The Meat Mafia Podcast

Paul Check
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[00:00:00] Paul Check, welcome to the meat mafia podcast. It's quite an interesting experience to be at the meat mafia. What were you expecting coming into the meat mafia? Well, you know, I said, depending on the way here, I'm, I'm a little nervous because I don't know if they're pro meat or I'm going to be with a bunch of vegans and if it's a bunch of vegans, I'm going to be a really hard date.

Yeah. I could go either way with that. Yeah. Um, yeah, but just a pleasure to have you. I, um, I've been consuming your content for a while and I feel like I need to start the podcast off by just paying some respects cause you've done a lot of Such amazing work. We were just talking a few seconds ago about you, just the gift to the public is just the free information that you put out there and I came across your stuff as a baseball player back in high school and I was just trying to figure out how to take my game to the next level and was coming across different modalities that weren't just your standard.

Hey, go, go squat, go bench. Yes. Those were kind of, some of those principles were part of what I was learning, but you kind of broke the paradigm for me when it came to holistic health. [00:01:00] Um, so I just, I want to start off the show by giving you a thank you and, um, just appreciate all the work you've done. I'm sure you've impacted thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions, millions of Published 12 books and I'm now about to release a 15 volume set.

I've probably, uh, there's like 1, 200 videos on my YouTube channel. And I've, I think I've produced like 120 professional education videos. So almost 41 years of non stop action. Just putting good stuff out there. Best I can. Well, these guys were saying before the show that you have one of the most impressive libraries.

That anyone has ever seen probably a five thousand books, probably half a million dollars worth of books. Wow. And you've read most? A lot of them. Yeah. I would imagine I've read 2000 of them and the rest of them I've used as research. So I, I let my soul guide me to the books that [00:02:00] are either important to have because they got reference material in them that I'll need.

So when I'm doing writing articles or education programs. My soul just guide me to the book that I need and say, okay, read chapter seven or whatever. And so, um, they're all well, they're like tools in a toolbox for me. Um, probably for about the first 25 or 30 years of my career, I was averaging about 55 books a year cover to cover.

I guess just looking through my library, I've probably read over 2000 of them cover to cover. Wow. Is there one that stands out to you as one that you feel like you continually come back to as a source of It depends what topic. I have books on every single aspect of everything to do with being alive.

Every metaphysics, religion, comparative religion, quantum physics, um, philosophy, nutrition, soil [00:03:00] science, musculoskeletal rehabilitation, visceral rehabilitation. I mean, if, if it has anything to do with the human life, it's probably in their cosmology. I'm curious, just to start before, before we hit record, you said you went from hurting people to helping people.

Yeah. And I just, I find that very interesting. You have this athletic background and now you're doing all this incredible work that It's, it's giving people resources and healing people and teaching people how to heal people. Mm hmm. When, when did you make that shift? Uh, well, I started boxing when I was 12.

And what made me start boxing is, as I was sharing with you, my father was an extremely violent man. And, um, his abuse made my brother very violent. And [00:04:00] so by the time my brother was in the seventh grade, he was addicted to drugs. And, uh, we didn't really have any buddy to support us with how to deal with that level of stress.

And I was so worried my dad was going to kill somebody that I knew it at a deep level that I had to learn to defend myself. So, I asked my mother if I could please join a boxing club. And the closest boxing club was like a 35 mile drive. But through luck, really, I, uh, through a friend, one of my best friend's dad's built a boxing club.

NASCAR engines and, and, um, later became a big help to me when I was a stock car racer, actually. But somehow it's been so long. I can't remember how, but I met this guy named Mickey Hale, [00:05:00] who was, uh, in the United States air force stationed in Comox, which is, I came from a place called Courtney, which is there's three towns almost touching each other.

Comox, Courtney and Cumberland. And there's an air force base in Comox. And it's half Canadian, half American, and he was stationed there and he used to be a boxing trainer for the United States Air Force. And so somehow I got introduced to him and he was excited to know that there was somebody that wanted to learn to box because they didn't have a boxing program there.

And so I think my mom paid him like 20 bucks a visit and he actually drove out to our farm for quite some time and gave me private boxing lessons. And then. It got to the point where he said, you know, to grow, to grow further, you're going to need to join a club because you need variety and you need other athletes.

You know, he, he's a, I'm a 12 year old and [00:06:00] he's a full grown man, right? So then my mom said she would get me in the club. And so, uh, we started going, I think I went twice a week for about three years. Um, and I also joined Taekwondo. So I spent several years in Taekwondo while also going to the boxing club.

And, um, I got frustrated with Taekwondo because. Our instructor was a fourth degree black belt, but he wouldn't let anybody really make full contact. It was more like point fighting. But when I got there, the black belts were trying to beat the hell out of me. And I had, by that time, I already had three years in the boxing ring.

Right. And they didn't like the fact that even the black belts, I would just get in on them and I would just beat the hell out of them. And so the instructor was so upset that this little white belt, 17 year old kid, 16, 17 was beating the shit out of his [00:07:00] black belts that he kept chewing me out. And I kept saying, well, what are you doing?

Chewing me out? These guys are black belts and they're trying to kill me watch, you know? And so I got so frustrated. Me and a buddy of mine who was also what we would call a purist got upset because they kept giving belts out just for attendance, but not for really developing skill. So it's just like, if you were there for a year, you'd get a belt.

And I'm like, that's bullshit. And so I finally just said, I'm not going to do this anymore because I want to learn to fight, you know, and I, with, you know, boxing is full on, you know, you really have to keep your shit together. People will knock you out. And so what we did is a bunch of us got together and I had some money at that time.

I was working in logging camps and making good money and I rented a warehouse and we built our own boxing gym in there and built our own ring and put heavy bags in it. And about a dozen of us that were all what I would call [00:08:00] purists got together every weekend and we had our own tournaments and we just fought each other and the rule was you have to tap out or you get knocked out.

Wow. So we had our own MMA system going and the guys I grew up with were all hardcore athletes. Um. Two of my buddies were nationally ranked motocross racers. Six of them had black belts in different martial arts. One of them became Mr. Canada in professional bodybuilding. One of my buddies that I grew up with and trained with became the world champion in full contact kickboxing in 1986.

Wow. Um, and he was my sparring partner for three years. His name's Lloyd Anderson. He was the Canadian lightweight champion in boxing as well. We all came from this little valley. There were several of them were top ranked elite skiers. And it's all just a bunch of farmers and loggers and they're all just ass kickers.

So by the time I got to the army [00:09:00] and fought my way onto the army boxing team, um, I had enough skill to get on. You'll, the only way you can get on the army boxing team is you got to beat somebody on the team. And it's, you know, I think I told you we were the third ranked amateur team in the world. Wow.

There was guys on the team with 300, many guys with over 300 fights. And one of our guys, I think his record was 320 in four. Some, many of them were national champions. Um, my buddy Ron Wallstrom was Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine champion several times. He was Iowa State Golden Gloves champion six times. So these are bad asses.

And those are professional fights? No, these are amateur. Amateur fights. Yeah. Okay. So what happened was, is um, I was fighting for the championship of the 82nd Airborne Division and almost on the boxing team of the 30 fighters, 28 of them were paratroopers. So the paratroopers are, you know, that's an elite level soldier and that's, I was a [00:10:00] paratrooper.

So it takes the right mentality to fight like that. And the point I'm getting at here is that I got into the championship of the 82nd Airborne Division and it's an interesting story. It's illegal for officers to fight enlisted men in the army because historically what happened whenever an enlisted man would beat an officer, all the enlisted men would start being disrespectful to officers.

It would affect them psychologically. So they would say, you know, they would take on the persona that, you know, we're tougher than you. And so they made it illegal for officers to fight. enlisted men in any boxing tournament, but somehow an officer got permission from the general of the 82nd Airborne Division to enter the tournament, which was quite a shock for a lot of people because this, you know, technically it's against military law.

Well, it turns out the guy that they put in, they were probably betting tons of money on, and he was a very, very [00:11:00] skilled Puerto Rican boxer. Wow. And I was watching this guy, you know, it's a, it was a three day tournament. There was probably, I don't know, over a hundred fighters in the tournament. And it's a pyramid system.

So I was coming up one side of the pyramid, he was coming up the other. And I was watching this guy knock guys out sometimes in as little as 20 or 30 seconds. I mean, knocking them out ice cold. And so I'm like, holy shit, this guy's good. And he's. taller and leaner than me. He's kind of like a Thomas Hearns build.

If you remember, you're probably too young. Thomas Hearns was a badass fighter. Yeah. If you just look up Thomas Hearns on the internet, he's, he's like right up there with Sugar Ray Leonard type fighter. Um, He was probably six feet tall and long and skinny and hard to get in on, and you know if I remember right he had like 70 or 80 fights under his belt.

Um, but he was hitting me with shots, I mean he hit me so hard in one round that my entire [00:12:00] left arm went numb. Um, and I had nerve jolts like lightning running up and down my spine. And I, you know, I used to fight with some, some of the best fighters in the world, and I'd never been hit that hard in my life.

And I immediately knew I had to get rid of this guy before he knocked me out. This was the championship fight for the 82nd Airborne. It was 5, 000 soldiers in there going wild and beating the bleachers. And it was crazy. And I, my company commander told me don't lose this fight. I bet a lot of money on you.

And so there's just tons of pressure on me. And he hit me a second time so hard that the referee eight counted me. And you're not allowed to coach boxers in the ring. If you're outside the ring and my buddy, Ron Wallstrom, who's one of the best fighters I ever knew, he, I was stoned out of my mind. And I just happened to look over and I noticed my wife was crying her eyes out.

And I'm like, why is my, why is [00:13:00] Sue crying? And Ronnie went like this with his hands, which is our code language because we use sign language. So nobody knows what we're saying. He said, Paul, wake up. You're, you're about to go out. This means you have to start, you have to win now or you're dead. Wow. So as soon as I saw that, I went, Oh my God.

And I looked at my hands and went, wow, I'm in a boxing match. And I realized right there, I was in trouble. Fortunately, the bell rang the end of the second round. And my corner man was Nathaniel Finch, who was the heavyweight champion in the United States at that time in amateur boxing. And he said, Paul, When the bell rings, run across the ring and hit him as hard as you can, he won't expect it.

And, It's interesting because we had been practicing this technique as a surprise in our boxing training for about two weeks. Wow. So I was already familiar with the strategy. So as soon as the bell rang, I just jumped out of my, off my stool and sprinted across the ring and hit this guy with the hardest right hand I could throw.[00:14:00]

And I got him right in the eye and I hit him so hard his feet literally came up in the ground. He was like horizontal to the ground and about three feet and he bounced off the deck and he was out so cold it took multiple doctors about five or six minutes with smelling salts. And literally I thought I'd killed the guy.

It scared the living hell out of me, but it turned out I detached his retina. So he had to retire from boxing. I won the fight. It moved me so deeply emotionally that I remember sitting in the change room for about three hours just crying because I realized I felt like I had crossed the line of sportsmanship.

I felt I hadn't done anything illegal by any means, but inside of myself and because I was raised in such a violent environment, I remember my brother attacking me with pitchforks and fire pokers and weapons. And I would [00:15:00] have been very badly injured and I, I couldn't let my guard down because he would kill me.

He was very violent. I've actually still got two holes in my skull from where one he drove a fire poker through my skull. Another time he took the, my father's 44 magnum pistol and turned it over and drove the hammer through my skull. Wow. And so I've, you know, I've been in these fights where I'm almost, you know, Go on unconscious.

And so it activates something very primal in you when you're, when you're realize your life's on the edge and this guy hit me two times so hard. Not only was my ego on the line, but I felt like I didn't know what would happen. I'd never been hit that hard in my life by somebody. And I've been hit by tough guys.

I mean, I fought a lot of the best guys in the world, but this guy was something else and I knew I was in trouble because I was watching this guy come up for three days, just taking people out. Like, like there were cheese, you know, people over like nothing. And I'm like, Oh boy, here we go. And so, [00:16:00] um, inside of myself.

I had the realization that I had been fighting all these years because my anger and my fear toward my father was so strong that I had been doing this to protect myself and knew that one day I might have to protect my brother, my sister, my other sister, or my mother because he was so violent. And I realized at that moment, my dad is who hit that guy.

And I, I felt. sad. And inside of me, you know, my mother became a yogi when I was 12. So by this time I'd had many years of meditation. I spent my 15th summer with the monks going deep into meditation training and various other trainings. So I had a very deep spiritual side to me while I was also a competitive athlete.

And so [00:17:00] at the moment that that happened, I realized I didn't want to hurt people anymore. And I realized I was only hurting people even as a fighter because I was afraid to get hurt. And so something inside of me, which I now know is my soul said, Paul, it's time for you to stop hurting people and start helping them.

So this inner voice told me it was time to retire from fighting. And, you know, by that time I'd been 12 years of fighting, um, And I just made a commitment to myself that I wasn't going to fight anymore. And, um, even now many people have wanted me to put boxing gloves on over the year or, you know, do some sparring.

But as soon as I, Put gloves on if something inside me feels like I'm gonna die. It feels like it makes me sad It's like, you know, you don't need to do that. You know how to protect yourself You don't need to keep doing that And so I just made a commitment to myself to take all the energy that I used to put [00:18:00] into training for fighting And put it into study and to helping people.

And that, that was what changed my life. Was it clear to you that those were going to be the next steps, like actually starting to help people? No. Um, I didn't realize. What I was here on the planet to do until I became the trainer of the army boxing team, which happened shortly after that. I also represented the army in triathlon.

And, um, which is very hard to do, to be a full time fighter, because we train six to seven hours a day. And so I had won the army triathlon and I became the army's representative for the national championships in, uh, you know, USTS triathlon, which is, you know, the big triathlon organization. That's the major one.

And so, um, my company commander came to me and said, Paul, I'm going to bet a lot of money on you for the army [00:19:00] triathlon this year, and I, I need you to win. So he said, I will let you stop boxing and train full time for the, for the triathlon, if you would like to. And I realized that I wasn't going to turn pro in fighting because my fighting style was too aggressive and I was, I was already surrounded by guys on the team that, that had punched drunk issues, 20 years old.

Yeah. And I just knew I didn't want to end up like that. And even if I made a lot of money, I'd still be brain dead, you know, and so I, I got a good look at that from my years of fighting. I saw how real that was. And so I went back to the team and told the coaches I was leaving and I was going to train full time for trial.

I told them what my company commander said, Oh my God, they said, don't leave. We'll make you the trainer, you train the athletes, we need these athletes to be able to fight like you do in the third round and anybody that can train on the boxing team and train for triathlons, you know, and they knew I was different because they were all eating McDonald's and [00:20:00] garbage and, you know, staying up late, doing everything wrong.

But I was very disciplined. You know, I come from a farm where we ate our own, raised our own food, ate our own food. My mother was a yogi. She was very, very holistic. Um, we ate. top notch food. Um, I also, because of my background in other sports, had developed a very, in motocross, I was very successful as a motocross racer.

I had a very good sense of my body. And so I,

Well, I had to, I had to work really hard to get to fighting weight because my natural walking around weight at that time was about 166 pounds, but I fought as a welterweight and I only had about 8 percent body fat on me to begin with. Is welterweight 145? 147. So it took me three months to get to weight for a tournament, otherwise I would be so weak when I [00:21:00] got there.

Wow. So they would always see me eating raw vegetables and yogurt and, you know. Steamed chicken or, or, or, you know, baked chicken. And like, I never ate crap like they did. And so I had developed a system from my years of fighting. Cause I knew what I had to do to get down to welterweight. And so they would always look at me like I was a hippie, but when I was knocking people out regularly, they were like, okay, whatever.

And, and, and winning triathlons, you know, and you know, I placed at, uh, I placed in the top 10 overall, even amongst the pros six times. Um, well, I was in the army and so they knew whatever I was doing was for real, it's working, it was working. So the coaches said, we'll let you do whatever you want to do.

You know, we just want you to train the team. So I actually started the first sports massage therapy program there. myself by just studying and reading books. [00:22:00] And I'd learned how important massage was because I was so tired from boxing and training for triathlon. I just would beg my wife to massage me and she had no training whatsoever, but it enhanced my performance so much.

It blew my mind. And so I realized how powerful massage was. And so I started buying books and studying it and then practicing on the fighters. So I actually started the first massage therapy program ever in the United States army. Um, and, and the team doctor was an osteopathic physician. And he was so impressed with how the fighters performed and how much quicker they were getting over injuries because of my massage therapy.

He started spending a lot of time teaching me about how to take care of sports injuries. Because our gym was the headquarters for army sports, for powerlifting, for track and field. So, we had a lot of top ranked athletes, you know, Fort Bragg's one of the biggest military posts in the whole army. We had 89, 000 soldiers, there's 14, 000 in the 82nd Airborne Division.

So I got exposed to all sorts of elite athletes, James [00:23:00] Bonecrusher Smith, who was the first one to go to the distance with Mike Tyson, trained in our gym. And I became his personal therapist. Um, and Emil Griffith, who's one of the most famous fight trainers in the world, was his trainer. And that's who asked me to work on Bone Crusher.

And so what happened was, is I became the trainer and I took over nutrition. I took over designing all their conditioning programs. I managed the gym, the gym equipment. Like I had to run it like a professional gym. And, and so basically I, I did their training, I did their nutrition. And I got up early in the morning and did my running.

Then after the boxing training was over, I went to the swimming pool and did my swim training. And then after the boxing training was over, usually every day, about four, four 30, I went out and did my cycling in the evenings. And so that's how I did it. But I was the trainer for two years and the coaches were so blown away with, you know, how [00:24:00] much better the athletes performed.

And, um, yeah, in many ways, less injuries, faster recovery, better performance. I got them to where they could all fight hard for all three rounds. We were winning constantly to the point that it was causing problems because people were accusing us of being professional athletes and, and, you know, we'd have all sorts of petitions against us and everything, but, um,

I realized probably about six months to a year in as the trainer that I got more reward and more gratification from helping other people win and heal than I did even from winning my own athletic events. Wow. It was like I got to win 30 times. You know, there was 30 guys on the boxing team. We ran two teams.

At any given moment, we had one team that was in the civilian circuit [00:25:00] and one team on the military circuit. And so depending on what tournament was on where, um, we would put certain fighters on the civilian circuit and others on the military circuit, depending on which tournaments were the most important to win.

Um, and we were on TV a lot. We were on Wide World of Sports quite a lot. I mean, we were a very famous boxing team. That's how I knew about the Army Boxing Team as a kid growing up in Canada, because I kept seeing them on television. Right. I didn't know I'd one day be on the team. And so I, when I left the Army, I knew that I wanted to go to sports massage therapy school, and I wanted to start a business.

Doing what I did in the army, which is mixing weightlifting, and stretching, and nutrition, and general conditioning, and sports massage therapy to produce a combination system that would be the best to help athletes win, [00:26:00] and to help people heal from injuries. Because after two years of working with a doctor, I'd learned enough that I understood injuries and the basics, and I read constantly to study all this stuff.

And so, um, I left the army, went straight to the best sports massage, I studied, I hired a librarian to research for me to find the best sports massage therapy schools in the United States. It turned out one of them was right in Encinitas, California, which is exactly where I wanted to go because that's Triathlon Central.

It's not a bad place to be. Yeah. So that's where I actually moved when I got out of the army and I've been, you know, in the San Diego area since then. I got there and I left the army in October 86 and I've been based in San Diego ever since and I've worked with Many, many, many, many of the greatest athletes in the world and sports teams.

What was it about your, either your natural gifts or your experience as a childhood, things that had happened to you that made you the type of person that could [00:27:00] box and also run triathlons? Cause I've, you're, you're in a unique category of your own with that. Well, quite simply put, my father was a fucking slave driver.

And, you know, if you want to get fit, swing an axe for eight hours straight. My father was not the kind of guy that took excuses. I mean, I would have blisters on my hands, covering the whole palms of my hands, and he wouldn't care. My dad's rule was, if you're not vomiting or bleeding to death, shut the fuck up and get busy.

And, I mean, you know, we would lift 100 pound, 100, 120 pound hay bales for hours on end. You know, we'd lift. We'd bring in 3000 bales of hay, you know, and this would go on. I used to laugh because I'd bring my buddies out who thought they were bad ass weightlifters and bodybuilders and martial artists. And as if, you know, my dad said, yo, if you want to get some of your tough friends to come over, we'll see what they're made of.

And [00:28:00] during hay season, I mean, these guys, they wouldn't even last 20 minutes and they were just on the ground crying for mama, but like my sister, Barbara, who's six months older than me. She could hammer these guys. Right. Yeah, no problem. And so, you know, we, we were 142 acre sheep farm cows. We milked our own cows.

We had 120 sheep. We had a woolen factory. We grew our own produce. We sold produce. We sold firewood. We had about, 70 acres of, uh, virgin timber. So we cut our own wood for making things and building things. And my dad had his own sawmill, you know, my father used to be a special effects man for universal studios, and he had a lot of different skills.

And aside from being violent, he was a very, very skilled human being. Interesting guy to be around because I learned a lot of stuff and um, [00:29:00] you know, between digging fence hole, post holes and cleaning shit out of barns and managing hay and gardening and you know, like this is like full on, you know, every day.

And my father's rule was you don't eat. Or drink anything until those animals are taken care of. And if I ever catch you, it'll only happen one time. And that's not a line you want to cross. No, so what happened was as I developed a real passion, I just think I had a passion for sports early. I started wrestling when I was in the first grade, and then I wasn't really very a person that liked school at all.

But I, I felt like I could really be myself athletically. It's where I got to really express myself. So I gravitated towards sports because it was kind of like the medicine that I could take to For the pain of having to sit in a desk and [00:30:00] learn stuff that didn't interest me. Right. And so, You know, I, I found that my father had conditioned us to such a high level through the work on the farm.

Most of my friends I thought were pussies, you know, except for the guys that I told you about. Every now and then you run across a stud, you know? Yeah. But I mean, when I was like, I think I was like 10th grade, I was probably five foot six, 140 pounds. And I was repping out with 225 in the bench. Um, you know, I'd be doing like 30 chin ups straight.

And before I joined the army, I ran a mile. Um, in four 38, um, I set the 82nd airborne division record for the most pushups in two minutes at 144. I set two military records for the obstacle and confidence course, which is, you know what that is where you run trails and you have to deal with things like swinging logs and [00:31:00] inverted walls and cargo nets and ropes.

And so I, I hold two military, I held two military records. I've never gone to check to see if they stand, but I shattered one by like 30 seconds. Wow. That's awesome. So I became quite famous in the army because I was winning competitions from 10 Ks and five Ks to military competitions of all different sorts to being a boxer.

Uh, so, um, that's how I got fit. I got fit because I was. Raised by somebody that made drill sergeants look like pussies. In fact, one time in the 82nd when I was in, actually when I was in basic training, one of the drill sergeants was being real rude and getting in my face and, pushing on me and you know, doing all this stuff they do.

And he [00:32:00] realized that I was not afraid of him. And he goes, check. He says, uh, you you're staring me down like you're a badass. And, uh, so he started coming after me, you know, like, we're like trying to, trying to get me mad. That's what they try to do. They try to piss you off. So if you lose your composure, then they can punish you.

And then, and you know, in jump school, they want to get you to lose your composure because then they can get rid of you because they're trying to get rid of anybody. That's a problem that won't follow orders. Yeah. And one day he did this again in the barracks, but it just so happened that I had to come back to get something out of the barracks and all the other guys were outside and he started getting up in my face again and I looked him right in the eye and I said, Sergeant Baumgardner, you would not last one day on the farm with my father.

I was raised with a man that would eat you for lunch. You've got nothing that scares me. I was raised by a grizzly bear. So get me, hit me with your best shot. I said, anytime you want to close the doors in here and [00:33:00] see. What happens when me and you go at it? I'm ready for you. Was he afraid? No. Uh, he just thought it was crazy.

Yeah. But what happened, what was kind of funny as a side story, he challenged everybody in our platoon, whoever can get a first time go on end of cycle testing, So at the end of basic training, you have to do 30 tests. And if you fail, you get one more chance. And then you have to get recycled, which would be terrible to have to go through basic training twice.

And it's a competition and it's all scored. So every, every platoon is competing against every other platoon. So they, you know, your, your shooting scores, your fitness scores, and then your test scores. So he said, whoever can max out these scores and get a first time go, On all your tests, I will feed in bed, and you can choose anything you want from the officer's mess.

And I knew right there, I had him. And I said to him, I'm going to win. And [00:34:00] he looked at me and laughed. He said, yeah, right. You think you're going to win, Mr. Farm Boy? I said, you're going to serve me in bed. And he served you in bed. And I won. I, I shot as an expert. I maxed out the physical fitness test and I got a first time go on all 30 tests.

Oh my gosh. And so the whole platoon cracked up laughing because him and all these other drill sergeants were riding me because, you know, I would to irritate them when everybody else was exhausted and on the ground crying. I'd be do single arm pushups with my rucksack on and I would just work my right arm till it was cooked.

You know, I came from a hardcore athletic development, you know, so like I lost, I got out of shape and gained weight in basic training. I'm like, I'm here with, I thought this was all the tough guys. These guys are pussies, man. You're on vacation. I was on vacation. And so when they saw me doing this stuff, Then they would just try to push me harder and harder and try to break me, but I, they couldn't break me.

So it was just [00:35:00] funny as a side note, I got served. I'm probably one of the few people that ever went through basic training in the military that got served breakfast in bed from the officer's mess. That's unbelievable. One of the best stories I've ever heard told on the podcast right there. Well, it's very true.

And I've probably got 30 letters from generals from, all over the military from all my competitions and army accommodation medals. You know, I broke a lot of records in the military and I got a lot of awards and generals writing me letters because it was obvious that when I became the trainer of the army boxing team, something radical happened.

Yeah. And just to show you something very interesting. Um, in 1988, in the 1988 Olympics to get onto the Olympic team, you got to fight your way on of the U S Olympic boxing team. 11 of the fighters came from my boxing team. Wow. They were all guys that I trained. That's incredible. It was, I don't think anyone's ever done that in history.

How does that [00:36:00] make you feel as the person who trained them? It gave me the confidence that listening to my intuition. And trusting my body to guide me. Um, let me know that my body was a laboratory that I could trust. And that what I learned through my own experience of healing my own injuries and training myself for athletic competitions, because I always seem weird to everybody, but I won a lot.

Um, I realized that Um, there was no better compass than your inner compass. And if you really listen to your body, it'll always guide you. And that's how I became successful, not only as an athlete, but as a therapist.

M1 - self-actualization
---

Do you have any advice for people listening on just, just the concept of actualization and finding your gifts?

Absolutely. Cause you. Went from it seems like you were just a an athlete by [00:37:00] process of your dad being hard on you and you just having physical gifts and growing in those gifts and Being competitive and then you have this realization actually you knock somebody out Maybe the healing side is where you're supposed to go.

Yeah, and you slowly start to take these steps But how did you really start to actualize those gifts into what your career has become? Well, I think a lot of it really came from working with the monks, um, when you were 15. Well, I started when I was 12. My mother joined the Self Realization Fellowship, which is Paramahansa Yogananda's teachings when I was 12.

And it was interesting because my mother had been meditating for many, many years. And so my mom would talk to me about. What I was experiencing in my meditation. And I used to tell her about the visions I would have and things like that. And she would be shocked because she goes like, Paul, I've been meditating for a long time and I'm, I'm not even at that level.

So it's almost as though as a [00:38:00] child, I. You know, now I know it's, it's past life stuff that I'm carrying in. I had the ability to focus my mind and because I had to work through so much pain with my father, I learned how to kind of be in my body, but be above it as well. And so I, I learned how to be, um, objective about where that line was between disabling myself.

But pushing myself hard enough to grow. And it's hard for a lot of athletes to figure that out. Right. Um, but because my father was not a guy that ever told me that I did a good job, no matter how hard I tried, I, I really craved acknowledgement. And [00:39:00] so, I think a lot of what drove me was, Anytime I could be in an environment where I could win a trophy or get some kind of acknowledgement because I lacked that from my father so much.

Um, I just went the extra mile. With everything that I did, I've always done that. And so

what I realized early on is that if I really have a goal that I really want to achieve that I have to make that the North Star on my compass and I have to get, I have to push away anything that could contradict that. And so. I would, a lot of my friends, for example, had problems with drinking and smoking a lot of pot and, um, staying up late at night watching television, just kind of stuff that young men get into, you know.

Yeah. Um, [00:40:00] being violent and getting in bar fights and just doing what I called stupid shit, you know. But I didn't want anything to, to get in the way of me winning, you know. And so, I learned very early that if you really want to achieve something, then you really have to be disciplined about making sure you're focusing on it and putting your mind to it and not making excuses.

and do what you've got to do with your food, with your sleep, with your stretching, with whatever you've got to do to have the edge, you better do it, or you're always going to be second and nobody remembers who's second. And I don't like being second. Um, so I carried that discipline Um, out of the military into my work and, you know, I studied science of mind, you know, Tony Robbins used to be my client for a number of years.

I was his therapist and [00:41:00] I took tons of his workshops and Tony's only two weeks older than me. We were really good friends. Um,

I think the key thing is, is that you really have to decide what's important to you. Um, I love the quote by Jerry Wesch, if you have a big enough dream, you don't need a crisis. And when I look around since I was young, I saw people that were constantly unhealthy, Um, distracted, would set goals and not achieve them.

They, they, they had become oriented such that the crisis was the normal state of life for them. And so for them to achieve something was a big step because they didn't have the discipline. But for me, I lived in a very [00:42:00] chaotic, crisis like environment where there was a lot of violence and a lot of stress.

And so the only way I could achieve safety in the environment was to work so hard that my father would leave me alone. And there was many times that I was exhausted, but I knew that if I didn't get the job done that, A, I would never get to go to, because my dad's rule was you don't go to sports practices until this work's done.

And he gave us a lot of work. So I had to focus like a laser beam. But at the end of the day, I realized most people are so comfortable living a mundane life that when it comes time to really focus, they don't have the discipline or the strength to do it. But paradoxically, I came from an environment where if I didn't have the discipline and strength to focus, I would either get beat up or I would lose.

So, athletically, I would lose and on, at home, I would get beat up and I didn't like either. So, I, I just, later I studied science of mind and learned that I had [00:43:00] naturally developed exactly the abilities that you would learn if you were studying science of mind and you wanted to manifest, for example. So, manifestation occurs in three stages, thought first.

First, you have to be clear in your mind of what you want. So you have to have clarity. Two, you have to believe in yourself. Three, you got to take action. This is why the Quakers say, pray and move your feet. Most people just pray, dear God, let me win the lottery. Yeah. Dear God, let me have a beautiful partner that'll make love to me all day long, but I'll continue to be the same asshole I've always been, you know, so you have to think You have to put it to word, so I always wrote my goals down, so that I You could read them regularly, daily, and then you have to go do the things you got to [00:44:00] do.

And you got to be clear about what is in the way of you being that person. I would visualize myself winning. I visualized myself the only way I could get onto the army boxing team, by the way, because I was in the 82nd airborne division and the 82nd combat aviation battalion and aviators hardly ever exercise.

And I hated that life. Even though I spent a year in electronic school, it was like I put a lot of work into becoming an aviator because I didn't want to be on the front lines. I wanted to be away from the battlefield because the life expectancy of a foot soldier at that time was, um, 16 seconds in a battlefield.

So I got the highest technical training I qualify for and they keep Cobra helicopters miles from the front line because they're 11 million a piece. So I knew if I attach myself to expensive equipment, I was in the best place to be. So I created my own safety plan and then I joined the 82nd Airborne Division because I knew if [00:45:00] I didn't like electronics.

I could fight my way onto the army boxing team. So I came in with the plan, but to get to Fort Bragg, I had to be a paratrooper, which I didn't mind anyhow, because I wanted to see if I could be one of those badasses. And, uh, so anyhow, to get onto the army boxing team, um, they wouldn't give me time off.

They wouldn't let me have time to train. I'm like, I'm going to fight some of the best boxers in the world. But I, they won't let me have any time off to train. So I had to get up at four 30, five o'clock every morning. I had to be in formation by six. So I'm like up early as hell to train to run. And then I'm like doing pushups any chance I can hanging off drainage pipes in the ceiling, doing chin ups.

Um, I mean, it's doing sit ups every chance I could while I'm working. Right. And so they wouldn't let me book an appointment because they knew if I got on the [00:46:00] boxing team, then they were going to lose me in the unit. And they don't want to spend, you know, it cost them 350, 000 to train me. They don't want to spend 350 grand to have a guy go join a boxing team.

So the, every year in the 82nd Airborne Division, they have, um, what's called the general inspection. And once a year you have to face the general and it's a post wide competition to identify who the best soldier is. And so they choose the six best soldiers out of 14, 000 men. They choose six top soldiers.

And, It's very, very hard competition to win. I, I said, I am going to win this competition. I don't give a shit what it takes. And actually I told some of the guys I worked with and they laughed at me. They said, you're an idiot. You, the guys that have been in the military for 20 years, trying to win that competition, you're, you're a private, you don't even, you're still wet behind the ears.

I said, I will win the competition. And [00:47:00] so I put my mind to it, man. I memorized the entire soldier's manual, you know, long story, but they check everything, man. They go through your toolbox, your bed, your, your boots, your, um, chem, your, your, um, your, your math gas mask. And, and your, uh, I forgot the name of it now.

It's been so long, but, uh, I mean, it's a full Then you stand in ranks. They look at your body. They look at your They look at your hair, they look at your nails, they look at your clothing, they look at your boats, and then they pop quiz you on the soldier's manual, which is like 400 pages of technical information about every other military and your own equipment.

Like, they say, okay, you know, what's the muzzle velocity of an AK 47? You know, or that ask you questions about, you know, what kind of explosives are in a hand grenade, shit like that. So it was very intense. I mean, I really had to study hard. And so, I won. [00:48:00] I was one of the six, and I got a three day pass paid to do whatever I want.

So I phoned up the boxing gym and I said, I want to try out. So they scheduled a fight and I went down and I took out one of their welter weights and I became a fighter on the boxing team. So the point I'm making is you got to put your mind to shit and you got to make it, you got to make it your life.

You can't, you know, an example I give my patients is if you, if you want to train for a marathon, if you hold the mindset that you're not a marathoner, so you're running a marathon. You're making a big mistake. Totally. You gotta be the marathoner while you're training for the marathoner, so you have to eat, sleep, breathe, and shit marathon for the X number of months that you're gonna train.

Because if you wait till you're at the marathoner to cons marathon to consider yourself a marathoner, you're never gonna win anything . Yeah. Good luck. In fact, you might give up at halfway . Yeah, [00:49:00] totally. Do you find it hard to teach people about discipline, just given your background? Uh, when I was younger, yes, there became a point in my career where I realized it did not matter how good of a program I wrote for people.

Most of them wouldn't do it. You had, they would just make excuses, right? You know, like, why are you still eating sugar? You got a fungal infection and a parasite infection and you're feeding the damn thing, and I've told you eight times. Um, and so that was one of the biggest challenges for me. People paid me a lot of money and I wrote very good programs, and I'm a very skilled therapist.

But, but, you know, you, the therapist can't do the work for the client. There's stretches and exercises and joint mobilizations and diet changes and lifestyle changes if people want to get better, they got to do it. And so I realized I've got to study psychology and behavioral change. And so I spent years studying psychology and behavioral change so I could really [00:50:00] understand the science of how you help people change their belief system so they will do things.

And so what I realized if you don't find a dream bigger than their crisis, they're never going to change. And I found that if you find a dream or a goal that gives them an authentic sense of levity. That's the only way you can overcome the inertia of a person's habitual way of living. And so I created a saying for my students, always tell your client what they want to hear, which is how they're going to achieve what they want to achieve, but give them exactly what they need.

If they want to hit the golf ball further, no matter what you give them from specific corrective exercises to diet changes, to ask them to get to bed on time. You better explain clearly exactly how that relates to hitting that ball further. Because if they can't connect the [00:51:00] dots to what you're asking them to do, and how exactly that's going to make them perform better based on what their dream is, they're not going to follow the program.

So once I started making an effort to explain everything that I was giving them on the program, This lower abdominal exercise will do this to get rid of your back pain so you can play with your kids or swing that golf club. This diet change will decrease inflammation in your body, which will calm your nervous system down and decrease your pain.

And that will allow me to integrate your motor system more effectively so that your muscles work better as an integrated system. And you will probably get rid of your back pain a lot faster if you do this. So once I learned how to connect the dream to the tasks that get you there so they can clearly see the path, I started getting a lot better results.

M1 end
---

Do you have any advice for, or techniques for developing that vision [00:52:00] and Being more dream oriented because I've been in the place several times where yeah I have a friend who's stuck and I'm trying to give them vision and encouragement and There's just no words that seem to land So I do feel like there's something to just getting out of your own head And developing some practices that can help create some of that vision.

Well, it's a complex question you're asking, um, because there's a lot of factors involved. For example, people that have a trauma history, um, or who have childhood experiences where they were diminished by their parents a lot. often don't have faith in the fact that dreams can come true. Okay. So when I work with people, I do a very extensive analysis, probably one of the most comprehensive analysis in the world.

It takes people about eight hours just to do the paperwork to become my patient. And it takes me about eight [00:53:00] hours to assess them when they come to see me so I can figure out what's really going on with their body and their mind and their emotions. So I look at their trauma history, their injury history, their emotional profile, their mental profile.

Um, a lot of things too much to explain, but

what I found is if a person isn't at least a 7 out of 10 in love with whatever it is. that we would call their dream or their goal that's not likely to get done. So I say first, you got to qualify the dream. People will come up with all sorts of neat things. I want to be a millionaire in a year. I want to win the bodybuilding contest, but if their heart's not in it, at least at a seven or a 10 level, then they're not going to do the work and have the commitment.

So first you've got to actually work with them. And usually what I tell people, look, ask [00:54:00] your heart. What would you love to do enough to change for and grow for? Because if you're not in love with the idea enough that you're willing to change and grow for it, you're just going to go through the motions and do a half assed job and you're not going to get any results.

And then you're going to give up on yourself because you think, Oh, I tried, I tried, I tried. But you never really tried. Right? So if a person's wounded in the heart and they have not developed trust and love, then the first thing I have to do with people is work on helping them heal. And I have to find a goal that is more short term oriented that I might even have to work with an addiction or work with something that's counterintuitive.

So I might say to somebody, okay, Um, I'll buy you a case of beer if you achieve this marker, knowing that the last [00:55:00] thing I should be doing is buying them a case of beer. But if I can actually get them to participate so they can start to see results from the program, once they get the case of beer, I explained to them what I did and why I did it.

But I say, you know, now we've got to go from a negative motivator beer to a positive motivator. The other thing is there's two motivational strategies and I studied this, um, If you look at what motivates people, there's people that are motivated by a positive outcome. If you win the competition, you get something positive.

And strangely enough, more people are motivated by a negative motivator than there are positive motivators. Hmm. So, for example, in the military, they use negative motivators all the time. Hmm. If you don't accomplish X, Y, or Z, we're gonna, you know, make a goddamn fool outta you. Hmm. And we'll punish the shit out of you.

[00:56:00] Or, you know, like when I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, they had a thing called the Cherry Helmet. So if you screw up enough that you really piss your commander off, you can get the Cherry Helmet. And it's a, it's a, it's a soldier's helmet, battle helmet, painted bright red. And you have to go do things like painting lines on roads and picking up garbage in ditches.

for a month and everywhere you go, anyone that sees someone wearing the cherry helmet, they cuss at you, they spit at you, they throw shit out of their cars at you, they treat you like a complete and utter piece of trash. And that usually breaks people of being lazy and not paying attention. And so there's a negative motivator.

Yeah. But, you know, that's a terrible thing to do because you can psychologically completely break somebody doing that. But they don't care because they want to get rid of you if you can't handle the stress. Hmm. That's the one thing about being an elite soldier. They're always looking to see where your breaking point is.[00:57:00]

If they don't think that you're of the right stuff to handle the pressure of a live battlefield, they're happy to get rid of you. Right. So with athletes, if you do that, you ruin good athletes. So my point is, you got to find out what is If it's this person inspired by a positive or a negative motivator, um, you know, for example, someone who's an addict, if you say, okay, if, if you don't accomplish this, then you got to agree to stop smoking for a month.

You cannot touch a cigarette. So that, that would scare an addict, right? So there's a negative motivational strategy. So first identify what they love enough that they're at least seven out of 10 to get in it and their hearts in it to find out if they have a positive or a negative motivational strategy.

In the meantime, you have to know enough about their history to find out what might be a blocking factor to them being successful. Because if a child got punished a lot because they were good [00:58:00] and maybe they were labeled as being a show off or whatever, now they're afraid of success. If they were punished because they didn't try hard enough, now they don't have.

faith that they're going to be able to do something without getting reprimanded and, and having a negative experience. So I have to look at how to, I have to look at how the person perceives the experience so I can then create an environment that is conducive to them being successful and knowing how to manage them so that they feel supported instead of Um, threatened or antagonized.

Hmm. It blows my mind how much perception plays a factor in almost all outcomes of, you know, all of our experiences are just based on what we're, what we're experiencing. Like, you know, if I, if I walk along the side of the road and I'm not afraid to get hit by a car versus somebody who is constantly in fear of, you know, you know, [00:59:00] breaking the rules or being too close to a car, like they're going to feel something totally different than me, but it's all just based on perception.

And that's just layered into how we are in our pursuits as well. Um, there's a very good reason. There's a saying in psychology that says perception equals reality. Um, by the way, everything you're talking about is exactly what I teach in my Spirit Gym training program, which is my newest gift to the world, uh, which you can see at myspiritgym.

com, but it's a mentorship program. Um, and it's about 130 hours of training and I meet with everybody each week, all the members meet with me each week. I take them through a lesson on something that's very important to understand aside from the lessons that I've already filmed for them. So I did a library called the Spirit Gym University where they can study the lessons that I organized.

based on the principles of holistic spiritual [01:00:00] development. But then each, I call them Sangha meetings. So each week we have a Sangha and I give a usually about an hour presentation on something just like the kind of stuff you're talking about right now and in many other topics. And so then I open the airways for questions.

It's a video conference. Um, and you can ask me any question related to the lesson. And then I take any, any question you want about personal challenges in your life, your health problems. or about challenges that you're having or questions you're having from the lessons that are what you buy in the membership.

Um, and that's because this probably kind of things you're talking about are as common as white bread out there, which is why our nation is in big trouble. Um, and most nations. I realized that the best thing I could do was to take all the skill I have, that I give to the best athletes and movie stars and music producers and people that [01:01:00] can afford me, you know, cause I'm not a cheap guy to see.

Um, and, and put it into a format that's more affordable to people that really are committed to achieving their potential in life and growing spiritually, um, holistically without a bunch of religious baggage attached to it. Yeah. How would you characterize your spiritual beliefs? Well, the way I characterize my spiritual beliefs, one, I've studied world religion extensively.

I've studied the philosophy of religion extensively. I've studied metaphysics extensively. I've studied quantum physics extensively. I've studied philosophy

and my mother was a Christian scientist, which I hated. And then I became part of the Self Realization Fellowship, which saved my life. And so learning to meditate and being with monks,[01:02:00]

What I learned through all my studies and my spiritual practices is that

God

is that for which there is no other. God is the only being that can create and maintain itself. God is the source of all that is.

God cannot know itself by only expressing itself as the good, because good has no meaning without its complementary opposite, which can be bad or evil. Or you can see the light in the dark. And most people have a very convoluted sense of God because they believe in God, but they also believe in the devil and they play a little game that the devil.[01:03:00]

is somehow separate from God and at war with God. But that sets up a dichotomy because then you have to say who created the devil. Because if God is God, that means there is nothing beyond God.

If you study the science of consciousness, you learn that consciousness, as Edward Edinger, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst says, consciousness is a psychic substance, which means it's real. Produced not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites. Therefore, God cannot know itself unless it invests itself in both sides of reality.

So because I'm also a deep student of myth and mythology, because myth is really the science of story and the philosophy of story, I created a statement to help my students understand the nature of story. First of all, [01:04:00] there's something profound about myth. One of the definitions of myth is myth is a story that tells itself.

And life is the story that it is telling. So if you understand that myth is the story of life, and it's a story that's telling itself, the first question you should ask is, well, who's telling the story? Well, the only answer can be God. So if you say, well, what's involved in life? Everything from the goodest of the good to the darkest and the most evil of the evil, which is the two polarities that hold consciousness up, because you can't know male without female, light without dark, good without bad, right without wrong, in without out, up without down, north without south, etc.

You cannot make meaning out of something without consciousness, and you cannot have meaning without a complementary opposite. It would not mean anything to be a man if there was no such thing as a woman, would it? So you can't know what God is until you have some [01:05:00] conception of what is antagonistic to God.

The problem is that people keep trying to define God with nouns, but you cannot define something that is infinite with a noun. You cannot define something that is that for which there is no other with a noun because there is no way to create a complementary opposite to God. You understand the point?

Yeah, I see where you're going. You cannot say that God is good or God is evil because there is nothing to compare God to. So I created a statement for my students. God is the mythmaker that plays both sides, but chooses neither. Choice is always left to you. So we are given free will by source or by God so that we can choose to love or not love, to love God or [01:06:00] not love God, to love self or not love self, to love other or not love, to love life or to not love.

Because without free will, there is no legitimate evolution, there is no growth. Without free will, you would be nothing but a computer program, or a train struck on railroad tracks that can never turn, unless someone bends the tracks for you. So, for me, I've, through my life experience, realized that love is the verb of God.

And that love is the highest expression of God and love is the actual experience of God. And we have the choice to not love because without it, we would not have free will, which means we would not be able to be co creative agents with God. And since we are all ultimately God embodied. Because if God is that for which there is no other and is the source of all, there can't be anything here [01:07:00] but God.

There's, it's impossible for there to be anything outside of God or you don't have God. And if there was something outside of God, you'd have to say, how did that get created? So you'd end up with an infinite regress. So ultimately God is a complete mystery that cannot be known. And you cannot know God until you become God.

But to become God, you would have to become one with all that is. Which would automatically exclude your ego, because to be one with all that is, there would be no self identity. How could you know Harry, if you were every mountain, every river, every stream, every star, every moon, every planet, and every dimension of space?

There would be no way you would know Harry because you would be everybody and everything. So the only way you could possibly know God would be to become God, but then there would be nobody there to [01:08:00] report it. There would be no witness. So you can only describe the experience. I've had many union experiences with God.

But you can only describe what you experience on the way in to the infinite and on the way out of it. But you can't describe anything that's there when you're there, because there's no thing to talk about. What do you mean by that? Well, for example, look at Big Bang Theory. Big Bang Theory says that a big bang happened out of nothing.

Well, you can't make something out of nothing. Right. The problem is, That's the materialist conception of the beginning of the universe, which has no scientific foundation because you can't measure nothing. So they don't know how the big bang got started. And almost I've studied 37 theories of everything and none of them can give an objective validation for how their theory began.

So paradoxically religion and science are on the same footing when you get right down to the base of [01:09:00] them. Okay. The problem is, is that To think of God or Source, even from a materialistic perspective, as nothing is a complete misunderstanding of what God is. God is not nothing. God is no thing. This is why in Spirit Gym I symbolize God, the symbol for zero, because zero is simultaneously nothing, yet everything.

So, another way to look at this is, God is a sphere whose circumference is nowhere, And a center whose presence is everywhere. So, simultaneously, what God is cannot be found anywhere, because you can't say, here it is. Its circumference is nowhere. But God is a center whose presence is everywhere. And if you can say, I, I am Harry, that makes you a center.

And since there is no edge [01:10:00] or aspect to existence or the universe, or what I call spirit, Jim, You are automatically the center of the universe. And that's why karma is real. Because As the center of the universe, and one thing we know about the universe is that the spiral is the primordial pattern, the base of all creation, and if you look into the night sky, you don't see anything moving in squares or triangles, or straight lines, everything is moving in a vortex pattern.

It's moving around an invisible center. Physics, and quantum physics, and astrophysics shows that every galaxy has a black hole in the center of it. And current science from people like Nassim Harriman shows that every star has a black hole and even Nassim Harriman says every atom has a black hole in the center of it.

So, there's an invisible center and if you study physics, if you throw a boomerang or a ball in the air or you watch somebody do a backflip, there's always an invisible center that anything's rotating [01:11:00] around. I call the pivot of the Tao. That's a Taoist term. It means everything that's moving in creation is moving in a circular manner.

But there's always an invisible center, and that center is the invisible center without which nothing could exist. Okay, so it's the zero point around which everything moves. So,

what that means is that if we're each the center of the universe, or the center of creation because God is unbounded, but is a center that's everywhere. If you're sentient and you can say, I am, it means you're a center, which means that you must be God consciousness because only God can create a soul because a soul is the witness and it's God witnessing itself.

So the only thing that can be [01:12:00] outside of creation itself is God. And since God is a source of creation, God has to be what is inside of creation. So paradoxically, what's listening to me right now, we call the subject in psychology. And when you're listening to me, I'm the object of your attention. When I say to my wife, I love you, I am the lover and she is the beloved.

So she is the object of my worship as my beloved. But I, as the lover, am the subject. So in order for consciousness to exist, there has to be something to witness what's happening. You understand that? Yep. So God is paradoxically the subject, but because God is the subject, every sentient being that has self awareness can only have self awareness as subject because God's invested it within its own subject.

So you're only conscious that you are. Because God's conscious that it [01:13:00] is. This is why Arthur M. Young says, If we have being, we must also have non being. You can't have being without non being. For something to exist, there has to be the possibility that it doesn't exist. So if the universe exists, then there has to be something from which it came from that isn't the universe.

So, Arthur M. Jung, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, who devoted his life to the study of consciousness, after he made lots of money, started an institute for studying consciousness and wrote some excellent books, It says non being is significant because it is aware of being, and because everything in existence is part of being, because to be is to exist, the only way it can be aware of itself is because that which is non being, or subject, or witness, is the witness within you that says, I am.

You're making me think of a piece of scripture in Genesis that's, [01:14:00] we're created in the image of God. Would that kind of align with how you're describing? Because, I mean, what you're describing is very much kind of the metaphysical God, but in that context, is that similar? Yes, it creates the wrong impression, but it's moving in the right direction.

First, we have to be very careful with scripture, and I'll tell you why. I'll quote the Hindu philosopher sage Shankara. Shankara said, no man can understand scripture until he's enlightened. And when he's enlightened, he does not need scripture. So the question I have for you is how many people teaching scripture in Sunday schools, churches, synagogues, and temples around the world are enlightened?

Very very few. How would you categorize that, the being enlightened? Being aware of the truth of yourself, being aware that love is the verb of God, being aware that everything in you and around you is God, and that you [01:15:00] should behave that way. Absolutely. And realizing there's a reason Jesus said, Love thy enemy as thyself.

If someone hits you, turn the other cheek. The kingdom of heaven is before you, but men do not see it. Okay, so the two great commandments are love God and love, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. Well, that if you go to the Christian version of that, though, it says, Love no other God before me. I am a jealous God.

I'm a vengeful God. And that's not God. Because if God is God, there's nothing to be jealous of, nothing to be vengeful of, because you are everything and you have everything. So this is one of the problems with scriptures that have been modified to control people's minds and make them controllable. And the first thing you do is make people afraid of God and make them afraid of death.

And if you understand what God is, or energy is from a physics perspective, You know, you can't die. Anyhow, your body can die, which means it just returns the elements. But the second law of [01:16:00] thermodynamics, I believe it says energy produced cannot be destroyed, only transformed. If you look at the work of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, who spent 27 years trying to define what the psyche is, they concluded that it's pure energy at one pole and matter at the other pole.

And what we call the seven chakras. from the Hindu philosophy, and there's many chakra systems from Taoism to Hinduism to Egyptian philosophy. Some Hinduism, or Taoism has three chakras, Hinduism has seven. The Egyptians go up to 21, which are really energy vortexes that are the interpenetration of higher dimensions of reality into a physical reality, so that you actually can have a mind and emotions.

and perceive things beyond your physical reality, without which you couldn't be conscious of yourself. So, um, what I was trying to get at, I sort of lost where I was going there, but what I was trying to say in reaction to what you said, we are made in, man is made [01:17:00] in God's image.

Well, if I took a picture of you and put it on the wall, and said, you are made in God's image, Are you the picture on the wall, or are you the person looking at it? Yeah, I, my understanding of it is, if we're made in God's image, that, I think that part of scripture was, is before Ab and Eve, from like, this is from like the Judeo Christian perspective, or even some of the other religions that believe in the Old Testament, where we're created in God's image, and then that, we've moved away from that image.

Yeah. So, it's all Not necessarily pointing back to getting back to God's image, but realizing we aren't necessarily in that image fully. It's a complicated, what I'm trying to point out, everything you're saying is fine and I don't disagree with it, but you have to look carefully at what's being said because when you [01:18:00] use the word image, you're using something that is a reference, representation of something, an image of something, a piece of art is not what you paint a tree.

It's not the tree. Right. I paint your portrait. It's not you, it's an image of you. Definitely. Okay. When the Bible says we are made in God's image, what it really should say is that all the qualities of God exist within you. So you are so much like God that if you knew the truth of yourself, you would behave a lot differently.

You understand the difference of what I'm saying? So um, the word image is also related to the word imagine. So when you imagine something, you make an image live. And imagination, as Einstein said, is more important than thinking, because if you cannot imagine, then you cannot create something new. You cannot get out of the box.

That's why Einstein said you cannot solve a [01:19:00] problem with the same thinking that created it. I tell my students and my patients, when they come to me in pain, you're, you're caught inside of a box, but you keep trying to solve the problem from inside of the box, which means they keep using the same thinking, the same behavior that got them in trouble to try to get them out of trouble.

To get out of the box. You can look at the box objectively and say, what is it that I'm doing that created these problems for me? And that's my job as a therapist is to see what they can't see. But most people are so caught in belief systems that they stop asking questions, right? So if you take it at face value, we are made in God's image, I agree.

But I would say be careful of the word image. Yeah, because the deeper truth is All the qualities of God are in you. So here's the qualities of a true spiritual master based on Sri Aurobindo's research. All true spiritual masters [01:20:00] draw their power from unconditional love. Why? Because there's no power you can get that doesn't come from unconditional love.

It's the source of everything. That's the highest form of God there is, is unconditional love. Mm-Hmm. . So we're all drawing our power from unconditional love because the entire universe is created from it and so is the world. And so is the food you eat, and so is the water you drink. So we all draw power from unconditional love, but how many of us are aware of it?

Very few. Yeah. But true spiritual masters that do miraculous healings, don't do it themselves. They draw their power from unconditional love. Hmm. All true spiritual masters can turn a negative into a positive, and so can any one of us. Hmm. If you choose to. Yeah, I would agree with that. The third quality is all true spiritual masters can create beyond the laws of physics.

Now most people are stumped by that. How do you create beyond the laws of physics? So, um, I'll ask you this question. [01:21:00] How high can you jump inside of your mind? Can you jump up to the sun? Hmm, no. You can't jump to the sun inside of your mind? Oh, inside of my mind. Uh, yeah, I can. You can do anything you want inside of your mind.

And you asked me a minute ago about how you manifest things, and I said you have to have a clear vision of what you want to do and focus on it. And where does the vision first originate? In your mind. In your mind. So all true spiritual masters can create beyond the laws of physics because they know how to use their mind, and they pour the love of God into the image.

Hmm. Or the vision. And since they're not doing it themselves, they open themselves as vessels and they're doing it out of love. Hmm. And because mind moves matter, they get out of the way and let God consciousness do the work. [01:22:00] Hmm. So we're all creating beyond the laws of physics. We're all deciding if we love or not love.

We're all deciding if we're going to. Help the other or ignore the other. It's even like a word of encouragement is Breathing breath of life into somebody else, right? So the point that I'm making is we're all creating beyond the laws of physics The problem is most people are so good at creating what they don't want They walk around complaining about how shitty their life is and I tell them all the time You realize the same amount of energy and the same amount of mental and mental focus that you use to create what you don't want.

If you just focus on what you do want would create exactly what you want. Yes. You're just conditioned to creating what you don't want because that's what your parents did. That's what society does. And we're almost all focusing on a negative bias. And most of us had teachers and parents that focus on what we were doing wrong instead of what we were doing right.

Hmm. So we're so conditioned to looking at the negative. [01:23:00] and judging it, that we don't realize that we're habitually focusing on what we don't want while complaining about the fact that we're not getting what we want. But the unconscious mind, according to Blucher Lipton's research, is one million times more powerful than the conscious mind, which is why in Spirit Gym I teach you exactly what the unconscious is, what the subconscious is, and how to work with it, because in order for you to do what True gurus and two spiritual masters can do, which is miraculous, such as healing people that the medical system can't heal.

You've got to be able to orient your consciousness and totally put your flow of energy and information into something without any antagonistic beliefs getting in the way. And one of the great examples of this is if you take children to classes where people are being taught how to bend spoons and horseshoes with their mind, They do it easily.

Adults have a terribly hard time doing it. Because children have not had enough [01:24:00] time to accumulate all the baggage and doubt in themselves. Once a child gets to be about older than 7 or 8 years of age, they start having the same problems as adults. I've done a legitimate fire walk. I told you Tony Robbins was a buddy of mine.

2600 degree coals. We spend an entire day learning how to hypnotize ourself, to convince ourself that we weren't walking on fire, we were walking on cool moss, like the forest floor. When I did the fire walk, it was about 35 feet across those coals, and there was six ambulances on staff. And every single person that could not hold their focus on Cool Moss immediately got burnt and you could smell burning flesh all over the place.

I heard people crying and screaming and the ambulances were busy. But of the 2, 500 people that were there, I would say 2, 000 or more, Maybe even 23, 20, I don't know how many people got injured, but enough that I could smell burning flesh everywhere. And people right in line with me, [01:25:00] right in front of me, lost focus and started screaming when their feet started burning.

I, I just felt warmth. I didn't feel anything hot. Wow. And you know, because of all my athletic training and you know, all the crazy stuff I've done, I've had to learn to focus my mind. And because Tony Robbins is only two weeks older than me, I said, if Tony Robbins can do it, I can do it. He puts his pants on the way I do.

He breathes the same air I do. If anybody can do anything, I can do it. And so, I just focused my mind. So, we're all creating beyond the laws of physics, whether we know it or not. And part of learning to manifest is getting all your beliefs out of the way that are antagonistic to what you want to create.

And that's why so many people have a hard time creating the life they want to live. And it's not profitable to allow people to be educated in how to create the life they want, because they'll be healthy people, they'll be productive people. And once you learn how to use your mind properly, you learn that you can't die because what you are is not the [01:26:00] physical stuff you're wrapped in.

That's just your body. vehicle of interaction with the physical realm, which we have to have because when a soul is created, it, it is unconditional love. It is an expression of the divine. And that which is unconditional cannot know itself because to know yourself is a condition. So what happens is as God dreams each soul into existence, it comes from higher dimensions of reality.

into progressively lower vibrations. So you start from the causal body, which is the emergence from source or the zero point field. If you want a scientific concept, then you go through the higher mind, which is the archetypal realm, which we have to have to make meaning. You wouldn't have a mind without archetypes.

Then you come to the lower mind, which is where you begin to Um, have concepts that we use to relate to everything like your normal daily mental work is the function of the lower mind, but it can be positively or negatively oriented. Then [01:27:00] you come into the astral dimension where you pick up the capacity to animate your thoughts, feelings and to have emotion.

Then you go to the etheric dimension, which is the dimension of energy that is created through the interaction of the biochemistry of biological life. It creates an energy field around you called the etheric field. Then you come into the physical dimension, which is why you have bones, teeth, and structure.

But each step you go down, consciousness becomes more and more entangled. Matter is light entangled. So if you think of the soul as pure light, If you're moving at the speed of light, then you're everywhere and nowhere at the same time, scientifically. And photons have an infinite capacity to carry information.

So, if you're moving at the speed of light and you're infinite to begin with, then you have no sense of self because you're everything. So, as, as God concentrates consciousness into form, There's a progressive loss of [01:28:00] consciousness, and this is why the great philosopher Plotinus said the soul's greatest addiction is to matter.

Why? Because without matter it can't identify itself. So when a soul is what we call a young soul, it doesn't have much awareness of itself without something tangible to say I am. The problem is, Plotinus says, that the soul falls in love with matter because it's so exciting to it to, to, to know that it exists.

And so spiritual development is actually the process of realizing that you are the consciousness that's embodied in the matter, but you're not the matter itself. So that consciousness is called spirit in spiritual terminology. So alchemy is the science that it's a non religious science. It's the science of using things like meditation and various spiritual practices that bring you into the self realization that who and what you are is not the material [01:29:00] form, but it's what's animating the form and it's what's giving consciousness to form.

And so I'm a remote viewer. I can go anywhere I want to go in what I call my light body. I can sit right here in the chair and go walk around on the sun or walk around on the moon and I've won a remote viewing contest to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt I'm a real remote viewer and I've also helped two people that were lost and nobody could find even the co, um, the National Guard.

I found them. Okay. So you, you know, I know for a fact, and I began having out of body experiences at the age of 12, where I was literally floating right out of the ceiling of the house and walking through the walls. And at first it shocked the hell out of me, but it was such a, an amazing experience. I said to myself, I got to make sure I'm not going crazy.

So what I would do is each night when I would go to bed, I would practice leaving my body. And then I would go around the farm and I would look for things that I could identify. [01:30:00] Then the next morning I'd get up and go see if they were there. And every single time I found them there and I realized I'm not going crazy.

Somehow I'm able to do this. I didn't want to tell my parents because I thought for sure they would think I was becoming psychologically damaged. And I already had a brother that was a drug addict. So I didn't want to. Get put in that category. But later on in life, as I studied, I learned that's called remote viewing.

And I learned that human beings have been remote viewing for as long as we have written record. Shaman been doing it forever. That's one of the ways they would find the animals so that the tribe knew where to feed themselves. So, ultimately, what I'm saying is that what we are is really God consciousness embodying itself.

But because God is that for which there is no other, God is completely and utterly alone. So the only way God can experience love is to dream other into existence. Mm. So In Tantra, [01:31:00] Shakti is the source of intelligent energy, and Shakti's desire is to have a partner, a consort, and a lover, and to have children.

So Shakti dreams Shiva into existence. So Shiva becomes the god of all things created. So the god of existence itself, but Shakti, or the divine mother, is the source of the subject of Shiva. She is the dreamer that dreams Shiva into existence. But Shiva doesn't realize it's only because Shakti's dreaming into existence, him into existence, that he can say, I am.

So paradoxically, Shakti has a lover, a consort, a friend, and a husband, and those two have children. Now this is a myth, so you have to realize we're speaking in metaphor. And everything in creation are the children of Shakti and Shiva. But you just have to say, well, shakti and shiva, that's the feminine, yin, darkness, [01:32:00] shiva, masculine, yang, light, who created them?

Well, if you go right to the King James Bible, Isaiah 45, 7, I, the Lord, create light and dark. Good and evil. I the Lord do all these things. The Christians hate that passage so much about 25 years ago, they started rewriting it so it doesn't say that anymore. And the Bible's been changed countless numbers of times.

I've got entire volumes of books on documenting all the changes in the Bible. But the point is, it's right in the Christian Bible. I the Lord create the light and the dark. Good and evil. I the Lord do all these things. The point I'm making is, Even if you go to myth and look at Shakti and Shiva as the source of creation itself, you have to say, well, that's a duality.

Who created that? Well, if you go behind a duality, that's number two. In spirit, Jimmy, you get to number one, which is being itself. Being is made of subject and object. There's an inside and an outside to everything. [01:33:00] There's a high and a low to creation. There's a light and a dark to creation. Those two are the basics that create the weave of creation itself.

If you go behind the principle of the one, you say, if a being exists, well, where'd it come from? Well, the answer is zero. So, it's not creation of nothing. It's creation from no thing. God is not a thing. God is everything and no thing. Because God is God. And only God can, God's the only being that can create And by definition, the word God means that for which there is no other.

The point I'm driving at is God is so terribly alone that its only desire is to know and experience itself and to have love. So God can only dream itself into existence because to get to duality, you have to have being first. Principle of the One, and you have to have a mind, you have to have a duality, a subject and an object.

But you [01:34:00] can dream when you're not conscious. And so, based on my lifetime of research, through much, much deep meditation, 18 years of Tai Chi, working with spiritual masters, and approximately 1, 000 plant medicine ceremonies in my last 40 years, And having conducted hundreds of them as healing ceremonies and being licensed as a Native American Medicine Man and Spirit Guide, I've looked at this through plant medicines, I've looked at it through all sorts of natural approaches, and I've been as disciplined with my spiritual research as I have with everything else that I do.

And what I've found conclusively, and I've found many mystics and even Paramahansa Yogananda himself says, God is dreaming the universe into existence and dreaming you into existence, and many mystics have in my book series, Spirit Jim Book Series, I cite many such sources. So the point being here is that God dreams itself into existence, dreams Harry into [01:35:00] existence as an example, and says, there I am.

Now God is the lover and you become the beloved. So God pours his love, or its love, or her love into Harry. And the way that that shows up is Harry looks at himself in the mirror and says, I am not realizing that what's looking through Harry's eyes at me is looking through my eyes at Harry. And that's the subject.

So because Shakti, the divine feminine, the dark has to be created, only God can pour its own subject into the divine feminine, which then gives birth to creation. So that's the Tantra myth. There's, you know, there's. Almost all cultures and countless native tribes had their own myths. But if you start studying creation myths, you'll see many archetypal foundations.

So even though they may be using slightly different words, they're ultimately all saying the same thing. And I've studied [01:36:00] probably over a hundred of them. When did you start to have these spiritual shifts that were starting to take form for you? Was it during the boxing days? No. My childhood was so intense and so scary.

When I was 12 years old, I didn't want to live anymore. My, my father drowned when I was eight. My first father was also violent. He was a competitive dancer and a professional drag racer. He took off with his dance partners and left my mother all alone. My mother had to work two eight hour a day waitressing jobs back to back to pay babysitters to watch me.

By the time she was 18, she had three kids. I was the firstborn. And she married my stepfather, and I, I, I was, she never explained what happened when my dad died. She never explained why this other man was, was, uh, Touching her and fondling her and, you know, [01:37:00] touching her in a way that it makes a child very, very confused.

And why is my dad not here? That was before he died. He died when I was eight. Um,

so by the time I was 12, my, my mother married my stepfather when I was seven, I think. Um, but by the time I was 12, I, I was so distraught. And I, I felt so angry at God because my mother was a Christian scientist from the time I was born so I had all this Christian programming and this Christian idea of God.

So one day, one of the things my father used to make us do when, when our chores were done, we would have to go out into the fields and, pull all the rocks out of the soil because we had a lot of rocks in the soil and it would damage the farm plows and the, and the rakes, the hay rakes. So rain or shine, we were out there picking rocks, which is, you know, hard manual labor.

And I just was [01:38:00] exhausted. I was physically exhausted. I was emotionally exhausted. I was mentally exhausted. I felt abandoned. I felt abused. I felt alone. And I broke down and then standing in the middle of a 10 acre field all by myself, I just started screaming at God and, and. Saying, why? What have I done?

What did I do to deserve this? Why, why have you done this to me? Why have you left me to have to, what did I do to deserve this? I was really, really upset. I mean, I was literally like right on the edge of wanting to commit suicide, which my brother did. Hmm. Um. Sorry to hear that. Well, it's just one of those unfortunate things.

It was very painful and very sad, but that's the reality of the environment that I was in. And all of a sudden, from every direction, from above me, from below me, from around me, from within me, a voice said, do not [01:39:00] worry. Your life is one of purpose. Be patient. And it scared the living hell out of me.

And it sounded like a deep voice that I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. Uh, I think, isn't it the famous narrator James Earl Jones? Mmm, yeah. Imagine a cross between him and, and, uh, Tina Turner. And I was in the middle of an empty ten acre field. Wow. And I was stunned, but somehow it calmed me.

Then I was again going through a crisis when I was 19. I was working in exploration and water well drilling. I was coming home from a remote island where we were doing exploration drilling. And I was just covered from head to toe in drill mud, freezing cold. I was working 12 hour days. You know, I became a father when I just turned 18 and my parents were broke, her parents were broke.

I had to [01:40:00] go for it. Or, you know, how was I going to support my child and my wife? So I'm a new father and I'm, I'm like exhausted. I just like, this can't be my future. So the crew, when we were crossing on this ferry from one island to another, the crew went up to have coffee and warm up and I just knew I needed to talk to God.

So I stayed in the truck. And I just went into meditation and I started saying to God, well, you know, you came to me and told me my life was going to be a life of meaning, but here I am covered in drilling mud. Is this all you want me to do? Is this what I come to this planet to do is just drill holes in the ground and manual labor?

I know I'm more intelligent than that. Why am I doing this? And why is my life still so challenging? And strangely, the same voice came to me. And I'm down in the bottom of, you ever been on a big ferry? Yeah. You're down on the lower deck, right? I'm in a semi truck, right? So it's a huge truck with a whole, you know, drill [01:41:00] rig on it.

And, um, the voice said to me, Do not worry. Your life will be a life of meaning and purpose. You will become a massage therapist. And you will be able to set your own schedule. You will enjoy your work and you will have greater freedom. And I'm like, I'm a massage therapist. I'm a, I'm a guy that, you know, builds race cars and races, motocross and kickboxes.

And I like, I couldn't conceive of that. Well, guess what happened? I became the trainer of the army boxing team, started the first massage therapy program, went to sports massage therapy school, became certified as a neuromuscular therapist, and became world famous and traveled the world beginning in 1988 lecturing on clinical and sports massage therapy and posture correction and rehabilitative exercise.

And [01:42:00] in 1995, I started the Czech Institute. That's what I've been doing ever since. That's amazing. So, you know, I've had these kinds of experiences. I started having out of body experiences at age 12. I had these two visitations. From what I would only know as God because there's no other explanation for it.

Yeah. And, uh,

and one thing I want to share with you, Harry, is that I've been a therapist for over 40 years and I've dealt with the worst kinds of things. I specialized in medical failures from the very beginning when I started my own clinical practice. People have come to me from all over the world and many great athletes whose careers were over that I rehabilitated and put back in the game when doctors told them they would never play again.

And I've always tapped into people's souls and asked for guidance for a very long time because I learned these ways of approaching through deep meditation. So I, I, and I also studied the soul [01:43:00] extensively and, and relate to my own soul very deeply. Um, but as I grew as a therapist, as I shared with you before, I, I found it a paradox that people would pay me a lot of money.

I charged 750 an hour for my time. Even back in the days when I charged 500 an hour, people would come see me. And they would have very complex problems, and I developed a system of psychological analysis so that I could determine what's getting in the way of them actually taking care of themselves and really loving themselves.

And I found over and over and over again that it always came back, nine times out of ten, it came back to childhood programming about beliefs in God that came from being in Sunday schools, churches, and synagogues. And I could tell you a thousand stories about the examples of this. [01:44:00] So I realized that I had to study world religion deeply.

And I studied courses on world religion. I studied all of Houston Smith's work. I studied all of Joseph Campbell's work. I studied the collective works of Ken Wilber. I studied, I've been studying the collective works of Carl Jung for 30 plus years. I studied the collective works of Hazrat Inyat Khan. I studied Sufism.

I studied the Sufi masters. I studied the great healers. Aurobindo, you know, I have a very, very comprehensive library and it's well worked and I realized that the biggest limitation people have is program beliefs about God. And that most people, as Shankara said, are programmed by people that read them scriptures but don't actually know what they're being told.

And Houston Smith makes a [01:45:00] very important point. First, Joseph Campbell says if you read the Bible as a dictation instead of a connotation, you're in big trouble. I've got a book, about 400 pages long, written by a psychologist in 1968. who tracked so many people's psychological problems back to childhood experiences of being programmed by religion, mostly Christianity.

He concluded that the Bible should not be allowed to be read by anybody until they're 18, because until then they don't have enough factor of discernment to differentiate myth from fact, story from reality. And that it damages their mind so much it can, it can lead to suicide and all sorts of problems.

And I've seen misunderstandings of the Bible at the root of people's health problems and diseases and relationship crisis more times than I can even count. So ultimately what I realized that [01:46:00] is very, very important. And before I tell you, I want to make this point, Houston Smith, you know who Houston Smith is?

I don't know who he is. He's considered the world's. Um, most highly regarded expert in world religion. Mm. He's, he died recently at 103 years of age. Wow. Houston Smith did something nobody's ever done before. Houston Smith devoted five years of his life to each of the world's major religions. He moved to those countries, he lived there, and he practiced that religion fully.

And he did that until he'd spent five years studying each of the world's major religions as a practitioner of it. And he is a, was a professor of world religion. and philosophy. And he wrote many excellent books. And Huston Smith says there's four levels of scriptural interpretation. You'll see why this is important in a second.

Huston Smith said the lowest level of scriptural interpretation The first level is [01:47:00] literal interpretation, which is fundamentalist religion, which is I centric, which means it's focused on your belief, whether it's true or not. The second level is ethnocentric, which means my group versus your group.

Isn't it interesting that if you go right now and search Google for how many branches of Christianity there are, you will find something very fascinating, 45, 000, each claiming to have the original teachings of Jesus. Why?

Because people that are interpreting the Bible aren't enlightened enough to see the common message. So they always see through the lenses of their own programming, most of which came when they were children and they were unconscious. And they did not have an ego to discern. So you get people reading the same book, getting as many [01:48:00] interpretations as there are people.

So the second level is ethnocentric, which means my group against your group. Now I got a question for you, Harry, care to guess what the most common cause of world war of war in general is? Throughout the history of the world, religion, religious differences, that's ethnocentric religion starts wars and gets people killed even in their own religion.

The next level is allegorical. So the third highest level of scriptural interpretation is realizing that everything that's written in scripture is a teaching story or a metaphor. And you have to have enough intelligence to interpret it metaphorically, just like you have to interpret a poem. You can't read poem literally, or it's not a poem.

Yeah. Okay. Now you're ready for the punchline? Guess what Houston Smith identified was the highest form of scriptural interpretation that could be done only by the most evolved, most [01:49:00] enlightened human beings on this planet. Love. Inspirational. Inspirational. The highest form of scriptural interpretation.

Is inspirational and those that are at that level can read even what looks like the darkest stories of the Bible and use them to inspire people to love more and to live more fully and to love life and to love nature and to love your enemy as myself. Yeah. Okay. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but earlier you said enlightened.

Is that kind of what you mean on the spectrum of? Enlightened, like going from, one, the literal interpretation to, to the inspirational. That's one way to interpret it, but enlightenment's one of these words that has so many meanings, most of which people are very confused about. Right. Because they think if you're enlightened, it means that you're one with God and you know everything.

Right. But the reality of it is, if you read the book Streams of Wisdom by Dustin DiPerna, he, he shows the structure stages of conscious development, how structure, how [01:50:00] consciousness evolves stages of development, not only historically, but within any one individual. So what happens if you take a kid out of the ghetto, And put them in the hands of enlightened parents.

How does his consciousness change and grow and evolve? And psychologists have been studying this for years, social workers. It's it's, it's been studied extensively and, and, you know, there's many models. Ken Wilber has models. Um, Houston Smith has models, um, Maslow has a model, um, uh, Arthur M. Young has a model.

There's probably a dozen models out there, but they all basically say the same thing with slightly different words. So Dustin DiPerna does as he cites research. Looking into what the level of development of the so called enlightened gurus and masters of the [01:51:00] world are psychologically, they found that the most common level of development of people that were considered enlightened spiritual masters was the third chakra, which means that their whole orientation is about something that gives them benefit.

In other words, they get gain from it. It means. That they can somehow use other people to their favor. You understand my point? Yes. So they're enlightened from our perspective, but when you look at what their motives and drives are, They're using you to make money, or they're using you to have power over you, or to control you.

He showed that even the people that are deemed enlightened in our culture are not that enlightened, because they're still driven by their own motives and desires, which is I oriented, not we oriented, not all oriented, and that was by far the biggest group. So enlightenment has a couple of meanings. One [01:52:00] is, yes, you actually are at the level where you can read scripture.

and understand it at the highest level, but not only read it, live it. The other interpretation of enlightenment means That as you grow spiritually, you heal, you grow, and you carry less baggage and less polarity within you, so you're literally lighter in your step. So you, you know, the Indians have a saying, leave no footprints.

You begin to heal. leave less and less of a footprint wherever you go. Rumi says the greatest lover is the silent lover and the greatest teacher is the silent teacher. That's enlightenment. Someone who's truly enlightened doesn't have to talk because just being in their presence you learn by just being there and witnessing them.

And they're the greatest lover without saying anything because their love is so powerful that it creates an [01:53:00] organizing field everywhere they go. And they, one of the things that Sri Aurobindo showed is wherever a truly, a true spiritual master goes, they create equanimity and harmony. Because they have an organizing field around them.

So think of what a magnet does to a bunch of iron filings, it organizes it. So, truly enlightened people have such a coherent energy field, which is why you almost always see them painted like Jesus with an aura around their head, that they actually create equanimity and harmony just by being in the presence of other people that are less enlightened because they're like an organizing force.

Okay, so an enlightened person sees scripture at the highest level. And instead of seeing polarity, death and destruction, sees a path to unity and can help you use scripture to say, this is what happens to people that are not awake. And the story is reminding you of how not to [01:54:00] live. So this doesn't happen to you.

I enlighten people say, if you don't love God, you're going to burn in hell. Yeah, totally. And they see. They sing, onward Christian soldiers marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before. Now if Jesus was to hear that, onward Christian soldiers marching off to war with the cross, he would be appalled because they would never march off to a war.

Um, then enlightenment means, as somebody becomes more and more enlightened, they're less and less destructive, they're less and less polarized, and they leave less and less of a footprint.

In my career, many people have said to me, Paul, are you enlightened? And I will share with you, Harry, what I tell them. I am enlightened to the degree that you applying my teachings in your life helps you live a better [01:55:00] life. And only to that degree am I enlightened. Anything else is bullshit. That's my estimate of that.

Yeah. It's, it's really interesting hearing you talk about just the spiritual world. Cause it, it holds so much weight in my own personal story early in my twenties, didn't have any really acknowledgement of my like spirit, no spiritual practices, um, no. Yeah, nothing I really like tethered the soul to anything um, outside of what I was doing, which is really, I mean, I was working a corporate job and there was, there was no soul and in, in, um, that was being nurtured.

And, and I really felt that and, um, you know, I feel like, There's a lot of people out there who struggle with the their soul like the soul realm because it's unseen Most people don't even know they have a soul. Yeah. Yeah, and that's a problem. Yeah, definitely But it must be nice, you [01:56:00] know for having you put out so much work over so many decades in the physical world In the mental and emotional world and has it been kind of a clear progression to the spiritual world?

Well, because I, I started in self realization fellowship so young and because once I left the army, I specialized in medical failures. I was dealing with people that were so complicated, even the best doctors and therapists in the world didn't know what to do. So, because I had this deep connection with God, that I got through meditation and through working with the monks and learning how to empty myself.

Um, early on I developed the realization that these people were so complicated that I didn't have enough knowledge to know what to do with them. And so what I did was I would empty myself and go into a meditative state and just connect to them. And I [01:57:00] would ask God to guide me. Or I would simply ask their soul to guide me, and I would begin having visions, and I would see how they were traumatized, or I would be told what to do, and it could be, give them this herb, or it could be, um, check their atlas, their atlas is out of place, and it's, it's strangling their spinal cord, or any number of things.

So,

my approach to therapy was never absent. Of a deep spiritual connection because I knew early that I didn't have enough knowledge to, to, to really. logically figure out what was wrong with some of these people because my analysis showed there was 50 things wrong with them, all of which would have been major for any one person.

Right. And so I had no choice but to go into my spiritual awareness to ask for help at that level. [01:58:00] And I've conducted many healings in my career where angels have showed up to guide me and people from the other side that were, you know, um, It could be a family member. It could be a healer that's come to support that person.

I've had shamans come from the other side or from other dimensions. And I've been guided and I've had the craziest things happen in these healings. You know, I'm often doing them in front of groups because I'm teaching this, right? Um, a good example is one time I was doing healing and it was one of the first times this happened to me and it really freaked me out because I think this was only the second time I'd ever seen an angel.

I really didn't know if they were even real. I thought maybe it was just a story, you know. Um, I was doing a healing on this very, very troubled girl who was very sick. And [01:59:00] I, I go through a process of invoking, uh, an invocation to start the healing. And I call forth any angels. Any great healers or any great spiritual guides that are willing to come forth and on behalf of and to love and support.

And then I say the person's name and I just ask my soul to guide me and tell me when to begin. And so I had done the invocation and I was just sitting there in a state of meditation. And all of a sudden I heard music playing like harps and trumpets and it was stunningly beautiful. And I'm, I was shocked because I'm the only one in the room with musical instruments, which, because I, I also use sound healing.

So I have tuning forks, drums, rattles, Tibetan bowls, but this was not that kind of music. And it was coming from above me. And I'm like, what in the [02:00:00] world is going on? And so I looked up and I'm, I'm also clairvoyant. So I can see beyond the physical. And there was, Not only were there angels, but there was baby angels.

They were in the bodies of babies. And they were flying around the room above the table, circling, like, imagine a treatment table, and they're circling the treatment table, and they're looking at the lady on the table playing these instruments. And I am, like, I'm having a hard time because I'm conducting class with, like, 50 people in it or 40 people in it.

And I'm in such a state of shock, I can't believe what I'm seeing. And this is only in your perception. I thought, this is what I'm telling you. Okay, so I said to my soul, am I really seeing angels? And my soul said, yes, they have come. You have called the angels and they are coming because this girl has soul contracts that are unfulfilled.

And if we don't help her now, she's going to die. [02:01:00] And so I did the healing, turned out she, I didn't realize this till a year later because these people come from all over the world to see me and I'm so busy I can't follow up with everybody. And so a year later I got a letter from her telling me about all the crazy things that happened to her and how she had this happen and that happen and spiritual beings that came to her and she totally healed.

And she was completely normal and she was now, I think, married and healthy and Wrote me this letter a year later just to say thank, thank me because she said, you know, that day, that healing you did changed my life forever. And so when I finished the healing, by the way, going back to the story, I closed the ceremony and immediately three women in the class ran up to me crying their eyes out.

And I'm like, wonder what's going on here? And they said, Paul, did you see the angels? I said, did you see angels? They said, baby [02:02:00] angels. I've never circling the room. Did you hear the music? They were helping you do the healing. Three women at the same time all saw it. Wow. And I've had several of those types of experiences.

I was doing a healing for a girl one time who was actually a friend of mine. Sad story. She was a single woman and she was in a sort of a, she didn't know this guy really well. He was a famous martial artist. She was a martial artist.

She's a very beautiful woman. Well, she didn't know he was a player and she had sex with him and she got a very, very bad sexually transmitted disease and it made her extremely sick. She was in a lot of pain. She had terrible sores in her uterus. It was nasty, not something I'd wish on [02:03:00] anybody. And the medical approach was not taking the pain away or helping her.

And she was scared to death because She realized, who am I going to be able to marry? Who am I going to have sex with? Wow. You know, it was a crisis for her, so she came to me. And so I did a healing, and I had my assistant there at the time, and she actually came to my house, um, which I don't normally work at home, but she was a long time personal friend of mine, and, and, you know, like, I care for this person.

And I did it for free because she's one of my best friends. And I invoked, I did the invocation, and I was looking down at her, and all of a sudden I looked up, and I saw something I've never seen before, and it's actually kind of funny. I looked up and there was two leagues of angels and they began right at the treatment table one and like a peloton in a V shape.

[02:04:00] They went as far off into the horizon as I could see Harry like military ranks and these angels were wearing beautiful polished silver. Like battle helmets, they had shields and they had swords. And these angels were like 10 feet tall, like right through the roof of my house. And then when, as far as I could see, I mean, there was thousands and thousands of them, so it started with one, then it went to two, then to three, then to four.

And so I saw this V that went out as far from my house, you can see my house is about 10 miles from the ocean, but I'm up high so you can see the ocean. They went all the way to the horizon. I was completely and utterly shocked. And the thing that was most shocking to me is why are these angels carrying swords, battle shields, and helmets?

Because it's kind of contradictory to what we think of an angel. And, and so I, I saw them and I said to these [02:05:00] angels because two of them were standing right in front of me and they shrunk themselves down so they would fit in the room. I said, who are you and why are you here? You know, because I never thought an angel would, like I, I never felt fearsome energy.

And so they said, we have come at your request. And they described to me that she had been wounded. But it was not in her karma to carry this wound and she did not know he was carrying a sexually transmitted disease and that they came to help her heal. And I said, well, why are you dressed this way? And it's been 20 years now, but, um, remember half of them were female looking angels.

They had the faces of women and half of them had the faces of men, which is another thing because angels are usually not sexed. Um, [02:06:00] and the female angels were dressed with black, like a black, um, almost like a vest. But it was almost like a, like, like a, something, a soldier, you know, the breast plates that Romans like that.

And they had black on and the males had shining silver with gold on it and beautiful insignias on them. Like stunning and like metal embroidery. Like I, you know, if you saw this, you would think it was just the most amazing art you ever seen in your life. But I'm looking at this, I'm just completely and utterly shocked.

females said, I'm trying to remember, I might have it switched backwards. The female said, we are the angels of truth. And the male said, it's going to make me cry. Oh, I'm sorry. Um, they said, we [02:07:00] are the angels of justice.

Oh, it was so profound. It's just like even taking myself back to that. It was shocked the hell out of me. And they said,

we are here because we're here to uphold the truth. And we are here to support justice.

And

so I was guided in the healing and she began to improve immediately. Wow. And I've had other experiences like that. Hmm. All of them shocked the hell out of me. Well, contrast that with the modern medical system. Yeah. It's almost uncomparable. And I think about just the paradigm of soulful healing. Which is, [02:08:00] you know, rich in spiritual practices and belief and faith that you can get better.

And then soulless healing, which I think is what most modern medicine is. And there's such a contrast and juxtaposition between those two worlds. And I think that's why we see so much ill health. Yeah. Um, it's a very deep topic. I could talk for days on it. Yeah. I've been involved in this for over 40 years and I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly of it all.

Yeah. But you know, this all began with you asking me what my spiritual philosophy is. Yeah. My spiritual philosophy is that there's nothing here but God. It's the only way it can be, or there is no God and if there is no God, we have a real big problem because even from a scientific perspective, we have a conundrum on our hands.

How did it all get here? And how did we get here? If you look at the complexity of a human being alone, you're about a hundred trillion cells, each made of a hundred trillion atoms, all dancing beautifully in harmony. You replace every cell in your [02:09:00] body. Every year based on current science, yet somehow you maintain this amazing form and no one's confused when they see Harry, but you're losing 3 million red blood cells every second and recreating them every second and managing to maintain this amazing form that we all identify as Harry and can no one love as Harry.

And if that's not a miracle that's beyond reach of science, then what is, you look at the complexity of life, nature, the universe. If you don't think there's an intelligent. Being behind it or an intelligence behind it, then you're so drunk on scientific materialism, then you're lost. And so my, my, my spiritual philosophy is totally in line with the first principle of Sufism.

There is no God, but God, I worship everything and [02:10:00] everyone. That's my spiritual philosophy. So cool hearing your story. Um, I've really, I've loved this conversation and just learning more about you. I feel like we got to talk about some things that maybe you haven't gotten to talk about. Yeah, we did. Um, one of the things that we touched on and I'm just trying to be mindful of time is just, and this is a total redirect, but we talked about addiction and I would love to Um, just wrap the podcast on this topic, because I think it's interesting, informative, and people will get value from it.

Well, I studied addiction extensively, because I've worked with hundreds of cases of addiction to everything you can think of, from exercise, to sex, to, to drugs, to power, to money, to food, to

violence.

It's [02:11:00] really It's rare that I don't have a patient that's got an addiction to something. So I spent years studying the literature on addiction, but the most powerful stuff I studied came from a shaman and an anthropologist named Angelise Arion, and she too realized there was a lot of problems with addiction.

As a shaman, she's a healer, and as an anthropologist, you study the history of human life. And so she traveled to 110 different countries over the span of 10 years and went to the tribal elders. The natives, to the psychologists, to doctors, anybody she could find that she thought had adequate knowledge of why people get addicted in each of these different countries and cultures.

After 10 years, she tabulated all her findings and she found that there was four common denominators that [02:12:00] led to addiction. And having learned that, I've studied every single case I've ever had of addiction and it's true every time. And I have lived through three of the four of these. The first, and these are not in any priority order, she said, none of them are more important than any of the other.

It's the presence of them, particularly in the first 12 to 14 years of your life. It has a formative force that tends to produce an addict. If you were raised by parents or caregivers that were oriented toward perfectionism, it significantly increased the likelihood you'd become an addict. If you were raised by parents or caregivers that focused more on what was wrong than what was right with you, it increased the tendency of addiction.

If you

had parents or caregivers [02:13:00] that

rewarded certain children and not others, Because they knew things others didn't know, then it created an addiction to the need to know. So as long as there were reward for being smarter than people around you, and there was favoritism given to the smart one, the other ones made the assumption that if I work hard enough to know more, Then I will be treated favorably, and I'll feel wanted, needed, loved, and valued.

So it creates the addiction to constantly know, to constantly study, to constantly know more. Now think of how many people spend so many years in school before they even go out and get a job, and they've got 200, worth of loans, and they got a PhD, but they still really don't know what they're doing. And finally, she found that the greater the degree of intensity, child's developmental [02:14:00] environment, the higher the likelihood of addiction.

So perfectionism, focusing on what's wrong, the need to know, and intensity. My parents weren't perfectionists, but they focused on what was wrong almost constantly. The environment was extremely intense, and there was definitely reward given throughout my entire period of going to an education system called school.

The kids that did the best on the tests got favored by school teachers. And The ones that weren't as smart got treated far less appropriately. So, once I learned of her research, I started evaluating those four factors. And in every single case, almost every addict had at least three of the four. And so, because the technical definitions of addiction were so [02:15:00] kind of cold and dry and They describe more the problem than, than anything helpful.

I develop my own definition. Definition of an addiction. My definition of an addiction is any repeated behavior that does not produce the results you want. So if you drink for any reason to numb your pain or to convince yourself you're having a good time, but it doesn't produce the results you want, you got an addiction.

Mm. If you smoke cigarettes, it gives you cancer and that's not the result you wanted. You got an addiction if you exercise. so much that you actually start to break down and you're not improving your athletic performance or your health. You're decreasing it. You're not getting the results you want.

You've got an addiction. So what I do with addicts is I help them identify what their dream is. [02:16:00] And I say, now, when it comes to the use of coffee, drugs, marijuana, mushrooms, DMT, any of it, sex, money, whatever, gambling, yeah, whatever their orientation is, I say, You must be honest with yourself about when your use of this practice or this substance is actually deteriorating your ability to fulfill your commitment to yourself in order to be and become or achieve your stated dream, goal or objective.

The athlete must. be honest about when they need rest instead of convincing themselves to go to the gym. The pot user must be honest about when the pot is making them more passive and more distracted [02:17:00] and less committed to their practices that are necessary. The sex addict must be honest about when the sex is no longer an act of love, but they're masturbating with someone else's body and it's becoming an act of disconnection and it's no longer sacred.

So without going through everything in my life, I love my tobacco and herbs. I enjoy marijuana. I'm, you know, I'm licensed as a medicine man and spirit guide. I've got a lot of experience with mushrooms and many other medicines. The way I've always kept these things sacred is I've always asked myself, how do I use this to enhance my ability to live and love?

As fully as I can, but not lose my ability to fulfill my [02:18:00] responsibilities. My commitments and my obligations to myself and the people I love and the people that hire me and to the degree that I cannot be honest with myself, I cannot be honest with anybody else and I need to go see a therapist and I should not be getting paid by people to help them heal.

So I've always been able to manage my use of these things because I've always had a dream bigger than myself. I've always had goals that I had to stretch and grow for. And so

because I know what God is and I know why I'm here in the world, it's important to me never to be dishonest with myself because I'm being dishonest with God. And if I'm being dishonest with myself, I'm being dishonest with everybody that I love. And the pain of that is far [02:19:00] painful than not getting to smoke another joint or drink a beer or whatever it is, right?

So that's how I've helped people manage addictions, is to teach them these things and give them the support they need to get really clear on what's worth, what's more worth living for than another bottle of alcohol or another joint or another shag in the hay, you know. Totally. We live in such a It's a society that promotes these addictions and addictive habits that, uh, profitable as hell.

Yeah. Um, and yeah, it's, I think it's great, um, wisdom just, you know, being able to identify some of those things and raise our awareness around the topic of addiction. Uh, I just know, I just know a lot of people who are struggling with that and, um, it's very easy for your life to get wrapped up in things that patterns that you don't really see.

Yeah. want them to, to be. So an addiction has repeated behavior [02:20:00] that does not produce the results you want. Yeah. But to know what the results are that you want, you must have a dream goal or objective to measure it against as an athlete, I've always known what my previous level of performance was is always a benchmark.

I spent a lot of time in my life in a gym. If I was doing 10 sets of four in the deadlift with 500 pounds last last week. I'm smoking a bunch of pot and staying up late at night and partying and I can't improve by one to three percent on my next workout. I know that I am actually working against my athletic development and I could, you know, mark that out in many different ways for you, but that's my job as a therapist is to help people get clear on how to be as objective as possible with themselves because a lot of addicted substances turn you into a professional bullshit artist.

[02:21:00] And you'll look at yourself in the mirror and lie to yourself, but nobody else is confused about what's going on. Right. Yeah. It's sad to see how quickly people can get wrapped up in that, um, addictive state. It is, and you know, one of the things that I learned, is that all addictions are attempts to get safe love.

When you consider the four things that cause those addictions, most commonly, none of those make for a very healthy developmental environment. And we don't have any real good education for parents. Right. And we don't have good education on how to be in a relationship. Mm. We don't know how to go about marriages.

Um, we've lost our tribal elders, so people are really like lost and confused. And you know, Carl Jung said something profound, all children are tasked with the unfinished business of their parents lives. And most of our [02:22:00] parents were not educated in many of the most important aspects of life, and therefore they emulated to us ways of living that were painful to them.

And only wounded parents hurt their children. And so we've got such a long line of wounding now, without a support system to heal. And it's so profitable to keep people sick now, that we've basically as a, as a world culture, as a people, we've pulled the rug out from under ourselves. And unfortunately, we are at a real crisis point in the world, where if we don't hold hands together, And realize that we need each other, regardless of race, color, or creed.

And that we need to keep the planet healthy or we're all going to die. Um, we're going to keep drugging and numbing ourselves because what you see in social media and [02:23:00] on the news today is so shocking and so scary. It's enough to make anyone want to bury their head in a bottle. And so, I realized from working with so many addicts that everyone was actually just looking for safe love.

No bottle of alcohol ever complains that you're a lousy kisser, neither does a cigarette. Um, most people that exercise the hell out of themselves are running away from something painful in their life. Or they're trying to make something out of themselves because their parents belittled them too much and, and the kind of experience that I had.

But it's also important to remember that Our imbalance is often what makes us great as long as we use it to motivate us to create something out of ourselves, but then realize when it's lost, it's beneficial. In other words, if me being [02:24:00] raised as a child that didn't get enough approval from his father turned me into a hardcore athlete that ultimately turned me into a successful therapist, if I don't realize it, it's now time for me to acknowledge myself.

And love myself and take responsibility for that. I can work myself to death trying to get the approval that my father can't give me. So if I don't give it to myself, I can end up destroying myself trying to get external validation. And ultimately, the goal of self realization is to realize who and what you are.

When you ultimately realize what God is and where God is first and foremost, right in your heart, then to love yourself honestly is to love God honestly. And to love life honestly is to love God honestly. [02:25:00] And one of the things that's kept me motivated all these years as a therapist is I look around me and I see totally and utterly committed God is to going on its own journey and equally investing in the light and the dark so that God can be truly conscious of its potentials and know what it really is and ultimately come to the realization of what isn't an expression of love and what is.

So strangely, God is walking with us. Um, with every step we take and in the Buddhas and the Thich Nhat Hanh's and the Jesus's God is very awake, but in the addicts and the people that are trapped in violence and lost in lies and manipulation, God is very asleep. And so, um, I think it's up to those of us that do have a honest, loving relationship with God, not a bunch of [02:26:00] words written on paper that have been memorized.

That's not God. That's why Rumi said to get to God, you've got to become a heretic. Worshipping and things you memorize is not really a true relationship with God. That's just doing what you think you've got to do to fit in, because you're too afraid to be alone, and say what you really think. But to the degree we really understand what God is, and how committed God is, and how invested God is to going on its own hero's journey, So that it has authentic experience of itself.

It's the only way God can check its perfection, is to test it. Otherwise, it's not wisdom. You can't generate wisdom without experience. So to be omnipotent and omniscient without experience means nothing. It just means you've got potential.

So that's what we are, in my opinion. We're all God exploring [02:27:00] itself. And ultimately, the fastest way to find out What you're capable of as an image of God, to use your words, is to love yourself enough to see what you can make out of yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Paul, I'm so grateful for you coming on. This has been amazing.

I'm grateful for your time. I know we've gone for a long time here and just excited for our audience to get to share in your wisdom and, um, get to explore. Some of your content. I know you have Paul Check blog.com. Uh, yeah. Where else can they find you? That's an old one. Yeah. Uh, you can go to paul check.com, but, um, my YouTube channel is youtube.com/paul, CHEK live, um, my Spirit Gym training program, my, my, um, mentoring mentoring program where I guide people into what holistic spiritual development really is, which is a, it's a very comprehensive, complete program.

It runs on based on a one year [02:28:00] membership cycle. It can be done monthly as well. That's MySpiritGym. com and there's lots of testimonials of people that have worked with me. Um, you know, everything from medical doctors to housewives to people that have been my private clients due to injury and illness and so there's lots of people on there.

Um, my institute is ChekInstitute. com and that's where I teach holistic health. And we have a five year academy program and there's many of my online education programs on a wide variety of topics that can be purchased there for online education. Um, I think those are the main websites. Amazing. Well, if anyone's, uh, still listening, go check those out and, uh, Paul, just really appreciate you and your time.

Thank you, bud. It was so great to meet you. Harry. So great. I got your name down. Harry Potter. Lots of love to all of you. Thanks, Paul.