Jung, Free Will, Synchronicity, Religion, & Paths to Transcendence - Dr Bernardo Kastrup, PhD

we are free to act according to our will but we are not free to will our will if we could will our will every one of us would be limitlessly happy because we would just choose to will exactly whatever circumstances uh we are experiencing at the moment we are not free to will nature Wills through us we have no control of that will all we can do is to act according uh to that will [Music] okay welcome to the show I'm joined here with uh Dr Bernardo castrip Bernardo to get started could you maybe tell us your thoughts on the main distinctions between the Eastern mind on the western mind there is a topic that has been very present in my mind recently because um trying to write something about it it's it's not easy um so everything I I will share with you now is sort of you know the current state of my thinking and it's a personal view I didn't do statistics about how Eastern people think and how Western people think it's all based on personal experience and you know not it's not this is not the result of a careful scientific study it's more a sort of a person account um I I don't know whether I can summarize all these differences in one theme that would sort of weave everything together so I'm not going to even try it I'm just going to mention certain things that I think I've noticed over the years the Western mind for instance seems to be more driven by theological thinking you know we we we want to have a per purpose um a goal uh that sort of indicates the general direction of our lives and if we don't have that future attractor so to say that tilos that goal that purpose we sort of tend to become disorientated uh not not quite know what to do with ourselves and even become depressed if we think life has no purpose life has no goal then then what is it for and then it's for nothing and then and then we don't want to live and you know you have this in the in the psychology of the West I think um in the East and when I say the East it's more the historical East because the the East is now so influenced by Western thinking that to a large extent it's becoming Western as well but historically speaking at least they tend to be more in the moment um that they cannot discern in their own minds what the ultimate purpose of the whole thing is doesn't seem to bother them there seems to be a sort of a a tcid trust that nature is going where it's supposed to go and we don't need to take explicit control over that or see the directions see the purpos or understanding what's going on um it's a more cyclical thinking as opposed to this linear evolution towards a goal or a place where we haven't been before there see things seem to be more cyclic and dynamic um and people seem to be more at peace with not knowing where it's going or or what is it for another difference is that not quite a completely difference but another uh um a completely different difference but uh another aspect of what I just talked about is uh reflected in um spirituality as well um Eastern spirituality has a tone of um regarding life in the physical world life here our normal lives regarding it perhaps as a a mistake something to be Transcendent to be left Left Behind um you know then the metaphorical image is you know you are in the first part of your life you you're a family person you you know you start a family and you put your family in the right directions secure everything do your job and then in the second half of life you you quit you go up a mountain and you meditate for the final 30 years of your life um there are some myths part of the mythology of the East also has to do with this this life here being a kind of error a natural mistake a natural error and therefore the way to go is to to abandon it in life and make sure that you never come back uh uh if you're if you know making sure you don't reincarnate um in the west it's different we are much more engaged with this right here right now even if we don't understand exactly what is this um we tend to remain engaged with it to not check out even Western spirituality although there is a monastic tradition in the West in which people do check out um but that is supposed to be reserved for a few and the rest of us are supposed to be engaged uh in life and express through life whatever it is that nature is trying trying to express through us so there is not only a Theos but a the theological drive but there is a more direct engagement with with with life as it is right now uh it is not dismissed as an error even in spirituality it's like God did it and God put us here so there is some significance to this and we are not supposed to overrule um nature or consider a mistake but uh to go through what we are supposed to go through in this life and make the best of it so that's another aspect um um of the differences I I I could go on and on but uh what I'm trying to to get across is that um I don't think there is a right and a wrong here I don't think we are right and they are wrong or they are right and we are wrong um we tend to make this mistake um in a far distant past we thought we were right and the Eastern people were wrong recently we think the other the other way around we think that uh we lost ourselves and the Easterns uh are the people who think clearly uh about what's going on and we should follow them should follow their premises I think both um are shortsighted I think there is a variety of human expression um theirs is one aspect of it ours um is another and of course even the term eastern and western it's for historical reasons because these are modes of thinking modes of being in the world they have little to do with geography and ethnicity if anything uh but historically they these modes of being in the world have Arisen uh in different parts of the world therefore eastern and western thinking but that doesn't mean that I cannot be an Eastern and thinker I can even though I'm a completely Western Westerner both in geography and and and and in in ethnicity uh so that's not what I mean um I'm using these terms just because of their historical Origins okay okay I can tell this is a very this topic is very fresh in your mind at the moment I think you could go on there for for quite a while another question I wanted to ask you was to what what influence has Christianity had on the western mind do you think oh massive massive that's historically uh undeniable um Christianity I mean it's Christianity is a middle eastern religion it's not really originally a western religion Western religions a more natural uh religions more sort of Cosmos psychist you know the world is alive type of thing uh very very symbolic in nature um but Christian ity despite that it spread in the west like wildfire um something in in the archetypal foundations of Christianity resonated enormously with the Western mind um and that's why it spread so fast and became so strong um it it Rose to the level of a unquestionable fundamentalism in the west very very quickly so it has had tremendous influence in the West for 2,000 years I think it is naive of us to to deny that or to think that we are immune to that and none of us who were raised in the west is immune to the influences of Christianity because we get our our maps of symbolic meaning very early in life before the critical intellect plays the role of bouncer you know and rejecting certain things and accepting others before we have the bouncer on the door um what we get what we sort of breathe and eat and drink in our cultural mil um is is saturated with Christian influence particularly when it comes to thoughts about what is transcendent thoughts about what is the tus what's the meaning thoughts about what is the origin of it all and why it's happening these thoughts that we absorb through the culture are saturated with Christian influence and therefore we were all laid bare to those influences very early in life even if we don't know that at a metacognitive level it's right there it's it's part of us um I I I'm very much in peace with it uh today to the point that I could even say I'm a Christian I'm okay with uh with being labeled that way of course by the same token I would also be okay if somebody would would tell me you are Hindu and and you know a number of other things but um the Christian influence has has come earlier the other influences came later in life um because of the way I was thinking I started appreciating Islam I started appreciating Hinduism Buddhism so there are other influences um but the earliest and therefore the influence that most fundamental in my psyche um I think it's Christianity and that's independent on of whether I rationally think it's a good mythology or not it you know even if I think it's not I I that's not what I think I think it is an amazing mythology so rich in symbolism it it's almost unbelievable how nuanced and subtle the Christian mythology is particularly when it comes to the idea of the kenosis is of god shedding his own divine nature in order to be a human and the idea of the Trinity how three can be one without ceasing to be three uh these are profound mythologies um but even if I didn't think that I would still have been largely influenced uh by the mythology of Christianity because when I was young the entire world around me was suffused with it in in in invisible ways that's really so it's almost like as we get older we develop this kind of like intellectual bouncer that sort of keeps in some idea or lets in some ideas and keeps most others out but in our earliest years that bouncer isn't developed at all so we just become saturated with the cultural myths that we're that we're surrounded by so if we grew up in a Christian culture then we just that becomes almost part of our psyche so when we're talking about Pathways to Transcendence Pathways to meaning it would make sense that whatever culture cultural Malo that you grew up in that would be the most direct pathway so if like if someone was born in India and was grown up in a Hindu culture they're probably going to find a lot more meaning in Hinduism than they would if they see it elsewhere and it seem for Christians seeking seeking elsewhere too what what are your thoughts on that I think you're completely right um our experience of meaning and relatedness to Transcendent uh is an inborn experience uh uh um we have all had that when we were young because we were still very close to our own Origins we hadn't yet replaced our direct experience of reality with narratives with concepts with ideas and stories and theories uh which is what happens very quickly after you're you reach s years old very quickly after that your experience of reality becomes entirely mediated by conceptual armor uh we don't longer have a direct access to to to the meaning and and the feeling of transcendence that we had when we were still very close to the moment of our birth um and therefore the way to evoke that primordial experience back uh is through the symbols that we used to associate with that experience of meaning and Transcendence when we were a kid and what were those symbols well those were the symbols that the culture has given us so if you're a Christian you will associate your inborn your original primordial experience of meaning and Transcendence with the symbols of Christianity because that's what the culture around you uh was telling you that that primordial feeling oh that's the Saints or that's Jesus or that's the church or the Bible and the symbolism of Christianity so as a kid did we associate those early symbols with experiences we have unmediated direct access to because we were still close to the moment of origin and we still hadn't laid this wall of conceptual intermediation between us in reality so when you were an adult the way to start to sort of try to go back to that primordial experience is through those symbols those maps of meaning that we were given when we were kids and there's nothing we can do about it that's how our psyche was was wired uh during our growth um we cannot replace if if you are if you grow up with the influence of Christian symbolism you cannot replace that with a Buddhist symbolism I mean you can become a Buddhist as an adult because you rationally you know you think things through and you realize that okay that resonates more with where I am intellectually today or I have tried Christianity and it didn't do it for me so let me try something else this is all possible but I think it's naive to think that the symbols of another religion can have the evocative power of meaning and Transcendence uh uh that the symbols we had when we were kids uh have uh when we are adults um we may think that they don't have that power anymore after we grow up because of the narratives that we adopt so as a grownup suppose you had Christian influence when you were a child and then you grow up and you study history and you realized that the church as an institution is behind the great greatest crimes in the history of humanity and you realize that um many members of the clergy either are not sincere or sometimes even criminals abusers and you become angry with the institution and you start telling yourself that Christianity is a hoax um that you surpassed it that you know you you see better things in life now and you become an enemy of Christianity and then because of that egoic conscious attitude the power of the Christian symbols to evoke Transcendence to evoke it to evoke meaning by connecting you to where you were when you were a kid close to Origins that power seems to diminish because the ego is at war with it um but if somebody could honestly come to a place where the person says I will differentiate the institution the church the institutionalized version of the religion I will set that aside and I will stick to my own personal relationship with that religion with the symbology of that religion in other words it does not matter if how the clergy are child abusers because that's the clergy not your direct relationship with religion not the meaning the religious symbols evoke in you the letter is a very personal thing it's your it's your relationship with a religion it does not depend on intermediaries on institutions on the history of those institutions on the officials of those institutions it's your private personal thing if people can make that discernment and therefore not judge harshly their own private relationship with religion as they judge the institution and the acts uh of that institution if they can get to that point I think they will quickly realize in that attitude of Tolerance that the symbols of the the religion they grew up in are much more evocative of meaning and Transcendence than anything they adopted as adults I think it it Bears repeating as well here when we're talking about this that religions are not supposed to be engaged with at a literal level the meaning is found in the symbolism and the metaphorical level you know I think that's really important and to be honest in my personal life you know I I grew up a Catholic and a Christian and I've in in recent years re-engaged at that level and I find a a depth of meaning in it you know um so I just wanted to sort of you know to to sort of go over that and the next thing I wanted to ask you about Bernardo was around uh Free Will and I've heard you speak elsewhere about schop schopenhauer's perspective on Free Will and and the implications on this and how we should live our lives I'm going to read a quick quote from you right I just want to get your comments on this all right so you in a previous interview you've said we are willed and then we are free to act according to that will but we are not free to will what we will so could you maybe elaborate on what you were getting out there that's that's almost a literal quote from schopenhauer so nobody should credit me for that they you should credit schopenhauer because he's the one who real realized that we are free to act according to our will but we are not free to will our will if we could will our will every one of us would be limitlessly happy because we would just choose to will exactly whatever circumstances uh we are experiencing at the moment so even if you were serving a life sentence in solitary confinement you would choose that that's exactly what you will the most in life and you would be super happy now that's not what happens we are not free to will nature Wills through us we have no control of that will all we can do is to act according uh to that will but not to will it I think the whole question the whole you know when people ask is there free will I think that's equivalent to asking whether the number five is married or not is there free will yes or no it's the same as is the number five married yes or no um and and forcing an answer so if you're forced to answer you might as well say the number five is married and the number five is not married or say the number five is neither married or not married but of course the the the right thing to say is to refuse to answer a nonsensical question all right so the question of Free Will depends on two distinctions um it depends at the first level on there being semantic space between Randomness and determinism because what we sense to be a free willed choice is not a random choice is not a flip of a coin but it's also not determined otherwise it wouldn't be free so if it's random it's not will if it's determined it's not free so there must be something in between well no there's nothing in between things are either random or determined and even Randomness is a label for the the arches of determination that we haven't figured out yet if you flip a coin and you say it will randomly land as uh faces or tails well it's not random at all the it will Land one way or the other in a very deterministic way depending on the the force and angle or of your throw and the air currents air temperature and you know all the acceleration of gravity it's just that it's too complex for us to model so we say it's random or in the case of single events in quantum mechanics we are completely unable to predict uh whether a single microscopic Quantum mechanic event uh what it will be uh we can only predict statistically you know laws of large numbers we can predict the averages but not single events and then we say well nature is fundamentally random that's philosophically a complicated step because it mixes epistemology with ontology in other words the fact that we can't predict the outcome of single quantum mechanical events does not mean that those Quantum mechanic events are random in and of themselves it only means that we haven't figured out how to predict them yet it's our epistemic uh limitation not an inherent feature of nature as far as we know I I mean that that Apes like us think that nature must be random at a Quantum level because we Godly intellects that we are haven't yet managed to predict it is supremely arrogant arrogant to the point of of naivity so that's one level um in which we fall into a trap by talking about the concept of free will we try to find the semantic space between uh uh uh Randomness and determinism that semantic space is not there the other error is to find semantic space between uh will and necessity um that difference the difference between what you will and what you need to do what you will to do and what you need to do there is a level in nature a non-personal level a transpersonal level in which that semantic difference disappears the necessity and will become one and the same thing let me try to quickly elaborate on it when there is an external environment with external forces then there is a difference between will and necessity for instance you wake up in the morning and you might not will to go to work you do not want to go to work you want to sleep longer and stay in bed that's your will but there is an external environment with external forces that impose the necessity of going to work on you because if you don't do it you might lose your job you might not have what to eat ultimately it's you who don't want to lose your job it's you who wants still to eat but okay we can speak of external forces however if nature is one Consciousness one mind which we talked about last time then there are by definition no external forces because nature is the sum total of everything that is the case of everything that is and if everything there is is one mind there are no external forces and then the will is the necessity the necessity is the will what nature desperately wants to do is what it needs to do and it needs to do it because it desperately wants to do it there are no external forces think of it and it's a it's the wrong metaphor but we use it anyway think of it as how an addicted mind operates um why does an addict desperately necessitates the thing it's addicted to well because it desperately Wills the thing it is addicted to the necessity of smoking the next cigarette comes from the desperate will of smoking the next cigarette now you can think that you shouldn't will that yes but you will it nonetheless um at the level of universal Consciousness which is all there is we are just segments dissociated segments of it there is no distinction between the will and the necessity the will is the expression of the necessity and the necessity is the form of the will they are no two different things they're one and the same and the moment they are one and the same the talk of Free Will is like the talk of the marital status of the number five uh uh it's it's it's a senseless question so what happens is that if people ask me do humans have free will sometimes I say depending on context I say yes we do why because to Me free Will is the expression of what you necessarily will so there is a sense in which you can say the number five is married and there is a sense in which you can say the number five is single but if you really want to dig deeper um and and and figure out the question thoroughly you will understand that the question makes no sense that we as individuals separate from an environment an environment that has external forces that this is epiphenomenal it's not what's really going on it's a kind of Illusion that arises because we are dissociated temporarily dissociated from the rest of nature that if you look at what is really going on there are no external forces and there is no difference between will and necessity between choice and determination we always make choices you're making choices all the time but those choices are the expression of the determined will of a nature okay okay all right so what this brings to mind for me then so are we sort of saying that it's sort of like was it hiig or he had this concept of thrownness we all kind of thrown into the world at a specific specific moment in time and we've all got a dispos disposition in nature yeah that's hiar yeah yeah and we've all get these kind of limitations within that dis disposition so what we're sort of saying is that's the element that's determined and then within that kind of within those limitations in that context we do have agency about how we um can move within it um and the thing that was sort of on my mind to ask you about then is that is a good General orientation for your life particularly for a young people for for a young person to to develop skills and capabilities within that disposition that allow you to make a contribution to the whole of which you're a part because then you be can become a Force for nature a force for um contribution in the world so when we speak of the question of free will having no actual meaning one should not construe from that that um you shouldn't be engaged with life and make responsible moral choices or responsible choices for how your life will unfold it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that you're that you have no choices to make you have choices to make ultimately those choices are determined by Nature they are determined by what nature is how nature is acting through you which are determined by what nature is um but the form of expression of that determination is our making choices is our pondering questions that's the form it takes so it's not like we are not making choices it's not like you can throw a coin and not care no no the form of expression of Nature's intrinsic determination ation is the act of thinking things through Gathering views studying making up your mind being responsible of about it making moral choices passing subjective value judgments on what's happening around you is it good or is it bad is it appropriate or not is it fair or is it unfair and the result of that will be the choices you make in life now what seeing through Free Will meaning means is that after you've made your choices there is no sense in looking back and saying to yourself it could have been different no it couldn't that's the only moment where understanding the inexistence of the question of free will plays a role it's looking back at the past because then you no longer have the thought it could have been different in other words regret disappears but not your moral responsibility for making those choices now now because making choices is how the will of nature expresses itself in an inevitable way it's through that process of making choices similarly um it doesn't mean that I think because I I don't see sense in the question of Free Will as a philosopher it doesn't mean that because of that I should stop talking about philosophy because everything is determined anyway so there is no point in I talking about philosophy who am I going to influence I'm not going to change anything but there are two errors to this one is obvious I don't have a choice to not talk about philosophy that's how nature is necessarily expressing itself through me and the other is the following even a computer system which everybody would say it's fully determined by you know the logic of the chips uh in a computer system if you take one of those chips out or if one of those chips doesn't produce outputs anymore because it gives up it thinks it's all deterministic anyway so I don't need to provide my output to other chips anymore well the computer stop working right because yes the system is determined but the way that determined system works is through inputs and outputs through a sort of a cooperation across many parts those chips talk to one another in a determined way but if one of them would stop talking the whole thing would crash so I am one chip the the audience is another chip um for this to work I have to produce outputs that will become inputs for other people and other people have to produce outputs that will become inputs to me so that's the second uh the second thing we have to keep in mind and the third if I may add one more is the notion that everything is meaningless just because it's it's determined that is a complete misunderstanding of the issue because the universe is a computationally IR ruc able system in other words there is no computer in the universe that can compute in advance where the universe will be sometime from now there is no way to predict where the universe is going why because you would need a computer bigger than the universe to compute the equations faster than the universe itself does just by going where it's going you see what I mean so um this is in contrast to for instance Computing ballistic trajectories if you shoot um a piece of artillery you can compute in advance where the projectile will land because you know letting the projectile go through the air is a computation but you have a computer you can have a computer that is more complex than the system of projectile and air and the pool of gravity and all that and therefore can compute the future state where the projectile will end faster then nature itself computes it just by having the projectile go wherever it's going so for subsystems small subsystems like projectiles you can compute the future State faster than nature does by just unfolding by just playing it out but when it comes to the universe as a whole and the universe as a whole we have good reasons to think is an is an entangled system so it has no separate subp parts to really know any future with Precision without simplifying assumptions um you cannot compute that in advance the fastest way for us to know where the chain of determination is bringing the universe is to just live life and let nature play out there is no shortcut for that no shortcuts only exist if you make simplifying assumptions nobody can know um in all EX Exquisite details the position and momentum of the molecules that constitute a building at any moment in time but we don't need to know that all we need to know is is the building going to hold up or is it going to fall apart that we can compute in advance you see so you make simplifying assumptions but if you really want to know where the nature of nature is bringing it through determination through the choices if you really want to know that then you have to let nature play out in other words nobody nothing in the entire Cosmos knows where we are going because the only way to know is to get there is to go there is no way you can shortcut that because the universe nature is computationally irreducible therefore life is is a journey of exploration the fact that it's determined is irrelevant because yes it's determined but not even the mind of God himself knows where it's going you see so everything happens as if we are not determined because we don't have knowledge we cannot fundamentally have the knowledge of where it's going so we are discovering nature As We Go nature is discovering itself as it goes as a matter of principle it's determined because whatever nature does is determined by what it is there's nothing else that it can be um but nature itself does not know where it's going so life is Meaningful it's it's a journey of Discovery it's it's a great research uh initiative and that is that it is determined or that determinism and Free Will that that distinction makes no no sense does not change this reality that it's a meaningful tremendous journey of discovery that brings me I think well into another question I wanted to ask you what are your thoughts on synchronicity I know you've read a book on yung's metap physics and can you maybe tell us about the time that you found a red foursided pyramidal Pebble and I think it was LE constant can you tell us about that that's right yeah yeah um the bodden in Germany Lake constant in English I never understood why the English gave it a name um like that like a family name but anyway um so first the notion of synchronicity the Yung notion of synchronicity is that um sometimes two psychic events happen together because of a conjunction of meaning and not because of C ality now when I say psychic I don't exclude the physical world because Yung timately was an idealist and I wrote a book defending this position I can't tell in 30 seconds why that was so Yung never used the word idealist as applied to himself but he was one that you can see throughout the Corpus of his work so for Yung the physical world was a visible manifestation of the collective unconscious which is psychic mental mind stuff so just as the collective unconscious manifests itself to us in dreams in the form of dream symbols people buildings cars you know that that's what we dream of in the same way it manifests itself to us in waking State as physical symbols too in other words this world around us right right now this is a sort of dream um modulated by the collective unconscious the physical world is the content phenomenon the appearance of the world as it is in itself and the world as it is in itself in yung's cosmology is the collective unconscious it is the appearance of the collective unconscious in awaking States as dreams are the appearance of the collective unconscious in sleep States um therefore you can have a synchronicity that constitute that is constituted by a coincidence between a psychic state in us and a physical state in the world because that physical state in fact is also a psychic State you see and and and why there should be these coincidences how do they happen if not through causality because synchronicities are not supposed to be caal they don't happen together because of a caal chain that caused by both of them they happen together because of a correspondence of form a correspondence of meaning and the reason why this happens according to Yung is that the psyche the mind not only the human mind but the collective mind the the collective unconscious um it behaves according to primordial templates there are preferential ways According to which the mind of nature expresses itself as if there were harmonics resonant frequencies preferred ways in which the mind of nature wants to vibrate you know everything has a resonant frequency right um um at least one U sometimes many harmonics that are resonant so does mind and those resonant frequencies are the archetypes these basic templates of behavior According to which mind preferentially expresses itself and since it's the same mind out there and in here it's just a my mind is is a temporarily dissociated segment of the mind of nature um since it's the same mind then it stands to reason that both sides would Express themselves according to the same archetypes my mind and the physical world Express themselves according to the same archetypes and therefore that expression should coincide now and then especially when there is a lot of archetypal meaning involved when there's a lot of archetypal events involved the examples of archetype events are a mother nurturing a child the mother archetype or death the death archetype birth uh another archetype the hero overcoming great difficulties another archetype so when an archetype is constellated which the union term for when an archetype is evoked by circumstances you will tend to have that evocation Express itself everywhere not only in the mind of the Observer but in the mind that underlies the physical world itself and then there are these major coincidences of meaning that are not causal but archetypal um the same archetype was constellated in the entire neighborhood so things tend to happen together that evoke that archetypal meaning in the case of my trip to Switzerland I was uh doing research for my book on Yung this was several years ago and at some point I was at Lake constant with my feet in the Water of Lake constant it was a warm wonderful summer day and um I was on the German Shore I was about to go to the Swiss shore on the other side but I was still in the German Shore so this the Swiss Shore was in front of me um it was a narrow part of the lake so you can see the other Shore right there and I was in a place where just across from me a little bit off to the left it was the place where I knew Yung had been born uh and uh as I was thinking of Yung uh looking at the place where I knew he was born a story he tells in his biography suddenly came to my mind um there was a time and this was already another Lake this was Lake T but um it was still a lake and it was a lake in Switzerland so the archetype of constellation was the same y TS of a uh he was playing building a little church with the lake Pebbles on the margin of the lake he lived at the margin of the lake and he needed a pebble that would play the role of altar in in the little Pebble church he was building for fun and uh and then he was walking on the shore of the lake and then he found a red four-sided pyramidal Stone and then he thought this is the perfect Altar and he picked it up and he put it in there and I was I was having that thought in my head and I was thinking do I really believe that I have never seen a foursided red pyramido stone in a lake no Lake Stones tend to be just like ellipses or rounds you know eroded stuff and they tend to be dark gray or brown you know red foursided pyramids it's probably young young with his you know fertile imagination he probably saw a circular grayish Stone and he thought oh this look reddish and this looks like a pyramid and the moment I was having this dismissive thought I look down in front of my feet and there it is a red foursided pyramidal P right in front of me and it immediately freaked me out but then that's my nature my intellect within a second kicked in and said oh wait a moment look further because if you find other red pyramidal stones then it's trivial it's not it's not a major synchronicity I'm not being given any particular message from nature here right if I find others it's it's trivial and I spent a good half an hour with paying my feet walking bare feet on Lake Pebbles trying to find another one and there was there wasn't another one um another thing I thought was could I have seen this pyramidal Stone subliminally first and then I thought of Yung because in that case it's causal and it's not a synchronicity then I played the tape back in my head and was like no I was not looking down looking down at all not at any moment um that maybe I I glanced down but I glanced down much further ahead then in front of my own feet and I concluded to my own satisfaction that no I hadn't done that it was was really a synchronicity the same meaning was the same archetype of meaning was constellated in my mind and the physical world um around me it was like nature telling me don't dismiss Yung because that's what I was doing in my head that's exactly what I was doing I was like Yung and his ferto imagination what is this business of four-sided pyramidal Stones red ones in a lake in Switzerland and then nature sort of no oh yeah okay uh let me show you um don't dismiss the guy and at that moment I started taking the book a lot more seriously than I already was so and and I never dared to dismiss Yung ever since it's been like four years four and a half years now since that event no that was yeah that was 2019 or 18 yeah four or five years ago and um you know even the parts of Yung scorpus which I have read more than once part of his Corpus that I think yeah there is better stuff than this in his Corpus even those parts now I go back and I'm like no wait let let me read this again I shouldn't be dismissive of it Yung was driven by a strong diamond and his Diamond knew what he was talking about even if I don't understand it and therefore miss it I should have a second look because the guy was not an idiot for sure for sure I'm I'm I'm joking here but you know um you could even say Bernardo Kash is the second coming of Carl Young because you're like you're born you're born a 100 years after isn't that right on the year is that right yes well let me first say this uh this is an insult to Yung I'm I'm I'm I'm only I'm I'm only playing I'm only playing but uh something just on the topic of Y and we talked there a little bit about the collective unconsciousness start there too um what do you make but before you go there let let me answer your question was good it's just when you said I'm the second coming of Yung that I thought this is an insult to Yung but uh yes Yung was born in 1875 in July I was born in October of 1974 so we are almost exactly a century apart uh from one another a few months uh in between uh and I do have the habit of monitoring my progress in life the phases of My Life by linking it back to where Jung was at around the same time and I can do that even on an yearly basis you know my 20 20123 December is yung's 2024 uh August you know what I mean so uh uh so I I I I tend to investigate my life and how I mature how I grow as a person the steps of my own individuation which is a yungan psychological concept alludes to psychological Pro progression psychological tillos where is the goal of your psychological development as an individual I monitor all that instinctively by linking it back to where Yung was because I I know yung's life in pretty much detail not only from his own biography his own biography is a weak Source about that because it's not a biography of events it's a biography of feelings and thoughts he doesn't talk about events about chronology in his biography it's a unique biography in that sense but we have other sources and then because I know that I know where he was what he was doing what he was thinking and every single year of his life I compare that to my own life and to see if I am on schedule or not you've got a a high yard stick to for they Anno but you're both in this very similar line of work and you're both I obviously idealists with with different ways of of expressing it um but the question I wanted to ask you about was related to the collective unconscious and when we we hear about things like psychedelics um near-death experiences and other Altered States Of Consciousness you hear almost consensus reports about what people experience during these these um experiences and trips what do you make of that what do you make of the fact that people find um they seem to have similar experiences whenever they're under the influence of these um yeah whenever these things are happening look some people might might even disagree with the premise uh of your question they might say well the Hindu sees uh Krishna and the Christian sees Christ what do you mean it's the same thing um the appearances are of course varied different there is a lot of noise especially in psychedelic trips there's a lot of your own skeletons in the closet you know a lot of your own [ __ ] let me use proper English word here there is your own nonsense that comes up and it's Unique it's individual um tends not to be very profound but underlying all that if you can see past the noise and past the literal appearances I think there is a surprising congruence of meaning in other words The Superficial symbolism is all pointing in the same directions um the Hindu the Hindus Krishna is in meaning the Christian Christ actually Hinduism and Christianity probably have some commonalities very early on because Hinduism also has a trinity Krishna is also an incarnation of one of the members of the Trinity uh so if you study religion Origins a little bit further you'll be amazed how much congruence there is between Christianity Hinduism and Buddhism you know Christ was essentially a a Buddhist and the way he lived his life um so that that's what is required for us to see this amazing commonality you're alluding to is to see past literal appearances to see past personal noise personal references uh and personal history and look deeper into the meanings that are being evoked and there there is surprising commonality amazing commonality it cannot be a coincidence uh it must mean that um not in all cases but at least in the real deep cases people undergoing a psychedelic experience or an N regardless of geography or cultural background they are landing in the same territory I think that conclusion um I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's inevitable because the data is largely anecdotal and it's very difficult to do any kind of perspective controlled study so I'm not going to say it's inevitable but objectively uh but the data suggestes suggests a sort of a common landing area extremely strongly very very strongly um and in my mind uh that's indeed what's happening that's that's how I interpret it I think U ND psychedelics um Syncopy some forms of brain damage what they do is they imp uh ordinary brain activity U and in doing so occasionally that impairment and Taos impairing the dissociative process itself because know in my mind and we talked about this before the brain and brain activity is what the dissociative alar of the mind of nature looks like when represented on the dashboard of perception um so it stands to reason that parts of that image an active brain firing and all that part of it must be what the dissociative process itself looks like not only the contents of the dissociation and if you impair brain activity you are impairing at least in some cases you're impairing the dissociative process not in all cases in most cases when you impair brain activity you're impairing the contents of the dissociation and that's just cognitive impairment you become Dumber you know but it TS to reason that occasionally when that impairment is extensive it will also impair the dissociative process itself and if you impair the dissociative process what does that mean well it means less dissociation a more poorest dissociative boundary you come again more in direct cont contact with the ground of reality with the the mind of nature in its undissociated non-dissociated state um and that's I think the common ground where people are all landing and of of course because mental activity is in a sense in a particular sense abstract in the sense of not having physical correspondence because primordial mental activity precedes alters and therefore precedes physicalities physicality so it doesn't correspond to anything to to any physical image it's it's an endogenous it consists of endogenous experiential States like thoughts and emotions but non-human thoughts nonhuman emotions so for a human to comprehend that a human has to clothe those transpersonal mental states with symbolism that makes sense to the human so I think we are all Landing in that primordial mental space in psychedelics andde Syncopy brain damage hyperventilation all these techniques that impair the dis iation we are landing that same place but when we come back and we want to talk about it we immediately clothe it in terms that evoke those endogenous States but according to the references of our particular culture so the Hindu saw Krishna the Christian saw Jesus the E The Atheist saw his dead grandmother whoever whatever symbol will convey the feeling of unconditional love of Unity of totality um so you explain your experience to yourself through that symbolism already um and and I think that's what's going on that's fascinating all right so only a few minutes left and something I heard you speak about in another conversation was you have experimented with active imagination in the past could you maybe tell us about that practice works for you and yeah what does it actually look like in practice I am well physiologically handicapped when it comes to meditation active imagination and Altered States Of Consciousness meaning I it's extremely difficult for me to move myself off my Baseline State of Consciousness my analytical State of Consciousness I am very very metacognitive I am in impossible to hypnotize um I don't slide spontaneously into Ry and alter States Of Consciousness and I well I I'll say it because it's true even if it makes me look Petty I envy people who can do that um and and I don't find it appropriate for anybody to feel Envy um but I accept that that I feel it you know what I mean I can't help it um I I have realized that um you know when we are born we are all dealt um a set of cards a hand of cards right and and and I was dealt mine and I am very grateful for some of the cards I was dealt I I can process information a lot of information uh quickly so I'm happy about that but I have not been dealt a number of other cards that I would have liked to have and this is one of them um so active imagination states of revery Altered States Of Consciousness are extremely difficult for me um I have no spontaneous access to those States so the experience you're alluding to probably is what I uh wrote about in uh dreamed up reality one of my earliest uh books I don't know 15 years ago um but to to achieve that one I did a lot of research um and all the techniques available um I even consultant with my own doctor because I'm in a country in which certain psychedelic substances are legal so I went to my doctor talked to him I want to do this and had my liver checked had my blood pressure and heart checked to make sure that uh you know if I did high doses that I wouldn't be stressing my physiology to a point where could trigger a pre-existing problem that I didn't know was there so there there is no pre-existing problem um and I used many techniques concurrently so I took psychedelics while I I was wearing um a mind machine which produces synchronized patterns of fleshing and binaural rhythms in your ears tries to entrain your brain to get your train your brain to sort of follow certain frequencies and rhythms that will move you off your Baseline analytical State of Consciousness um all of this I did uh after going through long meditation sessions um changing my diet to avoid certain things that I knew uh would make it more difficult to sort of shift my state of consciousness uh avoiding anything with sugar anything with high calorie content uh for days before uh um uh going through the experience and yes putting this all together in high intensity and high doses yes I achieved um non-trivial States Of Consciousness that to me were absolutely mindboggling for especially two reasons that I hadn't expected in advance despite all my research um for some I think it was there in the research but I didn't pay attention to it or I didn't really understand what it meant uh there were two things that were very discombobulating for me um in these uh other states one was how familiar they are despite being completely strange and alien don't know how to explain this seeming contradiction um I expected that I would my attitude was that of um an explorer I had my notebook in my hands metaphorically speaking and I was going to to go into a foreign country and observe it very objectively and take notes and come back that's what I thought was going to happen but that foreign country is as much a foreign country as it is you there is no distance you you are not an observer detached from what you're observing what you're observing is you but it's not a person um and and it's the size of the cosmos um so it when you try to talk about it the whole thing becomes incredibly contradictory but during the experience it's not contradictory at all and that's the second surprise so the first one is how familiar it is the second one is how self-evidently real it is more real than this here that was my second surprise uh um and then then I had to work that out it so happens that I was already an idealist um and with my idealist conceptual um dictionary and my idealist conceptual tools um I could make sense of it uh so it it didn't throw me for a loop afterwards which happens to a lot of people they don't know they don't know what to make of it they can't integrate it I could because I got lucky and I and I had the tools that allowed me to integrate and find the space for it and conceptualize it in a way that was satisfying to me that allowed me to think oh no this I I understand this this this this is reasonable at a meta level at some meta reason level um uh there was one thing else I wanted to say but I uh I forgotten oh oh that's just a disclaimer by saying this how surprisingly familiar and self evidently real it is more real than real I don't mean to say that um every psychedelic trip for instance is real I don't mean to say that at all most psychedelic trips are your own [ __ ] are you laying yourself bare be uh lowering your defenses to your own [ __ ] to your own fantasies your own traumas your own hidden thoughts uh the emotions that you that you don't want to know you are having uh and you're fantasizing you know it's a dream state so most of it is just your own nonsense nonsense it it has no profound reality at all it's very superficial stuff but if you break through and then only the people who once have broken through know what I'm talking about if you break through the [ __ ] level you know the noise the fantasies the traumas your personal stuff and even if you after you break through the cognitive noise around you which is not your personal stuff it's stuff that is not personal to you it's more in the collective areas of the psyche but it's also noise it's also a lot of nonsense uh or maybe not nonsense but uh it's more the psychoanalytic part and you know superficial stuff if you break through that too then eventually you get to that space that is more real than real and it is not at all at a distance from you it's the size of the cosmos but it's within you and it is you and and it is incredibly incredibly familiar at the same time that it is discombobulating alien and totally distinct from any reference you take with you as a human um and some people describe it as when you break through Humanity in other words you break through your personal self and then you bre break through the collective unconscious of the human human species after you break through these two boundaries that's the more real than real space that's the very familiar space not necessarily the noise stuff that people get if you know they take low those psychedelics in a party or this kind of nonsensical stuff if you do it seriously you can get to that more real than real space and there's no question in it afterwards afterwards you don't come back and say was that really real no no no by then you know there are certain things you cannot unsee if you know what I mean for sure for sure well I think that's a great note to end on um for people that want to learn more about your work Bernardo um and the asentia foundation where can they find that online you guys have a really your YouTube channel moment is thriving it's the Essentia Foundation YouTube as well can you tell us a bit bit about that yeah it has started growing a lot um um I I am surprised but at the same time not completely because because um this year um we hired a a professional filmmaker somebody who used to work for the Dutch version of the BBC or the Dutch version of in the US how is it called in the US uh their National broadcaster PBS Public Broadcasting System so we also have Public Broadcasting Corporation uh uh in the Netherlands and um this person Hans bura who is uh working for us now uh not for us I mean he he is now Essentia foundation too um he is a professional documentary filmmaker that worked not only for this public broadcaster but a number of other broadcasters in the Netherlands for many years um so he knows what he's doing and he's put a team together of professionals that know what they're doing and the production quality of our videos is now much higher uh than it was in the beginning when we were sort of learning as amateur filmmakers now we have a professional team doing doing that stuff and it's a level of quality that YouTube is not used to people who watch YouTube usually expect you know somebody at home making his own videos you know and they get millions of views but it's a sort of a a pro prototype like stuff done at home with unprofessional equipment and edited in an unprofessional way and now only we watch our stuff they go like oh am I watching a PBS Nova documentary in here it's you know it's it's not as expensive a production be because we produce a lot of videos so we have to cannot spend so much per video but it comes across as as professional and now we have a video now around 300,000 views which is like 10 times more than the best videos they had before um and next year 2024 uh we are hoping to get to a million views um in a single video um let's see let's knock on wood um and hope that that happens but yeah Essentia Foundation is the place to go Essentia foundation.org and Essentia is e s n TI a foundation one word.org or you can go to Bernardo castrop one word.com and that's my person website and there's a lot of free stuff there free essays free academic Papers free videos podcasts interviews all kinds of things the books are not free because they are published by a a company Collective Inc in the UK um because uh authors know that even though they're not going for the money um if the book is for free and upload it as a pdf online or upload it on Amazon as an UB people don't take it seriously people only take it seriously when it's published by a publisher a professional publisher um a big one Collective Inc is part of Watkins publishing he a big publisher in the UK and the US so that's why the books are not free that's the only reason why the books are not free although I have been known should I say this in public say I have been known to feed the underground pirate Market of books with my own stuff but you shouldn't do that you should buy your books officially you get better quality uh copies either hard copies or proper eups which are much better to read in a reader than a PDF that doesn't get the right format can't resize it can't make notes on it any anyway yeah these are the places and as we're saying as as well that you spend you know you spend years writing these things and put your your your life's best energy into them so I think it's just it's only right that you are compensated for that as well you know by getting a bit of return for it as well to keep things going but um any Bernardo um I think you're right and I think for many authors it's important that people buy their books officially because that's how they can live and write new books um in my case after 25 year career in in high-tech in the corporate world and now as the Director of Essentia Foundation we are not for profit but I do have a salary I earn a lot less than I used to but I do have a salary so in my case that's not really the point to sell the books but what you said is applicable to most other authors and I think we should help other authors continue to write by buying their books properly officially well Bernardo it's been an ABS pleasure speaking with you thank you very much for your time time today I really appreciate it and it's been a pleasure always nice talking to you I wish you the best for 2024 and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and everybody else thank you Berard thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed the show if you'd like to hear the full version you can do so with the weekend University premium membership this gets you access to your mastered library of over 5 years of psychology conferences including over 230 talks interviews with the word leading psychologists professors and authors unlimited CPD certification transcripts quizzes premium passes for annual conference online courses with Richard Schwarz and Deb Dana and more the cost is £97 for one year which breaks down at around 27p per day the best bit is you can try it out for 30 days completely risk-free as all orders come with 100% money back guarantee if you're interested please go to tww members.com for more information

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 34,282

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, psychology talks, psychology lecture, Bernardo Kastrup on Transcendence, Jung's theory of Synchronicity, The Role of Religion in Jungian Psychology, Synchronicity and Spirituality, Transcendence in Religion, Paths to Transcendence in Philosophy

Id: MjLDlkUil8s

Length: 73min 56sec (4436 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024