You Are Not Finished: Ayahuasca, Altered States & the Comfortable-Life Trap

Will had the perfect life. Good job. A pension waiting. A future he could see coming a year out. So why couldn't he shake the feeling that it wasn't enough?

This episode follows a man who walked away from the sure thing — and went looking for answers in some unlikely places. Years of deep meditation. A week in the Amazon drinking ayahuasca with a Shipibo shaman. A voice in the dark that seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

What he found changed what he believes about his life, about death, and about what's real.

It's not religious. It's not preachy. It's a story — about the comfortable life as a kind of cage, and what it takes to step out of it.

In this one: altered states of consciousness, ayahuasca, DMT, deep meditation, the strange science of the brain, and the one quiet belief that keeps most of us small.

Will teaches altered-states meditation at mind-beyond-matter.com.

Here's the question I'll leave you with: Where in your life have you decided the story is finished… when the truth is, you've just stopped asking?

If something in here moves you, follow the show and pass it to one person who needs it.

The most dangerous thing is a made-up mind.
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Music Credits

"Fathoms" by EVOE

"Strings of Soul" by Master Minded

"Tear Away" by Adi Goldstien

"Everlasting Flower" by DaniHaDani

"Qing Long" by Yotam Agam

"Breathe Deep" by Master Minded

"Of The Sea" by Okaya

"Whispers" by Okaya

"Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols 

Transcript

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Everyone talks about making changes in their lives, but not many people actually do. And I get it, because change is hard, and it's scary because it means going into the unknown. The question is, where do you come up with the courage? And how far are you willing to go to find it? That's exactly what we're going to look at in this episode. So let's get to it. There's a sentence almost nobody says out loud, "I have a good life, and it's not enough." Say that at a dinner party and watch the room go quiet, partially because it sounds ungrateful. It sounds like someone complaining about the weight of their own good luck. When someone has a good job, good health, and people who love them, you might ask what kind of person looks at all of that and still feels this cold draft coming in through the walls? But here's the uncomfortable truth, a lot of us have those thoughts. And let's face it, we live in a very goal-oriented society. We look at the good life we wanna build and look at it like it's a finish line. Then we eventually cross it, and we realize nobody ever told us what to do on the other side. So we stay busy, thinking that's going to distract us from wondering why it's so hard to feel fulfilled. And we talk about being grateful, but there's always this underlying friction because we know we're looking past what we currently have. All of it's really hard to figure out, so we stay put, and we get really good at ignoring the part of us that keeps whispering one word, "More." Most people never answer that whisper, though, because it's dangerous. People decide it's a midlife thing, and then they just turn up the music and keep going. But there are a few who can't stop thinking about it and have no choice. They have to answer it never assume that you're finished in terms of your perspective, in terms of your, you know, what your life's gonna be or anything like that. That's Will Frazier. He was in the middle of living his dream life when that whisper about something more out there for him got too loud to ignore, and he blew it all up by chasing the question most of us are too comfortable to ask. And what he found on the other side changed everything he believed about his life, about death, and about what is actually real. Welcome to Better Beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, about the world around you? Thousands of people have faced that very same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kocal, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds Will's story starts in the dark. It's really dark, like dense jungle at night kind of dark. He's deep in the Peruvian Amazon in a hut with no walls, the wild landscape kind of pressing in on every side. There's no electricity, and the moon can't break through the jungle canopy, so it's just black. And Will's on his knees, along with several other people, in front of two old shamans and a couple of flickering candles. Then one of the shamans hands Will a small plastic cup And they give it to you in a little plastic cup. And, um, you know, you come to the, the front of this, um, altar where the shamans have got a couple of candles. It does kind of... It's very kind of Catholic coded, which I suppose it would be in a, in a Catholic country. And you kneel, and, and they give you this, um, this sacrament of ayahuasca. And then nothing really happens for about 45 minutes, you know. You're basically encouraged to meditate in the darkness on your intention. And then the shaman starts singing, and they start singing this song. And as the shaman starts singing it, y- you get this almost wave of, um, energy through your body that starts at your feet, and it moves up towards your head. That sacrament the shamans gave Will, ayahuasca, it's a plant medicine indigenous tribes in South America have been using for 4,000 years. Ayahuasca contains something called DMT, dimethyltryptamine, which we'll come back to later. For now, you just need to know it's a psychedelic that South Americans have long believed opens the door to encountering spirits. Which brings us to that voice in Will's head, a voice that knew him It was, it was a very kind of... It knew me intimately. It knew everything about me. Um, it, it was almost, uh, take- like gently mocking me, but in a loving way. It was like pricking my ego. It was saying, "Oh, you think you're so smart. You think you answer all the questions. And, uh, I would say to it, you know, I would, I would answer in my mind. I would say, "Well, who are you?" And it would say, "Ah, that's classified. I'm not telling you who I am. It's not good for you to know who I am." Classified. A voice in his own head refusing to tell him who it was. And it hadn't come to make small talk either, because days earlier, when the shamans went around the circle asking each person why they'd come, everyone else had a wound. Addiction, divorce, trauma. Will, he had none of that I've lived a pretty charmed life. I haven't got major traumas I wanna work through anything. I'm just a, I'm just curious. I just wanna know what, what, what's out there. I just wanna explore the universe." Um, and he said, "Oh, okay, so you're just a student then?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I'm a student." He was there to learn about himself and the teacher, whoever it was, had a lesson. It wasn't fix yourself. It was something else entirely It was almost like a dialogue between me and the ayahuasca, and it was basically saying to me, "Think bigger. There's more that you can explore. There's more you can understand. Like, what's the biggest question you could possibly think of?" So Will asked the biggest question he had, "What happens when we die?" And what he says he was shown wasn't a heaven. It wasn't some tunnel of light. It was the shape of everything there was a whole bigger structure that was displayed to me about how, you know, every life eventually culminates and coalesces into this final form at the end of time, which is basically God remembering that God is itself or himself, and then God basically gets bored because God realizes he's God, goes, "Well, I'm an omnipotent being that is everything and knows everything. God, how boring. Like, I know everything, so let's go back to the beginning again." And he breaks himself into an infinite little, um, sort of array of particles, and then the whole process begins again of coalescing and remembering back to being God again. That's basically what I was shown. God forgetting and remembering itself over and over forever. You don't have to believe a word of that. Just sit with how it would feel to be convinced you'd seen it with your own eyes. You'd probably come home a different person. But a guy doesn't get on a plane to the jungle and drink something that shows him God and makes him vomit for eight hours for no reason. So let's rewind a little bit, because Will actually, he didn't start out as a seeker. He started out as a man with absolutely nothing to run from I've always assumed things will work out, and they normally do. You know, I've always taken a very kind of, um, positive attitude to life and, um, probably because I've had a, a, you know, I've been lucky enough to have a pretty privileged life. I've never felt like I've had any obstacles in my life. Everything I've ever kind of set my goals towards has been achieved. He grew up in a good home. His parents loved each other. They went on a couple vacations per year. Nothing broken, nothing really to heal from, and a career that was basically a moving walkway. He was a teacher for a while before he became a senior leader, then a principal, and he was on a path to a pension and a really comfortable retirement you know, the education system is incredibly regimented. You know exactly where you're gonna be on any given time, on any given day, a year in advance 'cause it's all timetabled. You know, there's very, um, structured pay scales that are the same across the whole country. You know, like, everything is just so predictable and comfortable and secure. Those words, predictable, comfortable, secure. For most people, those three words, those are the whole Dream. For Will, though, they started to feel more like a prison. And the first time he really felt it, he wasn't even looking. He was on vacation in South Africa on a river near a place called Plettenberg Bay. Everybody he was with, they were on a boat, music, drinks, the whole thing, and he just needed to get away from it for just a minute So I took a paddleboard and I paddled up the river. You know, went round the bend and just, like, until I couldn't hear the music anymore. And then I was just in complete silence in this beautiful gorge with jungle either side and the river. And I just sat on the board there. And that, I had a, I had a, f- sort of a flash of inspiration. It was almost like a download. It just went, like, flump straight in my head. And what it was was this complete pivot in my career direction, Notice how he doesn't describe it as a thought he had. He describes it as something that came to him, and that wasn't the first time. Will had been meditating for years, and in the deepest states, he says he would make contact. He'd encounter voices and what he calls beings. And I know how that sounds, and Will does too And some people might say, "Well, it sounds like you've got schizophrenia," right? But, but you have these encounters with these beings, and these beings talk to you. And, and the beings would always say to me, right, "You know, like, you're, w- you're, you've got so much more potential to, like, offer so much more than just working in a cog in a machine. But it's gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna be... You're gonna... It's gonna be, like, a difficult thing to go from a really comfortable, structured environment." Let's put the beings aside for a second, because you don't have to believe in them to get the message. Whatever that voice was, even if it was just his inner wisdom, it kept saying the same two things. "You're built for more than this," and, "More is going to cost you your comfort." And Will didn't just hear it in his head, he felt it in his body. When he pictured staying in his safe career, he'd lie in bed at night and physically shake. When he pictured doing bigger things with his life, though, the shaking stopped. Think about the last time you walked into a room and something felt off before you could even say why. That wasn't magic. That was your body voting before your brain finished counting. It's called the somatic marker hypothesis, and it was proposed in 1991 by a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. The basic premise is that the emotional or physical responses non-consciously guide our decisions before our conscious reasoning can even catch up. To put that in more approachable terms, your gut is doing math your head hasn't finished yet. And Will's gut, it had done the math. But knowing the answer and acting on it, those are two different animals I need to be uncomfortable, and I need to be pushed, and I need to get out of my comfort zone in order to really reach my full potential. Really easy to say on a podcast, but brutal to do when you're walking away from a sure thing You know, you've got a good career. You know, you could probably be running a s- a, a sec- a high school within, like, a few years. You could be the principal of a high school, and then, you know, that's an amazing pension and, you know, v- very comfortable for the rest of your working career." And, and I just was like, "I can't ignore this, this, this, this, um, v- this thing that's telling me that I need to do something else." That's the part that makes Will's story unique. It's not hard to leave a life situation that flat out sucks, but it's really hard to leave something that works exactly the way you set it up to. Will's cage, it wasn't made of him hating his life. It was made of the comfort his life provided, and it's a cage I think a lot of people sit in for decades because of the fear that whatever life has waiting for them beyond it is definitely going to be worse than whatever they experience now. Making changes when everything is going fine feels like a bigger risk the longer we wait. But that whole time, we hear the voice that says there's more out there for us. So how does a guy like Will hear that voice clearly enough to bet his entire life on it? Well, he didn't think his way there. It's not like he worked through a pros and cons list. Picture thinking hard as mental noise, which makes it harder to hear your inner wisdom. For that, you have to get quiet. That worked out for Will because he teaches meditation, but maybe not the kind you're picturing, not the light a candle and clear your mind kind. He describes what he does like going to the gym. Think of it as training, not magic. And I know even mentioning meditation will make some people roll their eyes because they think they can't do it. And when people try it and quit, it's because they think they're bad at it. They sit down, their mind starts to wander, and then they go, "See, look, I told you I can't do this." But Will says noticing that your mind wandering, that's the rep. That's actually the whole exercise. And if you keep doing the reps, something eventually shifts. The pictures in your head stop being ones you're making and start being ones that just arrive. Will calls that the difference between imagination and a vision. Imagination, that's you picturing an apple on purpose. A vision, that's an apple you never asked for showing up on its own. And he says you can ride that all the way down to the same place that ayahuasca took him without the ayahuasca you can access the same states of consciousness through meditation, um, as you can through psychedelics. Because the experience of the ayahuasca was very, very similar to the experiences that you can achieve through deep meditation states. The only difference is that the ayahuasca makes you feel sick, it makes you have this body high, and it lasts for eight hours, whereas the meditation experience you can do as long or as short as you want, as long as your attention span holds together, same destination, no plane ticket, no vomiting. And this isn't just Will's opinion, by the way. There's a report published in the National Library of Medicine where researchers looked at EEG-derived neural dynamics during meditation. That's a mouthful, but what it means is that researchers wanted to see what people's brainwaves looked like when they were in meditation Just in case brainwaves are new to you, think of them like gears on a car. Wide awake and stressed out, you're revving high. Let's call it fourth gear. That's called beta. Calm and relaxed, you drop a gear, and that's alpha. That dreamy half-asleep state right before you nod off, that's theta. And the deepest one, and I'm talking about dreamless dead of night sleep, that's delta. Will's whole method is teaching people to drop into delta while staying wide awake to capture these profound inner experiences the brain isn't the origin of thought. The brain is just a kind of a receiving antenna for consciousness. Think of what he's saying here like a radio. The music isn't made inside the radio. The radio just tunes in a signal that's being broadcast from someplace else and then amplifying it into something you can hear. Will is saying maybe your brain's the radio, not the broadcast. But he thinks there's actually something more to it than that. He thinks we're not just receiving a signal from some greater consciousness. We're using our own creativity to shape that signal into our own experience of reality. That's a lot, so let me use another analogy. Will's saying that there's a signal and then there's a screen. The signal is whatever's really out there. The antenna pulls it in. The screen is the world you actually experience, the one your mind paints for you in color and sound and solid edges. In other words, we create our own version of reality, which I've thought is an interesting possibility since I saw The Matrix with Keanu Reeves in the late '90s, but it sounded more like fiction to me than science. Then I read about the interface theory of perception, which was developed by a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, named Donald Hoffman. Hoffman makes the argument that humans have evolved to perceive an illusion that hides the true complexity of the universe in order to prioritize our own survival. Yeah. So here's what that actually means for a guy sitting in a safe little life. If your mind paints the screen, then what you believe is possible, that's part of the paint. The walls of your life and the ceiling on who you think you are, those aren't coming from the signal. They're coming from you, and anything that comes from you can be shaped by you. In other words, there's no fixed limit on the reality you're allowed to step into next I had no idea about reality at all. And, and that's, that's the most profound thing is that actually these kind of meditation exercises show you that reality is a lot deeper and a lot more complicated than just the material world, and that is both terrifying and extremely liberating at the same time. I agree. Terrifying and liberating. Terrifying because the ground under you might turn out to be softer than you thought, and liberating for the exact same reason. And the deeper Will went, the more the worlds he visited stopped feeling like a dream and started feeling like a place. Which brings us back to DMT. I mentioned it earlier in the episode. Dimethyltryptamine is one of the most powerful psychedelic substances we know of. It's the active ingredient in ayahuasca, which Will drank in the story at the beginning of the episode, where he came to that profound understanding of the universe. And that's not an uncommon experience, by the way. A quick internet search and you can find lots of stories from people who say DMT was the most profound experience of their lives. They describe stepping into vivid, detailed places, meeting with beings and communicating with them, and coming back certain it was more real than the physical room they were sitting in Those delta state experiences can be so vivid that people kind of lose themselves in them to the point where they, they're, you know, they feel like it's another reality because they then enter a state where they're in another kind of- conscious constructed reality that isn't the one their brain is creating. And that's, as I said, the paradox. The reason why our brain is so active when we're awake is because it's basically generating this reality that we're connected to. But when you're in the delta state, the brainwave is in a, it's almost asleep, but you're still having this really, uh, sort of, uh, vivid, almost photorealistic, in some cases some people describe it as more real than reality I realize that ayahuasca ceremony, that might be too far out there for some of you. So the question is: Is there another way to create a DMT-like state that can give you these profound experiences? It turns out there is. In a paper published in 2018 in Frontiers in Psychology, Raphael Milleret found that psychedelics and advanced meditation techniques, they both target the same neural hub. It's called the default mode network. Milleret found that as you go through your day, your default mode network is active. Your mind's wandering, you're overthinking, you're worrying. But if you use advanced meditation techniques, the activity in your default mode network, it dramatically drops, and that's the same thing that happens when people take psychedelic plant medicines. So whether you get there through a plant or through sitting in meditation, you still walk through the same door this is true of every civilization around the world, shamanic culture, they all have the same language of, um, the subconscious. The same symbols appearing over and over and over again. And what I've realized, is that when you come away from these experiences and you journal what you've seen, you know, you might get a completely bizarre, abstract series of images that seem to make no sense, and you write them down. And then at some point later that day, later that week, later that month, something will happen, or you'll see something, or you'll hear something, and that symbol will suddenly make sense. Those symbols, they're not random, and they're not just some trick of the mind. When you look back on them, they line up like road signs, each one pointing you at the same place, the life you're actually meant to be walking towards. Think about Will's own story, that download that hit him on the paddleboard or the voice calling him a cog in a machine, or his body shaking in bed when he pictured staying put. In the moment, each one, it was just a strange signal that he couldn't quite read. But when you line them up, they all point in the same direction: out. The deepest part of him, that was drawing a map to a life he couldn't see from inside the comfortable one he was living. And that's the real power of a profound experience. It doesn't just rattle you and leave. It hands you the map. But nobody really warns you about the price of the map, because to reach the place where it gets drawn, you have to let go, and you have to loosen the grip on who you think you are, and you have to do it long enough to be shown who you could become. Will could do that. In his own words, he was just a student, nothing holding him down. But when you've got a good life gripping you right back, letting go is the hardest thing in the world. And I know because I've sat in the same kind of hut Will did. I did four ayahuasca ceremonies in a week just like him. And in my hardest one, the message that came through was that I had to give up everything I thought was true about me. Up to that point, if you'd asked me to describe myself, I would've said something like, "I put in maximum effort in all directions, all at once, all the time." It was telling me to slow down and to stop trying so hard. That was really difficult for me to accept because in my mind, what made me unique was the amount of effort I put out. But if you've ever sat through one of those ceremonies and heard those messages, you know they're not the ones that you can really debate. And here's what I've been sitting with ever since. Relying on my effort, it kept me safe. It kept me feeling like I was in control of what happened in my life. Discomfort, that was sitting back and letting life unfold in front of me. The cage and the comfort, they're the same set of bars I haven't done any of the deeper meditation since my ayahuasca experience, and the reason is because I feel like, as I said before, the ayahuasca experience was almost like a full stop to everything I was searching for, and, and I will come back to it, I'm sure, in the future. But now I feel like it's all come together in a way that I don't need to poke with a stick for, you know, for a while, I would say. Now, you'd think the lesson of this whole story is really simple. A comfortable life is hard to break out of unless you go to extremes, never stop pushing, that sort of thing. But listen to what Will just said. The man who spent 15 years digging on the biggest questions there are, he got his answer, and then he put the shovel down. He's not searching anymore. He's living. And that might be the most important beat in this entire episode, because there's a difference between a cage and a place to rest. A cage is where you stay small because you're afraid. A place to rest is where you stop because you've actually arrived somewhere you wanna be. And from the outside, these can look like the exact same thing. The only person who knows which one you're in is you. The voice that says, "Think bigger," that's real, but so is the wisdom to stop and let yourself enjoy what you've built. Remember what Will saw in the dark, the whole universe shattering and starting over? That's almost word for word what Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu spiritual text. It's talking about the endless cycle of birth and death, and one simple instruction for how to live inside it. Do the work that's yours to do, and let go of your white-knuckle grip on how everything turns out. That makes me think that maybe joy isn't waiting for us at the finish line. Maybe the joy is finally admitting we never knew where the finish line was. Will went to the edge of death to find that out, and he came back with something simple I feel like I appreciate life and I appreciate reality a lot more now I realize the kind of magic in it, and the, the mystery in it, and the, the, the beauty of, of that kind of reality. magic, mystery, beauty. And remember how he got there. It wasn't by finding the final answer. It was when he stopped pretending he already had it. And I think that's the point a lot of people get to when life is pretty good. There's a natural human need to experience more, almost like it's hardwired into us. And a lot of us feel that pull, but we don't do anything about it because we can't see beyond our own comfort. So here's the one thing I'm gonna ask you to do this week, and don't worry, I'm not gonna ask you to burn your life down, and I'm not going to ask you to book a flight to Peru. All I want you to do is just take out a blank page and sit with one question: Where in my life have I decided the story is finished when the truth is I've just stopped asking? Don't rush to answer that. Let it be a little uncomfortable, and let it loosen your grip one finger at a time, because my bet is you're not finished, and that's good news Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It is always a joy to put these things together, and I really do appreciate you investing your time in listening. Hopefully, this changed your perspective. Hopefully, this opened you up a little bit, whether you choose to do an ayahuasca ceremony or you choose to dive a little deeper into meditation. I can tell you from my own experience that having these profound insights, it does stay with you, and it makes your life and the world around you make way more sense than you ever had. If you want to look into Will, he's got some great meditation courses. You can find him at mind-beyond-matter.com. I'll drop a link to that in the description so you don't have to remember it, but Will is, uh, fantastic. I've been, uh, with him a couple times and, uh, both times were very, very interesting to me. So, I would very much encourage you to check him out. Also, if you have not rated this show on what audio platform you're listening to it on right now, please give it five stars if you believe it is worth five stars. On YouTube, throw a subscribe and a like on this. No matter what platform you're on, though, share the show with somebody you think could benefit from what we talked about here today. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It is written, edited, and produced by me, Brent Kocal. Yes, I do all the things except for the cover art of the show. That's by Jenny H Designs, and the original music you hear at the beginning of every Better Beliefs podcast, that's by The Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes