Zach Bush Quotes from a Sagacious Align Podcast
By Ethan Maurice | January 30, 2026
Perhaps three times in the past five years, I’ve heard someone speak in a way that hits me as truly profound, yet half goes over my head.
I consider this half-grasped, resonant feeling the sweet spot. A signal that what is being communicated is both something I need to hear and lies at the edge of what I can conceptually grasp. The feeling is the signal of signals: if I come to understand this, I will grow.
The previous two times I can remember inspiring this feeling were John Frusciante’s musing on creativity and John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series (both of which have had a seismic impact on the lens through which I view the world).
Most recently, half an hour into this Zach Bush interview on the Align Podcast, the half-grasped resonance was so strong that I simply stopped listening until I could return with pen and paper, write every quote down that struck me as profound, and three months later, share it as this article you are now reading.
While I recommend listening to the entire episode, if the lines below resonate, I highly recommend first taking ten minutes to individually engage with each. There is a timestamped link before each quote — click it and listen as you read along for the feel, energy, and fuller comprehension of it.
Great gratitude to Dr. Zach Bush and Aaron Alexander for pouring so much potent wisdom into a single podcast episode. What a gift.
Quotes from Zach Bush on the Align Podcast:
““A thought is a pattern recognition that comes from data stream that is primarily — actually wholly — coming from non-human sources.””
““Not only is a thought something that is non-human, it’s a collection of data coming out of, and a conclusion derived from, an enormous amount, or trillions of inputs from the microbiome at large... Humans have no free will, but humans have an extremely unique capacity to have an infinite free will as to how we feel on the inevitable journey… ‘I’m going to bathe myself in gratitude today.’ That’s where you have free will. That’s your decision and capacity to execute on… and even though you cannot change the things that are happening in your life… it’s the input of a billion or a trillion other things that will manifest something… there’s a beautiful positive feedback loop. We may have no free will, but we do get to play with the universe at large through the way that we feel, how authentically we feel, and how embodied we feel that feeling in the more effect it is going to have.””
““The abandonment from nature/God is, I believe, the original lie, the original thing that’s taken us down to express an inhumane version of our species.””
““But it’s this one gift that is also the root of our wound, which is this perception of being separate from everything, was the breakthrough that nature was perhaps not even knowing it was wanting. Once it happened, once a species actually, radically saw itself as separate from nature, then our potential to see beauty was admonished. That is the remarkable thing about being human.””
““We are uniquely equipped, and that unique gift has made us extremely vulnerable to the abusive, destructive, extractive behaviors that we have stepped into because they’re two sides of the same coin. Now that you see everything separate, you can either see yourself completely inadequate, never making the grade, because how could you possibly compare to a mountain that’s been there for 125 million years? How could you possibly stare up at the stars and feel confident enough to take another breath if you know that there are 2.5 trillion galaxies out there? It’s dumbfounding… being exactly at this vulnerability point of seeing the beauty, feeling abandoned, for the capacity of observing that we are separate enough from nature to see her beauty in a unique way.””
““I will ride the waves of this unconditional love because I cannot look away from the beauty. That’s the love affair we should have with everything. It needs to be unconditional, completely in, two feet in. Stop being socially appropriate with the level of love you’re willing to go to and just go all into seeing the beauty, and the frequencies you will produce, you will live more lifetimes in those few minutes with that individual or that flower across the yard than you will have in a lifetime of trying to dumb it down, trying to dull it down in fear of the sensations that are going to come if you let it unleash because you know it’s going to create grief. It’s going to create heartbreak, which is not the breaking of a heart. Heartbreak, as we described, is simply the shattering of expectations. That’s what you’re feeling when you go through a heartbreak. There’s no end to the love. You already saw the beauty and something else is going to see the beauty in the next moment. There is no end to the love.””
““Can you hold the space for a moment and allow the wonderment to happen when you see the flow of life around you? That frequency — you can live a lifetime in, in a few breaths. It is just the most delicious, timeless gift that you can give yourself.””
““When you try to live life from your mind, within your mind — I did this for twenty years in academia… certainly from age twenty to forty, I was committed to this. Figuring everything out, understanding human disease, understanding the solutions that could come… It was a head game of figuring it all out. When you’re living life in the brain, it is an inevitably busy experience. I’ve got trillions of organisms that our speaking through my neurology at every given second. And so if I turn myself over to my mind and really focus attention and intention and witnessing of the world through the mind, there is absolutely no peace. There is absolutely nothing but almost chaos in there. New thoughts every few seconds… the cacophony of what you’re experiencing is overwhelming.””
“[Referencing Hermeticus (book)]: “In there, it says that the deepest evil of humanity is to call “less bad” good. To call “less bad” good is the deepest evil humans can do. And we’ve been doing less bad as good for a century or more. And for that, we have lost all integrity of beauty within human creativity and human design. So this is a terrifying time to be human because we are unplugging from the whole reason we are here, which is to witness and see the beauty. And as soon as you witness and see the beauty and then in that stillness become an avenue for nature to create through, you are going to create beauty. It’s the only option. Because you are the hands of the divine, you are the hands of source at the point of that stillness and witnessing the beauty. Now, you are inspired. Now, you are vibrating the frequency of Creator and that force is going to come through you.””
““I finally found nature as my pathway back in. And that’s where I began to feel, and feel safely, and started to allow wonderment to take over. And I think it’s in the utter surrender of the socially acceptable human journey or the socially prescribed successful human journey. It’s only in the surrender of that, that you’ll eventually find yourself back to being an element of nature. And once you find out that you are an element of nature that’s long been designed to be this pinnacle of sensation, you’re capable of sensing more than any other species on the planet, right now, because of the biodiversity within you.””
““She’s going to do it — absorb every single one of us right back into her soil systems when we are done. When we finally let go of these human bodies, she will absorb every molecule, every atom that has ever been you, will immediately be transmuted into the next version of beauty on this planet. And so you are about to become nature itself. You are about to become those day lilies. You’re going to become the breath for those birds as they wing through the air. You are going to become the minerals that will inform the crystalline structures of those distant mountains. You’re headed that way again, and you came from there. Your somatic experience of being human is an infinite soul now having a finite experience of mother earth, exposed to such intelligence through all of the diverse streams of information coming from so many parts of her ecosystem. Hundreds of thousands of species, trillions and trillions of organisms communicating through your gut microbiome into your neurology, such that you would have a thought and start to imagine yourself back into the creative force of nature. It’s such a powerful thing. And so go get out in nature. Observe the beauty and let her see the beauty in you.””
“[On dying]: “They had such poignant awareness of the harm their words had done to their children over decades of estranged, stressed relationship. And so they stopped using those words. And eventually they might say, ‘I’m so sorry. I love you so much,’ to a child. And you feel ripples in space-time when that simple delivery happens that will deconstruct decades, sometimes a century, of stories of brokenness and disconnect. And, a lack of love, a lack of care, can dissolve in a moment’s time. And then, what’s lived there feels like forever. And so I think that’s what the instinct of the human is when it is finally given a prognosis of a few weeks to live, is it becomes really aware that the way to make three weeks feel like thirty years is to go into more stillness, into more sense of heightened awareness of the highs and the lows and everything in between.””
““[On faraday cage experiments]: “What they eventually figured out in a series of experiments was that authentic feeling was forty times more generative than just the steady production of the vibration of love or joy. Authenticity — in whatever is expressing — is the highest vibration thing that humans do… If you’re authentically feeling everything, you’re going to be discharging these super high frequency bursts that, I think, can cure the disease of our inhumanity and really tie us back into nature in a potent way. And so learning to speak and feel and sing and play authentically will get us to the goal that we’re getting at. So, don’t have too much judgement on yourself… Be authentic to what you’re feeling, and this will get us out of the low vibration state of being performative.””
““We’ve been given an english language which is probably the least effective form of language that’s ever been created to express beauty. You put english in a text message and now you’re at the lowest vibration of human consciousness and collaboration ever. We’ve got to free ourselves up from that and get into the analog beauty of song and chant and dance again soon.””
““The practice that I’ve developed over the last fifteen years or so, since beginning that journey as a hospice doc, is really making sure I’m trying to die every day. To die well every day prepares you for a rich death, but it also releases you into a much more vibrant way of living. To die today is to let go of all of the beliefs, regulations, rules, stigma, that you held yesterday. Can you release yourself back into the playfulness of being alive? Back into the jubilation of that rebel jumping on his bike at midnight to go ride across a dark town and ride through all the stoplights and pass all the sleeping people with a sense of exuberance and adventure while everybody else is off in some dream state. You’re the only one alive in the streets of humanity. That level of vibration — that is something I yearn for for all of us — and to get there we’ve got to die every day. And so you’ve got to let go of everything and mimic nature.””
““That’s the journey we’re now all on: can you start to die every day, let go of everything you’ve held as important or right or wrong, and start to feel new again today without the imprints of yesterday? Feel everything today without the need to characterize it, or define it, or judge it as good or bad or light or dark or funny or serious. Let go of all of the definitions and simply feel everything. That takes a high degree of discipline, but boy does it allow you to die every day, and does it ever set you free to live a better life ultimately.””
“[Aaron on Ayahuasca]: “My personal, felt, visceral experience is it feels like a practice of death. And tonight at 10pm, I’m going to drink this cup and it’s going to be what it is. But in preparation, it feels like a very real preparation for death to me, which I feel is very helpful… The suggestion is, without doing ayahuasca… tonight, ten o’clock — real talk — you don’t come back. How do you live your moments starting now? And just do that as a practice, do it every Sunday, or do it every Tuesday… and just start to inject that in, but like, make it real… that’s a very powerful practice for a person to start engaging in.””
““Reigniting these small ceremonial acts of being human in nature can help you die that night. I think that that’s why we didn’t accumulate much stress for hundreds of thousands of years in the genome was because there was nightly decompress of that stress through these simple rituals… Probably starts with food, right? Food by the fire together under the stars or at sunset, that then turns into sitting around the fire and listening to stories from the elders, then turns into song and dance and chant around the fire later at night. That then turns into lovemaking, you know, whatever it is, like these layers and laters and layers of ritual, of exuberant expression and sensation of life, all of that is — that’s the essence of it — that’s the essence of being human. We’ve lived through a couple hundred years of, you know, thousands of years maybe of these controlled settings where all of that was taken away from us. And it was taken away from us through stigma, social stigma, and the social policing of each other right now is the most despicable thing to witness.””
“[On podcasters]: “Wow, here’s a human coming into its curiosity and its being changed by what it sees and touches and learns. And then it asks another question, and that question is so much deeper. Then they just shared what they learned from that [podcast] two weeks ago and that’s what I experienced when I heard that same podcast two weeks ago. So, we’re getting this incredible mirror through all of you that are doing this. So Aaron, congratulations. I’m grateful to be on your podcast again. To watch you continue to transform. The questions asked today show a whole lot more beauty and depth than you and I were able to share years ago, and it’s because both of us have become more alive in the number of times we’ve been willing to die since we met each other. So congratulations on all the deaths. Keep it going.””
For me, the hours it took to pen, transcribe, and timestamp each quote into this article bore the sweet golden fruits of wisdom, wonder, and a deepened trust in the feelings and intuitions of this scientifically-trained and perhaps a bit too skeptically-minded monkey on a blue-green planet covered in life floating among the endless void of space.
I hope you feel similar inspirations and sentiments.
P.S. If you dug this article, you may also enjoy this similarly formatted John “Jesus” Frusciante article on the nature of creativity.
