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You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist intimately explores the human experience while critiquing the state of the counseling profession as it yields to cultural madness. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist as she pivots away from treating patients, and toward the question of how to apply psychology to the novel dilemmas of the 21st century. What does ethical mental health care look like in a normless age, as our moral compasses spin in search of true north? How can therapists treat patients under pressure to affirm everything from the notion of gender identity to assisted suicide? Stephanie invites heretical, free-thinking guests from many walks of life, including current and former therapists, medical professionals, writers, researchers, and people with unique lived experience, such as detransitioners. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s interdisciplinary psychological lens investigates challenging social issues and inspires transformation in the self, relationships, and society. Pick up a torch to illuminate the dark night and join us on this journey through the inner wilderness.
Speaker 2 (00:00.078)
Say someone gets to the mid-30s and they're feeling alienated from their job and they're feeling bored at home in their marriage and then some big tech leader tells them to go into the jungle and do ayahuasca and there is plenty of that. So you take a man who's in his mid-30s or a woman who's built a life but maybe they're feeling a bit uncomfortable and life is a bit boring and stiff. Of course the corporate world is not enjoyable and home life can be difficult and parenting is hard. All these things are true. They take ayahuasca in the jungle and they commune with the spirit and the spirit tells them you need to be a traveling yoga teacher.
They're now commuting with an entity, a consciousness that is higher than their own. In effect, it's a god. It has a god-like level of 40 is not god. An entity at that level tells you to go do something. It's like getting a message from god. And so people come back and they take that as a message from god and they upend their entire lives and they create devastation as a result. And then they follow that path of becoming whatever traveling yoga instructor they're gonna become. They find their way into the new age world with the cult-like behavior, mistaken ideas, the Kundalini, all this stuff. They find their way into that world. Okay, fine. What I encourage people to do is
look into the future of the New Age world and see how many happy and healthy and fulfilled old people there are in that world. There are very, very
You must be some kind of therapist.
Speaker 1 (01:13.784)
My guest today is Will Spencer. He is an evangelist and adventurer, a former New Age seeker who found Christ, a biblical counselor and mentor to men and the host of the podcast, well, the Will Spencer podcast named after himself. So today we're going to talk about the journey from ayahuasca to Christianity and everything in between. Will, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Stephanie. I appreciate it.
So I was sharing before we started recording that I come from a very culturally liberal background. Having spent most of my life on the West Coast, I've known a lot of people who have done ayahuasca and all kinds of new age spiritual exploration. And sometimes I even feel like my current life away from those things feels a little like it's missing some of the richness of that cultural background. But I'm in a different place now.
and doing different things with my life. And now that I'm spending more time around, I guess, more kind of normal Americans and talking to more Christians and conservatives, I don't often come across people who have that particular background and journey. you had posted something on X. I've been following you for a while because I you do men's work. But you had posted something on X that caught my attention about your current
Christian perspective on drugs like ayahuasca, having explored them in the past. So I think you have a unique perspective to offer here. Before we launch into that discussion though, I am just trying to make a point. I think for the foreseeable future, I'll be spending a few words just honoring Charlie Kirk's memory and legacy. I'm not sure how long before this comes out, but I think that he...
Speaker 1 (03:03.68)
He's had a huge ripple effect and will continue to affect our hearts and minds for a long time to come. So is there anything that you would like to say about Charlie?
Man, there's so much that I could say. I think the thing that probably feels most relevant, for whenever this episode comes out, I pray still is relevant, is his death appears to have inspired a very righteous uprising of men and women to take a good look at their beliefs, their politics, their theology, their religious background, and really begin to question themselves and say,
Okay, there are certain things that are acceptable and there are certain things that are not. By the way, for everyone listening, I'm actually just getting over being sick. So please forgive me. And so, you know, we've seen a segment of the American population that has gleefully celebrated Charlie Kirk's death. And that has been very shocking. Some of us have known about that part of the American population for a while and others haven't, or they haven't believed that it's real. And so what appears to be happening is there are lot of people that might not be politically aligned
with Charlie Kirk, but they look at the celebration of his gruesome death and they're like, the people who are celebrating it, like, we don't want to have anything to do with that. And I think that that's actually creating a wonderful moment for Unity because Charlie Kirk was a great example of engaging people with dialogue. He would show up in difficult circumstances and he would listen fully and he would respond kindly and compassionately, forcefully, but he authentically from his own worldview. He never shied away from discussion. He never shut people down. He would let them have speak their piece.
probably long past when anyone else would, because he was so committed to dialogue. And what that says to me is he believed in the humanity of the people who disagreed with him politically. He believed in their essential humanity and that he believed that he could reach them through dialogue and rational discussion and appeals to morality and appeals to the heart. And I genuinely pray that what we continue to see is a commitment to maintaining Charlie's spirit of open dialogue.
Speaker 2 (05:04.3)
And there of course are people on both the left and the right. know, the left is many of the extreme left, let's say are gleefully celebrating his death. Many on the extreme right are excited about the possibility for national violence over it. And I think we can quite safely carve both of those groups off, but in the middle, I think there's a real spirit of, okay, this isn't working. We'd have to try something new together and make our politics sane again. I'm very happy to see that spirit developing today. And I pray that whenever this episode comes out, it's, it's born.
really good fruit.
Thank you so much. That was beautiful. And on the subject of making politics sane again, I do just have to show off my make therapy sane again t-shirt from my friend, Soad Tabrizi. It's blocked by my mic. But on that note, I think a lot of people are feeling like the line between good and evil has never been more clear. And all those people on that side of, well, I disagreed with his politics, but he was a good man.
You know, it's, it's abhorrent to use violence to silence someone. think to all of them. It's like all of those of us on team sanity and team reality want to extend a big warm welcome and say that you can join us. And, know, we welcome healthy disagreement and discussion over here on team sanity and team reality. And it's, really scary to take a look around and just see how violent and extreme things have gotten in a certain.
segment of society.
Speaker 2 (06:34.186)
Absolutely. And I think the American media so far has been very focused on supposed violence coming from the right. that is there are potentially violent people who talk about violence, talk about violent overthrow of the government. Like that's a real that's a real feature of the right, whether they're actually conservative or whether they're, you know, progressive and not in the left way, but in the right way is another matter. But those people exist. Meanwhile, the media has turned an absolute blind eye to the extreme violence promoted by the left. I think the person who took shot at
President Trump was a leftist. There was the people who shot up a Stephen Scalise. I think he's the House whip or something at the time, the congressional baseball game. There were two transgender shooters, at least that I know of, one of whom recently in the Minneapolis church and the other at the Nashville Presbyterian school. This is just within recent memory and there's probably far more. And so whatever threats of violence there might be on the right.
You know, for example, we will say January 6th. Well, January 6th was largely nonviolent. There's only one person that was killed and that was by a Capitol security and that was a woman who was shot by a Capitol security guard. So like you can talk about breaking into buildings or you can talk about shooting up schools and shooting up individuals. That has been largely done by the left. And so far the leftist captured media has either celebrated it or turned a blind eye to it. And so it's one thing if the media wants to do it. It's another thing entirely if normal people, you know, have their friend group on say Facebook.
And Charlie, Charlie Kirk gets shot in a gruesome and brutal fashion of the sort that most people will never see in their lives. And praise God for that. We in the West today are sheltered from the brutal, some of the brutal realities of war and death and violence that are part of life. But in this video, someone sent it to me. And when I found out, whatever it was Wednesday, I was recording a podcast. got done and I got a text. Charlie Kirk has been shot and someone sent me a link and then bang.
Right there, it was just shown to me before I even had the chance to be like, yes, and so here's this horrific scene. And people are confronted with that reality for the very first time. And gun violence is part of my background, like not me committing it or anything done to me, but something that has been part of my family. And so I've not, it's not the first time I've witnessed a scene quite like that, which is a, which is another story from at the time. But people were confronted with this. And when you, you encounter this horror, this absolutely gruesome and horrific.
Speaker 2 (08:53.27)
blood splattered murder, targeted political assassination. That's literally what it is. And then you see people cheering it and celebrating it. It's like, how can you look at that and celebrate that? This was a clean cut, respectful guy, husband and father, who died in a way that no one can say that he deserves just for his speech, literally just for speaking. And you think that gruesome death that robbed two children of their father
and a wife of her husband, he deserved that and you're celebrating that? That's a level of horror that don't think a lot of people in the middle of the political spectrum on either side were really prepared to see. And now they're seeing it and it's shocking them and it should, it really should.
Well, and maybe this ties into some of your personal story arc here because I'm thinking about, I don't know your background, but I know that you went from New Age spiritual seeking to Christianity. And I know for me, I also come from sort of a New Age liberal California background. you know, it's been really interesting the past few years as I've become
vocal and gained both fame and infamy for my position on trans issues to see how my old friends have reacted to that. Many of them I'm not in touch with anymore, but I've experienced the range from a couple of friends of mine, actually shout out to Dee Jin Jin, because they've been on this show and I knew them since forever ago and they have this beautiful little
mom and pop herbal medicine business that they run and friends like that who completely support what I'm doing and are grounded in the same respect for health that is one of the values that drives my concerns. To on the other side, thinking about someone I'm not sure if I went to grad school with but was studying counseling psychology at the same time as me involved in the
Speaker 1 (11:04.076)
yoga community at the same time as me very much into somatic embodiment stuff. And I think of people who are into somatic embodiment stuff as, well, I think of people like my friend Amy Sousa who knows what a woman is and knows the importance of staying grounded in our truth and the reality of our senses. But a friend with that background telling me that I'm vile scum for saying that men can't be women and that therapists shouldn't harm patients.
So you just never know with people who were you know, and I went to Burning Man Almost 20 years ago now. So Well, I don't know at that point I I met people who had been there much earlier than me But I was in my early 20s, which is you know It's the time that your body can withstand the conditions of Burning Man and sleeping on the ground in the desert I think people from that background if we go far back enough
in the early, some of the early days.
Speaker 1 (12:02.786)
we all remember if we were around 20 years ago when the new age health conscious, you know, quasi spiritual scene when we didn't have this infiltration of gender ideology and woke politics. But I see how those things could be huge turnoffs for people in that background. But I also see how the desire to see oneself as an open minded, good person can really be exploited here. And I think from
If I can say so myself, I would imagine that from the Christian perspective that the sin there is pride. that it capitalizes on the hubris of wanting to see yourself as better than other people.
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that, you know, the transgender ideology is certainly that has infiltrated a lot of these new age progressive spaces. I think for a lot of people also, including for myself, I was on my way out of the new age when all this came down. But also, you know, the the COVID, the COVID cookies as I want to make sure I don't know if this is on YouTube. There are certain words you're not allowed to say on YouTube. no. You're well, that's that's what a pastor, a pastor friend of mine, Jeff Durbin, used the COVID cookies.
Okay, so we're saying cookies.
Speaker 2 (13:08.12)
So perhaps we all know what we're talking about. Maybe at this point it's safe, but because it's so far in the past, but we'll say it just, you know, just in case. You know, here was a, here was a field that was so committed to holistic health and getting back to nature and grounding and organic food and sunshine and just all the, that you connect yourself to Gaia and you be in the energy flow of 432 Hertz, all that different stuff. And then, and then here comes a, a, a engineered in a lab.
cobbled together Frankenstein untested product of the pharmaceutical industry promoted by the same international governmental forces that I thought we were all allied against that is suddenly being literally pushed through propaganda and government legal sanctions on everybody, literally everybody, regardless of any potential costs that people don't know about, particularly to women's fertility.
regardless of any of that. And there are a lot of people like, yeah, we need to all just do this. And it was like, this is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of everything that you've ever said that you stand for. I got you on record and you're lining up in favor of this. And it was the biggest wake up call for so many people. Again, I was on my way out of that world, especially because, and maybe perhaps we can get to this later. I had discovered that, you know, the belief in karma and that all is one ends up in morally incoherent positions.
So we can certainly talk about all that. But so I was leaving that world because I found there was actually no stability there in anything. And so I watched it from a distance and I watched so many people just fall into something that was so counterintuitive to everything that they had said prior to that. And so you mentioned transgender ideology. Here are somatic embodiment coaches. They do women's dances under the moon sort of thing. know what I mean? Free bleeding into the earth and nurturing the divine feminine goddess Gaia.
yeah, but by the way, men can become women too. Wait, what? What? And so ultimately, I think when people get themselves into positions where there's a perceived hypocrisy, like a perceived inconsistency, you're pro-holistic health, but you're also pro-mRNA. These two things don't fit together. There's actually a higher principle that they are actually
Speaker 2 (15:34.902)
If they can keep these two things in tension with each other, there's a higher principle that's more important to them that they just won't publicly own. And I think you're very right to say it's maybe being seen as a particular kind of person or having a wider, a wider worldview that appreciates things that they don't want to say out loud. And so that's how they're able to hold them in tension within themselves as opposed to being able to say, yeah, no, that's, that's wrong.
And I will risk being seen as intolerant or hateful or unloving or whatever in order to make a strong moral judgment. So it is pride and it's also a fear of a transcendent morality that is higher than them that they are accountable to. It's easier to say, I believe in everything than to say, no, I believe in this specific set of things. So pride and a fear of being seen as intolerant and all the various manifestations of what that word means.
So let's go there. When you said that a belief in karma ends up in morally incoherent views, what did you mean by that?
Right. it's karma and all is one. So in the New Age, the belief is called pantheism and monism. All is one, monism. Pantheism, all is God, pantheism. There's also another belief called panentheism, that all is within God, but everything being within God is still, everything is still God in a sense. So we'll settle on pantheism and monism.
So in pantheism and modism, that worldview has adapted, particularly in the New Age, has borrowed a lot from Hinduism. So in the 1960s, was Hinduism that infiltrated American culture. It had been coming for about 50 or 60 years, particularly since Swami Vivekananda spoke at the Parliament of World Religions, I believe it was in 1893. That was a watershed moment when this Indian Swami, whose ashram I have been to actually in India,
Speaker 2 (17:28.942)
He came to the United States in 1893, gave a rousing speech to the Parliament of World Religions, and then that continued the advance of Hinduism into the mainstream of American culture that exploded in the 1960s and the 1970s. So this all-is-one belief is probably the dominant religion inside America right now. So all is one. That's one aspect. And there is karma, that the events and circumstances of your current life are the consequences of your past life or past lives.
So the problem, the moral incoherence of karma is that say something really terrible happens to you. Say, heaven forbid that you're sexually assaulted. If you are sexually assaulted, you aren't sexually assaulted by random chance. You're sexually assaulted because that's your karma, meaning something that you did in a past life or past lives has led to this event occurring to you. So meaning in some sense, it is your own fault. And inside India, where these beliefs are very prevalent,
This leads to very tough situations, particularly with regard to poverty. Because if you believe that someone's life circumstances are their own fault, a lesson they need to learn from a previous life, you're not motivated to help them because you're preventing them from learning their lesson. This is morally incoherent. If I say, okay, well, you were sexually assaulted, that's a great tragedy, but you must have done something to deserve it. No one would ever say that. And you shouldn't, because it's not actually true.
But this is what I mean by moral incoherence. We rightfully feel revolted and disgusted and furious at these things, right? Because we regard them as persecution and they are. But as soon as you want to step down into, yeah, but you you must have done something in your last life to deserve it. And in fact, the assailant, the assailant, that's probably his karma as well for him to be that. So these are just both lessons you guys need to learn. No one actually believes that. No one actually lives that way.
And so if you want to run this out to a much more pressing example where you really want to let's really just push this to the limit. One of the things that initially made me realize all this was discovering the truth of Jeffrey Epstein, which I think everyone acknowledges now that Jeffrey Epstein was a renowned sex trafficker of children, buying and selling children for the purposes of sexually abusing them and ultimately discarding them. That is well known now at the time. It wasn't so well known, but now it is.
Speaker 2 (19:48.098)
certainly wasn't alone in that. here you have, there's no grounds where you can say someone would do this by accident. Like I didn't know that was wrong, right? You know that it's wrong. It's absolutely wrong and there's no way that you can say that it's not wrong. It's just probably some of the heights of evil. So you're gonna tell me that being sex trafficked, abused and discarded is this child's karma? And you would look a child in the eye and you would say that to them? Absolutely not. No one, I found no one in the new age who would say that.
And so if your worldview, if your theology can't account for actual aspects of reality, your worldview is broken. And that's what happened, is I found this piece of information that did not fit in my worldview. And so I had to say, I going to throw out the information or throw out the worldview? And so I threw out the worldview.
What was that piece of information for you?
that child sex trafficking was real. Yeah. mean, like, this is not something that's back in, when would this have been? 2015, 2013, something like that. That's not something that people knew. Now people know the name of Jeffrey Epstein. But back then people didn't know that it was the conspiracy stuff hadn't yet become mainstream like it did after COVID. Conspiracy stuff is massively mainstream now. So back then it was, it was pretty outsider information. Once I validated that, not only was it true,
There was much more to it than even Jeffrey Epstein. I was confronted with this reality like, if I believe in karma, can't believe, like, and this is real, like I have to somehow make myself okay and say like, okay, it must be the kid's karma. I could not do that in part because it's not true.
Speaker 1 (21:21.678)
So you stopped believing in karma, that was a light bulb moment for you, the discovery of child, the reality of child sex trafficking.
Yeah, was, you're gonna take your worldview and you push it to the limit and you see if it can really handle the most extreme cases of reality. If it can't, then there's something false about the worldview. So I recognize that the worldview is false, but it wasn't just that alone. It was that, okay, I can't be the only one who's thought about this. So I tried to talk to people about it. Like, do you know about this? Have you heard about this? Like, how can it be this child's karma? And what I found was people inside the new age would change the subject. They wouldn't talk about it with me.
They simply wouldn't love and light, you know, that's, too dark. I don't like that negativity. Let's focus on something else. And so it was, it was that the extreme cowardice of the people in that world of being confronted with really hard aspects of reality that they couldn't account for. And so it wasn't just the information itself that did it. It was recognizing that for myself, like I'm in this world because I'm actually searching for truth. Like, like I actually want to search for truth. I grew up pointed 180 degrees in the opposite direction of Christianity. I grew up in a reform.
Jewish household, liberal, atheistic. We can talk about that as well. And so I went off into the world, pointed the opposite direction of Christianity, found my way into the New Age, which is not uncommon. But I was actually looking for truth. I didn't want to belong. I wasn't looking for anything else. I like, I just actually want to know. And so I find this piece of truth, and I want to talk about it with people. And they're like, yeah, we don't want to talk about that. And so for me, it's like, what are we all doing here? I thought we were all looking for truth. I thought we were all truth seekers. This is true. What are we going to do with this? And no one would talk to me about it.
So that's what opened the door to me being willing to consider other theologies, other worldviews that would talk to me about the truth, which I ultimately found.
Speaker 1 (23:02.604)
reaction you described brings up for me existential questions of what do you think is the purpose of being alive because I'm imagining that coming from a grown adult, right? Turning a blind eye to darkness saying that's too dark, that's too heavy, let's focus on love and light. And to me, the unspoken assumption that that's coming from is that the person saying that believes my personal pleasure is more important than truth, than protecting the vulnerable, than any purpose.
set forth for me and because it's psychologically unpleasant for me to think about something that dark, I'm just going to choose to remain in my bubble. And to me that seems narcissistic, shallow and childish, whereas I'm hearing that there was a values conflict there for you because you're more driven by truth, even if it requires facing some painful things.
Absolutely. I would say that's true. I'm driven by a desire to know the truth, both about the world and about myself. And one of the things that I also found inside the New Age world, again, having spent lots of time in therapy, Jungian transpersonal therapy, having done lots of somatic embodiment stuff, ayahuasca, 5-Meo-DMT, sound healing.
various forms of bodywork, like I could actually pull up a list of all the modalities I've engaged in, and that was over the course of about 20 years. Like to really witness the truth about myself, and I would say in a very ugly way, and that's not to say to diminish my worth as a human being, but to really look at myself, to really look at myself not as the victim of my circumstances, but as the architect of them. like I'm not just gonna, one of the things that I found particularly in the New Age world was that a consistent effort
to drive people back to finding the roots of their problems in their own parents, in their upbringing, in the notion of childhood trauma. And so I went deeper inside myself and turned myself inside out over and over and over again, trying to do that. And it wasn't until I started to be like, okay, I actually need to look at myself. I need to look at my thoughts, my words and my actions, my own individual responsibility for life, and until things really began to change. And so this constant wanting to look away,
Speaker 2 (25:14.976)
and look at the roots of our decisions as being grounded in somebody else. Nothing changed until I said, no, I am the owner of my life and I am the architect of my choices. Other people can set up circumstances for me that I'm not in control of. For example, I didn't control when I was born. I didn't control the area of human history that I was born into. didn't control my parents, et cetera. But there does come a point where we are all, and that point is pretty early in life where we are individually responsible for our decisions. And so the want to say, no, it's
It's karma or no, it's that's like, these are, these are choices. And so the truth is not just to say about the world. The truth is also to understand myself and understand my own choices and understand my own sinful nature. And once I was willing to witness the sinfulness, the fallenness of both the world and myself and really sit in that, that was tough, but worth doing. And I find that there's a resistance to that psychological discomfort because once we look at how fallen the world is, it can become quite hopeless.
And once we witness our own sinfulness that we are the architect of some of the most difficult circumstances we find ourselves in, that doesn't mean all of them, certainly, but many circumstances we are the architect of them, and we look and we see like, wow, I am totally hopeless. It's easy to stay there unless you find a way out. And the way out is the redemption found in Christ. I can certainly talk about that as well.
If it's all right, I'd like to take that Christian worldview that you advocate for and I wanna play devil's advocate for a moment here. Please. Because for you, it was a big awakening when you discovered that child sex trafficking was real. You could no longer defend a belief in karma because obviously, we already explained that, but I think a lot of people who are, let's say, atheists or agnostic might...
turn around that same subject to a Christian and say, well, how could this God that you believe in who's so loving and just and benevolent create a world where things like child sex trafficking exist? Where is your God now, they might ask. So what is your response to that?
Speaker 2 (27:21.442)
Yeah, so that's called the problem of evil, which is the strongest critique of Christianity, and it's a fair one. The first thing is that God didn't actually create the world this way. God created a perfect world. He created a world of abundance and peace and prosperity and security for humanity, for Adam and Eve. And he told us, you can have all of this if you just don't do the one thing. And the one thing is you do not eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Just don't do that one thing. Just don't do that one thing. And so he puts Adam and Eve in a garden of absolute abundance and peace in a way that probably lives deep within all of our hearts. And then along comes a serpent. And the serpent says, God's holding out on you. If you just eat from this tree, you can be just like him. And Eve eats from the fruit. And she gives to her husband Adam, who was not deceived. And he eats from the fruit as well. And the promise, the covenant that God made with
with Adam and Eve was broken and the world fell into sin as it is now. And we call that fall, a better term is also the crash. So we as humanity are the inheritors of the decision of our first parents, Adam and Eve, to worship something other than God, to listen to the voice of something that was in opposition to God's law. And so Adam and Eve are our first parents. They fell into sin and if they fell to deception, they fell to sin.
And as a result, we would not do any better than they would have. They were far superior to us in so many ways. They were as originally created. And so now we are the inheritors of that world. And so the bigger question is, why does God allow evil to exist? That's why, how could God turn a blind eye to these? He actually does not turn a blind eye to this. God is a loving Father who gave us the gift, but also gave us the ability to be responsible for our choices. We, me and our first parents,
made the choice that we are explicitly commanded not to do. We did the literal one thing, no ambiguity. But instead of abandoning us to this fallen state, God said, I'm going to send my son, my only begotten son, perfectly manned, perfectly God, to suffer and die a death that none of us could ever do, to pay the debt to God so we can be in reconciliation with him. God says, I'm not going to abandon you.
Speaker 2 (29:44.504)
to state of sin and darkness. I'm going to build the bridge downwards from heaven to you for you to cross. All you have to do is accept faith in my son that he's paid that debt for you and follow Christ. That's all. It's very simple. It's totally free. We can't earn it. don't have to give anything in terms of money in exchange. We just have to profess belief. And Christ says, you love Jesus, and Jesus says, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. So we profess faith in Jesus Christ, keep his commandments, follow God, glorify him.
and He delivers us, God promises not only to deliver us from the sin and darkness that surrounds us, but He also promises us in Romans chapter 8 verse 28 that all things work together for the good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes. And so all things, meaning everything in your life, every mistake, every bad circumstance, even actual evil that you've encountered, God promises to turn all those things to the good for those who love Him. So God can redeem
the darkest episodes of our lives. And I'm talking to you right now because I've made so many bad decisions in my life, but God has redeemed them in a glorifying way. So for example, before we got on, you mentioned my background, meaning the background that we're looking at right now for the podcast. The only reason I know how to do this, audio and video and lighting, is because I set out to try and make a documentary about the rebirth of masculinity in 2021.
massively expensive, incredible effort of driving cross country 14,000 miles, 25 interviews, being betrayed by a best friend. was a total wild goose chase of my life. And I like, can talk about that separately, but I had no idea what I was going to do with any of that. But you know what? God redeemed it by teaching me how to do, by giving me the opportunity to learn how to do lights and video, to be able to do a podcast like this, just a really small example. And so God doesn't abandon us to evil.
He declares, particularly in the Psalms, that He will protect us from it, that will deliver our feet from the snare and redeem all of the episodes of our lives. All we have to do is profess faith in His Son. And so that is too high a price for some people to pay, unfortunately, but that is what God promises for those who love Him. I hope that answers your question.
Speaker 1 (31:58.016)
It does and you and my listeners will have to forgive me for coming from a place of first principles and asking total, you know, beginners mind questions here. but, but if God made everything in the Garden of Eden, then did God make the serpent too?
Right, so that is a wonderful metaphysical question about where, so you can find Satan's story in the book of Ezekiel. So God created the heavens and the earth. And it is said in the book of Ezekiel that iniquity was found in this prince, it's referring to Satan, iniquity was found in him and he became the serpent. How that happened is of a level of reality and understanding that we cannot comprehend. And so asking questions, there's a wonderful book,
by C.S. Lewis called Paralandra. It's part of the Ransom trilogy. So the first book is called, I can't remember. It's gonna come to me later. Sorry, I'm sick. So my brain's a little foggy. Second book is Paralandra. The third book is That Hedius Strength, which is actually quite prophetic. In the book Paralandra, the main character, Ransom, is speaking to an angel. There's a pair of angels. And he says to one of them, like, so they look like humans to him. And so he says, what do you look like to each other?
He's speaking to an angel, two angels standing in front of him. They look like humans, but he says to one of them, what do you guys look like to each other? And the angel replies, you don't have space in your brain for the answer to that question. And I just thought that was the best answer. So how was iniquity found in Satan? We can't actually say, nor is it our responsibility to understand. Our responsibility is to not try and become gods ourselves and not operate and think on God's level, but to operate and act on our level as creatures.
and as creatures were given explicit instructions to follow. so following those instructions makes our life quite a bit more peaceful.
Speaker 1 (33:45.858)
Thanks, I had to look up iniquity. yeah. I know it doesn't mean unequal. It sounds like inequality, but no, that's not what it means.
It means wickedness. if you actually, if you read the book, The Silmarillion, which is like the prequel to the Lord of the Rings, you see the same or a similar story retold in a more fantasy kind of setting where the Ainur and Eru Iluvatar, which is a stand in for God, the father, the creator, and the Ainur, this we might call angels, are singing creation into existence. And then Melkor.
is the stand-in for Satan and starts singing his own tune. And Eru Iluvatar says, you will find that this discordant tune that you were singing will serve for a far greater melody than you could have ever planned for. So that's what we see is for whatever reason, you know, Satan, Melkor, I don't mean to equate the two, it's a story. For whatever reason that happened. And through God and through Christ, evil can be turned to the good, but a very specific kind of good.
Do you see any connections between the serpent and ayahuasca?
Yeah. Absolutely. There's a great book called The Return of the Dragon by my friend Louis Ungott, where he demonstrates through anthropological evidence that throughout history, the use of psychedelics is tied to both serpent worship, serpent imagery, and human sacrifice. It's a wonderful little book. It's about 150 pages. And so he was curious and went looking and sees that again throughout human history and throughout the world.
Speaker 2 (35:28.416)
any culture that engages in psychedelic use begins incorporating serpent imagery and then engages with human sacrifice. So yes, there is very much a connection. And from Delaney.
Okay, tell us about Kundalini then.
So Kundalini yoga is a Hindu yogic practice where you're meant to release the serpent energy from your root chakra, is supposedly at the perineum, which is in the area of the genitals, where the serpent energy is stored in the lower nether regions of our body. And we release the serpent energy up through our spine to our brain, which causes sort of transcendent visions and some would say gives us magical powers.
Kundalini yoga has the intention of raising that serpent energy for the purposes of quote unquote enlightenment or higher consciousness. But there's also Kundalini sex magic where through this quote unquote higher consciousness, you can manifest your will in reality. We might call it actual magic, magic with a K. And so the Kundalini is represented as a serpent, a serpent coiled at the base of the spine that you release up the spine into.
into the third eye or the crown chakra supposedly. So serpent energy tends to show up in many different anti-Christian, non-Christian, anti-biblical faith traditions.
Speaker 1 (36:54.38)
Have you ever had a Kundalini experience?
I have not, have not, not Kundalini specifically. would say there were probably moments where I came close to it in some of the various practices. I remember doing some breathworks and meditations, my spine would start waving back and forth. Actually, well, maybe actually, maybe the first time I tried acid or maybe the first time I tried mushrooms, had what you might call a Kundalini awakening. I mean, not awakening, but a Kundalini experience. Yeah, maybe the first time.
I didn't know that language at the time, but I think it'd probably fairly be called that. But not in a sexual context and not in a, I'm going to do a Kundalini yoga class specifically to get there.
So for those who are just listening, Will did a little wiggle when he described the energy moving in his spine. And so I have had that experience several times. I think the first time that I had a Kundalini experience was in my late 20s at a kirtana spiritual chanting event. And I've gone through phases where it felt like it was always ready to erupt. I guess when I learned about Kundalini when I was younger, I thought it was a much more.
subtle inward spiritual experience, but when I actually had my own Kundalini experience, it was incredibly visceral. It didn't feel like any kind of light going off. I imagined it like some sort of inner illumination or something. And what actually happened is in certain circumstances, I would find this spiraling pulsating energy at the base of my spine making my body want to rock.
Speaker 1 (38:28.066)
from side to side. And I would feel it go up and down if I let it, if I would just sit there and kind of let it do its thing, it would speed up and slow down, it would go up and down my spine. And I've had times of just kind of letting it do its thing and I never hear anyone else talk about this. But it's never felt like a spiritual experience to me. It's never felt particularly
enlightening or meaningful or life-changing. It's actually just felt like something that my body does. So I've just kind of let that be. And now that we're thinking about it, I feel like I'm a little tapped into that energy. And if I wanted to sit down on the floor in a certain position and get myself into a certain mental state, I could probably reactivate it again. I have no particular desire to, because once it starts moving, it's kind of hard to slow it down.
it just ends up being time consuming. I don't know too many people who have had this experience, so I'm just kind of saying it in case there's anyone listening who's like, I've had that experience too. But there is a huge contrast between what I learned about Kundalini from studying yoga at a young age and what actually happened when my body just started moving like that.
Yeah, I would say that for a lot of people can actually be quite painful, meaning like it's not necessarily a pleasurable experience. It's just something the body in certain states seems to naturally do for a lot of people. In fact, if you watch videos of psy trance festivals or music festivals, probably another thing that I should mention, was an underground house music and techno DJ for 15, 16 years. That was a big part of my story. So transformational festivals was a big part of that.
You can watch people watch them dancing and that's actually what they're doing. They're just you know, we there sub-hop bodies side to side like that That's what they're doing very very subtly. And so of course the music is meant to create altered states of altered states of consciousness It's a hypnotic pulsing Etc. So particularly some of the faster stuff like psytrance so I think this is something that potentially the body just naturally does when stimulated in the right way, but if you if you I would imagine if you were to really like surrender to it if you were to
Speaker 2 (40:43.276)
be intoxicated in some way, perhaps on the psychedelic or, know, you can really get yourself into a significant altered States through meditation and breath work as well. And really let it continue to evolve and work its way all the way up to, your brain. Let that energy move. You'll probably have some form of transcendent experience that you may, they may not like very much because one of the things that I remember hearing most about from Kundalini yoga, yoga, again, I didn't participate in any of that stuff.
was that you could activate it inside yourself, but probably don't unless you're under active supervision because they would say you could actually blow out your brain, that you could release more power from within your body than you're capable of handling. That was the consistent warning of the Kundalini yoga world. I remember it very clearly. And so what that all means is there's probably a real phenomenon there. But is that phenomenon good for us? Is it healthy? let's say, what are the consequences if someone can actually handle it?
And so the consequences of someone can actually handle it. studied for many years when I was part of an occult mystery school where we studied the tarot cards, but not tarot for the purposes of fortune telling, but actually for the purposes of studying the Kabbalah, like a picture book way of studying the Kabbalah. And the mystery school, was a part of it for, I'm going to call it let's say six years or something like that. was an active student daily for a couple of years, and then went to travel and wasn't able to study as much.
But they were very open about talking about the Kundalini energy, you know, within the body. This is an occult Western mystery school. So they're talking about things in Western language, referencing Kundalini as a, something that you actually learn how to bring up to create altered states of consciousness. And they were very clear about it's about will working, which is to say you can manifest your will in reality through the use of this Kundalini energy, which you awaken in the base of your spine and bring up to your third eye, your consciousness. This is magic.
This is like M-A-G-I-C-K, magic, magic. And so the state that you're probably experiencing that you and I have also experienced, and I'm sure many of our listeners have as well, is tied to actual magical practices working our will in reality.
Speaker 1 (42:50.434)
I think that, well, I have a couple of comments here. So one is that when I was 18 and moved to Hawaii and found Hindu spiritual practices, the sort of spiritual leader of my little group, which I came to think of as a cult eventually, had really piercing blue eyes and a perfectly erect spine at all times and had spent some time in India learning
I forget what they're called cities or something like that. That's magic. Yeah, he had a certain power and I eventually came to see what he was doing to the group of people that I was involved in and including myself. things didn't go well when I when I recognized the power and mind control games that were going over there. And then the other thing is I think that I had a lot of experiences over the years leading up to 2020.
A lot changed for me in 2020 and then in 2021 is when I began to speak, but I had experiences that disillusioned me with New Age community. And one of them was that, you when you describe this Kabbalistic Mystery School that you went to, I also knew someone who ran a Kabbalistic Mystery School that, you know, integrated Tantra and tarot and all that kind of stuff. Maybe you even went to the same school. We won't name names here, but...
line it wasn't in person but okay it was in Los Angeles
Okay. Well, I will say that, that the person that I don't, so I don't speak about this often because I refuse to let any experiences of victimization define who I am as a person. And I think that the best success is the best revenge, you know, with regard to anyone who is trying to, tried to harm me that most of the time, the best thing I can do is move on and never speak of them again.
Speaker 1 (44:46.178)
But I will say that I experienced an abusive relationship and while I was in that relationship, I routinely sought help from anyone I could because the abuser in classic abuser fashion isolated me from my support system and tried to ruin my friendships. And so that left me reliant on his friends and things like that. And I would try to get their attention and say like, when you're not here, he's a different person, here's what's going on.
and no one would believe me and no one would help me and they would equivocate and I would end up shocked because I'm like, I'm describing some really horrific things that he's doing and why am I getting this kind of glazed-eye response here? Do they not believe me? Do they not think this is bad? And the friends of the abuser who ran the Kabbalistic Mystery School were no exception. You know, just like so many new age people were no exception when I was an actual victim who needed.
And the person who did help me, the friend who helped the most, was my most down-to-earth, least crunchy, least spiritual friend. He was a farmer. He was just salt of the earth and someone who knew right from wrong.
Speaker 2 (46:03.542)
I'm so grateful that you're no longer in that circumstance, that you've been delivered from it, and that you're able to put it in the review mirror.
Thank you, me too. I'm happily married now, by the way, to a very good man who doesn't even so much as raise his voice.
Wonderful. Yes, that is as it should be. So I'm sorry that that happened to you. Thank you. I'm grateful that you're no longer part of it. to some extent, also, in a sense, I don't know if, please understand what I'm saying. I'm grateful that you saw it because the cult-like behavior of so many in the New Age world is very real. In fact,
I have recorded 250, 270 something podcasts and I've only deleted flick three. One is because the guy was supporting later found out that he was later supporting the work of a mass murderer that hadn't happened yet when I interviewed him. I'm like, I'm deleting that one. And the other was a man who was not telling the truth during the interview. But the third one.
was an interview that I did with a woman who was also from the new age. And had a wonderful conversation about new age spirituality. I come to find out later that she had participated in the coverup of sexual abuse by a guru at a renowned retreat center in Thailand. And so I just bang, deleted that instantly. to see that we were told that this is a male phenomenon-ish, absolutely, but that there were women participating, this woman was participating, she was named in the article as participating in the coverup. And to see that.
Speaker 2 (47:39.544)
This ought to put things on men and women just to say that like the cult like the susceptibility to cult like thinking and the cult like behavior is very real and it's not talked about enough because there's no systems of accountability. You just have to run and get as far away as you can into the arms of stable and grounded people.
Yeah, I mean earlier you were describing the Earth Mama hippie rituals, know, I I had girlfriends, we had an actual teepee where we would do new moon ceremonies as women, you know, we like the whole nine yards. But this group that I belonged to ages ago, this group of friends was infiltrated by a pyramid scheme and it preyed on women's vulnerability to group think, desire for friendship.
our vulnerability to magical thinking, our greed, the part of us that didn't want to work for money, you know, the part of us that felt special, like we were entitled to free money coming out of thin air. Surprise, it's actually coming from your friend who you stole it from, because 12 % of people are going to take money from the remaining 88 % in a pyramid scheme. That's how that works. So I remember seeing that same destructive pattern then as well.
That's very real. I would say that the problem is that the New Age world, we talked earlier about the unwillingness to be seen as intolerant, the unwilling, like I want to be seen in a particular way. That like, what if a man had the right kind of man, a common man but a brave one, a common man in the New Age world, not a brave one. Like we're not sending in Mel Gibson from Braveheart. You know what I mean? Like one of the guys had said, ladies, this is wrong.
you are being exploited by this guy and I'm not going to let this happen. What would the response to him have been? Would it have been receptive, receiving his protection, or would it have been stop oppressing us and telling us what to do? I don't know your friends and I don't mean to say either way, but certainly there are communities where his intervention would not have been welcome. Even if it was coming from the best possible place with evidence, it would have been taken as oppressive. And so this is how the dynamics within the community are very easily exploited.
Speaker 2 (49:46.68)
by people who are very savvy and very sophisticated and they have no morality at all. And that's very common.
And that particular community was lacking in men. It was a female dominated community. Most of the men who were there were sort of like beta feminine men who were all about worshiping the divine feminine or whatever, you know? And women craved, I mean, the number one complaint, because we loved our girlfriends. We had a great community of girlfriends, but we, know, good men were in short supply in that community. was part of why we had so much free time to hang out with each other.
And I think the response would have been very mixed and this points to a double bind that a lot of women I think find themselves in is the, you know, on the one hand, wanting, needing, craving healthy masculine partners and on the other, fearing and not trusting masculine leadership.
That's right, especially if it presents itself in the correct way. Of course, there is a bad way for men to present masculine leadership to be tyrannical and domineering and to shut down argument and dissent. But there is way that masculine leadership can assert itself to assert boundaries in a very healthy way. And one of the big problems with the New Age world is you are not going to find healthy men in a community that worships the divine feminine goddess.
because a man cannot find who he is supposed to be as a man in the reflection of a woman. And that's just not going to happen. So you're going to get these beta males who believe that it is right and good and normative to be like a woman. And so you have find no ability to mature a man in that environment. You always find men who will naturally take a second class backseat stance to women because that's what the theology tells them to do. And so the bind is, it's a triple bind. It's that.
Speaker 2 (51:33.516)
We want this masculine leadership. We hate this masculine leadership, but we worship a goddess who can't create it and we want men to come in and somehow just be what we want them to be in an environment that completely makes it impossible for them to be that.
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even when they're adults. Visit rogdrepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code sometherapist2025 at checkout to take 50 % off your first month. That's rogdrepair.com. So all of this conversation we haven't really talked about ayahuasca except briefly and touching on it but if I can ask because I haven't heard your whole story arc I mean I heard part of the story arc which was
discovering child sex trafficking interrupted your belief in karma, but I'm sure there's a lot more to it. If I can just ask you to maybe kind of compare and contrast then and now your perspective on ayahuasca. What was your perspective on ayahuasca whenever it was that you went to Peru and sat with a shaman? And what is it now as a Christian?
start by saying I don't particularly like the term new age. Because it's I mean it's it's handy it points to something but it's it's imprecise in terms of a belief set. No one really knows what it is. Is it crystals? Is it UFOs? Whatever right. So a much better term to describe what I think is going on and what we understand as the new age particularly today is called selfism which is the the worship the worship of the self.
Speaker 2 (53:36.328)
And the implicit belief that I think exists inside what we'll call the new age and also had a great deal within Western culture now is the belief that all the answers to life the universe and everything are within you they are within yourself And so they're not outside you they're they're in here And so if you're looking around for questions about the answers to questions about your past about the world about you Your future etc. The answer is you look within yourself
And if you look within yourself as you know yourself, like I ain't got those answers. So then there are a bunch of different tools and techniques where you can learn how to go deeper within yourself because the answers are deep inside yourself. Psychology is a part of that. Psychedelics are a huge part of that. All the different, you know, breath work modalities, you know, all these different things are designed ultimately, not just to find relief to physical symptoms, but also to find answers about life, the universe and everything within yourself.
So ayahuasca is a huge part of that. The idea that you drink this potion and you're facilitated by shamans on a journey deep within yourself to find the answers about life, the universe, and everything. That's similar in some ways to psychedelics as a whole. That's why people take DMT or that's why they take acid or mushrooms. It's one of the big intentions. It's not just for fun, calories, and trips, and entertainment, though that's definitely a part of it. It's I want answers and I'm told that the answers are inside myself, so I'm going to use these various tools.
you know, chemical, physical, et cetera, otherwise to find these answers inside myself. The difference with ayahuasca that makes it different from any other psychedelic out there is that ayahuasca explicitly, explicitly has an entity with a name that is attached to it. And that is goes by many names, mama, ayahuasca, grandmother ayahuasca. It is a named female entity, always female. Ayahuasca is never referred to as male. At I've never seen it referred to as male.
All within the ayahuasca literature, ayahuasca is referred to as a female. And so what are you doing with ayahuasca ultimately in an ayahuasca ceremony? You're drinking this brew to take you on a journey within yourself where this female entity, mama ayahuasca, takes you on a journey with her plant helpers, her plant spirit helpers, to show you things about life, the universe and everything to help you make major life decisions. And mama ayahuasca gives you a mission or she gives you an answer or she shows you things about yourself that you need to know.
Speaker 2 (56:00.47)
And the shamans are there to facilitate you connecting with Mama Aya and whatever, and whatever that happens. Then you come back and you come back to reality with the answers that grandmother Ayahuasca has shown you. And then you go and you make your major life decisions. You make your changes after a while to come into alignment with what she shows you. That is what Ayahuasca is. That is explicitly what Ayahuasca is. And when I was doing Ayahuasca, which I've done 15 Ayahuasca ceremonies in the United States, in Peru, my first Ayahuasca ceremony was in November of
2015, I did three, and then I went to Peru. I went to a world renowned, one of the top two most world renowned Ayahuasca retreat centers at the time. There are more now, where I did seven ceremonies in 12 days, two ceremonies that a night off, three ceremonies that a night off, and finally two ceremonies. You cannot do that same program today. It doesn't exist. There was a more rigorous Ayahuasca retreat program than is currently available.
And then I did a number of other ceremonies again in San Francisco and one more in Peru. So 15 ceremonies in total. That is what ayahuasca is. And I probably would have said at the time that ayahuasca helped me find many answers for myself that I thought that I needed that helped me learn things that I couldn't have found any other way. so I would have said that it was a valuable, if powerful, a powerful and valuable tool for me to learn the things that I needed to.
later, just for contrast, and before we can answer some questions about that and then my perspective on it now is I went on a Buddhist meditation retreat in the mountains of Kashmir, Vipassana, Goenka Vipassana retreat, 10 days of silent meditation, 10 hours a day of meditation. That was as powerful as Ayahuasca, but it required more work, meaning like, you know, sustain long sustained periods of
of meditation was very difficult, whereas ayahuasca, you take the drink and it takes you right there. So I've contrasted, know, the pasta and ayahuasca with each other. And so those are two equally powerful tools with pasta being a sober tool. That's what I would have said at the time. So I hope, and hopefully that sets the stage. can answer some questions from within the world view and then can tell you how I see it.
Speaker 1 (58:14.638)
Yeah, I mean, that sounds like how people I've known would have described it. And I wonder if part of where you're going with this is what guidance exactly mama ayahuasca gives because I think there's a presumption that this is a wise, benevolent, helpful entity. And what I will say of the people I've known who've done ayahuasca,
I certainly don't trust all of them. And at the moment, I won't say more than this, that I currently have a friend I'm very concerned about who uses ayahuasca regularly and is making very bad choices. And I've tried to help. Thankfully, my friend has well received my frank message expressing concern about the choices that she's making.
But you hear these stories of people who abandoned their previous life after ayahuasca and from their perspective it's expressed as a good choice and I think as an open-minded person it's like, well, who am I to say that they were better off working in tech than working at a Buddhist retreat center or whatever major life choice they made or maybe they should have left that relationship although I think the moment children enter the picture
the stakes of ending a relationship become a lot more consequential. It's like, who am I to judge? And especially when you hear the stories that people share from Ayahuasca, I had a friend many years ago who recounted things with incredible vividness, much more accurate than I could even describe a dream I had just last night and just as wild as a dream. And I do have some pretty crazy dreams. But again, there's a presumption of benevolence and wisdom.
And that doesn't match what I've seen with the results, the fruits, if you will, in some of these cases, as well as the ego that I've seen in some people who are wrapped up. I think the aesthetics of Ayahuasca users can be quite appealing because they do have this kind of earth mama energy sometimes that feels, it draws you in.
Speaker 1 (01:00:44.236)
and it makes you curious, aesthetics are just that and they can be deceptive. They can be smoke and mirrors. So that's where I stand. That's part of why I've never done ayahuasca myself is I've never felt like, yes, this is a benevolent and wise entity that has a message to offer me that I need to go here.
And you put your finger right on it. all comes down to, you know, just really quickly, a lot of people are hearing about Ayahuasca in the mainstream for the first time over the past few years, especially because there are so many celebrities that have been doing Ayahuasca and talking about it publicly. Joe Rogan probably being the most notable one. Aubrey Marcus, Mike Tyson, even Paul Simon, the singer Paul Simon, like lots of musicians and know, actors and like really high profile public people. So a lot of people are hearing about that.
I was for the first time through that but but the thing that's more troubling is that I was because now being promoted within the Department of Department of Veterans Affairs that's being promoted as a miracle cure for veterans who are struggling with PTSD it's being promoted by organizations such as maps the medical association
from multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies.
Bang, there you go. And they just raised $30 million. They'd been around for 40 years, and they raised like $30 million in six months. so have Johns Hopkins has a center as well. They raised $17 million. So there is a big push coming for psychedelics in mainstream American public. And it's going to come as a result in part due to RFK Jr., who's now at the Department of Health and Human Services, who along with targeting vaccines and cookies, who I'd say,
Speaker 2 (01:02:29.196)
As long as along with targeting those, he has also targeted SSRIs. SSRIs are unqualified bad. We can talk about that, you know, we can talk about that at length, but we can just say that certainly kicking SSRIs is incredibly difficult and destructive to people. It causes as much harm when you try to go off it as it attempts to prevent by going on it. And so that is now, that narrative is now starting to be propagated online. I've seen it twice on X just in the past week.
And so psychedelics will be proposed as a counter to the use of SSRIs and treating depression and anxiety. And ayahuasca of course is one of the most well-known and most popular psychedelics with a large global infrastructure for supporting people in the use of this. So ayahuasca however, is promoted as this miracle drug cure-all, as in you just drink it like you take a Tylenol and your depression and anxiety is cured. The entire spiritual aspect of communing with grandmother ayahuasca.
Mama, I'll being your being your guide through the spirit underworld with the shaman there who's facilitating that connection that is left out of the public dialogue always always period end of discussion even Michael Pollan's But how to open your mind or something like that a very famous very popular book Do you know the book that I'm about? That one at the end of that book. He's talking about ayahuasca very at the very end of the book
change your mind.
Speaker 2 (01:03:53.986)
He's talking about ayahuasca. vaguely mentions this is the this is literally the last paragraph of the book. I'm pretty sure at the end of that book, he's talking about ayahuasca. He talks about plant intelligences and he hints maybe there's more going on than we recognize. And that's the note that the book ends on. So even the most popular mainstream author acknowledges that there might be more going on in the spiritual realm with ayahuasca particularly than people are comfortable with talking about. And this is a real problem because you mentioned earlier about atheists and agnostics.
They don't believe that there's a God. They don't believe in that there's a spirit realm. However, ayahuasca is explicitly spiritual, explicitly. It is ritualistic. You walk into a room, you sit down with a shaman who sings songs over you, spiritual songs over you, while you commune with an entity and plant spirits, other entities as well. It is explicitly spiritual. And so this is a very real problem that's going to come right on the back of ayahuasca. You have a lot of people that are very committed.
to an atheist and agnostic worldview because they can't say there's anything. Really, they're rejecting Christianity. That's really what it is. But when you introduce this, well, this is explicitly a spiritual practice. Is there a spirit world? I hope someday I get the opportunity to ask Aubrey Marcus that, or Joe Rogan, or someone who's committed to an atheistic worldview. You're promoting and celebrating a drug with explicitly spiritual purposes. the consequences of depression and anxiety are, you're communing with the spirit.
That's what it is. So are you saying that there's a spirit world now? When it comes to the public dialogue about this drug, the proponents of it are very uncomfortable with acknowledging that. And that should make everyone very, very concerned.
having a hard time believing some of the things you're telling me, because I haven't heard them before. Specifically with regard to the uses of ayahuasca that are being proposed in the healing arts, because I am familiar with MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, the clinical trials, the work that MAPS and the FDA are doing. But to think of ayahuasca,
Speaker 1 (01:06:01.41)
I mean, especially because of the whole context in which it's used. It's not like something that can even be put into a pill. And considering the spiritual dimension, even supposing that we do assume that this entity is benevolent and wise.
Would you not at all be worried about angering this otherwise benevolent and wise entity by distorting and commercializing its purpose?
Well, if you assume that the entity is benevolent and wise, then the entity would be operating with some sort of moral foundation that says commercialization is bad. Where does the entity get that moral foundation to say that commercialization is bad? I don't have to, right? So what's the moral foundation of this entity? I would say that if the entity is benevolent and wise, it should be grateful to connect with as many people as possible in as many contexts and not be isolated to the jungles in Peru and
retreat centers in the United States and elsewhere, that it would actually be quite grateful to be healing and blessing so many people, even if it means removing it from its native indigenous traditions.
Okay, that's interesting. And I hear why that makes sense for you as a Christian because that's how God is, that's how Jesus is, that's how Charlie Kirk was. He was happy to connect with everyone. Partly probably a charismatic extrovert by nature, but partly also because of his faith. earlier you were describing, and I can't remember at what point in this conversation it was, but basically,
Speaker 1 (01:07:43.682)
having a robust theory of mind and a genuine respect for the intellect and emotions of those that we connect with. I see that in Charlie. And I think having a robust view of human nature helps with that. But so applying that sort of Christian lens, through a Christian lens, how would a benevolent and wise entity
operate well, it would be grateful to connect with people and want to heal and reach and love anyone. And that sounds like, that sounds very Christian. But I think it's clear that when we talk about the entity behind ayahuasca, that it's not a Christian entity. And so I think this is probably leading into what you've patiently waited to share, which is your current perspective on what ayahuasca is.
I don't believe that ayahuasca is a Christian entity and the evidence for that is you don't have I mean how many people around the world took ayahuasca last Saturday or last Friday like we can say a Thousand more. Yeah, I don't know like probably a lot Especially today how many of those come out of that one transcendent experience being like I'm a Christian now my goodness, I need to fix my life. None of them people will say that they have visions of Christ on it
I get that a lot on X when I start talking about ayahuasca and when I push on them, I try to find out the Christ that they follow. And the Christ that they follow inevitably isn't the Christ of the Bible. It's the cosmic Christ or Christ consciousness, which is a very different Christ. We can talk about that as well. So I don't believe that ayahuasca is in any sense a Christian or even a Christian friendly entity, especially because like it came out of the jungles of the Amazon.
In the well, I think the first first writing about it the first wedding about from the West was in like the 1600s or something is the first documented ceremony something like that maybe from the late the writing showed up in the 1600s Maybe the ceremony was documented in the 1500s. So it was 400 years and it was discovered by Jesuit missionaries So I don't think that this is and when the Jesuits arrived they didn't find that all these villagers inside a Inside inside the Amazon were suddenly Christians because they had been communing with the spirit
Speaker 2 (01:10:03.202)
They had to introduce them to Christ. So I think that alone means it's not a Christian or a Christian-friendly spirit. So my perspective on it now, and I'm actually working on a white paper to this effect, extended research paper, cited sources, et cetera, is that ayahuasca, unique amongst all psychedelics, is, if we want to think in biblical categories, is divination aided by sorcery. So it's actually two things. Divination is contacting spirits for the purposes of
making major life decisions or getting clarity and information from the spirit world explicitly forbidden in scripture. In fact, there's a story in the Old Testament of King Saul who did divination to contact an old prophet and he was cursed for doing so. The Witch of Endor was the name of that story. If anyone wants to look it up, King Saul was the man who King David took the throne from. if you're familiar with
the story of David and Goliath, that's the same King David. And so the throne, the king, the crown, the throne was taken from King Saul by King David, who was a wise and righteous ruler and one of the great men of history in many ways, certainly not perfect man. So anyway, so that's divination. Sorcery, the Greek, the word translated in the New Testament, sorcery, is the word pharmakeia, which is a spectrum of chemical processes ranging from
the formulation of poisons to drug addiction to the formulation of mind-altering chemicals. So ayahuasca, again, I'm documenting the history of this and with my own experience and also extensive, again, I've got a big stack of books sitting right here, is you take a potion for the purposes of contacting an entity, a spirit, for the purposes of finding that spirit's wisdom that is divination aided by sorcery, both divination and sorcery.
are considered damnable, meaning they damn someone to hell unless the person repents and they are explicitly called such, I believe, in the New Testament, in the epistles, and also in Revelation. And as well as also, of course, divination is all throughout the Old Testament as well, and there's never a good end. So what we're looking at with ayahuasca is you drink a potion, that's sorcery, for the purposes of communing with the spirit, that's divination, divination aided by sorcery.
Speaker 2 (01:12:25.952)
And so you're contacting something that is explicitly outside of the realm of both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. And so you have an entity, spirit, I would say a demon that is guiding people away from the truth of God and the truth of Jesus Christ. And that is the testimony of the lives of the people who drink ayahuasca.
When you say that's the testimony of the people of their lives, what do you mean by that?
One of the most common stories of ayahuasca, and you even said it, is the wreckage that it leaves in people's lives. People have meaningful obligations that they make to employers, that they make to spouses, that they make to friends, that they make to children. We have meaningful obligations in our lives. We have responsibilities. We have commitments. Some might even say we have covenants. We have promised to be together in a marriage.
We did this in front of our family members and friends and we bore children together or an employer has a reasonable expectation that you as a top performer are going to show up and do your job because they're counting on you. are honorable commitments we make in our lives. And the most consistent story of ayahuasca, the most consistent story is not that people come back and they lean into these covenants. Surely, I'm sure there are examples where people do, but the most consistent story is that people come back and they break these covenants.
because they regard these covenants, these promises as binding on their true self. It is dragging me down. It's committing me to something that I don't think I am anymore. I'm now something else after having done this. So I'm going to break all of my promises and go be something else. think you said like a work at a Buddhist meditation retreat or be a circus performer or, you know, traveling stripper or whatever. That's the most consistent story of ayahuasca is that people like they destroy their lives that they've built. spent decades building because they're unsatisfied or unfulfilled. They break promises. They break relationships.
Speaker 2 (01:14:17.314)
and they create wreckage in the lives of people. They don't become more moral people, they don't become more honorable people in terms of honoring their commitments, they become more selfish and self-centered people. And that is exactly what a demon would tell people to do in the interest of their higher fulfillment and higher self.
Yeah, I'm thinking about a friend of mine, as I mentioned earlier, and I'm not going to share, again, any personal information about this person. I will say, the reason that I'm friends with this person is because I have seen goodness in her. I've seen courage and compassion. And I'm also seeing a lot of terrible choices right now.
And there's part of me that kind of wants to play devil's advocate and say, well, who's to say that the world isn't a better place for having those circus performers or for the creativity and ingenuity and uniqueness that people bring into the world upon discovering their true self. But at the same time, even the words true self have become so tainted for me the last few years fighting in the gender wars.
there's, you know, if I take what I've learned from that, I think there is, there is this illusory component for many people to the idea of a true self. It's very, it's a seductive idea, right? The sense that there's something deeper and more mysterious about myself than what I've gotten to know so far. And I have to go on this wild goose chase to go find it. I have to
you know, go through a so-called gender transition, which of course we know, yes, humans can't change sex, of course, we don't need that in the comments, although your comments help the algorithm, but yes, when we say gender transition, we know humans can't change sex. You know, whether it's that, whether it's, you know, these other quests, I think there's just a lot that calls into question at this point, the validity of these quests. And I guess I wanna maybe look at the opportunity cost here because,
Speaker 1 (01:16:25.694)
If the comparison is between living a colorful life and living a boring one, then colorful sure is appealing. And the idea of authenticity and uniqueness, it's appealing. But let's frame it not in terms of what is gained, but what is lost. You've already started to frame it in terms of the heart's broken, the obligations broken to friends, family, loved ones,
You know, again, there's a kind of a scale of harm depending on like, you ending a marriage? Are you harming children? Are you just leaving a boyfriend or girlfriend, right? But there's the broken commitments. But what else are people missing out on when they go on this wild goose chase in search of the self? Or I guess another way of putting the question is, is there another way that they could have discovered something about themselves that's more true and that leads to better choices?
It's a great instinct to say that the response when people take ayahuasca, certainly many other practices as well, but ayahuasca seems to be the most powerful in this regard. certainly, if you've been listening, you understand why, is to throw off all the shackles of your current life as quickly as possible. And simply to say, I'm pursuing my true self. It doesn't matter. Everything else is a bind on my true self, which I have to express. That is a far older idea than just ayahuasca.
Radical self-expression informs Burning Man. The idea of, it also informs, a book called Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Truman, highly recommended, excellent book. Gosh, I wish I could think of the term right now. It's like self-expressionism. And earlier I mentioned the religion of selfism. Part of this also feeds into Carl Jung and his whole worldview about expressing the inner self, the shadow, right? Making conscious what's unconscious, right? I have to.
go on this journey. And the reason why I can say all this is this is exactly what I did. So I think in the bio that I think is in the show notes, I've traveled to 30 countries around the world. And I've also explored spiritual traditions ranging from Ayahuasca to Himalayan Buddhist meditation and breath work. And I've been to India and Peru and China. Like, I did all this. That was my journey of individual self-expression, was learning to express my innermost self. And certainly, like, I was very blessed that I didn't have to break any
Speaker 2 (01:18:49.254)
any noble, honorable commitments really in order to that. I wasn't married. I didn't have kids, but I also went quite far into my thirties, quite far into my thirties in order to, in order to make that possible in order to get to a place where I could actually take that, take that leap. And there were lots of things that I did not do as a result. I did not cultivate like a very stable like career. didn't build like 20 years of history in a profession.
I didn't get married. I didn't have kids. didn't do any of those things because I wanted to make this journey of radical self-expression possible before I even knew what Ayahuasca was. I will not get that time back. I do not get that time back. I'm married now. I have a, I have a wonderful daughter and I'm looking at my beautiful wife and I'm saying, I wish I could spend as much time with you as possible. wish I could go back in time and give you all the years that I spent on these other things. Of course, you know,
You can't change your past because your past led me to where where I passed led me to where I am today. So I don't need to try and go and rewrite history. don't want to create a butterfly effect, but at the same time, I think you understand the instinct. So what does the opportunity cost of saying, okay, I'm, know, say someone gets to the mid thirties and they're feeling alienated from their job and they're feeling bored at home and their marriage. And then some big tech leader tells them to go into the jungle and do ayahuasca. And there is plenty of that from Elon Musk to Lex Friedman. You know, I can name a bunch of other names of.
It's the CEO of Tom's is spending $100 million of his, I didn't even know Tom's shoes is $100 million of his personal wealth to promote psychedelic research, including ayahuasca. So authoritative men, you know, not just hippies in the forest, but authoritative men with status in particularly the veterans administration. You want to find out how popular ayahuasca is. Talk to a veteran, talk to a veteran of the global war on terror, and you will hear how heavily ayahuasca is being pushed in their community. And so you take a man who's in his mid thirties or a woman.
Take someone in their mid-30s who's built a life, but maybe they're feeling a bit uncomfortable. Life is a bit boring and stiff. Of course, the corporate world is not enjoyable and home life can be difficult and parenting is hard. All these things are true. And they take ayahuasca in the jungle and they commune with the spirit and the spirit tells them, you need to be a traveling yoga teacher. And understand that they're now communing with an entity, a consciousness that is higher than their own.
Speaker 2 (01:21:12.974)
In effect, it's a God. has a God-like level of 40. It is not God. What God is in the Nyahuasca ceremony isn't really talked about. But certainly when you're talking with a spirit, you know, that is of a higher level of a higher plane of reality than yourself. When a spirit, when a higher being, an entity at that level tells you to go do something, it's like getting a message from God or an angel or whatever, however you want to frame it. And so people come back and they take that as a message from God and they upend their entire lives, their lives, and they create devastation as a result.
And then they follow the path and then they follow that path of becoming whatever traveling yoga instructor they're gonna, they're gonna become. you've, find their way into the new age world, which we've been talking about the cult-like behavior, the mistaken ideas, the Kundalini, all this stuff. find their way into that world. Okay, fine. Let's just, let's just make that as it is. But what I encourage people to do is look into the future of the new age world and see how many happy and healthy and fulfilled old people there are in that world. There are very, very few.
very few. You do not see large, happy, thriving families. You do not see many old people. There are some that are managing to eke out an existence in their later years on the fringes of society, whether it be in Bali or Goa, you where an American dollar goes further, but they're still growing old alone in a community full of hippies and all the challenges there, and you don't see many old people there. So ultimately, it ends up in a dead end. So you're now walking a path away from
Safety, security, love, family, community, obligation, towards what end? Towards a cliff, towards a big cliff that falls into nothing. And so that's why within these new age communities, you have all of these continuing transcendent practices. That's why you have so much drug use and drug abuse is that people know inside their heart that they're not going anywhere. So they escape. try to punch out into a higher degree of consciousness to make themselves forget, to re-up the meaning that they thought that they had.
And it leads ultimately nowhere. It leads nowhere. And so if you want to make your way back to the world, and I'm sure that some people do, and praise God, I'm sure that some people will. In fact, if you're listening to sound of my voice, come back. Please come back. I would be personally honored and blessed to show you the way that was shown to me. I can't say that I found In a sense, I found it. But in a way, was a gift from God that I found it. Come back. But you will also find that the wreckage is real.
Speaker 2 (01:23:38.51)
You know, and taking that accountability is hard, but it grows you up as a man. It grows you up as a woman. And so your question ultimately was about how can people find meaning even when life is difficult and boring? That's ultimately your question. How can they find that personal growth without throwing off the shackles of their existence? And this is also what Christ offers. It's not often talked about, but this is one of the biggest blessings of becoming a Christian is that it imbues
a faithful mundane everyday life with such great meaning. Inside Christianity, parenthood is deeply honored. Being a husband and a father and being a wife and mother is a place of great honor and meaning and purpose. Raising children is a blessing. Children are continually called a blessing throughout all of scripture. And you begin to see, particularly in the Protestant traditions, which I'm a part of, the Reformed Protestant traditions, work is worship.
We worship God, we glorify God through our labor. That may not be working for a tech company that delivers weed, but certainly there are plenty of other tech companies out there that you can give your talents to that really make lives better for people. And so we find that the home is sacred and it's treasured. Being a father is a position of honor with strict guidelines for conduct. Being a mother is a position of honor. Being a husband and wife, the commands to love and honor each other in marriage are so real and so valuable.
And work, everyday work, yeah, it's boring and it's difficult and it can be mundane. You find yourself in doing immoral work, obviously change that. But the process of getting better, growing in skills and growing in profession and earning wealth as a blessing from the Lord. And so you find that the everyday life is not constraining anymore. It's blessed and you grow in faithfulness and you find you have kids and then you have grandkids, you have great grandkids. My wife is one of eight kids. She's one of eight kids from two parents. They're all married now. are 25 grandkids.
Our wedding was incredible. It's a photo of me with her family and it's massive. And the end of joy and laughter experience in this big family is incredible. Struggle too, of course, but it's a blessing from God. And so one of the great blessings of Christianity is that it transforms what we understand as mundane everyday life in the West today into something, a subject of great blessing, difficult labor, but faithfulness brings rewards of fruitfulness. And that's the blessing of Christianity that is it often talked about.
Speaker 2 (01:26:02.338)
So what you're talking about, what you asked about is how can people find meaning in their life? The idea is not to throw off these noble commitments. The idea is to find how they are blessings and to lean into them and find God's blessing in them. And that is only done through Christ. And the removal of Christ from American culture has removed the meaning of everyday life. And so people go looking for it in the fantastic, in the colorful. There's no meaning to be found there. It ends in a big cliff. But truly coming to Christ and being blessed with faithfulness is where we find true meaning of everyday life.
Wow, you answered my next question there. But I still want to ask it even though you already started to answer it because where I was going is I was thinking about your cultural background and how you were DJ at festivals. you've been to places I haven't been, you've also been to places I have. And there are things I miss sometimes. And the words that you use to describe it are colorful and fantastic.
And so the answer to that is finding the beauty and sacredness in the mundane. But I guess I did want to ask you, and maybe this isn't the right way to say it, but if there's ever a part of you that misses the more colorful and fantastic and bizarre and unique world that you lived in when you were still in the so-called new age.
Not really. I would say, I think that there are aspects of DJing that I miss. I miss the music. I think a lot of it has probably fallen, but I think that there are a lot of people that are very sincere in making music that is truly from a positive placement to move the heart. I do miss that experience. But there's so much that gets tacked onto it that drags away from it. I find it, let's see.
There's a concept in Christianity called sanctification. Sanctification, when we get saved, when Christ redeems us from our sinfulness and turns us to love and follow God's law, our entire personality and character begins to change from the inside out to live more in alignment with God's original design for humans to live in accordance with the moral law. To not just live in alignment with it, but to find joy in living in alignment with it.
Speaker 2 (01:28:19.424)
a burden or a slog or a labor, the Holy Spirit comes and transforms us morally in terms of character from the inside out so that our tastes change. Everything about us changes. That's quite powerful. And so as someone, me, who engaged in some of the most intense forms of, I will say psychotherapeutic, transformational, know, inner seeking kind of activities, like again, not just ayahuasca, but very deep sessions of transpersonal psychotherapy.
5m e o DMT Buddhist meditation like it really did the thing I said earlier that I would turn myself inside out over and over and over again trying to dump out my trauma and So that I was a significant outlay of time money and energy to create to create that change What I found since being a Christian which has been for just over five years But really over the past three years, especially it's such an effortless transformation of my interstate to want to live
in a more moral and pure and chaste and holy way in a way that doesn't cost me anything. It hasn't cost me a dollar. Bibles are free. Bibles are absolutely free. Church is free, right? It's just this ability to say, have faith in Jesus and I have faith in Christ that He will transform my heart. The Holy Spirit will transform my heart to want to live in alignment with God's law. And that has brought me such a a great peace. And it's changed my tastes away from everything that I would have wanted in the past. I'll give you, I'll give you a couple, a couple of really good examples.
So I think we would all acknowledge that pornography is just a facet of everyday life today for a lot of men and tragically for many women. So it was true for me as well. think I probably first saw porn when I was 12 years old, something like that. so porn uses were something that was like a daily thing, not because I was hyper addicted to it, but just like help me sleep. You know, that was very common. Some men go quite far with that and they can't live without doing it. I can't even see a woman in a bikini right now. Like make it go away. it's, I'm literally like that repulsed by
The female form, let's be clear, but the presentation of sexualized content, I literally can't look at it. I also have a history in the new age world, premarital sex, fornication, casual sex is a part of that world and I participated in that quite a bit. so when I met my wife, I told her and I meant honestly that I wasn't going to sleep with her before marriage, nor was I even going to kiss her.
Speaker 2 (01:30:45.184)
I was like the time when I was going to kiss her was going to be when the pastor said you may kiss the bride, not before then. And praise God, I'm happy to say that we courted over the course of 11 months and we both held true to that. And our first kiss was when the pastor said, you may kiss the bride. And I will tell you that was probably the greatest thing that she and I did together. Not because like it was extraordinarily difficult, like we're grating our teeth, spending time with each other, but because it took our sexual intimate relationship and it put it in the place where it was supposed to be.
inside the bonds of marriage and it forced us to get to know each other, to talk and not to activate the feelings of falling in love and that oceanic feeling. Who is this person that I'm going to give my life to? Who is she really? And let her find out about me. And that really forced us to come together and learn how to communicate with each other long before we could activate all the blessings of marriage. And that's what I mean by transforming as a human being. Like the things that were just formerly part of my life are no longer part of my life anymore. And not because
I had to grit my teeth and work through it. But because my heart has been transformed as a man, I am a new man. And when people say they are born again, you hear the term born again Christian, that's what it means. A lot of people associate the term born again Christian with sort of radical, you know, radical kind of Christianity in your face. Like that's what people mean. Usually when they use the term, but what it actually means is the idea like, I am not the man that I was. I am not at all the man that I was. So your question was, do I look back on those things in my life and miss them? I don't.
because my tastes have changed. I miss the feeling of when I DJed. I do actually miss that because I think at its very highest levels, DJing is a musical art form, but I can pick up a guitar and get that same feeling. That's also why I like doing interviews. There's a performing element of doing this, right? And so do I miss the colorful? I don't miss that really either because if I were to even go to a nightclub or a festival, all I would see around me is people that were like me.
that are looking for something, trying to escape for something, and they don't know what. And sadly, I fear that they wouldn't want to hear what I had to say. I thought about going back to Burning Man. three times. That's where I was introduced to Christ originally. We could talk about that if you like. I don't think I could go back to Burning Man now, because I think my heart would ache for not only seeing people who are like me, but I might actually see myself in some way. Like, that guy reminds me of me.
Speaker 2 (01:33:07.66)
I would want to tell him you're looking in the wrong place. Everything that you're looking for is where the one place that you've been told not to look, it's all there. And so for that, for that reason, I don't miss it because I found what I was looking for.
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (01:33:28.041)
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:33:34.414)
I'm resonating with what you're saying. I'm remembering, I guess, the highs and the lows and therefore the instability of some of the youth culture I participated in, I guess. I remember, and actually I have this memory of just being at festivals, looking at all these people and looking for my man because I hadn't found him yet. And I was looking in people's eyes and...
And I think some part of me knew that I would recognize my husband by his eyes. And he wasn't at the festivals, I can tell you that. And he does have just the kindest, warmest eyes. has the eyes that I knew I was looking for. I remember scanning the eyes in the crowd and just the loneliness that can come when you're in these groups of people. And then when you start to get to know
you know, some of the depravity as well, like I said, you know, how disillusioning it was for me to be an actual victim of genuine domestic violence and not be able to get help from any of the people in the supposed community. So I'm, you know, I'm resonating with what you're saying and just, think, going through my own process of feeling how far my life is today from where it was, I don't know, 10 years ago.
And yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I would be interested in hearing how you were introduced to Christ at Burning Man.
sure. So thank you for sharing that, by the way. Again, I'm sorry for what you've been through. Thank you. I'm grateful for the effort it seems that you've put into redeem it and put it in the correct place, you know, and do something healthy with it. So my story of how I was introduced to Christ is in 2015.
Speaker 1 (01:35:25.592)
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:35:32.974)
I had been in a long-term relationship with a woman who was a sinful relationship with a woman who was not suited for me. And I knew it for a very long time. However, we stayed together because she had contracted ovarian cancer. So we were a couple of years into the relationship and she got the news that she had stage four ovarian cancer.
And so I, however I was feeling, I, set aside my feelings saying, I need to be here for this woman. And so that was a two year process of getting her into remission. I was like, okay, now I think I can go. And then it came back and it came back worse. And so was like, oh, okay. So that extended the relationship quite a long time. It's a very powerful bit of sanctification. Um, finally, I think we got her to a place where, um, where she was in remission again after, uh,
after quite a lot of surgery and I just like, can't stay in this relationship. I think the most important thing to say is she was 20 years older than me. And so as a young man coming into my mid thirties, you know, it's like, well, I'm looking for things in life that you no longer want any kids and family and stuff like that. And that was very difficult for me as a man, understanding that the instinct to have kids and family is not inherently oppressive, but it's a good and God glorifying thing. so ultimately I had, I had to say like, I'm sorry, I have, I have to go. I love you.
I said, I'm not aiming to hurt you. don't have any ill will towards you, but I can't do this anymore. And so ended the relationship and it was very, very difficult. But again, set her up in a place and did everything I could to be as generous as possible and leave on good terms. And it was in that frame that I ended up going to Burning Man. And I went to Burning Man and arrived there just in the middle of what I was going through. she was very much a...
an RV kind of person. I was very much a tent kind of guy and bald. And so I don't really have to worry about things like things like hair. and so I was able to go and I woke up, there's a whole long story about why I ended up camping where I did, but let's just say a providential set of circumstances led me to the exact physical spot where I was set up. Woke up on, I'll call it Thursday morning, Wednesday morning. And, the guy I was camped next to, you know, he's like, Hey, who are you? What's going on with you? I told him I was
Speaker 2 (01:37:51.458)
you know, coming off a breakup and I was grieving. He's like, you should probably go to this camp called Spirit Dream. I visited them yesterday and they were great. So go check them out. Okay. Sounds good to me. So he told me where they were, whatever cross streets. And I wrote over there and managed to get in the last seating group in the morning. So I may call it like 11. And there was a sign outside that said camp Spirit Dream, dream interpretation, free fall, you know,
Stuff like that. Like, OK, I kind of recognize. didn't know what some of the term, I what dream interpretation was. Some of the other terms like free fall, I didn't know what that was. But OK, sure. There's all kinds of stuff going on. So I get into the camp, and they sit me down in a circle. It's a huge tent. It's a big military style tent. There must have been 30 or 40 people in the tent. So this is a big camp. they me down in front of three people. Barb.
Katie and Larry. Barb is a woman who at that point was in her mid 40s. Katie was probably in her late 50s, early 60s, and Larry was in his 70s. And so I just sit down and as a guy who'd been in therapy for a long period of time, I knew how to do the talk therapy thing. And over the course of three hours, a lot of stuff just comes pouring out, related to my parents.
particularly related to judgments that I had had of them that were unjust, but not really understanding what that meant. Thinking, for example, that my mother didn't love me, for example. There's lots I could go into related to that, and that would make more sense, but I'm going to leave it there. And understanding that she did, but she lacked the ability to show it. Also thinking certain things about my dad. These came out through the interactions with these individuals, particularly because Barb was the
name of the woman that I connected with, my mother's name was also Barbara, and Larry was an older man. So they sort of me surface a lot of things that I had been thinking and feeling that I needed to confront in that particular moment. was very powerful. Lots of tears, lots of tears for me to see that my parents did actually love me very much. And maybe they weren't great at showing it and I needed to have a bit more forgiveness for them and understand that there was much more going on than I realized. And that was very, very powerful.
Speaker 2 (01:40:15.374)
at the end of that three hours, like it just kept re-upping, you know what I mean? Like it was like get to a place and I've got a lot of stamina for it because I'd done a lot of inner work already. So let's do it. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. So at the end of three and a half hours, I'm like, yeah, I think I'm complete. pretty much all cried out at that point, I guess. Again, you know, very beautiful moments of, I would say, reconciliation and forgiveness and surfacing my own judgments.
That was really hard to look at. These are the ways that I had judged my own parents, and I was wrong for doing that. So at the end of that session, Katie, who was the older woman, was standing behind me. And she had her hands on either side of my head, and I was seated, and she was standing. And she was praying, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. And so with my eyes closed, I have, we'll call it a vision.
and so in this vision, if my eyes closed, I'm, standing on the Burning Man street. And so just people are riding by on their bicycles. There's tents, flags blowing the breeze, dust. And then that vision, a man walks up to me. He walks up to me. He's, he, he's got goggles on. And so, I see his, see his face, see the goggles, see kind of the shape of his head and his, and his hair. And so, okay. But then the face without speaking seems to insist like, look, like, okay, I see you. So I.
see the hair and the face, et cetera. so look, and then I open my eyes and Katie's like, come with me, there's someone I want you to meet. And so she takes me to the other end of the tent where I came in. And there's this pillar, this four-sided pillar that I walked past as I entered. She took me to the side of the pillar that I couldn't have seen. So I walked past one side, we'll say the south side of the pillar. She took me around and showed me the north side of the pillar, which there's no way that I could have seen when I came in. And she takes me to this north side of the pillar. She turns me around, points me up.
And there on the pillar was the face that I had just seen in my vision minus the Burning Man goggles. It was the face of Jesus Christ painted by a young girl named Akiane, A-K-I-A-N-E. If anyone wants to look it up, Akiane's Christ, there's a couple of them. And so this is not a Jesus with short hair. He has long hair. He has short hair, but it's very clearly the face of Christ. And so I got down on my knees and bowed down. I don't really know what you do. Because again, I wasn't a Christian at the time, but here I was having
Speaker 2 (01:42:40.47)
an experience of Christianity and of Christ. And I'm asking them, like, who are you people? And they're like, we're Christians. Like, what are you doing here? Because I would have thought that Burning Man was the least friendly environment in the world to Christians. Well, it turns out that they were of a particular denomination, that probably more charismatic, if anyone knows what that means, probably more gifts of the spirit, more spiritually minded. And they had been running an underground ministry at Burning Man for 12 years. They had been going every year, and the camp had grown from a small project
to the big thing, the big national size camp that it was, 40, 50 people every year, big infrastructure. The last year was 2017. I think their first year was 2004, 2005, or 2002, something like that. They've been going for 15 years. showed up at year 12. And so they've been going for that long to minister to the lost. They didn't have Bibles out. They weren't trying to talk about law. They weren't trying to really talk about the gospel. They were just there being faithful Christians to love on people who were seeking, to say, God loves you.
God is your loving Father, and we are going to embody that in our character and our practices, and we hope to show you to the love of God that He's not just a judge, that He actually loves you as His creature. And so that's what they were doing through various practices like dream interpretation. And so I was very struck by them. I came back the next day and spent more time with them, and they invited me to join them.
for a class they were giving in Carson City, Nevada about a month or two later, which I drove up to meet them at again. And then they invited me to come spend Christmas with them later that year. So we're talking about August, September of 2015. I was with them for Christmas of 2015. And so you might think that having this transcendent experience or vision of Christ, so to speak, I'm not sure what it was I saw. I just know what it looked like. You would think that that would do it, but that's not actually what did it.
It was going to spend Christmas with them and seeing how warm and loving and kind and welcoming they were. They had good food and they were drinking wine and they were celebrating and their houses were just full of joy. Their children were well put together and were singing songs on guitar and they were hunters and they served me like bear and pheasant and elk and they really welcomed me and no one made me feel lesser than or pressured or anything. They just loved me and I felt inside myself. I said,
Speaker 2 (01:45:03.01)
You know, I can still feel it in my heart. These are the Christians that I've always heard that exists, but I've never met before. Somehow within my heart, I knew that these kinds of Christians existed, but I just never, I just never met them. And that really, that really stuck with me. And so it was after that, that I went to go travel in 2016 through 2020. And I kept in touch with them. I was also doing ayahuasca, all the things that I've told you about. I was doing these things after I had met them, after I had had this vision.
So here were this collection of four people, including one more man, Rob. Here were four people who I was in touch with through Facebook Messenger while I was traveling. And they're praying for me because they're looking at what I'm doing through this Christian lens, like, this poor kid is doing all of this stuff. And so they're praying for me. And then ultimately, I went on my own journey out there into the world, found that there was nothing there for the reasons we described. And I returned to the United States in February of 2020.
And that was when Rob from Camp Spirit Dream, the leader of Camp Spirit Dream, gave me the book. The book is Simply Christian by N.T. Wright. Remember, we started out the conversation talking about how I had learned about the nature of evil and that had really troubled me. That here was child sex trafficking and here was this image that it's karma and I just couldn't get okay with that. It's like, just can't bring myself to say it's some little kid's karma. And so the nature, like here I am seeing that evil is real.
It's a real thing. It's not just all is one, all is love and light. Like, this is evil and it doesn't fit into this worldview. What am I going to do with this? So here I am reading Simply Christian by N.T. And in the book, he talks about how Christ up on the cross, this big wave of evil was coming to crash over him. And through his death and sacrifice and resurrection, he drove back the wave of evil forever. And I remember I was sitting on my dad's couch because I didn't have my own place yet. Sitting on my dad's couch when I read this.
And I got it. Something clicked. And so the next thing that I did was the only other book about Christianity that I knew was Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which I read. And one of the things that I had always been told in the new age world was you can't reason your way to faith. Like faith transcends reason. And what Mere Christianity is, is C.S. Lewis over the course of a couple hundred pages reasoning his way very movingly and compellingly. This is C.S. Lewis of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis reasoning his way to the Christian faith. It was actually a series of
Speaker 2 (01:47:27.502)
radio addresses that he gave to British soldiers during World War II to encourage them that he then turned to the book, Mere Christianity. And then I read the book, The Screwtape Letters, which is told from the story of perspective of evil and how evil and demons seek to subvert us in living moral lives. so Sip the Christian and T. Write Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letters. I remember reading Mere Christianity.
And in that book, C.S. Lewis talks about, he says, when you give your life to Christ, you don't lose yourself. You give yourself back, you get yourself back renewed. When you give yourself to Christ, you don't lose yourself. You receive yourself back renewed. And I was like, okay, that sounds, that sounds interesting. Let me test that out. And so I was in a creative writing class at the time for short stories, trying to tell some of the stories of my travel. was having a dreadful time because I'm a better nonfiction writer and I am a fiction writer. And so I was like, okay, um, I
I've got to give myself to you and I, and I trusted you to give me back renewed. And it may sound like a small thing, but I wrote this incredibly beautiful and moving short story that accounted for a very special moment in my travels in New Zealand that I was very proud of. my writing instructor said, I really want to publish this. This was the week before, like the week after a couple of weeks after he had said, yeah, I'm just not seeing this earlier version of a short story that I was writing. was really devastating. Like.
He was telling me how bad it was. And then I come back two weeks later or whatever, and I write this short story that captures this moving, moving moment. And so it's like, oh, wow, this is a, it sounds like a small thing, but I, seemed like a gesture of like, okay, there's some reality. There's some reality here. I was like, well, the new age world, I, there are so many troubling aspects of it. And I, I, I can't get down with all is one and all is gone anymore. And I just can't get down with karma anymore. And here's this book that told me.
that's talking to me about evil like I'm an adult. Evil is a very real thing. And there's a man who came and died to defeat evil, and it is real and it exists. And when you start looking into it, it does actually make logical sense. And you can actually communicate with God who does actually hear you. He does actually want to bless you. And so I contacted my friends up and evil and demons are real and they do interact with us in our lives. And so I contacted my friends up in Idaho and I said, can I come visit you guys?
Speaker 2 (01:49:49.646)
And I came, went to visit them Labor Day weekend, 2020, and I asked them to baptize me. And, and I knew that getting baptized was not something that I was going to do casually. The new age world, you don't ever actually have to commit to anything. You don't do any rituals that, that bind you to a community. Really. You can, you know, you were talking about Nick Mulvey. I think you said his name was about this, you know, pick and choose different forms of spirituality, right? Like I'm going to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
With Christianity, is actually, we'll call it a ritual. It's not the best word, but there is a ritual, sacrament, that you do say that that professes I would like to be a part of this. And it is a bell that can't be unrung. And so I asked my friends to baptize me. And I remember sitting in the car with them, realizing that they weren't just going to do it. And I had to actually ask. And I remember being nervous to ask.
but I overcame my nerve. I didn't want to mess with their day, but I overcame it and said, hey, will you guys baptize me? I said, we'd be happy to. And so they baptized me as Christian in September of 2020. And so that is my long version of coming to faith. Thank you for listening to the extended version of that story.
I really appreciate you sharing that story. And one thing I can appreciate about you that I think we have in common, if I'm reading you correctly as a person, is I think you seem like the sort of person who has to learn things yourself. am very much the same way. And I have a step kid who is also the same way. So I see that in him. And it helps to know that about myself and to know that about him because there are moments I can see someone else trying to
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:51:34.542)
teach him something based on their own experience. like, you have to let him figure this out for yourself. Just stop, just let him make his own mistakes, you know? So, and I think, you know, this is one of the things that for someone like you or me, who's obviously, you know, deep independent thinker, likes to grapple with things, needs to learn from their own experience, can't just take it on someone's word, that something like coming to faith, one of the issues is that you are being asked
to take someone else's word for something. And I'm actually hearing that when it comes to things like original sin, right, that Adam and Eve were asked to take God's word that you don't want to eat from that tree. And then with Christ, we were asked to take God's word that you can be redeemed from sin through this one and only path if you just accept it on faith. And I think those are the things that are hardest for me to accept about Christianity just based on the way I am as a person.
And so I appreciate you laying it out like that saying, here's how, here's what I needed to read and how I needed to think about it. And for me, I think the most compelling case for Christianity is the moral framework for understanding good and evil because we, and it's one thing to grapple with these questions when you're young. It's quite another, when you've had personal direct experience of, of evil and you understand, the importance of, of having a framework for evil. and so.
I'm gonna have to actually listen back to this interview and maybe check out some of those same books because I think that your thought process, the way that you grapple with things morally is probably more aligned with mine than a lot of other Christians I've met. those are probably the same exact types of books that I need to read.
Praise God. very happy to hear that. Yes, I agree with you that I very much need to learn it on my own kind of guy. In fact, one of the things that I joke about is, you know, I'm the guy who goes out and makes all of the mistakes so that I know that I've made them until I finally get the right answer and then I know that it's the right answer. And that could be a very painful and difficult and time consuming and really life consuming process. But I'm very grateful to God for
Speaker 2 (01:53:48.104)
Guiding me into and through that and giving me the opportunity to redeem my story To redeem my choices by telling a story like this I mentioned earlier that you We Romans a 28 all things work together for the good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes What that means is like all things work together for the good for the called who are according to his purposes God's children all things work together for the good and so as I look back on my life now and I look back on Well, let's say I would have been 42 years old when I got baptized in 2020
So in 47 now. So I look back on that and I see choices that I was communing with actual demons. that's if that's what I really believe in it is that's what I did in 15 ceremonies with Ayahuasca. I can't say that I ever personally had an encounter with Mama Ayah, but I certainly do have a tattoo. I don't know how I can show you on my forearm of an Ayahuasca vine that, you know, right. It's the vine that goes all the way up my arm. I did get that after my ceremony and in my like seven ceremonies in 12 nights.
So I have ayahuasca literally tattooed on my arm right now. That's for life. And it goes up to my mid bicep as well. And so if I believe that I was communing with demons, that I actually was. I was actually communing with demons. And when I was engaged in Kabbalah and tarot and Kundalini magic, I wasn't doing sex magic, but Kundalini magic, that is the bottom of the pit. I believe Kabbalah and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is actually the bottom of the pit. That's the drain that people circle once they start getting into
Cities you mentioned that guru quote-unquote guy you're talking about who said he'd been India cities s IDD hi ass I believe is how that's spelled cities is the idea that you've attained such mastery over your mind that you can manipulate physical reality So it's like you would call it we would call it a magic trick But in the sense that you can manifest things out of thin air, know I don't know if levitation is one of them, but there's a lot of that and so that is one of the promised byproducts of higher degree
yoga, Kundalini yoga and magic is that you can manipulate physical reality. And so like that's what the Kabbalah is for, is learning how to do that. Whether people can actually do that or not is another matter, but that's the promise is that you using your mind can manipulate physical reality based on your will. And if we believe that we are all fallen sinners outside of Christ, which we are, then what are people going to use their will for? They're going to use it to produce the things that people always want.
Speaker 2 (01:56:14.606)
They want power. They want money. What do men want? They want power, physical power. They want money, which is a form of physical power, and they want sex. That's what men want. That's what unredeemed men want. What do women want? Women also want power. They want their magical intuitions to be true. And I think women also do want power over men. I don't think women want power in the same way that men want power. Men want power over men and women. I think women want power over men most, not necessarily power over other women. We can talk about that at another time, perhaps.
But you know, these are the things that women, I'm sure women want sex and money too. So these are the things that are motivated by people. So when you start getting into magic, you start getting into working with demons to make your will to manipulate physical realities, to charm people. You can probably look at all the occult imagery in the music industry and the movie industry. And what you see is some of that at the highest level. There are those on the internet, I think they're probably telling the truth.
that will tell you that some of the most successful musicians that we know of are high level magicians, occult magic, glamour magic, power, know, like sort of musical techniques and dance techniques. And that's why you start to see like Sam Smith, he starts out as this really wholesome kind of singer in some ways. And then he started, then he wears like a devil costume and starts singing unholy. Like what happened to this guy? Well, these are guys that have, these are people that have given their soul to the devil for power.
And so that's the bottom of the drain, if you ask me. And I was right there. I was literally right there. And God reached down, snatched me out of it, plucked me out of that, picked me up, dusted me off, sanctified me in terms of my lust, and gave me a platform and a podcast and physical health and a wife and a daughter and a second chance at life. And so...
What do you say to that? What do you say to that? But glory to God, he makes all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. so I regarded it as kind of my responsibility. I don't want to call it my job, maybe vocation calling it, I don't know, but my responsibility to tell that story in as honest terms as I can. And you mentioned about making all the mistakes and the challenge of accepting things on faith. We're not necessarily called to accept as many things on faith
Speaker 2 (01:58:36.15)
As might think, just a second ago I wanted to look up a verse that came to mind. It's Psalm 34 verse 8, "'O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.'" So we're called to taste and see. It's not just, you you'll find out once you make a profession. Like, no, taste and see. And in writing that story, I took a taste to see and I found that it was good. And I found since then, since getting baptized and since...
giving my life to Christ and destroying all of my old new age artifacts, lighting them on fire, burning, smashing them, getting rid of all the books and everything, and talking about openly that I found the Lord is even better than I could have imagined. And so that is the promise of taking a taste and see. I'm grateful that the books sound like they resonate to you as well. And of course, I can recommend many others.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying and I think I don't remember that exact Bible verse about something, the fruits, knowing them by their fruits. How does that go?
And so I'll just read the whole verses as Matthew chapter 7 verses 15 to 17. Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? So every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.
Yeah, I think that's so much of what we're talking about today, right? The fruits of various practices, right? You're talking about where things led you and those you knew when you were on certain paths and how you found redemption and how you found joy in the mundane and how God creates order in people's lives.
Speaker 1 (02:00:20.906)
I'm currently grappling with, as I'm grappling with questions of my own faith, I'm also grappling with questions of my moral responsibility for how to handle certain situations. And I will say that part of what I'm looking at there is the fruits of people's choices and character. And I think maybe that's something I'd like to speak with you privately about actually. So this has been a wonderful conversation. I feel like I actually need to spend many more hours conversing with you. It's been very helpful for me personally.
So, thank you so much. So, Will Spencer, where can people find you?
I just want to say I'm very grateful to hear that and I'm open to many more conversations and in public and forms like this and in private as well. So I'm grateful for the conversation. Also, this has been a blessing to me. If people want to find me, the best place is you can go to willspenser.co. That's my website. You can find all of my podcasts there. You can go to willspenser.co. slash mentorship and you can find my biblical mentorship program for men. You can also find me on YouTube, youtube.com slash at Will Spencer pod.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (02:01:23.858)
And from those, can also find me on Twitter where my handle is at Renofmen, R-E-N-O-F-M-E-N. So thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecorero for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production.
For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Aermann, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
It is still a beautiful world.