The Fame Thing // An Interview with Abdi Assadi

The Fame Thing // An Interview with Abdi Assadi

We met Abdi Assadi on a bitter Sunday afternoon in Manhattan. His office was sunny, minimal and serene, just what you’d expect from a spiritual counselor & acupuncturist. But for all of his tranquility & consciousness, he’s got the tongue of a sailor, a love of motorcycles that rivals the gnarliest Hell’s Angel and a reverence for the late Terence McKenna that surpasses even our own. For three hours, we sipped green tea while we discussed his childhood in Africa, his experience working in the Bronx during the AIDS crisis and on our generation’s obsession with fame. His sentiments were as painful as they were hopeful and he left us with a few tips for transforming our collective ego mania.

*Note: the following are excerpts from a two hour interview that was transcribed from an audio recording.

3W: We’re here today talking about fame. It’s Jason Goodman Founder of 3rd Ward and Phil Weinrobe, Member Services Director. So, Abdi, do you want to talk a little bit about what you do?

AA: I was born a poor black kid. [Laughs.] I’m an acupuncturist and a therapist. I’ve been doing this 25 years and a couple of months. My interest is in helping people remember who they are, sort of spiritual work. I jumped into the deep end of this kind of work when I was 23-years-old working with people with AIDS. When I started working, I saw a lot of people die. It forced me to question things: What are we doing? What’s going on? I was raised in Africa, in Nigeria during Biafra and the war. My old man used to work for UNICEF, so we traveled in countries where people were starving and dying. That makes you question what’s going on, what this is all about. That’s sort of where I come from.

3W: I grew up listening to Terence McKenna. I am a big Terence McKenna fan - I actually play him in the office at 3rd Ward. One of my favorite things he said was, “Culture is not your friend.” How do you think this ties into our culture’s obsession with fame?

AA: Terence, dude... Fuck, that guy changed my life. Part of my path was Shamanic warps. I worked with these Shamanic Peruvians and Native Indians, American Native Indians, and these people couldn’t hold a fucking candlestick to McKenna. McKenna was so lucid. The guy was unbelievable. His understanding of culture is the understanding of the fascism that we’re living under and how we don’t get it. It’s phenomenal. McKenna, man, was all about opening up the mind in a radical way. He was a true revolutionary. Most people are reactionaries - they wake up to the fascism that’s suppressing them. He actually had stepped outside of it.

3W: What he says is really deep and tripped out, but also really clear. Super easy for anyone to understand. You don’t have to be a philosopher, you don’t have to go off the deep end and take a lot of mushrooms. What he says makes total sense.

AA: It’s true. He was an ethnobiologist. What he used to do was a heroic dose of mushrooms (which is five grams or over) to have this opening, and then he’d take the DMT as well, and he had opened. He would speak clearly about anything, any topic. One time, he had asked a mushroom “What about world population? I’m so concerned,” and the mushroom was like, “You’re such an idiot. If every American and European only had one child, as opposed to worrying about the rest of the world, we’d be fine.” He was like, “The mushroom’s crazy.” Then he did the research and he realized that - this was in the 80s - in the Third World a person can have up to 500 kids and they consume less than one European or American kid. So actually, if Europe and America had one child at a time, it was the same as cutting it exponentially. In the desert, you can go off on this shit. Wake up! But, hey, whatever these shows on TV are, people want to be famous. They’re taught we can get there, which is also insane. What? You’re going to have 300 million people be famous?

3W: A few weeks ago at Art Basel, a few of us from 3rd Ward were sitting around a campfire in Miami going, “What is wrong with our generation?” There were two things that came out. One was the “Fuck It” Generation: we just don’t care any more. But the other, almost opposite, is that we all believe we have to be famous to be successful. It’s our yardstick. We believe that we’re going to be famous eventually somehow, each one of us. And the relationship between those two things - apathy and fame as a mandate - it’s a weird connection.

3W-Phil: One thing I’ve noticed is that with this whole media explosion, and everyone’s access to that media, is that all of a sudden the potential to see where you rank is there. And that wasn’t there before. Think about the 1970s. If you wanted to see where you were at in terms of your fame level, there was no way. You either were famous or you weren’t famous. But now there’s this giant spectrum where everyone can see their place on that spectrum and try to move themselves up. And that self-awareness of your fame is what I think is driving people crazy and causing these obsessions, distortions.

AA: Yeah, well said. Just look at the art world. I remember back in the ‘70s when people started to attack shit, and started hitting walls. It was really just for your peers. It was just what people did on the Lower East Side. It was never my thing, but I just remember watching. And I remember in the  ‘80s, when the gallery thing started happening, all of a sudden it came out of this experiential thing that people did. Like, whoa, your consciousness was “How is this thing going to sell? How am I going to be,” as you said, “famous?”

3W: It’s interesting because I feel like you get back to the apathy from demoralization. We’ve been totally de-intellectualized, and don’t know what’s going on, and we’re the top of the food chain. We’re these over nourished, overfed, under-intellectualized little "fleshy balls of apathy. [Laughter]

AA: As Americans, the thing that we don’t get, is that our place of being on top is really changing. We’re turning into a poor country, man. We really are. Even that part is going to change, you’re going to have these gated communities and it is happening more and more. I was raised in the Third World, so to me it’s just how it was. You had your elite, which was 1% of 1% of the population, you had your service group that served that elite, and then you had the rest. And we’re going into that place and no one’s even talking about it. Detroit is going to be everywhere.

3W: It’s not okay. The guys driving the bus are totally blind.

AA: And you don’t even have a good economy when you look at it in terms of who’s really gaining. When you look at the net worth of America, what’s really happening is, you basically have this pyramid and the top 1% owns everything. We have two million people in jail. I’m all happy that we have an African-American president but you know when I’m going to be happy? When the majority of that two million are not African-American and Hispanic. People are like whoa, now racism is solved in America because we have an African-American president. No dude, shit, there’s some really crazy stuff. Taking it back to fame and celebrity – that’s the stuff that masks the fact that it’s rotting underneath, you cannot have that.

3W: It’s like human beings have a really hard time putting their minds around incremental change.

AA: The system actually functions by dehumanizing people. People actually go to that ego place which really ties into the Fame thing. When you go to the fame thing you’re just ego drive, ego overdrive, which is a very lonely place. I feel more isolated, so I have to buy one more thing. I feel more alienated; I have to buy one more thing. What we do is we get together, we get shitfaced, and we just totally try to   disconnect. We check out guys, girls, whatever you’re into, just disconnect, and talk about things that disconnect us. This is one thing that’s a gift out of what’s happening now. Hopefully, it’ll bring people together. Now, that’s the curse of the fame thing, that’s the curse of the celebrity thing. All these shows that are on TV, this fame thing is about me over you.

3W: I relate to what you’re saying, we’re all obsessed with ego and obsessed with being the best whatever, with fame, it just takes us far away from ourselves.

AA: The only way you’re really going to consume something is if you’re really not content. The contentedness never happens externally. When you purchase something new, all that does is touch the place that’s already content, and then you get bored with it and you want to repeat that experience again and again. This is Bush coming over after this horrific thing happens in our country and he says, “Go shopping.” The system has a consciousness. To me it’s not just about the fact that there are three mean guys sitting up there trying to figure everything out. These systems have consciousness. Kind of what we’re talking about: culture, as you say, is not your friend, but culture is not some dead entity. When you read Alice Miller - Alice Miller was this amazing psychotherapist and she studied the Nazis - these dudes were God-fearing, church-going family people. To me these Nazis were monsters. The scary part is that they weren’t monsters. There were a couple of psychopaths but there weren’t millions of psychopaths. How could a culture decimate eight million people? We’re the same people; we haven’t changed that much. Again, that ego thing you’re talking about is narcissism, the checked-outness. It used to be religion, then it became nationalism, now it’s become fame. To me it’s the same damn ugly medicine that keeps repeating itself, and no one’s learned to fucking think. It’s culture. It’s got a consciousness and it doesn’t want to die.

3W: It’s hard to imagine though, a world without culture. It’s hard to know where you stand in this culture, really, how to operate. There’s so much choice, and much of it’s predatory.

Abdi AssadiAA: Yeah, that’s definitely true. And again, what’s happening with the education level in this culture... Everything you’re saying is true. What’s going to be the next step? Right now, you have people with something to lose, so everything is cool. But, you’ve got the cops, you’ve got this and that, you’ve got the military, and when you have a culture that doesn’t have anything to lose, and a culture that is based on fame and alienation, that is when you get violence. People are sleepwalking into fascism.

3W: An educated person a hundred years ago would think that America is fascist at this point.

AA: Oh, for sure. And a lot of people in the Third World do, actually. See, there’s already that. From that fact, to me, there’s already training; taking your shoes off to walk on a plane. Everybody does it and they think it’s no big deal, but it’s part of the training.

3W: I think you’re right. I think that as soon as people start getting their basic needs challenged, then everything falls apart. In a previous e-mail exchange, you said some really interesting things, like how we whore the ordinary from the supposed extraordinary. That was a really strong statement to me: We are whoring the ordinary from the supposed extraordinary.

AA: We are so addicted to peak experience. One of the things about doing a meditation is that it’s difficult in the beginning to meditate. I remember doing a long sit for the first couple of days. Your mind is grasping at these amazing times you’ve had. And the porn thing is a part of it; we just want to keep the peak of the addiction to that, like drugs, and alcohol. We want to have these peak experiences but we’ve lost the ordinary. Ordinary is 90% of your life, 99% of your life. The job of a Shaman is to go to these distant places for one hour, two hours, 10 hours, and then bring it back and share it as ordinary. We have something hardwired to our brain, like those rats who keep pushing that button to get that charge in our pleasure center. That’s the part that we really have lost. We’ve lost knowing how to just hang out.

3W: It’s crazy. I’m a person who is thinking about these things and I also feel like I need total sensations. It’s hard to get away from.

AA: We don’t experience things directly anymore. It’s almost like we’ve lost our digestive tracks and someone else has to chew our food for us. Then, by watching them chew, we can actually taste the food because we don’t have any taste buds. “How does it taste?” “Well it’s sweet.” “What does that mean? I don’t really know what sweet is.” “Well, it’s got this experience.” We don’t have direct experience anymore. Do we choose not to go to that fame place? Do we choose to switch off the Internet that day and just sit down and create something?

3W: Saving money is an interesting connection, too.

AA: Same thing. What is the fame thing? You get the money. It is connected to that, it’s two sides of the same coin, really. Fame is a currency. Currency in the way that people keep up with it. It’s what I’ve noticed with people. If they know famous people, if they’ve seen them or taken a picture, it’s a currency. It’s become a currency. “Hey I saw Joe Blow at this place, here’s my picture.” It’s this impulse of taking a picture with a total stranger. It’s fame; it always just blows my mind. So, what does that say? It says this person has something I don’t have, and by putting my arm around this person and having this picture taken, I am somebody now.

3W: You’re attaching yourself to their fame.

AA: We don’t really have direct experience. I had a patient a couple of weeks ago that was going through a really hard time financially. A really good guy, working class background, worked hard to get where he is. He’s not surviving very well, he’s losing everything because things are so fucked. He’s got a wife, and his wife is a school teacher, and while we were talking, I was like, “How does your wife feel about this?” The guy kind of stopped dead in his tracks and really didn’t know. He was like, “I don’t know.” What was heartbreaking was that he actually got how off that is. This is your support system, this woman, you have children together, go there. Ask this woman. You’re going to lose your home. Do you talk to her about that? The craziest part of all this stuff is that it all comes back to alienation from me.

3W: I wonder if there is a time that you can point to where things shifted? Is there a point when we crossed over into the hyperreal? How do we step back?

AA: I think we have to be forced to step back. Even our activism is ridiculous and based on insanity. So, it’s like we’re insane, we drank so much poison. It’s like what Einstein used to say: You can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created the problem.

3W: I think most of us feel like something is wrong. So, I guess I’m wondering if the shift has to come from the internal emptiness or does it have to come from the external?

AA: Oh it can definitely come from internal emptiness if you do the work. It takes work; it doesn’t just happen by itself. Often, in my experience, it’s suffering, but what I’m saying is that there is this quantum shift that you’re talking about. It’s already happening. The problem with the celebrity, with the fame, is reality is replaced by trivia. If we actually sat down, and actually went, how many people are homeless in America right now? There are 2 million people. This is happening now! I just know that everyday you can quiet yourself a little bit and you’ll be shown what the next step is. But truly, we’re not going to really know it.

3W: There is no map.

AA: There’s no map to where we’re going. So the map comes by being in the moment. This is where you have to trust your sense and your emotional body. You have to use different tools. This is the problem with trying to solve a thing with the brain; it’s got to be from an emotional place, from an internal knowing. To me, that’s the gateway to where we’re going.

3W: I heard your talk a couple of months ago about relationships and you said, “Be bored.” For me, it’s hard to be bored because happiness is sensational.

AA: There’s anxiety underneath that. We’re actually overly anxious. And that’s a part of driving to the same path of doom without really stepping out. We don’t want to sit with the anxiety.

3W: Interesting. You’re saying we look towards sensationalism to mask our anxieties?

AA: Yes. When I was a kid in Africa, I remember going to school. This guy used to put me on the front of his bicycle and bicycle me to school. So, I’m on this bicycle and we would ride past this lagoon. There was a little road sign that was made of concrete that was about a meter above the ground. I remember in the morning going and there was this guy sitting on top of this sign, fishing. I’d ride back three or four hours later and the guy would still be sitting there in the same position. Now that experience of being able to sit - this was a regular occurrence. The last time I saw that, I was in bum-fuck Italy, somewhere up in the mountains.

3W: That’s so interesting. In Georgia, the old people used to do that. Now, they don’t even build porches anymore. It used to be that old people would sit on their front porches, looking at the trees blow in the wind, you know? And now, they don’t build front porches anymore. Everyone is going to sit inside and look at the TV, in air conditioning.

AA: I remember going cross-country at one point and it was really wild how if you stayed on the highway every state you went to looked exactly the same. You have McDonald’s, you have Sunoco, you have this and that. This whole corporate thing has completely demolished any sense of culture, so as part of that whole thing people have stopped experiencing their local environments.

3W: We are losing regionality.

AA: The corporations don’t understand. The people we’re talking about, the elites, they’re educated, they’re not systems thinkers. If the planet dies, the corporations will die, so the corporations are really like psychopaths because in their behavior they are psychopaths. Everything is really friendly; everything on the surface is nice, gleaming, friendly. There are not emotional contents. So, till you get that dagger out of your neck and your Jugular is hanging out on your living room floor, like, they’re really smiley and friendly.

3W: It’s like Bret Easton Ellis really nailed that with American Psycho. There’s this character who’s this Wall Street success, but couldn’t help just killing everyone around him in really perverse, sexual ways.

AA: I used to speak to some Vietnam vets in the Bronx. Those guys saw some shit. I can’t imagine these kids now, doing this close combat. We’re taking these guys, basically using them, and then throwing them back 24-48 hours later in the community. It’s like the highest rate of suicide, homicide; we’re living that nightmare. It’s not like in some distant future. These are the things that aren’t working. But, nobody’s questioning why. That’s where the fame thing comes in, the celebrity. “Pay attention to this, Tiger Woods has like 8 girls that he banged, check that out.” While your neighbor is losing his home, your neighbor just came back from Iraq, your neighbor just shot his wife, your neighbor’s a drug addict but there’s not drug treatments so he’s going to go to prison for 20 years.

3W: I guess what you were saying earlier goes person by person.

AA: The machine is too big; the machine is way better armed than you’ll ever be, the machine’s way smarter on that level. Forget about the machine, the machine is going to eat itself alive; we have to step out of that. It’s not going to be about shifting the system because the system has a consciousness and this system is so profound. It can co-opt anything. It’s a very intelligent virus.

3W: Everything becomes style.

AA: You have to step out of that. It’s not about becoming something radical, spiritual, or a monk or a caveman because that’s another thing. The question is how do you live your life in integrity and real authenticity? If you’re a rose bush, are you an oak tree? If the system needs oak trees, it will tell everyone they’re an oak tree. If you’re a rose bush and you’re trying to eat what an oak tree eats, you are going to die pretty quickly. You have to figure out what you are, and then feed that while you’re in the system.

3W: It’s like the concept of simulacra; everything’s a copy of a copy, with no original. We’re self-replicating these copies of another copy, of another copy. We saw it and we’re emulating it and there wasn’t an original. Or the original is so distant, so gone, so vanished.

AA: That’s what I’m saying about the system that does that.

3W: And then, you grow up in that environment, and nothing seems real except for what’s hyper, hyperreal. Even that is unsatisfying as years go on.

AA: People are living in fear - that’s how you keep people in line. It was the nuclear bomb, it was the Russians, it was the Chinese, always fear, fear, fear. Now, it’s the Arabs. Once these systems are in place, how can you step out of it? The only difference now is that we’re running against a finite. People laugh when it’s said there could be food shortages, actually laugh at you. There’s a very distinct possibility in our lifetimes that we are going to hit against that again. Right now, there are riots in many countries because of food shortages. This is how this myth gets perpetuated. “We’re fine, it’s nothing, stay asleep. Everything is under control.” That’s the part that’s going to shift it to the next level.

3W: Totally. And it could be next week or in the next decade.

AA: We’re trying really hard to keep this covered up. This is what I’m seeing in people’s psyches. It’s definitely out there. That’s like the most telling thing. It’s like, what’s in people’s psyches, what’s being sold externally.

3W: Well, maybe we should talk for just a minute about my personal favorite celebrity who just died, Michael Jackson. He was a really talented musician and all these things. But, I think his greatest work was the sculpture that was his body. People were terrified by it, and they didn’t like to look at it. But he transformed himself into what he thought people wanted him to be.

AA: Absolutely. He was a guy who lived in the hyperreal as opposed to the real. He lived in the extraordinary - the ordinary wasn’t okay. He had to go to the extraordinary. His only experience would be in his peak thing, right, a huge playground, this massive thing. It’s an amazing thing that people don’t realize.

3W: And he totally killed himself with drugs.

AA: That’s pain, that’s how painful it is. That’s how far away you get from yourself and you forget that you need anesthetics. The metaphor for that is lost on people. It’s not even using heroin, he’s using anesthetics, drugs that anesthetize people. It’s crazy and yet it totally makes sense. We have this projection on people; we have this addiction to perfection. Then, when these people don’t meet our expectations-- Tiger Woods is an amazing example in that way, right? He became a totally perfect, clear projector screen. He had no emotions; he was a good boy. Is he black? Is he Asian? He won’t even give you that. The shadow gets so huge, totally in reversion to how good you pretend to be. How perfect the projector screen, because there’s nothing really genuine, really authentic. And this is how these things always work  out and people are always shocked. How did that happen? It’s like, “It’s not shocking, it’s Michael Jackson.” Because the projector screen is so strong, the flip side of it gets ghastly. The flip side is us napalming the bejesus out of babies. These are the things we need to examine. Michael Jackson and Tiger are perfect examples of people carrying culture and its shadow. Michael Jackson is us. He was carrying that for all of us.

3W: He was this mirror. He kept mutating because we asked him to and then we couldn’t even stare ourselves in the face. We couldn’t even look at him.

AA: There’s this mass consciousness that doesn’t want to change and only wants to be changed when disaster comes - has to be forced to change, doesn’t want to do the fucking work which is all this stuff.

3W: Sacrifice.

AA: Yeah, sacrifice but also the fact that this can be pleasurable. That’s what I’m saying to you. For me, there’s a lot of serenity in the work that I do - trying to save the world and forgetting about myself. When I forget about myself, my big self steps in. Now that can’t be all the time, because the reality is that you have to feed all parts of you, that’s a really powerful experience. But that’s lost on this culture, that’s lost on celebrity, definitely lost on fame, cause that’s all about “me.” “What else can I do about me? Let’s talk about me, let’s talk about me.” That energy never gets into you.

3W: It’s always hungry and it’s never satisfied.

AA: It’s that hungry ghost. The Buddhists have that wonderful image, right, of this big ghost with a pinprick for a mouth and it can never get enough food to feed it. And we’re all guilty of that to some extent but the system makes sure that that keeps going on. Cause what is it going to look like? There is an economic reality; we’ve been trading since we had seashells. There is an economic reality when you have six billion, seven billion people on the planet. It’s not going to keep going this way, so, what is the next step? Well, you get that by Phil being the best Phil, and John being the best John, and Jason being the best Jason. That’s how you answer that question, and I truly know that in my bones. It’s not about going out there and discovering the wheel, but each one of us go out and do that - instead of A trying to be his dad, A is A, that’s my gift to this planet.

3W: What can the reader can do to become more of who they are?

AA: I would say, first and foremost, look at the places where you’re not really you. We are basic archetypes where we rebel against the culture. I realized I’m trapped being a rebel because I’m still connected to my past. How connected am I to the past? That would be the first thing. The second is how many times a day are you people pleasing or not people pleasing as a way of people pleasing? Just start by examining yourself. It takes like five minutes a day. And then really look at your relationships with things. Just look at the way things are. You don’t have to drop out. You can look exactly the same externally but you have a totally different experience in life, you can still take the subway, but from a different place. If you’re really angry, if you’re really sad, examine it. Give yourself a little bit of time to be bored, just a little bit of introspection. Something that I do is, I just take one thing every once in a while to work on. So, if it was anger, like in the morning, I would be like, “Look, I’m tired today, I’m tired, I’m going to be more angry, so pay attention.” At night, I would have a review, I would be like, “So that was good, you were tired, you knew you were going to be angry, so you didn’t work as hard today.” And whatever that thing was, examine it. I don’t want to be connected to my past, I want to have a relationship with it but I don’t want to be a slave to it. We never examine. The second we wake up we’re on the go. We don’t fall asleep until we pass out because we’re on the go and we do it seven days a week. So give five or 10 minutes a day.

3W: Five minutes?

AA: Literally

3W: Let’s talk about how we all think of ourselves as individuals. There are a lot of spiritual advisors and philosophers that are just rejecting that notion. But, there are also tangible things, like we all have individual fingerprints, we have different DNA, we are literally, undeniably individual.

AA: We’ve gotten so lost in the individuation and now it’s sort of the journey back into remembering we’re a whole. When that aspect of forgetfulness of individuation becomes hyper individuation, that’s the Wall Street, that’s psychopath. Psychopath does not have a memory of being connected to other people, that’s why it’s actually so disconnected. The problem with the psychopath experience is that nobody is experiencing it. That’s why you stab 10 people to death when you’re a psychopath; there’s no experience, there’s nobody left, there’s nobody home. Healthy culture tends to have a balance between perpetuating itself and allowing you to be the best you. To me, that’s a healthy culture. We’re in a culture that wants to decimate you if you’re not fitting into the program. And it does it.

3W-Phil: It’s this drive to make yourself thin, to make yourself vapid, just a wrapper, that way you can become famous. Become a brand of self.

AA: One thing that you’re saying which has like, become one dimensional, which ties into what you’re saying, which is chaos. People don’t want to deal with the fact that it’s chaos. The fact that you can have all the spiritual understanding in the world and walk out and get run over by a car, this is what all the bullshit in the way of spirituality doesn’t want to come to it. You can have the deepest understanding of it man, but if your number’s up, your number’s up. That’s where the real courage comes in. If you know that every time you get on that bike, you could actually be done, and you choose to do it, that’s courage. Not in a stupid way, but you’ll approach it differently. You’re sort of unconscious, you get on that bike, hit the throttle, do a buck 80 without giving a shit, you’re not really tasting anything. You’re in that psychopath mode. So the fact that it is chaotic, and yet it’s all one, there’s nothing to be done, yet it’s this wonderful, horrific play that’s happening... To kind of straddle those things, that’s what’s really rare. That’s a new thing that’s happening culturally.

3W: The thing about a bike that is a great benefit and interesting is I get scared when I’m not on a bike. I get scared thinking about what happened the last time I rode, how ‘it was fucking close’ and how I should do this or that next time. But, once you get on, and the motor is going... no more fear.

AA: When you’re riding, if you’re riding properly, the only way to survive in New York City, is you don’t think about anything. You’re in the moment, so like, the gift of this whole thing, that’s the pleasure, the moment. When you’re with your lover, and it’s awesome, it’s in the moment. These spiritual people have been trying to tell us this forever. The magic is in the moment. Now, if you’re going into quantum physics, there really is no past and future, like literally, there’s no past and future.

3W: Well, Abdi, thanks so much, man.

AA: Pleasure, man. That’s awesome. This was fun; we talked about a lot of stuff.

3W: We did cover a lot of stuff. What’s going to happen now is we’re going to go transcribe the recording and it’s going to be like 45-pages, then we’ll edit it down to 4 or 5 pages. [Editor’s note: The transcribed interview was actually over 50 pages long.]

AA: Just make sure that I talk about my dick. I like to have that in conversation, usually.

3W: Yeah, can we have a shot?

AA: Well, you need two cameras, actually....