In Crowley's introduction, he said,
"The 72 spirits of the Gauysha are parts of the human brain."
And I used to read that and I would teach classes and stuff.
And I would always amend that and say,
"Hey, he meant mine, right?
He didn't mean brain.
He meant the mine, right?
Because a more amorphous kind of idea
than the physical squishy stuff in your head,
which is the brain.
But the neuroscience shows that, no,
he was spot on because we do have actual locations in the brain
where different personalities and different kinds of entities
can actually take up residence."
Welcome to the Repaturning Podcast,
where we believe your mind-body system is your domain
and that choosing the beliefs, habits, and patterns
that best support you is your birthright.
I'm your host, Artin Lee, creator of the Repaturning Project,
an eight-week course in learning to free yourself
from the patterns of your past and program your mind
for your dreams of the future.
Join me for these extraordinary conversations
as we unpack the keys to creating our reality.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to the Repaturning Podcast.
I am so excited to welcome today's guest, Phil Farber.
Philip H. Farber, author of Brain Magick,
exercises in Metamagic and invocation.
And he is also the author of High Magic,
a guide to cannabis in ritual and mysticism.
And he is also the author of Future Ritual,
Magic for the 21st century,
which for my industrial music fans out there
has a forward written by none other than
Genesis, Breyer, P. Orich,
the non-binary parent of industrial music.
And Phil is also a practitioner of NLP,
Neuralinguistic Programming, and hypnosis.
He has a private practice in New York's Hudson Valley
and he has developed a system of magic
that he calls Metamagic, which he can also train folks in.
And I'm so excited to speak about that today
because naturally, that is quite relevant to repaturning.
If not, something that overlaps almost entirely
in the Venn diagram.
So tell us a little bit first, Phil,
about what you practice and what is Metamagic,
what is Brain Magick?
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Well, let's see.
This is Brain Magick, what is Meta-magic?
Metamagic is essentially magic that's about magic.
The idea was that I was going to do workshops and books,
magic works to teach people how to do magic.
And originally, way back when I started out,
teaching the real traditional stuff,
the lesser-bashing ritual of the pentagram
and goodies like that,
rituals that hexagram rituals, pentagram rituals,
planetary stuff, astrological stuff
that would be familiar to traditional ceremonial magicians.
But after a while, as I was teaching this,
I realized that some of it,
you couldn't really demonstrate it like on the spot
in a workshop.
I mean, you could do an invocation of something,
of a god, a goddess, or whatever.
And people would connect with it or not.
And would there be a result?
You know, during the space of a workshop, maybe, maybe not.
So at one point, I decided that I was really only
gonna teach stuff that I could demonstrate right on the spot.
That if stuff was gonna happen,
it was gonna happen right there in the room.
So I started working on magic that would demonstrate magic.
And that's really where Metamagic came from.
It draws on just about everything that I've ever encountered
in the magical realm.
Again, I started out with the real traditional
Western esoteric, golden, dawnish,
the lamek kind of stuff.
But over the years, I was exposed to,
I mean, just a big variety of all sorts of different traditions
of pagan traditions, wicked, voodoo, whatever.
Any time I had a chance to go sit in on a ritual
or take a workshop or whatever,
for many years I took every opportunity I could.
So I started noticing the commonalities
between these different traditions, right?
What was it that made a ritual in every one of these?
What was it that worked in every one of these, right?
After a while, I started, I don't know, deconstructing
or trying things apart to see like,
what were the pieces that actually did something that worked
and then I could demonstrate in the context of a workshop.
So I came up with some things, several books,
worth of things in fact.
What I love about brain magick in particular is that
it really shows you that you can,
this is going to sound so simplistic,
but you can change your mind.
You can change your programming.
I was also, I was so honored that you asked me
to write the forward for the new edition.
So you guys, this copy that I have in my hands right now
is the older edition of brain magick.
But there is going to be a new edition that's coming out soon.
And I was just so excited when you asked me
to write the forward to it because so much of my work
in repatiting is based around the idea
that we can change the way that we are programmed.
We are all programmed in some way or another
because we all grow up experiencing interactions
with the world experiencing conditioning of ourselves
and our minds by our experiences.
And none of us has like a default set of programming.
We all are the sum of our experiences.
And so it excites me the idea that we can change these things.
And by changing our internal programming,
we can generate a different external result in our lives.
So I was so honored when you asked me to write it
because this is exactly the kind of work
that I want to let more people know in the world exists.
And one of the things that I said in that forward is like,
I hope that not only do you do these exercises
and you find things that work for you,
but even if you just take away the fact that it is possible,
that you can change your own brain.
So share a little bit with us about how you develop
those exercises and what they do for folks.
- Well, first of all, I want to thank you again
for writing a great forward for it.
And I'll tell you, I actually, when it came time to do,
the book was it went out of print at the original publisher.
They decided they didn't want to reprint it.
So they gave me the rights back.
And I took it to another publisher who were friends of mine
and I thought would be interested.
And I did a little magic around it.
I mean, I didn't want to release the same thing.
I thought some introductions or forwards
or something would be a nice addition.
And I did a little magic around it.
And two names came into my mind.
And one of them was yours and the other was Don Webb.
And I know, you're a good choice because I know that you actually,
you worked through it with your groups,
or at least some of the exercises and you were familiar with it.
And the similarity with the repatterning stuff.
And the other name that popped out was Don Webb.
And if you're not familiar with his books on magic
and stuff like that, they're really awesome.
I highly recommend Uncle Sec Nats Guide to the Left and Path,
which is just a great one of the classic books.
- And Don's a good guy and a a person, often funny writer.
I mean, the name's just sort of like really popped into my mind.
Just like, you know, these are must have.
(laughs)
So I'm glad you were able to do it.
I'm glad Don was able to do it.
- I just wanted to say, I'm so honored by the fact that like your spirits
or your guides recommend it.
I'm like, now I'm doubly flattered.
(laughs)
So yeah, thank you again.
Thank you again for that.
So tell us more about what brain magick is
and what it does.
Explain some of the exercises, the visualizations,
and the results that folks can expect when they try them.
- Okay, well, a few of the big pieces that went into it,
I have a background in NLP, a neuro-liplistic programming.
And NLP, it provides a model that you can use
to, I don't know, take apart behaviors
or understand the elements of them.
So that was a big piece there,
understanding magic through the lens of NLP.
Also, I'm just a science geek.
So I read all kinds of stuff about neuroscience and consciousness
and stuff like that.
And I started, I don't know, my brain at some point started putting
the pieces together where the NLP and the magic
and the neuroscience kind of intersected.
And again, I taught most of that stuff in workshops
for years before it found its way into a book.
But the neuroscience is kind of a new thing, right?
Our four bears who wrote books on magic,
Alistair Crowley or whoever is real guardian,
they, that was the neuroscience, right?
So it was consciousness and psychology and so on.
Kind of a, kind of a black box, right?
Like something, something happens in here.
And we don't quite know what it is, but here's what comes out, right?
By adding in the element of neuroscience,
we have tools now, really just in the last 20 years or so,
where you can actually like observe what someone's brain
is doing in real time, right?
The FMRI machine in particular and PET scans and things like that.
But you could put somebody in there
and you can actually see what parts of the brain get involved
when you do stuff.
And there's been a few neuroscientists who specialize
in, let's call it neurotheology, right?
In the study of like what happens when people have
religious experiences or spiritual experiences?
And who's the one guy, Andrew Newburder, I believe,
who's actually written like, I think his book is called
Your Brain on God or something like that.
Now, I was fortunate.
Unfortunately, the neuroscientists have a,
they have a bias like most people in our culture
towards the monotheistic religions, right?
Towards the Judeo-Christian religion.
So a lot of these studies that happened,
particularly around this, were like,
not what happens when you think about gods,
but what happens when you think about God, right?
And so that one guy, right?
So I thought that it needed to be applied differently, right?
And we have a different approach
in the magical realm, in the pagan realm and so on.
So I started, I don't have the MRI machine,
but I can observe what people do
and I can get feedback from them and so on.
So I started, I don't know,
deriving some sort of general principles
from the neuroscience that would apply to magic.
And one of the really big pieces of recent neuroscience
is the ideas of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, right?
Neuroplasticity being the formation of new neuropathways,
neurogenesis being the formation of new brain cells,
new neurons.
I think if Genesis PRH had hung in there long enough,
maybe he would have been neurogenesis,
prior PRH, I don't know.
I think he would have loved the idea.
All right, so both neuroplasticity and neurogenesis
are important factors, both in how we feel about ourselves,
our mood and so on.
In fact, for years they've been giving people antidepressants
based on this weird theory of like serotonin levels
and the recent research on that is it's complete bullshit.
That the, what's really happening is that
there's a side effect of these drugs
is that they cause neurogenesis in the area
that brain noticed the hippocampus,
which seems to reset some of the feelings of mood and so on.
We've known, even before that,
we've known that there's other substances that do that better
and mostly the psychedelics and things like that
and ketamine therapy is huge right now
because that's really what ketamine does,
is it stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus
and does some other things.
Hopefully our magic, if we have things that can access that,
that can stimulate that, that's great, right?
Neuroplasticity on the other hand is about the formation
of new neural pathways,
which in regular old language is learning, right?
When you make a new neural pathway,
it's because you've learned something, right?
Either negative or positive or whatever.
So when we want to change ourselves,
change the way we think, change our brain,
that's essentially what we're talking about is neuroplasticity
because we need to kind of reset the neural pathways
and establish a deeper form of learning, right?
That's more than just the superficial remembering of facts
or whenever like you have in school,
but something much deeper that changes our consciousness
and the way that we think about the world and so on.
So all of that's possible and I found plenty of clues
in neuroscience to some techniques that you can do,
but more in the realm of magic and things like that,
where I saw people performing certain kinds of rituals
and having just big life changing things happen.
And so looking at those through these filters
of neuroscience, NLP and so on,
I was able to sort of see some of the elements
that made them work.
Probably not all of them, that would be 10 more books.
But some of the elements that made these techniques work
and particularly noticing the commonality
between different systems and so on.
That's what I started experimenting with
for my own fun and education.
And when I got things that I responded really well to,
I tried it out with friends, with groups
that wanted to do workshops with me
and eventually with my one-on-one clients that I work with.
So some of these techniques, I've been working with them
for 25, 30 years or so.
And there are some depths and some variations
that have not yet made it into a book,
but maybe there'll be a brain magick too or something one day.
But I'm enjoying the fact that brain magick,
that there was enough interest in it
for a second edition to come out.
And I do get plenty of email of people who I tried
that one exercise and that changed all sorts of things for me
and so on.
I love getting an email like that.
It's great.
No, no, I've helped somebody change in a positive way.
I still get, future ritual was published in 1995.
I actually wrote it in 1990 for '91.
I still get emails from people who've
somehow found that it's been out of print for years.
But people who've somehow found the copy and said,
oh, I changed my life.
I got me into magic and whatever.
I'm really, so that's the old stuff.
Share with us what happens in the brain,
speaking of the neuroscience aspect.
Share with us if you would, what happens in the brain
when we have a formative learning experience
such as we touch the hot stove, we learn that it's hot?
We open ourselves up to our crush
and they punch us in the stomach or whatever for me
in second grade.
And we learn these sort of associations.
It's true.
It's true, man.
It's, oh, man, that informs so much
of my feelings of rejection around relationships
for decades afterwards.
And share with us if you would, what
happens from a neuroscience perspective
when we have a formative experience like that?
And then also, what happens when we're rewriting that code,
either with NLP, repottening brain magick
with the exercises that you've detailed?
What are the things that are happening
on that neural pathway level?
OK.
Well, that's a big question.
The three factors that really seem to make a difference
in neuroplasticity are intensity, duration, and novelty.
And so intensity, if something is powerful enough,
you're going to learn it.
You're going to remember it.
You're getting punched in the stomach is probably
more of an intense experience that if somebody had gone,
eek, and walked off, right?
You know, something that you remember as being more intense.
Duration, let's say you practice something
every single day for years, or you have an experience
that just lasts for a really, really long time.
That's going to stay in your consciousness even longer.
And novelty, if something is new and different
and is surprising in a way, again, it's going
to set those neural pathways a lot stronger
than something that you're always used to.
Because actually one of the pieces that I got from Genesis
PR engines that when we practice ritual,
you have to change it up at some point, right?
You have to evolve from the ritual, right?
If you're doing just the lesser banishing ritual,
the pentagram, the gold and dawn used to require
their new students to do that every day for a year
before they would give them any more information or whatever.
But at some point it becomes wrote.
You have that duration factor, but at some point
that kind of drops off and it becomes sort
of an ordinary thing that you do.
And it may still work to some extent.
And I still do rituals that I learned 40 years ago, whatever.
But if you change, you know, that's the point where you go,
you say, well, I need to learn the next ritual, right?
And so on.
And the next ritual seems even more powerful
because it's new.
It's different.
It's, right?
You have to sort of keep escalating your magic
so that you're getting the same kind of things.
I mean, nothing against practicing the same thing every day
for a really long time.
There is that duration factor, right?
But particularly with ritual magic kind of stuff,
eventually it does become wrote.
With meditation, on the other hand, meditation
does seem to, I don't know, not have enough or limit on that.
That you keep meditating longer and longer.
Some of the interesting studies that I pulled from in the book
were about how the Dalai Lama provided some of his top
meditators for these brain scans studies.
And I mean, he had guys who had been doing the same meditation
for 30 something years.
And they were able to do some pretty interesting things
in the scouting machine.
Their brains were a little bit more under their control
than those of us who only practiced meditation
a few times or whatever.
So interesting stuff.
Yeah.
What I love about also the exercises in brain magick
is that they are predominantly focused on visualization
and also calling up other internal sensory experiences,
such as auditory, kinesthetic, how something feels,
what is the texture of something, what is the temperature,
what is the color, what is the brightness, et cetera.
And these are also, as you and I both know,
these are also those submodalities
are tools that are also used in NLP.
So what your book is essentially saying in the way
that I see it, that I perceive it is that we can create
those same sort of neuroplastic learning experiences
without having to experience them externally.
We can actually, there are ways through visualization,
invocation, evocation, again, calling up
those sensory experiences internally simply by imagining them
and immersing ourselves in them.
There are ways of hacking the code of our nerve
developmental learning.
Is that, do I, would you say that that's an accurate
sort of summation of some of your work?
Sure.
There's certainly a power to our imagination,
Carl Jung defined magic as active imagination, right?
So it's also the way that I use it in brain magick.
It's applying some principles of what's known
as embodied cognition, right?
That much of the way that we think and do things
and navigate the world is based in metaphors of the body, right?
So you have a metaphor life is a journey, right?
It means your body is moving, right?
I think less with your head and more with your heart, right?
We're locating things in our body and so on.
And the nervous system, the human nervous system is just
unbelievably complex.
And one of the things that it does is it doubles out
sometimes triples and quadruples up on functions
that one part of the system uses, right?
So your visceral feelings will not only tell you that,
like, oh, there's something wrong with my stomach,
but you may have a very similar visceral feeling
to a sense of loss or an emotional state, right?
So the nervous system doubles up on that, right?
On that sort of a negative example,
similarly, people who have panic attacks,
where they're breathing hard and high-preventilating
or whatever, if they get into a situation
where they are breathing hard, they're exercising
or they have to run or something like that.
Sometimes they're conscious this will mistake the breathing
hard for a panic attack and they'll have a panic attack.
I often have to tell my clients this stuff.
It's like, no, no, you're not.
That you were just running and you got out of breath.
But there's ways to--
it's sort of have to re-anchor those kinds of experiences.
In the positive way, we have wonderful positive things
that we feel in our body, tingling sensations
and expansiveness and things.
When we're having positive emotional states, right?
When you fall in love, you have feelings
all through your body that might relate
to other kinds of things, other experiences that you have.
But we're mostly able to differentiate, right?
This is an emotional state.
This is a visceral feeling of my body.
But the nervous system doesn't always differentiate.
It often-- let's say I think so.
So when people say, oh, I get a bad feeling from this
or that or the other thing, I will often say, well,
where in your body do you have the feeling?
That's kind of the first thing.
And then we'll get some other submodalities on that,
how big is it?
Is it moving?
Is it cycling?
Does it have a color or a sound to it?
And then you can take some of those submodalities
and you can start tweaking them and changing things around.
In NLP, we have the idea of driver submodalities
that very often there's a submodality
that will change all the other ones.
So sometimes if you change the-- I don't know--
location is a big one, right?
So if you take that colored blob that they've
created to represent something unpleasant
and you change the location, you have to move it out
of their body.
It causes-- right away, some people will say,
oh, well, I feel better now or whatever.
You can actually use that as a form of pain control.
I will do that ethnically with folks.
I actually had just had a client who--
not his main issue that we were working on,
but he did have to go to the dentist that day.
So I taught him how to do that at the dentist, right?
You take the feeling of pain in your mouth
and just put it over here for a little while.
And then you can bring it back in when you're done,
and it feels better.
And it worked really well for him.
And I think his dentist is going to start
recommending hit the therapist for their patients.
So nice.
One of the things that I always like to do in my approach
to my work is I always like to imagine
that I'm having to explain it to the former version of myself
who was unawakened for lack of a better word.
And I know that my former self would
have had an argument around like, well,
changing myself internally isn't going to do anything.
It's the external world.
That's the problem.
I don't want to change me.
I'm great.
And to be fair, there was a lot in my healing
that required validation rather than change,
but that doesn't mean that the work was not also required.
But that sort of like, I don't see what changing me is going to do.
I want the thing that I want externally.
I want the love that I want, the relationship that I want,
I want the money that I want.
And I feel this sort of like, for lack of a better word,
almost entitlement to it, not knowing
that there might be patterns in our shadow
that are actually leading to the results that we're dissatisfied with.
So how would you explain to someone who is caught in a thought pattern
like that, like, oh, changing myself internally won't do anything
because it's the externals that I want?
How would you explain to them how transformative that work can be
that we can do that work internally
and our externals of our lives will end up changing too?
Right.
Well, I often do get clients--
anybody who does any kind of counseling work or coaching work--
you will get clients who want to blame their problems
on everything around them and not on what's going on internally.
And I don't know.
One way that I do that is rather than necessarily explain it,
which I will at least to the extent that we've just discussed it here.
But I'll demonstrate.
I will do some less consequential uses of the same kind of technique
with a smaller problem or something that they're feeling right then
and have them notice the change.
And then they'll be much more open to working on the other stuff.
So if you can demonstrate it, it's always better than an explanation.
So I lean into that a little bit more.
But there are certainly clients where I do have to explain that.
And sometimes the client isn't a good fit.
And if somebody is really going to double down on that and go,
no, it's all because of my ex, blah, blah, blah.
And it may well be, but the ex isn't there,
and I can't work with them either.
So if you're just going to keep repeating that,
I will say, well, this is probably not a good fit.
I'll recommend somebody else.
But for the most part, I do that.
That has happened very rarely, but it has happened.
Again, demonstrating is always better.
When I do have to explain it, I will tell stories about other clients
who did something similar or something
from my own experience, or I'll quote a historical person
who told the story similar to that.
I do have all of those.
I do have the NLP metaphorics storytelling toolkit,
as well as the metamagic one.
So I can use that from time to time and just
give people the idea of plant something in their unconscious mind
and other NLP tools and embedded suggestions and things
like that are often very helpful.
And I'm usually very upfront with my clients
that I'm going to be--
I might be telling you a story about something,
but I'm saying something completely different to your unconscious mind.
I'll know every now and then I'll get one who'll say,
oh, did you just make some kind of weird suggestions in me?
And I'll go, yes, of course I did.
Isn't that what you're paying me to do?
Exactly.
You're getting the result one way or another.
So what is your favorite anecdote of the biggest change
that you've seen someone make through brain magick?
Oh, boy.
What's the best story you've got?
I got to move.
[LAUGHTER]
There's so many.
I mean, I do--
I see at least several clients every week, sometimes several clients
a day.
And there's been many of these situations.
I like it when there's corroborating
synchronicity to these things.
And there's a couple of stories in brain magick
that I tell one of a guy who he pulled an entity out of himself.
And he felt stuck in his business life.
And he wanted to do something new and different.
And so he pulled out this entity, which
gave the name of--
I remember what it was, Edom, I think.
And it was this female figure who basically
gave him the formula for a new way of creating a beverage
that he was interested in.
And when we went--
and I'm always like, I googled your names and stuff like that.
And it turns out that Edom, it was a city in the ancient world
in the Middle East.
And the importance of the city was that there was water there.
There were wells that people had for their beverages.
And it was named after the goddess who
was in charge of the wells, I guess, like that.
So I love stuff like that, right?
And you get these weird synchronicities.
Another one that I think is in the book,
I had a woman who was afraid of flying.
And so we took her fear, and we externalized it.
And it had a color.
I think it was like red and white and green or something
like that.
And we worked with it, and she felt much better
about getting on the airplane.
And she got on the airplane.
The inside of the airplane was all red, white, and green,
the same colors as her entity.
And she immediately just felt like right at home.
She was like, oh, this is obviously
where I'm supposed to be right now.
And she had a great flight and had a good time.
So there's been plenty like that.
There's been every now and then I will get a client who
has no history of anything about magic, whose entity will
have the name of a goetic entity or some other ancient god
or goddess that they would have no way of knowing about.
And I believe them when they say they don't know anything
about magic, it's often why they're
coming to me to learn about magic.
So synchronicities like that are fun.
And they suggest that there's something a little bit more going
on that this isn't just--
I don't know, some people try to put magic.
It's a form of human psychology and nothing else.
Now, magic partakes of human psychology.
Definitely, you know, we are humans.
You can't avoid it.
But when stuff like that happens, there's something else going on.
Right?
There's something a little bit--
or very much beyond just the kind of ordinary poaching
kind of things, right?
You know, somebody came out of it and they said, oh, I
made a decision to change my diet or whatever.
And they do it and they feel better.
Great.
Wonderful, right?
That's a good thing.
But if they say, well, a horse headed
being named Auroboss appeared before me
and started telling me about whatever.
I'm like, oh, really?
I think we have to go in there a little bit more and check that out.
So fun stuff.
Yeah.
That reminds me, actually, we had--
very recently, we had Dr. Jamie Marich on the show
who is a clinician who both specializes in
and also has lived experience of dissociative identities.
And there's these sort of thoughts coming
through from a lot of leaders in that field, both for better
and worse.
But for example, Dick Schwartz with IFS is now
speaking about internal parts, potentially being spirits,
just like with them the last few months or so.
There's also the work of Robert Falconer, who
talks about addictions and things being entities
in that he calls them unattached burdens.
And so there's this idea sort of floating around this space
that we can have other, I suppose, pockets of consciousness,
like organized consciousness come into the body
and start behaving in different ways.
There are folks who their own consciousness
has been fragmented into different pieces of spirit,
dissociative identities.
And then there are also floaters that can come along
and attach into the body whether someone is already plural or not.
So when you do those sort of evocations,
and you gather that sort of anecdotal evidence
that, oh, this actually correlates to an ancient Mesopotamian spirit,
or they're the name of a city or something along those lines.
Do you believe that that's what's happening
is that there are actually other forms of spirit,
consciousness that are potentially coming into the body
and causing behaviors in folks?
I do think so.
And I've had some experiences myself that were weird enough
to convince me of that.
People with dissociative identity,
dissociative order, or multiple personalities,
there was actually a study some years back
where they took some of these folks and put them
in the FMRI machine.
And they could actually see the areas of the brain
where there were distinct personalities.
There's like this part of the brain's work and doing something,
and this part's doing something
and there's no connectivity between them.
So there's definitely the potential for our individual brains
to play host or to represent different consciousnesses
even at the same time.
And most of us do this--
I mean, we do this when we sleep and we dream about other people
and things like that.
You could dream of a friend who acts very much like your friend does
and makes decisions and tells jokes like your friend does.
But it's not them.
It's something working in your brain, maybe.
Sorry, my maybe logic part of the brain comes up every now and then
with this.
And there's always a maybe, add a maybe to the end of every sentence,
I say, it'll make more sense.
So the very often when we're doing this kind of thing,
all right, actually, I'm going to take this back even for that.
And historically, this is a more common idea in older animistic
societies and shamanistic societies.
And shaman did a booming business in pulling bad spirits
out of people and things like that.
And then let's see, fast forward from the Paleolithic
up to early 1900s when Aleister Crowley
wrote the introduction to one of the lesser,
volume of the lesser keys of Solomon as one of the first English
translations by Mathers.
And in Crowley's introduction, he said,
the 72 spirits of the Gauysha are parts of the human brain.
And I used to read that and I would teach classes and stuff.
And I would always amend that and say, he meant mind, right?
He didn't mean brain.
He meant he meant the mind, right?
Which is a more amorphous idea than the physical squishy
stuff in your head, which is the brain.
But the neuroscience shows that, no, he was spot on,
because we do have actual locations in the brain
where different personalities and different kinds of entities
can actually take up residence.
The dissociative identity disorder studies
showed it on that level.
But I think if we were to do some goenic magic
and put someone in the MRI, we would see something
pretty similar.
We would see different parts of the brain lighting up
that are responded to some of these different entities.
I think that would be a cool study to do.
If anyone wants to fund me and provide an FMRR machine,
we'll do that.
So--
Oh my gosh.
I want to be a part of that.
OK.
So with that said, all right.
So some of these entities are definitely
based in the neurology, right?
Our neurology is able to run different personalities
to do a lot of tasks like that.
What about the entities that are outside of humans, right?
Are there spirits, in nature spirits, and fairies, and ghosts,
and things like that?
Again, my monolognosticism wants
to stamp a big maybe on all of that.
But I do think there are.
Why the hell not?
I mean, if humans can do that, why can't other complex networks?
There was actually a piece in Scientific American
where they were talking about the social identity
studies where they were seeing a different brand.
So they said, it's actually a compelling evidence
for the guia theory that we are the smaller entities
that are populating this bigger mind,
the mind of the planet of Earth or whatever.
And that if it's possible to happen in our own brain,
why is it impossible to happen with the whole planet?
And the person-- and as stodgy a publication as Scientific
American, they were arguing for the fact
that, yeah, we may be the subpersonalities
of this greater entity of the guia mind, which I thought was--
it was sort of mind-blowing that that was even
an argument raised in Scientific American at all.
But just a cool idea in general.
And I've had experiences where certainly I've
been practicing in the occult for most of my life.
And certainly some crazy things that have happened.
I did actually--
the guy who is the main guy who runs the Black Moon
publishing where brain magick is about to be re-released,
he's a voodoo guy.
And he was working on a probably lumark night.
And he's working on a project to bring--
there was a character who lived in New Orleans way back
when named Dr. John.
And the famous musician named himself
after the voodoo priest, Dr. John.
Dr. John's the one who really--
he did a lot of very cool things for New Orleans voodoo.
He was one of the seminal people in the form of drumming
that they do.
And he did a lot of very interesting magic and stuff like that.
And so Lou--
he's been working on this project to raise Dr. John
to the level of a low-up, to acknowledge him as a voodoo saint,
I guess.
So I participated in some of these rituals.
And the first one I went to--
we're drumming, we're dancing around.
He's talking a little bit about Dr. John.
And I keep getting distracted.
And I'm looking up-- we were outdoors in a field,
like midnight.
And I kept getting distracted.
And I'm looking up at the sky and staring at the stars
and going, well, the stars were really nice.
And I'm like, oh, wait, we're doing a ritual.
I got to pay attention.
And it just kept getting worse through the ritual
that I would be distracted by the stars.
And finally, at the end of the ritual, he closed there.
A bunch of weird stuff happened.
I'm not even going to go into it.
But at the end of the ritual, he closed it up.
And he said, thank you, Dr. John Gaser of the skies.
And I was like, afterwards, I'm like, hey, Lou, excuse me.
[LAUGHTER]
I think something weird happened out there.
So yeah, I got possessed a little bit in a voodoo ritual,
which was weird.
And definitely the sensation of thoughts and behaviors
that were not native to my own brain.
It was kind of an odd experience.
And it happens.
And I've been to enough voodoo rituals
that I've seen.
I've seen it happen to other people.
Who hopes to amongst us has not
been possessed at a voodoo ritual, right?
Something has been happening.
Something interesting has been happening to me lately, where--
and it doesn't feel unsafe for anything.
But I am accustomed to bringing in messages
from my own guides and spirits through cards and pendulum.
And I often joke like where there's that joke about neurodivergent
folks like myself, where I can't hear without my subtitles,
like me watching TV.
I've often joke like I can't hear without my pendulum.
I hold the pendulum and there is an openness that happens in me.
And I'll figure out kind of what they're trying to say.
And then I'll confirm it with the pendulum just
to make sure it's actually the correct guidance
and not just my intrusive thoughts happening.
But something that has been happening lately
as I've been doing this is I feel like there
are some of my spirits who almost get a little--
kind of almost benevolently frustrated with me.
And all of a sudden, I will find myself bursting out a sentence.
And it's not for me.
It's barely even in my own voice.
It's a different tone.
It feels like it comes from somewhere else.
And I'm like, I just spoke for the spirit
who is speaking to me.
I just said the thing like to myself, which
has been an interesting experience.
It happens, right?
Pendulums are good.
Well, sometimes do that in hypnosis
to get people used to the idea that their unconscious mind
can speak through them in ways outside of their conscious mind.
But traditionally, Pendulums were also
used to talk to entities and so on in a similar way.
My late wife was a pendulum fanatic.
And she would just make them on the fly.
She always had some string and just whatever it was.
She'd tied something to it and go.
And I mean, she would do this towards the end
of her life.
She was in the hospital for a while.
The doctors would come in and they'd say,
oh, we have this medicine or this medicine.
She'd go just a moment and pull out her pendulum and douse it.
They'd all be looking at what the hell?
She didn't care.
It was fine with her.
I thought she was weird, but it made some good--
made for some good decisions and so on that way.
And she was able to-- she had some spirits of stuff
that she'd be regularly communicated with that way.
I do sometimes use Pendulums in the hypnosis setting,
just as a way to get people used to that,
idiom, motor response, kind of thing.
I'm more of a tarot card guy in general.
But when I first learned tarot so many years ago,
the idea was that there was a spirit.
There was an angel set over the tarot
who was the one who was manipulating the cards
and providing the answers.
And you would say a little prayer or a little invocation
to the entity before you did your reading.
And I did that.
I don't do that anymore because I just--
I don't know.
I've used tarot cards for so many decades
that it's pretty much just a natural thing for me to do it.
But back then, I did that every time for years and years
and years where an angel set over the tarot,
guide my answers, and so on.
So an intermediary of a spirit or something like that.
But the idea is more that the spirit is the one who's
manipulating the cards rather than you.
So given that you have this set of tools, I'm curious.
What is the biggest change that you have ever made in yourself?
Because you've seen it, you know how it works.
And I would imagine like, maybe me, I'm like,
I know what I change in myself.
Or I'm like, oh, how far can I push this?
How great can I be or whatever that is?
So what has that been like for you?
Well, I was back in the day, I mean,
through school and college and so on, I got--
I was painfully shy.
And it took a great effort of will for me
to go up to a stranger and talk to them
or sometimes even somebody in a store,
in a retail setting, something like that.
But as I got further into the magic,
it was one of the things that I consciously worked on.
But I also put myself in situations
where I had to do it.
And I don't know, Robert Antoine Wilson
inspired me on some of this where he said when he was learning
the tarot, he would just tell people, I'm an expert on this.
Let's do a reading.
And he was learning.
He was not an expert on it until much later.
But that confidence of just getting out there
and doing it so that you're face-to-face with people.
So I set myself up with a lot of situations like that.
I did do tarot readings for other people.
I started doing more with the NLP.
And eventually I started teaching classes.
And I went from very introverted to--
I guess there are folks out there who consider me very
extroverted these days, perhaps perhaps even a little annoying.
So probably the biggest change in my life, that way,
from I did want to write back then and so on.
But even then, I get worried, I was worried about my audience
and who's going to read it and whatever.
But I got past all of them.
And my magic books are written for--
they're written for an audience, right?
They're written for a particular set of people
who are interested in magic or might be able to use
that kind of change or whatever.
My fiction or whatever, I also write novels.
My novels are written truly for myself.
They're just something I do to other people do jigsaw puzzles.
I'll sit down and write a novel.
So the freedom to be able to just write or say or do whatever
I feel like doing is good.
I mean, I revel in it.
So whereas at one time, I was just way more concerned about,
not a little people could think I'm weird or blah, blah, blah.
I am weird.
I'm weird.
And that's huge because that's really the difference between you
getting to live a life that you love versus not, right?
Like that's really, for me, that's the heart of why I do this work
is the courage to be able to, for me and for those
that I teach or work with, to be able to pursue the life we love
with a fearlessness and not even a fearlessness,
but an agency that says, I can give myself the patterns
that support me doing the things that I love.
And if I can do that, then I can have a life that I love,
which means I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be happy.
I'd love to bring on Tomi now.
We bring on Tomi at the end of every episode
to ask a deep-cut question.
Tomi, can I also brag about you to fill before you ask your question?
Yeah, absolutely.
So Tomi is in my advanced container
and Tomi very recently discovered an issue within herself
that she wanted to change.
It was something that was manifesting externally,
but likely had an internal start as most things do.
And I was so incredibly proud of her
because she combined the metamagic that we've gone over
because we've studied brain magick in that container.
She combined one of those exercises
with like two or three different other things
that we've studied and put them all together
and did this sort of evocation ritual that you detail in the book.
And she came back with this like long, incredible narrative
about what had happened and created that change.
So I was just like, God, like this is exactly why we do what we do
is so we have this tool set of different modalities,
different exercises, things that we can bring together
and create change in the moment to pick from all the colors
on the palette and figure out what it is we need
to create that change.
So I'm especially interested to hear what her question is going
to be today considering her recent success with your work
in her own life.
Well, I'm sorry to let you down, Arden,
but my question unfortunately has nothing to do with that.
In fact, I'm glad I brought you anyway, because you deserve it.
Yeah, I'm glad about that too.
Actually, Royce is something I could not track down
in preparation for this interview, but I am fiercely curious about.
And that is your novel, "Breaks," the adventures of Richard Nixon
in the 21st century.
I scoured the internet trying to find a copy
of that Peruz before I'm meeting you today.
And sadly, I was not able to find a copy,
so I would love for you to fill us in on that book
and how you feel it, it's aged in the year of our Lord 2026.
Well, Ernest Hemingway famously said that all writers should throw
out their first novel.
And allegedly, he took a ship out into the middle of the ocean
and dumped his first novel into the waves.
That was my first attempt at a novel.
It was a lot of fun to write.
And again, my fiction, I write for my own amusement.
I had it-- there was a character in there.
I had characters based on the people I was hanging around
with at the time.
There's a character in there named Primordial Stew
who was based on Genesis PR origin.
Well, then I had to fun with it.
It was about a glitch in the matrix, I guess,
about a problem with the internet where stuff would become garbled.
And I used a cut-up technique whenever that would kick in.
The text would become very random, which, of course,
made the novel kind of hard to read.
And I don't know.
I was learning how to write a novel there.
So I did let it go out of print, and it remains that way.
Maybe one day I will pull it out and maybe try to rewrite it
or something like that.
The main premise, though, when I wrote it,
Richard Nixon was still alive, as the adventures
of Richard Nixon in the 21st century.
I wrote this in the 20th century.
And Nixon was still alive.
Like many science fiction writers, I
thought we would be further into space than who you are now,
things like that.
So some of it did not age well.
When Nixon died a few years later after I wrote it,
I was like, oh, damn!
How's he going to-- in the book, he's rejuvenated
to the age of 23 and has his adventures.
He was sort of the perfect anti-hero, right?
He was a character who was so evil and corrupt
or whatever that when he changes.
It's a bigger change or whatever.
But again, my first novel, I did get better at writing novels.
There's probably a pirated copy floating around out there.
Take a look.
I actually-- I did release it as an e-book.
And this is, again, this was in the 1990s.
And I have been told by a couple people
that it was, in fact, the first science fiction novel
released as an e-book, which, yay, OK, I'll take that
as something of Pluto.
But as my writing ability, when it wasn't--
I don't think it was a great novel.
So go read.
You want to read my novels.
Go read The Great Purple Who Ha or Legendary Blue Smoke,
which are the ones I recommend The Great Purple Who Ha's
and had an introduction to my fiction.
But all the novels, even breaks, had enough magic in it
that I occasionally get people who tell me, oh, I learned
how to do this particular ritual from your novel.
I was like, oh, OK, cool.
Not really my intent to teach magic in the novels.
Again, they're purely for my own amusement.
But if somebody gets something like that out of it, fine.
I personally learned how to meditate out
of a Robert Heinlein book when I was 11 years old.
So you know, pass it along, I guess.
Awesome.
I'll start there on your fiction journey.
Thanks for that.
Well, thank you once again, Phil.
It has been such a pleasure having you on the show.
This is not the first time that you and I have talked,
and you've come in to guest teach for my classes, which I was
always very grateful for.
And the one thing that I really want folks to take away
from this episode is, again, just the idea
that you can change, you can hack the code that makes up
your neural pathways.
You can change your mind from the inside out.
And when you do that, I promise you,
you will see differences in your external results.
And you can continue this and continue refining it
until you have a life that you are happy with.
And for me, I know that has been the difference between whether
I feel engaged and powerful in my own life
and capable of making the changes that I want
versus whether I felt powerless to do anything
about my circumstances.
So if there's anything that anyone is listening to,
to take away from this, take away that much.
You can change your mind, and it will change your life.
Thank you again so much, Phil.
Where can people find you and what else
should they check out?
Oh, as we are speaking right now, I have a guy who is--
we've paving my website.
Hopefully by the time people watch this,
it will be up and running.
It is metamagic.com, M-E-T-A-I-F-N-A-G-I-C-K.com.
And hopefully that will be--
I'm hoping he's got it done later this afternoon.
Excellent.
Well, thank you once again for joining us, Phil.
And thank you to all our listeners out there.
And thanks for tuning in.
And go practice metamagic.
Change your mind, change your life,
and we will see you next week.
Thank you for listening to the Re-Patterning podcast.
If you're curious about the Re-Patterning Project,
the eight-week course in mental mastery
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Thanks also to Animation Studio Mortis and Madriacs,
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as well as to Andrew Means, who composed
and produced our theme music.
And also thanks to Al Alvarez, who took the photos of yours
truly that you see on the cover of each episode
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who give meaning to this work.
Our greatest wish is that whatever you've heard today
inspires you to live freely and begin creating
your reality from the inside out.
Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you again soon.
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