Erik Jampa Andersson: Mythology, Magic, and Connecting with Unseen Beings | Ep 11 Wisdom Keeper

and greetings everyone and welcome to another episode of the wisdom keeper podcast today i am joined by eric jampa anderson a founder and director of the shrimala and a scholar practitioner of so arigba colloquial no colloquially unknown colloquially known as tibetan medicine and we will unpack that term i'm sure in the course of this discussion he is a graduate of the shanghai institute and has is in my estimation one of the rare and distinguished members of a small cohort of western practitioners who have studied all four of the classic medical tantras his first book unseen beings is due this year in spring of 2023 it is published by hay house and we are going to spend quite a bit of time unpacking his new releases as i have come to understand as is the case with many of the first releases it represents a large commitment of energy effort and time and so we want to give this scholar practitioner his due and uh and some some nice respect for that commitment and energy in what is going to be revealed in that book but before i get going i just want to start with a little quote anderson uh eric and and get your and get your feedback uh it'll be a little bit of a curveball to start us off if you don't mind uh it'll also give me a chance to just really sort of uh contextualize a little bit of the wisdom keeper podcast the code is in order to go forward we must go back yeah um well thank you very much for having me i'm really excited to be able to chat with you today from across the pond um yeah so that's uh i absolutely agree i think it's interesting i think it's less about going back on principle and more about going back as a practical ramification of where we're at at the present moment so i think we've made using we very broadly here i think we've made some mistakes over the past um you know let's say 3 000 years i think that there have been particular moments where some societies some people have veered off course from what i would describe as being our sort of true nature and because of that i think it's useful for us to to look backwards both to find the sort of ideological cause of those you know runoff moments and also to see what we lost in the process so you know i'm i'm very uh you know if i'm honest with myself i'm definitely an antiquarian by nature i tend to prefer old things i tend to be very idealistic about the past especially the ancient past and i'm rational enough to know that that's not always well-founded you know we are very um we're very blessed to exist in the time and place that we existed you know in part because we have such massive access to a vast array of uh different you know traditions of knowledge and systems of knowledge so i think we're very fortunate to be where we are today but you know this this actually ties into something that i i speak about quite frequently in regards to being a traditional medicine practitioner you know i identify my practice as a traditional medicine practitioner not as an antiquarian sort of you know experiment of just doing things the old way i don't think that that's really authentic to the ethos of traditional medicine what i prefer is a mentality that is cumulative and that builds upon lineage and tradition so instead of throwing away everything that came before right now we can build upon that and you know continue interacting and engaging with some of the past realizations that we had in order to see how they can be you know fit into either in a positive sense or a negative sense are prevailing modern paradigm so for me traditional medicine isn't it isn't alternative medicine for instance i think of these as very fundamentally different things alternative medicine tends to take a very oppositional stance that forms itself based on not being that it's not the mainstream it's the alternative and i think that itself is a very reactive point of view that isn't super helpful or progressive in terms of science and the sort of cultivation of knowledge instead i think more of a traditionally based lineage based approach is really valuable so acknowledging that there are many things that we used to do and believe that we shouldn't do and believe anymore and we can we can look at that in a sober way by you know comparing it with what we now more empirically know to be true but if we just dismiss it on principle and say oh well that came before we had x y or z you know rational paradigm therefore it's useless i think that that's that's really a missed opportunity so in that sense i think it's necessary that we look to the past in order to be able to move forward we really have to you know we have to have a foot in the past a foot in the future and a third foot in the present in order to really be able to make progress in any real substantial way beautifully put thank you so much i think we're in a little bit of a alignment with that because of course you know being a healthcare provider myself i i love as much as i can get of the traditional lineages but if i wasn't being honest i i think there's something there's something that can always be added to augment and help and assist and and so you know trauma-informed pro approaches in psychotherapy are absolutely essential the neuroscience has been really clear in delivering you know a kind of vote of confidence for some of the underlying mechanisms so i just feel like yes absolutely in order to provide a service now of whatever kind uh being an integrative practitioner really widens the tool chest if if you will i think the the quote itself emerges from the uh origin story of the wisdom keeper podcast which is really tied to the 2020 uh jupiter saturn conjunction and at that time we were doing a the contemplative studies program the program that i i direct we were doing a long intensive study on the long rim and and we were reading some of the astrology about what was sort of predictive and it was it was about 2019 and we're reading maurice fernandez's synthesis of the saturn jupiter conjunction and it was written in 2016 and it really provided a lot of impetus for our work together because in a way we started preparing for for covid we've prepared for the pandemic because we didn't know it was going to look like a pandemic but i i i think the astrology really helped us understand the just the monumental paradigm shift we are now amidst yeah and as the whole snow globe starts getting shaken up and the systems begin to collapse and a resurgence of contemplation takes place a deep retreat whether it be personal collective sociological societal structural one of the impetus for me was in order to move forward out of this sort of disillusion we're going to also really need to remember some of the things that we've lost that contribute us to contributed to our societies getting too rigid and brittle and that really includes people like you the wisdom keeper really represents people who have steeped themselves in in very profound teachings but then have also taken the next step to make it applicable to the modern context so that's where the quote comes from and i think that's a great starting place because i'm sure your book and my new book all in in the terms of the introduction i'm sure you take a wide angle lens of just to really look at where we are as a species and to substantiate as the buddha would from a diagnostic point of view the tremendous amount of symptoms that we're now experiencing from its most broad sense and then all narrowing it down i'm sure you narrow it down in many ways first of all just into the biology of someone but maybe we can just start from the most wide-angle view like sitting back if we were to sit back together and just rap a little bit about the state of the world as you see it yeah i i feel like the it's interesting because i you know i think a lot of us are feeling the sort of pull from various different places so i think i i mean just in folks that i've spoken to over the past couple of years from wildly different walks of life different fields professionally that they're engaged in i've found that a lot of people are feeling drawn to a particular sort of matrix of of issues and topics uh especially pertaining to the state of the natural world and most specifically the the experiences of non-human beings in the process of climate change and really ecological destruction so for me you know the anthropocene specifically this is the topic it's the elephant in every room it cannot be ignored it can't be bypassed i actually i thought about it for a second when you you um when you read the quote because you know there's a sort of movement of folks that are trying to say oh we need to move past the anthropocene and we're actually in the symbiote scene and it's actually typified by an era of you know symbiotic relationships between beings and so on but that's that's super aspirational that is completely you know forward-looking and a bit uh idealistic i think part of that looking back is really a sober reckoning with the how we got to the very dark place that we're in right now you know humanity has gone just in our you know 200 plus thousand years as homo sapiens we've gone from being creatures of the earth to being cataclysmic you know um terrors of the cosmos that are in many ways akin to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs you know we're on that level of um cataclysmic might and that's what makes this the anthropocene it's not that it's the human era like you know put the crown on us you know good job humans we won very much not that it's only the anthropocene because we're geological agents now we have the capacity to destroy the planet not only ourselves but absolutely everyone else with some exceptions most likely but a lot of other folks you know a lot of beings that are not humans and uh i think that that's a something that we really have to acknowledge really seriously and it has to take priority in in really all of our conversations there's so many intersections between our fundamental ecological issues and the myriad other uh social issues that we're facing currently you know anthropocentrism and our you know our fundamental delusion that the entire universe revolves around humans that is both theoretically philosophically and genetically connected to top you know concepts like androcentrism the idea that men are the center of the cosmos uh it's tied to concepts of race it's tied to concepts of you know speciesism all of these are in the same sort of network of biases based on this fundamental delusion that there is a central master identity and that everyone around them exists only to serve that master identity so if we want to deal with racism on a real systemic level if we want to deal with sexism on a really systemic level then we also need to deal with anthropocentrism on a really systemic level these are all fundamentally related uh which of course we can see in a lot of you know eco-feminist critiques from folks like val plumwood etc uh you know really understanding that this is a core delusion that we've been we've been operating with for thousands of years but it isn't our natural state it's something that we cultivated over time i think that's an important distinction that we have to make because then it's fixable you know it's not a disease if it's if it's the natural state of things uh if it's a disease then we can see its etiology we can see where it's leading and we can potentially treat it uh that's how the buddha approached suffering and i think that that's how we need to approach our ecological crisis eric since you talk with so much passion about this and you're directly you know pulling from the matrix of being in the book writing maybe you can give us a little backstory you know on you and how you know how do you how do you get to this topic how do you how do you uh if you were to give us a specific sort of little bio uh glimpse of your biography how did you get here what what are the main beads in the mala that get you here interested in this stuff in this subject yeah this has really been something that's formed slowly over the course of my entire life and i you know through writing this book i've i've had to sort of go through the the memory book so to speak and and try to sort of follow the strands that led me here because even for me it was a bit out of the blue not entirely but you know a few years ago i thought that i would be translating medical texts and you know teaching students about urine analysis and things like that at this point i didn't expect that i'd be writing a book about you know animism and climate change or plant sentience or anything i have to say that too because just in our interaction our short interaction the other day and me reaching out to you like i i was sort of going in one direction but i had to be flexible because there's something just speaking through you right now and it's it's possibly taking your career in a little bit of a different trajectory maybe not entirely disconnected but that's a wonderful little back story for for our listeners just sort of what's that veer about but and and also how does how does everything come to bear in the end just to influence and augment your interest you know like it's not wasted time it's just it's perfectly positioned you for this reveal right yeah i mean it in my in my early life i think you know thinking back to it i think one of my first really um deeply influential relationships was with my family dog as a kid we had an english springer named star i was around six years old when we got her and she was my best friend you know she was my my closest relation especially on a real emotional level for years and that relationship helped to sort of lay the groundwork for the possibility of a kind of relatedness a kind of interaction with more than just humans that there can be meaningful emotionally fulfilling relationships that can come from cross-species interactions and that was something that you know my parents didn't try to sort of squash that or you know get me to think of her as as just being a dog and not a person she was a person to me she was more important than humans to my my heart you know she was deeply integral to my sense of meaning and what was valuable in the world so i i consider that to be a really primary experience of enchantment um defining enchantment enchantment is hard to define but understanding it as a semantic experience of connection and relationship with the more than human world so that experience with her was really formative um i also had a you know a tragic experience in my childhood when my brother was killed uh my half brother he was beaten to death in california we lived in new england and that sort of also you know pushed me into a slightly more existential direction uh in addition to dogs which i was very obsessed with as a kid being neurodivergent i i my life was a string of obsessions essentially and it still is uh but dogs were definitely one of the first ones and i was also very interested in magic uh you know spirituality religion mythology how old would you when your brother died he was i was eight i was eight i was nine do you remember how you in the early days and weeks and months years following how you made sense of it yeah i mean what what kind of imprint do you think it left it's it's interesting because i was already very interested in um ghosts i was interested in the afterlife i was interested in concepts of heaven and hell uh so having an experience of death more firsthand actually seeing my my brother who's 21 at the time laid out in a casket when i was eight years old uh that was really world altering it made all of that sort of theoretical interesting spooky stuff much more you know in front of me much more in my in my lap um i remember one time actually with my godmother uh in california we were there for the funeral and she was also you know she is very interested in sort of spiritual things as well and she had me do some automatic writing uh trying to sort of channel him and see how he felt about wherever he was and i remember um you know she had sort of prompted me to ask him you know where are you and he said he was in heaven and you know i had to ask you know how how do you like it there and he you know me him through me said oh i actually like it better here it's better than being on earth and i knew at the time that that this was inauthentic you know that wasn't um that was me an eight-year-old kid you know doing this sort of writing experiment to sort of channel perhaps what i wanted to be the case but i knew within me that i you know that was that was fabricated to some degree it wasn't uh i didn't speak to him he didn't you know tell me what to write so i became really interested in what the reality actually was and that pushed me in a much more existential direction quite quickly i became a lot more interested in religious ideologies both from christianity which i was sort of nominally raised in and also other religious and spiritual traditions which i also had an exposure to uh partially through my parents so yeah i i grappled with it in um a sort of but i grabbed the bull by the horns so to speak and tried to get sort of the basis of what was really going on uh i was also not so long after this my mother um who was quite ill for a while after my brother died he was my half brother her son uh and her only other son so it was really uh quite a harrowing experience for her and for our family but about a year or two later she gave me um a copy of the hobbit uh by j.r.r tolkien and um you know i think it was you know she she wanted me to sort of get my mind off of it i suppose but she also knew that that i would like it it was a favorite from her own childhood so she gave me that and i would say that that was that was the biggest you know sort of ign igniting point ignition point for my spiritual journey which is you know continued all the way to right now it was really my exposure to tolkien's works and that was something that you know even though it's unrelated in a certain sense to my brother passing it was the next step in that existential journey in an attempt to find meaning in an attempt to sort of get to a deeper layer of existence that could deal with topics of death that could deal with topics of of grief and loss and and life in a really um in an enchanted way in a dynamic way oh open open the door to toe tolkien for us like give us a little more uh into that world what what you discovered uh and don't be shy i mean if if it really took you out and beyond the box give us some of that numinous experience that you may or may not have had yeah he you know i i still consider i consider myself to be buddhist by religion and sort of tolkienist by myth you know he his works are are my mythic foundation which is something that we all had yeah uh you know we all we all had this for a very long time even in traditions where you know there was an established religious paradigm the the myths that informed the cultural identity or an individual's identity weren't necessarily just from that you know we have cultural myths and and deep ancestral myths that go back many thousands of years that have informed our existence in in really direct ways or things that we relate to over the course of our entire life the things that inform our social dynamics but also the way that we perceive ourselves the way we perceive our place in the world the way we perceive other beings this is very frequently narrated through myth and in the modern world we've sort of lost that we you know we think that you know myth is something that is a commodity uh it's a story and it's something that you can consume an endless amount of and the more the better uh we treat stories as very much sort of single-use commodities but there's many stories that were never intended to be that they were intended to be something that you you absorb slowly and carefully over a long period of time uh and for each of us we might have a different body of myth that speaks to us for me it was tolkien's works that really did that uh it introduced a sort of layer of enchantment onto phenomenal reality which was both accessible and also distinctly otherworldly you know tolkien he i don't know if people are sort of publicly very aware of what tolkien really did but tolkien was a philologist his background was really in comparative philology philology being the study of the evolution development and relationships between languages so as opposed to just studying one language or one linguistic tradition and understanding that fully a comparative philologist looks at many different related languages and looks at the connections between them in part to be able to reassemble what their ancestral forebears might have been so it's from this philological process that we get things like proto-indo-european uh which is the cultural and linguistic tradition that was practiced six thousand years ago and spoken six thousand years ago by the ancestral traditions that give us vedic sanskrit in india and also the norse traditions germanic traditions italic persian uh albanian you know all kinds of different linguistic and cultural traditions so that's that's sort of what philologists were doing for tolkien he was really interested in the connection between language and mythology for him these were intimately connected our languages tell stories themselves every word that we use and the way that it relates with other words that tells a story so for him um also i expect being a very neurodivergent individual he he saw the stories in the words he heard the stories in the words they were themselves a source of evidence for him a source of data something that he could mine for information that he could use to sort of fill out the contours of the world uh his main background was in germanic traditions anglo-saxon and norse traditions especially that's usually how people remember him but he wasn't just that he was fluent in you know probably close to a dozen different languages i don't know if that's quite true but he was fluent in many languages and at least well versed in much more than a dozen uh and he had a working knowledge of everything from you know the the sort of uh contours of sanskrit all the way to you know um you know the semitic tradition germanic tradition celtic traditions and so on so all that to be said what he was pulling from in his creation of his legendarium of his mythos was historical in nature it was linguistic and historical in nature he really underwent a process of mythic reconstruction in a similar way that a philologist might reconstruct a language he went in and tried to recreate something from the the core roots of our various mythological traditions across the globe so and he did that not as a sort of scientific process that could be published in a paper as as if it's you know a proto-religion that we could identify as historically real he was really fascinated with the actual process of mythogenesis the the experience of enchantment the experience of what he terms fairy which informs a creative expansion upon those those foundations so he put himself in the process his own experience of enchantment and his own creative process was for him a kind of scientific experiment it was a process of looking at you know okay these are the pieces that you're given these are the different components that we begin with and then create from there see what comes out of it organically and his mythos is what comes out of that you can read works like the silmarillion within the context of proto-indo-european mythology within the context of finnish finno-ugric mythology and you can see the correlations between them you can see how it's really embedded in a particular time and place uh within our human experience so all that to sort of justify his place as more than just a fantasy writer because he was so much more than that uh he was really one of the preeminent 20 20th century scholars uh in the study of fairy stories and the study of mythology he really understood fairy stories specifically which are myths without the political agenda in many cases he understood that much better than i think anyone else of the past few centuries at least so his work is really valuable it sounds like he's he was on you know a joseph campbell sort of tear and yet probably didn't get the credit that you're you know opening my eyes to at least he's really credited as a story maker or the the author of the series of books but like with the way you're describing him a great synthesizer of world history and knowledge and language uh and really this the mytho-poetic dimension of life which i think both you and i share is so absolutely essential let me ask you as a young person now you're 910 at this point where you get the book yeah and having having given an homage to tolkien in such a beautiful way just then thank you so much for that in such a young person's mind how do you think you were actually making sense and using it and what way was it moving you yeah it was my first exposure to a comprehensive body of um of knowledge something that really echoes in many ways like the vedic tradition or even potentially the biblical tradition but i mean personally i think that tolkien's work was a lot more earnest um certainly more earnest than joseph smith um oh you said joseph campbell but i thought joseph smith when he said that because also very very similar he spoke of his work as a kind of revelatory process also not dissimilar to what we have in the termite tradition trungpa actually who i don't quote frequent fan but um one of his students told me that he said in a in a presentation you know decades ago uh that tolkien was a kind of territon and that lord of the rings was a kind of karma and i think that that's yeah it's it's quite a statement to make but when you really look at the process i think more than terma it really aligns with the gesar epics um he he's very similar to the baptism of tibet who are the the revelatory bards who um you know were once characters in gesar's life story back in the you know 11th century and then in modern times they're reincarnated as these bards that tell the story and they reveal chapters of the story in their life from this sort of liminal space and that i think is very very very very similar to what tolkien did he talks about lucid dream experiences he talks about revelatory experiences he speaks of you know charter myths and framing stories that help to situate it within the present world he does all of that so i certainly think that he i he did a lot more than people realize and and part of you know the it's a blessing and a curse that we have a work like lord of the rings because it is so phenomenal and a brilliant myth for the anthropocene in particular but it does the popul the popularity of it and the commercial value of it blinds us a little bit yeah to really the the academic and um and philosophical prowess of what tolkien brought to the table so for me as a kid you know i was i was experiencing this body of work primarily through the hobbit and the lord of the rings but which then spoke to this whole mountain of knowledge that underlaid it and that was something that i could you know start to sort of chip away at by engaging with other materials and then finding the silmarillion and other works that were really from his heart corpus you know if the sort of tolkien ningtic if we were going to that extent um you know those were those were life-altering um in what way i'm trying to nail you down here let me let me be more let me be more transparent you and i both share this idea and it's not just us i mean it's a growing kind of consensus that we've lost touch with the mythopoetic dimension of life that we become too reductionistic in our thinking and that actually a whole telltale you know symptomology is expressing itself right now whether it be in individual symptoms or collective societal symptoms this is going to lead eventually to your book but just now in this phase of your life young person having [Music] met the most stark existential challenge a family could face here is a living embodied example of how mythopoetics reshapes transforms and i want to get a real flavor for that yeah in your personal life i think there there were two streams that came from this point there was a stream that was looking for philosophical and religious truth and that is something that at 9 10 years old i did start to apply on to tolkien's work i did you know before i ever became buddhist i was making offerings to vardari the queen of the stars and to yavana kementari and you know the queen of the earth and and i was engaging on that sort of level but then there was the other side of it that that lineage eventually got largely replaced by buddhism just a few years after but there was another side to it that was the immediate perception of the the phenomenal world tolkien's work what's enchanting about tolkien's work isn't the gods and goddesses it isn't the cosmogenesis story those are all enchanting but the real magic of his work is in the enchantment of some simple and ignoble phenomena you know the simple enchantment of a forest or a river or a hill or an ancient ruin or um you know the the stars themselves just the immediate experience of seeing the stars there was there's something that he brings to his work that allows these ignoble things to become ennobled to become enchanted in and of themselves you know he he speaks of this quite a bit uh very directly that you know just his treatment of trees it's not the central point of the narrative it's not you know it's there's the the ants you know attacking eisengarden all of that that that's important to the lord of the rings story but it's not the central point no one would say that the moral of the lord of the rings is that trees are alive but trees are alive and that's a that's a a basic assumption that's brought into the underlying framework that all of those stories are built from so i went from reading the hobbit and lord of the rings to looking at the world around me with entirely different eyes uh it was the simple features of the natural world that took on this this basic level of enchantment so i mean you know when my friends were were you know reading superhero comics and and playing video games and things like that i was actively engaging with the natural world my friends and i would go and build forts in nature and and make maps of our neighborhood with you know their sort of um you know sort of created original names and you know to speak of the different beings that inhabit the different hills and forests and rivers and so on that became a part of my lived reality because he opened that up in in such a phenomenal way but again it's it's not in the stories it's in the the world in which they were told you know people don't realize that middle earth is just an old uh it's a very old especially germanic term for the inhabited earth it's not different than where we are midingart in the norse tradition uh middle earth literally in the english tradition this is just the the world of humans um and specifically not the world of humans in an anthropocentric sense but just where we live it's here and many authors throughout thousands of years of history have spoken of the same enchanted world as the domain in which stories take place all he did was open that up again for a 20th century audience and within that world there's everything it's not just about gods and spirits and elves and dwarves it's also about the the enchantment of of nature itself the enchantment of the normal features of the world in which we exist and that's really where the magic uh comes in my opinion you know my and i'll come to my spiritual path in a minute i suppose but uh you know it's been a very sort of roundabout path to get back to just nature as it is and i think that it's no surprise really that so many of the ways that we personify the nature of mind the sort of our basic nature the ground of being have so many linguistic correlates with nature itself um we can basically take the same you know you know very profound and lofty statements uh like you know returning to our basic nature and apply that very directly and objectively onto nature as the environment it is a return to our true nature it is a return to just the way things are and recognizing the natural luminosity of that but that's something that we can come to through meditation and practice and it's also something that we can really inform through mythology which of course we do in the buddhist tradition as well but i don't think all myths work for everyone we have to really find what speaks to us it's brilliant yeah so and do you think the actual death of your brother itself was reconceptualized was sort of alchemically allowed to take on a different kind of meaning i don't know if if tolkien allowed for that to happen i think buddhism definitely allowed for that to happen um for me you know my my brother's death was something that constantly remained as an existential fire under my ass i suppose it was a direct acknowledgement of mortality especially premature mortality you know him dying at 21. and also brutally the way he was he was murdered yeah absolutely that's not that's you know if it's a car crash or you know maybe an illness it's different but that was a brutal you know occurrence absolutely and that was something that i continued to grapple with and to try to make sense of i think into my more formal sort of spiritual life uh once i found the dharma but it um yeah the the tolkien experience for me was primarily it was an enchanting of my experience of reality and that never went away you know that was something that that remained once i got switched into that mode of experiencing the world it never really stopped and it remains a really core foundation of how i experience the world to this day i mean the whole reason that i i you know came to england in the first place and even considered this being a place that i would want to live was was really inspired by the love of the english countryside that tolkien instilled in me but it's not limited to just one place it's it's a way of looking at the phenomenal world as a whole that allows us to be integrally you know engaged and in relationship with other beings so that that remains a really prominent theme of my work today more so i think now today than it was a few years ago let me ask you if you were you know as you look out maybe young people and maybe a little older than you were then but you know teenagers high schoolers that don't have the mythopoetic lens come online for them that are been raised in a very reductionistic paradigm what kind of subjective experience do you think that they are ex you know having as a result like what are what does it look like to miss out on that and you know just just sort of putting ourselves in their shoes how would we know and and for example like it's not that video games and dc comic movies are not there so then what's what's still missing do you think right it's it reminds me of something that um reminds me of something that russell brand said actually in in relation to uh sort of 12-step recovery you know um he basically says you know we're in a program you're in a program whether you like it or not it's you know you it's not you either choose to be in a program or you choose to not be in a program him speaking about recovery uh you're in a program no matter what it's it's just a matter of whether you're actually engaging some degree of agency and wisdom and choosing which one to follow and it's the same for myths our entire the entirety of our human culture of our human societies as a whole every single feature of our human societies are codified in myth our whole ability to relate on a social level with a large number of people is dependent upon myth you know we have a basic biological limitation for how many relationships we can have and the only way that we can go beyond that is through the establishment of common myth so definitely there's there's not a person alive today from you know a hardcore evangelical christian to a total secular atheist who isn't currently living in some sort of a mythic construct of reality but then the dynamics what that myth holds can vary very widely so you know someone who is who is living in a reductive mythological sort of construct of reality their possibilities for engagement for satisfaction for a sense of meaning are going to be limited by that so in this context you're saying that science is a myth too scientism [Music] to to an extent you know the um the empirical level of science is not itself mythic but then the theory that comes out of that right you know the belief that the dogma that follows the scientific method let's say yeah it's like chase like a beer and a shot it's chased with its own mythology but what you're saying is that number one what i'm hearing is that it's so implicit that it can't be self-selected or violent volitionally chosen and two there is a degree of difference between myths in terms of their practical application what they can actually substantially provide and also their origins you know not all myths are created equal there's a lot of myths especially a lot of the myths that underlie our dominant world religions those are a lot of those are politically contrived there's elements at least many layers of those those bodies of knowledge which were contrived in what i think is a sort of inorganic way they were contrived with a specific purpose in mind to get people to believe a certain thing or to think about history in a certain way and that's not really the same thing as what tolkien was doing for instance you know tolkien's process was an organic sort of revelation which have no political or religious ambitions which is why it never devolved into a religion i do think that probably a couple hundred years from now i think there's going to be people who who follow tolkienism as a religion because once you separate yourself by enough space those things become very uh very standard there isn't a single body of of mythic literature similar to his that was produced in the past that didn't devolve into a kind of religious movement so i think that could happen in the future but that was never his ambition in the slightest same with maybe star wars yeah i mean star wars i i'm not a giant star wars fan so i can't really speak to it on the same level but definitely you know there's these things will eventually i think manifest in different ways but i think that overall this century is going to renegotiate our relationship with religion overall and hopefully we'll see that religion itself is somewhat unnecessary it's a biological benefit for us to have these systems because they facilitate group cohesion they bring us together they give us a sense of value and meaning and community but we can accomplish those things in other ways what we can't sacrifice is myth myth is always going to be there so we can either subscribe to a myth of reductionism and materialism and capitalism and so on or we can subscribe to myths of you know uh genesis theory in heaven and hell and god and satan and so on original sin yeah exactly these are these are mythic constructs that we use to identify our place in the world our relationship with other beings and to give ourselves that sense of of you know um of understandable meaning our human brains we don't operate on the level of data i've never had someone on the show say that they think that myth is more indispensable than religion itself that's really beautifully put it i really that's that's a quite a profound assertion i don't know if i can stand by it if someone were to pick it apart but i do i do think that this is the case you know ultimately we we can have science mythology and religion all at once you can be someone who simultaneously has a religious faith has a you know a belief in science a trust in the scientific process and has myths that inform their way of living in the world i think of those three the only one that's at all expendable is religion and speaking of religion in its most sort of strict organized sense obviously there's there's elements of religion that aren't so you know dispensable um and our world view is often sort of you know wrapped up in that little package of religion and that inter intersects with myth and science in important ways but i think ultimately on a societal level what we really need is more engagement and collaboration between science and and storytelling because we don't understand reality most of us i don't understand reality through facts and figures and numbers i understand it once it becomes translated into something that we can really engage with on a more psychic level which is story you know that's really what fills the sort of you know blank space between our sensory input and our behavioral output it's how we you know embed it through the operating system of our myth of our our sort of mythic view of reality so without that science isn't going to be very very useful for us you know we've had a lot of really robust scientific revolutions even just over the past 50 years that have done absolutely nothing to impact the way that we actually exist in the world and that's something that i think it's not a breakdown of science um i you know i don't think that the scientific process is a myth i think that empirical observation should be the foundation of the way that we approach the world but it needs to be contextualized embedded and and um embodied through a body of story and myth and and narrative that's what allows us to make sense of how we fit into it you know the standard model of particle physics that's a myth the you know the empirical observation of particles that's that's not a myth necessarily that's observation but then the standard the standard model is in fact a mythic construct which is inherently mutable and that's something that's very useful about the scientific side of things is that it is mutable is that scientists are willing even if begrudgingly so on you know on some things they are willing to acknowledge that they're wrong and to then you know go into a new reality that's something that we don't always have in religious traditions which i do think is very very dangerous so the widespread apathy among youth uh incidents of depression which is at epidemic levels the suicide attempt uh put those into context and tie them to this thesis you're putting forward about the loss of myth yeah i mean just help the just help the the ordinary person who may be listening right now who's either you know young and impressionable and having a very difficult time maybe there are parents out there that have their own qualms and difficulties navigating the world and that that of their families or children they haven't quite yet come up into the mythological dimension of life they're struggling how do you make a connection between the vast symptoms challenges that we're seeing and the absence of mythology yeah i obviously think that they're they're deeply related i'm also really i think it's important not to pathologize those symptoms themselves you know people feeling alienated feeling depressed feeling anxious feeling totally appropriate that is the appropriate response that is the only appropriate response you know i'm really really resistant to any sort of world view that tells people you know to just not worry or just don't think about it or you know just remain positive you know don't focus on the negative just try to you know focus on your blessings and so on it's so it's such a process of bypassing um those responses are themselves the healthy response that is what we need to be having and i do think that there's a sense of empowerment that comes from recognizing that you know i definitely as a as a young person especially but even as an adult i've always struggled with anxiety and depression and you know senses of of you know deep existential angst and woe and that's natural that's that's appropriate that is the appropriate reaction to have and acknowledging that and giving ourselves space for that is i think a much more um it's a much healthier way of processing it and myth can give us the the sort of framework to be able to look at that constructively to be able to make sense of it and also to get us out of the isolation that our our social constructs and our current social myths have established for us you know recogni it's of course it's it's um it's crazy-making to think that our entire lives are only built around you know uh making money spending money saving a bit of money so you can spend it later go to work give away you know the majority of your your sort of vital years to someone else to make them rich and then still never be able to afford any of the things that you were told that you'd be able to afford by the time you were this age all of this it's it's of course it's deeply deeply depressing and uh it's not okay but it's it's a symptom of a broken system it's not our own brokenness that you know makes us feel depressed in those situations the the the overarching myths that we live by today namely you know anthropocentrism capitalism uh these are our stories that are designed to make us miserable they're stories that will always leave us feeling isolated and unfulfilled and unhappy that's part of their how they operate uh but we don't have to settle for isolation we can have relationship we can have real interaction and meaningful substantive um engagement with the natural world and with each other and that is built around myth and ceremony these are things that we've always had that have always brought us together and given us a sense of meaning that we've really largely just destroyed you know we've replaced that communal spirit that arises from those things with really rampant individualism and of course individualism would lead to a sense of isolation that's its natural sort of intended consequence so now that we've seen that we've seen that that's miserable and that we don't want that we can all actively work to create a new reality because there's you know no one among us is really fully satisfied with the way things are even those at the very top um you know they're they're not satisfied with the way things are especially when you look at folks like celebrities you know artists and sensitive people who think that you know stardom and fame and success is going to sort of meet their needs but then these very sensitive people get to the top and realize that their entire lives have been sacrificed in the process and unsurprisingly a lot of them uh destroy themselves they you know they go through a process of self-destruction so we we don't need to think that that is where the answers lie that you know if we just follow the status quo and play the game well that will succeed you know it's the basic buddhist teaching on you know not following the eight world leaders right yeah yeah i hope that's a helpful response no i mean i think things that i could say to that but yeah it's wonderful because i think you know we just opened up a small little portal in your biography and we got into the profundity here so thank you for that let me ask you then you know just as we inch closer to your book and of course these threads are interwoven with your book so it's not like we're you know we're covering the ground of the book in a way too uh but we'll make a a more uh concerted effort to consolidate the understanding of the book by giving it this background here what's the next bead in your mala in terms of it may actually be your entrance into buddhism i would suspect after after tolkien yeah yeah and i i do want to say one thing before we go too far past tolkien and myth even though i'm sure we'll come back to it but something that i think is really valuable for us to look at it's it was a comment made by ursula le guin uh who is a great you know myth writer and an eco or a literary critic herself and she made a comment um essentially that that fantasy what we term fantasy which is the mythic mode of writing of yesteryear but today we think of it as fantasy because it's a you know it's a different sort of world and it's an artistic realm where you can create something and sell it and whatever but fantasy what fantasy does for us what myth does for us what fairy stories do for us is gives us it gives us the possibility to consider the non-human as essential it's the only narrative genre that we really allow that to take place in and if you if you think about that it's really a bit jarring you know you can watch hundreds of movies and read hundreds of books that are you know serious dramas that get to the core of what it means to be human and all of them might completely bypass any non-human characters there might be absolutely no involvement of animals plants environment uh there's no real sense that those beings also have a presence in the world of the human and that's something that's really i i think there's a direct correlation between that and our ecological crisis uh i think it's a glaring connection at that and that's something that we can only really overcome by getting past our discomfort with these more mythic and fantastical modes of storytelling uh myth is the sort of you know sophisticated way for us to deal with that and still feel good about ourselves but you know for folks that engage with fantasy more directly there's there's benefit in that as well it doesn't have to be only some lofty uh you know mythic work that only a great seer is able to define from the from the cosmos you know even engaging with fantasy writing fantasy stories writing fairy tales writing stories about your trees or your garden or your animals that is a part of our sort of recovery process as as a species it's what can bring us closer to a real relationship with the more than human world so i just wanted to say that now that's that's beautiful but you know the association that's coming up for me was around uh well it's because i'm i'm devouring young right now but jung's yeah emphasis on active imagination is that's what it that's what it feels like to me about opening up a portal where you're you're in the mythic realm of your collective unconscious you're and there are a multiplicity of dimensions of beings yeah and that is actually a necessary unnecessary uh threshold to enter into in order to really begin a process of integration or what you and i might call reclaiming what has been lost uh there's no way to do it simply from the you know left prefrontal cortex there's no way to do an analysis about it they're they're really what is required i guess this is one of the profound things you were saying about tolkien is there needs to be another language there needs to be another lane land bridge in our brain hemispheres there needs to be a railway system into the body and then there needs to be a sort of portal that opens up multiple dimensions with with with entities other beings in order to foster this greater sense of connection which we have lost so that's that's what i'm picking up on when you're talking about this well i'm sorry i interrupted you but i'm just riffing it absolutely feels really resonant absolutely and i i think an important point which i i love jung and joseph campbell but i think an important foil for especially joseph campbell's perspective is that it's not all just human you know these fairy stories and myths are not just allegories allegory kills enchantment allegory is a cynical literary device in tolkien's opinion and i share this opinion quite strongly because it always keeps us a step removed it always keeps us hyper aware of the fact that this isn't real and that it's simply talking about things that are real which are almost always human affairs right what what's subjugated by the analytic mind in other words allegory exactly and it distances us from the enchantment that is being used it keeps it as strictly a literary and sort of um an imaginative device as opposed to a portal to another way of seeing things and that's not to say that the opposite is then true that there are historical real accounts of how things actually are of course that's that's you know that's ridiculous that's not what it is either but the enchantment that it fosters can't be only an allegorical device otherwise it's it's automatically limited what it is is applicable it's perennially applicable works like homer's odyssey or the mahabharata or the eddas of the norse world or the you know mabinogian or the kalavala or tolkien or whatever these are our applicable systems of myth that we can apply to any situation in our lives we can apply it to our relationship you can apply it to current political situations you can apply it to climate change and you should be able to then get something out of it it helps to clarify some dynamics of that situation that's the applicability of myth as opposed to myth's role as an allegory which i think is is somewhat limiting um you know it's interesting speaking of campbell actually you know just our perception that most myths sort of follow this fixed archetypal model of like the hero with a thousand faces uh you know that is partially a result of our sort of anthropocentric bias uh it's actually not all stories that we've told historically have been stories about a human hero overcoming supernatural foes to get some sort of you know magic treasure and appease the gods and so on there were many different kinds of stories that we told countless different kinds of stories and most of them really involved our human relationship with the more than human world that was such a core component for so many mythic traditions oftentimes to clarify the basic kinship between beings and that's a piece that we've we've somewhat lost in the psychologization of myth even though i think the union and cambellian approach is very useful and very valuable i think jung's quotes specifically we don't become enlightened one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious that's one of my very favorite quotes in the world and i think is a really a really sort of core pith instruction both for some of these processes and also for some of what we do in buddhism yes beautiful beautiful uh would you like to jump into your buddhist training yeah and maybe there we can get a through line into where we are today totally so my um my sort of wanderings through various uh fields of spiritual inquiry and myth and so on led me down a few different rabbit holes um when i was in middle school obviously being very very passionate about tolkien was not the coolest thing for someone in my my sort of age range to be doing um there was one day i can't believe i'm about to say this there was one day in uh in sixth grade when i went to school and i had um i had adhered fake hair to my feet i had some like polyester like golden locks that i had spirit gum to my feet and i like put on my shoes and you know went to school and i decided to show someone in my homeroom that i was really a hobbit see i have proof look at my feet and it was it was the worst choice i ever made because i was bullied relentlessly for months months and months thereafter of course as any you know kid with a sense of humor would do that's that's perfect fodder for ridicule um but that led to a lot of really difficult times for me emotionally because i was very much alienated and isolated from my peers and i was the you know the single topic of everyone's ridicule for a long time so i eventually decided to switch schools and i left the public school system and went to a private catholic school where i had a beehive put in my desk and struggled a lot with the nuns so i left the catholic school and then i went to a seventh-day adventist school which is where i stayed for two years and this was really uh that's the sort of background for then my um my disenchantment with christianity and ultimate denouncement of christianity and then going into something else so i i found in that environment uh you know we were taught all kinds of things in religion class we were taught that satan hid dinosaur bones in the crust of the earth in order to convince people that the earth was was more you know more than 6 000 years old um you know we were taught about the part of the the head specifically that receives god's blessings as a part of a sort of like religious anatomy lesson uh and obviously all of the the rhetoric about heaven and hell and uh the exclusivity of christianity as the only method of averting eternal damnation and torture in hell and this wasn't this it wasn't working for me well it's it's these kinds of introductions that i think could lead us to a very quick conclusion that this is the example of the religion that is dispensable this is precisely precisely an example of that you know i i i don't know i i think that you know tolkien was was a catholic he was very much found you know grounded in in christian theology he included an omnipotent uh threshomony god but he was very disinvolved uh as a component of his core mythos but he did that quite intentionally as a catholic uh i do think that christianity can lead to genuine experiences of the nature of mind because obviously i think we would have to be really really deeply um self-absorbed to think that only our tradition is able to foster an experience of the nature of things as they are that's it's a delusional sectarian sort of uh superiority conceit so i i don't think that that's the case but i definitely don't think that you know christianity as received through the the holy bible is comparable in any way shape or form to other spiritual traditions of the world namely you know buddhism taoism hinduism jainism uh you know even more mystical forms of of judaism uh it's just incomparable they were it was formed for completely different reasons there were distinct political and social uh you know mo's that underlayed the development of christian theology and biblical you know mythology that weren't necessarily present in the same ways for something like buddhism so yeah it's that that world view which also isn't christianity's fault they got the heaven hell dualism probably from zoroastrianism and partially from ancient greek traditions but they knew what they were doing in including those concepts in the formation of a new world religion because it's terribly compelling and it's terrifying and you know i it took me years even after abandoning christianity and feeling very solid in my buddhist practice it took me years to get over the fear of hell and then it took me many more years to realize that buddhism also yeah they have their own version don't they especially when you get into they have that bro fire and brimstone talk when you get into vadriana too hundreds of years before christianity did you know the vajrayana hells that's a later edition which is absolute nonsense in my opinion it's pure but the but it serves the same function right it has the same function exactly and there's psychological trauma that then results from that especially as a queer person i mean my god you know i didn't know i was queer when i was in this christian school but i knew i was different and i knew that i was different to a degree that would then alienate me from the the promised results of christianity so i i wasn't having it i i basically spent all of my free time on the you know dial up internet looking up contradictions and and hit you know problems in the bible and recording them in my little notebooks and i went to religion class one day uh where we had a pastor who would come in every week and teach us about religion and i pulled out my notebook and i started going through and just tossing out challenges adam and being like well this verse says that women shouldn't speak in church why do why do you say that that's okay you know this verse says that you're not supposed to you know mix fabrics the classic you know leviticus critiques and i i just kept going i went all the way through you know contradictions between the different gospels and so on and eventually he stopped me had me leave the class and i was suspended for i think three days for that that outburst which is a badge of honor that i wear very proudly now but at the time you know that was problematic i was you know only 12 12 years old i think 13 years old at the time and really you know being quite uh inflammatory yeah so eventually i i decided that i wasn't christian i couldn't be christian i didn't believe in the historicity of the bible which for me was really important uh understanding that the way that they told us things came about and that things were recorded was not actually historically true that was a major moment of realization for me uh and it remains a major moment of realization for me even in the buddhist tradition you know recognizing that there's certain myths and stories that we perpetuate in the buddhist tradition like vajra hell which are indeed myths that are not useful are not empirically founded and are really manipulation tools that that itself the historical context itself is very liberating i think that that's something that we need to allow ourselves to engage with to recognize where our beliefs really come from i'm slowly putting things together if you don't mind me just making a little bit of interpretation seeing if it lands for you the uh here are the here are the little um symbols i've collected there's only a couple of them one you mentioned doing rituals when you were before you had tolkien you must have set up an altar and you were making rituals to this one or that one i've got that little nod then you add this other piece of you had a tolkien the world that tolkien opened up and then the gluing the hair to your toes or your feet i i honestly listen i just because i was asking you the frame of reference that mythology provides is liberative what does it liberate from the sheer certainty and granularity and automaticity of reductionism yeah and your i mean your your soul must already be atypical in the sense that it is already primed to the world of magic at such a young age otherwise you wouldn't gravitate towards to these things but right there i think one of the things i was asking is like how does it work the fact that you could have easily been swallowed like your peers by the religious religiosity yeah and this kind of symptomology that both you and i agree symptoms are expressions of the soul beckoning for our attention it's giving us knowledge and guidance it's tell it's heeding us a warning of what it needs the fact that you were pushing back on religion and the fact that you're pushing back on these stories i cannot help tie these threads together to sh to sort of substantiate how myth had already dislodged you and gave you that observing capacity to see from another perspective just how confining and ridiculous it all is yeah yeah so i love the i love the the hair on your feet because you're already living in the world as a different kind of being and maybe at the time you know it wasn't accepted but you were still pushing the boundaries yeah exactly as and you were listening to something and i think i think oh my god how liberative would it be for so many more people right now young people to have a dose of the magic so that they could at least begin to dissolve some of the conviction that imprisons them yeah so i think i think it saved it must have saved your life in a way oh it definitely saved my life tolkien and buddhism saved my life i would not be alive today if not for those those two things in my life their presence in my life i think but one working on the other because listen you could fall into vod or hell you could follow into totalitarianistic buddhism you could fall into you didn't fault you didn't fall into the christianity pit of fire you didn't fall into the buddhist austerity and like you know its own form of dogmatism yeah i had my maybe you you dabbled i dabbled a bit i dabbled a bit and i which you can see that tendency in my my psyche which is something that i was hyper conscious of i was looking for a religion you know when i decided i wasn't christian anymore i was able to do that because i had tasted something else and that something else was so much richer so much more enchanting so much more meaningful and and fulfilling than anything i had ever experienced in christianity itself so knowing that that was there and knowing that that was a fictitious world something that had been created i knew i knew the profundity of it from tolkien's scholastic background but i didn't fully get it i was a kid but i knew that that was something that was much richer than what i had so i knew that there had to be more out there and when i left christianity behind i actively was searching for a religion i knew i wanted to be religious you know i initially went and looked at catholicism because i was raised protestants i was like maybe the saints will fix it and it didn't really do and then i was looking i looked into judaism and that wasn't really doing it hinduism i had a friend whose family was uh was you know sort of western hindu practitioners and i really loved that i was very interested in that but it wasn't quite getting it so i was i was you know in search for a path i knew that i wanted a path i knew that i needed a path but i was also very aware that it needed to fit certain criteria it needed to not have an on the thrice omni creator god i had absolutely no time or space for a god i was and still identified as deeply atheistic on an ultimate existential sense uh but i also needed it to be ritually rich i needed it to have mythic you know depth and and profundity uh and i needed it to be reasonable i needed it to be logical i had deep problems with the irrationality of christianity i had problems with you know creation theory with the young earth theory the rejection of science and evolution and everything that we know to be true that really disturbed me and i wanted to find something that wasn't that so of course when i encountered buddhism that was the golden ticket you know that was particularly the tibetan strain of buddhism because really there is a whole lineage of logic that coincides with mystery and magic and tibetan buddhism that is makes it i think pretty unique amongst the the buddhist possibilities or let's say i mean you have a very strong shamanic other world dimension entities and all the rest of it ritual very intense and incredible rituals and beauty but also this very practical logic reason and emphasis on reason in terms of really critiquing the nature of reality in the mud yamaka and so on i think that must have been very satisfying to find that yeah and real profundity you know real profundity that you know when you look at it from from any perspective you can see that it's trying to get to the real core of the way things are it's not profound in the sense that oh jesus died for our sins you know for a christian that is the most profound statement that someone could make or for a catholic that you know the father son and holy spirit are the same they're part of the same trinity these sorts of ideas are profound within their mythic world view but it's not really getting to the the true profound nature of of reality in my opinion and that was clear for me then it's it's still clear for me buddhism did that even in the tibetan tradition you know i was really i was brought in more through uh initially through zen and through um you know not formal zen meditation but experimenting with it on my own and then getting absorbed into the vapasana tradition through an insight meditation center in my hometown so i started getting some guidance more from the sort of vipassana you know insight meditation society approach a little bit more psychologized more theravadin in its sort of orientation and that was a good foundation for me and i got you know a good year of guided meditation instructions as a 13 year old before i ended up coming to tibetan buddhism but then finding tibetan buddhism changed everything reading the um the hey geography of padma zimbaba specifically the lotus-born eric kamakunzong's book uh his translation that really really enchanted me um and also a photo book that i i would always flip through tibetan buddhist life by don farber and that had a lot of nice images of of tibetan practitioners from various traditions and through that i was sort of i was able to piece together that i i felt a strong affinity for the ningmah tradition and for the practice of from the first time i saw a photo of some you know yogi's with their drums and reading a little bit about the practice itself i was i was enthralled and knew that that was something that i needed to understand and to get involved in and i i you know i was very fortuitous in this decision because i literally went to my parents and said i'm engma tibetan buddhist i went to my school and my my classmates and said hello everyone i'm now a ningma tibetan buddhist had no idea what any of that meant didn't know what ningma meant i just knew that it's connected with this guy and there's also this practice over here that they seem to do sometimes so that that was for me enough it wasn't until about i think six months later that i um went to a little holistic expo at the fairgrounds and i ran into a woman who was maintaining a a stand with a bunch of tibetan implements on it which i recognized from my book and i asked her i was like are you know is this a tibetan buddhist center that you're a part of and she said yeah we're at tibetan buddhist center we're in pagosa springs about an hour and a half away from where we were i said well what tradition is it and she said oh we're we're ningma do you know what that means and i lost it i was absolutely blown away that that there was a center in the specific tibetan buddhist lineage that i had uh sort of unwittingly adopted for myself and i begged my parents to take me there uh we went on a you know september day in 2005 and uh we went to tara mandala which is the center in pagosa springs drove onto the land there were no buildings at that time and there was no one there and we hadn't told anyone that we were coming they had visiting hours we were not in the visiting hours and we just drove up to a yurt that had a car parked in front of it and i went and knocked on the door and a woman appeared and you know i said hello hi i'm eric i'm ningma and she said hi uh i'm soldrim it's nice to meet you and i i recognized that she was the the resident teacher and she invited me in and we had a conversation i asked her to be my guru she said yes and gave me a copy of her book and some cassette tapes and sent me on my way so that was um you know i was led directly into it and i was led not only directly into tibetan buddhism but specific lineage you know she's a it was a ningma center mama sultrum is herself recognizes a nomination of machik lapton she's a holder of the tradition and those were the two pieces that had completely enchanted me when i first encountered uh this tradition so i was really you know i felt like it was it was faded and i think my parents also felt like it was it was faded you know which gave them a bit of confidence that i was doing the right thing and that they weren't losing their child to a cult or something it was obvious that i was really invested in that there seemed to be some some real connection here so that was how i met the dharma i've been with lama soltrum ever since she's still my root teacher but i spent a lot of years living on the land i was trained really extensively in ritual arts uh in shippening and also being an um like a practice leader i have a musical theater background so all of those kinds of things were very easy for me to assimilate and i i got really deeply deeply involved um it eventually took over my life pretty completely i had been on track to be a musical theater actor i had been in shows for many years i was accepted to the most prestigious musical theater conservatory in america and i was supposed to do that that was my sort of path but after a year at musical theater school i i realized that i just couldn't not be primarily invested in tibetan buddhism that that that had to be my primary focus i'm just what i'm again like i'm just i'm tracking your biography and i'm there are certain nuggets here that just scream out to me and um it just feels like the synchronicity is undeniable there's there's you're being led you know and i mean part of your part of the part of the thesis of your book will be that you know there are other worlds than these these are worlds that aren't just dominated by human beings but at least the world of spirit spirit beings buddhism bodhisattvas at least that's one one layer beyond the mere appearance of things and of course there's much more than that but i can't i can't help but characterize this section of your biography as one that's not being led you're following the magic and you're being assisted yeah uh yeah that's just what it felt like and i think that that's possible for any anyone but not everyone is primed for it and this is again part of the argument of what does the myth of like there's going to be so many people rightfully so that are questioning and suspicious of mythology they're going to just see it as a dispensable artifice of the past but this is how a life a really rich life can be guided yeah mythology helped open up receptivity channels to you yeah and you followed signs and you knocked on doors and i can't i haven't come across a person really who you know at least as they make their way into spirituality or into my psychotherapy office that isn't looking for a teacher but not all of them know how to find one yeah and certainly at finding one at such a young age now that we have a snapshot of your biography we see how it was you were already priming yourself very early on with these antenna or antennae and and really like you you're just following the magic and yeah and you you you find what you're looking for and of course the story doesn't just end there because then i think you probably have gone through a tremendous amount of refining like it's always just positioned there as here's the tradition and then there is a of course a whole phase of metabolization in which you you sift through what it is that your own the acorn of your own soul needs which makes it truly yours uh so i'm just i'm just i just keep wanna keep part of the podcast is an explicit hope that people allow themselves to drop out of the certainty channel channel and embrace some of the the myth again embrace some of the magic it's allow their intuitions to lead them and to and to see to start to recognize signs and to live what jung would have called a symbolic life and this is why i like astrology too we're probably not going to have time to talk about it although you have an extensive background in astrology but astrology fosters this kind of symbolic way of viewing the world it's not that there are just rocks flying in an atomic world out in the cosmos that inherently have meaning we supply the meaning and that meaning forms a language as you said about tolkien that helps us navigate and make sense of the world in a way that that actually deepens us and livens us and activates something inside of us that propels us further further into becoming more of who we are yeah and i feel that that's already in this timeline you're already there by the time you meet sultrum aleoni you're what how old are you 17 or 18. i was i was uh 13 years old no it's incredible i mean it's just it's it's just uncanny and then to have such you know to be thrust in such a way and obviously you have a lot of discipline and you're you're a man of uh incredible follow-through so you you you're given these opportunities and you seize them with reckless abandon so uh you know we're we're right you're i'm hanging on by i'm with you just keep go keep keep luring us into your path and make your way if you will into into the into the next iteration so we can come back into the book i guess because that's i want to make sure that you talk about your book yeah i um there was an important moment in in 2009 between my initial trajectory of you know going to musical theater school and moving to new york and being a chorus boy which was my my professional trajectory for many years uh and then switching into pursuing uh more tibetan studies more directly specifically uh i had attended a drew chen at tara mandala it was our first drupchen which is a great accomplishment ceremony uh considered to be the most elaborate ceremony in vajrayana it involves many practitioners coming together for 10 days and doing basically 24 7 practice throughout that time many different ritual procedures many different dances and instruments and uh you know giant creations of mandalas and tormas and all kinds of ritual activities it's a lot uh but it's incredible and it's really uh you know it creates the sort of vajra world in front of you it's you are in it you are physically in it you're living it uh where you're in the mandala you're completely in the mandalorian you're talking hairy feet you're in with my feet which i do now have quite hairy feet and i'm very grateful for that it's my only hobbity feature that i retained physically uh but yeah i mean that it was it was a real magical experience and that was something i literally the last morning of the drew chen we'd been there doing this for 10 days we had been preparing for months learning dances and instruments and melodies and mudras and doing all of this stuff we go through the whole ritual final day we wake up at 3 a.m everyone gets up and goes to the the temple we do practice all morning the sun comes up we have fire poojas we take substances we do not like psychedelic substances but you know sacred substances yadda yadda all finishes i say goodbye to everyone i hop on a red-eye flight fly to boston the next morning i start musical theater school with a bunch of my my fears that's not gonna work no no no no no no no no no it's like getting dropped off a cliff it was a terrible terrible idea i'm so glad i did it but my god it was a terrible idea so i immediately it wasn't it wasn't going to fly i knew immediately that this it wasn't going to be something that i could continue with so after a year i decided to drop out and go to naropa in colorado and then after a year there doing you know tibetan language and religious studies i decided i wanted to do something completely different and the opportunity arose to study tibetan medicine i had actually gotten sick myself went to see a doctor uh dr nishala guayninda in boulder and within a few days she had cured me and i was absolutely astounded by it and i wanted to know more about it and again another sort of synchronistic moment just a couple of weeks went by and i got a notification that her alma mater the shangshang institute was accepting applications for a new tibetan medicine cohort so i um i informed my my parents that i was again dropping out of school and i was by now by now they're not surprised by now they're not surprised they're still not thrilled but they're definitely not surprised and i tell them that i'm going to go to tibetan medicine school my mother she's always been very interested in holistic medicine and so on so i think she was she was happy on that sense but i was dropping a degree program to go and do a you know a certain to get in tibetan medicine uh which was you know completely different life trajectory than what they thought i was going to be on or what i thought i was going to be on so that you know that was the big change i suppose that really set the the stage for everything else you know between my meeting lama sultrum and now it's been around 18 years that have elapsed so i've done a lot in that time and the tibetan medicine training was definitely the sort of primary core of sort of restructuring my approach to my practice and my approach to the world there was you know a through line through these um my main practice being should which it has been for a long time and that was something that was really established at tara mandala and then in tibetan medicine i was really you want to describe chude in a nutshell for people who might not be familiar with it yeah so chid was an 11th century uh tibetan buddhist tradition that was developed by machi klepton who was the she was a matriarch of this tradition she's one of the few true historical tibetan matriarchs to establish a whole lineage of tibetan buddhism and her tradition was partially or you know in large part inspired from mahayana buddhism her study of the prajnaparamita sutra especially that really had informed her approach to creating a new buddhist tradition but she was also very much speaking to and relating to a tibetan audience who hadn't yet fully found a method of relating with unseen beings this was something that you can see from her writings was really a prominent topic at this point uh if we look at tibetan history objectively at this point the stories about padmasambhava pacifying all of the spirits and converting them all to protectors and stuff that hadn't yet been written that came in the 12th 13th century machik in machik's time tibetans didn't yet have that as the model for understanding how to relate with unseen beings so her core practice of chud of the lugin the body offering is a process on an outer level of going to places that scare us especially haunted spirited locations that are full of other than human beings who might be you know capricious sort of uh you know either frightening forces or benevolent forces but they're they're out there and uh you go into their domain and you make yourself vulnerable and that's the sort of outer level of this practice on an inner level you are you know pacifying you're sort of alleviating past karmas you're you're resolving karmic debts uh with other beings and also generating merit by making offerings to the buddhism bodhisattvas and sentient beings and so on but then the real core of the practice is severing egocentricity it's severing our fundamental demon of self-clinging of dachshund so machik talks a lot about demons and should in the you know 19th and to earlier 20th century most people in the west saw chud as an exorcism right it was an esoteric tibetan exorcism ritual with these you know frightening magicians that would you know just cast away evil spirits with their daggers and that was sort of the idea about what should was but that's not actually what trude was at all machik's approach to dealing with so-called gods and demons was fundamentally a paradigm of feeding instead of fighting so instead of you know with demons especially instead of um you know giving them extra energy by struggling against them and creating a further rift in our mind between these various fragmented aspects of our psyche yeah she advised feeding them finding you know what they really need and feeding them to satisfaction so my teacher lama sultrum she's formalized the sort of psychological approach to this you know i think of it as there were there's a division that takes place with that recognition uh machik teaches that external beings like the mamos and the taorang and the gulpo and all these tibetan spirits those are not the real gods and demons the real gods and demons are anything that that inhibit our experience of freedom that that hinder us from being able to experience our the nature of our own mind so namely our afflictive mental states and fundamentally our unawareness to the real nature of reality so there is this fort that takes place for a long time throughout indo-european history especially leading into buddhism at least there's a sense that you know gods and demons are these external beings there's the good guys and the bad guys in hinduism you have the devas and asuras buddhism as well there's this sort of division between the gods and anti-gods which is itself a bit of a delusion but this is the mentality we have there's gods and demons and they're out there and they can hurt us and they can drag us into terrible places and this is where we live machik said no that's actually not the case those beings are not gods and demons the only real gods and demons are your hopes and fears they're the phenomena that exist in the space of your own mind so lama sultrum took this understanding and really elaborated on the psychological interpretation of this understanding how to actually work with our own gods and demons our hopes and fears our addictions our traumas how to deal with those in an integrated way through precisely that jungian sort of ethic of you know not just imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious so that was one side of it but then there was another side there's a strand that machik sort of leaves hanging or at least in people's perception of her teachings and that is what are those things then what are those beings over there if they're not gods and demons what are they and in in the modern sort of western tibetan buddhist movement there's unfortunately been this this myth that's developed that actually those spirits that the tibetans talked about are just allegories for our human emotions all they are is a symbolic representation of that's too reductionistic too reductionistic it completely removes the possibility that there is something outside of humans that there are other beings with their own experiences and of course this is core to buddhism there are many non-human beings in buddhism i'm getting chills i'm getting chills because i'm a couple weeks out from moving my entire family to bali and of course in bali is very tantric hinduism but the the understanding amongst the local population is that they're constantly inhabited by a world of beings in fact you're you're in i mean talk about a world of enchantment this this population of people this way of living is completely enchanted so much so that your everyday your everyday interaction requires a conversation and a commitment to being in relation with them exactly exactly i mean we we have the you know we're starting to realize for instance like the importance of consent in certain human activities the fact that we actually have to have a relationship and a conversation in order to determine that certain kinds of relationships can take place this is the case for all of us it's not just the case in human relationships we are in dynamic relationship with all other forms of life including first nations also i mean first nations absolutely lived in relation with a world of not just i mean as you say human-centric animals deities plants the earth i mean everything and so profound so central yeah it is the profundity of just this understanding just this realization is so frequently overlooked i think especially in the buddhist tradition because we're so accustomed to jumping to those very high lofty levels of absolute reality and that's what profundity is but we don't realize that we have spiritually bypassed one of the most enchanting components of what it means to be alive and that is an earnest acknowledgement of other than human beings you know much extreme explanation for what those beings are is the buddhist explanation they're sentient beings full stop they're not absolute gods they're not absolute demons they're not gonna take you to the heavens they're not gonna drag you down to the hells they're not always going to help you or always hurt you they're other sentient beings just like any of us so we are in we're in relationship with them they don't have absolute existential control over us but we're in relationship with them so we should approach them with love and compassion we shouldn't approach them with deification demonization or a complete uh you know dismissal of their existence all of these are anthropocentric paradigms that bring us further away from a genuine experience of relationship so this is really this is the core of of machik's ontology is there's this this clear delineation between what are real gods and demons and then what are sentient beings and how do we relate with each of them and in both cases we relate with them with love and compassion i remember being in budgaya for the dalai lama this was before pandemic maybe a year before the pandemic it was 2018 the dalai lama was going to give the yamantika initiation there were maybe 30 to 40 000 people in attendance and we were at the onset of the the ritual and he stopped and he paused and he changed things up right on the dime and then he gave a sub commentary on it which was there was supposed to be a an aspect of the ritual that was uh um driving away the evil spirits from the the the mandala yeah and he paused and he said you know i've always done this ritual because it's part of the tradition but now i i see that it contradicts our intentionality here which is to live in compassion that's great and so he said what i'm going to do is actually invite all these the the uh malevolent spirits to stay with us and enjoy this nectar because this is this is how to be how to embody compassion for the onset of this ritual and i out of the 14 llamas he's probably the first to do such a thing but i think i think that moment really speaks to what you're saying yeah i mean we're building a mandala so it's an all it's an alternative paradigm it's a completely and in that paradigm we're all self-generating as deity and yet we're casting out it's like you don't belong here and and the dalai lama stops and says no i mean that that completely contradicts the whole ethos all those other spirits number one they do exist as you're saying and number two i guess in terms of the magic lebron let's feed them let's feed them the nectar of of of altruism yeah and i just i think that if we're going to take that as a metaphor i mean it was quite it was literal but if we were going to make a statement about it in real life i mean we are now on a cusp of a major global transition for the last few hundred years people's movements have been there has been a movement towards human right there has been a movement towards people's right there has been a great unnecessary destabilization yeah through all these sort of movements to correct imbalances of power and and and whether they be dominated by patriarchy or white supremacy or what have you uh equal economic elitism uh but we are now what i'm sensing from you and i'm going to open the door for you to to take us through it is those movements which have made so much gain in reorganizing how we see ourselves in relation to others are now going to take this next bold step transhuman yeah um and i just think that that's with with the dalai lama's little bit of symbolic and literal gesture there this is medicine this is actually what heals yeah exactly that that dalai lam anecdote gave me chills that's i haven't heard that before that's incredible and such a great example of the tibetan buddhist ethic that really developed around this time of machik leptin i think there's there i could be wrong about this but i i really feel that this is something that specifically arose in a tibetan context which is why we'll we'll find a lot of indic tantric works that don't have the same sort of um the same ethic they don't necessarily treat it in the same way machik's tradition specifically in many of her practices you know she says not to en not to exclude anyone everyone is included everyone is brought to the feast the worst of the beings the most malevolent and angry and uh you know needy beings are are first and foremost they're the exclusivity what a powerful what a powerful sentiment for the uh for the for the paradigm shift right absolutely which of course makes sense considering the animistic basis that that tibet had for the adoption of buddhism you know in india they had already by the time the buddha came around in um you know his sort of northeastern indian context with folks like mahavira and the sramana movements in relation with vedic brahmanism they there was animistic you know animism is embedded in that you know vedic brahmanism did have you know an animistic worldview more so i would say even than buddhism in certain respects jainism definitely had an animistic ethos but tibet it was it was living it was embodied it was a part it was a core part of the religious experience taoist and japan too strong absolutely and what we find when we see this integration of like you know buddhist tantra in japan also in tibet we see much more creative interpretations of what other sentient beings can look like in japan there were multiple traditions that earnestly considered the sentience of plants which is something that i talk about a lot in my book because i think it's something that buddhism kind of missed and and got wrong initially but it is corrected someone somewhat in these other traditions that buddhism came into because they were already so steeped in an ancestral animistic tradition it's not that machik laptop intentionally wrote animism into buddhism or you know was a some kind of bunpo priestess who was talking about buddhism that isn't the case but the culture from which she came was deeply animistic and had been for thousands of years most likely definitely for many hundreds of years and all of us initially were animistic animism is the is the original world view it preceded a belief in the afterlife it preceded shamanic engagement it preceded ancestor worship it preceded the existence of gods all of these things were preceded by animism it is the most fundamental way that we can interface with a more than human world that's all it is it's just acknowledging that yeah we're humans there's other beings that are non-humans and we have to have relationships with them but the way that it happened in tibet and japan was was very interesting in this sense and there was i think a bit more dynamism and flexibility in really making sense of these paradigms so through machik's teachings which were then they infiltrated all of the different schools of tibetan buddhism even though her own tantra sort of practiced lineage dwindled a little bit as its own sort of monolithic entity but it was in other places and that ethic really started to sort of seep throughout buddhism tibetan buddhism to the point that it's pretty widely considered that is sort of the gold standard for relating with spirits and what that teaches is that they're sentient beings you should feed them instead of attacking them you should love them as you love your own children because they've been your mother in a past life and also a recognition that the real gods and demons are not them the real gods and demons are the mental afflictions that we experience within the immediacy of our own our own awareness uh rising arising from our unawareness of the real nature of reality though that's the demon that's what we need to cut it's not those beings we need to help them and love them you know it's it's very it's ironic because we originally thought you know like alexander david neal when she she writes about should it's specifically this you know brutal macabre exorcism right that's you know totally violent and wrathful but the reality is that should is the most peaceful practice it is it's the epitome of a peaceful practice you know it's you're you're not in any sense attacking others there are some wrathful chid practices but those are only engaged if the peaceful methods don't work the first and and most important method of engagement is always through love and compassion we could talk for hours i'm going to ask you to to at least close the loop on this conversation i i think one of the things that appeals to me about the direction that you're taking in the book and maybe you can spark some interest among the the listeners now as we head into uh you know eagerly awaiting its release in in what way is this sensitivity towards the unseen medicinal in what way will it really be healing on the individual and on the collective level yeah so on an individual level this is an antidote for isolation it's an it's an antidote for our sense of alienation from nature you know we talk about the environment as a place as our home for instance which is very romantic and very nice but it's not it's not a place it's a community it's a community of beings there are other beings that comprise the place that we see as our you know sort of fixed home but it's a community it's a it's a wild complex interconnected uh universe of different forms of life and different kinds of sentient beings all interacting with one another so on a personal level that itself is an enchanting experience you know it's really at the heart of enchantment regardless of what form of of enchantment or fantasy or myth or whatever you're engaging in is to have authentic relationship with other kinds of beings you know to speak the languages of animals and trees that is far closer to the heart of what fairy story tries to get at than you know trying to appeal to the gods or trying to change your fate or something like that it's it's an organic immediate level of natural enchantment that arises through relationship so you know we know we have we have plenty of scientific data to show us that being in nature is deeply psychologically and physiologically beneficial for us it's it's you know essential for our health this is what we were evolved to do we evolved to exist in nature to engage with plants to climb on trees to you know be in nature itself to be fully involved in it and you know engaged with it and we've moved away from that so it will give us the ability to experience that that basic sense of meaning and involvement on a communal level my my the book is essentially it is itself based on the the diagnostic process that the buddha uses for like the four noble truths so that is a medical paradigm it's a medical paradigm that was used by the buddha is used by vedic physicians it was used in the ancient greek world this idea that we be we begin with a diagnosis we establish its etiology we look at its pathogenesis how did it develop we look at the prognosis and then we establish a treatment this is the basic process really by which sentient beings evaluate issues in their lives we all do this on a micro level constantly all day long so in doing this in relation to our chief problem our main elephant in the room which is the anthropocene and climate change and global warming so looking at that directly from a sort of medicalized you know uh diagnostic paradigm uh that was the the inception for the sort of theoretical basis of the book so the diagnosis we know what the diagnosis is it's climate destruction ecological meltdown you know global warming we're not very good at establishing a single term for it because global warming ignores all the other climate components that are going wrong and climate change is very docile sounding uh it's not just change and it's not a fever it's it's absolute metastasizing festering uh deep chronic terminal illness that we're dealing with so that's our diagnosis the ideology of why this happened in my opinion this comes down to anthropocentrism it comes down to the formalized development of a logical paradigm of anthropocentrism which we really find in the ancient greek world plato and aristotle sort of started this this movement and then that became absorbed into christianity and then later into many uh sort of enlightened western philosophical movements and ultimately to where we are now we still basically believe the same things about plants and animals that aristotle told us to believe over 2 000 years ago and that's very problematic because it's not based in empirical knowledge it's not based on observation it's based in delusion and he even kind of knew that he knew he wasn't a very good botanist for instance so his assertion that plants are completely inert biological automata with absolutely no sensory awareness whatsoever he he knew that that maybe wasn't true he had a student theophrastus who was a much better botanist who himself was able to determine that this wasn't true and that plants have a sensory experience they have an awareness component to their reality but as we tend to do it's not always the people with the best ideas that we listen to it's the celebrities that have the most endorsement and also the the works that end up surviving over time are selected to survive over time you know we lost 99 of latin literature in the early centuries of the christian era because christians destroyed them to scrub heresy from the written record and greek works had a very similar fate everything tended to go to the middle east it survived there arabic and persian you know scientists and philosophers they developed these ideas in a much more robust way but in europe we were left with sort of the bare minimum of what we thought was the aristotelian and platonic corpus and one of the things we learned from that is that animals and plants are completely non-vital they don't really exist they're just robots that were placed there in the christian era by god for us to use as resources and food so this is a basic delusion that hopefully people can see is not very useful in the modern era the idea that these are just unliving resources that were literally designed for us to exploit opens the door for unbounded exploitation and that's precisely what we've done so acknowledging anthropocentrism as the the ideological root of climate change today of our ecological destruction our paradigms of exploitation i think that that's really essential and understanding the ways that that progressed through religious movements especially but also later philosophical movements and ultimately the hard sciences is really important for us to grasp in the same way that understanding the historical roots of the concept of hell or satan is useful for us to realize that we don't actually need to worry about hell and satan so that historical context is something that i favor really strongly in the book and try to put that front and center for people to understand why we believe the things that we believe we don't believe that animals and plants are are agentless thoughtless instinct-driven machines because that's empirically true or because it's reasonable or because that's what all the scientists are showing us is the case it's the complete opposite of what we're being shown is actually true so what do we do with that what do we do with that knowledge our prognosis is significantly dependent upon what we do with that knowledge so you know if we choose to acknowledge that we made a mistake if we choose to write some of the wrongs that we perpetuated in the name of that delusion most of all arguably being the complete decimation of indigenous cultures that adhered to animistic world views on the basis that they were so primitive and stupid that they couldn't see the difference between a person and a thing it's we can't just go from that to appropriating indigenous animistic traditions to try to fix our problems because there was a lot of harm that was caused in between those two points and we have to acknowledge that directly so my my proposal is that we all re-engage in animistic worldview uh this is essential for all of us it's essential on a communal level to to be on on a path to recovery to actually find a way to get out of our current crisis we're never going to get out of it if the only way that we can talk about trees is as carbon sinks or if the only way that we can talk about animals is some through vague some vague notion of biological diversity and the importance of biological diversity for the planet these aren't compelling emotional arguments these aren't mythically ingrained we have no sense of how that relates with our experience or how we're in relationship with them if we can see that you know for starters the fact that plants are sentient beings in much the same way that animals are sentient beings and that we cannot create a logical division between animal sentience and plant sentience then that totally changes the the terms of our conversations about climate change deforestation in the amazon becomes a multi-compounded ethical conundrum because of the treatment of plants the treatment of animals the treatment of humans and the treatment of the biological or you know multi-compound organisms that result from those relationships we're destroying all of them and that by itself is an ecological and ethical conundrum that's an ethical crisis we don't even need to deal with the the future ramifications of these problems on human societies especially on you know uh sort of developed nations that have air conditioning and and uh you know some sort of uh protections against uh environmental crises it's it's you know this is the the point this is something that we really have to come around to and the only way that we're going to come around to it is through stories it's through changing our mythic world view it's changing the way that we actually conceptualize our place in the world only by doing that are we going to be able to actually achieve any kind of change well that is a wonderful uh coming full circle because we spent the majority of the top of our conversation exploring the mythical dimension of life and here you're coming not only locating it within the ecological demise of the planet but suggesting that without a mythological land bridge to reorganize our relationship basically it's just moving furniture on the on the titanic it's not going to be enough a lot a lot of the i would say the the scientifically grounded activism that is out there i i'm sensing that in your estimation that's just going to fall short and it's it's not nearly enough it's not sophisticated it's not it's not seeing the root cause clearly nor is it addressing it in any kind of meaningful way and so this is an organ is this is a this is a paradigm first or perspective first or uh what we'd call in buddhism view first this is about right right view precisely this is my world view our when we you know we say view as if it's just a distinct thing it's world view it is our world view that is what buddhism talks about an establishing right view it's establishing the right view of the world the right right view of phenomenal reality as it exists and that's something that that's the first first step on the noble eightfold path that is the first step in our treatment both in our treatment of our existential disease of suffering but also most certainly our disease of ecological collapse we have to deal with the the problem on the level of the world view because even 2 000 years ago people were using the justification that plants and animals aren't aren't really alive to exploit plants and animals and to exploit natural environments and resources resources our whole way of conceptualizing the problem is itself part of the problem so no matter how we dance around it and try to you know plant more trees so that we can sequester more carbon or you know we can try to you know preserve animal populations in a certain place as long as we think of this in such um sort of mechanistic terms especially anthropocentric mechanistic terms that we in which they only exist for our purposes we're yes i guess you know i'm going to just play devil's advocate as we conclude here i'm not going to make this the final comment but if you look out on the world right at least in the geopolitical mess that we're in or even just locally in the united states i mean we're talking about white supremacy and racial injustice i mean it's it's hard enough to get our heads around just the delusions that occur between people what you're asking us to think about or to consider seems like a magnificent leap have you have you have you i mean what ways have you thought about that in terms of the release and positioning this book and in such i mean we we can't even get along with our neighbors what's being asked of here is to then re-envision ourselves in our relationship with the entire biosphere of course some someone like me loves that i love that idea i mean i'm i want to raise my kids eight and five right now and in that very ethos yeah uh because i think you have to start young if if uh if you wanna have a chance and i wanna make sure that they get the opportunity to have the mythological dimension of life present just you know just as easily as rational rational science um but it is a hard it is a hard leap what do you what do you say to that um i before i before i say i do want to say that an important point i think also is the fact that that science is enchanting science can point us towards phenomenally enchanting realities about the nature of our world you know the study of evolution the study of biology the study of astrophysics et cetera that can enchant us carl sagan was an enchanting figure i mean absolutely yeah we we have this you know we have this myth another myth that we live by which is that as soon as you understand how something works it ceases to be enchanting it ceases to be magical and that's just that's just not not true at all uh we can know a great deal about something and that can actually make it far more enchanting it's you know the reason that certain myths speak to us is because we can tell that they're speaking from a place of truth and the more aligned the myth is with the truth the more powerful it's going to be so we really you know we have to be careful of of falling into any sort of dualism that that posits that there's a separation fundamentally between science and enchantment or even myth and science we need science to inform our myths and then we need our myths to expand the the breadth of what we perceive to be possible you know that imaginative space that comes from an experience of enchantment that pushes our boundaries it pushes us into new frontiers which then precipitate into new scientific revolutions and discoveries which then do the same thing that that would be the organic process that's how we can actually you know get into a cycle of more enduring progress as opposed to falling into these you know exhausting patterns of just accumulating knowledge throwing it all away new paradigm accumulate knowledge throw it away new paradigm etc um so that's just one thing that i wanted to throw out there um but then as to the the core question which i think is very very important for us to be aware of on many levels not least of all being an acknowledgement of the impact of our past crimes on indigenous peoples and the fact that there's far too many i think you know white westerners who feel like they can now just go and appropriate an indigenous animistic tradition and sort of you know wear the robes and take on the identity without without acknowledging the grave harm that had been caused just you know a hundred years ago and even still today so that's something that i think is important but also really seeing that the root causes are fundamentally the same regardless of the paradigms that we use to separate ourselves and others the production of a master identity at the center and then a bunch of others that are basically revolving around that master identity that is a very core delusion that we have you know whether we um we use species which is at least a scientifically identifiable thing species do exist on some level that we can determine through you know the ability to procreate and so on but we have this idea that it's between species so humans must be in the middle and everyone else is out there that's the anthropocentrism is the species equivalent of white supremacy as opposed to racism which is speciesism these are paradigms of dividing things up but then the the assertion that one of them is central and everyone else is lesser that's that's this master identity complex and that's at the center of everything that's at the center of white supremacy it's at the center of of patriarchy uh it's at the center of ethnocentrism these are all a part of the same constellation of delusions that we have what you know what is compounded when we talk about something like race is the fact that race itself is strictly a cultural construct it's strictly a social and cultural constructed identity there's no physiological or genetic basis for what we think of as race it we are all humans there's one human race there are different you know genetic and ethnic uh um you know lineages that arise from that but race itself is a political and social construct that doesn't have any absolute reality so the construct of whiteness for instance is it's open to interpretation which is very convenient for a white supremacist orientation because then you can keep whoever you want in the in group and then throw everyone else out who uh who you want to throw out but the the belief that this is a useful paradigm for breaking beings up for breaking humans up and looking at them in categories is deeply diluted uh because that isn't a fundamental reality that we can isolate on some sort of a physiological level that being said because we've asserted a paradigm of race for hundreds of years more than that in certain ways but our our logical paradigm of what race is is a relatively recent phenomenon but because we've done that for so long and because we've oppressed and objectified and exploited people on that basis we have to acknowledge it as a reality it's a myth but it is a myth that has incredible power and influence in the world that we live in so we have to acknowledge the crimes that have been committed in the name of racism uh we have to look at the systemic ways that our societies have been built upon a white supremacist model in the same way that it's been built upon a patriarchal model and also on a an anthropocentric model that there is a central pillar of the white straight man that is here at the middle of everything and then everyone else is secondary that has to go but we can't just knock down one we can't just go from one side we can't just attack the gender issue we can't just uh attack the racial issue we can't just attack the anthropocentrism issue we have to deal with the whole tendency that we have to place a master identity in the middle usually one that we belong to and then put everyone else outside of that these are distinctly related you know val plumwood and a lot of people have noted that very frequently in in societies that denigrate nature they almost always also denigrate women they perceive women as being lesser than men these two things go hand in hand even with platonic philosophy he very much creates this divide between the masculine intellectual you know transcendent world and the feminine base earthly material world of feeling it's that basic schism between reason and feeling masculinity and femininity that so much platonic philosophy is built on and then later cartesian philosophy but that's it's that basic split it's the the subject object fixation but we have to address all of the different permutations of it we have to look at white supremacy we have to look at patriarchy we have to look at anthropocentrism and we have to find ways to dissemble and and break down all of these broken systems here here what an amazing what an amazing uh contribution that you're making to this sort of uh inter-related interdisciplinary sort of attempt to get to the root of the problem and provide some solutions thank you so much for your body of work that was a engaging uh life history i think you really opened up portals for me that i think we we were able to track your biography in in in more let's call it it was a magical numtar that led into the book so i want to make sure that we're going to have your website and the the title the book in the show notes i want to thank you for your passion because it's clear and evident but also you're a human and you're you're you're really a sharp manjushri and it was a real pleasure to engage with you and looking forward to future dialogues so on behalf of myself and all the listeners thank you so much for participating so richly and authentically on the wisdom keeper podcast oh thank you so much for having me it's been great definitely look forward to few further conversations so we'll look forward to the potential release of the book in spring of 2023 that is the title once more uh unseen beings how we forgot the world is more than human and there's a bunch more in here that that you know i didn't touch on they talked a lot about medicine for instance and the connections between ecological health and infectious diseases so there's a whole bunch in there many cans of worms to open so i hope that everyone enjoys those yeah we'll keep we'll keep some of it we'll just tease a little bit so that we can generate interest thanks so much eric take good care until soon all best wishes thank you for listening to the wisdom keeper podcast if you've enjoyed this presentation of sacred knowledge kindly like subscribe review and share our podcast and video series on youtube with your network so that more people can benefit from these teachings and together we can create a brighter future if you're interested in my online courses our community membership and pilgrimages i lead consider visiting the contemplative studies program at gradualpath.com until we gather again all best wishes

Channel: Dr. Miles Neale

Views: 2,156

Keywords: #ErikJampaAndersson, #animism, #TibetanMedicine, #syncronicity

Id: PhG7lmOh3KY

Length: 124min 21sec (7461 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022