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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome today s guest, psychologist John Churchill, whose heady work is focused on blending Eastern and Western psychology.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks in their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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There s a deep need for all of us to grow up.
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We are now being handed tools of the gods.
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And so we have to grow up and we have to mature.
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And so those levels of deep heroic altruism that in the past maybe we reserved for the great saints and sages of the past,
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this will have to be democratized, it ll have to become something that is accessed to everybody.
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And so to do that, we re talking about the trait development, which means it has to become permanent.
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And so altered states is one thing, but an altered trait is a whole other process.
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And in order to have an altered trait developmentally, in order to really grow and then stay there, which is what you and I did, like you and I, we grew when we were five years old and we grew to 10, and then we grew to like 12 and 18.
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We went through completely different worlds.
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But the truth is, is most adults, we plateau, and most people haven t probably grown through any other worlds for a decade, two decades, three or four decades.
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So says psychologist John Churchill, co-director of Karuna Mandala and co-founder of Samadhi Integral, which is focused on consciousness, human potential, and psychedelic integration.
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John does both initiatives with his wife, fellow therapist, Nicole.
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In his early life, John became a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland.
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His book, Becoming Buddha, explores paradigm shifts of the dharmic wheel and serves as a gateway to integrating Buddhist theory and teachings into Western psychology.
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In today s conversation, we talk about the dire need for our culture to evolve and grow up, the level of consciousness at which we re creating technological advances like artificial intelligence, and the journey to self-realization.
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With vast expertise and experience, John invites us to explore our individual development and existence within the larger organism of our universe.
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This is a heady episode as John has a fascinating brain.
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Fair warning that you might need to listen more than once.
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And I highly recommend reading Ken Wilber if the topics we discuss stoke your mind.
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I d start with a brief history of everything.
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John has studied and worked with Ken for decades.
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Okay, let s get to our conversation.
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I have listened to many of your conversations, some of which I can follow and some of which are beyond me.
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So I m hoping I can – they re not really beyond me.
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I m kind of teasing but I m also not.
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I love Ken Wilber.
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I can go to most of those places with you.
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Will you talk a little bit about what you re about, essentially, and sort of the different worlds that you re weaving together into a new kind of tapestry?
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Well, you know, it s clearly that we re facing this kind of fourth industrial revolution in terms of outer technologies, right?
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The kind of AI and computing power and bio revolution and what s going to happen when those collide.
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And frankly, that will be a disaster if we don t have a comparative, what we would call in the kind of contemplative tradition, like a fourth turning of the Dharma.
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So in our culture, the interior
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the interior technologies probably start, you know, since Christianity kind of took political force, the interiors were really suppressed in favor of exoteric religion and also kind of exoteric science.
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And so we re at a point where that imbalance, it can t continue.
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So we have to meet the full power of these outer technologies and the world they re going to create with the full power of the world s interior psychotechnologies and interior
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understanding and development.
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And on the interior side, that involves an integration of understanding how all the contemplative traditions, how they all synthesize into a contemplative psychology.
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And then also an understanding of how all psychology is synthesized and how those two
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are then integrated so that we have, for the first time, a planetary developmental system that really integrates and understands the depth of what it means to be human in our most human way.
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By depth here, I don t mean like something spiritual.
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I mean something like deeply human and relational and intimate.
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and how that integrates into what we might call the most spiritual and elevated.
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So, yeah, so really that involves understanding from a psychological interior perspective, why we got to the situation that we ve got in right now and the kind of the effect of multi-generational trauma on our whole psychological makeup
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Right?
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And the thing about the technological revolution that we re facing right now, it will speed up every, whatever way we re going, it s going to speed that up exponentially.
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So if we don t have a deep understanding of how humans unfold and flower and where we ve got stuck, we will activate the opposite system, which then flip goes into the, in the direction of disintegration, separation, isolation, and deeper levels of trauma.
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It reminds me, I work with this woman, Carissa, and she talks about how we have made so much progress without evolution.
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And it also reminds me of that great E.O.
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Wilson quote, the real problem of humanity is the following.
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We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
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And, you know, we ve created
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We ve created many things that we don t have the capacity to manage.
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And those horses are out of the stable, right?
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And it s interesting, because I know you ve worked with Ken Wilber.
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And I love paradigms, and so I love a paradigm of a paradigm.
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And the way that I haven t read him fully or studied with him the way that you have, but the way that he has organized this
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I think might be sort of the click that people need to understand how these things are co-creative and co-existent, but that they all have to match, right?
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I mean, as you said, the exoteric science, this, he talks about it, right, as me, we, it, it s, and how the objective qualities have been almost our exclusive focus
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while sort of studying the brain, but not understanding the mind, or that the two are coexistent, right?
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Well, I mean, really, what we re talking about is the good, the true and the beautiful, and that the understanding of the
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what causes truth and what is truth and the value and the injunctions around investigating truth are also a sacred, they are sacred.
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And so science, which is the exploration of truth, is sacred in that it is concerned about truth.
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However, if you remove what is good, which is the interpersonal and what is beautiful, which is this pure subjective,
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then what happens is the shadow, then shadow controls science.
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And that s what s happened.
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It isn t so much even that it s science, it s also that our science has been directed, our investigation has been directed into a particular way of looking at reality for a few hundred years.
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And so, for instance, the kind of vitalistic perspectives and the non-dual perspectives that would have been part of science, scientific investigation,
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hundreds of years ago were slowly removed because the good and the beautiful weren t seen to be as important as what was true.
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Even this idea of truth and the hunt for the truth or something that s objectively, factually valid, as science evolves, that also becomes increasingly evasive, right?
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Isn t truth somehow also, I mean, I know that that s, there are many things that are true, but as we get into sort of quantum
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physics and things start moving and shifting that I feel like we re being led to a point of understanding the limit of that, of trying to nail everything down as well.
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I don t know if that s true.
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Okay.
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I think that part of that has to do with the limitations of the level of development of scientists.
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And what I mean by that, and that s where the interior is so important.
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There s been a lot of research, actually not a lot of research, but a fair amount of research in kind of human development over the last 50 years, very little of which has made its way into the mainstream.
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And mainly because the mainstream is governed by a particular level of development that brackets out anything above it, because typically we don t like to hear of anything that s above us, right?
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So culture will always bracket.
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pre-Renaissance, Dark Ages, there was a bracketing of not allowing science, not allowing Copernicus or Galileo into the medieval consciousness.
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We re at a similar situation where actually scientism is a religion and the more developed perspectives that could be integrated into science, though they aren t even part of the discourse,
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because they re not seen and even understood.
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And so in that next evolution of science that transcend and include idea, then the way that physics, Newtonian physics and quantum physics sort of break would be included and would make sense within a larger context.
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Yeah, exactly, meaning most of, I mean, just kind of mathematically, most of science arises from third person perspective.
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That s kind of Newtonian physics, kind of relativistic theory is kind of fourth person perspective.
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But human consciousness can go fifth person perspective, sixth person, seventh person.
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But in order to do that, you actually have to engage in contemplative transformative practices that transform
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how you experience yourself as a human being.
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And of course, when the scientist transforms themselves, and then is able to then how they think changes as well.
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And we get whole new not just not just kind of systemic thinking, we get paradigmatic thinking, or even meta paradigmatic thinking.
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So there is a relationship between the complexity of cognition, and the
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the level of development of that mind.
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And frankly, actually, it s not just the mind.
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It s actually the heart mind.
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I mean, this is where the reason why our culture kind of stopped really was when, where we re stuck is because of the split between the heart and the mind and the split between what s true and what s good and beautiful.
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At a certain point, you can t go any further.
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unless you have a radical reintegration of what it was that was left behind.
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Right?
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So like, yeah, yeah.
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Is there an easy example of something outside the bracket that s sort of circling around us, but hasn t yet been integrated?
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If you look at how
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how humans evolve.
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And this is a very simple first person, second person, third person model.
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Like first person is just me.
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And second person is you and me.
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And we call that concrete operational.
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Are you in or you re out?
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Are you part of my clan or you re not part of my clan?
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And that kind of zero ones, which is basically like in and out kind of computation.
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And then third person is objective where you and I can agree about something that s over there.
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We call that third person because both you and I are looking at a third thing and agreeing upon its objective qualities.
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And fourth person is about appreciating the context that that arises in.
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So that s got to do with pluralistic, relativistic cognition of recognizing context, which is super important because
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that allows us to reintegrate prior perspectives that have been left out, just in terms of history.
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The perspective of women, of the planet, of minorities, that kind of fourth person perspective is super aware of what s being left out of the conversation.
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However, what fourth-person perspective doesn t have is it doesn t have a holarchical cognition.
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It doesn t necessarily understand that nature arises holarchically, hierarchically, like things evolve.
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And fifth-person perspective really understands the depth of development.
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And so,
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at fifth person perspective, that s where you have the ability to, let s say, integrate the understanding of the shadow and psychology with the understanding of sociology and the understanding of technology, the ability to integrate multiple fields and to understand that there are levels of value
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Like the human being, we organize, we go through a developmental process as we unfold.
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We see if you ve had children, you see the infant evolve.
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And understanding those stages is very important in understanding how we heal and how we unfold.
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And also beginning to intuit that there might be stages even above where we re at.
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Right.
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For instance, at fifth person perspective, you d begin to appreciate how important psychology is as a part of politics.
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Like the lack of integration and understanding of people s psychology, right?
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Like, you know, when you have sociopaths and psychopaths in positions of power and the inability to work to life.
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So the lack of integration of the fields
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That, you know, that s the capacity to integrate those and to develop new ways of thinking.
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And that comes on a fifth person perspective.
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But this is all very cognitive.
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Like, that s not the heart of what you do.
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But are most of us sort of reaching towards fifth person or capable of fifth?
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Or it just depends?
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I mean, developmentally, I would say, I think it s about 20% of the population are at fourth person perspective.
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The majority, the mainstream, that kind of is held at around third person perspective.
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And about 1% functions at fifth person.
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But the problem is the mainstream is kind of controlled by, well, at this point, that kind of woke psychology, that s fourth person.
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And if that doesn t allow for transition to the next level, it itself will become a religion.
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It ll become concretized.
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And then what that does is it stops any further.
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That s the danger.
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It will stop any further development beyond itself.
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because that s what we do, right?
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We kind of, we build a little castle and we protect our positions.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wildcard, wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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Before we move on, you said holarchy and I just wanted to define that for people because I love this concept of because we re so we have such an aversion understandably to hierarchy right we equate it with dominance and oppression and
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In this model, a holarchy is a nested hierarchy where a word ladders up to a sentence, ladders up to a paragraph, ladders up to a story, ladders up to a book.
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That s a version of a holarchy, right?
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And if you destroy a lower version of a holarchy, so if you destroyed words, then the whole thing collapses.
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Collapses.
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Yeah.
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So we are effectively a nested holarchy.
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We have to take back the word hierarchy.
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It literally means sacred order, right?
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It means essentially that, well, the first thing is, is reality sacred or is it not?
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So that if it s sacred and we see how the sacred unfolds itself,
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It unfolds itself in our interiors psychologically, but it also unfolds itself in terms of our physiology, right?
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That cells are held by cellular systems, are held by organs and so on and so forth.
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That s how she unfolds.
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We unfold that way.
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And so we have to have a deep appreciation for the most fundamental levels.
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So for instance, in human psychology, that would be about really appreciating how the depth of our attachment system, right?
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The depth of our sense of how deeply safe and loved that we feel in reality.
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and our ability to attune to others and attune to ourself is that what is the process that we understand now allows for all higher healthy development.
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And if that trust
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is damaged psychologically, then so many of the personality disorders and the forms of psychological suffering that we see are due to the fact that those lower, they re not really lower, they re more fundamental levels, when they get damaged, then the whole stack gets fractured.
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And now if we look at the same thing in culture, what we ve seen is the fracturing of trust
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right, the interpersonal.
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So when trust, which is to our culture, what attachment in the sense of trust with reality is to an individual, which allows for all health, the depth of trust that you internalize as a child allows for healthy unfolding.
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And the degree that we lack that,
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is what affects complex developmental trauma and pain and suffering.
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We look at our culture and we see what s happening and the fracturing of the trust of the commons.
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And everything that was built on top of that, right, it was trust that allowed us to build
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Like if you go to London, the Victorian sewer system, underneath everything, you had to trust enough that it was valuable enough to build something to last for a few hundred years, to come together with other people in trust.
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We are losing that, right?
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It s fracturing.
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And as it fractures and we lose trust,
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the whole social fabric will rip and everything built on top of that, the whole stack will come down, just like with an individual, with a person.
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Right.
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And in the context of the individual, I wanna talk to you about sort of the heart and your work in psychology and also spirituality and the soul and psychedelics, because what I ve observed too in that space is that people will,
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you can sort of hit a higher state and you can take this out to the social level or an individual level.
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You ll see people sort of get to a transcendent state, let s say by psychedelics, but they re still completely, it s like a rubber band tethered to their emotional or psychological trauma.
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And obviously psychedelics can help people address that and heal that, but it doesn t, you can t bypass that integration.
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You might hit a state, but you re still at a certain
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not lower stage, but a wounded stage that needs to be reconciled, right, before you can actually hit that higher state as a stage, as something that you can stay at?
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Is that an accurate reflection?
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Yeah, beautiful.
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We are in deep, there s a deep need for all of us to grow up.
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Right.
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We can like, you know, like we are now being handed tools of the gods.
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Right.
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And so we have to grow up and we have to mature.
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And so those levels of deep, heroic altruism that in the past maybe we reserved for the kind of the great saints and sages of the past.
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this will have to be democratized.
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It ll have to become something that is accessed to everybody.
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And so to do that, we re talking about a trait development, which means it has to become permanent.
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And so altered states is one thing, but an altered trait is a whole nother process.
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And in order to have an altered trait developmentally, in order to really grow and then stay there, which is what you and I did, like you and I, we grew when we were five years old and we grew to 10, and then we grew to like 12 and 18.
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We went through completely different worlds.
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But the truth is most adults, we plateau, and most people haven t probably grown through any other worlds for a decade, two decades, three or four decades.
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And there s a reason for that, it s twofold.
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One is because of the injuries of the past that need to be healed.
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So we need to understand the depth of how we heal, which is one thing.
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And then we also need to have that integrated to understand then how we grow and mature.
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So psychedelics are helpful in a number of ways.
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They re helpful in that they open up and reveal
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what needs to be healed.
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So they are, they are a form of uncovering therapy.
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And that uncovering can be both uncovering what was left behind in the past, right?
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And so you have to go back and do that work.
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And it can also uncover where you re headed in terms of the future.
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Like a glimpse.
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And of course, roll of the dice as to which one it s going to uncover.
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Now, that s often set and setting can help angle that, whether we want to look into where we ve been or where we re going to.
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But the uncovering itself, that s just one thing.
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Then you need the deep work of healing, of integrating the past and of maturing and developing
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the kind of capacities that we can grow into.
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If you and I, if we continued on a lifelong learning path that didn t stop when we were 21, like, so we had this idea that, right, you kind of, and then you re an adult.
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Well, the tradition, you know, the contemplative traditions understand that actually, no, that s not even the, that s just the beginning, right?
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So if we have that understanding that actually,
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there is a path of real lifelong learning that leads to heroic altruism, increased cognitive complexity, deep embodiment, right?
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Deep levels of bliss and the possibilities of what it means to be a human being.
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You have that.
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And if we understood that that was a developmental journey, so there s no, we grow naturally into it if provided with the resources and the education
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right, to do that.
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And to go back to where we began, that education has basically been removed from our culture for hundreds and hundreds of years.
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Yeah.
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And what do you think, I know that you talk about psychedelics as a type of technology, spiritual language, or spirituality as a type of technology, I think, who are the appropriate teachers?
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Like what has been lost?
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And
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You know, a lot of, I love, obviously, all the people at MAPS.
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Rick Doblin s a dear friend.
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Like, I m a huge fan of that work.
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And in some ways, it feels like a panacea and another way
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is it feels like it might be enough to open the door for people, but it s not enough to walk them through it inherently, right?
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Like the integration and all of this deeper work is essential.
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Where do you feel like...
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To me, as someone who, as an adult, has gone deep into unaffiliated agnostic spirituality and reading widely from wisdom traditions, to me, that feels like one of the largest gaps in my own education.
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But where do you feel like you would most love to see a cultural intervention?
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That s been the question that on my mind for 30 years.
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Yeah, but that s the like, that it s, it s, it s a really, well, first thing, it s a really challenging question, because it involves, it involves so many issues, like hierarchy, for instance, being one, one of them, like, who gets to say, who is an authority?
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And then the question is, well, how do you protect from the mistakes of the past with authority, right?
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So you have to also answer the organizational question of how do you build a learning organization that allows for hierarchy and yet has integrated the understanding of the shadow and has the checks and balances so it s bottom up and top down, right?
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So there s that.
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Yes.
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So I mean, essentially, we have to re, you know, we have to reawaken the mystery schools.
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But so, and wisdom schools, right, the philosophia, like the love of Sophia, the love of wisdom.
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And that s difficult in a environment where everyone holds everyone like has their shingle out.
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And say, you know, and there s no sense of how do these pieces fit together?
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Yep.
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there s no right.
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And hierarchy isn t allowed.
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And therefore, who do you know, where to go and study and who you re going to learn with.
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And if you don t have hierarchy, you don t have a path.
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Yeah.
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So these are all really big problems.
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You know what I would love to see?
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Yeah.
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Maybe you can build this, and maybe this is where godlike technology helps.
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But I would like to see some sort of mapping, a way to map yourself, to identify sort of where you are within this larger nested holarchy, and then to be presented with teachers, ancient and new, and to choose who s resonant, and maybe it s time-bound,
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the amount that you – so that again to avoid sort of the guru-ification or this instinct that we have to sort of give away our sovereignty to other people and just continue to recreate that relationship.
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And that then you re sort of baton – you pass the baton continually as you
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figure out where you are emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and that people are, you know, what I think is so interesting about Ken, well, you can find someone who is
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He talks about Hitler effectively as being incredibly evolved and incredibly devolved.
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Maybe Hitler is a terrible example, but you have someone who clearly is skilled in creating a fascist government and has
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a dead heart or whatever it is, whatever.
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So how do you, you know, people can be advanced and deeply not advanced in other parts.
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You can find someone who s incredibly spiritually alive and they re very ungrounded, right?
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They ve lost a sense of any sort of truth, as you said, or objective reality, for example.
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Right, so the way that we re going to do this, I mean, the way that we re beginning to do this in my organization at Karuna is
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the first thing we have to understand that the earliest lessons of development, or the earliest ones, are actually important all the way up the stack.
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And so when we start, as part of our contemplative practice, as part of our meditative practice, rather than going up, but actually direct our attention back down,
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to start shoring up and strengthening the most basic and fundamental and human levels of the psyche.
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When you do that, and you go step by step from the bottom up, the psychological defenses that lead to things like projection can be dealt with early on.
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So part of the educational process
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is also relational.
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So these things always traditionally had to be learned in an apprentice relationship.
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So it does involve a level of commitment.
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Picking and choosing actually doesn t work very well because you need to be able to build an attachment relationship in order to receive an energetic download.
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Now, the issue is how do we heal our relational system so that we can be in relationship?
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See, in the Mahayana tradition, the Buddhist tradition, the kind of exemplar
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teacher is called a spiritual friend.
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So love that.
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Our question, our quest would be like, for you and me, how do we become friends?
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Right?
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Like, that s the like, it s at that level.
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And what are what are the what are the the psychological processes that allow for deep friendship with self and with other to evolve?
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When that happens?
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you don t get the kind of idealization and projection process, right?
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So that has to be addressed as part of the, you know, the educational journey.
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Because then you can continue in relationship with wise teachers and not get caught in,
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that guru game, right, which is problematic.
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And then the other piece of that is also about the interpersonal, meaning this journey now, traditionally, in the traditional mystery schools of the past, in the great traditions, in the mystical traditions, the yogic traditions, it was a very individual journey, because frankly, there were so few people who had the level of education to even get to the point to begin that journey.
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Like in Tibet, for instance, whilst a quarter of the population were in monasteries, it was probably the elite, the elite tukus, the kind of who were in the educational environment where they could actually get all the education in order to go on that journey.
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So now it isn t so much of an individual, it s like actually we have to go on this journey together.
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And so if the emphasis is placed on how do we learn how to grow together and how do we learn to deepen the interpersonal field, now part of that journey, it s interesting this, in order to really grow into the transpersonal, to beyond the self, you actually have to have a really deep level of individuation.
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you actually have to become a very individuated being because it s that individuation that allows for you to metabolize all of the mummy daddy stuff.
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So first you have to metabolize the mummy daddy stuff.
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If you don t metabolize the mummy daddy stuff, then you project it onto the Pope.
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Right, so the first step is how does John become a uniquely individuated being, autonomous, with a strong sense of trust, healing the trust system, healing the inner attunement system, strengthening the sense of self,
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then when you ve taken care of those and the person is really individuated and they re not going to surrender self before the surrender of self is the appropriate step.
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Because everything is developmental.
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So if we re dissolving the self structure into a larger we before we even have a self,
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That s problematic.
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But if you have a sense of self and then you grow into a larger sense of we, what happens is that sense of self stays, but now it s just connected.
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connected to a deeper level of motivation and a deeper level of interpersonal connection.
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And you don t lose that sense of autonomy.
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I was just reminding myself of the etymology of friend going to sacred friend and the the root is, it s free.
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It s both shared with like to love and free.
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And that s right.
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And that s such a
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like beautiful idea, but I think entirely correct.
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If you haven t maybe done the IFS work of recollecting all those parts of yourself, if you haven t the mommy, daddy stuff, you re always slightly hijacked, right?
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You re slightly not incomplete because I really believe we re all whole.
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It s just the recovering those parts of ourselves, pulling them out of shadow, I guess.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I mean, imagine if we lived in a culture where we really deeply understood, we had a department of friendship, like, really, how do we build strong, deep interpersonal relationships?
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We wouldn t have the othering politically that we do.
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All of that kind of partisan politics in expression of psychological projection and disowning of parts.
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Yeah.
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Where the conservatives disown their progressive parts or progressives disown their conservative parts.
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So if the foundation of the sacred journey, and I use sacred rather than spiritual, because the term spiritual is very dualistic, it kind of assumes that there s something separate from spirit, which is really not how the path is.
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So if the sacred unfolds through deep healing, personal and then interpersonal, and then it moves into the universal, you don t end up
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with the mistakes of the past.
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Yeah.
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When you think about the crisis of loneliness, the disconnection that s rampant, the lack of friendliness, the political binaries, do you feel like this is a necessary breaking point for us to collectively evolve?
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Or do you think we re about to spin out?
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Or could it go in either direction, I guess?
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Well, I think that s what we re saying is once we add this catalyst of these technologies, it s an amazing opportunity for it to go either way very, very quickly.
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Yeah.
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What do you think about AI?
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I mean, I know that s a big question, but... Well, I m working with a friend of mine on
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on a deliberately developmental AI project, meaning part of the problem with mapping these kind of neural, this neural mapping of the brain and then using that map as an AI is that
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how you understand how the brain operates is based on your level of development.
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So what you re seeing is an AI that s an expression of a particular level of development, which has no understanding of hierarchy and has no understanding of the sacred and has no understanding of what leads into the direction of deep healing and no understanding of actually what leads to greater trauma and then evil.
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If you don t understand, we don t understand the depths of what it means to be human, do not.
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You shouldn t, you know, you shouldn t be allowed because all you re going to do is create a technology that reflects your own psychology.
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And I think that that s, I do believe that we can create and it will happen.
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There s going to be wisdom AIs and
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The name of our project is Matreya, which essentially is like the name of the Buddha of friendliness of the future, because there is a possibility to program a benevolent AI that has a deep understanding that we, of how human beings develop, of how reality develops.
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But if you just kind of take it as if there s no depth and you vacuum the internet with information,
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then you just get an AI that has the psychology of surfaces.
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Yeah.
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No, it s fascinating.
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You mentioned evil.
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We ve touched on shadow a little bit.
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I m curious about sort of deep shadow, what s present in our world, what I think many people are tapping into as an energy source, as sort of a archetypal energy source without being aware of what that power is or how to not be distorted by it.
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And I worry about it, too, in the context of psychedelics.
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And maybe that s too woo-woo.
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But I worry often about what people are tapping into and what they re bringing through and whether they can keep themselves safe and therefore keep other people safe.
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And I worry a lot about both spiritual grandiosity but also distortions.
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Do you have any thoughts about that?
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A lot.
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Okay, so I think that the first thing we have to appreciate is that as a civilization, Western civilization, that we have a traumatic history.
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So if a person doesn t understand that they re deeply traumatized, and then they,
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engage with all kinds of technologies, then all you will do is you will spread, you ll continue that trauma.
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So we have to appreciate, we have to, you know, whilst we have to really value Judeo-Christian culture, we have to understand that Christianity, specifically Rome, destroyed the indigenous mystery schools of the West.
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Greek mystery schools, the Elysian mysteries that run for a thousand years, the Dionysian mysteries, the Egyptian, the Druid.
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In fact, the very general that wiped out Jerusalem turned around and went on and wiped out the Druids.
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The Romans as forces of empire
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had a strategy to basically remove all of these educational, lifelong learning academies and basically gain control.
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And if we don t understand that we ve lost our own indigenousness, but we had that, that it existed, then we re not going to be able to dig deep enough
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to understand the darkness that has befallen us, right, the shadow, and not just our personal shadow, but the collective shadow, like the shadow of empire, the shadow of thanatos, right, of the death drive, meaning that when you re motivated by avoidance of your own trauma, so when you avoid your own inner suffering,
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And that continues multi generationally, that leads to an avoidance of the present moment.
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And it leads to the tendency to start to, well, you project out into the world and into the world around you.
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If you ve disowned your own suffering, you project it onto people out there, and then you start trying to destroy them.
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So if we don t appreciate the destruction of the psychedelic tradition of the West 2,000 years ago, of the feminine wisdoms of the West, so we have to get a sense of we ve lived within a machine that was first the church and then just became capitalism, but it s the same machine.
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And the early Gnostics, the Gnostics and the
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the sacred tradition understood that this machine wasn t just physical, it was also mental, it was spiritual.
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And this is what the Gnostics called the archons, the archonic forces, meaning that our avoidance of our own healing has built
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archetypal force, which is an archetypal expression of our own avoidance.
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And as it gets stronger and stronger, it becomes more and more destructive.
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So if you don t appreciate that, like the shadow, not just inside of us, but essentially
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the shadow that we are living in, and just like the shadow psychology has a superego, the outer psyche, the world, has a superego.
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That s like what s allowed into the public discourse and what isn t.
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So those forces are eating the world.
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They are eating the world and they will continue to destroy the world because
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if you don t want to face your own suffering, you re gonna destroy everything that reminds you of it.
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So if we destroyed, if we lost our relationship to sacred world, and by that I mean, to the sacred plants, I mean, our medical system has no, there s no longer any, the natural world is not medicine.
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And we think that that s normal.
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but we re so divorced from sacred world.
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And by sacred world, I mean, when you take a psychedelic, you begin to see sacred world.
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The first level of the sacred beyond this realm, not the non-dual and not these vast open states.
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I just mean like seeing a different layer of nature,
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you know, pixies and the gnomes and the salamanders of the alchemists, right?
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The astral plane.
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I mean, essentially that nature has more going on than what our physical eyes can see.
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And part of what happens is when you suppress these educational systems, these educational systems, whether they were from, you know, deep kind of sensory deprivation or sacred sexuality or meditative practices, they were designed to slowly increase the DMT in the brain.
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So an initiate, when they were initiated into the sacred world, slowly began to see that the world was sacred, because they literally, their chemistry began to evolve.
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And when your chemistry evolves slowly, not just like an LSD trip or a ayahuasca journey, but as it slowly comes online, and it becomes more and more of a trait, and not just a state, you begin to see,
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as a trait capacity that this world is alive in ways that our culture has lost, completely lost.
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So with the psychedelics, we have to really appreciate that it s opening up sacred world.
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But when it opens up sacred world, it s also going to open up everything that our culture has suppressed for 2000 years, because it s like a part of our psyche that we didn t think even existed.
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So we might be super smart at one level, but at another level, we are like babes that we ve shut a door on a part of our psyche and a part of the world and a whole part of reality.
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And so we have to, in my mind, we need to approach that door informed by how our ancestors in the mystery schools understood it.
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So yeah, we need some humility.
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We need some appreciation.
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So we don t get inflated, which is easy to happen.
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So the psychedelic revolution is gonna reopen a whole realm that we shut 2000 years ago.
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But the problem is we might not necessarily have regained the wisdom, right?
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And you re opening up Pandora s box, a whole realm
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without the wisdom knowledge.
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And then maybe going to other traditions, like indigenous traditions, but not actually going to our own traditions, which is a mistake.
5
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We actually have and had traditions, they just had to go.
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underground.
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They had to go, you know, whether it was the alchemists or the Rosicrucians or the Carthas, right, or the, you know, the Freemasons, or all of these, you know, all of that Western esoteric tradition, that all has to be updated, integrated into our understanding of Western psychology, integrated into the kind of Eastern contemplative understanding, so that we have the
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the right GPS as to how to enter into that world.
5
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Yeah.
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No, that makes so much sense, including the dislocation that we feel from our culture.
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And the fact that it can feel so cultureless here.
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And then, obviously, the ongoing trauma of being sort of torn away from that and torn apart.
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and how odd it feels to be sort of a Western person and to be unmoored and to think about the loss of, you know, I would argue that the desecration of the divine feminine is also why we re careening towards devastation, that until men in particular reintegrate that essential energy for themselves, we re screwed.
5
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Yeah.
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And in her higher aspect, that is Sophia, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So yeah, in the wisdom within the within the mystery traditions, the highest aspect of wisdom is it s understood to be feminine.
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Yes.
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Like, the loss of the feminine wasn t just the loss of like, dancing and feeling our feelings and being embodied.
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we re talking about the loss of this really deep archetypal understanding of the nature of reality and a kind of intelligence, right?
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That isn t just feelings and, you know, like feminine intelligence, which is about knowing and directly experiencing the deep interconnection of all of reality.
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Like that s Sophia.
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SPEAKER_01
One more big question, which might be impossible to answer, but what is your sense of, I don t even think universe is the right word, but what do you think, what are we moving towards?
5
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What are we part of?
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Is it a Gurdjieffian climbing towards world 12?
5
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How do you locate us in a bigger context?
5
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Well, the I mean, this is where the the cosmology, the relationship between psychology and cosmology.
5
SPEAKER_02
Right?
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I mean, so of course, if we haven t, if we have repressed some basic dimensions of the sacred, then we won t integrate within ourselves, then we won t recognize the dimensions of the sacred of the planet.
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So
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if our mother is more than just a matter.
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But actually, but she is ma she is like the mother consciousness.
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So within within the Gnostic traditions, and when we integrate those into into a modern understanding, I mean, essentially, our planet, Gaia Sophia is a is an evolving organism that depends upon
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humanity as its catalyst for its own evolution.
5
SPEAKER_00
So first we would talk about like the planetary logos, like our planetary intelligence, which is then of course part of a solar logos and so on and so forth, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So these are nested intelligences.
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SPEAKER_00
So if we just start with our planet from the perspective of the perennial traditions, so not just like the, I mean, like the wisdom traditions of the whole planet, when you look at those and you come up and you look at what the deep structure is and what are we told about the deep structure of our planet, our planet is an organism that,
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Archetypally, we are constructed in a very similar way.
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So just as we have a physical body, and just as we have a desire, imaginal, astral body, and we have a mind, and so on and so forth, and we have these higher dimensions, these higher dimensions of our consciousness,
5
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that the mystical traditions lead us into, and that actually are accessible to everybody.
5
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These aren t just interior states separated.
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And that s the problem with kind of Western psychology and neuroscience.
5
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Within the traditions, it s understood that you are also actually perceiving different dimensions of our planet.
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So she has tissues.
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In Buddhism, for instance, they talk about the dharmakaya, the truth body, or the dharmadhatu and the kammadhatu.
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SPEAKER_00
But in medicine, this term dhatu means tissue.
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SPEAKER_00
These levels of realizations, not only are they levels of psychological kind of unfolding and beginning to perceive reality in different ways, including new content, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like realms, but actually what you re beginning to perceive are the different, the subtler tissues of a centralized organism.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now those tissues, just like we have physical tissues, imagine that there are subtler tissues, tissues made of photons, tissues made of substances that we just do not have yet the technology even to measure these tissues, to measure this substance.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if we take that as a thought experiment, then what the traditions say is that around our planet are these layers, and these layers, these tissues,
6
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These are the tissues that are, you know, the beings are circulating through those tissues as they carnate and reincarnate and that there are complexes or organs within those tissues and we call those heavens.
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that collectives form within the tissues of our planet.
6
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And some of those tissues, unfortunately, become kind of like cancerous.
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They become stagnant because our planet, because humanity is not fully awakened, and we re fearful of things like death, and we re not kind of, we re not with the program.
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We re not participating fully in that cycle.
6
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So if you understand where she is, B is,
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kind of half, if I would say like Gaia as a being, she s like a woman who really, she still has some trauma from childhood.
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There s a bunch of trauma from childhood.
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She s reading some books on self-help.
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She s in, she meditates.
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SPEAKER_00
She still has a smoking problem, but she knows it s bad for her.
6
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And she s addicted to Coke and coffee, but she wants to, like she med, so our planet right now, she needs to go into therapy.
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SPEAKER_00
We need to go into therapy.
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SPEAKER_00
And we need to clean up the past and we need to wake up and mature and begin to wake up to we are part of a planetary system that has subtler realms, but it s all a single system.
6
SPEAKER_00
And as you begin to wake up to that, of course what happens is your chemistry begins to change, the DMT begins to get secreted, and surely but surely you have a revelation and those realms begin to re-weave themselves.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s not about going up, it s about integration, like can we integrate
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the depth of matter into the height of spirit.
6
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And as human beings, our function is to make that happen.
6
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And what does that look like?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, it looks like a garden, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because there s no, what does heaven look like?
6
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t look like a garden.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s that process of returning back and seeing our planet as a medicine planet and a place of great beauty,
6
SPEAKER_00
and a place where the relative and the absolute can meet, spirit and matter can meet.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the view of the traditions.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not the view of like, we need to get out of here.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
Enlightened.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not, you know, the perennial, that was a way of controlling the population.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was never the perennial, that was never the wisdom schools.
6
SPEAKER_00
The wisdom schools was actually this,
6
SPEAKER_00
this is it, this is where the miracle is.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the weaving together of these different realms.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s the vision.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then that vision, then you begin to, because one of the things we understand about human development is, is the longer the vision that somebody has psychologically,
6
SPEAKER_00
Like most people in our culture are concerned about the quarter, maybe that what s gonna happen this year, but you can t address the problems, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So maturity, as you consider the next generation, which we re even stretching to do that, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
But as you begin to stretch to encompass seven generations in your awareness, and as we begin to make decisions based on that,
6
SPEAKER_00
And what the traditions would say, you re doing that in your own self-interest, because frankly, as part of the circulatory recycling system, you will be that seventh generation.
6
SPEAKER_00
And even if that isn t true, and what I m saying is a fancy story, the thing is, is the brain responds to story.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know what I m saying?
6
SPEAKER_00
So we need a story.
6
SPEAKER_00
We need a new story that s going to encourage us enough to make some radical changes in what it means to be a human being.
6
SPEAKER_00
So a lot of this is, at least this is the world story, like this is the story of our traditions, of our ancestors, of our indigenous ancestors in the West.
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SPEAKER_00
This is our story and we just have to reawaken to it, shake off a little bit of empire and look at the amazing opportunity that presents itself to us.
6
SPEAKER_01
What a mind.
6
SPEAKER_01
I will definitely ask John to come back so we can go deeper into his work and explore some of the concepts that I know are heady, particularly if you ve never read Ken Wilber or explored
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SPEAKER_01
some of these more esoteric traditions.
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It s interesting, he was talking about the cult of Dionysus and Elysium.
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There s a great book, The Immortality Key by Brian Marrusco, which is a good read.
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I ve interviewed him in my past life about the role of psychedelics in our, you know, millennia ago and what happened to those rites and rituals.
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SPEAKER_01
And I ve written a bit about Ken Wilber and holarchies and transcend and include and ascending and descending and darkness in my newsletter, which if you re not getting it, please consider signing up.
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It s EliseLoonan.substack.com.
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And I m curious for feedback on this and what you guys want to hear from John, because I have a feeling we ll have many conversations.
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Thanks for listening to this week s episode.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at theelisepodcast.com.
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While there, please sign up for my Substack newsletter.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive on Sundays.
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or follow me on Instagram at Elise Lunen.
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Meanwhile, if you haven t already, please pre-order my book coming May 23rd.
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It s called On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, and it s an exploration of the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread, available for now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Cadence 13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valera Doval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next week.
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Yeah.