‟We choose only once, to be warriors or ordinary…” Castaneda
I took out my Go Pro camera and feeling a bit inspired I decided to loose a few shafts from my wooden recurve bow. In a very unrehearsed and meandering narration I uncover some valuable lessons about zen when after making a few poor shots, I am forced to correct my mind in order to correct my results.
Amateur Zen & The Art Of Average Archery from Warrior Poet on Vimeo.
WPP 3 – Whitney Miller (Miss Texas), Nick “The Ghost” Gonzalez, Aubrey Marcus from Warrior Poet on Vimeo.
In our virgin video podcast we bring in professional fighter Nick “The Ghost” Gonzalez and Whitney Miller (Miss Texas) to discuss fighting, pageanting, and ultimately find the parallels between being ‘in the zone’ whatever your endeavor. The podcast closes with the game called ‘The Cube’, a great way to break the ice or learn about someone’s subconscious psychology. Please follow our gracious guests @nicktheghost and @whitneymiller10 and look for them on TV! We are still improving our technical prowess, and I mean ‘we’ in the King Louis royal sense of the word, so bear with me!
It couldn’t have come at a time more hostile toward the Christian/Catholic faith. I was in college and seething like Christopher Hitchens or Bill Maher with less than subtle contempt for ‘the faith’. Why? Well for starters I had been to a dungeon in Italy that housed the horrors of the Inquisition. I knew the story of Giordano Bruno. I was dating a girl whose sexuality was crushed when her boyfriend took her virginity and called her a sinner and a whore. I had a good friend who was tortured with catholic guilt every week for making out with pretty girls at a party. I had read Nietzsche’s “AntiChrist”, Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian” and I was determined to write a more devastating book than both of them combined.
A sound check from an audio technician I met only minutes before recording, turns into one of the coolest podcasts I have been a part of. We And yes, the sound quality is much improved! We cover multiple aspects of consciousness, meditation, and psychedelic exploration. A must hear for those who enjoy the Warrior Poet philosophy. Thanks to @quietdesign ’s Cory Allen for helping out and being such a cool guest. Check out his music at cory-allen.com and if you need some sound mastering hit him up at alteredear.com.
64 Minutes in Length
In the first installment of the Warrior Poet Project Podcast, Aubrey Marcus talks with CK Chin, a long time friend and hard working owner of Swift’s Attic in Austin, TX. The two follow a meandering pathway ultimately puzzling out the first and most important step toward dramatically improving our society.
Please bear with us as we gain mastery of the technical aspects of podcasting. We will be working to improve sound quality for #2 and hopefully be broadcasting live. In the meantime, let me know what you think! Thanks for your patience and support!
There was a buzz around my body, like I was caught inside a high voltage shed. The humming field of energy extended at least two to three feet, enveloping me in a palpable cocoon. My heart was pounding in my chest. Was I nervous? No fucking way, that couldn’t be possible. I had traveled to the other side of consciousness too many times for that. I tried to relax. I breathed deeply and exhaled a full breath, pushing out any nervous energy that might be lingering. Still my heart was pounding. Okay, maybe I was terrified! I moved on to explore my other senses further. The flickering firelight coming through the corners of my blindfold formed brilliant lens flares. I tucked the black cloth into the indentions of my sockets. I knew there was nothing but jet black pupil in my usually brown eyes. I felt a mild nausea. Already? Then I heard my fiancé on the mat parallel to mine cry out to the shaman, “I’m spinning!” Receptive to suggestion, my own world started tumbling like an oak barrel caught in a whitewater eddy. The shaman replied matter-of-factly, “Make it stop.” Good advice–It worked. Then it happened… I came face to face with Truth. Truth with a capital T.
“Nothing good happens after 4AM”. That’s a total lie. Post 4am has the potential for epic dark-energy indulgence, tender moments only possible when the ego’s defenses have been obliterated, and a special camaraderie amongst soldiers who have shared a mutual battle. Some of my most valuable and lasting relationships can recount early stories from the pre-dawn night. The reason people make that fallacious rule of thumb is that they lack the discipline or the intent to do what they should be doing all along: Party with their third-eye open.
In the era of the great composer, master musicians would weave together an orchestra of sound into a moving auditory experience. These symphonies, concertos, and sonatas would transfix the listener, translating the collective subconscious into sound. Gradually over time as attention span grew shorter and time more scarce, symphonies were replaced with songs, until finally the mark of a good album was that it had more than one ‘single’. While of course modern historic exceptions remain (Pink Floyd comes to mind), as a general rule playlists have replaced records. Nearly 11 billion songs have been downloaded on iTunes and only a fraction of them have come as part of an album download.
This is about to change. After experiencing a 3 day floating concert on the infamous Holy Ship!, I realized that we are about to usher in a new era, and with it a revival of the great composer. Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky– this pantheon of legends is being reborn amidst a full embrace of sonic technology. These maesto’s are not simply playing songs, they are once again translating the struggle and triumph of life into a musical journey.
Star Wars had it partly right. “You will be tempted by the dark side,” says the Jedi master to the initiate. Except they forgot to tell him why; Dirty, filthy sex with thousands of slave girls from every distant planet of course. Two opposing forces… equally seductive and locked in a mortal struggle. Creation vs. Destruction. Light vs. Dark. Good vs. Evil? That is where things aren’t so black and white. While obviously much of the evil committed is rooted in imbalances of dark energy impulses, the dark energy itself is not evil. The simplified distinction can be made: dark energy is the animal, light energy is the spiritual. And just as there must be dark for there to be light, there must be the mundane for there to be the sublime.
I was told that it takes 28 days for you to integrate what you experienced in the worlds opened up by the Ayahuasca. The shamans who guided our journeys in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon warned us to take things very slowly upon our return, as the inner process was still incomplete. I’m a warrior, I told myself. 28 days are the number of little white pills in my fiancé’s purse! I’m gonna give myself a week. So then after 2 days I dove back into my life like a pitbull on Viagra in a steak house full of bitches. After all, I had been to the 8th dimension. I had experienced a reality that few have ever been privy to. What could possibly slow me down?
