Simon van der Els - The Psychedelic Singularity

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🎙️🎙️🎙️ In a world teetering between the old and the emergent, Simon Van Der Rls stands as a beacon for the transformative. A scientist-turned-seeker, Simon bridges the fragmented domains of biology, molecular microbiology, and the metaphysical, unraveling the delicate threads of humanity’s great Metacrisis. His work explores the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, shamanic healing, and the psychedelic renaissance, offering an invitation to heal not by doing, but by perceiving wholeness.

Simon challenges the paradigms that measure value in metrics and efficiencies, daring to ask: What if the true worth lies in the unquantifiable—our ability to hold space, to witness, to make whole? As a practitioner of “whole-ing,” Simon engages in profound journeys into the energetic fields of those who seek him, unveiling stuck patterns, reclaiming the lost, and tuning hearts to their guiding stars. Drawing inspiration from David Bohm’s notions of fragmentation, Iain McGilchrist’s exploration of the divided brain, and the ancient shamanic traditions, Simon’s work is an emergent synthesis of science, spirit, and soul.

In these strange times of planetary upheaval, Simon embodies the spirit of the homo imaginalis—the human poised to reimagine what it means to heal, connect, and evolve.

Questions for Simon

Metacrisis and Societal Evolution

1. You’ve mentioned the Metacrisis as a central focus. How do you perceive humanity’s collective “stuckness,” and where do you think the most significant shifts will—or must—occur?

2. What is the role of psychedelics in helping humanity transition from fragmented to whole systems of thought and action?

3. Byung-Chul Han speaks of the ‘burnout society.’ How do you see the modern emphasis on productivity intersecting with our need for rest, contemplation, and healing?

4. What insights can we take from the psychedelic renaissance to address the ecological and spiritual crises of our time?

Shamanic Practices and Healing

5. You describe your work as “whole-ing.” How does this differ from traditional notions of healing, and what does it reveal about the nature of human suffering?

6. How do you navigate skepticism about practices like shamanic healing, especially in a world heavily grounded in materialist science?

7. Can you explain the concept of the body as a “tuning fork”? How do you attune yourself to another’s energy field, and what does this reveal about the interconnectedness of all beings?

8. What patterns do you commonly see in those who feel “stuck,” and how can others begin to address these patterns themselves?

Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Psychedelics

9. Iain McGilchrist writes about the divided brain and its implications for culture. How do you see the left-right brain dynamic playing out in the current Metacrisis?

10. How can the poetic language required to discuss quantum or psychedelic experiences help us rethink societal narratives and values?

11. Do you believe the use of altered states—whether through meditation, psychedelics, or shamanic practices—is essential for humanity’s next evolutionary step?

12. What does Byung-Chul Han’s idea of ‘re-wilding’ mean to you, and how might it manifest in healing both individuals and societies?

Personal Philosophy and Life’s Purpose

13. You’ve mentioned the question, “Why am I here, and what am I here to bring?” How do you personally grapple with that question, and what answers have emerged for you?

14. How do you reconcile the tension between working within existing systems and flowing energy into emerging, less defined ones?

15. If “earning a living” is a flawed notion, how do you envision a future where people’s worth isn’t tied to drudgery or arbitrary metrics?

16. What is your view on the role of sensitivity—emotional, physical, and spiritual—in guiding human evolution?

Vision for the Future

17. What would a society built on principles of wholeness, interconnectedness, and “whole-ing” look like?

18. What advice would you offer to those searching for their niche in these “strange times”?

19. How can the youth, unburdened by the idea of ‘earning a living,’ lead the charge toward more meaningful, connected lives?

20. If you could leave humanity with one question to ponder as we navigate this period of upheaval, what would it be?

Chrysovore’s Lament

We are the chrysovores, devourers of our own decay,

Feasting on the husks of who we were yesterday,

For what is the self but a cocoon of spent dreams,

Tattered by winds of truth, unraveling at the seams?

The chrysalis whispers: “Do not mourn me, child,

For my brittle walls were built to be defiled.

Tear through my skin, this paper-thin disguise;

I am not your prison, but your wings in disguise.”

Through the kaleidoscope of the psychedelic dawn,

We see the cosmos woven where our blinders were drawn.

A thousand selves fractal into infinity’s spine,

Each shard a reflection, each moment divine.

In the heart of the singularity, time folds like a plea,

A Möbius strip of becoming, unbound and free.

The spectacle of society crumbles like ash,

As we rise from the wreckage, unbound by the past.

For suffering is the alchemy, the crucible’s glow,

Burning away all that we think we know.

The chrysovore eats the lies we once held dear,

Digesting the old to make the new clear.

Homo-imaginalas: we emerge, soft and raw,

Wings of thought stretching to the universal law.

Not humans as fragments, but as cells of the same,

An organism of love with no need for shame.

The answers were never hidden, just unclaimed,

Scattered like stars in a cosmos unnamed.

We ate the husks, we drank the pain,

And from that banquet, new worlds we gain.

So let us chrysovore, unafraid of the feast,

Consuming our fears, transforming the least.

The husk is not loss but the bridge to the core,

A passage through which we become so much more.

Now the future beckons, vast and untamed,

With a language reborn and our hearts reclaimed.

No longer bound to the chrysalis of yore,

We are homo-imaginalas—forever and more.

http://linkedin.com/in/simon-van-der-els-phd-66434b231

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. I have with me a friend of the show, a friend of mine who's been on the show a few times before. Let me just give you this introduction for those of you who may be wondering, for those of you who may be seeking information. In a world teetering between the old and the emergent, Simon van der El stands as a beacon for the transformative. A scientist turned seeker, Simon bridges the fragmented domains of biology, molecular microbiology, and the metaphysical, unraveling the delicate threads of humanity's great metacrisis. His work explores the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, shamanic healing, and the psychedelic renaissance, offering an invitation to heal not by doing, but by perceiving wholeness. Simon challenges the paradigms that measure value in metrics and efficiencies, daring to ask what if the true worth lies in the unquantifiable, our ability to hold space, to witness, to make whole. As a practitioner of holing, Simon engages in profound journeys into the energetic fields of those who seek him, unveiling stuck patterns, reclaiming the lost, and tuning hearts to their guiding stars. drawing inspiration from david boehm's notions of fragmentation ian mcgillcrest's exploration of the divided brain and the ancient shamanic traditions simon's work is an emergent synthesis of science spirit and soul in these strange times of planetary upheaval simon embodies the spirit of the homo imaginalis the human poise to reimagine what it means to heal connect and evolve simon thank you so much for being here today how are you again man and again with this introduction holy thanks thanks yeah yeah and I've seen the title is psychedelic singularity it's like am I the psychedelic singularity I don't know what we're in for but now I'm doing good george thank you for the wonderful introduction that's uh that's great you have done yourself again Well, I can't help it. I always read all the things that you got going up. And it's so refreshing, but so sort of mysterious on some levels. And I always find myself it's a lot of your work reminds me of Ian McGilchrist, where I got to stop for a minute and reread it. You know what I mean by that? I'm like, okay, what's Simon saying right here? Oh, yeah, like the The recent post with Buckminster Fuller and talking about where are we going with jobs and this idea that we need to keep ourselves busy. All of this information is right in front of us, man. I feel like we're on the cusp of a giant change. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I also have the sense that we are in this process of... big changes right or at least chaos we're in amidst chaos and I think what I attempt to do with my writing and I'm at the moment still writing on LinkedIn I might want to do like a more sub stack but I'm a bit of a the problem there's this balance between the perfectionism and the sort of well, how I the training in academia and how rigid everything has to be. And at the same time, when I write, why I like writing on LinkedIn is because I just write what's there at the moment. And that's how I like to do most things. So I don't have to think about it too long because if I start thinking about it too long and brooding on it too long, it already turns stale. It's like you're you're taking a glass and you're putting it down in the stream. And then if you drink it that moment, it's nice, refreshing, cold water. But if you then are like, I might have to sit with this for a bit. You put it away. It probably starts to rot at some point. And then if you then still have to drink it, it will just be disgusting. So I try to avoid doing that. Yeah, it's true. It's interesting. You know, in our last conversation, we were talking a bit about the, the meta crisis and the central focus, but what, how have you seen that kind of playing out? Are you still focusing a lot on the meta crisis or are you seeing some sort of splits? Nice. Yeah, I think I've drawn in the Metacrisis more to myself, I think. So how does the Metacrisis express itself within my consciousness, within how I am in the world, how I show up? how I behave, what kind of things are important to me. So I try to pull it a bit more close. But from that perspective, I also try to see the patterns and what the effect is of the meta crisis. I'm less interested, let's say, in the the material side of the meta crisis, like all this work on energy, on energy materials and supply chains and biodiversity, climate, these things. I think I'm more interested in the psycho-spiritual side of things and what kind of effect it has on our individual consciousness. So I'm trying to sort of use myself as a study subject there and also in the collective. What do we see happening in the collective? And I try to make sense of that. And it's probably as much part of, I think, a self-soothing process to try to remain sane as far as one can be sane in a time like this. Uh, as it's just general interest, it's just fascinating. Uh, I think the times that we are living in, uh, and probably, uh, terrifying in both the, the, the, the bad sense and in the, uh, let's say the exciting sense. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. When I see all these giant ideas about saving the planet and the Metachrist, we've got to transfer this energy. It just seems so daunting. I can't help, but how does that apply to my life? And much like you, I start thinking about my life. well, how, how do, what is my climate? Like, what is the climate in my family? Like, like, how do I navigate this storm of everything failing around me? And you can't help, but see the patterns there. Like when you look at your life, you can see your own meta crisis. And I think that for me, that's where psychedelics kind of came in. They sort of gave me this compass on some level, or at least the ability to look around and navigate the environment. Like, okay, Just take some deep breaths. Wow, what is this shame doing over here? Jesus, shame. What is this shame thing? I got to get rid of this thing. But it really helps you navigate it, right? How have you noticed psychedelics sort of helping you navigate this internal esoteric struggle? Nice. Yeah, in different ways and different compounds. So I think in our previous conversations, I talked a bit about sort of my way into it. And I think psilocybin with psychoactive truffles played a big role for me in sort of reorienting and reconnecting to myself and then to the larger self, the local woods, other people around me. It helps a lot with the sort of emotional Yeah, maturing process in being allowed to or being capable to sit with heavy emotion for longer periods of time or to have it transform you. So still psilocybin every now and then with with low doses. So it's more of a micro dosing or mini dosing kind of thing. So for the for during the week. uh but in a ceremonial setting I've been working more with um cacao recently cacao as a being very nice heartwarming heart opening plant medicine and working together with blue lotus blue lotus extract is very very interesting for me so that has been a uh By now I'd call it a staple in sort of my medicine cabinet. And also I've been working with cannabis more in a sort of more shamanic sense, which has been interesting because, well, I come from the Netherlands. I studied in a life sciences university. I had friends who grew their own weeds outdoors, indoors. so during my studies yeah okay we smoked a lot of weed but that was very much in a recreational sense I never had a lot of difficulty with it concerning my studies or work these kind of things so it never became really like a like a problem for me but I did notice after a period of smoking weed that i instead of sort of anxiety reducing which I think I was self-medicating but wasn't really aware that I was doing that it became anxiety increasing so I had like sweaty palms heart rate going up a bit paranoid and so I quit and then I got into the phd process and so I didn't do it for like I don't know like eight years or something but recently I um re-encountered it specifically with a uh with a tincture so it's like a whole plant extract in oil and so you take like four drops or something and it's a very it's comparable to edibles I think but really um yeah really interesting journeys on that and very conducive for um yeah the type of energetic Uh, inquiry that I now often practice, but it gives me the chance to do it on myself instead of doing it on other people. I often have difficulty putting the, uh, making the time and putting the lens on myself. So there's been very helpful for that. Yeah. Do you feel like you're going through like a rite of passage sometimes, Simon? Like, you know, when I look back at both of our shared, like our relationship and where we are in life, you know, and I see that you've moved from, you know, sort of the academic side into going out and directly working with people in a field that's sort of novel. you know and it it's it's interesting to me I'm curious like first off what does that feel like is that a rite of passage for you moving into something different and two what does that feel like from going and working and exploring your inner self to going out and sharing these ideas and working one-on-one with with people or in groups sometimes yeah nice again nice nice question um I think the shift from working the doing the academic work yeah so I was doing um yeah molecular biology genome engineering these kind of stuff so it was very super cognitive very abstracted and I did enjoy working with other scientists so I collaborated a lot and that was already something that I took most joy out of also supervising students and working directly with them their learning journey so I always already had this sense of I actually want to work with people and it doesn't matter that much what then the the thing is that we're doing and I enjoyed the puzzle aspect a lot but I noticed that the switch um that I've made so I haven't been in a lab for now like Probably it's now like five years or something. And I'm not thinking I'm going to go back anytime soon. Maybe I will go into a sort of more improvisational lab and do some work with plant medicine. That might be something that I'm interested in. But let's say not in the capacity in which I worked. But yeah, making the switch to working directly with people and aiding them in their life's process, in their journey, that has been incredibly rewarding and very much feels like a homecoming. Because it engages my heart way more than I could put or that I was able to back then to put in my research. There were moments, of course, where I was very also heart motivated and fascinated with the work that I did. But now if I work with people, it's very it's it's super intimate, very moving. Oh, yeah. And the switch or the switch, the transitionary period of being a singer is first. Yeah. And rock your personal rock bottom, let's say. Yeah. And then In the framework of the wilderness guide that I enjoy reading, this Bill Plotkin, he talks about soul-centric development. And he has a very... how you say, a very holistic view of things, but also very influenced by deep ecology. And that's a branch of philosophy that I enjoy and that matches with sort of the shamanic practice. And he talks about how during soul initiation, so after adolescence, you are sent out into the wild, let's say, to... Well, more or less like the hero's journey. He describes it differently, but it has similar themes. It's to visit the underworld and die, let's say the adolescent dies and the adult moves out. But before that happens, you have to have an encounter with soul. How he calls it soul with a capital S and he uses a sort of ecological frame for it. So he says that it's your soul is a ecological niche, so it's your place in the world or in the cosmos. where you receive the most energy, let's say. So like organisms that inhabit a certain niche, if they're right in their spot, what they take in is the most nutritious for them. And also what they shed out is the most nutritious for their environment. So finding one's soul is finding one's place in the world or finding one's niche, one's role. And I think that's the That's the journey that I've been on and I'm still integrating. But after that stage, he says that like this is initiation. And then after you're a sort of beginning adult and the beginning adult is he describes it with a beautiful term. He calls it the artisan at the wellspring. And so you found the wellspring, which is your soul's image, which is your gift or your niche, what your energy you're coming to share with the world. And the artisanal part is there to figure out how am I going to share this gift? And so your your your souls, it might be for some people that a profession fits perfectly with what they're here to do, like becoming a doctor or a nurse or a musician. But for some of us, it's a bit less clear. And that is always been for me the case. So it's more about figuring out, OK, and how what are the ways in which I can show up and share my gifts or share my talent with the world in ways that I feed, I nourish those around me, but also I am nourished in return. Yeah. I love it. It's super inspiring to see both of us speak to lots of different people in the fields we work in. I'm very fortunate. I get to speak to a lot of people that are building new novel drug designs. I talk to a lot of people in the PTSD community that are working in these labs and working in these set and settings that are pretty rigid. Nothing but love for all of them. To me, I'm super stoked when I get to talk to you and see this sort of I guess the best way to describe it is to look back to the Arthurian sort of mythologies, right? The myth of the Holy Grail comes to mind where all the knights are sitting at the round table and the grail shows up to them and they're like, you must find me. And so they all go out into the forest, but each individual must enter the forest in the darkest place possible for them. And they cut their own path. And that's what I see, Simon, when I see what you've done and see where you're at and I read the progress you're doing that you post about, it's super inspiring for me to see you spend all this time in this lab and you're like, you know what? I think there's a different way for me. I'm going to try this. And you go and you talk about all the people that you're talking to. sitting under the forest, what you're learning with the different plants you're studying with. It's awesome, man. I'm super stoked that you're doing it. I'm just curious, man. What are you learning when you sit with these other people? Are you learning as much about yourself when you sit with other people? yeah yes short answer there there is that's the thing with the the healing process so I've been um so it's been about a year I think since we last chat or even longer and I've been doing this um shamanic training now for one and a half years which is way more focused on so it's without plant medicine yeah so it's a it's a it's on an inca tradition um um yeah the main focus for shamanic healing is first healing oneself so if you want to be a channel for healing you have to have as let's say as few dirt within the within the prism as possible because then the light shines through easier and if you have less let's say unresolved shadow ego parts that might take a hold of what you're wanting to do and then are using it for their own benefit. Yeah, you try to make sure that that doesn't happen. So you're trying to show up as clear as possible for the process someone else is doing. And it's always the case that someone else is doing the healing. The person is doing the healing and energy that is received and sent through is not mine, but I'm being conduit for things. And that has been fascinating to step into that space. And now also blending that with, well, my relationship or my practice with different plant medicines to see how these, how these parts of me interact and then bringing together with that this, well, uh this intellectual part or the academic analytical part of me that also wants to make sense of things that also tries to make maps and understand like okay how how is this working well what am I what am I doing because with the shamanic work you're constantly surprised at how how things happen and uh you open certain doors and certain experiences happen and it's yeah it's amazing in that sense so it's a great source of wonder for me um yeah and when I when you do processes with people if they come to you with specific um questions on parts in their lives or things that they want to release or they're carrying trauma with them um Oftentimes what I do is I or how I mainly work is through my own body. So I mirror people either online or if I'm in person, if they're in the Netherlands, then right next to them. So I try to synchronize, let's say, my being with them. so that any ripples that disturb that surface is information so I just try to create tune in to what they are experiencing and then in that tuning in become very sensitive to minor changes so imagery for instance so nothing is random then So if I'm talking to someone and they're explaining about a event that they experienced or ancestral pain or I'm constantly looking for, OK, where where does this where's the origin of this thing? What's the package there? What's the information? And so anything that changes. is information and either I store it for myself or I share or I share like okay if you're talking about this how's your lower stomach feeling because I'm if they're all already talking like for uh for a minute about the theme and my body is my stomach is constricting heavily then I'm like okay that's probably something to do with uh whatever you're talking about so let's have a look and often often the people that I work with often their themes resonate with my own themes so with my own healing process so it's again then it also makes it possible for me to journey with them to where they are I think uh a big part of healing work has to do with well having done your own healing and yeah I read somewhere the the like the wounded healer archetype it's better to heal from your scars than from your open wounds because then there's this big chance of your own coping mechanisms or your own um Yeah, ways how you delude yourself or how you try to escape, you'll start projecting them on the other person. And that's the last thing that you want to do, especially if people are very vulnerable and sensitive and in their own process. So that's also a big motivator to keep keep undergoing processes myself with other people that I train with or do solo journeys and these kind of things. But yeah, the themes are yeah, of course, we can talk about how everything is fun. We're all part of tuned into the collective human consciousness and all these kind of things. So it's different skills of experience. But in the end, indeed, the themes are all the same, or at least they're super recognizable, these archetypical themes. So, yeah. I think we're touching on the wholeness, the holing that you describe in a lot of the things that you write about, like whether it's the Jungian mirror or whether it's the frequencies at which we vibrate that we recognize in the other. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about this holing. Like is that – I mean maybe you could unpack that for some people who may not be familiar with that process. Yeah. So the – The word healing, in its etymology, comes from to make whole. So the older world. And in Dutch, it's healing. And heal, that's the sort of the... So healing and hailing, it's the same word. So to make something whole or to heal something is exactly the same word. And so for me, that kind of sparked an interest to have a look at the concept. And very early in my journey, I was reading David Bohm's work and his conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti, the mystic. and they both have a very well David Bohm was a quantum field theorist and very brilliant was a student of Einstein I can highly recommend reading some of his work it's on quantum field theory he the chapters on with math you can just skip he also says that I'm not a mathematician at all so for me this is only like I just try to intuitively read and I get some imagery or But yeah, don't ask me for the calculations. But as I started reading it, he describes a whole universe or how the... How you say he talks about an implicit and an explicit order and the explicit order is the reality that we exist in or that we sort of are currently sort of operating on the which is the unfolded reality. So the explicit is the unfolded and the implicit is the folded reality and that makes it possible for. well, everything to be connected. And at the same time, we experience it as not. These are, yeah, all, let's say, high, vague concepts. And, of course, a lot of spiritual traditions and also in the new age and, well, in, let's say, the more rigorous scientific fields, they have theories about this. But I mainly hook into the concept of healing and that wholeness is a state that everything is or that it's already in. So everything is already whole, is already healed. And why things aren't healed is when they are perturbed. um by for instance trauma and something becomes fragmented so a part of us gets shunted if we're talking about humans a part of us gets shunted out of our perception of who we are the moment we are traumatized depending on well what what what the origin of the trauma is but we We construct a fragment or we try to build up a persona from fragmented parts because it's very difficult to perceive ourselves as all or what we fully are. And that's, I think, the journey that every human goes on. We start probably from homeless as we incarnate into a baby, into a body. And then slowly we gain sort of control, or at least we become incarnated into this sort of spacesuit that we're in. And then we kind of lose our memory of where we're from because the density of matter makes it difficult to remember all that, the information of where we're coming from or what we are, this energetic field. And then slowly but surely we, uh yeah we build up a sort of fragmented uh ego but we yeah it's probably also built up from parts but yeah it's it's a journey towards um see yeah seeing the the wholeness of things the the wholeness of persons the wholeness of nature the wholeness in everything and I think for a that is what healing is and that is also let's say my main philosophy when I work with people it's you you start from the position that there's nothing wrong with someone there's nothing wrong At the worst case, someone is confused, confused about who they are, what they often what they should be or what they have to be. And it's about calling in these lost parts that we might lost contact with and seeing if you can re reorient oneself to see the wholeness. And that's, I think, also the practice of working with people is try to see them as whole as possible. Because also in that act of seeing someone's gestalt or seeing the things that they might not see from themselves is already calling those parts to the surface, is already calling those parts back into conscious awareness. And in that sense, it doesn't matter too much if they are the ones seeing it or if I'm the one seeing it. Because at a certain moment, that boundary just blends. Yeah. Man, it makes a lot of sense to me. I, on some level, begin thinking about the evolution of awareness, but maybe it's not evolution of awareness at all. It's just sort of re... remembering that you are aware of these things. Like when, when the way you spoke about calling it back to you, like that makes a lot of sense when you, it's almost like, you know, when you buy a new car, you see that car everywhere. When you get a new shirt, you see that shirt everywhere. When you become aware that you do this, that you have this pattern, you see it everywhere. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's always there. You're just read or you're discovering it on some level. Oh yeah. There's let me just take the cover off of this and I can see it from what it is. I want to, I want to include our friend Benjamin George here. Shout out to Benjamin George. He's got some incredible new stuff on the horizon. I can't wait to test out these new things he has going. He says, existence is founded upon information. The fundamental mechanism of action for interacting information is a toroidal field. It is through interacting fields of toroidal information in which the quantum nature is of this arises and so up up through atomic to our perceived reality the collective movement of all things in the universe is reflected back to us like ripples in the pond poetic in a way nice um if I'm correct the toroidal that's the that this this movement right I think so the the taurus yeah almost like the double helix yeah yeah yeah or it's like or like the planet and the magnetic field of the planet and the the heliosphere of the sun these kind of things oh interesting yeah thanks for sharing it's um like what when you speak yeah go ahead yeah I was just thinking about um the Yeah, so before I was doing more or before I was practicing more the shamanism, I was already doing sort of inner development, life coaching, systemic work with people, consolation work. and a big motivator for me with the shamanic work was a because it offers a way more subtle but at the same time more direct way of interacting with people and interacting with what they are carrying with them um and that also alludes to the comments just now with yeah that it's information energetic fields yeah yeah you're working with let's say a way fuller picture when you're looking at someone for instance if I uh I've had moments where I work with someone and they're talking about a certain pattern that repeats itself in their life yeah um And I just try to notice what I notice. And my attention is constantly drawn to, for instance, something above their left shoulder. There's nothing there as in physically. But as they're talking, I'm just constantly being drawn there. So I let them talk for a bit and then I then I'll say like, OK, can we have a can we see if we can interact with whatever is there? And then you guide the attention there and you start feeling around, for instance, with your hands and all of a sudden you notice or you tap into something of the field. And my trainer also calls it double clicking. So you're almost like you're double clicking a map and it opens. So you're double clicking that folder and they're talking about this pattern. So you're double clicking it and all of a sudden the emotions are there, the memories are there. Well then you can start accessing it and moving through it. You can also make representations of a of a map of a folder like that. You can make it physical outdoors and then directly interact on it like that. Yeah, so it's a very. I've. uh it's funny because my my because of my background I was uh atheistic for a long time and very skeptical a lot of things even though I did psychedelics when I was right uh my framework was completely different and I could be a bit allergic to like grand claims out of sort of new agey yeah kind of theory I still can be a bit allergic to that But in these kind of experiences, it truly feels that the mind is the limiting factor. So really, if you for certain things, if you leave at least the door open for the potential or the possibility of something being related to ancestral pain, for instance, or past life, parallel life kind of things, or that it's a collective wound. Often that creates the space for something to unfold. Because if you're believing that, for instance, every pain, everything that you carry is your responsibility and it's also your fault, for instance. If these kind of conditions are there, then it becomes often very difficult to unravel them because people are holding on to holding on to it because they have a I've also had this experience because you have a I think a limited view of who you are. Yeah. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I see this pattern, and I'm trying to navigate it in a way. There's a lot of talk of trauma, and in some ways, it feels like traumatastic. You know what I mean? We make our trauma fantastic. Like, hey, look at my trauma. Look at this thing over here. Everybody, don't you feel bad for me? On some level, I feel like, are we at this place where everyone is sort of coming to the idea of like, okay, maybe I'm not where I want to be because I have this generational trauma, or maybe I'm not where I want to be because I have unrealistic expectations, or maybe I'm not where I want to be and, you know, fill in the blank. But do you think that there is sort of an evolution of awareness when it comes to trauma? And, you know, you see it in psychedelics, like psychedelics used for trauma. It's like this giant medical container that we're in. Like, what's your thoughts on that? yeah um the image that comes up for me and this is also something that I try to operate under um I I'm I'm fairly inspired by sort of more post post-humanistic thought so more more Hmm. So I'm no scholar, but I did a lot of sort of autodidactical reading. I'm very interested in other ways of perceiving the human other ways than the individualistic framework that we operate in, because I think a large part of the issues of the time is this fragmented view on reality, this fragmented view of everything, on who we are as individuals, what the collective is, what the world is, what the cosmos is. So that demands other ways of feeling, other ways of perceiving. So seeing, not necessarily with the eyes, but seeing as a sensing. And with multigenerational trauma, I'm interested in taking the perspective of individual humans. So you and I, all individual humans, being part of a body, and that body makes up the human. So as a planetary organism, uh organism and I would say a planetary organ of the yeah of gaia the same that we could call the amazon the lungs of the earth these kind of concepts uh what if we take that seriously so um that we uh see the human uh with a capital organism as a gestalt um Consciousness, so I think if we talk about collective consciousness, collective unconscious and that our cells or our bodies are individual cells within that body and that is marching through time, right? Just like our skin cells, they die within or I don't actually know. I know that our gut cells, for instance, some of our gut lining is renewed within a day. So they they go through a day and that's their lifetime. it's the ship of what is it the ship of theses is that yeah yeah exactly but that's on the global human organismal skill um and then you can think like okay I I'm born into a uh into a body from a mother who is connected all the way back to the beginning of life and that human organism has been Homo sapiens has been estimated around for two hundred, what, three hundred thousand years? Yeah. Give or take. We in our lifetime, we remember. We our body stores memory and is conditioned to respond in a certain way to certain memories. So when we are children, we might burn our hands on the stove or we fall off something. And we gather scars, but we also store that memory within us. uh and not just in the neurons I think I think memory is stored all across the body on a different different way but um so when we talk about multi-generational trauma and also about personal trauma I think it helps a lot to widen the perspective of what is this self what is the self made out of but also what is the contents of the self I think we as a or what I try to operate on is that the self is a conscious field. And in general, my body is part of myself. that is where my awareness is and I consider that my myself but if I go working on a shed or I try to build something with wood and hammer and nails if I'm holding the hammer the hammer becomes a sort of extension of my body so it becomes partially part of myself so I think the self is a very flexible um concept that can encompass a lot of different things um and I think that the one of the main things that shamanism I think is a as a very anarchistic tradition of different types of practices and what you can call it it's playing around with what is the self and what do you feel the contents of the self so shape-shifting or astral travel or extending the self to incorporate the non-human and to gain information from, to ask questions to the non-human, or ask questions to another human, is shapeshift into their consciousness, their reading, feeling. So these are, I think, when it comes to multigenerational trauma, it feels very much a... It helps for me to see it as a collective thing. It also lowers the load of that you are the one that has to carry or that inherited a lot of heavy, heavy shit. It puts away the blame. We don't have to go into the past. Look at the stories. Who was to blame? Whose fault is this? It's not interesting at all. The interesting thing is to experience, to feel and to transmute. So what are the lessons there? It's interesting. sometimes feel like the human is also a um a species that is probably capable of metamorphosis as similar as insects do and maybe we became a swarm global organism similar to akin to caterpillar by acquiring all these lessons all this biomass becoming larger, larger, larger. We're worth eight point eight billion or close to nine billion. That's a massive increase. If we look at the timescale in which that happened. And so maybe there's this, like you said at the beginning, maybe we are in this or maybe I feel that we are in this state of potential transformation to new forms of being and that the collective trauma consciousness or the collective consciousness about trauma is a necessary step for the decontextualization of the human body. And I mean the human as a collective. So losing the shape of the global industrial society or this large scale way of doing things, modernity maybe. and becoming aware of the trauma that probably fueled a lot of the behavior and got us to where we are, or at least there's a lot of flag posts of learning. We integrate those lessons, transmute them, and then potentially, well, become lighter and have more, that's a freedom of movement, and then see how the cells reorient themselves into, yeah, something else. A homo imaginative. Homo vaginalis. Yeah, exactly. It's so, Simon has really, really well said. And as you're talking about that, like, you know, I have this visual of, of all this necessary trauma, which you hate to think about it being necessary. You hate to think about all these horrible things happening because they became the fuel for what got us to where we are. You know, whether you use the metaphor of the caterpillar or a swarm of locusts that, you know, their bodies change and they swarm on the fields and they consume everything, which is just debauchery. And then they, and then they change form again. When, when the, when the, you know, planets align or when the weather is right or when they have, you know, created enough of what is necessary to transform. But, yeah, I can't help but see us in that metamorphosis. Maybe we should all be reading Ovid again and reading a little bit more about metamorphosis. But, you know, I see it, man. I feel it. When I look at my mom – and I look at my daughter and I look at myself, like you can really see some giant shifts that have happened. And it makes you start guessing like, well, where does the blame go? Well, maybe there is no blame. Maybe these were all necessary things. And then when you think about it from that angle, forgiveness is something that flows to the surface where there was this pain and this anger of like, how dare they did that? How don't they know? How dare they did that to me to like, Oh man, look at my daughter. Like it was necessary. It was necessary. This pain that I felt someone had to go through it. And that was my lot. And I got it and it wasn't easy, but you know what? I'm better because of it. And maybe I can go out and now I have this rare gift to see people that are going through it, man. Maybe I should be reaching out to those people that I see around the cusp of it. I can help them. You know, it's kind of beautiful in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it means we're going into a better spot, I think. I mean, if you can see it, like it looks like chaos. It looks like, look, we're on the verge of this nuclear war. But are we really? Or is this what eating through the detritus looks like? Is that what it looks like? This is what it looks like, I think, that this is us as a new form eating through the detritus. yeah yeah and it's it's it's um both probably so I think there's it's so multi-layered in the amount of different uh ways of interpreting and I think we can get I I have to think about I saw this interview with Ian McGilchrist and now I have to think of his name. One of the co-founders of the Dark Mountain Project, Dugald Hine. Maybe I'm mispronouncing his name, British man. And the title of the talk is The World is Not a Problem. And that is super interesting because he's talking to Ian McGilchrist about the left hemispheres sort of stickiness to seeing the world as a set of problems and holding it in a certain way, in a certain reality and keeping it in that reality. Well, we all have that experience when you have a shitty day or something really bad happened to you or you can be locked in a certain way of seeing the world. So I've had depressive episodes and then it's incredibly difficult to see see the world in any other way. And it sees and it looks very true. It's like I'm right when you say, oh, this is shit and this is going bad and blah, blah, the old Doomer frame. You can be one hundred percent right. But at the same time, there might be other views that are also one hundred percent right and that you're just looking at a very small part of reality and then extrapolating from that part and seeing the whole as the same as that part. So that demands this way of being humble it demands letting go of certainty of saying like no this way of seeing it is correct it asks this more flexible way of seeing things and that helps as well in the process of seeing oneself and not only the world but also your own processes and it helps also with grace and with forgiveness And also not knowing and keeping that open. Especially if there are a lot of, let's say, collective frameworks, political frameworks, or in another sense, maybe ideological frameworks that are uh moved around and mass amplified because we are in the information age it helps to discern a bit because if if um if the world becomes collapsed into uh sort of dichotomies or frameworks of it's either this or it's either that and you have to pick one and be part of the right be part of the guys that get it um it it uh it um it fuels dogmatism and it fuels division and it's also a delusional way of seeing things and at the same time we also are I can't help but dream about what does this mean what and then not hopefully not dream and become so enamored with my own ways of thinking that I hold it and then say yeah this is what it is but then let it go again have a bit of grace but it's it's fun to do the more poetic and I would say the the shamanic of being very fluid with uh with your ideas and how you see the world because that allows you to move into different points of view. And then, yeah, looking at climate change, yeah, I'm, for instance, I'm following the projections that indeed a planet that is warming most likely four degrees than what we are currently at. Probably, yeah, that's gonna be a big mess. We as species and ecosystems will have to adapt to that. And at the same time, we don't know if it's probably the end of the world, but it's the end. It doesn't mean that there's no beginning of another world and after. Yeah. So it's the end of the world how we know it. but yeah, let's not fully close the door already and say like, this is what it's going to be like. It's like sitting on the sinking Titanic and then just looking out and I go like, you know what? We'll close the doors, have another champagne. And well, this, this was it because yeah, we don't know. Yeah. It's so, it's interesting to think about the, the idea of like apocalyptic thinking on some level, like it's, it's contagious and it's, it's interesting and fascinating at the same time. But when you start thinking about how long we've been here, it's sort of bewildering to think that we would, that you and I would just happen to be on earth when there is a, when the world ends. Like, the world's going to end? Probably not. Like, you and I will both get a front row seat to our own apocalypse. But to be here when the apocalypse for the world happens is kind of arrogant to think. Like, probably not. Probably not going to be here for that. You know, and... I can't help but shake the idea that maybe what we're living through is sort of the unrealized dreams and expectations of a large class of people that are dying. Like when you look at the boomer class around the world, like so many of this particular class are moving on to whatever comes next. Some begrudgingly kicking and fighting the whole way like, no, I must hold on to this idea. It's important, don't you know? And it is for them. And I'm not I'm not downplaying it, but like you can see this sort of brittle ideas of rigidness that like they're going to break, man. And it's it's both full of knowledge. It's sad. It's hopeful. It's all these things. But what do you think about maybe what we're seeing is sort of the death of unrealized dreams from a generation of people dying? Yeah. As you, as you say that I, it feels like it's becoming winter. So if the, if the, if the collective human, uh, or let's say the biosphere is a garden, uh, the season is shifting and, uh, I'm seeing these brittle, let's say these, um, uh, sort of these brittle plants that turn brown and that are, yeah, well, it's, and it's, uh, it's an end. Um, And if we look at the metrics, I think that there is also a large wealth, intergenerational wealth gap, or at least I know that in the US it's definitely the case, but I think in the Netherlands as well. That also says something, right? That maybe wealth is then locked in certain parts of the body, in certain organs, which are being... sort of having difficulty letting go. Because for instance, I think many trees, they sort of self-fertilize in a sense. So they fertilize for their offspring when they drop all their leaves. So they cover the forest floor and that's food again. And those nutrients get recycled, upcycled and become available for, well, the life within the soils. And that's, again, it's beneficial for the tree, but also for the offspring of the tree. And when that cycle doesn't happen or it's being stifled or there's a lot of difficulty letting go. Yeah. Then you see young people struggling. And I think young people aren't doing great mental health wise. Yeah. Or at least the metrics are saying such things. Yeah. I think everybody's feeling it. Let's say that the, the, the, The same is if you're if you have an inflamed wound in your toe, you'll get a fever and your whole body is feeling it. So it doesn't matter where the where exactly the wounding is happening, but it reverberates throughout the whole system. And I think the planet or the biosphere is being wounded quite a bit. And the human is part of the biosphere. And the humans are also being wounded for quite a bit, I think, in the violence of this economic system that we're part of. Yeah. So, yeah, I think everybody's feeling it. And then there's a lot of death terror, a lot of fear of death, especially if you're getting closer to that age. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, I think a collective, uh, I heard it or I saw it talked about and written about as a collective initiation process. So it's a match, a maturation of the species. And same as Bill Plotkin's framework, it's a late adolescence, and then you're tossed out into the wild, or you go into a ritual in which the boy dies and the man arises, or the girl dies and the woman arises. So probably we're, I feel it like this, that we are collectively in this kind of process. And maybe even the Gaia, the planet, is in this process with us as a expression or as a part of that. So in that sense, the planet is also very young. The planet is just figuring it out with this naked ape that has the skills of remembering the past and being quite good at projecting into the future. So that's a whole new... skill that's uh and then having having it completely terraform or completely shape the face of the planet in such a way it's a it's a wild wild time to be alive the amount of power that we wield yeah it's For me, it's heartwarming to think. Thanks for sharing that. I have never thought about it from that aspect of the planet is sort of in its own rite of passage. And if we can... I tend to believe you don't come into this world, you come out of it. And if the case is that the planet is maturing in a way, so too are we maturing in a way. And you see this sort of... I've spoken a bit about... a new awareness emerging. It makes sense. And all of a sudden, with the awareness of the planet, you have this explosion of large language models. Well, what's language but a way to transfer knowledge to people? And on some levels, when I think of this technology that can be frightening, like I see this sort of transcendence when you talk, I talked to Zoltar Istvan yesterday, who's like the really big into transhumanism. And we had this fascinating agreement that wasn't necessarily about us merging with machines, but sort of biohacking our way into a better world. And when you think about transhumanism and technology in that sense of psychedelics, like, yeah, maybe this whole confluence is coming together in And we are about to take that next step. Each step reveals the next step. And all of this technology coming together can be very freeing as much as it can be Orwellian. Do you have any thoughts on this sort of new technological emergence? Nice, nice. Yeah, this is a topic that I think about and that I have my different ways of perceiving. I think I'm a bit... I think I'm a bit biased towards sort of form of Luddism. I think I have a bit of a I also have issues with just trying to stay sane with the amount of digital technology, screen time and digital hygiene. And then I just get fed up sometimes. I'm like, why do I have to self-police with these sort of I'd call it parasitical technologies so there's a lot of power being wielded and I think a lot of misalignment of this power towards I'd call it not yeah not sanguine or not helpful or healthy goals not life aligned and so too I can I think transhumanism is like a quite broad spectrum. There are different takes on it. Whenever I detect a death aversion in it and a wish to overcome death, either through melt, replacing the body with a body that can be rebuilt endlessly or uploading consciousness to a computer or to whatever else creating a techno singularity of a god I I get a bit not skeptical but I also I'm curious as to what is speaking then if those are unresolved shadow parts if someone is talking from their own fear of death and seeing that blown up as a collective fear of death then wishing to create a alternative where death can be escaped that feels very because death is a is an essential part of uh existence in this cosmos everything dies and at the same time when something is dying something else is feeding on it yeah so as we were talking about for instance the older generations who might have issues with letting go um them not letting go and giving back has an influence on those things that might feed of that death. And there are different ways of how things can die. I think we as humans see it as very violent and bad, mostly, or a lot of... That's the cultural narrative. But you can also have, you have, for instance, octopus mothers that guard their eggs until they hatch and then they die, making sort of, I think they give their body to their young to eat. You can have trees that very slowly lose limbs one by one, and then in that sense are giving back to their environment. So if we think about dying as a process and if it's if transhumanism is death, the state of death, a virgin, I don't know if death is even a state of being. But if it's about avoiding that state, I think they also start avoiding the process of dying. And while dying is probably something that is uh incredibly important as a teacher probably death yeah so that's a bit my take on that side of the the technological advance and transhumanism and these kind of things well at the same time I also understand that there is potential for for instance biohacking and well yeah that is a branch of shamanism of course inducing altered states of being or optimizing one's physiology and I think that we are I think we talked about that probably last time but um most likely we are as modern subjects living in civilization eating mostly food produced by bio industry these kind of things soil depletion we are probably living quite malnourished uh in a sense and missing vital micronutrients are as the soils are as the soil health is declining so too is our microbiome our gut microbiome declining and that is a organ in our body and we've only become aware of our gut microbiome only recently so to get good samples probably you need to go back into the uh in the fossil record but I don't know if you can get her we don't have examples of what does the healthy human gut look like and how exotic is that and of course research I think is being done in comparing the gi tract of various indigenous cultures who are still living in a it is also difficult to romanticize these things. But I would say living in a fairly traditional way as we can expect for the majority of the history of our species we've lived as a hunter-gatherer or at least a species that doesn't live in a industrial-scaled cityscape. So comparing the GI tracts and the composition of the gut between those. But yeah, I'm skeptical about all the transhumanists melding with technology, with AI and these kind of things, because I worry about... um the misalignment of a lot of the why these things are created and with what speed they are created um and also um what unconscious drives are motivating the actors. It's the same that the internet is also a large mirror of the collective human consciousness and a lot of shadow projection that takes place on internet. And I see AI as a sort of accelerant of that. So I'm a bit ambivalent and it's also personal. I just don't have that much interest in it I know I notice I'm not getting very excited with technological advance I think I get more excited about yeah developments in wisdom uh human wisdom development and my personal uh insight and more let's say interior work more the spiritual yeah those are phenomenal points I I found myself biting into the ideas you were talking about the microbiome in our gut and that takes me to the ideas of of nutrients there's neurotransmitters in the gut and a few years back I had a really cool discussion with dennis mckenna about neurotransmitters in the gut and like what does that mean you know we talk about the five h two a receptor but what about what does it mean what What happens in the gut? What about the receptors down there?" He's like, we don't know, George. We don't know what's happening there. If you start thinking about that, our diet has a fundamental shift on our consciousness. That takes me to books like Jeremy Narby's Cosmic Serpent, where he talks about the indigenous people talking to plants. Maybe not having a full conversation in English, but being aware of what that plant is signaling to you via the shape of its leaves and the markings on it. There's real awareness and real information transfer that happens between the human and the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. And if we don't have a fundamental nutrient-healthy gut biome, we're missing all that. We just have these blinders on, like, don't pay attention to that. And maybe that's why when you have a bunch of mushrooms, you're like – whoa this plant I'm talking to this plant in a way and people think you're bananas but you are in some way exchanging information with that plant right it's I I love it man it blows my mind and I feel like I'm in a constant state of awe sometimes people like this guy does way too many mushrooms man well describe too many too many for what yeah that's a great answer Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, man, that's definitely a large motivating part for me as well to take shamanism seriously. And I think that's also what drew me is you can have this perspective that there are living cultures in the world who operate on a very different ontology, on a very different way of what is real. So coming from the Western tradition and also being trained in the scientific tradition and just the framework that we operate in, the splits between mind and matter, already the split between humans and nature, that doesn't happen in a lot of indigenous cultures. There is no word for nature. So there is no inherent division already. And if you don't see yourself as a... almost hermetically sealed organism operating within a hostile environment that has to keep structural integrity if you can open the barriers between what you consider self that it goes further than just the space suit that you're wearing and that you're also if you're touching a tree that you allow your consciousness to melt with the tree or with water or with the sea or with the elements, with everything you can do this. Yeah, you can start communicating with the whole field, with everything that's conscious. It might be not be intelligent, but it is most likely conscious or its intelligence shows itself in a completely different way. And yeah, for me, that's incredibly exciting because that indeed also makes the I have to think back on that quote that I think McKenna quotes, a lot of people quote, it's like the universe is not only stranger than we can imagine, it's much stranger than we can imagine. And that's the whole thing. So if everything is potentially a portal from which you can learn or which you can communicate with or make contact with, uh yeah that makes uh that makes living a lot of more exciting all of a sudden and I heard this this theory somewhere that um because you touched upon that as well with the blinders it's that the uh the highly individualized subject uh as we are operating on within modern society how we are now yeah that's almost um that is a prerequisite for a society like this to function so we have to be thinking that we are atomized individuals that live in a world of objects instead of other living subjects otherwise we cannot we probably wouldn't be able to do much of the actions that we do during the day. If you, the moment you eat meat, or let's say you go build a house and you're gonna use wood for it. If you are constantly aware of how everything is living, how everything is alive in different ways, you would have to treat it with way more humility and respect and love than we are currently doing and well say what you want about um so eating meat there are many many reasons not to eat industrially industrially grown meat because the the the sheer colossal size of the suffering that's being generated there is is mind-boggling and I think that that's also problem of the times that we are living in. We have to constantly, we have to live blinkered or we have to keep some information out of our framework because otherwise we won't function or I won't function. Let's talk about myself. And this more I also heard, I think I heard Vanessa Andreatti talk about this with Nadja on the Entangled Life podcast. It was a great episode of the Entangled Life. I think that's it. That there's this theory that we're living in a very dopaminergic world. uh, society. And it's also what McGilchrist talks about. The left hemisphere is more dopaminergic in its, um, in its wiring or the, the main neurotransmitter. And that's the, um, what would happen if we switch more to a serotonergic serotonergic um framework so these these um you talked about psychedelics and how they operate on serotonin receptors yeah well they stimulate connectivity they stimulate uh connections so making more relations and I think we uh That has been my experience as well. I think my the depression that I experienced was mainly one of loneliness and existential threat. And by reconnecting and having the aid of these kind of compounds, which would aid my brain, let's say, and maybe my guts as well. Yeah. Yes. In finding new novel connections while at the same time immersing myself in environments which I want to connect with. So in this case it was loved ones and forests and rivers. it sort of opens up the being way more. And that, I think, is a way healthier way of being. But it's also more painful because you're more connected to everything. So you're feeling more of the pain. But at a certain point, you might be so depressed, and depressed is a repression of emotion, that you prefer to feel something instead of nothing. And then maybe first it's a lot of grief, pain, anger, sadness. But yeah, then the heart starts breathing again. And then you can also experience joy, love. Let's say the more colorful or the more, let's say, the things that make life worth living. And I think in that sense, biohacking or paying more attention to these kind of things is very valuable. I think it will have a large impact. Even the sense that a lot of people drink multiple cups of coffee a day or people smoke. So you're taking plant medicine. You're taking tobacco and you're taking cacao or you're taking coffee or you're drinking or eating a lot of chocolate, so cacao. Yeah, that's plant medicine that you're taking. Well, maybe then expand that to taking a couple, let's say one gram of dried mushrooms on a Sunday morning and going out for a stroll. with the family or something. Yeah. Probably that's very, very healthy. I can't... I think of mycelium and the way it grows and what you just explained about making connections. Like I can't help but see like the human mycelium and you're right. Like it does feel painful in the beginning because you're building these new roadways. You're building these new maps. And when I, when I, when I apply my consumption of plant medicine, primarily, um, know psilocybin over the last few years has fundamentally transformed my life into building more meaningful connections and getting rid of the connections that I thought I had to have that I was thriving on maybe the the dope you know the the dopamogenic ideas of like I gotta have more money I gotta have more of this thing you know it's almost like the actions of like a like like a substance abuse problem in a way we were living our life. And we started looking at maybe the more mycelium route. We're like, look, I'm going to make these new connections. Like I have, I have fundamentally changed so many of my connections, like my connection with you started back then. And now we were having this discussion and we're halfway across the planet. Like we have built this awesome friendship and relationship that stretches through the internet and like making these cognitive connections and having these connections And so many cool people like that. I can't help but see exactly what you were describing about moving into a more serotonergic, I don't think I'm pronouncing that right, but like that kind of connectivity. And what does that mean if more of us can do that, if more of us can create than consume? And that gets us back to the other metaphors we were talking about, like the caterpillar or the locust. Like we're stopping the consuming and beginning the creating, which is more for everybody, right? You know, when everybody becomes a creator, there's an abundance out there. There is prices come down and there's more for everybody and a better life. I'm really hopeful for that. I see it and I want to help fuel that fire, man. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you on that one. Yeah. How do you reconcile the tension between working within existing systems and flowing energy into emerging less defined ones? Yeah, you took that from a recent post I read. Nice. Yeah, that has been difficult. I think that has been a journey that... almost everyone goes on in a way of finding their place within the world. But it's, I think, both more difficult and even more easy now. Because the places are shifting. The world as an ecosystem is changing. Culture is changing. So what may be your spot yesterday might change tomorrow or is different today. So it's asking of me that I'm in movement and that I orient myself towards what feels most real and fruitful to me. And that demands courage. and letting things go and uh there's a you're confronted with all the stuff um the moment you say like okay I wanna I wanna follow my heart you'll be presented with all the reasons why you're not doing that just yet so you're you're being presented with all the things where you're holding the handbrake yourself. So where are all the things that inhibit you from doing that? And yeah, it's been a sort of rough journey doing that and continuously orienting and having to reorient oneself. Because if you're in that transformational process, I've changed so much within these last couple of years that what I thought I would do two years back is already a completely different concept than what I'm thinking now. And then having to think about how to monetize this. And I don't like that concept. I don't like that we're all operating within a market economy and that every aspect of life has to be monetized. And I, yeah, I don't, I sometimes say this, and of course I'm aware that on some places I'm deluding myself or I'm not seeing things right, but we're human. But I'm thinking like, I have no interest in running a company I don't care about business. I do care about doing interesting and very worthwhile work with people. That's what I want to do. And I would ideally earn enough from that so I have my rent and my food. And I can do some fun things every now and then or continue to develop. but yeah not to monetize what I say or what I do here's this cool new method and I call it blah blah trademark all this all this I it's not interesting at all to me so it has been also a humbling Journey of letting go of old forms of thinking like okay how yeah What does life look like? Or what would life have to look like? And I was like, I don't know. I'm figuring out what it is to be a Dutch shaman, which I have already no clue what. I don't know. Figuring it out as we go. I love it. It takes courage, man. So many of the most interesting people I know are discovering who they are. And I think that's part of the process. When you trap yourself into this mindset of, how do I monetize this? You immediately fall into the trap of letting the algorithm lead you along instead of you creating. I struggle with it too. The moment you start, you allow yourself to let the idea of monetization creep in is the moment you become less interesting. Right? Because it demands abstraction. It demands that you take something and then you create a box around it and you say, this is the method that I sell. It's like my little rat maze that I let people run through. And you take it out of the living system. So what you can do is, of course, create or see if you can monetize presence. See if you can monetize emergence. Hence, I also sometimes use the word facilitator. So I like... um, holding ceremony with space or a ceremonial space with people to facilitate, uh, emergent developments in their, uh, awareness in their consciousness. So you put people in altered states, either induced by, uh, chemically with men or just by creating a certain state, you can also induce an altered state by having good dialogue by, um, creating the space to actually listen to other people to listen feel with them these kind of things and in that sense you can monetize your presence but yeah try doing marketing for that yeah I I know we're kind of coming up on the on the close here I wanted to get into some of the ideas about like the let goes and the maps and the trials and the tribulations that seem to be coming out of trying to monetize clinical, you know, you have these clinical trials that you can monetize, but it seems like there's all this messy human emotion that gets involved in there. And like, things don't work out and now you got to throw the trial out. And like, but that might have to be a conversation for another day. Cause we only have a few more minutes, man. But, um, Yeah. What are you most excited about, Simon, coming up? I mean, you have had an incredible journey, and I'm very thankful to get to play a part by watching and seeing and talking to you. What are you most excited about for the upcoming future here? Nice. Nice, George. I'm often very excited about just having conversations such as these is something that gives me a lot of joy because there's emergence here. And I'm excited about the end of this year and stepping into the next year. I'm doing more with my personal practice, my healing practice, working with people across the world. And as my training deepens, my abilities of doing proper work with people also deepen. It becomes way more, I call it magical in a sense. The type of experiences that I'm having both with people and on my own are consistently evolving and deepening. So I think. yeah, it's given me more and more joy thinking about the future in how I'm going to collaborate and also solo create new spaces where I, uh, where I can, yeah, go on expedition with people, let's say to, to, uh, move towards healing. Uh, and also with the joy that that entails doesn't all have to be very heavy handed and sad. Um, So that part, that's something that I'm really excited about. It's just so enjoyable to also now my relationship with psychedelics and doing it more in a ceremonial setting. I'm meeting more interesting people who also do energetic work and collaborating with them in a space like that. That's also something that's very special. because the it becomes less and less um journeying becomes less and less a thing of okay I take the medicine and I just see if I get sucker punched into I don't know what and then just undergoing the whole thing and it becomes more and more co-creative space where I um um Yeah, where I am moved by the medicine and moved by the experience where I can actually shape it as well. So do energetic work, become more aware of what is going on, navigating that space, saying like, okay, we're going to see if we can travel to this place. If you're traveling by yourself, just lying down knowing that, okay, my left hip, there's bad stores let's go into the left and then just being able to do that instead of having the experience be a roll of the dice and often of course you can you it's it's like do planning a hike you you kind of you're planning the destination but maybe the weather is completely different and everything changes yeah yeah you you're coming with a good enough map that you can influence what you're doing and um in the absence of a Dutch or in the absence of a rich local tradition of shamanic plant medicine work, I'm having to figure it out a bit by myself and learn from practitioners who come from other cultures. And that has been also very fun because that's also very non-dogmatic and free, playful and humbling so yeah that's that's that's great and I another thing um A conversation as a transformative experience. I've been experimenting as well with channeling or at least taking taking objects of interest, subjects of interest going into an altered state and sort of allowing the words to pass through and seeing what kind of terrain you come into them. And then this having a very interesting experiences and words open up And I've been thinking about how to, it has been showing in my writing, but a lot of it is so esoteric and strange that I haven't found a good enough or a format I'm happy with yet. So I probably have to just start trying things. making drawings, maybe making poems and just sort of getting the creative energy going and creating from what I'm tapped into or investigating. Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I find myself on a very similar journey in so many ways. Simon, you've been gracious with your time. Super stoked to talk to you. We shouldn't have to go this long without a conversation like this, man. I miss talking to you. I feel better after I talk to you, man. And I'm super stoked to see all the things you're doing. Where can people find you, man? If they hear this conversation and they're like, I'm in the Netherlands, I want to talk to Simon. Or maybe they're in Canada or something. How can they find and reach out to you? Yeah, so at the moment, my LinkedIn is sort of the only social media thing that I use. I also am on Substack. I haven't written anything yet, but I can be found there. And otherwise, my email is just my name and then at gmail.com. So people can also email me if they're interested in having a conversation or whatever, scheduling a session. Yeah. yeah yeah well fantastic everybody within the sound of my voice go down to the show notes click on the linkedin profile down there I'll attach it and um if you enjoyed our conversation reach out to simon yourself he's a phenomenal individual and I think he is leading the way in in a lot of different ways so that's all we got hang on briefly afterwards simon but everybody out there that participated thank you so much for hanging out with us that's all we got aloha