147 Escorting The Soul: On The Anima, Creative Unconscious

The Anima (Jung) is the feminine soul of a man. It is the source of creativity, well being, intuition, and inner peace. This episode shares how you can use your conscious mind to allow this part of you to flourish.

Transcript

So I'm about a month into parenthood,

Actually a little bit more.

My daughter turned five weeks old yesterday.

And at the risk of saying something cliche,

I'll just say it's been great.

It's been magical,

If you will.

I'm definitely flooded with feel-good hormones,

Oxytocin and whatnot.

Hasn't been as difficult as some would expect on me,

At least.

Everyone keeps asking me,

Are you sleep deprived?

And the truth is,

I'm not.

I mean,

There have been some difficult nights,

But I sleep in the guest room Monday through Friday,

So it really hasn't affected me.

Actually,

In some ways,

I've been sleeping the best ever.

And truthfully,

My wife is doing the heavy lifting with child rearing,

Breastfeeding,

Which of course is a huge amount of energy,

Requires her to physically be with the baby more than me.

But it has required me to take on more of the other roles in the household,

Not just provisioning,

But dealing with stuff,

Dealing with what we might call masculine parts of survival,

Externally focused functions.

And it's been interesting for me in that my entire household has swung more yin,

Has become more feminine,

If you will,

As would happen when a baby is born.

Testosterone's supposed to drop,

Oxytocin's supposed to rise,

And prolactin and all that stuff,

As I've spoken about in other more hormone-focused episodes.

But just like on a subjective level or experiential level,

The whole household is more yin,

Right?

Like my wife is in a hyper-feminine state,

Postpartum-ness hormones,

Her body's recovering still as well,

So she's less able but also less interested in certain external things,

Right?

I mean,

She's spending a huge amount of energy in the most important internal function of any survival unit,

Which is the sustenance of new life.

But there's also a new member of our family who happens to be female,

But I think that has nothing,

Doesn't really matter because all babies are essentially asexual in behavior.

But as a baby,

She is in the most yin state that any person can be in,

Like pure reception.

You know,

In this case,

Pure dependence as well.

It's been interesting,

Just because,

Of course,

I really like Timothy Leary's circuits of consciousness model.

The baby,

I get to actually observe here as a human being that it's only first circuit right now,

Right?

She's only operating on the survival circuit.

As you know,

At five weeks old,

Her social emotions haven't even developed yet,

So her experience is on that pure survival continuum of when her survival needs aren't being met,

She's hungry,

The wrong temperature,

She cries when those survival needs are met,

She's content,

And that's basically her entire experience,

Which has been fun to see it in actuality instead of just in theory.

And this swing towards yin-ness in the family unit has required me,

Who's holding down what we might call the masculine role,

Has required me to step up and be more masculine or deal with those functions better.

And so far,

It's been good in the sense that I seem to have had more energy,

Less resistance to chores I don't like to do.

And even in the moments where I'm,

You know,

Relieving the life of the baby,

You know,

Take her on walks,

Even when she's being the most annoying,

You know,

Crying,

All that stuff,

I do often have the thought of like,

Okay,

Well,

This is what it's all for,

Right?

You know,

All of the work,

You know,

Even if,

You know,

She's pulling me away from other things I planned on doing,

You know,

I can look at it as like,

Oh,

Well,

All of those things that I wanted to do,

The ambitions,

Whether for material things or value-based things,

At least on a biological level,

All of those behaviors are for this,

Right?

It's to support new life.

So maybe I don't need to work this morning if that's what happens.

I don't know,

Maybe more zoomed out level or from the lens that I explored in the episode on the five stages of male psychology,

Here I am finally in realness,

In the body,

Taking my place in my genetic lineage,

Right?

In that episode,

I flushed out my interpretation of the Oedipus complex or the Oedipus myth,

Where it's not that men wanna literally kill their fathers and marry their mothers,

But killing your father represents taking his place as the person who presides over the realm or passes on the genes and ensures their survival.

Then marrying your mother,

In my interpretation,

Means having a relation to mothers where you're no longer a child,

But you are the man who makes a woman a mother,

Right?

Procreation.

And in this,

I've noticed that in my behaviors,

I've noticed a couple things which are pretty cool.

I've had creative bursts or creative flow in a way that I haven't really sustained for long stretches of my life,

Right?

Like there've been times where when it comes to writing or any sort of creative output,

I'll put in a lot of work,

I'll do the mechanical thing that's supposed to happen,

But like that quality that the essence of it just isn't there,

Like there's no soul in it.

And there've been other times where,

You know,

The floodgates may be open of my unconscious and I have all these ideas and inspirations,

But like it's too overwhelming and I can't put it into form.

Lately,

It's kind of fit.

And it's also been interesting that because of the child and because of the state of Nalaya and,

You know,

Yeah,

It's just a whole new situation,

It's kind of forced me to be less rigid with the schedule.

I've essentially been in a relating to feelings,

Both externally represented by my wife and child,

But also I would say this is kind of representative of my relation to my own feminine.

It's something has been,

Something has changed.

And so in this episode,

I wanna flush that out and share this idea of what I'm calling symbiosis with the anima.

This of course is a Jungian term.

Carl Jung used the term anima to describe the feminine soul in a man,

Right?

An animus would be the masculine soul in a woman.

And we need to flush this out a little bit because as I've mentioned in other Jung-based episodes,

I think if Carl Jung was to formulate these terms or come up with these concepts today,

He would have had a little bit of a different interpretation.

I do think some of his lens came from the fact that,

You know,

In the 1910s,

1920s,

1930s,

When Jung was actively writing and coming up with these ideas,

You know,

He grew up in,

He was immersed in a part of intellectual Europe,

Mainly German-speaking Switzerland.

And at that time period,

The gender perceptions and gender roles were so defined that I think,

You know,

Regardless of his political beliefs,

If he was transposed into today with the way people speak about gender or explore that,

I think he would have a slightly different take on things.

I think just in the sense that back then every man behaved in certain masculine ways.

So it didn't really,

I don't think it occurred to him to categorize things differently.

But what he did recognize,

In my speculation,

Is he was recognizing the deeper truth that is symbolized by the yin-yang symbol,

That in each is its opposite.

And through his own inquiry,

Which we're gonna speak about a little bit,

Except in rereading the Red Book,

His book on his mystical experiences,

I think he was recognizing through his introspection and his kind of mystical inquiries,

Say,

Oh,

There's like a feminineness inside of me,

Even though I'm a man,

I think like a man,

I see myself as a man,

I express as a man.

And in his counseling of women,

He would see like,

Oh,

Something in them is also kind of masculine,

Right?

Here's this woman who behaves as a woman,

Acts like a woman,

Thinks like a woman,

But there's something in her that is masculine,

So he termed that the animus.

And this idea that people have an opposite sex soul has been echoed in other forms.

If you are familiar with the children's book series,

His Dark Materials,

In the US,

The first book in that was The Golden Compass,

Which was made into a pretty terrible movie with Nicole Kidman,

Although it was a great book series.

They followed this,

In that fantasy world,

They followed this model where every person had a little animal that represented their soul and was the opposite sex of them.

Except for a couple people who I think was the author's hint at like,

Okay,

For maybe a gay person,

A small percentage of people have a same-sex soul.

I think that was his nod towards that,

Hidden in the book,

Which came out some decades ago before this was common discussion.

But my interpretation of this is that,

In all of us,

Is what we might call,

As far as sexual archetypes,

A testosterone-driven force in our unconscious that we might call the animus,

And a more feminine-driven force,

Driven by feminine hormones,

That we can call an anima.

And I do think nowadays,

Especially in the social roles that women have had to take,

I would almost argue that everyone has a dormant anima.

Like the feminine instincts in all people in our modern,

Post-feminist,

Consumerist society,

Regardless of your gender or sex,

I think that part of us,

That part of the,

The part of us that's more internally focused as opposed to externally focused,

That's more feminine than masculine,

More feeling-based than thinking,

Where the source of our creative unconscious and all the spiritual experiences that we may subjectively experience,

That comes from a certain element that we can call the soul,

We can call the anima,

That I think is similar in all people.

It's almost a trope in the modern working woman,

Where she,

And many women nowadays,

Are also kind of disconnected from this feminine part of their unconscious,

Simply because of the fact that our society really over-validates the logical side of things.

And as I've ranted in other episodes,

Even feminism,

Even feminism,

Which of course champions women,

Also kind of disdains this creative unconscious,

The more yin part of the psyche,

The anima,

The more feminine part of the soul.

So this episode is not just for men,

Who of course maybe have an anima for them to connect to,

But it's for anybody who maybe is a little bit disconnected from their creative unconscious,

Or wants to be connected more.

You know,

This part of our psyche that doesn't speak in linear language,

But speaks in symbols,

Speaks in feelings.

It's a source of our,

Again,

Creativity,

But even if you're not an artistic person and that's not of your interest,

It's also the source of our spiritual peace,

Of our intuition.

So in this episode,

We are gonna use some terms that can be labeled or put in the category of spirituality.

As always,

I will do my best to ground it in something closer to rational psychology.

The goal,

Of course,

Of this connecting to the anima is to be able to hear the signals of our unconscious,

The parts that are not part of our voluntary logical brain.

And to be able to hear that signal beyond the noise.

You know,

Whether it comes out as artistic expression or intuition,

Or just a sense of peace,

Right?

Because even like the feeling of isolation that leads to the spiritual maladies that are discussed in things like 12-step or other schools of thought,

I think comes from this inability to hear your own soul.

There's too much noise,

Right?

Even if it just comes out as anxiety or a negative self-perception or essentially a bad relationship to self.

And one maybe totally non-spiritual way to interpret this is that when one has connection to this part of the unconscious,

You become more responsive or you have a more symbiotic relationship to things you cannot control,

The unknown.

And even though in this episode,

We are speaking purely about your internal relationship,

If you will,

Kind of what,

Say,

In the Tantra world,

They describe as like the divine inner union or intermarriage between your internal,

Masculine and feminine.

We're not really speaking so much about relating externally,

Although I will use external intersexual dynamics as a metaphor for your relationship to yourself because as in any relationship,

It is my view that it is the external-focused consciousness or the masculine consciousness who has the role of creating the conditions for the internally-focused consciousness or the feminine consciousness,

The anima,

To flourish in the same way that a father,

A husband's job or the head of the household's job,

The male head of the household's job is to provide a space for safety and security for children and the woman,

Especially when she's pregnant.

I do think within your own mind,

Your more logical side,

One of its functions is to create the condition for your soul to flourish,

For that unconscious part to flourish.

And you can see just like in a domestic relationship where the husband's total deadbeat or he's abusive or an asshole and there's just this disconnect and discord in the household because he's not using his abilities for the betterment of the feminine.

Same thing within a person.

When your logical mind is not in good relationship with your soul,

With your anima,

Your psychic household,

We can say,

Is not in order.

It does not feel good.

But when it is in symbiosis,

Just like in a happy relationship,

Everything seems to flow.

That's where you get the creative impulses.

That's where you feel a sense of peace.

In this episode,

We're gonna speak about one of my favorite concepts from one of my favorite philosophical novels,

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

Which is the idea of quality.

Quality being this thing that by definition,

You cannot quantify.

It's not mechanics.

It's the guiding force that you can only perceive immaterially.

So that's perhaps our entry point to the spiritual side of things.

We're also gonna revisit some ideas from other episodes like the Dark Night of the Soul episode of about six months ago.

We're gonna use some masculine-feminine dynamics as metaphor.

We're gonna talk about some things like internal demons and of course,

I'm gonna be drawing from Uncle Carl's Red Book.

And the reason why I named this episode Escorting the Anima,

It's actually coming from a chess analogy,

Which maybe resonates with very few people,

But in chess,

Which I've been playing obsessively lately,

In the beginning when you start playing chess,

When you're playing other beginners,

Usually people don't care about the pawns so much,

Right?

Because they do the least and there's many of them.

If you lose a pawn,

It's like,

Oh,

Whatever,

It's just a pawn.

But as you become better at chess,

You realize,

And you're playing other people who are good,

You realize like every little thing matters.

Like I've lost many games where I was ahead just because I placed a pawn incorrectly.

And as you get better and as you stop making dumb mistakes,

A big part of the game is the end game.

And in end game,

The pawns become extremely important because if you have a few more pawns than your opponents,

Those pawns can become a queen.

And one of the basic names of a tactical set that happens in the end game when there's very few pieces and the pawns start to really matter is something called escorting the pawn.

Whereas some other stronger piece,

It could be the king,

It could be a rook,

It could be whatever's available,

Walks the very vulnerable pawn across the board,

Protects it essentially so that it could become a queen.

And I like this imagery,

Not just because I'm obsessed with chess,

But I think it's very easy when we look at the world through the mechanical lens that consumerism and various cultural forces kind of influence us to just look at the world through,

Is a thing productive or not?

Productivity equals good,

Not productivity equals bad.

I ranted about this in the Dark Night of the Soul episode on how even mindfulness and meditation have become popular kind of through,

I believe through like a Silicon Valley perspective of like,

Oh,

If you meditate,

You can get more done,

Right?

That's almost a justification for everyone getting into anything mindfulness,

Anything mindful,

But that's not the point,

Right?

The point is that inner game,

Is that inner victory,

Not whether or not you can pimp it out to make more money.

And this idea of escorting the pawn,

It's like,

It's easy to look at the pawns as worthless,

But if you just recognize that every pawn is a potential queen,

Then you would do everything you could to escort those pawns to the other side of the board.

And I do think that is,

Yeah,

That is my overall metaphor for allowing your anima,

Allowing your soul to flourish.

This is episode 147,

Escorting the Anima.

So I'm gonna start us off by reading from Uncle Carl's Red Book.

So I've been very slowly making my way through this Red Book.

I actually have had this copy for years.

I only opened it a few months ago and I,

You know,

I'm maybe only halfway through it now.

And it's been interesting because as is a Jungian concept,

This idea of synchronicity,

When your internal experience matches your external experience,

I happen to just like pick it up randomly and perhaps due to selection bias or confirmation bias,

I always find something that matches exactly what I'm thinking about.

So as I was thinking about this episode topic,

You know,

I read a chapter and it happened to provide me with some quotes that are very relevant.

So I'm gonna start by reading them here.

If you're not familiar with the Red Book,

It's one of Carl Jung's more unique writings where he spent a number of years just in self-inquiry,

Like having,

I mean,

Using the technique of active imagination,

Going really deep into basically waking dreams.

And he describes them almost like a dream or a psychedelic experience with like clear details of him speaking with characters that he's imagining or hallucinating.

And one set of visions that he had was where he was interacting and having these long dialogues that he transposed into the book,

Transcribed rather,

Long dialogues with two biblical characters,

The prophet Elijah and Salome.

And I'm not too familiar with,

I wasn't too familiar with these biblical characters.

I had to look them up.

Salome is a figure that's kind of championed by certain types of feminism in the way that Kali from Hindu mythology is.

She has come to represent kind of the dark feminine of like the chaotic,

Emotion-driven,

Often demonized by patriarchal viewpoints.

And actually,

Salome,

From a medieval Christian perspective,

Has come to like represent the kind of dark or almost evil temptress.

Maybe evil's not the right word,

But the biblical passage that she's known for is that she was a young woman.

Her father held a birthday party for her and it invited all of the big deal people,

All the biblical celebrities,

If you will.

And in front of everyone,

While she was dancing,

He said,

Oh,

My daughter,

I wanna give you anything.

Name what you want on your birthday and I'll give it to you.

And the young woman didn't know what to ask for,

So she asked her mother.

Her mother had this beef with John the Baptist,

Who was there for some criticisms John had of her.

So she told her daughter,

Ask for John's head on a platter.

So the girl was like,

Oh,

Okay.

And then she asked her dad,

Okay,

I want John the Baptist's head on a platter.

The father,

Who had invited John to the party,

Felt terrible,

But he wanted to honor his promise to his daughter,

So he had John the Baptist beheaded.

And she represents kind of the unconscious,

Feminine,

Feeling-driven,

Like she didn't really think too critically about her request.

She just asked,

She just did.

She sought pleasure,

Or she just sought her feelings.

And in Jung's vision,

He had this set of dream conversations with Elijah,

Who's kind of represented like fair rationality,

Like the opposite,

And then Salome.

And in the dream,

He saw them together.

Elijah was kind of escorting Salome.

In fact,

He was even saying that this is my daughter,

Which in the Bible,

That's not the case.

And they were both speaking to Carl in his dream.

And Carl at first was like,

How could you,

Talking to Elijah,

How could you be with this impure woman,

Essentially?

And Elijah was like,

No,

No,

This is my daughter,

And you should love her.

She loves you.

And this was a confusing thing for Carl Jung,

Because he grew up in a Christian,

These were his symbols in his imagination,

His unconscious,

Right?

So that these would show up,

It was interesting to him,

And because he felt this,

He felt the same repulsion towards Salome that the medieval Christian,

Or we can even say patriarchal Christian viewpoint had,

Right,

That she was not a good person.

And in his interpretation,

It was his unconscious telling him to embrace this part,

This feeling irrational part that maybe he had distanced himself from,

Right?

Of course,

As an intellectual,

He sided with what Elijah represented,

Rationality,

Higher thought.

To him,

Elijah represented what he's calling forethinking,

Or rationality,

And Salome represented the pursuit of pleasure,

Or the unconscious.

And so now I'm gonna read the quote from the Red Book of him interpreting everything.

The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure.

Predetermination,

Or forethinking,

Is Prometheus,

Who,

Without determined thoughts,

Brings the chaotic to form and definition,

Who digs the channels and holds the object before pleasure.

Forethinking also comes before thought.

But pleasure is the force that desires and destroys form without form and definition.

It loves the form in itself that it takes hold of,

And it destroys the forms that it does not take.

The forethinker is a seer,

But pleasure is blind.

It does not foresee,

But desires what it touches.

Forethinking is not powerful in itself,

And therefore does not move.

But pleasure is power,

And therefore it moves.

Forethinking needs pleasure to be able to come to form.

Pleasure needs forethinking to come to form,

Which it requires.

One cannot live with forethinking alone or with pleasure alone.

You need both.

But you cannot be in forethinking and pleasure at the same time.

You must take turns in being in forethinking and pleasure,

Obeying the prevailing law,

Unfaithful to the other,

So to speak.

And then he goes on into some more of the story,

The dialogue between Elijah and Salome,

And then there's this third character,

The serpent,

Which I believe represents the serpent from the Garden of Eden,

Where he says the serpent is a third principle,

And the serpent would move back and forth between the two.

To him,

The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious.

He's saying the serpent represents actually putting things into action.

It's kind of like one's actual awareness.

It can be with forethinking,

It can be with forethought and rationality,

Or it can be with the pleasure-driven unconscious.

So he's describing this symbiotic relationship with logos and pathos,

Or one's masculine and one's feminine,

One's thinking,

One's feelings.

And as I mentioned,

I've noticed this change that maybe is represented by internal relationship on the outside.

So in my 21-Day Archetype Challenge,

There's one lesson on relationship mapping,

Which is the idea that your external relationships reflect your internal relationships.

So there's a journaling exercise in the challenge where you basically map externally,

Typically your more emotionally-driven relationships to certain emotional qualities within yourself.

So in my life,

As I mentioned,

Lately in my household,

My wife is in a hyper-feminine state.

Her,

With postpartum hormones,

Her emotions are kind of all over the place.

It's been a similar challenge,

The same type of challenge that I think any man has when living with a feminine person,

But heightened.

Everything's a little bit more extreme.

It has required me to step up and be a little bit more grounded than I have been before.

And I have noticed that in how I relate to this part of myself,

Or my perceptions of this self,

It's kind of how I end up behaving with her.

When I get frustrated with her,

My wife,

Or even my baby.

There have been moments where I have not been super peaceful.

The baby's just crying and it won't stop.

I have this perception that there's another way that things should be.

The baby should not cry,

Should let me do whatever it is that I'm doing.

But that's actually just wrong priorities.

That's inaccurate modeling.

I'm being semantically inaccurate,

Trying to essentially fit the territory to a map that does not represent it well.

Whereas in moments that I'm a better father to my child and better husband to my wife,

Regardless of what the right response is,

Because sometimes you do need to be a little hard and apply some discipline,

Lay down the law,

Or set someone straight,

Especially if someone's being chaotic,

Beyond their benefit,

Right?

The difference seems to come down to whether or not I'm accepting what's happening.

Another part of the Red Book quote in that chapter,

He speaks about how the forethinking self has a natural disgust for the pleasure-filled self.

And he even talks about two different types of men,

Like the thinking man versus the feeling man.

They both kind of have disgust for each other.

And in the piece that I quoted,

He identifies that you can't really be in both at the same time.

As we've spoken about in Relationship Principles episodes,

I don't have any prescription of how men or women should be,

But the fact is you can't be both.

You can't be driven by testosterone and by oxytocin at the same time.

It's great to have fluidity.

It's great to be able to be nice or act well in peace as well as in war.

But you can't actually do the same,

You can't do both at the same time,

Which is why specialization in relationships and polarized relationships is an evolved set of behaviors.

Now,

As the masculine presence in my household,

My ability to respond to the chaotic feminine comes down to whether or not I can accept what's going on.

This is the first piece at least,

Right?

The moment I think,

Oh,

There's another way that things should be,

And I get frustrated that these external things that I cannot control don't fit my model,

That's when I get tight.

That's when I get contracted,

Right?

Even when I say coach a guy on something like anxiety,

This essentially misplaced survival fear,

A lot of what keeps a guy in anxious behavior,

Whether it's social anxiety or general anxiety or any kind of dysphoric feeling,

Very often when it's recurring,

It's because he's not accepting,

He'll have an experience,

Right?

Maybe he has a shy or contraction or anxious reaction to some social situation,

Let's say.

That happens,

Right?

He's conditioned maybe in a certain way,

But what makes it persist usually is that he becomes ashamed about that experience,

And he becomes angry at himself for say,

Whatever the experience was,

Contracting,

When trying to,

In a situation they would have preferred to be confident,

Right?

And it's the shame cycle that makes that behavior recur again.

And then he ends up going years,

Maybe having the same reaction all the time or worse rather than letting himself grow out of it.

Yeah,

And you often hear when a guy is in this kind of thought loop,

He becomes,

He'll use language where he's angry at himself,

Right?

He's not accepting the situation and being like,

Oh yeah,

Okay,

Well that just happened,

As opposed to,

Instead he's like,

That shouldn't have happened,

I'm a bad person,

And he goes down that thought stream.

And it's even a thing that comes up when I've coached many guys through psychogenic sexual problems.

Almost always when a guy has some issue getting it up or something like that,

It's almost always because it happened once,

It just happens sometimes,

You know?

There's many factors,

Physiological factors where just maybe the response doesn't happen the way you wanted it,

But because he had some image of how he should perform,

He gets in his head,

He disconnects from his feelings,

Disconnects from his anima,

Ends up shaming himself.

I think this is something represented by the first scene of Peter Pan,

Where Peter Pan needs to sew back on his shadow,

Right?

Like if you disconnect from your shadow,

It kind of acts on its own.

And because of this disconnection,

The next time he's extra anxious and extra beating himself up,

And of course,

You know,

His parts don't work when he wants to perform sexually,

And it becomes worse and becomes worse because the shame is getting worse,

As opposed to what I usually offer guys is like,

Yeah,

Okay,

It doesn't work,

Just own it.

Okay,

Yeah,

It doesn't work today.

You know,

That kind of casual attitude almost always ensures that it'll be fine the next time,

Right,

As opposed to putting pressure on yourself.

And to bring this to an external experience,

And say,

To map it to an external relationship,

You know,

Often when I see a guy who is kind of unnecessarily rude or just isn't responding the right way to his feminine partner,

To his woman,

It's almost always because he is ashamed of his own feelings.

So when she has feelings,

He has to condemn them,

Right?

And it's not to say that there isn't a time to put rails around,

Say,

Your emotional partner's experience.

There are times for that.

I spoke about that in the relationship principles episode.

But to have this like kind of fearful contraction reaction where you now have to defend yourself from it,

That's different.

And I almost always think that's a sign of,

At the very least,

Improper modeling.

Like your map and your territory are not lined up,

But very often it's a deeper thing of,

You are not in acceptance of what that represents within you.

Like the guy who,

You know,

He just can't deal with his feelings,

Of course he's going to attack anything that brings up feelings in him.

And this is the first general piece,

I would say,

In connecting to your unconscious,

Which is to get away from or release attachments to future projections or ideas of,

Or structures of how things should be.

And I think a good image to represent this comes from my favorite philosophy book of all time,

Finite Infinite Games by James Kars.

He offers this idea,

This dichotomy of the machine versus the garden.

The machine represents functions that produce a predefined outcome,

Right?

Like a machine is good to the degree that it can repeatedly produce the outcome you want,

Right?

So it could be a literal machine,

It could be a technique towards something,

A productivity hack.

Like those are all machine things because you're recreating an outcome that you want,

That you've predetermined,

And you're attached to that outcome,

Right?

Obviously,

If you have a factory to make sneakers,

You want that,

Those factory machines to continue to make sneakers,

Not to one day make,

I don't know,

Bedsheets,

Right?

That would not be a good machine.

Whereas a garden,

You don't,

You can't force certain outcomes of a garden.

You can create conditions to have the garden do things in the direction of what you want,

But you can't know the specifics,

Right?

You can plant the seeds,

You can water it,

You can course correct,

You know,

You might recognize,

Okay,

There's not enough light or the plants are growing this way,

I need something.

If I knew more about gardening,

I could probably flush out the analogy better,

But you can create the conditions for growth,

But you can't force it to grow at a certain time,

Right?

And I think this is,

This very well represents the way to deal with your soul.

And for one political example,

To zoom us out into current events,

With like I say,

The US exit of Afghanistan,

A lot of the thinkers and analysts who I,

Whose analyses I like,

They all say similar things.

Jocko's one,

Who's one of the more famous ones,

Like essentially the powers that were to deal with the military exit from Afghanistan and the entire occupying force.

And arguably everything that the US did in Afghanistan from the time of removing Osama bin Laden and maybe even before that was basically in denial of reality,

Right?

There's an imposition of US culture on Afghan people which did not line up with reality.

There's a lot of things that didn't line up with reality.

And I'll just quote Jocko because he's probably the person most of you guys are most familiar with.

He was basically saying like there was a denial of culture,

A denial of facts,

And instead of responding to the way things were,

The decision makers were so attached to the way things they expected that they could not even see that the plant was not growing the way that they expected,

Right?

And that was,

At least in his interpretation,

One of the reasons for the massive number of errors there.

And you can see that throughout history as well.

So this first step,

If you will,

In connecting with the unconscious,

With the anima,

Has to come from this detachment,

Right?

First piece is to reduce abstract labeling.

Remember from our semantics episodes,

I spoke extensively about just the reminder that our ideas about things are not the same as things.

Ideally,

Our maps well represent our territories,

Right?

We have models of understanding that line up with what's actually happening.

But even when it's accurate,

Even when our logical mind is working very well with reality,

Just labeling something,

Just abstracting something,

Takes it one notch away from what's actually happening,

Right?

Korzybski,

Korzybski and actually Jung speak about real experience as being unspeakable.

I don't know if Jung read Korzybski or vice versa.

Very possible,

They were active in the same decades.

But actual reality is unspeakable.

Once you describe an event in words,

Once you move it into that level of symbology,

You've now taken it at least one notch away from what's actually happening.

And when it comes to the unconscious,

The experiences of the unconscious,

This is even more heightened.

Like if you ever had a psychedelic experience or even tried to like relay a dream you had to someone,

It's kind of hard to convey what actually happened,

Right?

Like,

You know,

You've done mushrooms once and you want to explain your intense mushroom trip to your friends.

It's almost impossible to put it into words in a way that they can get.

Because that experience is a purely unconscious experience where our language doesn't really fit.

Our language was created to describe concrete outcomes and things abstracted from outcomes.

But to speak about something of the unconscious,

Something of the soul,

It's very hard to describe.

I mean,

The best that we can do with words is seen more in art than in description.

You know,

A poem that really conveys an experience or an emotional experience doesn't do so by describing,

You know,

A poem doesn't move you to tears by describing how tears work or letting out a set of facts.

It's actually from what is unsaid in a poem that moves us,

Right?

Same thing,

Like if you explain a joke,

You take away the funny.

Like there has to be an opportunity for that unconscious set of connections.

That's why simple lyrics in songs move us because through its simplicity or through its allusion rather than its description,

It triggers something in our unconscious that gives us a set of associations just like looking at a picture.

Picture says a thousand words as the cliche statement goes.

And that's what moves us,

Right?

If you explain too much,

It takes away the experience of our unconscious.

And this has been described in writing itself by Hemingway,

Who's one of the people of his generation who probably the most influenced modern day writing and not just because his short sentence styles was good for the short attention spans of the internet,

Which is also true,

But his writing style,

He described with what he called iceberg theory where you're not using exposition to flush out everything.

You're allowing just enough to allow the reader to infer the rest of the story,

You know,

The tip of the iceberg.

So like a lot of relationships and things that happened were conveyed through Hemingway's dialogue rather than explaining what was going on.

Because the less you try to label things and categorize things with words,

The closer I believe you can move towards the experience that certain mystics would call gnosis or like the idea of knowing,

Wordless knowing.

I spoke about this type of experience in an episode on gnosis with a G,

I think came out a few months ago or might've been last year.

It was a while ago.

On this idea of like when you're,

It's kind of an Eckhart Tollean idea where when your mind is quiet and you're just in that state of original perception,

You can be in tune with things better,

Whether they're external or internal rather than when there's a lot of noise in your mind because you keep trying to label things or run dialogue in your head.

And another thing that can move us towards the internal experience and away from attachment to the outside is also what my wife calls timelessness.

This is something,

This is a word she used a lot throughout pregnancy,

Especially as her emotions would swing.

She would often bring up how in her pregnant state and now in her postpartum states,

As long as she didn't have to think about time or her schedule,

She was pretty happy,

Right?

As she could be in this like total feeling surrendered state where she can flow from one thing to the next,

Usually with positive feelings.

Whereas the moment she had to think about an appointment or she had to think about her calendar or what time it was in the day,

It would take her out of that state and put her into this stressful mode.

And I think this is,

This experience of timelessness,

We've all experienced,

I'm sure,

At moments where you're just really not thinking about the structures of time.

We spoke about time-binding in the semantics episode.

You're really not time-binding.

Like you're really essentially in the now.

You're really just experiencing what's going on,

Flowing from one moment to the next or the eternal moments,

If you will.

Because it's not,

Just to be clear,

It's not detaching from reality.

To say that because you're not paying attention to the numbers on the clock or what your calendar says is detachment from reality.

It comes from a very industrial perspective,

This idea that you're only part of reality if you're producing,

If you're part of the,

If you're following the clock.

Because prior to the Industrial Revolution,

This is something I will discuss in the History of Man podcast,

Universal time wasn't a thing,

Right?

I mean,

The common story was in,

It must've been in England,

As trains became popular,

They realized that from town to town that the clock wasn't the same,

Which before didn't really matter because it took so long to get from one town to the next that sure,

Everyone in a given town should sync their clocks,

Their watches to the town clock,

But it didn't matter if London and Edinburgh had different clocks.

But once these cities were connected by trains,

It did matter because there was a train schedule.

So the idea that we had to all be on the same time is really a relatively new thing and it's a function of like a global system that relies on each other for productive purposes.

And actually,

Even smartphone time,

Right?

Like now,

We assume that time is exact the same everywhere because we're all getting our time from smartphones,

Which have some sort of centralized time system or somehow synchronized with each other.

But even that,

I mean,

Before smartphones,

I remember that it wasn't necessarily assumed that everyone had the same exact to the minute time,

Right?

Like you wouldn't expect a person to necessarily be there at the exact second that you would.

But nowadays,

I remember this maybe like 10 years ago,

I think it was early when I got into coaching and Zoom calls,

Actually it wasn't even Zoom,

It was Skype calls were being used,

Zoom wasn't popular yet.

I remember a coach that I followed was doing a bunch of like free coaching calls on,

I guess on Skype,

And he was doing like really short increments,

Like 15,

15 minute calls with people.

And I remember him posting this thing saying,

We're gonna do it on the 15 minute going by Apple iPhone time.

Like he specified by the Apple iPhone time because he had the assumption as people did back then that maybe our watches don't really line up or maybe even our smartphones from company to company aren't the same.

So this is a new thing,

This is a new experience.

It's actually not a natural thing necessarily to be obsessed with some external time.

Because as Jung wrote in that quote that I read earlier,

You cannot be in forethinking,

Or in his language,

In forethinking mind and pleasure mind or pleasure focus at the same time.

In my language I'd say you can't be in your animus or in your externally focused consciousness and your internally or soul focused consciousness at the same time,

It's not possible.

But on a practical sense,

Like how do you use this with your schedule?

This might not be something easily applicable to a lot of people,

Especially if most of your calendar is determined by other people.

But what I've been doing in my life since a lot of my priorities,

I mean I used to be very strict,

Even up until recently,

Pretty strict with my calendar or my daily schedule,

Like 8 a.

M.

Is when I start writing,

Some other time is this and that.

In being responsive to the feminine of my household,

My wife and my child and also my dogs and also actually nature sometimes,

Instead of being set on I'm gonna do this at this time,

All I've been doing and something that's allowed me to keep peace even as things are rapidly changing is to simply just have one next priority.

Like I have my list of things to do,

But I just decide at any given moment,

Okay,

This specific thing is the next thing I'm gonna do.

I always have my next thing.

I don't know when I'm gonna do it,

But it is my next thing.

So like for instance,

This podcast itself,

Funny enough I did plan on recording it two days ago,

But baby and mom needed things during that time and later in the day I wasn't feeling it.

The next day it was a rainstorm,

So it was too loud.

Even this morning a couple hours ago,

The cicadas were really loud outside and it's ruining the sound quality.

So I had to keep pushing it,

But it was my next thing and I got to think about it until then.

Not that I did nothing between that,

But it's like,

At least for myself,

It's taken away.

I think this applies to any self-directed thing,

What Stephen Covey would call the important but not urgent stuff.

Maybe you can't schedule it,

Because especially with feeling-based things,

Creative experiences,

You can't always just force yourself to have that quality come out.

Sometimes you have to be responsive.

And it reminds me on the flip side of an Allen Ginsberg quote that I've always enjoyed,

But not always lived by,

Which goes something like,

When the muse comes to your bedside,

Don't tell her you're gonna fuck her later.

Which means when you feel inspired,

That's the moment you have to go.

The flip side would be,

Maybe sometimes you can't force it.

So I will say that my attempt at timelessness,

I still have things on the schedule with other people,

With clients or whatever,

But this attempt at timelessness has put me in a state of,

It's kind of what I was always striving for when I was reading Eckhart Tolle books of like,

Yeah,

I mean,

If you're not really concerned about the clock,

Well,

That in itself puts you in the now.

And I wanna see if I could take this further with like,

How detached can I be from externally created constructs,

Right?

The calendar,

The clock,

And with time,

Well,

The next thing would be money,

Right?

Money is another abstract representation of value.

And as people say that time is money,

It's another thing that drives a lot of,

I mean,

It drives much of our behavior,

This fear of not having enough because it represents survival,

Of course.

And a lot of people,

Including myself,

When really concerned about money,

Which is a proxy for a fear of survival,

Will throw away various ideals.

And I spoke about that in the Dark Night of the Soul episode of how I think my soul got mad at me in a sense because I had sacrificed certain values I had for the sake of making money about a year ago.

And my insides,

My soul punished me for it essentially.

But then what's the alternative,

Right?

I mean,

People have to pay their bills.

There's just existing in the world means there's some scarcity,

Right?

There's expenses if you are in some way connected to the global economy.

And there's not really a logical way to argue against it,

Right?

Certainly if you're struggling to feed yourself or make rent,

A lot of this might seem totally impossible to relate to.

Or even if not,

Like what drove my,

I guess what I would call scarcity-minded behavior to go against some of my values for the sake of money,

It was from what seemed like a very logical and even noble pursuit.

It's like,

Okay,

I have a baby coming.

Gotta make some more money.

We wanna send her,

We wanna provide her with the best,

Right,

Gotta make more money.

Okay,

I can cut corners here to make more money.

And it's hard to argue against that.

Even in my own head,

How do you argue against that?

Especially when the cost is not something that's necessarily bad or harmful.

It's just maybe a sacrifice over a little bit of a value here.

How do you justify the opposite logically?

And the fact is you can't,

Actually.

The only way to view this is to take on some sort of a spiritual view,

Some faith-driven view.

And I'll repeat a conclusion from the Dark Night of the Soul episode,

Because it's pertinent here,

Of course,

Which is what it came down to is like,

Okay,

Blind faith just puts you in a state of magical thinking.

I'm sure we all know,

Or maybe some of you have been,

That person who really takes the law of attraction literally and just thinks positive thinking,

Positive thinking,

Positive thinking as your bank account goes to negative and all that stuff,

Right?

Not to say that it's worthless,

But it's like,

You know,

To make it an absolute thought can put you into trouble.

And also,

It's,

You know,

We're talking about,

We're not talking about your animus subjugating,

Your animus,

Not your soul subjugating your consciousness,

Not throwing that away,

But symbiosis,

Right,

A relationship.

And I do think it's important,

Even when taking on a spiritual view,

To bring your rational consciousness on board.

You know,

We want them to be friends and work together,

Right?

So what I settled on,

Instead of any absolute statements of absolute positivity or whatever,

Is my faith,

Or at least the way I try to embrace faith or apply faith is through conditional statements,

Right?

If I do the quality thing,

Then I trust that I will get the results I want,

Right?

So it's not,

I can just sit on my ass and do nothing and think positively.

It's like,

No,

No,

I'm gonna do these things that I'm gonna follow quality,

Which I'm gonna define in a moment.

I'm gonna do the quality thing.

The quality thing,

Maybe as far as the causes and effects that I can observe,

Maybe they don't line up.

Maybe it's not like I can say,

Okay,

If I put extra time into reading and writing,

I'll make more money next month.

It's not really a one-to-one like that.

Maybe in some long,

Drawn-out causality,

Some dots can be connected,

But there is something that I believe to be the quality thing,

The quote-unquote right thing to do,

And I trust if I do that,

Then everything will work out.

And if you did catch the Dark Night of the Soul episode from,

I guess it's like six months ago now,

I kind of brought it up as a hypothesis,

Right?

I'm gonna test this out.

Back then is when I deleted my YouTube channel and my Instagram and these things that I found,

Or my conscious conscience found repulsive,

But I was doing it for the sake of productive reason.

I'm gonna delete all those things.

I'm only gonna do what feels good,

Which is just put a lot of attention into these podcast episodes.

We'll see what happens.

Some listeners have messaged me like,

Well,

What happened?

You got rid of your YouTube,

Which is how people discover your podcast.

Well,

Just to share as,

I guess,

Some of the results of this experiment.

My numbers have increased a little bit.

It might have just been random.

My income has gone up a little bit as well,

Right?

Can I say definitively that following quality has made me money?

No,

And that would be following the fallacy I mentioned earlier of like,

Oh,

Getting into meditation so you can make more money.

That's not the point,

And I can't even draw that conclusion.

But I will say everything has been fine.

Still,

My business hasn't tanked just because I stopped doing these supposedly necessary marketing activities.

Has increased a little bit,

Which also could just be random coincidence,

But,

Or I should say and,

My internal experience has been amazing,

Right?

So everything on the outside has basically been the same.

I'm enjoying my work more.

I have less resistance to things.

I'm just happier.

Do I expect this way of approaching my work to make me 10 times richer in the future?

I don't know.

I mean,

There's no evidence of that.

But so far,

Nothing is broken.

So this is just to say this is not a prescription by any means,

Just to share that I basically,

For the first time,

Really,

Even though when I was younger,

I was a lot more spiritual and more likely to take things like law of attraction literally,

Or really do things on blind faith,

Which would be doing things despite the evidence of the contrary sometimes.

Now I feel like I'm approaching spirituality a little bit more practically,

If that even can be done,

Which is,

Well,

I'm seeing the results of these actions and they seem to be fine.

They seem to be great,

Actually.

And what I mean by following quality,

I mean,

This word quality is the core idea of the book I mentioned earlier,

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

He basically spends,

I think it's like a 600-page book,

Going on this motorcycle journey while trying to define what quality is in his head.

And even though he never uses the word God in the book,

And I don't think the author,

Robert Persig,

Is into religion in that sense.

He's coming from a more philosophical background.

But essentially,

His conclusion,

Or at least my interpretation of his conclusion,

Is that quality is this thing that's beyond everything to the point where you can almost synonymize quality with God.

It's this thing that is the organizing force of everything.

It's the thing that we observe just because we can't,

There has to be some connecting force.

Kind of like,

I'm forgetting what the term is in science,

When you deduce that something exists just because of the relationships of things.

There has to be something,

Kind of like dark matter.

You can't observe dark matter,

That's why it's dark matter.

But based on the way celestial bodies move,

There has to be something,

There has to be some other type of matter that makes the equation make sense.

Quality is that thing.

Quality is that thing that gives you that felt sense of rights when you're doing the so-called right thing.

And a perspective that I've liked when thinking about this is,

I like the idea that life is a movie or life is an RPG,

A video game.

And kind of like in a game like Grand Theft Auto or one of these games where there's a sandbox element where you can move around and do whatever you want.

You can drive a taxi instead of completing missions.

You can do whatever you're doing in Grand Theft Auto,

Violent things if you want.

There's really only,

And you can do side missions and whatever.

There's really only one way or maybe just a few ways to progress the story forward.

You can stop and do random things along the way.

You can follow side quests and you have some,

Some of these more complex types of adventure games.

There are multiple ways maybe to follow,

To get to the end.

But there's one end or there's one set of ends and there's only a few ways to progress the story.

And in say,

Looking at life as a simulation or perhaps an RPG of a sort,

I like this idea of that like,

Life isn't just a random sandbox of do whatever you want,

Which maybe it is in reality,

But at least the meaning making parts of our consciousness want to see some progression.

I mean,

That's the whole appeal of the hero's journey psychologically.

If there is some progression towards something,

There is some narrative,

Even if we're subjectively creating the meanings and stringing the narrative together on our own.

So the only way to know if you're following the quality experience is whether or not it feels right,

Which maybe seems like a spiritual cop out,

But that is the thing,

Right?

It's not,

Something can make total sense on paper,

But unless you have that feeling of quality,

You're probably,

I mean,

You're probably not following your soul.

So speak more about actually following the soul because this part of timelessness,

Of detachment from money,

Perhaps faith in things is all to move us away from perhaps the logical production-minded consciousness,

Like that pure externally focused consciousness.

Actually,

One of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode and I thought about opening the episode with this story is that there's a recurring dream that I've had essentially since high school,

Where I wake up and it's kind of a trope of a dream.

Many people have this type of dream where you wake up,

Realize,

Oh shit,

It's my senior year of school and I've forgotten to go to school all year.

I've had this dream many times.

I must've had it maybe 20 or 30 times since I've actually been in high school,

Maybe even more than that.

And it's always this panic moment and I'm like,

Well,

How did I forget to go to school all year?

And I remember in the dream world,

Oh yeah,

Because I felt I was really ahead in class,

So I could slack off a little bit,

But then I slacked off too much.

I let six months go by and I forgot to go back to class and now it's too late.

Now I'm not gonna graduate.

And I always run to school in a panic,

Trying to see if there's some way to make it up and the dream ends with a state of dysphoria.

And I've always interpreted this dream to mean like,

Oh,

This is me recognizing that maybe I'm not working hard enough,

Right?

I'm letting life go by and I'm not producing enough,

I'm not trying hard enough or something like that.

And maybe at different times,

That was an accurate interpretation.

But I've had this dream continue even into phases of my life where I am working hard.

And I'm like,

Oh,

What's the deal with this?

Like,

Why am I still having this feeling that I'm not gonna graduate?

And for the first time,

A couple months ago,

I had a different version of the dream because it's always been almost exactly the same,

Right?

I panic,

I run to school,

Teachers are angry at me because I didn't show up for however long,

All my friends are graduating and leaving me behind.

But a couple months ago,

I had a slightly different version of the dream where all of the beginning was the same.

But I show up at school and I'm about to go to the teacher to basically have her yell at me for not being at school or to admit the shameful thing that I forgot to go to school for six months.

But then I was in my high school and I was like,

Wait a minute,

I was starting to remember some stuff from the not dream world of like,

Wait,

I already am in the line of work that I like,

I'm already a grownup,

Right?

Why do I need my high school degree?

Maybe I could just live my life.

I'm doing this high school thing just for validation,

Like it's silly,

I don't need this.

That was an interesting new interpretation of a progression of the dream.

And this is Jung's take on dreams,

He's really big on dream analysis,

Is that recurring dreams are symbols of the unconscious,

Are unconscious speaking to us in some form.

Recurring dreams are particularly important messages from our unconscious,

That's why it's coming back,

It's like to get you to get something.

And when there's progression in a recurring dream,

You know that that thing has progressed,

Right?

Like if you have a dream where you're always forgetting your wallet when you leave the house and finally have a dream where you remember your wallet,

Well maybe,

I mean,

That's a sign that something has changed or if you have a dream where you're always running away from danger and then you have a dream where you're actually facing the danger,

Well that's a sign,

Like in your unconscious,

You're getting a sign that that issue has progressed,

Like there's been progress in your psyche,

If you will.

So this felt like,

Okay,

This is great progress.

And then a couple weeks ago,

I had a new progression of the dream where everything in the beginning happens the same,

Then I show up to school and I go to one of these teachers and I say to her,

It's actually one of my actual teachers,

From one that I was actually intimidated of when I was a kid,

I say to her like,

Hey,

I realize I've missed school,

I realize I'm not gonna graduate,

But I actually just wanna learn the material,

Can I just sit in class and learn?

And in the dream,

The teacher's like,

Oh,

Cool,

That's nice.

And the teacher's like,

Oh,

This person actually wants to learn,

They don't just want to graduate and get the degree,

They actually want to learn the subject.

And she was like,

Charmed that I just wanna learn the material.

And I've kind of reinterpreted the meaning of all of this dream,

It's not that I wasn't working hard enough,

It was that maybe studying was representing connecting to my soul,

And I wasn't like,

Perhaps I wasn't doing things for the right reasons,

I was trying to get a degree,

Which I didn't need in the first place,

But instead I should have done it just because I wanted to learn.

And I don't know if I'll have this kind of dream ever again,

But it kind of felt like a completion or like a real sense of peace.

Throughout the Red Book,

Jung speaks about a particular recurring dream he had I think in 1910,

He kept having this recurring dream of seeing all of Europe bathed in blood,

Like a tidal wave of blood.

And his interpretation was that it was a premonition of World War I,

It seems to line up pretty perfectly,

Perhaps it was,

Could be that it was a pure psychic premonition of a sort.

It also could be that his unconscious was picking up on signals,

Perhaps from the news or certain things that were happening that his conscious mind hadn't processed yet of like,

Oh shit,

Clearly a major war is happening.

Both of those things are possible in combination of the two.

But I think there is something to dreams of premonition,

If only from the more rational perspective that your unconscious can pick up on data and make connections that maybe your conscious mind can't.

But it can't communicate it to you in direct voluntary language,

The way when you think to yourself,

It communicates to you in symbols.

Dreams are one way,

Random imaginations are another way,

Random interests are another.

And that was the first lesson in the archetype challenge is to recognize what random interests you have,

What things that your attention seems to be drawn to,

Even though it doesn't seem like there's a good reason for it.

And I think all of those things are extremely valuable pieces of information coming from your soul.

And one of the reasons why I had to make the dream interpretation guide for the archetype challenge is that a lot of the guys who did the first iteration of it,

Like for people who are on my email list a while ago,

They got to test out the archetype challenge earlier and give me feedback.

And something a lot of guys said is that they were remembering their dreams better.

Kind of,

I didn't instruct anybody to do that or even mention dreams,

But a lot of guys were messaging me saying they were remembering their dreams all of a sudden way better.

And I think it just comes from the simple thing of if you're really paying attention to your unconscious and what's going on in there,

Well,

It becomes easier to see what's going on,

Just like a person.

If you're paying attention to what they're saying,

You're gonna actually pick up on what they're saying.

If you're paying attention to how they're being,

You're gonna pick up on cues about them.

The only,

We could call seduction advice I ever give men is,

Across the board at least,

Is to pay attention.

The more you can pay attention,

The more the woman will sub-communicate to you what to do next and how to interact and how to connect.

And you can allow perhaps your anima to drive the bus.

And I think these types of symbols,

These messages from your unconscious are extremely important because your conscious mind not only perhaps doesn't have the capacity to connect certain dots,

These certain particularly divergent ideas,

Sometimes it gets in the way.

And we're gonna talk about demons in a moment,

But sometimes it needs to come from,

Through symbolic language for you to hear it.

And one example I have,

It's an adolescent example,

I mean,

For my literal adolescence.

It's my first clear dream of a premonition that gave me instructions,

That gave me practical information.

It was when I was 17,

It was my senior year of high school.

It was the first time I was really trying to practice thinking without thinking,

Or it was when I really started to embrace some sort of spirituality,

Kind of inspired by Eckhart Tolle.

But I was in this,

I was trying to practice this state where I wasn't thinking in my head as much as I could throughout the day.

I was basically removing the abstract labeling and trying to quiet the noise in my head.

And noticing that if I did that,

As I told part of the story in the Gnosis episode,

I was noticing it was kind of telling me what to do.

Something was telling me what to do.

And in that period of my life,

The thing that caused me the most stress,

The thing that was my greatest desire were my interactions with women,

With girls my age,

Or just in general.

It was a place where I was typically clueless and also extremely anxious,

Had tons of mental noise.

And in this period,

It was like the first time I felt like I was making progress in that area.

And there was this one girl who was kind of my romantic obsession,

Love interest,

Through all of puberty.

We were good friends when we were younger.

As our bodies developed,

I became madly in love with her in a very embarrassing,

Cringe,

Nice guy,

Beta way.

I told a longer version of this in another episode,

But when I was 15,

I was super obsessed with her,

But I was too shy to ask her out.

And it took me months and months,

And the whole school knew that I liked her,

And I couldn't say anything.

And finally,

I asked her out on Valentine's Day.

While the whole school knew I was about to do it,

It was extremely,

Extremely humiliating.

And of course,

She said no in front of everybody,

Huge source of pain in my life.

But anyway,

That's kind of what led me into,

Red Pill didn't exist at the time,

But precursors to Red Pill ideology,

It kind of became hard to hide my pain.

Of course,

I had some fear slash resentment of women.

And she and I had a more contentious relationship,

And we stopped being friends after that rejection.

And then fast forward to a couple years later,

We still have this kind of cold relationship,

But I had done a lot of work on myself to change.

And I think we were both a little bit,

Basically,

We weren't showing any kind of warmth towards each other.

But I had a dream where I was at a party,

And my best friend in high school,

A guy,

He came up to me in the party and said,

Hey,

Do you still like such and such?

You know,

The girl in question.

And in the dream,

I remember kind of hemming and hawing,

Because I didn't know if I wanted to admit that I still liked her,

Because I basically just tried to cut her out of my life,

Out of fear,

Of course.

And then just in the dream,

He's like,

Well,

If you do like her still,

If you ask her out now,

She'll say yes.

You should ask her out now.

And I remember,

It was one of the first dreams,

It's the first dream I can remember where I got clear instruction about something.

And there wasn't really evidence that I could consciously see that anything had changed between us.

But I had this dream,

And I still did really like her,

And I decided to follow it anyway.

And I asked her out,

And it turned out,

She had developed a crush on me in the last year,

But because I had been so cold,

She assumed I didn't like her.

And it was like this secret thing that somehow,

Perhaps it was luck,

Perhaps it was magic,

But more likely,

My unconscious was maybe picking up on signals that my conscious mind couldn't pick up.

And this message came to me in dream form.

And it was,

I'm very glad that I followed that,

Because yeah,

It mattered a lot to me when I was 17.

So this type of connection with our soul is the goal,

Right?

Imagine you had some being that could whisper things to you that you could not consciously perceive.

Another take on the daemon,

Daemon,

Spelled D-A-E-M-O-N,

Comes from a book by Anthony Peake,

Who I've mentioned is cheating the ferryman theory in some other episode,

I can't remember.

But he's written a number of books on this idea that we have a daemon within us,

Like we have another,

A second consciousness within us.

And he's using terms,

I believe,

From Plato.

There's the eidolon,

Which is our conscious mind,

Or maybe synonymous with Freud's ego.

And then the daemon,

Which is our unconscious mind that knows things beyond our ability to perceive with our five senses,

Remembers past lives,

And knows things are going on in the world,

And can come.

And if we have a relationship with that part of ourself,

In his model,

It's a part of ourself.

It's like another mind that lives in our mind.

It can give us information,

It can guide us in life and death.

He has all these reports,

These anecdotes from people who,

Especially in life and death situations,

It feels like some other being came in and steered the car for them.

A reductionist view on that would just be,

Oh,

It's your instincts.

A lot of spiritual people perceived it to be like an angel came down and guided them away from trouble.

Anthony Peake suggests that it's our daemon,

Our unconscious mind,

Perhaps synonymous with our soul,

That sometimes takes over when needed,

Or at least gives us useful information.

And this piece is also critical for how we move through reality,

How we could call it our creativity,

Not just in artistic work or that kind of creation of art or expression,

But how we create our lives.

Again,

Like the Peter Pan idea,

To walk around with your soul separate,

I think that represents when someone's kind of going through the motions,

But their soul's not on board,

Right?

They're mechanically doing things,

But the results that they want either don't come,

Or when they come,

It doesn't feel fulfilling because their shadow is off doing something else because there's that disconnect.

I will use an example from something more like what we traditionally think of like creativity.

There's a gentleman I've been coaching.

I've been coaching him on and off for many years.

I've seen him through different life stages.

And more recently,

He started a business that requires him to create content.

And he was asking for my feedback on it.

I'm coaching him through this new phase of life.

And he actually,

His native language is something I don't speak,

But he sent me some of his videos.

And I already had the feeling that he was kind of burnt out,

Or he was doing things too much from his logical mind and not from,

He's not driven by the internal side.

We use the term inner child in our coaching sessions,

But soul is another one.

And I was watching his videos,

And it's a language I don't even speak,

But I could already tell why they weren't really pulling people in.

And it wasn't the content,

Which I couldn't even tell anyway,

Because it was another language.

It was like,

It wasn't like the light.

It wasn't like anything tangible.

It was that he wasn't putting his soul in it.

Like he was creating from this place of,

This is the topic that's gonna get me clicks,

Or get me clients,

Or whatever.

And not from,

This is what my soul wants to express.

It was all external.

So I suggested to him an experiment,

Kind of similar to what I did in my life since the dark night of the soul some months ago,

To see if I could do things being internally driven,

Rather than what seems practical.

You know,

It's kind of a test of faith.

And for him,

Even though he's a very logical guy,

It was kind of an easy sell,

Because when he looked back at his last six months,

Him doing things from a production mind hasn't really worked,

Right?

He's been tired and wired,

And hasn't made as much money as he projected.

So we're trying this new thing.

So far,

Again,

In his business,

Nothing has broken.

But he is,

I mean,

He's in his language connecting to his inner child,

And things seem to be moving better.

At least the internal experience,

At least the inner game is being won.

We'll see,

We'll see how the outer game progresses.

And for anyone listening who's like so steeped in production mindedness,

That they're like,

Okay,

All of this inner game stuff,

All of this kind of spiritual stuff is fun and interesting,

But let's see if it makes me money,

Right?

Let's see if it's outwardly productive.

I would just remind,

You know,

I'll use my baby as an analogy,

Is that tending to a baby or being with a baby,

Being present with a baby is never productive,

Right?

I compare it to whatever you do for a living to make money,

Right?

But that's what it's all for,

Right?

The reason,

At least on a biological level,

Why you're driven to acquire money is for the baby,

Right?

So to say,

Oh,

It's only worth it to be present with my child if it makes me more money somehow,

I would say that kind of silly idea is similar to being like,

Oh,

Well,

I only want to be present,

Or I only want to be connected to my unconscious if it makes me productive,

Right?

It's the wrong,

It's like a switch of priorities,

Right?

One could even argue to really flush out the analogy,

The whole reason why you have ambitions to acquire whatever it is out in the world,

Be it money or status or experiences or an impact on the world,

Whatever these external things are,

Is ultimately to entertain your soul through this experience through life.

Now,

One of the reasons,

Aside from being attached to the world of production,

One of the reasons that people have a hard time hearing the signal of their soul is what we might call our demons,

Right?

And demons,

When I use the word demon,

I'm simply speaking about patterns in our feeling or behavior,

Perhaps conditioned responses or conditioned thought streams or feeling streams that have us contract when we don't need to contract or have us worry,

But essentially create noise in our mind.

When someone's obviously fearful or contracted,

It kind of goes along with thinking too much and it's hard to feel.

It's hard to feel the signal.

Throughout my life,

I've had what we can call demons or conditioned negativity,

Maybe conditioned at young ages,

Which came from my poor self-concept or it was conditioned into me when I was younger and I had a very depressed teenage phase.

And throughout my adult life,

I have had these bursts of negativity.

And at different times,

I've taken it more seriously than others.

When I was younger,

I used to have this involuntary mantra that would pop into my head of I hate myself.

Like it was just like that sentence would just pop into my head.

This is some time ago.

Later on,

I was like,

Okay,

Well,

If I can think the words I hate myself,

Well,

Why don't I just do the positive version of that?

Like I'll say I love myself.

And that was a mantra.

But later on,

I started to think like,

Well,

That's still noise in the mind,

Right?

If I'm repeating this mantra,

Even if it's a positive one,

It's still noise.

And on a deeper level,

Only someone who is insecure about his,

Let's say love for himself or his connection to himself would have to say that,

Right?

Like someone who's really at peace doesn't bother with that mantra.

So it's almost like,

Yeah,

It's like a rich man doesn't need to tell you he's rich.

A person who loves himself doesn't need to say I love myself,

Right?

So I was like,

Okay,

What's the next level of that?

So then I went back to this attempt at silence experience of Gnosticism,

And then moved into the mindful technique,

If you will,

Of just observing this sentence.

But then as I got more into Jung,

And even recently,

I've had a different version of this,

Not the sentence I love myself.

Actually,

At different moments,

I've heard this more recently in the last couple months,

I've noticed,

I'll think some negative memory will pop into my head,

And the words,

I'm afraid,

Will pop into my head.

And I would go through the same process of like,

Ah,

That's silly,

I'm not afraid.

Like I'm not afraid of whatever,

I'll maybe say the opposite version of that.

But then I was like,

Wait a second,

Maybe it's not me saying I'm afraid,

But something,

Some pattern in me,

Some demon,

If you will,

Is saying this negative sentence in my head,

I'm afraid.

What part of me is saying this,

Right?

This is more of the Jungian archetypal view of the mind,

Right,

It's not me saying I'm afraid,

Right,

It's popping into my head when I,

The conscious,

Voluntary part of myself doesn't want.

Like some part of myself is saying this,

So what part is that?

So I could personify it any number of ways,

But say it was my inner child.

So this part of myself that was conditioned and maybe solidified as an archetype when I was younger and had a negative view of myself and the world,

Where I was extremely fearful.

What if I view it like that?

So I'm not taking it personally,

I'm not shaming myself,

I'm not saying,

Oh,

Why am I saying I'm afraid in my head?

It's not me,

It's this part of myself.

And maybe it's not even a demon,

Right?

Like what if I look at it as it's a child,

It's my inner child repeating this program of I'm afraid,

I'm afraid,

I'm afraid,

Even though I don't agree with it,

I don't think it's true.

And then I thought,

Okay,

Well,

If it was my inner child feeling afraid and it's affecting my feelings and behavior as a whole,

How do I address this,

Right?

Like what if it was my literal child saying she was afraid?

Well,

What do I do about that?

Well,

I would ask,

What are you afraid of?

Or how could we make you not afraid?

Or what would have to happen for this fear to go away?

So instead of getting,

A parent wouldn't,

Hopefully,

A parent wouldn't get angry at the child for saying,

Oh,

I'm afraid.

You try to figure out what the fear was and then deal with it.

And it kind of,

As I inquired into myself,

Like why would some part of myself say I'm afraid in my head?

It came down to the same thing,

The same solution of following quality.

How do you progress the story forward?

It's not about grinding,

It's not about forcing myself to do things I don't want,

It's about following quality.

It's about the next thing that would progress the story forward rather than just running around madly in the sad box.

And it wasn't,

Because in other times in my life when I would be like,

Oh my God,

Like there's all these things I wanna do in my life,

I gotta schedule it.

I mean,

Even when I was young,

I would keep myself up at night,

Trying to fit in all the things I wanted to accomplish in my life,

Which of course would make me more stressed and not actually do things.

Instead,

It's like what is,

It's the same solution that I've been trying to employ just to respond to my new more yin household is what is my next thing?

What is the next thing that moves my story forward?

That's the quality thing.

And next moment I get,

I'm gonna do that,

Right?

And that's the way I've been trying to simplify how I progress through life.

So I'm gonna end this episode here with a recap along with some maybe more actionable points on how one can follow quality and feed the soul.

And the first bit is,

As we mentioned earlier,

Are things to remove your attachments from the way your abstracting mind categorizes things.

Remove attachment to the external constructs and attachment to future events,

Right?

So this comes from focusing on the unspeakable,

Right?

Trying to not fall behind or interact with abstract labelings of things.

Instead,

Dealing with things exactly the way they are,

Which also means accepting things the way they are,

Right?

If you're constantly measuring your experiences against what you think should happen based on what the Joneses are doing or what's,

You know,

Or your previous goal set,

If like,

Oh,

At this age,

I should have accomplished this amount,

Right?

Instead being like,

Okay,

Exactly what is happening right now is what is happening,

I'm accepting things as the way they are.

And instead of being resentful,

Which as I've spoken about in many episodes,

Resentment is essentially telling your subconscious that you don't have influence over reality.

Instead,

Choosing agency,

Choosing like,

Okay,

I can bring my resentment to zero.

I mean,

I think that's a useful quality in relationships to other people,

But also yourself.

Bring my resentment to zero and focus on what is,

Which also means focusing on truth,

Right?

As I've mentioned in other episodes,

There's the adage for my cult that I still subscribe to on some level,

That truth carries the most sensation,

Right?

Realness sharpens reality.

You know,

Brene Brown's whole take on vulnerability is essentially this,

Right?

The more,

It's not about lying versus not lying,

But it's like the more precise and the higher fidelity your truth can be,

Like the,

You know,

Which,

You know,

I say in a relationship comes down to not withholding little feelings,

Not white lying,

But being brutally true.

And it doesn't have to be brutal,

But precisely true,

Like really turning up the reality on things.

The more you can do that,

The more your reality is less diluted,

Or I should say that the less your reality is diluted,

The more you can feel things,

And the more alive you'll feel,

Because every time that we try to deny what is true,

Some part of us has to numb out,

Right?

Like if you don't want to believe,

If you don't want to acknowledge something that maybe isn't so pleasant in your reality,

Well,

The only way to get over the cognitive dissonance there,

You don't want to believe that something is not cool,

Or you don't want to believe whatever the rosy belief is.

What your consciousness has to then do,

Or subconscious perhaps,

Is to make your reality a little more fuzzy.

Like if you don't want to see a blemish on a photograph,

Well,

Then you have to go a little bit out of focus to not see it.

And the more you lie to yourself and to other people,

Or hide the truth,

Or not admit to things,

The fuzzier and fuzzier things get,

Which is why even in relationship coaching,

I'll often,

In the kind of typical situation where the woman has certain needs,

And the man is oblivious,

A lot of times if I inquire into the guy why does he seem to miss all these social cues,

Or why does he seem to be oblivious,

Or it's not that the guy is dumb.

The reason why he's lacking perception is because maybe he didn't want to admit to certain things that would lead to conflict or discomfort,

So essentially he kind of like numbed himself out.

He numbed out his senses.

His reality became very fuzzy,

Where now all these things are going over his head because he didn't want to acknowledge reality.

I'll actually say from my own life,

In times when I was younger and very,

Very afraid of confrontation,

I have all these examples from middle school where someone would say,

Talk shit about me,

Like someone,

We might call a bully,

Although that's not really,

It's different in the inner city.

Bullying is,

The way people talk about bullying,

At least in the United States,

Doesn't really apply when you're growing up in Brooklyn.

It's different,

But I would kind of like become oblivious to people talking shit because if I acknowledged it,

I would have to deal with it,

And I was too afraid to deal with it,

So it was almost like I had selective hearing where I would hear things but not really process it,

And I have all these examples from my life where someone would be confrontational to me and I would play dumb to the point where I actually kind of became dumb and I just didn't perceive what was going on.

Obviously,

If you're numbing yourself to reality in that way,

Certainly it would be difficult.

If you're numbing yourself to external reality that way,

Certainly it would become difficult to hear your internal reality.

Like your intuition is not gonna speak to you if you're denying what's true because when you do quiet the noise and sharpen the signal,

You do get information of what to do with creative inspiration,

But also even like moment-to-moment things.

Like one very concrete and somatic version of this,

I've mentioned this before,

The Alexander Technique.

It's this,

It's not really,

You can't really call it body work necessarily,

But it's a method of developing somatic awareness and feeling.

I've referred a lot of people to that because grounding has become a more popular term since my buddy Brian Vision blew up with Fearless.

A lot of guys are seeking grounding but not knowing how to become more somatically aware.

I've referred a lot of guys to Alexander Technique teachers because it's essentially,

If you have a good teacher,

They'll teach you how to use your consciousness to feel more in your body and when you're practicing in that way,

Not only do you not contract your muscles unnecessarily,

It's kind of like every moment,

And I don't always have this awareness.

In fact,

I've probably lost it since I was studying Alexander,

But remember when I was really doing that,

It was almost like every moment I was getting a clear signal of exactly how to sit,

Exactly how to stand,

Exactly how to speak,

How to move.

I just felt like I was moving fluidly because I was getting such a clear signal from my body on what would feel the best,

Which of course was the thing that happened to be the most aligned and fluid.

And my final piece on quality is an idea that comes from my wife.

I've mentioned it in some other episode,

I think.

I believe she developed this perspective when she was in the plant medicine,

Ayahuasca world,

Whereas what it means to live a spiritual life is essentially to treat waking life as if it's a dream and interpret the symbols that appear in your reality the way you would dream symbols,

Essentially assuming that everything means something.

Now,

This is not necessarily a literal belief to take on,

But it's one way to go through life where things have meaning,

Things start to matter,

And I do believe that whether or not it's real,

Right,

Whether or not synchronicities are actually something divine or simply confirmation bias actually doesn't matter to me.

It's that taking on this perspective simply as a model or a set of working assumptions does connect you to your animal,

Even if it's actually another exercise in the archetype challenge called the language of the birds walk where you go on a walk and you basically treat everything that you come across as a symbol to your unconscious,

Which even if you don't believe in any of the spiritual stuff,

I mean,

It literally is confirmation bias.

Like you're seeking an answer to a question,

You see a cat chasing a mouse,

Like,

Oh,

That means something.

It means whatever it means to you.

It actually doesn't matter whether it's,

The fact that it's subjective is the answer,

Right?

It's whatever associations your unconscious mind made.

This is one way to go through life,

To go through life assuming symbology that everything means something because whether it's divine or not,

Actually,

Again,

Doesn't matter.

It's coming for you.

And I'll end with this one story.

It's actually,

It was my third ayahuasca experience.

And I think it's also the week that this happened was also the week that I met my wife in Peru.

You know,

I didn't know she was gonna be my wife yet,

But it was a simple experience that I had during this ayahuasca ceremony where I saw the goddess Athena,

Like very clearly.

And she said to me very clearly,

Of course,

You know,

I'm hallucinating.

I had taken some number of cups of ayahuasca.

She said to me very clearly,

If you write two hours a day,

I will make you wildly successful.

And if you don't,

I won't.

Very clear message,

Right?

Whether it was the literal spirit of the goddess Athena that came to me or it's just what my unconscious chose to symbolize,

Some information,

Some advice that I should have been following.

Doesn't matter.

It was very useful advice that I should have been following anyway.

And if someone just said it to me or if I,

You know,

Logically deduced that this is the most productive thing,

One,

I probably wouldn't have followed it and it wouldn't have had that meaning.

And maybe it wouldn't have even generated the quality as opposed to me writing because I feel like I'm doing this for my patron goddess Athena.

And,

You know,

I haven't literally followed the advice all the time,

But I do notice that in stretches where I have been committed to writing two hours a day,

Even if it was not a thing that led to something beneficial,

It has led to something that has moved my career forward or at the very least increased my sense of quality.

So I don't have any hard prescriptions here.

I think the moment someone takes a spiritual principle and then tries to translate it into here,

Do this,

And you'll absolutely get this results,

I mean,

That's,

Well,

One,

That's like one of the errors I think that people,

How people approach mindfulness these days.

I think it's also the makings of a cult leader when someone is like,

Okay,

If you do these spiritual things I promise you,

You'll have this result.

I always cringe a little bit.

You see this in religious or spiritual situations.

You also see this a lot in the self-help world.

Anyways,

I'm not gonna do that,

But I'm sharing some of my experiences in ways that I do believe will help you connect with your anima,

The more feminine part of your psyche,

Your creative unconscious,

You will,

Sources of expression,

But also peace and synergy with things that you cannot control,

The things that we call the unknown.

And perhaps through doing the things that I suggest here,

You can escort that pawn of your anima to the side and she'll become something that can benefit you in great tangible ways.

But no promises.

Thanks for listening.

Goodbye.

♪ You want a piece of me,

Take the whole thing golden ♪ ♪ Not stolen,

I give it away ♪ ♪ Truth ain't black and white,

Even acting right,

Right ♪ ♪ There's still a little gray,

I'm coming from Brooklyn ♪