EFR 739: The Intersection of Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness and Finding God Within Ourselves with Dr. Randy Scharlach

0:00:05 - Speaker 1 I feel like it's important to kind of lay just a quick groundwork of who you are Professionally outside profession world looking in. Who is Randy? What do you do Outside the professional world, right inside the outside, looking into your professional self? What is your name and title right now, currently?

0:00:23 - Speaker 2 Well, my name is Randy Sherlock and I'm a physician. But then that kind of leads to the question of what kind of doctor am I? And the best way to describe it is I'm a Practitioner of voodoo or black magic, and I really mean that literally I have two completely independent medical practices. Then I keep pretty separate by day. I'm a radiation oncologist, and that really is voodoo to every other kind of doctor. I mean, I use this gigantic machine that vibrates the universe's Electromagnetic field to send energy into a patient to make cancer get destroyed Without touching the patient. Hmm, and if you just kind of think about that, that's pretty voodoo. That's a voodoo, yeah, yeah. And then by nights and weekends I practice psychedelic medicine, which in and of itself is certainly another kind of voodoo and Just for striking the record correctly, here you are an MD, I'm an MD.

Yeah, I went to UCLA medical school and did my residency in radiation oncology Yale and I finished that in 2000, so I've been sort of a real doctor at a school for 23 years.

0:01:29 - Speaker 1 Okay, all right, important information everybody.

0:01:32 - Speaker 2 I want everybody just kind of keep that in mind well, yeah, it is important because if we start talking about some interesting stuff, I might be taking our conversation down a very strange rabbit hole and it's very easy for a listener or viewer to go that dude's crazy. And so please to the you know, the audience. Just keep in mind that I'm a traditionally trained physician and the work that I do is all data driven.

0:02:06 - Speaker 1 But the psychedelic part of my work has taken me to some very interesting places which have changed my worldview about, like what the world is made, the universe is made out of, we're gonna be saying the universe a lot in this conversation, absolutely, and in preparation for this, I Kind of told you I have one question in mind that I wanted to start it off with, and it's kind of a doozy. Yeah and I have a few others that I've been unpacking today just in preparation for this and also want the viewer and listener to know.

You and I have developed an amazing relationship over the last couple years now With the work that you did with my wife and former clinic. You also former clinic, so we definitely have there's a lot of history coming here together, yeah, and so I appreciate and value your friendship and you're you're talks by the fire pit.

0:02:55 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, nights at Randy's.

0:02:58 - Speaker 1 This man cooks one hell of a steak and has some of the best wine I've ever had in my life. So the one question I'm here to ask you out of the gate is what is consciousness?

0:03:10 - Speaker 2 You know, I've been thinking about that and the very best answer I can give you is it's the magic in frosty the snowman's hat.

0:03:20 - Speaker 1 That's such a great Randy answer.

0:03:22 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and you know I mean all joking aside. The reason I'd come out with a Silly answer like that is because the very nature of your question suggests that it's hard to define. And there's a couple of reasons why it's hard to define. One reason is that there's two different perspectives, that you can look at it through two lenses. You can look at the interior view. You know what is it like to be Randy, or what is it like to be Anybody, or inside out kind of thing.

Yeah, like or the the inside, looking at your that, at the things that you're aware of, that's consciousness like Kogito arrow, assume right, or ergo assume.

0:04:06 - Speaker 1 I'm butchering my Latin, I think. Therefore, I am kind of thing. It's like yeah, that was Renee Descartes.

0:04:12 - Speaker 2 Definition of consciousness, but what Renee Descartes really missed is that that's only a Awareness of what you're thinking, but you're also aware of what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're smelling and internal states. You're aware not just of thoughts, but you're aware of emotions and You're aware of, like, where your body position is, and there's a lot of things that you're aware of more than just thought. That defines your internal subjective experience and all of those things that are in your field of awareness. That awareness is what the consciousness is. Okay, so you can think of consciousness as a field that is the subject of perspective and all of the things that you're aware of are the objects in that field of awareness.

0:05:03 - Speaker 1 Okay, so that's the internal perspective and would you say that maybe that is the perspective that most people are familiar with? Or If they think, what is consciousness? That's probably majority. Yeah, they're probably thinking of, like you know.

0:05:16 - Speaker 2 They're internal experience. But then to a scientist or a philosopher, they're asking okay, well, where does that come from, like, how is it that I have an internal experience, but this water bottle might not? I don't know if it does or not, but If it doesn't like like, where do we think my internal experience comes from? And that's a question that science is poked at, theology is poked at, philosophy is poked at, and and that is a very interesting rabbit hole to go down it's like the, the external description of what it is, or where it comes from and.

Another reason that describing consciousness can be difficult is because there are two Completely different worldviews about where consciousness comes from. There's the view that almost everybody in the world believes in and it doesn't make any sense, and Then there's a more primitive point of view that modern culture Disregards because we think that all of our modern science has allowed us to move on from these. You know, silly Primitive beliefs, mm-hmm. But an exploration of some of the beliefs about consciousness that come from Very primitive cultures or hunter-gatherer cultures, or at least non industrialized cultures, compain a picture of consciousness that, if you really look at all the evidence in the world Completely fits and it and it makes sense. And if you kind of look at consciousness through the lens of Occam's razor, they're cutting away any assumptions and getting down to the worldview that has the fewest number of assumptions.

It's this worldview that we get from People who are very connected to nature, people who live a lifestyle where they're they're they're out in the jungle or out in the savannah, getting their own food, and they're working with nature for places to live, rather than you know, in my life I almost never touch the earth, right. I mean, we've got a floor on underneath us and they've. I'm outside, I've got shoes on, and so I'm completely disconnected from nature. I buy my food in a grocery store.

0:07:38 - Speaker 1 Drive a car.

0:07:39 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I get around in a machine and and and that. That has led us down a path of Of looking back at at older paradigms of consciousness and sneering at them and snickering at them, and now we're literally in a place where our culture has boxed ourselves into a paradigm that has Not helped us understand consciousness ever since the time of Galileo.

0:08:11 - Speaker 1 What would you say, in your opinion, is the value for anyone to contemplate their consciousness Besides, maybe, people that already have an interest, they like to think about this stuff, or they watch all the YouTube videos and Netflix Documentaries where they've had an experience themselves and an altered state of consciousness. To someone who's never contemplated this before, what is the value of you know? Let me think about consciousness. What can you do for my life? How could this move me forward?

0:08:35 - Speaker 2 And that's a great question an Irrespective of which camp you want to be in the modern scientific Camp that believes that consciousness emerges from the activity of our brain, or this other sort of ancient wisdom description of consciousness. Either camp you're in, having an understanding of what consciousness is can radically transform the way you go through life and the way you experience your time here as a human. Also, and what I'm getting at is that Humans are designed to feel as if we're one cohesive unit, that is, a body, that is a mind that Can process three kind of objects of awareness physical sensations, emotions and sensory perceptions. And Within thoughts and sensory perceptions and emotions, we feel like there's just one Fielder and one thinker, but we're actually believe it or not, and this is supported by modern neuroscience, in modern psychology we're actually an accumulation of a bunch of different modules and.

0:10:00 - Speaker 1 Some one big thing made of a bunch of other smaller systems.

0:10:03 - Speaker 2 Exactly that that's what our psyche is and and we don't feel like we're partitioned Right we're designed to have this seamlessness to our experience.

0:10:13 - Speaker 1 That's what we have. I'm a nervous system doing a thing in the background exactly we had to sit and think you know breathe or Right, you know a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the background, but to us it all feels seamless.

0:10:26 - Speaker 2 And that Belief that we are a seamless, cohesive unit is precisely what the Buddhists would say drives our suffering. Because, if you can identify yourself like the word, when you use the word I, the first person Singular pronoun I, the part that you're referring to should just be referring to your consciousness. Because when you make that shift in your identity and you don't refer to I as the whole package, you refer to, I is just the witness, just the subject of Of experience like the passenger inside this body.

Yeah, exactly, the silent witness that's seeing the chase show play out in real time. When you identify that as you, then all the drama that the other modules Manufacture don't stick on you. They don't have the power, oh well, to grab you. And you know, if you're mulling over a Bad investment you made, you lost all your money and you're sitting there kicking yourself. You can either get caught up in the story because you feel like it happened to you and you feel like it's your drama, or you can just go. Well, my consciousness is is the part of me that's noticing that my emotions are Are looped in a negative spiral about this bad investment, detaching and when you detach From the module that's causing the looping and you separate your consciousness and you just take your identity back here.

Then whatever is happening in the loop doesn't bother you as much. It's almost like it's happening to your neighbor and you're like you know.

0:12:11 - Speaker 1 We can recognize like all that sucks.

0:12:14 - Speaker 2 But yeah, it's not really me, yeah, and you can say, well, this is gonna have a detriment to my life and I have to work harder to make up the money I lost or whatever, and there's consequences. You can ponder those. But that negative Ouch factor that something like that would have it's, it dulls the point of that ouch, it makes it not hurt so much. And so there's it an extraordinary value to identifying the answer to the question who am I? Because when, when, when you know the answer to who am I, not just in an intellectual way, but you feel it in a way in which you live. That way, your entire life changes, and and and what I'm telling you believe it or not is just the fundamental wisdom of multiple different traditions that you've heard of Zen, zou, chen, vedanta, christian mysticism, sufi, sufism mean all these traditions. They've all kind of found the same wisdom.

0:13:16 - Speaker 1 If we ask ourselves that question who am I? Which Kind of offshoot do you think is more likely to happen? For most people, we can develop an understanding this is who I am, or is it just opening a door to a lifetime of figuring that out? Asking the question, can we immediately have an answer, or do we ask the question and therefore we have to then be in search of the answer?

0:13:47 - Speaker 2 Well, searching for that answer is for a lot of people really what their spiritual path is.

0:13:55 - Speaker 1 Okay, yeah, and Like I'm gonna search for myself, I'm finding myself, yeah the kind of thing and and and.

0:14:02 - Speaker 2 At the beginning of that kind of path you might think that what you're looking for is some story that your ego mind tells you is like your core being. But when you really go deep down that rabbit hole, what you realize is that every single story that your ego mind tells you about chase is part of that thing. That's not you, that's the truth everybody.

0:14:24 - Speaker 1 I can tell you that's the God's honest truth right and it feels so counterintuitive to say that.

0:14:30 - Speaker 2 But to circle back to your question about searching, and you know, is there an endpoint. That's exactly why I'm using psychedelic medicines with patients. So there's kind of two flavors to my psychedelic work. One flavor is to assist a psychotherapist in performing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And, in a nutshell, you know, if you go to a therapist and you sit on the couch and you try to figure out why you're depressed or why you have anxiety, the answer is that something has traumatized your subconscious and you don't really know what that is. And you can talk to a therapist for 50 minutes a week and go through that that revolving door for years and not get anywhere.

But, as you've learned, when you take a psychedelic medicine, those veils that cover the subconscious get kind of pulled away and you can peer into your subconscious and say, oh, now I can see what traumatized me and I can take that memory out and look at it and hold it and go, oh, this isn't hurting me anymore, and then it gets repackaged as a non-traumatic memory rather than something that keeps poking on you. So that's the psychological value of psychedelic work. But the deeper work, and where my heart really is, is helping people find the answer to the question who am I? Because one of the things that happens on a psychedelic medicine is, if we go back in our conversation, I had said that the things that you can be aware of can all be filed into three different buckets Thoughts, perceptions excuse me, thoughts, emotions and sensory perceptions. So if you take a medicine that keeps your awareness turned on, but these three buckets of things that you can be aware of get dialed down, then what the question becomes? What does awareness have left to be aware of?

0:16:38 - Speaker 1 Truly wow.

0:16:40 - Speaker 2 Can I read you Brian Morescu's answer to that question?

0:16:43 - Speaker 1 Please, yeah, and for the record, if you guys don't know Brian Morescu his book, actually we're gonna get to that. A few questions around his work and the immortality key. I'm gonna link that book down the show notes Highly, highly recommend as an extension. It's a homework for this episode here everybody.

0:17:00 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so Brian's extraordinary. He's just such an amazing scholar and a wonderful man. And this doesn't come from his book. This actually comes from a YouTube video that he did on the After School. Youtube channel and it's called the Best Kept.

0:17:14 - Speaker 1 Secret in History. I'll link that for everybody, and Brian will be on the show in the near future.

0:17:19 - Speaker 2 Oh, fantastic, we've been talking. So he says the only way to experience God is to let go of the rational mind. And when the ego gives up, your consciousness begins to expand beyond the body, beyond space and time, beyond the very categories of being and non-being, to find itself looking back at itself. And so when you're on a psychedelic and your awareness has none of the things that it's normally aware of in its field of awareness, it then looks back on itself and the most amazing thing happens in that moment the person in that mystical experience remembers that their awareness is a direct extension of the awareness of the entire universe, and it becomes crystal clear immediately that one's consciousness is not a product of biochemical machinery, but that there is something greater than us, that is like an energy field that is created by all living beings and it surrounds us, it permeates us and it binds the universe together. And if those words sound familiar, that's the exact way that Obi-Wan Kenobi described the force to Luke Skywalker.

0:18:59 - Speaker 1 See people. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. It kind of, as you were talking, I was getting this memory. I've done it a couple of times. I wouldn't say I fully enjoy it. It's very unique experience. In a psychedelic state of mind, I found myself looking into a mirror. It's when you're having these thoughts and perception, these awareness components you're talking about. It's just you and you're staring out into an abyss of the world, your world around you, but then, all of a sudden, when a mirror is popped up, nothing is left to become aware of other than like the observer.

0:19:35 - Speaker 2 Exactly, yeah, exactly, that's exactly what I'm talking about that when the observer has nothing to observe, in a mystical state, the observer looks back at itself and realizes oh my goodness, I'm not the single individual thing, I am connected to everything. Or in a deeper state, you realize I am everything.

0:19:57 - Speaker 1 Yes, yeah, yeah, I've been there too. Yeah, so I have some questions around this. Yeah, fire away. I'm going to jump around a little bit here because we're getting there sooner, which is totally fine. Can we have full reach and capacity of our consciousness without an altered state of consciousness experience? Or is contemplating consciousness actually going into another really good question.

0:20:19 - Speaker 2 And so the answer is yes, okay, but the traditions that teach how to be conscious are not so the answer is yes, okay, but the traditions that teach how that is done are very esoteric and very difficult to understand, because it's sort of like the process of saying look at your nose, but don't cross your eyes and look down at your nose.

0:20:52 - Speaker 1 Can we even do that?

0:20:54 - Speaker 2 Well, in take the yoga traditions. Okay, in the yoga traditions there's karma yoga, which is a yoga of service, where, like you, devote your life to doing good things, and in the yoga traditions that's a way to kind of help you find this eye, this divine inner eye, where there's bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga is where you. It's like the in the Baptist tradition of catching the Holy Spirit. That's really bhakti yoga. It's celebrating the joy of God everywhere and God inside you and finding it through your joy and celebration.

0:21:38 - Speaker 1 Seeing a lot of people catching the Holy Spirit, growing up selling bhakti. Yeah, exactly.

0:21:42 - Speaker 2 That's why I made the analogy. But then there's this almost utterly unknown yoga tradition that's ancient, thousands of years old, and it's called nyanayoga Nyanah. Yeah well, Brian Rescue taught me how to pronounce it because it's J-N-A-N-A, so it's like nyanah, like a nasally nyanah, and what nyanayoga is is it's the yoga of mind, and it's basically a yogic tradition that allows you to find this consciousness, your divine eye, by asking the question who?

0:22:22 - Speaker 1 am I? It's like downward facing thoughts or just inward facing thoughts, Okay right. And that's my lame attempt at making a dad joke about yoga here.

0:22:31 - Speaker 2 Oh yeah, well, nyanayoga typically doesn't really involve any asanas, it's not a yoga that involves any posing.

0:22:39 - Speaker 1 It's a way of being.

0:22:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a way of being and it can incorporate meditation, but more than anything, it's just following your senses. Take any sense like vision, Like you see me in your visual field. Now here's an interesting question Even if you close your eyes and you can picture me in your visual field, can you separate the image of me from your visual field? Let me see, and no matter how far away I am, I'm just this thing in your imagination, and can you? When your eyes are closed, I'm in your imagination. When your eyes are open, I'm in your visual field, Right. And the question is can you separate me from my image, from you?

This is making my head all wrapped up like a pretzel, exactly, and so I don't expect you to find an answer right now, because people can take years of contemplating this very question. But the answer is is when you give yourself enough space and silence to really sit with that question, you realize that you can't separate that and that you can kind of follow that back and realize that the awareness that's aware of Randy in your visual field is not something that's happening in your brain, that it's a non localized consciousness that expands the entire universe like the force.

0:24:21 - Speaker 1 Well, I'm already getting some homework here. Very interesting, thank you for that. Let me see. I want to bring it back To maybe shift gears a little bit. I know in our previous conversations and what I've heard you talk about before, there's a part of the known universe that has a role in consciousness and I think that's maybe where a lot of mankind goes first to try to explain all of this stuff first. You know, through quantum mechanics and physics who we know nothing, the listener I know is nothing about quantum mechanics. How would you define it and how would you relate it to consciousness?

0:25:07 - Speaker 2 Well, in anticipation of that question, I actually wrote down some quotes. He came prepared I love it From four of the fathers of quantum theory Okay, all of which, all of whom won Nobel Prizes for their work in quantum theory. All right, not bad, not bad. And what the interesting thing is that this idea that quantum theory does inform us something about the consciousness of the entire universe. If you ask a modern physicist, well, whatever happened to those ideas? How did physics work through them? You know what, what, where are we at now? Everybody will almost everybody, would tell you, but we worked that out long time ago.

0:25:50 - Speaker 1 Like we solve the riddle. Yeah, we saw the riddle. It's not a question anymore.

0:25:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, we don't need to ask those questions anymore. And then you put, when you press them, and you go, okay, well, what are the experiments? What were the papers? They'll go oh, it'll take me 10 minutes to look it up, I'll get back to you. Call it shenanigans, but they'll never do it because the work's never been done. So just kind of.

0:26:11 - Speaker 1 So you're saying, has science, the scientific world, kind of just recognized that we can never explain this and we don't want to say that, so we're just going to brush it on the rug and say, yeah, it's figured out, but it's in a back catalog somewhere.

0:26:24 - Speaker 2 Essentially, so, basically to take you back, let me tell you a story. When you were in school and you learned about light, did you learn about wave particle duality? Does that, does that okay?

0:26:43 - Speaker 1 I didn't have any of those classes. Do you know?

0:26:45 - Speaker 2 what light is.

0:26:47 - Speaker 1 I see light, but do you know what it is? It's just a photon shooting around.

0:26:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so what's a? Photon You're supposed to have these hands.

0:26:58 - Speaker 1 Well, okay.

0:26:59 - Speaker 2 So there's a thing, an energy field that permeates the universe, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi was talking about, and it's called the electromagnetic field, and it's everywhere, it's everywhere.

0:27:10 - Speaker 1 And this is measurable. We can get a DMF detector and we can measure this.

0:27:13 - Speaker 2 This has been this was described experimentally by Faraday back in the 1880s. They think it was described mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1800s. This is a very, very well-known thing. No debate about the existence of the electromagnetic field and when that field vibrates and it moves in a certain direction, that vibrating wave is the photon.

0:27:49 - Speaker 1 Okay, so what? We can see this, as is the photon.

0:27:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah.

0:27:54 - Speaker 1 But it doesn't mean that there are photons. It's just our interpretation of these vibrations.

0:27:58 - Speaker 2 Well, that's now you're going down the rabbit hole with me. That is not a question that science has adequately answered to everybody's satisfaction. So the way it appears to us is that there's actually two ways to describe the photon it's the waving electromagnetic field and it's the little particles of light that we call photons.

0:28:21 - Speaker 1 Okay, so this is great. Anybody that's caught Oppenheimer recently. This came up in kind of the quantum.

0:28:26 - Speaker 2 Oh, okay, guys, I gotta go see that movie Is it particles or is it wavelengths? Right, okay, and they're like, it's both. So that question first came up about light and there was a debate way back in the 1600s about is light a corpuscle or a particle, or is light a wave? And Isaac Newton thought it was a particle and Albert Einstein thought it was a particle. Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize was for a scientific experiment or a paper about an experiment called the photoelectric effect, where he demonstrated mathematically that light acts as a particle.

0:29:08 - Speaker 1 How do you demonstrate light mathematically? Well, that's a yeah, we don't want to go down that.

0:29:15 - Speaker 2 It's complex departional differential equations, but the point is that the double you've heard of the double slit experiment.

0:29:25 - Speaker 1 I did recently. I was catching up with another interview you did on a podcast. Okay, yeah, I saw the whole interpretation.

0:29:31 - Speaker 2 So if you have, if I have, a flashlight and I'm shining it on the wall behind you, the light goes everywhere. And if I have a piece of paper in front of the flashlight and I have one little slit on it, what's going to project on the wall behind you is just one little slit of light that gets through that one slit.

0:29:51 - Speaker 1 Not the like disbursement of light Correct.

0:29:54 - Speaker 2 If there's one little slit and I shine a flashlight, you'll just see a little bar of light on the wall behind you. But if I have two little thin slits, you don't get two little lines, you get a pattern of light, dark light, dark, light, dark, going across the entire wall. What's up with that? What's happening is that the wave nature of light just like if you sent water waves to through through two holes in a sea wall, you'd get this very interesting pattern of the two waves mixing. That's exactly what light does, and so the point is is that through this double slit experiment, you can demonstrate that light is a wave, and through the photoelectric effect that Einstein wrote about, you can demonstrate that light is a particle.

So which one is it? Well, the answer is that it depends on what part of nature you're investigating, and the particle form is everything that we perceive, that exists as physical reality, that the wave form actually exists in a part of reality that doesn't conform to any of the rules that we know. It doesn't conform to gravity or space time, it doesn't, and it operates on bizarre math where A times B doesn't equal B times A. I mean, just don't try to wrap your head around this. Just know that the wave description of things is super bizarre. Well, in 1920s I think it was 22, a French prince by the name of Louis de Broglie, he was just kind of sitting around pondering and he goes well, wait a minute. If light can be a particle in a wave, he asked what about stuff? What?

0:31:42 - Speaker 1 about matter material.

0:31:44 - Speaker 2 Yeah, could an electron that we think of as a solid little ball of matter? Could that also be described in some other realm of the universe that we can't perceive as a wave Fair hypothesis? And he worked out all the mathematics, like the simple mathematics on the particle side of it, that describes yeah, electrons can have a frequency and a wavelength. And he wrote it up as his PhD thesis and nobody knew what to do with it and his PhD advisor said well, the only thing we can do is send it to Einstein. So they sent Louis de Broglie's PhD thesis to Einstein and he read it and he said this is the most whacked out crazy thing I could ever imagine, because what he's saying is that every single thing that we perceive is made out of matter is just yeah, this all matter you me is just one way to represent reality, but it actually emerges out of a deeper mathematics that's entirely described by waves and he was like I don't know what that means.

That can't be the way the world is. And Einstein really was rubbed raw by that. He didn't like that. There's something behind nature that we can't perceive. But he said to Louis de Broglie's thesis advisory is like, even though I don't like what this says, his math completely works out. You have to give him his PhD. And Louis de Broglie went on to win a Nobel Prize for that PhD. And it's unheard of for a graduate student to win a Nobel Prize based on their thesis.

But then, a couple years later, that's when Erwin Schrodinger worked out the Schrodinger equation and he actually worked out the very mathematics that describe the electron. This is some crazy shit. And so what he described is that the smaller and smaller you go to look at things, by the time you get to a subatomic particle. There isn't a particle. So what is it? That's the immortal question. That is the mystery that the mystery ceremonies from ancient Greece were asking. That is the mystery of all religion. It's like how does this world that we perceive and live in emerge out of this deeper layer that comes from a world that, as far as we know, is purely mathematical. And then more mind-blowing thing is that's exactly the way Plato described the world. He said there's this world of immaterial.

Plato's shadow in the cave, yeah, Well, he said there's this immaterial world of forms, and somehow it bubbles out this physical reality, but that there are two different ways of seeing the universe. And so his cave analogy was that there are people who live in a cave and they're chained in such a way that they can only see a wall in front of them.

0:34:46 - Speaker 1 They're only looking inside the cave.

0:34:47 - Speaker 2 Yeah, they're inside the cave and there's like a fire behind them and the fire is projecting shadows on the cave. So, to their perspective, all of reality is just what happens on that wall. The projection, the projection. This is a projection from a quantum layer of reality. Wow, that to many of the fathers of quantum theory, this deeper layer where physical reality comes from is consciousness.

0:35:18 - Speaker 1 I got to digest that yeah.

0:35:19 - Speaker 2 I just blew your mind. Oh shit Right.

0:35:23 - Speaker 1 Wow.

0:35:24 - Speaker 2 But don't even think about it.

0:35:25 - Speaker 1 Let me read some of these quotes. Okay, I literally can feel my brain hurting.

0:35:29 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and right about now, most of your viewers are just going fuck this and they've turned it off, but a handful are hanging in there going, oh my.

0:35:38 - Speaker 1 God, I'm fascinated by this. In combination with my lion's mane kicking in, I can hear my neurons firing. All right, so you've heard of Max.

0:35:45 - Speaker 2 Planck, no. So Max Planck was the very first scientist to hypothesize that in our world of particles, that energy can only exist in specific amounts, that you can't have arbitrary amounts of energy, it has to come in multiples. And so he invented a constant, or he discovered a mathematical constant called the Planck's constant, and essentially it's the smallest amount of energy that can exist in our physical world.

0:36:22 - Speaker 1 Okay, and this is what he said about. It's like the minimum effective dose of energy.

0:36:29 - Speaker 2 Yeah, effectively. Yeah, so he said this I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness, meaning there's this quantum layer of reality in which your consciousness resides, and that conscious energy is projecting this physical reality into awareness of consciousness. Wow, such that this physical reality isn't actually physically real, it's just a projection within consciousness. Just like when you're watching a movie. What's happening on the screen isn't being made there, right, it's happening somewhere else in the projection booth, but it's just it's being projected onto this screen or in a video game Video game yeah, absolutely A video game, like if you're playing.

My kids love FIFA soccer. When the soccer player's foot hits the ball, the ball doesn't move because these little pixels touch the pixels of the ball. It's because in the CPU the program's going okay, based on what's happening. We're gonna now depict the ball as being kicked and then the pixels on the monitor show the ball moving. It has nothing to do with what's happening on the monitor. What's happening in the game is in the CPU. Is this the real life matrix? Well, neil deGrasse Tyson has a friend who's another African-American physicist, who's a guest on his show, and they both said that they're blown away to realize that this physical reality that we live in is much more like the matrix than the world as we perceive it to be.

0:38:15 - Speaker 1 Well, hot damn everybody, Right? Okay, let me keep going with the quotes.

0:38:20 - Speaker 2 So here's what Erwin Schrodinger said about fundamental reality being made out of consciousness. The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing. Um Werner Heisenberg of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with his name memorialized by, was it Walter White? And, yeah, heisenberg. So Heisenberg says atoms and elementary particles are not real. Quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta. Vedanta is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very big difference in the existence of the body. So the physical world is the base of all reality and that's what the Vedanta is for. Vedanta is a thousands of years old Indian tradition that describes this physical world. They use the word Maya. Maya means illusion, and my personal consciousness is just an extension of that consciousness. From that base reality, whoa, almost like in the movie Avatar, right, right right, right, he was in this body but his real body controlling the avatar was in a pod.

So you're listening to me. You're not hearing me right now. In your head, your consciousness is hearing me on a deeper level of reality. That just appears to you as you're a human being sitting in that chair listening to Randy. Okay, so I want to be really clear. These aren't like nut jobs. These are people who won Nobel Prizes and invented the field of quantum theory, the world of science acknowledged and recognized at the highest level.

Yeah, and so Eugene Wigner. He's another guy that very famous in quantum theory circles. He says the very study of the physical world leads to the conclusion that the concept of consciousness is an ultimate reality. So they're all saying the same thing. They're all basically saying that their work with quantum theory led them to realize that there's an illusory quality to what we perceive as physical reality, and that this perception of physical reality sits on top of a matrix of consciousness Wow that spreads throughout the entire universe, that permeates us, binds us, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi talked about. Wow, wow, wow. But the real interesting question, though, is why did science get so dogmatically resistant to these ideas? And that's a separate podcast in and of itself, cause that's fascinating.

0:41:35 - Speaker 1 Here is where I would love to go next, I think, where maybe a lot of people would assume that the division, where the division comes from, and explanation of all this is science and religion. There's the world that we can understand and have Nobel prizes about because we can mathematically look at it or measure it, but then there's this other component to well, there's so much that you can explain, and what about this? What about that?

0:42:04 - Speaker 2 So what you're talking about is the Cartesian split. So you said Kojito Urgosum earlier.

0:42:09 - Speaker 1 René.

0:42:10 - Speaker 2 Descartes, I think, therefore, I am. So the other thing René Descartes was famous for was for splitting the universe, and we still call it in philosophy the Cartesian dualism. René Descartes said there are two parts to the world. There's this physical world, and it's made out of inert particles, and then there's the spiritual world, which includes God and mind. And he said I don't really know how the mind part of the universe interacts with the physical part of the universe. He said I think that link might be the pineal gland in the brain, but that idea of separating mind from physical reality and putting the mind part in the same bucket as religion, that's really what is the ultimate answer to this question. I just asked like why do modern physicists discount these perceptions about consciousness from the fathers of quantum theory? It's because René Descartes made it okay to push that aside.

Because, rené Descartes, he was really reacting to all of the religious violence that was happening in Europe when, after Martin Luther hammered up his theses on the Abbey door and created this split in Christianity. Reformation, yeah, but the Protestants over here and the Catholics over there, these people eventually started slaughtering each other in the street. Like a lot of us in modern day Western world don't realize how violent the Middle Ages were when it came to these religious differences of opinion, and the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution came out of a rejection of that. They basically said look, we're just gonna let these nutty people fight in the street over who's God is best, but we're gonna create science that isn't biased by religious beliefs. And so part of what René Descartes was doing was responding to this need to get religion out of science. So that's why he said the world now is in two parts there's mind and God and physical reality, and science just latched onto the physical part and never looked back.

0:44:38 - Speaker 1 You might've kind of just described it in there. But to ask you directly where does God play a role in all of this? Is there a God? Are we God? Are we all God? Are we just extensions of? What role does God play into the quantum realm?

0:45:01 - Speaker 2 To preface my answer, I really don't like using the G word because it's so loaded and it means so many different things to different people. The purpose of using words is to convey information, and if you use a word that means a thousand things to a thousand people, then you're not really conveying information by using that word.

0:45:21 - Speaker 1 By saying that word comes everybody listening who just heard that word, and that's why the culture is already coming to the front of their minds, with biases, beliefs, experiences, exactly exactly.

0:45:30 - Speaker 2 And I was almost reluctant to bring in Brian's quote because he references the G word. But hidden in Brian's quote is the answer to your question, and hidden in what we've talked about already is the answer to your question. So if consciousness is infinite, it's timeless, it knows or it is everything that exists and everything physical is a behavior of consciousness that it's perceiving. And when somebody has the deepest mystical experience and they feel like their consciousness goes oh yeah, I now remember what I am, I am the entire universe, that when you go to the deepest level that I've ever heard of in that kind of mystical experience, you directly remember that consciousness carries with itself the property of infinite love, Absolutely, absolutely so. When you put all those things together, what does that sound like? That sounds like God, and the only thing I've left out of that description is all powerful.

0:46:54 - Speaker 1 But that's a man-made description.

0:46:57 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so what I'm saying is my God is infinite, it's timeless, it doesn't conform to gravity. There's no mass, there's nothing but loving energy. That has to follow the Schrodinger equation for stuff to exist in the physical realm, and so it's not all powerful, it's limited by the math of the Schrodinger equation. And so the answer to your question, from my perspective and from the perspective of all the ancient mystical traditions, is that God is everything. God is the entire universe and your consciousness is the consciousness of God. And so, as you hear my words right now, Chase isn't hearing them, God is hearing them. Wow.

So imagine, like my hand, if I put one finger in hot soup and another finger in medium soup and this finger in cold soup, I might go in different viscosities. I might go, oh, I'm feeling three different things. So these are three different sensory probes for me to probe the universe, okay, Okay, you and the entirety of your conscious experience is a sensory probe for God to experience the world, as Chase and me and there's some total of all of my sensory experiences is. So God can experience the world through the eyes and through the body of Randy. I love that. I love that. So God is everything and we are all part of it.

0:48:32 - Speaker 1 I really enjoyed that description, that answer. Thank you for that. Sure, speaking of the big guy or girl or dog whatever it is upstairs the G word I have to assume someone like yourself. In your daily profession you work with oncology patients, people that are in the end of their life more often than not. What is it about a human coming face to face with their mortality, on the path to accept my days are limited, like very limited soon with their existence and coming to terms with what is the meaning of life and their relationship to God? If you can, I mean without breaking any hip ovilations here, I'm sure you have some really unique experiences with people coming to terms with their mortality and the meaning of life. And is there a God? Do I believe in it? What do you kind of see happen with a lot of people at the end of their days?

0:49:48 - Speaker 2 You know, one of the unfortunate aspects of our culture is that because Renee Descartes separated the physical body from spirituality and the mind, the vast majority of my cancer patients would be caught very off guard if I started asking them questions about their spiritual beliefs and their religious beliefs. So most patients really don't want that. When they go to a radiation oncologist all they really want to hear about is the technology in the machine and how I'm going to treat them. So it's very mechanical. Now many hospice workers have told me that the closer that patients get to like the moment of death, they actually do start letting go of some of their rigidly held beliefs and they start opening their heart, letting love in, realizing that some of the dogmas that they've held on to were not serving them well. I don't really see that, because if you're on your deathbed you're too sick for radiation. So I really don't treat people that are that are in hospice like that close.

Yeah if you're dying, you're too sick to get radiated, and so I'd recommend hospice, and so it's really the hospice workers and people who are very close to people on their deathbed who have a better answer for your question than I do. Okay, because I'm just not in a position to really see it.

0:51:29 - Speaker 1 Fair.

0:51:30 - Speaker 2 But I have seen these spiritual transitions in people doing psychedelic work, and myself is one of them.

0:51:37 - Speaker 1 So maybe kind of a spin off question there is to pull from our homie Brian again in his work immortality key, which pulls from ancient history If you die before you die, then you don't. You won't die when you die. So glad you mentioned that. Can you unpack that for us please? And also kind of like part two of that For people who maybe do not have any kind of near death experience or any kind of very involved altered state of consciousness to come to those terms? What do you think it is about someone unfortunately in a terminal illness or cancer patient as they get closer to their end of days finally coming to that realization anyway?

0:52:27 - Speaker 2 So for your listeners, the statement if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. That is on its own page at the front of Brian Moraske's book the Immortality Key, and it's actually the fundamental wisdom of every single mystical tradition, and it's not referring to a death of your body. It's basically saying when you have an experience either from psychedelics or from being a Sufi that's whirling for hours, or an indigenous person in a in a sweat lodge ceremony or even people during like breath work yeah, breath work drum circles or anything.

When the objects of your awareness fade away and your awareness then looks back on itself just like I talked about, just like Brian mentioned in this in his quote and you realize that you're not Chase and you're not Randy, you're actually the spirit of the universe. Then when you come back, you shift your identity from thinking that I'm a Randy that's gonna die to knowing that I'm an eternal spirit that simply is in this suit, like an avatar, for however long the suit's gonna be alive on this earth, so that your the fear of death melts away because you have this sense of permanence to your spirit. And this is this is the main finding of some of the clinical trials that use psilocybin to help treat cancer patients. Brian's book opens. The opening paragraph is about Dina Bazer. She's a woman who was in a psilocybin trial back east. She, the atheist yeah she's atheist.

And just to summarize her story for your listeners she got cured of a fairly advanced, tough to cure ovarian cancer and despite being cured, her life was crippled by this paralyzing anxiety. She was so terrified that her cancer would come back that she couldn't enjoy her life. So she went through this clinical trial, took a dose of psilocybin and, despite being an atheist, she described her journey as being bathed in God's love.

0:55:02 - Speaker 1 Like. What Exactly From an atheist?

0:55:05 - Speaker 2 Right Now she's still an atheist with respect to the Abrahamic definition of this old man in the sky who's judgmental and can wave him, wand and make things happen, but she developed a kind of a mystical sense of the universe that there's some loving energy out there. That's that underlies all the physical reality.

0:55:31 - Speaker 1 That's wild. It's wild. I want to kind of, as we begin to kind of wind down here a little bit, I want to share and I've shared this before on the show and I don't, I don't know if actually I've kind of fully shared this with, with you even, but I'll link down on the show notes where everybody I did a solo episode. I think I've done two now actually kind of unpacking my first two, my most most significant ketamine assisted psychotherapy sessions a couple years ago. But when I kind of share it with you and just I don't know, let's just go where it goes.

Yeah as an example I think a continuation, of this. Now, I'm not an atheist. I was born and raised a Christian, southern Baptist, and I don't know how much I fully associate myself anymore to Christianity in terms of the, my practicing religion, but I do, thanks to a lot of what we've been talking about, have have faith, I have a connection to source and the divine and I have a spiritual life that I have never had before, even going to a Christian school and all that jazz. But just as an example to the this, what we're talking about and how real it is and how much it changes you in 45 minutes to an hour for the rest of your life. So I went into this work being kind of at the tail end of being exhausted. Really about 1516 years of trying to overcome and work through and get into a healthy relationship with grief over the death of my father went years with undiagnosed PTSD around at all and I just finally was I'm just over this. I want to just move on with my life. I want to develop a healthy relationship with that part of my life, like I said, and I want to be able to put it in the rear view. But also I had a lot of fear around what if I get sick like my dad? What is, what was it like for him to be end of days, what was his suffering like? And all these things that I know I never would have answers to, but the mind can't not think about it when you have a loved one like that that suffered.

And this was my second journey, after it was about a week after the first one, and I was reunited with my father and we were just two entities. We're just like photons, just flying around space and time, and I went through this kind of ceremonial passing. All of a sudden, I was just this light, this entity, and I was imagining, like your crowd surfing is exactly what it was, but the crowd that I was surfing on top of was literally every human being that I had ever encountered in my entire life that had an active, passive, grandiose or tiny little influence in my life that had got me to where I was today. And then, 35 years at that time, of people I saw everybody and I'm getting goosebumps talking about this, but I was being crowd surfed, passed through and as I got towards the end, it was my father, this entity, this bright, burning, wild, burning, white, infinite light. And I got to him and I looked back at all these people and behind them was a world of planet, of just light again.

And my father and I kind of had this moment. We didn't say anything but it was just. We know what needs to happen here. Right Like chase, like true to my dad's form, he never really had to say a lot to me for me to go. I know what the thing to do here is. And his energy, his light I absorbed, imagine like an Iron man moment, like this big giant ball in the center of my chest.

And the moment that that happened I literally I felt the weight of that planet, that world that was behind me. And then, as I began to process it, I felt the weight of a world leave me, if you can imagine, the most pain or suffering you have ever been in your entire life grief, a breakup, just uncertainty about tomorrow, times that by like a bajillion. That was this. And in the journey I just felt like I'm crushed, I'm like suffocating. It's just this pressure. But then it went away. It literally just left my body and I turned and there was this bright new planet, a blank canvas, and my father kind of like, went away and my interpretation of that was like I died.

I went through this experience as rebirth and this journey of the world, of this pain and suffering that I have been carrying with me. I finally now thanks to all these people that were in my life and all the work that I had done. It was a reminder of all. You know why I had gone through all that. That all left me and I turned and faced a whole new world of infinite opportunity and, again, true to like my dad and I's relationship. It was just my interpretation of you know what to do. This has been waiting for you the whole time. He would call me a knucklehead and you know, just go live your life.

It doesn't mean that all of this still isn't here. You're not abandoning it, but it has served you well. You no longer need this. You don't need to let to hold on to it. You can let it go. And no, I mean I'm not somebody that was. I didn't have a terminal illness, I didn't have cancer, I wasn't at the end of my days, but I can honestly tell you there were many days since he passed where I contemplated staying alive or not, and just to be a human being who goes through pain and suffering, and I'm not alone. People lose people all the time and we go through hard times and unfortunately, for some people it's too much, but for a lot of us, I think, we carry that burden and you know, and it's chipping away on the quality of our life and keeping us from moving forward.

And so, through this ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in this altered state of consciousness, I was able, you know, to die before I die. So when I die I'm not going to die, and I can tell you now it's been like two years. I walk around and it's noticeable. I have people on social media just randomly message me, or people in my real life tell me there's a like, a lightness to you, there's just something different. You just, you don't seem as heavy. Their words, not mine. And it goes back to this moment of I literally was able to let a world off of my shoulders. And so having these altered states of consciousness but then integrating it and continuing the continuously thinking about what consciousness is, this world and whatever the projection is, I think is the way that I have found to be able to move forward in my life, ever forward, as my dad would say in a way that I, in a way that I can't, I can't put words to or I can't describe, or I can't, I have not found in any other way.

1:02:58 - Speaker 2 That's beautiful man, do you realize that you basically went to a leucis? I guess so, yeah, yeah. So again for your listeners, the immortality key, the book by Brian Rescue. It's centered around this investigation of this ancient Greek ritual that happened at the town of a leucis, right outside of Athens, and the ceremony went on for annually for nearly 2,000 years, and it was secret.

1:03:27 - Speaker 1 You think it was the original Burning man.

1:03:29 - Speaker 2 Well, it wasn't Burning man. In fact Brian's talked about that in some of his interviews. Some of the celebrations of Dionysus were very Burning Man-ish, but the ceremony at a leucis it probably wasn't like a party environment. It's very much a sacred ritual and it was secret. And the reason I believe it was secret is because what you just said I understand perfectly because I've been there.

But to somebody who hasn't been in that state of consciousness that you were in would have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and they would just imagine that you made it up. And it's because what happened to you if you want to get really kind of medical about it that was a right-brained thing. That's why you're here, and when you talk to somebody about something, you're only using the left brain. And when another person's intelligence is hearing your story, they're trying to process it through the left brain. And the left brain and right brain do completely different things and although they're synchronous, intellect can't absorb the story that you just told me. And so these ceremonies that involve altering somebody's states of consciousness, irrespective of how you're getting there, they're all getting to the same exact base experience that you had it's realizing that you're not a physical form called Chase, that Chase died.

1:05:12 - Speaker 1 And that happened in my first journey. Literally like the first 30 seconds I died. I set my soul, my spirit, my entity separated from my body and my body fell into this infinite abyss. It's almost like my body was hanging onto this rock, this cliff and the ego itself was holding on like no, this can't happen, it can't happen. It fell and separated and then I went on the rest of my journey.

1:05:34 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so I believe, I strongly believe, that the reason you had such a profound experience on your very first time with ketamine is because all the work that you've done 16 years of work, all the work that you've done.

And also you know some of the influence from your wife's spiritual traditions. I think that probably influenced your journey as well. Absolutely yeah, and for most people they don't get that their first or second time. They really got to do some work to get into that. But yeah, you died and you got to see firsthand through your own personal consciousness what the consciousness is that's sitting behind all of Chase's experience, so that when you come out of the journey, the medicine wears off and you're like, oh, I'm Chase again. You have a different perspective on what Chase is. And yeah, that's the beauty of these medicines it can take people to these healing moments that completely and profoundly change their life. Now to kind of circle back to your story all human beings, no matter how happy you are, no matter how well adjusted you are, no matter how non traumatized or healed from your trauma you are, we all have this kind of weird sense that something's just kind of weird.

1:06:59 - Speaker 1 And like, oh, I got a weird feeling.

1:07:00 - Speaker 2 Or just like there's. Like there's just this kind of in it for a lot of people. There's, like this, something unexplicable to life just this nagging sense of like what's going on, like why am I here? Yeah, and my belief is that that that nagging sense comes from our consciousness, its identity and its self knowledge being separated from the pool of conscious energy that's the entire universe. Right In your normal waking state of consciousness, you don't feel like you are the entire universe, you just feel like Chase, maybe some people do.

Well, yeah, some, some deeply spiritual people do and some mentally ill people do, but for the most of us, like we're sitting right here right now, I don't have the sense that I'm I'm everything. I have the sense that I'm Randy, but underlying my sense of Randy is this knowing that I'm not and I got that through the same kind of experience that you had, and somebody who has not had that experience to refer to can't have any idea what you're talking about.

1:08:14 - Speaker 1 Right.

1:08:14 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and that's exactly why these medicines are misunderstood, it's why they're criminalized and it's why veterans are still killing themselves at a rate of 22 patients a day. And we have phase three data from maps trials that tell us MDMA can effectively cure most of those people and the drug is still not legal.

1:08:37 - Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a damn shame and it really breaks my heart to brothers that I had in the military. They got out. It was too much for them Took their own lives.

In some pretty violent ways. Not an uncommon story, no, no, and you know my, my, all of our experiences in life are different and a lot of our military experiences are very different, but I think it doesn't really in the end matter. The perception of our suffering is the perception of our suffering and we are going to make certain choices to stay in that suffering or make certain choices to try to understand the suffering and to climb out of that hole. And it can take you 16 years, like me, and I'm here to tell you that it's worth it. It is so much more worth it.

1:09:35 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's worth it to stop believing the illusion that you're the human that you think you are.

1:09:43 - Speaker 1 One of the things I'll say to wrap up this point here is on another journey I had and I think it's such a crucial point to having meaningful, meaningful relationships in your life and to have integration and to have time to really sit with and unpack. Whether it's academy journey, whether it's an altered state of consciousness or meditation, breathwork or even just deep thinking, you know you're going to unpack some some shit. You know. Then, what are you going to do with that? And I had this one journey at home and afterwards May came in to check on me and it was one where my dad was in it again.

But in a way I didn't understand it when it happened until I all my journeys at home I would share with her out loud, just to kind of like have it fresh. And I just blipped over, I was like, oh yeah, my dad was there and I was like I was on my journey. I was like, oh yeah, cool, I'll see you later, dad, kind of thing. And all of a sudden, like a ton of bricks that hit me to your point of like the knowing that I have that I'm just, you know, back in this meat suit that is chase, and there's a whole nother world going on. That is as real as you and me, right here, right now. I said that out loud and I just I started bawling because that what happened was there was an emotional connection, a reconnection, I should say, to a way of describing my father, that relationship that I never thought I would ever be able to experience again.

It was as if I was, it was like he was still alive and oh yeah, I don't, I don't need to think about my dad. I know, I can just call him, I can just pick him up, he's always going to be there. It was this exact, exact, profound knowing that he's. He's there and I was. I was.

The whole point of me going through these journeys and going through this mental health help was to get closer to him until I try to reconnect and develop a healthy relationship with this and work through the trauma, through this. And I never thought one of the best takeaways for me to heal and to work through my PTSD would just come to this realization oh, he's just there. It's like I can just call him whenever, I can call upon him whenever. And that moment, I think, was like another world, leaving me just this, this, this knowing that I'm here but also there. He is there but also here. And I think, for somebody who is struggling, that is a thing you think you will never get to, especially in like the death of a loved one or even just a perceived death of like a part of your own life. You know, you think, you think that's gone and over and you miss it and you want it. You don't understand why it's gone, but it's not. They're not, we're not.

1:12:32 - Speaker 2 Yeah, your dad's everywhere.

1:12:34 - Speaker 1 It's crazy. Well, to bring it to our final question, speaking of pops, ever forward was his phrase, was his mantra, it was this model he set living his life that we heard as kids, as a family, and it was something that, quite literally, to his last breath, he embodied. I mean, he had ALS and a very severe case and you know, even in hospice, you know, in the hospital last couple of months, you never saw him or heard him complain as much as he could. You know, he was just, he was just dad, he was truck and he was just living a life ever forward until he wasn't living anymore. And so I always try to bring that into the show here. It's why I'm here to help keep me moving forward in life. But I always ask my guests their interpretation of that. So if I were to ask you, randy, how do you keep moving forward in life, how do you live a life ever forward, how would you answer that? What are those two words mean to you?

1:13:41 - Speaker 2 Well, they certainly mean something to me. Now it's different than what they meant to me before. Psychedelics changed my life, changed my perception of reality. Most humans live their life with a very rigid model of the way the world is supposed to be, and when the world doesn't meet their expectations, people tend to bang on the world to try to change it so that the world starts fitting their cognitive model. And I used to do that. It's kind of the human condition.

But the way I have learned to live my life is, for the most part, you've got to get out of the way if a car is coming at you in the middle of the street. But for the most part I've learned to just be happy with the world the way that it is. So if the world doesn't fit my cognitive model, I don't try to change the world to fit my model. I just update my model to fit what the world is. Love it. So for me, Ever Forward is almost like surfing a really long wave where that barrel just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling and you're not carving. You're just standing there and just riding this wave and letting it take you wherever it's going to take you, without fighting it. And to me, Ever Forward embodies that kind of sentiment of just loving every moment of life for what it is and when it's bad, just ride through it and know that there's some good around the corner.

1:15:26 - Speaker 1 The wave. Everybody the wave, randy. I really, really enjoy this conversation. Yes, it was fun. I'm so glad you're here. It's been a blessing. It's been so fun to get to know you more and to have you in our lives. I mean, you're just a wealth of curiosity and fun and great music and even better wine. Like I said, good fireside chats. I would normally ask my guests where can they get your book or learn more about your work. Is there somewhere that I can send people to learn more about you? Do you have anything going on in the world right now where people can connect with you?

1:16:03 - Speaker 2 I've actually tried to kind of keep a low profile, just because Randy's the best kept secret. Well, I mean, I really have a lot of respect for my cancer patients and I don't want to create a public presence of the psychedelic Randy that might undermine a patient a cancer patient's confidence in my ability to be their oncologist. What? A great doctor and so I applaud you for that.

The time will come when it's time to have the Randy website and the Randy publications or book or something, but right now I'm just surfing the wave. Yeah, I'm just looking forward to it under the radar.