Michael Tsarion Archetypes & the Origins of Consciousness

[Speaker 3] (0:00 - 0:07) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth Podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. [Speaker 2] (0:11 - 2:09) What's up everybody, welcome back to the Here for the Truth Podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti, I've got my co-host Yerasimos with me as always. Today Michael Tisarian returns and we're diving deep into archetypes, symbology and the origins of consciousness. These are concepts, topics and ideas which are very, very important to grasp. So we really hope you enjoy this conversation. Right before we bring Michael on, all our websites, many people have been coming to me lately and telling me that I didn't realize you guys even had a video component to this podcast. But no, there is a video component and all our videos are hosted on our website at hereforthetruth.com. So if you're someone who wants to watch the episodes, you can do that at our website, here for the truth. There's a comments section, a forum where you can engage and, you know, drop your thoughts about the episodes as well. And also from there, if you press on the membership button, you'll be redirected to our membership community, Friends of the Truth, where you can really connect with an awesome, amazing, like-minded community of truth seekers. And we offer three calls a month, so education, support, knowledge. It's a great place to dip your toe in the water if you want to get a bit deeper into what we're about. Without any further ado, thanks to the love. Thanks for the support. If you get a chance, please rate, review, subscribe. We'd really appreciate that. And please enjoy this episode. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Here for the Truth podcast. This is the return of the great Michael Tasarian, a man who needs no introduction, I guess, especially with our audience. His original episodes with us are 78 and also 102, where we do a deep dive into female psychology. And today, we're here to talk about archetypes, symbology, and the origins of consciousness. But I guess right before we get into that, just a quick check-in. How are you, Michael? Good, guys. Thanks. Awesome. How's everything overall? [Speaker 1] (2:11 - 2:12) Very well. [Speaker 2] (2:12 - 2:31) Awesome. All right. Well, how do we, I guess, begin to broach this incredibly vast subject? I mean, it seems more and more that we're becoming disconnected from the archetypal world. And that's something that I'm definitely, certainly interested in bringing back into the forefront and giving people a bit of insight into. [Speaker 1] (2:34 - 18:16) Right, right. It's very important for musicians, for artists. I mean, you can take how many classes are there out there on mythology, even in a university setting. Mythology is, of course, very interesting, right? But I've been much more interested in the psychology of mythology. And that's a different kind of take, where that might lead. And it's the same thing with the psychology of art. They're not the same. They're not the same because, you see, let's take mythology. I'm sitting in a class with 30-40 people, and we're talking about mythology, and they're talking about some Celtic thing, or King Arthur, or the story of Ocean, and the Fortunate Isles, and the Land of Immortality, or it could be the Flight of Icarus. First time I've ever heard that. What's really happening there is that the myths are being described, and that's fine. And you can spend an entire lifetime, there are literally encyclopedias this thick on mythologies described. In fact, if you went to Wikipedia or whatever, they'd say, oh, King Arthur, or Excalibur, or the Knights of the Round Table, and mostly what you're going to get, almost without fail, this is the same with the Greek, or the Romans, or the description of. And that's where most of the human race leave it. The psychology of mythology is better said to be interpretation. So there's already two totally different schools here now, or it would be the art. It would be art as palette of colors, brushes, technique, and then there's the meaning of a painting. See, we're in two different worlds. You can be an artist all your life and never, ever, ever really bother yourself with anything to do with the meaning of a piece of, you know, Dali, a piece of art, or a great, you know, Leonardo da Vinci. And it's the same with mythology. There's people out there who know a lot about the myths, but you'll never find this thing of interpretation. And I think the best way to start, as you asked, is to really take on board what is the actual difference between those two things, between a description of a famous myth, of which there are, as I say, thousands, A to Z, and then this need to interpret. Are they really the same? Why did the human mind ever get to the point of wanting to interpret mythology? You see, that that fissure in between that most people never ask about, that's where we need to start. That's where there's something really extraordinary there. And then as we talked offline about the Jungians, right, that's it. This road of the psychology of mythology will lead you basically to Carl Jung's work, and the Jungians, you know, that surrounded him. That's where the story or the path will actually lead. Specifically though, to the area known as archetypes. So if I was to introduce this to people, you know, it would be that you'd have to understand mythology, symbols, anything like that. You have to go to this concept of archetypes. Now he was not the first one to speak about it. Others had spoken about what's known as primordial images, you know, and just the image-making faculty that we have. That's going to have a huge bearing, because what we're going to investigate here, you know, will also help to explain dreams, which is nothing but images created by our own inner core or consciousness, and even the concept of the imagination, which is the very word image-making. This is why it's important to go to Jung, because you're going to suddenly go, whoa, whoa, oh yeah, gee, never thought of that before. Nobody's ever told me or explained what the imagination may be, or at least a good interpretation, I wouldn't say. It's the only interpretation. But so to bear in mind that there's a big difference in our lives between a describing of a something, and remember, think of the tarot cards for a moment. They're images, they're mythic, like, you know, and they come from the stars, right, the astro-theological uranographs. Same thing there. I could sit there explaining and describing what I see, but that's a big, big difference between, say, explaining, right, and interpreting what does Pegasus mean, or the great whale, or Leo the lion. So think about it. Does this have to do with right brain, left brain? I mean, right from the off, we have something really remarkable, the syzygy, right? But as I say, if you then get into the psychology, you'll not get your answers until you come onto the concept of archetypes, so maybe we could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, the question begs, what are archetypes? Well, obviously, history and archetypes go together. This is the most extraordinary thing, right, that there's nothing in history that could happen, or has happened, that in some strange way, mythology hasn't covered. And that's what I'm talking about, it's not from me, that's just generic understanding. Mythologies are really old, there's a point where the blur between a historical telling, and maybe where history stops, because documents have been burned, or just like it is when you're a child, you can't remember back to your childhood. So humanity can't remember back to its childhood in what we would call a historical way, but all the races have preserved what we call mythologies, which in a sort of a more garbled form, and they have their own logic, obviously, do go back to primordial times, the fall of Atlantis, whatever. But just like that motif of the fall of a great empire, the fall of a great monarch, those are universal, they're in the myths, but they could happen tomorrow. The story of, you know, Klaus Schwab falling from grace, or being found with some hookers, or something, right? Look, there's nothing, there's nothing, right, that ever could happen in our world that there's not some myth there to cover it. That is the shortest I can explain it, but the road I would prefer to take, though, is the one that the high Jungians take, and that is to say that once these archetypes are installed, we all have them, they're the background of consciousness, what we know as ego consciousness grows out of them, or they are like the DNA of the psyche, is the way that Jung explained it, DNA of the psyche. So at every step of what we know to be ego consciousness, waking consciousness, the archetypes are instrumental, sometimes in a bad way, it's not all positive, but let's touch back on the history again, because I know that's a difficult concept for people to understand. An archetype just starts as an idea, starts as, actually, really, better said, it starts as an experience. Now Jung talked about a thing called the collective unconscious, and that sounds all fancy until you realize all it means is that the experiences he's talking about are not the experiences necessarily of an individual, they're the experiences of everyone, and that's all, you know, we could talk for hours just on that. Yeah, so everyone has the same experiences, everyone has an experience of mother, everybody has an experience of father, everybody has an experience of animal kingdom, cold, hunger, nourishment, enjoyment, pleasure, of fear, so these are universals. Now what happens on the psychic level is that these experiences don't go away. When an individual experiences a fight with an animal, fear of death, of the blood rising when you're in combat, in war, right, or any other, in fact, it's any and all experiences, so you don't even have to delineate them, anything, sexual attraction, whatever, right? Those memories don't go away, they are ingrained in consciousness, in our DNA, in a way, right? But what Jung is talking about is that they don't only go away, even when the individual dies as an individual person, these experiences that all human beings have accrue over time, there's an accretion that takes place, and an archetype is born at some point down the line. Yeah, there was actually a time when there were no archetypes, because the experiences, you know, hadn't gelled, because they're called constellations, constellations of energy, psychic energy, but this is then leading up to what I think is the most fascinating thing, and most Jungians don't talk about it. As the centuries pass, actually millennia pass, these little, it's like if you look, then you'd see they're like, you know, little engrams, little mini ideas, but they all constellate together, like ideas constellate in the mind by association. So our experiences of mother all start coming together, they constellate slowly over the millennium. All the, any and all experiences of mother, good and bad, this will have a meaning later when we deal with something like the anima, which can also appear as a terrible mother, and we've spoken about that before. The Jung would say there's the bountiful mother, and there's the terrible mother, right, and there's all different kinds of mothers. Archetypes are manifold, they're absolutely manifold. Think of the, I don't know if you've seen the Conan the Barbarian movie, when he's out on his journey, his wanderings, he comes across a witch. She is both seductress, right, lover, way sure, she actually does help him, and also a predator, and then finally turns into a fucking demon, right? So that's what I mean, it's like, what? That movie perfectly illustrates this. But what I'm trying to get at here is the constellating accretion over centuries and centuries of everybody's experience is recorded in every individual's consciousness as an archetype. When it finally congeals together, and it's always ongoing of course, that becomes an archetype, a thing of such immense psychic power that it's indescribable. The best way to describe it is imagine the planet Mercury, right, this tiny burned out oxidized stone in space, and behind it this colossus called the Sun. Or think of, you know, the floodlights in a giant, you know, candlestick park or something going on, and a little ant crawling across the grass going, those bloody lights again. Now the ant, which is the ego, will still keep on crawling, right? It doesn't perish, but it's totally disabled by this, what's called numina, the numinous. It's a numinosium, is how the Jungians talk about it, of fantastic power, and anything that is in its path is just mesmerized, petrified, gorgonized, and that is ancient man, that is ancestral man. When he was confronted with the inner archetype, he was immobilized, because, and that's when we say, you know, ancestral man didn't have an ego consciousness, because the ego was overwhelmed, but this little ant, this little thing kind of persisted, you know, otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it. Even in the face of this overwhelming numinosium, this tremendum, they call it the fascinans, right? So then what do you do with this overwhelming power that could easily crush what is the germ of ego? The ego germ, you know, and that's also then later on what is, you know, pathology, because remember we're talking psychopathology here, psychoanalysis, so those who are neurotic, those who are schizophrenic, right? A lot of us don't make it. This is absolutely, and later on we'll get to, you know, how this is all relevant to exactly what's happening today in the headlines, but we'll go step by step. So what it does, and what it has been doing, and we said this is going to explain high art, dreams, imagination. Unbelievably, this little dwarf of an ego has slowly been trying its best to deflate the archetypes. You know, you speak a lot about the hero's journey, right? This is it, unpacked. There's a heroic part of the ego that even in the face of this colossus, it tries to puncture it or scrape off aspects of an archetype in order to lessen its numinosity, and to deflate it so that obviously it's like a seesaw. If I can deflate the power of these things that fascinate me, I have more autonomy, I have more emancipation. So the struggle of the ego is to emancipate itself from the colossal, you know, so Moses at the burning bush, or God in the whirlwind, and everybody's just gaga, right? You know this last scene in Indiana Jones when they open the Ark of the Covenant and all the angels come out, but when the angels realize who's performing the ritual, those angels turn to demons, right? And the end of the movie. So all through what we call history, I hope people can see the meta theme here, that's what's been going on. Ego consciousness has been strengthening itself by slowly siphoning off the energy of an archetype. That is what a myth is. All the different myths we know, or the content of storytelling, is this breaking apart. It's known by the Jungians as the fragmentation of the archetype, and without it there's no concept of ego consciousness at all, because we would just be enthralled, overcome, bleached, you know, and blinded, and solarized, or whatever, you know, we'd be mortified, and we'd be back at the primitive level, those stages. [Speaker 2] (18:18 - 18:25) Would it be something like multiple personality disorder, but where the archetypes just keep taking over the person's psyche? [Speaker 1] (18:25 - 20:17) Yeah, that's exactly what happens, you see. All sorts of pathologies take place when you succumb. I think we've talked before, at least I know I've mentioned it on dozens of occasions on Unslaved, that Freud's idea of neurosis and psychopathology was that content from within, from the id, possesses and takes over your consciousness, like what you're talking about, and he rooted most of the pathologies to this. Later, Neo-Freudians, including his own daughter, started to change and came up with what's known as humanist psychology, in which, no, it's the external world and its pressures that cause an ego to break. But to answer your question, Jung didn't quite abandon the idea, neither did Freud, right? I mean, neither did the Neo-Freudians. In certain cases, like in the case of a world leader, like a Hitler, he is definitely possessed by an archetype, and so much so that he thinks he's a messiah and that he can control the lives of millions of people and he's not speaking to an individual. All of these things show a possession from inside, so you still have it. But Jung is the one who really held on to it and didn't just cast it out, and for him, the possession of these archetypes is huge in his therapy, far more than it became, you see, with the Freudian school, and I like both. Both are so bloody important, right, to look at. But this is what causes an individual. So what the individual is doing is he's splintering the archetype into several individual myths, in order to break the power of the central archetype, which is just too luminous, too numinous and too luminous, you know, like they even measure light in candles. But there's like millions of candles to this tiny little ego. [Speaker 2] (20:18 - 20:30) So for example, like the great mother archetype, like being split up into like the good mother, the terrible mother, all the different versions of it, that's the splintering. And the lover. And the lover, etc, etc. [Speaker 1] (20:31 - 20:41) Oh yes, in fact, one could use the anima exclusively as a perfect example of any stage of what we're talking about. [Speaker 2] (20:42 - 20:56) So like the archetype is really hard to describe, I guess, it's almost like it's really hard to put a finger on, but I guess it's the symbology from the fragments that gives us insight as to what the archetype is. Yes. [Speaker 1] (20:58 - 23:49) And the basic thing to understand that is as a cache of power, mental, psychic, and libido is what it's called. Yeah, it's the origin of our libido, it's where it's where everything's plugged in. And you can come at this from many points of view, not just this point of view, but in my studies of many, many decades, this is to me the most important. And you'll see why when we move along a little bit. See, so you can think of it as just a cache of extraordinary power that has the deadly effect of overcoming ego and holding you in fascination, which for thousands and thousands of years, early man was caught, he didn't have a consciousness like ours. And he lived in a state of absolute trepidation. And another feature of how you lessen the power of an archetype is to project it outwards. So what we know as Jungian projection is a way to, again, minimize the power of the archetype. So we get God, because the furthest thing away from us is the night sky. So early man projected, first it was a seven-pointed zodiac in the northern sky, you know, the whole thing, then the 12 and all that. So we projected, the furthest thing to our eyesight is the night sky, we projected these fascinating numinous, I guess we could call them characters now at this point, out. So the archetype is actually, it's not blowing me up. So your multiple personality people and your schizophrenics are being blown up from inside, because they're not projecting anymore. Manic, manic people, right? A lot of the shamanic, what we know as shamanism is based on, it's not all bloody positive, right, it's based on this inability to project out. But once we learn it, ah, there's a semblance of balance and, you know, things can be a little bit more. In fact, what we call intuition, you know, you've got sensation, intellect, emotion, and intuition. Intuition is the oldest part of us, more than reason, more than emotion, because it is the relic of what we're talking about. When the inner and the outer overlapped, we still have a fragment of that, and it's called intuition. And some people rely on it more and some people less, but it links to what we're saying. Intuition was the type of dominant consciousness we had when this process of interjection of the archetype and our, you know, our extrusion of it. So in other words, everything that we know to be the holy, the sacerdotal, everything, when even nature worship, when nature was sacralized, is to do with the projection of the archetypes outside, as another means to alleviating it, to deflating the power. This goes on even at night. [Speaker 2] (23:50 - 23:59) Are you saying we only have the evolution of consciousness that we have now because of the deflation of the archetypes? It's all based on that. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (23:59 - 24:01) If you're coming from a Jungian point of view, that is. [Speaker 2] (24:01 - 24:01) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (24:01 - 28:56) So a dream then to Jung is the same thing. Remember, see, they now know through these scans of the brain that the brain is equally as active at night when you're sleeping as it is during the day. They can't explain that. Jung could have explained it in seconds. The process of chipping away at this vast mountain of marble is going on day and night. The worker ants are still at it. Your consciousness is still at it because your bloody ego development demands it. So, you know, the lights are on at night and the workers right there digging up the road, making more images, mini myths. You know, the books after books have been written about the connection between dream images and mythology, Otto Rank, you know, and hundreds of others. Yeah, they are. But they both come from the same source. We are sort of almost vampiristically taking energy from the archetype. See, this is the strangest paradox of all. This is where it is really a lemniscate, because the ego will be overwhelmed by the unconscious. But any energy that it has to be an ego is taken from the unconscious. It's fed underneath anything. Libido. The libido the ego needs to be the hero to move through its own what's called ontogenetic existence is lent to it, borrowed from it, taken from the unconscious that also has this antagonistic. So there's a bivalent relationship with our own psyche. That's what makes a Putin of all of these non-dualists right there. And if they just read their young, they'd know that they're non-dualistic theories, which, by the way, are rampant in Eastern mysticism. That's why I reject it all from even just this what I'm talking about. Of the bivalent relationship you have with your own unconscious, you need to get away from it. You need to differentiate. You need to individuate, as Jung called it. But the very power that you need to do that is rooted in the thing you're trying to get away from the unconscious. Go explain that. You can't. And that's the uroboros, this thing that could overwhelm you, drag you back into the infantile state or whatever, the non-differentiated state of total absorption and repose and sleep, uroboric sleep. The womb. But it also provides the libido you need to be separate from it. It hands you the knife to cut off its own head. And unless the hero, the greater hero, understands this dynamic, and that's why he's head and shoulders above everybody else and got a big fucking halo around his head, because he has learned the mysteries of mysteries. He knows that the key of his own liberation is found in the hands of his enemy, these paradoxes. So a dream is nothing but more chips off the great obelisks to try and deflate the power of an archetype. Storytelling for early man was a way of deflating, right? You spoke about a dream, you told a story, it was descriptive, it was never interpretive. But interpretation would mean they're all sitting around, you know, analyzing each other. No, no. It was just sitting around describing. There was no analysis. It was simply a description of how I fought that great wolf, how the beautiful lady came to me in a dream, right? And what do you think high art is? We said that they would explain it. Everything you know as art, from the primitive cave paintings on to the most sophisticated art of later era, is exactly this process. There would be no art without what we're talking about. None. Not even music. It's all part of our industry to do exactly what I've been saying. So we could end the story right there. There's enough analysis, there's enough insight into the—you know, like I said, the holy. I don't care if it's, you know, the worship of the zodiac, or signs in the sky, or Jesus, or whatever it was. Wherever you look, the holy originates in this. As a way of disgorging archetypal content onto the world outside is the origin of religion in all of its manifoldness. And until we know that, that's why the psychology of religion, the psychology of art, the psychology of mythology are far more interesting to me, you know. But we can go on if you want. Or do you have any points? [Speaker 2] (28:56 - 29:11) Yeah, well, like, just back to the beginning, like, where did the archetypes come from? Like, how did this process begin of the ego chipping away from the archetypes? And were the archetypes just always in existence? Or like, how does it start? [Speaker 1] (29:12 - 33:45) Only from original experience. You experience—so in primitive times, you know, and we have to have a year or a period when this started, say Paleolithic. But wherever human consciousness existed, even in its most primitive animalistic stage, you still experienced something, like hunger. So all the things that we experience today are obviously universal. They've been experienced by everyone all over the place. Sexual desire, right? The need to climb the mountain, the need to overcome an enemy, the feelings of giving birth to a child, or, you know, anything and all things accrue like a glacier, like a snowball. And those are the archetypes. Small individual thoughts that seek each other out because they're similar, and they come together in what we know as the archetypes. The animus, the anima, the wild man, the shadow. There's about 13 of them, you know. These—so what you're talking about is the history, phylogenetically, is so important. And that's not taught in school. See, maybe you could show the picture of the chariot here, card 7, and then, you know, beside it, the fool. They're related. They exactly represent what we're talking about. The fool is the individual ontogenetic personalized experience of the individualized ego, probably in a very early stage of ego, but nevertheless. Whereas the chariot, who drives on the ruts of what has gone before—see, the road ahead of him is not his own personal journey. It is the phylogenetic journey of those who've gone before. And so there is nothing that the individual can possibly experience that hasn't been experienced by somebody else, multiple people. So this is where the individual and the racial, the individual and the cultural interact. Now, it's not all one-way street, and it's not about predetermination. There's still a lot of freedom there, because you can still decide how fast your chariot goes, how many times you'll pull over and stop, and umpteen other, you know, personal decisions you can make. But it doesn't stop the fact that the road that you're on was there before you. You didn't build it. Now, when you go down that road, we have to say something that's very, very important, and it helps answer the question. The archetypes, although we try to delimit their power and condense it, our own experiences of the day, given what I've just said about that an archetype is based on an individual's experience or omaka, we're still experiencing. So the process of another lemniscate, our individual experiences still feed the archetypes and will feed them to the end of, to oblivion, to apocalypse time. That feedback loop cannot be changed, cannot be altered. So somebody would say then, well, the archetype then is going to remain powerful forever. That's right. Our attempts to deflate it are only a temporary solution. You know, I was going to try and get to that at the end here. But obviously, the archetype is going to remain the archetype mate, because you are that ant in front of it. You can't possibly extinguish the racial history of all humankind. And what those people have experienced before you, say that a lot of it was an evil mother, the terrible mother, you're not going to erase that. That's part of the archetype. Now, your conscious disposition, yeah, is going to be the active ingredient there to say, well, I've never experienced that, right? Your own comportment depends on what you will experience of an archetype. That's where the free will is. And good luck to you if you know you never have had that experience. So there's still a lot of, you know, wriggle room and free will involved in this. But the archetype determines a certain amount of characteristics, or at least it's the palette from which you can then paint your own picture. It's the palette, it's the DNA. What you can do, the way you live is different. But in living and in experiencing, it feeds back into the archetype anyway. Mm hmm. This is consciousness. What we're talking about here are the dynamics and the origins of consciousness. [Speaker 2] (33:46 - 34:00) Yeah. Michael, you talk a lot about terrestrial trauma and causing a fracture in the psyche of man at some point. Like, what role does this play in what we're talking about? Is it just a new archetype of experiencing terrestrial trauma as well or something deeper? [Speaker 1] (34:01 - 34:38) No, that's it. That was a big biggie written into the psyche. I've always presented it as that and thought of it. When I first came across this information, I immediately thought of how Jung would look at it. So it's as important to me. It's like hugely important, that one, the experience of that kind of trauma. Just as one, we should, I might forget to mention this one. So no, no, we're going to get to it at the end. I was going to think about collective consciousness in the group, group consciousness, you know, but that will come in as we go here. [Speaker 2] (34:38 - 34:43) Just for those who might not be familiar, do you want to clarify what terrestrial trauma is? [Speaker 1] (34:45 - 36:42) Well, that's just a series of cataclysms. Our earth has been torn apart by cataclysm. If you took away the water from the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, take a look at our ravaged earth. But because these terrestrial ones, and there's a big focus on ones that happened maybe about 13,500 years ago. Then there was a series of epi, you know, sub cataclysms in the 8000 BC and all that. There's been many, just so many. That's why it makes it a little bit difficult to date. But then there was the coming of this comet and stuff like that. So all of it is written in our consciousness. But the thing is, when those kinds of events happen, we block it. So I think the pathology arose because when that kind of trauma happens in the same way that when trauma happens today, say you have a very bad car accident, you know, on the way to work or the way to the shops, guarantee you're not going to take that road again. When all is back to normal, you'll take, you'll find a couple of secure disrupts, right? Even if it adds more time on to the journey, because obviously you want to forget about that event. So we have come into collective amnesia. That's the main, the cataclysm to me is far less, I love, I've read up on the details of it, and I know all the different theories, but you know, that's not to me the big fucking interest. Because other authors are fucking possessed by the details. They've written some very good books, but the word psychology never appears. I was turned on to the fact that what the hell did all of this do to the psyche? And of course, then we get into psychology, which says, well, you'll dissociate. And so there's a root of pathology culturally, you know, enormously important. [Speaker 2] (36:43 - 36:52) What are some of the symptoms of, I guess, that collective dissociation? How does that present today in one's fractured psyche? [Speaker 1] (36:53 - 38:43) Oh, well, then we would be going in the same direction I want to go, which is that crowd consciousness would be one of the manifestations. See, there's safety in the crowd. So when we talk about the hero's journey, and the path of the outsider, and the process of rites of passage or individuation, those are all suspended by your absorption. And this is another one of these tremendous fascinations. You're not, it's numinous. The crowds, the presence of the crowd is numinous. It's actually feminine, believe it or not. But although it appears to be active and mobilized and all, it's not. And it's comforting. It's a surrogate womb. So you can't even come to the bottom. There's even theories from people like Otto Rank that say the unconscious, he didn't take a Jungian point. He thought that he thought the unconscious was a womb metaphor, dreamed up because we don't want to leave the pleasure principle and enter in reality, because that will then, on one level, also reawaken trauma, which it actually does. The reality principle is where the threat, where the anxiety levels are, and mankind is looking for a way out. So dissociation, neurosis, groupthink, totalitarianism, the authoritarian state, you can start racking it up now. And also just start turning off, sitting in front of TV all day long, or the internet, and all of these ways that we want to remain amnesiacs would be all where you'd look for the consequences or something like that. Hatred of selfhood. Fuck, do you realize? I mean, it's so fundamental. The hatred of individualism would be all part of this, strange as it sounds. Yep. [Speaker 2] (38:46 - 39:04) So how does an individual take this information and, I guess, consciously interact with the archetypes to benefit their own personal consciousness, their own personal life, their own personal journey? Like, what does someone do with this to enhance the quality of their life? [Speaker 1] (39:05 - 43:55) Well, remember, everything that we're talking about happens on an unconscious level. So what you're talking about is a sort of a more willful, volitional attitude towards what we're talking about. That's a whole different subject, because excuse me, most of the human race is under the sway of everything we're talking about, like people's dreams, right? That's autonomous. You don't will your dreams. When you think of a painting to do or a piece of music, it just flows out of you. It's like a pre-set need to work with the archetypes in that particular way. What do you think the sand paintings are, or a mandala, right? Everybody's already preoccupied. Everybody's already got a job description, no matter what they think they're doing, even these lunatic priests. Everybody's already employed, processing, and even early man was in his own way, although he did it in a very, very different way. The tool set was far more limited, although we have problems today because we're individualistic. Later on, we're going to get to this point about, okay, now that the individualism is hyper-individuated, hyper-differentiated, that also causes a problem, which we'll describe in a minute. But I think you're already employed. Now, volitionally taking it up and saying, ah, right, now that I know some of this and I've read up on things, my art is obviously very, very different. My intent is very, very different. And then you work with the archetypes in a different way. You pay attention to your inner mythologies through dreams. And what will happen then is you will start to notice, because remember, we didn't explicitly mention that myths, when you break the myth, we know what a myth is now. It's a broken down piece of an archetype. Individualized to weaken it. But inside the myths are individual symbols. When you break a myth down, you get individual symbols, animal motifs, or something else. And they too must be interpreted. You see how this thing follows through? If I see a stop sign, you don't interpret it. If I see a right-hand turn sign, there's no, I don't sit interpreting it. It's a sign. A sign is a one-dimensional turn right. There's no like, oh, multiple levels of meaning. A symbol is different from a sign because the symbol can mean one thing. We were just speaking about Masonic symbolism in one of the podcasts, and how, you know, the bricklayer's trowel has multiple levels of interpretation. A symbol has these multiple levels of interpretation. But isn't that where we just started this podcast? That description and interpretation are very different? And always, always, always, for Jung, well, not for Jung, but this is my interpretation, the interpretation is the weakening of the archetype. So even, you meet the same process even down the line. You get an interpret, myths demand your interpretation. So there's no end to this. And then when you break it down into individual symbols, now I need to interpret each of them because they mean something different. Think of the astrological symbols or the alchemical symbols. So this process of interpretation, what I've just analyzed, why it is so ubiquitous is because the ego's identity depends upon it. So to answer your question a long way around is, people need to be getting into mythology and symbolism and high art more than they're doing, because that is helping with the interpretation. And the interpretation is an invention of the ego in its need to strengthen its sovereignty. So those, see, and what does this mean on the flip side? How many doctrines have you heard about? Get rid of the ego, this fucking New Agers, and all the Eastern palava. I cannot stress to you how absurd that is. If I don't have an ego, or I work like some non-dualist imbecile to weaken it in any way, that means that that neutron star, that red giant just goes, I will not be able to withstand its magnetic pull, its vortex. And these people who call for the death of the ego, which is all over the East and now all over the West, I've been saying from the beginning of my career how dangerous, dangerous, dangerous that is. [Speaker 2] (43:57 - 44:06) Yeah, yeah. They're also the types that are obviously most likely to be living under deep repression, and then these archetypes take over their life and do things that are horrific. [Speaker 1] (44:07 - 44:22) Ah, well, this is where we're going. Yeah, let's hold on, that's the key to where we're going, about the archetype's response to the ego's attempts to diminish its power, right? Should we go on to the next part, then? [Speaker 2] (44:22 - 45:20) I just wanted to highlight, too, even what you were saying, Joel, in terms of what an individual can do. And Michael, you highlighted knowledge is important. I mean, I remember when I first started reading Jung, or I read a couple of books, this was in my 20s, on the gods in every man and the goddesses in every man. It was written by Jungian analyst Jean Boleyn, and she talked about how each Greek god or all the pantheon of gods represented the psyche of man, represented these archetypes, and how if you want to be a more whole, complete individual, you need to integrate, you know, Zeus, you need to integrate, you know, the Poseidon, or maybe not integrate, but just allow these archetypes to play on you and provide you the gifts in your life. Yeah, I mean, and ultimately they all represent parts and aspects of ourselves, even in my own journey studying the Tarot and studying the Zodiac and astrology, like it awakens potentially different aspects of oneself that we've disowned. Yeah, for sure. [Speaker 1] (45:20 - 51:18) Yes, those are high art. The Tarot, alchemy, astrology are high art. And they are also taking us back to when this journey of abstraction, right, began. Prior to the... See, here's another thing. How many myths do you know? We said about the Codename Barbarian story, Frodo Baggins coming back from Mordor, Oceans return to Ireland from the land of the everlasting youth. Why is there always a kind of a sad type of ending? In Robin Hood, fall from the tower and hurting himself and then finally dying, there's a pathos, there's an incredible feeling of epic loss when the hero, after his struggles, in some way, you know, diminishes and goes into the West. And you'll find this in almost all the major myths. They don't particularly have a happy ending, or at least even though evil is conquered, there's still some strange lament there. Arthur being taken on the boat to Avalon, he'll return again, you know. The Fisher King, all of this, right? What's that all about? Why is that recurrent motif? Why is it not just complete and utter trumpets and triumph? It's because of this relationship we're talking about. As the ego forms the myths and gains greater and greater autonomy and power over the archetype, there's another underlying feeling that the power of the archetype is fading. You've been, you're like Prometheus, right? On the Caucasus mountains with a vulture plucking away at you, right? All the heroes have this strange, weird fate. The Fisher King's ankle bleeds. The others get old and decrepit, sometimes even imprisoned and what have you. I believe that that motif, which is very prominent in pre-Celtic, they seem to have it, you know, the dolorous maiden and all of this. So that is because there's an awareness of the ego that although it's empowering itself by way of the libido, it is a kind of a vampiristic relationship, and that there is a kind of a draining of the archetype's energy, right? Because what we said was, remember, all that was holy, all that was fascinating, all that was mesmerizing comes from the archetype. If the archetype is projected outside, then you have the mesmerization coming from the outside. But early man already had it within in a way that's incomprehensible to us, because we're obviously ego creatures and, you know, the power is not as strong with us. We couldn't possibly—unless, you know, something happens and mental disease comes about, right? So there is this strange feeling that there's a diminution of the power of the sun. So imagine that I am able to dim this kind of light. I find the switch and I'm able to dim it. But doesn't it mean that I also now feel cold and naked, because that light that I've basked in for eternity has suddenly gone cold? And might I not shiver in the corner? So here's the weird paradox with all of this. Too much deflation of the archetype leads to psychic impoverishment, almost in contradiction to what we're talking about. But no, we need to suck off the power of the archetype in order to have ego inflation, ego emancipation. But by a weird natural law, we can't, in fact—there's a point beyond which we cannot and probably should not go—because in the deflation of the archetype, we will actually feel naked, in a barren place, no longer heated, no longer animated by something that, you know, for millennia our ancestors, the psyche itself, was able to, you know, enjoy. And that's where we are in history today. There's been a desacralization. So all that you see in the headlines today, the state of males, the state of females, the NY, the apathy, the atomization, this belief in nothing, even if you want to frame it in the fact that, you know, religion, nobody believes in any religions anymore, you know, and all of that. You could look at it that way. So ego inflation is not particularly leading in necessarily a good direction. Freud iterated this exact thing we're talking about, but in a totally different way in his last book, Civilization and the Discontents, and I've written articles on that, and we've done podcasts to show his take was mostly just that aggression is on its way back. That's all he did. He just framed it as the return of the bestial and all of that. Jung would have just looked at it and went, and what is this, a pamphlet or something? It's just a beginning, mate. The ego inflation and the diminution of the archetypes or, you know, this scission between the two, because remember, the ego is now going, oh yeah, great, I don't need contact with the unconscious anymore. I'm fully, you know, individuated and differentiated. In other words, that's called personalization. [Speaker 2] (51:22 - 51:50) Self-importance. Hope you're enjoying this episode. Just want to jump in quickly to shout out some amazing human beings who are part of our membership community, Friends of the Truth. Today, I'd like to shout out Sophie, Joy, Nan, Shaina, Ingrid. Thank you so much for being part of our invaluable community. We really appreciate your presence there. And to everyone else, please enjoy the rest of this episode. Is there any relationships like grandiose narcissism? [Speaker 1] (51:52 - 55:43) Yeah, narcissism would be very much connected to this. It's in the same, exactly, good point. And remember, in the narcissist, there's nothing transcendent. When you were a child, your parents took on imagos of the archetypes. You know, mom and dad are exactly the projection outward of the inner archetypes of the anima and animus. God is the next step up. They're transcendent qualities and figures. If the power of the archetype weakens, then we don't have any more transcendent figures to keep us warm. So we get what's called materialization. And don't we have that? But the clever psychologist says, that's the way things indeed have been going for a while. All of this impoverishment of culture and art and apathy amongst the young and all the things we already know, sterile urban environments, belief in nothing, things changing as we buffet around and go from one thing to the next, blank stares, crazy. Okay, accept it. But the Jungian would say, ah, but that is going to be temporary too, because there's, and this comes to Erasmus' point, there is a compensate, there's bound to be a compensatory reprisal from the forces of the unconscious over this matter. The collective unconscious is a very powerful, numinous thing. Is it going to permit this state of affairs? And then comes the questions of modernity. What the hell will happen? And I have my own take on that, right? And a lot of what we see today I would describe as being simulated numinosity, in the sense that we will continue this projection of the archetypes outside of us, but because the actual archetype itself is sort of waning in power, we no longer have a direct, wholesome relationship with it, we start to find simulated archetypes. And the first one that qualifies with that is the crowd. It's very connected to the shadow. Maybe we can talk about that later if you remind me, but let's not go there right now. The crowd itself is a simulation of an archetype with a lot of perks for the kind of regressed, naked, empty, hollow person. What do you think the idol worship is? You know, not just your Dalai Lamas and all that, but the world leaders, these Klaus Schwabs, this King Charles. See, you won't understand their shit if you think that he's just satisfied being the king, or Klaus Schwab wants to be the king, or George Soros, or Obama, right? No, they want to be saints. Now it all becomes clear. They don't want to be world leaders. They don't want to be kings alone. That's too little for them. They want to see themselves being idealized up to the level of a saint. It accounts for a lot of the things that they're doing. They want to be canonized. In other words, we help them because they're mad and we're mad, so we project the archetype onto them in order to re-find and re-activate this numinous power that holds us enthralled. Too much deflation of the real thing sets up the simulated version. Is that celebrity worship as well? That's what I'm talking about. [Speaker 2] (55:43 - 55:51) Yeah, I'm curious what role you think the future of artificial intelligence might play in a simulation of archetypes. [Speaker 1] (55:52 - 57:06) It's the same thing. It's the idea that we are feeling deflated. So anything to do with technology is, you know, by another route, we'd have to get into Wilhelm Reich on this one, but by way of another route, because don't forget too that we've been talking about the ego, but this would include a whole story about how the first ego that we experience is body ego. One ancestral man, he became fascinated with his own body and had a very unusual relationship to it that we don't know much about. That's why he did tattooing and, you know, there's a lot of phallic stuff going on, totemism, because the body is the ego, and the ego is the body, and the technology is a way of sort of, it's hard to say this, it's like a replication or a simulation of our body's ego nature. [Speaker 2] (57:06 - 57:07) Mm-hmm. [Speaker 1] (57:07 - 1:05:58) Yeah. More, let's take a better example. This new gender dysphoria, right, and hypersexualization, but also this gender fluidity where boys want to be girls and girls want to be boys, right back in the early days, and it's also ontogenetic in the life of a child, they're bisexual. Bisexuality is the origin, original state. Don't let the feminists hear this, they'll take this up. That's not what I mean. And then, because of the archetypes, and then later on also because of culture, and because of our projection of our male, you know, the imagos on the mother and father, distinctly masculine and feminine, male and female, a contrasexual state is set up, in which the boy not only knows he's a boy, but he grows up as a young kid, he hates girls, and girls say, oh, there's horrible stinky boys. This is because the sexual hermaphroditic androgen, naturally androgynous bisexuality of the pre-ego germ is now splitting, as it's meant to do. It's all natural, nothing unnatural about this. But then the inferior type, right, when you're a boy and you know you're not a girl, the feminine qualities are repressed back into the unconscious, and then for a girl, when she identifies with being a girl, the male qualities are thrown into the unconscious and become part of her animus, you see? So the physicality and your sexuality is typological as well, as it's meant to be. But what this means is that before this level of differentiation, before the ego comes on board, certainly before the superego does at five, six, seven, you're really essentially bisexual, and this splitting hasn't taken place, right? If the archetypes are making a return in a demonic form, which I believe is happening, wouldn't those contrasexual repressed types start moving back into the conscious domain? Well, look around you. What is happening, and why? It's not just a politically motivated thing, although the people at the head, the architects of control, certainly know how to capitalize on what I'm talking about, but it's all based in the psychology of this depersonalization, a need to work again with the archetype, but how do you exactly do that? If you don't want to work with the actual archetype, you create these simulated versions that give you this feeling of power, and those are always causes, just like with the Nazis, the fascination of everyone with Hitler, right? See, it goes back to the power of the symbol. You can take a guy who's cleaning floors, some dude who's like an ice cream salesman or something, but when the call of war comes, he's a fucking bomber commander, squadron commander, who's got more fucking citations for valor than fucking Lord Kitchener has, and then you find out he's just a bank clerk, right? There's instances of the Victoria Cross, the highest award that can be ever given of a military decoration, has been given to Welsh coal miners for acts of unimaginable bravery when called to. Why did that happen? Well, what happened in Germany? Somebody only had to shout, the fatherland, blood and soil, and something happened inside, and it's the same for everyone. I see a symbol comes in front of me, like Constantine's symbol of the cross in the sky, that was the end of that. It was Jesus! So the symbol, often sent by the unconscious, is such a mesmerizing effect on you that you become a completely different person, and this is found everywhere. So today, when you see these mass movements and all sorts of things like that, look at, think of Ireland, there's so many instances. Back in the late 70s and 80s, you had a thing called the Hunger Strikers, Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers, guys who were in their 20s, being locked up in prison, members of the IRA, starved themselves to death, literally lay on beds and starved themselves to death after 70 days, as they fought with Margaret Thatcher's government for certain rights, whether you agree with those rights or not, they fought for them. Right, there's what I'm talking about in a nutshell. They were able to overwrite their feelings of, oh, I'd just love to eat that muffin or that omelette, I'm dying to eat, I'm dying for food. How can a young man say no and just lie there and die for his cause? Because a symbol or set of symbols dominated his unconscious, so he got possessed by these symbols that come from the inside, although they can also be projected outside. And also there's a streak there that says, yeah, I want to be worshipped for these beliefs, right? You can be caught up in a messiah complex, I want to be known as a hero of Ireland. But the symbol would be Irish liberation, we've got to be free of the tyrants, we're political prisoners, so we want proper costumes, we want to be separated from the rank and file of the criminals in here, so we want different food, different sales, different clothes. And Margaret Thatcher and that crowd said, the hell with you, you're not soldiers, nothing about you is to be distincted as an actual soldier, so no, and so they died. But that kind of mentality, like the other examples I'm giving, is all based in being possessed by a symbol of something, or they're thinking of Michael Collins or one of their heroes, is what if he could do it, I'm doing it too, I want to live like that heroic man. So this is the power of the symbol. Today it's exacerbated because the ego has come to a point where you can never break your connection with the archetype, but things can go wrong, things can become demonic. And so what I see now is, again, this projection outwards of the archetype, but in a sort of a negative way. With the crowd, right? The cause, the flag, all of this. And the transgender thing is a perfect example of the bisexuality returning, which is a gauge showing you that, oh my god, the unconscious is being mobilized here, ego resistance is breaking down. And of course then the apotheosis of this, taken to its extreme, is then collective regression. Which is simply that the archetype eats you up, you'll be devoured now, you won't be able to withstand, all processes of differentiation and individuation cease, and you find yourself hurtling backwards to ancestral stages of consciousness, where the individual again is overcome. It was just a blip anyway. What we know as individualism, I've just been describing the dynamics of how it comes to be, fails. And then Julian Jaynes, so many other scholars are saying, you know, we actually prefer, we actually prefer to be led by inner voices or the voice of the gods, and if we're not guided inside by that, we'll soon find world leaders, these new saints, to bow and scrape in front of. And the more, you know, they hate individuality, what are they saying? They're saying, come back to the Ouroboros, own nothing, want for nothing, we are your protectors, we know what's right for you, we're at the top of the black pyramid, but everything will be all right, and we're going, oh please, take away this burden of individualism, take away, you know, talk to me about non-dualism. Horrendous. [Speaker 2] (1:06:01 - 1:06:14) Where do you think, because you talked earlier about that the unconscious can only go in one direction for so long, where do you think this flip will happen, like where there'll be a rebalancing act in society, like you have any inkling on how you think it'll look? [Speaker 1] (1:06:15 - 1:22:28) It's already looking, it's not to come, it's already happening right now, there'll be demasculinization, ultra-feminization, more suicides, as the anxiety, because the reality principle brings high levels of anxiety, that's why we need heroes. See, remember the rites of passage, they don't mean anything unless there's a goal at the end, if it's the major arcana or any other iteration of rites of passage, rites of passage don't mean, and it's just a phrase, a word, unless they are rites of passage to some place, it's teleology, it's purpose. So the death of purpose, I don't have any purpose, I'm not integrating anything, I find myself at this highly atomized ego-identity stage, but it's been at the cost of other things, the short attention span, the return of the hermaphroditic principle, as we said, right? The absolute hatred of individualism, and all of this, and we said earlier, we talk about the shadow in relation to this, now's the time to do that. What we call the shadow, that's singular, it's not really the best term, because the shadow is really a realm, it's better to describe it as a realm in which all the parts of us that society frowns upon, and then we learn by our superego, which embodies these standards, we don't like about ourselves. So the shadow realm is where all these legitimate parts of ourselves are cast. Remember Nietzsche's, beware casting out your demons, you may be casting out the best part of you. Well, that's exactly what we've done. But at what behest, this is the part that all of these, we've done things on the shadow and the new age fraud, to point out that what they don't explain is, you wouldn't have a shadow archetype without the group. When we were absorbed in the plasma of the group as ancestral man, right? In the early stages, and there was no individuality, so any of the process we've described about, working with the archetype and weakening it, no, it was full blast. And so the group, it's like catching a virus. And they know this today by studying even primitive tribes today. If one person gets sick, all the tribe gets sick. If one person has a certain kind of powerful, numinous dreams, everybody in the rest of the tribe has a similar, feels similarly disaffected. Because there's no individual consciousness at all. The archetype is in domination, their collective unconscious, collective factors dominate. So what we know is individuality doesn't even exist. Now that was the way it was for literally millennia. We as individuals, there's a tiny blip in history. But during the time when you were absorbed in the crowd, the crowd decided what traits that you had were taboo. And it remained that way, even after the advent of ego individualism. Right up to today, and still it happens. The crowd determines, starting with mom and dad, what parts of yourself you must banish. So anytime you talk about a shadow, you're talking about a crowd. They go together, they can't exist apart. No crowd, no shadow. So shadow work is getting the fuck away from the crowd. Does that look like what's happening today? No. The crowd is more powerful now than it ever was before, which means that the individual member of the crowd is going to be more impoverished because that crowd, whether you like it or not, is going to determine what is correct behavior. That's where I see it going. So that all traces of individualism are completely crushed. And if Julian Jaynes and these others are right, go, we want that anyway. This is just an experiment of differentiating ourselves from the collective factors. And Jung agreed because the vast majority of his writings actually do warn about this. And therefore, one can just sort of track this, right? And see where it's going. I would say cultural, art. What is the art doing? What are people expressing? Or are they even expressing? What kind of TV films are being made? And what do they want? And are they wanting more and more powerful orators and leaders? Are they looking for, you know, the UN and the World Economic Forum, these big womb metaphors, you know, to keep them warm at night and banish the demons and the fears? See, the other thing we should say is that because of this extraordinary power of the archetypes, only when we became egos that break away from the archetype, do we learn about fear of the archetype. When we describe the mercury in the sun, you don't have the fear when you're absorbed in the uroboros. It's when you split apart from it that a dragon fight now has to occur in which you have to find the will and the power to turn around and face the frightful aspects. And what is the frightful aspect? The most fearful thing about the archetype? That it'll reabsorb you, devour you, eat you up, and you'll lose your sense of self-identity. And the other thing that goes along with this is the relative impotency of the ego in terms of libido cache. It gets fatigued easily. Well, naturally, just like a little baby has to sleep all day long. So the sleep of mankind has been longer than the awakening. It's only by incremental, incremental, like a worm, you know, like osmosis, that we've even managed to get to the sort of lucidity that we have today. But as I say, that's almost over-lucid. The light is shining very, very bright. And like burning a candle at both ends, there's going to be a consequence to that. And it could mean that the unconscious turns out, you know, to win in the end. And that's the fall of Atlantis all over again. That the libido is drained away and, you know, we fall back. But I would say what I look for is whether or not anybody's pushing back against that. Is that the secret death wish? And everywhere I look, I see that. Here's another thing we talked about. Said again, all that was holy in the world comes from the projection of the archetype as a means of gaining relief by pushing it out. So even the subjects that we find ourselves interested in, say a normie, starts to get interested in the tarot, starts to get interested in the mysteries, starts to get interested in various aspects of Eastern philosophy. Don't you see that that is also the need to find something to replicate the archetype? Even getting interested in psychology. See, this thing wraps around on itself. You have to be very careful. Can this interest in what we would call the new age thought, you know, and into some sort of thing about, you know, ancient civilizations? If you follow the trend of what I'm saying, you might even see that as being a search for the mystery. This is non-judgmental, right? It's just phenomenologically looking at the thing. Why is a Western dude, you know, getting interested in, say, Sufism? Why is somebody from the West converting to Islam? You might as well become a fucking Eskimo. What are they doing? What is all of this? Because if the archetypes are abandoning us or in some other way, we've drained them too much of energy, there's going to be this reprisal. Then we want to, in our error, start creating external simulations of the numina, of the numinous. Because we really have found out we can't live without it. But instead of regressing, there's a period where we have this moment of choice to say, well, I don't really want to regress. That's an option. But isn't there something else we can do in the meantime? And so for the last 200 years, since the rise of the spiritualist movement, could that be what it's all about? That the influx of Eastern mysticism and Gnosticism and all of this bead rolling and all the rest of it, and even the genuine interest in, say, yoga, for instance, meditation, transcendental meditation. And again, it's not about judging it. It's just about observing. What are we doing of a day? Is it positive? Is it identical with the moral uplift? Is it really the hero's journey? Or is it a subtly disguised way of falling back into sleep, of letting go of the Western tradition? And this becomes very important to us because one of the other ways that sometimes people look at mythology, we were talking about mythology, is that mythology can be best understood as the psyche writing its own tale, its own story. So just as an individual can write an autobiography about my life, the psyche has an autobiography of its journey that is called mythology. So this is where the rites of passage would now overlay perfectly on a mythology because it's the rites of passage, not of an individual, but of the hero with a thousand faces. Right? So there's this telescopic and macroscopic, you know, there's a pulling back and going forward involved in all of this. And looking at historical epochs in a particularly creative way, a woman, we're all here, all conservative, and the next minute we're super liberal, and then the next thing it goes over here, you know, looking at it from the highest vantage point, that's truth. Truth is when you are looking at things from multiple points of view, you're recapitulating what you already thought you knew, you're going back over it, and you're giving it the time to consolidate. Sometimes maybe it takes years for a consolidation process of things you've learned to really seep into your unconscious. People have three-second fucking attention spans now. So one of the things to answer your question is, there's no consolidation. I don't have the time to listen to anybody's talk or speech and then sit there and mull over it for any length of time and move on to the next thing. So this episodic behavior is one of the things that is coming up now, and the social media is a response to that. You want endless entertainment and social media? You got it. Then comes another factor that must be mentioned. As the ego breaks away from the great neutron star of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, another thing takes place. In its action of differentiation to say, I am me, I have my own rules, I'm here on my own, I'm the new center of consciousness. What we know as highers and lowers dynamic occurs because the ego sees itself as above the ocean of the uroboric womb. It just comes with the territory. It's a feeling of aboveness. In other words, what we know, and do we know it, is higher and lowers. In other words, hierarchy. So gradually we see our system, our world system, not only becoming more authoritarian and totalitarian, but there's a greater reliance on the hierarchy. It came with the ego's need to differentiate. And so many of the mythological motifs like Moses on the mountain and Jesus on the hill of Golgotha or Mount of Olives and the hero and all of these things also boil down to this, about getting above. It's called sublimation. When I get above, people have a lot of dreams of flying and falling. People who get into like aircraft and even become pilots or fascinated by aircraft and hot air balloons, you know all this. It's all based on a psychological typology of getting above and getting higher. But the point being that our society takes on a very hierarchical model. Now there's also holarchy, but we don't experience holarchy. It's part of the biosphere and the physiosphere and the new sphere, these three spheres. Holarchy is absolutely inherent, but we don't experience it. What is holarchy? Holarchy is, you know, the more... Well, it's like the cell, right? Or it's like an ecosphere, like our Gaia or Ecosphere. Okay. But within the holarchy, is little mini hierarchies. So when you're looking up close to it, everything looks like it's dog eat dog, animal eating animal and all. It's only when you pull out to the furthest view that you see that everything is a holarchy. And that kind of means also that any part, like a hologram, any part of the holarchy contains within it a microcosm of the whole, where that's not the case in hierarchy. You see? It didn't take too long to explain. But there's also a continuum. The interesting about this is we don't experience holarchy because of the right-left brain division. The left brain is trained only to see things as a hierarchy. The right brain does perceive holarchy, but it's been silenced. Now, if you saw too much holarchy, if you work with the right brain too much, there's self-loss. Because that is like seeing the oceanic movement of the universe in which you are sort of like you have to dissolve yourself or you'll be goaded to absorbing yourself into that matrix and therefore losing self-identity. The left brain is so hyper-focused on the particular individual concrete thing that in its own way there is a negative aspect to that. So whether it's left brain, right brain would be sort of loss of identity, loss of libido in that sense. And the left brain also is too tight a focus into the particular that you don't see the particular thing connection to the whole. So again, balance is required. But I don't see how you can have balance. The East is very right brain, we are very left brain, and neither the twain do meet. [Speaker 2] (1:22:30 - 1:22:47) Yeah. And what we're seeing rise in, I guess, antagonism to the obscurity of objectivity that we see with the gender dysphoria, etc. is obviously, as we mentioned before, I return to dogmatism as the answer as well, which obviously isn't. [Speaker 1] (1:22:49 - 1:23:27) Yeah. See, think again back to this thing where people think that a religious revival is going to be the solve-all, right? It's very much on the cards. The ancestral mind that we talked about when it was overwhelmed by archetypal content lived in what has been called a sort of participation mystique. Now, we don't know fucking anything about that. It's probably very right brain but we really don't know what that means. We're so completely out of it. But we're not so out of it that we don't want that again. [Speaker 2] (1:23:29 - 1:23:37) Yeah. Isn't it another form of a return to the uroboric state? But under the guise of actually, no, we're fighting something. [Speaker 1] (1:23:38 - 1:24:43) That's it. That's the point I was hoping to make. You will disguise the regressive aspect from yourself and say it's not in the name of non-dualism. It's done in the name of oneness. It's done in the name of humanity. It's nirvana. I'm releasing myself from the wheel of karma. I'm a yogi, right? And it's fucking amazing how this works. You don't admit that you're hurtling back through the Oedipus phases to this, you know, in Autorine state, Intra-Autorine state. That's too horrific for you to, you know, admit that you're regressing. We were maybe bad in life, but we haven't gone that far to openly. So you do it in the name of I'm searching for God. Yeah. You'll tell the guru, Guru, take me off this planet. I can't take it anymore. Can't you just zap me up to heaven right now? [Speaker 2] (1:24:47 - 1:25:05) Michael, what are, because you said balance is important and integration of opposites. And if the West is more left and the East is more right-brained, what are some of the positives or what can be integrated from the East? Because I know you've written a lot about some of the negative elements, but what are some of the positives of that side? [Speaker 1] (1:25:07 - 1:25:22) I've never been able to find any. They're anti-natural. They're anti-body. That's bad enough for an entire, you know, age, millennial, millennium. [Speaker 2] (1:25:22 - 1:25:34) For example, like you did, you know, people like Alan Watts or Krishnamurti, do you think they kind of found some of the good in those philosophies? [Speaker 1] (1:25:34 - 1:33:05) Not really. If you read Krishnamurti's books, he comes down on the Eastern jive with such ferocity. It makes you, you know, bring sweat to your brow. Alan Watts was more detached and non-judgmental, getting into just the histories. Because remember, their ego identity is very, very different than what I was talking about. They are more holy in that sense, with small caps, because they're still in the power of the archetype. They've been able to sacralize the world. And that can be, you know, that can appear to be on the surface very attractive to Westerners. They're more sacred. You know, the way you eat their food and have all these images of the gods and all of this. I know a lot about this. So on the surface, more monasteries, more this, you know, more reverent, more ascetic. But actually it's just fucking world denying. There's nothing more spiritual out there. There's a couple of exceptions, but on the whole, no, they're fucking, they're just non-differentiated. Their ego consciousness did not develop. Now, time will tell. This is all up in the air. Maybe because they didn't develop such a hyper, an attitude of hyper egocentricity, they won't be as damaged by what's to come. But there's no, you know, we can't predict. And so there's no safety haven just by, well, that's it then. That's it then. I'm joining Islam. I'm getting over there and going to Hinduism. I think it's safer. But you can't. And anyway, that's the crowd again. Remember, we've just analyzed the crowd. The crowd and the shadow self are linked. The way out of this nightmare is to detach from the crowd, to preserve your individualism, to preserve your, that it wasn't made explicit. But see the whole movement that we've been talking about, about the heat, the strange paradox is the ego comes out of the pleroma of the unconscious. If a person's just listening frivolously, it appears that the ego is standing there, you know, waving its fist at the unconscious as if they're two separate, divided realities. No, it is the paradox of all paradoxes is that which we call ego identity. Consciousness is itself a manifestation of the abyss. On some level, the abyss itself harbors and engenders and facilitates that which is, you know, ostensibly transcending it. This is why this is such an immensely important study. The dynamic as the ego tries to struggle for its self identity is definitely one of conflict and dualism. Has to be, can't be any other. But the idea is of the ego structure to try and become as powerful and libidinous as the unconscious, but in an individualized way. It's trying to build up its cache of power. That's why, and it has to do that by, we said, it's attached to, always will be. There's no source of libido without this mother, the great mother, you know, of the unconscious feeding it. But it has an ambivalent relationship to its own origins. Every tower is rooted in the ground, isn't it? And if it's not rooted in the ground, it ain't going to last very long. So there is a much more primordial connection between that which we call ego identity and the unconscious. And psychoanalysis, psychology, was meant to be the study of that kadanchionis, this extraordinary connection between the circle and the point, the ring and the rod. So by being anti-psychological in our cultures, we're doing great, great damage. Because there is some sort of, that's what a mandala is. A mandala is the bringing together of the triangle, the square, and the circle, right? So that ego is no longer vulnerable. And it has a very working, malleable, mutable connectivity with the ocean from which it has arisen. And there's a harmony between the ring and the rod, the wave and the particle, whatever way you want to look at it, right and left brain, body and mind. So that's where the balance comes in. But what I've always maintained is that there is no A to Z book teaching anyone that it is something that is awakened as what's called a transcendental symbol, a transcendent function within the individual. So again, the individuality is indeed the key that opens the gate. Because otherwise you're back to group again. And if you're back to group again, and A to Zs and shrink wrap, then drive through, then you're back to the shadow. Because the group is always going to, by its very dint of being a group, decide on what is acceptable behavior and attitudes and what isn't. And that's a no brainer. I mean, even in the sporting team, right, the attitudes will be completely oriented by the group. So you're just going round and round in circles. And because our own individual daily experiences, like a little centipede with 100 legs, each person's own experiences is feeding back into the archetypal matrix. It goes without saying that you cannot, in fact, completely divide from it. And so when Jung, you know, people like that are trying to suggest methods of integrating the unconscious, you know, maybe there's a lot of sanity in there. And he himself painted very beautiful mandalas and was heavily into that. And he made sure that his clients did too. Which means art. Well, we need more art. And we need more, you know, right brain. Because the right brain, at least, remember, the left brain is so close up that it doesn't see the connections. It doesn't see the holographic aspect. The left brain, the right brain does. The right brain can encompass the totality. See, we talked earlier on about symbol. Symbol comes from the word symbolium, which means to bring together. Symbolic. That's opposed to diabolic. Dia, dia means to split. So if you don't have symbolic, you have diabolic. Self-explanatory. [Speaker 2] (1:33:05 - 1:33:05) Yep. [Speaker 1] (1:33:07 - 1:40:29) The symbol is the wholeness. And that then is the key to individuation, because that has to do with what Jung called the transcendent function. But that is a unique epiphenomena of your own particular psyche as you go through the rites of passage. It can't be installed from the outside. It can never be drawn up by the crowd or even by a secondary person. Maybe a few pointers can be made, you know. And that's because who can judge where you are in your interpretive... Back to this again. It's not a sign. It's a symbol. But where are you in the symbol? The symbols that have become beloved to you through your dreams or through something else. You are the interpreter. But you might be miles ahead of interpreting a symbol from another person who's got, you know, lesser insight into that. So there's no... There's no we. When you're looking at false paths and false teachers, you'll always hear the word we. But what we gonna do? And what's the world gonna do? When you're listening to a real mystic like a Krishnamurti, there's no such phraseology. In fact, there's just disdain for that because he knows what you're doing. You're running away. You're heading to the group. He disbanded the fucking Theosophical Society in contempt, saying that truth is a pathless land. Well, so is selfhood. Because at the end of this rite of passage, what is the whole purpose? But now we've established these two extraordinary facts about what we've been talking about, that the very unconscious from which you must separate actually creates the dynamic. It's the essence by which you can even do the individuating. In order to be an individual, I must individuate from something, right? It must be in relationship to the context of where I'm coming from. In order for me to know myself as a self, I must first know what is the not-self. So the not-self has... But the not-self has given rise to this principle. So anything we know as ego identity didn't pop in out of the clouds. The Egyptians tried to create myths to account for this spontaneous appearance of self-identity, and really they didn't do a very good job. They all forgot that this matrix below is responsible. All right, but that's only two stages. What's the third? That's what Jung is a genius who discovered, individuation. We've been talking about ego consciousness. What about the thing called the self? The self cannot come into being unless the ego first creates the separation, right, and becomes a new center of consciousness. In fact, it is consciousness. Or the ego is like an island and then a lighthouse. Consciousness splits off from the ocean of the unconscious, and then upon the hill of consciousness is a tower, and that's the ego. And at the top of that is the light of ego consciousness, very focused, very laser-like. And we all benefit from having that. Although, as I said, there's a built-in dislike of it too. But the reason for this whole architectatonic development is for the birth of the self, which will replace the ego as the true center, not just of consciousness, but of the whole matrix. And that is ordained by that which is primordial. On some level, the very origin, the dark unconscious, wants it this way. Because if you think about it, there's no other explanation. So the antagonistic stance is something that Jung, some of the more positive Jungians say, well, that kind of does fade away in older age. Up until the point of the middle age, the antagonistic relationship of the ego struggling in an armored way against all of the threats is the dominant feeling. And that's when the ego needs to be what it is. And as I said, my God, the idea of the colossal error of trying to change that and come out as the enemy of the ego. But later on, there's a softening of that as the self comes into being and it's able to be less defensive and more mutable and accepting. And then it slowly moves in. This is what individuation is. It slowly takes over the realm carved out by the ego. And this time it embraces the entire psyche, conscious and unconscious, like the round table. And this is something that can't happen, in the most part, it happens for the person who's older and has been going through proper rites of passage because the rites of passage themselves, as I said, don't mean anything unless there's a teleology, a purpose behind it. And the purpose is the awakening of selfhood. But to me, as you can see from all my works, this is the antithesis of crowd consciousness. It's the higher serpent, just like the Uroboros was the lower serpent, you know, the snake in repose and sleep. Well, there's a higher manifestation of it, the dragon, right, which has embodied the four elements plus one, the quintessence. And it can be seen as coming of a full circle or there's, again, it's all up to the individuals. Nature, you know, and that's the path of the mystic. That's the path of the mystic. The opposite is the regression, but it's animistic, magical thinking. So when the freak who wrote Harry Potter or these fuckers who wrote The Secret, they're pretending to be mystics when, in fact, all they're handing you is what's called magical child thinking. Back to the animistic version of the Uroboros, which also gives you sort of clairvoyant powers, or at least it gives you this buildup of a feeling of magical power. So you're Harry Potters and then our society makes it into billion-dollar sellers. Why? For the same reason. Watch out about how we are trying to re-sacralize our world by loving things that are to do with magic and meditation and yoga and some more gurus, please. And political correctness and some Gnostic shit thrown in, a lot of Gnostic shit thrown in. And to me, it always feels icky because it's all being disguised as a religious zeal, religious experience, but actually it's completely regressive. And it's shocking when you don't see other people, you know, I'm not preaching anything, but it's shocking when you see that other people don't catch it. You know. [Speaker 2] (1:40:34 - 1:40:55) Yeah, well said, Michael. I think that's a lot for our listeners to digest for sure at this point. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing. Is there, I guess, any final thoughts which you have to wrap this up or you're happy to leave it at that? [Speaker 1] (1:40:56 - 1:41:02) Well, just the fact that there's so much one could say, I've just been, you know, condensing this. [Speaker 2] (1:41:03 - 1:41:03) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:41:04 - 1:45:25) But it's a magical thing because when you look at the whole dynamic, it does seem quite contradictory that that which is trying to be ethyphallic and differentiated, but that's written in the very substructure. Anything that you find at the top couldn't possibly be without some, you know, the antecedent stages are not, let's just say, the possibility is already written into the very structure of the core of the universe. And that's what makes me feel that there's a moral universe out there. You can prove it in many other ways, but this also tends to, you know, for me to be a massive proof of it because what we're talking about, although it can be from one perspective seen as a kind of a heroic struggle, but somewhere in the book of life, this is already preordained that this should occur. Spirit, if you will, these are the rites of passage of the spirit itself, right, like mythology can be seen from one angle as the psyche writing its own autobiography. But at the same time, we're not going to come to the bottom of each individual mythical, which some people try to do, but that's lunatic. Interpretation is the means by which the ego comes into existence, not description. And therefore, even no matter how you break the thing down, interpretation is still required. And again, it will be required. And again, it will be quite an infinite regress. And for this, you need the left brain, which is a very valuable tool for interpretation. But you also need to be able to pull back, you know, and see bigger pictures all the time, which is what the right brain is for. So in many ways, even neurology is accounted for here that the two kinds of our, the two kinds of brain that we have are instrumental to this interpretive process. We've just been walking through all the different reasons why interpretation even came about as a way to negotiate the power of the archetype. And the worst case scenario is that something's gone wrong and the archetypes will reprise. You know, they'll come back in a demonic form. That's a whole other thing I get into, right? Because we haven't really gone into that much detail here about the nature of the animal and the animus. Yeah, we did a bit on the shadow, which is really, really good. But, you know, again, it's impossible for any individual to say, but collective factors are a worry, obviously. And an authoritarian structure is a worry and hierarchy is a worry. Yeah, those are all bad signs. You know, because they really are about, you know, they look, they look more like the ego is being dissolved again. Now, even though it may not be dissolved by going backwards in the classic regressive way. Yeah, but as I said, we project the archetypes outside. So when you see political movements or human movements or whatever going on, it's still the same thing. It's just that, you know, instead of falling back into neurosis and pathology, you join the fucking crowd and become a social justice warrior or something like that. But those were the eyes to see. So communism, socialism, right? It's all nihilism. But you're always doing it with a compensatory cover and camouflage. I'm doing this for my brothers. There's injustice in the world, don't you know? And this is just, you know, now become ubiquitous along with the guilt of anyone who, you know, says, yeah, yeah, fine, mate, you know, but I'm not necessarily believing in that. I try to do the best amount of good I can do in life and the least amount of evil. But, you know, I'm not buying into your social causes. I'm a bit wary. And the person with the psychological insight is even all the more wary. So that's why I dedicate, you know, so much time to getting into that. And I'm really glad that we had a chance to talk about this today. [Speaker 2] (1:45:27 - 1:45:46) Yeah, Michael, thank you so much for coming on. And always, you know, we always tell our listeners, man, especially when you're on, go to Unslaved, go to MichaelDesari.com, check out, I mean, Michael's just breadth of research and work on, I mean, lifetimes of an investigation you can do with what you've done, man. And you're a gift and we appreciate you so much. [Speaker 1] (1:45:47 - 1:46:03) Same here, mate. Really appreciate your questions. They're great. You know, I don't get to do this on other podcasts very much. You know, so it's really thrilling when you do get a chance. Yeah. To go into it. [Speaker 2] (1:46:04 - 1:46:25) Absolutely. Guys, thanks for listening. As always, I highly encourage everyone head to Unslaved.com. You know, it's the best, one of the best investments in self you could possibly make. And just incredible amounts of knowledge to be absorbed there, which really can enhance your journey. Michael, thanks once again. And to everyone listening, we'll see you next time.