128 Dark Night Of The Soul: Realign With The Unconscious

The Dark Night of the Soul is a stage in the individuation process where one gets the opportunity to re-align with the unconscious. It's often associated with "feeling down" but is not the same thing. This episode hits on the "Dilemma of Honor", Kierkegaard's Knights of Faith and Infinite Resignation, Carl Jung's Red Book, and how to transform through your Dark Night process.

Transcript

It's been about three months since I put out an episode,

In case you haven't noticed.

And the reason for that is actually based on the topic of this episode,

The Dark Night of the Soul.

It's funny,

I actually had the idea to make this episode months,

Even further back,

Maybe four months ago.

One of my clients,

I'll call him Morpheus,

Because that's what I've called him in other episodes,

He was going through a Dark Night of the Soul experience,

We were speaking about it,

He's into the monomyth stuff,

So we're using that language.

And I made a note back then,

This was maybe June,

Maybe early July,

No it must have been February,

Where I made a note,

Like oh that's a good title for an episode,

It's another section of the monomyth.

I did an episode on the road of trials that a lot of people liked,

I think back in February or March maybe.

I was like oh yeah,

I should do another one like this.

And at first glance,

I thought,

You know,

Most people,

When they think of Dark Night of the Soul,

They think of,

You know,

It can easily translate it into the psychological experience of depression.

If you look up Dark Night of the Soul online,

People talk about,

Basically equate it to depression.

I think one of the definitions I found most is something along the lines of a period of seeming despair.

It's a big downer.

And when I originally thought to make this episode,

I was going to take the same approach.

I was going to,

You know,

Take the spiritual concept,

Translate it into psychology,

And basically speak about how to overcome depression and my own cyclical depression.

However,

This episode is not about depression,

And I'm really glad I didn't write the episode back then or try to put it out back then.

Because to equate the Dark Night of the Soul with depression is actually missing the point and the purpose.

So I'll give an alternate definition,

Which I think is more useful for everyone.

It doesn't matter whether you're experiencing depression or not.

I hope the information of this episode helps you avoid negative feelings that we might call depression.

Because the Dark Night of the Soul is a spiritual experience.

There's no way to put it other than using the S-word,

Which I will clarify further.

But the Dark Night of the Soul is a conscious recognition of misalignment with your unconscious.

I'll say that again.

The Dark Night of the Soul is a conscious recognition of misalignment with your unconscious.

The reason why it's often associated with pain or discomfort or perhaps depression,

I think it's because that's what happens when one resists this process.

It's very common because what we would term Dark Night of the Soul experience usually happens in an unplanned way.

It usually,

Almost by definition,

Goes against what you thought was real or what you thought your plans were.

It's a rapid shift into lucidity or sobriety.

Just to use that as an analogy,

Kind of like a hangover,

It can be painful.

When you have a hangover from alcohol,

Your body is craving.

It's literally withdrawing from a substance that made reality a little fuzzy,

Made things a little bit different,

And there could be pain involved.

However,

I don't think it has to involve what we might call depression.

Because I've spoken about emotional issues and mental health in many other episodes,

And I don't want anyone to experience depression.

I don't think it's necessary.

If I could share anything in this episode or other episodes that can help one avoid those kinds of emotional feelings,

I would.

Depression might be a part of life at times,

But I don't think it's necessary.

On the other hand,

I would not want to rob anyone of their Dark Night of the Soul experience.

It's a critical stage in your growth.

It's a critical opportunity to reconnect with what Jung would call the wisdom of the unconscious,

What a more spiritual or mystical person might call his or her higher self.

There's other names for it.

You can call it your daemon,

You can call it your soul.

Fill in a word that fits for you.

Ironically,

I did come across this and really get to the bottom of this by experiencing little bits of depression.

But I'm going to tell you all of the relevant parts of my last couple months in this episode.

But right now,

I actually want you to imagine something because unlike other episodes,

There is no video feed for this one.

I'll share why that is.

And if you listen to this on podcast form,

It makes no difference to you.

I want you to imagine it's actually a scene,

The opening scene to my favorite computer game of all time,

Which unless you were into computers in 1990,

You probably haven't heard of it.

It's actually a little bit before my time.

It came out when I was two,

But I ended up becoming obsessed with it later on.

It's a game called Monkey's Island,

Actually specifically Monkey's Island 2.

It's an adventure game.

It's a pirate kid.

I mean,

It's a kid who wants to grow up to be a pirate.

It's a comedic adventure.

It resonates with me a lot.

It's part of my childhood.

But the opening scene shows the hero,

Guybrush Threepood.

He's hanging from a vine into a cave.

It's an 8-bit game,

So the graphics,

It was all pixelated.

You could see he's hanging over an abyss.

One arm is holding onto a vine,

Clutching for his life from the opening of the cave.

Some light up there.

The other arm,

The other hand,

Is clutching onto what looks like a really heavy treasure chest.

The game opens with this scene.

He's swinging from here,

Obviously looking distraught.

His love interest throughout the game series,

Her name is Elaine.

She was a pirate of her own sort,

Comes down in an escape rope.

Actually a little fun factoid.

Monkeys Island was one of the inspirations for some parts of Pirates of the Caribbean,

In case you were wondering.

So Elaine,

His love interest,

Comes down,

Presumably to save him.

She's on an escape rope,

Grappling hook type thing.

And she says,

Guybrush,

How the hell did you end up here?

And he says,

Well,

It's kind of a long story.

Can't you help me up first?

And she says,

No,

No,

I got time.

Why don't you tell me?

And then there's a flashback and the game is essentially you playing out his adventure from the beginning till this scene where he's hanging from a cliff.

And I kind of had this image randomly when I was planning for this episode.

I don't know if it was a moment of nostalgia,

Thinking about the 90s,

The good old 90s.

Then I thought,

Oh,

Okay,

This is fun imagery because I'm recording this in a setting that's very different.

Not just my material setting,

Although if you want an image of where I am physically,

I'm in a dark room right now with candles in front of me.

I'm going off with my notes with candlelight,

Something I've never done before.

Usually I'm sitting in front of the computer live streaming to Facebook or something.

So that's new,

But actually more than my material circumstances.

I'm in a very different immaterial situation.

We could even call it spiritual situation or whatever.

Something not my physical circumstances.

So this episode,

We're going to kind of do this in medias res thing where I'm going to go back and tell you the relevant events of my last couple months that have led me to this different,

We can say spiritual place and the things that are relevant for you in terms of accelerating through your dark night of the soul journey.

But actually there's another reason why I wanted to share this image,

But I'm going to share that later.

So I've thrown the S word out a couple of times already.

I want to clarify what I mean by spirituality because if you listen to this podcast,

You know,

I do touch on topics that could fall under the umbrella of spiritual.

Um,

But I try not to use that word.

And when I do,

I usually throw quotes around it partly so that I don't,

Uh,

So it doesn't get lumped in with other stuff like crystal healing and astrology and stuff.

Um,

Which is not my thing.

Um,

And I also don't want to turn off skeptics.

I think there's useful things in here,

No matter what your lens on reality is.

And typically I'm looking at spirituality from a more metaphoric sense anyway,

Uh,

Allah young.

And,

Um,

But there's actually no way to speak about this topic without using this word without touching on it.

So,

But I want to give us a concrete definition,

Um,

That doesn't lead us into area fairy land.

So my definition,

My working definition of spirituality in this episode and pretty much always is one spirituality is your mechanisms for making meaning.

I didn't mean to make an alliteration,

But mechanisms for meaning making in your reality,

Right through the events of your reality.

There are the physical objects that do things that you interact with and then it's what it means to you.

Life a life is meaningless unless you apply significance to things.

Um,

I'll borrow from young and I'm actually going to read a quote from him,

Uh,

In a second.

Uh,

Spirituality is your,

Your symbol making your,

You know,

Symbology is the language of your unconscious.

Another way to put a spirituality finally is your communication with your unconscious or perhaps the collective unconscious.

So um,

When,

When you speak about this,

We speak about this meaning making filter of reality or you know what makes up our subjective reality or what makes it are like really our core wellbeing is not exactly the same thing as what we might call emotions or psychological wellbeing because if I speak about,

If I rewind three months to what really set me off on this particular inward journey,

It wasn't anything negative in my environments.

Nothing bad happened.

In fact,

Some really great things happened,

Which I'll share in a second.

Um,

You know,

Actually everything was almost exactly the same in my life as it was a few months earlier when I,

Everything was feeling great and it's not actually fair to say that I was even sad or upset.

I had moments of despair only because I was resisting something that was coming out of me,

But essentially what I was feeling before I really had words for it,

Uh,

Was some,

I was just feeling,

Uh,

Some dissatisfaction or unease,

What young would actually call spiritual malaise.

Um,

But it also actually,

One of the things that triggered it three months ago was some of the best news.

This is,

What's my little announcement section,

Uh,

Of personal life.

Uh,

Nalaya and I are having a baby.

We are,

We are five months pregnant.

Baby's due in February.

I'm very excited.

This is a thing that I've experienced.

I've wanted my,

My whole life basically even from childhood,

I wanted to be a father.

Um,

And uh,

You know,

Opportunity to actually employ a lot of things that I've,

Uh,

A lot of ideas I've thrown out about the king archetype,

The father nature archetype,

All that.

So I was elated.

I mean,

I am elated still,

But this news,

This great news of being a father,

Uh,

Becoming a true head of a real household.

Um,

You know,

It did,

It did shift a few things,

Right?

It's not like,

Uh,

It did,

It did start to change the archetype I was in from,

You know,

Bachelor warrior person,

Uh,

To someone with more responsibilities.

So even though,

You know,

I am still objectively young,

I'm 33,

I guess it depends on from whose perspective,

But this,

This experience or this expectation now I'm going to be a father in about four months,

Had me think about my mortality a little bit differently because I had to come to terms with the fact that,

Uh,

Some ships have sailed in my life,

Right?

There are certain things that,

You know,

This is independent of age really,

But you know,

Something regarding getting older,

There's certain things that I could explore and do and certain career things and life things that were only really possible as a bachelor who had no responsibilities and could kind of dream endlessly.

And actually I'm,

I'm mostly speaking about career stuff.

There's certain,

Uh,

Certain like,

Um,

Kind of goals or wishes or intentions that I had that they just don't fit in my life anymore.

Right.

And I was kind of holding onto these,

You know,

Maybe this will happen one day,

But you know,

Actually it doesn't really fit.

And yeah.

And,

Uh,

With this,

I had to think about like,

You know,

I've spoken about how when,

Uh,

When you switch from boy psychology to man psychology,

Part of that is accepting the fact that you can't actually do everything that you imagined,

At least not,

You know,

At least not all at once,

Right?

When you're,

When you're in boy mode,

Regardless of your age,

You can think like,

Oh,

One day I'll do this,

Or maybe someday I'll do that.

Or I don't know why,

What I'm going to do now,

But like someday I'll do something right.

You can,

You can be in that realm of infinite possibilities,

But when you switch into man mode,

When you become an adult and yeah,

This is,

This applies to women too,

As you could say from child to adult using Eric Burns model.

Um,

You have to,

You know,

Recognize that you're going to die at one point at some point,

You know,

You live in time and space.

You got to take some action now,

Right?

Maybe you have a million interests,

But you got to collapse the wave function of infinite possibility and pick something,

Right?

Otherwise you're going to be,

You know,

In your thirties,

Forties,

Fifties,

One day and you'll have done nothing.

And I've spoken about that in other episodes,

But so I started thinking about this more,

More,

And I was like,

Okay,

There's a bunch of things in my life,

Specifically with my career.

I've got a few things,

But,

Um,

I'll focus on career that I haven't really been doing fully,

You know,

With full,

I've been kind of half assing or I've been like half present there.

You know,

One example would be like my YouTube channel,

Right?

Like I,

I'm going to speak a little bit more on that,

But you know,

I've had different resistances.

I've been kind of been half in it.

I've never really given it full attention for various reasons.

And I was thinking,

You know,

Being a father,

I don't want to have half ass things out there,

You know,

Being responsive.

It's like either I'm going to do it or I'm going to not do it.

So I'll skip over some of the details of this career stuff,

But because it's not super interesting,

But I realized that actually going back now about a year ago,

So around this time,

Around this time,

This year,

And we're not telling the story in order,

But it's okay.

Um,

That was like around this time last year was actually probably the start of what I experienced more intensely as a dark night of the soul these past months.

Cause I recognized that I made certain decisions that kind of spiraled me in a not so good direction,

But it took me many months to realize that.

And I would summarize this to,

Um,

A term I've used before,

Which is the artist marker dilemma.

Uh,

There are many different,

Uh,

Situations this happened,

But in general,

I had some opportunities to,

Uh,

Well,

I had certain choices where I had to decide between doing something that was in line with my artistic integrity and doing something that would be like,

Would be marketable.

We would,

Uh,

Give me some sort of,

Uh,

High expectancy,

External value,

Whether it was making more money or getting more followers or,

You know,

Getting a certain things,

I'm getting more validation,

Getting more exposure,

Things that were like external,

These,

Uh,

Hard metrics that most business people do want to pay attention to.

I've kind of neglected a lot of my career and I was like,

You know what,

You know,

Time to take things seriously.

And I was presented with this choice.

I was working with these,

This marketing team and they presented me with these certain things that didn't feel so right,

But I am not so proud to say that I chose the,

What they said was the practical option and I use the justification,

Not to blame them or anything because I,

I,

I made the call ultimately,

But,

Uh,

I follow the justification of like,

Okay,

Let me just make a bunch of money now.

Then I can decide and I can do my own thing once I,

Once I have this,

You know,

These external things that,

Uh,

Are useful,

Money,

Followers,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Money and fame.

Very,

Very cliche.

This is basically me selling out or selling my soul.

Those things actually didn't,

Didn't,

Didn't work out.

So it was kind of a double fail.

Uh,

You know,

I abandoned myself.

I basically lost both the inner game and the outer game,

The outer game being a external,

Uh,

Value that,

You know,

These,

These things didn't work.

It was actually funny.

It seemed like such a slam dunk and easy thing to happen,

But then all of these random kind of explainable technical issues that this and that happened,

I'll spare you the details,

But like it was weird how,

How much energy was being poured into these projects and how nothing was coming back on top of the fact that I was kind of abandoning what I felt was right as like an artist,

What my soul felt was right.

Um,

So it was like,

It was a double fail essentially.

But even before,

Even before like any of this came to light,

It's like really early on,

Like basically a year ago,

I was already starting to feel a little bit of uneasiness and I kind of squashed it down.

It was like a mild dissatisfaction or a mild like discomfort of like,

Ah,

This is not really what I want,

But I just,

I just squashed it down and it wasn't,

It wasn't like upset.

It certainly wasn't depression or anything we could lump into like that category.

It was what a young would call spiritual malaise.

And it's funny,

Um,

You know,

If you've been following my podcast for any time,

You know,

A year and a half ago or maybe two years ago now,

I became super obsessed with Carl Jung.

If you look at back in my archives from 2019,

2020 of all these episodes that are basically focused on,

Uh,

Concepts I've read from Carl Jung's books.

And back then I had been trying to get my hands on his,

Uh,

So his famed red book,

His red book,

It was a book that was kind of a journaling of his more mystical experiences and delving into the unconscious.

And this book was really hard for me to acquire here in Thailand because it was,

You know,

It's kind of a rare book.

Um,

I had to like organize this big thing to get it to me,

Like through friends from America.

It was this whole process.

And by the time that the book finally reached me,

For some reason I picked it up,

I read it and I don't know if I was just young doubt by then,

But I just like,

I don't know,

I just couldn't get into it.

I was just like,

Ah,

I just,

I put it down and I forgot about it for two years.

I randomly picked it up like,

Uh,

You know,

While we were moving around from our storage stuff from our storage unit,

I found that I just randomly picked it up,

Started reading it this week.

And it was funny that the thing that drove him to write this book really resonates with the feelings I'm feeling now,

Like this kind of feeling of losing himself.

And I'm actually going to read this quote that,

Let's see,

It's on page,

It's in the introduction.

And you know,

What drove him to write this book was essentially a feeling of spiritual malaise,

Like things were also going okay in his career,

But something was not feeling right for him.

And uh,

Where is this?

He was feeling some,

Some uneasiness,

Uh,

What I guess I was feeling.

And he said some,

This is quote,

One without myth is like one uprooted,

Having no true link either with the past or with the ancestral life,

Which continues within him and yet,

Or yet with contemporary human society.

And he was speaking,

These are his journal entries about,

Yeah,

What was going on for him.

Um,

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness,

What is the myth you're living?

I found no answer to this question and had to admit I was not living with the myth or even in a myth,

But rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities,

Which I was beginning to record regard increasing distrust.

So I took it up in the most natural way.

I took it upon myself to get to know my myth and regarded this task,

The task of all tasks for,

So I told myself,

How could I,

When treating my patients make due allowance for personal,

For the personal factor for my personal equation?

Uh,

Anyway,

It gets a little more complex there,

But basically he had,

He had,

You know,

At this point that him writing the book,

He was already a well known,

Uh,

Father of psychology.

He was teaching,

He had great followers,

He had a full practice.

Um,

But he realized he,

He started living too much in his head.

And later in this passage,

He speaks about like,

This book was about getting back into his heart,

Connecting into the unconscious forces rather than his,

Um,

Focused,

Intentional thinking.

And a lot of this,

You know,

Resonated with me and I,

And I recognize like this whole thing of what we're calling the dark night of the soul is perhaps always,

But I'll just say often is caused by making the wrong choice or making the choice that abandons one's inner self,

Right?

Because,

You know,

Whether,

Whether it comes with the feeling of,

Uh,

Discord or despair or depression or not just as like mild feeling of uneasiness,

Which I think many people feel and then maybe shoved down the way I did.

Um,

Very often we are presented with a choice of doing something that seems outwardly practical versus what seems true to our heart or true to our insides.

And it's,

Uh,

You know,

When we make the choice going against our insides,

Going against our souls,

We end up in the dark night of the soul.

And I,

And you know,

The dark night of the soul experience is this recognition that,

Oh shit,

I was going the wrong way.

Or I was going against myself.

Because even if everything,

Even if,

You know,

You know,

The selling out works and you're making the money that you hoped.

And if,

Even if you're getting a validation because you're,

You know,

You're pandering to the masses,

Something in you is going to police you.

And that's what this experience is about.

And throughout this,

Before I even realized I was in a dark night of the soul,

I found myself thinking about this quote that I've,

I'm sure I've said on this podcast before,

Um,

Jordan Peterson has mentioned it a bunch of times.

I've said it to my clients many times when,

Especially when I'm coaching a guy about his life direction or a person about his life direction.

And I'm going to paraphrase this from Joseph Campbell.

It is many people spend their entire lives climbing a ladder only to get to the top and realize it was on the wrong wall.

I've said this to a lot of people,

Right?

I've said it on the podcast and I started to get the feeling that I was doing the same thing,

Although it took me a while to really realize that exactly how.

So I want to,

You know,

Dig into this,

Uh,

This,

We can call it the spiritual dilemma or the,

You know,

The,

The integrity versus practicality dilemma,

Right?

This is a thing that happens all the time.

You know,

We call it selling out when it's in a business context or,

And you know,

A creative business person.

Um,

We can call it pandering to people.

We can call it abandoning yourself.

There's,

There's many words for this.

It can happen,

You know,

In,

In career,

It can happen within a relationship where you abandon yourself for the reward of being liked.

I mean,

It's essentially nice guy syndrome.

But it shows up in many different contexts.

I'm actually gonna give an example of something totally different than this little,

You know,

My personal dilemma.

Um,

You know,

Of course,

You know,

We're all aware there's a lot going on with,

Uh,

Mandates from the governments on vaccines and this and that.

I'm not gonna,

I'm not trying to go into political direction,

But this is,

This is the thing.

This is a topic of our times.

People feel very strongly about one versus the other.

A lot of people do.

Uh,

I know plenty of people on both sides,

You know,

And just for the record,

I don't care if you,

You know,

If you want,

You know,

People should do what they want,

Right?

That's my opinion.

You want to take the vaccine,

Take the vaccine.

I want to take the vaccine.

Don't take the vaccine.

Uh,

My issue is more of the,

Uh,

Controlling not only by the government,

But also by social groups.

Like if,

If the,

If all of it,

I have friends on both sides where they're either,

They feel strongly one way and then their friends and family feel the other way.

And then there's,

This is this big,

Uh,

This big divide.

I know people who are being disowned by their family because of this silly little political disagreements.

But anyway,

This is a thing that's going on in our lives.

And I'm speaking with my neighbor and friend,

Chris,

I've mentioned him before.

Uh,

We have some great talks and,

Uh,

He and I both have similar opinions about,

Uh,

You know,

What's right.

Uh,

And you know,

What we would do.

Um,

And you know,

In our part of the world,

It seems like there's certain things that are happening that,

Um,

We don't agree with and we're,

We're,

You know,

Gaming out is,

Is this going to be a thing that we're gonna have to be concerned about?

Like how much is going to affect their lives,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

A lot of people are having this discussion and he,

He brought up the possibility of,

You know,

What if there are necessities where we have to do what we don't want to do?

I mean,

I'll just,

I'll just say like,

I don't want to get the vaccine,

Right?

I don't care if,

You know,

That's the truth.

Um,

I won't explain,

I won't get into that,

But,

Uh,

You know,

What if,

Uh,

It's like the world is such that it's so inconvenient,

You know,

I mean,

Would I get the vaccine if it meant I would otherwise be trapped in Thailand forever?

Well,

Well maybe.

What did I get the vaccine?

And he was gaming,

He kept asking these questions.

What did I get the vaccine if like,

You know,

For a parent to keep custody of their children,

They had to get vaccinated.

Like,

Well,

I mean,

Of course at some point there's a breaking point.

Everyone has a breaking point,

Even if you feel strongly about this,

About that.

And actually,

Honestly,

One of the reasons why I feel so strongly about this topic at all is the fact that as being,

Uh,

You know,

There's an authoritarian imposition.

But again,

You know,

Everyone can believe what they want.

But ultimately it came down to a question.

The reason why I'm bringing this topic up is that,

Uh,

He asked like,

What do you get,

You know,

If it's so impractical to do what you think is right or what you,

What you,

What is in line with your values,

You know,

What do you get out of going against it?

Like,

Shouldn't you just go along with it if it's,

If they make it too inconvenient,

Meaning the government or society or whatever.

And I was like,

Well,

I get dignity.

And he's like,

Well,

He asked,

He has a very important question.

He said,

What do you get out of dignity?

And he wasn't being facetious.

Like it's an important thing.

So I had to think about it.

We both had to think about like,

What does one get out of dignity?

Especially when it's a choice between dignity and practicality,

Right?

Like if the dignity choice is also extremely inconvenient,

Maybe extremely impractical,

Maybe it's a cost you money or comfort or,

You know,

Something worse than that.

Like what does one get out of dignity?

And this question in itself,

I think is the core of what we might call,

What I'll just call the masculine side of spirituality,

Right?

You know,

A lot of what is discussed around the word spirituality is from a very feminine lens like,

You know,

Astrology,

Things like that,

Whatever.

This question,

What do you get out of dignity?

I would say,

You know,

As far as my definition of spirituality,

One's symbol making mechanism.

This is the core question of the masculine side,

Right?

Because you could say,

You could fill a lot of words in with dignity that are important,

Right?

What do you get out of honor?

Honor is almost always impractical.

What do you get out of,

You know,

Integrity?

What do you get out of these things?

Other than,

Other than like the moral labeling of like,

Oh,

These things are good,

Right?

What do you actually get,

Right?

Because there has to be a path.

All of our behaviors come down to our genes.

I mean,

Initially,

All of our behaviors come out of our genes wanting to survive,

Right?

Things that we now see are good,

As good,

Have some sort of root in survival and replication.

Things that we see are as bad are the opposite,

Right?

So what does one get out of something that is going to cost someone's genes success,

Right?

If you're in a situation where you have to choose between dignity and death,

Or excuse me,

Around,

You know,

Dishonoring yourself from death.

I mean,

If it's Socrates drinking the hemlock,

If it's,

You know,

Someone refusing to bend the knee,

Where it's dishonorable,

Like what does one actually get?

If you're about to die,

Like why would anyone ever pick the honorable move?

And I like to think about this because,

You know,

It was a good point.

It was a good question.

And because I'm a game theory nerd,

I drew it out on paper in a two by two matrix.

You can,

You can imagine it in your head because it's pretty simple.

I want you to imagine on the vertical axis,

You have the two choices.

You have the noble,

Spiritually honorable move,

Whatever that is,

Right?

Using the thing that's in line with your values,

Perhaps whatever,

Whatever kind of values.

And then you have the choice below it of the practical safe move,

Right?

One can be called the noble move.

The other can be called the anti-noble or perhaps slave morality move,

If you want to use Nietzschean terms.

And on the X axis,

You can imagine the two possible outcomes.

There's the best case scenario.

Let's say,

You know,

It's a competition between you and some,

Some other thing.

Which is winning.

And there's a worst case scenario,

Some form of losing.

So with these two actions and these two possibilities,

We have four potential outcomes.

If you take the noble move,

You know,

Staying true to your values,

Being in alignment with your unconscious.

And you win.

You have the best case scenario.

You become the hero,

Right?

That's,

You know,

That's one of the reasons why anyone would choose the honorable move.

Honorable people,

When they win,

They become a hero.

If we're going back to the genetic imperatives and,

You know,

Looking at things through the lens of sexual market value,

A man,

Let's say,

Who makes the honorable move,

Does the brave,

Courageous,

Whatever thing,

And he wins,

He becomes a hero and he gets a harem,

Right?

He's the alpha male.

He has to pass on his genes a lot.

That's the big genetic payoff in such a situation,

Right?

However,

The reason why this is not the practical move,

Despite this big payoff,

Is that the payoff is pretty unlikely,

Right?

Any situation that we would call honorable and impractical,

The reason why it's honorable and impractical is because the chances of winning are pretty low.

More often than not,

Those who pick this kind of move in a situation where there's a noble move versus a practical move,

They end up losing.

And what does the honorable person get when he lose?

What does he become?

He becomes a martyr.

What does he get?

Well,

On one level,

He doesn't get anything,

Right?

Because,

You know,

Let's say,

You know,

We're speaking about honor in a war.

He dies.

I'm actually gonna use it,

I'm gonna mention an example from Game of Thrones in a moment.

Like what does one get?

Like he becomes a martyr and he dies.

Like that's not useful for his genetic line.

It's not useful for his genes.

So one could ask,

Like,

What does one get?

Like why would this behavior still exist?

Like why would anyone care about this,

Right?

And on the one hand,

And this is what I responded initially to Chris when he proposed this idea,

Was that,

Okay,

You're not perpetuating your genes anymore if you die as a martyr,

But you are perpetuating the meme group that you belong to,

Right?

Not your gene pool,

But your meme pool.

And you know,

I'm gonna flush this out a little bit more when we speak about honor specifically.

But essentially if you become a martyr,

You're kind of like one of the sperm cells that didn't make it.

You know?

So just like when I conceived with Nalaiah,

Only one of my sperm cells made it to the egg,

Right?

Only one is half the DNA in our child.

But the other 200 million were important still,

Right?

A bunch of them,

As soon as they entered the uterus,

They were there to basically neutralize the acidic environment and they died.

Kind of like cannon fodder or like the first soldiers of the beach in Normandy,

They got shot down so that other soldiers could survive and get further.

You know,

A lot of sperm cells were acted as fullbacks basically to clear the path.

Other ones were more like these kind of like a rugby scrum.

They were pushing themselves together.

One sperm cell could not make it up the fallopian tube on his own.

And half of them went up the wrong tube.

So like all of the sperm were necessary,

Right?

Even though most of them died,

They were all in it together to have one of their buddies,

Someone with a common gene to get there,

Right?

I know this maybe seems like a silly thing to analogize to sperm,

But you can see this principle,

This idea of useful martyrdom existing down to the cellular level.

So what does an honorable person do?

Well,

They die,

But they are able to perpetuate the meme of honor,

Of the noble move,

Assuming that there aren't other cultural constructs that change this,

Which we'll talk about in a moment.

Just to fill out the game theory matrix,

If one takes the other route,

If you fill out the other route,

One takes the practical safe move,

Best case scenario,

Which is pretty likely,

Which is why it's the practical safe move,

Is he gets safety.

He or she gets safety.

This can be from bowing down to the authoritarian government.

It can be from doing what your social group approves of,

Whether or not it goes along with what you want,

Just so you're not criticized,

Just so you have friends,

Just so you're part of the crowd.

And from a sexual market value perspective,

Best case scenario,

Maybe you get the alpha male sloppy seconds.

With elephant seals,

They break up into alpha males and beta males.

The alpha males fight.

Beta males will attach themselves to a winning alpha male and help him guard his harem,

Just so when the alpha male is done and goes to sleep,

He can also maybe mate with a couple of females.

That's essentially what happens on some level with the humans,

Because no one really cherishes the person who takes the cowardly,

Even though practical move.

A lot of times we understand it.

There's many times where it just makes more sense to take that route.

But no one's going to flock to this person.

No one's going to see this person as a hero.

Sometimes even the practical move doesn't turn out well.

Worst case scenario,

And this is the double fail,

This individual abandons himself,

But he also doesn't win the outer game.

So I'll just call myself out.

When I made the move to sell out and abandon my artistic integrity,

I chose the practical move and then it didn't work out anyway and I had a double fail,

So it just was worse.

But the reason why most people take the practical move is that it gives you security.

It is the safer bet.

It was interesting,

In reading the red book,

Let me see if it's worth reading the quote.

Jung had a little bit,

You know,

We speak about individuation,

A lot of people who speak about Jung reference this term individuation.

But Jung actually wrote something that,

And I'm paraphrasing,

A further paraphrase of him,

But he wrote something that individuation wasn't actually for everybody.

Individuation was for the few.

I'm actually going to read out of the book.

Individuation was for the few.

Those who were insufficiently creative should rather reestablish collective conformity with a society.

That was an interesting thing to read,

Right?

That's not something,

It's not a very collectivist idea.

It's a bit master morality actually,

That like most people are best off not even trying to individuate because it requires,

I mean,

He said creativity,

But I would say courage as well to go against the collective.

Most people are actually better off just going along with the collective because maybe they don't have the brainpower to really carve out their own way in alignment with their unconscious in a way that can still survive.

Right?

And that's probably what he meant by creativity.

I would hope that,

You know,

If you're listening to this,

You have an interest in deep topics which shows some level of brainpower that you should be on the path of individuation.

And I'm not anyone to say that any individual should or shouldn't.

It was interesting reading that from Jung because,

You know,

This game theory matrix,

These four possibilities,

These four outcomes that I described is true in an environment,

Like this game is accurate in an environment where society hasn't swayed the payoffs in one direction or another to really value the noble move versus the practical move,

Right?

I'm talking about situations where you essentially have enough freedom in choice to basically assess the outcomes on your own.

This is not always true and I'm going to give two examples.

One is in honor culture.

So actually,

I've been binging on Sammy the Bull Gravano's podcast.

He was the underboss of the Gotti family.

If you're into mafia lore the way I am,

You know,

He's a big character.

He's the highest level of defector in the history of the Cosa Nostra.

And his podcast is great.

Check it out.

He's telling all his basically his war stories from being in the mafia and,

You know,

Demonstrating a reality that's very different for most of ours.

You know,

He talks about like the emotionlessness of killing and just like what you do,

Etc.

One thing is interesting about the Cosa Nostra and I think this is one thing that draws a lot of men to stories of gangland.

You know,

A lot of teenage boys idolize Scarface and,

You know,

Smarter ones are into the Godfather and all these things,

Right?

Like why are these gang worlds so fascinating to men?

There's probably a few reasons.

But one is in the criminal underworld,

There are no obviously police policing what's going on.

The individuals have to police themselves.

The players have to referee themselves,

Which means they have to have these cultures of honor develop when the individuals have to enforce right and wrong through violence.

Right.

You know,

It's not that,

You know.

Well,

Anyway,

I'll just leave it at that.

And in a Cosa Nostra situation,

Like if you're in the mafia,

If you're in an honor culture,

If you're,

You know,

In rural Albania where they still do honor killings and blood feuds and the police basically don't go.

If you're in a street gang in America,

If you are a Taliban fighter or,

You know,

An Afghan fighter in the hills of Afghanistan,

You know,

There's no authority other than you and your own strength or and the strength of the people in your area.

So the culture develops to highly,

Highly reward honor and highly,

Highly punish dishonor through violence.

So actually,

This game theory matrix that we just mentioned is not it's not as true for someone,

Let's say,

A mafioso,

Because the practical move and the honorable move are kind of more the same thing.

Because if if I gave a mafia,

A mafioso does something dishonorable,

He's going to get whacked.

Like,

He just knows that.

So whether or not his morals are in alignment,

Whether or not he's actually an integrated guy or not,

He's more likely to do the honorable thing just out of fear.

I mean,

It's actually practical to be honorable.

And that's how I kind of how they ensure order in such in such systems versus kind of what we have going on in Western society now is masculinity shaming,

Marxist postmodern culture.

You know,

We have this generation of nice guys who are ashamed of what would previously be called honorable moves.

They're afraid of being toxically masculine,

Especially young people who maybe haven't been able to separate the nuances of like,

You know,

The blanket shaming of masculinity that happens.

And then,

You know,

You have the generation of nice guys,

Because now being honorable,

Which has always been a little bit impractical,

Just based on the possibility of winning or losing.

Now it becomes super impractical,

Because the honorable strong men will probably get shamed as well.

And if you are a martyr,

You're not even going to get celebrated.

So you don't even have that in you,

Right?

Like,

You know,

It's the guy actually has made me think of a story.

Perhaps this is a wound story.

I'm sure I'm over it by now.

But I remember,

So when I was living in New York,

And this is many years ago,

I was in a relationship,

Actually,

We had a look anyway,

We had some issues.

So it was a bit of a dramatic relationship.

Yeah,

Just leave it at that.

We were kind of arguing in a subway car,

This is in New York City.

And she was an angry feminist,

Let's just put it that way.

If you caught my interview with Dr.

Michael Pariser from last year,

He kind of analyzed why I had been historically attracted to angry feminists.

I won't get into it here.

But um,

You know,

We were having some arguments about something or other.

And some guy got on the on the subway,

I don't know if he was coked out or drunk or,

You know,

He's or maybe he wasn't on drugs,

But he was like being super obnoxious,

With a re with his music blasting on the speakers.

He's like,

You know,

Slam slapping the windows and the poles and like,

Kind of scaring everyone on the train.

And I'm trying to have this conversation with my girlfriend.

He's getting under my nerves.

I'm seeing people are being unnerved and like,

Well,

Someone's got to someone's got to stop this.

And I'm not I'm not like,

I've done things like this a lot in the past,

But I don't consider myself to be a brave person because every time I do it,

While I'm doing it,

I'm like,

Oh,

Shit,

What am I doing?

This happened a few times,

Especially in New York,

Where I like,

I tried to break up fights between like strangers and stuff.

And like,

In the in the act of doing it,

I'm like,

Fuck,

I'm being an idiot right now.

Like,

What was I thinking,

But for some reason,

I have a habit of doing this.

So I went up to this guy.

And actually,

You know,

He was a big guy,

A muscular and I just got the sense,

You know,

I've done combat sports enough that I can kind of get a sense of people,

You know,

I can size people up well.

And I just knew as soon as I stood in front of this guy,

I knew that if we threw down,

He would kick my ass.

I became very,

You know,

As I walked up to him,

And I asked him to stop playing his music so loud and to calm down.

I just got like,

Oh,

Fuck like and I actually had to grab on to the point.

I was like,

I'm gonna pull in the subway car because my hands started shaking.

If I didn't grip the pole,

I would have been I looked like a fool.

I would have just been shaking in front of him literally.

And anyway,

So my ground I was able to stay grounded just enough that for whatever reason,

Maybe because there's a lot of people around or maybe whatever or maybe I don't know,

He actually he didn't even back down in the sense of backing down,

But he did leave the subway car.

He cursed me out.

And then he just left.

And I was walking back to my seat,

Back to my girlfriend.

People on the subway car were like,

Thanking me for for doing this.

And I,

You know,

I was just elated that didn't get the shit kicked out of me.

I got back to the seat and I felt I started to feel even better about myself.

I started to say,

Oh,

Yeah,

I just did a brave thing.

I feel good about myself.

And then she said,

What you want me to congratulate you for threatening violence like you think is cool to like pick a fight.

And I just remember feeling so deflated in that moment and being so like,

I don't know.

I mean,

All these like anyway,

This this memory came up because I was like,

Man,

Like a lot of people do this to virtuous masculine impulses nowadays.

Anyway,

Back to Dark Night of the Soul,

Back to this whole thing of of dignity versus practicality.

Honor dignity,

These things that we label and at least for the time being still cherish in our culture to some degree is always impractical,

Almost by definition.

It's at least in the short term,

Impractical.

And actually,

There's a lot of examples from history that we can look at.

I'm going to share a hypothetical one.

But what actually came to mind the most clear is a fictional one from Game of Thrones in season seven,

An overall pretty terrible season.

There was a great scene.

I think it's called the the loot train ambush.

You know,

It's quite and if you don't have you didn't watch Game of Thrones,

Don't worry.

Just imagine like there's two armies.

There's the Lannister army,

Which is has a baggage train after looting some city.

And then there's this other army,

Daenerys,

Queen Daenerys.

She assaults.

She has fire breathing dragons.

Her and her army assault this ambitious baggage train and basically kick a bunch of ass,

Right?

They destroy everything.

And she captures the the lords of the opposing army.

One of the lords is Lord Tarly.

Lord Tarly is kind of it's kind of what David Data would describe as a stage two man,

Like very hard,

Very strong,

But totally lacking empathy.

He's one of the most cold hearted characters,

Not not cold hearted in an evil way,

But just like just cold.

Like he's just icy as hell.

He could have been the mafia like no,

No,

No sympathy for anybody,

No empathy.

And actually one of the themes in the show is he's got kind of like this pained relationship with his younger sensitive son.

Anyway,

That stuff.

She captures Lord Tarly.

She captures Tarly's oldest son,

Another kind of badass night guy,

But a young guy.

He's maybe 25.

And she tells all the lords of the captured army,

I'll give you a choice.

You can either bend the knee,

Which in Game of Thrones language is like,

You know,

Pledge fealty to me.

You switch allegiances essentially,

You know,

Say I'm the queen or my fire breathing dragon will burn you to a crisp.

So the older Lord Tarly,

He does what is consistent with his character.

He chooses the impractical honorable move.

He chooses to die by fire rather than go against his allegiance.

And you know,

He's not a likable character.

So if you're,

You know,

If you're in the audience,

You're like,

Okay,

You know,

Okay,

That's that's what we expect.

Very noble of him.

Fine,

He's going to die.

But then she offers the same thing to his 25 year old son,

A guy who's kind of innocent,

You know,

And he's a young guy.

He's trying to emulate his father.

He's now that he's going to be the heir.

He's the new head of the household.

He's the heir to the Tarly,

The House of Tarly,

Given that his father's just about to die by fire breathing dragon.

And you know,

Everyone's expecting him to just,

You know,

Bend the knee,

Live on,

Live another day.

Even his father tells him to do that.

But in a moment of,

You know,

Of spiritual honor,

If you will,

He says,

No,

Father,

I'm going to die like a man.

And he chooses to die with his father by fire rather than bend the knee.

And in a kind of surprisingly emotional moments,

Father and son stand there in front of the fire breathing dragon and Lord Tarly,

Who doesn't show any emotion throughout the series,

Reaches over and in an oddly emotional moments,

Holds his son's wrist in his one ounce of affection that he displays.

And it's and father and son die together honorably.

So you look at this,

Especially,

You know,

And I was even feeling even for this fictional universe,

Like,

Oh,

Man,

Like the younger son,

He should have just,

You know,

No one would have blamed him for doing the practical move of just surviving,

Right?

He's a young kid,

He's got to survive.

He's got to protect his family.

Now he's the man in the house.

He shouldn't have done that.

Right.

Like he should have just,

You know,

Even in the Lord,

Even in the Game of Thrones universe,

All the badasses would have understood if he just did.

There was almost no dishonor in just doing the genetically practical thing,

Right?

Meaning survive.

But he chose it anyway.

And it's like,

You know,

What did he get out of that?

Right.

He didn't really get anything.

Right.

But there's a reason why such behaviors persist.

And,

You know,

It's not just because in that universe,

Honor was celebrated.

Which brings us,

I'll use this an example from real history,

Kind of a hypothetical example,

Is a hypothetical example.

It's something I fleshed out more in the History of Masculinity podcast.

But I think this is actually the origins of honor.

Imagine you're a man in a Neolithic settlement.

So like this is New Stone Age,

Humans have just started to settle down and domesticate crops and hoard wealth.

Of course,

When there's hoarding of wealth,

There are other groups of humans trying to steal it away.

We'll call them marauders.

So if you're a farmer in one of these early Neolithic agrarian villages,

Right,

It's a small settlement.

And let's say this is a time in history where there's no such thing as honor.

No concept of honor.

Which probably wasn't even developed enough back then to speak about abstractions like honor.

If you're a man,

Let's say you're a farmer,

When the marauders are coming,

You have exactly this kind of dilemma,

Right?

There's a practical thing and then there's an impractical thing.

The practical thing would be just to save yourself.

You know,

If you're a farmer,

These marauders are probably more than likely going to kill you and anybody who stands and fights.

So the impractical move would be to stay and fight and protect the women and children village and all that stuff,

Right?

The practical thing,

You know,

If you run away,

You could probably find a new mate,

You could probably find a new collective that'll take you in.

You'll live another day.

What we would call proto-honor,

This is before honor,

But like the proto-honor move,

We would stay and fight,

Risk death,

Because even if you win,

There's a good chance you get wounded and die of an infection and there's a good chance you don't win.

And there's a,

You know,

You have so much more to gain by running away.

And I'm sure a lot of men did that.

However,

In settlements and societies where most of the men did the practical thing,

Those societies perished.

Those societies lost really quickly.

Whatever men stayed probably died.

The women and children were absorbed into another society that did cherish this meme of honor,

Right?

You know,

When someone dies a martyr,

They don't pass on their genes,

But they do pass on the meme pool that they're part of,

Like the honorable meme pool.

The settlements that persisted were societies where they developed some level of culture of honor,

Whereas the honorless societies very quickly disbanded or were conquered by other forces,

Right?

This is why honor has persisted and this is why in certain societies honor is cherished more than others.

It's based on competition and the need.

So this is all,

This is an aside on practicality and spiritual virtue and spiritual honor,

Maybe from a more masculine lens,

Let's say.

But we're going to go back and swing into the mystical realm.

But I'm going to first,

You know,

Bring us back to the example from my own personal life.

It's actually the thing that was kind of tormenting me in bits and pieces,

Which was my own artistic,

Artist marketer dilemma of practical versus honorable things.

I kind of came to terms with the fact that,

You know,

Picking the practical thing didn't work so I felt the double fail.

And then I started looking at everything else in my business,

Right?

One of these things was YouTube.

There's a few things,

But I'll focus on YouTube as one thing because I've always had this strained relationship with YouTube.

I actually just deactivated my YouTube channel so you're not going to find me in videos anymore.

But this is,

It was my fourth YouTube channel.

My first three got suspended.

I've always had issues with it.

It always felt like there's some reason why I wasn't being discovered.

But on top of that,

In more recent years,

As I've mentioned,

And at the end of many YouTube videos was basically I want people to get off of their phones.

I think infinite scroll and all that stuff,

I think it's terrible.

I think it's actually terrible for connecting with the wisdom of your own unconscious,

As is the point of the Dark Night of the Soul experience.

So I've had,

You know,

I've not served this half-assed goal of growing my YouTube channel because I didn't feel fully good about it.

Actually recently I was actually thinking,

A few months ago I was thinking,

Oh,

You know,

Maybe this is all just my creative resistance.

Maybe I have a fear for success.

I went down that road.

Maybe this is all it was.

So I was like,

Okay,

Let me take a couple weeks to really go hard on YouTube.

So I hired someone,

A YouTube consultant.

He went through everything.

And he basically confirmed to me a bunch of things that I was afraid of,

Which was I have a very high negative impression rate.

And for whatever reasons,

Basically the gist is my videos are often hidden.

The details of this aren't that important.

Basically things weren't going right.

And the way for me to fix it were kind of simple things.

I'd have to make more clickable thumbnails.

And I would have to,

You know,

Do these things that I could do.

They're not hard to do.

But they gave me this like really loud feeling of uneasiness,

This really loud feeling of what we'll call spiritual malaise of like,

Man,

This is not what I believe in.

Like,

I don't actually want to contribute to this.

And I know this example is maybe a little bit benign.

I'm sharing this just because it's actually the true example for me that generated all these emotions.

You know,

I'm sure this,

You know,

You can think of any certain time where you know there's a practical thing that you could and maybe should do,

But it just doesn't jive with you for whatever reason.

Right.

I don't think YouTube is evil.

I have a lot of friends who are YouTubers and I watch YouTube sometimes,

But I'm just like,

Man,

Like I don't I'm very against infinite scroll.

I think it's bad for you.

I won't rant about it.

But I was like,

For me to be contributing to this thing that I don't believe in,

On top of that,

Doing it half-assed,

You know,

This just doesn't work.

So I decided,

OK,

I need to be in integrity with myself,

Forget about what's right or wrong on a perhaps objective or universal level.

And I have to get off.

And actually,

I recorded this exact episode about four days ago.

And I'm basically saying the same exact information.

I've changed.

I've read I've read some Jung since then.

So I'm adding some things here and there.

But I actually couldn't put it out.

And halfway through the recording of the episode,

I had this funny feeling actually around this point in the episode,

Speaking about this idea,

Because I realized I hadn't yet deleted my YouTube channel.

And I'm like,

I'm not really practicing what I'm preaching here.

Right.

And I just felt like even if the information is true,

I'm not being in integrity.

Right.

You guys wouldn't know that.

But I had to do that for myself,

Because that's what that's what this like alignment with your unconscious is about.

It's like this feeling of what's right for you,

Even when no one knows or no one's listening,

Even though I just told you.

So I decided actually earlier today,

I got to get off YouTube.

I got to actually be in integrity with what I feel is correct.

And funny enough,

That's the stuff that feels good.

It's actually a lot easier to record this now.

Now that not not now that I'm not thinking about all this extra stuff that I would normally do such as YouTube,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Then I have to think,

Okay,

One of the reasons why I held on to YouTube for so long is that it's a really big search engine.

So even though I didn't really put a lot of attention into it,

A lot of people have found my Spotify channel through YouTube,

Right?

People search for a thing.

You are listening right now.

You know,

If you if you found me some time ago,

Maybe you found me through Google search or YouTube search.

Same thing.

It's like,

Man,

I'm gonna lose exposure.

Right.

That's the logical reason why I was attached to this thing that I didn't really believe in.

So that put me into a position right now.

I'm taking the choice.

I'm taking the spiritually integrated choice,

The honorable choice over the practical choice.

I'm doing something that's kind of impractical for my business,

For my,

You know,

My material value.

And it puts,

You know,

When someone when when you make a choice like this,

The result is one of two emotions,

Right?

If you're doing this thing that from everything you can see is impractical.

There's only two reactions you could have.

You can either feel resignation.

So just like,

Oh,

Shit,

You know,

I'm doing this thing.

You know,

The YouTube gods,

You know,

I'm shaking my fist at them,

But they still control my life and I'm just not gonna have traffic anymore.

Or you can say if you're going along with if you're if you're going against vaccine stuff and it's like ruining your life.

Let's just say that.

And use this as the more common example.

Right.

You know,

Oh,

Now my friends are going to like me.

Now I'm not going to be allowed in restaurants.

I can't travel,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

I just resigned to that fact.

Like,

Whatever.

Right.

That is one option.

That is that's kind of the choice of willful martyrdom.

Or you can hold on to this magic word faith.

Right.

And we actually are now touching on another side of spirituality,

Which is maybe the more mystical side of spirituality,

Which is trust in things that don't really make sense or that trust in things that don't really fit in what one should expect.

We can maybe well,

Anyway.

Yeah,

This is the other side of faith.

Maybe the less what we would call masculine side of faith.

And funny enough,

You know,

These two words,

Resignation and faith,

Are two ideas or related ideas by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

He didn't call them archetypes because archetypes,

That word wasn't coined until many,

Many decades later by Jung.

But they're essentially archetypes.

They're ideas or characters that can be enacted in the unconscious.

There's the night of infinite resignation and there's the night of faith.

These are two related characters or character ideas.

And in both situations,

This happens when one is facing impossible or improbable circumstances.

So the reason why they're called this is that in medieval times,

There would be knights who,

Either due to an oath they swore or some sort of social situation or construct,

They wouldn't be able to be with the woman they loved.

And this would happen often because of maybe religious oaths or,

You know,

The social structure.

Like,

There might be a princess that a knight swore his love to,

But because of the situation,

It just wasn't possible for them to be together.

So the night of infinite resignation is like,

Okay,

This is impossible.

I'm never going to be with my love,

But I'm still going to devote myself to her.

I'm not going to look at other women.

I'm going to,

You know,

Maybe swear chastity because I'm only going to be with her,

But I can't be with her.

So I'm just going to accept that my fate.

But I'm still going to do everything in her name.

I'm going to joust in her name.

I'm going to do brave things in her name.

I'm going to allow my devotion to this woman that I can never have and I know I will never have and I accept that I'll never have.

I'm still going to devote myself to her because that's what's going to fuel me through this life.

That's basically being an ultimate martyr,

Like choosing like,

Yeah,

I'm just going to I'm not going to get what I want in this life and that's just the way it is,

But I'm not going to abandon my values.

I'm going to stick to it.

There's something noble in that.

I mean,

It is a noble move,

But it's also kind of a downer.

It's not something anybody really wants,

Right?

But then there's a night of faith.

The night of faith is in exactly the same boat.

There's a woman he loves.

The circumstances of the situation are such that he can never be with her,

Seemingly.

But even though it doesn't make sense,

The night of faith has faith.

He believes,

I know it doesn't make sense,

He'll say,

But I believe that somehow we're going to be together.

Somehow.

I don't know how.

Maybe there's no action I can take that can directly fix the situation,

But somehow.

And he holds on to that belief.

And he goes through life doing the same thing,

Devoting himself to his lady,

Doing all these brave things in her name,

Being an honorable knight with the belief,

With the hope that somehow this belief that somehow they're going to be together,

Even though it makes no sense.

And in some ways,

This night of faith,

He's again tapping into what we could call the magician archetype,

This part of you that believes or has some influence over creating reality in a way that doesn't totally make sense necessarily.

Whereas the Knight of Infinite Resignation,

While he chooses the honorable move,

There is something slavish in that mentality.

And I'll say,

There have been moments with my silly,

My little YouTube example,

My relationship to YouTube,

Where I kind of was in this resignation mode or even slavish mode,

Like feeling this resentment for the YouTube algorithm of like,

Oh,

Poor me,

You know,

Poor me who wants to be authentic and get people off their phones.

But YouTube is such and such in the way the world is.

You have to give clickbait,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Some resentful thoughts,

Some disempowering resentful thought.

You know,

I was in my little bitch archetype,

If I may be honest with myself.

Whereas the Knight of Faith is more of the magician.

The Knight of Faith is like,

I don't know how,

But somehow I believe reality is going to conform to my will.

I don't know how.

It's a belief in somehow.

And this is a perhaps a non-mystical example of this,

You know,

A slight consciousness shift.

You know,

I'm not saying that I,

With all mystical things,

It can't be proven.

I'm not going to say anything definitively.

But I do believe people can influence reality a lot more than they realize.

I'm going to give a pretty grounded example.

I'm in a town,

Pai,

With Naliya right now.

We had this series of strange events.

This is maybe two weeks ago now where we had another Airbnb,

Another part of Thailand.

It was like very weird.

It really didn't feel right.

It smelled like alcohol and cigarettes.

Something was wrong.

A lot of things just started falling through.

Actually,

Funny enough,

This is perhaps symbolic.

We had stored all of our valuables in this little,

What seemed like the safest room in our old house,

Which we were renting out.

Everything that we actually cared about,

We hid in this little storage room.

It was on the second floor.

It seemed like the safest place.

Things don't typically flood on the second floor of a house.

Everything seemed to be safe.

But funny enough,

We don't know exactly how,

But this room flooded.

It was a second story closet.

Somehow,

The only room in the house that got flooded in a rainstorm was this one room that had all of our valuables in it.

The tenants living in our house didn't notice anything because everywhere in the house was dry.

It was like this odd symbolism that perhaps this thing we were trying to protect got destroyed perhaps by clinging onto it too much.

Or maybe all this stuff had to be taken away.

I don't know.

That's not the point of this story.

The point is a bunch of things started falling through.

Some other things fell through with some other ventures I'm involved in.

It was just this odd series of inconveniences or misfortunes.

Many misfortunes.

I don't want to dramatize it.

But it all happened in a 48-hour period.

Both of us,

Thankfully,

We're in our fool archetypes of taking this all with good humor.

But a bunch of times,

We're like,

Shit,

How is another thing another thing?

It got to the point where after 48 hours of uncanny,

Unfortunate experiences,

We ended up driving to a totally different part of Thailand because we couldn't find a hotel that accepted our dogs in a funny way.

Things were weird.

We ended up going to a totally different town after driving five hours.

I was exhausted.

This lady comes out.

It was nighttime when we arrived there and we were letting the dogs pee.

This lady comes out with a big flashlight on her head,

Like a miner's flashlight.

She's blaring it at me.

It's pitch black outside because we're in nature.

I can't see her.

I just see the spotlight on me.

She's basically being really rude,

Saying something about how dogs are evil and they're going to kill her cats,

Something kind of ridiculous and kind of mean.

I was really taken aback.

I was like,

Oh,

Shit,

I don't know what to do with this.

But then she walked over to the reception area and she was waiting for me to almost have a confrontation.

I don't know.

This crazy cat lady,

She wanted to fight about something.

We were going back to the car.

I was unloading stuff.

I was like,

What the fuck is this day?

Even this cat lady is yelling at me out of nowhere.

How is this happening?

Then I considered the mystical point of view.

I entertained the idea that maybe,

And ultimately I think this is the master morality view,

Maybe just maybe I'm actually able to influence my circumstances a lot more than I realize.

Not to say that I attracted these bad things,

But maybe I did.

It's also in the realm of possibility.

With this circumstance,

I was like,

You know what?

I'm going to take full responsibility about this situation.

I'm not going to be resentful at this lady because resentment is slave morality.

I'm going to take control of the situation.

I'm going to make it bend to my will.

I'm going to make it more of what I actually want,

Which is just peace at this point.

Which,

You know,

On a very practical social engineering level,

I guess you could say,

It's just responding to her hate with love.

I wasn't necessarily thinking in terms of technique or tactics.

I was just like,

I'm going to make this okay.

I walked over to her and I said something that was just like a fairly nice thing,

A compassionate thing.

I just said something like,

Hey,

I know that you're concerned about our cats or dogs or whatever.

I basically just was trying to respond to her angry energy with the energy that I wanted us to have,

Which was peaceful harmony.

Of course,

She responded with this weird thing.

I'm not going to get into the whole details,

But the next morning she actually came to me and apologized and just basically,

I don't know what I came over me.

I'm really sorry.

That's very rude of me.

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And there's nothing particularly magical about this.

The law of attraction idea that your thoughts become things or your reality responds to what you're feeling,

That may or may not be true on a cosmic level,

But it definitely is true when it comes to people and social psychology.

I just would not accept her meanness because my defensive reaction,

My initial gut reaction would have been to respond with,

Get in her face and yell at her.

Why is she yelling at me?

She's being unreasonable.

But that's not the reality I want to live in.

I don't want to live in a reality where I'm fighting with my new neighbor.

I want to live in the reality where everything is harmony.

And I just decided,

I was like,

I'm not going to take it anymore.

And I'm just going to make this a loving situation anyway.

Again,

This is not a magical situation.

This is basically the golden rule.

However,

This is a bending of reality.

This is an opportunity for faith.

And whether or not it's true that your attitude,

Whether you choose faith or resignation or resentment actually changes things in reality,

You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing this is so.

Because the knight of resignation is kind of a Debbie Downer,

Whereas the knight of faith is upbeat and finds solutions to things.

Because he believes he has this undying will to win.

So both of these knights choose the honorable move,

The move in integrity with his unconscious,

With his archetypes,

With his spirituality.

But the knight of faith is way more likely to become a hero where the knight of resignation is basically choosing to be a martyr.

And now we're going to,

Well,

The rest of this episode,

I'm going to share basically bullet points and takeaways that I've had from the last few months through this Dark Night of the Soul experience.

Some of it might sound a little mystical.

It's stuff that I can't prove,

But I believe to be true.

Otherwise,

I wouldn't share it.

And one of these things is,

Well,

I'll just say one in regards to something I said earlier.

I actually looked at my entire life,

My entire career doing this thing of,

You know,

Whether it's coaching or podcasting,

Basically learning things that I think are interesting,

Sharing it,

Which is something I've always wanted to do.

But you know,

I've been grateful and proud,

I guess,

And mostly grateful that I've been able to make a career doing this.

But to be fair,

You know,

I haven't ever become really big,

Which is kind of what started this whole artist marketer dilemma.

But I look back at my career,

I look back at all the times,

You know,

I've been doing this for a while,

Almost 10 years now.

Every time that I've essentially tried to sell out in some form,

Like do something just for the results,

Just for the followers or the money or whatever,

It's actually only worked out once.

Only one time that I totally sell out and abandoned my values and did it make a lot of money,

And it actually felt horrible.

I won't get to that.

It was basically,

I was partnered on this webinar series.

It was a bunch of things I didn't agree with.

It did end up making a lot of money,

But I felt really horrible.

But basically every other time I've attempted,

It hasn't made money,

Including this recent time where I abandoned myself with this marketing group last year.

Whereas the things that have actually quantifiably made me the most money have been things that came out of my,

That were more in line with myself,

That came out of my unconscious.

And the thing that,

You know,

I've maybe mentioned this before,

But actually if you listen to my podcast,

I plug this quite often because it's one of my programs and I like it,

My archetype challenge.

It's probably made me the most money out of anything I've done,

But it's been a double win because when I made it,

I went into it kind of thinking like no one's going to want to take a journaling course on Jungian psychology that requires them to meditate on their environment,

Which is basically what my,

I mean,

There's more to it than that,

But I was like,

Man,

And this is before,

You know,

Anyone was really talking about archetypes.

This is 2018.

I was just like,

Yeah,

I mean my practical marketer side,

You know,

There's no evidence that this is going to do well,

But I just got to do it because I was like so hooked on reading Jung and I was like always getting these epiphanies and I wanted to share it with people and I was just so obsessed with it and I made it and I was like,

You know what,

I'm going to put some time into this even though it's probably not going to make any money.

And actually during this time I was traveling with someone and she was like,

You're spending all of this time on something that like is too complicated for anyone.

Anyway,

She was talking about an article I was writing about the course.

I didn't even get into the course yet and I was spending a lot.

I spent like 20 hours writing this article.

If you check my Medium,

I think it's the last article ever published called The Devils Inside of Us.

It's about Jungian archetypes,

Specifically sexual archetypes.

But I did it anyway because it just felt right and I just felt like I had to do this.

Not for money,

Not for followers,

But for my soul.

I just had to do this and I kind of knew it was going to even get trashed by people who,

You know,

Anyway,

I'm not going to get into that part.

But it was such a great victory for me because not only did it get validated in the marketplace,

It actually was something that came purely out of my soul.

It was not something that there was any evidence that it would do well commercially.

It did well,

It did okay commercially,

But it's also,

You know,

It was a double win.

It's something I was really proud of.

And actually,

I'll say this,

One of the places where I abandoned myself last year working with this marketing group was that they took my Archetype Challenge,

Which is a course that I feel so proud of,

As I mentioned,

And they wanted to repackage it as like a dating,

How to become manly thing.

And I didn't feel,

You know,

I was like,

That's not really the thing.

It isn't,

It's not,

Yeah,

It feels kind of corny,

But I went along with it anyway,

Abandoning myself.

And Christina,

Who edits my podcast and does a lot of things for me,

She was like,

She watched the marketing stuff.

It's like,

Man,

Like,

This is not you,

Ruwan.

Like,

Are you sure you want to do this?

I'm like,

Yeah,

Yeah,

You know,

Just make some money and we'll have a budget to like promote the things we care about and blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Whatever.

And it not working.

It was a double fail.

And I feel particularly bad that I was willing to pimp out something that was,

I really cherished anyway.

But along all of this,

Right?

One of the things that I believe to be true that I cannot prove is that when something is right,

It should flow.

When I look back at this,

This marketing faux pas from last year,

The whole time it just didn't flow,

Right?

There was random things with email addresses and blah,

Blah,

Blah,

And websites just going down inexplicably.

Kind of,

I could look back if I choose to apply symbolism to this,

It was like there was some sign from the universe that this was not the right move.

It was many months later that this would be confirmed through more material things.

But it was almost a sign.

Whereas things that have been most useful in my life were kind of randomly just flowed.

Like there's this one piece of content that right when I was beginning my career,

I had no email list,

No followers,

Very few clients.

But I appeared,

And I'll just say what it was like,

I was on the Fearless Man channel.

This is 2015.

I was kind of struggling.

I just made it,

I just started.

But Brian Beijin from that channel,

A friend of mine now,

He interviewed me.

And I was just so aligned with my unconscious.

I had just put on an event that day.

I had just done all these things just in the name of courage and honor for myself.

And I was just so in myself.

And I don't think I said anything particularly profound in that video.

But for some reason,

That video resonated with so many people.

I've gotten so many,

This is like seven years ago now,

So maybe it's like buried under their other content.

But I've gotten so many clients with that video.

There's something about that,

And it was a random thing.

It was filmed on Dave Saltz's cell phone while wobbling on a little one of those mini gorilla tripods on a hotel bed.

It wasn't anything that I would have expected to do well.

And it seemed so insignificant,

But it just,

It was something that was really impactful and kind of in some ways launched my career or maintained my career.

And then this,

You know,

This episode's gone kind of long,

So I want to bring this home.

How long have we been going?

Okay,

Hour 16.

It's not too bad.

I've had some two hour,

Three hour episodes.

We're not going to go that long though.

I've actually been haunted a little bit by,

Yeah,

I guess haunted is the right word,

By some words by Nicole Dédonne,

Who is my cult leader back in the day.

And it was funny that one of the things that I felt a little uneasy about a couple of weeks ago was I appeared on an episode speaking about my cult experience and I sort of get the feeling that they were trying to really trash my cult experience.

If you caught my episodes on when I was in the sex cult,

I try to take the lens that it was a really beneficial thing that also went dark.

But some journalists like just want to tell one story.

And I felt like,

Oh man,

Because they're attacking her so hard,

I kind of want to defend her.

Not because I think,

You know,

Even though she's done some bad things,

Which I don't,

You know,

I'm not defending that.

And I,

For some reason,

And maybe,

You know,

Serendipitous or because of that or whatever,

I started like remembering things she said to me.

And one of those things was I once had this five minute coaching session with her and she basically said like,

All right,

I'm going to tell you what I see in you.

And she said that,

She said something actually that's exactly this artist marketer dilemma,

Which was I have a choice.

This is me back at age 24.

I had the choice to either be liked or to be a powerful man.

And she said,

Right now you are so in the middle that you're neither going to be liked nor powerful men.

And she said some other things.

But this quote came back and she actually,

Another thing that was relevant,

She said,

It's like you're afraid to be magnetic.

It's like you have this sludge over your magnet,

Over your magnet to attracting what you want.

And that is,

Yeah,

That's,

And that,

That sludge is self doubt.

And I've been thinking about this of like,

You know,

How I've,

I've had a decent career so far.

A lot of people who follow my stuff and I'm not trying to make this all about me,

But this is,

This is,

I mean,

I can only speak to my experience and hopefully you're getting something from it.

It's like,

Um,

A lot of people have said to me like,

Oh man,

I can't believe you don't have more followers and this and that and blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And it's been something like,

Uh,

I look at my actions and my feelings over the last decade that I've been doing this and there has been,

And this is something,

Uh,

My girlfriend,

Aliah has pointed out to me is like,

There's some like inner back and forth conflict where like,

I want to be seen,

But don't want to be seen.

I want to do what's,

Uh,

What's marketable,

But I actually don't want to do that.

I want to do what's like in touch with myself and,

Um,

Nicole actually said this thing like ending this of like,

How can people fully trust you if you don't fully trust yourself?

She didn't say it in those words,

But she says something along those lines.

It was actually,

Um,

Yeah,

Out of context.

It won't make sense.

That was the gist of it.

And that was actually what made me realize,

Okay,

If I actually want to talk about choosing the honorable spiritual thing over the practical thing,

I have to really embody,

And if I want to embody the night of faith,

I actually have to do what I say I should do,

Which is like,

Get off of all the things that don't resonate with me just because,

I mean,

Even that I was on because they're practical.

So that's actually what called me to delete my Instagram,

Delete my YouTube,

Get off all of this stuff.

Um,

Because the,

The thing that's actually important,

What I think that allows one to pass through and grow from their dark night of soul experience will allow you to do this rather than feeling stuck rather than feeling,

Um,

Depressed or any of these negative emotions because of,

Uh,

Because of resisting what your unconscious is trying to show you is playing the inner game first and last.

And you know,

The inner game concept being that there's an outer game,

Which is achieving some results,

Winning money,

Validation,

Whatever external things.

And there's the inner game,

Which you win essentially by really being present and really being one with whatever action you're taking,

Whether it's a moment in a sport of swinging a tennis racket,

Uh,

Allah Timothy Galloway,

Who coined the term inner game.

Um,

Or,

You know,

You know,

Uh,

Being really an integrity in a business deal or being really an artistic integrity with yourself.

Like if you do that,

If you're in resonance with yourself,

That is a win in the inner game that may or may not lead to a win on the outer game.

So like,

You know,

And actually I was speaking about this again with my neighbor,

Chris,

We're talking about meditation and how this idea of meditation and presence and mindfulness has become popular in the mainstream in the last,

Like,

Let's say 10,

Maybe 20 years,

Probably because meditation and mindfulness has been marketed in one of two ways.

One is it's,

Uh,

To fix the ailment of anxiety.

Like if you look at any of the meditation apps,

Um,

And you know,

I'm,

I'm featured on insight timer.

You might actually be listening to this on insight timer,

Even insight timer,

Which I like and you know,

Other meditation apps very often they market themselves as a way to get over anxiety,

Which is a fine use of meditation,

But that's an outer result.

It's using an inner game victory for an outer results.

The other way that meditation and mindfulness is marketed is,

Uh,

Uh,

To make your,

Your,

Yourself more productive.

Right?

So it's like,

Oh yeah,

Be present because then you can make more money,

Be present so that you can,

You know,

Get some sort of accolades or,

You know,

Pump out more of whatever.

But that's not actually the point,

Right?

And actually Alan Watts has this beautiful,

Uh,

Little passage about how you should not meditate because it's good for you.

Don't meditate because someone said,

Oh,

It's good for you or you know,

It's good for your mental health or whatever.

Don't meditate for that reason because it's always going to be a chore.

It's always going to be annoying.

It's always going to be something you have to muscle through.

It's not going to be fun and you're going to miss out the point of meditation.

The point of meditation is in itself the benefit.

It should be an enjoyable activity where when you meditate,

You're flowing with the universe.

It's your opportunity to flow with the universe and that should be the reward.

The presence in itself should be the reward.

The fact that you are one with yourself,

One with the flow of life,

You're connected to the wisdom of your unconscious,

That in itself by itself is the reward.

Not because the wisdom of your unconscious will tell you how to make more money or anything else that may,

May happen.

But that is the point.

So play the inner game first and last.

It's like the outer game is just a result.

And actually I flipped it differently.

I started framing my goals and my to-do list.

It's actually one of the key indicators that I was in a spiritual malady was that everything that I had on my daily to-do list for many days in a row,

All of it made me feel bad.

Steve Jobs has that quote,

Paraphrasing.

Anytime I looked at my,

Of what I was going to do that day and I didn't like it,

I knew something had to change.

Or if I did that too many days in a row,

I knew that something had to change.

I thought about that.

I was like,

Okay,

So then my outer game,

What I try to accomplish in a given day,

A different week,

A different year,

If I think of the inner game as the most important thing,

Then I should be setting up my outer game to benefit presence.

Right?

The reason I want to be present so I could become a more popular writer is that I want to be,

I want to set up my goals in such a way that I keep myself motivated to be present.

Right?

It's like if you're,

This might be more relatable if you're self-employed,

But everyone's kind of self-employed.

Like unless you're working on an assembly line,

You have free use of how you use your attention moment to moment.

And we think of it as like you are a company of one and you have one employee is your best employee.

You should set up your goals and your workday such that you can keep your number one employee motivated.

Right?

And I know I haven't done that all the time for myself.

And sometimes like,

Yeah,

I put pressure on myself to do things that I don't want to do where I set myself up with goals that whether or not I accomplish them,

All the things leading up to that are things that really take me out of my inner game.

That's not how I should live my life.

And actually one of,

One of my primary motivations to be self-employed many years ago was just this idea of like,

I don't want some other external force telling me how to spend my attention,

But here I am being self-employed,

You know,

Forcing myself to do things that maybe,

Uh,

Aren't necessary because I think they're,

Anyway.

Yeah.

So the question instead of how can I be present for an external goal is what if the goal was resonance?

What if the goal in itself,

The reward you're getting for yourself,

There was just having a great relationship with your unconscious,

Right?

There's some entrepreneurs,

The people I know who are like,

Oh,

You need to have a good marriage because married people make more money and they become more productive.

Like that's not the point of a good marriage.

The point of good marriage is that the good marriage in itself is a reward,

Right?

If it helps you with your career,

That's nice,

But that's not the point of having a healthy relationship.

The same thing with the relationship you have with yourself.

So essentially it's having values or having your value system cherish what's inside of you,

The wisdom of your unconscious over anything outside,

Whether it's external rewards or I think what's more,

I've been,

I've been using money as the example because that's where I've abandoned myself.

But I think with a lot of other people,

Maybe this is more common is abandoning yourself for social approval or banning yourself to be a part of a collective or banning yourself to avoid disapproval,

You know,

Just going along with the crowd because it's too inconvenient or maybe even painful to go against it.

And actually this brought me to some other little values of like,

You know,

I've ranted a little bit already about how I think infinite scroll apps are so bad for you.

Like anything that steals your attention away,

Which is why I like podcasts and audio only because as I've mentioned at the end of many videos and episodes,

Like you can go for a walk,

You can do pushups,

You can walk your dog.

You can clean your house and you can have your primary attention on real reality and your physical body when you're listening to audio as opposed to when you're watching a screen,

It's taking you out of your body.

There's other things that take you out of your body.

You know,

Yeah,

The screens thing,

This hyper focus on productivity,

This abstraction of productivity as being the most important thing,

Which in our consumerist culture,

It's been framed that way.

You know,

Productivity is to the consumerist what honor culture was to the night or honor was to the night.

Another thing was,

You know,

In the name of productivity or related to that,

I realized I was over caffeinating myself.

This is not a rant against coffee.

I still like coffee.

I had a cup of coffee this morning.

But I noticed that I was using coffee as a drug as opposed to just enjoying it and maybe also having a boost.

Like I was pounding coffee on days that I felt like I needed to get more shit done,

Which if my personal God,

If my religion is such that the highest God is the God of productivity and I think that's the most important thing to like crank out as much output as possible,

Then that's fine,

Right?

But if my chosen religion is to worship the God of presence,

Which we can relate to the God of well-being,

Let's say goddess of well-being,

Then that's a great sin.

To take caffeine,

I'm saying over caffeination,

Like to take coffee to the point that's actually making me feel bad,

Making me feel tense or jitters or not allowing me to sleep or whatever.

I mean,

I'm kind of caffeine sensitive.

So if I have too much,

My eyes twitch and stuff.

If I'm taking it to that point,

For anything,

That's a sin.

That's a sin in my personal religion where presence is the highest deity.

So that's messed up and I realized I had to cut down my caffeine consumption,

Even if it means that I don't write as well that day or I produce less.

And actually,

I still drink coffee,

But I went on a coffee break for a while and I've been drinking this other thing,

This herb called Genestema.

It kind of looks like green tea,

Smells a little bit like green tea,

But it tastes a lot sweeter than green tea and it's caffeine free.

And one of the beauties of this plant is that it's an adaptogen,

It's not a stimulant.

Adaptogens rather than having a unidirectional effect on you,

They bring you back to homeostasis.

So if you've had too much caffeine and your cortisol levels are too high,

Genestema,

This plant will actually bring you back down.

Actually,

The reason why I know so many facts about this is that while I was kind of deep in my,

Okay,

Let me just listen to my unconscious,

Let me only do what feels resonant with my soul,

I realized I was drinking this thing a lot and I realized speaking with Nalaiah and I was like,

You know what,

I want to bring this to America.

The only people who know about this plants are hippies and like Chinese medicine nerds,

But anyone who drinks coffee should know about this.

There's other benefits to it,

Improves your sleep,

There's other wellbeing and longevity aspects.

I won't list them.

But I was like,

You know what,

I want to bring this to America.

We're going to make a company,

Together We Made a Company,

She and I,

It's called Kudra,

We sell it,

You can actually check it out at drinkkudra.

Com,

That's drink,

K-U-D-R-A.

Com.

The point wasn't to plug it,

But the point is like I came up with this idea and in the name of when things are right,

They flow.

I've never had a business like this,

It's very outside of my wheelhouse,

But we kind of went to a part of Thailand where we thought the farms were.

We asked around,

We ended up meeting a guy who happened to have an out of print booklet,

It's currently out of print,

But it was like a Chinese medicine booklet that listed all of the Chinese medicine,

But also the Western studies on this plant going back to the 70s.

It was very,

Very serendipitous and random,

We met this guy.

Then we went out to this part of Thailand,

Chiang Rai,

Just kind of hoping we would run into someone who knew of a farm,

We knew there were farms around there.

Somehow we ran into one person,

Another person,

And within eight days of deciding,

Okay,

We're going to do this,

Everything came together and now we have stock in a warehouse in Texas.

If you do want to order and check it out,

You can go to drinkkudra.

Com.

Again,

The point wasn't to plug this,

I just did,

Of course.

The point was that,

I have no idea what's going to happen with this business,

I've never had a business like this,

But everything flowed so easily because I was just listening to the feeling inside of me.

I know this is a mystical concept,

I can't say that this is a law that's always going to be true in every situation,

But I actually ask you to look back at your life,

Think about this for a second.

When have things,

Perhaps maybe don't think of life this way,

But just entertain this idea.

When in your life have things kind of just flowed serendipitously,

Like things were coincidentally perfect,

And when have things not?

Chances are there was some,

I mean,

It's not even chances are,

It's just a question.

Best of your ability to remember,

Were you winning your inner game back then?

Yes or no?

Were you actually listening to your soul,

If you can answer that question as best you can.

I look back at my life,

At least as far as I can remember,

And this could be confirmation bias because everything mystical could be.

When things have flowed in my life,

And there have been times where I've gotten really lucky with things and gotten really big breaks,

I seem to have really been living by spiritual honor.

And at times when things have hit a sandstill,

Very often I was abandoning my integrity.

That might not always be true,

Again,

Could be confirmation bias,

But that is what I can take looking back on my life.

Because even looking at YouTube,

I've always had issues with YouTube,

And I've always had,

Even before the social dilemma and all these other things came out about the dangers of an infinite scroll,

I've always kind of felt funny about screen-based media.

Because this is perhaps the final point,

We're coming to the end here,

That the purpose again of the dark night of the soul,

The reason why it's an important part in your path to individuation,

To use Jung's terms,

Is that it is a quick recognition that perhaps you are not in alignment with yourself.

And the way through it is to get in line with yourself.

But you might not know what is alignment with yourself,

Right?

If it was that obvious,

You wouldn't have fallen out of alignment.

There's only one thing that allows you to get more in touch with yourself,

And that is cultivating peace of mind.

Actually,

I'll just use the word that I actually use to myself,

Which is gnosis,

Gnosis with a G,

As in Gnosticism.

And the actual definition that most people use is gnosis is a direct experience of God.

If we're not into that kind of language,

And I'm not totally,

I don't use the word God very often,

A direct experience of reality,

Where you're in what I,

Something I speak about in the archetype challenge a lot,

It's kind of the focus of it,

Which is to develop original perception,

Or no mindedness is what other people call it,

Where you are directly experiencing what is true without layers of judgment,

Without feelings of resignation,

With just the belief that if you just stay in resonance with reality,

Based on how you feel,

Based on your best perceptions of the unconscious,

You don't need to figure things out.

You need to force things and things will turn out okay.

And this is the only way,

In the red book,

Jung has different,

There's different quotes from Jung from his life,

And he was saying that one of the unfortunate things he experienced when he got married was that he no longer had access to that beautiful,

Scary feeling of solitude.

And he said this is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

This he said right when he got married,

Years later he ended up writing the red book and finding his solitude in other ways,

Because it wasn't the end of his connection to the unconscious,

But solitude is so important,

And the opportunity to experience original perception and think original thoughts and hear the undirected thinking that exists inside of you beneath your ego or the functions of your prefrontal cortex,

That is important,

Right?

Because we,

As I've mentioned,

And this is an idea from Steven Pressfield,

Like we are not blank slates.

It is a postmodernist idea that is very incorrect.

You know,

We are born with certain elements already intact.

These are maybe things that we inherit genetically,

Or maybe if you want to take a spiritual lens,

It's our soul that existed before our bodies did.

There's something in us,

And if you have siblings and you're very different from your siblings,

You know this is to be true,

Right?

If this wasn't true,

Then everyone who grew up in the same environment had the same interests and same personalities.

It's not true.

We have something in us that exists beforehand,

And part of the individuation process or the creative process is discovering what's true for you,

Discovering what is on your slates,

That's hidden in your unconscious,

And connecting it with the real world,

And that's what individuation is.

It's the self-discovery process of being fully expressed the way you're supposed to be,

Not the way the society wants or what's practical given the situation you're in,

But what's actually trying to come out and be expressed from your soul.

It's um,

Yeah,

And I mean that is essentially the wisdom of the unconscious,

Which is also why I'm so against screens and anything that takes our attention away,

Because the only way to cultivate this is to have solitude and silence and be able to think your own thoughts,

And feel your own feelings,

And have enough quiet to be able to listen to that wisdom.

And um,

Yeah,

Anyway,

So we're gonna remember that image,

Before we close,

I gotta bring you back to that image,

Right?

Imagine this 8-bit pixelated pirate.

He's hanging from a cave.

One hand is holding on to the vine for his life,

And one hand is holding on to the treasure,

And he's telling the story.

Here we are back.

Here we are back to the,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The,

The Inimidius Res opening,

Right?

And it's funny,

Um,

When I originally thought to open the,

Open this episode with that idea,

I didn't really know why.

I actually scratched it out a few times,

Because like,

This is kind of a silly image.

Like,

Why am I using this image?

I'm basically just explaining an Inimidius Res,

You know,

Like starting in the middle and flashing back,

Like,

There's no reason I have to mention Monkey's Island,

Right?

I'm just doing this cutesy thing,

Right?

But then I thought about the actual image itself.

There's some symbols here.

This is,

This is the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul,

Where you are hanging from a vine and holding on to a treasure over the darkness of the unknown.

And from my initial,

Superficial view,

I was like,

Oh,

These are obvious symbols,

Right?

Um,

Obviously,

The guy should let go of the treasure,

The treasure must be materialism,

Right?

He should let go of the treasure and climb up to safety where he can go back into the light.

But I thought,

That's not actually true,

Because that's kind of like,

That's kind of like the,

The Knight of Infinite Resignation viewpoint.

It's like,

Oh,

I can't have the treasure because it's impractical.

I can't pull myself back up to safety.

If I'm holding on to treasures,

I have to let go of the treasure and climb up.

That's not actually what is right.

That's not,

That's not the Knight of Faith move.

The Knight of Faith move,

And I think the actual way to pass through your Dark Night of the Soul and transform positively,

Is the opposite.

It's the treasure is not material treasure,

It's the,

It's the honorable move.

It's your values.

It's your unconscious,

It's your integrity,

Your spiritual honor,

Your dignity,

If you will.

It's the creative gifts that exist beneath what your conscious mind can see right now.

The Abyss is obviously the unknown of the unconscious,

The endless expanse that is all the things that are not immediately accessible to your ego.

And to climb back up into the light,

The light is where consciousness is,

Right?

Yeah,

You could climb up back to the light,

But you won't have the treasure,

Right?

So I'm saying this now after having done some things that are seemingly impractical for my business.

I know,

You know,

I don't know if the YouTube example I gave is relatable,

But that's what's going on for me.

I hope you can relate it to your situation.

I'm hereby saying that I have chosen to let go of the vine instead.

And I'm,

I,

And the Knight of Faith move,

The real,

You know,

Big testicles,

Honorable Knight of Faith move is to let go of the vine and to hold onto the treasure and let it bring you all the way down into the Abyss,

That unknown,

Because who knows what's down there?

It might be nothing.

It might be an endless falling.

It's dark down there.

Certainly you can't see,

But maybe there's a,

Maybe there's a springboard down there or soft mattresses,

Who knows,

But it's happening with the courage to go down there and maybe abandon what is visible and known for the gifts that lie down below because it's never worth it ultimately to give up the treasures of your unconscious.

There you go.

All right.

Um,

So I'm no longer on YouTube.

As I mentioned,

You're not going to see my podcasts and video format anywhere anymore.

Um,

And I'm not on any platforms.

I'm not going to be on any platforms where you can leave comments.

Although I might keep my Facebook group for a while just cause I know there's guys that are getting stuff out of that,

But basically there's no way to leave a comment on my stuff anymore.

So if you are listening to this and you find it interesting and useful,

You can eat and you have a comment that you want to share good,

Bad or ugly.

I'm happy to read it and respond to you directly as a real human to another real human.

You can email me at hello at rwondo.

Com.

I check that email address about once a week.

I will be happy to respond to whatever your thoughts are.

There's no need for me to say,

Please get off your screen and do something because if you're listening to this,

I hope you're not looking at screen.

But anyway,

Thank you for listening.

Goodbye.

Reviews

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