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The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Welcome to the Smoke Trail hosted by Smoke Wallin. Join Smoke on a unique journey of awakening consciousness, sharing authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests. Explore spirituality, leadership and transformation, tools to elevate your path.
Luke:They caught my daddy in the woods last night. Said they saw his shining light. Said they heard his rifle clear. He shot the rich man's deer. He shot the rich man's deer.
Luke:They call me a redneck. Hold your son, tell him I'm proud
Smoke:Welcome to the Smoke Trail.
Luke:County Jail
Luke:Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Smoke:That love that song, and and it's got a lot of meaning as we as we enter this dialogue here. That was that was a song you wrote that in parallel to or kind of around the same time, a little bit right before the creative juices started flowing for your first actual novel that you published.
Luke:That's right. I had sort of a half of a draft, and I was having struggles with it. A lot of things came together one night, and I wrote that song about one of the characters, the main character, and when I did that, it just opened up a whole new way of getting into the characters and expressing what they felt, and it really made the novel possible. So, I feel like, without my songwriting, maybe not my career as a novelist.
Smoke:That's awesome. I love that. We're going to come back to that whole creative process, but just by way of welcoming you and and welcoming our our audience to participate in this in this dialogue here, I always like to say upfront my intentions and kind of our intentions of what we're here talking about. We were talking off camera, so I'll try to replicate what I said to you. But essentially, you know, as I have gone down my own spiritual journey, we're dubbing the smoke trail, I have experienced tremendous benefits in my inner peace, unconditional love and consciousness level.
Smoke:As my consciousness level has increased, I have had direct benefits and part of what has come on this journey for me as I have become more and more conscious is something inside, which is I have a need, is maybe not the right word, but an overflowing abundance of energy to share what I have learned and to, if it's useful, to share ways in which others can unlock this. So, my intention with the Smoke Trail is simply that, is to share a bit of my journey, not to tell anyone how to do their journey, but to the degree what I have encountered, experienced, learned along the way that could be helpful, that I might have found helpful at one point along the way had I had someone in my shoes sharing, I'm attempting to make available and share in this forum. And although, you know, some of the episodes are just smoke talking about the smoke trail and that journey and and sharing directly my own experience. I also have invited select guests who are also on their own journey because we're all on our own path to whatever this enlightenment or spiritual journey might be for each of you, each of us, and to enter dialogue around meaningful topics.
Smoke:One of the things that I said earlier and that I want to just kind of say here on camera, because I think it's a useful frame, if you think about the conversation that you might have at a coffee shop, Starbucks or whatever, with someone or someone in line at the grocery store, you know, even if it's a very friendly conversation, and, you know, both parties are kind of like leaning in to be nice, the level of depth that you might get into is typically quite shallow. And if we look at all interactions, all discussion, all sharing that we might have in our lives on a bell curve, where you've got kind of the bulk of them are in the middle, which might be a lot like that coffee shop conversation. And then some of them might be out there on the ends, kind of at the ends of the bell curve, the upper 5%, the bottom 5%. And those are the kinds of things where if you really knew me, you would know blah, blah, blah. If you really knew me, you would know this, that and the other thing.
Smoke:So these are more things that we reserve and hold back. And so, part of my hope and objective in the dialogues here is for us to be comfortable enough to have some sharing that we might not otherwise do. It's not a coffee shop conversation, although it could happen in a coffee shop. It's more about sharing a deeper level.
Luke:It kind of is today, actually.
Smoke:It is today and I have my coffee here as well, my afternoon coffee here in beautiful Sedona. And I know you are in the lustrous, beautiful winter wonderland of Little Compton, Rhode Island. And so let's go to there for a second because Little Compton is just this magical little coastal town that you have been in for a long time. So why Little Compton? What's behind your window?
Smoke:What are we looking at there? I know you spent a lot of time out there, so tell us a little bit about your environment.
Luke:Yeah, it's a wonderful place, this little town. I came here with my wife and two kids in 1988 because I got a job teaching in the English department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which in those days was called Southeastern Massachusetts University. And so I it was a wonderful experience being there, and I was there for twenty years. That was after an earlier twenty years of teaching in different places. And so I'm still here.
Luke:It's a great place to write. It's a great place to play music. I'm about a little over a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. So, you know, it's a great place to meditate. And I have a lot of, I have, you know, personal relationships with some of the animals here, some of the birds.
Smoke:All right, let's not jump ahead. We're going get to that, I think. So you're about an hour from Boston, roughly, give or take, depending on time of day, and maybe an hour from Providence, so kind of in the middle of those two cities, but in a very rural setting.
Luke:Right.
Smoke:Awesome. Well, I wanted you to describe that a little bit because although it's far, far away from where the Redneck Poacher's son grew up and experienced the poachers and his whole life in that whole world that you so beautifully described and brought me to, as a young reader and many readers over the years, that you brought that world to life. Well, you grew up in that world or around that world. Maybe you weren't Jesse, you know, your dad wasn't the redneck poacher alcoholic who Jesse had to come to grips with that being his family, but you certainly knew a lot of Jesse's and Jesse's dads in your world. And I was one of the things that I really was struck by, what I love about this process is the questions, the pre questions that I ask my guests to answer always bring out interesting things in most cases, and you can speak to it yourself, but helps the person answering the questions recontextualize things in their lives around kind of a meaning, with a meaningful lens.
Smoke:I know you did. And part of the story that you told in one of the questions was just your life in that world. And growing up in Mississippi, hunting, the whole change of the hunting style and what went on, was news to me. That was an interesting really whole thing. I'd love to maybe discuss that a little bit.
Smoke:But the important thing was that at 16 years old, you and your buddy Dennis and one other pal decided that you were against the hunts that were they drove the deer with dogs and everybody was waiting to shoot them in a field somewhere, and you asked that let's not let people do that on our land, and you guys had a bunch of woods back then, and your dad at the time, who was quite a prominent business person in that community, respected your request and stopped allowing people to do it. That created all kinds of turmoil or enemies and all kinds of stuff. So tell us a little bit about that. Bring us back to that moment when, A, like what made you guys decide that you were, that the kind of hunting that everybody was doing was not right? And why did you ask your father to disallow it?
Luke:Yeah. Yeah. So I was born in 1943 in Mississippi and completely fell in love with the woods, with fishing, with hunting. I didn't like town. I didn't like the sense of secrets that town had.
Luke:I liked being alone. I liked being in the woods, and I tried to connect that a lot with Biblical stuff about the woods and the hunting in the Old Testament. So, yeah, there's a lot I wrote about that in answering your questions. And so I was My friends and I were in the woods, and this was at the age when we were just starting to deer hunt, it was around 14, 15, and the dominant method was people would bring a lot of horses and dogs and they had these giant events, they would put standers out on logging roads through the woods, people with shotguns. And then they would ride these horses and the dogs, and they would make a lot of noise on purpose.
Luke:They drive down through the woods and jump the deer out of the thickets, scare the deer to death. The deer would run past the standers. The standers would shoot at them with their shotguns, and they would you know, they had to use buckshot. And so some of the buckshot would get into the tough skin of the deer. The deer would keep going.
Luke:And then the deer would often be wounded and be tracked down by the dogs, and it was a big mess, it was cruel. And there was, at that time, a general feeling resistance to that, and as I mentioned, I found I was in the library in my hometown one time and I found a letter that had been written by William Faulkner in probably the early 40s, and he was complaining about this driving of deer and how cruel it was and how it would be so much better if people would just hunt with a rifle in the quiet and be careful with their shots and be more humane about the whole thing. And then he concluded that this was years away. People were not ready for this. This would take many more years.
Luke:And so the first year that I was able to go deer hunting and I went on one of these huge drives and I killed an enormous buck and it was this big event. But then the following year, my friends and I like we were trying to figure out how we could not have this stuff going on, and my father was a sawmill man, he had a sawmill and he owned some forest land, and so he had been letting people drive across our land for years as part of these big drives, which was a normal thing. All the landowners in the river bottom would say, you know, you can do this. So I asked him if he would tell them no, and we would just hunt on our land and, you know, they would have to go around us. This caused a lot of trouble.
Smoke:Was his initial reaction like he's accepted it or did he make you make your case or why you wanted to do it? Why you wanted to stop?
Luke:I think I had been making my case for a couple of years.
Smoke:Okay, it wasn't instant.
Luke:So, he knew how I felt about the whole he knew how important it was to me. I don't think he wanted to do it. I think he knew there would be some blowback from this, and I was actually surprised that he was willing to do this for me. But he did, and the first time that it happened, you know, my friends and I were down there and we were like just inside our land sort of monitoring things. And these guys would come and they would and there were barbed wire fences.
Luke:They come up to the barbed wire fences and they were used to going through there. I forget exactly why there was whether we had put up some barbed wire or what it was. In one case, they drove a buck over on us and my pal shot that buck. And then the buck ran was wounded and ran back across the the line when to where they were, and that's where he died. And then we went over there and they said, you know, what, you know, they were so mad at us.
Luke:And they were so mad at us. And then so there was the dispute about who got that deer, who should own that deer. So it got pretty hot, and somebody who wanted to be kind of a peacemaker said, Well, look, let us bring that deer down to our camp and hang it up and be part of the celebration of the hunt at the end of the day with the other deer that we're gonna kill, and then you guys can come and take it home. And we said, okay. So that's what that's what happened there.
Luke:But when we went down there to get the deer, they were waiting for us. There were like a hundred people mad at me. Some of them very mad at me. So that set the tone for having some landline enemies. And if anybody has grown up in deer country hunting and either owning land or being part of a club that controls some land, you will know that everybody has enemies.
Luke:Everybody's always trying to do something make it harder for the guy across the line.
Smoke:Well, let's talk about that. I could talk about, I would love to hear more of those stories, but what I like to do is, let's think about that for a minute. You grew up in probably a situation that was unique to you, but also quite common across lots of people and societies, and there were cliques and groups and tribes, if you will, of people. You were probably in the higher echelon of your community because of your father's business success, but you were right up against everyone else and connected with everyone and you guys were all in it together. This whole idea of having enemies and tribes and affinities, it's a level of consciousness that humans have to go through and that in developed situations, they get beyond that.
Smoke:We've actually, you and I, should reveal that we've had ongoing discussions along these lines of this topic or today's dialogue that have not been for the public, but one of those things is forgiveness. And I went through a process of unlocking memories, unlocking trauma that happened to me through different times in my life and understanding it and giving up the attraction and aversion of my ego mind to those experiences, giving up the payoff of the I have a grudge or I hold this against these people who did these things to me that I experienced. And in that process, you know this well, but I came to an unlocking of a whole bunch of understanding and it was through forgiveness. So I use that as a scalpel, if you will, like Hawkins talks about, the forgiveness scalpel cuts away all this other stuff that just falls away. Know you've had some experiences as well as we've thought about that, there is no situation that the person who holds the anger, resentment, grudge, whatever you want to call it, won't benefit from forgiveness, because the forgiveness is not for the forgiveee.
Smoke:Not for the enemy. It's not for the person that did it. It's for the person who gave the forgiveness in so doing, you have your freedom. So how do you think about that? I know we've talked about it, but you know, you went back and forgave old enemies at some point in this process.
Smoke:What was that like?
Luke:That's very true. It's all very true. And I think when somebody hears this idea of forgiving your enemies, especially if they have enemies, It sounds crazy, you know, like you say, there is a payoff. It adds drama to life. You know, when I had met my wife in the early days, I'd be talking about my enemies and she said, What is this?
Luke:You have enemies? What's this about? She was from New York. And I said, Oh yeah. And there were two different contexts in which I was very familiar with people having enemies in tribes.
Luke:One was hunting and the other was academia.
Smoke:Yeah. Man. That's a good question. Is worse and more vengeful, the rednecks that didn't like closing off your land or the other professors in the department who didn't like that you published something and that you spoke out at a faculty meeting?
Luke:Well, I would say that, you know, the hunters, the landowners, they would get pretty hot about things and they would have grudges and stuff, but not every day, but the professors do it every day.
Smoke:But of course they would be offended by us comparing them.
Luke:Well, they wouldn't even know what we're talking about.
Smoke:Right, well, and that's another thing that we have talked a lot about. I think that this would be something worth surfacing. And then I'm going to circle back. I'm going to jump around timeline wise. But I think in this understanding that we have come to at various levels, each of us independently, we've come to this understanding of a lot of what we experience as humans is what our ego mind has made up.
Smoke:And that is our identity for much of our lives. Many people, that's their identity their entire life. But once you understand what the ego mind is about, and I think you and I share a like of David Hawkins with his Power Versus Force and a bunch of his other books, where he really did a good job of articulating these levels of consciousness and the ego mind aversions and attractions that happen at every level of conscious, which are these payoffs. The payoff for being the victim holding a grudge against someone that did you wrong twenty years ago. The payoff of being in grief for the loss of that parent or child or spouse or whatever that you had ten years ago, and you're still grieving, it's the payoff of that grief that the ego mind goes to and why it regurgitates it.
Smoke:And that's an idea, as you said, like a lot of these folks might not appreciate this whole conversation, but once you see it, it's like, Oh, that's what that is. I can unlock that. That's a really powerful thing. Let's see if we can flesh that out a little bit and see if maybe you could say what I'm trying to say in a different way.
Luke:Well, yeah, let me say something about putting this in. So, we're talking right now about if you're in this mentality where you do have enemies, how can you see your way through that, and how can you actually forgive people, and how can you get out of that? How can you move beyond that, right?
Smoke:Yeah.
Luke:Because a lot of people hearing this would say, well, that would be nice. That would be nice. Everybody would just forgive their enemies and go and move beyond it. But, you know, that son of a bitch, let me tell you what he did. But here, let me put this in a little bit of a context of how what happened with me before, even before I started hunting, when I was seven years old.
Luke:We had lived in town in a fairly cramped house and we moved out into the edge of the country. We were like a mile away, we were up on top of a hill, there was big woods behind us, you could see like a mile away to the river, there were cornfields in the distance, these tall pine trees, it was really rural where we moved to, quiet. And in those days you know there was no light pollution, so when you go out at night the stars were incredibly bright. So at seven years old I was introduced to this magical world of nature and we had a very protected back garden. Had the top of this hill, we had fence around it, and I was able to roam around out there with my dog.
Luke:I had this great little dog, Ginger, And we were able to roam around and spend a lot of time out there alone. And, you know, we're really watching the ants and watching the quail and listening to everything. So everything was so vivid and especially looking at the stars at night and I had the feeling that those stars were being created continuously as I was watching them. I was seeing the original creation of everything, trees, everything. And it was not that it could happen once and then, okay, it's created.
Luke:And when I got to that story in Genesis, you know, the whole thing was done in a week. It was so deflating. It was like, you know, I had the feeling of what was going on during that week, But it's still going on, in my feelings.
Smoke:Yeah, it's constantly going on, right? Everything is constantly in creation of each moment. And, yeah, I think that's the frame that we all get. I didn't grow up in a very religious situation, as you know, but you did. You were in a heart of the Southern Baptist world, a very upstanding family in that world.
Smoke:You guys were, I think you said going to church three times a week. So how did that, you had this unbelievable insight as a seven year old, recognizing the divine creation of nature and what was happening in real time, but having, of course, no frame or way to talk about it, no one to talk about it to, and then being bombarded and inundated with the Gospel from the perspective of the Southern Baptist scripture.
Luke:Right. So it started out with just being Ginger, my dog. And we really Ginger understood.
Smoke:What's that? Ginger got it.
Luke:She did. Yeah. We really loved each other. And, you know, I can remember being out there with her, and I would put my hand on her head and it was warm and I could just feel the love flowing between us, right? And at the same time, I could look at the stars and I could see them being created.
Luke:So the whole power of the universe, the whole force of the universe, there it was. Things were coming into being. The unmanifest was becoming manifest. I didn't have this vocabulary, of course, but the combination of feeling the tenderness of ginger, the love of ginger, and the power of the entire universe producing stars at every moment, that combination was thrilling. But how can a seven year old talk about that, right?
Luke:So, you go along and then church comes along and Baptists come along and then they have this whole framework, you know, they want you to think about Genesis, but the big thing is when you're eight and you're approaching nine, then they give you the hell scare because nine is considered the age of accountability. So if you're accidentally killed after you become nine and you haven't yet accepted Jesus, you go to hell for eternity. Yeah. This is a frightening thought to an eight year old approaching nine. And so
Smoke:It's a frightening thought to anyone, I think, and it's a great illustration. Again, I'm not here to judge anybody's religion, and, you know, that's not what this is about or the show is about. That being said, I am, and I think I choose to freely make observations when I see different things like religion living in a certain level of development. And so a lot of that teaching, the stuff, the Revelation book, which we know now, thanks to Hawkins Research, that calibrates below Entegris. The Revelations brings the entire bible down because of its lack of integrity.
Smoke:If you take that book literally, then you're telling eight, nine year olds that they're gonna burn in eternal hell if they don't find Jesus, because it's coming. So it's just interesting. As we look at the development of all the religions from their essence, which was where they started, say the Christ or the Buddha or Krishna, Zoroaster or others, I always like to throw Zoroaster in there because I don't think he gets a lot of credit these days, but he was one of those also founders of the early religions. Their teaching's absolutely integris and aligned with truth and knowingness of what is real. And then you look at what humans did around those religions, aka example of Southern Baptist nine year old boy being told fire and brimstone and being told you have to find Jesus or you will burn in hell.
Smoke:It's really quite interesting to just take a step back and just look at those.
Luke:So you want to find Jesus, and there are these two prongs of the thing, you know, first of all, kind of believe all this stuff because there's no alternative worldview, And so you want to believe it because your parents are telling you they believed it. You don't really understand why they never talk about it, but okay, you still think they believe it, whatever that means. So you want to believe it, but other thing is that you definitely don't want to go to hell, so you want to get with the program. You want to figure out what it means to accept Jesus, to be saved, to be able to go and publicly tell the preacher, I've been saved, and the preacher then will schedule your baptism, and you'll be publicly baptized in front of the whole congregation and then you're in the club. Yeah.
Luke:Yeah, and you're in the best deer club.
Smoke:Well, let's now I want to bring it in just so we're keeping people on here. We were talking about forgiveness and talking about unlocking things and this understanding of by forgiving, you are forgiven, you're freed up and that would even make sense to someone. And you said, rightly, Well, let's put it in terms of someone who's like, Well, that sounds great, but how would I even think about this? And so, now we went down the path of this. So, a lot of us have, you have your story, I have my story, we all have stories, and our stories aren't us, they are what we experienced.
Smoke:And understanding the difference between the two is part of this understanding of ego mind, and separating yourself from the, I guess, all encompassing situation that we find ourselves in, which is this life, this human existence, where I'm looking at you on a camera, I'm looking out here at, you can see the Sonoma Mountains, and visually, I think 90% of our mentation, of our awake mentation is from visual stuff. Then all the other senses bring in the rest. You layer in the sixth sense, as Buddha said, our thinkingness, which is just another form of sense that we have in this form. And you've got all these things that make us forget who we really are and identify with this existence.
Luke:Right. And I started out with feelings that I would now identify as spiritual. And then, you know, I was sort of scooped up like everyone else into religion, I was always trying to have both. I mean, I went a long way with both. You know, went so far as to have a call to preach, and I preached in the maximum security ward of the prison in Jackson, Mississippi, and things like that.
Luke:But to be closer to nature, to be closer to my feelings of spirituality, that's where hunting came in. I got away from society, I got away from other people except for my buddies, and we wanted, we didn't want to hunt in that manner of the deer drives because we wanted to have a solitary experience and we justified it various ways. But think for a second what we were doing, we were still, was sport hunting, which means you're killing things for pleasure. Hang on, how spiritual can that be? Now, when I was coming up in the early 50s, nobody in the state of Mississippi ever said that there was anything wrong with killing an animal.
Luke:Right. That was not a thought that anybody ever expressed. There were plenty of people who felt that way and they would say, I don't like hunting. I don't want to hunt. And they were classified as kind of sissies, but or even enlightened sissies, but there was no point of view being expressed that would say animal life is sacred.
Smoke:It's a great example, Luke, of the, I think, the mistake a lot of us make in modern society and whatever time it is, just date stamp, let's say this is 2025 and we're looking back at activities in the, you're talking about the 50s, we could look back historically thousands of years at different activities, we could look back at the 80s or the 90s or even 2000s. You can always look back from the current mindset, which fortunately, some would say, unfortunately not enough, but fortunately is advancing overall. There is a higher level of consciousness that exists today than existed ten years ago and twenty years ago. Although, we could certainly find plenty of people who would argue why that may not be true, but it is true. And that being said, then that lens of judge, taking that lens and applying it to something that happened many years ago, and then judging, there's the mistake.
Smoke:It's not having the lens and like looking at it in perspective and saying, Oh, then that's funny. Nobody would have even thought that hunting would be bad for sport back then. Maybe some people thought it, but they certainly wouldn't have said it. That was just the way it was. And yet, to see that and have, I guess, compassion, a bit of understanding, that is where it was.
Smoke:They were probably a lot more conscious and less in those lower realms of thinking than their predecessors, you know, looking back another fifty years or seventy years in the 1800s and what was going on. I mean, we can look at it in this country, And the abolition of slavery that this country went through, obviously, was not the right thing to do. Was incredibly important to do. But, know, slavery's been going on in humanity since the beginning of humanity, and it's still happening in parts of the world. It has nothing to do with this race or that race.
Smoke:It has everything to do with low levels of consciousness and people taking advantage using power, they're forced force other people to do things. So, I'm going down a rabbit hole of that, but it is about the lens that we look back on, and whether or not we judge and how we look at that. And I think that ties to this forgiveness thing, because I didn't get the forgiveness by saying the things that I experienced, the trauma that I experienced, whether it was child abuse or other things that I saw that I experienced. And by saying, Oh, was okay, like what people did around me or what I experienced was okay. It is not condoning.
Smoke:But it is being able to get to a lens of being able to ask the question, what happened to you? What happened to them? What happened to the people that would allow them to do these things, perpetrate these acts, that would let someone operate at that level of conscious? That question unlocks things to say, of course you can forgive them. It's a different context, right?
Smoke:It's looking back at that same situation and you looking back at your enemy in the woods, you know, who was your arch enemy in high school and said bad things about you. And I think we had this conversation that you realize that actually, yeah, you did still have a grudge about this one person. I can't remember who it was, but it was somebody and you constantly went and forgave them. And they had already passed away, I think. But that unlocked things for
Luke:you. Right. One of the mysteries about forgiveness and about getting past having grudges is, yeah, but what about the things this person did? And that's not an easy thing to solve. I wouldn't want to say that I have a theory about evil that actually explains it in a satisfactory way.
Luke:You know, a lot of people all the way from Plato to Jesus would say, you know, forgive them for they know not what they do. It's ignorance that causes people to act so badly, and it looks like evil, but it's really ignorance. Well, that works for a lot of situations. I don't know if it works for all situations, though. Know, I mean, Hawkins says even Hitler thought he was being of service.
Smoke:Right. Well, would. Yes.
Luke:A hard thing to swallow and I'm not saying that
Smoke:Well, the question is service to whom? And it's the service to self or service to something greater than your selfish self. And so, I mean, every act could be seen as choosing, I think Aristotle might have said, your whole philosopher chapter, you've got depth and knowledge of that that I do not. But I think he said that everyone makes what they think, what they feel is the best choice, the best decision, right? Everyone thinks they're making the best decision.
Smoke:Notwithstanding, you're in a situation, you know you're making a bad decision, and so some part of you knows it's not right, but you think that's the best choice in that situation, because you're threatened because of repercussions. Mean, look, I think there are so many in society, there are so many examples of people going down a wrong path and making perhaps one shortcut, one quote wrong decision, but they didn't think it was that bad. And then it's always the cover up. It's always the how do you get out of it that turns into the big scandal and that brings people down and brings organizations down, that brings whole societies down. It's the how do you make up for this one act or whatever and you think you're doing something good to do that because you're protecting your family, you're protecting your wealth, your lifestyle, your whatever.
Smoke:And it's about a hierarchy of like, what is important to you. And so I'm not gonna say, I don't think we're gonna, this could be a second conversation, because I think we could get into this in quite some meaningful depth. But, you know, I think the way I have come to understand it is, you know, we're either ascending or descending. And, you know, as world, we are ascending, we're in the ascending time. So which means we're coming back to divinity.
Smoke:We're coming back to God. We're coming back to cosmic heart. We're coming back to universal consciousness. So we're on our way there. That's what's happening.
Luke:And as you said before, the person who benefits the most from forgiveness is the forgiver. Yes, and all saying about the problem of evil is I don't stand before anybody and say that I have an understanding of the problem of evil. You know, does God allow evil? I cannot answer that. I think that that business of saying, you know, are ignorant and therefore they do evil things.
Luke:That's true for many people. But there are people who like cruelty. There are people
Smoke:Well, again, let try to finish my thought here, because we're either we're ascending, right? And that's like heading toward God, heading toward what is the highest good for all. And there are people, entities who choose self over other, self over God, and they like something, they want to hoard it, they want to maximize their own personal value. They don't see the divine, they're ignorant of the bigger picture. Because you could not make these choices if you were not ignorant of that.
Smoke:So like, definitionally, I get to you couldn't be evil if you actually understood the repercussions of it to your eternal soul, your karma, whatever you want to believe your tradition. But everything in the universe, every thought, every emotion, every act, every hair on our heads is recorded, is captured by the energies of universe. And once you understand that, and I say it from an understanding of it's not because I've read it in a book, it is the way it works. Is a knowingness of like, this is actually what's happening, how it does it. I'm not here to tell anyone that because, you know, it's beyond our human comprehension now and we can go down rabbit holes of like how this actually works, but I can can I don't, I've said this to you before, I don't need to know how to build a jet to fly from Sedona to, you know, from Phoenix to Boston.
Smoke:I don't even know how to build it. I don't even know how to fly it. I I just need to know how to buy a ticket, get on a plane, and you know, get there and get off it and I'm there. I don't need to know how this happens and exactly how the universe works to know that it is working and it is true. So, back to this evil and ignorance thing.
Smoke:If you're ignorant of these universal laws, you can go back to the hermetic laws. If you don't want to get religious, don't. I like that. Look at the seven laws of the hermetic principles and every force, there are counter forces, there's reactions to everything. So, every act you commit is, you're either going to have the repercussion in this existence, or it's going to come in a future existence.
Smoke:So, it's not, we can't see all the dynamics around what brought someone to make a certain decision, what caused them to, you know, do a certain thing. Might see pieces of it, we might see, you know, someone who had a terrible background or someone who had, you know, crimes committed against them, and then they in turn start doing it to other people. So, we see that all the time and so we can say, that had something to do with it. But we don't see all the factors, right? Don't.
Smoke:What
Luke:I'm trying to say is that I think that can understand maybe you can understand people who like to be cruel by the analogy with addiction. You know, people can become addicted to a lot of things, not only to substances, but to gambling, to sex, and they can become addicted to cruelty as well. And when they reach that point, it's not a matter of what they think anymore. It's not a matter of if they knew enough they wouldn't do this. They just are caught up in this madness of addiction.
Smoke:Yeah, well, I love that. So, right, so let's dig in that a little bit here. Because I think it's something that it took me quite a bit of work to gain an understanding of. And I think you and I've had a lot of great dialogues around this. Maybe we can flesh it out a little bit.
Smoke:Because, you know, there's this whole, you know, academic debate about does free will exist or not. And there's experiments that show it doesn't. I would put forth that there are pieces of it that are real and then there are pieces of it that aren't real or don't exist, And it depends on your level of consciousness. So, yes, there's free will, but in certain contexts and in other contexts, there's no free will. And that gets back to what you're saying is like, you are the field of level of consciousness that you are.
Smoke:So, we all have a center of gravity, and that center of gravity starts out somewhere of a consciousness level, even as a child. And over time, we're on this journey to discover that we can affect that if we can learn lessons to the degree we can embody those lessons, that we can integrate those learnings, those insights, those understandings, we can progress and we can move up that scale of consciousness to different levels. And in so doing, we move from one field of thought to another field of thoughts. So, even when we're progressing, we're really, you know, the thoughts aren't necessarily our own. They are the thoughts of that level of consciousness.
Smoke:And so, best example, I think a good example is what you're saying, like addiction or, you know, but low levels of consciousness where people are stuck in grief, or they're stuck in sorrow, or a higher level, they're stuck in anger. And that anger level of consciousness is going to produce certain thoughts. Depression and grief is going to produce certain thoughts. And those are not unique to any of these people. Just the thoughts when you are at that level of vibration, of that energetic level of consciousness, you're going to have thoughts of despair and these thoughts that are like common across everybody who's depressed.
Smoke:It's the same. And
Luke:not only not only is is like desiring to do cruel things, a kind of addiction more than it more than it is a theory that somebody has. But the way out of these kind of addictions is also not through theory, not through thinking so much. It's more through feeling and it's more through there are things you can understand, you can come to understand about how feeling works in the universe and how your own thoughts actually create forms and create forces that they may not have a great effect, but they will have everything that you think, every emotion that you put out there is going to go into a field with all those thoughts and feelings from the other people.
Smoke:Well, Luke, that's exactly why, you know, the 12 step groups like, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous and others that have built on that, they actually do work, and why when they don't work for someone, it's almost inevitably that they stop going to the meeting. So there's a field of energy that those groups which really, you know, exist at a unconditional love level of consciousness. Like it's, you know, everybody comes broken and everybody accepts everyone else and you have to admit it to enter the field and be part of the group. You have to acknowledge it and then you can start your journey of all their steps that they But that is a higher level of energy than someone who is in that state of addiction has personally. It's not personal will.
Smoke:You cannot just wake up one day and say, I am not going be an alcoholic anymore. You have to actually ask for help and you'll receive it. That group, I just want to just finish this one little thing and then hear your riff on it. That energetic field that's at that unconditional love is so much higher and so much more powerful than that low level shame, anger, lower level conscious that that say an alcoholic was in and living in and constantly shaming themselves, Constantly, why did I do that? Why did I do that?
Smoke:Do it again. Why did I do that? Why did I do it again? And the way they break out of that field is the higher energy field of that unconditional love of that group. And it's not linear.
Smoke:It's an energy field that breaks them up to the next level. So as we think about these thoughts are not our own, these fields of feelings that you point out rightly, it's not just understanding. Understanding this is useful along the way, Because we have thinking minds and it helps us especially and the smarter you are, the more it is useful to understand how to unlock this. But no level of smartness will actually let you break free of some of these fields without divine intervention, which you can ask for.
Luke:Right, and just like somebody in a 12 step group needs those other people in the group to make this work. Anybody who's trying to make any kind of progress spiritually needs at least one person that they can talk to about it. And as Hawkins points out, most people never even meet another person in their entire life time who's really interested in enlightenment.
Smoke:I also think that's changing, right? I know it from my world, one of the reasons, one of my hopes and aspirations of what this is a part of process is, I see an awakening happening. I see more and more leaders. My circle of friends are this CEO business world that I have grown up in and been in for a long time. And I see a lot of awakening.
Smoke:I see a lot of people asking real questions about what is there. They have people who have, what you would on the outside, would say they have everything. They have, you know, all these houses and all this wealth and all this success and, you know, maybe fame also in some cases. Then I see them broken, you know, their marriages aren't good, their children are going off the rails and having problems. Their level of satisfaction in their daily life is terrible.
Smoke:If I turn off the radio, I turn off the TV, I turn off the internet and put your phone away, in some cases would suffer greatly from the quiet. It would just be intolerable to be able to sit with their own thoughts. And what I see is, not everybody, of course, but an awakening that's happening on, I think, a broad base. One of my objectives is to, you wouldn't get to this far in this discussion if you weren't having some of those feelings anyway. You're not going listen to this interview if you aren't interested in this topic.
Smoke:So, you're already on the path. So, can we help people unlock for themselves this path to a much greater outcome for themselves and for obviously all of society? Because the more we can move up and transcend the levels of consciousness, the better it is for everyone. Exactly. It's a shared field.
Luke:Exactly. And one thing is that people hear stuff like this and they think that meditation is incredibly difficult. They think making any kind of spiritual progress is hard and they think they could never get away from the clutter of their own minds, it's just too cluttered, it's just thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. They think with this stuff, but the thing is that it's actually easy to make progress, and it's painless, and it feels so good. And all you have to do really is relax and ask for help.
Smoke:Yeah, asking for help is a big one, right? Like there is a higher power, it will come. For me, I was in Nepal. You heard the story, but like, you know, quickly, I was in Nepal, was in Buddha's birthplace, I was in a temple, I wasn't religious, spiritual, or I was a pretty happy, successful guy, and yet something was off. And I was like, I just had this feeling come over me.
Smoke:I'm like, I asked for peace and love. And it wasn't like relationship love. It was like a real level of love, a universal love. It like this feeling in my heart that like, why do I have this anxiety? And electric shock came through my body, up my back, into my head and out.
Smoke:It was the divine intervention. I asked the Buddha for help in that case, but I got it. And that led me on this whole journey. So, you have to ask for help. If you ask for help, it's there, you'll get it.
Smoke:It'll show up in another person, it'll show up in an experience, it'll show up in a book, it'll show up in everything for me is now like, okay, I am beyond, am more and more, so it's never perfect because it's always easy to revert to old habits and to, you know, we're humans. So our human mind likes to think about the past and regurgitate it. That's what usually causes depression and sadness you know, because you're second guessing things. Or we are jumping ahead and worrying about what's gonna happen next. What's going to happen wrong?
Smoke:What's going to happen this? Worried about the bills, worried about this, worried about this, and that's anxiety. So anxiety and depression are our ego minds spending time in the past or the future. And if we stay present, the now, right, the instantaneous now, none of that exists. And everything manifests from this moment.
Smoke:And so, if you stay in that moment, if you can stay in that and not let your mind wander, which is why meditation is so good for you once you can get beyond the wandering mind because it allows you to see reality for what it really is and dropping the expectation. So, where I'm going with this is by staying in that moment, we have the opportunity to just witness and experience what the universe is bringing us. And it's good. The universe is bringing us things for our own good. Now, that it may not be understandable at different levels because it could be something where, you know, in a prior life, you know, there was some crime committed, some murder committed or whatever, like and then you have to experience it to learn, you have to experience the other way, you have to experience going through it.
Smoke:So, there's all kinds of levels of this kind of karmic recycling of things, but as we progress, everything is coming at us because, you know, we agreed to this, we're here, we're lucky, we are the lucky entities that have agreed to this life to be able to learn and experience these things so that we can move up the level of consciousness. It why we're here. And so when you think about that, and you can stay in that center place, which is admittedly super hard to do. Everything that happens is for a reason. Everything that's happening is opening up an opportunity.
Smoke:So I have like now I'm like, okay, why did I just meet this person at the checkout counter? Why am I in this line? Why am I at this trail? I just like met this Japanese couple who are hiking with their baby. Like, am I supposed to talk to them?
Smoke:Why? So you can go to extremes with this, but everything, there is something in it for us and it's up to us to figure it out.
Luke:I know, and the more you become aware of this, and the more you do ask for help, the more you see these synchronicities happening.
Smoke:You think the synchronicities have been happening all along and we just didn't see them? Or do you think they start happening because you're in this space?
Luke:Well, I think that 85% of them have been happening all along.
Smoke:Yeah, I agree with you. We didn't notice them.
Luke:But the minute you start asking for help, that's where the other 15 come in so fast. And the thing is that I want to say about for people who are back at the beginning of this, and they're thinking, well, this would be nice, but how do you do it? Okay, the first step, the very first step you start with is to express gratitude for everything that the world is. Thank you to the flower. Thank you to the sky.
Luke:Express gratitude, quite a few people.
Smoke:And you never stop doing that, right? I think you're right, it's the first step and it's the ongoing step, you can keep that in mind, I do it every day.
Luke:Right, me too, and for me it goes right back to that seven year old, my goodness, the stars are being created, I can see that they're being created.
Smoke:And
Luke:so, there's that gratitude thing. Alright, that's the first step. The second step is to say, Okay, everyone who's done me wrong, I forgive them. Now the first time you say that, you'll almost laugh, say that, you know, what did I say? You know, what could that possibly mean?
Luke:If you say it and you think about it, that's the start, that's just a start, okay? And then another thing that to me was a gateway as far as meditation and all the things that can come from that is Rupert Spira, who's got all these great YouTube videos, and what he does over and over again is he explains that when you sit quietly and you look at anything or you think of anything, you can learn to notice the difference between the witness that you are witnessing the scene in the field or witnessing the thoughts or the memories or the feelings in your body. There's a pure witness of self and if you can learn to appreciate that and you will realize that that witness is calm, it's fantastically calm, it's impersonal in a way. And once you get onto that, once really appreciate that and you can go in and sort of enjoy that, then you begin to realize that everything that you're witnessing brings you a kind of pleasure. There's something about being, all kinds of being, beingness, that when you just witness it without wanting anything from it, without wanting to manipulate it, but just anything that you are aware of, be aware of the calmness and the impersonality of the witness self and of the joy that you can feel just from the beingness of anything.
Luke:And that's just a gateway. There's much more to this, but Rupert was really helpful for me to begin to be able to meditate and to have more of an insight into the structure of my own mind. You know, was very lucky to have this feeling from childhood about the world that it was being created, it was magic.
Smoke:Yeah, you were already there, you just didn't know what there was.
Luke:I couldn't find anybody to talk to about it, and then of course religion.
Smoke:That's an important thing, I think, that I have experienced is, as I've been doing this, I've run across a lot of people and all kinds of different traditions. I think Rupert does a really nice job of simplifying things and helping you get to that place. And there's a lot of great ways to wrap around that understanding, but I think that's a really the direct path to understanding. Think you go back to Ramana Maharshi, who people cite quite a bit, obviously, as one of the great advanced consciousnesses of the last century, and His teachings are quite relevant because it was the reasonably modern era that we actually had a very enlightened being that was there. But he described these states of being and I didn't understand it when I first read his teachings at all.
Smoke:But I have recently had this experience. I just wanted to flush this out because I think it's at a level of identification of this base observing joy kind of calm, never changing self that is with us at all times that it's not something to find, it's something to relax the mind, relax our identification with this experience enough to where we were able to notice it. Abruptly kind of jarred me. I was sleeping and I became aware of my awareness in my sleep. And the only reason I recognize it is at some point, the book, I had an Audible playing, I think it was a David Hawkins book actually, an Audible playing through the night and I became aware of the sound of the audible.
Smoke:And I realized that I had been aware for quite a while, but I wasn't hearing anything because I was still asleep. And that base of self is that constant self that's in all three states of awakeness, dream state and deep sleep. Your conscious self, your higher level self is the same at all times and you're actually in that state of highest self in your deep delta REM sleep.
Luke:Yeah, think sleep is a very active spiritual area. It's not random, it's not crazy. There's a lot goes on in sleep.
Smoke:Yeah, for sure. So that's, I may have gone down a deep rabbit hole that is, you know, may not make sense to everyone at this stage. But think what we're both talking about in our own way is, and I like non attachment better than detachment, but it's a non attachment to the goings on, the things that are going on around us, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, physical things we're seeing. It doesn't mean you don't have a preference, doesn't mean that we don't want a good outcome, we want our team to win the game, we want our kid to do well, we want deals to close. Those are all normal, and there's nothing wrong with having a preference of an outcome, as long as we're not completely attached to that.
Smoke:If we can have non attachment, we're okay with whether the deal closes or not. We're okay if we win the race or we don't win the race. We're okay if we get this new position or we don't get this new. We're okay if this relationship happens or it doesn't. Very solidly aligned with our higher self.
Smoke:At the end of the day, that doesn't change. And we can still have preferences. Detachment, I don't like the word, some teachers use it, I don't like it as much because we wanna be part of this experience. It's not that the inner world and our connection to higher self is the only thing that matters and the rest of what we experience as humans don't matter. We're here for a reason and we're in this experience to experience it and to live life fully.
Smoke:It's just not to be caught up in it. Rupert says, once you recognize that, you know, this state that we're in right now is actually more like a dream to our higher self. And, you know, once we can realize that like, this is really a dream, let's like, why would you do anything other than live fully? Like, we should experience this to the maximum possible. What does that look like?
Smoke:That doesn't mean being a daredevil and riding off a cliff on a motorcycle, but it means living fully, whether that's following your passion to write, as you did and you articulated so well, and we won't get into all that stuff because we can't, but what you pursued was your passion and to do that. And I think that's where people get caught up and where this discussion might be useful is that, you know, you don't have to go to the extreme of I want to be enlightened and drop everything else and you go live in a cave. I mean, that might have been appropriate culturally and at certain times in history. I think the challenge of our time is to wake up, become enlightened to the degree that we wish to and are able to, which everyone can do it. Everyone can do it, just you have to make the decision to do it, and then there's a lot of work to be done, but it's doable, and to live in the world.
Smoke:So, for me, that's been the interesting challenges, is getting to that level to recognize the higher self. And I could be happy going to that mountain and literally living in a cave and not talking to anybody. I could do that. It would make me very happy. And to still be engaged, to still do my role in the world, to do the things I do with family and business and YPO, all the different things I'm active in, and helping get back with homelessness and all that stuff.
Smoke:Those are all things I'm not interested in dropping while I'm also raising my consciousness level.
Luke:No, but also, I think it's good to think about that it doesn't have to be this extreme contrast between a peaceful, meditative spiritual life and an engaged busy life in the world. And it's interesting how some really enlightened people have described this thing. And Hawkins is one of the best. And one of the things that he said was that normally when you hear sounds, you sort of hear them against a background of silence. So whether it's music or someone talking or a bird singing or any sound at all, it takes place against a background of silence.
Luke:That's your default assumption and feeling about life. But once you begin to become more engaged with God and with your higher self and with goodwill and with avoiding negative feelings toward people and concentrating more on positive things, then all the sounds go into the background and there's a silence around you. There's a silence around your thoughts and your feelings and you can still hear what's going on. You're not going to miss anything that you need to, you know, you're not going to get hit by a car, but it you're like under a blanket of silence. So this is one way.
Luke:Another is Tom Campbell talks about how our mission is to decrease entropy. He describes love really as a process of decreasing entropy, so making things better. And so he actually had out of body experiences as a child and he became adept at it, became a physicist and so on, but he also developed remote viewing and all these things, and so he's kind of lives in a trance, and he describes this, and when he talks you can kind of see that he's really in this other world more than is with you, but he's saying very intelligent and helpful things. But you get a feeling from him of how he's got this blanket of silence and meditation and stuff going on while he's engaging with you.
Smoke:Yeah, think that's a great point we wind down this part of our discussion, which obviously we have a lot of other things to talk about in a part two down the road. But I think you make a great point, which is it's not complete unawareness versus complete enlightenment that we're talking about. In general, it's a continuum. And any increase in consciousness that one can experience and embody and bring their, call it, center of gravity to, any increase is good for them, their life, and all of the world and society. Know, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Smoke:There's all these sayings about like things, you know, I think God probably, you know, didn't take seven days to build the universe, you know, it's constantly happening as you say, but it also could be happening in an instant, right? Every instant it's recreated is actually what's happening. So, you know, it's all that stuff in Genesis, but every instant, every instant, So, I think the idea that people can just pick one small thing and do it rigorously, consistently, relentlessly, unceasingly, that one thing will act as like a scalpel that cuts to the core of things that are holding you back. And it's like an avalanche in a mountain, like a giant mountain with snow on it. It doesn't happen, doesn't happen, doesn't happen, and then that one final snowflake drops on the mountain, and there's an avalanche of avalanches, and it just cascades down.
Smoke:That's how enlightenment happens for people. So, it can happen in an instant, it can happen slowly, gradually over time, and then in an instant, it can happen very quickly, but the scalpel, the thing that snowflake that's adding to the pile, if you're conscious and intentional about it, you will make progress no matter what. That one thing could be as simple as, I'm going to be kind to everyone at all times, including myself. So, you make an exception and you are kind to everyone, and then when you're on your inner thoughts, you're beating yourself up because you messed up something, you didn't do this, you knew that, and you're beating yourself up in negative self talk, that's not consistent, That's not what I'm talking about. You'd have to actually be kind to yourself and everyone else in order for this to work.
Smoke:Or pick something else, respect all life in all its forms, from the flower to a beetle to your dog to people, and at all times, just have a love of life and appreciation for it, and no exceptions. So, there's a bunch of these things, and meditation can be a part of this, think it's literally, it's don't try to do it all at once, just pick something and do it consistently. That's why The Course in Miracles is so great. I really enjoyed doing it. And although I didn't see the point of doing it every day for a while, after I did the entire course, the workbook, which is three sixty five days of lessons, I think it actually took me a year and a half because of travel and missing days and then doing catch up, but anyway, at the end of the day, I did the whole thing.
Smoke:And once you've done the whole thing, what you've done is you have committed to something and you have thought about God, you thought about a higher power, you've been working on, and it's a scalpel. You're working on beliefs, you're embracing forgiveness, you're doing exercises to do that. You can't, like you said, you can't just forgive somebody, your enemy from the old days, just by saying I forgive them. But I forgive them is a start. Then if you work with that, work with that, work with that, that at some point, there's going be a snowflake that causes the avalanche that just opens up the world to you.
Smoke:Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. I think we have a lot of other things to talk about.
Smoke:You did a really nice job of answering a lot of questions, which I think is going to turn into a book for you. Frankly, I think that would be awesome to turn that into an actual book. But that stuff will be published along with this episode, at least the summary of your answers. And if people want to look at your work, mean, a lot of that stuff, we have links to a bunch of stuff in your answers, which will take people there. I know you've got a website, you're lukewallen.com, correct?
Smoke:Yeah. And, yeah, and so it's been awesome having you on and I love having this conversation in a format. There's an eater behind us. She made the she made the video in a format that we can share with others a little bit of our conversation because I would say that this is not atypical to what we we talk about on a regular basis.
Luke:Right. We have these kind of conversations every week, and we go into all kinds of things, including the things that we don't understand. It's not like we understand everything.
Smoke:No, what we know is that we don't know. That's what we know. But the things that we're figuring out, we're like, oh, this makes sense. So we should share some of that stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Smoke:But the more you understand, the less you actually know, and the more you can stay in that present moment of trusting this divine experience we're having. And with that, I thank you for all this energy and these stories will to be continued.
Luke:Thank you also. This is great.
Smoke:Awesome. Thank you.
Luke:They caught my daddy in the woods last night. Said they saw his shining light. Said they heard his rifle clear. Shot the rich man's deer. He shot the rich man's deer.
Luke:They call me a redneck. Hold your son. Tell him I'm proud Now daddy's in the county jail. His truck is on the city lot. Rifles hanging on the wall of the sheriff's den.
Luke:Trailers leaking in the rain. Mama's cousin