Phil Borges

Cameron: [00:00:00] Flow unleashed, unleashed, unleashed. Do you get a little scared or feel out of control? With getting into non-ordinary states, do you initially think that a mental crisis is a bad thing? Often we have a protective resistance to the occurrence of altered states, but what if we were to embrace these moments?
What benefits or insights can they bring and how can they help mental illnesses?
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Cameron Norsworthy and this is your podcast for human performance.[00:01:00]
We are just at the beginning of understanding how the brain works. Yet there is so much we just don't know about why and how we dip in and outta different states of mind is a topic close to the nature of flow and optimal human functioning. There is a train of thought that the sidestep we do to exit our normal waking consciousness into optimal states is similar to the sidestep we do when we exit normal states and go into non-optimal states.
And even if not to similar, there is a lot we can learn is ability to sidestep or enter and exit. Non-ordinary states of consciousness is often met with resistance, fear, or negativity. Probably because the most,
probably because for the most part these states are often associated with mental illness. Yeah. With [00:02:00] the Institute of Health and Welfare, suggesting that 43% of the population have a mental illness in their lifetime, and around three out of every a hundred young people will experience a psychotic episode, we can no longer ignore non-ordinary states of consciousness.
While scientifically we're clutching at straws, still experientially varying cultures have been inviting and utilizing non-ordinary states of consciousness to access deeper wisdom and heal parts of ourself and others for centuries, one person who has spent decades of his life documenting indigenous and tribal cultures striving to create an understanding of the challenges they face and how they use non-ordinary states to their advantage is our guest, Phil Borges.
Phil's work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. And his award-winning books, which have been published in four languages include the Tibetan Portrait, enduring Spirit, [00:03:00] women Empowered, and Tibet Culture on the Edge. He has hosted television documentaries on indigenous cultures for discovery in National Geographic and lectures and teachers at a wide range of universities.
And while Phil was documenting the various human rights abuses faced by tribal and indigenous indigenous cultures around the world, he began to meet their healers and visionaries, the people we often refer to as Sharmans. He was surprised to learn that many of the shamans he met had been identified in their youth as being gifted by having visions, hearing voices, and experiencing intense mood swings, what a lot of the Western world would call psychotic episodes.
This discovery led Phil into an ongoing exploration of mental health and the mental healthcare system and potential value of non-ordinary states of consciousness to provide profound spiritual [00:04:00] resources, natural wisdom and knowledge of our physical surrounding that we have often lost in today's modern society.
Phil's work from the Amazon Forest all the way through to Siberia highlights how these cultures offer a completely different narrative of the mental crisis. In fact, in a majority of these well communities, psychotic episodes and mental illnesses are perceived as indicating a person's extreme sensitivity, which can usefully serve the entire community rather than being treated as a symptom of a brain disease.
Join us today as we unpack Phil's experience of understanding different cultures and how they approach non-ordinary states of consciousness to better society. This chat I had with Phil has been remastered from several years ago, so please excuse any discrepancy in audio quality flow [00:05:00] unleashed unleashed.
Welcome to the show, Phil Unleashed. Thank you. It's great to have you with us. I've had moments of brief experiences where I feel I might have had a glimpse of your life where I've been sitting in the jungle in AK with the tribe that has only recently stopped its cannibalism activity and hearing their stories and traditions and ways and feeling the awe of the past and the tradition and, and seeing both the amazing attributes that come from that, and also seeing some of the dysfunction around it.
So I'm really excited to hear some of your stories today and happy with us and, and hear your wisdom, um, from all your time. You've spent decades. Documenting indigenous and tribal cultures, understanding their challenges and, um, helping tell their stories to the world and how some of that might correlate with modern day mental health.
Um, in watching [00:06:00] one of your Ted Talks, you put a quote up there from Einstein. I thought it might be nice for me just to read it. Who says A human being is a part of the whole call by us universe apart, limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, the kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our tasks must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compression to embrace full living creatures. And the whole nature in its beauty, nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the [00:07:00] liberation and a foundation for inner security.
Phil: Yeah, it's a great one. You, you know, he wrote that, that was part of a letter he sent to a friend of his, a woman who had lost her daughter, I believe in some type of an accident. I, I found that very interesting. He felt that would comfort her. I, I would imagine. But yeah, there's a lot in there and it, it, it goes back to what I've learned interviewing a lot of people that have successfully navigated a.
Psychological crisis. And one of the things I've heard over and over again is before they got frightened, when they went into that non-ordinary state, they had to sense many had the sense of unity oneness. Many [00:08:00] times they couldn't describe it 'cause there's no re real language to describe it. I have heard them say, I, I couldn't tell where I ended and everything else began, or I was everything and yet I was nothing.
You know, strange things like that. But the gist I got out of it was their sense of self as being separate from everything else. What the Buddhist call is an illusion. I. That disappeared, that, and so they fused with everything for a while, which in itself can bring a lot of peace and feelings of connectedness and compassion and love and all those good things, but it also could be quite scary.
So anyway, yeah, his statement, that sense of self that we carry is, is really, he called it a delusion of [00:09:00] consciousness, but the Buddhist call it an illusion and the neuroscientists call it a predictive code that we construct in this one network in our brain that they've investigated quite a bit called the default mode network.
I find it very fascinating. And then the other part that I find fascinating is his statement that we live in these circles of compassion. Maybe it's our family, our community, our country, but we tend to identify and value the things within that community much more than things outside. And I've really seen this play out in tribal areas like in the lower Omo Valley of Ethiopia.
There are 14 tribes that are pretty much living like they have for [00:10:00] millennia. Some, some say since the time of the Pharaohs at least. And these tribes within the tribe, there's this honor code of harmony. I mean, if you are, if you have an issue with somebody. You've gotta solve that issue. And if you can't solve it, the the tribe will gather and help those individuals solve that difference that they have, because within that tribe, they can't afford too much disharmony.
But if you're outside of the tribe, many of those tribes, and there's around 14 in the lower Romo Valley of Ethiopia, if you're outside of the tribe, you're very well could be an enemy. And I've taken these photos of these warriors with these scars on their shoulders, where they've [00:11:00] made a circular scar for every enemy they've killed in another tribe.
So they live in these confined circles of compassion, much like Einstein spoke of. As he said, it's our job to widen those circles of compassion to eventually include everybody and everything. And that's our task to break us out of this illusion of separateness.
Cameron: And what is your experience of cultures in which a deep separation is ingrained into society?
Phil: Well, I live in one, you know, the United States is just in, so is Australia to a certain extent. Uh, we brought together many different ethnic groups. We've got, of course, Americans, we've got, I mean, we got just about everything here and we're still working it out. You know, we, [00:12:00] we've come a long way. But we slide back at times, like in the last couple of years, I think.
And, but we're trying to work it out and, and not other, the differences human beings have, and we've done it around sexual preference, you know, not completely, but we're working on that one. And, and quite frankly, I, I believe that the people we call mentally ill after I've done this film and dove into that subject for eight years, I think that's one of the next steps, is to not other people that go into these non-ordinary states of consciousness and, and have more understanding about what that is.
We, as a culture in the West are fairly frightened of people like that. [00:13:00] But the, the whole process of othering, um, you're not in our group. You're different in to be afraid of that. Other is a human tendency that we're working on as a species.
Cameron: Tell us a little how you got into this work and your documentary.
Crazy wise.
Phil: Crazy wise came out of my work in indigenous and tribal cultures and I was basically a human rights photographer. That's why I was doing my work in these indigenous and tribal communities, and I began to meet the healers and the visionaries in these communities quite by accident. I didn't seek 'em out.
I. In fact, one of my first projects, I did a project on Tibet and the issues in Tibet. For the listeners that don't know, China invaded Tibet in [00:14:00] 1949 under Mao Ton, and they've occupied that country ever since. And the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan people, had to flee and leave Tibetan in 1959, and he's lived in India ever since.
So I, I wanted to do a story on that. And while I was doing it and I was in the little town, the Dalai Lama lives to Arm Salala, India, and I got the opportunity to watch one of their monks known as a coten go into trance and take on the spirit and entity of the protector, spirit of the Tibetan people.
Known as the Na ch Oracle. And I had never seen anything quite like it. It happened in this little monastery with about 40 monks, and they started chanting and [00:15:00] they had their drums they were beating, and he sat down in this chair and they put this heavy hat on his head, and he went into this alt, you know, trance-like state.
His eyes rolled back and he started talking in a different voice, a very high pitched voice. And the monks were writing down everything he said, and then he somewhat collapsed and they had to help 'em almost carry 'em out of the room. And I thought, yeah, that Was that a performance? I, you know, I really had never seen anything like that, and I didn't know anything about the fact that the Tibetans used.
Individuals to go into, we would call it channeling spirit entities. So I, two days after I saw that ceremony, I got to interview him and he, one, one of the questions was, how did you get chosen to [00:16:00] be this coten that can do this? And what he described was what sounded like a psychological crisis to me. He was hearing voices, his personality was shifting and changing.
He was going through these wild mood swings. He thought he was dying, and the other monks in the monastery just told him, but you've got this potential to be a coten. They brought him through some initiation or some training that I don't know too much about. And so now he's the main state oracle of Tibet.
And by the way, there are several QINs in the Tibetan culture. He just happens to be one of the most well-known. And so that started my curiosity and it just so happens a couple of years later, I was in Africa doing a story on [00:17:00] the Samburu tribe up in northern Kenya, and I ran into one of their, what they call predictors, and also she was a healer and it was a 37-year-old woman, and she had a very similar story.
At 14 years old, she started not only hearing voices, but having visions. Seeing things that other people weren't seeing, and she was feeling very frightened by it, and she thought she was dying. And by the way, I've heard that from a lot of the shamans I ended up interviewing, but her grandmother took her aside and told her she had a special sensitivity.
And it was, yes, it was difficult, but she could learn to manage it and, and they paired her up with an older. They don't call 'em shaman in the Samburu tribe, but we would people that go [00:18:00] into trance to act as healers or visionaries. Anyway, she par paired her up with somebody like that, someone who had been through that and they served as a mentor while she went to her training or what they call an initiation.
And now when I met her, she was 37 years old and she had become quite famous in, in the Samburu territory. So that's how I got started in, in being interested in this. I was doing human rights stories and just by chance running into the healers. So as I continued my work, when I go into a tribe to do my human rights work, I would ask, who are your healers?
Do you have any predictors or healers or visionaries? And I started interviewing him. Nobody was asking me to do that. I was working for the UN or Amnesty [00:19:00] International or CARE, or various NGOs doing the human rights work. I was just kind of doing this on, on the side, and I just learned that a lot of them are identified by having a crisis and often it's a mental, emotional crisis.
I later learned looking up what other anthropologists had learned over the years, and that's known as the shamanic sickness, but I, I knew nothing about it until I started actually running into it myself.
Cameron: Interesting. It's not often we come across what we might frame as a mental illness in a positive setting.
I also think in the documentaries, you compare that shamanic sickness to what we might call in modern day as mental health issues and how we might label it. And how those experience can be a positive experience and something that we can learn from as opposed to put it as a diminishing factor and try and [00:20:00] label and try and fix it.
I wonder what life and the world we live in would look like if we labeled mental illness and sickness differently. Would we come to accept it, be at peace with it, learn to communicate what's going on and progress as a culture, seeing it as a state that has advantages. How much more would we learn about the brain and our states in general?
What did you learn from your years doing crazy wise?
Phil: So, you know, by the time I'd started this film, I had interviewed maybe. 40, 45 Shaman around the world and heard that similar story in about 70% of the cases. So what happened was, I, I just thought I'll do a little film on meditation, just interview a lot of people that are [00:21:00] practicing mindfulness and meditation and see what they're getting out of it.
What they've noticed has happened to them since they started their practice. I was working with a, a line producer, a woman that, uh, was a friend of mine and I said, if you line up the people for us to interview, I'll show you how to use the cameras and how I set up my lighting and do all that. You can learn that and we could just start this and see where it goes.
And I, I, I just was thinking of it as something I'd just do as a sidelight when I was back in town. 'cause I was traveling quite a bit. Anyway. The second or third person that we interviewed was this kid by the name of Adam, who was 25 years old when we met him. But at 20 years old, he slipped into what they call the psychotic state in Adam's words, [00:22:00] when I hit 20, I went nuts.
That's the way he talked about it. But he, when he spoke about what actually happened to him, he said, when it first happened, it was very fun and exciting. It was the first time I felt a real connection to the universe where I was it, and it was me. And then I kept going, and then I went way too far and then it got scary.
And I didn't think too, that was in his first interview we did with him when he was talking about. Going through this break, which for him put him on medications. You know, his parents didn't know what was happening. He started talking about all these crazy things. He, he, he said, I came up with math equations that would solve all our family's problems.
And so his mother and dad [00:23:00] were saying, okay, tell me more. But they thought he's gone crazy. And then they took him to the psychiatrist. He was put on Depakote, very heavy tranquilizing type of psycho pharmaceutical. And long story short, over a four year period, he was on several of these drugs. 'cause none were working very well.
He was having a lot of side effects. He ended up taking 15 pills a day until he finally cut 'em all off all at once. Did a ana meditation retreat, which is 10 hours of meditation a day for 10 straight days. And, and no one would recommend that today for anybody to do. I mean that if you're gonna get off medications, I've learned they have to be.
It's a very tricky process and you [00:24:00] have to do it very slowly. But for some reason, for Adam, it worked and all of a sudden he was able to go back to work. All his side effects went away. So I was very interested in just that story and we started following him and that story took a very strange and different turn to turn.
And we ended up following Adam for six years. Took us six years to make the film, but in that time, I'd learned a lot about those states of consciousness. So anyway, that started the whole story of crazy wise and my exposure to well over a hundred people that have gone into these non-ordinary states of consciousness spontaneously, and what they have told me, what helped them, what didn't help, what it was like, especially the people who have [00:25:00] successfully navigated it and learned to handle their sensitivities, most of them doing it on their own.
Cameron: That's fascinating to me. It seems to be this grand opportunity, but also potential danger or threat. You know, when we enter an altered state of consciousness, if it's positive, there's a great opportunity to have. Insight perform exceptionally well. As the inner critic disappears, we then get bombarded by the destruction of the ego and all the normal stuff that holds us back and limits our thinking.
And as you talked about, primarily responsible 'cause the default mode network that contains our moment to moment experience, our normal waking experience becomes inhibited and there's a great opportunity there. But alternatively, when we're dislodged from our normal waking consciousness, we can perhaps move into a more chaotic place [00:26:00] as Chin Mihai talked about a place of entropy where the consciousness goes into chaos as opposed to more towards flow and neg entropy.
I just wanna talk a little bit about the default mode network. For people who have not heard that before, don't understand, it's often called the self-awareness network. It's a set of anatomical regions in the brain that are normally active during our normal waking and consciousness. And during flow and other altered states of consciousness, it becomes downregulated or the blood flow to these areas of the brain become inhibited.
This network is heavily linked to anterior cingulate cortex and part of the medial prefrontal cortex, and there seems to be this downregulation to the areas of our brain that normally are responsible for holding the container of self that hold this container of me versus you. How we normally perceive [00:27:00] the world and during these altered states of consciousness, for whatever reason, these containers don't have the significance over our attention.
Space opens up. And it seems like this space can be both an amazing experience, perhaps also an opportunity for someone to enter into a chaotic space where mental illness compounds, instead of becoming more connected, they can lose connection and become even more paranoid, maybe even going to even more ego captive activity.
So I'm fascinated to hear Phil, what helped some of the people that you interview, how did they navigate into and out of that space?
Phil: Well, they, it happens spontaneously. It seems like people that have that tendency to go into that space have [00:28:00] usually had a good deal of childhood trauma. That's one of the things that it seems that makes a person have the proclivity to have these spontaneous openings.
The things that I've learned talking to these individuals that, that have that ability and have done that, uh, and, and then have learned how to manage it, is number one, one of the things that frightens them and gets, so let me back up and just say the way I look at it now. So we have this ego sense, this ego self that gives us our sense of being an ob the subject and every, everything else is objects, right?
We're separate from everything that, that sense is a, a construct of the brain that neurosciences call a predictive code. [00:29:00] And we tend to, we look at reality through the lens of our prior experiences. So everything we see has, is colored by what we've learned in the past. So we're, we're typically prejudiced to everything we see.
We, we prejudge things because it's a mental shortcut that allows us to really navigate this reality efficiently. If you had to think about putting your finger in the fire and wondering if it was gonna get burned or knot each time anew you, you would be really lost. And, and so these little codes are, they call 'em mental models are predictive codes that helps us predict what.
Reality will do. So we don't actually see reality. We see it through these codes. [00:30:00] And by the way, in the default mode network, it is where these codes are put together evidently, and when it shuts down, when you lose those codes, one individual told me, just think of trying to fly a 7 47 or a jumbo jet and you've got 400 passengers you're responsible for, and all of a sudden all the controls aren't doing what they used to do, the panic that you could be in, in trying to land that aircraft.
He said, that's kind of what it's like when I go into these spaces. I look at things and it's like I'm seeing them for the first time and I, it's, it's, it can be very frightening. To see that raw reality without having all these prior experiences we've had since birth. So a newborn doesn't have them, [00:31:00] you know, it's something we built up through our enculturation into the culture we've been born in.
So the things that can happen to make you go into that frightening place, first of all, just that not being able to be with that change. 'cause it can be quite frightening in and of itself. But the other thing that happens when you get that sense of, and I've heard this term over and over again, that sense of unity or where you're just part of everything and you're not separate from it and you're trying to explain that to the people who really love you, your parents, your lover, your best friend.
They get frightened. You're talking gibberish, you're, you're not making sense. And that fear in your, the people around you when you're in that state, [00:32:00] you pick up. Because when you're in that state, you're also very sensitive to emotion coming from other people too. So you pick up that fear and in that state you go into the fear.
So that's one of the big problems is the reaction of people around, around somebody going into that state. And by the way, I've never gone into one of these states, I'm just a journalist that have heard a, a lot of people describe it. And so they usually say what really helps is somebody that's kind of lighthearted.
And we'll listen to it and say, ah, that's interesting. Just be curious and not take it so seriously. That's one of the things I've heard over and over again. And it can be very wonderful and it if, if you get frightened that ego comes back [00:33:00] in spades and you get what you call an inflamed ego. And it can go into paranoia and thinking like this, you know, the CIA's following you and has your room bugged?
Or it could go into delusions of grandeur where you think you're the Messiah that's come to save the world be 'cause you've gotten this new insight on reality. So those things can happen, but if you have a guide like many of the shaman I met that know and are not frightened by these states. And that's one of the things that it's interesting about indigenous and tribal cultures.
They don't seem to be frightened by these non-ordinary states of consciousness. And if you're not frightened by it, you can have the support of a community and people around you that understand [00:34:00] that ability can be useful. It can actually be useful to the tribe and, and in fact, they do put the person through an initiation and then they become these very important people that are their healers or their visionaries.
Cameron: Yeah. It seems like we have this constrained framework in which we view the world. We have our thoughts and which are mostly predetermined by our deeper agendas or our kind of meta scripts, if you like, of. How we want to see the world. And then there's that kind of predictive coding that you talked about, or what others might call besian inferencing.
And there's this, this constant framing of what we see. Yeah. And, and which the brain does naturally because it's trying to process things as efficiently as possible so we can keep [00:35:00] learning and keep moving and it categorizes everything exceptionally quickly. Whether that we're driving down the road and we see a shape and we immediately say it's a tree, even though we haven't really looked at it.
But we try to constantly categorize and process and in order to, to keep going and make things simple. So yeah. Open up more bandwidth to whatever we wanna focus on. Right. And at a more deeper level, there's these more cultural. Frameworks associated cultural frameworks in which we've grown up with. What does culture believe and what did our parents believe and have we inherited those and do they shape and how do they work with our values and our beliefs and what, you know, do we believe the world is round and flat?
All the kind of more deep orientated thoughts that we never think about moment to moment, but have an underlying effect on how we see things. And it, it seems that when we, when we loosen those frameworks and we're able to kind of glimpse at [00:36:00] the world before us in a perspective that isn't our usual one, as you have that analogy with the plane, there's this disorientation, there's this like this is new.
And that can either be a really, meeting that novelty can either be an invigorating, beautiful experience in which we can find inside, in which we can find connection frequent find. Ultimate performance, or it can be this, this, this frightening experience where we suddenly try to grasp onto things. And in that grasping, there's this chaotic perhaps what other people call insanity.
And we, and we can go down the rabbit hole in those areas. And it, you talked a lot about these really deep TRAs like experiences. And I'm also thinking about the, the day-to-day experiences [00:37:00] that we might ordinarily have, whether it's, I'm in a conversation and something just comes out and I'm like, I didn't mean to say that.
And sometimes it's, it's a good thing. Sometimes it's not a good thing. Um, but it just pops out and it's almost like I'm not in control of it. Mm-hmm. And I haven't predicted it, and I haven't consciously controlled that experience. But it's just happened and it's only a second or a few seconds, but there's that micro experience of where I'm just for those moments operating in an area that isn't my usual conscious experience.
I feel that there's this paradigm, if you like, or there's this intense and mild linear spectrum of how we can have these experiences. There's the steep trance where we go fully absorbed and fully egoless and and detach from all those scripts. And also there's these mild moments where we [00:38:00] just glimpse upon certain frameworks, get loosened or certain aspects of the ego get loosened and
Phil: yeah.
Cameron: With with flow, we often try to help people identify when they found flow in these milder experiences. Yes. In order to identify and grapple with, how do I find it in more intense experiences. If we can operate at that mild level, then we can move to those deeper experiences more positively.
Phil: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Cameron: And have you found any interesting similarities there around those? More milder?
Phil: Yes. Well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've, I've got especially a couple of interviews on my website of a young woman by the name of Laura. I, I captured just that thing where she's talking about she's been, uh, diagnosed as [00:39:00] bipolar.
That's kind of the diagnosis of the day. Now, nowadays it was called something else when I was a kid, and then there's hypomania that they within bipolar. So the way she describes it is when she's first going into one of those states, it's wonderful. She's an artist. She's a writer. She makes jewelry. She writes and she says, when I first go into that state, just slightly.
And the therapists call it hypomania. When I'm in that hypomania state, not all the predictive codes have dissolved, but you're just starting to see things and connections you've never noticed before. And she says, when I'm in that state, I can make jewelry in, in ways I would've never conceived before.
And when I'm writing, the words just flow. And they're very creative and the connections the words [00:40:00] make in, in unique ways. It's very creative and, and people like it when they read it. She said, but I can keep going. And I go too far, and I get to the place where I've actually gotta watch the sun rise in the sunset.
I'm, I gotta pick something that everybody knows, happens. There's no question about it. And when I get into those states and when I have to start doing stuff like that, finding those very definite markers, I know I've gone way too far. And as she's saying it, she's starting to cry because that's what has sent her to the hospital on a couple of occasions.
So what she's trying to learn is how to control that, going into those, those states and where her level of [00:41:00] comfort is with it. And when she starts going to far how to pull back, she knows how she has to get a, a eight hours of sleep a night. Her nutrition and and exercise have gotta be good. And she also likes to be out in nature that helps bring her back and calms her and grounds her.
So there's certain techniques she's just learning now and she's doing it on her own. She doesn't have an older shaman teaching her like she would if she was in one of these cultures. I visit
Cameron: on the reverse. There's a huge trend out there now of people trying to find these alter states of consciousness for Yes.
Most people who are very constrained by, yeah. Reality, myself included. I wake up every morning, the matrix of my mind comes up. [00:42:00] I'm there too. And it seems like most of the world is, you know, seeking relief from that. Whether it's like drinking copious amounts of coffee, whether it's going to the cinema, whether it's enjoying, um, sexual activities, whether it's whatever we crave, these experiences that kind of get us out of our own head, get us outta our own normal experience.
And we've talked a lot about the, the deep trance experiences and coming back to a place of grounding, have you found positive ways of opening up to opening up the space?
Phil: Good question. Well, here's what I think is going on, and I think we talked about it a little bit, but this sense of self, this ego self, if you think about it, it takes a lot of defending, we tend to defend it all the time.
We wanna be the best, we [00:43:00] wanna not make a mistake. We don't want the, that sense to be made a fool of. We don't wanna be humiliated all that to keep us from doing that. We've gotta do a lot of work and it's exhausting. And I think if you can drop that, that need to defend that sense of self. You're given a lot of extra energy and that can be used for creative things.
And, and so how do you get, how do you lose that sense of self? Now, I, this is what I was hoping I could ask you, but here's what I've heard. You know, I spent a lot of time with the Tibetans and I've done two books in Tibet in exhibits and spent a lot of time there. And, you know, when I was doing [00:44:00] my last book, I came across a group of pilgrims that were making their way all the way from Eastern Tibet on the plateau all the way to Lasa, which was about 1600 miles as I remember.
And they were doing it by prostrating the whole way. Which means they hold their hands to their chest, bring it up to their ed, above their head, drop down to the ground, scoot their hands along the ground till they're fully bred out on the ground and touching their forehead to the ground. Get up and walk to where their fingertips were and do it again.
So like Inchworms, moving along 1600 miles, going over 15, 16,000 foot. We use feet. I know you guys are meters, right over these high, high [00:45:00] passes, frozen and all the way to Laa. The Joong temple is their very sacred temple, and that's what the pilgrims are headed for. So I've asked them, you know, I asked them, when I met 'em on the road, I, I met a couple of groups like that when I was doing my stories over on the Tibetan Plateau and they said, it's to conquer the enemies of enlightenment and freedom.
And I said, what, which enemies? And the big ones, self cherishing, self grasping. Uh, and that pretty well summed it up for me. You know? Yeah. That's it. It's, it's getting over that, um, need to protect and defend the self that they're trying to work out. Seems like a strange way to do it, you know, [00:46:00] to humble yourself, I guess, by.
They end up with these big calluses on their forehead, by the way, stick out about half an inch from their foreheads, just by the practice of doing it for so long over such a long period of dis, such a long distance and such a long period of time. But, so that's how they do it. How we can do it. You know, I've certainly got a big ego and I, I struggle with it all the time and as much as I can remind myself, I'm married to somebody who is very other oriented, much more than I am.
So I watch her, she's my, uh, guru in a way. But as much as you can orient yourself to, I'm doing this not for me, I'm doing this to help. So and so and so, and so doing, devoting yourself to service. In other words, that's [00:47:00] one way. I think it's helped me to get an understanding of the mechanism that doesn't give it to you.
It, it takes a lot of practice once you have the understanding, just being other oriented as much as you can, being curious instead of judgmental about everything so you don't other things. And there's a lot of religion out there that teach you a lot of the stuff Jesus taught is right on Golden Rule. So, but I don't know, like I was hoping to ask you, um, you probably have interviewed a lot of extreme athletes and maybe artists that lose themself into the work.
That's another way of doing it. I think I do that when I'm doing my photography. I totally lose myself into the subject that I'm photographing and. [00:48:00] How do you find people get into that state? And, and I'll just say that we could get back to how I've seen Shaman get into that state in tribal cultures when they go into trans.
Cameron: It's a really interesting question. I think it's quite a personalized one based on our frameworks, but it, we have a saying in the flight center, which is we first, rather than me first. Mm-hmm. And certainly when in a social context that is a, an underlying principle of, of enacting or operating is quite important.
But I relate to what you talked about of saying understanding how this all works, having clarity around what self is really enables us to trust the space beyond it. And being able to label it, recognize it, understand it [00:49:00] just reduces its significance and frameworks. I think education is a a huge thing.
And generally at the Flow Center to help people find flow. We have this kind of like mindset orientation. Part of it is what you talked about, being in that curiosity, that place of learning. When we're in that place of learning and curiosity, there's this openness. The judgment tends to disappear. The defensiveness tends to disappear.
Yeah. Or just inviting everything, being a perceived threat or a conflict or a challenge or whatever is this call to connect with as opposed to just be defensive and hold back and just be safe and cautious. And as we take a step out of control and we move into the space of new. I think that's a really important foundation.
And then a second step for those three steps is around this idea of self-regulation or preparation. Where for most people in our [00:50:00] pre-programmed natural states is to have all this predictive coding, have all this framework quite there. And ordinarily that pops up in our, our thoughts, in our visions, in our emotions.
And we kind of become enslaved to that. We react to that constantly. Yeah. We spend most of our time reacting to that, what's happening within our consciousness. So to be able to change the, the dynamic on that to be able to hang on there. I'm going to. Self-regulate myself, only gonna prepare myself where I can awaken my mind.
I can awaken my body, I can bring myself ultimately to a present state. Yeah. Where I'm I'm as much as possible, less orientated by my framework and more able to again, see that newness. And then this last stage of letting go, trusting, finding this absorption into the moment where we're able to surrender, to let go of control in [00:51:00] order to feel more control and find that that space and more importantly, stay there.
You know, allow ourselves to operate in it. And often in terms of a language most people can understand. A lot of that comes down to self-trust. That ability to stay with the new and trust that we can talk through it, we can act through it, we can learn through it, we can be through it. And. Allowing ourself not to, from a scientific point of view, for that default mode network and the explicit system not to, for that to come on and constrain our experiences.
And there's certain processes getting into a self trust and connecting mind and body and heightening our senses and oversensing our potential bandwidth that the thinking brain and default, my network goes, oh, I can't. And we kind of instantly become present. You know, there's lots of little [00:52:00] ways to help that.
And I think people in different careers will naturally have different kind of rituals to how they do it. Whether it's a surgeon taking time to put on the gloves and go through the process of the robes, or whether it's an artist who might take time just to, to close their eyes and visualize what they're going to do.
And then they go through a process of getting the paints ready and then. Take brushes or, you know, we naturally have rituals that we have symbolized or added connotations to that help us get more and more into that flowing space. And so there's a kind of a contextualization process going on there.
That's just, I guess, just a real overview. I'd love to hear how the shamanic rituals went.
Phil: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Of course, trust and surrender big ones, aren't they? Yeah. In the, [00:53:00] the few ceremonies I've watched where I've watched them go on trance, of course, I, I described the cutin in Tibet and that was, it seemed like it was a combination of the drumming, the chanting, and the, just the ritual.
Putting this 80 pound. Hat on his head that seemed to all of it together. And when we talked to him later, he said interesting things that he said when I'm talking, I, I have no re I don't remember a thing I said when I'm done, when I'm out of the trance. But, so there's all that ritual that when he starts hearing those drums, he says, I start feeling the spirit and then I go in.
So around the world, what I've noticed in different tribes, there's different methods of induction [00:54:00] and drumming is big. It, it's big in Mongolia, it's big in, of course, native American, uh, culture. In the Amazon, the tribes I visited down there, it's plant medicines that they use quite a bit. Ayahuasca being one of the main ones.
Um, uh. In Pakistan, right on the Afghan border. There's an interesting group of people called the collage, and there's only about 3000 collage. They're animists, and it's interesting because they're totally surrounded by Islam and, but they've held onto their animistic culture and the shaman there. He did a ceremony for my son, and I never asked the shaman to do a ceremony for me, by the way, because once in Mongolia, one went not well, and so I was always hesitant.
[00:55:00] I was just there to interview them and ask them, how did you get into it? What do you do? How do you serve your community? That thing. But anyway, he insisted on doing it. What they did is they started a fire of juniper branches and then sacrificed an animal. In this case it was a sheep. Took the blood, hor it onto the smoldering juniper branches, and then the shaman inhaled the smoke as he was praying to the mountain gods and that put him into trance.
So I've seen different ways, you know, the Sufi do their spinning and just spin for hours until they go onto those trance-like states, the Lakota Native Americans up in the northern plains, I went to a, I was invited to go to one of their sun dances, which is very extreme method of going into trance. The Lakota do this thing called [00:56:00] the sun dance, and it's very grueling.
They, they dance for four days and four nights without food or water. And what they do is they pierce. With these wooden plugs, they go into their, not only under their skin, but actually into the muscle of the pectoral muscles. And they tie a rope to those pegs, which is tied to a tree in the center of this dance circle.
So they have about a, a 20 or 30 foot rope, you know, a thin, I mean, about a half inch rope that's tied to that tree. And then they do this dance. And at the end of the dance, the fourth day, they get up next to the tree and then they start running backwards with as fast as they can. And hopefully they will [00:57:00] pop those, those pegs in their chest and be free from the tree.
So you can imagine what they've gone through physically, but that puts 'em into a space where. And this is done not only by the healers, but this is done by individuals who have had problems with alcohol or chasing women too much or whatever addiction they're into, and it, it cures them. It, I, I talked to many that said, before I did the Sundance, I was lost.
And it just brings them. So the methods of going into these alternate states are, are very different in different parts of the world.[00:58:00]
Cameron: Do you want to help others unleash their performance? Do you want an internationally recognized accreditation to stand out amongst the crowd? Or do you want the playbook I use every day when helping professionals to be their best and find their flow when it matters most. If this sounds interesting, join others who are training to become a high performance coach.
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I'd love to touch a little bit on your life. You've had an incredible, uh, uh, you were always a photographer and film producer and journalist. You were an orthodontist and I believe you, you had a career change, and I'd love to hear what initiated that change and what gave you the kind of [00:59:00] the motivation to see that change through.
Phil: Okay, so. I'll have to go back to when I was a kid. My, I grew up with in a very poor family. My mom, uh, my dad died when I was young and my mom was the only breadwinner. And, um, she was a hairstylist, so we didn't have very much money and she managed, we were living a very poor part of California, uh, in the East Bay of San Francisco, and she managed to move us to a very upper middle class neighborhood where I went to, I went from one school where all its kids were in the same boat.
He very poor, but we had a lot of fun together to thrown into in high school, into this very wealthy neighborhood where these kids were getting cars for their birthday and they had material things that I would only [01:00:00] dream of. So I'm telling that because I got to believe that that's where happiness was.
You make money and that solves your problems. And quite frankly, that's why I chose the profession I did back when I chose it. If you were an orthodontist, you made a lot of money. You didn't have to work that hard, pretty easy life. Well, once I got into it, I, there was a creative part of it, what I don't want to get into, but there was a change that happened in orthodontics in the seventies that made it a lot easier.
And w uh, some friends and I were part of the change and I found that very exciting and creative to do that. But after that, it was pretty much like going to a, uh, a factory job because even though you're working on [01:01:00] people. The way that practice was set up, you would see so many people in the day. Like we were seeing 70 people a day and working with a lot of assistants.
So you don't have time to really interact. And I found it very unsatisfying, really, you know, if, if, if it was practiced in a different way, I could see where you would be with one kid over a two year period of time. And I could, to some degree really have an influence on the kid's self-esteem, just by the way I talked to them and did that.
So that was satisfying. But basically it wasn't that creative. And on top of it, I felt it was the beauty business that was partially unnecessary. In fact, I got to really think that I. Slightly crooked teeth were more beautiful than perfectly straight [01:02:00] teeth. So anyway, I found myself in a profession that I wasn't being that creative, you know, you're trying to make everybody pretty much the same in terms of their teeth.
And I didn't like going to the same office every day. I, I wasn't cut out for that. And on my vacations, I'd always take off to some remote part of the world. And, and, uh, that eventually became my work. So after 18 years of doing it, and I was living very comfortably in terms of having all the material things I wanted.
Which wasn't satisfying me. I was, was starting to get very restless. I felt like I had golden handcuffs. I was wedded to this thing that gave me a nice living but wasn't satisfying to me. So that was a mistake I made in my childhood by being roped due, thinking [01:03:00] that material stuff would bring me happiness.
It, it makes life more comfortable of course. But yeah, so anyway, I actually fell in love with photography while I was in dental school 'cause I was living in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco during the sixties while going to school. And that's where the hippie revolution happened. All the music that came out at that time was a very exciting time.
And I started taking pictures of all the hippies 'cause I had a job interviewing them on the street. But I put my camera away when I started practicing and I didn't take it out till several years later when my son was born and I recorded his birth and then I had to find a place to develop the film.
And the only place I could develop it was at this community college. It was close to me 'cause they had a dark room, but they said, you have to take a [01:04:00] class. I said, oh, okay. And I took a class and it was just a guy that inspired me. It was just incredible. I fell in love with it again. And within a year and a half I had brought in somebody to take my place in the practice and, and moved up to Seattle.
A whole different town where I couldn't even practice if I wanted to. 'cause I didn't have a license. And that's how I did it. It was frightening. And I had sleepless nights. And there were times where I freaked out and I started buying and selling houses 'cause I could make a little money that way. But I finally grabbed ahold of myself.
No, you, you, you did this 'cause you wanna do photography, do not start distracting yourself. And, but anyway, after three or four years I started getting jobs and I could [01:05:00] relax a bit. But then I was doing commercial work and I ended up illustrating, I dunno, 50 romance novel covers to the point why I said, wait a minute, did I quit orthodontics to do this?
And that's when I did my first Tibet project where I combined my love of travel. With these, um, remote culture and Tibet wasn't that remote, but it was a very different culture and that's where I started and it all worked out very well. I mean, that's what put me on the map as a photographer, that one project, and it just happened at a time that Tibet was becoming popular and all my images started selling in galleries all around the world.
And so I didn't have to do commercial work anymore. It was just a big lesson to me that, you know, the old cliche, do what you love [01:06:00] and everything will follow. Certainly worked out that way for me. I hear that a
Cameron: lot when there's a combination of passions or interests. You know, for you it seems like there was this combination of travel, photography, culture.
And storytelling when there's multiple motivational principles there that combine, then there's this powerful force that creates success for people. And ordinarily it's difficult for people to jump on that boat or a, find them in the first place and then b, jump on a boat in into that where there isn't a formalized career or uh, system in order to get work and make money.
What's, yeah,
Phil: a lot of what you talked about, trust and surrender goes into it. I had to just trust that it was gonna work out and surrender to it. And you [01:07:00] know, at times I would lose that trust and freak out a bit and have to regain it again. And I had to do it over and over again within photography when I did this film, you know, this film.
Uh, I've gone eight years without income. You know, I'm making a lot of money on a documentary film unless you're real lucky, but it's allowed me, I've been very lucky. My life has allowed me to choose the projects I was turned onto and I was curious about, and things I thought needed to be said that I saw and found out by doing one thing or another.
Um, I. You know, just finding out how differently we treat non-ordinary states of consciousness. I'd never thought of that before until I started meeting the shamans and then compared 'em to the way [01:08:00] Adam was treated and then realizing that's the way everybody is pretty much treated.
Cameron: Which kind of move on to some quick fire questions.
Based on your personal wisdom, what advice would you give to someone?
Phil: Well, like I said, make sure it's what you love to do, that you're not just doing it to make a living, something that's turned you on, and usually it'll come from your childhood. Something that really you were turned onto as a kid before you had to start thinking about making a living and taking care of yourself that way.
I grew up on a ranch and on the place I grew up in Utah. There wasn't, you don't go to the grocery store for you food, you grow it all, you, it's, they're small communities like tribal community and I, I loved it. So I was naturally attracted to those type of communities. [01:09:00] So think about the things that really turned you on as a kid and or turn you on now or whatever, and just pursue that.
And, and that'd be one thing I would say. And it does take surrender and determination to keep at it, especially if you're involved in something. Like the arts, like photography that are historically, everybody wants to do it. So it's a wild, wild west, raw capitalism. There's no, you know, when I was an orthodontist, I had this piece of paper.
I said, I can do this, but you can't. So it's a real protected market and there's none of that in some of the things that you might be interested in doing. But still, it's your love that's gonna carry you through. And your curiosity about what you're learning.
Cameron: Hmm. What have being your three pillars to success?
Phil: I would say the number [01:10:00] one thing for me is curiosity. I'm always wanting to pick something I wanna learn about more, whether it's Tibetan Buddhism or it's how tribes lived, mainly in terms of tribes, the way they've lived. I know that that's the way my brain is wired because. That's the way all our brains evolved.
They evolved over 200,000 years in these hunter gatherer small tribal communities. So I think it gives us a clue to what makes us happy and what gives us contentment. And it's a lot of human contact and a lot of doing for each other. It's not power, it's not money, it's not status and all the things that, you know, we tend to think, and at least in the culture I'm in, so curiosity, um, [01:11:00] lugs, passion, you know, being totally in love with what you're doing and and passionate about it.
And serendipity for me, I mean, I, I just have to pick projects that. That were real successful for me because it was the timing. I had no control of that, but it just worked out. So there's a bit of serendipity to it.
Cameron: What's one KO film that has changed your life or perspective?
Phil: The film that changed my life the most was crazy wise. Okay. Just taking this deep dive into human consciousness, interviewing all the psychologists, psychiatrists, meditation guides and mentors I got really [01:12:00] helped me deepen my own meditation.
There was one book I read, you know, back in the day, in the, in the seventies for me, of course Rom Doss is Be Here Now was a big one, but there was this other obscure book, it was called The Seth Material, and it was written by a woman that claims she went into trance and wrote it that way. But it was, is essentially how our reality conforms to our beliefs.
And it's a little bit like predictive coding actually, but it just made me. Take more responsibility for my life in watching what my beliefs were and being careful not to start nourishing beliefs that would take me to places I didn't wanna go. So that book had [01:13:00] quite a bit of an influence on me. Yeah.
Cameron: That's
Phil: nice. Thank you so much for your time. All right, Cameron. Thank you.
Cameron: Flow
Phil: unleashed.
Cameron: Unleashed, unleashed. This chat with Phil makes me want to jump on a plane and get back into the jungle. Talking to lost tribes, it has inspired me to reexamine my own perceptions about mental health and psychosis.
I've often had a long held belief that midlife crisis and other mild forms of mental breakouts offer great moments for change for that individual. A volcano of undealt with issues rising. To our consciousness, providing an opportunity to grow self-actualize and not be shackled by the dysfunctional narratives and automated behaviors that have been restricting our satisfaction and performance for years.
In a society that is extremely individualistic and geared towards increasingly fierce competition, [01:14:00] even amongst very young children, our own humanness will tend to crack. It is no surprise that mental illness is off the chart. Suicide factors amongst schoolchildren and youth are getting higher and higher year on year, and when humans can't stand the pressure and stress they crack, but this cracking may not be a negative thing.
The sensitivity of us all is often misunderstood and underestimated. Yet what would happen if our culture valued such sensitivity? I. Where altered states of the mind are understood or perhaps even appreciated, would we slowly become collectively free from most of the fears, stress and self-judgment that lead to a lot of so-called mental illnesses.
What if we perceived a mental crisis as a portal, a gateway that the person needs to go through? If we [01:15:00] approach the process in a positive vein, how would this change the outcome for the patient and the community? When the world is crashing down around you, how would it feel like to hear? Yes, it is true.
You are going through a pretty rough time, but chances are that you will emerge stronger and live at a different level because of this awareness shift you're going through. One example is that of a small town of Tonia located in Finland just by the Palo Circle in which. This psychiatric ward of a local hospital decided to carry out an experiment.
Whenever a person experiences a mental crisis, a team goes out to meet them as well as their family, partners, friends, employer, and anyone who matters to them and is part of their social network, is invited to an open discussion meeting in which everyone is free to share their [01:16:00] feelings for the team. The crisis belongs to the entire group rather than to a single person.
They abstain from a clinical assessment of the situation and do not use labels. Clinical diagnostic is carried out, but serves exclusively for the purpose of health insurance. And while this approach is still very young, this open dialogue method is gaining popularity in various parts of the world. I'd like to thank Phil for his great work over the years, exposing different ways to look at the world and bringing back important cultural wisdom that is often dead and buried in a world in which mental health is taking over conversations depleting our governments of time, resources, and money that could be otherwise spent elsewhere.
It's important to look at what's causing these mental illnesses and what [01:17:00] can we learn from the ancient civilizations. What wisdom are we begetting and is staring us right in front of our face? If you want to find out more about Phil. Please see the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that subscribe, the better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this pot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed.