🟣 Midnight Gospel - Original audio for episode 3 - Damien Echols - Fish Bowl Man

Actually you know and uh have you read uh reza aslan's book zealot yet of heaven so it's a really great take on jesus and it um talks about how if you're looking for like a historical account of jesus mostly a lot of what you're going to get is people referring to jesus the magi or jesus who is working some kind of magic all over the place Um and and so yeah that's the the concept is he was some kind of well have you seen like the very earliest depictions of christ like the very first ones

they always depicted him holding a magic wand like there are even depictions of him bringing lazarus out of the tomb by tapping the tomb with a wand wow that is so fascinating man this this stuff is Always been of great interest to me uh and also somehow for me these days at least it's i i though i've had experiences with it working experiences like it works yes i mean i think you're living proof of this exactly and um these days though just out of a general realization of the fact that um before i can know

what i want i need to know More who i am i'm doing the first part of what you recommend in your book and i thought maybe that would be a good starting off point for us uh is if you could if you don't mind i was wondering if you could um and it maybe it's a little long i don't know but i just thought this was such a beautiful simple description of meditation and i really appreciated the fact that you put This as the very first thing if you're gonna start doing magic and i would

love to hear you read it you got such a nice voice just a little explanation even before we start the the reason that meditation is so important in magic is because mostly what you're doing is directing energy towards something you know there's this phrase now uh energy flow we'll see energy flows where attention Goes it's basically basically means whatever you fasten your attention on is where you're directing you know this energy that there's a name for in every culture in the world but ours like the chinese call it chi the japanese call it ki the

hebrews call it ruach the indians call it prana whatever we fasten our attention on that's the direction that our energy is going to flow in so when you're doing Magic you want to keep your mind as single-pointedly focused on whatever you're trying to accomplish as possible so that's what meditation does it trains your mind you know so it's not constantly scattered and going into you know all different directions and dispersing the energy that you're trying to build up gotcha good okay let me see I'm sorry i wrote all over your beautiful foot it's perfect that's

what it's for where should i start out are you there yes sir if you don't mind right there most people aren't aware of just how much they're missing from life they're distracted by so much stimulation trapped in loops of internal dialogue relieving past events and feeling anxious about what's going to happen Tomorrow and it's so easy to carry on like this until the grave never actually experiencing the richness of life of the present moment meditation changes all of this it enables you to pay attention to the present moment and train your mind to do what

you want it to do meditation enhances your natural ability to be alert And aware try biking down fifth avenue absent-mindedly you can't do it well not for very long riding a bicycle in that situation requires incredible awareness and if you're not present for every single second of that ride you'll end up beneath the city bus before you know it additionally a bicycle will actually drift in whatever direction your attention is focused Remember the chapter on the power of attention and if you've ever learned to drive a motorcycle you know how important this principle is if

you look at the tree you're about to hit instead of the path you need to take to avoid that tree you'll hit the tree every time it's the same reason why they train race car drivers to never look at the wall the drivers learn to focus their Attention on the track and all of the action going on around them so this is why meditation is important if you're not aware precisely where your attention is it's hard it's kind of hard to change that focus biking in new york is a demonstration of the primary principles of

magic in real time meditation empowers you to notice where your attention is going And to steer it accordingly in magic we steer it toward what we desire instead of on that which we fear that is great thank you wow man this is so good you know you run into books on magic i mean i crowley wow but jesus he sure comes across as somber sometimes yes he does and it takes forever to to sort of crack open what he's even saying you know you've got to learn so much other stuff before you can even Begin

to understand what the hell he's actually talking about a lot of times because so much of it is written in a kind of code yes yeah that's right and and which is great and i understand that i think that that his reasoning behind that was more than just how funny it is to do that but also knowing that there's certain layers to this where if people jump ahead too far you can really blow your face Off with this stuff so to speak right well yeah and the reason for that is because you know when you're

talking about eastern traditions eastern paths you know like buddhism taoism hinduism things like that most of these practices are set up to lead you to this state of what they call enlightenment awakening what in magic we call crossing the abyss Eastern traditions are focused on doing that over a period of several lifetimes magic is like pouring jet fuel on that process it aims to accomplish it in one lifetime so what you're trying to do is cram several lifetimes of spiritual and energetic experiences into one and that can be a little uh overwhelming sometimes oh that's

right yeah and is that tantra that Reminds me of tantra yes that's tantra actually plays a huge role in certain aspects or certain traditions of magic like the oto uh you know which crowley was the head of whenever he died so have you i i noticed uh that uh you have been ordained in renzi zen zizen buddhism yes it was the tradition that trained the samurai in ancient japan when i was in prison i had a zen master that would come back And forth from japan to the prison and you know i said zazen meditation

for years and you know honestly i did not get as much out of years of eastern practices as i did months of ceremonial magic and i think part of that it's you know the same goal the same it's they're both aiming at the same thing western mysticism and eastern mysticism But whenever we especially someone coming from my background you know just poor white trash from arkansas who has no connection to you know any eastern tradition at all i had to learn that stuff from scratch so it was like learning an entire different language whereas magic

deals with western iconography symbolism things that you know we've grown up having shoved into our psyche from the second We came into this world so i think part of a some really deep internal part responds to it a lot quicker than it does the easter eggs right i've heard different versions of what you're saying that's cool right like you know for example like let's take ganesh you know like or no uh maybe hanuman for example you know the monkey god it's like this is a very powerful symbol but How many of us have had any

real experience with monkeys in the wild exactly you know but when they were writing about it this was because this is a symbol they were grabbing something exactly yeah yes we didn't have many monkeys in arkansas too bad i love them they are annoying though they are in india it's like my god i got chased off a roof by monkeys they're really nefarious i've heard about people Having their phone stolen cameras still they'll run up and snatch stuff right out of your hands and carry it up in the trees with them they know if you're

a tourist or if you live in india they could tell the difference right away and uh um yeah and if they if you're afraid of them man they they will they have then they're they have a sense of humor you know magic ceremonial magic what what we call High magic um originated in ancient mesopotamia somewhere around 3500 bc so it is uniquely western you know that's not entirely the west it's more the middle east because it originated in a part of the world that would now be you know present-day iraq in a city called nepur

what happened the way we got it in europe was whenever the knights templar Were sent over there to you know escort pilgrims through back and forth from the holy land to make sure they're not attacked by bandits things like that the knights templar come in contact with this current and when i say current what i'm talking about you know how in certain buddhist traditions like say tibetan buddhism they talk about what's the word they use Empowerments sure or transmission yes you know it's like a current of energy that is passed along from master to student

ceremonial magic is the exact same thing the knights templars started receiving this current whenever they were over there that's how it makes its way back to europe it makes it from europe it makes its way to the united states eventually Through the hermetic order of the golden dawn which was the order that crowley was a member of before he you know went off to the oto you had mcgregor mathers dion fortune the poet wb yates all of these people were members of the golden dawn that's how this current makes its way to the u.s um

i forgot what the hell we were talking about we're talking about the Transmission oh it's also known as the disciplic succession yes people think here's the thing that is so important that i want people to understand about magic whenever i talk about it a lot of times when we're talking about something being an oral tradition we sort of live under this mis understanding that that means it's just a bunch of stories told handed on That's not what this means what an oral tradition is it means the way this current of energy is passed from one

person to another is through the voice you know our voice is sound waves we're creating sound waves which carry information that's why you know in the bible i always tell people the bible is the greatest book of magic ever written once you know how to read it you know the whole thing in the very First chapter of the bible they're talking about in the beginning was the word and the word was god that's because this is an oral tradition um there are basically two ways that magic is passed on does that make sense [Laughter] there's

two ways that magic is passed on one is through like a lodge or order setting yeah like The golden dawn that's more like a curriculum type thing like a school you know everybody's learning the same thing at the same rate the other way is like master to student mastery student and that allows for things that are a little more profound just because you're not learning the same thing as everyone else right if it's someone who knows what they're doing they can judge you know where you're at mentally Where you're at emotionally where you're at spiritually

and figure out what it is that you need to sort of set off these bombs in your head that cause epiphanies and realizations and things like that so that goes all the way back to um ancient mesopotamia uh i forgot maybe further back well i think the whole of our species has forgotten because I don't know if you've been following this uh greenland ice sheet meteor impact thing we just found so a for someone i've had on the podcast a few times graham hancock uh fingerprints of the gods that's right right i know who that

is and he's you know just he's just a brilliant human but basically the idea is that there was some kind of uh very advanced civilization on the planet that got wiped out because a Meteor smashed into the ice where there were ice caps at the end of this lesser dress period which caused the sea levels to instantly overnight rise by like four feet causing massive floods that wiped it and that's the flood story yeah but there were like some people who survived from the civilization and they went out into the world and tried to like

Spread this um energy yes right which absolutely the oral tradition as you're calling it which we really kind of blows my mind i want to talk a little bit about the what you just said there because it's it seems like what you're saying is that words themselves or the energy behind is it the is it the words that have the energy or is it the energy but coming out of the person saying the word Combination of both for example you can only pass the current if you've received the current like you could say the exact

same words that a person who's holding the current would say and if you're not holding the current it's not going to transmit you have to be holding the current and have the right words it's a combination of both and it You know that's why we have things the energy behind it that's where things like mantras come from right you know even if it's just um things of that nature it is very specific vibrations everything is energy you know we're starting to learn from science now it's just catching up to us we think that what we

experience out here is real you know we think this table is solid we Think our bodies are solid we think these bottles are solid almost nothing is actually solid we know now from science that something like .001 percent of everything that we perceive actually has solid mass to it over 99 percent of what we perceive over reality is empty space you know now we know that there's protons neutrons electrons waves particles But they're just like these tiny little dots moving in infinite empty space yeah we don't know what over 99 of the universe is made

of because our senses do not allow us to perceive it we can't even perceive the entire light spectrum so all of this this empty space is energy almost everything that exists is pure energy the two things that i use whenever i'm teaching people magic that i rely on the Most number one is the bible and number two as strange as it may sound is that movie the matrix okay the thing i always bring up is that scene where neo goes to see the oracle and the little bald kid is in the room bending spoons and

neo says how do you do that and the kid says don't try to bend the spoon because that's impossible just know that there is no spoon that's the key to Causing some sort of manifestation in the physical world using magic there's two reasons to do magic one is for manifesting something and that can be anything from a parking spot to the career you want to the relationship you want to be in whatever it is all about creating something the other reason for doing magic is what i call spiritual sustenance where you are deliberately invoking Energy

and intelligences that you then absorb into your energy system into your aura to make you grow make you change trigger epiphanies realizations shifts in consciousness things of that nature that allows you to some of this sounds crazy but what it does is allows you to see that current of energy you know everybody has human teachers in the beginning we you Know people that teach us magic people that teach us meditation whatever it is but the point of what those teachers are trying to accomplish is to get your consciousness to a state where you start receiving

what i refer to as downloads directly from divinity when that happens then magic itself god itself the divine architect of the universe whatever you want to call it starts to become your teacher once you Know most magical lodges and orders have a grade system and part of this grade system this is not anything you know anywhere even remotely near the beginning this is like after you've been doing this stuff for years you reach the the grade where it says from this point on the magician will look at every single thing that they encounter come in

contact with and experience as a direct dealing of god with your Soul from that point that means there are no coincidence if you are seeing something if you are smelling something if you are tasting something it is god speaking directly to you and the more you acknowledge that pay attention to that the more it starts happening in in dramatic and really profound ways so everything that exists is energy that's why Our voices that's why our words are so important you know that goes back once again to the bible in the book of genesis whenever adam

is naming everything you know he's given all these different animals names there is power in our speech we have the ability to shape reality with nothing but our vocal cords yeah you know i always tell people don't focus on what you Don't want focus on what you want most people spend their lives complaining about things they don't like yes they constantly talk about what's wrong with the world so you're adding power to it you're giving it chi you're feeding it we're supposed to focus on what it is that we're wanting to move towards instead of

away from so if you if someone asks you You know just for example you don't have to to lie when something is bad you know someone says you know if you have a cold and someone says are you sick that doesn't mean say no it means say i'm getting better minute by minute oh that's great my wife i wish you were here she would love that thank you for the correction i fucking do the first thing you said but out of pure Superstitious so if i'm sick i definitely did nope i'm fine oh shit that's

great i'm getting better this is exactly passing it's passing and well you know just that example when people are sick people not only speak about the negative all the time they also visualize it all the time and they don't even realize they're visualizing it because they think you know when you hear the word visualize You think it's some profound thing that you're doing you know in a room full of candles and incense and wearing a robe or something we visualize all the time right so you know most people will say i hope i don't get

the flu this year you know the neighbors have it and every time they have it i end up getting it and it's twice it whenever you're thinking about all that what you're doing is visualizing Yourself being sick so you're putting energy into it you are manifesting something you don't want that's what i mean about how everyone is doing magic all the time they just don't realize it the point of doing these practices is to harness that to train that so you're putting energy into creating the reality you want to experience Instead of the reality that

you're fearing because fear is a very real energy too yes it is and this to me this is i i think uh why most of the this this type of uh teaching that you are engaged in is usually starts with a warning which is this this is real and it can be very very very dangerous if you haven't done the work to help dissipate that fear and This is one of the topics i wanted to to see if you could address which is what what can happen is that someone comes to this in a fear

state and because you're afraid you're in a hurry usually you know as they say fear is is cold anger i've heard so you're kind of in a hurry you're angry you're afraid and you want some result rightfully so man it's fucking You know as i was like reading your book and i'm in a terrible state right now because i'm studying uh kagyu buddhism with a a really wonderful teacher and i think part of that practice is you go you get in a pretty pretty awful judgmental phase where you're like this this this uh people must

be careful and we must all have a practice and discipline Discipline discipline and then fortunately with cognitive buddhism once you've gotten into that state that's when you start being shown how absolutely ridiculous that state is too you know but i think a lot of that what it comes from you know people for some reason think when they think about spiritual practices spirituality they think that we're here to be one with god Or you know with you know unity with all that exists all this kind of stuff sure and they think that's what the only thing

we're supposed to be aiming for if that were the only thing we were supposed to be doing we would have never been born because we were all that before we came here we come here for a very specific purpose yeah in buddhism they call that purpose your dharma in magic we call it your will this is What crowley was talking about anytime he wrote about your will your will is your dharma so the universe is not going to waste energy creating you know cookie cutter duplicate people right everybody is here for a specific reason a

specific purpose now your will may overlap with other people's it may have things in common with other peoples but there is still something there is a very specific Unique experience that you are here to have most people don't realize even what that experience is that's what leads to unhappiness in life you know people who just have this vague sense of discontent or angst yeah where they're just you know just like i don't i just know that this isn't what i want that's right when you discover what your will is that disappears the whole what crowley's

Writing what he was getting what he was pointing to is that the entire reason you are here is to do what whatever you want to call it god the divine mind whatever put you here to do that's what he meant when he said do as thou will shall be the whole of the law it means if you do what you were put here to do everything else is going to fall into place but before You know what your will is a lot of times you have to go through the awakening process you know what they

call enlightenment in the east or crossing the abyss in the west well whenever you go through this process suddenly everything that is not you everything that is ego starts to fall away and you start to see what you really truly are And what you really truly are not now when that happens it will cause profound changes in your life because 99 of what we do with our life is ego driven and by ego i don't mean you know people whenever they hear that word they think it means somebody that's full of themselves and that's not

what it means ego is anything within your psyche Anything within your consciousness that creates the illusion that you are separate from other people from god from the universe from anything any sense of separation that you have is ego well what happens whenever you transcend that whenever that starts to disintegrate whenever you start to see through the illusion of ego you start to see what you're here for and your first clue to what you're here for what your will is Is what really makes you happy what is it that when you do you lose yourself in

it you get so immersed in it that you don't think about anything else that's what your will is well when you start to reach that point you'll start to look around you and realize the mess you've made of your life it could be something as profound like the the example that i give as i've seen You know like people that say whenever they go through this process they realized like they were born the wrong sex like suddenly i'm awake i realize i wasn't i don't want to be a man yeah i want to have the

experience of being a woman that's what i'm here for well if you suppress that and you say you know that would upend my entire life and you start Pressing that down then it's going to create psychic tension force and pressure that is going to then manifest in all sorts of ways it's going to make you even more miserable in life yes can't it could be anything from cancer to just all of your relationships to disintegrate you lose your job whatever it is because you are basically fighting against god wow does that make sense yes Who

trained you a little bit of everyone um a lot of what i had to learn like technique-wise when i was in prison was through trial and error uh you know i would just have to figure out things and here's the thing i always tell people about magic is you know people will say to me sometimes well i don't believe in magic and i say well actually what you mean is you've never done it because magic works Whether you believe it or not you know that's like saying i don't believe in meditation if if you're doing

it and you're not seeing a result that means you're not doing something exactly right and you have to keep tweaking it because none of our psyches are exactly the same so the technique or the way i do a specific technique May work amazingly well for me but you may have to tweak it a little bit change it a little bit do something slightly different before it triggers something in you so i had to learn a lot of that i also had teachers you know i had like i said the zen master from japan i had

um a chaos magic teacher a guy named steven mace for people who want to look that name up you can find you know books that he's Written out there we corresponded when i was in prison uh also since i've been out here um i've come in contact with people you know like we were saying about this current of energy being passed on yes what happens you know i don't have very many friends just because magic is my life i do this for hours and hours and hours a day this is not something that i do

as like a hobby or you know something on the side this Is the focal point of my life i can tell just like you know sitting zazen is the focal point of a zen priest's life yes magic is what i am that's what i realized that's why i wasn't miserable a lot of times when i was in prison is because even in there in a hellish situation i was doing what i was put here to do which was magic that alleviates a lot of suffering Right but i also out here have a couple of friends

that um are as devoted and dedicated to this as i am and we don't get together very often because we're all spending our time doing magic but whenever we do meet you know two or three times a year the fact that we have all accumulated so much of this energy around ourselves through you know what i call the process of Like trying to get spiritual sustenance through these rituals that whenever we do come in contact with each other it usually triggers massive leaps massive expansions in consciousness that would take us each you know longer on

our own than whenever you come in contact with other people who are doing it right you know most people that are doing magic in groups uh whether it's You know witches and covens or magicians and lodges and orders it's almost like they become glorified book clubs i honestly think it's better if people practice on their own every single day number one you don't get involved in drama there's no politics any of that and then come together for specific reasons specific occasions when that happens it's like atomic bombs go off yes So a lot of what

i learned also a lot of the changes in my consciousness and psyche comes from coming in contact with people who are you know bearers of this current of energy absolutely and this is the two thoughts popped into my head one description i've been given of this current of energy which i think is the most perfect description of it Is fresh baked bread it's like fresh baked bread it's alive it's warm it's wonderful yes that's one thing about it because like if you're hearing this kind of stuff you might project in your mind some concept of

here's what it must be here's what it must look like because your mind is going to do that with anything it's going to try to imagine i know what this is which is one it's great kind of but also One of the big fucking problems is because this entire time that you think you know what something is you are looking for what your mind is telling you yes and it might make you miss the reality of what it is because you're so focused on your conceptual idea of what you're looking for yeah yeah and so

then and then the other thing i really love about um Your teaching here is that uh it has within it the necessity of a community of sorts of a transmission of a teacher and that's something i've always railed against or i used to rail against uh until i got lucky enough to have a real teacher because this uh thing that you're talking about the passing on of a certain thing you can't get it out of just a book exactly impossible Exactly the uh you can't get it out of a book at all but i also

tell people there is a way to come in contact with it without another person it is possible it is hard yeah the example that i usually use to describe it is say for example you're trying to get into a club now there's two ways you can get in and there's a bouncer at the door there's two ways you can get in One is you know somebody who goes to that club on a regular basis takes you up to the bouncer and says hey this guy's with me he's cool the bouncer says okay come on through

cool that's what happens when you come in contact with people with this current who pass it on to you easier by far the other way would be you know you go to this line you go to this bouncer every day you start chatting with him you know weeks go by you give him a Cigarette when he needs a cigarette eventually he gets to the point where he says you know what you're all right you can come in now yeah you if you work hard enough if you take if you actually put time effort energy and

persistence into trying with your whole heart to move closer to divinity divinity will then move closer to you for every step you take it will take 10 to meet you yeah so you know for People who don't know anyone who's practicing magic always say don't lose heart just practice that's the main thing just practice you will eventually start to get those downloads those those realizations those epiphanies all of that sort of stuff it can't it is entirely possible uh without help but having help does really facilitate the process Absolutely you know maybe i love the

description of the bouncer by the way the guardian and that but also the if you're having this conversation with a bouncer so to speak more than likely the bouncer is going to introduce you to somebody else in line yes yes absolutely that you know just like in my my case you know it's like one day um you know i did i didn't know these Guys you know i i had actually gotten disenchanted and sort of disillusioned with the magic community you know at one point i moved up to massachusetts to salem thinking okay you know

there's all these stores that sell like magic paraphernalia and all this so there must be like really hardcore practitioners there so i want to go there and and meet these people And learn from these people i get there and there was fucking nothing yeah you know it was like a kind of like a tourist town yeah like stuff that was just for um selling the tourists who wanted to take it back home and say you know look i got this bottle of herbs in salem or whatever i gave up i i was thinking that no

one was really doing these practices anymore that everybody was what i would Call armchair magicians yes you know people who read the books or argued about it with other people on facebook or whatever but wasn't actually you know doing what was going to lead to growth it was then sort of giving up and letting go of that that i did actually start to come in contact with people who were doing it and i realized oh this isn't dead at all this is a very alive Current that there are people out there working with and passing

on yeah and they seem to want you to get out there and talk about it a little bit i mean that's the other side of it is there it isn't is that i think there's a kind of graceful equality to the teachers who understand that man if i go slamming somebody with this right now it's not going to be good for Them it's just going to confuse them yes or even worse it's going to make them like turn their backs on something you need this is why you know you hear in uh freemasonry uh if

you want to be amazing ask a mason you know they put that out there yes you know it's not like no one's recruiting necessarily for this exactly and that's not a prideful i don't think the decision behind that is Prideful as much as uh compassionate that and it also weeds out those who want it and it also sort of you know raises up those who are actually doing it because if someone comes up to you and says you know hey i want to be a mason how do i go about this or hey i want

to be a magician how do i go about this that means they are seeing something in you that they say That guy's got something going on that i i want to get some of in my life yeah you know maybe that guy's got some kind of inner peace or that guy is pretty calm or you know this is just a good person so whatever it is you got going on i want to know what it is i want to be part of this if you know crowley once again he said uh convert not talk not

over much and let success be thy proof Don't go out there and try to convince people that magic works let your life be an example and once again it's the same thing as in the bible whenever christ is saying if you buy a lamp and bring it home you don't bring it home to put it under a basket or in a closet you bring it home to put it up high so that it'll illuminate the room what he's saying is that the more you Use magic the more magic will use you magic wants to spread

in the world whatever you want to call it god the divine mind it wants to bring more of his presence into the world so the more you're working to bring it into your life and into yourself the more it will raise you up like that lamp so that other people see you and say you know what the hell's he got going on over there looks pretty Cool so you're saying there's nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to to that sort of thing exactly yeah i i know what you mean but it's it's a

funny thing isn't it where like if you're having this experience or that experience there's a sense that holy shit especially maybe in the beginning phases of it Where you're like oh are you kidding me like it's it's like not only is it real yes you do you you want to go through the world in the beginning i think everybody has whenever you start to see oh my god this actually works you want to start running around telling people stop watching jerry springer and look at this yeah you know stop worrying about what celebrities are getting

divorced Today and look at this i found something that you can use to change your life but nobody really wants to to see it and i think it's because we're all at different levels of consciousness you have to wait for someone's consciousness to evolve to a vibratory rate that is going to be acceptable you know is going to be in a frame where they can accept this teaching If even if if they haven't reached that state of consciousness even if you can convince them to sit down and look at these teachings they're not going to

get anything out of it it's not going to click because they're not in the right pearls before slime exactly that's exactly what that means yeah and you the the i mean it's a kind of there could have been a nicer way to say it but i get it man the guy was going to Get crucified he probably wasn't feeling so great about him exactly exactly yeah um do you think that uh the reason you ended up in prison is because this sounds so weird good karma in the sense that we don't have like you know

i'm in the type of buddhism i'm studying many of the great teachers they had to go up into caves yes i i absolutely this will sound crazy to People but i absolutely do i am thankful now for the time that i spent in prison you know i even for some of the most horrible things that happened to me say for example you know when i was beaten so bad that i was in a lot of physical pain if i would have been out here i could have just went to a doctor i didn't have that

option in there i had To find ways to help me cope with not only the emotional and mental anguish that i was going through but also the physical anguish the physical pain so that pushed me constantly to keep exploring what was possible with these practices the more results i experienced the more it started to convince me that well i'll just say that by the time that i got out of prison I didn't even feel like i was in prison anymore my cell almost felt like a control tower where i could reach out and touch anything

in the world by the time i walked out i was doing up to eight hours a day of these practices i look at people out here now who think that i had like a horrible life and don't get me wrong there were some pretty unpleasant aspects of it you know whether it was beating or starvation or You know just living in fear sometimes that these people are going to kill you at any minute whatever it is still i think i had a better life than most of like the millennials i see that are sort of

flailing around out there now trying to figure out who they are and what they're going to do with them so i never had to experience any of that right i always knew what i was i always knew What i was supposed to be doing and i kind of embraced that wow when you say control tower and reaching out do you mean that you are doing some form of uh astral projection or some kind of that is part of magic um and and i don't like that word actually but i don't know another word to use

astral projection just because um it sounds so kind of flaky and new agey the guy i'm working with the guy's Teaching me buddhism right now i brought up astral projection then the other day and he said almost the identical thing he's like i don't know about that word yes but here's the thing that people don't understand in our society now well not just our society in the west but also in the east we've sort of arrived at this conclusion somehow spirituality has become so watered down That we think enlightenment is the be-all and the end-all

of spiritual practice it's the finish line it's not there are actually things that come after that what we think of as enlightenment is the first step in a process in magic what what they call in the east enlightenment we call solar consciousness because you know the sun represents christ christ being You know the son of god all this sort of thing solar consciousness means that you are completely and absolutely in the present moment just like whenever you achieve enlightenment after you develop solar consciousness the next step in this process is developing what we call the

solar body which is very similar to in dog chin you know people think dog chin is buddhism It's actually it actually predates the birth of the buddha by something like 6 000 years what happened is the native tradition of bonn in tibet was a magic practice well whenever buddhism started moving into tibet these two things integrated combined to form tibetan buddhism which is why tibetan buddhism looks so radically different from like zen and it looks different from vietnamese Buddhism and looks different from korean buddhism that's because tibetan buddhism still has a incredibly strong magical presence

yeah well in dogchen the end result of their practice what they're aiming for is what they call building the rainbow body now if you've ever looked up like monks llamas that have completed this process you'll see after a period of about seven days after they die they don't move the Body other llamas other monks come in and they continue the practices around the body but after seven days the body will start to shrink until after about you know a week-long period you're you end up with something that looks almost like a small mummified form that

they say there's no putri putrification there's no smell of decay Any of this sort of stuff they then put that little mummy looking thing on a shrine and it stays there as like a holy relic in magic we're aiming for the same process they say that if you reach the very very end of what you're supposed to be doing here the only thing that will be left within seven days after your death is hair fingernails and toenails the reason those things are left is because they're Not connected to your nervous system your nervous system is

the key to a lot of these practices that's why whenever they go to you know the tomb after they crucify christ they say there's nobody there well that's because he was doing these practices there wouldn't be a body there anytime you see in the bible where it's talking about someone ascending to heaven body and soul that's what they're talking now there Aren't many like i said this is not a practice that everyone masters the only people in the bible it talks about doing it were christ elijah enoch and uh in some accounts mary magdalene so

it's not like a thing that is like really easy to do but part of this process when you're building what we call the solar body you are building a vehicle To allow your consciousness to uh not disintegrate at the point of what we call the second death you know the first death is when the physical body dies the second death is whenever your astral or ethic body begins to unravel that's whenever your consciousness goes through this sort of cosmic washing machine every aspect of personality is washed out of it you're left with a kernel of

Pure energy which has been recycled into something else if you develop the solar body that doesn't happen you put your consciousness into the solar body at the moment of death you then become what something similar to what in eastern traditions they would call a bodhisattva um not entirely not exactly the same yeah But your consciousness is then completely unbroken for eternity you will never again go through the process of being born and not remembering who or what you are anything else from that point on you can come into the physical realm when where and how

you choose if you choose to do so the point is to help other people complete this process you know beethoven said that The point of being alive the point of being human is to approach divinity as closely as you possibly can and then disseminate those rays out to mankind that's what we're doing with magic also first you want to develop the solar consciousness or go through the process of enlightenment then you build the solar body astral projection is a huge part of that Process if you can project your consciousness into other realms into other objects

then you can project it into the solar body after you develop the solar body you are then free to basically do whatever the hell you want to do you can help other people accomplish the process you can form your own universe whatever the hell it is you're wanting to do that's the end End of the solar body wow this is so cool man i'm so happy to be chatting with you because it's so nice because what really what you're saying is the reason to do this is to help it's not like and this is what

i love it's because like it's not like the the these beings maybe bodhisattva is the right word for it i don't know but magic they usually call and this is Another word that sounds horrible but they call them secret sheeps secret chiefs yeah yeah and this is when we were talking earlier you were saying that there is this possibility that you can actually make contact with someone who isn't in a body exactly who can start teaching you exactly potentially exactly regardless of where you may be exactly yeah and this is actually Um one of the

teachings in uh one of the teachers in tibetan buddhism i think his name was tilopa was this is how he learned was not from an embodied person but from i think the avo lukita shivara buddha like came to him directly and he got the dad that the the um transmission yes so the spark can not just only be passed from human to human but it can also be passed from I'll tell you two things one is that's partially you ask how who trained me how did i learn all this that's partially what started to happen

to me after a certain point when i got to where i was doing magic for like five hours a day i experienced the disintegration of ego of what i thought i was i the only way i can articulate it is i experience myself as something like someone throwing a handful of sand into A tornado like i just come apart it was terrifying you know when we think of going through this process that we call enlightenment we think it's like all bliss and flowers it's not you die everything you think you are comes apart i was

absolutely terrified i was convinced i was going to die for a short period of time what eventually happened was i realized Well if i'm disintegrating then who is it that's watching the disintegration process i can't be disintegrating if i'm watching the disintegration therefore i'm not what i thought i was i am this observer that's sort of in the background of what i thought i was once i realized that once that clicked into place suddenly everything was okay then this is where you start to sound crazy To people sometimes it's exactly like what you described with

the guy who is you know saying he received these teachings from avaloki teshwara i started to download things that for me the the you know these things pass through cultural lenses that's what i mean about the things that are in our psyche for me it's you know the western stuff what i started to perceive the way that i Recognized it was not as an eastern deity but as it's hard to say this because it sounds so crazy but as the deity that in ancient mesopotamia they called in lille e-n-l-i-l i never heard this name before

didn't know anything about it whatsoever whenever the process ended the disintegration process it was like suddenly you know you're in this storm this Horrible fucking storm that you don't know if you're gonna survive and suddenly it stops and there's peace and it's like the sunrise after you've gone through a week-long hurricane and there's just this calm and i saw when i say so i don't mean with my physical eyes you perceive it somewhere internally i saw spelled out almost like a gentle wind moving across the sky The letters e in l i l a couple

days ago by before it even occurred to me that i'm like okay i don't know what the hell that is but that's an interesting experience it took a couple days before i even thought google it so i started looking it up to see what it is one thing led to another and the more that i learned the more epiphanies and realizations i started to Have what i realized was when you first start doing magic you invoke angels archangels these are intelligences that underlie certain energies like it could be planetary energy energies like mercury jupiter whatever

it could be elemental energies earth air fire water it could be zodiacal energies whatever it is these are the Intelligences that underlie these energies you invoke those directly into your aura into your energy sphere the reason you do that what i always tell people magic think of it as like a glass of water that you leave sitting until it gets you know stagnant and gross like a fish bowl that hasn't been changed in a long time take that glass to your kitchen turn the Faucet on and just hold it under the faucet and let it

overflow and overflow and overflow eventually what happens is you're left with a clean glass of water again that's what we're doing when we're doing magic we're invoking these energies into ourselves over and over and over flushing ourselves out right whenever i realized whenever i had this realization whenever i came into You know brushing against this intelligence that the mesopotamians called in lil once i start invoking that along with the angels it increased the process a thousand-fold it was more powerful than anything that i'd ever come across in any book or that any human teacher had

ever given me anything like that that's what i mean About how in the beginning we all have human teachers but eventually the energy the the current of magic itself becomes your teacher yeah that's what started to happen and for me i perceived it in the form of this western deity that we call in lille whoa dude that is so cool i i understand also your hesitation because it's like it makes you sound crazy well yeah that's it makes you sound crazy and That's you know that part of it is like at some point i really

do understand why lodges form because i think groups of people who are having these types of experiences for real because the problem is people who are authentically having a kind of hard drive problem begin to have these experiences too yes because It's not necessarily because they're going crazy i think one way to put it might be imagine if you couldn't control the blinds on your windows and they were just flying open at random times and you were having to deal with looking out at this crazy landscape similarly i think people live in these sort of

enclosures that have these closed windows they're sealed and then when death happens or disease or Catastrophe or love or psychedelics the windows open up yes holy shit look at that i can't believe it shut the fucking window yeah yes shut the window and and this is actually in the you know in the bhagavad-gita the universal form when krishna reveals himself to arjuna you see this like this incredible thing Uh and the fir like right after it uh at some point arjun says can you go back to being my friend please because it's like i don't

i'm i don't want to deal with that right now i liked you with your normal forearmed version of yourself and also think of like in eastern traditions we are not supportive of spiritual practice at all in the west no not at all you know basically the the Extent of most people's spiritual practices if they have one at all as they go to church once a week on sunday and even while they're sitting there they're thinking about i hope we get out of here in time before the game starts that's right in the east you tell

somebody you know oh i came in contact with this intelligence that we call avaloki teshvara or or krishna whatever it is they're like Okay cool you know we got this story about this guy who did that and there's this story about this guy who did that and this guy it's like no big deal it's just a thing that happens sometimes tell somebody that in the west and they're like oh well you're delusional you're crazy yeah you know we don't believe in that yeah and it becomes i think um at some point i think it just

Becomes a little dull like you don't want to spend two and a half hours explaining to your skeptical friend yes that there's the potential for these extra dimensional yes intelligences that are really interested in helping this particular part of history well and keep in mind also when you are trying to convince someone when you're having a two-hour conversation with them what i Always remember is the story of david and goliath the point of the story of david and goliath is don't fight battles that there's not a reward for whenever david steps up to fight goliath

the first thing he says is what do i get if i beat this guy first thing he says if they say oh well you get to go and say you beat the giant he's going to say Fuck that i'm going home they tell him you know you're going to get gold you're going to get to you know marry the king's daughter you're going to get all this he says okay he steps up he does battle with goliath whenever you're trying to convince people of something ask yourself why am i doing this is this that is

this because there's something to Actually be gained here or is this just because my ego wants me to convince this person that i'm not crazy that i'm right and that i had this experience and if that happens then what have you really gained from it nothing not a damn thing god the ego could be so embarrassing it can oh that moment when you realize you're really you have zero interest in helping Uh someone and in fact really all you're trying to do the way i've been thinking about it lately is uh uh the image that

keeps coming to my mind is how much it would suck to be kind of like floating in the ocean you know and then like a lifeguard swims out there and tries to pull you back to shore because because he thinks you're drowning you're like dude i was just swimming man like i don't i don't want some Muscular ass fucking dude yanking me back to sure leave me alone i'm doing fine out here yeah and so sadly i think i've i have been in the past been that lifeguard really let me help you but you're not

really like let me help you like let me gain all the accolades from saving you from your well i think it was chogyam trungpa called it spiritual materialism he said it's like Another trick by ego where you want to build another identity for ego as a spiritual person as helping someone but if you think about it when you know when you when most people are saying you know when it's ego saying i want to help someone what you're saying is you cannot feel fulfilled unless someone else is lacking in some Way unless someone is beneath

you in some way and they need your help to pull them up like you're this great high thing and you have to lift them up so that kind of ego depends in some way on there always being need and lack and uh what's the word um when people don't have anything the opposite of prosperity poverty poverty yeah it relies on people having A poverty mentality or a poverty type state of existence yeah rescue fantasy yes exactly you're no different than that embarrassing old dude at the strip club who goes down there every wednesday to visit

with tonya because he wants to save her from her wretched life and she knows it and she's like oh save me save me please because she's getting this kind of relationship can't happen if and it works on both sides By the way there's not just the rescuer there's people who are professional rescuees yes well a lot of that comes from you know the fact that the the bread and butter of ego is need ego always needs if it doesn't need something it will cease to exist it has to need something all the time because it

has a hole in it ego can never be fulfilled it can never be satisfied So you always have to sort of be looking around for the next thing that you have to have the next thing you have to do you can never exist in a state of contentment or ego will fall apart and i think you also can have on the other end of the spectrum you can have people who do here's what i always tell people if you really want to help other people Sometimes that may not even look like you're doing anything if

you work on yourself if you raise your vibratory rate high enough if you collect enough divine energy you are going to change everything and everyone you come in contact with without even trying because you're going to lift their their vibrational rate so you could have somebody who Is in a state where they do go to the strip club and they sit there and they affect everyone in there there's there was even an old zen story and i can't remember which zen master it was where you know the people from the town come to him and

they're like uh you know there's this brothel down there with all these prostitutes and they're they're you know they're just being sinful and you know wallowing in materialism and He heads off towards the the brothel and they're like you know what what are you doing why are you going to the to the prostitutes and he says somebody's got to save them you know so he goes and hangs out at the brothel all day long yeah this is you hear versions of this all the time like one of the there's a hare krishna story about this

where one of the devotees just switched channing harry Chris just the chanting of the mantra it it this is really i mean this is as all of my teachers thank god have taught me this because otherwise i would be a disastrous disastrous missionary pig but the teaching that they've given me is uh we work on ourselves so we can help the people closest to us yes and that's it and that by helping by the time you've gotten to the point we're Like all right i think i'm ready to help you might notice that the people

you were wanting to help have actually don't need it yeah yeah it creates ripples too you know you raise their you raise your own energy rate which raises their energy rate and then they raise the rates of the vibratory rates of everyone else that they come in contact with you're creating ripples by just working On yourself that's right and also the other thing that can happen is the thing you wanted to help in them was in fact the projection of some broken part of you and so by working on that you don't even see it

in them anymore yes that's sad at least for me sadly that seems to be more often the case is the whole thing whatever it was like i'm gonna This poor this or that you were it's just like it was some unbearable truth in your own heart that you didn't want to take a look at well that's the whole thing about attachment you know people have a really hard time even you know some of the buddhist scriptures are really hard for people in the west to even understand exactly what they're reading like you know most people

in the west have Trouble figuring out or understanding what is attachment you know what do you mean there's a difference in love and attachment how do i know the two how can i tell them apart well it's exactly what you just just described what attachment is is ego projecting onto other people so that you don't even see that person you don't even see the actuality of who or what the person is You think you see who you think they are you see who you feel that they are so if you think you love that person

you don't actually love that person because you can't even see them you don't see them as infinite consciousness you see them as whatever you're projecting on them therefore you can't even see the other person much less love them you have to get through the attachment Before you can experience true love and you can't get through the attachment until you start to see that it is like a projective quality of ego wow man holy shit it is 205 this time went by so fast i am so lucky these great teachers it's like i've created some kind

of wonderful and forgive me i don't mean this in any disrespect a trap for some great teachers they come here and i get to get these wonderful Teachings right in my face and i really appreciate it thank you so much thank you for having me and i mean this is fun this is like i said this is my life this is all i want to talk about it's all i want to do so for me this you know it's like this brings me a tremendous amount of pleasure yeah well me too and i i please

if you don't mind if you could Just tell listeners where they can find you are you where did can you take are you teaching classes in new york uh i do sometimes i also do them other places i'm getting ready to do one i'm going to be back here in california and when's it may april i'm going to be here in april at the at joshua tree to do like a a weekend retreat it's going to be like a Two or three day a three-day retreat here in in joshua tree in april but i also

do some in new york they can find me just um usually on all social media i just go by my name just at damian eckles instagram is where i'm most um active at just because it seems to have the less negativity out of all the things or they can find me at damieneckles.com d-a-m-i-n-e-c-h-o-l-s Dot com great thank you so much i'm gonna have all the links to find you it's been a real joy chatting with you too hari krishna