Josh Schrei

But I think that what you're pointing at, understanding that our relationship with the relational web is not one of salvation, but one of recognition and acknowledgement and interaction with. I think that allows us to actualize teachings on love and compassion that are more in alignment with what love actually is. Welcome to the Passing Through Podcast. A show dedicated to exploring those spaces not just within, but also between and around us. The cracks in the walls. The moments between the moments. I speak with thinkers, authors, artists, teachers, and everyday humans who have touched the edge of the ordinary and found something to bring back. I want to start off by saying that I enjoy speaking to all of my guests. I try to get in contact with people who I think have important things to say or who might offer something helpful or insightful that could potentially enrich the lives of the listeners of this show. Sometimes I have the honor of speaking with a guest that I would have never dreamed of speaking with. That's happened to me a few times on this show already. And today's guest is one of those. Josh Shry is the creator and host of the Emerald Podcast. One of my own personal favorite podcasts. And Josh isn't just an educator or storyteller or music maker or writer or a pioneer. In terms of podcasting, he is one of the best to ever do it. And that's not hyperbole. He is an absolute juggernaut. So I was thrilled to speak with him. I was, yeah, it was a deep pleasure to be able to speak with him. So if you're curious about spirituality, Buddhism, the collision of Western consciousness with Eastern animist cosmologies, practical practices for orienting your mind with the land, loving kindness, also known as metta, as an animist force strong enough to halt charging elephants, bardic visions of the storyteller, rhythms as living entities, the sonic nature of the universe, little Richard, old dirty bastard, festival culture and burning man, or just creating a collective field where group alchemy can take place, then friends, this is the episode for you. This is such a deep, juicy, wet watermelon of an episode. And in case this is the first time you're tuning in, to help you get the most out of this episode, I'd like to spend a quick moment defining a couple of terms you'll hear in our conversation. So let's go back to school for a second for some vocab lessons. The word of the day is animism. Animism is the ancient understanding that the world around us is not a dead backdrop where we live out our lives, but instead a vibrant, shimmering world of interconnection and responsibility. So in this understanding, animacy or animism or the animate world just means humans are alive, trees and flowers and bees are alive, and rivers and mountains and stones are alive and conscious and have their own agency and intelligences. It's the understanding that the world is populated by human and non-human intelligences and a vast web of relationship. To quote animist scholar Graham Harvey, the world is full of persons, only some of which are human. Another word you'll hear us use is bodhisattva. This word comes from the Sanskrit word bodhi, meaning awakening or enlightenment, and sattva, meaning being. So a bodhisattva is a being who vows to awaken, not for their own personal liberation, but for the liberation of all beings. This is a special kind of being who chooses not to escape the world into nirvana, but rather to remain in these cycles of samsara, helping others awaken. The other thing I wanted to mention, since we'll be speaking quite a bit about Buddhism, is that there are several different branches in Buddhism. Because when a lot of us hear the term Buddhism, we think of just one thing. But the term Buddhism actually is an umbrella term, like Christianity. Because within Christianity, there are many different denominations of Christianity. You have the Catholics, the Protestants, the Lutherans, Mormons, Evangelicals, Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, etc. And inside of Buddhism, you have three main branches. Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. And within those branches, you have further delineations. For example, Zen Buddhist traditions fall under the branch of Mahayana, and Tibetan Buddhism falls under Vajrayana. Some people even categorize the Vajrayana branch as a branch of Mahayana, rather than its own distinct branch, because it shares so many philosophical underpinnings with Mahayana. So depending on who you speak to, you'll have two or three different branches, and many schools and traditions within those branches. So Buddhism isn't just one big monolithic thing. It actually has a lot of nuance. Okay, the lesson's over, and now you're equipped with all the words and concepts you'll need to surf the wave of this conversation. So let's find out whether life is, as Buddhism suggests, just a cold calculus of karmic causality generated from your individual actions moment to moment, or whether there might be something more complex and relational at play. All the links you'll need to find Josh will be in the show notes. As always, be good to one another. Remember that the funk is the space between the notes, and that the Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with. So, Josh Shry, welcome to the Passing Through Podcast. I am absolutely honored to have you here today. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Nice to have one of those conversations that's happening somewhere between the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a van in Poland. Yeah, for sure. I think this is the latest that I've ever spoken to someone. It's like nine o'clock for me over here, so it's a first for me. Before we start, though, I just wanted to begin by making an offering of gratitude. For the work that you do, not just in the field of animacy, but also in storytelling and podcasting, because I feel like you're doing pioneering work that pushes the format forward into new frontiers. Whenever I share an episode of Emerald, I'm always telling people to think of it less as a podcast and more of a kind of sonic collage, where it's just dripping with the wet glue of story and atmospheric chanting and pop culture references all interlaced with myth. And it makes this really immersive, almost hallucinogenic auditory journey. So thank you for your passion and your voice and your contributions. Oh, thank you. That's exactly the intent. You've picked up on it well. The collage element and the journeying element. And yeah, it's meant to spark feeling and it's meant to take us somewhere. And, you know, we've gotten kind of used to existing art forms and it's good to try to reimagine those existing art forms and ask ourselves, like, what a 90 minute song would be like, or, you know, how can you reimagine what a podcast could be? And I'm trying and I appreciate the gratitude. I appreciate when it lands and just makes me want to explore more stories and dive deeper in. There's a quote I wanted to start with as well, because it touches on some of the stuff you just said, particularly about art. But I think it also marries some of the other things we'll likely speak about, like animism and the land. And so I kind of wanted to plant the seed as like a little thing that we could return to in water throughout the conversation. And it's by Gertrude Stein. So feel free to react or not. I just want to put it in the space. And the quote is, After all, anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is, low or high, the air heavy or clear. And anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything. Yeah, that's wonderful. So yeah, I just wanted to float that in there, because I think this land acknowledgement and taking into account elemental forces and things that often go invisible is an important aspect of the types of things I'd like to speak to you about. And I know that these are passions for you. Yeah, that quote reminds me of how in the modern world, we've kind of adopted a hard line between the subject and object and isolated ourselves as individual units alone in a dead universe. And how the reality is much different than that. And we are hollow vessels through which the land and the airs express. And so it asks us to investigate a deeper vision of what the self is, what the individual is, and spread our roots a little bit deeper and raise our branches a little bit higher and weave a web of interconnectivity. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that was something that's been alive in me for the last 10 days or so. I was serving on a Vipassana retreat. And there was a second time I've been at a Vipassana retreat. The first was as a sitter and this time was as a server. And I felt something different this time. I don't know if it's because of my exposure to these kind of ideas. But I felt there was this strong isolationist, highly individualistic, disconnected, detached observer, almost scientific materialist focus on sensation. That was surprising to me because you would think in a tradition like Buddhism, there would be this emphasis on interbeing, interconnection and all of this stuff. So I was surprised to feel that absence there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's a deep well to explore. There's a thing. There's a thing. There's a thing. There's a thing. There's a thing. I talked about how, first of all, those practices traditionally were not just solo isolationist practices. Those practices were part of a continuum of practices. And that continuum includes things like relational acknowledgement and ancestor candle lighting and recognition of animate forces that permeate the place. And over time, it's interesting to see with the adoption of these practices by the Western world, it's interesting to see which elements tend to kind of get weeded out a little bit. And there's this sense that like, oh, what's really important here is the solo isolationist part of the practice. What's really important is you alone with your own mind. You know, well, why does the Western world tend to focus on that as the most important thing? You know, it speaks to age old historic dichotomy within the Western world in which you could say formlessness is valued and form is vilified or essence is considered to be the thing. And the actual matrix in which that essence takes place is not considered to be as important as, you know, what lives at the very center. And I talk about it in another episode called When Bread is No Longer Bread about how you find the like part of the orange that is the vitamin C and you're like, aha, this is the vitamin C. We can extract the vitamin C and take it out because it's the important part. And then guess what? It turns out that all the other parts of the orange are essential for the body in assimilating and digesting the vitamin C. So actually you need the whole contextual vision. And if you remove it from that, I wonder sometimes about the value of taking modern Western minds that are already in an individualist model, are already kind of isolated from what they consider to be kind of the objective world. And then you need the whole process, you know, you need the whole process, you know, very bound up in the machinations of their own minds and then stick them on a cushion for, you know, multiple days and tell them like, just pay attention to what is going on within yourself. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. cheesy. DJ for quite a number of years, which is why, if people are wondering why Emerald episodes are nearly always punctuated with some 90s hip hop song or other, that's why. That's coming straight out of the record crates in my garage. And I was a storyteller and I was a spiritual practitioner and I was always a little bit interesting trying to balance and navigate these different worlds. And I always thought like, okay, well, I'm not a musician because I'm not a virtuoso guitarist or I'm not like, you know, an amazing vocalist or anything like that. What role does it actually play in my life? But then through the podcast, I found that there is a place for the musically driven storyteller. And in fact, that place is the original vision of the storyteller. The original bardic vision of the storyteller is someone who invokes spoken word to rhythmic music. And this has been happening in culture upon culture upon culture for thousands and thousands of years. And that place isn't highly recognized in the world today as it used to be. We've got, you know, singer songwriters and musicians and bands and this type of thing over here. Then we've got the whole kind of spoken word poetry scene over here, which I'll be honest, like I was in that scene very briefly in like the late nineties, early two thousands, but I find it very restrictive and flat, honestly. And I know maybe it's changed a little bit recently, but there are rhythmic and tonal expectations of that art form that I think are very narrow compared to what it could be. Like a lot of it became rage poetry, which is important. It's important to have rage poetry, but when the entire medium becomes like, it's expected to be at this cadence and it's expected to be like rapid machine gun fire of words and everything like that. Well, you look at the good hip hop artists and, you know, they don't restrain themselves like that. One of the incredible things about like people like Kendrick Lamar is like the ability to find all of these rhythmic and tonal textures, slowing down the words, and then going back to geniuses like ODB from the Wu-Tang Clan, who's able to turn a nonsensical phrase and just repeat it with so much conviction that it becomes an anthem, right? Bards have always worked with the ability to squeeze words and draw the nectar out of words and expand when they need to and shrink when they need to and pause in silence when they need to. And this is like, you know, this is how the voice of the bard or the storyteller links with the animate forces and is able to actually transmit something. And if the, if the cadence and the delivery is just one note, if it's just rage poetry, then the opportunities, you know, like Bootsy Collins said, the funk is the space between the notes, like the funk is the space between the notes, then the opportunities for the animate force, in this case, being described as the funk, the opportunities for the animate force to get through have lessened if you just have that kind of rapid fire cadence. So I know you started asking about music, and I kind of went on a little bit of a spiral here. But reclaiming the bardic mechanisms of invocation in a way that allows the animate presence, the force of life of the cosmos, space to move and breathe and can vibrate when it needs to vibrate and can soothe when it needs to soothe. And this, I think, is a art form that was very available to our ancient ancestors. And I think we need it in this day and age, because art needs to transmit the entire point. You know, if we want to talk in terms of points, the entire point of art is an energetic transmission, a living energetic transmission. It's not to make you conceptually think of something and go, aha, like, what a genius way of, you know, depicting the struggle between proletariat, da, da, da, da, da, da. Like, like, yeah, there's art like that, that is never going to actually really move much because it's not within the language of transmission. And transmission is how human beings learn. Transmission is how we feel. When a storyteller tells a story that has some juice to it, some nectar to it, it transmits something, you know, and I've had teachers and storytellers in my life who were able to tell very, very simple stories that transmitted so much. And so I'm not claiming to be some transmitter of whatever, but I'm trying to be someone who uses the simple tools of music, sound, cadence, speech delivery, in order to create space so that something palpable and tangible might move through. So I love music. This cosmos is made of music, in case you haven't heard, which I'm sure you have. And, and, and music and vibration are at the heart of reality. And so if we want to accurately storytell or accurately describe what it's like to be a human being or accurately describe this universe of joys and sorrows and this universe of rare beauties, then music must be involved because it's a musical cosmos. That's an answer that's so beautiful. I don't have anything to bounce off of that. That's, that's, yeah, thank you for that. I'll just say, thank you. Give gratitude. Um, there's more stuff I want to dig in there because music is another Pandora's box of stuff. Um, but a simple question. We can go deeper into it if you want. Okay. Yeah. I'll start simple and we could scale up again. Uh, you said you were in a band. What, what were you, what were you playing? This was in the era of rage against the machine and the red hot chili peppers. And I was the vocalist who was screaming about the downfall of the system and, uh, writing lyrics about wild sunsets and mountains and, uh, the end of civilization and, and all this kind of thing. And I'm still kind of doing that. So I guess I was onto something at that, at that young, at that young age. And many of the folks who were in that band are doing their various musical projects. One of the guys is a guitarist who I featured on the podcast, uh, a bunch and actually the bass player Walker, he's been on the podcast a bunch too. And actually like, yeah, three out of the four out of the five members have, uh, kind of been featured on the podcast. So I'm still in touch with all of them. And, but yeah, this was like, this was a very long time ago and then went from there into spoken word and DJing and, um, and all of it. So there's still a chance of getting the band back together and doing some, some anti-Trump, anti-authoritarian, tear down the machine stuff. Yeah. Um, yeah, there's still a chance in an infinite universe. There's always a chance. Yeah. There is a, there's some old, uh, there's some old recordings that might start to make their way into certain podcast episodes, uh, just to kind of give people a little taste. You know, there is also some of the stuff that we did that I find fairly cringy now, but, uh, that's, that's how you learn as an artist. And, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And luckily this all happened before the internet. So I try to find it people you won't. But yeah, there was this other question that I had a more philosophical question, because for me, when music is good, it's so deeply connective. It's becomes deeply ritualistic. Deeply sacred. It's almost as though, I mean, maybe I wouldn't say almost as though music is an animate force. And when we are together in a group and there's music, we enter into this kind of thrall. It's, it can be rapturous, could experience dissolution and all of these really ecstatic states. And music is a form to me of almost like spirit possession. When people are experiencing music together, it is profoundly transcendent. And I, I wonder why that is, why, what is it about music? It's just vibration, right? It's just sound vibration. Why is that so powerful? I would just take out the just in that sentence, like it's just vibration and, uh, say it's vibration. And, and that's, you know, this is a vibrational universe. The universe is architected of vibration and it manifests in harmonics. The structures of creation are mathematically harmonic. And the intervals that exist within creation, the intervals that exist that form the way that the human body forms and the way that plants form and the way that star clusters form and the way that planetary orbit patterns form. These are musical. They're musical in nature. So the ancient understandings of the music of the spheres, this isn't like some overlay they put on the cosmos. This is actually mathematically right at the heart of the structure of, of creation. There are musical intervals that are universally seen as sad, right? There are musical intervals that are universally felt as uplifting, right? The reason for this is that it's in the architecture. It's in the vibrational architecture. So music, the bodies of the goddesses say the tantras are sonic. The animate forces are sonic. The spirit forces are sonic. They're vibrational, which is why invocation is used even in good old silent Vipassana, quote unquote, silent Vipassana, you chant at the beginning, right? And you chant at the beginning. And what does that do to your mind? It vibrationally smooths the agitated vibrational brain waveform currents and patterns and the field around you. And it is literally directed and smoothed by the chanting, the mantra, right? The tra, the traverse that happens in the is the traverse from kind of agitated, discombobulated vibrational space to coherence, mandalic harmonic vibrational space. So the sonic frequencies, the animate forces are sonic in nature. And, you know, you look at traditions like the West African tradition, and they understand that rhythms are particular animate beings. They understand that instruments are particular animate beings, and that the song has a life of its own. And those rhythms, those West African rhythms, really pan African rhythms, but, you know, primarily West African rhythms, those West African rhythms form the basis of 90 plus percent of modern popular music. And when those rhythms first arrived, and got, you know, syncretized into jazz and into blues and into rock and roll, look what they did to people. They sent people into states of spirit possession. There's no other way to describe it. You look at footage of 1950s kids at a Little Richard concert, and they are screaming and crying and wailing and collapsing on the floor. And this is spirit possession. And because we did not have a cultural context for it in the West, it was incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful. Now, traditionally, that all would have been facilitated from a spiritual perspective. It would have been known what to do with people who are having these great awakenings and these, like, you know, in the modern individualized West, all of that gets focused on the rock star, right? All of it gets focused on the individual artists. And the individual artists, you know, the burden of that is one that an individual being can't bear. And so people think they're gods and throw themselves at them like gods, and they respond by getting into like debauchery and this type of thing. And that's understanding the power and potency of sound and vibration, but then not having a contextual framework in which that can live, right? There's a story that I told in an old episode about drumming, a Sumerian story in which Gilgamesh performs a particular task for the goddess and she rewards him by giving him a drum. But he's half god, half human, and is prone to getting a little bit carried away with his human sentiments. So he takes the drum and instead of using it as a means of reconnection to the great cosmic tree from whom its wood comes, uses it instead to cause men to fight each other and to seduce women and this type of thing. And, you know, that's a like 4,000 year old story probably, that says something about sound and music and its power to change people's moods and its dynamic vibrational ability to, you know, to possess and to take people down a particular path. And, uh, and it's powerful and like all things powerful, traditional systems have had ways and protocols of working with that power. So music in the West still serves what you can call a sacred role, except we don't recognize it as sacred. And then it becomes all the kind of burden of the individual artists. And I'd love to see more what you could call ritualized music in which it's understood that the music that lives at the center is, is sacred. And I know that there's more and more bands that are kind of experimenting with that with like musical ritualism and this kind of stuff. Because now we've kind of reached, I think the end of the age when the rock and roll song can drive people into a frenzy because it's just kind of everywhere and it's background noise and this type of thing. Now we need to expand our vision of what music can do and be, and maybe find the sacred in it once again. Another incredible answer. I'm still amazed that the concept, you know, I thought of music as as animate, but rhythms themselves as animate is, yeah, that's something that's going to be moving in me for a while. So thank you for sharing that and the imagery of Little Richard and I'm thinking of like Chuck Berry and all this kind of music that was coming out. And yeah, even the Beatles, when you think back to the Beatles, like girls, just same thing in tears, apoplectic, just crazy, deranged. Yeah. Well, the reason I said Little Richard is because in that Little Richard documentary, he was like, ha, the Beatles. He was like, girls were throwing their underwear at me in the 1950s. Like, you know, Little Richard has a claim to the one who really, really started rock and roll. And, and that claim was not recognized for a long time. So it's good to give credit where credit is due. But, you know, he was describing scenes of mass catharsis and, and mass, you know, what can be called hysteria and like spirit possession that were happening like in the 1950s, in a very, in a culture that was really, really not, you know, the only place that you were supposed to have those types of experiences was at a church revival, right? And Little Richard, Little Richard's father was a preacher. He was a preacher who moonlighted as a whiskey producer and nightclub owner. And Little Richard went through this like incredible life trajectory of total and complete debauchery followed by like giving it all up and embracing Christ followed by total and complete debauchery followed by like giving up. And it shows something about our Western relationship with these types of powerful forces. Either it gets marshaled into kind of overtly repressive religious structures, or it lives in the field of total debauchery. And this is like the Western mind body split in action. Again, it's the, the Western dichotomy around this stuff where ultimately we need ecstasy. We need experiences of ecstasy. They're fundamental to human life and they are sacred, right? And if we de-sacralize ecstasy, on the one hand, you get dry religious ritual that nobody really wants to go to because they don't feel any ecstasy at all. And like eating a little cracker and drinking grape juice, you know, and on the other side, you get debauchery and bridging that something I talk about in an episode I did on festivals, but bridging that by returning a sacred vision of ecstasy, I think is deeply important. But I think what modern festival culture has to understand is that that requires a lot more focus than is sometimes actualized in modern festival culture. You're not like re-enshrining the sacred just by paying lip service to it and like having a Reiki tent at your festival or a frog medicine tent at your festival. Like to actually re-infuse something with sacredness, it takes slow, steady, deep work and attention. And possibly in traditional systems anyway, it takes some type of slow, progressive initiatory structure too, right? You can't just, because I get a lot of inquiries from festivals who are like, yeah, we want to, you know, incorporate some elements of ritual. We really want this to be a sacred thing. And it's like, well, if you really want it to be a sacred thing, like that's a multi-year project, that is something that takes focus and cohesion. And it's not just like, yeah, let's pile on more sacred offerings at the festival. Yeah. So another wormhole that we could go down. Yeah. And I, and I, and I know we're, we're at time now and I, I didn't hope or expect that my last question to you would be about what your thoughts on Burning Man are. But I am curious because when I was living in San Francisco, I used to go. And to me, the thing that Burning Man, I don't know what it is like now. I haven't been in some time, but back then there was this sense of something more, something sacred, particularly at the temple, which was the kind of spiritual center of the space. Have you ever been to Burning Man? Yeah, I've actually never been. So I lived in San Francisco and like way back in 1997, I got invited to go. And then my friend was like, oh, I hear that event is totally like corporately sold out and everything. And this was in 1997, right? Like, oh, that's a bunch of corporate sellouts. And I was like, yeah, man, screw that event. And like, you know, I got his shows where I was at at the time. So I never went. And I have friends who are, have been deeply involved for many years and have obviously talked to me about like, you know, neo-ritualism and the, the model there. And, you know, sounds to me like there are great beauties to that model. And then also, you know, there are challenges. And when your event has like private landing strips for tech billionaires and people are thanking Elon Musk on stage, then I wonder about it a little bit. But like, you know, the model, the model of wanting to embrace, you know, a communal ritualism, I think is a deeply needed model. And I guess the heart of what I say, I'm saying is that I think it takes even more focus than people are giving it. I think that even just like, if you talk about like the coherence of the field, even just knowing that people are on 10 or 15 different substances, and what that does to the coherence of a field, you don't have like in a traditional peyote ceremony, you don't have the one guy who's in the corner who decided to drink ayahuasca instead, because there are particular energies and particular forces in particular ways that you're working. So for what it is, for what a lot of these kind of festivals are, you know, I think obviously, they're, they're seeking to do really good and powerful work. And I'm sure that people are having profound life changing experiences there. And for what they are, you know, they're, they're serving a purpose. And I think that's great. But I think it's also worth looking into what would a more coherent field be? How would that be actualized? How would a more coherent field be actualized? You know, maybe it's a group of people who study with each other across the country for a couple of years, and then come to this, like slightly smaller thing, and everyone's fasting, and everyone's focused around the same thing. And, you know, there's just ways to start to deepen the vision that I think would align it more to the spirit of ancient festivals, or festivals that I've been to in India, for example, over many years. And I think that, you know, I think that starts with, like, really seeking to understand what it means to navigate and co create a field together, a vibrational field, a coherent field. I've been to rituals in India where the field was so pristine and coherent, that the animate forces, the really finer animate forces could play and dance and move and have space to breathe. But those finer forces, if the field is clunky, if the field is jagged, you know, there are places in India, and this is just an example, I'm not saying this is something I believe. But there are places in India where it's like, you know, if if one person enters that field who eats beef, like, they consider the entire field to have been vibrationally disrupted. And it's like, you know, got to start over again. You know, and again, I'm not saying I believe in that, because I know friends for all across the, you know, dietary spectrum. But it's worth understanding that, like, imagine, you know, and you can see this in the dieted traditions, in South America, you know, the traditions of working with particular plants and fasting around plant medicine, and the question of like, okay, how coherent, how harmonically vibrant and flowing, you know, can this field be? A lot of that depends on our ability to value that, first of all, and then to deepen into understanding what brings that quality about and it's a step in the right direction to say, okay, we're not just like doing whippets in the corner and like, you know, noodling around at our Grateful Dead show, we're going to have a focal point, energetic burning man focal point at the center, and there's going to be kind of a cohesion around that it's a step in the right direction. But that's only a very small step, as I see it, as I as I see it, you know, I've been to festivals in India where there were a million people and no alcohol in the field, for example. And, you know, that's something, it's something to feel a million people who are completely focused on a sacred mountain, at the same time, you know, in silence, you ever heard a million people in silence? Like, that's, that's something, you know, and those festivals too, obviously, it's like mass groups of people, you're going to get all kinds of, you're going to get a range of human experience. But often not enough attention, I think, for those who are wanting to re infuse the sacred, not enough attention is paid to the quality and dynamics of the energetic field, which again, means to bring it full circle, getting out of just kind of our concepts of like, the purpose of this is to have a really great individual experience to what actually facilitates group alchemy, what actually facilitates an alchemy of the relational web. Mike drop. I, and I, and I know we're over, I just want to give you the last minute for anything you wanted to promote or talk you anything you have coming up, just for you to use the space as you want before we close out. Yeah, I mean, I don't do a whole lot of promotion. I have the podcast, I have a Patreon study group where we talk about mythic topics twice a month. It's patreon.com slash the Emerald, the Emerald podcast. See, I don't even know my own URLs. And then I teach a year long deep dive course into these mythic topics too. So those are really the areas where I, I focus this work and yeah, would love to share with anyone who wants to explore those things deeper. Okay. Thank you, Josh. From deep in my heart, this was a pleasure and honor. It was great to hear your stories and your insights and listen to everything, all of your vibrations that you put out. And yeah, this was a gift for me. So I'm really happy to have had some time with you. So thank you for your time. Sorry for running over. No, this is exactly the amount of time that I had booked for it. So. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. No, it's a pleasure. Thank you for passing through today. Yeah. You, dear listener. Thank you for your support, for your attention, for spending some time with me and this episode's guest. If you're enjoying this content, please subscribe, rate it, like it, tell your friends about it, buy a billboard somewhere next to a highway, promoting it. I mean, I'm kidding of course, but your support really does mean a lot to me. So thank you for listening and I will talk to you next time.