WEBVTT 00:00:00.120 --> 00:00:02.840 Lemonada 00:00:06.120 --> 00:00:09.523 Hi, I'm Zosia Mamet. You might know me from the show Girls. 00:00:09.606 --> 00:00:13.955 I've been a horse girl since I was six. Not a phase, definitely not ironic. 00:00:14.038 --> 00:00:17.914 I will talk about horses until the people around me start to worry. 00:00:17.997 --> 00:00:21.578 So I made a show about that feeling. It's called OMG Obsessed. 00:00:21.661 --> 00:00:25.418 And every week I sit down with one of my favorite people and ask, 00:00:25.502 --> 00:00:29.023 what's your horse? What's the thing you cannot shut up about? 00:00:29.106 --> 00:00:32.391 So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. 00:00:32.475 --> 00:00:34.720 Follow wherever you get your podcasts. 00:00:34.950 --> 00:00:35.783 you 00:00:36.270 --> 00:00:39.436 Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread, 00:00:39.519 --> 00:00:44.145 and I am so excited about today's guest, the great scholar and thinker, 00:00:44.228 --> 00:00:45.090 Michael Mead. 00:00:45.690 --> 00:00:52.690 *music* 00:00:55.970 --> 00:00:59.881 - Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, 00:00:59.965 --> 00:01:04.859 we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're 00:01:04.943 --> 00:01:05.377 here. 00:01:05.460 --> 00:01:10.460 My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds 00:01:10.543 --> 00:01:14.340 of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. 00:01:15.150 --> 00:01:20.354 Here is today's guest, Michael Mead, on what happens when we start on 00:01:20.437 --> 00:01:23.610 an individual level. growing our souls. 00:01:24.210 --> 00:01:28.290 other people are going to go away in the darkness isn't that the chaos where 00:01:28.373 --> 00:01:29.197 everything began 00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:33.396 Can we not begin it again? And then you get to the idea of the soul, 00:01:33.480 --> 00:01:37.349 where the individual soul is connected to the soul of the world, 00:01:37.433 --> 00:01:41.117 and enough souls awakening revitalized the soul of the world, 00:01:41.200 --> 00:01:43.300 and we're back in a living cosmos. 00:01:44.130 --> 00:01:48.497 rather than in an accidental universe. Michael Mead is a groundbreaking 00:01:48.580 --> 00:01:52.257 storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, 00:01:52.341 --> 00:01:55.266 and psychology. He has written many, many books, 00:01:55.349 --> 00:01:59.110 including "Why the World Doesn't End" and "The Genius Myth," 00:01:59.220 --> 00:02:03.400 And The Water of Life, which is a book about men and initiation. 00:02:04.260 --> 00:02:08.313 I was very excited to talk with Michael and he did not disappoint. 00:02:08.397 --> 00:02:12.951 He actually blew my mind with a historical gem he shared toward the end of 00:02:13.035 --> 00:02:14.100 our conversation. 00:02:14.250 --> 00:02:18.391 But before we get there, we cover the crisis of masculinity and the manosphere 00:02:18.474 --> 00:02:20.370 that has been dominating our feeds, 00:02:20.490 --> 00:02:23.230 But of course, Michael has a fresh take on all of it. 00:02:23.520 --> 00:02:28.117 We explore antidotes to monoculture and polarization and the fallacy of the hero's 00:02:28.200 --> 00:02:31.941 journey. And we spend most of our time talking about the importance 00:02:32.024 --> 00:02:36.390 of individually being. Each of us growing our own souls. 00:02:36.510 --> 00:02:40.340 what this means, how we do it, and what the result would be, 00:02:40.424 --> 00:02:43.360 personally and collectively. I loved this one. 00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:45.820 I hope you enjoy it too. Here we go. 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:54.592 Thank you for joining me. This is a total thrill and I'm very excited. 00:02:54.675 --> 00:02:57.080 And there's so much ground to cover. 00:02:57.570 --> 00:03:01.567 And, you know, I mean, we are living in... 00:03:01.650 --> 00:03:05.010 archetypal times. I'm also very curious, 00:03:05.640 --> 00:03:11.121 about sort of the crisis of masculinity that's happening and the absence, I guess, 00:03:11.204 --> 00:03:13.847 of initiation or just your perspective on that, 00:03:13.930 --> 00:03:16.540 because it feels like there's so many things. 00:03:16.650 --> 00:03:21.370 I guess I would call them thin stories about it that catch wind... 00:03:21.870 --> 00:03:26.224 in the culture. So I'd be curious about what medicine you would offer. 00:03:26.308 --> 00:03:28.970 I don't think it's that, but I don't know. 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:35.829 I don't know. Well, we'll see. The crisis of masculinity, I don't think, 00:03:35.912 --> 00:03:38.300 is more masculinity in this way. 00:03:39.150 --> 00:03:45.848 Simply put, it's soul. Simply put, it's soul. If men are not doing soul work, 00:03:45.932 --> 00:03:51.485 they are becoming more isolated, more inflated, more disjuncted, 00:03:51.568 --> 00:03:58.350 more dissociated, more anti-world, more anti-nature, more anti-feminine soul. 00:03:58.950 --> 00:04:01.639 All the work that we did with men that I, you know, 00:04:01.722 --> 00:04:05.257 years ago with Robert Bly and James Hillman and many, many others. 00:04:05.340 --> 00:04:08.280 was also work. And then people... 00:04:08.430 --> 00:04:11.510 began to talk about it as a men's movement. 00:04:12.330 --> 00:04:15.562 And I would always say, no, no, no, there already is a men's movement. 00:04:15.646 --> 00:04:16.896 It's called the Congress. 00:04:17.430 --> 00:04:21.779 In other words, if you're on top, you don't need a movement. 00:04:21.862 --> 00:04:25.768 You need a breakdown. You need a descent. You descent. 00:04:25.852 --> 00:04:30.157 And soul is the missing ingredient in the manosphere. Yeah. 00:04:30.240 --> 00:04:31.073 For sure. 00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:37.220 I mean... Maybe we even start there as an introduction to sort of this cultural 00:04:37.304 --> 00:04:42.457 moment because – It feels like when we look at our world, it is that, right? 00:04:42.540 --> 00:04:46.710 The absence of soul and the people in power, fear of death. 00:04:46.920 --> 00:04:48.277 driving, driving, 00:04:48.360 --> 00:04:55.140 huge amount of unrealized anxiety and fear and unwillingness, right, to break down. 00:04:55.590 --> 00:05:00.930 So when you look at our culture, what would you diagnose it with? That? 00:05:01.020 --> 00:05:05.880 Lack of soul. Oh, yeah. Lack of soul is the briefest way. 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:09.060 To say what the condition is. 00:05:09.300 --> 00:05:13.620 If we take soul to be the connective tissue of life. 00:05:14.610 --> 00:05:16.310 So spirit. 00:05:17.400 --> 00:05:19.540 is about rising up. 00:05:19.740 --> 00:05:25.440 Towards the light. And then that implies towards the spirit. Spirit as one. 00:05:26.310 --> 00:05:29.090 Soul is about descending down. 00:05:29.730 --> 00:05:32.910 And it goes into multiplicity and diversity. 00:05:33.690 --> 00:05:37.230 And so what we see is monoculture. 00:05:37.980 --> 00:05:42.560 And the hero's journey, which is a good mythological story. 00:05:42.720 --> 00:05:47.187 style of story, but it is not a monomyth, as Joseph Campbell said. 00:05:47.270 --> 00:05:51.200 That's a complete misunderstanding of both myth and myth. 00:05:51.330 --> 00:05:53.370 and imagination. 00:05:53.580 --> 00:05:58.877 And so part of what's, I think, generated the excess of the manosphere, 00:05:58.961 --> 00:06:04.720 besides loss of soul, is this fantasy of the hero's journey being the story. 00:06:05.520 --> 00:06:10.637 When it's masculine in style, it's aggressive in manner and it's aimed at 00:06:10.720 --> 00:06:14.797 the outer world. And so that's why I talk about the genius myth. 00:06:14.880 --> 00:06:19.681 Because genius already is inside people. You don't have to go looking for it. 00:06:19.765 --> 00:06:24.629 You could look inside and everyone has genius girls, boys, anybody in between. 00:06:24.712 --> 00:06:27.991 It doesn't matter social status or background genius. 00:06:28.075 --> 00:06:31.500 The word genius means the spirit that's already there. 00:06:32.220 --> 00:06:36.011 And right now we need that spirit that's already there and people, 00:06:36.094 --> 00:06:39.440 which is going to be by its nature, multiple and diverse. 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:44.168 as opposed to monocultural or monogenderal or whatever the word, 00:06:44.251 --> 00:06:46.340 all the things that are mono now. 00:06:46.800 --> 00:06:52.290 or against diversity and diversity is the life of nature. 00:06:52.830 --> 00:06:55.780 Take the diversity out of the forest and it's not a forest. 00:06:56.280 --> 00:07:00.460 It's just a cultural project. And it's incredibly weak, right? 00:07:00.544 --> 00:07:05.220 And we know from sort of that Susan Simard's work that it becomes... 00:07:05.430 --> 00:07:08.947 Yeah, it becomes incredibly susceptible to... 00:07:09.030 --> 00:07:12.490 being ravaged in all sorts of ways. It can endure. 00:07:13.920 --> 00:07:19.571 Recent study really interesting in South America where the forest in Brazil and all 00:07:19.655 --> 00:07:25.029 have been turned into a monocultural thing with a growing just one kind of tree 00:07:25.113 --> 00:07:28.327 or one kind of plant. The bees in those places. 00:07:28.410 --> 00:07:29.350 lose their color. 00:07:30.420 --> 00:07:35.140 And the bees are either gray or tan and they have no color. 00:07:35.280 --> 00:07:37.280 And so it's like nature saying, 00:07:37.770 --> 00:07:41.221 Pay attention. Look at what happens when you go in. 00:07:41.304 --> 00:07:45.378 When you move away from diversity, you move away from color, 00:07:45.462 --> 00:07:50.506 which makes things either just red, gray and depressing or black and white 00:07:50.589 --> 00:07:51.490 and divisive. 00:07:52.020 --> 00:07:57.300 Yeah. I think it's so interesting thinking about the hero's journey. 00:07:57.420 --> 00:08:00.575 and your perspective on sort of that being a fallacy, 00:08:00.658 --> 00:08:05.279 I always read it through the reason that it doesn't work or the way that it's 00:08:05.363 --> 00:08:09.923 misunderstood or misapplied in our culture is that it's not seen as the full 00:08:10.006 --> 00:08:14.871 developmental cycle where you, regardless of gender, would individuate, separate, 00:08:14.955 --> 00:08:19.637 go out into the world, find the antidote, find the medicine and bring it back. 00:08:19.720 --> 00:08:24.647 That somehow it's particularly in sort of it's a masculine application that people 00:08:24.730 --> 00:08:25.563 get stuck 00:08:27.420 --> 00:08:31.642 fighting, whatever, swashbuckling way. But it makes sense to me, too. 00:08:31.726 --> 00:08:36.010 And it's also one of the things that's picked up, right, by Hollywood. 00:08:36.094 --> 00:08:42.270 And then... The gaming world all comes out of that. But it's not just that. 00:08:42.353 --> 00:08:46.270 It's that also the antidote is not out there. 00:08:46.830 --> 00:08:51.525 Going out there is necessary because you get defeated and it drives you in. 00:08:51.608 --> 00:08:54.730 And the antidote and the medicine is in the soul. 00:08:55.620 --> 00:09:01.726 Mmmmm. That's beautiful. So it reverses the process of awakening when it's taken 00:09:01.809 --> 00:09:06.995 literally the way it has been taken. And when it's presented as the only story, 00:09:07.078 --> 00:09:10.080 some of the people that are running Pixar are 00:09:10.830 --> 00:09:13.830 have at times be in contact saying, 00:09:13.920 --> 00:09:16.951 What are the stories other than the hero's journey? 00:09:17.034 --> 00:09:20.820 Because all of our creators keep repeating the hero's journey. 00:09:21.180 --> 00:09:25.232 And they don't know of any other story, but they know that there's something wrong 00:09:25.316 --> 00:09:28.140 when all the creators are coming up with the same story. 00:09:28.860 --> 00:09:32.460 So the creative Western world, 00:09:32.550 --> 00:09:38.882 American version of things only has that story inside the abuse of it with Donald 00:09:38.966 --> 00:09:43.635 Trump and his cohort who are all masculine, who abuse women. 00:09:43.718 --> 00:09:50.209 And everything that's being demonstrated is really a distortion of the exaggeration 00:09:50.292 --> 00:09:55.120 of the hero saving everyone. Yeah. Trump's first move. 00:09:55.320 --> 00:09:56.153 Yes. 00:09:56.730 --> 00:09:59.927 can save you. I don't know if you've encountered James 00:10:00.010 --> 00:10:04.042 Kimmel Jr.'s work. He wrote this book called The Science of Revenge. 00:10:04.126 --> 00:10:08.703 It's kind of about the hero's journey in part in feeding our revenge-obsessed 00:10:08.786 --> 00:10:09.377 people. 00:10:09.460 --> 00:10:14.479 culture. He essentially posits that revenge is an addiction pattern that 20% 00:10:14.562 --> 00:10:17.177 of people have, including Donald Trump. 00:10:17.260 --> 00:10:23.079 Stalin, Hitler, but that this need for vengeance also creates this weird cycle, 00:10:23.162 --> 00:10:26.300 and it's put in all the children's movies. 00:10:26.920 --> 00:10:31.637 that this right must be wronged in this Hammurabi's code type of way. Well, 00:10:31.720 --> 00:10:35.710 a very helpful. Very child, dark childish. 00:10:36.100 --> 00:10:41.380 I mean, it's really many cases, it's vengeance on the parents. 00:10:42.100 --> 00:10:47.170 I mean, Trying to defeat the father, but also trying to 00:10:47.980 --> 00:10:51.980 Hmm. Exact. Some kind of penalty on the mother. 00:10:52.090 --> 00:10:55.842 Usually for not being loved, if you get right down to it. I mean, 00:10:55.925 --> 00:11:00.503 that's why Trump is so great. You know, he's always trying to defeat his father 00:11:00.587 --> 00:11:04.929 in terms. And yet he's fascinated by people more powerful than him or other 00:11:05.012 --> 00:11:07.490 autocrats, which his father was like that. 00:11:07.720 --> 00:11:12.460 but also he was never loved. So we have that huge narcissistic wound. 00:11:12.760 --> 00:11:16.797 So he gets elected by whatever it is, tens of millions of people. 00:11:16.880 --> 00:11:20.220 And the feeling of that is gone in about five minutes. 00:11:20.303 --> 00:11:23.980 It just goes right out the hole of the narcissistic wound. 00:11:24.250 --> 00:11:27.530 And so he's really such a symptom. 00:11:27.700 --> 00:11:32.543 He's a living symptom of American culture and all of the things we've been talking 00:11:32.626 --> 00:11:37.049 about. Not that that should justify his existence or certainly his position 00:11:37.132 --> 00:11:41.735 of power. No, but he is very archetypal. And I want to talk about that because 00:11:41.818 --> 00:11:43.140 there's a moment in... 00:11:43.360 --> 00:11:48.137 why the world doesn't end that I was like, oh, wow, that was very prophetic. 00:11:48.221 --> 00:11:53.382 Before we get to that, though. Yeah. So if men are sort of architected or oriented 00:11:53.465 --> 00:11:55.640 around hero's journey and history, 00:11:55.960 --> 00:12:00.768 That being the story and a refusal to go in and the antidote being soul. 00:12:00.852 --> 00:12:05.999 What is that aversion? Do you think that's a cultural aversion to that inward 00:12:06.083 --> 00:12:10.279 journey? Or is it a fear of the feminine or fear of that depth? 00:12:10.363 --> 00:12:13.420 What do you think it is? All of those things. 00:12:13.510 --> 00:12:20.510 OK, all of those things. And so then you had mentioned initiation and initiation 00:12:20.981 --> 00:12:24.250 was the culturally created descent. 00:12:25.060 --> 00:12:30.047 that took place the young man or, you know, 00:12:30.130 --> 00:12:34.630 Teenager, as we would say now, out of the gang. 00:12:35.050 --> 00:12:39.155 otherwise known as the political party or the police or whatever. 00:12:39.238 --> 00:12:44.051 The men form gangs all the time and take them out of that into an individual 00:12:44.135 --> 00:12:44.968 dissent. 00:12:45.460 --> 00:12:51.258 For two reasons there is I could figure out one is to find their own natural 00:12:51.341 --> 00:12:56.830 gifts, the gifts that they are in sold with and the other being to begin 00:12:56.913 --> 00:13:00.860 the healing of the wound that everyone has. And so. 00:13:01.210 --> 00:13:04.810 Whereas with women, it's a little different because of the menses. 00:13:04.930 --> 00:13:10.203 that a girl becomes a woman in a sense on the day she begins having the menses. 00:13:10.286 --> 00:13:14.203 And it's a physical, extroverted demonstration of bleeding, 00:13:14.287 --> 00:13:19.628 which suggests the moon. I said a wound, a wound, but it also suggests the moon. 00:13:19.711 --> 00:13:22.830 And there's a whole thing that goes with that. 00:13:23.080 --> 00:13:26.600 And if men have the menses, it's. 00:13:26.770 --> 00:13:28.960 Internal And 00:13:29.500 --> 00:13:33.757 Can go unnoticed. You can't pretend that there's not blood happening, 00:13:33.841 --> 00:13:38.350 but you can pretend men pretend that they don't have wounds all the time. 00:13:38.433 --> 00:13:44.630 Back to the manosphere. To be a man is to know one's wounds, not to deny them. 00:13:45.160 --> 00:13:50.276 And so there's a way in which the manos fear might better be termed 00:13:50.360 --> 00:13:56.810 the adolescent. No spear. You know, it's more like adolescent teenagers. 00:13:56.950 --> 00:13:58.550 than it is men. 00:13:59.170 --> 00:14:05.037 Yeah. Well, in our culture, too, we equate getting older with getting theoretically 00:14:05.120 --> 00:14:10.011 older. more mature, but many men are in an arrested development. 00:14:10.094 --> 00:14:13.730 Many women are too, but that there is this lack of 00:14:13.960 --> 00:14:18.460 growth, maturity that's happening where people aren't really 00:14:19.090 --> 00:14:22.840 moving forward. into... Manhood. 00:14:22.930 --> 00:14:26.750 Yeah, I mean, it's like these 13-year-old boys at the wheel. 00:14:27.730 --> 00:14:32.925 Well, maturity, if we look to nature, it depends on the roots going down as well 00:14:33.009 --> 00:14:34.790 as the branches coming out. 00:14:35.290 --> 00:14:41.243 And so actual maturity would be depth combined with outer growth or evident 00:14:41.327 --> 00:14:43.060 growth. So, yeah. 00:14:43.180 --> 00:14:47.395 Yeah. So that's what we were doing when I was doing a lot of men's work. 00:14:47.478 --> 00:14:51.812 We called it soul work because the feeling was that men didn't have souls. 00:14:51.895 --> 00:14:56.289 They weren't growing the soul. They didn't even know they were supposed to. 00:14:56.372 --> 00:14:58.700 And the key to that is the woundedness. 00:14:59.080 --> 00:15:02.400 The acceptance of being wounded, which is... 00:15:02.680 --> 00:15:07.000 Oh, it's really interesting because it actually creates a second kind of tears. 00:15:07.270 --> 00:15:11.412 that there's the tears of the child and then there's more mature tears that come 00:15:11.495 --> 00:15:12.710 from a different place. 00:15:13.510 --> 00:15:15.250 And so... 00:15:15.880 --> 00:15:19.500 Anyway, we may be making the interview unnecessary. 00:15:20.350 --> 00:15:27.350 Do you? 00:15:48.880 --> 00:15:53.827 particularly in the olden days, was a confrontation with death as well. 00:15:53.911 --> 00:15:57.370 Do you think that that's just a deepening process? 00:15:57.453 --> 00:16:02.542 It's just much more intuitive to women that we are just much more earthy, 00:16:02.626 --> 00:16:05.801 connected to the moon, connected to the tides, 00:16:05.885 --> 00:16:09.640 connected to the planet as another co-creative thing? 00:16:09.730 --> 00:16:12.070 vehicle? What do you think that that is? 00:16:12.610 --> 00:16:15.935 Well, I think it's I mean, it's lots of things, 00:16:16.019 --> 00:16:19.790 but I think there's such a thing as lunar knowledge. 00:16:20.560 --> 00:16:23.408 which actually is connected to the moon in cycles, 00:16:23.492 --> 00:16:25.720 and therefore it's a bodily knowledge. 00:16:26.440 --> 00:16:30.880 And then, yeah, if you take the menses as the beginning of the end of childhood, 00:16:31.810 --> 00:16:33.550 But it's then... 00:16:33.760 --> 00:16:38.741 being pulled into the cycles of the moon, which are attuned to the cycles of all 00:16:38.825 --> 00:16:41.777 the bodies of water as well. So you're in this. 00:16:41.860 --> 00:16:48.860 Water, moon, lunar changing realm, which partly then becomes women's much greater 00:16:50.018 --> 00:16:53.140 capacity for shifting emotions. 00:16:54.010 --> 00:16:58.210 which they can track to the back of the brain, the stem of the brain. 00:16:58.293 --> 00:17:03.237 But also it's a bigger thing than that. And so men tend to get stuck in emotions. 00:17:03.321 --> 00:17:08.079 I mean, you know, a man that hasn't learned anything about his own woundedness 00:17:08.162 --> 00:17:12.548 of the nature of his own psyche can be in a mood for two or three years. 00:17:12.632 --> 00:17:17.079 Not still not talking about it, whereas women will convert the experience 00:17:17.163 --> 00:17:20.742 of emotional mood into language and share it. And it moves. 00:17:20.825 --> 00:17:23.357 It shifts really quickly or much quicker. 00:17:23.440 --> 00:17:25.040 So there's a whole... 00:17:25.450 --> 00:17:31.512 you know, different world in the sense, which was indicated in the initiation 00:17:31.595 --> 00:17:33.590 practices to some degree. 00:17:33.940 --> 00:17:39.887 But psychology then would say, yeah, but inside the man is the unseen woman. 00:17:39.970 --> 00:17:42.767 Inside the man is the feminine trying to awaken, 00:17:42.850 --> 00:17:47.147 and that would bring all kinds of new levels of knowledge inside the man. 00:17:47.230 --> 00:17:51.587 And then inside the woman is the man trying to awaken that would bring all 00:17:51.670 --> 00:17:56.248 kinds of levels also. And everybody is a mixture of both. And it's not binary. 00:17:56.331 --> 00:17:58.943 It's a big arc with all kinds of places on it. 00:17:59.026 --> 00:18:01.931 And you can move up and down if you want. You know, 00:18:02.015 --> 00:18:04.710 it gets to be just a bigger, greater exchange. 00:18:05.260 --> 00:18:09.790 But the difference, the difference, makes the exchange possible. 00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:16.330 Yeah. No, certainly. And I think people are starting to become more aware of, oh, 00:18:16.414 --> 00:18:19.231 I have a lot of masculine energy personally, 00:18:19.314 --> 00:18:23.449 and the variability between the two and what they feel like and, 00:18:23.533 --> 00:18:27.009 and how to move seamlessly between those two energies. 00:18:27.092 --> 00:18:30.832 And that it's unfortunate that they're attached to gender, 00:18:30.915 --> 00:18:34.847 because I think people get really confused, but that they're 00:18:34.930 --> 00:18:40.750 also different animating energies that belong to all of us. I was talking to this 00:18:40.930 --> 00:18:45.870 I don't think that they're science, but he was talking about for women that the womb 00:18:45.953 --> 00:18:50.235 functions as a brain, like an intuitive brain that's constantly scanning. 00:18:50.318 --> 00:18:52.830 I loved that just as an image of a way of. 00:18:53.020 --> 00:18:59.766 Yeah, of a perspective, essentially, brain that is taking in a ton of information 00:18:59.849 --> 00:19:01.620 about what's present. 00:19:23.020 --> 00:19:26.224 horse. What's the thing you cannot shut up about? 00:19:26.307 --> 00:19:30.048 So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. 00:19:30.131 --> 00:19:32.680 Follow wherever you get your podcasts. 00:19:33.130 --> 00:19:33.963 you 00:19:34.390 --> 00:19:37.116 Hey guys, we're Elizabeth Chambers and Marissa Hermer. 00:19:37.200 --> 00:19:40.238 You may know us from television, business, and other things. 00:19:40.322 --> 00:19:42.840 We're talking about the stuff that really matters. 00:19:42.923 --> 00:19:46.274 Every week we're celebrating women and getting real about divorce, 00:19:46.357 --> 00:19:49.552 dating, motherhood, sex, friendship, and everything in between. 00:19:49.636 --> 00:19:53.403 It's honest, hilarious, unfiltered, and proof that this chapter of life is 00:19:53.486 --> 00:19:56.368 the best one yet. So if you're ready to laugh, feel seen, 00:19:56.452 --> 00:19:59.937 and join the conversation, come hang out with us. This is a podcast. 00:20:00.020 --> 00:20:04.760 is The Dash. Listen and subscribe to The Dash wherever you get your podcasts. 00:20:06.410 --> 00:20:11.459 All right, let's talk about this current moment because it feels obviously like 00:20:11.543 --> 00:20:14.513 kabuki theater. It feels incredibly archetypal. 00:20:14.596 --> 00:20:17.910 And I don't know if you remember writing this in... 00:20:18.200 --> 00:20:19.900 Why the World Doesn't End in 2012, 00:20:20.600 --> 00:20:23.360 But... You wrote about the trickster. 00:20:23.630 --> 00:20:27.710 And you wrote about how the trickster appears... 00:20:27.950 --> 00:20:31.508 I don't think it's always the trickster that we want. Sorry, 00:20:31.591 --> 00:20:33.207 there's an alarm going off. 00:20:33.290 --> 00:20:36.651 It's the trickster. That's the trickster. That's the trickster. 00:20:36.734 --> 00:20:39.002 Triggering the alarm. Triggering the alarm. 00:20:39.085 --> 00:20:42.610 Just being mentioned and it shows up. Just being, and it shows up. 00:20:42.693 --> 00:20:46.546 And that the trickster shows up when we need to break out of our rhythm, 00:20:46.630 --> 00:20:49.170 when there's a preponderance of cultural shadow. 00:20:49.254 --> 00:20:51.550 You write about him needing to bear his... 00:20:51.650 --> 00:20:56.410 behind to show us the other side of life, to break the spell of perfection. 00:20:56.493 --> 00:20:59.270 And you even write about him as throwing... 00:20:59.450 --> 00:21:02.785 fecal matter. I don't know if you remember this. 00:21:02.868 --> 00:21:07.770 Sometimes at people and sometimes at God. And I read that. Yeah, yeah. 00:21:07.853 --> 00:21:13.324 And I was like, whoa, that was a prescient statement when we think about Trump 00:21:13.407 --> 00:21:17.810 and his obsession with bathrooms and the fact that he, I guess, 00:21:17.894 --> 00:21:22.225 pooped on all of us on No King's Day. Yeah. He's an open book. 00:21:22.309 --> 00:21:27.740 He's an open book. Psychology. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think He's a trickster. 00:21:28.460 --> 00:21:32.396 No, he's totally unconscious. He could be. He's so unconscious. 00:21:32.479 --> 00:21:35.394 He's tricking himself every moment of his life. 00:21:35.477 --> 00:21:39.987 He has to trick himself to think he's OK and he's better than everybody. 00:21:40.070 --> 00:21:43.368 He's smarter. He's more powerful. He's more handsome. 00:21:43.451 --> 00:21:45.620 All this crazy narcissistic stuff. 00:21:45.950 --> 00:21:49.457 He's constantly tricking himself. And then, of course, 00:21:49.540 --> 00:21:52.382 he has to all deals are tricks in his hands. 00:21:52.465 --> 00:21:57.501 He's tricking everybody with every deal. And so he's like the extreme version 00:21:57.585 --> 00:22:00.510 of the utterly unconscious trickster energy. 00:22:01.190 --> 00:22:03.974 Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. He's not conscious. 00:22:04.057 --> 00:22:08.210 I'm just wondering if he hasn't been inserted into this moment as 00:22:08.293 --> 00:22:13.357 an unconscious trickster to blow it all up and expose it all. I don't think so. 00:22:13.441 --> 00:22:17.037 But that implies that he could be the agent of the good. 00:22:17.120 --> 00:22:18.627 He cannot be. 00:22:18.710 --> 00:22:24.110 Say more. I'm trying to find a moment of faith. It doesn't work that way. 00:22:24.410 --> 00:22:29.019 It doesn't work that way. No. So the trickster is underneath the trickster 00:22:29.102 --> 00:22:34.173 is the healer. So that in Native American traditions like the Hopi, 00:22:34.256 --> 00:22:38.544 the tricksters come and they disturb everything and everybody, 00:22:38.627 --> 00:22:40.390 but their aim is healing. 00:22:40.760 --> 00:22:46.362 which means to make it whole. So the healthy aim of the trickster is to create 00:22:46.445 --> 00:22:50.371 wholeness out of a broken person or a broken community. 00:22:50.454 --> 00:22:55.109 And so and then if you think of the tears of the clown, you know, 00:22:55.192 --> 00:23:00.649 that was a popular song once upon a time. But it's a common idea that inside 00:23:00.732 --> 00:23:02.700 the comedian are the tears. 00:23:03.350 --> 00:23:07.840 And that tells you something. So that if Trump were to be... 00:23:08.120 --> 00:23:10.160 acting the role of the trickster. 00:23:10.430 --> 00:23:16.750 in some way that is aligned with healing and wholeness, he'd be crying a lot more. 00:23:17.450 --> 00:23:23.024 He doesn't cry. He makes people cry. It's a real inversion of the idea of 00:23:23.108 --> 00:23:27.597 the trickster as healer. And it's the mindless destructive. 00:23:27.680 --> 00:23:32.330 So in a lot of trickster myths, the tricksters are creators. 00:23:32.630 --> 00:23:36.750 But he's not that. He's the other side. He's a destroyer. 00:23:36.950 --> 00:23:42.477 So a healthy trickster would be taking the already broken things and showing people 00:23:42.561 --> 00:23:45.670 how they can be put back together differently. 00:23:46.340 --> 00:23:48.740 And Trump is actually just breaking more things. 00:23:49.190 --> 00:23:53.533 But is he breaking things? I'm just looking for meaning here. Okay. 00:23:53.616 --> 00:23:58.488 So just bear with me. Is he breaking things in part because it has been one 00:23:58.571 --> 00:24:03.509 of the sort of superific parts of our culture is someone's going to fix this 00:24:03.592 --> 00:24:08.463 for us. And is he breaking it? Is he not the healer in part because there's 00:24:08.547 --> 00:24:13.418 a collective healing action that will be incited by this that will generate 00:24:13.501 --> 00:24:14.307 healing? 00:24:14.390 --> 00:24:19.746 Something new, something beautiful, something creative? No? No guarantee. 00:24:19.830 --> 00:24:23.577 No guarantee. The archetypes are both good and bad. 00:24:23.660 --> 00:24:27.160 Both, you know, the archetypes are not human. 00:24:27.560 --> 00:24:33.860 By definition, and they are manifestations of darkness and light. 00:24:34.580 --> 00:24:40.880 So that you can have you have the dark king versus the enlightened leader. 00:24:41.690 --> 00:24:48.690 And Trump is totally on the dark side of it. And so you see the potential for. 00:24:49.550 --> 00:24:54.290 tricks their energy or something like that, but you don't see it happen. 00:24:54.373 --> 00:24:59.246 What happens is the Christians start voting based on the idea that empathy 00:24:59.330 --> 00:25:02.210 is the most destructive thing in the world. 00:25:02.600 --> 00:25:04.940 I know. Everything is upside down. 00:25:05.720 --> 00:25:09.560 Yeah, it's upside down because this is the trickster of destruction. 00:25:10.130 --> 00:25:14.785 And also it's dangerous because the Christians who I'm not sure are interested 00:25:14.868 --> 00:25:17.700 in the world mythologically and philosophically, 00:25:17.784 --> 00:25:22.378 they think this world is a fallen place. So if this world is destroyed, well, 00:25:22.461 --> 00:25:27.116 they were going to leave it anyway. They're trying to get to that other world, 00:25:27.199 --> 00:25:31.611 which is over identified with the good. And so the kind of destructiveness 00:25:31.694 --> 00:25:32.970 that he's acting out. 00:25:33.080 --> 00:25:36.905 I mean, which is massive. And when you get to the individual level, 00:25:36.988 --> 00:25:41.338 he's destroying lives. He literally taking food out of the mouths of infants 00:25:41.422 --> 00:25:44.280 and actually glorifying it. That's not trickster. 00:25:44.510 --> 00:25:48.510 That's madness. That's being, what would you call that? 00:25:48.920 --> 00:25:53.667 taken over. by dark forces that... 00:25:53.750 --> 00:25:58.512 Yeah, so it's the trickster on only one side, the destructive side. 00:25:58.595 --> 00:26:04.008 So the problem with it is, I think, not that it can't kind of provoke people 00:26:04.091 --> 00:26:10.083 to get more awake and get more imagination about how to fix things and all that kind 00:26:10.166 --> 00:26:15.217 of stuff. But more likely what happens is it causes the reawakening and 00:26:15.300 --> 00:26:18.410 the reimagining of the world. It delays it. 00:26:19.100 --> 00:26:24.860 Mm. Yeah, so that if people can't figure out pretty soon what to do, 00:26:24.943 --> 00:26:28.380 then that kind of a reign of power lasts longer. 00:26:28.940 --> 00:26:33.711 And it actually prolongs the darkness. The world will come back. I mean, 00:26:33.794 --> 00:26:38.026 someone wrote a book about that. The world can't come to an end. 00:26:38.109 --> 00:26:42.677 That's that's I think that's OK. But we could be living in, you know, 00:26:42.761 --> 00:26:47.427 under the jet stream dropping piles of feces on us for a long time if. 00:26:47.510 --> 00:26:51.034 He and they, because he's got cohorts all around the world. 00:26:51.117 --> 00:26:53.930 It's a worldwide thing, the rise of autocracy. 00:26:54.440 --> 00:26:57.729 The longer that they can hold power, it's like the Middle Ages. 00:26:57.813 --> 00:27:01.560 We could go into the Middle Ages before we could find the Renaissance. 00:27:02.120 --> 00:27:07.497 So the trick is, how do we get Renaissance now? And part of it is by realizing that 00:27:07.580 --> 00:27:08.600 that 00:27:09.200 --> 00:27:11.220 The world is both dark and light. 00:27:11.420 --> 00:27:15.080 And that certain kinds of darkness are not going to produce light. 00:27:16.220 --> 00:27:17.053 Yeah. 00:27:17.300 --> 00:27:23.160 You know, this is bad stuff. What's going on with no virtue coming from it? 00:27:23.630 --> 00:27:28.191 I'm trying to be more optimistic. I'm trying to, 00:27:28.274 --> 00:27:31.347 which is maybe delusional and... 00:27:31.430 --> 00:27:35.972 I don't know, trying to imagine the ways in which this is happening for us and not 00:27:36.056 --> 00:27:38.030 to us and what it could accelerate. 00:27:38.930 --> 00:27:43.474 In response, I'm with you, but I don't think it's optimism. 00:27:43.557 --> 00:27:49.356 I don't think that I think optimism, pessimism is not an interesting binary 00:27:49.439 --> 00:27:51.650 thing. I think it's knowledge. 00:27:51.980 --> 00:27:56.257 It's not... I mean, even just from the talking to you for a little time, 00:27:56.340 --> 00:27:59.959 you have knowledge about things. And then when we get real knowledge, 00:28:00.043 --> 00:28:01.760 we don't have to believe things. 00:28:02.120 --> 00:28:06.387 Believing in optimism is kind of like, OK, you know, that's good for a while. 00:28:06.471 --> 00:28:08.900 And then you realize there's more optimism. 00:28:09.110 --> 00:28:14.450 more firm and embodied knowledge ways to know things. 00:28:14.540 --> 00:28:19.520 that don't require us to project, you know, I mean... 00:28:19.910 --> 00:28:21.290 I get up every morning 00:28:21.470 --> 00:28:25.977 excited to work on mythology and stuff and dreams and things, you know. 00:28:26.061 --> 00:28:28.917 And so but I don't know that it's optimistic. 00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:32.660 Because the dream could be a nightmare. 00:28:32.780 --> 00:28:37.520 And I'm going, all right, well, the nightmare is there for some reason. 00:28:37.603 --> 00:28:40.660 And let me find out what's in that nightmare. 00:28:40.790 --> 00:28:44.876 And so I think it's actually I get really interested in knowledge. 00:28:44.959 --> 00:28:50.119 I guess it's wisdom, I mean, or a kind of knowledge or what the Greeks used to call 00:28:50.202 --> 00:28:53.900 dark knowledge. which is a knowledge of light and dark. 00:28:54.230 --> 00:28:58.407 And so the argument I'm making about Trump would be based on 00:28:58.490 --> 00:29:03.532 My supposed knowledge of light and dark and that there's nothing there. 00:29:03.615 --> 00:29:06.430 It's all what we see. It's all surface. 00:29:07.070 --> 00:29:12.023 It's all narcissism. It's all a kind of spell of superiority. 00:29:12.106 --> 00:29:18.628 It's all needing that others to go down for him to come up moment at the moment, 00:29:18.712 --> 00:29:24.738 year after year, term after term. He's an example of how that could become 00:29:24.821 --> 00:29:28.830 the Middle Ages or. the Kali Yuga, as they call it in India. 00:29:29.270 --> 00:29:34.766 You know, he's not going to help. I mean, he helps in the sense that you could see 00:29:34.849 --> 00:29:37.790 from the psychology. What's wrong? 00:29:38.180 --> 00:29:42.290 But he will not... help things, get better. 00:29:42.770 --> 00:29:47.657 even by making it worse and worse. He'll just keep making it worse and worse 00:29:47.740 --> 00:29:53.044 and new levels of worse. And people could stay in the dark for a longer time. Yeah. 00:29:53.127 --> 00:29:54.620 So I think the energy... 00:29:54.800 --> 00:29:59.917 I'm about the soul a lot because the soul, which seems connected to truth, 00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:03.060 darkness and depth, essential qualities of the soul. 00:30:03.240 --> 00:30:05.290 The soul is already living in the future. 00:30:05.490 --> 00:30:07.570 Our souls value the future. 00:30:08.430 --> 00:30:11.147 And I know people say just live in the present and all that. 00:30:11.230 --> 00:30:12.997 That's interesting. But the present. 00:30:13.080 --> 00:30:17.406 The present is the place where the ancient past and the unseen future meet. 00:30:17.489 --> 00:30:21.463 And so I'm not sure what they mean, because if you're in the present, 00:30:21.546 --> 00:30:24.167 you're really in the present in your own soul. 00:30:24.251 --> 00:30:28.459 You're connected to the ancient past and the origins of ongoing creation. 00:30:28.543 --> 00:30:32.751 And if we're really in the present, we're getting glimpses of the future, 00:30:32.834 --> 00:30:37.572 because when does the future come? Every present moment is falling into the future 00:30:37.656 --> 00:30:40.360 just as much as it's disappearing in the past. 00:30:40.650 --> 00:30:41.890 Anyway, that's. 00:30:42.300 --> 00:30:48.022 So when you think about that, when you think about sort of re-insuling the world 00:30:48.105 --> 00:30:50.497 and insuling men and women who... 00:30:50.580 --> 00:30:56.200 Need it. How does one do that on the scale at which we... 00:30:56.670 --> 00:31:00.510 particularly when it feels like we're being run by 00:31:00.630 --> 00:31:04.250 amok by a bunch of guys with Messiah complexes. 00:31:04.620 --> 00:31:09.922 Well, let's throw some women in there, too, because you in America, 00:31:10.005 --> 00:31:14.744 you now have the attorney general. Kristi Noem, too. I mean, 00:31:14.828 --> 00:31:17.467 there's some real it's it's wild. 00:31:17.550 --> 00:31:21.430 Yeah. So when it really happens, it gets like that. 00:31:21.600 --> 00:31:25.921 And it penetrates all the things you thought might resist it. 00:31:26.004 --> 00:31:30.480 And that's a lack of soul. Christy Noem, I mean, what is that? 00:31:30.570 --> 00:31:34.701 She's an empty vessel. Oh, yeah. A big hollow thing. Yeah. Yeah. 00:31:34.785 --> 00:31:38.389 And she's just all performative. It looks very feminine, 00:31:38.473 --> 00:31:43.592 but it has this deadly quality. I mean, I mean deadly because of the ice people 00:31:43.675 --> 00:31:45.190 and what they're doing. 00:31:45.450 --> 00:31:49.477 So I think if it keeps going, it'll penetrate more like that. 00:31:49.560 --> 00:31:53.740 Because you also have ministers and church leaders signing up. 00:31:54.180 --> 00:31:55.960 Signing up for a war on empathy. 00:31:56.400 --> 00:32:01.492 So it's really upside down and it's also plunging into darkness. 00:32:01.575 --> 00:32:07.960 And the soul has its own light. One of the old definitions of soul was the light 00:32:08.044 --> 00:32:09.580 hidden in darkness. 00:32:10.440 --> 00:32:12.690 And so I think that's what we're looking for. 00:32:12.900 --> 00:32:16.300 The light hidden in darkness. And that's in everyone also. 00:32:17.130 --> 00:32:21.643 Is that the same as Jung talking about the gold lost in the shadow or the gold in 00:32:21.726 --> 00:32:22.559 the shadow? 00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:25.220 Yeah, it's like the gold shadow, yeah. 00:32:25.470 --> 00:32:30.442 So are we being prepared in some way to go into the darkness to collect the light 00:32:30.525 --> 00:32:34.498 and collect the soul, collect the gold? Is that what's happening? 00:32:34.582 --> 00:32:35.830 We're being invited. 00:32:36.720 --> 00:32:38.160 Okay. We're being invited. 00:32:38.910 --> 00:32:43.158 And so then the other thing about the soul is the human soul. 00:32:43.241 --> 00:32:47.430 And I like these really old ideas, which Jung was tracking. 00:32:47.610 --> 00:32:52.482 And so one of the old ideas is that the individual soul is connected to the soul 00:32:52.565 --> 00:32:53.398 of the world. 00:32:54.060 --> 00:32:57.579 The soul penetrates everything. The soul is the connective tissue of everything. 00:32:57.663 --> 00:33:01.213 And so when you find the soul, you're actually connected to everything. 00:33:01.320 --> 00:33:06.116 And you could learn how that is, which means we could learn how to reconnect 00:33:06.199 --> 00:33:07.740 human culture to nature. 00:33:08.460 --> 00:33:10.927 which aren't opposing things in a binary way, 00:33:11.010 --> 00:33:15.260 they will used to be connected and they still are. We call it human nature. 00:33:15.690 --> 00:33:18.037 But so then you can work from that. 00:33:18.120 --> 00:33:22.060 the depth of the individual soul. And so in the Renaissance, they would say, 00:33:22.230 --> 00:33:23.930 Change the soul, change the world. 00:33:25.230 --> 00:33:28.380 We change the world by changing our soul, by growing more soul. 00:33:28.710 --> 00:33:32.317 And that's how it changes. There's not going to be an idea or an agreement. 00:33:32.400 --> 00:33:36.635 Or a revelation in a religious revelation or something, I think, 00:33:36.719 --> 00:33:40.211 or I've been I wrote the book called The Genius Myth, 00:33:40.295 --> 00:33:43.248 which says that it's the awakening of genius, 00:33:43.331 --> 00:33:46.840 the inherent natural spirit in more and more people. 00:33:47.160 --> 00:33:51.240 so that the world gets renewed from the bottom up. 00:33:51.870 --> 00:33:55.130 So that, for instance, when you get to where everything is wrong, 00:33:55.320 --> 00:33:57.780 Nature's falling apart. Culture is collapsing. 00:33:58.830 --> 00:34:01.451 There's no fix. And because people want the simple fix, 00:34:01.535 --> 00:34:05.583 and that's why someone says I can fix it. And people vote for that because they want 00:34:05.666 --> 00:34:09.066 to get out. But that's not going to do. It's going to make it worse. 00:34:09.480 --> 00:34:14.370 The opposite is the truth in a way that the awakening of genius in many, 00:34:14.453 --> 00:34:16.940 many people, and it doesn't require. 00:34:17.040 --> 00:34:20.851 It's not like democracy. It doesn't require a 51 percent vote. 00:34:20.935 --> 00:34:24.495 No one knows what the no one knows what the proportion is, 00:34:24.578 --> 00:34:28.320 but if it's under 50 percent. Like the Renaissance. 00:34:28.560 --> 00:34:33.417 You know, all the people in Italy and parts of Europe in the Renaissance all 00:34:33.500 --> 00:34:37.140 didn't become artists or philosophers, a certain number. 00:34:37.290 --> 00:34:42.090 And then it becomes the exact opposite of what you have now. We have polarization. 00:34:42.390 --> 00:34:45.742 Everyone turned against each other and every issue that comes up, 00:34:45.826 --> 00:34:49.976 it polarizes again. When the soul is activated, it's the opposite. 00:34:50.059 --> 00:34:53.749 Each person waking up to who they are and what they have to bring. 00:34:53.832 --> 00:34:57.864 And all of a sudden that affects the person nearby that didn't know that 00:34:57.948 --> 00:35:01.408 was possible. And then that person goes, well, what do I have? 00:35:01.492 --> 00:35:05.550 And then that changes the world. That's the premise I'm operating with. 00:35:05.910 --> 00:35:07.310 I think that's beautiful. 00:35:35.910 --> 00:35:40.210 is The Dash. Listen and subscribe to The Dash wherever you get your podcasts. 00:35:40.910 --> 00:35:44.291 Hi, I'm Zosia Mamet. You might know me from the show Girls. 00:35:44.374 --> 00:35:48.695 I've been a horse girl since I was six. Not a phase, definitely not ironic. 00:35:48.778 --> 00:35:52.629 I will talk about horses until the people around me start to worry. 00:35:52.713 --> 00:35:56.270 So I made a show about that feeling. It's called OMG Obsessed. 00:35:56.353 --> 00:36:00.087 And every week I sit down with one of my favorite people and ask, 00:36:00.170 --> 00:36:03.668 what's your horse? What's the thing you cannot shut up about? 00:36:03.752 --> 00:36:07.015 So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. 00:36:07.099 --> 00:36:09.330 Follow wherever you get your podcasts. 00:36:10.770 --> 00:36:11.603 you 00:36:12.180 --> 00:36:17.977 In our highly polarized world and... 00:36:18.060 --> 00:36:24.137 this invitation to eat the shadow or to go into the shadow, to find the soul, 00:36:24.220 --> 00:36:27.580 find the gold. Is that also a way I would, 00:36:27.750 --> 00:36:33.819 I want to believe that that's the way that the polarization starts to mute down is if 00:36:33.902 --> 00:36:39.102 enough people are working with their own internal shadow and then helping 00:36:39.185 --> 00:36:42.367 to transform the collective and not feed it. 00:36:42.450 --> 00:36:43.770 Is that accurate? Yeah. 00:36:43.920 --> 00:36:49.620 Yes. And so polarization, if you take it back to the origins of 00:36:49.890 --> 00:36:52.990 polarization is the source of creation. 00:36:53.490 --> 00:36:57.007 So we're closer to we're closer to creation. 00:36:57.090 --> 00:37:01.229 Thank you. Also, the beginning of creation is chaos in all myths. 00:37:01.313 --> 00:37:03.490 Chaos is the beginning. Darkness. 00:37:04.380 --> 00:37:06.480 disorder, but really chaos-wise. 00:37:06.570 --> 00:37:11.558 means more than that. It means the unexpressed creativity being held in 00:37:11.641 --> 00:37:17.058 a dark condition, something like that. And so we're almost in it solidly now. 00:37:17.141 --> 00:37:19.570 We're actually closer to creation. 00:37:20.010 --> 00:37:24.444 We're closer to going. And that's why I say it's not going to be helped by people 00:37:24.528 --> 00:37:27.930 like Trump. They're going to hold to that darkness. OK, fine. 00:37:28.080 --> 00:37:30.994 Other people are going to go away in the darkness. 00:37:31.077 --> 00:37:35.249 Isn't that the chaos where everything began? Can we not begin it again? 00:37:35.332 --> 00:37:39.984 And then you get to the idea of the soul where the individual soul is connected 00:37:40.067 --> 00:37:44.419 to the soul of the world and enough souls awakening revitalize the soul of 00:37:44.503 --> 00:37:47.200 the world. And we're back in a living cosmos. 00:37:47.970 --> 00:37:50.430 rather than in an accidental universe. 00:37:51.000 --> 00:37:54.180 Mm-hmm. So maybe he's just the polarizer in chief. 00:37:54.510 --> 00:37:57.907 And that's his job, right? Yeah, because he... 00:37:57.990 --> 00:38:03.187 When you get all the way down in the narcissistic personality, apparently, 00:38:03.270 --> 00:38:06.475 And the borderline personality, which has those qualities, too. 00:38:06.559 --> 00:38:09.430 What happens is you have a split that never got united. 00:38:10.230 --> 00:38:12.630 That in the infantile realm, 00:38:12.930 --> 00:38:16.345 Yes. You know, there's always the dark mother, you know, 00:38:16.429 --> 00:38:21.031 who isn't there when you need to be nourished or she has one of her breasts 00:38:21.114 --> 00:38:26.029 is envious and the other one's nurturing, whatever it is that never got resolved 00:38:26.113 --> 00:38:29.613 at all. That split is so deep that it's currently unresolvable. 00:38:29.697 --> 00:38:33.420 People like him would have to go into therapy for a very long time. 00:38:34.230 --> 00:38:37.131 And in order to do that, they would have to admit they're not perfect. 00:38:37.214 --> 00:38:39.987 They're not in charge. They don't know what the hell they're doing. 00:38:40.071 --> 00:38:42.427 It's all a pretense and they're not going to do that. 00:38:42.510 --> 00:38:44.210 And as long as they don't do that, 00:38:44.370 --> 00:38:47.530 Then they're just creating more darkness for everybody. 00:38:48.300 --> 00:38:52.369 Yeah. All right. I mean, I buy it. I understand your version. 00:38:52.452 --> 00:38:57.084 And I just I want to believe that we're at some and maybe we're both getting to 00:38:57.167 --> 00:39:01.500 the same place, which is that we're at some sort of shock point. You know, 00:39:01.583 --> 00:39:04.245 you mentioned it as being this point of chaos, 00:39:04.328 --> 00:39:06.871 which is the sort of cauldron of creativity. 00:39:06.954 --> 00:39:10.809 All growth comes out of the darkness, the tomb to the womb. Right. 00:39:10.893 --> 00:39:15.584 And that there's something that wants to be born or there's something that wants 00:39:15.667 --> 00:39:18.830 to come through. And it is a do or die moment. Right. 00:39:19.170 --> 00:39:24.441 or it feels that way. No, it is. And in a funny way, it always has been. But yeah, 00:39:24.524 --> 00:39:27.951 some are more do or die crises than others. And yeah, 00:39:28.034 --> 00:39:33.051 we're at the do or die. But a moment, you don't know how long a moment lasts. 00:39:33.134 --> 00:39:35.965 A moment is not a minute. A moment can open. 00:39:36.049 --> 00:39:40.950 So that's the Greek idea of the Kairos is we're also in the Kairos moment. 00:39:41.460 --> 00:39:44.460 When something regenerative happens, 00:39:44.580 --> 00:39:49.980 can spark a great imagination and the process of a renewal begins. 00:39:50.730 --> 00:39:55.483 But I think the thing that really got lost is the value and necessity of 00:39:55.567 --> 00:39:56.910 the individual soul. 00:39:57.630 --> 00:39:59.927 That's the big... in mass modernization. 00:40:00.010 --> 00:40:00.843 culture. 00:40:01.300 --> 00:40:05.110 Where a person is seen as part of a voting group or part of a purchasing group 00:40:05.193 --> 00:40:09.203 or part of the, you know, whatever. Now they're trying to make it part of a gender 00:40:09.286 --> 00:40:13.086 group. All those things they're trying to do. Yeah, an identity group. Yeah. 00:40:13.690 --> 00:40:16.590 And the individual soul is unique by definition. 00:40:17.140 --> 00:40:20.714 It is unique. You cannot completely categorize it. 00:40:20.797 --> 00:40:24.820 And that's what we lost. And the tradeoff has been for. 00:40:25.180 --> 00:40:28.940 in materialism versus the awakening of the soul. 00:40:29.260 --> 00:40:33.309 which brings both spirit and a deeper connectedness to life. 00:40:33.392 --> 00:40:38.681 And that has been traded for whatever that is. I don't know what they call it. 00:40:38.764 --> 00:40:44.052 But anyway, all the material goods, wealth has been championed over well-being 00:40:44.136 --> 00:40:49.355 repeatedly by both political parties, even though I go with any party that is 00:40:49.439 --> 00:40:53.020 for freedom and independence and that kind of thing. 00:40:53.230 --> 00:40:55.430 But everybody's kind of sold out. 00:40:55.750 --> 00:41:00.902 And lost the soul. Christianity took the soul out of the equation in that meeting 00:41:00.985 --> 00:41:05.232 in Constantinople in 869 of all the Catholic bishops and cardinals. 00:41:05.315 --> 00:41:08.030 And they took the soul out of the picture. 00:41:08.410 --> 00:41:14.260 It was always... spirit body and soul They took the soul out. 00:41:14.470 --> 00:41:18.970 And you have spirit and body and spirit is moving away from body. 00:41:19.420 --> 00:41:22.441 There's nothing bringing you know about this. So why? 00:41:22.524 --> 00:41:24.340 Why did they take the soul out? 00:41:24.670 --> 00:41:25.690 Too feminine? 00:41:26.440 --> 00:41:29.555 Yes, good one. Too feminine, too connective. 00:41:29.638 --> 00:41:35.380 It was causing all the problems. You couldn't separate God and humanity from... 00:41:35.560 --> 00:41:41.041 If humanity had a soul, because the soul was the connection to the divine and you 00:41:41.124 --> 00:41:45.438 couldn't pretend that it was outside if the soul was saying, no, 00:41:45.521 --> 00:41:49.780 it's inside everybody. It just was messing with their project. 00:41:50.050 --> 00:41:53.350 of creating a religious system 00:41:53.440 --> 00:41:57.951 That had heaven and earth as separate and had good and bad as opposites. 00:41:58.034 --> 00:42:00.140 And the soul never was like that. 00:42:00.340 --> 00:42:04.697 It's a ternary force, right? A unifying ternary force. 00:42:04.780 --> 00:42:08.180 bringing the two together and the divine and the human together. 00:42:08.500 --> 00:42:10.823 The masculine and feminine and the timelessness. 00:42:10.907 --> 00:42:13.932 It's the thing that brings everything together. Take that out. 00:42:14.015 --> 00:42:15.820 You can really control people. Yeah. 00:42:16.330 --> 00:42:18.596 You can say those people are bad, those people are good, 00:42:18.680 --> 00:42:21.953 or those people are bad, we're good. You can play all kinds of things and people 00:42:22.036 --> 00:42:22.870 buy in. 00:42:23.080 --> 00:42:24.760 People know they have a soul. 00:42:25.210 --> 00:42:29.578 You can't do that. You can't say, you know, this is men and this is women. 00:42:29.662 --> 00:42:33.127 You can say these are masculine traits and feminine traits, 00:42:33.211 --> 00:42:37.820 but you cannot divide it. You cannot polarize when the soul is really present. 00:42:37.903 --> 00:42:40.610 So one reason I think about the soul so much. 00:42:40.780 --> 00:42:45.486 is that if the soul is present, you can't get polarization of the kind that we have 00:42:45.569 --> 00:42:49.204 now. Would you say that this is a different concept? 00:42:49.287 --> 00:42:54.427 The soul is different than the capital S self that Jung writes about or Richard 00:42:54.510 --> 00:42:58.080 Schwartz talks about in his system is the soul itself? 00:42:58.240 --> 00:42:59.920 that inner self, 00:43:00.610 --> 00:43:03.410 higher self or is it a different concept 00:43:04.840 --> 00:43:10.580 Yes? It's a both and yes kind of thing? Yeah. That's the thing, 00:43:10.664 --> 00:43:12.830 the soul defies definition. 00:43:13.270 --> 00:43:19.358 Yeah. So you can't do the things that the church has done and that philosophers do. 00:43:19.441 --> 00:43:22.778 You can't do it because the soul says, oh, no, 00:43:22.862 --> 00:43:28.801 it's not this one and the other one. It's actually a third thing that mixes them, 00:43:28.884 --> 00:43:32.207 that redefines them and revitalizes them. So. 00:43:32.290 --> 00:43:37.030 The soul is something that has no definable substance. 00:43:37.570 --> 00:43:41.410 and yet when it's not there substantial things are missing 00:43:41.800 --> 00:43:44.207 I mean, it's paradoxical in a way. 00:43:44.290 --> 00:43:48.214 And that's part of the problem that the church had with it. Well, 00:43:48.298 --> 00:43:52.715 we can't define the darn thing and it keeps messing with our theologizing 00:43:52.798 --> 00:43:56.924 things. About heaven and earth and everything and the good and the bad. 00:43:57.008 --> 00:44:00.980 So let's just get rid of it. And then Descartes comes along. 00:44:01.330 --> 00:44:05.298 You know, that's quite a bit later. And he comes along and says, well, 00:44:05.381 --> 00:44:06.770 I think, therefore I am. 00:44:07.180 --> 00:44:11.487 There's a subjective and the objective. And then modern science is based on 00:44:11.570 --> 00:44:14.648 the division between the subjective and the objective. 00:44:14.731 --> 00:44:19.180 And it does produce a lot of stuff, but it tends to alienate people's souls. 00:44:19.690 --> 00:44:23.985 Yeah. Well, it takes everything off the table that can't be readily or immediately 00:44:24.069 --> 00:44:24.902 explained. 00:44:25.090 --> 00:44:30.551 And it substitutes quantity for quality. And the only things that count are things 00:44:30.634 --> 00:44:35.959 that are measurable and can be proven. And soul is immeasurable and can never be 00:44:36.043 --> 00:44:40.422 proven. And yet when it's not there, you know something's missing. 00:44:40.505 --> 00:44:45.170 And so we lost our connection to all that is immeasurable about life. 00:44:45.520 --> 00:44:51.380 which includes both the masculine and the feminine. It includes the love. 00:44:51.463 --> 00:44:56.020 It includes the intuition of being deeply connected to nature. 00:44:56.170 --> 00:45:00.130 Because you can't do the nature culture split when you have soul. 00:45:00.760 --> 00:45:05.077 You take a walk in nature and you can have these soulful experiences that, 00:45:05.160 --> 00:45:09.560 as people would say, blow your mind because your mind cannot capture that. 00:45:10.330 --> 00:45:15.730 But your soul can experience it. And so all of those divisions and the 00:45:15.820 --> 00:45:18.647 lead up to the big polarization. 00:45:18.730 --> 00:45:21.770 in a sense, comes from lack of loss of soul. 00:45:22.750 --> 00:45:26.750 The only good thing about that is it means we have a way back. 00:45:27.250 --> 00:45:29.357 We have to reinstall the world. 00:45:29.440 --> 00:45:33.230 And the only way we can do that is to grow our own souls. 00:45:33.314 --> 00:45:38.531 And we're back to the idea that each one of us can contribute by becoming more 00:45:38.615 --> 00:45:43.440 soulful, which will also mean we're more creative, we're more creative. 00:45:43.630 --> 00:45:47.338 in love with the world, with other people, with ourselves, 00:45:47.421 --> 00:45:49.970 because the soul is the source of love. 00:45:50.590 --> 00:45:54.950 Right. And then it is really interesting to me because. 00:45:55.150 --> 00:45:57.527 The old ideas would say, well, where is the soul? 00:45:57.611 --> 00:45:59.770 And one answer would be it's in your heart. 00:46:00.220 --> 00:46:04.006 And so then wait a minute, all of a sudden it brings the heart in, 00:46:04.090 --> 00:46:06.527 not as a medical organ or a physical organ. 00:46:06.611 --> 00:46:08.780 I call it the heart within the heart. 00:46:09.220 --> 00:46:14.073 The heart within the heart is the source of our soulfulness, our capacity, 00:46:14.157 --> 00:46:18.760 not just to love, but to learn of love and our source of imagination. 00:46:19.750 --> 00:46:22.712 which has always been considered the power of the soul. 00:46:22.795 --> 00:46:26.809 So when people took away the soul, they took away the capacity to imagine. 00:46:26.892 --> 00:46:31.238 And no one can imagine their way out of the polarization because they don't know 00:46:31.321 --> 00:46:33.370 that imagination is the only way out. 00:46:33.940 --> 00:46:36.440 Most people cannot imagine how we get out of this. 00:46:36.640 --> 00:46:42.315 Or rationalize out of it. Yes. But the soul can imagine things that are unseen, 00:46:42.398 --> 00:46:46.700 unexpected. unpredictable and unable to be categorized. 00:46:47.560 --> 00:46:51.835 Mm. You know, such like love and the deeper, deeper, 00:46:51.918 --> 00:46:57.950 greater values of humanity are aspects of the soul, not aspects of a belief system. 00:46:58.630 --> 00:47:01.887 I have two questions. One is a selfish one, which is, 00:47:01.970 --> 00:47:06.991 have you written about this? And or are there any great books about what happened 00:47:07.074 --> 00:47:11.528 in the ninth century and the desoling of the world? That's question one. 00:47:11.611 --> 00:47:14.510 Are any of your books specifically about this? 00:47:14.890 --> 00:47:18.364 Not specifically. I usually just throw it in. In there, 00:47:18.448 --> 00:47:22.892 just toss it in as a little bit of a salad dressing. Yeah, but I mean, 00:47:22.975 --> 00:47:26.643 people can study this conference in Constantinople in 869. 00:47:26.727 --> 00:47:31.624 They were trying to solve philosophical, theological problems in the Catholic 00:47:31.707 --> 00:47:36.216 Church, but also in what becomes the Russian Orthodox Church also since 00:47:36.300 --> 00:47:37.217 Constantinople. 00:47:37.300 --> 00:47:41.592 where the East and the West kind of meet. And it's just point black. 00:47:41.675 --> 00:47:45.067 They just get rid of the soul. This is so fascinating. 00:47:45.150 --> 00:47:49.764 I wonder if there's a Dan Brown novel about this. No. Yeah, it'd be good. 00:47:49.847 --> 00:47:54.480 I know. Have you read The Secret of Secrets? It's so fun. No, I haven't. 00:47:54.880 --> 00:47:59.273 It's all about consciousness. Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah. And Descartes, 00:47:59.356 --> 00:48:03.280 who everybody knows as the Cartesian split, he's adding to that. 00:48:03.520 --> 00:48:10.397 He's coming in from the Catholic background and so on. He also has no... 00:48:10.480 --> 00:48:16.060 active mother or father. He's an early life orphan who was never held. 00:48:16.540 --> 00:48:21.080 And he becomes the embodiment of the Cartesian split. 00:48:22.180 --> 00:48:27.060 Acting out in a sense and then speaking out his own words. 00:48:27.700 --> 00:48:29.180 infantile. 00:48:29.800 --> 00:48:33.012 Lack of being held and becoming connected to, you know, 00:48:33.095 --> 00:48:37.505 usually the connection to the mother. The mother is Mother Earth. You know, 00:48:37.588 --> 00:48:42.058 the connection infant to mother is like the connection to everything outside 00:48:42.141 --> 00:48:42.974 the infant. 00:48:43.570 --> 00:48:47.065 And he doesn't get he doesn't get that. So he is split. 00:48:47.148 --> 00:48:51.228 He then his personal split in a way then comes up with the idea. 00:48:51.312 --> 00:48:56.238 I think therefore I am instead of I love. Therefore, I am. I sing. Therefore, 00:48:56.321 --> 00:49:01.637 I am. I defecate. Therefore, I mean, you could add a whole lot of things that could 00:49:01.721 --> 00:49:06.707 make you. And you could be aiming through those things. He makes it thinking. 00:49:06.790 --> 00:49:07.970 and being, 00:49:08.170 --> 00:49:12.934 which then becomes the mind-body split, which then enhances the split between 00:49:13.017 --> 00:49:17.550 human nature and nature, and we're headed historically for polarization. 00:49:18.460 --> 00:49:22.158 For everyone who's listening and saying, okay, I'm grokking this, 00:49:22.242 --> 00:49:24.220 but how do I become more ensouled? 00:49:24.430 --> 00:49:29.452 What do we do? Okay. So, in a sense, we did what people always did, 00:49:29.536 --> 00:49:34.652 because there was an understanding in ancient times, you know, not that, 00:49:34.736 --> 00:49:39.167 you know, to make... the past perfect, but people did 00:49:39.250 --> 00:49:44.890 have the sense of that they were connected to nature and connected to the cosmos. 00:49:45.100 --> 00:49:50.780 I mean, when you read ancient stories and certainly mythology, humans are. 00:49:50.920 --> 00:49:54.677 Unique beings because we are stretched between heaven and earth, 00:49:54.760 --> 00:49:58.060 not because we live on earth and we're going to heaven. 00:49:58.540 --> 00:50:01.240 really it's more like we're here to and down to earth. 00:50:01.430 --> 00:50:05.870 That's more like a soulful thing. So there's an answer, kind of. But 00:50:06.440 --> 00:50:10.980 The soul being the source of imagination and love, let's say. 00:50:11.420 --> 00:50:12.760 That gives us some hints. 00:50:13.640 --> 00:50:17.450 what we love is how we grow the soul. 00:50:18.770 --> 00:50:22.090 And then you could say who we love is how we grow the soul also. 00:50:22.190 --> 00:50:23.830 because 00:50:24.290 --> 00:50:30.986 The soul being the source of love wants to have meaningful connections to other 00:50:31.069 --> 00:50:35.015 people. But it also wants to have meaningful connections, for instance, 00:50:35.098 --> 00:50:37.298 to what you were saying about the deep self. 00:50:37.790 --> 00:50:40.430 So we grow the self deeper. 00:50:40.910 --> 00:50:44.790 We learn how to love ourselves better, which I think requires big time 00:50:44.873 --> 00:50:47.790 forgiveness. I was raised Catholic. And so, you know, 00:50:47.874 --> 00:50:51.130 they mess around with you as a child when it comes to that. 00:50:51.214 --> 00:50:55.290 You're supposed to believe all this stuff and all. But it does activate. 00:50:55.790 --> 00:51:00.267 ideas and imaginings about what it is. And one of the great things that's in there, 00:51:00.351 --> 00:51:05.300 even though, it's become occluded is forgiveness is really important. 00:51:05.630 --> 00:51:08.390 Once we realize I'm not a perfect being, 00:51:08.780 --> 00:51:13.404 And everything hasn't always gone right. And even when I was young and couldn't 00:51:13.487 --> 00:51:17.367 defend or handle myself or protect myself, some things went wrong. 00:51:17.450 --> 00:51:21.710 and you accept that, then forgiveness becomes a part of it. 00:51:22.070 --> 00:51:27.915 Forgiving oneself for not being better for whatever we were told we should be. 00:51:27.998 --> 00:51:31.190 And so we accept ourselves more as we are. 00:51:31.340 --> 00:51:35.807 That would be soulful. And then following. So there's an old statement. 00:51:35.890 --> 00:51:40.310 You find it all over the world at some point, which is what we love is a cure. 00:51:40.910 --> 00:51:42.770 So the illness... 00:51:42.920 --> 00:51:47.976 is being gifted and wounded. The illness is being alive at a dark time. 00:51:48.059 --> 00:51:52.040 The illness is being alive in a period of polarization. 00:51:52.460 --> 00:51:53.960 And what we love is the cure. 00:51:54.470 --> 00:51:59.334 So someone loves music. They just love it. We all like music. 00:51:59.417 --> 00:52:01.850 Music is archetypal, you know, 00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:05.757 connection for almost everybody, even for the animals, they say. 00:52:05.840 --> 00:52:08.840 But someone loves it. That's it. What they really. 00:52:09.350 --> 00:52:12.825 go with that, if they accept that, it doesn't mean they're going to be a great 00:52:12.908 --> 00:52:14.517 musician. That's not even the point. 00:52:14.600 --> 00:52:17.000 It means they will be growing their soul. 00:52:17.540 --> 00:52:22.420 You know, through the process of being engaged with things that are essentially 00:52:22.504 --> 00:52:24.200 lovable by that individual. 00:52:24.860 --> 00:52:29.957 And then that just puts more music in their life and more music in the world. 00:52:30.041 --> 00:52:33.658 Someone else loves an aspect of nature. Just, you know, 00:52:33.741 --> 00:52:36.447 I was once got to meet with these people. 00:52:36.530 --> 00:52:38.667 pretty young people that were doing 00:52:38.750 --> 00:52:43.956 Kind of scientific work with rivers, getting the heavy metals out of the river 00:52:44.040 --> 00:52:48.025 and getting the rivers to be more pure. They used that term. 00:52:48.108 --> 00:52:51.280 And they were using mushrooms, they figured out. 00:52:51.364 --> 00:52:54.890 You could use mushrooms to get the heavy metals out. 00:52:55.100 --> 00:52:57.500 And they were in love with what they were doing. 00:52:57.620 --> 00:53:02.063 And they were completely lovable when you were with them because they were in love 00:53:02.147 --> 00:53:05.431 with what they were doing. And someone could call it science, 00:53:05.514 --> 00:53:08.191 but it looked to me like a love project, you know. 00:53:08.274 --> 00:53:11.007 And so what we love becomes the cure. For instance, 00:53:11.090 --> 00:53:15.092 some people really love knowledge. I remember I used to always make notes. 00:53:15.175 --> 00:53:17.880 I'd read books and I'd make my handwritten notes. 00:53:18.380 --> 00:53:19.380 Because... 00:53:19.610 --> 00:53:23.010 When you're writing by hand, you're using your body, not just your mind. 00:53:23.094 --> 00:53:26.294 And then someone said to me once, oh, so you're an intellectual. 00:53:26.570 --> 00:53:29.720 And I said, hey, I didn't insult you. Why are you insulting me? 00:53:32.900 --> 00:53:38.420 Knowledge, intellectual knowledge, is a very small strata. 00:53:38.870 --> 00:53:45.117 of the kinds of knowledge. So some people love knowledge. And in ancient India, 00:53:45.201 --> 00:53:50.810 that would be called the path of yana, J-N-A-N-A. It's a form of yoga. 00:53:51.170 --> 00:53:57.030 The path of loving knowledge. and that leads to being perhaps a philosopher, 00:53:57.350 --> 00:54:03.710 "Philosopher" comes from the Greek, "philo," which means love, Sophia, 00:54:03.800 --> 00:54:08.747 is the God of wisdom. Those who love Sophia, the God of wisdom. Well, 00:54:08.830 --> 00:54:12.507 if we were going to have wisdom set of just data and. 00:54:12.590 --> 00:54:15.840 information, We're going to have to have people that love wisdom. 00:54:16.430 --> 00:54:20.910 And the ancient definition of wisdom is light and dark. 00:54:21.320 --> 00:54:24.537 And so the seekers, the ones who know, 00:54:24.620 --> 00:54:29.499 really love both light and dark, and they have a great value to everyone around 00:54:29.582 --> 00:54:34.524 them. There's all kinds of knowledge that we have lost and the kind of knowledge 00:54:34.607 --> 00:54:36.240 that we've lost primarily. 00:54:37.190 --> 00:54:38.250 Is wisdom. 00:54:38.780 --> 00:54:43.700 And so some people love knowledge and they should. And that becomes a sacred path. 00:54:44.270 --> 00:54:49.938 And so I don't know, almost anything that anyone really some people love animals. 00:54:50.021 --> 00:54:52.920 It's actually a fairly common thing. Well, 00:54:53.003 --> 00:54:58.529 humans used to associate with animals. Animals were understood as spirit beings 00:54:58.613 --> 00:55:01.947 and animals were imparting knowledge to people. 00:55:02.030 --> 00:55:07.037 They do it now. And so the people that love animals are also capable 00:55:07.120 --> 00:55:11.079 of rediscovering the animal nature of the human being. 00:55:11.162 --> 00:55:17.067 Because a human is an animal on one end and connected to the divine on the other 00:55:17.151 --> 00:55:17.697 end. 00:55:17.780 --> 00:55:23.774 So the animal lovers actually could bring the kind of animate knowledge of the body 00:55:23.858 --> 00:55:26.640 and the instincts back into the world. 00:55:27.350 --> 00:55:29.900 I don't know. I'm just... I'm just talking. Yeah. 00:55:29.990 --> 00:55:34.087 No, I love it. I think it's really beautiful and helpful. 00:55:34.170 --> 00:55:39.733 And I think we're all... searching for what is our specific mandate to do. 00:55:39.816 --> 00:55:44.607 And I always like to be reminded that we're individually, uh, 00:55:44.690 --> 00:55:48.684 uniquely gifted and that your part is different than my part, 00:55:48.768 --> 00:55:54.099 but that there is a part and we are all participating in this collective culture, 00:55:54.182 --> 00:55:56.967 even if we might not like it or choose it. 00:55:57.050 --> 00:56:02.570 Yeah, and the philosophical idea that's also a soulful idea, 00:56:02.690 --> 00:56:05.650 is the part is related to the whole. 00:56:05.960 --> 00:56:10.223 Change the part, you change the whole. So it's not to be inflated and say, oh, 00:56:10.307 --> 00:56:12.480 I'm so important. It's not that at all. 00:56:12.620 --> 00:56:19.107 It's actually to be real and say, I'm doing what I'm called to do, which is, 00:56:19.190 --> 00:56:23.450 involves a greater awakening to who I already am. 00:56:23.570 --> 00:56:27.344 at the core of the self or the soul. And in doing that, 00:56:27.427 --> 00:56:31.972 I'm not just satisfying my ambition. I'm actually adding presence, 00:56:32.055 --> 00:56:35.197 imagination, creativity and love to the world. 00:56:35.281 --> 00:56:40.437 And the more I do that and the more other people do that, all of a sudden, 00:56:40.520 --> 00:56:46.613 the polarization starts to be diminished and it starts to be revealed to be what it 00:56:46.697 --> 00:56:51.997 is. a kind of lack of soul and a loss of the sense that we're really all in 00:56:52.080 --> 00:56:57.937 this together. And that's the I would say that's the future world is a reimagination 00:56:58.020 --> 00:57:02.886 of a world in which everything and everyone and all the beings and all 00:57:02.970 --> 00:57:07.000 the things are all interrelated as they have always been. 00:57:17.060 --> 00:57:20.980 which objectified people and diminished the world. 00:57:22.390 --> 00:57:27.063 Beautiful. This was such a pleasure. I hope you'll come back. I loved it. 00:57:27.147 --> 00:57:31.103 And now I'm going to go read about 9th century Constantinople. 00:57:31.186 --> 00:57:35.599 This feels like a big unlock for me, so I really appreciate it. Well, 00:57:35.682 --> 00:57:40.421 that's the knowledge part of you. Your knowledge, and I want to know that. 00:57:40.504 --> 00:57:44.917 Yeah, it's amazing. They actually did it. They got together and said, 00:57:45.000 --> 00:57:49.803 let's just get the soul out of this. It was never two. It was always three. 00:57:49.887 --> 00:57:51.190 It was always three. 00:57:51.770 --> 00:57:55.635 So is a relationship. Two people are in love. It's the one person in love, 00:57:55.718 --> 00:57:58.730 the other person in love, and the presence of love itself, 00:57:58.813 --> 00:58:01.717 which has hints of the divine and hints of the creative. 00:58:01.801 --> 00:58:04.012 And as soon as you take the middle one out, 00:58:04.095 --> 00:58:07.990 you just polarize those two people and they have to start all over again. 00:58:08.510 --> 00:58:10.490 Yeah. 100%. 00:58:11.360 --> 00:58:14.500 you you 00:58:16.790 --> 00:58:17.623 you 00:58:19.070 --> 00:58:22.297 That was so fun. And he just turned some of my ideas, 00:58:22.380 --> 00:58:27.169 I'll just say he evolved some of my understandings in ways that is always very 00:58:27.252 --> 00:58:30.250 thrilling for me. And hopefully it was very fun. 00:58:30.770 --> 00:58:36.860 for you. And I am just shook by the fact that 00:58:37.310 --> 00:58:41.277 this third force, the soul, was removed. 00:58:41.360 --> 00:58:45.839 In the 9th century, I feel like so many things now make so much more sense to me. 00:58:45.923 --> 00:58:50.260 So I will be in a wormhole excavating that. And I will speak to you all soon. 00:58:51.740 --> 00:58:54.352 If you got something out of today's episode, 00:58:54.436 --> 00:58:57.560 I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. 00:58:57.740 --> 00:59:01.937 Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred 00:59:02.020 --> 00:59:06.300 podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. 00:59:06.500 --> 00:59:09.080 That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. 00:59:09.440 --> 00:59:14.659 Thank you. If you want more in this world, please sign up for my newsletter 00:59:14.743 --> 00:59:19.433 at eliselunan.substack.com or consider picking up copies of my book, 00:59:19.516 --> 00:59:20.990 On Our Best Behavior, 00:59:21.380 --> 00:59:24.130 and the new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. 00:59:24.500 --> 00:59:25.800 Thanks again, friends.