Grace Watcher Report - This is the most Important Truth that You Will Ever Need to Know

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
I watched all of these movies before the human race
existed to try to figure out the answer to something
that most of us can feel intuitively, even if we
can't explain exactly why it is that there seems to
be a pattern that keeps showing up again and again

(00:24):
in some of the most popular films. Maybe you've noticed
it too, In movies like The Matrix, Wall E, The
Shawshank Redemption, and even in shows like Severance in Black Mirror.
They seem very different on the surface, and yet if
you look a little deeper, they share almost exactly the
same meaning, a symbolic message that's hiding in plain sight.

(00:46):
Here's what we find. First, we're shown a world that
turns out to be deeply flawed. In many cases, it's
revealed to be a kind of prison. Then we see
the creator of that world who's trying to control and
manipulate everyone inside of it. And then we find a

(01:07):
redeemer figure who shows everyone had a break free. This
is the basic story arc in all these films. Now
you might look at this and say, isn't that just
the hero's journey. Well, there are some elements of that,
for sure, but it's actually a lot deeper than that,
because there's a very specific symbolism going on, and what

(01:27):
it's hinting at is the idea that there are dark
forces in this world that are trying to keep us
distracted and confused. They're leading us onto paths that are
harmful not just to the mind, but to the soul,
and whether we know it or not, they're trying to
get us to give up the very things that make
us who we are, our freedom, autonomy, consciousness. It goes

(01:51):
back to a philosophy known as gnosticism, a very old
set of ideas that's often misunderstood, and it's been maligned history,
and even today there's no shortage of people attacking it
without really understanding what it is. But I think one
of the reasons narcissism has endured for so long and
why it continues to be the subject of so much

(02:12):
discussion and debate, is that at its core, it's really
a story. It's a myth that mirrors a lot of
the things we still deal with today, and like any story,
it answers three basic questions, where did we come from?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
What are we doing here? And where are we going?

Speaker 1 (02:30):
The psychologist Carl Jung saw within these ideas a hidden
process for psychological change that any of us can use
to break free from our conditioning, and it's how we
grow into who we were really meant to become. So
today we're going to look at what these teachings are.
We'll look at why these ideas have found their way
into so many films and TV shows, and we'll look

(02:51):
at what it all means for you, because once you
understand these symbols, and once you see these patterns, you'll
never unsee them again.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Let me show you what I mean.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
The first pattern we find in these films is the
idea of a paradise, a world that was once perfect
in every way, but the closer we look, the more
we find that things aren't really what they seem. In
Free Guy, the hero lives in an impossibly bright and
colorful place filled with excitement and stimulation. My name is Guy,

(03:27):
and I live in paradise, he says. But the world
he's living in is completely fake. It's a computer game,
a digital illusion that's been programmed by a powerful corporation
to make huge amounts of money. In The Truman Show,
the hero lives in a beautiful suburb of a place
called Sea Haven, where everyone is wholesome and pleasant. There's

(03:48):
no crime, no conflict, and nothing ever changes. But it's
a false paradise because the town of Sea Haven is
actually a gigantic TV studio. He has no idea that
his whole life is being filmed and broadcast to the
world as a television show. Everybody in town is an
actor except him. Even his wife, his mother, and his

(04:10):
best friend are all actors. His whole life is a lie.
And of course the Matrix is probably the clearest example
of the fallen paradise. Agent Smith sums it up when
he says.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Just look at it.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Billions of people living out their lives oblivious. The first
Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where
none suffered, everyone was happy, But it was a disaster.
No one would accept the program.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
So what does it mean.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
That so many of these movies tell the same story
of a seemingly perfect world that is revealed to be
broken and corrupt. Well, they're all different versions of the
same story. The original paradise in the Garden of Eden.
It's here that God tells Adam and Eve that they
can eat anything they want, except the forbidden fruit of

(04:58):
the Tree of Knowledge. Warning them that if they do
eat it, then on that day they will surely die.
But one day, an evil serpent tricks Eve into eating it.
She shares some of the fruit with Adam, and for
this God makes them leave the garden forever. They can
never come back, and the rest of their lives are
painful and hard. Traditionally, the lesson of the story is

(05:21):
that disobeying God is what led to the fall of humanity.
It's what introduced sin into the world, and it ruined
what should have been a perfect paradise. But a lot
of people have raised questions about this interpretation of the story,
because why is there an evil serpent in the garden?
Why doesn't God want us to have knowledge of good
and evil? And why does he punish Adam and Eve

(05:42):
for being tricked? After all, how could they have known
that what they were doing was wrong because they didn't
have knowledge of good and evil until after they ate it. Well,
it turns out there's another version of this story that
answers these questions in a completely different way. We find
it in an archaeological discovery that happened in December of
nineteen forty five in an Upper Egyptian town called Nakamati.

(06:05):
It was here that a farmer was digging in the
desert when he hit a very old jar almost a
meter high. He broke it open, and inside the jar
he found thirteen very old books bound in leather. Together
they came to be known as the Nagamadi Library. And
inside one of these books there was a text called

(06:25):
the Testimony of Truth. And this text gives us a
version of the Adam and Eve's story where the serpent
isn't evil at all. Why because the serpent tells Eve
that it's not true that you'll die on the day
you eat the fruit.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
What will happen is.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
That your eyes will be opened and you'll understand the
difference between good and evil. And that's exactly what happens.
They don't die, they gain moral understanding, and so in
this version of the story, the serpent is actually the
revealer of truth. Of course, this is a controversial idea
for a lot of people, because well, isn't the serpent

(07:02):
evil and isn't the garden of Eden a good place?
The author Graham Hancock makes the point that there's a
fundamental problem with any paradise. If you live in a
place where you have everything you could ever want, and
you never have to struggle or make any moral choices.
Then there's nothing to learn and nowhere to grow. There's
just endless self indulgence, and if you stay there, you'll

(07:25):
stagnate as a person. The movie Wall E shows us
exactly this kind of world, where in the twenty ninth century,
humanity now lives on a giant spaceship called the Axiom.
It's built like a high tech vacation resort, where we're
told that everyone has everything they need to be happy.
It's an artificial paradise where the robots do all the

(07:46):
work and life is one long, never ending holiday. And
yet because they have nothing to work towards and no
reason to push themselves, they've all become weak and helpless.
Like babies, they just jump from one distraction to another,
until finally the captain of the ship realizes that humanity
has lost its way and it's time to go home.

(08:10):
What this means is that symbolically, we have to eat
from the fruit, because how else do you grow if
you don't learn to make choices between good and evil.
Our lives are defined by the choices we make, and
it's through those choices that we grow, which means that
understanding good and evil is a central part of what
it means to be human. We see the same choice

(08:30):
in the Matrix, where Morpheus plays the role of the
serpent and he offers Neo a choice. This is your
last chance after this, there's no turning back.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
You take the blue pill.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
The story ends, You wake up in your bed and
believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill.
You stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep
the rabbit hole goes. The red pill is the forbidden fruit.
It's a metaphor for illumination. It represents the first step
in humanity's awakening, and it's the initiation to which every

(09:02):
secret of truth has to take. This forms a core
idea in what would come to be known as gnosticism,
a collection of teachings that emerged in the late first
century among early Christians. They were looking for something called gnosis,
which is Greek for knowledge. But it's more than just
intellectual knowledge. It's experiential knowledge, the kind of spiritual insight

(09:24):
that can only come from direct experience with a divine
and they saw nosis as the true secret.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Teaching of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
And they believe that he came into the world to
awaken humanity by sharing a set of instructions that were
meant to show us how to free ourselves from our
ignorant condition. As you can imagine, this was a very
controversial idea, and even today, gnosticism is a very debated
area among scholars because it paints a very different picture

(09:52):
of Jesus than the one we're used to. But you
might wonder, how do we know that any of this
is true? What reason is there to think that Jesus
even had a secret teaching. Most people agree that the
gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all form the
New Testament canon, and together they describe the life of

(10:14):
Jesus and the things he taught. But let's look at
the Gospel of Mark, chapter four, verses eleven and twelve.
Here Jesus says to his disciples, the secret Kingdom of
God has been given to you. But to those on
the outside, everything is said in parables, so that they
may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and never hearing
but never understanding, lest they should turn again and be forgiven.

(10:37):
This is a really strange passage because it implies that
Jesus had a deeper teaching that he purposely held back.
But why what is the secret Kingdom of God? And
why doesn't he want people on the outside to know
what it is? We see it again in the Gospel
of Matthew in chapter thirteen, verse eleven, where Jesus says
to his disciples, to you has been given to know

(10:58):
the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them
it has not been given.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
So how do we explain this?

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Elaine Pageles is a professor and historian of early Christianity.
In her book The Gnostic Gospels, she explains that Jesus
would have taught in much the same way that other
Jewish rabbis did in the first century, which means he
had one set of teachings that he used when speaking
to crowds of people in public, but he also had
another set of teachings that he kept secret. These would

(11:25):
have been advanced lessons that he shared only with his
personal disciples, and they weren't written down. They were passed
orally from teacher to student, because that was the only
way you could judge the maturity of the seeker and
see if they were really ready to be initiated into
nosis the secret knowledge. Pegel's points to First Corinthians, Chapter two,
verses six and seven. We speak a message of wisdom

(11:49):
among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age
or the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No,
we declare God's wisdom a mystery that has been hidden.
So Pegels said that Jesus would have taught in both
of these ways, a public teaching that was written down
in what became the New Testament of the Bible, into
secret esoteric teaching. They contained hidden mysteries that he revealed

(12:11):
only to the mature. Both of these teachings were meant
to compliment each other, and many rabbis today still teach
this way. We see the same theme of secret teaching
in the Matrix where Morpheus takes Neo into the construct.
It's a private simulation room where he gives him one
on one training. But why does he keep them secret?
Why not share them with everyone? Because most people are

(12:34):
not ready to be unplugged. Look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers,
the very minds of the people were trying to save,
but many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent
on the system that they will fight to protect it.
So if we suppose that Jesus had a secret teaching,
what were they What did they say?

Speaker 2 (12:55):
The New Testament.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Gospels don't tell us what they are, but Pegel suggests
that some of the books found at Nagamati may hold
the key to some of these secret teachings. One of
these texts, the Gospel of Thomas, identifies itself as a
secret gospel. What's interesting about it is that Professor Helmet
Kester of Harvard University has said that although the Gospel
of Thomas was most likely compiled around one hundred and

(13:18):
forty CE, it may include some traditions that are even
older than the Gospels of the New Testament, possibly as
early as the second half of the first century, which
would make it as early or possibly even earlier than
the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But unlike
the other Gospels, Thomas doesn't tell the story of Jesus's life. Instead,

(13:40):
it's a collection of one hundred and fourteen lessons that
purport to be the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke.
In one of his most important sayings, number seventy, Jesus
says that if you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you. If you do
not bring forth what is within you, what you do
not bring forth will destroy you. In other words, salvation

(14:03):
lies within. It's a powerful idea that we see in
a lot of Gnostic films, and it's a major theme
in the Shawshank Redemption. In the scene where the warden
meets with Andy Dufrain for the first time in his
jail cell, we learn that the warden is a Christian
who likes to quote from the Bible.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
I am the light of the world, he says.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
For almost the whole scene, he's holding Andy's Bible in
his hands, and yet he totally misses the fact that
there's something hidden inside a raw hammer that Andy will
later use to dig his way through the wall and
escape the prison. But what's the deeper meaning of this scene. Well,
the warden represents the kind of person who studies and
memorizes the words of the Bible but doesn't understand its

(14:45):
true meaning. He doesn't see the hidden mysteries. He's ever
seeing but never perceiving. He's ever hearing but never understanding.
He thinks that salvation comes from the literal words of
the text, and so he misses the secret teaching that's
hidden in play in view, and that's what the hammer represents.
It symbolizes the secret that will set you free. And

(15:06):
there's a lot of biblical symbolism in the film. Andy
represents the gnostic Christ from the beginning. He's an innocent
man who comes into the fallen world of the prison,
much like Jesus does, and his first miracle is making
a deal with the guards so they can all enjoy
a beer on the rooftop. It's a scene that mirrors
Christ's miracle of turning water into wine. Andy's escape from

(15:30):
his jail cell also mirrors the empty tomb of Christ
after his resurrection. But more importantly, Andy reveals the gnostic secret.
He teaches the other prisoners that the way to become
free is by bringing forth what's inside them. It's why
he helps them build and expand the prison library.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
That's why he teaches people.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
How to read, and why he helps them to develop
their inner world. Gnosis is doing the things that cultivate
the soul, the part inside all of us that no
one can touch or take away. When we experience through beauty,
art or music, it gives us a glimpse of the divine.
This is how we transcend the pain and suffering of
this world. That's how we hang on to hope, and

(16:10):
it's really what keeps him going after nineteen years of
wrongful imprisonment to finally escape. So you might ask at
this point, why don't Christian churches teach any of these
Gnostic ideas today? Why is there portrayal of Jesus so
different from the Gnostic one. Well, if we go back
to the time of early Christianity, after Jesus died in

(16:31):
the first century, we find that there was no single
organized church authority. Early Christians had many and radically differing
religious beliefs and practices. Each group practiced Christianity in their
own way, and each followed their own interpretation of jesus teachings.
But this began to change with figures like Erineus. In

(16:51):
his massive work against Heresies, he tried to argue for
a single universal church that followed one set of doctrines
and rules. He claimed that this church alone was the
true Orthodox Church and that any other kind of teaching
was heresy. And yet gnostic theologians didn't see themselves as heretics,
they saw themselves as Christians. But in the fourth century,

(17:15):
after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire
and the Orthodox gained military support, the penalty for heresy
was severe. Just having a book that was denounced as
heresy became a crime. These books were confiscated and burned,
which is why hundreds of years ago, someone living in
Upper Egypt took their books and hid them in a

(17:36):
jar to save them from being destroyed. They buried that
jar in the desert at Nagamati, where it stayed hidden
for almost one thy six hundred years. But why were
the authorities so threatened by these Gnostic ideas? What made
them so dangerous? Well, some of the texts found at
Nagamati show us that the Gnostics had a radically different

(17:56):
story for why the world is the way it is.
We offer very different answers to a lot of the
questions that are often asked in Christianity. For example, if
God is a good and all powerful being, why do
we live in a world with so much suffering and
tragedy in it? So let's look at the traditional explanation

(18:18):
for human suffering. According to the Orthodox view, suffering was
introduced into the world because of Adam and Eve's disobedience
in the Garden of Eden. This was the original sin.
Before that, the world was a perfect paradise. After they
eat the forbidden fruit, God says to Eve, I will
make your pains and child bearing very severe, with painful labor.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
You will give birth to children.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
And then God says to Adam, cursed is the ground
for your sake, and toil you shall eat of it
all the days of your life. And so, according to
this view, disobeying God is what led to the fallen
condition of our world, and this is really the root
of all our pain and suffering. Just as sin entered
the world through one man and death through sin. In

(19:00):
this way, death came to all people because all sin.
But the Gnostics give a very different reason for human suffering.
They say it's not because of any act of disobedience.
We suffer because of what our bodies are made of.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Matter. If you think about why we feel pain, or.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
Why we get sick or grow old, it's because our
bodies are made of flesh and bone, cells in tissue.
By nature, these things don't last forever, and so we die.
It's why our lives are temporary, and it's why we
experience tragedy and laws. But if that's the case, why
did God make the world out of such an imperfect material?

(19:37):
Why did he use matter to create the world. Well,
according to the Gnostic myth, he didn't. They imagine the
creation of the world in a very different way.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Here's how they saw it.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
In the beginning, there was a perfect divinity called the Monad.
This is the one god of the universe and the
source of everything. The Monad then starts emanating other divine
beings in pairs called diads, and with permission from the Monad,
each of these pairs then creates more divine beings, and
soon there's a whole spiritual realm called the Ploroma, which

(20:11):
literally means fullness. One of these beings is Sophia, and
she decides to create a being on her own, but
she doesn't get permission from the Monad. But in doing
this she makes a terrible mistake. She creates an ignorant
and malformed creature known as the Demurge. She's ashamed of
what she's done, and so she falls out of the ploroma,

(20:32):
taking the Demiurge with her and hides him in a
separate reality. The Demiurge has no idea that there's another
divine world. He looks around and sees that there's no
other gods, and so he assumes that he must be
the only god in the universe. Demiurge means craftsman or artisan,
and so he starts building the material world as we
know it. And then he takes Sophia and splits her

(20:55):
into billions of tiny pieces, and puts each of these
fragments of the divine into human beings, and so each
of us is really a divine spark that's been sealed
inside a material body. But the Demiurge doesn't do this alone.
He creates lower beings to help him, the Arkans. These
are his agents, and they become the rulers of the

(21:16):
material world, and because they have no divinity of their own,
they feed off the divine sparks of humanity, creating a
system of control sealed inside this world. Our sparks have
fallen asleep. We've forgotten our divine origin, and most of
us don't realize that the soul is the only thing
that's real and enduring, that our bodies are temporary, and

(21:39):
as long as we can't remember who we are we
stay in the material world, which means that for the Gnostics,
it wasn't God who made the world out of matter,
it was the Demiurge. And it's the Demiurge who put
Adam in even the garden. And the reason he doesn't
want them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge is
to keep them ignorant of the truth. But there is
a way out. Ed sends a divine being into the

(22:01):
material world to help set us free. This being is Christ,
and his true teaching is to show us how to
free ourselves, to transcend the physical suffering of this world,
and to awaken the spark within. This is no Sus
and so according to the Gnostic point of view, salvation
isn't found by believing in a set of doctrines or

(22:21):
following a church authority. It's found through no sas the
direct revelation of divine experience, which means that anyone at
any time can access it, and you do it by
bringing forth what is within you. That's the source of
your real power, because the Kingdom of God is within you.
Now these are very controversial ideas, I know, but this

(22:43):
is what the Gnostics believed it's the Gnostic story, and
it's the symbolic myth we find in so many films today.
We see all the same elements, the demiurge, the powerful figure.
He's trying to control humanity and keep us ignorant of
the truth. We see the false world he's built that
turns out to be an illusion designed to keep us
trapped here. And we see a gnostic Christ figure who

(23:06):
comes into the world to set us free and to
help restore our connection to the divine. So why is
this same myth being told over and over again in
so many different movies, and why does it seem to
resonate so much with people. Psychologists tell us that we
all have a storytelling mind. We naturally tell stories about

(23:28):
ourselves to explain who we are, why we do the
things we do, and where we're going in the future.
Dan McAdams calls it narrative identity. And whether you know
it or not, you're living out some form of story.
Some people are living out the story of the tragic hero,
or the misunderstood rebel, or the wounded healer.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
But let me ask you a question.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
If we imagine that our society itself is living out
a kind of story. What would it be. Well, let's
look at the architects of our world. Oligarchs, corporations, big tech,
and government. They're all trying to shape the world in
their image. And whether it's through the media, technology, the
monetary system, or military conflict, they see themselves as the

(24:12):
gods of the modern world. And so whether they know
it or not, they're acting out the story of the demiurge.
Because symbolically, the demiurge is really a way of looking
at the world. It's a mechanistic world view that sees
people not as free, autonomous beings with their own value
and dignity, but as cogs in a machine, as resources

(24:33):
to be extracted, replaceable parts in a much larger system
of control. These forces have never been more powerful than
they are today, and yet no amount of power ever
seems to be enough. Graham Hancock says that the gnostic
myth is really a metaphor for our time. It's an
allegory for the idea that there are forces in this

(24:54):
world that are trying to keep us ignorant and docile.
It's trying to snuff out our divine spark and stop
us from figuring out the real source of our power.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
How do we know this is happening? Well, what would
you say?

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is the philosophy that pretty much every student is taught
to believe in almost every school and every university. It's materialism,
not just in the consumer sense, but philosophical materialism is
the idea that the primary thing in the universe is matter,
and it's made up of four main beliefs. One, all

(25:27):
of life came into being by accident. Every living thing
we see in the world today can be traced back
to a random interplay of chemicals and molecules, and through
millions of years of evolution, we came into the world. Two,
as human beings, we are nothing more than the physical
parts of our brain and our body. We're a collection
of selfish genes, and we have no purpose other than

(25:49):
to reproduce, survive, and then replicate those genes. Three. Matter
is the only thing that's real. Some even argue that
consciousness is an illusion, which reverses the order of what
Almost every spiritual tradition tells us that the soul is
the only thing that's real, and the material world is
the illusion, for there's no such thing as the divine,

(26:11):
and so after we die, the brain stops working, and
everything about who we are disappears along with it. I've
argued against these points and other videos, so I won't
do it again here. But the point is that when
the modern world tries to convince us that we're nothing
more than our material bodies, it's doing exactly what the
demiurge does. He makes their sparks fall asleep, and so

(26:31):
they actually forget that their divine beings. And this materialist
view is now so widespread that most people don't even
recognize it for what it is, a story, because it's
not a fact. It's an ideology. It's just one possible
explanation for the world and how we came to be
in it, and it happens to be a very disempowering one.

(26:52):
The psychologist Victor Frankel said that the legacy of philosophical
materialism is that many people today experience what he calls
and exit essential vacuum, where the average person struggles with
a feeling of alienation, meaninglessness, and disconnection from the world.
I think that's why movies like The Matrix feel so
relevant even today, more than twenty five years after it

(27:14):
was made, because the architect of the Matrix is such
a clear example of the demiurge and the materialist worldview.
He's the godlike figure who tries to reduce all human
experience to a mathematical equation. He's trying to build an
algorithm that predicts everything we do so he can control
and the choices we make.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
But he's not God.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
As intelligent as he is, all of his power is
derived from a system that's built on rules. He's a machine,
and so he has no choice but to obey those rules.
It's a lot like the AI and the large language
models we use today. They're fast and impressive in what
they can do, but they aren't thinking when you ask
it a question. What it's doing is taking huge amounts

(27:56):
of information from the Internet, and then it uses statistical
rules to try to predict what the next word in
the sentence wibey. And it's all based on the words
that came before it, which means that they aren't reflecting
or discovering meaning in any way close to what a
person would do. They're using algorithms and rules to rearrange
information that people have already made. And this is why

(28:17):
the architect is doomed to fail, because he's ignorant of
one very important fact. His formulas will never capture what
it really means to be human, our consciousness. This is
the spark of the divind that gives us the power
of choice. We can choose what rules to follow and
which ones to break. We can make up our own rules.
In the history of humanity is filled with stories of

(28:40):
people who fought and died for what they believed in.
And this is what's so threatening to the Demiurge, because
as he tries to control and suppress humanity, he's also
bringing about its opposite. The Gnostic Christ Jesus represents the
awakening of a higher consciousness. And so just as there
are forces outside of us that are trying to snuff
out the spark, there's a force inside of you that's

(29:03):
working towards your own reawakening, and it points to the
single most important thing you can do in this lifetime.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
So what is that.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
The psychologist Carl Yung was really interested in gnosticism, and
it was the Yung Institute that acquired one of the
first books at Nagamane, which came to be called the
Yun Codex. He saw within the Gnostic story a metaphor
for the different parts of the mind, a kind of
symbolic map that shows us how to awaken our higher consciousness.
In his book, Ion Eung says that the myth of

(29:36):
the ignorant demiurge who imagined he was the highest divinity,
illustrates the perplexity of the ego when it can no
longer hide from itself the knowledge that it has been
dethroned by a superordinate authority.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
What does that mean?

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Well, in Yung's model, if we imagine the ego is
a circle, then it would be one small part inside
a much bigger circle that represents the.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
Self as a whole.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
The ego is the conscious part of who you are,
the part that's aware of what you're thinking and feeling
right now. But there's this whole area outside of it
that's unconscious. These are the parts of yourself that you
don't yet know about. The problem arises when the ego
makes the mistake of thinking that it is you, that
it's the entirety of who you are. When it does this,

(30:20):
the ego is acting in a similar way that the
demiurge does when he makes the mistake of believing that
he's the supreme authority. This creates an imbalance in the
mind because as long as the ego believes that it's
the whole of who you are, it sees any challenge
to itself as a threat. And if that's where you are,
then there's nowhere for you to grow or develop as

(30:40):
a person. So what can you do about that? Here's
how Young explains it. Let's say you have a hidden
artistic talent, but your ego doesn't know about it. As
long as this talent is unconscious, nothing will happen to it.
It might as well not even exist. It's only when
your ego notices it that you can then bring it
into reality. This is true of every part of the

(31:02):
self that's unconscious, and so this is how we grow.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Little by little.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
As the ego notices more and more of the unconscious
parts of the psyche, it expands and so Yung says
that the proper role of the ego is to hack
like a light that illuminates the whole mind, which allows
it to become conscious and thus to be.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Realized and fully lived.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
The thing is, most people don't do the self reflection
that's needed to bring these unconscious parts of themselves to
the surface. Most of the time we go through life
on a kind of autopilot, just chugging along. But then
one day we're hit with something unexpected, a crisis that
derails us from the path we're on. Maybe your health
takes ahead, or you lose a loved one, or you

(31:46):
lose your job. Symbolically, these events are a lot like
the gnostic serpent and the Garden of Eden. They're the
unforeseen elements that come into your life and disrupt everything
that's happening. They're painful, but they also bring in the
possibility of awakening, because like the serpent, every crisis is
also offering you a choice. You either stay where you are,

(32:08):
protecting your ego, falling into the same patterns and doing
the same thing you've always done, or you try something new.
You explore the undiscovered parts of yourself. You find all
kinds of undeveloped talents that can help you expand beyond
the old ideas of what you thought you were supposed
to be. In other words, if you bring forth what's

(32:28):
inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If
you don't bring forth with inside you, what you don't
bring forth will destroy you. And this is why you
considered Christ to be the ultimate symbol of the self.
Christ came into the world to heal the divide between
heaven and earth, to bring unity to the divine and
the material, and so he's the total timeless person who

(32:50):
stands for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious. Young
saw within the gnostic myth a metaphor for the ego's
psychological journey toward wholeness, a way of integrating all the
different parts of who we are. It's a lifelong process
he called individuation. The gnostic awakening that frees humanity from
the ignorance of the Garden of Eden is really a

(33:12):
metaphor for the individuation process that lifts us out of
unconsciousness and sets us free from our social conditioning. These
ideas feel especially relevant today, a time when we're facing
all kinds of threats and challenges we've never seen before.
What can we do about a world that seems to
be falling further and further into chaos every day. Jung

(33:35):
dealt with these same questions. He lived through two World
Wars and witnessed the rise of the Cold War, which
brought the West and the Soviet Union dangerously close to
nuclear conflict. For the people who lived in these times,
it felt like the world could end at any moment.
These were problems that seemed impossible to solve, But Yung

(33:56):
saw that the greatest and most important problems of life
are all, in a certain sense insoluble. They can never
be solved, but only outgrown. This consists in a new
level of consciousness. It's not solved logically in its own terms,
but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger
life tendency. This is why he saw the work of

(34:17):
raising human consciousness as the most important thing you can do,
and as overwhelming as it seems, this is where it starts.
As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single
individual who will experience it and carry it through. The
change must indeed begin with the individual. It might be
any one of us, which means that when you do

(34:38):
the work of finding your talents and cultivating your soul,
it's not a selfish act, because as you raise your
own consciousness, you also raise the collective consciousness as a whole.
And as you do this work, you're not alone. You
become a powerful strand in a vast tapestry of souls,
a legacy of generations of people, who brought insight illumination,

(35:01):
each in their own way. Humanity is both darkness and light,
but history is shaped by those who bring the light
forward and somehow find a way to hold on to
hope and optimism even when going into the darkest places.
And that brings us to the second way of becoming
more conscious. You do it by confronting the darkest parts
of who you are, the things in yourself that you're

(35:24):
most afraid to look at. It's one of the most
crucial things you can do, because knowing your own darkness
is the best method for dealing with the darkness of
other people.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
It's called shadow.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Work, and if you haven't seen it yet, you can
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