- Hey humans.
How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 406, and my guest is Michael Mcbe.
Mike has quite a story.
His childhood was intense to say the least.
Academic parents, an overbearing father, abuse
and, uh, the PTSD and, and problems that arose from that.
A frequent house guest was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
His father was a tutor for Dr. King,
and that was a really interesting part of the story.
Mike went on to have a career in medicine,
but it was cut short by his addiction stemming from a lot
of the trauma he suffered as a kid.
Uh, he learned how to center his mind
and self through karate
and is still a practitioner of that to this day.
He's sober. He has been for over a decade.
He's a bassist, a musician, a founder.
I shouldn't say bassist and musician,
every basis just rolled their eyes.
He's a bassist. His musician ship, uh,
has had him in many bands
and more specifically today, he is one of the founders
of Circle the Earth
and I'm gonna play a little bit of their music
for you so you can hear.
Circle the Earth,
- Is that a train rail?
And recognize the coat she's wearing.
It once belonged to a girl, I loud,
and now the dirt is falling and it comes without a warning.
It's raining down from the stars above,
but they just burn out pieces, ran out, faith and breathing.
Oh, that keeps some lady hat
another from Atlanta.
I fight the urge to answer
try.
I used to rev when the pain staying bad straight, kind
of missing this the way that take
when I'm looking in the mirror.
Wanna smash it with a hammer 'cause she's smiling
and I can't relate.
Ooh, another car from Atlanta. I fight the urge to answer
- Because - I'm in a,
- The,
- I don't feel anything hate way.
- I don't feel
hateful the way that
everything, but I
still try.
- And that was maniac on mute by circle,
the Earth Mic's band.
And they are touring,
they are doing all sorts of really fun stuff.
So I'll definitely put links on the links page for you
to check out how to listen to them and go see them live
and all that good stuff.
I really enjoyed the conversation. He is an fascinating guy.
I'm glad he is sober. That's, it's great.
And it sounds like he is really gotten to a,
a beautiful place in his life
and is on the upswing as they say in other news.
I've got a Patreon now, it's under patreon.com/susan Ruth.
Please check that out.
I'm building a community there for he human
and all my other artistic endeavors.
I hope you'll be a part of it.
I'm going to keep this, hey, human ad free.
It helps to support that.
And I am going to have a book club on there
and do some musical stuff and share writing
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patreon.com/susan Ruth help keep this podcast going.
Help keep Art going for the independence.
Uh, so yeah, okay, uh, general stuff.
Check out hey human podcast.com for links.
And to learn more about my guests
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Follow Susan Ruths and hey, human podcast on social media
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And thank you. Thank you for listening.
Be kind, be well, be love.
We are in a crisis of humanity all over the world
and it is a harrowing time,
I guess maybe it's always been a harrowing time,
but we need each other and we need our voices to be strong
and to speak out
and speak up for the people
that don't have a voice and who need us.
We're in this together, this, this planet, this human thing.
And I love you. And yeah, here we go.
Mike McVay, welcome to Hey human.
- Thank you for having me. - We have a mutual friend Chris
who suggested we chat.
Tell me where, where are you from? Where'd you grow up?
What was growing up like?
- I was born in Atlanta, Georgia,
and um, both of my parents were college professors.
I grew up in the sixties during the civil rights era.
My father was the first black American
to get a PhD in a gamt
chemistry from the University of Chicago.
My mother was the first Black American or any ethnic person
or woman to get a PhD in mathematics
or University of Georgia.
Then she went on to become the first female dean
and Black American dean of students at MIT.
So I grew up on Morehouse college campus
that my father taught.
He trained more black chemists
and PhDs than anybody in the country, even
to this day, even though he is dead.
So my entire background was academic.
Uh, there was a lot of pressure on me to perform.
They dressed me up like Urkel
and sent me to all black elementary school.
I got beat up a lot. I got a scholarship to attend Atlanta.
Georgia's last private white high school
where I got beat up a lot
and my dad beat me if I get anything less than an A.
So I had a lot of physical abuse as a child
and that made me low, gave me a very low self-esteem.
I felt it was as though I deserved this.
Like something was wrong with me. That's all was happening.
Martin Luther King was a student
of my dad used to come to my house for dinner.
I went to elementary school with his kids.
They used to bring pieces of bombs to show
and tell pieces of artillery that was shot
through the window to show and tell.
That's the era that I grew up in.
- What was it like, uh, growing up with the civil rights
movement, literally in your living room, especially knowing
that you weren't feeling very liberated in your own home
because you had all this pressure scholastically.
- Exactly. Mm mm-Hmm .
It was, uh, interesting.
I started to, um, compartmentalize
my true feelings and the external world
and academic demands of the external world.
Uh, I was in second grade
and a girl sent me a ring
and a letter and asked me to marry her
and I left it at my books and my dad found it and beat me.
And he said, this will distract you from academics.
You must never, it was, it was very confusing for me.
, I got a straight A's
though I tell you that .
- That's awful. I'm so sorry.
That happened to you before he died.
Were you able to talk to him about
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah. I worked on that.
So later in my life I became addicted to crack
and alcohol for quite a long time.
I'm sober for 14 years now.
But all of that had to do with, uh, PTSD
and sexual confusion
and all the things that, that I went through
as a child. I'm sure.
- Were you sexually assaulted as well as a kid?
- No, not, I was not sexually assaulted.
- Alright. Is it just you or only child?
- Uh, one younger brother. - Did he have the
same thing to endure?
'cause sometimes in the family, the parent, no.
- Yeah. Not at all.
'cause I was like, the experiment, you know, so they,
they beat him a lot less
and he was a lot more normal than me.
I was pretty wild and he was a lot more normal.
So he, by the time he went to, he went to the same
exclusive white high school that I went to,
but I already integrated it, so, so the opposition
to him was much less
that he start, I went to the high school.
He started there in elementary school.
So it was, they, they had,
those people had not learned the porosity of prejudice
to the extent that the high school students had already.
So he didn't face it anywhere near the backlash that I did.
Have you ever seen show fresh principal Bel Air? Yes. Okay.
I'm, I'm fresh Prince and he's Carlton.
It's exactly like that. Okay.
- . That's a good reference point.
Did you have a sense of justice as a kid,
especially since you were being beaten?
Um, did you speak out for justice as a child
or were you traumatized the point where you were quiet?
- I sought refuge in, um, in music as,
as I started playing music in high school as an outlet.
And I started martial arts in high school as a way of, uh,
I first did it for rage, the wrong reasons,
but that was the reason I, how I started it.
And, uh, I, my parents were really dedicated to education
for minorities and I learned that from them.
And so I emulated them in that respect.
Uh, education is my opinion, the way out
and academic performance
and quality of education to my point of view
or the absolute reason for the different, the,
for the continuing differential in the accomplishments
of minorities in the United States.
- What do you think needs to be done for that?
- That's impossible to figure out. Man.
Thousands of dollars need to be
poured in the educational system.
Integration needs to happen.
They need to stop paying basketball players millions
of dollars to throw a ball
and teachers hundreds of thousand dollars to teach people.
I mean, the fundamental changes are so,
so deep it'll never happen.
I think every professional athlete should
sponsor 10 teachers. 20 teachers.
- That's a great idea. Crazy. - Millions of dollars to,
- There's a key in Peel sketch that's so great.
And it's the draft only, it's for teachers
and it's such a poignant sketch.
- That's, I like, I need to see that.
- Yeah, I'll send it to you. It's quite good.
Do you have any fond memories of, about Dr. King?
- Yeah. Yeah. He was having difficulty in organic
chemistry and .
I saw my dad would tutor him
and try to give him time off
to go do his, uh, demonstrations.
It was interesting he, to see a man in that stature have
to ask my dad for permission to miss class so he could go
and save the world.
It was pretty cool. . Beautiful person.
- Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
What happened when you headed off to college?
- Well, okay, let me tell you this.
So I'm 10 years old
and little beings of light start coming into my wall
and I'm like five actually.
And floating me out into a ship and back.
And I'm told my parents about it.
And they told me that that was just my brain forming
and they were just hallucinations that weren't real.
So I believed that. And then sometimes I would ask them
to let me sleep in between them
'cause I was so tired of these people taking me out.
And they come in the room, leave my parents asleep,
float me out the ship and back.
And that happened. Um, even when my brother was in my room,
he would sleep and they'd float me out.
No one believed me. And I assumed that none of
that was real until I went to Stanford.
Stanford was a radical change from the way I grew up.
I grew up with people who were still trying
to figure out if evolution was real,
if black people were human, things like that.
And I walked into Stanford's campus
and was the complete opposite, uh, vastly integrated.
I saw Asians for the first time
and Stanford was doing research and remote viewing,
and they were teaching extraterrestrial civilizations like
its biology or math with the reality of it.
And all of that expanded my mind.
And I had some further paranormal experiences in college
that, uh, demonstrated to me the absolute truth
of some spiritual stuff that came later.
So it was a mind blowingly expansive experience going there.
- Do you have any recollections of
what would happen once you were taken from your
home into the ship?
- Just in just instruction.
Instruction and preparation
for some challenges later in life is all I can remember.
And that they would be with me guiding me
and, uh, observing me the whole time.
- Do you feel that some
of your addiction issues ha were correlated with that?
Or is that something different?
- That's something I've always thought about.
I think that my addiction issues are correlated with my,
well, couple things.
My grandfather was a Comanche Indian who was an alcoholic,
so has some genetic predisposition.
And now that I look at it, I think that my parents
academic excellence was just a
socially acceptable expression of addiction too.
So I think I have this strong genetic
component from both of them.
Actually, when I took care of my mom later,
she smoked obsessively.
I never seen her smoke during her regular life,
but when I took care of her in dementia,
she smoked excessively.
So I think there's a genetic contribution.
There is a psychiatric contribution from the
abuse that I had.
And some of the pressures
of the emergency room residency I went in when I was in med
school at King also contributed to it.
And just rebellion and,
and wanting to experience the things of childhood
and adolescence that didn't get to experience.
And a strong component really of spiritual seeking,
just in the wrong direction.
- Did you feel that any of the information given to you
when you were taken, did that help you at all along the way?
Or was it too hard to remember in the moment?
- It didn't register with me that it could be a possibility
until I took the, I I just thought it was some childhood
fantasies until I took extra stressful
civilizations class at Stanford.
And they, it's taught by award-winning physicists
who are actually doing research.
They can't tell you this, but they're actually doing
research on the recovery technology and all that.
And it was mind blowing.
And they, these are world tola physicists
with multiple patents and, and,
and electrical engineering and physics.
The class is very systematic.
It talked about the history of abduction phenomenon,
the history of the visitations,
how they go back in history, how they're happening now.
And that over the next fi this is the 1972,
and over the next 50 to a hundred years, we,
we would see gradual disclosure.
The fact that you're taking this class means you have some
serious interests in the topic.
So we can't teach it all to you now
'cause it's not being disclosed to the public yet.
But just keep reading, keep your eyes open
and you'll see a gradual disclosure was how the class was,
uh, structured.
And when they talked about the abduction phenomenon,
how it runs in families
and how it involves kids, um, thought back to my past
and oh, that maybe that really happened.
The life-changing event
for me spiritually occurred as follows.
They also teach a class,
they also teach a class called
ultra states of consciousness.
And they are doing research and remote viewing
and telekinesis with a regal and ingle swan and all that.
And they have a neutrino detector buried
underneath the ground, two miles under ground, surrounded
by a tank of water to, uh,
detect neutrinos coming from the sun.
And it's buried underground and shielded.
So it's to minimize the effective electromagnetic
signals sent by humans, by people.
So they said to Ingle Swan,
if you really have these abilities,
maybe you can try moving the nutri detector.
And he did that. So the physicists that are running that,
uh, part of the research, they, they have TAs.
And the TAs are, uh, they have, uh, research assistants.
Those research assistants are the TAs in our classes.
So they're leaking to us as undergraduates
for what's really happening in the research.
So the campus is above about
how this man moved the trino detector.
And so the government poured a couple million dollars
of mon uh, funding into Stanford Research Institute
and they generate that research forward.
Okay. So my very get to the point, my very best friend,
his name is Fred, he is super brilliant, uh, white guy,
eventually became, uh, director of the family practice, uh,
wing of, uh, Mayo Clinic.
He's taking off the station's consciousness class.
And I'm taking all, uh,
extra professional civilizations class.
And we always talk about all the crazy stuff we hear.
And my sophomore year, he goes to
study at Stanford in England for the summer.
I stay at Stanford to do karate
and work in the psych department.
And one night I had this dream and here we go.
In this dream, I'm in a vapor form.
I emerged from the ground.
I see blades of grass and like they're like trees.
And as I assume human height, grass comes underneath me,
I see the tire tracks of treads of a car as I
assume human form next to the car.
I look around, there's nighttime,
I see a house with lights on.
The moon is out, the stars are out, the wind is blowing.
I go into the house. Inside the house is a party.
I look around in the party, I see a girl
staring at me intently.
I haven't met in my life yet.
I turned to the left and they're spread in the bedroom.
And I'm like, what are you doing in my dream?
And he said, I think I'm asleep at in
England having a dream.
And you are probably asleep at Stanford.
We're having a shared dream experience.
And I said, this is not possible.
I'm just having a vivid dream and you're in it.
He goes, no, I think this is
what they talk about in the author states
of consciousness class, uh, astrals travel.
I'm like, no, this is just a dream.
He goes, wherever we are, reality is controlled by the mind.
He waves his hand, the stars disappear,
the ceiling disappears, the stars come out,
he waves his hand and makes the ceiling reappear.
He says, you try it. I'm like, okay, I'll try it.
I 6, 7, 8 times 13, 14 time I get the ceiling disappear.
Stars come out and he says, look here.
He opens the Chester drawers in the bedroom inside
of tiny little people walking around getting in
and out of bunk beds.
I'm like, that's really weird. He goes, yeah.
He says, when I wake up, I'm gonna
write you a letter about this dream.
'cause there's no internet in those days.
I'm like, you can't write me a letter about this dream.
It's just a dream I'm having.
He says, I promise I'll write the letter. Okay, fine.
We shake hands a vertical Whirlpool appears,
his hand slips off in the whirlpool.
My dream goes on with music and all this kinda shit.
And two weeks later,
'cause it's in those days that I got a letter from him
with pictures of the house, pictures of the ceiling,
pictures of the stars, pictures of bunk beds, the whirlpool.
Did you have this dream? And that changed my life.
When that happened to me, I realized
that probably extra stress was real.
Probably all the shit they're teaching me is absolutely
true and I better figure it out.
And it's just something that science has not taught me yet.
It's not, it doesn't have to be anything
scary, although I was frightened.
I just spent the rest of my time trying to figure that out.
It didn't stop me from doing drugs,
but it did lead me to a spiritual teacher
to some wonderful spiritual experiences
that formed the foundation for my recovery later in life.
- When I was in high school in ninth grade,
my best friend Diana and I practiced every day
after school to, we would take a nap
and we would try to get into each other's dreams.
Wow. And we practiced every single night.
'cause we had read about it in books. Mm-Hmm. .
And we, it worked once.
- That's amazing. We
- Did it and we worked once
and we both woke up from the dream,
we're like, oh my God, we did it.
It was so cool.
- Beautiful. And you both
remembered it when you, when you woke up? Oh
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Yeah. That's amazing dude. Yeah.
I'm, I'm so happy to hear that from somebody.
- Yeah, it was really cool.
So I, I do believe in that kind of thing.
Have you been visited as an adult?
- I don't have any. Here's the deal.
After childhood, I started to
after project into the atmosphere
and they would, during dreams,
then they would meet me on a ship
and tell me that from now on out,
the experiences would be in the dream state
and I would be observed.
There wouldn't be any more physical visitation.
So as an adult, no more,
- Does that bum you out or are you okay with that?
- No, I'm, I, I've handled, I have had about as much
as I can handle .
I dunno if I'd be ready for that. An adult.
- How old were you when you started using?
- Was about, see over 14 years. So I stopped when I was 55.
I used for like 25 years.
So around 35, 33 around there.
- And that was a response of, of internalized PTSD.
- Yeah. That and, uh, sexual confusion.
And I was in a really high intensity, uh, neural
surgical trauma rotation at Martin Luther King Hospital
was a level one trauma center.
And obviously a lot of blood,
a lot of death, a lot of pressure.
And when I did a, I just was smoking to study,
smoking cracks and study.
But, um, the immediate relief it gave me from the pressures
of work led me into addiction over,
over about a six month period.
- Had you wanna be a doctor,
was neurosurgery something you were interested in?
- It was just a rotation I had to take
as an emergency room, uh, training.
- And when did things start to fall apart?
- Oh, dude, I'm strong. I laughed.
you, you, on one hand, they started
to fall apart in six months
when I stopped going to residency.
But I had my license already, so I just went out
and moonlighted and got high.
I I lasted a good 20 years
before I came to the attention of the medical board.
'cause I was, well, that's not true.
I I came to the attention of the medical board within three
or four years, but I survived and kept getting high
and dodging bullets for 20 years.
- Wow. How did you manage that?
- Really creative. Yeah. Just, yeah, just, yeah. I'm, yeah.
Using my creativity in the wrong way.
- And you mentioned sexual confusion. What does that mean?
- Uh, I'm bisexual and I, and,
and coming to grips
with the homosexual part was really tough
because I grew up in Georgia in
those days it was really tough.
- Mm-Hmm. . And also my understanding is in
the, in the black culture also,
homosexuality is a big No-No uhhuh.
.
- Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Mm-Hmm. .
Yeah, definitely. But
- Do you feel more centered in that
- Now?
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm in Los Angeles
now, so it's a whole lot easier. Yeah, definitely.
- Yeah. Let's talk about karate. What got you into that?
- Started karate in high school
because, uh, white chick had a crush on, started the class,
but once I started taking it, uh, it was a way for me
to express the rage from all the
physical abuse that I had been having.
And when I gotta Stanford, I lucked into a class
that was taught by a Japanese master who was also
had grips with the philosophical
and the spiritual aspects of it, not just a karate teacher.
So after the third month, he pulled me to the side
and he said, he's Japanese, right?
He says, I can't teach you anymore. I'm like, why?
I come all the time. I train extra. I could work on the bag.
Why you? And he said, I'm not from this country.
He said, but from what I can see, you just need to get a gun
and shoot some white people and get her over with .
- Oh my God. So he saw your rage.
- Yeah, Uhhuh. So he said, I can't teach you.
I can't promote this. You have
to take a month off at least, and read these books.
And he gave me some Buddhist books and some spiritual shit.
And, uh, I came back
and said, please teach me again, I'll change.
And he did. And, uh, he, he was like a second father to me.
I really, uh, embraced the Asian philosophy.
That sounds racist, but,
but the philosophy, you know, ethics and morality
and spirituality and how it's, uh, an expression of love,
not trying to hurt people.
And anyway, it really, yeah, it really helped me.
- It's a defensive art, not an offensive art. Correct.
- Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
And then I guess I get just as much satisfaction out of it
as I did outta drugs.
So it, early on I was smoking marijuana all day,
every day in college.
But I figured I, I discovered I couldn't do it high.
And that put a check on my marijuana consumption,
which is an early expression of my upcoming, you know,
my later on addiction.
So I, I didn't smoke until
after karate at night instead
of all day like I previously did.
And even to this day now, karate is a foundation
of my recovery, uh, spirituality and something that,
and karate and music give me, uh, gratification
and fulfillment that I was seeking through drugs before.
- Did you go to rehab
or were you able to quit everything on your own?
- Oh, I went to rehab. I went to, I've been
to rehab probably six or eight times,
but the last time they, uh, the government,
the court put me into six months
of mandatory inpatient treatment.
And that got through to me.
And I never, never went back braced the program
and let go of my ego after that.
And I realized that I, I, they took me away from music
and all this shit and karate and the stuff I loved.
So I went back and, uh, just stuck with it.
So I've been sober a little bit over 14 years.
- How'd you support your habit that long?
- I was a doctor, dude. I, yeah, I, I'm a doctor.
I'm making money and partying.
- DI saw a clip once.
It's professor talking to a group
of first year med students,
and basically said that the,
the most addicted people are the dentists, the doctors
and the lawyers.
They, they have the highest instance
of drug and alcohol abuse.
- Yeah. And out of the doctors, the highest instance
of abuse are emergency room physicians, uh,
anesthesiologists and psychiatrists.
- So a lot of heavy lifting that they have to bear.
Uh, I don't know, having not gone
through the education, I don't know.
But I would hope that they also teach ways to,
uh, let that stuff out of the person
that's holding that space.
- Mm-Hmm. , unfortunately, that's not a major
part of the education, and at least not in those days.
I think these days there probably is the awareness of the
medical aspects and the treatment aspects of drug addiction.
And it not being a character defect
or character flaws, the way they used
to pass judgment on it, has progressed to the point
that there are probably more, uh, classes
and education time spent to handling issues like
that than there were before when I was in school.
- Did you lose your license over all of
- This?
Oh, definitely. Uhhuh, I surrendered it.
I say I surrendered it once, got it back,
surrendered it again, and now I
gotta try to get it back again.
Now I've been, I surrendered it 10 years ago,
and I work in the medical field right up to the point
of making medical decisions, so it's still legal.
And so I'm still in it and still fluent in it,
but I have to take an exam
and just that I haven't had time to do it
because, uh, music has really taken over right now.
- Yeah. Let's, let's get into that.
You started doing music at a young age and, and kept going,
and that was another form of refuge for you.
- Absolutely, yes. Uhhuh , there was a band,
uh, the kids in my neighborhood played in a band,
put a band together, and it was the,
I heard it, it was like, great.
And I, my parents, I took a couple of piano lessons,
but they wouldn't support me doing music.
So I had to figure out what could I teach
myself that'd be the easiest.
So Bass had four strings. I figured that'd be the easiest.
So I got my mom to get me bass played in a high school band.
And when I got to college, I met a black guy who was like,
incredible, this, that, the college was amazing.
This guy had, his name is John Ivy,
he's a federal judge now.
He had scholarship in acting, a scholarship in music,
scholarship in academics, this kind of guy, right.
He was a keyboard virtue, also incredible.
He could play, he was like Jimi Hendrix on keyboards.
And I met him and we started playing the band,
and he just taught me how to, how to, how to run a band
and how to do, how to arrange songs, how to write songs, how
to rehearse, all the stuff I had no idea about.
And we actually pursued music in Los Angeles for 20,
20 years in a progressive rock band called Taliman.
And I learned everything about how
to do a band from him.
And then eventually he went back to law school
and became a federal judge now.
But I learned, I learned everything from him.
- And when did you get into Circle the Earth?
Did you, are you one of the founders?
- I'm the founder of Circle the Earth. Yeah.
I've been playing music originally in Los Angeles
since 1976.
When I got here. I had a band called Talisman for 20 years.
Then I switched, I met a guy named Phil Van Ha on guitar,
and we switched to Commercial Rock.
That band was called Icebreaker.
I had, I discovered Eric Singer, the drummer for Kiss.
Now, when he first got into Los Angeles from Ohio,
we played together for a year or so
before we went on to, uh, leader Ford and, um, David Boy,
and finally in Kiss.
And I played with Chris Poland, the guitar player
who was eventually ended up in Mega Death.
Oh, wow. So I've run, yeah, I run across some star,
some future stars back in those days.
And then I stopped and got into drugs for a while,
and I met a girl named Candace Aragon, who was a
pop rock singer songwriter, put together a band behind her.
She took off, and that band just told me
to just get another single, we keep going there.
That became, I put Icebreaker together again.
And then that changed in the Soul Rising.
And then that changed in the Circle of the Earth.
I found The Circle of the Earth currently has been together
in its current lineup, two or three years.
But I've been with the drummer, Sandra Feliciano,
who toured the world with Tina Marie and, uh, Lauren Hill.
I've been with him 14 years.
Next person was, uh, Lee Singer Kaiya, who sang with Prince
and Imagine Dragons.
And after that was Sandy, uh, Chinese, uh,
keyboardist who played with a lot of famous Chinese
artists, I don't know who they are.
And finally, Zuki to Tokaji
and Guitar Virtue also,
I've been with him for two or three years.
And that's the current lineup at this point.
We're, as of yesterday, we're changing lead singers,
but that's the lineup that people know.
- Yeah. All right. And what else are you up to?
What are you doing? How do you stay focused?
How do you channel your spirituality into
your daily life?
- The experience with the dream with Fred
was only the beginning 12
or 13 episodes of
wild spiritual activity experiences occurred to me
as my life progressed.
When I got here in Los Angeles, I ran into a, eventually
to a spiritual s teacher named John Rogers.
He's dead now, but I studied with him for 30 years.
And the experiences of that were indescribable.
And so I do everything to the best of my ability
from a spiritual point of view.
Now, I, I work full-time in, in a medical office
as a medical quality assurance officer,
where I make sure the charts are up to date
and the billing is correct,
and the medical information,
support the billing is done and all that.
So I'm intimately involved in practice of medicine,
although I'm not practicing as a physician legally, uh,
or, or illegally.
I'm not, you know, I'm just doing, and I also, um,
do karate every single day.
I've been practicing karate every day
for a long time in my life,
but absolutely every day
for the last 14 years of my sobriety.
And that keeps me, that's a tremendous stress relieve.
And I practice in a band, and it's, that's a fulfillment.
My life now is flourishing
and fulfilling in ways that I could, I can't describe you
and spirituality pin it all together.
- Can you tell me one of the other 13 or,
- Yeah.
Okay. So I come to Los Angeles
and I've had this dream at Stanford.
I'm like, okay, here's la. It's very wild.
And they have all these, uh, fringe spiritual groups.
So I get a book, I, I met a guy,
uh, who was a friend of mine.
I said, let's, I'm going on a spiritual search.
You wanna go? He go, okay, I'm gonna, I said,
I'm from Stanford, I know how to do research.
So I got a fucking notebook.
I bought the whole lifetimes,
and I went to every single spiritual organization, A
through Z in Los Angeles.
Over a two year period, 90%, you know, normal.
A lot of bullshit, a lot of take your money, a lot
of this kind of stuff, a lot of fluff.
Or a third of the way through the study,
I go into a meeting on Fairfax, on, sorry, on Melrose,
in Fairfax, in,
there's like 24 middle class white people sitting
around, all middle aged.
And so there's three women. One is all dressed black robes.
One of 'em is, uh, older.
One of 'em is fat woman, and one of 'em is young woman.
They all, and they stand up at a podium, point
to somebody in the room, and they go sell your car.
Oh, go ahead and get the new job.
Oh, call your sister in Albuquerque, pass a hat,
put money in the hat and move on.
So me and my friend, well check,
this is another bullshit, right?
So the meeting ends, we get up to leave
and the young woman gets up and she says, wait a minute.
Wait a minute. Everybody sit down.
I need to talk to, I got in the back and points at me.
And I never seen this person in my god damn life.
She said, you are here
because you are trying to decide between science and music.
She said, I see all this physical abuse in your life.
You're estranged from your father's side of the family.
I see him beating you. I see him, uh, loving you,
but not expressing it in the right way,
causing you great pain.
She goes, you really wanna know whether
to do science or music?
She says, I'm looking.
Um, she says, I see all this hard work. I see all this.
She said, I see more music than I've ever seen than any
person I've ever given a reading for before.
You need to call your brother right now.
There's something wrong. Uh, someone
with the initial P is gonna come along and,
and help you on your search.
And I just see all this work. I just see all this music.
You just might get it.
I just, it's so far away, I can't tell.
And I hope that helps you. I went home, called my mom.
My brother had a nervous breakdown that morning at Prince,
so that, that happened.
So we checked, okay, cool, let's keep going.
So we went on to the, and there some more stuff after.
- Wow. That's intense. Did he recover all right? Yeah.
Yeah, he did. Are you close with your brother?
- He is dead now, but, and we were not close.
We were like, we're the opposite.
Like Carlton and Presh friends.
We tried to, I tried to make amends with him as much
as I could, but to me, to, to him, I'm insane doing music,
doing drugs, you know,
he's never had a tra never had a traffic ticket in his life.
Complete opposite. He loved me.
- How did he pass? - Uh, he,
dude was found dead in an extended stay hotel room
with blood, with blood on the bed, so,
and blood in the toilet.
So I think he probably had GI cancer.
Didn't tell anybody it, and bled out. That's my best guess.
- Oh, that's awful. What's his name?
- Ronald Mcbe. Ronald.
- Well, I'm so sorry about that. About that.
It, it's hard, you know, when people pass away
and we don't get the chance to have that
connection and say, Mm-Hmm, .
Mm-Hmm. , I see you for everything you are,
and you see me for everything I am.
And we're all just doing the best we can.
- We had that on an unspoken level, semi but unspoken level.
- Mm mm-Hmm. . Is your mom still with us?
- No, no. My, okay.
So my mom started a com
after MIT she started a company called Quality
Education for Minorities.
And they got money from Rockwell, nasa, the government, to
iso to identify minority geniuses in poverty situations
and with, with, uh, talent for math and science.
Pull 'em out of there, stick 'em in a dormitory, pay
for their education and turn 'em into PhDs.
So she did. That was the, uh, crowning work of her life.
It was very successful, tremendously successful.
And, uh, then she developed dementia.
So she got, uh, she, she wasn't gonna let go of the program
until she found somebody to take over.
So she found a qualified black guy from the outgoing Obama
administration, installed him as her successor,
and then came to, uh, Las Vegas
and then Los Angeles to, to,
to be, for me to take care of her.
My brother called me and said, you're sober now.
Uh, I trust you.
Do you wanna move back to the condominium you used
to be in and live with mama?
Take care of her. So I said, sure.
So I, I went back to the condominium.
We had, I took care of my mom
for the last three years of her life.
I took her to karate, I took her to rehearsals.
I let her, I took her to work.
She saw me, she got to see me completely recovered. Oh,
- That's nice.
- Yeah. Yeah. She died in my arms.
Basically came back to earth just in time. .
- Yeah, I get that for sure.
, what do you believe in God?
- Here we go. There's my scientific,
there's not even belief.
My scientific data indicates
that there is a beautiful loving God.
It's the same one behind all religions.
We're just stupid people speaking French and English
and turns to the east and turns to the right.
Same exact God reincarnation and absolute fact spirituality
and absolute underpinning of everything.
And there are actually huge,
tremendously gifted spiritual masters walking
around like all the time.
Super rare. One out of a million to 2 million.
But definitely ally gifted people with a mastership
exist, very rare, but they exist.
And, and for me, study of guys like science
or anything else, you gotta be open to it.
Gotta pursue it, gotta read about it, gotta look for it.
And for me, you know, it's different for different people.
For me, it came to me through active search.
- Yeah. I see miracles everywhere. . Mm-Hmm.
- . Mm-Hmm. - . Yeah.
That's really lovely. So what's next for you?
Where, where are you heading next?
- Okay. At this point, I've got a fair degree
of notoriety with Circle the Earth.
It's really, uh, beyond my wildest dreams coming together.
And I had to change lead singer.
I've been with her for eight years. It was a beautiful ride.
It was really tough, but I have to change it's time for us
to, to her to move on and me to move on.
And we just came to that agreement last night.
So now I am in this.
And the beautiful thing is that when I, when I ask God
to fill these void, it's done in a very beautiful way.
So I'm nervous and scared,
but I'm also excited for what's gonna happen next.
So I'm looking for a, a state of the art, uh, lead vocalist
who have a single, uh, new video coming out on
a couple weeks, just released a single,
we've recorded six singles, so three more coming out,
got an EP coming out
and working with top of, top of the
line videographer, Henry Lipitol,
producer Eric Ron, songwriter.
Lauren Christie did, uh, complicated
for Abel Levine, the whole .
I'm working with top five people. It won't be a problem.
I just gotta find somebody, uh, incredible
and move and take the next step.
Very energetic, very intelligent, very melodic pop rock
with an underlying message of positivity,
but without mentioning anything spiritual at all.
So it's, uh, it's kind
of like Paramore heart, Starship too close to touch,
you know, I'm dated, so my references are older. Those
- Are good references for sure.
- Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's really good music.
- That's great. Well, I'm excited for you. That's wonderful.
Do you have, um, any kind of message
for the listening audience that you want to impart?
- Sure, absolutely.
If you are struggling with addiction, there is a way out.
There is absolutely a way out.
And life after it is beautiful.
And if, if I can recover, anybody can recover.
'cause I was really bad at really, really bad.
I wanna say that it's the same God, the same, loving,
all knowing, merciful God
behind all religions, all of them same.
And that, uh, the human souls were united.
We just seem to be separated.
The analogy my spiritual teacher taught me was
that we're like islands in an ocean.
You drain the water. It's all the same landmass.
It just looks like we're separate.
And, uh, that's basically the message I wanna get back.
Just, it's all about love and positivity
and karma and good intentions.
All the, you know, the basic common
sense stuff that, you know.
- Do you think that we, uh,
as a whole are gonna find our way again?
- Ultimately, yes. But it is, you know, it's
with tremendous difficulty along the way.
- Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me.
- Dude, this has been beautiful.
I really appreciate your time. Thank you, ma'am. Very much.
- I hope I get to meet you in, in person over at Chris's,
maybe, or Oh
- Yeah.
You're in Santa Monica. Yeah, sure.
I'm gonna train in Santa Monica at six o'clock.
- Uh, you train here?
- Yeah. Uh, I go to two karate schools.
One is called Avi Rocha on Pico and, uh, Roberton.
I do that Monday through Thursday for sparring.
And then I do, uh, technical
and cardio at, uh, if at JKA,
Santa Monica on Wilson fifth Street.
- Oh, lemme know. We'll grab coffee or something.
- Oh, I'd love to. Sure. - Okay. Cool.
Thank you for listening everybody. Bye.
- Thank you.
- Rate review and subscribe to Hey, human Podcast on iTunes,
Spotify, iHeart, wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks. Bye.