The Tripod That Reconnects You to Source with Justin Baker – SMJ 006

You're About to Learn …

• What consciousness actually means beyond the textbook definition.
• Why your body is the critical antenna for intuitive knowing.
• The three disconnections keeping you from feeling whole.
• How attention works like a set of dials you can train.
• Why every indigenous culture used sound to shift awareness.
• What's on the menu of knowing beyond your default senses.
• How mind-body practices are really just training you to listen.
• A real-life story of intuition predicting a birth years in advance.

Hear It Here

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Resources and Items Mentioned in This Episode

Resources

• The Reluctant Lightworker Podcast

Where to Find Justin Baker Online

• Mindful Power

Timestamps and Topics

• [00:03:45] Consciousness defined – the light of awareness looking out from within.
• [00:07:18] Batness, dogness, and Joel-ness: fractal layers of who you are.
• [00:09:07] The one power source that everything in the universe plugs into.
• [00:15:12] A 3 a.m. vision of a friend's daughter … before she was conceived.
• [00:18:04] Your body as an antenna: how intuition arrives through your senses.
• [00:21:09] Why mind-body practices are really just learning how to listen.
• [00:34:00] Every indigenous culture on earth uses sound to shift awareness.
• [00:39:43] Attentional capacity versus focus.
• [00:49:45] Modern Western culture's limitations.
• [00:54:14] The three disconnections causing restlessness and how to reconnect.

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Transcript

Joel: Welcome, Justin. It's all kinds of groovy to be having this chat with you, my friend.

Justin: Happy to be here, Joel, as always.

Joel: This is unscripted for the most part, but before I reached out to you, I said, “Hey, is there anything in particular that maybe you want to cover?” And you said consciousness would be cool along with maybe a couple of other things. So I figured we'd start with something simple like the nature of consciousness. What can be more simple than that?

Justin: Yeah, just start with a nice light topic.

Joel: I have the voice of my friend Heather in the back of my head, which says define your terms. Meaning when we use a word, let's make sure that we're both using it in a similar way. What to you is consciousness?

Justin: Wow. I think I needed to do my homework before this podcast. Let's start with basics. There is a sense when I look out on the world from inside of this body that there is some light of awareness that is looking out and knows that it is somehow a little bit separate from what's out there. What is this light that grants me the sense that I'm looking out? The metaphor a lot of the Eastern philosophers use is something like a light that is shedding some visibility into the darkness.

Justin: And that allows – that illuminates experience. There's no reason, for instance, that we shouldn't just be like an amoeba that is out there seeking food, seeking sustenance, exchanging oxygen and air with the atmosphere. There's no reason we have to be aware – that the lights have to be on – for any of that biological stuff to happen.

Justin: But there is a light on. We are aware that we exist for some reason. And that is how most of the ancient philosophers and even the current philosophers, in my understanding, have come to define consciousness.

Joel: Makes sense to me. I heard you use the word “I.” Is consciousness something that we experience individually and collectively? Is it more of a unifying force? Is there a fractal nature to consciousness?

Justin: Short answer is yes. I think the starting point for asking the question – if we're going down that epistemological rabbit hole that your friend Heather is suggesting – is that the common experience we all have inside these modern bodies, especially in our modern culture, is an individual experience. That there is an “I” that is somehow aware.

Justin: When you start to expand your sense of awareness through any sort of practice – for those of us in modern Western culture, that often comes through mind-body practices like yoga, meditation, maybe we try some psychedelics – we have certain experiences where our awareness seems to expand beyond just the “I.” And then we start to notice that this consciousness, this sense that we exist, may not be confined just to this light that's flickering inside of this body. I personally have had a lot of those experiences, and I know a lot of other people who've had those experiences. A lot of us are coming to the conclusion that consciousness is not limited to a little light flickering inside of this body.

Joel: Please don't ask me what I think the nature of consciousness is or to define it, because I don't have a very good answer for that.

Justin: I can't volley that back at you?

Joel: Well, you can volley a lot of things back at me, but please don't do that one.

Justin: Let me just try this. It just took me five to seven minutes to even venture a term definition. Are there any parts of that definition that either don't make sense to you or that you would like to quibble with or add to?

Joel: No. The thing that I hear the most is that being a conscious entity, there's something that it's like to be that entity. There's something that it's like to be a bat – which is a classical case – or a human. I'm having a human experience right now, at least I think I am. But I'm also having a Joel Zaslofsky experience. So to me, that's where the fractal or layers of consciousness come in. And as you go up, identity is removed and any sense of Joelness is removed – as we go up to the cosmic scale of consciousness.

Joel: And this is where it's really hard because I talk about so many different things with so many different people. This particular concept and topic is something where words very quickly fail. And maybe it's because I'm inadequate when it comes to my vocabulary or my learnings. But consciousness and the nature of consciousness is just something that really defies words to me. If we could energetically communicate about consciousness, that seems so much more appropriate. But of course, we're recording something and all we have to communicate right now is our words. It's a very crude form of communication when we're talking about something like consciousness.

Justin: Yep, crude form of communication. What I say to a lot of my friends when we get into these deep, expansive topics is words are hard. And the English language was not born from a context in which we have a deeper, complex understanding of the different levels of awareness. But I do want to say I really like your example of a bat. There's an experience of batness. There's an experience of dogness. And there's an experience of Joelness. I think that's an important layer of the definition.

Justin: If we think of some of the ancient traditions that I like to study, they will relate consciousness more to a flame. It's like a power source. And different types of beings can plug into or benefit from or manifest out of that main power source. That power of consciousness or that flame of consciousness can alight many things. It can manifest in so many different ways. Joel is just one manifestation, and Rosie the dog is just one manifestation.

Joel: Is there a source of power beyond consciousness or other than consciousness? An enlivening force and energy – again, words are hard. But do you know of, from anything from your PhD program or studying ancient traditions, any other source of spark of light that is other than consciousness?

Justin: This again becomes sort of splitting hairs etymologically. As humans, we have this impossible task of trying to put words to things. And when you put words on things and define them, you've got to draw boundaries. What I've noticed studying ancient traditions of various sorts is that they draw these chains of logic back to the source energy.

Justin: Some of them will say there's this one elemental source of energy, and then it fractals downward and you get the consciousness of a living biological being. But there are steps before it becomes that – there are refinements or the opposite of refinement. They make the distinction sometimes between gross and subtle. The most subtle energy is this pure energy or pure life force or pure consciousness. And as it slowly filters its way down into material reality, it goes through a process of becoming more coarse. Is the consciousness we experience a level of coarseness that is separate from the source energy? Or is it just a derivative? Is it a different thing or just a different manifestation? I don't know.

Joel: All right, you're not here to make any definitive statements about that. Cool. Maybe we can go to some place where words are a little bit easier. I know intuition is a big thing with you and me as well. I've really been trying to develop this thing that we call intuition. I'm not going to ask you to necessarily define every single new word that comes up in our conversation. But what I'm looking for is – is there some way that intuition and consciousness are intertwined? What are you thinking of as you reflect on intuition?

Justin: Sure, tied to consciousness. I'll tell you what – if you're going to free me from the need to define my terms super clearly, this will just liberate the entire conversation. From my experience and understanding, our consciousness is tied to something outside of our bodies. It's coming from somewhere. For the sake of this discussion, let's just call it source.

Justin: What that means is we have the ability to tune our awareness to different levels. At the most coarse level, we're totally in our bodies. We're attached to the earth and we're very task-focused on things like recording a podcast, having conversation with this person right in front of us. But we also have the ability – because this source consciousness is flowing through us – we can think of ourselves as just little spokes on this giant wheel. And if we can tune our bodies and tune our wavelength and our rhythm up a little bit, we can start to expand the awareness to a more ethereal level.

Justin: What that means is we can start to use other ways of knowing. And those ways of knowing can expand a little bit beyond our bodies. Here's a really grounded example that I think everybody can understand. You're sitting in a room with another person, and instead of talking, you decide that you're both just going to get really quiet. After five minutes of being quiet, your body settles down, your nervous system settles down. Maybe you were even meditating, and then you open your eyes and somehow you sense the other person is feeling a little bit tired and you didn't notice that before. What changed? That's an open question to you.

Joel: Was I there? Did that happen? Was I involved? I'm not sure what changed in that scenario. But I get the scenario that you're describing. I have done spontaneous group meditation at dinner before. A hundred percent of the time, I'm the one who suggests it. Even with good friends, I'm like, “You know what'd be really fun right now? Let's just not say anything for five minutes and meditate or breathe or whatever it is and see what happens.” So I've been in a similar scenario. Nothing necessarily special has opened for me in the past.

Joel: One of the reasons why I bring this up and one of the things that I've loved about talking with you over the years is you just gave a very practical thing that almost everyone can say, “Okay, I kind of know what that's like” or “I've done that before.” I'm interested in just a brief idea – what's on the menu to know? You used the phrase “a different way of knowing.” What's on the menu of knowing when you become more intuitive that you don't think most humans have ever thought is possible or haven't experienced firsthand?

Justin: I'll give you another really concrete example. A few years ago, I woke up about three in the morning. Just kind of shot up in bed and I was having this vision – sort of like a waking dream. I saw this friend of mine, and then I saw a young lady, maybe six, seven, eight years old. Very feisty young gal, very prominent energy.

Justin: I'm asking, “Who is this? Who is this child that I'm seeing?” And the sense I got was that it was the daughter of this friend of mine. Now here's the problem, Joel. This friend of mine didn't have a daughter. She had a two-year-old boy and no other children. I had a very strong sense that I was being shown her second child.

Justin: Just to be clear, stuff like this had been happening for a while, so I understood what was happening. This wasn't totally disturbing to me. So the next day, I saw her in the yoga studio. I just kind of casually said, “Hey, are you and your husband thinking about having another child?” And she said, “Oh, no, man, our boy is a handful. We're not thinking about that right now.” I said, “Huh, okay.”

Justin: A year and a half, two years later, I saw her again near the yoga studio. She seemed like she was having a tough day, and I just said, “Hey, is everything okay?” She said, “Well, just going through some morning sickness. I'm pregnant again.”

Justin: I got that buzz of knowing. For me, intuitive knowing often shows up as somatic experiences in my body. That's one of the ways it shows up for me. I just kind of knew this was the girl I saw. A few weeks or months later – I don't remember exactly – she ended up telling all of us that it was a girl.

Justin: All of the senses I had about how fiery and feisty this young lady's energy was were showing up in her pregnancy. Her morning sickness was volumes worse than it was with her first child. She told me what her due date was, and I said, “There's no way the kid's going to make it. That kid's going to be born way early. She's hyperactive. She's not going to have that kind of patience.” And sure enough, the kid was about five weeks early.

Justin: That's a pretty dramatic example. I can't tell you exactly how that works. What I can tell you is that when you learn to expand your awareness beyond this very grounded level, your body can start to act like an antenna and it can receive information from a lot more sources than you're used to.

Joel: The antenna. I like that mental imagery – that you have this antenna that can pick up different things from different sources. Part of me is wondering, because I don't really have that antenna right now – yet, I hope, is the appropriate word, because I'm both actively and passively trying to be more resonant and be able to tune into more things.

Joel: As somebody who can, I'm wondering about the difference between reactive and active – turning the antenna on because you want it to be on, you're seeking, versus you're receiving. Does it work in a similar way for you when it comes to your intuition? When you're going out either for yourself or on behalf of somebody else versus when you're just ready for – I've heard people use words like “the downloads.” To sum that up: reactive and active intuition – how do they work for you?

Justin: When I say an antenna, what I mean is – whatever pure consciousness is, however it operates – we still live in bodies. So everything we do has to come in some way, it lives inside of our bodies. Even if I were capable of reaching up to the source and just downloading all of the information, it still has to come through my body somehow.

Justin: We have these physical things. Information has to either show up as a feeling or a thought or an image or a sound. It has to come through our senses at some point. It has to ground itself down here for us to make sense of it inside of our bodies and then be able to tell somebody, “Oh, I saw your future daughter that you haven't conceived yet.” It still has to show up in my experience as an image and a set of feelings.

Justin: To tap into one's intuition, the first step is being able to tap into your own body, period. You have to start refining your awareness of what's going on in your experience of Justinness or Joelness. And you need to know the difference between a subtle download of information and “I'm hungry” or “I'm scared.” You have to be able to discern between those two things. And that discernment is really an act of listening.

Justin: That is why mind-body practices – just to name something very common – are a really good way to train yourself. Because mind-body practices are nothing other than learning how to listen at the end of the day. It's awareness training. Nothing but learning how to listen.

Joel: This is counterintuitive to me. I thought that there may be a point in human evolution where I could essentially upload myself to the matrix, where my physical Joelness would be gone but all other things that define me as Joel would still be there. And from the way I hear you say it, my ability to have intuition would disappear when my body disappears. If I don't have something to ground with, if I don't have something to feel with biologically, then intuition goes poof.

Justin: Oh, I wouldn't say that. That's just the reality of being a human being right now – you're in a body. So if you want to sense anything, you have to use your body. Something you may have heard – the term mediumship or medium work.

Joel: I have, but this is where I'm going to say define your term a little bit, because I don't think most people have heard it.

Justin: Generally speaking, it refers to being able to communicate with dead people, if I can be really crass – communicating with people who are no longer inside of earth bodies. Theoretically, let's say my earth life ended tomorrow. No longer have an earth body, going back to source from that position. If I have something – just for the sake of this discussion, let's just say there's an energetic soul – no longer in the body, reconnecting to source, going home. Once there, it's like plugging right back into the internet. You have access to all the information directly, just like you're saying.

Justin: There's no complication. A lot of intuitives will tell you time is different over there. Information is different over there. It's all just there. It's all connected. People who are very connected or attuned or plugged in on the body side are just very good at accessing that level of information.

Justin: But in order to communicate that information to other people, in order to make sense of it, you've got to make sense of it through the body, because this is just the meat suit you're walking around in and it's all you've got. Even if I went into the deepest meditative zone and I was way off in the astral plane learning all this amazing stuff, I could absorb that in my body. But in order to bring it down to earth and communicate it to you, it's still got to come through my body to turn it into earth language. I can't speak to you in astral language.

Joel: You can't, or humans can't? Do you know people who can?

Justin: There are people who are highly, highly attuned who are probably capable of communicating with each other on energetic planes if they know each other. I want to emphasize this pretty strongly. Sometimes when you start going down these rabbit holes with people, there's this wish – almost an escapist wish. “I don't like being in this heavy, muddy, earthy existence. I kind of want to just go hang out in the astral plane or on the energetic plane.”

Justin: It's important to realize that we're not one or the other. It's not a choice. Being a living thing is being a hybrid being. And that's a beautiful thing. It's not a choice to be one or the other. We get to be these animated hybrid things that are part infinite life force and part beautiful, earthly, impermanent, changing, roiling material. And that's a really cool experience. It's not a one-versus-the-other kind of thing.

Joel: Get to be, not have to be. The distinction.

Justin: Yeah. This is the thing that's hard to separate. Life on earth – this whole gigantic, amazing terrarium we live on – is a hybrid project of the life force and the raw material of the cosmos. That's what the whole thing is. And that's amazing. That's what the life force – whatever it is – that's what it's here to do.

Justin: Before the Big Bang, it was total unity. And it was boring. Nothing was happening. Total unity, total oneness, total peace and tranquility is boring.

Justin: In the handful of opportunities I've had to ask – whether in my own deep state of connection or to ask somebody else who has a great deal of experience and wisdom – what does source or God or that source energy want? What it wants is to manifest in all these crazy, inventive, beautiful, creative ways. Earth is one of those ways.

Justin: The Big Bang had to bang so that things could happen. And so now things are happening. We've got atoms and molecules and all these raw materials, and then they can be animated with life force and you get frogs and cockroaches and trees and dogs and bats and humans.

Joel: I was pondering for a brief moment between the source and the material world as a project you used. I was about to ask, well, who's the project manager? Every project needs a project manager. But you did answer that. So kudos to you.

Justin: I'm anticipating.

Joel: This is an issue that I have, based on my corporate days as a project manager. Whenever I hear the word project, I'm like, well, something is generally managing or overseeing a project. But you went there. So kudos to you. And if you'd like me to go further down that rabbit hole – I don't know if I can do it justice.

Justin: No, that's cool. I'm good. Where are we going, by the way? We're wandering our way through conversation here. What's been coming up for you as we've been talking?

Joel: Well, I'm curious if I've answered your question about intuition.

Justin: I think so.

Joel: Okay, well, you asked me about doing it intentionally versus just having it passively happen. Is that my understanding?

Justin: Passive, yes.

Joel: Like I said, it's really important to ultimately be able to discern between things that are just happening inside of my body – my internal reactions – and being the antenna and sensing something that might be coming from outside of my body. That takes a lot of practice, being able to discern between a gross signal and a subtle signal. And that's where a lot of mind-body practice comes in.

Justin: In terms of intentional versus unintentional, that's tricky too, because let's just say you were a client of mine and you came to me and said, “Justin, I'm trying to figure out my purpose in life and I'm wondering if I should move out of my house.” Totally reasonable, practical question.

Justin: One thing I have to be able to separate is what my just-Justin brain thinks from what is out there. What is coming? What does your soul want? What are your spirit guides trying to tell me? What are the forces of the earth trying to tell me? And so my intent is actually to quiet the Justin noise and then turn on the antenna to receive.

Justin: It's effort and action to shift my mode, but that mode is receptive – setting very clear boundaries on what is allowed into my microphone or my headphones and what is not. So for me, that does require intent. I have a busy mind naturally.

Justin: I spend a lot of my life learning how to tune out the outside world and tune out my own feelings and my own somatic sensations – basically numbing myself. I was an athlete for a lot of my life. When I was playing sports and doing something very high intensity, I had to turn off a lot of my sensitivity in order to do that.

Justin: I learned that skill pretty deeply, which is a good skill. Sometimes you have to go out and operate in the world and the world is loud and scary and intense and you have to wall yourself off. That was one of the first skills I learned growing up.

Justin: When I got older and learned that walling myself off was not a good way to go through life, I had to reverse engineer that and learn how to listen and how to open myself up and receive. There are a lot of gifted intuitives who have just always been naturally open. Setting boundaries is more of the challenge for them, and discerning is more of the challenge for them. It's different for everybody, but the discernment skill is necessary for everyone.

Joel: I think it would be a lot of fun to put you in very specific scenarios beyond a thought experiment. If I could just conjure up something – “Okay, Justin, go, you're on a roller coaster about to go down at a hundred miles an hour. Game seven of the Pistons Championship Series.” Have you ever wanted to do this with any of your friends or family? Put them in a situation and see how they react or interact? Then put them into some scenario and be like, “This seems really fun, I'd love to understand what you do here.”

Justin: So you want to understand what I'm going to do when the Pistons win game seven?

Joel: No. I don't need to do that. This is a verbal thought experiment that I was doing in real time that failed.

Joel: What I wanted to know even more is – before you hopped on Zoom with me, I was listening to what I call medicine music. This is something that I've gotten into, especially in the last six to nine months or so. Whether it's plant-based or fungus-based medicine, around the world of psychedelics, there's something I've come to know as medicine music. There's a group called White Arrow, and I was listening to a song called Tribus, which – oh man, it does it for me in so many different ways.

Joel: Your ability to tune in or tune out – I recently learned this about you. I don't know how I went so long without knowing how music is such a fundamental part of your life. How does music aid you in being either the fleshy bag of water that you want to be or operating beyond that?

Justin: That's a good question. Music is a tool, and it can do a lot of different things. If I want to get distracted, I can throw on something loud. If there's a certain emotion I want to move, I could use music as inspiration for that. If I want to get work done, I can turn on something mellow. Our bodies and nervous systems have a long relationship with sound, which I'm sure you're well aware of. I've felt from a young age that music was a pretty kick-ass tool for cultivating whatever kind of conscious experience I want.

Justin: What's really fascinating about music is the long history that humans have with using sound and rhythm to alter our consciousness. There is something about our nervous systems that responds to rhythmic sound. Almost every land-based indigenous culture that has ever been discovered has a handful of things in common. Number one, they use some combination of breathing and sound to shift their state of awareness and expand their awareness. That's pretty cool if you think about it.

Justin: It's not always what we would consider music. It could be chanting. It could be some sort of rhythmic drumming. They could have some sort of instruments. It could just be voice work. Doing that rhythmic movement, combining it with rhythmic movement of the body – which today we might call dancing – and some combination of those things leads to rhythmic breathing and intensified breathing also.

Justin: People use that to shift their consciousness. And we still do it today. It's wild. No matter what culture you go to, anywhere in the world, there's going to be some version of that. We've retained the music, but we haven't necessarily retained the traditions of combining that music with movement, breathing, chanting – whatever – to elevate our consciousness. But anyone who listens to music and really loves it knows that there's something to that. When's the last time you went to a really good concert?

Joel: I generally don't do live music. I've been to one and a half live concerts in my entire life.

Justin: Okay, well, even something like a marching band. The Wisconsin marching band. Something happens that everybody on earth is well aware of when a group of people get together and sing together, move together, dance together to a rhythmic beat or some sort of rhythmic sound. Your consciousness does start to expand a little. You start to feel less like just Joel and more like part of something bigger. And that's just that first level of consciousness expansion.

Justin: It's happening when you go to a concert, when you go to a football game and you're rocking with the marching band. There's a deep wiring between sound and vibration and rhythm and our nervous systems that is like a key into a lock that starts to shift our awareness out of that separate, individual mode and into that first level of collective awareness or expanded awareness. You can even do it by yourself. Certain music will start to shift your consciousness individually if you just let yourself get immersed in it.

Joel: I wonder about the difference between listening to music on a speaker versus with headphones. It's a very different experience. It's the same thing, but your ability to sense when the music is just being piped directly into your ears, as opposed to five feet or ten feet or twenty feet away from a speaker – biologically or evolutionarily, I haven't done any research into it, but it's so wild how it's such a different experience. If I'm in the middle of a drum circle versus if I have a similar experience of drums but I'm listening to it through a pair of headphones. Do you know any of the science behind sound or vibration or frequency and how close to the ears the ability to perceive it – how that impacts things?

Justin: No, I don't know any of that science. I'm curious what you perceive as the difference.

Joel: You can pick up things, and maybe this is because I'm insensitive in some ways. I joke – and my family knows this to be true – that I am generally environmentally insensitive. The things that other people pick up, smells – I have just total crap smelling, which is really useful when there's some biological thing that happened in my house, whether it's human or dog related. I am the one who gets sent in to deal with that because I don't really smell it.

Joel: There are subtle things with music – whether it's harmony or some kind of instrument that's just intentionally late when the track was laid down at a much lower decibel rate – and then I put on my headphones and I'm like, “What? I had no idea that was part of it too. I didn't have any ability to pick it up.”

Joel: This is what I'm trying to explain – just my default way of being. When I look around, I try to be really laser-focused. I think part of this is because over time, I've tried to get more and more present. And to me, the act of being present, especially with other humans, means narrowing my senses and narrowing my focus down almost to what is literally in front of me. Not necessarily being able to hear my children say something in a room over until they get right in my face and say, “Papa, I'm talking to you.” And I had no idea that anybody was talking to me.

Justin: So it sounds to me like – here's a little crude scientific description of attention. Attention has multiple factors. One of them is attentional capacity – your ability to notice a lot of stimulus at the same time. And it sounds like you might have high attentional capacity.

Joel: You think so?

Justin: Yes. One of the other dials is focus. You might be the kind of person who can get distracted because you notice a lot of things, but if you have a strong focus dial, you can take your attention and narrow it so that you tune out a lot of other things and you don't hear the person in the other room. But it's an intentional act for you. Unless somebody puts the headphones on you – then and only then, with other things blocked out, can you pick up all of the different things happening in the music.

Justin: You have the capacity to notice a lot of different things in the music, but you need to turn the dial and narrow your field. There are some people who even if they put the headphones on, they're not going to notice the eight different things happening inside the song. They're going to pick one or two things and focus on those. So it sounds to me like you have learned over the years that if you don't intentionally narrow your focus, it's going to be all over the place. Is that accurate?

Joel: Now I don't know. You're making sense, and now I need to reevaluate the way that I perceive the world. Which I'm going to do after we're done with our conversation. I'm keeping my focus lasered in just on you right now. The rest of the world doesn't exist.

Justin: But so I'm just saying – when I interact with you, Joel, I notice that you are really good at being present and really focusing your attention on the person you're with. And you pick up a lot of interesting things in the conversation and reflect them back. To me, that says you're holding a lot in your working memory and you're really attending to a lot of different things in your zone of focus, which says to me you've got a pretty good attentional capacity and you have a good dial for really honing it in and putting some walls up so that you're all engaged right here.

Joel: I love it when you get sciencey with me. What are other components of attention? You've talked about two. How many are there?

Justin: I don't know how many there are. Those are two big dials. It's also possible to talk about how different senses affect you. Some people are more sensitive to their inner somatic world. Some people are more sensitive to their outer world. Some people have the ability to pick up very low-level stimuli. Some people, like you were talking about smell – that's a dimension. You can be insensitive in that sense. And maybe that's across all of your senses. Some people pick up very minute smells. You do not.

Joel: Yeah, poop is no problem.

Justin: So sensitivity is another one of those dials, and it can apply differently across different senses. That's a really cool ability you've got, Joel. Whenever something awful and smelly happens at my place, I'm calling you.

Joel: All right, it better be really good. But I am willing. I am willing to do it for you. You are good enough that if something sufficiently stinky happens and you need someone to deal with it, I will do that for you.

Justin: Now another interesting thing – and this ties back to our conversation about consciousness – attention is the tool that can be trained. That's what's really cool. If you're looking to expand your awareness, attention is the tool you can start to use. By practicing, you can dial up your sensitivity. If you actually wanted to train your smell to get better, you could do that. If you wanted to train your hearing or your somatic awareness to get better, you could practice that, because it's all really just a function of your nervous system and the power of certain brain networks to be active and picking up information.

Justin: There's sensory information coming at us from all directions all the time. And basically our senses and our brains are giant gates that keep most of the crap out of our conscious awareness. Through practice – and that's where things like meditation come in, things like mindful applications of our senses – we can start to signal to our nervous systems, “Hey, we're going to try to strengthen our ability to pick up that information. We're going to tune in way more to sound.”

Justin: So if you listen to a ton of music and you put on your headphones and start paying attention, you're going to get better over time at picking up the subtleties of that sound. The network in your brain that is responsible for processing, identifying, labeling, and discerning different sounds is going to get stronger and better. That is how over time we can actually start to alter our awareness.

Joel: Well, it starts with directing effort, right?

Justin: I mean, theoretically, if you just rocked out with headphones on for twelve hours a day, then you're going to have some different capacity or focus abilities. And likewise, if you just moved out to a very rural area, spent way more time with nature sounds – we live in the city and we're surrounded by cars and concrete all day, so our senses get very dulled.

Joel: That does sound lovely.

Justin: So you're right, there are some environmental factors you can just kind of throw at your body. But in terms of intentionally expanding one's awareness, becoming more intuitive – which is kind of how we started this conversation – that takes, especially because we are in these overwhelming sensory environments as urban Western humans, some pretty focused training to develop those faculties.

Joel: And I put myself in those overwhelming environments relationally. I have so many amazing friends all around the world, and I'm so extroverted that I'm just constantly looking for human input. I'm not necessarily giving myself the opportunity to experience other things because I'm always seeking out rad humans to do rad stuff with.

Justin: Interesting. That's not a bad thing, though. Relational connection is not a bad way to tune your awareness. At least it's certainly not an unhealthy way.

Joel: Okay. Yes, I agree. I'm not trying to point out a deficiency here. I'm a verbal processor. Sometimes I don't have realizations until I hear it come out of my mouth and I'm like, “Oh, that makes some sense.”

Justin: So what are you processing right now? Based on the conversation that we've had so far – or maybe earlier in your day – I'm just wondering what are some of the overarching themes or questions that you've been pondering or challenged by?

Joel: Here's kind of a big one.

Justin: Because I've been going down this rabbit hole of awareness and connection and consciousness for going on fifteen years now. I've spent a lot of the last few years kind of asking, “Why? What's the point?” This is obviously a topic you've gotten really curious about, Joel. You're interested in expanding your consciousness. Do you mind if I just ask you why it's an intriguing avenue for you?

Joel: I feel – despite what you told me before about the body having to have some experience in order to translate something beyond it to our human experience – I often feel limited by my human senses. And I know – know being the appropriate word now, after having some experiences that have broadened my perception of consciousness, my connectedness to everyone and everything on this world and in the universe – there's so much more to experience beyond my default way of being human.

Joel: I didn't know what was possible or what was on the menu. That's why I asked you that question earlier – what's on the menu of knowing for you? I am very interested in knowing, even if I don't necessarily experience it firsthand as whatever Joelness this is. Being able to observe from a distance and know – “Ooh, that could be known, that's something I could be aware of.” That's probably the primary thing – just opening myself up to possibilities and knowing that I otherwise wouldn't or couldn't.

Justin: So this is a sentiment I hear a lot. You said a word that I think is really useful as a jumping-off point here. You said you feel like your human experience is limiting. Is that what you said?

Joel: Limiting. I am very, very grateful for very, very many things. And it also feels limiting often.

Justin: I completely agree with you, except to say that what's limiting is not the human experience. It's the way we were raised in this culture that's limiting. We are not – and again, I'm making a pretty big generalization here – but I'm talking about modern, Western, and especially American people. We have narrowed and limited the human experience more than any humans that have ever lived in the history of earth. That is the limitation that you are experiencing. I'm just going to say that.

Justin: You are not alone. A lot of people who have grown up the way we have – I reference this a lot, but the film The Matrix. Familiar with it?

Joel: Oh yeah. Reloaded – the second one – is in my top five all-time favorite movies.

Justin: Right, but the Alice in Wonderland aspect of the first one – where at the beginning, Neo is meeting Morpheus, and he's telling him, “You know something is wrong with your reality. You can feel it, you can taste it, you just can't put a finger on what the hell it is.”

Justin: I think for me, that's always been the experience of growing up in the suburbs of a major city in America. Something is not right here. Something about my experience feels so limiting and so wrong, and I have no idea what it is. And as soon as you get a little taste here and there, you're like, “Wait, there's more.”

Justin: You go to another country. I remember when I was nineteen, I went to South America for the first time. I had a buddy who was Brazilian, and I witnessed a completely different way of being with other human beings – way more collective culture. It was a completely different feeling. And I was like, “Whoa, we are so individualized and atomized and separate from each other, and we are missing out on so much joy and connection. What are we doing in America?”

Justin: Tip of the iceberg. Eventually, you experience the things that we experience in this culture – restlessness, lack of purpose, disconnection. Maybe you get some anxiety and some depression. Something doesn't feel right after a while when you're churning your way through this modern Western world.

Justin: We are the most atomized and separated, disconnected culture that has ever existed on the entire planet in the history of living things.

Joel: That statement feels very true.

Justin: My response to that as I came of age was I just didn't feel well. And I stumbled my way into meditation, as a lot of people do these days. But that was the first time I connected deeply through my body to myself. And I recognized that this shell of ego and the conception of self that I had was not the whole picture. As you say, it was extremely limiting and there was more.

Justin: It connected the dots for me to experiences I had had in my early twenties with psychedelics – expanded states of awareness. And it was very validating. It was like, “Oh, this experience I've been taught is so limiting. I am not – ” what's the speech from Fight Club? You are not your khakis. You are not your job. We're raised in this world where it's about your job, it's about your roles, it's about the things you do outside of your body. We live our lives way out in front – in the future, in the past, in our tasks, in our roles.

Justin: That's such a limiting understanding of who we are. As soon as you get into some of these ancient practices – or who knows, you go to a concert or you're at a football game – as soon as you have any expanded sense of self, you go, “Oh, wow. That's really intriguing. There's a lot more there.” Because there is. And if you spend ten minutes getting to know what other cultures have known for thousands and thousands of years, you realize how limiting this experience is.

Justin: What I've come to understand is there are three specific ways in which we have disconnected ourselves that are causing all of these feelings. We have disconnected from ourselves and our bodies. We have disconnected relationally from other human beings – community is a big part of who we are, we are supposed to be communal creatures, we are supposed to have shared consciousness with other humans. And we are disconnected from the living natural world – the land, the animals, the water, the air, everything. We are children of the living world, and our bodies and our community are part of that connective tissue. We have systematically disconnected ourselves from all of those things. It's what I call the three disconnections.

Justin: When you get intrigued about a psychedelic journey, or you get enamored with the idea of building greater community, or you get into an individualized mind-body practice, or you feel a deep connection with music – one way or another, you are starting to reconnect at one of those three critical junctures. And that's why it feels good. It feels enlivening because it's what we were born to be.

Justin: These are – one way to think of them – the self and the body, relationships with other human beings, and relationship with the greater living world. They're like churches you can attend. And if you go to those churches and you immerse yourself for thirty minutes or an hour or two hours, you will start to feel more human and more like yourself and more well and more connected and more whole.

Justin: You can think of them like a tripod. If you build your connection in all three of those churches, it's like a tripod that starts to reconnect you to the life force itself. Because this is the tripod of being a living thing – being deeply connected to yourself and your body, being deeply connected to your community, your cohorts, your people, and being deeply connected to your land and your living biome.

Justin: When those things are happening, when you're rebuilding those relationships, there is no mystery about what the source or the life force is. It's just right in front of you. You're experiencing it all the time. And this is what all of our ancestors knew for hundreds of thousands of years. This was not even a question. Nobody was sitting around a hundred thousand years ago going, “What is my purpose? Why am I so anxious and restless?” Nobody was going to their psychiatrist. Nobody was doing a podcast saying, “What is consciousness?”

Joel: Too bad for them. But yes, I understand how that could be a wonderful way of being. I'm really glad that you have language. Words are getting easier as the conversation goes on.

Joel: Some of this tripod of churches and connecting to source – I like that. Your analogies, your metaphors, the mental imagery that you've been able to paint is really working for me.

Joel: I know this goes into your role as a light worker – at least a reluctant light worker. By the way, for those of you listening who doesn't know that you have a podcast, The Reluctant Lightworker – pretty groovy. I know at this point in time when we're recording, you're just a few episodes in, but it's already really good.

Joel: The concept of being a light worker – I guess this is where maybe I am more intuitive than I think. The first time that I heard that word, or that you said that word, I was like, “I get it.” And then you explained it more, and I was like, “Yep, that's exactly what I had in mind.”

Joel: I'm so grateful that you're a light worker, that you fully stepped into that identity and that knowing, and that you're helping so many people with those three sources of disconnection and helping them become a sense of connection instead.

Justin: Yeah. And as long as you're not asking me to clearly define my terms academically.

Joel: No, I'm not.

Justin: I'm happy to do that. Speaking in metaphors works a lot better. That's what a good metaphor or analogy is. You don't have to break it down to its elemental level. You tell a story or you paint a picture and people get it.

Justin: That's part of the reluctance that has plagued me over the years. I was raised in this very linear Western science tradition. And not only that – I got my doctorate. I'm a licensed scientist in a lot of ways. As I was getting that training, I was also experiencing these openings to a very different way of knowing. That dichotomy was challenging.

Justin: The full humanity and our wholeness and our relationality does not lend itself very well to the kind of precision that writing an academic paper demands sometimes. And that is why – and thank you for making reference – that's why The Reluctant Lightworker exists as a podcast and as a platform. There needs to be another outlet for that work.

Joel: Well, I have many other conversational places that we could go, either directly related to what you just said or pulling out a thread we've tapped into. But I'm feeling pretty good. What about you? Is there something else that you were hoping that we might discuss that we haven't touched on?

Justin: I hope we could go all day, Joel. I'm comfortable calling that round one.

Joel: Yeah, all right. Well, then maybe we'll talk a bit about the good that you're doing in the world. If people want to connect with you online or offline, where is a place – one or two places – where they would go to learn more about some of the things that you've been talking about or the good that you're doing or just getting the Justin Baker experience?

Justin: The simplest one-stop shop is drjustinbaker.com. That's no punctuation – just D-R-J-U-S-T-I-N-B-A-K-E-R. That landing page will direct you to wherever you want to go, whether it's The Reluctant Lightworker, whether it's my podcast, whether it's the organizational work that I do during the day. All of it can be found right there.

Joel: Right on. You don't have to spell your name, by the way. It's not like your last name is Zaslofsky and you have to be like, “Z as in zebra, A, S as in Sam.”

Justin: Oh, it'd be fun to be a Baker sometimes. I've been a Baker, yeah. It's one of those made-up Ellis Island names from the Irish side of the family. There was some other name and they were like, “Ah, you're bakers.”

Joel: Yeah. I was about to start another conversational topic, but we're going to leave it there. We don't have to get into the origins of naming conventions and how that's changed over time as we've immigrated and migrated from place to place.

Justin: That's for round two.

Joel: For round two.