Show notes
So, should you do Ayahuasca? No.
But if you want to hear what it was like for Ryan DMT Moran and what he took away from the experience, listen in.
Preface:
Ayahuasca has become this cliché thing that entrepreneurs do, they come back changed and want to tell EVERYONE about it. It's like being vegan, or doing crossfit.
Ryan wants to make it crystal clear that he is not a hippie and did not want to talk about this experience. He is not an "Ayahuasca person" but since he also attends burning man, he may already be on a slippery slope...
Disclaimer
This interview and associated content is in no way an endorsement or recommendation that anyone should do Ayahuasca or any other illegal drugs — there is nothing you cannot achieve or go do on your own through meditation or spiritual practices.
Key takeaways
How did this come to happen? [2:58] For Ryan, it began years ago with an obsession for the truth — to witness: he left his faith in his mid-twenties because he no longer believed it was true.
This obsession has had him chasing ideas down many a rabbit hole, and he has been on this self-discovery journey for a long time (it would be ill advised for anyone to jump-start their personal discovery journey with the use of potent psychedelics.)
Recently though, his most reasonable, rational friend shared his very positive experience of Ayahuasca, and because this trusted friend did not come from a spiritual background and had such a spiritual experience, Ryan was convinced.
He had never planned on doing Ayahuasca and never wanted to: isn't that a glowing testament to the power of referrals!
It's been two weeks [6:04] Ryan's afterglow is gone now and he's ready to answer C-Money's questions from a more grounded place.
Surface questions first [7:28] What does it cost? (Shockingly affordable), What did you feel physically? What did you see?
There were no hallucinations per se — nothing like the open-eyed movie of psilocybin (mushrooms) — the experience was more akin to MDMA (ecstasy) but even then, it doesn't really encompass the experience.
Imagine that ethereal feeling in the space between consciousness and sleep, when your thoughts are more material, tangible and textured but free.
Imagine being in this state with a lucid mind.
An intensely personal experience [9:17] Aubrey's Marcus' recounted experience was diametrically in contrast to that of Ryan.
Don't take legal advice from a guy on the Internet [10:03] So the shaman prepares the brew from leaves, and hands you the equivalent of a raisin smoothie flavored shot glass...
Where do they find the ingredients?
What are the legal ramifications?
Ryan doesn't know! But as far as he believes, it's protected as a religious rite if you fit the criteria...
Anxiety [13:26] Managing his anxiety is a goal that Ryan was hoping to make some headway on with this experience, but on the first day he was met with a mind where thoughts were racing at a million miles an hour "How is this ever going to help me get rid of anxiety?"
That was the first realisation: those thoughts WERE anxiety.
Anxiety is the voice in your head who is constantly judging and making evaluations about right and wrong: you feel anxiety because you are making a judgement and that judgement may be right, or wrong.
I judge my body.
I judge my bank account.
According to what? It's all subjective, and who's to say who's right?
If you stop taking that voice so seriously, if you just remove judgement: there is no more anxiety.
Drive [16:36] Entrepreneurs tend to use anxiety as a tool to move forward, and they often fear healing the wounds that drive them, in case it removes their drive altogether.
But say your driver to get wealth is fear of scarcity, having wealth will not fix it! It will only make it worse: What should I do with my wealth? What if I lose it?
Try thinking of it this way: I don't want to be happy because unhappiness drives me!
Consciousness [22:56] You dose everyday for 3 days and Ryan's day 1 was frustrating because he was fighting with the voice of judgement the whole time.
Because of how day 1 unfolded, on day 2 the facilitator gave him a smaller dose before the ceremony followed by a full dose at the ceremony.
This journey was more pleasurable, and Ryan had an out of body experience for which he was required to disidentify with all physical things.
It sounds esoteric but it is a really interesting thought experiment:
Take away the money, the track record, the stuff? I am still me.
Take away health? I am still me.
Take away the "Ryan" construct? I am still me.
Take away your daughter? This was immensely painful but I was sad for me, for what I had lost. Somehow, I am still me.
Everything is temporary and everything is a blessing. If you accept what is, you can create what you want without any attachments to the results.
[27:40] This realisation does beg the question as to the place of legacy in this world… The obsession about legacy, immortality is rooted in a fear of death.
Death [29:37] Three weeks ago Ryan didn't believe in life after death. He does now.
He tries his hand at explaining life after death in two minutes or less:
In our experience of life, we are slaves to certain rules about our existence as reflected by certain things like biology and physics. Those are reflexions of the physical world.
Ryan asserts that consciousness precedes the physical world and in that construct, when our biology decays and goes away our consciousness remains.
"You remain in the physical world even if your meatsuit goes away."
Life after death (or before birth) is a physical but not in the sense of a biological experience, it means in essence that your consciousness is situated on a continuum which intersects other realities including this one.
Where is my meatsuit? [:32:21] What does it mean for consciousness to live on without the brain?
Ryan offers 2 analogies to better grasp his understanding of consciousness.
1. The dolphin:
A dolphin swims in the ocean and one day, he jumps out of the water and is amazed — The air! The sky! The trees! Wow! the whole though pattern about this experience is contained in the 3 second jump — and suddenly it becomes scared to lose all of this new wonder. But as soon as it hits the water it realizes it's home, and home is the same place after the jump as it was before.
Life is the jump. When it's over you just fold back into what existed before, and that's home. We need to enjoy the jump, man.
2. The flashlight:
Turn it on and it beams out wide and the light goes on, and on, and on forever and we are all photons in that beam expressing what is happening at its source, the origins of the beam: the singularity.
The lesson [37:03] Ryan's big lesson from all of this was: Relax.
There is no end or arrival, nothing to grasp, nothing to figure out, to do, no one is in control. Literally nothing is under control.
Anything you chose to do is all equally fine: at the end of it we all go back into the same ocean, weather that means nothingness or pure consciousness.
In that context, there is nothing to fear! You are already fully expressed so dance in it.
Resistance is futile [39:47] We quite literally create the things we don't want by resisting them. Your resistance to a thing supposes its very existence and possibility.
Trump is the perfect example of this: the reason he is president is because all the people talked about was how he shouldn't be president (they created the constant media noise about him.)
"Trump shouldn't be president" is a qualitative statement that includes the possibility of "Trump is president".
Back to reality [43:58] Ryan has done a lot of personal work and although he did gain some important insight, he didn't feel the urgency to proselytize as some do after such an intense experience.
Goal [47:29] To be content with what you have, to stop judging and comparing: there are days even Elon Musk doesn't want to be Elon Musk.
What if we just didn't play the comparison game? We'd all be equal and actually free! Which would probably result into you doing the thing that will make you the "Elon" of what you love to do.
Happiness [56:23] Stop making life so hard. Ryan has such specific rules as to what is required for him to be happy that it's easy to fall short, and when he does, he feels miserable.
When he meets other people and they ask what he is up to, his answer is now "I am practicing being happy". Happiness is the game, and business is just one of the ways Ryan is happy.
Find pleasure in what is.
Leadership [1:00:04] One of the things that occurred to Ryan was that if he wants to become all he wants to be, he has to to empower other people to do the same.
What he had done in the past was pull other people along — preventing them from learning and growing — when in fact he should have been pointing to the goal and calling people into that path.
A leader's job is to set the overall vision for the goal and then hold their people accountable for that.
Capitalism [1:03:16] After having a hippie experience, do you relax the marriage to Capitalism as an ideology?
Nope! It still stands that Capitalism is the system through which we exercise freedom and freedom requires people to be responsible, not coddled. The purpose of Government is to set the rules though which we practice freedom. As few rules as possible.
The judge [1:05:50] Ryan used to view God as the outside judge but the idea that there is a god outside ourselves, judging us, is actually a miscategorization of our own inner judge.
People who have a very profound desire to judge other people are actually just judging themselves. If you forgive yourself then you have the freedom to not judge other people which allows them to be what they want to be.
Let go of judgement will set you free, and that is a very humbling thing. But means everything to overall happiness.
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