In January of 2023, I had the great honor of conversing with an extraordinary man, Dr. David Martin.
I have yet to encounter another individual who wields a genius-level intellect to achieve such a wide-ranging set of remarkable accomplishments, from developing the field of computational linguistic genomics to profoundly transforming governments, businesses, and personal relationships in over 120 countries. To me, David is not just a genius and a social innovator, but a role model – a deeply caring human whose vision for humanity gives me hope for our future. To get a sense of David, watch him speaking in his Future Dreaming video.
My 35-minute conversation with David occurred at the end of his week-long 12 Senses workshop. In his quest to share what it means to fully live as a whole human, David guided us in understanding and developing the 12 cranial nerves that have been largely forgotten or ignored in modern society.
One of the primary reasons I attended his workshop was to gain insights into how the 12 senses relate to nighttime dreaming. Indeed, when we sleep at night, many aspects of our nervous system have a direct effect on the nature and quality of our dreaming.
On the last night of the 12 Senses workshop, David’s wife Kim organized a dance party. In a room adjacent to the dance room, David and I were sitting at a table with a large group of people gathering around us.
Before one of the workshop facilitators, Amanda, began recording our conversation, I explained my Vibrant Planet project, a global community that utilizes nighttime dreaming for individual and collective transformation. I mentioned how VibrantPlanet.com will interconnect and illuminate dreams shared by participants based on the felt or subjective states expressed in their dreams. This feature places each felt state in a dialectic or a dialogue with its opposite, such as fear and courage or confusion and clarity.
At the heart of my dialectics lives love and loss, or the fundamental experience of connecting and disconnecting. Love, I posited to David, is no different from the atomic valence that connects an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom to form the greater union of H2O, or water.
David responded by saying that it’s not love that creates the union. He said that “love” is an illusion of the human mind.
Amanda’s recording begins here
Anthony:
What is pure love then? There is something there. What is the human experience?
David:
No, no there is pure source? Love is a judgment of an energy.
Anthony:
Okay?
David:
And any judgment of energy is not source coherent.
Anthony:
How do we classify these emotions though?
David:
Yeah, well, that’s the problem. The whole purpose of the course was to actually blast all those apart. The minute we actually say we have an emotion, we’ve already dismissed something dimensionally in our 12 senses. Because the “I Am”, the whole purpose of that 12th cranial nerve, the I Am.
What is that? That is when I have the ability to fully broadcast the complete essence of what I am, and then you for whatever reason have the impulse that goes: Hey, connected to that we “are”, and then we “enable”. So what’s happened is we’re moving into a space where the more we have pure signal of the I Am statement, the more we can actually be sending out a clear signal that the other person is picking up and going, oh my god, that I Am and Me I Am, we come together so the We Are can do stuff that doesn’t diminish anything.
And here’s where the problem comes in. This is a problem for you right now. The problem is, if oxygen says, hey on my outer ring I have six electrons and I want eight. Let me go take one of your electrons, because I have an outer shell (that can take it). My model just got destroyed. If oxygen said to hydrogen, give me your electron. We’d still get water but we get a hydroxide that burns things.
Because the oxygen is taking and not becoming its essence and sharing its full essence with full essence. If I actually go, I’m gonna take an electron, and then what I do is I create an isotope. And if I created an isotope, it’s unstable. It decays.
Anthony:
It’s not true union.
David:
It’s not true union. Now, the illusion in the moment is you go, oh, it’s connected therefore there’s a union but there isn’t a union. Because union never happened. Because the only way it worked was somebody had to give up energy. That’s not love. That’s not connection. That’s actually predation, and that’s parasitic, and it’s a bunch of other things.
So that’s why when people talk about this with ‘love is the answer’ and ‘love is . . .’ No it isn’t.
Pure identity, not illusion, pure identity. That means you fully functioning with all the things you have, with all the insights and with all the pains and with all the joys and all the stuff. You will attract in pure possibility from pure identity. Which will then transform the experience of the what was an individual, that’s now not an individual anymore. It’s the we doing what individually we could never do.
When we say that’s happiness, joy or love, or any of these classifications., then we moved into a transactional mode, not into a pure essence mode. And the challenge is to find the pure essence.
You may love me like, ‘Hey, let’s get connected. Let’s do something together.’ But you equally may ‘love’ the polarity that you see in me that drives you away to connect with Carolyn (someone else). It’s the same impulse.
We say, well one of those is good (the one with Carolyn) because Carolyn and I are now connected. Versus, how wonderful it was, that I was so clear in my energy, that I repelled you. So you connected to the next person. What a frickin amazing thing. Right?
That’s pure energy, not pure love. The minute I’ve decided that the only thing that love is, is the connected part, it’s bullshit. Because I may be doing nothing but a service in repelling you. Which is the purest form of energy, that says I’m not going to try to make this decay work. Because this decay was never meant to be, because we weren’t sharing that electron energy, which was the identity of one, the identity of the other, giving up nothing.
And that is what I’m doing with everything. If you diagnose where our social fabric falls apart, it’s that we have hijacked this idea of love to be something that almost borders on the edge of sacrifice, to tolerate, to put up with.
Here’s the problem. If I’ve accommodated you and you’ve accommodated me, neither one of us energetically is our pure essence. There’s something about what I’ve given up for you and something about what you’ve given up for me, has deprived both of us of who we are.
Unknown Person:
So connection instead of attaching.
David:
Well, it’s connection for purpose. Remember that decision the hydrogen is making to connect to the oxygen. That decision is saying, I want to experience a thing that in isolation, as the gas oxygen or as the gas hydrogen, I can’t experience. I would “love” to feel what it’s like to become a snowflake.
Well, oxygen can have that thought as much as it wants. But as long as hydrogen isn’t recognizing, oxygen pure and hydrogen pure – connection – now let’s go make a snowflake. If what we do is we’re aspiring to create a thing, then we’ve lost the plot.
The moment that oxygen recognizes it’s pure, and hydrogen recognizes it’s pure, now we come together and guess what? Snowflakes, rain, rainbows, waterfalls, oceans, you know, fish gills, all that shit happens. But not because we are aspiring, or because we gave up something. You didn’t give up anything.
Here’s the problem. Love as an occidental phenomenon, meaning from Greek, Roman, European derivation. It’s the Western frame. That whole idea of love has always been perverted. With principles like sacrifice, and giving up, and some form of transaction at some level. Even if the transaction is, “Hey, hang out with me and together we’ll do great things”. Bullshit.
Be Me! Be you! I see you as you, you see me as me. Let’s see what happens together.
Anthony:
That’s something, huh?
David:
And then you get the amazing thing! But the amazing thing happens, not because I was pursuing it. The amazing thing happens because I was emitting pure energy, you were emitting pure energy, and those two pure energies came together. So it’s like, let’s see where this goes. Not, let’s make a thing happen.
Anthony:
So unconditional love is the most problematic?
David:
It’s the worst form of love possible. Because what you’re doing with the word unconditional is you’re already bastardizing the principle and saying, “I’m gonna pretend like it doesn’t matter.” But you know what you’re gonna do? And by the way, no exceptions to this. Everyone who uses the term unconditional love also has unbounded resentment, period.
Because that’s the cousin of unconditional love. Because you’re gonna be, “Well, I’m the one that gives all the time, I’m the one that gives all the time.” Bullshit. You’re building a resentment pattern. And what happens over time is your unconditional love blows up. And all of a sudden you got shrapnel everywhere and people go, “Oh, what happened there?” Well, it’s the years of unconditional love baby, that’s all stacked on itself.
Anthony:
You know Dr. Gabor Mate?
David:
Yup.
Anthony:
In his new book the Myth of Normal, he says that women have an 80% higher likelihood of contracting autoimmune disease in modern society. Not traditionally, because they didn’t do this traditionally. They didn’t go the unconditional route and say we’ll take the bullshit and have it affect their bodies.
David:
Realize this: 8000 years ago, a woman chose who the king was gonna be. Not the other way around. And that’s not in one or two places. That was how humans civilized. And what was that? If you go back to Persia, you go back to all the old poetry of the Assyrians and the Mesopotamians, everybody else. What was it? It was the person, who may be selected as king, had to demonstrate their capacity to sexually pleasure the queen. But not in a superficial way. That person had to prove that they had this sensitivity of picking up the subtle energies of a woman, to the point of saying you have the capacity to sense the unknown.
And the greatest mystery was, does the Queen approve? Not of the strongest warrior out in the battlefield? Does the Queen approve of the person who can take that strength and then show up and know how to navigate her. And that’s how we used to choose our leaders. And the Queen would go, “You know, he kind of looked great, kind of Spartan, kind of hunky, but he absolutely didn’t know which end of the tool to use.
Anthony:
So you think the theory of sexual selection is the driver for human evolution.
David:
There’s no question. But the problem is what happens the minute we actually start transacting that. It’s the “What can I do to coerce you into giving me the approval that I don’t really deserve?” And by the way, that’s the vast majority of what we call relationships now. Unconditional bullshit. It’s not unconditional, because you should never tolerate anything. Not if you want authentic anything. Because the minute you go, well, I’ll tolerate that bit and I’ll tolerate that bit. You’re not tolerating, you’re stacking up a scorecard of resentment.
So that’s why I love to actually lecture on why I hate love. Because it’s so screwed up. And whether people do the Greek version of it, or the English version, or the Latin version of it, or anything else. We lost it when we stopped selecting leaders based on their ability to be approved by virtue of how they handled themselves as a complete man, or as a complete woman. The minute we decided on that compromise, to settle for that bit and settle for that bit, we lost humanity.
So it’s only been 8000 years. So it’s not like it has been that long. But where we are now is that pure essence you, and pure essence everybody else, has to be in a situation where we start recognizing that I can be sitting here and Kim (David’s wife) can be dancing her butt off in there. And what neither one of us is doing is worrying about what the other one is doing.
Because we don’t love each other. We don’t. We are in life together. And since we are in life together, we are having an experience where both of our individual lives, as full essence, are expressing something and we happen to like to do it together. But there’s not a thing about her, and you can see it, I mean if you go look at her dance. None of that is me, at all. And, none of what I do is her at all. But the wholeness of her and the wholeness of me together – freaking insanely cool. Because we do things that would not happen otherwise.
Anthony:
Thank you. You’ve given me a lot of homework, because I’ve been working on codifying human emotions in terms of . . .
David:
But that’s the thing, that’s what I’m saying – friggin torch it. If it’s a classification, it is flying in the face of one of the 12 cranial nerves.
Anthony:
But if we were to say that there’s a physics to the human experience. That these things we feel may be felt in a much more diminished way in the molecule.
David:
But the things we have as our experience are mirrored across all expressions of all energy. So that’s the reason why people sit there going, “How on earth did you access that writing from 1624?” Which is a good question. How did I know to go to the Parliament of France and 1624 to find the edict which outlawed studying the 12 senses? There’s a high degree of possibility that’s not on Wikipedia.
Unknown Person:
What was that edict?
David:
In the Parliament of France in 1624, there was the session of St. Thomas Aquinas, which actually outlawed teaching anything but Aristotle’s five senses. How on earth would a guy sitting in Charlottesville, Virginia (David) find the 1624 edict in Paris in 1624? The answer is actually tune into the executions. Follow the executions, to the place that the execution happened. See who’s standing there as executioner. See where they got their authority. See where that authority came from. And by doing that energetically you land – are you ready for this? – in the Parliament of France in 1624, and in Charlottesville, Virginia today.
That’s because energy is persistent. So that we can say it was a 1624 thing, but it isn’t. Like everything in all energy, right? Energy is persistent. It’s generative, and it is infinitely orthogonal. So guess what that means? It’s all there all the time. People ask me often, “How did you come up with the way that we’re treating hydrocarbons right now?” And I tell people, with truth. I went to the second day of creation. And people go, “You mean, metaphorically.” No, not metaphorically. I actually went to the thing that happened right after light.
Unknown Person:
Was that remote viewing?
David:
No. It’s not remote. It’s as close to me as right here. It’s not remote anything. You just go, “What’s the intention energy I’m looking for?” I’m interested in what the heck was that thing after light? That’s all I knew to look for. Tune that frequency and you find yourself on the second day of creation. And then you sit there and go what’s happening. Because as I pointed out many times, if you actually read the biblical account of creation, plants happen on day three. But the Sun is created on day four, which means plants don’t grow with photosynthesis.
They don’t. The lie is what we tell people. We tell people that the sun is required to grow plants. Well, it isn’t. Because the fourth day is when you get the stars, the Sun and everything else. So what’s light that’s not light? Well, that’s an interesting question. And to get to the answer to that you have to follow that thread. Because it’s sitting right here next to us. It’s right here. But you have to follow the thread to it, and it’s right here.
Then you go, Oh, hold on a minute. The synthesis of hydrocarbons comes from the synthesis of carbon. The synthesis of carbon we thought came from photosynthesis, which is why we’re blind to finding out what happened on the second day of creation. Because we’re not even reading our own story of our own lie that that we tell about the story. We’re not even reading it. Because when we read it, we go Oh, hold on a minute. If it took plants to decay to make hydrocarbons, and plants happen before there was a sun, then our own story tells us that it’s not photosynthesis.
Anthony:
So carbon was created inside stars.
David:
No, because what is carbon? It’s a hexagonal structure. Oh, was that six again? Did I say that again? A hexagonal structure that binds hexagonally. Because what, because the law of the order…
At this point Kim comes up to the group that’s listening to David. She is dancing and encouraging us to get on the dance floor.
David continuing:
The problem is we’re looking for the starting point. But there isn’t one.
Anthony:
What is Panpsychism to you?
David:
An illusion.
Anthony (explaining to the group):
OK so Panpsychism is that everything is conscious.
David:
But you’re classifying again.
Anthony:
Okay, help me. I want to break free…
David:
Remember, you’re classifying again. What’s consciousness? Is an iron filing conscious?
Anthony:
Yeah. Panpsychism would say yes. It has an awareness of its surroundings, which is saying…
David:
OK, so if I have an iron filing on the table and a magnet, sometimes that iron filling will jump to the magnet and sometimes it won’t. Is that because the iron filing is choosing or because the magnets choosing? Because physics says that iron is the structure and the magnet is a structure. And, according to physics, in proximity, they have to have the same effect. But they don’t. Sometimes they respond, sometimes they don’t. Which means the iron filing is making decision just like the magnet’s making decision.
But here’s the interesting problem with Panpsychism. The presumption is that there is some transactional energy happening there. Rather than saying, pure essence, unified by purpose not consciousness, sees the reason why they come into proximity…
At this point Kim comes up to the group again beaming her efferent self.
David:
After this workshop, one of the coolest things in the world is stop yourself every time you use a noun. And at least slow yourself down every time you use an adjective. Nouns are the curse of humanity. Anything that’s a classifier or anything that’s a noun is a curse of humanity. Because humanity is the doing-ness of things, not the I am a …. fill in the blank. Right, I am a son, a daughter, husband, wife or whatever. That’s the death knell of connection. What am I in this moment? Not what am I?
What is this moment? This moment is sitting down with you and saying hey, guess what? The greatest gift you can give yourself is to step away from nouns and adjectives. Give yourself a fast from nouns and give yourself a fast from classification and see what happens when you go to all verbs.
Anthony:
One time before I went to sleep, I asked my nighttime dreaming mind, what do I need to know to show up in the utmost vibrancy? And this voice, this all knowing voice in my mind kind of like you’re saying, said what you need to know to show up in the utmost vibrancy is forget everything you think you know.
David:
Right. But what you’re really being told is, forget everything that you’ve classified. Right, drop into the “is” nature of reality. Just drop in. Because then what happens is you’ll start going, “Oh my gosh, I was blinded to the everything, because I was looking for some objectified expression of reality.”
And the minute I step away from that and go, just tell me what’s the is condition, what’s the unfolding is? As long as you get a verb next, you’re great. The minute you stop yourself with a noun or with an adjective, you’re screwed.
Anthony:
OK I’ll work on that. Thank you.
David:
So here’s what I recommend. I did this and I do this relatively frequently now. But I did it first in Colorado, a week before my first date with Kim. Because it took me six months to work up the courage to even go out and date with this woman. Because it’s a, she’s way too out of my league kind of thing. And I wanted to see if I could figure out if I cared about my own life enough to run the risk of ruining hers, which is great.
So I went to a monastery in Colorado, down near Durango. And I spent a week where I gave myself a fast from words. That included all food, all everything, but a fast from words. Don’t even think. Just let is be.
You’d love this by the way. It’s a really cool Dzogchen Buddhist monastery. It’s phenomenal. And they have these little cabins on the top of a couple of mountains, and you can just go and like be entirely on your own. The coolest thing was the fast from words, meaning that you see and observe everything and you don’t name or even think about the name of a thing.
So if the wind is blowing the pine needles. Don’t think the wind is blowing the pine needles. Just watch, and listen, and experience. And never acknowledged that there is wind, and never acknowledged there’s pine needles or anything else. Just let it be, and give yourself the privilege of trying to cut the cord of the obsession of naming things.
Anthony:
And what comes out of that?
David:
The most brilliant experience of living possible. Because what happens is you start going oh my god … Like Lauren okay. (David gestures toward Lauren) We were out scavenging stuff for our river-dunking exercise. And she thought a bunch of vagrants were in the back, trying to break into the kitchen. And she sat in the window. She sat like this (David takes a regal pose) in the window looking down. She was timeless in that moment. Like timeless, you could have a Renaissance painting and she would have been in the painting. Right, she was just sitting there looking down and she had this friggin regal look. Like what are the serfs, the peasants doing down in here?
And we’re just rummaging around trying to find the pallets to put in the river. The way she sat, she had the poise, it was timeless. And when I looked up in the window, I didn’t see Lauren, the person working at Riverside. I looked up and I saw a timeless icon of a woman. That’s what I saw. And I saw the painting version of it. And I saw the sculpture version of it, and I saw every manifestation version of the essence she was poised holding. She became a caricature of essence of woman. Not Lauren, not Lauren the worker here, not anything else. She was amazing.
Unknown Person:
Yes she was.
David:
She had a dominion and it was an awesome energy. It’s like she’s lord over this space and what the hell are you doing peasants, and it was a great vibe and it was amazing thing. But if I actually said oh, it’s Lauren in the window. All of that would have just gone poof.
Anthony:
Okay. So I can I finish what happened after waking up from my dream. I said, so thanks a lot all knowing voice. All my thoughts are cages for my mind.
David:
Right.
Anthony:
So I said to myself, that means that everything I think is a cage. How am I going to think my way out of this one?
David:
But you’re not, you can’t think out of it. You have to let the expression emerge in its reality and let it be what it is. Right. So in that moment, Lauren became an iconic representation of a million things. None of which were the thing that was happening which was I was rummaging for scraps to do the river exercise. But in the moment, her poise (David looks to Lauren) and I don’t know why you even did it. I don’t even have to know why. What I knew was that there was something about the energy that she was holding. There was simultaneously for me a beautiful gift. Because I looked up and I was like wow, brilliant things just happen.
But she was getting a gift – that gift was a connection which would matter in less than 24 hours. And that connection only happened on a frequency that, if either one of us tried to script it – like if Lauren practicing, “Oh, how do I sit?” – it would have never happened. We would have tried to make something contrived that wouldn’t happen.
But in that moment, a pure energy that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t need a name. Put a connection in the field that actually didn’t even have its manifestation until 24 hours later.
Anthony:
What was that 24 hours later?
David:
Well, 24 hours later, I actually saw a thing in Lauren, which was in the tangible proper noun Lauren in her experience that moment, but had I not had the timeless woman vibe thing, whatever that was? If I hadn’t had the timeless piece of that, then I wouldn’t have had the sensitivity of giving a shit when she walked in the next day. Because, I wouldn’t have had that because that energy, where I saw her, not as an individual, but as a metaphor of something that matters to me, and matters to her. But if I didn’t have the energy connection none of that would have happened.
Okay, so my point is really simple. No nouns, no adjectives, zero.
Anthony:
Okay, I got that. See how this ties in? After the voice told me that thoughts are like cages for your mind. It said, just give them to the void and watch what shows up.
David:
Yeah, well that’s basically what I’m saying. That is what I’m saying.
Anthony:
So what do you think the void is?
David:
Well, it’s not a thing.
Anthony:
Well, I kind see it as black hole. You can have everything in it.
David:
But the black hole exists because inside absolute union, shape, and light and all the reflectance stops mattering. In pure oneness, there’s no edge at all. In true oneness, there’s a connection that doesn’t have an edge you, and an edge me. So we don’t need edges anymore, because in genuine oneness, all reflectivity goes away. Which means all need for name, shape, place, light, anything else, it all goes away.
Anthony:
And that’s the void.
David:
So a black hole is not an absence. It’s a completeness at which point nothing is required to describe it. It’s not an emptiness. It’s the completeness. It’s the union of everything, that then has no boundaries and edges.
Anthony:
So union of everything. OK, so that’s what I would think. Like all of you (gesturing toward group) are my void and I’m giving my thoughts to you.
David:
Yeah but void as an energetic term implies an absence, but it’s not an absence.
Anthony:
OK, so void is a word (noun) and maybe my dreaming is using whatever means it can to reach . . .
David:
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. I don’t have a problem with it. I’m just saying that ontologically when you get into a space of abundance, and union, what you’re going to say is, the completion of all oneness is the loss of identity, not as a (loss of) individuation. It’s a loss of identity, where I don’t have an edge, you don’t have an edge, and that togetherness is the point.
Anthony:
So is the universe using us to make something greater than ourselves?
David:
Well, I would go as far as to say that our journey in this space is our capacity in this microcosm, as a fractal of the macrocosm. Can we build and emulate the macrocosm effect that we would like to also experience? Because the fact of the matter is that Jesus’s prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven”, has always been hijacked, because that’s not what he said.
Unknown Person:
What did he say?
David:
What he said was that the condition in this plane and the condition in other planes can come into harmony, in the fullness of all of what we are…like his prayer in John (10:30), “I and the Father are one.” Right, that was what he wanted his disciples to do. He didn’t want his disciples to sit there going, “Oh, you’re more important than me.” That’s not what he wanted. He actually said I want to be one, like connected, in the way I and the Father are one. What’s that mean? Well, it means that the aspiration, that was being spoken, was actually a full union that has no identity.
Anthony:
Okay, then as a hydrogen atom and an oxygen we have to keep our complete identity.
David:
Yes, but in the fullness of all purpose, then our identity ceases to matter. Right, the hydrogen and oxygen deciding to become a water molecule, can as easily be vapor as they can be an ocean. Neither one of them cares. But all of them care about the experience.
If I don’t show up with Kim dancing I am in trouble, okay.
After thanking David, we headed to the dance floor, where the upbeat 80’s song ‘Hold on Tight’ to your dreams began to play. The song was utterly perfect for me, especially after my conversation with David. I danced with exuberance and pure joy.
The dance of life calls us to be in union. As David eludes, true union comes from beaming our authentic essence to the world. In that unscripted unfolding, each of us must hold on tight to our dreams. Hold on tight to your authentic nature and then share it with the world, so that you may truly connect and contribute to something greater than yourself.