The Secret Language of Archetypes with Laurence Hillman Ph.D

the cool thing about archetypes in a in the current time and I think why they're becoming so popular is because they are indeed a universal language you know I have called archetypes the the Genome of the Soul you know it's what connects us all on a soul level um we know about genetics and how we're all connected that way but on a soul level what is the common language that we all share and it is indeed archetypes because you can go anywhere in the world and present an archetype in a culture to a person and observe it so for instance we can take mother Warrior lover these archetypes will Express themselves individually and culturally differently but that's what makes it interesting what they have in common is what interests me which is what is the deeper connection that makes them the same so that we can all recognize them on some deep level as existent in our psyches welcome back to the transmission my friends I hope you are excellent um if you've ingested any of my content in the past chances are you know that I am deeply fascinated by archetypes in fact I just did a whole exploration on the topic via Carl Young the collective unconscious and the archetypes that live there so yes it is a topic that really uh gets my Wonder dander up and in this mind meld my friends I am excited to say we have a real scholar and practitioner of archetypal Theory Dr Lawrence Hillman he holds a PhD in Psychology he's the author of planets in play and he's the co-creator of archetypes at work a method to assess and develop people and organizations based on archetypal theory that aims to uh in Lawrence's words re-insole the workplace I think he says which my God what a steep and Noble Hill to climb I also definitely have to note that Lawrence is the son of someone who's been a pretty massive influence on my own personal philosophy the late psychologist and author James Hillman so this is kind of a surreal mind meld in that respect so given that this topic really runs in his blood as he puts it at one point in this conversation he was pretty much marinated in archetypes from a very young age another thing I must mention about said archetypal brining is that Lawrence is a master astrologer and I'll be honest astrology is a topic that I'm careful about approaching I've never really done a deep dive on the topic because it is such a polarizing one and it's not that I'm totally by any means closed down to the topic I just want to make sure that I had the con conversation with the right person and my God Lauren Silman is a fabulous representative Emissary of that art of astrology he was also kind enough to do a reading for me and I definitely still have not fully digested or downloaded it I think I will be just making sense of it in general uh indefinitely so much territory covered in this mind melt so many novelty nuggets Unearthed I'm not even gonna try to to Rattle off a laundry list of topics we get into in this conversation we get into all of the above everything I've mentioned and much more this one was really special to me uh so let's just get on the ride let's just pierce the membrane of this mind meld all of the applicable portals for Lawrence Hillman will be in the description do me a favor stop and tickle the algorithm with a like and a sub that is of course the nutrition that this media entity requires to mature also if you enjoy these mythopoetic musings we've got over 300 more in audio only form that will never be posted to video here so do look up third eye drops wherever you listen to podcasts and click subscribe and if you want to go a layer deeper if you want to initiate yourself into our Wonder Lodge uh crowd sponsor third eye drops over on patreon like I said you can join the community there and support the show and you get rewards like stickers pins shirts and more we do live Gatherings a book club all at patreon.com forward slash third eye drops and with that my friends I am so excited for this one so without further Ado let's meld Minds with the wise Wonderful Whimsical Lawrence Hillman it's always challenging when you're you're going into a conversation that you know is going to be deep the very deep mind where to start and I think a good place to start would just be with what I think is going to run through this whole mind meld which is archetypes and you know this idea that I I think people like you and I probably approach it from as it's presented by young as this dimension of psyche that is deep deep below the conscious mind where the core foundational symbols that we use to make sense of the world emanate from and what that means how you think about it um so yeah I I'll leave that ball in the air since I've already introduced you started philosophically rambling and I'll let you uh do your magic with the ball as it were well Michael thanks for having me it's really a pleasure to be here you know um I think the cool thing about archetypes in a in the current time and I think why they're becoming so popular is because they are indeed a universal language you know I have called archetypes the the Genome of the Soul you know it's what connects us all on a soul level um we know about genetics and how we're all connected that way but on a soul level what is the common language that we all share and it is indeed archetypes because you can go anywhere in the world and present an archetype in a culture to a person and observe it so for instance we can take mother Warrior lover Sovereign these archetypes will Express themselves individually and culturally differently but that's what makes it interesting what they have in common is what interests me which is what is the deeper connection that makes them the same what are the what are the universal principles and ideas that lie beneath them that give them this universality so that we can all recognize them on some deep level as existent in our psyches yeah that makes a lot of sense and when you think about this realm of the collective unconscious or this dimension I imagine you and to an extent I know this is impenetrable it's unanswerable I think Young himself said that we can only know of its existence through working backwards right because it's like we see their Downstream effects and if you try to trace those Downstream effects back to their root you you get to this central point of mystery where to your point you see these things existing throughout cultures manifesting in different ways but noticeably similar ways so you're left with the conclusion or or I guess the open-ended curiosity that that puts you in this space of this concept seems to exist it seems to exist whether it's as an endemic feature of the human psyche or it's a priori of the human psyche it it seems to exist but I would imagine from what I know about you you must take this notion of their existence to be pretty literal in a sense like that there really are these ontological locuses of archetypal energy or consciousness how do you think about it do you am I mischaracterizing you there I think we can never see an archetype we can never measure an archetype but what we can measure or see or recognize is it's manifestation it's embodiment and I have a lecture that I call Venus in the chocolate mousse it's one of my lines so to me when a waiter is kind enough to put a beautiful chocolate mousse in front of me I see the archetype of Venus in that it's it's seduction it's Beauty it's sweetness it's delicious it's all of those things that you know we all have our own personal um responses to it but it is an archetypal energy to me so I see the whole world like that whatever I'm looking at whoever I'm talking to I think archetypally I'm constantly using what I call my archetypal eye to see the world it makes it a lot of fun and quite interesting to me and it's a way to to read what's going on beneath the obvious and beneath the surface so it's a it's an in-depth look at things and not to look also feel and embodiment I love that it makes it so practical here I am getting huge uh and philosophical and borderline masturbatory with my question and you're and you just bring it right down to earth with a with a really practical example and I love that I mean of course the energy of a chocolate mousse would be this this Venus like energy of of decadence and richness and and love and and I do really think that that helps make sense of the world and and that's one of my core preoccupations all the time is in a world that seems really chaotic and and like we you know we have no real anchor spiritually what are some of these principles we can return to that will will begin to re-center us and to me it just seems like this idea of archetypes is a great ground floor to go to because it doesn't you know it doesn't require that you make any ontological statements about reality it just requires that you you recognize hey these are real like the these foundational concepts are real to The Human Experience and even if they're just psychological that really gives you a certain stable footing to to operate from and and that in itself is incredibly practical and I just want to be clear that you know we live in a multicultural world so you're in my reference would be Venus because that's our culture and that's the name of the planet that is behind it from an astrological perspective but in other cultures there are different words for Venus and there are different ways that the archetype appears it's a short it's a shorthand but if you go to Africa or you go to South America or go somewhere else you might find different words you will find different words but the archetype is recognized so part of the Curiosity then on your Journeys becomes to find out how do other cultures how do other people experience Express and imagine that archetype just because I call it Venus that's a shortcut for me but the experience is still Universal those experiences of Seduction of beauty of longing of Desire of sweetness all of those are Universal and so my curiosity when I travel is to find out I always understand the archetype but I want to know how it's then translated upwards into culture and people yeah from this deep place where it exists in form they essentially inform you know people Behavior objects um everything so they are just they're La they're an underlying pattern that exists and so if we can read them we can understand things much uh better on it on a much deeper level yeah you know what really just struck me in an almost like micro Epiphany kind of way when you were talking there is the way ancient cultures used to approach Gods versus the this like locked down dogmatic way that we tend to approach them in a modern sense where seemingly from what I understand they were seeking a kind of syncretism the Egyptians and the and the Greeks liked when they and the Romans liked when they would come together and say aha your Mercury is our Hermes your Thoth is our Hermes etc etc and there's some there's some equivalency in these Concepts the way that you were just outlining it makes that make so much more sense because this stupid modern notion that we would you know argue about the what's the correct name of a God to put over to use your example chocolate mousse like who cares about the name it's understanding the this the symbol system and its roots and just putting a name like Venus over it helps you get there if you understand the mythological genealogy of that idea then it just it it makes sense and I think that that's something that we we lose one of the many things we lose when we think about gods in this really oddly reductionist way where it's like it like we live in a world that at most allows for one God you know most there there is a God or there's not a god like that seems to be the way that we think about well it's literalism you know we live in a literal time and so it's hard to make these these richer analogies I like your your referring back to you know cultural Mutual interests and understanding and you know your Mercury is my is my um Hermes and these kind of ideas I'm not sure it was quite that elegant and not just stealing but still it it it is a way of of longing to understand I think we lost a lot of that with um you know with Inquisition and with and with um the whole sort of conquering of the world um that happened you know in the in the in in the 18th well 16th 17th and 18th centuries you know just going out and conquering and then killing all the local structures and imposing Christianity in so many parts of the world took away that conversation of what what is here what are the origins we're not trying to recover a lot of that all over the world but part of that notion of you know our God is better than your God takes away that richness of Multiplicity that we had globally and that is still available to us of course and it still exists in some parts of the world yeah and it's leading to this lack of mythopoetic fluency that I think is really robbing us of that more connected spiritual way of being because when you don't have that language things don't seem magical things don't seem like they have this deeper root in something meaningful and connected and playful and dramatic and romantic anymore it's just like it's just stuff there's no Essence beyond the stuff if I can't weigh it I can't measure it empirically then it's not really real and if you live in that kind of a world that's it's just this I mean unless you're the type of person who's super analytical and and you you get off on that kind of um complexity it just seems like a world that's that's robbed of its essence or something absolutely well it's you know I think at our core we are meaning making creatures I do believe that no matter how you put it we look for lots of different ways and have forever looked for ways to make meaning of of things and people and ourselves and our stories and you know when you get to a completely materialistic existence you cut off such a big part of yourself that people then go to extremes to make some you know to have some kind of meaning making they look for isms or they look for for for Clear rules about what makes sense to them and and I mean just think about it when you buy you know when you're totally materialistic if something has no meaning except that it's a it's a satisfier for a short Moment Like an object or something you buy because it's the thing or because you want it right now think about how quickly we lose interest in our you know presence when we get them and things like that it's just it's just it doesn't it doesn't last because it has no meaning but if it does have meaning because so and so gave it to us then it suddenly becomes this hugely Rich object for us yeah um or this thing from our childhood or this you know somebody saved you know a lock from our from our childhood it has this huge meaning because we we've imbuted with with the gods with richness with an archetypal value and that's what makes life meaningful and and and important otherwise it's just a bain existence of consumerism which is where so many people live and are suffering because there is no meaning making mechanism anymore so they're they're they're you know the huge Resurgence of astrology at this time is clearly because people are trying to make sense you mean I fit into the universe in some way I'm actually part of something larger I'm not just a random existence here you know for many many God has left the picture and so it's no longer about religion it's about trying to make meaning in some way so there's all these new ways that people are trying to find some kind of pattern where they fit in yeah yeah and I I wanna make our perilous wonderful journey into the a word that you just brought up because I know that you're really a renowned as far as I'm concerned a renowned expert on that topic and practitioner of that art but uh one thing I wanted to bring up before I forget is um a weird relation to your idea of Venus being in chocolate mousse there's a have you by chance read the book immortality key no I think you would love it um it is written by a guy who is a classicist speaks ancient languages um and he set out to essentially investigate the famous mystery Cult of eluses and one of one of his motivations was to try to exonerate this professor named um I believe it's I believe it's Rook I don't want to get this wrong but from Boston College um he and a couple other people proposed essentially that at the cult of eluses there was some well they we know that there was a beverage called the kaikion that was like the the entryway to the great mystery and you ritualistically drank this beverage and Rook hypothesized that there was a psychedelic component to this beverage and that you would go into an altered state of communing with the Goddess that you know all of these great people throughout Antiquity um spoke so highly of you know people like Plato I think Herodotus there's so many like it's it there's so many that it almost like it's pretty much any name that you can think of from that era probably was initiated at some point but one of the things that really changed my understanding of their ideas of gods versus our ideas of gods is that gods were something that you would directly experience not not in a way of like um where where we're sort of trying to dialogue with with something higher but we would literally take the body God into our bodies and experience the God so he also talks about like the Diane like the dionysian Cults and the mine ads and they when you read the text it's very clear that they believed they were taking Dionysus into their body through the wine and they would go into this altered state where they would become they would merge with this dionysian archetype through the wine and that's just something that it's maybe it's a small difference but I think it's such a profound huge difference it's a profound difference the model that I use to understand the world and and the people I work with is based on embodiment completely it is that we actually step into these parts of ourselves these multiple gods that are within us and funny enough you know in in Christianity it is repeated again and again and again that you know you are in made in the image of God you are you know Jesus is in you it's that kind of a thing meanwhile you know most of us think of Jesus as up on the cross and separate from us and we worship what's up there and we pray to and we ask for forgiveness and it's all about a distant relationship that we try to make closer it's very very different from what it actually is teaching which is a it's in you and it's and it's behaving christ-like which is the idea not to sort of try to emulate someone else and so uh or I mean worship someone else or or you know that it's already within us the potential to do that so in a very similar manner um without that whole worshiping part I believe that the gods are within us because these archetypes are within us and that we can step into them at any moment so you have these inner archetypes that we just talked about um for instance take the lover um you know the lover is not only in the in the Venus moose uh I mean in a chocolate moose Venus in the chocolate mousse but the lava is also in us when we go on a date or when we dress nice or when we put on some perfume or when we do our hair or when we um love to counter money or when we um you know are in politics and have to be diplomatic all of those moments the same archetype is showing up in different variations of that archetype archetypes are very rich so if we can recognize that we can see who's present who has stepped forward in that moment in the space in the person in the environment in the music in the smells so we can recognize the archetype as being present anywhere at any time when we develop this archetypal eye yeah so we have we hear it and feel it and see it and it is incredibly personal um and it's also incredibly reflected in what we see yeah I think that's so indisputable especially once you equip yourself with what I was saying before with that like a little bit of that mythopoetic fluency I think you just see it in yourself you see it in everything you know when I was drinking my coffee this morning I was thinking to myself I wish I knew more about the brain and hormones because if I did I bet you there are some mythopoetic connections that would really set off epiphanies like perhaps in other people but definitely in myself from the standpoint of like hormones themselves seem archetypal like testosterone is a low-hanging fruit one right like that's that's Mars that's Warrior energy like and then there's like there's serotonin there's uh oxytocin that you know the very venous-like energy and like that there there could be something to of an Olympus literally physically in your brain in a way that people don't don't think about absolutely and that has been I have a book from the 1930s I believe from a medical doctor who wrote a it's a fabulous thick book that talks about connects um the planets and body parts and functions and it's just fun to read even from the medicines how things were looked at then that we've now know so much more about medically and yes that's true and um I think it's a mindset you know how much do we need to know so if you go back and you go to Delphi and you say where there were gases they're coming out of the ground and so everybody was stoned essentially yeah or if you have if it's sort of like see they're not doing anything weird they're just doing this it's just you know I can explain it with my left brain scientific mind now I feel good about myself because it's so scary that maybe there is no explanation that I can fathom with my left brain ability that I'm now freaked out that's fine that's a person's mindset I just need to be sure that we recognize the limitations of that mindset because he closes off a whole lot of things it's a little bit to me like going into um you know to uh a concert and hearing Beethoven's Fifth playing but being only concerned with the um you know the the space between the notes you know that's what in the intervals is what interests me not the sound and so it doesn't mean it's wrong I'll give you a very quick analogy so just we understand how people show up in the world it's it's it's it's kind of a clear distinction in how people approach things sure there are people in between but just as a general story I think of of two let's say two young girls who have lived all their life in a village in China they've never been outside of their Village they speak only Chinese and somebody invites them to Broadway to go see a show and they're sitting in the front row and their eyes are this big and they're looking at this extraordinary scenario that's happening so the one girl is really interested in the curtains going up and down and the things moving around on the stage and she can see behind and see people running around and pulling ropes and pushing buttons and levers and all kinds of things and she's fascinated in what's going on and the mechanics of this whole thing it just it's you know her engineering mind is just really excited the other one is trying to figure out what the story is about yeah neither of them is right or wrong but they're two different perspectives I often use that analogy the first one is the astronomer who wants to know how fast things move and how the you know what the mass weight is and so forth of the planets the other ones who know what they mean astrologer so neither one of is right or wrong but they have equal value because they just have different perspectives that's the key for me yeah and so um and you can argue with well how do you know what something means but then you have to actually deepen yourself a little bit into astrology to be able to answer that just like you have to deepen yourself into astrophysics if you want to answer you know astronomy so I just think that's important that we understand where a person is coming from there's no right or wrong or you're right and I'm wrong kind of a thing it's it's being aware of my father used to say be aware of what tree you're sitting in yes I love that whole rip I know that riff I love that riff yeah please share it yeah yeah it's just it's it's that it matters because it's perspective essentially that's it you know what what Tria is sitting in and how are you how are you um recognizing your own thinking because so few people do and that's self-awareness which to me is the beginning of any conversation if it's just attack or just denial or just pushing back or just it gets really boring so I don't get into arguments with people about the validity of astrology I'm like have you tried it it's the famous line of Newton you know he said to one of his fellows he was an astrologer and he said to one of his fellow scientists um I have tried it and you have not so basically shut up you know right that was his comment which is not necessarily the best way to go about it but there's something clear about that it's like give it a shot try it out and it's like someone explaining why love is not right who has never been in love you just I'm not going to listen to them it's boring yeah it's Mind Games it really is and yeah I love that point that knowledge is not mutually exclusive it's not either this mythopoetic way of seeing or a literal analytical way of seeing it's it really is like to two povs what's that that famous uh um uh the famous analogy about the the uh the elephant where it's like the Blind Man's like feeling different parts of the elephant yeah no one can ever see the whole one exactly and and um yeah it's not about right and wrong is the is is the point it's just being aware of our own perspective I think that's really really important yeah and to be and to be um you know interested in the other perspective I love science you know I have a engineering Masters you know I love I love science I have no problem with science um and um and I get it and astrology has a lot of Science in it we have to calculate you know I remember in the 70s doing using tables and spending four hours calculating a chart that's now done by a computer I love all of that I love the scientific part but that to me means I have a well-developed left brain and I can think practically and linearly if I have to but I also want to enjoy you know who wants to live with only half their brain right yeah yeah to an extent we need it and I'm and I'm with you on that if I'm although I am very attracted to this mythopoetic way of seeing believe me I am allergic to and when I sense that there's nothing propping up some idea or there's dubious Origins to some idea I want to know and I want to dig and if I don't feel like there's anything of substance there I'm not interested um you know like we we need to to exercise critical thinking when it comes to these ideas especially if we feel really just drawn and naturally biased towards certain ideas like I say this all the time I don't want to live in a cold dead meaningless Universe therefore I know that I might be primed to want to connect to some of these ideas so I need to maintain that critical eye on them and myself and why I'm attracted to things because it may be that it's just oh I'm not alone you know it might be my my reaching at times so I I have to be aware of that and I think everybody has to be aware of that in their own way maybe they have the opposite disposition maybe I know so many people and I'm sure you do too that came from some kind of really dogmatic religious background and as soon as you bring up anything remotely spiritual you can like feel them start to quiver and clinch their orify and they're like I don't I don't no no and it's scary but that's right but that's a Dogma you know that's an ism it's just as much in ISM as somebody who is in the scientific mindset and just cannot think outside of what can be measured yeah and so neither of them is right or wrong but again what might help these people is you just be aware that from their perspective they're missing a whole bunch of other perspectives and that that's not a threat multi-perspectival ability is one of the main things we need today and you also mentioned the other one that I think is the main the main skill set going forward for human beings to really learn um in the age of Aquarius for me that's a whole other conversation but for me the main skill set we have to now learn and develop well is discernment yes the number one thing because so much BS is coming our way all the time from so many directions that we have to learn essentially how to become fact Checkers and how to become how to really let things sink in and see if they resonate with us or if it's just you know something that someone else has preached for us and these kind of things that takes discernment that's a skill set that we're not very good at and that is going to be the primary required skill in my mind to make it you know through the next hundred years yeah I think discernment and the and as well as just being ready to be flexible because and I think this fits in with the Aquarian sort of ethos or or dynamic as well in that we were talking about this I think privately a little bit that people just don't want to be put in boxes anymore and our ideas about well things are this way and you know I'm not quite comfortable with that idea like you better get comfortable because it's just gonna get weirder the boundaries are going to get blurrier um it seems like that that is for sure on the rise yeah one one of the ways I'm getting ready for this new age as we're that we're sort of already in in many ways but not fully it probably you know there's no switch that gets flipped and suddenly we're in a new age that takes a while to make the transition as Ray grassy so beautifully says you know it's called the dawning of the age of Aquarius when is it Dawn when you see the first rays of the Sun or when the sun is above the Horizon so it's a it's a period that we're definitely in and one of the ways I'm I'm getting ready for that is by literally in my own private life embracing change as much as I can so any habits that I have anything that I'm comfortable with I tend to challenge regularly yeah I've done that don't need to do that and let's do something different with that and it's always a little bit just you know um difficult and then when I do it it feels freeing because I'm sort of going with the flow of what's going on in the world and that's that's much easier than when there is actual change that happens oh I thought this was this but I guess it's not it's this way um it's like yeah I mean it's like that muscle has been trained so I can practice my own muscle because I know things are only going to change way way way more than from what I've known so all the unknown can be embraced or it can be shunned and pushed back against but the unknown is emerging and um it is happening really fast think of chat GPT and we don't have the tools remember when we had cloning come up and everyone we don't have the ethical tools to deal with cloning what if you could clone a human being and then what you know where does it end and so these kind of things um as a science advances really quickly we need in my mind myth operating tools to see all the the surface stuff that's bubbling really quickly on a deeper level that we can resonate with that we can understand which is the archetypal level and because that's in us already and with that we can understand all these changes and it makes perfect sense and we can even enjoy them because we're part of it and it's not out there it's not something we're either worshiping or hating it's something that we actually can personally experience yeah yeah I'm so with you and and I love I love the way that you just laid all of that out and now I think Lawrence it's time to go there it's time to go into the realm that you are such an expert in that I am so curious about that I've actually I'll be honest with you I think I've avoided conversations about astrology too much on the show because I was waiting for the right person to really have that conversation with and you're without a doubt that person I knew that before you even did my reading but then after you did my reading I was like yeah this is like this is this is the man that I want to have this conversation with well thank you very generous of you to say that thank you thank you so so do you have a specific question you want me to just yeah yeah I think so anybody who is listening like just you know creating some simulacrum outline of a skeptical person who has a knee-jerk negative rejection of that idea and I think you know where I think the chasm that most that those people can't cross is they see everything we're talking about so far in that these archetypes whether they're ontologically real or just psychologically real that they seem to exist but then there's this Chasm between them existing within us and the planetary bodies celestial bodies having some kind of actual influence on us okay and for for you how did you initially how did it click for you and how did you initially cross that castle if you can remember yeah I can remember I can remember like it was the first like it happened yesterday I was 16. and my mother was interested in astrology I was kind of bored in school and we had a family friend whom I'd known since I was a little boy who was an astrologer and she said hey because she liked it she said hey why don't you go spend some time studying astrology with him I'm like okay whatever and I was 16. so I go to my little moped went down the hill and knocked on his door and said hey um he says you want a scholarships and yeah I guess so I just literally sat at his feet because it hit a small place or sat on the floor and then he was sitting in a chair and and 10 minutes into my first lesson with him I knew with the absolute Clarity this is what I'm going to do all my life and that was 46 years ago wow I've never it's never changed and it was a recognition like oh yeah I guess you know maybe I've done in the past life who knows doesn't really matter but it felt incredibly familiar about what what interested me what why I got caught was by what he can do the the what it's actually what its capacity the capacity of what astrology actually can do which is to map out these archetypes so I was talking before about that we have these inner archetypes and maybe people agree with that but they don't want to go as far as connecting through the planets so then I asked the question all right so what if there was a way that we could actually map out these inner archetypes and so there's different ways we can do that we can do that by just describing a person's talents for instance and saying well this painter clearly the way she paints has all these beautiful figures and colors and Landscapes that she paints there has to be a strong um you know venusion in in our language archetype right there that's present in her she's has easy access to that part of herself and she uses it on a daily basis cool or somebody who's you know James Earl Jones famously is well known in the world for his voice so probably there's a strong Storyteller or Mercury um you know present in his psyche that he has easy access to and then that would I would be curious about so um so that's the the way one could start to map these you know a little bit sort of it's a little bit like somebody if you break your arm and you go to a good doctor you know they can probably set your arm pretty well by just feeling what's going on and and and bandaging it up and it'll probably grow together pretty straight but what if you had a tool to actually look at the bone structures and how they've broken or what's going on in there that which we would call an x-ray there is such a tool and it's called you know a person's personal chart that is that precise now can I say that with with with with Surety absolutely because I've seen it for 46 years thousands of times to be extraordinarily accurate there's no way that a a a rational causal thinking mind can explain the experiences that people have when they get a reading that cannot be explained through the left brain that they just can't now some of those things happen in therapy as well or they happen when someone is um you know in love they happen in other places where Architects become very very strong but you have it you have a blueprint you have a way to look at that that is incredibly useful so I look at it from totally utilitarian perspective if I can if there's a tool that I can use to apply to actually map out a person's archetypes where they're where they are really comfortable with an archetype where they're less comfortable with an archetype where they could develop an archetype because it would help them to not be walked over all the time so maybe they want to develop their Warrior so that they can stand up for themselves or these kinds of things or maybe they feel they're too sensitive and every time someone says something mean they fall apart and so how would that help them to build up there in other words it's a developmental tool it's a psychological developmental tool but we need the map first so we know where a person is that you can see a trained eye can look at a map of a person's um birth chart and see those things in a split second so it's a little bit like um you know a a suppose we found a brand new piece of music from uh from you know Beethoven that was hidden in someone's attics it's never been found before right and you're a composer or you're a you're a conductor I mean you would freak out with excitement you see that you would see these black dots on on on on the white piece of paper and some lines and you would hear the whole thing in your head and get incredibly excited that's how I feel every time I look at a chart I'm looking at black dots and lines on a white piece of paper and it speaks to me the same way it would to a composer or to a conductor a new piece of Beethoven work it's a new piece I've never seen this chart before and it's really exciting so it tells a story it's music it's it's but it's a right brain story so um now you might say okay well how is that possible or you know the the left brainer is going to go well wait a minute how is that possible the planets have to do with anything the first thing I want to think about is the word influence influence literally comes from astrology it comes from Latin influero the idea that planets are flowing into us that's actually where the word comes from so do other words like disaster literally means disaster which means this is disconnected from the Stars so um there's some lovely lovely um you know astrological uh terminology in our language but influence to me is not the way to think about um the planets so I don't believe that the planets influence me I don't believe that um you know I know enough physics to know that that when I'm born the the gravitational pull if that's what I'm thinking is the influence of Pluto is way way less than the you know than the the vas that's sitting on the on the on the windowsill so um no that's not how it works I think of it very differently I believe which most spiritual um philosophies and belief systems believe that there is really no separation that everything is one you can literally say that because we all came out of the Big Bang as everything at one point was just you know an atom and now it's everything so everything is or as others have said we are indeed made of Stardust because that's what we are so if that's true if there is just a Oneness then this is one large system one giant system we have little thoughts about that and you know um quantum physics certainly starting to go there um and um you know the butterfly effect speaks of that something happens here something over there so all of these that we're starting to get into the collective Consciousness that there is actually this Oneness the age of Aquarius will bring that about even more internet has certainly brought this idea of Oneness covet has certainly brought this idea of Oneness that we're not really able to sort of separate ourselves from this Oneness whatever this Oneness is Humanity the world the universe all of it yeah then once we have that idea if that there's Oneness if we accept that idea and that's a belief system because you could argue against it and so and I'm fully aware that part of astrology is a belief system just like science is a belief system even though you can prove it and repeat it you can also prove and repeat things in astrology so you know if you want to use that logic but um so there is this Oneness and in this Oneness there's a lot of chaos that we really just don't understand and if I want to understand something specific like let's say human behavior a person's Behavior which is very complex and very messy if I want to get some structure into that I can see this over here but I can look over here in something that is organized and get a sense of that because it's part of the same system so what's going on here is going on there as well it's a parallel thinking or what's called synchronistic thinking so where is there some structure in this chaos of Oneness the only thing I would argue that is completely and absolutely and totally predictable always is the position of the planet there's nothing else you can really know but I can tell you exactly where Mars is going to be in reference to the Earth in 37.5698 years yeah science so so we know certain things so we know structures we know Cycles we know how long it takes planets to go around the sun we know all of these things so we have a very very very struct which is why by the way all calendars are always been sent around Heavenly Bodies sun and moon throughout the ages because that gives us some order in this chaotic world of ours yeah beautiful so we've used the planets for that so just to finish um those so we can use that we can look at patterns in the planets if we understand their meaning which is a different conversation but if we understand their meaning we can look at those patterns and then understand what's going on in a person at that you know at any given moment because those patterns are reflected in that person and then so the first idea is As Above So Below which is the old the old Axiom of what's happening this guy is also happening on the earth and the second idea in astrology there's two key ideas first one is that one that you believe that or you don't and the second one is um that of the acorn that you know why is the minute of birth so important because the whole oak tree is already in the acorn same thing is all of your potential everything that can be on this archetypal level not literally doesn't give you the name of who you're going to marry but it's going to give you a potential of how you approach marriage and so that's going to be in the acorn now we know there's such a thing as an as nurture so we know it's not just nature not just how you're born and what sky you're born under but as that tree grows to be three foot high you know a deer comes by and eats off a branch I have no idea if deers eat Oak but let's pretend they do and so that Branch isn't going to grow but something else is going to grow more we know that from biology so there is this there is this real life nurturing of this tree that is going to shape it in a certain way but the potential of everything I'm not just talking about its genetics I'm talking about things like it's treeness it's Beauty It's ability to give shade all of these things are already in the acorn that's the lovely thing and that's what you can read in a person doesn't matter if they're two years old or if they're 92 years old you can read that story that's in a person that poetic story and that can be very valuable because now we're right back to where we started today Michael which is this gives a person meaning to actually have a place in the universe and their own story that is actually sense making out of this mean seeming you know chaos masterfully explained masterfully explained and you reached into some of my very favorite bags subtly you know the As Above So Below were getting into hermeticism the the acorn you're getting into not only um your father but the work of Plato before that and the way the Greeks thought of people as this paradigma this pre-established pattern by the fates where the you know the the threads of their fate was already formed at Birth to an extent and that doesn't mean you have no free will but it means this is the Avatar you have to play the game of life with and this is your situation and to your point like them at most you have to suspend disbelief because there are things that happen to us all the time that are whether we're even aware of them or not sometimes we're more aware or less aware things are happening that are incredibly synchronistic are incredibly interwoven in ways that we don't understand and there are moments in your life where that happens in a really undeniable way where all kinds of things line up and you have to if you're a thinking person and you're weighing both options equally either something incredibly statistically unlikely is happening to me that's equivalent to like getting struck by lightning or there is some kind of hidden meaning in these events being exerted that I don't understand and if you're at least willing to get to that point then you have to hold some space for this world view of interconnection of you know Young's idea of the unus Eunice Mundus of the Tao of you know the Hermetic Oneness take your pick of the mystical Traditions talking about Oneness it's literally all of them and if you leave some room for that you have to at least be open to the idea that there could be something to this method and even if you're just open to it then I think it deserves when you look at the preponderance of evidence in that every single ancient culture on the planet from my knowledge had an astrological system they were heavily obsessed with the night sky and understanding planetary bodies in a way that if you if you look at it it almost doesn't make sense from our modern perspective because their whole civilizations were formed around these astrologically aligned megalithic temples that would have been nearly impossible to construct yet they exist on every single continent you know so when you when you look at it that way you've got to open your mind to hmm maybe there's more going on than science allows for maybe the Ancients knew something we didn't and maybe we should pay some modicum of attention to those things right and and and the reality is that we still have innately you know our what I call in simple terms you know our right brain capabilities we all do and and it's just that they get Warped they get you know so we can instead have a belief that astrology is can't be real because our other beliefs are so strong that's a right brain problem and you know because I'm Christian I can't believe in astrology meanwhile the Bible is full of full chock full of astrology if you know where to look just like Shakespeare is chock full of astrology there's books written about it so so there's astrology in everything like I just said in language you know the most of the days of the week are after planets so it's just it's just it's such a it's such a natural part of our thinking it's not like this ISM that is being forced upon us if you think of science as observing nature the simplest maybe definition of science observing and you know and and experimenting around nature then um you know then astrology is the oldest science that we have because astrological measurements were done back in the Babylonian days five thousand years ago there's no other science that was translated but I think you got into the key of why it's been shunned regularly comes up in times and all the you know all the Nobles and the Kings and the popes and everybody want astrologers in their courts and then oops they have too much power let's kick him out again this is a rising and ebbing flow has been through history and I think you touched on it by using the word Free Will I think there's a real fear by the church that if astrologists can can you know look into the future and do these kind of things and we should talk about looking at the future because that's a highly contested subject too but if we can do these things where is our free will and so in simple terms um it looks like that well astrologers predict the future and therefore you know we have no Free Will and therefore astrology is BS if I believe in free will all of that is nonsense from my perspective first of all I do not believe I have it written on my website I do not believe that a person can predict the future period I don't believe you can predict the future because I believe in free will however what I do believe in is you can do an archetypal forecast that means I can tell you hey Michael you know in September it's going to rain in your life it's a metaphor it's a right brain image it's going to rain a lot um I don't know what that means for you but I know it's going to be a rainy kind of season that's probably not the best time to go and plant a garden I would wait till you know maybe November however um you have a choice because you can say screw that I'm going to plant a garden when I want to plant a garden I don't care about rain it's fine I'll put a roof over it I'll do something about it um or you can say I hate the rain I'm going to stick my head under my blanket until it's over or I'm going to go out and dance around in the rain because I love the rain those are all choices what you do with it I have no idea if I told you you would do any one of those things that would be a prediction but by archetypally forecasting and give you almost like a weather forecast here's the kind of time you're going to be in astrology essentially is a clock that measures the quality of time the moment the kind of time that we're in or what some people call Kairos yeah it's a Kairos clock I like that it's a Kairos clock that's exactly what it is and so you know and and we still use those words in our language we say things like I'm having a bad day that's a qualitative statement about time or you know but imagine how we've lost that ability imagine if you went to your boss and said boss I think we should sign this document um you know next Tuesday because it's a better day to sign you'll be looked at like you're nuts because we think we're in control of time and quantitative time is more important nope this is the wrong time meanwhile people understand things like Mercury retrograde this is a time where things go weird things like that you know it's getting more and more part of our Consciousness but if we could become totally time quality conscious we would live a very different kind of a a life because we would ask ourselves what's the right thing to do in this moment not what's the right thing to do because I want to or because someone told me to but what's the right thing to do in this moment that would be completely receptive to synchronicities into the time that we're in yeah yeah all very well said let's dig into this concept of Kairos a little bit because you I think that's a really good kind of shorthand way of describing it I don't know if I've ever thought about it that way that it's like a qualitative clock it's a quality of time but it's but so the the Greeks had this notion of two different kinds of time Kronos and Kairos Kronos is the more you know this happens then this happens sequential kind of time that we measure with a clock and Kronos is this it's the right time I've heard it described as too it's it's the it's it's the um it's a it's a more potent kind of time right think about um here's a very practical example how you know someone is talking quality of time somebody says Hey I was born in the 60s baby what you immediately associate with that rebellious you know change yeah psychedelics we you know fight the war you know Music Revolution all those things because there was a certain quality in that time so if someone is and so we we think of those I was born in the 60s is essential an astrological reference that means from an astrologer's perspective Uranus and Pluto the two most rebellious revolutionary planets that we know were aligned in the 60s only once in the 20th century and that gave us that impact that changed the whole world in so many ways so so that's that's an astrological sentence essentially if you have that mindset yeah what let's expand on this idea so so I think people get that like there is this quality to the 60s and in the that whole movement what is the character and quality of the time we're in now and where where is it heading I mean I know to make you go against your own dictum of not being able to tell the future but but those kinds of things we can ask those kinds of questions we can ask because that's asking about the quality of the moment you're not asking me what's going to happen you're asking me what what kind of time are we living is a different question yeah and then one can very quickly imagine based on one's own filters what one thinks is going to happen in such times but one can explain a lot of what's happening through through this filter through the understand the quality of the of the time okay so um biggest picture all the way down to you know short-term things that that last a couple of weeks from an astrological perspective but the biggest picture of what's going on from my perspective is the shifting of the ages is that we're moving from the age of Pisces into the age of Aquarius and that is maybe takes a hundred years I don't know but it takes time it's not a switch and the way I know that it's there's a lot of conversation arguing and one of the ways people try to refute astrologers by saying well you guys can't even agree on stuff well have you ever heard two psychologists agree one's in you know archetypal and one's developmental have you ever heard two medical doctors agree everybody has these different of course there's certain key tenants you agree on and then there's things you argue about because it's an it's an unfolding knowledge of course if it wasn't it would be a Doctrine which would be incredibly dangerous from my perspective it's an alive thing just like all other isms so um so that's the biggest one and to me that's the most significant one that I that I measure what's going on against to get in to get an understanding of what's happening because it's to me it's so obvious there are other things it was the U.S Pluto return which happens once every 248 years there's some YouTube stuff up that where I speak to that and many others have talked about it who is excellent you know the the the the brilliant genius mind on that topic of timing and of history is really rich tarnis archetypal astrologer and philosopher and thinker um very capable that's where I would go to answer those bigger questions but from my perspective the the um the Aquarian age has a core shift in how human beings organize themselves and that's the really biggest change that we're dealing with on the macro level and I think of it in a very simple image if I think of how did people organize themselves for you know the last many thousand years but certainly especially for the last two thousand years for one other reason which is monotheism but we'll get to that but the main structure that I think of how people have organized themselves is as a pyramid and you know at the top of the pyramid is one person usually a man if it's anywhere in the world and if it's in the west it's almost always a white man and these are power structure so you can take one Pope at the top down to people in the pews one CEO at the top down to people on the line one General at the top down to people in the trenches think about any structure you want how human beings organize themselves and you'll find that model in that model your job as being somewhere in the pyramid is twofold is to kiss up and to kick down that's the model that's what we've been told and and we all know this you know that's you you polite to the adults and you you know you beat up the little ones that's the that's the that's the idea and that's very prevalent in every structure it's deeply ingrained in our way you know we respect authority because they have power over us and my father would have said as I just said before that this is also very monotheistic idea because one God at the top is the same idea down to us you know mere mortals at the bottom and so the closer we're trying to struggle to get up the pyramid to get to become CEO to get to be the boss to become you know higher in the position you climb up the ladder of power all of these things a lot of that today even in this conversation start to sound really silly they would not have sounded silly 30 years ago or certainly not 60 years ago that's what you did but today that seems really weird really why are you asking you don't tell a young person that it seems wrong so what's happening here there's a new model out there there's a new way that human beings are thinking about talking thinking about how they organize themselves and so the image that I have for the new model and I ask this when I teach a class I say so what do you think can I get circles fear I get you know cylinder I get all kinds of new kinds of ideas I think of it as an exploded three-dimensional Network lots of dots connected all over the place and each one of us is now a dot in this network we are incredibly networked these days and you know the Ukrainian War even made me think about how we're also networked into physical systems like the sewer system and the electrical system and the grids that we're in you know getting off the grid is this this new thing because it's a realization hey we're actually in all these grids you know there's electric coming into my house there's gas there's there's a you know um there's cable there's there and so on you know phone lines all of that stuff so those are all networks where you're tied into others but of course there's all these new social networks that are that are incredibly powerful where people are connected and we're all in family networks and we have different groups in our in our twitters and in our um you know Instagrams in an hour and so forth we have likes we have dislikes we're in these groups this is why I think discernment is the number one skill set that we have to develop because we're being bombarded with information out of all these networks we're in all these networks and as a node on this network we're getting information I have to pass it on if we blindly pass it on which is what most people do most people do that's how scams get you know distributed very quickly is because people say oh that's cool let me share with everybody my favorite scam was the one where where the scam itself was the fact that you passed it on be careful of whatever oh I got to tell everybody well that's yeah jamming people's inboxes was the scam itself that that really was a classic example that I'm talking about so discernment learning how to do research you know double sourcing things triple sourcing things um what is it what does a um double-blind study mean what do these things mean what does peer-reviewed mean these are really important terms that people are going to have to learn to become intelligent nodes in this three-dimensional Network so it's changed a lot but you know I deal with leadership I'm a leadership coach and consultant and and and one of the things I've learned is imagine if you're leading in that model I got an MBA in the 80s that was you know fully in the pyramid model most of that stuff except for finance and some things that don't really change that much it's almost useless today imagine if you're a leader in that mindset you know you you you kick down and kiss up that's what you were trained that's what you know how to do and you're trying to lead in a three-dimensional Matrix you're really in a bad place and that's why so many leaders are struggling because they don't know what to do and how to lead in a matrix it's a completely different skill set yeah and and that to me is a fascinating topic how do we teach how do we train leaders to be able to operate in a three-dimensional Matrix or in a three-dimensional Network use whatever term you want um to me that is that is the thing so movies like The Matrix speaking of Matrix you know really speak to this to this interconnectedness and being part of this whole system that we're in that we you know can't um extricate ourselves very easily sure you can get off the grid um you know and that's part of that desire I don't want to be in The Matrix but to me it's also like do you want to be part of what's happening or not do you want to be intelligent in this new Matrix or you want to be a victim of it and say I'm gonna I'm gonna get out of it I think it's wrong to say I'm I'm not going to use technology I'm going to get out of Technology it's like saying I'm not breathing air because right now everything is technology so let's work with it and make the best of it and what could it be really good for the fact that you and I can talk across the country like this is fantastic I think that's super cool um so I think technology is a tool it's not a thing by itself that is you know attacking us yeah yeah and what man nobody wants to be in The Matrix right like everybody wants to believe that they're that well I'm gonna escape the matrix I'm not gonna be the one that's in the Matrix but when you really ask yourself the question of what that means I think you'll find that it's not as simple as being knowledgeable or bathed in the light of some higher truth it's about actually transcending to a level of severe egoic discomfort right because you like if you really don't want to be in The Matrix well guess what the very first most powerful element of the Matrix is it's your own perception of yourself and all the things that are appear to be good or bad for you from your unique POV as a being being operated by an ego or trying to use an ego to navigate this macro all these macro happenings that you're talking about and it seems more like what people mean by they don't want to be in The Matrix is that they want some version of reality that their ego can rule over or understand better or we started kind of hinting at this in our last conversation where people start to use some of these principles to be like as materialistic tools or something as a way to instead of really trying to understand this message of unity this message of transcendence this message of interconnection they are trying to use that terminology those rules those games to essentially Elevate their ego using spiritual mythopoetic language absolutely yeah yeah yeah you know I think there's I think there's three ways to go through life it makes I make this really simple how I understand the world the first way is to say you know life happens to me yeah that is like you know the Matrix is out to get me you know corporations are doing this to me you know um 5G is going to kill me and vaccines are gonna all of that sorts like things are happening to me I'm a victim of the man right others are controlling me that's a victim mentality a lot of people live there my parents did this to me if that one would only be nicer to me all of those things that's the first way you know life happens to me the second way is to say I make life happen it's all up to me that's just as much pushback against the Matrix because the Matrix isn't going to get me I'm going to make things happen I'm in charge right so it's all about me take your gun and Go West Young man it's actually a very American idea and I can say that because I grew up in Europe um you know um manifest Destinies no it's it's you pull yourself up by your bootstraps do your own thing it's up to you you know you anyone can become president these ideas are very much ego driven that's ego the first one is victim second one is ego it's up to me I have to do it it's all the all the power is in me you know activate the power in you that whole new age stuff is all um yeah very um suspect from my perspective but yes that's that's the second way and the Third Way is how I try to live and I certainly fall into the first two at times but that is saying the universe is already happening it's already unfolding as other cultures might call it my job is to recognize and to read what's happening and then to co-create with all the possibilities that come up with what's create what's being created by the universe unfolding that's a completely different perspective so that involves two skill sets first have to know what's happening and not literally um by joining something but by figuring out what is the what is the story that's unraveling what is the story that's what are the potentials that are being presented to me so what is happening I have to be able to read that for for me I use astrology to read what's happening in real time um there are other tools meditation Ayahuasca is really popular not psilocybin is coming in to do the same exact thing to start to read well coming in again I should say in terms of broader culture to to be able to read what the universe is already doing and what's already happening so once I can read that understand that I'm making meaning of what's Happening Now I can co-create with that what do I want to participate in what do I want to contribute to that that to me is how I try to live but it requires being able to be tuned in and not thinking I'm going to make the world happen the way I want it based on some imagery that I have in my head or um you know everyone else is in charge of my life I'm just a quirk bobbing around on an ocean right right and that's so important because I mean to use another you know probably overused analogy when you escape Plato's Cave you think you're going to be you know like to the person in the cave they can't imagine what's outside the cave so let's say you're that person you're the Neo that gets outside the cave oh there's a sun now you don't understand do you understand the sun because you escape from the cave it's like it's a continual climb that does not end and you get a maybe you get a bigger more broad view of how things exist how they connect but you're never done and and that's the the sort of trickstery Paradox of trying to honestly reach some level of understanding and that's why models like individuation and understanding the world archetypally rather than like linearly makes so much more sense because it's never it's never linear you you change Vantage points and you perhaps you've gained some wisdom but now you've got to re-contextualize that wisdom in light of everything that you now know and that that you don't know that you didn't know before it's like it's a constant Balancing Act a constant Act of trying to contextualize and adjust and anything less I think is requires some kind of Dogma or requires some kind of fairy tale that is really just limiting you or to use Robert Anton Wilson terminology like putting you in a new reality tunnel and you're not really after truth then you're after Comfort or Community or something but it's not truth right and we're right back into the tree you've just jumped into a different tree and and then you think yeah you have the truth and I don't have a problem with people being in a tree I'm in a tree I get it um I am but I'm aware that I'm in a tree and I'm aware of what the limitations are what the gifts are that come with the tree most people never think about the fact in the tree they think that they're in the tree and their trees there is the right tree and everyone else is in the wrong tree and therefore they have to do something about it often or they just you know avoid them and that's that's what we call being in you know in our bubble or our tunnel yeah and that's not and that's not productive to you know solve the problems of the world yeah let's explain the tree because we we brought it up and it's a it's a it's a fairly famous riff of your fathers but maybe maybe we didn't well why don't you tell me what youth get out of it and I'll see if oh yeah yeah yeah so the idea is when you if you're in your your tree philosophically speaking take note of what branch you're on and what other branches seem close to your branch so for me you know here I am here's Lawrence Hillman here's James Hillman here's young here's Plato here's these kind of mythopoetic thinkers that inspire me and fill me with curiosity and the stuff of life and that's where I am I'm I'm or you could use a planetary analogy like this is orbiting this and I'm I fit right in this little solar system um and over there we've got all these like way way on the other end of the tree perhaps or in a different tree completely we've got the super uh in the weeds analytical types that are you know measuring I don't even know do trying to trying to play with numbers on a computer all day and they're getting immense enjoyment and purpose out of that activity but right I agree I mean it's just like it's that that your tree has certain perspective you can see certain things from that tree and there are people on you know on similar branches for sure and and um but that it's just a tree it's not the truth to me the truth is the most dangerous word in the English language because you know I I can talk about approaching the truth and being interested in the truth but anyone who tells me they have it I run away as fast as I possibly can because no one has the truth you know everyone has perspectives of the truth and and the more comprehensive that perspective is so I just I ask myself sometimes you know if you want to get into a philosophical argument with a left brainer then to me the the the conversation is as such let's just look at quality of life would you rather have a life that includes the things that you can't measure like I don't know love you know or do you want to just say well love is just a matter of firing neurons in your brain fine does that which life would I rather have a life that tells me that love is neurons firing in my brain it's just chemicals that are going on between me and another person and so you know and rationalize it down to that or do I want to have the experience of you know heart heart um palpitations and getting red in the face and swooning and not being able to sleep and you know do I want rather have that it's not right or wrong but they're very clear choices so how we go about it is going to matter you know what do we want to how do we want to explain the unexplainable and to me it's more a psychological question also you know it's like what is what is because I know that this person has the lover within them because I know astrologists I know that archetype is fully present what happened to that figure why is that figure so pushed away or so don't want to go there so we have to hang on to this because that's so safe that's a more interesting question to me um psychologically what's going on in a person rather than just getting into an argument about um you know about who's right and who's wrong it's not the point yeah it's a way of thinking it's like it's like those two young girls watching that play yes exactly why why should they argue about who's right about the play it ruins the world view for both of them they just have to be aware of the limitations the one will never know the story and the other one really will never know the mechanics of it which could be very very um thrilling and exciting for the for the first girl yes yeah really really well put really well put one of the things since you are you know so steeped in astrology and that's really been a central passion of yours for so long people who have played around on the surface of the idea or on on the surface of that art what do you think some of the most I mean there's one misconception or limitation I think that most people who are vaguely aware of their own chart um often I don't know if it's a mistake necessarily but it's a where where they stop is you know they might just say I'm a this I'm a this sun sign and I know for somebody like you that's I think you said this to me privately at some point that that's like I don't remember what you said you said saying I'm saying I'm a Pisces is like nothing no yeah it's like saying it's like saying I'm an introvert and I'm an extrovert is the world really about two kinds of people and and yet that's an extremely common term it's a shorthand for something and Pisces when people say I'm a Pisces they want to say something about it that to me is like telling me you're six foot tall Right Said certain things about you um but it certainly doesn't describe you and I certainly wouldn't want to make any kinds of decisions about you or any kinds of comfort level about your anything else without having a much more complex picture about you than putting you in a label of course there's not 12 kinds of people but it's shorthand that has value because it means something deeper it's like you know we all complexity is difficult and we all try to simplify you know so we come up with these things you know Latin lovers and all all Italians are are romantic or all French you know in Paris is the city of love and it's all parisians you know these kind of things but most of those stereotypes are actually very um negative and we live in a time where those stereotypes are really no longer I just gave you a couple of positives there's plenty of bad ones yeah yeah and so astrology is kind of the same thing you know all Pisces are dreamers and can't get it together and all Scorpios are over sex this kind of stuff is just stupid but it's entertainment which is what Sunshine astrology um in the back of a magazine is It's Entertainment I read them every astrologer I know reads them of course it's fun I like to be entertained but it's not astrology not astrology the way I practice it the difference between imagine going to therapy for six months and someone um saying you're an introvert that's the difference between real astrology and sun sign astrology right yeah so what would you get out of six months of therapy you'd know a whole lot about yourself from the deepest levels about your patterns about your history about the whole complexity of what made you you today um and that's has way more value than saying you know you're an introvert you're an extrovert which is just you know a label again we're getting away from a time of labels and so people now are getting a little bit more sophisticated so they're the sun sign and their moon sign and their ascendant so that's a little bit richer already but it's still not the full picture that you can get when you have all 10. it's just it's just a play that's I think of the inner life of our inner psyche of um what's going on within us as a as a theater as a play where the planets slash actors slash parts of us are alive and well they're all actors on this inner stage and they can step forward so if you're in a if you're in a dark alley and somebody jumps out and says give me your wallet and sticks a knife out at you you're not going to think about stepping into your Warrior that's going to be survival that's instinctual you're going to do whatever your Warrior does now there's different kinds of Warriors one Warrior may say oh really you want my money why don't you come and get it another type would turn around and run as fast as you can in other types would start screaming so but they're all Warrior the archetypal eye recognizes the warrior there but these are three different kinds of Warriors gets more sophisticated as we look deeper into the chart what kind of way would you respond to something like that so that's also automatic but you can also choose you can say I'm going into a meeting right now and um I know everyone's against my idea but it's really important because I see the vision for the company I'm a leader or I'm I'm anybody in the company and I need to make my statement I need to stand there in a warrior-like way I need to access this part of myself that I know I have available but I need to make sure that it's present when I make my presentation that I don't come across as as geeky or weak or or unsure or something like that yeah so so we can access these parts and by the way we think like that you know how many times have you said you know part of me wants to do this another party must do that we think in multiplicity we don't think of ourselves as a singular eye we think that we have these different roles and we and we and we step into them um we have inner conversations it's a mess in there at times you know I can do this I could do that I could you know all of this stuff and I'm just giving those voices a a a description a an embodiment so that we can work with them and play with them by thinking of them as a stage very interesting I know where they are and who they are by looking at the sky that was above you where I by the way see the planets in the sky as actors on a giant stage it's just a bit unwieldedly so if we drop them in onto your inner stage at that moment of birth we get this play that we can play with in a story that we can read just like we read that sheet music that we just found of Beethoven yeah yeah yeah that makes perfect sense and I was loading up a question that you actually partially already answered but um and by the way I made a connection have you ever heard of a uh it's a newer I guess type or or technique in Psychology um by Dick Schwartz it's called Parts work or parts it sounds so much like what you're saying except that they're not using astrological rights and I have right there's uh internal family systems yeah right and um I have an issue with that for some reasons because some of the names are really negative names like the you know the there's like there's a lot of that and there's like there's characters there's parts that are not good parts that we have to mess you know we have to address and and and and and see I just don't think of archetypes as being good or bad I think of them as characters energy is nothing until directed you know so what we do with it is what matters and so I don't think that there's a bad part of me or that there are bad charts or that there's you know I don't think of those terms I I wonder what happened to Parts when they appear as being unfriendly and difficult for us and then I want to know how else could we live them that's the therapeutic process yeah I talked to Dick a while back I think he would agree like he seemed very more interested in trying to take parts that feel negative or exiled and bring them back into a more positive familial Dynamic but I also see your point and I also think too like it could almost benefit from using more archetypal more and they may I I've admittedly I've not been deeply schooled in this but it seems like they could use archetypal language a little more readily because that would really help people understand like you've got this rebellious part you've got this right and The Sovereign part and right there Michael you're talking to the core and the key of um the archetypal model because you know it's easy to see that we have all parts by just knowing we're all born under a sky and all the planets are there right so that's the easy sort of analogy but if I know it's a different model you see most I work in organizations and just about everyone I've ever talked to who works in the company has had an assessment they've been assessed right and almost all assessments there's hundreds and hundreds of Assessments out there right and almost all assessments let's take the most popular one perhaps the most famous One based on Jung interestingly which is the Myers-Briggs some ice breaks essentially is a typology There are 16 types and you get this four letter combination of who you are so if you're an intfj you're not in whatever right so a typology by definition is exclusionary because if I'm over here in this type I'm not those other 15. I'm making it very simple I know it's more sophisticated than that but this gives you an idea of typology versus archetypal thinking and so I'm separated from that group and it gets even worse when someone then says well intfj should only work in accounting which does happen it's horrible but it does happen because that's the type of person who does best at account okay that's one way of thinking the problem is that we live in a world which you have just said again and I said in the earlier is that we we don't want to be put into boxes we don't want to be told on this and therefore I'm not that however someone who tells me I'm everything but part of me isn't very comfortable to me because of Nature and nurture maybe I was told that Boys Don't Cry or girls don't get aggressive or whatever the stories were that we were told culturally and in our particular families allow us to repress certain archetypes put them away and others are encouraged we're really good at those because yes boys do Sports and so my warrior is really strong right because that's what I was told and so um we then also have cultural ideas that you know good leaders are good Warriors because most leadership Theory comes from World War II and people came back who were put into business um you know had leadership experience in the military so that's literally how leadership theory was built in the first time didn't exist really before so so this is a um this is a a problem that we then face because we're looking at um you know being separate from other people the archetypal models say no actually everyone has everything um what would it behoove you to develop right now because it's not there strong enough who's and you could also have someone on the against theater metaphor you could have three actors on the center of the stage that are always running the show they're always Center Stage that could come boring because you've got seven other ones that are sitting out and eventually could get boring probably that's how people recognize you most for those three you know in a combination in your life or three or four or something like that but then what about the other ones you have all these other talents that you don't really access because you're told you're not supposed to or you just don't know how or whatever so all of that becomes an interesting developmental fun play to step into these parts of us that we don't otherwise um you know access easily yeah yeah I like that I like that a lot and and I think even if you if you dive further into a lot of those other assessments it's like they're they're telling you that you are partially all of these different things but they greatly disemphasize the things well you're less this and you're more of this so therefore you're this it's kind of it's sort of sort of the way that you leave feeling I don't know that's totally true I think if you're and of course um you know if you are this people walk away with that with a label on their forehead this is who I am and those other things aren't really um yeah they may show up as you know far far away but they're not it's not in the model it's not included as part of the core idea because it's like you don't do this you know if it's a circle thing it's like you this is like gone you know it's not there and so um I think it's really important to embrace the fact that an archetypal model says actually we all have everything if people wanted to go a layer deeper with kind of understanding their natal astrological situation Beyond okay I know my son signed but then after that everything gets foggy where where do you encourage people to look next and how do you start to like weigh the things beyond that if that's possible yeah so it's a great question and it it matters who you talk to so I suggest they find somebody they Trust and that would mean mostly word of mouth or someone they've heard somewhere or something that they where they feel comfortable with that person because there's a lot of garbage out there just like there's a there's a lot of really bad therapists out there there's a lot of really bad doctors out there unfortunately you know every profession has um less and better people it's just human nature and and um there are a lot of really good astrologers out there what I would do is I would go to astrologyuniversity.com I think it's.com or dot org but astrology University a friend of mine runs it I think he has the best teachers in the world I don't know if I should say that because I'm also one of his teachers but I think they're real he has amazing people he's doing an extraordinary job you can go there and just browse around and find a lecture that interests you and you know some of them are I think are marked as beginners or whatever else just get a sense of listen to other people talk don't take my word for it listen to other people talk about this language talk in this language and see what they're doing with it and how it might resonate with you so so dip your feet in a little bit deeper um and you might say I really like with this and you can go anywhere from just that to you know studying with him for four years and getting a certified certificate of you know as astrologers so there's real programs out there now to learn this stuff again it's a complex language and it takes some patience to learn it don't do it overnight so it's also good to be guided by someone who has done it for a while that's the number one thing I would look for someone who's you know has been doing it who's been practicing not just thinking about it but it's been practicing or it's been published or has been out there has really given it a big chunk of their own time and Life Investment so somebody's not just doing it on the side or doing you know something somebody's really serious about it and and and who you like their style you know um and then um and then get a reading from them I I really think that getting a reading is the only way to have a real a real experience of it you know sure you can go to astrodines to print out your own chart and you'll be looking at it the way someone who doesn't read sheet music looks at Beethoven's Fifth it's just a whole bunch of lines and dots in the circle and you might be able to find one little piece that gets dangerous because you might you know um to know just enough to be dangerous as they say where you start to make assumptions about yourself that are not psychologically framed and so to me to really um to what you're looking for an astrologer Sometimes some sum up in in in five different things the first thing is the technical knowledge that's simply you know I know what this means and I know I'm not what this means but I know what the difference between the Mars and Venus I mean simple stuff like that that's technical lung it's a language you have to learn the language that takes some time just like learning any language so you start to speak differently have you ever heard two astrologists talk they're talking a different language they're talking in jargon because when they say yeah my moon is in Pisces squaring my you know Saturn in in Sagittarius and someone will go huh but that means something specifically right there for that little story I get an image right and then you combine that with the rest and you can go on for hours like that it's shorthand because it's a it's a it's a language so that's the first skill is learn the language second skill be able to translate that language into psychological patterns that's a completely different skill set you can have really good technical people who have no psychology who don't understand what it means to have Saturn moon in a person how that might manifest psychologically not just what it means from a textbook the third thing and and then also how to talk to someone psychological the third thing is the communication how do you tell that psychological story that you now know to a person communication skills oh you have a mother complex no you don't say that even if you understand the psychology of it right so that's a whole other skill set you have people are really good technically really good psychologically but they can't explain it they can't talk to other people about it if people are really good technically and really bad psychologically and really good at talking about it and they're just talking jargon and nobody understands what that means and so on the fourth thing is life experience the more you've fallen on your own face and scratch your knees the better the more you have experiences you can relate to real people through the better if you know if if if um you know I mean this is the classic story of of you know um architects who don't cook who designed kitchens you know it's just like if you don't if you don't have a sense of what you're doing um of what you're talking about personally from personal experience therefore the older you are the more you experienced the more life you've lived that doesn't necessarily mean age but the more life you've lived um the more the more valuable I think and the third and the and the fifth thing is you know be professional so are they professional to show up on time do they you know do they handle it properly I know of a case someone once told me they were having a reading and and they could hear you know the person using a nail file in the background that's just not professional so it's those little things so show up you know lift up the profession of astrologer by being Lift Up Everybody by being doing it professionally so those five things if you find that in somebody and you can gauge that with your own depth of knowledge of human beings then I think you found somebody where where you have yeah that's a great skill set um but it takes those it takes those five things so that's what I would look for so I would look for I would look for um you know if you want to know more about yourself and about your deeper chart and use that pathway to understand yourself better again there are others but if you want to use this one it is a really good x-ray then um I would start at astrology University and start to listen to other people and get a sense of what they're saying then go to their websites and see what they're doing and what their availability is and these kinds of things but it gives you a sense of people who are really dedicated an intellectual mind to teaching and learning and passing it on and has their own style which you can see by watching yeah that's a great answer that's a better answer than like look at this next or look at this in your chart next because it does it it is difficult to know how to balance these things to know how what it really means in relation to something else and I mean that's what really blew my mind in the reading that you did for me which thank you again by the way for doing that was just the interplay of everything and trying to understand how to weight everything it's so much more complicated there's such a story yeah I think I think the personal experience is is is the thing and and finding someone you're comfortable with there's not a right way to you know I remember famously Liz green one of the greatest astrologers ever um also jungian you know she I remember in a book um somebody asked her something she was she had a lot of her lectures transcribed and I remember in the book she says somebody asks her so tell me you know what is I have this and this and this what does it mean and she said it means absolutely nothing without the whole chart so just because you have the moon in Pisces doesn't mean anything um unless I know the context of the whole story The Art is the synthesis of the whole picture keeping the whole thing in mind you know if you're a conductor and you've got you know all of Beethoven's Faith it's not about getting that drummer to play exactly right it's about getting that drummer on those big drums to do things in context to the violin and to the recorder and to the flutes and to all these different things I don't know if there's a recorder but whatever the instruments are to put them in context to the um to the whole music that's the art that's why it's an art more than a science the science part is figuring out where the planets are at any given time that's math but computers do that now and so having an understanding of the the the the meaning making from a story that's an art and that's something that good astrologer answer yeah if people want so this is another thing that's I've got to ask you if people want to they feel pulled toward this more archetypal mythopoetic way of seeing but they just don't they they feel ill-equipped they're not sure how to develop this way of seeing and this is me to an extent too and it and now even just turning the question back around on myself it's kind of a hard question to answer because I feel like over the last decade and a half or so I've really had to kind of just go out there and search and comb through the to find the jewels you know like to to come it's like okay so we have young and I can go a mile deep through his collected works if I want to is it approachable not really likely that that himself is like you almost need some priming to get into young I I think I would actually encourage people to read Souls code by your father because he does a great job of contextualizing here's the way we're thinking about the world these days here's what we're losing here are some mythological examples from from Plato from the Greeks here are some real life examples of exactly what I'm talking about and that you're trying to fit um a square peg and a round hole and that's why this person struggled and then as soon as they got into this environment they thrived and I I think that's a really useful I agree and that's that's the that's the diamond story and the idea of the inner of the inner core and the life purpose yes very very good idea I would also recommend if you want to start developing the archetypal eye then and seeing sort of the practicality of this as you're saying I'm hearing that's where you're going then I would you know I would put a plug-in for my own book which is um the planets in Playbook planets in play you know how to align your your uh no that's like planets and play I don't remember the subtitles and not be one but the planets in play oh reimagine you're reimagining your life through the language of astrology and so that is very it's a very practical book so it goes into each of the ten and tells you very clearly in different very different scenarios how they show up in your life so you can start to develop that archetypal eye that's that's how I would go about it I wrote it on purpose for that for beginners and as sort of as a as a book reference you can keep on your desk just when something happens now how would I translate that into archetypes that process which is a great way to start because it becomes natural you start to see it as you learn the language but actually I think I thought I knew where your question was going and I was going to answer you by reading poetry hmm that's a good answer too okay I would read real good it's so incredibly archetypally and beautiful so I would read poetry and I would read um half feets and I would read you know I would read these these kind of things and the classics is another good way to get in just read stories read mythology read read you know it's called mythopoetic for a reason it's poetry and mythology so you know um yeah that's where I would go because you that's an indirect way to develop that muscle in your mind as opposed to you know learning all the theories and filling your head up with with what other people have interpreted certain things to me yeah yeah yeah yeah we don't want to make it another literal language it is not literal it is you bring to the table your own archetypal story that will read the play that is you and that is other people differently than I will read it which makes it more interesting and more beautiful and then we can start to find what we all share which is the underlying archetypes even though we see the literal image differently if I say tree and you say tree Michael we're both thinking of a tree but your tree is different from my tree but we agree on what treeness is we agree on the archetype of the tree yeah do you think in a sort of platonic sense or or maybe maybe I'm phrasing this in a way that's way too suggestive but do you think that that's because that there is some underlying truth like we're I guess I was asking you this in the beginning as well so maybe it's appropriate that we come full circle do you think it's because there is some truth of what treeness is that exists in an almost platonic kind of transcendent way okay absolutely I believe those animals walking on the wall behind me are real so yes I believe there is such a thing and that is why I have used a very scientific word called you know the genome the Human Genome of the soul I think they really are the building blocks of human of the human soul and they're Universal and every culture and every person has always throughout history expressed them in some way shape or form and that gets really interesting to me because now I can I can be curious about the different forms that they take it's like being in you know if we if we say there's a person standing inside an outfit I could be interested if I'm interested in fashion I can go all around the world and see how different people stand but there's always a person in the middle there's always it's always an outfit but they can take on all kinds of forms you know from a bikini to you know a toga very different and it gives you completely different cultural context everything else but it it dresses up the archetype um and makes it palatable for me because I'm studying and I'm interested in outfits and how do people do outfits differently you can do the same thing for a house or for what is a suite or what is money or what is valuable or what is love and all these things you can get take any concept any word and start looking at it through this Multicultural Global lens which is very popular today so that's why I think astrology is getting such a Renaissance because it is a universal language everyone is born under a sky yeah speaking of genealogy and not just I guess not just literally though the literal aspect of this there will be a literal aspect to this question I guess when you look back at your own curiosity and your own interest on some of these topics do you think you would have had those interests if you weren't part of the family you were part of or do you think because you saw these things at an early age that opened a door because from personally speaking I had no familial example of really mythopoetic thinkers like I I was just curious I was always asking questions I was always wondering why people wanted to do this job or go to this church and didn't make sense to me and I just wound up there but it's a great question it's a great question so I think it's it's definitely for me I'm very clear on this that it's a it's a flat out combination of nurture and nature so I think definitely you know as someone once said about me I was marinated in archetypal thinking as a child of course and that gave me great advantages and an ease with that and you can see lots of cases where musicians children's become great musicians and doctors kids become great doctors and so on but it could that can also be a very dangerous assumption because you know that's the one who says hey Grandpa was a doctor and I'm a doctor and by gosh you're going to be a doctor because that's what we do in this family that could be very dangerous so it's both now the the the nature part in my case just like you didn't have any access to depth psychology maybe or archetypal thinking I had absolutely zero exposure to any kind of Technology both my parents I mean it was before that time they were completely you know not interested in technology we were backwards in technology you could be in the 60s and 70s in Switzerland where I grew up um computers didn't exist um you know everything was mythopoetic and it wasn't you know it was natural and things like that and we didn't have a television in my house none of that things like that well I happen to love to program I love technology I taught all that myself nobody showed me how to do that that stuff that I have natural talents for so I believe there's it's a mixture of nature nurture so nurturing and and understanding um what's there already it's a combination and so um we need to take history into consideration it's certainly part of it but one of the cool things about astrologies you don't need to do I've often said tongue-in-cheek that getting a good reading is like going to therapy for six months and then I have people poo poo it and yeah right and you know I have tons of therapists and also lots of psychiatrists as clients and once they get a reading they'll say well you're right you know because they've had the experience you don't need the whole history that you often spend a lot of time with in therapy you can see things in patterns and where people are right now and sometimes it's important to go back into the history but again we're not into blame psychology we're interested how did you get here and and and what are you doing with that right now and how do you want to go forward you want to spend you know all this time going back and not living in the moment or you want to spend this time actually understanding your potentials and doing something with them and trying something you might not have that you might have great talent with because you've never seen it no one has ever pointed it out to you yeah yeah that's a different way to go forward and you know time is short you notice that when you get older but also you notice that when you look around you know that the time is running out in a lot of places which is why I work more with organizations where there's more power you know because to me like if I want to make a difference if I can leverage this work in an organization with 10 000 people I don't have to talk to 10 000 people I can talk to the leadership and that to me is worth it yeah yeah I guess that's the the the the double-edged sword in a good way of hierarchy is it allow it gives you access to a large number of people if you can get in from the top and you can proliferate that down but at that point you made about not spending too much time looking backwards dealing with where you are now and figuring out how to move forward from that that's another thing that I definitely got a lot from reading your father is that psychology does not have to be reverse engineering every goddamn micro trauma that's ever happened to you in your life and you don't like lettuce because your mom spank you wearing a green dress or something you know like like just these small tiny things and it seems a lot like as a person who's not a professional but it has an interest in Psychology it seems like that's what psychology can become is is going through every nook and cranny of potential trauma and everything that ever happened to you rather than dealing with how can we move forward what are your strengths what are your weaknesses let's use those to to look forward not backward um well psychology has been hijacked in a way by developmental models you know that that you have to advance you have to be here you have these stages and you have to get and you get better it's very very hierarchical it's very top down and you're trying to get to these you know most developmental models are quite linear and quite masculine in that sense that you get better the higher up you get you know um then you're more developed well I don't see it that way I I combine developmental thinking and archetypal thinking and say we have all these different parts each one of them is developed at different levels which very quickly and easily explains why you have the genius Professor who can't put on two matching socks because that part is not as developed as this part you know so so it it's kind of like it's we don't have to throw out developmental thinking of course we all go from you know from sitting to crawling to walking um to Running of course that there's a natural human development but we can't think of ourselves as being singular we can't think of ourselves as being this one thing that develops there's these different parts that develop at different speeds and some of them sometimes get pushed away and so again in the theater metaphor some of them are benched and there's usually a cost to people when an archetype is benched if you're a leader and your inner nurturer the part of you that cares about people and is emotionally available and close is totally benched because you're always told that you know real men don't have feelings and because you know you have to be the first to beat the competition it's a jungle out there if that's your belief system and that's how you go at it and your nurture is benched you might have a really high turnover because nobody feels like they're part of the family nobody is um feels like they belong there or that they have any I think they're contribute except they're part of the their machine in the Cog how many people do we know who feel that way about work so as a leader if you can develop that nurturing side of yourself which is there by definition of the model now you can actually develop something you can lower your costs because because people start to feel you know the turnover cost goes way down it's very expensive to you know to lose someone and have to hire someone else plus you can't find anybody so it's important to keep the people that you have that are good so it's a simple you know leadership problem all right the the Techno trickster has decided to to show its face so we're dealing with a with a hard restart but I believe where we left off was you're starting to talk about the importance of the ability to really try to get this archetypal thinking I guess back into the Zeitgeist by introducing it at the top of Corporations which is which is very interesting and and I think very very genius and practical well I sat back one day and I thought you know um I have a daughter who's almost 30 and you know the world is falling apart and I have responsibility as an you know slowly becoming an older person um to take some responsibility for my part in in creating what's happening and I thought how can I make a difference how can I do something about it it's happening very quickly and I want to um give something back to a larger amount of people and I thought well where is the power if you want to make a difference speak to power and I thought well politicians don't really have power they are you know they are controlled pretty much by by you know their constituents that they get paid by so it's a strange system that we have so I thought well the real power is with where the money is and the money is with corporations with organizations and I also at the same time this inter intermingled with the fact that a lot of corporations are looking for new ways to do things that they've done a certain way for a long time that is no longer working such as you know at the example I gave before about you know leading in a top-down model when we're really in a matrix and what is that or in a three-dimensional Network and what does that really look like so um there are a lot of questions I'm I have a belief that you know eighty percent of companies won't get it in my lifetime some of them are too big to fail some of them are just have enough power and money to just push through the old ways they're not really adapting they're too big to really change and they'll either do or they will just you know drop out of the picture which surprisingly many companies are doing so quickly that were you know Fail-Safe Banks now but you know other retail stores just like you know Plum it's it's in in amazing how many big chains have just that were a big successful and Powerful have just collapsed in in the 40 years that I've lived in this country and then you have um you know so those those are not going to be interested in the work that I do 10 this is just a rough number that I use 10 um I think already get it they they have figured out the new models they're doing things very very differently Ubers the airbnbs the networking sort of models the the people working for themselves in larger systems and so there's pros and cons to everything of course and we're just trying out new things but it's a completely different business model to what we had before and um and at the same time you have um that leaves us with 10 to me that are knowing the need to do something but they don't know what and those are the 10 that I'm really interested to talk to if I go to a party I figure there'll be one person out of ten at that party if they're all in you know doing business of some kind who wants to talk to me and who's interested in what I'm doing and those are the ones I want to focus on I don't want to waste my time with the other 90 yeah and because that's just you know barking up a wall or so so if we find those people who are open and interested in doing something differently we can say well guess what we have a model you're recognizing you need to do something we have a model where we can go in and we can actually help you in your leadership and the reason you know I'm very aware that most companies are still in a pyramid model um very very few are operating in what's called a hierarchy where there's sort of equal power those are small groups usually once you get into more than 100 people you start to have to have um you know hierarchies of some kind but it doesn't have to be hierarchies of power it can be hierarchies it can be groups that worked you know there can be they're interesting new leadership models out there but that's the second conversation right now what interests me is to think about Leverage so if we really want to make a difference if leadership buys into to a new idea it's much easier to disseminate that because of the power structure so we can use the power structure as an advantage to actually get more work disseminated quicker and so once leadership understands the power of this kind of language and understands that they can address things like you know feeling disenfranchised from their work 70 of Americans I read recently um you know want a new job I mean that's extraordinary the cost of that to organizations is incredible not just two big ones but two small ones as well so why are people so unhappy what are we doing wrong you know why aren't people doing their passionate work and so on so these real deep questions are so strong I know you were once in a corporate setting and so you know you change your life so this is a extremely common problem today we have to address that we can by giving people a sense of meaning but young people are coming in and they're saying you know what are you guys making I don't want to just be making widgets I want to have a meaningful connection to the product that we're making or to the service that we're providing otherwise I'm just doing my job and people don't want that anymore and that's a huge shift in awareness of people so we can address that by again making people understand the archetypal value of what is being done in this organization and then doesn't matter if it's for-profit non-profit size none of that matters but what is the archetypal story that is being told here and does that archetypal story am I in agreeance am I comfortable am I good with that archetypal story that's the first thing we can do we can also so we can help find what the archetype stories that's being told but we can also develop people so let's say you have a an R D team right and Leadership one day looks at the numbers and says you know what we've given them um you know uh millions of dollars over the last five years they've never really come up with anything new that's what R D's supposed to do what's going on here so they call us in they're thinking of shutting it down but you know you have to do r d and and but they've really not come up with anything interesting so what's going on is there's 30 people working there so we come in we do an assessment we have our own archetypal assessment that isn't typology yeah um that tells you where you are in the developmental place right now at this moment you know and what you might want to develop and last week you know last year it might have been different because you were in a different place in your life so we understand the people change and so we give an assessment of this team and we might find that none of them have the Renegade which is the part that invents the part of us that is inventive and thinks outside of the box very very well developed or very comfortable with it that could be for different reasons it could be because they're they're afraid if they step out of line they're going to get fired for what doesn't matter what the reasoning is we don't have to go into the history same thing we just recognize right now the Renegade is not very present in this team and we know we need more Renegade so we're going to do a renegade workshop for them and we teach them to activate that part of them which is different than the model that says you know what you're the wrong people here because you don't have that part you're of this type you're not of that type you're not the creative type we need creative types in here we don't say that we say actually we all we have to do is activate the Renegade which isn't that easy because you have to overcome certain things yeah you can do that and you can keep your people so it's a big difference in model and that is very exciting to leadership and you know and then see how they what they developer we can also help them and just work with them we can also do coaching with just the leader of that team um so that they become more comfortable with their inner Renegade because that's the part we need we might be a combo of renegade and Storyteller once you invent the good stuff how do you tell the story to those who need to make the decisions on financing and things like that so we teach different skill sets that are already in people but specifically for corporations it's a language called archetypes at work there's a book out there's a website archetypes atwork.com we also train people in this in this model so we train coaches and consultants and HR people in how to use this language it's extremely effective and useful we're doing this globally I'm translating the work into 10 languages as we speak it is a very exciting model that people like because it speaks to the person and what's already there and people are seen for the parts of them that they aren't usually seen yeah I've done these debriefs for these assessments for people all over the world and you know people say you know I've never been seen or talked to like that in a corporate setting and that's very refreshing it's literally insoling the workplace yeah I love that I love that mission and it the the product if you want to call it a product which I'm sure you you have some probably not your favorite word for it but it's a language I like to think of it as a language yeah the other part of it can I just I'm sorry one thing that's really important is that unlike a lot of other language is out there it is an embodied language you know my partner in this Richard Olivier is a theater director and comes from a theater family in London and is you know incredibly skilled and has developed this language called mythodrama which is an embodied way of telling a story and and of and of doing leadership and um so so our language this archetypes at work language is an embodied language how do you step into that Warrior when you step into that and that's based on all kinds of techniques that he has developed over the years so we train people very deeply it's really in your body it's not just something in your head yeah and that's another thing you don't get through these other models is like along with the recognition of and the in the issue that comes with leaving thinking I'm a a this in a Myers-Briggs sense or even worse like disc that breaks you down into like one of four like I'm I'm at this and like not only are you not leaving with that kind of a sort of limiting view of yourself you're also taking it to that other level of embodiment that you're talking about so it's so you can wake that part of you up through actual actions even you know it's funny because even talking about I guess we were talking about the Renegade with respect to my reading the other day but it's also really interesting and I won't go off on a huge tangent here because this is a whole nother rabbit hole we could get into but isn't it funny how everything starts from that Renegade POV of doing something different being a disrupter but then eventually that calcifies into some rote way of doing the same thing over and over again and then you're scared to wake the Renegade back up because not only could the Renegade innovate for you well they could also everything up because they because they come in and they topple over the established order of things but that's but that's the magic that's the fire you gotta play we have other parts that's why we have a strategy is to organize everything he keeps everything in shape so we don't want to just have the Renegade around the show we want to have a renegade you know strategist combo that's why we develop different parts and that's what we think of it as a multiplicity not as a single character ever running anything I just use that as an example right right I'm fully aware that when I'm talking to those 30 people there are lots of archetypes in the room you know they also have a dreamer they also have a lover they have a nurture they have a sovereign they have a renegade and so on so I'm just speaking to particular part because that's the skill set that they need for that particular job that may not be active enough and we can show that in the assessment and give some you know some some some numbers to the number crunchers and say look you know we could work on this um they answered the questions like this they don't feel about themselves to be very um very you know inventive yeah it's really interesting and I love that mission of reinstalling the workplace because my God does the workplace feel soulless a lot of the time unless you happen to end up in some position where you really feel like it's speaking to your personal gifts and you as a full human being are integral to what you're doing man that does not really harmonize with work in general especially in our culture so that's a that's a very Noble end but people were never were never asked um yeah about that and people never came to the workplace demanding that it was sort of like this is my nine to five and then I go live my life you know and and that's no longer acceptable because people are not making that separation so much they're saying look I've got this life world is falling apart what am I going to do when I do work to make a living or because I'm passionate about it for whatever reason that I work you know what what I need to have more meaning in that in that decision of what I do and and you can't buy me and just tell me to shut up and give me five thousand more dollars a year and I'll be quiet it doesn't work anymore with young people and that's freaking leaders out yeah because they have to deal with you know that a leader once said to me a CEO of some company said you know this is the first time in history that a leader has to deal with five generations whoa it's an interesting idea because you know you still have those greatest Generation people who are coming in you know who have certain belief systems and you have young people coming in out of high school and you know if you don't have if you don't have that skill set of knowing the difference in the mindsets in this rapidly evolving time you're just a command and control person from the old days and you just in my way or the highway and that doesn't work anymore because it's too expensive to fire people so you know and this there's so many if you Google leadership in Amazon you get over 60 000 hits it's a big it's a big topic and um most of them use the same you know more of the same of the old models you know just slight tweaks there's all kinds of things like you know leading from behind or gentle or soft skills and all these kind of things but they're all missing the idea of of Singularity versus multiplicity and the multiplicity says you already have this stuff in you it's a world view and again astrology shows it most simply because we all have the same ingredients in the charts just put together differently that's really refreshing and people really take to that because I don't feel like I'm missing anything I might just not be very good at something which I can then develop and ask myself how and that becomes that becomes a coaching Journey with a coach or with someone who can help you yeah really well put Lawrence I've really enjoyed this mind meld I hope it's the first of many like I really you know there's that feeling when when you've had a really good one where it feels like hardly any time passed at all and other than our technical hiccups I felt like we were just completely in the flow throughout this conversation so I really really greatly enjoyed it one something just came to me that I kind of want to throw you one one final one final musing that I'd like to hear your Riff on if if you'll indulge me of course um it's a it's not quite a quote but there's a quote somewhere that this thought is emanating from and I think it was young it may have actually been your father but it's something to the effect of we're being lived by forces that we can't understand or some something of that effect So to that to that to flesh out the question do you think of it that way do you think of it as like archetypes are having us or do you think about it like us as having archetypes or is that a false dichotomy no I have a very clear line that people know me for for decades that I use which says due to the gods of the gods do you yeah and and that pretty much says it for me so the gods are planets archetypes inner figures characters parts of me whatever you want to call them they are going to have their way you have a choice in how much you have a say in that I'm very very sure of that because otherwise how could I look at so many charts where I don't know the person at all and immediately see their life in front of me if they had that much choice and and you know they weren't but they weren't aware of it then why would it unfold exactly as as sort of planned you only have choice and and it's also you know you talked about Choice before and Free Will you know um Jung said famously you know freedom is to do gladly that which we must so the archetypes compel us to do certain things it's like this is our nature you know this is what we must do because it's in us and it's old code talks a lot about that you know I must I must sing instead of dance you know the Ella Fitzgerald story so um it's like this moment where this power comes up in us that's the archetype speaking I must do this because this is who I really am and I'm stepping forward and I'm taking control now and so I see it all the way like that I see I have more the more I know about my archetypes the more I'm doing them and then not doing me yeah that makes sense that that there is some kind of reciprocal relationship that they in like you said we're we're doing each other and that perhaps we're fulfilling some kind of some kind of function that they cannot experience without beings Like Us in that they they themselves are sort of these more fixed qualities but then when they intermingle and express themselves through a human being or through a being that maybe that kind of um what's the word I'm looking for catharsis is like part of how they actually live or Express themselves or something that's a very very old idea that's actually biblical possibly older but the idea that you know we need to find you know Source whatever that is God the gods whatever you want to call it you know that we need to make that connection that's the human longing for meaning making you know to put in perspective and Source God the gods whatever else need us to Incarnate because otherwise what's their point and so there is that and and that's the two triangles that you know push into each other where you get the start of David symbol to me that's also As Above So Below same idea yeah pointing upwards and pointing downwards you know so yeah definitely we need the gods and they need us so it's a it's a fun it's a fun way I just like to think that I'm playing with them all the time and not that that I'm a victim of them or anything like that not at all they they're not mean again energy is nothing until expressed so they're just energies that want to be manifested in some way so I have a choice yeah well said well said well again I haven't mentally enjoyed this same here thanks a lot I'm looking forward to hopefully doing it again please stay in touch and uh I'm excited to put this one out thanks take care

Channel: THIRD EYE DROPS with Michael Phillip

Views: 29,156

Keywords: carl jung, james hillman, james hillman souls code, archetypes, collective unconscious, collective unconscious carl jung, psychology, philosophy, philosophy podcast, archetypes jungian, archetypes jung, astrology, laurence hillman, mythology, joseph campbell, carl jung shadow, carl jung archetypes, carl jung synchronicity, james hillman archetypal psychology, james hillman alchemical psychology

Id: laxfzT_Z6pA

Length: 129min 19sec (7759 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023