The Magic of Dark Medicine with Dr. Andrew Holecek

Dr. Andrew Holecek 0:00
I started having a really hard time determining if I was awake or sleep. I thought, this is an awakening. This is psychosis. It was extraordinary energetic surgery. I literally thought it my head was going to go off.

Alex Ferrari 0:06
You were in the middle of the ocean, though, without anything to hang on to.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 0:12
If you can't be with yourself, how on God's good earth can you expect anybody else to be with him? The darkness is fundamentally neutral. It's metaphysical mirror. You can no longer distract you realize just how addicted we are to light, to entertainment, darkness, just like death, uncompromising, non negotiable. The only thing you can do is to open to darker tree. The single most transparent ever done.

Alex Ferrari 0:36
Is that you're going into the void.

Alex Ferrari 0:48
Now, before we jump into this episode, if this conversation resonates with you, please like subscribe and share this with whoever you feel that needs to hear it. Your support helps us keep bringing this information out into the world and helps us awaken this planet. Thank you. I'd like to welcome to the show Andrew Holecek, how you doing Andrew?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:13
Alex, I couldn't be happier. So glad to be here with you and looking forward to this one and so thanks for the opportunity.

Alex Ferrari 1:19
Oh, of course. Thank you so much for coming. Our mutual friend Debra Silverman, hooked this up, and she's like, You have to talk to Andrew. Andrew has to come on the show. I was like, Okay, I hear that all the time. And I was like, Well, let me look and then when I saw your work and your point of view and what you've gone through, you've had a pretty interesting life, to say the least. I was like, this is going to be a really fun conversation. So can you talk to can you tell people a little bit about your background, where you kind of started, because you and I are both recovering Catholics, right? And we both still feel guilty about it, but you've definitely gone another path along your journey. So from where you were the programming you had when you were young, yeah? To where you are now, in five minutes go!

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:05
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I really appreciate what my parents did, yeah, introducing me to a tradition, the Catholic thing. I have tremendous respect for it, but at a certain point it just really didn't make sense high five to people that it does still speak to but at a certain point it just didn't add up. And so I actually kind of got interested in the big questions. And in my teenage years, I was always interested in way back then, it wasn't even the new age, it was like pre New Age. There was a sitcom called, I can't remember what it was, not dark shadow. So I watched it, and you know what it was like. This was a British show, if I remember correctly, to remember the details. But there was something there. I had no idea what it was that just spoke to something bigger than just this conventional

Alex Ferrari 3:02
Dark shadows, is where you got your spiritual start. That's amazing. You never know where it's going to come from,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 3:07
And then, well, check this out. It got even better, in a certain sense, because what really kicked it off for me was David Carradine and Kung Fu, of course. I mean, how cool could that be? So here you got the Shaolin Prince priest who's just like, you know, so, so spiritually connected and put together. And then at the end of the 50 minute thing, he kicked some serious ass, right? And I said, I want to be like this guy. So hey, you know, whatever! David Carradine, Kung Fu, got me into it. But during those years, Alex, I did start to get interested in just alternatives to the conventional view. I didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I had an intuition. There's got to be more to it than this. And so I started studying the developing New Age stuff, Jane Roberts, the stuff material. And I actually had a sweet little correspondence with her, Edgar Cayce, the whole channeling thing, whole psychic thing, and then from there, it just continued to morph and evolve. And a major turning point for me was I was a stressed out undergraduate at Indiana University doing a double degree in music and biology.

Alex Ferrari 4:14
I'm sorry, music and biology, yeah, because they work well together.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 4:18
Yeah, exactly. Doesn't everybody do that?

Alex Ferrari 4:21
So two degrees, you can't get a job with. No, I'm joking!

Dr. Andrew Holecek 4:25
Exactly, yeah, I was in a spine concert pianist, and so I have a degree in classical music and also a degree in biology. And I was diagnosed because I was type a hard worker. I grew up in an Eastern European family where discipline and work ethic was like the thing. And so I was diagnosed. I started having some symptoms, dizziness, bloody nose, that kind of thing. I went to the Health Sciences Center. I was diagnosed as a 20 year old with hypertension, high blood pressure. And so they said, Well, you know, do this exercise, modify your diet, and take these meds. And I said, I'm 20 years old. I'm not gonna take. Meds. So I did modify my diet. I did start to exercise more. And then I remember reading some article somewhere about the benefits of TM Transcendental Meditation. And as it so happened, there was a lecture on campus. I went to it. I thought the guy was kind of compelling, kind of cool. I said, Well, I'm just going to try this. What do I have to lose? So I went to the first session, and here I am, a good little Catholic boy from the Midwest and offering incense to the shrine and offering fruit and supplicating to this Hindu stuff. And I said, Oh, well, okay, whatever. Let's just go with it. And so I'm not sure if you know how it works, but what happened was my instructor introduced me to my mantra, which I then realized a couple million other people had that same mantra, but that's okay and the way it works. He introduced it. He started saying it out loud. We recited it together, then he gestured for me to kind of diminuendo, decrendo into silence, and my life was forever changed, because at least for the first time in my life, I entered beginner's luck, total state of complete meditative absorption, complete Samadhi cessation, or nirodha space, no thoughts, no space, no time, no me for some timeless period of time, maybe half an hour, I Have no idea, because time didn't exist. I came out and my life was never been. Has never been the same. It was just a massive tectonic before and after experience, just that one session, just that one thing, because it was so foundational, though, so true, that it pointed out a dimension of mind reality that I had no idea even existed, and I didn't know what that was, but I knew I wanted more of it. And so right there, my path was born, my meditative path was born that that day, and I haven't looked back. And so I tried the TM thing. I still have tremendous respect and allegiance for it, but it didn't have much of a path quality. And so then I entered a challenging bit of time where I finished my degree. I took a year off because I figured out, do I go to med school? What am I going to do? So I took a year off. I worked really, two really interesting jobs. I worked in a maximum security state penitentiary, and I also worked the second half of the year because I was thinking of med school as a surgical orderly in the hospital. So this is a pretty gritty introduction to the kind of darker shadow sides of life and death. And so around that time, Alex, this is really big deal for me. A second major event happened. So this the TM thing. Was around age 20. This is around 23 I was reading the Edgar Cayce stuff, reading the self material stuff, the channeling thing. And I started having all these dreams, what are like now, called prodromal dreams, or dreams of premonition that something was going to happen. And one day I was reading, I'm hanging out, actually, with my sister, just talking about some material because she was highly, kind of psychically inclined, and as I was contemplating, for some obscure reasons, some things around physics at the time, my mind just broke. It just broke open. For sure, my meditation has something to do with it. I'm not entirely sure what the other factors were, but I fell into a state of reality that was just beyond profound, and two character qualities characterize it. And then I'll pause for a second, was for about a two week period, all my nighttime dreams became lucid. So it was just a little like non time, non stop lucid dreams where you're dreaming and you know that you're dreaming. And then even some of my sleep experiences were lucid. So I started, I was entering a space of tacit, 24/7 consciousness. I hadn't had that before. And kind of correlative to that, that was really cool, is my nighttime experience became more and more real. My dreams became more solid, more like this. Well, conversely, my daytime experiences became more illusory. They became more dreamlike. And eventually, like, wow, this is really cool. Look at this. Well, because I didn't have any doctrinal underpinnings or understanding, after about two weeks, it wasn't so cool anymore, because I lost my footing in right in reality, my ontological footing, I started having a really hard time determining if I was awake or asleep. And so, yeah, and so I started fundamentally to freak out, because I thought, well, this is this. This isn't awakening. This is insanity. This is psychosis. I'm starting to lose my shit here. And so I panicked. I shut it down. This one I was working at the or I jumped in my VW Bug, who's driving and driving, living in Michigan at the time, I drove off to Colorado, and somewhat long story short, I basically skied and drank my way back to reality, right? I had to get the rug back from, you know, underneath my feet. Eight. And so those two experiences were absolutely just massively impactful. And then from there, my path really took off.

Alex Ferrari 10:08
So it sounds like you had almost like a psychedelic experience. It's very similar to a psychedelic experience. The second one that you really can't connect what's real and what's not. But I've never heard of it from a meditation or something else I can only imagine. I mean, just looking like being here with you, and all of a sudden, thing is it, am I? Is this? Is is this real? Is this what's real that becomes very dangerous to the uninitiated mind or the not without a guide, like if you had a guru, or if you had a teacher, or you had someone to go, no, no, here it's going to be you did it right? So you were kind of out there, you know, in the middle of the ocean, without with, you know, without anything to hang on to,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 10:54
Totally and, you know, either, I can't remember if it's Rd Lang or Joseph Campbell, this quotes attributed to both the mystic swims in the same ocean where the psychotic drowns. And so I yeah, not great. And so I started drowning because I didn't know how to swim in this space. And then things got really dicey. So I do want to say after that experience there was so revelatory. So opening things, I entered a period two, three years, kind of dark night of the soul, thing where, where I really wasn't sure if I was going to make it psychically. I never thought about suicide, but I just, I said, How can I survive this level of tremendous uncertainty? And I had, you'll, you'll appreciate this from your yoga and Hindu background, I started having these extraordinary surges of energy, which now I can recognize, is a rapid rising from Kundalini, where I would literally, especially at the night, and the night when things would kind of implode, these extraordinary energetic surges would start from the base of my spine and just shoot to the top of my head. And I literally thought I was just gonna my head was gonna blow off and I was just gonna lose it, but because I had a little bit of meditation experience with the TM thing, I was able to kind of ride that and eventually dissolve into it, you know, I let the energy rise. I feel like I'm just about to lose my shit, almost like, like, really, like a trip, like, it's like $1 trip. And then the only option, some deep intuition says you just have to surrender to this. You have to die. And so every time it come up, I would actually just kind of dissolve into the cosmos. And so I again, I had no understanding what that was about, until I started looking around. I was in Boulder, Colorado at the time, and the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism just started to pop into my lap because the radical, iconoclastic Siddha sage trunk, para Rinpoche was there at that time doing his crazy stuff. And so karmically, serendipitously, auspiciously, I fell into that fold, and all of a sudden it started to click. I discovered Dream Yoga, which helped me really understand what happened during his outrageous two week ride when everything just appeared to be a dream, because everything is a dream, yeah. I mean that there's that, yeah, there's that, the Buddha, the awakened one, you know, that's the ultimate lucid dreamer. That's what he discovered. And so for me, I like having that, that tradition, come to my rescue. It's such a critical time. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a card carrying Tibetan Buddhist, I often playfully say for tax purposes, but I also say immediately, this is important, always remember that the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, right, right? Jesus was not a Christian. Christ, he was a Jew, exactly. So he was just an amazing individual who woke up correct? And so all of a sudden, I just, I was reading the text and listening to each I just found myself nodding my head all the time, going, geez, maybe I'm a Buddhist. And so even though that is the principal kool aid that I drink, the way I really roll is when people ask me, I hear, you're a Buddhist. Well, again, I'm more a curious I'm intensely curious about the nature of mind and reality. What is this thing called life? What is this thing called death? Why are we here? Why are we here? Purpose? Exactly the big questions. And so even though I have tremendous I did a three year retreat, I have such allegiance to the Tibetan approach. This is a big world with lots of elegant systems of knowledge acquisition, yes. And so I study, I'm a big fan of integral approaches, integral theory. I study east, west, north, south. I run in philosophy, psychic channeling, you name it, all of it, you know, if there's truth, I will listen. No one has a patent on truth.

Alex Ferrari 14:35
You were saying earlier. We were telling you you were first time you're here in Austin, yeah. And we were talking about it being a weird little town, and they're very proud of that, like, literally, T shirts at the airport that said, Keep Austin weird. It's a, it's a badge of honor that we're weird here. And you said something that was pretty profound. He's like, I forgot who said it, but the weird, the weirder is,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 14:55
The truer it is. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 14:57
That's a, the weirder it is a true or it is sometimes, and it's, it's, it's pretty it's pretty fat. What I find also fascinating with you is that you've, you walked in, you've kind of gone down the Tibetan Buddhist path, if you will. But you started with channeling, with the Seth, the Seth material, and Edgar Casey material. I was very similar. I started with the Edgar Cayce material that then led me to many, many, many lives, many masters, totally, those kind of books and and then eventually to Yogananda and the yoga philosophies. But I started off with the more esoteric, you know, on the on the fringe, because, I mean, quote, unquote, Edgar Casey and channeling was more especially at your when you were thinking it was completely you're you're a weirdo, you're on the edge, complete. Now it's super cool to be a channel. Everyone's channeling. Everyone's a psychic medium all of a sudden. But I love that. That's your path you started. You found truth in that I did. And then, slowly but surely, throughout your throughout your years as an academic, as a researcher, and then your own personal spiritual journey, you open yourself up to all different paths, which is what I try to do as well.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 16:09
I think this is so important. I mean, one of the things that I'm just passionate about Alex is blind spots and having people, life situations. Teachers show me what I don't see. That, to me, is so key, because, again, the Tibetan thing is so incredibly powerful. But every world was in tradition that I've really explored in some detail, they always have. There's always going to be some blind spots. There's always going to be some limitations. East, west, north, south are always there. And so there's this, again, I like to think in terms of jingles and quotes. And there's another one by Mark Twain that is just so spot on, or sometimes attributed to Josh Billings. This is so great. It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you do know that just ain't so the myth of knowledge. So whenever Sam King said this decades ago, that you know, whenever you have the urge to bang the fist and say, Damn it, that's just the way it is, that's your biggest indicator that you're up against a beliefs spot, a belief system in a blind spot. And so for me, I like stepping outside of the perception box. My friend Elizabeth coke talks about perception boxes, how we box ourselves in in these world views. And so this is why I'm always looking for approaches to challenge my comfort zone, to challenge my particular places, often almost forcing myself out, doing things out of my comfort zone, so that I don't get too comfortable and secure in my way? Yeah, because there's so many ways this is this. The universe is so big, there's so much beauty, there's so much mystery, there's so many avenues for truth. And if it's spoken to and it's delivered and it expresses itself with love, kindness and compassion, I'm going to pay attention to that.

Alex Ferrari 17:56
And what I love that's so beautiful that you were just saying is, I think this is the nature of where we're all going as humanity. I'm hoping one whole I think we are. I think look from the moment that you were, you know, in your teen years and early 20s, to where you are now, things have changed a bit. We're having a conversation like this that will be seen by a lot of people. That wasn't the case 10 years ago, Yes, God forbid, 20 or 30. You know that Seth material and Edgar Cayce was so fringy, where now a lot of that stuff's being studied by scientists,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 18:31
Exactly. And this is great. I think this is important. You know this notion in the Taoist tradition of co emergence. You see it in the Yin Yang symbolism that co emergent with this collective show that we're in this, this mega Kali Yuga the Dark Age, yes, right? Yeah. coemergent with, with the Kali Yuga the Dark Age, the degenerate age, are amazing beams of light like you and what you're doing here. And researchers and scientists, I mean, there's some really cool people doing really illuminating things right now. And so William James said something once, it really stuck with me. Reality is what you attend to, and so I choose to attend to truth, beauty, goodness, and these avenues that lead hopefully to the fruition of the human condition, but at the same time maintaining one eye. I think it's one reason we have both two eyes on the crazy, the craziness, the circus, not buying into it, being aware of observing it, hopefully with more openness and responsiveness and that reactivity, and then using this kind of higher vision, so to speak, what Blake called double vision, to then inform and transform the way I relate to relative realities.

Alex Ferrari 19:43
You know, it's very interesting, because the world does seem, for many people, that we're going upside down. There is a circus going on. There's a lot of negative things happening, wars and old systems are coming crashing down around us, and foundations that we've been holding on to. I mean, you and I are both for. Former Catholics. I mean, the Vatican, the Catholic Church, was unfallible. Little different today. Couple things have been brought to light over the last few decades, and then also just a lot more information out there now. And you know, there's a lot more research is digging deeper into the origins of the Bible and the stories and in the historical documents and and all of a sudden, you know the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, it's starting to be shown, and people are like, wait a minute, it's there is no Great and Powerful Oz here. There's just a dude pulling some strings in the back. So that's happening across all spectrums, from media to medicine to economics, to food, to everything, totally. So the world seems to be, for many people, a little bit upside down right now, a little chaotic, and seems to be getting more chaotic. But what I love, what you said, and it's something I found in my own life, is I stopped watching the news. I stopped watching it. I always said, and this Wayne Dyer said this, the great wind diaries at one point. At one point, he's like, if, if the news is big enough, he'll get to me. You know, if an asteroid is coming, someone's gonna mention it.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 21:10
Just don't look up.

Alex Ferrari 21:11
Just don't look up. Great movie, the best movies in the last 10 years, great movie. But don't look up. But that information will get to me. If there's something major, it will get to me. Everything else is just, yeah, just yappy, yappy, yappy. And if you fall, and I have, and I don't sure if you've had in your path, but you you can fall into this vortex of negativity, because that's what's being sold to you. Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. So you fall into and you start getting angry, and you start getting tribal about your things and all this stuff, where now I look at what's happening with that eye as the observer, and I'm aware, like, look, I understand the economy is doing this. I understand that there's worlds over there, but I can't do anything about that that's not in my life. So my life has a different energy to it, and the people around these energy has a different energy to it, because I don't, I'm not in, I'm not participating in that movie.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 22:07
Well, that's, I mean, this is beautiful because this is, this is archetypal lucidity. So, you know, I roll a lot in the world of lucid dreaming. I've written three books on it, and I use lucidity as an archetype, as a code word. And here lucidity is co language for awareness. And so another way to talk about these lucid principles is that fundamentally what happens and we can, we can bring this back also to the wizard behind the screen in our own mind, how it is that we're being pulled by levers that we're not even aware of. And this is a big part of my personal internal journey is finding out who and what is pulling those levers behind me, giving me the illusion that I perceive in reality properly and that I have some semblance of free will. So we can come back to that, because this is a really big part of my own personal journey. But this lucidity thing is a big one, because what happens is when a phenomenal arising, let's just take a dream. Let's take a nighttime Dream, which is one of the principal sources of education in both Hinduism and Buddhism. I mean, in the monduki Upanishad, they have a tremendous literature about the importance of working with dreams. Dream Yoga and the Tibetan tradition is massive. And so you can learn so much about the nature of reality by studying the nighttime dream. So here's an example. So you're in your dream tonight, right over the mind is manifesting in a particular way. And what happens in a classic, non lucid dream, a normal dream, is you miss take that dream to be real. You get sucked into it. You're lost in the display, and therefore you're basically pinged around by the contents of your own conscious mind, yes, and fundamentally, then you suffer in direct proportion to how sadly you take those contents. And so what happens with lucidity in the nighttime arena, and then, most importantly, extrapolating it into the daytime arena is one moment of recognition that's a game changer, because in one moment of recognition and a dream, through all kinds of techniques and whatnot, you realize, hey, wait a second, this is just a dream. And so when you realize it's just a dream, it's just a display of my own mind and appearance. Now, appearance is in harmony with reality. Before they were conflated, you thought the appearance was the reality. That's a non lucid dream, and we suffer because of that. So in a moment of lucidity, you step back, you have a new sense of perspective. The display is still there, but you're no longer ensconced in it. You're no longer lost in it, and now you can relate to the display instead of from it. And that's the basis of freedom. So the dream yoga tradition takes exactly that, that phenomenology, that process, and it extends it to this dream that we haven't woken up from, and you realize the same thing is happening. Yes, so that when something arises and you get sucked into it, you miss, take it to be real. Reality is what you attend to. That's a moment of archetypal non lucidity. You've just gone non lucid. And then that phenomenal display. Then. Has power over you because you've reified it. You've made it real.

Alex Ferrari 25:03
The Evening News,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 25:04
Hello, or social media. Oh God, here's like, here's what. I mean, I saw this the other day. I couldn't believe it. This is, like, a whole riff on news about, again, I feel so badly for this woman. But, you know, this deep fake thing and all the sexual stuff that she had nothing to do with, and how she was just, I mean, she was like, on the brink of suicide.

Alex Ferrari 25:04
They just passed that bill here.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 25:10
Yeah, exactly. And so to me, it was to me, I was sitting there. Well, have you ever tried, just maybe not looking at your social media feed? Have you maybe actually tried to extricate yourself from this display? It was like, it was almost incredulous for me. So I like to talk about this, because this allows us to use all the dimensional displays of our mind and our being, whether it's a nighttime arena for nocturnal lucidity or the daytime arena for diurnal lucidity, to bring a quality of awareness to what's happening in our lives. And then from that awareness, then comes a responsibility, instead of reactivity, the capacity to relate with kindness and compassion to others. Because if you're talking to someone, you can't even listen to them from the other side of the political aisle or whatever. You know, you get defensive and offensive. Those are also instances of non lucidity. So I just wanted to throw that into the mix to show how we can actually work with this moment to moment, night to night,

Alex Ferrari 26:22
Right! There was there's you were saying about the the person in your head that's pulling the tree, yeah, pulling the levers, which is the subconscious mind, essentially, in many ways, and a lot of the subconscious mind has been built on the programming that we've gotten in those first seven years of our life.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 26:41
Bruce Lipkins work, you know this way? Well, very much, if you understand that it's jaw dropping,

Alex Ferrari 26:42
Isn't it, when you when you come to the realization that, for me, you were talking, you were reading or watching my video about my my my mob, yeah, story, my mob story, when right, almost made $20 million movie for the mob. That whole thing was, was one of the more traumatic things as one would have, a year of having your life threatened by a psychopathic ex gangster, a Year of Living Dangerously, if you will, it was one of the more traumatic things ever happened in my life. I had no idea it completely controlled everything that I did professionally in the film industry for the next 16 years, only once I wrote the book about it that I kind of exercise those demons, if you will, perfect. I was like, Oh, that is why I've been so terrified of making a feature film. That's why I've self sabotaged myself throughout because I would get in the room, I would get in the room with big celebrities and big movies and paper, and it would just crash every time. And I'm like, I'm good enough to be in the room. Why can't I get the damn thing made? And then, to add insult to injury, I'm helping other filmmakers in post production make their dreams come true, and they don't know what they're doing in many times. And I'm fixing their mistakes, or fixing mistakes of production. I'm like, This is so unfair. Only once I understood that, like, Oh, my subconscious mind. And it wasn't an it wasn't a nefarious thing. It was just trying to protect me. Yeah, absolutely, it's just trying.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 28:10
I mean, this is the genius of ifs, right? Yeah, I Oh, I'm so glad you brought this up, because this is such a colossally important topic. Estimates vary, but about 95% and this is interesting in terms of dark energy and dark matter in the universe, which is basically a euphemism for, we have no effing idea, but about 95% of what we do is dictated by these unconscious Absolutely. So talk about, Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. I mean, this is largely what it means to proclaim we have no free will. You think you're living the dictates of freedom? No, you're basically living a printout of what's been installed in your operating system in these formative years, zero to seven, when we're basically literally being hypnotized. I mean, you know, first two years and delta two years, two through seven, mostly in theta. This is the brainwave that hypnotists take you down into to bring about their post hypnotic suggestions. So we live, we talk about the Buddha's, the awakened one. He's also the dehypnotized ones, a dehypnotized one. And so we're living in this narcosis, this sleep, this level of anesthesia, this level of hypnosis. And these technologies, the psycho spiritual technologies east and west, are really designed to rouse us from the slumber. Jung was on to this. The whole notion of Plato was on Parmenides. Take it back to the pre Socratics, yeah, you know, the whole notion of anamnesis recollection returning, and then Jung's teachings on individuation, bringing unconscious processes into the light of consciousness. And so for me, this is one reason I'm so incredibly fascinated with the forces of the dark side. Excuse me through the nocturnal meditations. And then, in particular. Regular, a big practice I've been doing for 29 years. I'm finally coming out to write and do research and talk about, which is the magic of dark retreat, going into a sensory I want to get into. This is you want to explore the the depth, the depth and the dimensions of your being, especially the unconscious mind. This is an incredibly powerful way to do it,

Alex Ferrari 30:19
Before we get into, yeah, before we get into, before we get into because I definitely want to talk about dark retreats. It's fascinating. And as you said, the dark side, Yoda sitting right behind you. Yeah, Yoda's always somewhere in the back of one of my sets. Always the I had a dream once. I never it's one of these dreams. You know, you don't remember many dreams. Mostly don't. You mostly don't. You mostly don't. But this one is, it's been, it stayed with me for all my life, and it's my first, at least, that I can remember lucid dream. Oh, cool. You remember how old you were? Oh, I was. Must have been in sixth grade, seventh grade. Yeah. I think around there Exactly, yeah. So I was, what, 1312, around there, I was in my apartment, and the door, the door, oh, you're dreaming. I'm dreaming. I was in the apartment, the door. Someone knocks on the door. I open it up, and there is this massive, dark figure in a trench coat, and he does not look like he's there to give me a hug. And I get scared because you like, it's a stranger. I'm 1213, and there's, there's big, faceless, by the way, faceless, shadowy figure, and I and then that was the moment. Like, wait a minute, this is a dream, beautiful. I'm gonna kick this guy's butt because I've been watching too many 80s movies like dreamscape and these other great 80s movies that were back then, and I went to kick him in the balls, yeah? And I'm like, You know what? I kick him. He blocks and I'm like, I'm out. And I just woke up. I'll never forget that that dream, because it was the first time I had control of my dream. But the dream did not let that go. He's like, Oh, I could block you. I'm like, Okay, I don't understand these rules. I'm out.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 32:01
Yeah, yeah, well, look at that. I mean, just that one experience that maybe lasted, what, a minute or two, probably, yeah, something was so foundational, oh, absolutely that it stayed with you for your entire life.

Alex Ferrari 32:12
I've never forgotten that dream. I remember a handful of dreams that really still stick with me. I love interpreting dreams that dreams are ways of the other side to talk to you and teach you about things and let you know what's like. There was one, there was one dream. Okay, I'll stop telling no shooting. This is awesome. There's a there was a dream I had. I was right before. I think it was before, I think, don't quote me, but I think it was the time period where I had let go of next level soul. There was a three month period that I stopped doing it because I was scared of doing the show. Okay, because it's weird. I'm talking weirdos like yourself exactly. So the warrior the truth. The weirder, the truer. So and there was this. And the funny thing is, I was about to get on a plane in two days when this happened, I was at the edge of Los Angeles, like up in the hills, like Hollywood Hills, let's say, and I'm looking over the entire city of Los Angeles, and this giant jumbo plane, Jumbo 747, flies like inches away from me, flies over, does a U turn, and crashes into the city, but crashes as almost a cartoon that the plane is so much bigger, like the so basically, like a skyscraper would be this big. And the plane, and it was just coming towards me, yeah, and it just kind of almost stops in front of me. And I wake up and I ask. I was like, What the hell does that mean? So I spoke to you about Connie, my spirit, my spirit my teacher, my spirit guide here on Earth, who's alive. I always have to premise a preface that I asked her, What does this mean? She's like it means that you've got to get Hurry up. If not, this is not going to work out for you. You need to get back to to doing what you're supposed to be doing with next level. So I was like, wow. So the other side was like, dude, yeah, dude, kind of

Dr. Andrew Holecek 34:08
Yeah, you know, yeah, get on it. Because, you know, if you resist that, that that calling from these higher dimensions, these interior dimensions, if we resist that, it doesn't always turn out so great.

Alex Ferrari 34:21
It generally never turns out great. Life harder for you're

Dr. Andrew Holecek 34:25
not in alignment. And so my dear friend, you know, come back to my dear friend, Deborah, when, when she offered to do this astrology thing. For me, I'm an academic, I'm a geek, I'm a cognitive neuro

Alex Ferrari 34:36
Crazy astrology.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 34:37
Yeah, exactly. So, like, it's like, Oh, you got to give me a break. And so like with you, something about Deborah just completely opened my heart. And she's a shaman. She's a medicine woman. She's wonderful. But the one of the things that happened with her, Alex, that is worth sharing for me was, you know, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, astrology is actually a huge thing in Vedic Astrology. I mean, in the Western traditions, it's. Big. And so my categorical dismissal was really of the newspaper or Western version of it, right? Like, and that

Alex Ferrari 35:06
Today, if you're a cancer, don't go outside.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 35:09
Like, really. But the reason I mentioned this is what, what this led me to, is to explore, as I'm prone to do, some of the roots of astrological principles. And one of the things that clicked in for me, I'm curious, if this speaks to you, is that astrology, at least for me, is more about alignment than prediction. And by that, what I mean is, yes, indeed, in the non dualistic world. So the philosophy behind this goes actually quite deep and very profound, that if reality is, in fact, non dual, and everything is of the nature of heart, mind, spirit. Then there is just the illusion of external, of exteriority. And so when you're working with astrological principles in a non dual world, as the great wisdom traditions do, then there really is some power and resonance to what these agents, these stars are actually inviting. And so what I've discovered, and this is why Deborah's reading, for me last year, was so foundational, because so much was happening so fast. Had a conversation with my wife, Cindy, is like, boy, it'd be interesting to have her reading. And there she pops. And I realized with with her guidance, that these, these incredible forces were already working through me and her ability to actually articulate those articulate those forces, then helped me align myself in resonance with them. And so then what became this kind of flow stage where you enter this zone of optimal, whatever you want to call it, performance, where you fundamentally realize, like we talked before we came on, that this life never was and never will be about you and I. It's about these amazing cosmic forces that are being played through us. And so for me, there's something about really, finally understanding that, and then opening to the extent where I would allow these extraordinary powers to just flow through me.

Alex Ferrari 36:58
And that's a very key point there, because a lot of people listen to my go, What do you mean? So what's the point? What's the point of us doing what we're doing? If everyone over just puppets for someone else? It's not the case. No, the case is that it's a dance. It is a agreement that we allow ourselves to be used in this way, like when we when we come down and with the soul in this incarnation. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, from your background, from my understanding and research, is like, as a soul, you're on the other side. You're like, you get together with your spirit guides and whoever's there, and like, Okay, this life, you know, would be really great. I want to, I want to suffer a bit. I haven't suffered enough. And the other life, last, last life, was like, I was a king. It was great. You know, I had everything brought to me, I want to learn what suffering is, and let's go through some suffering in this life. And they're like, Okay, great. So what we're going to do is we're going to give you a talent, and you're going to be constantly near the goal that you reach, but you'll never get to it. But then only years later Will you realize that all of that was, all that work, was prepping you for something else that you're going to do in the second chapter, in the second chapter in the second half of your life. And you're like, oh, but you're gonna go through hell for these 30 years. Like, okay, great, fantastic. Now, from us at this point, as playing, you and I are Mario and Luigi down here, from this point of view, it's dangerous because there's fireballs being thrown at us and there's turtles and, you know, but from that side, we're like, you know, be kind of cool if I play this level again. And let's see if I challenge myself a little bit. I used to do that. I don't know if you remember this game. I was an old Nintendo player. The original intent, okay, there was a game called Contra. Back in the day, it was a game called Contra, and that game, there was a code. It's very famous code in the gamer world, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right. Ba, start. I still remember that makes you invincible. So you would go through the entire game with all the firepower, all the invincibility, they couldn't really do anything to you, yeah. And you would play that game. And I remember sitting there playing that game 100 times with invincibility, meaning that there's no challenge, barely a challenge. Then I would go back, even though I had the power to be invincible, and I would challenge myself, let me go through this level again and see I'm gonna hold my one arm back, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna. And I would create challenges for myself to play the game. And in that, I use that as an analogy from what the soul likes to do when it comes down here, but we do agree to make agreements with the universe, like you came down to do the teachings and everything that you're doing and the path you walk. I did the same agreement that the universe is working through us to help the collective.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 39:35
Totally, totally, yeah. And I think again, the subtle alignment of understanding these issues and ways to work with it, one of the things we talked about earlier about the big questions. And as you know, I'm sure, you know, Alex, questions are so much more important than answers, because questions, even the power of an open question, you know, sends the mind and heart in the right direction, right? And so for. Me. I realized over the last couple years in terms of these foundational questions, in this issue of alignment, I realized that a large part of my life, I'd actually been asking the wrong question, where often it would have been like, well, what should I do with my life, right? And then no, what does life want to do through me better? What does life want to do with me, and then the minute I do that, this fundamental, and this is one of the archetypal narratives that I've really come to appreciate of openness and contraction, I then allow myself to open to these, these forces, both internal and external, because these boundaries break down where, then fundamentally, thy will be done. These you open to such an extent that you allow yourself to be Yeah, just a conduit for this sort of thing. Like the book I just sent to my publisher on dark retreat is the first time I've ever actually had this feeling. It's my ninth book. I didn't write this book. I mean, this book was, dare I say you can't believe I'm saying this in public was channeled into me through a dark retreat I did 18 months ago.

Alex Ferrari 41:06
All all, all writing, all art, is a channeling process. I've spoken to some of the most, one of the, some of the most successful artists, writers, filmmakers, in the planet, and I've asked that question before I even got into this, I would go when you're writing. Do you ever just sit there and write something, and when you're done writing, you go, Oh, God, that's good. Yeah. Who wrote that exactly? That is when you are hitting, I've talked to multiple Oscar winners who have that. And the great writers know that they are not they are just a conduit. They are a filter that this information comes through exactly. You could use the word channel. You can use the word whatever.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 41:42
And so this and this can happen. This is what's interesting to me. It can happen serendipitously, as it does throughout history. It can happen be facilitated with things like psychedelics, yes. But I also think it can be facilitated more, so to speak, intentionally, through opening practices like the contemplative arts and meditation, where eventually, if you can set yourself aside, set Alex aside, set Andrew aside, and then allow so. So this really leads to fundamental questions of identity and who we really are in relationship to these forces and the cosmos at large. So we have, there's the two, I thing, you know. So we have the relative Andrew, the relative Alex. But then if that can be temporarily opened and set to the side. Then these other energetics, whatever you want to call them, these non human intelligences, whatever, can then actually engage in you, so to speak, use you in that best sense,

Alex Ferrari 42:31
With permission. Yes, with I understand it. But a lot of people get freaked out when you hear, when they hear things like that. Yes, and what you're just what you just said, basically is the experience of a channeler in the shaman.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 42:44
This is the job description.

Alex Ferrari 42:46
They put themselves literally the exact words you use. They put yourself aside. And I sit there, and sometimes they remember, sometimes they don't, and the information comes through exactly, so it's exactly the same thing. Yeah. So let's get into this dark retreat. Cool, I'm dying to hear about Yeah, so a dark retreat you spent? How many, how long?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 43:06
Oh, you know, Alex, I've been doing this for I started in 1996 I started studying officially with my Tibetan teachers. In 96 I've been doing it for almost three decades. Good Lord, I've been the longest. Well, this year, I went in for a month.

Alex Ferrari 43:20
You were in a dark retreat for a month? Yeah, yeah, that man. I mean, you don't start that way, by the way. No, anyone listening? Oh, God, no, God, please don't do that.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 43:29
No, no, no, we'll talk about how to get started. You definitely.

Alex Ferrari 43:32
So explain to people, I think I know what a dark retreat is, to my understanding, it's just you're in a dark room where there's no light for an X amount of time. Yes, and you do not see light. You do not you're basically in pure darkness. Not like, oh, like at night, pure darkness. I use F bombs. I would prefer not.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 43:53
It's effing dark in there.

Alex Ferrari 43:56
It's, it's pitch, pitch dark. And when you are in that kind of environment, your brain. And this is, again, this is my understanding. And I love to want to hear your experience. My understanding is your brain can't really it has nothing to hold on to. Oh, yeah, so it can't hold on to that little bit of light. It doesn't. So all of a sudden it implodes on itself, because there's no other place to be is that, is that?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 44:22
Well, there's so much to say here. So a couple things at the outset. Just a tiny disclaimer the books that I'm writing, when I started doing this practice, I was somewhat sworn to secrecy around this practice, really, yeah, in the 90s. You mean when you first Yes, in the tradition, this is not something you talk about in a public arena. It was always held behind the curtains because there are certain practices. There's a handful of practices that are so powerful, they're called forceful methods of liberation that just like with psychedelics, actually the parallels are crazy, that if it's not done with proper set and setting. With proper intention, with proper guidance. Dark medicine is really big medicine, and call it dark medicine. I call it dark medicine because it can't hurt you, and I'll say why and where that comes from. But if it's done properly, used as directed, right, then it's one of the most in fact, for me, hands down, like, like, no question, the single most impactful, transformative practice I have ever done, and I've done a few, Oh, I did a three year retreat, yeah. So, yeah, 60 that, well, 30,000 hours of practice, yeah. And so let me say a little bit about that. One of the reason I'm coming out of the closet, almost literally, to write and teach and that we're doing research, is just as much to keep people out as it is to keep people in. Because if you don't go in with the right attitude, you think of it as the next extreme sport, the next exotic golf meditation, the darkness will

Alex Ferrari 45:54
I'm sorry you say golf meditation, golf meditation. I just see a golf it's right.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 46:00
So if you're going with that mindset,

Alex Ferrari 46:04
That's the wrong listening to the cure. Sorry,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 46:07
The darkness will pulverize you. And it's actually not the dark. The dark, the darkness doesn't fundamentally do anything. It's neutral. It just serves as a metaphysical mirror. And this is important, the darkness itself is fundamentally neutral. And so everything that happens in the dark, and we can talk about this in some detail, even before you go in the darkness, starts to teach you actually. And so it's an ancient practice. Just to put it in some context, you'll find it in the pre Socratic tradition, Parmenides, I mentioned earlier, Empedocles, some of the pre Socratics. They work with dreaming, incubation, in terms of dark retreat. You'll find it in the Neoplatonic tradition, Iamblichus, procalist and people like that. You'll find it in the West, in the shamanic traditions of the Kogi tribes in Columbia and the ones that really, really ran with this in a huge way, the Daoist did, and still do, but the Tibetans, and this is another reason why I'm so enamored with the whole Tibetan thing, because they have so many psycho spiritual technologies. It's sometimes called the traditional skillful means. There are just dozens and dozens of practices, Dream Yoga, sleep yoga, karma, mudra for sexual practice. There's so many meditations and so dark retreat in that tradition is part of the death preparatory practices, which we can come back to later. So when you said something about your dying to get into it, well, there's an interesting turn of phrase there, but I say that just so people realize what I'm talking about. And it's gaining a lot of press these days. The celebrities are going in and writing about it. It has tremendous power in this Kali Yuga in this dark age. And I think some of the irony here, the languaging is very compelling. I see dark medicine, dark retreat, actually, as a potential antidote to this dark age. Interestingly enough, interesting. And also we can talk about this later, about how this can be a very powerful counterbalancing approach to what's happening with AI these days. But I'll say a little bit more than I'll pause, because otherwise, once I get going, I mean, I'm going to be running on this for hours. There's so much to say. But the way it works, like you're saying, Alex, you go in through a specially prepared cabin, and when you start at home, by the way, and I'll say that a little bit later, you start with the little goggles on in a room. You start really slow, really gentle. You do what's called a gray retreat, which means you're weaving in and out. You do not listeners, please do not do this at home, or you can do this at home. Don't go in and do five, five days, seven days, 10 days. Don't even think about it. Start at home, literally by by closing your eyes for one thing. Then you can get these masks, mind fold mask, or a mountain mask. We can send links to that. Then you can wall off a part of your room, and then you can start working with one of the dark retreat centers and do this work. But fundamentally, when you go into a dark retreat facility, a cave or a cabin, just like we're saying at the outset, it is as black as Black can be. I mean, it is dark. It is there's no light. There was zero light,

Alex Ferrari 49:01
So your eyes can't grab onto anything.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 49:04
There's nothing. And this is where it becomes incredibly compelling. So I'll say a little bit more than I'll pause, and then I can talk a little bit about entry level transformations, intermediate and then advanced levels of transformation, where, and then where those transformations are coming from, and why? Why is it so incredibly transformative? What's actually happening in there that makes it such a radical form of transformation? And so, yeah, I'll pause for a second, because there's so much to say that I want to make sure I include you in the conference.

Alex Ferrari 49:34
No, I appreciate that. Um, to I'm actually want to do it one day.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 49:40
Totally.

Alex Ferrari 49:41
It seems like it's a it is a mirror to you, and that's actually more terrifying to anybody than having someone judge you. That's it. The mirror of you judging yourself or looking into your soul, for the uninitiated, could drive you mad. Exactly, absolutely. So it's very similar to psychedelics. I've spoken to many people who had psychedelics. It is not like, you know, it's like, the cool thing, Ayahuasca, yeah, don't take Ayahuasca in the valley of LA. Don't do that. Bad idea. Don't do that. But a lot of people going in, doing ayahuasca, or doing psilocybin, or any sort of psychedelic and mushrooms, whatever, you got to be very prepared, because it will, it will open you up in a way that you might not be prepared.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 50:34
High five, right there, so you just hit it. God, you got some great questions. So one in the parallels here, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, were just crazy. So one of the biggest issues with darkness, as with psychedelics, is dosage. You can overdose on yourself, because what happens in the dark? You nailed it, my friend. What makes it so transformative and so powerful is you cannot escape from yourself. Wherever you go, there you are. And so there's no way to get away from yourself. And so the issue of dosage is, how much of You Can you handle? How much, how much of yourself can you actually tolerate? And here's one for this. I discovered this very early on. This is so great in terms of like relationships, if you can't be with yourself, right, how on God's good Earth, can you expect anybody else to be with you, right? So give your partner, give your intimates a little break. If you can't even be with yourself, then how do you expect others to so I cut you off a little bit, but one of the ways to look at this practice to kind of demystify it, because it's so easy to project all these aspects of our own being onto the darkness. Just think of it is really intense, concentrated inner work the NBA superstar Rudy Gobert, who's actually playing in the NBA Finals semis now with the Timberwolves. He went in, and he came out and said something actually quite lovely. He said, dark retreat is meditation times 1000 Yeah, it's just really intense, steep, concentrated inner work. And so I cut you off, but I wanted to throw that in, into the mix right off the bat, that the biggest, the biggest issue is, is dosage. Because if you go in like some people do, and this is why I'm a little bit reluctant to say, like, how long, how often, not how often, but how long I go in there, because this practice is about breaking down metrics and measurements. It's all about breaking down judgments and just basically opening to the space. And so even saying, Oh, geez, well, I have to go in for three days, five days, seven days. No, you don't Who cares how long you're in there.

Alex Ferrari 52:45
You know what sounds interesting because of my perspective of talking to so many people in this space, and I love connecting the dots by different cultures, different paths, different experiences, what it sounds to me that it's happening when you go into a dark retreat is that you're going into the void. So the Void is something that is very predominant in near death experiences, totally and also in a near death experience, there's no time. So when you are a soul outside of this, this primitive hardware, the soul is infinite. I always say where we're a fat floppy disk from back in the 70s to the other side is basically the cloud, infinite, essentially. So that processing power we when we're on the other side, we have all the processing power we have so the no time, the void, these kind of things don't bother us as much there. Yeah, but to throw that onto a human with a human brain and human programming and human neuroses and trauma and all that, it's it's dangerous. It is dangerous. It's very dangerous as you're explaining it, I'm like, Oh, my God, that's basically, you're basically having a near death experience,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 54:07
Fundamentally spot on. So the in the Tibetan tradition, this is precisely why it came about in the context of what's called Bardo yoga. A Bardo is a Tibetan term that means in between transitional process gap. It's basically in that mapping what happens after we die. So it's the penultimate. This is why I started doing it. It is the penultimate preparation for the end of life or death, because you're going in to enter the death space, but before we get to that. So that's like the advanced level type stuff. What I thought we could talk about is exactly what you have on your hat, Next Level Soul, because this is the journey of the soul. And so let me say a little bit about this. This is a really interesting it's a provisional differentiation, but I think it's a compelling one that you can look at it psycho spiritual development is a journey of spirit and the journey of soul. And. We need both. They're fantastic. So just just to articulate these two. So journey of spirit is really about height and light and acquisition, and kind of more traditional what we know of classic psycho spiritual technologies, going to the top of the mountain, achieving these lofty states of realization, heavenly dimensions. And as I playfully say, if you just do that, you're going to get high altitude sickness and metaphysical sunburn, right? So if you're just looking for height and light, well, welcome to spiritual bypass. Welcome to spiritual good. Feel good strategies. And so in a non dual tradition, this is so cool. In a non dual tradition, height is replaced with interiority. So in other words, you you can't really go up and out, but you can go down and in and so. So for every step that you do take up and out on the spiritual path, the invitation with things like dark retreat is take a balancing step down and in this is the journey of the soul. This is the journey into the feminine principle. This is a very feminine practice. It's a journey into the womb of reality. It's a journey into the tomb of reality. It's the journey of journey of interiority. And so again, any any other deep internal level of work will do this for you. This just really accelerates the journey of the soul. So when we're talking about next level journey, we're talking about this level of profound descent. And you use the word implosion, which is, this is another really revelatory comment, because Alex, what happens here? And again, this is taking me decades to figure out I was trained in the Tibetan tradition and the boon tradition as well. But I juxtapose a lot of Western depth psychology, a lot of understanding of the mind from Western structuralism and the like. Then what happens fundamentally, that I've discovered is the mind, literally the term in Tibetan is rangbop, R, A, N, G, B, O, P, the mind literally falls into itself. And as it falls into itself in the dark, because it can no longer get away from itself, you literally, this is the, probably the single biggest challenge of the dark retreat, is you can no longer distract. Literally, you can no longer etymologically, to distract means to pull away. You can no longer pull away from the present moment. You can no longer pull away from yourself, you realize, and it's like, it's like a detox center in there, you realize just how addicted we are to light, the artificial light, to distraction, to entertainment, to the movie industry. And so when you're in there, it is all gone, man. I mean, there is no way you can distract that's what makes it so transformative and also so challenging, because you realize we're all addicted to these distraction mechanisms. And so then finally, you're it's called a forceful method of liberation, interestingly enough, of course, and the reason for that is, is darkness, just like death. They're very similar, uncompromising, non negotiable. You can't, you know, sorry, you can't. You just the only thing you can do, my dear friend, is you have to open to it.

Alex Ferrari 58:16
You have to surrender. That's the word I was going to use. You have to surrender to it. And when you in your you've been meditating for a long time. I've been meditating for a few years myself. It's surrendering to the mind needs to finally let go. We get, let go of the ego, let go of the thoughts like all you have to just let go and surrender. When you do that, that's when things start to happen for you. And this is a, it's, I mean, it's a truck running. I mean, it is like an 18 wheeler. If a meditation is a nice little bike ride, this is an 18 wheeler that's gonna hit the bike and you're gonna go spot, because it's, it's intense, and the longer you're in, the more you have to deal with that, and people who are not prepared, I personally don't think, and please tell me what you think. I personally don't think anyone should go into a dark retreat without meditating first

Dr. Andrew Holecek 59:12
100% this is my this is my approach, and this is why I'm coming out to write. And it's not I, it's not like I have the gold a triple standard here of doing Sure, I don't, but I've been doing it for a really long time, and I've been in connection with a lot of colleagues who've been doing it. So I have some sense of how to do it. And there are a lot of ways to do this wrong. And in my estimation, proper set and setting, proper preparation, you do it. This is this will just this will rock your world, man, but if you don't, and this is, again, the caveat, I'm just gonna do this next thing on the resume, and next thing to chick

Alex Ferrari 59:49
Ayahuasca,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 59:51
The darkness, will pull you aside and have a talk with you. She will spank you. But you said something earlier. Again, your languaging is so compelling. Thank. You. You said something about letting go. Letting go is just a euphemism for dying. So when you go into that space, you are forced to let go.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:09
You're done, you're done. You're dying. But but the thing is that when the the masters, the Buddha, Jesus, Yogananda, they all, they all died absolutely while they were living.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:00:23
Well, that's the key, isn't it, if you die before you die, then when you die, you will not die, because you're liberated Exactly. So if you go, if you release on your terms, you titrate it. See this. This is the great gift of deep inner work, meditation, darkness. You can drip it. You can titrate it on your terms. You go in there and you work and you let go, and you work and you let go. The thing with dark retreat is It's so steep, you know, that's why it's considered somewhat advanced. You know, it is really steep. But if you go in there and you understand, and I'll come back to this, what actually happens in there, I can talk to you a little bit about which helps you understand the star. Understand the structure of the mind. Then you're more willing to let go, you're more willing to to die, to open, open, open. And so then when you come through these progressive stages of openness and dark retreat, so the forced openness that happens when we die, that's all this that's going to happen, according to my understanding, death is just a grand opening. It's a fundamental grand opening into reality. And so these practices, my favorite definition of meditation, by the way this ties in here, is habituation to openness, which is fantastic. And so this is a way through meditating before you go in like you intimated, learning how to open, learning how to let go, learning how to become familiar with the very definition of meditation in the Tibetan language, G, O, M, to become familiar with. You do this in advance, and when you go into the dark, you have a deep understanding of what's taking place, because you've done the preliminary work,

Alex Ferrari 1:02:02
Andrew, this is very interesting. Your language is also very, very good as well, because it's triggering ideas in me and questions. When you are at the base level of meditation, you're having small deaths, small deaths all the time. And those small deaths, when I say small deaths, it's you are letting go of Andrew. You're letting go of Alex. You're going into a place where there is no thought, there is no time. And when you get to that magic place, that is when the other side the universe, spirit guides every anything comes through to you,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:02:40
Totally, right. Well, what happens? God, this is you are on it. Man, what happens here is my languaging. But again, after doing this for so long, I've kind of like, maybe this is what's going on. Darkness is the caller of non duality. And so one of the breathtaking things that happens, and this happens in a graduated fashion. The longer you go in there, all the constructs, the dualistic constructs, fall apart. So let's look at some of these, right? So day and night falls apart. You have no idea time. You have no idea what what time it is. Time falls apart. Inside and outside falls apart, self and other falls apart, dream and waking falls apart. And one of the most important ones, and I'll say more about this later, because this is huge. This is kind of intermediate level. The boundary between the conscious and the unconscious mind completely breaks down. So you were talking earlier about the other side. Well, what happens in there is, there is no longer an other side. What happens is you drop through any differentiation between self and other, between this side and the other side. So this is how you die. Before you die, you enter the underworld to realize the ultimate, what we call the reduction base of innate wholeness. And so therefore it's exactly like you say, space time, causality and self, they're co emergent. They all come up together. Space Time, causality is the retinue of the self sense. And when you're in dark retreat, and again, deep meditation will do. It's not the only thing that does it. It's just darkness. Does it in the most kind of dramatic fashion. You start to see over and over and over how it is that space, time, causality, the very sense of self, is constantly made up. It's a construct. And as you see this demolition derby in the dark, in the construction process and the deconstruction process, over and over and over again, you start to realize this is what's going on, night to night, life to life, and moment to moment. So I'll pause for a second, because then what I want to do with your permission is go back and say a little bit about. Beginning, middle and more advanced stages of what actually happens in there and like, well, what, like, what do you do in there man?

Alex Ferrari 1:05:06
Right? Exactly. You can't play Uno because you can't see the cards by yourself.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:05:12
You become, you become uno, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:05:15
You are one with Uno. If there's anything that we can say about this whole conversation is to become one with Uno. The The interesting part about this, these little mini deaths in meditation and then these bigger deaths that you have in a dark retreat, is that what I'm fascinated with is how the mind is fighting to hold on because its job is to not let you die. And wonderfully so wonderfully so it's there to keep you alive, and you are forcing it into a place where it has now no control. It has nothing to grab on to, and you are now left to your own devices, and if you are not prepared, or, if you haven't been to the gym, the meditation gym, or something along those lines, that you are kind of walking in with the proper intention, walking in with the proper ideas of what's going to happen. And even with all that preparation, I'm sure the first time you went in, you're like, Oh, this is not what, this is not what was in the brochure, right? And you were prepared, yeah, someone who just walks in cold, it could be extremely dangerous.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:06:24
It could but, you know, just to balance that, and some of my people so just to be a little devil's advocate, I completely agree with what you just said. But some of my people who run friends, who run dark retreat centers, and this is actually very interesting, they say that some, some of the people who do the best and like, what does it mean to have a successful retreat? Are actually those with a complete open beginner's mind. In other words, if someone actually can be that fundamentally open, and I would actually counter that and say that is a meditative quality, absolutely, you may not call it that. And people have said, well, I don't do any meditation. Well, fair enough. But if you go in there and you have a really great experience, I can promise you, you're engaging meditative principles,

Alex Ferrari 1:07:05
Absolutely, you're open. You're open exactly, rigidity is, is that is death. You know, as we are getting older, rigidity is what's hurting us, not fluidity. Exactly, when you're a kid, what happens? You fall on the floor. You bounce right back up because your bones are made of rubber. Yeah, nowadays. And if this is really interesting too, because I've had family members who have fallen, and when you fall, what happens? You you Brace yourself, you become rigid, and that's when you break Exactly. But if you fall, and you just fall like, you know, like a rag doll, that's why people who get hit by cars who were drunk, they just walked up because they're like, that's right, cool, because they had no rigidity to them. So walking into a dark retreat with rigidity 100% you're gonna break eggs. But if you walk in open and fluid, yeah, regardless of your background, then you have, you have a fighting chance.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:07:54
And it's being a fighting chance. Bruce Lee said, so beautifully. Be water, my friend, be water. And so if you enter that fluid, nocturnal, feminine space with a liquid mind, and this is where humor comes into play, curiosity, delight, child like, wonder, like, what's what's it going to be like in there, if you come in with a fluid, open attitude, then the darkness responds in kind. Darkness, this is such a great jingle. Darkness is only as hard as you are. So if you go in there, just like you say, and you're gonna white knuckle it, and you're gonna tough it out or ego way, like I can handle this, you may cross the finish line bruised and battered, but the idea is, if you're doing this practice right, you don't come out a tough guy. You come out of softy. Oh, absolutely. If you go in there and you come out bruised and battered, and you finish, you cross the finish line, it's only ego, egoic self aggrandizement. You just strengthen your ego. If you go in there and you and you surrender to her, it's feminine, and you allow her to penetrate you, then the magic the darkness will teach you. The magic will actually inform you.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:05
What's really interesting when you just said her that darkness has a feminine quality to it, not a masculine and Debra actually said this to me the other day, and I thought it was such a profound observation, that the male energy. If we use man and woman as an example, the man's genitalia is outside, that's it. And it's like, look at me, and the woman's genitalia is interior. They she said this very beautifully. It's like, the woman doesn't need the spotlight, but the man, by nature likes to be upfront. And there was a time in our evolution as humanity, you needed the male energy, yeah. Because without the male energy, a lot of times you know that we have to build, we have to go, we got to do, we got to do that energy in the early stages, 1000s of years ago, we kind of needed that male energy. But we're. Getting into an age now the feminine energy is starting to be not only needed, but is necessary to have to be able to move forward. Because who are you channeling? Right? One of these guys, I'm sure. Because you can't move forward the way we've been moving as this male war, I need to take more the feminine energy is something that is absolutely needed to if not, we won't make it. If we do another 100 years like we did the last 100 years, we won't make it as a species, okay, there's no question about it. And I say this from being around women my entire life. Okay, I have no testosterone. This is the most testosterone I've been around in a while, even my cat's balls are cut off. So, so I'm surrounded by women, single mom, all everything, all my life. So I have a very unique perspective on the feminine energy. And trust me, you know you're married, we understand

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:10:57
You want to venture to the deep end of the pool for a minute?

Alex Ferrari 1:10:57
Absolutely. I love it. That's what so shows about is the deep end of the pool.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:10:58
So here we go, and then we'll come back, because I do, I do want to go into the three, yes, yeah, I still want to go through that. But what you just said, Oh my gosh, this is so profound. So wow, this is cool. We're gonna, we're gonna really dive into some cool things here. So fundamentally, the darkness in the in the Buddhist tradition, darkness is homologous to emptiness. So you in emptiness is in the Tibetan tradition, emptiness is feminine. It's a feminine dimension. It's literally the womb, the matrix of reality. Makes sense. And so I will. I'm going to now cautiously, but I think with some conviction, if it's if it's delivered properly, share how this practice, if it's related to very carefully, and I say this with a lot of qualification, can be seen as the introduction, or introduction to a radical form of Feminine Spirituality. And by this what I mean, and this is where it goes, deep in the in the Buddhist tradition, light is masculine. It's male energy, darkness is feminine. And so what fundamentally happens, and this goes, this goes all the way down. We can take this to to ontological primitives, in other words, to the very generation of what we think reality is all together. One of the things that happens here that is so profound is a type of primordial divorce, or what Gregory Bateson talked about, is a schismo Genesis. I love this term, and it's represented tantricly, because this is a tantric practice is represented iconographically. And I don't see one here, but maybe I'll send one to you of the YA Byung deities, the deities that are in union, yeah. And so they represent the feminine and masculine when they're in Union. This is the balance of luminosity and emptiness. This is the irreducible dimension of what reality is. And so what happens at the deepest philosophical levels is this kind of primordial divorce, where luminosity, the light, patriarchal energy, pulls off the lap of the feminine, or vice versa, the feminine jumps, jumps off the lap of the masculine. And then what happens is the masculine goes into runaway goes into schismogenesis. Therefore, what then occurs is this light, this fundamental principle of luminosity, breaks away from the emptiness and actually crystallizes, solidifies, reifies into the entire manifest world. And so what we have today is a massive light pollution problem at the level of reality itself, ontology. This is nothing more than frozen light. We've we're basically, we're basically blinded by the light. There's too much patriarchal energy in the world. There's too much frozen light in the world. And so therefore, what, what does this do? Light distracts, pulls us out, keeps us away from our souls and extracts us in terms of entertainment and distraction and the whatnot. And so whether it's the end of the night, this is so interesting, there's this colloquialism. We use phrases like, well at the end of the day to suggest substance or conclusion, or like, this is what really matters. Well, have you noticed what happens at the end of the day? Alex, it gets dark. So at the end of the day, at the end of life, when you really get down to it, when it really matters, depth, interiority, intimacy, connectivity, femininity. And so these are all the fundamental elements that are lost in this day and age that I would argue, and I am arguing in my book, this is the fundamental generation of the meta crisis, one distraction after another, one dismemberment after another, one forgetfulness after another, breaking and breaking. Breaking away to such an extent that we're so disconnected from source that we have what's happening in the world today. So this practice, and it's not just this. There are others. Returns, you literally retracts, returns from distract to retract. Essence of the word religion to bring you back to the elemental. Because if darkness represents something, you cannot make darkness, you can make light. Darkness is elemental. It's primordial. It's the very Genesis. Even you know Big Bang, we're not sure. You'll see how excited a guy for the pause. We're not sure we the physicists, but arguably, the Big Bang arose out of a primordial matrix of darkness. Right in the great many of the creation myths, everything arose from darkness. And the book of Genesis, it rose from darkness. We were probably kind of received in the dark. And there was like spend nine months in the dark and then came into the world. Look at your mind. Thoughts arise out of the background darkness of the mind. So, so darkness is, is elemental, primordial. It is the Alpha and the Omega. It is the cradle and the grave. Everything comes from it, and everything returns to it. And so I'll pause, because you see how excited I get. The issue with this age today, just to recap, is there's too much patriarchal energy, there's too much runaway light. There's too much addiction to exteriority and appearance. We're infatuated with it. It's killing people on social media, and all of this is taken away in the dark, appearances don't matter. In the dark, you cannot have a bad hair day. In the dark, nothing. You can be obese, you can be deformed. You can be a billionaire. You can be a popper in the dark. Everything is democratized

Alex Ferrari 1:16:47
Because you are you basically are stripped away of everything that is you,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:16:52
Everything that you think is you correct, that pulls you out of who you think you are,

Alex Ferrari 1:16:56
The character that you're playing. When you said that the dark is feminine. The first thing that popped into my head is like, well, isn't it interesting, the entire universe is mostly dark. There's with glimpses of light, these little stars, yeah, but generic, generally, what the vast majority of the universe is dark. That's correct. So I was like, wow, that's that's pretty that's pretty insane. This is such a powerful conversation. I've really never delved into any of this stuff like this. This is gets my juices flowing as well. So tell me about the three.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:17:32
Yeah, so let's see. Oh, so, so from lofty. So this is a little kind of, you know, Geek Speak psychobabble, just to create kind of this metaphysical view. Take it or leave it. But so let's get a little bit practical. So, so first of all, what do you do? Let me just say that, and then I'll talk about the stages, because it gets super cool. So you can go into dark retreat for a number of different reasons. And like in the book I'm publishing, I have an appendix of maybe 8090 people that that have submitted in their surveys, you know, like why they go in, you can go in for creativity, you can go in for healing. You can go in for integration, for divination, problem solving. I mean, there's an amazing array of things you can do. And so depending on what you are wanting to do, if you want to cultivate those, then there's specific forms of incubation, and you work with that. But by far, Alex, the most important thing to do, ironically, is the hardest, absolutely nothing. Yep, you enter, you're a yogic person. You enter shavasana, the ultimate yogic pose. You go in there to die. And one thing that is so bloody revelatory, painful but revelatory, is you realize how much of, how many of us, we're not human beings. We're human doings. We define ourselves by what we do, by acquisition and appearance and display, career and just doing, doing, just like with death, you can't do anything in there. That's what makes it so hard. That's why it turns into a detox center. You don't realize how addicted you are to movement, to distraction, to light, to entertainment, until it's all taken away from you. So I say this because, well, what do I do on there? Well, it's literally called anupaya, or non distracted, non meditation geek speak. You simply go in there and you do absolutely nothing. The highest form of meditation is the art of doing nothing. Well, and that's where meditation comes in. So right there. That's the parameter. By doing this is the amazing thing, Alex, by doing nothing, by simply, it's the act of cessation, not addition, right? So this is really very brief. I have to throw this in, the vast majority, or many of the terms for awakening are terms of negation, not addition, not. Un duality, near Vana, near Roda, near Guna, Nish, propancha, these are all Sanskrit prefix, prefixes for extinction, cessation. And so the way to look at dark retreat and then go through the stages is it's the addition of a tool designed for subtraction, the soul. Meister Eckhart said it the soul does not grow by addition, but by subtraction. Hence Plato's and amnesis, like Deepak Chopra said, all this effort to learn, when the only thing we have to do is remember. So you go into the dark to literally remember reunite, to stop breaking apart. And it is through this is the most profound thing. It is simply through the cessation, the negation of the relentless distractions and the fracturing that creates the meta crisis. It is through that cessation that the restoration takes place. We see this provisionally, when we fall asleep, we heal or restore. We when we when we when we get sick, what do we do? We fall asleep. Healing comes about through holding and integration and through cessation. And so I'll pause, because again, I know I get so excited I can just run away with this. But I think this is important to understand at the outset, so that people know the extraordinary elegance behind this and the unbelievable simplicity. Simple doesn't mean easy. It's an incredibly simple gesture of simply holding, healing, integrating by ceasing all the distractions and all the dismemberment that takes place in normal, daily life.

Alex Ferrari 1:21:41
It's, it's, it's almost, what's the word I'm looking for. It's a falsehood to believe that the simplicity is is simple because as as I think it was, Willie Mays, the great Willie Mays, said, baseball is a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Now, that is a simple game in theory, but anyone who's ever tried to hit a baseball, you understand it's not, it's not the easiest thing to do in the world, but it's a simple motion, you know? So it's, it's, it's a falsehood to believe that this is super simple, just because it is simple. It's basic. It's elemental. I love that word. It's elemental, primordial. You know, it's, it's, it's it. And again, I think we've been doing this dance with this conversation throughout, throughout this conversation about what this really all means. And at the end of the day, it's the ability to die while living. That's all it is. It's about dying while living. Every master who's on that wall, every every Ascended Master, every master who's walking, they all died while living. And once they died, the the illusion was ripped away from Exactly, yeah. And all of a sudden, they're Neo from the Matrix. Yeah, yeah. All of a sudden they see the code. All of a sudden they understand things. And then they then a lot of them have, not all of them, but a lot of them, they just kind of like the the lucid dreaming. You don't know what's real and what's not. When you get to that stage, you do know what's real exact. But you can jump in back and forth, play with it with you can play you could stop bullets in the air. You could do all this kind of stuff, like, like Neo for an example, that he was able to play in the matrix because he understood exactly. So it's a great analogy for what this is, enlightenment in one way,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:23:37
Yes, but not. And I would suspect and maybe tell me a little bit, because, God, you, I mean, it's like you've done this, man, so in your own experiences with deep meditation, in terms of what I've shared so far before, I go back to these little this three fold thing, how does this resonate? Or how does this speak with your own interior work, in your own journeys in meditation?

Alex Ferrari 1:23:59
I think that it is I would have never in a million years thought I would do something like the dark retreat. Years ago, I would have just been insane to me. I think I still will probably have, once I do it will probably still be challenging, because it's what you're paying for. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be a challenge, even with the amount of meditation I do, which is more than most, but definitely not like you like I don't go to, I'm not in a Tibetan, you know, monastery for three years, or something like that, exactly. But I feel that this kind of ripping away of the and I use the word ripping, very specifically, ripping away the delusion and illusion, delusion and illusion of self, the fake self, not the real self. And as you go deeper in meditation, you start to realize who you are, but yet, and this is where the difficult part is, and of enlightenment as it. General statement is to be able to balance understanding the truth while playing in this world beautiful. It's very difficult. Ram Dass said, is so beautifully because if you, if you think you're enlightened, spend a weekend with your family. I always said this too. I always said, like, you know, all these, all these gentlemen and ladies who are on the wall here, these Ascended Masters. I'm like, Well, yeah, you know, if you go off into a mountain, the Himalayan mountain somewhere, and sit in a cave for 40 years and don't have to deal with children or taxes or family or the drama of this and this, this, this grand movie that we're all in, it's a lot easier. That's why I love Lahiri Mahasaya, who was, who basically was the father of Kriya Yoga. When Babaji gave him the kriya yoga, and that's the lineage that got to Yogananda, he was father, and he had family, and he had a wife. And I always look at him anytime I'm going crazy because of my kids. I go, Oh, well, there was somebody who did it. You need those kind of total goals and and examples. I'm like, no, no, it can't be doing there are, there's a have a yogi, a great yoga coming in from India, later this, later, next month. And He's a family man, yeah, yeah. But he's a great master. He's in his 80s now, and he and he's like, No, you can do it in the real world, because it's a lot. And I'm not saying it's a lot easier, but there's two paths, the the path of the monk, the monk path where you you disconnect from the world, and you're not in the world anymore. You're literally in a magical world, in a Tibetan, you know, monastery somewhere, and you're living the spiritual life, and you're disconnected from the entire world, maybe, maybe in theory, in theory, in theory, but you disconnect from the world we're now. And that worked for certain time periods in humanity's journey. But now we're in a time that the monks and the yogis and the spiritualist and the mystics have to come down from the mountains and become the CEOs and become the leaders and become the examples in the real world, because we are desperate for it, right?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:27:13
100% Oh, I couldn't agree more with you. It's it's sometimes referred to as the path of freedom and the path of fullness. And so the path of freedom is a return, a retreat, a retraction into geek speak and Buddhism, the empty nature fundamentally emptiness. That is fundamental liberation for self, realizing that there isn't one right. But then what do you do with that right, that that can be the classic spiritual trap, spiritual bypass, whether you just hang out in your absorption states and your delicious meditative bliss and yeah, following your bliss in that dimension can become highly problematic. These are, these are among the most insidious of all spiritual traps, because you fundamentally become a state junkie. You become a duck. You become addicted to these delicious states of mind. And so for me, and this is the great gift of my, of my three year retreat, when I did it, we did, I mean, all this, like really incredible 5060, different meditations, but the last battery of meditations we did, Alex, were all about into the world, bringing us into life so that you can enter you can enter a lifetime retreat in the context of your normal life. And so this is a path of fullness where you then take your insights with you. You don't lose them, and you come back voluntarily into speech, into body, into form, into life, manifesting this through every speech, to every gesture out of love and compassion for the benefit of others. This, I could not agree more with you on this, and so this is the great gift of John wilwood's teachings, of course, on spiritual bypass Toronto, bon Bucha talked about it 55 years ago in terms of spiritual materialism, these are massive near enemies in this day and age, when people just want some metaphysical Valium. They just want to sedate. And that has some provisional validity in spiritual vectors, but fundamentally, it's all hands on deck right now. That's one reason I'm coming out of the dark, so to speak, to talk about this practice that was previously secretive, because I think it has this applicability in this day. What's needed now, it's desperately needed. It's desperately needed, and I think that's one reason it's actually coming to light. No pun intended, yeah, and you said something earlier. Again, your language is it's just amazing. So I often, I don't guide very many people through this practice, because just for purposes of time, but when I am doing it with people, sometimes I say at the beginning, it was my before we start this journey, it is my honor and privilege to introduce you to yourself. That's what this practice is. And again, the question is dosage, how much of you can you tolerate? And so I have this little playful jingle I like this, Alex, while silence is. For bumping into yourself. Dark retreat is for slamming into yourself, as is death. And so this is hence why these are both wrathful forms of liberation, because, like I mentioned at the outset, they're uncompromising and non negotiable. But to come back to what happens in the journey you mentioned the word implode, well, what actually happens is the implosion is a slight, near enemy of the mind, falling into itself, sort of languaging. But it's important, because if the if the mind does actually implode, that can become a little bit problematic. If the mind is allowed, in the journey of the soul to descend into the interior, into the feminine, and then actually fall through the sedimentation levels of selfhood. This is what I've discovered. So just briefly, I'll say the first band, and then we'll pause. So when you first go in, this is what I've discovered. After many, many years, it's really hard at first. I mean, it's like it is not easy. And what I'm going to share, I wish somebody would have told me this 30 years ago. It's the darkness can be heavy, it can be suffocating, it can be claustrophobic, and it's really challenging. And what's happening here, that I've discovered is, is as the mind relaxes and starts to fall, as it starts to wake down into the wisdom of the body is it starts to relax, the first dimensions that it falls into as it goes from conscious to pre conscious to sub to unconscious, and then collective unconscious. Well at the higher bandwidths of the unconscious mind are the spiders and snakes, the repressed elements of the unconscious mind. And if you understand this, you know that when you go in there, it's almost initiatory. It's almost like, I don't want to get to say this in quotations, it's almost like a spiritual gauntlet you have to go through these particular repressed elements of your mind. And so what I discovered that's so interesting in terms of how this works with depth psychology, you see my passion and excitement here is that what happens with this practice that is so brilliant is it helps you understand the incredible power of the mind to project we are always projecting. And so what happens in the dark is this metaphysical mirror. At the first point, you realize just how much we don't really just project our crap into it. I project our crap out of it. We project, yeah, we project our crap into the darkness. That's what makes the darkness so heavy. At first, the darkness is neutral. It's not heavy. You're heavy. And so when you're in there and you're feeling the weight, another jingle I have to make, like some Chinese, misfortune cookie.

Alex Ferrari 1:32:49
Misfortune cookies. Oh, I love that.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:32:53
No pressure, no diamond. So you're in there, you're feeling the pressure. Where's that pressure coming from it's not the darkness, it's your inability to project any further. If you literally try to throw something in the dark, and ain't going to go very far, and if you do, it's probably going to come back and hit you physically. So because you can't project in the dark, all the projections come home to roost. So therefore, when you're feeling the load on the front end, it's your projections coming back inviting and then basically forcing themselves back into an incorporation. And so as you start to do that, well, guess what happens? The Darkness gets lighter. It almost changes color. It's no longer suffocating. Has the darkness changed? No, you have. And so if you don't understand this, you go in for the first Dark retreat. You go there's no way I'm coming back. Well, unfortunately, you're stopping when the heaviest lifting is being done is you go in and the projected elements are owned, Shadow Work cleaned up. The Darkness literally changes. It's not heavy, it's not dark by languaging. It goes from a tomb, and this was one of the most profound retreats I had, this suffocating tomb. It transformed from a tomb into a womb. Or as I play, I can't resist a womb with no view. Wow, right. So you're in there, and now, now it's no longer the death space. Now it's the birth space, because they're co emergent. And so when you're in there, you're going in there. Oh, my God, this is amazing. Just, you know, two retreats ago, I thought I was going to die in there. Well, at one level I did, and now I'm going to be reborn. Because the shadows have come home to roost. Because I can't throw them out anymore. They have to come back. How I relate to them is the issue, and as I integrate, metabolize. Work with them. Everything changes. Well, the darkness hasn't changed. I've changed. So I say this, and then I'll pause. This is one of the major insights at sort of entry levels that is huge, because it first, it is not easy, it is a detox, it is tough, and understanding why is really important. Then when you feel it, instead of resisting it, you welcome it, you say yes to it. It's just a rejected, disenfranchised, lost child that's been projected out and away exile, ifs language that's simply now being incorporated and brought home. And when you understand that, instead of contracting, there's that narrative you open, you embrace, and you heal.

Alex Ferrari 1:35:47
When you said that, that we are in a constant state of distraction where there's no doubt in this time period we are, we're more distracted now than, I mean, when I was, when I was a kid. I mean, I had TV and my kids, you're gonna write your brain, that kind of thing. But I was out playing, but I was always just, you're always just try you figure out something to do, whether it's read a book or run outside. You're always doing now, it's all the phones, it's phone and television and moving social media and all that kind of stuff. But what about the time periods, like the Roman times, the Buddhist time? There wasn't the same amount of distraction, but there must have been distractions, enough different variations, different variations of distractions. We are actually the more the most challenging time in human history not to be distracted, correct? Because we literally have $300 million productions that are vying for our attention, social media that's vying for our attention, news is vying for our attention. Just the world is so noisy, so busy, that the dark retreat sounds I mean, it's a detox, detox. But, man, detoxes are not fun, buddy.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:36:59
No. But if we understand that, and if we also then understand it's not really a detox, it's restorative, it's, of course, all these things, but understanding this, like you said, Alex, is so spot on, because when it does get difficult, hard, heavy, oppressive, and you understand why that's the diagnosis, and you Go in there and you go, wow, it is really true what they're saying about the power of distraction. I am addicted to distraction. And in the stage this, this is the signature of the Dark Age, the Kali Yuga. It's not the overt manifestation. It though it makes the dark age so dark is this insidious manifestation. It's distraction. Like a Rinpoche said point blank, to end. Distraction is to end samsara. Conversely, he didn't say this, but the logic is there. To amp. Distraction is to amp samsara. Look at the world. My iPhone 10 to the 30. I think whatever number it is is faster. Everything is speedier,

Alex Ferrari 1:38:01
Faster, faster,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:38:03
And it literally just take this. I'll pause. There's a great teaching in the Buddhist tradition. I love it. It's called Buddha in the palm of your hand. It basically intimates the immediacy of the awakened state. It's right here, right now. So I playfully say the Buddhist devil there isn't one, but if there was one, it'd be called Mara. Well, the Buddha has been replaced by Mara, so it's now Mara in the palm of your hand. And what does that look like? Pick up your phone, Mara in the palm of your hand. You can't, you know, I'm gonna go fly out this afternoon. I'll be lucky if I get to the My plane without being bonked by somebody. Because we're living just completely we are forever elsewhere. As Sherry Turkle from MIT said, we're living in an age of runaway, rampant distraction, and it's only getting faster, and it's only getting worse. This is the generation of the meta crisis right here. And so every time we capitulate to distraction, we're practicing samsara. We're practicing the meta crisis. This is the way we contribute to it, unwittingly every single moment.

Alex Ferrari 1:39:05
Um, one last thing before we go, my questions, because I will talk to you for another three hours. I'm here, and you've got a flight to catch. We got time the Kali Yuga, as you were you're mentioning, which is Yukteswar presented it in the holy science. This concept of 26,000 year if I'm not mistaken, might be 24 but 26,000 year cycle that humanity goes through the way we come. We start enlightened when they argue astrologically. We're closer to the center of the universe here. And as we get farther away from the universe center, we become more disconnected from attracted, distracted, more disconnected. So from my understanding of where we are in the Kali Yuga, we are past the Dark Age, meaning the Dark Ages was the dark was 500 years, nothing going on, or for 300 years or 400 years, we are now on the upward swing, which makes sense, because now we're much more conscious, even. In the last 100 years, we are much more conscious, we're much more open. We are becoming more enlightened in many ways, in many ways, in many ways, in many ways, we're not but we are. Have to agree, I hope you agree, that we are better off than we were. Oh yes, then, boy, in the dark ages, you know, we've we've evolved to a certain point, so we're now on the upward swing, but now we're going through this time period of great change of the old systems having to be brought down because they don't serve humanity anymore. Religion had its place at the time that it was invented. You know religion, you know the we were running amok. We were absolutely we're killing each other, we're raping, we're pillaging, we're doing whatever the hell we wanted back then. So we needed to put the fear of God into the populace to control them with if you don't, hell yeah, if you don't do this, and there's the big guy with a white beard, and he's gonna come down and you're not gonna be able to they needed that to control the populace. So there was a moment where it was needed. We don't need that anymore. So these older systems are falling apart. And that's the stage that we're in right now, is we're getting through it. From my understanding and from the research I've spoken to with from many channelers and psychics, we're probably in it for another seven years, in the dark stuff, and then it starts the pejorative dark stuff. Yes, look 2020. On. It's been a rough five this has been the roughest five years of my life. And for humanity, it's, I mean, look, we literally, we arguably had a dark retreat in 2020 but it wasn't dark, it was just a retreat,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:41:32
And we didn't relate to it as such. That's the ,

Alex Ferrari 1:41:37
But the thing was that we all stopped the world was you, you that bull, you there was, it was the pandemic. The bull stopped the world. And you were forced to look at yourself, evaluate, you start to think, because you weren't distracted anymore, because you had, you couldn't go for a month or two. The dolphins came back to Venice, for God's sakes in Italy. I mean, it was insane. People forget. I think people have this kind of forgetfulness of what we went through. In many ways, we stopped in the first time in human history, the planet, for humanity stopped. That's never happened. It's never happened before where we all just said, Everyone three weeks, we're all staying home, pretty much, you know, other than a few people running around, generally speaking, everyone just at home. Yeah, so was it this giant retreat inside, inward, and that's where you're like, I need to get a divorce. I need to change my job. I want to spend more time with my family. I needed, I need to write that book. You know, all these things happened in the moment of stopping. Yes, forced stop, exactly. So the dark retreat yes is a volunteering high five, a volunteering way to stop, yes and face in a much in, arguably a much more intense way than even we dealt with in the pandemic.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:42:56
Exactly. Yeah, you come face to face with who you really are, like with any inner work or death, because, again, you can't get away from it. I simply can't get away from yourself. So that is absolutely spun on. And the great gift, you just nailed it, my friend. So the great gift of dark medicine is, again, you can drip it, you can titrate it, you can do it on your own terms, absolutely eventually, especially in the ultimate dark retreat at the end of life. It's the ultimate dark retreat. It's non negotiable. You know, you have no choice. It's it's death, it's death. And so here, here's how you die, before you die, and you can titrate it. You can let go on your terms.

Alex Ferrari 1:43:34
It is, it is, when you said that, like death is the ultimate bull coming towards you, it is non negotiable. No matter who you are in the in the world, billion dollars or a pauper, you will have to deal with this force exactly in one way, shape or form in your life. The dark retreat is a simulation of the 100% it's a simulation of death.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:43:54
This is, this is why it came about. It is, it is L entering the death space voluntarily, on your terms, so that when you enter this non negotiable retreat at the end of life, you can say to yourself with such conviction, because what you've done in the dark with a smile on your face, been there, done that. I ain't scared of it anymore. Been there, done that.

Alex Ferrari 1:44:15
Have you ever done breath work in a dark? Are you kidding? Because breath work itself is can induce a near death experience without dying. Oh, totally Holotropic breath work, absolutely, I've done that.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:44:26
Presence breathing, shamanic breathing,

Alex Ferrari 1:44:28
It's crazy. It's incredibly combining those two. I mean, that's very next level.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:44:33
Well, you could, you could, you know, and this is a really beautiful thing. I'm not being glib when I say this is once you open and trust the darkness, just like with a good psychedelic journey, trust and surrender then the darkness, which, of course, is just a representation of your deep unconscious mind, the darkness will teach you, but if you open to it, she will tell you what to do. I cannot tell you how many times I've gone in there and the single best. The thing is just open. Just simply surrender open. Let her teach you. And if you do that, and you're really, really receptive to what she says, she will always tell you what to do, this is the most beautiful thing. You just continue to open. You hear that voice, you feel it, you trust it, because you understand the dimension of your mind and the goodness of your being, you trust what happens there. You trust that you're being introduced to these deepest dimensions through this extraordinary medium. So do we have time to talk about the second and third briefly, or briefly? Go for it? Yeah. So this is important again, just to show because we stopped at the level of spiders and snakes, which is where, where most the

Alex Ferrari 1:45:41
Indiana Jones level. I call that the Indiana Jones. It's the and when you were saying the three levels, I was like, Indiana Jones, oh yeah, you have to go this, this and this, until you get to the Holy Grail.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:45:51
Well, that's actually not bad because, because I look at it really, like I suggested as a kind of an archeology of consciousness. So here you are. Oh, that's really good. So, okay, cool. So, so you kind of work through that. You fall through that it's, it is a bit of an initiation. And this, I think, by the way, parenthetically, is going to be a colossal contribution to the youth today, where there's rites of passage are missing. Yes, initiatory passages are gone, yep, going into the dark with guidance for young people like this walkabout. It's an inner, inward bound walkabout, and I think it's going to be colossally impactful for the youth. There's no doubt we're doing some work with this now. So you in, you relax. The mind continues to drop. You're opening, as Rumi put it, so beautiful, opening into wider, wider rings of being. And so as you fall through literally wrong Bop, you're falling through the upper sedimentation of the repressed elements. Well then the spiders and snakes my languaging are replaced with sages and saints. Then you enter the more creative elements of the deeper unconscious mind, literally called the emergent unconscious mind in integral theory, and then eventually even what Jung called the collective unconscious, where it becomes now transpersonal. Now, this is a really big deal, because this is where the creativity comes from. The creativity arises when I mentioned this an hour or so ago, when the artificial boundary between the conscious and the unconscious mind is actually taken down, because the unconscious mind on one level two seconds of geek speak, there actually is no unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is only unconscious from the perspective of the conscious mind. And so what happens is, when you go in Earth's now, when you go into the dark, you you start as you start to break down the boundaries. Remember, it's a duality, decimated or boundary Decimator. One of the most unbelievable things that happens, like the book I told you about, just exploded into my mind in my last dark retreat, is when the the the unconscious mind, which is actually so hang with me for just a second. A deeper definition of the unconscious mind is the obscured mind, or technically, it's called the obfuscated mind. It's obfuscated. It's obscured. Well, this is such a mind bender. What is the principal source of obfuscation? Light, light. So if we were to do a little experiment, we take a little break. We step outside, you and I. We step outside. It's daytime. We look upstairs. You can't you see nothing but blue sky. You don't realize that there are 10s of 1000s of stars that represent the unconscious mind that are up there. We can't see them. You can't see them. Why too much light? Because they're obfuscated by this sight centric, solar centric, solar, spiritual thing that we have in the West. What happens in deep meditation, the nocturnal meditations, dark retreat, the sun sets, and if you don't violate that natural curfew, the sun sets, that masculine, dominating, patriarchal, metacognitive mind sets, the stars come out, the stars have always been there. They've just been obfuscated by this metacognitive, conscious mind. And so when that mind sets, the stars come out, and when the stars come out, brace yourself. The creativity just explodes. Because this will a whole astrological thing comes in that all the lights from from these principles, these these planetary systems and whatnot, are allowed, both internally and externally, to just flow through you. I really emphasize this because this is like for people listening. Okay, that does interest me. And so if you can get through the gauntlet the initiatory dimensions and drop into this, welcome to the riches and the depths of Pluto you know, the revealer of treasures that are held within you. And. So this is a game maker.

Alex Ferrari 1:50:01
And you know what's funny is when you were saying that, if anyone who's ever been in a city and looks at up in the stars, like, let's say, if you're in New York City and you look up, you'll see a couple of stars. But if you're out in the middle of the New Mexican deserts, right, and there is not a city for 50 miles, the darker it is out, the more that's it you see. So light pollution, that's it, is part of this, what you're saying.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:50:25
It's what I said. That's what I said an hour ago. The fundamental physical light pollution is runaway light, to the extent that we take all this stuff to be real. This is just frozen light. So when you go in, that light pollution is taken away. It's like the Hubble, or, even better, the Webb telescope. You want to see to the edge of the universe. You go where there's no light, you go where you can have these incredibly polished mirrors. Exactly what happens in the inner observatory of the dark. But now you're not looking out, you're looking in. And so when you're looking out or in, you get rid of the light pollution, you're going to see back to the origins of the universe. And in this case, you're going to see into the origins of your being. You're going to look into the very big bang of who you are when you're no longer being distracted by all this exogenous light right here is like, if you get this, it's like, holy crap. Look at the potential in the opportunity of this wisdom technology. So you had the second layer and what's the third, third layer? Just briefly, oh my god, this is so. So the transition between the second and the third, again, it just, it gets deeper and more profound. You drop down eventually into the archetypal dimensions of reality. So Carl Jung's depth psychology comes into play here. This is so subtle. It's beyond profound. This is where you meet the deities and the gods and they, hello, hello, hello. They are there. Now, are they internal? Are they external? Well, remember, internal and external are gone.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:57
There's no, there's no, there's it's gone.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:51:59
And so you, you actually, then discover, literally uncover yourself as these archetypal principles, as all these deities, as all these gods. And so whether it's archetypes in western depth psychology and language or the deities and gods in the eastern language, you come to meet these and then further you go even deeper. Because even that, you relax into that, I wouldn't say it's deconstructed, but it's released. You go from that super subtle, archetypal, platonic realm of very subtle forms. Now you drop into the full formless dimensions. And here you drop, this is a little bit more advanced. So this is more advanced stage practice. You're not going to have this in the first couple of dark retreats. Then you dissolve into the infinite, clear light mind itself. You enter domains. Literally, I'm not exaggerating, Alex, you're in the dark. I mean, it is as dark as there can be. And all these lights start to appear. Where are they coming from? Sure, who is seeing them? Sure. And so inside and outside breaks down. You literally start to see the luminous nature of reality. When you drop through all the obfuscations, what are called the sedimentations, the adventitious defilements, you fall into this primordial, infinite light source. This is allegedly where you're going to drop when you die. You're going to go all the way down to this reduction base, which it's beyond profound. It's bliss, it's light, it's perfect. Purity is whatever you want to whatever term you want to append to your definition of the ineffable absolute. That's it. You're going to fall into that bed at that point. You're totally remembered, you're totally healed and hold and basically just like in shavasana, what do you do nothing. You just you just die into this infinite universe. You are gone. There's no Alex in there at this point, there's no Andrea Andrew. You finally get out of the universe by becoming the universe. You disappear. I can't help myself. Man, you disappear. You become nothing to be replaced by everything.

Alex Ferrari 1:54:02
Now, when you say that the ego is terrified of this situation, there's no way it's gonna do this is so this is why it's so scary for people. What do you mean? I'm gonna lose myself because you're still attached to this character that you're playing. Exactly these are we're just, I've always said this, and we'll end on this. This is great. And then we'll ask, I'll ask some rapid fire questions, okay, is that the delusion that we live in, in our current world is we are in a movie. You and I are actors in this movie, but the insanity of the human condition is that Hannibal Lecter, I'm Anthony Hopkins, and I go on set to play Hannibal Lecter. And I'm on set. I'm playing. I mean, he's in it. He is Hannibal Lecter at the end of the day when the director yells cut. All right, guys, let's call it a wrap for the day. We'll see you tomorrow. He takes off the Hannibal Lecter mask, goes home, and he's an. Any Hopkins. Our insanity is that we don't understand that we're not Hannibal Lecter high five. That's, that's, that's basically what the delusion and the insanity of the human condition is. So if you understand what I just said, then what you just presented is not terrifying at all. No, exactly. If you have that view, if you have that, it's not terrifying. No. I'm like, oh, yeah, you need to lose everything to have everything. Of course, exactly.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:55:26
So it's so great, man. It's a case of mistaken identity. It's an identity theft. This is a primordial identity theft, a crime that occurs in broad daylight. Why? Because it's facilitated in broad daylight. It's facilitated ever every time we're distracted away from the depths and the darkness of our interiority and consolidate our identity in the superficial most dimensions of our being. This is a crime that's taking place right now. And so when you drop into the next level, Soul of interiority and depth and femininity and intimacy. It's a the crime is solved. You finally it's solved. But because it's dissolved, you return to this base, and then you say, like the great wisdoms, tat tam Aussie, I am that you then become the world, your identity, the crime has been solved when you stop initiating the crime by pulling away from who you are,

Alex Ferrari 1:56:26
And one of the primal fears of humanity is of the dark. Isn't that amazing you come out of the womb who you've been there nine months in the dark. You are taught the dark is dangerous. So as a kid, you're afraid of the dark. You know, as adults, you know, if you're in a dark place and you don't feel comfortable any little noise, you're edgy, it's part of it's the ego. Exactly, it's the ego. But to live in the dark, it's like, I've used a lot of movie references, and I will use it last one before we finish up in Batman in the dark night, The Dark Knight Rises with Bane. Bane is like you play in the dark. I was born with it was formed by it, hardened by it. It's he lives in the dark. He, he was he. It does. It does nothing for him. Where Batman plays in the dark was very, very interesting, deep conversation that happened there, that he plays in the dark, but he actually, in that movie, had to face his, his, his mirror in the pit of that pit where he comes back out of it. It's such a profound analogy for what we are doing. He was playing in the dark. He was a costume. He was an image only once he was stripped of it all. Had to go back down and really, truly see who he was. Was he able to ascend? Isn't it? And Bane, and Bane lived. He was literally born in the dark. So he wasn't afraid of it. He actually reveled in it, and he was coming in to fight him in the dark, you're going to lose until finally he was able to do it.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:58:04
These are great these are great connections. So our relationship Alex, our relationship to physical darkness, is reflective of our relationship to metaphysical darkness. And so if we're afraid in the spectrum of our identity, thing comes into play here, because there's a real deep conflict of interest that's going on here. There's a part of our evolutionary spectrum of our being, the ultraviolet dimension, higher level soul that craves this, that knows there's some ineffability, ineffable profundity, depth truth here. But the devolutionary tail that wags the dog, the egoic part, says No way, because that part of it realizes this is the death space. The evolutionary part represents, understands that death represents transcendence. So then they know, if they can understand this, this kind of sometimes bipolar relationship, love, hate, relationship to darkness. You understand that like I'm afraid of it because I'm projecting onto it. That's ego operative. I'm drawn to it from the upper bandwidth. That's what's going to be bringing me into deep underwear, deep meditation. Understood the dark, because there's this, there's this incredible underlying urge for transcendence, and the death space represents that, and if you know it, hell yeah, I'll go into this tomb. Hell yeah, I'll go in there to turn into a womb, to turn into a woman, be reborn.

Alex Ferrari 1:59:31
Now, my friend, I'm going to ask you questions I ask for every every guest, rapid fire. Do this rapid Fire, what is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:59:39
In the service of others, a life that's lived in the service of others, I never feel more fulfilled. Yeah, serving.

Alex Ferrari 1:59:46
If you had a chance to go back in time and speak to little Andrew, what advice would you give him?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 1:59:50
Have the courage to follow your bliss and follow your fear from the outset, don't, don't worry about what other people say.

Alex Ferrari 1:59:57
And what will little Andrew give you as advice today?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:04
Relax, play, don't take everything so seriously.

Alex Ferrari 2:00:07
How do you define God or Source or the Divine?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:12
Love. It may seem cliche, but there's, I'm sorry. There's no other way. It's just unconditional love.

Alex Ferrari 2:00:17
What is love?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:19
Complete, utter openness and loss of boundary, connectivity to all of reality.

Alex Ferrari 2:00:25
If you could ask God or Source one question, what would it be?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:29
How can we reach the world? How can we reach I don't want to use the word masses because it seems pejorative. How can we communicate and reach the world? To convey these truths and the glories and the wisdoms that are within them. You know, just yeah,

Alex Ferrari 2:00:48
We're trying here, man,

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:49
We're trying. We're trying to relax. That's the kicker, right?

Alex Ferrari 2:00:53
How do you define liberation in this life now?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:00:58
Yeah, yeah, waking up, growing up, cleaning up, opening up, showing up, just opening, radical, unconditional, opening into love.

Alex Ferrari 2:01:09
And what is the ultimate purpose of this life?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:01:12
To wake up and be fearless in our love.

Alex Ferrari 2:01:16
Oh, beautiful, sir. And where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:01:20
Well, you're not going to find me, because I'm going to disappear into the dark.

Alex Ferrari 2:01:24
Yes, like Bane, I understand, yes.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:01:27
Well, thank you for that, for the opportunity. Alex, yeah, so I have, you know, I have a website andrewholecek.com, we just added backslash darkness where we're going to set up a dark retreat Academy. In fact, it's there. Everything you need to know to get started with home practice, how to work your way in, contraindications, indications, the support how to do it. I have another platform, playfully called nightclub, which is an international, international support platform that that supports all the nocturnal meditations, of which dark repeat is the fifth so liminal, dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream, yoga, sleep yoga, all the other nocturnal meditations are explored on that platform. So yeah, those fundamentals.

Alex Ferrari 2:02:10
And do you have any parting messages for the audience?

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:02:14
Don't be afraid to simultaneously follow your bliss and also follow your fear, because your fear will lead you to the truth as much as your bliss will.

Alex Ferrari 2:02:24
Andrew, this has been a profound conversation. I think it's going to terrify many and enlighten many, all at the same time. It's part of the journey and it's part of what we're going through as a human in this planet and in this lifetime, in this incarnation. So I appreciate you and everything you're doing to awaken the darkness within all of us.

Dr. Andrew Holecek 2:02:46
Alex, thank you, my friend. Thank you. You know you it's it's a gift to hold space like this and to engage with such authenticity and the invitation of your heart and what you've created here, and your intense curiosity is contagious, and it invites a dance that I actually didn't expect it at this level, and it's just it's really beautiful. So thank you so much for the opportunity to hang with you and your audience for a bit. It's really a pleasure, really an honor.