Eric Oliver

It is great to be here.

Thank you so much for having me on.

It landed really well.

I was having a very bumpy adolescence, as most adolescents experience, and really just unsure of who I was or where I was going.

And I had this wonderful teacher, Mrs. Malone.

And one day she wrote, know thyself on the blackboard.

And she said, distilled in these two words was the collective wisdom of the ancient Greeks, you know, those marbleized founders of democracy and poetry and

And she said, if we wanted to heed their wisdom, we would need to know the self.

And she was such a great teacher.

And I took her words to heart.

And I thought, yes, this is something I really want to do.

So I spent the next three decades of my life trying various ways to get a handle on what's behind this lived experience that I'm going through.

And in college, I started reading deeply into psychology and philosophy.

After college, I moved to Northern California and I started doing yoga and practicing meditation.

I experimented with everything from psychedelics to...

hiking naked in the wilderness to backpacking through Asia.

I tried to seek out gurus and priests and Turkish rug sellers who often have a surprising amount of knowledge about spiritual matters.

I was basically trying to do everything to click every box on the spiritual seekers bucket list.

And it was a very enthusiastic and a very sincere desire to get at what was behind this experience of being.

Well, I think this was a big part of my feeling of discontentment was a lot of my own psychological instability at the time, which probably traced back to my own bumpy family life.