Episode 42 – The Primordial Shamanic Path to Oneness – A Summary

As a child, Amina hated nature, and nothing was worse than a school trip into the woods. Then the pandemic closed the cafés and the gym, and she ended up sitting awkwardly by a tree, saying hello and wondering how the two of them were supposed to communicate. Today she feels shut in if she can’t get out into nature for a day or two. Pål-Esben, meanwhile, switches his phone on once a month, or once every six months.

In this forty-second episode, Amina and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, talk about the primordial shamanic path to oneness, and sum up the last 15 episodes. They explore what separates a real experience of oneness from a peaceful feeling in nature, why primordial shamanism has no room for fear and protection, how nature works as a tuning fork, and the anti-inflammatory diet for the mind. It is part of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a podcast about the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to yourself.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

In this episode

• Loose threads from the listeners, and why feeling at one with nature is valuable but not the same as a real experience of oneness
• The New Earth as a fairy tale, and why the world only gets better when each of us becomes a peaceful human being
• The Sahara and the grain of sand, and the shock and reorganisation that follow a first real experience of oneness
• Primordial shamanism as shamanism before fear, the Aboriginal people of Australia, and why energetic protection has nothing to do with reality
• Nature as a tuning fork, the gravitational forces in meditation, and Amina’s journey from hating nature to longing for it
• Why you need a guide, a process, and a guide who actually wants to work with you, and how the personality changes completely in the Sahara
• The pineal gland, kundalini and psychoactive substances as misunderstandings, and the anti-inflammatory diet for the mind
• Brain rot, self-responsibility and free will, the rubber band that taught Pål-Esben to let go of results, and Amina’s poem “The Language of Truth”

This podcast is for you if you:

• Seek real depth in your spiritual practice
• Want to understand yourself on a more fundamental level
• Are curious about shamanism but tired of superficial “new age” spirituality
• Have taken many alternative courses but still feel that something is missing
• Feel an inner longing for freedom, love and wholeness

In a time when so many get lost in external methods and promises of quick fixes, this podcast invites you back to the only place where true answers can be found: your own heart.

Listen above, or read the full conversation below.

Transcript

A warm welcome to the podcast “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. This podcast is a collaboration with our favourite magazine, the health and lifestyle magazine Medium, and is devoted to exploring the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to oneself. We follow Amina, a student at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School, as she goes through a deep primordial shamanic process of development together with her guide and teacher Pål-Esben. It is a raw, unpolished journey of discovery towards true joy in life, deeper meaning, and a life that truly feels good to live.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

Pål-Esben: Hi, Amina, and a warm welcome to a new episode.

Amina: Hi, Pål-Esben, thank you so much. Likewise.

Pål-Esben: Thank you. Today we’re going to sum up the last 15 episodes, where we’ve talked about the path to oneness. We’ll try to untangle the threads that need untangling, the ones we need to close the loop on, that are left hanging a little in mid-air. We’ve now been on a long, long journey into the path to oneness. What are your thoughts so far about what we’ve been through, Amina?

Amina: Through the podcast episodes, you mean?

Pål-Esben: Yes, through the podcast episodes, the last 15. You in particular are in close contact with our listeners, and there have been quite a few questions about what we’ve gone through, and perhaps some misunderstandings too. That’s one of the things we need to try to untangle today, and try to close the loops, so that no loose threads are left hanging. What’s the feedback? What are people thinking about all this out there in the world?

Loose threads and open loops

Amina: Yes, first I’d like to say thank you so much to those of you who write to us, share your experiences and insights and ask questions, and also to those of you who have sent in wishes for topics we could talk more about. I just want to say that first of all.

And then there are several people who share experiences from times they’ve been in nature, where they tell us they experience a feeling of oneness in nature. They experience a deep presence and a sense of oneness. And some of the people I’ve talked to think they’ve experienced what we talk about here in our podcast. And I can find that a bit challenging to answer, because it’s a very big topic. Why isn’t feeling at one with nature the same as what we’re talking about now? We’ve also touched on how extremely difficult it is to use words, and so we use the words we have. And several people recognise themselves in feelings like these after experiences they’ve had.

So what I’d like to ask you today, Pål-Esben, among other things, is this. What’s the difference between the experiences of oneness you get on the primordial shamanic path to oneness and spiritual enlightenment, and the feeling of oneness you get when you’re fully present with nature, for example?

What we call it doesn’t matter

Pål-Esben: First of all, it doesn’t matter that much, as long as people are better off afterwards. Whatever we call it or don’t call it, as long as life gets better, as long as you come into deeper contact with your heart and with nature and with gratitude and forgiveness, and you become a much better version of yourself, a much better version for your children, for your partner, for your friends, then in the end it doesn’t matter what we call it.

Because in the end, that’s what we’re after here in our podcast, Amina. It isn’t to tell you to do this, or not to do that. We’re here to inspire you, dear listener, to see: how can I create a better life for myself in practice? How can I become a better version of myself? How can I become a better version for the people around me? Because in the end, that’s the only thing that matters, in my eyes.

You can call it 10,000 different things, you can have 500 different traditions and paths, but in the end this is what it’s about.

The New Earth: no fairy-tale world

Pål-Esben: Many people, at least in the esoteric world, are very taken with the path to the New Earth and the new world where everything gets so much better, where the sun shines, people live together in peace, and the spiritual side of humanity blossoms. Many people long for that path.

But nothing happens by itself just because you listen to a podcast, or hope that aliens will come and fix our whole mess, or that a magical parallel earth will appear where the so-called spiritual people end up just by being spiritual, that is, by believing in angels and things like that. It’s very psychotic to believe that reality works like that. It’s like telling a child a fairy tale they believe in.

Because reality doesn’t work like that: something doesn’t just suddenly and mysteriously appear because you’re so-called spiritual, and then the globe changes, and this new, fantastic world appears for the so-called chosen ones. That’s what I have a problem with out there in the esoteric world: people hope and believe and have these fantasy ideas that something mystical and magical is going to happen, and everything will get better.

The way I experience reality, the only way this world gets better is for each one of us to become a better version of ourselves. And that doesn’t come from wishing that some thing or other will happen, and then suddenly the New Earth appears, or whatever they call it. That isn’t how this is going to happen.

But it does come when we as individuals take self-responsibility, and are willing to do the part we need to do to heal our hatred, our resentment, our jealousy, our control mechanisms, all these facets of the ego, and our false self and our false identity, which we have named the construct. It comes when we as individuals take responsibility for this part of ourselves, heal it and develop out of it, so that we become a peaceful human being: a human being who is automatically filled with gratitude and love and all these fine words, which in the end make that human being feel joyful and express themselves in a joyful way to the people around them.

I believe that’s the only way this world we live on can reach the so-called New Earth, or a more enlightened and better world. Believing this will happen by itself is like a child believing in a fairy tale.

And of course some people may get a bit cross with me when I say this, because people hope everything is going to sort itself out now. After all, people listen to so many podcasts with hundreds of thousands of followers, with all these people talking about how we’re now in the new spiritual age, where the vibration in the world is rising. And that’s nice, but it’s like telling kids fairy tales. Because if we look at what this world is, it’s definitely not a world vibrating faster and in more harmony and with more love. The opposite is happening.

And then you can see: OK, we’re heading towards a point where everything comes to a head, where we as humanity of course also have a number of choices about which people we want to rule the world, and who we want to lead us. But that’s a whole other topic.

The goal: a peaceful human being

Pål-Esben: So what I care about, and this was a long introduction to the answer to your question, isn’t what we call things. Say we call it: “Oh, I feel enlightened.” That’s nice, and there’s nothing wrong with it, because enlightenment can mean 10,000 different things, since each of us can have our own definition of it. As long as you’ve become a peaceful human being, as long as you don’t go around shouting and screaming at your kids and your partner, carrying resentment and jealousy and all those things: brilliant. That’s what we’re aiming for here. Not that there’s some special kind of mystical experience we have to have to become this or that.

It’s the opposite way of thinking. We ask ourselves what it is we want to arrive at. And if someone has gone out into nature and feels balanced, feels at one with nature and in harmony, and brings that harmony home to their family, then I say: Gut gemacht. Very good. Great.

The Sahara is not the metaphysical

Pål-Esben: But that has nothing to do with what we mean when we talk about the primordial shamanic path to oneness, or true spiritual awakening, because that will feel like something very different. The first time you touch what we call the Sahara, it actually has nothing to do with the metaphysical as we know it. It has nothing to do with energies or astral planes or angels, the things people are so taken with in the esoteric world. It has absolutely nothing to do with that, because all of that is part of manifested reality. An angel is part of manifested reality.

A power animal is the same. Every form of energy you experience, whether on astral planes, or flowing out of your hands, or when you channel your energy, is part of the manifested part of our reality, which we call the grain of sand. And the grain of sand is actually quite big. It doesn’t just consist of our body and the physical world; it also consists of everything that is manifested.

What we’re talking about is touching what isn’t manifested, that is, the unmanifested, which we’ve described with words like: there is no time there, and there is no space there. And it has nothing to do with a peaceful feeling. It has nothing to do with feeling good and at one with the trees and nature.

Because when you touch the timeless and spaceless, it will be like an experience of paradox: on the one hand there’s nothing there, and on the other hand everything is there. And a human being who really touches oneness, their Sahara, won’t manage to handle their life very well for the first couple of weeks after an experience like that.

The shock and the reorganisation

Pål-Esben: So one of the things that separates a real experience of oneness, as we’re discussing it here, from feeling peaceful and at one with what is, is this: what happens afterwards. Because if you just glide home feeling peaceful and everything’s fine, it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

One of the hallmarks of a true experience of oneness is that your whole system is thrown completely out of action. Everything to do with the material part of yourself, your psyche, your ego, your intellect, your physical body, your energy system, gets a tremendous shock, because it experiences that nothing of what you believe is real is actually real. It’s a shock from another world for your whole system, for what most people believe is reality: their body, their psyche, their thoughts, their intellect, their energy system, their light body, all of which is manifested. It gets a violent shock, because perhaps for the first time in this life it experiences what reality is, and that flies in the face of how you’ve experienced reality so far in life.

And that shock leads to a violent process of reorganisation in our whole system: in our thoughts, in our feelings, in everything to do with the head and the intellect, but also in our whole energy system and everything we are in the manifested version of ourselves. A violent process of reorganisation takes place, and it lasts at least one to two weeks. And during those one to two weeks it’s very difficult to relate to material life at all. That’s one of the signs that you’ve had your first real experience of oneness.

In all these years of working with people who have been guided into this process, I’ve never experienced, or heard of, anyone entering a true experience of oneness, that is, diving straight into their whole Sahara, without a tremendous after-effect, which often lasts for weeks. And everyone I’ve interviewed who has really had these experiences says exactly the same thing. Whether it’s friends of mine in Asia, in America or here in Europe who experience this, or teachers I talk to who guide people into experiences like these, I’ve never heard of anyone entering an experience like this without an after-effect.

And that’s the simplest way to see whether you’ve gone in and experienced what we’ve talked about here, which we also covered in episode 40 with your fellow students, or whether you’ve had an experience where you feel a deep peace with what is. Both are very valuable, but they don’t have much to do with each other. They’re two completely different things. One is tea and the other is coffee: we drink both, but they’re very different. That was a bad comparison.

So that’s the simplest way to see it, when you slip down the rabbit hole we’re now describing. The day you have your first really deep experience of oneness, you’ll hardly be able to deal with your life at all for the first couple of weeks afterwards. And that also means you ideally need to be very well prepared before you enter a true experience of oneness like that. You need to be prepared, and to have strengthened certain muscles, so that you can handle yourself in the weeks after an experience like that. There’s a long process of preparation before the experience itself.

So that’s the first part of the answer to the question you’re asking me.

Amina: Yes, and I’d also say that on the path we walk, finding that peace and that presence is a prerequisite. We use nature as one of the first steps towards being able to have real experiences of oneness with what lies behind time and space. So it’s absolutely valuable and hugely important on the path we walk.

Shamanism and neo-shamanism

Pål-Esben: Exactly right. And that’s what’s so cool about doing this on the primordial shamanic path. And again: if you, dear listener, are unsure what the difference is between shamanism and primordial shamanism, it lies in the following. What is often called shamanism is often connected to what is also called neo-shamanism, what has gone on in shamanism over the last 200 to 300 years. And that is often very closely linked to what has happened in our world in connection with a patriarchal way of thinking, a patriarchal way of acting. We find the patriarchal in our largest religions, among other places, where the masculine rules, where the masculine leads the way, and where yang goes first.

Over the last 200 to 300 years, a great deal of shamanism has been partly twisted into this side of our existence, in terms of patriarchal fear, for example. In shamanism, at least the kind based on the last 200 to 300 years of our history, you’ll very often find a lot of focus on fear: that there are things you need to protect yourself against, evil energies, demons, whatever it might be. It’s a very fear-oriented approach, and that’s where so-called modern shamanism comes from. And whatever culture you picture, as soon as you go into shamanism, you’ll often find a big theme to do with fear, and a need for protection.

And that’s something that has very little to do with reality, in my experience. Because there’s nothing you need to protect yourself against, except yourself, and of course people who want to harm you, but that has nothing to do with energetic protection. As soon as you believe you need energetic protection against someone throwing some negative energy or other at you, you have a genuine problem. Then you believe something else is the cause of your pain. And that also means that if you can’t resolve and fix what the others are doing, you’ll never be able to get well. It’s the same as giving away all your power to others. And that’s meaningless, when the only one who can make you well and happy is you. As long as you believe others are the cause of your problems, you don’t stand a chance.

That’s one of the problems with modern shamanism. And especially when you read the book many shamans in our world today treat as their bible, The Way of the Shaman, your hair stands on end. It’s all: oh, shamans, only for a chosen few, and it’s scary, and you have to be careful. When shamans have that book as their bible, there’s a genuine problem. Because then you see the world in a way that has nothing to do with reality.

Primordial shamanism: shamanism before fear

Pål-Esben: So you might ask: “How can you say that, Pål-Esben? How do you know better than all these so-called modern forms of shamanism?” Well, it’s very simple. We have to look at how real shamanism was practised. Then we have to go a few thousand years back in time. We have to go back before patriarchal thinking, before religion invented hell, and before the idea came into shamanism that demons were the cause of your problems. We have to go back before that time, before patriarchal thinking took over.

And the best and simplest example to look into here, which a fair amount has actually been written about, is the cultures of Australia, the Aboriginal people, but before the white man came to Australia. What was their culture like before they got this destructive influence from the white man, who came in and in the end destroyed their whole culture?

If you look a few thousand years back in time, at how they related to nature, the first thing you see is that they had no words for anxiety and fear and control. Those words weren’t even in their vocabulary. Because it was a culture that was deeply, deeply connected to Mother Earth. To Mother Earth’s natural rhythms, to nature. They lived in step with nature. They lived in step and in harmony with nature’s healthy rhythms. And there you didn’t have the chaos of modern shamanism, with fear and all these things.

There you get an example of what real shamanism is. And you’ll encounter it in older cultures, long before this problem arrives with all the destructive things in shamanism. Then you find nature-based cultures that lived in step and in harmony with nature, where you didn’t have words in the vocabulary like demons and evil forces and the like.

Because, at least in nature, there are no evil forces. There are no demons there. There are nature beings and the like. Are there beings out there that are different from us? Yes, of course. But nobody is coming here to get us and ruin things for us, as long as we don’t give them the power to do so through our fantasy world.

So when I talk about primordial shamanism, I mean the kind of shamanism that was practised by our ancestors before all this fear and the demons and the evil forces were invented. That’s what primordial shamanism is. And the example is how the Aboriginal people lived in step and in harmony with nature.

So that’s the difference, and that’s why I call our tradition the primordial shamanic process of development. Because I don’t want anything to do with modern shamanism that focuses on fear and protection. I want to distance myself from it completely. Nothing we do at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School has anything to do with it. That’s the reason we call it the primordial shamanic process of development.

Nature as a tuning fork

Pål-Esben: And when we’re going to find the path to oneness, and find the way to our real Sahara, the timeless and spaceless, the complete us, we use nature’s rhythms very actively in that process. That makes doing this through a primordial shamanic process of development much more spectacular than doing it through the yogic process, for example.

In the yogic process, first of all, if you’re going to do a process like the one we’re talking about, you have to live in an ashram. Otherwise it’s very difficult. And then it’s often a very long road of learning your asanas 100 percent precisely. Because when it comes to the tuning that’s done through yoga, the asanas aren’t there for stretching and bending; they aren’t there for gymnastics. They’re there to tune your body to a particular blueprint rhythm, which is connected to what we call nature’s healthy rhythms. When your body is tuned to this complete, correct blueprint music, or blueprint rhythm, your body comes into harmony with what lies behind your body. That’s a very short and rough explanation.

The problem with modern yoga, the kind that has been brought into the Western world, is that most of it is seen as stretching and bending and gymnastics. Because it takes years of guidance from a competent guru to do a single asana 100 percent correctly. And we’re not talking about 99 percent correct, 98 percent or 90 percent; we’re talking about 100 percent correct.

One example is kundalini yoga, the most potent of all the forms of yoga out there. If you do a single kundalini yoga posture, a single asana, 100 percent correctly, your kundalini energy shoots up your spine, spontaneously, there and then. That’s also why it’s called the most dangerous form of yoga in India, but the most potent form. But then it was translated and brought into the West as stretching and bending, and people sit fiddling about with their kundalini yoga asanas all day long, and nothing happens. Of course nothing happens, because they’re not doing it correctly.

So the yogic way is the longest and most complex path. And we, in our tradition, use nature as a tuning fork. Instead of having to learn 100 asanas correctly, we learn to use a tuning fork correctly. And that’s nature’s healthy rhythms.

That’s the reason a process like the one you and your fellow students have been through, on the way to oneness, can go so incredibly fast. It’s a combination of how we use nature’s healthy rhythms as a tuning fork: physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and the mystical parts of that tuning fork. As we learn to use and apply that tuning fork in a very exact way, we take that attunement, that music, with us into the meditation process. That makes it go radically faster than if you sit fiddling about in meditation for years, with some meditation on a still mind, for example.

The gravitational forces

Pål-Esben: We call it the gravitational forces. Because when you go into a meditation process with the aim of a still mind, and you slip into the meditation process, you’ll eventually come across something called gravitational forces. That means there’s something pulling you inwards or deeper, depending on which form of meditation you’re in, but without you doing anything to make it happen. The best word I’ve found for it is gravitational forces. It suddenly takes hold of you and pulls you downwards without you doing anything.

Making contact with these gravitational forces through an ordinary meditation process, just by meditating and meditating an hour or two a day, can take many decades, if you ever make contact with them at all. So we use special rituals, shamanic rituals, our own attunement processes and initiation processes, which among other things mean that beginners in our tradition can do spontaneous healing as early as their first beginners’ seminar. And we use even more advanced forms of attunement processes and initiation processes, so that through nature the students make contact with these gravitational forces that lie behind the subtle, and they’re trained in it in a very specific way.

It takes three to six months, with 30 minutes a day, before anyone, talented or not, begins to make contact with these gravitational forces. Then you learn to use the same gravitational forces, through the reference experiences, in the meditation process, and suddenly you’re there. That’s an example of how we use nature very actively in these processes of attunement, which are actually so complex if you’re going to do it only with meditation, or yoga, or mantra, or other paths.

The images of shamanism

Amina: Yes, that’s very interesting, because I had never heard of a shamanic path to oneness or spiritual enlightenment before, and certainly not a primordial shamanic one, because I hadn’t heard of that before either. Apart from the shamans who talk about how we’re all the same, and we live in love and everything is love. I’ve come across that, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that what’s called spiritual enlightenment could have anything to do with shamanism.

So when I was first introduced to this, I thought: hmm, interesting, exciting. And when I meet people and they ask what I do, I notice that if I say I’m walking a shamanic path of development, they tend to have an image of who I am and what I do. And then they might say: “Yes, because you know a lot about things like that, since you’re on a shamanic path.” And actually that’s not what we do, because we don’t cast out demons, or cleanse ourselves energetically in a bath every evening to get rid of all the negative energies, for example. People have a very fixed image of what shamanism is, and think that what we do, the primordial shamanism we practise, is the same.

I notice it too with the people who are interested in the basic shamanic training, where several are drawn to this path, to the Yggdrasil Shamanic School. But then something stops them, and they think: “Should I, though? I have a bit of trouble relating to this business of shamans and shamanism.” And then perhaps they mention other figures out there who are shamans, and they’d rather not be associated with them, or do the same as them. But at the same time they’re drawn to this path, and there’s a reason for that.

So I’ve had many good conversations with students now, before they started the basic shamanic training. I think it was three or four of them who said: “Yes, I’m drawn to this path, but shamans, shamanism, isn’t that this or that?” And all of them have managed to understand, or at least accept, that we do things a bit differently, that this is how we do it. I don’t know how everyone else does it, but this is what we focus on. And all of them have felt: “Yes, I’ll come along and see what this is, because I’m so drawn to it.” So there are lots of perceptions out there.

And I myself didn’t think that nature’s path could potentially lead to our true nature, that it could lead all the way home, lead us to our Sahara. It has actually dawned on me even more lately how cool that is, how spectacular it is. This path home must be one of the most exciting paths to walk. Of course there’s something for every taste out there, but what we’re doing is absolutely fantastic.

Coming out of the closet

Pål-Esben: Yes, and that’s why, as you say, it’s a challenge for people to relate to the word shamanism, since there’s so much madness around shamanism out there, with various figures who have quite spectacular ideas about reality. It makes you break out in a sweat when you listen to it. And I can understand that people who have listened to these figures, who often have lots of followers and are well known in the media, don’t particularly want to be associated with the words shaman and shamanism. I can understand that. But on the other hand, perhaps you also need to make a distinction: shamanism doesn’t have to be shamanism. In the same way, a politician doesn’t have to be a politician. There’s a very big difference, even if he calls himself a politician.

And that’s perhaps what’s needed: being willing to do your research. A word means nothing; you have to look at what lies behind it. I well remember the old days, when I started getting involved in shamanism, more than two decades ago. I wouldn’t tell a soul I was doing this. They’d probably have bullied me and thrown all sorts of crap at me for doing this nonsense. So it took me two or three years before I could come out of the closet about it.

But by then I was so confident about what nature really is, what real shamanism is, that I didn’t care what people said or didn’t say about me. Because everyone has an opinion about it anyway. But I really do understand it.

Built by Mother Earth

Pål-Esben: But I think that once you get away from these modern things to do with fear and protection, and get past them, most people understand the following. If you go out into the forest, out into healthy nature, and simply sit down with that nature, it shows you the rhythms and the blueprint rhythms that we human beings arose from. Your body is built from building materials that Mother Earth has. Every atom, every carbon atom in you, every water molecule. Everything you consist of, you’ve received from Mother Earth. It’s Mother Earth’s building blocks that have built you.

Your whole body, your whole energy system, has come from Mother Earth, from Gaia, from Maha Terra: it goes by many names. And the mechanical, biological entity, or body, has been animated with the help of your soul and the higher self. In Norse mythology we’d say that Odin, Vili and Vé give their breath, breathe Önd into Ask and Embla, so that they become the first man and the first woman, for those who are interested in Norse mythology. Your soul comes in and animates this body with life, with soul and life, and that makes you you.

But when you come into this body as a new soul, when you’re born, your body, your whole system, your whole biochemical and biomechanical system, is in 100 percent harmony with Mother Earth’s blueprint rhythms. Your soul comes into this body, and the soul’s rhythm and the body’s rhythm have exactly the same music. They play in perfect unison with each other, which means you’re in full contact with your soul when you’re born. The only thing you haven’t developed yet is the use of the interface in your brain, so that you can express this to the world around you and interact with the world, as we talked about in the first episodes on the path to oneness, which began in episode 27.

From blueprint rhythm to chaos music

Pål-Esben: Then these things happen where we get imprinted. We’re told: you’re a woman, you’re a man, this is how we do things in the family, this is how we don’t do things, here are the belief systems that work, those are enemies, those are friends. We get imprinted with all these things. Through that our construct is created: our false self, our false identity, which we believe is us.

And the more of this nonsense gets imprinted into our noggins, the more our internal music is disturbed, compared with the healthy rhythm and the healthy music we had as a newborn body. Eventually there’s nothing but chaos music inside the human being. The whole human being is in chaos: the thoughts and the feelings, everything is chaos. We fear, we have anxiety, we have jealousy, we carry resentment, and everything goes round and round like a Duracell bunny in our heads. We sit watching the news all day long, we surf our feed all the time, go from one emotion to the next, a new emotion every 30 seconds, and there’s total chaos inside us.

In other words: when you have an adult in front of you who hasn’t been through a profound process of development, it’s as if there are needles, as if it’s a hedgehog you have in front of you. The aura system is greyish, there are spikes in it, and there’s wild chaos in the whole system. It almost makes you feel a bit sick to see it. That’s the modern human being, going round on the hamster wheel, thinking they understand everything, and in reality not having the faintest idea what reality is about.

Then you come to me. On the outside you look very well groomed, you’re wearing make-up and you’re glowing, and most people think you’re a happy person who smiles, and everything’s fine. And then you’re there in front of me, and you look like this grey hedgehog, with spines sticking out everywhere and wild chaos inside.

And then it’s my job as a guide to begin tuning the music in you, so that it starts to sound more and more like the healthy music your body and your system and your brain had when you were born. And if we look at this a bit from an eagle’s perspective: isn’t it much better to use the expert in tuning for that process, that is, Mother Earth, nature, the blueprint rhythms there, than some stretch-and-bend thing some human being has invented? Personally I think it must be the most spectacular and most direct way to find your way back to the healthy rhythms.

Forest bathing: the first task

Pål-Esben: So what were you asked to do after our first conversation? The first task was to start learning to use nature and to start taking forest baths. That was the first task you were given, wasn’t it? “Amina, now you set aside 30 minutes a day, and then you go out and take a forest bath.” And what did Amina think when she got that message? What was the first thought that struck you?

Amina: Oh. I don’t remember. I was very open to it, because the thing with me is that I’ve hated nature since I was little. The worst thing was going on trips with school and being in nature. But then the pandemic came, and there was lockdown, and I used to go to cafés with my girlfriends every day. Then we’d go shopping and things like that. And then I couldn’t do that. And it started to get pretty boring hanging around at home scrolling on TikTok, which was the trend at the time. The gym was closed and all that. So for the first time I had to work out in nature. That was a way in, along with starting to go for walks and starting to like nature.

So I’d already had a bit of a warm-up there before I came to you. But I remember, when you talked about forest bathing in module 0, I thought: “Yeah, yeah, forest bathing, walking in nature, I’ve got used to that now, that’ll be fine.” And then you mentioned: “OK, we’re not talking about music in your ears, or stretching and working out, or going for a walk with the dog or a friend.” And then I thought: “OK, so what am I supposed to do, then?”

So I tried it out, and it was a bit strange at first, I remember it now, a bit awkward. “Right, so here I am sitting with this tree, and hi, hi, tree, and how are we supposed to communicate, then? Nice day, isn’t it?” That sort of thing.

And then gradually I began to want more, when I relaxed my shoulders and realised, most likely after a conversation with you: just be present with what is. Because very often that’s one of the hardest things a human being can do: just be present with what is. Don’t try anything, don’t try to achieve anything, just be there.

Then I had more and more experiences of simply being with nature, being present with this tree. And through that I also learned to enter into communication with what I had around me. And if I had a problem or a challenge, I could also go into nature deliberately. Then I had a different attitude to why I went into nature. I made contact with nature: “OK, I have this challenge. What in nature can help me understand how I can solve this challenge?”

And some very interesting things began to happen. Suddenly a leaf fell from a tree, when my theme might have been: how can I relate to what this person has done to me? And these quite special insights just arise: “Yes, well, it’s just a matter of letting go.” Or: “Yes, well, autumn always comes after summer.” Things like that.

But of course on my path I’ve had periods when I thought I’d done what I needed to do with nature. Life has happened, and I haven’t had much time to go out into nature, or so I’ve told myself. Because you make time for what you want to make time for. And then I’ve also noticed what that has done to me. It’s like fresh food: it doesn’t keep. And not least: once you’ve really come into that deeper contact, a longing arises. You no longer have to put on your grown-up trousers and use discipline to get yourself outside. It comes naturally. That’s how I feel today: if I haven’t managed to get out into nature for a day or two because things have come up, I feel very shut in. So that’s been my path with nature.

Retuning back to the rhythm of birth

Pål-Esben: Yes, that’s how it is. Because that’s how you start. At first you think it’s about being in nature, but it’s about so much more than being in nature. First you learn the idea: OK, forest bathing. Then you understand forest bathing. Then you learn to sit by a tree and make contact with nature. And that’s where the process starts. Then perhaps you have a drum, and you drum a bit, but that’s only right at the beginning. You’re still in the sandpit compared with what we’re talking about now. It’s the first rough tuning that has begun to happen, and already there you start to notice it in your daily life.

Over time you of course use nature in much more profound and complex ways. When we step into the primordial shamanic path to oneness, you get a completely different picture of nature, and then we start to go behind what lies behind this. But that’s a whole other story.

If we take it from an eagle’s perspective, in the end it’s about retuning our chaos music back to the state we were in when we were born, a state we’ve forgotten. It’s part of shamanic death, part of the preparation for the second birth, which we’ve discussed in the last 15 episodes.

And that’s one of the reasons a primordial shamanic process of development like this can go so fast on the way to your Sahara, to true spiritual awakening. We don’t use any man-made stuff, methods and techniques; instead we use nature and the blueprint rhythms, and eventually also the blueprint rhythms behind the blueprint rhythms in nature, in a very direct way, to retune our system back to the state we were in.

Just sitting in nature to retune yourself isn’t enough. There’s a fair amount of work that has to be done with the personality, and as we’ve discussed in all 41 episodes so far, there are a number of things we have to be willing to do and work on. Practical action, we call it. But nature will be the ultimate tuning key there is for getting back to what we are, for the simple reason that we arose from Mother Earth.

Our body is built by Mother Earth, and when we die physically, our body, our whole system, goes back to Mother Earth, rots and gets ready to be used for something else. It might become a mouse, an elk, perhaps partly a new human being, perhaps a fish, perhaps a bird. But they’re the same building materials.

And that’s what makes the primordial shamanic process of development on the way to oneness and true spiritual awakening so spectacular: we use what we already are. And we use nature, which brings us even further back to what we are. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about getting to guide you and your fellow students through a real shamanic process of development.

But as long as you have an idea of shamanism that relates in any way to fear or protection, well, that will only reinforce your straitjacket. It’s the opposite of setting yourself free. You stand next to no chance there. So you have to reach the point where you let go of fear and all these things. Because those are the biggest factors stopping us from becoming free.

So that’s a bit of a short version of why we call it the primordial shamanic process of development on the way to oneness and true spiritual awakening. There’s a reason we use those words, and they have a specific meaning. And I hope, dear listener, that as you listen to us now, you see the difference between ordinary shamanism and what we’re doing. They’re two completely different things.

And there’s nothing wrong with ordinary shamanism. It can surely help many people, and it can do a lot of good, beyond any doubt. We’re not saying we hold the only answer. But if you’re going to walk a path like the one you have, Amina, which depends on us setting ourselves free from our construct, our false identity, our fear, our primal anxiety, which is an absolute must for finding your Sahara, well, it’ll be tough going on a path based on fear.

Whether there are other schools out in this world that have a specific process for helping shamans into the Sahara, I don’t know, but I haven’t heard of any. But I do know that the older shamans, for example, if we go into Peru and that region, at least the oldest of them, if they haven’t died out by now, have talked about these things. You’ll often hear them use expressions like dreaming reality: that by dreaming reality, a new reality becomes available, for example.

But that isn’t quite what we’re doing. There have definitely been shamans in those cultures who were so-called spiritually awakened. We find them in all cultures, if we look at the older, let me say genuine, raw processes of development. But in modern shamanism it isn’t so very common, of course, because as long as you’re dealing with fear, you don’t stand a chance at this. It’s that simple.

Amina: Yes, and it’s the contact with nature’s gravitational forces that has given me the breakthroughs I’ve had in the meditation process. We’ve talked quite a bit about the meditation process in this podcast. So thank you to nature and the gravitational forces for that, because otherwise I’d have been in a somewhat different place, with somewhat different experiences.

I realise more and more with every day that passes how important it actually is, and how important that groundwork is. There are probably several people listening to this podcast who may also be taking the basic shamanic training now, or later. And I just want to make it clear: the way you, Pål-Esben, have laid out the whole course of training is no coincidence. It’s built so that we can really set ourselves free and come home, for those who are interested in going all the way.

Everything from module 0 through the whole basic shamanic training and the senior shaman training is a preparation for semester 1 of the primordial shamanic path to oneness and spiritual enlightenment. And forest bathing, really taking it seriously from day one, will be one of the most important things you can do, along with the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, of course, and The 7 Golden Keys, which we’ll dive into a bit more later.

A guide, a process, and a guide who wants to work with you

Pål-Esben: I don’t know if I’d say it’s one of the most important things, but it’s very, very important on the road ahead. It’s also a tailor-made process. And here’s one of the things when you’re seeking a way to your complete nature: you need some process you have to go through for it to be able to happen.

If you go into an ashram in India, you have a very specific process for this. If you go into a Zen monastery, a Zen temple for example, you have another very specific process. And in our tradition we also have a very specific process, which guides a human being from the start until they find their way all the way home again. So you need a process, and that process is often the challenge.

When you start looking for this, you think: “OK, let me read a book, let me listen to a bit of YouTube, and let me sit in nature and make contact with nature.” And of course that’s great, but it won’t lead to what we’re talking about. Because that process consists of quite a few steps you need to go through. We’ve covered that in the podcast so far: examples of the steps that have to be gone through and integrated, so that you gradually loosen the straitjacket, loosen what’s holding you back, so that you eventually become able to tune yourself in to your own Sahara, which actually lives in you. It’s never something you lose; it’s always there. So this is an active process of uncovering what’s already there.

And if you believe you can do a process like this without having a process, there’s very little chance you’ll get there.

If you study the yogic tradition, this is described everywhere, from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras to everything else that’s been written, at least in the older scriptures, the older Vedas. If you go into that, you’ll always hear the following: you’ll always hear that it’s a process. They won’t call it a process, but it’s something you need to go through.

And the other thing you hear is that doing this without a guru, guide or the like isn’t possible. It’s also mandatory that a student-teacher relationship builds up, and they describe why this is important, and why it’s mandatory for a process like this on the way to oneness.

We’ve talked about it in an earlier episode: if you don’t have a suitable guide, it’s very difficult. If that guide doesn’t have a suitable process, it’s also very difficult. And if that guide isn’t willing to work with you personally, it’s also very difficult. Because those are the basic prerequisites. You need a guide who is competent: a teacher, a guru, whatever we call it. Then that guide needs to have a process that’s set in advance, which he or she leads you through. And then that guide needs to be interested in working with you in particular. Because without personal interaction with your guide, this is also close to impossible.

Why? Well, because things will come up that absolutely need to be discussed. You’ll get into situations where you can’t see your own chaos, and where you need a mirror to reflect you. You need help when you’re stuck. You need help when you slip into the ego’s last stand, where your ego becomes spiritual. This is almost impossible to do by yourself, through listening to a book, reading a book and listening to YouTube. You need a human being who is willing to interact directly with you, live. Regularly.

So that’s what you need: a suitable guide who is qualified; a concrete process the guide takes you through, one that has been proven, with people who have gone through it before, to lead to the goal; and a guide who is actually interested in helping you.

And the last one is actually the biggest problem. Finding a guide is one thing; you can go into an ashram in India. But the chance that that guide takes a special interest in you is close to zero. They have so much to do. Try going into a big ashram where you have a guru who is truly qualified. Not all ashrams have one, but you arrive at an ashram, and that guru will probably have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of subjects or followers, or students, which is the word I’d use. How big a chance do you think there is that a guru like that will work directly with you? Don’t you think they have enough to do with their most advanced students, and with running the ashram? There you have your answer.

So we need someone who is willing to interact with us. That’s necessary. And once you have that, there are different schools for doing this, as we talked about earlier. The safest and surest way is to go via the yogic school or Zen; that’s very clearly documented in the literature. And then we have our way, which we’ve talked about. And there are surely many other paths that lead there.

The personality changes completely

Pål-Esben: But what characterises the day you stand in your Sahara is that your personality will be completely changed. That’s one of the things that will happen. The anxiety will cease, the depression will cease, the resentment will cease, the irritation will cease. Your need for other people’s recognition will cease. All of it will cease, because there’s no longer any point in it. Why should you define yourself through others?

It becomes a completely different way of experiencing life, since you have contact with, and have experienced, what you really are. Then what goes on in this dream, in the soul’s dream, which people believe is reality, will be a dream you know is a dream. Then you can choose to interact and play with the dream, and you can choose to step out of the dream, but you’re never the dream any more.

And that’s what revolutionises the life of a human being who goes through a genuine process of development on the path to oneness. In my eyes, it must be one of the most important things you can offer the world you live in: more people who become beacons of light, and fewer people who are black holes. That’s how I see it.

Amina: Yes, I completely agree.

Pål-Esben: And through that we can create the New Earth, or the new world. As more and more people wake up and let go of the ego’s nonsense, their false identity, their need for control, their anxiety, their fear, their manipulation and their hatred, and as more and more people let go of all that and become genuinely peaceful, balanced human beings, that will of course have an effect on each of them, but also on tens, perhaps hundreds, of people around each one.

That’s the only way I see for this world to become joyful to live in: that many, many people gradually wake up. So the best thing I can do for the world is to wake up. The best thing you can do for the world is to wake up. And the best thing any human being can do for this world is to wake up.

Because one of the side effects of waking up is that nobody can control you or manipulate you any more, neither the authorities nor the people around you. You simply can’t be manipulated, because you see the game, you experience the game, and nobody can put fear into you any more, whatever society does or doesn’t do. You’re immune.

And it’s actually very pleasant to live like that. Then you can interact with the dream when you want to, and I call that playing with your karma, but you can also go into observation mode and be out of your dream when it suits you. That’s what we call learning to stand with one foot in the dream, that is, in the grain of sand, and one foot in your Sahara. In my eyes, that’s what makes a complete human being a complete human being.

That’s what we’ve described in our podcast: how that process can unfold to get there. And you’re one of the star examples of what happens to a human being when they begin to dive deeper and deeper into this. It isn’t just something theoretical that happens; life changes dramatically.

The relationship with time

Amina: Yes, definitely. And it comes gradually, more and more, with such extreme insights that things, belief systems that is, simply change. I came out of meditation the other day, and it took a few hours before I managed to come fully back to myself. And just looking around at people, I felt: “Whoa, we think we’re so short of time, we think we have to get things done in time, we think we’re on our way somewhere, and really we’re just here.” In physical life we of course have to make it to the dentist at two o’clock and things like that, but for me that insight went so deep.

So it comes with quite a lot of interesting experiences, which make things gradually change more and more. For the better.

Pål-Esben: It’s the relationship with time, no doubt about it. I’ve experienced that time is very relative. Of course, if you have to pick the kids up from nursery at a certain time, you have to do it. But otherwise, getting things done on a schedule becomes more and more meaningless, because you understand that that’s not what it’s about. It isn’t about how much you do, or how little you do, or how much stuff you acquire, or how nice your house looks, or how many holiday cabins you have. That gradually becomes more and more meaningless. You feel more and more of a need to get rid of pretty much everything, because you’re looking more and more for simplicity in things. That’s one of the side effects of these things.

Separating the relevant from the irrelevant

Pål-Esben: So the challenge when we’re in a process of development like this, because we’re flooded with so much input, is to separate what’s relevant from what isn’t relevant. That’s also one of the hardest things about a process of development like this, because how am I supposed to know whether things are relevant or not? Well, it isn’t that easy to know at the beginning.

Take an example that’s perhaps very familiar out there, at least to those who are on YouTube and the like. There you’ll often hear so-called gurus claim that by activating your pineal gland, for example, and learning X number of methods to activate it, you’ll reach what we call Sahara oneness. So people sit fiddling about, believing that by breathing in special ways, and by pushing the energy and forcing it up into the middle of the head, where the pineal gland is, they’ll activate it, and through that they’ll see the light and reach oneness.

Well, no activation of the pineal gland can lead to oneness. Activating the pineal gland can have many positive effects. First, your body produces more DMT, which is a psychoactive substance, and that can mean there’s more serotonin and dopamine available, so you can feel much better. After your pineal gland has produced a certain amount of DMT, you can of course feel much better and much more at ease. You can even have visions and things like that. Beyond any doubt. Health-wise, it may well be very good. But claiming that once you’ve activated your pineal gland you’re in oneness: that’s a gigantic misunderstanding that has nothing to do with reality.

Nor are you in oneness the day you learn to activate your kundalini energy. True, there’s a kundalini energy that needs to be activated to find the way to your Sahara. This is one of the things that goes on in the yogic world, and it’s called energetic enlightenment. You kick-start your kundalini energy, either with a kundalini yoga asana, or with a specific use of the breath, or with more extreme things that can also be done, and then your kundalini shoots up your spine.

When you experience that, you can feel a kind of ecstatic bliss. But it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here, nothing to do with the Sahara. It’s just an energetic yang experience, which indirectly produces massive amounts of dopamine and serotonin in your system, which can feel totally out of this world, but which doesn’t lead to what we’re talking about. It’s also called energetic alignment.

And here’s the thing: to reach your Sahara, no more energy is needed. It’s simply about finding the right rhythm, the right music, back to where you were when you were born. There’s no more hocus-pocus to it than that. But people make this so complex. And you often have people who are very good at marketing themselves, who talk about reaching oneness through technology. Through technology, that is, through a technical use of the breath that gets your pineal gland to activate and produce DMT, you’re supposed to get there. But they forget all the prerequisites for this to be able to happen. They’ve picked out one method from perhaps 1,000 methods in the yogic tradition, and then they think that with that method they’ll get all the way.

But that’s not how it is. And through that you may end up somewhere where you believe a yang experience like that is an experience of oneness. And as long as you believe it’s an experience of oneness, you stay stuck with it. And that’s a real loss.

Psychoactive substances and oneness

Pål-Esben: It’s the same with believing that when you use ayahuasca and psilocybin, magic mushrooms, liberty caps, mescaline, LSD, any psychoactive compound you take in, it will lead you to your Sahara, to a spiritual awakening. That’s just as big a misunderstanding.

In episode 40, Daniel, who was one of our guests, talked about exactly this. Because he has used ayahuasca and DMT and done the whole lot, not just once, but a massive number of times. Listen to what he says about exactly this: what he understood the day he had a real experience of oneness. All those euphoric experiences in one psychoactive state or another had terribly little to do with what a real experience of oneness is.

But as long as you’re geared and trained to think that the more ayahuasca trips you take, the closer you get to these things, then the more confused you become, the more chaos there is in your system, and the further away you are from your own Sahara.

Can these psychoactive substances be good for things? Of course. There’s a deep healing effect in them. From PTSD to depression to anxiety and addictions, you can heal in a very powerful way with these psychoactive substances. Beyond any doubt.

And perhaps a bit later we’ll have a separate episode where we go into these substances in more detail, and say exactly how they can be used, what they can be used for, and of course what they shouldn’t be used for. Because here’s one of the big misunderstandings out there: that you can go to the mountains for a weekend, take a bit of ayahuasca, and then have experiences of oneness. That’s not how it is. So it could be an episode with Daniel; he has experience with this. And you too? You’ve had some ayahuasca experiences too, haven’t you?

Amina: Yes, though I’ve never used ayahuasca, or gone to an ayahuasca ceremony, in order to become enlightened. Feeling that I was in oneness has been a side effect of it. That wasn’t what I was thinking before I dived into it. But as I’ve also talked about before, the oneness thing you can often feel there is at any rate something completely different from what we’re doing here. I’d actually venture to say it isn’t even in the same category. So yes, I have experience with it.

Pål-Esben: Everything can be used for something good, and that’s how it is with most of the things we have in our society: everything can be used for something good. You can learn to talk to animals. That can be good for the animal and for the animal’s owner, but it doesn’t help much with what we’re doing.

If you’re seeking oneness, you can learn and believe that you’ll get there through esoteric methods, techniques and esoteric technology. That’s often the challenge: we get so curious, and then we go looking to learn esoteric methods. We learn about the chakras, we’re going to channel, we’re going to talk to animals, we’re going to learn about stones. And that’s great. I did that too at the start. We were curious. About everything. But none of it will lead you into what we’re talking about now.

So that’s the question you have to ask yourself when you reach a certain point in your process of development: what is it you’re actually looking for? Is it esoteric methods and techniques, or is it the real thing you’re after?

Willing to give things up: the smooth or the hard path

Pål-Esben: And then there are a couple of things. We’ll give a few tips here at the end, before we wrap up and close the loop on this part of our podcast. What do we start with? Say you really want to start, and you say: “Listen, Amina, listen, Pål-Esben, I’m ready to start a process with myself to find the ultimate freedom a human being can experience. I’m ready. Tell me how to start.”

In addition to what we’ve talked about, finding a suitable guide and process, what is it you can do yourself? The first thing you have to ask yourself is this. Are you willing to give up what needs to be given up, so that this becomes a smooth ride, with a nice flow to it, or will you do it the hard way?

And what does that mean? The first thing we talk to our students about is that there are several ways of doing this, in our tradition too. You can do it the hard, exhausting way, or you can do it the more joyful and smooth way.

So what are you talking about, then? Well, there are certain things we need to be willing to make a couple of choices about. And the simplest way to understand this is to go back to health, and I’ll tell you a story.

The story of the anti-inflammatory diet

Pål-Esben: For example: you’re struggling with a chronic illness. What do you normally do when you have a chronic illness in Norway? You go to the doctor. And what does the doctor often do? Well, they give you medication that suppresses your immune system, since there’s far too much inflammation in the body. In other words, they give you cortisone or corticosteroids, or whatever it is they prescribe. You get that almost all the time.

What does that do? So you come to your doctor with a chronic illness. Most of the chronic illnesses a human being has come from there being far too many inflammatory processes in the body, which set off autoimmunity: the immune system starts attacking you and your body and your organs. It starts with far too much inflammation in your system.

And if you go to the doctor, the doctor often isn’t very interested in finding out why you have a lot of inflammation in your body. No, they’d rather give you cortisone, which suppresses the stress in your immune system, so you feel better. But you know that when you take cortisone, at least systemically, that is, as injections or tablets, it has a number of side effects for your body: you can get osteoporosis, muscle weakness, problems with many things, everything from problems with your eyes and onwards. Lots of side effects.

So when I have people with me who are chronically ill, since I have many years of experience with chronic illness, the first thing I look at is this: what do we need to do that minimises inflammation in your body? And what’s the first thing we look at? Well, how to stop adding new inflammation to the body.

And where does the conversation go then? Well, then we have to change our diet. It’s not possible without that. If you’re struggling with massive inflammation in your body, which most chronic illnesses have arisen from, it would be logical, at least for an engineer’s brain like mine, to think: OK, what do we need to do to get the inflammation down?

And the first, simplest step, which is mandatory, is to make sure you stop eating the foods and sweets and fizzy drinks and whatever else creates inflammation in your body. The first thing I start my client on is switching to an anti-inflammatory diet, where certain foods are absolutely taboo, the ones that create inflammation in the body, like milk and wheat flour and cola and Grandiosa frozen pizza, and whatever the big brands in Norway are.

Then they get the task of going to their ChatGPT or their AI. Here’s one thing AI is actually good for: what can I eat that’s so-called anti-inflammatory? And then you find: “Oh, salad is good.” It is good.

The anti-inflammatory diet for the mind

Pål-Esben: The same applies when we’re going to find the path to oneness, to our Sahara, which is one of the most complex undertakings a human being can embark on. We believe so strongly that our body is real, and that what we experience is real, and that’s what makes this so difficult: we believe 100 percent that this pen is real. Go out into town and say this pen isn’t real, and people will soon think an institution is the place for you.

So what do we do to start an anti-inflammatory diet when it comes to the path to oneness? Well, then we have to think about what input we’re giving our brain and our psyche that creates chaos, which is the opposite of the stillness we’re seeking. Because this process isn’t possible unless we find a point where it’s dead quiet in our heads. We have to reach the point where it’s quiet inside and outside, because that’s one of the prerequisites for being able to drop into our Sahara.

If people feed their brain with news all day, for example, which creates tremendous emotional stress in them, this becomes a terribly hard path to walk. Because what do you do then? You sit and meditate for an hour a day to find calm, and then five times a day you sit reading the news, about war here and war there and chaos there. That means an hour of meditation isn’t even able to balance the new chaos your brain is taking in. Isn’t that logical?

In other words: if we aren’t willing to stop this, and take responsibility for how we feed our brain and our psyche with these signals, this is a very hard path to walk. Is it possible? I can put anyone into an experience of oneness through an extensive ritual. That isn’t the point, but we do that at our retreats, which we hold in Norway once a year. The point is how you find these states yourself, at home. And that’s very difficult if you feed your head and your psyche with chaos all day.

That’s why we say to new students: if you want a smooth path here, the anti-inflammatory diet for finding the way to stillness is to cut out news 100 percent, completely, for 90 days. Number two: uninstall the social apps on your mobile phone, or minimise your use of social media to ten minutes a day.

And that’s the worst one. “Who are you to tell me I can’t go on my Instagram feed any more?” Well, you do what you like, you know. But read my article on my blog about how Instagram and the like, and short videos, destroy the brain physically and psychologically, and how they create tremendous subconscious stress in you continuously. Then you’ll understand that it’s one of the most inflammatory diets you can give your brain.

And my experience is the following. Some of my students are willing to do this for 90 days: stop the news, stop social media, and only use social media if they need it for work, to keep in touch with friends and for the basics, taking real responsibility for not scrolling their feed, ten minutes a day at most, or ideally next to nothing, zero. Those who are willing to do that get a much smoother path into the stillness than those who say: “I’ll do what I want, whatever you say.” Be my guest. But they often have a very hard path.

It’s the same as for someone struggling with a chronic illness, fibromyalgia for example, which comes solely from too much inflammation in the body, and which in most cases is very simple to resolve if you get that inflammation down, if you’re willing to change your diet 100 percent, turn it upside down, to an anti-inflammatory diet. Then many people with fibromyalgia will find that they suddenly no longer have pain in their joints and muscles, within 90 days, in my experience.

So the question is: are you willing to do that for your path to your complete self, or not? That’s the first question I ask you as a student of mine. What you do is up to you, but I’m obliged, that’s actually how I see it, to tell you that you can walk a path that’s easy-peasy and reasonably simple, and you can walk a path that’s very hard. Which do you choose? It’s up to you.

That wasn’t the easiest start, was it, Amina?

News, scrolling and the rotten feeling

Amina: No, absolutely not. I’ve never been much of a news person, so that one has actually been fine. But I caught myself scrolling around on the news site VG now and then, almost automatically, so I got an insight that, yes, I’m still a bit of a news person, even if I don’t have the news on TV all day.

But of course the hardest thing has been social media and scrolling. It really has. But it’s also been an important insight, seeing how addicted I was. And not least the insights from the periods when I was good at staying away, compared with the periods when I wasn’t good at staying away, when a rotten feeling began to arise inside. It was actually also a really good experience to see what happened inside me when I went from having distanced myself from the scrolling to gradually bringing it back in again. That’s been a hugely important experience, because then I really got to see what actually happens.

I notice it myself: it’s hugely important for me to stay away. And I see it with students of mine too. I talked to one of them the other day who often has a lot of stress in her system, and I noticed straight away that she was much calmer. After a few weeks I just asked: “So how’s it going? What have you done?” Well, she’d stopped being on social media. Yes! And then even the contact with nature had come back, because that had been difficult for a while, after she’d had good contact with nature.

So I see it again and again with the people I follow up, and I see it in my own story too: how important it is not to spend your time scrolling and checking everything. I don’t think we’re made to know everything that’s happening in everyone’s life all the time. We have the whole world, that’s one thing, and then you have all your friends, and what they’ve done, and what they had for dinner, and what they’ve posted, and which holiday they’re on. Good heavens, no.

And then there’s the part where people think: it’s so nice to see a bit of what Sarah’s been up to, and that’s where I keep in touch with my people. Then I think: “OK, but then use those ten minutes to get a little update. Not to scroll yourself to death, ideally not, but use those ten minutes to get an update and say hi to your friend.” Using it consciously is the be-all and end-all. First of all to get a better life at all, but especially for this path, if you’re really seeking a way home.

And I see it with my children too. My children aren’t allowed to have social media, but then they’ve downloaded it in secret, and then I find out in the end, and then there have been consequences. And then I’ve seen: “Oh yes, my child was like that during that period.” A lot of it probably also comes from all the input my child got through scrolling and social media, because I saw a big difference when it was taken away again. So I see it very clearly there too.

Brain rot: what the research shows

Pål-Esben: Yes, and researchers in psychology and neuropsychology have begun to find something out: the most destructive thing that’s actually damaging the society we live in is social media. It’s so destructive and so damaging in every area, including the brains of those who are on social media, which are literally damaged physically and emotionally through brain rot. This isn’t some esoteric thing that has been channelled; a great deal of research has been done on it, and you can search ChatGPT for what brain rot is. It means your brain is rotting. I also wrote an article on my blog about this, with references to research.

So clearly this is something that’s destroying our society massively, and not least the new generation of children growing up, whose brains, physically, are being damaged. The white matter, the part that protects the neurons, for example, shrinks dramatically, which means their cognitive abilities, their ability to use language, are lowered considerably. They say a 12-year-old should have access to an iPad for 30 minutes a day at most, for example, and for children under 6, a total ban.

This isn’t esoteric stuff; it’s hard research through brain scans. And then we have to ask ourselves the question: do we want our addiction to lead our life into this, or do we want to take self-responsibility for stopping that process? That’s the question. Because it’s destructive either way, whether you want it to be or not, whether you believe it or not. That goes for your life and your brain and your psyche, and for your kids.

And when we walk a path to find the way to our Sahara, it’s even more destructive, since there we depend on finding the way to calm, balance, inner harmony and stillness.

You don’t need to be as extreme as me, switching my phone on once a month, or once every six months. The only way people can get in touch with me, including my friends, is to send me an email. I’m the one who gets in touch with them and calls them when I feel like it. It’s not possible to get hold of me directly. Nobody, not a soul. Well, that is, we have a small handful who have direct numbers to our house here, family and a couple of good friends. But that’s it. It’s extreme, and I’ve been like this for 20 years.

And I had a period some years ago when I actually started reading the online newspapers, when I wanted to keep up to date. And what I noticed was this. Suddenly I was going through all five of the most important online newspapers, and when I scrolled, it became five minutes, ten minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. And you get a bit odd. That’s simply a sign of an addiction developing. Today I haven’t watched the news, either on TV or in online newspapers, for well over five years. And you’re still not living in a cave: you pick up what’s going on. You know what’s going on in Ukraine and down in the Middle East, and that Trump is even crazier today than he was a year ago. You pick it up, but there’s no longer any need to watch it every day.

But in the end it’s a choice each individual has to make for themselves. And I think the most important thing you do when you make this choice is to also take 100 percent responsibility for the consequences of the choice you make. That’s what I say to my students and clients: you do exactly what you want with what I recommend, as long as you don’t come to me and complain about making stupid choices and about the results. As long as you own your choice, and as long as you own the consequences of your choice, that’s brilliant.

So it’s not as if I come chasing after you out in the forest either. I didn’t wag my finger and say: “Now you must stop using social media.” “Here’s what happens to your brain,” I say. “Here’s what happens in relation to what you say you dream of, that is, the path to oneness. So now you can make a choice yourself,” I say to you. “Now you can do whatever you want, Amina.”

Self-responsibility and free will

Amina: Yes, that’s what you say to all of us, your students. You haven’t phoned me up and said: “Listen, now you have to.” So this is where self-responsibility comes in. And I notice along this path that you’ve constantly said what’s important to focus on if you want to get there. It makes no difference to you what we do, but if you want to get there, then you need to do it. This is the cake recipe, if you want to eat this chocolate cake.

And I’ve noticed along the way that there have been things I’ve taken for granted, or not spent much time and energy on, where I can see in hindsight that perhaps I should have spent a bit more time and energy on them. And then I did, and then the changes I wanted actually happened.

So I just have to say that I really applaud your patience with certain things we students have to engage with if we want to get there. Because there are several things you say again and again and again, and then I see how important it is. One thing is that I learn more each time I get the reminder and you say something about it. But also: we really ought to have grasped how important this is by now. So you’re patience itself, Pål-Esben?

Pål-Esben: You have to be, because it’s each individual who goes through an internal process with this. And that process has to happen in each human being. As a guide you can’t control the process going on in a human being, even if you know that if they’d only done this and that, they’d have been spared so much suffering and frustration.

But each human being has to be allowed to use their free will, to experience things, and eventually, hopefully, to come to the insight: why shouldn’t I do what works, why shouldn’t I do what gives me results, in the end? Whether it takes one day, one week, one month, one year, or whether it takes five years: well, that’s up to each individual.

But I think it’s also important that each individual gets this task: you have to be willing to own this process of development yourself. Otherwise it’s like coming in as a little child and expecting mum or dad to fix things for you. That won’t work. Here, as an adult, you have to be willing to own your own process of development, and be willing to own the consequences of the choices you make, and of the choices you don’t make, which are also choices. And then you have to understand that this is your process of development, and not your guide’s.

The rubber band: when I learned to let go of results

Pål-Esben: In the old days, when I was much younger, more than 20 years ago, I saw how simple it actually was for a human being in front of me to stop suffering. And then I almost forced that person to the point where they weren’t suffering, like this: “Now you have to do this, now you have to do this, now you have to do this.” And if they hadn’t done it by the next time we talked, I got furious. In other words, I forced people to succeed, or to become happier.

And what happened then was that every single time it was like stretching a rubber band. Things got better and better, their finances got better and better, they got happier and happier and healthier and healthier. And suddenly you stretch the rubber band too far. This is done in an artificial way, with the guide, the therapist, almost pushing people to become happy, or to avoid all the conflicts in their relationship. Then there comes a point where the band is stretched so tight that it just snaps back, and they’re exactly where they started in the process, and nothing has happened.

And it frustrated me no end, because it got to me so much. God, they’d experienced what it’s like to have a happy life, or good finances, or to be out of burnout, or whatever the theme was that we were working on, and then suddenly they’d do everything they shouldn’t do, and end up back in exactly the same place where I first met them, with the same problems, the same desperation.

Why is it like that? And then I started flogging myself over it, and I began to identify my problem at the time: that I had identified my worth with the success my clients had.

Then I had a wise mentor at the time, who says to me: “Can’t you see the problem here, Pål-Esben? The problem is that you don’t let the people you help own their process of development. You don’t let them use their free will. You control their free will. Even if you have good intentions,” this person says, “it doesn’t help the person in front of you. It’s only when they become independent, and independently use their free will to make good choices on their own behalf, that real development can happen.”

So I thought: “Oh, that’s how it is.” So I did a 90-degree turn, and from then on I gave my students and clients 100 percent self-responsibility. I told them that too: “I’m going to stop trying to persuade you to be happy, and to do what it takes to be happy. From now on I’ll give you an impulse, I’ll give you my thoughts, and then it’s 100 percent up to you what you do with those thoughts, impulses, insights and the knowledge I pass on to you.” It’s something I no longer identify with.

So in the end some people did something with what I said, and some didn’t, but I no longer spent any energy on the client’s outcome, whether it turned out well or not. My job was to inspire them there and then, and not to get involved in what they did with what I inspired them to do.

From that day my life changed, as a teacher and guide and mentor and in all the hats I wear: what you do with what I say doesn’t matter that much to me. My job is what we’re doing right now. When I sit and talk with you, I’m fully present, and I try to give you the impulse or impulses I see you need right now, which are often impulses you perhaps hadn’t expected to get right then and there. But what you do with it, Amina, is 100 percent up to you and your free will. And I encourage that too: do whatever you want with what I say, but at least take responsibility for the consequences of the choices you make.

And for me as a mentor, therapist and practitioner, it was a liberating turn. Because from then on I no longer identified with the results my clients and students had, or the lack of results. I stopped identifying with that completely.

That’s freedom. And today there are often many practitioners or mentors who struggle because they believe they’re doing a good job if their client either gets well or gets a better life, so they identify with the outcome of the work they do with clients and patients and the people they mentor. That’s a very stressful thing. Because it’s the same as indirectly trying to believe that you have control, or can have control, over people’s free will.

But your job is to set free will free.

So you do a professional job, you give an impulse to the person in front of you, and you understand that what they do with that impulse is entirely up to each individual. In that way you acknowledge the free will of every being around you. And you slip out of what I call the almighty syndrome, which is really what happens the day you try to control other people’s success, even if the intention is good. Your job isn’t to be God almighty.

Your job is to let this soul in front of you play itself out the way it does in the dream, with the free will the chess piece has. And as long as that chess piece is with me, that is, you, as a chess piece with me, my job is to inspire you to steer this chess piece in your game, the game of chess that is your life, in the best possible way, so that the soul’s learning tasks come to fruition: that they ripen, so you can pick the apple when it’s fully ripe.

Yes, I believe so. And that’s my job here in our podcast too. It isn’t to tell you or anyone else what to do or not to do. It makes no difference to me whatsoever what people do with what I say; I’m not identified with it at all. But of course I’m glad if someone does something with what we talk about and creates a better life with it. But that’s up to each individual.

So that’s the last thing I’d planned to say in this closing episode on the theme of the path to the Sahara and oneness: life can be joyful, and the path to that joyfulness is much shorter than you could ever dream.

Amina: Yes, absolutely.

“The Language of Truth”

Pål-Esben: Do you have any closing words, Amina, to close the loop?

Amina: Yes, I have a closing poem, which I’ve been wondering a bit whether to share today, and I feel it’s fitting for ending the season on the primordial shamanic path to oneness and spiritual enlightenment. After the meditation process, not that long ago, I felt that, oh, there’s something that wants to express itself. How am I going to do that? Should I paint, should I draw, should I write? OK, I’ll try my hand at a poem. And then my head piped up: “But you’re not a poet.” “Yes, but that doesn’t matter.” And so I just let it come. So I’m going to read a poem.

Pål-Esben: Lovely.

Amina: Yes. The poem is called “The Language of Truth”.

The language of truth does not speak in words, it comes from a place where pure being dwells, a place where pain and suffering have no room, a knowing that ends every burden and load.

A love that is greater than the name of love, the anchorage in the harbour of reality, where the wave is the ocean, and the ocean is the wave, where there is nothing more to chase.

Here there are no goals that need to be reached; the burden only comes when we try to understand. The experience is recognised by the witness itself, the insight that life wishes us well.

The language of truth carries its own rhythm, a wave to ride, but one must learn to listen. It arises when the noise has died down, when one surrenders to the path of stillness.

Pål-Esben: Beautiful. The perfect summary of everything we’ve talked about. I’m impressed, Amina. So, dear listener, we hope you’ve appreciated what we’ve talked about in these last episodes, about the path to oneness and freedom, and we’re very glad you’re with us. We hope to have you with us in the next season, when we’ll be moving on to a new topic. And what you did just now, Amina, was the perfect ending. I’m touched. Thank you so much for staying with us all the way, dear listener. We really appreciate your feedback, and a five-star rating on Spotify helps our podcast reach more listeners. And thank you so much for being here with me, Amina. I really appreciate it.

Amina: Likewise, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: Thank you for being with us, dear listener. I hope you’ll join us again in the next episode. And until then: have a truly wonderful day, evening, night or morning, wherever you are listening from. Take care.

Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. We hope Amina’s story has inspired you to explore your own journey of self-discovery and development. Remember that the path from suffering to self-realization can be demanding, but with courage, patience and support from a competent guide, mentor, teacher or therapist, almost anything is possible. We wish you all the best on your journey, and we’ll talk again in the next episode.