How to Grow Your Soul (Michael Meade)

Introduction and the crisis of masculinity

00:00Lemonada

00:06Hi, I'm Zosia Mamet. You might know me from the show Girls. I've been a horse girl since I was six. Not a phase, definitely not ironic. I will talk about horses until the people around me start to worry. So I made a show about that feeling. It's called OMG Obsessed. And every week I sit down with one of my favorite people and ask, what's your horse? What's the thing you cannot shut up about? So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. you Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread, and I am so excited about today's guest, the great scholar and thinker, Michael Mead. *music* - Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.

01:05My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. Here is today's guest, Michael Mead, on what happens when we start on an individual level. growing our souls. other people are going to go away in the darkness isn't that the chaos where everything began Can we not begin it again? And then you get to the idea of the soul, where the individual soul is connected to the soul of the world, and enough souls awakening revitalized the soul of the world, and we're back in a living cosmos. rather than in an accidental universe. Michael Mead is a groundbreaking storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He has written many, many books, including "Why the World Doesn't End" and "The Genius Myth,"

01:59And The Water of Life, which is a book about men and initiation. I was very excited to talk with Michael and he did not disappoint. He actually blew my mind with a historical gem he shared toward the end of our conversation. But before we get there, we cover the crisis of masculinity and the manosphere that has been dominating our feeds, But of course, Michael has a fresh take on all of it. We explore antidotes to monoculture and polarization and the fallacy of the hero's journey. And we spend most of our time talking about the importance of individually being. Each of us growing our own souls. what this means, how we do it, and what the result would be, personally and collectively. I loved this one.

02:43I hope you enjoy it too. Here we go.

Lack of soul as the diagnosis

02:50Thank you for joining me. This is a total thrill and I'm very excited. And there's so much ground to cover. And, you know, I mean, we are living in... archetypal times. I'm also very curious, about sort of the crisis of masculinity that's happening and the absence, I guess, of initiation or just your perspective on that, because it feels like there's so many things. I guess I would call them thin stories about it that catch wind... in the culture. So I'd be curious about what medicine you would offer. I don't think it's that, but I don't know. I don't know. Well, we'll see. The crisis of masculinity, I don't think, is more masculinity in this way. Simply put, it's soul. Simply put, it's soul. If men are not doing soul work, they are becoming more isolated, more inflated, more disjuncted, more dissociated, more anti-world, more anti-nature, more anti-feminine soul.

03:58All the work that we did with men that I, you know, years ago with Robert Bly and James Hillman and many, many others. was also work. And then people... began to talk about it as a men's movement. And I would always say, no, no, no, there already is a men's movement. It's called the Congress. In other words, if you're on top, you don't need a movement. You need a breakdown. You need a descent. You descent. And soul is the missing ingredient in the manosphere. Yeah. For sure. I mean... Maybe we even start there as an introduction to sort of this cultural moment because – It feels like when we look at our world, it is that, right? The absence of soul and the people in power, fear of death. driving, driving,

04:48huge amount of unrealized anxiety and fear and unwillingness, right, to break down. So when you look at our culture, what would you diagnose it with? That? Lack of soul. Oh, yeah. Lack of soul is the briefest way. To say what the condition is. If we take soul to be the connective tissue of life. So spirit. is about rising up. Towards the light. And then that implies towards the spirit. Spirit as one. Soul is about descending down. And it goes into multiplicity and diversity. And so what we see is monoculture. And the hero's journey, which is a good mythological story. style of story, but it is not a monomyth, as Joseph Campbell said. That's a complete misunderstanding of both myth and myth. and imagination.

The hero's journey fallacy and the genius myth

05:53And so part of what's, I think, generated the excess of the manosphere, besides loss of soul, is this fantasy of the hero's journey being the story. When it's masculine in style, it's aggressive in manner and it's aimed at the outer world. And so that's why I talk about the genius myth. Because genius already is inside people. You don't have to go looking for it. You could look inside and everyone has genius girls, boys, anybody in between. It doesn't matter social status or background genius. The word genius means the spirit that's already there. And right now we need that spirit that's already there and people, which is going to be by its nature, multiple and diverse. as opposed to monocultural or monogenderal or whatever the word, all the things that are mono now.

06:46or against diversity and diversity is the life of nature. Take the diversity out of the forest and it's not a forest. It's just a cultural project. And it's incredibly weak, right? And we know from sort of that Susan Simard's work that it becomes... Yeah, it becomes incredibly susceptible to... being ravaged in all sorts of ways. It can endure. Recent study really interesting in South America where the forest in Brazil and all have been turned into a monocultural thing with a growing just one kind of tree or one kind of plant. The bees in those places. lose their color. And the bees are either gray or tan and they have no color. And so it's like nature saying, Pay attention. Look at what happens when you go in. When you move away from diversity, you move away from color, which makes things either just red, gray and depressing or black and white and divisive.

07:52Yeah. I think it's so interesting thinking about the hero's journey. and your perspective on sort of that being a fallacy, I always read it through the reason that it doesn't work or the way that it's misunderstood or misapplied in our culture is that it's not seen as the full developmental cycle where you, regardless of gender, would individuate, separate, go out into the world, find the antidote, find the medicine and bring it back. That somehow it's particularly in sort of it's a masculine application that people get stuck fighting, whatever, swashbuckling way. But it makes sense to me, too. And it's also one of the things that's picked up, right, by Hollywood. And then... The gaming world all comes out of that. But it's not just that. It's that also the antidote is not out there.

08:46Going out there is necessary because you get defeated and it drives you in. And the antidote and the medicine is in the soul. Mmmmm. That's beautiful. So it reverses the process of awakening when it's taken literally the way it has been taken. And when it's presented as the only story, some of the people that are running Pixar are have at times be in contact saying, What are the stories other than the hero's journey? Because all of our creators keep repeating the hero's journey. And they don't know of any other story, but they know that there's something wrong when all the creators are coming up with the same story. So the creative Western world, American version of things only has that story inside the abuse of it with Donald Trump and his cohort who are all masculine, who abuse women. And everything that's being demonstrated is really a distortion of the exaggeration of the hero saving everyone.

09:52Yeah. Trump's first move. Yes. can save you. I don't know if you've encountered James Kimmel Jr.'s work. He wrote this book called The Science of Revenge. It's kind of about the hero's journey in part in feeding our revenge-obsessed people. culture. He essentially posits that revenge is an addiction pattern that 20% of people have, including Donald Trump. Stalin, Hitler, but that this need for vengeance also creates this weird cycle, and it's put in all the children's movies. that this right must be wronged in this Hammurabi's code type of way. Well, a very helpful. Very child, dark childish. I mean, it's really many cases, it's vengeance on the parents. I mean, Trying to defeat the father, but also trying to

10:47Hmm. Exact. Some kind of penalty on the mother. Usually for not being loved, if you get right down to it. I mean, that's why Trump is so great. You know, he's always trying to defeat his father in terms. And yet he's fascinated by people more powerful than him or other autocrats, which his father was like that. but also he was never loved. So we have that huge narcissistic wound. So he gets elected by whatever it is, tens of millions of people. And the feeling of that is gone in about five minutes. It just goes right out the hole of the narcissistic wound. And so he's really such a symptom. He's a living symptom of American culture and all of the things we've been talking about. Not that that should justify his existence or certainly his position of power. No, but he is very archetypal. And I want to talk about that because there's a moment in...

Initiation, wounds, and the manosphere as adolescence

11:43why the world doesn't end that I was like, oh, wow, that was very prophetic. Before we get to that, though. Yeah. So if men are sort of architected or oriented around hero's journey and history, That being the story and a refusal to go in and the antidote being soul. What is that aversion? Do you think that's a cultural aversion to that inward journey? Or is it a fear of the feminine or fear of that depth? What do you think it is? All of those things. OK, all of those things. And so then you had mentioned initiation and initiation was the culturally created descent. that took place the young man or, you know, Teenager, as we would say now, out of the gang. otherwise known as the political party or the police or whatever. The men form gangs all the time and take them out of that into an individual dissent.

12:45For two reasons there is I could figure out one is to find their own natural gifts, the gifts that they are in sold with and the other being to begin the healing of the wound that everyone has. And so. Whereas with women, it's a little different because of the menses. that a girl becomes a woman in a sense on the day she begins having the menses. And it's a physical, extroverted demonstration of bleeding, which suggests the moon. I said a wound, a wound, but it also suggests the moon. And there's a whole thing that goes with that. And if men have the menses, it's. Internal And Can go unnoticed. You can't pretend that there's not blood happening, but you can pretend men pretend that they don't have wounds all the time. Back to the manosphere.

13:40To be a man is to know one's wounds, not to deny them. And so there's a way in which the manos fear might better be termed the adolescent. No spear. You know, it's more like adolescent teenagers. than it is men. Yeah. Well, in our culture, too, we equate getting older with getting theoretically older. more mature, but many men are in an arrested development. Many women are too, but that there is this lack of growth, maturity that's happening where people aren't really moving forward. into... Manhood. Yeah, I mean, it's like these 13-year-old boys at the wheel. Well, maturity, if we look to nature, it depends on the roots going down as well as the branches coming out. And so actual maturity would be depth combined with outer growth or evident growth.

14:42So, yeah. Yeah. So that's what we were doing when I was doing a lot of men's work. We called it soul work because the feeling was that men didn't have souls. They weren't growing the soul. They didn't even know they were supposed to. And the key to that is the woundedness. The acceptance of being wounded, which is... Oh, it's really interesting because it actually creates a second kind of tears. that there's the tears of the child and then there's more mature tears that come from a different place. And so... Anyway, we may be making the interview unnecessary. Do you? particularly in the olden days, was a confrontation with death as well. Do you think that that's just a deepening process? It's just much more intuitive to women that we are just much more earthy, connected to the moon, connected to the tides, connected to the planet as another co-creative thing?

16:09vehicle? What do you think that that is? Well, I think it's I mean, it's lots of things, but I think there's such a thing as lunar knowledge. which actually is connected to the moon in cycles, and therefore it's a bodily knowledge. And then, yeah, if you take the menses as the beginning of the end of childhood, But it's then... being pulled into the cycles of the moon, which are attuned to the cycles of all the bodies of water as well. So you're in this. Water, moon, lunar changing realm, which partly then becomes women's much greater capacity for shifting emotions. which they can track to the back of the brain, the stem of the brain. But also it's a bigger thing than that. And so men tend to get stuck in emotions. I mean, you know, a man that hasn't learned anything about his own woundedness of the nature of his own psyche can be in a mood for two or three years. Not still not talking about it, whereas women will convert the experience of emotional mood into language and share it. And it moves. It shifts really quickly or much quicker.

Lunar knowledge and masculine and feminine energies

17:23So there's a whole... you know, different world in the sense, which was indicated in the initiation practices to some degree. But psychology then would say, yeah, but inside the man is the unseen woman. Inside the man is the feminine trying to awaken, and that would bring all kinds of new levels of knowledge inside the man. And then inside the woman is the man trying to awaken that would bring all kinds of levels also. And everybody is a mixture of both. And it's not binary. It's a big arc with all kinds of places on it. And you can move up and down if you want. You know, it gets to be just a bigger, greater exchange. But the difference, the difference, makes the exchange possible. Yeah. No, certainly. And I think people are starting to become more aware of, oh, I have a lot of masculine energy personally, and the variability between the two and what they feel like and, and how to move seamlessly between those two energies. And that it's unfortunate that they're attached to gender, because I think people get really confused, but that they're

18:34also different animating energies that belong to all of us. I was talking to this I don't think that they're science, but he was talking about for women that the womb functions as a brain, like an intuitive brain that's constantly scanning. I loved that just as an image of a way of. Yeah, of a perspective, essentially, brain that is taking in a ton of information about what's present.

19:23horse. What's the thing you cannot shut up about? So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. you Hey guys, we're Elizabeth Chambers and Marissa Hermer. You may know us from television, business, and other things. We're talking about the stuff that really matters. Every week we're celebrating women and getting real about divorce, dating, motherhood, sex, friendship, and everything in between. It's honest, hilarious, unfiltered, and proof that this chapter of life is the best one yet. So if you're ready to laugh, feel seen, and join the conversation, come hang out with us. This is a podcast. is The Dash. Listen and subscribe to The Dash wherever you get your podcasts.

Trump as the destructive trickster

20:06All right, let's talk about this current moment because it feels obviously like kabuki theater. It feels incredibly archetypal. And I don't know if you remember writing this in... Why the World Doesn't End in 2012, But... You wrote about the trickster. And you wrote about how the trickster appears... I don't think it's always the trickster that we want. Sorry, there's an alarm going off. It's the trickster. That's the trickster. That's the trickster. Triggering the alarm. Triggering the alarm. Just being mentioned and it shows up. Just being, and it shows up. And that the trickster shows up when we need to break out of our rhythm, when there's a preponderance of cultural shadow. You write about him needing to bear his...

20:51behind to show us the other side of life, to break the spell of perfection. And you even write about him as throwing... fecal matter. I don't know if you remember this. Sometimes at people and sometimes at God. And I read that. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, whoa, that was a prescient statement when we think about Trump and his obsession with bathrooms and the fact that he, I guess, pooped on all of us on No King's Day. Yeah. He's an open book. He's an open book. Psychology. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think He's a trickster. No, he's totally unconscious. He could be. He's so unconscious. He's tricking himself every moment of his life. He has to trick himself to think he's OK and he's better than everybody. He's smarter. He's more powerful. He's more handsome. All this crazy narcissistic stuff.

21:45He's constantly tricking himself. And then, of course, he has to all deals are tricks in his hands. He's tricking everybody with every deal. And so he's like the extreme version of the utterly unconscious trickster energy. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. He's not conscious. I'm just wondering if he hasn't been inserted into this moment as an unconscious trickster to blow it all up and expose it all. I don't think so. But that implies that he could be the agent of the good. He cannot be. Say more. I'm trying to find a moment of faith. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. No. So the trickster is underneath the trickster is the healer. So that in Native American traditions like the Hopi, the tricksters come and they disturb everything and everybody, but their aim is healing.

22:40which means to make it whole. So the healthy aim of the trickster is to create wholeness out of a broken person or a broken community. And so and then if you think of the tears of the clown, you know, that was a popular song once upon a time. But it's a common idea that inside the comedian are the tears. And that tells you something. So that if Trump were to be... acting the role of the trickster. in some way that is aligned with healing and wholeness, he'd be crying a lot more. He doesn't cry. He makes people cry. It's a real inversion of the idea of the trickster as healer. And it's the mindless destructive. So in a lot of trickster myths, the tricksters are creators. But he's not that. He's the other side. He's a destroyer.

23:36So a healthy trickster would be taking the already broken things and showing people how they can be put back together differently. And Trump is actually just breaking more things. But is he breaking things? I'm just looking for meaning here. Okay. So just bear with me. Is he breaking things in part because it has been one of the sort of superific parts of our culture is someone's going to fix this for us. And is he breaking it? Is he not the healer in part because there's a collective healing action that will be incited by this that will generate healing? Something new, something beautiful, something creative? No? No guarantee. No guarantee. The archetypes are both good and bad. Both, you know, the archetypes are not human.

24:27By definition, and they are manifestations of darkness and light. So that you can have you have the dark king versus the enlightened leader. And Trump is totally on the dark side of it. And so you see the potential for. tricks their energy or something like that, but you don't see it happen. What happens is the Christians start voting based on the idea that empathy is the most destructive thing in the world. I know. Everything is upside down. Yeah, it's upside down because this is the trickster of destruction. And also it's dangerous because the Christians who I'm not sure are interested in the world mythologically and philosophically, they think this world is a fallen place. So if this world is destroyed, well, they were going to leave it anyway. They're trying to get to that other world, which is over identified with the good. And so the kind of destructiveness that he's acting out.

25:33I mean, which is massive. And when you get to the individual level, he's destroying lives. He literally taking food out of the mouths of infants and actually glorifying it. That's not trickster. That's madness. That's being, what would you call that? taken over. by dark forces that... Yeah, so it's the trickster on only one side, the destructive side. So the problem with it is, I think, not that it can't kind of provoke people to get more awake and get more imagination about how to fix things and all that kind of stuff. But more likely what happens is it causes the reawakening and the reimagining of the world. It delays it. Mm. Yeah, so that if people can't figure out pretty soon what to do, then that kind of a reign of power lasts longer.

26:28And it actually prolongs the darkness. The world will come back. I mean, someone wrote a book about that. The world can't come to an end. That's that's I think that's OK. But we could be living in, you know, under the jet stream dropping piles of feces on us for a long time if. He and they, because he's got cohorts all around the world. It's a worldwide thing, the rise of autocracy. The longer that they can hold power, it's like the Middle Ages. We could go into the Middle Ages before we could find the Renaissance. So the trick is, how do we get Renaissance now? And part of it is by realizing that that The world is both dark and light. And that certain kinds of darkness are not going to produce light.

27:16Yeah. You know, this is bad stuff. What's going on with no virtue coming from it? I'm trying to be more optimistic. I'm trying to, which is maybe delusional and... I don't know, trying to imagine the ways in which this is happening for us and not to us and what it could accelerate. In response, I'm with you, but I don't think it's optimism. I don't think that I think optimism, pessimism is not an interesting binary thing. I think it's knowledge. It's not... I mean, even just from the talking to you for a little time, you have knowledge about things. And then when we get real knowledge, we don't have to believe things. Believing in optimism is kind of like, OK, you know, that's good for a while. And then you realize there's more optimism.

28:09more firm and embodied knowledge ways to know things. that don't require us to project, you know, I mean... I get up every morning excited to work on mythology and stuff and dreams and things, you know. And so but I don't know that it's optimistic. Because the dream could be a nightmare. And I'm going, all right, well, the nightmare is there for some reason. And let me find out what's in that nightmare. And so I think it's actually I get really interested in knowledge. I guess it's wisdom, I mean, or a kind of knowledge or what the Greeks used to call dark knowledge. which is a knowledge of light and dark. And so the argument I'm making about Trump would be based on My supposed knowledge of light and dark and that there's nothing there. It's all what we see. It's all surface.

Darkness, knowledge, and the soul's connection to the future

29:07It's all narcissism. It's all a kind of spell of superiority. It's all needing that others to go down for him to come up moment at the moment, year after year, term after term. He's an example of how that could become the Middle Ages or. the Kali Yuga, as they call it in India. You know, he's not going to help. I mean, he helps in the sense that you could see from the psychology. What's wrong? But he will not... help things, get better. even by making it worse and worse. He'll just keep making it worse and worse and new levels of worse. And people could stay in the dark for a longer time. Yeah. So I think the energy... I'm about the soul a lot because the soul, which seems connected to truth,

30:00darkness and depth, essential qualities of the soul. The soul is already living in the future. Our souls value the future. And I know people say just live in the present and all that. That's interesting. But the present. The present is the place where the ancient past and the unseen future meet. And so I'm not sure what they mean, because if you're in the present, you're really in the present in your own soul. You're connected to the ancient past and the origins of ongoing creation. And if we're really in the present, we're getting glimpses of the future, because when does the future come? Every present moment is falling into the future just as much as it's disappearing in the past. Anyway, that's.

30:42So when you think about that, when you think about sort of re-insuling the world and insuling men and women who... Need it. How does one do that on the scale at which we... particularly when it feels like we're being run by amok by a bunch of guys with Messiah complexes. Well, let's throw some women in there, too, because you in America, you now have the attorney general. Kristi Noem, too. I mean, there's some real it's it's wild. Yeah. So when it really happens, it gets like that. And it penetrates all the things you thought might resist it. And that's a lack of soul. Christy Noem, I mean, what is that? She's an empty vessel. Oh, yeah. A big hollow thing. Yeah. Yeah. And she's just all performative. It looks very feminine, but it has this deadly quality. I mean, I mean deadly because of the ice people and what they're doing.

31:45So I think if it keeps going, it'll penetrate more like that. Because you also have ministers and church leaders signing up. Signing up for a war on empathy. So it's really upside down and it's also plunging into darkness. And the soul has its own light. One of the old definitions of soul was the light hidden in darkness. And so I think that's what we're looking for. The light hidden in darkness. And that's in everyone also. Is that the same as Jung talking about the gold lost in the shadow or the gold in the shadow? Yeah, it's like the gold shadow, yeah. So are we being prepared in some way to go into the darkness to collect the light and collect the soul, collect the gold? Is that what's happening? We're being invited.

32:36Okay. We're being invited. And so then the other thing about the soul is the human soul. And I like these really old ideas, which Jung was tracking. And so one of the old ideas is that the individual soul is connected to the soul of the world. The soul penetrates everything. The soul is the connective tissue of everything. And so when you find the soul, you're actually connected to everything. And you could learn how that is, which means we could learn how to reconnect human culture to nature. which aren't opposing things in a binary way, they will used to be connected and they still are. We call it human nature. But so then you can work from that. the depth of the individual soul. And so in the Renaissance, they would say,

33:22Change the soul, change the world. We change the world by changing our soul, by growing more soul. And that's how it changes. There's not going to be an idea or an agreement. Or a revelation in a religious revelation or something, I think, or I've been I wrote the book called The Genius Myth, which says that it's the awakening of genius, the inherent natural spirit in more and more people. so that the world gets renewed from the bottom up. So that, for instance, when you get to where everything is wrong, Nature's falling apart. Culture is collapsing. There's no fix. And because people want the simple fix, and that's why someone says I can fix it. And people vote for that because they want to get out. But that's not going to do. It's going to make it worse.

34:09The opposite is the truth in a way that the awakening of genius in many, many people, and it doesn't require. It's not like democracy. It doesn't require a 51 percent vote. No one knows what the no one knows what the proportion is, but if it's under 50 percent. Like the Renaissance. You know, all the people in Italy and parts of Europe in the Renaissance all didn't become artists or philosophers, a certain number. And then it becomes the exact opposite of what you have now. We have polarization. Everyone turned against each other and every issue that comes up, it polarizes again. When the soul is activated, it's the opposite. Each person waking up to who they are and what they have to bring. And all of a sudden that affects the person nearby that didn't know that was possible. And then that person goes, well, what do I have? And then that changes the world. That's the premise I'm operating with.

Growing the soul and awakening genius

35:05I think that's beautiful.

35:35is The Dash. Listen and subscribe to The Dash wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Zosia Mamet. You might know me from the show Girls. I've been a horse girl since I was six. Not a phase, definitely not ironic. I will talk about horses until the people around me start to worry. So I made a show about that feeling. It's called OMG Obsessed. And every week I sit down with one of my favorite people and ask, what's your horse? What's the thing you cannot shut up about? So come be an obsessive with me. OMG Obsessed is out now. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. you In our highly polarized world and... this invitation to eat the shadow or to go into the shadow, to find the soul, find the gold. Is that also a way I would,

Polarization as the source of creation

36:27I want to believe that that's the way that the polarization starts to mute down is if enough people are working with their own internal shadow and then helping to transform the collective and not feed it. Is that accurate? Yeah. Yes. And so polarization, if you take it back to the origins of polarization is the source of creation. So we're closer to we're closer to creation. Thank you. Also, the beginning of creation is chaos in all myths. Chaos is the beginning. Darkness. disorder, but really chaos-wise. means more than that. It means the unexpressed creativity being held in a dark condition, something like that. And so we're almost in it solidly now. We're actually closer to creation. We're closer to going. And that's why I say it's not going to be helped by people like Trump. They're going to hold to that darkness. OK, fine.

37:28Other people are going to go away in the darkness. Isn't that the chaos where everything began? Can we not begin it again? And then you get to the idea of the soul where the individual soul is connected to the soul of the world and enough souls awakening revitalize the soul of the world. And we're back in a living cosmos. rather than in an accidental universe. Mm-hmm. So maybe he's just the polarizer in chief. And that's his job, right? Yeah, because he... When you get all the way down in the narcissistic personality, apparently, And the borderline personality, which has those qualities, too. What happens is you have a split that never got united. That in the infantile realm, Yes. You know, there's always the dark mother, you know, who isn't there when you need to be nourished or she has one of her breasts is envious and the other one's nurturing, whatever it is that never got resolved at all.

38:26That split is so deep that it's currently unresolvable. People like him would have to go into therapy for a very long time. And in order to do that, they would have to admit they're not perfect. They're not in charge. They don't know what the hell they're doing. It's all a pretense and they're not going to do that. And as long as they don't do that, Then they're just creating more darkness for everybody. Yeah. All right. I mean, I buy it. I understand your version. And I just I want to believe that we're at some and maybe we're both getting to the same place, which is that we're at some sort of shock point. You know, you mentioned it as being this point of chaos, which is the sort of cauldron of creativity. All growth comes out of the darkness, the tomb to the womb. Right. And that there's something that wants to be born or there's something that wants to come through. And it is a do or die moment. Right.

39:19or it feels that way. No, it is. And in a funny way, it always has been. But yeah, some are more do or die crises than others. And yeah, we're at the do or die. But a moment, you don't know how long a moment lasts. A moment is not a minute. A moment can open. So that's the Greek idea of the Kairos is we're also in the Kairos moment. When something regenerative happens, can spark a great imagination and the process of a renewal begins. But I think the thing that really got lost is the value and necessity of the individual soul. That's the big... in mass modernization. culture. Where a person is seen as part of a voting group or part of a purchasing group or part of the, you know, whatever. Now they're trying to make it part of a gender group. All those things they're trying to do. Yeah, an identity group. Yeah.

40:13And the individual soul is unique by definition. It is unique. You cannot completely categorize it. And that's what we lost. And the tradeoff has been for. in materialism versus the awakening of the soul. which brings both spirit and a deeper connectedness to life. And that has been traded for whatever that is. I don't know what they call it. But anyway, all the material goods, wealth has been championed over well-being repeatedly by both political parties, even though I go with any party that is for freedom and independence and that kind of thing. But everybody's kind of sold out. And lost the soul. Christianity took the soul out of the equation in that meeting in Constantinople in 869 of all the Catholic bishops and cardinals. And they took the soul out of the picture.

The removal of the soul in 869 Constantinople

41:08It was always... spirit body and soul They took the soul out. And you have spirit and body and spirit is moving away from body. There's nothing bringing you know about this. So why? Why did they take the soul out? Too feminine? Yes, good one. Too feminine, too connective. It was causing all the problems. You couldn't separate God and humanity from... If humanity had a soul, because the soul was the connection to the divine and you couldn't pretend that it was outside if the soul was saying, no, it's inside everybody. It just was messing with their project. of creating a religious system That had heaven and earth as separate and had good and bad as opposites. And the soul never was like that. It's a ternary force, right? A unifying ternary force.

42:04bringing the two together and the divine and the human together. The masculine and feminine and the timelessness. It's the thing that brings everything together. Take that out. You can really control people. Yeah. You can say those people are bad, those people are good, or those people are bad, we're good. You can play all kinds of things and people buy in. People know they have a soul. You can't do that. You can't say, you know, this is men and this is women. You can say these are masculine traits and feminine traits, but you cannot divide it. You cannot polarize when the soul is really present. So one reason I think about the soul so much. is that if the soul is present, you can't get polarization of the kind that we have now.

42:46Would you say that this is a different concept? The soul is different than the capital S self that Jung writes about or Richard Schwartz talks about in his system is the soul itself? that inner self, higher self or is it a different concept Yes? It's a both and yes kind of thing? Yeah. That's the thing, the soul defies definition. Yeah. So you can't do the things that the church has done and that philosophers do. You can't do it because the soul says, oh, no, it's not this one and the other one. It's actually a third thing that mixes them, that redefines them and revitalizes them. So. The soul is something that has no definable substance. and yet when it's not there substantial things are missing

43:41I mean, it's paradoxical in a way. And that's part of the problem that the church had with it. Well, we can't define the darn thing and it keeps messing with our theologizing things. About heaven and earth and everything and the good and the bad. So let's just get rid of it. And then Descartes comes along. You know, that's quite a bit later. And he comes along and says, well, I think, therefore I am. There's a subjective and the objective. And then modern science is based on the division between the subjective and the objective. And it does produce a lot of stuff, but it tends to alienate people's souls. Yeah. Well, it takes everything off the table that can't be readily or immediately explained.

44:25And it substitutes quantity for quality. And the only things that count are things that are measurable and can be proven. And soul is immeasurable and can never be proven. And yet when it's not there, you know something's missing. And so we lost our connection to all that is immeasurable about life. which includes both the masculine and the feminine. It includes the love. It includes the intuition of being deeply connected to nature. Because you can't do the nature culture split when you have soul. You take a walk in nature and you can have these soulful experiences that, as people would say, blow your mind because your mind cannot capture that. But your soul can experience it. And so all of those divisions and the

45:15lead up to the big polarization. in a sense, comes from lack of loss of soul. The only good thing about that is it means we have a way back. We have to reinstall the world. And the only way we can do that is to grow our own souls. And we're back to the idea that each one of us can contribute by becoming more soulful, which will also mean we're more creative, we're more creative. in love with the world, with other people, with ourselves, because the soul is the source of love. Right. And then it is really interesting to me because. The old ideas would say, well, where is the soul? And one answer would be it's in your heart. And so then wait a minute, all of a sudden it brings the heart in, not as a medical organ or a physical organ. I call it the heart within the heart.

Descartes and the mind-body split

46:09The heart within the heart is the source of our soulfulness, our capacity, not just to love, but to learn of love and our source of imagination. which has always been considered the power of the soul. So when people took away the soul, they took away the capacity to imagine. And no one can imagine their way out of the polarization because they don't know that imagination is the only way out. Most people cannot imagine how we get out of this. Or rationalize out of it. Yes. But the soul can imagine things that are unseen, unexpected. unpredictable and unable to be categorized. Mm. You know, such like love and the deeper, deeper, greater values of humanity are aspects of the soul, not aspects of a belief system.

46:58I have two questions. One is a selfish one, which is, have you written about this? And or are there any great books about what happened in the ninth century and the desoling of the world? That's question one. Are any of your books specifically about this? Not specifically. I usually just throw it in. In there, just toss it in as a little bit of a salad dressing. Yeah, but I mean, people can study this conference in Constantinople in 869. They were trying to solve philosophical, theological problems in the Catholic Church, but also in what becomes the Russian Orthodox Church also since Constantinople. where the East and the West kind of meet. And it's just point black. They just get rid of the soul. This is so fascinating. I wonder if there's a Dan Brown novel about this. No. Yeah, it'd be good. I know. Have you read The Secret of Secrets? It's so fun. No, I haven't.

47:54It's all about consciousness. Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah. And Descartes, who everybody knows as the Cartesian split, he's adding to that. He's coming in from the Catholic background and so on. He also has no... active mother or father. He's an early life orphan who was never held. And he becomes the embodiment of the Cartesian split. Acting out in a sense and then speaking out his own words. infantile. Lack of being held and becoming connected to, you know, usually the connection to the mother. The mother is Mother Earth. You know, the connection infant to mother is like the connection to everything outside the infant. And he doesn't get he doesn't get that. So he is split. He then his personal split in a way then comes up with the idea. I think therefore I am instead of I love. Therefore, I am. I sing. Therefore, I am. I defecate. Therefore, I mean, you could add a whole lot of things that could make you. And you could be aiming through those things. He makes it thinking.

How to grow your soul: love, forgiveness, and genius

49:06and being, which then becomes the mind-body split, which then enhances the split between human nature and nature, and we're headed historically for polarization. For everyone who's listening and saying, okay, I'm grokking this, but how do I become more ensouled? What do we do? Okay. So, in a sense, we did what people always did, because there was an understanding in ancient times, you know, not that, you know, to make... the past perfect, but people did have the sense of that they were connected to nature and connected to the cosmos. I mean, when you read ancient stories and certainly mythology, humans are. Unique beings because we are stretched between heaven and earth, not because we live on earth and we're going to heaven.

49:58really it's more like we're here to and down to earth. That's more like a soulful thing. So there's an answer, kind of. But The soul being the source of imagination and love, let's say. That gives us some hints. what we love is how we grow the soul. And then you could say who we love is how we grow the soul also. because The soul being the source of love wants to have meaningful connections to other people. But it also wants to have meaningful connections, for instance, to what you were saying about the deep self. So we grow the self deeper. We learn how to love ourselves better, which I think requires big time forgiveness. I was raised Catholic. And so, you know, they mess around with you as a child when it comes to that. You're supposed to believe all this stuff and all. But it does activate.

50:55ideas and imaginings about what it is. And one of the great things that's in there, even though, it's become occluded is forgiveness is really important. Once we realize I'm not a perfect being, And everything hasn't always gone right. And even when I was young and couldn't defend or handle myself or protect myself, some things went wrong. and you accept that, then forgiveness becomes a part of it. Forgiving oneself for not being better for whatever we were told we should be. And so we accept ourselves more as we are. That would be soulful. And then following. So there's an old statement. You find it all over the world at some point, which is what we love is a cure. So the illness... is being gifted and wounded. The illness is being alive at a dark time. The illness is being alive in a period of polarization.

51:52And what we love is the cure. So someone loves music. They just love it. We all like music. Music is archetypal, you know, connection for almost everybody, even for the animals, they say. But someone loves it. That's it. What they really. go with that, if they accept that, it doesn't mean they're going to be a great musician. That's not even the point. It means they will be growing their soul. You know, through the process of being engaged with things that are essentially lovable by that individual. And then that just puts more music in their life and more music in the world. Someone else loves an aspect of nature. Just, you know, I was once got to meet with these people. pretty young people that were doing

52:38Kind of scientific work with rivers, getting the heavy metals out of the river and getting the rivers to be more pure. They used that term. And they were using mushrooms, they figured out. You could use mushrooms to get the heavy metals out. And they were in love with what they were doing. And they were completely lovable when you were with them because they were in love with what they were doing. And someone could call it science, but it looked to me like a love project, you know. And so what we love becomes the cure. For instance, some people really love knowledge. I remember I used to always make notes. I'd read books and I'd make my handwritten notes. Because... When you're writing by hand, you're using your body, not just your mind. And then someone said to me once, oh, so you're an intellectual.

53:26And I said, hey, I didn't insult you. Why are you insulting me?

53:32Knowledge, intellectual knowledge, is a very small strata. of the kinds of knowledge. So some people love knowledge. And in ancient India, that would be called the path of yana, J-N-A-N-A. It's a form of yoga. The path of loving knowledge. and that leads to being perhaps a philosopher, "Philosopher" comes from the Greek, "philo," which means love, Sophia, is the God of wisdom. Those who love Sophia, the God of wisdom. Well, if we were going to have wisdom set of just data and. information, We're going to have to have people that love wisdom. And the ancient definition of wisdom is light and dark. And so the seekers, the ones who know, really love both light and dark, and they have a great value to everyone around them. There's all kinds of knowledge that we have lost and the kind of knowledge that we've lost primarily.

54:37Is wisdom. And so some people love knowledge and they should. And that becomes a sacred path. And so I don't know, almost anything that anyone really some people love animals. It's actually a fairly common thing. Well, humans used to associate with animals. Animals were understood as spirit beings and animals were imparting knowledge to people. They do it now. And so the people that love animals are also capable of rediscovering the animal nature of the human being. Because a human is an animal on one end and connected to the divine on the other end. So the animal lovers actually could bring the kind of animate knowledge of the body and the instincts back into the world. I don't know. I'm just...

55:28I'm just talking. Yeah. No, I love it. I think it's really beautiful and helpful. And I think we're all... searching for what is our specific mandate to do. And I always like to be reminded that we're individually, uh, uniquely gifted and that your part is different than my part, but that there is a part and we are all participating in this collective culture, even if we might not like it or choose it. Yeah, and the philosophical idea that's also a soulful idea, is the part is related to the whole. Change the part, you change the whole. So it's not to be inflated and say, oh, I'm so important. It's not that at all. It's actually to be real and say, I'm doing what I'm called to do, which is, involves a greater awakening to who I already am.

56:23at the core of the self or the soul. And in doing that, I'm not just satisfying my ambition. I'm actually adding presence, imagination, creativity and love to the world. And the more I do that and the more other people do that, all of a sudden, the polarization starts to be diminished and it starts to be revealed to be what it is. a kind of lack of soul and a loss of the sense that we're really all in this together. And that's the I would say that's the future world is a reimagination of a world in which everything and everyone and all the beings and all the things are all interrelated as they have always been.

Closing reflections

57:17which objectified people and diminished the world. Beautiful. This was such a pleasure. I hope you'll come back. I loved it. And now I'm going to go read about 9th century Constantinople. This feels like a big unlock for me, so I really appreciate it. Well, that's the knowledge part of you. Your knowledge, and I want to know that. Yeah, it's amazing. They actually did it. They got together and said, let's just get the soul out of this. It was never two. It was always three. It was always three. So is a relationship. Two people are in love. It's the one person in love, the other person in love, and the presence of love itself, which has hints of the divine and hints of the creative. And as soon as you take the middle one out, you just polarize those two people and they have to start all over again.

58:08Yeah. 100%. you you you That was so fun. And he just turned some of my ideas, I'll just say he evolved some of my understandings in ways that is always very thrilling for me. And hopefully it was very fun. for you. And I am just shook by the fact that this third force, the soul, was removed. In the 9th century, I feel like so many things now make so much more sense to me. So I will be in a wormhole excavating that. And I will speak to you all soon. If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it.

59:06That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please sign up for my newsletter at eliselunan.substack.com or consider picking up copies of my book, On Our Best Behavior, and the new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. Thanks again, friends.