Hey, what is up? It is ross, and we are back trying this episode again; I've tried to record it, this is the third time now, and if I don't get it done, I'm just going to go with one of them; I've hated everyone. I'm going to try to do one that I like this time, and with that said, let's get into it.

So episode five, this is being a fellow traveler on the path. Here are a couple of the key points that we'll get into. 

• There is no singular way

• it's a team sport

• The path isn't linear

• A quote by Ram Dass

• A quote by Castaneda

And with all of that said, um, let's run into kind of what each one is. 

No singular way builds out on the concept that there's more than one road to get to this experience, right? It's a team sport implying that we have to work with each other along this path. The path isn't linear, meaning that you end up in different places at different times, and things can be circular at times. Uh, and like, the quotes are self-explanatory; we'll get there when we get there, let's get into it.  

No singular way.  

Sometimes people get into spirituality, and right off the rip, they'll be like "religion is horrible; you can't find the same stuff as spirituality; spirituality is better." It's not the case.  

You can tap into the essence of what we're after or what you found, or what I've found in lots of different ways, and atheists are fine too, they can experience it because it's not so much about practice and don't get me wrong, there's a certain way of carrying yourself in the world that will allow you to experience it more easily. And, I would say, a prerequisite. But that's not practice.  

It's about heart and how you show up to life, where intention lies, and things of that nature. In my, in my understanding as well. Maybe I'm mistaken. But that's what I've tapped into and what I've found, a lot of people who seem to have an easier way of life have expressed as well is the best way I can put it.

It's a team sport.  

Think of how you treat the waiter in this scenario and wanting to be kind to other people and like being generous and being decent to people just because that's the way that you want to show up.

Because the world is a stage is the next point, meaning that we're all playing different roles, right? And we need to treat everybody with respect and dignity, and that even goes to people that are assholes now. With that said, there's a line when you need to stand up and hold your ground. Do no harm but take no shit.

It's helpful to remember, too, that for anybody that we meet, there's a bigger story than we see behind what's going on, right? And by that, I mean we might meet some assholes in our life, but these assholes might be there to help develop, and these assholes as well might be there to learn some lessons about that experience.

It doesn't mean that they're an asshole in every existence and that they're doomed to some lousy experience afterward. I think that negative actions have their punishment built-in, and we continue to experience hardships until we are willing to look at our current problems.  

The path isn't linear.

We can come back to things that we've seen before. We can re-experience the same thing again, and we're going to unpack spiritual growth isn't linear more in its own subheading. The main thing that we need to understand is worry about ourselves in these instances. Be mindful about how you're showing up to life. Like I was told in when I was involved with 12 step recovery, keep your side of the street clean, that means, but you're not being an asshole.

Do the next right thing, and generally, things will work out for you in the long run if you maintain that and hold the line on that; growth isn't linear. Unhealed wounds will resurface at times, and even healed wounds can resurface at times, right? Um, but unhealed wounds will come back up.  

For me, the fall of '21 has been about inner child stuff that I thought I dealt with a long time ago, but I've been processing a lot of that.

Um, and now it's moving into winter, and it's about processing being at this stage of my life and single; it's interesting how life works, and there are all these different layers to everything. 

Like some people with broken bones feel the change of the weather before it hits cycles in our life can make things that we've already faced and made peace with come up. This path is not for the faint of heart, which is why it's important to have fellow people on the path. Um which is what this episode is largely about, right.

You'll revisit unlearned lessons. Sometimes you'll come up and see things that you need to learn again. Other times you'll even come back to lessons that you've learned and get to make the right choice and get the experience of choosing differently and navigating circumstances with more awareness. It's a good feeling.

The other thing is that retrocausality has played a large part in my life, and it's something I need to work with. Maybe I need to tap into it now and receive some blessings. I'm going to cast back to myself. But retrocausality works by it's the belief that you can impact the past by current actions that you're doing now.

So you can send a lifeline out to yourself, and I've done this after the fact by sending myself Reiki for when I was going through other challenging experiences. But if you play with it once you get outside of the common thinking and get outside of the box, you realize reality is a lot stranger than you might think it is, and retrocausality isn't off the table.  

And then the other thing about growth isn't being linear is there's a premonition, which is knowing what's going to happen in the future in the current moment. And if you have that ability, you're able to understand situations differently. So you can kind of skip ahead in the spiral and maybe hurdle jump over some hurdles more quickly if you're able to navigate it.

If you're able to work with retrocausality and premonition collectively, you'd really be able to accelerate your growth exponentially. I don't know how that would work, though. That was just something that came up off the cuff, but an interesting thought, maybe listening to this later, somebody will pick something up.

So now we come to the quote section of this. Ram Dass had a wonderful quote, "we're all just walking each other home," and I think this is an excellent point that he has here, but I also think it's a little bit too rose-colored glasses and the quote that I resonated with the most is by Carlos Castaneda.  

"And the sorcerer starts on his way back home, knowing he will never reach it, knowing that no power on earth will ever deliver him to the place, the things the people he loved..." That hit home for me because I was waiting outside of my therapist's office, and I read it and felt this deep sense of isolation and disconnection from everything at the time.

When you begin intensely working on yourself and healing things by working through old patterns and looking at stuff that most people don't look at, it's isolating, and it makes you look at life differently. Carlos Castaneda was aggressively pessimistic because Ram Dass das is right on something; having the right people in your life makes a difference.

Castaneda's life ended darkly and with a lot of mystery and speculation about it, and I think that's because he kind of fell prey to some of his victims on the path or his enemies on the path to power. He was misguided somehow, but if you go through that journey, you will encounter what Castaneda called "phantoms on the path," which is an area that I think that Ram Dass misses.

Phantoms on the path are people stuck in destructive patterns, and these will be people who come into your life and waste your time, distract you, and overall drain you. The phantoms can manifest as people in your life, such as toxic parents, lovers, friends, and others who ultimately drain you. Phantoms on the path can also include places and anything that distracts you from your ultimate purpose and moving forward, and they can look very, very attractive.

They're almost like sirens in um greek mythology where they have this very enchanting song, what they're leading you into despair. These are more subtle, though, because they're like the island of the opium eaters where they keep you stuck in one particular spot, and you're not moving forward. So you have to be mindful of those while you're walking people home on the path.

Um, but ultimately we're supposed to be here for other people. And I hope that that makes sense. I think that the sharp people will get it and the people who aren't won't, and the point will be missed because you can't help everybody. And a lot of this journey is you have to help yourself.

You can find people who are willing to pull their weight, and you can walk alongside them, but you can't stay anywhere too long on the path of spiritual development is the easiest way to put it. A mentor told me at one point the road behind you is burning, and you find that you have to move ever forward. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. That's why you need to squad up with real ones; it's a lonely road.

It's challenging at times. It can be daunting, and kindred spirits are a welcome addition. While you don't need others, it's exponentially easier to have people you can relate to as you're going through these experiences, which is part of the reason why I'm creating a meet-up specifically for talking about this type of stuff. It would be helpful for people because there's some pretty unsavory shit out in the world, and a community can help.

As somebody that processes the bullshit of the collective psyche, we have it as a responsibility to keep each other healthy. And I think that people have different roles and that's why working together is essential.

And just to kind of run over what we discussed in this episode, 

The intention is essential, you can be religious and find this truth, and you can be an atheist and kind of tap into this energy. It doesn't matter so much what you believe to an extent.

Unmistakably, it matters where your heart is. We all have our roles. So don't judge how people understand. That's just who they are and how they're showing up now, and it doesn't mean you don't call people on bullshit or don't hold people accountable and don't get justice because I think that that is still important.

Make sure that you're stocking up with friends and people allied towards the same things as you, and don't stock up with hungry ghosts or phantoms on the path or N. P. C. S. Find the others. Find people who want similar things working towards similar goals. Make space for people in your life that might not be at the same level of awareness as you, but do so in a respectful way to your time and energy.

In the next episode, we're going to talk about the baddies and cultural programming corruption. Digital echo chambers and disinformation. We're just going to do an overview of this stuff briefly. I don't want to get too deep into it. There are plenty of ways that you can find out about this shit. I don't have a plan where I'm going to try to steer you to one side of a political party or get you to believe anything that I say. I want to express my opinion on these topics briefly and then move on. 

Later on, when I have authors on the podcast, if I find interesting people that are discussing some of this stuff, and it's relevant to some things that we're talking about, maybe I'll get into it more. Still, it's just not going to be at the forefront of anything that I'm doing here, because that's not what this show is about.