The Smoke Trail S2 E43: Luke Wallin- The Garden, The Practice and the Merge

Luke Wallin

The Garden, the Practice, and the Merge

Episode Metadata

Slug: GUEST-WALLIN-LUKE

Season: 2

Episode: 43 (Season 2, Guest Episode 2)

Arc: Consciousness Frameworks & Healing Science (primary); Spiritual Discernment & Navigation (secondary)

Guest: Luke Wallin (returning — Season 1 Episode 7)

Relationship: Smoke's father

Recorded: April 29, 2026, in person, Sedona, Arizona

Status: Filmed — ready for post-production

Guest book: The Night We Call the Owls (Ember Press, 2023)

Guest Bio

Luke Wallin is a writer, philosopher, and seeker with forty-six years of teaching across philosophy, fiction writing, American studies, and English. He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, an MA in Philosophy from the University of Alabama, and a Master of Regional Planning from UMass Amherst. He has taught philosophy at the School of Visual Arts, American studies as a Fulbright Fellow at University College Dublin, English at UMass Dartmouth, and writing in the Spalding University MFA program.

His novels have been selected as best books by the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, translated into Danish, and recorded for the blind by the Library of Congress. He is co-author with his daughter Eva Sage Gordon Raleigh of The Everything Guide to Writing Children's Books. His most recent book is The Night We Call the Owls, a collection of poems and stories from Ember Press, 2023.

Luke first appeared on The Smoke Trail in Season 1 Episode 7, where he and Smoke went deep into philosophy, nature, and creativity as survival tools for the soul. This second conversation is different. After a lifetime in scientific materialism and analytic philosophy, something shifted three years ago when Smoke visited him. He returns now as a man who has lived through what he had always told his students: that reality is going to turn out to be much stranger than anyone thinks.

Episode Hook

Three years ago I went to visit my father, Luke, and something shifted. He had spent a lifetime in philosophy, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, decades of teaching, the whole architecture of Western analytic thought, and he had always told his students one thing: reality is going to turn out to be much stranger than you think. What he didn't expect was to live long enough to find out he was right. This is the second conversation. The first was deep in the woods. This one is where the woods led.

Show Notes

•  The boy in the garden at 7: oak bark pressed to the eyeball trying to find what made one tree different from its identical neighbor, Ginger the Cocker Spaniel as constant companion, the early intuition that the universe is contained in every speck — and the lifetime of philosophy spent traveling back to what that boy already knew

•  Boredom as a gift: the lost developmental capacity to sit with nothing, develop the will, and discover that the 80,000 to 90,000 thoughts streaming through the mind each day are not the same thing as the self

•  The Idaho fire lookout tower at 19: a whole summer alone on a mountaintop watching shadows, eagles, grouse, and bears — sometimes lonely, never bored, the early evidence that presence is its own form of company

•  The shift three years ago: scientific materialism, the residual skepticism, and the moment a son's lived experience cleared what a thousand books couldn't — including Luke's resistance to David Hawkins, and the eventual full immersion (audiobooks while mowing the grass)

•  Why academia — the institution structurally designed for open inquiry — has become one of the hardest places to honestly explore consciousness: tenure, peer review, and the social cost of taking telepathy or reincarnation seriously even when the evidence is good (Jeffrey Kripal, Dean Radin, The Telepathy Tapes)

•  Suspending disbelief as a practice: not the leap of faith, but the willingness to hold a question open long enough to test it directly

•  Rebecca Johnson and Presence Practice: the small Sunday night Zoom meditation group, why "transformational listening" is structurally different from interior meditation, and what changes after a year of being quietly present with strangers

•  The bodies of light: what happened the first night Luke closed Zoom and asked if the group could still be there — fifteen luminous presences appearing in his loft, then twenty-four a week later, still accessible whenever he turns toward them

•  The laser surgery merge: the Jeff Mara podcast interview with the Irish doctor's near-death experience as the conceptual primer, and the unmistakable felt experience three weeks later of Luke's etheric body and the surgeon's etheric body rising, meeting, and merging during a thirty-hole laser procedure

•  A new theory of intimacy: why sex is a bigger deal than the standard explanations account for, why crowded subways feel intolerable, and why some merges are sacred and others violating

•  The eye that self-healed: the macular hole diagnosed in June, Smoke's remote work with energy balancing by numbers and the quantum block, the September appointment where the surgeon said only one to two percent of people have this close on its own

•  The Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts, Dean Radin's Real Magic, and Tom Campbell's My Big TOE: imagination as a portal, the field of love as the operating substrate, and why setting intention into the field works while gripping the outcome with the conscious mind does not

•  Attention and intention as the highest sovereign powers a human being has — and the daily cost of letting the ego mind run them by default

•  The Gift of a Practice: ask to meet your guardian angel — a specific, simple, unguarded practice anyone can begin this week without a teacher, a group, or a tradition

•  A closing challenge to the determinist: choose what you give your attention to, set an intention, and watch. If outcome is determined, lucky you. If not, you helped. Either way, the practice is participation.

Key Moments From the Conversation

The Boy in the Garden

Luke describes a childhood lived on a hilltop with woods behind the house, hours alone, and the early intuition that nothing anyone said about nature was adequate to what nature actually was. Two red oak trees in the yard, identical in size and appearance, became his first philosophical problem — the ancient question of universals and particulars discovered in a 7-year-old's hands. He pressed his eyeball to the bark trying to find the unique signature of one tree against the other. Smoke names it: a child's intuition that the whole universe is contained in every speck.

"I had always told my students: reality is going to turn out to be much stranger than you think. And you should always keep that in mind. It just deepens the wonder."

— Luke Wallin

Boredom as a Gift

Luke had hours of boredom in those early years and learned, gradually, that boredom is the ego mind grappling with itself. He didn't have a phone to reach for. He had bumblebees, oak trees, and Ginger the Cocker Spaniel. The capacity to sit with nothing became a muscle. Years later, at 19, he spent a whole summer alone on a fire lookout tower on a mountain in Idaho. Sometimes lonely, he says. Never bored.

"Boredom is a gift. We have an instinct to be curious. But the thoughts that come to us aren't necessarily us. They are the thoughts of the ego mind, calibrated to whatever field of consciousness we are in."

— Luke Wallin

The Shift Three Years Ago

Luke had spent a career in philosophy: Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer. He had concluded, like most academic philosophers, that scientific materialism had the upper hand and that consciousness — the hard problem — was the only legitimate aperture left. Then Smoke came to visit. Smoke told him about plant medicine, the Hindu worldview, reincarnation, the experiences that had reshaped his life. Luke describes the moment plainly: it was a different level of evidence. I just believed him.

"I was capable of making that move because I always believed that reality is going to turn out to be more strange than anyone thinks. That was my creed. And it turned out that prepared me for a shift."

— Luke Wallin

Smoke had been trying to get Luke to read David Hawkins for a long time. Luke resisted. Then, after the shift, he dove in fully — listening to Hawkins audiobooks while mowing the grass through whole summers.

Why Academia Cannot Hold This

Luke is direct about the institutional problem. Academia, the place that should be the most open environment for testing theories and remaining receptive to evidence, has become structurally hostile to honest inquiry in consciousness. Tenure, peer review, the demands of consensus. He names the researchers who work the boundary anyway — Jeffrey Kripal at Rice, Dean Radin at IONS, the production team behind The Telepathy Tapes — and the cost they pay for doing rigorous work on territory the consensus refuses to look at.

"Try expressing interest in these topics before you get tenure. See what happens."

— Luke Wallin

Presence Practice and the Bodies of Light

Luke was invited into a small Sunday night meditation group on Zoom by his longtime friend Kayleen Johnson Sullivan, a writer in Alaska. The group was led by Rebecca Johnson — a former medical doctor who had moved from medicine into spiritual direction, then developed her own approach to guided meditation she called Presence Practice or transformational listening. Rebecca had grown up poor in Nebraska, worked her way through medical school, practiced for a decade, then turned toward what was actually feeding her soul. She passed in early 2026. The group is still grieving.

The practice keeps the meditation grounded in the body — feet first, then up through the energy field — and emphasizes that the meditation is being done together, with the others on the call, not interiorly. Fifteen people on a typical Sunday. Half an hour. Luke describes a year of gradually feeling something change in him — calmer, more loving, more confident in beliefs he had long held in cautious half-light.

Then one Sunday, a few weeks after Rebecca passed, a new facilitator led the session. The reading landed differently. After the call ended, Luke turned off Zoom, sat alone in his loft, and wondered if the group could somehow still be there with him. They were. Fifteen presences appeared around the room — bodies of light, each unmistakably belonging to one of the humans on the call. He couldn't tell which presence was which person, but it didn't matter. He spoke to them. They were amused. The next week, after a smaller session with nine people, he asked again: are you nine here? And you fifteen? They were all there. Twenty-four bodies of light. They have been accessible ever since whenever he turns his attention toward them.

"It was real. They were around the room. They looked like bodies of light, but each one belonged to one of those humans. There was no question in my mind, this is that group."

— Luke Wallin

The Laser Surgery Merge

Three weeks before a scheduled laser eye procedure, Luke watched an interview on The Jeff Mara Podcast with an Irish doctor who had died briefly in his late twenties after mixing alcohol and ketamine. The doctor described an etheric experience: meeting three child patients he had recently lost (they were happy, they had no questions about the hospital), then his best friend who had died — a big atheist, also a doctor, who simply said, you were right. The doctor described the merge with the beings of light. Luke could not stop thinking about it: what would it be like to merge with another person?

Three weeks later he sat for the laser procedure. The surgeon — fast-moving, few words, deeply competent — began drilling thirty holes with the laser. Luke could not move. He was calm. Then he felt his own etheric body rising slowly out of his shoulders and head, expanding while remaining tethered to his physical form. Then he saw the surgeon's etheric body rising in the same way. The two energy bodies moved toward each other. Closer. Closer. Closer. And they merged.

"I felt it. There was no question that it was happening. No question. And I thought: this is what it feels like to merge with another human."

— Luke Wallin

As the procedure ended, the two etheric forms slowly separated and returned to their respective bodies. Luke never told the surgeon. He thought about it for weeks afterward — the implication that this is probably happening all the time with people we are close to, that this might be what intimacy actually is, that this might explain why sex is a bigger deal than the standard accounts of it can carry, and why proximity to certain people on a crowded subway is unbearable when proximity to others is not.

A New Theory of Intimacy

Smoke names what Luke is circling: separation is what causes pain. When we move toward divinity, we move toward the actual field of love. The act of making love is a mini-union — a small approach to the one substrate beneath the apparent many. The ultimate orgasm is not biological. It is the experience of non-duality, of being for a moment what we have always been underneath the constructed self. Luke agrees, and adds the corollary: this also explains why some merges feel violating. Not all proximities are sacred. Some energies you do not want close to your energy.

The Eye That Self-Healed

In June, Luke was diagnosed with a macular hole in his left eye — a degenerative tear in the layer of tissue at the back of the eye that, untreated, would have required surgery to repair. His vision was compromised. When he closed his right eye, his left eye showed a swirling mass of black worms in the center of his field of view. The top retinal surgeon in Boston scheduled him for a procedure in early September.

In the interim, Smoke had been working with energy balancing by numbers — a modality using specific frequencies from a database of thousands, derived through pendulum or muscle testing and transmitted through what is sometimes called a quantum block. Smoke worked through the book, found a few numbers for vision, then asked source whether there was a number not in the book that Luke specifically needed. He derived a thirteen-digit frequency, put Luke's photograph into the quantum block, and sent the frequency.

When Luke arrived in Boston, the fellow examined the eye and was uncertain there was still a hole there. The senior surgeon confirmed it: the macula had healed itself. Only one to two percent of patients see this happen spontaneously. A follow-up appointment a month later showed continued improvement — the tissues looked better, the vision was a little better. The surgeon told him: you have self-healed.

"Only one to two percent of people have this self-heal. That is what he said. And there you go — an example in real life with two people doing it remotely, and making it happen."

— Smoke Wallin

The Field of Love: Attention and Intention

Luke draws on Jane Roberts and the Seth material, Dean Radin's Real Magic, and Tom Campbell's My Big TOE to describe a working model of how intention actually operates. The conscious mind is not the agent. The subconscious is. The technique is to place an intention into the field of love that surrounds you and the people the intention concerns, and then to release it — not to grip it, not to rehearse it anxiously, not to fight the monkey mind to remember to repeat it.

Luke offers a personal example: his daughter and her family flying to India with two small children. He set the intention for their safe return into the field of love and released it. They returned healthy. The skeptic, he acknowledges, will laugh. But the practice itself is the point. It makes you calmer. It reduces the load on the monkey mind. It is the opposite of what worry does, which is to rehearse the negative outcome and increase its probability.

"The most important things humans can do is think about what they give their attention to, and what they give their intention to. That is the greatest power you have."

— Luke Wallin

The Gift of a Practice: Meet Your Guardian Angel

Luke's gift to the listener is simple. No group, no technique, no tradition required. Be calm. Ask to meet your guardian angel. They are there. They have been there. Most people do not realize they can speak to them directly. The contact may come as a flash of imagination — and that flash, Luke says, may be the actual encounter. An answer will come. It may arrive immediately. It may arrive in the morning. Either way, you have begun a conversation that was always available to you.

"If you don't ask, the guardian angel generally has to work behind your back and help you anyway. But people don't realize they can talk to their guardian angels. They will speak back. But you have to listen."

— Luke Wallin

A Closing Challenge to the Determinist

Smoke closes the episode with a direct address to listeners who deny free will. The challenge is characteristically practical: choose what you give your attention to. Set an intention for what you would want to see happen in regard to it. Then watch. If it happens and it was determined, lucky you. If it happens and it was not determined, you helped. Either way, the practice of intention is unfalsifiable as a participation in outcome — and the conversation about whether you had a choice becomes academic.

"And if it happens, and it wasn't determined, I can say: you helped. That is a level of action that would really be hard to refute."

— Smoke Wallin

Standout Quotes

"I had always told my students: reality is going to turn out to be much stranger than you think. And you should always keep that in mind."

— Luke Wallin

"Boredom is a gift. The thoughts that come to us aren't necessarily us."

— Luke Wallin

"It was a different level of evidence. I just believed him."

— Luke Wallin

"Try expressing interest in these topics before you get tenure. See what happens."

— Luke Wallin

"It was real. They were around the room. There was no question in my mind, this is that group."

— Luke Wallin

"This is what it feels like to merge with another human."

— Luke Wallin

"The most important thing humans can do is think about what they give their attention to, and what they give their intention to."

— Luke Wallin

"Ask to meet your guardian angel. They will speak back. But you have to listen."

— Luke Wallin

"When we get close to source, it feels good — because separation is what causes pain."

— Smoke Wallin

"Suspending disbelief long enough to test it for yourself is one of the most powerful tools a human can have."

— Smoke Wallin

"The doctor said: you have self-healed."

— Smoke Wallin, recounting the surgeon

"If it happens and it was determined — lucky you. And if it happens and it wasn't determined, I can say: you helped."

— Smoke Wallin, on free will and intention

Johari Thread

Hidden → Open: The merge experience made public.

Two pieces of material move quadrants in this episode. The bodies of light around Luke's loft and the etheric merge with the laser surgeon were both Hidden — known to Luke, never spoken aloud, never told to the surgeon. Bringing them into a recorded conversation is the Hidden → Open move itself. And for the listener, something else moves: from Blind to Open, the working hypothesis that consciousness extends beyond the skull and that we are merging with the people around us — in marriage, in conflict, on subways — whether or not we notice. The Window opens.

Take-Home Lessons

•  The seven-year-old in the garden already knew what a lifetime of philosophy would have to come back to. Your earliest, unprogrammed sense of reality is data worth trusting.

•  Suspending disbelief is the most practical spiritual technology available — not belief, not faith, just the willingness to hold a question open long enough to test it directly in your own experience.

•  Presence practice changes you in ways guided interior meditation does not. Being quietly with other humans, even strangers on Zoom, generates something the solo practice cannot.

•  Consciousness is not bounded by the skull. The merge with the laser surgeon, the bodies of light from the meditation group, and the remotely healed eye are all evidence that the boundaries we assume are negotiable.

•  Your two highest powers are attention and intention. What you give them to, set into the field of love and released to the subconscious, increases the probability of the outcome more reliably than gripping it with the worried mind.

Tools, Practices & References Mentioned

Practices Described or Demonstrated

•  Ask to meet your guardian angel — Luke's closing gift. A direct, unguarded inquiry available to anyone, requiring no teacher, technique, or tradition. Calm enough to listen. Open enough to receive.

•  Presence Practice / Transformational Listening — Rebecca Johnson's body-grounded guided meditation, designed for group settings on Zoom, with emphasis on doing the practice together rather than interiorly

•  Setting intention into the field of love — placing a positive intention into the subconscious and the surrounding field, then releasing the grip on the outcome (Dean Radin / Tom Campbell synthesis)

•  Energy balancing by numbers — Smoke's remote-healing modality using specific frequencies (derived by pendulum or muscle testing) transmitted through a quantum block; demonstrated in the macular hole self-healing

•  Suspending disbelief as a practice — the willingness to hold a question open long enough to test it directly, distinct from either belief or skepticism

•  Cultivating boredom — sitting with nothing as a developmental practice for separating the witness from the stream of ego-mind thoughts

Frameworks Referenced

•  David Hawkins' Map of Consciousness — the calibration framework Smoke pressed Luke to engage with for years, eventually adopted through audiobooks during summer mowing

•  The Seth material (Jane Roberts) — imagination as a portal; thought forms as creative

•  Dean Radin, Real Magic — the field of love, the role of the subconscious in manifestation

•  Tom Campbell, My Big TOE — the universe as an information-processing system; intention as input

•  The hard problem of consciousness — Chalmers' framing, the territory Luke held open inside academic philosophy for decades before crossing

•  Holographic universe — the whole contained in every part; Luke's childhood intuition with the oak bark

•  Reincarnation evidence — children's verified past-life memories; the body of cases that Luke spent years studying without quite knowing where to put it

•  Johari Window — Smoke's closing frame; Hidden → Open as the structural movement of the conversation itself

Teachers, Researchers & Sources Cited

•  Rebecca Johnson — founder of the Presence Practice meditation group, former physician turned spiritual director, passed in early 2026

•  Kayleen Johnson Sullivan — writer in Alaska, longtime friend of Luke and Rebecca, the bridge into the group

•  Jeffrey J. Kripal — religious studies scholar at Rice, working at the boundary of academic respectability on consciousness and the paranormal

•  Dean Radin — chief scientist at IONS; author of Real Magic and rigorous experimental work on psi phenomena

•  The Telepathy Tapes — podcast series Luke and Smoke both recommend as a strong entry point for the skeptic

•  The Jeff Mara Podcast — the interview with the Irish doctor's near-death experience that catalyzed Luke's merge experience three weeks later

•  Jane Roberts — channel of the Seth material

•  Tom Campbell — physicist, author of My Big TOE

•  David Hawkins — author of Power vs. Force and the Map of Consciousness

•  Susan Hassen (S1E26) — Quantum Sphere Healer, referenced re: the fifth-dimension retreat work

•  Sarah Elkhaldy, The Alchemist (S1E24) — referenced as a co-facilitator of the same retreat

•  Meister Eckhart — opening quotation read by Smoke to set the episode ("Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world")

•  Galileo — invoked as the historical pattern of dissent being institutionally punished

Luke's Own Work Referenced

•  The Night We Call the Owls (Ember Press, 2023) — poems and stories, Luke's most recent book

•  The Everything Guide to Writing Children's Books — co-authored with daughter Eva Sage Gordon Raleigh

•  Novels selected as best books by the American Library Association and the New York Public Library; translated into Danish; recorded for the blind by the Library of Congress

Arc Placement & Registry

Slug: GUEST-WALLIN-LUKE

Primary arc: Consciousness Frameworks & Healing Science

Secondary arcs: Spiritual Discernment & Navigation; Wisdom Traditions (philosophical voice)

Season 1 parallels: S1E7 Luke Wallin (the first conversation — philosophy, nature, creativity) • S1E26 Susan Hassen (quantum sphere healing, fifth dimension) • S1E33 Liv Fisch (presence as medicine) • S1E34 Jonette Crowley (inner planes accessible now)

Season 2 bridges: HAWKINS (S2E47) — Luke's mowing-the-grass immersion as lived evidence • HARD-PROBLEM (S2E48) — Luke as the trained philosopher who lived inside the hard problem before crossing • AUROBINDO (S2E51) — "reality is much stranger than anyone thinks" as the prerequisite stance for the supramental • NEW-THOUGHT (S2E54) — attention, intention, field of love; Seth, Radin, Campbell all converge here • GEOMETRY (S2E61) — the holographic universe intuition Luke had at 7 pressing his eyeball to the oak bark

Note for episode sequencing: This is the second guest episode of Season 2 and the second time Luke has appeared on the podcast (S1E7 was the first, deep in the woods of New England). The natural release position is after the solo Consciousness Frameworks and Hawkins arc (S2E47 HAWKINS), where Luke's audiobook immersion functions as a living demonstration. Alternatively, it could sit earlier in the season as a paternal counterpoint to S2E42 (Travis Suit) — two father-figure conversations bookending the entry into the season's deeper material.

Production Notes

•  Recorded April 29, 2026, in person, Sedona, Arizona — first in-person Luke conversation on the podcast

•  Smoke opens with a Meister Eckhart quotation ("Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world…") read aloud — establishes the contemplative register and the season's wisdom-traditions thread immediately

•  Light edit needed around the chair-switch moment when the sun moved into Luke's face — natural break, easily trimmed

•  Brief offhand exchange ("magical / whisper water") during the chair switch — likely cuttable, or kept as warm color depending on edit philosophy

•  Smoke's dog Bodie appears in the room and is briefly acknowledged — a warm moment, easy to keep

•  The bodies-of-light story (Rebecca Johnson group → fifteen presences in the loft → twenty-four a week later) is a self-contained narrative beat and highly clippable as a 4–5 minute standalone

•  The laser surgery merge is the strongest single clip in the episode — beginning with the Jeff Mara podcast prelude through Luke's full description of the etheric experience. Approximately 6–8 minutes; ideal for long-form social

•  The macular hole self-healing story (told as a duet between Luke's diagnosis and Smoke's remote energy work) is the second strongest clip — concrete, surprising, externally verified by a Boston retinal surgeon

•  The guardian angel practice (closing) is highly clippable as a standalone teaching moment — under 90 seconds, immediately applicable

•  The boy-in-the-garden opening with the two oak trees and Ginger the dog is a beautiful clip for the more reflective audience — works as a YouTube short with stillness and pacing

Social Media & Platform Notes

Suggested Clip Moments

•  The boy in the garden (~3 min) — two identical oak trees, the eyeball pressed to the bark, Ginger the dog, the early intuition of the holographic universe

•  The shift three years ago (~4 min) — Luke's philosophical position, Smoke's visit, the moment of believing him

•  The bodies of light (~5 min) — Rebecca Johnson group, the loft, fifteen presences, the week-later expansion to twenty-four

•  The laser surgery merge (~7 min) — the Jeff Mara podcast primer, the thirty holes, the etheric forms meeting and merging

•  The eye self-healed (~5 min) — duet narrative; Luke's diagnosis paired with Smoke's quantum-block work, ending with the surgeon's verdict

•  Meet your guardian angel (~90 sec) — Luke's closing gift; immediately applicable, no setup required

Hashtags

#TheSmokeTrail #ConsciousLeadership #SpiritualAwakening #EnlightenedLeadership #ConsciousHealing #EnablingHealing #PresencePractice #EthericMerge #FieldOfLove #ConsciousnessBeyondTheSkull #SuspendingDisbelief

Tagging

@SmokeWallin • @TheSmokeTrail • Tag Ember Press (for The Night We Call the Owls) • Tag IONS / Dean Radin if appropriate • Tag The Telepathy Tapes podcast • Tag The Jeff Mara Podcast — Luke's reference for the near-death experience interview

Cross-Reference to Season 1

This is a returning-guest episode. The first conversation (S1E7) framed Luke as a mystic philosopher with a childhood vision of continuous creation. This conversation shows what happened when the lifelong stance ("reality is much stranger than you think") finally met direct experience that confirmed it. Promotional copy should reference both episodes — listeners discovering Luke here will want the first conversation for context.

— • —

THE SMOKE TRAIL  •  S2E43  •  Luke Wallin

The seven-year-old in the garden knew. A lifetime of philosophy walked back to him.

What is The Smoke Trail?

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.

Smoke: 00:00

Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world or by running away from things or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude whenever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.

Luke: 00:28

Agreed. Meister Eckhart. Yep. I love that quote from him.

Smoke: 00:34

Yeah. Welcome to The Smoke Trail. This is season two, and very pleased to welcome my returning guest, my father, Luke Wallin, who joined us in episode seven of season one. But this time, we're doing it in person. Luke is a writer, philosopher, seeker, forty six years teaching, and still walking the trail.

Luke: 01:03

That's right.

Smoke: 01:04

And we've been out on the trails this week here in Sedona. Luke's a writer of fiction and poetry, novels for children and young adults, songs, works on conservation. He's a co author with his daughter Eva Sage Gordon, my sister. Rowley. I missed her last name.

Smoke: 01:23

Rowley. Rowley. Of the everything guide to writing children's books, which is if you're thinking about writing a children's book, this is a great one to pick up. Luke got his MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop, an MA in philosophy at the University of Alabama where in Tuscaloosa where I was born in Druid City Hospital, master of regional planning at UMass Amherst. He taught philosophy at the Visual School of Visual Arts, American Studies as the Fulbright Fellow at the University College of Dublin, English at UMass Dartmouth, and writing in the Spaulding University MFA program.

Smoke: 02:04

His novels have been selected as best books by the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, translated into Danish Recorded for the Blind by the Library of Congress. In our last conversation on the podcast, we we were we went deep in the woods in our in our discussion, philosophy, nature, creativity as survival tools for the soul. What's changed since then? Well, three years ago, I came to visit you, and something shifted. We're gonna talk a little bit about that.

Smoke: 02:38

And and I I understand you report that that you had no idea how strange and wondrous reality would actually turn out to be. His most recent book is The Night We Call the Owls. It's a book of poems and stories from Ember Press 2023. And just closing the loop, after years of studying the philosophy of science, Luke has returned to trusting his seven year old sense of reality bursting into being at every instant. The intuition came first, the technical understanding caught up a little bit later.

Smoke: 03:16

So with great pleasure, Luke, to have you here. We're going to have kind of a few different streams of conversation around the garden, the practice, and the merge. And I've turned this into a few questions that we'll just take through, and and that will help us guide us on this conversation. And we'll we can go off script too, but I thought this would be a good way to to structure it so we're organized. Right.

Smoke: 03:43

So three over a little over three years ago, I came to visit you and something shifted. Also, you know, we did an episode about a year ago. What's the headline of where you've actually traveled in that three years and more recently in the past year? Because I know that you're experiencing like I am that we're constantly evolving and our understanding keeps changing. So how has it changed for you?

Luke: 04:10

Well, first of all, great to be here with you. I always enjoy our time together. Three years ago when you came to visit me, we sat out under a tree and I had always felt that the world was incredibly strange and wondrous. And I had always told my students, reality is going to turn out to be much stranger than you think. And you should always keep that in mind.

Luke: 04:42

And you should always try to figure out what is this world? What's in this world? What kind of things are here? And you should not turn away from those questions. Now, it doesn't matter that we don't know how to answer those questions.

Luke: 04:58

We still have to try and if we can't answer them adequately, it just deepens the wonder. So I had always felt that way since I was seven or so. And I was what made me feel that way as a kid was just nature. Everything about it seemed so strange. And it seemed like nothing anybody said about it was very illuminating.

Luke: 05:30

It just seemed like it was beyond everything people would say. And I lived on a hilltop at that time with my family and we had it was a great place to live. We had a garden in the back, flower garden and behind that were woods. And I I spent a lot of time alone, an enormous amount of time alone in those years, which I think was a great thing. And I really got to know boredom at times.

Luke: 06:05

And I think that was a great thing.

Smoke: 06:10

Yeah. In in in today's modern era where we've got so many ways to distract our minds with social media, with the, you know, entertainment, with gaming, with just, like, nonstop, Boredom is a gift. And we people tend to, you know, run away from it. You know, I'm bored, so they have to look at their phone. Or I'm bored, have to look on social media.

Smoke: 06:41

Or I've got to do something. I've got to stimulate myself at all times. And just sitting in boredom. Now I I don't find boredom exists. This is what I

Luke: 06:51

was gonna say. The the the great thing about being bored at age seven is that I lived through it. Right. And I learned not to be bored. Mhmm.

Luke: 07:02

And one perspective that I had on this later when I was twenty nineteen or 20, was on a lookout tower on top of a mountain in Idaho for the whole summer.

Smoke: 07:19

A fire lookout tower. Fire lookout tower.

Luke: 07:22

I had fantastic experience and people would ask me how was that to be up there and I said sometimes I felt a little lonely but I was never bored. Yeah. I was never bored. You could watch the shadows. You could watch the eagles.

Luke: 07:39

You could you could watch you could look down and watch the grouse and the bears. And, you know, it was just it was fabulous experience. So but back at age seven, you know, I I learned to not be bored. But I learned that by, you know, many, many, many hours of being with the trees and bumblebees, the quail. Yeah.

Luke: 08:08

So, you know, we I've talked about this before, but,

Smoke: 08:12

you know, the human humans have something like, you know, with somewhere between eighty and ninety thousand thoughts a day. I don't know if you've counted your thoughts, but, like, that's that's the typical range that are quoted. And we think we are those thoughts. Boredom is, you know, your ego mind seeking. It's it's it's grappling with those thoughts.

Smoke: 08:41

It's, you know, what do I do next? What do do next? And we've got this base animal instinct to be curious and to want to look at things, and that's that's a good part of it. And then there's this thing that's the thoughts that are coming to us. And I say that intentionally because those thoughts aren't necessarily you.

Smoke: 09:01

They are just the thoughts of your ego mind, and they come from the field at which you're calibrating. So at whatever level of consciousness you are, those thoughts are going to be consistent across all people who are at that level of consciousness. Now, do I mean by that? I mean by that, that if someone is depressed and feeling really down at a low state of consciousness, you could change the storyline, but the thoughts are going to be identical across depressed people. Something happened.

Smoke: 09:36

I I did something wrong. Someone did something to me, you know, and then whatever. Fill in the gap to the story. Someone is angry, same thing. You know, this person did this, and I'm angry because I they they shouldn't have done that.

Smoke: 09:49

Well, that universal story. If you're in a higher state of consciousness, say, you know, love or, you know, some kind of higher level where, you know, those thoughts are all gonna be kinda consistent. Oh, I'm happy where I am. I'm enjoying the the mountains in Sedona, and these thoughts are just we have to learn to recognize that, you know, that it's not that all thoughts are worthless, but they aren't you necessarily. And I think that's what we get at the root of it with this seven year old boy who was living in boredom and transcended that boredom.

Smoke: 10:31

It's a muscle that you develop, and that muscle is basically exercising your will over your mind.

Luke: 10:39

You know another thing about that is when you get older, get so busy and you get all this education, sort of the weight of education and your your mind is Also

Smoke: 10:49

known as programming. Also known

Luke: 10:50

as programming. And, you know, but you might have data running through your head from different fields of interest and just busy, busy, busy. And then you might learn to separate you who are thinking you are who are being from that that stream.

Smoke: 11:11

Mhmm.

Luke: 11:11

But back when I was seven, I remember exactly what it felt like to be me thinking, feeling. I was I knew I was separate from everything. I wasn't overwhelmed by thoughts. Mhmm. I mean, that was part of the joy of what we call boredom, but then became something else.

Luke: 11:33

It was it was great to to to be able to just be yourself and observe everything. And of course, when you're that age, you don't exactly know what's coming and you think maybe something more exciting should be coming. And so you don't realize how absolutely great it is to be doing nothing and and Well, that in a restful state of mind.

Smoke: 12:01

That takes me to the boy in the garden, which you've already we've already referred to. But, you know, take me back to that seven year old in the garden, the oak the oak bark, ginger's head, the stars. What did that boy know that took you a lifetime of philosophy to come back to?

Luke: 12:18

Yeah. You know, this this comes to the significance of your visit three years ago. So I at that time, I was I spent spent all this time in the garden and these oak trees and I would feel the bark of the oak tree. I remember there were two oak trees that were just about the same. Same size, same appearance, two red oak trees.

Luke: 12:49

And I would think, how can there be two that are the same? Two that are one. This is a great problem of universals and particulars, but I I was discovering it and I remember going up to one of them and putting my eyeball on the bark, mashing it up against the bark, just trying to somehow see something, you know, that was actually on my eye that that would reveal the the uniqueness of that tree compared to the other tree.

Smoke: 13:27

So Somehow you intuitively had knowingness that the all the universe is contained in every little speck. So every Yeah. It's we're in a holographic universe where everything all information is contained in everything else. Yeah. And somehow, like, that seeking by look trying to look at the bark up close, you were actually you were actually uncovering the secret of the universe Yeah.

Smoke: 13:52

Had been without realizing it.

Luke: 13:54

Yeah. And my dog had this little dark red conquer spaniel, Pidgey. She was my constant companion, you know, and I I would put my hand on her head. She loved that. I love that.

Luke: 14:07

So I can still feel the electricity moving in my hand, her head, the warmth of her head. And so and I could feel how much she loved me. And I had a number of dogs after that in life, but nothing like quite like this connection.

Smoke: 14:26

Yeah. She was a contemplative dog. Bodhi's close. You you got you got some bonding going on here with Bodhi.

Luke: 14:33

Yeah. You know? Yeah. We have a relationship.

Smoke: 14:35

You have a relationship. It is true. Well, let's move on and talk a little bit about practice and the field of love.

Luke: 14:45

Well, let me answer your question about what happened three years ago. Oh, yeah. You didn't finish that. So I had gone up, you know, from age seven, I had gone on to age eight. And and I'd gone on to many many different efforts to understand nature and society and myself and so forth like everyone.

Luke: 15:08

And I had I've been a teenage Southern Baptist preacher. And I had been a philosophy major in college. I'd studied all these different ways of understanding reality that people had come up with. And eventually, know, teaching philosophy for quite a while. Eventually I settled the point of view that sort of scientific materialism had had had the upper hand in the culture.

Luke: 15:59

And the only gap, the only thing you are allowed to discuss other than that completely deterministic universe of dead matter, which came from, we don't know where, it was consciousness. You could discuss consciousness, which is now called sometimes the hard problem. And so I was interested, you know, to see what philosophers had come up with over the years and I, you know, made a close study of people like Descartes and Kant and Schopenhauer and all kinds all kinds of people to see what they came up with. And I was like a lot of people, I was unhappy with materialism, but I wasn't quite ready to go all the way over to idealism. Dualism was kind of had a bad reputation, but it was what everybody believed, and it seemed to fit common sense.

Luke: 16:59

We know you had it seems like we have minds and bodies. Skipping ahead, you know, until three years ago when Smoke came to visit, he told me all of these experiences he had had terrible experiences which has led to revelations and he had not only come through a lot of suffering but he had come into a sort of Hindu worldview which included things like reincarnation, god, all these things that I had thought were kind of vaguely okay with me, but I still had, you know, sort of residual skepticism from all this programming. But for Smoke to tell me these things that he had experienced and where he'd come with it, it just to me it was a different level of evidence. I just believed him. And so yeah, I started to read a lot of these books that he had been reading, Hindu texts and Buddhist texts and things like that.

Luke: 18:37

So it was great because it's hard to find, you know, for me, I love philosophy and it was hard to find anybody else who really loved it and want to talk about it. Interesting thing about smoke is you didn't really love it. You didn't enjoy it, but you wanted to get to the truth. And so you're willing to read everything. And you also have ability.

Luke: 19:00

I don't think I've ever met anyone who had so much ability without really liking it to do it. It's not your first choice of something to do, I think. Although you might be changing a little bit on that.

Smoke: 19:12

Yeah. I think it turned into actually a thirst for not for understanding, which I did I do like, and which meant that I actually did enjoy absorbing all of that material in different levels and different ways. I do remember telling you about David Hawkins.

Luke: 19:34

Yeah.

Smoke: 19:35

And trying to get you to read Hawkins and I had a lot of resistance for a while.

Luke: 19:43

At the time I thought this was too much.

Smoke: 19:45

It was a little leap too far. But over time, you eventually dove in and dove in deeply.

Luke: 19:55

I did. I listened to many Hawkins books while mowing the grass.

Smoke: 20:03

These end of of grass growing

Luke: 20:07

mowing. Yes. Yes. So this was three years ago and and it did change me and I was I was thinking, okay. You know, what if Smoke is right about all this?

Luke: 20:17

What if this is actually the truth? And and, you know, if I was capable of making that move because I was always believing that reality is gonna turn out to be more strange than anyone thinks. Yeah. And I believe that. I mean, that was my creed, and it turned out that, you know, that prepared me for a shift.

Smoke: 20:41

Well, I think it's a it's a it's a great illustration of if we drop judgment and we remain we minute we don't have to take the leap and agree with everything Smoke says or some other teacher says. No. That's not what you're saying. But to hold disbelief. Yeah.

Smoke: 21:02

Suspend disbelief long enough to see, test it out. Yeah. Test it out for yourself. It's It's one of the most powerful tools that a human can have is to drop judgment, hold their disbelief long enough to see. That's right.

Luke: 21:25

But that's the virtue that academics and scientists think they have.

Smoke: 21:30

Right. But in some ways, they're some of the most dogged.

Luke: 21:32

Yeah, they think that is the hallmark of science, of scientific method, and of scientific philosophy, analytic philosophy. They think that is their chief virtue and yet, I'm sorry fellows, but you guys are caught up in a system where if you start talking like we talk, there won't be anybody left in the room.

Smoke: 21:59

Yeah. It's a it's a really strange thing. Academia ought to be the most open environment place for testing theories for remaining open minded, test adjust your learning, adjust your view, test again, open your view, continue to kind of push the envelope of what's possible, what's what what you're looking at, whatever field it is.

Luke: 22:30

Yeah.

Smoke: 22:30

And yet it's become like this dogged ego mind prison. Yeah. In certain ways. Yeah.

Luke: 22:39

And try if if you're in a a field that has anything to do with philosophy. Try expressing interest in these topics before you get tenure. See what happens.

Smoke: 22:52

Yeah. And so the the whole publishing tenure program where you've got to publish to get tenure, you can't get published in these peer reviewed journals without being part of the consensus. Yeah. It's That's quite hard to go against some big core thinking or Yeah. Thesis of the time.

Smoke: 23:12

Yeah. And we can go back in history. We can go all the way back

Luke: 23:15

Yeah.

Smoke: 23:15

To, you know, Galileo or to, you know, any number of of thinkers along the way who saw the world differently and were chastised if not burned at the stake or thrown out of society. I think academia is a microcosm of that whole thing we've seen in human history. There

Luke: 23:37

are a lot of academics working kind of at the fringe of these things and doing good work to try to prove that telepathy is real for example. Something like that. And it's great that they're doing that. Do such labor to make this much progress and to present evidence that will be strong enough that some people will say, well, maybe so. Yeah.

Luke: 24:13

But that is just that's not satisfactory for us. We need to go way beyond that.

Smoke: 24:19

Well, it's incrementalism. It it's it's you you to be on the cutting edge of academic thinking is to be an incrementalist. You're just pushing them just a little bit more like, oh, maybe this could be proven.

Luke: 24:33

Yeah. So that you're not But even there, even those people are at risk. Like Jeffrey Kripal for example or Dean Raiden. These people write good books. They work hard.

Luke: 24:46

They really work hard to present evidence that stands up and they do. But the stuff that they demonstrate is not dramatic enough and it doesn't have enough voices of support. So it's one of those things that people can say, Gee, it's like you can ask a lot of people, have you ever met a ghost? Yeah, I met my grandfather's ghost one time. And do you really?

Luke: 25:18

That really had well it seemed like it was real at the time. What did he say? Just sounded like him, know. And, but then, well, what did you what did that do to your worldview? Well, nothing.

Luke: 25:30

Just kind of, you know, I didn't know where to put it. Yeah.

Smoke: 25:33

So we so that's that's a common experience, which is probably everyone has what we might call mystical experiences in their life and maybe more often when you're really young. And we don't know what to do with it. We don't have a frame for for handling it. So we put it away and we forget about it. And and we just tuck

Luke: 25:57

it away and say, that was just weird and it's not didn't change my world view. I'm still Right. In this in this realm. I'm I'm an individual human living in duality. Right.

Luke: 26:08

Another one would be reincarnation. You could get interested in reincarnation. You can start reading about it. You can discover that there are all these cases of children who reported past lives and then the details that they gave were verified. There are a lot of cases like that as well as adults.

Luke: 26:31

And so you can get into this and you read these books and so forth and you say well and and then you read the criticisms and most of the people don't really have a criticism. I mean, they they could try to say, well, you know, the family seeded this idea, things like that but they don't. That's speculation. So, you could you could let's just say that you study reincarnation and because it makes sense in some ways and because of this evidence, you think it must be true or it might be true. But then what do you do with that?

Luke: 27:09

People have no way to fit that in to other things that they believe or do. And so they're able to just let it hang out there. So there are all these many pieces of a more magical worldview that are there's there are lots of people working at at the margins and having doing great work. The telepathy tapes. Yeah.

Luke: 27:33

Absolutely stunning work. Every one of those things demonstrates that we live in quite a magical world. But you know, relative to what we think.

Smoke: 27:44

Yeah, those are, I think those are a great entry point for many. I think that I recommend highly watching the telepathy tape or listening to them. Really well produced and lots of great lots of great food for thought, lots of great things. And and season two is is was fantastic. It was it was really special.

Smoke: 28:03

Alright. Well, let let let's keep going. Yep. And as we think about changing your worldview, part of part of it is is by direct experience. So there's only so much we can learn from reading books, listening to other people, and, you know, and I think there's a certain amount of that that the mind needs to be open to something else.

Smoke: 28:30

But it's really direct experience where where you get conviction or I would just say knowingness of the truth, which is a different thing than knowing something and knowing something reading. One of the ways to have direct experience is through meditation and some kind of presence practice. Right. And you found Rebecca Johnson's group over a year ago. So what is presence practice actually doing and when did you notice that it had changed you?

Luke: 29:07

I was invited to join this Sunday night meditation group, a very small group by a close friend of mine, Kayleen Johnson Sullivan, who's a writer in Alaska. She and I have been friends for a long time. And I I joined this group. Rebecca was a long time friend of hers. Rebecca what Rebecca passed this year.

Luke: 29:37

Yeah. I'm sorry. She just passed this year. Yeah. Everybody's still grieving.

Luke: 29:43

Wonderful person. And she she had grown up in Nebraska, very poor, had a lousy home life. Somehow she got herself through medical school, became a doctor, married a great doctor. They came to move to Alaska and after ten years of practicing medicine, she decided it wasn't feeding her soul and she became a spiritual director instead. She did that work for a while then she kind of went on her own and became like a spiritual director on her own and studied lots of, you know, yoga, different things.

Luke: 30:26

And she was trying to find a meditation practice that would be somehow speak to what she felt was missing. And she kept finding that they were too intellectual or at least for her. And she was also trained as an ADHD counselor and she felt like a lot of people were just too jumpy in their minds to do meditation. So she was looking for some way and so she she found or invented an approach to keeping the the guided meditation close to the body. So you would start in with your feet, so you would gradually go feel the energy coming up your body and so forth.

Luke: 31:14

And so she found that that made her feel grounded enough to really reach a level of kind of transcendence and and spirit. And and so she would have this group and we would be on Zoom. Most of us were spread around. And I thought it was, you know, a nice experience. Had been in meditations before and what I had noticed before is that even though you might be in a room with people and that you're having this guided meditation, it seemed like it would that the purpose of it was for your individual experience.

Luke: 31:59

It was a kind of an interior thing. It wasn't that much about being in the room with the other people. And and so you were supposed to, you know, make maybe kind of figure out how to become more enlightened or something like that. And yet your goal was to something like that. And then afterward, it might not stick with you so much or that kind of background out that we're programmed with could just kind of be a little overlay.

Luke: 32:29

How was yoga practice today? How was meditation practice? It was great. No problem. But you didn't necessarily feel like shouting hallelujah and talking to people about it.

Luke: 32:39

You just Yeah. It was just kind of under a little damp blanket. So I was in the script. I I didn't know this. This is the important part of what I'm gonna say, I think.

Luke: 32:52

I didn't know these people except my friend Kayleen. And most of these meetings would have from about 10 to 15 people. That's all. Would meet for just a half hour on Sunday nights. And we do about, you know, about ten or fifteen minutes.

Luke: 33:15

So, Rebecca would do a little almost like a little sermon and then fifteen minutes would be the meditation practice But it was called presence practice. And it was also called transformational listening. And so the framing of it and the emphasis of it was that we're doing this together. We are listening to what other people say. They don't get to say much but they sometimes, you know, we get to hear their breathing maybe.

Luke: 33:55

But we're tuned into what they're feeling a little bit. And we're very tuned into the fact that we are with them. And so we're not exactly trying to do phenomenology on ourselves or something like that or try to how can I become more enlightened? I don't think that would that would have occurred to anyone in this setting. It was just it was more like, you know, you people seem real nice and it's good to be in the room with you and it's good to be quiet with you.

Luke: 34:25

And they were not they didn't seem like people that I would have a lot to talk to about that, you know, I didn't but I couldn't really say because we didn't talk. But I was in this group for over a year and gradually I began to feel like it was having an effect on me. It was changing me. I was feeling something. I was feeling like I was part of them in some way.

Luke: 34:58

And I didn't know what how to frame this. I didn't know what to say about it. How how could this how could this be? I could have believed this a little more if they had been a group of friends for or people I, you know, had something in common with. But how could meeting with strangers for half an hour a week on a Zoom call doing a fairly traditional sounding to me sounding meditation be making a difference and but it was.

Luke: 35:33

It was making me calmer. It was making me more loving, more confident in my beliefs about this stuff and and I wished that I could understand it better. I wish I could understand why doing this the the presence part what is presence anyway? And so I'm gonna come to a slightly different set of experiences and show how, in a way, partly how they illuminated the question.

Smoke: 36:12

So so you're it changed you, and you were wondering, like, why? Yeah. Pick it up pick it up from there.

Luke: 36:21

Yeah. I said, was wondering why. There And was a meeting of the the group. I guess it was the first meeting I had attended after Rebecca passed, and it was led by a wonderful person. And so somehow this person, her reading of the of the guided meditation fit me better.

Luke: 37:01

It was a little slower. It was a little more rhythmic. It was it just made more sense to me, and I was able to follow it with more emotion. And when the when this group when that evening session was over and I turned off my Zoom, I was sitting in my loft room in my house alone. You know, it was quiet.

Luke: 37:31

It was nice very nice up there. Send her. And I thought, I wonder if all those people could somehow be still here with me. And there they were. Just like that.

Luke: 37:51

They were they were in my mind, you you would say they but they it was real. And they were around the room. They were they looked like sort of bodies of light, but each one belonged to one of those humans. There was no question in my mind. This is that group.

Luke: 38:15

I couldn't tell you which one was who, but it didn't matter. I can't really really tell you that anyway with that group because I don't know them very well. But I was just like, what? And it was I was so calm, and it was so real that I was able to just hold it in mind and and really feel it and interact with them a little bit, you know, and say, glad you're here. And they were sort of amused.

Luke: 38:49

It was like, you know, the beat the part of your being that's more advanced than you are.

Smoke: 38:55

Yeah. So I mean, I think what you're describing to me sounds like what I what I did with Susan, who's known as the Quantum Sphere Healer. And we did a retreat with her and Sarah Alcady, the alchemist. And and we she took us to the fifth dimension using a gamma beat, you know, kind of music and meditation. And we went to up to the fifth dimension where we could kind of communicate with our higher self and experience that, and she could see all of us in that realm.

Smoke: 39:32

I feel like that's what you're describing. Yeah. So it's like the, you know, there's multiple layers of reality and you can cross the, know, kind of pierce the veil of these other dimensions in certain mind states. The more time you spend in a meditative setting, whatever it is, it sounds like this group was quite powerful, the more you have the ability to notice these things. We're experiencing them all the time, but they're drowned out by the physical world that we're in.

Luke: 40:10

Yeah. And there there's so there's so many different different kinds of forces trying to get us to to just, life it off. Turn away. Mhmm. Don't even try to study it or stay with it.

Luke: 40:22

But I stayed with it, and and I talked to them a little bit. And they were, you know, they were very present. They were pleased to be there and everything, and they were glad I had asked them to be there. It wasn't like they were they were the people. These were somehow parts, you know, higher selves of the people, something like that.

Luke: 40:43

Mhmm. So there were 15 of them like that. And so that I I didn't want that to end. So I kind of kept that going. And then the next day, I was waking up the next day, and I remembered it.

Luke: 40:58

And I thought, oh, I wonder if they will be here today. And they were there. Just thinking of it, they were. Oh, good. So that was like three weeks ago, and they're still there when I think about them.

Luke: 41:12

Now here's the next thing that happened. One week later, I had the the, you know, meeting with the group and the same woman read the thing. This time there were only nine people there and only a couple of them were the same. And and so after that meeting was over, I did the same thing. You closed down the Zoom, looked around my empty loft room, and I said, are you nine people here?

Luke: 41:47

And what about you 15 people? And they were all there. Although some of them I guess I guess a couple of them were the same person, but that didn't matter. So the 15 people were kind of slightly farther back and the nine people were a little bit closer and larger like they would be on a little screen or something. So now I had 24 people and they are still there whenever I think about them.

Luke: 42:18

They're wanting them to be there. They're there. Now this tied in with one of my favorite favorite sources to read about this kind of stuff is the spirit Seth. It was channeled by Jane Roberts. And Seth has a lot to say about this.

Luke: 42:46

He says, the imagination is actually a portal. When you imagine something, sometimes you create it. You know, the whole thing about thought forms and the power of thinking and the power of words is true. It also applies to what you intend to imagine, to think about in your imagination. So I sometimes say that the most important things that humans can do is think about what they give their attention to and what they give their intention to.

Luke: 43:31

That's the greatest power that you have.

Smoke: 43:35

That's why having a practice of some sort is so important. Because until we master the incessant ego mind of constant thoughts, they're running you. If you allow them to run you, they're basically, it's kind of like cascading things. I've talked about this before, but you wake up and you have an anxious thought or something that you didn't do or you're worried about and you energize it, it turns into another thought in the same vein and then another one and another one before you know you have a lousy start of your day and your whole day goes in a trajectory.

Luke: 44:20

Right.

Smoke: 44:21

Opposite is true if you wake up like, Yeah! And you go do your meditation and I go do my sauna and my hot tub and I sit outside with my coffee and listen to the birds and I'm like, Okay, it's another day. And that cascades. We're creating the reality we live in with our thoughts and our intentions, either unintentionally, accidentally by not having mastered this, or intentionally by having a practice where we can get to directing this. When we get to directing it, then we are becoming the source of manifestation in an intentional way versus let's just see what the crazy mind brings me today.

Smoke: 45:10

It that's the difference. That's who you're speaking

Luke: 45:13

to. That's right. And another thing about this is and and I I got this some of this originally from Dean Raiden's book. I call I think it's called real magic. And he's talking about, suppose you have a a wish for something that's that's good.

Luke: 45:39

It's good for the people involved and good for you and so on. And you you want to set that intention, and you want to concentrate to a certain extent on that, and and hope the universe will manifest that. How do you do it exactly? What he says is the unconscious or the subconscious does most of the work. So what you want to do is to focus on the field of love that surrounds you and surrounds them.

Luke: 46:10

And you want to say to that in into that field of love, I want to set my wishes, my intentions for this good good result to happen. And I don't wanna have to be thinking about this all the time myself. I don't have to be fighting my monkey mind to remember to make this matter this, you know, what whatever you call it, request. And so you can just calmly put this into the system, put it into the universe and ask the universe to bring about this. And that is a very calming thing for you.

Luke: 46:56

It makes you feel better. And I I also I think it's if it works. So one play one way that I tested it, I didn't test it, but I used it. Is my daughter and her family were going to India with couple of little kids on a plane going to India, and I I was worried about that. You know, the all the things they they might catch.

Luke: 47:18

And so I put this intention that they would come back safely and healthy into my subconscious and into the field of love. What what is the field of love? That's another discussion. Okay? But anyway, they came back healthy and safe.

Luke: 47:38

Now skeptics will, you know, will laugh. Okay. Laugh. But once you start doing this, once you become comfortable with this, it's great. You you're a calmer person.

Luke: 47:52

You and you don't have as many of those jumpy thoughts that you have to overcome. You have a sense of working with fields of love, working with the subconscious, working with the universe. And once you develop that sense, which all these meditation practices and so on can help you do, you feel more at home in the world.

Smoke: 48:20

Yeah, and I think you described it really nicely, but from a practical standpoint, setting your attentions and, you know, the exact way it unfolds, we don't control. It's the broader power of the field of source that rolls out. But setting the intention in a very positive way or setting an attention in a very negative way tends to unfold. Right. And it'll unfold.

Smoke: 48:56

The specifics will vary, but that's why it's so important to gain mastery of our thoughts, of our mind, and to set because we have the power as sovereign beings in this realm

Luke: 49:11

to choose.

Smoke: 49:15

And you can choose the field from which you come. You can choose, do you come from anger? Do you come from envy? Do you come from these lower levels? Or do you come from a field of love at the highest level?

Smoke: 49:27

And if you come from a field of love and you put that attention into everything you're doing, everything you're going, everything you're dealing with, things in the world, whatever, it could be world events or it could just be your specific family and your specific thing you're thinking about, you increase the probability of that happening. So Everything is probabilistic that hasn't happened yet. The probability of good things happening when there's good intentions consistent in place go up significantly.

Luke: 50:00

And if you if you focus on the end result, you know, I wanted my family to come back from India healthy. I didn't I didn't focus on, I hope the plane ride from, you know, Dubai to somewhere is the safe one, you know, or anything like that. Just let the universe take care of those details. So I think that's important stuff. I mean,

Smoke: 50:23

really the root of if you think about the source or all these manifestation bodies of work and people that try to teach manifestation, that's really what they're getting at. What they're getting at is, Where do you come from and how do you set the conditions right to cause the manifestation to unfold in a way that is, I say good, but is a positive outcome, a loving outcome. If you constantly worry about things, this is what people don't understand, is the worry and the anxiety and thinking about all the downsides, all the things that can go wrong incessantly makes it more likely that those things happen.

Luke: 51:11

Right. This is another thing about all of this stuff is that you have to learn not only to be calm and not subject to the stream of thoughts, be able to choose what you want to focus on, but you also have to really learn to filter out negative formulations. You don't want the word not, the word negative, the word no in your sentences that you're thinking. Because the universe in a way is like a machine. It's reading it's reading everything.

Luke: 51:46

It's adjusting everything. And that the person who's really got the developed that approach to things is Tom Campbell with his TOE or theory of everything. And he thought, you know, he thinks about the universe as kind of like a computer. Anyway, it's a it it sounds when you first hear this, you this sounds crazy. This is this is like the power of positive thinking.

Luke: 52:13

Everybody has learned to to laugh at that. That was a popular book a long time ago. But the more you learn about this stuff, the more you should be able to learn that it's real. The positive thinking is real.

Smoke: 52:29

Absolutely. And there's a book I still have on my bookshelf that I read as a young boy called The Magic of Thinking Big. And it was of a similar vein. It was just it talked about like, you you could have big thoughts or small thoughts. And a lot of times, because of circumstance and programming and society and all the things that we see in our reality, we diminish the bigness of our thinking and intentions.

Smoke: 53:00

And there's really no limit to what we can do in this realm if we don't diminish it ourselves. So, I realized that was a really influential book to me at a very young age that in spite of a lot of turmoil and things that I was traversing, I always had big thoughts, which is why I thought big. I did big things in entrepreneurship and other things. I was always like, Well, yeah, I could do that. Dotcom came along and I'm like, I could do that.

Smoke: 53:31

Well, why not? I went out and raised $60,000,000 in 'ninety nine, two thousand when that was real money. But that's just because that was just part of the way I was. I didn't understand it like I do now, but that's what I was doing. Well, let's keep moving because I think that was great and I think it's really powerful.

Smoke: 53:55

Let's talk about the laser surgery and the eye in general, right? Tell me about laser surgery, the doctor, the etheric body rising, and the two forms gradually merging. What do you mean by that?

Luke: 54:07

Well this ties in with all this stuff because first, to start with, I watched a video of the Jeff Morrow podcast. I'm a big fan of that. And he had this Irish doctor on there. You can find this easily. And this Irish doctor had what he was telling the story.

Luke: 54:29

He's about 40 years old. This is something happened when he's about 28 or something. And so he he he and his buddies were go go out drinking after work. He was drinking a bit too much. And so he he went out to a bar one night.

Luke: 54:49

He was drinking and then and somebody gave him a little bit of ketamine, and he he took that on top of the drinking and he collapsed and he died for a short time. So it then he his his etheric body rose up and he was in this other realm. There was no pain and then so forth and so on. It was they were beings of light. He couldn't identify them as but as individuals, but he he knew that he knew some of them.

Luke: 55:25

There were three children, and these were children he had treated as patients recently and they had died. They had all died somewhat unexpectedly and it really affected him. He grieved a lot about this. He felt really bad about this. And so Jeff asked him what did the children say to him?

Luke: 55:48

Did they they ask you any questions about the hospital or anything like that? He said they they made absolutely no reference to the past. They just wanted him to know telepathically that they were very happy. Everything was fine. And then he he this other being of light, the fourth one came came in.

Luke: 56:11

That was his best friend who had died. And and that was a I think he was also a doctor. But that guy was a big atheist and always made fun of this Irish doctor because he he was religious. And he he had said, you know, there's nothing after death. But now he said, you were right.

Luke: 56:36

So this guy, you know, when you hear these stories, it all depends on how that how the person strikes you. Did they strike you as you know, as the real deal or what? But I was really taken by this idea. Oh, oh, and then the the thing was that he felt like he merged with these people, that he was kind of a a body of light. They were these bodies of light, and then and he said they merged.

Luke: 57:03

And he said that they he says, I'm telling you the story sequentially that I met these three kids, and then my friend came, and then he said this. But, actually, it all happened at the same time, but you can't comprehend that on Earth. You know? So and and then he came back to life, know, and he thought he had been, he thought surely he had been gone for three months or something. I mean, they said, I don't know about ten minutes.

Luke: 57:29

So I would, that really made an impression. I mean, was just thinking about that. You know, what would that be like to merge with somebody in that way? And so about three weeks later, I went in for a laser surgery. I was having a repair done by this doctor and he's a very impressive guy.

Luke: 57:53

I don't know him very well. He's one of these sort of fast moving guys. Doesn't man a few words, but just gives you the impression that he he really knows his stuff and a a good guy. So I'm sitting in this chair, and I can't move. I'm not allowed to move, you know, because working on my eyes.

Luke: 58:13

And he comes in with the laser, you know, and he's drilling holes around, like, 30 holes. And and I thought I'm just I was perfectly calm. I thought it's interesting that I'm so calm, and and I don't mind being still. It's not hard not hard for me to be still. Of course, I'm scared to death with you know, I have highly motivated to to be still, but it's not like it wasn't like like that feeling that you would have.

Luke: 58:43

Right? It it was just a very calm thing, and he's drilling away. And and then I become aware of like my etheric body coming up out of my shoulders, out of my head very slowly. It's like my energy or something is coming out and it's expanding and it's still in my body. It's not detached from my body.

Luke: 59:11

And then I see that his etheric body is coming up out of his body. And these two are getting closer, closer, and closer, and closer, and closer. And they merge. And I thought, oh my god. And I felt like I was seeing this.

Luke: 59:30

Now I don't think I was seeing it because my eyes were kind of engaged at that time. But I felt like I I felt it. There was there was no question that it was happening. No question. And then and it went on for a bit.

Luke: 59:48

And I thought, this is what it feels like to merge with another human. And this apparently was a really good human and, you know, it was a good experience. So after Did you tell the doctor? Never did. Would you?

Smoke: 01:00:05

I don't think so. Just thought I'd ask.

Luke: 01:00:09

I might need him again. As it got very close to the end of the procedure, these two itch just slowly separated and went back into their respective bodies. And I thought, good lord. And so, I walked out of there thinking, okay, I I really learned something today. And and after that, then I thought, you know, this must happen all the time.

Luke: 01:00:44

Mhmm. Especially with people you're you're close to. And so I started paying more attention, you know, around my wife, my daughter, you know, my granddaughter, people that you you know, you wouldn't mind merging with. And

Smoke: 01:01:02

And it may be what it may be what happens when when we have sex with others. That Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it may be a similar experience that people are having is the

Luke: 01:01:14

This gave me a new theory of sex because I'd always wondered why is sex so big a deal as it is? Why do people kill each other over it all the time? Why do people obsess about it so much? They they have to write plays about it. It's just really on people's mind.

Luke: 01:01:35

You know? I'm not saying I'm an exception, but I've always wondered there was there's gotta be something more than than the normal theories about it. You know? Theories about, oh, well, you know what? People don't wanna be lonely.

Luke: 01:01:50

They wanna procreate. You know, they're all different things like that. But I would always feel like no. So I would ask thoughtful people once in a while, know, what do you think is going on? They would just say, I don't know, you know.

Luke: 01:02:08

But anyway When

Smoke: 01:02:11

you said that, made me so it came up for me, is that when we you know, we're all in the mind of God, so we're all divine beings living these separate lives, but reality of the substrate is one entity, one God, one source. When we get close to source, it feels good. The separation is what causes pain and causes all of it. As we get closer to divinity, we are getting closer to the actual field of actual love. And when you get to a level of non duality where you actually experience it and recognize it, it's the ultimate orgasm.

Smoke: 01:03:00

It's the ultimate experience of pure love. I think what happens is you get a little glimpse of what it is like to be one with God in the act of making love and having sex with another. Because it's like it's a mini union. It's a mini coming together of what actually it is to be in divinity. That's what

Luke: 01:03:19

I think too. But also that it also shows you something about what's going on when you have sex with the wrong person. That's why it's so horrible. And if if you're, like, in a crowded subway, you're just too close to too many people. And some of those people, you know, you don't want their energy to be close to your energy.

Luke: 01:03:41

Mhmm. So I think it has a of explanatory power. But tying it back to these other things, It made me feel like, okay. When you're in this meditation group, you're actually probably commingling with their energy. Even, you know, across Zoom.

Luke: 01:04:05

It doesn't matter how how many thousand miles away they are because consciousness doesn't seem to be in space and time.

Smoke: 01:04:13

Yeah. So well, let's let's do one more dive on the eye thing because this is a separate eye story, but it relates to this. You got diagnosed with a hole in the back of

Luke: 01:04:24

your eye. Right, separate issue.

Smoke: 01:04:26

Doctor. Separate issue, totally separate thing. Not caused by the laser surgery. Was it was its own thing.

Luke: 01:04:31

It was a degenerative

Smoke: 01:04:33

thing.

Luke: 01:04:33

Yes. With aging thing, the macula, the layer of macula in the back of your eye gets dried. It starts to peel away. And if it peels away altogether, that's a good thing. But if it gets sort of hung up, you can get a hole in the back, a little hole in the center of your eye which requires surgery to correct.

Smoke: 01:04:54

Yeah, so you told me this and this was last June and you said I've got this issue and I'm going to

Luke: 01:05:00

have to have surgery. And in June I had been noticing my vision was weird. Said you know something's wrong with my vision. And I had I had had new lenses put in a year before and I had everything was great. And then I was I noticed the vision was dropping off.

Luke: 01:05:18

So I tested my eyes like this. I closed, you know, off the left eye and everything looked fine. I closed off the right eye. Oh my goodness. It was a swirling mass of black worms in the center of my visual field.

Luke: 01:05:35

And I hadn't even noticed this because the two eyes working, it was just like vision was off a little. But it was a pretty serious problem. So I went right in. They looked they said, you have a hole in your eye? We're sending you this top surgeon in Boston.

Luke: 01:05:50

I go up got to Boston. Yeah. You know, I couldn't get in until a month later. It was like the September 1 or something. And I go in and they they do a whole series of of scans and things and different people look at you getting to the higher level and finally you get to the fellow.

Luke: 01:06:10

The fellow is in training under the great doctor. And he was cool, know, and he he looked at me and everything and he says, I'm not sure you have a hole in your eye. And I said, What? No. Right.

Smoke: 01:06:23

So let me interject. So you had gone in to get the surgery and you didn't have a hole anymore. Right. And what we did in the interim, and this ties to, you you don't have to be in the same room with people who, you know, when you told me this, I had been working with this energy, different energy healing modalities, and one of them is energy balancing by numbers, and it's a really cool thing. I'll do a show on that at some point, but it's, frequencies.

Smoke: 01:06:52

Human body has 1,300,000 or so frequencies in in our in our, in our field. These frequencies sometimes were born without one, sometimes they get knocked out with trauma or with some issue. But it's constantly changing. By getting these frequencies into your etheric body, lots of health and issues can resolve because we're just an output. We're the printouts of our higher selves.

Smoke: 01:07:26

And these energies are like the underlying code of what is gonna be in the printout. So I've been working with this modality. I've had a lot of different interesting stories, this one I thought I would share here because when you told me this, I went through the book. The book has like six or 7,000 numbers in it, so only a small portion of all the numbers. And I found a couple numbers around vision that it said you might need.

Smoke: 01:07:55

And then I asked the question, well, is there a number that's not in the book that Luke needs for this specific thing? And I got yes. And I'm like, okay. And and so I derived the number, figured out what the number was, and just I use a penguin to do this, but you can do muscle testing. There's other there's lots there's different ways to access source and and ask questions.

Smoke: 01:08:17

And I came up with this number. It was like a 13 digit number. And I put a picture of Luke into the quantum block, which is these blocks that have high energy and you can send things to people. That's a whole maybe another show. And sent you that frequency.

Smoke: 01:08:35

That was in June and then it was late August, early September and you went in and the doctor said, Doctor said, you

Luke: 01:08:42

don't have a hole in your eye. He said, only one to two percent of people have the the hole close-up like this. He says, you're very lucky and, you know, monitor it and cut you know, come back. So I came back a month ago and it looks and they were equally amazed because everything looked better. The tissues look better, my vision was a little better.

Luke: 01:09:12

And the doctor said, You have self healed. Only one to two percent of people have this self heal.

Smoke: 01:09:23

Doctor. There you go. An example in real life with two people doing it remotely and making it happen. So I'm going to keep moving because we went deep on a couple And of I'm going to jump to gifting of a practice. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Smoke: 01:09:42

For the leader listening who wants to begin one practice, one entry point this week, what do you give them?

Luke: 01:09:50

Yeah. I want to give give something that's really easy for you to try. It doesn't require a group, doesn't require meditation, doesn't require anything except you have to be calm to even want to do this or to be able to see the result. But you should ask to meet your guardian angel. If you don't ask, the guardian angel generally has to work behind your back and help you anyway.

Luke: 01:10:33

But if you people don't realize that they can talk to their guardian angels. Like those those beings that have been around me since that meditation, I can talk to them. They can somewhat respond. And the thing is that when you when you talk to your guardian angel, you very well might see that person in a in a flash, you know, in your imagination, and it very well might be real. And the thing is that they will speak back to you.

Luke: 01:11:12

They will answer your question, but you have to listen. And and it'll be in your mind, so to speak. It'll be in your imagination, but you will get an answer, and it's up to you to be able to listen and to remember it. Don't just, you know say, oh this can't be real and you don't even remember what was said. No, you can't do that.

Luke: 01:11:35

That doesn't help. But you can learn to do this. That's it. That's one easy takeaway. Awesome.

Smoke: 01:11:43

Alright. Well that's all going to try that this weekend. And you might not get an answer instantly. It might be you put an intention, you ask to meet them, you might ask about a certain issue you're dealing with. And you might go to bed and you might come to you in the morning.

Smoke: 01:11:59

Right. It doesn't always happen instantaneously, sometimes it does. Right. So I think going back to my framing of the Johari Window, that which we know and other people know, that which we know and others don't know, that which we don't know and others know, that which we don't know and others don't know. I think we covered a few things here.

Smoke: 01:12:21

What was unknown that kind of moved to the open, what was hidden from everyone, consciousness extends beyond the skull, the body is not the boundary of the self. We merge with each other constantly. The laser doctor, the meditation group, and most of us are just not paying attention, so we don't notice. Naming it makes it observable. So, there's something that the window maybe has shifted for some of you.

Smoke: 01:12:48

What was hidden that has now moved to open, what Luke kept private, he never told the laser surgery doctor what happened. The April letters were written privately to a group leader, Bringing the Merge experience into public conversation that we've just done is in itself moving from hidden to open. So we're kind of opening the Jahari window a little bit more. From blind to open, hidden from yourself, invisible to others. How often are we merging with people around us in marriage and work and conflict without ever noticing?

Smoke: 01:13:23

I think your observation, this may explain, you know, the crowded subway claustrophobia or the disorientation around malevolent people. It's happening all the time, but it may be hidden from us because we don't notice. And then what listeners, you know, maybe leave with open. A new working hypothesis perhaps, presence is real, intention is creative and merging is already happening whether or not you see it. Permission to take your own subtle experiences seriously instead of dismissing them.

Luke: 01:13:54

And think that the real power that you have is what you give your attention to and what you give your intention to. And if you think, you know, for people who don't think there's any free will, think about that for a second. Don't you think that you can choose to give your attention to something? And they'll say, yeah, but that's probably determined. Okay, But let's think about it for a second.

Luke: 01:14:24

Give your attention to something and then give your intention what you would want to see happen in regard to that thing. And you can say, oh, well, you know, if it happens, it was determined. And you and and I can say, well, lucky you. Mhmm. And if it if it happens and it wasn't determined, I can say, you helped.

Luke: 01:14:53

That is a level, I think, of action that would would really be hard to refute, barely.

Smoke: 01:15:00

And it ties into the thing you said to your students way back when, whatever reality turns out to be, it's going to be strange. Yes. So we will leave you with that. And I hope you enjoyed this beautiful conversation here with Luke. Thank you for joining me.

Smoke: 01:15:18

Thank you. Thank you. Until next time.