SOG EP 1654 BONUS: Shift Your ENERGY! Go from Fear to LOVE and MANIFEST Your Perfect Life! | John Mackey EP

0:00My name is Lewis Howes. Thanks so much for being here. I want to remind you about the Summit of greatness, our annual conference happening this September in Los Angeles. With David Goggins, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and many more incredible speakers and performers, there will be so many live attendees there that you can meet with, you can network with, and you can help transform your life. I can't wait to see you at the Summit of Greatness here in Los Angeles.

0:28Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:37When I was 22 years old, just turned 22, I did a psychedelic trip with LSD that changed my life completely because I experienced, the only way I can describe it retrospectively is that I had what I would call an ego death. And what I mean by that is we experience ourselves as separate. We identify with our bodies. You're Louis, I'm John, this is a cup, this is a table, and we're separate from that. We're individuals. When your ego dissolves, there's no separation any longer. There is no John. There is no Lewis. There's only beingness, pure beingness. And I was part of it. There was no I. I was it.

1:21I didn't have any sense of any separation or differentiation. And that was sort of a timeless state. And I don't know how long I stayed in that state, probably until the drug began to wear off. and then I began to slowly differentiate again. But I came out of that with completely changed. It was like I realized, oh my God, the essence of what I am, not my ego, not my body, the essence of what I am is immortal. It's always existed. It always will exist. And then it was like, wow, it's all just an adventure forever. We're just an adventure forever, adventuring forever. And we're free to create whatever kind of life we want to create.

1:58So I let go of a lot of fear then. Not all of it, but I did let go of a lot of fear about, I'm going to go out and take chances. I remember symbolically, I went outside and started hitchhiking. Really? It's like the guy says, I don't have a shirt on. It's August 1975. The guy picks me up and he says, where do you want to go? I said, I don't care. Wherever you're going. He says, I'm going home. I said, I'll go there. So he drives a few miles and he said, well, son, this is as far as I'm going. I said, okay. And I got out and then I thought, where the hell am I? So I started to walk home. And I ran into my philosophy professor.

2:35This is a life-changing event. On the way back walking home. Yes, on the way back. And this was the guy that I idolized. He was my intellectual hero. He'd written a ton of books. Bob Solomon, Robert C. Solomon. He wrote 35 or 40 books. Still had a big influence on my entire life. Were you in college at this time? Yes. So he was a professor at the college? Yes. Yes. And when I was studying for philosophy at the University of Texas, he was one of my professors. So I run into him and I said, this is a great opportunity. And I went up to this professor Solomon, it's John Mackey. I'm one of your students.

3:13I don't have a shirt on. And he didn't recognize me at first. And I said, you know, listen, I've had a couple of questions I've been dying to ask you for years. And he said, well, okay, this is a great opportunity. So what are your questions? I said, well, sir, you know, you teach, you know, he was an existentialist influenced by Sartre and Camus. And there's more to his story, which I won't get into because it takes us too far afield. But he would teach that, you know, life is absurd. There is absolutely no meaning whatsoever to life at all. There's just, we live, we die, we disappear, and that's it.

3:51but he believed that you could kind of shake your fist at that grim fate and that you could create your own meaning sort of in defiance to this absurdity of life so you give life meaning it doesn't have any meaning but you give life meaning so I asked him I said so Professor Solomon do you really believe that there's no real meaning to life except what we just kind of make up and he said yes that's what I believe and I said well I don't see if you believe that how you could be happy and he looked at me and he said I'm not I'm not very happy and it was like from that moment I didn't want to be an existentialist anymore because I just had this incredible experience I saw I was part of all it is it was all an adventure meaning is everywhere and I just wanted to get on with my adventure.

4:40So after that is when I moved into this vegetarian commune. I wasn't a vegetarian. In Texas. In Texas, yes, in Austin. And I had this sort of food awakening. I never realized before, I knew exercise could make me feel better. I just thought food was kind of like fuel. Like you're a car. You got to go into the gas station and get fuel. But if it tastes good, that's all that really matters. I didn't think about whether it was nourishment. I didn't think I thought myself a machine, not as this living organism that needed to nurture trillions and trillions of cells. So I had this food awakening, learned how to cook, became the buyer for this commune, food buyer for the commune.

5:21And then I went to work for a small natural food store. And I came back after doing that. I loved it. I loved working in that store. And I came back to the co-op, to the commune, my girlfriend Renee, who I'd met there. And I asked her, I said, what do you think if you and I open up our own natural food store? And she said, oh, Mac-O-Man. She's hippie. Oh, Mac-O-Man, that'd be cool. Let's do that. So we did. Wow. And that was the genesis of Whole Foods Market. So I start the book telling that story because that LSD trip changed my entire trajectory of my life. Wow.

6:04Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:54Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.