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The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Welcome to the Smoke Trail hosted by Smoke Wallin. Join Smoke on a unique journey of awakening consciousness, sharing authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests. Explore spirituality, leadership, and transformation, tools to elevate your path.
Smoke:Welcome to the Smoke Trail, Steve. Super happy and excited to have this conversation with you and kind of a continuation of our our last conversation. And but this one, we're gonna we're gonna actually, be able to share with some other people.
Steve:Smoke, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me today. I've been looking forward to this conversation since.
Smoke:Here we are. So, what I'd like to do is, first of all, before I introduce you, I'll just state my intentions, what the smoke trail is all about. And it's a good idea to state your intentions to yourself, if to no one else, before you embark on anything so that you have some conscious awareness to what you're doing, whatever it is. And that can be as simple as going on a workout or making dinner or also can be applied to any activity you have in the physical world, like a meeting or, in this case, our podcast. And my intention to the Smoke Trail is simply I'm on this journey.
Smoke:I've learned a bunch of things along the way. I'm learning things every day. I learned things since I last talked to you a couple of weeks ago. So it seems like every week, it's like, oh, wow, now I know this. Now I know that.
Smoke:What I felt at some point, I felt like, wow, I would have been really benefited if I'd heard some of this stuff earlier along my journey and didn't have to go down 10 little side shoots to find out the one that I felt like was actually really valuable and then go forward. And I've done that over and over and over again. I know you have, too. So the intention here is to share in the journey, to share with people who I have great respect for, who are also on some we're all on some form of journey or path that have some insights that I think I can learn from and that our audience, we're going to put it out there in the universe and see how it sits and how it helps people. And I welcome you if you have any thoughts or intentions yourself.
Steve:Yeah, I do. So, I think you spoke. The thing that I've come to realize is that if we do this maybe as well, we improve ourselves and we improve the energy that we radiate, which has a direct and meaningful impact on others. And often we have no idea that that occurs. As you know, I write a substack that is as much a labor of love as anything else.
Steve:And one piece I pondered aloud in writing, you know, was this worth it? You know, I'm not I don't see a million subscribers. I get, you know, one or two here and there, three or four here and there, is this worth it? And I got full of study in a coffee shop by somebody. It seems like this stuff always happens in coffee shops.
Steve:But this person said to me, your writing has a material impact on me. So if you think I am worth it, then please don't stop. So if
Smoke:Love that.
Steve:If we can put a mustard seed in the ground and have that impact one person, the dominant effect of that is we don't know, but we are doing good. So my intention for today is really to continue to do housekeeping, to take away and purge the stuff that doesn't belong, to hold up to the light, you know, the things that I'm doing or the things that I believe or the things that I'm advocating or embrace and then determine how authentic are those things to supporting, you know, who I am and what I am supposed to do. And, you know, am I living am I living those things correctly, or am I continuing to fake it? Which it's really easy to bullshit ourselves and find ourselves in a place where we're telling, hey, we're doing the right thing. In reality, maybe we're not.
Steve:So, you know, part of today is a systems check, if you will.
Smoke:Awesome. Well, thank you. And thank you for taking the time. I read your posts, your writing, and I've gotten things out of it. So count me and the guy in the coffee shop.
Smoke:You've got at least two and probably a lot more. I have found them to be they've touched home and I have we're going to get into that a bit and what made you get into that. First, let me take a second and just I won't do justice to your full background, but I know it personally. So, Steve and I, and I go way back. We've been friends for decades.
Smoke:You are a serial entrepreneur, as am I. We met in our various entrepreneurial activities. First time in any real way was during .comone, when we both had ventures there and I'd raised a whole bunch of capital. I look back, I think I raised $60,000,000 for eSky in total over several rounds. And, you know, back in '99, '2 thousand, that was real money.
Steve:Yeah. Yeah. It was. And I still recall sitting in your office with you and one other individual former, then we don't need to go into who that is. You know, I've known for a former, I believe, Kokai.
Steve:And we were chatting about that and what your vision was. And and I recall, you know, raising that, that money and I was, how the heck did he do that? That's amazing. And as you recall, I went and did it with, another, Alkbev firm and, you know, raising money is a full time job and it's really hard. And, you know, everybody thinks it's glamorous and sexy, but sometimes, you know, those dollars, they come with a hidden cost and nobody tells you that until sometimes it's still too late, but dive into the positives and negatives of that as we go forward.
Steve:You know, I will say that I used to think that in, you know, raising x amount of money to say that you raised $30.50, 70, a hundred million dollars was a check mark on how successful you are. And all it does is indicate that, you know, you're a good salesman. But what did you do? But so what? You know, what what else is there?
Smoke:Oh, for sure. For sure. But it was a those were crazy times. And I I I certainly and I think you were I don't want speak for you, but I think we were both caught in the moment. It was an exciting time and lots of lots of creative energy.
Smoke:And I believed I was creating something that was going to be worth billions of dollars at the time. It's a pure effort. It wasn't about raising money. Was about how do organize the industry I was working in and how do I bring the Internet to this old regulated business. Anyway, I was definitely on a mission.
Smoke:I'm on a different mission today. But I can't say that I regret any of it. I'm super grateful for the experiences I had in my various ventures. I don't remember who said it, whether it was Ram Doss or somebody, but it was somebody of some wisdom. But I keep quoting it, so I need to find out who said it.
Smoke:But you have to become somebody before you become nobody. And, you know, and and I don't know if you said that or I whatever it is.
Steve:I do believe it was Ram Dass, you know, but so, you know, one of the things that I think it's important to push pause on is, you know, when, when, as, as you, as we go through these journeys of spirituality, many times we, we have to have faith in the things that we can't see because we know that they're there. And, and oftentimes it's our job to, either build them or will them or construct them, know, brick by brick into some form of reality because others can't see that. And there's, I don't see a whole lot of difference between having a vision for creating a business in a place that it isn't supposed to exist. And everybody says that that can't happen or that's not a reality or, or fill in the blank and, and you seeing it and then literally manifesting it step by step by step because of faith in what's possible. This what we're talking about here today as we go forward in this conversation is really no different.
Smoke:Yeah, no, I I'm I'm with you, brother. I I totally get it. And and when I say that quote, I guess it is Ram Dass, you've to become someone to know about, it's not about what you became, it's about the experiences that you have in the world that build up your ego, that contribute to your ego. I'll speak first hand, in my case, that were part of who I became so that I could then strip them down realize what's important, what's the essence that's important. And although those experiences and adventures, I think, helped make me who I am today, I realized the essence of who I am today never changed.
Smoke:And so it's just a perspective. It's not that one is better than the other, but a young person enters the monastery in their teenage years and gets very high up and just studies the scripture. I'm not judging or saying anything bad about it. In fact, it's wonderful. And those monks and those communities help keep the world intact with their level of energy.
Smoke:But I also like the path that I and you have taken each differently. Where we lived in the world, we maybe forgot that we weren't really focused on spirituality. Did a bunch of things, and then we got something that checked us or got us to take a step back and say, Woah, wait a minute. What's important here and what is the essence? And I'm enjoying that aspect of the journey for sure.
Steve:Yeah, look, to some degree, it's like being a lay preacher. Right? We don't have the formal training, but the application comes through thoughtful intention of the application of what we've learned and then trying to provide some context around that. And I think that that's very valuable, as valuable as the more institutionalized format of spirituality or learning or enlightenment because we provide not only the theory, but the practicality of it because, you know, seen what the ruts in the road look like, and they're very real.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. Very true. Well, let's take a second and talk about I I I was surprised to read in your in your pre pre answers to my question that you had had four near death experiences, which is, you know, let alone one. I knew I knew about the one.
Smoke:The one, which was kind of maybe the one that really, really shook you to the core, I guess, was, you know, was your bike accident. And I I wonder if you mind telling us a little bit about that just to frame it, and what it meant to you coming through that, and how it made you recontextualize maybe how you were thinking or how you were living.
Steve:Well, when you say bike accident, I think I understand which one you're talking about, but to be a bit of a smart ass, I have to say, well, which one? Because the first one was a couple years ago. And I'll get to the one that you're talking about, was a couple years ago, and I went straight into the grill of a Ford F-one 50 after bombing down a road bike course, chasing a former pro and having another former pro and then now a current pro following me, and then a bunch of teammates that were quite good. But I was in a place where I was not making really good judgments at the time. And to quote the Top Gun movie, my body was writing checks that I couldn't cash.
Steve:You know, so I got hit, broke a bunch of bones, and I recall waking up and having, you know, one of the pros who was following me. And again, I was doing stuff, It's not important, but I way out over my skis. And I remember him looking down at me, like six inches from me. In that moment of sheer relief that, oh my god, he's not dead. It probably should have been.
Steve:He looks at me and he goes, I've seen worse. There were two others, and people say, Well, had near death experience. No, they were right there near death experiences. One was a deep water diving accident and one bike accident. But the last one, oh, it was an accident.
Steve:It was, I believe, meant to occur for a whole bunch of reasons that, you know, I don't yet fully understand. I was a, know, sort of lead into the accident, a couple years back I was coming off of a business experience that didn't end very well. I found myself in a position, and I think you and I had maybe a couple of conversations then, where I was in full on victim of, you know, the world and all of the bad shit that was happening to me was not my fault and poor me. And I really let myself go and got to the point where I just, I didn't see anything other than what was inside of this little physical box that I found myself in. So that was all there was.
Steve:And, it wasn't, it wasn't all that great. And it was a place where I can now relate when I see a lot of people driving or I'm walking around or I'm doing stuff. I see the look in the eyes of frustration and hopelessness, anger, victimhood, and you fill in the blank. And I was all of those things. I have a picture that I share with a lot of people, I think you've seen it.
Steve:And people look at it and they're like, yeah, that's not a good look. Know, but I had one person, just one, out of all of the people, as you know, when you're doing certain things, business, you have a lot of people that surround you because they want the halo effect or they want something from you. They're your best friend until the check comes and all of a sudden they're not there anymore or they're, dude, I don't have it. So, you know, take care.
Smoke:Yeah. I'm sure many of our audience can relate, but I have been the darling child on all the media and and shows and everything else, and everybody's fighting to be in a deal I'm in. And and then I've also been where I people won't return a phone call. And nothing changed about me, but the situation changed. So obviously they wanted something out of it or there was some different energy around it.
Smoke:I totally get that.
Steve:Well, the interesting thing is that when that happens, to them, what's changed is forever. But what's happened is simply a moment in time. To your point, you're still who you are and it's a moment in time. But to them, you know, they're out because what they see now is the forever. And that's just how they that's how a lot of people choose to live.
Steve:It's the same day over and over, sixty, seventy, eighty years in a row. And then they wonder when they get to some point in their life, what the hell happened? And why did this happen to me?
Smoke:It can feel quite transactional that if I don't have what you are looking for, then you don't have time for me. But if I have something you need that you actually think you might need, then you have lots of time for me, right? Like that feels transactional.
Steve:It is. And often it's people waiting for their turn to talk. And so they're looking for, they're fishing for that transaction. And they often lack two things, empathy and compassion. So empathy is an understanding of, who and what the other person is and what they're going through.
Steve:And compassion isn't just, oh, here's a dollar, go buy yourself a coffee. Compassion is really taking some form of action and to be constructive. That's really all it is. So I had one particular individual that took empathy and he's like, this is, he showed up at my door. He's like, Steve, we're not doing this.
Steve:You're not doing this. You look like shit. You've given up. No, no, sorry. This is not how it's going to go down.
Steve:He had signed me up for a series of events that I probably shouldn't have been signed up for, but nonetheless he did it and he said, this what you're going to do. And you know, damn well, you can do it. So over a period of nine months, I got back to the business of living. And magically when I did that and I moved away from that victimhood standpoint, you know, synchronistic events really started to occur. And I started taking away the noise, the things in my life that were causing noise.
Steve:You know, the burdens, the stones that had built up over time that I was carrying. And, you know, that was both redemptive and freeing. And then things got a lot better. And then one day, you know, I decided I was going to take four or five days off of work and I was preparing to go to a gravel race event called Unbound Gravel. It's a 200 mile race across one day in Borea, Kansas.
Steve:I'd leaned into that because it was this hard thing that taught me more about myself and what I was capable of doing than anything else. And I recall, you know, that friend of mine who signed me up for these events, first event that I did, it was nine months later, you know, after dropping just an insane amount of weight and really getting my head straight, standing on the starting line going, I don't belong here. You know, I do, I cannot do this. It was a complete imposter syndrome. And then I went off with everybody else.
Steve:And over the course of that 156 miles of racing, you know, I told myself maybe 20, quite literally 5,000 times, you know, once every minute or so, you can't do this. Here's all the reason you can't. And so you break it down into just bite sized chunks. And pretty soon you're, you're accomplishing things that you didn't think you were capable of. And so that put me in a very different place mentally and emotionally, but not spiritually.
Steve:And then so right before I got, before I left to go to this race in Emporia, I got hit from behind by a very large truck. I don't know what kind because it was hit and run. They left me there, for dead. And quite literally, I did die. I flatlined and stopped.
Steve:All my vitals stopped for about two minutes. And, you know, I had an NDE. And I say that it was an intentional act by the universe because leading into that accident, there were a series of things that, I begin to understand now, but at the time made no sense whatsoever. And I thought were kind of, I don't want say crazy, but it was just almost difficult to wrap your mind around. You know, but it happened.
Steve:And I ended up in a level one trauma center. And one of the orthopedics who was tending to me said, Hey, man, you're in your mid 50s. Had you not been in the shape, both emotionally and physically that you were in, you would either not be dead or you would never ever recover. He said, so I don't know what it is that you're meant to do, but my God, you're meant to do. You're still here for a reason.
Steve:And I recovered faster than I probably should have, or others did in February
Smoke:And you had severe injuries?
Steve:Oh yeah, I mean, I broke my neck, I broke my back in four places. I had 11 other broken bones. Had a compound fracture of the collarbone. I had a fractured skull. I had a TBI.
Steve:I had a punctured lung. Like I said, I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating for two minutes.
Smoke:So you were just hit from behind you know, by this truck going high speed, right? When did you figure out that this had happened? Like, when did you know it?
Steve:Which part?
Smoke:I mean, like, well, when did you know that something went wrong? Like, you got something happened that, like, I'm not riding my bike anymore, I'm not in, you know, I'm not in Kansas anymore or whatever.
Steve:So there were three parts to it. The first was, so I was in cool down portion of the ride. I was out on a country road in Illinois. The truck that hit me likely hit me with, so think like a Ford F-three 50, just a big pickup truck and hit me with a mirror likely. And then they made that assumption because of where the broken bones were and the giant contusion that went all the way up my back that culminated in like where the neck and backbones broke.
Steve:But when that happened, I remember like two things before everything kind of went dark. And the first was a sound of, you know, lots of something big displacing a lot of air and it came on just like in an instant. And then the second thing was moving towards these giant barrels that were on the side of the road, these 55 gallon drums full of refuse that some that, you know, were stacked next to a construction site or a barn or something like that. The name of the person that owned the barrels had painted their name on it. So I just recall before I hit the barrels thinking, now why in the hell would somebody paint their name on these 55 gallon drums?
Steve:And that was the last thing until I woke up, which was like an hour and change later. And woke up sort of coming out of this near death experience. And then I remember lying face down, not really being able to breathe and kind of hearing this wet gurgling sound, which was, you know, blood filling up in the lungs or already in there and thinking, damn, if I don't get up, I'm going to drown. And, you know, I didn't even think about things being broken. I didn't know where I was.
Steve:I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what had happened. And I remember trying to stand up and, you know, then feeling this. And you don't think, right? This is just the, this is the subconscious going bing, bing, bing, is wrong.
Steve:And so standing up, was like a bag of dominoes and all the dominoes were kind of moving over each other. And those were all these broken bones inside moving around. I had no idea my neck and back were broken. So I'm standing there because before I'd been lying in a ditch and I thought nobody will ever see me. And I was going to drown, so I need to get up.
Steve:So I stood up just kind of trying to keep my balance. You know, ten minutes later, another cyclist comes by and took a look at me and it's like, No, this isn't good. I ended up taken down to a level one trauma center ICU, which is where I camped out for a bit.
Smoke:And I want to get into what this led to, but I know the recovery was was miraculous. Nobody in the ER would have bet that you'd be sitting here like you are. They certainly wouldn't have expected you to be up and about as quickly as you were. And and what do you attribute that to? And what what what was your mentality coming out of this?
Smoke:Tell us, give us a little inside scoop of your perspective.
Steve:So, leading into the accident a couple of months prior, out of the ordinary was happening. I was journaling, I was doing my gratitude. I was, you know, I was working my program and my process and always generally improving. And I was, you know, I was a more balanced person than I'd been in a while. And I saw a lot of work to do, but nothing out of the ordinary that occurred.
Steve:And then one night I had the first of a series of very unique dreams like I've never had before. The first was I'm sitting on a ledge, a rocky ledge overlooking this green valley in twilight and I kind of recognized the valley or at least it looked familiar. And I just sat there and it was very peaceful and then, but that was it. The next night, the same thing. The following night, the same thing with one exception and that was that a guy came out of the pine forest that was behind me.
Steve:And it was an individual that for all intent purposes that I've described it to others, including a shaman from New Mexico that I got introduced to, looked like a Lakota medicine man or an indigenous person that had very specific characteristics. And so he began to sit with me. And so this went on for a period of nights. And then one night the location changed. So rather than being on that ledge, you know, I was inside of those pine trees and in front of me, was a, a clearing and there was a bonfire in the clearing.
Steve:So I go through the pines and sit in front in this clearing. And he comes from the other side of the woods and sits, sits there. And we, for the first time, have a discussion. And I noticed that around the, you know, the wooden beaded necklace he had, he had a crow's feather and several blue jay feathers. And I made note of that because I thought it was interesting.
Steve:It was really sort of the blue jay feathers were really sort of the one pop of color outside of the fire. But this was a very realistic dream. I could smell the smoke. I could hear the pop of the flames. You know, I could smell the pine.
Steve:I distinctly recall the conversation. Was almost like a lucid dream. I'm like, this is a dream, but it's not. And so, the next morning I'd left my journal sitting outside underneath our pergola, which is in a protected area that's kind of surrounded by holly pines. And sitting next to the burgola were three blue jay feathers that were just sort of, I don't want say scattered, but placed on the table next to the, to my journal.
Steve:And I, and then it dawned on me that over the course of these past few weeks that the normal birds that we have that inhabit our area, this is, May, robins and blue jays and finches, they'd all disappeared and had been replaced by a dozen or so blue jays. And blue jays are very territorial, so you don't see a dozen or so of them. You see two or three or one or two, but not 15 or 20, which had been the case. And I'd never noticed it, but I'm like, wow, that's interesting. So I find these blue jay feathers that are sitting there and I think there's got to be some consequence of these things being there.
Steve:And then I recall the dream thing. And then that guy had on a blue jay feather. He had crow feathers. That's why I look it up, and there's a significance to that from a spiritual standpoint. And then the next night, go back to the same place.
Steve:And there he is sitting across me from me, in the fire. And I noticed that the crow feather is there, but the blue jay feathers are gone. And I had actually, the physical ones I kept and taped in my journal and I wrote about it. He says to me, you have a difficult path that you need to choose and they lead very different directions. You need to choose right now.
Steve:And I said, well, where are they? And he points to his left, which was my right, which I got the sense was, which is out by the ledge where I'd been the first time. He pointed behind him and then he pointed to his right, which was my left. And that was much, in the deeper, pine forest. And he said, you can choose one of those directions, but you must choose now.
Steve:And I said, well, I like the direction to the right because that's where I felt the openness was. And he says, I believe you've chosen wisely, He said, but time will help. And he got up and turned around and walked out the path into the darkness that was behind him, which was one of the choices. So the next day I get hit and I recall Okay.
Smoke:This happened all before the accident.
Steve:That was the night before the accident. All of this led up to the night before the accident. He said, You have a choice. And so when I got hit after noticing the barrels rushing at me at some high rate of speed, I remember waking up and to a smell of grass and clover. And so I sit up and I look around and I'm back in that field, but it's daylight.
Steve:There's no bonfire, but it's that meadow that's in the midst of the trees. And so I get up and I walk to the right and I come through the right and rather than it being a rocky ledge, it's a broad shallow mountain stream that's full of river rocks. And it's bordered on either side by pine forests and behind that are just these beautiful mountains that kind of reminded me of the Canadian Rockies. And so I step over stream across the rocks and I walk through this field and it seems like I walk forever. But, in a matter of minutes, I end up in front of this guy and it's the same guy that's been in my dreams.
Steve:And so he says to me, this is not your place, it's not your time, but you, it's important that you visit here and you understand the reality of what it is that you're seeing so that when you return, and in return you must, that you've made the right decision and it leads you down this path. And so I said, well, I kind of want to stay here. And he says, you can't. So he turns around, turn around, and he sends me back, walk across the path. And as I'm walking back, he he says to me, he goes, you you have to let go of the remaining stones that you carry.
Steve:So I get to the the the stream, and I look and I in my hand my hands, I've got three giant stones. And these are behaviors or beliefs or burdens that I've been carrying for some time. So I dropped them into the river and realized, oh shit, those are mine. I need them back, but they're gone. So I cross over the stream, back to the meadow, and I sit down and get sleepy, fall asleep.
Steve:And then the next thing you know, remember waking up face down in clover and grass thinking, you know, before my eyes opened, I could smell the clover and grass. I said, this is a great smell. I wish I could stay here forever. Then I opened my eyes and, you know, I'm back here. What do I make of that?
Steve:I was given another chance to do, to live a life that maybe is a little different than before. So I know there's a couple of things for certain. I know that it happened. I know that death, as we believe it, is not what we've been sold. I know I'm not scared of it.
Steve:And I know that there's a lot more to this world than our five senses tell us. And because I know those things with certainty, I'm choosing now to live my life in a different way. In large part, it's paying off.
Smoke:I love the story and it's incredible. And I I I know it happened too. Like, I wasn't there, but I just I know it from the way you described it. It just I I know it. You got you got to download too.
Smoke:So you shared with me a chart that looked like it came out of some spiritual textbook or some Ken Wilbur or some somebody, you know, who's out there writing stuff, and it it came from this this being. Right?
Steve:Yep. This being, who his name is either Black Horse or Dark Horse. I'm not quite sure which, but I can I can if you put a composite artist in front of me, I could have it drawn, right?
Anitra:I
Steve:know exactly what he looks like, but, he'd been back a couple of times, a couple, three times. And the first time he came back, he, with a stick in the dirt that was, you know, in this meadow, there was a grassy area and there was some dirt where the fire once was, but it wasn't, it was dirt and ash. He drew that chart and he said, you know, walk me through it.
Smoke:And then he asked me where I thought I was. And I'll put it up here for the audience, if that's all right. Where did you think you were on this chart, which starts out at fear, rage and anger, goes all the way up to joy and purpose and realization?
Steve:Yeah, so in the middle, it looks like an hourglass, right? So there's an eye of a needle, there's a lot of spiritual and religious, documents that talk about, including areas of the Bible that talk about passing through the eye of a needle. But this isn't that as much as it's a choke point for you to leave behind the negative energies that we're not supposed to hold on to so that you can continue to rise. So your question is, where do I think I am or where do I think I was? Well, you know, I started my journey down at the lower left and that sort of victim in between addiction and victim, that dark area to the lower left.
Steve:So you receive at the bottom, there's victimhood, there's self centeredness, selfishness, and in the middle is addiction, and the far right is narcissism. That's
Smoke:sort
Steve:of the bottom, but there's yet another layer underneath that. In between the choke point smoke, the thing that I was told was that each of those layers, sort of like water, as we understand, thermoclines from free divers. The deeper you go, the more it pulls you down. And the higher you go, the more it pushes you up. I went from the lower left to when I was hit to being sort of in the middle and bobbing up and down between in that eye of the needle, if you will, the narrow point of the hourglass.
Smoke:What amazed me, when you sent me that, was like, Wow, I really thought it came from which spiritual teacher gave you this, which book is this in, right? Because I've read a whole bunch of these things, and when I look at David Hawkins' map of consciousness, and his scale of consciousness maps pretty nicely to this. And there's lots of other modes in psychology, these emotions are a scale, whether you follow David's or you follow some other. Basically, anger, shame, those lower level emotions, lower energies, they feel thick, they feel heavy, like you say, lower levels of the water. As you move up into these higher levels of neutrality and then beyond that to understanding to eventually the joy and just kind of a bliss state, feel light, feels are vibrating rapidly, the high vibration levels, it maps perfectly.
Steve:You used a phrase that I really liked when we were chatting last, and that's like you used the word tar, right? We talked about it. It's sticky and tar like, and clearly it resonated with you and you got it because that's where you came out. I'm like, wow, that's probably the best word I've ever heard to describe it because that's what it is. It's a simple self diagnosis and anybody can print this out, it's got to really be on paper.
Steve:Then you just put your heart to it, you point your finger and you'll probably get a sense of where you are. And once you know where you are, then you can start figuring out, well, how do I get further up? With that interest and desire to improve, you know, comes the opportunities to do so. And all of that's just hidden in plain sight. It's just we have to wake up to see it.
Smoke:Yeah, and it resonated with me and really that's the purpose of this show. Like when you stare at me like, okay, well, I'm feeling joy and bliss, and I've cleared a whole bunch of stuff in my journey along the way, which is dropping stones or clearing away the tar, if you will. And, you know, what I came to realize and just so just for the audience so they understand, like, I actually read this account from one of the guys that was part of putting the in in in in in in gram together, I'll say it wrong, but used in management and understanding bowling. And he he wrote this account, which I I it really struck me. It makes perfect sense to me.
Smoke:And and since then, it like, it's just like, well, that's truth. Where he had this heightened state of being and it continued over this retreat weekend. Then he realized when he was working with the other people on the retreat, he could see the underlying essence of people. He had kind of seen the light within himself, within nature, the planter, and then he could see that within everyone. And so everyone on this retreat, he could see this inner glow.
Smoke:But a lot of them are men people were covered up with this black tar at different levels of cover up. So some were were really covered up and they were the people that had a lot of work to do, had a lot of issues, hadn't cleared, hadn't dropped stones, hadn't cleared a lot of things. And then there were people that where the tar was very thin. It was almost like it was almost wiped off, it was, you know, there was still a little bit, but only in patches. And those are people that had done a tremendous amount of work and had kind of cleared themselves.
Smoke:I I just I love that visual because it rings true to me what we all go through as humans as we drop our ego mind, as we understand the traumas and the things that we've experienced and we come to terms with it and, you you could say transcend it, but I think it's an alchemical process of turning that stuff into really, it's a superpower once you understand it and that clears that tar away. I'm glad it did with you too.
Steve:Since the accident, I ask people, mostly strangers, So what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you? And I'll do that all the time. And I think I'm up to now 147, one hundred and 40 eight different people. And sometimes I get some bona fide answers, you know. One guy had an argument with my spouse one morning and I watched her drive off taking my daughter to school.
Steve:And it was the last time I saw them because they were hit by a vehicle, know, by a truck, you know, ten minutes later. Okay. That's bonafide, right? Most people, most people really haven't had any, anything really challenging happen to them. And what ends up happening, Smoke, is they start descending into these layers, not because of the adversity that they're dealing with, but because of what they're making up in their minds about that.
Steve:So, you know, I'll ask somebody, what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you? And there's sort of a universal truism. The handful, maybe a dozen people that had something tremendously difficult or challenging or terrible happen to them, there's a common, they're all different, there's a common threat.
Smoke:It's funny though, Steve, it's easy to say it wasn't someone hasn't had something bad, like I've had childhood trauma, I had a pedophile grandfather or grandmother that covered it up, And and so I've had a bunch of these things that were, like, really traumatic. As you know, in when I relayed my story, I didn't remember any of that until I did, and then I came to terms with it. And those were obviously those are clearly you understand why you might have PTSD from these things. But that being said, the smallest thing, you can still build it up in your mind and just as big from a trauma standpoint. I've learned so much, there's a doctor who does a lot of EMDR, this treatment, and he claims that fifty percent of all people in America have childhood trauma.
Smoke:Infant trauma. So that's between zero and two years old. And he does this treatment where I did it because I was interviewing him to learn about it and then he made me do it. I'm like, Alright, I'll do it. So I got a chair, he got me into something of a hypnotic state, a theta mind state.
Smoke:Then he had the and he and he and he talked me through it now. You go back. You're one years old. You're stand you know, you're you can stand up holding on the furniture. You've got a diaper.
Smoke:You're you're in that place, and and you're you're seeing everything happening around you. And I'm like, I don't remember that, right? But I'm like, okay, I'm putting my head there. I'm in this state of state. And then he does this chair that vibrates asynchronously, very rapidly.
Smoke:And then he talks me through some more. And basically releases an energy that came up at that time. So even if you can't put a name to something, even if it's not like, Oh, I had this trauma happen to me. You might have trauma that's inside that you haven't released. The energy is still there.
Smoke:And, you know, I call these emotional energy hairballs. They get stuck inside. And you can and so in some cases, like in my case, it was really important for me to dissect and understand, re find the memories, understand them, contextualize them, forgive everyone, like, go through this whole process of knowing. Like, I needed to know. I need to remember everything.
Smoke:So I went through a deep digging process to find out. But I also learned that you don't actually always have to need to know. In my case, I did. But then there's other things. If you just find that energy that's embedded, that emotional energy hairball, and you can bring it up, you can release it.
Smoke:That could be literally, you got stuck in your crib and no one came to get you and somehow you internalize that as this trauma.
Steve:Right. Well, you're, I mean, the things that you shared with me were this litany or series of dominoes of things that had happened to you over the years. Yes, you pack that stuff down and you don't even know it's there, right? But it's still impacting you.
Smoke:For sure.
Steve:Because we choose not to pay attention to that. It's like the symptom of a heart attack. You're like, oh, I'm fine, right? Until it's time when you're not fine. But the people that I've talked to that have worked through or at least faced those issues, challenging or terrible or scary issues, like yourself, Smoke, they tend to have these things in common.
Steve:The first is they're no longer afraid of much. And secondly, understand that it's okay to be vulnerable and it's okay to be introspective and it's okay to dig that stuff out and to let it go because it doesn't belong to you. Pretty liberating. The others that haven't done that or they really haven't addressed anything or they haven't had things that they remember that are hard, they struggle in those lower levels of energy because the world more often than not happens to them and they don't realize how much agency they really have. Part of the value of the smoke trail and the work that you're doing now and others is to give people permission to understand it and know it's okay to, you know, let the door crack a bit and begin to excavate what's there.
Steve:And if need be, find help for, you know, or somebody like yourself or others that say simply, you know, it's okay, rather than, oh, it's woo woo bullshit and don't talk to me about that. What I came
Smoke:to realize, and I think we shared this together, but is that the idea of the trauma, the idea of some horrible thing is much worse than the actual processing of it and going through it. So it's the there's an energy that's this emotion. It's this trauma, and avoiding it is like, oh, we keep it there and it it it it grows in its in its importance and its significance, because you don't touch it and you don't you want to you want to always be like tiptoeing around it. And what I found is once I did that with myself, this isn't fun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about a joy walk on a trail behind me.
Smoke:It's also not that it's at the end of the day, the what you get on the other side is complete peace. Complete complete absolute peace. And as a result, there's nothing I can't sit with, Steve. Like, you know, I I mean, I I used to cringe when someone tried to tell me some personal thing. You know?
Smoke:I I don't wanna hear about your problem. You know? Like, but, I mean, I would do I would listen, but I'd be like, as soon as I could figure out an exit or I could figure out, like, how do we go to the bar and get a cocktail? Let's talk about this over a drink, would be my my number one go to. And and and basically, once so, you know, now I'm like, I didn't seek it out, but I have I have all kinds of people coming to me.
Smoke:And I in the way I understand it, I'd love to hear have your what you think this is, but and you're experiencing if you're experiencing this too. But, like, because I'm okay, I can sit with anybody's trauma. Nothing bothers me. I don't cringe about anything because it's not it doesn't I can sit for it. So what happens is now, I have people coming to me all the time, 'Hey, I have this problem, my marriage is going away, I have this illness, my kid is off the rails, or I don't know, like all kinds of things.'
Steve:Doctor's in, man, the doctor's in.
Smoke:Yeah. Right. And I'm just like, okay. Well, tell me about it. Tell me me let
Steve:me ask
Smoke:a few let me ask a few questions.
Steve:But I I thought a lot about this, and, you know, the only answer I can come up with or the hypothesis, if you will, is that there's a difference. And the people I know or that I've talked to, some of the people I know that are stuck in those lower forms of energy, you know, the victimhood or the narcissism, they're stuck in the last chapter. And the problem is that it's, that thing that you've gone through, what you just talked about, is not the last chapter, it's the price of admission for the first chapter because it's about what happens now on the other side. And so when realize that you've made it through and all of that stuff was just the prelude to the first chapter, That's liberating, rather than just living over and over in this narcissistic or this victimhood state to where you're not willing to address everything. It's the same day over and over and over.
Smoke:Yeah.
Steve:No. That's the death sentence. Right?
Smoke:Yes. And also, you said you can ask, you can go get help. You have to ask for help. In my case, I was in Nepal at the Buddhist birthplace. Something came over me.
Smoke:I knelt down and I prayed. It wasn't very spiritual or religious, but I prayed and I asked for peace and peace and love, to the Buddha. And I felt this electricity go through my body, up my spine, into my head and out, and I was like, What was that? I had no idea what that was, but I asked for help. And that led me to plant medicine and my whole journey with Ivan and uncracking all this stuff.
Smoke:And I realized that what I wanted was peace and love, which was not God's love, not like I have a great marriage and kids and all that stuff, that was all pretty good. It was great. But I had this anxiety and this unease at the back of my head that I didn't know existed. And I realized that in order to get what I asked for, all of the things in the way of that had to come up. So that's the tar or the rocks or whatever you wanna metaphor you wanna use.
Smoke:But the things that were in between me and perfect peace were all of these memories that were locked away in these energetic hairballs that were stuck inside in my subconscious that I needed to clear, I needed to learn about, and then in so doing, forgive and then clear. And then by clearing them, what was left was the top of your chart, the top of your picture, that little, that little, those, those things, that's what's underneath the tar. That's what we all have inside. It's, it's innate in all humans.
Steve:No, that's true. We just need to remember that that's there. So remember. It's not adding things, it's taking things away. So it's the removal, the stripping away of all tar and the negative energy, all the stuff that we've held onto that, you know, energy, whether it's negative or positive or emotions, negative or positive, it's supposed to be the breeze through the pines, but it's not meant to be trapped.
Steve:We shouldn't cling on to, you know, positive memories in hopes of repeating them. We shouldn't sequester away the negative things that have happened because they're not, they don't, we don't own them, that we're meant to experience them, but it's transitory, right? The problem is that when we do, when hold on to all of that stuff, it weighs us down. And it's like treading water, you know, with a backpack full of rocks. Some point, you run out of energy and you just start to sink.
Smoke:Absolutely. So let's, this has been great. And now, fast forward a bit, you and I had a great conversation around this, so I want to bring up the topic. Part of my journey, not everyone's going to take their own path. Like the smoke trail, the reason it's called the smoke trail and not the way to God, the pathway to God.
Smoke:No, Steve has his pathway, smoke has his pathway, the Buddha has his pathway. Now, there things we can learn from how the Buddha did it or how David Hawkins did it or how various teachings. Absolutely! There's all these rich traditions. But I, for mine, I needed I realized I had major gaps.
Smoke:I didn't grow up in any kind of religious family of note. In fact, some of my abuse was around, you know, around whatever religion I did see. You know, my grandfather was an organist in churches, that was his cover. I had no interest in any of that. So, like, when I started going down this path, was like, oh, wow, I need understand.
Smoke:What what am I even dealing with here? What is this? And started going deep and discovered all kinds of things, read ancient scriptures, you name it, the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, the Buddha. And then discovered David Hawkins, who, I would say, gave me the most clarity in this whole process because he's a relatively modern era enlightened being who was also a trained psychologist, psychiatrist, you know, for fifty years had the largest practice in the country, was gifted with training and enlightenment and was able to write about it, which for me was really helpful because it really made me understand things. So all these things kind of come together and given me this understanding.
Smoke:And I believe that our challenge today, not everybody, but the challenge that I believe that my path is on, I think there's a lot of us, is not to become enlightened and go up in some cave in some remote area and leave the world, but to gain a level of enlightenment, whatever that is, and to be in the world, and to exist in the modern world. I think that's the interesting challenge that we have in this modern era with distractions and social media and all the things that get in the way of that. It's the greatest challenge is to also have a peace of mind, have clarity of spirit and also still not be withdrawn from that world. You have to withdraw some of it in order to be sane, but to live in the world. And we have, at our fingertips, and this is both a blessing and a curse, at our fingertips we have access to all the great traditions.
Smoke:We have all these great texts and knowledge and some of it's been lost, there's a tremendous amount of it. You can go down the Zen path, can go down all these various pathways that get you to a higher level of connection with cosmic heart or divinity or God or whatever you choose to call what it is that we're talking about.
Steve:Well, I I agree with that. I think that we're at a place. We're in some form of a tipping point where, you know, these conversations, these points of view are a bit like amplifiers. So a frequency amplifier, an electrical amplifier that steps it up and so that energy, the positive energy that we're talking about, ideas that originate from source, all of the stuff that is already out there. It's just a matter of, you know, have we tuned into those frequencies?
Steve:Can we decipher it? Can we find it, decipher it, and do something with it? It is is on the rise, and it it's something that I think is is a very positive. It provides me with a great deal of satisfaction and hope that we're in the process of facilitating, you know, real and fundamental change that all of humankind, as well as, you know, all of nature can benefit from. You know, again, we are so trained to see things in moments in time.
Steve:This snapshot right now is all that there is. And that's amplified by, you know, our desire and habits of immediate gratification. So we don't see the results of it instantaneously, therefore it doesn't work. Well, it is working. It's like the season shifting, right?
Steve:You don't see the season shifting till it's happened and you realize, well, a minute, when did all the trees bloom? And so that's, I think, what's occurring.
Smoke:I think it's a good point. Because sometimes this work is frustrating, right? Like, you can seek and you shall not find, right? You can try and try and try and it feels like there's no progress. But probably there is a lot of progress and I liken it to if there was a mountain that mountain had a bunch of snow on it and there was a billion snowflakes on top of it, but the 1,000,000,001 snowflake that lands on it is the one that causes the avalanche.
Smoke:Scott Adams, who is the creator of Dilbert, I don't know if you follow him at all, really like him a lot. In one of his books, he gets into this talent stack, which is, I think, one of the best advice for young people coming up. His talent stack thing is about, you don't need to be the best at one thing in the world, but if you become good at spreadsheets and math and you understand accounting and you also learn how to do public speaking and then you learn how to make presentations and add one or two more things and all of a sudden those talent stacks add up and you're a one percentile valuable player to the world. And it's a really, really good way to think about things. I look at that from a spiritual standpoint.
Smoke:Some in the spiritual community would probably disavow this thought process because it sounds like an entrepreneur would do it, but that's why I'm saying it to you because you'll get it. You you create a talent stack of knowledge around these different traditions and the ways to the higher self and you don't know which one is that snowflake that's going to create the avalanche, but you start stacking them up and all of a sudden you're in the one percentile of awareness and consciousness and it works. It absolutely works.
Steve:It does. It also, I think it helps us hone the, you know, the behavior of embracing creativity, the hunting of knowledge. Mean, so when you admit that the things you don't know, you don't know, and then you go out and you look for answers. And Sometimes those answers come from very nontraditional places, right? So inspiration can hit when you're listening to, or you're watching a TV show about something and then you make the giant leap between whatever you're learning there and something, some problem that you're working on that has nothing to do with what you've been watching.
Steve:Right? And so those things occur all the time. But unless you're open to receiving that and being curious and learning, then you're never going to be able to see the results of that effort.
Smoke:It's really dropping the judgment, right? So as we make judgments, my understanding has come to everything that we judge, we aren't able to see what else it's trying to tell us, whether that's a person or a situation or something in nature. And you you aren't open to it if you're judging. So dropping the judgment, really dropping the judgment. And you said something earlier about, like, waiting to hear waiting to talk, and I and I've become very conscious of I have to I have to be careful on these talks because I'm I have to keep us on a a little bit of a a program and not not too much.
Smoke:But I've now listened differently than I used to. There was a time when I would be thinking of my next response while I was whoever I was talking to would be selling with theirs, and then I was like, okay. Now here's my point. Oh, thank you. Your point.
Smoke:Here's my point. And not that I didn't hear your point, but I was I was focused more on my point. Now now what I do is what are they really what's the essence of what this person is actually saying to me? And it may not be the words. It may be something different.
Smoke:Like, I what is it that it that is being conveyed? And if I take that open stance, as you say, a lot of times the meaning will come to me and I'll understand it differently. And then that creates a higher level of communication.
Steve:That's very well said. And it's the accruing of that knowledge in those behaviors and habits, right? So active listening, being open to learning new things. It's like your Dilbert stack. It's, it's, you know, a talent stack.
Steve:You get better at these, these, these various skills that then you can put to use when need them because the opportunities, those opportunities for improvement, they hide in plain sight. The more you become accustomed to being open to seeing them, you know, because they're not always obvious, then then you now have a new set of tools to put them to work in ways that before you simply couldn't. And, you know, that that's ultimately the essence of, you know, why we're here is to continue to improve, elevate both in our consciousness and our understanding and compassion for helping one another and making the, helping me in some small way to make the world a better place for ourselves and the other constituents that we share this environment with, whether it's animals and plants and nature or other people that we have direct ties to or indirect ties to.
Smoke:Yeah, love that. I love what you One of my questions in the pre work was how do you reconcile spirituality and consciousness in a material physical world? And your answer was simple, gratitude. You have a stance of gratitude in everything you do, which I really appreciate because that's how I got there too. Gratitude got me there.
Steve:Look, gratitude's a practice and a journey. There are days that I can be more thoughtful in what I'm grateful for, and there are days that I'm less thoughtful. It's, you know, how deep or how broad can you go? We're human, we're infallible. And there are days that we just screw up, right?
Steve:And so it's not that we make a mistake because we always do. The question is, you know, how do we learn from that? How do we, how do we be introspective and say, you know, the reality is this is what's occurred. This how I approached it. This is what I did wrong.
Steve:These are the thought or the perspective that I had that was incorrect. Maybe I was waiting for my turn to talk. Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself, whatever. But incrementally, how do you just continue to chip away at the noise that allows you to move up those levels? Because, you know, as you get through the eye and you get to, you know, awareness and you go higher and higher up in that graphic, that's a process and a journey and it just doesn't happen overnight.
Smoke:The gratitude is kind of the first, it's the vibration that helps you get there to start with, but we are living a human experience, so we're all human. So there's not a single human that doesn't make mistakes or hasn't made mistakes. The issue is what do you do with those mistakes? And are you learning, like you said, and are you letting them go? There's a letting go process where you don't eat yourself up.
Smoke:I mean, we're usually, the biggest critic is ourselves. Like, I remember when you were talking about when you were talk your self talk was, I I don't belong here. I don't belong in this race. I don't belong I can't make this. That self talk, that's real.
Smoke:Your subconscious hears that and it acts on it. And we have to learn to fix that. One of the things that people aren't even aware of their negative self talk sometimes. First step is become aware of it, Notice it. Don't necessarily fight it to start with.
Smoke:Just okay. Then you'll you'll be mad at yourself for doing it. You'll be you'll be criticizing yourself for your negative self talk. Instead, just once you become aware of it and you're like, oh, that's that. Bring me something better.
Smoke:Swipe left, swipe right with your mind, your mind will start producing what you give it energy. So if you give it energy gratitude, give it energy positive things, and you don't give energy to any of the negative self talk, it will automatically decrease.
Steve:There's a voice inside of our heads that is constantly talking, right? And so it's talking to us, right? So it's not part of our consciousness. It's, it's part of our ego because it's, it's telling us you're, you're good at this. You're not good at this.
Steve:Maybe you should do that. Maybe you shouldn't have done that. Maybe you did, you know, so it's, but that voice that's in your head that, that is your ego. It it's all it understands is gray, right? It's the spectrum of gray because it's never wrong.
Steve:Right. And it doesn't like to be wrong. It doesn't like to be challenged. It doesn't like to shut up. And so over time it it'll, it, it shouts out the heart.
Steve:The heart knows one of two things. It knows black, it knows white, it knows right, it knows wrong, right? And so when you stop listening to your heart, you make bad decisions because you're, you're constantly readjusting, listening to that voice inside of your head that to some degree, if you actually thought about it is crazy because it's constantly contradicting itself. It's constantly, it's, it's paranoid about being wrong, right? If we were to
Smoke:sit
Steve:next to a person that was like that, he'd be like, get me the hell away from this person, right?
Smoke:Well, what's really crazy, but I know you know this and I know this, which is that most of those thoughts are not our own anyway. They are the thoughts of the level of your chart or Hawken's chart of where your your base ground zero is. Right? So where your center of gravity is. If your center of gravity is in shame or something one of the negative levels, those are the thoughts you're gonna have.
Smoke:If your if your center of gravity is in anger, those are a lot of the thoughts you're going to have. Can pop out. Center of gravity is where you end up back. You can go higher and go lower, but you're going to end up back there. Thoughts that you and I could sit here and make a list of here are the thoughts you're going to have if you're at these different levels.
Smoke:And those substitute the name of the culprit that caused you, that made you angry or the situation that made you angry. So everybody's got their own little nuance to it. But it's not that thought and that emotion are part of that field. So what we want to do in consciousness is we want to figure out ways to drop the negative things, drop the barriers to going to these higher fields. As these higher fields come, we align ourselves, the heart and mind align themselves to where there's no gap, there's no separation between what you were talking about with the and that mind, that monkey mind that talks all the time and incessant chatter goes away.
Smoke:It stops. Eventually, it just stops doing it. But you don't try to stop it because if you try to stop it, it will do more. You're energizing it. But it eventually goes away once you have alignment, but it's a process and you have to let go of these things as you go through.
Smoke:And again, this is not something to seek or to find somewhere. It's innate in each of us. It's just covered up by this tar. It's covered up by this stuff. And so it's really an undoing to get to oneself that we're talking about.
Steve:Look, Michelangelo was quoted in saying, and the question was, how did you create David, the masterpiece? And he said, just chipped away what didn't belong. Yeah. And I think that it's the uncovering, it's the chipping away and getting rid of, you know, all of the extraneous bullshit that doesn't belong that allows you, it's like ballast, you let it go and you rise up. And I still recall the first time when, you in meditation, the chatter wasn't there.
Steve:And I'm like, wait a minute, something's wrong because it was just silence. And that silence could go on forever. It was a wonderfully calming thing. So you're 100 right. There's been lots of really good nuggets in this conversation.
Steve:You've laid out some really thoughtful stuff for I think people that are either wondering where they are and they know that something's not right and they're just looking for permission for ways to improve or that they're on the journey they've started and they need the encouragement or they need the assistance. I think innately we birds that, you know, migrate, they just innately know where to go and nature tells them what to do. I think for us, as we sort of balance our heart and our mind and we get into that symbiotic state of conscious awareness that nature to some degree takes over and allows us to point towards that true north and we can head there. And then magically, run into people, places, resources, things that help sustain us on that journey.
Smoke:Absolutely. To that point, I think we did have a bunch of good topics. I think we'll, you and I could do this many more times and get into more other topics that I think would be really interesting. Hopefully, you'll consider joining me again. Is there anything you're working on?
Smoke:I know you've got your Substack or your writing. Tell people how they can get ahold of you, how they could find some of your work.
Steve:Yeah, and you can put this up on the screen. You can find me on Substack at The Chosen Path. If you want to look at some of the work that I do, you can go to Amplify, A M P L I F Y, amplifyflow dot co dot co, amplifyflow dot co. Those are two places to start. And if somebody wants to email me, it's really simple.
Steve:It's my name. It's steveantoddhirschberggmail dot com. Here is a fellow traveler.
Smoke:Awesome. Thank you, Steve. I know there are people all over that you're affecting by just by your own journey. Your writings are great. The fact that you have gone through what you've gone through and, you know, as we as we move up your on your graph, on your on your shaman's graph, it affects everyone around us because we're all connected.
Smoke:No one does it for anyone else, right? It's our own journey and we all have to figure this out. But as we do it, we help others and frankly, the path gets easier. It's easier now to become fully enlightened than ever in history. It was much harder when the Buddha did it, and then six hundred years later when Jesus did it, was much more difficult because the level of consciousness in all of humanity in the world was so much lower.
Smoke:Today, it's actually, believe it or not, you wouldn't believe it from the news, but it is much higher. And there's more and the more people that move up, it becomes easier.
Steve:I I think that we we talk about the negative aspects of the Internet and social media, and truly, there are plenty to indite it with. But I believe that one of the positives that it has the ability to generate is that we are, in fact, two degrees from separation from Kevin Bacon. And then through this, this neural connection of networks that we're all involved in, we have the ability to share this energy and these points of view as easily as we have the ability to tear others down. So it has the ability to amplify the positive just as easily as the negative. And so I think we should leverage that.
Smoke:Yeah. And the higher levels of consciousness are a log 10 scale in power greater than the lower one. So someone who's operating at level of love or unconditional love is exponentially putting out good energy into the universe compared to someone who's operating in anger or shame or fear.
Steve:Yeah. It's like they, you know, they used to say back in the day, it's the 50,000 watt radio station that, you know, you could hear 500 miles away versus the low power station that you could only hear two miles away. And and you're absolutely right. It is it is that difference. And so I think we just, you know, we continue to amplify and more people are talking about this, more people that believe in it, more people that practice it, better off we are.
Smoke:Well, Steve, thank you, you, thank you. I really appreciate you spending time with me and with with our audience, because if they're if they made it to this part, they're on the path too.
Steve:Well, Smoke, you never have to ask me twice to hang out with you. It's all, you know, over the course of years, it's always been interesting. It's always been enlightening and it's always been a joy. So thank you for having me and I look forward to another one.
Smoke:Alright. Well, maybe we'll do it on a on a hike in Sedona. We'll do it live.
Steve:Sounds good, man.
Smoke:Alright. Cheers.