Know Thyself - E96 - Dr. John Churchill: How To Wake Up & Show Up For A Planet That Needs You

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Dr. John Churchill joins the podcast today to walk us through the process of human development: from infantry to enlightenment. He shares a deep understanding of the spiritual awakening journey and how we can best optimize ourselves for this process. He lays the foundation for the conversation by describing our planetary cycle and how it related to our own development. revealing the "Fourth Turning" our planet is currently in and it's greater global implications. He describes the personal ascension process in 3 stages: growing up, cleaning up waking up - and how by deepening our understanding of these phases we can lay a strong foundation for our spiritual awakening. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 1:49 The Wheel of Time: Understanding Earth’s Cycles 10:18 Organizing Ourselves For Planetary Change 18:54 Emergence: How to Optimize Yourself For Synchronicity  22:22 The Fourth Turning: Our Current Planetary Cycle 35:05 Transitioning From the Head to the Heart  39:10 Levels of Human Spiritual Development Explained 1:17:30 Healing Childhood Trauma: The Cleaning Up Process 1:24:27 Understanding the Attachment, Relational, & Self Systems 1:35:04 Visualization Practices for Healing Relations 1:47:45 How to Wake Up & See the Oneness 2:00:17 The True Nature of Self 2:08:05 Merging Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Waking Up 2:16:45 Specific Practices for Raising Your Consciousness 2:17:13 Developing Processes to Cover the 3 Stages 2:31:10 How to Embody Your Highest Self Today 2:39:40 Conclusion ___________ Born in London, Dr. Churchill's interest in psycho-spiritual development, Integral theory, Contemplative studies, Western Esotericism, and Mahayana Buddhism began in his adolescence, eventually leading him to spend several years as a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland. During this time, John received the esoteric Planetary Dharma transmissions that would in time unfold as his contribution to a planetary fourth turning teaching. For the last 25 years, John has developed a a Fourth Turning Planetary Dharma practice which includes the somatically based contemplative practice path; Embodying the Open Ground, that integrates psychodynamic healing, adult development and meditation.  John holds a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from William James College, and is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Instagram: @planetarydharma Website: www.planetarydharma.com August online Retreat info: https://www.planetarydharma.com/embodying-the-radical-wholeness-of-the-open-ground-registration 10% off coupon code: KnowThyself10 ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

In our civilization, if we're still here in 50 years time, millions of people will suddenly realize the development is a real thing. We're at war on this planet. We live in this materialist, empirical, scientific worldview, but actually, there's so much more going on. A lot of what we're being asked to do is to align with how our planet is unfolding. We do have now the technology that could allow us, essentially, to spin up a golden age in a short amount of time.

If we can... The term mysticism is a bit of... of a misnomer because it actually, it isn't a mystery. It's a science. Doing the right practice at the right moment in time, it's super important. You can waste years and years and years. And the thing is that is so common. If we can build a new initiatory system that really takes people through those stages and bring to the table the best of the world's wisdom traditions, this moment in time actually holds great promise as well as great peril. Hey everyone, welcome to the Know Theyself podcast. Today we have the privilege of sitting down with

a powerful teacher in the field of human development. He has a degree in contemplative psychology and Chinese medicine in a doctoral degree and clinical psychology as well. He's spent several years as a Buddhist monk. This conversation, the goal I feel, is going to be providing this whole tribe that we're building here with a comprehensive framework and overview for the path of human self-development as well as planetary development towards self-actualization and realization. The need for an integral approach and an overview of it all as well. And much, much more, Dr. John Churchill. Thanks for being here. Andre. Thank you for welcoming me. Yeah, my honor. So excited to dive in deep. I would love to start a little bit more wide and then go kind of into the microcosm of the human

journey. But before we do, we were speaking yesterday on the phone a little bit about this, you know, this perception that Earth is its own being on its own developmental journey, much like we are. So when you look at planet Earth and what's happening right now currently within humanity, what's some powerful important context and a framework for where we're currently at on that developmental journey? Well, one of the things we have to ask ourselves is what time is it? Right. And clearly it's not 2024. for. So our planetary logos, the intelligence that is our planet that is our planet is also on a journey. And just like we go through cycles, just like we've gone through childhood and

adolescence, she is also unfolding. And so having a perspective of sacred world, and appreciating that we and our spiritual journey as individuals and as a species is an integral part of her process. So we don't separate actually what we need to do from what's happening for her. And so we are quite clearly going through a quickening process that's part of much larger cosmic cycles. This is kind of taught about in the teachings related to the wheel of time.

which we see nearly every culture on this planet. And of course, there were these largest cycles, and during these larger cycles, certain capacities are built up, and then we kind of culminate in a transition phase. And we're in one of those transition phases right now, like a 24,000 year and 12,000 year cycle. So a lot of what we're being asked to do is to align with how our planet

is unfolding. And according to the teachings of these, you know, the very, the wheel of time is often we don't do that. And then things get reset and we have to kind of start all over again. Right. So there is, all of us sense this kind of a sense of, this imperative and this sense of urgency because she is wanting to blossom. And, you know, we really need to align with that process and understand what it asks to us. Like you said, the planet, as it goes through its own cycles like we do in our own biological body, for example, are given opportunities to transmute into, and phase shift into that next level of being a next potential possibility.

And yet, you know, so many of us really do feel the quickening process that we're in, that we're in a time that is unlike any other, that there is so much, you know, possibility for catastrophic dystopia on one head, but also so much beauty and light on the other, if we harness the opportunity and realize the blessing that it is and not have it turn into a curse. The issue largely is that, you know,

everything that we're doing in the world is infused with the consciousness in which we're doing it. And so the tools that we're engaging with, the technology that's advancing, all these amazing things that aren't inherently good or bad in and of themselves, are being infused with a traumatized speech, That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so the perspective of the Wheel of Time and the Buddhist tradition has, Buddhism is a vast tradition, but it's kind of apex teaching is called the Wheel of Time, the Kalakshakra, and there's both a kind of Indo-Tibetan color chakra, but there also is a planetary color chakra.

and really what we're talking about when we're talking about the wheel of time are the process of multi-generational trauma so that's what each of us part of our work is we're all cleaning up and integrating the past so we have that individually but then we have multi-civilizational trauma

and of course that's just like an individual who goes to therapy who doesn't realize perhaps they had traumas in the past One of the challenges is we're in a civilization that doesn't really realize that there were perhaps previous civilizations and that we reached a point similar to this and then things didn't work out so well. So we have this cumulative effect of trauma related to particularly to this transition that we're facing right now. So we have individual, the wheel of multiple, you know, of individual trauma, so to speak, the wheel of like generational civilization. and planetary. So a lot of what we're having to do is digest the momentum of the past.

A super tanker, if you put a super tanker in neutral, it doesn't stop. Right. So this is what we find is even if we put it in neutral, even if we get that wheel it's not enough, we're going to have to reverse the wheel. the good news is we have the psychotech and the outer tech so at the moment when the wheel needs to be reversed we do have now the technology that could allow us essentially to spin up a golden age in a short amount of time if the if the if the Dharma gets to meet the AI so to speak right if if the what we call the fourth turning of the Dharma the reiteration of the planetary d'armor at this moment in time,

if it can meet the fourth industrial revolution on an equal, you know, as an equal partner at the table, because of course our civilization has thrown away our interiors for at least a couple thousand years. But if we can value the interior and bring to the table the best of the world's wisdom traditions, this moment in time actually holds great promise as well as great peril. Yeah, I really love that understanding that we're kind of in this collective amnesia, in a sense.

There's the conventional view of like 12,000 years civilization, but these larger cycles that happen within larger cycles, within civilization, within planetary celestial bodies, invites, yeah, an important reflection as to where we're currently at and the opportunity of civilization. And that reflection there is so important that we have an opportunity here that we have trauma about

because we failed many times. Exactly. And of course, without a larger... So the personality vehicle only lives a lifetime. Right. And maybe we'll be lucky. Maybe you and I will be sitting here in 200 years' time will be like, bro.

Right? But even then, it's still a lifetime. But the sole vehicle, or what's called the bliss body in the... Buddhist tradition, it has a multi-lifetime narrative. So if you shrink in the cultural story, what is possible, it's very difficult for people to awaken to soul, even through the narrative, right?

Because the soul has a story. And developmentally, what we find is part of what supports awakening the soul is awakening to that much longer story. So if you clip that and keep it within a, you know, a 12,000 year history, it's one of the ways that the soul stays kind of a straight jacket. Straight jacket in. Yeah, that part of that process that keeps us in that slumber is these deeply embedded beliefs and mythos that are within culture that keep us stuck within, you know, kind of blind, blindsided to a grander horizon of what's possible within the human system and planetary system and I've heard you share about how beliefs are psychoactive. Beliefs are psychoactive. Yeah.

I mean the first thing is we have a massive enchantment of disenchantment. Massives, which means that our listeners and viewers right now, while they're viewing and listening us, Like there's this idea that you and I aren't actually connecting to them energetically. We live in this kind of materialist, empirical, scientific, positivistic worldview. But actually, there's so much more going on. Right. And that enchantment has kept us asleep for thousands of years. That enchantment of disenchantment in the process of awakening from that slumber,

like we were talking to, there's an opportunity here now to, I believe, what Martin Luther King said, those who love peace need to learn how to organize themselves as much as those who love war. That's right. Exactly. And it's the process of, you know, assembling the rainbow warriors. Well, that's, well, that's right because the myth, you know, one thing was the myth of the heroic journey. And, you know, we can talk about that. But what's happening, what we've seen in literature, particularly in the last 50 years is how you see it in movies how it's no longer the the single hero it's like multiple heroes coming together that's a different mythic story like the the group hero

right and the group the the calling of the Dharma army and you know what it's going to take to organize that um but the color chakra itself is actually a military tantra i in order so kalachaka time wheel in order to to make a transition from one time to another time that is a dama warrior operation right it takes like it takes a we are you know we're at war on this planet it would be naive to think that what we see on the tv screen is happening to other people right so um the time for calling you know gathering the dama army so to speak and working and gathering the dama army so to speak and working out how we're going to organize in such a way that we can actually be effective because part of the challenge and we'll get into this developmentally is that in order to organize

you've got to have hierarchical structures and to do that you have to have a sense of like development right otherwise all you have is a flat land army with no organization which is kind of what we've had for the last 40 years developmentally in the west yeah i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on in the actualization process of that actually happening. It's, you know, you have this kind of domination hierarchical structure that we're so accustomed to, especially, I mean, it's all across the globe. And there does need to be that enlightened leadership, but there also needs to be an invitation for sitting around a circle.

Absolutely. With those leaders. And I've, yeah, I've just felt so deeply that it's not a lack of brilliant minds who have done the work and are, you know, living a purpose-driven life. but the organization of those to create structures and systems to actually make that applicable on the wide scale. Yes. Yeah, I think that is the big challenge that we'll be facing in the next 10 years

because the truth is that the armies of darkness for want of a better word have no problem getting highly organized and hierarchically structured in such a way that they can have, that they can be effective. and one of the challenges in the kind of progressive or spiritual or the sacred is that the sensitivity you know we've gone through a necessary process of recognizing these dominator hierarchies and developmentally making sure that we integrate perspectives that have been lost that haven't

been invited to the table so to speak and hearing all of those voices making sure that they're heard. But the truth is, is that the human psyche unfolds holocically, which means that any effective organization also needs to mirror that. Now, of course, that could be decentralized as well. But understanding the deep structure that the human psyche unfolds developmentally and building organizations that reflect that so that we can be effective, is I think that's the next phase.

I'm really looking forward soon in later parts of this podcast to dive into the journey on an individual level going from personality to soul because as we awaken to our own Dharma and our own true nature, that becomes the unique puzzle piece that can't be fulfilled otherwise

just like we have unique fingerprints or a unique contributor to this process. And I think as much as you know, I think as much as you know, what you're doing in your work and what I try to do with this podcast is almost like for me, this is kind of a big part of my Dharma and being like a bat signal for this information, for these conversations, for people to find resonance with these awakenings and these insights. And then, you know, somebody who's maybe more systems focus, it plays a different role

and organizing different things. And, you know, it's just a really important, I think, thing to realize because that's what we have most control over is our, own individual awakening process to see how we're a part of the whole pie coming together. Well, part of technically, as we're awakened to soul, we're also awakening to the anamamundi. So soul being a kind of a developmental stage midway right in the sweet spot between complete openness and complete form. so the sweet spot is right in the middle right the middle way so to speak right between the higher centers and the lowest centers right in the middle and that on a planetary level provides the in the planet's capacity to integrate and create magic to create synchronicity

So as you're awakening to soul, you're beginning to awaken to a participation with a larger intelligence who is also wanting you, me, all of us, to awaken to that. When you do that, you begin to engage synchronicity in sacred world. And the beauty of the intelligence of a planet is she can be doing that for everybody simultaneously. And that's when you begin to see, like the murmuring of a flock of starlings, we can begin to see that with as those people, as people are awakening and they become parts of kind of pods or soul clans, whatever, want of a better word. But the soul is a group entity, so to speak. I mean, it's important to say there are levels of development above that, but we're just focusing on getting humanity there for now. Do you know what I mean? So each one of us, when we awaken to our soul, we awaken to our sacred design. And we also awaken to how that fits into sacred world. And as you're right, each of us has an integral, you know, you and I and everybody who's listening, we are all unique.

And as we awaken, we hold a key for somebody else, right? We can't do this alone. It's like one of those scenes in the Avengers where everybody has to do their thing at the same time in completely different dimensions. But if we do that, planetary magic can happen. We can, I really believe we can reverse this wheel

that we see where it's headed. Yeah, it's like the Avengers of Consciousness. I like to call this tribe as building here like the Ascenders. The Ascenders, uh-huh. Ascenders unite. Yeah, I'm really fascinated with a phenomenon that is emergence And seeing the intelligence that comes together when those The individual parts come like a shawl of fish or a flock of birds that have this intelligence

That moves together That really fascinates me because we lost touch with that to such a massive degree Yeah, so that that intuitive intelligence which is what the Buddhist called direct non-conceptual valid cognition direct non-conceptual valid cognition so what that means is direct like it's immediate

non-conceptual like you're not you're not noodling over it valid meaning you're right on cognition meaning a way of a way of knowing so that way of knowing we call that intuition but the challenge with that is we're not talking about gut intuition

We're talking about a form of intuition that's synchronized with the planet, right, with the plan, with the unfolding of something larger than our own personal agendas. But that intelligence, that soul intelligence, it operates through synchronicity. So it operates through emergence. However, there are some prior state. of development necessary to bring that online in an effective way because let's take music as an example I can see that you're a musician right I'm not but if you gave me a guitar or give me a piano I could play chopsticks I could improvise right but that improvisation is not

going to look like what you look how you when you play what it sounds like when you improvise on a guitar or a piano so the soul with its emotional emergent intuitive intelligence, it needs abstract knowledge, which is why in the great mystery schools, there was a significant part of learning the spiritual science. Now, everybody here is actually learning some kind of science in whatever body of knowledge that your work is in. So if you're in advertising, if you're in, you know, if you're in physics, if you're in mathematics, whatever body of work you are abstractly like engaged in right which is why our civilization has a certain level of education that that is a new thing so when you bring online the intuitive capacity having had let's say

a college education then the soul is able to use that abstract knowledge in a way of improvising and allowing emergence to happen right so emergence and kind of direct knowing, light playing jazz, jazz might sound like it's been made up on the spot. But the musicians, they didn't just start with that, right? They started with their scales to get there. So we're going to go into, metaphorically, what are the scales that we need to learn internally to be able to awaken to that part. Before we do, do you want to touch further on what the fourth turning is?

Yeah, that's a great idea. Thanks. Yeah. You should podcast. I'll think about it. The fourth turning synchronistically means a number of things. So we could say, well, what's the fourth dimension? Time, right?

So the first thing is that the fourth turning is a teaching that opens up the nature of time. So time is a really important. part of it. So let's say sacred time. What time do we live in? Like that, like the calendar. Like if you change everything and you don't change the calendar, that is the context that everything is happening inside of. And whoever controls that context is controlling the dream spell, right, the controlling the enchantment that we all are living within. And none of us question, why are we still living within this calendar? So the fourth turning, the first thing is related to

the nature of time. The second thing we, could say, is in terms developmentally, it's about bringing humanity from the third chakra, so to speak, to the fourth chakra. And the thing about the heart center is it's actually, and I think this is what Dr. Gilbert was referring to with ascending and descending, is actually the human psyche is like a seed, it's holographic, and it flowers up, and it really, and it roots down. But the center, the central organizing principle is the heart. So the heart creates the morphogenic field that integrates the highest and the lowest. So once you actually get to the heart center, the drive mechanisms that then unfold from the journey from thereon are completely

different drive mechanisms. Now, a lot of spiritual practitioners can practice from the mind. And Sriorabindo, who you probably heard about, made a strong emphasis. this about this, that the soul or the psychic being needs to be the disciple. So the fourth turning is also about awakening the soul. So in the old theological teachings, the fourth plane of seven, so the heart plane of our planetary system is called Budi or the Christ plane or the plane of direct valid non-conceptual cognition. So the fourth turning is also a developmental turning of bringing people developmentally to a whole new tier of development from which the practice can unfold. We call that also the tier of the bodhisattva.

So it's a new developmental tier. If we also use the language of my friend Ken Wilbur, whose work you're aware of, the fourth turning is also referring to the recognition of the four dimensions, the four quadrants, that actually the path is a mandala. The fourth turning is the recognition that our planetary system is a whole and that our interiors and our exteriors and our cultural interiors,

we call it culture, and our cultural systems are part of a complete whole. And so it's an understanding that the spiritual journey isn't just a personal journey. it's also a chemical journey it's a cultural journey

and it's a journey to essentially if we want to survive to get to a class one civilization integrated planet so a fourth turning is referring to the fact that it's a shift in energy it's a shift developmentally

it's a shift in the appreciation of time it's a shift in an appreciation of those four different dimensions, that that integral perspective. Then within Buddhism itself, so a little bit about Buddhism. In my mind, you know, Buddhism is the approach to the sacred that's based on medicine. Based on, you know, the foundation of the Buddhist teaching was the four noble truths. You probably heard that.

But what most people don't know is the Four Noble Truths is simply the analysis that an Ayovetic doctor would make. So essentially, the four noble truth, you know, well, basically it's like there is disease. Duker. Ducca. Dice. Or this disease is caused by multi-generational trauma. There is a way to reverse the wheel. And that is the path.

that approach is Buddhism is essentially secular sacred secularism sacred humanism it's approaching the teaching using the sciences right so it's not so in 200 years time I don't think we'll have the term Buddhism anymore alpha tombie who is this great British historian of civilization said that probably the greatest event to happen in 20th century was the Dharma coming to the West. Now this is like some white pipe smoking English dude wearing a tie. So why was he saying that? Well, he was saying because actually this technology

and how it approaches the sacred, which is kind of objectively and really understanding as a science of goodness, truth and beauty, whenever it goes to a civilization, it radically transforms that civilization. So Buddhism itself has three turnings. So the first turning from the perspective of a planetary tradition

so the lineage that I've tapped into since I was a kid is a Buddhist planetary lineage, so to speak so what Buddhism will be like in 500,000 years time. So this first turning of the wheel traditionally it's called the Hinniana means lesser yana means vehicle And essentially that is the focus on understanding your own personal trauma, your own history, and taking responsibility for yourself as an individual to individuate, right?

To clean up what needs to be cleaned up, right? So that you're no longer caught in the cycle of reactivity. And we all know what that's like. And in that frame, the term Nirvana, which referred to this. This first turning means, Navana means cessation. Cessation of what? Cessation of reactive trauma.

So all of us who are, you know, who are part of this awakening process, understand that there's a cleaning up dimension to the path. Right. So that involves kind of deep, emotional insight and processing and cleaning up. So that's the first turning. And of course,

you can unpack the whole path through the perspective of your own individual, cleaning up your own individual stuff, so you're completely free of it all. The second turning happened around the same time in common era when we saw the kind of trends, the teachings of Christianity arise. So it's a very, on a planetary level, it's a similar recognition that suddenly love and relationship and the we, is an important part of the spiritual journey, right? The emphasis on charity, of generosity, on service, and an appreciation that we're all deeply interconnected. So no matter how free I am, how can I be free

if we're seeing our brothers and sisters starving the other side of the world or having bombs dropped on them, right? You can't. So that second turning, or the Mahayana, is the universal vehicle. Now, this universal vehicle within the tradition is understood to be taught

in many different solar systems, in many different galaxies. Meaning, if your motivation towards understanding the sacred is that you want to improve the lives of other beings, improve their psychology and their cultural environment and their physical health

and the systems they live in, that is the Mahayana. So in that sense, it's a very big umbrella for a spiritual path. The exemplar in the Hinniana in the first turning was called the Ahart, which is like the symbol, imagine the archetype of a monk, somebody who's doing everything right and saying no, no, no, no to everything, and just cleaning it all up.

Maybe a little bit rigid, no wine, you know, no fun, no music. Right? This is like get the guy, wheel him into emergency, nothing, like clean it up, right? In the second turning, the emphasis is the Bodhisattva. So Bodhi means awakening satva being, the awakening being. So this is the soul. And this is like the Bodhisattva warrior. So she, he is committed to building enlightened civilization. That's the big game is like, this is the game right here.

So once you have that kind of motivation and you've kind of done enough individual work and you begin to develop your heroic altruism, then the third turning was like, okay, now we can start using special techniques, alchemical techniques to speed that process up. Right. So these are, you know, in the east, these are very similar to the alchemical teachings used by the Rosicrucians. In fact, they all come from a similar route, so to speak. But these are the teachings that work with speeding up the transformation of the subtle body,

opening up access to other realms, opening up access to cities, to powers. But none of that should happen until you have a right motivation and, like, you're taking care of enough of your personal stuff. Okay. Fourth turning, sorry. fourth turning essentially is well what happens when all of that tech meets a civilization that has a vast amount of tech to address those three previous turnings meaning we have in the west a deep understanding of trauma right we have a deep understanding of you know of of culture and we have a deep

understanding of science. So when those two meet, when the psychotech of the East, so to speak, of the Dharma, or even the Rosicrucrucci, the psychotech of the world's wisdom traditions finally gets to meet this culture, then you get a fourth turning, which is, as I said, the possibility for the reversal of the wheel and the possibility for a whole new time if we make use of it. So that's the long For the fourth Turning is a You know

It's a big deal So to speak We were to speak To like the opportunity now Is that that's present Like the transition point is here It's among us That's right

And the most powerful That thing that we can do Is unveil how we are A piece to that puzzle And So you know Like cultivating the intuitive Faculties

I think we have such a Especially the Western mind has such a strong magnetism towards the conceptual cognition, like the intellect, you know, that scientific mind, which is very powerful and important, but we're speaking to a deeper level of intelligence that can be awakened, which is so more vast and isn't bound to just our brain power. That's right. Yeah. So does it feel true? We can start to transition a little bit more to the individual journey. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Cool. Well, really what we're talking about is a transition to the heart. Because the thing about the, shifting from the emphasis of mindfulness to heartfulness,

if you will, right? That the heart field, so when we feel our heart in our chest, that's like one end of a sensory neuron but the other end is actually in the brain so when you when you're feeling your heart you're actually accessing a particular a particular center in the brain now what we know from the research is that the energy of the heart coheres the whole brain so all of the brain centers the all the various systems start cohering to the central organizing principle.

Now, the intelligence of the heart, the toroidal field of the heart, is the same kind of archetypal structure from photon to a planet to a solar system to a galaxy. So as we begin to move to heart intelligence, we're beginning to move to kind of holographic resonant model intelligence. Now, as the heart field gets stronger and stronger and stronger, so this doesn't happen immediately, it coheres the brain more and more and more and more and more. So this field, this heart field is your motivation to want to be of service,

expands and expands, and it coheres all of the various processes of your brain, slowly but surely all those cognitive processes start to get cohered into the structure of the heart. Now the heart is in coherence with the electromagnetic field of the planet. So we actually are in information coherence with a planetary field. The more the heart opens, the more the brain begins to become coered by that deep hologramed. graphic structure, the more your thought processes begin to become more and more systemic. So cognitively, what we would expect as that heart center opens up is the birth of systemic

thinking first, then metasystemic, then paradigmatic, then cross-paradomatic, then metacross-paradamatic, meaning that the heart has an effect on cognition. And this is the bodhisattva path. And the reason that this is so important is, it's that kind of way of thinking and knowing that is going to be able to find the solutions for these immense challenges that we're facing. Yeah, it's like cognitively seeing new colors

as you awaken the heart. That's right. It's like a veil that pulls away. It's a whole new kind of intelligence. Access beyond the matrix. Whole new kind of intelligence, right? And what's interesting is you can even do meditations and open up and develop meditative capacity without doing that. And what happens is then you don't get this kind of holographic synchronization with the planet.

you're kind of, well let's put this way, the Sith option can happen pretty far up. You can go up the path of meditative development, right, of personal development, and take the Sith route, like, you know, quite a way up. I've just always been so enamored by the capacity for anything really, but especially human beings, to truly transform. It's like, if we take an acorn seed that looks nothing. nothing resembles nothing like a tree. And yet somehow the intelligence of the universe, when the proper nutrients are provided, this small thing turns into this huge, magnificent being.

And the power that's weaving underneath to be able to make that happen is in that intelligent force, that creative energy that weaves in between us all is so fascinating. And I think when I first saw, I believe, yeah, Ken Wilbur's spectrum of consciousness and integral spirituality, the kind of color chart of consciousness and the levels of consciousness that, you know, from a bird's eye view, you could look at a human being on their own developmental journey and see them go from infrared to ultraviolet, you know, that correspond and correlate to different perspectives and worldviews. And that's like, it's like the ultimate video game. Which is so, it's so exciting. What do you find a framework that really shows you how you can wake up and what that, because it can be so esoteric and kind of this far. off thing, but like it's such a real process from point to point. Yeah. I'll just pause because I can see you brimming. Well, I'm just thinking of my wife Nicole and we sit around the kitchen table and she's like, God, they don't even know about development. Like we don't even teach human development

in our schools. Right. And so then it can sound esoteric. But actually, as as Ken, who's done this huge amount of research in one of his books, Integral, uh, psychology, there were charts after charts, after charts, basically showing, listen, all of these can be distilled into a developmental structure. And once you understand that that developmental structure has like a fractal, it is based on perspective taking. So we could even take the journey, so to speak, through perspectives if you wanted to, if that was interesting. But the dynamism of development is like is is algorithmic if you will right and once you appreciate that and understand that and you understand the map suddenly you can see the world in terms of colors or in terms of

perspectives you can understand development in terms of like seeing the culture wars that are happening and what and why they're happening developmentally that there are it all makes it all, it helps the bodhisattva. It helps her understand the classroom that she's in and how to help all the beings who are in the different class levels, right? It's like suddenly waking up at high school and realizing that everybody in middle school and elementary school is in a slightly different grade, right? And then if you want to help somebody, we'll work out what is their central operating

principle at that level of development. So it's a, you can't, you can't really awaken, well, not awaken, you can't stabilize and function as soul or as a bodhisattva without understanding development. It's not going to happen. And it's going to be futile to try to speak to somebody at like a second or third density level with this like seven dimensional kind of perspective. You know, it's just like, well, no, you just get burnt at the stake. if that's, you know, typically what we like to say is like two stages. One stage above can be, you know, can like cause some interest, two stages above allergies. Yeah. Would it be, would it be useful to kind of make a journey through these stages? Yeah, no,

I'd love to. So, I mean, there's many different frameworks of this from spiral dynamics to these levels of consciousness that kind of color coordinate the developmental process. What I want to do is zoom out, take a bird's eye view, what are all the pieces of the pie of the developmental journey as well? Right. And then let's, yeah, let's go through these different colors. Because as somebody who's, you know, maybe more at an egocentric, conventional level of development, they're going to have, even if they have like an inner luminous state experience, they will correspond and maybe attach it to a religious figure or perspective in a certain way versus somebody at maybe, you know, blue or purple consciousness, if you will, we'll have that and see it with more clarity in its

true form in a way. And so it's just so fascinating because every experience that we're walking around to, we're seeing it through metaphorically, these colored tinty glasses that we have on of how we see things. That's right. As that quote that I love and repeat many times from Wayne Dyer, you know, when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. And we change the way we look at things by changing who we are being for herself. So let's move, let's go up this developmental journey. Sure.

We'll kind of overview as well. Okay, so high level view is, let's say, this planetary system has a number of levels of grades or initiations. And once you complete those grades and just like, our planet is like middle school,

obviously. Right? So even if you're like, well, I'm at the top, it's like, we're bottom dwellers. So that's helpful because, you know, we don't want to get inflated, but it's also important that if you, you know, if you are reaching graduation, that you kind of, it's important that you recognize that you are. And it's also important that like, that we're able to find the spaces that those who, those graduates, those near graduates can actually say, hey, guys, it's okay before they leave and never come back again, so to speak. Yeah, for middle

schoolers, I think we're at the top of the mountain. It's not preschool either, right? No, it's not preschool. This is Earth school. We came here to work our shit out through the reflection and mirrors of duality. That's right. Well, let's just begin the journey, and I'm sure we'll kind of weave. So we can look at it also, which is helpful

through perspective taking. So if you think of first person, first person perspective is, well, let's say an infant doesn't even have first person perspective. They're kind of fused with everything. And as they differentiating themselves from other, they become aware of I. Right. Self-reflective

capacity. And you'll notice that when a child finally sees themselves in a mirror, right? That is a developmental milestone. Before that, my son Bodie, when he was like, you know, three months, I used to sit on my lap when I was doing meditation interviews and he would sit there and just drool and just look at great beyond. I'd be like, yeah, you need to meditate like this, right? But six months later, when he swore himself in the mirror, then he's like, the self is there, right? So first person is really the birth of, if an adult is operating from that place, there's complete narcissism. It's me, me, me, me, me, me, me, right? An example of this that might be useful for the listeners, too, is at that pre-conventional stage of development, I've heard the same. I've heard the

example many times where you put a ball in between us. One has one half of it's red, the other half of it's blue. And like if I'm sitting across from like a baby who doesn't have that ability to take the role of other, that's right. If I show him both sides, right, look, it's half of his blue, half it's red. If you just show him in the red side, you say what, what color are you seeing? Red. Red. What color are they saying? Red. That's right. Yeah, inability to take the role of other. No other. Yeah. That's right. first person perspective. And so, you know, we all begin there. We all begin there, right?

And then slowly what develops is slowly what develops the second person perspective. Now, in that process, if it wasn't, if we didn't have a history that we have, part of that being born would also be born into the magic, into magical world. So children are still living,

in this kind of magical world, which is alive with magic and the trees are alive. And they're kind of living inside of a fairy tale. And as they slowly develop second person perspective, this is what we call in cognitive psychology concrete operational thinking. So what concrete operations means is, is you can finally process zeros and ones, black and white, in and out. So it's a level of cognition that can't, it can't do anything than that. So this is what we would recognize as fundamentalist cognition, right?

Like, are you in? Are you part of the in crowd or are you part of the out crowd, right? and as we go through this it's important to recognize that we all have these operating systems still happening right now right so that second person perspective it kind of matures into the best of it is like the code the true what is what is good and what is bad or my nation right or or my team or my religion or like wherever there's this like very strong like black and white way of thinking and of course it's extremely it can be extremely dangerous and if we were to go and we were to discuss like empire on this planet empire loves to manipulate to second person

perspective this this level of cognition because there's still a vast amount of people on this planet running those programs and they can easily be manipulated because if you really really like something and you really don't like something you can manipulate somebody all around the board and who manipulates them third person perspective which is the birth of objectivity right so first person perspective john second perspective andre was andre with me or is against me third person is like there's something objective over there, and maybe you and I can actually agree about that, right? From that level of consciousness was birthed a whole world. Now, we've seen this progression evolve in the last 12,000 years,

but these cycles obviously repeat themselves in any civilizational cycle, if that makes sense. Like, we begin and we go first, second, third. So this isn't just about, modernity but third person perspective we see in modernity um and if you look in the history of art in the west suddenly in the renaissance the art pops a perspective and suddenly there's like you're looking into a painting and you can see perspective in the painting right dark ages it's it's just flat and then suddenly there's perspective and they're drawing perspective and they're drawing into the painting. You're seeing there in art the birth of third person perspective, right?

Of course, there were probably people before that, but the thing about the Renaissance is there was enough financing that you could begin to see all of the artifacts born out of that. Fourth person perspective is the birth of multicultural pluralism. So what do we mean by that? We mean that after since the last hundred years and particularly since the 60s, fourth person perspective is the ability to see that third person perspective is lacking something significant. What's it lacking?

It's lacking the perspective of the feminine. It's lacking the perspective of other cultures who do science. We've done third person perspective. through a particular science. Well, how about Chinese science or Ayovetic science? Right? Like, you know, so fourth person perspective is, is inclusive. And it's what we see right now in the kind of a progressive woke movement, right, in our culture, in the left wing, right?

Which is we need to make sure that every single voice is heard. and of course that's a necessary compensation for 500 years or even more of this third person kind of machinery that we've seen is so effective in basically harnessing the industrial revolution and drawing upon monetizing and breaking everything down into smaller pieces so that's third person perspective fourth person perspective fifth person perspective now let me just say something that

we could look at these perspectives and say well there's one and there's 1.5 and there's 2 and there's 2.5 and there's 3 and there's 3.5 right there's something that's very important that happens just after fourth person perspective we could call that 4.5

we could call it integral but essentially the understanding that there is a developmental ladder doesn't kick in to 4.5. What that means is prior to that, if you get the kind of traditional, like traditionalists in a room with Wall Street executives

who are running like mainstream CNN, like Be All You Can Be Code, in the same room as kind of like crunchy progressives, right woke progressives they're all going to look at each other and think that the other person is completely mad and needs to be like taken out right um it's at the birth of the capacity for hierarchical thinking that appreciates all of those stages of development and begins to realize like oh i need to go back and i need to do some healing because this the second person perspective when I was meant to be like integrating like a deep sense of connection with

others maybe I didn't right so the birth of like integral cognition 4.5 is the ability to recognize the whole stack and recognize the value of every single one of these prior stages if we to use this in the language of the chakra system 4.5 is when you like a dimension of the heart where the heart realizes like, oh, you know what? The solar plexus and the second chakra and the root chakra are all important. Wow, there's colors. Oh my gosh, there's colors up as well as down. So 4.5 is the beginning of a really grounded appreciation that has gone through

all of these stages to get here. And then the recognition, like, oh my gosh, wow. and the whole, and it can begin to see the whole stack and appreciate development. Before that, it's not that you won't appreciate the great mystics, but you're going to kind of throw them out in space. And also there's a lot of mixing of what we call the pre-trans fallacy, meaning mixing like magical thinking

with trans-personal technology. Like just because something isn't rational doesn't mean that it's sacred. Can you think of an example of that? Okay, yeah. Well, first in terms of altered states, right? There are some altered states where it's like a regressive state because you're going to go into that state so that you can regress back to some childhood innocence, right? And feel your feelings and run around, take off.

your clothes and be completely free. That is a non-rational state. That isn't the same thing as the non-rational opening up of this non-conceptual valid cognition. Now you could say, well, both are completely spontaneous, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier, well, yes, one is the jazz musician playing and the other one is smashing on the keys, right? Now, don't get me wrong. I like to take my clothes off and run around as well, right?

But to recognize that that kind of freedom, right, that freedom, which is the freedom of the body, isn't necessarily the same thing as the freedom of soul. But what's happened in our culture is it's very easy for us to like merge the two. Right. And we need both, right? But they're not the same thing. Right. Is that a good example?

Yeah. I think a lot of what people would attribute to being free. or freedom is like a kind of more immature temporary access to something that is like a feeling of freedom, yet it's within the context and confines of a lot of the shit you haven't looked at, for example, where you could actually arrive at a stage that sustains your freedom.

Another good example would be psychedelics. Yeah. Okay, psychedelics will open up, but they can open up the ceiling or they can open up the basement. okay and so how do you know like when you've had this amazing vision and some being communicated stuff you know to you how do you know that basically it wasn't just your own narcissism talking to you about how amazing you are exactly right it's very real yeah oh for sure i mean there's nothing

worse than getting stuck next to somebody telling you their iawaska trip right because you're like so and and so that's not to say anything negative about about psychedelics, they are, they open. Yeah, they open the veil. And they open the veil either direction, either trans or pre, but much more confusingly, both at the same time. Right? And if you don't have a developmental understanding, you won't be able to purify and distill, which is why at a certain point, many of the traditions will leave the psychedelic work behind in favor of maybe a more precise approach. I think that that might change as we become, as we evolve our appreciation of psychedelics, we'll be able to take them.

I mean, the truth is, is if we, if the academy, the sacred academy in the West hadn't been suppressed, we'd have had 2,000 years of psychedelics. And our chemical elixas would be, I mean, just amazingly refined, you know, right now, I think we're kind of, it's like a hammer and a chisel, you know what I mean? Yeah, which is still a pretty damn magical hammer and chisel. Yeah. But just on that note, because we have, like, accessing these altered states, like you said, both to the trans and pre, can open up the veil to the basement and the ceiling, which is very powerful.

Yep. And it's useful for seeing and having a reference point of what's possible. But at the same time, it's like if there's me right here and the truth of who I am is over there, but there's a wall in between the psychedelic or altered states, you know, moments can be like a trampoline to see that. But as you jump up, you must come down and building the stages of consciousness is like building a ladder to like... Absolutely. To actually get there. And once you're there, then you're there.

And you don't need to jump on a trampoline anymore unless you want to. just for the fun of it. Yeah, for sure. Well, so we were at fourth person perspective. Four and a half. Four and a half, right. Okay, yes. So essentially four and a half realizes development.

Four realizes context that everything is socially constructed, right? Okay, like a good dose of kind of French postmodernism with a cigarette and a black coffee, right? that's kind of four. A whole new tier of development opens up a fifth person perspective. A fifth person perspective not only do appreciate that things are socially constructed and that they are developmentally constructed, the mind begins to see. So remember, when we're saying perspectives, we're not talking about thinking. We're talking about seeing.

Now that seeing can think, but it is. really a seeing like it's it's how many cuts the diamond has at fifth person perspective the diamond has enough cuts to see that everything that we use in terms of language all language is a construction the whole thing now what does that mean it means that awareness begins to see through all of the structures into the deep deeper interconnected field. Fifth person perspective is the beginning of the soul awareness coming online. Now to make things more difficult, you could have a great master, a great meditation master,

who's at let's say, sixth person perspective, and he's going for a pilgrimage, and he comes across a kindly goat herder who's sitting out, chilling, smoking his pipe. Right. And the meditation master could teach this goat herds. herder who is kind of just like living in the village and developmentally not very sophisticated because he's not doesn't need to be right it's not even third person perspective he's just kind of smoking his pipe and the great meditation master can say okay i want you to do this technique now the go herder would have never have came up with that technique himself it's unlikely however

he was introduced to the technique so now we have this interesting thing is that He's been introduced with a technique, with a technology, developed by somebody at sixth-person perspective. He's ingested this psychotechnology and he's running it. This is where we see a lot of the confusion because you can run that technology, have experiences of, let's say, soul, but developmentally, your structure is actually not at that level structurally, what does that mean? It means you're going to interpret the whole state experience based on the level of development that you're at. Ideally, we want you to be interpreting the state

experience at the level that that state comes from. So this is why in some ways, meditation itself can be developmentally inappropriate. There's more important lessons to be doing when our kids are at preschool, we want them to be doing preschool stuff. When they're in middle school, we want them to be middle school. There's nothing worse than a precocious child who's been like, listened to the wrong conversations

and is like in middle school and telling everybody else about like whatever it is when really that isn't necessary the lesson that needs to be learned at that stage. Right. And it could fracture our consciousness perhaps at that stage too because our eyes and energy gets put on to site for this one area, which is, you know, we talked in the Gilbert podcast about the energies of Aramon

and lucifericum impulses. And, you know, in the east, there's more luciferic impulses in terms of these early access to these spiritual, you know, states and experiences. Now, there's no value judgment on that. But, you know, if there's, like you're speaking to, there's these other developmental processes that haven't been focused on first, then you might be able to, and you see this with a lot of gurus

that have woken up to the profound truth of who they are, but they still haven't cleaned up their own, you know, psychodynamic stuff and childhood stuff. And so I feel like we often put this umbrella of, like, waking up is just like kind of everything, but it's like one aspect of it. Yeah, waking up ideally, well, our friend Ken

articulated this you know this simple maxims kind of waking up growing up cleaning up cleaning up opening up showing up and I always like to add fucking up because you know what I mean that's really there's a lot of

there's a lot of that happening that's a good addition right the growing up process before we go into this because I do want to dive into this was there anything else within the fifth six person well yes yeah so so I think the first thing to say is essentially what the fifth so that is opening up that whole tier of the soul

of non-conceptual valid cognition where the hallmark of it is the recognition of the fabric of love as being like the the fabric upon which all that information is flowing. So the intuitive information is flowing on love, if that makes sense. As that process, so in the beginning of that tier, this is where we can get into like closer, I mean, some of the details of these dynamics, but essentially, because this actually, this will be speaking to many of your listeners, they're beginning to journey into that

into that realm. So the beginning of that tear of soul, the tear of the bodhisattva, the experiences of that fundamental openness. So from the point of view of the mind you're seeing through the structures and then from the point of view of the heart, you're feeling that as like a deep, a deep intimacy with all beings. In the beginning, it's a passive process. What I mean is that to kind of have that state, it takes a lot of work to be able to calm the mind down and open things up to experience it.

So your ego in some senses is passive. You have a meditation practice. after a certain amount of time and the better the teaching and the better the teacher, the faster that time because that time could be decades or months, right? I mean, the technology does matter. I think what's important for our friends to understand is that just as you and I, and all of us took that journey from zero perspective to

fourth person perspective through our educational system if you went through the educational system particularly recently you will get to fourth person perspective at university that is like guaranteed it is scaffolded it's a scaffold so it's not some kind of like

mysterious process that we don't know anything about it's the same thing up if that makes sense it's not a mysterious process even the term mysticism is a bit of a misnomer because it actually isn't a it isn't a mystery it's a science so that so i'm saying that because as we move in to discuss these realms which might sound mystical they're actually pretty precise from the point of view of the academy

from the visible college if you will from the kind of the adepts of the planetary dama this is not like vague. So first kind of phase is somewhat passive, whether you're taking plant medicine or you're doing a meditation practice. As that new perspective is essentially wired in, so in terms of like the kind of the neuroplasticity to hold that way of looking at reality become solid,

the next stage, which would be like a 4.5 stage, is that the mind, thinking mind, can now be fully operational whilst maintaining that experience of fundamental openness. So your identity now, your identity is shifted to like soul identity, soul realization, but it's more than that because now you can reintroduce the mind. And now the mind can start being informed by that field and it can begin to organize itself and reveal itself. So the mind itself begins to become an expression of synchronicity.

That's what we mean by intuition. As that matures, you know, at that point you think that you're really hot shit. And you are hot shit. Because frankly, we're developmentally, we're talking probably like, you know, 0.01% of the planetary population. population. But then what begins to dawn on the practitioner is that, oh, maybe I'm not alone here. Right. So if you can imagine, you know, it would be the same thing way back down in like preschool where like little Billy or little, you know, Joanne learns how to talk and learns how to move and they're pretty hot shit and then suddenly they go to the next classroom

and like everybody's doing it but before that they were like look at like look at me so that what happens is the soul begins to realize that it is joining what we would call the human hierarchy that there is actually like a for want to use a contemporary term there is a organization that they that they kind of step into, or they begin to intuit that they're part of an organization. An organization, a hierarchy, a holarchy, of advanced souls, if you will,

of wisdom and compassion. But again, not advanced really compared to like some of the other galactic civilization. So we got, you know what I mean? Like, it's like advanced compared to maybe the majority of humanity. Right. A lot of, like, for, so a lot of our listeners,

perhaps who are already, you know, some who are already involved in that, part of the challenge is that because of this wetware, this body, mind, hasn't been initiated. And we can talk about the need for building a new initiatory system. Because of that, your remembrance between functioning within a department of that organization in the dream state and what you're doing in the awareness, wake state is not the transference of information because of the kind of the pineal atrophy, if that makes sense, and the lack of kind of DMT in the system, the ability to carry over that information from one dimension to another dimension is weak. And this is actually a major

problem that we have right now with many people, that level of initiation is not knowing that they're part of something, but they are. You know, like a good example, my wife, Nicole, I forget what, the first, it was a few years back, was one of those elections where people were like, oh my God, what it's gonna happen. And she got so concerned that she was, she started lucid dreaming and then went through a whole cycle

where she was with a group and they would go to different places on the planet, right? The White House or the Sudan, and essentially provide kind of off-ground support. The truth is that if that would be your motivation in the waking state, then it's also what's happening in the dream state, which is more connected to that much larger ecosystem of soul. But because the physical body hasn't been initiated,

because of the chemistry of this body, we're not able to remember. Does that make sense? And that's why the initiatory systems were so important because they were helped to kind of support the soul, the body and the personality, the soul and the personality,

integrating. So that's sixth person perspective. Now, just so you know, in terms of, let's say, the advanced meditation systems, that is maybe only two-thirds, of the way up the mountain. I don't know if it's, you know,

talking about those more rarefied kind of clear light states, I don't know how useful it is, so to speak, but just recognize that there are further grades. I mean, what we're talking about now is the territory that probably need to everybody who's listening in this lifetime, that is like the territory that is like,

it's also the territory that's really needed, so to speak, because if we can build a new initiatory system that really takes people through those stages into Sacred World and initiates the chemistry so that we actually can see Sacred World again, that's enough to put us, to reverse the wheel and put us in the, you know, heading in the right direction.

Yeah, well, we can dive into the initiatory process of what that system would look like in a little bit later, but I love how you broke that down from zero to, seventh person essentially perspective and also throw up that chart from Wilbur's integral spirituality about the levels of consciousness.

So people can see the color coordination and also how many, there's so many different frameworks for the developmental process that overlap, right? And, you know, from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric to cosmic-centric.

What's, you know, and maybe sometime we can look at these maps because some of the more sophisticated ones which look at like the let's say those seven tiers appreciate seven sub phases and then you begin to understand that what we're talking about is chromatic and harmonic meaning like music and once you understand that then you can play a note at the bottom and it can reverberate all the way up so to speak so it's as if this is where the Pythagorean sciences and the appreciation of music and why geometry was studied. Geometry was studied so that these maps could be introduced, right?

You could put a point with a compass, make two circles, spirit matter, Vescapricis is in the middle, soul, and then basically the initiate would learn through mathematics and geometry to format the mind to be able to see all of these stages. So in the traditions, this was an essential part of the spiritual science to get the mind aligned with the structure of sacred world. Because if we do that, your thought processes are resonant with the actual structure of reality. That isn't enough, but it's helpful.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So I'd like to now go into... I would too. Yeah. The cleaning up, growing up, waking up side of things. Because this also... I think we just kind of provided, mainly you provided an overview of the developmental process and journey.

Let's start with cleaning up. Let's talk about it. Yeah. Because the metabolizing of our childhood stuff and you know that all this is a very recent

but very important discovery I guess in this kind of time cycle within humanity it is one aspect of it but it's an important one so let's unpack each of them and I think it's important to give credit to Ken absolutely you know because essentially what we're describing here are like the different

like the different in the physical body like the different processes that major organs are doing right so these are like the major kind of organ processes of the psyche yeah right so you know a shout out to uncle ken yeah we love you we love you can in the studio at some right yeah um Ken's new book finding radical wholeness you know if you guys want to like dive in um I think that would be like he breaks this down but let's start with cleaning up. So, I mean, essentially what we're talking about in the cleaning up process is the integration and the metabolizing of psychodynamic material.

Now, what happens in all of us to some extent when we're not fully individuated. So the term individuation is related to cleaning up. when we're not completely individuated, we're fused with our childhood structures. So cleaning up is about digesting the childhood shadow. However, cleaning up is a good one-liner, but if we go a little bit deeper, what we're really talking about is, okay, what are these structures, these early structures? Well, there's the attachment system. There's the self system.

Well, there's the attachment system. There's the early relational system and there's the self system. And in some ways we can map those onto the three chakras. So cleaning up process generally, the heart opens down. Now this is important also in terms of the sacred journey because that's where the dragon energy comes from, right? Like, we want dragon energy. You know, we don't, you know, we don't just want to ascend. We want to descent. We want to bring spirit down, right? And so an important part of that is cleaning up these lower energies. The attachment system itself, so if we're using the model

of the chakras, let's say that that is like the root. The attachment system is related to our physical survival in the sense that mammals grasp onto their caregivers in order to have a sense of security. And I think a lot of the research indicates that when mammals don't have a caregiver, we basically, we die. We just wither and die. So the early childhood environment, the outer experience of having somebody there holding you, does that make sense, right? That physical presence is internalized as a deep sense of security. And how much of that personality structure is created before the age of seven, what do you say? Oh, nearly all of it.

That's great. You know, that's wild. Nearly all of it. Because we typically don't have, you know, real memory in the brain. Yeah, in our body, our heart is obviously store at all. That's right. And not only that, it's all. it's all relational.

Yeah. Meaning. Which is good indicator because that's also where it's usually revealed in interpersonal dynamics, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's right. I'm watching my daughter now, like, as she moves into, like, dating. And, of course, she's got two parents.

And so we're, like, we sit down. We're talking about the attachment styles because it's like, oh, my gosh, it's a minefield out there. all these kids who haven't had, you know, the right attachment, it all gets played out in relationship. God bless you both as parents. I wish we all could have parents that understood this. If everybody right now could please pray for myself and my wife and our journey's parents, maybe that would make this whole poem that was worthwhile. So, okay, so attachment system. First, right, safety.

Right. Feeling physically safe. that stems even way back to the physiological skin-un-skinned contact right after birth. Well, that's right. And what will... So, you know, the next generation of teaching around this. So, you know, the kind of teaching that I teach the work with is, once we understand, is an appreciation that there's a relationship actually between these lowest structures and the highest.

meaning the relaxation of the root and the sense of safety actually releases the crown so it isn't that oh i'm just going to rush through my cleaning up stuff actually there's an intimate relationship between how deeply you can embody and therefore internalize safety and how stable your soul realization and non-door realization can be further on along the path. So I think that's really important to understand is actually in that at the sixth person perspective, when we're devising, when we're developing new technologies, so different spiritual paths are evolved by teachers at various stages of development. Does that make sense?

Okay. The next level tech, right, which is like holonic, resonant model kind of holographic tech chromatic and understanding how these stages resonate you know this is a very different

this is part of the fourth turning fourth turning is a whole different body of tech okay so when we look at this early stuff what we're looking at is these are the things that stop us from actually stabilizing soul realization

okay so safety is the first one the second quality is is attunement. And I've got to, you know, really got to give a shout out to my old mentor, Dr. Dan Brown, who mentored me in attachment therapy for a decade. So, just so you know that, you know, these have lineages associated with them. Attunement, when you, if you think, if you see a parent holding a child and you can see the child feeling safe, but the parent is checking their phone.

the child might feel safe, but the child won't feel attuned to. What is attunement? Attunement is where you feel into the nervous system of somebody else. So if we are attuning to each other, I'm feeling you, you're feeling me, I'm feeling felt by you. I'm like, oh, Andre gets me. And Andre is like, oh, I feel felt by John. That feeling felt experience is a sense. essentially taking the other person's nervous system inside of you.

And in the case of a child, the parent's nervous system is being used to organize the child's nervous system. So if a child doesn't get that, for instance, that's where you might see like a borderline injuries, where the ability to organize the internal landscape is very difficult. So we've got a sense of safety, we've got a sense of attunement. Now, if you focus on developing safety and attunement, a lot of the higher noise or the mind will quiet and down

because a lot of the kind of ADD-ish and constant thinking is due to a lack of safety. So safety, attunement, the next quality would be like feeling valued or even adored. It's like when little Andre was, you know, a little Johnny were in the playground, they turned around

and mummy or daddy was like looking at them and they saw they were seen but not just seen but like completely cherished. Little Billy, little Johnny, Andre internalized like, I am cherished.

Right. And you know, that's often the case where that's not, that need is not met because I think a lot of people just see trauma as stuff that you didn't want to have happen happened to you, but it's also the stuff that you needed to have happen that didn't happen.

That's why I said cleaning up isn't quite the right term, because you're not just cleaning up, you might be rebuilding. Reparancing, I don't know if that's the right word, but yeah. Technically, you could say restructuring. You're going down and you're rebuilding structures in the psyche. So there is a cleaning up phase. Yes, if you've had acute traumas, then we want to clean those out.

But developmental trauma can be a trauma caused by the absence of something. This is hard work. It is hard work. But again, you know, there's a understanding what the right tech is for that level of issue. That can be super helpful because, you know, using the wrong tech at the wrong level of development. Right. Because you can meditate all day long

and it's not going to do anything for that. Not unless, I mean, what I've what I've done is re-engineered the contemplative system so that actually I get my students to meditate on those functions. Right. So if you're taking the best of east and west,

in the right context. Fourth turning, you actually recombine them. You develop the meditative skills whilst doing the reparenting piece. And that way you're doing both processes simultaneously. Yeah. But yes, generally, knowing which one, you can waste years and years and years. And the thing is, that is so common.

So how do our listeners, how do I, how do we continue to gain clarity as to what those pieces are that we really do need to clean up or hold space for it to create the developmental process? We can go into the many different, you know, therapies. Well, let's just, let's complete them. Okay, so attachment system. Attachment, attachment, safety, safety, attunement, kind of value. And then also basically, if I was your dad and like, let's say we come from a family of lawyers

and you're like, music. And I'm like, music, right? And you see that I see that you need to be a musician. And I'm like asking you the questions. Andre, how do you feel about this? Andre, like, you're developing. a cognitive capacity to ask yourself questions about yourself because I'm interested in you and I'm asking and I'm modeling.

If you don't have that, you don't even ask questions. You can't even think like that. Of what do I want? What do I think? What do I think about this? We're just so outwardly source what will be safe and... There's no cognitive... So having modeled to you, what do I want?

I think, Andre, that you want to play, you don't want to be a lawyer, do you? You don't want to be a break. You want to be a musician. You want to be a podcast. So that is one of the qualities of attachment, which is a deep care, a deep caring on my part to help instill inside of you your GPS system. Yeah, and the alternative, which is unfortunately the widespread case most of the time is music. No, lawyer. You want to be a lawyer. because the Johns are lawyers. The Johns are lawyers. Meditation Masters.

No! I want to be a jazz musician. Okay, so those, you can see how important those are. So first, even knowing that. So there's that section of the stack. The next section of the stack is related to the dysfunctional relationships that were mirrored to you when you were a little. bit older. So that attachment stack is like, I don't know, zero to four, five. Let's say between five and ten, you're watching how mummy and daddy do relationship. Okay? That forms a whole

model and mapping of relationship. Okay, that's a different attachment will not address that. that's like got to do with the mapping of how of the meaning making that you've made of the relational landscape yeah third system here has got to do with the self system self system isn't got that isn't got to do with attachment that's not got to do with the attachment system yeah it hasn't got to do with the relational construct it's got to do with self so the first thing is like what is your self definition who do you see yourself to be right so self-definition self-esteem and self-efficacy these are all built around the self-structure itself so people who don't have a strong sense of self-meaning when they reflect

upon themselves they don't know what they're about and they don't have a sense of their self-image of or a self-image that is like capable and positive. So maybe they have a negative self-image, right? So the restructuring of the self-image so that when you reflect upon yourself and you see yourself, you see a piece of artwork that you're like, okay, I feel good about that. That's who I want to be.

Right? So that's the self-definition piece. self-efficacy well self-esteem is well how good do I feel about that how good do I feel about the structure that I'm building and then self-efficacy is well how effective am I right like so some people their parents help them feel really effective right but no sense of self-definition right or feel really good sense of self-esteem but like completely ineffective, right? Like you might know people out like that

who just feel really good about themselves. They're just chilling out, maybe smoke a bit of cannabis for a few decades, not really do anything. They're not effective, but they just feel good about who they are. So those three main dimensions, attachment system, relational system, self-system,

you can think of that kind of related to like the lower chakras, cleaning those up and restructuring them so that we have an optimal self-structure. So that's cleaning up. The roots of the cell. The self, yeah, the psychodynamic piece, right? Yeah. Okay.

And there's various therapies for each of the like you said. Well, we could even, I mean, hundreds of therapies. Yeah. But if you understand those three dimensions, it's like, oh, attachment, any kind of attachment therapy will address those, kind of lower attachment system or kind of relational work, psychodynamic work, or self-work. So, I mean, we spoke to a little bit that we really get often revealed to what is the unprocessed

shadow material through the interpersonal dynamics where we have an avoidant or, you know, anxious kind of attachment style. And it's like, okay, so we can go into that down in before we go up into that process. Gestalt therapy can provide a powerful framework for, you know, three, two, one process of, you know, putting into third person, second, first person. That's right. And so I like breaking all these down in potential therapies for each of them because I'm putting myself in the shoes of a listener where we all have our own different, unique stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, so with the attachment work, I mean, often that happens, my

mentor who my late mentor Dr. Dan Brown who passed away who did amazing work on attachment work mainly in my view influenced by the Indo-Tibetan tradition so maybe I'll talk a little bit about that and then we can because I think that's a really

helpful approach and it also frankly in my work I'm interested in how do I connect, let's say the attachment system to full awakening. Like, we don't want to like just do one or the other. There's a way of cohering these in such a way that they're interconnected. For the attachment system, at a kind of basic level, what matters is how well you and I have internalized a relationship.

So it's not actually even if there was that relationship, because if you didn't internalize, it, then you're still going to have a challenging attachment system. If you have ADD, so in my mind, ADD is a symptom of multi-generational trauma that's kind of like building up. So if you have ADD, if I'm your parent and even if I'm trying to give you, like connect with you and if you're just like kind of, right, then you haven't been able to internalize it. So the internalization of the relationship is important. The second thing to an understand is the brain doesn't know the difference between whether you imagine that you've had a relationship like that or whether you did.

If you put someone in an MRI machine and you hold up a green card, right, and you say, you know, what is this? And they go green. Okay. And then you hold up a red card. And I say to you like, imagine this is green. and even though they're seeing red, green will light up. What that means is what we're projecting onto reality

in some ways has more of an influence on the brain than actually reality itself. That's why projection is so powerful in these interpersonal, because we're projecting ghosts of the pasts onto each other. Yeah. Right? It's like if you know one or two people

that are assholes in your life, then they might be assholes, but if everyone's an asshole in your life, you're the asshole. you're projecting absolutely for sure for sure so

where are we sorry had nothing to do with me yeah that that projection is a powerful that's right so okay so in the

in the Indo-Tibetan tradition it was understood that like the best it was said like the best teacher is the one that lives four valleys over Why? Because you get to project onto her, right? If you get to see the teacher early in the morning with like drool coming out of, like, you know, and his wife, you know, like, talk, you're like, shit, right? I don't want to follow that. I don't want to study with that person. But the idea that the teacher, that if you didn't have access to that teacher and we all, the only times you showed up was where the teacher was giving this amazing teaching, you'd be like, oh, wow. So, The appreciation of projection in a mature way is also, in my mind, a hallmark of a student who is ready for the fourth journey. If you're going to work with a teacher and you're going to project your daddy or mommy stuff onto them, you're probably not ready, right?

Because these traditions rely upon transmission. So if you don't have access to a teacher, right, if you don't have access to a parent or a therapist, right well the thing is is you can envision what the perfect parent or perfect guide or perfect teacher right would would be like so in the tradition part of that is the visualization practices of both teachers but also the visualization practices of archetypal forms so let's say the healing mother Waitara or Medicine Buddha, which would be like the ideal therapist, okay, the ideal parent. So if you have these archetypal forms that have been built up by thousands of generations of practitioners who are like, oh, okay, so you have some parenting stuff, well, why don't we have you

work with this pure archetype of mothering? And the first thing I want you to do is kind of envision situations where you see this amazing healing mother, you know, feeding her children and taking care of the sick. And you just familiarize yourself and how does it feel when you watch her? And how is she talking to the people around her? And how is she moving? So you begin to familiarize yourself with that energy. And then you, you, you know, you can bring the visualization of Tara or whoever it is in front of you and you begin to get a sense of what does it feel like to sit in the presence of somebody who makes me feel really safe. Right. So if I was sitting in the presence of somebody who is really safe. Now the truth is,

even if I've had some developmental lack, our brains are shaped by thousands of years of love. So the deep structure, the Dharmic traditions on the planet all agree that if you can get through the conditioning, that the deep structure of this body mind is over Christ, is of a bodhisattva, and that actually that is innately good. If you can hit the factory reset button, you'll come back to your default, which is love. That's right.

So at the beginning, you work with an envisionment practice, right? And so the student, the person who's being, you know, the patient because you do have to be patient. It does take patience. Beginning to form a relationship. Now, in the traditions, if you had a teacher that you trusted, right, and I go and I have an interview with my teacher, and there she is, and I trust her, and she's not, she's being, all that she's there for is to care for me. And then I leave. And then I internalize that relationship and I bring her

out there and I feel like, what does it feel like to be in relationship with her? So, So the teacher then becomes, or the therapist becomes internalized. But it was always understood in the tradition that the teacher was this, underneath the teacher was this archetype. And that they were just forming a role. So it wasn't their personality. It was the nature of understanding how projection works. And that was one of the ways that the Dharma was transmitted from one generation to another generation was through close, intimate fiduciary relationships of teacher and student. Does that make sense? Okay. So if we can internalize

that and do that process without necessarily having a teacher, but understanding that working with visualization practice will help bring that in. Then, of course, there's the shamanic dimension to it, which is, if you do that practice long enough, with a sincere, heart that you're wanting to work on this, then the form will attract a being who will happy to be your surrogate, just like you have spirit animals. There were also members of the spiritual hierarchy who are happy to come in here and help you reparent. So traditionally the process was, was you first kind of felt how safe the person was in front of you. You took refuge in them so you would like really appreciate wow it's so amazing to be in this person's presence

what does it feel like and then you would then internalize the archetype the teacher and then you would become and so it was never left that was outside of you was always internalized as like now this is part of Andre this is part of John and this is a dimension of you and me that is the good parent and I have received that transmission from my teacher and my teacher's teacher and my teachers, teachers, teachers, teacher and teachers, teachers, teachers. Because really, I mean, this is what I love about human relationship is all the people that you and I have loved who gave us that gift of fire gave us that. so i mean i learned this pretty early as a as a teen when i i left a girlfriend that i was really in love

with but you know i had the hero's journey to go on and i needed to go and do some other things and i realized like oh if i sit here and i visualize this woman i can feel the love born between us that's the gift she gave me now once i feel that i can then internalize that and the visualizing can just gently dissolve and the attachment itself state. And then essentially what you do is you meditate on the safety and attunement and security. Does that make sense? So that's like in terms of, you know, in terms of the contemplative tech that I've developed, the foundational kind of retreat that I often offer, which we call embracing,

embracing the whole and embodying the open ground, we do that deep attachment work to open up the transpersonal states. Because when you feel deeply safe and deeply attuned to and a deep sense of value, the grip of the attentional system. So in Buddhist psychology,

the deepest source of suffering is that we're gripping the attentional system. When that relaxes and it opens up, the soul can release into the wider field. So deep relationship between attachment system and flowering, if that makes sense. So that's a little like in terms of, if there's some creative people out there

who are listening to what we're saying, like, oh, okay, use your imagination to resource yourself now of course there's all kinds of attachment therapy but what I love about this is you get to do this the whole time

you get to sit in the car with your healing parent figure and drive you get to take that with you throughout the day right and so yeah that's that is no matter what happens in therapy, you're doing that process with the therapist anyway.

Essentially, the common denominator of all therapies is there's somebody there sitting, creating safe space and attuning to you. Wonderful. So I feel like that was fairly thorough within the cleaning up process. Yeah, we were cleaning, we clean that up. Yeah, which is really important. and like one without the other is not whole.

As like we can we can dive into the waking up side of things now with, you know, if we just focused on waking up without the cleaning up work and the shadow material stuff, then creates a whole different host of problems that can be some of the scariest individuals on the planet, you know. And at the same time, if you continually excavate your inner shadow material and don't wake up to the truth of who you are beyond any notion of self, the lowercase self. Sure. Then you're just, you're still in the rat race, you know, of, of being a person or being a someone. And so, you know, both are required in the process of the integral approach.

And so how would you succinctly describe the waking up process? What is that? Sure. Well, remember, so we've done the cleaning up. We've also spoken about growing up in terms of the perspective taking, right? So that one, first person, second person, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. Yeah. That is the growing up.

That's the egocentricity that we have in the development journey that a lot of people still really kind of embody towards the ethnocentric, taking the other person's. Ethnocentric, exactly. Towards kind of, I guess, modernity, third person perspective. Yeah, growing to like a world-centric. World pluralism, fourth-person perspective, hierarchical, 4.5. And then five point, so this is, so fifth-person perspective,

and above involves a waking up process. Got it. However, the awaking up process that happens part of growing up means that the waking up and the growing up is integrated into a single process, which is ideal. Yep. Okay? However, you can strip out the awakening process, right? So let's talk about what is that awakening process.

So the cleaning up was the process. So the cleaning up was the process of individuation. Growing up is the developing of our conventional self. Conventional. And then into even transpersonal functioning. Yeah. Like, you know, like next generation, taking the next steps in evolution as a self. And all of these happen can coexist simultaneously, obviously, and do.

So then, yeah, the waking up process now. So the first thing here is to appreciate. what are we awakening up to, right? So all of the traditions would really agree and all of the kind of well-developed contemplative traditions because I'm not quite sure, I mean, like the ones that have mature contemplative academies, would agree that there's a fundamental ground of being,

fundamental openness that when accessed, is felt as a deep, absolute compassion that embraces all beings and that when that level, when that recognition is functioning, that all the operations of the mind become translucent, meaning transparent, that they don't obscure the fundamental openness and the deep intimacy. Does that make sense? Absolutely.

Okay. It's like the sky, you know, that analogy. The sky of our being versus the clouds of our personality, the weather. So what I describe, it is as stable, this dimension of us is as stable as a mountain. It's as deep as an unbounded ocean. It is as open as unbounded sky. It is awake as kind of crystal, as kind of clear crystal. So it is intense.

intelligent, it is fundamentally open, and it is loving. And of course, it is whole, and that wholeness continues to expand. So, so when you realize that dimension of your being, you realize, it's like realizing a circle, but then as it matures, the circle gets bigger and bigger and it's always whole, but the wholeness gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. unending in its depth. So we can think of that as like the ocean, right? So there's a fundamental ocean. Now, as I was saying is because of the default settings of trauma,

the default factory settings, so to speak, the survival settings rather, that fundamental openness gets fused. And so in Buddhist science, we call that process confusion or ignorance. but technical it's confusion. This fundamental openness becomes fused with the attentional system. That makes sense? Okay.

Now the attentional system, the moment it becomes fused with the attentional system, it creates an eye, at the deepest level that's called the witness, but it creates a witness and a witnessed and a witnessing. So now you've created subject and object. When subject and object to created, then we begin to create time,

because it's a creative distance. Then we begin to create space. Then we begin to create a sense of an outside world. And then we begin to create a sense of self. Okay. So if we reverse the process, that unbounded loving awareness is fused with all of those structures in our consciousness.

It's fused with the body. It's fused with thought. It's fused with the self-structure. it's fused with the idea of there being an outside separate from an inside you know it's fused with a sense of time it's fused with a sense of i amness right okay so the process of awakening is the process of of that fundamentally awake consciousness what the traditions will call the infant consciousness or the soul, first releasing from gripping onto the body, which means you begin to experience that you're not your body,

but that you're including the body and you go beyond it. So it's not like you leave the body behind, but it's now that your body is, you know, you can feel into the space. You have gone beyond the body. The next level is then thought. mind is constantly thinking and you know if my mind says i'm great i'm great and i'm happy and if my mind says i'm a loser i'm a loser and i'm sad right so so by calming the mind down what's called

calm staying and developing the capacity for no thought i've now gone beyond that like trampoline of bouncing up and down so i've gone beyond the structure of the self i'm sorry of thought next structure would be the the self as a structure Now the self-structure is like that narrative or that self-image that we think is so real. And it is real and we need a healthy self. So this goes back to the kind of psychological piece which is like, okay, you need a self because a self is the vehicle in this dimension. However, if you're fused with yourself, that's problematic.

It causes suffering. It's like you need a car. but if Andre was out there polishing his car like I am my car you know what I'm saying right there could be a problem right okay so the ability to release from grasping onto the self-structure

which is real but not true in the way our capital south is like a hologram so rather than thinking that it's solid you suddenly see this is fifth person perspective now this is where at fifth person perspective you would start doing this naturally anyway. So you begin to see through the boundaries.

You begin to see that it's all photons in your direct experience. You know that. And suddenly the self becomes like a hologround structure that is there, but it doesn't obscure this fundamental, open, loving connection with everything. You effortlessly perceived the ephemeral nature

of all things. And also the impermanent nature as if anything that does arise, it has to by nature fall away, right? So there's a negative dimension, so to speak, which is like negation, like negating time. Like everything is impermanent. And there's a strong emphasis on that in the first turning teachings. The second turning teaching says, yes, everything's impermanent,

but hey, there's actually something to be affirmed here. deep into connection. You cannot, deep into connection is not impermanent. It is the very nature of everything. So there's a, there's a sense of impermanence, but there's also a sense of like intimacy and connection. Yeah. Right?

Which is you need both. You want to be free, but not free to fuck everybody. Right. But free to actually be like to be in relationship with everybody. Yeah. So once that has, once the kind of the confusion around that has released, right, then this open awareness can now release even deeper. It can release the structure of there being an outside world.

Because actually there is no inside or outside. That's not how our mind functions. Our mind works, you know, much as if we were in a dream. If there's a, like the dreaming is out there and the dreaming is in there, it's not like there's an out there or even an in there it's actually a single field right and then finally you begin to let the structure of time can be released and then eventually the structure of this individual consciousness think of it this way vast ocean warm loving crystal clear sink a bathtub into it take a bucket sink the bucket into the bathtub take a must a bucket into the bathtub take a

mug, sink the mug into the bucket, take an egg cup, sink the egg cup into the cup. Okay, now what's the water? Well, the water is awareness. So, like, drop a little fish into the egg cup. I'm aware. Right? I know what awareness is. Right. Yes, it is water, but this water is trapped within structures. Yes, it is the water of the ocean, but it ain't ocean water, right? So what the waking up process would do would be like, let's say, see that that egg cup was not as solid as we thought it was,

and the little fish can now swim into the cup, right? And then see that the cup is not as solid, and now the little fish goes beyond the self and into the bucket. And then in the bucket, the sea that the bucket, the structures of the bucket aren't as solid as you thought. And the little self moves into that fundamental field of the tub and then finally open. And then what happens is all of those structures are open. So thought stays. The self-structure stays.

Transcend but still include. That's right. It's like a roomy sense. like great masters like Muhammad or Jesus walk through the marketplace and nobody knows who they are because they don't stink of nag chumper right meaning

like really you're a fully functioning human being completely integrated into reality that's woken up for the vastness of your awareness woken up to the vastness and the universality of water

yeah that's awakening up and just for the western mind it can be a little tough to try to, we want to grasp onto something that is inherently solid, like point to something as like, oh, this is who I am. When in reality, we are that which is seeing. So I just want to, and every reflection is there because there's the negation part of things of netty, netty, and not this, not that, you know, all these things that could write down from the thoughts that I have to my ethnicity, cascrete, color of my skin. We can all see these things that are not fundamentally who I am. And then you start to go into the deeper process and deeper process. And like, what is individual?

visible. What can't be negated, really? And is just that there is an experience arising that I'm aware of? Well, technically, so in our experience, I mean, I think the first thing to be said is that with skilled teachers who know how to do this, this doesn't take very long. Right. So yes, it does sound a little bit out there, but actually in practice, and this is where I'm mastery, you know, master teachers are important because otherwise it's like how, I don't know. But I just a quick example, I had, when Sam Harris was on the podcast and we were talking about this and the validity and the importance of having a powerful teacher, it's like walking into a restaurant, where have you ever walked into a restaurant? There's like one of the walls is actually a mirror.

So it gives the illusion that the restaurant is actually bigger than it looks like. A master teacher goes up and like slaps his hand on the mirror. And this is like, no, like this is an illusion. here right right right right which is you know you could get into the philosophy and theoretics of like yeah I could see maybe where it splits off into a mirror but like slapping your hand onto the reality of what your consciousness is is like in that pointing out technique is so valuable is direct yeah right so there's a number of dimensions that are pointed out the first I mention is the inherent intelligence itself so by that I mean

that right now as you're listening to me talk and as the listeners are listening, there is an inherent knowingness, right? There is an inherent alertness and that alertness doesn't change. Like that is, when we say in English, he is a bright, he's a bright person. We're not referring to how much content the person knows. We're referring to the fact that we recognize that their inherent intelligence is operational. And that inherent intelligence is super awake. So to the extent that right now, you recognize that you are awake and that quality of awakenedness has a quality of lucidity and brightness to it, that is one of the dimensions that is always already right here. In fact, that's like the immediacy of experience.

Like there is this illusion of time passing, but there is an immediacy to the fact that it's always now. So this power of the now, and somebody should write a book about this, entitled it The Power of the Now, is right, this is one of the Dharma doors into that kind of inherent truth that's always already right here.

And so those schools that like to emphasize that will slap you and shout at you, like Zen schools, like now, now, now. and if you're shocked into the now and many of us can have these experiences whether it's like on a sports pitch or in an accident or something where

you went into this heightened state so that heightened state of alertness is one of the dimensions another dimension that's always right here is well so to speak is all that can be pointed out is the fundamental feet, like the ground aspect of the various senses. So what I mean by that is, is right now we're talking.

Oh, I'm talking. Maybe you're talking. You have to be very specific, yes. Right? And you're listening, right? You don't know that, but I think so. You're listening, right? I am.

I am. Okay. So when you're listening, how will you describe the listening mind? Receptive. Receptive. It's silent. Okay. how

how bounded is silence? Does silence have any boundaries to it? No, okay. Can you recognize it as unbounded? Yeah. Okay. So if we're recognizing

the unboundedness of silence that's right here, right now, that opens it up another doorway, right? So open silence. Space, right now you're looking, I hope. Right? Okay, so if we look into the field, right?

If you look through me, like, you know, that scene with Neo-Morphius where he's like, this is the construct, just before he loads up all of those AR-15s or whatever they are, they're standing in a field, right? So if you look at this experience right now, as if it is space, right, and you look through everything, does that space come or go? No, it's just there. Just there. Ever-president.

Okay. And is it outside or inside? everywhere. Yeah, because if you try and like don't stick your finger, but if you're like, where does the space out there end? Okay. Now, just so you know, like, sixth person perspective, these realizations are sealed in. Like, they don't come or go. Like, your mind is fundamentally always operating. Fundamental openness, fundamental spaciousness. And then the ground, for instance. So the stability that you feel, how stable does the stability feel? is just like the sturdiness of a mountain

Okay, does it have Does the stability have any boundaries to it? No. Okay. Can you recognize that that stability has no boundaries with the silence? Like where's the boundary between the silence and the stability?

Can you find a boundary? No, synonymous. Synonymous. And then where's the boundary between those two in space? It's again, quantum, they're all the same. All the same. Okay. So now what we're doing is we're beginning to

establish that fundamental, we could call it meta-aware tier, that is the bodhisattva level of functioning. Then I could say to you, okay, now look, can you notice like the whole? So what is the whole? I mean, it feels just like the unbounded awareness of all that is. So just swat, so even beyond like noticing that the space or silence, the whole is the innocence. So when the chart, Imagine a child, they're climbing the sand dune and they see the ocean for the first time. What happens when a child sees the ocean for the first time? Okay, what happens is there's no reference point. Okay.

And the perspective orientes towards wholeness. So right now, you and I, our attentional systems can look at each other. But can you notice how there's a wider system that can see the whole room at the same time? Now, most people don't run those two consciously simultaneously. But if you're keeping that fundamentally open and running both at the same time, then you're maintaining the wholeness of experience. Now, that wholeness, the dynamism, that which looks through the wholeness, is the heart mind.

So the stronger the heart mind becomes, the more you're, commitment to the whole, quite literally, like the whole planet, the more stable that way of perceiving reality becomes. Because you can look at this as if it's some sort of like cognitive like, hey, I'm learning, but actually what it really is is how the heart sees the world. Which is the most beautiful way to live. Yeah. Right. So it isn't just like, I'm staring into I went into a gas station recently and I was like, said to the guy like, how you're doing?

He's like, I'm staring into the void. So it's not that. And this is why, like, if you understand awakening as just an awareness process, it isn't. These are ways of describing various dimensions of the heart mind. So it was always understood that you had to wire those realizations

into the heart. If you didn't, you would just awaken the head centers. And if you do that, well, as you've said, you can get some really interesting cats because essentially they've awoken the wisdom centers without actually appreciating that they are dimensions of the heart. and that can lead to all kinds of interpersonal problems. So this is why, for me, awakening was always meant to be part of growing up. If you take that tech and you separate it out and you just teach it, you have to be careful because it is very potent, coactive technology.

And it needs to be... In these traditions, it was never taught like that. In Tibet, you would do years of study and it was integrated in with a cognitive understanding and an interpersonal understanding. With an integral understanding. So we don't want to separate a waking up process from growing up or cleaning up. And part of the problem is that most traditional... still separate it. Now, unless of course you're a Tibetan monk living in a, like,

but even then the way the cleaning up piece hasn't been well, right? So we really are at this new, at this point where if we're going to, if the Dharma is going to come to the West, we have to make sure that it's taught with at least an integral understanding and actually that the the practices are redesigned from that level of development. And that's part of the work that we've been doing is how do we redesign the Dharma, these technologies have come here to the West, take 20, 30, 20 years, study these technologies, and then repurpose them understanding how does our civilization need to clean up and grow up, right? is that's the, that's the kind of Dharma that we need right now.

Yeah, I love just the understanding to couple the waking up and growing up process because having the authentic experience of interconnectedness, like it's not a philosophy or an ideal of, you know, taking view as the other person. You experience yourself in many ways as the other person. Like the boundaries between us don't. Well, and then, and then the question is, how does that affect the work that you're doing?

How does that affect every part of your life? Profoundly. If you have, yeah, so it has to be taken back into the mind. And then the mind has to say, wow, if you and I aren't separate, then how should I behave ethically in a line with the realization that we are all interconnected? And it's so important to just reiterate that this is a real stage of development and not like some experience that lucky enlightened beings get to have, right?

Well, that's, so yes, if integrated into, in our civilization, if we're still here in 50 years time, I can say to you, I think, with quite a degree of confidence that this will be as much a part of our educational system

as right now learning to be rationalist. Although clearly we're struggling on that department a little bit as well. Why do you think that? Primarily because the advent of AGI in conjunction with... Well, because what we describe... Because it'll have to for the species to survive? Well, yes.

Yes. I think there's going to be a developmental revolution, meaning the 60s were a real revolution in 4.0. When we have a revolution in 4.5, millions of people will suddenly realize the development is a real thing. At that moment of time, lo and behold,

AGI, if it's also developmental, and we have a team working on a developmental AI right now that understands these stages. So imagine if you have an AI that understands you're at 4.5 to moving to 5.0 and it can spin up a video parable

using everything that's going on in your life to say, yo, Andre, these are the perspectives that need to be taken and then model it in a little video, right, that you can see, because with all of the stuff, seeing outside makes it easier inside. So, and because what we're describing, that process of going from, like, moving beyond the cup

to the bathtub and moving beyond the bathtub to the wider ocean, that is basically 5, 5.5, 6, 6.5.5. these are cognitive perspectives. They're not just mystical states. It's like scaling and democratizing those developmental states being mirrored back to people. Yeah, we do it right now. We've democratized like zero to three to four point zero.

I mean that is the stack that everybody who's listening to this, everybody, I can't imagine anybody, isn't at least 4.0, which means that the top like 5% developmentally of this culture. of the civilization, you know, 10% around that. And so, yeah, we've made that journey. Now, all that we need to do is basically create the scaffolding for the next phase.

You know, the challenge is to do that, you have to, we have enough people who understand the need for development and you need to bring together and build a, you know, deliberately developmental organization that really has a big enough view of what needs to happen in our culture and civilization. which like Gaffney would refer to also, and I've heard you speak to, like, religion 2.0. It's like the developmental framework, spiritual process, and a language that doesn't, you know, divide people. Yeah, I mean, I think Mark and I are different terms for it. I mean, my term is like basically within sacred humanism, which again, for me, is what the Buddhist tradition is.

it's finally like Buddhism dies in the sense of like the kind of outer religious dimension of it revealing that there is a sophisticated initiatory tech that's been you know practiced based evidence and now evidence based practice long enough to have a pretty confidence in its efficacy and when that is integrated with the kind of the cleaning up and the growing up up research and understanding that we have, we have the possibility for a fourth turning planetary Dharma. So in terms of the developmental, like, different stages in the process of waking up, you know, there's different frameworks for like what types of meditation will bring you

on average a couple of years, like another stage up the ladder every two years or, for example, or whatever it is. So I'd love for you to speak to what, like, what is the real, what are the real, what are the real primary practices. Different types of meditation practice? Yeah, that really move the needle in terms of that stage development. Okay. So if people want to go and dive deeper into the practice, which I'm sure many already have. Yeah. So I think that there's first, there's the kind of, there's the tech where you pull all the different pieces apart and you say, okay, this is this dimension and this is this dimension and this is this dimension. So this would be like taking something to pieces. And

And that's very important. And having that understanding is important. The more sophisticated tech then takes all of that, integrates it back into a new, into new coherent practices that are addressing multiples of these different dimensions simultaneously. Okay. Okay.

So what I'm saying is, is like it's useful to understand the different kinds of tech. but even that approach then has to come back to be reintegrated into more holistic type contemplative technologies because when you emphasize a number of these different dimensions simultaneously

you get a larger effect than if you're doing them independently. Okay, so that being said, okay. So one level of practice is really about stabilizing the attentional system because the attentional system is at the center of the self-structure. Yep. And I want to dive into the intentional system as well because I think we widespread suffer this low-grade suffering from our distractibility

and so we can dive into unpacking how to harness the intentional system as well. I mean, we kind of are right now. Well, I mean, yes. I mean, really the reason why the little attentional system is free out is because down the stack not safe right so when I did when I was doing my my doctoral work in psychology one of the things I was looking at was a relationship between ADD and attachment because I was like hang on a second there's what if like what we call ADD is basically the effect of multi-generational trauma kind of

building up momentum more and more momentum so that inherently the system doesn't feel safe it's like it's just the the bug that doesn't allow for the experience, their clarity of stillness is like the dysregulated nervous system. So you're like, all right, well, regulate your nervous system and then all of a sudden

you won't be so distractible and you'll be able to harness your attentional system and go on this path. Yeah, but it's painful, painful for people to do that, you know? So, okay, we have a whole spread

of different kinds of contemplative practices. from the most fundamental of like basic mindfulness. So basic mindfulness essentially is working on that self-regulation capacity that should have been internalized through attunement. Right? So basically the ability to sit down and attune to your own nervous system in such a way that's non-reactive and non-judgmental and brings you into the present moment, right?

we have there's also a whole series a whole kind of teaching on what's called calm staying calm staying um you know last i took last year i took a hundred people through a year long process of of developing that calm staying is the ability to to just stabilize the attentional system so it calms down and stays um and we particularly have reconfigured that so that that calm staying process is really about developing the stability in the heart center. But calm staying itself, calming and stabilizing. Then, and those practices exist in all traditions, whether you're saying a mantra, or whether you're following the breath, if the attentional system is steering,

intensifying an interest, and staying, it's calm staying practice, no matter what the special source they're trying to sell you is, right? then you have insight practices insight practices the Buddhist tradition is particularly known for them but I would say you can see them in an Advaita and maybe some more advanced

kind of Christian non-dual approaches like Meister Eckhart insight practices begin the Buddhist tradition and kind of insight into impermanence insight into Dhaka insight into no self they then mature in the Mahayana into insight into this emptiness, which is this deep openness and interconnectivity with everything.

And then the insight into the practices of what are called the essence practices, which are insight into the fundamental open ground of experience itself. And you see those practices in all the mature mystical traditions, right? obviously we're not talking about the plant medicine or the shamanic levels of training as well which are also kind of universal but we'll put those aside right now but then of course you have the practices that are related to the energy so embodiment practices so those that there's level of practices that are about kind of deepening embodiment itself. And in that sense, working with the trauma and redeveloping, like, let's say, deeper roots so

that you're deeply rooted in the physical experience. And then there are practices for awakening the vital energy, the dragon fire, the kundalini, the red lion, as they call it, in Western alchemy. And those are obviously kind of forceful practices. there are practices for then kind of once you do that for melting the the subtle body so this is where you bring the red element and the white element so the lion and the unicorn so to speak the white element being like the brain center the red element being the kind of the lower fire and essentially generating inner intercourse between the fire energy and the bliss energy and beginning to run bliss through the nervous system so that the two, the masculine and

the feminine sides of your psyche come together at the heart. And that purifies the subtle body. And then, of course, you have all the practices, even more euterteer practices that are related to kind of opening up dream yoga or astral projection and sleep yoga and all of those kinds of practices. But doing the right practice at the right moment in time is, you know, it's super important. We try to align the practice. In my mind, what's most important right now is to help people have practices that help with the cleaning up process and help with the growing up process.

So I don't like to prescribe practices are like medicines. I don't like to prescribe any, I don't prescribe waking up practices outside of understanding they're growing up and cleaning up dimensions and redesign them in such a way that they do all three. Because by themselves, well, they were never, they were never abstracted out of a tradition. see every Buddhist tradition, for instance, equal emphasis on wisdom training, which is like understanding the theory, ethics, which is like understanding activity and relationship and right speech and contemplative tech. One of the reasons we love tech so much is A, it's a tech,

right? B, it's non-relational. So I don't care about anybody else. It's highly individualistic. I can run this tech and get way ahead of everybody else. So the shadow sides of it are that if it's separated out from the wider path, if it's separated out from the kind of Mahayana deep motivation to be here to make a better world, to help other people clean up and other people grow up, if you take it out and you're just using it by itself can be problematic but those are like the kind of corpus of various practices

I just feel called to bring it back to when you know we were kind of describing what is it like in the boundless experience of our awareness you know the vastness of the feeling of what it is to be water I think because we spoke a little bit about the difference between states and traits or the states of consciousness that you can have versus the stages of consciousness that you really operate within and that are your foundation where you can

have that vastness of awareness as you're walking through your daily life it's just it just is it's become a structural stage yeah it's been integrated in that's right yeah and so to the path to arriving there authentically you see is a multi-year journey of both the contentious contemplative tech in conjunction with the growing up and cleaning up awareness. That's right. In actuality, it's obviously most holistic to take it upon in that approach, but you could also just take up the contemplative tech and come to that place. Would you say that?

You can. You could. And that's so as a responsible citizen, you know, knowing that people, I want to get people the option to do that. So I have developed a very particular tech that makes sure that the cleaning up piece is integrated in so that the attachment piece is taking care of along with the awakening piece. So it's like if you it's like the crown and the route operating simultaneously. That I feel like I can like teach that and like give you guys and run with it because I know that if it's done that way,

it will be safe. Because for every level of awakening, there has to be a descending. and so if I can't follow somebody in doing that, I need to make sure that it's built in holographically that every level that awakens up is going to deepen your sense of safety and your sense of attunement and your sense of feeling committed to the larger world. So yes, of course.

That's aside from the longer multi-year training, Personally, I offer that as like a one week training is to get the depth of that kind of holographic tech in and then go forth, right? Because yes, we need like special forces and special operatives who aren't going to train with the army, but who are like, yeah, I'm off doing this thing. Yeah, come, we'll train you for a week in how to do this, you know, how to take you through all these stages, how to recognize them, and how to own that, and then that's yours. But it needs to be tech that's been developed from 6.0, because, so to speak, or that area, because that's where we want to go. If we're using tech that was developed from a different time, every technology

is developed by a particular level of development. And therefore, it's resonant with the egregor, which is like the subtle energy form of the particular tradition that developed it. So what we want is we want folks to practice practices that are designed and resonant with a planetary, a whole integrated planet that all of us share as like the dream that we want to see, this amazing medicine planet. So that, Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to offer that, but not. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think as we're starting to wrap up this podcast, you know, a great place is in the showing up because it kind of comes back full circle to where

we started at the beginning of this podcast of the time where we face ourselves as humanity. We see this developmental process. We're starting to awaken to our own Darmic purpose and alignment. What is the piece of the puzzle? Yes. What is a slice to the pie that we can contribute towards the fourth turning? Yes. And there is a beautiful joy in carrying the weight of the responsibility that we uniquely have the capacity to carry in that process. Yes. Yes. For sure. An awakening to what we have there and the responsibility there is what I want to do as much as I possibly can to steward helping people realize what their unique responsibility is, you know, as well as owning my own and being in the reflection for others too.

And so what words do you have for people that are listening that really feel that they deeply are in this lifetime a part of this fourth turning that want to be the best stewards they possibly can and owning up to the responsibility that they can carry in this life? Thoughts you have there for people to continue to embody that. I think the first thing is we have to take the fruit as the puff. okay so we're we're sitting here in 2050 and like something was pulled off right okay so self in 2050 victory epic victory so the first thing is is like okay what is that getting there by being there we ain't going to get there by trying to get there right so it's like the recognition that this is inevitable right the recognition that like the whole of this planet is like the chipmunks the squirrels the great whales okay like the condors and the sparrows is like um i just taught a retreat in

san francisco and uh one of the guys aza who runs this AI company that is that is based beginning to interpret like animal communications in such a way that we can be will be able to communicate like aside from just the psychic path we'll be able to like communicate so imagine that world sacred world is online right like you can take your tail and hook it into the tree right and you're like oh yes so the first thing is sacred world has blossomed okay so then we like so we're right here right now. So we have to align with a timeline of inevitability. Right. Absolute inevitability. Complete conviction. And that's important in two ways. One, it protects us even if, even if it doesn't, even if I think that actually you've aligned with sacred world. So in your

passing, that's where you're going to go. Does that make sense? That even if we don't fully descend it. So there's a descending and ascending function. here. The ascending function is the aspiration to see the world in 30 years and the work is to descend that here and that's what we're going to do. Yeah, it's like us going to it versus it coming to us right now. So we're going to do both. Yeah. And in that way, no matter what happens, our army is protected. It's like we have an arc and the arc is we believe in sacred world, right? We believe in that kingdom, so to speak. That the wholeness of our sacred planet. and we know and we're living that.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is beginning to expand, you know, look at where you are, look at your story and begin to weave a story that's longer than just this single lifetime so that you can look back and look forward. And obviously, not everybody was Cleopatra. So seriously, look at where you really are

and what your real skills are. So you're not inflated by wanting to be something other than where you find yourself. But that story is important because we want to look forward to like the next three, where we're headed, right? So the narrative is important. So with the siops of the enchantment of disenchantment, you've got to pull off, so to speak, and, you know, we've got to be an advocate for sacred world, right?

Having an integral orientation is super helpful. And then the next thing, you know, appreciating that in the past, this was a path that was only walked by individual initiates. So essentially what a bodhisatt for training is, is what we would have called a training for messiahship. Okay? But now it's open house. It's like everybody takes the responsibility upon their shoulders of that.

you take upon yourself the responsibility of the whole that if you and i don't if we don't show up if our brothers and sisters if our friends don't show up then it doesn't happen so we take the the responsibility of the whole onto our shoulders now to do that you have to be grounded in these contemplative technologies because you also have to understand that all of that is also open yeah because if you put that onto your shoulders without having the contemplative technologies the weight will crush you and you'll like you know you'll take it too seriously does that make sense yeah yeah so with that pressure then that is diamond pressure because there is the necessity for the right amount of pressure now if you don't have the technologies to liberate yourself from the pressure then the then the magic doesn't work but if you

you can take on the responsibility, right? And at the same time, liberate yourself, right? So one truth being is really understand that everything is fundamentally perfect and nothing needs to change and really understand that everything needs to change and that they both come together in our hearts, right? that we know that fundamentally absolute everything is perfect fundamentally relatively everything needs to change and we find good friends and we put one foot in front of the other i have no doubt and i know that you have no doubt like that we're going to we're going to get there just like good friend

charles eisenstein has the quote for his book title the more beautiful world that our hearts know possible it is it is the intuitive felt sense that there is this more beautiful world that is going to be realized in our time and the relative experience of putting one foot in front of the other that's right as there's a lot of corrupt you know horrible shit going on you know at the same time there is a divine perfection of how it's unfolding and so you know i i really feel that this conversation uh just paints a beautiful understanding and picture for for our own developmental journey and process to come to that point where we are awakening to that power, how we kind of merge in the power of community and finding friends that are also along this path is so important.

It's one of my favorite things outside of the conversations I have in this podcast is starting to weave the tapestry and the fab grip, all the connections I meet and seeing how they start to come together and different meeting of minds and things. That's right. Yeah. You know, it's so needed. We were talking a little bit before about that. Such an important piece to it all. Well, there's a, there's a story, our story is unfolding. Yeah. Right.

Our story is unfolding. And it gets, it's so much more fun and enjoyable when we get to do this together. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's been part of, we've been, we've all been separate for such a long time. Right. And now really is like the time for the gathering of, of the heroes. And of course, the heroes can also be like the cooks and the nurses, not just,

the mountain climbers and the skydivers right that to be heroic doesn't mean you know it can be heroic to be a gardener right and to be you know and to take care of the little things so it it's like each each to their own but we all need to understand what heroism means for each of us for some of us that means retiring from a job and gardening. And for others, it means like training up and going to Washington, D.C. Just beautiful flowering and transformation of the heart awareness where it's not,

it might be changing what you do, but it's more so the presence of the changing of who you are while you do what you do. And whether that's gardening or podcasting or teaching or whatever. Many different forms. Many different forms. Yeah. man, this conversation was so awesome, delivered beyond expectation.

So just such a pleasure to weave with you and dive into this. And, you know, I see the tapestry building at each conversation. And, you know, connection is just so beautiful. So I want to just leave a little bit of space for just for you to share anything you have going on. We'll link below as well for people to stay in touch with you or what you have going on with retreats, coaching, stuff like that. And then we'll let out.

Yeah. Thank you. Unfortunately, I don't do much coaching anymore because I've got too many you know, too many folks to work with. One thing that we did, we put on the schedule because we thought it might interest, your listeners, is a retreat called

embracing wholeness and embodying the open ground, which is a week-long retreat. I mean, it is a commitment, but essentially it is a week of kind of downloading that kind of integrative, contemplative tech that people can then take it is like a module in itself we have a multi-year program

but this is something that like if you're special forces and you don't have time to do a lot of other things this would be enough to like really to kind of to get you going it's August 2nd to the 7th

and I'm happy to give your listeners a coupon perhaps we can put it in the yeah sure yeah in the details you know I right now I'm in conversation

with my good friend Ken Wilbur and we're in the process of essentially beginning to bring together the various components to really build this kind of fourth-turning Dharma which includes like top designers from Silicon Valley and the financing and the plan is in the next you know few years to really be able to offer a training for a Dharma army right and to really bring the best teachers on the planet into this an integrative framework and to offer, you know, what a forthcoming lifelong path will be so that we can offer, you know, the retreat centers and the retirement communities and all of the infrastructure really to

help bring about revolution and consciousness. So, yeah, stay connected. My website is planetrydharma.com. And yeah, thank you, Andre. And thank you listeners for the listening. And I look forward to continuing this relationship. Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing yourself today

and the powerful insight. And just excited to dive deeper as friends off camera. Yeah. And just last reminder for the listeners, you know, can't forget to remember that fucking up is also part of the process. Well, that's right. Yeah, it's just a nod to Uncle Ken. Uncle Ken fucking up. Needs to be there.

Yeah, it's just, you know, I can always get myself into these existentially heavy kind of rabbit holes of putting the weight of like trying to figure it all out and all that. And then it's been done. Yeah, it's been done. Got to arrive at that harsh face. That's right. The exhale. Yeah, that's right. It's been done.

Where we're already there. Yeah, that's right. So it's that dance. But yeah. Thank you, man. Yeah, thank you so much. Everybody's been tuning in. Thank you for coming to this episode of the Know They Know Theirself podcast.

let us know what uniquely activated within you in this conversation. I read the comments I see who's out there in building of the Dharma Army. Bring it. Yeah, bring it. Thank you so much. Until next time, be well.