Out of the Blue - The Podcast: Finding the Way Forward
Out of the Blue-the Podcast features interviews with inspirational survivors of traumatic out of the blue events who have overcome unimaginable challenges, sharing their stories of resilience and triumph. By sharing these stories, "Out of the Blue" aims to create a community where others who have faced similar hardships can find solace and strength as together, we find the way forward.
Out of the Blue - The Podcast: Finding the Way Forward
The Psychedelic Path with Louis Dorian
What if the universe is trying to become aware of itself through your experiences? What if your most devastating loss could become the doorway to profound transformation?
Louis Dorian's story will stop you in your tracks. After his partner's accidental opioid overdose, Louis spiraled into grief and heavy drinking. But something unexpected emerged from this darkness – insights that would transform his understanding of consciousness, trauma, and healing.
This conversation goes far beyond typical discussions of psychedelics and mental health. Louis shares how he developed his "eight root fundamentals" of growth after discovering that many of our deepest struggles stem not from our thoughts, but from the automated beliefs anchoring those thoughts. He challenges our society's obsession with thinking, explaining how our Default Mind Network (DMN) operates like computer software – often with contradictory programming that creates suffering.
"True love never seeks reciprocation," Louis explains, describing how his relationship with his partner taught him that love is maintained regardless of how the other person responds. This perspective asks us to take radical responsibility for our reactions rather than blaming others for our pain.
Whether you're curious about psychedelics, struggling with grief, or simply seeking a deeper understanding of consciousness, this episode offers a roadmap for transforming pain into wisdom. Louis's journey reminds us that sometimes our most profound growth emerges from what seemingly destroys us.
Out Of The Blue:
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Welcome to Out of the Blue the podcast, where we share real stories of people who faced life-changing challenges and found their way forward. I'm your host, Vernon West, joined by my co-host and daughter, jackie West, our social media and marketing manager, a professional musician and Reiki healer. Thank you for tuning in and if you find value in these conversations, please like and subscribe to help spread the word. This week, we're honored to welcome Louis Dorian, founder of Psychedelist and a powerful voice in the growing conversation around mental health, psychedelics and healing. Lewis's journey is one of deep transformation, rising from a childhood shaped by trauma, through years of extreme exploration, personal loss, incarceration and a near-death experience. Out of that crucible, he discovered the eight root fundamentals of MES growth and launched Psychedelist, a platform for education and healing. His story is raw, honest and deeply inspiring. Join us for a conversation about truth, transformation and the journey back to life. Hi Lewis, and welcome to Out of the Blue the podcast.
Speaker 2:Hello Vernon.
Speaker 1:Great to be here, nice to see you, lewis. So tell us, lewis, let's start right, you know, at the beginning of our narrative. Basically, it would be probably right around that time when you're the aftermath of deep personal loss, including losing of your partner Laurel Nicole. You know when, what, what, what was that about the issue when things started to turn for you?
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, it's, you know the name of your podcast and everything, and I thought about it as time went on and it seems like, uh, uh, there's so many moments in my life that would fit under the category of out of the blue, um, but Nicole's death especially that, uh, even though there were issues, there were indications, nicole died of an overdose, a tragic, accidental overdose. Opioids were a factor and it was unexpected. It was extremely unexpected and the reason was, you know, obviously I was very aware of her issues around substance abuse. You know she had this substance abuse issue, but she had told me that she disliked opioids and she tended to lean towards stimulants and things like that in a binge fashion. She was a lot of things. She was very talented. She was a dancer, a personal trainer, a very physical, physically engaged person, extremely talented. She could do almost a Cirque du Soleil act on a Pilates ball where she would stand on and do this whole float thing. But then in her dark moments she would disappear. I would have to go hunt her down in CDO hotel rooms and places like that and find her and pull her out of her deep dark you know, darkness that would just pervade her being. And then I would take her places. I would take her to Puerto Rico, I would take her to Costa Rica. I would take her places for periods of time where she would emerge from that and become just her beautiful self again. But she never admitted to opioid usage, said she disliked them, and then, out of the blue, we found her body December 10th 2014. So that, yes, that was the moment when some of the biggest changes happened. That was when a lifetime started to turn into something. It didn't happen right away.
Speaker 2:It was about a year of drinking for me. I was drinking heavily, damaging my body completely in a state of misery and grief, and then, eventually, things started to emerge. I started to receive what people sometimes in the space call downloads. Right, I'm a surfer. Uh, the ocean is sort of like my church, uh, my my place, where I go to uh kind of commune with spirits, I pray, meditate out there. Uh, I I surf for very personal reasons, and out in the ocean is where I started to receive some downloads. I I gave uh a eulogy at her funeral and that was a download that was straight, just came while I was in the ocean. And so, yeah, that was the turning point where the prior experiences that I had and then the experiences I started to have after through the healing process, where I started to develop the eight root fundamentals and I started to um, you know, do my own healing and emotional and trauma process work, that, uh, that really helped me, uh, you know, integrate the wisdom that was there but that I didn't have access to until I started doing the trauma work. So when you start to process trauma and really start to make headway, that's when there's there's deep's deep wisdom in all that experience and that pain and then transforming it into wisdom. Psychedelics is a um is a manifestation of that, as well as uh. Just sharing this, these, these, you know, things that I learned, these lessons that I learned and working with people in uh, in one-on-one sessions and talking to people about um, what I see when it comes to mental health, which was became a very nuanced thing.
Speaker 2:I I think that one of the issues with society that came out from Nicole's death you're never going to hear me demonize drugs. A lot of people go through these type of tragedies and say we got to get rid of all these drug dealers, we got to put away the fentanyl dealers, we got to do all this stuff. I disagree with all that. I think it's not so simple, it's very complex and gray space. It's not black and white. I think that when we start to look at things from a very black and white perspective, we're actually in a somewhat juvenile or immature mindset. So substance abuse became one of the important things I talk about a lot and it certainly ties into my kind of ethos around psychedelic usage and the proper use of tools. As you mentioned in the opener there, I've experienced both positive and negative experiences with psychedelics and that helped shape my ideas around the proper engagement with these powerful tools and it expands beyond that.
Speaker 2:The way I look at substances in general is that they are powerful tools, oftentimes vehicles for different types of engagement and travel, depending on what it is, and they each have their own set of skills, including opioids, including stimulants, including other categories of substances and, unfortunately, including stimulants, including other categories of substances. And unfortunately, I think our society, because of the immature mindset we've had around substances this very black and white perspective we haven't engaged our population enough with the ideas of skill development that is very much rooted in mental, emotional, spiritual growth and healing. So that was what emerged. Was this far more, I would say complex view of the world and instead of, you know, leaning into bitterness or anger or rage or judgment around, you know substances. Some substances are bad and some are good. No, it's a very nuanced skill development journey and that was the big thing that came from Nicole's death, including so many, so many lessons. You know, while Nicole was alive she was a very complex person because of the traumas that she experienced and had not processed, and I was not who I am today, of course, and didn't have all the skills and perspectives I have now. So I was doing the best I could at the processed and I was not who I am today, of course, and didn't have all the skills and perspectives I have now. So I was doing the best I could at the time and I was learning and I began to understand things through this lens of root fundamentals.
Speaker 2:And that came from martial arts. That came from, particularly, a martial arts mentor that I had, a man named Roy Harris. That is one, one of the I think only the second american in history to receive a coral belt in brazilian jiu-jitsu. He, uh, he's one of the best hands-down teachers generally, not just in martial arts but in anything I. I went to school and uh was working on a phd in mathematics. I didn't finish. I got a master's, uh, and that was around the time when my father passed away and that's why why I didn't finish the PhD.
Speaker 2:You know, and I've had many experiences with higher learning and education and teachers, and none of the teachers I've ever had were as good as Roy Harris. He's the one who helped me start to see the world through, when you engage with a new concept, a new idea, a new skill, that there are important fundamentals that lay the foundation for going down that journey effectively, and and implying that I began to learn and that was what I learned from Nicole. One of the first lessons I learned from Nicole was what true authentic love is, and that uh was mind-blowing because I had a lot of different mixed up ideas in my head and and took things personally when she was hurt and going into her dark places. After six years and all this time together, you know I learned a lot and and and I got to learn that you know love is actually three root fundamentals and it would align more with what you might call authentic love or even, like Buddhists, might refer to it as noble love.
Speaker 2:It gets complex when we start to talk about romantic love and different types of love, and I think that there can be confusion there. Right, it's similar. All these concepts start to merge into a similar theme of complexity and understanding, nuance and not looking at things as black and white, and then really starting to become granular. You're looking at things like look at how far the study of physics has come because of this pursuit of the granular, the tiniest particle in the universe, right? What is it? And we've never even really found it. And in that pursuit, though, look at all this wisdom that's come from it. Look at how far quantum mechanics has come, and I feel like that's the way that I've approached a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Once I was exposed to this idea of fundamentals, I started to look at things much more granular not that that granular approach is always, that's one particular side of it and then it becomes this cohesive bigger picture where you start to try and integrate the things that you're understanding and looking at. And so that that was the journey. And and what happened is prior to that. As you mentioned, I had all these other experiences, so I had the psychedelics experiences of my earlier days, you know, like late teenage years to early 20s, and that was a result, as you had mentioned, of the violent environment that I was growing of. And that's the journey is awareness, and that's another thing. Foundationally, fundamentally, I believe that the real and ultimate purpose of our lives is to gain awareness, and that comes down to almost a quantum idea of what is the universe's purpose, and I believe its purpose is to become, uh, simultaneously aware of all its parts that's, that's a, that's a big number there right there to become aware of itself.
Speaker 1:The universe wants to become aware of itself and I love that makes a lot of sense because, um, that's when you get into the granular. Really, what you were talking about is so much space, you know there's so little actual um matter. Everything is sort of you know waves and, uh, you know particles. Maybe, I mean it depends if you're watching it, you know but, um, so that's that, this, it's an issue that's gonna, it's definitely ongoing and it definitely goes down to that, uh, that granular.
Speaker 1:When you, when you were talking about um, so this, this, this major event, of course, you with having to do with love, that's obviously to me, hits me really hard because I know that's one of the most powerful things you can deal with in this world is love, and interacting with love in your life is going to make those changes.
Speaker 1:So another thing you said was when we talk about out of the blue, the whole thing with out of the blue you said earlier the first thing. You said so many things from out of the blue happen to you in your life and I mean that's so aware of you, you know, because I think that awareness of all the blue things happening in our lives comes from experiencing them. Experiencing them, and then you start seeing that there's so many of these things coming out of the blue to you and then it is this universal mind trying to find its identity. Really it's evolving through us, our own experiences. And when you said that, it made me see it like clearly, for like a first time actually, that the web, the network of all these out of the blue things that go on interpersonally, all different people everywhere in the world and the planet, it's all working together for that consciousness growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's been, yeah, that's, that's been my experience, that's been my experience. That's, and that's what turned the corner for me is seeing that and also the prior you know phases of my life where I and you know self-reflection and so many efforts before maybe it starts to coalesce into some sort of understanding that works for you personally. I talk about this stuff. For some people it will resonate and mean something and for some it won't, perhaps because they don't have aligning experiences or they haven't had the time to do enough self-reflection or spend enough time marinating to reach that point.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things I really like about certain types of reading. For instance, the book that Tao Te Ching is a book you read your whole life, because in the beginning it's sort of gibberish. Some things might make some sense, but ultimately, as you get older and mature and change, you start to glean more from the short poems that are in those writings. There's deep truths hidden within the poems but they don't reveal themselves right away until you kind of have this moment of. You'll have an aha moment, and it usually takes years.
Speaker 2:You know it takes years well, one author that really helped me tie some ideas together that came from northern mexican. Toltec shamanism was actually eckhart tolle, believe it or not, which is rather strange, oh yeah I'm reading the Power of Now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, eckhart's amazing. He is explaining something I think is extremely fundamental to our world. And then I I did not start with him, of course, and in fact when I first started reading he hadn't written his books yet. I was reading about Toltec shamanism in northern Mexico, and they talk about some things that, because of a cultural barrier for me, I didn't understand until I really read Eckhart, and it tied it all together.
Speaker 2:The Toltecs talk about something that they call cleaning the island of the tonal, and what they're talking about? They're saying that you need to diminish your sense of self-importance and diminish it from what they're calling this island of the tonal, and that there's this other side of ourselves, that there's a duality within us that's called the nagual. Well, I don't. For years was trying to figure out what the heck they meant by all this. What is the nagual? What is the tonal? They reference the nagual as a place uh, that is, uh, outside of the mind. That's infinite. That's this human experience, or or not even just human experience, but a conscious experience that is infinite and beyond language based. Mind is really what it is.
Speaker 3:And so this is where right.
Speaker 2:This is why the world is so confusing If you look at our society. One of the things that in my early days of you know mainstream schooling, going to public schools and the philosophies and things that were taught to us One celebrated philosopher was Rene Descartes, the philosopher and mathematician that said I think, therefore, I am. He was actually incorrect. It was just flat out false. It's not true. And yet an entire society adopted and celebrated what he said there.
Speaker 2:And language-based mind is not a necessity for having a conscious perceptual experience, uh, and yet that seems to be exactly what renee de kart was saying and what was adopted by our society. In fact, that, I believe, is what's led us to a society that is full of sick people because we're overly obsessed within mind. We're overly obsessed and mind is deeply rooted in dopamine release, constant dopamine release and stimulation. Right, and that's where meditation and beginning to slow down the mind and getting away from that is when we start to find more inner peace and harmony and balance, and not constantly releasing that dopamine and going into that constant stimulation and and being obsessed with thinking. An obsession with thinking is where we're at, I think, in this society, and it's one of the lessons. That comes from psychedelics, but it's not to say that thinking is negative in some way. It's just that we've overused it, overdone it. It's it's it's like an addiction. It's the same thing as what I was saying about substances. Right, you can use substances, you can use psychedelics. You can use other substances appropriately and properly and have positive results. You can also use them improperly and have terrible results, and I think to some degree we've done that with our actual thinking minds.
Speaker 2:And this is what the Toltecs were referring to with the tonal. The tonal is the rational mind, it's the place in which our personalities reside, our identities reside and our ego resides. And that's the crux. That's where that word is a loaded word that in certain circles people have different definitions, and this is where it gets tricky. I have to put a lot of preface on it and delineation, otherwise people have this strong disagreement with this. It's because they have a different definition for the word ego. My definition is aligning with Eckhart's and Eckhart, if you notice, never defines it. What he does is he describes it and he describes it in detail through anecdotal experiences and explanations and descriptions of people's interactions, and you start to see a picture. In that picture, ego is completely negative. There is no positive side to the ego he's talking about, and that's what's important is that particular side of ourselves that we might call hubris, or we might also call self-importance, to use the toltec uh term. Of course, that's subject to uh translate, language translation, which also adds a barrier when we're talking about cultural, you know, trying to understand another culture. Uh, that part of ourselves, I believe, is the stumbling block, the evolutionary obstacle to achieving our higher level of potential as a species. And that's tied into what I was saying about this idea that the universe is attempting to become aware and almost kind of like a panpsychism model. All of these things that we're talking about, by the way, are things that supported my life and made my life better.
Speaker 2:In my understanding, one of the root fundamentals actually the fourth root fundamental is auditing one's beliefs, a full belief audit. When you really reach a point where you say, hey, I'm ready to change, you stop blaming the world entirely and you start looking at yourself and you start trying to figure out how to find your peace and inner balance and harmony and heal, and you reach a low point in your life. You eventually have to turn inward and not look at everything as external and someone else's fault. In that process, there becomes a point where you start to audit your beliefs and this becomes a discussion that's very pertinent to the term default mind network that Michael Pollan brought up in his book. You know how to change your mind. That was when that term, I believe, really became more mainstream.
Speaker 2:People started talking about the DMN. The DMN is deeply affected by ego. The DMN is affected by automated beliefs. That is what the DMN really is. It's this network of beliefs that are all functioning in automation. They're allowing us to assess the world at a symbolic level so that we can ascertain things in a practical way. I need to go to work, I need to answer emails, I need to, you know, pay the bills, I need to do certain things. At least that's in our modern world. In our older world we didn't need to do those type of things and so we actually had less mind going on and probably a much less developed DMN, which I believe was probably a more positive experience.
Speaker 2:The DMN if we aren't careful, we begin to have a bunch of beliefs that become automated and then, if we don't do an audit, some of those beliefs are actually contradictory to each other and we won't even realize it. And some of those beliefs are actually contradictory to each other and we won't even realize it. And some of these beliefs cause harm and they're all operating very much like computer software and that was mind-blowing for me. I began to realize that after nicole's death is that there were automated beliefs and during her life that was what was hurting me at times with our relationship, because she was damaged and she had pain that was really affecting her life and having this ripple effect. I was taking things personally and then I would do things out of judgment, out of beliefs I had. That damaged the relationship further and eventually I realized that it was causing me harm, it was causing her harm. It was that there were beliefs that were not positive and they were within me and automated.
Speaker 3:What is DMN? What does that stand for?
Speaker 2:Default Mind Network. This is a term that really showed up in Michael Pollan's book how to Change your Mind. He was a journalist, a scientifically minded I believe even atheist and started to hear rumbles and reports of people having positive psychedelic experiences and doing all of this deep dive research into what was happening with psychedelics and, of course, then started experiencing them himself and he had come across the term default mind network. He had come across the term default mind network. Default mind network is our logical mind, is operating at a symbolic level through language and what's happening is, as we get older, we're assigning language to objects and concepts and then we take them sort of sort of for granted. It what it is, is it's a practical thing when I say the word tree? If I, if I say the word tree, is it's a practical thing when I say the word tree? Uh, if I, if I say the word tree, it's a conceptualized idea and you might get a quick flash of an image of a tree in your mind and it represents something. But an actual tree is, is something extremely profound and of course you realize that yeah and you're almost limiting yeah, well, it is limiting and it's
Speaker 2:intentionally, and it's important that it's eliminating, because what it's doing is this is what I meant about accomplishing practical tasks at the practical task level of feeding your children, you know, getting from point a to point b uh, ascertaining a threat versus, uh, you's benign, these type of things. We need these things to be automated, and very fast, and that's a part of how our kind of organism and our system works to manage our world in a practical way. The problem with it is that this becomes this overbuilt, just giant structure that's full of a bunch of programming and and for many people, much of that programming is really uh, can be very toxic and and even contradictory. There can be all types of um it's it's like broken code, but what it is is. It's this development of the. It happens from a very young age when we're when we're infants and then toddlers and learning to speak, we're being taught to develop our default mind network and then we're sent to schools and we're sent, we're taught to read and we're taught, you know, all these basics. We're taught arithmetic and basic math. With all these things it's developing that default mind network so that we're able to practically interact with our world on a, on just a practical, uh, you know, basic, uh, uh, physical realm level. I gotta I gotta be able to feed myself, I gotta pay my bills, I gotta, you know, be able to drive, I gotta be able to manage in this world. And that when that starts to take over too much, that's when the world becomes very mundane. And the world becomes very, it can become a really dry, mundane, boring place with not a lot of substance.
Speaker 2:And this is where, when people are completely trapped within their default mind network then, and that that coding becomes larger and larger, and then you start to see that there are these issues within the automated belief systems. That's, that's the weird part, is the automation of belief, and that's what's happening with with thinking and thoughts. They aren't the problem. So when people talk about, well, I have all these really negative thoughts in my head. It's driving me crazy, I'm very unhappy, I'm depressed, I go through anxiety. I have these thoughts in my head.
Speaker 2:It's not the thoughts of the problem. What's the problem is the belief, is that anchors the thoughts. The thoughts don't have any power until you believe them. Once you believe a thought, now you're anchoring it in power, and that that is where the issue is, and it's the actual beliefs. This is something that michael poland does not talk about. This is something that I've I'm sure other people probably talk about it, but but I've, for whatever way, kind of invented the wheel for myself. It's really the beliefs that are operating the default mind network and what the Toltecs would call the tonal. So the tonal and the DMN are basically the same thing.
Speaker 3:I would love to see a diagram of this, so cool to just like look at and like, really just look at my scan, my whole self, and and be like, ok, this is the belief that is that is weighing these thoughts so closely to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right, a diagram would be great. And we're only talking about one side. When we start to talk about the novel, we're talking about the non-language based side of our conscious experience. I won't even call it our minds you might be able to refer to as mind, but now you're, then it starts to muddy the water a bit. It's a conscious experience that's outside of language-based thought, and there are some people probably a good amount of population out there who believe it's impossible to have a conscious experience without thought, and they're actually incorrect. There is absolutely a way to experience conscious perception without language thinking, and once you do, it's an extremely powerful experience and for many people it's very rare that they have that experience. It's even rather rare for me.
Speaker 2:I've, throughout my life, had the experience of meditation and psychedelics and different things where I've slowed down language-based rational thought, but it's been rare that I've seen it stop completely while I'm fully awake, and that is. That is a rare moment, an extremely profound moment in which we step into another side of ourselves, the side of ourselves that's infinite, and it's the side of ourselves where we feel the connection to all things, where we feel that quantum level of connection, and so on that side of things, this interplay between our non-language based perceptual consciousness and our language-based rational mind. That's where there's some actual danger involved when it comes to psychedelics and things like that. When we force ourselves into heading towards that language, that non-language based perceptual consciousness experience, that's when our egos become threatened. And this is where you'll hear, in the psychedelic experience, people talking about ego death and these things. This is where people can slip into psychosis and people can have negative experiences, uh, through their interaction with psychedelics. We have to be very careful. This is why meditation, breath work, these type of things are far, in my opinion, more safe and, uh, more attractive way to approach this.
Speaker 2:From my perspective as a facilitator, before I ever introduce anyone to a psychedelic, I want them to experience breath work, I want to experience sitting still. Uh, the second root, fundamental mental, emotional, spiritual skill development, is what I call not doing, and that's actually a term. Uh, we might call it meditation, right, we might use that word, but meditation, in my mind, has this idea that we're still doing something, and and I don't, I don't want people to think that they're doing something. The idea is not to do anything and in not doing anything, we're actually attempting to achieve a point where we're not even thinking and you're just being not doing for people who are wrestling with past traumas that they haven't resolved, and and those types of things. Not doing is very difficult.
Speaker 2:Paul Stamets made a recommendation when it came to his advice around hey, how will I know, how should I gauge whether I'm ready for a macro dose, a large dose psychedelic experience? Paul Stamets said go into nature. Don't bring a book, don't bring your phones or electronics, don't bring anything, don't even bring food, just bring water. Sit for three days and do nothing. If you can do that fairly comfortably without freaking out, you're ready. If you can'tic experiences.
Speaker 1:I might have done mescaline or something. And I remember saying to my friends I don't think in thoughts. I don't think in thoughts. And they say what do you mean? You don't think of it. I think in clouds, I think in spaces. I actually felt that that's how my mind was. I was thinking in clouds and I was just interpreting whatever it was. I mean I was definitely. I think I was experiencing the non-language self there at that. I mean it was really pretty intense and I think that stayed with me. It's still with me. I still think that way.
Speaker 1:But the other thing I wanted to say was when you mentioned how people are just not mature. You know you said that about people not being mature enough to understand all the different types of drugs and they can be good or bad. It depends on how they're used, and then that goes right to even thoughts. Thoughts can be good or bad. It depends on how they're used, and then that goes right to even thoughts. Thoughts can be good or bad, depends if you believe in it or do it or whatever. You know, it's the same thing with everything and it's like it's funny that you say that about not being mature, because I feel like that is the what's going on really, why this trouble's happening in this.
Speaker 1:The world of division that's going on now is a lot of people just holding on to their I don't know, maybe they're must be their dmn, they're holding on to some really wrong thoughts and they're just not getting out of it. If you think about it, if you become a little bit mature or evolved enough to see that the dichotomy of things that good and bad and hot and cold, it's all relative I mean it down to the granular level, really, what's hot, you know it's it depends on where you are in the spectrum. So, um, yeah, those are two things I wanted to mention, but, um, we can go in any direction you want.
Speaker 2:This is sort of this talking about this, the operation of the mind, and you know, this is where it gets really interesting, because we're seeing in the psychedelic community and within mental health in general and we've seen it in, you know, health care in general and a lot of areas of life where if somebody doesn't have the letters at the end of the name the certifications, the licensing uh we sort of dismiss them and and it's become really interesting. We're seeing that, um, in this world of psychedelics, we're seeing that there are uh, there's a, there's a movement here, unfortunately, uh, where people are looking to take financial advantage of something that could really help and heal people, and in that we're seeing that this isn't completely linked to necessarily that side of it, but there's an arrogance sometimes with people that have the letters at the end of the name the MD, the doctor, the PhD, the, whatever it is and that's that's where I think there's a. It points back again to this ego that we've been mentioning and this idea that immaturity. When you talk about immaturity, in a way, what this becomes is when we look at our species. Our entire species is immature from an evolutionary standpoint, if you think about it, if, if there are intelligent species on other planets, around other star systems, which it seems likely, that probably are based off mathematics, just pure probability theory alone states that there probably are and there probably are intelligent life forms that are beyond our place that we're at now.
Speaker 2:I've thought this through and it appears to me that in science fiction writing we've now I've thought this through and it appears to me that in science fiction writing, we've noticed that I've seen that these science fiction writers are almost like modern day prophets. I mean, look what's going on with technology, look what's happened with SpaceX, look what's happened with, you know, cell phone technology, camera technology, drone technology, I mean AI, you name it. These are things that science fiction writers were writing about 50 years ago and it's amazing how prophetic they've been. But in one area I think they've been consistently wrong is this idea of a predatory, malicious alien species. And let me explain why. Uh, if an alien species were to achieve interstellar capability through technological advancement, right where there's some people and even even the Toltecs would talk about this that there's a belief that you can actually transfer your consciousness through some forms of meditation or psychedelic usage where you could experience another planet. Let's say, some people talk about this and through their experiences at DMT, you could maybe travel and actually see it for real.
Speaker 2:We don't know, we don't have a way to verify it, but if you were to technologically acquire the capability to go to another star system, the advancement is so vast from where we're at, you know obviously Elon is talking about going to Mars and things like that we're so far away from that, from making that a truly practical, pragmatic endeavor. Think about going to Alpha, centauri, any star system. It's so far in the future. So that trajectory of technological advancement is going to many, many multiples of orders of 10 times over. We will create technologies that can destroy us, that can ruin our environments, that can destroy each other, can actually wipe out our entire species and destroy our entire ecosystem. That is part of the trajectory towards achieving this capability. So what that means is we have to overcome our baser, more toxic, you know things about ourselves, the flaws within our species, the things that I would say are rooted in ego. That is what we must overcome in that endeavor, and so what it becomes is this idea of the default mind network and these things we're talking about with maturity and immaturity, and and these things, is that the entire species evolution towards this.
Speaker 2:What I would say is the goal to become stewards of our own environment, stewards of our own planet, and then be able to explore who doesn't want to explore and see another planet. That is the goal, but in order to achieve it, we will have to overcome the things that are holding us back and threatening us existentially. We will have to eliminate borders. We will not have borders. We will not be engaged in an economic system of currency exchange. We will be one species with a hive mind and the ability to have an individual uh, you know, prefrontal cortex experience of knowing who I am, but also being completely connected and kind of hive mind driven in such a way that we are completely harmonious with each other. And we have to overcome our arrogance over our other fellow species on the planet. That we believe we're somehow so superior to other species on the planet is a part of our ego and beliefs. These beliefs are harming us, and that's the number one metric for me. If your beliefs, if you can sit and do a belief audit and you are able to ascertain that a belief that you're holding on to is harming yourself or harming other people. That is the metric in which you need to abandon that belief at that point, once you see that it is harming you or others.
Speaker 2:And I went through this with nicole when nicole was alive and she did things out of her own pain and I would take it personally. I would believe certain things about, for instance, uh, loyalty and romantic love very complex people. People think it's simple. It's not simple. Just because she went and left me in a state of confusion and had some fling with another man, did that mean she doesn't love me? Well, if I hold on to the belief that she doesn't love me and I'm going to harden that belief, guess how that makes me feel.
Speaker 2:I start to feel negative things, I start to behave negatively. Next thing you know my actions and my thoughts and my words towards her negative. Was any of that positive and helping anyone, or was it causing more harm? No, those beliefs I was holding onto, these very judgmental beliefs, were actually harming. They're harming myself, they're harming her, they're actually probably even harming people beyond that. And that was when I began to realize that I needed to abandon certain beliefs and choose different beliefs that were not harming people. Once I did that, I started to see a far more positive experience in my life.
Speaker 3:I love how you are taking this situation as an example, because it involves another person and their actions and how those actions affected you, and then you're mostly or almost entirely, talking about what you can do in yourself, like you're taking a lot of responsibility for yourself in this dynamic, and I think that's very rare for most people to do.
Speaker 2:It's an enormous amount of self-responsibility. In fact, it does almost become all about the self and it turns out that love itself is a very personal journey in truly understanding it, and it doesn't seek reciprocation of any kind. True love never seeks reciprocation. It doesn't matter what the object of love does. Love is a frequency that's maintained and expressed and does not matter even if someone spits in your face, because the understanding becomes back to those four agreements. It's not personal, it's their journey, it's their issues, it's their problems, it's their baggage they're carrying and so then, as you begin, to elevate this vibrational frequency.
Speaker 2:that's when you'll start to see that it has this very powerful effect. When we take someone, people, you know this is interesting because it starts to relate to the criminal justice system and all kinds of things, because when you take a person who's done something that we see as morally deficient, right, and then you punish them and you shame them and you isolate them and you do all these things to them, does that have a practical effect on improving their state of mind and changing their behavior and their beliefs and affecting their default mind network as we get back into using that terminology, or does it increase their pain? Does it further harden their negative ideas and thoughts that led to the actions that got them in trouble in the first place? Does it actually have a negative impact on them?
Speaker 2:And I would argue, just from the understanding of human nature, that it does not help the situation. It doesn't. We need to in certain cases, when we're talking about violent individuals, we will have to separate them from circumstances where they can harm or hurt other people. But in the way that we punish them, the way that we see this punitive experience with people, is actually it doesn't work. That's the real issue Punitive measures do not work with human beings or with anything any organism when you are punitive with it you only harden more trauma, harden more negativity within their psyches and they just become really even worse.
Speaker 2:It's not the way to approach this, and so experiencing love and understanding truly what it is, and then understanding the interplay between boundaries and love, is where we need to head as a society. As we see, what's going on right now politically and socially, and there's all of this unrest taking place, there's still an enormous amount of immaturity, and it's coming down to the lack of understanding of what really works First of all, what's practical, what's pragmatic, what's going to build a better society, what's going to make a better world and what isn't. What do we want as a society? Do we want to live in a loving society and a society built on cohesion and harmony and balance, or do we want to live in a society that's constantly at odds and friction and potential for violence and things like that, and potential for violence and things like that? And if we're going to choose, you know, the former over the latter, which I would hope we would, I think yeah, you would think right.
Speaker 2:Then we got to start doing things that are practical and pragmatic, and those things do not involve heavy judgment of others, heavy handed punitive measures. Those types of things don't work. I'm not saying that we don't in the cases of violent criminals and things like that put them in a place where we protect society, but you don't do it in a punitive way. You need to treat these people like human beings, even the worst of them, even the work that have committed?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I believe that for sure.
Speaker 2:And that's where you know. That's why sometimes, when I talk about, for instance, the fentanyl crisis and I'm an anti-war on drugs proponent, a big-time anti-anti-war on drugs advocate I'll have people who have experienced the loss of loved ones and they're furious about fentanyl, they're furious about these things. They want to throw around this hatred and I'm like, look, that's not going to work. The reason we have fentanyl today is because how we treated heroin in the past, and that's because of how we treated the laudanum in the past and opium in the past and those things. That's how we ended up here. You keep doing the same thing. You're going to keep getting worse and worse results, right, uh, you know, and and so stop doing that.
Speaker 1:We need to start looking things in from a different way, you know that is the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Yes, the basic thing about that is that immaturity comes back to the front of the subject again. Now. I think that you, when I'm listening to everything taken into the out of the blue idea, like you were saying how you've been aware of a lot of out of the blue things in your life, and I think that, because you are evolved in a sense that you're able to, I think that also equips you to take what happened to you and turn it into something positive. I mean, we actually had a young lady on the other day who has got cerebral palsy and she said something really profound. She said, just because something is tragic doesn't mean something good can't come out of it. We just want to start that conversation that positive things can be happening, even though you might think of it as negative. It's like this is what the out of the blue I think is here to do. I mean, as we go through our life and this stuff starts happening to us that we don't know why it's happening. Well, there's a reason why. It's the universe trying to grow to us, smartening us, giving us a smack. Hey, pay attention, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:For me, it was like taking away everything that I thought was important. So I had to stop and take stock of everything and build my life from the bottom up only on what I know is important and real, which is basically love. And um, you know, it comes right down to it. It is love. I mean and that is a tough one man you talk about describing what is love. I mean, and that is a tough one man. You talk about describing what is love. I don't know, it's a tough one. I like to hear what you think about that. How would you think of that plays into the Out of the Blue network, so to speak, or the journey that we're kind of being ushered on?
Speaker 2:I think you brought up some extremely important points, and so, before I talk about love, I want to talk back about the, the tragedies of life and what, what they represent for us as, uh, conscious experiencers, perceptual beings in this world. Um, I think that what we're wrestling with and where religion comes from spirituality and our early, early hunter and gather ancestors that were using psychedelics in a natural setting as hunters and gatherers in a primitive world is that what we've all been wrestling with is the idea of death, and in the Toltec traditions they have a term called using death as an advisor, and when you understand what using death as an advisor means, becomes extremely potent and powerful. But that journey is not easy at all. Uh, what I would say is that even when you look at religions, organized religions, who claim to have the answer to what happens after you die and therefore are providing some sense of security around this, you'll find that often, many of the parishioners within those ideological frameworks do not act as if they are secure with the idea of death. If they did act that way, I think you would see different mindsets and different types of actions and words that came from these people, but oftentimes you find that, no, they're very insecure and very frightened and very concerned about what happens after they die, and then, in some way, are kind of stuck in a contradictory place.
Speaker 2:What I would say about tragedy is that it is pointing, these are signposts towards the idea that this life is not as important as we make it out to be, and what I mean by that is that this is a transient experience we're having, that we don't even own these bodies that we think we own. They're really just vehicles that we're renting for now, and then they run out of, you know, battery life and things start to fall apart and the vehicle is uh begin, is recycled, basically, and it doesn't mean that we are, uh, eliminated of the conscious experience ends there, it certainly doesn't. I think psychedelics are one of the powerful tools that we can utilize, and this is why end of life, uh, uh, you know, preparation for people suffering from cancers and things like that why psychedelics have been enormously powerful for them is they get to experience a bit of understanding of what's going to happen to them, and that's extremely helpful, because there's a lot of fear and insecurity there, and so we are placing too much importance on this physical experience of life, and so tragedies seem insurmountableountable. And yet, if we're able to achieve higher and higher levels of perceptual frequencies and perceptual experience, we start to have a feeling of connectedness in which we realize that nothing is lost, no one is gone. The consciousness of the, the people and ones that we loved are here with us, they're in us, they pervade everything.
Speaker 2:I had an experience in one of my psychedelic emotional process journey work sessions where I spoke to Nicole after her death and she was in this experience represented. What her spirit was at the time in this experience was a planet. She was an entire planet, a gaia spirit around another star, in another galaxy, and she housed life forms on her. She had forests, she had oceans, she had early uh, almost hominid like life forms. It wasn't very developed, but that was her and she was speaking to me as a spirit, as the spirit of this planet, and so that whether that's a reality or not doesn't matter. The point is she was right, there with me. I could feel everything about her essence. She was there and present.
Speaker 2:And when you look at more indigenous ideologies around, uh, their spiritual experience and they look at the salmon as their ancestors, as their great aunts and great grandparents and great uncles and great warriors of the past and look at the buffalo the same way, these things. It's an interconnected network in which it's it's a transient life, in which there's a cycle of life. So we're placing too much importance on this physical experience of life and that's out of kind of insecurity. That's the default mind network, that's the ego, that's an attachment to identity as ourselves, as this, of this kind of physical life experience and that creates an enormous amount of suffering. And this kind of comes back to eckhart and what he talks about with ego creating suffering.
Speaker 2:We're identifying as this is it, this is all there is we're able to get to outside of that. That's when we're able to, uh, you overcome those limited mind spaces and then see this expansion, that that the tragedy itself isn't so tragic in the end. And so when people say, oh well, why does it always have to be negative, like you said, it doesn't have to be, but there's nothing more powerful than that be, but, uh, there's nothing more powerful than that. If we're stuck in a physical experience, what's going to be more powerful than then obliterating that physical experience and forcing you to then fate? Now, what right? The universe is very powerful and say now, what do you think you better?
Speaker 2:you better have some ideas that overcome and transmute that. It is an alchemy, it's a, it's a transmution of that. Now, that being said, that does start to lead into what love really is.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to say this to lewis, because I think we're going to have to do another episode with you yeah, I don't think we'll finish it because there's too much stuff. We need to talk about if you don't?
Speaker 2:if you don't mind, we'd like to have you again, yeah, yeah, I'd love to be back anytime, because this is.
Speaker 1:this is the beginning of some serious development of the human race. Let's face it we're working on human race development here. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:And this is so important. It's such important work. I mean it really is. Thank you so much for joining us with Louis Dorian on this incredible journey. I encourage you folks to do a deep dive with Louis and because he's going to be back and we're going to talk some more about all this stuff. Thank you so much, louis, really so much. I can't thank you enough. You made my day a really great day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you so much. Really nice to meet you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely great to meet you both. Thank you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Okay, Bye-bye everybody. Thank you for joining us on Out of the Blue. Out of the Blue, the podcast hosted by me, Vernon West, co-hosted by Jacqueline West, edited by Joe Gallo. Music and logo by Vernon West III. Have an Out of the Blue story of your own you'd like to share? Reach us at info at outoftheblue-thepodcastorg. Subscribe to Out of the Blue on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and on our website, outoftheblue-thepodcastorg. You can also check us out on Patreon for exclusive content.