Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #386 Imagination & Consciousness in Eros w/ Marc Gafni

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Dr. Marc Gafni returns to discuss the concept of imagination, as part of a deeper dive into the 12 faces of Eros, inspired by his book 'A Return to Eros' co-authored with Christina Kincaid. The discussion highlights the profound role of imagination in understanding Eros, reality, and consciousness. Gafni emphasizes that reality is an evolving love story driven by Eros, and imagination is a key aspect of experiencing and understanding it. He also touches on the importance of fantasy as a doorway to possible futures, the prophetic nature of imagination, and how the erotic serves as a model for imaginative exploration. The talk includes analogies to spirituality, Sufism, and literature, stressing the transformational potential of imaginative thinking.     Connect with Marc here: Website Instagram Substack   Our Sponsors: - Organifi's new Shilajit gummies are a game changer. Try them out and get a 20% discount www.organifi.com/KKP Use code KKP for 20% off! - Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy.  Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. - For the best Kratom, go to happyhippo.com/kkp and use Code KKP for 15% off the entire store.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site   If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!  

Welcome back to today's show. The podcast has the return of Dr. Mark Gaffney, one of my favorite people, one of my mentors, and author of several amazing books. And in this series, we continue on the 12 Faces of Eros, all of which are in the book, A Return to Eros, which he wrote with his partner, Christina Kincaid. And in this episode, we dive into imagination.

And imagination is not how you think it is. It is absolutely one of the deepest episodes we've done. All of these episodes are meant to be more of a lecture series where Mark is basically teaching and I'm the first guy to get to hear it. I really appreciate that Mark has selected the Kyle Kingsbury podcast to release all these. I'm very excited. Eventually we will button all these up and release them on YouTube, but this has just been fantastic. So love Mark, love what he's doing. And I get to learn first. It's been a real experience and a real joy in my life to be able to sit and listen to

Dr. Mark explain details of how consciousness works, how Eros works, and how it is a part of the very fabric and structure of our existence. Really cool stuff, not to be taken lightly by any means, and still very digestible. It's probably one of the things that I love most about his teaching style. Anywho, he also wrote First Principles and First Values. That was his latest book under the pseudonym David J. Temple. I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

It is a fantastic one. Merry Christmas, everybody. Happy birthday, Jesus Christ. Happy solstice. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy fucking New Year. Happy all of it.

Dr. Mark Gaffney, welcome back to the podcast. I'm not sure which round this is, but I know we're talking imagination. We're talking imagination. We are, and it's great to see you, Kyle. It's been too much of a bit. And we are in our series of conversations around Eros. Reality is Eros, and we're looking at the faces of Eros. And when we say, just to kind of find our way

for a second when we say reality is Eros what we mean is that reality is not merely a fact it's a story reality is not an ordinary story it's an erotic story. It's a love story, but it's not an ordinary love story, meaning it's not a love story that takes place only at a kind of human level, but the human love story participates in the love story of reality. So reality is an evolutionary love story. It's an outrageous love story. And by outrageous love, we mean eros. Outrageous love, we mean not merely human sentiment on a passing day when Cupid's arrow happens to strike in a particular way. Oops, it hit the secretary, right? No, no, we mean, we mean, no, we mean eros, which is the heart of existence itself.

And finally, we don't mean this as a human potential movement statement. We don't mean it as a new age statement. in the interior sciences and the exterior sciences across space and time, traditional, modern, and postmodern, woven together in a new story of value, which is the beginning of a shared story, which creates a global intimacy that allows us to become the human beings we need to be which is the only way we can respond to the metacrisis which could end humanity and that's our that's a big context okay so that's like in context is everything so in that context we've talked about at this point, I think five faces of Eros, I think. We've talked about Eros as being on the interiority, being on the inside of the inside. We've talked about Eros as fullness of presence.

We've talked about Eros as the yearning desire of reality. We've talked about Eros as wholeness, the interconnectivity of the all with the all this this this movement towards wholeness. And we've talked, I believe, also, I think we did also Eros as perception. Right. We did. Yep. So we're now up to that. So we've done five qualities of Eros and in each one of these qualities of eros we've said the sexual models the erotic it doesn't exhaust the erotic so we always kind of say well there's 12 billion years of eros before there's any sex because eros is we said eros equals eros is this is our interior science equation, Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That's Eros.

That's the movement of Eros. And so this movement of Eros, we're saying, has 12 faces that live in all of cosmos, meaning all of the world of matter and all of the world of life, so the physiosphere, the biosphere, and then all of the world of the depth of the human self-reflective mind, all of reality, all of cosmos is governed by eros. and the eros that lives in us is the same eros that drives reality and sex which is disclosed by reality some 12 billion years in sex becomes the most dramatic model of the erotic sex models eros but doesn't exhaust eros. So all five of those qualities that we just talked about, those five faces of the erotic, live in fuck and the sexual and all of its forms, and they live in all of reality. So I want sex to be, I want the sexual,

I want eros, I want reality's tender, quivering, trembling, ecstatic, fierce fuck all the way up and all the way down that lives inside of me. That lives in every dimension of my life. And the sexual becomes the model. Sexing is the model for living in radical eros and erotic life in every non-sexual part of my life. Like that. Okay, so we're in. erotic life in every non-sexual part of my life. Like that. Okay. So we're in. Okay.

That's our, that's our just kind of, just kind of looking, landing, landing our plane here. Right? So, wow. We're up to imagination. Wow. Wow. So here's, here's the crazy thing, right? So we're at a seminar and the leader or the teacher, and I've often been in that position. So we offer an exercise and, you know, and imagine, you know, the, you know, and there's this long

series of, you know, imaginations of, you know, the interior and, you know, feel the inner cave of the heart on the left side. And there's this long, long descriptions of imagination, you know, and the visualization, let's say, goes on that the teacher's leading for about 20 minutes. There's, I don't know, 200 people in the room, you know, about 195 were lost in the first five minutes. But, you know, knowing you can't get that or it's kind of like you have this like kind of new age inferiority complex, like why can I not follow this 20 minute visualization? But everyone's lost. Because actually, imagination is not easy. But if you did that same exercise in imagination, you know, let's say we would do it on the masculine side, let's say in one form, you know, let's say a heterosexual, you know, masculine to feminine

form. And of course, there's feminine to masculine, there's masculine to masculine, feminine to feminine. But for now, let's just do kind of the classical form. So let's say someone begins and says, you know, imagine on the other side of the room, she slowly opens the buttons. You realize she's not wearing a bra. Button after button. Let's say I went on for like 25 minutes, an explicit and clear description. Do you think anybody would get lost? No. Everyone follows it perfectly. So all of a sudden, we've got this all 200 people who couldn't follow at a classical spiritual visualization.

And all of a sudden we're talking about this enacted, well-described erotic fiction, sexual fantasy. And all of a sudden we have 200 of the most advanced spiritual masters in the world. Huh. Right. So. Right. So that's the sexual models, the erotic, that actually the quality of my imaginal faculty to envision possibility. That's very beautiful, right? You know, there's a book I've important book by um henry corbin called creative imagination in the sufism of ibn arabi right now you know it's an insanely great book right not an easy book to read but but the point is here you've got ibn arabi, who's one of the major masters in the Sufi lineage, right?

And he is talking about the path to realization as creative imagination. And he's not only talking about the curve of the breast and the inner thighs, right? He's talking about this wider possibility, but which is modeled by the sexual. And it's my we we've pathologized our ability to fantasize. Right. And so we look at the literature on fantasy, it often will identify fantasy with early childhood trauma. Right. You know, so. So Christina actually talks about a. You know, a wonderful person that she's worked with for many years, who I don't know their name,

but she's a wonderful person who had this very profound experience of being a first child, the second child's born, right? He loses the attention of his mother and he's always at his mother's feet, kind of pining for attention, and she wears these kind of, you know, black lace stockings. And so, as he kind of gets older, right, he fetishizes, right, around black lace stockings, right, and he can't really get aroused, right, without some access. Right. The black lace stockings of a particular kind. Right now. Huh. Right. So so so we often can trace back a particular fantasy right to some broken or pathologized moment that then translates itself into fantasy. And there's validity to that. And it's worth tracing it back. And it's worth trying to kind of locate my fantasies in my early childhood.

But that's a very limited game. And the reason it's a limited game and the reason people play the game so intentionally, and if you look up the literature on fantasy and psychology and psychoanalysis, that's the basic vector. Well, the reason is because the assumption is that we can't identify the cause of behavior in the immediate present. So we need to go into the deeper realm and the deepest realm that contemporary postmodern materialism has available. The deepest realm of mystery is your early childhood. So let's go to what we got. Let's go to your early childhood. But what if that wasn't the deepest realm of mystery, right?

What if there were much deeper realms of mystery and forests of possibility, right? And, you know, fauna of fantasy, right? Which we're kind of living and breathing in, which is the deepest interior realms, which we visit in the dream space occasionally, which are the larger field of eros, desire, and consciousness, which is reality, which is the divine fields, which is the fields of the archetypal imagination, but it's also the fields of previous lives. It's the fields of future invitations.

So it's not fantasy as mythology, but it's actually something much deeper. It's fantasy as a door, imagination as a door into the fullness of possibility. So it's fantasy as possibility. It's even fantasy as prophecy, right? Where actually fantasy becomes, imagination becomes the door to imagine the fullness of possibility. And in fact, one of the key prophets and the great Solomon lineage tradition says, right? The divine voice is kind of in mad joy and the divine voice, she says, I'm imagined by my prophets. I mean, my prophets are fantasizing about me, right? It's kind of like, whoa, right? So all of a sudden we begin to realize, oh, oh, there's this faculty of gnosis, of knowing.

There's this faculty of perception. There's this faculty of wisdom. There's this faculty of which capacitates, right, my aliveness and capacitates my precise potential and capacitates the full possibility of possibility, which is my life that I can access often, not through discursive cognitive thought, but through flights of fantasy, right, where I open up the possibility of possibility. So that's imagination. And that is this book of Ibn Arabi's, that Corbin, who's one of the great, maybe the greatest scholar of Sufism.

What Ibn Arabi is talking about is, and that's Rumi. That's why you feel so good reading Rumi. Because Rumi's writing from fantasy. He's writing from fantasy and he's writing from imagination you know he's writing from you know from the same thing that got my son who was 10 years old who Kyle never wanted to read he's like I, I am not reading, you know, and there was, of course, no small act of rebellion because his father had thousands of books kind of all over the house. And he's like, fuck you, man. I'm not I'm not reading. Right. Like, I hate books and don't really like you that much. No, no, I read. It's like I'm not doing any reading. And then I was in Oxford, you know, writing, you know, academic kind of shit. And, you know, that's where they were filming part of Harry Potter at the time.

And all of a sudden I became a much more popular character. Right. I love to visit you, Dad. Right. That that sure would be fun. Sure. Sure. I am missing you, Dad. Right. And so I said, hey, maybe try read three pages for me, man. Three pages of Harry Potter. And he kind of begrudging agreement. Hey, guys, I want to stop the podcast for a brief moment to tell you about Lucy.co. Lucy is one of our longest running show sponsors. Let's level up your nicotine routine with Lucy.

Go to Lucy.co slash KKP and use promo code KKP to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers free shipping and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. That's Lucy.co, C-O, and use code KKP to get 20% off and always free shipping. And here comes the fine print. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age. And every order is age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. All right, nicotine is an awesome chemical, and there's a reason why so many people love this stuff. It tunes the brain in on a frequency that's kind of hard to match. Now, nootropics attempt this, but nicotine already fits into certain

receptors in our brain that are responsible for memory, language recognition, learning, and all sorts of cool shit. It also fires off dopamine, which is the part of us that makes us feel good, which is the part of us that makes us feel good. And that one-two punch is actually essential in helping us learn. So if you're studying for a test, if you're cramming for an exam, and this is for adults, of course, that are going to night school. If you're trying to learn something late in the evening and you need to pick me up, but you also want your brain to recognize this is an important time where I need to hold this information, nicotine is unparalleled. It's also unparalleled in helping you pull that back out on test day or on presentation day or on podcast day or whatever it is when you need to access your best self, lucy.co, and use KKP to get 20% off. You know, 10 books later, every word's been written, and the entire world of the written word has been opened

because J.K. Rowling took imagination seriously. She took imagination seriously, right? We're so used to being told, it's just your imagination. But the word it's just shouldn't be the sum total of our imagination. And so imagination is this faculty of prophecy, right? And I want to see if we can kind of, my brother, if we can kind of, like, let's just kind of go all the way for a second. It's like, and just kind of say the unutterable, which is,

there's a commandment to the prophetic utterance. We're commanded to be prophets. It's like, huh? So when you first hear that sentence, you think, that's a pretty zany, wacky sentence. I was following, you know, Goffney and Kyle until now,

but I think they just lost me there, okay? I knew those guys were suspicious. So it actually means something very profound, right? Prophecy is understood by the Solomon lineage as the summa bonum, right? The penultimate achievement of the human being. Because what prophecy is, my brother, is the ultimate conversation. So let's go slow, right? We live in what we might call a conversational cosmos. It's a cosmos that's filled with conversation and conversations, conversation between Mark and Kyle, right? Crazy. And what's a podcast? A podcast is a conversation at its core. It's like, oh, let's actually participate in a conversation.

One of the reasons that I can never pronounce this, Kamala or Kamala, right? But one of the reasons that Ms. Harris lost the presidential election, and this is not whether that should have happened or shouldn't have happened and right or wrong or up or down. We're not having that conversation now, was because she didn't want to sit down and have a conversation with Joe Rogan. She's like, I'm not having that conversation. And one of the things that Joe Rogan wasn't being fully responsible for, sorry, Joe, right, was taking responsibility for the conversation. You know, he wrote something right before, right after the election, where he kind of said, yeah, this is a, you know, he wrote something right before, right after the election where he kind of said, yeah, this is a you know, this is a podcast election. And this is how it's happening. This is where the this is where it's happening.

And he's probably right. But you got to take responsibility for the conversation. Do you fact check? Do you not? Right. Right. You can't have it both ways. You can't say, OK, I'm going to actually have the deciding power, right? And the electoral process of the world's greatest superpower. And then just say, oh, we were just talking. Conversation is the structure of reality. Reality is a series of conversations. It's a conversational cosmos. And conversation means we exchange information. We impact each other. We're moved by each other, right? And through that exchange of information, we feel at home in cosmos and we generate new possibility, new insight. So that conversation takes place between an electron and the nuclei, the atom, right? And the nuclei has both a proton and a neutron,

so it exchanges information with the electron. Or, you know, when you have what's called a random mutation, which is not even slightly random, for example, let's say the emergence of, I'm just making this one up, of a cytochrome C, which, you know, is called a random mutation, but it's actually, what does the mutation mean? A mutation means, by the way, mutation means there's a shift in the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA. What does that even mean? Oh, so nucleotide is a sugar group and it's phosphate and it's a nitrogenous base. What does that mean so actually each one of those sugar phosphate nitrogenous base are actually configurations of erotic attraction

right and when you're erotically attracted in a particular unique vector of allurement you're drawn to each other you share share information. And from that information comes something new, right? And it's very hard for us to, we actually were so lost in the jargons of science when the biologists hear, oh, there's a mutation which generates cytochrome C, which is by the way, the protein that allows us to turn grain, let's say a piece of bread, into flesh and blood. So cytochrome C is key in that process. It's a big one. So that comes from this desire generated by eros, allurement,

desire for both right autonomy and right union, right, between different values of cosmos that want to create a larger whole. Same, exact same way that we're having a conversation. So if you want to kind of get it in a deep way, if I said, I don't know, if I said, hey, Kyle, just between us, I know no one's are you sexually attracted to German shepherds? Okay. So I guess that's a no, right? So that's the point. Oh, okay. Not, not having that conversation. I have a different conversation, right? So, okay. I might, I might, right. So another, it's okay. So, so the nature of that, I might be interested in taking a walk with a German shepherd, but that's about the limit, right? It's about my limit.

I got a limit, right? Well, that's the exact same thing that's happening all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain, right? In other words, in this nucleotide, right, there's these very particular configurations of value conversations that engage each other in order to exchange information. But they decide to engage because they're allured, right? They're erotically allured. That's what we call chemistry, right? In other words, they're like, oh, no chemistry between me and a German shepherd.

What are we saying? So we think that's kind of a mocking, you know, weird, strange thing to say, but we're just saying, no, no, that's, that's just, that's not where it's going on, right? That's not the, right? That's not where it's happening, right? Because, so that kind of conversation that's going to create a larger union and a larger hole is not going to happen between me and a German shepherd.

Now, there might be a different conversation of love that happens between me and a German shepherd. A German shepherd actually might become, you know, my live-in companion, right? That, you know, we lived together for 15, 20 years, and in a certain sense might become this very deep part of my emotional life. So that's another currency of value, where there's two value structures engaged in a different kind of conversation that yields a different kind of wholeness. So I'm not being just we're not being just kind of cute and clever here. We're trying to point towards, oh, when we talk about the German shepherd, we clearly get those two vectors of allurement and how those create two different kinds of wholeness. It's completely clear to us. That's actually what's happening, right, at the level of mutation, right? And mutation means a shift in the vectors of allurement in a nucleotide, which is made up of these three

kinds of chemical structures, which are governed by chemistry. So the chemistry changes, the vectors of allurement change, and something new is created. Like, huh, right? So to get that is to get that reality is conversational cosmos. It's all conversation. And all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain, it's conversation. Now, the new human, the new possible human, right? The generation of the good, true, and beautiful world that we already know, right? Can exist and can live, right, that's called Messiah. And the word Messiah from the Solomon lineage actually means

conversation. Mashiach, siach, means conversation. So the vision of Christos, right, the vision of the new human, the vision of what Rumi calls the friend, the vision of what I call a planetary awakening in love through unique self symphonies. Right. This new possible world. Right. That vision of honor. Right. Where where Rome falls and every slave goes free and strength and honor. And we understand that what we do in this world echoes in eternity. Lucius gladiator to where at that moment't not cite Lucius, of course, right? That vision, that Messiah is a vision which everyone's in the conversation. We've learned to have a conversation. Democracy is a conversation. That's what democracy is. Democracy is a conversation

mediated by infotech, which allows hundreds of millions of people to be in a conversation. And totalitarianism is the stopping of the conversation. We're going to eavesdrop in every conversation. We're not going to allow for a conversation. So prophecy. Okay, now everyone got that? We're going to end our bracket there. Now we go back to prophecy.

We said we're commanded to prophecy. What's prophecy? It's the ultimate fucking conversation. What's a prophecy is I'm talking to she. I've tuned into that channel where God's talking to me, I'm talking to God. See, in prayer, we invoke the conversation we initiate. In prophecy, infinity invokes the conversation. Infinity initiates. But you can only participate in a conversation if you're listening in. Right? How many times has it happened?

I mean, not to you and me, because we're obviously the perfect husbands, but to other lesser mortals. Those other guys. Those other guys, right? Where our partner says, weren't you listening? It's like someone's trying to have a conversation with us, but we're not actually attuned. We're not open. There's a reason why we're in our armor. We haven't moved from homo armor to what we call, in the new story of value we call cosmogumitism we haven't moved to homo amor we've got to move from homo armor to homo amor so that i can actually access

the conversation there's a conversation happening and that conversation is is prophetic prophecy Raphs means Navi. So you remember in Avatar, there was the Navi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, guys, I want to give you another quick break here to tell you about Happy Hippo. With Happy Hippo, you're getting a product that's been sterilized of pathogens, tested for impurities and heavy metals, and sold with a guarantee.

They stand by their products so you can sleep soundly, knowing exactly what is and what isn't in your Kratom. I want to tell you, Kratom is an absolute phenomenal, I can't call it a plant, but I can call it a plant optimizer. It is a phenomenal product for physical discomfort and discomfort relief. It reduces irritability, calming effects, allowing one to just feel into the moment and feel better. A calm sense of self. It enhances mood. It promotes a sense of well-being. It's easier to access happiness and be in a relaxed state.

It also supports healthy sleep and promotes deep relaxation. And at the same time, there are strains that help with energy boost, give you increased motivation and increased efficiency. It is phenomenal. It is a plant that makes me feel better. There's a euphoric effect while at the same time, not making me uncoordinated or unable to perform tasks. And I think that's fucking fantastic. I've used Kratom and nootropics before when shooting on the land and I have been fucking exceptional. I've actually honed in

higher levels of fine motor skills through that pickleball games, all sorts of fun shit where I have a high degree of hand-eye coordination that's needed and I perform much better. and feel fine the next day, Kratom is the way to go. And Happy Hippo is a phenomenal, phenomenal lifestyle product. Go to happyhippo.com slash KKP and remember to use code KKP for 15% off everything in the entire store. And as with any plant optimizer, make sure you use respect and reverence with this wonderful, wonderful plant from Southeast Asia. So Navi is a Hebrew term, which means Niv. It's the ability to access the power of speech, right? To have a conversation. Conversation's everything, right? You know, people think you can pay for erotic conversations. You can't, right? No matter how much you paid, you can't get an erotic conversation unless you're on the inside of the inside, right? So the sexual model's the erotic, right? Meaning an erotic conversation of the classical

sexual kind, right? You know, you're like, oh, wow, right? You know, you're breaking all these boundaries and you're creating this intimacy, but it's actually often a pseudo intimacy. It's not a real intimacy, but in a real erotic conversation, you're breaking all the boundaries, right? You're not just getting naked in body, you're getting naked in heart, naked in soul, naked in vulnerability, naked in possibility. That's a prophetic conversation. A prophetic conversation is I'm so de-armored. And I'm actually homo amor. And homo amor means I'm a unique calibration of intimate conversation. And I'm having this unique conversation

with all of reality, that reality is desperate to have with me, right? There's a way in which goddess is lonely until she talks to you. That's why you exist. That's why you exist. That's not a, that's not a, that's not a, a, a kind of overreaching, you know, kind of narcissistic grandiosity. No, that's the nature of our existence, right? My irreducible uniqueness. Why do I fight for my survival? Evolutionary psychology got a lot wrong. It's often paper thin, but one of the things they pointed to correctly was we always fight for our survival. But evolutionary psychology said, oh, that's just a mechanics of cosmos. No. Survival is life. And my survival is the survival of my life. And the reason I exert unimaginable effort and don't roll over and play dead when I'm threatened

is because I have this knowing that the continuity of my life has value because, because I can have a conversation with reality that no one else but me can have. Right. And in that conversation, there's something for me to say. There's a prophecy, right? There's a word that I have to speak. I'm here to speak a word. I'm here to be a word. I'm here to be a word. I'm here to be that word. That's what my life is, right? And it's about not plagiarizing that word. Let me be that word. That's prophecy.

So prophecy is conversation. It's the ultimate conversation. And in the conversational cosmos. So all of a sudden, this kind of crazy shit we said like 20 minutes ago, not so crazy, right? I'm actually writes Maimonides, right? The great master of medicine and of philosophy and of law, right? In the early medieval period, writes Maimonides, right? If you read him carefully, we're commanded to be prophets.

It's like, huh. He was a pretty sober guy. He wasn't just on a medicine journey. He was intoxicated and sober in every moment. He said, we're commanded to be prophets. It's like, and how do I become a prophet? By imagining. It's that thing. You can't become a prophet? By imagining. It's that thing.

You can't become a prophet just by cognitive work. You have to imagine. You have to imagine yourself into the conversation. Imagine yourself into your greatness. And you have to imagine that it could be true. You know, do you remember Twilight Zone? Oh yeah.

God, right? God, right? Twilight Zones. When I was a kid, it's like, what? When was that? Like 19, I was born in 1903. So I look very young.

It's like the race work. You haven't aged a bit. Yes, I haven't aged a fucking bit. It's unbelievable. So I remember when I was a kid, there was this one, I don't know if you remember it, Kyle, brother. There was this one Twilight Zone where this kid's father is kind of like a little bit of an over-the-hill fighter, but a beautiful guy who just didn't quite have it right. And his son's watching the fight and the father loses and the son wishes, he imagines, he imagines that his dad won. And his imagination is so beautiful and it's so real and it's so true.

And it's so that the fight, right? Reality transfigures and his dad wins, his dad wins. And his dad comes home and he says, dad, let me, let me tell you what happened. You lost, but I, I imagined it. And the father looks at me and says, no, dad, you don't understand if you can't imagine, if you don't, if you don't trust this imagination, it's going to go back. And he can't, he can't, he can't show his dad that way and the fight goes back it's like huh right it's like it's beautiful right the ability to imagine myself into reality I to imagine reality into existence and that is the divine capacity that's the er. The erotic is the capacity to imagine, to imagine, you know, imagine that my relationship with my beloved could be

unimaginable. Right. And often what happens is relationships break down because we lose access to imagination. Right. And so we're doing, you know, all sorts of life hacks with our therapist. You have a good therapist and they're doing good life hacks with you. Keep at it. So I'm not right. That's that's important. There's all sorts of things that really matter enormously. But in the end, life hacks with a therapist won't actually ground the relationship. You can only ground a relationship in a shared fantasy, right? And we think shared fantasy is about a new sexual position. Maybe, right? But probably not, right? Right? It's a new, it's by taking a new position in life, right? It's actually, can I actually approach life through a new angle? Can I penetrate reality? Can I actually receive reality's penetration through a new angle? That's fantasy. We need a shared fantasy, right? In which we're imagining possibility, in which we're living into the

future. We're accessing the memory of the future because if we don't fantasize about the future we're lost in the abuse of the past right so when all i have is the memory of the past that then i can't find my way and i can't actually hear the call of the memory of the future and hope is a memory of the future, right? Hope is imagination. We imagine a new reality. And maybe to close, right? I'm so, I've got, I was so excited to talk to you about imagination, right? It's like just any questions, thoughts, comments, you know, or fantasies are of course welcome.

There's a great text, my brother, in a book called Return to Eros, which I think is the book that we're trying to point towards in this series and just invite people to be in and, you know, and we can talk about together. So there's this ancient text we cite there. And I had the great privilege of writing the book with my beloved partner, Christina Kincaid, Dr. Christina Kincaid, who three of us have hung out a little bit. Right. KK is awesome. So there's this group that they call Mirrors of Desire. So there's these slaves in Egypt. Now, to be a slave means you're so lost in your iPhone. You're just like you. You can't even get out of it, right? You're like, you're gone, right? And they're just, so they're slaves in Egypt actually under intense conditions

of physical, emotional pain and stress and they can't find themselves and they certainly can't rebel. They certainly can't, you know, Spartacus, right? They can't stand themselves and they certainly can't rebel. They certainly can't, you know, Spartacus, right? They can't stand for freedom, right? And so they're women in this description. And of course, you could have a reverse description. You could switch the genders. But in this ancient text, it was this.

This was the description. So I want to share this text as it is. They're women take out mirrors and they begin at night when their men come home exhausted. They're like they take out these mirrors and they start playing with the mirrors kind of in sexually provocative ways. Right. And kind of pointing towards parts of the body and possibilities just by playing with these mirrors. And they arouse their men through these mirrors. And the text at the end of this text says, I mean, the great exodus from Egypt takes place because of the way these women played with their mirrors of desire,

right? Those mirrors are then brought by the women to Moses, right, who builds them in to the central construction fabric of the temple in Jerusalem. So the mirrors of desire erect the temple. It's like, wow. Right. And, and then the men are aroused and then the revolution begins and then the warrior emerges and then the possibility emerges. I mean, do you remember that scene last thought in, you know, that great scene in Tolkien and Peter Jackson's great job when Aragorn and Arwen, and he has to decide what to do and they meet and you're not sure is it a dream. All right, guys, one last quick break to tell you about Organifi.com slash KKP. I think it's our longest running show sponsor. Use code KKP for 20% off. These guys are absolutely phenomenal. I want to tell you

about their shilajit this is sourced directly from the himalayas home of the world's finest shilajit and tested for heavy metals it's rich in antioxidants that can help fight that can help fight free radicals it can support gut health and nourish the digestive tract by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria the buddies in our belly it improves the permeability of cell membranes and helps to better absorb and enhance nutrient absorption. This is key. Are you getting everything from your food that goes in? Can you extract out all of the goodness that went into the food choices you made? It can help support detoxification, can enhance energy levels and overall vitality, and it has

an anti-inflammatory property to it. It also supports healthy testosterone levels in men and women, supports bone and muscle health, aids in cellular energy and mitochondrial health via creating cellular ATP, and decreases fatigue. Just take two gummies once or twice per day. It tastes phenomenal. I love it. Get it at Organifi.com slash KKP. And while you're at it, throw in the brand new creatine gummies. These things are fantastic. They taste great. I munch them right before I work out. Sometimes I'll have a couple after if I have a really hard workout just to aid in recovery. All the gummy lineup that Organifi.com has right now is phenomenal.

Is it real? Right. And they make love. Is it a dream? Is it real? And she says, go with Frodo. But she says, trust this. and the even stars between her breasts. She says, trust us.

And she's saying, trust our desire. Trust the truth of our desire. Trust the dignity of our desire. Right? I am your Arwen. walking, you know, sword warrior to go join Frodo and the shot pans to the even star, right? Which has moved from the breasts of Arwen, right? To his chest, right? That's mirrors of desire. It's imagination, right? We have to access the quality of imagination and all science, as Einstein reminded us, all interior, all relationship is our ability to fantasize,

right? And the sexual models, right? Teaches us how to access that prophetic imagination. Cha. Wow. Cha. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It has been too long for my liking. So I'm so excited that we get to come back to this.

Yeah, no, no. Thank you, brother. We'll see in a couple of weeks. This was six, right? We've done six out of 12. Yep. Wow. What a crazy delight.

And if I can just end with your permission. Words emerge from the space in between. And you have so much to say, Kyle, about so much. And you've chosen, actually. It wasn't my request. It was a choice you made to kind of just, you just kind of create space with such depth. So that's in the depth of your space that the words flow. All right.

So just, just deep down, brother, deep, deep honor. Thank you. Thank you. Ciao. Ciao.