You detribalize by recognizing that there are other tribes with other belief systems and you go out and experience some of them and then you become separate from all tribal belief systems right to bring it to bring it on home to where we are right now at meet delic i think there's a reason we call this tripping right people using psychedelics because it does take you out of your familiar way of thinking and viewing things and and makes things new again um so my whole life i've been really invigorated by newness and and surprise and you know you mentioned spontaneity and and the feeling of not just the feeling the realization that when my life was open all sorts of interesting things came into it,
But when i was back in the us doing the nine to five working trying to save money to go on the next trip not that much happened you know and um and actually i remember when i was in india the first time i i was i would sort of plan out my trip by the full moon so it's like okay i'm in srinagar now on this houseboat and it's really awesome and and the ful the moon is full and next full moon i want to be at the taj mahal right and then the full moon after that varanasi and then the full moon after that i want to get up you know into kathmandu and and so sort of it was a calendar month but by the time i got to the taj mahal from cashmere it was like a lifetime ago it so much had happened,
So many people had come in and out of my life so i've seen so many things so much you know new content had had gone into my brain that it felt like time stretches out and life becomes longer and more interesting and fuller at least for me my way of thinking um so that's the attraction the the the push or that's the pull right the push is that i've never felt um comfortable in the united states uh i feel comfortable in nature yeah yeah in the desert in the mountains whatever yeah um but american culture has never made sense to me even when i was like a five-year-old kid i was looking around saying why are they doing this this makes no sense yeah i relate to that you people are crazy yeah so i've just always felt like an outsider here yeah i feel much more at home in spain than i do here despite the fact that you know my spanish is far from perfect,
I don't look spanish no one ever thinks i'm from there you know yeah but at this point in my life i i'm more comfortable as an outsider honestly yeah i think i've felt like an outsider just about everywhere i've ever been you know but like as you wrote in uh you're amazing dude by the way i just want to tell you i'm in the process of writing a book i've been working on it forever and um i i think that many people don't understand how hard it is to write a great book and to be a great writer it really is a rare skill when you sit down to do it it's difficult and i just want to tell you like from aspiring writer to writer your writing is just pristine it's epic no thank you yeah,
But you know yeah i mean it's true but you know in your book you're you're going back into you know ancient civilizations hunter-gatherer people and you're kind of tracing the steps along the map of time and where we've kind of gone awry and it does seem that in certain places on earth we've gone further awry right this being one of them and it's interesting that from one perspective in western culture in the united states specifically we've made so much progress air quotes right yet we're in some ways one of the most devolved cultures on earth when you begin to travel and you go to south america and in places like india,
I remember um you mentioned india it sparked a huge kind of punctuation point in um in my own growth when i went to india for about five weeks maybe 2004 and i'm in these remote villages just in the middle of nowhere in southern india where it's it's generally much more remote anyway and we would uh we'd get a tuk-tuk ride out into some village to go look at you know a temple or something or ashram and uh i remember being out there and what really struck me was the children and how ecstatic these kids were living in what we would as westerners determined to be squalor and suffering and they're they're just stoked i've never seen and not just the kids,
But i mean the kids are just so much more alive and exuberant than older people generally speaking and we'd get off the tuk tuk and be taking pictures and these kids had i mean i think never even seen a camera in person before you know and i'm looking at this no indoor plumbing and i go god when i was eight i was like suicidal already you know what i mean i mean i was having those kind of thoughts and i'm going i'm sure there are sad indian kids but it was just such a big awakening for me to see that it really is about the inner experience more so than it is about your level of comfort it just had a huge impact on you yeah yeah comfort is another word for numbness right comfort is the absence of discomfort which is sensation uh i remember i was staying with some friends in topanga uh and they're really nice people i love these people,
And i was staying in their guest house and they're wealthy and so they had this new mattress and then the woman said to me hey i'm interested let me know tomorrow what you think of this mattress it was eight thousand dollars it's some special natural latex you know sustainably harvested you know the whole thing right yeah and you know egyptian cotton sheets and the everything and uh so i was up there working and i went to bed and i woke up the next day and went down and we were having breakfast and she said what did you think of that that mattress and the whole setup i said uh i guess it's great because i didn't notice anything you know and it occurred to me like that's the whole point that you don't notice anything right,
And people get more money i wrote about this and civilized to death as people get more money what do they do with it they start cutting themselves off from other people because they're afraid they're going to get scammed everyone's got an angle you got to have security you got you buy a bigger house you put a wall around it or you stay at the expensive hotel you know where the windows don't open rather than the guest house where the dogs are barking outside and you know the call to prayer is going off at dawn or whatever.
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