Latest / The Reverse Aging Club with Meredith Oke / 161: What We Really Need To Be Healthy in 2026 with Russell Bishop

Transcript

161: What We Really Need To Be Healthy in 2026 with Russell Bishop · The Reverse Aging Club with Meredith Oke

6:23
Russell Bishop, welcome to the QVC podcast.
6:27
Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to what comes forward today.
6:31
So am I. And thank you so much for that beautiful
6:35
invocation that you opened our interaction with.
6:39
I think it really set the tone for opening up
6:43
a space for the two of us and anyone who cares to
6:47
join us to. To go on their own personal journey.
6:50
So I'm just going to start somewhere fun because I was
6:54
listening to an interview with you, and my daughter was in the room,
6:58
and I didn't know she was paying attention. And all of a sudden she's 11.
7:01
All of a sudden she said, you know, mom, that man's
7:05
really right. Sometimes it is really simple, but it's not
7:09
so easy.
7:14
Well, that's good. And she said. And
7:18
then she went on to say, you know, like, being the
7:21
seeker, when you're playing what's the
7:25
game they play at Hogwarts? Anyway, she's like, it's very simple. All you
7:29
have to do is catch the snitch. But it's not easy.
7:32
It's not easy, mom, to catch that snitch.
7:37
So let's just open it up there. Because I think,
7:42
you know, I think a lot of the time most people listening are on some
7:45
sort of journey, whether it's a personal health journey or a journey of owning their
7:49
own business related to health. And I think
7:53
sometimes we forget. We're like, oh, it's so simple. Why aren't I doing it
7:56
better? Or we make it complicated when it actually is simple
8:00
and you've had so much experience with human nature.
8:05
Help us out.
8:10
Yeah, it might be helpful if I give a little thumbnail about
8:14
some of my background, because that informs and
8:17
has for a very long time the work that I do.
8:23
I was raised in a Presbyterian family. We had
8:27
four ministers in the family, and I. So I was at
8:30
church a lot, but I always had
8:34
a sort of a conflicting experience.
8:38
On the one hand, I loved it. On the other hand, I hated it.
8:41
And later I was able to identify what I loved was
8:45
actually the music, because the music.
8:49
In my spiritual practice, we think of two principal connections
8:53
into spirit, light and
8:56
sound. And of course, music is sound, and. And almost
9:00
everybody can relate to music of one kind or another. And
9:04
for me, it. I. I just opened and I. I kind of soared with
9:08
the music. But when they started doing all their
9:12
talk and, you know, blame and all that kind of stuff, I said,
9:16
well, maybe not so much. So
9:20
I didn't have the conscious awareness at the time. But
9:23
that connection into spirit is what I was Experiencing.
9:28
So also because. Because we have a little bit of a
9:32
health focus in here. I had 14 surgeries by the
9:35
time I was 14. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was kind of
9:39
interesting. You know, some of them were accidents. I went through
9:43
two windshields when I was a little kid, you know, way before seat belts were
9:46
around. And, you know,
9:51
I. I guess the one way to say that is they had to keep knocking
9:54
me out. So I was gonna say
9:59
a lot of. It's a lot of anesthesia in a short
10:03
period of time on a little body and a little consciousness
10:07
back then. When they used ether. Oh. Which is
10:11
like, I thought, oh, my God, they're trying to kill me again.
10:16
So in any case,
10:21
my father wound up dying of leukemia when he was 42. I
10:24
was. Had just turned 19 and
10:29
a bunch of circumstances not worth going into right now. But it
10:32
bankrupted the family. And I wound up. I had an
10:36
old beater of a car, which I lived in for a while. And
10:39
that was actually grace in
10:43
many ways, because as challenging as it was, I mean, I had
10:47
literally $6 to my name. I
10:51
never felt like I was in trouble.
10:54
I just felt like, okay, so that's how this is right now. And it
10:58
was truly experience of being in the now, in
11:02
the moment. And that began to
11:05
open up the. The distinct awareness for
11:09
me that there's a difference between my experience and my ex.
11:13
Circumstance. And
11:17
I can author the quality of my
11:21
experience independent of
11:24
what's going on circumstantially. And I
11:28
began to see the difference between some people experience their circumstance
11:32
as their experience of who they are as
11:35
opposed to the condition. There's no gap. There's no choice.
11:40
Yeah, exactly. So
11:46
about. In 1968, a guy named
11:50
Fritz Perls, who was considered the creator of
11:53
Gestalt Therapy, wrote a book called Gestalt Therapy
11:56
verbatim, which I read. And
12:01
he used to be a psychoanalyst who
12:05
did traditional psychoanalysis. So three sessions a week for seven years. He
12:08
said all of my patients after seven years had well analyzed problems,
12:16
and now they just had stacks of reasons why they should have the problem.
12:19
But he said, he discovered that what he said, simple awareness can be
12:23
curative. So he changed the therapy did
12:27
with people to basically asking questions. And
12:31
so what are you experiencing? Well, where did that come from? Well, what choices
12:34
can you make? What choices did you make? And all of the notion of. He
12:38
said, responsibility is the ability to respond. So
12:42
he's helping people notice how they chose responses and
12:46
how that then created the quality of their experience.
12:49
Now I was 20 at the time
12:53
when I read that book. And that put me on
12:57
a path of saying, I want to work with people in that
13:01
regard. And when I applied to
13:05
graduate school, I wrote on the
13:08
application, give you a window into my arrogance at the
13:12
time, which may or may not have been diminished much. I said, I'm willing to
13:16
let you have me, a student as I. As long as I don't have to
13:18
take any of your courses.
13:26
This audience will appreciate the wisdom of that. Actually,
13:31
yeah, it was. Was really kind of interesting because the
13:35
chairman said, before we throw you out on your ear, what are you
13:38
talking? And I said, well, you're going to want me to write a null
13:42
hypothesis for a thesis. He said, yeah, and you're going to
13:45
want me to prove it at the O5 or 01 level of significance, meaning
13:49
at.05 only five times out of 100 or oh, one, only one times
13:53
out of 100, could this have shown up by chance? He said, yes.
13:57
I said, so if we go through these bookshelves
14:00
lined with the theses that have been done heretofore,
14:04
will we not find this one with proof that this one
14:08
has the opposite proof, and so they can't
14:12
both be true, can they? And he kind of went, never thought
14:16
of that. So what you really don't want
14:19
here. And there's again, the brashness of the time. You're not really
14:23
interested in what's true. You're just interested what we can put together within
14:27
some kind of statistical summary.
14:31
Well, what do you propose? He said, well, rather than having a theory or a
14:34
null hypothesis, what I want to do is I just want to bring
14:38
different people into the campus who can work with groups of
14:42
students for over the course of a year or maybe two, and
14:45
simply chronicle what changes take place
14:49
without a theory about what changes should take place or
14:53
which modality is more effective than the other. So
14:57
that became my thesis. And he did say, well, you're going to have to take
15:00
three of our courses. All
15:04
right, all right, we'll take three. I surrender. Okay, fine. But
15:07
that then put me on this whole path of
15:11
beginning to understand that knowledge is always
15:15
present, but I may not be present with the
15:18
knowledge. Oh, that's quite
15:22
profound, Russell. Yeah, well, I. I didn't have the
15:25
language for that until much later.
15:29
In fact, someone once said, peace is present, Russell. You just may not be present
15:33
with the peace. And that's when a bunch of dominoes clicked
15:36
together. Oh, that's what that's about. And so
15:42
I wound up doing a lot of Work in the gestalt world,
15:46
in various kinds of encounter groups and gestalt therapy
15:49
and national training labs and sensitivity training and, you know, on and
15:53
on and on, because I was, I was just enthralled with
15:57
what that process of self discovery was.
16:00
So shortening this story by quite a bit.
16:05
By the 70s, I was running a personal development
16:09
course called Mind Dynamics, which it's something I had
16:13
personally experienced and found it amazing how much
16:16
change people made in a couple of days. And in 1978,
16:20
in concert with my spiritual teacher, whom I wrote a letter
16:24
saying, hey, you know, I'm sure the people are doing well spiritually in this group,
16:27
but boy, they can't handle the real world very well.
16:31
And he called me and I didn't expect the rubber meets the
16:35
road boom. Exactly. So
16:39
he said, what did you have in mind? I said, well, I can design a
16:43
training program, an experiential seminar that would help
16:46
people translate what they are learning spiritually into
16:50
how they make choices in the real world and how they create the experience of
16:54
life. We spoke at length,
16:58
we got together in person and he said, well, let's try it. And
17:02
so in January of 78, Insight Seminars was birthed
17:06
in Santa Monica, California. I thought it was going to be a
17:09
once in a while kind of thing, but
17:14
strictly by word of mouth, it wound up as a knife
17:17
501C3A not for profit. It wound up in 43 countries around the
17:21
world. And wow. It was all built on
17:25
this notion of awareness. Right. And
17:28
so the. And this I think will be really important for those
17:32
listening here. We subtitled the program we didn't really have.
17:36
Later on we had an insight 1, 2, 3 and a whole bunch of stuff
17:40
sort of using an educational model. But
17:44
we call insight the awakening heart.
17:48
Not mind, body or emotions, but heart.
17:51
And using heart as the center of the soul, sort
17:55
of trying to make us something spiritual, physical.
17:59
But also the principle of awakening was huge.
18:04
And so I would say to people, this is going to be two really stupid
18:07
questions. The first one is obvious. If you are
18:11
awakening, what were you before?
18:14
Asleep. Huh. Well, here's the question. No one ever asks.
18:18
If you were asleep, what were you before that?
18:21
Awake. Ah,
18:25
so all this focus on transformation and
18:29
change is assuming that something is amiss
18:33
and it has to be changed into something else. But what if
18:37
it really is? All I have to do is awaken to something that's always been
18:40
present. Now let me tie that back to
18:44
church. The word religion comes from the Latin
18:47
root word ligare, which means to Connect or bind together.
18:51
And the prefix re means again, so truly
18:55
what religion means is to reconnect, which begs the question
18:59
of reconnect to what? And so
19:02
insight, the awakening heart, becoming more of who you already are.
19:07
And without being preachy to anyone. We never said
19:11
you're a soul, you're a spirit. Just people would come into
19:14
that awareness in their own way
19:18
and their own language. So I like to say God never named itself,
19:22
so have at it. I don't care what we. We call this,
19:26
but let's find it. And the core essence of it will be loving.
19:30
So that's sort of the background to what's informed my
19:34
work over these many years. That's so beautiful.
19:42
That you've made Russell. And I'm really struck. I'm thinking back
19:46
to how you explained what you wanted to do to
19:49
the head of the department at graduate school,
19:54
and it was to observe people without
19:58
an expectation. Something along those lines. Right. Like you
20:02
wanted to take away the expectation of having them fit into your
20:05
hypothesis or not, and just allow them to
20:10
do what they are, do what they need to do. Which strikes me
20:14
as an incredibly loving approach
20:19
where, because I think so many of us often feel,
20:23
even if it's not articulated, although a lot of the times it is articulated,
20:27
that we, you know, we're kind of
20:30
continuously gauging if we're meeting the expectation
20:35
of somebody or something, whether it's to
20:38
feel better physically or show up or. So
20:42
to have the intuition or the knowledge to create a
20:46
space where people were just free to have their own
20:50
experience. Like, that's. It seems quite profound.
20:55
Yeah, it certainly turned out to be that way. I had no
20:59
idea what it was really going to lead to. But,
21:05
boy, brain cells fade. This is gray hair.
21:09
And I was told gray hair is gray matter leaking out. So.
21:17
Boy, how could I forget his name? A longshore philosopher.
21:21
Longshoreman and a philosopher. Oh, Eric Hoffer.
21:24
Exactly. Hoffer. How can I. We. My husband and
21:28
I are reading his book right now, so I. I heard you reference him in.
21:32
In one of the interviews I listened to. Yes, exactly. And so
21:35
the way I paraphrased that was you can never get enough of what you don't
21:39
really want.
21:42
And so that's profound.
21:46
Yes, because we're locked into
21:50
seeking things. Absolutely.
21:53
And sort of the.
21:57
The myth that people tend
22:01
to lead is that if I only get enough of X,
22:04
then I'll be happy, or then I'll be full, or
22:08
then I'll have peace. And so in sort of the
22:12
Western world, it's well, let's just put off all that stuff
22:16
because we have to go acquire. But as soon as we've
22:19
acquired, you know, whether it's a house, there could be a bigger house or
22:23
car, a better car, a certain amount of money. And so in
22:27
insight, well, we would. On a big
22:30
easel pad, two columns. The
22:34
left column was labeled symbols and the right column was
22:38
labeled experience. And we say, so what? In
22:41
symbols, we just say, those are the things
22:45
that people pursue a lot of in life. What are they? And so
22:48
people would make their list and we put it up and it always goes things
22:51
like money, house, job, car. And some people would say
22:54
relationship. So it's kind of like, you know, the trophy,
22:58
family, whatever. And we say, so let's take money. Because most people
23:02
think they want more money. What's the positive experience that you
23:05
associate with having enough money? If I had enough money, then I
23:09
could experience. And some people would say, travel. I said, no,
23:13
no, that's what you could do. So it's not about buying
23:17
more stuff. What would the inner experience be if you had enough money? And people
23:20
say, well, eventually, security, peace, peace of mind,
23:24
you know, fulfillment, freedom. So in other words, what we're after is
23:28
peace and loving and caring, but we're pursuing this other thing
23:32
and there's no direct relationship because there's people with tons of money and they're
23:36
not very secure. And people with tons of money. There are people with
23:39
no money and they're secure and da, da, da, da, da. So let's take all
23:43
those definitions out, and if you can focus on the right hand
23:47
side column of the quality of experience, then the question is,
23:50
what experience are you looking for? How could you produce it?
23:55
And then that awakens people to go, oh, oh my God. You mean
23:58
my experience is my choice? What a possibility.
24:04
So big stuff. It is big. And so
24:08
in your experience, what happens when people choose
24:11
to live from there? So instead of saying, okay, I have to wait until
24:15
I have the money, I think I'm supposed to have to feel peaceful and
24:19
free. I can just feel like that right
24:23
now. And then what do you see happen
24:27
when, like, do people. Are they able to make that choice? And
24:31
then what happens? Well, there's.
24:39
Oh, boy. What happens when people
24:43
make that conscious choice to.
24:49
Well, we call it what if we said this isn't anything
24:53
to believe? None of this just play the what if
24:57
game. What if it is true that if you focus on
25:00
experience, life will change
25:04
for the better? What if it is true that the consequences I'm experience
25:08
come from the choices I make, not the victimhood.
25:12
Because Fritz Pearl's really mad at a burant distinction
25:16
between victim and accountable. And we'd ask, so,
25:20
you know, if. Let's just take a look at anything in your life.
25:24
If it's been positive, were you the victim of something out there?
25:29
Very few people play victim to positive, but if it's negative, yeah, they go
25:33
victim. So we said, well, let's. Let's try take a look at
25:37
how are my circumstances a function of my choices? And then
25:40
even regardless of circumstance. So Viktor Frankl comes to mind.
25:45
How do you discover that freedom is a choice
25:49
while in a Nazi internment camp? I mean,
25:53
wow, talk about consciousness. So if people play what if,
25:57
Then what usually becomes interesting,
26:00
the amount of money or the job I have become less important,
26:04
but easier to have. Right. Because I'm not
26:08
attached to the thing, because I've already produced the experience inwardly.
26:14
Right. Qualitatively and quantitatively different.
26:19
So I move toward
26:23
the symbols or the signals of what I
26:26
want more easily when I'm coming
26:30
from the experiential state that I wanted in the
26:34
first place as the result of those things. Absolutely. And
26:38
from a Buddhist perspective, when you're in that space, you approach life without
26:42
attachment, Right? And it's attachment that
26:46
usually creates our pain and our suffering and also
26:49
blocks us from achieving that which we might
26:53
otherwise achieve, which it also
26:57
can be interpreted as we might otherwise experience.
27:02
So we used to ask people these questions all the time that said, so
27:06
have you ever been at peace? Well, yeah.
27:10
Well, when you're at peace, did you ever say, wow, I'm at peace?
27:14
No, because you're too busy being at peace.
27:18
But when you left the peace is when you noticed you were at peace.
27:22
And so the question becomes, what did you have to focus on to leave the
27:26
peace? If you're in a loving
27:29
relationship with someone, you know, husband, wife, boyfriend,
27:33
girlfriend, son, daughter, whatever,
27:38
what did you have to focus on to leave the loving you had for that
27:41
person? And that's like a
27:46
bombshell in people's brains to go, oh, my God, yeah, as
27:49
soon as I focus on this, that shows up.
27:55
Now it's a thing you're focused on
27:59
leading you towards the positive experience you want or the negative experience
28:03
you want. Now the
28:06
critics of the world go, oh, just more of that
28:10
positive thinking psychobabble crap.
28:13
I go, well, no, not really. When I was editorial director at
28:17
Huffington Post for a while, I wrote a series of articles every Monday.
28:21
And one I put up was called why Positive Thinking Just
28:24
Doesn't Work. Now, the
28:28
Huffington Post pioneered the thing of having real live
28:32
community and comments. And so people
28:35
would throw up on some of my articles every month, and then I
28:39
copy some of their comment and put it in the next month. I go, well,
28:42
there's a great way to sort of miss the point without,
28:46
without being condemning just to say. So let's, let's see what,
28:50
what's missing here. And it's understandable it could be missing because
28:54
of the programming we've all gone through, so on and so forth. So
28:57
this was the, the peak of frustration. And when I write these articles or
29:01
when I write my books, same thing. I sit down in front of the
29:05
computer, front of my little keyboard, and I go, father, Mother, God, show
29:08
me what to be written today in ways I can understand and with the clarity
29:12
to put it down. And I don't have notes, it just comes through and
29:16
I write it. So that title showed up that
29:19
morning, why Positive Thinking Just Doesn't Work. And what I said in
29:23
the article was, of course, positive thinking doesn't work.
29:26
Positive action works. But how do you take a positive action
29:30
without a positive thought? And so what positive thinking really
29:34
means, do you have a positive focus? So I
29:37
have a good friend who
29:42
used to be a cable car gripman in San Francisco, and he was riding
29:45
to the cable car barn one day in the 60s on his motorcycle
29:49
when a laundry van ran the stoplight. His
29:53
gas tank exploded. It burned his face off, burned his fingers down
29:57
to not as. No, no finger nub was longer
30:00
than my little pinky fingernail. So just
30:04
mention that. Several years of
30:07
surgeries. When he finally was recovered,
30:11
he became the mayor of a small town in Colorado,
30:15
and he was a pilot at the time.
30:18
So he was taking off to go to the annual Mayor's conference
30:22
in D.C. when the plane crashed, and he wound up
30:26
paralyzed. And so here's a guy
30:29
paralyzed looks grotesque. No, I mean,
30:33
he can still pick things up, but with these little nubs.
30:37
And he writes a book, it's not what happens to you, it's what you do
30:40
about it. And he said,
30:44
before I was paralyzed, there were 10,000 things I could do. Now there's
30:47
9,000. Should I cry about the thousand I lost or celebrate the nine I
30:51
have? And so the epitome of what
30:55
you do with a positive focus, no one's saying, oh, it's fantastic.
30:59
I'm paralyzed and my face is burned off. No, that's the
31:03
circumstance. Now what do I do with it? So back to how do I
31:06
author my experience? His name is Mitchell,
31:10
and He has a website called wmitchell.com and people
31:14
can watch some incredible videos of this guy. Wow.
31:18
Yeah. That is a really powerful message to come
31:22
from someone who experienced not once but twice.
31:27
Yeah, huge. Just amazing. So to what
31:31
would you attribute a person's ability
31:36
to do that? To live the way Mitchell is living?
31:41
Is it. I mean, your most recent book is Soul Talk. Is.
31:45
Does Mitchell. Is Mitchell more soul
31:49
powered than someone who lives in victimhood?
31:52
What. What are your
31:56
observations slash thoughts? Yeah, that's great, because
31:59
we've chatted about that a few times.
32:04
Not telling any school tales out of school. But he doesn't have a
32:08
spiritual focus that he would call spiritual
32:12
because I think he would think more things in religious,
32:17
you know, traditional religious terminology. But
32:21
the. The soul is present, whether we want to call it
32:25
a soul or not. And it doesn't care what we call it because it didn't
32:29
name itself either.
32:33
So I think.
32:38
Something is inside each of us again that
32:42
wants to awaken. And when we
32:45
awaken, that's when this power of choice
32:49
becomes more evident. Now, when a person, as a person
32:53
awakens, it's not like asleep awake done.
32:57
No, no, it's awakening. It's an ongoing process.
33:02
So as I awaken to my next level of
33:05
consciousness, I can look back and see all the
33:09
crumbs on that path that I never noticed along
33:12
the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, I did that back then.
33:16
Well, if I did that back then, what could I do now? So what's
33:20
the choice in front of me right now that wants
33:24
me to awaken to so that I can make the next step in
33:27
expanding my life? And, you know,
33:31
we can get into all the. The neuroscience behind all that.
33:35
There's a lot of theory about what's there and what's my.
33:38
And what's in my genetic coding and my DNA and all that kind of good
33:42
stuff. But yet people can learn,
33:47
even if they don't come cold, sort of naturally predisposed
33:51
to this. But if I preach at them, you
33:55
can make a choice and you can do this and da, da, da, da, da.
33:58
It's just like, oh, get away. But if I simply ask, what are you
34:02
experiencing? Do you like that? If so, well,
34:05
great. How would you have even more of it? You don't like it? What could
34:09
you do to change it? And if we just keep persisting in
34:13
what could you. How could you people slowly take
34:17
the blinders off and start to see? And once a
34:21
person has begun the process of seeing and
34:25
actualizing what they see, it becomes
34:28
something that has its own momentum that we can build on.
34:32
But it really helps like crazy to be in a community.
34:37
And I don't mean I live in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a place,
34:41
but not necessarily a community. The community of the people
34:44
that I hang with who have a like focus.
34:49
Because if I'm surrounded by people with a like focus and if
34:52
one of us starts to slip, there's consciousness
34:56
around us to help support us. Now most
34:59
people these days are choosing communities that
35:03
are not all that uplifting, especially when we start
35:07
looking at the political world. And that
35:11
becomes a perfect example of, well, what does you have to focus on in the
35:14
news today in order to ruin your day?
35:18
And if you didn't open the news that day, would your day have been different?
35:22
So asking people that kind of stuff, that
35:26
thing, well now that starts to open some
35:30
doors or windows to other parts of the universe which
35:33
are really interesting, which is about the power of thought.
35:43
So I like to remind people that the universe. Just go back
35:47
to school. What they tell us the universe is made of it's energy. Can you
35:51
create energy? No. You can generate it, but you can't
35:54
create it. Can you destroy energy? No. What can you
35:58
do with it? Well, you can change its form.
36:02
Well, what's that mean? So I'll ask people
36:06
something. Maybe your listeners here would be interested in just
36:09
matching along the way. Anybody listening to the BBC radio
36:13
right now? Like dumb question for
36:17
you. Are you listening to the BBC right now? Meredith? No. Is
36:21
BBC in the room right now? No. Yes it
36:24
is. That's the trick.
36:28
Because what is BBC radio? It's a
36:32
frequency upon which rides information.
36:37
So at 9 o' clock the show is X and at 10 o' clock the
36:40
show is Y. But it's always the same frequency being broadcast.
36:43
Now if you had a radio in your room, you could
36:47
attune to the BBC. That's why I say is the BBC in the
36:51
room? Yeah. The difference
36:54
is for those kind of frequencies we need an external
36:58
device called a radio. What if I'm the radio?
37:04
What if I'm the tv? You ever have pictures come into your mind? You. You
37:08
wonder where they came from? Yes, great question.
37:12
Yes. Or a person. And then the next day they call
37:15
all of that. But see, since the.
37:19
You know, I don't recall the article. I
37:23
read it about four or five years ago, somewhere
37:27
up in one of the Harvard northeast teaching
37:31
hospitals or universities, someone
37:35
discovered a device that can
37:39
detect your thought without any
37:43
physical contact to your body. So we know
37:46
we can put probes all over your head. And then we can watch what happens,
37:49
which part of the brain, and yada, yada, yada. Well, this thing
37:53
sits outside the body, and it can detect your thoughts. It can't tell
37:57
you what you're thinking. It can just detect the changes in thought,
38:02
which is one of the first beginnings to say, hey, wait. This is
38:05
an energetic process, just like the
38:09
BBC radio is an energetic process. Just like
38:13
light is an energy, when you run it through a prism, you see
38:16
colors that were always there, just not visible. So if
38:20
we begin to play with it, you go, well, so
38:25
what is thought then? What is a being? What is aliveness? What is
38:29
energy? And that's the kind of stuff that becomes very
38:33
interesting. So during COVID I did a lot of free
38:38
coaching and counseling, most particularly for families
38:43
because their kids were getting stressed.
38:47
And, well, now, how much do you and your partner spend
38:51
stressing over Covid and the change in the
38:55
economy? And you talk about it with your kids?
38:59
No, but are they picking it up anyway? Yes,
39:03
because stress is just another frequency or another.
39:08
Maybe like a content writing on the frequency of who you are,
39:12
and the kid picks up who you are, and then they pick up that content
39:15
called stress. Now, most parents will
39:18
relate to the notion of having a young baby. The
39:22
baby is just fine. And someone walks into the room and the
39:26
baby gets all distressed. That person leaves, they calm down.
39:30
Or the inverse baby's all stressed. Certain person walks in, they calm
39:34
down. Well, why? And maybe it's
39:38
the quality of energy that that person is holding,
39:43
and one's easy to flow with, and the other is in conflict.
39:47
So how do we monitor that? So if I begin to think of
39:50
myself as the radio receiver, so I can pick
39:54
up. My teacher used to say, you're not responsible for the thoughts that
39:58
come into your head, only the ones you hold on to,
40:01
because thoughts are all over the place. But what if, besides being the receiver,
40:05
we're also the transmitter? So now
40:09
what energies am I transmitting into the universe, whether it's with my
40:13
wife or my family or whether it's out to the broader universe?
40:17
And what's the amplification effect when a bunch of us start holding the same
40:20
thought pattern and then other people pick it up and now we're in
40:24
this kind of thing, which is the predominant pattern today.
40:29
But I think what's coming onto the planet is a time for greater
40:32
awakening into loving as the,
40:37
I guess, preferred way, but perhaps the only way
40:44
for true life.
40:49
Yes. I think we're. It feels to me like
40:53
we're being shown that and that
40:57
Right now, I feel, it seems to me that a lot of the work
41:01
we have to do is to disconnect ourselves
41:04
from whatever would like to
41:09
be in charge of that frequency and those thought frequencies. You
41:13
know, I'm thinking of the media and particularly the news,
41:17
where their. Their business model is to have us in a certain
41:21
state of fear all of the time. And what I'm
41:25
hearing you say is that it's up. You know, the.
41:30
This soul connection is calling us to choose
41:34
always.
41:38
Always.
41:42
And I feel like we are
41:45
choosing collectively towards the love.
41:49
And I also feel like each time we make a big leap or
41:53
even a small leap, the fear
41:57
ratchets up and the
42:00
headlines become more intense. This
42:04
feeling of being enveloped by a manipulation
42:08
every time you open the computer becomes more
42:11
intense. But I also feel like then we up level again and
42:15
choose. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of us like
42:20
making a different choice.
42:24
Well, my wife has a sort of
42:28
a metaphor for how she sees what's going on.
42:32
She does a lot of work with consciousness and
42:35
judgments that people hold inside and get locked into their
42:39
bodies. And then how do you do forgiveness? Not forgiveness
42:43
of the other, but forgiveness of self. And it's really
42:47
powerful work. But she. She says the image he has is
42:52
like from a planetary consciousness level.
42:56
We're in a birthing process. So as
43:00
a male, I can only relate to birthing from a
43:04
theoretic point of view, but from a woman who's gone through it,
43:08
incredibly messy, painful experience that
43:12
results in joy most of the time.
43:16
And so she says she kind of sees that as a
43:19
conscious birthing out of the planet of a new day of
43:23
loving. But it has to go through all that painful,
43:28
perhaps even stressful process.
43:32
Right? Yes. That feels. Yeah, that feels like an apt
43:36
metaphor. And the contractions and then the release
43:40
and we move forward a little bit. Yeah.
43:43
So you mentioned a few minutes ago about opening
43:47
doors into some cosmic.
43:52
Let's call it cosmic science. I know you've
43:55
been involved in some organizations that are really on the cutting edge of looking at
44:00
consciousness and where we're headed
44:03
from that perspective. What are you
44:07
seeing. Happening?
44:11
Yeah, it's a really interesting thing that's going on
44:15
right now because it's a. I've
44:19
come at this from. There's so many angles to come in on this. So I'm
44:22
going to come in it from a. Odd one. First,
44:26
the world of science
44:30
can pretty much get stuck on itself. Yes.
44:37
And yet there's a. There's no such thing as the world of science.
44:41
There's a thing we call science, of which
44:45
there are many practitioners. But one of the issues that
44:48
science has dealt with for a very long time is the lack of
44:52
reproducibility. So
44:56
just like I told my chairman of the department, well, this
45:00
thing proved that when this one proved that. And they're different, they're in
45:03
conflict, direct conflict. So how's that
45:07
if it's real? So
45:11
what? A lot of scientists, there's a. I think it's called
45:14
the center for Open Science, something like that,
45:18
they're really working to provide a very sound set
45:22
of protocols that start with. Before you even form
45:26
your hypothesis. And there's a
45:29
whole litany of steps that
45:33
they would like to see people go through, regardless of what area they're
45:37
looking into. I don't care whether it's vitamins or how do you
45:40
operate on a liver, whatever it is,
45:45
that will make it more likely that a true
45:48
finding can be reproduced. And the reproducibility
45:52
issue is, you know, people can run an experiment, Somebody else
45:56
runs the exact same experiment with the same protocol and get a different result.
46:01
So what's that about, you know? Well, some of it is about
46:05
maybe the. The actual protocols were, were not
46:08
identical. So they're trying to eliminate one of those
46:12
variables. Now, we all know this thing called the observer phenomena.
46:16
So maybe the issue is that it's. It's not
46:20
what's happening, apparently, but it's the impact
46:24
that the observer has because, remember, it's thought and energy
46:28
that then disrupts something. So
46:32
way back, I went to school at University of
46:35
California at Davis, and Charlie Tart was a professor
46:39
there who's one of the early people looking into
46:43
various paranormal phenomena. And I got
46:46
to work with them, and we did some very interesting experiments and all the things
46:50
about, you know, remote viewing. And then we looked at
46:53
energetic transfer between plants. Like you could hook up
46:57
a plant to
47:00
gsr. I guess it was a galvanomic spins response
47:04
meter. If you took a cutting from the plant and grew
47:08
it in another room, you could take a pair of
47:12
scissors and threaten the plant in room B. And the mother
47:15
plant in room A would have a. A
47:19
measurable spike take place. And those are
47:22
some early things we were looking at. What's the nature of energy and how does
47:26
it communicate? And if it communicates from a plant to a
47:30
plant, what's that about?
47:34
So that's still the big question. What's that about? So there's a lot
47:37
of work going on, and it's.
47:43
Oh, let's see, what would be a good.
47:51
I don't Know what the right metaphor is? It's an
47:55
amazingly conflicted world because there's people out there
47:58
who are doing their best to study
48:03
and observe. Remember, key word
48:06
observe. What truth might be
48:10
about any of these things, whether it's remote viewing or absent healing or
48:14
just the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, any of this kind of
48:17
stuff. And then there's, there are those out
48:21
there who want to become famous because of it, and those
48:25
who want to then generate, how many grants can they get and how much
48:28
money? And one of
48:32
the, I'm not going to be naming any names here for
48:36
obvious reasons, but there's some pretty big names out there that
48:40
seem to be engaging
48:43
in something called P hacking. Have you heard that term?
48:47
No. P for probability.
48:51
So you set up your null hypothesis. You, you say if
48:55
this happens, it's, then it's less than, it's a P
48:59
of O1, you know, less than one time out of a hundred.
49:03
So they don't get the result they wanted. So then they start
49:06
running the data to see how it can be manipulated so they can
49:10
hack the P. And now all of a sudden the study gets
49:14
produced and nobody can begin to reproduce it
49:17
because it didn't actually happen. So now you got
49:21
the problem of the people who are trying to do something and they don't get
49:24
what they thought, then they scratch their head and go, hmm, so I wonder what
49:28
it is. And those who go, I didn't get what I want, how can I
49:31
make it look like I did? And so that creates
49:35
conflict in the world of the scientific community.
49:39
So there's a number of folks out there looking
49:42
to do really high quality works
49:46
because they all know, we all know
49:50
intuitively that this thing about it's all energy is real,
49:57
but we don't have the tools. I keep telling the folks that I
50:01
work with what would happen if you
50:05
ask Spirit this question.
50:09
What do we need that we don't have? And the
50:12
parallel question, what do we have that we don't need? So what's in the
50:16
way? And well, why would you ask Spirit? Well, because spirit is
50:20
the source of all energy.
50:24
So maybe if we could go into that consciousness, we could precipitate
50:28
down the next step or the next thing that we
50:32
need in order to move these things along. Now,
50:36
I don't know if I.
50:41
Thought I had one in here. Well,
50:44
I don't. You will recognize
50:48
this. Yes, we have. This is a high tech science tool.
50:52
Paperclip. Yeah. Okay. And.
50:56
I haven't done it a long time, but I would use the larger size
51:00
paperclip. I take a piece of thread about
51:04
24 inches long, tie it to one end, and then have a person
51:07
just dangle it like a pendulum while balancing their elbow. Okay, now
51:11
I want you to visualize the paperclip swinging back and forth, left to
51:15
right, and pretty soon it's going, and then north, south, then
51:19
in a circle. Now visualize it changing. And almost everybody
51:22
can do that. And I was doing this for a group of
51:28
MDs up at,
51:31
I forget Mass Eye and Ear, Mass General, one of those
51:36
Boston area leading hospital groups.
51:39
They were primarily neuroscientists and
51:43
endocrinologists. And those are two groups who really
51:46
know that thought changes what happens in the body.
51:50
So this thing is going like this, and there's one neuroscientist in the back. This
51:54
is back like around 1980. 81 just goes, this is
51:57
all. And I said, oh, interesting. What
52:01
do you mean? He says, you want me to think that my mind is
52:05
making the paperclip move? I said, that's interesting. Did I say that? He said,
52:09
no, but this is still. I said, why? Well,
52:12
what's happening is that I'm making little micro movements with
52:16
my hand or fingers. And because of the length of the string, it's amplified
52:20
and it looks bigger down here, but it's all because of movement up here.
52:23
I said, well, that's really interesting. And so you think it's,
52:27
huh? He goes, yes. I said, so let me ask you this.
52:32
In order for that paper gut to move, even if it's just micro movements up
52:35
here, did you have to engage a neuromuscular pathway for that to happen?
52:40
Yeah. Well, did you know which neuromuscular pathway
52:43
you engaged? No. Did you know how
52:47
you engaged it? No.
52:51
And yet it was engaged. And
52:55
he kind of sat there dumbfounded. And I said, so what if
52:59
the real key is how you hold the focus and
53:03
inside your body already knows how to make that happen? And it
53:07
sure is a little movement up here. Not disputing that.
53:11
But the question is, did you have to know the
53:14
particulars or was the result enough
53:19
to allow the particulars to take place? He still was scratching
53:22
his head. And I said, so you deal with people
53:27
who are paraplegic? Yeah. He
53:30
said, so what's the problem? Is it neuromuscular?
53:35
I mean, muscular, skeletal? No, it's neuromuscular. What's that mean? Well, below
53:39
the level of entry, no information is getting out.
53:42
So, I mean, this is like 80, 81, 82 somewhere. And I just said,
53:46
well, what if you could take some little titanium wires and stick it into the
53:50
motor control center of the brain and hardwire it down to their muscles. Could you,
53:53
could they think about their arm moving and get the signal out there and have
53:57
it move because it was hardwired. Well, guess
54:00
what? That's what's happening today in the world
54:04
of prosthesis
54:08
as well as people are. I mean, there's, there's images you can see on
54:12
the Internet of a guy who's paralyzed picking up his baby
54:16
by thinking about it. So we're only.
54:20
This is like the dark ages of what we're learning about. What's the
54:23
nature of energy and thought and how do you
54:27
both work with it as it is and harness it for whatever might
54:31
be. So sometimes these things
54:35
start out there in the world of that's impossible and
54:39
become every day sooner or later.
54:44
Yes. And that's such a good example with the paperclip
54:48
because. Yeah, it was our thought.
54:54
Our thought imaged the result and the.
54:58
Without our conscious intervention on the,
55:02
on the how we just got the result. Yeah.
55:07
Well, you know, it's interesting that that kind of thinking has been known in the
55:10
world of sport for a very long time. Yeah.
55:14
You know, high end athletes, whether or gymnasts or skiers or
55:18
golfers or whatever, visualize
55:22
the outcome and their body knows how to
55:26
produce it. But when you get outside of the world of sport, people go,
55:29
yeah, well that worked over there, but that won't work over here. Oh,
55:33
okay. Henry Ford famously said it does not. Whether you believe, whether
55:37
you can or you cannot, you're probably right. Right.
55:43
So. So you're engaged and connected to some,
55:47
you know, to some people, some scientists who are
55:51
very curious and engaged in these
55:56
types, in this type of research. So
55:59
where's it headed? And if you could, you know, and what are
56:03
your hypotheses? Even if they haven't, we haven't don't have the
56:07
mechanisms to, to show it.
56:10
Well, it's
56:14
as I mentioned before, you know, these energies and the
56:18
simple ones are things like light. You shine a beacon
56:22
beam of light through a prism and you see all the colors that are resonant
56:25
within it. But even that's not true.
56:29
We see the colors that our eyes are capable of perceiving.
56:33
And yet animals can perceive colors outside what we can perceive.
56:38
And the same thing is with sound. You know, we can hear within a
56:42
certain range. You know, men hear a certain range, women hear a certain range.
56:46
They're not the same. And then bring a dog around or
56:50
a cat or anything else and there's all kinds of sounds that we
56:53
don't. So because we don't notice it, we think it doesn't exist.
56:58
So the basic theory here is there's a whole lot to be discovered around
57:02
what exists that we do not yet know how to present perceive.
57:07
And then if we can learn it,
57:12
you know, there's,
57:16
let's see, where do we go with this?
57:20
One area of research that's going on is about telepathy
57:24
and this whole thing about, well, can you hold a thought, can it be
57:27
detected by another person? And then you have this whole thing about,
57:33
oh, can you influence an electron flow with thought?
57:37
It's sort of a classic experiment which then
57:41
produces some baffling results. But it's only
57:44
baffling because we don't have a framework to understand it yet. So
57:48
I think the main thing that's going on right now is the understanding
57:52
is that we only understand a tiny bit.
57:57
And yet the things we know just enough
58:00
to either shut us down going, well, why bother? Or
58:04
enough to awaken us and enliven us and go, oh my God,
58:08
what's really possible here? So it's all around what's really possible
58:13
and beyond possible. See,
58:17
in this world, when you get into the scientific community
58:21
and conventions and meetings, they talk about
58:24
paranormal, abnormal things like that. And I
58:28
go, so we're starting with a thought assumption
58:32
that it's not normal, right?
58:36
So if you already know the observer effect and you, you, you come
58:39
in going, it's, this is not normal. Do you expect to find
58:43
it? No, we expect not to find it, except rarely.
58:47
But what if it's entirely normal?
58:51
Just like the little baby who can sense who just walked in the room and
58:55
then later we have to train it out of them. Stop being so sensitive.
58:59
Oh, okay, I'll shut off. Sensitive
59:03
doesn't mean sensitive isn't there now it just shows up in another
59:07
way that shows up as a internalized
59:10
self judgment or it
59:14
internalizes as resentment which eventually bubbles out
59:17
in terms of anger. But all it was was I sensed something,
59:22
but I didn't know enough about what I was sensing to
59:26
either work with it, change it, or get out of
59:30
it. So there's a, I mean the, the
59:33
implications for everyday life are huge.
59:36
Yes. And it's like the way that you're
59:41
describing the limitations that we put on
59:45
science or that the scientific community puts on
59:49
itself are mirrored in the
59:52
limitations that we put on our, on our own energies.
59:58
I'm sort of hearing is where we, we may have
1:00:02
these expanded capacities if we did Ask Spirit what was
1:00:06
needed instead of trying to figure out how to iterate the
1:00:09
machine that we have to the machine that we could to the next version of
1:00:12
it. If we did, ask Spirit, what would that open up in
1:00:16
terms of our capacity? Well,
1:00:21
there's no way to validate what I'm about to tell you anymore
1:00:24
because he's dead. But George
1:00:28
Washington Carver may be a name that, you know, he was a black
1:00:31
botanist just after the Civil War.
1:00:36
I mean, he was born for that. But so He's a black
1:00:39
PhD botanist in, I think
1:00:43
Georgia, maybe it was Alabama somewhere down there. And all of these
1:00:46
now, now freed slaves had their land,
1:00:50
but the primary crop that they knew was not cotton, it was
1:00:54
peanuts. And so now all of a sudden,
1:00:58
all kinds of people are growing peanuts.
1:01:02
So in the world of the market, you know, capitalist forces
1:01:06
now supply is way more than demand. So what happens to the
1:01:10
price of peanuts? It crashes. So now everyone's producing all these
1:01:14
peanuts they can't do anything with. And
1:01:18
I read that George Washington Carver went out into
1:01:22
the field of peanuts, a field of peanuts,
1:01:25
sat down with the peanuts, meditated
1:01:29
and asked the peanuts, tell me what to do with you.
1:01:34
And he came up with, I think the number was 114 different uses
1:01:37
for peanuts. You could use it for dyes, you could make
1:01:41
cloth out of them, out of the shells. I mean, it goes on and on
1:01:44
and on. But the. He said the peanuts told him what to
1:01:48
do. And that radically transformed the economy for
1:01:52
those now newly freed slaves.
1:01:57
I love that. But it might be,
1:02:01
I mean, it could possibly be back
1:02:05
to where we started. That simple, maybe not easy for some of
1:02:09
us, but that simple is that if we're surrounded by all
1:02:13
this information and all this energy and we're only limited to
1:02:17
by the, you know, ability of our, what we think of
1:02:21
as our five senses, it could just be that, that all the
1:02:24
information, all the piece, all the everything, all the knowledge is
1:02:28
just sitting there waiting for us. Well, it's open
1:02:32
to it and it's all. What's really interesting, it's all
1:02:35
inside of us too, because it's all energy.
1:02:41
So, you know, in insight,
1:02:45
we created something called a heart chart. And outside
1:02:49
the heart we had opinions which were thinking and beliefs
1:02:53
and all the mental stuff. And the other side of the chart we had
1:02:57
the emotional content and what we feel. Well, I
1:03:00
feel this is true is different from it's true. And I think it's true. It's
1:03:04
different from it's true. But in the heart center we said that's A
1:03:07
center of natural knowing. And if you can learn how to access your heart. And
1:03:11
obviously we didn't mean the physical organization, but another
1:03:15
place, all kinds of information becomes available
1:03:19
to us, but we have to become available to it.
1:03:22
So everybody has what I. I
1:03:26
call an internal bell just to create a metaphor
1:03:30
for it. And people have heard the phrase, well, that rings
1:03:33
true. So have you ever had a conversation
1:03:37
with somebody and your internal bell just rings
1:03:42
and you just know it's true? And you ever had a conversation
1:03:45
and the bell goes thud, because
1:03:49
it ain't true? So we know that.
1:03:53
We know we have the ability to know, which
1:03:56
we shut down because then we want to run it all
1:04:00
through this brain. We already know that there's bundles of
1:04:04
neurons in the heart, just like we knew a few years before that
1:04:07
there's bundles of neurons in the gut. When you say, my gut told me. Yeah,
1:04:11
it did. You just have to learn to listen to it. Well,
1:04:15
I knew in my heart. Well, you did, but can you
1:04:18
expand that to include more and more? So
1:04:22
we usually just train people out of it. Oh, be logical.
1:04:27
Be rational. I love the word rational. Lies. To
1:04:31
frame it as two words, rational and lies.
1:04:35
So we can tell ourselves rational lies. And doesn't change what's true, it just
1:04:39
change our experience of it. So my
1:04:43
teacher, you know, he would not
1:04:46
say he taught meditation, he taught what he called spiritual exercises.
1:04:51
And he said, so, you know, if you want to get strong physically, what do
1:04:55
you. Do you exercise physically? Well, if you wanted to get
1:04:58
strong spiritually, you might want to do spiritual exercises.
1:05:02
So if we wanted to develop these other
1:05:06
abilities which are native within us. So that's the theory. It's
1:05:10
native within everybody. Well, then what would you do to strengthen
1:05:14
those? So first we have to detect them just
1:05:18
to understand if it's even there.
1:05:22
But we all know intuitively, for most of us, it is there,
1:05:26
unless we've really had that beaten heart out of us. But
1:05:30
even the most jaded person has had that sense they knew
1:05:33
something. They had the intuition. Well, yeah. So what would it
1:05:37
do to develop that? And if you look at the word intuition, it's really
1:05:41
incredible that I like to look at words from their original
1:05:45
root meaning. And the Latin
1:05:49
vulgate, Latin root for intuition, was intuire, which meant
1:05:52
to look at. Isn't that amazing?
1:05:56
Intuition means simply to look. And my
1:06:01
spiritual teacher told me years and years ago I was about to go in for
1:06:04
a procedure called radial keratotomy, which is they use a
1:06:08
scalp and put little slits like bicycle spokes around your
1:06:12
iris in the cornea, and it flattened the lens so you
1:06:15
could see. I was basically coke bottle blind at the time.
1:06:20
He said, so, Russell, the source of the. I mean, the
1:06:24
problem is now physical, meaning your eyes, but the source
1:06:27
isn't. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you've been straining for
1:06:31
years to see things with your physical eyes that can only be seen with your
1:06:34
spiritual eyes.
1:06:39
So if we take spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, go inside,
1:06:43
what do I need to see? Show me that which I'm not yet.
1:06:47
And sometimes we've all had things show up inwardly.
1:06:52
So can. Can that. Is that an actual
1:06:55
muscle that can be trained? Yeah.
1:06:59
Yeah, it is. So
1:07:03
I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I love
1:07:06
that. I think so. And it's. It's.
1:07:10
Yeah, I love that idea of practicing. Just
1:07:14
practicing it. Ask. And
1:07:18
I, you know, a lot of my audience is on a health journey, as you
1:07:21
know, we all are in some capacity, I guess, and it's just
1:07:25
opening up to what. What's next? What. What's
1:07:29
next on the path, not trying to hit a specific destination.
1:07:34
Well, yeah, you know, years and years ago, I saw
1:07:40
a doctor who was.
1:07:44
I was there for general health interest and curiosity. But he
1:07:48
did a lot of work with people with cancers and whatnot. He says, you know,
1:07:52
people will come in and they'll see me and they'll say I was just fine.
1:07:55
And then all of a sudden. And he said, no, this was
1:07:59
at least 12 to 14 years in the making,
1:08:03
so. Well, yeah, so
1:08:07
now you have a. An issue. Like, as my eyesight
1:08:11
deteriorated, there was actually a physical problem with the eyes, which they could
1:08:14
correct, but the source wasn't.
1:08:18
So then the question is, well, now how do I move forward with that in
1:08:21
this or any other area? And something I like to do for
1:08:25
anybody. Imagine I've got a couple hundred
1:08:29
people in a room to a couple thousand people in the room, and I say,
1:08:31
take a hand and make a fist. The hardest, tightest
1:08:35
squeezing as fist you can make. How's it feel?
1:08:40
Not so good. Is this good hand good for anything? Well,
1:08:43
yeah, only a couple things. And if you look
1:08:47
at the top of your hand. Yeah. You can probably even see it
1:08:51
on the screen. You'll see that there's parts would have gone all white
1:08:55
where the blood is left, and there's parts that are. Now you can
1:08:58
be a black person, but keep squeezing for a second.
1:09:02
And as you keep squeezing, the blood is pooling up, and pretty soon that
1:09:06
hand starts to go Numb. Now, if you take the other hand and make a
1:09:09
hard squeezing fist, too, then pretty soon you got all kinds
1:09:13
of things. And this is an image of resistance only. What, am I
1:09:17
resisting my own self. And if a person
1:09:20
squeezes down inside going, I hate this, or I
1:09:24
resent them, or. Yeah. And you hold, ah,
1:09:28
which is all this stuff going on in the political, social world
1:09:31
right now. They're squeezing on their own cells and the blood's pooling up. They go,
1:09:35
no, numb inside. And the only thing they're left with is the ability to react.
1:09:39
Now, if you take those two hands, which we've only been squeezing for
1:09:42
less than a minute, count of three, I want you to
1:09:46
take one hand and shoot it open and the other hand open
1:09:50
as slowly as you possibly can. Okay? Okay.
1:09:53
Count of three. 1, 2,
1:09:57
3. How did the hand feel that
1:10:01
you shot? Open. Tingly. And it
1:10:05
had a little beat up, but it was. And now it's fine. What's
1:10:08
the other hand like? Going really, really slow. It feels
1:10:12
still really, really tight. And it's not very fluid, is it?
1:10:16
No. And so the question becomes,
1:10:19
if you find yourself stuck someplace, do you find yourself in resistance? You find
1:10:23
yourself in pain? Did you want to shoot it open
1:10:27
or just go? Until finally you just go, oh, that feels fine.
1:10:31
And you're not in a very useful hand position. Now, it's just a
1:10:35
matter of metaphor, but the question might be, if
1:10:39
I'm dealing with a medical issue, what
1:10:42
am I resisting inside?
1:10:46
Am I resisting some part of me? Am I resisting some part of you?
1:10:51
Is it a thought? What am I holding inside that's
1:10:54
constricting and blocking the flow? Now, if
1:10:58
you get it early enough, you know, like a headache. What do people
1:11:02
do with headaches? Pop aspirins or Advil or something?
1:11:07
Well, did the headache show up because it
1:11:10
wanted to be killed, or was it there to say, something's going
1:11:14
on, let's pay attention? And what's usually going on is stress.
1:11:18
And we squeeze down. We squeeze across here.
1:11:22
Blocks the constrict. It constricts the flow of blood. The capillaries don't get
1:11:25
enough, and then you have a headache. Now, not all
1:11:29
headaches are from that, but many are. So what if
1:11:33
you said, I just may need to go in and relax? What tension am
1:11:36
I holding? Is it in my tmj? Is it, you know, is it up
1:11:40
here? You know, what's the tension? What am I
1:11:44
resisting? What am I judging? And if you can find the thing you're resisting
1:11:47
or judging, maybe then you can go, oh, so I release
1:11:51
that. I forgive myself for judging.
1:11:54
Judging what? Well, I start out judging you,
1:11:58
but if the thing I've been talking about is true, we all are part of
1:12:02
the same divine energy. As soon as I judge you, I've judged the divine
1:12:05
without thinking about it. As soon as I judge the divine, guess
1:12:09
what? I'm connected to the divine. So now I've judged myself as well. And
1:12:13
I cut myself off from the divine flow. So just like you
1:12:17
can cut yourself off from the blood flow, you can cut yourself off from the
1:12:20
divine flow. Not that the divine stopped flowing. I just
1:12:24
cut myself off from experiencing it. So the sooner I can find where
1:12:27
I cut off and release, the more I can move back into
1:12:31
flow again, which is then part of the
1:12:34
awakening process. But now we have a dilemma.
1:12:38
I was running a program with my teacher. We were both
1:12:42
co facilitating and on a break. He said, russell, you seem so
1:12:45
frustrated. I said, yeah, they're so slow to wake up. He said,
1:12:49
oh, Russell, if you had a little baby and it was
1:12:53
asleep, would you shake it? Say, wake up, grow
1:12:56
faster? No, because the sleep is part of the
1:13:00
growth process. So with a human and consciousness.
1:13:04
Yeah. Bingo. Yeah. We may receive something and
1:13:08
we may have to sleep on it for a while, because in the
1:13:11
internal state that never sleeps, that's where
1:13:15
we have a greater openness for the spiritual
1:13:18
flow of education, if you will, that awakens us and then we can go,
1:13:22
oh, now I'm ready for the next phase. So we do
1:13:26
have these rhythms, just like the heart has an up and a
1:13:30
down, open and a close, a breath in and a breath out.
1:13:33
Well, let's let all that happen. And then
1:13:37
perhaps the most interesting part of this, in my way, thinking about it, I used
1:13:41
to do the work I call. I do the work. The work I used to
1:13:44
call transformation. And everyone likes transformation.
1:13:48
And I do too, at one level. But the word, if you look it up
1:13:51
in a dictionary, means a change in form or appearance.
1:13:57
Okay? So I say, well, let's pretend I had an
1:14:00
old, old Volkswagen, but I always wanted a Ferrari.
1:14:04
You can go online and you can buy a Ferrari car kit. So you get
1:14:08
the body and it's literally. You can literally do this. And it's
1:14:11
designed to go over the frame of a Volkswagen.
1:14:16
Now the question is, do I have a Ferrari? No. But I did
1:14:20
transform the Volkswagen because it changed the former
1:14:23
appearance. Transmutation
1:14:28
is the same thing. It says it's a change in form or appearance to a
1:14:31
higher order of energy. Well, now we're progressing
1:14:36
but we still just change the form or appearance, although the energetic flow
1:14:39
is different. So imagine you put a different grade of
1:14:43
gasoline or something inside of your Ferrari
1:14:47
Volkswagen. But the real thing we're after is transcendence.
1:14:52
And to transcend something means to rise above, especially over
1:14:55
the negative. And so how do we learn to
1:14:59
transcend the apparent limitations of my mind, my
1:15:03
emotions, what's going on in the world, so I can create the
1:15:06
qualitative experience that rises above and stay loving?
1:15:11
Nelson Mandela, you know,
1:15:15
all these people who've shown us what it means to be loving in the
1:15:18
presence of oppression so we
1:15:22
don't have to be oppressed in the presence of
1:15:26
oppression. Although from the outside it will look that way.
1:15:29
But can I still be free? So we can use all these as
1:15:33
inspirations. And inspiration. I mean, I have so many of these things. Inspiration
1:15:37
comes from a Latin word, inspirari, which means to be breathed by
1:15:41
spirit. It's not something
1:15:44
that happens to me from the outside. It's the
1:15:48
spirit breathes me and I arise in its
1:15:52
awakening. So.
1:15:57
So we'll step into that.
1:16:02
Into being breathed. Yeah.
1:16:07
Russell, thank you so much for your time today.
1:16:11
This has been beautiful. And
1:16:15
I was going to say transformative. I'll say
1:16:20
transcendent. That's okay. See, the challenge
1:16:23
is, you know, we need the words to communicate. Yeah. But
1:16:27
we can use it to communicate to a higher level
1:16:31
so I don't have to say to somebody, oh, wrong word.
1:16:35
Just go. Okay, so what I think what you may be meaning is the ability
1:16:39
to expand in the presence of this. Oh, yeah, that's good. Fine,
1:16:43
we'll do that. Yeah.
1:16:47
And that's what I mentioned at a before, but I do want to end on
1:16:50
it as well, is your approach of there is a real
1:16:54
space of allowing in your presence,
1:16:58
which I think from the perspective
1:17:02
of the observer, effect has
1:17:06
an extremely loving resonance
1:17:09
for whomever is getting observed
1:17:13
by you. So thank you for bringing that.
1:17:17
Bringing that energy to it. It's very profound and important.
1:17:22
Yeah. Well, lest anyone be
1:17:25
misinformed, I am not the model of loving
1:17:29
kindness. We always teach the thing we most need
1:17:32
to learn. Yes. No, I will
1:17:36
not hold you to that standard all of the time, but thank you.
1:17:42
You certainly are able to embody it,
1:17:46
which is most appreciated. Well,
1:17:49
thank you. Your loving essence
1:17:53
radiates beautifully. Thank you, Russell. Thank
1:17:56
you for being here.