September 16, 2025 • 62 mins
In the Fools and Sages One Year Anniversary Episode, these fools discuss various aspects of the nature of “madness” and the role it plays in society, and in human creativity and evolution. Threads of the conversation include “transgenerational trauma,” comparing the cognitive models offered by shamanism and western psychology, and the relationship between madness and the idea of a collective mind. We hope you enjoy this episode, and that we’ll all be together for another year at least, evolving our thinking together.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:14):
Hey there, Brian. Hey, how are you doing?
I'm well, thanks. How are you?
I'm doing good. We're in the thick of the summer
here. Yeah, I think we've actually
made it to the to the monsoons. It's coming regular now.
It's coming. It looks a bit more regular and
every time I wanted to do something outside, a
(00:35):
thunderstorm came up. So yeah, it's been a good
fortune, I guess. Yeah, you got to do get get your
outside stuff done in the morning, huh?
Yeah, that's what I usually do, Yeah.
But so, yeah, so I'm doing good.Good.
Well, I, I had like a couple of things point at this topic and
(00:56):
and I'm not sure where it's going to go exactly, but but one
thing is Brian Koeberger is getting sentenced today and he's
he's the madman who just decidedto plead guilty to murdering
those four kids. What a weird case, Idaho.
A really weird case. And as I was thinking about that
and like what our topic for today might be, I also our our
(01:20):
episode about Hitler flashed in in my mind and we had talked
about maybe his oratory skills being what differentiates him
archetypally in our collective consciousness.
And I, and I realized that I disagreed with that, although
(01:40):
it's true, it's certainly a factor.
But for me, what differentiates him is his madness.
And it just got me thinking about the role that madness
plays in society, in art, in expanding our consciousness and
expanding how we relate to the world, in politics, like
(02:03):
especially politics writ large, like back in the day, madness
drove conquest sometimes and changed the face of
civilization. As in the madness of the crowds.
And, and there's the madness of the crowds, right, which which
shows up in all kinds of ways. So right, there's this
(02:24):
individual lens on it, there's acollective lens on it.
There's internal and external, of course.
Always. And there's in the light and in
the shadows. So I was curious what you think
about madness and the role that it plays, and also whether you
(02:45):
know anything offhand about how other thinkers and writers have
kind of tried to integrate the idea of madness into their
worldview, or what, what, what, what has madness represented in
the past two? Well, you know, there's two
(03:07):
models that I have that I think in most, most world views people
will argue you need to pick one or the other.
But somehow to me, they are, they overlap.
They're mutually significant. OK.
I worked in the psych ward when I was younger.
And so I've seen most of the menu, like most of the items on
(03:32):
the madness menu. And, you know, I think the thing
that's unique about us today, well, this thing happened, you
know, this thing named Sigmund Freud.
And they claim, you know, they, they will, they will refer to
Sigmund often as the discoverer of the unconscious mind with
(03:58):
this idea that the, the, the aspects of our mind, both
collective and individual, are bigger than what is in the
daylight of our awareness, you might say.
And that's why I said that the what's in the light and what's
(04:18):
in the shadows. And you know, for example, I
thought immediately when I thinkof the madness of Hitler, I
think of the passage of him beholding the Spear of Destiny,
which was supposedly the spear that was stabbed in Christ's
(04:40):
left side. And the, the mythology since
then has been that whoever holdsthe Spear of Destiny will
control the world. Pretty Dungeons and Dragons kind
of stuff. You know, it's like so.
And I, and I thought I heard that it was in the Smithsonian.
(05:03):
But anyway, I I digress. I, I think I, I, I heard that he
had it for a while. Hitler did, and then he lost it
sometime in 1944 or 1945. When things unravelled, yeah,
that's the, you know, that's theidea.
If you do, if you do business with demons, they're tricky,
(05:25):
right. But, but my point was that I
think there is a passage in MeinKampf where he talks about
beholding this. And as I recall, I can't recall
the specifics of the passage, but I remember walking away from
it going, well, that's probably the most direct explanation.
First person account of a demonic possession that you're
(05:49):
going to get right. And now that sounds like a
poetic illusion. It sounds like maybe hyperbole.
You know, like, wow. Yeah, of course, because now
we've I. Know you mean it quite
literally. Yeah.
Well, because, you know, we're enlightened now and we
(06:10):
understand that there's the unconscious mind and there are
complexes and there are, you know, professors that understand
things and, you know, but at thesame time, you know, I'm
somebody that has done a, you know, upwards of a couple 100
ceremonies with shaman. And for them, demonios are very
(06:32):
real. And I have to say that from my
seat, white boy, going into the Indigenous tradition, seeing
what I see, look, seeing what what they see when they point to
something and say that and we call it a this, these are not
(06:54):
that. This world view doesn't come
from pure superstition. This worldview comes from pretty
much the same process that ours comes from.
That is moving into it, trying to label things, trying to
understand relations between those things, trying to
understand our interactions withthem, their responses.
(07:16):
That what what's going on here And a need for a taxonomy of
some sort. You got to have names for things
and then associate with those names.
Now we can start to build some knowledge that can be passed on.
And that's, you know, that's been an ongoing lineage for them
for 10,000 years is what my teacher said.
(07:38):
And so, well, I, well, I don't want to give an absolute
definition. I certainly know what they mean
and I have seen these borrowing from what Harlan Ellison these
mind parasites that there are energies that can exert powerful
(08:03):
influences over individuals and they can at times be overcome by
these energies that you might asthat it is good a model of any
is that these things swam up outof the collective unconscious
and that they overpowered the the focus point that that
(08:28):
individual consciousness represented.
And now all this unconscious material can pour forth.
And I think we know that there are certain things like I think
this is one of the things that happens with a lot of
methamphetamine use, is that it sort of opens a person up to
these pernicious influences thatcome from using Freud's model,
(08:52):
the collective unconscious, you know, and until Freud, we just
said, well, they're insane. But it's not like we had a great
excuse. We did have, we do have a
tradition within the, within theChristian traditions within the
Catholic Church of actually doing exorcisms.
(09:12):
And those exorcisms look very similar in certain ways to to
the South American tribal responses to these things.
So, so you know that if we stay too, if we stay too focused on
the linguistic and the definition world or it, or if
(09:37):
people just sit outside of the experience of these things and
come to logical analysis based on their worldview that doesn't
have a map of these things yet, then then something's gonna get
missed here. Some important things are gonna
get missed. Yeah, or or they're just going
(09:58):
to develop another taxonomy and and not realize that it
represents the same material, just seen through a different
lens as an existing taxonomy, which is also incomplete.
It it it but but. It has techniques that has a
technology and a way to move in that world that we don't have
(10:20):
exactly yet. We don't have those.
We have different techniques in in kind of the Western
therapeutic tradition now, whichis 100 some years old, not
10,000. Years that includes such hits as
frontal lobotomies and. Bottle in frontomies.
(10:40):
And and and and and Thorazine, which is basically lithium
frontal lobotomy without all themessy ice pick part, you know,
so we have not. Had a beating somebody with a
Guinea pig, you know, you know, there's that too.
Right. Well, in in all fairness, these
are not easy. These are not easy problems to
(11:01):
solve and. This I wanted to ask though,
about like you, you kind of presented this model that's new
to me and I think it makes sense, but but I want to talk
about it a little more. So my model for how madness is
transmitted is, is pretty low resolution, but it's something
(11:27):
like from individual to individual.
And that it's, it's easy and, and through trauma essentially
or, or through imprinting, let'ssay.
And trauma is a conduit for imprinting.
(11:49):
And I've thought metaphorically,and I think maybe we've talked
about this a little bit about kind of transgenerational
behaviors. I was just going to say
inheritance. Yeah, that that happens through,
(12:11):
through, through this conduit, right through the imprinting
and, and, and the metaphor can be of a parasitic entity that
exists even as people's lives come and go because it's able to
live generation after generationthrough being imprinted onto
(12:34):
others. But I thought of that as
metaphorical in in a way that your model about emerging from
the collective unconscious makesmore literal.
And I was wondering if you couldsay more about that because
because it kind of like makes the leap to there.
There are actually things livingin the collective unconscious
(12:56):
which through a shamanic lens isthe model, but through kind of a
a Western psychology lens is more metaphorical.
Yeah. Well, and I think that even when
we talk about the collective unconscious, unconscious, we
(13:16):
tend to think that that's something that only humans might
share because it's collective amongst humans.
But if we think of mind as pervasive, maybe in a in some of
the ways that we have explored in the podcast, the way that
from physics to different philosophers, then we realized
(13:40):
that this world, for example, the shamanic experience of the
collective unconscious, seems tohave a lot of plants and animals
in it. In other words, that dimension
encompasses all the places that mind at large touches.
(14:02):
So, so that, so that, you know, a shaman in South America, he
might call the Puma, he might call the plant a plant like
ayahuasca or chakruna, he might call silver or gasoline, right.
He might call Saints, he might call other shaman, he may he
(14:27):
might call animals in particular, a lot of different
animals and within his world, they all have special types of
knowledge and special they participate in the this
pervasive mind in their unique way.
And so they they are a particular thought of the
creator that's taken form and that exists in the mental realm
(14:50):
necessarily because it manifestsbecause of us physically.
We tend to separate these things, but they're not
separate. That is the world of the of, of
formation where idea and mind starts to influence the
formation of matter. But they're really the same,
(15:10):
which even Lausa tells us. We give them different names,
but really they're the same. And I think that's what the
physicists now are telling us. Some of these, these guys like
Fajine and, and, and I guess Langan's not really a physicist,
but his model sort of starts to trick to bridge across that.
(15:31):
I think Boehm's model starts to bridge across that.
And so there's, so we're clearlysniffing around something going
on here. Well, the, the, the shamanic
approach. I mean, I think that that that
that maybe people don't completely grasp that we can
(15:52):
make ourselves open to pernicious influences.
And this is one of the things that most indigenous traditions
seem to have a pretty good graspof is like, you know, mend your
fence line. And, you know, a great example
is when I was sitting in that inone of those first ceremonies
(16:14):
that I talked about in our episode called La Maravilla del
Mundo. And there was a negative, a
negative influence, let's say, that I could feel coming at me
from a particular side of the room that was showing me, you
know, I think I mentioned it, snapshots of mute hands, missing
(16:35):
fingers and, you know, stuff to go Boo, basically.
And it wasn't until I made the internal mistake of going what
that that's then it was on me that, you know, as we say,
proverbially like a pit bull on granny, right?
(16:58):
I mean, and that was when the Sean when I was working with put
his hand on my, my thigh and allthis stuff backed off.
You know, he touched me for maybe 5 seconds and then and
then my movie changed entirely, you know, So but that what that
point and then he told me later as a remedy to that, he said
just keep your attention on the song, on the econo.
(17:21):
But what that demonstrates is that there are psychic
influences that we can in a certain way go what and open
ourselves to. And then we may have a problem
before, you know, before we're finished dealing with that.
And that's why a lot of traditions, they warn us off in
(17:44):
ways that that the older generations warn us of and the
younger generations go, oh, they're superstitious.
The older generations say don't make yourself open to these type
of influences and. You know what one that that came
up for me in a really early ceremony was idle hands do the
(18:05):
devil's work. That's a good example of it, you
know, Yeah. Yeah, and then, and then the one
you're talking about I think gets phrased as vampires can
only come in the house if you invite them.
This is pretty much the energetic message of that, of
(18:25):
that saying, yeah and. It's not a superficial it's it's
actually a a practice. Yeah.
And when I put something like I had one around here, that's a
Feng shui Mir, and it has the trigrams and it has a mirror,
and you put it over a doorway oryou put it somewhere.
And the idea is that it's going to reflect that whatever
(18:46):
pernicious influences might comealong.
Well, that's a physical aspect. But what's significant here is
the intent that shows that you are carrying the intent to repel
these pernicious influences, right.
And that's what a lot of these these sort of like habitual
customs that we have, they're really about carrying a certain
(19:09):
intent. And because that intent and
where we steer our consciousness, if you think
about it, what is our consciousness is actually sort
of trying to vacuum up experience to process it, right?
Like that's sort of this is partof the what, what Bergsen called
(19:33):
the, the, the, the, the way the intellect moves to the world to
organize matter, right. And so so we're sort of out
there vacuuming up what's out there.
And we may do that indiscriminately, but it's a
sort of a psychic psychological thing.
And that's why we say, but you know, things like one bad apple
(19:59):
spoils the barrel. Because it only takes 1
pernicious influence, right? And, and, but what's the real
message here is that is that we will function at our highest if
if our consciousness is conscious of our consciousness.
And what that means is looking at what our awareness is and
looking at what we let in through that mechanism.
(20:23):
And that holding our intent actually has a sort of a
prophylactic effect in in certain situations, you know,
and that's why certain people weknow are very vulnerable to
influence. And we know that if they're in
the a certain situation, they will succumb.
(20:44):
And other people that have strong, stronger influence, we
know that if they go into that situation, the whole situation
will have to alter around that because of the intention that
those people hold. And I know that sounds maybe
more quasi mystical than it needs to, but if you think about
it, you'll know, you'll have seen this of this effect at
different times. And so, so, so no, there's an
(21:10):
interesting thing that's going on there.
And I do think that if we lose the, if we lose perspective on
our fear and our and our desire,we will more likely make the
kinds of mistakes that will makeU.S.
(21:31):
Open to pernicious influence. You know, I've said before that
I actually have a one string banjo.
I'm like a one string banjo. And it's all about virtue,
right. Well, this is like, again, this
is just a another way into that same conversation.
It's. Yeah.
There, there. I guess a couple of maybe just a
(21:52):
quick comment. I just want to note that some
madness is not the the result ofof, of this attention.
I just, I just think that that that bears saying this loss of
focus in our attention. But let me put it that way.
(22:14):
Some madness is, you know, to me, inexplicable.
But, but, but that I know that doesn't explain it.
And then, and then I, I wanted to, to, to kind of ask you
about, well, what about the relationship between madness and
(22:35):
the expansion of consciousness? And, and the first name that
comes up for me is Van Gogh. But there are 1,000,000 names.
And I don't think Van Gogh wouldhave probably been the brilliant
luminary he was if he wasn't also open to pernicious
influence. And what about that?
(22:57):
Yeah, Like, there, there's so. So I would say there's like an
evolutionary role that these pernicious influences can play
in the expansion of consciousness.
And and I, I do want to reiterate what you said at the
beginning of your comment, whichis that yes, there are many
different kind of flavors of madness and there are when we
(23:19):
look at those that are often come from early trauma, they
will come. We can still trace it back to
the fact that it when you're young, you have not developed
the capacity to mend your own fences.
So you are vulnerable. And if you're not protected by
(23:41):
adults who should have developedthat capacity, then yeah, you're
not responsible. It's not about you having made a
mistake. It's about you having been
vulnerable to pernicious influences when you should have
been protected by other people. So that's a whole category.
And the other thing I wanted to say about this idea of, of
(24:02):
Demonios or these pernicious influences is that they are,
it's like a, when you're in the jungle, the way that a Puma is
going to attack you is going to be very different maybe than the
way that a giant boa mite and again, very different than the
way a mosquito will. And yet all three can be, you
(24:26):
know, game over. But the way that they move, the
way that they hide, the mechanisms they use, the way
that they get, it's all different.
And, and, and the shamanic worldtranslation of that is exactly
the same. There's some things that are
just minor pernicious things. There are some things that are,
you know, for a shaman, they're insignificant.
(24:50):
And then there are other things that they call in their buddies
to handle because it's more thanone can handle, right?
And so, so just like in the jungle, there's big things,
there's little things, there's sneaky things, there's ferocious
things there, you know, and, andthat's where the power of
taxonomy comes in, I think because that's sort of the key
(25:12):
of understanding the, the mentalprinciples to be able to
withstand these things and that they don't we, we did an episode
about how the, the things will find their way through your
armor. Well, this is a version of that
same thing. There's at some point there's
(25:33):
every one of these things is going to get at every chink is
going to get tested and and you know, so that's part of it.
I think that what that the, you know, first of all, the biggest
implication of this all is that we don't know ourselves.
We only know the part of ourselves that is in like the
beam of the flashlight and that all humanity is in that boat.
(25:59):
Unless maybe if you want to talkabout what so-called
enlightenment or realization might mean within certain
traditions, then it, it's going to, that might pose the
possibility of a human way out of that.
(26:20):
But I, but I think that, you know, again, it's the trip.
It's not the destination. Something's getting done by all
this. There's some it's like there's a
price to be paid for every new bit of realization.
Your cognitive model can be stretched a number of different
(26:41):
ways, but some of those ways have extreme costs to be able to
have the experiences that are necessary to get that map worth
of data. And so, you know, which is why
we look to certain people who have paid that price in the, you
(27:02):
know, the spirit of true trusting is the Buddhist
concept, I think true in trusting shinjin.
I think it is. And so, so the idea is that,
well, if a real Buddha tells us something, we pretty much have
to take it on, you know, becausewe're not going to be
necessarily be able to read to, to verify that in our own
(27:24):
experience just yet. Someday, someday.
Fingers are crossed, right? But so, so, yeah, the the you
know, Plato's Academy, know thyself, right?
This is an old idea, although the idea of the collective
unconscious or the unconscious mind itself is not it, it, it,
(27:47):
it was. I'm not going to say that nobody
had that idea. I think they just use different
words for it because it wasn't like these people lived without
an unconscious mind. And I've made reference to to
Julian Jane's and the the break origin of consciousness and the
breakdown of the bicameral mind.And I think there's some other
interesting theories about the origin of consciousness as a
(28:09):
development. And so I.
Mean when you when you go back to like Greek myths and and the
idea of destiny essentially implies unconscious and a
collective unconscious. And the Sybil and the all of
the. All the all the creatures of
(28:31):
course. Well, I mean all the, the
temples that had mystical, you know, the Oracle at Delphi, for
example, and things like that, What were they contacting if it
wasn't some unconscious and somecollective.
And it seems like it seems like there's some, you know,
(28:53):
psychoactives might have been used to catalyze that, you know,
traditionally so, but but they're mysteries, which means
they don't tell it, right? Because if there's a certain
thing going on there that it's not like a club having a secret
handshake, It's, it's something much profounder going on.
(29:14):
In that case, that's used to what's the word as a filter to
make sure that the per the initiate is in the right
responsive state of mind so thatwhen the information is
transmitted, it's not profaned in any way.
(29:36):
And that's not unique to that. That's like an idea that lends
itself immediately when people have these realizations, right?
Is it is that this is a pretty tricky thing.
We better be careful about how we talk about it when we do, if
we do, you know, and there are situations where any words are a
(30:02):
lie. And those are the things where
we're better to remain silent. And that's why Laoza says that
the true doubt can't be spoken, you know?
That's where I thought you were going.
Yeah. When, when it comes to, you
know, instructions are not readily available for
(30:23):
interactions, at least through some modalities with these
unconscious dynamics or forces, partly because the instruction
is experiential. I mean, you can't explain to
somebody. Yeah, you really can't explain
to somebody what a ceremony entails and send them off to go
(30:47):
do it. No, but no good books, even with
pictures and diagrams. Yeah, and I've seen some
attempts. They're poor, poor.
Right. Substitutes.
Well, you're getting the the outside picture of an inside
thing. Yeah.
And there's no, it doesn't matter.
(31:07):
Hell, it's not really done with an inside thing that much.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's why, you know, some of these shaman in in
South America, we're talking about a little old guy in a
dirty T-shirt with holes in it. And you know, the the, the
Western idea or the first world idea, 'cause these guys are as
western as we are. That first world idea is that,
(31:31):
Gee, if there's some sort of notspecial knowledge of the other
world, and that should show up in this world as all sorts of,
you know, sparkly this or that somehow.
Where's your wizard's Cape, for God's sakes, you know?
And but, you know, Saint Franciswas dressed in rags, apparently.
So. So there's an interesting, yeah,
(31:54):
interesting thing that goes on there.
And trying to map these on all onto 1 map is a bit tricky, but
you can definitely there's something going on there.
It's not like this is all this is all random.
There's definitely a theme running through it that that can
(32:16):
be distilled and distinguished with time and experience, but
without experience is not possible.
Well, the idea of the collectiveunconscious was fleshed out a
little more for me interestinglyin in what we've talked about so
far. But I'm wondering if you want to
come back to the the comments about the relationship between
(32:42):
madness and art and that kind ofbeing on the vanguard of the
evolution of consciousness. We spoke in a few episodes back
about the, the, the uniqueness of language in that we can
speak, we can speak science withlanguage.
We can we can make truth propositions with language.
(33:06):
And we also can, you know, talk about that rough beast that
slouches towards Bethlehem. And you know, if you're right,
it's so spit or not to invent right?
Who rides so late through the wind and the night and this
whole, you know, and with those like, look, I just got
(33:30):
goosebumps from that. With those, we're talking about
something that's beyond what we're talking about.
We're talking about the things that that that start to move
into the shadows. And that's where maybe art can
work by giving a voice to unconscious elements.
(33:53):
And I mean, I was just seeing the other day, some of these,
the black paintings by Goya. There's no, there's, I mean, I'm
not going to say that a poet couldn't do that.
But you know, it's not, it's notgoing to be a slouch.
You know, like there's somethingbeyond words in in art that
(34:15):
definitely can be communicated. And there's no easy science
about it. There's no way we can drag that
out over to the rational side ofthe brain and say, well, you
know, we found that if the shades of Gray are in black or
exactly this tone, it stimulatesthe nervous system of it's like,
oh, go screw yourself. It's just like the example we
(34:38):
were talking about of, you know,a book or ACD about how to go
have a successful ceremony is going to be useless.
Same same problem. Because we're we're trying to
cross that same border. And the interesting thing is
that human consciousness can't cross that border, though human
understanding will lag behind. And, you know, so there's a
(35:02):
fascinating thing. Rational understanding, Yeah.
What do you mean by understanding?
OK, yeah, I mean, and, and in a very practical way, I mean, I, I
think we've had situations and ceremonies where the the
understanding part came way later.
But the But it was just like a download of direct information
(35:24):
that, you know, the reason has to be strained out of it somehow
through the application of a certain effort, you know, but
that. But the reality of the thing
we're talking about was never inquestion at all in that respect,
you know, any more than the reality of the rough beasts
(35:46):
louching towards Bethlehem is inquestion.
He was pointing at something. And if they.
If there was no such thing, you know, there would be nothing to
point to. No pointing would be inspired
and. There probably wouldn't be
goosebumps. There probably wouldn't be
goosebumps. Exactly.
(36:06):
Exactly. And for folks who didn't catch
our last episode, our last episode was all about or no, I
guess it just dropped. So it's a few episodes back.
Episode 57, I think it's about that rough beast that we were
referring to here and relevant to that episode.
For those of you that did catch that the lion with the head of a
(36:27):
man was a reference to the Sphinx.
So anyway, just just a, a show note that got late in a few
episodes, but so, so, so yeah, there's something going on that
you know, the Sphinx represents also, is this like eternal
(36:49):
mystery of what is man? And in fact, wasn't that the
Riddle that was the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx?
For those of you that don't remember, the Riddle was what?
Walks on 4 legs in the morning, on 2 legs in the middle of the
day and on three legs in the evening.
And who wasn't that had to answer that.
(37:11):
I don't I, I don't know. It was one of the heroes with
1000 faces. We'll say that referring to
Joseph Campbell's Parsons of TheThing That Works.
And the answer was the worst man.
In the morning of his life he crawls on all fours.
In our adulthood we're on 2 legsand in our aged years golden
(37:34):
some. For some reason we use a cane
and there's our third leg. Yeah, or Shalali.
Or shalali when the times come. Yes, exactly.
And so, so yeah, there is that whole mystery.
What is man right, apart from the measure of all things?
(37:59):
So, so yeah, they're, they're, this is one of those great
questions. And that irrational aspect has
just so many ways to ask that question.
If everything was rational, or if everything was deterministic
in a big computer, even though we don't have one, could somehow
calculate it all and know from the previous state what the
(38:22):
future state of everything wouldbe by tracking the movements of
molecules was sort of the fantasy.
Life wouldn't be the same. It just wouldn't be the same if
everything added up, if there were no irrational numbers in
the number board. Right?
(38:44):
And this is the thing that even great minds like Albert Einstein
are humbled beholding. And it's also something that
great minds like Einstein and Gerta and all these ones, they
didn't miss this. They were not so they were not
(39:07):
so insensitive to the fundamental mystery of
everything. To forget that at the core of it
all, which is to say not just the core of all creation, but
the core of our own experiencingself, is fundamentally
mysterious. And and that's a good starting
(39:28):
place for our science. It might ultimately be the
ending place for our science, but we might run through most of
the world before we get back there.
Looks like the way we're going for it at this point.
Well, yeah, and and I guess in the in our understanding of
(39:50):
madness, not to kind of like lean too heavily on that as a
theme. But you know, when we talk about
running through this world in our attempt to understand
ourselves and understand the universe, you know that that
seems like a manifestation of madness.
(40:12):
Maybe not exclusively, but at least among other things.
Yeah, I mean, it shows us that there's places where our our
flashlight just won't go and that those play.
There are places inside as well as outside of us that to which
that applies. You know, there's places on the
bottom of the ocean we're never going to see.
There's places in the depths of the human soul that we're never
(40:35):
really going to see, at least not that directly.
Unless you're the shadow. You remember him who knows what
evil lurks in the hearts of men and the shadow knows early radio
show, right? Mild mannered Lamont Cramston,
something like that. I'll put the reference for
people who want to check it out in the I'm sure they've got them
(40:58):
on the YouTube as us old folks say.
Yeah. But yeah, there is that that
question. And you know, I mean, I think
that part of that this is connected to this idea about
Hitler and why? Because maybe that ability to to
(41:19):
for someone to manipulate us rhetorically is about that
opening of ourselves. And it's about that, the door of
madness as a potential threat. I think that's a good segue to
what you mentioned earlier aboutthe madness of crowds, which
(41:40):
which I, I typically think of aslike the, the massive IQ drop
that happens when people are in a big group together and how
weird collective behavior can be.
It's not always an IQ drop, but it's often an IQ drop.
But, but I think you meant something different by it.
(42:01):
And, and we've been talking about the collective unconscious
in a way that is a little expansive for me.
And so I'm curious about what you meant by the madness of
crowds relative to, I think it was my comment about kind of
political history being greatly influenced by madness over the
(42:24):
years. I'm thinking of like I assume
Genghis Khan had had a touch of it.
I'm assuming Napoleon had a touch of it.
I'm assuming the Romanoffs had atouch.
You know, I'm thinking when I'm thinking of the madness of
crowds. I'm not thinking about mobs and
riots as much as I'm thinking about this great German
(42:45):
philosophy word, the zeitgeist, which translates directly as
time ghost. But it also sort of gets
translated to this as the spiritof the times, which is, you
know, we never think of the eye again.
There's the word spirit shows up, but we never think about it
(43:09):
that way. But isn't it curious that
language chooses that right? And so, you know, when when
Yeats was talking about the the second coming, he wasn't really
talking about Jesus's second coming.
He was talking about that rough beasts second coming.
(43:32):
And the fact that it was slouching to Bethlehem is
because Bethlehem was the seat of Christianity, Judaism, Islam
in the in the in his days, the East was still more of a mystery
and still less, you know, open. But what he was seeing was
(43:53):
similar to Nietzsche's idea of the God is dead was not, you
know, Nietzsche wasn't wasn't all jazzed about that.
We should be clear. He was just stating what he was
observing. And so that's what he was
wondering was what is going to replace this If our moral
(44:17):
tenants have been have been cut loose.
If our which is a question we'veasked a number of our guests and
and will will undoubtedly do again on future dates.
Because this is one of the questions of the ground.
It's called the grounding problem of morality or ethics.
And that is, you know, upon whatdoes it sit is the grounding
(44:42):
problem. So, so, so yeah, this, this,
this idea of the spirit of the times.
If I'm a conventionalist, right,If I'm like heart in the in the
dialogue between Heart and Dworkin, and I say, well, good
and bad and all of our standardsare all just convention.
(45:03):
It's all just what everybody thinks and has worked out.
And those change over time. So there's nothing written in
stone, as it were, that is a lack.
Of focus, of attention that makes one open to pernicious
influence, by the way, thinking that.
It sure could contribute, you know, But if I'm one of those,
(45:25):
then it's like, well, I mean, myboat is kind of cut loose
because everything's just convention.
And maybe I just want to have a different convention, you know,
and, and I would attach, I wouldassociate that with a spirit of
the times. And so that can sort of become a
(45:48):
madness of crowds, but a, a morepernicious madness of crowds.
They're not all standing out there with burning torches.
They're just everybody going about their lives with that
model, that sharing that cognitive model and with with
and all of the implications thatit has in value systems and in
(46:08):
in how we balance our relationships and how we lead
our lives and all those practical things.
And that all comes in with the spirit of the times.
You know, that's why I thought it was interesting in The Hunger
Games where my buddy Stanley, when he was all the all the
people that were in the most elite classes, they all had the
(46:32):
same fashion. That was way overdone, right?
And that was clearly an example of the spirit of the times
within that class saying, OK, this is what's cool.
Sometimes I'll refer to that as an applause system.
The other part is it's also verymuch related to what you can get
away with, and that's directly related to which pernicious
(46:56):
influences might thrive in any particular epic based on the
zeitgeist that inhabits that epic.
And you know, this, this Hegelian idea was the
Phenomenology of spirit of Geistwith this idea that the, that
(47:16):
there is a transition through time, that the zeitgeist morphs
from one value system to anothervalue system over time.
And whether it does that randomly or whether it's it's,
it's, you know, slouching off toits own Bethlehem to be born
somehow. It's evolutionary and.
(47:39):
Finalism or something like that,Are we going somewhere or we
just riding the bus around town?Yeah, and but, but so
definitions of madness are probably, you know, connected
directly to that zeitgeist and and the way madness showed up
shows up seems to be like, for example, if this is just one of
(48:01):
the weird things of history, youknow, I will go Jamie, pull up
that video of. Jamie doesn't work for us yet.
Yeah, I know we really need a Jamie, but it's, you know, where
people used to have, what are they called the tarantella,
where people just used to go into fits of mad dancing.
Dancing, yeah. Till like they crashed and
(48:23):
burned right till they till theywere just like trouts flipping
on the floor or something. Yeah.
And then you got speaking in tongues.
That happens in certain circumstances.
And yeah. Yeah.
I mean, so there's these things that I'm thinking about this
also in terms of Freud and the types of patients that Freud
(48:44):
saw. And they're different than the
types of patients that psychoanalysts are seeing today.
And say, Chinese medicine will tell you the same thing.
The the kinds of problems that we see people with changes
through different times of history.
And it has to, it's tied with everything.
It's tied to fashion and it's tied to economics and it's tied
(49:08):
to politics and whether there's wars or, you know, uprising, you
know, so all this stuff is just a big plate of spaghetti tangled
together that we could call the zeitgeist, right?
Like kind of what's going on. And it's very hard from one
zeitgeist to peer into another and imagine what it's like
(49:31):
because you grew up when the pervasive madness of crowds was
following a different zeitgeist or, you know, or like that.
So so that is a bigger madness of crowds than I think we're
talking about when we're talkingabout a sub sect.
And oh, aren't they crazy? They think birds are are really
(49:52):
spy devices. And although now New Mexico is
using stuffed birds as drones. So if it flies, it spies folks.
And. But anyway, I digress.
Each time has its own crazy, it seems like, and each, each time
has its own habits that 'cause its own crazy.
(50:14):
For example, I missed this in our episode about hats because
it's a great reference to hats. And that is directly mad as a
Hatter, right? And then they weren't talking
about angry, right? They were talking about loopy
(50:35):
and it was associated I believe with Mercury, wasn't it?
They were using Mercury somehow in the process of you of
building making hats. And so they had exposure and
they became mad as Hatters. Right?
Oblique Alice in Wonderland reference.
They're talking about another, you know, another exploration
(50:58):
into a kind of madness through the looking glass, where things
make a different kind of crazy sense.
We haven't talked about him, I don't think at at all on the
podcast yet. We probably should.
Yeah, it's true. What a character.
Yeah, and. Remembering the screw tape
letters, that was him, right? That was CHCS.
(51:19):
Lewis was screwed. Oh, OK.
Yeah, yeah. No, this is the interesting
connection with with Alice in Wonderland is that homie who
wrote that, You know, Alice was the daughter of a professor at
the same university that Lewis Carroll was working at when he
(51:42):
wrote that. And Alice's last name was
Lydell. And those of us who are Greek
scholars, really a Greek scholar, those of us who
suffered through many classes ofGreek, will recognize the name
Lydell because he wrote the everpopular Greek lexicon.
(52:03):
Lexicon is just a dictionary, soit tells you in English what the
Greek words mean and might show you where they show up in the
classics. But.
But anyway, so, so yeah, that's where history kind of folds back
in on itself. And I and I believe it's Oxford
that we're talking about. I'll, I'll, I'll correct that in
the show notes if I'm wrong. Yeah, No, there is a whole
(52:29):
interesting thing. And again, these are all non
logical dimensions of mind, but that doesn't mean that they
don't carry meaning. It isn't that weird.
Yeah, so coming back to Brian Koeberger, it's funny the the
(52:50):
families want him to explain. And of all people, Donald Trump
wrote a post on Truth Social that I, I assume somebody
screenshot or he screenshot ontohis X account because I don't
think he posts on X himself a whole lot saying that the judge
should require an explanation aspart of the sentencing procedure
(53:16):
and, you know, as as a requirement of the, the plea
being accepted. And I would love to hear the
explanation. And I've watched a lot of
interrogations with people suffering from madness because
that that interests me and the explanation never satisfies.
(53:36):
Sure. Well, and often it's not a, it's
not a, a complete coincidence that often in situations of
violence, alcohol is involved. And you know, we've often had
the saying within the, within the shamanic community that
there are drugs that demand responsibility and drugs that
(53:57):
basically people go to, to be cut loose of responsibility
somehow. And, and I would put alcohol in
that category. And so, and I know because I, I
used to teach in the penitentiary and that, you know,
there are people there for murder who will literally tell
you, I have no idea what happened.
(54:20):
They had no reason to lie to me about it.
I woke up and this and there waswreckage all around me and so
somebody was driving and these you know, I'm not talking about
somebody who was saying I don't know what happened to the judge
to try to get a sentence. I'm talking about somebody
that's already 25 years in. He's got no reason in the world
(54:43):
to bullshit anybody or himself. But it alcohol was involved.
And when he said when he came tothings had happened that he
didn't want to have happened, but he didn't know what
happened, right? Well, sure.
Sounds to me like, I mean, we know somebody was driving
(55:04):
because a lot of wreckage was wrought, but it sounds like an
incidence of unconscious material breaking through in a
pretty dramatic and destructive way, which.
Can't really be explained. Yeah.
Can't really be explained rationally.
I think though, that, you know, this is where and I think
(55:27):
because of many, many years of ceremonies, when it almost comes
to a metaphysical understanding of these things, because it's
not like anyone incident is going to explain it.
It's like you see that these types of things happen on this
plane in this world, the way this game is going down.
(55:49):
And there is some, and we've spoken about this before in our
episode on suffering. There is some price that we are
paying to come to consciousness.And I and I mean that, you know,
consciousness in the fullest dimensions in that way of
understanding ourselves. And we're going, we're doing
(56:12):
that collectively as well as each person individually being
on their own project, whether they're undertaking it directly
or indirectly. So I I kind of have a feeling
that some of this is somehow written into the script.
(56:34):
Maybe in the Bhagavad Gita it explains it well.
Isn't that what the script is? Or what do you mean by the
script? Well, that I don't think that
this that there is a script thatis written per SE.
I do think that that I don't think that the universe is
determined. Now we're at the metaphysics of
it. Now we're at the metaphysics of
(56:54):
it, but I think that there are energies that have to be worked
out the the specifics of how those work out.
I think that's up for grabs. I think that's possibilistic
with probabilistic overtones. But the thing that's being
(57:16):
expressed or the process that has to be gone through, I think
just has certain chapters in theevolution of it.
And I think that's what they're getting at with the Yugas and
with these great epics of history, the Cot when the when
the Hopies talk about the different worlds, And they're
not unique in that, I might add.They're not just other Native
(57:42):
Americans, but there are other traditional world views that
have a very similar picture on it.
And it's not like typical first world Western knowledge where we
could say, Oh yeah, this guy came up with it.
And then and then we've thought about it.
We thought, yeah, he's right on.So that's the way we think about
it. It's more like we've we've
(58:03):
always known this. These are things that that also
emerge from the collective unconscious.
Literally, yeah, Yeah. And have overtime.
And that's why we don't want to lose them because they're all
pieces in the puzzle. And, you know, like I was
thinking. We can't lose them, but.
Well, but I like his languages disappear as the last language
(58:26):
speakers and as their traditionsdisappear, we may lose part of
the payload to that, you know, and.
And so now we should be smart enough to be supporting that
process to, you know, get get reinforced that rather than let
it pass away. That's just my vision to the.
Race that might be worth an episode at some point because I
(58:49):
think I agree with you and I think that's also not how the
script is written, as evidenced by the many languages that have
already died off. So, So what about that I think
is kind of interesting, but but not for today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's a whole thing there
(59:11):
with that mystery of language and, and the mystery of humans
in reality and, and the, the linguisticality of, of reality
itself. Yeah, yeah.
I can't remember who I ripped that off from Gotham or maybe
one of those phenomenologist, I think one of those
phenomenologists. Yeah, yeah.
(59:33):
And but so, so which is an interesting thing because that's
tied up with this idea of mind and matter.
And I did finish Bergson's Creative Evolution.
Wow. I think I want to do a reading
of it. But that idea of we've talked
about is something moving up theladder or is it coming down the
(59:53):
ladder? And he explains how the going
down and the coming up are mutually interdependent, in a
similar way that Boehm later wasto say that the explicate order
and the implicate order are folded into each other.
And the way we've talked about evolution and devolution being
(01:00:14):
the yin and Yang of how how we move forward through time.
Balancing spirals, Yeah. If you get to the into the
really into the Kabbalist theory, you should.
They'll show you the the tree, the Kabbalah.
Well, there's actually a tree that's the mirror image that
goes underneath that goes and itmaps all the other directional
(01:00:37):
stuff. So you've got, again, we've got
these two spirals idea, you know, so, so yeah, no, there's a
lot going on there. And again, it is the fundamental
mystery. And that's why Ramana Maharishi,
who I mentioned before, said youcan become enlightened by asking
yourself the question, who am I?Because when you come down to I
(01:00:58):
am the fundamental mystery and everything else is also the
fundamental mystery. And then you have the Hindu
saying, Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahma, I am God.
Or as I've referred before, wakeup to find out that you are the
eyes of the world, right? So then something different
(01:01:22):
happens there and there's, there's the world is different
from that seat. And that's all about, about all
you can say about it. But or as, as Hanshan said, try
to make it to cold Mountain, right, which is his seat where
he would attain a different typeof consciousness.
(01:01:43):
Try, try to get there, you know,but it's tricky.
It's rough terrain, you know should do one on cold Mountain
too at some point yeah we could read some of his poems yeah cuz
he's another one that's. I'll put him in the show notes,
folks. Yeah, yeah.
Those are like a bag of goodies,I tell you.
(01:02:04):
We'll. Put it in the backlog too.
Good. Well, thank you, Brian.
Sounds good. Be well we'll.
See everybody later. Bye bye.
Hey there, Brian. Hey, how are you doing?
I'm well, thanks. How are you?
I'm doing good. We're in the thick of the summer
here. Yeah, I think we've actually
made it to the to the monsoons. It's coming regular now.
It's coming. It looks a bit more regular and
every time I wanted to do something outside, a
(00:35):
thunderstorm came up. So yeah, it's been a good
fortune, I guess. Yeah, you got to do get get your
outside stuff done in the morning, huh?
Yeah, that's what I usually do, Yeah.
But so, yeah, so I'm doing good.Good.
Well, I, I had like a couple of things point at this topic and
(00:56):
and I'm not sure where it's going to go exactly, but but one
thing is Brian Koeberger is getting sentenced today and he's
he's the madman who just decidedto plead guilty to murdering
those four kids. What a weird case, Idaho.
A really weird case. And as I was thinking about that
and like what our topic for today might be, I also our our
(01:20):
episode about Hitler flashed in in my mind and we had talked
about maybe his oratory skills being what differentiates him
archetypally in our collective consciousness.
And I, and I realized that I disagreed with that, although
(01:40):
it's true, it's certainly a factor.
But for me, what differentiates him is his madness.
And it just got me thinking about the role that madness
plays in society, in art, in expanding our consciousness and
expanding how we relate to the world, in politics, like
(02:03):
especially politics writ large, like back in the day, madness
drove conquest sometimes and changed the face of
civilization. As in the madness of the crowds.
And, and there's the madness of the crowds, right, which which
shows up in all kinds of ways. So right, there's this
(02:24):
individual lens on it, there's acollective lens on it.
There's internal and external, of course.
Always. And there's in the light and in
the shadows. So I was curious what you think
about madness and the role that it plays, and also whether you
(02:45):
know anything offhand about how other thinkers and writers have
kind of tried to integrate the idea of madness into their
worldview, or what, what, what, what has madness represented in
the past two? Well, you know, there's two
(03:07):
models that I have that I think in most, most world views people
will argue you need to pick one or the other.
But somehow to me, they are, they overlap.
They're mutually significant. OK.
I worked in the psych ward when I was younger.
And so I've seen most of the menu, like most of the items on
(03:32):
the madness menu. And, you know, I think the thing
that's unique about us today, well, this thing happened, you
know, this thing named Sigmund Freud.
And they claim, you know, they, they will, they will refer to
Sigmund often as the discoverer of the unconscious mind with
(03:58):
this idea that the, the, the aspects of our mind, both
collective and individual, are bigger than what is in the
daylight of our awareness, you might say.
And that's why I said that the what's in the light and what's
(04:18):
in the shadows. And you know, for example, I
thought immediately when I thinkof the madness of Hitler, I
think of the passage of him beholding the Spear of Destiny,
which was supposedly the spear that was stabbed in Christ's
(04:40):
left side. And the, the mythology since
then has been that whoever holdsthe Spear of Destiny will
control the world. Pretty Dungeons and Dragons kind
of stuff. You know, it's like so.
And I, and I thought I heard that it was in the Smithsonian.
(05:03):
But anyway, I I digress. I, I think I, I, I heard that he
had it for a while. Hitler did, and then he lost it
sometime in 1944 or 1945. When things unravelled, yeah,
that's the, you know, that's theidea.
If you do, if you do business with demons, they're tricky,
(05:25):
right. But, but my point was that I
think there is a passage in MeinKampf where he talks about
beholding this. And as I recall, I can't recall
the specifics of the passage, but I remember walking away from
it going, well, that's probably the most direct explanation.
First person account of a demonic possession that you're
(05:49):
going to get right. And now that sounds like a
poetic illusion. It sounds like maybe hyperbole.
You know, like, wow. Yeah, of course, because now
we've I. Know you mean it quite
literally. Yeah.
Well, because, you know, we're enlightened now and we
(06:10):
understand that there's the unconscious mind and there are
complexes and there are, you know, professors that understand
things and, you know, but at thesame time, you know, I'm
somebody that has done a, you know, upwards of a couple 100
ceremonies with shaman. And for them, demonios are very
(06:32):
real. And I have to say that from my
seat, white boy, going into the Indigenous tradition, seeing
what I see, look, seeing what what they see when they point to
something and say that and we call it a this, these are not
(06:54):
that. This world view doesn't come
from pure superstition. This worldview comes from pretty
much the same process that ours comes from.
That is moving into it, trying to label things, trying to
understand relations between those things, trying to
understand our interactions withthem, their responses.
(07:16):
That what what's going on here And a need for a taxonomy of
some sort. You got to have names for things
and then associate with those names.
Now we can start to build some knowledge that can be passed on.
And that's, you know, that's been an ongoing lineage for them
for 10,000 years is what my teacher said.
(07:38):
And so, well, I, well, I don't want to give an absolute
definition. I certainly know what they mean
and I have seen these borrowing from what Harlan Ellison these
mind parasites that there are energies that can exert powerful
(08:03):
influences over individuals and they can at times be overcome by
these energies that you might asthat it is good a model of any
is that these things swam up outof the collective unconscious
and that they overpowered the the focus point that that
(08:28):
individual consciousness represented.
And now all this unconscious material can pour forth.
And I think we know that there are certain things like I think
this is one of the things that happens with a lot of
methamphetamine use, is that it sort of opens a person up to
these pernicious influences thatcome from using Freud's model,
(08:52):
the collective unconscious, you know, and until Freud, we just
said, well, they're insane. But it's not like we had a great
excuse. We did have, we do have a
tradition within the, within theChristian traditions within the
Catholic Church of actually doing exorcisms.
(09:12):
And those exorcisms look very similar in certain ways to to
the South American tribal responses to these things.
So, so you know that if we stay too, if we stay too focused on
the linguistic and the definition world or it, or if
(09:37):
people just sit outside of the experience of these things and
come to logical analysis based on their worldview that doesn't
have a map of these things yet, then then something's gonna get
missed here. Some important things are gonna
get missed. Yeah, or or they're just going
(09:58):
to develop another taxonomy and and not realize that it
represents the same material, just seen through a different
lens as an existing taxonomy, which is also incomplete.
It it it but but. It has techniques that has a
technology and a way to move in that world that we don't have
(10:20):
exactly yet. We don't have those.
We have different techniques in in kind of the Western
therapeutic tradition now, whichis 100 some years old, not
10,000. Years that includes such hits as
frontal lobotomies and. Bottle in frontomies.
(10:40):
And and and and and Thorazine, which is basically lithium
frontal lobotomy without all themessy ice pick part, you know,
so we have not. Had a beating somebody with a
Guinea pig, you know, you know, there's that too.
Right. Well, in in all fairness, these
are not easy. These are not easy problems to
(11:01):
solve and. This I wanted to ask though,
about like you, you kind of presented this model that's new
to me and I think it makes sense, but but I want to talk
about it a little more. So my model for how madness is
transmitted is, is pretty low resolution, but it's something
(11:27):
like from individual to individual.
And that it's, it's easy and, and through trauma essentially
or, or through imprinting, let'ssay.
And trauma is a conduit for imprinting.
(11:49):
And I've thought metaphorically,and I think maybe we've talked
about this a little bit about kind of transgenerational
behaviors. I was just going to say
inheritance. Yeah, that that happens through,
(12:11):
through, through this conduit, right through the imprinting
and, and, and the metaphor can be of a parasitic entity that
exists even as people's lives come and go because it's able to
live generation after generationthrough being imprinted onto
(12:34):
others. But I thought of that as
metaphorical in in a way that your model about emerging from
the collective unconscious makesmore literal.
And I was wondering if you couldsay more about that because
because it kind of like makes the leap to there.
There are actually things livingin the collective unconscious
(12:56):
which through a shamanic lens isthe model, but through kind of a
a Western psychology lens is more metaphorical.
Yeah. Well, and I think that even when
we talk about the collective unconscious, unconscious, we
(13:16):
tend to think that that's something that only humans might
share because it's collective amongst humans.
But if we think of mind as pervasive, maybe in a in some of
the ways that we have explored in the podcast, the way that
from physics to different philosophers, then we realized
(13:40):
that this world, for example, the shamanic experience of the
collective unconscious, seems tohave a lot of plants and animals
in it. In other words, that dimension
encompasses all the places that mind at large touches.
(14:02):
So, so that, so that, you know, a shaman in South America, he
might call the Puma, he might call the plant a plant like
ayahuasca or chakruna, he might call silver or gasoline, right.
He might call Saints, he might call other shaman, he may he
(14:27):
might call animals in particular, a lot of different
animals and within his world, they all have special types of
knowledge and special they participate in the this
pervasive mind in their unique way.
And so they they are a particular thought of the
creator that's taken form and that exists in the mental realm
(14:50):
necessarily because it manifestsbecause of us physically.
We tend to separate these things, but they're not
separate. That is the world of the of, of
formation where idea and mind starts to influence the
formation of matter. But they're really the same,
(15:10):
which even Lausa tells us. We give them different names,
but really they're the same. And I think that's what the
physicists now are telling us. Some of these, these guys like
Fajine and, and, and I guess Langan's not really a physicist,
but his model sort of starts to trick to bridge across that.
(15:31):
I think Boehm's model starts to bridge across that.
And so there's, so we're clearlysniffing around something going
on here. Well, the, the, the shamanic
approach. I mean, I think that that that
that maybe people don't completely grasp that we can
(15:52):
make ourselves open to pernicious influences.
And this is one of the things that most indigenous traditions
seem to have a pretty good graspof is like, you know, mend your
fence line. And, you know, a great example
is when I was sitting in that inone of those first ceremonies
(16:14):
that I talked about in our episode called La Maravilla del
Mundo. And there was a negative, a
negative influence, let's say, that I could feel coming at me
from a particular side of the room that was showing me, you
know, I think I mentioned it, snapshots of mute hands, missing
(16:35):
fingers and, you know, stuff to go Boo, basically.
And it wasn't until I made the internal mistake of going what
that that's then it was on me that, you know, as we say,
proverbially like a pit bull on granny, right?
(16:58):
I mean, and that was when the Sean when I was working with put
his hand on my, my thigh and allthis stuff backed off.
You know, he touched me for maybe 5 seconds and then and
then my movie changed entirely, you know, So but that what that
point and then he told me later as a remedy to that, he said
just keep your attention on the song, on the econo.
(17:21):
But what that demonstrates is that there are psychic
influences that we can in a certain way go what and open
ourselves to. And then we may have a problem
before, you know, before we're finished dealing with that.
And that's why a lot of traditions, they warn us off in
(17:44):
ways that that the older generations warn us of and the
younger generations go, oh, they're superstitious.
The older generations say don't make yourself open to these type
of influences and. You know what one that that came
up for me in a really early ceremony was idle hands do the
(18:05):
devil's work. That's a good example of it, you
know, Yeah. Yeah, and then, and then the one
you're talking about I think gets phrased as vampires can
only come in the house if you invite them.
This is pretty much the energetic message of that, of
(18:25):
that saying, yeah and. It's not a superficial it's it's
actually a a practice. Yeah.
And when I put something like I had one around here, that's a
Feng shui Mir, and it has the trigrams and it has a mirror,
and you put it over a doorway oryou put it somewhere.
And the idea is that it's going to reflect that whatever
(18:46):
pernicious influences might comealong.
Well, that's a physical aspect. But what's significant here is
the intent that shows that you are carrying the intent to repel
these pernicious influences, right.
And that's what a lot of these these sort of like habitual
customs that we have, they're really about carrying a certain
(19:09):
intent. And because that intent and
where we steer our consciousness, if you think
about it, what is our consciousness is actually sort
of trying to vacuum up experience to process it, right?
Like that's sort of this is partof the what, what Bergsen called
(19:33):
the, the, the, the, the way the intellect moves to the world to
organize matter, right. And so so we're sort of out
there vacuuming up what's out there.
And we may do that indiscriminately, but it's a
sort of a psychic psychological thing.
And that's why we say, but you know, things like one bad apple
(19:59):
spoils the barrel. Because it only takes 1
pernicious influence, right? And, and, but what's the real
message here is that is that we will function at our highest if
if our consciousness is conscious of our consciousness.
And what that means is looking at what our awareness is and
looking at what we let in through that mechanism.
(20:23):
And that holding our intent actually has a sort of a
prophylactic effect in in certain situations, you know,
and that's why certain people weknow are very vulnerable to
influence. And we know that if they're in
the a certain situation, they will succumb.
(20:44):
And other people that have strong, stronger influence, we
know that if they go into that situation, the whole situation
will have to alter around that because of the intention that
those people hold. And I know that sounds maybe
more quasi mystical than it needs to, but if you think about
it, you'll know, you'll have seen this of this effect at
different times. And so, so, so no, there's an
(21:10):
interesting thing that's going on there.
And I do think that if we lose the, if we lose perspective on
our fear and our and our desire,we will more likely make the
kinds of mistakes that will makeU.S.
(21:31):
Open to pernicious influence. You know, I've said before that
I actually have a one string banjo.
I'm like a one string banjo. And it's all about virtue,
right. Well, this is like, again, this
is just a another way into that same conversation.
It's. Yeah.
There, there. I guess a couple of maybe just a
(21:52):
quick comment. I just want to note that some
madness is not the the result ofof, of this attention.
I just, I just think that that that bears saying this loss of
focus in our attention. But let me put it that way.
(22:14):
Some madness is, you know, to me, inexplicable.
But, but, but that I know that doesn't explain it.
And then, and then I, I wanted to, to, to kind of ask you
about, well, what about the relationship between madness and
(22:35):
the expansion of consciousness? And, and the first name that
comes up for me is Van Gogh. But there are 1,000,000 names.
And I don't think Van Gogh wouldhave probably been the brilliant
luminary he was if he wasn't also open to pernicious
influence. And what about that?
(22:57):
Yeah, Like, there, there's so. So I would say there's like an
evolutionary role that these pernicious influences can play
in the expansion of consciousness.
And and I, I do want to reiterate what you said at the
beginning of your comment, whichis that yes, there are many
different kind of flavors of madness and there are when we
(23:19):
look at those that are often come from early trauma, they
will come. We can still trace it back to
the fact that it when you're young, you have not developed
the capacity to mend your own fences.
So you are vulnerable. And if you're not protected by
(23:41):
adults who should have developedthat capacity, then yeah, you're
not responsible. It's not about you having made a
mistake. It's about you having been
vulnerable to pernicious influences when you should have
been protected by other people. So that's a whole category.
And the other thing I wanted to say about this idea of, of
(24:02):
Demonios or these pernicious influences is that they are,
it's like a, when you're in the jungle, the way that a Puma is
going to attack you is going to be very different maybe than the
way that a giant boa mite and again, very different than the
way a mosquito will. And yet all three can be, you
(24:26):
know, game over. But the way that they move, the
way that they hide, the mechanisms they use, the way
that they get, it's all different.
And, and, and the shamanic worldtranslation of that is exactly
the same. There's some things that are
just minor pernicious things. There are some things that are,
you know, for a shaman, they're insignificant.
(24:50):
And then there are other things that they call in their buddies
to handle because it's more thanone can handle, right?
And so, so just like in the jungle, there's big things,
there's little things, there's sneaky things, there's ferocious
things there, you know, and, andthat's where the power of
taxonomy comes in, I think because that's sort of the key
(25:12):
of understanding the, the mentalprinciples to be able to
withstand these things and that they don't we, we did an episode
about how the, the things will find their way through your
armor. Well, this is a version of that
same thing. There's at some point there's
(25:33):
every one of these things is going to get at every chink is
going to get tested and and you know, so that's part of it.
I think that what that the, you know, first of all, the biggest
implication of this all is that we don't know ourselves.
We only know the part of ourselves that is in like the
beam of the flashlight and that all humanity is in that boat.
(25:59):
Unless maybe if you want to talkabout what so-called
enlightenment or realization might mean within certain
traditions, then it, it's going to, that might pose the
possibility of a human way out of that.
(26:20):
But I, but I think that, you know, again, it's the trip.
It's not the destination. Something's getting done by all
this. There's some it's like there's a
price to be paid for every new bit of realization.
Your cognitive model can be stretched a number of different
(26:41):
ways, but some of those ways have extreme costs to be able to
have the experiences that are necessary to get that map worth
of data. And so, you know, which is why
we look to certain people who have paid that price in the, you
(27:02):
know, the spirit of true trusting is the Buddhist
concept, I think true in trusting shinjin.
I think it is. And so, so the idea is that,
well, if a real Buddha tells us something, we pretty much have
to take it on, you know, becausewe're not going to be
necessarily be able to read to, to verify that in our own
(27:24):
experience just yet. Someday, someday.
Fingers are crossed, right? But so, so, yeah, the the you
know, Plato's Academy, know thyself, right?
This is an old idea, although the idea of the collective
unconscious or the unconscious mind itself is not it, it, it,
(27:47):
it was. I'm not going to say that nobody
had that idea. I think they just use different
words for it because it wasn't like these people lived without
an unconscious mind. And I've made reference to to
Julian Jane's and the the break origin of consciousness and the
breakdown of the bicameral mind.And I think there's some other
interesting theories about the origin of consciousness as a
(28:09):
development. And so I.
Mean when you when you go back to like Greek myths and and the
idea of destiny essentially implies unconscious and a
collective unconscious. And the Sybil and the all of
the. All the all the creatures of
(28:31):
course. Well, I mean all the, the
temples that had mystical, you know, the Oracle at Delphi, for
example, and things like that, What were they contacting if it
wasn't some unconscious and somecollective.
And it seems like it seems like there's some, you know,
(28:53):
psychoactives might have been used to catalyze that, you know,
traditionally so, but but they're mysteries, which means
they don't tell it, right? Because if there's a certain
thing going on there that it's not like a club having a secret
handshake, It's, it's something much profounder going on.
(29:14):
In that case, that's used to what's the word as a filter to
make sure that the per the initiate is in the right
responsive state of mind so thatwhen the information is
transmitted, it's not profaned in any way.
(29:36):
And that's not unique to that. That's like an idea that lends
itself immediately when people have these realizations, right?
Is it is that this is a pretty tricky thing.
We better be careful about how we talk about it when we do, if
we do, you know, and there are situations where any words are a
(30:02):
lie. And those are the things where
we're better to remain silent. And that's why Laoza says that
the true doubt can't be spoken, you know?
That's where I thought you were going.
Yeah. When, when it comes to, you
know, instructions are not readily available for
(30:23):
interactions, at least through some modalities with these
unconscious dynamics or forces, partly because the instruction
is experiential. I mean, you can't explain to
somebody. Yeah, you really can't explain
to somebody what a ceremony entails and send them off to go
(30:47):
do it. No, but no good books, even with
pictures and diagrams. Yeah, and I've seen some
attempts. They're poor, poor.
Right. Substitutes.
Well, you're getting the the outside picture of an inside
thing. Yeah.
And there's no, it doesn't matter.
(31:07):
Hell, it's not really done with an inside thing that much.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's why, you know, some of these shaman in in
South America, we're talking about a little old guy in a
dirty T-shirt with holes in it. And you know, the the, the
Western idea or the first world idea, 'cause these guys are as
western as we are. That first world idea is that,
(31:31):
Gee, if there's some sort of notspecial knowledge of the other
world, and that should show up in this world as all sorts of,
you know, sparkly this or that somehow.
Where's your wizard's Cape, for God's sakes, you know?
And but, you know, Saint Franciswas dressed in rags, apparently.
So. So there's an interesting, yeah,
(31:54):
interesting thing that goes on there.
And trying to map these on all onto 1 map is a bit tricky, but
you can definitely there's something going on there.
It's not like this is all this is all random.
There's definitely a theme running through it that that can
(32:16):
be distilled and distinguished with time and experience, but
without experience is not possible.
Well, the idea of the collectiveunconscious was fleshed out a
little more for me interestinglyin in what we've talked about so
far. But I'm wondering if you want to
come back to the the comments about the relationship between
(32:42):
madness and art and that kind ofbeing on the vanguard of the
evolution of consciousness. We spoke in a few episodes back
about the, the, the uniqueness of language in that we can
speak, we can speak science withlanguage.
We can we can make truth propositions with language.
(33:06):
And we also can, you know, talk about that rough beast that
slouches towards Bethlehem. And you know, if you're right,
it's so spit or not to invent right?
Who rides so late through the wind and the night and this
whole, you know, and with those like, look, I just got
(33:30):
goosebumps from that. With those, we're talking about
something that's beyond what we're talking about.
We're talking about the things that that that start to move
into the shadows. And that's where maybe art can
work by giving a voice to unconscious elements.
(33:53):
And I mean, I was just seeing the other day, some of these,
the black paintings by Goya. There's no, there's, I mean, I'm
not going to say that a poet couldn't do that.
But you know, it's not, it's notgoing to be a slouch.
You know, like there's somethingbeyond words in in art that
(34:15):
definitely can be communicated. And there's no easy science
about it. There's no way we can drag that
out over to the rational side ofthe brain and say, well, you
know, we found that if the shades of Gray are in black or
exactly this tone, it stimulatesthe nervous system of it's like,
oh, go screw yourself. It's just like the example we
(34:38):
were talking about of, you know,a book or ACD about how to go
have a successful ceremony is going to be useless.
Same same problem. Because we're we're trying to
cross that same border. And the interesting thing is
that human consciousness can't cross that border, though human
understanding will lag behind. And, you know, so there's a
(35:02):
fascinating thing. Rational understanding, Yeah.
What do you mean by understanding?
OK, yeah, I mean, and, and in a very practical way, I mean, I, I
think we've had situations and ceremonies where the the
understanding part came way later.
But the But it was just like a download of direct information
(35:24):
that, you know, the reason has to be strained out of it somehow
through the application of a certain effort, you know, but
that. But the reality of the thing
we're talking about was never inquestion at all in that respect,
you know, any more than the reality of the rough beasts
(35:46):
louching towards Bethlehem is inquestion.
He was pointing at something. And if they.
If there was no such thing, you know, there would be nothing to
point to. No pointing would be inspired
and. There probably wouldn't be
goosebumps. There probably wouldn't be
goosebumps. Exactly.
(36:06):
Exactly. And for folks who didn't catch
our last episode, our last episode was all about or no, I
guess it just dropped. So it's a few episodes back.
Episode 57, I think it's about that rough beast that we were
referring to here and relevant to that episode.
For those of you that did catch that the lion with the head of a
(36:27):
man was a reference to the Sphinx.
So anyway, just just a, a show note that got late in a few
episodes, but so, so, so yeah, there's something going on that
you know, the Sphinx represents also, is this like eternal
(36:49):
mystery of what is man? And in fact, wasn't that the
Riddle that was the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx?
For those of you that don't remember, the Riddle was what?
Walks on 4 legs in the morning, on 2 legs in the middle of the
day and on three legs in the evening.
And who wasn't that had to answer that.
(37:11):
I don't I, I don't know. It was one of the heroes with
1000 faces. We'll say that referring to
Joseph Campbell's Parsons of TheThing That Works.
And the answer was the worst man.
In the morning of his life he crawls on all fours.
In our adulthood we're on 2 legsand in our aged years golden
(37:34):
some. For some reason we use a cane
and there's our third leg. Yeah, or Shalali.
Or shalali when the times come. Yes, exactly.
And so, so yeah, there is that whole mystery.
What is man right, apart from the measure of all things?
(37:59):
So, so yeah, they're, they're, this is one of those great
questions. And that irrational aspect has
just so many ways to ask that question.
If everything was rational, or if everything was deterministic
in a big computer, even though we don't have one, could somehow
calculate it all and know from the previous state what the
(38:22):
future state of everything wouldbe by tracking the movements of
molecules was sort of the fantasy.
Life wouldn't be the same. It just wouldn't be the same if
everything added up, if there were no irrational numbers in
the number board. Right?
(38:44):
And this is the thing that even great minds like Albert Einstein
are humbled beholding. And it's also something that
great minds like Einstein and Gerta and all these ones, they
didn't miss this. They were not so they were not
(39:07):
so insensitive to the fundamental mystery of
everything. To forget that at the core of it
all, which is to say not just the core of all creation, but
the core of our own experiencingself, is fundamentally
mysterious. And and that's a good starting
(39:28):
place for our science. It might ultimately be the
ending place for our science, but we might run through most of
the world before we get back there.
Looks like the way we're going for it at this point.
Well, yeah, and and I guess in the in our understanding of
(39:50):
madness, not to kind of like lean too heavily on that as a
theme. But you know, when we talk about
running through this world in our attempt to understand
ourselves and understand the universe, you know that that
seems like a manifestation of madness.
(40:12):
Maybe not exclusively, but at least among other things.
Yeah, I mean, it shows us that there's places where our our
flashlight just won't go and that those play.
There are places inside as well as outside of us that to which
that applies. You know, there's places on the
bottom of the ocean we're never going to see.
There's places in the depths of the human soul that we're never
(40:35):
really going to see, at least not that directly.
Unless you're the shadow. You remember him who knows what
evil lurks in the hearts of men and the shadow knows early radio
show, right? Mild mannered Lamont Cramston,
something like that. I'll put the reference for
people who want to check it out in the I'm sure they've got them
(40:58):
on the YouTube as us old folks say.
Yeah. But yeah, there is that that
question. And you know, I mean, I think
that part of that this is connected to this idea about
Hitler and why? Because maybe that ability to to
(41:19):
for someone to manipulate us rhetorically is about that
opening of ourselves. And it's about that, the door of
madness as a potential threat. I think that's a good segue to
what you mentioned earlier aboutthe madness of crowds, which
(41:40):
which I, I typically think of aslike the, the massive IQ drop
that happens when people are in a big group together and how
weird collective behavior can be.
It's not always an IQ drop, but it's often an IQ drop.
But, but I think you meant something different by it.
(42:01):
And, and we've been talking about the collective unconscious
in a way that is a little expansive for me.
And so I'm curious about what you meant by the madness of
crowds relative to, I think it was my comment about kind of
political history being greatly influenced by madness over the
(42:24):
years. I'm thinking of like I assume
Genghis Khan had had a touch of it.
I'm assuming Napoleon had a touch of it.
I'm assuming the Romanoffs had atouch.
You know, I'm thinking when I'm thinking of the madness of
crowds. I'm not thinking about mobs and
riots as much as I'm thinking about this great German
(42:45):
philosophy word, the zeitgeist, which translates directly as
time ghost. But it also sort of gets
translated to this as the spiritof the times, which is, you
know, we never think of the eye again.
There's the word spirit shows up, but we never think about it
(43:09):
that way. But isn't it curious that
language chooses that right? And so, you know, when when
Yeats was talking about the the second coming, he wasn't really
talking about Jesus's second coming.
He was talking about that rough beasts second coming.
(43:32):
And the fact that it was slouching to Bethlehem is
because Bethlehem was the seat of Christianity, Judaism, Islam
in the in the in his days, the East was still more of a mystery
and still less, you know, open. But what he was seeing was
(43:53):
similar to Nietzsche's idea of the God is dead was not, you
know, Nietzsche wasn't wasn't all jazzed about that.
We should be clear. He was just stating what he was
observing. And so that's what he was
wondering was what is going to replace this If our moral
(44:17):
tenants have been have been cut loose.
If our which is a question we'veasked a number of our guests and
and will will undoubtedly do again on future dates.
Because this is one of the questions of the ground.
It's called the grounding problem of morality or ethics.
And that is, you know, upon whatdoes it sit is the grounding
(44:42):
problem. So, so, so yeah, this, this,
this idea of the spirit of the times.
If I'm a conventionalist, right,If I'm like heart in the in the
dialogue between Heart and Dworkin, and I say, well, good
and bad and all of our standardsare all just convention.
(45:03):
It's all just what everybody thinks and has worked out.
And those change over time. So there's nothing written in
stone, as it were, that is a lack.
Of focus, of attention that makes one open to pernicious
influence, by the way, thinking that.
It sure could contribute, you know, But if I'm one of those,
(45:25):
then it's like, well, I mean, myboat is kind of cut loose
because everything's just convention.
And maybe I just want to have a different convention, you know,
and, and I would attach, I wouldassociate that with a spirit of
the times. And so that can sort of become a
(45:48):
madness of crowds, but a, a morepernicious madness of crowds.
They're not all standing out there with burning torches.
They're just everybody going about their lives with that
model, that sharing that cognitive model and with with
and all of the implications thatit has in value systems and in
(46:08):
in how we balance our relationships and how we lead
our lives and all those practical things.
And that all comes in with the spirit of the times.
You know, that's why I thought it was interesting in The Hunger
Games where my buddy Stanley, when he was all the all the
people that were in the most elite classes, they all had the
(46:32):
same fashion. That was way overdone, right?
And that was clearly an example of the spirit of the times
within that class saying, OK, this is what's cool.
Sometimes I'll refer to that as an applause system.
The other part is it's also verymuch related to what you can get
away with, and that's directly related to which pernicious
(46:56):
influences might thrive in any particular epic based on the
zeitgeist that inhabits that epic.
And you know, this, this Hegelian idea was the
Phenomenology of spirit of Geistwith this idea that the, that
(47:16):
there is a transition through time, that the zeitgeist morphs
from one value system to anothervalue system over time.
And whether it does that randomly or whether it's it's,
it's, you know, slouching off toits own Bethlehem to be born
somehow. It's evolutionary and.
(47:39):
Finalism or something like that,Are we going somewhere or we
just riding the bus around town?Yeah, and but, but so
definitions of madness are probably, you know, connected
directly to that zeitgeist and and the way madness showed up
shows up seems to be like, for example, if this is just one of
(48:01):
the weird things of history, youknow, I will go Jamie, pull up
that video of. Jamie doesn't work for us yet.
Yeah, I know we really need a Jamie, but it's, you know, where
people used to have, what are they called the tarantella,
where people just used to go into fits of mad dancing.
Dancing, yeah. Till like they crashed and
(48:23):
burned right till they till theywere just like trouts flipping
on the floor or something. Yeah.
And then you got speaking in tongues.
That happens in certain circumstances.
And yeah. Yeah.
I mean, so there's these things that I'm thinking about this
also in terms of Freud and the types of patients that Freud
(48:44):
saw. And they're different than the
types of patients that psychoanalysts are seeing today.
And say, Chinese medicine will tell you the same thing.
The the kinds of problems that we see people with changes
through different times of history.
And it has to, it's tied with everything.
It's tied to fashion and it's tied to economics and it's tied
(49:08):
to politics and whether there's wars or, you know, uprising, you
know, so all this stuff is just a big plate of spaghetti tangled
together that we could call the zeitgeist, right?
Like kind of what's going on. And it's very hard from one
zeitgeist to peer into another and imagine what it's like
(49:31):
because you grew up when the pervasive madness of crowds was
following a different zeitgeist or, you know, or like that.
So so that is a bigger madness of crowds than I think we're
talking about when we're talkingabout a sub sect.
And oh, aren't they crazy? They think birds are are really
(49:52):
spy devices. And although now New Mexico is
using stuffed birds as drones. So if it flies, it spies folks.
And. But anyway, I digress.
Each time has its own crazy, it seems like, and each, each time
has its own habits that 'cause its own crazy.
(50:14):
For example, I missed this in our episode about hats because
it's a great reference to hats. And that is directly mad as a
Hatter, right? And then they weren't talking
about angry, right? They were talking about loopy
(50:35):
and it was associated I believe with Mercury, wasn't it?
They were using Mercury somehow in the process of you of
building making hats. And so they had exposure and
they became mad as Hatters. Right?
Oblique Alice in Wonderland reference.
They're talking about another, you know, another exploration
(50:58):
into a kind of madness through the looking glass, where things
make a different kind of crazy sense.
We haven't talked about him, I don't think at at all on the
podcast yet. We probably should.
Yeah, it's true. What a character.
Yeah, and. Remembering the screw tape
letters, that was him, right? That was CHCS.
(51:19):
Lewis was screwed. Oh, OK.
Yeah, yeah. No, this is the interesting
connection with with Alice in Wonderland is that homie who
wrote that, You know, Alice was the daughter of a professor at
the same university that Lewis Carroll was working at when he
(51:42):
wrote that. And Alice's last name was
Lydell. And those of us who are Greek
scholars, really a Greek scholar, those of us who
suffered through many classes ofGreek, will recognize the name
Lydell because he wrote the everpopular Greek lexicon.
(52:03):
Lexicon is just a dictionary, soit tells you in English what the
Greek words mean and might show you where they show up in the
classics. But.
But anyway, so, so yeah, that's where history kind of folds back
in on itself. And I and I believe it's Oxford
that we're talking about. I'll, I'll, I'll correct that in
the show notes if I'm wrong. Yeah, No, there is a whole
(52:29):
interesting thing. And again, these are all non
logical dimensions of mind, but that doesn't mean that they
don't carry meaning. It isn't that weird.
Yeah, so coming back to Brian Koeberger, it's funny the the
(52:50):
families want him to explain. And of all people, Donald Trump
wrote a post on Truth Social that I, I assume somebody
screenshot or he screenshot ontohis X account because I don't
think he posts on X himself a whole lot saying that the judge
should require an explanation aspart of the sentencing procedure
(53:16):
and, you know, as as a requirement of the, the plea
being accepted. And I would love to hear the
explanation. And I've watched a lot of
interrogations with people suffering from madness because
that that interests me and the explanation never satisfies.
(53:36):
Sure. Well, and often it's not a, it's
not a, a complete coincidence that often in situations of
violence, alcohol is involved. And you know, we've often had
the saying within the, within the shamanic community that
there are drugs that demand responsibility and drugs that
(53:57):
basically people go to, to be cut loose of responsibility
somehow. And, and I would put alcohol in
that category. And so, and I know because I, I
used to teach in the penitentiary and that, you know,
there are people there for murder who will literally tell
you, I have no idea what happened.
(54:20):
They had no reason to lie to me about it.
I woke up and this and there waswreckage all around me and so
somebody was driving and these you know, I'm not talking about
somebody who was saying I don't know what happened to the judge
to try to get a sentence. I'm talking about somebody
that's already 25 years in. He's got no reason in the world
(54:43):
to bullshit anybody or himself. But it alcohol was involved.
And when he said when he came tothings had happened that he
didn't want to have happened, but he didn't know what
happened, right? Well, sure.
Sounds to me like, I mean, we know somebody was driving
(55:04):
because a lot of wreckage was wrought, but it sounds like an
incidence of unconscious material breaking through in a
pretty dramatic and destructive way, which.
Can't really be explained. Yeah.
Can't really be explained rationally.
I think though, that, you know, this is where and I think
(55:27):
because of many, many years of ceremonies, when it almost comes
to a metaphysical understanding of these things, because it's
not like anyone incident is going to explain it.
It's like you see that these types of things happen on this
plane in this world, the way this game is going down.
(55:49):
And there is some, and we've spoken about this before in our
episode on suffering. There is some price that we are
paying to come to consciousness.And I and I mean that, you know,
consciousness in the fullest dimensions in that way of
understanding ourselves. And we're going, we're doing
(56:12):
that collectively as well as each person individually being
on their own project, whether they're undertaking it directly
or indirectly. So I I kind of have a feeling
that some of this is somehow written into the script.
(56:34):
Maybe in the Bhagavad Gita it explains it well.
Isn't that what the script is? Or what do you mean by the
script? Well, that I don't think that
this that there is a script thatis written per SE.
I do think that that I don't think that the universe is
determined. Now we're at the metaphysics of
it. Now we're at the metaphysics of
(56:54):
it, but I think that there are energies that have to be worked
out the the specifics of how those work out.
I think that's up for grabs. I think that's possibilistic
with probabilistic overtones. But the thing that's being
(57:16):
expressed or the process that has to be gone through, I think
just has certain chapters in theevolution of it.
And I think that's what they're getting at with the Yugas and
with these great epics of history, the Cot when the when
the Hopies talk about the different worlds, And they're
not unique in that, I might add.They're not just other Native
(57:42):
Americans, but there are other traditional world views that
have a very similar picture on it.
And it's not like typical first world Western knowledge where we
could say, Oh yeah, this guy came up with it.
And then and then we've thought about it.
We thought, yeah, he's right on.So that's the way we think about
it. It's more like we've we've
(58:03):
always known this. These are things that that also
emerge from the collective unconscious.
Literally, yeah, Yeah. And have overtime.
And that's why we don't want to lose them because they're all
pieces in the puzzle. And, you know, like I was
thinking. We can't lose them, but.
Well, but I like his languages disappear as the last language
(58:26):
speakers and as their traditionsdisappear, we may lose part of
the payload to that, you know, and.
And so now we should be smart enough to be supporting that
process to, you know, get get reinforced that rather than let
it pass away. That's just my vision to the.
Race that might be worth an episode at some point because I
(58:49):
think I agree with you and I think that's also not how the
script is written, as evidenced by the many languages that have
already died off. So, So what about that I think
is kind of interesting, but but not for today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's a whole thing there
(59:11):
with that mystery of language and, and the mystery of humans
in reality and, and the, the linguisticality of, of reality
itself. Yeah, yeah.
I can't remember who I ripped that off from Gotham or maybe
one of those phenomenologist, I think one of those
phenomenologists. Yeah, yeah.
(59:33):
And but so, so which is an interesting thing because that's
tied up with this idea of mind and matter.
And I did finish Bergson's Creative Evolution.
Wow. I think I want to do a reading
of it. But that idea of we've talked
about is something moving up theladder or is it coming down the
(59:53):
ladder? And he explains how the going
down and the coming up are mutually interdependent, in a
similar way that Boehm later wasto say that the explicate order
and the implicate order are folded into each other.
And the way we've talked about evolution and devolution being
(01:00:14):
the yin and Yang of how how we move forward through time.
Balancing spirals, Yeah. If you get to the into the
really into the Kabbalist theory, you should.
They'll show you the the tree, the Kabbalah.
Well, there's actually a tree that's the mirror image that
goes underneath that goes and itmaps all the other directional
(01:00:37):
stuff. So you've got, again, we've got
these two spirals idea, you know, so, so yeah, no, there's a
lot going on there. And again, it is the fundamental
mystery. And that's why Ramana Maharishi,
who I mentioned before, said youcan become enlightened by asking
yourself the question, who am I?Because when you come down to I
(01:00:58):
am the fundamental mystery and everything else is also the
fundamental mystery. And then you have the Hindu
saying, Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahma, I am God.
Or as I've referred before, wakeup to find out that you are the
eyes of the world, right? So then something different
(01:01:22):
happens there and there's, there's the world is different
from that seat. And that's all about, about all
you can say about it. But or as, as Hanshan said, try
to make it to cold Mountain, right, which is his seat where
he would attain a different typeof consciousness.
(01:01:43):
Try, try to get there, you know,but it's tricky.
It's rough terrain, you know should do one on cold Mountain
too at some point yeah we could read some of his poems yeah cuz
he's another one that's. I'll put him in the show notes,
folks. Yeah, yeah.
Those are like a bag of goodies,I tell you.
(01:02:04):
We'll. Put it in the backlog too.
Good. Well, thank you, Brian.
Sounds good. Be well we'll.
See everybody later. Bye bye.
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