Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: Matthew Pelivery back with us, author editor, somotic Explorer, his
Speaker 2: adventures of taking him through the mountains, deserts, and jungles
Speaker 2: of North, Central and South America, pursuing his studies of
Speaker 2: shamanism and visionary experiences working with plant medicines, among them ayahuasca, peyote,
Speaker 2: San Pedro, cactus, and many more. He's been a leading
Speaker 2: popular fantastic fiction workshop at the Southern California and Santa
Speaker 2: Barbara Writers' Conferences for more than thirty years, and frequently
Speaker 2: lectures about shamanism and writing throughout the United States. He's
Speaker 2: got two books out this year, The Thinning Vale and
Speaker 2: I Am Consciousness Incarnate. Matthew, you've been busy.
Speaker 3: Yes, sir, I am George. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Good to have you back with us. Have you been.
Speaker 3: I've been great, as you said, super busy, keeping my
Speaker 3: nose down on my butt up, working.
Speaker 2: Away, traveling.
Speaker 3: Still, yes, sir, almost too much. But you can never complain.
Speaker 3: You got to get it while you can get.
Speaker 2: It right, absolutely, absolutely well. Tonight we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about consciousness and YouTube books like and let's talk about
Speaker 2: the two books that have come out which came out
Speaker 2: first this year, The Thinning What Veil or the IE
Speaker 2: Am Consciousness Incarnate.
Speaker 3: The Thinning Veil came out first. I was actually writing
Speaker 3: the two in parallel because I was working on the
Speaker 3: I Am Consciousness Incarnate. I actually started and I got
Speaker 3: the inspiration for it, of all times, of Christmas Eve,
Speaker 3: and then one of my fans was bugging me, be like, Okay,
Speaker 3: we love you nonfiction, but how about some more stories.
Speaker 3: So I was doing the stories kind of in between,
Speaker 3: and it's nice to change off between two different projects
Speaker 3: kind of to get a break from each one and
Speaker 3: keep it flowing.
Speaker 2: It is refreshating. Now, in your opinion, what is your
Speaker 2: definition of consciousness?
Speaker 3: So, in my opinion, in the end, consciousness has to
Speaker 3: do with awareness, and it's our individual awareness of our
Speaker 3: thoughts and our memories, our feelings, our sensations, and our environments.
Speaker 3: It's awareness of ourselves and the world around us. And
Speaker 3: it's just it's as subjective experience that you need to
Speaker 3: eat one of us. So if we can describe something
Speaker 3: that we are experiencing in words. Then it's part of
Speaker 3: our consciousness, and it's interesting because it constantly shifts and
Speaker 3: changes you. Right in one moment, you could be listening
Speaker 3: to me talk right now. In the next next you
Speaker 3: may shift over to thinking about conversation you had with
Speaker 3: your friend or you know your previous guests there, or
Speaker 3: you might suddenly think about how uncomfortable the cheer you're
Speaker 3: sitting in, or your stum might start thinking about what's
Speaker 3: going to be for dinner. It shifts very quickly and
Speaker 3: dramatically from one moment to the next, and yet there's
Speaker 3: a continuity to it. It feels very smooth and effortless
Speaker 3: as we as we flow through it.
Speaker 2: Is it related to the brain or is it outside
Speaker 2: of the brain?
Speaker 3: Questions like that, I would say yes. And the reason
Speaker 3: I say that is because we are the seat of consciousness,
Speaker 3: so to speak, and how we experience the world has
Speaker 3: to do with our perceptions, and so we have the
Speaker 3: experiences that come to us through our five senses, but
Speaker 3: we also have what comes from within us. You know,
Speaker 3: there's the expression our priori, which is how you think
Speaker 3: about something sort of before it happens, Like you can
Speaker 3: have our priori concept of house, and then you're looking
Speaker 3: to see a house, and those two connections make it
Speaker 3: become real for you and you know in your experience.
Speaker 3: They There are tons of theories excuse me, about where
Speaker 3: consciousness resides within the brain. But there are all theories
Speaker 3: because the brain is a very complex network and it's
Speaker 3: interconnected in many ways, so you can't really pin it
Speaker 3: down to one place because it's very evasive, it's very mercurial.
Speaker 3: It moves around. And then there are tons of different
Speaker 3: definitions of consciousness and.
Speaker 2: Where does the subconscious fit in, Matthew, So.
Speaker 3: Subconscious kind of lies below everything else, and much of
Speaker 3: it comes through in how we talk. It's closely related
Speaker 3: to our conscious mind, but it's the things that we're
Speaker 3: not really thinking about in the moment. But we can
Speaker 3: go into our conscious awareness very quickly. Things that we
Speaker 3: don't want to look at necessarily or see are repressed
Speaker 3: into the unconscious minds. I know you and I have
Speaker 3: talked a bit in the past about shadow work. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know shadow work is the things within ourselves
Speaker 3: that we consider to be unacceptable. But there are good
Speaker 3: things and bad things that are in there. And you
Speaker 3: could have an experience or a traumatic experience that sends
Speaker 3: you into shock, and your mind will automatically block it out,
Speaker 3: just like you know, if you can do a nasty
Speaker 3: car accident, you may not feel anything because your mind
Speaker 3: it's a survival mechanism. So it can come into our
Speaker 3: awareness when we need it. Like right now, we may
Speaker 3: not be thinking about doing long division, but if we go, oh,
Speaker 3: I want to do long division, we can immediately go
Speaker 3: to that information and bring it into our conscious awareness
Speaker 3: and solve a math problem. There are other things, there
Speaker 3: are memories, other things we can access, and this happens
Speaker 3: a lot obviously being a writer, where we can go
Speaker 3: to those places. And being a writer, you have to
Speaker 3: learn to work with your subconscious. You have to learn
Speaker 3: how to feed it and then basically forget about it
Speaker 3: and then it will deliver sometimes when you're taking a shower,
Speaker 3: sometimes in a dream. But you learn to work with
Speaker 3: it and you learn to trust it. It has all
Speaker 3: the stuff that's not immediately available to us in the moment,
Speaker 3: because if we had everything that went on in our
Speaker 3: brains happening at once, we would be completely incoherent.
Speaker 2: We couldn't handle it all.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. You know, we don't think I
Speaker 3: can we can suddenly take control of our breath, but
Speaker 3: breathing is really an unconscious process. Our heartbeat, our body temperature,
Speaker 3: all of the things that regulate keeping us alive we
Speaker 3: don't consciously think about. There's that whole part of our
Speaker 3: mind that takes care of those things for us, which
Speaker 3: allows us to be very present and in the moment
Speaker 3: so that we can function, you know, with all this information,
Speaker 3: and we have to follow the information that we get
Speaker 3: in order to remain coherent. Otherwise we're just simply overwhelmed
Speaker 3: by everything.
Speaker 2: The late psychologist William James talked about human consciousness and
Speaker 2: he said there were five major characters. What are they?
Speaker 3: Yeah, William James is one of my favorite heroes of
Speaker 3: all time. He was brilliant and he says that kind
Speaker 3: of what I was just saying just now, that human
Speaker 3: consciousness it flows like a stream, and it's characterized by
Speaker 3: streams of thought being governed by these five characteristics. So
Speaker 3: the first one is that every thought tends to be
Speaker 3: part of a personal consciousness. The second one is that
Speaker 3: within each personal consciousness, thought is always changing. The third
Speaker 3: is that within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.
Speaker 3: The fourth is that it always appears to deal with
Speaker 3: objects independent of itself, and the last one is that
Speaker 3: it is interested in some parts of these objects to
Speaker 3: the exclusion of others. Those are the five primary characteristics
Speaker 3: that he observed.
Speaker 2: Some people naturally use their conscious nub minds and subconscious
Speaker 2: minds without really even trying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, generally speaking, intuition is one of the
Speaker 3: greatest examples of that. And some people have more intuition
Speaker 3: and awareness than other people in certain situations, and some
Speaker 3: people have more knowledge of one area than in another.
Speaker 3: So I always, you know, not getting into politics, but
Speaker 3: I always like to say, if you go far enough right,
Speaker 3: you're going to end up left, and if you go
Speaker 3: far enough left end up right.
Speaker 2: Circle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly exactly, But it all, and it does, it
Speaker 3: all kind of goes full circle. And there are things
Speaker 3: that we can do intuitively that we don't really have
Speaker 3: to think about. And anybody who has studied, you know,
Speaker 3: writing in many respects is one of them. But anybody
Speaker 3: who's a musician, I'm a musician, I'm a vocalist. I've
Speaker 3: also studied and practiced martial arts. Great sports players they
Speaker 3: don't have to think about what they're doing. There's an
Speaker 3: expression among scientists and psychologists. They basically say, neurons that
Speaker 3: fire together wire together. So in my case, among other things,
Speaker 3: I'm a drummer, so I learned to practice there's the
Speaker 3: twenty six drum runiments and that you learn to practice them.
Speaker 3: And in the beginning you have to think about what
Speaker 3: you're doing, and you make it happen, and then the
Speaker 3: more you do it, the more you don't have to
Speaker 3: think about it. And then of course when it's time
Speaker 3: to play music, you forget about all that and you
Speaker 3: just play. And years ago, when I was first studying
Speaker 3: martial arts, my sense i was saying that the ideal
Speaker 3: condition would be to be in a fight and be
Speaker 3: knocked unto conscious and still being able to fight because
Speaker 3: your body knows what to do. So I always kind
Speaker 3: of like that idea. And you know, same thing about
Speaker 3: when you know other different physical skills. As examples, if
Speaker 3: you learn to ride a bicycle, you got to really
Speaker 3: pay attention to what you're doing, but once you learn
Speaker 3: how to do it, you forget. You just get on
Speaker 3: the bike and you ride.
Speaker 2: With that old saying, it's like riding a bicycle.
Speaker 3: That's where those cliches come from, because they're great.
Speaker 2: I was talking the last couple hours about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2: Is that going to play a part in any of this?
Speaker 3: Yes, and no. I also nowhere is near the background
Speaker 3: of your previous.
Speaker 2: Guests, Bart, right, yeah, Bart Cosco.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I have a background of technology, and so
Speaker 3: you know, one of the things Bart was saying was
Speaker 3: that the massive amount of computing power you need for
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence is to learn to train it. And the
Speaker 3: more you feed it all this different information, it learns
Speaker 3: and then it responds. But it can never really have emotion.
Speaker 3: You know. It can emulate it, it can be polite,
Speaker 3: but it can't change physical sensations. It can't really smell.
Speaker 3: It can't feel in the heart. It can't really admire.
Speaker 3: What is it like to look at a beautiful rose
Speaker 3: or to smell a beautiful rose. You know, it can't
Speaker 3: go down the street like we get down the street
Speaker 3: and suddenly see a beautiful woman in your heart stops
Speaker 3: because she's so beautiful. Right, It can't do any of
Speaker 3: those things. But I like to think of it as
Speaker 3: a very complex tool, and it's an extension of our
Speaker 3: consciousness because, like Bart said, it is. It's doing what
Speaker 3: we're asking it to do, and it's extending itself to follow.
Speaker 3: He used a great term about human I forget how
Speaker 3: he put it, but with it like human error or
Speaker 3: human agents. I think it's the word that he used,
Speaker 3: the expression he uses, so we can use it as
Speaker 3: an extension. It can certainly do wonderful things, but it
Speaker 3: can't have those spontaneous emotional things. It can't shift like
Speaker 3: we shift in the stream of consciousness from moment to moment.
Speaker 3: It can only copy what we do and how we
Speaker 3: direct it. It's just like you can see a house
Speaker 3: and you can build a house, and you can use
Speaker 3: all the tools to build a house, but you're the
Speaker 3: one that's doing the building. You know, you can program
Speaker 3: computers to carve beautifully pieces of wood with laser and
Speaker 3: all of those things, but there's nothing like that hands
Speaker 3: on feeling of old school artistry and carpentry and you know,
Speaker 3: sculpting and things like that that we do as humans.
Speaker 2: You talk about animal and plant consciousness, Tell me about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm fascinated with that, particularly because of my experiences
Speaker 3: that I've had in the jungle. And people could say, well,
Speaker 3: that person is dumb as a houseplant. But I'm not
Speaker 3: so sure that the house plant is so dumb, and
Speaker 3: maybe they're even smarter than us. And you know, there's
Speaker 3: that whole thing about how maybe plants are cultivating us
Speaker 3: because they were there before we were, and there's this
Speaker 3: whole symbiotic relationship between plants and humans and other things.
Speaker 3: So the whole idea of animal consciousness, excuse me, poses
Speaker 3: a problem of other minds because non human animals don't
Speaker 3: have the ability to express human language and they can't
Speaker 3: tell humans about their experiences. So you can't really have
Speaker 3: objective reasoning about that question, because it denial that an
Speaker 3: animal is consciousness implts it doesn't feel that its life
Speaker 3: has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong.
Speaker 3: De Karte has often been blamed for mistreating animals because
Speaker 3: he believed that only humans have a non physical mind,
Speaker 3: and most people believe the animals like cats and dogs
Speaker 3: are conscious, but insects or not. But the source of
Speaker 3: this is based on personal interactions with pets and other
Speaker 3: animals that have been subjectively observed. So if you think
Speaker 3: that subjective experiences yestereness of consciousness, then the nature of
Speaker 3: animal consciousness. We can't really know. If insects have subjective experiences,
Speaker 3: then they have to embody the yesters of consciousness. Do
Speaker 3: bees like the taste of nectar? Do ants foraging for
Speaker 3: crumbs to feel better when they find one? Everyone agrees
Speaker 3: that bees can take an environmental environmental from and perform
Speaker 3: impressive computations on it, But can they feel and sense
Speaker 3: the environment from a person perspective? Just because they can't
Speaker 3: articulate it in human language doesn't mean they're not conscious.
Speaker 2: Where does consciousness come from in the first.
Speaker 3: Place, Matthew, It comes from within us.
Speaker 2: Are we born with it or do we inherit it?
Speaker 3: I think we're born with it. I think we come
Speaker 3: into awareness initially in the womb or whenever we come
Speaker 3: into this plane of existence, and we are evolving. So
Speaker 3: when we first come into feeling and knowing and experiencing,
Speaker 3: we're definitely connected to our mothers in the womb, but
Speaker 3: we can't articulate things. We don't know what's going on
Speaker 3: until suddenly things start to change in the womb when
Speaker 3: we end up into the world, and then we start
Speaker 3: to learn as we go. But if you go onto
Speaker 3: the basics of defining consciousness as awareness. Then the moment
Speaker 3: you have any sort of awareness within the womb is
Speaker 3: the beginning of consciousness. And of course, the more you
Speaker 3: evolve and the bigger your brain gets, and the more
Speaker 3: your sensory organs evolve, the more input you have, and
Speaker 3: the more your consciousness can evolve and develop and become
Speaker 3: more aware. And then you know, in shamanism and on
Speaker 3: the spiritual paths throughout the world, in the end, it's
Speaker 3: all about growing awareness and becoming more aware. If somebody
Speaker 3: is working towards becoming enlightened, so to speak, then they're
Speaker 3: becoming more aware of things. And of course the more
Speaker 3: aware you become, the more conscious you become, and the
Speaker 3: better and the wiser and the better decisions that you
Speaker 3: can make. You know, within yourself and within the world,
Speaker 3: and within you know the people around you.
Speaker 2: Does consciousness make successful people?
Speaker 3: I think yeah, But I think consciousness in terms of
Speaker 3: success is also a subjective thing. A guy can have,
Speaker 3: you know, six gazillion dollars, and in the ways of
Speaker 3: the world of money, he could be considered to be
Speaker 3: very successful, but he could be the unhappiest people, one
Speaker 3: of the unhappiest people in the world.
Speaker 2: That's possible. That's true.
Speaker 3: You could have a shaman in the jungle who has
Speaker 3: no physical.
Speaker 2: Possessions and he's happy.
Speaker 3: He's happy. He's like, he walks ten feet and there's
Speaker 3: the banana tree, and there's a banana and he goes
Speaker 3: over there and there's his fingertips.
Speaker 2: And he's got his little hut and everything else.
Speaker 3: That's right. He's got no insurance, he doesn't have the
Speaker 3: I R S right and you know, uh, he doesn't
Speaker 3: have air pollution. All of the things that come in
Speaker 3: society and all the material possessions that people spend their
Speaker 3: lives after, he has none of it. And he doesn't
Speaker 3: want it, and he doesn't need it because he's really
Speaker 3: happy with who he is and where he is, because
Speaker 3: he's you know, he's in the he's in the palm,
Speaker 3: in the heart of Mother Earth, and all his needs
Speaker 3: are met.
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