#067 What is Awakening Really

A must-listen for anyone interested in how the stories we tell shape the lives we lead and the societies we create. Whether you're looking to better understand your own place in the world or seeking ways to impact the broader societal narrative, this discussion will provide valuable insights and practical tools for navigating the complex interplay between myth and reality.

This episode is a recording of a talk I delivered at The Walled Garden Philosophical Society in August 2024, in which I explore:

• The Influence of Historical Myths on Modern Identity: How do ancient stories and cultural narratives continue to shape our beliefs and behaviours? We uncover the threads connecting past mythologies to current societal norms and personal identities.
• Authenticity in the Age of Social Media: In a world dominated by digital personas, how can we reclaim our true selves? We discuss the challenges of maintaining authenticity when online platforms encourage conformity.
• Awakening to Personal Agency: What does it mean to 'awaken' in a culture steeped in preconceived narratives? We contemplate the process of recognizing and asserting our individual sovereignty within the emergent tapestry of societal roles and myths.
• Navigating Cultural and Psychological Landscapes: How can we help ourselves and others navigate complex cultural narratives? This conversation provides insights for those guiding others through the labyrinth of societal expectations and self-discovery.

Transcript

Constructs of Shared Consciousness - Reclaiming Identity in the Age of Myth, Media, and Spirituality
[00:00:00] Yeah, sure. So I don't know if, uh, I got, I got a question or a comment. I'll start with the comment. I don't know if you've come across Brian Murarescu's work on Christianity and Psychedelics. 
I interviewed him on the show, he's got a really interesting book that immortality key talking about the psychedelic origins of Christianity and through a contact of his, he actually got into the Vatican vaults to research this sort of stuff. And in the Vatican [00:01:00] vaults, he was trying to think of what he could search to quickly come across something that might lead him down that trail.
And he searched witches. And it's his understanding based on what he found in there that, uh, basically the, the combinations of substances that led to some of those early enlightening visions and things like that of the early Christians in those ceremonies were carried through female lines. So the, the mother would pass on these recipes to the daughter.
Metrilineal traditions, they call it. That's it, metrilineal traditions, yeah. Um, and so So much of the witch hunts, according to his understanding, was actually just the Christian church trying to stamp out all of these people who were passing on Well, ceremonial. It's to stem the matrilineal lineage, [00:02:00] yes.
Hmm. So there's, there's, um, I can't really comment on that, but we can comment more essentially and more archetypally on the entire project. So, One really needs to understand that, um, it is really, really helpful to understand, um, Christianity as a mythos. So it might be more complex and might be more integrated into politics and, um, the, the, the way we think.
Uh, and then it's, it's, it's hard for us to, um, associate it on an equal footing with Norse mythology or, but if we begin there. Right, because any one of those mythos could have been made more complex and integrated into society, and sometimes they were, you know. We also normalize the model that we have, and the model is fundamentally,[00:03:00] 
you need to also understand religion and worldviews like this. There were mythologies that came before that were more organized. in something that would be recognizable as a religion. So there was an aspect of Greek mythology, for example, which was just, you know, folk tales and, and little practices, but there was sections of it that were more organized by with, you know, the temple of Apollo or the, or the temple of, um, Poseidon, where there were certain priests that practice certain rites on certain days, and they were pandits and experts on certain things.
Now that's more akin to the, um, model of the Indian subcontinent. where a lot of our language and influence came from. That's why it's called Proto Indo European roots and languages. And there's even a similarity between the Hindu gods and the Greek gods. And then, you know, [00:04:00] between the Norse gods as well, they've got like a similar model, but it wasn't the only kind of model that was floating about.
So the dominant cultures in the area were the Phoenicians.
And the Mesopotamia and their inheritance from like the Babylonians, Mesopotamians, um, Akkadians, Sumerians, and they tended to have something that was more recognizable or similar to Egyptian gods and goddesses. So cities. would have a, um, a God. And, you know, if there was war or a commercial battle between two cities and the, and, you know, the one fell into pestilence and ruin, the city would go and attack that city, go and take their God from their center of town or from their temple, and then go take it back to their own compound or their own [00:05:00] temple to say, ha ha, look at what because To that psyche, the, the, the city was named often for the God, and then the God, the temple was at the heart of the city, and the king was always assigned rulership under the aegis of divine rule.
That was the premise. The God rules by divine power. And so, There's a hierarchy of power, of order, of say so, you know. What really keeps people in line is not only food and money and spears and walls, it's very much also a belief that, um, The king deserves to sit on that throne. He's the one that maintains, uh, uh, the image of divine order here on earth.
That's why cities were [00:06:00] designed according to how they thought the divine was organized. So when one city knocked the other one over and took their, their totem back to their, um, citadel, it was deeply psychological as well. But. Just think of the consequence of invasion or conquest, because it's not just the government that changes or coins that change, or the guy that sits on the throne that changes.
It's a undermining of your whole, this is the, just think about the way Americans are behaving about their political heroes. They are deifying these people. And so if the one gets toppled, it's not an, uh, a situation they can easily get their, their heads and their hearts around because it also, um, disenfranchises [00:07:00] their, um, belief that their God is the top guy.
So there's, there's that happening all the time. Now,
there were examples like Zoroastrianism, um, which had a single god and had good and evil battling it out, which was almost a prototype of Christianity. And then you had this kind of pantheistic model, and the turning point, the fulcrum of that pantheistic model, the main one that we know about was the Jewish people had been in Egypt.
Assumedly under some form of enslavement, were then liberated, travelled the Sinai Desert for 40 years, and went towards the promised land. [00:08:00] If you take an aerial drone and you fly over the Sinai desert, you can drive across it in a couple, in a day. You know, you, it takes an effort to wander it for 40 years.
And if you fly towards where, um, Jerusalem and Judea and everything were, there's nothing visually that looks like a promised land. So this is all metaphor, obviously, right? But herein emerges this notion of covenant, wherein, um, one God focuses his head up above the others and says, I'm the God of your forefathers.
Like, you've got to bring me back to life, basically. You've got to worship only me. And much of the Old Testament is like, um, how it looks when there's a few false starts. As soon as Moses pops away, he comes back down the mountain and they've got a snake on a stick, or they've got a golden calf, or, [00:09:00] um, you know, then he has to kind of threaten them to pull them in line and then they have to still battle their way there.
And then there's a battle of priests because the priests of Baal are throwing down and doing some magic. And then their priests have to come and show that their God's the most important. It's a very common trope in the area. Right. Which is all just folded in. But what emerges then is the first and the second temple and this notion of covenant.
this, it's like a contract, right? I'll sign on this side an X, and then you sign on that side an X, and then in between these two Xs on the contract is the covenant. And that's basically the, the heart of the Jewish faith. And then the Romans come along with a model of religion that's very much similar to the Greeks, but Their religion is in the backwater a little bit and what they really, they believe in the gods, but [00:10:00] what they're most focused on is the deification of their own emperors or their own leadership, you know, their own generals, and that becomes the politics of this very much an echo to America going on here.
And so what is dividing America at the moment,
a common system of belief, because you can't implant your guy because somebody else. The governor of a neighboring state who's bringing in lots of revenue, you know, he suddenly thinks something else. So what, um, Justinian does is he decides, no, this is not going to work. Um, and they advocate for a Catholos.
a general faith. And how this begins is through the actions of the Flavian emperors. [00:11:00] Um, Vespasian keeps having to put down these revolts in Judea. And the reason that the, the Jewish people amongst all of the other provinces in the Roman empire are so resistant to rule is because the Romans are still following like a standard model that says when we conquer you basically our emperor is deified and our rules and our laws and all of your laws and things sort of are subverted by by our rule and of course this can't wash with the Jewish Psyche, who have written a covenant.
They've, this is a very personal agreement that cannot be broken, that's edified by the temple, you know, and they're carrying this, this promise that they're going to rebuild the [00:12:00] temple and a, um, a Messiah will come. Now, the Jewish notion of a Messiah is not a gentle soul. It's much more akin to the idea of, um, how Islam perceived Uh, a holy cleansing or holy rectification, you know, by fire and sword sort of a thing.
But the Romans are great propagandists. So one of the things that they do is they go and look through the, the Jewish story, the Jewish mythos, and they find this character, Joshua, and then they retrofit The journey of Joshua and then they send Vespasian son the Emperor's son Titus to Judea to basically walk in the [00:13:00] footsteps and have his journey chronicled
and then they Rewrite a story. There's a guy called Josephus He was a lackey of the the Flavians the Flavian was the dynasty in Rome And he writes and issues and releases this propaganda in Judea. And the nature of the propaganda is that the Messiah has actually come, and they draw all of these accounts, and a lot of the accounts of Jesus mirror the account of Joshua.
And then they affix him to the, the motif or the archetype of this Messiah, but they change his whole tune and they position the most faithful, the most ardent, the most resistant to change [00:14:00] as the ones who actually are the cause of the Son of God's undoing. They position the Jews and their most fervent adherence.
and resistant adherents. They actually become the baddies in the story. And then the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're written between 100 and 400 years after Jesus is supposed to have been living.
And the rest of the New Testament is assembled via ecumenical committee in Rome.
Many of which are the book of acts and the letters to the Galatians, the Philippians, the Corinthians, so [00:15:00] on all the major cities of the area. And what we discover then is that all the first saints were, um, in the same way that when, you know, Donald Trump, for example, came in to office the first time, all of his ministry.
was just cronies and lackeys and right now imagine you didn't have the internet back then and suddenly these people became and were deified as saints and then what also happened is the roman empire was struggling to maintain order because you couldn't send goods from one end of the Roman Empire to the other, but every little principality and province would demand their own coinage, their own taxes, their own levies, their own tolls, their own, and there was, there wasn't, there wasn't a Pax Romana that you could speak of.
the state of, of peace. [00:16:00] So they established, um, I think it was in Antioch, they established the first, and I'll remember this in a minute, the first attempt, they get all these religious leaders together and they establish the first attempt and say, all right, you've got to come up with something here, a Catholos, a general religion, a something that's going to neutralize.
All of this and they say it can't be done and give them a period of time comes back and they say it can't be done. So he asks for the most fervent, um, exponents, the ones who are saying Hinduism cannot be ameliorated. Um, the, the, the Egyptian belief system cannot be folded into this. Um, and he lops their heads off in front of everybody else and he says to the rest, how about now?
And they say, give us a year, you know, now some of this is allegory, [00:17:00] obviously, but then we look at the, we look at the evidences. So, we know that the Jewish faith, there's no way they're going to come along without their book, right? There you go, there's your foundation. That's the first half of the Bible.
Then we come along with a Jesus the Christ. Chris is an Egyptian word. meaning resurrection or resurrected body.
The mother Mary is part of a paganistic belief system, the matrilineal line. Well, we've got to snip that right off and make her immaculate.
We've got to stem the entire, um, thread of the divine feminine because we can't be having that in the Roman emperor. [00:18:00] This is a patriarchal, the emperor's on top. Women must know their place. Mary is just this unachievable, unattainable, perfect, ideal of a woman. The Trinity is something that's very precious to the Hindu faith, Shiva.
And the Zoroastrians have a god called Mitra, or the Mithraics rather, have a god called Mitra, which is born from rock of a virgin.
which is where we get Simon called Peter, Petros, the rock of the church. Now I'm just pulling out the examples I can think of in my head. Odin is pierced in the side by a spear while he hangs on the tree to gain his knowledge and cries out, it is done. You know, that's in the Norse Eddas, right? And here we have Jesus on the cross pierced by the [00:19:00] spear of Longinus crying out to his father.
And I've got dozens of these examples. of how the mythos and ideology of other belief systems and religions were drawn into Christianity to deify. And by the time Constantinople comes along, the religion is not only formalized, it's enforced at the end of a sword. And further to that, there are two strains of Christianity that that were viably considered.
The one which, if you do the research, you will find was violently put down. So these were the Essenes. Um, it was more of a Gnostic sect that didn't believe in any intermediary or any church. And it was all about direct relationship with God by [00:20:00] the example. of a holy teacher, like a Jesus, like a Buddha.
And that was thoroughly squashed, because that didn't lend itself to any form of control. And so the other sect was really devised by priests. And what a priest like to do, they like to quibble over minutiae, gather money, be intermediaries between people in God. And this is a form of control. Now, we wouldn't have survived as a species, and been able to populate the globe without these monotheistic religions as the base operating system.
But one wonders what might have happened if some of those other mythos systems survived. And if we can look at the Christian mythos like that and all the infusions from these other [00:21:00] mythos systems and, um, traditions and unpick it, you know, because by the same token, then, You had millions of people living in dozens of countries and kingdoms across Europe, and Christianity wasn't just like, oh, there you go, there's Christianity.
It went through multiple challenges, changes, updates, iterations. And you must remember, this is more like a cultural operating system that we inherit. Um, from parents to children, also all mythos is our cultural operating system. The American mythos is a, is a cultural operating system, but look at what happens with Christianity.
So
one example is the Romans come to Britain and then they, they leave [00:22:00] and Britain itself is the result of Celtic peoples living there being displaced. Um, by invading Saxons from where Germany and, um, Holland and part of France is today, who were in turn displaced by Goths. Slavs and people migrating from the east to the west.
So as they migrate from central Asia into Europe, they push out the people that are there. And some of the people move south and north and east and west. And some of them move into, into Britain. And some of the Britons actually move to the other end of Europe. They, and they establish Brittany, which is the last Celtic colony in France.
Right. And that then this is what the Arthurian legends are about. They're about the, [00:23:00] the, um, the, the last vestiges of pure Celtic, um, Britons with their connections with their gods and their gods being displaced and killed by the, the, the, the Saxons bringing their gods in, whilst at the same time, um, Christianity getting a foothold.
in the island. So it's this three way battle of belief systems, right? Like, in other words, England as an enterprise is going to continue, but it's got three different, um, factions or versions of what the dominating operating system is going to be in 100 years or 200 years. So eventually the Saxons push the The Britons into where Wales is today.
Scotland remains Celtic and Ireland remains Celtic. And a little tiny little edge of England called Cornwall, Curnow at the time [00:24:00] remains Celtic, but the rest of it is Saxon.
You know, and now this is after the, the Romans have come and gone. So they were the first of all, the Britons that were there with their gods. Then the Romans come in there and fucking trounce everything. And then they bring their priests and their things through there at the same time. Then because of what happens in Rome, the Romans leave, then there's this vacuum of power, which then the Saxons with their North gods come in and overtake.
But this melting pot. This looseness allows Christianity, because it's binding and cohesive and coherent, it allows Christianity to take a foothold. Because people are still psychologically bowing the cap to Rome, who was so unbelievably powerful and left, like, all these incredible buildings, these statues, there's a visible representation of divinity and [00:25:00] power there, and Um, conversion happens on the island so that later on when the Danes attack, England is already, uh, a Saxon country called the Anglo Saxons, right?
There, there are Germanic peoples that have become their own sort of thing and Christianity is, uh, uh, a main operating system, but Christianity starts capitulating because all the bowing and kneeling doesn't really have an answer for the religious operating system of the Norsemen who are coming in who are happy to die at the edge of a sword as long as they're holding their own, and they're coming there with a vision of legacy and future for their own people, and they're happy to lop heads off and do all sorts of crazy shit.
Violent torture, it's taking slaves because it's in their culture. So now you've got another clash of operating systems. And the only way England [00:26:00] survives this is by taking on a sort of update from the, the invading Danes, they become more war like. more pugilistic, more, they build these conventions called boroughs, which is, it's a city with a walled fence around it.
And at any point in time, the Earl or the which reports to the king can raise an army. and bring them all with inside that and then send message. And so even when the Danes attack, they find it hard to eventually knock over the updated, um, England and England survives with that update to their operating system.
So that later on when Christianity and Catholicism spread all over Europe, what would make the English go? Yeah, we'll come along. They won't because they've had the [00:27:00] pugilistic our way. We'll never bend. We're going to survive until the end. It becomes like an apotheosis to them, which is why it's such an easy switch for them to create their own Anglican faith because.
It's already in the mix for them, right? And now you understand how Christianity and how every religion actually always bends to the cultural operating system of the people on which it's running. Because the first crusade might have happened in the Holy Land, but the second, uh, Really, and it was just a series of crusades, but what no one ever speaks about is the crusade that the Catholic Church ran across Europe, stamping out what they called heresies.
In other words, different versions of Christianity, which wouldn't bow to the Pope.[00:28:00] 
And so what you had in France, in the Occident, Um, L'Occitane and, um, the, the region of the Cathars is these Gnostic sects of Christians that had established this very mystical form of Christianity that had rejected the rigors and the piety and the, um, bureaucracy and the control of the church. And we might have had a very, very different version of that, um, religion today, but that was stamped out again by the Catholic Church.
Now, none of this is historically precise, but the story all remains true. I've not invented a story here. So now we look at this, it's not a single homogenous, um, operating system. And in fact, If you go and, if you go through America and you ask them [00:29:00] about heaven or what happens after you die, you go to heaven.
Now, 8 out of 10 people that identify vaguely as humanistic or Christian will tell you that. But in the Bible, it doesn't actually say that you go to heaven. It says you die and then you wait for the day of rapture, then you're called up, then you're judged, then you'll be determined when heaven, when, when the new Jerusalem and the new earth is created, then, uh, you know, only select pure souls will go to heaven.
And then the condition even changes later to say only if you've accepted, um, the Messiah, the Son, as your, um, as your intermediary with God. So, we realize then that our notions of divinity and of how we belong to that divinity, partially are, um, brokered by intermediaries and churches and religions, but partially also just brokered by [00:30:00] Imprecision, because they basically put tropes together also got infused into those tropes were Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Christmas trees and now it's all this unmitigated mess and now you're trying to make a society a cohesive society.
where one group is absolutely adamant that you have to use as your bedrock a operating system which they have filtered down and distributed into at least 30, 000 versions of Dancing with Snakes, you know, some of them. And, Some of them are like singing and clapping in, in, in megachurches, it's not integratable in even of itself.
And then that proponent thinks that [00:31:00] they're joined unilaterally on articles of faith. They just haven't begun to debate them yet
with another group that marginally agree with it, but couldn't actually put together any of the, the key points, which would make them qualify for Um, what do you call it? Like the afterlife or, you know, getting a ticket on the day of judgment. And then another third again, which thinks it's a complete load of hooey and then other religions and thought streams and mythos and then the commercial, um, mythos of, you know, Santa Claus, Thanksgiving, Dios de los Muertos, and all of the other infusions.
Of course, this can't cohere anymore.[00:32:00] 
But what you're really looking at is this idea of syncretism about how cultural things stick in the fabric in one way. And even if you unpick the fabric and realign the threads, or you force or you paint a certain pattern over the threads, there is something about the way the threads are woven together.
That retains a picture or an image or a, or a current or a, and, but it has effects that run both ways. So first of all, if you go to different countries in the world that are Christian and you look at their icons, you'll notice that in the Philippines, Jesus looks Filipino. In South America, he looks like a South American.
In Europe, he looks like a blonde white boy in, you know, and so on and so on. And so, and it's not, and you can see this when you travel to Bali as well. [00:33:00] So Bali is part of Indonesia and Indonesia is a Muslim country, but Bali is a Hindu state. And so all over the island, Um, our villages in every single village, there's Hindu temples, they're all laid out in a similar way.
But you can, if you know anything about Hinduism, you can start recognizing deities, but they all look a little bit different. So it takes actually some help. Who is this guy? Who's that guy? And then you look at it and something's off and something's missing. But of course, they're all shaped in the likeness of the local people.
So they don't look like the Indian gods who all have aquiline features and you know, pristine jawbones and are tall and beautiful and airbrushed and all the rest of it. And if you go to South India and Sri Lanka, they look different. And if you go to Bali, they look like Balinese people. And the Balinese people are practicing Hinduism very integrated into their [00:34:00] culture.
And they, they're quite devout and they're not disingenuous about it. So what it means is, is that How would we have spread an idea? All the ideas would have been spread virtually and the original icon would have just been said, this is the icon, this is the guy, and then they would have made their likeness, but people make likenesses out of their imaginations.
And out of their heads, all statues of all gods, all icons were either copied from other icons, artwork, in other words, or they were borrowed from the essence of the sculptors or the person who commissioned the artwork. And don't we know that every single chief or King or Lord or something always wanted the likeness also to resemble his uncle or his father or his so and so.
And so. Religion really runs on an operating system, as all mythos do, on an operating system of human [00:35:00] beings, held in place by anchors of articles of faith, canons of scripture with descriptions in them, icons like statues and arrangements and temples and things like that, and then Practices and traditions, including pujas, prayers, recitations, etc.
Those four mediums are so very different, so very different. And the, and so if you get everybody of a faith together to start swapping notes, you'll suddenly realize that there's very little coherence because the way each of us interpret Our ideas of things or even the words or meanings like if you take a poll of Non When I say non educated Christians, I don't mean they have no education I mean, they don't have education in [00:36:00] the in the the liturgies and the details and the fact They will not give you a clear account of what is or isn't actually expected or what the actual deal is going to be.
And yet they will die and believe they're going to heaven or that the cats have gone to heaven or that their uncle has gone to heaven or that. And a lot of people, the source of their comfort is saying, don't worry, she's gone to heaven. Subscribing to the, the broad strokes of the faith, which actually says something quite different.
Whilst happily believing it with no contradiction and no disingenuousness and no challenge. So what it really all points to is the fact that all of our religions and mythologies It's easier to look at them as mythologies, even if you really hold onto one religion or the other. [00:37:00] To understand the relationship between people and their religion and their gods, it's helpful to understand them as mythologies.
And it's helpful to understand that all of our notions of the gods, like Zeus and Thor and Hanuman, that these are, they live exclusively, exclusively. exclusively in the hearts and minds and the psyches of people, of people. So that means gods die and gods must be replaced. Now imagine what would have happened to the Viking psyche, holding their gods as they did.
And then, but the reality is that there's a These are violent warlike, taking names, kicking ass, chewing gum, [00:38:00] and these are meek, robe wearing, kneeling bowers. How does your psyche flip from one to the other? There must be a story that carries you from A to B. And so we get the story.
And in a similar way, how could you maintain the veracity of your belief in the gods? If the gods maintain order in Greece, the, the mountain of Olympus is like this eternal pinnacle in the middle of Greece. It proves that Greece is the heart of the world. It proves that this is where the gods live and all of the order that you see around you is sustained by that order.
Eventually when Greece as a city state fails, well, not as a city state, as a nation. of city states effectively fails. There is no way that religion can be persisted in the face of Roman occupation. [00:39:00] Do you understand?
So it's amazing, first of all, that all of these wonderful stories have survived, but no one's looking at the effect of the human psyche individually and collectively now. What it looks like when you're trying to run multiple, multiple operating systems over the other, if you call them all mythologies. We can make room for them.
If you're saying one of these mythologies is more true than the rest, especially considering how imprecisely we are keeping them, because remember what that needed, it needed familiarity with the literature, it needed buildings, icons, statues, visual reminders, which is why many of us wear little trinkets and things around our neck, so we can form an anchor and a connection and keep it fresh.
It needs traditions, In other words, [00:40:00] a living form of practice and engagement. We have none of those things. We have none of those things. Our traditions have become commercial. Our icons are, they're non uniform. And our relationship with the, the scriptures and the details is, is vague and nonspecific and contradictory.
There's, um, 35, 000 different sects or schools or, um, derivations of Christianity today. 35, 000. Um, which will claim that they agree. But when you get right down to it, we realize that, you know, whatever they disagree on, they disagree on quite adamantly and violently, otherwise they wouldn't have made fractures.
But, um, here we, we start playing with. the, [00:41:00] the nature of the human operating system and why mythos is such a wonderful vehicle, because we've got all of this, um, these little snippets of code and pictures and stories and ideas and archetypes and gods, and we need to bring them all together. What we need to start, first of all, becoming more conversant in this language again, you know, I even forget how we got onto this.
We were talking about, um, how did we get onto this, which is leading back to EU. Right, right, right, right, right, right. And so, you know, just imagine what it did to the psyche of, you know, Um, the peoples living in Europe that had largely had paganistic beliefs with, um, the idea of a divine feminine was the mother, was nature, [00:42:00] was, um, this, just think about how the Greeks used to look at it.
So we look at the feminine through the lens of Greek mythology. So the first mother that appears is Gaia, mother earth. You know, who gives birth to all of the Titans, but also all of the monsters.
And somehow there's a separate realm. Her sibling is called Tartarus, which is the underworld, right? And some of her children are banished to the underworld. And then the next feminine expressions we get are some of these feminine deities, like Knight, Nyx is a feminine deity, and some of the other scary ones are feminine as well, but she gives birth to daughters.
and sons and one of those pairing are Kronos and Rhea [00:43:00] who have children and Kronos is Saturn and have children and those children Kronos swallows them all and Rhea is associated with excuse me with fertility, excuse me,
I came back from my holiday with a chest infection so Rhea is associated with fertility. And so she has all these, um, uh, equal number of daughters and sons and they automatically pair up and they have children in turn. And the most, um, noteworthy are the children of Rhea and Kronos, which become Hades, Hestia, Demeter, um, Hera, Poseidon, and Zeus.
And Kronos, which means time, [00:44:00] one of his expressions is the devouring nature of time, you know, the, the dominating nature of time with his enormous scythe, his sickle, he devours all of his children, but Rhea spirits away one of them and gives him a stone instead. And he, you know, and he swallows the stone and she takes Zeus away and hides him on an island.
And Zeus is suckled by a goat, Almathea, and one of the acts that Zeus does, because he's made so strong by this goat milk, this, this, um, this is no ordinary goat, you know, it's one of those primal archetypal beings, is he pulls on her horn the one day, and it breaks off, and this becomes the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, the horn of [00:45:00] abundance.
Now, Rachel in the Bible means you, E W E, and she's seen as a maternal figure of the nations.
Very interesting.
They then, um, with a mentor, another feminine mentor, so Rhea, the goddess, this titan of fertility, has Zea suckled by a goat, and there's a sea nymph or sea deity called which, um, is very wise, one of the wisest beings. Mentors, Zeus, and right at the end, um, Zeus puts together an alliance. of gods and deposes his father and gives him an [00:46:00] emetic.
Um, Rhea gives her husband an emetic and he vomits up the stone and all of Zeus siblings and Zeus makes an alliance out of those siblings plus some of the the titans that defect and they depose the old order and set up the new order. And what that story actually is, if you pay close attention and you get like a 20 foot view, is the emergence of the human psyche.
So first of all, all there is, is, you know, this and that. There's Gaia, space time, and then there's The underworld, which is, you know, the subconscious and the unknown. And then out of that emerge these elemental titanic forces, which we can barely understand their motives and all the rest of it, and they just devour everything up or they just, it's just this titanic battle.
And then [00:47:00] the gods emerge, an order is established, and then this gives way to the age of heroes. And you can see what you're really tracking is the emergence and maturation of the human psyche, the human psychology, making sense of how it orders the world. And how would it order the world? The first thing a psyche does is, and this is what's happening in the world right now, This is what's happening in the world right now.
Just consider the deranging impact of the internet, of social media.
It's deranging.
There is a new cycle with alarm and drama happening so quickly that Even if you start getting into the rabbit hole of one issue, which comes up before the new cycle has managed to put a lid on that, but [00:48:00] there's five other heads like a Hydra that have sprung up no matter which head you cut off another five or seven and grow in its place.
And it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and tomorrow it will be bigger. There's more content created since we began this call than you can ever read in a lifetime. And that content, not any of it is worthy. It's photographs of cats, it's arguments, it's pictures of breakfasts, it's people posing in the gym.
It's just chaos. It's pure chaos. Now remember, the Greek myth was
chaos comes from a Greek word meaning a more, a void, an open mouth that stretches forever, out of which gets born chaos. Gaia and Tartarus.
Simon's leaving on that note, said something he didn't like.[00:49:00] 
I'll be back. I'm still listening. No worries.
And so we have social media at the moment, which is really, um, a form of control that's so complete and so insidious, and it operates on two levels. In the one level, it, it is a platform that is intelligently designed to optimize user engagement at once people engaged. doesn't really know what people are, but its goal is to keep people engaged.
And one of the surest ways that it's discovered to keep people engaged is to make them emotionally agitated. Because especially if they're emotionally agitated, they want to be heard, so they vomit out their feelings. And this emotionally agitates other people. who want their [00:50:00] feelings heard, and then they emotionally agitate each other, for which there now becomes connections of hatred, blame, um, anger directed at people.
And so then the swords and the stones fling, and you don't have to add much, you just add a bit of news. And every time you add news into this ecosystem, a new shudder of trembling and pain and agitation just ripples through it and fires and crossfires and goes in every single direction. And the, the trouble that we added in, during COVID has still not worked its way out.
We still don't have an answer. We, we used to have an answer about how we felt about the, the, the Holocaust. And now we're doubting that answer. So even things that we thought [00:51:00] we had all agreed on and resolved, now we're not so sure about anymore. Maybe that was a lie too. And then you throw in aliens and Conspiracy theories and, um, the Russian danger and the war in Iran, and then the Palestine versus Israel thing, and then global warming, and then a new disease, and then Taylor Swift's new album, and then the super bowl, and then the elections, and then you just chaos.
Absolute chaos. So that's the one form of chaos and control. The emotional capture and the mental derangement with too much information that's too troubling, on which no one can con, can cohere. It's moving and changing too fast. It's the definition of chaos. It's the definition of chaos. And the other system of control is very, very secret.
Very, very clever. So when we interact with each other [00:52:00] here on the screen, I'm looking at your eyes, I'm looking at your body language, I'm looking at your visual cues, and we're saying a lot to each other that we're not saying, but we've developed millions of years of evolutionary biology and integrated human psychology, that we can read very subtle cues on each other's bodies.
And I'm speaking very slow and steady. And we've got a civil arrangement to listen to each other. We've got a convention we developed where I'm giving a lecture or a talk or a class about mythos and mythology. And then also on some level, what I'm saying is of interest to you when you're sticking around.
But what happens if You hire the brightest behavioral scientists and neuropsychologists and you get them to train a computer. With unlimited processing [00:53:00] power, unlimited access to data and storage and you train it to reverse engineer these kind of visual subtle cues and not just visual and subtle cues but little hints that it can extrapolate out of when somebody uses this word rather than that word these triggering words and it's
for you and I to you. Reverse engineer all the subtleties of communication and cues that are passing between us would actually rob us of the ability to communicate effectively because it's so much minutiae and detail that is what we call metadata, that it would swamp what we're actually trying to talk about.
Now, what happens if there was a machine that was so good at reading that, predicting it, um, curating it, uh, lifting certain bits up, and then entrained An entire population of [00:54:00] close on 8 billion people. Let's call it 5 billion people that are on the internet, 5 billion people, not all speaking English, but in training them to styles and forms of exchange and communication, which was optimal for the capture and retention of energy disregarding the any exchange of substance.
So if substance exchange is not a metric and not a factor, what do I need to do, behave, look like, speak like, interact like, in order, as a machine, to optimize the attention span and psyche of another human being? It must be no more than 15 seconds or 30 seconds long. Every few seconds the frame needs to change, or I need to be doing something while I'm talking, because I've learned now that this is what retains attention.[00:55:00] 
But the only thing that's not being preserved is the exchange of substance. So what we have is is a perfectly designed system by a superhuman intelligence, super, super, superhuman intelligence that is designed to introduce new forms of agitation, which are designed to overwhelm the Need for coherence and closure, which is maddening the psyche, which is operating and exchanging and interacting on a basis of interaction and exchange in which no substance can pass.
And what's being optimized and prioritized for is entrainment to this system. So we have something without a soul in training 5 billion people on what normal is. And it's completely unraveling the fabric of society. and driving us to a point of madness. [00:56:00] Most of the anger and unkindness on the planet today is not via actual wars involving guns.
It's all happening here. The amount of terror, the amount of fear, the amount of anger, the amount of animus is all in our imagination.
And so the invitation, just like those ancient Greeks, that were forming stories about their unconscious recollection of waking up into consciousness. We have a moment where you can take anybody on the internet and stop them and say, just stop, stop. Be still for a moment. Be not afraid. Be not afraid.
Realize That you are in a system of control, a very assiduous, very expertly designed system of control. Your only [00:57:00] question really, and now you can recognize that this is a very, very tangible, very comprehensive system of control, almost like a matrix. But here you have a question. The question is, can I step away?
Can I deny? That system of controls complete sovereignty over me. Can I rest back a moment, a breath of sovereignty in this moment, right? Can I do that? Part of you wants to do that. The part of you that wants to do that, let's call that the self. The self is this thing that wants to be sovereign, that wants to have the agency to determine the borders of itself.
What defines me as self?
The next question is, [00:58:00] what is the limits of myself? Because I'm a border. I'm a boundary between me and something else, me and, and the unknown, me and the system of control. I can't even, but I can, I can be this thing,
but what, what creates the boundary between me and something else and what something else is there? Now, the boundary between me and something else, and what something else exists, we have many answers to those questions. All religions, all mythologies, all ideologies, all our sciences, are fundamentally the answers to that question.
But we're at a point now where none of those answers cohere either. There's some beautiful answers, there's [00:59:00] inspiring answers, there's um, head scratching philosophical answers. But none of them cohere, none of them provide a total answer. So what you should focus on then is the holding of the question.
The fact that there is a question. The fact that what you are in your deepest self is a question. The first fact is I am, and then the next fact is what am I? And self, self is really, there's a trick, there's a gift I'm giving you. Self is only meaningful in the context of other.
So this is the consciousness emerging out of chaos, and all around it is the gloom of chaos and night and elemental forces at battle.[01:00:00] 
And then this thing at the heart of you, which you didn't even recognize until someone pointed out is I am actually a question. And my question is what is the extent of me? What is the purpose of me? What is the boundary of me in potentiality in reach in how much can I hold a boundary against what and for what?
Why? That that's the question. That's the question. Now, if we could all be reminded of that question, we can start building a new coherent operating system. But instead, we are not awake as a self. We are not separated from this insidious influence of control that's deranging us and Squashing our sovereignty and our consciousness and everything that makes a me, a me, a self, [01:01:00] a self, it's stripping away and discombobulating and co opting and monopolizing and every political argument, every scientific argument, every ideological argument, every argument between the generations, the sexes, the races, every single argument, every single argument.
It's no longer about enough stuff or having enough. It's about deciding who is us and who is they and, and, and concocting in our heads what, what we need and what they want. And all of it is something that we are being told to believe by a system of control that has no soul.
What a beautiful question. Who am I and where do I begin and end? And what am I for? I[01:02:00] 
don't know if you guys want to dive in there because I've spoken a long time.
Yeah. I've got a question for you. I got a fucking question for you. Hey, I got a question for you. Hey, Joey. But did you both understand that arc?
I think I was, um,
slightly confused about when we got, got to the social media and then to the question of the boundaries of me, but I, but I did have a question. Yeah, sure. I can go over it again, but sure. Okay. Um, so
there's the kind of [01:03:00] mystical answer to that. Which is often, you know, well, when you just dissolve into that oneness, it's like, Oh my gosh, I am just everything at once, you know, like I'm part of it. Uh, that, that's, that's my question, right? Because then there's, there's the more earth bound answer, which is, well, no, that's not how it feels.
There is this, this. layer and there is the outer and then there, there is me. So what? So let's, yeah, no. So that, that presents a paradox, right? Yeah. So you've hit the nail so squarely on the head. So let's explore what a self is. A self [01:04:00] is a, is consciousness with a sense of an I, a me, uh, a capacity to direct or to choose.
So like consciousness, we can't answer the rest or we can speak about, I think therefore I am. Let's begin just with the ground underneath our own feet. So we wake up in this bubble and we realize that we are subject to systems of control, various systems of control. And our first question is, can I pull myself away?
Can I be, can I just begin with this pinpoint of me? And I, we can all recognize that it doesn't matter which religion you come from, doesn't matter which you, we can recognize that. But[01:05:00] 
as you say, there is a body and there is this consciousness, but there's also this, and. This element of will, because I, if I can pull myself away, I'm, I'm, there's something I'm exerting in that inus that I'm making a choice. I'm making a choice. So the power to make a choice is what we shall call will. And, but will isn't only the power to make a choice.
Some kinds of will are just indelible. Like you can't walk through a wall or push a mountain over because it's got its own form of will that you can't subvert to your will,
but. Um,
not every consciousness and [01:06:00] will that is this like little impossible bond that we identify as has an inclination to surrender or to connect with the all, because it sounds Liberating. But when you explore it truly, isn't it true that part of you doesn't want to disappear?
You don't want to stop being.
And if we're more accurate with ourselves, the invitation is to belong to the all, not to dissolve into the all.
Um, something to that as at some point in the conversation today, I can't particularly remember when, but there was a moment where what you said made me think it's so funny that you just said that is what you [01:07:00] said made me think about. That experience of afterlife and being there dissolved into the all right, and I almost thought what's so good about that.
I kind of like the, the, the, the, you know, Now, go back a bit 400 years and put yourself in the shoes of somebody who wakes up to that question that realizes that culture and society and the church and the state are all forms of control that co opt you into a certain project which you're not even sure you want to pursue, but you don't have options because you don't have, your, your psyche doesn't have.
The equivalent of archetypes is possibilities. Um, it doesn't have possibilities to latch onto, but in our rich society, we've got so many stories in Hollywood movies and sci fi and fantasy and [01:08:00] horror genres and religions and mythos, we have. a very rich tableau to concoct options out of, but they had a lot simpler one.
And so for that simpler psyche, the systems of control were just as complete for them. And they didn't have the wherewithal. It took extraordinary humans with extraordinary experiences, to To start looking over the horizon of what was known. Some of that is encoded in the motif of the hero's journey to leave the village, to have some form of accidental invitation to go out into the world where the order doesn't reign and monsters exist.
And then to have to face some form of ideal, bring back a prize and then try and integrate it, either that back into your life or your family or your village or something.
So it's a very social dynamic.
We've become [01:09:00] individuated. We've been conditioned to become individuated through our Netflix feeds and our Spotify feeds, and our podcast feeds and our Instagram feeds. I live in a world that no one else shares in many ways, and we broke the waterline between shared mythos and individual mythos. We've all been invi individuated to make us ripe for what?
To make us ripe for individual awakening. What
happens if that's been the purpose, the arc of humanity all along, to get us to such a point where society is so well oiled and integrated that you can get vegetables all year round, fruits all year round, meat off the counter. All of your Maslowian hierarchy of needs are taken care of. You can now virtually broker status.
online, you know, via Instagram. And so now you can actualize. The [01:10:00] problem is you've got no impulse impetus. You've got no thing, catalyst forcing you to actualize because it's all too easy. And so certain individuals in the group are agitated and distressed to the point of psychological collapse where they want to distance themselves so rawly and so strongly from that which they are connected to.
And this is what, so most awakenings that we're talking about here are not awakenings that come from a vocation of mystical searching. They're awakenings that come out of a kind of psychological necessity, because we can't face the distress of our lives or, our societies or our families or our prospects.
We're facing end times. We're facing calamity. We're facing deluge. We're facing war, pestilence, the plagues, et cetera.[01:11:00] 
This is the way nature and creation has always elicited A transcendent upgrade or a, uh, a change. Things reach breaking points or the birth of a child inside a womb. Consider the mindset of the caterpillar eating its way to oblivion. It's only thought is of more next, but at some point in time, it gets satiated in a way that it didn't know was going to happen.
a week ago, and it starts building a cocoon to separate itself from the world and close itself off and dissolve and begin that conversation of what am I and what is the boundary of me so that something can emerge at the end of it. Now the womb and the child in the womb [01:12:00] to the mindset of the child that doesn't have a concept of what's beyond to the world.
bird coming, dawning into its own selfhood inside the egg. It has to become aware that it's bumping up against something and it has one hard surface in it, which is its beak. And the best way to break an egg is not on a hard surface where a flat surface is from the inside. And so our consciousness almost needs to break out of the paradigm that we are in, out of the Plato's cave.
into this absolute, like, savage Eden that we don't know how to order. And imagine being a prisoner, living your whole life, looking at the back of Plato's cave, and then just for some reason crawling out, even if you see the fire. And the people walking past it and the other prisoners. It's not that you go, ah, now I know what was [01:13:00] going on.
You've got no fucking idea what was going on. You have to piece it together in pure chaos. The trauma of that is the trauma of birth is the trauma of awakening is the trauma of arrival, the psychotic. drowns in the same waters that the mystic swims in.
And the awakening that we are being agitated and pushed towards in waves is not one of a mystical seeking. It's one of a psychological necessity. Now, that selfhood carries vestiges of its past, of its previous paradigm, that when you get to it, like the decision that you came to, there's things that I would happy be happily to throw away and say, fuck that, never again.
But there's things that you don't want to let go of, like the having of a body, which is a passport to pleasure, but it's also a passport to pain, which is therefore an invitation to more [01:14:00] questions, to say, how do I. Operate this body in such a way that I optimize pleasure, minimize pain and conserve energy.
It's the motivational triad. It's the heart of motivation. But that's motivation that was borrowed from nature. But a different level up is the motivation that's borrowed from our cultural operating systems. The smallest node of which is a relationship and then a family. And then a tribe, and then a village, and then a city, and then a community, and then a country, and then a nation, and then humanity.
Now we've got many strata of social coherence in this big bubble of 8 billion people. And some of these things we value, like our connection here. Even in my selfhood, how would I preserve this? So now, the questions just explode. Like the Big Bang starts off as a [01:15:00] singularity, and then it explodes, and the more you pay attention, and the more you notice, the more shit there is.
But,
some of the social coherence we don't want to lose. The social cohesion in all of my selfhood, I actually long for social cohesion. And I didn't find that by someone telling me that I found that by looking inside and trusting the answer, the truth of it, I want to live. I want to be successful in my attempt to live.
I want to be free to do what I want to do. I want to be fulfilled. I want to have purpose. I want to. These are the foundational truths that we can start. connecting one, because I share them and you share them. It will take an academic arsehole of a philosopher to waltz in and say, but who's to say purpose is important?
Well, who's to say suffering? Sure. Academically, I [01:16:00] can have that jujitsu with you. But it's not innate to me. It's, it's, it's intellectually curious. And if you really inspect why you're doing that, what you're doing is you're flexing a status game. That status game is something that you are doing to elevate or preserve your status because of feelings of insecurity or all the rest of it.
It's not because it's an innate question and answer outcome that you arrive at. innately in yourself. It's a, it's a learned behavior of, let me show you what I can do, or how about this, or I can pull the leg out from that table, watch me go. There is a nature in the human psyche that obviously lends itself to that.
You recognize that because you have a little bit in yourself, but you have, there's a part of you that is on top of that thing. That thing becomes an emissary, a tool, an aspect of you. [01:17:00] It's not. The one that's at the forefront leading the conversation. Now, everybody that you are in relationship with is a complex organization of these archetypal impulses, but sometimes the wrong one is in the chair and they don't even know that there's a right one inside themselves that they are keeping in chains.
But then you tell them the story of Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf goes into Theoden's Hall and Grima is whispering into And he's this doddering old fool that gets told what to think and what to believe. And then I tell you the story of the left brain and the right brain. The monkey, the master and his emissary and the master has fallen asleep and the emissary who doesn't know the whole context and the whole job thinks that they are the master, the left brain and they're trying to run the show [01:18:00] and the result of that is they've created the internet with the social media that we have today.
And so we've got everybody's left brain running around interacting with everybody else's left brain and the tortured right brain, the soul, the one that wants to ask and answer these questions. for your time. And who, for whom the question really matters, doesn't know how to take back control from the master and the emissary and say, you work for me and we work for us, like there's an us here because that's selfhood.
The silver branch is a little self as well. The walled garden is a self. Your family, Luis, is a self. There's, there's a, you realize when you're in close love connection with other selves, you can see the selfhood in them because there's a symmetry, but you can also see a cohesive selfhood between you all that you want to expend some of this question and answer cycles [01:19:00] in the goodwill or the flourishing of that self, as does a community, as does, and all we are lacking is a shared notion of selfhood.
at scale, which is perfectly possible, but it's only possible if we have coherent mythos. And the only way we arrive at coherent mythos is not to pick one of the bad ones that we have and enforce it. It's to make something new that makes room for everyone's selfhood. So you have to begin with mythos.
Because you have to start at ground zero with nothing. Just with that single truth that, yes, I am a me. I do feel like this. And I do have these questions. Okay, let's not get to the answers. Let's build up from there. Let's tell stories. Let's tell stories and let's tell a shared story and then let's give names for these things that we recognize [01:20:00] in all of us or Let's borrow from these excellent examples that we already have.
Let me tell you about Mars. Let me tell you about Mercury Let me tell you about Jupiter Let me tell you what they do and how they behave and what they stand for and how they all work together There's no scenario where Mars is trying to depose The Olympian order. Mars is Mars. He does his thing. It's a soap opera.
It's a never ending soap opera of change in which everything is relevant and everything plays a part and everything has an aspect to it. If we can create a mythos that has that dynamic, we've got a solution. Because our current embedded mythos is the mythos of capitalism and empire, the core of which is growth and more and conquest and dominance.
In a closed system, no one [01:21:00] ever thought what would happen when you reach the edge of the eggshell. Then you have to start devouring yourself. Or you have to break out of the egg. So are we going to then just take our shitty attitude and then go and dominate another planet? Or are we going to realize, oh, this never ends?
You're just going to get a, you're going to go from Rome, then to Europe, then from Europe, then the whole world, then like the, at what point do you think that, that, that recursive process is going to become silly? It's already become silly. We are at the edge of that eggshell. Now we have to say to ourself, Oh my God, in our stories, in our systems of belief and control and coherence and behavior, is this normalized idea.
of how to interact with each other. We have to break that and this normalized idea that there can be eternal shareholder return [01:22:00] at the expense of other people and other things of a system which we ultimately rely on. That's insane. It is insane, which means we don't share a mind. And if you don't share a mind, you can't share a soul.
And how you share a mind Is by having shared paradigms and shared stories, shared mythos. Because we already share a body. The body is the earth, the commons, the air and the atmosphere, the water. There's one finite load of water. We share a sun, we share an energy source, we share a planet, we share a moment in time.
We share a common fate, we share a common history, we share a common mess. We will share a common legacy. We're at this nexus right now. And for anyone who has a story that says, oh, don't worry, when I kill all you [01:23:00] all, It'll be right in the end. Ah, no, I'm not in. I don't, I don't want that. My I doesn't want that.
How about this other story that says you just let it all go and you dissolve. Some souls are wired for that Buddhist story to say, yes, that's the one I want. I want to let go of the boundaries of self. And I just want to flow like a river into the ocean. That's, I'm called home like that. The truth inside of me is I'm not called home like that.
I'm called home in a different way. I'm called home like a fucking shooting star. I want to get somewhere. And not only do I want to get somewhere, I want to create a legacy. A legacy, and not a legacy for me and I, a legacy of us, where not a single person is really left behind. And we are making meaning out of all of those that came before us and everything that came before us.
And we are creating a platform of potential for those yet to open their eyes to the world. [01:24:00] Fuck, I want to belong to that. That excites me. Let's go. Now, there's more than one person that feels that way. They just haven't been told that story yet. That's why we need Bards. More than we need philosophers right now.
We need people who can tell the story of a vision. Weaving the tapestry out of the broken, bitter threads, out of the shit that we have right underneath our feet. Starting with that truth that I've just begun with today. I am an I and I want something and I have questions. Stop telling me the answers, let's tell each other stories.
The answers will come. The answers will emerge. That's the point of the silver branch. That's why this is called soul speaking, not mind speaking, because you can talk to minds and they will come with all of their detritus and their chatter. And they will tell you what the other minds have to say about this thing.
And we're just constantly [01:25:00] batting pawns against pawns in a chess game. We can't win or lose, but now we're breaking the whole board open. We're breaking the rules of the game. We're just telling stories, connecting here. Now, interestingly, you raised that question. You said, I've got this one truth. of open to me here, but I've also got this truth kind of anchoring me down.
You know, this is the reality that is such a beautiful showcase of the truth of humanity and the truth of man and the truth of being a human being. I am part animal, part divine. It is the source of my torture, but it is also the source of my revelation, my purpose, my destiny, because the The fate of the caterpillar might be disappearance, but its destiny is transcendence.
And the fact that you are anchored to nature means you [01:26:00] belong to the world. But the fact that you are pulled home means you want to belong to something else, but you can't sever this tie and still belong as a man. You can belong as consciousness if you want to go the Buddhist route, or you can give up your consciousness and just melt back into the earth as material.
But something wants to do the impossible. Something wants to carry the The baggage over the threshold. It wants to take the body along for the ride. The only way nature does that is through iteration, through death and rebirth. Death and rebirth. So, nations have to die and be reborn. Religions have to die and be reborn.
We have to die and be reborn. And that is what awakening is.
How powerful is that? How beautiful is that? How hopeful is that? How sane is that? It's, it's a cohesive, coherent, sane, complete answer.[01:27:00] 
Ah! Witchers teats indeed.
But you followed that, Luis.
Yes, of course. It's a lot. It's a lot. And But it's also the story of us. No, it is. And it reminded me of you having mentioned, I don't know, maybe a year ago, how all religions had to be because it was part of this. Full operating system. And we never talked about it and you never talked about it. And I assume this is what you were getting at.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we've got a very messy operating system, which is non integrated. Now, how would you run a business today successfully, an enterprise that you actually meant to survive and grow and flourish and be rewarding for all the stakeholders, not all the shareholders? All the [01:28:00] stakeholders.
So right now we have corporations that build products that build them very efficiently, but those that efficiency comes at the cost of human discomfort and suffering because in corporate, a leader will make a decision that is nonpractical, and he doesn't understand enough to be making those decisions because he's not a real leader.
He's just a figurehead with permission to do so. With everybody subject to his whim, all buying into a story that said, this is how we operate. He's the ship captain. And even if he drives us straight into the heart of a storm, when we could have gone around, we all just have to suck it up and deal with it because if we don't, we could lose our jobs.
And so that formula of, um, inept leadership playing games with other people's welfare and money and energy, based on ignorance and ego is a massive part of our corporate [01:29:00] truth and corporate reality. But if you had a business that you wanted to belong to, that you would be proud to make transparent to the rest of the world with nothing to hide, nothing to hide, because all businesses have a face that looks like that.
But all the horror and shame is hidden beneath brochures and slogans. And, um, it's very disingenuous, but if you did the other thing, and you wanted to build Spotify, or you wanted to build, um, Netflix, or you wanted to build some product in the world that was of value to, it was a win win for everybody.
Everybody liked building it. It was adding value to the world. You can imagine something like that. If you did that, one of the most important things would be the quality of your leadership
and the culture that you established, because you don't know When Spotify started building Spotify, the [01:30:00] first version looked like iTunes from 10 years ago. Not ugly, but it's not, it's not beautiful the way it is today. But they couldn't conceive of what it would look like today, because today is an emergent reality that came out of things that they couldn't control or decide.
It was an emergent reality that was built on things that were changing in their market, in technology, in the music industry, in the political appetites and spiritual appetites and artistic appetites of people and artists. And it's a confluence of many things that are emergent. And the only way to do that is then not to have a fixed plan of what you're going to do.
That's how you can tell that politics in its current format can't work or ideology or religion, because everybody's trying to. Lock in a fixed plan. Fixed plans cannot work at this scale, at this rate of change. The only thing that can work is something that's agile, that adapts like a garden. A [01:31:00] garden, you can have a plan for it, but if you step back and rewild for 10 minutes, you come back, nature will show you what the plan was and how silly your plans were.
Now, what happens if you develop the sensibility of building a garden in partnership with nature and in part with wise to the reality of emergence, where you had in mind the needs of the visitors of the garden, but also of. the plants and trees and animals and all of that confluence of emergence that needs to come together.
The key thing would be culture and leadership and leadership would not be one guy at the top that claims to know in that entire paradigm or purview that that is such a silly childish idea of what leadership need to look like. It's a redundant model that we need to outgrow. The only model that will work is a tribal model where you have some elders, Some custodians, some pioneers and some [01:32:00] visionaries and the elders and the custodians are the ones that are interested in conserving things and preserving things and the ones that are visionary and pioneers are the ones that are interested in progressing and adapting things and they need to be in balance with each other presided over.
With philosophy, the expansion of reason and the mind, but also of myth weaving and storytelling so that this, all of this can be made coherent and cohesive and can be living and growing.
Like you've mentioned before, it's all about incentives. And in this case, the incentive would be to have the same, the same outcome, the same goal. How do we build a common incentive? There's only one that exists in the world,
legacy. for listening. legacy. We don't realize it yet, but that's the only [01:33:00] incentive everything and everyone can agree on. We, we, we want our lives to have meant something. We want what we're doing to have meaning. And we want people that will come later to look back at us and go, wow, what a, what a generation, what a job, what a project that was, what a piece of art that was, what a, this is worth preserving.
This is, we're proud of this. This is our heritage. Wow. Look at our ancestors, what they built, what they did. We want to be remembered fondly and with great admiration years from now. And we want whatever we did and put in place to have made a real difference in the world, made a real mark in the world, added real value to the world, brought light into the world, let our genius shine.
And our genius can only shine, can only shine if we arrest The overwhelming forms of control and subversion that we are [01:34:00] subject to all the time. We have to liberate our genius by being able to hold a boundary as a self, to give ourselves permission to think what we want to think, feel what we want to feel, acknowledge what we, what our truth is, and then let that, that vital, um, divine essence just work its magic.
And when you said operating system, the reason I mentioned that model of a business, if you had an operating system built out of 8 billion parts and companies and religions and ideologies and countries and nations and things. And, but it was in your interest to make this thing last more than a day or more than four years.
you would have to start integrating certain pieces, updating certain pieces, and it becomes really apparent that certain religious streams like, um, fundamental Christianity or fundamental Islam, they are so [01:35:00] resistant to update and moderation that it would be the same as saying, To an organization with an operating system and databases and systems that everybody is upgrading and working to integrate, but don't worry, you can just do what you want, or we'll all downgrade and go down to your standard.
But you don't have a working example for us on how this is going to look and your our promises are going to be in heaven once everything is dead. I don't know if we can buy into that. It doesn't seem like a sane proposition that I can, I couldn't sell this to a child. Unless I removed all other options of possibility from them, and that's then robbing the child of their genius, which means I don't know if I want to do that right.
So you have to look at the world and politics and ideology and philosophies and everything to say. What can we extract of value and meaning that we would want to put into an operating system forever, that can actually take us somewhere of meaning? And if [01:36:00] you can start looking unemotionally and non detached about things like that, it doesn't mean you must be inhuman, but the emotion and the sentiment can't be your leading edge.
It can't be more important than the prime sentiment, which is how do we build legacy? That we're proud of and will remain proud of forever. And no one will look back on and shame us for our efforts. So then you suddenly started realizing very quickly that politics in its current expression can no longer work.
It just cannot business in this current expression is going to start becoming redundant. And I'll give you an example of how that works. And then we'll close the call out. There was a man by the surname of Powell in, um, before. America became thoroughly industrialized and locked into the shape and way the states are currently.
He noticed that there was a north south line, a meridian, where, if you look at an aerial map of America, it's green on the [01:37:00] eastern side up until a point, then there's like a heartland, which, first of all, very few people live, and the reason very few people live there is because there's very little water.
And then, um, the rest of the people are rarely, um, concentrated in California. So there's this big, broad band of heartland of America that's unpopulated, very sparsely populated. And his argument, he went to Congress and he said, you better watch out. You need to redraw your state lines here. Because what you've got is America in the heartland can flourish.
Now, not only is that meridian north south from the, from Texas all the way up to Canada, It's also migrating east, which means the desert is expanding and the green belt is shrinking, which means America's ability to feed and water itself is diminishing, because it's not integrated with its body, right?
You understand what I'm saying? And what he noticed was rivers [01:38:00] have natural catchment areas and what he asked Congress to do was recreate states, not based on square lines, but based on catchment areas so that the government of that area, the state government of that area, would be wise to the boundaries and limits of its resources and would be able to naturally establish legislation and behavior and zoning, etc.
Which would be integrated with what that area could sustain and the best for that area. What that would mean was if you had the Colorado river that flowed through seven states, right? You imagine trying to use federal government plus discombobulated state entities to preserve the wildlife, the welfare, the preservation of the water, the industrial rules, the environmental standards.
across all those strata of municipalities and government agencies and industrial [01:39:00] interests and what do you think is going to happen to the water? Okay, exactly what he predicted. And until humanity realizes that our arbitrary lines of division are so daft, but you can't get anyone to stop for five seconds fucking long enough because it's like a person who's addicted to TikTok, you can't stop them and say, just stop for a second.
And go through that process that we went through. Do you want to be part of a system of control? They'll say no. Then you have to reason them very quietly and carefully into what better might look like. Now you've got 14 million Americans that are deeply invested in everything except what they ought to be invested in, which is where their food and their water and their welfare of their environment is going to come from in 15, 20 years.
And everything that they're arguing about is immaterial. It'll just evaporate within four years time and there'll be some other bullshit to argue about.
Now, you scale that out to the size of the continent, or [01:40:00] you scale that out to the size of the globe, and you've got global climate change problems, and desertification, and eradication of forests, and melting of ice caps, and acidifying of oceans, which no single could resolve, even if they had coherent, cohesive political will and intentionality.
Those problems are too big for any state. And we're still arguing about the ethnicity of a presidential candidate. or what religious kind of manifesto they're going to enforce after it. When you look at it like that, you suddenly realize how farcical, how silly it all is, and it can only end in a kind of dissolution.
Nature will force that hand. Nature will force that handle. So project legacy, you [01:41:00] know, you have to, you have to be thinking about that. That's the only sanity is whatever covenants we make with gods are doomed to end because as culture is emergent, our ideas of gods and their extents and their reach and their purpose has to falter and change and be supplanted and replaced, and it will continue to do so.
The only leg, the only covenant we can make is with humanity, with mankind, with our own legacy. But the only way we do that is to build a tribe that wants to stay together as a tribe and knows how to look after its environment.
And then the skies are the limits at Astra to the stars. But this is the, this is the threshold. This is the moment of testing. This is [01:42:00] the moment of revelation and of judgment. Judgment does not mean God's voice booming down from heaven, telling everybody who's been naughty or nice. God's judgment is a pronouncement.
A pronouncement is like I said to Simon, just something that becomes clear. Like when somebody is a silhouette and the light is very, um, coming from the back, all you can see is their outline. But when there's more light from the side and the front, then their features become pronounced. That which is always true now becomes pronounced.
Revelation means revealing. Apocalypse means the lifting of the veil. It means revealing. And what is revealed is what will be pronounced, the pronouncement of our doom, the pronouncement of our doom, the pronouncement of our judgment, the pronouncement of what we inevitably have to face. As per, um, just the mechanics of cause and effect.
[01:43:00] It's not, it's not law written down in a book. It's thermodynamics and the water cycle and fucking how the human psychology works. There's a cause and effect to that and the cause and effect to that is If you give a computer system absolute control over the human mind and psyche and emotional field, this is what you get.
And if you take a continent and you divide it up arbitrarily with straight lines and weird fucking borders, you create systems of governance and control that are completely oblivious to natural resources and necessities that you have to maintain and understand. And not only are you oblivious to them, but you make the management of them orders of magnitude more complicated and, um, complex than they would have needed to be in the best possible scenario.
So when you just realize how apocalyptic or how [01:44:00] dystopian our actual solution to modernity is, it can only end in some form of trouble. It can only end in some form of trouble, but the awakening needs to happen inside the self. And the self needs to be burdened with these kind of questions. Now, awakening, sadly, is somebody is troubled, and they awaken into something.
And then they go look on the internet, and somebody has a package of ready made bullshit answers. And then they suck on the teat of those answers. And they become nourished by that paradigm, and then they grow up. But there's 8, 000, 20, 000 of these different, warring, evolving, parasitic, conflicting paradigms.
So even people that are waking up that think that they're spiritual, they, they Instagram spiritual. And they, [01:45:00] They just loosey goosey about sort of things. They just say things that aren't coherent and don't make sense. And then they think, I'm there, I've done it. Which means they can't see the illness and the disease beside them, so they're not incentivized to help.
Because if you speak to a Taoist or a Stoic that doesn't really understand Taoism or Stoicism, they'll tell you, just don't worry about it, it's out of your control. That is not a formula for survival.
You first have to ask if you're actually correct about what you deem to be inside and outside of your control, which at its fundamental is that same question we sat with when we said, what is awakening of the self? And you can't just take the first answer you reach for and go, I found it. How small do you think the world is that you got your picture of the universe from a subreddit, you know, or, uh, so we're in for a, [01:46:00] the best awakenings are rude awakenings.
But we're in for a rough ride because there's lots of rude awakenings that need to, Benjamin Franklin said, the only time we will see an end to injustice is when, um, the powerful. are suffering the consequences of the, the powers. When, when suddenly the fire and the storm and shit is at your door, and it doesn't matter what color your flag is or how high your walls are or how much money you have in a bank.
Like there's, there's kind of problems that are emerging now, which just are completely agnostic of those systems of status, control, power, um, our small versions of little, little L legacy, because we don't understand capital L legacy. So,
you know, you will notice that what I'm speaking about here is fire and brimstone, but I'm [01:47:00] not preaching fire and brimstone. The fire and brimstone is here. What I'm preaching is hope and sanity and sovereignty and make up your own damn mind, but also have the conviction to stand behind whatever you make up, you know, and make sure it interacts and integrates and fits with everyone that you want to be a part of.
And if you don't understand that you will either be made to understand that through calamity, because the cure for apathy is discomfort, or you will be taken out of the equation in some way. You know, that's, that's, that's the, the pronouncement of life fit in or fuck off, like get with a program or get snipped.
And it's not human cruelty. This cosmos is, is this cosmos is 50 percent created by Terrible violence.[01:48:00] 
Species eat each other. Planets collide. Asteroids explode into fucking things. Stars explode. There's just, violence is 50 percent of the equation and we've got one moment here where things have settled down and we've got a reprieve and we've got a solar system that has settled itself down into an arrangement where life can be sustained on one planet and the other planets all conspire.
To mopping up the debris that could end our lives and we've got one shot at this and I promise you it's not the color of your time or the color of your flag or the, the, the minutia in your doctrine, it's nature has provided us one chance. One chance. Now we've got to play our cards right. You know, exciting times.
So exciting. So [01:49:00] exciting. Standing on the threshold of this impossible moment. So incredibly empowered. So incredibly empowered. So much beauty, so much wisdom at our fingertips. So much beautiful literature, music, art, technology, medicines. The medicine of music, the medicine of dance, the medicine of movement, the medicine of community, the medicine of prayer, the medicine of plants.
Ooh, we can do anything. We can do absolutely anything, but we have to get our shit together. And that's what the world gardens for.
Okay. Oh, if you need to get going, Simon, we can wrap up, but just Yeah, we're gonna have to touch base on this once things are, are signed about that. Um. I might have to take next week off [01:52:00] for this. Um, yeah, it just depends if, if I'm in the studio, I'm going to be laying flooring and painting and, and everything, you know, so, and, uh, and hopefully feeding the noise on social media with something a little bit more beautiful.

It's weaving a bit of our history and our truth and our mess into a potential beauty. That's the whole craft and calling of the bard. And we can all do this as musicians, as studio leaders, as teachers, as philosophers. It's a beautiful mechanism and that's what I'm trying to demonstrate and live. And so there's multiple layers to what we've just done as well.