Maybe we can combine 2 things that everybody loves. Helping out the poor and blow jobs.
That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.
Most people who've never experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness and only hear them described tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.
It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, they all had the ability to do what we would call - I don't know what you would even call it - psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive the future, the past and the present simultaneously.
I describe the variety of different kinds of experiences I had, from seeing into the future to being inside the body of a bird and feeling the bird consciousness, to being in a plane of existence with beings that do not exist on this planet at all. And I described my experiences to shamans who started to laugh, saying, "Oh, we know those guys. "
We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq. Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there" reality - and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most magical and so-called Third World belief systems.
When I worked with various healers of one kind or another, very often what came up was that there was an "inner" person who was controlling what was going on in the life of the "outer" person, who thinks he's in control of his life. That inner person has a vested interest in keeping the person from getting well, so the healing doesn't take place.
When I first got on the internet as a tween, I wasn't comfortable showing up in social spaces. I didn't have a loud voice. As a function of my youth and gender, I wasn't given a voice at the dinner table, and nor maybe should I have been. But I thought I wanted one, and I was able to have it online. I wasn't a great talker, but I found these other skills. And when this stuff is described as "not real writing" or "bad for my brain" or whatever, it just seems like it's from people who wanted to keep their place at the dinner table.
I was really excited because I had never ever in my life done anything like this [Romeo + Juliette], and at such a young age it was like, "Wow, my dreams are coming true, I'm already in a movie at the age of 12. "
One of the things that I think we have learned is that we should all be very careful about making predictions about the future.
The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.