We also contemplate the profound concept of free will and its role in shaping our destinies. We explore the mysterious realm of DMT and its ability to awaken the soul, and confront the societal implications of alcohol, examining its detrimental effects on consciousness and spiritual growth. This episode is a deep dive into the core issues facing humanity today, offering insights and strategies for navigating the complexities of our spiritual journey.
AUBREY MARCUS: Chervin, my brother, here we are.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's about time, Aubrey.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I agree. And it's timely as well, because I think now more than ever, we can see that there is literally an attack on the good. And I know that you have roots and faith that stretch back to Zoroastrian heritage and beliefs. And so what this would be called is the druze, the bad. That is moving through the world and creating endless amounts of suffering, disease, chronic illness, a plague of both separation and misery. That's an ignorance that's kind of sweeping over the whole world, both affecting us individually and collectively. And I know you're standing on the front lines as any good ashavan, which is someone who stands for the good. In the Zoroastrian face, someone who stands for the good, you're there doing your part. But when you look out, what are you seeing from this kind of meta perspective, is it getting worse and worse is the momentum picking up, or are we just starting to see the corruption, the druze that's always been there, but it's now being exposed
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: This is a great question. And I love that you got the nomenclature down. The Farsi, the ancient Avestan, I mean, that's beautiful because those sounds and nuances, they're a framework of really penetrating into your soul, a call to action, a call to awareness. I think at the crux of Zoroastrianism and just the concept around that is just contemplation. Like wait a second, something's going on, what's my purpose in all this? Interesting enough the path that was laid forth for me through this incarnation in an Iranian family that 75-80 percent is still practicing Zoroastrianism right now in Iran today, and the path of Rudolf Steiner. Which was the initiation path of contemplation, which had its cosmology tied with Zoroaster and the concepts of that cosmology is really interesting because I reflect on where we are today. You know, we're right here at critical mass, and I think we could have said it 10 years ago. We could have said it 30 years ago. At present time, we're hitting critical mass of like, wait a second, what the fuck's going on here? How did we let it get here? Are we at the 11th hour? And I don't mean that in an apocalyptic kind of Abrahamic perspective. I think I feel it more. I'm just like the culture of humanity has had enough. And there is this paradigm of the divide and conquer, plague is starting to break apart, you know, where we have to be isolated in our trip and our own power and our own dominion and behind the walls. And it's interesting because our first conversation on that phone call, we kind of got into that a little bit. You know, you and I spoke about, it's like, okay, I think you phrased it as we were knights, you know, kind of pummeling through the darkness or I would say almost the suppression of the light. And now we've put our arms on the table as brothers and sisters and said, it's time to come together because we know that that whole side has come together very well.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: They are playing chess where most of the society is playing checkers and they're doing a great job and to know thy enemy, you know, Sun Tzu, you have to know yourself first and you have to respect their plan by respecting their plan. You pave the path forward for more information, more knowledge, more awareness, and I think you take the anger out of it. I think there's moments where we can summon the anger and the frustration and the rage. That's part of like, what's a good metaphor for that? Our inflammatory system, how the human body works. It's good to be inflamed from time to time. It's good to have an immunological reaction. But you don't want that dysregulated all the time at a low level. You don't want it humming beneath you.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right. You want those peaks to come up. And that's why we do certain things in this life that call us into the presence. That's why some of these ceremonies that we do, some of the experiences that we have, whatever it may be, brings the ultimate level of presence. And so where I'm at, I just reflect on how gnarly it is being a person of education and health and wellness and really going for it on a deep level outside of the trendy version of biohacking, which I think is a complete aberration of health, in my opinion, and it's a problem. It's almost like an infection of the wisdom of the body. I see the cosmic giggle in this entire realm that we're in right now. While there is torture things happening in the world right now, and I find myself feeling that, and it consumes me sometimes to the point where I do feel like I need to take a time out. I do need to shut down. Maybe I need to go to a Laker game or something or go and hit the waves or do something, create some movement out of it.
AUBREY MARCUS: I wish that we were able to podcast with the warrior classes of old. And I know that we have like the military operators and the people who I do also enjoy talking to, but I'm thinking about the long military campaigns, the thing where it's every day, it's a march and a battle. Like those, you wake up at dawn and you put on your armor and you go to battle and then you retreat at dusk and then you go back there the next day the war at Troy, for example, if that happened or so to speak, you know, it was a long actually protracted 10 year war until eventually the Trojan horse came, but it just seems incredible to me that someone could sustain that kind of warrior energy and that pressure, but also speaks to the ability for the human body to adapt. And so I look out at my own life and I'm like, I don't think I can do it anymore. I don't know when the wheels are going to fall off. And then I think about some of the great warriors and some of the great leaders, think about even watching RFK on his campaign and the relentless day to day energy, schedule packed wall to wall having to be on and speak impeccably and I think fuck maybe I actually do have more capacity and maybe I just do need to be a little bit more intelligent about how I navigate my own thoughts. That drains my energy and how I support my physical body as the foundation for that energetic system. And just wonder, where is that point? And I think it's for all of us to discern, like how much capacity do we have and what is the real rate limiting factor on that capacity?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Very well said. I contemplate that. Like, what's the output? What's the return? What's the balance? How extreme do we have to go to make a point? What's our role in this game of life, the Leela? Are we here to observe? Is that part of our karma? Like the monk who's in the cave for 80 years holding it down with some type of etheric plan? Or do we need to be on the battleground? Do we feel guilty for not being there? Are we subject to the law of attraction that what we feel and what we present and what we project is really what's coming back around? It's interesting because I was introduced to David Icke when I was 11 years young.
AUBREY MARCUS: Oh, wow.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right. So I read the truth shall set you free. And then children of the matrix, I have a crazy cousin who mentored me at an early age. And instead of teaching me the Gettysburg address, he was teaching me about the money matrix, the creature from Jekyll Island. And because my parents were immigrants from Iran. I knew that I had figured out there was a reason why I was born here and was not allowed to go back to Iran and you start digging deep into the foreign policy and start looking at the matrix of the tentacles of that Kabbalistic state and how there's so much divide and conquer and confusion and instability was part of the game. By age 13, I was ready for war. I was militant. I was angry. I was frustrated. And so are all my brothers and all my Iranian brothers and Afghan brothers in San Diego, we're ready for it all. And at some point that kind of matured into more of an awareness of like, okay, well, this is the truth of the matter. What do we do about it? As opposed to getting angry and frustrated. And we were merging with testosterone at that time and sure developing, you know how that goes. And I'm with you. Like, I find that we're incarnated souls, but these bodies came with a set of instructions and it depends on what your plan is here. My only thing is don't lie to yourself, right? If our game plan is, we're here to make some serious changes. We want to impact as many lives as possible. We want samsara wheel, some type of accomplishment in this life. And we're bringing forth a new age of thought, then it takes discipline, it takes commitment. And those commitments and disciplines start with how you rise every day, how you approach your thought reprogramming the programs that are within you, because we all have them. It's just part of the matrix that we're in and taking some serious accountability. It's almost a Rosicrucian practice, and that's the thing, it's not just everyone who thinks that my frequency towards Zoroastrianism and Ahura Mazda and understanding the Ahriman Luciferic impulse is deeply connected because I'm Iranian. It's not. It's connected because that is a frequency that makes so much sense to me in my scientific mind.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: If you're not analyzing your thoughts, your emotions, what bothers you about somebody else, why you're in the same hamster wheel every day. Why are you attracting the same kind of people around you every single day? Then you're running around half cocked completely in an illusion and some type of Maya. And so I appreciate the warriors that are embodying both the hidden faculties of the Magi and the hidden faculties of the warrior and are coming together to create a system. And those systems are things that I'm very much attracted to, you know, I love what you're doing over here with your crew. I see you guys, your brother Kingsbury has been a brother of mine for years.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And we're, it's not a week goes by where we're not trading ideas and concepts around health and wellness and life and purpose. When the Wateco virus came in, my mind was blown because I knew what that was. And he brought that into my field. And speaking to him about Ahriman and how the age of Ahriman's impulses right now, we've never felt this level of materialism invading into our psyche. It's the predominant way of thought. And what part of my soul is Ahrimanic? You know, what part of my soul is resisting the spirit? You know, I can have mantras and think about the spirit all the time, but am I really believing that in my bones or is it just fancy to me? Or is it just some kind of lexicon that creates a poem of my life? Or am I really embodying this? Is this real to me? And so that's where the discipline comes in,
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, man, that lands deep for me as well, because I've been on my own deep exploration of what Tico, which is called the nightmare mind virus, right? And this nightmare mind virus is a virus that uses both separation, keeping us separate from the actual true and real connection that we have with our brothers and sisters. And the earth and the cosmos itself, as well as the deceiver, you know, there's a satanic element to the father of lies ways that it distorts our belief systems and then hijacks moves through the cracks in our psyche and the old wounds we has and jams a fucking crowbar in there and makes them a crevasse until we're slipping down the ice and we don't know where we are. I've studied this really well and this is a part of my next birthing of this book called you versus anti you. And I've just called it anti you because it's the force that's opposing. It's a negation of our potential of who we are. And at the same time, you know, I'll still find myself. Actually rolling over and kind of giving my backside to anti you to just with grin on its face and drool dripping down its mouth to unleash its barbed cock and just fuck me in the ass.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Wow. Well said.
AUBREY MARCUS: You know, like literally.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: So that's your surrender.
AUBREY MARCUS: And there's a point where.
Instead of standing like the warrior, like an Ashavan or like a disciplined, even a disciplined mage, I like someone who's like, no, I will not let this voice, some part of me still, whether, and I don't exactly understand it, and this is also part of my exploration, there's a level of commitment, and what you're talking about was commitment to right thought and commitment to resistance. Like I will resist this force of Wateco, this anti you force. I will resist it everywhere on every plane and in every way. And I will never roll over and let it in. It reminds me of when I was a martial artist. There's a saying like fatigue makes us cowards of us all and I remember late in rounds where instead of slipping and covering I would just be like I'm so tired. It's okay. If you just hit me in the face.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah
AUBREY MARCUS: And or in a basketball game where I'm just so exhausted being given everything and then it's like, I'm so tired. It's okay if you guys win.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right?
AUBREY MARCUS: And there's this like little
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Letting the guard down.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Letting the guard down and just almost like an act of submission to this force. And I know that for me to reach the next level, there's a level of discipline that I need that is both linked to my energy levels. Again, I don't think it's an accident. I'm bringing this back to fatigue, 'cause when my energy levels wane. Then I become the submissive little sub bottom for anti you, who's dominating my life.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You’re hitting it right on the nail. And I love that analogy because when you look at the biochemistry of humanity, and I'm going to be generally speaking. Most people don't have the faculties to even comprehend a conversation like this, or even take part in the level of sophisticated meditation and thinking and self analyzing, becoming their own therapist, becoming their own doctor, really looking into the mirror. And we're talking about where fatigue sets in, emotions set in, and things slip in. And we almost have to lay back sometimes just to create some type of balance. Because if we don't, things break, right? We have to be able to be malleable and bend. I look at the health of humanity right now. The faculties, we can start with the physical, we can get into the mental, we can get into the spiritual, it is fleeting everyone right now, I'm actually surprised that humanity has this much resistance to what's coming down the pipe to a certain degree. When I see what's happening, what's cultivating in communities, when I see the mothers stepping up and saying, you know what, fuck you, not on my watch. When I'm seeing those things, I'm actually presently shocked and stoked at the same time. There's been such a hijacking of the internal CPU of the system of the sanctity of being human, whether what's in the water, what's in the air, what's in the food, what's in the systems, the escapist mentality, the poverty conscious, all of those things are playing in its part to create someone who's already tapped out from the jumpstart and they can't go into becoming a master in Kung Fu, becoming a master in Muay Thai, becoming a master in health and wellness, understanding how the epithelial layer works in the body, understanding what the liver does, the function of the liver, understanding traditional Chinese herbal medicine or Ayurveda or whatever it is, these constitutions are necessary for humanity to be able to not only preserve, but to thrive and hit a vision of paradise. Where there is a utopic energy as opposed to this entropy that has invaded our entire system. And I really believe that starts, you know, with our children.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You know, it's a fundamental way of raising children, cultivating children and giving them, the nurturing where the intuition muscle is flexed from the jumpstart. And they are not suppressed in their mind and they're not suppressed because they have to regurgitate things and have to go into this forced labor of not wanting to learn something that is irrelevant to their skill set, to their mind, to their art form. I have families of cousins that are eight brothers, three sisters, every single one of them are completely different. They're a completely different soul, you know, but being cast into one box is kind of, that's a microcosm of the macro we're putting everyone into this conformity and that's causing children to be undeveloped. Then they hit adolescence and no wonder they're angry, frustrated, resentful, pissed off, hate their parents, not nourishing the family bloodline, not nourishing who they are. At that point, their spiritual practice and their journey in life has basically been eroded. Now, I'm not trying to be a pessimist, but this is the clarity that I see.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And through understanding the fundamentals of Waldorf education and understanding what that identity means, the concepts of Waldorf, it speaks to what we're talking about.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: So, the vitality, it's like my teacher, Maestro Hamilton, he said to me, when you're dealing with any kind of spiritual battle, which were certainly in a spiritual battle, he said, energy levels matter. And it was a very simple thing to say. But he's like, energy levels matter and those demons of the mind, the Wetiko, it is, again, it has a lot more permission to, and deeper access into your body when your energy is depleted. And it seems like whether consciously or unconsciously, this collective Wetiko Virus, these dark forces that are on our planet are actually sapping our vital life force energy from the moment we're born and we're jabbed with the start of whatever, 72, 84, 96, 185 needles that were on
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: In the hundreds.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, that's ultimately going to be a part of what it is to the absolute dog shit metabolic health food that is still being propagated in Tufts analysis where lucky charms are better for you than steak. If you run the fucking calculations, like there's all kinds of crazy things that are attacking our vitality as well on a physical level, as well as our mental psychic vitality, and then our emotional regulation. And the fact that we're not collectively taught how to breathe from the moment we understand vocabulary, like we should be taught about nasal breathing, and we should be taught about basic box breathing and pranayama, how to regulate your emotions. The fact that that's not a part of every fucking educational program is like, what are we actually doing? This is not new information. This is ancient information.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's comical, almost, because it's so gnarly.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's so gnarly!
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Instead of crying, you know, sometimes the body's response is to smile. Right. Cause it's almost like it's a survival reaction. Yeah. Cause these are the conversations that we have, you know, and we're in the jungles or on the island or sitting here in Austin and I, you know, if you're listening to this and feeling what we're saying here, you know, it's one of those moments, those aha moments. Okay. So this is the case, you know, we're in a chemical intrusive society. Our medical system has failed us. We have an entity, some kind of entity that is overtaking the rule of thought, you know, our thought systems are gone, right? So we're just taking what is handed to us and that is creating the system of becoming the beggar, right? And the beggar begins the weakness and then the weakness becomes frail. The frail becomes irrelevant
AUBREY MARCUS: And also, you know, much more easily manipulated by fear.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right? When you don't know strength in your own body, then you're going to be far more susceptible to being afraid and when you also haven't pushed yourself through uncomfortable and challenging situations to know that you're going to make it through that hard workout, that cold plunge, that sweat lodge, that whatever, the night you spend alone in the darkness or in the black of a darkness retreat or however it is, if you don't know yourself as capable and competent to do that, you're going to be terrified of everything. And you're going to seek, I call these some of the seven deadly seductions of Anti Yu or Wetiko. It's comfort, hopelessness, powerlessness, and all of these different ways in which we can be more easily manipulated. And also, without an understanding of the continuity of consciousness. We're deathly afraid of fear because fear is just the end of us entirely. And that's also the idea, this materialist rationalist concept that when we die, we die. And that's the end of us. It's been debunked.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's impossible.
AUBREY MARCUS: Literally been debunked by the university of Virginia and all of the past life memories. And there's like, but still it doesn't permeate into society in the way that it needs to where people go like, okay, all right, let's just take a breath here. And meanwhile, while Wateko, Anti You, while these dark forces have us by the pit of our stomach with their hands reaching up and grabbing us from our insides, they're just moving us. It's like they have their hand on our spine and use our fear to manipulate us into all kinds of different things, as well as our vanity and our desire for superiority, all the virtue signaling all of the identity in group politics. Well, my group is better than your group. And if I make my group even smaller, I can get better than the smaller group that I already was and then if I make it even smaller and I can get better than that and if I make myself a victim within that group, then I have no actual responsibility for anything. And I can just say must be nice to everybody else in the whole fucking world because I'm the winner of the victim Olympics and therefore I'm exculpable. But it's just leading to internal individual misery and collective misery across the board.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Oh, brother. Thank you for that perfect representation of the realm we find ourselves in right now, the reductionist theory that we evolved from apes. We're following the science doctrine to the concepts around how we've forgotten what we've forgotten. You know, we don't even remember where we come from anymore. And with the advent of artificial intelligence, I think you and I are the same age. I grew up on the beaches and the canyons, you know, there were no phones, there was no social media. I think we might be the last of that. It’s interesting to see how the gospel of science has basically become the new path of thought. Everyone is stuck on the literature that we have no soul and this is all random and this is an accident and this falls back to the Big Bang Theory and that form of consciousness, that form does not allow you to see your purpose in this realm that invades you or persuades you to become hyper materialistic and I don't mean fancy cars and fancy homes. I mean a materialistic frame of thought where everything is just about the relevancy of what I do for a living. What I do to learn is so I can put food on the table so I can put my parent, my family in a home. This is interesting. I was going through some of some old Steiner passages and he was breaking that down. It was very, it was like a mystery unfolding. And he saw this in the early 1900s. He said, what happened to the scope of interest of desiring to learn, to expand your soul versus the desire to learn just to be able to survive. And so we're in that state of consciousness. It's all economic driven and it's all ego driven to a certain extent because of the media. And I find that if we don't snap out of this, this path that we're on. I'm talking about the collective. We're going to be heading towards a cliff with no brakes. And the downfall of that is a completely dystopic realm where there is no cosmic law or connection to the spirit of our embodiment and our ancestors and the ancestors that laid their lives for us. And who we are and as warriors in this life and as magicians in this life and as mystics and the cultivation of that beauty is just becoming almost obsolete the acute mind where it's just so present on this. What can this do for me? What can this person do for me, which is vampiric in nature. And we can do all the spiritual lexicons around that is an absolute miasm and it's a shroud on our ancestors. I feel it, you know
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, sure
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I meditate in front of fires, I've been meditating, I've been a pyro maniacal maniac since day one.
AUBREY MARCUS: Wow. Proper Zoroastrian.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right. And I look at the fire as the ultimate alchemy of turning matter into nothingness, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Just poof right there. And I can see how the reductionist mind also is so stuck on an island of nothingness and I, not as an empath, but empathetically pulling that faculty out of me. I feel for these souls.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I don't believe that they're just spliced souls incarnated as cockroaches and human bodies. I don't want to believe that. I want to believe that. All beings have the ability and the opportunity to be activated.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I think that's a criticism I have of the David Icke doctrine, right? It's like, they're just fucking lizard people and the real people, you know, we got to stand up against the lizard people. It is participating in the virus of othering, which is actually the root virus of, and I have to say there's potentially some very small chance that he could be correct, even if he's actually correct, it's the wrong thought. I don't think he's correct, first of all, but I can't rule that out entirely that there's some extra dimensional action that is happening through different lineages. I suppose it's possible, but I don't believe that that's true, but I also know it's not helpful. And so, you know, there's a distinction between true and helpful. And like, if it's true, but not helpful, then it's not true.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Like, especially if you're trying to move towards the good and I think there's even going back to the old days, you're talking about meditating in front of the fire and in my readings of Zarathustra and the Zoroastrians, they would go into a place and let's say that place was worshiping Moloch and boiling children in vats of oil, right? They would not immediately as the first action go bring their swords out and kill all of those people. They would try to actually convert them into the path of Asha, into the path of goodness. And they would say, how about instead of that, you actually meditate in front of a fire, instead of burning children, you burn wood and try to actually transform them. And I think that is clearly the first action. And then violence is the last resort. Unfortunately, we have this backwards, right? And we see in all of these conflicts right now, it's like war first, and then, actually don't even bother with the story. Let's just kill them all.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And that will never work. That's just going to create more incessant conflict.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Israel cannot win this war. And again, this is a very complicated issue and they can't win the war because they're perpetuating war indefinitely, right? Like this is the biggest problem, it's unwinnable because it's not actually addressing the story that's at the root of it. So whether it's necessary to take military action or not, that's not the point that I'm saying. I'm saying that military action alone is an unwinnable solution. It cannot work. In isolation, because it will just perpetuate more war and more violence. You have to get to the root of it, which is the story, which is to actually connect people to the true story of God, goodness, the universe, and actually allow people to feel that and transform from within. Otherwise, the fuck are you doing? You're just racking up bills for Lockheed Martin.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's it. And you're running around like a chicken with its head cut off in circles coming to the same conclusion every single time just different timelines. It reminds me of the idea of, you can't heal a failing sick body with prescription drugs. You can't just keep throwing short sightedness at a systemic problem, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: We have the same model with the body. It's the war, war on cancer, war on viruses, war on bacteria, war on fucking whatever else. And yeah, right, there may be a time where you need an antibiotic for a staph infection if you've been rolling in a grubby jiu jitsu fucking studio.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course.
AUBREY MARCUS: You know, like, I get it.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah, your staph is flaring.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, time for war.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That’s different.
AUBREY MARCUS: You know.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH : But that took precision, education, awareness, and at the end of the day, discernment. Right? It's interesting that the word discernment keeps coming up as you're speaking. It's like, what is discernment? Discernment means that you're actually making a thoughtful choice based on facts, information from all sides you gather, you think about it, maybe you implement the scientific method to test it out and then you come to a conclusion. Whereas judgments based on fear, irrational and provocation create some type of conflict. And so this miasm of what we’re seeing today, I think this has been going on for quite some time, right, unfortunately, and this is a product of humanity not knowing who the hell they are, where they are, why they are.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's the root of it all. The less gnosis we have on who Chervin is, who Aubrey is, who Joe Schmoe is, who this person is. We're gonna keep having the same old shit over and over. And again, that's why these conversations are so beautiful. I mean, there's so much to talk about. But this is really the crux for me. You know, this is what inspires me. And this is where I can feel my activations, I can feel a little epinephrine pumping through my body right now. I can feel a rush of cortisol that is actually balancing my body right now because it's good to have a little bit of stress hormone. I can feel these things embodying. I feel my father, I feel my grandfather. I feel that I feel the women of this world, I'm evoking this energy because we are speaking it, before anything there was the logos, right? We have to be able to communicate these thoughts and build momentum with it because at the end of the day, you and I can have these conversations, but what the fuck are we going to do? You know, what’s the action? What's the call to action? How are we showing up? And that's what I asked myself every single day. I don't ask that for anyone outside of me. I asked that for myself. When I rise, I look at myself in the mirror. I spend some time outside naked on the earth, you know, those are the moments that I get clear with me. You know, and I evaluate, what did I do the last 24 hours? You know, how did I handle this situation? How do I feel about this situation? How did I show up for this? What made me want to retreat? What made me want to dive in head first? Why was I furious about this? What does that mean that I'm furious about this? These are nuances that is part of, I think, everything you and I are talking about right now.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Because at the end of the day, it's building faculties and knowing myself, you know, knowing who you are and all of it plays its part to perfection. And if your body is corroding, you have runaway free radicals and oxidative stress in your body. You're filled with glyphosate, you know, you have holes all throughout your microbiome. You're filled with autoimmune conditions. You're on prescription drugs. I'm not sure how much of a service you can be. I don't know how you're going to generate agency in that state. You know what I mean? And you don't need to do some fancy stem cell therapy or do some crazy thing. It's just get back to the fucking basics, get back to clean water, get back to sunlight, focus on your sleep. Look at the people you're around. Are these people that are better than you in ways that you need that stoking of the flame? How are you supporting your lover? How are you supporting your parents? How are you showing up in the community? All of those things. Like, can you imagine if a decent percent of the population smoke toad and all of a sudden got the bufo in their system and five methoxy dimethyltryptamine activated a hidden consciousness that's been laying dormant in their last four cycles on this earth. Can you fucking imagine what that would do? And I think we can stoke that flame. And I don't mean that in a luciferic impulse, I have a God complex and I'm better than anyone, but sometimes you have to tap into that bearer of light. You have to tap into this non reductionist. I'm just a human body. And what can I do? Cause that's the reaction I get from most people, even in the community. Well, what can I do, Chervin? What is it that I can do? And I always tell them, how are you showing up for yourself first? You cannot do anything unless you are taking disciplinary or multidisciplinary activities and building momentum in your life. Are you doing the exact same thing? Are you having the exact same conversation with the exact same people you did 12 months ago? If you are, maybe it's time to change something up a little bit. Maybe you need to eradicate a few things that are wasting your time every single day. And I've been doing this for quite some time. And sometimes I fall back into old patterns and old programs. And we're human beings, we're living in that miasm of coming full circle with our journey and our path, every single moment, every single breath. I love that you brought up breath. It's like, that is the biggest paradox of life. Without the prana, without the chi, without stoking the ether into the human body, we're nothing, we're not even alive. We don't even know how to breathe. Like, we don't know how to breathe. How could we take on these tasks with entities that have built strong positions rooted in manipulation, rooted in domination and very ruthless at it too. So it's a ruthless energy. How could we even alleviate that, let alone bring it back to homeostasis if we don't even have the faculties in our body?
AUBREY MARCUS: So when you're talking about, I mean, I think obviously the basics. I think a lot of people on this podcast probably have a decent idea. Obviously, I wrote a book on the day, which is very much about basic practices and a few practices that moved up what in your mind is in fact the next level. And I'm 100 percent with you that there's the level of the absurd. You know, where you can't be out in any artificial light without your blue blockers, you can't do it, you can't do anything, everything is just so you're so concerned at every given moment about the utter infinitesimal optimization that you might be harvesting out of the moment. Meanwhile, you're overlooking the genetic wall, the joie de vivre of life itself, like the actual joy, the ecstasy that's available. If you just relaxed a little bit
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Please, say that again, that was brilliant. That was so good because that I love right there.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: This is what we need. That art. We need art. If you're too locked in because of where I'm at and this whole thing is symbiotic and what I'm doing, the biohackers are everywhere around me and they're gathering every single piece of data you can ever imagine and everything is a problem and everything's going to kill you that's already that's taking them off course. So, I love what you just said right there.
AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, Zach Bush came on the podcast and he was, you know, I asked him what he thought the key to medicine was and he said, ecstasy. Ecstasy is the greatest healer of all healers. Like if we can get in the episodes are titled ecstatic health
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And I love it. And I really believe that, really laughing, like you could have some mushrooms that are a little bit moldy and got some mycotoxins on it. Oh, mycotoxins, but then you eat the mushrooms and you spend the next five hours laughing with your friends And there is not a fucking question in my mind that you're way net positive on that experience, right? That experience of both laughter or erotic rapture, or just the presence of flow state that you find. I mean, these are probably the healthiest practices that I engage in. Now I have healthy baselines, some things that I could certainly tweak, but it's when I don't have, you know, you asked me before, how are you doing, bro? And I go, yeah, I could be better. And I think part of the reason is things have been so full. What haven't I been doing? Well, I haven't been playing basketball. I haven't been playing pickleball.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You play basketball?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, bro. I'm fucking, I go for it. Dude.
AUBREY MARCUS: Dude.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Did you hear that? I have played ball my whole life.
AUBREY MARCUS: Oh, oh.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Okay.
AUBREY MARCUS: Oh, let's go.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: All right.
AUBREY MARCUS: All right, so it’s been a nice podcast, everybody. Thank you for tunning in
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Do you play basketball?
AUBREY MARCUS: Bro.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Dude. Are you like a small forward or like a shooting guard?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, both.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Okay. All right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Let's go.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I love it.
AUBREY MARCUS: All right. It's fun.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I'm a point guard, so I love to dish. And I love the handle.
AUBREY MARCUS: All right. We got a good squad. We got a solid squad here. And
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: All right, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but that brought a little bit of ecstasy for me, right? I felt serotonin hit my 5-H2 receptor. I felt the tickle.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's the best that whether I'm playing ball or having sex or laughing with my friends, like that's the stuff that actually really helps me to come alive. And it's not that I don't get great joy from creating my art and when I'm in the flow there, but I get ground down when I don't make the time to actually have those experiences when every part of me just wants to call up the homies, clear my schedule and say like playing ball for three hours. And I think that's one of the essential ways forward for me, as well as tweaking a few different things there is, I just got to recognize how vital that is for my overall vitality,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: What you're saying and how I'm receiving it is, I think the most descriptive form of self love, you know, at the end of the day, this is a practice of self love and I'm feeling almost like emotions hit me because in the last five, six years of my life, I've suppressed a lot of the things bring me the greatest joy. I went through a gnarly gnarly experience with my father and walked him home and then built this company Symbiotica with one of my best friends and a lot of my close people. And it's been such a grind energetically, emotionally. And there were times where I almost felt like a victim in it, where I couldn't. And I chose, I could always have gone and played ball twice a week, three times a week and get out and do the waves, but I chose not to just because I've almost victimized myself energetically like I had the weight
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, like trapped in the prison of your own creation. We fucking welded the bars. We ordered the steel, you know, we called the locksmith and then we locked ourselves in and said, hi, I'm in prison. You know, I mean, I'm fucking with you, bro. And then it's one of the hardest things for me in the last couple of weeks, because the last couple of weeks have been the most intense of, probably I can recall in a long time, especially since the sale of Onnit and I'm just thinking, what did you do to yourself, bro? Like, what did you do? And I look back at my, the only salvation for me, and Vylana helps me with this, the only salvation is realizing that my intentions in getting myself into the position that I'm in, my intentions were good.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: I actually had good intentions. I wasn't doing these things out of excessive greed. I wasn't doing these things out of malice or anything like that. Or like I had a chip on my shoulder and I had to get back at this person or event, any of these other petty reasons, they were genuinely good intentions, but the results of my actions have put me in a position where I'm like, how did I get here? And why am I here?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: You know what I mean? And that's been difficult. And I have to just keep reminding myself like, okay, doesn't matter. You know, like learn what you need to learn and allow those lessons to come through, what are you going to do now?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: What are you going to do now? How are you going to choose differently now? And that's like, I'm really at this inflection point where it's like, all right, I don't want to continue living at this particular pace. If this becomes not just a sprint, but if this becomes a new pace, the universe will bench me basically from the race, there'll be like, you're off the track team, bro.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I've been benched multiple times.
AUBREY MARCUS: Of course.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: So am I.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: And it's like, I'm going to bench myself before I get benched and I’m gonna like to pair down and say like, all right, we're running, we're going back to ultra marathons. You know, like we're going a lot slower here
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah. That's a great reflection for me to receive because to hear from someone that has a quasi similar path. I'd love to learn more offline, but that was the impotence around building this was to help people to really do something that created change in the world through education and not just through a product line, but to really motivate people to be their own doctor and to take that shit back. Nobody's coming to save you. And so that was what sparked me to just keep going even through the tribulations of becoming the prisoner and the self defeating warrior and all of those things where I felt like I couldn't breathe at times and I couldn't do what I wanted to do. And I also felt suppressed to not be able to speak about things that I really want to speak about. Which is tough for me based on my gene keys, my design, all of those archetypes that I hold within myself. And so, all we have is now we have this moment, this is real. And today, I'm making the announcement that I am going to go back, pull up the things that I love, and I'm going to make sure that I do not push those things out of my life and I go back to the joy. And you asked me, what can we do outside of knowing what things are killing us every single day? And I think you're right. I think it's having AHA moments with your brothers and sisters, your lovers and hitting just peak pinnacle ecstasy with them, but also in a form that is so grounded and not outside of us where it just becomes reckless because then we're following for the entertainment trap, and that's part of the cycle that we're in right now is that most people are in such pain, frustration, anger and resentment that all they want to do is escape into entertainment. And that's why that whole system is leading the way, almost is that the trap of entertainment? I'm a sports guy. I love sports, but I also know the business of sports and I know the conditioning that comes from it. I love athletes. I respect athletes. I'm an athlete and I know the hard work and sacrifice that goes into it. But I also know the way that this system is running is that it's sucking out the marrow of people's own lives, you know, it's becoming so idolized in a sense where people aren't enjoying themselves. They're just living through some type of projection and that feedback loop in their brain, just like watching a television is turning on those chemicals at a slightly different decibel than actually doing it yourself. So they're getting the dopamine, they're getting the satisfaction, if you will, from it. It's just like someone who's masturbating five, six times a day.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right. It's the same thing. And so at this point, I think cultivating your spirit, putting it on paper, knowing who you are, where you are, why you are, starts investigating the mysteries of life. I think those are the root of them becoming the embodiment of what we consider to be a happy fulfilled life. Now that's subjective to someone else's perspective because your perceptions, your reality of what happiness is, but your happiness could be completely different than what my happiness is.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I think it's incredibly dangerous when we get into this comparative mindset where we assume because we see somebody else with more money or more YouTube subscribers or more Instagram followers and likes that they're happier than we are. It's not true.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Not true at all.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's just fundamentally untrue, but we imagine that. And again, this is that harmonic, you know, kind of harmonic and also the deceiver, which I call the satanic energy. It's clouding our mind and helping us to look, they're seducing us, I should say, to judging our own worth based upon something that could be measurable and quantified rather than the unique essence of who we actually are in our own unique story, which is completely different than anybody else and our own dharmic path of what the full actualization of yourself looks like and how it's going to be different than everybody else. But instead we're comparing and then if we're not careful, not only are we comparing, which is like a Craven image of who we actually are, then we start to envy those people who have what we believe to be more than us and then the envy creeps in and then very quickly that envy can turn into which is the pain that we feel in somebody else's thriving in their success. That envy can quickly turn the same side of that coin and it can become sadism. Where we actually are rooting for their demise. We're actually hoping that they suffer. And we saw this in COVID and we saw it on both sides. We saw people who were celebrating when those people died of COVID or whatever.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Justified their position.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. They justified their position, right? Like if you died of COVID and you were unvaccinated, then well, you're a fucking idiot and you deserved it. And if you died of the vaccine and like, well, you're a fucking idiot and you deserved it. And we had both, I saw it on both sides and it's also like, man, this is fucking not the way y'all like, this is not the way
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: What you're illustrating right now is if you really contemplate how deep that is, that spell, that's really dark.
AUBREY MARCUS: Really dark.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's really dark. And it's so prevalent right now. And I felt, and I still feel that growing energy or that sentiment. I mean, I can't even tell you. I'm sure you've probably received this. I've seen people send me messages on social media. I've never even opened these messages for years, changing their stance on what they're messaging me over years of complete infatuation to resentment to hatred to then, wow, I hated you so much, but that hatred showed me how much demons I have inside me and how much work that I had to do to get through it. So thank you for the entire elliptical experience of going through these ups and downs just through your embodiment. It's really fascinating. And I think that is a perfect sketch of not having deep practices early in life and finding out really what you are in this realm. And that's again, that goes back to the suppression of children being suppressed by the parents telling them that this is wrong. No, you cannot feel this way. No, you cannot cry. No, you cannot express that. I mean, from the third trimester to age seven, children's and theta wave brain systems, that's the imaginary brainwave. You know, that's like the impulse of learning everything around you and experiencing everything and cultivating that Chi life force that you pick up through sound and feeling and touch and optics and all the senses. And then the internal senses of inner gnosis, if that's completely suppressed when you're four or five, six, seven years young, then you really have a lot of work to do. And most of the parenting that's been going on and I'm generally speaking is a level of suppression because those parents are just kids themselves. They didn't develop full faculties. They didn't have a toolbox that was built for them around personal development and how to really tap into your heart and how to feel emotionally, how to embody nonviolent communication, all the things that we know have been missing in today's society. And I'm speaking for America generally. And I'm sure this is in other places in the world too. But I also see families that I grew up around that had very cultured families. And you see that in the Latin communities, you see that in a lot of the ethnic communities that it was a household of love and expression and all of those things. Not that there were no cons in that involvement as well. Everything's a whole kaleidoscope of things, but I've seen how that nurture and that connection to the child has made such a difference. It's made such a difference on how easily they're persuaded by an outside group or a policy or a government or an idea or a fear. When the whole thing with the COVID narrative happened, it was intense. You know, it didn't affect me to be honest with you. I didn't feel anything from it, but it was intense seeing how easily the fear jumped in on everyone's rationale and people lost a sense of comprehension. And I was just observing from a distance, and just witnessing what was coming and the experience around it. In my opinion, I think that whole thing was a psychological data capture, just how much can we really figure out how the human mind is working. Because the amount of data that's being captured today through harmonic technology is unbelievable. We can't even comprehend it. And that was really a nice test for them to see how far we can take this? And this is part of the story, right? You know, it's part of our story. We live through a very unique thing. Also, it's preparing us for what could be coming next, and I like to test my wits. I like to get uncomfortable, there's something to that. There's something about getting through it and getting on the other side of it. That just brings so much ecstasy. That brings so much joy. And I'm definitely at a state right now where I feel like everything has happened exactly the way it's supposed to be. I'm just being very present with it as I'm unfolding the nuances and relationships and ideas that are swirling around me constantly.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I don't fall for the plague story or the energetic story that this is all coming to an end and all that stuff. That doesn't pique my interest at all. I'm just here, present today.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a combination of recognizing that your choices have consequences, which is true.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: And also that as hafi, the Sufi mystic and poet said, wherever you are right now, God circled that place on a map for you
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: A hundred percent.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right. So it's like, really? And there's a discipline in that level of faith. Like faith is like anything is a practice. Like it's a practice and it's a discipline. And it's like to be disciplined in that faith and say, all right, wherever I am in my life right now, somehow, for some reason, including the choices that I made, because I made them for the reasons that I needed to learn and needed to get to this position I am right now, this is exactly where I'm supposed to be. And that, collectively, therefore, you know, as within, so without, as above, so below, like, collectively, wherever we are right now is exactly where we need to be. And like,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: We couldn't think any other way. You see that like what you just said, there's no other way of thinking that because any other way of taking that outside of that gnosis. You fall directly into a victim and you're disabled
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and you become hopeless and then you become impotent and then you no longer become an agent for the collective growth.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right
AUBREY MARCUS: That we need
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right. You become part of the heaviness and the weight of that big snowball that's just building momentum towards suppression, right? And you're jumping in that because you're an electrical body. You're an electrical system. You have energy in a field. We know that. Modern quantum physics is showing that. And so if you're deflated and that energy is in that state of mind, then that's all you're going to offer everyone around you. And that's like a deep meditation that I have sometimes is like the way that I'm operating in the way that I'm carrying myself has a profound effect. There is a butterfly effect. There is a ripple effect. And I have to make that choice. Every single moment and it's easy to just let go of it, when you're tired and you're ready to tap out and you want to jump into that whateverness. And I think that's human. It's being human, but it's also getting back on that horse. I have a stun. This is an ancient Farsi tattoo here on my arm. This one right here. All of this is, and it's speaking, it's a Huda Maza speaking through Asha and it's basically saying that in the deepest darkness of your shadow, like the dark night of the soul times 10 trillion, you couldn't even comprehend. That's where you illuminate, that's where the fire begins to spark, and that's something that I take very seriously and everything that I'm thinking about and how I'm reacting to things and all that stuff and feeling the weight of the world. Is that okay? It’s almost like, are you familiar with mannism? Mannism was a Christian mystic in Iran and this is 300 AD and his whole trip was basically, when we hit the impulse of evil and evil is taken over, it's taken over a village, it's taken over a town, it's taken over a city, country, whatever. We have to leverage that darkness as a way to push forward the light. So you almost take the momentum of what it is that the trap is. So it could be technology, right? Could be artificial intelligence. It could be whatever it is. Social media could be a whole app, who knows, all of these things. So instead of going to war with it, we figure out how to leverage that momentum to rebound it back into a balance. So it's kind of like in basketball, right? You're posting someone up and they're putting their weight on you. You're on defense and you pull the rug under them. Right. And then they fall over, they travel, they lose the ball, whatever it is. There's something to that and it's a lot deeper and more profound way to articulate it. But we can cultivate that
AUBREY MARCUS: It’s also judo or aikido. And it's this way of using force and not saying like, I'm just going to meet the force head on, like sumo style is like, let me add more sake and beer to my mass and let me smash head forward, like cutting no angles whatsoever just straight forward head on. And let's see who can push the other one back out the other way. Well, that is one way to do it, but there's a whole other way, which is. All right, let's, how do we use this force and how do we use this force to our advantage? And that's the master's way, you watch a master judoka, and you'll see them, somebody will try to throw them like a hip throw, big strong guy. You'll see some 70 year old master and he'll just float off the ground, like over the leg and just like the way that they're moving. And then the subtlest shift in balance, they're able to capitalize on it.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah,
AUBREY MARCUS: I think when we see the empire has literally all the guns in the tanks and they have all of the weight and the mass and they're like bloated blessings to sumo wrestlers. I'm not trying to disparage their fucking craft because I know it's a craft as well. It's more simple than just smashing head forward. They slap each other in the face and pull each other's thongs and do whatever they do. You know? I actually am a fan of sumo, but
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I think it's amazing.
AUBREY MARCUS: I think it's amazing. But nonetheless, like they are the fucking sumo wrestler.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And we have to be the judoka. We have to figure out how to use this mass in a different way. And ultimately convinced the sumo, this massive energy of empire, like there's a different way. And come join us in our way.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And it's about creating a compelling enough story and a compelling enough life where we cause the empire to defect. And just say like, no, I'm not doing this anymore.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That’s right. Yeah. I love that analogy. I'm just thinking about the beauty of really witnessing evolution and studying the opponent, I think of Kobe Bryant and that just
AUBREY MARCUS: Study the opponent is the first,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: First step
AUBREY MARCUS: First chapter of my book.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Is it really?
AUBREY MARCUS: And I'm writing, yeah, it's literally word for word chapter one, move one, study the opponent.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: There it is. Right. And that's the blueprint. That's the beginning stage of the blueprint or the source code. You have to know what you're dealing with. And there has to be a level of respect there too, because respect is what brings you to have the faculty to take the step forward to learn and study the opponent, this again, just throwing them as the evil, which is that dualistic flame throwing that mentality, which really plummets us to our capabilities does serves no one, and that's divide and conquer. Republican Democrat, black and white, the separation is just such a falsity to who we are and our intelligence and our innate wisdom. And I think that ultimately we're at a point right now where there's enough information out there, there's enough experience, there's enough case studies, there's enough evaluation that we can really start to create interconnected web of consciousness that is resonating to everyone that has the ability to want to tap into their free will, because really, this isn’t all coming down to free will, right? Having the choice and knowing that you have a choice. And I'm just that, almost a crossroads in so many ways, it's
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I'm with you there, bro. And I think reading the Gathas, I read,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You read the Gathas.
AUBREY MARCUS: Oh yeah, I read the Gathas, Pablo Vasquez's translation and I tried to get him in on a podcast. We'll see if I can get him in and at some point,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Did you agree with it all?
AUBREY MARCUS: It's an interesting thing to ask. Did I agree with it all? I think I understood a lot of deep truth and wisdom that was expressed there. I thought some of it wasn't dissonant to my beliefs. It wasn't like, nah, that's off. But some of it I thought was like, all right, this is a little irrelevant to the times that we're in now. This is a little potentially reiterative. This is a little potentially superfluous, but through there, like there's a lot of deep nuggets of wisdom. So it wasn't like I could go to some kind of church sermon name and denomination. And I'm guarantee I'd fucking disagree with a lot of things. You guys fucking lost it.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: You know, even if I agreed with some of the deeper teachings of Yeshua, which I do, I think Yeshua is an amazing teacher.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: But there's a lot that's really distant. I didn't find that in the Gothas. I just found stuff that was like, all right, I'm a little bored with this section here.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Sure.
AUBREY MARCUS: And maybe there's a level of depth that I wasn't actually seeing, but I have a pretty keen eye for reading sacred texts. But then I would get to key moments. And I think one of the things that I'm recalling now from my reading of it was this emphasis on our choice, that it's a choice. The path of Asher, the path of Druze is a choice, like it's a fucking choice. And like you versus anti you, like this is a choice. Are we going to be our higher self or are we going to succumb to these darker impulses and seductions? It's a fucking choice.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It really is. Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: And people want to say, Oh, there's no choice. Obesity is all genetic. It's not a choice. Oh, whatever illness you have. It's not your fault. Here's a pill. Here's an injection. Here's Ozempic. Here's whatever the fuck, you know, like it's not your fault. There's no responsibility. And it's like, I think returning people to that choice point is absolutely essential to say, no, you do have a fucking choice. And maybe the cards you're dealt are harder than the cards that somebody else has been dealt. It's still your choice how you play those cards. And there's a way to make a winning hand out of any situation. You gotta figure it out. This is what Viktor Frankl tried to teach us after he left Auschwitz and after being a prisoner in the Holocaust, like it was like, no, there's a choice. And he watched some people make a different choice and the ripple effects of that choice, even in the most hell on earth environment you could possibly imagine. There was still a choice.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I think that's one of the deceptions of the empire that we're facing is that, Oh, there's no choice. There's no hope. There's no choice. And that's I think one of the, probably the strongest messages that I want to put out is like, no, this is a fucking choice.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: And it's okay if you've made the wrong choices or made bad choices. It's all right. Like there's also forgiveness. And from this point now, there's still a choice.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I love it. Part of the story is the hero's journey. It's the phoenix, all of these artistic concepts. They elucidate the feeling of being able to find redemption in life and to be able to come back from it all, no matter what kind of cards you've been dealt. It's interesting that Steiner would constantly say that all this ease begins in the mind and that kind of reminds me of what you're saying here is that, it's your thoughts, it's your emotions, it's your faculties, it's your capacity to feel which drives you to make the choices that you're making every single day and every choice that you've made up until now has brought you into this moment. Right. And you've set the sail and you've set the direction of that sail, and the winds can be coming from any direction, right? It could be Cardinal West, could be whatever direction it is, but you are the person who's capturing that momentum and allowing yourself to go in the direction that you choose to make it. I think we do have that free will. Have some people caught a tough ride, a tough incarnation? Of course. Does it pain me? Absolutely. I had a father that didn't understand the American way of life. He came here and I remember five years young, six years young, seeing his reaction to homelessness. My dad would literally cry. Like I would see tears come down his face cause he couldn't comprehend this. And I remember at five feeling the wave of emotion that my father was feeling, and I realized that, and he would tell me, we don't have this in Iran. You know, this is not, this is foreign to me. How could humanity create such suffering, and those nuances of that level of empathy stuck with me. Yet I've also, I would say almost the mindset that if you allow yourself to penetrate outside of your victim, you're creating the greatest, I would say almost experience for your entire life ahead of you right in that moment, you are literally taking life by the horns and pushing through all of the problems that you think have collapsed onto you and your family and everything there. And there was an old girlfriend of mine that I hadn't seen in, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. And she reached out to me, this was years ago. And she was having a lot of relapses on stuff that had happened to her during childhood. And she was molested by her uncle. And that had just basically hit her later on in life, which is a common theme, that during adolescence and early twenties, a lot of that is suppressed. And then after maybe she's gone through or sat in return or whatever, it came up and she was really on the edge. And I talked to her and I said, maybe you should take ownership for that experience. Now that sounds very aggressive and very controversial and really ridiculous when you say it out loud, but I got into a contemplative state with her. That if she took ownership of being who she was incarnated in that family, it would allow her the freedom to be able to move through that pain and move through that challenge and accept that that was part of her story. And that she was not a victim to that experience. Do you get what I'm saying?
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's just framework, but it's, but it's an empowering
AUBREY MARCUS: It's the paradox of, it's absolutely not your fault, sweetheart. Like, it is not your fault that this happened. And like my heart bleeds for you. And I'll sit here and I'll cry these tears with you. And that being said, it is your opportunity, your invitation, and you could even go so far as to say, and it's your responsibility to play your hand out with these cards that have been dealt.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's it.
AUBREY MARCUS: This is the invitation of, for the hero's journey, the heroine's quest.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right.
AUBREY MARCUS: That you're on. And it's to say, yeah, like, all right. Maybe this was a free will choice that, you know, I don't know if I necessarily fully ascribed to like, we chose our incarnation and everything else that happened in it, because I believe that there's a series of forking paths that we all can take. I think that uncle could have healed his trauma without the repetition compulsion that caused him to as all kinds of things that maybe could have happened that would have made a different outcome, but either way, once it's happened, that's when it's like, you got a fucking choice. What is the choice for how you handle this situation? And the choice is available, you know, always. And this idea of the choice that's always available is really, I think, one of the most important things. And I've told this story a few times before, but even in the most unthinkable, the most unthinkable and unavailable choice for like the greatest master, more choices are available. So there's a story about Sage Wang Chongyang. So she is one of like the founders of a deep kind of Taoist tantric school, I believe it's a Taoist tantric school, but a tantric master and she was walking alone on a road and she was accosted by a group of bandits and they proceeded to rape her. But instead of going into fear, she had no way to physically resist them. Instead of going into fear, she maintained radical presence. And actually like beamed like forgiveness through the process to every one of the bandits that was raping her. I mean, rape is the most atrocious of all different violations, right? In some ways you could think of it almost worse than death.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Probably the worst. Yeah, way worse than death.
AUBREY MARCUS: And so. But she was able to make a master's choice. I'm not saying that that's available to anybody, but the master,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's a responsibility, you’re explaining it.
AUBREY MARCUS: But this is pointing to the extreme of this and what ended up happening is they finished, they had this kind of, the blood was rushing through them and the lust and the deceptive blindness, but they finished. And after that experience, they all started weeping because they just recognized that's something, they recognized what they had done. They'd seen a reflection of themselves. That wasn't the monster that they thought that they were and they all knelt before her and vowed that they would spend the rest of their lives protecting her and they would be her like an honor guard, for the rest of her life. And it's like the amount of choice that we have is, it's proportioned to a variety of different things. Sometimes those choices aren't available. Sometimes we can't help ourselves and that's why there's always forgiveness in this, but to point to let's give ourselves more agency. If you have a proclivity to fly into a fit of rage, give yourself a little more agency, practice something when you get hooked with that Shempa, that Poison that strikes you and you want to leash, leash out with more poison. Like, do you have that moment of awareness? Can you make a different choice?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Can you expand your agency to have a little bit more choice in that moment and
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's a muscle. It's a muscle.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah. And that's like becoming a master, whatever martial art it is, whatever thing it is, the more that you are flexing that and you're experiencing that and you're practicing it, the more that you're able to run around and be able to adapt and flow and do those things. I love that. I love that story in the sense that it just shows you at the highest level of carnage. The highest level of theft, because that's a form of theft. Right. And you're able to almost alchemize that experience and create such profound story and thought, which then lays the seed of wisdom throughout the ages. Right. And I think that's why the more we can learn about things like this and learn more about things about the ancient world, it equips us with things that are prevalent today. And that's why these stories and these things, these different caricatures are just archetypes for us to embody and experience through other multidisciplinary things that are happening around us every single day. And the more that we can gather those and actually sit in contemplation, because the way that you explained it, for me, I was imagining being her in a sense. I was contemplating what that realism would feel like. And I think that's the beauty of contemplation is you can foreshadow your own self and basically slide yourself into the embodiment and that is a practice that has to be implemented and taught. And I think these are actually really powerful experiences and that's why the medicine evokes a lot of that.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure, and there's some things that you can prepare yourself for, but you'll never actually know how you'll respond. Like she was never able to practice that. It's like, all right, let's set up the practice rape so I can work on this ability. Right. Like you can't, but she'd developed a level of mastery. And then some through divine grace and inspiration in one of these moments where I'm sure this was something beyond even what she thought was possible. And of course I can't podcast with her, so I don't know exactly how it went, but I would imagine that this was like, wow, I can't believe I was able to do that shit. And I've felt those moments come through, but it was still based upon a life dedicated to training on this very disciplined path. And then in that moment, something even greater was able to arise. It reminds me, and this is a super trivial story. So it's kind of absurd to even mention it in the same conversation as yes, she's so guilty, right? But so I've trained martial artists. I trained martial arts my whole life, basically. Since I was three or four, I have photos of me doing flying sidekicks with my instructor, Pat Johnson, shout out to Pat and his son Garth.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And you were a ninja too as a kid.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It was Tang Sudo. It was Chuck Norris's school. And Pat was actually the referee and karate kid, which is kind of cool.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: These are LA guys, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. LA guys. Yeah. They were in Agoura.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course. Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: In Agoura. But it developed a level of confidence, right? And of course, I understood the limitations of that confidence. Roger Huerta was a great UFC fighter. He was one of my best friends and we'd fuck around in the gym. And I was like, all right, I understand even though you're smaller than me, there's a big difference between a real MMA fighter and me. But nonetheless, I still had a high degree of confidence in an ordinary situation.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course.
AUBREY MARCUS: So. There is a guy, we're at a nightclub, and there is a guy who, and I am also dedicated to my spiritual path as well. So both of these things were present. A dedication to martial arts, a dedication to my spiritual path. And we're at this, the nightclub was called Summit. We're at Summit, outdoor table, everybody's standing up on the, I don't know the seats or whatever, just dancing around the fucking bottle of whatever it was, vodka, champagne, and both probably. And there's this guy who kept coming around and kept being aggressive with my fiance at the time. Exactly. And I was like, yo, like chill out. And he was like, ohh. But he was a little drunk.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: He was under the spell of alcohol
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, exactly. And then he came and he did it again and. There was something very interesting that could have happened, like one of several reactions could have happened. One, I could have lost it, and it could have been a full on physical altercation.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: In which I'm sure you and I have both been there many times.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure, and I was prepared for that. I was prepared for that outcome, but something came through at that point. And I just stood there in front of him and he was like ready. Like he was thinking this is about to turn to violence and he was overestimating his abilities. I would probably imagine to say,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH : I’m cool with it
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, exactly. But nonetheless, for whatever reason, I just looked at him. And I made the deepest penetrating eye contact. And I said, there is something deeply unreconciled in your heart. And he looked at me and his eyes just got all wide. And he was like, what the fuck just happened? And he kind of puts his head down and just wanders back off into the crowd.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You just pattered, you just destroyed his pattern recognition.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That was mastery. Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And that was the thing, but then I thought about it. I was like, where the fuck did that come from?
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: So that just came out of nowhere
AUBREY MARCUS: Came out of nowhere.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Wow.
AUBREY MARCUS: I didn't practice that. I didn't think that would happen. But some confluence of both my confidence to be able to stand in front of them and also my spiritual practice led to this unique outcome that I didn't prepare for, I didn't rehearse. I didn't think about what if I said just the right thing in that case, but something came through that was beyond what I thought my capacity was, but it was built on the foundation of certain levels of training. And I think that just shows like we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what situation will arise. And there's so many stories of like heroes that just emerge. And I believe that those are all built upon, not just some random thing, it's built upon levels of competency and then allowing something greater to emerge that comes through it. But it's still built brick by brick in different areas, and then the emergence of what happens in a moment, can be something even greater.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's the greatest story. I grew up fighting. I was wild. I've been in so many knee jerk reaction fights with my own brothers. Alcohol was involved probably 75 percent of the time. I mean, I'm sure you can understand there were moments in life where we were looking to fight people and that just all resented suppressed anger and rage and just had to get it out on someone. It's kind of like road rage. You know, you could be at a Vipassana for two weeks straight. Somebody cuts you off on your way back from the airport. You're ready to kill them. And so I think that moment for you sparked amazing momentum in your life. I'm sure, and I think that's the definition of true mastery. I mean, this is beyond nonviolent communication. I mean, what you said to them, those penetrating words and maybe the tone that you said in a time where you could have just taken all frustration that you had built up is fucking with your woman. It's on. That took serious, maybe it was something that was sitting in your lower colon. There was a signal there that had been activated through the practice. And that level of rationale was able to be opened up and the signal was able to reach your heart and then electrical stimulation came into your frontal cortex and then the linguistics came out of your mouth. And I think it was beyond words. I think it was the energy field that you created at that moment too. And that right there is a perfect artistic expression of where we need to be today. There is a time to grab the sword,
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And we know when those times when it's on. But there was also a level of, I wouldn't even say maturation level of sophistication of being a higher being and that higher being was witnessed in that moment and it probably sparked so much more unfolding for you because I've had similar moments where something inside of me showed me that this is the way, I do not need to result to becoming a warrior in that moment or an animal. Actually, that was a warrior in my sense, or going into an animalistic rage. And it's a good story because what do you do when you turn on the TV or you turn on the news? I live in Southern California, Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami. It's nothing but, you know, 187 murders, fights, attacks, things of this nature. And it's not because these people are necessarily evil. I don't think so. I think they just don't have any capacity to feel the nurturing empathy within them and have the tools of understanding these different philosophies. And the studies and practices that come with it. And that's really what it is. It's just that these people, they're not running around with Satan on their back. I don't think that maybe a small percentage are invaded. And there's walk-ins there, but I think that it's just ultimately, we don't have the faculties of understanding reason and rationality.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And that's a great story, man.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And I think, I remember these stories of different conflicts and there's been certain other moments. I remember another story, which is interesting to reflect on. I haven't thought about it in a minute. And it's a story where I didn't make a choice that I was happy with. After that, I was like, wow, that was a choice that was better than me. And I remember another choice that I made that was like, that was not the right choice actually. And this was also, same. She wasn't my fiance yet, but I was with Whitney. She just finished her Miss United States pageant, which she ended up winning. And we were out in Washington DC and Washington DC is a funny place. It has an interesting energy about it. And there was
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: The Masonic temple.
AUBREY MARCUS: It was like wherever we tried to go celebrate, there was like a lot of dark energy and it was just me. And she had some of her girlfriends there. So I was on my own. And there was this guy, this just like a disgusting man. Like I could feel the disgustingness and I'm not like a judgmental person that's like saying because of how he looked or whatever, but the energy itself was repulsive. It was like something out of sin city. It was so exaggerated. And I didn't know exactly the extent of what he had done, but he'd reached under my girlfriend's skirt and grabbed her pussy.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You're kidding me
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And I didn't know, she didn't tell me like Exactly what happened and I didn't see it exactly, but I remember like, right. And I remember I knew something fucked up had happened. And I was like, I remember at that moment, I was so off guard and I was so thrown by that experience, but also so cognizant that there was like kind of a strong police presence in the bar. And there was like a whole, it was very interesting, also. I didn't feel like I was on my home turf in any way.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You were scanning this situation.
AUBREY MARCUS: The whole situation was a little weird. So I said something to him and I was like, you're a fucking piece of shit. And you're lucky I don't do it. And maybe said something like that would probably be better than actually what came out of my mouth at that time. It could have just been a fucking grunt. I don't even know. But I thought about that moment and I've thought about it and I was like, I should have fucking hit that guy.
CHETVIN JAFARIEH: You kick yourself for that.
AUBREY MARCUS: I actually regret that at least I didn't open hand, just slap him in the fucking face.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah, yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: And so like, it's interesting to look back and to say, yes, in that one action that I just told the first story, absolutely. The perfect right action was to say those words from the heart. And in this case, actually, that was a time for the metaphorical sword, which would have been at the very least
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: An open hand
AUBREY MARCUS: Open hand
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Man to man
AUBREY MARCUS: Man, yeah. And if you want to take this further, we take this further. Right.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's how you would set up a duel.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. For sure. And so it's interesting that every situation and some people might agree and like, no, bro, it's better you walked out of the bar and I'm like, yeah, all right. Like I get it. It was, but I never,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Do these stories pop up in your head whenever a circumstance presents itself? Are you,
AUBREY MARCUS: I haven't had a circumstance in a while. Cause I'm rolling pretty deep. I'm rolling deep and I will admit that I do select friends, slightly on size, male friends. I gravitate myself.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You got Kingsbury.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. Like he's solid in the range, but I do see large people and naturally without even thinking about it, I like to form an affinity. I'm like, Hey bro, what's up? You're 6’8, two seventies. Nice.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Vy is laughing because she knows it's true. She watches me go through this or anybody who's fit. So anyways, my squad is always like we're big and we roll deep. So I haven't had any conflicting situations cause it's like, naturally we're like a force that’s kind of moving through, but I still do. It's funny because I still do think about that situation. And I think about it like, damn it. I needed to hit that motherfucker, you know? And so I just want to share that I don't think that, just because I shared this spiritual moment that I don't think there's a time where actually honor demands a certain action. And the lesson that needs to be transferred is a lesson of there are boundaries and you cross these boundaries, there are consequences and actually what that person needed for his life is to recognize, Oh, I better not do that because I might grab the wrong person's girlfriend's pussy and it might get real bad for me.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Oh, he might have his head blown off sometime.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. So actually that could have been the thing that actually, like, all right, because if he didn't know better, and I've seen that situation happen before I've seen somebody, none of nobody that was related to me, but like grab somebody's ass and then a gun get pulled. And it was like, holy shit, this thing got fucking gnarly,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Non action on impulses that you feel in your heart and your soul has the same ripple effect as an action.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah, that's established and you just have to use full discernment.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, that’s it.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And maybe the thing with alcohol is alcohol is just one of those things that it penetrates everything in the body, fat soluble, water soluble, it penetrates the mind, the heart. And when the liver cannot metabolize alcohol anymore, meaning one or two ounces, depending on your bloodline, it could be an Irishman or a Native American, when that alcohol cannot be metabolized, that's when the entities come in. Alcohol is the perfect
AUBREY MARCUS: It was called Al-Khul
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's Al-Khul evil spirit, that could be the etymology of it. There are some Arabic connotations to that. And alcohol seems to be the provocator of these types of activities. I'm not trying to sidebar into that conversation, but I've seen alcohol destroy so many lives and in split second lives, not even deteriorating over years, like just fucking up situations. I would say 95 percent of the brawls that I've been in have been alcohol induced, cause just no rationale to some of these fights and these types of actions that could have had me killed or I could have killed someone. I'm from San Diego. Tijuana was my playground
AUBREY MARCUS: San Diego is very aggressive. It's a surprisingly aggressive place.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Very aggressive. From the Samoans to Southeast San Diego
AUBREY MARCUS: And the military presence out there.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Military
AUBREY MARCUS: Bunch of kids fucking coming off ships all fucking cooped up with
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Half cock pissed off.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You have methamphetamines, you have heavy alcohol usage and it's a real thing. And once your body can't metabolize alcohol, it shuts down the nervous system, and for whatever reason, it literally extracts your essence out, just like how you would extract the vital force of ashwagandha, or a flower, or a seed. You use ethanol. The ancient alchemists were using alcohol to extract herbs. That's what alcohol does. It does the same thing to the human body. Once you drink a certain amount of alcohol, there's no escaping there. Your soul's coming out with your piss. It's coming out with your breath. That's why you breathalyze. That's why the alcohol comes out. It's a force. And so if you're listening to this, I'm not saying don't drink alcohol. Although I kind of am saying that. Alcohol has a tendency to put us in positions where other entities take form within our body. And that's why people black out and do the most heinous crimes. That's why people black out and wake up in their house and have no idea how they got home, what they've done. It's beyond inhibition. It's full on, it's a monstrosity to the human body in so many ways. Yeah. I was in the King's chamber on my birthday with our brother Robert and our whole crew over there and he gave me a whole night in the Great Pyramid on my birthday alone.
AUBREY MARCUS: Wow.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: This is the night we landed, and this is my first time in the Middle East. It's a trip, the Middle East has always been like this mystery, right? I've read about it. I've contemplated, I've never been to Iran, and I'm sitting here in the great pyramid tripping on some medicine and I'm laying in the sarcophagus. He's humming outside of the sarcophagus. And then we make our way down into the pit. We're literally crawling in this. Have you been down there?
AUBREY MARCUS: No, I haven't been. I've seen where you're talking about though.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: We're in this hole for like 50 yards, 400 feet under the pyramid. And I am feeling the weight of the largest, heaviest structure in the world on top of me. And I'm in this crevice. And as I was laying there, alcohol just kept popping up in my mind. I kept feeling it and I'm not a big drinker, I'm more of a ceremonial type drinker. I love good mezcal. But it just hit me that all of the shadows that I've experienced for the most part in my life, whether it's with my partner, with my ex lovers, with my family, with my friends, with law enforcement, with whatever it was, was all alcohol related every single experience and I was in that moment, I was like, okay, I'm going all of 24 with not a drop of alcohol. And so we're just hitting like 95 days right now. And again, not that I was drinking a lot, but it's just one of those chemicals that take us out of everything that we talked about today, which is absolute agency, presence, free will, composure at the front line, composure to be able to not result to fear. Fear is what creates you to strike. It creates the first action. It puts you in an offensive state. For better, for worse, and I just thought that was a poignant thing to add.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, sure. And I've certainly felt the medicinal properties of alcohol.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I felt, I mean, I remember one really prescient example of this is, my first experience with the toad with bufo was administered in a very questionable circumstance. Where
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I have to hear this.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So I was given 350 milligrams of MDMA.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Wait, hold on.
AUBREY MARCUS: So 350,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: 350 milligrams
AUBREY MARCUS: Of MDMA,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of pure MDMA
AUBREY MARCUS: Pure MDMA. So that's three and a half normal doses. So the maps, therapeutic doses, 80 to 120 milligrams.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah, that's right.
AUBREY MARCUS: So and usually on the street, you're going to get capsules with 100.
That's usually where it's standardized. Maybe it's not pure. This was actually pure quality, high quality MDMA. So, thank you for not giving me some fucking crystal meth that's ground up,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Tweaked out,
AUBREY MARCUS: Tweaked out.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: So you had pharmaceutical grade.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: MDMA
AUBREY MARCUS: At 350 milligrams, which is absurd. So I am rolling tits.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Your jaws going
AUBREY MARCUS: Like, I'm fucking jaws going. My eyes are like
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Your pupil. You don't have pupils?
AUBREY MARCUS: No.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH:It's not even dilating at this point.
AUBREY MARCUS: No. And then that's just setting me up for my toe journey.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: No, hold on. You were under 350.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of MDMA and you smoked Bufo for the first time while under the magic of that.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So now, and full flood dose of Bufo, not just like sipping a little bit, like full.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: No,like a hundred milligrams.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Like 120.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Okay.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, micrograms. And so that fucking experience was profound. It was unbelievable. Now I will
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Orgasmic times 5 billion.
AUBREY MARCUS: Of course! It was incredible. However, it was so much for my nervous system. And I was like an experienced psychonaut. And I think that's why they made this decision to ramp things up to the fucking absurd. Although I'd never done Bufo at that point.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Did you make this decision?
AUBREY MARCUS: No!
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: So how did this happen? your agency was down.
AUBREY MARCUS: So I went to a facilitator and I went to this facilitator because
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You leave me good information after this.
AUBREY MARCUS: So I went to it because a good buddy of mine was going to this facilitator and he was a good buddy. And I was like, let me vet this guy out. And there were also some connections to this guy. And ultimately I was like, all right, I'm going to check it out. And so I didn't know how much MDMA I was given until after the fact. And so, but it was like, all right, this is going to be the MDMA and the Bufo protocol. Now my first psych, psychonautic journey was MDMA and psilocybin. That's what started me on my quest. So conceptually, the idea of laying a foundation of hard openness before smoking the toad. I was like, all right, conceptually, I think I'm not opposed to this as the framework if this is how it's done. And so, but anyways, at the point that I was rolling that hard, I was like, all right, well, fuck it. I'm here anyway, so we're going to go for it. And again, the experience itself was pretty incredible. However, it brought all of whatever my neurochemistry, hormonal balance, nervous system. It brought it to such a level that I didn't sleep for three days.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course, you fried your receptors
AUBREY MARCUS: I fried everything. Everything was just cooked.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Your 5H2A receptor site, that is the serotonin uptake system right there, on a hundred milligrams has dumped its reserves. Now you've introduced five methoxylated, not NMDMT. It's methoxylated.
AUBREY MARCUS: I know.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Way more aggressive.
AUBREY MARCUS: I know.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Okay.
AUBREY MARCUS: I know.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Dude.
AUBREY MARCUS: I was fucked. And then, so three days in, and again, at three days without sleep, the psyche starts to degrade. And at that point,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: When was the
AUBREY MARCUS: This was probably 2016, I was basically trying to get all of the different support from different other people and people talking to me but things were starting to unravel. And I was like, you know what? I just need to drink some whiskey.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah, that makes sense.
AUBREY MARCUS: I just need to drink some whiskey. And I got out a bottle of good scotch, some Obon 14.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's a good one.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I poured it in and I just started sipping that. And I could literally feel my body start to relax a little bit. And then I was able to take a deep breath and then was able to go to sleep that night and so I want to just point to that example being that there's lots of lots of challenges with alcohol and then also many beautiful experiences. We have a glass of wine with your friends, et cetera
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Intention,
AUBREY MARCUS: But intention is was
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It was your intention. How you do anything is how you do everything right? The water you drink, the way that you breathe, the way that you make love, the food that you eat, the way that you choose to chew your food, food combining the way that you smoke tobacco. If you're unconscious drinking coffee every single day and you don't realize it and that's just unconscious, coffee's going to be a problem. If you celebrate it as a ceremony, everything that you do in life, you're present and you're making a calibrated decision. That alcohol and that moment of being 72 hours on a freaking come down hard for fried receptor sites. You're probably dehydrated energetically a little bit. Your electrical systems shorten out, you're not sleeping, so you're not detoxifying the body, right? So all of a sudden that alcohol allowed a little bit of dopamine to come into the body. Allow the glutamate receptors in your brain to start calming the nervous system. And that was the medicine, right? And that's interesting because my favorite time of having a drink, whether it's an ice cold beer, or it's mezcal or even like an aged Scotch is usually after a lot of medicine. Yeah,
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It's part of the Colombian tie, touch tradition actually. It's like that, the pure cane alcohol part of their medicine boat.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right. And that's a ceremonial path. Now, I'm not advocating that,
AUBREY MARCUS: Of course, we're not advocating any of this. We're certainly noting 350 milligrams of MDMA and bufo.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: No way. Next time, try that suppository style. Let's see what happens. My first toad experience was in 2015 and my cousin whispered in my ear, he's like, it's time to do the toad. And I was like, toad, what the hell is this guy talking about? And I thought he was talking about combo, which is the Amazonian tree frog poison. And I showed up at this random house in Southern California and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And I blasted on 125 milligrams of pure 5 MEO, not synthetic from the buffalo various toads, which is the most enigmatic creature in my opinion. I have the atomic structure tattooed on my side. And that was such a dissolving of all matter in my reality. That it changed the trajectory of my life. I left my partner, I sold my company. I went back to our farm in Kauai. I went to Peru, stayed in Peru for extended periods of time. My whole alchemy went back to me being nine or 10 or 11. I went back into my child, the whole birth of everything that I'm doing now is really that part of that moment. And a year prior to that, I got into a gnarly car accident. Like gnarly, like full on, I can't believe I walked away from that. And that led into me starting to open up into becoming a psychonaut and trusting the medicine and understanding the medicine. And ever since that toad experience, I've gone through a lot of ceremonies and have a devout respect for the medicine, like a deep devout respect. I mean, these are putting you into situations where you might attain 50 years of darkness in a cave. And my whole thing with Bufo in particular is that I've studied that a lot of the ancients believe that the soul carnates into the womb around day 40 or day 45. And that's also the time where modern science tells us that the spinal cord starts to fuse in there. And The compound dimethyltryptamine starts to trickle a little bit, and I believe that we have souls in these bodies. And I also believe that we are in, I wouldn't call it a stimulation, but we're in some type of electrical particle wave system.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: You know, we're receiving information. We’re standing here looking at each other. There's light bouncing off the protein in my face. It's hitting your retina. It's going down spirals, hitting your nervous system, hitting your brain, my image pops up into your frontal cortex. And here I am, this is happening in real time, so we're just like projections of particle waves and lights and all these things. And so if that's the case, and we have a soul in this body, that soul has to have an action, there has to be something that transports the soul in and out of the body, I believe it to be part electricity and DMT, I believe that that is the material world chemical that transports the soul in and out of the body. And so when you free base five MEO, which is the fastest way of getting a medicine or a drug into the body faster than IV, faster than anything. That's the lung, right? The alveoli, the oxygen, the blood, right? We're immediately vacuumed into whatever in between realm that is. And that Shervin that went into that realm. And went to the God source and got obliterated into nothingness, just literally melted into nothingness. No ego, no nothing. As I came back, literally it scraped off all the scar tissue, all the old wounds. I weighed 220 when I did that, I was all muscle. I gotta show you pictures of me. I was walking around at 220. I'm like a little bit over six foot. Just like for what? What was I doing with this body? I just felt like I could be energetically intimidating. That's all it was for, and all that got scraped off from that experience. And it was basically polished. And I was like a virgin energy in my soul. Like I just literally let go of so much pain, so much anger, so much frustration, a lot of mother wounds, a lot of all this stuff just completely scraped off and that's the beauty of an entheogenic experience and even more so than the trip, the integration over the following like few months. The level of hyper synchronicity that I went through brother was so full on, I was trying to quantify it, I started writing a ledger and using an old abacus, but I was just like, what? How is this stuff possible? And it sparked me into the spirit of really knowing that there's so much going on outside of the standard touch, feel, sight, smell, all those basic senses of being a human being were very limiting. And I started trusting the nuances of my spirit, and that led me back into going back into my studies and really training for the next wave of my life, I was 33 when that happened. And so it's just really interesting to hear your perspective. And that we're all, everyone, there's probably someone out here that has the exact same story. We're all paralleling this interesting paradigm.
AUBREY MARCUS: And one of the beautiful and encouraging things that I find is when you meet a brother on the way. And because sometimes you can feel like, where all my brothers are, where all my sisters are, like where you can feel isolated or alone. And then you just meet someone and it's like, Oh yeah. And we knew this within 10 minutes of talking to each other on the phone, even though we'd had mutual friends and things and everything, nothing just lined up. But it's just a beautiful experience for me when that clicks in and it goes like, aha, my brother.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And then. When that relationship is formed, I think, I don't even know if there might be a difference between how men and women bond and hold bonds, but it might be the same for women as well. I can't speak to that experience. But it's funny like once I form that level of brotherhood with somebody it could be years before when I haven't seen them anymore or haven't talked to them but if it was really formed and it'll always be there.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: It's anchored for sure
AUBREY MARCUS: It’s like it’s anchored in something that's really, really deep. And that's always such a cool experience to think that there's just so many that are out there. And I feel very blessed in my life, probably of all the great blessings of my life, it's been the friendships and the lovers and the people in my life and family and, and that helps remind me that God is good and the world is worth fighting for.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: And that's beautifully said and received. And I think, two brothers, two women, whoever it is coming together, one plus one's not two here. There's a synergy that is just untapped and unlimited. And for me to be able to embody a lot of the trials and tribulations and experiences that you've gone through, it allows me to live through those. And I'm able to pick up a lot of those nuances and vice versa, whatever it is that I'm able to offer you because our feet are somewhat pointed in the same direction. And we have a lot of likeness and there's magnetism to our experiences. We're able to build upon that. And that's the point of connection. The point of connection is, what is it that I can offer and bring to the table that's going to impact you in any way that you want it to impact you. Right? And that's the beauty of relationships. It's something that I ponder every day when I wake up. It's like, how can I make her life better? How can I make my mother's life better today? What can I do? And it's not me feeling like I have to do something. It's more of a level of righteousness that comes from it's such an authentic space. I have an ancient poem here. This is Asha and this whole thing basically translates to embody righteousness, not to be received as righteousness, but just fucking do it
AUBREY MARCUS: For its own sake,
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: For its own sake, to keep it alive, right? And that's the beauty of a fire to the ritual. Like we are one week where Tuesday is March 19th. That is Nowruz. That's our new year. That's the Persian new year, right? New day. And it's a Zoroastrian new year. And we know that's the real new year. It's not the Gregorian calendar January, that's a false calendar. And that's part of what we're talking about right here. It's like, it's a new day. What does the fire represent in the new day? Well, it represents alchemy. It represents the concept of us being able to share stories by a fire and be able to bring up these life experiences. Because now you told me about the experience you had at that club or whatever that was, both of those experiences. Now I can live through those experiences. I don't have to have done that. Right. I can embody that and I can feel into it because the nuances are impacting me right now because I'm open to it. My heart is open to receiving that from you. And that's really what it's all about. Nothing gets me more fired up. Jamie was saying earlier, in my observation of you over the years, what lights you up more than anything, no success, no this, no accolades. It's you and your brotherhood, the way that you are with men, the way that you show up, the way that you feel around them, just something about you, you turn into that child again. And that's why when you said basketball, I was just like, well, this guy plays ball and things like this, and that’s probably the greatest thing that I'll take from this experience. And this conversation was that there's just a lot of beautiful story here and it's just fucking beginning.
AUBREY MARCUS: We're just getting started, my brother.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Yeah my brother
AUBREY MARCUS: Thanks for being here, my man.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: Of course Man
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And just want to let everybody know, I know a thing or two about supplements and Symbiotica makes some of the best fucking supplements in the world, period. I still love my Onnit shit, but our pantry has both Onnit and Symbiotica and pretty much exclusively dominated by those two different brands. So, just like giving a shout out to this company you're still running because it's fucking awesome.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: I really appreciate that. And that's another beautiful thing that we didn't even get into is like that same storyline. You know what I mean?
AUBREY MARCUS: There's a lot of
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: There's a lot of stuff. Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: There’s a lot of synchronicity.
CHERVIN JAFARIEH: That's epic. The alchemy of life is right there for us. We just got to step and grab it.
AUBREY MARCUS: Amen. Let's go. Love you guys. See you next week.