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What's up folks?
Today's episode is on the long awaited magician archetype.
If you're in the Masked Underground group,
You'll know I posted a poll.
It must have been almost two months ago of what is the next episode you want me to focus on or the next topic you want me to cover.
The overwhelming response was to focus on the magician archetype,
To do the magician archetype episode.
It's taken me a long time,
I admit,
But one of the reasons why it's taken me so long is that I had to make some decisions of how to speak about this because the magician archetype,
If you don't know what we're talking about,
I am taking the term from Gillette and Moore's book King,
War,
And Magician Lover.
We're not going to focus on their lens of the magician so much,
But essentially the magician archetype is the part of your psyche responsible for creativity,
Self-expression,
Meaning making,
The narrative of your life,
Spirituality,
And heightening,
Summoning,
Integrating this part of your psyche,
This part of your unconscious will aid you in these elements of your life.
Creativity,
Self-expression,
Meaning making,
But also the spirituality piece.
This is what,
Before I really dug into this,
I had to make a decision.
On the one hand,
I can speak about the magician from a very grounded,
Life-hacky perspective of like,
Oh yeah,
That's magic stuff.
It's a metaphor for creativity.
In many ways,
That's very accurate.
If you look at many of the mythological tales of magicians,
Merlins,
Shamans,
Supernatural forces,
Almost all of that can be used as a metaphor for some emotional experience,
Some element of the hero's journey that you experience in your life,
Even though the events are obviously not the same.
There's also another way to look at the magician archetype or another way to look at magic with quotes on it,
Which is the more spiritual side,
The less grounded side of manifestation.
This is where people who are into the law of attraction spend a lot of their brain power and stuff and I was hesitant because if you listen to the podcast,
I try to focus on what is practical,
Even though I do go deep into philosophy,
I try to stay grounded.
I spent a lot of time in spiritual communities.
There's danger in becoming that untethered from material reality.
However,
As is one of the main points that we will get into in cultivating your creative potential that is high fidelity truth and for me to really be honest and vulnerable,
I do have to admit there are a fair number of magical beliefs that I hold.
In more grounded language,
There are some unprovable things that I believe to be true and I would be lying if I pretended I didn't believe they were true.
So I'm going to try to speak to both ones.
So if you're someone who like magic is only useful to you as a metaphor,
Magic with quotes around it,
Please take everything I'm saying because we are going to talk about certain elements of occultism drawing from like Aleister Crowley's work,
Peter Carroll,
One of his books Librenal,
I'm going to actually quote a few times here.
If all of that stuff seems like hocus pocus,
Please just translate it into metaphor,
Everything we're going to speak about in terms of quote unquote manifestation which I actually hate as a term,
I'd rather call it something else but making your intentions come true can be translated into the creative process.
However,
If you are into that spiritual stuff,
Please feel free to take it a little bit more literally.
However,
My word of warning to everyone is when you're trying on a belief that can't be proved,
Just remember it's an unprovable belief.
It doesn't mean it's not useful but it's a lot of people have gone mad and insane and gone deep into delusion by taking certain unprovable things a little too seriously.
So with that,
We're going to jump in.
This is the magician archetype.
Roll those intro music.
So with every episode,
I'd like to start with a story and this is another thing where I had a lot of options.
I've been working on this history show,
The History of Men series and I had some good examples at a story of Genghis Khan,
One of his first battles were won because he brought his shamans,
The Mongols were animist people and he brought his shamans,
His enemy brought their shamans and somehow a thunderstorm came about right in the beginning of it and everyone believed that the gods were on the side of Genghis Khan's shamans.
So the other side panicked and routed and now is it.
This was something that was a magical belief,
A perception that caused a real change in reality.
I had some other stories similar to that like Crazy Horse is a historical character I really believe in.
He had a vision that he would never ever be harmed in battle and that's exactly what happened.
He was actually killed by one of his own people.
But actually,
And actually there's many war stories where magic or magical thinking has had a real effect on the tide of events.
I can list a few others but I actually wanted to start with a story that I've already told because it's actually the most meaningful to me and actually highlights most of the principles that I want to zone in on here.
So I told part of the story already in the Lover archetype episode of how I met the love of my life or how I've connected with the love of my life.
But I didn't highlight certain elements of the story that are more magician.
So essentially I told the details in the Lover archetype but essentially my girlfriend and I,
We've known each other for years.
We met kind of in passing and then we went to different continents and it just never seemed like we would necessarily meet again but we were connected on social media.
And for years,
Every time I would see her on social media,
I would think,
Man,
It would be great to be with a woman like that.
I didn't think I want to be with her.
I wasn't attached to her.
I was attached to the,
Not even attached,
I just felt desire for the idea of her.
And actually I found out later she had a similar thing.
When we would briefly interact on social media,
It was fairly platonic,
It was fairly PG.
She had the same feeling of like,
Man,
I would love to be with a guy like me.
And there's something about this lack of attachment that as we fast forward through the experience of where we actually professed our attraction to each other,
This is back in September.
Nowadays we look at it now,
I mean,
Six months later we look at it and it's like something about the fact that we really felt this desire but it was not attached.
It was like,
It's like to use the law of attraction language,
It's like we said it and then forget it.
And somehow over the course of the events that we connected during the height of COVID,
Somehow with even with the world making it so hard to travel and like so many roadblocks,
We had all of these synchronicities,
Which are synchronicities being in Jung's terminology,
A matching of your internal experience to your external experience in a way that seems unlikely.
We had all these synchronicities with travel specifically where she was able to get here.
There's a two week window where someone can fly from where she was at to where I was at.
You know,
She had to fly through Peru to Holland to here and it's literally only a two week window where this was possible because right beforehand everything was shut down,
Right afterwards everything was shut down,
Like she actually got in right in the perfect moment.
And it's,
Even though it could be coincidence looking at this from a purely rational perspective,
There's some,
I mean it's hard,
It's almost impossible to not think like,
Man,
This was like divinely inspired,
Like,
Like it's so unlikely that the timing would work out so perfectly.
Obviously this is subjective meaning,
Important point,
But there's something that is,
It's impossible for the two of us to not see this as something magical or divine or predestined or something,
Right?
Now,
I want to highlight to you,
Dear listener,
This probably means nothing,
Right?
You might think,
Oh,
That's cool,
But like it doesn't have a meaning to you.
Meaning is subjective and that's something critically important to understand as far as,
As far as playing with magic with quotes around it.
This was actually the most subjectively meaningful outcome because as I spoke about in the lover archetype,
Like this desire I've had my entire life since boyhood was to be really with someone I really love.
And that's why I look at all of my,
Like my adventures in relationships and dating and sexuality and intimacy.
They're the kind of,
I mean,
I could look back now and string a clear narrative,
A hero's journey of finding now the love of my life.
But the final point I want to bring with this,
Cause we're going to hit on all of these points throughout this episode is,
Well one,
The first moment we saw each other,
Like when she got out of quarantine and we met in my hotel room,
We embraced,
We kissed.
It was,
It was this amazing moment.
And at the same moment we both said,
Wow,
You're real.
And that feel,
And we laughed of course,
And it was funny that we said the same thing at the same time,
But that kind of enchantment,
That enchantment feeling,
That is the crux of what we're going to be referring to as magic.
Whether you're going from the grounded lens of like the creative process,
The artist's way to perhaps something more spiritual of conjuring certain events in reality in both ways is true.
And the final bit is this entire relationship,
Probably because of all these synchronicities and all these things that happened has allowed,
We both have this experience and we use this term a lot with each other that like our relationship feels like home.
Like it feels like returning home,
Coming back to something familiar,
Even though we've only recently connected in this way.
So I tell this story,
There's a lot of other stories I could have told about synchronicities of times that I wanted this or like money or certain events or whatever.
And then synchronicities happen.
In fact,
I'm sure if you think in your own life,
Even if you're not a spiritually minded person,
I bet you can think of times where you thought of something and then it happened.
It was crazy synchronicistic or very unlikely we should say.
I'm focusing on,
I picked this one because of the deep subjective meaning.
And so I tell the story to share some points that we're going to keep returning to throughout this magician archetype experience.
But we need to start with the definition.
What is the magician archetype?
Very clearly I have to put it in one sentence.
The magician archetype is the part of your psyche that brings your intentions into real form.
So again,
You could take this as the creative process,
You come up with idea,
You write it,
That's magic of a sense.
You could also take it on the other end of like you're dreaming of a certain outcome and then things randomly align and it happens.
We could also look at,
I mean all of these things we can break down in different ways,
But essentially magic is this experience of subjective meaning of interesting intention.
And the last thing I'll say on the magician archetype as a concept,
And one of the reasons why I had to do this last out of the four Gillette Moore archetypes is that every other archetype can kind of fit as a part in the hero's journey.
The hero's journey is largely the path of the warrior,
Like picking some external goal and working through it in material reality.
For most men,
The king archetype is what occurs towards the end of a given hero's journey where he's conquered something,
He's established his power,
He's then moving into a new level of responsibility,
Returning to the shire as a hero or whatever.
The lover is kind of like the B storyline of the hero's journey.
It's the side quest,
It's the,
If you think of the hero's journey from a masculine perspective,
The lover archetype is his connection to his anima,
It's his connection to the manic pixie dream girl or the love interest who teaches him lessons about life while he's conquering life or taking on challenges in life.
The magician is a little different because the magician isn't really in the story.
We could say that the magician is often portrayed by the mentor in a given story,
But in terms of your life journey,
The magician archetype is not in the story.
The magician archetype is the part of your psyche that writes the story.
We can keep going into narrative and this reeves in perfectly with the process of writing because if you think of your life as a story or as a movie,
The magician is the part of you deep in your unconscious that writes the events.
You can take this on a spiritual level of like there's a part of you,
Maybe you're Damon or your higher self that's writing all these events for you or you can take it on the other end of like the magician is the part of your psyche that creates meaning perhaps in reverse to make the events of your life make sense.
That's probably more of a grounded psychological way of looking at it.
Either way,
I'd say same thing.
The magician is the meaning making part of your life.
So we need to define a few things and we're actually going to take this episode in two parts.
First is defining and really understanding what magic is in terms of the creative process and two of how to actually cultivate creative potential and be a magician.
So first,
As we've spoken,
The magician is the story writer.
So in many ways,
If you compare this to the warrior archetype,
The magician is kind of the immaterial counterpart.
The warrior is what moves things in physical reality.
The magician doesn't really touch material reality.
So I'm just going to give you a simple example,
A little bit of a cheeky example.
If I pick up this soda water and I move it across in front of me,
That's definitely not magic.
So it's like,
Whoa,
I can't believe you did that.
If you want to be a little cheeky,
It's kind of the realm of the warrior,
Of using my muscles to assert will against this object and moving it in accordance with my intention.
But that's not magic.
Why is it not magic?
Because I am physically doing something.
The cause and effect is very obvious.
However,
If I'm just here and you're looking at me on the screen and if you're watching the video of this and this bottle just levitates in front of me without my hands touching it and flies across the screen,
That's pretty magical.
That would be pretty astounding.
For a more realistic example,
If I reach into your pocket and pull out your wallet and take a hundred dollars out and put it in my pocket,
That's also not magic.
In fact,
That's probably very much tied to the realm of the warrior.
You'd probably punch me in the face and we'd get into a fight and that's probably what would happen.
No magic there.
Here causes and effects of how that hundred dollar bill ended up in my pocket.
However,
If I say some words that means if I make sounds out of my face that means something to your language center and through this process of just sharing ideas,
Doing nothing physically,
You reach into your pocket and pull out your wallet and give me your hundred dollars,
That's a little bit more magical.
Now we can look at this in different ways like if the words that I said could be considered a salesmanship,
Maybe I convinced you like,
Hey,
Buy this soda water for me.
It's worth so much more than a hundred dollars for you.
It's going to give you these benefits and you believe me.
Whether or not it's true,
Not talking about ethics or morality,
But if you believe that it's true and you give me that money through my words,
That's a little bit more magical.
If I do it through some sort of oratory appeal of like you need to give this hundred dollars because there's kids starving here and it matters whether or not I'm telling the truth,
If you believe me and you feel like this has to happen and you pull out your hundred dollars and you give it to me without any physical effort on my part,
That's a little magical too.
If I do this through propaganda of convincing you that this has to happen for our country's war effort or if I convinced you through religious authority that if you don't give me a hundred dollars,
God will damn you to hell or something like that or God wants you to give me a hundred dollars regardless of whether it's true,
Regardless of whether this ethical,
We're not thinking about morality,
We're not even thinking about that.
If you believe it's true and you do it,
That's basically magic.
And finally,
If I do something like hypnotize you and cast a spell on you and you become a zombie and give me your money,
That's also kind of magical.
I'm illustrating this point because essentially what we're going to define as magic is creating a real effect on reality without an obvious physical cause.
That's the difference.
And we can look at this in the creative lens,
We can look at it from a kind of a mystical lens.
Let's go back to the creative lens for a second.
Let's stay grounded.
The Mona Lisa or pick some famous painting,
Most people believe,
Perceive that this is a meaningful configuration of matter.
The paint that Da Vinci put together to make the Mona Lisa isn't worth a lot,
But the Mona Lisa in the configuration that it is,
With every paint molecule where it is,
With every brush stroke that put it together,
Makes it incredibly valuable.
I have no idea how much it's worth,
But a lot of people perceive it to be valuable.
A lot of people get a real effect from beautiful art.
Even if you,
Any valuable art piece,
If you reduce it down to material,
It's almost,
It's probably very low value.
But in the configuration that it is,
It's super valuable.
It has a lot of meaning,
It has a real effect on people.
So what is this?
What is this exactly?
So essentially what the magician,
The magician's tools are belief and meaning.
And essentially what the magician does or what anyone does to create meaning,
To create narrative in your life is reducing entropy.
So if you're in the mascot underground group,
I actually did a whole episode just on entropy.
It came actually from some ideas I had after eating an edible.
Ended up being a little bit too abstract.
And also the recording didn't come out well because I'm using a new microphone and I'm a loud American speaker.
And anyway,
I deleted that.
But I'm wondering this whole thing of like,
What creates meaning from anyone's subjective perception is a reduction of entropy.
Entropy is randomness,
Right?
Throughout life there's all these random stimuli.
I mean,
We can think of,
You know,
Reality is a soup of energy and matter.
However,
Certain configurations mean more to us,
Right?
Like if we have a 300 page book and we shuffle up all the pages,
There are almost infinite.
There's hundreds of thousands of configurations where these pages mean nothing to us.
But there's one configuration where,
You know,
If you actually ordered it from one to 300 where it's meaningful.
Things are meaningful when they have less likely permutations,
Right?
So like for instance,
At the opening story,
Like the fact that my girlfriend was able to get on a plane in the exact tiny window that it fit,
That seems magical.
That seems meaningful because that's something that matters to me.
Essentially,
If you want to look at it from a psychological perspective,
Things are meaningful.
Excuse me.
We feel a sense of security when we can see patterns that match something that means something to us.
So one example I gave in that style episode that I deleted was one of the reasons why little kids like to rewatch the same movie over and over again is because for a little kid,
For a four year old,
Life seems so random.
They don't have enough experiences to know what things mean something and what things don't.
Like,
So to just watch the same movie,
To watch the Lion King over for like the 500th time,
It gives them a sense of security because in this soup of stuff,
Like,
You know,
The first time they see a certain animal,
They don't know if it's a common animal or not.
Everything is new to them.
To see something that they can recognize gives a sense of peace.
It gives a sense of meaning.
So meaning is anything with a lower entropy,
A less likely permutation of reality that gives us something that matters to us.
And just,
You know,
This thing on,
You know,
This,
Anyway,
I don't want to keep repeating myself.
So when it comes to creative quality,
Even though creative quality is subjective and specifically because it's subjective,
Anything that's considered good art,
For instance,
Or good oratory or good writing is a reduction in entropy,
Low entropy,
Timothy Leary used the word negentropy to just be the opposite of entropy,
A reduction of entropy that means something to the person consuming it.
That's essentially it.
I know that we're getting a little nerdy here,
But I think this is important to understand of like the creative process in magic.
So and all of this comes down to value perception.
So for a totally different realm where this is true,
We're kind of in the age of the magician in a sense because value,
Never before in history has value been so separated from matter,
Right?
Like once upon a time,
Money was way more in the realm of the warrior,
Like money was gold or money was bushels of corn or something.
Now we're in a place,
Especially I've been playing around with crypto,
Some of these things with cryptocurrency,
I'm not an expert by any means,
But like it's so ridiculous,
It's like there's this thing called NFTs,
If you're familiar with crypto,
You know I'm going to give a layman's explanation.
An NFT,
A non-fungible token is basically creating a scarce property with something that doesn't physically exist.
So like there's actually this NFT that I'm thinking of investing in,
These are essentially possessions that exist only in the blockchain,
Right?
So like Grimes,
The musician,
She put one of her albums out on an NFT,
Which means you can pay to have this,
To have like ownership in quotes of her album,
But it only exists in the blockchain,
Right?
And there's this NFT I'm thinking of investing in where they're basically making baseball cards,
Which I mean I used to collect baseball cards as a kid,
They're basically making baseball cards that only exist in the blockchain.
And I mean I don't want to get too deep into this,
This is where you know your magician mind can like just spin out,
But essentially where value is becoming so separated,
Like if you look at one of the big criticisms of cryptocurrency is that it doesn't actually affect real matter,
You know it's value is completely based on perception,
But the argument against that is that all value has always been based on perception.
The point,
You know we're going to bring this back to something more simple,
The thing to understand as far as the magician archetype is that information,
You know our perception of what configurations,
What permutations of reality mean something is subjective and it can act independently of matter.
So for a different example,
You probably heard this statistic before,
But the cells in your body completely regenerate every seven years,
Right?
Like I think different parts of your body regenerate at different rates,
I don't remember exactly what it is,
But like I think every four years all of your skin cells are replenished,
I mean different organs completely regenerate themselves,
You know like cells are dying and cells are being created all the time,
Every seven years all the living cells in your body have completely regenerated,
Meaning there's not a single molecule that's in your body right now that existed in your body seven years ago.
However,
Even though the matter that makes up you is completely different,
The organization of you,
The being of you,
The meaning of you is still the same,
Like the consciousness that inhabits this matter that constantly is filtering out exists,
Like so there's some configuration,
There's something we can conceptualize it as an energy body if you want to go spiritual or like there's a sequence of,
There's an organization of matter that means something,
That means you as a human being,
Right?
So this is the realm of the magician where you're seeing that there are configurations of meaning that can be applied to matter but they can act independently of matter.
Cryptocurrency is something where like it's completely disconnected from matter,
But we can also see this in things like propaganda and creativity.
Going back to the art example,
The molecules of paint that make up the Mona Lisa are almost worthless but in a configuration that Da Vinci put it in,
It's incredibly valuable.
So what does this mean to you?
Like you might be,
Alright,
We're nerding out a little bit,
How is this applicable to you?
As I mentioned earlier,
The magician archetype is the part of your psyche that makes meaning.
A lot of people,
Especially in personal development,
Sometimes like attack this idea of like creating stories like you'll often hear coaches sometimes say like,
Oh,
Like you're attached to this story of the victim,
Right?
And all of that's true,
Part of being the magician is recognizing stories and rewriting stories.
But essentially the magician's value to you is that it weaves the narrative of your life.
Essentially your life story,
Your perception of the hero's journey of going through whatever struggles you're going through,
Like we spoke about the road of trials a couple of weeks ago.
I got a lot of positive feedback,
I got a lot of people message me about the road of trials episode.
I think,
I mean a lot of people said like it helped them through a hard moment because essentially in one perception,
People who are in a hard time got to re-narrate what the hard time was,
Right?
They can reframe it as like Tony Robbins or the NLP terminology of like reassigning meaning to the same events,
Right?
A lot of people reached out to me who are like struggling right now,
Who are like frustrated or creatively stuck.
By listening to the road of trials episode,
They got to,
Nothing changed in their actual reality in the moment,
They got to re-write the narrative of what this hard time in their life means and move through it because of a change in meaning.
So like this is the power of the magician.
This is why like understanding these configurations of like what permutations mean something to you,
Why this all matters,
Right?
It's not just nerding out about reality or going to LSD brain,
Although we're going to talk about that in a second.
Let me just make sure I didn't miss anything.
The narrative of your life is the string of value perceptions or significant feelings that you put in order,
Right?
The reason why we are all so drawn to stories is that when we watch a hero's journey in fiction,
It resonates with the string of meanings that is kind of embedded in our unconscious as the way that we should be progressing as a being,
As a soul if you will or a consciousness.
Without the magician archetype,
Life is totally just a bunch of random stimuli.
You can see one of the reasons again why kids like to repeat watching the same videos over and singing the same songs is that that's kind of the magician archetype forming of like,
Hey,
This is a meaningful configuration because otherwise life is too random.
It's like a little random story.
Actually this always happens to me on LSD,
Sometimes when I'm on mushrooms too,
Right when the trip is coming on,
Whatever we could call it my magician archetype expanding or something or actually what my experience is,
I start to forget all the meanings that mean something,
Right?
It's not that I forget how to speak,
It's not that I forget how to move or do things or what base reality is,
But I forget all the meanings and this happens almost every time on acid where I forget the names of the people I'm with,
I forget my name,
I forget my identity,
I forget all the labels because the magician archetype is putting labels on things to make meaning.
I forget all of these things and I forget why people do things and there's always an experience that is always funny to look back on,
But it's kind of terrifying where I don't know what meanings to make of anything,
So everything seems so random.
I told a story on Instagram,
But on my 26th birthday I think I did a bunch of acid with my then girlfriend and she actually didn't do it.
She wanted to have sex.
I ended up going down on her and I ended up peaking right when I started peaking while going down on her and while I was in the process of it,
I totally forgot the point of what we were doing.
I forgot why I even have a face.
What is the point of all of this?
It became so ridiculous to me that we are shaped in the way that we are and I would put this hole on that hole.
What is the point of that?
That's essentially all of the meanings I've created over my life being washed away so that you could create new meanings,
Which is why a lot of people are able to find,
They can rewrite their stories when guided properly on psychedelics because psychedelics,
Neil Goldsmith who was on the podcast years ago said what psychedelics do is they make your old layers become translucent,
So you can see through them and rearrange them and perhaps make new meanings.
This is going to be our transition into the second part of this episode.
Beneath the magician archetype,
And this actually can be seen in western occultism in the tarot card deck,
Beneath the magician archetype or before the magician archetype,
The foundation of the magician archetype is the fool archetype.
In the tarot deck,
The magician is number one,
Is the first card in the major arcana.
The fool is zero.
Actually the major arcana,
I don't know a ton about tarot and I'm not into divination on cards necessarily,
But kind of like Carl Jung and maybe because of Carl Jung,
I really appreciate the symbols that are in tarot.
The major arcana,
Which are like the numbered cards that don't have suits in a tarot deck,
Follow what's called the fool's journey or the magician's journey,
Which is supposed to show the evolution of consciousness from one archetype to the next,
And actually Timothy Leary has a whole book on this,
I'm forgetting the name of it,
But he goes through each one and how each card in the tarot deck represents a stage of consciousness.
The fool is the most,
You know,
People think of the fool as this negative thing,
If like the fool doesn't know anything,
But the fool actually recognizes the reality beneath all of the narratives.
So the magician is the part of you,
Or the experience of writing,
Consciously writing narratives.
Like if you want to think,
I do like thinking of like there's a part of my unconscious that kind of writes my life story to give it interest in meaning.
In times that I'm stuck,
Perhaps I'm not working with the director of my life properly.
Me,
My ego being the actor,
The director's trying to guide the story one way and I'm fighting it,
That's what causes suffering or pain,
As opposed to,
As I mentioned,
The Road to Prellis episode,
Moving through it because,
You know,
This challenge has been presented to make life interesting.
But the fool,
The fool is a part of consciousness even beneath that.
The fool is the part that recognizes that everything the magician writes for the things that come later are just a story,
Right?
Beneath of all the meanings that we make,
Deeper than all the meanings,
Is a reality that's more real.
And I know we're getting a little,
We're getting maybe a little spiritual,
But this is,
I think,
A very useful process also for the creative process.
The fool is a part of you that can take you out of the story or pop out of the movie theater,
Right?
So like,
You know,
Stories aren't bad and sometimes it's useful or fun to descend your consciousness and the example I like to use is if you're watching a scary movie and you like scary movies and you want to be scared by the movie because that's the experience you want to have,
It doesn't help to watch the movie and think,
Oh,
That's just a special effect.
Oh,
This,
This person,
She's not really dying.
She was in another comedy that I saw last week.
Her name is blah,
Blah,
Blah.
Like if you,
If you constantly break the scene and like look at what's beyond the scene,
You're not going to enjoy the movie,
Right?
To really enjoy a movie,
You have to enter the reality of the movie.
However,
If you are stuck in the reality of the movie and you're so terrified and it's just becoming a very unpleasant experience,
It's very useful to remember,
Hey,
Step outside of the screen.
It's just a movie.
That part of you is the fool.
The fool essentially,
And if you look at a tarot card of the fool,
The fool is to use usually doing something dangerous.
Like the fool is often like this,
Usually represented by a happy-go-lucky youth,
Usually hanging over a cliff or doing something that all of us know is a really dangerous thing,
But to them it seems oblivious.
It's not because it's oblivious.
The fool archetype recognizes,
You know what,
This,
This material reality that we live for these stories,
It doesn't really matter.
Like nothing really,
I mean,
I might fall and die,
But everything's going to really be okay because there's some other immaterial realm that I belong to,
Right?
And this is,
This is the innocence that we see in children.
It's often represented by trickster heroes in films,
Right?
Like in Looney Tunes,
Almost all the heroes,
Bugs Bunny,
I can't think of anyone else,
Bugs Bunny,
The Roadrunner,
They're all trickster archetypes.
They're all trickster heroes that do all these seemingly impossible things or dangerous things fearlessly because they recognize that reality is not what it appears to be.
I know it's maybe a deeper way of looking at Looney Tunes,
But that is,
That is why it resonates with us.
Actually a great example or a real life example,
If you're an MMA fan,
Last weekend Kevin Holland fought Derek Brunson.
Kevin Holland's so fun to watch because even when he's losing,
Even when he's getting his ass kicked,
He's making jokes and he's not taking the loss seriously.
And actually a lot of people criticize him because he just lost actually perhaps by not taking it seriously.
People criticize him because all that joking is really cool and really fun when you still win,
But when you don't win,
It's just not funny actually.
But still,
He represents the trickster archetype in sports because he doesn't take the material things so seriously so he can maintain a sense of humor.
Sense of humor is something we're going to get back to in terms of rewriting your life.
Which brings us to part two of this episode,
Which is removing resistance.
So for someone to really be creative,
If you just look at writing for instance,
You got to be able to overcome writer's block.
For someone to really intend their vision,
Their outcomes into being,
You have to be able to remove whatever,
And this is a spiritual way of looking at it,
But you have to remove your emotional blocks to having the thing,
Whether you call it a fear of success or something more spiritual.
So the next section we're going to talk about that because before,
And actually real occultists like Aleister Crowley for instance or Peter Carroll,
They often warn that if you don't remove certain blocks of your ego or certain attachments,
Magic can get kind of dangerous.
I would translate this to mean if you try to do these complex things with your mind,
But you're trapped in resentment or you're trapped in small thinking or you have some sort of psychological blocks,
It actually can make you go crazy.
I've seen this happen with people who go really deep into spiritual lenses of reality,
But they're kind of trapped by fear so it ends up perverting into paranoia.
I knew this one guy,
I know this one guy who got really into this stuff,
He was a personal development junkie,
He wanted to be a life coach,
But he could not confront certain basic fears.
And because of that,
His mind,
He's a very smart guy,
His mind kind of morphed into this very false narrative where he literally,
It was kind of like,
He became kind of schizophrenic where he was sure that guys in black coats were out to get him.
Almost like the plot of A Beautiful Mind.
Like he would call me,
I've known this guy for years,
I actually don't know what he's up to now,
But he would call me and be like,
Those men in black coats are there again,
Like they're here to foil me.
He went very deep into delusions and is very sad because from my perspective it's obvious that his fears,
When empowered,
His fears basically combined with his very high intellect to create a story,
A very complex story that he believes to be real that obviously one is not real to the rest of us and two is very disempowering.
It's almost like he created a very complex way to justify not taking action on certain things which is a shame.
So if one is going to go deep into the unconscious minds to perform what we can call magic,
It's very important to clear a certain box.
So bringing us back to a more grounded lens,
If you just think about the creative process,
Let's just say being a writer,
Being some sort of artist,
Creator of some sort,
The creative process has two stages.
There's the conceptualization stage,
Like to put something out to the world,
Your mind has to be clear enough to identify,
Identify configuration of stuff whether you're imagining a written piece or imagining a video or imagining a painting,
Like there has to be some idea,
Some conceptualization that has to be clear enough that you can start to take action,
That's one,
And two,
You have to actually have the energy to put it into reality whether it's moving the brush stroke or starting the business or hitting record on the video or whatever.
Resistance can happen in two ways but I see a lot of people get stuck the most with the first one which is mental resistance,
Like they can't even conceptualize it long enough to take action.
This can show up as mental fog,
As ungroundedness.
I'll say this is what happens to me sometimes where I have a very exciting idea but my mind is in such diversion mode where I'm picking up all and making all these connections that it starts to spiral out and out and out and like,
Oh man,
I can't even explain what I'm thinking because it's so far,
Like that's something,
That's one of my,
I guess,
Issues or ongoing things that happen sometimes.
So let's start with this,
Resistance.
And actually I just want to go off of this,
The War of Art,
Which I think is the best book on creativity of all.
In The War of Art,
Steven Pressfield uses the term resistance with a capital R as making it the enemy of creativity.
And in many ways,
What he does for us as the reader,
And this is considered good marketing,
Is he identifies that term.
He makes resistance into a proper noun so we have something to focus on,
To in a sense blame or fight against in terms of our creative process.
In a sense,
Steven Pressfield is doing some magic of like,
For all of us who try to be creative or who are creative,
We all know the experience of like the creativity is just not flowing.
And sometimes it can be hard to explain or to even conceptualize.
Pressfield does us a huge favor and actually helps us simplify it by labeling it resistance.
So he's actually doing some magic.
He's acting as a magician to put a label on this thing so we can perceive it as real and attack it.
Actually,
On my last interview,
Episode 101 with Cam Sapa,
I asked him about the terminology he coined called dopamine fasting.
And dopamine fasting has been attacked by different people and whatever.
We talk about that in that episode.
But I asked him about if he thought much about the terminology because essentially he took a practice that has existed forever,
Basically cultivating attention,
Put a label on it,
And one of the benefits that he's given the world by putting a label on it,
Aside from his protocol of how to do it,
Is by putting a label on it,
He makes it easier for people to treat something as real.
When something has a label,
This is the realm of the magician,
When you add a label on something,
It becomes more real.
And that's what Pressfield does.
Anyway,
Resistance,
I'm going to use his term that he labeled as real,
Work off of his magic,
And labeling on enemies.
So what Pressfield doesn't get into is why resistance exists.
And maybe for some people you don't care why resistance exists,
But if you want to go on the total other end from a spiritual level,
It's kind of answering the question,
Why do bad things happen to good people as well?
I'm going to give you a belief that I believe that I feel is useful in understanding these things.
Actually,
It's a belief that can be very empowering in terms of your creative process,
But also navigating life in a way where you don't get emotionally stuck.
But I do want to make a distinction between provable beliefs and workable beliefs.
And this is,
I'm drawing from Catherine Macoon's book on becoming an alchemist,
Which is everything that we can consider magic or magical thinking or magic with quotes around it,
Typically is a workable belief,
Meaning by employing this belief,
You can get a desired effect,
But doesn't mean it's provable.
If something's provable,
That's in the realm of science.
Some things are both provable and workable.
Like dopamine fasting is something proven by science,
It's also a workable protocol.
But when you start to talk about things that are less and less material,
And I'd say the creative process is one,
Like creativity often feels magical,
Even if you're a total atheist,
Because it's just like,
Oh,
This idea,
This configuration of information,
Just where did it come from?
It came out of nowhere.
When we lean on things like that,
Or especially if we go into anything spiritual,
You start to come across beliefs that are definitely not provable.
If they're provable,
They'd be science,
But they are workable.
And I'm making this distinction again,
To keep us grounded of recognizing that some beliefs are simply useful.
I mean,
Jim Carrey had this in his,
He gave this commencement speech to,
I think it was Maharishi University,
Where he was saying like,
He was talking about the law of attraction or something.
And I can't prove any of that is true,
But I choose beliefs that I find useful for my life or something like that.
So this is a belief that I offer you,
That if you're wondering why the hell do bad things exist,
It's because the universe doesn't give a shit about good and bad.
And that's not the actual thing.
Resistance exists to counterbalance creativity,
Because nature wants everything in balance.
To a person,
An individual person who's making a subjective meaning,
A human-centric or egocentric meaning,
You're like,
Oh man,
Everything should happen.
Why do bad things happen if I did this thing as good?
Because nature,
The universe,
Does not have a definition of good and bad that us humans do.
I'm actually going to talk about the evolution of morality,
Because I think it's useful.
Nature doesn't give a shit.
Nature just wants things to continue,
And for things to continue,
They have to be in balance.
If creativity became unbridled,
Reality would fall apart,
In a sense.
The universe,
Nature is kind of indifferent to individual units,
But what it does want is a movement towards complexity.
And for a grounded example,
You could look at any ecosystem.
In a healthy ecosystem,
In a sustainable ecosystem,
In an ecosystem that will continue to have evolving life forms and where life will continue to exist,
There has to be a balance between predators and prey.
The gazelle can be like,
Oh,
Why does a lion eat me?
Well,
That's the only way it works,
Right?
If the lions didn't eat the gazelles,
There wouldn't be any more lions,
And nature wants things to exist.
But it's largely indifferent to morality,
Right?
Not to say you should go into this belief to the degree of nihilism,
But I find this is actually a very empowering idea of,
If you just think,
I think this is one of the solutions to entitlement,
This idea that,
Oh,
I should have this and this and this.
The universe doesn't give a shit about you.
Everything comes down to cause and effect and certain probabilities.
And if you can really accept that,
It takes away a lot of what I'm identifying as creative blocks like resentment,
Like loathing,
And we're going to talk about that in a second.
But to bring us back,
Because for most of us,
Even if you're atheistic in this age,
If you're an intellectual,
Very few people take old world religions seriously.
Even still,
Most of our perceptions of reality as a people are based on previous perceptions.
As I spoke about in the Breaking Social Constructions of Reality episode,
I think it came out in November last year,
We talk about this in more detail of how belief forms and moralities exist and how they've evolved to become better and better at controlling populations,
But at the expense of taking away individual creativity.
So we want to reclaim our creativity,
Recreate our ability to influence real events in life.
So I'm actually going to reference Peter Carroll's book,
Liburnal,
Where he broke this down in a very clear way historically,
Which I'm into.
He identified five stages of belief that humans have had.
So once upon a time,
The root of every culture's belief started with some version of animism or shamanism,
Where there's some belief in like there are forces of nature,
They're kind of indifferent to us,
But as people,
If we can align ourselves with these forces of nature,
We're going to be better off.
So I briefly told about telling the story of the Genghis Khan thing.
He had shamans and they did some prayers and then thunderstorms happened and they assigned the meaning of a week called in these thunderstorms or something like that.
You see,
Almost every culture starts with this because it's actually the closest to direct observation.
Why does rain happen?
I don't know,
But it just happens.
How can we work ourselves around that?
It's essentially the application of human meanings to stuff that just exists.
Astrology is one of the best examples of this.
Primitive peoples looked up at the sky,
They saw all these glowing dots,
But then they started to string things together and connect some of these dots and be like,
Oh,
That's okay,
That looks like a guy with a boat,
It's a Sagittarius.
This looks like a spoon,
Let's call it the Little Dipper.
It must represent plentifulness of cups or whatever meaning people assigned.
It's interesting because if you look at different cultures,
Different peoples identify different configurations in the same stars.
I don't know enough about this to know,
But I do know certain parts of the Little Dipper are part of another configuration,
Like another astrological thing.
It's not because these guys were less intelligent,
But they did have less access to technology.
But they were just trying to assign meanings in the same way that a little kid tries to watch the same thing to be like,
Okay,
This is something that matters.
They look at the stars,
They look at different elements and they assign meanings.
This gave way to paganism.
Animism is essentially,
It builds off of animism,
But it assigns more personified meanings.
So most pagan belief systems have personifications of these forces.
It's not just thunder energy coming out.
I just want to say actually,
This animism thing,
Taoism,
Which is not animism at all,
Has a similar function of like,
There is some flow to the universe and if you can align yourself with it,
You tend to do well.
If you fight against it,
You tend to do poorly.
This is perhaps an important creative principle.
Paganism takes us one step away from that of personifying these forces.
It's not just thunder because thunder energy is coming down.
It's that Thor is swinging his hammer or Zeus is throwing down a lightning bolt.
That is what they assigned meaning.
Then we start to see,
Of course,
Animism had amorality,
Things just are.
Emism had somewhat of a subjective morality of like,
Oh,
There is some personified force causing this thunder,
Causing this lightning.
How can we make him happy?
We start to see this sense of subjective morality where people are essentially trying to be good to these forces that they've personified.
How do we make the rain come?
How do we make the rain goddess happy with us?
How do we make the fertility goddess send us good energy?
They did things that may seem primitive or certainly unscientific,
But they did things with this attempt of creating meaning so they can create some sort of cause and effect.
We all look back at this and we look at a shaman shaking a rattle and we're like,
That's magical thinking.
Magical thinking with the judgmental term with quotes around it,
Magical thinking meaning false belief.
This was an attempt at creating meaning.
Even if the shaking of the rattle or doing the rain dance didn't actually cause the rain,
Those moments that it did where they,
You know,
Maybe when they shook the rattle and didn't come and like,
Oh,
We didn't shake our rattle hard enough.
Right?
We see this a lot in the law of attraction of like,
Oh yeah,
I was positive thinking and didn't happen.
It must be because I didn't think hard enough.
Right?
That's what,
That's the reverse justification you often see where people kind of put themselves into a hole sometimes.
Too much magician,
Not enough warrior.
Anyway,
Paganism was an attempt at this,
But this gave way to monotheism because the,
One of the issues of paganism,
And I talk about this in the history of man series where we speak about the evolution of warfare because warfare has been the birth of masculine ethos.
One of the greatest or one of the most significant advancements in warfare and with the development of civilization was monotheism because paganism,
While it allows,
Which is a little,
Paganism is a little closer to nature.
You have all these dueling forces.
Paganism doesn't have objective morality because if morality is,
If good is what is beneficial to us and bad is what's bad to us and the gods are what determine our reality,
Sometimes it's hard because what the god of war wants and the god of love want are sometimes the opposite,
Right?
Like how do you appease both the god of war and the goddess of love?
Like sometimes you have to choose sides.
So morality in a sense is subjective and like you can see like seafaring nations like the Phoenicians praised Poseidon over everyone else.
Like they knew that there were other gods,
They believed there were other gods,
But they didn't cherish what the lord of the sea wanted more.
Like they chose their moralities and this,
Anyway,
This became very hard,
This perception of subjective morality made it hard to unite a people and field armies that can do something.
You know,
Essentially the crusades was a really powerful application of magic that the pope did.
You know,
The pope said some words,
He sent out some meanings and he got thousands and thousands of warriors throughout Europe to travel for months to get down to the Middle East and kill people they have never met because of some words.
Like that's some really powerful magic.
Anyway,
Monotheism allowed for something like that because paganism when there's subjective morality,
As many gods to please,
It becomes very hard to unite a people or unite a reality,
The subjective reality.
Monotheism says there's one god,
Therefore there's only one version of good and evil and if you all follow this,
We all can be on the same page.
So this was very effective in uniting people for things like war or things like state,
But it was also far more oppressive than paganism because if someone,
There's only one set of rules to follow,
Right?
Monotheism allowed,
You know,
You could choose,
In a sense,
You can choose what god to follow.
So it was really good for war,
Really bad for freedom,
But monotheism gave way to atheism.
Atheism,
You know,
Whereas monotheism gave an objective morality,
Atheism,
Objective morality,
Atheism gave an objective reality.
If like now we know science,
You know,
We have all of this science,
We have all these ways of observing material reality so we can detach it from gods.
It wasn't god that created this,
It was this and all these scientific theories.
However,
While this has been a great advancement in not getting diluted and having more direct causes and effects,
Like now we know that shaking a rattle doesn't necessarily cause the rain to come,
But it's caused by changes in pressure and condensation in the atmosphere,
We did lose some of our magician qualities.
We did lose some of our meaning and there's a quote that,
Did I copy it?
Well,
Essentially Carol wrote that the expense of all of this intelligence was that we lost the meaning of things.
Like we know we can identify all the hows of how things happen,
We kind of lose the whys sometimes of like why,
You know,
Science cannot answer why do good things happen to bad people.
I have to give you an unprovable belief that I believe to be true.
Actually,
Carl Jung spoke about this in how even though Western people,
He was writing this about a hundred years ago now,
But he was saying that primitive people,
Because he spent some time in South America observing indigenous people,
He's like even though primitive people don't know as much about the world,
A lot of them were more psychologically healthy.
An example he gave was that a primitive man,
You know,
What he was calling an indigenous person in South America might experience what he perceives to be demons.
He's like,
Oh,
There's a demon in my head and like,
You know,
It's preventing me from doing things,
It's preventing me from socializing.
So he goes to see a witch doctor and the witch doctor says,
Yes,
This is a demon.
This is the demon this and this happened because you did this last season and this demon is cursed to you,
But I know how to fix it.
Here,
Shake this rattle,
Drink these herbs,
Go pray at this mountain and the demon will leave and you'll be fine.
The person,
You know,
We call this self-fulfilling prophecy now,
But the primitive man takes this belief,
He believes this belief,
He fully believes in this reality.
He does the actions and the demon,
He perceives a demon to leave and then he's fine.
A Western person may have the same exact experience,
But instead he's like,
Ah,
I feel stuck,
I can't socialize,
I can't like,
I'm something that's not myself.
He goes to see a shrink.
The shrink says,
Oh,
You have chronic anxiety.
And then the guy said,
Well,
How do I get rid of chronic anxiety?
You know,
There's no rattle to shake,
There's no herbs to shrink.
It's like,
Oh,
Well,
Anxiety is,
You know,
It's hard because it's not because of something you did last season.
You have this anxiety because your mother raised you this way for 25 years and man is going to take,
You know,
You know,
We're going to have to get to the root of this and we're going to have to talk about this for five years to get over your anxiety.
And Jung identified like,
Man,
The primitive version of this is so much more effective because the guy shakes the rattle,
He prays a few times and he's cured.
I mean,
The demon and anxiety are the same thing,
Right?
Even different meanings made,
But something that we've lost in terms of perhaps healing or letting go of things is because we know more things of how things actually work,
We kind of lose the magical enchantment quality of things happening immediately,
Right?
Like use another ground example,
If you work really hard and accumulate a bunch of money and you save 10% of your income and for years and years and years,
Eventually that 10% grows into a big nest egg.
That's nice,
Right?
It's more warrior stuff,
It doesn't feel magical.
But if you're like,
Man,
I want X amount of dollars and then you think about it and you do some actions and you get into the flow and then someone just gives you a check,
That feels magical,
Right?
I'm not saying this is possible or impossible,
Even though I'm sure all of us,
What I will say is if you entertain the more magical viewpoints,
Magic seems to happen more,
Right?
And again,
It might be self-fulfilling prophecy,
Right?
The more you choose to make meaning,
The more meanings show up.
If you're looking for synchronicity,
This is something I go into pretty deeply in the Mask and Archetype Challenge,
It's to in a most grounded way,
Look for synchronicities in life,
Look for meanings that will serve you in your life and you'll see more of them happen over and over again.
Anyway,
I'm jumping a little ahead on myself.
This is all to say that atheism,
While it's great for understanding the universe,
Has had us lose some of our storytelling and our meaning making and atheism very often deteriorates into nihilism where you see these atheists who can go out and criticize all the people who believe in these things are unprovable but very often,
Not always,
Very often these people,
These people,
I don't mean to sound judgmental,
But very often the militant atheist has this nihilistic worldview and they're very often not happy.
There is,
And I used to be one,
I used to be very critical of anyone religious.
In college,
Actually I don't know if I'm going to go into this story,
But I had a buddy who became a born again Christian essentially,
It's a little bit of a funny story,
He wanted to get with this super Christian girl in college,
He was super attracted to her and he's like,
I'll go to Bible study to show her I'm a good guy and then she'll like me and then I can bang her and whatever,
He was a frat boy,
He's kind of stereotypical.
No judgment,
That's who he was,
But he started going to Bible study to basically get in her pants and he essentially,
I mean whatever Bible study,
I don't know what they do in Bible study,
But it actually changed him and the next time I saw him,
This was like a semester later after winter break,
He no longer drank,
He no longer party,
No longer swore and he totally changed his life and ended up marrying this girl.
So actually it was a great thing and the thing that,
This actually was the thing that had me stop being a militant atheist.
I could see that before when he was an atheist,
He was a pretty troubled guy,
He got into fights a lot,
He wasn't particularly happy,
He wanted to get pussy to fill a hole in his heart essentially,
But when he became a born again Christian,
Even though that's not my thing,
It's not a worldview I choose to subscribe to,
He became so happy,
He was very clearly a way happier person and I was like,
Man,
I can't argue with that,
Even if these beliefs are not true in my worldview or they're not true in reality,
They're unprovable,
Was Jesus the son of God?
Like we can't actually prove one way or another,
But clearly this belief is serving him,
Magician archetype.
Okay,
But Carol says that we are moving into a fifth stage and I think this is part of like his work of chaos magic of a fifth stage that some people are delving into is chaosism,
Which is essentially a return to the amoral animism with the knowledge that we have from the atheistic age of our knowledge of science,
But willfully assigning meanings to things to essentially activate our magician archetype and create meaning in our lives,
Right?
The chaos magician in Peter Carroll's terminology takes real knowledge,
You know,
They're not just making up hocus pocus,
They take real knowledge,
But they're specifically assigning meanings and sometimes descending consciousness or descending,
You know,
Not ascending,
Descending consciousness,
Forgetting about the fact that you're in a movie theater and like choosing certain narratives that serve you,
But then also having the dexterity of still connecting to the full archetype where you can step outside of the theater when needed,
Right?
Sometimes it's really fun to take a sporting event seriously where like your team has to wait and like it riles you up and like you have to take it seriously to get those emotions,
But if your team loses and you're still feeling shitty on Monday,
This is actually why I stopped watching football,
The Jets keep losing,
But if you still feel shitty on Monday,
Then you're kind of failing yourself here,
Like you chose to get into a reality that really doesn't matter,
Like the Jets success has no effect on my actual life,
So there's no reason to assign meaning there.
That's the dexterity that comes with the chaosism or that kind of magician archetype and I would say you could see this kind of in Burning Man communities or like,
You know,
Like the tech scene,
Which in many ways is the core of the atheistic movement of like going deep in technology.
They're actually kind of in a sense,
If you think of subcultures amongst humans right now,
They're kind of like the people pushing,
You know,
The use of psychedelics,
You know,
All like in Silicon Valley,
You hear this all the time,
Like effectively using psychedelics to go deep and recognize things about yourself,
Like kind of the Burning Man,
The Burning Man millionaire who has been very successful in real life,
But returning to these animistic ways of being by choice,
Not out of ignorance.
That's essentially the chaos movement.
So what this chaosism lens or this activation,
This intelligent activation of the magician archetype does is deconceptualization.
In the same way that I mentioned on an LSD trip,
I forgot the meanings of things.
If you do this willfully,
Perhaps when you're not tripping,
So you're still lucid,
You can rewrite narratives and rewrite meanings.
This is all to say that in order to do magic,
To really have your intentions appear in reality,
Whether through a creative work or through something more mystical,
You have to be free of moral judgments.
You have to be free of the word should.
The word should is one of the most disempowering things because the word should is a moral word.
It only makes sense in the sense of morality.
You should do this.
That doesn't mean anything.
Even when someone gives advice,
It's like,
Oh,
You should totally post more to Facebook.
What do you mean?
Based on who's morality?
Based on some perception of morality,
Some implied morality that you will be a better person or life will be better if you do that.
It's a lot more effective to break everything into cause and effect statements instead of you should post more.
If you post more,
You'll have this result.
That's a more grounded way of looking at things.
But essentially,
The more moral judgments you have,
The more belief of you should be some way.
That's the core of most shame,
Internalized shame.
Like,
Oh,
I should be some way or I should be like this person or I should do this and not this.
This shoulding yourself is essentially the antithesis of the creative process.
The more you have these moral judgments,
The more you're limiting the natural flow of expression we're going to talk about in a bit.
It's the final section.
That's why art often tiptoes into taboos or perverse things.
This is why,
Going back to the fool archetype or the jester,
Comedy almost always is on the edge of what's okay to talk about.
One expression of the fool archetype is the court jester.
The court jester was the only person in a given court that could speak the truth to power.
The only person who could make fun of the king.
There are very social reasons for this to keep the king humble,
To identify reality,
But also to prevent the entire court from spinning out into this delusion that the king is actually a god.
The jester has to call out truths that crashes back into reality and that release of tension usually comes out as laughter.
If something does not resonate with actual reality,
It typically can't be funny.
In a lot of magical and occult rituals,
They use different processes to stun or delete your perception of how things should be.
This can be done through drugs.
Very often it's done through terror.
A lot of magic goes into perverse or gross things.
I don't talk about occult magic,
Like magic with a K at the end,
Like what Alistair Crowley stuff.
I'm not going to be able to get into it,
But a lot of their rituals are meant to stun you or stun your conscious mind,
Which is why they do.
Even before that,
If you go into more indigenous ancient peoples,
The reason why they had human sacrifices or later animal sacrifices or do weird stuff,
Drink blood,
Orgiastic rites,
Things that are just weird.
Weirdness kind of like,
It hones us in.
It puts us in a survival brain where it disables our conscious mind as attached to certain stories.
When you're in that state,
Very often,
If you are witnessing something that's very unusual and very high sensation,
Like let's say a chicken being slaughtered or something,
It forces you into reality.
It stuns the story making potential and someone,
For good or for evil,
Can implant a set of beliefs or stories,
Essentially a way to brainwash you to perceive the world differently.
That's the role of the magician.
It's giving you a new meaning that you didn't believe before.
And this is,
Whether it's for good or for evil,
It doesn't matter because to really tap into the magician,
You have to kind of remove yourself from your sense of morality for the sense of understanding that nature is kind of indifferent.
And essentially,
This is what even churches do or a regular religious congregations do,
Where they do it in light ways.
But even drinking the body and blood of Christ is a sublimated version of this,
Where obviously no one's going to be stunned by drinking a wine cup.
But at one point,
This came from pagan rituals of actually drinking blood,
Where something about that stimulates the nervous system,
Where you become more impressionable and you can take in things.
So for a more positive view on church,
For instance,
They have you sing songs in unison,
They have you follow certain ritualistic things to kind of shut off your hyper-thinking brain so that when the priest says,
You are all God's children and you are loved,
You actually believe it.
Like you actually feel it.
It's like,
Oh yeah,
God's got my back.
Or like,
Be your brother's keeper.
Like you're not thinking of all the reasons why you shouldn't be your brother's keeper.
You actually take it in,
You become a better person.
Ideally,
That's what happens.
This could also be used for negative purposes,
Like propaganda.
Hitler's propaganda.
Hitler was basically a really effective dark magician,
Whereby using his words,
By sending out meaning into Germany,
He was able to change a huge population's perceptions of reality very drastically so they felt justified in certain things that they later found to be abhorrent.
This is the realm of the magician.
So in terms of being an effective magician,
In terms of being effective with your creative process and shifting reality,
The most important thing is that the artist,
The creative person,
The magician,
Has to be real with his deepest self at the most precise level.
And essentially,
In the Dark Masculine episode,
This was one element of that,
Of removing shame,
Of getting real with yourself and accepting yourself and accepting reality the way it is.
It's important because in order to be able to play with reality,
To play with,
Let's say,
The magician's veneer,
The story,
The narrative part of reality,
You have to at least perceive what's beneath it.
At least perceive the consciousness that most people enter when they're on LSD of like,
Oh yeah,
All of that shit,
All of these things that bother me,
They don't really matter.
All these things that I want to get joy from,
They also don't really matter.
I'm choosing narratives that either give me joy or pain.
And down here,
This perception of this other world,
This immaterial world,
Is what allows you to look objectively at the narrative world.
This is,
I mean,
A lot of spirituality uses this model of like,
You know,
Christianity's like,
Oh,
There's heaven,
Right?
Heaven,
And I've heard this from a lot of Christians,
Like heaven is the real life.
This material life is just a practice life to prove to God that we're worthy of heaven,
Right?
I've heard that,
I mean,
You've probably heard this from religious people before.
But there's something empowering about that belief system because if you,
Not to say that it's useful or always applied in a positive way,
But if you believe that this other world is actually more important,
If you believe that your dreams or your inner monologue is more important than what's on the outside,
You're never going to take the outside that seriously.
And Carol has a quote that I can't find on my piece of paper.
Let's see here.
I mean,
He's speaking about one of the techniques by amoral cultivation of laughter,
A magician can shrug off all losses and avoid getting stuck in averse states altogether if you want.
Sorry,
My handwriting is terrible.
I can't even read it.
But essentially what he was saying is like by entering this amoral sense of the world,
Not getting attached to stories or shoulds or morality,
You can basically not get stuck on emotions that stick people.
So before we get to techniques,
This idea of fidelity matters,
Right?
Fidelity means faithfulness.
And when I use it,
I'm talking about faithfulness to truth.
And it's not like,
I've said this in a few episodes,
But I think this is one of the most healing concepts or most mind enhancing concepts of like,
How precise can you get with the truth?
How real can you get?
Because the more real you get with yourself,
With the good,
With the bad and not having judgment,
Like this is just the way things are,
This is what reality is,
This is what I am,
This is the reality of the situation,
The more precise you can get and more you can admit.
And this is socially,
We call this vulnerability.
If like just being able to admit things the way they are,
It increases the resolution of reality because now you're willing to see things.
When someone becomes apathetic or emotionally shut down,
It's kind of like their world becomes gray.
This is something that I've mentioned as an idea before,
Like their resolution becomes funny because,
Fuzzy because if you're lying to yourself,
If you,
And this,
You know,
Give the example with apathy that a lot of men experience these days.
When a man,
When you feel,
When a man feels a certain desire for whatever and he doesn't act on the desire,
The only way that he can get over that cognitive dissonance is to try to convince himself they never had the desire in the first place.
But that's not true.
So in order to reconcile this difference between this lie to himself,
He has to kind of no longer see reality as clear.
It's like if you are trying to tell yourself that,
I don't know,
A weed is a rose,
Right?
If you're like,
Oh this weed,
It's a rose.
I'm telling you it's a rose and you look at it and it's a weed.
Well that's very hard to,
It's hard to reconcile.
But if you make the resolution on your camera really terrible,
If you make it,
Make reality really fuzzy so that it becomes blurry,
Well you can be like,
Oh yeah,
This weed is a rose.
That's essentially,
And this is a Black Mirror episode,
But essentially by blocking things,
By making things harder to see,
You can lie to yourself easily.
And this is why truth matters so much.
Yeah,
I mean,
Yeah,
People who lie to themselves end up becoming apathetic.
People who try to reconcile conflicting emotions with a lie,
With a mistruth,
They end up losing their zest for life.
It becomes hard to be enthusiastic when you're constantly lying to yourself about what is real for you.
So two things that cause mental contraction.
Well,
I'll say,
I'll summarize it in one.
Resentment.
So the magician,
The magician's,
Another useful belief for the magician,
And maybe I should have said this in the beginning of the episode,
Is the chosen belief that you actually can influence events more than you can.
I'm wording it this way,
It's a workable model,
It's not approvable,
But this is something that is,
Will make it easier.
Well,
Essentially,
This is what I was saying before,
If you look for meaning,
You'll find meaning and life becomes more enchanting.
If you reduce everything down to the most nihilistic way of viewing things,
Your life will end up feeling nihilistic.
Resentment is a key emotion that goes against this magician's belief.
The magician needs to believe that he can influence reality.
If you are resentful at circumstances,
If you're resentful at a person,
If you're blaming Donald Trump or Joe Biden,
If you're complaining about the government or the way things are or whatever,
Or if you're resentful of people who are more successful at you,
You're essentially saying to yourself,
To your unconscious,
There are things,
My reality is outside of my control.
It's under the control of this person that I'm resentful at.
It's in the control of the president of the United States.
If you hold on to the feeling of resentment,
You are essentially telling your own magician archetype,
Hey,
You have no power.
And the more you believe that,
The less that you will have power,
The less you will have influence over your reality.
So in increasing your fidelity,
You also need to reduce your resentment,
Which comes down to accepting things the way they are.
Socially,
This means forgiveness.
If you can really forgive someone,
You're essentially saying,
You don't have power over me.
I'm no longer fearful of you or blame you for this thing because it doesn't affect my life.
I'll say,
I'll admit I've had various resentments at ex-girlfriends for different things,
Things that I feel are very justified,
But also pretty much everyone that has some sort of resentment at their ex because of pain.
When I've entered my current relationship where I'm so happy,
Where like,
Man,
I'm just so fucking happy.
Everything just fits exactly the way I wanted it my whole life.
I didn't tell this in the beginning,
Didn't want to get mushy,
But everything I've wanted is in this relationship and I feel so grateful.
And because of that,
I can't possibly be resentful at any of my exes.
How could I possibly blame them when I'm so happy in that part of my life now?
Gratitude clears up resentment.
Truth telling clears up mental fog.
Two actions that reduce mental resistance are gnosis,
That is one,
I did a whole episode on this.
This is essentially entering the experience of no mindedness.
And this is a practice,
This is a practice that you can practice right after you listen to this episode.
You can practice now where you do your best to not think,
Right?
Do your best to just perceive.
Gnosis means knowledge or wisdom.
Can you not add a narrative to things and just perceive things the way they are?
This is perhaps a mental way of tapping into the fool archetype.
Actually,
Both of these are.
The second is laughter.
And this is something that Peter Carroll speaks about because he speaks about in terms of creative resistance or resistance,
The root of every emotion is opposite.
It's a quote straight from his book.
So when you,
This is why in Law of Attraction they talk about setting an intention and forgetting it.
If you think about something and you're like craving it,
This is why in Buddhism they say craving is the root of suffering.
If you're craving something and you're gripping onto this future outcome so tightly,
You're also increasing your resistance.
You're increasing your creative,
You're increasing your desire,
But with it you're also creating your resistance so they cancel each other out,
Right?
Nature wants a balanced checkbook.
But if you have an intention,
And then this is why I brought it up in my initial thing,
I saw my girlfriend and I thought I would love to date someone like that,
Right?
And I didn't get attached to,
I need to be with her,
Right?
If I became from a magical lens,
If I got attached to that,
I need to be with her,
I probably would have found some way to self-sabotage because I'd be gripping so hard on that outcome as opposed to,
Yeah,
It'd be great.
So I had this desire and I could send things in that direction because I wasn't focusing on it,
I wasn't gripping to it.
The resistance didn't rise up to the desire.
That's one way to look at it.
The other thing that Peter Carroll says,
One of the actions he sees as critical for the magician or creative person is laughter,
Right?
As we mentioned with the fool archetype or the jester,
Things are funny when you crash back to reality.
And in Peter Carroll's words,
Laughter is the only action that is its own opposite,
Right?
Laughter contains both the desire and resistance in itself,
Right?
Laughter is like kind of a synergy.
It's a collapsing of duality for a moment where when you laugh at something,
You're in full acceptance,
Right?
There is no resistance against the desire.
It's like the desire and resistance have met each other,
Which is why if you can laugh about things,
You can reduce resistance in yourself.
If you can laugh about your writer's block,
If you can laugh about the fact that you have no money,
If you can laugh about the fact that you just lost your MMA fight or something,
That takes away resistance.
I was thinking about Kevin Holland.
But one of those also bring concept and meaning into matter.
We have,
Oh yeah,
And then physically laughter is a physical release of tension.
If we go back to Wilhelm Reich's idea of muscular armoring of chronic tension in the body is emotional tension that's preventing a flow of energy,
What Reich would call organ energy.
Reich being one of the people kind of like Jung that connected psychology with mysticism,
But he leans so far on mysticism that most people are not into his stuff anymore.
Laughter is a release.
Laughter is a collapsing.
And with that,
Last bit before we speak about this last section,
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they move.
One way to,
And I spoke about this in the episode I ended up deleting on what makes a good dancer,
When someone is conscious of their movements and are specific.
A bad dancer can be on rhythm,
But if they're flailing and moving without intention,
That's very high entropy.
There's a million ways to flail.
There's only one way to move your hand exact.
There's only one way to have your head in balance with your spine.
And you can tell a lot about a person by the way they move.
People who have a lot of resistance emotionally tend to contract certain things and it causes stiffness and a movement of flow.
All of these things that we've spoken about over this last half hour have been about removing your foot from the break as your other foot's on the pedal.
Which brings us to our very last piece which is opening the floodgates.
I know this has been a much longer episode.
I've been thinking about it for months so I have a lot of stuff here.
This is actually going to be the shortest thing because just to do a quick recap between section three,
If we understand the nature of what we're calling magic or the creative process beyond obvious cause and effect.
And we look at these ways to deconceptualize or remove the hard material time perceiving story of like,
Oh it takes forever for this to happen or like,
Oh yeah the odds of me finding the perfect partner.
That's just like look at the numbers,
It's so unlikely.
If you're stuck on that material reality or stuck on different emotions that cause this prevention of flow like resentment or lying to yourself,
It becomes impossible.
If you do those things correctly,
If you understand this model of reality,
If you can remove these resistances in yourself,
Then things tend to open up on their own.
So this last section is probably going to be the shortest,
It's on opening the floodgates.
So I mentioned this earlier,
In western occultism most occult rituals are essentially ways to send your energy,
There's no better word to use than energy,
Send your energy in the direction of your intention without grasping.
So because of the fact that when you focus on something,
You become attached to the outcome,
You add the same amount of resistance.
A lot of rituals,
I'm not an expert on any of these,
But you'll see in occult rituals,
You'll see things like sigils which are like symbols that are supposed to activate the desire in your mind but they're not,
It's not like writing I want a million dollars,
It's having a symbol that represents that so you don't get stuck on the outcome.
Your unconscious can just be stimulated,
Different forms of meditation,
As you mentioned terror is one way,
Actually I've mentioned this in some of our sexuality episodes but I mean this is relevant here.
And my buddy Omer Pandey has been on the podcast a few times,
I've seen him demonstrate this in the podcast,
In workshops rather,
Is like a lot of people ask like why are women especially into pain and sexuality,
Why is it that they like to be spanked,
So many women like a hair and a hand on their throat,
It's like very hard for an intellectual guy to grasp this sometimes.
And one explanation is these types of fearful activities force you into your body,
Like pleasure doesn't have very high stakes,
Right,
If everything is light and everything is pleasant and gratitude while it's super important,
It's very easy to be grateful or it's very easy to focus on joy and comfort but then also let your mind wander,
Right,
It's very easy to spread your creative capital because there's no risk whereas if someone's got a hand on their throat,
Everything in your body is thinking,
Oh survival mode and all of your attention becomes focused on the sensation.
Hand on the throat,
Some of these BDSM things,
Not to say they're good or bad but like a lot of women will experience,
It really puts them in their body because their survival brain is like oh here,
This is important.
So this is why a lot of occult rituals deal with weird stuff again where it's not particularly pleasant because it's very easy to check out on joy,
It's very easy to not take joy seriously because there's no threat whereas if you're perceiving something that's like scary or weird or perverse,
It kind of grabs all of your attention like a car crash.
But you don't need to do that,
I'm certainly not saying anyone should go around,
You know,
Doing weird or painful things for the purpose of magic because there are other ways to experience this kind of focus but it comes down to in order to,
You know,
If you think of your creative capital in terms of units like your fucks,
You can't give a fuck about a million things,
I've talked about this in other episodes,
Like if you give a fuck about a million things,
That energy is just like kind of dispersed,
Like you need for you to move reality,
You kind of have to get all of your fucks in a row,
Right.
And there's other ways to do that aside from terror,
Terror is one way,
That would be more of like the black magic thing.
There's a lot of things I could speak about that but the thing that I've found to be most useful is sustained sexual arousal and,
You know,
If you listen to this stuff,
You know,
I have a course on arousal control,
I swear to you,
I'm not saying this just to plug my course even though I like my course,
This,
No actually the reason why I have an arousal control course,
Especially for men,
I feel like it's the most,
One of the most simple and far-reaching lifestyle changes to learn how to cultivate sexual arousal because it just like enlivens your body,
It takes advantage of nature's agenda,
Like we go all the way back to our models of reality and like the animist thing,
Like nature is kind of indifferent to your needs but if you take on this animist or magician's model,
It's like if you can align yourself with the forces of nature,
You can get things done in a way,
This is what scientific technology has done,
Like we can use the wind to power ourselves or windmills,
You know,
Different forms of energy now,
Not by fighting against it,
By going along with nature's forces.
One of nature's primary forces that they are,
That nature,
If we personify nature,
Is not indifferent to is the furthering of life and your sexual drive is that expressing through you.
So,
Essentially,
We're taking advantage of nature's drive that is already trying to express through you and using it for something.
And I'll say,
I hope my girlfriend doesn't mind me saying this,
But one of,
She's a woman,
She gets emotional about things,
She gets emotional about things that don't really make sense to my male brain and something I've gotten much better at is instead of trying to use my male brain,
My male material reality of looking at things in terms of minutes and meters and like,
You know,
Here's the way to solve that problem,
Is to forget that,
Is to take off and not bring the warrior into my relation with my woman,
Instead bringing in a magician of recognizing women's needs typically are more in the energetic realm,
The material realm.
And essentially,
This is all to say that the number one way that we solve her emotional problems is through sexuality,
Arousal transmutes resistance better than anything else.
And part of,
You know,
She's been well trained in these arts,
So I'm not saying that just because your wife is having a bad time,
Just say,
Hey,
Let's have sex,
It's not going to fix everything.
But,
And what I will say is like on the male end,
The reason why I aroused control is actually something that's been,
That's talked about in many different occult forms in the tantra world.
It's really not just about sexuality,
Sexuality is a relatively small part of tantra,
It's what the West tends to focus on.
But the reason why sexuality is included in tantra is they find ways to use sexual energy to better your life.
In Western occultism,
Even Aleister Crowley spoke about men learning how to sustain high levels of arousal without release.
And the thing is,
The male body,
When it ejaculates,
The sensation drops.
So in order to have that flow,
To have that drive still moving through you,
The more arousal you can feel in your body,
The more desire you can feel and sustain,
The more you'll have that urge,
That zest for life.
I do find it's a major cure for apathy in men.
If they can enter pleasurable sexual experiences and not nut all the time,
Your body just maintains an aliveness.
And the thing is,
Arousal being such a primal experience,
It occurs on our lowest part of our nervous system,
Our most permanent part of our nervous system,
It can kind of override other feelings.
It's very hard to be super horny and be frustrated about life at the same time.
And actually,
I don't know if I wrote down this quote,
But yeah,
Peter Carroll wrote in his book,
Frustration is essentially balked lust.
So is boredom,
Laziness,
Depression,
And self judgment.
Basically in his worldview,
This aligns with Wilhelm Reich's worldview that any negative emotion we feel is essentially a lack of flow of our sexual energy,
Our life creating energy.
And some people who are really into Daoism might not like this comparison,
But I would equate that with Daoism as well in that there is a flow to the universe and in nature specifically,
It goes in animals specifically,
It goes through sexual procreation.
So this is all to say that heightening your arousal is one of the best ways to increase your desire,
Your zest for life.
And if you've done the work to be truthful with yourself,
To reduce your mental chatter through the practice of gnosis,
To laugh at things and view the world amorally,
Not that you're going to be a bad person,
But to not go around passing moral judgments,
Which get you stuck in different narratives.
If you can maintain that full view of nature,
A view of reality and activate your body in this way,
It gives you kind of like this fire to do things that is very,
It's just basically a lack of resistance.
This is not to say this is the only way to increase the floodgates of creativity,
But is one that I find very far reaching in his benefits,
Especially for men.
And if we actually go back to pre-monotheistic,
It's just like kind of a factoid,
I think it's interesting,
Like the word fetish,
Which we commonly associate with like sexual proclivities,
Like a foot fetish or like a whatever fetish,
The word fetish actually refers to an idol.
A fetish is an idol that pagan people assigned magical abilities to.
And this is actually one of the reasons why in monotheistic religions,
They're very anti-idol worship because it was very hard for the creators of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam to get people to believe in their God when everyone believed that their golden calf had some sort of power over them.
So that's why idol worship is very shunned in monotheistic religions.
What a lot of people got,
Pre-monotheistic people got from idol worship from fetishes is that they assigned a bunch of meaning to a golden calf or to a rock with eyes on it or something.
They believed it gave them superpowers.
They focused their attention on it so that they got an effect from it and it actually gave them effect.
And this word has become used to a guy who has an unusual attachment to feet,
Gets a lot of energy out of it for some reason.
Actually,
I'm not actually sure if that's the reason,
The connection of those two words,
But I just thought that the word,
The meanings of words were interesting.
I'm going to end this episode with a spiritual view.
I hope that all of this was useful in terms of creativity at least and just to recap,
Understanding the reality that the magician archetype is what weaves narratives by assigning meanings to things.
An unencumbered magician accesses the fool archetype of seeing the amoral view of things,
Seeing the reality beneath the storytelling reality so that you can rewrite certain meanings.
And finally,
If you can take away these blocks,
You take away these judgments,
Take away lying to yourself,
Take away resentments,
Enter a state of amoral laughter of things where you have choice of what realities you enter.
One way,
Not the only way,
But one way to really open the floodgates is to increase the sensation in your body.
And I think arousal control is one of those ways.
Even Robert Anton Wilson speaks about this in most of his books,
In his lens,
The way to activate the fifth circuit of consciousness.
If you caught the episode of Prometheus Rising,
I spoke about the first four layers of consciousness,
Which are basically tied to well-known parts of our nervous system.
The fifth is kind of a transition between science and mysticism where you give yourself a kind of a mystical experience.
The fifth circuit is known as the tantra circuit because you're activating your body to a level where reality can be changed,
Where you're tightening your arousal to a degree that contraction isn't possible.
Your body is so open,
It's so alive with life that you can't possibly get worried about a bill that's due or be stuck on negative thoughts like,
Oh,
I can't have this because it's unlikely.
You're entering a realm of possibility.
And I would add to this,
A belief that I've found to be useful,
Even though I can't prove,
Is that if you take on the belief that even these unlikely things are possible,
Even these very unlikely permutations of reality are possible,
And you look for meanings,
You look for meanings,
Like you're actively trying to write a story,
You're looking for meanings that make sense from one to the other,
It becomes more and more likely that you find future meanings that make your story make sense and bring you to that desired outcome.
As long as you don't take it too seriously,
You don't get attached to outcome.
I can't prove that's true,
But I believe it to be true.
And I do,
Whether it's self-fulfilling prophecy or not,
The more you look for synchronicities,
The more you find synchronicities.
Life just feels more enchanting that way,
And you can decide how much that is of value to you or not.
I'll end with this.
I know this has been a far-out episode,
Very different than our other three Gillette and Moore episodes.
It's actually a bit from my favorite novel,
Shantaram,
By Gregory David Roberts.
It's a book I've mentioned in different ways.
I think it exhibits a lot of the principles of masculinity,
And it's just one of the best books.
It's based on a true story.
This guy was called the Gentleman Bandit because he was a real guy in Australia.
He would rob banks,
But he'd be super polite with people because he was a nice guy.
He was also a badass.
He broke himself out of jail.
This happened in real life.
He broke himself out of jail,
Smuggled himself to India,
And ended up joining the Bombay Mafia.
Shantaram was basically a kind of fictionalized retelling of the story.
But one of his mentor figures,
Which was the Bombay Mafia boss,
Kader Bhai,
Was also a philosopher.
He was very much the mentor in the story.
And he shared an answer to how do you determine good and evil and what is God,
Essentially.
And he said,
I'm retelling this,
But he said that from the Big Bang,
Which is the moment of ultimate simplicity in the universe as our current scientists can perceive,
There was nothing and then there was a lot of things.
From then until now,
The universe has become more and more complex.
Even though the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is always increasing in total,
There's also been a reduction in entropy,
Neg-entropy,
Or a creation of information of less likely permutations of reality in the form of planets,
In the form of life forms,
In the form of life becoming more and more complex through evolution.
We are far more complex and have way lower entropy than an amoeba.
All amoeba are the same,
But in our bodies we have millions of cells that each are unique and are specific.
They're not random,
They're low entropy.
And if you look at existence in total,
What Kader Bhai,
The guy in the story,
Defines as God is this movement towards infinite complexity.
And the guy in the story,
He was Muslim,
His belief was that anything that brings you closer to God,
Anything that brings you closer to infinite complexity is good,
And anything that hinders that is bad.
Another way to look at this,
This is my interpretation,
Is that from the Big Bang until now there have been infinite narratives,
Whether you look at it from a human perspective or not.
There's been infinite narratives.
If you just look at humans,
There's infinite,
So many people have been alive in life.
It's like Louis C.
K.
's thing,
There's way more people that are dead than are alive.
I actually don't know if that's even true.
Infinite stories,
Infinite narratives.
Your job,
If you do want to take on the spiritual lens that there is an infinite consciousness or collective unconscious or collective consciousness,
However you want to put it,
Your job as a consciousness,
As a piece of this infinite consciousness,
Is to maximize the complexity of your story.
Not in terms of making things complicated,
But in terms of fully fulfilling your permutation of reality,
Of reducing the randomness,
Of not doing random things but doing specific things,
Of having your intentions,
Whatever they are,
Whether they're for selfish motives or altruistic motives,
Whether they're for good or evil,
I mean,
Under this world view there is no real morality other than moving towards or fully playing out all the stories.
Your job is to fully reduce entropy in your part of reality and finding your specific style,
Of finding your specific permutations and taking away randomness and expressing your intentions based on your desire to fully play out your story.
That is your role as a consciousness in existence.
And I can't prove that that's true.
In fact,
That's kind of a should statement.
So this is perhaps my view of morality,
But I do find that this is a very liberating world view if you entertain it.
That's all I got to say on the magician archetype.
There's many things to talk about here.
So if you have any questions about this,
I'm actually,
So a bit of an announcement.
I'm thinking about hosting some form of discussion group in my Mastin Underground Facebook group.
Probably pick a topic.
I mean,
Actually the way I'm conceptualizing it right now,
Putting this into form perhaps is we pick a topic and maybe speak about the four archetypes of Gillette and Moore section by section.
If you're interested in that,
Please join the Mastin Underground group on Facebook and I'll open up a thread or a poll asking about that and please comment if you're interested.
If there's enough interest,
I'll do that.
I'll be free.
It should be fun.
And that's my only announcement today.
And if you are listening to the recording,
If you're watching the recording,
Of course,
I highly recommend you listen to the audio instead.
Get off your screen,
Do something in real life.
Even though you're a magician,
You can affect the world not sitting in front of your computer.
All right.
I'll see you next time.
