Guest: Man, where to begin? I’ve got a lot for you. I’m a very philosophical, truth-seeker kind of a guy. [1:29]

 

Eric: Alright.

 

Guest: I kind of fit that mold so I’ve got lots of questions for you tonight. [1:35]

 

Eric: I just have one question: Why in the hell did you wait how many years before reaching out to me? You got spooked with everything? What happened?

 

Guest: (laughter) That’s a good question, man. It’s been a journey.

 

Eric: You’re one of like hundreds. They’re just kind of creeping out slowly and they’re like, “Yeah, I read the book years ago. I was really into it.” I’m like, “What happened? Did they all get cold feet? Is it—What is the problem?”

 

Guest: That’s a good question, Eric. I think for me, it was never just the right timing, you know? I’ve had a kind of a really interesting walk for a long time. It’s been an up and down journey like most people have. I just feel that now is the right time. I have kind of an extensive background in Christianity so it took me a long time to kind of outgrow some of my old beliefs so to speak. I don’t think a lot of people are kind of ready for stages until certain parts of their life. Even for you and for me, I couldn’t have had this conversation five years ago. [2:06]

 

Eric: I agree. I got you.

 

Guest: When I was younger in my Christian walk, I couldn’t have handled some of the questions even you seek and you answer. Yeah, I think it was just the right timing and here we are. [2:40]

 

Eric: Alright, that’s an honest answer and I can live with that.

 

Guest: (laughter) I could’ve used you five years ago but I’m glad we’re here now too! [2:53]

 

Eric: Alright, so what have you got?

 

Guest: Oh man. I guess let’s start off with the wonderful topic of religion. As I told you, I do have a long background in Christianity, I’ve kind of reached this awkward point, Eric, where I’m kind of in this awkward transition. It’s almost like I’ve outgrown my own beliefs but I don’t really know where I stand now. I’m kind of in this awkward middle ground of “I outgrew that and have no firm footing anymore.” [3:00]

 

Eric: Yeah. I’ll tell you, I have a number of people in the same boat as you at various ages but within that, from younger to even older. It was just a matter of months. I’ve got one student who’s come a long ways and they were just hardcore Christian just four months ago, before meeting me. You’re talking prayer group leader, the head person for events and stuff. It really comes down to—I don’t like knocking other faiths. I don’t like to say, “Oh, Christianity is terrible. Hinduism is this and that. Buddhism is—” I think that it’s right for people who are seeking some level of comfort and direction. I also believe—and this is the bolder statement that I can get a little bit of slack back—I also think intellectually, it is also the level of one’s intellect, that you get to start questioning things. Your generation is the internet generation. You guys grew up with the internet and you have access to a slew of information at your fingertips. That information, although 80% junk in my opinion.

 

It still doesn’t matter. It brings up a lot of opinions, a lot of voices, a lot of data, a lot of stuff to reflect on. I think that people are just getting smarter. We know that there’s a 60-70 percent—maybe even higher than that—of people leaving religious institutions. When they’re interviewed why, they’re like, “I just can’t accept the answers that I’m given. They don’t satisfy me and I feel like something has been missing for years. I’m just at the point now where I’m looking for something that has better answers.” That’s kind of how I look at it. I see that religion is adapting with a lot of their views on things whether it be social or political or scientific. They’re trying to adjust themselves to society because to me, it’s big business if you really think about it.

 

If they’re leaving, the pastors don’t have anybody making big donations to pay for the mortgage on the church, their house, their lifestyle. There’s a need to “How do we adapt? How do we bring in more flock as we call it,” the people. I think that with the younger generation, they’re just way more educated with way more science and way more logic. It just can’t deny the majority of the science behind it. It’s one thing to say that you have faith but it’s another when it begins to narrow into the ideology that they want you to guide your life by that doesn’t quite add up in modern times. That’s the frustrating part.

 

Guest: Exactly. It’s tough because I feel like many people like me have this conflict between their heart and their head. Their heart sees truth—at least to an extent—in all of those institutions and religions but their mind can’t accept the dogma. My heart wants to be a part of church or a community but my head says “No, I can’t accept that stuff!” I feel like an outlaw! It’s just tough. [6:22]

 

Eric: I think you’re one of hundreds of thousands out there. I think that from my experience, I would say that you are not a unique situation in that sense. I think that there’s a passion to love God but I call it “the universe” because I don’t like the word God necessarily anymore because it’s been so monopolized by religion.

 

Guest: Oh, for sure! [7:13]

 

Eric: The second you say it, people want to put you into some kind of category religiously. I think that there’s a very strong sense there. I call it “the Force,” “the universe,” call it whatever you want. I think that most people that are in your kind of bracket are brought in through family and indoctrinated into a religious thinking. When you outgrow it, it becomes something where you feel emotionally obligated in a sense and there’s a sense of guilt to separating that. It is hard because it’s like you’re saying, it’s also friends, family, functions. It is a community thing.

 

Guest: Right. Do you see there being a place for religion? Like do you think it useful? [7:53]

 

Eric: I think that the place for religion is—I’ll just talk very boldly. I think religion has been dying and on it’s way out for the past two decades.

 

Guest: Oh, for sure. [8:11]

 

Eric: If you look at Europe, their percentage of people who are basically attending church is like 20% of the population. In America, it was 80% just ten years ago or thereabouts. It’s dropping dramatically. We’re catching up to what Europeans have more or less figured out. At the end of the day, I just think that it’s the common person now who’s basically under 40 years is able to poke too many holes in the whole religious viewpoint. The problem isn’t the socialness and the function of it. I think they should adapt. They should be more like a unified religion where people can come, whether you believe in meditation or whatever, but the bottom line is that you believe in God, you believe in wholesomeness, you believe in certain values in life. You come together as a community rather than saying, “Okay, you have to use condoms. You have to do this or that. You can only date this person or that person.” I think that they need to be broader-minded and they’re too old school and they need to adapt. I think the younger generations are just much more broader-minded.

 

Guest: I agree. [9:23]

 

Eric: Therein lies the problem. I think the New Age has come to an end also. I think that nobody is really that much now is really going to be—I think people who were once into crystals or healing or stuff like that, astrology and all this stuff… I just think it’s just as much bunk as a lot of stuff from religion. I am always amused when they want to go, “Oh, well religion is dead but what we’re doing—” Any intelligent person is going to poke holes in this too. I have always never seen myself as part of the New Age movement either. I try to keep myself as distant from that but I don’t really have a name for what I do. I call it a “spiritual scientist,” “a spiritual intellectual.” I love science. I think that the New Age and religion is on it’s way out. I give it another probably twenty years before it’s maybe 5% or 10% of the population.

 

Guest: The whole Law of Attraction thing and just all of that stuff…What’s your view on that whole message of the whole New Age movement? [10:21]

 

Eric: I’ve said for two decades: Look, I don’t believe in astrology. It’s too vague. The houses don’t line up correctly to what we know through astronomy. That doesn’t make any logic. You can give a breakdown analysis to a group of students from their date of birth, time of birth, read it, they’re all blown away, and then the teacher will say, “Hand it to the person next to you because you just read theirs and you thought it was your own.” It’s just stuff like that that makes it so much more difficult for the real investigation of spirituality or psychic phenomena or mental abilities or time and space or any of these things. When you start to get into quantum physics and anomalies and stuff like this, split particles, it just goes on and on. It really takes away from us really looking at something that’s already incredibly elusive to figure out. We’re just technologically barely scraping the surface and we’re saying, “Hey, there’s really something here.”

 

I’m not a fan of people who do the crystals. I’m not into the people or into the idea of token animals and shamanism. I can’t knock shamanism 100% but it just depends who and what angle and what position they’re coming from. If you’re going to come at shamanism from a chemical level and some various levels of spirituality, now I respect that. When you’ve got people who don’t have a clue about what they’re getting involved in but they’re just like,” Oh! I have a token animal! I’m a wolf,” or “I’m a badger!”

It’s always like people with reincarnation. It just blows my mind! “I was King George VIII!” “I was Queen Elizabeth!” It’s like everybody you meet are these famous people and it’s like the reality is—I just try to stay as far away from that as I can. These are things that I consider New Age. When you really look at the New Age stuff, what it really is is if you follow it back, you’ve got to go to Eastern philosophy, to go back to ancient Vedic teachings and you go to deep Buddhism and you go into the old school stuff. You find the slivers of truth that they were teaching which is probably dead on and you get this Western, what I call “dumb-dumb intelligence,” and they candy-coat it into colored spiral rainbows and token animals that love you and they’re all around you. It’s just enough to make me go crazy.

 

The biggest one is when I have people that—not to knock Christians or Catholics or Catholicism but—”I have a guardian angel.” You look at the person, they’re 50 years old, typical housewife. They’ve got children who’ve got children so they’re grandmothers. They’ve got the metaphysical degree and they’re like, “Oh, I have a guardian angel!” I’m thinking, “Well, does your guardian angel have a level of intelligence?” “Of course! Yeah!” So, they can have conversation if they chose to have a conversation, or with other angels if that’s the case? If you died, would you want to be a guardian angel? From the way it sounds to me, your job is to sit in the corner of the room, follow this person their entire living life and I don’t know, you sit and you knit, waiting for them to have a moment where there’s an accident so they can run over and go, “I’m here to save you!” That is the purpose of your existence! That’s terrifying to me! That may as well just be a form of hell on a pretty level with throwing wings on your back. Your purpose in life is to govern over somebody else from having an error in their life.

 

Guest: That’s pretty strange. [14:19]

 

Eric: This is where—Do you attack somebody for this or even try to rationalize it with them? If you do, it’s like, to then, they’ve built up this idea or view of a relationship with this invisible person. There’s this heartache that they have or it’s death of a person but it’s the death of a belief. I find—Is that my job to do that? Is that what I really want to do? Is there something I’m going to follow up and do for this person to help them better their life or am I just going to leave them hanging after I kind of dismantle this whole belief system?

 

Guest: That’s a good question! [15:02]

 

Eric: I’d just rather let sleeping dogs lie, as they say. Let them stay there. It’s not my job to save the world. It’s not my job to convert the world. It’s not my job to convince anybody that I have the right view versus their own. I put what my thoughts are. If people want to read it, if they want to hear it, if they want to listen to it, fine. They either will agree or won’t agree. I don’t push it on anybody but at the end of the day, those are some of my positions on religion.

 

One could say, “Well, you know, Eric, you don’t believe in all of these things but you’ve got some pretty crazy ideas too!” I believe in imbuing something and putting consciousness into objects. I realize that may sound kind of crazy to people but my logic behind that is: Look, I’ve been doing psychic work since I was a kid. If I pick up object and I’ve got information from holding the freaking object from somebody and that is astoundingly correct information in detail, where did that information come from? I have a scientific brain also and the first thing is, “Okay, it’s got to be my imagination.” Then, when you’re given the information that just goes beyond any rational level of what you could know on a personal level, you’ve got to say now, “Where is the source of that information coming from and how did it involve itself into a freaking watch or a ring or an object,” from that person?

 

Guest: That’s interesting. [16:24]

 

Eric: Then, I have to start looking at it and I have to say, “Well, I believe that there’s an aura. I believe that there’s an intelligence, we’re energy, that energy saturates stuff.” Then, you’ve got to think of “How do I educate somebody very quickly and in very simple terms before it gets more and more complex, which can come later.” I always say, “All of your clothing absorbs your energy, your frequency, your vibe,” which is a very loose word used in the New Age community. It could mean anything, just like frequencies.

 

I say, “If you wear your best friend’s shirt, the moment you put it on, if you have self-awareness or self-reflection, for a few moments, you feel like your friend. You feel like, ‘This isn’t me!’” You feel like that person. How I look at that is that that shirt is charged with that person’s consciousness. Their energy is emoting off of their body, the cellular electrons moving through muscles and tissue and everything. It doesn’t just stay within the god, the rails of the nervous system. It kind of has this electrical field and it’s absorbing or saturating like a sponge into the clothing that these persons wear.

When you wear somebody else’s, it’s like somebody is taking a video cassette and you’re the video player and you’re feeling whatever this is. It’s like a computer disk of a program that you’ve been given and your equipment is basically playing the program to understand it.

 

Guest: That’s crazy. [17:54]

 

Eric: For about five or ten minutes, you’re like, “God, I really feel like my buddy John,” or whoever’s shirt you were wearing or Peter’s or whoever. What happens then is that your own energy field, because it’s dominant, you’re the source of it, starts to resaturate it. It’s kind of like pouring milk into a sponge. Eventually, it swells up and it starts to let the milk ooze out the other side where there was water. If I start pouring red Kool-Aid into it, eventually it starts to turn the milk from being milk as it’s pushing it out, from a white to a pink, to a brighter pink, to a brighter red until it becomes clear. Then, that clear is Kool-Aid as it continues.

 

You’re kind of doing the same thing with clothing. The same thing happens with houses and environments. It doesn’t just end there. It can be a town. People don’t pay attention to these things. When you go into someone’s house, you may never have been there before. It may be the cleanest, nicest, most modern, most beautiful house and you’re like, “I feel like this is a bad place. I feel it in my core.”

 

Guest: That’s true! [18:48]

 

Eric: That is an awareness. That is a sensory. Animals have this and humans have it through evolution. We just don’t think about it because we’re the top of the predatory list. There are so many things we’ve forgotten to feel what we feel or to check in with ourselves. You can go to a town and you feel like, “Oh my god, there’s something about this town I don’t like.” Once you stay in a place long enough, you will calibrate or adjust to that environment and then you don’t feel it anymore. It’s like you condition yourself to get used to it. I say it’s kind of like getting used to cold weather if you move to a Northern area. For the first year, if you’re from a Southern area, you’re always freaking cold! You’re like, “Oh my god, it’s freezing,” and everybody else is like, “What are you talking about?” They’re walking around in t-shirts. It’s 65, 68 degrees out. They don’t think anything of it.

 

A year or so later, you, then, too, are doing that and not thinking about it. You’ve adjusted. The same things goes for if they go somewhere South and it’s 80 degrees out, 85. They’re like, “Oh my god, I’m ready to die! I’m sweating!” You adjust. So is true about going to bad energy areas or living in a bad house versus a “good vibe” house. It’s all about listening to your initial sensory. Your sensory field is getting information. It’s electrically, like fingers, touching the entire environment, giving you information. It’s just a matter of whether we’re going to think about what we’re feeling and then react to that.

 

Guest: Wow. That’s good. That’s where you seem different, Eric. I think the biggest difference that I’ve seen from you is that you have a systematic approach. Even with my background in Christianity, I would see crazy things. To kind of scratch the surface, I saw miracles that people wouldn’t even believe that I saw. I saw blind eyes open. I had these crazy visions at times where I would pop inside of people’s lives and read their mail. Things like that that I couldn’t really understand but I didn’t have a system to keep those things going. It was kind of like it would happen haphazardly and I was like, “I don’t know what’s going on,” but I feel like it was this Holy Spirit inside of me. That’s how I interpreted things.

 

You have, it seems like, a system to just dig deeper, to see consistent results, whereas I was before just kind if going randomly and haphazardly. Just to kind of get personal with you here, I’ve had this thing that’s been happening for the past five years. I grew up and I was this crazy extrovert, even five years ago I was all of this stuff. I was this big preacher kind of a guy, whatever. I had all of these ambitions, goals, and dreams. Then, I don’t know how it happened, man, but somehow I got this extreme anxiety. It wasn’t just like one day, it kind of came on progressively to the point where I almost felt like if I could describe it, it felt like there was this dark cloud that was attached to me. If I told you in Christian terms, I would say it was a demon, all because it was like this thing was always on me. I felt like I was going crazy. I read neuroscience, quantum physics, anything, you name it, that would give me answers and nothing could give me answers. It was all just rhetoric.

 

The more I looked, the only place I found answers was spirituality. My intellect and my heart were still divided. Even now, I still have this massive anxiety at times. It just comes on me like a flood. It makes no sense intellectually and it’s to the point where I really believe it’s a spiritual thing. It’s honestly been oppressing me for about five years now. It’s hard to talk with people and all I know is that it’s a spiritual thing because I’ve tried, intellectually, for years to figure it out. I’ve even gone to counseling and nothing’s really helped. [20:15]

 

Eric: Well, let me intervene. Let me just kind of cut in there and say this:

 

One, to come up with an opinion of what that is during a short conversation, I think a lot of people would say, “Oh, I can heal this,” or “I can do this and that.” I have a very rational mind as much as I have an “out there” kind of mind. The first thing is that I believe in this kind of reality of how I see things, I try to always keep at least one foot grounded. I always say that you should always come up with three reasonable answers, or at least two of them need to be kind of reasonable on an earthly level. In the third one, you can start to reach a little further.

 

You have to ask yourself, maybe you’re going through a depressive moment. Maybe biochemically, something in your body is off and that’s true for a lot of people. Maybe the anxiety is that you’re growing older and you’re sensing “What am I doing with my life? Am I happy in my career?” I mean, you did do a big, radical change in your career. Evidently, you had to get educated and get a degree to be teaching. Here, you changed all of that. That could be that kind of angst or anxiety of “I want to find something I want to do in life.” Those are the first things that I would be looking for in someone before I start pushing some other, higher level idea.

 

Now, I think it’s true to say that it could be several things that feel like it’s just one big pressure but it’s actually several things coming from different directions. I’m betting I’m right about the first two, to some degree. I don’t think it’s completely the whole problem but I think it’s contributing. I also think that a person who is what I call a “White Cell,” from a very young age, intuitively know that there is a purpose, that there is a destiny that they’re supposed to meet. There is a sense of knowing that they have to evolve spiritually or awaken and it’s enough to drive them nuts their whole life. It’s like this driving force.

 

The first thing is that I’ll hear people say, “Well, everybody feels that way.” No, they do not feel that way. Not everybody feels that way! They’ll sit there and they’ll go, “Well, everybody feels that way. I felt like I should be doing more hairstyle jobs.” They think that they understand what we’re saying about this crazy need. We know it’s spiritual, we know the elements of it. I’m also trying to explain for anybody who will be listening to this later. The point is that I say that 85 percent of the population does not feel that. Just because they say they do, dig a little deeper and you’ll realize it’s not the same thing you’re talking about.

 

There is this incessant—it’s almost enough to drive you nuts—that’s constantly searching for these answers. This is what gets everybody to go look for these books and these things and to get into everything. I think you have that, there’s no question about it. That is that sense of needing to serve God. It’s enough to drive you nuts!

 

Guest: Absolutely. [25:23]

Eric: It’s like you get this little piece of, “This is God and you need to serve me,” but there’s no other diagram to say, “Okay, how do we figure this all out? You’ve got to be a little more specific with me, God! You’re just leaving me hanging now! Where’d you go? Hey! Hello?” That is enough to cause any person, spiritually, an incredible amount of anxiety, an incredible sense of failure, a sense of “I didn’t fulfill whatever it is,” or “I’m not fulfilling whatever it is I’m supposed to do in my life.” That is my drive because I feel that same thing. This is why I believe that you have to do exactly what religion says not to do and that’s to develop psychic abilities. Everything they tell you is to control you. I say, “Do these things to liberate yourself and don’t be a typical human that fears everything you don’t understand!” If you fear everything you don’t understand and you don’t have an inquisitive mind, guess what? You’re not going to grow! You’re going to live under the same rock your entire life because you were too afraid to wander out a little!

 

Guest: True. [26:33]

 

Eric: You have to contain that fear and try to approach it like a scientist would in spirituality and try to look at it in different ways. I think those are things that are affecting you right now. I think you have an incredible spiritual drive. I don’t doubt that for a moment. Look at the conversation we’re having. I also think that you have to look at your life like an ecosystem and say, “What other stuff am I doing?” You have to sit down and say, “Okay, I’m doing something now that I want to do. I’m passionate about it. I have a job. I’m pursuing what I want to do and now I’m continuing to pursue my spirituality. I feel like I’m able to see—” You’ll find that that negative vibe when you really reflect on it, starts to diminish.

 

One of the biggest things about White Cells that I find that’s so frustrating for me is this incessant drive to feel not worthy to God, to feel as if you do not deserve God’s love or presence in your life. Especially if you come from a religious background, like this, “I’ve abandoned that so I am undeserving,” but then you’re like, “No, I should be deserving.” I say that anybody, if you ever have children, would you want your child, your son or daughter, to feel that they’re undeserving of your love because they messed up?

 

Guest: Of course not. [27:55]

 

Eric: Would you feel that way from your parents, that you weren’t deserving of their love? Do you think that’s fair to them? I say, as far as that goes, the biggest thing to relieve yourself of is to realize that the universe unconditionally loves you. It’s up to you to evolve yourself and that’s up to you. No matter how far you go or how little you go, it’s still going to love you. If you want to be integrated more and you want to serve on a higher level, then you’ve got to bring your game. You’ve got to build skills. That’s my thoughts with that. Without meeting you in person to kind of get a real direct vibe off of, that’s what I’m thinking, I think that you’re going through the exact three things that I was saying. I think it’s not just one of them, I think it’s all three. It’s a lot of anxiety. You’re 27, 28 years old. You’re almost approaching 30. 30 is what call the mini midlife crisis. You’re approaching it. For women, they hit it already at 27. Guys tend to hit it around 30 but they’re a little more kind of connected. It already starts in the mid-twenties even.

Guest: Mine was 25. [28:57]

 

Eric: There you go. These things are all kind of predictable because I meet so many people after 30 years of teaching that I see patterns. I’m getting to the point where I guess I could say I’m getting wiser, a little bit more mellow, cursing less and less frustrated with everything. We’ll see. Hopefully, it’s going to go in the good direction.

 

Guest: That’s awesome. Okay, let’s go to the question of enlightenment. I’ve been studying that for a long time. I’ve kind of gone from salvation in Christianity to enlightenment in general now, I’m just curious as to what your thoughts are on that because the more I study that, the more it seems like it’s more confusing. It just seems like true enlightenment is a lack of self. It’s almost like it’s a very—It’s like, “Why would you pursue something that leads to nothing?” Does that make sense? It’s almost like this road…why would I even go down that road if it leads to nothing? [29:21]

 

Eric: Like everything else in the New Age community, it has been twisted, contorted, powder-coated, rainbow-colored, fuzzy love from it, “feel the love, namaste.” There is truth to all of these things but people of a lesser knowledge, lesser dedication to going back to an ancient period and really understanding what they were talking about. There’s this huge barrier of even understanding the language, let alone interpreting what they were talking about from thousands of years ago. These guys kind of knew what they were doing because they didn’t have anything like TVs and radio and stuff to distract them. They were poor. They were dirt-ass poor. What did they do? They ate a little bit and they sat around, reflecting mentally, all day long. You better bet they figured a few things out.

 

Having said that, I think that the term “enlightenment,” like the word “God,” has taken on this connotation of being owned by something that’s incredibly elusive and you don’t really know how to handle it. That’s exactly what’s happened. I remember people used to say to me, “You’re enlightened! You’re enlightened!” I don’t like to be called enlightened. I don’t want to be called special. I don’t want to be a prophet. I don’t want to be anything because, on this planet, you kill all of your prophets! I don’t want to be any of that! I’m just me! I’m this person who, in any other terms of perfection, I’m just as fucked up as the rest of you guys! I have my thing and it’s my thing. People want to know what my thing is because they’re like, “Hey, that’s cool shit you can do,” so I teach it.

 

At the same time, everybody else wants to noose me and tie me down because I don’t fit a certain standard or mold that ideally fits into it. My answer to all of them is that the person who is going to have the answers is going to be the person that doesn’t fit into the mold because they’re uniquely unpredictable. Anything that’s going to be beyond you is something that you don’t understand or couldn’t comprehend or you don’t get it. That’s what makes it unique and when you get it, you’re just totally kind of like, “Wow, I never thought of things that way.” If everything is from this mold or basket that you pick, you already can anticipate what to expect from it. What are you learning new? You already kind of know what’s going to happen.

When it comes to enlightenment, I could say, “I’m enlightened.” I believe I’m enlightened because every definition I’ve ever looked at in thirty years, I definitely meet. If you’re going to say, “Well, am I walking around shooting rainbows out of my butt?” Well, no! That’s open to interpretation, who you ask, I guess. The point is that everybody seems to have a different value of what that is, whether you have to be incredibly humble or you have to be gifted to do all these abilities 24/7 or you’re in servitude to other human beings. Most of the guidelines by which we judge this are people who aren’t living. You have—I don’t want to say that they’re fictional characters but you have the best parts, the best story, the best—

 

It’s like when someone in your life dies and you’re like, “God, they were a complete asshole,” when they were living. When they die, it’s like for some reason, we empathetically want to see only the best parts and we have the best fond memories of that person. We begin to edit in our mind and create this idyllic thing. Then, we start yearning and missing them. In the end, I think it’s the same thing when we write book about spiritual masters. A lot of people don’t recall—If you really look at the pages, that that’s probably only two percent of their entire life that’s recorded in this book. That’s polished and edited how many times to impress people to get them into the flock.

 

Jesus had meltdowns too, yelling, when they were trying to heal the lepers and they were like, “We can’t do it!” Could you imagine that scene? I guarantee it was cleaned up a bit, It was probably like me screaming at people. When you look at Milarepa, you find the same thing. He just went through all these different phases to get to where he was. The idea is that we want to fit an idealistic view of what an enlightened or spiritual master is supposed to be. I do think that there are certain values they should have and there are certain things. I think that if you’ve never met one, how can you say that the standard is whether they are or aren’t?

 

I’d say: Throw enlightenment completely out and just find somebody who teaches you that makes sense. As long as you’re learning and you’re having epiphanies and mind-blowing experiences and revelations in thought, run with it! When the day comes that it stops, you’re done. You move onto the next thing. No matter what, you’ve changed as a person, you’ve grown, you’ve matured…hopefully. You take that and you use it for whatever. That’s kind of my approach.

 

Enlightenment to me is always like a person who sees stars in the sky. They think that if they climb up a mountain that they can get closer to it so they can touch it. They don’t realize that the light is traveling to them and they don’t understand the concept of how far that distance is. It’s like walking to get to that star, to get to that horizon that—It’s like trying to get to a rainbow’s end.

 

To me, enlightenment is—I would say it would have to be the highest level of perfection in life. You have to be super sympathetic, super compassionate. You would have to have mastered all senses of reality, all senses of physics and the laws of physics and be able to bend them and do all sorts of stuff with that. It’s this idyllic, perfect person. As long as that’s the idea and you can’t step back and go, “Okay, I just don’t see that as being feasible,” then you spend your life chasing something that you’ll never attain and you’ll always feel like you’re not worth it because you never could get there.

 

This is why I despise all of these spiritual teachers that come off on a stage dressed in white and they’re all—Bullshit! They go around the corner and they’re farting, they’re yelling at their staff, they’re doing all of these different things, you just don’t see it. They’re creating this image that they’re trying to tell the masses, “You’ve got to reach where I’m at.” What you’re seeing is a facade. If there’s anything true about Eric Pepin, it’s that what you see is the truth, good, bad, and indifferent, just like anybody else! There are things about myself that I don’t care for. There are things that I do like about me and I’m always trying to improve myself. That’s probably the best quality that anybody could have is trying to improve yourself.

 

I say, “Take me for who I am,” but I’m a realist. I believe that’s the first step to truly evolving in your consciousness and in your abilities. Enlightenment is about developing yourself as much as you can. The moment that you self-reflect, you’ve entered enlightenment, in my opinion. When I say to you that 15 percent of the population are White Cells and the other 85 percent don’t care about whether they’re reflecting, “What am I? Is this all that I am?” They’re not obsessed with it. They can follow a cookbook that we call a religious Bible or a religious Torah or whatever you want. To me, it’s a recipe book. In us, there’s this inner design that driving us and the moment that you start to try to answer it or try to figure it all out, you’ve entered what I call the “enlightenment cycle.”

 

Guest: It’s self-awareness. [37:27]

 

Eric: That enlightenment cycle continues to the day you die. Unless you completely give up on everything, then it’s like the enlightenment cycle kind of gets put on a shelf for a while. It’s still always there, nagging you. That’s what it did for you. It’s always ready to jump back into the game, to drive you half crazy in this world.

 

Guest: It’s funny because that’s where I was before I talked to you and that’s why this conversation is funny, because I reached a point where I was kind of ready to just give up for a while. I’ve been asking these questions for so long, Eric. I just kind of reached the point where I’m like, “You know what, I’m just frustrated with all of this stuff. I’m just going to focus on me, do what I love, and pursue my passions.” Of course, the questions don’t stop. There’s always that deep, underlying nagging but that’s kind of where I was at before this conversation, just kind of at that point like, “Alright, where do I go from here?” It’s never going to leave but that’s where I was at too, kind of that transition as I mentioned before. [37:47]

 

Let’s talk about reality too. You’re kind of mentioning that as well. It’s just crazy, man. Reality really is subjective, isn’t it?

 

Eric: Yes.

 

Guest: Are we living in the matrix, for real? What is your take on that? It’s so fascinating.

 

Eric: Well, that’s why I told you not to watch the program I did last night! We had hundreds of people who participated and listened to it. For two hours, I basically told everybody, “You live in a simulated reality and that’s the truth of it.” All the greatest mind right now are all on board with it. If you crunch the numbers, everything in our universe is mathematical. We are shocked by that and because it’s mathematical, that means it’s predictable. The point is this: as much as you think of stuff on a caveman level, like “It’s solid! It’s real, therefore reality is real,” then no. We are at a part of evolutionary level of commonality, at least in the advanced countries where we’re looking at virtual reality, we’re looking at video games and as the Tesla guy there—what’s his name?

 

Guest: Musk.

 

Eric: Musk. He says that if you look at Pong, we start off with Pong. That was just like thirty years ago or whatever, if not less. That was the level of our skills (imitating Pong sound effects) with the paddles going on. In that time, now, we have characters in video games where you can see the pores of their skin, their hair flowing, and it’s not thick and “loppy,” it’s becoming as detailed, almost, as ours. In another ten years, ten years to fifteen years, it’s going to become so—In virtual reality, wearing these glasses will become so indistinguishable from reality that you’re not going to be able to tell the difference.

 

Guest: That’s pretty scary! [40:09]

 

Eric: They’re going to find ways—Yes, absolutely! They’re going to eventually build it into our neural system where you’re going to hear things, you’ve going to smell things, you’re going to taste things, you’re going to touch things and that is going to be the commonality, to which you go into a virtual reality. You’re going to need an alarm clock or some system that regularly makes you come out of it because you’re going to forget your life. You’re going to think that your life was a dream and the virtual reality was your true life.

 

Guest: Wow! That really is this reality in it, too? [40:40]

 

Eric: That is absolutely this reality. Now, the thing is that it’s really hard to imagine that we’re in a virtual reality but I would say this to anybody and this is what I said last night: Look, every White Cell already knows this! We know this is the truth! It’s just a matter of defining it and accepting that truth and finding a way to get our brain around the system.

 

Thousands of years ago, the spiritual people would meditate. They would comes out of their meditations and the first thing that come out of their one-day meditation or their one-week meditation, which is the biggest revelation they had, the deepest they’d gone, they’d come back and they’d say, “Reality is but an illusion.” For crying out loud, what you’re really saying translated into three thousand years later where we’re using all sorts of slang words, what you’re really saying is that we live in the matrix!

Now, the new word, instead of calling it the matrix because that’s another dominated word like the word “God” versus Christianity, matrix comes back to the movie, The Matrix. Now, we come back and we say “simulated reality” or a “simulated consciousness.” That’s the new scientific way of cleaning it up and not getting caught into other thinking, which is a good point.

 

We absolutely believe. When we dig in quantum physics and we keep going down smaller and smaller, you think the details would become more complex but they become vaster. It’s like space widens. If we go out and we look into the universe, the universe just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Every time we think we’ve seen the edges of the universe, we find out that it’s ten times bigger than that! Simulated reality makes sense when you think about this! It’s observable and the second we are able to observe it, it changes.

 

I did a huge lecture probably almost a decade ago now on all of this. I’ve been preaching about it for thirty years, more than thirty years. I don’t come forward and say it at that time period because how do you say to somebody, “Oh, you’re in a video game. You’re in a simulated reality,” ten years ago? We have to say “dimensions” and “alternate realities” and “frequencies.” I would say, “Okay, imagine in one frequency, you’re in a car and you’re driving and you’re heading down the highway and you’re doing 60 miles per hour. The other car next to you is doing 60. You look over and you can see the person, what magazine they’re looking at, what hair color they have, what they’re wearing for clothing. If you pass and you keep going and another car passes you in the lane and they doing 100 miles per hour, all you see is a momentary blur. All you see is something and you try to distinguish it but it’s gone. It’s there and gone.

 

In some cases, you’re not even aware of it. It just shoots by. These are different frequencies. That’s how I try to explain it at that time. I already wanted to say, “Look, there are simulated realities happening all around us.” When you think you see somebody out of the corner of your eye, I used to say that that was a spirit or an entity because people could accept that more. The truth is that it’s overlaying simulated reality with something going on and you just happened to have what I call “a glitch.” Or with paranormal events that are paranormal, these aren’t paranormal likes ghosts and spirits and hauntings and stuff, it’s literally a glitch in the matrix, or as Neo would say in The Matrix, it is déjà vu, it’s a glitch. This is not just a repeat of something, these are like things dripping over or in. We, as primitive people, because we’re still very primitive, we go, “Oh! They’re spirits! They’re ghosts,” just like our ancestors used to say. It’s just that we think we’re smarter.

 

Guest: I’m curious because I hate over-spiritualizing things. We all do that. Do you think—What’s the biggest—I know in your book [Handbook of the Navigator], you kind of talked about how we’re kind of like cells to God in a sense, like how cells are to us in our body. A big picture here, you could say…Do you think we’re like God in disguise or are we just cells in a much bigger picture? [44:08]

 

Eric: Well, there are different ways to look at it because everything is going to change now in the sense of spirituality. I’m trying to pioneer this kind of approach in making it palatable to people so they don’t feel like, “Oh, we’re in a machine! It’s cold!” There is a knee-jerk reaction. When we say, “other dimensions,” we’re fine with that spiritually. The second you call it a simulated reality or “we live in the matrix,” we get this knee-jerk reaction that’s like a panic attack, like “What do you mean?!” It’s just words. It’s really words. Repeat your question again.

 

Guest: Do you think there’s like…I guess you would call it God. Is there like a grand master plan, kind of like in the movie, the Matrix? There’s this whole thing behind it. There’s this whole thing behind it. There’s always another level to go to. Is there an architect or is it just kind of this crazy evolutionary process? Are we God in disguise? Is there a source behind this? Is it a never-ending paradigm? What is it, really? I know that’s a crazy question but like what’s going on? [45:06]

 

Eric: If you were to study all of the material that I have, you’d have the answer. For me to give it in a nutshell and have you go, “Oh, alright,” I can totally get that. That’s like you basically being thrown in an MMA ring with the world champion and saying, “Okay, you can do a round with this guy. One round.”

 

Guest: That makes sense, right. [45:53]

 

Eric: People want this instant, magic wand. Your generation, McDonald’s, they just want to be tapped in. They want the easy answer. If you’re a physicist or scientist or whatever, to evolve to that level, you’ve got to discipline your mind. You have to have revelations and experiences to make your mind capable of comprehending something so much more complex than where you’re ready. Your ego says, “Oh, you’re ready! You’re 27 years old!” “You’re ready, you’re 50!” “Oh, you’re ready! You’re 100!” The truth is that not everybody is really ready for that. It could be terrifying or it could be just so numbing that you really disconnect from everything. You don’t really fully understand what to do with it. If you understand it, there’s still the whole level of, “How do you work with that? What do you do with it?”

 

In a nutshell: Look, it’s a very, very complex thing but I do answer it and people who are students of mine, they know I do. As I said yesterday, you’ve got to look at it in different ways. One way is to say that—I often say that if you look at nature, you will see a repetitive process, chaos theory. If you look at something, it’s like repeating over and over and over again. If you look at a spiral, or a hurricane, a tornado, a swirling of water going down a drain, a galaxy. There are certain things that are repetitive over and over. There are only so many of them.

 

Having said that, when you look at consciousness as a human being, you’re made out of billions of living cells. If I say to you, “Point to where you are,” you can’t. You say this is you but none of it is really you. You could get banged in the head and totally be unconscious, but this body will keep on going if you feed it. It doesn’t give a shit. We do know through emotion that we affect it. If we’re optimistic, our immune system goes up. If we’re depressed, the immune system goes down. It’s like the force that’s affecting all the living portions of your universe, your body. For cells to move just a tenth of an inch, it’s like their whole life existence. It’s like millions of years depending on how you look at it and what portion we’re talking about.

Having said that, you have to look now beyond the organic and look at your consciousness, what we call “self-awareness.,” your thoughts. When you look at it, you—and this is what I said yesterday, I’ll repeat it—you have different personalities in you. The person that I’m talking to is just a facet of this very multi-faceted consciousness that has all these other personalities that actually have their own processing and thinking of how they see the world. In a very simple way, I would say to you: Look, if you’re really tired, you’ve been working out at the gym, you got beat up by the training guys and all this other stuff. You’re exhausted. Your body is sore, tired, but you’re starving-hungry.

 

You go this restaurant and it’s the only restaurant for 50 miles in any direction. You’re ready to pass out. You’re tired. Your ass hurts, your back hurts, your head hurts, your shoulders hurt, your hands hurt. Everything’s been just tired, sore. You go in there and they’re like, “Well, there’s a 45 minute wait. Now, the first part of one of your consciousnesses, which is the hungry “I” goes, “Fuck no! I can’t wait that long! I’ve got to eat right now!” It searches out where there might be some other solution to the problem. It looks over and it sees the bar and there are these hard, wood, stiff really upright chairs. Just awful, like they should’ve been changed out twenty years ago. You’re like, “Can I sit on those?”

The lady is like, “Yeah, if you want you can sit there and you can order to eat.” You look over and there’s this other part of you that goes—that’s your body part saying, “We’re tired. We’re exhausted. Look at those big cushy booths. Look how cozy and private they are. Look how comfortable that is. Look at the fabric on there, soft and everything.” Now, you’re having a fight between two intelligent consciousnesses in your mind that have a difference of opinion. One is trying to convince you, “Let’s eat now. Screw the shit. Deal with the hard chairs. Satisfy the drive of your body.” The other one is saying for your body, “No, no! You can wait! It’s just 45-minutes for Christ’s sake! We’re already 3 minutes into it! Think about it! We’ve only got 42 minutes left! We’ll go over to the booth!”

 

These are intelligences. They’re entire personalities. You could almost give them their own name. They’re part of this complex consciousness you have. You have hundreds if not thousands of them. You have one as a lover, as friend, as a fighter, as a teacher. As we switch these personas onto a certain level, even though they’re all sharing data. They all can draw from each other’s memories like a hive-collective to a database of a computer. They certainly have an agenda. They certainly have a personality. They certainly have a stance.

 

When you ask me, what you’re asking me is, “What are we in? Is there a God or anything?” I would say to you: When you’re in a dream, how many people can you have a conversation with? How far can you walk in the world of your dream? How deep can you go to the deep depths of the ocean? How far, in a spaceship, can you travel in space? Tell me the limits.

 

Guest: It’s limitless. [51:15]

 

Eric: My point. That’s from your little brain’s CPU that’s speck in the universe that’s smaller than a particle. Think about this. If there was one final consciousness, it’s entire consciousness would be like a database of shared information. It just would say that it limits a certain amount of information or at least you think you’re limited. This is where psychic ability comes in. You’re getting past the limits or the governors of what’s restricting you, like a car can do 180 but it’s set with a little chip in there saying you can only do 90 or 100. If you could find a way to hack it, you would be able to go faster. If you find a way to hack your consciousness, all of a sudden it can pull data from other places. This is what psychic phenomena is. This is past lives. This is sensory. This is seeing the future.

 

Some of these people are finding ways of getting around the system and it’s like a kind of small, drip level of information. They’re using it and they’re like, “Ooh, this guy’s got powers!” In essence, I believe that God exists whether we are simulated and we are not the real deal or we are the real deal. Regardless, there is a consciousness to it all. Whatever, if there is a real deal, it’s still the dream of this ultimate universe and our consciousness. If you go into the Handbook of the Navigator that I honestly wrote around 15 years old, 16 years old, it just became later to the point where it actually got put into written word when I got older.

 

If you think about what I say about the creation of God and the particles and how the various particles combined and became an electrical pattern, there’s no time limit! You might as well say that you’ve got a little tiny dash of snowflake going down a mountain and it’s got a little gravitational pull. If it has all the time in the world and never stops rolling, eventually it becomes bigger. It becomes more complex. As I explain in that, that is actually the birth of the consciousness of God. It eventually starts to self-reflect. We, in a sense, are its dream. It gets more and more complex because it’s relating and thinking, just like in a dream.

 

If I can say to you, “Can you learn something in a dream that hadn’t occurred to you before?” The answer is yes. Look at how electricity was created through Edison. Einstein had breakthroughs in his dreams. They were thinking about stuff that they couldn’t break and all of a sudden, it’s there, it appears. That is progressive intelligence. That’s like a supercomputer within your own consciousness. In essence, I say: Don’t get too caught up in trying to figure out that big answer.

 

Guest: And the why, the huge why, right? [54:05]

 

Eric: Right, because I’ll get to why. I’ll teach you. Whatever you’re understanding right now is not even a quarter of one percent of what I present in all of the teachings because when you have events that happen psychically and you’re like, “Holy shit,” that is actually knowledge. It’s not just something you observed, it’s actually a downloading of information that now will take may be days or weeks. You’re going to revolve in on this and some of it is going to get edited because there is an editing process to limiting you, throttling what you can know. I keep finding ways to hack the system and that’s really what it should all be called, hacking the system of consciousness.

 

Guest: You’re a spiritual computer hacker! [54:46]

 

Eric: Yeah! Yes and that’s how I look at it. People will say, “Oh, but you have so much material!” Yeah, we’ve got more material—I was told years ago—than all of the other paranormal/metaphysical schools combined.

 

Guest: I’ve seen that you have a lot, for sure. [55:00]

 

Eric: Yes, but the truth is that you can go through that within—less than 4 years of college, probably one year, maybe sixth months even if you dedicate yourself and think about. It’s taken over a decade and a half to two decades to compile it. Here, somebody comes along and they can just pop it in their headphones and go for a walk and just keep downloading all this information. The advantage to new people is just mind-blowing to how fast they could accelerate their consciousness. They’re complaining, “Well, that seems like an awful lot.” I’m like, “Just go to the McDonald’s school of information and put your flashing goggles on and your sound headphones.”

 

Guest: I’m curious. I know you’ve mentioned some things about drugs and bending God and stuff but what’s your take on hallucinogens and psychedelics? Do you think that’s kind of a shortcut, hack in the system to get there quicker for a quick view or a glance? Obviously, for me, I’ve always kind of seen that as a counterfeit way of doing it but is that still a legit shortcut for a temporary time? [55:41]

 

Eric: I would say this: I don’t speak out of ignorance and I’d like to think I’m honest. I’ve done LSD. I’ve done ayahuasca. I’ve done my share of marijuna.

 

Guest: You’ve done ayahuasca? [56:16]

 

Eric: Absolutely.

 

Guest: I’ve wanted to for the longest time. [56:19]

 

Eric: I would say: Look, I don’t feel the need to ever do it again. There’s this whole thing, I go into it, what happened, and what took place and what my position is. I talk about all of these things. I’m very liberal, I’m very honest. I don’t hold information back from people. I’m very giving with it. You make of it what you want. Is there an advantage to using hallucinogens? Absolutely, absolutely. Does it come at a price? Absolutely.

 

When I would do various things, it would knock out my psychic ability fifty-fold. I would have to have recoup period for my brain synapses to kind of get back and start to get my sensory back. It depends which drug we’re talking and stuff. Did I experience stuff that was interesting? Absolutely, but here’s the problem: Everything that I experience was stuff that I could imagine already? In other words, if you see a pterodactyl, you’re like “Holy shit, it’s a pterodactyl!” That’s nothing new! Show me something new! Show me something I haven’t—

 

Are those things out there? Absolutely. There are things. Can you push between reality and not? I think so, absolutely. In lies the problem, there’s an addictive level to it. It becomes just like the strobing lights and the headphones but tenfold more because you think that you’re getting a simpler way of attaining information you want and then you get addicted to it without realizing you’re getting addicted to it and it becomes your go-to. No longer can you function in this reality or society. Not only that, but you’re burning out neural pathways, so I often say, “Using drugs is like slamming the door of your mind.” It’s not the door that takes the beating, it’s the frame of the door. As you slam that door, eventually it starts to buckle and warp until eventually, you can’t close it anymore. You go a little fucking nuts! There’s alway this draft then, or worse! You’re never quite the same anymore.

 

You can get away with it once or twice. Anytime I’ve done acid, I’ve done a lot of—I wouldn’t say a lot of acid, I’ve done a number of trips but I’ve done some heavy dosing. Probably because I have fairly good mental discipline, even when I was younger, I found it interesting but I didn’t find it mind-blowing. Do you understand?

 

Ayahuasca, without a doubt, in my opinion, was probably the strongest one out of all hallucinogens that I’ve done. I’ve done mescaline. I’ve done shrooms. None of those compared to—DMT, yes, real ayahuasca. There are various forms. I had the real one from South America from one of the oldest trees. There’s a story I give on it. Like a fool, I was just supposed to drink some of it and I ended up drinking the whole thing because I thought I was supposed to. It turned out that I wasn’t supposed to, but hey! I had quite the experience and it legitimately hasn’t—There’s some stuff I say in there that I think is absolutely mind-blowing, even to people who utilize it. They totally go, “Holy shit!”

 

You’ll see all these insects. There’s a repetitive thing and I often say, “If you do ayahuasca versus doing DMT through the pill, there’s a difference.” To me, there’s nothing better than doing the plant one but it’s a different experience. The reason is that I think that there is—I’ll call it, for lack of a better word, because I don’t necessarily know if there’s a word for it or not, “liquid data.” It’s like program on a USB. It’s there but it’s not functionally doing anything until it hits an electrical field and unfolds into a holographic reality. You’ve got all of these characters with information that are going to—It’s like having a virus put in your computer. It takes on its own life and it preys on your own life.

 

Guest: Is that from the plants, do you think? [60:13]

 

Eric: Yes, absolutely. You take on this and it goes in your system and it kind of holographically molds over over your consciousness and you interact with that program. If you really look at it, X amount of percentage is repetitive. People will talk about going through a death cycle. You get eaten by these bugs where they eat all your stuff. If everybody is seeing kind of the same thing, then that is kind of like a computer program, it’s just like you’re going through the motions through your consciousness. If it was uniquely different for every single person and every level of it, every aspect of it, then that would be something a little bit different.

 

They talk about what I call “the snake lady,” it’s like this lady with black hair and these things. I didn’t know of any of that stuff. I did not have that presented to me as something that I would experience and yet, there it was. It was only afterward that I start investing in it and I started to see it repeated everywhere in a lot of the stuff that I had experienced. My feeling was, then, the same thing. It, to me, was what I call “Gaia consciousness,” versus universal consciousness. A lot of the Gaia people don’t like it when I bring this up I think they’re too earthly. It’s all about “mother goddess.” It’s all about earthy stuff. I just cringe from that. I’m like, “No, as much as I’m here to serve the world, I serve God and God is this universal thing.”

 

Of course, they feel the same way, but I think they’re too fixated on the idea of the “mother goddess” stuff. They can’t get out of that loop so they want to do marijuana, ayahuasca, and that became the cycle of their existence. Until they get older, where of course they want to move on but they’re like, “Oh, what did I do with my life? It’s over.” In essence, I think that some of these people are beautiful and they have good intentions. I think like any other group of people, no matter who, there are other people who have other intentions.

 

I think that it could be the death of a White Cell on a spiritual, universal level because for one year, to the day—I promised myself that if I did it, that I would not do it again for one year. No matter how badly I wanted to do it, I would not do it again. I can tell you from the minute I came back out of it, the only thing that was on my mind was going back into it and acquiring more ayahuasca to go into it. Anybody who tells you it’s not addictive is full of shit.

 

Guest: Same with cannabis. Same thing, in my opinion. [62:46]

 

Eric: It’s super—Yes, cannabis. When people say cannabis is not addictive, I’m like, “Bullshit, it’s not!” I had dreams about smoking marijuana for like two years after. I would wake up looking, thinking that I had it in some cabinet.

 

Guest: I could agree! [63:02]

 

Eric: The point is that this is where you get these people who get sucked into doing ayahuasca and they justify it. They find ways of making their argument of why it’s good and why you should do it. To me, that’s no longer you. If I wanted to do it so badly that I was—but it was my will of making that commitment to myself. I had this little pressure, it’s kind of strange but to me, it’s like when you snap a bottle like Snapple, it’s got that little pop-top thing where the air hits it and goes snap or whatever. It makes that pop. I felt like that was underneath my skull. I could give you almost the exact spot and it stayed there for months, months and months and months and months. It was almost—I don’t know if it was almost a year or eighth month or whatever it was. I remember where I was driving, back from work, where exactly I was. I always kind of wanted it to pop but you can’t get to it because there’s a skull. I’d always be trying. I’d be like, “Gosh, it’s driving me nuts!” Eventually, you’d get used to it but you’d think about it. You want to get in there but you can’t. One time, I was just kind of mentally working it, working it, just wanting it to go. When you’re driving, what else have you got to do? Finally, all of a sudden, it went “Pop!” It was relief. From that moment on, I had no more desire to do the ayahuasca again.

 

Guest: Wow! [64:23]

 

Eric: Yes and I remember the moment, the place, everything of where that moment happened. Then, I was like, “Oh, I’m over it!” It’s like I came back to my senses. It was that powerful. I swear that I probably thought about it every day at least once, of wanting to do it again and having to control myself from that higher consciousness, going, “Okay, let’s just put it aside,” but my body wanted it.

 

Guest: Wow. Another powerful desire: sex. Even in my Christian background, things of flesh were seen as negative, bad. I have seen some positive aspects of abstinence with gaining spiritual power that way. I’m curious what you take is on sex. What’s your spiritual view on sex in general? [64:49]

 

Eric: I think I do a two hour or four-hour class just on that subject.

Jesse: It’s like four hours. [67:17]

 

Eric: It’s such a touchy subject. It’s so taboo. It’s only in the last five years if you think about it that you’ve started to see on regular TV, people showing their ass. Now, they’re grinding and doing all of their business on TV. You may not see the parts doing it but now we’re like, “Ah, what’s the big deal?” Before, it was like, “Oh my god!”

 

Of course, you have the taboo of various sexes and same-sex and everything else. It’s your generation now, MTV, you don’t give shit. We’re finally catching up to the French and the Europeans. They’re way beyond us, and the Spaniards. We’re really—This is why I said 80 percent religion here, 20 percent there. We really are the Neanderthals when it comes to that. It’s all so bad. Control, control, control, control. That’s what it is.

 

Is there energy involved with sex? Absolutely there is. Are there other issues with it? Yeah, You’re talking about one of the strongest programmed things in human nature that guarantees the procreation of our species. Next to breathing, oxygen, next to having to drink water and having to eat food and having to have shelter, your fifth one or thereabouts is basically the drive that’s designed in you to mate, to procreate.

The problem is that it wants to make a baby. We want to beat the system and we’ve managed to cheat the system, so we’re constantly going at it like crazed monkeys. I go into it for a couple hours. To justify it in a simple conversation is incredibly difficult. I don’t want to sit here and say, “Hey, you’ve got to buy my material,” but at the end of the day, what the hell do you want me to say? Get the books, you can get it for $4.95. I don’t know if it’s in there or not but it should be.

 

Nick: Yeah, it is. [67:03]

 

Eric: I don’t know what else to do. Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to it. If you look at human nature, you realize that almost everything in the human mind has a governor set on the limits and aspects of the parameter of what that’s supposed to be like. All that psychic phenomena is spiritual or mental disciplines through Buddhism or Hinduism and going in your mind is really hacking reality. It’s hacking that system and you’re changing the rules of what your mind is capable of understanding or seeing or perceiving. That is the pursuit to finding a higher truth. We’re not allowed to see the real truth so you’re finding ways to peer and get past that. That is the spiritual adept. That is the mystic.

 

When it comes to sex, sure, it’s a conversation that can’t be—It’s the elephant in the room. Any guy and girl, for the matter, it’s something going through their head. If I don’t address that, then I’m doing a disservice to students. You could say, “Well, that’s my opinion.” Fine, that’s my opinion, but you tell me if you don’t agree or see the common sense in it. I believe in a lot of common sense thinking, if possible.

 

Guest: Absolutely. Speaking of energy, what’s your take on chi? Obviously being in martial arts, that’s a hot topic here. What’s your view on chi, channeling energy? Can you store it? Can you build up a lot of it? Can you become invincible to an extent? What’s your view on that? [68:23]

 

Eric: A lot of chi is like New Age shit with auras and everything else. They’ve taken 10 percent truth and added 90 percent bullshit. It’s from people who never achieved, experienced it, or know what it is. They just try to think they know what they’re doing with it. I hate to be that guy and they’re going to all come after me now. Whatever, whatever.

I see these people in the [Youtube videos] back when they would heat up with their hands and make the fire burst from paper and stuff. I’d go, “Absolutely not true.” You’d find out later that they’re training themselves to take electrical charge and that they’d put their hand on the wall and they find out later that there’s this electrical current that they built into the wall. They’re making it stay in their muscle tissue, water, fatty tissue and they’ve learned to expand or retract the muscles, which actually makes the electricity build up and it actually will make fire. It’s amazing in itself until you get cancer and die.

 

In the end, they’re trying to say it chi. Now, you have people who basically say, “Try to move me,” and this and that. You do that and I think that’s more mental, mind over students. They believe that and then all of a sudden they can’t move them. Is there chi? Yes, there is chi. Is there an energy that can be utilized? Absolutely. I think that the way that it’s been defined has been distorted greatly. That is a conversation that I’m sure I go into. I kind of go into the pros and cons of that.
Do I believe that there are forces and energies within the bodies that can do profound things? Absolutely. Do I think that you’re going to find this in some quick, easy fix way? No. If you were to say, “Hey, Eric, do you think you could train me as an MMA fighter to do really badass stuff?” I would say, “I can take the best guy and up his game 15 percent.” That’s huge if you think about it.

 

Guest: That’s what I figured. [70:29]

 

Eric: If you’re an A-game guy and somebody is like, “I can take your 100 percent and bring it to a 115” or make it so that you become the new level of what 100 is ad everybody else drops down to 85 or whatever, then let’s call it. All of that is within the mind and manipulating your mind and disciplining it. When you think about the primitive state of mind, the hunter-gatherer, and our survival means, what we had to do with adrenaline pulsing in our body, and all of these different things. If there’s a way to control that which still comes to consciousness, consciousness equals electricity pulsing in your blood and the release and timed release of biochemicals in your body. This becomes chi. It’s still energy. It’s electricity. The electricity in your body is produced by chemical factors in your body.

 

If you can manipulate or find a way to get that electricity to manipulate or you can turn on adrenaline in a certain way and control it, you have a significant edge over your opponent. This is what goes into true martial arts. Even the martial arts, I believe, in the East if you will, has lost a lot of that knowledge. There’s that truth also.

 

Guest: That’s good. That makes a lot more sense because chi is kind of a weird term, but there’s a lot of truth to that. You’re right. [71:50]

 

Eric: It’s not only that, but you’ve got to think of chi outside of the box. Most people think of chi as this energy where you can push people away and do stuff. What you really have to understand with chi—and this is where I get frustrated because I have to now use the word chi because there’s not necessarily a better word that the commonality of people listening can relate to and know what I’m talking about—but they also have this built up concept that they’ve been educated on. If I say it, they make these assumptions without realizing they’re making assumptions and now we could be talking about two different things.

 

This goes for everything. This is why I hate New Age. I hate all of these different things because they’re destroyed real knowledge. When you think about chi, I don’t necessarily think about chi as the energy moving through the body. I think of it beyond that. I think about it as the electrical field around the body. That electrical field has a survival mechanism that I believe we’ve had since primitive day to survive against animals that were 50 times stronger than us, 50 times faster, had fangs, had claws, had a sense of smell greater than us. We could sense them and the hair stands up on your back and you’re like, “Something is watching us. Something is preying on us.”

 

If you turn and you can feel that, that is a survival instinct. I think that is a psychic ability. If you could learn to utilize that to sense what your opponent is going to do next to you, you should have a reaction that’s before you even have the thought. That is primitive instinct. There’s this other mechanism that can think faster that will react to that. I think to some degree, that’s what training helps to do. You’re learning all these patterns and when a body moves a certain way, you’re feeling that movement in them and it’s recognizing that. I’m saying it can be pushed to another level.

 

Guest: I’m really curious of what your thoughts are on healing potential? I’m curious just physically and spiritually. Obviously for me in the octagon but just in general, what are the possibilities for human potential? What do you think? [73:54]

 

Eric: That’s a very open-ended question when you talk to a person like me.

 

Guest: Yeah, that’s why I gave it to you that way. [74:11]

 

Eric: If I think of it in standard terms, I think that you can have extreme adrenaline pump. I think that the human muscle can get so tight, meaning lifting or strengthening-wise that it literally can become like wood. I wouldn’t say steel, but it can become incredibly—That’s very powerful. Your hand could crush something under extreme situations. There would be a limit to that.

 

On another level, on a metaphysical level, I also believe that if we live in a simulated reality and everything’s an illusion or everything is basically a hologram, then the real limit is the limit of which the governors in your brain define what your capabilities are. I think that when you think about spiritual masters who’ve done miracles, as soon as you accept the idea that we live in a simulated reality, it’s like, “Oh my god, it makes so much sense!” You realize that anything is almost possible but there is probably a limit as to how far that can be pushed. That limit, when it is pushed, we say, “Oh my god, it’s a miracle.”

 

I’ve done stuff and have done multiple things with witnesses that defy physics. If I look at it as a simulated reality, then I’m just tampering with the laws of the program. Magic is only magic to the intelligence that can’t comprehend the science behind it. So is mysticism, psychic phenomena, everything. I believe that anything I can do, I can teach anybody else to do. That’s what I do. At the end of the day, there’s a systematic, mathematical process in my mind. I may not be using math to teach it but at the end of the day, there’s a system and it can be replicated.

 

Guest: That’s crazy. A few more small questions for you if that’s fine. [76:05]

 

Eric: Alright, we’ve got to wrap it up soon! We’ve been going here for a while!

Guest: Alright, one small one real quick is just on creating change and making a difference. In the big scheme, if this is all an illusion, I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on actually doing positive things for people, making a difference, whether that’s social justice causes or whatever. If this is an illusion, what’s the balance between doing good and impacting people and just being lazy and saying “Whatever.” [76:12]

 

Eric: This is where I can get hung because I’m supposed to be a spiritual teacher and all about love and kindness and all this other stuff, but I’m a realist. It’s not that I don’t feel things. It’s not that I don’t have love. I feel like I have an abundant amount of love. I think sometimes you can do things for people and they’re very thankful. A month later, you need something and that person is just like, ”What do you need? Why are you bothering me?” I think it creates in some people this sense of spite because you do much for so many other people but it’s so easily forgotten. Why bother doing that? Do you get what I’m saying?

 

On the same token, I do a lot of things for a lot of people. I think the people closest to me know how much I do. I help a lot of people. I don’t put it out there because then everybody comes in droves. There’s only so much of me I can do but anybody who knows me personally, I think I do an awful lot for people. My philosophy is that I believe I’m one of those people who get high off of helping or doing stuff for other people. I enjoy it. I make me feel good and so I want to do thing to help other people. Whether or not they reciprocate that back or do something, helping me with something at my house or whatever, it doesn’t matter to me but it does sometimes if I’m ever really in a pinch. I’m like, “Boy, you know, all the things I did for this person and I’m shocked that they couldn’t stop for ten minutes out of their day for me.” Most of my friends, fortunately, would be willing to do that. This is just a very practical view of something that’s a very complex question.

 

In a simulated reality, the point is that there’s a part of me that looks at the simulated reality and works on that in a mystic way. I have this other personality that pursues knowledge through it, that pursues burning questions, that pursues things that just entice me. Then, there’s this part of me that accepts the fact that I am in this reality, I am having a life, and I’ve got to interact with other people. In that process, I have to be humane. I have to be kind. I have to treat people the way that I would want to be treated. There are bad people and there are good people. There are bad intentions and good intentions.

 

For the most part, I have to constantly evolve myself and say, “Did I make a mistake? Do I regret that decision? Would I do it differently the next time around?” I think that’s the part of living as a human and growing. When you don’t have remorse or you don’t rethink things, then you’re not really changing. Then you’re not—whatever. I think that the value of life is as important as the value of knowing there’s a simulated reality and wanting to know much about it.

 

Guest: That’s powerful. [79:28]

 

Eric: That’s my opinion. I think that whether we live in a simulated reality or not—and I do believe we do—I think it’s just as beautiful then as when I would reflect before I considered a simulated reality. Going back to my youth, I would look at everything and say, “My god! God, you created the most beautiful, mind-blowing place ever imaginable! I love it! It’s beautiful!” I feel that way to this day! See the hair popping up on my arm?

I think that being in this reality, simulated or not, is an absolutely beautiful thing. I think that the people that I meet in this life I will mourn and be very despaired to leave them one day when I part this reality. That speaks volumes because no matter how simulated they are and “not real people,” in my mind, there as real as I ever was. There are things I learned from them and there are shared things and there are all of these things. To me, the existence of life on any level that’s—even simple life—is the pursuit of garnering information, data, experiences. The only time I’m going to be like, “It’s not worth anything—” It’s not the fact that I know the real secret behind it all. It’s that, is there anything here that’s not rewarding me on some level that I’m getting something out of? Am I not getting experiences anymore? Am I not discovering things that are new about people or life or new things?

 

There are certain things in life that—There’s an old saying: “the world gets smaller the more intelligent you become.” It’s absolutely true. I sometimes envy the terminology of “ignorance is bliss.” I remember times when I knew a lot less and the world seemed much more interesting. Now, I think about traveling places in the world and I feel like I’ve been there already even though I never have. I kind of know what to expect, what’s going happen, what it will be like, so I’m not as excited about it anymore. My mind is so complex that I can do all that. In a way, I feel cheated but this is what pursues me mystically to peel the ribbons of reality to keep pursuing this thing. In the meantime, I’m definitely rooted here. There’s a commitment. Otherwise, why not check out and why not be able to do it all?

 

Guest: That’s really good. [81:54]