enchantment in the age of disenchantment w/ dr. teddy hamstra

Long-term listeners of this podcast know that I've spent the last five years talking about the dark. Now I've built a flashlight, and it's called Moots. It's an instrument for serious private inner work designed to dismantle your excuses and never inflate your ego or assume the role of a sick-afantic companion. And the wait list is finally live. Access is granted in the exact order you sign up. Lock in your spot now at Moots.World. Welcome to the new era of inner work. Welcome to Back from the Borderline. I'm your host Molly, and I don't want to talk to your personality. I want to talk to your soul. This podcast is where we unravel toxic programming from dysfunctional family systems, societal scripts, and the mental health labels that have kept you small. We talk about sovereignty, shadow work, emotional alchemy, culture, AI, and everything that lives at the intersection of the soul and the system. Back from the borderline, it means back from the edge, from the abyss, from the illusion that you're too broken to heal. If that sounds like the kind of journey you're ready to take, follow the podcast on the player you're listening to right now. I drop new episodes every Tuesday. All right? Let's get into it. Hello, everyone. Today's episode is something very exciting. It is a long winding conversation with my good friend Teddy, or, as he is now known, Dr. Teddy Hamstrah. This is not a formal interview, okay? So it is more like a living seminar between two good friends. He comes in with a structure. He is a scholar of mythology and mysticism, and I meet him through lived experience, intuition, and emotion. So what you'll be hearing is us just thinking out loud together. Sometimes we overlap, sometimes we interrupt each other, and sometimes we just follow the thread wherever it leads. That is the whole point. I approached Teddy with this idea. I wanted him to bring the scaffolding of the conversation, do some research, and then I chime in like a curious student. So the rhythm feels a bit like a socratic dialogue, intellect, meeting soul. And throughout this conversation, we move through really big terrain, the history of enchantment, the 1561 Nuremberg Skybattle, the Gospel of Thomas, language, as spiritual technology, and how the modern world tries to explain a way of mystery. It's really a discussion about what happens when wonder itself is pushed out of culture and what it means and what it takes to bring it back. One of my favorite things about this format is this balance of head and heart that emerges. A friend once told me that that's what makes my work different, and I think that's what this exchange really shows. And I also think Teddy really embodies that. He thinks like a philosopher, but he also responds and embodies someone translating those ideas through the body and through life. And somewhere between those two approaches, meaning starts to appear. So grab a drink, tea, coffee, settle in, and let this conversation unfold at its own pace. If you end up loving this and want to hear more, Teddy and I did a separate long form conversation on Patreon where he shares more of his personal story, and that is linked in the episode description along with his brand new sub-stack. All right, so with that, let's get into it. I bring you my conversation with the fabulous, amazing, and my dear, dear friend, Dr. Teddy Hamstrah. So, Teddy, do you want to take a quick second and just introduce yourself to the listeners? What are your interests here? Place them in the Teddy lore. I feel like it's nice to be back here, Molly. We've become voice note queens over this summer, since doing our episode. And I'm officially a doctor as of this August. I have a hard copy of my diploma, which is a surreal feeling. That must be very interesting. Yes. It's got right. Six very long years of academia. The funny thing is that it was in an English literature program at USC here in Los Angeles, but that's not really what I do anymore. I have a love for story, and I think part of my degree, honestly, was just like recovering what that is. And the mythology, I think, is this overarching, organizing look at the universe that I have always been tooted and felt drawn to, and I think literature needs more story these days. I was doing a dissertation that became a kind of like biographical project about Joseph Campbell. I called it enchantment as a form of care, Joseph Campbell in the power of mysticism. And some of these questions are going to come up today about enchantment. That's going to be a driving word, I would say, and the mystic path. Buckle in, Liz Harris. All right. So where are we starting, Teddy? We're starting in a funny place because I was thinking about these orbs late last week. And then you fucking posted it on your story. And I thought, oh my god, Molly is stealing my thunder and she's probably going to drop another like two hour episode about these orbs of a Germany that I was just thinking about including in our episode. Amazing. That isn't what happened. Exactly. How weirdly synched our niche interests are listeners. Can you, before we even go into orbs, can you define what you mean by orbs for listeners who maybe haven't been familiar with my lore in terms of my orblore? Well, I don't want to speak for yours. What do you, what do you interpret them as? Just to place them in the context of why we're we texting each other about orbs? I think of them as interruptions into our plane of existence of the holy, there's these two phrases. One is the holy other and it's spelled differently. Sometimes wh, oh, L, L, Y. And then there's a slightly different tinged one which is holy H, O, L, Y, other. And that kind of gets us to a place of sacred strangeness that I am drawn to. To give you a very brief summary a year and a half, two years ago now, myself and my husband had an incredibly profound anomalous experience with Chris Bledso and his son Ryan Bledso where I saw a glowing, flaming, unjelating, plasma orb about two or three yardsticks length away from us above us underneath some trees and it was unmistakable, literal, we saw it. And my husband, Chris, Ryan and I all saw it together. So this was an ontologically shocking experience to me to such an extreme degree because I was a mystic at heart before all of this and I've had synchronicities witnessed by my husband even a couple of them were. But the moment you turn on the mystic mentality, I feel like you start noticing these synchronicities, but this was different. It was a physical or that we saw, Ryan Bledso was the one who showed me, look at some of these medieval paintings. There are depiction of orbs in a lot of ancient artwork and I posted one of these pieces of artwork or it was a woodcut rather from the 1500s in Nuremberg. They would cut clearly depicts a bunch of orbs in the sky. I've seen certain medieval artwork or Renaissance artwork where even halos around the heads of characters look very orb like and the orb I saw looked like that. It was the color of when a flame is really, really bright, that whitish, orangeish, yellowish stuff. That was the color of that orbit was like a flame and distinctly very circular. So now I look at artwork like this with a completely different viewpoint because I'm not theorizing about it and listeners that have listened to me for a long time know. I've been podcasting way before I saw that. I saw that with my own eyes and we've talked about it a lot, but I think that grounds the conversation. It wasn't just us theorizing. I've literally seen one of these things and have many friends who have as well. So you've allowed me to do a little story time segment. I'm going to read this is a translation from the Deutsch of the artists who created some of those images you were posting were woodcuts for essentially the local newspaper in Nuremberg. So this is sunrise on April 14th, 1561. You were also posting stuff from a different occurrence over Basel, Switzerland, 1566. So that all culminated in me thinking that's an intriguing synchronicity, right, in and of itself. But it actually relates to what I wanted to talk about, which is the sacred, desecular, spiritual, but not religious, intimate, all of that. So before I read the description, that is of this incident that took place about the skies, I did the math. So 1561 is 15 years after the death of Martin Luther. Martin Luther essentially began as a monk, a Catholic monk. I know you've been talking about awakenings. Martin Luther, he woke up. I think he's one of the most important and influential people of all time. He translates the Bible into the German of that day. Everything was in Latin prior to that. But it's also about the individual experience of the divine. He's not a saint. He's also prophetic of in some ways the mess we are in today, because the rut and rabbit hole maybe of the individuation, I think, is that young in turn. I think that there are a lot of downsides to a society based on the individual. And so we really owe Martin Luther a lot. For good or bad, this is the text from the newspaper, Woodcut, with the image accompanying, and I'll just read it in the morning of April 14, 1561 at Daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun. And then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city before the gates and in the country, by many men and women. At first, they appeared in the middle of the sun, two blood red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood. There stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black, ferrous color. Likewise, there stood on both sides, and as a torus about the sun, such blood red ones and other balls in large number, but three in a line and four in a square. Also some alone. These all started to fight among themselves so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the one standing on both sides. Thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun in a small and large rods flew into the sun. How in the hell did the person remember the detail of this? Like, how in the book, are you awe-inspired and you got your notes out? So one rod did this. How do they remember this? Good for them. Besides the globes, the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as set above, bell from the sun down upon the earth as if they all burned, and then they wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this, there was something like a black spear, very long and thick. The shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the Almighty God, to bring us to repentance. They'll are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind. In order that God may send us a frightening punishment and account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will, by no means, discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of the merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment on us so that we may temporarily hear and perpetually there live as a children. For it, may God grant us His help. Amen. Amen. So basically, what we just heard is there was a battle of epic proportions in the sky between flying cosmic spears and orbs. And this person had an incredibly good memory. And of course, at the end, they have to make, and this is because we're all 30 sinners and God's mad at us. The end. Amen. What do you make of that when you read that? When you look at the picture, it's a trip. There really are references in art to these orbs. So when I see stuff like this, and then I've seen what I've seen, it's certainly notable. What do you make of it? There's a line there towards the end that has me thinking about a lot of our conversations, both between us and also just me following you recently. The woodblock writer says, "Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind." And so part of what, part of why I wanted to do this episode with you is a kind of fuck the haters in response to your episode about the negative review situation. And this idea of why is she getting all the ligious? I don't remember what the exact phrasing of that. Let me tell the listeners because again, this was a Patreon exclusive one. So main feed listeners won't know this. I received this three-star review where this person wrote an actual thesis about their trajectory with my work. The essence of it was, I used to really like following Molly's content. I followed her when she only talked about BPD and mental health. But then there was this turn where she just went basically that I went crazy, and then I started talking about these crazy kooky subjects. And again, this was following my intuition. Me deciding to go and talk about what I talk about now. Arguably, I see as much more pressing and realistic ways to transform our quote-unquote mental health than the institution of mental health that's been sold to us. But she insinuated that I had undiagnosed mental illness. It was pretty scathing but blessed her heart energy. And basically she ended the review by saying, "I wish her the best bless her heart, and I hope one day she returns to the land of the non-religious insane." So that's the essence of that review. So take it away, Teddy. I gave them the TLDR. The idea that somehow you've become, again, I don't want to be speaking for you, but the idea that you've become really this is to me such a kind of false, not dichotomy, but just it's a close-off way of looking at the work you're doing and the interests you have to even think that talking about mental health is not related to the UAP stuff. And so that question of spiritual but not religious, are we religious or reseculated? Those are these things that have motivated me for a long time because we don't live in 1560s Germany where the Reformation is fresh. I like to think of the America that we live in today that you and I live in Molley is both. You could say it's like it's the most secular version of a society ever filled with the most religious lunacy in the same time. And I think America has always had this issue of both being drastically secular and vehemently religious. And yet I kind of want to suggest that they're the same. It's almost like people think that if they are not worshipping a God in some way that they are not religious, humans are wired to worship something. And I argue that the biggest problem happens when people don't realize that they have a religion shaped whole inside of themselves and then they are not conscious of what they happen to be worshipping. And in this particular example, that person represents an irony that Teddy and I had a hard time looking past because in one breath, you're saying this podcaster that I follow is gone crazy and religious. And I liked it better when she talked about the religion I worship, which is the biomedical model of mental health. But the irony and I talk about shadow and projection all the time and I'm like, listen to my newer shit because maybe you'll realize that you are also religious. And I argue that I'm conscious of the ways that I am exploring my consciousness and my spirituality. And I'm finding new ways every single day that I am brainwashed and religious. And I'm unpacking every single one of them. I'm pulling it apart. But if you're not conscious of that you end up writing reviews like that and looking pretty silly because the scientists or the psychologists are your priests. You're trusting them to interpret the DSM. Only they can interpret the Bible for you and then you're adopting those labels and saying that I need to quickly hurry. I need to go to DBT because I'm a borderline and it means I need to get my crazy emotions in check and don't question the science when there's literally no science in the DSM. It's voted in by a committee. It's very religious. Homosexuality was literally a disorder until the 70s when it became no longer convenient and probably some psychiatrists were like, "Y'all, we're gay too, so can we take that off there now?" This is what me and Teddy are talking about. And then everyone is taken to saying, "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. What does that even mean?" Yes. And when I started doing graduate school, it was looking at American fiction, mostly from the second half of the 20th century onward, that was asking those kind of spiritual questions, religious things. They weren't dogmatic type of novels. And something that in all of that scholarship I was weeding through that I found so weird was there was this term called the "post-secular" and it's much debated as of course everything in academia is. And the thing that really struck me in all of that in all those conversations was they kept talking about the return of the religious as if it was this thing that had been banished from an normative story of how we became modern. And these scholars would say, "Hmm, well, the Iranian revolution happened. There's these mega churches in the US." So obviously the religious didn't disappear, but it somehow returned with this vengeance in a way. I would wager to say that we're almost entering this new period. I talked about this. When me and you were going to school and to place listeners in this time, Teddy and I are in the same age group. We are millennials for sure, true and true. I was in high school from 2005 to 2008. It wasn't cool to be religious at all. No one was saying, "I'm spiritual, but not religious in high school." At all. That didn't exist when I went to high school. No one that I knew was doing yoga. No one that I knew was meditating. None of that. If there was a kid in school that was talking about loving Jesus, we would be like, "Nerd." And I'm just saying, "That's how it was." I'm just being very real because I think that helps us realize how much things have changed. On one hand, we've made amazing progress because I think there's more people that are willing to talk about things that we would have outrightly just said as bullshit, paranormal, "Woo," maybe 10 years ago. But now you have this strange turning in the United States where it's like people are converting to a kind of Christianity. Me and Teddy, by the way, we both love Jesus. Mystical Jesus is really cool. He was an activist. He was a badass. He did not like hypocrisy. And also with the Gospels. There's so much cool stuff that you can do with Christianity. But what we're seeing now is people converting to this version of Christianity that SkyDaddy is watching you masturbate in the room and you're going to hell. It's feeling crusader coated to me right now. And this mix of crusader coated evangelical ultra right wing Christian energy around Christianity that's feeling weird. And it was not there when we were in school. And so we're dealing with this issue where it feels like we have three options where you can be secular, have no real interest in transcendent meaning, interaction with the holy, the sacred, whatever. You can be religious, which is what you were talking about of. To be religious, it's kind of a dorky thing. It's something that the secular kind of wants to push to the side. And then there's that third option right, which is the spiritual one, which has all the kind of fuzziness around it. And does that mean that you like reading Elaine Pagel's books and going to yoga and the crystal shop kind of like me? It's a very ambiguous one. But certainly is it's like, well, I don't actually go to a church. I don't have a community that I'm a part of in my faith. So I think there's those three options right now. And what I realized in doing over the course of my PhD was that mythology is more than just stories of heroic encounters with dragons and beasts and overcoming those. It's understanding that it's these stories that bind people together. It's the creation of shared meanings. It's what does it mean to live in a common story. And to me, that's what someone like Joseph Campbell was really interested in excavating is belief. I saw a weird translation about him as a historian of belief. And I actually think that that's a curious but interesting title. And as I was going through these different approaches, there's a lot of question about modern life is somehow very different than the ancient. And there's all these different, when does modernity? That's one of those big words that gets thrown around. When does that begin? And there's some people who say, it's the enlightenment in the 15 through 1700s and it's industrialization and it's capitalism and it's all these things. And it's so funny because they never talk about what we lost in those times. They talk about it as if it's this linear progression upward as if things are getting better and better. And in many ways they were, but what is not often talked about is what's lost. And that also coincides with mental health history and how essentially during the enlightenment, they started thinking about the human being like a clock. They started doing dissections, right? And then people would come and view those dissections. And it got quite macabre and more bread. And they started like there was a weird time in history that I talked about in one of my mental health history episodes where everyone became pretty obsessed with dissections. And that's when they started doing weird shit at this French asylum where they started doing experiments. That's when the hysteria all came into the mix. They started treating human suffering in a mechanistic way as if the psyche and soul were no longer. And I'm not saying they knew about serotonin and stuff in this time. But they started to basically make it about like the brain firing and God knows what helps your wandering womb. They've never stopped theorizing. But what I find fascinating and I've talked about this before is humoral theory from the Middle Ages where they said, you know, you had four humors. I almost think that their thinking along those lines was almost better than our quote-unquote modern thinking because they're thinking of in terms of essence and how if things were imbalanced within you, it wasn't as pathologizing, I feel. Everyone had those humors. They believed. Some people were wired in a way to have more or less than the other. And those would give you strengths. There were strengths of even being melancholic. You could be creative. You could be this, but if it's not grounded and balanced, it can be out of balance. And I find it just to your comment of modernity, we had advances. And then we had huge losses. Me and you were following these niche things. And if they're discovering all of this shit, and it's like, yeah, the ancients were already saying that basically. I did that whole episode on simulation theory. Every single esoteric framework essentially is saying we're living in some kind of a simulation. And that there are rules to said simulation, right? So that's just my little bit that I wanted to throw in there. We're watching everyone say we're getting more modern progression, progression, but what about all this ambiguous shit underneath where we're losing the arguably more important knowledge that we need to keep ourselves connected to meaning. There was a really great article. I'll try and send it to you. It's a very academic thing called modernity and enchantment by this colony, Michael Sayler. But it was very important to me in understanding that there was this sort of undercurrent to that linear arc of history at both that we were in some ways always getting better. In some ways, we're always getting more secular according to a certain story that we've told that that we could say that there's witch trials, human sacrifice, witch trials, all that stuff was bad religion in the past. And now we're at this great thing that we're kind of freed from superstition. Even the story we've told about superstition as a way to just cast off all previous forms of knowing. Yeah. And anything you can't taste, see, touch in this physical reality. It's, oh, that's just in your imagination. And therefore, it doesn't matter. And so in this article, and I had to quote it because I just think it's worth keeping in mind, which is that he's interested in the way that from let's say the 1600s through the 1800s into the last century and to now, you had two competing forces happening, which is that elites in culture, in society, even though we think that we got away from kings and that older way of governing ourselves, elites actually have again I'm trying not to sound all conspiratorial, but they have gained more and more of a chokehold on society. And that's from the development of science through today's tech bros. - I really think that that's not conspiratorial anymore. It's just so obvious. I think almost all my listeners that tune in at this point and that are still around after my recent trajectory of going completely into what used to be very speculative territory. Now there's a lot of proof for these things. Anything I've been talking about, I'm using all these unclassified documents for actual sources. I mean, look at the two party system. There's this puppet dance going on of look over here, look over here, but we all are aware that there are elite interests that bypass the drama that we're seeing playing out on the stage in front of our eyes. We're becoming more and more aware of the reality of that every day on so many different levels. - And so the impulse of elites to hold on to power, to really define what knowledge is, coincides with back to Martin Luther because he is about democracy in a weird way because it's about the empowerment of the individual and breaking out of really constricting ways of living. The centuries that saw all of modern science getting defined and law and these different versions of DSMs and things like that and regulations is also at the same time as people have gotten more and more empowered and free in a lot of ways. And there's something about the democratization of the world that is really terrifying to elites. And so one thing that this scholar Michael Saylor looks at is how enchantment, which used to form something that I always struggle with is are these words sufficient? Is enchantment, is that the proper alternative to spiritual but not religious? I'm not really sure, but I want to at least just understand that. - I feel like that word has less baggage. Like when you say enchantment, it's the same way that I like the word awe inspiring. You can imagine that feeling. Whereas when you say spirituality or religion, what do people go to religion or spirituality for to be enchanted, to be awe struck to the degree that there will be some kind of psychological transformation that helps you connect with the divine in a way that is good for you. For example, when someone tries to tell me, what did I feel when I saw that orb? There are certain things that completely bypass language. For example, I'm sure you've had this exact feeling. You know when you are in some kind of meditative state or maybe you're reading an esoteric book, whatever you happen to be doing, all of us have had the experience, or at least the most people listening here and I know both you and I have, is the feeling where something just clicks into place instantly. And you know that maybe something that you've been doing that self sabotaging for years because of that one experience or that one aha moment that you had 10 years of therapy couldn't do that. It's just boom. Oh, okay, knowing has been had. Maybe you have a flash of a visual image of something and it all clicks, you could never describe that in words to someone ever. And if you tried to, you'd sound crazy, but nonetheless, it had a transformative effect on your psyche. And to me, that's enchantment. - The thing about enchantment that I was drawn to, and especially as I got deeper into the things about shamanic traditions and magical practice, and you could even say pre-medieval Europe that Joseph Campbell was looking at, is you really is underpinning that is these experiences. Enchantment is, it's about wonderment, it's also about aha, and it's connected to the idea of the sublime, which is the awe-inspiring, the beautiful, the terrible, rolled into one, because it's wholly other from what we experienced day to day. And there's a power to those moments of enchantment, but also because they're put it to you this way. - And don't at me about the actual math of this, maybe I'm wrong, but I saw this on the history channel, so it has to be correct. Supposedly, 95% of the universe, and I know this debates about what even is that, but exactly, 95% of the known universe is dark matter, that we don't perceive that you can't see, touch, whatever. And so I think that has to be our starting point. We are able to perceive and experience so little in our daily life that when we encounter the sacred, it's both beautiful and life-changing and also kind of terrifying, because it carries with that thing that, again, makes you sound crazy. - Yeah, and also the unknown and the undefinable, right? - Yeah. And so what I came to understand is that, in many ways, religion and kind of block quotes with a capital R has for a very long time been a secularizing force. We think today that they're separate. There's this amazing woman, Merlin Stone. I'm sure you've read when God was a woman by her. - You know, I've never read it, but I have heard of it. - Amazing book. - Okay, I'm an after-reader. - And in the kind of like all these different pre-histories of Abrahamic religion, so Christianity, Judy, and Judaism and Islam, she does this wild, etymological look at the title Yahweh. Her theory is, it gets to lava, and she goes into this whole thing of Persian mountain top, volcanic worship, deeply ancient, and that Moses and the burning bush on the top of the mountain is this sort of secularized retelling of the myth that comes from volcanic priestesses and ancient Persia. Whether that's true or not, I just think what it does showcase is that there's a slightly dangerous core to a lot of sacred experience. When you look at the Shamanic traditions, those rituals are not for the faint of heart. And I think you see today, these people that go down and wanna do Iawastic stuff, and they're not ready for it. I certainly am not gonna place where I need to do that, and I'm not, I don't think prepared for it. - Interestingly, from people I've spoken to, I've had quite a few different higher dose psychedelic experiences, but I have not had an Iawasca ceremony properly, but it sounds like the people that have the worst experiences often are ones that go in when they're not in a good psychological place. They are not going with someone who's a professional at facilitating these ceremonies, and then thirdly, also the people that come in thinking it's gonna be no big deal. Like, oh, it's all good, and then they fuck around and find out. Interestingly, the fact that you would approach it with this reverence of I'm not quite sure. Arguably, that's a much more mature approach to these things, 'cause it is true. At the heart of every esoteric tradition is a symbolic death and rebirth process, and even the Ellucinian mysteries, you would be put in actual fear of your life. They believed that they wanted to get you to be so scared and think that maybe you are actually going to die, that experience would catalyze something within you, that would make you appreciate life more. Look at all the people that have near-death experiences. They're basically having a serious initiation, and that's terrifying, right? Would anyone wanna have a near-death experience, but then a lot of people that do have them say, would do it over again, because of the transformation they've had in their life, because of the realizations, or the new-minus quality of that experience and the transformation thereafter. And now, with this stuff that's coming out about Skywatcher and what they're doing in these black programs, allegedly, is that they are recruiting people from other countries that are really poor disadvantaged people, coming from some of these countries who have traditions that are still thinking in these ways where their consciousness is different. And what do they do? Jake Barber said in his interview with Ross Coltard is that these people were deliberately put into fear states so that they could have more psionic abilities, that they are now scientifically experimenting with people that have natural heightened psychics sensitivity. They're finding them, and then deliberately putting them in a situation where their fight or flight instincts kick in. And so it's super charging that psionic ability. So I find all of that very fascinating because it goes to show that this aspect that you're talking about of fear, 'cause it's not that it's dangerous in a sense that it's coming to get you. It's the fact that danger transforms the psyche to a certain degree, right? - When it's dangerous because it threatens the kind of dumb, day-to-day, the way that elite structures of society want the masses to live does not want to have these eruptions of sacred enchanted experience happening all the time because it would get us to stop performing in their charade in a way. - Precisely. - And so that's where I think that this divide that we think we have today of spiritual secular, religious and secular, it's a newer version of a thing that's always kind of happened, which is the aliode. any mysteries get secularized by the Greco-Roman religions of kind of how the societies were operating and Christianity gets secularized by shifting from that mushroom fungi version of shamanic ritual in the Dead Sea caves of the Essenes into the kind of whatever is sort of like chifle religion of today. Yeah, what? It's so disappointing too because it's cool. That's why like all of them who have like written off Christianity because of the Mick Christianity. Christianity has really cool roots. You can fuck with Jesus and still really also get into this esoteric stuff after all of my rabbit holding Teddy one of the things that never ceases to amaze me and also annoy me is the my listeners are not the people that are doing this but they probably have family members that do. They're the people that are like cat hissing at a tarot deck because it's demonic when in reality they don't realize that you can get a Marseille tarot deck and still be a complete believer in Christianity. The ultimate source of Christianity, Jesus would totally rock with the Marseille tarot. It encases the esoteric truths that he was trying to espouse. Everything we know about Jesus is he sat with mystics of all stripes and I believe that Jesus Martin Luther, Alistair Crowley, don't come for me people. I'm not comparing Jesus Christ to these men. But what I am saying is that these people come up in their time as a catalyst and a pendulum swing and it feels like Jesus came along to merge all of these threads of mysticism not in a way to say I am the one God to rule them all. But in a way to remind everyone hey we're all talking about the same thing here, right? I don't think he really would have wanted a religion to rise up in his name. He's up there doing like the SMFH meme phase being like no. So I just find that all very fascinating. I feel like now we're here with a lot of people worshiping Jesus. It's missing the point entirely. It seems. And I had to put it in my notes because I just wanted to quote it word for word. It's one of my favorite portions of the Thomas gospel, which is one of the Gnostic Gospels. Speaking exactly to what you're saying. He says, I am the all, cleave a piece of wood and I am there, lift up a stone and you will find me there. To me that is that's the enchanted world he's speaking about. It's not the I am the God above all gods. You shall have no other gods before me. It's actually that he's trying to get you to realize that this realm is vibrant and enchanted and that when you pick up that stone to me that's a kind of coded way of saying that's getting that 95% of dark matter. It's touching that. I know I promised you a kind of Celtic Irish thing as well because it's a similar sentiment of what the enchanted world looked like. If people did enchantment, right? It was the fucking Celts. This is the faith, the land of the fairy, all of this stuff is so enchanted, which I love. And so this is a magical charm of and I cannot do Celtic right. American, the majestic. But he says these things of like I'm the wind that blows over the sea, the wave of the deep, the bull of satan battles, the eagle on the rock, a tear of the sun, the fairest of plants. It's the famous that verse. It's the exact same. Yeah. There's in 19th century India, there was this amazing figure named Shri Ramakrishna, who Joseph Campbell was endlessly quoting because he says one day it was suddenly revealed to me that everything is pure spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the door frame, all pure spirit, man animals, other living beings, all pure spirit. Then like a mad man, I began to shower flowers in all directions, whatever I saw, I worshiped. That's beautiful. That's the encounter with the holy, that's enchantment. And when you act as if that is the case, your life is different automatically. Yes. And the kind of sad part of the story is that going back to those things, but it leads at rationalism, scientific revolution. And I'm quoting for this article now, Michael Sealer talks about how that cognitive outlook of enchantment of the enchanted world of before came to be cast as the outlook of women, children, primitives, again, and quotes, all these things as we're not sufficiently rational. And so one of the fascinating examples that just proves how these things are all commingled, but religion in a way is a kind of secularizing force and vice versa. I think a great example is something like the Russian Revolution 1917 to the early 20s. And part of that is fueled from the same thing of rational thinking. It's liberatory. And there's reasons that it probably should have happened. But part of Marxism that is really sinister, right, is it's so materialistic. It's thinking that anything transcendent is dangerous. And so in that way, in itself, Marxism becomes its own religion and blind adherence to any ideology in essence becomes religious. You can say that it's not, but it is. If you can't question the religion, you're a heretic now. The dynamic is all the same, no matter what way you slice it. And the reason I bring up that example, the sort of bubbling point of what I'm trying to get us to think about is this sometimes Freud does have really good ideas despite a lot of for sure. And his idea just as does Marx. The thing is there's essences of really good insight. Like Freud, I'll be the first one to shit all over Freud. But the thing is there's a reason he endured. And it's because he had nuggets of wisdom that rang true, same with Crowley. But it's all about I have it in my mind. It's the moment that the masculine gets out of balance or the feminine for that matter because we need the masculine discernment. The masculine's gotten way too out of whack over there with those with these things because again, it becomes this very regimented authoritarian hierarchical extractive obey daddy and it gets dark. But it's just such a shame because there's a lot of really good insights that these men had and then it turned dogmatic and religious because they said, I figured it out. I know the way that it's supposed to be and here are the rules. We all need to follow said rules. Uh oh, that's when you know the shit's hit the fan. And one of the Freud's things that I think is so relevant to this is this idea of the return of the repressed. It's a very basic psychological thing. The more that you repress something down, the more it's going to sort of burp back up. Uh huh. It's really unpleasant and unexpected ways. And so the Soviet thing is a great example of that where the Bolshevik understanding of Marxism went so against religion into burning up all these churches, mass killings and some really horrific stuff. But what they didn't account for was that there's still that religion sized whole and because it's because of the orthodox because of that deep ritualistic kind of thing in the Russian psyche when Lenin dies. Suddenly it starts to get a little kooky and religious all over again because he gets embalmed and there's the shrine and visiting Lenin's tomb becomes this pilgrimage thing for Marxist to do. We just can't help it. We want a worship shit. You know, I just think there's such a wild arc from Lenin's embalmed tomb pilgrimage to like where you're at there now where you have essentially secular orthodox priests putting holy water on like giant ICBM missiles for the Russian military. It's all one. It's all one. But what I want to do is it suggests that maybe Enchantment gets us close-ish to a way of walking through the world that is more helpful than saying spiritual. Yes. And I did a little digging in because the meaning of words interests me. Enchantment really comes from this early French understanding of all-shant of both. It's a dual meaning of chanting, of singing, and of casting spells all sort of rolled into one. And around the same time that word was coming into being. And I know you've talked about like the Bards, the Trubodors. There's this moment in the 12th century in France of this alternate way of living bubbling back to the surface of going against that hierarchy version of religion that is rooted in these storytellers, myth makers, magician musicians about the sacredness of experience. There's a funny connection to me as another one of those word Synchronist of Bard and Bardot from the Tbil-- that understanding of being in a barter world. And I do think that if we both become bars in our own way, that it's at least a way through this dark winter. - Absolutely, that's why I feel so compelled to do the work that we're doing here. In our own, probably very flawed way, because it's been such a spiritual game of telephone and some of this stuff has been so actively suppressed. I can say that there's stuff that has been permanently lost. There's wisdom that we can never get back, but there are these perennial threads. It is someone's responsibility to keep talking about those things. And I think that's why both you and I have a love and fondness for people like Joseph Campbell. When you actually are familiar with Joseph Campbell and his work and you've listed to ours of him talk, and then you actually hear someone trying to paint him as any kind of problematic character. He's like the mythic Mr. Rogers. He had such a reverence for what he spoke about. And also was being such a good steward of these things trying to inject this back into the collective consciousness because he felt like it was his profound responsibility to do that. He dedicated his whole life to keeping myth alive in the consciousness of the people or something that I have spoken about a lot on the pod recently is if your ancestry is European, for example, my ancestry is deeply Celtic. I have pickedish ancestry. We all come from indigenous elders who were originally animist. And so no matter where you trace back your ancestry if you're Western, you don't get a pass to be like, oh, I didn't have indigenous roots. Yes, you do. And I do believe if you don't know the myths of your ancestors, at least your own, and the beauty of knowing the myths of your ancestors is if you go and read the myths of others, you'll understand, wow, these are pretty similar. And then I wonder why that is. And then maybe there is something to this. I think that the recovery and rediscovery of all this lost wisdom, particularly in the West, because we've had this unusual thing, right? Of these processes of rationalization, secularizing, they're not cyclical, they're more like these arcs that have spirals that then go straight for a little while than spiral out again. I guess the lane that I'm most interested in and trying to explore is if we really take seriously the idea of that encounter, you talked about the Numanus earlier, I don't know if you've read him, but Rudolph Otto, early 20th century German writer who had this idea about the Numanus as the word to describe the holy, he called it the Mysterium Tremendum at Fassinoms, right? - Sounds like a Harry Potter spell. - Yeah, but it's a little ridiculous, but it's that idea of the sublime, the tremendous fascinating mystery all wrapped into one. - Numanus is my favorite word personally. I like enchantment, but enchantment also feels cute to me. You know, like, oh, a little enchantment. I'm enchantment. It's just the cultural baggage that that word has accumulated over the years. The Numanus, to me, feels holy other, which I love. - Yeah, and this is a long way of trying to tie it back into why I thought that description in the woodblock cutting is relevant to what we've been talking about because it's both an example of trying to describe the Numanus within the vocabulary that you have of the culture that you grew up in. - So that's why it ends like you said with a kind of like, oh, we need to repent and blah, blah, blah. - And which is arguably the reason why we've had such a hard time with any of these texts because they are communicated through the lens or the hand or the voice of flawed people who threw the veils of their time, the baggage that came with it. And then also potential additions throughout history, it is a huge game of spiritual telephone. It's everybody interpreting their own Numanus or holy other experiences and insights through the muddy delens of time. - I guess you could say the supernatural, the paranormal are kind of the same thing. And that sounds obvious, but again, I feel like there has been some damage done by something like the ancient alien show where-- - For sure. - You know, because of the guy's crazy hair and it's like everything can't be explained by aliens. What's unhelpful of that is it's like, well, that's how the pyramids are built. That's not the point. To me, it's like what's going on when those people in Nuremberg saw these orbs and bloody flying crosses in the sky, can it just be explained away as mass hysteria of people in a really religiously hectic time of the reformation? Is that all that's going on? Or is it a real thing of the Numanus breaking in to our 5% perception box of reality? - And also how do we even talk about those things, right? Because I have my literal experience of the orb on one hand and then I also have my more internal divine experiences that I can fully say that didn't happen out here in material reality, but something did happen inside my head box, my self space that no one could understand. I could never understand your self space, but there are things that happen inside of there that transform you and then there are those things that are literal experiences that are shared by other people that have the exact same quality and effect. - Yeah. - That's wild. And also how do we know what examples from history are the inside the head box transformative Numanus experiences that are very much real because they have real impact and transformative quality, but then Marion apparitions, Faye encounters with varies. There are people that say they literally saw a small being. So that is my personal, what the fuck at the moment? Because I'm still trying to parse what happened to me. I've never had anything like that happen since mind you. And I gotta say, I live a little bit in fear 'cause I want to see that again, but also do I wanna see a little being? I don't fucking think so. I think that would scare the shit out of me. And I think that the universe, the divine, the source probably knows that about me and then maybe only shows me what I can handle. But then there are people who have said they've seen beings that I actually know and trust. And there are people out there that would say, that person is insane, but I know my friend saw that. My friend Michael went to the Monroe Institute, had an out of body experience. Left his body, watched it happen. I trust Michael implicitly. He was a total skeptic. And that happened. My friend Chris Ramsey, same thing happened to him. So I'm going, these two categories of experience fascinate me because they have the same result and it's the same flavor, but one is in our material existence and sometimes shared by others. And then one is inside and then what impact does that have on our historical documents? 'Cause I don't think they had the language to talk about that. But it really matters though. It matters if that was an allegorical experience and dream inside that guy's head that he depicted or was that a thing on CNN where we're seeing the orbs, not CNN of Nuremberg and the 1500. But you know what I'm saying? But you said it was in a newspaper. So that matters. - Is it just by, yeah, I mean his, I should have said that his reporting of it, but he was not the lone witness and these other things that happened. - And that's what I mean is like that matters. So that sounds like that was an orb experience like I had because think about this. If someone heard me in the future right about my orb experience and try to say that that was just a vision I had in my mind and wow, it sounds amazing and transformative for her. It sounds like this was just kind of a religious vision she had. But I'm like, no, this was something that I could report in a newspaper article as in I saw this with my own eyes and multiple witnesses saw it too. And it was also spiritual. We see that as different. It either has to be a news article about here are the facts or it has to be a spiritual experience. It's like our brains short out as Western materialist piled people. We can't write about those both being the same. They have to be one or the other. - And I wonder if in some ways I get to these questions that have been gnawing at me. And I'm trying to phrase these very carefully. I don't want it to come across the wrong way. - Okay. - I'm already got raised in my eyebrows. I'm like, don't filter yourself. No one's gonna take them the wrong way, especially not people that are two and a half hours in the listening us talk. So I think the stragglers that are still here with us, they're not judging. - When I look at all of the great kind of mystic writers and teachers that I have been shaped by, whether you wanna go back to those, really ancient writings or even someone more contemporary like Thomas Merton, who I deeply love. And the lifestyles that they either cultivated or the societies that they grew up in or were shaped in were not "modern liberal" democracies. And I think the question that I have been asking myself is, because I know it's something that you've repeated throughout your podcast about, we're lonelier than we've ever been, we're unhappier than we've ever been. And I think it's obviously these sort of pendulums, these extremist things that either side are not the solution, because you know, just trad Catholic, fascist kind of people, and then there's like, it's so either again, kind of just like, do Bolshevism again. Impulses and you know, I don't think- Yeah, like which extreme auto correction fill in the blank are we going to do this time? It's not okay. I'm trying not to be quippy here, but when I see like, yes, our world that you and I live in, at least in America, is broken profoundly. For sure. And so I understand the lure of, well, why can't we be like socialist Denmark, right? And it's like, I understand the benefit of bicycles and free healthcare, but in a way, I'm also like, but what kind of healthcare are we talking about? That's correct. And I think it's like what sort of healing are we actually after? If the goal is free pharmaceuticals, I think you could at least count me out. That's to me not the better solution. We are at this precipice, I think. Hopefully we do get to build a different kind of world of new futures. But I certainly don't have an answer for that, but I just know that it can't be a continuation of all of the old ways. No, and also when are we going to learn actually? It never ceases to amaze me how we keep repeating the cycles of history, but none of these supposedly really smart, switched on people and leadership are not seeing it. I don't know if you know about Ray Dalio. He's in the financial markets. He owned one of the biggest hedge funds. And I'll tell you what, whenever people start talking about finance, my brain turns off, which is my own issue that I need to figure out. I don't need that's an issue. Well, I'm saying it's good to be financially literate to a degree, to survive in the world and I'm allergic to it to an unhealthy degree. But Ray Dalio wrote this book called Principles and he talks about cycles. The reason why he says that he's been able to get the success in his life is because of his study of history and patterns. I argue that pattern recognition and the ability to look back of what's worked and what's not is literally the most important skill you can have. And fascinatingly, this is a fun tie in for listeners. I've been watching this amazing new content creator and she is interviewing people in AI and really high positions. She interviewed this AI ethicist and he said this whole idea of machines coming in and taking over our entire world and jobs. It's so stupid. They keep saying, AGI is coming. AGI is coming. We have these amazing tools. AI is a tool. It's a great pattern recognizer. This job in the future will be interpreting the results of AI and directing its outputs and then making judgment calls. So they essentially said in this episode that the most important human skill for the future of work is going to be judgment. He said that when he was in school, one of the degrees that they taught at this university, I think it was USC maybe that he went to. But he said that accounting was the degree that the most people were getting degrees in. And one of the homework assignments that they gave was at university was get a phone book and add up all the numbers in the whole phone book. Can you even imagine? Because arithmetic was the most important skill for an accountant. So then Excel came in and could do arithmetic better than any human being could ever do. And everyone said, Oh, no, our jobs. Well, but no, now you have Excel. You have this tool, but your job is going to be pattern recognition. You have to interpret the numbers, interpret the output. And I feel like there's a through line here because we need to study myth and study the patterns pattern, recognizing and knowing how things play out cyclically has been. How a lot of people have risen to the top of their fields. You can use that in any profession and it's arguably the best way to future, prove yourself in my opinion in all aspects spiritually pattern recognizing is great, not to an obsessive degree. Mind you, people have gone crazy doing this. So again, I was going to name drop someone, but then I thought, let's keep it. But there are people that pattern recognize to a neurotic degree where they're seeing shit that's not even there. And I would argue that we need to be better pattern recognizers and then make judgments based on those patterns. And I feel like people have not absorbed that or it putting our conspiratorial pants on they're deliberately ignoring said patterns because those patterns keep people servile and dead to the enchantment to the holy other. While we have our government experimenting with the holy other and using it to defend ourselves, whatever the fuck they try to justify that right for national security and for pursuing the technology that's probably hundreds of years and advanced to ourselves. There's enough document and proof that I've seen that is literally in documents. I can see from the government that have been declassified over the years that we can say I would be willing to bet the toes on my right foot. That our government has access to technology that could make life a lot better for the average everyday person and they are deliberately withholding that and knowledge that consciousness works much differently than they're allowing people to make decisions and raise their kids and do that. I believe that's a level of like cognitive colonization. We are not angry enough about that. If we're talking about human rights, that's the most fundamental human right is to know the truth about reality to the degree that you can know and keeping people in narrative boxes to deliberately stop them from knowing that. That's a deliberate abuse of human rights. And have you watched the new George Johnny interview on Jesse Michaels yet? I need to. I'd love him. Oh, okay. But like, there's an example of someone. And I'm just going to say it. He's the person that I was going to name drop. He is undoubtedly incredibly intelligent, like, if encyclopedic knowledge. I think it's an example of too much pattern recognition with an assumption. I think the main issue with me for George Johnny is that it doesn't sound like he has any of his own personal, new, menace experiences and that changes things. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of everybody else's experience and then he's making this grand theory of our cons true in his own mind. Whereas I don't agree with that. One thing that he said that I was like, oh, I wanted to talk to you about it. He thinks that Rene Descartes was, and I'm paraphrasing here, listeners, don't come for me if I get some of this wrong. But he essentially thinks that Rene Descartes was a Jesuit listeners. Rene Descartes are supposedly known to be the military arm of the Catholic Church. They were. Yeah. But they're still out there. George Johnny thinks that Descartes was a philosopher and Teddy can totally school me on this and probably bring better information. I was looking up his dates because he's a little bit after Luther dies. In a certain way, you could look at Descartes as the secular Luther in terms of the sense of the individual. Yes. Yeah. That's all good. No, but you're exactly right. So George Johnny's very interesting theory is that he was a Jesuit asset, almost like he was a siop, like deliberately injected to stop people from having these experiences. So just a different flavor of a way of stopping people from having their own individual, divine, numerous experiences. This is my always sunny, Charlie moment of this episode. So guys were really going there. But I do or Johnny thinks that he was deliberately planted to continue this narrative. I think that after the inquisition and the crusades and the burnings and everything, I'm not saying more burnings didn't happen around this time. But I think that savvy people started recognizing that the way that they were going to get people to change were nonviolent ways and changing the way that they believed about the divine. And the fact that it's actually quite intellectual, if you can make a man feel much smarter than everybody else, that's how they got him. Oh, I'm much smarter. It's actually quite primitive and womanly to like all of that intuitive shit. And they said, got him. That's my thought. And that's why when George Johnny said that, I said, you know what? I might not fuck with your arcons or like we're in this alien simulation and they're succubishing off of our resources. I don't know if I fuck with all the threads he connected, but that one thread, I said, okay, interesting. I remember in my English classes encountering this esteemed literary critic, Harold Blue. who has this idea about Shakespeare, inventing modern consciousness. And if you look at the difference between the plays that were happening in England previous to Shakespeare, it's like, suddenly there's this explosion of individual characters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the modern author or whatever emerges. Now, that's around the same time is what you're talking about. And you could say many things about it, but it might actually derail this a little bit because you could almost argue that there's something sort of sinister lurking within that, I think, therefore I am because it elevates ego and ego experience to-- - The primary, exactly. It's like, yeah, if there's a food pyramid of what's okay, so true. - And so that idea of like, all this, when we talk about the ancients, right? Yes, some of them are named, but a lot of these stories, they're not authored by one person. And they weren't, they didn't need to be part of the modern condition of disenchantment, is because of being an individual. And to me, that's where Luther went wrong, which is the mystics have always understood that the more that you stumble down your own mystic path, the more that you actually become connected to everything and to everybody. - And that is the know thyself on the Oracle of Delphi. Interestingly, and paradoxically, if you get into right relationship with yourself and have these experiences of the holy other, usually the takeaway is that I'm connected to everything and maybe the way that I treat other people reflects back on me in this simulation in some way. These takeaways happen to make you more of a collective team player when you do turn inward. But, but if you turn perpetually inward, you will lose yourself. You always have to find that tension of the opposites because you don't wanna be too grounded and you also don't wanna be too up here in law, law land and having all these spiritual insights. And to me, that's what those beautiful, mystic texts were alluding to. It is, that's the game. Know thyself, then come out with the insights that know thyself provides, which is you're connected to everything and then go forth into the world, acting as if that's the case. - And that was sort of the place that I arrived at after six years of doing this dissertation, I was just like, "Oh yeah, enchantment is a form of care because an encounter with the newmen is ought to." Besides all the other stuff I was talking about, like awe and terror and beauty, all those things combined should actually make you a better person and a more caring person and a more connected person. And if they don't, you're doing it in a masturbatory way. At the end of the day, if you're not grounding those insights into your material world and actually taking action on it, you're effectively the girl that keeps texting her friend, "Oh, I'm gonna break up with him this time." You have to like actually do the thing to make your life change. And it brings me to the thing that I always think about when I go into these long intellectual rabbit holes, what happens with mysticism is you always end up coming out with the most simple fucking thing. Where it's like, "Oh, just actually be in the present moment and listen to the signals of my body." And when we hear these simple phrases from elders, we think as our young selves, we're just like, "Oh, whatever, grandma, but no, that's the fucking truth of it." And now you're gonna spend the next 30 years figuring that out to only be sitting in their shoes to say the same goddamn shit. What a trip. I don't want that. I wanna know that stuff now. I'm gonna live as if everything is divine around me. I wanna fucking learn that shit right now. (laughs) And that is a tragedy that we live in a society where that wisdom has to be something that we can maybe hope to grasp at 80. But now we arguably live around a lot of elders who have been epistemically colonized for their whole life. They've been deprived of this stuff. And so they are brainwashed to a very real degree and they're unable to effectively transfer that wisdom onto young people, which is exhibit A. Look around us. This is the kind of society that that creates. I feel like we covered so much good ground here, even though it was such a winding discussion, we opened up so much good discourse here and there will never be an answer in any of these episodes. There is no place to put a pin in this discussion and I want to fight the urge as a content creator to say, "Well, okay, here's the lesson. "There isn't any. "It is literally in having these conversations "and as people listen to this episode, "it's very likely that they're having their own." Well, let me pause that like, "Whoa, "I'm now having my realizations. "That's what we have to bring back. "It doesn't have to be this. "Here's the theme, here's to take away. "Here's what you need to do now." No, the discourse is the whole point because we're not talking about these things anymore. - I had a really beautiful encounter. I didn't get to talk to a person or person or anything, but I was at this screening of Hellboy, which talked about a sort of Numinous Wild movie and the filmmaker, Guillermo D'Ottaro, was there and he was talking about dreaming as a political act and that it's a revolutionary thing to dream. And I think that that kind of gets to that thing where the mystics were sometimes the wisdom that they present can seem like, again, cutesy or a chantment seems kind of cute, but it actually is that simple. And to me, that's where the enchanters as they sort of barred troubadours. It's not just that they contained all of the mythic traditions in these stories that they were telling to these people. They were actually inviting the people that they were visiting with, that they were encountering on the road to actually dare to dream. And I know that sounds trite or whatever, but I think we have to like. - But that's the problem I'm trying to point out and don't you think that that's part of the siaop? It's the cumulative effect of the siaop. It was that we think of things like, be in the present moment, dare to dream, listen to your heart. People call them stupid hallmark phrases now. Pretty much. - Yeah. - Or they will say, yeah, that's nice. Yeah, agreed. Their brain knows, yeah, that's true. Do, listen to your heart. But they're not actually doing it. They're not living as if they listen to their heart. - And to dare to dream, when I've actually done that, just in talking with you, I've remembered some dreams that I woke up and I felt profoundly shaken. And I remember having this one recently, it was Shamaness woman telling me that things were taken back from the moon during the moon landing, not too have been removed. And then I just woke up and was like, "Only shit, what does that mean?" - Wow. - Those are those little ways that I think, remembering that dreams really are these, like a regular prophetic time travel. We all get to do every night as. - And again, folks, there are literal examples of that in history where people have literally dreamed a scientific invention or something you could arguably make an entire podcast episode, just examples of that of dreams that people have had that have either predicted things or have come up with an idea of something or maybe remembered ancient wisdom that has been lost or something. It happens all the time. And you know what I thought of when you said that is, I took Stephen Eisenstadt's dreamtending course that year long thing and he talked about the fact that there are dreams where it's almost like your psyche is just digesting the day. There are two different type of dreams. There's archetypal dreams where these are the dreams where you wake up and you're like, "Whoa." You just know that was big. It really affected your nervous system. Then you wake up from other dreams, you remember bits and pieces, but your shit didn't really get rocked by it in REM sleep, you're dreaming all the time. Every night you're dreaming all the time all the time, your psyche is digesting it. But if you remember that dream and it feels like it has these big like a woman, moon, these archetypal things, that's something to tune into. That's why dream work is so important because then you learn about this stuff and you can more consciously work with it. And then like for me, I had a big archetypal dream about a bear when I was pregnant and I worked with it more. I ended up buying a totem, the little bear, because I wanted to show my subconscious, Teddy can see it. This is my little bear totem that I got. - Amazing. - And I got that after I had this big encounter because I wanted to send the message to my psyche. I see you, I listen. So I'm gonna bring that into my physical reality to show my psyche. I sent you a message or a video of the crow I saw. Did I ever just look at that? - Oh yeah. - We had a whole message about crows. I did the same thing. I saw a crow a million times. And so I got this little crow totem because this is the way that I bring it into the real world. And I've personally seen, we'll call them results when I do this. And that's why I encourage people to find their own ways to do that when you become literate in this stuff. And when you throw out what mainstream society says about these wholly other experiences, just meaning nothing and you actively start working with them. Interesting stuff happened. Yeah. So there's one practical thing people could do, start listening to your dreams more and trying to bring that stuff into the waking reality. Not like if you have a dream about chopping your arm off. Hey, maybe you should just chop your arm off in real life. No, but work with that material and send a message to your subconscious that you're paying attention to that part of reality. And you will be surprised at how things change and it will be unique to you. So the thing that's going to kind of tease is because I think again to do one last tie back to the Orbs in Nuremberg, I think if there is a wisdom lesson from that, it's that there obviously was something did happen. What that wisdom teaching was for those people is a little unclear. But it had an effect and it had an effect at a very interesting time when it did a political violence of obsession about identities and the intensity with which identities were being defended and fought over and all these things. I think a fun thing to explore and it would require me to do a little bit more of a more formal like Dr. Teddy prep work is looking at is there actually something that did happen in the consciousness of the world right after, basically from the end of the Second World War through the late 1940s. Because one of the weirdest synchronicities is the Nakamadi Library, Dead Sea Scrolls and Roswell all being within the same 18 months of each other. And my personal belief that maybe us experimenting with nuclear weapons and all this stuff, something in the Numinous field has been a little disrupted because of that. And our kind of chaotic experience of the world since then has been a kind of unfolding from the late 1940s. Interestingly, when we were talking, I wrote down a note to myself of saying a cool episode would be really going back that middle ages, John D. Time onward. And if I put the lens on that arc of history, what significant shifts happened in human consciousness at large as it relates to the Numinous. Where were people leaning and then connecting those threads in that way? I think you see where I'm getting with that, but I feel like that would be an interesting exploration. And a whole George Johnnie's theory about Descartes really got me thinking down those lines because I was going like, interesting, interesting. I wonder what other examples like that are there and how do they all connect? It's a fascinating thread. What I feel as though the message of this episode is be careful about who you allow to tell you isn't, isn't religious, right? When people say they're not religious, don't believe them because they are. And also if they say they're not religious, there are ways that they are. And it doesn't mean that that's your job to tell them that, but I'm just saying know that everybody's worshiping something and it behooves you to figure out what that is for yourself. If you want to make fun of supposedly superstitious people in ancient times for, oh, they bubble, they didn't do the thing. So then their cow died. If you want to take that attitude, then I would just say to you, why are you basing your life off of what X Bitcoin percentage or stock market that like we, that's right. You know, in some ways, we have them most religious mentality still, right? That's just its contemporary superstition that we don't call it as so. Yes. Yep. I know is when I was in high school, we called them primitive people. And that's a siaop too. What many people don't know, especially as I've been studying my Celtic ancestry, the word pagan is a slur. Oh, yeah. It's a slur. Yeah. It is litter. Exactly. Someone who has family that also hails from Appalachia, I'm doubly offended by that, which again, arguably is where a lot of Germanic people came. And I think there's correlations there where they practiced ancient cunning folk wisdom and healing. And they were seen as these trashy hillbillies. They think they can blow the fire out of a burn in Appalachia for people that still believe you can blow fire out or you can suck the sickness out of something. The ancients may have actually had ways to do this in ways that we don't understand and we don't like to believe that we like to believe that we know better. But what I feel optimistic with is that now I think we're re-remembering that, but unfortunately millennials fucked it all up when we started selling every divine, yoni healing course and commodifying all of this wisdom to where we need to take accountability. We didn't do what Joseph Campbell did and really tried to disseminate this wisdom and approach it with reverence and really be a little scholarly about it. They don't know from what the things they're doing springs. I find this conversation really important because I find that it is imperative in our current cultural moment for us to more deeply understand the difference between spirituality, religious, and really understanding also what is overt propaganda and having these nuanced conversations because basically what me and Teddy are saying, aren't we above the black and white interpretations by now? I think we should all rise above that and realize that the conversations we need to be having about this stuff are never ending should be in respect of cyclical times. We need to revert back to history, but also understand that history is flawed like a game of spiritual telephone, but be good pattern recognizers and don't fall in to the same shit that has fooled people for a long time since all of this operation of removing the new menace again. We need to take what resonates and then make a new iterative version rather than repeating cycles and then convincing ourselves that we're just getting better and better and better because I think that's the thing we're all believing now is millennials in our heyday of the 90s and early 2000s. I think all of us were riding this high. Yeah. Progress. Everything's good. I don't think anyone believes now that we are on this trajectory to the stars. Everything's getting better. It is not objectively. I laugh because it's one of those you got to laugh. Otherwise you'll cry a moment. We have to figure this out and the conversation has to change around all these things. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that for the most part we have a negative cynical approach to what's going on right now. The future. If I say the idea of I don't know maybe in my lifetime, 50 United States might not be a thing. That is an unthinkable reality for someone like my dad just because of when he grew up on the blog. Yeah. And I'm going to be riding through this a little bit in something soon about these different areas of political violence. It's not just right now. It has happened for her. So on the one hand, hold the reverend of the fact that shit is really bad. And we have to acknowledge that. But to me, the optimistic thing is relating to what you're talking about, whether it's the AI of it all, but literally where we are in the history of humanity on the earth, we actually now have the chance to synthesize and recreate all the wisdom that's ever existed. We could have a renaissance right now. All the signs are there. This is the winter. And after the winter comes the spring. It's only a matter of time. We have seen in play out. There will be a spring. Probably within our lifetimes, many of us, unless you're really, really old listening to this right now, talking to elders right now. I have elders that are very special to me, my own therapist, Jo T who's the most badass woman in the world just casually drops about conversations she had with Terrence McKenna. Are you kidding me? Come on. So cool. And she's sitting with indigenous elders, these indigenous tribes in Colombia. She's really out there doing the good work. And these people may not get to see a better world. They may have to exit this world in this stage and it gets me a little emotional like the people that came up in that 60s, 70s time, like, Estelle and Institute. I don't know why I'm crying, but imagine spending your whole life fighting for that and then having to be part of this subsection of silent heroes in the boomers generation that will die potentially before seeing any of that good work really take hold in a meaningful way, but they did such meaningful work while they were here. And I feel a sense of responsibility in our generation to get our shit together. Yeah, I didn't expect to get emotional guys. But it's not even just sort of like the Estelle in generation, like every generation for the most part has been going it alone on their own. Yeah, that's such a good point too. Yeah. [BLANK_AUDIO] is look at the barto teachings of ancient Tibet. - Yes. - Look at the Populbhu of the Mesoamerica, look at Celtic lore, all of this stuff, and everything since then, they got to the source of so much shit, they figured out so much amazing for them. - They did. - And that, for the most part, was living without a sense that other people were thinking about that in these other traditions. This is where I met my most dual-leap, radical optimism, because we have all of it. - They would dream for the tools and access that we have now. - You know? - It's so true, it's so true, Teddy. I am a perpetual optimist as well. This isn't polyanna thinking. If you wanna be a scientific optimist, look at the cycles, look at the patterns, a renaissance will come, we are on the cusp of it. All the signs are there, people are waking up, the kind of conversation we're having, and it's happening everywhere. There's a lot of this happening, not saying me and Teddy are the only ones. This conversation represents the kind of awakening that's happening now. People are connecting the dots. They're starting to go, huh, scratch their head. And then all of you listening, you're having similar thoughts. I hear it from my patrons. And my lovely patrons are constantly saying, do you listen to this podcast? Oh, I followed this that creator. Micro-creators, I've never heard of any of these people for the most part, or they'll reference one really niche creator that I thought was niche. And they're listening to me and reading that person's work and I'm going, oh, look at that and take heart. And I also encourage you create right about this stuff. If your skill is to paint, if your skill is to podcast, if your skill is to write essays on Substack, create, research this stuff, create about it, and think about it, and take part in the conversation. Because that contributes to this cumulative renaissance. Because what happened during the renaissance time? Explosions of painters and thinkers and creatives bubbling up this numerous stuff as Teddy described. It makes me think of the Gothic to theedrals. We have to create that. And now our medium is technology to do that. It happens to be. And that's what we're doing here right now. And so I'm optimistic because they, quote unquote, whoever they may be, the way that society is incentivized right now, makes it to which the fuckery that we've described in this episode. But it doesn't have to be that way. And that's why revolutions have succeeded is because there's more of us, which is why they have to create these suppressive narratives. But if we break out of those, that's why every fairy tale says, fear is the enemy. So if you face the monster, for example, that bear dream I told you all about, the bear was terrifying. The bear was chasing me in the dream. I was pregnant. I couldn't get away. Then when I did active imagination with that dream the next day, I went through my process and I realized that bear was trying to protect me. It was trying to help me. And the more work I did with it, which it's only meaningful to me, I came out realizing that, oh, what I was running away from was actually my protective force in that. It's deeper than that. And so that's what comes up for me when we talk about these things and why it gets me so sad to see how disempowered and disconnected we've become from that. Because it's our choice, we have to decide to take up the mantle and continue this kind of thinking. It's there. It's all there. You could either scroll on TikTok or you could literally watch 18 hours of Ann Baring do a fucking amazing YouTube series of lectures that have 300 views per video, by the way. And this woman is 100 years old almost and has spent the entire life doing goddess wisdom. And she has 18 hours of herself talking on YouTube. You could just go listen to it. No one's listening. At what point are we going to take responsibility for where our eyeballs are going? Is my question. You literally have the world in your pocket in a way that no people on Earth have ever gotten to have that. Yeah. That gift like we've been-- And when are we going to take the reins and say, no, this is what we want from technology. That's why I feel so passionate about AI right now is I'm going look what happened with social media. We all were sitting there and eating our pudding and being like, cool, all download Facebook. But we didn't realize that shit, we need to get involved in activism around that right now. We need to have other people building in this space right now so that they can't dictate and create things that are literally meant to just siphon off of our intention and make us all hate each other. We want to keep the good parts of this and remove the bad parts. And that's why I'm so passionate now about people building in AI and not doing this do-myristic approach. Do we need to think about the environmental impact and all the questions? Yes. But we shouldn't leave it to the tech bros because look what happens when we do that. We could be on the cusp of a renaissance, but I think that a requirement of that is us being good stewards of this new technology that's come into the-- because you can't put the genies out of the bottle. AI is not going anywhere. So any conversation that starts with don't use AI to me is the stupidest shit that you could ever talk about right now. That's not going to help us. There's a woman in Africa who is trying to use AI to preserve ancient indigenous women's wisdom and give it to young girls who have had their families murdered. Ow. That is so amazing. And we need AI for this stuff. It's just going to become the new base layer of technology. The slop phase will end. I believe that because everyone's going to sniff out the slop or already board of it, then I believe new, beautiful ways can generate from utilizing it that can really help people and empower them. And then we can become pattern recognizers and directors of this intelligence and hopefully use it to solve for some of the stuff we've been talking about here. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I do think that us having these kind of conversations allows us to approach the conversation about AI in a way that other issues in our society should also be approached. I was just thinking about how Joseph Campbell would have loved to be able to use AI to synthesize so much. He had to learn eight languages to read the things that he wanted to read. So-- I couldn't even imagine if he would have had that. The inference is he could have made. But now we can apply that to his work. And so we can carry it forward. Use that technology but be a good steward of it. Don't make slop. Use it to take my work forward. I don't know if you've ever saw it. There's this amazing group of people. They were literally using early forms of AI imagery construction to read old ancient tablets. So I'm saying, guys, the conversation cannot be AI bad. Caveman shit. Look what we can do. We need to come to the table and use this technology in service of reconnecting to myth. And then maybe also connecting some dots that those people weren't able to connect. All of the government tries to say, you guys just aren't ready for the truth. We need to keep some of this stuff secret from you about reality because of national security. It's like, bitch, there were societies of people who didn't even know there were other people. And then they somehow adjusted to that. That they weren't the only people living in this world. I do think that people in our government haven't counted the new menace. They're shorter. Terrified of it. Oh, 100%. This is what Mick Christianity addled brains will do for you when they're running your country. Because then I say Mick Christianity, my friends, because there are very wise Christians out there, very wise. But this Mick Christianity, it's like, we have spiritual earthworm consciousness, typically, running our government peppered with people in the government who know that there are laws to the universe. They've figured certain things out. They know these things are real. They're making decisions at the highest level of our government. And some of it's so high that it's not even in the purview of the president, sadly, or the Congress. And they think of the Congress as these little peons that are little spiritual infants, which honestly they are. But that's the whole problem too. Do you know what I mean? The same reason why you see Sam Altman testifying in Congress, and you could see he's smirking like the Tessure Cat, because he's like, I've got all these grandpa's that can't even fucking change their password. They don't even know what 2FA is. And they're holding me to task. You can just dance circles around them. And it's not even a productive philosophical engagement. Me and you could question Sam Altman way better than our sitting members of Congress, not all of them, but as a group in general, for sure. That is depressing to me as a citizen of this country. I am optimistic about the idea that it might all go away in my lifetime. As him, like, just fucking burn it all down. What do you mean? I think a little bit like I just don't think it's sustainable. And I don't have a political program of what's next. The American experiment is not getting a passing grade at the moment to say the least. And it was the best thing for its time. And all good things have to come to an end. That is the cyclical reality. And the end doesn't always have to be blood, guts, gourd, and drama. We know that as it's working right now or as it's set up, it's literally an absolute shit storm of corruption. And it's not doing anything for anybody. The one thing I would be really concerned about if I'm leading this country, nobody trusts shit anymore. Everyone's trust is so broken and also with AI, even if I see something, I just don't know if it's true. And I inherently don't believe people in positions of power. - That's something I've been laughing about is when people are like, we have to be careful by AI 'cause it's gonna have a video of, Joe Biden or Donald Trump saying something false. And I just wanna say like, (gasps) - Just watch all their actual videos. - I'm just like compared to what, you know? - Yeah, literally. - Maybe that's a little cynical of me, but I just, - I don't think it's cynical because the thing is, look at what we've been dealing with the last few years, is like just seeing a example after example, if it doesn't matter where they come from, what side of the aisle they are hailing from, it's riddled with lies, there's an esoteric government and an exoteric government, and they're all doing different things. And I think all of us are now going, what the fuck about that? And now I'm seeing those things and I've pattern recognized over time, and I've gone, uh-uh, no, I'm not buying it. There's something that doesn't smell right under the hood. I consider myself to be really politically homeless at this point. I yearn for better for our country, but I'm very disillusioned with what I've been watching playing out. I don't even see any options I like right now. - I think being a little bit of a student of history gives you some weird zen because you realize, we have to stop thinking that we live in an unprecedented time. I think that's the kind of thinking, like, you know, we've kind of always been in that. And so I just think that if you can get wisdom outside of your immediate time and place, it actually helps you too. 'Cause even something that happened recently, that a lot of people I know, the Charlie Kirk thing, and whatever it comes after that, they're like, "Oh my God, this is the end." And I kind of want to be like, "Yo, like, Waco, "look at the-- - Yeah. - Can you imagine Waco happening with the way social media is today? That would be-- that was on CNN. - Yeah. - And it still didn't even jar people as much as it should have. - There are probably listeners out there that are like, "What's Waco genuinely?" - And that, if I was living through that, I would have been like, this is the end of everything. This is the craziest thing I've ever seen happen in America. - That's such a good point. You know what, Kate, it's that phrase, there's nothing new under the sun, right? That's a phrase for a reason. Interestingly, that is a very optimistic message to leave people with at this. And I think we can put a pin in it for now. You can't have these conversations in short form. They unwind and they unfold and you have to really go there. And so I think we're ending on an optimistic tone because the fact is, things just don't go into the shitter perpetually. Things fall apart, the winter comes and then the spring does come. But then the thing that sucks is that a lot of us have a hard time enjoying when times are good because we know the other truth. Then there will also be another fall and there will be another winter and on and on and on it goes. And that really is that as above, so below, as within, so without wisdom, that is the perpetual truth. And so in times of winter, what you must do is know that spring is coming. But that also doesn't mean that you stay idle. It means that you have to do what you need to do to get into right relationship with yourself and unpack all the ways that your brain washed and that you might be worshipping things that you didn't know you were worshipping and all of that. That's the best collective service you can do in the winter, in my opinion, and then start creating. From that place, because there has never been a time before that you can really have your voice heard. I get in the tens of thousands of downloads in a month, some months, there's 100,000 people listening to this in one month. That blows my mind because four years ago, I was sitting in front of a microphone going, "No one's going to listen to this." And I have a small amount of downloads to think about the people that listen to bigger podcasts in me. But you, person out there listening with diligence and over time, you can speak out about these things and take part in that conversation. It's not that that's what everyone should do. And also go out there and seek out people that are talking about these things so that you don't feel so isolated and alone in your thinking. We are not saying there's any answers here. Me and you are going, "We don't know. We don't know." And I'm not special. No. Exactly. And we don't believe we have it figured out in any better way. But we do know that people that are having conversations just like this, there are people out there that would say, "You're crazy." And that's tragic because if that's the baseline, that's really scary because think about in the best times in history, the salons, the philosophers talking and thinking and ideating and not caring if something sounds a little bit crazy. We need to bring that back. Stop being so boring and being little hall monitors to each other. We need to bring back the renaissance taking responsibility for where our eyeballs go. We know by now. Tech, overlords, we know what their incentives are. So fight back on that. Act as if you know that instead of being like, "When, when, the algorithm?" Okay, the algorithm's there. Let's figure out how to take responsibility for our eyeballs and our inner world. And I think that's very revolutionary right now. Mm-hmm. Weirdly. You can have all the mysticism of the world up to this point. Yeah. In a way that no one ever has. And to me, that, please use that. Yes, exactly. Empower yourself with it. It's sitting there. It's not going to download itself into your brain, you know? Hey, maybe in five years it will. We don't know. But also the whole pursuit of it, the subconscious message that you send to your psyche or higher self, your diamond, whatever you want to call it, when you go down that rabbit hole and start that search, it does something, the actual intentional diving in to these types of conversations and material, adjacent to mythology and all that stuff. It does something transformative to your psyche. So the cool part is, don't have to go, what should I do? What steps can I take? Stop. That's a product of the enlightenment. I'm not saying linear thinking isn't good. But with this stuff, just dive in and have fun. And start reading what calls to you and trusting that there's a certain kind of transformative process at work when you do those things. Yeah, I mean, you want to talk about revolutionary anti-capitalist, whatever. Just getting practicality out of your head. That's right. That's right. You know, through reading like Julian of Norwich talking about like Jesus' breast milk, that, I mean, that'll-- There's nothing practical when she's saying in there. But-- Right. You'll-- something will happen to you. And there's some shit out there. I bet some of you Christians didn't know about that writing. We'll just leave that one just dangling there and there for you to pick up where we left off. Mystics think in this way. It's the allegory. And you actually approaching this stuff, what does that mean? What is it? You just read it. And then you let it be. And some say that even if you don't know what it means, that it does its work on you. And not in a creepy way when you're reading these kinds of texts. It's like you read a mystical text, like the cloud of unknowing, for example. I read that. And when I was reading it, like sometimes, you know when you're at school and you're like, fuck, I've been reading this. But now if I had to say it back, now I'm going to go read that paragraph again. Do it again. I don't understand. I had to learn how to read differently, because I just read it. And I just continue to let my eyes glaze over the page. And if I skip some words even sometimes, like it is, but it's that act of training yourself to read symbolically and intuitively rather than for understanding and practical application. Paradox is a potion. Yes. Vax. Well, Teddy, this was brilliant. Thank you for being here. And listeners-- Thank you for having me. Teddy has a sub-stack now, which he has recently started. And if you want to connect with Teddy, or follow his work and hear more from him, subscribe to his sub-stack, which I will link in the episode description. Teddy, do you have any final parting words for the listeners? I will just say thank you for found gratitude, because you've made it this far in the episode. Thank you. I'm really grateful for spending time with my weird brain, and Molly's. The sub-stack thing has been fun. I needed you to kick me in the Tush with that. I think it'll be a little-- Just the lightest of Tush kicks. Yeah. I think there will be some things for my dissertation reconfigured in a more fun way. Some of it's the continuation of my Instagram, just throwing things at the wall together, and sometimes fun secretities happen from art and works together. Yeah. And I am doing this extended Heroes Journey tarot thing that I'm calling a tarot's journey with this one deck, maybe every other post. It is still very much a work in progress, but I am working on a creative consulting service that I will offer if you need. Research on nithic esoteric things for a creative project. I have a website for that now. And also he'll be back on the podcast more, folks, so this is not a one-time thing. I will be linking to all of that stuff in the episode description so you all can connect with and find Teddy. But Teddy, thank you for being here and getting weird with me and the listeners. Thank you, Molly. What a-- Wow, we did a we did a broken really we really did we really fucking did well Listeners if you listen to this whole thing throw a comment in Spotify if that's where you're listening to and show Teddy some Love show Teddy some love on patreon members. We'd love to hear what you think about the episode and Regardless, I'm still gonna have him back because he's my friend and I enjoyed it So I hope you all enjoyed it and we will talk to you on the next one. Thanks Teddy. Thank you Molly All right everyone. I hope you enjoyed that I just love Teddy so much and I'm so grateful to him for coming to this episode with so much preparation and we really did just follow the thread wherever it let us I Hope that it gave you lots of mythopoetic esoteric Things to chew on and I'll absolutely be having him back on the podcast Please don't forget to subscribe to Teddy's sub stack the link is in the episode description I know that he would appreciate it so much. He's just started out on this endeavor So you can support him doing really really good work. He's a brilliant brilliant human being as you've just heard and As always if you loved this conversation and you're not yet subscribing the best way that you can support my work is to follow the Podcast on the player that you're listening to right now and that way you will receive all my new episodes as soon as they drop You can also go to back from the borderline.com where you can subscribe to my patreon where there are Hundreds of hours of additional bonus content episodes Add free and one of those is me and Teddy's initial conversation where he talks about his Time in seminary how he left seminary and then how he got into all of this stuff that he studies It's a really good conversation. So I'll be linking that into the episode description as well So thank you for being here with me. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and check out that initial conversation with Teddy and I You can even listen to the first ten episodes for free before deciding to dive in all the way. So You what do you have to lose just check it out? All right, with that I will love you and I'll leave you and I'll see you right back here next time But as always remember anyone even you can come back from the borderline Long-term listeners of this podcast know that I've spent the last five years talking about the dark Now I've built a flashlight and it's called moods It's an instrument for serious private inner work designed to dismantle your excuses and never inflate your ego or assume the role of a Psycho-phantic companion and the wait list is finally live Access is granted in the exact order you sign up lock in your spot now at moods.world Welcome to the new era of inner work