A Spiritual Quest Across Continents, Cultures, and Consciousness with Michael Shandler
A Spiritual Quest Across Continents, Cultures, and Consciou…
Send us a text In this episode of The Wayfinder Show, host Luis Hernandez interviews Dr. Michael Shandler, an award-winning author, life co…
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Oct. 1, 2024

A Spiritual Quest Across Continents, Cultures, and Consciousness with Michael Shandler

A Spiritual Quest Across Continents, Cultures, and Consciousness with Michael Shandler
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The Wayfinder Show

Send us a text

In this episode of The Wayfinder Show, host Luis Hernandez interviews Dr. Michael Shandler, an award-winning author, life coach, and organizational development consultant. Dr. Shandler discusses his tumultuous childhood during the apartheid era in South Africa, his mother’s escape from Nazi Austria, and his own brutal experiences in an Afrikaner boarding school. He also explores his spiritual journey, including transformative experiences with psychedelics and his personal development under various mentors. Dr. Shandler shares insights from his latest book, 'Karma and Kismet,' and his eventual reconciliation with his abusive father. The episode provides a deep dive into personal growth, spirituality, and healing.



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Transcript
WEBVTT

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I've never felt this sad about the world as I do right now.

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Really?

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I really do.

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I'm very concerned about the world, but I would say that I think that the only thing that I can do as a person, as an individual person is work on myself.

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If I'm working on myself, if I'm centering, if I'm getting centered, then my actions are going to come out of a compassionate and more likely to come out of a compassionate and loving place.

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Welcome to The Wayfinder Show with Luis Hernandez, where guests discuss the why and how of making changes that led them down a more authentic path or allow them to level up in some area of their life.

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Our goal is to dig deep and provide not only knowledge, but actionable advice to help you get from where you are to where you want to be.

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Come join us and find the way to your dream life.

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Welcome back to the Wayfinder show.

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I am your host, Louis Hernandez.

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And today we are here with Dr.

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Michael Chandler.

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Dr.

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Chandler is an award winning author, life coach, and organizational development consultant.

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in his new book, that we're going to talk about, he talks about his boyhood in a dysfunctional family during a part, the apartheid era in South Africa.

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and how that provided powerful grist for his transformational personal journey.

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Michael is a multi published author as well as a co author with his wife, Nina Shandler, of several books on health and communication.

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Dr.

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Shandler also holds a master's in counseling psychology and family therapy and a doctorate In leadership and organizational development from UMass Amherst, Chandler has consulted to and trained hundreds of leaders and organizations internationally.

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He is an avid cyclist and yogi a husband of over 50 years, a father, a grandfather of five incredible kids.

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today he's here to talk about his journey and his new book, Karma and Kismet.

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a spiritual quest across continents, cultures, and consciousness.

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Dr.

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Chandler, welcome to the Wayfinder show.

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Thank you.

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Great to be here.

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Yeah.

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Thank you for being here.

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So let's just get right into it.

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I'm curious.

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I've heard, you and other, forums talking about having been groomed to be an elite.

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Can you talk a little bit more about that?

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Yes.

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First of all, I grew up in South Africa during the beginning of the apartheid era.

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apartheid was introduced in 1948 officially as a legal system.

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I was born in 46.

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So I was a young kid when it first came into being.

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and of course, We were, the whole society, everybody in the society was divided up into their race.

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And of course, white people, as you all know, was the privileged, was the very much the privileged group.

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Within the white group, there were two basic factions.

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One was the perhaps more commonly known one, the English.

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They were, descendants of the British.

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colonists who had settled at the Cape, and the other group were the Afrikaners, who also were descendants, but of the Dutch.

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So these two groups in the beginning were very much in competition in South Africa and actually went to war.

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the Anglo Boer War is the famous war that they fought.

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It went on for about four years, at the turn of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, 1899 to 1902.

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The British won that war, but in so doing, they created a lot of very bad feelings with the Afrikaners.

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the British incarcerated in the first concentration camps that we know about, incarcerated the women and children and elders of the Afrikaners, and they put them in these concentration camps, and about 27, 000 of them are recorded to have died.

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this left an incredibly bitter kind of feeling with the Afrikaners toward the English.

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So I was born Jewish into a Jewish family.

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My mother was a, survivor of Hitler's Nazism in Austria.

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So she carried the wounds of her escape and her escape of the whole family with her.

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My grandfather was put into a concentration camp, in 1938, which he managed to bribe his way out of.

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So there's a whole history of my mother's family's, escape from Nazism and how they were taken, to Palestine.

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It was called British Mandate Palestine because the Brits were kind of in charge.

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And during the Second World War, my father was a soldier.

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In the British Eighth Army, and at one point he was stationed in British Mandate, Palestine.

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My mother, who, as I mentioned, escaped to Palestine when she was 16 and she was about 21 when she met my father at a dance in 1945.

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And they were married in 1945 in Tel Aviv, and I was born the next year in Cape Town, South Africa.

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So 1946.

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I mentioned all this stuff about apartheid and the tension between the English and Afrikaans because it really mattered.

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I mean, it was one thing to be white, you had automatic privilege because your skin color was white, but there was a lot of tension, and it's not much known really, but a lot of tension between the English and Afrikaners, because I was Jewish, there was an additional tension on me, a lot of antisemitism, the question was why, and the reason was in the Second World War, The animosity between the British and the Afrikaners was so extreme that the Afrikaners actually sided with the Germans, with the Nazis, many of them did.

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Wow.

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So, and that carried over, I was born a year after the war.

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So there was still very much that feeling of, that some, that Afrikaners, at least some of them were Nazis.

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That was still very much a residue after the war.

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So my mother being who she was, and, I'm being, very much affected by what had happened to her.

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She believed that all Afrikaners were Nazis, and she would say, so I'll fast forward a little in my story.

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Is this level of detail good or?

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Yeah, that, that's fascinating.

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That's a bit of history.

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I never knew that the Afrikaners were considered Nazis.

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That just blows my mind.

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As I say, a percentage of them during the Second World War who, who were very much who were Nazis.

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There were even Nazi organizations that ran around South Africa, creating all kinds of trouble, beating up soldiers who were going to join the army and so on.

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Yes, there was a lot.

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Were they, forgive my ignorance here.

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I don't know, were they recognized as Nazis from, the larger groups in Germany and who we all think of as the traditional Nazis?

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I don't know.

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I'm not a scholar of the subject myself.

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Sure.

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So I don't know exactly what their relationship with the German outfits was.

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Okay.

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But I can tell you that some of them wore blatantly wore.

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Takeoffs on Nazi uniforms Nazi insignia.

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Wow.

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but that really was birthed more from their, despise for the Jewish people.

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Is that what you're saying?

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The fact that the Nazis despised the Jews, was, so they followed suit.

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There was another big thing that happened between the British and the, Africanas, and that was that the Jews were identified with the English side.

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Okay.

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They were English speaking and they were identified sure.

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But they were blamed for helping the British to keep the africanas in poverty after the Anglo Bo War.

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And that led to a lot of tension because the Jews in South Africa.

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were very successful.

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they had opportunity, they were hard working, and they were a successful immigrant group for sure.

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I went to this very, how shall I say, very prim and proper English school.

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And everything was going more or less swimmingly until I hit about age 13.

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And I started to get into fights.

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I got into one really bad fight and was almost expelled for it.

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And then, a few months later, I got 19 percent for Latin.

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You have to understand that Latin most symbolizes the British heritage in South Africa.

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So if you fail Latin, it's not too good.

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So I failed that and it was very clear that I was going to fail.

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I had never failed a subject before.

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I wasn't a great student by any means, but I had never failed a subject before, but it was very clear that I was about to fail.

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So my father, I've left out a lot of details about my dad.

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My father was a very mercurial, abusive guy.

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He was very violent and there are plenty of details in the book about his violence and what happens.

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I won't get into that now.

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But I think he was in some sort of state of despair about me.

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And he said, I'm going to send him to an Africana school in the hinterland of the Cape province.

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So he found a school for me in the, about 300 miles from Cape Town in an area where pretty much everybody spoke Afrikaans and very few people spoke English.

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And suddenly at age 13, I found myself living with Afrikaans boys in a boarding house in a godforsaken place, barren desert like place, and I wasn't used to it.

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I'd never Cape Town, by the way, and if you don't know it, is a very, very magnificently beautiful place with oceans, two oceans, huge peninsula, wonderful fauna and flora, great climate, etc.

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And suddenly I find myself living in this godforsaken place.

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The only distinction that this place that I was now sent to, which was called Oudtshoorn, oh, it's pronounced O A T, Oudtshoorn, but spelt O U D T S H O O R N, it's a Dutch word, means old horn.

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But it's only, it's famous for one thing, and that is, it is the world's ostrich center.

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The biggest ostrich producing place in the world.

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And, what people don't know is that before the First World War, women had a kind of, an ostrich feather frenzy that went on for about 40 years.

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The style for women was to wear these ostrich feather hats and boas around their necks.

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and it was only with the, invention of the open car.

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that it became sort of, well, the wind would blow the ostrich feathers.

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And so women stopped wearing them.

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They weren't convenient anymore, but for years before that ostrich feathers were worth more than gold by weight.

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Wow.

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they were the fourth largest export, South Africa's export.

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when I was 13, I was sent to this place.

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of which the heyday had been some 50 years before I got there.

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So by the time I got there, there was really nothing, except its reputation and except there were ostriches, ostrich farms still around, but ostrich feathers were no longer as popular as they were back in the heyday.

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This was really the first, I would say, existential kind of crisis in a big way that hit me, and that was that basically I couldn't speak the language, I couldn't understand the kids, and all of the lessons, most, not all, most of the lessons were in Afrikaans.

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So I started to fall further and further behind.

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Yeah.

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And the kids, some of the kids were bullies and some of them were very anti Semitic.

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It happened that, shortly after I arrived there, some of the bullies in the boarding house got together in my room and they trapped me.

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They made a circle around me and they trapped me.

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And they put another guy in this kind of human circle that they formed, who was much bigger than me.

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And there was no contest.

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I think that was the point.

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And I was in this room, in this ring, I was about to get beaten up for sure, and suddenly, I just don't know what came over me, but I went I went out of my mind for a moment, and I spun, and I punched this guy, he's much bigger than me, punched him, and I landed right on his jaw, and he went down like a sack of potatoes, boom, and he was out, and his lip was split, and the other bullies took him out and I was really afraid.

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Everybody melted away.

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Nobody wanted to be seen with me.

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Nobody wanted to talk to me.

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The whole scene was not supposed to go down the way it did go down.

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A few minutes later, one of the 18 year old big boys, you grabbed me and took me to a kind of an outdoor, concrete sort of outdoor mall, and he took a rubber hose pipe and he beat me very badly with it.

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So that was the beginning of, it was kind of survival.

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And I was helped.

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It was also the first of where I could say that there were kind individuals that helped me.

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And I went to, it was one of the teachers in the boarding house was designated supposedly as our, boarding house father.

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And, he was a nice enough man.

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I'd never had any interaction with him.

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I'd only been in the boarding house for maybe a month at that point.

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So I didn't even know him.

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But I went there and I rang his bell and, he came to the door and immediately saw that I was all black and blue, had welts over my face and over my body, everything.

00:14:16.422 --> 00:14:17.402
I took off my shirt.

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I showed him and I was wearing shorts and I showed him everything.

00:14:21.011 --> 00:14:22.532
And he said, who did this to you?

00:14:22.692 --> 00:14:23.861
I told him the whole story.

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So he took the entire, boarding house of about, probably, I would say, maybe 70 or 80 boys, and he collected them all together, and he gave them a lecture in Afrikaans.

00:14:35.652 --> 00:14:41.822
I couldn't understand it, but later one of the friendlier Afrikaners explained to me in English what he had said.

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And basically he said, We as Afrikaners have a code of honor, and we honor people who come from the outside, even English, and even Jews.

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There was a small percentage of the kids in the boarding house that took this seriously, and They became a little warmer to me.

00:15:00.741 --> 00:15:02.601
They certainly didn't abuse me.

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They didn't call me little Jew boy like the bullies did.

00:15:07.491 --> 00:15:16.562
So anyway, That was the very first of my sort of serious, if you will, at least in my 13 year, 13, 14, 15, 16 year old life.

00:15:16.876 --> 00:15:19.486
It was pretty serious for me surviving in this place.

00:15:19.726 --> 00:15:20.876
I'm curious.

00:15:20.876 --> 00:15:28.687
going back to your father, you talked about him being violent, and did he have anything to do with you being sent to the school?

00:15:28.706 --> 00:15:30.236
Was it a boarding school in Missoula?

00:15:30.317 --> 00:15:30.496
Oh, yes.

00:15:30.496 --> 00:15:31.657
Oh, yes.

00:15:31.657 --> 00:15:32.606
That was his idea.

00:15:32.956 --> 00:15:33.376
Okay.

00:15:33.897 --> 00:15:38.397
So was he just struggling with figuring out how why did he do that?

00:15:38.726 --> 00:15:42.716
Cape Town and South Africa in general, in those days, and I'm talking, I'm talking here.

00:15:42.716 --> 00:15:44.277
This was at the end of the 50s.

00:15:44.277 --> 00:15:45.716
It was early 1960.

00:15:47.017 --> 00:15:51.246
They want a lot of resources, here in the States, we're used to a lot of resources.

00:15:51.246 --> 00:15:54.317
You have no idea how much resource we have here.

00:15:54.466 --> 00:16:01.236
It's only when come from a poor place or place with limited resources that you sort of get an inkling.

00:16:01.687 --> 00:16:01.897
Yeah.

00:16:01.927 --> 00:16:08.197
It's like someone who's never been into a supermarket goes into a supermarket and says, Oh my God, all this food.

00:16:09.236 --> 00:16:10.287
This is unbelievable.

00:16:10.876 --> 00:16:12.216
It's kind of something like that.

00:16:12.417 --> 00:16:14.317
We didn't have resources.

00:16:14.846 --> 00:16:25.017
So my father was a South African and he thought that I should learn Afrikaans for sure, because it was our second language, and that I should become a kind of a well rounded South African.

00:16:25.456 --> 00:16:31.197
And since I had failed at the, in the British mode of education, maybe I would do better with the Afrikaners.

00:16:32.037 --> 00:16:36.746
So it took me about two and a half years to really master Afrikaans, but I did.

00:16:37.437 --> 00:16:38.826
and then I became quite fluent.

00:16:38.907 --> 00:16:41.397
And by the time I left there, I was completely fluent.

00:16:42.341 --> 00:16:47.121
So anyways, the first part of my book, Louis is called Karma.

00:16:47.562 --> 00:16:51.042
And it's basically about the obstacles I faced in South Africa.

00:16:51.042 --> 00:16:53.951
There were many more aside from the one that I just described.

00:16:54.192 --> 00:17:00.241
For example, when 10 days after high school, I was conscripted into the all white South African army.

00:17:00.371 --> 00:17:03.116
I didn't want to be there, but There was no way to get out.

00:17:03.687 --> 00:17:05.846
Anyways, I won't tell you too much about that.

00:17:06.076 --> 00:17:09.426
that is a dramatic chapter in the book as well, what happened.

00:17:09.846 --> 00:17:10.396
Interesting.

00:17:10.446 --> 00:17:11.406
I'm curious about the book.

00:17:11.406 --> 00:17:14.297
I think most of us are familiar with the term karma.

00:17:14.987 --> 00:17:18.977
I can, really admit, I'm not as familiar with the term kismet.

00:17:19.446 --> 00:17:20.067
What is it?

00:17:20.067 --> 00:17:21.557
And why did you name your book?

00:17:22.576 --> 00:17:29.676
and you could sort of say, you could say in the sense that I used it, you could call it bad karma if you will, or.

00:17:29.717 --> 00:17:30.047
Okay.

00:17:31.467 --> 00:17:44.527
Yeah, bad karma, I guess that's the colloquial term, that happens to you in life that keeps you stuck, stuck floundering in some way or another, obstacles, difficulties, etc.

00:17:44.967 --> 00:17:45.156
I see.

00:17:46.791 --> 00:18:06.652
the second part of my book is about, and I'll just jump to that, by way of answering the question, the second part of my book is, called Seeking, and it's basically what happened to me when circumstances, outer circumstances, which involved a war in 1967, created a situation where I could leave the country.

00:18:06.781 --> 00:18:19.382
and do something that felt at that time, because I was so deeply depressed, to be honest, deeply, deeply depressed, where suddenly an opportunity that was much, much bigger than myself, showed itself to me.

00:18:19.612 --> 00:18:21.521
and I grabbed it for all I was worth.

00:18:21.721 --> 00:18:22.352
And I took it.

00:18:22.971 --> 00:18:25.811
And next thing I knew, I was living on a kibbutz in Israel.

00:18:25.872 --> 00:18:37.477
And, being Jewish, my mother having such a history with the place and so on, I seriously, and in those days being a Zionist was not a bad or pejorative word.

00:18:37.757 --> 00:18:41.606
There was a purity about it because it was so soon after the Holocaust.

00:18:41.987 --> 00:18:43.217
People were in sympathy.

00:18:43.217 --> 00:18:45.477
I felt very idealistic about my Zionism.

00:18:45.967 --> 00:18:51.797
Then things have changed dramatically since then, In those days, there was a purity to it, and I felt good about it.

00:18:51.866 --> 00:19:01.717
I felt very, very clean, in my, going to, it was like a very idealistic thing to go and help on a kibbutz, this country that had been attacked and so on and so forth.

00:19:02.307 --> 00:19:11.696
But, there was a man on the kibbutz who was, assigned as my kind of mentor, and he happened to be a colonel in the Israeli army.

00:19:12.477 --> 00:19:26.186
He said, look, he said, I'd like you to take you to the Golan Heights, which, as you may know, is one of the main sort of battle, even today, literally, is the main areas where there's all kinds of, it's very hot there, as they say.

00:19:27.317 --> 00:19:32.227
And so he took me up there and there'd been big battles fought there against the Syrians.

00:19:33.067 --> 00:19:38.067
And I saw, I saw tremendous destruction on both the Israeli and the Syrian side.

00:19:39.116 --> 00:19:47.126
And essentially I realized, wow, I said to myself, I dodged, I managed to dodge the army somewhat in South Africa.

00:19:47.696 --> 00:19:53.547
And here I am in Israel and it's very tempting to stay here because there's a lot of great things about being here.

00:19:54.047 --> 00:19:59.767
It's a great, it was a wonderful time in 1967 for young, for to be a young person in Israel.

00:19:59.767 --> 00:20:00.336
Wonderful.

00:20:01.106 --> 00:20:03.247
And adventurous and all kinds of things.

00:20:03.317 --> 00:20:12.446
And it was 1967 was the beginning of sort of the emergence of new consciousness, if you will, people beginning to waken up to waken.

00:20:12.817 --> 00:20:14.936
And so it was a very exciting time.

00:20:15.196 --> 00:20:18.896
But I realized when I was on the battlefield in on the Golan Heights.

00:20:19.501 --> 00:20:20.432
I can't stay here.

00:20:20.491 --> 00:20:22.892
I've got to, there's got to be some other places I can go.

00:20:22.892 --> 00:20:24.632
I can't go back to South Africa.

00:20:24.872 --> 00:20:28.362
My life, it's just too, there's no opportunity for me there.

00:20:28.501 --> 00:20:31.402
I cannot go back and I can't stay here in Israel.

00:20:31.571 --> 00:20:32.301
What to do?

00:20:33.112 --> 00:20:38.866
And then it came to me that my mother, had two brothers who, like her, had been dispersed.

00:20:38.866 --> 00:20:43.686
She'd been dispersed to South Africa, and they had been dispersed to Vancouver, Canada.

00:20:44.217 --> 00:20:58.946
So I wrote to them, and I said, I told them my situation straight up, and one day a letter arrived from them, torn piece of paper with a scrawled, barely legible line on it that said, Here's a hundred dollars.

00:20:59.146 --> 00:21:00.227
We hope this will help.

00:21:01.067 --> 00:21:01.826
Hope to see you.

00:21:02.192 --> 00:21:06.991
And it was from my two uncles, my mother's two brothers, who were survivors also.

00:21:07.422 --> 00:21:07.721
Yeah.

00:21:08.402 --> 00:21:17.612
so off I went to Vancouver and I arrived, and I became a college student and I arrived in the middle of the kind of psychedelic awakening.

00:21:18.332 --> 00:21:26.342
All my peers, everybody was, was taking mescaline or magic mushrooms or LSD and it was before ayahuasca.

00:21:26.632 --> 00:21:28.031
it was before ecstasy.

00:21:28.801 --> 00:21:32.842
one of my professors said to me one day, he said, I'd like to take you on a mescaline trip.

00:21:35.082 --> 00:21:47.932
so I went over to his house and he, we sat down and relaxed for a while and then he gave me this rather large blue pill and he gave me some water and I took it and he took a similar pill himself.

00:21:48.561 --> 00:21:51.622
And nothing happened for about 20, 25 minutes.

00:21:51.682 --> 00:21:53.281
I said like, well, this is interesting.

00:21:53.281 --> 00:21:54.162
I don't feel anything.

00:21:54.362 --> 00:21:55.511
Nothing's going on here.

00:21:56.342 --> 00:21:59.132
but then I started to feel a force.

00:21:59.317 --> 00:22:07.787
Suddenly I started to feel a force that was far more powerful than my puny little ego and my puny little efforts to try to control.

00:22:08.196 --> 00:22:09.896
It was much more powerful than me.

00:22:10.307 --> 00:22:16.196
And it became a Python, a Python, and I was in its coils and it was squeezing me.

00:22:16.846 --> 00:22:19.477
And first I was fighting it as hard as I could.

00:22:19.981 --> 00:22:22.432
But I soon realized that I can't fight this.

00:22:22.451 --> 00:22:24.501
This is much, much more powerful than me.

00:22:25.201 --> 00:22:28.471
And I said, what, what is what is the answer here?

00:22:28.771 --> 00:22:32.922
And what came to me was surrender, surrender.

00:22:33.396 --> 00:22:40.517
Even if the snake, this python is going to kill you, let it, let him kill you, let him do it, die.

00:22:42.207 --> 00:22:43.247
And that's what happened.

00:22:43.247 --> 00:22:50.376
And when I let go in that way, Louis, I, it was a tremendously very, very powerful experience.

00:22:51.017 --> 00:22:57.676
And I realized that I was connected to everything in the universe, to other people, to nature, to everything.

00:22:57.676 --> 00:23:00.737
I had a kind of a living experience of unity.

00:23:01.436 --> 00:23:05.217
And it was, something like they talk about in the Bible, about being touched.

00:23:05.386 --> 00:23:06.777
I was touched that day.

00:23:07.136 --> 00:23:11.037
It was a very powerful experience and it changed my life.

00:23:11.817 --> 00:23:13.846
And I became very interested at that point.

00:23:13.886 --> 00:23:18.257
I began to realize, there's something much more to life than I thought up to now.

00:23:18.326 --> 00:23:19.307
I didn't have a clue.

00:23:19.547 --> 00:23:21.096
I was a naive kid.

00:23:21.317 --> 00:23:23.007
I like to do all the things that kids did.

00:23:23.007 --> 00:23:23.916
I like to get drunk.

00:23:24.136 --> 00:23:28.527
I like to get stoned and high, everything, but I'd never taken a psychedelic.

00:23:28.527 --> 00:23:30.707
And now I was in another universe.

00:23:30.967 --> 00:23:31.336
Wow.

00:23:31.946 --> 00:23:35.047
Did you go on to take more or was it just this one experience?

00:23:35.156 --> 00:23:37.086
No, I went on to take much more.

00:23:37.477 --> 00:23:38.366
Many trips.

00:23:38.696 --> 00:23:58.277
Eventually I came to, someone handed me a tape recording of a lecture that had been given at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver by Richard Alpert, who, as you may know, was Timothy Leary's cohort and fellow professor at Harvard.

00:23:58.971 --> 00:23:59.571
I didn't know that.

00:23:59.571 --> 00:24:04.332
what topic do they, so the, they were professors of psychology.

00:24:04.682 --> 00:24:05.102
Okay.

00:24:05.102 --> 00:24:09.811
And who had gotten turned on to psilocybin, ah, magic mushrooms.

00:24:09.811 --> 00:24:13.561
Psilocybin is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

00:24:13.801 --> 00:24:13.981
Yep.

00:24:14.342 --> 00:24:20.511
And they had somehow managed Tim, Tim had managed to get hold of psilocybin and he had turned.

00:24:20.592 --> 00:24:22.372
Richard Alpert on.

00:24:22.491 --> 00:24:25.622
He said this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

00:24:25.622 --> 00:24:26.731
You've got to experience this.

00:24:26.731 --> 00:24:27.531
And Alpert did.

00:24:28.041 --> 00:24:35.741
And he reported that he learned more in six hours than he had in his entire time training to become a psychologist.

00:24:36.211 --> 00:24:39.642
So he had an amazingly powerful experience.

00:24:40.261 --> 00:24:47.432
And then he, eventually they went on, they created a research project for the Harvard psilocybin project.

00:24:47.922 --> 00:25:01.912
And they were giving, in kind of a quasi research mode, giving, mushrooms to graduate students, but then Alpert kind of slipped and he gave a dose to an undergraduate.

00:25:03.352 --> 00:25:10.241
But out that an undergraduate had somehow become a part of this big experiment on campus and at Harvard.

00:25:10.842 --> 00:25:16.701
So the admin cut a long story short, they kicked both Alpert and Leary out.

00:25:18.011 --> 00:25:23.501
Timothy Leary went on to become the famous kind of psychedelic Pied Piper that's, everyone knows about.

00:25:24.442 --> 00:25:31.511
Albert went to India and he took with him, a bottle of very powerful LSD.

00:25:31.801 --> 00:25:33.112
It's called White Lightning.

00:25:33.561 --> 00:25:40.092
And each of the pills was 305 micrograms, which if you know anything about dosages, that is a whopping dose.

00:25:40.372 --> 00:25:40.821
Okay.

00:25:41.201 --> 00:25:46.412
He gave it to Various people that looked like holy men on the way that he saw, oh, that guy looks like a yogi.

00:25:46.662 --> 00:25:47.352
I'll give him this.

00:25:47.372 --> 00:25:48.521
Let's see what happens with him.

00:25:48.801 --> 00:25:50.971
See how he handles my enlightenment test.

00:25:52.082 --> 00:25:54.592
he tried this several times and no one passed the test.

00:25:55.071 --> 00:26:00.432
the test was, you take the LSD and basically see how you react to it.

00:26:00.511 --> 00:26:01.402
That was the test.

00:26:01.686 --> 00:26:02.217
Just take it.

00:26:02.257 --> 00:26:07.557
Here, if you're enlightened, as you as a yogi are claiming to be, then take this and we'll test your enlightenment.

00:26:07.567 --> 00:26:09.406
We'll see how strong your enlightenment is.

00:26:09.797 --> 00:26:10.207
Okay.

00:26:11.471 --> 00:26:16.662
So anyways, Robert reports that none of these people that he gave it to, none of them passed.

00:26:18.011 --> 00:26:29.511
So he gets to the Himalayas and he's introduced to a little old man, a nondescript little old man in a blanket with kind of toothless, unshaven, unkempt.

00:26:30.392 --> 00:26:35.392
And the little man begins to tell him about his mother's cancer.

00:26:35.402 --> 00:26:39.142
His mother had died of cancer two months before he came to India.

00:26:39.422 --> 00:26:51.692
And here's this little old man telling him about his mother's cancer in amazing detail, by the way, and enough to convince Albert that this was a person of substance.

00:26:52.241 --> 00:26:58.422
And then the little old man said, I want some of the medicine to the medicine that you gave to those other yogis.

00:26:58.652 --> 00:27:03.582
I want some to help up and got the bottle and gave him one of the pills.

00:27:04.142 --> 00:27:06.491
And the guy was obviously in his 70s.

00:27:06.491 --> 00:27:08.932
And he said, Wow, 305 micrograms.

00:27:09.182 --> 00:27:10.582
This is going to be interesting.

00:27:11.392 --> 00:27:13.872
But the old man said, No, no, no, give me more.

00:27:14.442 --> 00:27:15.602
He took three pills.

00:27:15.872 --> 00:27:19.862
Honestly, this would be enough to knock the socks off even a giant.

00:27:20.011 --> 00:27:22.741
No, it's really, it would be enough for an elephant.

00:27:25.582 --> 00:27:26.991
Absolutely nothing happened.

00:27:28.182 --> 00:27:38.971
So, Albert was given the name Ramdas, which means servant of God, and he was assigned to study with a yogi by the name of Baba Haridas.

00:27:40.001 --> 00:27:59.951
And to learn the various limbs of yoga, eight limbs of yoga, there are eight different aspects to yoga on the path that range from basically, yamas and niyamas, which are the precepts, if you will, the do's and don'ts all the way to the highest states of consciousness and the methodology for retaining the highest states of consciousness.

00:28:00.311 --> 00:28:02.561
so Albert became Ram Dass.

00:28:03.422 --> 00:28:15.382
And again, I'm going to fast forward, comes back to the US, and he gives a talk, and I'm given a tape recording of this talk, and I'm like, it really blows my mind.

00:28:15.432 --> 00:28:19.211
it's like the hand of God reached down and said, here, this is your next lesson.

00:28:19.632 --> 00:28:22.551
Here's the next thing that you need to hear and understand.

00:28:23.446 --> 00:28:27.217
And, so I wrote a letter to Ron Duss.

00:28:27.277 --> 00:28:30.497
someone told me that his father lived on a farm in New Hampshire.

00:28:30.957 --> 00:28:34.196
in Franklin, New Hampshire, if I remember, yeah, Franklin, New Hampshire.

00:28:34.596 --> 00:28:37.416
I wrote him a letter, I told him, I said, I'm a young immigrant.

00:28:37.646 --> 00:28:41.136
I dropped out of, by then I dropped out of school, I'd taken too much acid.

00:28:41.576 --> 00:28:43.767
And school seemed really barren to me.

00:28:44.307 --> 00:28:45.396
I wrote him an honest letter.

00:28:45.396 --> 00:28:53.527
I said I feel like some kind of spiritual yearning has been awoken in me and I want to learn about yoga and spirituality and I don't know anything.

00:28:53.527 --> 00:28:54.237
Can you help me?

00:28:54.926 --> 00:29:04.076
I even asked him, I think I had the audacity to ask him if he would come to, I was at the time living in Montreal, would you come to Montreal to give this?

00:29:04.967 --> 00:29:06.737
So he writes back and he says, yes.

00:29:07.446 --> 00:29:07.727
Wow.

00:29:08.057 --> 00:29:11.846
So he came to Montreal and I set up a talk for him.

00:29:11.906 --> 00:29:19.946
We went on the radio together and 2000 people showed up for the talk, more people than we could possibly fit into the hall.

00:29:20.406 --> 00:29:23.336
So he said, well, can you see if you can get this all for tomorrow night?

00:29:24.076 --> 00:29:27.781
So the same thing happened the next slide.

00:29:27.781 --> 00:29:31.582
So he says to me, he says, wow, you're really good at setting up these talks.

00:29:31.582 --> 00:29:41.172
I really hadn't done very much, but the talks were amazingly successful because he was answering a kind of, yearning that a lot of us were feeling.

00:29:41.172 --> 00:29:44.011
It wasn't just me feeling this sort of spiritual yearning.

00:29:44.061 --> 00:29:55.749
Lots of kids would, were taking psychedelics and other strong drugs and things were being awoken, awoken in them that the culture at the time really didn't have a model, didn't have an answer for.

00:29:55.749 --> 00:29:59.412
And so I felt that increasingly that the culture was kind of empty.

00:30:00.682 --> 00:30:11.662
So from there, Ram Dass introduced me to his teacher to this to the silent yogi by the name of Baba Hari Dass, who came to live in California.

00:30:12.211 --> 00:30:18.291
And I became a close disciple of his for five years, and then five years after that more peripherally.

00:30:19.031 --> 00:30:31.491
And part of the book is about what happened in those five years, okay, and about the formation of a community and so on my relationship with him and he was a very, very, he was a silent, completely silent.

00:30:31.721 --> 00:30:34.172
He had been silent for 20 years when I met him.

00:30:34.622 --> 00:30:40.832
And he communicated by writing on a chalkboard and he would write things like, I'll give you just an example.

00:30:41.461 --> 00:30:48.152
He would say things like, if a pickpocket meets a saint, he only sees pockets.

00:30:51.372 --> 00:30:53.451
Okay, so that would be like a teaching.

00:30:53.461 --> 00:30:58.192
That would be a thing in and of itself, like, like almost like a Zen koan.

00:30:58.192 --> 00:31:01.811
This would be like, he would tell you this, he would write it and show it to you.

00:31:01.862 --> 00:31:07.842
Or he would say things like yogis in jungle need not fear snake knows heart.

00:31:11.807 --> 00:31:21.267
Michael, I'm curious, part of your book, it seems again with without having read it, it talks, you seem to talk about the journey of reconnecting with your father.

00:31:21.737 --> 00:31:22.166
Yes.

00:31:22.176 --> 00:31:22.467
A bit.

00:31:22.497 --> 00:31:23.067
Can we.

00:31:23.251 --> 00:31:24.382
Talk a little bit about that.

00:31:24.382 --> 00:31:27.301
You already talked a little bit about what it was like growing up with him.

00:31:27.751 --> 00:31:42.011
I share with you, you know a relationship with my father that it was pretty sour and only maybe 10 years ago that I really reconnect with him Maybe a little longer than that now but same kind of background and I'm curious to know what that journey has been like.

00:31:42.011 --> 00:31:44.352
and there's some similarities in your story and mine.

00:31:45.491 --> 00:32:06.446
I write in vivid detail about, an incident that happened with my father and me, which I won't describe here, just tell you about it, but it symbolizes the beginning of the arc of the story with my father and I, where he basically, sucker punches me and my head hits a chair and Begins to bleed.

00:32:07.106 --> 00:32:11.817
And anyway, the scene is described at the beginning, very beginning of the book.

00:32:13.217 --> 00:32:17.396
And it kicks things off and shows my relationship with him.

00:32:17.396 --> 00:32:20.287
I was always tense with him.

00:32:20.326 --> 00:32:21.196
He was violent.

00:32:21.207 --> 00:32:27.416
I had to always be at least until I was 13, very mindful of what space he was in, what sort of mood he was in.

00:32:27.711 --> 00:32:27.932
Yep.

00:32:27.942 --> 00:32:32.912
Could I trust him, and where is he really at, do I need to be really quiet now?

00:32:33.261 --> 00:32:37.432
Do I need to not be seen for a while just in case he's, he's predictable.

00:32:37.961 --> 00:32:39.122
Did you have any siblings?

00:32:39.821 --> 00:32:42.592
I had a sister and a younger, much younger brother.

00:32:42.592 --> 00:32:42.991
Yes.

00:32:43.051 --> 00:32:43.352
Okay.

00:32:43.352 --> 00:32:46.692
And was he violent towards your mother and your siblings as well?

00:32:46.882 --> 00:32:47.781
Oh, okay.

00:32:48.531 --> 00:32:51.311
Here comes the second part of the story, Louis.

00:32:51.392 --> 00:32:57.392
So when I was, again, I'll fast forward and just let's say that it was always tense with my dad.

00:32:58.541 --> 00:33:06.991
But when I was 18, I had just come out of the army and, my parents went out, I was living at home still.

00:33:07.372 --> 00:33:16.751
My parents went out, they went to see a film about, The Sound of Music was the film, and it, as you know, it's about Austria.

00:33:16.821 --> 00:33:48.382
It takes place in Austria, around the Second World War time, and my mother had never seen any footage of her home country since she'd come to live in South Africa, and she was very upset by it, by seeing this film, and they came back into the house, and I'll just, I won't go into all the details, but my father beat my mother up and I ran into their section of the house and I intervened and my father, I got into a really pretty bad fight.

00:33:48.451 --> 00:33:48.791
Sure.

00:33:48.892 --> 00:33:51.701
And, my father, the family broke up at that point.

00:33:51.951 --> 00:33:54.636
My father left and my mother blamed me.

00:33:55.826 --> 00:34:02.396
So I was alienated from both my father and my mother for different reasons.

00:34:03.267 --> 00:34:07.267
And, I was extremely unhappy.

00:34:07.717 --> 00:34:12.757
And then I had a separation from my father, real complete cutoff for 16 years.

00:34:13.246 --> 00:34:21.746
During this time, I went overseas and I, I told, I mentioned to you about going to Israel and then out to Vancouver and Canada and so on.

00:34:23.086 --> 00:34:33.277
And As the kismet part of the book would have it and kismet means fate meant to be in Hebrew.

00:34:33.277 --> 00:34:36.956
It's the shared meant to be, God's grace.

00:34:40.387 --> 00:34:45.956
Unspoken meaning, but that's what kismet means.

00:34:45.956 --> 00:34:50.306
It's a Middle Eastern concept, and it's found in Turkish, Arabic and in Hebrew.

00:34:50.686 --> 00:34:59.476
It's all of the Middle Eastern religions, and tribes have a version of it, and it really means a just portion.

00:34:59.777 --> 00:35:03.067
So it's similar to karma in a way, but it's different.

00:35:03.286 --> 00:35:07.496
There's an element that you don't understand why things are coming to you.

00:35:07.856 --> 00:35:09.056
they just arrive.

00:35:09.396 --> 00:35:14.867
And then only later may you, understand of like, wow, that was kind of unseen hand here.

00:35:15.697 --> 00:35:24.847
So, what I'm about to tell you, it fits into the kismet side of the third part of my book, which is about the kismet in my life.

00:35:24.887 --> 00:35:29.086
And let me say it this way so you can really understand it.

00:35:30.907 --> 00:35:32.766
I mentioned that I dropped out of college.

00:35:32.766 --> 00:35:41.847
I had less than two years of college, but I'd written some books they seem kind of youthful looking back at them now, but at the time, I was pretty proud of them.

00:35:42.606 --> 00:35:49.427
And one day I was, we'd come to live in Amherst, my wife and I and our two kids I was a struggling writer.

00:35:49.427 --> 00:35:57.476
I wasn't, making any money, really worried about how am I going to make ends meet I've got a young family and the money isn't exactly flowing in.

00:35:58.186 --> 00:36:16.362
And, one day I'm walking in with my dog, in a cemetery close by to my house, and I run into this old guy, he's also got a dog, and he says, I'm your next door neighbor, and he introduces himself, and it turns out that he's a Princeton University professor, and he says, what are you up to?

00:36:16.362 --> 00:36:17.161
What are you doing?

00:36:17.161 --> 00:36:24.202
I tell him, well, I'm a writer, and I wrote this in this book, And I founded, co founded a yoga community in Vancouver.

00:36:24.612 --> 00:36:26.512
so he says, I'd like to see one of your books.

00:36:27.052 --> 00:36:31.242
So I brought him the book that I was most proud of, which was called the marriage and family book.

00:36:32.032 --> 00:36:35.061
And I brought him the book and he took it and he read it.

00:36:35.251 --> 00:36:37.922
And we met a few days later, again in the cemetery.

00:36:38.152 --> 00:36:39.652
And he says, I really liked your book.

00:36:39.661 --> 00:36:42.371
He says, have you thought about going back to school?

00:36:43.061 --> 00:36:45.402
And I said, I'm 33 years old.

00:36:45.402 --> 00:36:46.641
I can't go back to school.

00:36:47.231 --> 00:36:49.481
And he says, I'm not talking about undergraduate school.

00:36:49.481 --> 00:36:50.862
I'm talking about graduate school.

00:36:51.231 --> 00:36:53.061
I said I'd have less than two years of college.

00:36:53.371 --> 00:37:00.822
He says, I'm going to give you the number of the Dean at the University of Massachusetts, and I'm going to call her myself, but I want you to call her and let's just see what happens.

00:37:01.266 --> 00:37:13.947
So to cut a long story short, I was given admission to the University of Massachusetts into the graduate school, and I got a master's and got a doctorate without having an undergraduate degree.

00:37:14.586 --> 00:37:15.177
Oh, really?

00:37:15.327 --> 00:37:15.746
Wow.

00:37:15.746 --> 00:37:16.237
Wow.

00:37:16.447 --> 00:37:17.177
Yeah, that's right.

00:37:17.617 --> 00:37:17.967
Amazing.

00:37:18.706 --> 00:37:19.277
Yes.

00:37:19.657 --> 00:37:27.112
So, I was great school too, that I, on the day that I literally got the signature on my dissertation, I was now a Dr.

00:37:27.112 --> 00:37:33.786
Chandler I said, my dad would just absolutely, he would be shocked and amazed.

00:37:33.786 --> 00:37:39.097
Here's his son, the one that he sent into the interland of South Africa, South Africa, because he failed Latin.

00:37:40.077 --> 00:37:42.657
And here's his son, who's now a doctor.

00:37:42.657 --> 00:37:42.717
Yeah.

00:37:42.956 --> 00:37:44.367
A master's and a doctorate.

00:37:44.746 --> 00:37:46.976
Did he ever, is, did he live to.

00:37:47.556 --> 00:37:48.027
Learn that.

00:37:48.586 --> 00:37:49.297
I will tell you.

00:37:49.677 --> 00:37:49.987
Yeah.

00:37:50.467 --> 00:37:51.706
I called South Africa.

00:37:51.876 --> 00:37:57.496
I called his business and they said, sorry, your father's in the United States.

00:37:57.496 --> 00:37:58.146
He's not here.

00:37:58.166 --> 00:38:00.016
He's in the United States on a business trip.

00:38:00.387 --> 00:38:04.286
Now this in itself, just that information was completely mind blowing.

00:38:04.327 --> 00:38:07.637
My father rarely ever left South Africa.

00:38:07.686 --> 00:38:10.217
So again, cut a long story short.

00:38:10.577 --> 00:38:14.376
I called him, we arranged to meet in New York city and we met.

00:38:14.896 --> 00:38:18.867
And we had this meeting and finally, eventually his wife said, okay.

00:38:19.407 --> 00:38:26.817
and she got along with my wife and my kids and they all went off and my dad and I were left alone for the first time in 16 years.

00:38:27.016 --> 00:38:30.266
And there had been a lot of tension between us, believe me, violent tension.

00:38:30.626 --> 00:38:34.146
I said to him, I said, dad, I'm carrying around a lot of baggage about the past.

00:38:35.157 --> 00:38:36.626
And he didn't skip a beat.

00:38:36.626 --> 00:38:41.487
And He says, if you want to have a relationship with me, it will have to begin on this day forward.

00:38:41.717 --> 00:38:44.947
He says, I'm not interested in doing a postmortem of the past.

00:38:46.452 --> 00:38:49.541
But to myself, I said, Well, I had a doctorate in psychology.

00:38:50.302 --> 00:38:57.641
Like, whoa, I'm gonna have to set aside all my training, which is basically says, you can process your stuff with a person.

00:38:58.081 --> 00:39:02.001
And I realized I'm going to have to do this inside myself if I want peace here.

00:39:03.001 --> 00:39:04.581
So I made the deal with him.

00:39:04.851 --> 00:39:07.021
And we went forward 15 years.

00:39:08.101 --> 00:39:21.961
And I don't want to tell you what happened at the end, Louis, because it's very, very dramatic, but that's all I want to say is we had in pretty good years, really quite good years, and with a very, very dramatic and positive ending.

00:39:22.512 --> 00:39:22.871
Excellent.

00:39:22.871 --> 00:39:23.547
Okay.

00:39:23.547 --> 00:39:31.052
And it's in the book, and the reason I'm not trying to be funny about the ending, I just want to kind of, it's pretty sacred, really, and it should be read.

00:39:31.842 --> 00:39:32.262
Excellent.

00:39:32.402 --> 00:39:33.831
Yeah, all the more reason to read it.

00:39:34.271 --> 00:39:34.481
Yeah.

00:39:34.481 --> 00:39:34.871
Thank you.

00:39:35.202 --> 00:39:35.501
Thank you for that.

00:39:35.501 --> 00:39:37.521
So that's basically the arc with my dad.

00:39:37.532 --> 00:39:38.632
It's what happened with us.

00:39:39.001 --> 00:39:39.351
Yeah.

00:39:39.782 --> 00:39:42.492
I think you teased us to want to go and read the book.

00:39:42.862 --> 00:39:46.577
Let's put Wayfinder 4.

00:39:47.067 --> 00:39:47.586
Okay.

00:39:47.836 --> 00:39:48.137
All right.

00:39:48.137 --> 00:39:52.016
What do you want to know about a book that I recommend?

00:39:52.016 --> 00:39:55.336
Well, may I sort of break protocol and recommend three books?

00:39:55.606 --> 00:39:55.976
Sure.

00:39:56.056 --> 00:40:02.606
Because, okay, the first one is, The Power of Now, which you may certainly be aware of.

00:40:04.867 --> 00:40:24.166
The second book is, Loving What Is, Byron Kane, and the third book is Still Here, and this is perhaps for, people that are more in my sort of age where they're thinking about what's next, not necessarily on this plane, but Still Here by Ram Dass is a wonderful book.

00:40:24.666 --> 00:40:25.786
It's still here?

00:40:26.166 --> 00:40:27.077
One's attitude.

00:40:27.077 --> 00:40:27.916
Still here.

00:40:29.387 --> 00:40:31.956
Still here by Ram Dass.

00:40:32.166 --> 00:40:32.556
Okay.

00:40:34.706 --> 00:40:35.137
Thank you.

00:40:35.206 --> 00:40:44.157
What about, is there a hack or a shortcut that you can recommend to people to help them just do better in life that hopefully doesn't involve the little blue pill?

00:40:48.782 --> 00:41:03.981
I'll tell you something that, a question that was given to me by one of my mentors at a crucial point in my development and it had to do when I was working with other people, with people, with teams, with leaders.

00:41:04.271 --> 00:41:05.382
The question was.

00:41:06.021 --> 00:41:08.702
what's the desired result of this interaction?

00:41:09.422 --> 00:41:11.132
What's the desired result here?

00:41:11.702 --> 00:41:13.192
what are you really aiming for?

00:41:13.402 --> 00:41:16.242
What do you really want in this interaction?

00:41:17.762 --> 00:41:19.121
And get clear about that.

00:41:19.271 --> 00:41:25.052
And then once you're clear on the desired result you want, work backwards to where you are.

00:41:27.271 --> 00:41:27.572
Excellent.

00:41:29.771 --> 00:41:32.601
What about a piece of advice for your younger self?

00:41:34.661 --> 00:41:36.271
I could have used a lot of advice.

00:41:36.391 --> 00:41:51.271
I tell you, the one piece of advice if given to me in a loving way, if I were told that I didn't have to do anything, I didn't have to prove anything that I, just of myself was lovable.

00:41:51.592 --> 00:41:52.492
You are lovable.

00:41:53.052 --> 00:42:03.282
If I could have known that, if that could have been transmitted to me by a caring mentor or adult, it would have meant a tremendous amount because I had the opposite belief.

00:42:03.802 --> 00:42:11.572
I believe that because of all of, what everything that had happened to me and how I dealt with all these things, that I was anything but lovable.

00:42:12.452 --> 00:42:19.961
So that's what I, if I had to, if you had to say, in retrospect, if you could have said something to your younger self, well, that would have been pretty, pretty cool.

00:42:20.351 --> 00:42:20.681
Yeah.

00:42:21.132 --> 00:42:23.192
To know that, to really know that and take it in.

00:42:24.061 --> 00:42:24.342
Yeah.

00:42:24.371 --> 00:42:33.021
And me, by the way, it took me, took me many, many, many years to believe that, to actually believe it, given, given my background.

00:42:33.572 --> 00:42:33.902
Dr.

00:42:33.902 --> 00:42:38.351
Chandler, what about a big opportunity that you see out there in the world right now?

00:42:38.976 --> 00:42:39.907
Out there in the world.

00:42:40.117 --> 00:42:45.856
Oh God, boy, maybe you're pursuing.

00:42:46.036 --> 00:42:49.666
I've never felt this sad about the world as I do right now, really.

00:42:50.266 --> 00:42:51.077
I really do.

00:42:51.887 --> 00:43:01.496
I'm very concerned about the world, but I would say that, I think that the only thing that I can do as a person, as an individual person is work on myself.

00:43:02.391 --> 00:43:15.112
If I'm working on myself, if I'm centering, if I'm getting centered, then my actions are going to come out of a compassionate and more likely to come out of a compassionate and loving place.

00:43:15.851 --> 00:43:30.512
And since I want more love in the world, and since I believe that love and cooperation are the answer, and I've spent, my entire adult life working with teaching people how to basically collaborate and cooperate together in teams and so on.

00:43:31.061 --> 00:43:43.711
I think that working on oneself and really taking responsibility, I mean, if I'm having a fight with my wife, it's very, very hard to step back and say, wait a minute, what am I putting out here?

00:43:43.882 --> 00:43:48.452
How am I increasing the tension here in this simple interaction with her?

00:43:48.811 --> 00:43:49.101
Yeah.

00:43:49.692 --> 00:43:55.331
To really to step back and still step into myself and take responsibility for where you are now.

00:43:55.391 --> 00:43:56.782
What is your body telling you?

00:43:57.467 --> 00:43:58.956
Work, work with yourself.

00:43:58.956 --> 00:43:59.586
Get centered.

00:43:59.597 --> 00:44:01.367
Do whatever it takes to get centered.

00:44:01.586 --> 00:44:06.817
If you can't, leave temporarily until you go for a walk in nature.

00:44:07.036 --> 00:44:08.916
Do something to change the subject.

00:44:09.177 --> 00:44:10.336
Let some time pass.

00:44:10.516 --> 00:44:11.237
Come back.

00:44:11.586 --> 00:44:12.237
Try again.

00:44:13.697 --> 00:44:14.237
I love that.

00:44:14.637 --> 00:44:20.367
I'll say, I think working on ourselves is something that we can control.

00:44:20.887 --> 00:44:34.766
Yes, and by focusing on that, they're that's something I think a lot of the concern for example that You have often and that we all get comes from focusing on things that we can't control, right?

00:44:35.106 --> 00:44:38.487
And so then when we do work on ourselves that takes away a lot of concern, right?

00:44:38.536 --> 00:44:53.306
Yes, and I would also argue that you gave a lot more a bigger answer there Well, you talked about love and collaboration I would argue based on your response that collaboration is a big opportunity I think we have a opportunity in this world for just a lot more collaboration, right?

00:44:53.637 --> 00:45:02.061
Absolutely And you know, Louis was so amazing what I've seen, not only in the United States, I've seen this everywhere in the world, many different countries.

00:45:02.731 --> 00:45:06.922
People, even at high levels, really are not very good at it.

00:45:07.161 --> 00:45:08.061
They have a lot to learn.

00:45:08.871 --> 00:45:09.452
It's amazing.

00:45:09.871 --> 00:45:10.211
Yeah.

00:45:10.581 --> 00:45:12.152
That's a whole nother topic on itself.

00:45:12.152 --> 00:45:20.632
I'm very fortunate to get a lot of great authors on this show and some of them send me their books, some of them don't, but I don't have the chance to read them all.

00:45:20.661 --> 00:45:23.481
At first when I started getting authors, I was trying to read the book beforehand.

00:45:23.481 --> 00:45:29.972
Now I just, the bandwidth isn't there, but yours is one I'm going to order and I'm going to read May I send you a copy?

00:45:29.972 --> 00:45:32.302
If you give me your address, I'll be happy to send you a copy.

00:45:32.362 --> 00:45:33.442
Oh, I would love to.

00:45:33.442 --> 00:45:33.922
Thank you.

00:45:34.192 --> 00:45:39.242
Yeah, but I would love to, have you back on once I read it, because I think your story is fascinating.

00:45:39.311 --> 00:45:45.112
And I think, there's a lot there that's very deep and I'd love to have a deeper conversation.

00:45:45.181 --> 00:45:46.342
I think you'd enjoy the book.

00:45:46.342 --> 00:45:47.351
Honestly, I'm not just saying that.

00:45:48.231 --> 00:45:48.692
Thank you.

00:45:49.181 --> 00:45:49.842
So Dr.

00:45:49.842 --> 00:45:54.391
Chandler, if people want to get this book or want to know any more about you, how could they find you?

00:45:55.197 --> 00:45:58.637
Okay, they can find me at, michaelshandler.

00:45:58.677 --> 00:46:07.686
com is my website, and everything they need to get in touch with me is there, and if I may, this is what my book looks like.

00:46:08.067 --> 00:46:08.416
Okay.

00:46:09.327 --> 00:46:09.706
Excellent.

00:46:09.746 --> 00:46:11.896
And it's available on Amazon and everything as well, right?

00:46:11.896 --> 00:46:15.717
Available on Amazon, Barnes Noble, books a million.

00:46:16.347 --> 00:46:16.737
Excellent.

00:46:16.996 --> 00:46:17.367
Thank you.

00:46:18.047 --> 00:46:21.237
Michael, yeah, like I said, it's really been a pleasure having you here.

00:46:21.766 --> 00:46:22.907
You got quite the story.

00:46:22.907 --> 00:46:23.836
I really enjoyed it.

00:46:25.536 --> 00:46:34.692
We may have to have a longer form episode in the future, perhaps after I read it and love to, have a deeper discussion on it.

00:46:35.141 --> 00:46:37.692
Once we're off recording, will you give me your address so I can send you?

00:46:37.711 --> 00:46:38.222
Absolutely.

00:46:38.731 --> 00:46:39.521
Yeah, absolutely.

00:46:39.992 --> 00:46:40.942
Thank you so much, Dr.

00:46:40.942 --> 00:46:41.251
Chandler.

00:46:46.021 --> 00:46:47.782
We hope you've enjoyed The Wayfinder Show.

00:46:47.931 --> 00:46:52.152
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00:46:52.442 --> 00:46:56.692
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00:46:57.351 --> 00:46:58.652
We'll catch you on the next episode.