Martin W Ball, PhD — 5-Meo-DMT, Non-Duality, The Science Of Psychedelics, Spiritual Bullshit, Ego Transformation and More – #31

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Or do you know someone who’s always focused on “manifesting” their dreams … who only surrounds themselves with “high-vibe” people?

These are classic examples of spiritual bullshit.

And in this episode, we talk all about the various types of spiritual bullshit (plus we venture into the wide-ranging realm of psychedelics) with Martin W Ball.

With a diverse background encompassing a PhD in Religious Studies, writing, artistry, music, and more, Martin talks about how to navigate the complex landscape of psychedelic experiences, namely 5-meo-DMT and salvia divinorum.

In this episode, Martin sheds light on several key aspects of the psychedelic journey and its impact on the human ego.

Formation of Spiritual Egos and Post-Psychedelic Identities

Martin W Ball explains the concept of non-duality and “spiritual egos” – the distinct personas that can emerge after psychedelic experiences.

Martin also unveils the psychological mechanics behind why people form spiritual egos, offering a deeper understanding of how altered states of consciousness influence your perception of who you are (either for better or for worse).

Psychedelics and the Mind-Body Connection

We then discuss the diverse effects of different psychedelics on both the mind and the body. Martin shares his personal encounters with entheogens like 5-meo-DMT, alcohol, cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, and salvia divinorum.

Each account is a window into how psychedelics can be used to enhance your life, or create more bullshit (enter the Messiah complex).

The Profound Encounter with 5-meo DMT

5-meo-DMT is a potent psychedelic renowned for inducing ego death experiences. Martin explains how it works, and how it can be used to unlock past traumas and greater self-awareness.

Assimilating Profound Experiences and Navigating Ego

We also discussed the challenges of assimilating profound psychedelic experiences and the intricate dance with ego. Martin shares how the ego can shape out experience of reality (which might not in fact be reality), and how past lives, out-of-body experiences, and enlightenment are merely just distractions from being present in the here-and-now. Aka, we talk about all the spiritual bullshit that so many people get caught up in when taking the psychedelic route.

Beyond Psychedelics: Storytelling, Self-Transformation, and Physical Catharsis

Martin W Ball talks about the power of mental stories, and how these can shape your identity. He also explains how physical expression when using psychedelics can be a therapeutic tool for processing and releasing emotions (e.g. crying, purging, screaming, or rolling on the ground). Martin’s insights illuminate the many avenues of personal growth and self-discovery that extend beyond the realm of psychedelics.

The Value of Authenticity and Truth in Psychedelic Practice

Throughout our discussion, Martin emphasizes the paramount importance of authenticity and truth in the practice of psychedelics. He underscores the significance of approaching these experiences with sincerity and openness, in order to tap into the transformative potential that lies inside each person (if they’re ready to see it).

Your understanding of psychedelics (and yourself – mind and body) will be enriched and expanded by the insights shared by Martin W Ball.

This episode promises to challenge your preconceptions, provoke introspection, and inspire a renewed understanding on the power (and risks) of psychedelics.

Martin sheds a light on the endemic of spiritual bullshit (unfortunately it’s everywhere in the spiritual community).

How all these stories and ideas can be a major distraction.

And they can disconnect you from happiness and joy.

So, prepare to embark on a wildly interesting journey that might just revolutionise your understanding of consciousness, self, and the intricacies of your mind.

Connect With Martin W Ball

• martinball.net
• Instagram

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Ellie Goode — Host of the Provocative “Sex, Money & Rage“ Podcast, Nervous System Junkie, and Plant Psychonaut 🌿

I created Sex, Money & Rage to talk about everything that’s taboo. BDSM. Plant medicine. Healthy Rage. Kink. Emotions. Boundaries. Money issues. Less thinking, more feeling. How to get into your body and silence your overactive mind.

Sex, Money & Rage provides straight-up, powerful nervous system tools to help you dominate life’s toughest moments.

All podcast episodes are located here.

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Transcript:

Ellie GoodeHost00:04

Welcome to the Sex Money and Rage podcast.

Ellie GoodeHost00:04

Welcome to the sex, money and rage podcast.

Martin W BallGuest00:08

Let’s take someone who just thinks that they’re the spiritual shit. They’re like man, I’m, I’m fucking top spiritual dog. And people definitely develop spiritual egos, there’s no doubt about that. And then then they take a psychedelic and in their experience they perceive themselves as the Messiah and they get the message like you’re the one, it’s all up to you, but that’s just. It’s just feeding the bullshit that they’ve been feeding themselves for years. And then they come out of it and they say I’m going to start a cult and I’m now going to be a cult leader. And usually they don’t put into those terms, but that’s what happens to people. And then actually what it’s doing is inflating these dysfunctional aspects of their ego.

Ellie GoodeHost00:58

Welcome back to sex, money and rage. I’m your host, ellie, and thank you for listening. If you want to support the podcast and help it grow, I’ll be forever grateful. Just hit the subscribe or follow button and make sure notifications are ticked so I can spam the shit out of you. If you have 30 seconds to spare, please leave a five star reading or review.

01:17

It really helps to get the word out, especially as this is a new podcast. We’re talking about the psychology and the hangups that people have around sex, money and rage. We also talk about psychedelics and nervous system hacks to help you dominate in business and in life, because life is more fun when you dominate. Sex, money and Rage is about living dangerously, and it’s the provocative podcast where we talk about anything and everything that’s taboo. So if you’re easily offended and somehow ended up listening to a podcast about sex, money and rage, you should probably push the pause button right now. Or maybe you should listen, I don’t know. Anyway, today’s interview is with Martin Bull, who has a PhD and is a writer, independent publisher, non-dual guide and consultant. If you’re wondering what non-dual means and non-duality, then keep listening. He’s also a visionary artist and musician. He is very big into entheogenic medicines and self exploration, working with the mind and the ego and all of that fun stuff, especially five MEO DMT.

02:20

This interview was a really, really interesting one and pretty out there. We talked about some of the things around how sometimes these psychedelics can make your mind and your ego and your bullshit even stronger and more evident, which you might be wondering. Oh, I knew these people who have done all these plant medicine or have explored these alternative modalities and they’re actually worse than they were before, or they’re more just caught up in stories and shit. So, yeah, it was a really interesting episode. It’s pretty out there, pretty different.

02:50

So just wanted to put a disclaimer in there, as per normal, that I am not recommending or encouraging you to do psychedelics or plant medicine or anything of the sort. Please do your own research and check everything before deciding whether you want to do it or not. It is not a magic pill that fixes everything. I know from experience these psychedelics can just shine light on things, they can magnify things. So I’ve been learning recently that, yeah, they’re powerful tools, they’re really really incredible in a lot of ways, but they are not without risks. So definitely chat to people who have done it, interview people, research, whatever you need to do. If you decide you do want to do psychedelics, but you know what, then not necessary for everyone. There are many ways to heal and work on yourself, and psychedelics are just one component. Anyway, that’s enough for me. Let’s jump in and hear what Martin has to say, all about his crazy experiences. Hey Martin, how are you going this morning? Oh, this afternoon, I should say.

Martin W BallGuest03:55

I’m doing well. Thank you very much. Yeah, awesome, looking forward to speaking with you today.

Ellie GoodeHost03:59

Yeah, yeah, likewise it should be a good conversation. I was doing some research to prep for the interview and you’ve got a very interesting background. I’m going to have some interesting things to talk about, so, yeah, cool. So I guess, for people who don’t know you or have never heard of you, can you just sort of chat a bit about who you are and what you do?

Martin W BallGuest04:23

Okay, sure. Well, my name is Martin, so I’ll give you this is my non-dual answer to the question, because we’ll probably be getting into non-duality because that’s a big part of what I’m known for. So my non-dual answer is I’m a localized embodiment of the universal consciousness that is associated with this particular human vehicle and personality construct that is known as Martin. So that’s my non-dual answer to that question. But the personal answer yeah, my name is Martin. I live in Ashland in Southern Oregon and this is where I’ve been living since late 2007. And as an individual, I wear a lot of different hats, in the sense that I do a lot of different things, but underneath all of the various things that I do, my primary mission in life is just to be myself and to express myself and to authentically bring myself into whatever it is that I do. So now let’s go down the list. I’ve been the host of the Entheogenic Evolution podcast since 2008. So I’ve been doing that for about 15 and a half years now. And also something that I’m plugging about that is that I think that at this point, I might be the longest consistently running podcast on the planet on the topic of psychedelics and entheogens, because I’ve been doing it for so long. So that might be true. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the stats on that, but I’ve been doing that for a long, long time and also, somewhat related to that, I’ve also been an event organizer around the topics of psychedelics and education. So I’ve organized a number of events here in Ashland. Formerly I’d run the Exploring Psychedelics program out of Southern Oregon University excuse me, conference out of Southern Oregon University, and I did that for five years. So also I have my PhD in religious studies and I was actually a professor of religious studies at Southern Oregon University for about 10 years. I got laid off in the past few years due to student enrollment drops from coronavirus and the university needed to take care of its budget and my classes got cut. So I’ve been unemployed as a professor for the past several years but did that for a number of years and also taught briefly at UC Berkeley in California. Okay, so those are. Those are those items.

06:51

I’m also kind of a self-identified non-dual and theogenic educator, in the sense that my primary focus when it comes to entheogens and psychedelics is the non-dual experience and how we can work with various entheogens in order to generate non-dual experiences and then also how to integrate those experiences into a transformed and liberated life. I’m primarily known for my work on five-methoxydimethyltryptamine, that’s a five-MEO DMT. I’m also the guy who nicknamed it the God Molecule back in 2008, and apparently that I also named it the crown jewel of entheogens at that point. But the God Molecule seems to have really taken off and so people use that kind of all around the world at this point.

07:42

I’m also an author. I’ve authored a number of different books, and they range through a variety of things. My main books that sell the most are my non-fiction books about non-duality and entheogens, but I’ve also released some books of poetry, some books of my visionary art, and I’m also the author of six novels, which I kind of call psychedelic fiction, because they kind of bridge the gap between fantasy and science fiction and they’re generally psychedelics play main roles within those novels. So there’s still more to the list. I’m also a visionary artist. I’ve been making art since I was a kid and these days I do a lot of digital artwork and it kind of fits within the visionary art category. I’m also an avid nature photographer and I use a lot of my photography in my art these days, especially since about a year and a half ago I put down the big bucks for a much better camera and a much bigger and better lens, and so use a lot of my bird photography in my art since then and also use a lot of my landscape photography within my art.

08:55

I’m also a musician. I have been making music since I was about 15 years old. I am self-taught as a musician and I’m a multi-instrumentalist, so I play a wide variety of different instruments and I like to refer to myself as a musical shapeshifter, in the sense that I don’t really adhere to any particular genre or style and really look at music as an exploration and a journey, and I want to go as many places as I possibly can with music. So we’re almost to the end of the list. I’m also a father. I’m a family man. I’ve got three kids. Two of them are a bit older, one’s in college, one is in high school and my youngest, jayden, he’s 10. He just finished fourth grade and he is my little budding naturalist buddy, in the sense that he and I pretty much, if I’m not doing interviews or doing other work on the computer and if he’s available, we are out in nature taking photographs, catching lizards and snakes and toads and frogs and stuff like that. So he’s my little outdoor buddy.

09:59

And also these days I work as a non-dual and theogenic integration coach, meaning that I work with a variety of clients around the world. We do video calls, and the majority of them are people who have had an experience with 5MEO DMT, but it’s certainly not limited to that People having all different kinds of experiences as psychedelics, and so they bring their case to me and say, hey, this is what happened and I can help them kind of unpack, from a non-dual and energetic perspective, what’s going on without putting a lot of meaning and interpretation into it, and let’s see. Lastly, I would say that I was a facilitator of 5MEO DMT experiences for a number of years. I stopped doing that back in 2016, but developed a whole program and methodology there that I called non-dual energetic therapy, which again is tied into the idea of how do we use entheogens to actually enter into non-dual states of being and then how do we use that to transform ourselves. So I think maybe that covers it.

11:09

So those are all the things that I do, but, as I said, underneath, behind, within, throughout all of that, it’s merely just me being myself, and I guess if I were to wrap it up really sensically, I would say I’m just kind of a multimedia artist, essentially.

Ellie GoodeHost11:27

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, it’s super cool, like what a what a diverse background. I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s really cool. Do you think that? I mean, we’ll sort of go into a few of the things you’ve mentioned, but do you think the psychedelics have contributed to you being quite artistic and musical as well, or have you always sort of been that way?

Martin W BallGuest11:48

Well, I’ve definitely always been that way. You know I was. I was into art, you know, even as a little kid. That was obviously long before I ever experienced any kind of psychedelics, and I think it was around 14 or 15 where I had my epiphany around music, which was again before I had ever experienced any kind of psychedelic, but it was actually in the summer. My family was in Santa Cruz, California, where my dad used to teach chemistry summer school at UC Santa Cruz, so we’d go there every summer from our place in Northern California.

12:22

I was listening to the radio and I think that summer the Cure song why Can’t I Be you is out on the radio and some of my other favorite bands at the time had some hits on the radio. And I was just listening to the radio and I realized that when I listened to music that I was really kind of analytical, sort of breaking down like OK, this is what the drums are doing, this is what the bass is doing, the guitars and the rhythm instruments, and here’s how the melodies fit and here’s what the harmonies are. And again, not without any training in music. It just kind of had this epiphany and felt like you know what I think I could do that, I think I could make music, and so I started when I was 15. And it was always, you know, I’d bring stuff to other musicians, ok. So here’s what the guitar does. Here’s how the bass goes. This is what the keyboard should be doing.

13:09

But definitely then, a little bit later, had my first experience with cannabis and I kind of hooked up with this older friend in high school. He was like a couple years beyond me. My high school was a three year high school, so he was a senior and I was what a sophomore, and we used to go over to his house and we’d get high and he would tell me he’s like well, as artists, it’s our responsibility to do drugs, get high and then be creative and then bring that back to the world. And I like that. I was like, ok, that’s cool, I like that, yeah.

13:46

But then you know, over the years, as I explored more into the realm of psychedelics, it just had an overwhelming impact on my creative and artistic expression. It’s just a central theme that runs throughout everything that I do, especially in the sense that, of course, with psychedelics you get lots of interesting visuals and so that’s really easy to work with as an artist, and then also I like to characterize all psychedelic experience as experiences of amplified energy. So we get these, these big bursts of energy and these waves and these crests, and then these openings and these transformations. So that’s definitely a dynamic that I bring to my music. I like to use lots of interesting sounds. I like to make music that’s rather dramatic, that takes people on a journey and that opens you up to these these enveloping kinds of experiences. And then also with my storytelling, it’s just, it’s a huge aspect of what I do. So, yeah, my art, my music, my books, my expression wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be anything like it is now if it weren’t for my experiences with psychedelics. So they’re definitely foundational.

Ellie GoodeHost14:55

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And and so you mentioned your friend in Smoking Weed Was that sort of the gateway to psychedelics? Or how did you first sort of dive into the psychedelic world? And I guess, was 5-MEO DMT like kind of how you sort of weight your feet in that space or how did it all sort of come about?

Martin W BallGuest15:16

Yeah, yeah. So I think again when I was around 15, when I was some friends and we drank rum and Coke and I got really drunk, I mean drunk to the point where, you know, we were out in some field, we had to get to my friend’s car and I’m crawling across the field and my friend is kind of walking me like a dog and you know, I’m in that typical drums drunk state where I’m like, oh man, I love you so much, oh, thank you for being my friend. And then I got home and right as we were pulling up to my house I was like, oh, I’m going to throw up my friends, like don’t you fucking barf in my car, and so open up the door and I throw up on the street. And then he walks me to the door and I literally have to crawl inside the house and I crawl back to my sister’s bedroom and I wake her and I’m like Jessica, jessica, I’m really drunk, I need your help. And it was actually one of the sweetest things my sister ever did for me. She went and she got a bucket for me to throw up in and then she like cleaned it all up and made sure that my parents didn’t find out.

16:16

And then I was really hung over the next day and I was like I don’t like being drunk. I felt really stupid, I felt numb and that and felt really sick and that was just stupid. I’m not, I have zero interest in getting drunk. And so then yeah, a couple of older friends were like, well, hey, you want to get high and want to try some cannabis. And I tried some cannabis and it was like, oh my God, I love this that suddenly I’m inspired. Like I wanted to sit in my room in the middle of the night and get high and write poetry and light candles and listen to the cocktail twins and a dead can dance and I wanted to play guitar and make music. And then I wanted to go outside and hike and just just vibe off of nature. So I learned right away that I was really interested in cannabis, that that was a very, very interesting and enlivening and stimulating and inspiring, versus alcohol was just like this deadening, just stupid. Just I didn’t like it at all. So then I didn’t, you know.

17:18

So I do consider cannabis to kind of be a light form of psychedelic, for a variety of reasons. I mean one is that we have an endocannabinoid system. So when we consume cannabis, it’s actually interacting with our natural biochemistry, versus for, like alcohol, that’s literally a poison. You’re drinking a poison, you’re killing brain cells and like, oh, this feels good, but we have an endocannabinoid system and this is the way that most psychedelic works, that when we ingest them, that actually what’s happening is they’re. They’re working as neurotransmitters within our body and, for example, the human body also produces DMT and five MEO DMT. Those are known as endogenous psychedelic neurotransmitters and these are in all mammals. So these psychedelic compounds interact with our body chemistry and our internal dynamics in a very different way than, say, something like alcohol.

18:14

So, also, just kind of given my philosophical interests and whatnot, it was in college that I, my first year of college, I had this girlfriend and she said well, you know, martin, you really ought to try psilocybin mushrooms at it. I think you’d really like them. Just, given everything that you’re interested in that, you know, why not give them a try? So it wasn’t until the summer, after my first year of college, I went to a music festival with a couple of friends and we were in this long line of cars waiting to get into this, this hippie festival in Northern California, and some guy was walking down the road and he’s like shrooms, shrooms for sale. And so my friend Gary leans out the car and is like, yeah, we’ll buy some. So we got some mushrooms and that was my first mushroom experience. And then after that I started experimenting with them more and that was my only psychedelic experience for many years. The first I don’t even maybe 10 or more years of my psychedelic life was simply psilocybin mushrooms.

19:15

And then, a bit later, after I graduated from graduate school, completed my PhD, I was reading an article in the LA times and there was an article about this website in Santa Monica in Southern California called sage wisdom that was selling this herb called salvia divinorum. And having completed my degree in religious studies, I knew what salvia divinorum was. I knew that it was this entheogenic plant that was used by the Mazatec Indians of Mexico, which also make use of psilocybin mushrooms within the religious ceremonies and spiritual practices. And here this guy was selling. It was perfectly legal. He just go to the website and order is like, okay, well, I’m going to get some of that. And so I got some salvia and he was selling what was called enhanced leaf salvia, salvia divinorum, and that’s what I decided to go with.

20:09

So what that means is in this is Daniel Sebert. He was actually the person who identified the psychedelic molecule of salvin ornate. So what he would do with salvia. And so salvia is a sage plant. It’s like this big dark green leaves. And actually just let me say one of the things that’s fascinating about salvia divinorum is that every salvia divinorum plant that exists, it was cultivated for so long by the Mazatec people of Mexico that the plant no longer goes to seed, and so it’s a strictly a cultogen. And the way that you get new salvia plants is you clip off part of one plant and then you plant that in the ground, and so every salvia divinorum plant that exists is actually the same plant, because they’re all just clones. They’re genetically identical, so there’s only one salvia plant in the world, technically speaking. So anyway, he would extract the salvin ornate from the leaves and then he would create it in a liquid crystal form and then put that, add that to the leaves of the dried salvia so that that way, if you’re smoking it, you could just smoke a small bit of salvia.

21:26

The advantage is that if you’re just working with raw salvia leaves, they burn very, very hot and you need to smoke a lot of it, like you have to have a pipe with like a really big bowl and you need to smoke about two of those bowls and it can’t, and it’s not just like casual smoking. You have to smoke as much as you can. Smoke as much as you can, then you have to clear it out. Then you pack it with more salvia and then you smoke as much as you can and then after that, suddenly reality unzips, turns inside out, gets smeared across multiple dimensions simultaneously and then zips back up and you’re right back where you started and it’s bizarre, but anyway, with the enhanced leaf salvia you’ve got more salvin or an A mixed in there, and so then you can actually just smoke just a little teeny tiny bit and you take this one little teeny tiny hit and for my first experience I described that as a psychedelic tsunami.

22:18

That is, just this absolute tsunami of psychedelic experience that hits you in a matter of seconds. So then the five MEO DMT didn’t come until several years after that when I first experienced, started working with five MEO DMT, and it was a couple years into that before I had what I consider my first full experience of five MEO DMT and then, after that point started working with ayahuasca and it was after five MEO DMT that I got to experience DMT and then also started working with a wide variety of synthetic molecules. Also spent some time with peyote centipedrocactus. So yeah, my experience now is really quite extensive. But again started with cannabis. Then for at least a decade or more it was only psilocybin mushrooms, then salvia, then five MEO and then everything else.

Ellie GoodeHost23:24

Nice, you’ve had a very wide ranging experience then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I guess, for people who don’t know, can you just explain a little bit about what five MEO DMT is.

Martin W BallGuest23:37

Yeah, so that would be five methoxy dimethyltryptamine. As I mentioned before, this is something that’s naturally produced in the human body, so there’s nothing foreign or unusual about it in that sense. Only that we generally have very, very small trace amounts of this in our system at any given time. In terms of the natural world, five MEO DMT has recently been identified in a lichen. You know one of these fungus, algae, hybrid things, these lichen, but that’s only recently discovered. It’s also found in a variety of different grasses around the world, primarily phallaris grass. So a lot of the plants that also produce DMT also produce five MEO DMT, but generally in lower quantities. So it’s in the phallaris grass and it’s in acacia wood and acacia trees very, very small amounts.

24:41

And there also are these trees that grow in Central America, which are known as Yopo trees, or the proceeds that are called Yopo seeds. And this is the only place that we can find, anthropologically speaking, where human beings have been using five MEO DMT. So in these Yopo seeds you get these little seeds that come out of these larger seed pods that the tree produces, and then there’s these little seeds inside them that they’re kind of flat little discs and they have a hard shell on the outside of them and you have to roast them. You have to crack the shell, remove the shell. Then you take the roasted seeds and you grind them all up into a nice fine powder and then you stored it up your nose and you have a five MEO DMT experience. And so there, in terms of the Central American cultures, they’ve been using it for hundreds of years, thousands of years. You don’t really know, but it’s not really widespread. There also are some accounts of certain batches of ayahuasca being made in South America with plants that contain five MEO DMT, but most versions of ayahuasca are made with DMT, which is very, very different from five MEO DMT.

25:56

It’s very important not to confuse the two that five MEO DMT and DMT are two separate things. Yes, they share the same three letters, dmt, but that doesn’t make them the same in any way, shape or form. Lastly, the only other place in quote, unquote nature that we find five MEO DMT, though I did mention, it’s in human beings, sexually, in all mammals. So in low quantities it’s in all mammals. But outside of that, the only other place that we have found five MEO DMT in the natural world is in the secretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad, also known as the Colorado River Toad. Scientifically formally it was called Bufo alvarius. It has been renamed to Insilius alvarius, but the word Bufo has kind of stuck as shorthand for the secretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad, even though the name is scientifically changed. So most toads produce what’s called bufotaning and that is 5-H-O DMT. And again it has DMT but it doesn’t mean it’s DMT. That actually functions as something of a nerve toxin. So when a predator comes up to a toad and says, oh, I’m going to eat you, the toad secretes this 5-H-O DMT and it gets into the animal and they start twitching and wigging out because it’s a nerve toxin. But for some mysterious, magical, mystical, unknown reason the Sonoran Desert Toad in addition to producing 5-H-O DMT also produces 5-MEO DMT. So this is one of the places where use of 5-MEO DMT has really exploded. It’s called milking the toads, where you squeeze their glands and then you collect the secretions. Then you dry it out and you get this little crystalline substance and you can smoke or you can vaporize that and have a 5-MEO DMT experience.

27:52

So back to what it is more at the phenomenological or experiential level it is hands down in terms of experience. Now, if we’re just going by molecular weight, in terms of how powerful something is, the most powerful psychedelic substances on the planet would be LSD and salvinornae from the salvia divinorum plant. In terms of how much do you use versus how much experience do you get. But if we’re talking about the phenomenology of the experience, in terms of how powerful was the experience, how amazing was that experience? 5-meo DMT is by far the most powerful and theogenic compound that exists within reality and it’s very unique in the sense that virtually all psychedelic experiences, even though they may alter and fundamentally shift certain aspects of the ego, of someone’s personal sense of self and identity, virtually all psychedelic experiences are still within the realm of duality in the sense that there is.

29:01

So. Duality just means there’s me and then there’s everything that’s not me. There is the subject, that’s having the experience, and then the objects of perception. So anytime you have an experience of yourself as being in a place, that’s a dualistic experience, because there’s me and then there’s the place that I’m in. So even if somebody is tripping really hard on salveodivinorum and they’re like man, reality just split into multiple dimensions and now I’m in some weird in-between space. That’s still an experience of the ego. Now it’s not your normal everyday experience but it’s still experience of an ego. Or if somebody smokes DMT and says, yeah, I was out in outer space and I was talking to aliens and I was on their spaceship and then they took me to the heart of the universe, that’s still a dualistic experience. You’re still interpreting experience through your ego because it’s you and these weird fucking aliens and you’re somewhere else and you don’t know where you are. That’s duality.

29:56

And the problem with dualistic experiences is that it’s all filtered through the ego and the ego is basically a bullshit machine that it makes shit up and then goes around pretending that the stuff it made up is true and it projects a lot and it has a really hard time distinguishing between what it’s projecting versus what it’s actually experiencing. So the ego is very problematic in that sense. But what happens with 5MEO DMT is, if you take what’s called a full release dose, meaning you have a sufficient enough fuel to launch yourself what happens is, within a few seconds after inhaling, the ego thinks oh my God, I’m dying. And so there’s this potential for an ego death experience and the way that I like to describe it.

30:42

The reason why this works this way is because the ego itself is made out of limited patterns of energy, meaning we all have habitual ways that we think, habitual ways that we act, habitual ways that we express ourselves, the words we use, the language we use, the gestures we use, the way we think about things, the way we process information, the way we become attached to things, the way we project. These are all just patterns of energy, of how we are experiencing and expressing ourselves and how we are identifying, but they’re all limited. In other words, people, each person, acts this way, not that way, right, and that’s just really general and arbitrary. But in other words, we all kind of inhabit a persona, we inhabit a character, and there are certain things that we say are in character and then there’s other things that we would say, well, that’s really out of character for that person. And so these are just patterns of expression that we’re habituated to, into which we’ve identified, but they’re all limited by definition.

31:46

So what happens when somebody takes 5MEODMT is there’s this experience of this infinite expansion of energy, and a lot of people liken it to like a nuclear weapon going off or like a star going supernova. I mean it’s that dramatic and that quick where somebody feels like, oh my God, everything’s bursting and as this energy is expanding, it’s almost not entirely, but almost impossible for the limited patterns of the ego to maintain their structure within this massive energetic flood that’s taking place. So, in other words, people start to experience everything I’ve ever identified as myself is now falling away and I’m forgetting who I am. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what my history was. All of that, all of my ideas, my beliefs, everything is falling away. And when that starts, the ego thinks I’m dying.

32:37

And if a person can say yes and allow that process to happen and not hold on because the ego can always hold on what happens is people enter into a non dual state of awareness. Now, a non dual state of awareness in being means that there is no longer a separation between subject and object. There’s no longer a self identified ego that says I am me and this is what I’m experiencing. It just becomes a total experience and there individuals experience their fundamental nature, as being the shorthand word for it is God that you realize. I am an infinite consciousness. I’m made out of the infinite energy of unconditional love, I am limitless, I am eternal and everything that exists is actually just me in disguised form. So it’s like this complete sense of totality where everything is experienced as one, and many people will then describe it as an experience of being fully enlightened or being fully liberated, or you know.

33:47

Again, the shorthand is people experience themselves as God and this can be maintained for about 10 to 15 minutes as that energetic expansion is at its peak. But as soon as it starts to die back down, the energetic structures of the ego start to reassemble and then eventually, after another 10 or 15 minutes, the ego is then fully reassembled and people come back and they’re like what the fuck? I just experienced myself as God. Is this real, is this possible? But that’s the non dual experience and most psychedelics.

34:21

At best people tend to get like a short glimpse of maybe a few seconds of that experience, but the energy is not sufficient enough to maintain that ego suspended state. So, for example, in someone’s six hour mushroom journey, they might have about 30 seconds where they experienced something like that, but as soon as that wave of energy passes, the ego comes back and then ego says, whoa, what was that? So this is what makes five MEO DMT fundamentally unique and that this non dual nature of it is the primary aspect of the experience, versus with most psychedelic experiences. They’re primarily dualistic in nature and even if there is a non dual breakthrough, it’s very, very brief and actually relatively rare. It doesn’t happen that often on most other psychedelics. So this is what makes five MEO just hands down clearly the most powerful psychedelic that exists on the planet, that there’s nothing really comparable to it.

Ellie GoodeHost35:20

And so I guess then, like you mentioned, sort of you know, people will go in and have these psychedelic experiences of feeling this oneness with everything and then, as they come back to, I guess, reality for lack of a better word they, you know the ego structures, come back in. How, how do you find people integrate those two distinctions of experiences? Because I just know people who have had that oneness, that God like experience, and then they come back and they’re like, well, like how do I live my life now? Like what do I do, how do I make decisions? And like, is that something that you’ve either encountered yourself or seen other people encountered, that you coached through? Of how do you integrate, I guess, an experience like that?

Martin W BallGuest36:04

Yeah, well, there’s no easy path to integration of this, but if I were to just kind of summarize it and like one really simple thing, it is learning how to be yourself and really giving yourself permission to be yourself. And that sounds easy enough, it sounds small enough, but it’s pretty monumental because you, we have to remember, so, all of us, we’ve lived our entire lives through the perspective of our ego and everything has been filtered through the ego, and then suddenly we strip it away and it’s even, it’s this entering into the most fundamental nature of reality. So, even though people say, well, I left and then I came back to reality, actually it’s, it’s the opposite, is what’s happening? You’re going all the way into the true nature of reality and then you’re kind of going back into the illusory nature of reality where you think everything is like separate and separated and individuated, which is also true, but it’s not the fundamental nature of being. The fundamental nature of being is this unitary state, and so it’s the most fundamental experience of truth at an energetic level that people could ever have. So there’s a sense of everything is infinite, I am infinite, I am eternal, I am everything and I am this energy of love, and you’re feeling that in every molecule of your being and it just feels fundamentally true. It feels more true than anything you could ever possibly imagine, in the same sense that maybe the very first time that you told your lover I love you, and you just felt that surge of oh, my God, this is really a true statement. I’m not just saying it because this person wants to hear it or because I’m just being like, oh, yeah, I love you. It’s like, no, I love you, and that sense of wow. I’m really entering into something true here. So take that and magnify it by a billion, trillion, zillion, and that’s the five MEO experience.

38:07

Then what we find is we come back into our ego and we get a chance to really observe. The ego is that we notice Wow, actually I’ve got a lot of stories running about myself. I’ve got a lot of stories running about other people. I’ve got a lot of conditioned ways that I’ve responded to things and actually a lot of it is just not really genuine for me. You know, for example, take someone who’s a people pleaser. They spend their entire lives trying to make sure everybody else is happy and usually they’re neglecting themselves along the way because they’re so busy making everybody else happy and they’re telling people things that they want to hear because they want other people to feel good. And then you go through this experience, for example, with this kind of personality type, and they come back and realize I’ve been like expending so much energy on trying to make other people feel happy and I actually tell people things all the time that I don’t really mean and aren’t really true for me, and I want to get in touch with that true part of myself.

39:05

So the way that I like to describe it is that each and every one of us is God, this universal being that is performing as the person that we think that we are, but also that infinite energy has been channeled down into the human form and the human mind and the human body and the human ego. But this is where our energetic expression comes from, is from this universal source. So it’s not a question of, well, do I need to be in that infinite oneness state all the time? But how can I get in touch with my true, authentic expression and my true authentic energy so that I’m actually living from that place? And that’s the real integration and that’s also where liberation comes from is learning how to really authentically be yourself and inhabit that in your body and express that within yourself. And it’s not necessarily easy, because a lot of the patterns and constructs of the ego have been embedded with this since we’ve been children. They’re now operating at an unconscious level. We’re not even aware of how we’re doing it. So this is where I like to emphasize the idea of a process. It’s not about a singular experience. It’s about a process of learning how to give yourself permission to more fundamentally be yourself.

40:21

And I’ll just give another example. Let’s take somebody who, through whatever trauma or whatever they received in life, that they feel that they’re not worthy of being loved, and maybe they don’t even love themselves, maybe they hate themselves and maybe they’re constantly critiquing themselves in their mind and constantly second guessing themselves and constantly telling themselves that they’re not good enough, that they’re not worthy. And you go through this experience of being infinite, unconditional love. And then you realize I was just. I was like punishing myself, I was telling myself I wasn’t worthy of being loved, but actually I am love. So then how do I start to live my life from that perspective? And then also, you know, for somebody who’s felt really separated and really cut off, that you start to realize. You know, every person I ever interacted with is another version of me. Now, not my egoic me, not Martin, not Ellie, but just in the sense that I am an embodiment of God. Every other person I interact with is also an embodiment of God. So the judgments I have around them, the way that I want to separate myself from others or put others down or raise myself up, all of that is just games of the ego. So it gives us an opportunity. Only by getting all the way out of the ego Can we really see how much the ego fucks with us, and then we can start to make conscious choices about whether we want to choose to continue to listen to the bullshit of the ego or actually live from in a more authentic place. But in terms of the specifics of integration, really what it takes most often like. So I’ll just give you an example.

42:05

If somebody comes to me and says, hey, I’ve had a really powerful or even challenging five MEO DMT experience, can you help me integrate it? The way that I start is as okay. First, just tell me whatever you feel is significant about your background. Where do you come from, how are you raised, what was your childhood experiences like. And then, depending on how old the person is, you’re asking okay, well, what are, what are the different things that you’ve gone through in your life and any significant traumas? And I asked them like where do you feel you’ve been most authentically yourself, where do you feel you’ve been least authentically yourself, how are you in your relationships?

42:42

And we start looking for kind of patterns. We look to see where where their energy might have gotten stuck or blocked or distorted. And then, if they have prior psychedelic experience, I like them to give me a little bit of background. So you tried ayahuasca what happened? You tried mushrooms what happened? And then, for their five MEO experience, I like them, as best as they can, to walk me all the way through the experience, from what was the context, what brought you to it, what did you hope to get out of it, how has it served you? What happened, how did you react? Very importantly, I always ask about what’s going on with the body. It turns out. Were you writhing around? Were you curled up in a ball? Were you open-spread eagle? Were you crying? Were you laughing? Did you have an orgasm? What happened? And then, okay, what have you been experiencing afterwards? And so what we’re looking for is this idea that, by completely flooding the system with this infinite energy, that we have the opportunity to clear out the refuge of what has been withheld from our emotional repression. And then also, where are there potentially patterns that might be changing for you? And also looking at like, well, what showed up for you right as you were about to launch?

44:02

So, for example, a lot of people who are parents that they actually don’t spill over into the non-dual experience because right when they’re at the threshold, they think, oh my God, I’m never going to see my kids again, and so that’s a way to help people integrate. It’s like, okay, well, you don’t actually ever know when death is coming. So, if you’re worried about leaving your kids behind, what are you doing to live right now as though today were your last day? Have you told your kids that you love them? Have you encouraged them to be themselves? Or have you been like, dominating them with religious ideology or political ideology? Have you been telling them to be something that they aren’t? How are you treating them? So we get into all these aspects.

44:43

I mean, it’s very multifaceted in terms of like actually helping someone integrate, and there’s no cookie cutter answer, but it’s always about looking at it as an ongoing process and whether someone is potentially deluding themselves which happens with psychedelics a lot or if they’re moving into greater acceptance of truth and greater sense of self-love, greater sense of my heart is opening and I’m allowing myself to love myself and come from a place of love and place of truth, or if I’m still trying to be something for someone, even if it’s like, oh, my dead parents would be ashamed of me, and so I’m living according to this program that I have of my dead parents in the back of my mind. So there’s a lot of different ins and outs, but it’s always unique to each person, but it’s about helping them really come into a new relationship with their ego. That is not this unconscious bully that’s beating them up and telling them what to do, but it becomes more of a partner in the sense that, oh, I get to play the character of my ego, but I’m not imprisoned by it.

Ellie GoodeHost45:48

I like that. Yeah, that’s CS I mean I’ve been playing with a lot lately. I think psychedelics really help with. Is is holding up this mirror or showing you you know just the stories, like you mentioned as well as it’s almost like psychedelics help bring the mind and the body into alignment and, like you said, you know you have this huge amount of energy come through and it can clear out these old blockages and and traumas and things, and, like even I like to, which said about the emotion or oppression as well, something that I’ve really experienced is just how powerful these psychedelics can be to help release these emotions, especially really old historical ones, from the body.

46:29

And then just seeing how then, once you’ve released that stored survival stress from your body, how your mind almost auto corrects, like you know, you can sit there and fight with your ego, with your mind, like you said, all day, or you can. You know what, what, what is driving that ego? You know? Is that something in the body? You know? Is that something you can clear out, which is something I’ve experienced which is really cool as well. So so I guess, when you say you know people, you mentioned people deluding themselves with psychedelics what, what do you think causes that, or in certain people, because I’ve seen it too. It’s almost like plant medicine or psychedelics they can give you so many amazing tools, but they won’t do the work for you. So I guess, yeah, why do you think that is like the psychedelics? Yeah, some people are deluding themselves.

Martin W BallGuest47:23

Well, it’s kind of like you just said that. I do like to refer to all psychedelic experiences, as you are looking at yourself in a spiritual mirror. And I like to say that this mirror that we open up when we take psychedelics, it is interactive and it’s immediately responsive to your emotional and mental state, so that, especially when we can see this very easily at, say, the visionary level so let’s say, somebody is in the middle of a vision and then something makes them feel uncomfortable and all of a sudden the vision starts to turn dark and they’re like, oh shit, like, oh, the demons are coming to get me and then all of a sudden, oh, they’re attacking me. So there’s this constant feedback that’s taking place between what we’re seeing, what we’re feeling, what we’re experiencing, what we’re thinking. And this is where we have to remember that the ego is built up of stories and narratives about the self, and a lot of those elements of those stories simply are not true, but people might have been habituated to believe them. And so if we’re dealing with this interactive mirror and if it’s amplifying everything that we are, if we are lying to ourselves and not willing to face the truth of that lie, then it can just amplify the lie. But the person can then perceive that as truth and they go oh look, I got this amazing message. But no, it’s just an application of the lie that you told yourself. So I mean, let’s just take a really grandiose case. Let’s take someone who just thinks that they’re the spiritual shit. They’re like man I’m fucking top spiritual dog and people definitely develop spiritual egos, there’s no doubt about that. And then they take a psychedelic and in their experience they perceive themselves as the messiah and they get the message like you’re the one, it’s all up to you. But that’s just feeding them in the bullshit that they’ve been feeding themselves for years. And then they come out of it and they say, oh, I’m going to start a cult and I’m now going to be a cult leader, and usually I don’t put it in those terms, but that’s what happens to people and then actually what it’s doing is inflating these dysfunctional aspects of their ego.

49:51

So this is where, in my opinion, if you actually want to be liberated by psychedelics and even below that, if you just want to be transformed and hopefully healed and get a little bit of relief in life from whatever problems you are creating for yourself, you absolutely must be committed to truth. That has to be your primary commitment, not I want to see the things that make me feel that I’m special and important. It has to be. I want to see the truth, and if I’m bullshitting myself, please bring that to me so that I can see it for the bullshit that it is. But this is the thing that I like to say about psychedelics that they do suspend our free will to a degree, but of course, we make the choice I’m going to consume the psychedelic and then it starts to loosen the bounds of what we’re able to control, and so surrender is a huge part of working with psychedelics, but they can’t ever fully violate our free will. They cannot do that because they’re only an amplification of ourself, and so we can’t override our own free will. So this is why, like in the 5MEO experience, it can’t force someone into a non-dual experience, even if it’s at an unconscious level somewhere. The ego must choose to trust and let go and have this experience. And this is where people they can fight all the way through if they want, and this is also a place where I’ve seen people.

51:35

Ok, so this is kind of a harsh example, but many, many, many, many, many years ago now, I worked with this individual who wanted to do a 5MEO session with me and he came over and he told me before we started, said oh well, I’m enlightened and actually what I want to do, what I use 5MEO DMT for, is I want to contact my dead mother and I want to talk to her. And just right away I was like dude, you’re approaching this in a completely delusional way because, a, you’re not enlightened and B, if your mother is dead, you can’t talk to her. Ok, because I also I’m a self-described radical non-dualist that I don’t believe in spirits and ghosts and afterlives or anything like that. Because, let’s just be really blunt, each and every one of us is God pretending to be the person that we are. There’s no soul in between us and God. That God is the one actor playing all the parts simultaneously and there is no afterlife, because I mean, that’s just totally pointless. What would it even be there for? Anyway?

52:42

So this guy comes over and then one of my requirements for working with this so, when people go into a non-dual state this is why I’m always very interested in body language and what’s happening physically with the body when people go into an energetically, infinite, non-dual state in their bodies. They always open up at this bilateral symmetry. So they go like this, they go into this kind of spread eagle, the star position, and that’s a good indication that you are fully open, because we can see it in your body. Versus someone who’s clenched up like this in a fetal position, we can tell, oh well, you’re not open at all, you’re resisting, you’re holding on because you’re in a fetal position, we can see it, there’s no question about this.

53:28

So anyway, this guy, he wants to sit there with his legs crossed and meditation posture, and I’ve given him my instructions that it’s very important that you not have your legs closed. But he’s sitting there and he’s saying I am enlightened. But that’s his ego speaking. And it’s like OK, so you’re just fluffing your ego with this experience. And even in the middle of that he’s saying I am enlightened. And I would tell him who are you talking to? He’s like oh, you’re interrupting me, I am enlightened. I was like who are you telling that to? And so it’s just kind of a dramatic example of someone who is just so firm in his belief that he was already enlightened that he was using it as an excuse to kind of puff up his ego through the 5MEO experience.

54:17

And after that, I mean he did this totally insincere Because he was really irritated with me. He’s like, oh yeah, you’re really enlightened. I can see by how irritated you are. He was totally irritated with me. But then afterwards he did this whole oh namaste and he bowed down to me Like I was some kind of master or something. I was just like dude, what is that? And that’s what I mean that that wasn’t authentic at all. You know, what would have been a lot more refreshing afterwards is if he had said that was really fucking annoying how you wouldn’t let me say I was enlightened, and then we could have a conversation about it and then I could tell him how this is you bullshitting yourself, and then he could storm off in anger and then I would say that was authentic. But him like oh namaste, and like bowing down, that was totally inauthentic. That was just like spiritual bullshit. That he was like he’s like leaving a pile of spiritual bullshit at my front door as he was leaving and then pretending that he left me a gift. That’s totally inauthentic. I’m not interested in that.

55:21

So yeah, there’s lots of ways that people can bullshit themselves with psychedelics, and that’s what I mean that if you’re not committed to truth, so the truth is.

55:32

His ego thought he was enlightened. If he actually got the opportunity to go all the way beyond his ego, then he would have realized oh, my true nature has always been enlightened. But my ego is telling me a story that it was enlightened, but it wasn’t at all, because it was just trapped in a story and then that would give him the opportunity to completely transform himself and to start letting go of the story and start exploring. How do I kind of vibe back into that energy of already being that? So it’s tricky business. It’s tricky business working with psychedelics and that’s why it is really important just to toot my own horn. It is important to work with integration coaches who are not just going to just give you bullshit spiritual stories and go like, oh wow, good job, I’m so proud of you, but actually you know what I’m going to call you out on that yeah, I’m going to call you out on that for your own sake that there needs to be some tough love in there sometimes.

Ellie GoodeHost56:33

And I think to a therapist or an integration counselor or coach or whatever you want to call it. Is you know someone who? Because it’s almost like if the therapist can call out their own bullshit, they’re gonna see it in other people. Because that’s that’s what I find like. The more I call out and see my own bullshit, my own stories, I’m like okay, it gets easier to see it in other people. So I imagine that you know coaches who have really done their work will be like you know, my, my housemate actually is an integration coach and he’s just like you can’t get sucked into the person’s story. You have to really just pull them back and pull them back, pull them out of it. And and I guess, why do you? Why do you think people have so many stories? Like I guess you know like where do they come from? Is it, is it a safety thing? Is it to avoid feeling emotions in their body? Like Because everyone has stories in their head, everyone has this ego, like why do you think it exists?

Martin W BallGuest57:28

Well, that’s where we get into that. It’s just a fundamental nature of being human. So it’s kind of unavoidable that as human beings, first of all, we do have these egos, these self-referential things that say, whoa, I’m me. And then when the, when that recognition happens, what also happens is so what the hell is the rest of this and what’s going on here? And and who did this, and where did I come from? And and who am I, and what am I supposed to do? And is there something I’m supposed to achieve? And then how do I do it? How do I know if I’m doing a right, right? So the ego comes with sort of all these existential questions, and then what it does is it picks up information from its experience, that starts to put it into narrative form, because also with this self-awareness, we can then project into oh well, what’s gonna be me in the future, and then we can also reflect on, well, what was me in the past.

58:24

So the narrative, the story form, is very natural to the human experience and it’s fundamentally related to our ego. And this is also why Human beings, for as long as we can tell, have always been Storytellers. And this is something that’s really interesting, that if other animals tell each other stories. We don’t have any direct access to that, so we don’t know if other animals are really telling each other stories or not. So, for, based on like actual knowledge that we have, human beings are the only storytellers that we’re aware of, and it’s a fundamental part of being human and it’s how we construct an identity at the personal level, at the family level, at the group or tribal level, at the national level, at the Religious level, right, for example, every single religion Comes with a set of stories that says this is who we are, this is how we practice, this is what’s meaningful for us. Every Nation has a story that says this is how we came to be, this is our national identity, these are our values, this is how we enacted. So this, the storytelling, is very, very natural, and we’re actually really fortunate that we live in an age where we have all these different categories of stories.

59:46

We could say, oh well, this is a biopic, this is a historical piece, this is a work of fiction, this is a work of nonfiction, this is a memoir, this is a fantasy story. This is a magical story, this is a fable, this is a children’s story. But for most of human culture, we haven’t really had all these fine tunings of distinctions of the stories, and so we tend to take stories as truth without really analyzing it. And it’s also important to recognize that these stories, especially when human beings lived in small tribal societies, these stories were necessary for our survival as a species, because the stories that the cultures tell themselves Talk about how they developed their values and how they can get along as a small group, as a small tribe, and what values are important within that tribe. And then the stories also relate to what are the different plants that we can use for medicines and what do we use for food and how does all this stuff inter relate to it, so that these stories like we can take. So you’re from Australia, so the Aboriginal song line stories, where you have these stories and these songs that actually are maps across vast stretches of the landscape that talk about, well, this is what happened in the dream time, but if you follow the story, it will actually take you to geographical locations that have water or food or resources, and so these stories are really integral into how we have survived as a species. So it’s such a fundamentally human thing.

01:01:22

And so when we’re dealing with the personal ego. Of course we have stories, but here’s where the difficulty slips in is that stories we like to have heroes and we like to have Victims, and we like to have the protagonist and the antagonist and we like to have nice climaxes and we like to have nice Resolutions, and we say, okay, well, that was done, and now I’ve moved on, and we like to have closures and we have all these narrative elements, but they don’t really reflect the true nature of life and the true nature of being. And we also can then box ourselves in to, you know, again, going back to someone who, through their childhood Experiences, whatever it was, that they come out with the belief that they are fundamentally unlovable, and so they tell that story to themselves, like why parents didn’t love me, my parents beat me, they abused me and I’m unlovable. And then they bring that belief and that story into every romantic Relationships that they have and then, soon enough, they’re then creating the conditions that allow them to perceive you, I can see this person doesn’t love me, they’re rejecting me, and but they’re, but they’re blind to, and these are all the ways that I’ve manipulated the relationship to get this outcome that I’ve expected, because I’ve affirmed to myself that this story is true. Meanwhile, their heart is closed down, they’ve got all kinds of repressed and unprocessed energy in the body Because they haven’t really let themselves go through the grieving process that yeah, my parents were kind of assholes but I am worthy of being loved, and so they haven’t found that sense of self-worth. And you know they’ve.

01:02:55

Once we develop these stories, we spend our entire lives reinforcing the story, and Then also, when we’re operating from a story, we tend to only look for the things that conform to our story and we just ignore everything else that doesn’t fit within the story, because it’s not fitting in the boxes that we’ve set up for ourselves. So this is why it’s a subtle, complicated process. It’s not an easy thing to just say, okay, well, just love yourself, just come on, just love yourself. It’s like, no, I’ve got to unpack all this shit and then to free ourselves from the story and really and it could be hard to acknowledge like, oh my god, I have been creating so much suffering for myself because I’ve been telling my myself this story over and, over and over again. But it’s not true, because then the next story that comes on is yeah, you fucking idiot, why’d you fucking do that so stupid. It’s like oh, now I’m telling myself the story that I’m stupid, right, so it’s hard to untangle from these things.

01:04:00

But this is why working with psychedelics with intentional purpose is really useful, because it brings the stories and and brings the shadows and it brings all of this stuff to the surface so we can start to interact with it in a new way. We can release it, we can transform it, but it’s work. I think you mentioned that it’s work. This is not. You know, one of the old critiques of psychedelics was like oh, that’s cheating, it’s not fucking. Cheating like this is hard fucking work.

Ellie GoodeHost01:04:31

So by someone who has probably never done psychedelics before.

Martin W BallGuest01:04:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, just cheating. If you’re doing that, it’s not cheating at all.

Ellie GoodeHost01:04:39

Definitely not cheating.

Martin W BallGuest01:04:41

Yeah, it’s a lot of work and it takes dedication to Really loving yourself and again living in truth and being in truth. And if you’re not into that, you know, then it’s gonna take you down some other route but it’s not necessarily gonna be liberating and transformative, and you know, that’s what I’m interested in, that you know, we’ve had enough storytelling on the planet. We’ve had enough bullshit that we we desperately need people to live from a place of truth and authenticity In order for us to manage the crises that we are going through at the geopolitical, social, economic, environmental I mean, you name it. We’re going through it and the stories Don’t help.

01:05:25

And, like here in the United States, we’re under an Epidemic of bullshit that we have a political party in this country that is completely devoted itself to 100% bullshit and lies. And so I’m again, I’m not On one side or the other because I’m a non-dualist and I’m not coming from the position of being in one political party or another. I’m not interested in that, but I am very concerned that we do have a political party in this country that is completely committed to bullshit and just spews lies and Untruths and then treat them as though they’re true and then goes about living from that place and Bringing suffering to themselves and others. That that’s not functional. We’re living in a dysfunctional society because the levels of bullshit are just I mean, they’re through the roof now and that’s not very sanitary a Little cleaning up.

Ellie GoodeHost01:06:23

And so you mentioned authenticity and sort of you know, deconstructing these mental stories and, and really I guess, getting to the heart of you, know who we are, and part of that is, like you mentioned, going to the shadows or dealing with these sort of heavier emotions. I guess, for someone who who fits that persona that you said of feeling unloved, unworthy, how would you, I guess, work with someone like that into stepping into a more authentic version of themself?

Martin W BallGuest01:06:53

Yeah, so usually with someone who’s coming with that kind of energetic construct, they probably need to go through a lot of encountering and releasing first before they can really get, for example, to a breakthrough experience that they probably have a lot of barriers that they’ve built up within themselves. And here’s again where we’re emphasizing the idea of a process, that we’re not talking about singular events, but we’re about working on the process and working with psychedelic therapy. For example, they’re probably going to need to encounter first all of these beliefs around being unlovable and that have to have that be played out at the psychedelic interactive level and then, as they start to have breakthroughs there, we’re probably going to be seeing a lot of purging. There’ll probably be a lot of throwing up taking place, probably also a lot of deep crying and wailing and screaming and see, and even here this is an interesting place because a lot of people have a lot that’s bottled up within them and this is something that I get in my integration calls that sometimes the context in which they’re taking the psychedelic is not really conducive for this particular person. For example, let’s say, somebody goes to a group ayahuasca ceremony and energetically, what they really need to do to release all this stuff is they need to wail and scream and thrash about for several hours, but usually what happens that, like an ayahuasca retreat center is eventually someone’s going to come over and say, hey, you’re disturbing the other participants, can you tamp it down a little bit? And even that’s a tricky one, because then also there are people who will indulge in that that don’t necessarily need to do that and they do need to be told hey, can you bring it down, but other people, they actually do need to go through it.

01:08:40

And for people who facilitate, if they can’t tell the difference, then they’re not good facilitators. That they need to be able to tell the difference between this is really authentic for this person versus this is some kind of performance or indulgence that we need to make a correction on. So people need to go through these releases and these can be really, really hard and also very, very scary. So this is where someone might go and say, well, that was just fucking terrifying, it was really hard and I don’t ever want to do that again. And this is where, if they have good feedback, it’s important to remind people that, okay, this is a phase and you might need to go through this phase a bit more, there might be more of this coming for you and, in fact, just based on what you’ve described from your life and your beliefs and where you’ve withheld love from yourself, there’s a good chance that there’s more of this coming.

01:09:31

But once you work through that, then you have the opportunity to expand into new areas and then maybe uncover the next layer underneath that. So, for example, let’s say there’s someone who realizes that they’re abusive to their kids and they want to deal with that. Maybe the first thing that comes up is like flashes and memories of all the times they’ve abused their kid and it’s like my God, like really taking it in honestly and like I’ve really been abusive. And then they can start to release some of the trauma around that and some of the emotional baggage around that, and then they can start to reorient their relationship with their children. But then underneath that is, oh, and then my parents abused me and that’s why I turned into an abuser, because I felt that that’s, that’s how parenting was done. And so then they can start to work on that. And then they might even realize, oh fuck, my parents were abused by their parents. And so then they start my going back in time and unraveling layers of that. And then they might even get into a transpersonal state of realizing like people have been being dicks to each other for millennia oh my God, we’ve been like enslaving other people, we’ve been attacking the neighboring tribe and kind of go into these transpersonal states of really realizing that human beings have. You know, we’ve been pretty fucked up in terms of our behavior towards each other. And then we can get into racism, we can get into sexism, we can get into homophobia and like realize all these layers of hate and abuse and domination and it just feels like it’s endless.

01:11:04

But then, once you’ve processed all that, and then you move beyond it into the non dual and you realize it’s all love. And then actually we can. We can release the victimhood, we can release the abuser, because actually it’s all been God interacting with itself. And so we can come from this place of unconditional love and we can say, hey, I don’t like that, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to participate in that, but I can also let go of all my trauma and suffering around it because I’m not going to be able to take it. Actually everything is God and so we don’t need to judge it. We don’t need to put it into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, because those are just relative human categories.

01:11:46

And then, after that death, experience of the ego dying, going into oneness and then being reborn, then there’s this sense of now. I get to choose how am I going to be? How am I going to embody love in the world? How am I going to embody truth in the world? But, man, that’s a process and there are so many ways to get lost or stuck along the way.

01:12:11

Like we mentioned before, ego or grand diesman is one of the big problems that we see a lot of in the psychedelic community. People who have like one or two experiences and they say, oh, I’m called to serve the medicine, yeah, you haven’t done your work, man, and kind of like you mentioned before that. My opinion is definitely anybody who wants to do this kind of work in service of others, you must have done this within yourself first, that if you haven’t done this within yourself, do not ever even think of serving anybody else. You’ve got to. You have to come to the hard truth of yourself, you have to face yourself and you have to accept yourself and love yourself and know the difference between bullshit and reality and if if you’re not learning that, don’t be serving other people, because you’re probably just going to perpetuate their own bullshit.

Ellie GoodeHost01:13:01

Yeah, definitely, definitely, and, and so I like that. You mentioned, I mean, there’s so many good things, but you know, I guess, just the different layers to this stuff, in the sense that you know we have our own stuff that we go through, but then you know our parents and grandparents and society as a whole, just, I guess, the different layers of processing. But you mentioned, you know, for a lot of people, the way to process this or release this stuff is it’s very physical. You know. You mentioned purging or vomiting, rolling around on the floor, crying, you know even screaming, and and releasing that.

01:13:37

Do you find that because that’s been my experience too is is the more I release stuff for my body, just the better I feel overall? Do you find that’s the case for most people, in the sense that it’s almost like these emotions, this, this energy, takes on a very physical form, or these stories have a very physical element to them, and so by by, you know, physically purging, crying, going through all these physical sensations, that it that it helps shift a lot of these things. Is that something you’ve noticed in people as well, or yes?

Martin W BallGuest01:14:11

absolutely, and that’s really where it’s all taking place, and I think that this is this is another place where I think a lot of people in the psychedelic movement or community that they’re basically they’ve gone astray, where a lot of people talk about, well, your astral body or your past lives, you know all this immaterial stuff and they say, well, this is where the healing is taking place. It’s like, look, everything you’ve ever experienced is lodged in your body. Everything you’ve ever experienced has been through the medium of your body. Every thought you’ve ever had has taken place in your body. Every emotion you’ve ever felt has been in your body. Everything you ever know about anything, anywhere, anytime, has been in your body. Therefore, this is where we’re working. We’re not working on the astral, we’re not working in past lives, we’re not working on your disembodied energy centers or anything like that. It’s all right here and it’s actually profound, because what that means is that, as long as you’re in a body which is 100% of your life, you actually have access to all of this stuff and that the potential to transform is there, because you don’t have to go looking across multiple lifetimes or out into the universe to find what’s wrong with you. Fuck, and look right here, be right here, and so for me, psychedelic practice is very much an embodied practice, and the highest levels of psychedelic experience is not an out of body or disembodied experience, that’s just a journey of the ego into what I like to call the divine imagination. The highest level of experience is being fully embodied and fully present right here, right now, with no story and focus and awareness. That is for me that if you can do that, you’re good. You’re good and if you have learned how to be authentic with yourself so that you say the things that you really think, you allow yourself to to experience your emotions, you don’t repress them and you also don’t hang on to them and you don’t identify with them. But you let yourself be angry when you’re angry, you let yourself be sad when you’re sad, let yourself be happy when you’re happy and you express yourself authentically and embody yourself authentically throughout all of that. That’s the best we can do as human beings, as I like to call us God vehicles. We are vehicles for God to experience itself in and through, and if we can just be authentic and true within our embodied experience, that is the best we can do and that is the place of liberation.

01:16:46

It’s not drifting off into some ascended realm or not coming. You know, some disembodied said I’m just going to float around the universe because I’m totally free. It doesn’t happen. That only happens in the divine imagination and it only happens because you have a body from which your awareness has been dislodged and is going off into a construct. But living in reality is a very embodied practice and embodied experience and working with psychedelics for transformation. If it’s not being embodied, there’s something else going on there and that’s where I get concerned. It’s like, well, there’s, you’re doing something different, you’re doing something else and it might be bullshit story creation that’s happening here. So let’s get you back in your body, let’s get you embodied.

01:17:32

And I know maybe it’s uncomfortable, maybe this difficult, dark stuff is coming up and it’s even you know it’s not the substance of what you’re throwing up, that’s you know. Like some people say, oh, it’s cleanses you of toxins. I was like what the fuck are toxins? Like we use this word all the time. Like nobody knows what it even means. Like, oh, you’re releasing toxins and it’s not about that. It’s actually about oh shit, yeah, I am dislodging stuck energy, and the dislodgment of stuck energy is coming in the form of throwing up and it’s opening up my body as it’s doing. That. That’s what the purging is about.

01:18:11

And even when people get into the deepest levels and they’re purging this really dark, difficult stuff, if they’re in that non-dual state, it will also be an experience of oh, these are all the parts of myself that I hated or was ashamed of, but actually I love it because everything is love and so I can love it. I don’t need to keep it in, I can get it out. I don’t need to like, live at this shit, but I can still love it. I don’t have to hate it. And that is where this, this again, living in love, living in unconditional love Again, it doesn’t mean you have to like everything. Liking and loving things are two different things, you know and that’s another place where a lot of people get confused that they did develop a spiritual persona of oh, I’m going to be nice to everyone all the time and I’m going to be happy about everything all the time and I’m just going to come from this place of love. But that’s performing, that’s acting, that’s not genuine, because sometimes love is angry. Why did you intentionally hurt me?

Ellie GoodeHost01:19:12

It’s boundaries yeah.

Martin W BallGuest01:19:14

Yeah, so there’s room. I like to say that we are full spectrum energy beings and then we have permission to experience that full spectrum and sometimes it’s angry, sometimes it’s ugly, but we are that energy. It’s important for us to be the energy that we are so that we can live from a place of truth, not be a construct of who we think we should be and then projecting that out onto others of, oh, I’m certainly super spiritual because I’m happy all the time, even when the worst possible things happen to me, I say, oh, I’m so grateful. No, you’re not, it’s just, it’s not true.

Ellie GoodeHost01:19:51

Yeah, it reminds me of like, you know, coming back to that piece of being authentic, and it’s like, if you feel anger, you know, usually anger, I find, is someone’s crossed a boundary or done something. That’s that’s you know doesn’t feel right in your experience and so being authentic in that sense is not being nice. It’s saying, okay, calling this person out or saying you know, this made me feel XYZ, you know, asserting a boundary, depending on what the situation is, obviously. And it’s just coming back to you know, it’s almost like the same with truth and authenticity.

01:20:21

They’re very, I think, you know, one and the same, to a degree of of you know truth is is what, what is here now, you know true, it’s like, how do we define truth? It’s like, well, what can you see, what can you feel? You know what is your direct experience, and it’s almost like that that’s what truth is. And so you know thinking of like past lives or, you know, going off into the astral plane. It’s almost like that’s a distraction or a dissociation from present day reality. So it’s almost like to be your authentic self and to be truthful is just being present and being, you know, with you, with yourself and your experience. Yeah, yeah, even if, like you said, that’s really difficult and uncomfortable which it can really be at times, but that that’s truth, yeah.

Martin W BallGuest01:21:04

Yeah, I do like to say that at the deepest levels. Truth, energy, reality, I, you, we, god, these are all synonyms. So, in perfect alignment with what you just said, truth is the energy of what is present right here, right now, because energy is real and so I can say the sun is truthfully shining right now because you can see it on me. Okay, now, if we get into, oh well, the sun is the spiritual center of our galaxy and it’s beaming out encoded messages of enlightenment through the light beams. And it’s like, ah, man, we’re jumping into metaphysics there, now that now you’re telling a spiritual story and and then, well, I’m a receiver of light messages because I’m a light worker.

01:21:55

So, okay, now we’ve completely gone away from what’s really happening right here, right now We’ve gone into stories. So let’s come back. No, the sun is shining. Okay, that’s enough, let’s, let’s leave it there. You know, and it could be hard to keep bringing people back to know what’s actually true right here, what’s true right now, okay, that’s a story, that’s a story. And the thing is, when people become start to become aware of this, they realize like, oh, fuck, I’m doing this like all the time. Oh, my God every day.

Ellie GoodeHost01:22:24

I had that experience once. I’m like Holy shit.

Martin W BallGuest01:22:28

Yeah, so it can be intimidating, yeah, but the plus side is that if you can work through all of this, what you realize is that I’ve been expending tremendous amounts of energy propping up the story and living out the story and now that I’m free, I can just I can free up my energy to actually be true and, like, do the things that I want and live the life that I want, because I’m not expending all of this energy maintaining these stories and then I can really be present with what’s happening right here, right now. And then every person that I’m with, I’m really with that person. Every project that I’m working on, I’m really working on that project. Every conversation I’m having, I’m really having that conversation because it’s just present. And, yeah, that’s. That’s the real gift, that’s the real beauty.

Ellie GoodeHost01:23:19

Totally, totally, it’s awesome and so it’s sort of coming up on time. But do you want to sort of mention about your your 12th audiobook, which 12 audio books is a huge feat, and, yeah, the soundtrack that goes with it?

Martin W BallGuest01:23:35

Yeah, yeah, well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. I mean, it’s kind of out of context, but the whole conversation that we’ve been having but, yeah, I’m a projects guy. I love working on projects because I love just pouring myself energetically and authentically into this is what I’m doing and I get really excited about it. So, yeah, the project that I just finished was creating my 12th audiobook, and for me, audiobooks the whole thing is like a fun artistic project, because I record my own audio and then I record music to go along with my different audio books, and so the cycle, whole package of stuff, and then I designed the covers and all of that. So where I started as an author is I wrote a fantasy series. You know, not ambitious at all. I just decided, oh, I’m gonna write a fantasy series. No experience as a writer, so that’s why I started as an author and that became a series of four books and I actually started writing those back in 2002. So it was kind of a ways back that I wrote those. But in 2020, I made an audiobook for the first of those four books and that was Orbi’s vision and created a whole musical soundtrack to go with that. That’s kind of integrated into the story.

01:25:00

And this year that was, I wanted to start the year with Okay, what’s my big project that I’m working on now? And that was okay, I’m gonna do the fate of Marani. So that’s book two. So I recorded all the audio for that and then I spent about three weeks recording 14 track soundtrack to go with that. And Wow, and even as I was working on the audio book and I’m rereading the book it actually been a while since I’d read the book because I wrote it a while ago I was just feeling so inspired. I couldn’t wait to get to the music. I really want to record the music. I’m so excited to write, you know, compose these songs. But it’s like, okay, gotta wait till you record all the audio first. You know those, as I’m telling myself. So then, because I do like to work in stages so that I can really devote myself to something and not have other distractions, so I finished recording all the audio and it’s like, hey, now I get to write the music. And I must say so.

01:25:52

I created this album. It’s called the fate of Marani, the soundtrack, and currently it’s like my favorite thing that I’ve done musically. I released lots of music. But I’m just, I’m just so into the songs that I wrote for this that I’m really, really happy with it. And actually, after I finished it, I took a night where I took some MDA and was just like listening to the soundtrack and I was like, oh my God, I love this. And so, yeah, that book just got released in audio book, is also in paperback and ebook, but it became my 12th audio book and also released the soundtrack. So that’s out there where you can find digital music under my name and yeah.

01:26:33

So now I’m sort of in transition excuse me, before starting the next set of projects that I want to do. And so there’s there’s more stuff coming up in this. So there’s two more books to the series and I hope in the next couple of years I hope that I will get to both of those. But it’s a big thing to like record all the audio. I mean, that takes like weeks and months to do that and then for each one I’ll make a new soundtrack for it. So, and that’s for me that’s exciting, it’s like I have something to look forward to, is like, oh yeah, there’s gonna be a time when I get to the alchemist in the eagle. That’s book three, and then there’ll be a time when I get to the fifth temple, which is book number four, and then I’ll have other projects meanwhile along the way. But I really enjoy creative expression and especially things that use like multimedia, that I can kind of get into all these different aspects of creative expression. So, yeah, those are my newest things that are out and available now.

Ellie GoodeHost01:27:28

Awesome, awesome, I’ll be. I’ll be sure to put the links in the show notes so people can find it as well. But where can people sort of connect with you or find out more about you as well?

Martin W BallGuest01:27:38

Yeah, well, my central hub is just Martin ballnet. That’s my personal web page, and there you can find links to my podcast. You can find links to my YouTube channel, which is the entheogenic evolution. That’s also the name of my podcast. You can find that anywhere you can find podcasts is the entheogenic evolution. I also have a Patreon page for people who want to support and get access to various bonuses and whatnot, and so that’s at. You know, patreoncom slash Martin W ball. And yeah, you can find me on Facebook at Martin W ball.

01:28:14

I have to use the W my, my middle initial, because when I first started out as an author, there was a Martin ball who was writing books about Welsh phonetics. So I wanted to use the W to distinguish myself. But I made a mistake. I made a terrible mistake. I’ll tell you what it was. With my music, I’ve always just used Martin ball, because people never use their middle name when they’re a musician, right? But the problem is that when I started releasing music digitally online, there was another Martin ball who had beat me by a year. He started releasing music online a year before I did. And this other Martin ball his music is Christian praise and gospel music and my music, even though he released one album, but it came out before me.

01:29:03

Most musical outlets online lump our music together because we have the same name and they can’t figure it out.

01:29:12

I mean, this is it actually? I was in touch with, like Apple music, where it took me like five years to get them to separate our music and then actually list words like at the bottom of your Apple music pages here’s the here are similar artists, and finally they had changed it over to stuff that was more like electronic psychedelic kind of music and I was like, oh yay, finally I’m free from the other Martin ball. And then, like six months ago, I opened up my Apple music page and, by God, it changed back over to now all the similar artists are all like Christian, christian praise and gospel music artists, and so and it’s been that way on YouTube, it’s been that way on Amazon music, it was on that way on Spotify for a number of years, and so it’s just like one of these great ironies of my life that my music is lumped in with this Christian praise and gospel stuff and my music is definitely not that in any way.

Ellie GoodeHost01:30:12

Yeah, it’s just God and everything coming through.

Martin W BallGuest01:30:15

Yeah, I always like to say God has a super wicked sense of humor, just a divinely wicked sense of humor. So be prepared. And like. This is one of the ways that it just manifests for me. It’s like there seems to be nothing I can do to separate myself from this other Martin ball and I just need to live with it. You know, even making music for like 35 years and my music gets put under his.

Ellie GoodeHost01:30:37

Yeah, I wonder if, like the Christian gospel, are referring onto your platform as well. So, like all these Christians are now listening to, like psychedelic electronic music or yeah, that’s what happens on on YouTube and YouTube music.

Martin W BallGuest01:30:53

If I release a music video, I will. Then I can find it on Christian praise playlist. I was like, but do they not, do they not listen to the music? They just go look, martin ball released something new, so let’s put it in. So it’s, it’s really crazy, it’s crazy. And even there was even once, many years ago, where his royalties were paid to me.

Ellie GoodeHost01:31:19

Oh, wow, yeah they’ve meshed, you guys together.

Martin W BallGuest01:31:22

Yeah, and then I was because I don’t make a lot of music, I don’t, I make a lot of music, I don’t make a lot of money from music. And then one day I got like a check for $800 like oh my God, like what happened. And then, you know, I contacted the royalty association, was like, oh, that’s the wrong Martin ball. That’s awesome. And the weird part is this other Martin ball, he’s never done anything to try and separate our music. So I don’t get what it is Like. I’ve tried so hard and it’s mostly been met with a dead end. But I mean he could also get in there and say hey, you know, we’re two different people here, same name, two different people. But anyway, oh yeah, and my Amazon author page is just Amazoncom slash. Author slash Martin W Ball.

Ellie GoodeHost01:32:11

Awesome, awesome. Well, yeah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been a really interesting discussion. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Martin W BallGuest01:32:17

Yeah, I’ve had a great time. Thanks for having me on and thanks for the good questions and the good contributions. It’s been nice to riff off of each other.

Ellie GoodeHost01:32:26

Thanks for listening and before you go, please hit the subscribe or follow button and make sure those notifications are ticked, If you’ve done it already. Thank you so so much. I’ll catch you next week.