Maja D’Aoust | Familiar Spirits, Spiritual Labor, & The Conscious Cosmos

The planet's puppet man surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man And until we've thoroughly tested every last close-chested view I find the more we think we know, the less we really do Without THC, because we know they're lying too Just don't know where would we be without THC The Higher Side Chat Show It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, from the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood And while many people never stray beyond or even question the conditioning that has them living their whole lives within the guardrails of established consensus reality The rest of us have let curiosity get the best of us from time to time Whether it's psychedelic substances, Eastern mysticism, meditation, lucid dreaming, dabbling with the occult Or maybe something more random and less voluntary Like shadow beings in our bedroom, near-death experience Or even a spontaneous sexual kundalini experience, if we might be so lucky Oftentimes, it only takes a single instance of sensing the deeper reality behind the material facade and our meat-body shells To change us permanently and get us wondering how far those boundaries can be pushed on What lies beyond, and might there be behaviors or even beings out in those unmapped spaces that can enrich our lives more than the endless scroll of a digital screen Well, today's guest, Maja Deo, knows this all too well Out-of-body experience due to childhood illness and three near-death experiences along the way made it obvious that there was more to explore and on top of being a practicing witch and professional astrologer She's also earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and a master's in transformational psychology with a focus on shamanism, the I Ching, and ancestors She's the author of several books like Astrology of the Shadow Self, Working with Oppositions in Your Natal Chart The Occult I Ching, The Secret Language of Serpents A Witch's Bestry, Visions of Supernatural Creatures Familiars in Witchcraft, Supernatural Guardians and the Magical Traditions of the World And a book she co-authored with Adam Parfury The Secret Source, The Law of Attraction and Its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages You can find all that and more on her website Witchofthedawn.com And it's a pleasure to have her here The occult advocate, astrological insight extractor and the true good witch of the West Maja, welcome to The Higher Side Thank you so much for having me, Greg It's a pleasure to be here with you today Yeah, thanks for doing it It was a pleasure to meet both you and your guy briefly at Miguel Conner's Astronosis and I liked your presentation there I got a question or two about that But Sure Just to play off the intro though There are many ways to break through consensus reality and baseline consciousness to prove to oneself there is more going on behind the scenes I know you've experienced a range of them What do you consider the quickest or most reliable way to make it happen for those who haven't but might be curious? Sure, that's a really great question You know, I've done a lot of spiritual labor as you mentioned in my life so some of it is really hard work to break through but in my experience I've done divination sessions for squares And by that I mean someone who's not into any spiritual things at all I went to this one party where they hired me and it was all lawyers who were not spiritual at all They were probably the most base people which we need them, right? Like we all want a lawyer when we need them but they had zero other experience And with a simple three-card tarot reading that I gave to them they had an existential crisis So I would say that in my experience tarot and the I Ching is probably the fastest easiest way to show you that reality is not as it seems and I've had probably several thousand experiences with people I like to do what I call sneak attacks where people don't know who I am or what I do and I'm just kind of hired for some mundanity and people have no clue and then they have the experience they're like, what is this? What is going on? And then they have essentially like a psychedelic experience without drugs I'll give you an example just really quickly I was reading for this lawyer and the cards that drew was that his father had just passed away and that he had to really go into his grief and it was exactly correct His father had just passed away like two days ago and he got spooked by the session because it was exactly spot on and then he was asking me all these questions like, who are you? What is this? But I was like, you don't have to worry about it All you have to worry about is to deal with your grief for your dad and then he was just like this was a party he was drinking and within minutes he had had a total breakthrough so I do feel like the divination if you, you know, this is you don't have to do a vision quest or so much spiritual labor you can really see that reality is thin if you can have a good experience with divination Yeah, that's not what I expected to hear from you but it does make sense that if a reading is extremely specific or accurate you have to start reverse engineering how could that be possible? And it's not exactly a visual experience but it's very similar but I really do think the effort required seems kind of perfectly designed for this reality because you can go your whole life and completely ignore the greater reality if you want to and then with minimal effort you can see beyond now I was thinking, you know you can take psychedelics but then there's always the question was that the substance? or you can do other things like meditation but three card spread I mean, that's really minimal effort especially if you're having someone else do it 10 minutes, right? It's pretty good Also, I would secondarily say a dream where if you experience a dream because everyone can dream, right? We all do it every night but some people's dreams I feel like my dreams are not the same as others so some people can't quite breach that but if you have a good dream where it's like, whoa something's weird here that can also just pop you out real quick but in the 10 minute three card spread that's the fastest I've ever seen it happen Yeah, it's just like we think so much about ways we would want to improve our physical self through diet and exercise and we spend no time thinking about the spiritual self and meditation is difficult I mean, I've definitely fallen off that wagon many times and then gotten pretty far into it and it's like a use it or lose it thing just like a lot of exercise but you can actually see beyond the very thin veil it's really not that thick you can see beyond it faster than you could develop six pack abs if you really wanted to and I think it's just calibrated perfectly that's kind of like one of the reasons why I think reality is kind of designed for you to make of it what you want because it's just like a lot of people couldn't wrestle with it if you had to engage with it but you don't It's true I think there is the make it what you want and I am an advocate of free will and that we all need to find our own way rather than being dictated to and for me it's very important to not listen to what people say to some degree and to find your own truth but there is also this spiritual reality and parts of truth that are consistent and real where even in these spiritual realities like for me the closest thing I can find is the Taoists that see how nature works and the golden mean and to see like phi or things that are consistent so a big part of my spiritual practice is trying to find consistencies in the crazy chaotic thing that is these other realms and when you can find that there are rules or consistencies even in these I guess you would call them deviant realities or realities that go against the norm that's what has kept me going so if I have an experience that I read about that an ancient Taoist has I'm like oh that how can they have had this same thing happen 3,000 years ago so I like to also see the consistencies that come in the patterns of the fractals not just the chaotic kind of like unraveling right well said and I've heard you talk about the free will versus fate question that's always asked and you put it in an analogy of a boat on a river the river goes one way you can still steer the boat around you can either run it aground on shore or hit a rock or this or that or you can have a smooth experience or a very rocky one but you're on the river so that doesn't change but how you navigate the river can and I think that's really a great analogy and going back to the thing you said about dreams funny that you shared with me I popped into your dreams last night on a stationary bike which is so appropriate because these days I do feel like I'm just spinning my wheels you were literally riding a stationary bike and you were making yourself toast with bread and the bread was almost gone and you were like who ate all the bread again but you had just like wanted some toast so that was what the dream was but yeah dreams are crazy it does sound like the scattered mind of a dad of two toddlers so yeah I think that's appropriate and so even after I've done so many great interviews about greater consciousness and all these abstract things I still struggle I recently had Gordon White here talking about time beings and we've gotten into the idea of some type of intelligence that speaks to us in the language of synchronicity these are fun bizarre ideas but there's still a part of me that says okay well where is that on the map like how do I put that into the greater picture how do you advise people to try to visualize or construct a model for the non-physical and how it intertwines with what we can map more easily it's really challenging so if people are struggling I'm here to give props because yeah it's literally nothing like what you can conceive of especially in modern culture so the way I experience it's funny like Grant Morrison talks about this too and as you go into the time dimension the best way I can describe it is it's like Picasso's nude descending a staircase or like it goes into this snake and this is what Grant Morrison talks about imagine you could see yourself from the time you're born to the time you die in every place you'd gone and kind of in Donnie Darko they have this as well as he has that thing that comes out of his chest where it shows where he's gonna go and it looks like a snake so when we go into time beings and time space they don't see it the same way that we do and when I talk to Gordon it's like a dragon because you want to know why it's like like a slithery thing and some people if you take psychedelics you can see tracers right that's how it is from the time space beings perception you don't just see these moments like we do you see the whole thing like this weird snaky loopy thing and so if you're trying to conceive of a reality that is higher dimension and then this gets into four dimensional five dimensional things because you're literally going to perceive it in a different way than we're used to I do feel like our brains have made and this is what my teacher Dr. Kelvin DeWolf explained it too from indigenous our minds have shifted our perception so that we can navigate the 3D world without getting eaten or getting hit by a car right so we have to take it bit by bit but if you're going to be a time being you have to understand that you're going to literally be perceiving things different one of the best explanations of that would be like flatlands the romance where he talks about interdimension or Carl Sagan's lecture he gave on the tesseract and fourth dimension so before you can even approach that you have to understand that you're looking at something from a different dimensional perspective and if you can't widen your view to that you're not really going to be able to grok a time being because they're going to be literally viewing things with different eyeballs if that makes sense yeah it really does especially the Donnie Darko example and just the way you can try to get outside of your head and think about yourself as a series of slides or frames you know to use the cinematography language but yeah we often maybe think about interacting with these beings and we take for granted our perspective and this is you know the main reality and wherever they are they can come into this reality and give us insights but we don't really take into account that their perspective might be completely bizarre and different and the reason our interactions might not be exactly clear is not always because of something we did or because the language is different it might be because from their perspective they're perceiving reality so different that any message they give is clear to them or they think it's clear yes but not to us in my experiences of exchanges with some of these higher dimensional sentiences I find myself in debates or arguments with them where I'm like that just won't work here I can't do that I call myself a spiritual arbitrator because I do a lot of arguing and debate which if you look at many of the stories of religions they'll have a main person that argues with God or spirit and I relate to that very much because you're like no I can't do that that's not going to work for example in some of my peak experiences they were like what's the problem why can't you just and you're like well that just won't go like there's all this stuff you have to go I feel like it's like in 3d and our meat suits and our bodies we're sludging through this time space and these time beings don't have to deal with that so it's literally like if you're a parent and you're talking to your toddler and you're like why can't you just do a backflip babe and they're like I can't do a backflip so I feel like it's that kind of thing because they see our struggle and our problems they can't relate to it because they're not in a body or have to deal with gravity or hunger so they're trying to give us data but it's like talking to a toddler trying to get them to do stuff that you could easily do yeah that's good that's good especially for this point in my life because I say the simplest directions in the clearest language and it doesn't seem won't work to get through that's right we fight we fight it you know because we're like how am I supposed to do this it's hard and I don't really gravitate to the language of this is a prison planet or a prison reality I mean it's provocative I like the Gnosticism stuff and I find it fun but I like this life though you could see from a different perspective it's very dense and maybe your actions are extremely limited or it takes a long time to get the six-pack abs like you can't just make things happen it's repeated action over and over again and finally you get a result so from a being not constrained by those limitations you could easily be like man that looks like it sucks you're walking through cement every day but that's why it's the boundary work and why is the time god Saturn right which is all you said the word constraint and this is very important because as a mother and I'm sure for you too and maybe our listeners will know we mostly rebel at boundaries if someone says no you can't do that it's gonna rile up our ego right like a toddler that's like why can't I have the ice cream but I agree with you and I also don't believe we are punished or anything like this it's a different experience right which has constraints which has boundaries but I don't view those as negative so many people I work with I'm trying to get people to have more boundaries better boundaries work within their boundaries because if we can do that kind of Saturn constraint let in work in time space that's I think part of the human experience where we can excel if we can learn to deal with and accept boundaries it's very important yeah and to get a little bit more into fate or helping people find their way or what you might do with clients this is just a silly example but I had a vasectomy and then a buddy of mine was like well you know you probably shouldn't have done that because if it's God's will for you to have more kids you would just have more kids and my response was well if it was God's will then he would have put a lot of roadblocks up for me to get the vasectomy I would have missed my appointment I would have gotten a car accident on the way and then things would have happened and then all you know all of a sudden we're pregnant again you know that would be the way so it's like a lot of people have different ideas of interacting with the will or getting in the way of it how do you advise people to start finding the path because to me I have always kind of I just said this to Gordon the other day don't ask and you shall receive I've always been very hands-off and I've found my way kind of by stumbling through it and now I do feel kind of fated to do what I do now but there hasn't been a lot of conscious attention into it though I have friends who are constantly going from one job to another always pissed off this job didn't do the thing like they just always are facing massive resistance and I'm like man maybe you need to move out of that city or something or get away from that partner like they don't see those as signposts whereas I would I just see if it's easy then it's probably right I mean obviously I'm not a hedonist I do get up and have responsibilities but how do you thread that needle between like taking signs negative signs in one's life as like maybe you aren't quite on the path and then maybe going too far and being like hey everything's groovy you know you can also dive too much into indulgences and then also not find your path yes that's excellent and I deal with that on the daily my whole book the secret source was kind of against the positivity movement where everything should be great and if you're not manifesting a million dollars every day it's your problem so I also feel like there's bad things that happen here in this reality that's not because you're doing something wrong to be clear we have death we have trauma we have things we have to deal with and this is something that I think is really important for people to know that the world and bad experiences are not your fault but we have to navigate so I look for cycles and patterns so as I help clients if somebody like you said your friend that keeps meeting that same thing you're in a loop and you're not breaking into the spiral to go up rather than but I would never say that because you had a negative experience or a failure that that's you're bad for not following the path I don't believe that and I feel like we're in a jungle where like I wouldn't blame a gazelle for drinking out of watering hole that it got eaten by a lion right we have to deal with the nature and so many things but we have to hook into our navigation system we have to pay attention and if something doesn't work and you keep hitting your head against that wall you're gonna have to shift you're gonna have to take your hands off the wheel like you said if we're trying to really hyper control right and be like this is what I want this is where I'm going I want this and I meet so many not to be offensive but women that feel like they need that perfect partner who's gonna do ABC and if they have an experience where someone doesn't do exactly what they expect they're gonna leave to try to do it somewhere else but that's not realistic so we have to do some emotional labor we have to look at what's our pattern that we're stuck in we have to be open to be mutable to make shifts to make changes and to see if there is a path that's there for us which I do feel like is there for everyone where we can come into a kind of flowering of our best potential you can even mess up a lot of times in my experience like I work with addicts for example you can really fuck off for a lot of years and still come back I feel like spirit and reality loves a good comeback they love redemption so I don't think you can really mess everything up you have to do labor to fix but sometimes having that path of having to fix something is also part of your deal so I think it's about raising awareness to are you just hitting your head against that wall do you need to be a little more open a little more shifty and that actually helps most of the time yeah fair enough and there's so many people out there with so many different problems and a wide spectrum so advice should be broad but it is really just awareness awareness recognize your patterns I think a lot of it is the cyclical thinking like if you look at your life in those terms what aspects are going the way you want and which ones aren't and how can you apply what you did in those other areas to the things that aren't going that well you're exactly correct yeah your perception or something or did you reflect more were you less reactionary those kind of things but I spent time with all three of the books you were kind enough to share with me but I think my favorite is familiars in witchcraft to me the idea of a designated spiritual companion is a good entryway to sensing a larger than human world we know that people we hold in high regard from Socrates to Nikola Tesla were fairly open about their lines of communication with some sort of non-physical intelligence but we take that out of the story a lot of the times and it sounds very odd to modern ears but how common is that throughout history you think extremely common and you'll see it in almost every large event or people who assume positions of leadership will almost all make mention of this even modern-day presidents right I mean think about it George Bush did the war on Iraq because he said God told him to right what does that mean it means he's hearing voices we're perfectly willing to stigmatized people who hear voices as being mentally ill unless it's the president saying God told him to go to war right so you can see it all over the place if you look but it's widely prevalent this is not to excuse that certain people will hear voices that direct them to ill will as well which is very well documented in many cases of serial killers for example people or you could obviously if you're in Iraq you would say that George Bush has had ill will to use the name of the Lord to go to war with you so it gets really sketchy right because people will use directives as a call to action but you can see that many people throughout the entire course of history have a relationship or dialogue with an external entity giving them directives and these are most of our very intelligent historical figures will claim this there's a lecture on my YouTube where I talk about the occult origins of science and if we look at many of the most incredible scientific advances they were all receiving it that way as well there was an Indian fellow who'd received dreams where a goddess came to him and told him the solution to mathematical equations like what that he would not know the periodic table was given in a dream to the fellow that was working on it so there are certain advances scientifically human beings have made that there's no way they could have figured out or deduced on their own that was communicated to them and they say as much so I don't understand why we don't spend more attention on that because that's crazy right I think Francis Crick is another example he was shown the double helix in a dream and it's like man imagine a culture that accepts this and then has entire structures built for gaining that kind of insight like maybe the Greeks had this but it was definitely more in their culture to accept that sort of information and it's like you look at the megalithic sites around the world and people romanticize and speculate what were they for and some people think they were meeting places between the gods and people like the serpent mounds yes exactly yeah or gobekli tepe they say oh it looked like a place where people would go and have a ritual before the hunt and you know Stonehenge it's like well these places they all seem somewhat circular and if you just leaned into that ability think about how far society could go if you are willing to accept that sort of information and then fold it in and advance upon it it could be pretty great but apparently we haven't done that instead it was stigmatized so check it out not to get to like tinfoil hat but not only is it not encouraged it's discouraged and made taboo right so to kind of add a layer to what you just said we could encourage it and see when people are receiving this information but we instead make it a psychological illness when it occurs unless you have enough power and clout to be able to claim God told you to go to war and then perfectly acceptable exactly and I love the George Bush example because there's a through line kind of in all of your books where you know you are a witch you're an occultist and you advocate for that direct relationship that interaction with these magical tools and that's great and you kind of always come back to or reiterate that the major religions will demonize all this stuff and they might not kill you today but they definitely have a lot of blood on their hands and yet these very tools and practices are baked into their religions in ways that they allow and people don't even question you mentioned that Roman Catholic altars have remnants of the saints in there but necromancy is bad and you can't engage with spirits of the dead and of course the Holy Spirit we can ask the Holy Spirit for guidance I heard that many times from priests growing up but if you hear a voice that they determine was not the Holy Spirit which how would they know they didn't hear the voice then you can get burned alive so it is interesting because I think there's a thing in this culture where we go through and like yeah we probably get a lot of religion in the beginning and then it's like oh well there's one God and then it's like oh there's these other religions the three Abrahamic religions and there's so much war which one's the real God and then it's like oh well go to indigenous cultures and the whole world the whole outside reality is full of spirits and things that can speak to you so who knows anything about the one true God or what any voice in your head is then you get to the point that like they can also lie to you or rape your children sure hello and that's just but oh there God's correct it's a hot mess it is but it's like that is a question that comes up here a lot because we talk about the intersection of power and magic and these kind of things so it's like some being told George Bush to go to war and then he says it's God which is really God is more like a label for just like spirit angel God I consider one of many so some God told you to go and kill over a million people overseas probably not the God I want to pray to if there's any truth to that at all you could just be leaning on people's predispositions and like oh well we can't question it if God said it go ahead and I feel like a lot of this is bullying one of the main reasons I'm an advocate for everyone to tune in to their inner conscious it's a little like how Elon Musk says everyone needs to have AI because if there's only one AI but this is a natural force I talk about this in the astrology shadow book it's a Saturn shadow in my opinion you've seen the movie Highlander right mm-hmm there can be only one but this is natural this is the alpha state where all things will try to go to one ruler one ring to rule them all so if we're not careful and we don't decentralize a natural link is to go into a single point that's the pyramid symbolism how I was shown is that all things arise to a single point but then it falls because it can't be sustained with a single point when everyone says you must listen only to this God and not the others what is that that's a bully you don't count because I say it's a boss I don't like being told what to do so this was how I was hip to this data you're gonna see the same structure fall with corporations with families with a band right you're gonna see it again and again and when you see something over and over it means it's a natural disposition to go into this point into this pyramid where there's only one to rule them all and this is like Emperor of China shit this is Genghis Khan we see it over and over throughout history so whenever anyone tells me there's only one way I know they're going into a bully and a boss and I rebuke and refuse but then we do have to come into a consensus to do things in reality you lead a family how are you going to do anything if everyone isn't on board and we don't all agree so community consensus I'm more of like a bioregionalist where I feel like we can work with structures but as soon as anything starts getting to this is the only way and the one God says this and everyone else is wrong I'm like oh no this is a cult you're incorrect it's bad yeah I like that and to talk a little bit more about power and magic obviously there's a lot of speculation but we do see weird things like Michael Bloomberg being obsessed with this Mithraeum that is unearthed or Marina Abramovic hanging out with people it's like well if she's an artist then fine I guess but she's hanging out with a lot of powerful people that you would think wouldn't have time for her what is that about taking pictures with Rothschilds in front of paintings of Lucifer so there seems to be something to it but I guess no one who isn't involved would really know the degree to which the elite respect magic and use magic but what are your thoughts on that that at the upper levels of society there's an unadvertised affinity for using some of these tools it's parasitic did you see the movie Akira where they have the psychic children that they use to get all the information yeah when someone comes into a high creative state and utilizes rituals that can then get reflected into reality I'm a writer okay so I've had experiences much like Alan Moore has talked about where if you write something it can show up in reality maybe that's happened to you on some of your shows where you said some words they get broadcast and then it changes reality and one of the easiest ways to see that magic is real is you can play around with this and it's a spell or spell writing when an individual reaches a high creative state and people can see that they're really good at manifesting their ritual practices the people higher up are gonna be like oh that's a let me get a little bit of that because maybe they haven't done that spiritual labor and so they're gonna use them just like they would any other laborer or worker so if for example Netflix sees that a comedian is really good at making people laugh and has a high return they're gonna absolutely take that comedian and give them a lot of specials but it's under their contract now they're going to do that ownership over this creative individual because they can see that that has value or worth to them that's just my personal opinion yeah that makes sense to me and we do see a lot of people who get idolized in Hollywood is like oh these big name actors they're making millions and millions of dollars everyone knows them their life looks so great and then they try to take a break and they come right back to work because even though they've made six seven figures somehow it got sucked away from them they got bamboozled you look at NFL players who have these six figure seven figure contracts and then at the end they're like broke and it's just like how does that happen to regular people you can't even fathom like I would never lose that amount of money if I got it but you're not always in charge right as soon as you try to do something creative if you don't maintain that control you have publishers you have lawyers you have your distributors your agent all of a sudden all these middlemen go and then everything is parasitized off of you before you can even say your name and so these contracts one of my favorite books for maybe I think your listeners would like it's called God's Man by Lynn Lynn Ward Lynn Ward and it is the first graphic novel it's all in woodcuts and it depicts the problem of the creative where they get usurped or taken over by this has been going on a long time this is Goethe's Faust this is the same story it's so boring but somehow these pyramid schemes I view it all as pyramid schemes where the creative power is taken and culled by individuals in positions with the resources and contracts that are gonna take your power away and bully and boss you it's true I mean you get six or seven people getting their ten percent piece of the pie there's not a lot left and then you got to pay the tax man that's right I work in LA I see it with clients every day and myself there was one situation I won't name names so I don't get sued because libel and slander are very serious maybe you've run into that as well just talking on your show but I offered I volunteered to assist I was solicited by a show from Netflix to give some consult they were gonna pay me a small amount but I was like you know what I'll do it free come hang out talk to me and then they were like okay but first you have to sign this and I looked at what I was gonna sign they were gonna own my face own my name be able to call me in whenever they want it was absolute slavery and I said no way get out don't talk to me again so you get involved with some of these things that everyone thinks is the best thing ever but it is a literal selling of your soul they wanted to own my face yes I can say that exact thing has happened to me and I've been offered to come be a part of this show or that show and the contract shows up and it's like now they're gonna dictate what I say on the higher side chats I have to give them approval for shows and guests because putting me in their show I can't do anything on my own show that might damage the reputation of that show and it's like wow I mean they own you yeah good for you for saying no good for you it's hard though right because we need to earn income I hate how creatives are treated and even with AI now entering where your value or worth becomes this kind of sellout idea and these contracts which you have been able to maintain your own autonomy and authority and for that I salute you because it is a struggle and then you're like how do I earn income if I don't do these pharaonic contracts that seek to own you yeah because I mean I am so happy with what I do but then you get hit up by a traditional TV network and it's like yeah I'd love to be a talking head on an ancient aliens type show or something but then I went through three contracts and they were all the same and it's like well I'm not even going to look at another one because this is clearly a pattern and I had a friend who has dealt with this who got me in touch with an entertainment lawyer and the entertainment lawyer is like have you ever had someone from Hollywood hit you up and say hey we want to put you in something what are some of your best ideas of what that could be and I was like oh yeah they'll steal every one of them exactly don't give them any ideas I've had my shit stolen so many times that I was like but so to go back to where we started this conversation I personally believe they're trying to cull from these creatives and from these ritualists because they know that we have a connection to the muse to those entities that are giving us these ideas and that's why they're interested that's my opinion yeah I think that makes a lot of sense I was gonna come back to the familiars idea and ask you more about like how an individual could facilitate a better relationship with their familiar do we all get a familiar I mean I've read Patrick Harper's demonic reality and you know he frames some of this is more like cryptids or like animal spirits kind of companions and some people think of it as angels guardian angels of course how do you see familiars is there a range of possibilities is there any mechanism to determine who gets what and how can we start that relationship if we've ignored it for so long yes I think everyone has them that's my opinion some people might disagree but we're here in our meat suit bodies and we are animals we automatically have correspondences and dispositions to certain creatures because of where our animal came from the land it's on in the familiars book I talk about how there was even areas in China where they said they were descended from dragons and serpents and they weren't being metaphorical and this is if we think about ancestry everyone thinks about people or the grandparents but to me I include ancestors as like the first creatures that had blood like arthropods and scorpions they found a lot of genes that have the same as humans that are like in bees okay bees actually share a lot of genetic ancestry with us which I always think is funny because certain people are so allergic to bees but we have these entities that are not only guardian angels or our family members but also animals parts of the land like rivers I had crazy experiences where the Ohio River was talking to me it's not happy by the way the Ohio River wants us to stop dumping stuff in it including our dead bodies so if anyone like hears that message but we have relationships that are familiar we can have them with angels with these kind of outer entities or you can develop them with stuff from your meat soup from the earth from the land from the food that we eat like let's say you eat beets every day of your life there's going to be a kind of fairy or fae that is in charge of the beets so you could have or develop a relationship with that and so some of them I think we're born in with other ones I think we can develop them for me I had the most severe experience with speaking with other entities and seeing my familiar spirit when I did vision quests so these were definitely spiritual labor where I fasted no sleep plant medicine and really open that space on purpose but I could see other places where that guidance was always there like where I'd get assistance I would say or directives that usually were to save other people or to remain out of danger that was how I experienced before I came into like a really close contact after doing my spiritual labor I definitely had an experience when I was really young of a voice that got me out of danger basically told me to put my seatbelt on when I was very resistant to seatbelts and I actually listened for some reason and then was in a car accident whoa like that yes I've never really thanked that being or tried to be like hey can we communicate when I'm not in a immediate danger or heightened stress that's how Socrates described his daemon as well people would ask Socrates about his daemon and he said watch out hmm Socrates said his daemon mostly alerted him to danger much like you experienced for me too one of the clearest ones I was walking down the sidewalk I passed a man he was rolling his two-year-old daughter you know those little like cars where you push behind and the child sits on him sure I walked by and in my ear it said watch out like a voice but it wasn't said and I turned around and the child was getting off the car and running into the road and her father couldn't move in time and I reached out and grabbed her arm and stopped her from getting hit by a car but it was a literal voice that spoke in my ear damn now how do you factor that in to the whole thing about fate and free will and being on the boat on the river it's like you know some people don't hear that voice or they don't act on that voice and why do we have that voice step in at some points and not others I mean I have been in other car accidents I didn't hear a voice those times I'd also didn't die but it's messed up and then people are like what am I doing wrong if I was forsaken so what you're talking about is being forsaken sure right and then we think was I not a good enough boy or girl or whatever you want to identify as that now I'm forsaken then that's what Jesus says on the cross and so many spiritual people in books and religions they come to this crisis when Jesus is crucified and the eclipse happens the words he says which I mentioned in the epilogue of my astrology shadow book a shadow crosses over and he's basically like fuck you God is this why you created me and he rebels and says like why was I led here why do I have to deal with this and this is the point we come to when we have to deal with negative or terrible things and we think why wasn't I saved and I'll tell you all my clients that experience their loved ones passing terrible diseases they'll think why didn't you tell me don't do this and it could have saved me it's the problem of pain that C.S. Lewis talks about as well in his book like why are we told sometimes not all the time I don't know I struggle and fight with that a lot so I can't say I have an answer but I hear you and I fight with God or spirit or whatever goddess whoever is there my guides I have to fight them to get information and then at the last second they'll usually step in and say something but I had to like fight for it and I'm like oh such a pain to do yeah it is interesting to think about but there's that whole section of people who think like well everything is just experience you know why do people starve in Africa well it's a spectrum of experience and God is experiencing everything from good to bad I kind of do agree with that but sometimes those people use that to justify really evil things and not take action and I think you know we may be in a story or a play and there may be good guys and bad guys but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to defeat the bad guys maybe that's part of the game maybe that's part of the hero's journey you know there needs to be a dragon doesn't mean you let the dragon eat everybody in the village and just say well that's part of the experience you know part of the experience is also fighting that thing so I don't like when people use that argument to justify or accept really horrible things that go on but you have to think well what is the big picture what happens to us when we die are we all just souls coming down for a physical experience because it's something that God decided would be interesting and then broke off a bunch of fractals to have those experiences and left us here with no memory otherwise it wouldn't work so I don't know I think there can be action in the game and then also a bigger picture of like well yeah negative things exist in it because it can't just all be bliss sitting around being fanned by women eating grapes yeah you can't use that as a reason or justification why you don't need to care it's about caring it is about caring I agree and this was an interesting line in the familiars book but you say this is an important point that cannot be understated if you lose control of your dog and it bites you or someone else there are terrible consequences likewise if you lose control of your familiar spirit and it goes feral there can be similar dangers keeping trust and control when working with spirits can prevent mutiny and I really love that last line and just using the term mutiny there because when people who are more Christian don't engage with this stuff that's always what they go to is like when you start messing with the spirits they're gonna wreck your life and everything's gonna go bad but then there's other people I know who have positive reciprocal relationships with spirits and it is a lot of times about honoring the land and really positive things like treating animals and the plant kingdom with respect I mean that's good care yes talk to us about this idea of a mutiny and how just like in any human relationship human to human relationship it can go south and you can be like shit what even happened there I was trying to do the right thing spiritual relationships even more complex but help us if we do engage with them not create feral familiars and have mutinies I'm so glad to speak on this and I'll do it as concise as possible I get harassed by Christians constantly as soon as you announce that you work with spirits there's a wave of harassment by Christians calling you demonic they'll say don't engage with divination because it's demonic but we see Christians themselves fall to thinking they're doing the right thing every day you'll see in the news someone who claimed to be a Christian that was following the orders of God and then does terrible things right every cult has this story parents on Instagram that do terrible things their children are also claiming the same thing so what I would say on that is that spirit is amoral humans have morality and we have to tend to and care for things or it'll be destroyed that's our responsibility so we have to navigate these things that we're told like I said we have to arbitrate we have to have a debate if I'm told by spirit and this is the best example in the bible is when Abraham is told to murder his son it's like you're told to do this by spirit and then you need to like speak up if you're being told to do something wrong you need to say no and this is what I said earlier about the boundary work do you do everything your friend tells you to do absolutely not I don't someone can tell me to do stuff that I'm like I don't really think so I think that's a little sketchy right so it's the same when navigating the spirit world you have to maintain and this is what Kelvin DeWolf very much told me and believes is that you have to have your own inner authority your own value system your own connection to your right and wrong your yes no your discernment and as you go through and unfold your spiritual initiation you're taught to be like is it shit or shinola what does it smell like and so these are decisions you have to make no matter what a spirit tells you to do so if you're receiving information from the spirit world you still are the one that has to navigate and do it that requires autonomy authority and your individual stance in fact in the bible Moses was told not to listen to angels and to listen to himself in all of Abraham same thing and when he goes through that test Abraham trying to sacrifice his son the angel stops him and is like what are you doing and Abraham's like uh you told me to do this so what are you talking about what am I doing and it's like don't do that and he's like what there's this cognitive dissonance where part of the tests are to see what's your choice you when spirit comes and says identifies itself it says I am I am you are we are who's you who dis right who am I talking to what's your choice and that's discernment so when we have spirits that are rebellious it's like children again as parents this is what gave me this insight is that and dealing with people if I'm in a group of people and everyone's gonna drink the kool-aid I'm gonna say no and then have to deal with it because I'm listening to me me says this also even if I'm getting directed I'm the one that has to do it so do not ever release your authentic self your autonomy your inner voice that's telling you maybe this isn't a good idea but we get swept up in these waves of influence influence is what I mentioned as the key to dealing with these familiars with instagram with social media with other people we must understand how influence comes and then you find your center and your pillar in the middle of it right we have so many influences but sometimes because we have so little experience with the spirit world people prioritize a voice that has no body because they just don't know how to interact with that they don't have the discernment for such a thing which is why the military develops technologies to put voices in your skull because they know if a guy in fatigues or in a men in black suit comes and tells you to do something you'll be skeptical but if they just beam it into your head you'll do it darpa man yeah the radio wave that's been going on a long time when they started the microwaves so if you have discernment you don't need to worry about any of those things so many people they're like what do I do and I even hate I wish I had no clients okay this is why I'm a bad professional and my clients I try to empower and tell them what do you think a lot of times they want to pull cards and see what's the truth what's the answer but a good oracle and anyone who's doing their job well I need to say what's your immediate feeling I want to pull cards to help you make your choice but not to make the choice for you because then I'm taking away that discernment which if every individual had better discernment I feel like that would be maybe the best start we could make to navigate yeah I'm with you so I guess that's a final question is I would ask how do you discern from your own imagination because I might invoke or I might try to engage in some of these processes and then immediately my imagination starts going and I'm just like well I can't separate you have to clear your mind so again I'll refer to my teacher but you actually should not think you make a space where there's no thought the correct or I won't say correct because who knows but the meditation process I learned was to actually make like a cavitation or a bubble where there's nothing so the way I can discern am I creating something I should not be thinking anything and it's what comes in when it's quiet it's like think about an empty nest that a bird lands into that's how I can tell if it's spirit or if I'm generating something but I mean it's very subjective I guess you could say but so when I have nothing to say that's when it can come in if I'm making a bunch of noise I'm not going to hear anything because my mind is too loud so if you're very creative and intelligent you're almost at a disposition to do this work because you have to work harder to clear out your own damn head and make it quiet so that you can get something else coming in but I always discern by is it I get the proof I ask for proof or corroboration reality so that's kind of where I do my judgments makes a lot of sense and it really does go back to meditation 101 that's why every beginning meditation is like focus on your thoughts observe them let them leave start to get to know what is your thought how the thoughts come into your consciousness you know if you don't engage in that process it becomes very hard to distinguish so yeah it all just comes back to that's why everyone says you should start and it's just so crazy that our society leaves no space in an eight-hour school day there's no empty space for it to come in yeah exactly no empty space man well this has been awesome I'm really glad we could do it so many great things in your books and we didn't even talk about astrology of the shadow self but tell people about the range of your work and where they can get more of it before we call it in oh sure yeah I usually post things on my website which of the dawn.com all my books are available on amazon of course but if you don't like amazon you can go on like bookshop.org which is really great and supports bookshops as well if you want to you know fight the man go through other areas but they're pretty widely available and I like to put updates on my website as well right on well I loved it enjoy the holidays if my middle name comes to you let me know and I'll probably see you at the next astro gnosis will do thanks so much Greg a pleasure all right long time coming Maja has been requested many times in fact we could call this a guest request from the forum thread that is long overdue because that's where I originally heard about her we had a member who pitched her as a female Gordon White and that stuck with me I think it's even been over a year at this point but it stuck with me and then I met her partner at astro gnosis and talked a little bit and I think I just got such a good charge from that event that I wanted it to continue in spirit by bringing on someone who reminds me of it who was already recommended and aware of THC all the stars aligned as they say I actually recently talked to Miguel Connor and it sounds like I might have attended the last astro gnosis which is quite sad but I understand it's really hard to make the numbers work venues of any decent size are thousands of dollars for a weekend and then you have to fly in your guests and put them up in hotels and I think even more than the money is the pressure of trying to make sure it's a good time for everyone you're the host you're the end-all be-all if something doesn't go right I wouldn't want that to all fall on me so I understand obviously over the years sometimes I get good and high and I can see a pretty clear elaborate vision for the higher side con presentations roundtables individual workshops and we really could do it all conspiracy 40 and stuff biohacking health stuff and of course magical training sessions I look at the chaos of skank fest for the comedy fans out there and I think man scale that down to our little counterculture and there might be something in that but then I sober up and it all just seems so logistically difficult that I forget about it I mean Gordon is trying to come to Florida in March and we want to do a little higher soup event like we did in Austin and just finding a space for that is hard in Austin we found a free space that served coffee and beer and was just happy to have us bring in whatever it was 50 75 ish people and we didn't charge it's fuzzy but I think we limited it to just paid members but there were no ticket sales and that was perfect I hope we can find something like that in Tampa or St. Pete but it's not exactly coming together right now I suppose if you are hearing this and have an option for us please let me know but if you just go in cold renting a space they have minimum number of hours you must have it for and then big insurance fees and cleaning fees costs for even providing drinks and then it's like we're charging $50 a ticket just for a small event and that doesn't even feel right events are hard but I do think they are valuable and refreshing in a largely digital world so I want to keep the dream alive maybe I can partner with Miguel or something but the immediate issue is higher soup Tampa in March I'm gonna focus on that first and we can go from there but yeah all that just to say that that's how I learned about Maja and I'm glad she was willing to do this we did talk a little bit about those pesky Hollywood contracts I don't know I usually like peeks into that world I hope that part wasn't boring but I think I've told you guys I've been offered maybe five or six contracts and they're all basically the same and every time the first couple times cold the next couple times I had an inside source but I had to get an entertainment lawyer just to look at it and sometimes that was a couple hundred bucks and their advice was usually don't do that because it's full of language about how they have to take control of the higher side chats and I would have to commit to making their project my top priority because they're investing in me and then I would have to do the press that they asked me to do regardless of how much that is that alone could be a huge burden and then you are forced to do later seasons if it takes off and you want it to take off but you also don't want to maybe be locked into something for five years just so many factors and I just wasn't ever willing to do that because I already have my total and complete freedom here I got as far as filming a pilot once for a show about the occult in pop culture with Jay Dyer and Isaac Wisehop and you can find that trailer online under pop a culture but that's only because the pilot came before the contract and I was willing to have as much fun with it as I could up until that point and this isn't really about me this is just an insight into the reality that every single person you know and like in media who does anything with the traditional companies has signed these sorts of deals plus you know they have agents and managers who push them towards whatever makes them money it's really a sick system of exploiting talent but we know that it's just something that has come up in the history of me on this trajectory and there hasn't been a lot of people I could talk to about it so just to have that little solidarity the wink and the nod that was fun so good show overall why only hear the first hour when you can easily become a plus member and hear twice as much as you did not only on this interview but all the interviews going back many years the free plus show for December was Tracy Twyman yeah I went there I did it I think the dust has settled and we have about five interviews and I just kind of realized that for people who have never been plus members that's five hours of Tracy that hasn't really made it out there she's not the only one of course the same is true for a guy like Jim Mars who I considered one of the greats who is no longer with us barely even mentioned anymore really but if you like getting those free plus shows at the end of every month that's just one small taste of what the membership offers so come on in eight bucks a month it's manageable and you don't have to be a member forever but hop on in give me something it's the only revenue I get but in today's episode the plus hour got into some really fun stuff some experimental material and testing of Maja's connection to the field let's say we tried to see if she could ask the spirits for my middle name and we also did a three card spread for insight into what those New Jersey drones were about I thought the spread was pretty good though we still don't really have an answer that kind of went away and was replaced by all the fog stories and then you got the exploding Tesla trucks and the New Orleans Bourbon Street car attack and those guys both apparently have links to the same military base obviously I've got some work to do but in this plus show she also kind of explained the star seeds thing in a non-cringy way that's hard to do and it was just fun to play with some of these techniques on the fly of course the big question plus listeners might have is did she get my middle name right well she did follow up and this is what she said as for the hunt for your middle name I like paying attention to the first thing that comes in rather than noodling about it and since what I saw was Hecate I'll say more about what she said she said his name is not his name first and then said something like his name is an ancestor's name so it seems maybe that was about you being named after your father which I don't know about but Hecate didn't straight up tell me your middle name just that information I feel like this sounds crazy but is Greg Carlwood your real name that might be what she meant but anywho when I revisited it later I was laughing because I was like oh my god it's Rumpelstiltskin after opening a space later regarding you they kept showing me an image which this will also sound weird but it was the scene from the bible of Daniel in the lion's den so that was what she wrote back to me and not bad because a lot of people I think know that I slightly altered my name when I started the show so that it wouldn't get linked back to my job and get me fired so I picked an old nickname of Carlwood so I was born Greg Carl Carlson Jr. and now I'm legally Greg Carl Carlwood I kept it all the same but my wife and I wanted to make Carlwood official before the kids came so the kids are the first Carlwoods ever and Carl is just a bad middle name for me I used to always say that my parents stuttered and the nurse just wrote it down and said you can't change it now and when I told Maja this it was funny that she came back and said hey you should plant a tree in honor of your new name which is another hit because when my dad's birthday comes back around we're having family come down here to the property and burying his ashes under a fruit tree so she didn't say Carl specifically but she did circle around my name having been created and that's interesting because I don't know how many people would have picked up on that and the whole idea of it being an ancestor's name she also made a comment about Carl being a Swedish name and yeah a good chunk half of my dad's side is Swedish so I'd never done a genealogy family tree thing but I bet I could go back and find a Carl Carlson I mean Carlson is like the Smith of Sweden and it basically means Carlson so yeah there has to be a Carl somewhere we can deduce that but these things are interesting when we start thinking about what makes us up it's easy to go years without even thinking about it and then all of a sudden you're like trying to pull on those threads and you might learn some stuff but these sorts of readings with the spirits and the cosmos they are often obtuse so I appreciate her willingness to play test it out I thought it was a fun interview overall and I hope we do others in higher side news I've been getting asked about the ads thing or at least getting a lot of feedback on it I've been vague about how I would implement it so some people think plus would go away entirely some people think there'd be ads in the plus show no no not at all plus would be completely its own thing and I just have some ads in the free show so at least I generate some revenue from the tens of thousands of people that have listened to the free show for a decade right now I get nothing from that and my archive is completely unmonetized except to promote the idea of what a full plus show is like but when it comes to the feedback most people have just been like get the bag dude who cares and I appreciate that it lowers my stress level when it comes to the anxiety of even making a big change and the dialogue with some of these companies is still ongoing I haven't gotten the hard numbers that I would need to even make a decision I'm not going to make a decision about something that's vague and then have it not actually be what was promised and now I'm already doing it I did however reapply for YouTube monetization I was demonetized in the first month of existence for THC I was demonetized in basically 2010 or 2011 so it was never part of the thing but I figured I would try again that's one of the steps to doing this and I was denied it's so crazy the shit I see on YouTube and yet I can't get a few shekels for putting interviews up there so the whole decision might not even be up to me because if I was gonna do the ads thing it starts with even being allowed to do it or finding a partner another company I met with said they would only partner with me if I split the plus show up into two separate hours because otherwise advertisers wouldn't have access to THC's highest value listeners I definitely see where they're coming from and that's an interesting point but of course I'm not gonna do that so we're hitting roadblocks and it might just be what it is however on the bright side another way to look at this is right now I can say that I have built one of the most successful and longest running ad-free podcasts in all of podcasting history right I mean I can only think of two shows that have been around 10 plus years and never done ads red ice radio and no agenda both of them would rank way higher than me but who else is there I think I would at least be able to say I'm top 10 assuming there's seven other ad-free shows that I'm forgetting and that's being pretty generous I might be top five comfortably so yeah I got stuck thinking about how much money I've been giving up after talking with Sam about it but I've come back around to appreciating what I've accomplished on my own terms yeah there's a lot of people who have substack now and have patreon now but I built my thing before that with no training with no team or any kind of industry advantage I built it all out of nothing I built something pretty great without selling airtime to anyone so maybe I should just be happy with that whatever the future brings because if I could get like a thousand more plus members that would be the ad money and I wouldn't even worry about it I don't know these are just the thoughts that come to mind I'm getting a little in the weeds here but I guess to turn it into something actionable if you have an appreciation for whatever kind of accomplishment that might be join plus for a bit just to give me a tip of the hat and enjoy more of it yourself I always try to say that it's not a donation it's not a handout you're doubling the content you get from me I think it's a good deal mutually beneficial and yeah so I am in a very small club of people who have been able to do it and have committed to it and then gone as long as I have and then add in the reinvestment into new tech that allows us to get past the username and password thing and now I might be able to say that I'm in a class of my own and I would love to just forget the ads thing and just focus on growing the membership but that's hard to do what more can I do to grow it but continue to make my case so I guess I've said what I can say but either way links are right there at the top of the show notes the sign up is quick and easy the form is mobile friendly and getting the full two hour plus show into your podcasting app is a 30 second process help me out and really help yourself out and just give yourself more of a show you already like but okay moving on we got to do that last episode review Al Borealis conspiracy Santa Claus coming in at a 4.8 I agree and I'm not surprised I don't think anyone is it was just good fun conversation about what me and Al have learned from interviewing a lot of the greats really some of the comments were pretty critical for a show that got a 4.8 and I'm always curious what's going on there maybe people just don't want to rate a show as mid so they skip that and just comment instead but I see a little bit of a weird disconnect there either way I liked it seems like most people agree one of the biggest criticisms was we didn't go that deep because we went so wide I understand that it's always a balancing act but I dig the breakaway civilization stuff and then you throw in a little hollow earth for good measure and what is there to really complain about all right doing the meetup calendar thing next on deck January 4th we got to we got London at the monkey puzzle and we got Beringsville Pennsylvania at McCall Collective Tap House then our big day January 11th we got Hawaii at Ola Brew the Raleigh Brewing Company in Raleigh North Carolina hops on tap in Portland Oregon Porsche's Cafe in Columbus Ohio then we got January 13th Lincoln's Beard Brewery in Miami and January 22nd Corner Bakery Cafe in Pasadena once again I love it a very active January for THC listeners go out and meet some new people or make an event near you it's free it's easy to do and I already talked about how physical meetups are something magical but that's the show thanks for listening I'm ready to crush it for another year I hope you stick with me let Maja know you enjoyed her insights if you did and I'm out of here I've done my part your move unseen familiar spirits power pyramid magic users and connected cosmos secret keepers your fucking move there comes a time in many lives where we get some kind of clue drilled into us might not be exactly true maybe telephone telepathy or some very potent dream a wave of synchronicity or a ball of plasma's beam when you get the hint you're a fractal of pure consciousness as the good witch said you'll be surprised to find how deeply it's all connected go scroll your phone or see what's new on the TV why would you ever want the trouble that comes with being free the fear to fade changes our behavior never taken a savior look inside and stick it you