https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1Lw1wOtgE5c
Hello, everybody. We’re back again with another episode of Unfolding the Soul. Today my guest is Nick. I’ve met him on Discord and he’s been part of my journey in the early days. Then he retreated into his modern day hermit style way of being where he’s now more sporadically found on the internet. I had the good fortune to catch him and he wanted to participate. He’s going to talk about his journey with his discovery of spirituality because he’s had a lot of stuff happen in his life. You can see in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server YouTube channel there’s a whole set of things where he did talk about his experiences with cults. I bet we get some snippets of that as well today. Nick, where did spirituality enter your life? Well, it’s pretty interesting. I grew up as a kid as the most nominal Christian on one side of the family. My parents divorced when I was an infant. I always had two separate world views depending on which parent I was with at the time. One of which was deeply atheistic. The other was so nominally Christian that they couldn’t quote a single line out of the Bible. They had, as far as I know, never gone to church. I was very young. I kind of chose the atheistic side of the coin and largely went through the teenage atheistic phase where I was the smartest person to ever exist and could see the ridiculousness of every system of beliefs in the world. So the hubris was where you went into the atheistic side? I mean, what actually triggered it because I was very young. It wasn’t hubris out the gate. It was actually fear around eternal life. I was very young riding in the car along car trip. My uncle, who was the only one in the family that knew anything about the religion, was answering some of my questions. It got to his description of heaven, which was very simplistic, fairly standard. He lived eternally and everyone you love is there and this type of image. That night when I went to fall asleep, I was stuck in this existential terror. I was like seven, maybe eight at the time and couldn’t fall asleep just trying to picture this concept of eternal life. It was shortly after that that I basically just rejected, it fell to that atheistic side of the coin. Then as I got older and did my own investigations, I definitely became the Sam Harris type of atheist, if you will. Very much a physical reductionist. Everything could be explained with physics and there were no mysteries to the universe other than its own deceptions on itself. That continued until I was about 17 or 18. It was around that age that I had started accumulating enough experiences that weren’t able to be contextualized in such a ridiculous worldview that I slowly started investigating. I went really the atheistic route, which is to say I started with Buddhism because of how friendly it is to an atheistic worldview, particularly as we describe ourselves in the West. I started meditating and trying to, in some sense, gain some control over these experiences. It was not much longer after that, maybe another year where I came across Joseph Campbell primarily and Carl Jung. I was able to start looking at the world’s religions from this kind of mythic lens. That’s where I got my foot in the door with the whole situation, where I stopped contextualizing everything from just this physicalism and started moving into that narrative manner in which people were able to pass wisdom down through their traditions as opposed to just knowledge and started trying to look at religions through that way. Granted, I was still very bitter against Christianity, probably just because I was raised in it and formed my early worldview in contrast against it. It was much more comfortable for me to look at Hinduism or older European mythologies, whether it was Roman or Greek or even with the tiny amount of information we have about primitive Celtic religions. Was this purely an intellectual pursuit or was there also a participatory shift? There was a pretty dramatic participatory shift. I would say it definitely, well actually I’m not even sure if it started as intellectual because the impetus to even open up out of that initial worldview was like I could not contextualize the emotions I was experiencing because they just didn’t fit in that really simplistic worldview. I would say it definitely, there was a lot of aspects of the intellectualism later, but at the same time it’s kind of like my entire trajectory in life had shifted at that point. When I was a teenager I was like dead certain I was going to be a scientist or a mathematician. I was always very gifted in mathematics when I was young and around that 18 year old mark it just wildly swung in a different direction. You got dragged along by your experience instead of that you opened the door. Right, exactly. It really was a radical shift in how I contextualized life. I went from having a fairly clear trajectory to a really unclear one, much more exploratory. Around that age I started traveling a lot. I started going out of my way trying to design a life that I thought was going to lead to a healthier balance between what a human was and the rest of the world, which I did not find in the modern way of living. I started going pretty far out into remote areas. I was trying to come up with skills, things I could do for a job that didn’t require me to live the normal life that was in some sense more naturally laid out. That sounds like you found your second rebellion. First you rebel against the Christianity and then you rebel against the intellectualism. Right. It’s a good theme. It’s kind of funny because I feel like I’m generally quite a stable person until I remember my life. There’s definitely these points where I go, I’ve found this nice little pocket of stability and I kind of know what I’m doing. Then my entire world view shatters at once and then I just go flying off in some crazy direction. It almost sounds like you’re on this hinge point and you’re putting so much pressure and then it slips or it breaks and it’s like bam and you need to re- Yeah, that’s exactly how it seems. The goofiest part about that is it seems exactly correct and yet that pressurizing period is so dull. It’s not an exciting pressurizing. It’s not like I can even really feel the weight of it until it gives. Then suddenly I can see how much I was forcing myself into a particular structure, which I suppose there’s probably an aspect there that I find desirable in a weird way. It’s that freedom that comes from deconverting from a world view and then right immediately after that great feeling of freedom comes just like the existential pair of not knowing what anything is. I get this image that you’re in a mold and your reference is the mold and you’re just squeezing yourself into the mold and you’re like, oh, everything is going fine because I’m in relationship to the mold and you’re like, oh, there’s something outside the mold. Outside the mold. Right, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. Right. And then it is like, oh, how exciting. There’s all this other stuff and then immediately followed by, oh, there’s all this other stuff. Yeah, it’s definitely been a cycle in my life. The time in between big bursts has definitely grown as I get older. It’s longer gaps. I’m able to stay in these stable positions for longer and I do feel like to some degree as well every time it happens, I get a bit closer to a mold that doesn’t require quite as much pressure to hold me closer to its shape. So what if you flip it, right? Instead of making really long, big molds, you break your mold every day, right? Like breathing. No, I did try this. This, but really, I mean, it’s actually kind of funny. This was the main draw. There’s several ways to approach it. This was the main draw of the fourth cult I participated in, the one that I actually chose and knew was a cult. The others were more like I showed up somewhere and they were like, hey, this is a cult. And then, you know, it blew up after a couple weeks or whatever. But this last one, one of the main aspects, and this was writing off a very intense, for lack of a better word, spiritual or I guess transformative experience, which was also my turn towards Christianity. Which was also my turn towards Christianity. Yeah, so maybe we should focus on that aspect a little bit, right? So you’re discovering all of the spirituality and you’re getting blasted. Yes. Yeah. So, okay, we’ll do a quick run catch up to this other area. Just for, I think the con, oh my gosh, cat. It’s probably useful to run through. So, went to backpacking through Europe the summer after high school. I was 18. I was 18 at the time. Went there for four months, came back, got a job back at the coffee shop I was working at before I left. Met a buddy there who’s still one of my best friends. And the following summer we took off to the big island of Hawaii. This is where I ran into cult one, by the way. One and two. Met a girl there. We ended up coming back to the mainland, to Washington state. And about a year into our relationship, she went crazy. Like real, not like, not acceptable. She actually went insane. A mixture of schizophrenia and bipolar. I was watching this transition from this, you know, totally wonderful, nice person, if a bit of a weird one, to full on psychosis. And the way that that happened was through all these kind of new age spiritual ideas. You know, many of which provided by me, many of which provided by her. And we were kind of cobbling together some goofy world view. And then as it got more extreme, it mostly just became this rapid adaptive network of like trying to explain whatever random thing she was experiencing in that moment and trying to make sense of it on the fly. One, to ground her to try and like reduce some of that mania. And two, so that I was able to round some of it out. Because when you’re around someone like that, we were living in the woods. There was like no one around us. We were in a one bedroom cabin. So when you’re around someone like that, for that much time, it definitely has an effect on your sense of reality. It becomes really hard to stay in a stable, your own stable mindset, when you don’t have all these other networks of people, kind of like reinforcing what’s real to you. And so it’s a friend X world views are really overpowering. Like there’s so much energy behind them. And if you don’t have that huge kind of network to absorb some of that energy, and you’re just getting blasted by their mania, it does feel like it just overpowers your sense of reality. So do you feel like a person can be the grounding for such a person? Or is that just a false error? I think it can. But I think when it’s in such a self, there’s a word for it. I can’t remember the word self taught manner, right? This fluid manner, you don’t, you’re not able to spread it out over larger groups of people that are having like experiences and are able to guide you because they went through something similar or, you know, all these other aspects. Autodidactic, that’s the word I was trying to think of. So, your attempt to ground and how rapidly it changes almost starts creating a meta, I hate that word, but it fits here, a meta insecurity, right? You might feel grounded in the moment because you kind of were able to run it through these processes. However, the part of you that’s watching you go through all these processes is going, oh, something’s not, there’s no consistency here. Something’s not fitting together, right? It’s too adaptive. And in some sense, right, to use an image from Peterson, the layers in the hierarchy are disconnected from each other. And you start perceiving that. And then it starts creating an existential insecurity. I would, I would. Yeah. So the association I got was also Peterson, him talking about the people in the prison camps having to carry sacks of salt across the camp and back, right? Without meaning, like I got that sense. That’s kind of, yeah. Well, you’re grounded, right? But yeah, it’s a part of you goes, why the hell am I getting the salt back and forth? Yeah. So that was, that was a big one. And after that, I definitely went into a pretty major depressive period for about two years. Didn’t end well. But it also didn’t end like in the worst. It could have gone a lot worse. It was an ugly situation, but it worked itself out just with us going different ways. So yeah, what type of depression is this? Is this like real dark, bad feeling or is it apathy? Like, like, where did you go? It was definitely, it felt like a weighted depression. It wasn’t just like, I don’t care about anything. It was, it had a feeling of heaviness, almost somberness. There was definitely like that. I didn’t know how to do something meaningful. Partially too, like when you go through those extreme experiences, normal life just doesn’t feel very stimulating, I guess, exciting. Like it’s not giving you much. You’re used to like, yeah, that’s the thing that soldiers go through, right? And when they come back and then they have to readjust back. Exactly. Yeah, it’s probably now that I’m saying it, it was probably something akin to a lighter trauma response. So yeah, I kind of just floated on like that for a couple years after that relationship, without much change, just kind of going to work, going home. The millstone around your neck? Yes. Yeah. A lot of it was just kind of like, all right, I’ll just hunker down and like, wait it out. And then what actually ended up working great for me was I just kind of was like, let me go do something I wanted to try, which was for me, rock climbing. And they had just opened a gym in the town I was living in. So one day I was like, well, screw it, let’s go see if this is any fun. And I became obsessed with it. I met a lot of people, a lot of friends. I started going on these rock climbing trips. We go camping for four or five days and go climb on the rocks and have a good time. And that all like really pulled me kind of back up to a normal, healthy base line. And it was also at that time that I got diabetes, like a few months after I started rock climbing, maybe half a year. Do you feel a connection or is that just random? I actually feel the connection was with that extreme depressive period that led up to that. And by the time I was starting to like do something that made me feel better for myself, it was in some sense a little too late. I heard, you know, the damage had been done. Yeah. So where were we? Oh, we were aiming for cult four. Yes, Christianity was the big transformation that you had, right? Because like where are we at with our spiritual life at this point? Is the spiritual life in the rock climbing? There is none. It was, you know, I still had these kind of ideas. It was kind of a vague new age sense of spirituality. You know, again, I still had all these mythic systems, but at that point, it was definitely like I had gotten blown out on the over exposure to playing in those realms. And I just wanted to like have fun grabbing things really hard, you know, very much just like, let’s, you know, just kind of live life a little with less of the theory about what life is and what it means. And yeah, right after getting diabetes, I moved here where I’m currently at in Santa Cruz, California. And that was a bit tricky because, you know, I lost my friend group, but at the same time, when I was in Washington, I was living with my dad and we never got along particularly well when I was living with him. Like we get along great, so long as I’m not living with, you know, too close. So that had built up a number of pressures. And I just felt like I needed to get out of that area. There was still like a lot of environmental triggers that would kind of throw me back into those depressive periods. And the option to come down here was there. So I took it. And yeah, still wasn’t, I think what it was that kind of got me back on the spiritual train was I ended up getting a job with a jewelry company that was basically made all its money in the festival circuits. So here in, well, pretty much the entire U.S., they went everywhere, but specifically some of the ones in California, you have these music festivals that are very spiritually oriented, or at least they paint themselves as that. And this company was very deeply involved in all that. And even the product that they sold was being marketed with all this kind of New Age language and like the meaning of the stones and what the thing represented and all this stuff. But it was a great job. Like I really had a lot of fun working there for the first couple of years. And it was a good group of people. The people that actually worked in the workshop were like way more down to earth, grounded people. They usually have to be to make physical objects. Whereas then, you know, you’d get these wild people coming in where their entire life was just based around partying at these festivals. And they would kind of come in and go out. We’d hear all the stories and have fun conversations, but it was never the focus of that job. And so I kind of got back into that, yeah, that whole group through that job. And it kind of kicked back in these, you know, all this New Age spiritual learning I’d done before. And at that time, I’d had enough distance to it. It felt like a period where I was starting to reintegrate a lot of what I learned in those earlier years with the crazy ex-girlfriend and all of that stuff. I was trying to pull the valuable bits back out of it and slowly work them back into my life. Do you describe that a little bit? Yeah. Well, a lot of it was I knew how to have the conversations and now I was surrounded by people that talked in the same language that I used then. And a lot of these people were doing a lot of psychedelic drugs. So they were kind of always in these, you know, they were in these, you know, exploratory, pretty out there states and they would often try and describe them to you when they got back. And then I would be basically in much the same way I did for the crazy ex, like trying to hear their experiences and contextualize them and, you know, go through that process. And it kind of like brought back some of the skills and processes I had learned back then, but in a way that was like a lot safer. It wasn’t like life or death. It was just some goofy hippie telling me about their psychedelic experience, right? It didn’t have as heavy of a connotation, which made it easier to kind of integrate those experiences back in. But it was very similar in many ways and just being able to have conversations in that way again without it, you know, feeling overly dramatic, I suppose. Yeah, so that kind of continued on. And then eventually I went to one of the festivals. They sent me on one. And kind of this whole image I had had about what I thought I was participating in. So, you know, you hear all the stories, you see the people, you hear all these stories of growth and how much fun everyone’s having. And I kind of built up this image that I wasn’t even quite aware of that, you know, something cool was going on here. Like people were really trying to like, you know, be better people and they were, you know, spiritual but not religious. And they were actually finding systems that worked to create spiritual growth minus the religious dogma and all that. And the moment I actually went to a festival, that entire image, again, the mold exploded. And what I saw was basically people using pseudo spiritual language to rationalize every god-awful thing you could imagine. You know, it was just, it was like the the worst parts of cliques in high schools mixed with holier than now pseudo spirituality, mixed with extreme narcissism and abuses that come from people’s inability to hold their boundaries in place while on enormous amounts of drugs. And all of that mixed together in just one big stinking pile of like decent music, I suppose. That stinking pile of decent music. So that was pretty dramatic. And I actually have a great story that I feel like was the perfect microcosm for this whole situation. So I was one night at this festival, and it’s tricky, right? Because I had a lot of fun when I went there. It was just worldview destroying at the same time. It’s not like it wasn’t fun, but yeah. One night I was working at the stand selling the jewelry we made and really had to go to the bathroom, specifically number two. And it was dark out. And I’m pretty unfamiliar with the proper, like, you know, normally people that do these things a lot, they always tell you bring your own toilet paper because the chance that they’re going to have toilet paper is very low. And always make sure to bring a headlamp with you because there’s no lights where all the porta potties are. But not knowing any of this, I’m like beelining it for a freaking porta potty because I’m having some difficulty. And most of them are closed. And then the few that are open, there’s no toilet paper in them. So finally I find one and it’s super dim. And you could see the toilet paper roll because it’s white. And it was just like the faintest, you know, image you could like make out that there was something there. So I found one that had toilet paper in it. I sit down right into a pile of somebody’s shit that they had missed the toilet and took a crap on the rim of the toilet. I sit right in this. I do my business fully knowing now at this point, like, oh my God. I’m trying to clean it up. Thankfully, at our camp we had a little makeshift sink. So I’m back behind the place where we’re selling jewelry to people with these crowds of people. And I’m back there trying to wash my freaking butt from where I sat and someone else’s crap. Did you steal the toilet roll? I didn’t. I was I took a lot of it. But it well and of course it made perfect sense. The only reason that was the only stall that had toilet paper was because everyone else could see the giant pile of crap on it. It was like, oh, I’m not using that one. But the image, the image was quite accurate, right? I had found myself in this position of having sat in someone else’s crap. And then I’m sitting there having to clean it off of me. That’s what the entire right. It was one of those things where the the symbol was so poignant in the the micro. And then the moment I zoomed out, I’m like, oh, man, that’s what happened. I sat in someone else’s crap and now I’m having to go through all this effort to like wash it off of me. Is this referring to the festival or to your relationship? The festival, just like the whole New Age scene itself was very much like what you’re picking up from these pseudo gurus. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t like really cool people in those scenes. There definitely is. It’s just the way the general culture processes it here. Maybe this is a fun one. Do you know who Bhagavan Das is? No. He was the teacher of Ram Das or I don’t know if teacher’s the right word. He traveled with Ram Das in India in the 60s. Ram Das is a pretty well known, you know, 60s New Ager. He brought a lot of people into Hinduism way back in the day. Robert Alpert is his real name. Richard, Richard Alpert. Bhagavan Das. So, so Richard Alpert writes this book describing their time in India and he basically has just got the most rose colored tinted glasses on about Ram Das, right? Just thinks he, Bhagavan Das, he just thinks he’s the coolest fucking dude that ever existed, you know, and he’s watching them like walk through India and every town they go into, all the yogis and mystics like invite them in and they’re like, oh, you’re here. They have a great time. They’re doing a bunch of drugs on the side while they like wander around India. So it was like my trip. So you get this image of Bhagavan Das is just like the most enlightened white guy wandering around in India and later Bhagavan Das writes his own book describing that period of time and it’s totally different. And you find out that after literally wandering around in India for years, he comes back and becomes a literal used cars salesman, right? Well, you got the skills. That’s what you’re right. And I was just, you know, it was that thing where it’s like, wow, there’s no more poignant image in the world than these white guys going around finding used cars, used spiritual vehicles, right? And in Buddhism, the Mahayana and the, oh gosh, I forget the other one. They’re literally called vehicles, right? The big vehicle and the small vehicle. So finding these used spiritual vehicles, coming back to the West and then trying to sell these used spiritual vehicles, you know, largely devoid of everything that makes them work in the place where they found them. So it was kind of a symbol like that where something just lines up a little too perfectly to describe a situation you find yourself in. That was the image I got that night of sitting in someone else’s crap. Wow, very desperate to go myself as well, right? It’s almost like a spiritual experience. It really was. Ironically, it really, I mean, that was a transformative experience as uncomfortable as it was and as ridiculous as it was in the moment. That was like the trigger point. That was the break, right? It was like I could write off the grossness of this festival experience because there was so many parts where I was having a lot of fun. And then it was like that one moment kind of like kicked it over into the other edge. Is it also like being filthy allowed you to look at the filth? What was that? Oh, yeah, in some sense. Well, it’s just like, it’s not even like, it’s like I had no choice but to look at the filth. I had no choice but to go, you know, wash my ass in that sink, you know? I don’t get to pretend or like just have dirty feet. Yeah, yeah, but it’s like, oh, I got dirty feet. Whatever. It’s not a big deal. But when it gets closer to your body, it’s like, oh, I have to deal with this now. I don’t get it. But it’s also an allowance, right? Like it’s like, no, you got, now it’s okay to look at all the other dirty stuff because you’re very. Right, right. That’s very true. Yeah, it was. It’s like I can admit it to myself that this actually is as gross as, you know, I was perceiving but ignoring. Yeah, that’s fascinating. And following that, I went into a pretty intense, pseudo manic period. And I think a lot, it was, you know, I really like Peterson’s description of burning off the dead wood because that’s how it felt. This worldview, and in some sense, this was the same worldview I had dealing with the crazy ex. Right. And instead of burning the worldview off back then, I went into that depressive period where I just kind of like hunkered down. I didn’t. Yeah, I get, I get the word repressive. Right. Right, right. Very accurate. Yeah. And it’s hyphenated for me. Yeah, in its hyphenated form even. Yeah, repress. We form again. So I entered into this burning off the dead wood state. And when you burn wood, specifically dry old dead wood, it produces a lot of heat. And I think that’s often missed in the descriptions of burning off the dead wood. It’s very hot, you know, you’re in largely, you know, there’s a definite manic aspect to it. It’s high signal, right? Like it’s the contrast. Yeah. And there’s a physicality to that as well. Right. For me, it was extremely physical. And so I was quite literally having these states that I guess you could call the mystical states. But it felt like I was seeing too deeply into the world around me. And I had no way to get rid of the energy. Right. And this was like literal nervous energy, like neurons and, you know, the nervous system firing off at the chakras. Extremely accelerated. Yeah. Yeah. And that was like the burning, right? The foliage on my nervous system tree was definitely on fire. Yeah. What is it? So, criticality, what did they call it? Right? Like system criticality, and then you get new, you collapse back into a new optimum. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yes. And yeah, so I was going through this state and it was terrifying because I could see myself going through the same process that I had watched my crazy ex go through all those years before. Like it was scarily similar. And very distinctly, the feeling I was having was I was getting all of this stuff coming in through my forehead. And then it felt like it would go down and hit something and pop back out my head. Like it couldn’t get through me. And it was creating really manic, really uncomfortable states. And eventually I found out that when this was happening, what I could do was give up. And I would get on my hands and knees. I put my knees on the ground and just lay out, you know, with my forehead touching the ground. And for some reason in that body position of just like, I give up, you know, whatever, go for it. If I’m going to have this experience, I’ll have it. I could feel like a trickle going all the way through my body, right? Almost like it was coming down into my legs instead of just like hitting a spot and then regurgitating back out. And again, these were all like very physical sensations. I was in a deep way mapping the experiences directly onto my body and what my body felt like. Actually, so far this makes total sense to me actually. Perfect. That’s rare. Because I have the sense, right, like this rebellious nature, right, like this self-reformation thing is that’s the blockage, right? Like it’s the incapacity to submit, right? And well, what’s the pose, right? Like it’s like, it’s like, it’s like, well, there’s this position, right, which you did before the king, right? Like there’s this pose where you’re in some sense completely submitting and there’s an actual physicality associated with that, right? Like, and you’re putting yourself completely under and that’s you, right? And you’re putting yourself completely under and that’s you, right? And yeah, what was so strange was how, oh, my internet is getting weird. Can you still hear me? Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah, what was so bizarre was just like how direct these physical representations, I mean, it really was. It was like the whole diagetic, right? Like, you know, like, how direct these physical representations, I mean, it really was. It was like the whole dichotomy between spiritual and physical was just gone. They were like very clearly directly related to each other in that state. There was no intellectualism. There was no world of platonic forms. It was like one to one mapping between these, what it always felt to be disparate worlds. So I started being in that position a lot because it was the only thing that made me feel better. Oh, my. And one night in this state, it becomes very intense. And then I have the sense that a being of light descends into my room while I’m in this hands and knees position. And it’s a very bizarre feeling because it really felt like I could see it, except I couldn’t see it with my eyes. It was like I knew exactly what its shape was, where its outline was. But it wasn’t, I don’t know how I was perceiving it or how I was. I don’t know why it felt so distinct as a separate entity. Yeah, it’s a bizarre sensation. I don’t have. Oh, yeah. Like, I can imagine it’s something new, at least, right? Yeah, I’ve never had anything like that. I still hadn’t touched Christianity in any meaningful way. I had done some Joseph Campbell-esque playing around with a couple of the stories, but I still had no idea anything about it. I’d never done anything with it in any serious sense. And then now I’m having this experience. And the thing says to me, get up, get off your knees. Like, what are you doing? Why are you on your knees? And I thought that was like the weirdest thing. And I didn’t want to get off my knees. Like, I was in some sense terrified to do so. So all I did, I stayed on my knees, but like raised my upper body up. And I very much had the sensation of it touching me on the forehead. And then all of a sudden, all of that, like, that regurgitating energy I was talking about, that whole thing, suddenly, all at once goes straight through my body and right out the bottom of my feet. And it just, it was a crazy feeling. It felt like my legs suddenly became alive for like the first time in my life. Like, it felt like my nervous system was finally working correctly. And it was such a foreign sensation, but it was very much stuff comes in through the top, through the forehead, and then it rolls all the way down and grounds out through your feet. It reaches down into the ground through your feet. And all of these problems, I was having these psychosis like states disappear, right? And I could actually handle these large amounts of information or energy coming in without feeling like I was going crazy. So right, that ended, I got touched in the forehead, go through this crazy experience, I kind of come to, and you know, there’s no being there anymore or anything like that. But I had this very clear image that I was participating within the Christian story. I just didn’t know how or why. And so the weirdest part of this whole event is my diabetes goes away. And I’m a type one diabetic, it’s supposed to be incurable. Your body literally is an autoimmune disorder, where your body kills the cells that produce insulin in your pancreas. And I’m measuring my blood sugar regularly. It’s staying within healthy levels most of the time, but like, I’m like still going to my job, making this jewelry. And I start noticing, now I’m speeding up the timeline a little bit now, like weeks are going by. And I’m basically using my diabetes as a measuring tool to see if I can figure out how to live in this new way. So my blood sugar is stable and healthy at normal levels for about three weeks. And then after those three weeks, it starts wavering. Right. And I noticed that my blood sugar is wavering. Right. And I noticed that the waivers take place specifically when I find myself unwilling to submit. Right. It’s like I’m rebuilding that unhealthy regurgitating pattern, instead of, you know, letting things move fluidly through me. So I start using my blood sugar as like a testing rod to figure out what I’m doing wrong. Like, how do I live in this submitted state? And it doesn’t work. After about another three to four weeks, a total of about a month and a half, I have to take insulin again. Because my blood sugars are just too unstable. So, yeah, I want to touch on this aspect. Were you feeling like you were having granted agency? Right. Like, were you in a state of gratitude or were you in a state of, oh, I’m going to fix this? It was an absolute lack of agency that felt like the most agency I had ever had in my life. That was the correct state. And every time I tried to grip life and control it to what I wanted it to do, I started reforming this really like gross feeling energetic pattern, that regurgitating, vomiting it back up. And my blood sugars would go out. So you were calibrating your relationship to do, well, is it surrender here? Yeah, I guess it’s surrender here. Right. I would say surrender was the right word. One of the aspects of that experience was basically the way I’ve come to describe it is it felt like I became part of the revelation of God. Right. So instead of me being this individual who’s looking at the revelation of God as it unfolds in the world, whether it be through the trees blowing in the wind or the people or whatever, the Bible, any number of things, it felt like I found myself in a state of pure discovery unto myself. Right. But only when I was in this submitted state. So by being perfectly submitted in a sense, or by giving away my self back to God, I found myself as part of the revelation. And that was a tremendous… So I had no personal will when I was doing it correctly. Okay. So it’s the word witness appropriately? Witness is a great word. Right. I was witnessing myself as part of the creation unfolding, but I had no… It’s not that familiar self-concept of agency where it’s like I’m controlling things and I know who I am. I didn’t know who I was. When I was in a healthy state, I wasn’t controlling my actions. I was letting the actions happen. And the weirdest part about all this is just like you’re like exuding love, you know, agapic love. It’s like… I don’t know. I don’t know. The words get messy here. By being loved, you cannot help but love in return. And likewise, it never felt like I was loving anything. It felt like the love of God was just pouring through me. And it loved reality. It loved all the people. It loved creation. And I was just kind of like the channel that it took to express itself. But it never once felt like, oh, I love you or, you know, this or whatever. That barrier of self-concept was like, you know, mostly gone. It was very bizarre. Especially just normally, even now, my normal operating state is very much like there’s some little homunculus inside me that creates stuff and then expresses it. And I have to control the homunculus and make sure he doesn’t get too angry or, you know. Kind of the Freudian model of the id, the ego, and the superego. It’s this weird layered control system that feels very uncomfortable. That was gone. It was all just one flow through. I don’t know. You can hear it in my words. It gets really hard to describe the experiences in any way that’s like meaningful. So I’m wondering, were you ever able to recapture that state? Or is that just something that comes upon you? Never like that. It was kind of, it was a pretty ridiculous and long extended experience in that state. And since then, it’s definitely way less present and it mostly comes in little fits. And a lot of that is I’ve just become so accustomed to once again to not submitting. So I would say it’s not as if it’s inaccessible. It is weird, right? Because in some sense, I feel like not submitting ironically comes from finding yourself unworthy as opposed to finding yourself too worthy. It’s a bit paradoxical, right? Usually people don’t know that. They don’t know that. It’s a bit paradoxical, right? Usually people say we would describe it as we refuse to submit because I’m too good to submit to something else. But in this case, it almost feels like the recognition is I’m too bad to submit to this other thing. I don’t know. It’s almost like you get the images of the Christians in like the first 600 AD or maybe 1000 AD walking around whipping themselves. It becomes like a bizarre sense of self-flagellation as opposed to like why doesn’t submit and feel it doesn’t feel like a form of flagellation. And instead it’s like I’ve picked up this horrible unhealthy practice of just like, well, let me give myself a couple snacks today and then I don’t have to submit, right? Well, I guess that brings me to some awe, right? Like maybe you’re in an extended state of awe, right? And there’s the overwhelming nature of it is in some sense inducing fear, right? Or at least the potential. Yeah. Well, do you mean now or do you mean in that extravagant experience? Well, it’s more so your relationship now to potentially going there. Right, right, right, right. Perfect. That is exactly the sensation. Yes. Yes, it definitely is a fear of awe, which is ironic. It’s just ironic on so many levels. Like you really start to, I don’t know, some of the weirder stories, stuff that turned me away from Christianity when I was a kid or a teenager and I’m looking at these stories going, what in the hell is that? They just make perfect sense now. Like how ridiculous the types of sins the early stories communicate. They seem so silly. And then like you start having these experiences and it’s like, oh, I get how that’s working. Like it suddenly makes sense. I don’t know. It’s very bizarre. Yeah. Pujar is nice thing that he was talking about where you need to leap of faith to a level and then when you’re in the level, you can start discovering it, but you can’t get that to the leap of faith. Right. Or like sometimes you get smacked onto a level. Right. But yeah, right. It’s like, okay, as long as you’re not on the level, right. People talking on that level is like, what are they talking about? Like, yeah, I don’t get it. And I think I’ve always been trying to describe it as transcending the paradox, right? Where there’s these two things that can’t get together and it’s like, but they can get together here. Right. That’s very true. And yeah, I think that’s what I’m struggling about even trying to describe these experiences is that they are fundamentally paradoxical in the language I’m trying to use to communicate them with. However, the experience itself is not paradoxical at all. It makes perfect sense. It’s a perfect combination of something that just doesn’t, the moment you try and say what it is, you end up with these like paradoxes, which is probably true of like all language. Well, yeah, you’re imposing a frame, right? So now you’re having a set of constraints and it’s probably not sufficient. Right now, we’re getting into Gödel’s incompleteness. Right. That’s exactly it. What we are actually communicating is not the paradox of the experience. What we’re actually communicating is the paradox of language itself and it projects itself onto whatever it is we’re trying to talk about. We start thinking reality is paradoxical when it’s not reality. It’s the tool we’re using to describe reality is has an inherent paradox in it. If you look at it far enough, looks paradoxical. Well, yeah, or we don’t have the participatory underpinning of the language that we’re using. Right. Right. That’s a good point too. That’s something I always appreciated when I would kind of dive into some of these words from other languages. Like a big one was Pankaja, which is the word used for the lotus flower in Sanskrit, one of many words. And it literally means mud born. Pankaja is just mud and Jaa is born. And I always thought that was so beautiful because they took like the most beautiful flower that they could find. And the word they used to describe it is born of mud. Right. So every time you look at it and you say what it is, it brings this view of an entire process into the name for that object. So you cannot talk about the flower without talking about how it’s mud. Yeah, it’s cause, right? It’s precondition. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of just seeing this disconnected, disembodied flower floating on top of the stem, you get the image of the entire cycle taking place. That’s the pattern that’s creating that beautiful flower. Whereas like our object-based language, English, you say the word flower, right? It has no process. It has no- Well, actually flowering, there is a little bit process in there too. You can add process into it. You can try and make it more obvious, but I would argue unless there’s like an etymology to the word flower that I’m just totally unaware of. But you’re right. We can take a noun and turn it into an adjective. And now we start getting a view of the process taking place. Yeah. Yeah. But maybe it’s just a consequence of our relationship to the language. Most of them, that’s an actual artifact of the language. I think it’s probably a little bit of both. Yeah. I think you’re right that if we related to the language differently, we would come up with words that describe things differently. I think that’s true. However, I think it’s also true that the language will impose itself on how we perceive reality, particularly in the stages of learning the language. Right. Right. And this goes back to, do we have the participatory experience and are we enchanting the world with it? Like with the words, right? Right. Right. Yeah. Because if we just learn- To aid us in the enchantment, not pull us away. Now, of course, there’s a lot of use to pulling us away from the enchantment, right? Latin and these heavily object-based languages, these disenchanting languages gave us a lot of power over the world, you could argue. It makes it a lot easier to manipulate the world because you view everything as mostly meaningless disconnected parts instead of- Well, it gives you access to a bunch of intelligibility at once, right? Because you can just learn the words on a piece of paper where they’re decontextualized, right? So they’re completely disenchanted. Now you have all of these reference points. So now it’s like, oh, I have this big map, but it’s an empty map, right? Right. Right. That’s exactly it. And it’s the irony of how our culture developed. We got all the power in the world, which we thought would be the enchanting mechanism, right? We thought, if I could only have enough power, then I could properly enjoy life. Hamburgers all day, every day for every meal, and life will truly be great. But of course, we ended up disenchanting. We lost the enchantment in the process of pursuing it. And now we find ourselves in the meaning crisis. We find ourselves in cult four. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. I forgot we were even going there, but that’s exactly what happened. So I took my insulin and some random crazy dude on Facebook started screwing around with me. I mean, this guy’s strolling level was unlike anything I had ever seen anywhere. And during this collapse, I found I saw something of extreme value in his absolute willingness to totally throw away his his. So image, he was not playing an image game the way everyone else was playing an image game. And what I had come to understand was it was my obsession with image games that made it so that I could not stay submitted. So is image different than identity? Is this like persona instead of identity? I would say from the from the way I was experiencing it then, I would say they were the same thing. Image was identity because I had come to understand the true self is not anything you can ever know. The true self is where you are partaking in the revelation of God. Right. You’re in a state of discovery under yourself in every moment. And there is no secret Charlie Chaplin hiding out inside of you or something. Right. There’s no homunculus. There’s no little completed person sitting inside of you. Right. That’s just not there. What there is is the agapic love of God that creates this endless blooming into reality. So I’ve been playing with this idea, right, where we were talking about the words, right, and how they’re referencing objects. Right. So would you say that the agapic love is process oriented? Yes. And it’s the participation in the process oriented state of being. Right. Okay. Right. And that’s a great way of putting it because what I’m doing is I’m contrasting that with the concept of the homunculus, which is extremely object oriented. Right. It’s in some sense this idea that there’s a perfect soul, a little piece of God that is our essence, and that we have to uncover or unbury it. And then we get to be that completed, perfect little object. I think that’s totally wrong. Totally wrong. Having more. And I think our language betrays us very deeply at that point. So yeah, crazy, numb. Right. What’s the word? Image? So what’s image there? Is that the persona? Is that how he was presenting himself? Well, it’s yeah, it’s basically the game that’s being played on social media, particularly Facebook and particularly at this time, which was like late early mid 2016, I suppose. Is that right? 2015. And my perception of time is terrible. That’s with Trump coming to power. Yes. And this was before Trump. Oh, but Trump came in in 2017. 2016 was the last year of Obama. So the elections were being held or, you know, all that stuff was going on, but no one had been voted in. That’s correct, because the festival I went to put on a giant political ad on every TV screen in the entire place of who’s the guy all the hippies like the socialist Bernie Bernie Sanders. So broadcasting to literally a hundred thousand people, probably 70 percent of which are on extreme psychedelic drugs for multiple days. This giant political ad. That was one of the things where I’m like, I even liked Bernie, you know, like I thought he was a cool candidate and it just felt so gross, like so manipulative, like, oh, here’s your little brain brainwashing ceremony for all these you know, subliminal advertising. Right before the election. You don’t remember that you saw the commercial, but it did happen. It’s so weird. But, okay, we’re getting sidetracked. We’re in cold four on Facebook and this guy is just like, so, so, so everyone’s playing this game, especially in the New Age circles that I was friends with, where it’s like, how enlightened can you appear? And there’s all this image crafting that goes into it. You never let an ugly picture on your Facebook. They’re all beautiful. They’re all taken with like professional lenses where the background is all blurred and you just look blissed out of your mind. You know, life is perfect and everything’s glorious and everything you say is all there is, is love and, you know, good vibes only. And, you know, all this just such hokey, you know, sweeter than sweet image crafting. So along in that, that’s the environment, along comes this guy that’s just absolutely brutal and is absolutely honest. So disgustingly honest that he immediately turns most people away. Like they just want to have nothing to do with them. And he knows how to hit the weak points in a person’s image. He knows how he knows where the cracks are in between this cobbled together, you know, persona. And he can, he knows how to just right in the spot where it’s going to hurt the most. And in a way where you can’t even take him very seriously, you know, he’s just so over the top and ridiculous that you get this bizarre feeling of like, why, why does such a ridiculous person know every little spot to hit? So I saw a tremendous value in this. One was, oh, well, here’s a person that will relentlessly hit every weak point in this persona that I keep trying to cobble together, right? Maybe he can break it faster than I can rebuild it, you know? Yeah, that’s, that’s not a, okay. And then the other part was just the willingness to be brutally honest and just be totally transparent in a place where everyone is doing their best to not be transparent and kind of allowing my honesty to destroy my own positive self-image of myself, right? If I can be honest, then at least I can deal with it. Whereas if I just am constantly lying about who I am and what I think and all this other stuff, I’ll never get anywhere was kind of a feeling, especially coming down from this, you know, other state that I had experienced. So that was what drew me in. And then my whole life kind of collapsed around me, you know, I left the job, which was its own chaos, chaotic exit, as I am seemingly armed up. And… You’re one of those people that… I guess I better go, go ahead. You’re one of those people that has an explosion behind them and you just put on the sunglasses. Yeah, right. Put on the sunglasses, what? Put on the sunglasses, wow, like my back is on fire and I’m like flying through the air. Wishing I was cooler than I am. Yeah, go ahead. You got to treat the burns when you’re home, right? Yeah, just make sure the camera is only looking from the front. So, yeah, I just kind of took it as like, well, I guess I better go figure out what these people are doing. And it was never like I never went into it where I was just like 100% gung ho. It was I don’t know if I’m here because I have something to learn from these people or because I need to destroy what they’re doing because it’s gross and needs to not exist. Or like I just it was always ambiguous, but I did have a lot of fun with it. And then it eventually, about a year, year and a half later became very clear that it was a good thing. And then I just kind of went back and year and a half later became very clear that it was it was no longer ambiguous. And it was something was going wrong. And I just left. So I get the sense that like you’re like a spy, right? Where you have your allegiance and then you’re infiltrating this place and then there’s these bifurcated allegiance. Yes, very much. And it’s like one of those really good spy stories where the spy themselves is like playing double. They’re like, they don’t know who to help. For some reason, they start believing in the thing that’s supposed to be their enemy just because they spent so much time with them and start understanding their motivations. And it gets really convoluted. But the way you face it, you flee. You didn’t blow it up. Right. I didn’t. No. No, I was too insecure to blow it up. I mean, that’s not entirely fair. I did try and blow it up a little bit when I left, but it was not. It was not a serious attempt like other attempts to blow stuff up in my past. And again, this was the fourth cult I had interacted with. The first three, I literally just went in and like wrecked shop. Right. That teenage atheist part of me knew how to find every inconsistency and drive the. Drive the. The. The world view against itself. So back to the mold. So you blow out your mold, but you also blow out the mold in the materiality, right? Like in the world around you as well. Yeah, it was always that way. Like I don’t think I ever went through a transformation where like my entire life didn’t fall apart along with the transformation. Like there was never like a nice gentle transformation where I was able to like adjust myself to the situation I found myself in to begin with. It was always like full meltdown, you know, everything falls apart. And then I’m just like building it back up from scratch is largely the feeling. Again, really ironic because I do feel like a pretty boring person. You still got a persona, dude. Clearly. Boring person persona. Yeah, that’s true. There is, yeah, my homunculus is just kind of like, you know, quiet and tired. I got pacified. Yeah. My secret inner self is just, you know, some guy sitting in his chair reading a book, the newspaper. So how did the jive with your Christianity? Like, were you actively pursuing Christianity as well as the cult? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. After those, well, that’s where I was burning very hot. It just felt like I couldn’t, I can’t not be a Christian anymore. Even if I find myself in extended states where I just don’t feel it whatsoever. Like it felt like it just locked it in place somewhere in me. For lack of a better description. And graved. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, even now, like it’s been a while where I’ve accessed anything like a state like that. And in many ways, if you were to ask me, like, do I believe in God and Christ, a major part of me would probably say no, just because it feels disconnected from my experience now. And I’m not quite sure how I fit in relation to that. Right. The belief part gets weird. And on the other end, I feel more securely stuck in that world than ever before. At the very least, than ever before. It’s a really bizarre mixture of seemingly contradictory. Well, it’s the element of interpretation connecting with the experiential element. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. The left hemisphere and the right hemisphere are kind of like, well, well, my corpus callosum is not doing its heavy lifting currently. It might get hot again if that ever happens. That’s the problem. It’s like, oh, I’ve been cold for a little too long. Something’s going to come. I hope it’s when I’m like 50 and not like next year. So, so, so you’re not out of the cold. You’re entering the discord space. You’re going around a bit there. How has that been? The disc. So when I entered into the disk, or really, you know, Paul, Paul’s channel, and I did the interviews there. And then eventually that led to the discord space and all that. The energy I was like this, I was eating an elephant. Right. Because that was right. It was not long after I left cult four. And when I left cult four, I was 99% certain that something was really wrong. And it was going to collapse in the same way I’d seen all these other cults collapse. But it hadn’t yet. And all the people I’d been interacting with for the last year and a half kept going. So I was in this really insecure state of like, did I make the right choice? Should I have like kept pushing it and, you know, write it straight into the ground? Or did I, you know, am I just a coward? And that’s why I couldn’t go as far as I needed to. And I had all these weird insecurities. Now, eventually I became vindicated because it was a total shit show. After I left, they were in the process of going from online only to in person. And the moment it was in person, it did every horrible thing you, you know, would imagine it would have done. And I dodged that. I had actually learned from the previous three cults to not fall for such clear symbols. Nonetheless, it did, I was in a very insecure state. So I was eating up everything. You know, I came across Jordan Peterson, that was extremely helpful. I came across Paul, you know, I was looking at all this philosophy and just again, trying to like reform a worldview out of this fallout that came from, you know, multiple failings at that point. And Discord was perfect for synthesizing that information and making relationships and having these great discussions and kind of like reforming a functional worldview. You know, finding some value in the bullshit I had gone through where people at least, you know, if nothing else, other people could delight in the ridiculousness of the story, which was cathartic, you know, it helped. It felt like, okay. I’d bleed innocence. So yeah, and then eventually I kind of oversaturated the territory and my life has changed quite a bit. And, you know, I’m trying to focus on, on taking care of other stuff right now. So it’s just been kind of a slow slide away. From those areas, I still love to pop in and, you know, it’s always a lot of fun. I feel, I feel like I have a lot more fun when I do pop in now because the lengths of time are so long that when I do come in, there’s a lot of new information and new stuff. And so I get to get excited about it. And then I just kind of, you know, I’ll pop in and then another two to three months. So, so basically you’re, you’re sliding like, you’re not doing upkeep. You are participating in life. Right. So it’s like, it’s like, you know, you are participating in life. So it’s like, it seems like a, like a cycle somewhere going. Right. I would agree with that. And it is, I mean, I’ve made headway. I, you know, I’m engaged now. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Which, you know, my relationships were always really unstable when I was younger, obviously. This is, you know, we’ve been together for coming up on eight years now. Been engaged for about nine months, almost a year, actually, 10 months, something like that. And we’re both the same age. We’re 32 going on 33 this year. And so it’s just kind of like crunch time. You know, it’s like, if I want to have a family and kids, I need to get my, shit in order and take it seriously. And, you know, if I want to be able to do it, doing a skill that I practiced and learned and enjoy instead of just finding a wage job somewhere, then I need to make sure I’m good at it and offer all those spaces. So that’s where my energy has been, been heavily focused recently is like trying to, you know, get that stuff in order so I can move on to the next stage of life. Ideally get out of my Peter Pan. We would do that. That was kind of that was part of entering cult four was like, this is my last big, like, I know this is stupid and ridiculous. I was like 26, 27 at the time. And I’m like, all right, this is my last hurrah. Like if I’m going to do this big, like stupid, let me go take off to Hawaii and live in a shack for, you know, or it was that type of thing. And I’m like, I’m getting too old to keep doing this. So let me give it a real solid attempt. And if it fails, then I need to like really put a lot of energy into developing the other part. And so that’s what I’ve been trying, trying to do. So, yeah, let me, let me take a stab at your future. So I see yourself, see yourself, I see you the coming five years, right? Like you’re busy with hopefully kids, I guess. That would be ideal. Yeah. And getting some structure and then assuming that you get things fall in line, like after five years, like you kind of get some rest maybe, right? And you can start reorient, you get back to the spiritual aspect, maybe a little bit. Oh, I’m certain I’m going to have the worst midlife crisis you’ve ever seen. But, you know, hopefully it’s when I’m like 55 or so. You’re going to do the avoidance trick, okay. Well, I’m hoping, here’s what I’m actually hoping. I’m hoping that there’s something legitimately transforming enough about consciously weighting myself and weighting myself in ways that are more than just like my own self development. You know, because every time I did it before, it was just, I was kind of in a narcissistic loop. So I’m hoping that this process of marriage and family has something legitimately transforming that doesn’t require burning the entire life to the ground in order to, you know. Yeah, service is the word there, right? Like living in service and, well, I’m just going to say probably. Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, we’ll see. It does seem like I’m an engine that likes to occasionally backfire quite loudly. And while I can hope I’ve come up with some useful strategies to deal with that by now, who the heck knows? So yeah, like one of the things that got into me is like, well, yeah, you are quite a grounded person, at least in some ways, right? You also have a lot of experience to draw upon, right? Yeah, if you’re going to go for kids, go for kids. But then at a certain point, I assume that you want to start giving back to the world. So do you have a sense of how that would look like? I do and I don’t. I feel like. I don’t know. That’s a hard question bizarrely. I didn’t think it would be such a hard question. Maybe I’m trying to escape it. The only state where I felt like I was truly giving back to the world where it was. The thing it’s supposed to be instead of this weird self-serving by helping others thing. Was that letting agapic love through me? And at that point, it’s not even giving. It’s just like, you know. There’s no self-effort required on that type of giving. And on the other end, there’s the part of me that wants to give back in the sense of like. Well, I love teaching. I love helping the people around me navigate their problems. I love being able to share from what I’ve been able to learn from my rather bizarre little. You know, path. So there’s kind of this high ideal form. And then there’s the more. Mild or muted, you know, what are things I enjoy and how do I find value in sharing them with others? Which is a pretty basic answer. Yeah, so I’ve been having this background sounds where there’s this like. Like you’re the vessel, right? Like you’re the vessel for God’s will. In some sense, or God’s love. That’s better than God’s book. You’re the vessel for God’s love. And then you also have to do upkeep on the vessel. And I feel like there’s a tension there. And in some sense, they’re contradictory, right? Right. And because the vessel is only so good as what it can hold. Right. So you need to cultivate the capacity to hold things while also being in the expression. Right. And there’s a bit of a trick there, too, which is to say part of what makes the vessel properly shaped is that the thing is flowing through it. Right. In some sense, what makes a tunnel a good tunnel is that it has water always moving through it that flushes out the rocks, right? It carves the tunnel as it’s acting in its role as a tunnel. Right. And if there’s no water flowing through your tunnel, it’s just a matter of time when you’re time until your tunnel becomes a cave. It’ll clog up, stones will fall, and then it loses the ability to let water move through it at all. And then that’s also true for the air, right? Because if the air ain’t moving, it’s becoming still and then can’t sustain life. Yeah, literally becomes poisonous in that case. Yeah. So it is contradictory. And it’s also part of me thinks that the framing because I do exactly what you described, right? It’s like I go through the stage of like, let it move through you and then like, oh, upkeep, upkeep, upkeep. And in some sense, I feel like there’s a way in which my self perceived need for upkeep is a way to hide from the other thing. Is that spiritual bypassing or is that the opposite? I don’t know. Which which direction are you spiritually bypassing? Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I can see that tendency in myself, right? Where I’ve perceived the need for upkeeping myself so much, right? So that you get in this purity spiral where you’re like, okay, like I need to get rid of so many things before I can do something. And at a certain point, it’s like, no, you just need to do it. Right. And that’s, you know, it’s so clear telling the story. I should be spending at least 10 minutes a day on my knees with my forehead on the ground. Like, it’s such a clear thing. It’s such an easy practice. And I have not done it in years. You know, like, why don’t I do that if I know it has a certain positive effect on my life and on my, you know, well-being and everything else? It’s bizarre, you know, at some point I can sit here investigating. Well, why don’t I do that? I need to fix whatever it is about myself that makes me know. Or I can just like shut up and do it. You know, let’s call it yoga. And by acting it out, I’ll learn and remember why it was worth doing. I don’t need to figure out what’s going on with me. I just need to actually commit to the thing. Yeah. I think it’s also connected to burning of the dead wood, right? Like the less wood you have, the less fury that you have to care about the dead wood and the more you can actually enact things. A lot less tinder to catch fire if a spark does come along. So, yeah, I guess I want to close off with what do you want to pass on to your children? Like how do you see your experiences inform you educating them? It’s kind of a weird one because I often find that the best advice I’m able to give to the people around me, I often find myself in a flow like state where I’m not even super sure of what I’m saying. And yet it seems to match the situation well. So I guess see now I’m a repeating record saying the same thing in different ways. On the other end, it feels like I have like I’ve built up a good adjustment for the kind of form of the world today, right? How do you navigate these online spaces? How do you navigate moving in these kind of ethereal realms? And how do you more easily fit them together with physical life? How do you make that boundary seem less dramatic and not in a way where it just makes you easy to manipulate? But again, I have no idea. I have no idea. I would need to know my kid to know how to answer this question, right? Because teaching is not, again, it’s not like the homunculus. I’ve got the knowledge. Yeah, but I think you’re going too specific. How do I make the kid better fit into the world? But in order to do that, I have to know who the kid is. In some sense, but there’s also principles, right? That’s true. That you want to connect them to. So it’s like, yes, you need to give them the light to sprout, right? To grow into, but you also have to point them at things. So I’m kind of looking more at that side of the equation. Yeah, right. Yeah, it is weird. I didn’t think it was so difficult for me to nail down those upper values. I guess in many ways, they just kind of follow a lot of boring Christian prescriptions that you hear. And I think probably why I think I would have some value is I would know how to breathe some life back into those prescriptions. Enchant them. Enchant them, right, exactly. Yeah, that’s most likely, but things like submit a Gothic love, right? Well, yeah, let’s just take submit, right? Did you know what submitters was before it got imposed upon you? No, not at all. I thought I did, but not at all. So how do you teach that? Right, like? Yeah, I think the best would be trying to highlight the paradox. And of course, that would be very difficult with a child. So the different way of highlighting the paradox is giving the child the affordance to recognize when it’s actually introduced in their lives? Right. I think so. You know, there’s a simple thing, right? Like, no kid wants to do the dishes. At least very few of them do. Right. However, or clean their room. We’ll use a Jordan Peterson. That actually that fits perfect. No kid wants to clean their room, right? But in some sense, when you finally do submit to that impetus, the feeling, the rewarding feeling you have on the other end of it is so good, right? That you need to learn that pattern of, you know, I don’t really want to do this right now, but I know it’s the right thing to do or it’s a good thing to do. And I know that there’s the reward of it on the other end. Now that’s a little tricky because you can lock yourself into some weird dynamics by framing everything in that way, right? But I think it does communicate that kind of basic principle of what submittance is communicating, right? If you’re able to give up some of yourself, you’ll find rewards from doing so. It’s just they’re not rewards you get to claim in your own name, right? Well, that’s second part that would be the harder part to teach, right? Because most people can understand the first part, even with if you have them acted out in fairly simple ways, the cleaning the room, the doing the dishes. It’s the removing your name from the accomplishment that is a little harder. You know, it’s almost where the mystical element of Christianity comes in, right? It’s not your name, it’s Christ is the Christian, right? Okay, that sounds like a good note to end on. Like, is there something that you still feel like you want to add? I don’t think so. Running through that story always kind of scrambles my brain a little. So I have I feel like I gradually get worse and worse at communicating this. It goes on. You got my help this time, so. So, yeah, thank you, Nick. That was amazing as always. I want to invite everybody to write their lesson that they took from the story in the comments so that Nick can get some feedback and that we can see other people their participation and their insights because that’s also part of this. And we’ll see you on the next Unfolding the Soul. Bye.