One: The Early Days

Interviewing Selves:  It's been so long. I’m just delighted to be speaking with you. Thank you so much for today. 

Deep Breath: Anything. Period.

IS: I want to talk about the early days.

DB: OK. Now I may fumble. It has been many years since I've used my voice to communicate words. 

IS:  If anybody has taught me about the importance of fumbling, and being fallible, and of being a human, it's you. So I'm prepared for that, but only because of the knowledge and grace that you've equipped me with.

DB: Beautiful. If there’s anything to be taught now, it is how not to be human.

IS:  For our readership, just tell me about those early days. Tell me about when you were still Brett Fleisher. Those exciting times during the 2020s, when this space we’re in, was the original Yummy Heart space, the ceremony space, the somatic business, the tea franchises. 

DB: I remember standing a lot. And then it became a lot more about sitting. I think about those early days of the Temple of the Yummy Heart — of what it was just to sit for two hours, three hours, with friends, and the amount of movement that was still happening inside of me. The movement that was happening all around me. We were just coming through the pandemic. There were shootings taking place all the time. There were the chemtrails and 5G. Can you remember when it was 5G?

IS:  So different than today. 70G.

DB: And I remember that freneticism having such a sway in my desire to consistently and constantly build and create, and get things done, and do things well and right. There was a certain excitement to that, a certain chaos to it, a certain drive and ambition to it. When I look back, I think just how wasteful so much of that energy was. I think about how necessary all the energy was, for it to be channeled and harnessed into where it went.

IS:  Tell me more about that.

DB: Oh, just the desire to be loved, the desire to be seen, the desire to be pain-free. Desire, period. Desire, on the flip side of fear, in deep conjunction with panic. All that energy of: Will it work out? Will things happen? Fuel to a means toward an end, towards that thing that it was desiring. And yet now, of course, in retrospect, recognizing that it wasn't about that thing at all. It's about that energetic fuel of what that desire was, just being elicited so that it can be channeled into “the great trust.”

That’s where the Radical Vulnerability Readings (RVRs) came from — it was the harnessing of that energy, like oceans on a wave; recognizing that underneath those waves is great aliveness, great stillness. So I think those waves were ridden until there was a pummeling that happened within the waves. Eventually there was a sinking. We were very distinctly in the sinking moment at the end of 2027. Things were shifting. I had just become a father. It was the first time in 18 years I was considering leaving Los Angeles. At that time, those gatherings were held in the yurt every Tuesday. That small little faction had become a daily, then a nightly gathering. We had 12, 15 people in that small space every night for five or six hours at a time.

We built that other pergola on the property just to be able to have a second location. Yummy Heart zones were popping up in different cities, different townships within Los Angeles. There was a moment where it was both gradual and instant all at the same time. It was this gradual weaning off of conversation as story or connection.  There was a moment I remember I was sitting.You were there, I believe.

IS: I was.

DB:  There were 12 of us. I believe it was the last gathering, actually, on this property, in that original structure. At that point, it was beginning to fall apart on us. It was beginning to crack and the spiders were nesting their eggs all inside of the wood. 

IS: I remember it and the breeze would come right through the canvas.

DB: Mmmhmm. It had thinned. The top cracked and all the spider webs were very symbolic. Glass, window, cracking. Everything was cracking. Cracking open. 

I remember, I think it lasted a day. We sat there with the intention of sitting there for just a few hours and it ended up being just a full day of sitting in sustainable silence. Even the emotions, those primary emotions that were so discovered, explored, and exploited in those early days, dropped deeper, into much deeper emotions — profound feelings of belonging, of connection, of love. That was the first moment that the group telepathy really took place. Where we all knew that we were all thinking, and feeling and sensing and sending the same things.

In almost the pre-moment, without any intention of it, it was just the understanding that if we got out of everyone's way, we would all just be in the mycelial network of feeling and thought. While the thoughts were all different, they were all coming from the same source. They were channeling through different people at the same time. It was all fully synced. That's where the readings came from. The RVRs. The Radical Vulnerability Readings were where we learned that we could individually and collectively sit with someone, tap into that space of great consciousness and know everything, sense everything, and not have to communicate it. It wasn't about communicating what someone was going through to fix them. It was about tapping into it and letting it be there.

IS: Now this is about the time that I had left. And so I'd love to hear more about the move from the Radical Vulnerability Readings being developed in that moment to being shared with others, which I know intersected with the move to Omaha as well.

DB: Yeah. I mean, there was that period of time, of space, of existence. There were moments when there was a hibernation that took place from that moment. There was the desire to honestly luxuriate in it. And out of the 12 there was six that left the Angeleno region and we went to the woods initially. We went up North to go to Mendocino then we went into the Oregonian woods. We began to sustain each other on other types of programs, other types of fuels. Food was becoming less and less of a necessary resource. Since the early 2030s we were dissolving any social needs.

IS:  Was that because of the mycelial network of consciousness that was flowing and feeding people?

DB: Yeah, it was both the willingness and the receptivity to release the constructs of any sort of programming around being a human being and tapping into the well of love. 

IS: Mmm. Beautiful.

DB: Yeah, and those six: it was one perpetual orgy, but not sexual always. But an orgiastic experience of penetrating love constantly. Through touch, through looks, through glances, through silence, through stillness, through separateness. That was a big recognition; feeling the orgasmic connection as we created separation between ourselves and felt the bond actually get stronger as we would go off into different corners of the woods for weeks on end and to still be able to communicate and send messages to the butterflies and through the mushrooms and through the the rustling of the trees and the leaves—not only communicating with each other, but of course, with our surroundings.

IS:  I feel that it's that emphasis on separation that has always given me pause when people call you a “cult leader”, because so many cult leaders are filling a deep void in themselves by having many people worship and connect with them. And in your ethos, you have always encouraged independence, and as you said, love through separateness.

DB: I would even challenge the idea of love through separateness. It’s the fact that it's all connection. The idea of separateness is just a construct that we can communicate to each other. It is that exact notion that there is no actual separateness if we choose not to be in it. But distance, perhaps that's what we're talking about? Space and distance. And oftentimes that will be associated with feeling separate: I am away, therefore I am not with, therefore I am separate from. And clearly that is untrue. I am alone. I am in space. Even the idea of aloneness is clearly a silly idea.

For when I am alone, there is no void or vacuum. There is never full aloneness. I think some liked to call me a cult leader was partly because I like to call myself a cult leader. Because it was fun and funny.

IS:  An artistic subversion.

DB: Yeah, it looks like one.

IS:   [Laughs] That is true.

DB: And what else are you gonna call me? And it was a cult! Well perhaps, what creates cults, or at least the notion of one, is really any gathering that is unified over a belief system or a connection point. Although we didn't have a belief system, all we had were connection points. Yes, it really was the anti-cult cult, which was pretty cultish.

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Two: Competitive Pregnancies in Omaha

IS:  The true growth of the community was when you had moved to Omaha, and the competitive pregnancies entered the picture. There were more offspring, there was more progeny of the non-cult cult. Tell me about the move from the forest, into the Empire of the Yummy Heart.

DB: It’s fun to think about the creation of that. Almost two decades removed from the original creation of the Temple of the Yummy Heart. Like I said, all of that initial hungering and desire harnessed into something different. The building of it wasn't built off ambition, or need. Care? Yes. Need? No. Desperation? No. There was this great recognition that we needed nothing. So the creation was the pure enjoyment of creation, of the bliss of it. And so naturally, organically, everything presented itself. The timber, stones, the workers. It was a colony of ants as if ants had roller skates with little turbo jets in them. In fact, we attempted to put miniature roller skates on an ant colony, to actually great success.

IS: I saw it in the news.

DB: And what they learned to do was they adapted to the slipping - and quite extraordinarily. Anyway, it was this dichotomy of the ancient futurism. How do we honor where we've come from, of what worked for human evolution and meet and match that with a new way of doing things and marrying that in the moment? So, competitive pregnancies came from our human past, where in certain tribes, it was the women who chose their partners. Not the silliness that took place [later on] when they were possessed and owned, but rather, the women would choose their mates. They would choose multiple mates. And the sperm would compete inside the woman to see which one was going to win the survival of the fittest. Sometimes the sperm would actually merge together. Therefore, our community was formed, releasing the ego of “That is my child. That is mine. I own that,” because no one would know.

And naturally, there was a core of us that had been developing this for almost a decade; this deep way of release, connection, and others would join us still in the throes of their own programming. And what we found, through my years of studying the nervous system, and the human systems and trauma, was that it was all similar to that energy of fear: A bit of a waste of time.

IS:  The competitive pregnancies?

DB: No. The attempting to go back into one's own history, to spend time suffering through, to release old patterns and programs, and rehabitualizing one’s self. 

IS:  Tell me more about that. 

DB: This is where the RVRs came in. Someone experiencing suffering on any human level will come and sit with us, “the Heartists”, as we were so named. At that time, there were about maybe a dozen of us that were fully aligned in it. By the end the 2030s there were about 1000 of us.

Like the ancient forms of Reiki, the idea was that you'd be attuned to the master energies, and whoever was attuning you would attune you to the original energies, like dropping you back into the roots of the tree. We did that except it wasn't an energy outside of oneself. It was just rerouting someone into their own energies again — and simply providing the mirror necessary to do that, through touch, through love, through looks. Some would last for only a moment, some would last hours depending on how deep the resistance was. But it wasn't necessary to tell the story to re-traumatize the past, or to try to create practices to instill new ways of behaving. It's just simply letting the person know that they are God, that they are loved.

IS: I want to talk about some of the darkness - the obstacles. Every powerful moment in history faces pushback, every visionary leader. I want to hear about yours. There were a few other spiritual movements that got a little testy about what you were doing. Some world leaders got involved. There was the IRS raid. Tell me about some of the obstacles.

DB: Those are some of the more beautiful moments I look back at. 

Any new way of doing things is going to be a threat to the old way of doing things. So when we were bringing people together to a state of love within moments, it was very threatening to those that spent and made a lot of money charging people for years and years and years of therapy.

IS: A huge upset.

DB: We were a threat to the food industry, to the water industry, to consumerism on every level. There was a returning and an evolving that was happening simultaneously where need and fear were no longer the foundational fuel of existence. That was fine when we had six [people], or 100, but when we started to get to the 1000s, we were sustaining ourselves on each other. And doing so with great inclusion. Similar to what happened to Osho in the 70s in the 80s, there was pushback around the city and state. We had so many moments of outrage; parents, lovers, former husbands and boyfriends whose partners had come and weren’t playing their games anymore. 

I know I am not novel. I am not a revolutionary. I am an evolutionary human from a source of other humans that are tapping into the same consciousness. There are well known ones like Buddha and Jesus and there are millions and millions and millions of lesser known ones that were tapping into the same consciousness. So I find experientially there were a lot of similarities to when the Buddha would be raided by men wielding swords above their heads and he just approached them with compassion and they dropped their swords. In some instances, we weren't as effective. Bullets did fly on a few occasions. Of course, my approach at that point - which was deep, deep understanding and care - was very misunderstood.

IS: How so?

DB: I was privately attacked for being apathetic, unboundaried, for being dangerous. At one point I was on the government's Enemy of the State list.

IS: Did that change how people within the community looked at you

DB: Mostly [they looked at me] more lovingly. There was always the desire to put a face to something. But the truth is, at that stage, it wasn’t a man leading an organization, we were an organization leading men and women and humans. There are many faces to us. My intent always was to spread. We started with six, then 12. Then eventually it was in the 1000s, 10,000s leading each other.

IS: Really a leaderless organization, wouldn’t you say? 

DB: I would say it was a leader-filled organization. That's exactly what it was. I think it was everyone, recognizing that they're all the leaders of their own steps, of their own feet, of their own choices. And those choices affect others, and therefore, they're a leader of other people. Now, for so many that shun their own responsibility in their own leadership, in their own lives, those that were complacent and desiring to be led, to follow — once again that was a either a very deeply threatening experience, or one where they would come to be told what to do. They would join us to become part of a cult. To be following. And that was never the invitation for them. That was never the instruction. So some left very embittered. It caused all sorts of media and controversy. 

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Three: The Longest Perpetual Smile

IS: Can you talk about your relationship to the government

DB: It must be understood that on that level of “beingness,” the idea as Thoreau well knew, as so many well knew coming before, the idea of paying money to a government that is no longer in a reciprocal relationship with you doesn't make sense. Now, there is charitability, there is tithing, and providing money for those in need. But that too, should come with choice. And we were very choosey of where our resources would go. So to provide resources to the government to let them decide, when you're no longer requiring any support from them, really put our relationship with them at odds, which led to several of our followers that came in and felt unattuned. Their expectations weren’t met [around our desire to] bring our inner workings out, which sent us to a six year court trial, which was fun!

IS: And game changing.

DB: I had a great time. That, I believe, began what eventually became my Guiness World Record for the longest perpetual smile at 171 days. That started in those court cases.

IS: Was the smile prompted by the joy from the court case?

DB: Yeah, I think what happened is that what was often mistaken as irony or consternation was actually a great reveling in the human drama. What better stage than a court system. Throughout history it has always been a stage. An incredible stage. I found myself having grown up so desiring being on a stage. I forgot the joy of what it was like to sit and to watch a performance take place. That smile came from just watching the performance happen. The performance of life, and myself being a figure in the play. So often being yelled at, which was my original wounding — the hardest thing is always to be on the receiving end of that. At this stage in my life, it was just such a level of true joy to know that that energy was coming at me, through me, and just also watering the garden.

IS: Yes. Which I don't think would have been possible without our RVRs. And really what you had tapped into, was to have a more permeable membrane to outer forces.

DB: What happened is, through the blessed technologies at that time, of cameras not only picking up video feeds, but also kinesthetic feeds, we were able to tap into sensors and create the empathic experience of being there in the tension of the courtroom. They had monitors all over my feet, my fingers, a few that we snuck into other places, so that people could tap into my experience. And that's when we started growing. Because it was that opportunity, that stage in the face of the attack, that the simplicity of the love was able to hit home for so many people in their homes. 

IS: Yes.

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Four: Secession

IS: As we're drawing to a close, one of the last questions I'd like to ask is about the move through NERFA (New Era Religious Freedom Act) to secede. Can you answer that question through the lens of separateness and togetherness? There was so much connection happening with the world in the court trial and then the move to secede felt like a separation.

DB: Interesting that “secede” and “succeed” are so close.

You know, the difference was: It wasn't planting flags in the ground, claiming, “This is our spot in our land.” It was more the energy of when a landmass over a long period of time shifts and shifts and shifts until it breaks off and forms its own island. That was the energy of what happened with Nebraska. The Heartists got stronger, and everything else outside of it began to move away from it. So, the decision to “secede” was more the agreement that that word itself would be appropriate. And only so that there was true independence while the invitation always remained: independence with inclusion. That allowed us to be able to govern from the heart and to have nature be the government that would tax us, not human beings. While some people felt (still do and always will) disincluded, that is simply by choice.

IS: Some pundits have said they saw this secession as a metaphor for emotional boundaries. Can you share your thoughts on that?

DB: [Laughs] I guess my question is: Do boundaries exist at the core of the planet? Are boundaries a more surface experience? How deep do emotions run as well? If emotions are currents that move through, how deep does the current run? For some, I imagine that feels true for them. But that has to only come from the idea that a boundary actually is a thing. 

I sit into the current of experience that flows between us, beyond the energy that is in motion inside of that. You can build a brick wall between us. You can shove yourself full of different types of narcotics or pills to shut things out. Yet if we tap into the same well, there is no such thing as a boundary. For some that feels like an important thing to establish. Bless them.

IS: My final question: Talk to me about now. It came out recently that you had passed along many of your responsibilities to your granddaughter Yurta. And you’ve also announced that on your upcoming birthday, January 9th, 2065, that you’ll be uploading your consciousness into an animatronic version of Willa, your beloved cat you taxidermied upon her death in 2022. Tell me tell me about now and where you find yourself?

DB: I find myself in the three words before the final punch line at the end of the comedy set. Just because things have become very still and silent and deep does not mean they haven't been retained or become even more and more funny and humorous. What greater joke than to put myself inside a cat. [Laughs]

It’s where I felt my heart always was to begin with. So perhaps I will experience this reality, the way I've always dreamt I would for those 18 years when we were together of what it would feel like to lay for 20 hours a day and feel nothing but that deep level of love. I got to experience that as a human and now perhaps there's something else.

IS: Well, Deep Breath. We’ll take one. [Both take a deep breath]. I thank you for your time today and for stepping back into the realm of verbal processing for this interview. I know that transition isn't always easy but it was so worth it and I'm so grateful for it.

DB: It is the best moment that exists right now.

IS: It sure is.

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Links

• The Yummy Heart