Interview on The Infinite Zero Experience with Ti0 Rohan

The conversation explores the parallels between their work:

• Ti0’s path from skeptical atheism to ayahuasca shamanism
• Joshua’s approach to making self-development measurable through Internal Family Systems

About Ti0 Rohan: Ti0 is an ayahuasca shaman and spiritual teacher based in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, where he leads transformational retreats at his center, I0. A former software developer at Amazon, his life changed in 2014 when an ayahuasca retreat—undertaken purely for curiosity—introduced him to the divine despite his hardcore atheism. He spent eight years apprenticing in the Brazilian rainforest, training in psychotherapy, ayahuasca shamanism, and multiple spiritual disciplines, facilitated over 1,000 people, and was initiated as a Spiritual Master. He now focuses on helping skeptics and atheists access higher consciousness without requiring belief.

Read Ti0’s write-up on Substack

Transcript

Ti0: Welcome to The Infinite Zero Experience. I’m your host, Ti0 Rohan, and today I’m joined by Joshua. Josh, welcome—introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your book and your work.

Joshua: The book’s title is Religion Unburdened by Belief. I’ve been trying to promote it and you were one of the people I emailed. Something about it resonated with you. I suspect it’s that we both see beliefs as something to hold carefully—or even as an obstacle. What made you receptive to speaking with me?

Ti0: It’s very in line with my work. I work with skeptics, cynics, and atheists who are leaning toward higher consciousness but don’t want to go down the route of belief—because my own path was exactly that. When I had my awakening, I was a hardcore skeptic, cynic, atheist. I wasn’t just agnostic; I actively disbelieved and criticized spirituality. I approached ayahuasca with the intention of getting the highest high the world has to offer. That was it.

And despite my cynicism, ayahuasca introduced me to the divine—not some personified religious god, which I still don’t believe exists—but a realization of the divine. And that happened despite me not believing. I started noticing how much of the spirituality industry claims it only works if you believe. I disagree. It works because it’s real. You don’t need to believe. If it were conditioned on belief, it would only work for some people—and that working wouldn’t even be the real thing.

In my experience, skeptics and believers are actually the same. Both are operating from the domain of belief. There is knowing, and there is belief. Knowing is: these are the laws of reality and you operate by them. But skeptics and believers are both operating from the level of rules—man-made impositions and limitations—rather than the laws of reality itself.

Joshua: I like how you’re distinguishing belief from knowledge. Usually the path from belief to knowledge requires evidence. In mathematics, you need to check a proof. In history, you look for corroborating accounts. In weather forecasting, a 30% probability is still better than a guess. What kind of evidence does ayahuasca give you that you’re encountering the divine?

Ti0: That’s a good question, because it allows me to clarify that it’s not ayahuasca specifically. I’ve been working with it for 12 years, facilitated over a thousand people, had over 600 experiences myself, and served over 5,000 doses. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll drink ayahuasca and know the divine. I’ve seen many people who don’t have that experience, and I’ve even seen people who have the experience but whose skeptical mind concludes “it’s just hallucinations from a drug.”

The way I see it: the ego and the rational mind can learn everything about the world. They can describe the function and appearance of a tree. But they cannot know anything. They can only have information about things—descriptions. We’ve mistaken information and descriptions for knowing.

What happened with ayahuasca for me was that I got separated from my ego-mind and actually landed in what I call the soul—that which has the actual ability to know, because it is the only thing that is real within us. Everything else is a projection, a description. Even our bodies: physics has shown us that all matter is just energy vibrating at different frequencies. The soul is connected to what is real, and only that which is real can know real.

My job now is to help people decouple the one who is describing the experience from the one who is having the experience—because the one having the experience is real and can know things before they’re described.

Joshua: So is that related to what philosophers call “noetic” knowing—the feeling of directly knowing something?

Ti0: Yes, but I’d say it’s even higher, because the beauty and awe are emotional responses happening at the emotional layer. There’s something happening at a higher mind level. The higher mind in us can know things at a much higher level. When we experience reality from there, we understand the actual mechanics of reality—we know the laws of consciousness, not as belief but the way we know the law of gravity: it works whether we believe it or not.

Joshua: In your work facilitating people, what blocks that knowing? If someone comes to you, how can they increase the odds of having it?

Ti0: That is the work. I call all interference “noise.” I don’t think there’s one noise more important than others. Some people call it anxiety, some call it trauma, some call it rage, some call it alcoholism. It doesn’t matter what the noise is—it’s all noise standing in the way of clarity about reality. My job is to clear it out.

In Hinduism—I come from India—the word guru in its original Sanskrit context means “the one who dispels darkness.” That’s all. They dispel the darkness and the light becomes clear. What Western religion does instead is try to fill your head with descriptions of the mystical and the divine, adding more noise. More ideas, all in the head, nothing lived or experienced or known.

Joshua: That may be an area where we look at self-development a little differently. I practice Internal Family Systems as a profession. You’d suggested you don’t see people as composed of multiple parts?

Ti0: No, no—I definitely do parts work. IFS is something I’ve come across and I’ve done a lot of it myself. I simply see it as one tool among many. Different tools work at different stages of a spiritual journey. The risk is that people get too attached to one system—they get captured by the tool rather than using it and setting it aside when it’s served its purpose. A hammer is a hammer. A screwdriver is a screwdriver. IFS is great for what it is—emotional healing, trauma work, psychological work—but it has its domain. It doesn’t go into the spiritual, in my experience. It helps you manage your inner world, and that’s valuable. But you won’t know God through IFS.

Ti0: I’m curious about your book. You describe a scientific approach to religion—not scientism, but a scientific approach. Tell us more. Does it go into divinity? Does it go into higher consciousness?

Joshua: What I mean by “scientific religion” is making it more like weightlifting. You have a clear goal, you go to the gym, you progressively increase the weight, and you get accurate feedback about whether you’re progressing. The idea is to make religious experience as reliable and predictable as that—not accidental or haphazard.

Ti0: Can someone know the divine if that’s their goal?

Joshua: Many people understand the divine as a non-dual experience—the felt dissolution of the boundary between self and other. That’s one way to talk about it. But that kind of experience can be hard to reach. What I’m doing in my book is identifying a step before it—an approach toward that experience that’s more tangible and measurable. The approach toward the divine, one step removed from it.

Ti0: So your work is preparation to meet the divine. It’s doing the inner work—emotional, psychological—before that encounter.

Joshua: Yes. And as people get close to that threshold, I think they sometimes just accidentally cross it. It’s spontaneous.

As an example: in Santo Daime, everyone drinks ayahuasca and we sing hymns. What’s unusual is that the ayahuasca is almost treated as a distraction. What you’re really trying to do is stay with the group—keep track of where you are in the lyrics, stay on the melody and rhythm. That quality of staying present with the group is what Santo Daime calls firmeza, “firmness.” You’re developing resistance to being pulled inward.

This maps directly onto the IFS distinction between blending and unblending. If I have a part that’s afraid of public speaking and I’m blended with it, it controls my behavior—I freeze up. If I stay unblended, I can still feel the anxiety but that part trusts me enough not to take over. So I can feel it without it running me.

Ti0: Let me frame that in my own words. Generally, people use the terms identification and disidentification. When you’re identified with a part, it dictates your possibility. The moment you disidentify, a new reality opens up. So: when you unblend or disidentify from all the things, you accidentally step into the mystical divine experience.

Joshua: Exactly.

Ti0: That is the drive of all spiritual work—whether meditation, yoga, IFS, ayahuasca, the Tao. All of it is to find that flow beyond the noise of the mind: the limitations, beliefs, cultural impositions, the obligations that dictate who we’re supposed to be. When all of that clears out, you get acquainted with something truly limitless.

And that’s the difference versus even conventional religion, which tries to find God in some very definitive way. What was coming to me as you spoke is that the preparation work is essentially setting order to the inner world before you go to higher reality. The moment that narrative stops—the moment all descriptions stop—the tree is connected to the sun, connected to the rain, connected to the soil, connected to other trees. It’s all just one thing in constant eternal flow. That’s the enlightenment experience: the noise stops and you realize you’re part of this whole system that’s just life moving through different forms.

Joshua: You’ve spoken beautifully about that experience. My hesitation is always in trying to describe it. That’s why I focus on the approach—the unblending, the step before—because it’s more tangible, more precisely describable. That’s what I mean by doing it scientifically.

Ti0: Absolutely. And yet if people don’t hear about what’s waiting, they ask: why unblend at all? Why do any of this work? There’s something so much grander waiting. I’m always walking that line—talking about it enough to tempt people into it, but not so much that it loses the magic and mystery.

What’s one thing from your book that would tempt people to take that step?

Joshua: A modification to basic breath meditation. Usually you’re taught: sit, relax, focus on your breath, and when your mind wanders, bring it back. My modification is: when your mind wanders, instead of immediately returning, write down what took you away. What are those concerns? After the meditation, take time with that piece of paper and actually address those issues—follow up on them.

What you’re doing is letting those parts know you’ll come back to them. And you follow through. You’re training your parts to be patient, and you’re building trust with them. When they trust you more, they’re less inclined to interrupt during meditation. Over time, you can develop more effortlessness.

Ti0: That’s really beautiful—because without explicitly defining it, it makes clear that there is you, and there are your parts. The angry one, the sad one, the one who had a fight with the boss, the one worried about dinner—none of that is you. All of those are happenings happening within you. And who you are is the one who gets to experience that, navigate that, release that, and be more than that. We don’t have to define who you are, but just knowing there is something free from all this noise and narrative—that’s a beautiful invitation. Since that’s what your book promises, I’d definitely recommend people check it out.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Joshua: Just that the book is autobiographical in the sense that I’ve personally tried all the techniques I describe. I continue to attend Santo Daime ceremonies—I see it as training myself to stay present for people, to hold space. And I can bring that into my talk therapy work as well. So if anyone is interested in working with me in therapy, they can benefit from that training.

Ti0: And I’ll add: you described the Santo Daime intention of drinking ayahuasca and finding your presence beyond the psychedelic noise—their job is to stay present in this world with the people. That’s beautiful. But just to clarify: ayahuasca holds infinite possible experiences with infinite intentions. People like me awaken to divinity, heal deeply, quit substances, discover more about reality than we could imagine. There’s no box for ayahuasca. A lot of it is about the intention you hold, and then finding the right guide for that intention. Everything has its place.

Joshua: I agree. And Santo Daime actually embraces both sides—staying with the group and the inner exploration. Both kinds of experience are honored.

Ti0: What’s your website? How can people find your book?

Joshua: If you go to unburdened.biz—B-I-Z—that’s the book’s website. And my therapy practice is Estrela Counseling—Portuguese spelling of Estrela.

Ti0: I’ll add it to the description. Thank you very much for sharing your time and your work. We’ll put this out in the world.