Mark Jones The Search for the Soul

[Speaker 1] (0:00 - 1:52) This episode and all our episodes are brought to you by our amazing members within our premium membership community, Friends of the Truth. That's the reason we get to sit down week to week and record these incredible dialogues and provide this value with some amazing individuals. So if you'd like to support our podcast, support our platform and support this endeavor, you can become a basic or premium member at friendsofthetruth.co and in exchange, on top of having the chance to support what it is that we do, we provide awesome value with regular monthly calls, members-only podcasts, and over 100 plus hours of previously recorded members-only content. All that and more is at friendsofthetruth.co. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Here for the Truth podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti, got my co-host Erasmus with me as always. Today, we have Mark Jones joining us, an incredible evolutionary astrologer and teacher. We have an incredible dialogue on just the search for the soul, cultivating meaning in one's life, becoming who you were born to be, all the things that you guys know that we're into with an incredible array of commentary from amazing teachers come and gone, Jung, Sri Aurobindo, Gurdjieff, and so much. Just a really, really, awesome dialogue, which I think you guys are going to get a lot of value out of. Thank you so much for listening. If you guys get value from this podcast, wherever you're absorbing it, please like, comment, subscribe, follow. It would mean a lot to the work that we do. To watch all our episodes, you can head to hereforthetruth.com and to see what we got on offer. You can also go to hereforthetruth.com and check the coaching and office tab. Rise Above the Herd will be back next year. In the meantime, we do always have our membership community, Friends of the Truth, which you can find at friendsofthetruth.co. All that being said, please enjoy this episode. [Speaker 2] (1:53 - 1:59) You are now listening to the Year for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Graffiti and Yerasimos. [Speaker 1] (2:03 - 11:54) Mark Jones is a renowned astrologer, teacher, and transpersonal psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience and 10,000 hours of client work, offering transformational consultations to help individuals unlock their true potential. An expert in evolutionary astrology, Mark is the author of Healing the Soul and The Soul Speaks, which integrate his astrological expertise with therapeutic insights. With degrees in literature and creative writing, Mark's journey began with Kabbalistic studies and advanced through extensive training in psychosynthesis and evolutionary astrology, where he became a leading UK teacher. He now teaches globally, empowering students and clients to explore astrology's transformative power. Mark, thank you so much for being here for The Truth. That's great, and what a great introduction. And I appreciate you being able to pronounce psychosynthesis, which my mother called photosynthesis for years, which led to many an entertaining conversation. Yeah, he sounds like a great guy, this Mark Jones, doesn't he? I mean, I hope, yeah, I live up to that. I really do try and do those things. I really try to use my skill set to help people across the world. Amazing, man. He's a great guy. I've got first-hand experience now, having had a consultation together, which I've got lots of value from, so thank you so much for that. One way we always like to tick this one off, especially with first-time guests, is we want to get deep into your personal journey, into your personal hero story, your major rites of passage, wherever you feel called to start. What were some of the major catalyzing transformative moments in your life that kept evolving you down this path? Yeah, I mean, how long have we got? I'd say a classic thing for people attracted to therapeutic work is that they have difficult elements in their own childhood. So certainly I felt that sense of misunderstanding that my intuitive nature, where I was really coming from as a child and a young person, wasn't really understood by the world around me. And I had that kind of glitch between my intuition and the way I was seeing things and the way the world appeared to be happening. Now obviously, I tried to learn from that as well. You don't just want to stay in an intuitive bubble, but I also came up against a lot of resistance. So when you have struggles like that, I think it predisposes you to a certain desire to help people. I remember a particularly painful night as a teenager, if I can start like this strangely, which I don't normally do. Some lovely girl I'd met on some history group tour to other schools had been writing to me. She was literally going out with some England hockey player. She was a really cool person and she liked me. She came to visit me in my village. We'd been writing to each other and I just had this kind of ennui. I had this kind of sickness of self, not feeling in my own village that I was really expressing myself. I just picked her up at the station. I walked around the village right back to the station. I put her back on the next train in this sense of like, I don't feel the when I'm not away from here, when I'm not in this exciting place where I first met you. I don't feel good about myself in some way. I can't be myself. And conscientious kind of young man that I was, I went home that night and I felt terrible about it. I just basically blown off this lovely, sweet person that I'd been writing to. And I really wrestled through the night and I concluded about four in the morning, I had to go to school the next day. So not very much sleep that I was going to do some good in this world. And even if it only hit home with one person, it'd be worth it. I would make something of this sorry ass feeling I had, this feeling of where my life was, where my emotional and psychic reality was. And I would do something to make amends. And that memory came back to me in my late twenties when I was doing a psychotherapy training. And we were asked to reflect on how did you end up here? How did you end up training to be a spiritually orientated psychotherapist? And that's what came back to me that, you know, it tied in with that childhood sense of being this very sort of good, conscientious, loving, highly moral, quite clever young child. And feeling disappointed by the world or weighed on by people's burdens and their psychic detritus and the kind of sluggishness of the world and the way that so many adults around me seemed unhappy or burdened by things. And I realized that had a massive impact on me, but I wrestled with that in my own entirely intuitive way. So I came at 15 or 16 or maybe 16 or 17 to an intuitive insight, a bit like certain spiritual texts, you know, do some good, give, be loving, come to something. Now, I'm not saying I upheld that perfectly from that day forth, but it was an important inner principle. Then I go to college, meet my close, weird, intense friend, John, and we turn on to the first book he buys me is a Rudolf Steiner book, From Buddha to Christ. You know, we look at literature together, poetry. He's a very clever guy. We end up writing our own poetry course because Warwick University's literature program, when you were doing English and American literature, did not have a poetry program. We persuaded these professors to create a poetry program for just the two of us. And we became obsessed with the poets, the more mystically orientated poets. Way before Popeyeville and the show X Factor in the UK, we used to have this term X Factor for the fact that the poets were seeking this more mystical presence, this kind of engagement on this deeper level. We were in our own naive, highly intellectual, somewhat pretentious way, looking for God in a sort of godless or looking for the divine or the sacred in an otherwise materialistic world. Then we experimented with psychedelics down the line, doing post-grad. I only did psychedelics briefly, but I really went for it and that unleashed something. Really a kind of experience of, you know, almost akin to cosmic consciousness essentially and being reborn. Then the rebirth element just went on for years and I was fortunate enough to stumble into, and it really was stumbling into, teachers, genuine teachers, mystics, people who'd done real practices, the Kabbalists that I studied astrology with. So I was studying the Kabbalah, various different occult mystical systems. I had this intense realization after psychedelics that my education was incomplete. It was focused on the wrong kind of thing. So literally from 22 to 27, I just read super intensely, world religion, mysticism, the occult, psychology. That's what gets me into astrology, but it's Kabbalah initially. I'm studying Kabbalah and then I realized there's this like Zev Ben Shimon HaLevi teaching at college. I go to one of his weekends, I persuade my mother to pay for it as extra education, post-grad education. I'd show up and it happens to be his weekend on Kabbalistic astrology. It's the only thing I ever went to study with him. He's literally placing the planets on the tree of life as an incarnational map. That perspective's never left me. I was sharing before I came on that just to get to know you guys or what you did, I was viewing a Michael Tisarian episode that you guys were talking to him about, the inner zodiac. It really just struck me that I was fortunate enough to be presented with literally, there's this idea in Kabbalah of the Adam Kadmon, the original human, the divine emblem of the human. So it's a sort of cosmic map of the ultimate human, and it's also an individual map of the individual human. Warren Kenton, which is his astrological name of this Yevben Shimon HaLevi, he was overlaying your chart onto that map. So it was explicit to me that astrology was being used to map a hidden, extradimensional, soulful, psychic domain of the human experience. I wasn't going into astrology because I was interested in ancient texts or predictive techniques of how to control the weather, elections, your finances, whatever, your love life. It was just presented immediately as like a mystery that could unlock who you really are. And I feel very blessed that, I don't think I was the deepest guy at some points, I think I was just an intuitive, I was a sweet person. I met good people and I was fortunate enough to be profoundly influenced by them. I literally met three high quality spiritual teachers between the ages of 22 and 24 in the immediate aftermath of those experiences. To help me orientate to the world that had opened up by being shown that my psyche was real, and it had a real interface with a real presence in the universe itself, or in reality itself. And that's deeply shocking. I think it put me back into something I knew as a child, but in my teenage years, the sort of loneliness, the materialism. When your favorite books, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea and J.D. Salinger's work when you're 16 or something, you're clearly not the happiest kid. A book about alienation and a guy freaking out at himself. But it's also an exploration of freedom, that behind our paradoxical rejection of ourselves, there might actually be a deeper freedom that we've given up on, that's part of our sickness. So even as I was exploring my sickness, I was stumbling across these doorways, if you like, to what might not be sick. Beautifully said. Yeah. Sorry. I just said beautifully said. Thank you for that. [Speaker 3] (11:54 - 11:54) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (11:54 - 41:06) My pleasure. My pleasure. And I credit the quality of the teachers I was exposed to with great love and reverence now. It's funny, right? Years later, so during the last period, the last five years, I was in a creative lab where people were exploring astrology as archetypes to potentially help people in workplaces work up how their companies work, or they were doing this version of constellation work where they were using astrological archetypes. And there was this person there, and I just had this strong intuition, I need to know this person. I asked them out for dinner. I don't know if they thought it was a date or something. I mean, we just sat down and when we realized, I was just like, I just felt intuitively called to connect with you. Within 10 minutes, we discover she was probably in the room that day when I did that Qabbalistic astrology 20 years before, 25 years before. And she worked in the inner circle with that teacher for the remaining decades. And she was able to tell me during the COVID period when he passed away and I was able to attend his funeral online and actually just stand up in my own, in this office, in front of this computer, I was able to stand up and pay my respects as his coffin was brought in. And I would have never known that without just following this personal intuition to just connect with this person. Mark, what do you think, I guess, prevents an individual from connecting to this level of intuition? Great question. I mean, there's a series of factors. There is a collective factor, which is that society and civilization has highlighted intellectual development over intuitional development for a long time. I mean, arguably for centuries or millennia, but certainly post enlightenment. And I'm not going to just overly critique the enlightenment because obviously we live in societies that have received enormous benefits. But the overly rational focus, dismissing the direct intuitive knowing is enormously costly to people to the level. So, I mean, the rejection could be absurd. I mean, I was literally working with someone once who was walking down the aisle in this massive Hawaii wedding, tens of thousands, she's about to walk down the aisle. And this inner voice just speaks in her ear clearly, do not marry this man. This is all a huge mistake. And she just goes ahead and marries him and spends the next seven years just extrapolating herself from this disastrous situation. So, we're at the point where your intuition cannot just subtly, you know, we're not talking dream symbolism or, you know, I was thinking about this and then a bird flew a certain direction out of the window and it made me think of freedom and I need to do this. No, not subtle stuff. Literally voices can speak to you and we can ignore them because we demonize that as pathological effect. You know, you're a paranoid schizophrenic at worst or just a kind of oddball who has failed to integrate the great rational game of our culture and civilization. Now, again, I have to say, rationality is an enormously positive, constructive thing. You know, we all can all see what happens when the world becomes deeply irrational and just feeling based and chaotic. At the same time, there used to be an order in which it was understood that the mind was a gift from another dimension, if you like, a more divine realm. The mind was in service to a greater being. We separated that, arguably, most specifically around the enlightenment and in doing so, it takes very strong people to stay with it. People learn to lose it somewhere, usually childhood, somewhere down the line, or they're made to feel ashamed, you know, or they lose in love. You know, your intuition said this hot person is great for me and then they break your heart and then they just start retreating from it. Whatever it is, you could look at people's lives and you could analyze people's lives from the basis of when did you start giving away the precious faculty? When did you start trading the jewel for costume paste replacement? And that would be, I think, very much along the same graph as when did you stop trusting yourself and when did that trust in self start decaying? I mean, do you know how many people, guys, when you work as a therapist or you work as a therapeutic ally to people, or even sometimes when you wake up in your own family and you realize that people are a mess, just how many people don't trust anyone and therefore, if you're at the point of not trusting anyone, you don't trust yourself, yeah, fundamentally. It's rampant and we see this in this increasingly like pod-like reality, don't we, where people sit in and watch their own prescribed Netflix, their own streaming services, their own content, a wonderfully freeing world, as I'm sure you guys know with what you're doing, but also a world that just increases the sense of people being in their own bubble, just their own thing, no communal, no coming around and watching a show that generations watched together, like in my childhood when there were only three channels when I was first born, three channels on TV and one or two of them just stopped at 10 o'clock at night and they just turned up, you know, and there's music playing. So, but the deeper question, because it's a brilliant question, it's not just collective or societal, there is a individual tragedy, you could say, or it's frequently developmental, right, people come into this world and they're raised by people, flawed people doing their best, I have no beef with people, I know how hard it is to be a parent and there are other people here who know that too, but frequently they're raised by people who already gave away the jewel, they're already beaten down by experience, by trauma, by teachers, by society, by their own parental failures, by ancestral pains, by the tragic nature of human life, you know, it's brief, you just get into it, then you grow old and die, even in the best case scenario and you often see that when people are very young, they sell out something precious in themselves so that they can stay apart, that family system or that tribe at school or that tribe later on, you know, from sports tribes to political tribes, they want that group in card and they sell out a little piece of the preciousness that allowed them the individual access. Yeah, do you think there's anything from an astrological standpoint that would highlight why, let's say, a child or a teenager is more apt to connect to the intuition, to, you know, go on their hero's journey and maybe, you know, go against the collective, you know, whether it's society-wise or more specifically in the early days of family-wise, because I get, I'm always curious, like what is it in me as a first-generation Greek-American when so many other children that were born into Greek families maybe stayed home, took over the family business, you know, what is it in me, maybe even versus someone else in my family, like that has this connection to something deeper or a curiosity or the wherewithal to go, no, this path is not the path that I'm going to be on, I'm going to take this road. I mean, we could, for example, and some of the point, look at your individual chart, we would see qualities, we could say, broadly speaking, because I want to be clear here, I'm not just saying all childhood states are somehow better, because that would be very naive, wouldn't it? I mean, evolution is real, human development is real, adult development is real, the initiations that take us into adulthood and greater responsibility are real, I'm not wanting to idealize the child. At the same time, if you only look at things in a developmental model, you know, the child's kind of nothing, they don't know how to do anything, when they're very young, you just put them down, they can't do anything for themselves, and then they become a fully blown adult, that misses something, this preciousness that's come in with them, it's like the words with poem intimations of immortality, they come in trailing clouds of glory, there is an essence, there is a, they're closer to the pre-soul state or the mystery, the mystery from which they came, they're closer to it. So if you don't overly pressure them too young, if you don't condition too rapidly out of fear of fitting in or schooling, there's a chance to retain it. But maybe, maybe we all have to go through some version of the betrayal there, maybe we all have to have disappointment in order to find out, do we have the mettle to respond once this happened? So I think there's a series of mysterious factors. I've certainly, I've worked with people before where the family system was extraordinarily traumatic, and you know, multiple of the siblings have mental health issues of a serious kind, others are addicts, or you know, really tragic circumstances, and the one person I'm talking to came through it and went on to say, become a therapist or do good work with people. And I think that is to do with individual spark, that some people just are sensitive enough to realise when they're giving away the precious thing and they keep some of it back, they learn to hide some of it somewhere that they can access later. And there's some really beautiful, complex work on childhood trauma done by a psychotherapist called Donald Kalshet, where he analyses this kind of space, the way it can become persecutory and defensive, but also the way that you can place the heart or another special sensitive part of your childhood in a special realm effectively, almost like a magical act, so that you can draw on it later, so that you don't give all of it away, so you don't lose it. In the betrayal that can occur developmentally, betraying yourself to belong, sacrificing individuation for the state of loyalty. That's why we've got to be very careful with loyalty in this life. You want to be loyal to certain core principles, you want to be loyal to reality or the presence itself, and that will take temporary forms where it overlights someone's work or a cause or something, but you don't see me rushing out to follow every cause that comes up. I try to stay loyal to certain key principles, if you like, inside or the very quality of essence we're talking about. Gurdjieff had this great point, he was basically like, children give away their essence to develop a personality. In our work, he said, we want to reverse this somewhat, we want to learn in the work with adults to make the personality passive again to the essence, so that the being can shine through. The personality that's all about doing an achievement and fitting the essence being about being, radiation, just radiating your quality into the world. Would you say that's one way to describe the individuation process, to weaken the ego personality in order for that essence to shine through to a greater extent? Yeah, that's a good question, and it's maybe a little bit more complex than that. I certainly wouldn't say weaken. When Gurdjieff meant become passive, he meant an actual discipline training so that you consciously take your conditioned reflexes and re-explore them in the original protein form of their essence. Because Gurdjieff argued that by 18, even, you'd learned how to move. That's why he had so many movement exercises and dances. He was basically saying you're so conditioned, even the way you get up and down in a chair has already been set by all the previous times you do it, and now you're just doing it with a very limited muscle range or a very limited engagement. So he was attacking our automaticness, our mechanicalness. So one model would be say, yes. You see, if you only take the developmental model, you say you come from nothing, the oceanic nothingness, and you just develop over time. If you do that, you forget this essence quality, and that's a reversal of the development where you have to actually go back and take something precious that you came in with. But I would say it's both at the same time. That's the paradox. The developmental model is still real. You still have to learn these different things grow. But I think it's one way of reversing the overly developmental trend, which you could argue is almost Darwinian. As if there's a kind of really narrow Darwinianism running through certain developmental psychology. You must do this thing now, and it's a kind of survival of the fittest. I think that's... I'm into developmental models. I think they're super helpful. But I don't want to miss that precious, the thing that makes one child take the risk or be dynamic. That's not a simple reason. You could also look in family systems. It's complicated. In the example I was giving before of the person that was in a family and the other siblings weren't doing so well around all this trauma and dysfunction. The father in that family was very violent. And this person I was talking to was the last child, a little girl, very petite. He was not violent to her. She was kind of his favorite. Weirdly, in developmental models, even messed up relationships can still be empowering to kids. It's better from a child's point of view to have someone that cares about them, even if it's a distorted kind of caring from a somewhat messed up kind of person, than it is to have nothing. Because you need to feed off something. When you're a child, you can't always see that essence. That's the relational vulnerability. When we're born, we're so dependent in that loyalty bond in the early life. It's very hard for young children to entirely see themselves without seeing it through the parent's gaze. So it's such a complex mix, isn't it, of relational stuff, individual stuff. But I would say this, right? I've worked with people sometimes in the most horrific circumstances. And I genuinely believe you can reconnect with that quality, even through horrific experiences. And I've seen it happen. Now, that doesn't mean everyone's going to do it. And I don't really know why. There's a kind of grace or a kind of propensity that's part of the mystery. But I will say this to people listening to this who've had very difficult childhoods or traumatic experiences, or they're thinking, oh, well, it's all well and good, this guy's saying it, but how can it happen to me? I've seen it happen. I've seen the miracle happen. I've seen the comeback to that space, even after decades of being lost. Yeah. Do you think there's a soul evolutionary aspect to those that are more inclined towards maintaining the jewel and individuating in this lifetime? It must be, mustn't there? I think this, right? If you're going to get into karma, for example, there's a couple of things you want to think about. One, we live in the West, people confuse karma with sin. It's not the same thing. In the Judeo-Christian heritage, there was this obsession with sin, the wrong you did to the personal heavenly father. Karma is a universal law, like weak and strong nuclear forces, like electromagnetism or gravity. It's just a principle. If you're going to get into karma, there wouldn't be a specific point in the birth chart. You wouldn't have the asteroid karma telling you this, or just this one placement in the chart. It must all be karmic, mustn't it? If there's any karma, then it's all karma, in a sense. The phenomena that I started writing about, the way I started thinking about it so that I wouldn't literalize reincarnation or such ideas in my own mind, was to use the phrase soul memory. It was clear to me in my work with people that they had a prior life memory sometimes. Sometimes people would just spontaneously remember, but that they had a pre-defined or pre-experienced psychic world. They had come from somewhere psychically that was more mysterious than just their family origins. I began to use the term soul memory, that we have memories in our soul before we come in. Do you literalize that as reincarnation? That's a different step, slightly. It's not antithetical to reincarnation, but I'm not just a card-carrying believer. I don't know how the great mystery works, but I can say firsthand, because I've been in a room with people clinically, going back into past life memories or going back into deep sort of psychic states where they felt senses of identification cosmically or with their higher self or with animals or nature. There are these pre-existing soul states, soul memories that people have. Yes, some people have reached a certain point in that soul evolution process, within that mind stream, within that stream of memories. Sometimes I think my own life was just set up in a certain way, or I've used this metaphor with people. You're parachuted into your life almost, aren't you? Almost, sometimes it feels like going behind enemy lines or something. Then you have to find yourself and get your little kit out and find your way back. Some people were born more ready for that. You've got to be very careful with this, because there's a mystery and a grace. I've seen some of the most traumatized and disrupted people find this grace again. What they have to go through is an unleashing of shame. These are often people that have explored karmic ideas, and they've internalized them as a form of punishment. The terrible things I did, or they've even had flashes of memories of the terrible things they did. It might even be quasi-real, but I know that in the healing, you have to move past that shame. The past life type element is both super powerful. I stumbled into it one day. A lady I was doing a relaxation exercise with said she had a chain, something locked around her heart. We had to end the session, and I did that classic young therapist kind of line, your emotions are feeling locked up, but we touched on that, and that was really sweet. Anyway, I get this phone call the next morning, 8 a.m. or something, before I've started the day. Oh my God, I couldn't sleep last night. I've had to cancel work. All these images are coming up. I need to see you. So I fit her in that late that day. She's straight into all this material. She's chained to a wall. She's been left there by her father with just a bowl of water. He's abusing her regularly. I'm like, what did I miss about this lady's childhood? How could this be going on in 1960s north of England? What the hell was going on? Why didn't people notice? Then I suddenly realized she's talking in a strange kind of way. The whole thing was just a spontaneous past life memory that even went as far as going forward to her death, and this sense of what she carried from it as she left her body. Now this is an example of my ordinary idiot with good teachers kind of life experience, in that I had just completed a training in hypnotherapy. I had literally just two months before been regressing other therapists, my friends, just trying to kind of practice this training I built, and then this person just spontaneously does it. Over the next six or eight months she regressed into about five or six different lifetimes without me doing any form of induction, without me trying to. She just found someone she could trust that she could give it to. She could lay it out. So maybe, yeah, maybe we're just literally picking up. Maybe a certain young Greek man has already had a lifetime where he stayed and did the family business, and he remembers then how frustrated he got, and comes in and just touches the edges of that and goes, no, I'll take the risk. Maybe we're arcing, we're coming in on this wave like a surfer trying to find that peak. Yeah, because I guess there must, if we're going to honor this notion of soul memory, then it would have to be connected to this other notion of intuition. Is intuition a remembering of, oh, that path didn't feel good, that path didn't lead us to the desirable outcome? Is there a correlation here between that intuitive hit and that something within me remembers? Exactly, which is why, although it's very hard to do this at the time it's happening, it's really important over time to reinvestigate your mistakes or difficult experiences and realize that they are some of the most valuable teaching tools, because frequently we learn many of our more important lessons in a kind of, let's not do that again. Let's not make that mistake again. I think it's super important, and they may be actual intuitions from a deeper dimension. Who's to say that many of our instinctive desires aren't emanating from a deeper part of the psyche or even the soul, and that that's how it's reaching out to us? Sri Aurobindo had this idea of the psychic being this warm, loving part of the soul that's trying to reach out to you, reach you, and it might come through repetitive, instinctual, you know, you keep imagining you want to do this, you want to get this thing, you want to get a bike when you're a kid and just ride out in the fields. Who's to say it's not the soul touching you with part of its intention for freedom and self-discovery? Yeah. I guess, you know, the question is, in a practical way, how do we begin to cultivate a deeper relationship and connection with that psychic being? Yeah, great question. Makes me think of the start of Jung's Red Book. If you read the whole just first few paragraphs, it's just this intensely personal calling of this soul. I mean, you've got to start, haven't you, by reaching out? Well, that poet Rilke, who would hear me if I cried out amongst the angelic hierarchies. I mean, if you... where is your call? Are we expecting the calling to just drop on the plate without any... I don't know, it changed Jung's life, didn't it? To just go, where are you, my soul? Finally, after all this time of traveling, I'm ready to be me. Please show yourself to me. And he goes on. Yeah, it's super powerful. And the Red Book is just super emotionally powerful. It's like going on a mushroom trip with Carl at your side, showing you these great figures from history. I read it all. There's just a few sittings. It was literally like sharing Carl's psychic journey. But the whole first section is just super powerful. It's just I've traveled long and far, I'm finally ready to be close to you. He's just opening up this intimate love and yearning. And I just don't see how we're supposed to engage with something of that capacity without some of that. It's not just all on outside. A sincere yearning to open the dialogue. And a certain capacity to put yourself on the line as part of it. To go, look, here I am. Being that was in love with myself and frankly, full of shit most of the time. But here I've had enough of a realization about the beauty of the world and the potential to go down on one knee, as it were, on both knees and just go, here I am. Forgive me. Here I am. Where are you? Knowing in another level, it's another part of yourself. But I think for me, and this could just be because I'm a dramatic kind of person, I don't know, that ritual element of literally in one experience I had going down on my knees and just saying, not my will, but thy will be done, but in this steady mantra for like an hour. It was like, that was as a young man just suddenly recognizing these powerful pulls that, you know, there isn't, the psychic being in Aurobindo's idea is like a form of love for you. People think they're searching for the great transcendent thing, but some part of that transcendent thing might actually be looking out for you. Might actually be searching you out and might actually be dropping a trail of breadcrumbs all the darn time, which, you know, you only start noticing if you start looking for. And I don't mean special numbers like 11, 11 came on the clock, it's my angel number. I don't mean picking a tarot or an angel card every moment anything happens and asking. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying you start to realize certain friends you met, certain people that the man or woman you fell in love with, you know, your own child, what are they bringing to you from this place? You just realize that everything comes bearing gifts in a certain place. Yeah. And then what do you do with that? You know, how often are we given these signals, the almonds come to us and then how do we respond? Yeah. And can we hold ourselves accountable because there isn't, there isn't just a right response, but clearly ignoring them for forever is a mistake, isn't it? I think at best it's a mistake. At the same time, chasing after them is a different kind of mistake as if you're just desperate to collect all these points, like you're in some horrible computer game trying to get your different coins on every level or something. I think, I think what's helpful is the conscious attunements that everything is conspiring to shape me into the person that I'm born to become. So you have to trust, you have to trust there is a telos, that sense of purpose that can unfold to become a potential. You have to have this reverence. The mystery of reality is mysterious. I can see signs, I can interpret them to some extent, but I'm not going to know the full picture in some like literally someone's just giving me the rule book kind of way, which by the way, is one of the great fallacies of astrology that gets very dangerous. And then of course, you've got to have this basic gratitude for life. I really think if you, once you start touching the soul, you'll know it because there's this mysterious co-present quality where the soul just feels incredibly loving and incredibly grateful for life itself. Just you start to feel, realize the sort of miraculousness of it all. Yeah. From experience, that space, it's like there's spaciousness in that. There's an uncertainty in that. It's not a rigid knowing or clinging to it. It's almost like there's space for something to touch deep within my soul. And it's almost like this, it's awe-inspiring and it can bring tears forth in a sense, but it's not like a certainty, like I know things, you know? Yeah, I find it. I would say I just find it to be this deep, overwhelming gratitude for the mystery. And like you said, the awe-inspiring, I mean, there's so many moments in my life where just tears come to me, like not in this like, oh, I'm sad, something happened to me, but just in this, just this magical, deep thanks for the fact that I exist and I get to have these experiences of life. I think it's a phenomenally good sign when you're connected to that, because that's the gratitude of the soul for the miracle of the creation effectively. The sacred dimension of life gives you your life and you are grateful. And that gratitude is a life-changing quality. You know, life can seem very dull, very rigid, very competitive, full of suffering. You drop underneath to that level you're talking about, you're suddenly plugged in again, you know? I remember watching Lord of the Rings in the cinema and Aragorn gives one of his particularly cool speeches and I nearly stood up and said, I will follow, you know, it's that feeling. You don't know where you're going. You might be going to the gates of Mordor itself, but you're in, you know, I will follow, sir. Yes. Count me in. You know, you say yes, don't you? Even if it's high risk, because of that feeling, that, you know, joy, inspiration, sadness, poignancy. Plato would say we're remembering something in that moment. We're remembering our true nature. [Speaker 3] (41:07 - 41:08) Anamnesis. [Speaker 1] (41:08 - 46:38) You remember it. You're recollecting where you really, who you really are and where you really come from. Would you find that obviously you've worked with so many different people that some of the barriers to connecting to that is like, if someone has a really deep inner critic or deep self devaluation, that it's harder to remove the obstacles or like the chains around the heart? I know you brought up that image before. It just made me think of that, like to even get to this place. I think it's, yeah, it's a really crucial therapeutic insight. In my, um, when COVID hit, I, for a series of reasons, I started developing a spiritual psychology training, a vision of it using psychosynthesis, but not just limited to it. And in the end I ran that between 2021 and 23, and I'm running it again now. And I came across the need to talk about the inner critic very early on in it. Yes. Because it's so destructive, isn't it? It's like a person, part of the person has broken off. What Freud would call the superego, the part of you that has to learn from parents and teachers and societies and becomes the potential to internalize a sense of conscience or morality, but gets too hung up on the rules and gets too perfectionistic about it, especially if it becomes allied with childhood shame. You see, you get some people's response to shame is so devastating that they don't want to step on the lines on the pavement. They don't want to break the rules. They have to start arranging their room in a perfect way to not, you know, so nothing's imperfect because then it makes them feel this terrible shame. I have worked with many people where the whole first part of the work is just trying to identify the inner critic and truly see it or stop it or provide even just a pause button for some of it. And a lot of that came immediately after my early 30s. I started noticing some deeper messages of my own, even though I'd done a certain amount of work on it in my therapy training. I was quite young when I undertook that, 27 to 30, 31. And it was actually playing sport. You know, I'd get all kind of inspired after Wimbledon, go out and try and play tennis with my friend. Then of course, I was nowhere near as good as I thought I was when I was watching Wimbledon. And then I get super frustrated. And then every now and then I just throw the game in this kind of like sulky kind of way. And a couple of times I caught myself doing that. And I looked at what was coming up inside my consciousness. And I realized there was some very intensely shameful, critical thoughts. You're worthless, you're whatever. And it actually became super interesting to me. I took it into like deeper contemplation, like what part of me is so down on myself that under stress, it would just come up in that way. And I connected it with certain deeper struggles in my early life and in the developmental process. It was very liberating for me. And then I don't think it's accidental that just a year or two later, I'm working with lots of clients, helping them break through their inner critic, you know, literally creating exercises for them. I would get people to, what would I say to them? Imagine you're writing for like, you know, a Sunday broadsheet, a more serious newspaper, and you're lead journalist. And you're going off to interview your inner critic. I want to know what kind of house they live in, what they look like, what they spend their money on, what kind of stupid shit they say. Investigate. And we'd have this more playful stance on it. Because setting up games like that, even if people didn't do that homework, and people frequently do not do homework. So most of the time on my courses, I never set homework. But paradoxically in sessions with me, it doesn't matter even if people don't do it, because it creates a setting where you start playing that game. And then when they're talking to me in the space, and a certain voice comes out, where they start shutting themselves down, I go, okay, right. We're that leading journalist right now. What's going on? Who are you? Voice. Please speak here now in this space. So I can be with people as they might catch themselves doing it. So they might have chance to create a space between them and that part of themselves is shutting them down. Yeah, it sounds familiar, but different. I was heavily influenced in my 20s. Actually, first introduced by my acting teacher, the works of Dr. Sal and Sidra Stone, they created something called voice dialogue and the psychology of selves and the aware ego. And they wrote a book called embracing your inner critic that really had an impact on my life. But part of their process was like interviewing different parts of your psyche, just to kind of get a picture of that. So I mean, it sounds similar, but also different. I don't know. Well, but they stumbled into very similar terrain, didn't they? I checked that book out. Maybe you can send me, email me the link to it, because I'm always looking at material like that, how we can, because there's a lot of work in psychosynthesis, and it's recently been allied by intense study of Gurdjieff. You know, that we're not a coherent self, Gurdjieff argues, we're like a series of divergent parts. And you're not going to get to that coherent self until you stop lying to yourself that you already are it and recognize all these divergent parts that are frankly arguing with each other all the damn time. It's like taking out a bunch of friends that don't get on to a restaurant or a bar, you know, and trying to like chaperone them or something. Yeah. Yeah. I always look at it like even the analogy of driving the car, like certain parts just hijack the car, the wheel. And they're there, they're driving the whole time. And there's no even awareness that like there is gold on the other side somewhere, you know, like, you know, and even the idea of standing between the tension of opposites, can even a person do that? Can they understand that they have these two parts that like oppose each other? And then how do you relate to them consciously? But yeah, parts work or any form of that has had a huge impact. [Speaker 2] (46:39 - 46:39) Exactly. [Speaker 1] (46:39 - 57:28) And lots of that, lots of that, and it went into the hypnotherapy training that I undertook. But lots of that came from early work in psychosynthesis, and particularly a whole strand of psychosynthesis that was on the West Coast that then slightly petered out. But for a while in the in later life, in the early 70s, just before he died, Asagioli was coming to Esalen all the time. And the Esalen guys were hanging out with him. And in fact, the Esalen guys were involved in some sort of like psychic experiment with some people in Russia during the Cold War to use like psychic positivity to help shut down the Cold War. And they would have to fly over and they would usually stop over in Florence, in Asagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, his Florentine home and hang out with him there. And then they'd go on to Russia. It's like super interesting, like psychosynthesis or California connection that isn't really active or alive now, but was really vibrant then. I love that parts work. And I think your question, can we stand in the middle and see it? Can you hold that tension? That's a huge part of the work. The work to be a human is, can you hold the tension of the paradox? Can you stay in that place? And that's what real maturity is, I would argue. Real maturity is the capacity to live with paradox and not in an abstract sense, just intellectually, like being clever in discussions. I mean, an actual psychic sense of you are living with this intense paradox for potentially months or something, weeks or months. And you continue to have the strength to stay in it. The paradox of how much one loves one's kids and they are the absolute meaning of one's life. And then the paradox of, I need a bit of time away from my child and to reconnect with me all at the same time. And yet it's all still part of this greater love or holding. Yeah, I agree. It feels like so much of our confusion or dissonance in life before this knowledge comes from over identifying with one side of the paradox and confusing that for the way, you know? Yes. Or worse than just identifying with it, isn't it? It's identifying with one side and then vilifying the other side. And it's all their fault. They're terrible people, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the great part of the issue in the world right now, isn't it? Like the splitting around parts, basically. Yeah, for sure. Is astrology the study of the psyche or the soul? And is there a distinction between the psyche and the soul? And if so, what is that? You guys ask some questions, don't you? Well, I am an unusual astrologer. I mean, a bit like Michael, who you were speaking to, you know, he was saying he was pretty renegade. And actually, from what he was saying, he kind of was. I'm not as renegade in that I operate within the astrology community or I'm a figure within it. But yes, to me, astrology is about the soul. It's about pointing to your deep being. It's not about, in a naive or literal sense, studying the clockwork machinery of the universe, like some people would argue it is, where they're like projecting onto an outside that can be mapped and followed because you're studying astrology. I'm a within you, without you kind of person, in a George Harrison kind of way, you know? The outside is not separate from the inside in that deeper sense. Is there a difference between psyche and soul? I mean, psyche is a Greek word, butterfly or animal, you know, linking to a concept of the caterpillar self re-emerging as the butterfly self. I think that historical or semantic distinctions, it's very complex to even say what soul is. I use it semi-poetically because, you know, in psychosynthesis, there's this idea of the I and the self. And in fact, my researcher and I create this amazing animation where we show the sun in the middle, the earth going around it, forming the ecliptic of the zodiac. And then we take ideas of Dane Rudyard, who was a good friend of Roberto Asagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, and he's one of the great founding figures of modern psychological or spiritual astrology. And we reroute the sun as the self and the earth as the personal self voyaging around a spiritual center. And then we take the thing that formed the zodiac and we show how it's the egg diagram of Roberto Asagioli, which is your personal auric field. So we center you, universal human, like the Michelangelo kind of figure, as an individual representation of the same process that could be perceived spiritually, cosmically in our solar system. You know, our journey around the sun, just like our personal journey around a great unifying higher or deeper self. So I would say my vision, at its best, integrates the component of the individual psyche into the cosmos. Cosmos and psyche, to use that phrase that was the great title of Richard Tarnas's book about world history and planetary combinations. So astrology can be to look deeper into the soul. And of course, astrology could technically be used to take you way further away from it. Yeah. What has been the importance? Because I would consider astrology a system or a study of self-knowledge ultimately. And I guess, what has been the importance of self-knowledge in your personal individuation process? Because I don't know, for me, it seems like the more that I uncover about myself, and not in a literal kind of way through these systems, but through an experimentative and an intuitive way in engaging and interfacing with these systems, like the deeper reverence I tend to have for the mystery and for the sacred and for a unique purpose that seems to be unfolding in my life and a unique direction. But at the same time, I'm sure that there's people that have gone down this path and have had even deeper reverences in any inkling of astrology or any insight at all into the self-knowledge. I just say that all the time to people who are too hung up on astrology. I really think you can be too hung up on astrology. I remind them of all the great people in the world, all the visionary artists, spiritual teachers, incredible humans that have lived that knew nothing of astrology. They were just living their life. It's all the confusion about the difference between the map and the terrain. An image I'd used before to kind of critique astrology is a bunch of astrologers drive to the Grand Canyon. They're at the South Rim. They have a map of the Grand Canyon and the South Rim. They're sat inside their grand sheep, Cherokee, arguing over the map. And all they have to do is open the door, stand on the South Rim, and look at that which can't be taken in and just be with it for a minute or more. The danger of all this study of occult stuff is this higher intellectual game that you're playing with reality, even perhaps heightened states or subtle, psychically more realized states of reality. It still lacks humility of direct engagement, doesn't it? Because my great point is astrology ought to point back to you. Your chart ought to enrich your living being. If you'll forgive me, one moment of pretentious philosophical clarification. There's a study in philosophy called ontology, the study of being. You have being. Three beings here have being. Your birth chart doesn't have being. I mean, I could represent it to you now as just a piece of paper with a circle on it and some squiggles. It's a symbolic map. It's a sort of poem. It's a piece of art to help you reflect back on who you are, where you came from. You've got to keep that in mind. The real thing is the flow of your deeper being. The real thing is the increase in lovingness, the increase in willingness, the sense of connection, the sense of life meaning, of suddenly finding yourself surrounded by people you actually love or care about or people you connect with because of your similar views or similar openness or conversations like this right now. They happen because you set yourself in a certain place. The astrology has to point back to that. The danger sometimes, is it important that certain people share their skills, study it, get better at it? Yes. Am I trying to knock the entire astrology community? No. But I cannot tell you that the sheer number of times that astrologers have ignored the human being in front of them, ignored their even direct feedback that they were wrong and taken the interpretation of their chart and plastered it over them in a way like you can't even see them anymore. And said, no, you're like this because I've seen it in the chart and it is every time in the chart like that. Is that loving respect for the mystery? Is that the orientation we want to take by using these occult or divinatory tools that we increase our own hubris and vanity and sense of control? Yeah, it's interesting too because it's like even what part of you is studying this stuff? What part of you is using this information? Brilliant point. Yeah, take parts theory and actually look at because so often with astrology, it's a kind of controlling part. It's the kind of anxious part that wants to guarantee that the terrible thing isn't going to happen to you. And if I study these planetary cycles intensely enough, I will work out how to sidestep these terrible things. A. Good luck with that. B. That's the greatest part of you, is it? Or the most unified part of you? That's a persecutory, anxious, avoidant part. Maybe for good reason, but that part needs attention. We're not going to trust that part's wisdom. That's not your King Solomon or something, is it? Coming in with the most wise take of the astrological chart or something. Parts work. It's such a great idea, by the way. I love that. Yeah, because it's like even when you can say the same sentence, but who in you is saying it? I know. [Speaker 2] (57:28 - 57:30) It's a brilliant question to ask. [Speaker 1] (57:30 - 1:04:56) Who in you wants to study astrology? I mean, there's so many people that read all the psychological texts so they can use it to have more control within and externally, as opposed to coming from a more organic, natural place. Well, famously therapists are very difficult customers the other way around. And one of the most difficult astrology readings I had in the last five years was with a very experienced therapist who was literally like, why am I answering this? This isn't a therapy session. I was like, no, it's not a therapy session, but I'm a very psychological person. So is it okay if I continue just talking like me? And they accepted it. But you know, they're notoriously people with high levels of psychological training and notoriously good at escaping the implications. Well, I mean, hearkening back to that episode of In The Zodiac with Michael, like to him, like divination was the original form of psychotherapy. You know, tarot reading was a psychological therapy session in the beginning. But I think that world that he's referring to, and he mentioned Owen Barfield without going into it greatly, but Barfield has this great series of subtle critiques about modernity and this assumption that we just got better. And he uses, for example, the idea of pneuma in Greek, translated as spirit, which will cement breath in the Bible. And he's saying, we assume that's metaphoric, but what if it's that in that time when spirit hit you was so intense, you were literally blown over. It was like being caught up in an intense wind. He goes back and he re-examines the metaphors and he shows that they have an energetic substance to them. He was particularly, he was a friend of Tolkien's and C.S. Lewis's, but he was very influenced by Rudolf Steiner. But that divinatory thing, what it makes me think of, it was a ritual space. You know, they had a ritual understanding of reality. They had an initiatory understanding of reality so that they understood that they were in a participation with the living cosmos. We don't necessarily understand that at this point. The common scientific metaphor is we're studying this sort of partially dead or only microbially alive thing through a microscope. We're not attributing it to the kind of complex dance between, we're not recognizing the participatory aspect. And in so doing, we've denied the ritual space that would make divination more therapeutic, if you like. Because it reminds me, there's a great guy, what's his name? Joseph Rael. He writes under the name Beautiful Painted Arrow. Creates these kind of like peace buildings. Wonderful writer, short, ritually intense books. And he has a brilliant analysis of ritual space and time. You know, he'd go solo walking or even, I think maybe hunting, hunting a deer with a bow and arrow, literally for many hours in canyons. And he would find the journey itself would become this powerful multidimensional space beyond space and time. You would actually get divinatory insights about your life path from the individual shorter journey you were on. The way he explores ritual time in those short series of books he wrote, Ceremonies of the Living Spirit, House of Something. Anyway, brilliant books, very short, very poetic, very readable. If you lived in that space, then divination could be therapeutic. But if you live in rational, disconnected, you know, I'm different from, I'm outside of you, the subject, object, complete distinction world, divination can't be therapeutic, can it? Because divination is about me as a separate subject, maybe having this outcome, you know, picking a tarot card, will I get this job or will I become rich and successful? Will everybody love me? I don't know what motivates people. If you're outside of it, it can't be therapeutic. So the therapeutic step has to be this inward step. And you see it, don't you, in the consulting rooms, Freud's couch that you can see in the Freud Museum in London or Jung's room where he used to sit so close to people, their knees would be about that far apart. And it used to freak people out. It freaked James Hillman out so badly he left Jung as a therapist because he had this massive Swiss giant, like farmer kind of guy that Jung was his physical presence sat so close to him. That inwardness, that inward turning into the inward inner space was to try and recreate that divinatory power because you had to create, in a sense, an autonomous space to recreate it. And that's when Jung notices the same bleeding into ritual space and time that comes through synchronicity. You know, he's talking to a lady who has this intense dream about this golden scarab beetle and then literally a descendant that's hardly ever seen in Switzerland of the scarab beetle is scratching at the window and he sees it. Or a guy comes to him about a book and says, could you help me do some research for this? Or maybe write a forward or an intro for it? Jung's like, no, no, no, I'm far too busy. And then he looks down at his watch and he sees that his watch that he's just had repaired at some famous Swiss watchmaker has stopped. And just as he said, I haven't got the time for you. And he suddenly goes, maybe we'll have to rethink that and have a look at your book. You know, he learns to read. But you have to almost step out from our normal paradigm in our society or civilization at that point to go back into that ritual sensitivity where divinatory forms could be engaging like that. Yeah. I visited Jung's house and office. Oh, fantastic. My wife and I, we did a tour. It was random. We happened to be there and they were doing a tour that day and they weren't really often doing them. And to be in his office, I was pretty tiny. I could see how maybe there wasn't much space there. Honestly, he would get so in your space. You know, he was so like, and he wasn't a small or slight guy. You know, he was a massive, imposing kind of guy. And you can imagine what he was like psychically, a kind of giant. I know I'd love to go there. I've been to the Freud Museum in London, but Kusnack is on my list. And I've looked at, you know, studied the photographs and the Red Book and the various things. I mean, Peter Kingsley wrote a book, Catafalque, on the Red Book. And he shares a story of accidentally finding his way to Jung's house. That's really kind of stunning. I won't spoil it for anyone if they read that. But I mean, yeah, it's a beautiful place to go and see. I've been in Sagioli's archive in Florence and it's a similar thing. His actual study room is not that big. You know, he's got this, these pictures of this Russian mystical painter, Nicholas Rorich. And he's got his little kind of the people that influenced him, these private spaces that these people created to have this conversation that was quieter than the noise of the society outside to try and come back and recreate that quality. I think the best of the therapeutic endeavor was an attempt to recreate that sense of connection. Yeah, it's really interesting being in that room too. The smell, the energy was very, I want to say odd, but obviously so much had gone on in there. And I felt like I was tapping into it. My wife and I actually also went to visit his country home in Bollingen. And there was no one there. We trespassed onto the property because we wanted to take a look. And we just heard a noise and we both just freaked out and ran. [Speaker 2] (1:04:56 - 1:04:57) We just left. [Speaker 1] (1:04:58 - 1:24:14) There was a part of us where we're like, oh, we almost made it to the front door just to knock. I don't think anyone was there, but we just wanted to go see. He's an individual that had a huge impact on my wife, especially myself as well. We happened to be in Switzerland, so we're like, why not? Let's go check it out. It was a pretty funny story in memory. Yeah, that's fantastic. You know that he built a whole chunk of that place in Bollingen himself with his own bare hands and lived in it for long periods of time with no running water, no electricity, no heating other than a wooden fire, that he did all the carvings outside it with Gnostic inscriptions, as well as creating a collected works that was so big it could take up that bookshelf behind me, as well as speaking to all these different people around the world, maintaining intense correspondences with Wolfgang Pauli, the theoretical physicist, or all these other people, as well as being a pretty decent artist. And look at the pictures in the Red Book. They could have made their own kind of cool tarot deck or something. They're so archetypal. Yeah, respect to that man. Well, I mean, that's like moving beyond the constructs of time in a real way. Yeah, I think Jung was capable after that midlife crisis with Freud and being brave enough to walk away and brave enough to kind of break down to break through because I think that's what it was. Even Jungian analysts still think Jung had an actual breakdown there and was like a damaged person. I just can't go that far. He's a visionary. Okay, what he produced was pretty weird after that, but it was visionarily very satisfying. But yeah, I think he did have that capacity. He could quiet everything. He built that tower so he could get away from clock time, from electricity, from the normal routines and allow himself to sink back into what he called the spirit of the depths instead of the spirit of the time. And it's that quality that runs through the Red Book. And the Red Book is a magical text. I dare anyone to read it and not be just subtly changed by it. It is like reading a spell. It will change you. I think this might be the call to actually read it. I believe my wife has, but it lies at the center of our bookcase. We custom made our bookcase with a large space in the middle just for the Red Book. I think it deserves that. I really think it deserves that. I asked my students in the spiritual psychology training at one point, what is your Red Book? What would you do? It doesn't have to be like an annotated manuscript with drawings like Jung, but just what is your individual, how would you create your magical text? And it doesn't even have to be a text. I think it's such a gift that they got that together and published that. And you realise it comes from all these journals, the Black Books. He wrote it more loosely and then he highly curated it into the form it takes. So it's a very considered aesthetic form in the end, even though it's his vision material. And it makes me think a lot about creativity. You know, like old writers, the way they used to value their leather journals or the particular pen or the kind of paper they wrote on poets and stuff. Can we take creativity seriously again? Can we care about the ritual, almost magical, poetical space that we do it in? It's a level of intentionality, you know, that is missing. I have this little collection of Zuni fetishes from a village in New Mexico, up here where I work. And I have a little small original painting by the visionary mystical artist Cecil Collins, the British mystical artist, a very small piece called Head that looks like the head of an angel or a woman or even Christ. It's really hard to tell. I'd take it off the wall and show you, but I'm not sure it would translate very well. But I have my little space here because this is where I work with clients now. I don't have an actual room anymore. I do it and I have the virtual room I'm in with you guys. And I take it seriously. I take it seriously, even the way I position, just like you with, because I think putting red book in the center of your bookcase is a magical act. I got to be frank, that is a powerful, creative, magical act. I have to give the credit to my wife for that one, but yeah, I was on board. Go her. I don't know her, but yeah, that's a nice mood. That's a good mood. Yeah. You guys would get along. She's got a PhD in depth psychology with an emphasis in somatic studies. Oh, wow. Nice. So yeah, you guys have a lot to talk about as well. I just love that idea because you recognize that the bookshelf is more than just a place to put books. You recognize it's an actual vessel. Books aren't just empty, are they? It's nice that you guys would care about books enough. I was thinking about this the other day, talking to someone because in this amazing world of podcasts, right? And I learned so much from podcasts, so I am not knocking anything, but people don't read as much, do they? And occasionally it's important to read because if you think about it, the difference between film, visuals, or even audio format, you have to think something through in your mind's eye. When you follow Carl through the red book, you've only got his words. You have to bring the rest to it. You know, no great animator is creating the beast that slumbers in from the east, or Salome, or Elijah, or these figures that show up in it. You're not getting this cartoon representation. You're not giving some great graphic artist in the Bay Area's take on it or something. No, no, no. You're having to find it within. It means something to you or it doesn't, and you have to stare at what that does to you. And so, when you join Carl on his strange trip, you're putting something into it because you have to read it. We don't want to lose that at all, you know, totally. No, not at all. And I'll be the first one to say, I'm not reading as much as I used to, and I feel it. I'm the same, man. It's like this, I mean, the love of technology and the things that have come from it. And at the same time, I feel often that like I'm a slave to technology and my phone and like the things that are quicker and faster. And it's like, man, just take a book and just go sit. Like I remember when I backpacked Europe after university in 2002, and like I would just find a bench and take out a single book and read the entire book in a single setting. Like my mind didn't have the same level of distraction or the thoughts of like, oh, I should take a picture of this and post it on Instagram. I should do like back then it was just, I had a book in front of me and I just read it like six hours straight. Now it's a lot more difficult to read six hours straight sitting on a bench. It really is. I think it's genuinely harder and the collective has changed. Gurdjieff has taken me back to that state. Memoirs on Gurdjieff and his teachings have seen me read again recently. For me, I sulked for ages, turning 50 a few years ago, I had to wear reading glasses and I just sulked for a year and refused to read. But that's just really childish. I can't believe I was like that. I was very busy at the time too, but I had to just get over myself, humble myself. I think something has changed. I think it's amazing that we can get information in this way. I did from my own phone strip all social media and related phenomena. I mean, I've never been on hardly anything, but I tried to keep all of that to a minimum. But I don't know about you guys, the YouTube addiction, you know, if I don't have much time, it's in the evening where maybe, you know, we've been upstairs with my daughter. Now my wife's just settling her down. I'm tired. I've worked all day. We're flicking through YouTube shorts, you know, 10 minute little talks. You just find all these random interests people have. People are building forest homes. My daughter likes to watch strange people with forest skills build homes with me. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that strange? There's something about the home archetype or the skill set, or, you know, we'll watch people training puppies together, or this guy in Florida catching rare fish from abandoned swimming pools, whatever it is, it's just strange. You realize this great panoply of human interest, but yeah, respect to you on that park bench reading a book. I think it's a very valid thing. I think every now, I think, I think it's worth picking out the books that are worth sitting down and seriously engaging with. Yeah. And consciously making the time, you know, cause I feel like we can in the modern world, even more so now it's easier to get pulled in a lot of different directions. And I think, you know, individuals have different phases of life where maybe they're, you know, consuming a lot more and then maybe they're creating more. And, you know, I'm trying to find my own, my own balance of that, you know, especially managing my time, you know, since, since moving, Tory moved, you know, four years ago, we have more responsibilities on the land. I'm busier there. And Joel and I have been building what we've been building. So I'm trying to figure out how to make more time. Well, how did you guys get this thing together? We actually met due to the enslaved podcast with Michael Desarian and David Whitehead, my wife and I were interviewed on it in 2020, a couple of times. And then Joel obviously was into Michael's work and he came across our episode early 2021 and he hit me up on Instagram and we connected or realized he was a social media. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Real connection. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's, there's benefits and there's challenges. Again, these are tools and how do you use them? But very often the tools use you. And so it's, how do you, how do you, how do you work against that? But yeah, we, we just got on zoom and connected and then we both wanted to start a podcast. We had similar interests. And then the next week we literally got on zoom like this, press record, and just started talking about what it means to walk an authentic path. And that was our first episode. And then we did a part two and then we decided to have, maybe we should have real guests on. And this was three and a half years ago. And here we are now speaking with you. Yeah. And that went on for two years without ever having met in person. Really? Yeah. Cause I was, he was based in Australia and I was in the Los Angeles area. And then when he moved to Mexico, my wife and I flew down and met Joel and his family. And this was April last year, right? April of last year. Yeah. And then we've seen each other a few times since they visited us here in Topanga. So you're in Topanga. Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. We've been here for about four and a half years. So yeah, it's wild, you know, to think that I only knew Joel in the square just like this. And then we met in person and when we met in person, it was really, I was kind of, I have to be honest, it was weird. The first couple of days, it was surreal. I was like, what is going on? You're like a real person. I can touch you and hug you. And, and then like your family's here. It took a little while to kind of get used to it. Cause we had our, our, you know, this was a ritual we would get on zoom, you know, you know, multiple times a week for, you know, a few hours every day and build what we were building. Yeah. That's really cool. I know that feeling. I was in Colorado teaching recently and there were a number of, you know, classy world-class astrologers that teaching with me, these four people at the event, but very few of them, I don't think any of the others had the experience I had where there was at least 10 or even 12 people in that room that whom I'd known in this format, some for years I'd worked with one-to-one and people were coming up to me after the talk. It looked like I was the most inspired speaker ever because people are literally like holding me or tearing up, but they don't realize that I'd known some of these people for years and years and years, but we'd never met in person. And here they are the reason they can get to Colorado, obviously more easily than the UK or whatever. And it was super powerful. Yeah. It's weird sometimes because you learn something. I realized one guy I spoke to is just enormous, you know, he's just, that was a big gentle bear of a guy, you know, and you'd never have known that before that. Yeah. I was going to bring that up. Like I've met a bunch of people that have seen me in person and they're like, I thought you were way taller than you are. Yeah. And I'm like, no, I'm five foot eight, you know, not very big. And then we have another friend of ours who's kind of in a similar space and he's like a giant. He's like six, four. And one time we met, we met at an event in person and we took a picture and posted to social media and he's just like up here and I'm down here. People were commenting on it. Like, whoa, I have no idea. Oh, it's a massive thing when you've met on Zoom. Yeah. I have people, they don't realize that, I mean, I'm not six, four or massive, like this guy I also met was, but I'm six, one and more broad shoulder than you'd think, you know? And it's like, it's a thing, but just the reality sometimes of people being with people that you, you basically love, you know, and work with very profoundly. And then suddenly they're, they're giving you a hug and it just means so much to them. It means so much to both people. It was extraordinarily changing. There were a few times we went out in the evening as colleagues and they don't realize I've just come from this. You know, I think one person assiduously said, Oh, well, you've always got the groupies or something, Mark. As if like, I just gather that, you know, at the top, not realizing, you see, it's not their fault. They don't realize that this profound, because a lot of my work is basically secret, isn't it? It's me privately working with individuals sometimes for years on the deepest things in their life. And then it's obviously going to be moving when you then meet in person. You know, I just think the story of how you guys got this together is, is, is great. And I think it's a sign of something about the two of you, isn't it? That you even, it is a ritual. You know, the fact that you just said, let's just do it. Let's just start. Let's just have the conversation ourselves. I mean, that's the authenticity, isn't it? That you're prepared to put yourself in the mix. Yeah, it's, it's pretty special. I'm very grateful. Well, I mean, it's such a huge part of our lives and like, you know, again, it almost seems, it's, it seems like predestinatory to me to be having this experience with, with, with Erasmus. Like, it seems like this was preset on the path at some point to come about. I literally, like this, this changed everything for me. Like we've spoken, I was working in a family business in Australia, basically, you know, betraying the deepest aspects of me, succumbing to a life half lived in, in my own words, you know, and then a single encounter or a single instinct to message someone and reach out shifted everything. Yeah. So the person who did it, you are the person that followed it. Yeah. That's what I love to talk about is like, you know, when you have that itch or that knock on the door, like, what do you do with it? You know, there's so many relationships that have, I mean, even just before him reaching out to me, like I had been into Michael's work for a really long time and I always wondered how I can, you know, just thank him. And then my wife came across some research in her, during her dissertation that aligned with some of the stuff Michael had talked about in some of his presentations. And I was like, oh, this is a good moment. And then I went, oh, let me reach out to him, thank him, share this information with him, whatever, you know? And then two days later, he responded back to me and was like, this is interesting. Would either one of you like to come on the show? And I was like, can we both come on? And then we've gone on this podcast, something that two years prior, I would have been like, if someone told me that I would be in an interview with Michael and David, I would be like, you're tripping. It's not, but then it happens. And then, and then Joel sees it. And then there've been other people who've seen our episodes and reached out to me on Facebook. And they're dear friends of mine. We just went to their wedding like a year and a half ago. So again, it's like, what do you, what call do you answer? You know? And like what you said, it's like, you're the person doing it. You're the person reaching out. You're the person sending the email, responding to the text. Because you have to have said yes to something beforehand, deep in your soul. Yeah. There is a preexisting yes. And I'm not trying to be cynical about people. I'm trying to say this compassionately. And I try to work with people to help them undo it, even sometimes. But some people have said no, or they've turned away through pain, or they, they haven't been able to uphold the inner flame of being because it's been quenched by suffering or loss or whatever, whatever process. So it is just important to realize that. And we can't shy away from that, that difficult truth. You know, frequently people don't say yes to the And then also this new modern format, and we do have to watch how much it eats our minds and our lives and our time. But it also brings these incredible rewards that this conversation can be happening across these just places that are thousands of miles apart. And something real can be occurring on multiple levels as a result of it. And we realize, don't we, that some part of our psyche, some part of our humanness is non-local. Like, yeah, it would be different if we were all in a room together, and then we might go and get a drink or something afterwards. But it's like, I can feel you guys. I can see, feel where you guys are coming from. It's remarkable. It's moving. It's inspirational. You know, hearing how you set this up just makes me feel good about things. I said just last night when I was playing guitar with my researcher and my nephew, who it turns out is a really good guitar player. I'm going to have to practice. But I was saying I just want to be, I just want to make as much cool shit as possible happen in my life. I want to be a part of whatever can come through this being that's good, that connects, that connects people or even just certain aspects of certain traditions. You know, psychosynthesis, the form of spiritual psychology I'm into is hardly having some heyday in the world right now. It's hardly this famous big thing with this massive draw. I was just in a conference in near Venice, the international conference. No disrespect to the organizers, but it's not exactly showing how alive and kicking it is right now. And yet that doesn't put me off. You know, I want to find a way to keep the right hidden traditions alive too. And I know that it's human connection and human inspiration will do that. And it's inspiring hearing you guys talk and, and the emotional sense of loving friendship between guys, you know, that isn't just characterized in some comic bromance, Hollywood kind of way, just like real love between men and the spiritual purpose and psychological riches that come out of that. And I have multiple close friends in my life like that. And a guy that I do the spiritual psychology coaching training with, I teach the teaching content and he holds the group spaces. And, you know, I just couldn't do it without my soul brother in that sense, you know, and see you guys having effectively found each other in that way. And it really coming from your original saying yes to my soul and taking a leap yourself of like reaching out to someone. It's a series of reaching outs, isn't it? Based on the inner potential to say yes to life and to, you know, created purpose. Yeah. Yeah. It's like your life is an amalgamation, the yes or no yet choices. [Speaker 2] (1:24:15 - 1:24:15) Yes. Yes. [Speaker 1] (1:24:16 - 1:25:37) Yes. There is an almost binary element in that Gurdjieff argued at some point what he called the parting of the ways was this incredible, powerful realization where you realize you're going to commit with your true will to fully waking up or you're just going to go back to sleep. You're just going to commit to going back to sleep. There comes what he calls the parting of the ways where you have to decide, no, you're all in or not. Yeah. It's like difference between dating and getting married or something, isn't it? You know, on the loving wedding days, a greater love holds the fact that the couple has gone all in. Yeah. Yeah. It takes like, it takes an openness and a willingness and a level of self-esteem to honor the yeses, you know, because Nathaniel Brandon, he said, your self-concept is your destiny. And it's like, if that. Yeah. Character is fate. Yes. That has a certain truth to it. Because if you're constantly down, if you're constantly broken by your past experience, no matter what life puts in front of you, you just sort of end up turning it down or being clumsy about it and dropping it. Yeah, exactly. You have to, you have to feel yourself competent, capable and willing. Like before you said, I just want to be involved in as much cool shit as possible. [Speaker 3] (1:25:37 - 1:25:37) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:25:38 - 1:40:32) You saying that, that opens the door. That's the intention. That's the affirmation. That's I'm willing and I'm ready. And I know I'm appropriate for those situations. And I think the issue is most people that don't feel appropriate for that. Yes. What an interesting choice of word. Appropriate. Yeah. That's so specific and interesting word. Yeah. I experienced it myself too. It's, it's a kind of strange mix of really genuine humility and occasionally really towering self-confidence. You know, I'm not one to shy away from what I am good at, but I'm not going to bullshit you and say I'm a brilliant guitarist, especially not when there's two really good guitarists in the room. You know, as happened to me last night. So it's this nice mix of knowing where you are, isn't it? Appropriateness is knowing where you are. It's knowing when you can lead because you really do have a vision and it's knowing when you could shut the eff up. Yeah. Well guys, I mean, thanks for having me on. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed our conversation. You know, you asked such deep questions today that to be honest, I mean, I could give a whole series of different answers. I mean, obviously just, I've had the kind of life and I'm old enough that just the first question about my personal development could have taken us way beyond the entire time. I just cherry picked a couple of examples. Yeah. I, I, but I'll tell you just to highlight back to that question, that turning point where that lady spontaneously regressed into multiple past lives in the middle of what was supposed to be counseling effectively or psychotherapy. That was another turning point. You suddenly open to a lot of stuff, don't you? When someone's actually, it's not theoretical, is it? It's not like reading the reincarnational cases documented by Ian Stevenson or reading Hans Tendarm, a brilliant Dutch psychotherapist specializing in past life regression material. It's not theoretical, is it? When someone just does it spontaneously. I guess I tried to search for the points where theoretical learning and actual life's experience coincide in these powerful collisions. Um, so you guys are going to carry on just doing this. Yeah. This is your thing now. Yeah. This is one of our things. I mean, we have a group coaching program and a membership community. I mean, you know, we're related to a lot of what you said before. It's like, we've, we've met these people, we've connected these people online and then occasionally, maybe at events, we get to meet people in person and it's pretty incredible and special. Yeah. We'll have, you do have in-person events. Uh, no, we haven't. There's other events like within, you know, our community, in the broader community that we've gone to where we see people, but we may do an in-person event at some point, Joel and myself, but right now we, we, our focus is our 10 week group coaching program that synthesizes a bunch of different things. And my wife is a part of that as well. She leads five nervous system focused workshops. Um, so yeah, we're just doing our thing. The biggest driver for us is we just feel like the real conversation about the self is, is missing from the space, which, which we find ourselves in, you know, and perhaps reverence for self is, is, is what holds the most weight above all else. And without that, there really is nothing, you know? Um, and so the big part of what we do is helping people to, yeah, develop the self-esteem necessary to become who they were born to be, because we all have this potential, but without healing that deeper relationship with oneself, you know, that potential is meaningless. I love that. I also think there's a confusion about the self. Psychosynthesis has this enormously subtle model because even the I is, is like a true self in a way to most people, because the ego and the conventional self would be a, a sort of identification or part outside of that I. And when you read things like internal family systems or various approaches, as I have done recently to prepare lots of my work on parts work, you realize when they're talking about self, from my point of view, they're talking about I, it's not self with a capital S. It's not like the thing that, that the higher self that relates you to the everything, or, or occasionally it's confused as that. They're really talking about the more authentic personal self, the I, because I would argue there is a real personal self. It's not just all ego. It's not just something to get rid of. It's actually the foundation, the presence of the I, or the I am, is the foundation for psychic and spiritual growth. Without it, you're lost. Without it, you're just floating in the crazy tidal swirls of the ocean. There is no compass. There is no north star. You know, your compass is just an amalgamation of what other people think about you and want for you, you know, but we have to, there's a deeper wanting. There's, there's a deeper yearning. There's a deeper path that wants to unfold. You know, we spoke about the concept of entelechy from Aristotle before, and I believe that there is a unique blueprint that wants to unfold. Yes. It's actually part of being here, isn't it? To love and will the creation or the experience of being alive enough to fulfill your potential. It's a denial of life to not fulfill it, to withhold it. It's like assault. You're sulking with life if you withhold yourself or the nihilism of the contemporary situation or the real issue with suicide or say the opioid crisis or various things. All of that has within it the traumatized rejection of the little piece of the universe that you could be, which of course, again, is a nice way of looking at the birth chart. This little symbol of the, the U shape that you could make, you know, in being you because lots of this is about being, it's not really even about doing. Okay. There are certainly many problems that need to be addressed in the world and everyone's in a rush to do something about it. But what would it be like if we, we were differently, we responded differently in our being it's, it's being something about it. That's being asked for a lot of the time. I think to actually show up with more of your love and will. And I think it is a unification of those two things because the love types tend to get too passive. They're too nice. They get pushed around and the will types crazy. They just stamp on people without even realizing it. We got to go for a kind of synthesis between the love and the will type and, and the something more coherent together so that we have empowered loving people that we bring love to temper the power of the will. Yeah. I, I and Rand would have put it in a way where in order to say I love you first have to be able to say I. Yeah. And we see, don't we, that the great wound and what causes so much spiritual bypassing in so many communities is the failure to become a self before you give it away. Yeah. If you're going to sacrifice the I on the altar of reality or the I on the I am that in the classic Hindu teaching, you have to have the I or the I am first. Otherwise it's a meaningless gesture. You're just giving, you're just your immature nothingness throwing something away in the face of the everything. Yeah. And what we're up against is that the, the most prominence blanket, collective morality driving us or driving those people is that to love is to give away the I and that real sacrifice. That's that betrayal I was talking about earlier. We come full circle, haven't we? Yeah. The great betrayal is you give yourself up your true spark, your true preciousness just to belong, just to fit in with the family story, your schooling, your tribe, your nation, the political situation of your times. Yeah. None of this really matters in that deeper sense. You know, if you, if you talk about the soul in the soul memory sense or young spirit of the depth instead of the spirit of the time, what matters is your integrity in the face of the issue. What matters is your response to the archetypal domain of truth. It's not, see, I'm hoping for a world where that produces a backdrop for some people to make some of the contemporary issues that seem so hysterical and existentially threatening and depressing to people to give them a kind of ballast. You know, people have faced existentially threatening and terrible depressing truths for like forever on some level, you know, the second world war, the Holocaust, the black death in Europe, you know, slightly worse than COVID, you know. Can we, can we recognize, you know, you're literally born to die, whatever. You're going to grow old and die. Your kids are going to grow old and die. Everyone you know and love going to grow old and die. And that's it going well. That's a best case scenario. That's something tragic doesn't befall them beforehand in that world. What is the point of being here? If not to find alignment and to contemplate that yes or that no is the start of that alignment, I would argue. It's not the end of it. The purpose of life is not just to say yes. There's an awful lot that can happen once you understand the implications of saying yes and staying with it over time. Certainly you can't do much if you don't say yes, at least to something. Yeah. And memento mori as a spiritual practice. Yes. It's real. It's been in every spiritual tradition, Buddhist, occult and magical. Yeah. Yeah. And without the possibility of death, there can be no value for life. It's that primordial scarcity of life that gives anything value, that gives any decision meaning. But the materialism paradigm leads to this sort of tragic modern nihilism, the sort of scientific dystopia of movies or superheroes where half the universe gets killed by some strange god or the darkness or New York gets destroyed in a kind of 9-11 repeat by Batman and Superman fighting or whatever. We see the darkness in the contemporary imagination. The fact that life ends in death is not materialism. It can bring you to the edge of the discovery of the psychic or the soul domain. But a lot of people get put off. There's this contemporary thing like it's all wish fulfillment, you know. Oh, you sorry ass people, you can't take the darkness. You need your silly little feather like Dumbo in that movie to make the leap. It's sad. It's critiquing. You know, there was this idea, wasn't there, that drugs turn you on to reality. And briefly, I could see that point. But is the primary thing that's happening with drugs in our society, turning people on to reality? I don't think that's the primary thing. I think something much darker is happening and it's robbing a lot of young people of that almost angelic potential. So how do you navigate all of this? Well, Shakespeare would have called it the distinction between appearance and reality. Just because we're born to die does not mean that is the whole story by a long way. You know, search for your own soul. We came back to it. How do you start? Jung started by just going, where are you, my soul? How can you start without reaching out? How can you start without acknowledging that domain and recognizing that it's personal? Not personal in one sense, because it's, you know, reality has an impersonal aspect. But the story of you discovering your own soul and its meaning and purpose is the single most important personal dynamic, arguably, in your life. It's the most personal quest. Yeah. That's the final closing note right there, Mark. Thank you so much, man. Thank you so much. Pleasure, guys. Really a joy to meet you both and hang out in this space. Yeah, I have a feeling this won't be the last conversation. For sure. I think there's a lot more to be said. But yeah, this has been amazing. Yeah. I mean, Joel had told me about you and I didn't know much about you until this conversation and I feel very grateful to have shared space with you and inspired. Yeah, me too, guys. Really, it's really like soulful hanging out. And yeah, I appreciate both the depth and the personal directness of your questions too. And the space between you, the friendship between you and its deeper meaning, really, that you're exploring. It's kind of a beautiful thing to see and share. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. For our audience, can you share how they can support you, get involved with your work, et cetera? Certainly, they could check out markjonesastrology.com. Mark, M-A-R-K, jonesastrology.com. Loads of free resources, loads of information about courses. Anyone's interested in a serious spiritual psychology, coaching training, or even just the hundred plus hours of highly curated video content that I created for it. You know, it was a two-year program initially. Just please contact me directly through that website. But yeah, you can see my stuff there. And certainly in individual consultations, I try to help people orientate to this level of meaning, if it's possible. And even if it's not, I try to help them realize what stands in the way anyway, potentially. Because I don't... Guys, I'll just say one last thing. Astrologers have this sort of fantasy that there's one chart reading because you have one chart. Like you're just going to give someone this overall life thing. I don't see it like that. I see it me coming and accompanying people at a certain point in their life and development and being real to that point. Yeah. And then maybe even coming back. And sometimes people work with me even 10 years later, five, 10 years later, they come back when they come to another point. Thanks for letting me share all of that. And it was a joy and yeah, be well both. Thanks, man. And everyone else, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. Just a thank you to our amazing membership community, Friends of the Truth. That community is the reason that we're able to do what we do and record these conversations. If you got value from this and you'd like to support this ongoing endeavor, you can become a basic or premium member at friendsofthetruth.co. And on top of that, we're offering amazing private, regular monthly calls and community as well. All that can be found at friendsofthetruth.co.