentor, a mentor in terms of an understanding reality, it's been unbelievable, like and you know I met him in this- community in Paraguay. So again, like if I'd never done made that decision, I never would have met him. And he's like this 85 year old Romanian man, like the wisest motherfucker you could possibly imagine. Two wise to the point where I'm like, help me. And he just asked me more questions and I'm like that's amazing, yeah. But then it makes sense Like afterwards, later down the line, you realize like something is like they seeded a little thought and then whatever that was seeded, blooms, blossoms, like grows flower, and then you see it and you realize that's such a good feeling when something happens in your life.

Yeah, in a way you're, you're somewhat of a mentor now in the job that you're taking, doing the coaching that you do. And along those lines I wanted to ask you about it's a question I love to ask my guests because I feel like it opens the audience and myself up to, or it gives you a lens into, their thought and how they think about things and it's if you were to have a school, what would the curriculum look like?

Okay, well, it's cool question, because I kind of do have a school in a way, I mean, I don't know with my clients. I mean some of my clients, we just we just work with what's going on in their life in front of them. And then other clients, they come to me because they want to know more, and so then there is a curriculum, there is a course, and I will be releasing an actual course, like where you don't have to have me as your personal consultant, but it will just be a course that you can get online, the video and written course. So the curriculum is a mixture of things. So it is spiritual science, which is from Steiner's philosophy and, to understand the context of that, it's Steiner was a Christian, but it's esoteric Christianity. It's very different from going to church and listening to the Gospels. It's sort of dissecting these things. And it's also informed by the Rosicrucian tradition and the Rosicrucians were a society that loosely formed in the medieval times as a way to explore like esoteric concepts. All of the founding fathers were Rosicrucians, all the founding fathers of the United States, yeah, and there was never a formalized society like the Freemasons or something. The point is it was not to form something formalized. It did eventually form, but then it hasn't really been the same and it does still exist, but I don't know in what form or the teachings like it's more like the principles of the Rosicrucianism is. This is a esoteric. How can we esoteric understanding about spiritual worlds and the physical worlds and the tasks that we have to do in this age to further us along our spiritual evolution? So we would talk about the being of man, which is what you are, and that's your body, your soul and your spirit, and these three distinct realms that are all integrated. Okay, and so you know. And within within the body, within the soul, within the spirit, there are subdivisions and it's it's quite scientific, it's not like to airy fairy, but it's very good to understand Because it clarifies certain things like how to think properly. You know how to think about things properly and then, when you can do this, you you bring your subtle body, your energetic body, into more congruence and then you know this is how you develop mentally, emotionally and spiritually. So yeah, on one side of the course, right would be an internal, an internal kind of work. Like you come to understand the body, the soul, the spirit, how, in what like, what intuition is like, what synchronicities are serendipity, why that works how to increase them and how to like sort of understand things in your life from from a particular perspective, from a spiritual perspective, let's say it gives meaning to what otherwise would seem like chaos, and how is the soul and the spirit different?

Well, I do think the soul.

The soul is something Okay, let me try and be succinct. So the soul is something that you have inside you, it's housed in your body and the soul houses the spirit. So it's like Russian dolls. Okay, but there are layers to the soul. The first layer would be called the sentient soul, and the sentient soul is you take in, you take in information from the world around you via your sense, perceptions, and then we, we move this into our sentient soul and we prescribe a value to these things, like whether you like it or you don't like it, and then this informs your action. Okay, but what this is is not the thing itself. You created a new world inside you that you don't isn't actually truly correlated to the tree that you looked at. I don't like that tree, because I mean the trees that. No, it does. You've created this new world in the soul. Right? Criminals, for example, they have a. They can't really overcome their sense of soul, so they will act, you know, without thinking that, okay, I've, I've just created these sensations. This is not a reflection of what it actually is. This is just me, okay, so you go, you try to, we try to move past that into the next layer of the soul called the intellectual soul, and this is where we can look at our sensations, how we like things or don't like them, and you can say, okay, I appreciate that this isn't a reflection on the thing. So that's that next stage of the soul. You're able to not like, hurt that person Because you know, you realize, like I need to control my sensations. And then you have the next stage, which is the consciousness soul. And this is where, like this is the gateway to the spirit and this is sort of where the soul and the spirit meet and whether, if you are, if you do certain things and you work to build your consciousness soul, the spirit comes into you essentially and you get filled with the good that you're in, the beautiful, and this like just affects a lot of other things that will go on in your life. Like it's it's a practice that you develop Basically. I've tried to explain it but I know that may not make I think it doesn't make sense.

It kind of reminds me of what Jung said when you're on the right path, the universe winks at you almost.

It's almost, it's almost like that, correct? Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's, it's, it wants to come into you, really like, so you become more integrated. So the spirit is the universe, let's say it's everything, all material objects, planets, let's say they all have a their, their material beings, so they are spiritual beings as well, so that there's a correspondence there on a different plane that we can't really see. And you know, all mystery schools throughout history have dedicated their lives to trying to understand this and come to terms with it. You know, and people if people think it's not important, or then go and tell, like billionaires who literally like other than making money, the really clever ones spend all their time doing this kind of stuff.

I mean like because you see it time and time again, especially these very wealthy people, they almost dive into like meditation or just some sort of spiritual art to try to better align themselves.

Yeah, exactly, because when you can better align yourself, things go better for you. You know, like there is a certain certain element of pushing up against the brick wall and you think like and you get, you can't go anywhere. Right, and that would be like if you view the world as purely materialistic, you will eventually hit a brick wall. But if you can view the world as both materialistic and spiritual, then you can just go around the wall. Because there are different tools for different scenarios.

And what I love about this is, even if you don't believe it in the physical sense like, let's say, you're a very reductionist thinker Even if you look at it through the lens of, just like, how does this affect my life and how can this improve my life that belief and that understanding that it's not just material, there's like a spiritual element in things. It allows you to just understand that it's an infinite game and, like when you make all the money, there's still levels to ascend to. And even if you don't believe in whatever it may be a God, the universe, whatever you can still have this understanding of like daily working to be just more disciplined and more aligned with your soul. And that doesn't have to be this airy fairy spiritual thing. It could be very disciplined and in the real world or real world, quote unquote but it's the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, it is the same thing and you've got to do both. Like, we've spoken a lot about spirituality, but I just came from the gym and had a delicious back session. I played rugby for like 15, 16 years of my life, constantly to a university level, which is fairly high. I'm not some sort of guru on a mountain, like you know. I like the material just as much, but I but I like have always been drawn to these other aspects because I understand that there's there's something more, there's something going on that I want to be the master of both worlds, you know, not just a master of one. People in history like real sort of leaders and successful people throughout history they've been masters of both worlds, Not just one. So that's the goal and that's how we can really affect things positively. You know you want to affect things further upstream rather than like down at the bottom, where the where meets the scene. You want to. You want to affect the top and that's kind of this thing between the spirit and the material. The spiritual is upstream, the energy by the energy behind things that we can't really perceive unless we have a Geiger counter. That's for radiation. We have, like you know, a certain photography called like helium photography, which is light sensitive, so it can actually trace the energetic outline of objects with a photography, so you can see that. Yeah, it's really cool yeah it's called the leaf, the helium leaf experiment. So they cut off the top of the top half of the leaf. So they use the photography to trace the light, the light body, and you could see that, you could see the residue of the light body of the top of the leaf, even though the physical thing wasn't there anymore.

I forgot.

So everything's called the same.

That's crazy. I think that what is it? I'm trying to think of the exact example. But like some people, when you cut off a limb, they would still like feel pain. And like, let's say, they cut off the hand, they'll still feel like a pain in the finger. That's like not actually there. Yeah, wow, yeah, it's that same thing, right.

Yeah, well, it is, yeah, and it's also because pain centers are not associated with limb damage. It's actually in the brain, yeah, so, like you know, you can have a decimated, like broken arm and stuff. It's the brain that creates the pain, not the actual limb. That's why they can have phantom limb syndrome, which is where they feel like they've still got a hand when they don't, which is really interesting Crazy.

Orphous.

Oh sorry, Go yeah. Okay, just I'll just finish the we got stuck in the weeds with the body and the spirit. That's good, it's good. So then I guess I would talk about, or I would involve, the collective destiny. So one side we were talking about was just the individual you know what's important for you and then the other one is the sort of collective destiny and that's like generally raising the vibration of everything around you, so things go better, so people are cooler and better to hang out, and then dealing with like these polarities that we've talked about and the sort of general esoteric overview of past, present and the future. So that that would be it in a nutshell, and that will be the course. Let's go.

Do you have a timeline for it? Well, I want to make a good production.

So I want to like it'll be recorded and like be entertaining, not just informative and interactive. So I would say two weeks should be ready.

Let's go, yeah, because the body of the work is all done Is there anything we haven't talked about today, that you want to cover, anything that's been on your mind or front of mind lately.

Yeah, I guess the one thing that you know because we've covered, like the soul and these pretty high concepts, but there's, you know, the one thing that I think we all need to focus on as well is the body, physical health, Because that informs. Obviously we want to be physically healthy, so we've got energy and creativity and all those sorts of things, but the physical body also informs the soul. You can't actually have good spiritual development without physical development. So that would be the last thing. I love it.

I mean, it's so true. It's something I've noticed in my own life. What the saying is a sick man, or a healthy man, wants a lot of things. A sick man only wants one. And it's like when you are your body, your body, your heart, your gut, when these things aren't in alignment, you aren't able to reach that next spiritual plane because you're so concerned about this physical self and you almost need to get to a point where it's in alignment so you're able to think about these things in a higher way. Yeah, exactly, I've not heard that, but that's a really good way of putting it.

What is it? The healthy man wants many things, but the sick man just wants one. Yeah, nice, or this?

was enlightening, it was awesome and I so appreciate your time today.

Thanks, steve, I appreciate you having me on. I've had a great time Me too. I'm really glad we did this.

I knew it was going to be good, but you surpassed my expectations for sure.

Cheers man. I appreciate that yeah.