Interview: Mike ~ Miracles Aplenty!

Greetings everyone!

I hope you're enjoying your Sunday and ready for the next episode of the Bite-Sized Blessings podcast.

This episode I'm introducing you to Mike Oppenheim,

Who is truly,

Truly a polymath.

During our conversation I was left wondering,

What does this guy not do?

He and I had a really incredible conversation and once again it left me saying,

My god,

There is so much going on in this world that is so mysterious and so interesting and I just wish that everyone could understand that this place is a truly incredible world to live in.

Now Mike is many things and he does talk about that in this podcast.

He's an author,

He's a top humor and philosophy writer on Substack and he also was in two bands.

He has his own podcast called Coffin Talk,

Which is about the meaning of death and that one is actually in the top 3% on Apple Podcasts.

He's so very interesting and such a great speaker I kind of felt like I could barely keep up with him.

I hope you enjoy this conversation because lately it's been one of my favorites.

Alright,

Here's the very next episode of the podcast and my conversation with Mike Oppenheim.

So I bought a helmet the next day and I started wearing it and then two weeks from the day of the accident I was leaving my house and it was the best weather ever and I was like screw it I'm leaving the helmet at home and I felt knowledge.

This is the only way I can explain it.

I don't hear voices,

I feel knowledge.

Like my intuition is never a voice,

It's like knowledge.

It's just like something hits me and it said,

I'm gonna say it said but like for the sake of the story but it wasn't a saying,

Like I'm not hearing a voice.

What the hell is your problem?

Get the hell back inside,

Get your helmet and put it on.

If you had to go to a conference or a party and self-describe and say hey let me introduce myself,

This is who I am,

How would you do that?

I think that answer would have changed over the years and it just recently kind of re-centered itself but I would just say I'm a humanist.

I would say like I'm a humanist and it means like most of what I'm doing now is the bottom line is how is this gonna affect humanity positively.

So while I am like a musician,

A writer,

A filmmaker,

A father,

A husband and all these other roles,

The more I cultivate my spiritual outlook on life in my worldview,

The more I see that like what we're doing is to me the meaning and purpose of my life which is just expanding connections and just trying to not leave earth a better place than before you know because that's that's a little like egotistical to me but just every interaction I have with another person is a chance to enhance and make their day better or a chance to make them feel lousy you know so especially in the car that's where I struggle with this the most.

I assume you know I was just my sister and I walked over to this local grocery store and I'm outside Chicago and it was people were just laying on their horns and I've been living in New Mexico that we just don't have that kind of thing where people are just hands on the horn for like five to ten seconds and you can kind of feel the rage and the anger and I thought my sister said well you're in an urban environment and I think you know urban environments are good but I think they also make people a little grumpy maybe a little crabby so yeah I think I agree the car is a challenging place for sure for keeping your cool you know keeping cool and so but so now you said that you're a filmmaker and you're a writer and so what kind of filmmaking and writing do you do well I think I probably should just go in order like as a little child I was like very imaginative and I was really into music so I got a guitar by the time I was like 11 I'd quit the piano and saxophone before that but the guitar stuck because I worshipped like you know different musicians and so I just made it my mission to start a band and start bands and become a professional musician so I achieved that when I was 22 or 21 I graduated college and we started a professional rock band in New York and my band and I we quit after a year and a half and we quit for like a million reasons but it was in retrospect we really should not have quit like we were way ahead of schedule and we were doing great but it was still an incredible experience and from there I went back kind of to like film which was my other love in high school so I was making films in high school and in college I was a film major and then suddenly like things really shifted because I quit playing music in my mid-20s professionally and just because I didn't like I don't like staying up late at night that's really essentially the problem with vowing to be a professional musician and having my personality so I became a writer because that's like the perfect yeah I write 5 a.

M.

6 a.

M.

Like I love the morning so and then I decided I wanted to get published and write novels so I went to an MFA program and I got an MFA and I my first novel novel was published and then I self-published a few after that and then I just had another one published and it's actually interesting because I say this to a lot of other writers self-publishing is actually more fun and better like I would just recommend it strongly to people I wouldn't even say self-publishing anymore I think that's an anachronistic term but um the point I'm just trying to make is I've done all these things so now I got back into videos during COVID because my wife and I had just my wife and I got married three weeks before the country closed down we didn't know it was gonna close down we're just very lucky our wedding was on February 16th 2020 and about I remember people at the wedding saying like have you heard about this they called it the Wuhan virus at the time and so it's crazy because our timing was really lucky and then talk about a honeymoon she was like pretty much unemployed collecting checks and my job is like like very it's a work at home job always so I've never I've always told you get it so I was like working a little bit she was getting these checks in the mail and then we were just making videos and having fun so so my main my main thing I do though is writing for sure at this point I'm definitely that's most of my income and what I'm spending more of my time on just for my curious ears what was the name of your band oh yeah the band that was most successful was called punch clock like the thing you use to clock in and it's because we all had really crappy blue-collar jobs and then we also had degrees from college so we thought it was hilarious that our parents had told us you had to go to college which is like now I realize how generous and nice it is of parents to kind of force the kids you know or at least in the era I went because it wasn't a you know a huge fortune but um yeah but we thought it was like kind of ironic so that was our band name I don't think a lot of people got it though you sound like a bit of a polymath would I be wrong in assuming that is that I'm I know a poly and I know math but do you mean like literally like sciences and maths or no no someone who is interested in a lot of different things and likes to learn and become proficient at a lot of different yeah you threw me off of math just because I'm good at math but I have no training yes a hundred percent and I definitely I have been told many times in my career by professionals who want to make money off of artists that I have given myself the kiss of death by doing this that I I get really into things and I go into them and do them and then I get bored and switch so like had I just stuck with one thing my whole life I would be in a different spot but like I'm 42 and I have a family and I love my life and I love every second of my life so while that was not true in my 30s I had a lot of like imposter syndrome and issues and things now I'm very happy with the path I've cultivated so I learned a new word thank you yeah a new word there you go you are welcome sir you're welcome well I'm so curious did you grow up in a religious household or what did that look like for your family no no religion whatsoever but lots of spirituality my parents are transcendental meditators so they taught me how to meditate when I was a kid which I thought was like dorky and lame and like I definitely stopped doing it from 13 to 20 and then something kicked in when I was it like I think I was literally too I remember why I mean September 11th happened so it was 2001 and I was freaking out and my mom was like you tried meditating and I was like oh you know that that actually sounds like it might hit the spot and so I started meditating on September 13th 2001 and I have literally never missed a day since it's just like like people take medicine that's my medicine can you describe what transcendental medicine medicine transcendental meditation looks like for just yeah listeners yeah definitely um it was famous really famous in the 60s and 70s cuz this guy named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came over from India and he taught the Beatles how to do it and like I mean I could name like Jerry Seinfeld does it all these celebrities love it David Lynch one of my favorite filmmakers but I'm actually uh I feel torn because there was like a weird arc with it where it became very expensive to learn it but all of the money was going back to India to build houses and stuff for poor people so it's not like this guy Maharishi was just sitting in a mansion he really wasn't like you know he died with grace and like honor and there's no like tell-all memoir that says he was like a scumbag however with that said I just prefer to do the meditation practice and just keep it simple in my life and so the way I describe to people is there's many forms of meditation the reason this is probably the easiest especially for Westerners is it's called effortless meditation which means you have a mantra and you start with it and then when it goes away and you remember or recall that it's gone away you just go back to it but there's no wrong or right there's no judging it they specifically go through all the forms of judgment you could have and I'm not speaking judgment in like this you know modern metaphysical context that we use that word like you know don't judge people like it literally just the actual like definition of discerning or judging because like the more stressful the meditation is often means the more stress you're releasing so like really weird emotions and feelings come up sometimes for people I have actually because I started so young it's just smooth sailing for me I just love it I like transcend and oh that's where the word transcend comes from is there's like liminality between the states of consciousness and unconsciousness right like when you go to sleep there's that weird moment where you like know you're falling asleep or when you're waking up meditation takes you to a different point but it's similar to that which is between like according to the theory like Maya is the grand illusion this duality but everything comes from one and so transcendental meditation supposed to take you from the duality into the consciousness of one I can't prove or say that it does that but I can tell you that the bubbling bliss feeling of transcending is unlike any drug I've taken any alcohol high it's pretty similar to like when you first fall in love so you know I think there's something to that but it's a unique process and I recommend it to everyone yes I had a functional nutritionist who suggested that I start TM when I as part of my protocol but it it got to be really complicated for me I had to get a teacher who I had to pay every month and it just it just got like really and it felt a little pyramid scheme II for me yes really made me feel uncomfortable and I thought you know what if I'm supposed to do this I'll find some other way because it just made me feel a little strange plus I had to check in with this person who's a stranger and I don't feel comfortable with that process either I know that it has done wonders and there's amazing scientific studies about I'm sure you've heard of them where they had a bunch of people do meditation and it lowered like crime rates in the area and changed kind of the valence just in the general area of like everything that was going on so there is something to that collective kind of practice and just shifting and changing and having a really positive effect on reality I totally 100% believe in that but just I was so bummed when it turned out to be this you know I was already going to her for some serious health issues and then I had to like make myself vulnerable to someone I didn't know and pay all this extra money and I just was like I can't this is just too much for me right now but that doesn't mean it's it's like gonna be like that forever this person was gonna give me my own personal mantra I think that was also what I had to pay for yeah that's why I'm so reticent to like stay I do transcendental meditation TM as you called it um and it's not that I lie about it or cover it up and the only reason why is like if you like your Apple phone but you also know that Apple people are a cult it's kind of hard to like explain to other people but like you can still use an Apple phone and not be in the Apple cold and if you keep the two apart now as far as the learning goes that's exactly what I was describing is yes there is a process to learn it and yes it is like bonafide meaning the mantras are like sacred sounds that reverberate and work with that said I believe that you could say any word you want and do the practice and it would work and I'm not gonna go on record on the internet saying that because I don't want to get like sued or deal with any flack from it but I will say that I think you know this is a even like nationalism even just being a member of a country is like this for me it's really hard to like you know and groups like they trademark things like the West is full of like intellectual trademarks that's a very peculiar notion in India you could never trademark meditation or at least ancient India so he Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has explained he's dead now but he explained that he brought a gift to the West but also knew that he was gonna take the riches and money from the Imperial West and rededicate it back to what you described which is making established places for people to live and meditate 24-7 and the studies that you're talking about there was one and famously in Washington DC that they did for a week in the 70s I believe and then right now in Missouri the state of Missouri paid the company to teach all the prisoners because the rehabilitation effects are incredible so it's hard because I feel like I'm talking out of two sides of my mouth but I'm really not transit on meditation works Apple iPhones are cool there's Android Android works so it's like there's a million ways to do it and one what I would really recommend to people though is the effortless version doesn't frustrate you and the other ones can and do from what I hear so I am pretty adamant about like why would you want to learn something that's strict when there's something you know that feels less strict and then what the guy Maharishi's always said and I and I do agree as he said there's a million ways to get from America to London you can take a boat you can take a plane you could like so he just said like this version of meditation is the fastest jet developed by consciousness so that if you really want to get to the point of meditation this is the one so yeah but I agree with everything you said I might tons of compassion for how you described it and that's pretty accurate right now I'm doing meditation that's kind of I call it imaginal meditation so I you know the person with their the dulcet tones of their voice that I'm listening to takes me on an adventure and I get to imagine every step and I like that it's fun I'm I mean I mean and I never know what's gonna happen you know it's always exciting and fun for me and I always whenever my mind drifts off because it does all the time people quit meditating because they're like it's so hard and I can't yeah I can't concentrate I keep going off script but that's that's what happens that's the practice so you just recenter back in and you say you forgive yourself okay all right I just got a little lost there for a second but what's what's going on right now and you just recenter yourself and I do believe honestly like it's been amazing for my nervous system for my vagus nerve for everything for just chilling me out chilling out which I've needed I love it and that's well described and I would stick with what you're doing you know just journaling walking all of these things are forms of meditation but what you said is the key which is you can't beat yourself up and you can't get frustrated just because you have an attention span and it does what it does you know I know be I have noticed that you know it's like oh did I forget to do this did I forget to do it just kind of creeps in and there's nothing I can do about it but I was gonna ask you it sounds like your parents were sort of spiritual seekers would you describe that is that correct yes and what's weird I told you I'm a writer I actually really upset my mom recently and then she was okay with it because I wrote an article and I say about how my parents like we're on the spiritual path and then they just kind of went yeah like you know so my dad stayed on it much longer than my mom they both still meditate and they're very dedicated to it but their curiosity I really shouldn't say they it's really different between my mom my dad but anyway the article I wrote was just about my mom but then she reread it a week later and said oh it's full of love and I understand what you were saying but I do I feel like this black sheep now because I shunned spirituality as a kid because I was a kid you know as a teenager I was like no I'm gonna be a punk rocker I'm gonna smoke pot and like you know screw this um and then my brother also wasn't doing it and then we both came around to it so it's interesting now my brother and I run this podcast I do which you're gonna be a guest on called coffin talk and it's a metaphysical podcast it's it's about spirituality and so it's very interesting but yes I would say that especially at the time of my birth in my early formative years my parents were like my mom was always like say a prayer when you hear an ambulance like you know just those kind of things but there was no mention or reference to like technically my dad is Jewish and my mom converted and we did like eating challah and like drinking wine on Fridays and stuff but I had never got bar mitzvah we didn't go to temple and I barely understood who Jesus was until like kids in high school we're talking about it yeah I love that I think it's so much more interesting to have questing parents because it just really I don't know illuminates a lot more of the world to children to kids to teenagers when you have parents that are actively looking or searching for some way to connect or learn about a new secret of the universe or something like that so I think that's kind of exciting and you know a lot of the stories that people tell I love that you brought up liminal spaces because they're everywhere and you know especially in myth and folktale and fairy tales there's always these these liminal spaces that oops someone accidentally walks into and then where am I what's happening what's going on but why is that person have green skin so I love that because so many of the experiences on this podcast that my guests share with me have to do with a liminal space and either in finding oneself in it or accidentally stumbling into it or even dreaming about it and it's really fascinating I'd never considered that meditation can do that and I do think it's really beautiful that you brought up Maya right the Grand Illusion you know it's it's a little bit of a depressing thought too yeah frankly it's a little bit depressing but it's also beautiful you know to consider and then it begs the question what are we all doing here that's a even bigger question than this podcast can handle but it is it is beautiful to think of and I think is that from the Vedas I think yeah okay which is where Transcendental Meditation comes from Transcendental Meditation makes no makes no effort to hide the source the source of it is from the Vedic tradition which is 12,

000 years old and they're very like you know proud of that and so you know I guess in the beginning there was a sound the Big Bang is the sound OM according to East West so it's very interesting that I mean every quantum physicist was immediately going back to like the Vedas you know even Oppenheimer with the atomic bomb quoted the Bhagavad Gita so you know this it's this intersection of like their science and our science and also I always bring this up just because it fascinates me the Great Pyramid like the very biggest first one that was older to Cleopatra than the invention of the cell phone is to her so like less time has elapsed between her death and now and so all of it's just like think about like a science huge air quotes for people listening because we just think of science as like the scientific method Newton you know and like this like but that's just a drop in this weird bucket and yeah so so meditation is a science and it's Kriya yoga it's the yoga of the mind and it's the most essential component of asanas of the body yoga so you know if you're a healthy practitioner in life you're supposed to have a spiritual and mental and a body physical existence and you're supposed to marry all three and so meditation is essential and just real quick because I was it was so pertinent oh no I forgot it never mind there was something else we were talking about that was a are you sure because I do a lot of editing here so if you got it let me know I was talking about liminal spaces yeah Maya and let's see the Vedas I mean I find the Vedas to be completely fabulous and mysterious and what I was gonna say was I just read an article recently where the author referenced quantum theory and atoms and they said well I mean but in the Vedas from I don't know how many thousands of years ago someone was already writing about how everything was energy and little points of energy and that stuff and I thought good lord we are so late to this party yeah that's what um you know it's funny because I'm not one of those like the East is better than the West people I think that's a ludicrous accusation and I think there's also the North and the South East and the way you know there's just a lot of pocket cultures but I will say the arrogance of our paradigm of being an American and this like you know even not to get political at all but just watching us deal with kovat was like air quotes hilarious I mean it was just like no matter what opinion you have you have to see the humor and like so many people using the word science to argue against someone else's science so I grew that and I did remember what I was gonna say which is uh the most life-changing mind-blowing thoughts that was ever introduced to me that still to this day helps me cope with the depression of the grand illusion is that where do you go when you dream like you're there and you're here so clearly when you die or whenever whatever happens is there's obviously something else that you already go to all the time and your experiential time here feels longer than the dream but there are famous case studies of people who have seven year long dreams and like you've probably experienced one yourself we're like you know yeah because you don't your memory of the dream is different from your experience in the dream but anyway all this just gets into what is consciousness is it coming from our brain or is it beyond the brain you know all this stuff is just my favorite topic ever so I'm sorry what do you mean seven year long dream okay yeah so the in a dream you have an experience of time in the dream but like if you actually monitor a person who's sleeping they're having like REM patterns of sleep for like maybe two minutes but then that person will report you know details of a dream that lasts longer than two minutes and so there are people who have reported that they were stuck in a dream I forget the word for it and they could not get out and it was seven years they they had a seven year like like calendars were moving and like and they did not they don't say they hated it or liked it but they say they were trapped they for sure knew that there was a person dreaming and that they're more into that person than this person but then they had to give it up and just admit that they were here now so I always wonder like you know who's dreaming who here like you or me is this a dream is that a dream which is the real state how do we know that this isn't the fun crazies any adventure and then this ends and you go back to some other greater or even worse existence I love that I've certainly had dreams you know I dream a lot I'm a big dreamer and I've certainly had I've had very precious dreams where with my body and soul I knew I was somewhere else I could feel it I was 100% somewhere else and I've talked about one of them recently where I was on a planet that was not Earth and I was in the ocean and I was swimming near the beach and I could see when I looked up another planet really close by and I was in the water and swimming and all of a sudden I found myself drifting out further and further and I couldn't get back to shore and then suddenly this dolphin came up to me and led me back to shore and you know I but but the feeling in my body was so visceral of well first of all it felt like where I was home like I had a deep sense of knowing that I was home wherever I was on this planet that wasn't Earth but you know there was also the feeling of being scared because I was being drawn out into waters that were uncomfortable to me and I couldn't get back but then this dolphin I mean you could read so much into this dream so much but the most fabulous part of the dream what was really fascinating is you know I looked up and I saw this other planet and on that there was a what do they call those bridges that they want to build from Earth to the moon a Scott not a sky bridge some sort of bridge that would connect us to the moon so you you wouldn't have to you could just get on a like conveyor and go out to the moon if you wanted to there was one of those up to this planet and I could see spaceships up there and people getting on and off and I thought what is going on but it was there was such a deep feeling of ease and comfort and finally being home that when I woke up I missed that place it felt like I had left the true place where I was supposed to be and I I was kind of heart sick and I thought oh my gosh I got a glimpse of something that is so profound and now I have to live with that glimpse knowing that there's this other place I don't know dreams can be completely fabulous yeah yeah that was I got so many goosebumps as you told that and it's just I swear like it's it's just we spend so much time I think convincing ourselves that this is it I think we prefer that because it's scary to think I don't know everything I'm not gonna know everything and and as you said like I feel this is someone else's term but like this meat suit is clunky like I feel like I should be able to fly like I really do like I always just intuitively felt like I'm limited physically in a way that doesn't feel right and I love swimming because I think when we swim we like feel this motion that we like should be able to do in the air or something I don't know but your dream touched so many tangential like spots in my yeah that was incredible well I do not dream like that by the way I don't have dreams like that I'm jealous well I do you know when I was a kid I certainly had dreams of flying but and sometimes it was easier than others and I also remember waking up then and thinking okay this is poopy that I can't just fly in general in the world anyway like it doesn't make any sense and it should be that we could all fly I mean I think that I mean yeah there would need to be some sort of air police to make sure we don't crash into each other but in general I think it would be a grand adventure and I hate heights so I don't even know what I'm talking about I would maybe go like 10 or 20 feet off the ground I'm totally too cowardly to go any higher than that so yeah I don't know how people with a vertigo would do with that probably not very well but I so I would love for you to just tell me I don't know how I don't know let's eat knowledgeable you are about the Vedas or what have you but what are your some of your favorite takeaways from the Vedas that you have kind of yeah I mean I'm not I am by no means an expert but I am like a huge fan of what they call like I mean just a lot of the theories like the Akashic record theory which is this idea that well I think I think paramount to this discussion would be if you think that time is a real variable that is fixed none of this can make sense and won't make sense and it sounds preposterous if you put yourself in your fake Einstein shoes and you pretend you're like half as intelligent as that guy was time is a variable and he made it very clear to all of us like there's my favorite example is one minute with your hand in like a cool like water is very different than a minute on a stove you know and one minute in the comfort of someone you love is very different from one minute with a person you can't stand so like time really is relative and when you start to understand that you could see that while it feels like there's causality to the universe there's absolutely none it's just us stringing it together so I think what the Vedas to me helped me see is that they talk about these the cycles of destroying and creation and destroying and creation and it's endless and that kind of relates to like this big pyramid thing like where did that culture go they're dead like modern Egyptians are not those Egyptians there's no connection whatsoever they don't even think they're genetically the same like nothing makes sense with the history of earth and especially as we uncover new geological you know buildings that prove that civilization is older than we wanted to say it was to fit like this explanation so with all that said I just think it's crucial to understand that like you were born and you got older and bigger and then you got normal and then you start to get smaller and you're gonna die like and that you're gonna die part we whisper in the West we but in the Vedas you wouldn't look at it as a whispering event because what you just talked about that place that felt like home that is home and you totally do want to go back there and so like you don't want to leave people you love here but you certainly don't want to stay here forever and I think I just talked about this with someone else but like we go to funerals because we're sad because we lament the loss of a person we like the person who died is probably like oh yeah I feel bad and I loved all you people but like check it out I'm over here and to planet world and everything feels safe and I'm swimming with dolphins you know so like that's why heaven is such a great carrot rope I think in our culture is that it's just a simplified version of what we're talking about I like that I definitely can be led by a carrot anywhere so two thumbs up for that and it's healthy and it's good for you and lots of fiber we all have fiber so thank you for that and I do think you know these are all such big ideas and big topics and you know I the Vedas are massive okay it's not like it's some like tiny little book that you can carry around with you it's I mean it's like thousands of years of discerning and interpreting and trying to comprehend what's going on in this reality or our relationship to it and its relationship with us you know it's also it has a relationship with us and I think that's important to understand you know I always tell people on this podcast that hey to really be invested in this reality understand that you're co-creating so that when you speak to that energy or that however you want to call it God the Great Spirit your ancestors what have you that if you start a conversation that energy will talk back to you in some way and you can make it co-creative and you can start working together and I really do think those energies that energy that's what they're looking for from all of us is to understand that hey we're co-creating everything with you but we want to have a more conscious conversation where you're invested we're invested what have you I'm sure they're looking down at me right now and they're saying don't speak for us do not but this is just with my little tiny brain how I discern what's going on in this world but yeah thank you for that because I think you're my first guest who's brought up the Vedas so I appreciate it very much and it just reminds me I need to like get I need to read in more about that find some books or something to read about the Vedas again and Sanskrit and just it's a gorgeous gorgeous lineage of knowledge that I think most people don't pay attention to these days right but every time I read something about it I think what is how did I not know this for so long like this is knowledge that I need well you know the central idea and concept of this podcast is I ask every guest please I would love to hear a story or stories where you feel like you've witnessed or experienced something magical or miraculous in your life and it could have happened to you you could have witnessed it I mean it doesn't have to be just one I'd like to hear whatever you want to share yeah I have a lot actually so I think I'll go in order I think there's probably four and they range from super funny interesting and cool to very tragic and people are gonna like feel sad but I don't care because I'm an open book and that's my life also interestingly enough all of the events I'm about to disclose are nine years apart which I just find interesting so the first one is the first time I thought something magical or weird was going on I went to college and I was a freshman and it didn't take for me I flew 3,

000 miles away from home to a place I'd never visited Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and I went there for a million reasons that were good but within about a month I realized I'm a weirdo from California I don't fit in I have no friends I had the best group of friends ever in California they're all still hanging out they went to colleges near each other I made a huge mistake but I made a huge mistake that I couldn't go back on you know tuition's been paid I'm there I have a place I I also bragged to everyone that I'm cool and I'm flying 3,

000 miles to a place I've seen you know so so I started praying for an excuse to leave without realizing I was praying that's a very important part of the story but I know in retrospect that thoughts are prayers so I was thinking anyway one day I felt really sick when I woke up and I couldn't eat and a week later I still couldn't eat and I passed out in the middle of a class in the hall and I woke up with paramedics over me and they took me to a hospital and after a litany of tests that took five hours a doctor walked in a room with no smile on his face and said Mike you have non-hodgkin's lymphoma and it seems pretty late-stage you need to deal with this you could potentially die and so they told me they released me for this is the story's weird I was 18 so they're like they just released me with that news and so I went home and I'm like crying and I called my best friend back home this this girl who I would go on to date later and I cried to her and told her what happened she's like well what did your parents say and I'm not telling my parents she's like what why and I'm like I'm just not she's like okay well at least tell your brother so I was like all right I'll tell my brother so I called my brother and I said you have to promise not to tell mom and dad and I told him and then I hung up and then the phone rang a minute later and was my parents my brother had told them so anyway they were about to withdraw me from school and fly me back to San Francisco for like cancer and stuff and then this is why I believe in magic I didn't want to go in the period of my mom flying out to like take care of me and all this crap I made two really good friends and I suddenly loved Pittsburgh so after I go back for screening in a week and it's the same not worse like the white cell red cell counts and then I go back for a week after that the counts the same and then they said or no I'm sorry the count was like slightly better so I was like improving a little bit so they said okay you you definitely aren't in stage five or whatever you're in whatever this is so my mom's like all right I'm gonna fly home and then we're gonna wait for the next test and then we'll figure out whether to withdraw you and all that and then I went in for the next test and it was gone completely gone and the doctor told me sometimes things go in remission you should like follow back and so I told my mom and she said all right well tell us how the follow-up goes so I lied this is the weird part of my personality I lied to everyone I said I went to a fallback and I never did and this was when I was 18 and I'm now 42 so there's no way I'm carrying I've also as we'll learn from these next stories I've been medically tested a couple times since then so I definitely don't have it so that made me believe in much more than the positivity of prayer it made me believe in the negativity of prayer this was a lesson for me in like be careful what you wish for don't ask well the next story is another example so when I was 26 and a half so remember I was 18 when the first thing happened and then I was I turned I was turning 27 I can't remember the exact details but um I had decided and actually I just wrote a series of essays on this so if people want to check it out you can go to my website and read this there's like a full long story I will make it much shorter right now but uh yeah I had made plans to go to a graduate program and I was gonna get a law degree because I was giving up on myself and my dreams of becoming a writer and a musician and so I committed to the University of Oregon to get a concurrent degree in law and conflict resolution and I was gonna be a mediator and help homeless people in prison convicts that was like what I was gonna do but as like the summer started to like approach and it was getting closer and closer to moving and going to the program I realized I made a horrible mistake I didn't want to do it I loved Portland I love my friends and also being being being being I just knew I didn't want to be a lawyer I knew that like that was an easy path in life for my personality and where I'm from like that's like a not it's a beaten path and whether or not you know and I'm not really financially driven as a human I'm just never been my thing so so anyway I started like praying for an out now at the same time I was really into bicycling I was like bicycling every day of the week I would only drive one day a week I'd like really because Portland Oregon was like the first bike friendly city in America probably I'm probably I'm not positive on this but anyway so one day I was bicycling at night back from the bars with my friends and I never wore a helmet and I saw a person not wearing a helmet slam on the brakes crash into a car break their head into the back windshield fall on the ground right in front of me I walked up and I tried to help them as they bled out and I'm assuming they died there's a chance they didn't but I would be blown away if they didn't survive with like massive head trauma I mean no matter what this person's life changed that day and it probably ended my friend at the time like was she still a friend but she elbowed me really hard and was like do you see why you need to wear an effing helmet because you know my friends were like you're so arrogant like why are you doing this I was like and I'm not a cool person I cannot stress this enough to people I'm not like this like leather jacket shame-smoking person I just literally loved the feeling of wind if I got that stupid okay so it wasn't like try to be cool thing it was literally oh then biking won't be fun helmets like make your skin weird you know it's just so I bought a helmet the next day and I started wearing it and then two weeks from the day of the accident I was leaving my house and it was the best weather ever and I was like screw it I'm leaving the helmet at home and I felt knowledge this is the only way I can say I don't hear voices I feel knowledge like my intuition is never a voice it's like knowledge it's just like something hits me and it said I'm gonna say it said but like for the sake of the story but it wasn't a saying like I'm not hearing a voice what the hell is your problem get the hell back inside get your helmet and put it on so I go all the way back to my house I was like a block away I get the helmet I put it on I go out and have breakfast my friends and then I'm biking home and I was lazy so I put the helmet on over my sunglasses on my head and then the same voice told me if you get hit that will cause the sunglasses to cave into your head and it will defeat the entire point of wearing a helmet stop take the stupid sunglasses off and put them so I did that and then a block later a car ran a stop sign and hit me and where I not wearing a helmet a hundred percent would have died I've been smacked it like three times on the car and the pavement I was in a wheelchair and guess what happened when I was in a wheelchair I didn't have to go to the law school program they gave me my money back and they told me I didn't have to go and then in that period I realized I wanted to be a writer so I applied for an MFA and I moved and went to Oakland which is where I'm from my whole life changed so that's the second story I do think I mean obviously I adore everything you just said about intuition because it's this latent superpower that we have and you know I remember being I don't know my 20s I suppose 30s in Portland I lived in Portland as well Oregon about 20 plus years I remember going to New Renaissance bookstore I'm sure you on 23rd and looking in the section for how to grow your intuition how to listen that still silent voice and I just a at that time didn't believe into any of this crap but it had experiences that I thought okay there's something weird is going on I I want to get because my scientific analytical brain wants to parse it out and kind of dissect it so I was looking at all these books I just remember sitting there looking at these books and thinking why am I spending this money like there has to be a better way of accessing this quote-unquote intuition thing but I think if the desire is there it can help wake that up wake that trait that we have inside of us all up because I've certainly had the experience I was working at a I lived at Canon or I'm sorry Manzanita Nahalem one summer I was working at this wine bar which is no longer there now and this gentleman came in like about 830 and we closed at 9 at night and he sat at the bar and I just remember being terrified of him for no reason he scared the crap out of me and I just kept praying that everyone who was sitting there at the bar wouldn't leave me alone with him because I knew something so bad could potentially happen I didn't even know him I'd never seen him before but there was just something there that was so profound and so now I think I refer to it as a superpower and everyone has it everyone has it just how much do you choose to actually ignore it to make your life more comfortable you know what I mean totally yeah it's a superpower yeah no it really is yeah it truly is and it there's a famous stand-up comedian I can't remember which one but I've heard him on numerous podcasts telling the story but his mom went on a date and the guy was like handsome really good at talking and just seemed to be the real deal but she had a funny feeling so she said no thanks when he offered her a ride home three weeks later that man was arrested in Colorado his name is Ted Bundy you know and that's her story and it's verified like she had like numerous people you know so because he was he was a charmer and apparently he's just yeah so everyone get in touch with your superpower because who knows how to change the world you know who knows all right everyone I hope you enjoyed this very next episode of the podcast and my interview with Mike Oppenheim I need to thank Mike for taking the time to be a guest on the show and for telling all of his stories thanks to everyone who listens I'm so grateful to all of you and I need to thank all of you for the ratings and reviews you've given me you have no idea how much those help other people find the podcast thank you for listening and here's my one request be like Mike be into the mystery Mike has lived this charmed life it seems and has this ability to walk through the world having all sorts of synchronicities and magical things happen around him be open to the mystery like Mike be aware that there is mystery in the world like Mike and I bet so very soon magical and miraculous things will start happening to you I'll see you next week for the very next episode of the podcast and until then I hope life is filled with laughter with dear friends and with summer days and summer fun that just goes on and on and on