[00:00:01] Luke: All right, Joel. Have you noticed that in the past, let's just say year, how we perceive time is speeding up exponentially? Are you experiencing that, or is it just me?

[00:00:18] Joel: I get both. I've learned to slow everything down, so my days are really long. But then when I'm reflecting on how things are, more in a long term, I'm like, "Whoa, it's like a snap of a finger." All of a sudden, we're here. So I'm experiencing very non-linear intensity with the comparison of it.

[00:00:38] So I think the collective is going through an expedited process. Then our capacity to slow it down and have our personal journey go slower and more intense is a way to balance that. But yeah, I agree.

[00:00:54] Luke: I want to learn more about how you slow it down because I'm like--

[00:00:58] Joel: Yeah.

[00:00:59] Luke: It's like days into weeks into months, a year. The year's almost over. It is bizarre. I haven't applied any specific modality to try and slow things down, but I have been for almost 30 years, refining my capacity to be right where we are in this moment.

[00:01:21] And I've done a lot of reorganizing and training of the mind to make sure that I'm not time traveling. So I can't blame the perception of time speed on not being present or being out of body and time tripping. I'm right here in my body, pretty damn grounded most of the time. Yet still, at the end of every day it's 10:00 PM, and I'm just going, what just happened?

[00:01:50] Maybe it's because I'm writing all day. I don't know. It's tripping. What are some of the broad strokes in your practice of making that non-linear time malleable in your day-to-day life?

[00:02:08] Joel: Yeah. The Toltecs introduced a concept called not doing. And so it goes beyond the being just present in the now. It's actually where you are letting go of the world. So when I'm in a state of gazing, where I'm looking out at the world, my eyes cross and then everything turns into fractals, and then another world forms in front of my eyes.

[00:02:31] And when I'm there, it's very different time speed. And it took a lot of training to get there. I do these shamanic movements that make it possible for me to get to that psychedelic place. I don't necessarily recommend it because it's super ungrounding. So you have to balance that with the movements, which I do a lot of.

[00:02:52] And the movements aren't things that you can remember with your mind. You have to use your body memory in order to continue to do them. Otherwise, you'll get tripped up in your head trying to remember what's the next part of this sequence of movements. And so it's similar to being an athlete where you're in the flow state, where you just have to trust your body.

[00:03:13] And so I do so much of this, and I've been doing it for so long, and I'm tapping into the lineage of the shamans of ancient Mexico who did this very, very, very long time ago. These come from really distant time. And so I am in a relationship with them. So when I'm teaching my workshops, their energy shows up.

[00:03:31] I'm in a very non-linear experience the majority of my life now, but I'm not as productive. I'm not writing books. I'm not running a huge podcast program. I'm not communicating with lots of people every day. I'm spending most of my time alone.

[00:03:48] Luke: That sounds really nice.

[00:03:49] Joel: It is really nice. And that's about to change for me.

[00:03:52] Luke: I hardly communicate with anyone, and it's too much.

[00:03:55] Joel: Yeah.

[00:03:55] Luke: God bless the everyone and the anyone. But yeah, I think just at a place in life that I feel less social, more insulated.

[00:04:05] Joel: Yeah, yeah. It's been really nice to do that. I've been on 20 acres of land by myself, hanging out with the deer and ravens and eagles. I'm really into birds. So when a bird flies by, I feel like I am the bird. I'm experiencing the same flight feelings. I don't necessarily sleep a lot because I'm in this in between place, looking at certain colors and patterns while I'm about to go to sleep.

[00:04:29] I don't necessarily drop off that much. And then when I do drop off, I'm waking up often because my dreams are so intense now. I've learned to navigate sleep deprivation so that it doesn't bother me where it used to be really difficult to not get good sleep. So I've regulated my nervous system enough that I'm able to handle going long periods of time without sleep, without food, without water.

[00:04:54] I switched to carnivore, and that healed all my pain and my injuries, and it gave me an energetic boost that I'm not familiar with. It's a brand new thing for me. So I'm just in a real healing pattern right now and coming out of some old stories. I think it's just a balance right now, but I am heading into a time where I'm about to get busier, and I'm going to miss this time that I've been in. So I think we go through different stages for different reasons at different times.

[00:05:22] Luke: How do you learn to surrender to those stages? Because we all have a will. It's like you have the mind. You have the will. It's like, I want this. It's directional. It's goal-oriented and future-oriented, and maybe even more so for males, the builder archetype. I sometimes feel it's difficult to not be doing because I'm just wired to produce.

[00:05:54] Joel: Yeah.

[00:05:55] Luke: Maybe some programming, maybe some biology, neurochemistry. But even though I'm pretty good at being present, it's difficult for me to not be getting something done, even if it's gardening. I got all these Wachuma cacti that are babies, and I'm always taking care of those and repotting them and doing cuttings. But I'm still doing something even though I'm integrating in nature and I'm in a peaceful state. But to not be proactive is hard.

[00:06:25] Joel: Yeah. I just don't have many things that I'm tied to. I don't have a garden. I don't own a home. I am not married. Or I'm coming out of a relationship that's been long term, but even then, I was really alone in that relationship because it was dysfunctional and challenging. And so I was retreating into my aloneness a lot.

[00:06:49] The Castaneda material taught me the not doings, and it is feminine. Not doing is more feminine, and doing is more masculine. And so that was how I got trained since I was 16. So I've been practicing the not doings, and it's so liberating, and it's just a matter of time.

[00:07:09] If you read the Castaneda's material over and over and over, it starts to saturate you with an understanding of what the benefits of the not doings are. So I'm staring at the shadows, and the shadows become the world, and the world becomes the background. Or I am looking at the clouds or the stars moving, and all of a sudden, I'm rotating.

[00:07:31] My dreaming body becomes accessible. So it's just a really intense practice, and it does take some fierceness to stay there because the autopilot program comes in and tries to get you to worry about getting this, that, and the other done. So I had to modify my life so that I didn't have a lot of tasks.

[00:07:51] And I'm very intuitive. I don't plan what I'm going to say at my workshops. I don't plan what I'm going to do in my online courses. I trust and listen. And so therefore I don't have to spend a lot of time preparing for anything. I'm not writing any books. When I go on my YouTube channel, I just start talking.

[00:08:10] I don't think about what I'm going to say, and then I give a title to it later based on what I said. It just totally opens up the field for a totally different way of living. I highly recommend if somebody's in a position to be able to do that, to play around with it. Even when I was at construction management, I was using my psychic side of things to run the job site rather than stressing out and overthinking everything.

[00:08:38] And my job sites ran better than everyone else. But my bosses would get frustrated with me because I wasn't stressed like them. They didn't like it. So I had a lot of challenges with that. I almost had to pretend I was stressed at times so that I fit in. But I've been doing this way of living for a long time, so it's starting to all click for me to be in that more relaxed, trusting, intuitive state.

[00:09:05] Luke: That's a really interesting observation with the construction site. I've noticed at times in relationships with the feminine that being self-regulated and unbothered, and unworried is sometimes irritating to said partner because to them it can feel like you lack empathy.

[00:09:32] Joel: Yes.

[00:09:33] Luke: Because you're not mirroring, right?

[00:09:36] Joel: Exactly. It's intense.

[00:09:38] Luke: You feel for their predicament or their concerns, but if you're not also concerned and agitated, then it seems like you don't care. Have you experienced that in relationships other than construction too?

[00:09:50] Joel: Yeah, across the board. It's a reflection piece where you have to end up talking through that and try and explain the reason why you're doing that. Otherwise, they'll take it personal. So it's not an easy thing to break out of the typical way of relating and start to offer new ways of perceiving it.

[00:10:11] But if you have the compassion for where they're at, then you don't get triggered by the fact that they're that way. Then you find creative ways to invite them into the space that you're occupying, which can be even more triggering, depending on the timing. So you try to find that window when they really can accept that invitation.

[00:10:35] Luke: Have you met or do you see resistance from more of the collective that are caught up in the latest psyop and trauma-based mind control that if you are not feeding into the fight, that you somehow don't care or unaware that there's a fight to be fought?

[00:11:01] Joel: Absolutely. Yeah. People will attack you even and say that your indifference is going to lead to suffering. That we need to stand up and be men and speak truth to power. And I don't agree. I think it's the 100th monkey thing, that if we can unbind from these psyops and not be caught up in these waves of controlling us through storylines, that it's just a story.

[00:11:29] It's just a drama really. It's theater. It's ritual. It's psyops. So it doesn't mean we shouldn't be tapped into some aspects of it so that we understand their functionality, but you need to be minimal in that, I think, so that we don't get energy harvested in the process.

[00:11:48] Luke: Well said. This is my daily practice, bro. It's like, don't look at Telegram, Luke. I just want to see what's going on for a couple of minutes. Next thing you know, I'm an hour deep into the darkest Twitter thread. I wasn't even going there. I just want to get the highlights from Telegram, from the truthers.

[00:12:08] Yeah. It's a slippery slope. I wonder about that because there's an instinct within us to tap into news, the collective. If we were hunter-gatherers of 50, 60 people, you naturally want to have your finger on the pulse of who's doing what--

[00:12:27] Joel: For sure.

[00:12:28] Luke: --for safety and cohesion and all those things. But it's like our brain is still the 50 to 60 people tribal brain, and we have access to literally billions of people on these devices. And it's just like, we're not made to be able to take in that much information, especially the intensity and the speed with which the psyops and the programming is coming at us.

[00:12:53] Joel: Yeah, man. Yeah, it's definitely a balancing act. I've learned to catch myself as I'm starting to get pulled to reset my field. And that's why I really do the movements a lot, because it's like it clears whatever energy I picked up. And I'll shake and even yell and just try to remind myself of the importance of today.

[00:13:17] Today could be my last day. And am I going to spend it paying attention to what's going on in the world? Or do I want to be hanging out with the birds? I'd rather be with the birds. They're singing the most beautiful songs. They're not paying attention to this stuff. That's how I knew COVID was a psyop.

[00:13:34] I asked the birds, like, is there a pandemic? And they're just singing and playing. I just could tell from what was going on from creation that we're all good, that these are just storylines to hijack us.

[00:13:48] Luke: You are going to really like my wife. I hope you get to meet her. She's very into birds.

[00:13:52] Joel: Cool.

[00:13:53] Luke: She's my roadkill girl.

[00:13:55] Joel: Yeah. Oh yeah.

[00:13:56] Luke: When we were in Nevada City, I already know she's looking for roadkill. This is to harvest whatever she can to make her fans and things. Oh, there she is. Hi, sweetheart. You were so stealth. I was talking about you. We're recording. Yes, dear. That's okay. Live your best life. Cookie's in the bedroom.

[00:14:16] We were driving along a country ass road out there, and you see a bunch of vultures. And like, ooh, there's roadkill there, or there's going to be vulture feathers. So I'm like, "Okay." I marked that spot on the fence, and the next time we came by the next day, we stopped. There were tons of great vulture feathers. Dude, there was a whole wing  just sitting there.

[00:14:38] Joel: Wow.

[00:14:38] Luke: And she had one other wing, but I had to cut it off. I'm like, "Who de-winged the vulture?" It was such a mystery. I'm like, "I wish I had a trail cam. I just want to see what was happening there." It was so interesting. But yeah, she loves the birds too. When the plandemic-- I try to love my fellow humans, but I find it so annoying when people call it a pandemic.

[00:15:02] Joel: Totally, totally.

[00:15:03] Luke: I want to make a t-shirt. Don't call it what it wasn't. But I had an interesting experience to your point during that, in that when we were looking to move out here over Christmas 2020, I happened to sit with Bufo during that two-week period and was in a really exalted place afterward.

[00:15:26] The after shocks were pretty beautiful and intense, but I was in another field completely. So my phone was so toxic to me that I just stopped touching it. I just could not interface with the phone. I noticed that in that couple of weeks. And then we went right into a Joe Dispenza retreat, which was also not conducive to geeking out on your phone.

[00:15:52] So it was like, I don't know, maybe three weeks there where I was devoid a phone, and we're right in the middle of said pandemic. And I realized that even with all the shenanigans that the state was up to and all of the victims of the mind control and all the things that were going on culturally, without that phone, nothing at all in my life objectively had changed whatsoever.

[00:16:19] The only indication that something different was happening in the world and the only one without a phone was if I walked into certain places, someone would say something like, you need a thing on your face.

[00:16:32] Which is different, but that was the only thing that was different. I'm eating the same food, sleeping in the same bed, same friends, just same daily practices, same money. Anything you could measure did not change at all, and I was like, "Wow. That's how powerful the programming is."

[00:16:53] Joel: For sure.

[00:16:53] Luke: Yeah. So tell me about the mythology of Carlos Castaneda, Don Juan, this whole trip. I'm sure some people listening will be very familiar with it. I really know nothing about this teaching at all. It's just something I've never come across. It's been in the periphery. And I know that's one of the roots or pillars of your worldview and practices and things. So take us back a little bit to just frame what that's all about and then maybe how you were led to that path early on.

[00:17:34] Joel: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, the Toltech Dreaming arts is what it's often referred to, and it's not particular to Carlos Castaneda or Don Juan, but it is really rare how advanced they were within it. So I trained with some elders who practiced these things who were learning it from their elders.

[00:17:55] And it's ancient teachings. Castanedo was the only one that ever wrote it down, at least during that time. And so he caught a lot of shit for it. A lot of people who were believe those teachings to be sacred were very upset with him for sharing it, that it was supposed to be private.

[00:18:19] And I can understand. I'm not saying that he did the right thing or not. But I was introduced to it by a really powerfully gifted, fearless person that was much older than me when I was 16. And he basically pretended to be Don Juan, and I was an apprentice. And I got this advanced intense training within these arts.

[00:18:42] And it's essentially a three-phase system where you practice these shamanic movements that make it easier to recapitulate. It's the movements. The recapitulation leads to being able to walk through other worlds in dream time. So they have these gates of dreaming that you can cross. And it would be really hard to cross those gates if you didn't practice the movements and practice the recapitulation.

[00:19:07] The movements, if done enough times over a period of years, will lead to these unique states of silence that make it possible to go back into your memories and reclaim your soul energy or your soul essence that you left. So it's like doing a soul retrieval on yourself.

[00:19:26] If you get good at that recapitulating, it's like it unlocks a treasure chest of memories that were compartmentalized that we forgot all about. And that is a very powerfully intense experience to have, especially if memories from zero to three start to come back. It's like doing psilocybin on a large scale or doing Bufo or something, where you get access to stuff that was dormant. And to be able to do that without substances is pretty cool.

[00:19:55] Luke: Very cool. There's a cost to substances.

[00:20:01] Joel: Yeah. Don Juan said it does untold damage to our energy body, so we want to be careful with how much and how often.

[00:20:08] Luke: Yeah, I agree.

[00:20:11] Joel: So the movements are, there's a lot of resistance for people to do the movements because there's forces here that don't want us to find a sustainable way to move into the next stage of evolution because they're higher on the food chain and they want to make sure that they can continue to have access to harvesting humans' fear and hopium. Or just in general, the energy that they can feed off when we're in arguments.

[00:20:38] That's why arguments get intensified, is because those forces come in and they start nibbling. So it's this ability to stop feeding-- as an individual, you don't have to contribute to that process. And then if you're disciplined enough, they say that you become unpalatable to these forces because you don't taste good anymore. So that's the goal, is to become impeccable so that you're no longer accessible as food.

[00:21:05] Luke: Can I interject, a question within that? Hold your thought. That, to me, makes intuitive sense, that you get immunity to some of these anti-life dark forces that are clearly present in this experience.

[00:21:25] At the same time, and I know you have some experience with fallen gurus and cult leaders and things like that, which I do too, it seems to me that there's also, as one ascends and consciousness and emits more light, for lack of a better way to say it, that also attracts the moths and in come the temptations that corrupt one who was originally pure in their intentions.

[00:21:55] Joel: Yeah. So these forces are very clever in that once you come out of victim hood, then they try to convince you that you're victorious to turn you into a cult leader or whatever, so that you can affect and make sure that there's a lot more people that end up getting accessible.

[00:22:13] So there's really no way. Like Don Juan said, "I have a companion for life, whether I like it or not. This force is following me around, and I have to be impeccable for the rest of my days until my last moment because it's here to make sure that I don't get free from its clutches."

[00:22:30] And so 99% of the time, when a person builds their luminosity up, they end up being hijacked and used in a way that makes sure that these forces stay in charge. And it's a very disturbing thing to come to terms with. That's why I tell people to go really slow in this path and not try to advance too quickly.

[00:22:53] Because if you don't know yourself, you're going to be easily manipulated and controlled. And so we want to have counsel around us and be in a round table rather than there be a pedestal.

[00:23:06] Luke: Yeah.

[00:23:07] Joel: If you let yourself get put on a pedestal, if you put someone else on a pedestal, everyone's going to get hurt. And so finding people that'll be really true and reflective to you about anything they sense that's out of balance with your being. And this is where celibacy for a period of time can be critical. But it can also backfire, like all the yoga dudes that came from India that were celibate.

[00:23:28] They repressed all that energy, and then it just it destroyed the whole communities, because it finally had to come out. So we're not supposed to not have a lover or not be expressive sexually, although Don Juan did figure out how to use his sexual energy for dreaming only.

[00:23:46] So there does come a point that if you want, there is a way to travel into other layers of the onion without having to-- you learn to balance that so that you can use-- they say sexual energy and dreaming energy are the same. So you want to be very careful with your sexual energy.

[00:24:03] There's no such thing as casual sex. When you have sex with someone, there's a seven year bond that happens that Toltecs can see. And so being careful with who you're with and then being careful just with your energy in general as far as semen retention and all that stuff plays a key role. But yeah, these forces are very powerfully capable of making sure that we are controllable one way or another.

[00:24:30] Luke: Doesn't it seem as though these forces-- and I've wasted time and energy trying to figure out who they are. You know what I mean? Because there's a field of energy above the theys. It seems that they work through these different groups and secret societies and bloodlines, and so that tends to get us chasing around, trying to decide where to point our finger, like on Scooby-Doo.

[00:25:03] And you end up in the circle and you're all pointing at each other. Is it the Jesuits? Is it the Freemasons? It's interesting and novel, but it doesn't really matter. I think for me it's like I just want a name. I haven't come up with a good name to call that thing, which it's the polarity.

[00:25:21] It's the antithesis of goodness and of love and of life and vitality. And it is like a parasitic energy. But what I have noticed about whatever it is, whoever they are, is it has such a keen understanding of the human intellect and the human ego.

[00:25:43] To your point of, as someone starts to ascend in their energy and their understanding, the fallen guru thing, they know that there's been a virtuous period of celibacy. Let's say someone has renounced their sexual energy and they don't know it, but the egoic part of them, or their instinctive part of them is just laying in wait for the opportunity.

[00:26:06] Those energies know that too, and so it's like they're just waiting for a gap, a chink in the armor to get in. And then all of a sudden you have someone who was truly spiritually gifted that is now exploiting and abusing people.

[00:26:23] To me, that is one of the most fascinating human phenomenon, I think because I've had some personal experience with it where-- and one in particular person, one of my teachers along the way was incredibly tapped in, incredibly wise and gifted and had a very legitimate spiritual energy that was incredibly healing.

[00:26:43] Being around him could lift me out of a terrible mental and emotional place instantaneously. Sometimes he'd pick up the phone and I'd be all upset. I'd go two seconds, tell him about my problems, and he would just be laughing his ass off at me, and it hurt my feelings.

[00:27:04] Next thing you know, I'm laughing at my dumb drama too. He's just such a gifted guy. And also had a really dark shadow side of unresolved trauma and ended up being really abusive and manipulative and things like that. So it took me a long time to be able to reconcile how those two can meet.

[00:27:24] Because it seems like when someone falls from grace, you want to discount their gifts and wisdom completely because what they're showing now is in opposition to that. How do you see both of those existing at the same time?

[00:27:43] Joel: Yeah. In the Toltec tradition, they say everyone has holes in their consciousness. They're just in different places. And if you ever think that you no longer have holes in your consciousness, you're in serious trouble. It doesn't exist. But that's what happens when people call themselves enlightened or whatever. I don't believe that that ever happens.

[00:28:05] But yeah, I call them shadow teachers. They are very dangerous in the amount of people they can hurt because they can mislead you to thinking that they are capable of truly being unconditional in their support, in their awareness.

[00:28:21] So for the Toltecs, you have to lose self-importance, have death as an advisor, and erase personal history. Those are the three premises of making sure that you're not going to fall into that trap. And then avoid being in a situation where people rely on you. You teach your students how to become independent.

[00:28:49] If you create some sort of dynamic where they are in some form of desperation around needing to see you and all that, there's a period of time where you support them in order to get to where they're strong enough to do it on their own. But this whole worship, the teacher and all that stuff gets really tricky.

[00:29:09] And there's just got to be a way to keep yourself in check so that you don't become that as a teacher. But yeah, man, it's the shadow work. So getting to know your past and getting to know your blueprint and what your likely vulnerabilities will be when you start to get really powerful energetically, you got to have to stalk yourself.

[00:29:32] And the only way to do that really is to come to terms with what makes you-- Toltecs say that once you get really strong, you want to go find a boss to work for who has a massive ego who's never been defeated, and make sure you can handle being ridiculed and fucked with to find out what wounds you still carry.

[00:29:57] And that's like an advanced stage of the journey. So that could be an interaction with a police officer who's misusing his power. That could be working for a construction company where the boss is just extremely ruthless in his capacity to find your weaknesses. So Toltecs don't think this world is supposed to get rid of tyrants.

[00:30:19] They're actually a necessary ingredient. And it's not these elite family bloodlines that are in charge. It's non-human forces that have possessed them. So you don't want to battle the tyrants, according to the toll texts. You want to outmaneuver them so that you don't end up-- because they say that the tyrants usually win.

[00:30:40] The masses will follow the tyranny. They're terrified of evil, so they're not going to ever want to come to terms with the fact it exists to the degree that wouldn't be needed. So it doesn't matter how much information you give people, they can't hear it if they can't face the predicament that we're in.

[00:30:59] Luke: That is a really interesting aspect of the character of humanity. I've looked at this a lot, especially during the pandemic time, just was shocked by the sheer mass number of people that were so easily manipulated. I have nothing but compassion. It's not like, oh, I was too smart to get tricked.

[00:31:25] It's not that at all. It's just like, wow. And I think looking back on my own naivete in ways that I've been manipulated or abused in the past, I think part of it is, if you're not a sociopath or psychopath, it's very difficult to understand that many people are. Because you can't imagine being that way because you've never been that way, and you're not that way now. Do you think that's part of that failing?

[00:31:56] Joel: Yeah. If you don't have a reference for it within you, then you just assume that inherently people are good. But it's just not the case.

[00:32:03] Luke: And you can't imagine someone that climbs their way to a position of power in politics or celebrity or something like that. It's even more difficult to imagine them because then you have the projection of a persona that's been sold to you, which is not even the real article. There's a mask that's showing you one thing. Then there's a sociopath behind it. So you have a double barrier to being able to see and accept that reality.

[00:32:37] Joel: Yeah. The Toltecs practice and art where you sit in a dark room and you call in one person at a time, just invite their spirit-- not them. You're not like inviting them, but you're inviting their essence to be witnessed. And you learn to see through the many masks and veils so that you can get to the essence of who they really are.

[00:32:59] And it's learning to see energy. It's learning to cut past the facade. And if we could get really good at this, then nobody could lie to us or deceive us because we would have that tool in our tool chest. And that takes real practice. Because those masks have mass behind them. And then you might think you got to the real thing, but there's even deeper. I bet there's like people pretending to be villains that are actually doing it for good. Because they're trying to trigger us and wake us up.

[00:33:32] Luke: The Q people think that that's Donald Trump.

[00:33:35] Joel: Yeah, that's too bad. That's a real bad. That's scary to how bad that's gotten. But yeah, so just being able to play with all these things and start to-- and being able to laugh at our situation, laugh at ourselves, make fun of ourselves, make fun of everyone and everything.

[00:33:51] The real masters are hilarious. They're not trying to convince you-- in fact, in the Toltec world, if there is a healing that needs to happen, they'll pretend that their assistant is the healer, and they'll pretend to be the assistant, so that it's like an offset. And then they'll be this lowly assistant sweeping the floor, but they're really the one that's running the show.

[00:34:14] So if you can play those roles and not need to be seen as the one, then you have all this flexibility. And then you can actually get a lot more done. And so there's some real freedom at a certain point, and that's what they call controlled folly, where you recognize that the world is operating under a folly, and that you learn to match people's energy where they're at rather than try to convince them to change.

[00:34:44] So I go into construction situations, and I can't be this guy that practices Toltec dreaming arts. It wouldn't fit. So I have to pretend that I'm just like them. When we're out to lunch, I have to talk about things as if I'm just on their same wavelength. Otherwise it just wouldn't work.

[00:35:03] And that's like being an actor. And it's actually really fun to play something other than what I am, to play a different character. And you can take that into deeper and deeper stages where in situations, where you really need to, like with a police officer or a situation where you can intuit the drama that you need to exude in order to get out of the situation that could be tragic or whatever.

[00:35:28] So our actors, even though most of them are MKUltra-ed, some of them are naturally just really gifted actors, and they get really high from playing a role outside of their typical character. And so there's a lot of freedom in being able to especially play roles that would typically be embarrassing in a public setting.

[00:35:49] So one of the ways we free ourself is doing handstands in the grocery store and doing strange things in public, and getting over the need to be seen as normal. Breaking out of that heavy patterning of conformity. It is critical. Because all these people don't matter. But if we let them matter, then we'll stay in a limited capacity to express ourselves. It can be anything.

[00:36:20] Luke: You know what it is for me?

[00:36:21] Joel: What's that?

[00:36:23] Luke: Not holding back on my weird biohacks when I got on airplanes.

[00:36:27] Joel: Yeah, there you go. Huge.

[00:36:29] Luke: There would've been a time in my life where, a, I would've been super embarrassed to go anywhere in public if I didn't look super cool, when I was Hollywood rock and roll guy. And I started noticing over the years that I go, wow, I just went to Whole Foods in dirty sweats and a t-shirt, and I wasn't even self-conscious.

[00:36:45] This is amazing. But when I go on airplanes, it's such a shit show, dude, all the stuff that I'm doing and have. Thankfully, I have a very not self-conscious wife who isn't phased at all by what people think of us. But sometimes I'll step out of myself for just a second and look objectively in the sky as a freak.

[00:37:05] And I could tell the feedback from people are like, "What?" Got my EMF hood. Just the whole thing. It's ridiculous. I'm making hydrogen water. It's a whole shit show. But I like doing things that are on the edge of embarrassing for that reason. Although I haven't thought it through so much. But now that you explain that, I go, "Yeah. Wow. I think over the years I've lost a lot of that self-importance and self-consciousness just by being willing to be that guy and giving fewer and fewer fucks as life goes on.

[00:37:40] Joel: Yeah. And you're giving permission to people to do the same. So it is not just for you. It produces that capacity for more people to become liberated in the ways that will benefit them.

[00:37:55] Luke: Tell me about your experience with cult dynamics.

[00:38:01] Joel: Yeah, man. I was working with very, very gifted people who developed delusions of grandeur because they became really powerful. So it didn't start off necessarily negative, although the red flags were in place. I just didn't want to see them. And so I was handing my power over to these people because I thought they were so rare and that the world was so fucked that they were a lifeline.

[00:38:32] And if I didn't stay with them that I was doomed. And they bought into that and used that to like-- it's that left behind cult concept. You're going to be left behind if you don't keep up. Which in a way I'm glad was there because it forced me to push myself to train and really try to achieve a lot in a short period of time.

[00:38:58] In my first cult, I started at 16. I went from being a pretty wealthy, rich kid to being a really badass martial artist that was minimalist. I turned down my parents' money. I went and lived in a studio by myself, made my own money, started landscaping, started doing framing, construction.

[00:39:20] Because I didn't want to be domesticated. I didn't want to be weak from the financial support. And that was not just my idea, but my teacher was basically like, "You're going to have to extract yourself from that world. Otherwise you're going to be soft. And so from 16 to 18 was a massive transformation for me.

[00:39:40] And from the entire year of 17, I was celibate without even a single sexual thought because I was so focused on the Castaneda material. I wouldn't even look at girls. I was just like in the woods. We were doing parkour before they called it parkour. We were facing physical fears. And I was in love with that life.

[00:40:00] It was really going to be hard for me to leave it. But that teacher started saying things, confessing to me how powerful he was getting. And I could see something that got ahold of him. And so I got really freaked out. And I went to look for an actual older-- because this guy was only five years older than me.

[00:40:23] He was 21, and I was 16 when I met him. And then at 20, when I became 21, I went to find a shaman in New Mexico. Actually, my sister found a shaman, told me about him, and he was a real deal. I went to meet this man in New Mexico. And all the red flags were there to begin with, with him too. But he was like, had this old grandfather energy.

[00:40:49] And what happened was everyone from that first cult followed me down there to find out what was going on, including the teacher. And the teacher tried to come down and act really cool, like he was-- and this elder, this old grandfather just swatted him like a fly. He used his ancestors and sent them into his dream time so that he couldn't sleep. Just was fucking with him every night and just making fun of him during the meetings.

[00:41:21] Luke: Was the elder a Native American guy?

[00:41:24] Joel: Yeah. Chippewa and Choctaw trained since birth. He was taken away from his mother by his grandfather on his first day of life, so they would never be under the hypnosis of a typical nurturing environment.

[00:41:38] Luke: Damn.

[00:41:38] Joel: Yeah. And so he was a very well-seasoned, lucid dreamer. He could walk into other worlds easily. He could remote view at a young age. He was very, very powerful. And so an example would be like when his grandmothers or grandfathers would come to him in dreams and say, "There's a woman--" he lived in New Mexico.

[00:42:03] They'd say, "There's a woman in London that has a tattoo on her left arm, and it says this, that and the other. She's going to be at this concert in two weeks." Then he would send one of his apprentices that lived in London to go to that concert, look for the woman with the tattoo, tap her on the shoulder and say, "Hey, you're invited to come to New Mexico to meet the elder. He said You would be here."

[00:42:27] So a week later, she's in New Mexico, and he marries her, and he had wives from all over the world. And they all wanted to marry him because he had this supposed capacity to-- he had a seed. His seed would make sure that each child had its genetic memory intact. That they had transcended the typical recycling process and had access to their ancestral memories. And it was actually true. These kids were super powerful.

[00:42:55] Luke: Really?

[00:42:56] Joel: Yeah.

[00:42:57] Luke: I think so Les Wexner, and Epstein, those guys were into some of that--

[00:43:02] Joel: I have no idea about them.

[00:43:03] Luke: The type of reading stuff. Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:05] Joel: I've seen this with Native Americans though, where there's something where their genetic awareness isn't always as severed as some of the other races. It's very earth-based stuff, but you never know. We all have shamanic histories as far as ancestry goes.

[00:43:23] So he was powerful. He helped me get away from that first guy. One of the women that was in the apprenticeship with me came down and stayed with me, and we got married, had kids, and we're raising our kids in this cult.

[00:43:40] Luke: Wow. So you jumped from one cultish dynamic into another one.

[00:43:47] Joel: Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:48] Luke: Interesting.

[00:43:49] Joel: And then this Native American healing woman, a medicine woman from El Paso, Texas, came over to meet the Elder, and one by one she started to convince us to leave. She saw what was going on. And then my wife and I ended up living with her in El Paso, and she helped us to heal from the previous two groups by helping us get back in our heart and really get to the emotional wounding.

[00:44:15] Luke: With these two charismatic leaders, what was their hook? What was it that lured you, but also, what were they seeking to extract from you? Was it just adulation? Were they trying to get money, put you into servitude as a volunteer to build, bring more people? What were they looking for from you? I'm asking this because it's not like this shit stopped. There's probably people listening to this right now. They're going to be like, "Whoa, I think my teacher might be a little shady."

[00:44:55] Joel: Yeah, yeah. It's tricky because if you can build a large enough group, you can achieve certain unique states of consciousness in a dream state. So the Mayans really were able to exit this reality by having enough people focused on another layer of the onion. And so both of them were attempting to build a group that was powerful enough to leave this place intact. We call it human mass.

[00:45:22] The first teacher hooked me because he was physically fearless. He was doing acid drops off the bridge with a skateboard in Seattle. He just didn't care. And I was just so impressed. So the parkour thing in the woods was just addicting. We were jumping out of trees and doing ninja rolls down the hill and crossing logs with 300-foot drops.

[00:45:42] We were shaking out in the middle, and you have to really figure out your fearlessness in order to not die. We were doing the craziest stuff in the woods, like these big logs where you'd run across and skate them on your feet with just your shoes. And if you fell, you would've fallen to your death.

[00:46:00] So you had to commit because he was just one of these people that was an adrenaline junkie. Plus, he was really gifted as a psychic. So he could tell me things about my past that he couldn't possibly know. That was a hook.

[00:46:14] Luke: That's a major hook because that is impressive. When I meet someone and they have that kind of insight, it makes me want to follow them.

[00:46:22] Joel: Yeah.

[00:46:22] Luke: You're like, "If they know that, then they must know something else that could be helpful."

[00:46:30] Joel: Yeah. And he was a word singer. He would put me in a trance just by the way he talked. He was celibate and been saving all that energy, and I respected that because he wasn't chasing women. But he was using me because he was too scary to lure other women. He had an intimidating energy, and so I wasn't scary, and so I was inviting all these females to come train with us. And I think that's why he wanted me there, because he could tell that I could do that.

[00:46:59] Luke: Recruiter.

[00:47:00] Joel: Yeah. Topher talks about that. Topher Gardner, he was the recruiter of a yoga cult that he was a part of. And once he walked away, the whole thing fell apart because without the recruiter-- that's what happened with my thing. I walked away, and the whole thing fell apart for him.

[00:47:20] Then with the elder, he was even more psychic. But he wasn't psychic in the same way. He had his grandfathers and grandmothers that he knew when they were alive, who had now crossed. They were giving him information that was legit information about people and about events to come. Because we say this is a nonlinear experience and that the future, past, and present are occurring simultaneously.

[00:47:48] So people that can-- they call them dark dreamers. They can see into the future. Some of them are pretty incredible with that because they're not attached. They're able to unbiasedly look without having an attachment to what it's going to be. And then this elder head basically recruited all these women that were really beautiful from all over the world.

[00:48:15] So we were doing vision quests and sweat lodges every week. All these women could sing and dance, and everyone's in sarongs. We're in New Mexico, and it was beautiful. It was a powerful time. And people were getting really profound visions, and their vision quests, the sweat lodges would go on for days, and people would come from all over the world.

[00:48:40] And it was just every morning we'd all wake up and talk about our dreams. And then that inspired everyone's dreaming to go into that next level, because there's just so much attention on dream time. These little kids that he was raising that were his, they were all having the most profound prophetic dreaming experiences.

[00:48:58] That was hard to walk away from all that, but it was, in reality, transurfing. They talk about whenever a group starts to grow and get powerful, that a pendulum comes in. Something to make sure that that group doesn't actually become successful at escaping the mainstream consciousness.

[00:49:19] So that's the trick with this realm, is that we're not just dealing with human interference. We're dealing with forces that can hijack really anything and everything. And it's just a matter of being aware of that so that we're really careful with what we do in groups, what we do in general.

[00:49:40] But yeah, this woman that helped us get out of all that, she was aware of those things and spoke to that stuff, and tried to keep our container a lot smaller, and make it more private. But her demise ended up being old age and alcohol. She eventually wasn't able to continue with her gifts. So everyone has their areas where they tend to fall on some level, and it's all really sad and unfortunate.

[00:50:15] Luke: When you were speaking to the idea of enlightenment earlier and expressed that you perceive it to be a fallacy, at least as we commonly hold it, do you think that the limitation of consciousness has to do with a soul still being in a body and that there's only a certain level you can reach while you still have an animal part of you that's operational in order for your soul to be in it?

[00:50:51] Joel: Yes and no. If you can make fun of yourself properly and live in a state of intensity where you're not needing people to validate you, you can do the most incredible things here. Like Don Juan in the books, he could use his dreaming body to merge with a river and then end up 3,000 miles down the river in a blink of an eye.

[00:51:14] He could walk into other layers of the onion and back without anyone ever knowing. But he also recognized that he was therefore being targeted by forces on a level that's incomprehensible. So he never referred to himself as enlightened, although if somebody knew about this guy and used the term under that vocabulary, they would call it beyond enlightened, this mastery.

[00:51:45] But because he was aware of how powerful these forces are, he didn't ever refer to himself as anything. And in fact, he would walk around, pretend to be this decrepit old man. He would hide his power. He found the peyote to be a very earth-based medicine that balanced his being. So he would go and sing the songs and do the peyote, and he was okay with not needing to be recognized by people because the earth and the sun were his source of energy.

[00:52:23] And he was validated by those things instead. So I think for the most part, people are operating from-- even though they may be spiritual, there's this religious overlay that's hijacked spirituality. The Toltecs say religion is the hardest thing to extract apprentices from.

[00:52:46] It's like the ultimate programming. So all the religions, in my opinion, were designed by forces to make sure that we don't discover the secrets of the earth and the sun. It puts it into situations that are not simple. That have all these crazy stories. But I think they hired mystics to write the religion so that they would be seductive. And I think the mystics snuck in really beautiful teachings. So you could work inside of a religion, deliberate yourself as long as you could read between the lines, so to speak.

[00:53:23] Luke: This Don Juan fellow, what time period did he exist in, and where did he live? How did he roll? Because I know very little about this mythology or the story. Was Carlos Castaneda a seeker and a writer who then wrote books about his experiences with Don Juan? Is that the basic gist of it?

[00:53:49] Joel: Yeah. So Carlos was an anthropology student at UCLA, and he was trying to get knowledge about peyote to write a book about it. He went looking for an informant, and he ended up finding someone named Juan Matus. And Don just means elder. So it was Elder Juan Matus.

[00:54:13] Luke: He finds him in Mexico?

[00:54:18] Joel: Yeah, Sonora, I believe. I'd have to reread it. But yeah, he met this man who he knew, and he said, "I know this eccentric old Indian, and I'll try to connect you to him." They were sitting at a bus stop waiting for a bus, a Greyhound or whatever, and he goes, "Oh my God, that's him."

[00:54:42] And so Carlos gets up, and he goes and asks him, if-- "I'd be willing to pay you for any information you can give me on peyote." And Don Juan locked eyes with him and just totally fucked him up. He just couldn't talk. He just shut him down.

[00:54:55] And then he tried to push past that, and he was saying all this stuff that wasn't true and trying to convince him that he's this really cool guy. And then Don Juan took his eyes off of him and said, "If you can find me where I live, then I'll that'll be a test for you." And so Carlos--

[00:55:13] Luke: What time period are we talking here?

[00:55:15] Joel: Yeah. So that would've been 1960, '59, '60.

[00:55:20] Luke: So this is maybe just before Timothy Leary and Ram Dass going to Mexico and find mushrooms. It's in that same flowering of West mates South.

[00:55:32] Joel: Yeah. Carlos was already in his late '30s, going to school late in life, and Don Juan at that point would've been in his late '80s.

[00:55:42] Luke: Oh wow.

[00:55:42] Joel: But Don Juan, even though he is more than twice his age, he was so much younger than Carlos, as far as physical abilities, energy levels. He was a really, really gifted old Indian. And so Carlos ends up finding him, and rather than it being a book about anthropology, Carlos got sucked into the knowledge, and he stopped being an anthropologist and actually became an apprentice.

[00:56:12] Luke: Wow.

[00:56:13] Joel: Then the books go on to explain his actual breakthroughs with perception. And Don Juan being as powerful as he was, he tested Carlos to the max, and he tricked him. He made him think he was this old Indian living in a shack. But actually, he was a really multifaceted stockbroker.

[00:56:38] He wore a suit and tie in New York and would travel all over the world and was totally functioning in all the different ways. But he didn't reveal that to him until way, way late in the apprenticeship. And he taught him all this shamanic stuff that was typical shamanic stuff, but he was really teaching him a level of sorcery that's not typically even discovered even in the world of common day teaching.

[00:57:04] So reading the Castanedo books in itself will move you into a state of heightened awareness just by tapping into it. That's why I don't recommend people listening to the audio, because then you won't be totally paying attention because the books will shut you out if you're not in a state in which you could understand it.

[00:57:23] You have to be in heightened awareness to receive it, and that's what the books are designed to do. So Carlos put his spirit into the books, and Carlos became very powerful himself. So you're tapping into a lineage. I call them the never ending story because you can read them over and over and over, and you swear you've never read this part before because you weren't meant to hear it until now.

[00:57:47] So people try to criticize the books and say they were made up. If Carlos made that stuff up, that would mean he's even more powerful than if he had learned it. There's no making this stuff up. I practice these things. They are so powerful. But the haters have to say that it was made up because they can't even touch it. It's all this--

[00:58:10] Luke: How many books were there?

[00:58:12] Joel: It ended up being 12 because he wrote like some practical books at the end that were like, how to do the movements. And one of the books is called The Wheel of Time, and it's just a collection of quotes.

[00:58:24] Luke: And Don Juan's foundational premise was out of Toltec tradition?

[00:58:34] Joel: Yeah, he was a Yaqui Indian, and he was raised in a reservation, and he saw his parents get killed and all that. But he got intervened with by a Toltec medicine man. So it doesn't have anything to do with Yaqui. Toltec doesn't mean that you come from a certain part of the world. One of the toll tech teachers was a German man.

[00:58:58] Toltec in this tradition just means that you've become capable of doing the Toltec dreaming arts. It's like a lineage that's imbued upon you. And so a lot of people misunderstand or they think, who the fuck are you, a white guy, doing this stuff? But it's not limited to anyone.

[00:59:19] And that's one of the things my elder said, is there's only two tribes in this world-- a tribe of man and the tribe of woman. If we keep comparing each other in race, we're going to miss out on being able to really come to terms with what our actual enemy is.

[00:59:35] Luke: That's one of the biggest psyops there is, if not the biggest. You know what I mean? I trip out on this too, because my wife wrote a book called Power Animals.

[00:59:45] Joel: Yeah. I saw it at Cal's house.

[00:59:47] Luke: Oh, cool. Yeah. So when we first met, she was in the process of writing that book for the first year. And one of the things I didn't know as she was writing that, that I learned, was that the word shaman is originally from Siberia.

[01:00:06] Joel: Yeah, totally.

[01:00:07] Luke: And my wife is a white lady, and so at times I've, I don't know so much anymore, but there was sometimes some friction around someone teaching shamanism or being involved in it. And it was very race restrictive, which I can understand from the standpoint of, I don't know, not honoring different cultures that over hundreds, if not thousands of years, develop certain technologies and modalities and teachings.

[01:00:36] I get all that. But when I heard that, I thought, that's so funny. It's like people are getting real uptight about that particular word. It's like someone owns it. And then even further, as she was researching it, it's like part of the origin of the word too. And just in practice as a whole is that it's like a universal teaching for all of humanity.

[01:00:58] It doesn't belong to any one culture. So that was really an interesting thing to stumble upon for me. Not that I was locked into that view, but if you ask me like, what is a shaman? I see a vision of a Shipibo. It's like there's nothing other than that. And meanwhile, at the same time, before that, you have people living in the snow caves across Siberia that are shamans that still exist also. It's interesting.

[01:01:27] Joel: And in the books, Carlos ended up adapting the word shaman later, but Don Juan never referred to him as that. He was just trying to find a syntax to help people understand. Don Juan referred to himself as a man of knowledge. And knowledge doesn't mean information. Knowledge means power. So in the world of perception, doesn't matter what kind of things. It has to do with what you can do.

[01:01:51] Luke: Yeah.

[01:01:52] Joel: And that is power, is the undoing, the not doing the unbinding from this story. Being able to go into all these other layers. And so it's just critical now more than ever that we have access to all this information that we learn about perception instead.

[01:02:09] And perception can't be taught through information. It has to be taught through experience. So fasting and sleep deprivation and things that take you out of the doings of the world is really where the breakthroughs happen. And that's why there's so much pure-- the focus of purification. And that's what recapitulation is.

[01:02:30] It's the most advanced form of purification according to the Toltecs, is you reach a point of silence where you're able to breathe your essence back. And on the exhale you're purging your past, and you'll actually feel acidic memory coming out of your mouth. And so we call it puking up our past.

[01:02:50] And if you can purge all of the memories, which is a lot, then you'll have access to being able to travel. And they refer to that as a warrior traveler. So we need to become warriors capable of handling the jolts that occur when you unbind from this layer. And so physically strong, energetically strong, critical.

[01:03:13] And then on top of that, you want to be able to-- having recapitulated, you've erased your personal history, so you're no longer blueprinted by it. Because they say your blueprint of how you were conceived, the first girlfriend, that plays a pattern in all the rest of your relationships.

[01:03:34] All these blueprints really affect us, and if we don't go clear them, then we're always going to be predictable. Like Don Juan would say, you want to have a fog around you so that nobody knows where you're coming or going, including yourself. So becoming mysterious again, like we were when we were little. We didn't know things.

[01:03:55] But then we copied the description of the world that are people who raised us. And we became hypnotized just like they became hypnotized. And humanity's evolution is determined now by people coming out of hypnosis so that we become magical and not predictable.

[01:04:12] Because the forces that are stalking us and trying to feed off of us, they can pretty much predict how we're going to react to situations. So how you refine yourself or the shadow work that you do so that you-- Cal was talking about this. He's changed a lot recently.

[01:04:29] Luke: He has. Cal Callahan, our mutual friend. That guy has grown so much in the past couple of years since I've known him. It's insane. He's one of my go-to guys if I feel I need a perspective on something. What a dude.

[01:04:49] Joel: It's amazing. Yeah. So cool. I only know him recently, so I don't know who he was, but he was saying--

[01:04:55] Luke: It's not like there was anything wrong with him before. And also I'm not like, oh, he's reached my level now. What I'm saying is just bearing witness to an awakening is really beautiful. Andin my experience of my own awakening, which is ongoing of course, and what I've made it through so far, has taken almost 30 years.

[01:05:17] But to your 100th monkey thing, I think that's part of it. It's like, I don't know, back when I got on this journey of finding oneself, healing, whatever you want to call it-- spiritual awakening, quest for self-realization-- there were so few people that ever made progress. And those of us that did, it took literally decades.

[01:05:39] And now I see people that are much newer to the path that three or four years ago they were working a corporate job, trying to make money or doing whatever. Cal fitting within that, he was into trading and all this stuff. He was very career focused and whatnot, and not interested in these topics. And you see someone like that in three years are already caught up, if not exceeded you in many ways. It's like, wow, there has to be something going on--

[01:06:12] Joel: I agree.

[01:06:12] Luke: --that wasn't 20 years ago, 30 years ago. A guy like Cal, when I got into this 30 years ago, would've been so exceptional in where he is right now. And now there's a base level that most people, you and I roll with, operate on. And so it's like the stakes are higher than they've ever been.

[01:06:42] Joel: Truly.

[01:06:42] Luke: But the performance is rising to meet it.

[01:06:45] Joel: Yeah. In the Toltec world, we say forces rise to meet each other. So it may seem like we're heading into a dismal transhuman situation, but that means that our resourcefulness for our natural capacity to do the most beautiful things with our perception will meet those non-natural developments that are going to be occurring as well.

[01:07:10] So we get to have a really expedited process now as far as developing our capacity. Our back's a little bit against the wall, so we're going to have to pull out some tricks that we didn't know we had. And that's the only way these things usually happen, is because we do operate in autopilot. And so now we're going to be forced to be in the manual, learning to drive a stick again, kind of thing. It's going to have to be--

[01:07:36] Luke: Well said. So earlier you were talking about the non-linear nature of time, and that because we're locked in a certain perspective, being like, I'm sitting in this chair. You're sitting there. We're separate. We're two different things. There's a wall over there, a wall over there. There's polarity galore.

[01:07:59] And so we categorize and perceive time in the same way. But in deep meditation, plant medicine, the rituals that you practice, dreaming, even just for average people, we also experience timelessness all the time. No pun intended. The thing I've wondered about that, and maybe you have a perspective on this, maybe not, is the commonly held belief around past lives and reincarnation.

[01:08:36] It's like the way I've always held that, because it's always just made sense to me, is that way back in 1850, I was out on the plains, and I was a coal miner. And then came again in 1920, and I was this guy or this girl, and I was in this place in the planet. And now, in 1970, I became this guy born in Denver called Luke Storey.

[01:08:56] Joel: Yeah.

[01:08:58] Luke: And I started to expand on that, seeing how malleable like our concept of time is, and that there isn't even really a now. It's just like a place you look on this infinite field.

[01:09:07] Joel: Yes.

[01:09:10] Luke: It seems more likely to me that we don't have past lives. We have other lives that are simultaneously happening in one eternal moment.

[01:09:23] Joel: Yeah, yeah.

[01:09:23] Luke: What's your take on that or the teachings that you follow? Is there anything around that particular topic?

[01:09:28] Joel: Yeah. They precisely say that reincarnation does not exist. That there are parallel lives all happening simultaneously.

[01:09:36] Luke: Oh wow.

[01:09:36] Joel: Yeah. And that when one of the goals of the lucid dreaming is to meet one of your parallel lives. And when you do, it's the most beautiful emotional experience that you can have.

[01:09:47] Luke: Wow.

[01:09:48] Joel: The boost that you get from that other life and the boost that they get from this particular layer that you're in, it's like nothing else. And then that leads to both lives becoming exponentially better. And then when that happens, it leads to all your parallel lives benefiting, like the 100th monkey thing, just for your soul.

[01:10:06] So shamans go backwards through the stream of consciousness to that which is projecting this experience. And they see all these different aspects of themselves experiencing all these many, many, many lifetimes. So the lifetime that you and I are in, according to Toltecs, has already happened. You and I are in a memory right now.

[01:10:27] We probably already had this conversation many, many times. But there's like timeline jumps and changes and shifts, and we're just in this infinite expression of theater, of sorts. Our ability to come out of being the actor, Luke Storey, or the actor, Joel Schaefer, and actually become that, which is experiencing ourself as a projection.

[01:10:49] On top of that, they say the physical world is an illusion. It's all luminosity. It's just energy. It's not physical at all. So shaman's learned to walk through walls, and that's how they free themselves from being able to be put in reservations or jail cells. If you can outmaneuver the tyrants, then you're untouchable. But it's not by getting billions of dollars so you can live underground.

[01:11:14] That could work, I guess, but the real freedom is not being accessible. And so I think we're in a time where more and more of us are going to be able to do things of that nature by bilocate. Remote view to the point that we can then find places that we could go and be for a period of time if things get tricky, as far as police state or something. So the solutions are going to get more magical as this attempt to enslave humanity increases.

[01:11:49] Luke: To the other soul concept, one part of that that I have a difficult time reconciling is that it seems to me that, say your oversoul, say there's an oversoul you that's just more embedded in the greater field of consciousness that's expressing as whatever number of other simultaneous lifetimes.

[01:12:18] It seems that the name of the game of consciousness is evolution, of we go into separation from the field of totality, and we become an individual that is in separation, even as a soul. Not even in a physical body, but of course in a physical body. I'm here. You're there. There's a parent separation based on perception.

[01:12:46] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:47] Luke: If the goal of this whole game and the goal of Earth School and coming into all of these bodies, even if they are happening simultaneously, is evolution and the maturation, karma, and all of these things, that seems really solid to me based on my own experience. It's like if there are 12 other versions of me as sub-souls existing right now on different timelines, are all of those at different levels of development and maturation and evolution?

[01:13:19] Is there still a me back here that's still evil and super shitty, and in this timeline jump right here, born in 1970, I've become a pretty, if nothing else, benevolent being, truly? So that's the part I can't reconcile. That makes more sense if you've had a couple thousand lifetimes and you start out as a more primordial, instinctive animal, kind of human.

[01:13:50] And then you work your way up over all these lifetimes until you graduate and don't have the need or are required to take on a body again. It's like a Darwinism kind of approach to reincarnation. The two of those don't exactly line up, and I don't know that any human being has the answer. But have you pondered that kind of conundrum?

[01:14:12] Joel: Yeah. So the Toltec's goal is to take this physical illusionary form and turn it into pure energy. And instead of recycle at death, transfer your consciousness into the afterlife and then merge with the earth and all of creation. And I don't think that happens until all of your parallel lives link up and you are able to go back to that which is projecting all of them and become the neutral observer.

[01:14:46] And then that is what allows you to transfer from that place. You can switch grooves. There's like a record player, and you can switch to these other grooves. So there's multiple dimensions in this reality, and then there's other realities that have multiple dimensions. Shaman, sorcerer, warrior travelers learn to go while they're alive into all these other layers of the onion and other realities entirely. There are alien worlds. They're just not in outer space.

[01:15:15] Luke: I don't think there's anything outer space.

[01:15:18] Joel: Exactly.

[01:15:19] Luke: Sometimes on the show people will be like, "Well, NASA--" Shit. I'm just like, "Do I say anything?"

[01:15:24] Joel: Yeah. So the lights in the sky, they're actually conscious beings. We're dealing with the stars and the wandering stars. Even this place isn't physical. So if we were a star looking down on this place, it might look similar to a wandering star. But this one isn't moving. So this is like the center.

[01:15:46] Luke: Oh, that's interesting. Which becomes very clear for me in any really deep psychedelic journey. Because it's like your body becomes, a, in many cases, non-existent. And even if you know it's there, it's so uninteresting. You close your eyes, and this world that we think is real and tangible and material completely disappears, and you're in another world.

[01:16:15] It's not like the psychedelics created this other world. Think of the DMT space. It's like, no, the neurochemistry is just removing the filters that prevent us in everyday waking state to perceive all of these dimensions at the same time, because how could you operate?

[01:16:33] You couldn't drive a car. You'd probably be a really shitty parent. You know what I mean? It's like, you got to go make the oatmeal. You can't do that if all these dimensions are bleeding. That's why there seems there's a time and a place for that.

[01:16:46] But that's been one of the most interesting things to me, is just in an experience, say of something like ayahuasca or Bufo, something that's really heavy in that way, those worlds are just as real as this world when you're in them. And then I always have this experience where I'm like, remember this dude? You know what I mean?

[01:17:05] You got to be able to know that this shit right here is also always here. We just can't see it. And then of course, you come out of the experience and you're like, "Yeah, I don't know. Everything feels real here. In that other world, seems like it wasn't." In dreaming too.

[01:17:22] It's so interesting how we're-- I know it's the brain, is just built to compartmentalize in order for us to segregate these different experiences and these different interpretations of consciousness. And as much as we might build our awareness through whatever practices, it's like the people you're describing and maybe some of the things you do are able to just weave within and out of that and not have to drink ayahuasca or something.

[01:17:51] But for your average person is like, we spend our entire lifetime thinking this is all there is. And if you get shown that there's more, once you come back here, there's an amnesia. It's like when you're born again in another incarnation, there's massive amnesia to all of your other souls or other lives and oversoul. It's like there's a lot of amnesia going on across the board. Those of us on similar paths, we're all trying to overcome that amnesia essentially.

[01:18:26] Joel: Yeah, man. The Toltecs say that the physical experience is a convenience, but that it's become an entrapment. We've identified with the convenience, but it's a way to learn. And we're actually really lucky that we're dense and that we do come back. I know people that don't come back, and they end up in mental wards.

[01:18:46] It's really hard to handle, so we want to be really careful. I highly recommend people read the Castaneda material. Or there's a more refined version of it called the Sorcerer's Crossing by Taisha Abelar. It gives an entire apprenticeship under the same teacher, Don Juan. And her name's Taisha.

[01:19:03] And she explains the recapitulation and what happens to her over her-- and she develops what's called the abstract flight, which is to be able to move her dreaming body across time and space. I don't know how else to refer to it, but she's able to bilocate because of her training.

[01:19:21] And it's really difficult thing to even handle. You could end up losing your marbles. We just want to be careful. But yeah, I think this capacity to enter the afterlife consciously and merge with eternity, we call it the somersault of thought into the inconceivable.

[01:19:42] It's basically like lucid dreaming for millions of years without stopping. It's ecstatic. That's what we're meant to be doing. We were not meant to be just caught in this one story. Shamans say that something got a hold of us, and it put us in an eddy. Like an eddy in a river where the water just keeps spinning.

[01:20:02] Luke: Oh yeah.

[01:20:02] Joel: And so we think this eddy is all there is. But at some point, that eddy, if it doesn't break out and start going back to the ocean, we're going to perish. This is critical that the 100th monkey thing works. But that doesn't mean everybody's going to evolve. In fact, we're lucky that the majority isn't because they're like food for the flyers, is what we call them. And if we were the only ones here and we were super conscious, then we would be not-- the program leaves us alone because it has plenty of other people to fuck with.

[01:20:36] Luke: Oh, it can feed on the NPCs.

[01:20:40] Joel: Yeah.

[01:20:41] Luke: There's so many more of them in numbers, so they produce much more energy.

[01:20:45] Joel: Yeah. And I wouldn't call them NPCs because they have the same luminosity that you and I have. Therefore, they can be fed off. If you could scratch the surface of them, if they had an near-death experience, then then what we call an NPC could become liberated.

[01:21:01] Luke: Right.

[01:21:02] Joel: But for now, they are programmed creatures.

[01:21:05] Luke: And I didn't mean that to be derogatory or from a superiority complex. I was an NPC.

[01:21:12] Joel: Yeah, yeah. It's just a way of talking.

[01:21:15] Luke: Aside from that, of conscious beings that have the potential for a greater awareness, do you think there are replica decoy humans on earth that are truly NPCs, that are actually just projections of the simulation? They're not able to evolve into higher states of awareness and feeling and merge with creation.

[01:21:45] Joel: I don't know, but I do know that there are beings that are not like us who show up from other worlds and pretend to be like us. And you can tell because they don't have thoughts, but they try to mimic being thoughtful. They try to pretend like they're like us. Shamans can tell because they don't have a toroidal field around them.

[01:22:06] They're just trying to fit in like a body. It's like an ugly woman with lipstick trying to smile all night and pretend she's hot. It's like this forced feeling. It's like really contracted, and you can learn to see it. My elder would take us to Walmart at 3:00 in the morning, and he is like, "This is a portal."

[01:22:24] And he could show us people that were about to die. He would show us people from other worlds. His elders would come and talk to him while he was walking through the aisles. So this place has all kinds of visitation. There are alien worlds, and there's a lot of beings. If you go to down to the Tenderloin in San Francisco and you're hanging out at three in the morning, there's a lot of schizophrenic people.

[01:22:48] There's also beings that are not human that are hanging out there. And you can have some really profound conversations and dangerous interactions with these beings. And they'll do the strangest things to people like me because they notice you and they're there to teach you things. And they're also very dangerous to interact with.

[01:23:11] As far as the simulation and there being programs, I do believe we're in a simulation of sorts based on the events that are occurring. And I think what's going to actually help us out is to realize that the theater that we're in, we don't need to pay attention to it.

[01:23:32] And the shamans say not to follow the ups and downs of your fellow men, to just free yourself and not worry about saving humanity. And that the simulation serves its purpose in a sense, in order to be part of the Earth School training. And those souls that are in the NPC category will eventually graduate and have experiences like you and I are having, and then there'll be new souls that come in.

[01:23:59] And that time is an illusion, so it's not like we're in danger of the earth ever dying. We're just in danger of our particular way in which this dream layer is experience. We could lose it, and we could perish to a point where there's a reset of sorts. I think there's just a lot to look at, and we just don't want to assume that there's reincarnation so that we make most use of this lifetime. And gather our parallel lives and have a talk and say, "Let's do it." And learn how to do these dreaming gates.

[01:24:34] Luke: This is your shot. That's how I always talk to myself. Which you spoke to earlier about just wasting your life on your phone. If it was your last day of living, are you to be sitting there and arguing with a bot on Twitter? Wow.

[01:24:48] Joel: Yeah.

[01:24:49] Luke: I find that to be a really good practice anytime. Not to say that you always have to be doing something meaningful or productive, but if I'm doing something that is counter to my highest good, what am I doing, man? I got so many years in this simulation as this version of me. God, I feel there's this thirst to just juice all of the growth and experience I can out of it because I don't know what other opportunities are coming. I'm not conscious of them.

[01:25:24] Joel: Yeah, yeah. There's ways to break pattern and do things that would really change your day, like get up in the middle of the night and go for a long walk. Even though one part of you is like, "No, I can't. I shouldn't." It's like, that will really change a lot. Just these little things that are unpredictable.

[01:25:45] Luke: Unless you live in the Tenderloin, then maybe.

[01:25:47] Joel: Right. Yeah. But when I was in Montana on 20 acres, going out on a moonless night in the dark and walking for hours was powerful.

[01:25:59] Luke: That's cool.

[01:26:00] Joel: Psychedelic.

[01:26:00] Luke: Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. I think the idea of pattern interrupting is really important. I notice my life is very routine and redundant. I hate to admit it, but the way things are set up now, it's a little bit of groundhog day. Part of it's being in Texas. It's a big state. There's not a lot of different stuff to do. You know what I mean?

[01:26:27] Joel: Totally.

[01:26:28] Luke: Versus some, I don't know, other places on earth that are a bit more diverse and dynamic just in terms of nature. So I'm less inspired to go out and adventure and experience new things. because it's like for six hours in every direction basically looks the same on the surface.

[01:26:44] Joel: When people are asleep, their assemblage points have moved. So if you get up in the middle of the night, if you have the capacity to sleep during the day a little bit, to have power naps and stuff, getting up at 3:00 AM is a time where most people are asleep. So you're able to tap into a less linear experience because when people are dreaming, they're in the non-linear.

[01:27:09] Or if everyone around you is on ayahuasca, everyone's in the non-linear. So we benefit from everyone doing all their journeys right now because it's giving us a break from just the routines. So I get up, and even if I'm just going to stay in my house, I'll do these movements that I practice, and I get into this really pristine state of attention.

[01:27:33] And it's like I can basically transcend the physicality at the end of those movements where everything's moving. The physicality is not the same. I can still see the fractals of the thing, but it's not solid. And the more I do this, the more excited I get for life, knowing that I'm starting to access these capacity to eventually travel.

[01:27:59] I think I'm going to be able to do some really cool stuff. I used to listen to my teachers talk about the things they did, and I'm like, "These motherfuckers are exaggerating. They're just telling us some bullshit." But now I know they weren't exaggerating.

[01:28:13] Luke: Yeah. When you talk about bilocating and things like that, some of those, from the Indian mystic perspective, they're called sidhis. And I would read about these Indian saints and sages and whatnot, and they're these gurus. And their abilities like that. It was really good for me because, I don't know.

[01:28:38] Not that all of those stories are true. I'm sure there's a lot of myth there, but some of them were told by people that I knew that had firsthand experience of things like bilocation. Going to India, being in ashram. Dudes in one room talking to a group of people, and he is also in another room talking to another group of people, and they corroborate their experience.

[01:28:58] Things like that that are undeniable. And that was one of the first hooks that got me thinking, hmm, maybe the life I'm living-- and I was in a really dark place at the time-- isn't all there is. Yeah. Cool. If one of those, what we would perceive to be a miracle is true, or even half true, or a quarter true, it's worth investigating. It's worth looking more deeply.

[01:29:24] Joel: Absolutely. And the more curious we get, the more we can return to our youth. So the reason we recapitulate is because all your youthful feelings that move through your chakras come back. And you almost have to take a knee sometimes. This feeling from childhood comes in and makes you cry, and you'd be in the grocery store. It's uncomfortable and embarrassing, but it's like, it's so worth having those floods of feelings returned to you.

[01:29:50] So the recapitulation is essentially the retrieval of your youthful energy. So Don Juan was like half the age of Carlos, even though Carlos was a third his age. So it's a matter of reclaiming that imagination, that creativity, and then the capacity from there is to be able to use that imagination to transcend the hive mind. Because if you try to copy a guru and how they did it, you're just a copycat. It's got to come from you. You have to be inspired from the core.

[01:30:22] Luke: Right. And because if it's performative and inauthentic, it's actually taking you backwards in your development.

[01:30:29] Joel: Yeah. You're a follower. And then the whole world is a cult. Really, it is. Until enough of us figure that out and start becoming individuated, then we will have so much respect for each other. And that respect creates this huge boost of energy. So it's just that capacity to-- for the Toltec, sorcery is a dead end street. But so is ignorance.

[01:30:55] You have to be able to handle both and had some experience being able to be functional in the normal world, and also be able to keep up with the sorcery side of stuff. There's a middle path they call freedom, and you have to turn down the seductive side of sorcery, and you have to turn down, really, the laziness side of just staying ignorant. Because there's a part of you that just says, "Oh, you can do it tomorrow. You'll do that next year. There'll be time in the future."

[01:31:24] Luke: That's beautiful. That's a really good point. I think there's a lazy part of it too for me sometimes, is like just getting past the threshold of constant suffering to having a pretty decent quality of life, where I'm not really terribly bothered by things. Life happens. People die.

[01:31:48] Still an imperfect experience, but perception becomes malleable enough where even during something that might have been painful or cause suffering earlier in life, rather than having to be five years past and go, "Oh, I see the lesson now." It's like the ability to actually see the lesson in the moment. All of those things, where the neutrality and equanimity becomes more automated. It's pretty easy to just be like, "I'm good."

[01:32:17] But there's always more. Then you look at someone who's taking it further, and they're doing dream time and going between dimensions, and the ancestors are chilling in all those. You're like, "Okay, God. There's still more."

[01:32:31] Joel: That's why Don Juan made Carlos walk away from his millions of dollars and his nice house and go pick a town in California that was really run down. And he said, "You have to start from nothing." So he had to beg for a place to live and a job and climb out of poverty. And if he didn't do it, his apprenticeship would've been terminated.

[01:32:55] Luke: Wow.

[01:32:56] Joel: So he found out--

[01:32:57] Luke: I hope I don't have a teacher that recommends that.

[01:33:00] Joel: He found out that the universe is conscious and that if you show up, willing to do whatever it takes, that it totally takes care of you. So I did this too. I hitchhiked out of my town of Seattle with a backpack on with no money. Clothes, some cans of tuna, not much.

[01:33:20] People picked me up hitchhiking. They were like, "My car pulled over for me. I don't pick up hitchhikers." And I'd have those most profound conversation with them, and they'd be crying and telling me their whole story. And then they'd take me to their house and gimme a place to sleep. And then they'd tell me about a job.

[01:33:40] And pretty soon I'm getting a draw from the boss, and then he is lending me his car, and I'm going to a rave in this new town. I'm partying. I just showed up this town with nothing. The universe will provide for you as long as you aren't wearing blinders and in fear. Now, there was some rough nights where I didn't get picked up and I'm on the side of the road, and I'm scared, and it's cold, and it's dark. The highway is intense when you're out there by yourself.

[01:34:08] So I'm not saying it's some easy thing. You go through rites of passage. That's my story. I don't mean people should copy it, but anything you can do that will break you out of your routine. It actually feels really good to have some hardship, especially if life's been pretty chill. So anything would work. It's just a matter of that pattern break, that shift of perception that happens when you're outside of your comfort zone.

[01:34:39] Luke: Love it, dude. All right. Last question for you. I really enjoyed our chat too. These are my favorite kind of conversations to have. And I sit here and talk to incredible people all the time, so I'm very blessed and fortunate. But I don't know, there's certain threads that light me up in a unique way. And you've brought that, so thank you.

[01:35:04] And you can't use the obvious ones that you already talked about. Maybe surprise us. Who have been three teachers or teachings outside of the Toltec, Castaneda world that have informed how you roll, who you are today?

[01:35:19] Joel: Yeah, I was fortunate to find-- in the world of Aikido, the Japanese martial art, a lot of it's really fake and weak, but there's some actual real stuff to tap. And I found a man named Sensei Shannon Reitan out of Bend, Oregon. I think he's in Sandpoint, Idaho now. But he was one of the most magical people. I was training at a dojo in Bend. That was pretty normal. And I heard there was a new teacher or a teacher from another dojo was going to come.

[01:35:49] Luke: Sounds like an episode of Cobra Kai.

[01:35:51] Joel: Yeah. The minute the door opened, my body like turned and I felt his energy, and my perception moved. I was like, "[Inaudible]". I literally quit that dojo that night and joined his school, which is not protocol. That's considered really disrespectful. I didn't care. And everyone followed me. That school that we were all in, it all shut down within months because we all went to this guy. And we had the most magical years training with him.

[01:36:21] I'm really blown away by Jason Brashears of Archaix. A lot of people think he's this, that, or the other. But his understanding of how to break pattern, it's been profound shift for me to realize. He wrote a book called The Immortal Within, and he spent 27 years in jail for actually saving a girl's life, but they thought that he was part of the kidnapping.

[01:36:48] In reality, he was just saving her from his friend who had-- and they were just 17-year-olds on a joy ride with their parents' car they stole or something. And he figured out how to save his energy while he was in prison for 27 years.

[01:37:04] Luke: Wow.

[01:37:05] Joel: He noticed a man in there that was just to himself and was really in a unique state of perception. And he just basically mimicked that. And so he's the reason I'm here today. I had a really small YouTube channel, and I wrote him an email. He was on Santos Bonacci's channel, and Santos interviewed me and then Jason Brashears brought me on his channel.

[01:37:33] And because Jason  Brashears's  Archaic information blew up so quickly, and he teaches about the simulation theory and that every 138 years we go through a reset, it's really fascinating information to tap into. It makes a lot of sense when you're trying to study simulation theory. And so his knowledge has been really helpful.

[01:37:54] Luke: Where are we in the 138 years right now?

[01:37:56] Joel: 1902 was the last one. So 2040. So we're going to see some major shifts.

[01:38:03] Luke: That tracks.

[01:38:04] Joel: Yeah.

[01:38:04] Luke: In the United States at least, between 1871 and 1913--

[01:38:12] Joel: Yeah, yeah.

[01:38:13] Luke: A lot of enslavement was implemented during that period.

[01:38:18] Joel: Yeah. And if you pay attention, if you look, all these companies started in 1902 because they went underground. They go underground. Like right now, all the money's going to these breakaway civilizations. Trillions and trillions and trillions of our taxpayer money is gone into these alternative systems because they don't know how big the catalyst will be this time. Each one's different. So it could be total. It could be minimal. Jason's point is it doesn't matter what's happening because you can insulate your own reality tunnel.

[01:38:48] Luke: Hmm.

[01:38:48] Joel: So as long as you're sovereign and aware and not in fear, then you're not connected to the collective program.

[01:38:53] Luke: You don't need a bunker in Kauai to make it through.

[01:38:56] Joel: No. But you might not want to be-- if you get a hunch that something's going to happen in your town, you got to follow that hunch. So there's the intuition side. As long as you trust your intuition, which I totally do-- I don't drive in my mind when I'm in my car. I sense everything all around me.

[01:39:15] So there's a way to be a defensive driver that's even more evolutionary than just thinking or paying attention. It's like a total feeling-based thing, the way you navigate the world. There's a woman named Carol Tiggs who lives in Los Angeles, and I've never had anybody affect me as much as she did.

[01:39:34] And I trained with her for a very short period of time. I was a student of her students for many years, and then I was given the opportunity to meet her in person, which is not typical. She usually helps people from a distance, and I'll censor, like observing me when I'm at these certain workshops.

[01:39:55] But I've never looked in anyone's eyes and had such a profound experience of somebody that's on another level. She doesn't spend a lot of time in this layer of the onion. She was also taught by Don Juan. But she's a separate category because she was trained on the side and these other ways that aren't typical. She disappeared for 10 years and doesn't know where she was, and nobody knows what happened to her, including herself. She's the most otherworldly being I've ever seen.

[01:40:27] And she's the one that gave me permission to teach these things. Normally, I wouldn't be doing the workshops that I do or teaching the online courses that I do if it wasn't for being given permission from this lineage. So she's a subset of the lineage, and yeah, I would hate to not mention her because it was one of those people where you can't help but get extremely emotional just by being in her presence, because she sees through.

[01:40:58] So I thought I was in my heart, but then she put me in my heart. And it just got me to be really honest with the pain that's-- and to this day, I still have a ton of wounds that I have in process because it's hard to just be in your heart all the time. And so really thankful. Helped me begin that process. And she taught me how to go into the earth, put my awareness in the earth and stay there until my emotions really start to move, which is a practice that I continue to do. So yeah, really appreciate her as well.

[01:41:31] Luke: Beautiful. We're going to put the show notes for today's conversation at lukestorey.com/perceiver. And we're going to put links to everything you do in there. But for those that don't go to lukestorey.com/perceiver, give us social website, your courses, anything you want to share with people that want to learn more and interact with you.

[01:41:52] Joel: Thank you. Yeah. So joelschafer.com. Schafer is S-C-H-A-F-E-R. And you can find all my information on my courses and my in-person workshops. Sedona, December 7th and 8th, we'll be meeting in an outdoor event, doing the shamanic movements. A lot of really amazing people will be there as well as myself.

[01:42:14] So there's going to be a real benefit to attending the in-person stuff. My YouTube channel is called Perceiver. On Insta, it's @joel.schafer. And I do free consults. So 30-minute consults. A lot can happen in 30 minutes. So I highly recommend reaching out. It's a good way to get to know me. And you can jump right into any material.

[01:42:36] Luke: I might hit you up for one of those.

[01:42:38] Joel: Yeah, dude, hit me up.

[01:42:40] Luke: You could get a lot of inquiries from the show.

[01:42:43] Joel: Cool. Yeah, I'd love to meet people.

[01:42:45] Luke: People that listen to this podcast, I think, are going to really resonate with your energy and your perspective.

[01:42:52] Joel: Thanks man. Thanks for having me on.

[01:42:54] Luke: Yeah, for sure.

[01:42:55] Joel: Cool.