Lessons

Lesson Info

Meditation

Here's a picture of me meditating. This is actually at one of my retreats, my masterminds, I think. And after years of doing this now consistently, it's still the number one thing that I hate making time for, but I'm always happy after I've done that. You hate making time for it, always happy after I've done it. And it's just something that, especially as ambitious people, we just, you know, we're just like, wait a minute, I've got all these things I gotta do today and one of the things I gotta do is sit there doing nothin'? It doesn't really make sense with what we think we should be doing, but you're not just doing nothing. Meditation is a metaphor. Meditation is a metaphor and a practice for breaking through the known into the unknown, which is exactly what psychedelics really is, except psychedelics is just like a forced door. You don't really get to have a choice. If ayahuasca wants to show you an experience, it's gonna show you the experience. You don't have a choice. Meditation ...

is very much under your own control. But once you figure out how to really utilize it beyond just the om, I'm feeling calm, there's a real deep aspect to it. There's lots of ways to do this. You know, there's transcendental meditation, which Dalio talks about this in his book, Principles. And basically, transcendental meditation is like, it's like repeating an om or a chant, and using that to basically loop yourself, using that to trance yourself. So you might be like, nam myoho renge kyo, and you're just repeating the chant, and it can be in your head or it can be out loud. Transcendental meditation is like 20 or 30 minutes a couple of times a day. You'll get to that trance state. Zen meditation is what most people think of when you have the crossed legs, and you're like this, and your back is straight, and then there's a zen master over you hitting you with a bamboo stick. That's the zen meditation. There's guided meditation. There's a lot of apps for that now. I'll talk to you about some of those in a bit. Guided meditation, even when I was at the Dispenza thing, the Dispenza event a couple of weeks ago, I did almost 40 hours of meditation in one week, and a lot of it was guided meditation where he was working us through different visualizations and part of it too was bianural beats, and part of it was also holotropic breath work and chants. This stuff is really interesting here too because bianural beats relate a lot to, bianural beats and holotropic breath work for me, are some of the biggest transformative effects I've seen through meditation. We had a retreat at, it was actually for my birthday, we actually hosted an event, and we did some breath work at that event, and people were going full psychedelic. Now, here's the thing, because psychedelics are such a reference point, once you do something like DMT, or ayahuasca, or mushrooms, you have a sense of what it feels like to be in that psychedelic state, and so, once you do a deep meditation and you get back there, you'll know that meditation is a way to get to that psychedelic state. Until you have that frame of reference, you don't always know what you're shooting for, so for me and the reason why I wanna cover psychedelics first here is because for me, psychedelics was a great reference point to know what was possible for my brain to do, and once I was able to categorize that experience, catalog that new type of experience, then, through meditation, I could look for that again. You know, if I'd just done meditation without having a reference point for what a psychedelic experience was, it'd be harder for me to know what I was looking for. But really, there's a lot of science behind what's going on here. And especially through holotropic breath work, bianural beats, you know, we were doing this breath work with a guide at this retreat that I hosted, and people were having full-on experiences where they were seeing dead relatives and crying. Elron, you can speak to that, right? That was happening, you know? People were going into full trance, and this is just by controlling your breathing. So again, let's talk about physical power. You have the power in your body to create a chemical cocktail in your brain that releases your brain from your body, that releases your mind from your body. It sounds nuts but I'm just reporting. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just reporting. Matthew said, "People that sat in darkness saw great light" and so let's talk quickly about kind of just what's going on in your brain when this stuff is happening. So, serotonin, when you open your eyes in the morning and the sunlight hits your optic nerve, your optic nerve signals your pituitary gland. Your pituitary gland is a it's a small little gland about the size of a piece of rice. It's kind of shaped like a pine cone, and it's midway between your jaw and the crown of your head, so like right here in the middle, right here, your pituitary gland. It's kind of in the mid-brain. and this is a very interesting gland that releases all these different psychedelic, healing, and essential hormones and chemicals into your brain then into your blood system. And when your pituitary gland gets a signal from the sun to release serotonin, that serotonin then changes your brainwave function, and it changes your brainwave function from, like delta and theta brainwave states up to through alpha and into beta, which is where we operate, and once we hit beta from the serotonin, we become awake and conscious, and aware and present in space and time, right? Does that make sense? Does that make sense, hello? And melatonin is the exact opposite of that. So, when you lose that sunlight and it gets darker at night, your brain then signals melatonin to be released through your pituitary gland. Your pituitary gland then drops you from beta down into theta, alpha, theta, and delta, and then you go to sleep and your brainwaves slow down. So this is, it's really interesting because it's a pretty simple pathway, and a lot of people think this is very complicated science, but it's actually very simple. It's just your brain releasing hormones and creating this neurological pathway. And DMT, as it is, is actually a metabolite of melatonin, meaning that, as melatonin breaks down, it creates DMT, which is why, when you meditate in the morning, it's really best. Melatonin is produced in its highest concentrations between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. so when we're waking up, especially during this seminar I just did, we're waking up at 3:00 in the morning to do these meditations, and it's because the fact that there was so much melatonin already in our brain that it was easier for us to get into theta and delta more easily, and the easier it is for you to get into theta and delta, the easier it is for you to go into that trance state. The trance state is where you start seeing the visions. It's where you start seeing the hallucinations in the psychedelic state where you can go very, very deep and that's why, if you guys have ever been, you know, in that half awake, half asleep state, you'll be able to see things, you'll be able to get messages, you'll be able to receive information. And a lot of us pass off that information as being something that is just forgettable, part of a dream, negligible, but as you start navigating that space, as you start getting more familiar with that space, you can start to live a life where the interactions you have in that space become more real than your waking life. The reality that you have in your theta, delta state becomes more real, more sensational, more interactive, more intense, than you just being presently awake, okay? And then the paradigm starts to flip 'cause you say, when does the simulation start? Am I in the simulation now or when I go to sleep? Or is when I sleep and when I'm in that state actually the reality, and here is just kind of a lessened form of that? It's very strange. During successful meditation, you know, I like this picture because I think about submerging into the depths and going deep. Really, here's what happens, you have these brainwaves, and if you think about how these brainwaves work, imagine each one of these blocks is a second, and the theta and delta state, which are typically the state of trance, where your body is asleep, but your mind is either partially or mostly awake, that would be mostly alpha. But as your body's asleep and your mind's awake, you can start to receive information that you don't necessarily consciously fight because your inhibitions are down. And so, in theta, for instance, it's about four to seven cycles per second. That's what Hertz is, is cycles per second, so you see one, two, three, four. And as a successful meditation occurs, you'll start off in beta. Beta is the state of waking consciousness, alertness, concentration, cognition. When you're really stressed, you go into high beta, high, high beta, and as you start to calm down, you might go into alpha as you're daydreaming and visualizing, and as you sink down into the depths, you go from theta to delta. Most people like to meditate and hang out somewhere around low alpha or theta, but as you get better and better, you can go down into delta, which basically means you can control the functioning of your brain, even when you're not consciously aware. And I'm sure you guys have experienced this before. Have you guys ever gone into a state where you weren't asleep, but you weren't necessarily awake either? Isn't that state kind of weird? It's a little bit weird. I remember as a kid, my brain waking up and feeling paralyzed, not being able to move, but my brain having full activity, or what felt like full activity. That essential is the theta state, 'cause your brain, your body isn't really able to start moving until around alpha or beta, right? But in theta and delta, you can still be consciously aware of some things, you can start to receive information. And so, these are the meditative states, and then as we move past beta into gamma, gamma is actually a really interesting state because we don't fully understand it, but what we see when we do, like, if you were to hook up an EEG monitor to someone's head when they were going through gamma, you'd think they were having a stroke or a seizure, but what research has found is that people in gamma are having crazy, incredible, insightful experiences that are expansive and immersive. So, when you look at like, you know, alpha, theta, or delta, a lot of these experiences are deeply inside and they're connected to your oneness, but in gamma, you feel connected to everything, and so your energy is so high that you feel like you are the whole, like you are the entirety of creation. And so, people who've ended up really becoming great meditators can submerge all the way from beta down to delta, and then shoot back up to theta and have crazy brainwaves and brain readings on an EEG that really baffle scientists. So if you look at, really thinking about, and if you think about meditation, really, if you think about being able to learn to control your brainwaves, going from beta all the way down to delta and being able to do this at will, that's really the sweet spot of meditation. So, a lot of us think about meditation like just sitting there and doing it to try to calm our minds because we heard Tim Ferriss does and entrepreneurs are supposed to do it, but the real sweet spot is, right? But the real sweet spot is, once you figure out what you're actually doing here, think about the context of the whole lesson today. We're talking about physical control, we're talking about mental and emotional control, we're thinking about control of our finances, our money, and our resources. Now we're talking about control of our brain, control of our mind, like the control of our actual brainwaves. This is when you become truly powerful, right? And remember, power is control. It's not just enough to be strong, you have to have control over this. Imagine having the ability to have complete control over this engine. And through meditation, you can learn to control your brainwaves. I wouldn't have really been as interested in meditation if it wasn't for psychedelics, 'cause I wouldn't have known what I was looking for, but now I'm just as fascinated in that as I am in the former. This opens up a whole new area for us to explore in our lives, and for me, this is what I was looking for. Terence McKenna says DMT was the answer to him for what he was looking for. For me, I find that this level of power and control over my life has been what's given me the most satisfaction because, at any given state, I can completely transcend my body and completely transcend my thoughts. And again, I don't think there's a way to say that without sounding kind of a little cocky, like, I'm completely transcending right now, you know? But it's the truth, and I make it a practice, and it's changed my personality dramatically. And so, those who take the development of the skill very seriously are able to develop a very serious power. It's certainly very easy to shrug this off and say that either it doesn't work, it's not that real, it's not serious, or for a myriad of reasons not wanna try this, but I can guarantee you that those who seriously pursue this power of controlling your brain state will reap a serious reward, and it's something that takes practice, but it doesn't take an entire lifetime. There's a lot of natural, obvious benefits to meditation, which is what they sell you on. These are kinda like the benefits on the label, right? So like, you know, you're gonna improve your relationships, increase performance, focus, energy, productivity, learning, and you know, memory, and compassion, harmony, peace. I don't really know, like, I guess you would be more compassionate, of course. But these are the things that they tell you to get you to buy books and apps about it, which is true, and it is part of it, but for me, what I found is that this is a way to connect to a religious experience without religion. It's a way to connect to a spiritual experience with no context of religion, and that's why I think it's actually okay to talk about this. Before I was, in the past, I was a little bit afraid because I thought that people would shun it off, since it can have a spiritual context to it. But what I realize is that meditation and even psychedelics have no religion. They just are what they are, and you experience them, and you interpret it as you want. So, if you're a raving Catholic, then you can have a meditative experience as a raving Catholic and you can go see Jesus, or you know, you can see whoever your personal god is. It doesn't really matter, it's just a way for you to connect deeper. It's like saying, well, I don't wanna work out because it goes against my religion. No one ever said that it was not good to do that. So you can create your own transcendental experiences from this ability to control your mind and control your brain. And so, you know, I've had these deeply psychedelic and spiritual experiences just through tapping into my own stuff. And so you can practice this discipline, and what I would recommend is, you know, I don't think you have to go into an ashram right away. There's lots of different ways you can start to become more familiar with this. So, on the front end, I would probably just download an app to get yourself familiar with it. I was talking to my dad the other day and I was like, hey, have you ever considered meditation? He's like, oh, my brain can't do that. I'm like, that's not, that's impossible. He was like, you don't understand my brain. I'm like, actually, you're right, I don't. But he was like, you don't understand my brain, it just can't do it. I'm like, man, it just takes a little bit of practice, it just takes a little bit of dedication. It's like saying I can't squat. Well you might have some mobility issues, and once you work out those mobility issues, you can squat. So for you, you know, if you're just very much beginning, I would say start with the Headspace app. They have like a little 10 minute program where you do 10 minutes a day, and it just gets you used to the activity of doing the thing. I don't think you're gonna go full psychedelic in your first 10 minutes. And to be honest with you guys, I don't get to the same spot every time I meditate. I can't always replicate the experience. And part of the frustration with meditation, especially when you get that first, when you've done a few psychedelics and then you do the meditation and the meditation works just as well as the psychedelics, you get hooked on it 'cause you're like, oh my god, I can create DMT in my own brain, 'cause that's what you're really doing. You're essentially creating DMT in your pineal gland with this meditation. But you get hooked to it and you wanna repeat that experience, and sometimes it will take me weeks between experiences of meditation to have the same depth of experience. I won't be able to completely transcend every time. I won't be able to go as deep as possible. And when you get really involved and you're really working on it, you'll start off doing 10 minutes to get the practice, but you might go to an hour or sometimes two hours. And maybe you can't do it every day 'cause you don't have the time to do it every day, but it becomes part of a serious practice. And once you can go that deep, that's when you can see those more consistent, very transformational effects, and that's when your health starts to change. Your physical body starts to reorganize itself because you're connecting to your autonomic nervous system. Most people think that they can't connect to the things that are autonomic. They think that they can't connect to their software, essentially. Your body can resolve a lot of its own problems and heal a lot of itself within itself if you're able to change your brain state because your brain is what's regulating all of the hormones, all the secretions, all the different chemicals that go on and your brain is releasing and healing all the things that are ailing in your body. So you'll get to a point where you might even get better at this. You might become addicted to it. There's things you could do like Vipassana. Vipassana is this retreat where you'll go away for like seven to 10 days and it's free especially here in California. You can go and they'll put you up with some monks and you'll wake up at 4:00 a.m. and you'll go to bed at like you know, 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. and you can't talk. You can't bring any books with you. You can't bring any phones. You can't draw. You can't read. All you can do is sit and eat their vegan food and meditate when they tell you to meditate and then you have to go to bed. And people start to go crazy after a couple days 'cause they can't not do anything. Can you imagine, I'm talking about nothin', nothin'. You're either sittin' there or you're eatin' their vegan food or you're goin' to bed, that's it. And you'll go nuts but after a while, it spikes where you're like, this is weird, this is weird, this is weird, oh my god this is nirvana and then you have to go home, you know? But what's happening is your brain's state is changing. So there's all the different ways that you can dive into this discipline and this practice and I guarantee you on the other side, there's some really crazy benefits to doing such. So bullet point review 'cause let's just wrap this whole thing up in a little bow. Your future is a cloud of potential and it's moving towards you at the speed of your intentions. And meditation and psychedelics are both gateways to the unknown and traveling there is a way you'll push yourself into new possibilities. That's the simplest way I can put it and of course, stop making excuses, meditate consistently. You know, that's pretty much the key. I would say apps to consider for this. Calm and Headspace, just get 'em, they work. They are a great gateway to you getting to that point and obviously I'd recommend psychedelics as well, obviously. I think now is a really great time to take questions, so. So I really appreciate you talking about this. I think there's a lot of cultural stigma when it comes to religion and how outside-of-the-box you can be with spirituality and especially as a black person, as a Caribbean person, you're Catholic, you grew up in a specific way, the idea that there isn't white Jesus and God is like really unheard of, so I really appreciate you touching on that. In terms of getting into your awareness, how do you balance people feeling almost like, well I don't know if people in your life, but just generally people feeling that you're less empathetic because you kinda understand how the dots are connected. You kinda understand the realities that people are creating and they're living and so when people come to you with like problems or you know, health issues or just whatever situation that they're in, it can sometimes seem that you're not as empathetic with them because you're just not in that space and you realize that they're literally just, you know, asleep or they're just disconnected and they haven't tapped into that spirituality. So how do you sort of balance this awakening and living in whatever network you live in with people as they are but also you know, be empathetic and kinda not really guide them to your side but you know, be where you are but then also recognizing where they are but still having that empathy for whatever situation they're in. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I was just talking the my wife about this earlier 'cause I was, you know, I was just talking about how there are just people in my life who I wish would have some of the same realizations or ideas that I had and thinking about how much that would improve our relationship if they had those ideas 'cause we would be on the same wavelength and I think that the first thing you have to realize is that everyone, without a fault, progresses at their own pace, especially with this type of work and all the stuff we've talked about today. We've covered so much ground, covered so much ground in all these different areas of life and there's just no way that you can, the only reason why you guys resonate with this is because you're already on this path. Does that make sense? If you were here and you weren't ready to receive this, it wouldn't matter. I could say the coolest little quote or argument and you'd just be like, no I'd rather be checking my phone right now. And so it's really hard because you just have to understand that people come to the realizations when they come to them and the only way that you're gonna be able to break through to them is just by remaining who you are and they're gonna have to see that in their own time and recognize that. And sometimes it will go from, why are you doing that, to how'd you do that. You know, people will question you. They'll prod you. They'll even make fun of you and say, why are you doing things like that, or why are you doing this differently now, or you never were like that. And then months or years later, they'll come back to you and say, hey how did you do that? And it's really tempting at that point to be like, I told you. I've been telling you, man, get your physical right. Like I've been telling about this ayahuasca, get on it, you know, but that doesn't really help anybody. And from the position of power, you have to come from a place of like think about it as, think about the initiate. So we think of the ancient initiates and we think about Jesus and Muhammad and Buddah and there's tons of other initiates and ascended masters. The way that they would approach someone who is just awakening and just learning wouldn't be to say, I told you, this is how it should've been. They would say, welcome. So you have to approach things from a position of always being open and willing to accept those who are ready to take the journey and if they're not, then there can't be any type of convincing because they're gonna have to figure it out for themselves and it can be frustrating but it's just part of the unfoldment. And I also think some people, just because of where they are maybe might not ever get there in their whole life and that also isn't a negative thing. They might not ever get to the point where they understand things in the way that you do or if you feel like you've discovered something very, very deep and important, they might not get to that point and part of their journey will be to realize that limitation and overcome it if they can. So it's challenging but it's something that since you guys are here, you guys are those warriors of light. You guys are those initiates on the path looking for that power and so it almost doesn't make sense for you, as an initiate, to say why isn't everyone an initiate. You are an initiate. An initiate means starter, fire starter, and so you can create that awareness in people and you just have to let it take effect. You can't force it, it's hard. Does that kind of answer your question, yeah. One of the questions that I had was, so I've meditated for some time now and I feel like I've gone to this place where I feel like I have a lot of power and sometimes it frightens me. How do you deal with that? Do you ever get scared by how much power you have and how do you manage it? Yeah, I mean, and we all have that power, you know? Yeah and I'm like, oh my gosh. It's a lot. What do I do, yeah. It's a lot but it's not just enough to recognize the power, you have to be able, remember it's not just about strength, it's about control. So it's like learning to control that power and it may not happen overnight but don't get so scared of it that you stop doing the thing. Embrace it, dive into it. You're not gonna get to a point of control if every time it gets scary or weird, you let go. So you have to be able to become more comfortable with it and I've experienced that too in mediation or psychedelics where it's very hard to control my fear. Very, very scary and every time, the answer was on the other side of the fear. It was never backing up. It was always on the other side. It's definitely hard though and there's this commonly understood idea of this psychedelic breakthrough and with DMT, especially you'll get to this point where you'll recognize there is this wall and beyond the wall is where the personality is destroyed. You can get to a certain point as you're going deeper and deeper in the medicine and the shaman will give you the medicine and you'll be holding and he'll say, hold it, hold it, hold it forever. And you'll hold it and it's so weird because when you have this medicine inside you, you can hold your breath literally forever. You don't even feel the need to breathe anymore which is also in itself scary. And you'll be holding it and as you exhale, you'll shoot through the tube and you'll feel yourself hurtling towards this unknown place and you'll see these fractals, these crystals. You'll see images and pictures and shapes but you won't be able to discern it and you'll reach this point and you just know intuitively that if you go past that point, you're going to lose your personality. Literally, you're not going to be yourself anymore. You'll feel like a computer that's about to reboot and you know that when you wipe, you're not gonna be you anymore and it's very terrifying because you say, this is all I know. What if I don't have this? And every time I do it, I'm not always able to break through because I still get the fear but when I do, when I am able to break through and I break through to that barrier, it's the most terrifying thing in the world and it's the most gratifying thing in the world. And it makes me realize that there's actually more power on the other side of fear than before it.