Episode Transcript
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Welcome to the mushrooms Apprentice. I'm your host, Shona Home. Lakshmi Narayan is the president and co founder of Awake.net comma, an ad free social network for the entheogenic community, and the creator of the Awake Feet program, the Fund for Entheogenic Addiction treatment, whose mission is to end addiction one ibogaine treatment at a time. She is also the writer producer of a documentary, Iboga saves, that will document the psychospiritual healing inner journey of people going through the feet program to end their addiction. Her interest in knowledge about iboga and its power to heal has come from both personal experience and from having created brands for ibogaine clinics and psychedelic clients. Lakshmi is the founder of Awake Media, a coalition of designers, writers, technologists, marketers, and a hosting platform for the transformational wellness community. Lakshmi designed the mushrooms Apprentice website, and I think she did a gorgeous job. I met Lakshmi over ten years ago at the women's visionary congress, and I have the great privilege today of being on the board of awake.net dot. Lakshmi is also a longtime student of the I Ching, and she has a lot of knowledge to share on that subject. So welcome, Lakshmi.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Hi, shawna. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: You are so welcome.
Let's talk about how you got into the I Ching, how you came to use it, and then get into the history of it. What is the I Ching? What makes it so special?
[00:02:10] Speaker B: I got into the I Ching when I was 22. My brother used to buy books, and he would get into things. He would buy all the books on the subject and then move on to another topic. And he had bought these books on the I Ching. One of them was the Wilhelm I Ching, which is translated into German from Chinese, and then to English. And it's really, really a profound good I Ching text. Anyway, I started looking at the I Ching, and I started. I was, at the time, I was applying for graduate school in the US, and I had applied to ten schools, and I got nine rejections, and the 10th one accepted me. But I still had hurdles because I had to get financial aid. And every time I would get a rejection, I started throwing the I Ching because these books were lying around. And I started reading it. I couldn't understand the word that it said because it was written in this really archaic language. The metaphors were from another time, but there was something about it that just mesmerized me. And what happened was, when I got a rejection from a university, I would throw an I ching, and the I ching would give me very often. Not always, but very often. This one hexagram, the traveling stranger, hexagon 56, which is talking about the journey of life. And it's talking about this, both the actual journey and the metaphorical journey. But, you know, the itching has always got these levels it works on. It'll give you some really practical advice, some emotional advice of behavior or what you should do if you want to be superior in your actions. And then it'll give you outcomes based on being at different levels in your understanding of the situation and your behavior. So you have this. It's like a ladder, and you have this opportunity to climb it. And the traveling stranger was talking about, on a very prosaic level, how to conduct yourself in a foreign land. And since I was in India and I was trying to go to America, every time I got that, I said, well, I must be going. That's why it's telling me how I should behave. It's not telling me how to go, but how I should behave. And so it would give me this little boost of confidence, and I would, you know, I would wait for the next rejection to come, and it would come, and then I would again do an I Ching, and it would again give me. So it was so consistent. And then I went, and I'm here in, you know, I've lived in America for decades now, and I believe that the I Ching is what gave me the correct orientation to the problem in order to be able to get there, because I had so many challenges. And every time it would say, you're going to go, and it would make my intention that much stronger to go, and I would push through. And so I think there's a lot of value in this amazing philosophy and wisdom and psychology, and that comes from the ancient Chinese, not the chinese culture that we know today, but the ancient Chinese. And I think there's value in it for all of us. And I have been a student of the Yiqing ever since that happened, because I just couldn't understand, how did a book know that I was going to go in the end? That's the question. And it's still. I it's still a question, because how does this happen? And I have some ideas about it, but they're just ideas. I don't know yet.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Carl Jung writes the foreword for the Richard Wilhelm translation, the book of changes, and he talks about that, how we're in this modern construct about causal reality, and one thing leads to another, and it's very succinct. And he's saying, not so for the ancient Chinese. That was not their mindset, it's all about chance, and you're working essentially with nature.
And these are invisible forces that inform this reality and influence this reality we don't obviously understand, especially with the western mindset. Right. So it's quite something that you can. Well, you're going to explain how this works, but the answers you get from either drawing these, I think they were reeds, or using the coins, which is what I used, is extraordinary.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Well, I told you. Yeah, exactly. It's a conundrum. It messes with your sense of time. Linear time, like you said, and also causality. And time is really like one of the biggest teachings in the I Ching as a whole about the nature of time. And it does it through in a very specific way. You can learn it as you. So, you know, I started, instead of doing hexagrams, I started just reading the hexagrams to try to understand it, because I couldn't. So for a long time, I didn't do any, you know, I would from time to time. But it wasn't like I was just experimenting to see, what is this book? What does it do? And I had a lot of time because I had no agenda. I wasn't teaching a class, I was just learning it. And some very weird things happen during that time, for example. And I think this is a really good demonstration of how the teaching works. I mean, how in terms of how it works, like what impact it has on you when you ask a question or have a reading. And the other part of it is why it works. And the why it works is conjecture, but the how it works is. So you ask a question and you, you know, the right. The right question is pretty important.
The way you frame it and what you're trying to understand, your level of understanding about the problem, all of that influences the answer. And so you ask a question and then you get a hexagram, you throw the I Ching. The I Ching is basically made up of this duality of a straight. It's Yin and Yang is a taoist foundation of it, but it's male and female. There are these two poles. There's the strong line, the Yang line, which is an unbroken line, and what they call the broken line, which is the yin line. And the yang is created, and the yin is receptive. And these two are these fundamental polarities. They're complementary as well as oppositional to each other. And they're the basic matrix of all life. And it's the philosophical basis for right and wrong, basically, understanding right and wrong, understanding good behavior, but also understanding how to evolve your personality, how to have a tool, a real tool, for good behavior and right and wrong. In a world where we don't even know what male and female is anymore, we have lost an understanding of it. I read a lot of books on the I Ching, and I discovered over time that, yeah, Jung says all the stuff about the subconscious and the unconscious and synchronicity and these laws of synchronicity. But synchronicity remains kind of a mystery for most people. What is synchronicity? It has something to do with presence, and it has something to do with consciousness and how in sync you are with the time is really what the I ching is trying to teach you, like, how what is the right action in this time, given this configuration of circumstances? And so you can use your questioning or your intentionality, intention making in a very conscious way, and use the iching as a tool. In the nineties, I met this, I was introduced to this person, a Lakota shaman, who I apprenticed to him for a couple of years, and he taught me these nine hexagrams for character development. And they're not in any, I don't know what the order is based on, but there are nine specific hexagrams of the I Ching, and you go through the nine, and you study them. And so I embarked on this course of study with him.
And, you know, it was very informal, but it was also like, you apprenticed. It was like this formal apprenticeship where you took. So made certain agreements, and you worked with this person, and they shared with you what they knew about it. And then you read the I ching on your own. And it was intellectual at first, and then it became experiential. It was a very strange relationship. The more you. More I meditated on this hexagram, and what it meant. I began to see the lines, the situations that I was talking about. They were using metaphors from their time, you know, so it would be things like, his feet are fastened in the stalks. Well, they don't do that anymore. But, you know, it was a metaphor, but you understand that. Oh, that's a metaphor from that time. They're like, they were pointing to real situations and saying, see, this is what's happening, and this is why it's happening. So I started to translate that into my time. And what's happening here, it becomes kind of automatic. But at first it's hard, but then you start to see it, and then suddenly there'll be, like some line in the reading that you're looking at that is really, really obtuse. You don't have a clue what it means. And what I do then is I'll just recognize, I don't have a clue what this means. And then somewhere along the way, the situation will show up like it's right there and it'll be like these words were precise. I don't mean just precise in terms of metaphor, precise as to the situation that it was describing. And I'll give you an example of this. Jack and I created a website for this collaboration, and we put it up and it had this stuff about sacred geometry. And we were. It was hard on the heels of our intense journey with psychedelics for several years, and we put it out. We spent like $7,000 on SEO, and we didn't get a single response, not one. So then I did an iching and I asked the iching, why has nobody responded to my website? This was really a fantastic website.
And the I jing gave me this line which said that I had. That we had hit an arrow and the arrow had. He shoots an arrow. It's always in he. You have to translate it to she, but she shoots an arrow and hits him, who is in a cave. Literally, those were the words. And hits him who's in a cave. I had no clue what that meant. But some weeks later, I met this person and he became.
His name was Dan Bachman, and he became a mentor to me. He was a filmmaker, and he was very wise in terms of marketing and communication. He was really, like, so gifted. And he became my mentor. And he saw that website, and he liked that website, and that website is what inspired him to work with me. So even if nobody else saw it, he saw it. And he was a very big influence in my life. But here's the funny part. So then after I knew him and met him, and it was like months after that, I Ching, he told me the story about how he was once in the caves of Lascaux in France, and he was with the tour group, and they were walking through the caves, and then they came out and they were all standing around outside the cave. And the tour group guide turned to Dan and said, oh, mister Bachmann, thank you so much for your expose about the caves. And in such perfect French, this is what she said. And Dan is standing there, he doesn't even know what's going on. And he's looking at her and says, what do you mean? And she says, well, you talked for 20 minutes in French about the cave paintings and their, their significance and blah, blah, blah, and he says what? He said, I don't speak French.
And it was this moment, for him, that was a very big moment of profundity, what happened in that cave. And then for me to get that line in the I Ching and for it to be so exact, because as soon as I heard that story, I knew that he was what he was, the man in the cave. It also said it was someone who had retired, and he was retired at the time. So, anyway, that's just to demonstrate the profundity of how the itching works. And these are not easy answers, but they're profound, and they make you think about life differently. And so anyway, I studied these nine hexagrams, and I had read this other book, and during that time, I had a lot of ahas and a lot of awakenings and chakras. You know, my heart chakra opened. And one time I saw this vision of DNA, like blue. It was like a projection right in front of my eyes, and I was wide awake. I wasn't on any psychedelics. I didn't even know about psychedelics at the time.
And I began to understand that there was this really big relationship between the DNA and the I ching.
So I started researching it, and I found this book. It was pretty obscure. It was some mathematician who talked about how the I Ching and the DNA have this exact mathematical correlation to each other. There are 64 DNA strands. There are 64 eachings. There are three pairs of two. That's what makes up. And there are three pairs of these two lines that make up a sequence. It's very exact. And so you could say that if the DNA is a blueprint for life, perhaps the I ching. This is the conjecture part, because I Ching is a blueprint for consciousness. It is definitely a blueprint for consciousness, whether you relate it to the DNA or not. But if you relate it to the DNA, it becomes hugely significant for our time.
Right? Because we are understanding the code of the DNA.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Well, okay, for those who are listening, who are going, okay, this is fascinating. And wait a minute, like, what are hexagrams? What? How does this work? Could you go just do. Give a basic kind of understanding?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Okay, so basically what the I ching has done is they've extrapolated from nothing to one to two, to three, to eight, and then eight times the age is 64. The reason you have 64 DNA is because you can. You can characterize all of life in those 64 configurations. Mathematically, you don't need to go beyond that. So you. You know, eight times eight is 64. And that that's all the permutations of life, which is because there are so many variables inside of that. So it's. So teaching is based on the same thing. And what they did was they took these two poles. So you have left and right, good and evil, male and female, matter and spirit. You have all these dualities and tensions and oppositions. That's what life is made up of. But the one that really, all life, as far as I know, has this polarity of male and female. Even if sometimes there are some species that have both in themselves and these strange things. Each species is specific to itself and it has a certain configuration, and it's not, but it's not just in gender. And it's all become localized to gender. What's going on in this gender identity conversation and the physicality of what's going on and the sort of.
It's like taking a chopping axe to a eye surgery, what's happening. It's very, very harmful for our species to lose sight of what maleness and femaleness is.
You need the polarity for life to exist. And you have that duality within yourself. And once you understand that, you're both male and female inside of yourself, and you have an outer expression. But what you are is not just a body, not just a sex or an identity. You have a whole other identity behind of that that is invisible, that is related to. That inspires awe. However you think of awe, whether you think of it as God or as higher self or angels or your own creativity or intel, however you think of it, it inspires this sense of awe and appreciation. And that's where the healing comes from.
So I've been going on and on. Sorry.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: That's right. I love your passion. Okay, so we have 64 hexagrams. What is a hexagram? Like? What? So you're talking about the Yang line, which is a solid line, and the yin line, which is a broken line.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Right? So if you take each of those and you replicate it, you just double it like a reflection. You get two Yang lines, two yin lines. And then if you. Then you can create the other possibilities. There are six yang line and a yin line, a yin line and the Yang line. You can create these pairs, and there are eight pairs that you can create, and then that's all you can create. So then they did that. That was the next logical step, from zero to one. And then one replicated itself. So it was two straight lines, and then each of them had two other forms they could replicate. One is a straight line, the other is a broken line. We just have the line. So it's mathematical progression. And because of that, they came up with, and that's DNA progression is the same. This is how many possible permutations you can create of those three sets of ag ct ua, I believe, is it, I'm not a geneticist, but those three pairs, and so you, so you get these eight pairs, and if you double those eight pairs, you get 64 different combinations. So when you do that, you get 64 hexagrams. And hexagram is made up of. It's very hard to do this, just talking about it. I have to show it on a map, and I'm going to teach it in this course. But a hexagram is made up of six lines. And you get them by, you can take like a copper coin, for example, and you have a heads and a tails. The heads is equivalent to a three, and the tails is equivalent to a two. And so you have three coins like that. And then you just shake and throw, and they'll fall in a certain way. So you can say, okay, if you have two heads and a tail, it's three plus three plus six. So you have nine. I mean, eight and eight is a broken line. All the even lines are broken lines. And then if you throw another throw and you get three heads, you would get a nine, and that nine would have a little circle in the center of it, because it's called a moving line. And what a moving line means is that it is the, it's the place where the action happens in the hexagram. So it'll give you a hexagram of, you throw six times, you get six lines, and they're either mathematically, they either a six or seven and eight or a nine, depending on how the dice fall or how the points fall. And so you get the 64 different permutations. Each one is different, and each one is a constellation about a certain situation. So the traveling stranger, the first one I mentioned, 56, was about the traveling stranger. And on a very practical level, it's about how to travel through life, how to travel in a foreign country, how to not be like, understand your place. You know, if you're in a foreign country, you're a stranger in a strange land. And then also how you're always kind of on a journey, and you're journeying through life, and you come on, you have these different stations in your life. It's really profound. You can think about just that one hexagram for your entire life and can be a, like a teacher for you.
It has been for me, and it gave me this feeling of belonging.
So taught me how to be in a foreign man. And after a while, you begin to see that everyone is like you. You know, there's different cultural things, but everyone is the same. We're all human beings. We all go to the same source. And so, anyway, you get this hexagram, and you read the whole hexagram, the commentary, and you read the moving lines. And there are many, many books on the I Ching, if you. If somebody wants to explore. But for me, the two I like the most that I've stayed with me the longest are the Wilhelm, each ing, and the taoist teaching, which is really good. Really good. It talks about things in alchemical terms and in terms of yin and yang, and it talks about this idea of true yin and true Yang and false yin and false yang. And it's this very general thing, but immediately, you start thinking about what is true yin and what is true Yang. And can there be a false expression of yin and Yang? And what would that look like? And how. How can you tell the difference?
[00:23:59] Speaker A: So that book is titled the taoist teaching.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the taoist teaching. And I'll send you the links afterwards, and you can put them in.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Fabulous. Yes. Because I, of course, use the Wilhelm translation always. And then I have something called the I Ching workbook by Rl Wing. And that is just.
It's just nice, because, of course, the original translation, it's beautiful. And I have to read the description always. More than once. More than twice. Sometimes. Sometimes it's really easy. You just got it. And other times, I'm like, wait a minute. So that's when I go to RL Wing's book, the I Ching Workbook. And just to give. It just gives a kind of a brief, concise summary. So it just helps to deepen the message. But I love this taoist teaching. And then the whole idea of the false yin, false Yang is so fascinating. So I'm going to order that after this.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good one to have. So I started the fund for anthrogenic Addiction treatment, filming people for the documentary, and looking through all of this stuff, I realized that a big pain point in the addiction recovery landscape is that there isn't a place where community can gather who can actually help with integration, not a place where online, where people can gather, and people go back home, and they don't have the support system. So really awake.net, which you helped create, and we've been doing for years, is really was created to have a place where people could gather and offer their services for integration, amongst other things, but also shamanic journeying and guidance and, you know, all the things that go with it. And so then I thought, well, this change your character, these nine hexagrams was a very good way to create a course. So I've created a course called change your character. Nine hexagrams for rebirth. And it's intended for people who are going through ivigaine treatment for addiction recovery. That's the primary. But for anyone really going through psychedelic integration and wanting a framework. So these nine hexagrams are a framework, and I'm going to be teaching one a month.
And then I invite other teachers who have different skills and gifts to offer their services in a course or give a lecture, somehow make their presence known. And let's create a village online, a community of healers, so we can actually make this I begin interruption work.
So that's. So that's change of character. That's the I ching. And that's how it's kind of connected to feet.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Okay. I love that you've done that. And that brings me to the next question I was going to ask you is, what makes the I ching? Why is it so relevant to this day and age? Because it truly is. Right. It's like having your own personal ancient sage to guide you.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: The fact that you incorporated it as a course for integration is, I think, ingenious.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Because we live in a secular state and because religion, spirituality and health have been in two separate camps for a really long time. We have a culture that is mostly atheistic, doesn't really have a. And with the loss of religion was the loss of philosophy as well, because that was the context in which philosophy became. Was relevant and without. Without reverence. So the I Ching says, reverence is the foundation of true culture. And that makes you think about that. Just that one line makes you wonder whether we live in a false culture.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Well, we definitely live in a circling the toilet culture.
Really. Like all this new age talk of, oh, we're ascending. I'm like, no, I. I'm not seeing that.
So.
Yeah, but that lack or that loss of reverence, it's the loss of the sacred, right?
[00:28:24] Speaker B: And how do you bring it back? You know, you have to find it in yourself. And. And honestly, the itching has been so true. Like, if you think of a philosophy that's true and it's foundations. Its foundations are about the well and the well being. The well is the divine, the waters of the divine. Your divine consciousness, the well going down to the deepest, to the source. This is all the well. And that's really the basis for what the I ching is talking about. So I find it to be a true philosophy that transcends these religious compounds, you know, that exist. So I think it's useful for anyone, no matter what, what religion or non religion you come from, it's useful to have something that plumbs the depths of your own consciousness, because if you start doing psychedelics, particularly, this is what is happening. This is what ibogaine is doing in that addiction interruption. It's opening. It's connecting you with the doors of your psyche and your subconscious, and it's the beginning of a process. It's not the end. It's the beginning. And. But if you didn't have that interruption, you couldn't go anywhere because it's got such a hold on you with the addiction. So then it interrupts that process, and then you need some really hefty tools to get through to the other side of your. Whether it's addiction or PTSD or panic or anxiety or trauma, whatever the reason, or just depression or somebody in your family committed suicide, there are so many reasons that you could be seeking healing.
And ibogaine door opens the doors to your psyche in this very profound way. And then after that, you need other tools that are as profound, and some of them are people. Some of them are teachers, energy healers, you know, other kinds of modalities, maybe other plant medicines. And some of it is philosophy and psychology.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Yes. Which is ancient. We've been asking these deeper questions for untold thousands of years. And the I Ching reflects. It's a reflection of nature, and we are nature, and human nature doesn't change. I mean, there's different trends and whatnot. Right. So I just find the I Ching is its council is as relevant and true today as it would have been 10,000 years ago.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Right. And I think, yeah, exactly. It is relevant and true, even though the language is archaic. The.
It's like each thing is a hologram of meaning that applies to any time, and it transcends or processes these borders of time and space and consciousness in its. In the way it works. And so it makes you start to wonder, and you need wonderment. You need what you need to be able to wonder about the nature of the world, not think that AI can give you all the answers, because AI is, as its name says, artificial. It is an artificial intelligence. What is artificial? What is true Yin? What is true intelligence? What is false intelligence? It's a big question. And if you don't have intuition and you don't have feelings to inform your intelligence, you have an artificial intelligence.
Yes.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: Which is programmed. Artificial intelligence is programmed, whereas I think of it as artificial. Intra intelligence versus living intelligence, like our body and our consciousness. That's living intelligence.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: I like that word. Living intelligence. Exactly. We're real. We are living. And. Yeah. So that's one part of it is that the AI. The other part of it is a transgender movement that is talking about 72 different sexes, or all these being on a spectrum. The gender is on a spectrum. No, it's not on a spectrum. I'm sorry, that's all made up. What gender is, is there are two poles, and if you don't have those two extremes, you cannot make life. And so then you have to go to all kinds of artificial means to make life happen. When we're already equipped to make life happen naturally with these two.
These two. And from a ecological, biological. I'm not any of those, but hey, I'm a human being with a brain. From an ecological, biological standpoint, we are equipped.
We're made.
We're the product of millions of years of evolution. We didn't just rise up yesterday our bodies. And so for somebody to think that just because they cracked the genome or they understand they've been able to reverse engineer the genome, that they can actually make life is a huge leap. And so I guess reverence is needed to understand, you know, and people are not reverent, and they're kind of adolescent in their ambitions about what to do with all this. And it alarms me. And so I think, yeah, you know, if you understood this, I ching. And had a. And then you, then you were also doing psychedelics and you had this, you caught a glimpse of the vastness of life and what you're, what you. What's even inside your own mind, the vastness of it, you're going to be have a very different approach to reality in life.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Yes, I wish they would. Obviously, it will never happen in government run schools, but to teach that eaching in schools would be amazing, would have to be a very different kind of school run by intelligent people. But, but that, to your point, to give children the understanding that they are so much more than what they see on their screen, you know, that then what they're told, they must be this kind of thing or how to think or whatever, that they are so, so much more, and that would really get their creative juices flowing in absolutely wondrous ways.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, it would and, you know, maybe we have to. Maybe it won't be as ubiquitous as being in a public school, but we could create avenues for it and bring it. You know, it's like. So I got this from teaching, this idea that when one abides in their room and their words are well spoken, the ripples reach out and reach all those who are conscious and go further and further. And it's just this idea of, hey, if you just are in the right place, you yourself find the right place to be in this moment in time, right now, that's going to lead to the next right moment. And if you can keep recognizing where you're.
And it's literally understanding that every moment is a choice point in your behavior. And you have this, the autonomy of response, and you can navigate your life if you pay attention like that, in that way. It's really not that hard, but it's really profound, because that's not how we think our culture.
It's very much like the branching of trees. So the tree of life, the branching of the nervous system, you can literally. One of the things I teach in this course is how to start with zero and draw this tree of life just based on a branch, a y. Every time we just keep replicating the y, you get molecules and hexagons and you get the tree of life.
So it's real. The way that that inner geometry is created is based, is the same mathematics and geometry of the I ching. And when you do psychedelics, I'm sure you noticed this.
Psychology is logical, so you can understand yourself and the psychology of why things happen and how they happen.
It's not magic, it's not boo boo anymore. It's self knowledge. And I really feel like the value of becoming your own healer, becoming your own shaman, having your own tools, which is why I want to teach this course, because once you get into it and have that, you. It's yours. You can have it on your phone or in a book or whatever, and it's yours.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Could you talk about the course? How does it begin?
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Well, sure, I could. I could talk about a little bit. So there are. There are nine hexagrams, and the first hexagram is hexagram ten. So each month I will be teaching one hexagram. So hexagram ten is called treading. And if you look at the word treading, in Jack's way of taking words apart, the t is across it's orientation, and reading is reading the path or treading the path. And it's also called conduct, and it's how you conduct yourself. But the image of the hexagram is called treading on the tail of the tiger. The tail of the tiger means you're treading on something really powerful. And then it says, you're treading on the tail of the tiger. It's really powerful but doesn't bite you. And that's how it starts. And the way I think about the tiger is the tiger is in a lot of cultures, the tiger symbolizes your spiritual energy.
And so really, when you decide to go within and heal yourself, you're going to confront your darkness and you're going to come, you know, you're going to be able to command your light in a way, in a boat, you have both. But you're going into this journey because that's why you're ill and seeking healing. It's just metaphorically, that's what's going on, and you go into it, and that's the tiger. And so if you don't understand that this is a big deal, you're going into when you do an ibogaine journey, a big deal, and you have to have the proper reverence when you approach this. And at the same time, you know, there are other factors to how you approach something, especially a psychedelic journey, with a certain amount of neutrality, not too much projection. Maybe you have an intention, but you hold it lightly, right? Hold your intention lightly, and then don't expect what others have experienced, because it can be, it's going to be your experience. And this is true for life. Right? So a journey is just like a compressed life experience where you're. Where you kind of are seeing things holographically. And so it kind of prepares you for that journey, and then it takes you through these lines. But the other part that. The other dimension that we want to bring in is this idea that ten, one and zero is a binary system.
That's what the whole of the technological, it's one and zero. The binary system, which was, which is a foundation of technology, code, was. Was discovered by this man named Leibniz from the e chain, believe it or not.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, so it's. It's based on. It's hexagram. Ten and ten also is the completion of a cycle. Like decadence. A decade ends decadence, like D cadence. It's. It's the end of something, and it's also the beginning because after, when you come to ten, you're starting another cycle, counting ten, 1112. So it's the end of a cycle.
So it's really very significant. So teaching is always like this. The last hexagram is 64, which is before completion, and 63 is completion. So it starts with the beginning, and it's just before something has ended. It's when the beginning. It's very beautiful how it teaches you about sequence and consequence.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: We start with hexagram ten, and then what. What comes after that?
[00:40:48] Speaker B: I don't want to go into the whole sequence right now, but you study. So for hexagram ten, you would read the whole thing and maybe meditate on some of the images and go through each line and change each line into its opposite, and you'll get a new hexagram as a result. And then you study six satellite hexagrams along.
So you will study those six hexagrams as well. And it's very loose at this point, because we have one class and hear about it, and I teach, like, I share what I know about it because I'm going through it, too. I'm going to learn something, too. And then we meet again at the end of the month to discuss what we learned about the hexagram. That's more than one hexagram, but about the whole thing. And then the next month, we start with hexagram 15, which is modesty, which is the next one in the sequence.
And so there are nine like that.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. It's just one.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: I mean, I don't mind. I don't mind sharing it, but I just don't have it in my head, the whole sequence.
[00:41:53] Speaker A: Okay. No, I just. I just. It's so. I think it's so essential after, whether it's a big psychedelic experience or especially for people who really are on a road to recovery, a road of healing, because it brings in these philosophical concepts and takes you deeper than kind of the surface story of where you're at, into the deeper symbolic nature of. Of what you're experiencing. The metaphor, all of that, it changes you.
[00:42:36] Speaker B: Literally. It's going to change your character. Literally. That's what happens.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Yes, because you're seeing from a broader. A far broader view.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Right, right. But it does go against the zeitgeist of our culture right now. And literally, the I Ching was. It says that it was written during a time when the way had already been lost. And so then it was written for a time when the way had been lost. And then there is a line in the Higgs Graham, the family, which says, when the way of the family comes to an end, oppositions arise. Well, if you look at our culture now, that way is coming to an end. In so many ways. And so here are the oppositions, too. So we're in that time. And so then again, somebody who wrote it, wrote it with this consciousness that culture would reach a point of such ignorance or decadence or whatever that would need. It would need this deep knowledge to be available. And then it's come down through us, through time, with all these amazing translators and people who have preserved it for us to be able to learn from.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: Yes. I have said for so many years that if you want to stay really on course, you look to nature and the ancients.
And so this is a perfect example. I'm not interested in what the New York Times and the Huffington Post or Fox News or any of it has to say. Right. I want to hear what is the wisdom of the ancients that guided them. That is as true today as it was all that time ago.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: Right. Don't take it for granted that what we call common sense or wisdom is really the only way to go with something like, you know, people think that being modern is everything, and it's not.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Well, you know, that's funny you would say that, because I've just been doing deep, deep research on iodine, which is something that over 95% of us are critically low on. And so I was reading a book by doctor David Brownstein on iodine, and he was saying how modern medicine just thinks if it's new, that's good, that's where we're going. And they disregard so much of, for instance, iodine has, you know, it has thousands of years, but there's 150 years of kind of more sort of modern medical history to it, of tremendous efficacy for cancer, for so, so many issues, of course, goiter and that kind of thing. But. But it's completely disregarded, thought of as dangerous due to a flawed study that was probably put there by design.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: Right, right, exactly. So somebody.
Yeah, you. You invent the wheel again because you want to market it, and you want to say that the new wheel is better than the old wheel. It's just, it's just marketing.
And I've been seeing it come around like two or three every decade. There'll be a new bunch of people talking about the same things, and they send you material about it, and it's the same thing packaged differently. And you're teaching people who don't know that blueberries are good for you, that blueberries are good for you. But, hey, not just the blueberries. You need to have this super potent product about blueberries with blueberries in it.
It's really kind of stupid.
And we're stupid that we accept it.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the power of marketing, which is, again, why I'm just like, well, you know, the ancients weren't really doing that. I mean, we're doing it on steroids. And of course, they had various things that they would do to promote ideologies and whatnot, and certainly through plays and that kind of thing. I mean, it's very old, and at the same time, my goodness, you know, they had a lot of common sense and so. And what they were in touch with philosophically and also medicinally, in terms of how to care for the body and treat the body.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Right, exactly. So. So we don't want to throw away all this knowledge and evolution.
Yeah.
I think it's not just the Yi jing. It could be any philosophy. I know that you do tarot. It could be that the western trivium stuff that you talk about, it can be anything, but it just needs to have enough depth to allow you to, you know, grow and have enough staying power. And for me, anyway, the Yi Ching is that staying power. And so I feel pretty comfortable offering it, and I really hope that people will join and I can, and we can evolve. Psychedelics brings that. It's not just one dimension. Psychedelics brings many dimensions into the. Into the conversation, because it's psychedelics. And the I Ching is already this multi dimensional book. So I think it should be an make for an interesting combination, you know?
It'll be interesting.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: Yes, definitely. So if someone is new to the I Ching, how would you suggest they get started?
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Okay, well, you know, these days I use the I Ching app, so I have this app. Let me see if I can find it. Find my phone. Here it is.
So you could buy. The two books that I recommend are the Wilhelm. Each input in the chat.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: Yes. The book of changes.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: It's called Wilhelm Baines. Yeah. So Wilhelm Baines translation is really, really wonderful, is my favorite.
And I. Gosh, I know a lot of it by heart. I read it for so many years. And then the other one I was talking about is the taoist teaching, which I really have come to love, especially nowadays, because it's very simple and it's very elemental. It's talking about yin and yang in terms of energies and alchemy. So it's. I like it because it's not so much in your psychology. It's more about your. Your energy and how you're. How it's moving.
Okay. It's a daoist teaching by Thomas Cleary. I have this app. It's the Wilhelm I Ching app, and it's this yellow icon. Show you, okay, next to the Kindle. It's a yellow icon, not the red one, and it's the ching, and it's the whole Wilhelm Baines translation in there, so you can download it. It costs 6.99. And then once you do that, you can ask questions on your phone, which is really fantastic. And, you know, people think they have to do coins and sit and all that. You don't. If something can work with coins, it's equally magical that it works with your app. It's just the same. It's not different. And so I use that. And what I like about that is that I can very quickly do a hexagram while I'm in a situation in real time, and just glance at it and get a sense of something. Sometimes it guides me like that.
If I'm in a difficult situation, I don't know the answer. So you can start doing that, or you can, you know, I've done all kinds of things. You can ask a question a week, a question a day, or an intention, and kind of map it and see how it works and try to understand just how it works. And once you get started with that process, it'll just continue.
And sometimes you'll get a hexagram that is completely. It's like a closed door. You can't understand it. And if you just say, okay, and sit with it, or even just put it on the back burner, there's going to be some situation that will come up that will reveal itself to you because of the hexagram, and you'll understand it. Yes.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: What I also quite like about the I ching is that it doesn't coddle.
It doesn't coddle you. Even when you get a message saying, yes, you're in a time of abundance, and this is great. And it will say, and to everything, a season, and at some point, you'll go into lack, you know? And so what you want to do in that time of abundance is don't lose your head, but have your feet on the ground. Make sure that, you know, you're ready for the time of decrease, as it would say.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: Yeah, so that. Yeah, that brings me to modesty. The second hexagon. Second one that we study is modesty, and it's one of my favorite hexagrams in the book. It's hexagram 15 and modesty. So if you just look at the word with Jack's hyphenated map mode, hyphen St.
Modesty is mode St. And St stands for serpent, the shape and t is the tree, or, you know, serpent cross, serpent, tree. It's the whole, that's the metaphor for knowledge and right and wrong and the way and life and all of it. And so it's saying you have to find the mode, what is right and wrong. And when a culture is so sophisticated and saturated as we are, and there's so much false information and so many bubbles, sometimes you have to go back to the origin and to the root. And I began, it's the root. It's literally a root. It's taking you to the root. And the I ching also is helping you find the root of things, the root of your behavior, the root of your genetics.
That's what it's an expression of. And so we start thinking of the I ching and the DNA as being these companions, and you say, okay, what I thought was, at the time, they were talking about junk DNA, and there was all this junk DNA, and only 20% of our DNA was reused.
And they called it junk. And I used to think even then that it was immodest for them to call it junk, because nature doesn't create junk like that. It's more like you don't know what to do with it or what it's for. And what if it's really this ladder of ascension that they talk about?
Ladder is the ladder ascension.
So what if the DNA is this ladder of ascension and your behavior, youre changing yourself and being in the present and understanding what the moment demands and knowing how to navigate through life awakens higher centers or.
So this was my, I began journeys teaching was epigenetics. This idea that you can change the expression of your DNA by your consciousness. You don't have to accept weak things or diseases that are in you. You can, with your intention, you can decide that you want that out. And then once you make that intention, which is a very important thing, I think, with healing, you actually want to heal. And so if you're an addiction, for example, or something, you make that intention.
It kickstarts a process in you once you've made that intention, and you can learn about epigenetics, this idea that just because you have so what the itching, what the ibogaine was showing me was diabetes. And so just because your father had diabetic neuropathy and you have, you are prone to diabetes, doesn't mean it has to be your expressions. You can kick it out, and that's what it was telling you. Kick it out. I was like, how do I do that? Just kick it out. And I would see this comical kind of rendition of me going onto a screen and kicking out this DNA. And finally I got that. It was this very literal thing saying, you have to. You have to have the force of kicking something out. Like, I intend to get this out of my. I intend to become well.
And once you do that, you're going to be led to the well. And what is the well? Well, the well is the source of your, of your identity and your being. And the source, the one origin, the one root of all things. And then from that, if you understand that one root, you're going to understand many roots. That's just how it goes. That's why it's a hologram. You get high, you expand your consciousness, and you see this hologram of how life is. And everything makes sense in this amazing way. Even the mistakes make sense. And that's where the healing comes from, is you understand? Oh, I'm a. I'm a traveling stranger. I'm going through life.
I am a stranger. Every moment is strange, new moment. And I can change myself in every moment.
I can become the right person for that moment. Everyone has this choice.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And where creatures of habitat. So we get stuck. But this is just, I think, most psychedelics, of course, and the I Ching can kind of call you out of that trance, just snap you out of it with the right words or the right experience, interior experience. All of a sudden, you are on a completely new track.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: Right? And that's all it takes, that moment of. Of turning it. So there is a, in the taoist teaching, there is this thing that they call the reverse operation of the sages. And I really love that metaphor and image. And they talk about how we are when we are born. We have this. We're connected to this primal innocence and clarity, and we have. We don't have to. We're connected to that, to the source very close to it. And then what they call acquired conditioning comes in over time. And by the time you're a teenager, you're in this world of acquired conditioning, all the things you've been told, and then you have to break through it again into this primal thing. And so you have to reverse a trend. It's like going back to the origin and reversing, and you can begin that like so in any moment. For example, in this moment, suppose this conversation wasn't quite going where one of us wanted it to go.
You have the option of saying something that takes it in a whole different direction. And it's a different conversation. And that's a very simple example of that power that you have and when to invoke it and how to invoke it. So then, for example, in Hexagram 15, modesty, it will say something like, a superior man modest about his modesty, they cross the great water.
And I converted to a superior woman modest about her modesty. Or one modest about their modesty may cross great water. But what that's saying is even modesty can go too far.
You know, you got to be conscious that you can become pious or proselytizing.
[00:57:46] Speaker A: Right. Wow. Well, this is, we've been going for a good hour for, I think we're good for the first hour. That was just so enlightening and so helpful.
And it's just so great to talk to someone who has, I mean, really for the better part of your life. You've been a student of the I ching.
Where can people find you? Where would you direct them?
[00:58:08] Speaker B: They can find me on awake.net. if you go to awake.net, it's a social network for the entigenic community and which I created.
Shawna is on the board of it, and we're inviting people to join. So you can go there, you can find my profile there. You can connect with me, email me. You can also call or text me at 619-366-7788 and you can find my web and branding servicesawakemedia.com. and then if you go on awake.net, you can, and you go to courses on the, on the header, you find the change your character program. You can look at it and see how it's set up, the broad outlines of it. And the last thing I have, which I'll give you a link for, is I created a, it's just a Google Doc version of the Wilhelm each ing, which is kind of gender neutral because I found it was all talking about men and I had to keep translating it. So I've changed it to one and I call it the one Yi ching.
So I'm going to send you a link to that as well because it helps.
[00:59:19] Speaker A: Okay, great. Thank you so, so much. And for the second hour, let's talk about, I want to have you talk about the feed program, and I will gain and maybe get into your experience with that, and we'll bring in more I ching as well.
[00:59:35] Speaker B: You know, one thing we could do, the second part, I don't know if you're recording right now, but one thing we could do is ask a question.
[00:59:42] Speaker A: Oh, with I ching. Ah. Fantastic. Okay. All right. That's what we're going to do. So I will invite listeners to come to the mushroomsapprentice.com and subscribe. It's very reasonable. And my goodness, this is good. This is going to be great. I'm looking forward to the second hour.
