Episode 72: What It Means To Be Human With Vincent Daranyi
Have you ever considered a plan to escape the matrix, leaving your promising career, giving up your home, leaving all your possessions, and embarking on a journey to discover the meaning of life and, ultimately, to find yourself in the process? Our guest today has been on a paradigm-shifting 8-year journey, so he can bring back this sacred knowledge to share with you today. Vincent Daranyi, the Founder of Neoslife, takes us on a journey to what it means to be human. He explores stripping naked, Ayahuasca, and the 8-year journey to the soul. He also dives deep into what it takes to live a fulfilling life and how letting go of the attachment you hold to things can free you. Join Vincent as he dissects what it is to be human while finding how to achieve a limitless life.
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What It Means To Be Human With Vincent Daranyi
Have you ever considered a plan to escape the matrix, leaving your promising career, giving up your home, leaving all your possessions, and embarking on a journey to discover the meaning of life and ultimately to find yourself in the process? Welcome to the show. Our guest for this episode has been on a paradigm-shifting eight-year journey so he can bring back this sacred knowledge to share with you.
Vincent Daranyi is a high-performance coach helping individuals become the best and truest versions of themselves. He is the Founder of Neoslife, meet your soul self. It's the most transformative experience on this planet launching this year. After careers in investment banking for JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch in London and starting two companies in Brazil, raising multimillion-dollar venture funding and leading 120 people, a split with his cofounder started him out on the journey of asking the deepest questions about life, dissecting what it means to be human.
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Welcome to the show, Vincent Daranyi. How are you?
I'm very good. Thank you so much for having me, Anand. It’s a pleasure to be here.
It's an absolute pleasure. I got to talk to you and spend time with you for a couple of weeks when we were in Egypt a few months ago. A little theme that my show audience is probably noticing is that there are so many people from my Egypt trip that I'm interviewing but I’ll tell you, every single one of those 75 people is a rockstar. They are bringing so much knowledge and so much light into this world. Vincent, you were right at the top of the list. With the conversations we've had and learning about your journey, I said, “We have to get your story on the show.” I'm excited to dive into this with you.
Thank you for having me. Egypt probably put an incredible trip together. There were so many beautiful souls.
To set the tone of the show, I always ask my guest, what does living a limitless life mean to you?
The first thing that pops up for me is to go beyond the limitations that we perceive to be like my ego. My personality constructs an idea of who I am, but I'm so much more than that. From the day we were born, we are bombarded with information that we soak up like a sponge, especially in our early years. That defines how we look at the world.
When I look at my eyes and I look at you and from the window, I'm looking out, my mind immediately says, “This is a window. This is a wall. This is good, bad, beautiful, and ugly.” It’s all the filter that has been conditioned from my experiences. It's a very limited life and a very limited perspective. Living a limited life for me is going beyond that perception of limitation and checking in. The way we live is based on beliefs and we take many of our beliefs as truths.
Once we start questioning these beliefs, that can be very difficult work because how we see the world might be collapsing, our own world, what we look at, our relationships, etc. That's the power of the mind. It’s challenging its own perspective on the world. I've been trying to do that for the past eight years. Every time, I'm attacking a belief of myself and deconstructing it. I'm going down that rabbit hole. I come back and realize that whatever I thought is not true.
It's going beyond who you think you are. In that vein, it’s realizing why you are here. We live our lives, we go to work, we're in a relationship, we have family, etc., then we die. What was the purpose of all of it? Is it just having a good time or is there something more? I believe there's something more. For me, pursuing that is living a limitless life.
That's such a beautiful way to express it. I agree completely. So much of our belief system is formed when we're a child. Our parents try to do the best they can. The people around us try to do the best they can. We try to do the best that we can so we have to forgive ourselves. We have to sometimes be in safety mode or fear mode in order to avoid certain situations or to block out some emotional things that are going on.
I'm very similar to you in that I have gone on this journey of trying to understand myself, forgiving myself for whoever I was in the past with those limitations, not feeling worthy, not feeling loved, feeling alone, and not good enough. A lot of the people that we come across who are on this journey have had a little bit similar stories of these.
In order to want to express our full self, we have to understand what it is to be limited, come to that awareness, and then understand, “That was one aspect of my life. Going forward, who do I want to be and who do I want to create? What impact do I want to make in this world?” The seed of pain is what leads us into this place of blossoming into the full expression of who we become.
We are always trying our best. Best is always what we currently know, whether we are traumatized or we had a re difficult upbringing or not, or maybe we were pampered too much, so we're spoiled. We are all a product of our past experiences. Becoming limitless or waking up or challenging your belief systems, whatever you want to call it, is going beyond that.
I would go even a step further. I don't think it's so much a question of who I want to be. It's more a recognition of who I truly am. What do I mean by that? Especially when you have spiritual psychedelic or out of the normal state of mind experiences, you realize you are more than the body and this physical brain inside of you.
To Be Human: When you have a spiritual psychedelic or normal state of mind experience, you realize you are more than just the body and this kind of physical brain inside you.
When you go down these rabbit holes, you realize there's a deeper calling within you. You don't even have to take psychedelics. Let me make it even simpler. There's an inner knowing or an inner voice. It's not the chattery voice that says, “Vincent, do that” or “Anand do that. You got to be careful of that.” That's the monkey voice, the mind, the ego, etc. That is safety and survival-driven. There's something deeper in the body below the neck maybe in the heart region that has a yearning, “I want to do that. I always wanted to be a painter. I want to play piano. I want to bring smiles to other people's faces. I want to build a business that allows people to do X, Y, and Z,” whatever it is.
It could be anything but I believe you come into this body, which is a vessel for us to have an experience on this planet in the context of time and space to evolve, to grow, and to learn. Whoever comes or what we are on a higher level is not something we choose. It's who we are, then we go into this body which limits us. We’re here to wake up and break out of it.
Finding your purpose or finding what you want to be is finding yourself in that journey. This is the core part of life. The choice we have in every moment is we have to pick the easy choice or the hard choice. Do I take the convenient or pleasant choice? That gives meaning, purpose, and happiness ultimately. This is the choice we have. It's either we are going the easy route, which is what other people expect of us. It is our conditioning of staying in the routine, doing the same thing over and over again, but it's unfulfilling.
It's easy but as the saying goes, “Easy chooses hard life. Hard chooses easy life.” It's easy but it's unfulfilling. We are like, “What's next?” I close this deal then I make that money and I get that house but the happiness never arrives. Why is that? It’s because the other path is recognizing who we are. That in itself is a whole journey. When we recognize who we are, then it's about having the courage to express ourselves authentically.
When I do that, then I'm on purpose, and then I am fulfilled. Fulfillment is not something that's out of me that I need to acquire through assets or achievements. It's being myself but to be myself, I need to get rid myself of the trauma, of the conditioning, of the wounds, heal, then have the courage to say, "This is what Vincent does." It might not make sense to you or other people or not to my mom or to whoever but this is my authentic expression, then I thrive because I'm being me.
To Be Human: Fulfillment is not something that's out of me that I need to acquire through assets or achievements. It's about being myself.
The beauty about it then becomes you switch life from putting more effort to effortless. I'm not saying easy. I'm not saying there's not going to be any pain. It might be even much more difficult at first. It’s like the hero's journey. First, you have to go into darkness to recognize that but then you rise up, then you are on purpose. I believe this is why we are here to express that.
It's a journey of remembering our true soul's calling. I truly believe that before we come here, we understand it fully, then we sign up for the experiences, the journeys, the lessons, the heartbreaks, and the beautiful moments. We sign up for all of it because we want to experience it in order to understand who we truly are at our core level, and what we want to tap into our soul, our soul's voice, and our connection to it.
It's reconciling the monkey mind, the subconscious, and the heart at coherence but then also to the higher levels of our higher self. Once we start mastering that, then we start unlocking different levels. What I love about you is you're one of these people that understood that there was some resistance and some blockage that you had in your life. You took a sledgehammer out, then you started deconstructing all your beliefs. It's not easy to do that. I want to understand a little bit about your background. Tell us the story of how you decided that you needed to go on this journey for the betterment of your evolution.
If you would've asked me ten years ago or even less and we had this conversation about life consciousness and spirituality, I would've laughed at you. How my career started was I studied business, then I was seven years in investment banking, and six years as an entrepreneur in Brazil. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a conventional career path like, “Let's get stuff done faster.”
In my second business in Brazil, my cofounder and I had a falling out. I call it a professional divorce. It was pretty nasty. I ended up leaving the business and moved from Sao Paulo to New York. I thought, "This is where I'm going to build my next business." I've done it twice. I have a little bit of an understanding of the pitfalls. I decided to enroll in a coding course in New York. Every morning, I woke up and asked myself, “What happened? Why did that happen? What was I doing in Brazil? Why was I creating this business? What's the meaning of all of it?”
I started asking these existential questions. A couple of months before, a friend of mine had done The Power of Now, the book by Eckhart Tolle, which was my first spiritual book. If you would've mentioned the word spiritual to me, I would be like, “What's that like?” Anyway, I started asking these questions and these questions never left me. Eight years later and having gone down a million rabbit holes, that was only the point I started living because I broke out of what I thought was life about.
I thought, “I'm a banker and an entrepreneur. I'm building this career and I'm building businesses. I'm leading people, then I get bigger and bigger. That's it, and then happy end.” I had this break and this is the beauty of it. I do believe it even though it can be very painful in the moment. I like to say that everything is a gift. This professional divorce is painful as it was. It felt like my baby was taken away from me which is the company.
It was a blessing in disguise. I believe that all the adversities we encounter in life and the people who have the worst lives at some point often come out with the most beautiful gifts for the rest of the world and themselves. It helps you and me to find ourselves. I started asking these questions and I believe I was always here to start asking these questions. I've always been an inquisitive mind.
The people who have the worst lives at some point often come out with the most beautiful gifts for the rest of the world.
When I was 3 or 4 years old, I could barely speak, but I was taking everything apart already. Now I moved from taking toys apart, the power outlet, and all kinds of weird things to taking life apart and my understanding of it. That was the blessing in this professional conflict that helped me, then to push out and start deeper questions. Once I looked into the rabbit hole, I was like, "This is interesting. I need to go deeper." I then discovered all these kinds of events.
It might sound like cliché but I went to all kinds of retreats. I did coaching courses. I started reading spiritual books or self-help books, then they became spiritual books, then Burning Man and Ayahuasca, and other psychedelics. I'd never taken any substance before the age of 37. I’m 44 now. The first time I did that, I said, "Wow." I thought this is bad stuff but it was so mind-opening. It helped me to go deeper. What I took away and whether it's a conclusion but where I stand now is nothing is as it seems.
The mind creates an experience, a construct, a perception of myself and the whole world but it's just a computer. That's also how you explain the visual like when you look at something and you see something that's not there. The mind creates that all the time with everything. There have been studies that showed that what we see and perceive through the senses has nothing to do with reality. A cat sees things differently.
We believe we see the truth but we just see what our mind creates, and every human sees something different. We might stand next to each other, look at the same thing like a tree and you see, “This is an old tree. It looks ugly.” I see, “This is beautiful nature,” or the other way around. In a way, everything is an illusion of the mind but there's a way of breaking out of that. Spiritual people call it awakening. It's one of these words that people put labels and they say, “It's such an overused work.”
I have lots of friends who say, “Don't like the way,” but it's whatever word you put it. That's the difficult part. I'm using my mind to see the world, and now I'm trying to use my mind to step out of it. It's a little bit like biting your own tail. Sometimes these experiences are so overwhelming when you deconstruct your beliefs because it's like I'm trying to see myself through myself outside of myself. I don't know how to explain it in a better way.
It makes total sense. Let’s say you have a home and the city is providing water to you. The pipes inside your home are filthy. That's the mind and when you drink it, you could have the cleanest spring water coming from the mountains of Switzerland. If it's going through a house that has rusty pipes, you're not going to experience that same water. Everything that we take in is filtration through our minds. Coming to the place of understanding that our mind is responsible for the reality that we see and experience. That's the hard part for a lot of people in this world, especially in a landscape where the media and the government always want us to think that something else is the problem.
It's the people who don't agree with us that’s the problem. It's the people that don't do this or don't do that or think this way. It's always something else. We are living in this victimhood mentality as a society where we're not taking responsibility for our own thoughts, actions, and way of being. We are the creators and the arbitrators of our happiness. A lot of people can't seem to understand that. Take us through your journey and specifically where you started going. I know there were several different modalities in which you experienced. Maybe you can go into some of the most impactful ones for you at that time.
To Be Human: We live in this victimhood mentality as a society, where we're not taking responsibility for our thoughts, actions, and way of being. We are the creators and arbitrators of our happiness.
I want to add something which you beautifully pointed out. It is what I call the creatorship versus victimhood dichotomy. We are educated that the mind is the source of truth. Everything is mental, intellectual, and logical. This is the time we live in right now. As a result, I look at the outside and say, "This person screams at me. This person hurts me.” There are two aspects. One is the moment I change that way of looking at it and I'm saying, “I'm the creator of everything.”
When a person screams at me, how I take it is my choice. The person might be screaming but I might be, “I don't need to let it affect me.” That's one step. The other thing is, “Why is someone screaming at me? Why is my partner screaming at me? Why is my boss screaming at me?” I'm using just one example. It’s taking ownership of that because there is so much going on. The moment I take ownership and I step out of victimhood, I have the power and the responsibility.
We are educated that we don't want that. It's much easier to say, “I'm the victim. He or she did that to me.” That’s how you stay in your own prison. The way I like to illustrate it is a little bit like I'm holding onto the prison bars and I'm looking from inside the prison, but there is nothing behind me. It's open. There's no fence. I'm not in a building, yet I keep looking through, “I'm a victim. You did that.”
How did I create this situation? That's freedom. That's one thing about breaking down an old belief system. Now in my journey, eight years is a long time. So many things happened. There's not one single thing. One thing prompted another and led to another then led to another. At the very beginning, I was going out and having different experiences, and breaking out of the social places I've been normally. As bankers and entrepreneurs, we are the certain type of people that wear certain types of clothes, and do certain types of things. It might sound a cliché but this is a long time ago, but going to Burning Man. It was mind-opening.
I was like, "This is like a place where the rules are different and everything is different." That was a mind-opener in terms of everything can be different. It doesn't have to be like that. We live in cities with streets and buildings. That's just one way. Maybe there's another way. That was a mind-opening experience, and then meditation. Maybe we'll talk a little bit more about that later. You can go deep in meditation. It's one thing to do Headspace for ten minutes a day. It's another thing to sit down in stillness for an hour or two, and then you go places.
Also, plant medicine. I stumbled into my first Ayahuasca experience in 2015. Most of these experiences found me. I think that's something else that I found. Life wants us to succeed but we need to let it. When things come into our lives, that doesn't mean we need to accept everything but it's about paying attention. Why am I meeting this person? Why is he or she recommending me this book? What is he telling? Feeling into it rather than thinking.
This is what I'm doing the most work on, which is endless work like getting out of the mind because Vincent who thinks is very limited. It's Vincent who feels, and by feeling I mean this inner knowing. Rather than the emotions or "I'm sad or happy," it's this inner feeling of "What Anand said deeply resonated. Maybe I should pay attention."
Things are finding us all the time. The more we pay attention, the more things and synchronicities and semi-serendipitous events happen. You bump into someone from the other side of the world at an airport. It's not random. It feels like random but when this happens all the time, we start recognizing that there is something much more going on that the mind cannot comprehend.
The more we pay attention, the more things, synchronicities, and serendipitous events happen.
Recognizing those patterns is what makes the richness of our life and to understand those synchronicities, everything is in order. If we look at it that way. There's no such thing as coincidence or chaos even. It's all a part of a divine order if we're tapping into this. One question I had for you before you continue is you are in New York and you made this decision, “I'm going to dedicate this intention of finding myself through different experiences.”
At that point, you starting a potential business at that time. Did you go into this thinking, “This is going to be an eight-year journey like you're on right now?” Did you give yourself a timeline? Did you have a certain budget like, “I have so-and-so in the bank and this is what it's going to last me?” Walk through that a little bit so then we can get a little bit of better understanding of what was going through your mindset at the time.
In short, I had no clue what I was about to do. I was in New York. I thought I'm going to start another business and I wasn't ready. There are some questions I need to ask. Why start something without knowing why I'm starting it? I felt like I'm continuing the old pattern. I was like, “I need more time.” I left New York after I was there for five months. I traveled for a year. I didn't know it was going to be a year. In the back, I always had my parents like, "Vincent, what are you doing? Why don't you come back? Why didn't you become a banker again? Get a job and get a house."
That was very intense and part of my challenge. I had to liberate myself from these people that doubt doubted me. I had a lot of doubts. I didn't know what I was doing. I was floating around the world. It was European summer, so I went to parties. I was still very much into parties and all of that. It’s a very external-oriented life. That changed in the process as well looking inwards but I came only much later, only a couple of years ago, so many years into that journey.
To answer your question, I didn't have a timeline. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know where I was going to live. I was also looking for the perfect place to live. At that time, I was nomadic and lived in many different cities in succession looking for the answer. That was driving my whole quest. I was like, "I want answers. I want it in black and white. This is what I need to do, 1, 2, and 3."
Of course, there is no answer. I'm saying of course now, but by asking questions, we are in the process of finding our own answers. Over time, it brought me to this realization no one has the answer from me and it's none of the books, all of the modalities, people, writings, courses, and experiences. They're all there to help me and guide me. My faculty is simply to start listening to what resonates and what does not. That took me many years to figure out.
To Be Human: Simply start listening to what resonates and what does not.
One of the most important things I found is to stop listening to others. I don't mean not having conversations, not gathering data, but the decision of what I need to do. If I'm in a relationship and I ask my friend, “Should I break up? What should I do?” He or she will never have the answer for me because it's my journey. By doing that, we are trying to outsource responsibility to someone else, which is the easy choice but it leads to the wrong outcome because no one knows what's good, neither my parents.
Often parents don't know what's good because they have their own safety wishes and requirements for their offspring and their own idea of what's the right path, but we are here to find our path. That was one of the hardest things. It's letting go of this idea of who Vincent thought he was and everybody around him like the banker or the entrepreneur, and being willing to stop building a career.
I look at my peers now, they have founded unicorns, MDs, investment bankers, and CEOs of large companies. I'm goofing around in the world. I'm being very critical of myself on goofing, but at last I'm realizing, I'm doing something. I'm finding answers here for my own journey, then my gift is to help others with theirs if they so wish.
That's so beautiful. Dr. John Demartini said, “When the voices on the inside are louder than the voices on the outside, that is when you've mastered your life.” We all have to come to that place because you and I both went on these journeys of seeking knowledge and gathering data, but then we have to say at one moment, “Now, I have this data. I am the one in charge. I'm the one in power to create what I want to deliver to this world as my soul.”
It's so important. It's good. It's always great and I've done this path. The same thing with you. I've done Tony Robbins and Joe Dispenza. I've done all these things that impacted my life so much. There are people that are wanting to empower us to then go out and make the decision rather than listen to any government or any other person. Even with my family. Sometimes, they tell me to do things. I live a very unconventional life.
As an Indian male and 42, I don't have kids. They're like, “When are you going to have kids?” I decided at some point that I am going to live my path and not just follow something because that's what the tradition is. Now it's my journey to not let their input bother me. The next step in my journey is not to get triggered when they do that because I know I already am becoming independent in my own thinking, but it's to love them because they're coming from where they're coming from.
That's a beautiful recognition, which also took me forever. One is the step of loving my parents for who they are because they put me on the journey. They gave me all the challenges and all the love and all the factors that made me who I am. If there would be one change, I wouldn't be where I was. I think we are where we need to be, then to forgive them for whatever they did because they always did their best with the best intention. We always all do our best.
There's no one wanting to hurt another person. If someone hurts another person, it's because they're hurting. That's a question I've been asking myself over and over again. In terms of exploration, I feel I'm on a highway and I'm driving. I'm going further and further. At some point, I need to take an exit and build something or do something or express the learning to the world.
To Be Human: If someone hurts another person, it's because they're hurting.
This decision, when is it time to go into an exit and how long to stay and when is it time to go back on the highway? For me, I've taken exits. I've become a coach on this eight-year journey but I've always jumped back on the highway. I realized that this is just a gestation period. This is what is being birthed through my process. It takes a certain amount of time. I have a coach, she told me it took her twenty years. There is no right time.
It might be tomorrow. It's about listening to yourself and making decisions, "Now I'm ready to step into the world and build something again, or I need to stay on the highway." Another thing is based on what you shared like the Tony Robbins and the Joe Dispenza. What I found here as well is that there are also many dead ends.
There are things that serve you at a certain point but that might not lead you where you need to go. It's also about recognizing. No one has the truth. It's for you to find the truth. When you take the oldest spiritual texts, which I believe are closest to the truth, if there is such a thing, they might be impossible for someone to read when you're starting out. It’s like, “They didn't resonate with me.”
No one has the truth. It's for you to find the truth.
Even texts like the Bible, even though I'm not religious. When they're read properly and not literally, they contain deep truths about being human and life. It might not be the first document you want to start. You do a self-help course online and that might be the first step then you're like, "That's interesting. Someone mentioned this book and this course." It's all about progressions but also the realization that as you take different experiences, it might not be the answer.
I did a lot of Tony Robbins a couple of years ago, then I found, "It doesn't work for me. This is not sustainable," because he pumps you up. He's very good at that and he can drive change and everything. No doubt, but does it ultimately to the fulfillment you're seeking and help to find yourself? I put a question mark.
Nobody has the complete answer. Everyone who figured things out and is teaching it. They found maybe the answer for themselves. At the end of the day, we sit here from this place of putting in so much time and energy, but we're still on this journey. It's not like we ever come to a conclusion. That's not the point of life. It is to figure it all out. We never will figure it all out. We're unlocking clues and hopefully, sharing some of the experiences that we've had along the way.
Stay hungry, stay curious, and keep going. I don't know it because that's clearly not where I'm at but if there were a conclusion, it's when you get to a level where you completely surrender to life because you get attached to, "I want this," and the person does that. I'm like, "Why?" Something happened or the weather is not the way I want. A surrendered way of being is when there's no more friction with life. Something happens and I'm saying, "That happens," and now I'm going to make a decision based on what happens.
I don't let it take me over. I don't let it make me angry or sad or whatever. I'm not talking about suppressing feelings. It's about, “I'm sad that it didn't happen and it's fine.” I let it go and I move on. When you look at history, for example, someone like Jesus, I'm not religious but I see him as a very evolved human being that was completely surrendered. He came here to teach us about selflessness. He was an avatar teaching us something.
This might be the end of the journey if there's such a thing. We can walk that journey. When someone reads this, the first thing they will say is, “I don't want to end up at the cross.” It's not ending up on the cross. It's about surrendering to life and not fighting life. What I've found in my own experience is then life starts happening for you and through you rather than to you. You're like, “I have the most serendipitous meetings and experiences like when we went to Egypt.” That floated into my inbox randomly and Egypt popped up in my head. Life wants us to succeed but we have to get out of the way.
Looking at it as a gamification, I believe these bodies and this life are these little avatars and this is a just small little human experience. When we understand that we're divine and we're eternal, there is no death. There's no end to it. What is it that's blocking us from fully expressing ourselves? We have infinite potential. Our minds can conceive of the most amazing things. You look at people like DaVinci and Michelangelo, and the things that they've created.
It's mind-blowing. The makers of the pyramid. You go in there and the first question you're asking is, "How did they do this?" I say, "Instead of asking how they did it, why don't you ask yourself how can I do this?" When you start asking those questions, then the answers start coming rather than, "I can't do this. This is way beyond my abilities." You say, "How can I do this?"
If I am an infinite being, if I am limitless, if I am divine creation, or if I'm an extension of that, what is in me that wants to come out to the world? Once you get to that place, and you even mentioned Jesus, he was put on the cross but he had the full understanding of maybe this is my way of showing love and compassion towards the people that are doing this. That's a lesson in itself.
It’s a very powerful one. As you said, I believe we are powerful beyond measure. It's our ego construct and our limited perceptions of who we are that shut us down and think, “We need to stay in this job. We need to be in this life.” No, we can be anything. What stands in the way is fear. It’s fear that I might be wrong. It’s fear that I can't do it. It's disbelief, etc. That's all part of who I've been conditioned into.
We are powerful beyond measure. It's our ego construct and limited perceptions of who we are that will shut us down.
This is the journey of letting go of that like healing these wounds and these beliefs, then I can thrive. I can fully express myself in the world. I believe that we can do anything that we can imagine. It might not be instantly. We still live in the dimension of time and space but we have this who we are as a human being. What is also interesting to touch upon is school. School teaches us how things are but it's done in a way like, “This is how it is. Learn it and believe it.” We don't ever question these things.
What my journey over the last eight years taught me is that most things I've been told are wrong. In most cases, not because anybody had bad intentions. It's just because that's how they've been told the same thing and what they have been told. We are all living in this belief bubble. It applies to everything, including science. We know about Egypt. There are certain inconsistencies between what traditional Egyptology says and what archeology says in terms of dating. We are like, “Let's ignore it.” This willingness on any level in science or anywhere to question what I believe can be very difficult because it might destroy everything that I've built my life on, but it's the door to freedom.
If I want to have a fulfilling life, it's not about the next big house. I might enjoy a big house. There's nothing wrong with a big house but that won't lead to fulfillment. What will lead to fulfillment, I believe and that's what my journey has taught me, is to question and find my truth. There are so many layers because there's also so much conditioning.
It's an intense journey. That's why it’s eight years and I'm still on it. It might also not be for everyone but what's important for everyone is if they're hitting walls in their life. In some way, shape, or form, we all do, I believe. It's about asking questions and taking ownership. Why is that? What am I doing? What can I do differently to change that?
That's the path to liberation. That's literally like stopping to look through the bars of the prison that I've built myself in my mind and say, “It’s an open lawn behind me like a field. I can walk away from the bars.” I once saw it beautiful in a video where the guy was handing a pen. He was like, “Letting go is so hard.” You just let go but opening your hand might be very scary if you have never done it. That is the process I believe we are on. Take a step back, question what we are doing, see how we are creating our own experience through our perspectives and limitations and wounds, then say, “Take a deep breath. Do whatever therapies, ceremonies, or what you need to do to help you on the way, then go.”
Frankly, I'm still in the midst of the process. It's because there's so much shedding that needs to go and it's a long journey. Based on my understanding, I will go as far as I can in this life, then I continue in my next life. Once you see it like that, I'm not interested anymore. That maybe has been also one of my bigger changes.
I was this guy who partied, full out all the time 24/7, very much driven by external pleasure. Now I've gone inside. I'm like, “No, this doesn't satisfy me. Another party.” It feels empty these days. I'm like, “Why am I here? What am I here to do?” Getting rid of my conditioning and wounding, that's what I'm most interested in, so I can be the full Vincent that I came here to be.
It's so beautiful that you understand that the whole part of the journey is important. You can't just reach the place of going inward without experiencing all the external simulations. That's part of the beauty of this life. When we can start marrying those two opposite spectrums, that's what the beauty is. I was talking about this with Robert Grant. You have to show love for the shadow side of yourself or the place that you were in order to merge the new version.
No great change in society or transformation happens without questioning the old systems. Once that old system is questioned and there's a consensus, maybe this is not the right way. We move into a new way of doing things and we never look back and go revert to the old ways. We have to constantly do that in every aspect of our lives. You talk about education but literally every system of control has that. It's religion, education, government, science, and medicine.
We need to start questioning all of these things to see how they affect everyone from a collective level but also on an individual level. It's our job to question every aspect of ourselves because if we're keeping hitting walls, it's the decision and awareness to understand we are the responsible ones here. It's a hard thing to become aware of, but once you do become aware, it's now the easiest decision because every other potential opportunity is open to you. Once you stop looking at that wall, you turn around and say, “There's an entire infinite potential of choices that I can make in order to move into a different place.”
It's an interesting, simulation game, life, or whatever you want to call it that we're in. I know that in order to demolish a lot of these things, you did work a little bit with plant medicine. I want to hear about your Ayahuasca sessions. I know you did an entire Substack blog series on this, which is very interesting. For anyone who wants to read the entire thing, I highly suggest it. Can you give us an overview of your journey into Ayahuasca and some of the great awareness lessons and perspectives that you reached?
My first Ayahuasca experience was in 2015. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just curious and that drove my whole journey. I try anything. Nothing will kill me. This experience you are referring to was in October last year. Not long ago. In between, I had done several times of Ayahuasca. Maybe 10, 12, or 14 times. This was a series of four ceremonies and four nights. One of my teachers is called Dr. Nader Butto.
He has done incredible work. I also encourage people who are curious and try to understand more about life, health, and disease, and how everything is connected. He has created an incredible curriculum around this. We were sitting in Ayahuasca because it was one of the learning modules. A lot of theories. Some were practiced, and some were working on the body of other people, releasing trauma. This was about recognizing who we truly are.
In all the other Ayahuasca experiences, you're told, "Don't resist it. Go with it." Those are the instructions, then you drink. Here, he shared a lot more with us and give us instructions. I share that in my blog and how to go through it. It allowed me to have a breakthrough that I never had in Ayahuasca. Previously, I've always seen myself in this animal spirit, underworld, the darkness of Ayahuasca with all the challenges where I see all my fears, and I'm faced with them. It can be very scary and very intense.
On the first night, that happened again. I was in the mind and I was like, "What's going on here?" I'm overwhelmed. I was asked to surrender everything. I often find myself in choice points in Ayahuasca. One is you take this route, like surrendering everything. You see the light, truth, etc., or not doing it and you stay asleep and not fully coming alive.
Both of these choices, like letting go of everything, all my money, all who Vincent is, everything. If you haven't drunk Ayahuasca, it's so real. It is real at that moment. It's not like I say it then tomorrow I do something else. It feels like it's a choice. You have to make it now. I have to go one ceremony back because what allowed me to be seriously willing to let everything go and give away my money and everything, which from my trauma perspective, I am very much holding onto.
A year earlier, I had an experience where I had to strip naked. My choice point was to strip naked or don't and stay asleep. This has been something that came up over and over again. In this ceremony, I was like, “Fuck. I got to do it because I am on repeat.” I believe that Ayahuasca is a compressed version of life. In life, it's the same. We keep getting the same message.
If you bump into the same wall, it's because we haven't completed the learning. Here, it was the same thing. I was shown strip naked and I didn't want to do it so it came back in this ceremony, which happened to be in Tulum. I was with friends. It was strangers and friends in a group of twenty people and I'm like, “Really?” I walked up into the middle of the circle and I stood there. I started taking off my shirt and my trousers, and then my underwear.
To Be Human: We haven't completed the learning if you bump into the same wall.
The moment I did it, I was like, "This was so easy." I struggled with this so much. It is a metaphor for life for me. We have so much resistance like leaving a job or leaving a relationship that's unhealthy. We don't want to do it because we're scared of what comes. When we do it, we're like, "That wasn't hard." It's just the safety and the fear-driven resistance. I strip naked and I was like, "That was easy," so I did it two more times. I got dressed again and did it two more times.
The interesting thing that I learned, I took three things away from it. There are things in life I need to do that I have extreme resistance to. When I do them, they're easy. Thirdly and that's what a friend shared in the ceremony. When I do them, they're powerful. As she said, "When you strip naked, the energy in the whole room changes because there was something."
There was something about overcoming my resistance and showing my true self, both literally as well as metaphorically. Anyway, fast forward to the experience a year later in October last year. I'm again faced with this impossible choice of letting go of my money, my social media, and everything. I'm talking about the stuff we're talking about now. It's a big ask of becoming a nobody basically was the question.
Based on my previous experience, I said, “This is what it takes to live a beautiful life to fulfill my purpose. I will let go of everything," and then I collapsed that night. That was a very intense experience. The next night I came back and I was like, "What's going to happen tonight?" We had an integration session the next morning. When I shared my story, it was reflected to me that maybe I don't have to let go of everything but it was about the willingness to let go of the attachment.
To Be Human: Maybe you don't have to let go of everything, but it was about the willingness to let go of the attachment.
It's not about giving the money away. It's about the attachment one and the story I was holding. I was like, “Okay.” I went back into the second, third, and fourth ceremonies. They were so beautiful like the heavens opened. I'm trying to describe it in detail in my block but basically, I rose up from this darkness of an Ayahuasca experience. It took an elevator into a higher light.
The second night, it was all love. There was such love for everything. I wanted to fly home and hug my parents and for everybody, all my enemies. I wanted to hug everybody. It was like, “Thank you, life.” The fourth night was a celebration. It was like, “You made it. You've overcome this resistance and you freed yourself from the money story.” That's a whole other story why I have this money story because my grandparents lost everything in the war. It's this conditioning. It's not a logical choice. It's embedded in my body.
It was this whole celebration, and on the fourth night, I saw the light of God, if there was something. Our language doesn't have a word to describe it. You can only experience this. If you don't, you probably don't believe it. That's why we have to go through these experiences. No book can teach you that. It was so powerful and it showed me that when I let go and surrender, that's what opens up. It's a metaphor for mine and all of our lives.
It's about letting go of the attachment of the holding onto, of the grasping, and of the yearning, and being here now, embracing life, and being grateful for whatever brings you, whether it's painful or beautiful. It's all there for you. If you were now to ask me, how is it going? It's a continuous struggle as I share in my ongoing blog series. Even though this expands very powerfully, the hard part is bringing it back into daily life because we are so trapped in the system and the way we think about life. Everybody around us hasn't changed. We are herd animals. We're like, what is everybody else doing? That's also the trap. It's an ongoing process of continuous shedding and letting go.
What did God share with you? What is God?
In that experience, it was a blue-white shimmering light. That's how other people have also described it but it’s like, “You are in the journey. Keep going. Keep surrendering. Keep letting go. Trust yourself.” He didn't say that literally but that's what I took away. It’s like, “The investment banking and the startup thing, you've done that but that's not you. You're on a different journey. Keep trusting. It's an ongoing path that needs to be walked.”
A couple of weeks ago, I had another experience. That wasn't Ayahuasca but a mix of substances. Your audience might be thinking that I'm constantly on some substances. Not at all. Some of these experiences find me, then I'm listening in and say, "Yes or no?" I believe life is all about discernment and checking in on what is good for me, no matter what other people say or do. I felt called to go there and that was my most powerful experience yet.
It catapulted me out of my body and I became conscious. I was in pure consciousness. I found myself and myself is obviously not Vincent. I found my experience at the beginning of the universe. There was nothing. There was just me but not me being like us. It was just consciousness but I was there. I saw how consciousness creates like I created everything up to the world, and then Vincent, and then back into consciousness.
There are no words and it sounds so incredible. Basically, what I realized in the process and maybe that's the more interesting part, is how I'm creating everything. It's my consciousness that creates this experience. It's my consciousness that creates these limitations and I can let go of it. I have the key out of the prison or I can let go of the prison bars, however you want to think about it or to use Plato's cave allegory, I'm looking at the shadows and I can get up and walk out of the cave and realize, “The world is beautiful and the world is here in service of me.”
To Be Human: It's our consciousness that creates these experiences and limitations.
It was incredibly powerful again, and you come back from the experience and you're like or I am like, "I'm back in my apartment in these four walls." The beautiful thing about these experiences is they can show you something, including going very deep in meditation. There's no need to take substances. It's a shortcut. They show you reality. That's how I look at it. This is not a hallucination. This is reality. You moved out of the limitations of your body and mind. It’s pure consciousness and you see it.
The very challenge is to come back into the body and say, “I'm living that now. I am not letting myself drive by fear.” It's very hard because it's not a mental decision. Our traumas, fears, and limitations are in the body. They're physical. That's also when something triggers us, it comes up in the body. It's not a logical choice. It's reactive.
It's about reprogramming our bodies. It's interesting, I'll make one more loop here. For a long time science and the majority of science still thinks about it like that. We have a lot of junk DNA that has no function. That's not the case. This is DNA that's not activated yet. When we change our state and raise our way of being from the lower survival-driven chakra. If we open our hearts and go higher, we allow these changes to happen. Suddenly, new gene sequences get activated. New proteins get into the body and are transcribed.
We are this very powerful machine but we are using the bottom percentage of it. This is what my journey has become about. It’s how can I unlock the true power of myself, then how can I show others how to do that? That's an experience I'm now working on to create a retreat. There are a billion retreats out there and all of that is for people to have a very powerful experience that gives them a glimpse of who they are, and all the modalities around that allow them to integrate and bring it back into their life.
I'm making one more segue here. It's incredibly important that we have these types of experiences because the world is changing very fast. I'm especially concerned. I love technology and I went to Singularity University a decade ago, which is all about exponential technologies and how they can change the world. What I'm seeing is like nuclear fission, we can build a bomb or we can build a power plant.
It’s the same here with AI. AI is this technology that will allow us to create any content that looks real and that might not be real. There are all the biases that are programmed. It’s already making a lot of people redundant. What I'm seeing is this is pushing humanity at the edge and it could lead to a dystopian event. We can't stop technology. Even if you make laws and regulations, someone is going to keep developing them. The only way out I see is for us to wake up. I hope that the process of creating is a contribution to that because I feel like we might be going to some dark places otherwise.
To Be Human: AI Technology is pushing humanity to the edge. It could lead to a dystopian event.
AI is such a double-edged sword. There are a lot of people that are advancing it now with the chatGPT and all this stuff. There are inherent biases that are built into it. As you said, there's redundancy, so it'll take away a lot of jobs. There's a lot of confusion as well because you could create a lot of fake stuff that appears completely real.
We have to take a step back and this is an inflection point in humanity. Life will never be the same again once this technology is fully unleashed. Even if we have regulation in the United States, maybe in another country there's no regulation. Bad actors can go there. Hopefully, we have people that are trying to create good versions of AI. There's so much there but how do we start waking up? What would you say would be the first step one could take if they're looking to understand who they truly are?
That’s an incredible question. I'm not sure I have a short answer to that. Looking back on my journey, one is to find people that you feel are a step ahead of you. One step ahead, they might still walk into a dead end. There are so many dead ends on the journey. Let it guide you like, “Maybe I can try that.” For me, it's always coming back and developing this discernment and this feeling, and checking in with yourself. You can do that with anything like, “Do I want to go to this dinner party?”
From an inner knowing, I might feel no but my mind says, "There might be an important person. Go." The discernment says no, so it's a no. Step one would be to find people that inspire me and then have a conversation with them. Go online and put your questions. Maybe even ask chatGPT and use discernment like, “Does it resonate?” There are beautiful experiences like Joe Dispenza’s event. Go to a retreat. Try things that might not resonate. What I mean is not resonate. It should resonate but try things that might scare you as in, “This is too spiritual.”
Expose yourself. For me, it’s going to Burning Man. It's such a different world. It opened my eyes. The amazing thing is now ten years later, a lot of it is online. You can go on YouTube and you go from one to the next and the next. Curiosity will get you very far. I believe courageous curiosity and open-mindedness are the path to whatever you are seeking, and removing judgment. Not only will it hinder your journey but when you judge, you judge yourself because you put limitations on others, which is putting yourself in prison. Open-mindedness, curiosity, the people around you, the people that you might have come across, and explore. There is no one path.
Courage, curiosity, and open-mindedness are the paths to whatever you seek and remove judgment.
It's understanding, firstly, and making the declaration that I don't have all the answers. The answers are out there. Maybe ask yourself the right questions. Why is it that I have pain in my body or why is it that I don't feel loved? Write down all the pressing questions you have. Why am I not fulfilled at work? Why am I not happy in a relationship? All these things. Writing it all down, journaling about it, and being honest with yourself.
I think life starts to transform when you're honest with yourself. If you don't have the body that you desire, why is it that? What decisions am I making? It's coming to those places and connecting with the people that inspire you, whether you know them or not. There are so many different places where you can get those answers from. I know that you also are helping people through this journey and putting all of the knowledge that you've gotten together to be able to help others that maybe don't have the ability to take years and travel and do all the hard work and the hard lessons that you've came to the conclusion of. Can you tell us a little bit about your coaching program?
It's open for anybody that's curious. Over the years, I've worked with a number of people from tech CEOs to moms. I ticked all the boxes in life. I have all the money, the freedom, and everything but I'm not feeling it. I don't feel that fulfillment. I'm tethering on suicidal depression. In the end, we all want the same thing. We might be in different places but the realization is that the answers are not external.
Often, people come to me and something is nagging them. It can be either, "I want more from life or I'm stuck somewhere." As we start working together, we look at everything. The longer we work together, the more we can look because everything is connected. If your relationship is challenging or there are health issues, it filters into your work, your financial situation, how you feel about yourself, your body awareness, and all of it.
I found that you need to go down all the rabbit holes. I haven't gone down all but I keep going down as many as I can and I'm trying to connect all the dots. That's what I like to offer my clients. It’s the full range. If I cannot, and there are many things I might not be particularly expert in, then I can send them to someone.
I'm like your playing partner that you can shoot a ball over and I will return it, then we play that game together. Based on my past as an investment banker and entrepreneur, this is also the people who read my blog. This is the people I speak to. I've worked with a number of them. They say, “He was sitting next to me 10 or 15 years ago and now he's talking about all of that. There's something that's interesting. I want to learn and understand more about that. Maybe there's something in it for me.” That often is how the conversation starts.
Can you share an experience you had with a client where they were in a place similar to yours at the beginning, and how they've transformed after working with you?
I worked with one client for an extended period of time who was a partner or is a partner at a VC firm. He is also the founder of the firm. He initially came. There were a couple of things, as in any life, that he wants to work on. We had crossed paths at some point, so he came to me and said, "I want to start having a conversation." We started having conversations. Over the process, we worked on all the aspects. We worked on relationships, health, and life purpose, and restructuring his company so he could do more of what he likes.
We also looked at whether there needs to be larger changes in terms of what he does in life. It has been extreme. It's so beautiful when we realized we do what we love. It's so rewarding for me to work with someone because he was extremely open-minded and curious also about all the spiritual aspects. No one has to go down the spiritual route.
We come to a point when we need to start asking these questions. That's what's my own journey show, but some people don't want to go there, so we don't go there. It's when you allow yourself to look at the whole wheel, then you can open it. Everything can open up, and that's where profound change is possible.
To Be Human: It's when you allow yourself to look at the whole realm that everything can open. That's where profound change is possible.
I was having conversations with you in Egypt and being in group conversations with you. Anytime somebody brought up a book, you're like, "I read that book or I did some work with this guy." It was crazy. You were always the one that knew everything people were talking about, which is incredible. It shows your curiosity and your passion for stepping out of your comfort zone.
Also, being humble about like, "I don't have all the answers. I do want to explore as much as I can to then synthesize it through my own lens and see what works and what doesn't work." For those who want to step into this arena, having a shamanistic guide like yourself to navigate those waters would benefit people that don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in eight years to go on these journeys. It's incredible.
It's about helping you to find your own answers. I don't have the answers. I can show you a lot of stuff because I've been on this journey for eight years full-time. It wasn't a hobby. I didn’t do it on the side. I was all in. For a long time, I struggled with that. At some point, I said, “This is who I am. This is what I do.” I go out and I look for answers. I bring what I find back and I show it to you or others. You do with that what you want.
A bit of segue back to where we started, there are no answers for us in the external. There is no external authority, no government, no partner, no parent, and no society. We have to find our own answers. This is the journey of life, to find the answers. In my case, who is Vincent? What am I doing? What is my gift? The realization that all the struggles and all the adversity is itself a gift for me to unlock my gift. That brings immense gratitude and peace. It also puts me in the creator's seat rather than the victim's seat and shows these things to people. This is what I love to do.
There are no answers in external authority, government, partner, parent, or society. We have to find our own answers. This is the journey of life.
Stepping into that journey of transformation for everyone individually is difficult enough, but then also with the world changing as rapidly as it is. We talked about AI but also our financial systems are changing drastically. I know that you've dived deep into Bitcoin. I believe you said on your blog you have about 3,000 hours of research and study on it. Can you tell us your views on Bitcoin?
Let me try to compress it. It is a journey one has to go for oneself because I can tell you and I will what I think. For you to believe it, or not you, but the audience or anybody else, you have to go it down yourself. You have to see it for yourself. After all these hours, what I've found is that money is whatever we decide the money is.
We believe the dollar is the dominant currency for global trade and everything because we decided that it is as a world. If we all decide tomorrow that, the dollar has way too much debt or it doesn't work or it's the wrong thing, which we'll get to in a second how it squares off with Bitcoin, then it collapses. There is no more dollar.
It's a construct that is created by all of us as we believe in it. We are born into it, so we believe it, but you can question that. What Bitcoin showed me is that there are a number of aspects that make money sound. One is the scarcity of it. If you can create more of it at will, you dilute everybody else who's holding it. That's what we've seen with whatever the Central Bank says. What happened is they first shut down everybody, then they printed a lot of money to compensate for it and to boost the economy, and to send everybody checks, then everything get more expensive.
It's a very simple one-to-one connection. You print more money. If there's only $1 million in the whole world and to make it simple, let’s say the only thing we buy with dollars is houses. There are only 100 square miles of real estate, then each dollar buys a certain amount. Now I print another million, so I double the supply of money. Everything is going to cost twice as much now immediately. I reduced it to a very simple example for direct connection. That's what has been happening with the delay.
Everything is getting more expensive. The beauty of what Bitcoin does are a number of things. One is the amount of money is programmatically limited. There will only be 21 million bitcoins. The other thing is it removed the intermediary. There's trust within the Bitcoin network without a single source of trust. I don't need to trust a Central Bank or a bank or a government.
That's incredibly powerful because whoever we put our trust in will abuse the trust. We've seen that in history. We have seen that in highly deflation countries. We have now seen it in the Western world as well over the last couple of years. I think it was Rothschild who said, “As long as you give me control of the money, you can make any laws you want.” The money is this bigot. It’s what controls everything and it has been extremely abused in history over the last years.
It also leads to things like the reason why governments can go to wars that people don't want them to go to is because they print money. Taxation is not necessary to finance the government. They can just print money. Interestingly also, the Fed is a private institution owned by the banks. It's not even a government institution, yet it runs the government.
Private banking families.
This is a whole lot of rabbit hole. Bitcoin opened all these eyes because all the economic theories I studied when I studied business and when I worked in investment banking don't hold true. The reality is you need to have sound money. Sound money means you cannot at will create more. This is a big statement, but I think we will probably in our lifetimes witness the dollar collapsing and all the other fiat currencies. I hope it doesn't happen, but we are overstretching the system and also the Central Bank run out of tools.
That's what I realized on the Bitcoin journey. I don't believe Bitcoin is the answer to everything but from a financial system perspective, it is the only alternative that exists as of now. Bitcoin is also very different than crypto. Crypto is I create something and I can change the monetary policy.
The beauty about Bitcoin at this point is no one has the power to change the rules. There will only be 21 million and the way it's issued. It's the most secure computer network in the world. Anyway, this is a huge topic. I dropped a couple of things. Back to your question, the biggest eye-opener was that it showed me how our current financial system is based on abuse and lies. It’s unstable inherently and proactive. It takes the money away from people without them even knowing and they call it inflation. They teach us that it's necessary. It's bullshit.
To Be Human: The beauty about Bitcoin at this point is no one has the power to change the rules.
It's incredibly profound the way that you described it. Just so everyone knows, the average lifespan of a fiat currency is about 40 years. We're a little bit past that at this point. At some point, you said you think it's going to happen in our lifetime. There's no doubt about it. It's most likely going to. If you look now at the bricks countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, they're all starting a change around their financial system. They're not using the petrodollar.
Saudi Arabia is also looking into not dealing in dollars anymore. If that happens, based on the energy and everything like that not being used for dollars, it's going to create a worldwide issue monetarily. The dollar would keep inflating. During lockdowns in 2020, with all these monies being printed, all of the citizens got peanuts compared to some of these large institutions like BlackRock and all these other companies.
Hundreds of billions of free money came to them. They started buying up all this farmland and all these single-family homes. If you look at what's going on now with rents in the United States, it's insane. Maybe they had knowledge of this prior. Maybe it was a good financial strategy. Who knows? At the end of the day, inflation is a tax on the poor. No doubt about it. Five dollars doesn't mean what it meant 10, 5, or even 3 years ago.
It's been throughout history like that if you look at the dollar in the 1920s. Everything changed once we decoupled from the gold standard. Suddenly you can print as much as you wanted. That's when inflation started to work itself into the system at extreme speed over the last years because it is trillions. The TARP program in 2008 or 2009 was $700 billion or $800 billion that Obama approved. Everybody was like, “That's crazy, so much money.” No, it was a couple of $4 trillion or $5 trillion that have been printed.
It's two rounds of $2.5 trillion or something. Nobody was questioning in the media and like, “Let's print $2 trillion.” Forty percent of the world's dollar supply has been printed in the last few years or something. Some crazy stat.
You touched upon another. At the last minute, you touched on so many topics. We could have I don't know how many episodes on those. With the government and media, the more you look into it, the more you realize they're all in the same bed. That's unfortunate because the media is there to challenge the narrative and it's not happening. They don't point to the real issues. They tell a story that keeps us in the system.
All the points you raised like everything is getting more expensive, how the government is abusing the role because the government is meant to be a supporter of us. It's in service of the citizen but it's turning around. It's becoming the master and we are the servants. All of this with AI and the world changing and the money. We need to wake up, for the lack of a better word. I'm going to keep looking for a better word for people who don't like waking up, but wake up to reality.
I believe we need experiences in the community and it's happening. You have the movement in the Bitcoin community and the spiritual community. People are seeing what's happening but it's suppressed. It's not in the media. If you're not looking for it, you might not be seeing it and you might think the two of us are crazy. It's probably not your average audience that thinks that because they want to have this type of content. We are now talking about a completely different reality than the 90%-plus when they're watching TV.
We live in a different reality. It's extremely important for our freedom and well-being and for thriving as a human species to wake up. I believe that all these negative events are here in service for us to wake up, whether it's Corona or money printing. The world is asking, "Wake up and see what's going on. You are powerful beyond measure. See beyond your limitations. See beyond the system." That's what the movie The Matrix is about. The Matrix is not sci-fi. It's reality.
Maybe you don't have a physical connection with whatever is strapped to the back of your head, but it's about realizing that what we perceive as reality is not reality, and we can question it. That brings us back to the beginning of the process. It’s questioning your beliefs, what you see, what people tell you, what the media tells you, and what the government tells you.
It's all unfolding in our favor. It's being done on purpose. We have to realize the falsities that we believe in and deconstruct those thoughts and create something new, which is serving humanity and more love. It's all a part of the same construct of order. This force on the highest levels, whether they're corrupt or whatever, wants us on the highest levels of their consciousness because everything is God. They want us to ascend. They want us to wake up.
You look at the back of the dollar bill, it was created in 1792 with Washington. George Washington designed it and the top of the pyramid is off. That's consciousness. That is equitably rising. Once we get to that state of opening ourselves up to spirit, that's when we all wake up. All the other stuff is a distraction. It's a part of this game to help us. It's all beautiful if we think about it.
There’s no good or bad. It's all in service of us. Something might feel extremely unjust or unfair but it's there in service of us to wake up. I also believe it's not about fighting the existing system. It's about creating a new system. People will see, "I want to be here. This is so much more beautiful." It's not going to war. It will create conflict when you create something new, but I like to think about it when the forest is burning, you don't successfully fight it with water. You don't fight it. You create another fire, so it runs out of fuel to burn. We just need to light another fire.
To Be Human: It's not about fighting the existing system. It's about creating a new system.
Vincent, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. The last question is, why do you think you came here to earth and what did you want to experience?
After my previous careers, at last, I am living why I am here. It's not fully expressed yet. It's an ongoing journey that I'm in, as we all are. I believe I came here to question things, ask deeper questions, go down rabbit holes, transform myself in the process, and show it through my way of being. Not even through teaching. I don't think we learn through didactic. It's about us embodying the way of being that we would like to see in the world. It's me doing the work.
It's me letting go of the fears of surrendering and all of that, and then I'm a living example. If I do it well, then people can say, “That's a role model,” at whatever scale. If it's just for my family, then that's the gift, or if it's to a larger community. It's my dream to build a community around all of the things that we talked about through initially a retreat format, and then a center where we come together to create ourselves anew if you would like to say so.
That's so beautiful. The true blessing that we can offer is our embodiment of everything. That's how you inspire in the best way. You can't tell people, “I know the answer. This is right. This is the way.” Show them what works for you. If they're inspired, they'll go that path or they'll find another path but at least they know it's possible for themselves. One of the missions of this show is to always give people hope that it can always get better. They could always be more fulfilled and happier because that is our divine right.
Nothing is impossible. As you said, no one has the answers. That's the old system. It tells you what to do. We are told what to do by whoever. The new system is you're looking inside. You're feeling and you're connecting with yourself. There's a lot of guidance and support. People are showing and living it, but you find the answer within yourself, your authority, and your inner knowing. From there, anything is possible.
Tell us how we can learn about you a little bit more and how we can learn about your work.
You can go onto my website, that's VincentDaranyi.com. I haven't updated for a couple of years, so it doesn't reflect everything we talked about because people usually find me otherwise by word of mouth mostly. You can have a look there. You can find me on Instagram. It’s the same thing, Vincent Daranyi The blog and the newsletter you've mentioned include my Ayahuasca experience and my recent journey. I try to vulnerably share how I'm struggling with a lot of the things that I talked about, then I get up again and keep walking. That's MyAwakening.Substack.com.
I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me. It was such a beautiful conversation. I appreciate you too.
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About Vincent Daranyi
Vincent Daranyi is high performance coach helping individuals become the best and truest versions of themselves. He is the founder of neoslife - meet your soul self - the most transformative experience on this planet launching this year. After careers in investment banking for JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch in London and starting two companies in Brazil, raising multi-million dollar venture funding and leading 120 people, a split with his co-founder started him out on the journey of asking the deepest questions about life - dissecting what it means to be human.
On this eight-year journey, he stripped naked literally and metaphorically, let go of everything, created and lost a fortune, experienced panic attacks and thoughts of going insane, ingested all kinds of substances, no longer knew who he was, pushed his body to its limits, became a hermit, was in complete silence for weeks, stopped drinking, stopped partying, stopped socializing, stopped having sex, lived in seclusion, … all in the search for finding the answer, the truth about life before finally emerging transformed, grounded, centered and yes, with clarity and peace.
On his quest, he found that each of us has a deep purpose embedded in life and that what feels like obstacles are springboards to help you find it and unleash your unique and greatest gifts into the world. Whatever happens to you in life, it serves a greater purpose. Everything is a gift.
