Shiv Sengupta: Raw Wisdom, Shadow, & Unknown Reality

Shiv Sengupta explores the nature of reality, the unknown, and mysticism, emphasizing raw wisdom beyond spiritual dogma.

Key Takeaways

Reality is fundamentally unknown and mysterious, resisting fixed definitions or explanations.
Embracing uncertainty can lead to deeper presence and awakening rather than fear or avoidance.
The mystic’s path involves facing fear and transforming it into fascination with the unknown.
Spiritual growth requires integrating shadow aspects and rejecting simplistic or dogmatic views.
True wisdom arises from direct experience rather than inherited beliefs or conceptual maps.

What the video covers

Shiv Sengupta challenges conventional spiritual and materialist views by emphasizing direct, unfiltered experience as raw wisdom.
He discusses the fundamental unknowability of reality and the importance of embracing uncertainty with a beginner's mind.
The unknown aspect of reality evokes both fear and fascination, and confronting this duality is central to the mystic's path.
Sengupta uses the analogy of moving through a dark room to illustrate how uncertainty heightens awareness and presence.
He highlights the biological and psychological human craving for certainty and how this shapes responses to life’s unpredictability.
The mystic’s journey involves embracing fear as a gateway to fascination and deeper awakening.
Sengupta warns that the path of mystical exploration is not for everyone and requires a calling beyond personal will.
He critiques spiritual romanticism and materialist dogma, advocating for a grounded approach to presence and radical truth.
The conversation touches on the integration of shadow aspects as essential for human development.
Sengupta also reflects on the limitations of human attempts to 'fix' reality and the value of trusting mystery.

Chapters

What is Shiv Sengupta's view on the nature of reality?

Shiv Sengupta views reality as fundamentally unknown and mysterious. He emphasizes that no explanation or model can fully capture reality, and that embracing this uncertainty with honesty is essential.

How does Shiv Sengupta describe the relationship between fear and fascination?

He explains that fear is the gateway to fascination. When we confront the unknown, fear naturally arises, but by sitting with that fear, it reveals a deeper fascination and engagement with reality.

Why does Shiv Sengupta say the mystic’s path is not for everyone?

Sengupta suggests that the mystic’s path requires a deep calling beyond personal will. It involves facing uncertainty and fear directly, which can be challenging and is not something to be undertaken lightly or casually.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome. I'm honored to be here today with Shiv Sang Gupta. Shiv is a writer, philosopher, and spiritual iconoclast working at the threshold where spirituality meets lived reality. His work includes the Advitaolics Anonymous series of books,

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which challenges the status quo of new age and non-dual narratives, pointing instead to the raw wisdom that emerges from direct unfiltered experience. He also continues to publish essays on his Substack, Dark Knight of the Soul.

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Writing with clarity and reverence, Shiv challenges both materialist dogma and spiritual romanticism, offering instead a grounded path of presence, remembrance, and radical truth. He speaks to those who feel the quiet pull toward something deeper, toward the sacred in the ordinary and the eternal

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within form. Shiv, welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me, Jordan. Happy to be here.

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Awesome. Yeah, great to be here with you. So, I thought we'd just dive straight off the deep end and I'd ask you one of my favorite questions, which

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is what is reality? What is your fundamental perspective on what this is that we are currently experiencing?

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Well, that's a beautiful thing, right? We don't know, 'cause if we knew, it wouldn't be this miraculous amazing thing that we're a part of. It would be something known and after a while something dull and something boring.

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And if you think about it, for so many people, that's what reality is, right? It's, it's, oh, do I have to do the same thing again? My life is meaningless. It's this mundane. I don't understand what any of it means. Why

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does reality have to be this way? But funnily enough, under that meaningless is an assumption of what reality is, right? We're, we're assuming that we know what reality is. It's supposed to be meaningful, but somehow ours is not.

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There's some glitch. There's some mistake that we need to correct. All of these things are all based upon fundamental assumptions about reality. I don't care if you come from a more metaphysical bent of mind or more scientific materialistic bent of mind.

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It doesn't matter. Everybody's got an assumption of what reality is. Even if it's not voiced, you know, even if it's not articulated in their brain, there is an underlying belief system there that we think we know what reality is. And based

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on that, we then form all these different kinds of thoughts and expectations and assumptions about what reality should be doing or how we should be interacting with it and what should be happening. You know, all these shoulds, coulds, woulds, must comes from

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an assumption somewhere, right? So, so that's, that's like the million-dollar question. What is reality? Beginner's mind, as they would say in Zen, starts with saying, I have no idea. That, that's true honesty, right?

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You, you come down to all right, I've considered what we, you know, scientific evidence shows me. I've considered what, you know, the spiritual texts have said.

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I've considered it all. It's all compelling. All different models of reality, all different ways of explaining what reality is. But reality is not the explanation of it, right?

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There's two different things. The map is not the territory. So we got all these maps. Some of them, you know, fit well, some don't. But what is that territory? We don't know. That's the beauty, beauty of it, right? That's,

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that's what's so mysterious and miraculous about it is we don't know. We've been around as a species for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years actually. And then as a civilization for tens of thousands of years, and documented civilization for

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6,000 so, so odd years. We've technologically advanced as a species. We've gone to the moon. We're, we're trying, trying to put a man on Mars. All of that kind of stuff or a woman on Mars. And yet we don't know what reality

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is, right?

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Yeah. Beautifully said. I, I love how you're speaking to the unknown quality as a source of beauty and a source of, you know, astonishment, wonder, as you say. I think a lot of people see it as

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something terrifying and something they need to get away from. They need to somehow fix the uncertainty or solve the uncertainty or hide the uncertainty beneath endless layers of beliefs. And so I'm curious if you could expand a bit

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more on that. What is, what is it about that unknown quality that is enticing and alluring and how does it relate to the awakening process or what it means to be awake?

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Well, I mean, I just give you very simply the analogy of your own bedroom during the day and at night when it's pitch dark. You move through that bedroom differently, don't you? When it's daylight and you can see

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everything. You're just like zipping through it. You don't really have to be conscious of anything in the room. You can be completely unconscious. Just walk through that bedroom. But at night in the pitch dark, but you're trying to get

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to the bathroom, which might be across the room, and you're trying to avoid obstacles, and you don't know where things are. Maybe the dog's lying on the floor like my dog always is. Half the time I'm tripping over him. Now you're

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consciously and gingerly stepping through that same room that you're so familiar with, right? Because you don't want to hurt yourself. You don't want to fall over. All these things, these, these very basic biological mechanisms of protection kick in when the environment

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suddenly becomes less predictable because you can't see, you can't anticipate, you can't analyze, you can't predict what's going to happen. And so now you are more engaged and you're more, your, your heart rate's a little bit higher. You might not be terrified, but

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you're definitely more alert, more vigilant than you would be just walking through the room, the same room you'd walk through a hundred times before in the daytime, right? Now, think about your life that way. The same life, but when

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events slightly change and there's a bit more darkness in your life, little less that you can see or foresee into the future, that predictability factor goes down. Your ability to analyze and, and project into the future diminishes. You start feeling those

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same disorientating feelings that you felt in your room, right? And if you look at just humanity in general, look at the way they respond when things are going well versus when things become uncertain for them. Typically anxiety, fear,

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hatred, you know, all these kinds of emotions come back out from the very same people in the very same lives in the very same places. It just flips on a coin. And that's because we are entrained to crave some level of

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certainty, right? Because survival is a biological thing. So the, the fascinating thing about reality is that this unknown quality has the capacity to evoke two kinds of emotions from a human being. The one is fear but the other is

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fascination, right? Because that's what the mystic's purpose is. The mystic's purpose is to delve into the unknown. They want to bring out the uncertain qualities of life. They don't want to fall into the stupor of certainty that most of society

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is playing with. So the more and more you confront the unknown nature of life,

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the more fear that brings up within a human being. But if you watch that fear and you sit with it, it shows its other face and the other face of that is fascination. So the, the, the, the statement I like to use is fear is the

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gateway to fascination. And that's, that's the quote I use very recently in one of my articles. I think you, you may have read that one. Beautiful.

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And, and what some people may ask themselves, why would they want to walk the mystic's path? Why would they want to go into this exploration of reality and kind of peer into the abyss of the unknown and face their deepest fears?

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You know, if somebody asked you what's the upside, what's the payoff? What would you say to them?

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I would say you don't want to do it.

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I would, I would not recommend it to anybody. You, you have to be called to do it against your own will. It has to, it has to defy all reason and r

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And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if someone were to ask me, why should I pursue the path of mysticism as in not the frills and the the bells and whistles, but the real raw path mysticism?

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I would say no. You you don't want to p pursue that unless there's the compelling need within you that you can't explain that just propelled you that way. I was propelled that way at a very young age. I didn't know why. And it

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hasn't really served me well from a practical standpoint as you all know. Right. It it it kind of sabotages a lot of your ability to survive and play nice in the world and the and the social status quo because it is

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fundamentally set up to question that. So when you become and then you use the word iconoclast when introducing me when you become an iconoclast and I'm iconoplastic by nature not by choice. Okay. They can't help. Then you you risk

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alienation, ostracization, excommunication from the group, right? And that is one of the greatest fears. Like if you look into you know mythology and or history apart from death, the second worst punishment person could be given was banishment.

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Right? You were banished from the kingdom. you had to go live out in the desert and survive on your own. You couldn't be around society. So if someone would ask me why should I pursue this, I would I I would

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say there's probably other pursuits that you you could follow instead of mysticism. [Music] I love that answer. It brings up a lot for me. Um, one initial question that arises in response is like isn't it in some sense the deepest longing of

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the human soul, the human heart to have some kind of relationship with being? You know, it doesn't everyone in the modern world or so many people have kind of a a god-shaped hole in their chest that they're trying to fill with

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everything else. And really it is that that love of kind of finding that wholeness, that sense of melting into this belonging and this sense of I do belong here and I can, you know, have this actually trustworthy relationship

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with being. Isn't that what we're all looking for in some sense? And how does that square how does that square with, you know, never recommending anyone kind of explore God directly or explore being directly or whatever word you would use?

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So, I love two phrases that you use. The deepest yearning and the God-shaped hole. You're right. It is the deepest yearning known to humanity. The yearning for God, right? The yearning for that divine union. However you want to frame it, we

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can use, you know, less religious language. I I don't really care. Here's the thing. Imagine you're snorkeling. You just begun, okay? Or you're scuba diving. just begun. There's many depths to which you could go. But in order to get to the deepest

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part of the ocean, you need to first acclimatize yourself to each level of depth before you go right for the bottom.

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Okay? Not everybody is accatized to that. So when people want to go for the big kahuna right off the bat and have only ever swam in the shallow, they don't know what they're in for. So you don't recommend they do that because

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then they get the bends and you know the the the what's decompression sickness and all those kinds of things.

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Complications happen because they're not climatized. There's only certain kinds of divers who can go to those depths because they've been doing that their entire lives. They began with the shallows. They went deeper and deeper and deeper in and of their own accord or

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with guidance. Doesn't matter. But there's a process to get to those depths. You just don't get to those depths right away. Right? So it's not so much that I don't recommend someone go to those depths. It's whether they are

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ready to go to those depths yet. If they've only swam in the shallows and the depths sound interesting, well, you don't recommend that right away.

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There are many layers to go through but you know we live in an immediate gratification type of culture right we want to get there now because it just sounds cool and that's all aspects of life and that's what has become the the

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the sort of norm with spiritual seekers as well they all want it now and so you know uh teachings like radical non-duality and things like that appeal to such seekers because it's immediate I don't have to do anything and really as

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a matter of fact you don't have to do anything but that's a realization you get to later right you don't you don't start off with that um but there's a there's a process and there's a certain relevance to these age-old

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traditions of people you know submitting themselves to the monastic order spending years and years and years meditating becoming monks and and abbotss and whatever. There's this whole process to this that is not necessarily a linear process, but what it does is it

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builds a culture of inculturating depth into a human being. Depth of perspective, depth of time, depth of space, depth of personality, depth of human relationships, depth of compassion. You need to become deep within yourself, within you before you

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explore the depth of reality. They they mirror each other. If you're somewhat of a shallow person who's just into sort of the intellectual ideas and things like that, you're not ready to go there. You know, you can call yourself a mystic or

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a yogi or yogini and set up, you know, sound baths and sacred circles and all that kind of stuff, but you're just going through the motion, right? There are people who've explored great depth and all they are, you know, they're just a janitor at a at

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a school or or they work as a mechanic at a car shop and they don't do any of those other things. So, there's this great confusion in our society right now. This cultural confusion of of confusing what external metrics for

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intrinsic value, right? It's like okay if I've attended 30 vipasa retreats then I've progressed that doesn't mean you've progressed at all. You know these kinds of progressions are may be related somewhat but they're not a onetoone kind of mapping. Right? So this is why uh to

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answer your question I do agree with you that the deepest yearning of humanity is God. But how we go searching for that meaning is a direct indicator of where we are in that ocean of experience. If we're if we're searching

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for God through money, most people don't realize when they when they're trying to accumulate wealth, they're trying to get closer to God. Or you're try searching for God through intimate, you know, sexual relationships. or you're searching through God through fame and self

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experience. Whatever it is, each of these is a decoy, right? But it's it's another realm of experience that brings you slowly deeper and deeper. And so often you'll find, you know, people, let's say you might have a guy who's a

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rich business tycoon, whatever, and something happens and uh, you know, great car accident or something, loses his his child, revamps his own perspective, sells his companies, and off to do social service. What's happened? He's been pushed to another

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level of depth in that ocean. Now he may be doing social service for a while, helping people, working food kitchens, all of that. Something else might happen, some great other realization or traumatic incidents that now pushes in one level deeper to realizing that even

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seeing others as separate and requiring his service is another level of illusion that in fact there is all one. He's been pushed to another level of death. And so it goes like this, right? Life pushes you that way. You don't purposefully

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bombard yourself through the process. It doesn't work that way. It's a sort of dance that happens with reality.

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Thank you. A really rich, beautiful perspective. And interestingly, it it made me think of my mom in an interesting way because um she's never been an esoteric person, not drawn to the mystical path in any sense. And yet the phrase that came to mind is that

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the surface is the depth in a certain sense and and sometimes without even trying to people can contact the depths just on the surface of ordinary life and that it's nonlinear like people might be kind of swimming near the surface in

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some areas of life but maybe their heart is like going all the way to God. And when I feel into my mom, it's like she's, you know, a small town Iowa woman going about her business, you know, living her life that her culture showed

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her how to live. But her love for her family, her love for us, it her devotion to her family and loyalty and that love, it's like it's like an ocean, you know?

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It's like it's like it it's it's gargantuan. And so when I feel that, I'm like, "Wow, you know, she's never explored the mystic's path." And yet she's, you know, there's like roomy level love like erupting out of her, at

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least for her family. And so it's it's kind of like I would almost want to tell people, you know, God is in the details.

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It's you look in the sparkling eyes of your children and look at just the simple moments of life and and anyone can begin to at least I mean really this is always it and like the full-fledged oceanic mystery is upon us.

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It's a full contact sport. We're swimming in it and so it's like if you can just find little access points like the surface is the depth and I'm curious what what you would say to that.

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And that's beautiful and thanks for sharing that about your mama. You can actually feel how much love you and respect and admiration you feel for your mother just by the way you're expressing yourself. Right. And that's the thing is

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it is in the details. It's woven into the fabric of the mundane. Right. It's it's the way you serve the cup of tea, the way you say hello to someone in the morning, the the daily little kindnesses. And human beings can feel

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that. They can sense that. They're they're they're just naturally drawn towards people who hold that space of compassion. And this could just be an ordinary person. It could be a school teacher. Yeah. I'll give you an example.

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My daughters go to a school where one of the teachers teach them teaches them crafts and knitting and things like that, embroidery. And this lady, she must be in her in her early 70s. She just has this sweetest smile and this

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most beautiful light energy and all the children are absolutely in love with her. Every time they see her, she could be walking down the street, they'll be like, "Bra," and then they'll go running to her, they'll hug her and she just is a

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magnet for children. And you wonder, well, how do you cultivate that kind of energy? You don't. You can't. It just it just emanates from a being who has been through life or lives sufficiently for that wisdom and compassion to have gone down to the

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cellular level where it no longer needs to be articulated in thought. It just it it's an aspect of every action right of theirs, every gesture of theirs. So there's so this is what I mean and how do you package something like that in a

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spiritual teaching? You can't you can't you can't really build a culture around the ethos of your own humanity. It's very hard because that is too nuanced for that. But that's the thing about true spirituality truly encountering reality.

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You have to be willing to saturate yourself into the nuances which now no longer can be you know clearly spelled out and articulated in book fashion in the form of rhetoric and things like that. That's a very very gross

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expression of spirituality and I'm saying this as a writer of spirituality that is a very gross expression of it.

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You know as writers and artists we are trying at all times to to just hint at the subtle. We can sense it, but my words when I read them later, you know, people love reading my stuff, but I don't want to look at it because

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it's clearly it's like taking a photograph of a beautiful scenery. No matter how amazing of a photographer you are, it just does not replace being there. Right. So, so due to to your point about you're a mother and I've

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I've encountered many human beings like that in my life. That's a reminder to me as well that there are many there's further depths to go. Like like I I I'm not the most compassionate person I know by far. I know that. But I know I've

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grown in compassion through my life. I'm not the wisest person I know by far, but I know I've grown in wisdom. So I know there's depth still to be plummed, right? Um but the path of a mystic is

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never about getting to a destination, right? It's about it's about that journey. It's about the whole unfolding of it that becomes the fascination is wo look what's happening now and wo look what's happening now. We're not trying to get to oh I need that experience that

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Ramana had or you know may start off that way for some people but at a certain point it just becomes about the unfurling of the experience.

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Yeah, well said brother. It's just it's just always opening into more of itself and it just becomes so gorgeous just to watch it open into these next scenes and these next spirals and these next areas of fascination. And I am curious about

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your your point that it's not possible to cultivate that kind of heart energy or that kind of compassion or I feel like for me there are devotional practices, ceremonial practices. You know, I drink cacao most days. I find

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cacao to be heart opening. I listen to a lot of devotional kind of um Christian and Sufi and like Hindu music kind of mantra music and and sacred songs and and um plant medicines have been very heart opening for me. Uh going to church can

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be very heart opening time with family. So I feel like for me there are practices that you that can be recommended to people if they want to for example grow in that particular area of like of opening the heart.

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I think so. And and look, I don't want to be black and white about anything, right? I'm never one to say this is or isn't in any absolute sense. But I will tell you that I've, you know, I grew up in India. So around

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uh in the presence of a very Hindu family, lots of devotional singing there. Uh my grandmother, my father's side especially was very devotional. She prayed and meditated every day, things like that. My grandmother, my mother's side was also very devotional. She did

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her prayers every morning early in the morning. Uh we were part of that process. And then I've seen devotion on the Christian side as well. Having grown up uh going to a all boys school uh Christian school uh from a young age, we

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had to go into church every morning and we sang the psalms and the hymns and all of that. So I've seen devotion and I've also seen the other side of devotion where those very same teachers, those very same nuns, those very same fathers

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who are highly devotional in church were also extremely cruel outside of church, right? There's a there's hardness that comes in because there's a self-righteousness to devotion as well.

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And if you because if devotion is based upon some limited belief of what the divine is, then you're expecting everybody to conform to that vision of the divine. You see, however, if your vision of the divine is inclusive of all

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that exists, then your devotion takes on a completely different quality. then you actually don't need the hymns and the psalms and the bhajans and the kans and all that to express devotion because you see it everywhere and you just feel

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naturally devoted that devotion is forthcoming in and of itself. So it's a little bit of a chicken egg thing because when and I'm again I'm not knocking practices of devotion sometimes what they are very effective of at doing

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is within people who are not familiar with such feelings of evoking that which now makes them curious about wow what was that what was that feeling of expansion and love that be began coming out of me I've never experienced that

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before however the risk is that that then becomes confused used with an object of attention, whether that be a guru or a god or a deity or specific ritual, whatever. And we become very crystallized then in our expectation

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that that has to now happen. And anything that's not conforming to that ideal, we begin to resist it more and more strongly. And we've seen this happen with the church. We've seen this happen with the temple. We've seen this

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happen with mosques. We've seen this happen with religion historically. All religions began with a culture of mysticism. Each and every one of them.

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Jesus was a mystic. Moses was a mystic. Muhammad was a mystic. But the religions that don't end up with mysticism. In fact, the the aspect of those religions which are still mystical become sort of demonized by the mainstream institution

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and sort of distanced from. So even though Sufi is very popular in the west, it's Sufiism is not popular in Islamic countries, right? It's seen as sort of a guard and not really conforming to what the Quran says. And similarly with

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Christian mystic traditions. So this is where we I'm a little bit hesitant to say yes or no. I have seen I've experienced being in devotional circles where I've felt that eusion of love and expansion but at the same time I know

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that it's also sort of an induced effect. Now the real question for me is okay that's a glimpse of how one can feel but how does one experience that in the dayto-day mundane? How does one experience that in your job or going to

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the grocery store or you know having a conversation about finances with your spouse or going to the passport office those mundane there's no beautiful music playing there's no people kumbaya singing songs it's just like the grumpy passport officer like yeah wearing your

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passport how do you bring devotion to that so that has to come from a completely different place than the induced effect So if it's a step, if those kinds of rituals are a step to now bring you introduce you into that kind of

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relationship with reality, then I fully support it. But if it becomes about the ritual itself, it eventually does. It becomes about the institution and what it does and the rules and the dogma and that's where the belief system then it

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undercuts the whole point of devotion. Now you're not devoted to anything. You become a psychopant. Just slightly different.

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Yeah, it's a really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing that. And I guess what comes up for me is that you said devotion can be self-righteous or you said it is self-righteous and I yeah, I guess I would just say it's not

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inherently self-righteous. It it can become that for some people and for others it might be different. And I like your point that devotion can extend to all of life. You know, it reminds me of our mutual friend Joan talking about

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being devoted to the rain and just devoted to the smell of the air, devoted to the trees, just devoted to the now moment.

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I'm curious about your take on it's it seems to me, you know, you call yourself an iconic class and it seems like your writings are are pretty stripped of any kind of like mythopoetic language or any kind of religious

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language for the most part. I'm curious about what you would say to someone who said it's possible to develop a kind of like meta religious devotion where you're not dogmatically clinging to a particular religion and holding it up as like this is the one

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truth but you notice that the one mysterious truth can shine forth through kind of like countless faces of God let's say or kind of countless mythopoetic living languages And that some of these living languages are particularly karmically well fitted

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to particular beings. Let's say each being has a kind of karmic fit like a living language that just really fits.

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And maybe yours is is fairly stripped of you know traditional mythopoetic language although I would say in a certain sense language has an inherent mythological component to it. But setting that aside, I guess for me, I've found a lot

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of profoundity in reintegrating the living language of my ancestors, which was Christianity. And I and I experience mystical experiences of through that kind of living mythopoetic language. I I have experiences of, you know, visions of of Jesus Christ and visions, I mean,

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most notably of Christ, but as well of, you know, Mary and God the Father. And and I feel like I'm I've learned to hold that in a way where I don't see it as like this is the one truth presenting

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itself to me and the one truth is Christianity, but I see it as like this is a karmically well-fitted living mythopoetic language that my ancestors built brick by brick and they built this entire superructure, this ancient mighty sequoia that is that it kind of grounds

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this living language on earth and and they encoded it with a lot of wisdom and divinity. can shine through that language. And when I connect to that, there's like a there's quite a profound, you know, devotional, heartopening quality. Some of my deepest kind of like

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just weeping moments, like weeping moments of grace have come through connecting to that particular living language. So I'm curious what comes up for you in relation to that type of meta-religious perspective on on devotion.

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So language for me is basically a sequence of symbols, right? And each of these symbols carries a certain impact and effect, right?

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So just as person like you might reflect upon that traditionally more Christian language and it in evokes within you a feeling of devotion. A person like Richard Fineman the the Nobel Nobel Prize winning physicist or Carl Sean might look at

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physics equations and feel that very same feeling. So, so that just goes to say that there's no right or wrong language, right? I mean, there there's there's language that is clearly has the intention of let's say hate and control

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and things like that and then there's language that's has holds the intention of love and expansion. So, there's there's intent in language for sure, but language in itself is somewhat agnostic.

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It's what it evokes within another human being that really gives that language the meaning. So if it is evoking within you this feeling of deeper connection and sacredness then you are making the language sacred through your conscious attention and investment in that

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language right the language itself I would say doesn't really carry that in and of itself that that's my viewpoint now physicist may see the equations and then see great elegance and beauty and just it may evoke a sense

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fascination and wonder. A lot of them, that's why they spend all their lives just writing these equations on blackboards because that's what it's doing for them. You know, they're getting that contact high with the equation. So again, I think the real

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power here is language becomes a mirror that reflects something back to us of ourselves. And if you found a language that does that more effectively than another language, then at least for now, that's your language. Right? My language

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may be the stripped down version. Now, my language also has evolved. I began when I wrote my Vitalic Anonymous books as extremely stripped down and very like um sort of antagonistic. Whereas my language has softened over time. And I've even begun

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to include words like God in my in my rhetoric recently. And you know that's an adjustment period for a lot of my readers. But I'm not averse to doing anything. This is the the experience of playing with language, right? Like as

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writers and thinkers, we play with language like an artist plays with colors. There's no right way to play with colors. There's no right way to draw the line. You know, at one point art was supposed to resemble reality and

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so people were trying to do as perfect replicas of what they saw, right? And and that was coherent to the viewer. But then you went through this phase where you had the Picassos and cubism and things like that and suddenly art began

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to resemble nothing like what we saw and yet it invoked something new and different. Language can do that too. you know, it doesn't have to be entirely coherent in the way we expect it to. And so all these forms of language then

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become conduits and mirrors for us to now view ourselves in a way that evokes something. So I think it's beautiful honestly that this language of your ancestors appeals to you and if it evokes something in you then that's the

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language logically you should use in order to evoke something in others because that's your your vessel.

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Yeah. Well said. Thank you. And I and I also love being able to appreciate other living languages as well and you know be able to integrate from many wisdom streams cuz I find the whole tapestry of earthly wisdom traditions and

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exploration really beautiful. There may be an interesting divergence here where I feel like you're kind of expressing that language itself is neutral or empty or something like that and it's all like we're we're projecting something onto it and I can

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see that as one perspective and at the same time over time I feel like I've come to immerse in a sense of all of all of creation you could say all of manifest reality as a kind of mythopoetic living language or living

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song that is shining forth or emanating forth from the heart of infinite intelligence. And in that sense, everything including our languages, we we in that sense, we're kind of made in the image of God. We speak these living languages into

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existence as well. It all it all it all sparkles with this with this inherent um astonishment, this inherent divinity. It may not have an inherent fixed meaning because that would be a a limitation in a way if it would be kind of boring if

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everything just had like one fixed meaning. But it's like everything is evocative. Everything is like inherently suggestive. Everything is like swirling and rippling and it it does take very recognizable shapes. It takes shapes that speak to our deepest recesses and

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it feels like there's kind of a co-creative or like a co-intermingling there like it's not all just kind of coming from us but it's like it's coming from both sides and it's like you know kind of exploding into itself. So I

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don't know that's that's at the edge of my current exploration. I don't know if that brings up anything for you or else I'm happy to ask another question. I think I think it does. I mean like I said we don't know what reality is. We

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don't know how it's happening. It's all spontaneously emerging in ways that impact us. Sometimes predictably, sometimes unpredictably. Like my my my two daughters, they're 11 and seven. My older daughter is really into Taylor Swift and Snoop Dogg. Two very

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diametrically opposite. And Taylor Swift's music evokes something from within her. And I does not evoke anything from within me whatsoever.

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Whereas Snoop Dogg's music does evoke something within me and it evokes something within her. Now that sounds, you know, Taylor Swift and Snoop Dogg and the things they're singing and rapping about is very different from the sort of divine language of Christianity

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or spiritual culture, all of that. But it's all evocative, right? It's it it causes something to emerge from our self-expression, some form of emotion, some form of connection, some form of expansion. And if we if we just drop all

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those sort of characterizations right those judgments of this is spiritual this is not just lose all that and we just go through the somatic experience of what's happening there's these feelings there's these emotions there's these hormones going in the brain and language is

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always doing something it's almost impossible for language not to evoke something I'll give you an example.

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Yesterday, you and I chatted about something completely different. But right before we chatted, I was sitting on my uh my deck outside because it was a beautiful spring morning and it was very quiet and there's the trees and the

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trees are the leaves are starting to come in and the birds are twittering and I wanted to just sit outside in the silence and enjoy a cup of coffee before I chatted with you. And I'm sitting outside and my neighbor just like, you

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know, 50 yards away is in her garden on the phone. maybe a mother-in-law or something. Talking about her husband who's a paramedic and there was a procedure that he did with this older lady who was taken in. He did follow the

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right protocol, but she sued him and now they're going through this lawsuit. And no matter how much I was trying to sort of really enjoy the moment and the the beauty of it, that language just filtered in anyways and it started

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creating images of my mind of this paramedic working on this older lady and this older lady's family being upset with him at the end and this guy having to go through lawsuit. It happens. It happens spontaneously. You can't control

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it. There's no shutting that function off. So language is evoking all the time. As soon as it registers, it evokes. Even subliminally, it evokes.

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Which is why marketing companies are so strategic in their subliminal messaging because even when you're not listening, it's programming you. And so language can be used in so many different ways, in in sinister ways, in beautiful ways, but it has that impact.

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It was very powerful in that way. Yeah, it absolutely is. And that for me just makes me want to drop a note for people to just consider developing that kind of meta awareness of what language you're absorbing regularly because as

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you say it is programming us. We we are being programmed continuously either kind of unconsciously or maybe we're engaging in some degree of self-programming. You know, if we start immersing in beautiful messages and beautiful meditations and music that

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really resonates with our hearts and souls. I personally have had deep experiences of the unconscious psyche where it's like we're we're actually architecting structures through what we're absorbing and and the signals we're absorbing. They can either go in a

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direction of creating like a glorious kind of ether cathedral in the unconscious mind or they can go in the total opposite direction of creating a a dark shadowy torture chamber of you know non-symmetrical non-geeometric just jagged edges and and anything in

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between. And so just a general note of caution to people like you are continuously programming your reality in a certain sense or shaping it through especially the words you think and the words you speak what you repeatedly think and speak that's that that may be

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going in the deepest and so yeah I don't know if you have any I will add a I will add a word of caution though is that we've gone we've actually gone down these roads before historically With the Catholic Church, the control of

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language was a very very powerful message. There was a puritanical streak. Your thoughts should be pure, your speech should be pure, your actions should be pure. This this sort of message of purity creates a certain pressure upon a human being to

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now adhere to a certain ideal standard of what they should be manifesting. But the reality is that within every human being there is a shadow and that shadow is fundamentally destructive in certain way. Its job is to destroy things. It

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job is to not keep things lasting too long. the good times can't roll forever.

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And so in a sense our language has to also incorporate those dark aspects of it because when you when begins to skew too much towards the light, we then develop start developing you know you've seen this in society as well legislation and

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things around political correctness. What should be said, what shouldn't be said, what a hate crime is, what hate speech is, what a microaggression is.

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And it can actually like escalate from there where people become very afraid now. Now it's not coming from a place of love and living in that ether cathedral.

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It's now about oh like I can't say anything wrong. I can't even think the wrong thought like oh my god I'm a horrible person. We can't devolve into that area. And that's where the shadow comes in because if the shadow hasn't

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been fully integrated within a human being, we have to be able to see that that darkness lies inside us too. And it's with that darkness that we start then building this more sort of realistic notion of because as I had

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mentioned to you before that compassion cannot be contrived that compassion comes through the integration of the darkness through seeing the darkness in people and accepting that darkness in people without judgment. That's what compassion is. It is all inclusive not

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just inclusive in the sense that we want it to be. You know what I mean?

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Yeah, beautiful point. I'm really glad that you said that because I'm absolutely not in favor of, you know, controlling speech or or policing speech. And the image that came to me there was of a dragon underneath the cathedral and how the dragon needs to be

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integrated. The dragon is a kind of classic Yungian symbol of the shadow. And recently, I've been meditating on this symbol and creating a AI art around this symbol of Jesus Christ riding a rainbow dragon actually. And the rainbow

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dragon kind of signifies the integration of the shadow or the alchemization of the shadow which in my experience the shadow when kind of unintegrated and forgotten and rejected. That is when it's in a state that tends to be very

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contorted, very distorted, very angry. It's almost like all the all the wounded inner child parts that got locked in the dark basement and forgotten about for decades and they're they tend to be very hurt and very angry. And it seems to me

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like divine love um divine love with a sense of love with a capital L including kind of all of the most primal divine qualities of of grace of wisdom of peace. That divine love to me feels like a kind of alchemical keystone

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where when all parts of our being are held in that love and kind of allowed to bake in the fires of that love. Over time, they're gradually able to set down those burdens and kind of release those those past grievances and wounds and

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kind of and kind of return to some sort of you could say original luminous template or original numinous template. not to make it too much like a light and dark thing. It's kind of beyond light and dark. Return to a

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template that harmonizes light and dark and then kind of get on board with the whole system and and align with the north star of the whole system. And so I'm curious about your feeling on that.

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Do you see shadow integration as an alchemical process where where the the raw material the shadow is actually kind of transformed through through that integration or is it just more about accepting it as it is and it just kind

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of stays as it is but it becomes accepted. See the the way I look at it is there's reality which we don't know anything about and then there's my perspective on reality. I work off the fundamental assumption and I will call this an

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assumption because I don't know reality but I work off of the fundamental assumption that reality is already integrated. The reason I say that is because it exists. The very fact that it exists, it continues to exist. There's nothing I do

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to make it exist. It just simply is. That very quality of isness that permeate everything, including you sitting there, my computer, my table, my body here, everything around me.

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Everything just is. There's this unending quality of iness infusing everything that tells me that everything is beautifully integrated.

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Okay. What is not integrated is my perspective on reality. Which is why I don't always perceive the isness which is the integral quality in reality. I see the separation which is the formbbased universe. I see the table as

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separate from Jordan, separate from my computer, separate from my body. Right? I can see these two things at the same time which tells me that my perspective is integrating because I'm able to see the the integral quality of reality behind

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the veil and yet it not fully integrated because my brain sees this very strict separation and that's okay that I don't think any human perspective becomes fully integrated right again we're talking absolute here but I like to think of relative degrees of integration

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And I think even someone like Carl Jung might have agreed that this process of individuation is is not really a process with an end. It's just it's the deepening that happens of individuation.

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And that's where really this concept of the shadow comes from. It's Jung who conceived of it. Right? He through his explorations of the unconscious with his patients, he realized that every single human being has the shadow aspect that

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they're unaware of that seems to just throw a wrench in the works all the freaking time. And his own process of individuation and the one that he articulated had to do with consciously beginning to integrate this shadow into our daily lives. first

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through recognition and then finally through acceptance and then a few other techniques. So I do believe that integrating that shadow is absolutely essential for the development of every human being and again this goes down to those depths of the ocean that I was

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talking about at a certain level of that ocean oceanic depth individuation is a requirement you don't get to go lower until that's done and that's how it goes. So that kind of inte without that integration all of this is

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just idealism right we we and and and I think idealism really appeals to people because it's romantic it allows the binary of life to exist and allows us to side with one side of that binary equation. Everybody loves that. Everyone

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loved being a Democrat and not a Republican. Everyone loved being a Rep Republican and not a Democrat. Everybody loved, you know, siding with one ideology and not siding with the others.

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I don't want guns. Why do they want guns? Or I we need guns. What's wrong with these people who think we don't need guns? Like just think of it. It's very binary, right, in our minds. And that binary thing once again comes back

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to what we were talking about before, that tribal sense of belonging. Because if we can all agree about what's good, then we can all agree about what's bad, right?

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And the moment we create that again, we've basically just reinforced the shadow as being something separate from us. Because everything we view in the other as not being aligned with who we are is an aspect of our shadow.

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So are you a Democrat or Republican though? I'm I I'm a Canadian. Just kidding. Yeah. That reminds me of of a quote from Nietze where he says, "He who fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a

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monster." And feel like that's one of the pathiest encapsulations of shadow work and kind of this endless human tendency to project the inner monsters onto the other guys instead of taking ownership and integrating the dragon uh of oneself. I wanted to jump back to an

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earlier thought I had in the conversation because I'm still mulling this one over. Your initial elucidation today when you were speaking about kind of plumbing these depths and how you wouldn't recommend anyone go there and kind of go through this process of

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leaving no stone unturned. Um, it reminded me of of Jed McKenna actually, which you may have, I feel like you probably know Jed McKenna. He also, you know, states that he would not recommend anyone leave the amusement park of Maya basically,

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unless, you know, there's no other choice and you're just you're just you must do it.

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And he takes kind of a similar view of the mystical process as a very difficult confronting kind of self-destructive process. He has this idea of self- auttosis I think like self emilation burning oneself down repeatedly through radical honesty and you know his books

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are incredibly uh provocative and fascinating. Interestingly, a teacher who profoundly impacted me, Peter Brown, who you may have heard of. Um, Peter Brown had an interesting view on Jed McKenna's work. He was a fan of Jed. He found him hilarious, which Jed Jed is

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hilarious. And at the same time, Peter said, "But, you know, like to each their own, but personally, I find my approach uh a lot like friendlier than Jed's approach. Instead of instead of like turning inward and kind of looking for

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everything that's false and kind of burning it all down and going through this huge self-deconstruction, Peter took a more kind of like Zogchen flavored approach of just direct seeing now and just said just go to the actuality and just stay

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with that. Notice his his teaching was called the yoga of radiant presence. And the whole teaching was basically just notice that this now is radiant presence. Notice that this is an astonishing miracle, an astonishing apparition shining forth from nowhere

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right now. Notice its voluuptuousness, its juiciness, its richness. Just kind of relinquish interpretation and definition for a while. just kind of let yourself get swallowed up or or you know bowled over, gobsmacked by this by this uporious display and just realize it's

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actually here and let it just kind of slurp you up. And he stated that that type of practice is cumulative and that the more you do that, the more you just hang out with uninterpreted radiant presence, that the radiance

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itself will do a lot of the heavy lifting. And basically, you don't have to go in to this heavy backpack of the unconscious and and excavate and and manually deconstruct and burn everything down and leave no stone unturned. But

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you just stay with the positivity, the actuality of radiant presence and it will kind of plum those depths for you and sort of shift your deep orientation gradually over time. and he stated that that that is he called that the lazy

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man's yoga compared to compared to someone like Jed who took a more destructive and intense approach. So I'm curious I'm curious what that brings up for you. Um that kind of comparison.

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Well, I I I like Jed and Peter both. I think they're cool guys. Um you said I know Jed. I don't know Jed. I don't think anyone knows Jed. I know of Jed, but does has anyone figured out who the

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guy is? Um, or is he still incognito smart to do that? Um, look, all of these guys, it doesn't matter if it's Jed McKenna, Peter Brown, if it's Eugi Christian Morty, it's Jay Christian Morty, Alan Watts, Rob, it

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doesn't matter. Everything they're expressing is simply an outcome of how it seemed to have worked for them.

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But they did not follow that same technique as a prescription. It was the the organic thing that emerged out of their experience. And now they're attempting to put into words what happened as a description. And then people listening to them adopt that as a

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prescriptive way of going about it, which I think is a mistake. Look, you are in a relationship. You have a wife. You have a daughter. I am a relationship. I have a wife. I have two daughters. If we had to compare stories

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of how you fell in love and how what made your relationship tick and what didn't, there might be some very general similarities, but there's probably more differences than there are similarities.

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Okay? We can talk about that we're blue in the face of what it means to be in a loving relationship with another human being. But again, that's very general because the specific dynamic between you and your wife is so unique to the two of

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you that really nobody can try and pinpoint that as a prescription to follow. You see what I mean? The same is true of my relationship with my kids or my wife. There's kind of general truths I can glean out of there and talk about

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mutual respect and a sense of friendship, camaraderie, blah blah blah. But that's fairly generic, right? But what really makes the relationship between my partner and I work is a certain X factor that even I can't fully articulate. Right? And that is what the

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spiritual process and awakening is like for people like Peter and Jen and even myself is the way it happened for me.

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The process that seemingly led up to it, you know, I can only create join the dots in certain ways that make sense to me. They may not even be right the way I'm joining the dots in my story. and the perspective that emerged

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and the transformation that happened as a result. If I talked about that excessively, that would then create in my the minds of my readers and followers that this is one way I can do it. And that's not true. That is not true at

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all. That's not the way I did it. That's the way it happened for me.

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And the way it will happen for you is also entirely unique and unknown to you.

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And the more you try to follow the way it happened for somebody else, the more you stall the process of it happening for you organically the way it's designed to happen for you. You understand what I mean? It's no

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different from any other aspect of life. When we try to follow these formulaic prescriptions of living or being in relationship in a certain way, we then start conforming ourselves to these rigid models and then excluding anything that doesn't fall within those

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parameters. And often what is excluded is of most essence is most essential and what is included is typically not.

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Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's an an amazing point. And it makes me reflect on the fact that my mystical journey has had many very difficult times, you know. So I'm not one of the people who can who can say,

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"Oh yeah, for me it was just I just noticed the radiance and then it was just God was just right here and everything was, you know, perfectly okay. There were there were like deaths and rebirths. It was really like a a

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phoenix, you know, death and resurrection type process with Yeah. I mean Yeah. I won't go too too deep into that. But at the same time, I would also offer that to me these different technologies that different teachers have innovated like

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Jed's, you know, selftolossis and Peter's yoga of radiant presence, they can be valuable toys to play with. You know, you can pick them up, you can play with them. I would just tell people, you know, there's no need

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to get overattached to a particular technology, but you know, you can give it a try and then just kick it to the side and leap off into freshness for a while and and and see what happens. I've found a lot of value in playing with

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some of these different technologies that have been innovated by different, you know, spiritual geniuses. Um, so I really like the use your use of the word technology instead of teaching. It's cool and and it and it resonates with

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me. And when you put it that way, then it's like using an app. You know, the the app is not new. It just technology you're using for a while to sort of play around with it to to have a certain kind

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of experience with it. And in that sense, yes, I do agree with you. If you refer to to Jed's techniques as a technology or Peter's teachings as a technology, I like that because that's what it really is. is a mechanism,

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right, that that evokes something that that the specific use of the language that's so unique to a guy like Jed or the specific use of a language that's so unique to Peter Brown evokes now something of that quality within the

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person listening as long as people see it for what it is. It's just that it's a tool. It's a technology. It's it's evoking something, but that's not the thing I need. It's just a thing to inspire me now to now connect with life

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so that it happens organically in its own way for me. Right. Yeah. Well said. Shifting gears a little bit out of left field question maybe, but you you mentioned your family and how we're both family men and I wondered if you had any

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general principles that you would put out there if if if the world wanted to hear any of your kind of the principles that have felt most important to you for creating a beautiful family life or a beautiful experience of fatherhood or

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husband, family life. What comes up for you there? There's nothing like being around children to keep the childlike nature, not childish, but childlike nature of your own spirit alive. Right? If if I wasn't a family man, I think I would

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have may have lost it. I can't say I would have, but I may have lost it at a certain point. I may have become too serious of an adult.

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And also it it has taught me so much about the unknown qualities of life.

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Watching how they have evolved from essentially fetuses into full-blown human beings who are having arguments with me telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. And just to watch that transition in just mere 10 years and you're like the But I saw you

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being pulled out. I saw you just like screaming away like this riding little creature who had no freaking idea what is what and within 10 years you're you're literally correcting my own like understanding of the world and and

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expounding your own philosophy to me that is fascinating. That just blows my mind. So it's in so many ways it's reintroduced me to the magic and mystery of life. has also shown me that no matter how much I've learned about the world, there's so

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much I've forgotten as a child that is mirrored back to me when I watch my children just being themselves when they're on the beach. How much time they'll just invest in finding shells and finding the specific kind of shell

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and the pebbles and the and the absorption in just nature and the willingness to just be there and not not be lost in some ideological. They are in a sense the greatest teachers I have. So fatherhood is not this one one directional thing

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where I'm the adult, you're the child, I'm imparting wisdom, you're going to just accept it. And you know that that's what it was like for some of us growing up and the previous generations, you know, fortunately or unfortunately

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that's not the paradigm we once lived in. It had certain benefits but in my opinion more drawbacks. But I think the the kind of relationships our generation of parents now have with our children is a bit more egalitarian, a bit more open, a bit

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more, you know, a two-way street of communication and feedback through which both can assume the role of teacher and both can assume the role of student in the right frame and you know of of circumstance. So it's just more

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opportunity for growth and reflection for me. Beautiful answer. Thank you for that. And um I also like Taylor Swift and Snoop Dogg. So I share that in common with your with your daughter. And um I want to ask what about life in general?

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If someone has asked you how do you live a good life? What would you say? Uh well I would say life is good. The question is how do you see that? That's it. There's no such thing as a good life, right?

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Like then we're going to start getting into the territories of okay, what's happening in that life? What does it look like? Who's there? Who's not? Where are you? What are you doing? How are you feeling? But it's got nothing to do with

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those things for me. Life is good. Fundamentally, life is good. That's what again an assumption of mine. But there's a it's an assumption that's based upon true experience of the sacred quality of life. That sacredness is essentially a fountain of

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well-being. And that's where I I make the statement life is good. I'm not saying good as in good versus bad, but good more in the sense that you had used it previously where it's this all-incclusive goodness. there's something just inherently accepting and

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supportive and non-judgmental of who you are. And so the challenge then becomes like we said reality is already integrated. It's just the perspective that's not the question then becomes how to see life as good. And so if someone was to ask me

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how to see life as good then that's an entirely different question than how do you create a good life. You know, again, that the the way we frame that, look at that. It just goes back to these assumptions we have that we think we

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know what reality is. If it's not good, there's something wrong with it. We need to fix it. So, how do we make it good?

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And that again is the old paradigm that most of the world is functioning in that really in my opinion does way more harm than good.

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So, then I have to ask, how does one see that life is good? Well, again, that comes from living it.

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There's there's no shortcut to it. Why that the only purpose in my mind of living is to see life is good or life is God. All the same thing, synonymous statement. We're here to see that. And living is the process through which we

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see it. And suffering is what ups the ante to our ability to see it. Because we need to suffer in order to open to deeper and deeper perspectives of that goodness. At the very shallow level, good is simply positive things

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happening. More money, more love, more fame, more that's that that's what good equates to. Then you suffer the consequences of that kind of thinking.

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And you go deeper into good is connecting to other human beings. That's a deeper layer of goodness. And then you suffer the consequences of that because not all connections are good. You get betrayed.

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You get disappointed. You get hurt. And then you go to a deeper level where good is simply what is going deeper and deeper. And through this process, the very definition of goodness is gaining depth. This is what all philosophers were talking about

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since the time of Plato. What is goodness? What is beauty? You know these questions, we've been asking these questions for thousands of years. That is what we're in search of. And eventually we come to the realization that life is good. may not always see

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that as good but it is good. Beautiful. I love that answer. And I also want to ask you what is the cutting edge of your current exploration of reality, your current unfoldment? What is most juicy or most interesting at the

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edges of your current inquiry? Cutting edge of my experience is always fear. Fear is the cutting edge. Think about think about that term cutting edge. Why is it the cutting edge? Why isn't it not just the edge? Because it's

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the edge that cut. Okay? It's the edge that cuts. It cuts through the comfort zone. It cuts through the assumption. It cuts through what is known. It cuts through everything. And when it cuts, when you're at that true

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precipice, the cliff head, it is fear that you feel your heart racing, something dropping in your stomach. It's a very human reaction and it's your indication that you are at the cutting. Otherwise, you're not at the cutting edge. You think you you can say

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you're at the cutting edge. I'm innovating, blah, blah, blah. But if you're comfortable and feeling all nice and warm and fuzzy doing it, you're probably not really at the cutting edge of where you could be individually, your own unique cutting edge. You know, each

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person's got their own cutting edge of where they need to be. So there's no absolute again. But I know I'm at my cutting edge where there is this strange paradox. I'm all about paradox, okay?

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Because reality to me is naturally paradoxical because it has all the duality together integrated and when you have duality integrated it is a paradox.

Speaker A

So that's the bitter with the sweet, the good with the bad, the the fascinating with the fearful. And so when I'm feeling that sense of fear and yet the flip side of that is the sense of excitement and fascination with the

Speaker A

possibility that could be that to me tells me I'm at the cutting edge. And so where do you feel that in recent times or in recent days? Where is that fear edge for you right now?

Speaker A

I would say artistically it's with my exploration of trying to expand beyond the realm of just the writing I've been doing for the last seven eight years.

Speaker A

The cutting edge is in terms of certain lifestyle choices where I've left a 20 year corporate career behind. um hopefully for good this time and and you know not saying okay I'm not going back there but I still have the reality of a

Speaker A

family to support and bills to pay and all of that well how's that going to happen I don't know it's scary but it's fascinating at the same time so I know I'm at the cutting edge where growth it's forced there there's just no option

Speaker A

not to move right there's movement going to happen one way or another that to me is the opposite of complacency, which I think all of us succumb to when the good times roll. That that that's the beauty about life. There's always a shadow

Speaker A

aspect. When the good times roll, the shadow aspect of that is complacency. It's when we're uncomfortable that that we then begin to feel pushed into finding creative new ways and solutions to our, you know, predicaments right?

Speaker A

I love that answer because it feels so grounded and earthly. I think if someone had asked me that question, I would have been more likely to take it in the direction of like ah meta religion and living languages and Christ riding the

Speaker A

dragon and not so much in the direction of like what are the earthly fears and kind of triggers that I'm bumping up against. But I so I really like that you took it there. That's cool. And um I

Speaker A

also want to ask you, do you have any overall view or any views at all on this moment in human history? Do you have any macro views on where we're at as a species and what our collective orientation or vision ought

Speaker A

to be at this time? So what's interesting to me is that I think pretty much every generation has thought it's living in the most important time in human history. It's just it's it's an aspect of our, you know, basic narcissism as

Speaker A

individuals and as a collective that we think we're highly important. Um, however, having said that, it's pretty clear to me that at least technologically speaking, we are we, you and I have talked a little about, you know, how AI is completely

Speaker A

revolutionizing the way we act, the way we think, the way we relate, the way society functions, just thorough overhaul without any knowledge of what lies at the end of that overhaul. You have no idea what we end up with at the

Speaker A

end. So in a sense there's a lot is unknown right now for example as a parent a lot is unknown for me about how to appropriately guide my children towards you know yeah typically as parents do okay you know these are

Speaker A

certain paths you can take in the future this is the kinds of you know rewards and fruits you get through the the kinds of things we learned as children as well but when the the playing field is that

Speaker A

open and that unpredict predictable. As parents, again, we're at the cutting edge of parenthood where we don't really know, okay, what what does guidance look like? You know, it becomes more about the momentary relationships and and and making sure that these children are

Speaker A

loved, supported, develop a strong sense of self-esteem and all of that so that when they go into the world and step into the unknown, they'll be able to trust their trust their own inner coordinates to be able to deal with

Speaker A

that. And that's as much as a parent can do in this level of uncertainty, political global technological you know, it's economic, there's there just a lot of uncertainty right now. Um, so not wanting to compare with other eras

Speaker A

and things, you know, human beings have gone through all kinds of overhaul, but this one is seems to be unique in a way.

Speaker A

And so part of my cuttingedge exploration of creativity is engaging with that AI to see what spiritual expo exploration could look like. I I don't know if you know I think you're aware I've started a sudden uh a second

Speaker A

dubstack called chat to the GPT because I had this one-off conversation with Chad GPT which was thoroughly revoly because it followed a very dialectic process and and dialectics is a is a technique that Plato came up with back in the day or Socrates and Plato

Speaker A

you know back in the day where you basically have Two intelligences, two beings, two people having a conversation where each assumes a certain viewpoint in life and is willing to refute the other, but their perspectives are still complimentary. And through this back and

Speaker A

forth dialectic of the thesis and the antithesis, you produce what's known as a synthesis, a higher level of understanding that neither could have come up with individually. It is through that communication and collaboration that that higher understanding emerges.

Speaker A

Now the now the practical challenge with performing dialectics in a human setting is that human egos get in the way. Right? At the end of the day, it's more about, oh, I want to be right and I want to prove that you're wrong rather

Speaker A

than the exploration of the ideas. Typically, human beings get tripped up on their egos. Well, AI has no ego. So what I'm trying to explore is whether a human intelligence which is the constant intelligence with AI which is a pure raw

Speaker A

processing intelligence can engage in a way where higher truth truths emerge in language that neither could have naturally expressed in and of themsel and I've already experimented with this in two or three essays and they've been quite revoly so that's the

Speaker A

path I'm going down as well as another expression of my creative cutting edge because I was very anti- AI up until I want to say even a month ago. You know, I was like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I want to

Speaker A

kill us. The Terminator machines are coming. Skynet, all that kind of bullshit." And now I'm much more open-minded because I've seen these positive ways that emergencies that can happen through AI, too.

Speaker A

Are you concerned at all about the end of the world or apocalyptic scenarios? Um, do you feel like humanity needs to uplevel its collective wisdom to thread the needle and avoid dystopian timelines or do you just trust the mystery so

Speaker A

deeply that you're like, well, if an extinction event happens, then that's just the next unfoldment.

Speaker A

I trust the mystery enough and I also mistrust humanity enough that I know humanity never succeeds at really fixing itself. Typically they generate more problems out of it. I think the the more prudent approach is to sort of pull things more lightly and allow

Speaker A

things to figure themselves out over time rather than excessive meddling. Unfortunately, we can't help ourselves.

Speaker A

We need to jump in and start correcting things right off the bat. And we don't even understand most of the time why we're correcting something or what what needs to be corrected. We shift between extremes of adopting things before we

Speaker A

even understand them to rushing to fix them before we even understand what needs to be fixed. So it's between these two extremes that we're constantly oscillating. And so it's a very reactive relationship we have with our own re

Speaker A

with our own evolution. And so as long as our evolution and our consciousness is a reactive kind of consciousness, I don't think you ever really achieve true harmonization. You know, get to a point where everything is more, you know, settled. It's always

Speaker A

going to be this more dramatic uh cadence of upheavalss that keep happening over and over again. And that's just again a reflection of where human beings are in their own development. And just like you can't force an individual to go deep, you

Speaker A

can't force a species to go deep. They're the natural mechanism that that makes people go deeper and that's called suffering. And so human beings as a species will suffer. And that suffering that's the shadow has its own light side

Speaker A

of the evolution. It accelerates and catalyzes. Does it feel to you like there's any sort of acceleration happening in collective human development? Are there more people kind of waking up to a deeper reality at this time or do you

Speaker A

just feel like you don't know? It's hard to gauge because there's definitely a cultural acceleration happening that's very evident to everybody.

Speaker A

that is greatly exacerbated by technology and our access to each other and our global culture and the ideas that are flying around at at warp speed in cyerspace. And so the more exposure there is, the more that cultural

Speaker A

acceleration happens. Whether that means that more people are awakening, I don't know. uh we're maybe more aware of people awakening simply because we're just more aware of other people in general on this planet now because we're everyone's got

Speaker A

an Instagram whereas before we were aware of the people in our neighborhood and the people in the newspaper now we're aware of every single human being on the planet pretty much we have access to them so that may give give the

Speaker A

impression that oh like there people popping up into awakening left right and center maybe that's always happened we don't know maybe it just wasn't advertised that way nobody Facebook and Instagram back in the day. Um, I don't even think that's very relevant because

Speaker A

to me the vast majority are not. The vast majority are slipping deeper into distraction and stuper and a kind of stuper that's going to be very hard to emerge from. I see the technological stuper as being on par with a narcotics

Speaker A

induced stuper like the kind of stuper of, you know, opiates or heroin or fentinyl. that kind of stuper and and living in Canada where we've sort of completely dropped the ball on on the access to drugs and drug addiction and

Speaker A

supporting uh people who have addictions and things like that. I see how there are some people who can never be rehabilitated. Their minds are too far gone. They are the walking dead. I see them in the towns around me. that level of stuper, nobody

Speaker A

comes back. And the technological stuper that people are being induced into is fast approaching that kind. So yeah, even if there are more people awakening, there are far more people going even deeper asleep than they were before in

Speaker A

my opinion. So I don't really know how it all where it all hangs in the balance, but I know what my part in this whole drama is. is to contribute to the energy that awakens rather than puts you

Speaker A

to asleep. Do you have time for about three more quick questions? Yeah, I got all kinds of time. Awesome, man. This one kind of relates to what you were just saying about the stuper. So, you mentioned to me yesterday actually about how noticing

Speaker A

being is easy, but the difficult thing is to see everything that pulls us away from pure being. something like that.

Speaker A

I'm paraphrasing. I wonder if you could expand on that idea. Um, feels related to what you just said about the technological stuper in the age of distraction.

Speaker A

Well, they call it an attention economy. Why do they call it an attention economy? Because attention is the fundamental currency that the entire world runs on. It's not the US dollar.

Speaker A

It's not fiat currency. It's not even crypto. It's not Bitcoin. attention. If I own your attention, I own you. It's very simple. You are a slave to me. I can get you to do whatever I want. I can get you to buy

Speaker A

whatever I want. I can get you to live the way I want you to live. It's attention that is the main currency.

Speaker A

Now when your attention is directed towards being directed back to the source of who you are, the divine god, call it whatever you want. Then it is not directed towards the thousand agents outside agents of the matrix that are

Speaker A

trying to suck it from you and claim it as theirs. Attention is power. The more attention you have, the more powerful you are. The reason Google is more so powerful, open AI is so powerful, Facebook is so powerful is because they

Speaker A

have captured maximum attention on this planet. Okay? Being is also vying for your attention. It's competing with Facebook and OpenAI and all of that. But it does it in a very subtle way. It simply calls you. Doesn't offer

Speaker A

you anything. It doesn't say you'll have better stock options. It doesn't say you'll be popular. It doesn't say you'll have fame. It doesn't say you'll live a life of passion and purpose. It doesn't say any of the things that the corporate

Speaker A

or cultural uh you know rhetoric is saying to you in order to captivate your attention. It simply calls. Doesn't even call you by name. It just simply whispers, "Listen." Now, here's the beautiful thing right?

Speaker A

is you've got this soft inner voice whispering and then you've got a world screaming at you, demanding your attention, cajoling you, selling you, marketing you, seducing you, just everything they're capable of.

Speaker A

Just tentacles coming at you, come to me, buy me, do this. And then there's this soft voice saying remember remember and that the deep is calling to you right? So this is the beautiful thing is being God is evident at all

Speaker A

time but God is drowned out by the world. And it all depends on what you truly desire. Because if you truly desire union with the divine and eventually that single whisper, it's the silence. It's it goes louder and louder and starts rushing and

Speaker A

the all the voice of the world begin getting drowned out and that silence just rushes like a hurricane in your ears and you can feel it, right? You can feel it. You can feel that resonance in your body. And this is the

Speaker A

juxiposition. This is the gauntlet we're here to run. This is the challenge. This is the purpose. That's all it is. The world will just keep getting louder. How much can you pay attention to that which is truly you? Man, that was beautifully said.

Speaker A

That was Yeah. One of my favorite things you said today and it it reminds me of uh I've said before that the modern world is like a spiritual obstacle course in a way. We are inundated and surrounded by vices and garbage and

Speaker A

distractions and attention traps of every kind. So it really does require cultivating you know a lot of remembrance and a lot of awareness and a lot of discipline to be able to navigate skillfully at this time. So it can be

Speaker A

seen as a great catalyst for you know the path of you know the warrior of awareness if you absolutely if you see it that way and I was going to say too that it's kind of fun once you reach a

Speaker A

certain depth of being able to see from silence or from as radiance then you can even see the the fascination and the the comic absurdity of all these distractions and all all of this slop that we're surrounded with even that you

Speaker A

can you can find even God in that and see this kind of funny joke of like wow this is what is occupying the the human hive mind this is what is you know slathering around the corners of the

Speaker A

internet and it's it's somehow like all redeemed in the light of you know the cosmic joke and the cosmic silence um you could say well and that's exactly it first you have to disbelieve before you can laugh because

Speaker A

laughter after is a sign that you're no longer afraid. You don't take it seriously. You see it all as harmless. We don't laugh when we feel there's harm around us. There might be nervous laughter, but that's not the

Speaker A

kind of not laughter. I'm talking about real laughing. You laugh when you feel existentially safe. In order to laugh at this whatever this is that's happening on this stage of life, this drama of life, you first have to disbelieve

Speaker A

what's happening. Because until you disbelieve, you're not really laughing at the thing. You're laughing along with the story line. So when it's funny, you're laughing. But when it gets dark, you're not laughing anymore. And in order to laugh at anything, you need

Speaker A

to feel a sense of existential safety, right? Because otherwise, you know, if you're laughing at something which feels unsafe, it's it's nervous laughter. It's not genuine laughter. We genuinely laugh when we feel safe and comfortable, you know, with friends or or at a comedy

Speaker A

club, whatever. We're we're genuinely laughing because we feel safe in our own space to do it. And that kind of existential sticky when you're laughing at life and the way it's unfurling, especially the the dramatic or or distressing parts of it, that means your

Speaker A

sense of being is no longer anchored in the events of life. It's anchored in the fact of being itself. And then you can laugh even into the moment when people would traditionally like worry or be afraid. They can be laughter at the

Speaker A

absurdity of this whole thing unfolding. Yeah, well said. Kind of reminds me of one time I asked Peter Brown, "What is the enlightened view of politics?" And he just said entertainment. That's that's seems resonant with what you're saying. I

Speaker A

would say that's the enlightened view of spirituality as well. I've called it that too. I've I've called it a form of entertainment, especially the way the culture manifests. At some level, it is a form of entertainment as is politics.

Speaker A

I wanted to ask you, what were your favorite stories as a child or your favorite alltime stories in your life? You know, it's so funny. Whenever I'm asked to reflect on my childhood, it I feels like I'm reflecting on someone else's life.

Speaker A

My past, my past is not something I think about. So, even though I'm not very old, okay, it does feel like it's like lifetimes ago and I'm like reaching into some nebulous cloud of memories to try and pick one out for you.

Speaker A

But some of my earliest memories of books that I loved reading, you know, were the Narnia series because there's something mystical and spiritual about that whole world of the medicine and the whole representation of the divine in the form

Speaker A

of the lion and the whole metaphysical quality which was somewhat predicated upon his Christian beliefs.

Speaker A

of that beyond realm that a lot of these characters eventually transcend to where where life continues in another form. It just deeply appealed to me as a young child. I think probably around 98 or nine. Uh it just resonated in a way that

Speaker A

you know I was not indoctrinated into me but it just felt beautiful. Yeah. For me, the Harry Potter series did that, and I'm currently rereading it, and I'm finding so much joy rereading it. So, perhaps a a humble invitation to consider

Speaker A

rereading The Chronicles of Narnia. You might find some some hidden keystones in there that that unlock something. Um, one final question for you, Shiv. If you had an opportunity to send one message to everyone in the world in this moment,

Speaker A

what would that message be? Well, it's I have been sending that message for 10 years now through my writings, right? It's simply to trust your own experience because that is where the root of being is. It's only in your direct

Speaker A

experience. The root of being is not in somebody else's version of it. No matter how beautiful that version might be, it is in your own subjective experience.

Speaker A

Even your interpretation of that person's experience is your own subjective experience. So that direct experience, no matter how dull, no matter how boring, no matter how depressing, you know, it may not be fireworks, right? We all want fireworks.

Speaker A

We all want a sunny day, but sometimes it's a cloudy day. Sometimes it's a rainy day. Sometimes it's a shitty day.

Speaker A

You don't have to wait for the clouds to pass to see the truth of what this is.

Speaker A

It's here right now present in every single moment. And the very fact that you can enter it through the darkness of depression just as effectively as you can enter it through the beauty of bliss says that it's neither the bliss

Speaker A

nor the depression. Right? It's something beyond both. So that's an invitation for people not to place conditions on reality because reality places no conditions on you. It allows you to exist as you are. It accepts you as you are and that's evidenced by the

Speaker A

very fact of your existence. All that is waiting is for us to reciprocate with the same unconditional acceptance.

Speaker A

Allow what is to simply be. Don't assume you know what this is. Don't assume you know what needs to be done about it. There's actions can that can be taken but take them with the humility of knowing that this is to the

Speaker A

extent that you might understand it but there may be more depth to this that you don't perceive and so your actions may not be fruitful in the way you expect them to because you don't know the whole picture. You know, if we just I think as

Speaker A

a human society operated with certain amount of humility, I don't think you'd see the kind of polarization you see in society today, the kind of hatred, the kind of opposition. Because all of that comes from a fundamental assumption that

Speaker A

I know what reality should look like and you don't and therefore you're the problem. But what if not nobody knows what reality looks like? What are we arguing about then? like the blind men arguing over the shape of the elephant,

Speaker A

right? Beautifully said, man. And speaking of synchronicities, there's been a deer that appeared in the backyard for the last like half hour of our call or something. So, take that as an auspicious sign. And and where can people find more about your work if

Speaker A

they're curious about it? Yeah. and and maybe you can share the links at the end as well uh on the actual video, but potentially my website is advitalahholics.com and that's where you know there's a little bit of an

Speaker A

introduction to me, my work, my books and my Substack, my Substack itself is called Dark Knight of the Soul and that's where I do most of my writing now. Um, and so people are free to go on there and read some some of my work. And

Speaker A

now, as I mentioned to you earlier, I've started a second I call chat with GPT where I'm having dialectic dialogues with AI. So that's just begun recently.

Speaker A

So I'm looking forward to that. I also have a YouTube channel called spiritually incorrect with shifts and grip where I've done had a lot of these kinds of conversations with uh people like Joan like you mentioned and others

Speaker A

uh and I've also you know had done some of my readings of my articles. I've done some musings and things like that. So just a little collection of different forms of expression in a different video audio format. So those are some places

Speaker A

where people can be introduced to my work. Awesome my friend. Well, thank you so much. It's really been a joy to speak today and connect. Take take Absolutely, Jordan. Yeah, highly enjoyed.

Topics:Shiv Senguptarealitymysticismunknownspiritualityawakeningfear and fascinationshadow integrationAdvaitaphilosophy

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