Mustafa Matt Gross | Pathways, Plants & Psychedelics | MindTrap#68 | Mufti Abu Layth

[Music] [Music] i'm just going to just check that this is live and that the sound is coming through loud and clear let me just fire this up make sure it's all screaming across the channels are right so guys okay i can see it uh those of you just tuning in i take it you can if you can hear me just drop a

a comment ah is the audio coming through clearly uh all right so bismillah rahim is folks i've got another amazing

guest lined up for tonight's mind trap and that is our guest from florida us mustafa matt grass and we're going to be speaking about some wonderful experiences that have really just defined the spiritual path for our guest and his journey through islam and also how psychedelics have played a substantial role in that so we'll come to that in just a moment i wanted to just take out a few um i want to just take out a few um

right so i want to just take out a few seconds and just speak about something that's that's really um some disturbing matters within the uk so those of you that are aware about what's been going on in leicester within the uk i just want to share my thoughts on that just very briefly because i've seen online from different people especially certain

from non-muslim sources people blaming muslims for some of the for allegedly causing chaos and for trouble and rioting and things like this um this is completely counterfactual and so those of you that are not aware there's been some trouble brewing in the midlands within the uk um for a little while now recently in leicester and what you have is a group of hindutva

hindutva is like right wing hinduism that kind of hindu fascism right wing and just straight off the bat just making it very clear most hindus are not fascists and are not going to be right wing and this is not a representation of all hindus however there have been a number of hindus that have that appear to have recently within the last few years come to the uk come to leicester um so they're mainly

immigrants that have come here so they brought up over there they've come here on some student visas and things and what you know some however they've got here and they've really started to mirror a lot of what's going on in india the bjp sentiment so in india those who are not familiar with the politics there's a lot of this hindu mob uh that you know incidents that occur where they go around and they lynch muslims and this has been going on at least since the bjp have been in power so this last decade you you could you see a drastic

rocketing rise in these lynch mobs of hindutva that go around and they and they do things like they'll find muslims that are eating beef and attack them and obviously that's and in india muslims are a minority so what's happened is some of these people in the last maybe i don't know five years or whatever they've they've been coming over and they and they've come to leicester which has a a hindu um from the ethnic minorities it has a hindu majority and there are muslims that live in leicester also from indian um [Music]

from indian ethnicities and background mainly gujarati muslims and a few others so what they've done is these hindus that have come here they've started to reflect some of the behavior that they've been seeing in india whilst they've been there and they've started to go around and just taunt and try to traumatize and try to terrorize um local muslims so this has been happening for a while now it's not recent it's not like this has been happening for a while it's been staggered but in the last

maybe month two months this there's been a spike in these events so they for whatever reason have become quite emboldened and they've gone around and they've attacked there's there's reports of they attacked a man in his 20s a group of like 20 men with bats and sticks and they hospitalized him there was another incident and this is all within like the last month there was another incident a man 19 year old they just they would just approach men and say are you a muslim and they would just start attacking these people in mobs in groups and

um and and then there was the uh um the pakistan india cricket match and when they won that they they won uh india won they went around and found muslim sharps started yelling death to pakistan death to pakistan attacking shops and they attacked a sikh person as well assuming he was muslim and hospitalized him so you've got these mobs going around of these cowards nothing but cowards and you look at them absolutely scrawny little cowards that

are just emerging in these mo in this kind of mob herd and they're going around and just picking just isolated individuals and attacking them just because they're muslim so before i just share any further thoughts i think it's really important to just highlight look why you know this message straight off that look why can we just not live in peace that what indians and muslims i mean hindus muslims whatever you name it they've been here for you for so long i mean there hasn't been

this issue muslims don't go around attacking hindus muslims don't go around look at the muslim populations within the uk they never when pakistan lost the quicken match they never went around attacking any indian no such thing sure people may be upset that are passionate about these things but there was nothing like this you don't get muslims going around on diwali taunting and you don't get one on the you know navrati or these other festivals and celebrations muslims don't go around this and to see some comments trying to blame these incidents on muslim is appalling

now i want to say i feel that this whole incident was is so poorly managed by the authorities how could they not see this coming they are so ill-informed i mean there's reports there's video clips of um these of hundreds of these hindu hindutva men uh kind of balaclava'd up and masked up and they're marching through the streets harassing muslims they're going by like hundreds of them they're doing this protest and you've got the police there and this that you get recordings of people that are they're recording right they're saying look look that guy's got

got a stick in his hand he's he's wielding a weapon why are you not doing something and the police are not doing anything and some of the hindutva people are going past saying oh we should smash them up smash them up and the police are not doing anything and some of the police and comments are saying oh is this over a cricket match like how are you so ill-informed over what's going on in the city how can you not understand that the politics of a country that these people are from and connected to is influencing their behavior they should have been on it they should have moved in had the hindu community leaders involved had them addressing people had

them out on the streets had them sending these youth back telling them that look what on earth are you doing how dare you terrorize these muslims so that's as far i really see this as such a um and a kind of incompetence on the part of the authorities for treating this matter so lightly that muslims were being attacked they were being uh beaten up hospitalized there was a report that a schoolgirl a schoolgirl was stopped by three individuals who approached her out of the vehicle and said are you muslim and

when she said yes they tried to drag her into the car she luckily got away what on earth do these people this is this isn't india this isn't the bjp you can't just drag little muslim girls into cars and think that oh this is you know this is somehow going to be okay and and i you know i say and the authorities being so slow on this is appalling abysmal how can they let this and then you see this is the thing that the reason this was even allowed to happen up until now like let's be honest

the reason is because the city that they've been doing this in one it doesn't have a muslim population it has a very small muslim population relatively speaking and two that the muslims that are there are you know masha'allah very you know you know they they've they they have a very gentle approach and they you know very martial are very well mannered and they they are people who always tend to have a you know they which is a great thing you know they want to always resolve things by dialogue a lot of

because the muslim community is from the gujarati community mainly speaking and a lot of them are very humble brothers and humble kind of people and tabliki jamaat and um and and what that's done is it's emboldened these people to think they can come around with bats and things and just attack target off teenagers and grab little girls school girls who claim to be muslim and drag them into cars and it's like yeah what is going what are the authorities doing and you see so many of these clips and the police i'm seriously ashamed of

how the authorities have been responding to this and people saying oh this is over a cricket match no it bloody isn't over a cricket match and that shows how incompetent it is and yes so what's happened is muslims have then turned up muslims have gone down from birmingham they've gone down from other places and obviously it's you know the these people like the cowards that they are that it immediately dissipated and just disappeared into thin air and this and this isn't a kind of i'm not condoning any kind of violence or anything like this i believe that matters should always be resolved peacefully but it's

appalling to see that when people are being this isn't about words they're being targeted and beaten up with bats they're being they burnt qurans they took qurans out burning them okay people may say that's their freedom they've been hospitalizing individuals i mean beating like a crowd of 20 people battering one person with bats putting them in hospital they've beaten up several in the last few weeks they've done this trying to the you know these reports of grabbing a school girl trying to pull her into a car because she's a muslim so yes people have turned up and they've react it's natural that there's going to

then be a reaction to that you know people won't just stand and say well oh it's okay to just do this to little girls and do this like and if the authorities ain't going to defend them then people are going to defend them and i i just felt honestly so appalled by what's going on and i seriously i and i say this that this what this hindutva which is the right-wing fascist hindu extreme faction does not represent most hindus and most hindus i believe would be against this and and i uh i would you know urge these people to decry and

condemn these groups and not just because the muslims that live in your neighbor seem to be these you know sharif nice uh you know sweet gentle people that you're going to try to bully them and try to terrorize them and kidnap their girls and try to beat up the you know in the name of because of islam you know islam isn't something that so i wanted to say because it had me i couldn't believe like what i was seeing on the things it had been uh yeah may allah keep all people safe i mean i make dua and i say this because i've spoken to people

firsthand that i've witnessed all of these that i've witnessed many of these kind of things that live in leicester i've spoken to people from there i've been seeing things you can see clips you can see recordings i just hope that the you know this that the authorities step in they do their job competently that they've realized that the high authorities that look you this this is not just this is not some cricket match this is fueled sectarian hatred that is coming imported from india from the bjp and this is another reminder that you can't let international things go on

like unnoticed or just ignored when muslims when people were raising humanitarian people there's been reports of people saying right now non-muslims european uh global researchers you have a very popular article by one of the first people who predicted the rwanda genocide he's written that he is now warning the world about a genocide that is going to take place in india against muslims people ain't taking heed and they just think well it's not our problem but then this is how we you see when you ignore and and keeping in mind that you know many of these powers are involved in

metal meddling always in political affairs for their own gain but when certain things happen over there and you ignore it and this genocide and you don't you get involved through the united nations and you don't try to bring you know security council resolutions and you don't do these things then it seeps into these other communities and then it's you know you have these ramifications and then obviously people have taken up you know they've got took a stance but this is a stance of self-defense that muslims have taken and obviously these people you know like the cowards that they are have disappeared nowhere to be seen so

may allah keep everybody safe restore a calm and you know just just a love like let people be you know just what seriously what you know people celebrate your festivals your things no muslims have never attacked people or criticized people for celebrating that be be you you know do you just let you know there's a saying live and let live may allah safeguard and protect all the vulnerable people i mean and bring these these

these thugs to justice i mean i just want her to say that shook him right um guys coming back to the mind trap sorry i because it was just that was really used a lot of few people had been messaging me and i want to share my thoughts on guys um all right okay shukran those of you tuning in click like click share spread the love people speaking of love and a spiritual path our esteemed guest tonight mustafa matt grass

a healing coach a spiritualist somebody who converted to islam navigated through his journey and also encountered and researched experientially and and through his just on information as well the path of psychedelics and how that how that how that ties in with his um his his spiritual strengthening within islam so people all the way from florida u.s i bring to you much

cross avraha assalamu alaikum i'm good i'm good i'm just am i pronouncing is it grass it is grass here gross oh you see i avoided saying that because i didn't want it to sound gross [Laughter]

oh oh right okay well i'm here so i was just saying i i avoided saying gross thinking you know i don't want it to sound gross but but it's it's it is gross macros mustafa macros so shukran mustafa masala and i want to first of all thank you for taking the time out uh for you know to be with us all right mustafa do in it yes yes so guys yes it's coming through so people once again uh uh mustafa matt grass right here from florida us

just helping us navigate through some of his journey on how he got to where he is today along the way embracing islam and and other things but from the from from the get-go you were born and raised you said in yeah i was born in maryland uh raised in florida since i was about five years old so um yeah um i learned about islam through my wife uh i did mention just now that we just had our 22nd wedding anniversary on the 15th oh wow and that's where i said to those people who think love is dead huh

but you know but uh it was it's it's god that has kept us together without without allah like i don't know how people divine intervention right i mean see that's that's a discussion in itself then that it takes divine intervention to keep the marriage going no we're missing that's yeah but yeah so you know when i was uh coming out of my high school years um you know because i i met her when i was probably

she was 18 i was 19 you know and uh i was really coming out of a sort of very low point in my life okay um you know i was you know i was into you know abusing some drugs you know in my last couple of years of high school you were or you weren't i was i was oh you were yeah i was okay we haven't had we have an admission move in moving task force one [Laughter] you know so i just i got had got to a very low point in my in my life and um but like alhamdulillah i have i have

something within me that it doesn't let me cross certain lines you know like i always felt like when i look back on those years like i felt like god was there with me the whole time i could have made worse decisions than i made you know i found myself in certain situations where i made the the good choice rather than a bad choice so i kind of started to kind of come out of that um so as i was kind of like coming out of that is sort of when i when i met her and uh when she was 19 she had sort of a spiritual rebirth and she got the opportunity to go make hedge with her grandparents

and so she went she made head she come she came back and she was literally like like transformed um because she was living the life of a normal american person she got sort of she was living in foster care at the time so she got this opportunity to sort of live an american lifestyle because she had grown up very very strict in islam and so she started to she started to um sort of speak to all her friends about god okay you know she didn't really like say she was speaking about islam or anything like that but she was just really speaking about

you know what got in her life and um so she um she was actually closer with i had a roommate at the time she was close with she was like closer with my roommate she actually and she was going through her phone book you know we had like phone books at the time this is back we're the same age with 40 43 yeah it's 1979 yes 1979 people same age so back then yep i remember the phone book days we used to have one here at the yellow pages i don't know if that's yeah yeah you have the american absolutely that was like something you could hit somebody over the head with and it would

they would be out you know pay phones and whatnot you know so yeah so she came over to speak with him and subhanallah he was on the phone with his girlfriend and so she spoke with me she's like would you like to go for a walk so we just went out the house we went for a walk down the street and we're talking and she's like i'd like to do something with you she and she said i'd like to hold your hands and and and and pray and recite some quran for you oh wow okay so she held my hands and she recited i believe she recited uh

ito corsi and you know ahad and uh ability and you know the last three disorders of the quran and so she wrote those and she's she's i mean she teaches children like how to read quran and um she's a beautiful recitation martial law and so so she's reading and she's singing these words and i just i just felt like this something lifted off of me i just felt like something lifted off my soul or or just a lightness you know and that was pretty much it we were you know

we became best friends after that so we became best friends we were hanging out you know and then at some uh probably it wasn't six or eight months later we came to this point where uh we realized that we just couldn't be friends anymore we had to get married so we just decided to get married so i went to my house how old are you at this time like 20 uh this time i'm 21.

21. okay yeah i'm 21. so i went to my mother and i'm like we we want to get but we want to get married tomorrow like right away because it was like a situation where we didn't want to be like in sin you know like we wanted to do the right thing and get married before our relationship went too far you know so um you know so she's like well you have to sort of she wasn't she didn't have a super close relationship with her father this time but he also lived in florida and so she's like you need to ask his for his for my hand from him so she still like had that respect with her father that take

his blessings yeah but at that time i i didn't have education i didn't have a good idea job or anything like that you know muslim parent fathers like you know they want to know did you know what who muslims were and did you know during that time during that six or eight months i was like i was learning about you know i had i had done prayers with her i you know had i was learning about islam and what it was and and she had told me about you know we believe you know jesus isn't isn't god but he's a prophet and you know this it really made sense to me were you coming from a christian background at the time yes yes you were

okay i mean uh my mom well my dad is very religious uh my mom wasn't so i didn't live with my dad you know growing up um but he um but yeah but i come yeah i come from a christian background and um so i knew you know i know about christianity and and i was always a believer in god but when she was telling me about like like the oneness of god that like really made sense i mean it just makes sense right i mean um so i just started learning and praying and i had i had a few you know spiritual experiences that kind of led me to to know that there's truth in

this um would you just would you were you a curious mind when it came to religion growing up as a teenager i had more of a curious mind when i was younger okay like when i was like in elementary school age i mean i did go to a christian school at that time up through fifth grade um and i do remember because i used to spend the summers with my grandparents and they would take me to church every sunday and i do remember there was a time where i was i i wanted to start reading the bible so my grandma gave me a bible so i sort of started reading it i just had

this like sort of inclination to do that you know um but then you know through middle school and high school i was just a normal kid i didn't really i didn't really think about that stuff too much and um i did have i did have some experiences um in high school that sort of opened me up to spirituality and and realizing there's more uh well you know because i used to what would you say that that was that well so

probably uh when i was 17 i had a an experience with um a drug called mdma and that is like it's something that's sort of they they use it um full therapy they do yeah they use it for therapy for ptsd ptsd and stuff like that it's what it does very effective in clinical studies like for ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder yeah yeah and i think it's even um it's going to be approved by the fda at some point i know it's in and gone through several stages i think it's in its final stage right now i think it's in stage uh three of the clinical trials

in in anyways if you follow a channel called maps m-a-p-s um they have a youtube channel that it's they're the ones who are doing all the studies and um if you want more information on that but what what that did it like it opened it just blew my heart right open like i had this like amazing experience of just this love for all of humanity and i couldn't i couldn't grasp like why humanity is not just in love with humanity like that's just that's the only thing i i could think of and i'm like i was just like loving

nature and loving everybody and just like wow there's like there's more to this you know that's like sort of what started my spiritual journey that's called a an impathogen for that reason isn't it they one of the names that they give that right right is an in pathogen because it just expands the empathy you have for humanities in it and yeah but um so that journey kept going and then um when you start to abuse something then it it has the negative effects right um but you know like i used to listen to hip-hop and and you know i mean i still like hip-hop

but i had to stop listening to it all together at that time because it just the the sort of the vibe the vibe of it wasn't um and there was all there was sort of different new kinds coming out and people were listening it just didn't uh it didn't resonate with me anymore so i sort of um but you know so anyway so as i'm sort of coming out of that i meet my wife i learn about islam i accept islam and then um yes was it a simple thing to just accept islam or was it were you kind of ready for it when the time came or was the uh i was definitely like i was definitely ready when i met her

for something something new what an ambassador see this is this is how it spread people through love and i you know and like i was saying before like god saved me from a lot of things like bad things that could have happened or bad situations and i was like i feel like i was being saved for this moment you know so that i could come to my wife you know with more purity and more you know readiness and and and um and uh yeah so that's sort of where it started um yeah we ended up

um well her her father didn't didn't give me his blessing oh he didn't this is turning into a bollywood movie all of a sudden but then uh her grandfather had to basically marry her like he was the one who you vetoed and i said well i'm the dad's dad so [Laughter] yeah but i mean it was her mom's father but oh well it just sounded it just sounded better to say that yeah right um yeah yeah so i mean

we were discussing before we came on you know it just the whole the whole situation just meeting her learning about islam and then like i started to read the quran and realizing that this wow this must be from god and then like going into the message for the first time it was just it was surreal i guess that's the word it was it was just so surreal and just the arabic calligraphy and even just like opening the the arabic quran and looking at it it's just like that's a beautiful honesty you know it's just like enchanting yeah a beautifully enchanting effect yeah it's like you can't i could you know i couldn't explain it and at

that time you know there wasn't that many converts in my area like i met i met a guy who had been muslim for 25 years and he was older and and that you know and maybe like one other um one other guy or something older guy but nobody else is this the the time that uh no this would have been so people like sherham's yusuf would have been probably on the scene around the is that florida as well he's from california california sorry california yeah but he was a huge inspiration for for me like i didn't know about him at first but after i became muslim and people

were giving me information and lectures like videotapes to watch and um he was you know i got i was watching some of his early stuff in the 90s and yeah yeah i remember them and finding out the good old days well i said you went off to study then oh okay so what was that later later later oh that was late well we ended up going to south america and staying down there for a while and that's when where our first son was conceived and then we ended up in oh we ended up in uh canada and then back down to florida and then we got

opportunity to go to the islands to teach at a islamic school down there so we were down there for three years where's the island what do you mean by uh saint croix oh right okay well okay yeah um and it was interesting because there was a fam like there's these families on the island the arab families um they owned like some of the supermarkets and gas stations and stuff like that and so we got to know them because we taught their children in school and so this

one of the families they went to make omra and the one of the sisters as she was making umrah she's thinking to herself we have to send somebody okay like i want to pay for someone this is her mind there so she comes back and comes back and she comes and offers us to pay for our trip to umrah so we went for the last 10 days of ramadan uh so that was like pretty amazing and this is the whole story of how it happened you know because we were still we they were paying for a ticket from new york to saudi arabia but we didn't have the money to get to new york you know but

the lord works in mysterious ways my wife could tell you the story much better because she was more on the front line of that situation and but it was just a miracle that we ended up getting all the money for it and going and making umrah and i was sitting up in the uh up on the top floor and i was talking to this brother and he spoke very good english and he happened to be a libyan brother and he was you know he was a dentist and i was telling him how my dream is to go study so he's like oh i have extra houses you know come stay in the house you'll have you know you'll live for free and i'll get you into school and everything and um

i was like great wow you know subhanallah like as a miracle and so we get back and anyways end up not being able to get the visa to go so that was kind of disappointing so we're in florida at the time and we're just kind of like what are we going to do like we kind of put our whole life on hold you know we we quit our jobs in the island to because we're going to go study and um then we've you know we found out that my wife's uncle actually had a house in egypt and we found out that egypt is kind of like the place to go to go study arabic back then there was a huge high i think with egypt there still is a lot of

people going there to study if they want to study arabic but i remember initially it was syria damascus and this is before the that's like the late 90s kind of people yeah early 2000s and then as you know things then a lot of people started going to egypt and yeah but sorry you were saying yeah yeah so uh we got the opportunity to go go down to egypt and uh you know i studied arabic and quran there well i had an amazing amazing quran teacher like uh i would love to get back in touch with him he drove a motorcycle that he'd pull up in a oh that's just cool actually you remind

me of him a little bit actually you pull up in a motorcycle davidson that would be sleek and yeah and he took me for a ride and one time he took me to uh eat camel meat for the first time where were you studying where were you studying in egypt um just that like they had the small little arabic schools um one i mean the most famous one was called uh marcus alfajor yes yes al-fajr institute quite well known i think yeah for foreigners yeah and then you know there's just a bunch of them i studied at one called uh alibana was the name of it

and um yeah so like after probably about a year i knew our stay might might be coming short and you know arabic is something i mean it's a big undertaking to learn the language and the problem was there's so many people from the uk there yeah so i had all these friends from the uk and we would just be speaking in english all the time so it's like you really need to be somewhere where english isn't an option you know but um yeah so i was like okay i'm just going to stop the arabic and i'm just got a private teacher for quran so i you know i went through that for about

six months of focused study learning the tajweed and recitation and doing some memorization and stuff like that and uh met some really really amazing people um there some lifelong friends um um yeah i mean wow okay so that so that's kind of that's given you quite a i mean it's it's quite a an encounter with the an understanding of islam you know the basics even if it's the basics in in the hotel arabia or whether it's going to be just other things that you're picking up

certain sciences and and then you you've made your way back to the states um did you find out of curiosity were there certain things about uh the faith that that had that you either found very challenging or or maybe gripping you know in a positive way what was your experience like with that um

sort of i don't know once i kind of jumped into it i you know i really jumped into it you know i was doing all the prayers and and i i don't think i i didn't i don't i wouldn't say i found it hard i just knew this was sort of my duty to god and that you know i did it for that reason and um i wouldn't say i wouldn't say i found any i didn't find anything really challenging as far as that goes i mean i know some people who um getting on that regimen of of of you know getting up in the morning and doing your prayers and taking the time out throughout the day and like really

really really help them because just you know we have different personality types for some people it might be something smooth to go into for others it might be ripping them out of their previous life and and giving them some you know grounding and some uh a schedule you know for their life yeah um but you know i had my wife there with me the whole time from the very beginning and she was a great guide uh great guide and spiritual teacher and she was studying as well so both of you we weren't yeah together oh wow how was that as a couple's experience because when i studied abroad um

most people naturally they would be you know single and just studying but they were one or two couples i do remember and and and that would bring it i mean that naturally that that would bring its own kind of dynamic and its own challenges in that way and and also its positive points but yeah as a as a couple was it something yeah i mean there was other we met other couples there was quite a few but obviously like you're saying the majority of people are single going to study and stuff but um and we were young relatively young still and um no it was a great experience it was like it was like a long holiday

with but we were also studying you know because it was just sort of we didn't have anybody like over our head saying you need to do this you know so we just sort of made the schedule we wanted what kind of year so what year is this this is uh i guess it's around two thousand six 2007. oh right okay sure sure um or a little yeah sure because yeah mm-hmm so um yeah and you've you know something that you've been very big on and this is something we'd love to kind of get into um this whole thing of healing

that there's that you know there's there's obviously an importance that you feel about it and then spirituality with that as well so i mean what what could even interest was it something is this something personal about why the need for healing is it like personal trauma or the trauma of others or um a lot of times you don't realize that you're the trauma that you've picked up until later on in your in life so a lot you know you might have had a lot some childhood trauma and maybe through your 20s it's not it's not affecting you yeah but you're getting

into your 30s and then going into your 40s this stuff starts coming up yeah you know late like you know midlife crisis you know people have a midlife crisis or something you know um tell me about it not now no no no but i you know because i i went into a lot of um not to cut you off but i went into a lot of uh self healing probably as i was approaching 40 as well so but yeah sorry carry on no that's good right um so what really started that

um we started learning about ayurveda which is like uh it's from india which is like the healing and health aspect of the indian culture and um so we actually went to this i uh something called the ayurvedic health retreat here in florida uh we have it's a very a very huge like hindu um community in northern florida and um they have all this land and cows that they they they only drink the milk from the cows that they milk themselves and um

so i just we just got to know this community and we ended up doing a yoga teacher training there in 2011 and prior to that i really had this like really kind of stern you know i'm a muslim and this is the right way and um you know that attitude kind of you know had some negative effects with with my relationship with my family um i mean my family in general like was very accepting of me becoming muslim i mean my father had a problem with it but he wasn't going to disown me or anything like that i mean we just debated about religion but

it really opened me up to realizing that other people can be good human beings too and other people have their spiritual path and it has a very positive it's very positive in their in their lives and um and i always because i always heard muslims saying oh hindus like you know hindus are idol worshipers or hindus are this or hindus are that but when i started really looking into it

they still they still believe in one creator you know what i mean and just over the years you know they've had stories and and and you know over a few thousand years they can come up with a lot of different things but i just started seeing a lot of similarities between islam and hinduism from from like a spiritual aspect from their core sort of beliefs outside of everything else and it just started sort of opening me up to softening my heart to other people it helped me soften my heart towards hindus it helped me stop my heart towards christians and sort of like letting people be

not needing to like prove to them that my way is better you know when clearly these people it's been working for them yeah i mean there's a lot of you know they have been in the past um especially during the moral time there's been several people that have written on different i guess philosophies within india and they've spoken of this uh the the different uh so they are like you're mentioning those and at one time it was the majority of india historically

would have been pre kind of movement that before they had idols and things so they believed in the kind of forces of nature and so like from the rig vedas and and that kind of the ancient script scriptures that they have um and this is why several people like dara shikou and these other people when they write about them they call they call those people like the people of tawhid of hind of the ancient hind as in the ancient beliefs of hind and they don't categorize them with the others that are so into the kind of um the the let's say superstitions and things like that

but um yeah sorry i was getting and i keep yes sorry yeah i mean that's one thing i i that intrigued me about islam because just it's very simple one god and you know no superstitions and you know what i mean just um just very simple and basic really just in a very resonating way that you know they say that because this simplicity that just strikes the heart like it's not about it being

simple not to mean because simple in a in a low level sense like i also think it's simple but in the sense that as leonardo da vinci said that you know simplicity is the highest form of sophistication ultimately because to have something simple it's actually this it's quite a complex procedure for people to be make things very simple for people yeah it's easy to grasp like it's exactly yeah like what's easier than just one god you know worship one god and seek help from directly to god there's no intermediaries you know that's a really

um direct experience yeah yeah yeah absolutely um yeah so you were saying so you so you'd kind of uh by uh interacting and engaging with this the local community who were hindu and helping you with the yoga uh training this kind of broadened your uh your kind of horizon on how to interact yes it also yeah it helped me break through like my own fears my own you know because going through the postures and even doing some of their chanting and um

you know prior to that it'd be like no way i'm not i'm not going to be part of that but i sort of saw that okay look it's it's really not it sort of helped me break down my own uh just just opened me up to the other end and sort of enjoy their culture enjoy their their spirituality but at the same time holding on you know keeping my own my own beliefs you know with without you know i remember but you know before we'd gone on uh come on as well you were speaking about look how you were seeing you know sometimes certain people's

philosophies have maybe certain beliefs that because you mentioned about krishna from the thing saying look how people over time could have changed certain you know we're having this discussion and that how krishna is worshiped in now in hinduism but in the rig faith in the ancient rigvedas he's actually described as a wise scholar um and he and this like and by the time it reaches the other texts of the upanishads he's then deified and becomes so they are in many traditions there may be people who were

you know we were talking about this we may have been sages or wise people or people of god or maybe prophets in certain traditions we don't know from thousands of years ago but what people made of their tradition later on thousands of years later um you know may have shown them in a different light but yeah yeah because they had they had this mural painted in the yoga studio and it had you know these two characters on a swing off in the distance and it was krishna and i'm not sure the name of the other one and i you know asked like what what what are they they're basically they're the first two people or the first two deities

to be on earth and i related that to adam and eve i was like you know i was like oh wow it was like this aha moment i had looking at this i'm like they must be these paths must be from the same origin originally and then they just sort of broke off and the different civilizations sort of came up with their own teachings and their own stories you know to you know and maybe that some of that was necessary to help help you know the tradition survive you know through you know stories and yeah um oral transmissions of you know just like in islam we have that too things passed down from student to teacher you know

okay and so so with that kind of training from the you you've kind you've gone forward into this whole healing and why healing is important and yeah because yeah they they i'm sorry they opened they so their whole thing was like you know eating for your you know your different doses you're different the type of people so you eat for that you eat different things in different uh times of the year and so really got us connected to ways of eating and eating healthier you know so really we were learning about uh health in that kind of a way initially

and also you know sort of ex expanding our minds into being open to new things and uh you know not not necessarily just reading only muslim books like you know reading books by other people and seeing what other people have to say about different topics i mean it's it's a famous quote um by aristotle that that the the mark of an uh educated mind is that it can hold an idea without necessarily embracing like it can it can hold views that can sit like

as in to study them to read them to without even necessarily embracing them that is the hallmark of an developed mature mind yeah because i i found that it's like you know stay away from this because it's going to lead you astray it's like well if you how is it going to lead me astray like am i not confident within my own faith enough to be able to like you said hold that without necessarily embracing it just having it there looking at it examining it taking some truth from it leaving the uh you know taking some leaving some

you know so i think that's really um that's important because i do see you know sometimes very religious people are sort of close-minded because they feel that if they go if they go outside or they listen to something else you know it's shaytan is going to come in and and plant seeds and get them to sort of be led astray and i understand that you know sometimes it's better just to be safe and stay in your you know safety area but at the same time it's also good to sort of expand out a bit i mean yeah i i would see that with

a reflection of uh where the person's at so so for example there are people you know like what you just said there are people that they they are for example very insecure about things and they're struggling and they don't seem to you know you know they have just a lot of doubts and just by their nature they they've not learned a lot about certain things and not even learnt enough about not even the basics about islam maybe and so yeah so for these people it's it's very understandable that why you know even doing something like studying philosophy why they you know it really comes

crashing down on them and they they struggle with these things and there's a difference between that and people who have a firm foundation in what they're doing they've you know they've quite secure with themselves with the understandings with faith and and for them it's not for for them this looking at other things comparative studies seeking wisdom from wherever they find it it just complements their their life it doesn't really inhibit anything yeah yeah because like an interesting thing like when i was learning about islam like i i was given

like these books on like the scientific miracles in the quran you know and those things were like wow you know it's speaking about this and how do they know about that and you know what i find is some people like really hold on to those things of because of these things this is what's giving me my faith rather than actually having that direct experience with god that's giving you that faith so it's almost like even if even if like it what the books weren't true if it came out like say it came out uh you know breaking news all this all the

religious books are not true okay as a thought experiment yeah yeah right it it shouldn't matter if you have true faith like what are you going to do go and like lose faith and and just say ah to hell with it you know what i mean like you can't have your faith based on these things can help build you up but i really think your faith is based on your your your just your experience your taste yeah you're being faith you're just sort of floating in it you're floating in the divine you know like experience because it's so

true because the mystics and people speak of this and this is really you know it's it's kind of uh just mirroring what you're saying that the they speak of it's all about the tasting faith that this is though this taste and that in some of the texts iman is described as it has a halawa it has a sweetness faith has this sweetness a taste of it so it's a very that there are obviously there are academic things to it there are rational things to it there are these other things but there is ultimately a a kind of an awe

but an experiencing of that holy and sacred and devotion yeah absolutely um wow so you know with with that so this this what you're saying this whole thing of tasting and this um tasting the the rouhania almost you know the spirituality of this how does this tie in with your with you on the path of psychedelics because because that's uh that's an

interesting that that's an interesting one so yes it is interesting so yeah probably around 2016 um uh you know or living life you know as normal uh or i thought i thought i was living life as as normal you know um we got an opera basically it was recommended to us by a friend um that we should try

some plant medicines uh specifically they mentioned ayahuasca um and you know so we decided to go ahead and give this a try i didn't really i didn't i didn't really feel like i needed it you know what i mean like i just did you know what it was i mean i i had some experiences like with with mushrooms and lsd in high school but not not too much you know not too much and it wasn't it was it wasn't for any kind of you know spiritual awakening or anything like that it was just

just for fun or something i didn't even really know about like know what it was really for at that time but this when when we went into this it was very intentional like you know you have to go into something like that with intention and you really you know my intention was to get closer to god that's that's that was my intention because i really didn't like i said i really didn't feel like i needed to do this um but when i went to that first experience it like it just it blew me away like it

just it just opened up just a whole new realm of possibilities for how we can think about the world how we can think about our creator the closeness that we can feel and get to our creator like it just really and it showed me that my own demons you know it made apparent like the own demons that i had within me that i didn't even recognize that i had and even it could even it's just very subtle sometimes you know it's just very subtle but those subtle things like they make a huge difference

so it really helped to sort of cleanse my spirit basically is what it was the whole the whole journey i went through was just like a cleansing of of my spirit and a purification of the heart of the purgative effect la purga as they as they call it the purgative it kind of cleanses the the soul as you go through it yeah mind body and spirit you know like it's it can be a physical purging and it can be a uh like like a per like we have mental constructs we have like a mental construct like even how we think about god

like if you're thinking about god it's on some level it's still just like a mental construct that you have in your mind like because we're kind of simple beings you know what i mean and we're trying to think of an infinite creator we can kind of only think about it in our own how we think about it you know like and the mind can't think outside of space for example so if we think of space let's say we're thinking of the universe's space uh ultimately all of space we're still picturing it inside some other space yeah and it's almost like if you think about

what god is it's not that right because it can't be it's just so much more than that so what these medicines help you do is to sort of if you're thinking about it like this it's helping to expand you out to now okay wow it's it's out here now and then wow it's out here and then it just becomes um just something really really like incredible i mean that word that you're using interestingly expanding is the word that people use with this experience often

this kind of expansion this in fact psychedelic the whole term was coined to to mean the expanding of the the kind of psyche uh of the soul or the mind or yeah i mean and it can really take you back to a place of like when you were a child before you started to bring on all this baggage of life you know it really like has the ability to sort of wash away um all the life experiences and you know bring you back to you know even like a

newborn baby in some cases where you just get to experience what what like that feeling of what it feels like to just be a child you know um like we you know if you could just think about like a perfect moment you had when you were a kid like one of my perfect moments is i was probably two or three years old and i'm just outside in the grass outside two three yeah like before we moved down to florida um yeah i mean i remember i remember really early but um and actually the plant medicines actually helped me remember even earlier than

i could pretty much like in the womb and like i have a vision of breastfeeding that i was like shown um like i remember i remember the room and where i was at and my grandma's basement my mother was there and she was holding me and like it's you know wow you know but um um oh yeah i was just saying like our perfect moment of a child was just i was like two or three years old i'm just outside playing in the grass and the sun is beating down and you just have no worry in the world you don't have the stress of having to work having to make money so it can

bring you back to that place and help you to remember what it's like to feel like a child what it's like to not have those worries and the stress of life you know it's it's beautiful that you you highlight these points because in the quran one of the verses that describes that those people who who who attain proximity to god who become

these people this the thing about them the quality that is then bestowed upon them that not a worry in the world and not a fear but that this state of mind it's such it's and it's so and you know when you're saying that because so many people will will will say very similar experiences of this not a worry in the world and not a fear and it just so resonates with how the verse explains these qualities as well for certain people but yeah i think that's yeah that's something that is repeated like on them shall be no fear

and nor will they grieve you know it's like you really get to like really exp yeah really like have that experience of what that really even means because you can hear it and you can read it but to actually really to be able to experience that you know um i mean is there a you know no because i was gonna say how would you that's been a few years since now that experience um having gone into it how would you say that then um redefined the

kind of path or it you know how significant were the like imagine you hadn't taken that experience how different do you see the paths and just a quick question i know i asked you before i'm not sure if i got the answer were you familiar with what dmt was i know you said you'd done shroom mushrooms and some lsd but you know with ayahuasca were you familiar or familiarized with what what is dmt or was it just a leap in the embrace it with all your heart i mean as soon as i was like had this opportunity to to go have this experience i just started youtubing um you know so i i didn't really know

what ayahuasca was at the time um maybe i had heard of it but i you know so i just started doing research and looking into it for the viewers the ayahuasca is um it's it's a very popular brew made in south america that is made from certain vines that has that's vine not wine but certain plants that have dmt rich in dmt and also mao inhibitors are kind of put together these and then they're brewed as a tea this kind of tea drink and uh apparently it's very ghastly and

very difficult to to down if you take the traditional tea it has like the mao inhibitor which sort of clears the stomach so that it can um absorb the dmt because otherwise you'll just digest it and nothing would happen nothing somehow they discovered you know that's that's amazing i think they say that the the plants spoke to them or something yes because you know this there's a book with uh the cosmic serpent as well we the researcher goes and does all his research and the interesting thing for the for the viewers that you see this in the amazon you there's 80 000 species of

plants and some have dmt but only i think something like 20 of these different thousands of species have these mao inhibitors um and the these kind of enzyme inhibitors that because if you if we consume dmt if this had dmt in it and we're just drinking it or eating it it would go into the stomach and the the mouth enzymes would would not let it operate like it would do nothing we would just eat it and and it would do nothing to you so for it to be effective that there's

you have to kind of inhibit the mao enzymes within your gut so the question was that these people were asked that how did you know from these thousands and thousands of plants to just to choose that particular one because it was the odds were ridiculous because it's only i forgot now exactly but i think there were like not even 20 species or something that just had that so they said well the plants told us [Laughter]

it's almost like you know god wanted us to have this you know what i mean especially like today it's like this has gotten into like mainstream culture you know and it's become more and more popular and more you know because it really i was mentioning before it's like it's like these plants are like a psychologist well you know and and just that i love that you know analogy that the plants are like it's like i was listening to at one point during my you know the last year this was several years ago now i was listening to uh um

like what the buddhists go through yeah like uh like this whole process they go through where they have this stage and that stage and like another a whole list of stages that they go through like during their meditation over all these years of practice all these stages that they were going through and i was like oh my god i was like i went through all these stages in my plant medicine journeys i didn't even know i was going through them but listening to these buddhist talk about it yeah i was like it's like a natural thing that the the psyche or whatever will go through as a healing process i i guess

um because you know it's been there's there's a famous professor i went to his lectures is from the uk uh professor dr david luke a passionate advocate of psychedelics and um i mean he's a professor um forgotten the university but he has a few books amongst them other worlds is a popular book but he in one of his lectures he was saying that you see the thing about the plant medicine it's not about he says sometimes some people go to it with

what they want from it but it gives them what they need not always necessarily what they want but what they need that there is a this kind of synergy between you and what is ultimately you know this shifa that has been placed in nature by allah and yeah yeah because they say you know when you go into the experiences you should go with an intention yeah you know but sometimes you go with something too specific and and and maybe you're not ready for that yet

you know like maybe you need to learn some other lessons first before you can reach that level and and you can go in and have a beautiful you know angelic experience of just joy and love and happiness or you could go in and you can kick your butt you know and it could be really a difficult uh a difficult time you know yeah um you know my first experience was was like one of those difficult times because i'm going in and i just my my whole intention was i wanted to get closer to god i mean yeah that's really that's the purest of intense i mean

like what what what's you know because because i'm going in you know at the same time i'm like i'm muslim and you know should i be doing this you know because i had one experience where like my whole world you know in the experience my whole world came crashing down and i'm like what am i doing you know is this is this wrong you know that you know like it really all came crashing down around me i'm like what are you doing you know like what are you doing like why am i here what what what did i get myself into you know what i mean and um but that i learned you know there was a

lesson that i learned from that you know it's always a lesson always but like in my first experience i had this really it was just it was so intense and i really felt like my my dna was being sort of rewritten or like purified um did you go through the ego death this was this i wouldn't ex i mean that an ego death can be something super intense that smacks you and like it's it's something that happens in a very short time and it can

be really intense or it can be something that you know it happens throughout an evening you know so it wasn't it was i wouldn't have at the time i wouldn't have like called it an ego death it was more just like a purification like i felt like the idols within my consciousness were being ripped out like things that i feared things that i may have been serving other than god just just very subtle things and i just felt like they were just being ripped out of me and um i felt like the shirt was being ripped out of me yeah because because it's just expanding on on that

point like you felt that you know you explained this as a shirk well what what go into that a bit just because you know i mean like quite a quite a term to describe because what are you talking about when you're saying right because yeah well i my understanding is shirk is like it means like partnership like like like worshiping something just with god or beside god or in addition to god but what i was feeling it was all these things within my consciousness that was distracting me away from god whether that was fears or insecurities or just

a whole a list of things that you know sometimes our minds are just going this is in your personal capacity because you're seeing this as you know as a person in your person you're seeing this as you know this is a shirk almost like i'm you know i'm i'm i'm afraid of this or i'm insecure about this or i'm high like yeah i really felt as if i was like these were like idols i was worshiping that's like how it was so it was so subtle but at the same time it was so grave it was like

that do you not see these people who take their desire or their lust as a god it's not an and like an actual that they worship and but it's as though because they succumb to these things and it's as though they worship it it's not that that they go to a temple where they have these things but yeah so yeah so like going back to my intention going in was to get closer to god so before i could get closer i needed to sort of be my consciousness needed to be purged from a lot of these ideas and a lot of just um

it wasn't really specific things in this journey it was just the whole concept of these idols being ripped out of my like these idols of the mind these fears these just all being ripped out at one time nothing too specific or anything and as i was mentioning before i got very thirsty and for some reason i wasn't getting water normally people will bring you water for some reason i just was being overlooked you know so i i started to have this like thinking like wow like humanity needs to be watered with spiritual knowledge and you know and you know and i felt like that's what i was going through

and um so once i got through that that that that tough time which seemed to be most of the evening you know i i i kind of came out of it i came out of it and um i walked inside and i laid down and i was just like staring up at the ceiling and all of a sudden like i felt like the divine presence was with me and i was just like i just i i was just there and it was just like i just tears were just flowing out of my eyes i was just like in absolute amazement because i just felt like

the only way i can explain it as i felt like the divine presence was just emanating right there in front of me and i was just experiencing this love and like i had just gone through all the stuff i just got all this stuff ripped out of me for me to come in here now and get to like experience god basically and then and also like i sort of had the experience like like i kind of like is that gonna sound kind of whatever but i also like saw like the prophet and he was sort of there and the only thing that was coming to me

is like what i realized i was like wow like what a special thing he must have had to go through because like i was telling you like i was also going through like a uh taking a look at my dean and islam and going through the quran again you know and and i was like you know if what was coming to me i was like if if people said things in your name that you didn't say you know like i was like apologizing to him for that i was like i'm so sorry if people are like saying things in your name that aren't true you know um it just was like it's just a very

deep feeling and i was like i remember like you know we say like i remember being like that's the very least thing we can do to you know what i'm saying to like give you that respect to you to give you that respect for what you went through to bring us this knowledge you know um so that was kind of like what i was thinking at the time i was sort of recognizing and and sort of apologizing for

you know a few years back i remember that there was this whole thing in saudi arabia where they'd caught this some guy who uh he was saudi who obviously i i don't know if he'd left islam i guess so or he was very critical but he'd said these tweets that he was in some he was being decent but in some he was being quite um you know they were quite um coming appearing disrespectful towards the prophet like he was saying you know he was saying that what have

you brought us that does this and you know what kind of thing and he had made these tweets and then he was on the run i think you i can't remember i think it was in malaysia or somewhere but they caught him and handed him over to the saudi authorities and they were i had put him on death row for execution this is going a few years back and i spoke about it then but it just reminded me that you see i'd said that look you know people and we see this today we see this they have this some people they have this hostility towards the prophet

they have this somewhat of an anger towards the prophet sallallahu alaihi see they've never met the prophet we've never we've not met the prophet they've not seen him or heard from him directly they've not done these things their rage or their hostility or their animosity or whatever it is that they they're dealing with or trying to you know that's unsettling them it is what some people have presented to them a a version

of what they feel the prophet might be so some people may have presented very extreme views and put this off in the name of the prophet said that you know the prophet said we should treat people like this we should kill and this has resulted in individuals then having this unsettled feeling towards the prophet otherwise if if people were to know the character of the prophet the whole quran is nested on this thing when it comes to the prophet

that we have sent you but as a mercy for the whole world and it's so beautiful because this rahma is mushtaq that you are compassionate and merciful with the believers that and taken from the mercy of god but yeah sorry you know when you were saying that i just thought that i wanted to just it just reminded me of that point but sorry you were saying so you

yeah yeah and and also like to that note about the harshness and even everything is going on in your country and um it's like like in the quran it says allah doesn't change to get condition of a person or the condition of a people until they change what's within themselves so this whole concept of like taking personal responsibility um really like hit home with me like i need to take responsibility for my thoughts for my emotions because like even it says like you like not just your deeds and your actions but also even your thoughts

like if you're walking around having negative thoughts about people all the time to me that's sinful like you're not but you're not actually doing something but you're you are doing i mean having thoughts isn't it is an action you know in a sense because you even though it's negative you can't hide it you think you're hiding it right yeah it's it's it's a venom that this negativity you know having if you're going around having negative thoughts about people about it's a venom that firstly consumes you it consumes your soul it is it is actually you are doing so it's actually you know it's

it's very rightly aptly said that it's it's it's like a sin that you are it's a crime against yourself to start off with because you're harboring this hatred kills you first you know it doesn't absolutely and he and other people can pick up on it as well you know you can sometimes you can tell if you know no one's saying anything they're not saying something but you can kind of tell that they're you know there's an issue there or at the same time you might meet somebody and it's like wow like this is an amazing person just by being in their presence you know like they say like when the prophet you just you were in his presence it was just like

because he was just emanating beauty you know and just and you know i i i really started to really look at things from from like that verse saying a lot of changes that doesn't change a condition until we change was within ourselves so really that's like the the secret ingredient is to work on ourselves and when we do that it will change our surroundings it'll help change the people around us um you know i just started looking at i mean i started looking even like at the like for example the israeli-palestinian

conflict i really started to look at that a little because i've always i was always told a certain way and things are a certain way and and obviously there's issues there but i started thinking myself well what has the ummah like has the ummah change what's within themselves because if the ummah or if a people start to change what's within themselves god has to change the situation it's just like a divine rule you know what i mean so i started thinking to myself okay well there's some response there it's not just there's some responsibility there for each group of people if they're in a bad situation

they're they can't just be for nothing and sometimes these things are that other people have kind of betrayed them as well like there is so if there's like a a greater collective whole uh so for example you could be in a ditch now uh but you might be in a ditch because you know your friend and maybe these people had kind of for their own interest uh you know ditched you so and now you're in the and so as a collective whole there is that responsibility that how do

you betray you know because people they ever people are driven by their self-interests but i i feel that there has been a huge shift sort of a spiritual awakening happening like where where more people are starting to and i i feel like like you were saying like that's what it's going to take it's going to take like this this almost worldwide shift to sort of start to solve some of these huge deep issues like what we see in the middle east and what like what you know what i mean like it's not just them because there's so much so it's the whole thing there's so much like this yeah there's like this right it's such a

nice russia ukraine you know we've got all kinds of stuff going on like people you know taiwan china it's like i don't know what's going on with the world because it's like yeah i look at those things like they're all happening for a reason it's all in the divine plan and and and perhaps perhaps like these evils have to sort of bubble up and get ex like start like start happening to to sort of get to the next phase you know the next sort of phase of humanity where there is more of a more of a peace you know like

i just had this yeah i mean i mean i'm just i'm optimistic about yeah regardless of how bad things are i'm optimistic that god has like one of the actually one probably the biggest verse for me is they plot and they plan but god is the best of planners so despite all this stuff if you have if you believe that this is all part of god's plan there has to be some reconciliation it has to be something you know whether you will you know a defined algorithm at play absolutely yeah you know i wanted to say just picking on what you said there that you feel that

there is a this kind of rise this kind of awakening towards consciousness and i feel that this definitely in the last few decades and especially in this last decade uh i think this it's been kind of brewing and there's been the whole movements coming out of uh the united states and um but especially in this last decade there's been this this kind of especially towards plant medicine this whole thing of um i mean you must be feeling this and yeah what are your thoughts on that do you feel that they are going to like

will this be do you see the states and uh the world moving more towards uh embracing you know decriminalizing dmt and and these things within the coming years yeah i mean i think i'm not uh a doctor or anything like that but i i really feel and and we have actually a lot of doctor friends and some of them are sort of getting shifting their their mentality to natural remedies and stuff like that and i mean there's a whole history i really think the way we perceive medicine and pharmaceuticals and you know everything

that we've been going through you know the last couple of years and all that i really think that that is sort of showing us some of the issues and sort of bringing them out to the to the forefront um i just think we're gonna going forward i really feel like there's a huge shift where just the way we look at health and medicine and um you know because a lot of these a lot of these you know medicines that people like for depression and different things like that they actually they actually have a net you know they might work they might work in the beginning but then they have like this negative effect and then um

but with these with these natural like god-given medicines like it's just one you know one one of these one like psycho impactful psychedelic journey can like change your life even if you never did anything else after that like it's such a impactful shift that is just um it can just like really help solve i mean i envision like all these retreat centers everywhere and anyone who need you know is depressed or something they can go on a holiday and spend a month there and really work on themselves and go through these ceremonies and and get

advice and talk to people you know get get out of their stuck world that they're in and go you know go do something i just i i kind of see the world from sort of a really mystical you like i don't know definitely not from a um just intellectual like i i just fear that the pharmaceutical i don't know whether the pharmaceutical kind of mega corporations will allow all of that and but i i i equally you know inshallah envisage that that at least more and more of it and it becomes you know more

part of the norm to seek uh these alternatives these which are really i mean it's crazy when you think about the kind of drugs that people are prepared to take which are pharmaceutical drugs that you don't like these that you're saying like how these uh antidepressants and people take all these you know benzos and all these kind of things and and they result in sometimes catastrophic effects on people debilitating them sometimes almost life-threatening and and they're all licensed and part of the you know the norm doctors prescribed them i mean it tells you at the end of the ads what's really going to happen

you know make you know you might you know all these bad things might happen all these bad things might happen to you know they they just rumble off all these negative things it's like are you kidding me you know you showed me this beautiful commercial and they're living their life and this and that you know in the end it's like it may be very bad for you you know um i almost feel like on a from a spiritual level i almost feel like the the consciousness was like exploding at such a rapid rate that almost like the negative part of the whole system had to sort of shut it down you know like put a block on it and so

that's what we got this last two years but no god is the best of planners and you know what i mean like like you said like they'll never allow it well well maybe i think i think you know i think it will be a people's up it will be a bot approach right that the government would not want to approve it but they'll be forced to like now they're being forced to uh especially in the states now they're having to re-examine uh especially uh psilocybin mushrooms because of just its curing qualities the way it cures depression the way it cures things they can't how

can you ignore it and now mdma they although it's may you know maybe it's differently psychedelic not in psychedelic in the other sense but they had they had you know going through final trials on that i was watching this thing on a pharmaceutical company in america running its trials for dmt at a very sub hallucinogenic level so to to administer it uh in tiny quantities that you see because it has uh dmt when they've tested it so far on um where they were allowed on people or on animals it had no um

it developed the people the subjects or the animals developed no tolerance so it wasn't your body like every whatever you take it's always like that you don't develop a kind of tolerance or need a stronger amount and so that's something that they were like wow okay so we could just use tiny amounts below the hallucinogenic kind of uh stage and use it to cure whether it's going to be depression or result in kind of neurogenesis developing more synaptic connections in the brain and obviously this is a pharmaceutical company jumping on it for money you know it's they're just doing it for the money they're not doing it

for the kind of spirituality so and i i do feel that in many ways it's a shame because this was this whole thing is a proper gun is the consequences of the propaganda of nixon's war on drugs you know nixon had this thing he you know his political agenda is striking back at the the democrats he was annoyed at those people hippies refusing to go to war in vietnam and this whole thing of criminalizing psychedelics and then

getting other countries that obviously saw america in a superior state to to also be on board with this and criminalize it in their countries hence europe criminalized it you've got uh even you know third world countries criminalized in kind of agreement with america so it's a shame that certain i feel this is my thought and people can disagree with it that certain muslim countries don't take the lead on this and open up this kind of research and become you know they don't need to be sheep and follow uh just because we've got to wait till the united states does it and then we

gotta why don't they lead on these kind of things and show the world that look we can cure certain mental health we can cure this we can do that but yeah oh i mean definitely i mean for the mental health of the world i mean a lot of people are struggling you know right now and that you know it's it's a crime to not give these people like a true opportunity if there's medicines that can help you you know it's it's a crime to not allow them to use it you know but like you said i do agree with that it's it's sort of like it's a bottom up yeah you i think it's

like everyone wants like the people to top to solve all of our problems and you know but really it is a bottom-up because if if we do it from the bottom up there's just no at some point there's no choice like it just change happens then it goes back when the people change their condition and they start doing things then that just sort of changes yeah that's that's just wow you know somebody so the question that somebody could say well i mean i'd like to put to you for the views that so you're uh keen to speak on these topics

of uh sacred medicine plant medicine psychedelics um yeah so what what you know a simple question that why are you so keen to speak on it considering that um as you do speak on it it may trigger the curiosity of people naturally and people may say well are you saying this is for everyone then or yeah what are your thoughts on this so like when you're speaking some people some people say it's not for everyone you know like i've heard people say that but it's it's pretty much it's for whoever is kind of guided to do it i mean you're either a guy to do it or you're

not i i i i say that you know i say the path calls you right like you're it's either going to come about in your life or it's not i mean um i mean i would recommend people being open to it you know because but i also can understand how people might be afraid yeah are they you know because a lot of times you know muslim as muslims we we don't want to displease god you know and a lot of times we'll think uh well i don't need you know i don't need to do that like you know i have i have the you know i have the quran and the sunnah and that's

all i need but it but this is not against the quran i mean not according to your understanding or people who don't i mean some people may in an interpretation some people may feel oh this is like alcohol for example um obviously other people i'm with that group would say this is nothing like alcohol this is not an intoxicant this is a psychedelic they they operate so psychosis is it opposite it's the opposite of uh it's expanding your thinking it's expanding your mind it's expanding your heart you know what i mean it's like it's it's helping you

now the thing is if you go into it with a lot of fear and a lot of hesitation it can it you you might not get that that breakthrough experience that really shows you it might actually take you in the opposite direction you might go and have an experience and be like no you know not want to go back to it so really i think there's a lot of work that needs to be done prior to actually going into one of these experiences to be sure that you are ready you know that to be sure you're ready you've done your research you've you've prayed you know you've made your instagram about it and you've you're like okay and make sure your intention is right why am i doing this am i doing this just

to have a good time or am i really doing it for the sake of god you know and i think if you go into it doing it for the sake of god you can be shown some really beautiful and amazing things and get a lot of personal healing and um and and like you know just maybe you're a person you just you go about your day you do your rituals you but like you're just sort of stuck if you feel like you're stuck and you're just something doesn't feel right or you're just not as happy as you think you could be um

experiencing these these medicines like really just it does open you up to new levels of love and compassion and and nearness to god and really sort of understanding just life and why we go through the things we go through and you know like this this you know it's i'm not saying everyone but most i would argue people who've been uh atheists and have experienced something like this um end up struggling to remain an atheist yeah absolutely yeah because

i mean that just tells you right there that this is an impactful these are impactful substances if you're going from it because what it when you're an atheist you're just materialistic like it's just like here's the desk here i am when i when we die that's it like i can't imagine knowing or believing that when i die that's just it there's nothing after that like what what's the point like what's the point of like being a good person you know what's the point of um but even like eight i i even think atheists a lot of times and

a lot of times they they actually have people have faith like they just naturally have faith and they don't even realize it yeah it's true that i feel that it's in all honesty there are no such thing as atheists it's just that they frame their ideologies differently so they don't frame it in the same way because anybody you see it's simple as this if you believe if you believe that anything anything in existence is sacred you are already in the realm of faith nothing

can rationalize sanctity except faith anything sacred is the realm of religion it's the mastery of religion nothing can not even human life you cannot define anything you cannot believe in anything to be sacred and almost every single person believes in something to be sacred so the moment but it's just they don't think about it like that because they've not been made to question so when they say oh i don't believe in god and you say well okay do you believe in anything sacred do you believe there's anything sacred so what makes something sacred how does

something become sacred and it's it's just that they've not come face to face with this line of reasoning that they just so they don't see it they think they don't believe but they too they their whole existence is nested in a belief albeit a vague one but it's nested in some suspension a lot of times i mean they have really like they want evidence and you just come into me saying oh well your book says that it's true so it must it means it means it's true that's not that's not evidence like they want they want that experience so it's almost like those people could be you know like like uh i think it was

omar like he was the enemy and and whatever but then he became one of the best ones you know so it's like yes so it's like when they have this like psychedelic experience and it opens them up and they actually have the experience of something beyond what they didn't before understand then it's like okay now i can now i can actually believe that there's actually something more because i i had first-hand experience because they're not just gonna accept something because you say so yeah you know and that's actually it's commendable sometimes because oh i'm not just going to blindly follow you of course yeah you know what

i mean so they need something to sort of see it's personal just about last month last month here i was just i won't go into the details until he's not comfortable with me die you know divulging the details but there was uh an ex-muslim who [Music] rejected islam and rejected faith categorically a categorical atheist of the you know the most certain kind um and he's you know he is he's a friend of mine in the sense that you know he would i've always been friendly

with him like my belief is that look people who however they are let them be on their journey you know we should always have a extend and like an olive branch to people that this should always be bridges people if they need to bridges never burn bridges with people that's that's i mean i i see that as just counterproductive so now and this person not uh of any faith uh and we've spoken at times you know maybe uh you know over the phone or we've spoken at times over the years um and he's asked me stuff about islam what do you say about this and he's

reasonably he's been respectful right uh with me anyway when he's been speaking about islam always respectful and or reasonably within reason respectful but we'd had this conversation on psychedelics uh a while back and it was something he'd never explored and i don't think he really felt the need to explore it and just very recently he like within a month just over a month ago he experienced it you know he went ahead and just thought oh we're going to experience it and it was just it was with mushrooms and it was so profound

you know he he messaged me saying i need to speak to you you know it's like and so when we when i did manage to speak to him um it was just like a really i mean he was just going through his experience and he and he said to me that you know it's he said i don't know i like he's not saying he's in some in you know organized religion or something but he said there is something i cannot believe that there is nothing like you know this thing of he said that i feel that atheism is just nothing but another dogma

like i have experienced i've tasted that this exists like there is an existence beyond this world he's like how he's like he said to me look i told my atheist friends and they said oh this is blah blah blah you've taken this you know it's intoxicated you it's done this to you it's like no it's like made i'm telling i've it's not this is like it's so real it's more real than real and this and they're shutting him down and and the point is that like he said to me look mufti and this is why i say don't burn bridges because people they can reach out to you they can talk to you about he said that look i i would never have thought the day would

come that i would say this but i feel that it's so difficult to deny that there is something you know that there is and you know subhanallah and these are steps you know people are taking steps on a journey you know that this is this is a lifetime sometimes of a journey of faith it's not just something done in in one go but yeah yeah how can that be bad for somebody to come to faith in that way you know it's just like wow this and these are not things that are you know um how would you describe them

would you describe these things as recreational because because these things could not be recreational no no i mean you could take i mean you could do like a like a micro dose like a small small amount of something and sort of be recreational with it that way but if you're gonna take any kind of like larger dose it's it's it's just it doesn't make sense like you know what i mean like it's i guess people just do it for fun but maybe young kids or something i don't i don't think so

it's too it's too powerful yeah it's too powerful and it's not something that oh i want to be a dmt you couldn't do dmt recreational that that doesn't even that's an oxymoron yeah yeah rip the life out of you there's nothing fun about it right exactly yeah now you're right it's like it's like you need some you know months to go by or something before you could even think about doing something like that again you know what i mean it's not it's not something that oh i'm going to take mushrooms every day like that doesn't it just doesn't doesn't work out like that you don't want to you you're not going

to want to do that yeah it's something so like there's no like addictive i mean i'm sure there's no there's nothing no there's no there's several studies out there somebody had put in a comment about addiction there's several studies out there there's no addiction on these things there's no addiction on dmt no addictions on mushrooms psilocybin mushrooms have been around longer than humans have been around you know i mean you can't i mean you can't do it you can't do them too often i mean you can't do that but at some point you're going to figure out whoa wait a minute like there was a point where i knew that this sort of this journey that i was

going on sort of was coming to an end like i knew i knew there was a point where because i was even sort of told in in one of my uh later ceremonies that this is coming to an end and say goodbye basically you know and um i didn't really necessarily believe it at the time but yeah it ended up happening that way because you just at some point you get you get a lot of healing you get a lot of knowledge and a lot of wisdom and at some point you just have to sort of ground be grounded and live your life and take what you've learned and move forward and help other people and

because it's not you see something people don't understand that sure maybe as a curiosity young you know you might get university kids or you might get these kind of people who oh i know they do mushrooms or they do something just out of that kind of oh it's going to be fun but in all you know honesty these things it's very difficult to to because they seldom is any fun associated with these things it's just an overwhelming experience so it's not the kind of thing which people would uh be kind of like oh yeah so so

this is the thing look when people because many people don't understand this when people resort to a let's let's call it a drug or whatever that be let's say a poison a metaphorical poison when people resort to a kind of drug uh there is an expectancy um effect yeah i mean not just the sorry not there is an expectancy of result so an expectation so let's say people uh they drink alcohol they know when they're going to drink alcohol what's going to happen like they think oh i'm going to drink alcohol oh can't you know i'm going to go to the pub i'm going to go to the bomb i'm

going to get a drink i'm going to get all kind of like relaxed lose some inhibitions people smoke weed let's say um they know what they go what's going to happen when they smoke it like they think oh this is what people may smoke cigarettes they they have an expectancy of when i smoke the cigarettes gonna calm my nerves um similarly whether people out there are on crack cocaine or whether people are on heroin or whether people are on anything there is an expectation that when they do something oh i get this buzz and i get this and this is why people do all those kind of poisons and drugs

and and those things are very catastro you know catastrophic and dangerous now with psychedelics it's like there's a door yeah and this door is closed now today when you open this door there may be a beautiful landscape you know there may be this garden and greenery and this mind-boggling kind of just beauty that exists all you know that's all great and tomorrow when you open it it might be an inferno the next day when you open this door it may just be a bottomless pit and then there is no idea what's going

to be behind that door yeah yeah because something like i would cannabis i would put i would put cannabis in the category of psychedelics um would you um i could yes i'll tell you i can tell you why but okay but when you have something like alcohol alcohol is a vibration so like you were saying you're gonna expect it it's like okay here's the vibration of alcohol or if you did cocaine here's the vibration you're going to get that specific experience but with the psychedelics it's like it can be here here here here like it's or like this you know what i mean you can take

psychedelics and have a beautiful blissful fun amazing experience you that that can't happen but it's not a guarantee you know what i mean like it's unpredictable right it's terribly unpredictable yeah and that's why i put cannabis in that category is for some people if it's okay if that's used as like a plant medicine and you were to consume that like like you would like you would go and you have a ceremony you'd consume that it can be very profound if you remember if you're going to kind of heal right right if you abuse it and you use it all the time um

then it can be more like another drug yeah but even even even in those cases sometimes you can be abusing it and then it starts to give you massive anxiety and you end up having to stop using it because you're getting anxiety from it yeah so it's it's sort of like in between sort of halfway because where i'm at with the things like cannabis uh with weed is that i i feel because i've i have a video on it when i'm speaking about it and i said that look um i think i've got a couple of clips but there's one where i'm highlighting that i think as far as the islamic viewpoint

is concerned i've said that i feel it would have been discouraged and it's difficult to say haram although i'm i say personally i'm against it and i say as a person like i don't smoke and i don't smoke cigarettes and i don't smoke cannabis but i said that when for people for young people and people under 25 i would feel that this is haram in the sense that the what i feel what it does is it interrupts and it inhibits the development of synaptic connections because the brain the you know the prefrontal cortex of the brain the

neuroplasticity really just completes at about the age of 25 and so even though people you know we're by you know we've gone through puberty people by the time they're 18 they're classed as an adult but neurologically the brain hasn't fledged out until about so it's still kind of growing it's it's kind of connections and it's growing its stuff so i feel that what's happening is as younger people are abusing uh these kind of things at a young age what it's doing is it's resulting in

things like paranoia it's resulting in a lot more mental health issues for kids i feel that these kind of things may also be factors for things like high suicide rates amongst they may be i feel that you know all this put together like paranoia depression not having the right synaptic developments made and so i for for people let's say people who are older uh once again i've said that you know maybe it's difficult from my reading to say that it's harami or definitely i would see as discouraged

because of how people do it but maybe not but for a certain age like 25 down i would definitely see this as it would damage the their brain because when people are using it they just they tend to not be using it like how you said medicinally they tend to be just abusing it like yeah i mean yeah even though like oh i it's uh you know i have a medical card and it's used for medicinal purposes like if somebody wasn't using uh marijuana and then all of a sudden the doctor's going to prescribe them to use it daily i i mean if they went on like a ceremony and they

went and they consumed it in like a situation like that they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna have an experience like as if it was a psychedelic experience because they're not used to it and then if they went and integrated that experience and didn't do it every day so i think that's something that's like it can be abused very easily because of the nature of it but at the same time it could be you you know so i think it's like i think you yeah you hit it on the head with the setting because i suppose where people are going into a setting because i have read about a lot of the practices in um south america with you know a lot of those ceremonies where they do have

ayahuasca they also do using some of them marijuana that's also used and tobacco is used as well as part of their ceremonies in some of them and but they are using that very ceremonially and it's not and that then that setting has an atmosphere of itself and you've gone the people that have gone there as a kind of healing it's not like they don't replicate ceremonies when they come home like they don't sit in their room and say okay i'm gonna conduct this it's a it has a set and a setting yeah because you will if you can i mean if you if you're consuming cannabis every single day i mean there is i mean there's not

it is addictive you do get addicted to addictive yeah it's and it can be more like schizophrenia in certain people yeah it's like it's more psychological than physical although some people probably have some physical problems when they try to come off of it but yeah if definitely if that's abused it you know it's it can be a problem you know wow you know a simple thing i know we've really you know i'd love to kind of bring this to to to to you know to a a bring it round on this point that how would you say this like your life you've obviously

you've you know you've gone through your journey your journey of spirituality islam which has played a significant role in your life mustafa and you've uh and then you've also found yourself this path intertwined with this path of plant medicine with psychedelics how has this been a force for good in your life like if your life was let's say not having experienced this how would you see it differently now i don't know i can't i can't even imagine not having gone through it you know yeah because it like like i was saying before like i

didn't think i needed it but until i did it i didn't realize i was like whoa so it caused me to go into like you know four years of just going through that path and and exploring and you know experiencing different kinds of medicines and um really what i was able to do was sort of have have you experienced the toad yes by the meal you have one time one time and you gotta share your thoughts on that let me just fix my you were freezing there okay um yeah like i did that one time

uh what were you sold 2000 in 2019 and i mean i know people who have done that several times but that it was like it was so impactful that i just i don't i just couldn't see myself doing i couldn't the kind of intoxications of death come to you i had like i had been on like the back sort of back end of my whole plant

medicine journey and i had been being invited to experience this for quite some time but like you said you you don't do things so you're sort of guided to it so it did work out that i was able to um go and have this experience and um it was really sort of the grand finale of the whole the whole journey and it maybe it was six months later after that that i kind of and the whole journey ended for me um

but i really had a deep connection with like sort of all the souls like you know like in the quran it says um we're from a single soul you know so i kind of i got that well in the experience and in the months after that i kind of had these experiences of being unified with that single soul i also was able to connect with the pain and suffering of of humanity um when i first went into that experience it was i was just like basically just like

crying and like like i didn't know it was going i mean i didn't it was interesting when i came out of the experience i was kind of like shy because i didn't know what my physical body was doing during it because you're sort of just it takes you out of body basically you're not you're not you're not experiencing it right in front of you you're sort of more like like a dream more like a dream and yeah so i just connected with the suffering of humanity and it sort of made gave me empathy towards humanity and people going through struggles and um but then it

it sort of connected me with god it like i had this experience in there where all my cells were exploding with light like every single cell in my body was just exploding with like divine light and when i came back i i found myself in this in this in this like this darkness and it was very uncomfortable wow and and the the facilitator at that moment came and put their hand on my like on my heart and i felt like it was like my mother holding me as a baby like that's what i

was feeling like like so i i sort of experienced what it was like in the womb and like being born into a baby and that experience right after and the interesting thing was i was like laying there and i was like sort of coming back and had this overwhelming feeling to suck my thumb like literally like and i was like oh my god i discovered in that moment i'm like i know why babies suck their thumbs you know just because it's it's comforting you know but it you know it was just like wow it was you know and that sort of um

um it did throw through me for a loop like in the moment i didn't realize it but the weeks and a few months after that it was it was uh it was as if i was really reborn into a baby and a child and then i real then i i came and i'm i'm married and i have children i'm 40 years old and and it was like whoa because i had this experience of like sort of rebooting myself but at the same time i find myself in my current experience so i had to integrate it and like really um just

meditate on it and and it just took me like it took me a few months to really ground myself back down from that experience so it's not something to take lightly but not everyone gets get because i had gone through a big journey up into that point i've done a lot of healing i've done a lot of expanding so it was like it just blew me wide open as far as that goes some people that might be their first experience ever with psychedelics they might not oh yeah yes but first experience they don't necessarily yeah they don't it it will work with you where you're at so wherever you're at the medicines work with you there if you're not ready for

certain things obviously you're not going to be shown those things you know so it can be a you know a slow process some people take it and they don't feel anything because i've had that experience i i had somebody they wanted to try mushrooms they end up taking like up to four grams and barely barely felt it and my suggestion is them just sort of keep trying because sometimes you're so tight and you're so closed up that you even take it nothing happens because you're just not you're not ready your your psyche is not ready to like you know open up um mushrooms is always a great starting point

well there's i mean it's not anything lower than anything else i mean they're they're just as powerful as anything else i mean it's just more common you know what i mean because i mean they grow they're just more common but i wouldn't say that ayahuasca is any more potent or strong than mushrooms is or you know you wouldn't feel that you wouldn't feel dmt's more well okay then like the five meow of course that's that because i would say that that's a whole nother that's a class of its own a world unto itself shall we say yeah

yeah yeah but um okay so wow i i i really appreciate you really taking all this time out today and and really you know sharing it with us your insights your journey uh it's been amazing i'm sure so many people really have will benefit from this i mean there's so much more that we can talk about you know but you know time is limited i know but we'll we we'll we definitely we're going to stay connected and we you know we'll get inshallah more of this uh in the future as well i know you've got a

youtube channel are you going to be resuming that anytime soon or are you thinking that's my that is my intention my youtube channel is called mystic dean um also on instagram i'm at mysticdean i'll put up your youtube channel link in this in the description for this video if people come there if i find anyone from this that comes there it's going to motivate me to actually start putting some content out there because then i know that people have received this and they want to hear more um so that would be definitely motivating so if anybody wants to come and chat

thank you for having me oh it's been an absolute pleasure may allah bless you may allah bless your journey and bless the journey of each and all because really that's that's what this is my we're we're we're on a journey and you know along the way and and i think one of the most difficult things to find in this journey people may think it's the destination but it's actually yourself that you know to just find yourself that there's a um there's a poem in urdu by the legend where he says um he says he's speaking about this

this state of being kind of out of it this kind of and that where has this this self like this this bewildered state like not being truly grasping your consciousness whereas this where has it kind of led my where has it taken me that for so long i've been waiting for myself but you know i just because when you find yourself it helps you find others you know when you love yourself you love others when you when you're content with yourself then you'll be content with the people

around you you know so yeah and and it's you know as the mystics have said that and the sufi say that when arafa nafsa who finally came to know himself came to know his or her lord so mustafa shukran once again and the views as well this was a an exceptional timing we we kind of did this but i really appreciate once again you taking out your time so mustafa allah bless you alaikum and likewise people allah bless you all if you do want to reach out uh youtube instagram or you can go to

patreon forward slash malm and you can connect with me on there as well so guys have a very good evening wherever you are assalamu