Rev Left Radio - Breaking the Spell: Patriarchy, Dismemberment, and Pure Awareness

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

In this episode, Breht sits down with Suzin Green, author of The Goddess Remedy, to explore the psychological, spiritual, and civilizational roots of modern disconnection. Moving beyond conventional political understandings of patriarchy, Green presents it as a deeper structure of domination that shapes not only institutions, but consciousness itself -- fueling alienation, compulsive striving, inner fragmentation, and a profound loss of connection to self, others and the living world. Together, they unpack Green's concepts of "dismemberment," the "inner patriarch," and the tension between "being" and "doing," while probing the experiential realities beneath the book's symbolic language. The conversation explores how ego, social conditioning, and modern systems of competition shape subjectivity; whether inner healing can meaningfully intersect with broader social transformation; and what it might mean to reclaim wholeness in an age defined by burnout, anxiety, and disconnection. Drawing connections between mysticism, psychology, and political life, this dialogue examines the possibility that genuine transformation may require not only structural change, but a radical reorientation of consciousness itself. For listeners interested in spirituality, liberation, psychology, and the crisis of modern life, this is a rich exploration of what it means to heal both self and society. Outro Song: Semolina Pudding by Spinitch ---------------------------------------------------- Check out a great new resource for revolutionary education, Unlearning Capitalism, HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/      

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, it's been a while, I think, since we've done a quote-unquote spiritual episode, an episode about intertransformation, spiritual practices, deepening, transcending, ego identification, etc. And so it's, you know, it's time to do it again. It's one of the core pillars of Rev Left, I think, is that we make genuine forays into broadly conceived religious territory. We see it as a terrain of struggle in many cases, and we have always argued. I've always argued.

I do so in my upcoming book and throughout the nine plus years on the Rev. Left, that these sort of serious contemplative practices of deep inner transformation and deepening are part and parcel of an underlying evolution of our species that has an outward objective, revolutionary, political, social development, as well as an inward psychological, existential, experiential component. And those things are dialectically connected and that you can't separate the insight from the outside, the subjective from the objective, the inward from the outward.

And if we're really interested in transformation, genuine deep transformation, then that transformation occurs at every level, including the level of the individual, including the level of consciousness and psychology. And so with that in mind, have on honestly a great friend of mine you'll you'll hear in this conversation that susan and i met through you know in the wake of michael brooks's passing um we reached she reached out i believe and we've had a relationship ever since then and she's you know as a sort of spiritual

teacher and a mentor has helped me greatly during incredibly difficult periods of my life with the loss of my father the suffering of a miscarriage and other deep impactful moments of grief in my wife Susan has been there. She arose. He arose in my life at a crucial time when I clearly needed her presence. And so I'm just deeply grateful for her on a human, personal, individual level. But the whole time we've known each other, she's been working on this book that is titled The Goddess Remedy. And it's, you know, in her own unique way where she's, you know, using her own unique concepts. She's articulating and arguing for something that I have argued for on this show for a very

long time about that sort of inward transformation. And, you know, the book that I'm working on tentatively titled A Letter to Young Revolutionaries is weaving together the necessity of a political life with an inward spiritually serious, mature, transformative life and how they complement one of a another and can contribute to the genuine evolution of the human species. Right. And so our work dovetails in a lot of interesting ways. She speaks about it in, you know, language of the divine feminine, patriarchy, using a lot of

goddesses from Hinduism in particular, though other places as well, and kind of weaves together an approach to this subject that I find really unique and interesting. And so we talk about that. And in the process of that, we go in a million directions. We talk about, you know, we talk about Palestine, we talk about addiction. We get very personal and vulnerable about maybe some struggles that I'm dealing with in my life. And she helps me walk through it. That was not planned, but it did pop up in the course of this conversation.

And I know for some people, you know, my audience is largely composed of Marxist intellectuals of various sorts. And some people don't really resonate with the religious and the spiritual and the psychological stuff. that's totally fine. But I've done it enough, and I've heard feedback from enough of our audience to show that a genuinely significant chunk of you do enjoy this, you do get a lot out of this. And if you open your heart, you open your mind, and you sit back and you listen to this conversation, I truly do believe that it will be generative and meaningful to a large swath of you.

So I'm excited to present it to you here. I also wanted to let people know that you can support us. We are 100% independent media. you know, given the nature of what we talk about, we're never going to be, nor would we want to be supported by advertisers or big money, and I would never, ever put an ad in front of any of my audience. What a disrespectful thing that would be.

So the only way that this show keeps going and has gone on for almost 10 years now is from the support of our listeners on Patreon to become a monthly subscriber for $5 a month, get a bunch of bonus material monthly, as well as you can do a one-time donation at buymea coffee.com. The links to both are in the show notes. And we also collaborated recently with Goods for the People on a really cool merch design, a sort of spring themed that says they buried us, but we are seeds, sort of a common revolutionary slogan. I think it goes back to the Irish revolutionaries in Bobby Sands, but some people even attribute it to other figures in revolutionary history.

In any case, it's a beautiful design. I don't make a dollar off of it. There's zero money coming in. It's not about that. I just wanted to collaborate with this really dope fashion cooperative that has been a supporter of Rev Left for many years. And so we worked together on a new shirt. And the revenue goes to support this cooperative, continue to build out its designs and

offer cool stuff to people like you and I. So if you're interested in doing that and getting a really cool fucking shirt, go ahead and do that. Support goods for the people by purchasing it and then Rep Rev. left by wearing it. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Susan Green on her book, The Goddess Remedy, About Spirituality, Inward Transformation, The Psychology of Alienated Beings and Subjectivities under late capitalism, and so much more. Enjoy.

So my name is Susan Green, and let me start with one. I'm not, I'm not an academic. What I am is someone who has been thinking very seriously and observing. been very seriously the evolution of consciousness. And specifically for the last 20 years, this is so really looking at the ways patriarchy has formed and deformed our sense of self within this larger field of our consciousness.

And I'm very, very interested in the evolution of consciousness. I think a lot of people who listen to this show probably also know me as someone who was very close to Michael Brooks and who Michael considered one of his quote-unquote spiritual teacher, mentors. So that's another piece of what I do. And another piece of what I'm about is I am, well, now that I've written a book, I guess we can say I'm an author, but I've always been more identified as a musician and a writer and a teacher. And I walk these paths, which are parallel and often weaving in and out of one another. Yeah. Well, it's a pleasure and an honor. You and I have basically created a friendship over the last several years after Michael passed. I think, we reached out and made some connections in the wake of that tragedy and you also spiritually helped me and mentored me through some really difficult times in my life including the loss of my

father and I had you know trying to use meditation and you know a spiritual dimension of life to help navigate that period of grief and and you were enormous more than you even recognize enormously helpful in me processing some of those deep feelings and having like genuine breakthroughs and being able to navigate the deepest grief of my life in a ultimately a constructive and generative and edifying way so I have deep appreciation and gratitude to you forever and I really appreciate you so much oh my goodness thank you so much I brings tears to my eyes dear you say that I'm so glad that I was able to be there for you in that way I remember that time it was rough yeah yeah

Absolutely. Well, you know, you mentioned the evolution of consciousness. And this is something that we're going to talk about. We're going to get into it's the focus of your book. In a lot of ways, the book that I'm working on dovetails interestingly with what you're doing here. I think we kind of use different words or maybe different inroads to talk about some of this stuff. But we're really getting at a lot of the same stuff. And the evolution of consciousness is not something that, you know, people on the Marxist left talk about often. But I kind of think of it as, and I've made this argument before, you know, the other side of like the dialectical development of the outward is the inward, the objective and the subjective. And human consciousness has certainly evolved, is still evolving. It evolves along with the unfolding of the material, civilizational, historical structures of the societies we live in. And I think it is one of those things that is probably under theorized, under grappled with on the left. And I think it's kind of a ripe area for people to get into. It's risky a little bit, you know, because a lot of those things can kind of deviate in some ways

from a more, you know, orthodox Marxist analysis, which is concerned with the political and the outward and the historical. But of course, we know that the, you know, the superstructure evolves along with the base and ideology evolves along with the material conditions we live in. So it's not outside of that to think deeply about how human subjectivity is evolving in these times, and I think it certainly is. But we can touch on that as we get into this. I think the first question I want to ask you, Susan, is, you know, for listeners who haven't

encountered your work yet, this is a new book, how would you describe the core idea of the goddess remedy in simplest terms? And kind of what problem are you trying to help people see more clearly or wrestle with throughout the book? So I think at its core, my book is about a cry for love. and not the romantic endorphin-driven, falling in love, kind of romantic love, but the kind of love that knows at the very deepest level that we are all intimately connected. And that the divisiveness that's tearing the world apart, especially now,

we're seeing that on steroids, is at root a lie. And that we really are all part of each other and, of course, part of the earth. And even though it sounds a bit corny to say it, we really are. all one. And the point I'm trying to make in my book is that patriarchy, and when I talk patriarchy, I'm speaking about it more in a psychological sense, and obviously we're going to get into that later. But the patriarchal structures that live inside of us really keep us separate from the living 24-7 moment-by-moment awareness that we really are one. It separates us from that I think primal awareness and keeps us at war inside of ourselves, with ourselves, and with the world with each other.

And to me, when I use the goddess, I see the goddess as the remedy to that patriarchal divisiveness. I see the goddess as the ground of being. It's a metaphor. It's not some woman out there that we worship. It's the ground of our interior being. And to me, the more we live into that, the more we lean into that, the more we open into that, since that force field is essentially the same love that my book is a battle cry for, that love is a very unifying matrix. And it opens us into a much wider dimension of reality and living in the most secure, empowered, cherishing, reverent life.

Yes. And I, you know, I truly believe that we're living. through, you know, a crossroads in our species development and what we are living through, we're kind of reaping the consequences of a separate, ego-identified way of being that manifests psychologically in the way that we organize our societies and manifest structurally in the way that, you know, war and capitalism, you know, these things play out, colonialism. And I would even argue that European colonialism and the destruction of indigenous ways of life does have this deep connection to an egoic separatist way of looking at the world where you see yourself from the inside out as being fundamentally separate from, alienated from the natural world

and indigenous people who are not alienated in that way suffer for it. So let's go ahead and talk about the patriarchy thing. You say the goddess, you know, the notion of goddess here is playing a metaphorical role, and I think that's important to know. And you use the word patriarchy, as you alluded to, in a way that goes beyond politics or gender and maybe more of the common ways people might use that word in the discourse and moves more into something psychological, existential. So can you kind of flesh that out a little bit? What do you mean by patriarchy in this deeper sense? And how does it show up in someone's everyday inner life? Okay.

Yes, of course. So to me, patriarchy, it's bad enough as an external organizing system. But what concerns me even more than the external patriarchal system that obviously I think is a psychotic system that has wreaked a nightmare on planet Earth. I think it also implants a seed of itself within the mind of each one of us as an individual. And it creates a pathology. It's a dissociative condition. It's pathology of mind. And it takes something entirely healthy, which is the impulse to individuate, which is something

that we all, we're born. Before we're born, we're one in the womb. We're born. We're now a separate, separate from the body that gestated us and birthed us. And now we're beginning to grow into our own individual self. But we need to always be connected to the ground from which we come. And what happens, the patriarchal implant takes our individuation process, and it's like rising up, I am, I am, I am. And at a certain point, it splits off from the ground from which it came, and it loses connection to its own inner ground,

aka one of the metaphors for that inner ground is the feminine, it is the goddess. We don't need to use that metaphor. For reasons we'll get into later, I chose to use this gender language in the book. after much wrestling, but at the end of the day, I couldn't come up with better language. And so here we are. But the ground, the inner feminine ground is where that's our feeling sense, that's the body, that's our intuition, that's our sense of connection, that's the anchor that actually holds us in life. And when the patriarchal impulse splits us off from that, we end up growing into a more and more profound sense of alienation and isolation, and that existential

aloneness, that it becomes a very fear-based scarcity mentality. And the next thing we know, we're living in this patriarchal nightmare where everyone is competing with everyone else, and the whole system is run by the need to dominate and accumulate and control. and all of that has been internalized inside of us, and we end up seeking power in all the wrong places, seeking strength in all the wrong places, which are outside of us, rather than inside back in that ground

that we all actually have, and we're just caught in this projectile that's not growing strength, that's growing pathology, and it's not growing out of power, it's growing out of fear. Yeah. And I hope that explains something of what I'm trying to say here. Fear, I think fear really is crucial to the psychological process.

And you're calling it patriarchal. I might talk about it. And let me know if I'm off base here. But I kind of talk about it in my own terminology is like the sense of a separate egoic self. But it seems to be some sort of, you know, you mentioned like the impulse to individuate is natural, right? We have to, we kind of come from the womb, this sort of ambient unity. The infant doesn't even know where their body stops and the world begins over time for obvious reasons. And we'll get into this more throughout the episode.

But you need to sort of individuate to see yourself as separate where your body ends and where the world begins. This is natural and normal. But it seems to be like if you get stuck in that gear, pathologies arise. And there seems to be something wanting us to move beyond. that. Like, yes, it's a necessary stage, you know, but there's now it's time to move beyond it in a similar analogous way to, you know, capitalism naturally evolves out of feudalism, but now it fundamentally is unsustainable. And the longer we try to maintain capitalism, the more suffering will impose on ourselves and the world until we transcend it in a sense.

So the impulse to individuate seems natural. Is it correct to say that this patriarchal distortion or this egoic distortion happens when that process is ready to transcend, ready to move on, and yet we are not doing that or not capable of that or we're kind of stuck in that gear, etc. Well, you know, it's an interesting way to frame the question. And this is one of the ideas that I still wrestle with, but I keep coming back to patriarchy. I think we are so influenced by the outer system. And this is why I talk so much about the literal patriarchal structures of consciousness and this implant inside of us. I suspect that, well, you talk about the indigenous cultures.

I suspect that left to a natural state of individuation, we would grow into a sense of our individual, I am self, but we would also maintain a rootedness in the ground. like a plant. You know, the roots are always in the round, even though we don't see them. And the plant is growing up out of those roots. The plant never forgets its roots that it came from. And I think what happens, because we're formed in this psychotic system that trains us to dissociate. It trains us to split off from everything it disapproves of. and it basically disapproves of everything

but the intellectual pursuit of power over others. And so this is why I keep landing on, I think, patriarchy, and again, this is not against men. When I first started working on the book and I was using the word patriarchy, you know, so many people who I would talk about it would say you shouldn't use that word and men are going to think you hate them.

No, if anything, I wrote this book for men because I think men have been so victimized by patriarchy. It's a sick psychotic system that's all about domination and control. And it's all about dissociating from what really is and creating inhuman, you know, what I call human doings, who are just running rampant right now on planet Earth, trying to destroy the entire planet, it as best as they possibly can. So, of course, we have to individuate. And of course, it's very important to have a very healthy sense of I am.

But we can never forget the ground that we come from because that's where we, that's what keeps us anchored. Yeah. And truly, to reconnect with that ground through concerted spiritual practice, once you've even touched it a little bit, you realize the insanity of. the patriarchal ego, that psychological process, the alienation inherent to it, and the enormous relief found when you're able to set it down to let it no longer control you, even for a few moments.

Yes. And you mention young men. You know, we often hear this crisis of young men, and there's a million reasons for that, largely material reasons, and then, you know, reactionary fascist forces, especially online, the manosphere. What they do is they come in and they tell you. young men triple down on patriarchal pathology, right? Hate women, hate gay people, dominate, control. This world is yours. They're taking it from you. Yes. It never solves the problem. It intensifies that

none of these men ever find happiness through this route. Of course not. And so I think it's an interesting, yeah, an interesting reaction to that is the tripling down of it that we're seeing. Yes, no, it's fascinating. And the irony, the great irony is if embracing the feminine is what would save everybody. That's what Great irony here. All these young men are being brainwashed by these, I don't even know what to call them, patriarchal monsters. Whether that guy's clavicular or whatever his name is,

didn't he just have some kind of major breakdown? And he's like a major influencer in that world. It's like, it breaks my heart. So much suffering. It's like more and more suffering. And the answer is right inside. It's right inside. just turn inside

now when you just kind of interesting when you say turn inside a lot of people who you know follow me on the Buddhist stuff and kind of experiment or interested in Christian mysticism for example

they'll know what you mean but it is always a vague term before you can kind of connect with it yourself and even when I was learning about this stuff it's like turn inward what does that mean what is the ground of my being what's inner silence I don't know and you kind of have to grapple

and grasp for it inwardly until you kind of finally touch it and then it kind of makes more sense. But I mean, it's hard to do, but how might you describe what that means of turning inward what that actually looks like in practice? I mean, I think the simplest thing

for someone who was just coming to these ideas for the first time is just, you know, pause for a moment and think of a time in your life when you just felt wonderful. You know, maybe you were, I don't know, going on a hike in the woods and there was a specific beautiful spot where you just sat down and gazed out of the vista

or you were at the beach sitting with the ocean or just a moment of whatever, just a moment, just one of those moments where we feel completely alive and completely connected to everything that is. And that is an internal state. It may sometimes seem to be, quote, unquote, induced by a particularly peaceful place we may find ourselves. But the actual experience of peace or serenity or equanimity that we experience in them, that's an internal experience.

This is what so many people, again, because back to patriarchy and especially the patriarchal capitalist system in which we live, we're constantly being trained to look outside of ourselves in this material. material culture for something to buy that will make us feel better and will give us the illusion of our power and the illusion of our, what's the word I want, being okay. Of course, we know this is a lie because people keep accumulating and accumulating and suffering grows even more. But that experience, that experience of quote unquote equanimity or serenity or peace or just a moment of joy or just a moment of, oh, I can exhale. that lives inside of us. And that's the point of doing any kind of internal process work, any kind of quote-unquote spiritual work, personal growth work, whatever adjective one wants to put on it, is to keep opening us into that spaciousness that is inside of us. And people who, like me, who work in this realm pretty much 24-7, I see over and over, when people, come to me in tremendous suffering for one-on-one sessions. And within half an hour, they're just like, oh, I feel so much better. And it's like there's so much space inside. We just have to keep

opening into that space. And we see the world differently. And whatever difficulties and challenges we're having to navigate in our daily life. We're now connected to that inner ground that will hold us very strong and steady no matter what is arising. Yeah, I think that spaciousness that you're talking about is connected in some ways. Perhaps I'm putting this into my own language here because that's how I naturally can relate to this stuff. Is that when you get underneath the identification with compulsive incessant thinking, right? The way that we talk to ourselves in our heads all day long. There's something manic about it, and it never stops, you know, and all of us have had the

experience of laying down at the end of the night, wanting to go to sleep, needing to go to sleep, and yet our mind just whirls and runs on the hamster wheel psychotically. And what does it feel like to set that aside? Well, it feels amazing. And you alluded to the fact that people actually... probably experienced this in their daily lives even without knowing it and the moments when they felt best when they felt actually like the most joy you know raw wholesome joy is those moments when they're so immersed in what's happening they their mind naturally silences and the feeling

of being a separate self grasping for comfort and certainty and control even for a moment fades away you can get this when you're engrossed in a really great movie um I play softball, I play volleyball, I play sports. I notice it like when I'm really in the moment in sports, I'm in the outfield, a ball comes, I'm running, chasing it down, I'm diving, I'm making a play. In those moments, there's no time for me to think or to construct because the self is kind of constructed through compulsive thinking. That all goes away and you're forced to live in the moment and only after the moment is passed as the thinking flood back in. You start reflecting on that moment, you know, maybe in the case of a good,

play in sports, it boosts your ego a little bit. It feels good. But it's that, it's that, it's that getting under or detaching from the, the endless stream of compulsive inner thinking, and those moments in which there's a, there's a sense of selflessness where you're not mediating experience through the psychological self, but you're just with experience directly. And it's unfolding through and with you. Does that, does that sound right to you? Yes, but what I would add to that, and I think another very important piece to add to that is because when you or me or whoever, the example you give of playing sports, you're fully in your body. And remember, so one of the things that the patriarchal impulse does is it dissociates us from our body because it wants to keep us. trapped in the mind. And it wants the mind to be driven by fear rather than power. And one of the

easiest ways for it to do that is to dissociate or split us off from our body because the body is the ground. And this is why in the patriarchal system that ranks thinking over feeling, doing over being. We get caught in this notion that the life of the mind and being in our head is where we need to be. Body is like second-class citizen in a patriarchal system. And that is so dangerous because without the body we have no anchor. And you describe it beautifully. Then you get out of the softball field and you feel great because you're fully embodied.

100% alive in your body, every cell is just firing. And it's true. The mind can't go into those psychotic states because it's too busy being embodied. And the body is holding it. The body is grounding it. Otherwise, we are. We've lost touch with gravity. It's kind of a gross metaphor, but I think of the chicken without a head.

And we're just like the head rolling around with no body to ground us. And that is a very dangerous condition. And unfortunately, a lot of the people right now in control of the planet Earth, that's where they live. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you emphasize the embodied part. I think that's really important. What's the first thing people do when they learn how to meditate, for example, is they tell you, focus on your breath, Focus on how the breath feels in your stomach.

Like go deep down into your stomach. What are they trying to tell you to do? Go down into your body. Feel what it feels like to breathe a breath in and out. And when you are focused on the body in that way, when you start to meditate in that way, if you are literally feeling the breath in and out, like truly feeling it, you can't at the same time be talking to yourself in your head. It'll try to penetrate in there and you'll get distracted and you'll find yourself. after a few seconds lost in thought again, and then you return to the breath, which is to say

you return to the body. And the other side of this, the patriarchal psychological process that you talk about in this book so well, it disassociates us, alienates us from our own bodies. It makes us identify completely and exclusively with the endless chatter in our minds. And one of the consequences, and there are so many, but one of the consequences is that people actually begin to hate their bodies. They hate the way it looks. They hate the way it feels. They want different ones. They torture themselves with like extreme diets or drugs or, you know, this endless search for self-improvement and working out. And they're, they spend so much of their lives in a state of insecure hatred of their own bodies because they're alienated from

it, right? Yes, exactly. And again, and again, the reason I, I have continued to come back to this language of patriarchy, I think the values of patriarchy force this way of thinking on us. What I call the inner patriarch, its job in the psyche is to serve the outer patriarchal capitalism. Its job is to keep us dissociated. Its job is to keep us from feeling empowered. Because if we feel empowered, if we feel alive inside of ourselves, if we just love ourselves as we are, we don't need to go spend a fortune on whatever. Make up, new clothes, plastic surgery,

working at whatever. We're no longer pursuing this impossible ideal of beauty or perfection or whatever it is that we have to buy. We're simply alive within ourselves. And yeah, if I need a new whatever,

a hairbrush or a bottle of shampoo or a new sweater, whatever, of course, I'll go buy it, And I'm not driven by the compulsion that I have to accumulate all these things that are finally going to make me perfect. And I think the more we see the way this patriarchal capitalist configuration that has been controlling us for so many hundreds, thousands of years, patriarchy thousands, capitalism, not thousands, but it's been growing for a pretty long time. and it is up, from my perspective, it is a psychosis. And we've internalized the psychosis and turned it against ourselves. And I think that's why I find the language of the interpatriarch, even though it can be annoying to people when they first hear it, it's like, oh my God, right, I see what you're saying.

Because one of the reasons I wrote this book, I want people to get off the blame. We blame ourselves for everything that we think is wrong with us. And that's like patriarchy brainwashes into thinking we're the problem when it's the problem. It's like it needs to correct itself. Not us. We're fine. Absolutely. Absolutely. And if if, as you said earlier, fear is at the root of this patriarch, you know, this patriarchal psychological process, that explains the incessant need to dominate, to hoard well, even more wealth than you could ever spend in a million lifetimes, you know, the control, competition, all that stuff. It doesn't come from, as machismo patriarchal figures like to tell us, you know, self-control, disciplined, like going out and conquering the world. No, it comes from trembling, insecure fear that you'll never have enough.

You're never in control. And you're driven actually by fear. And then you cut, you dress it up as if it's this machismo, self-rengthymo. confidence, but underneath it is always a trembling little boy scared of, scared of life. Exactly. And I do want to add to what you were saying there, too, that, you know, this subjectivity you're pointing towards this overthrowing the patriarch, the inner patriarch, if you will, that is, as you were just saying, with regards to consumer society, a radical subjectivity, because if you are embodied, if you are in the present moment, if you are truly

at home in your own skin and in the world. You're not somebody that can be, well, manipulated by political propaganda as easily. You can't be manipulated by advertising and the incessant need to try to fill some inner void with consumption of all sorts. You are no longer a subject that is susceptible to the overall capitalist imperialist structures that we live in. at least you're getting away from that increasingly. And so I think along with an outward political revolutionary process, this inner radical transcendence of ego identification, if you will, is revolutionary in that way and actually, I think, complements and unfolds along with an outward, truly revolutionary political project. Absolutely. I totally agree. And again,

that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. I think it's very, I want people, I mean, look at, I am a woman of the left. I'm a red diaper baby. My mother was a card carry member of the Communist Party in the 30s. We grew up, she was a union person, local 65. We grew up singing the union songs. We grew up hearing about all her amazing stories about the union and all of that. Deep, it's like my mother's milk is steeped in Marxism and the union. As I grew, as I matured and I end up, you know, part of my individuation was moving into more of a spiritual journey than a political journey. I mean, I've certainly went to every protest and I was very involved.

You know, I'm older. You know, I came up in the 60s, but I was very involved in all the great political movements of that time. But I always leaned also to, there was just something inside of myself I was after. And in those days, it was ineffable. I couldn't really name it, but something interior was calling me to go deeper and deeper inside of myself. And I ended up on a quote unquote more spiritual path journey than to say a political path journey. But for me, very much the two are intimately connected. And one of the things I've observed in my now rather long life is that, like, I came up in the 60s.

I'm a product of second wave feminism. There was so much, we were creating, I lived in Conyons, you know, we were creating communal, this, and communal, that we had amazing food co-ops. We, we, the whole world of yoga and meditation, I saw all of these movements totally co-opted. And, and I realized that if we're not doing the interior work to keep ourselves in a very whole, very connected to reality and not driven, by fear and not driven by greed, then none of these beautiful outer structures that we're trying to create are going to stand. They all get co-opted. I remember when I was in high school, you know, I was really big Marxist period. I mean, I guess a lot of us wake up to Marxism in high school. And my mother, who was, you know, my parents, they had, they came back, what they

had lived in California, they came back to New York after the war. Then my uncle gave my father a factory. It took over the factory. They grew that factory into a business. We lived outside of New York in one of the suburbs outside of New York City. And so, you know, my, my, my, my, my, comie mother, you know, became a suburban, um, capitalist. But she always, her roots were, you know, she never forgot where she came from. And I remember, I was like to, I still remember it's so funny in the kitchen. And I was giving her some lecture about marks and probably, you know, accusing her of selling out or whatever I was saying. And she just looked at me and she said, you just wait, 25 years from now, all your lefty friends are going to be selling real estate in Scarsdale. And she was kind of right, you know.

And I say that with love, you know, and there's nothing wrong with selling real estate in Scarsdale. But we need to just, I think we need, the inner work is very important, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And if we don't do that inner work, the outer structures we build are always going to end up co-opted by unconscious greed and unconscious fear. Absolutely. And so this is why I have ended up over and over I come back to, this is the sphere I need to work in. because I know how to help people build a life that grows from their own inner power. And that's the gift I can offer with my life. And that's what I've tried to do.

And that's what I'm trying to do with this book now is I mean, I'm, you know, I've been around now. I'm past 75. I'm past three quarters of a century. and I've learned a few things in my now rather long life. And with this book, I'm trying to give all of you everything I've learned and hope that you'll make with it something really beautiful and sustaining. And that's it. Absolutely.

I want to talk about the way that you use collie in your work. I've always found that very potent, and it's always been a potent sort of, archetype or figure in my own life. But I just want to mention one thing really quick. You talked about the 60s, the radicalism, how interestingly, culturally, the not, not, the hippie movement was not the same as the principled political radicalism of that time, although they kind of intersected and had conflict. But, you know, the people that were active and the young people that were active at that time, they did often get co-opted by the broader processes of society. And by the 80s

were Reaganite yuppies in many cases, right? The hippie to yuppie pipeline is not an accident. So there's one just material co-optation there. But I also wanted to say in my own organizing life, you know, I'm 37, so I'm approaching 40. I've been in many, many different types of organizations through the years with some wonderful people. Time and time again, I've seen how the ego, in the, you know, not to be judgmental, but like sort of the inner immaturity personally has, has manifested in organizing places, has been dressed up as principled political disagreement, but it's really ego, it's grasping, it's insecurity, it's interpersonal conflict that they can't handle correctly. And this spiritual process, we're using the word spiritual, which might turn some people off, it could also be thought of as an existential maturation process. Yes. And more than that, it's not something. that we construct, it wants to unfold through us.

Like, you know, the deepest connections I've had with this through my life off and on, of course. Always it feels when I'm in the deepest sort of parts of my own spiritual development, it feels as if it's a natural force that then is kind of manifesting through me. And I don't have much to do with it at all. It's gorgeous, it's beautiful. And when you stop trying to control it and stop trying to impose your idea of what it should be on it and let it flow through you, there's like sort of an ecstatic and uniqueness to it, right? It's not like we all become like, you know, carbon copy drones or, you know, like the lights go out or

something. No, like you're still as unique as a blooming flower in the field is unique to the flower next to it and unique compared to the flower next to that. It's gorgeous. It's even in some ways more unique. The ego likes to think of itself as unique, but the ego is social conditioning. So, you know, when the ego is thinking, it's being used. unique, it's actually manifesting a deep social conditioning that is, you know, a dime a dozen. It's everywhere.

It's the subjectivity of modern late capitalist society in so many ways. And so there's actually something more unique, which is counterintuitive to letting the self go than in edifying and reifying the self as such. Yes, yes. And it's very counterintuitive, but it's very true. Well, let me ask you this, because you describe in your book, and this is, I think, very potent imagery again. Well, actually, let's touch on the collie thing because I put that on the table and then I never got back to it. Can you kind of talk about how you think of, maybe explain to people who Collie is and then kind of how you use Collie in your work and how you think about it?

Sure. Maybe I should backtrack. Let's talk a little bit about what I mean when I talk about the goddess. And to go there, let's maybe just sort of take a moment and just, and I know you've already done this, talking more to your audience here, you just sort of think about your entire mind-body system and see it as a landscape, and see the mind as one aspect, and see the body as one aspect, and see the body as another aspect, and think of those two as intimately. connected, like one big landscape. Maybe the mind is, oh, I don't know, the mountain and maybe the body is an ocean. And these are very literal simplistic images. And think of within that ocean

body realm, there's so much going on in there. There's just so much. And when we talk about the unconscious in psychology and Jungian psychology, we talk about these archetypes, and the archetypes are these patterns or designs of consciousness that inhabit both the unconscious and the conscious. And although what we think of is our mind very much, and we associate that with our head, consciousness is way bigger than that and moves throughout the entire mind-body system. And kind of deeper than the mind and the bigger realm inside of us, that again, for lack of another image, right now I'm referring to as this ocean of consciousness within that huge spaciousness

are these archetypes. Young identified them, Jung named them, but people have been aware of them for thousands of years. And so a lot of the, and a lot of these archetypes have been personified in various cultures as quote-unquote gods and goddesses. But these are, Again, these are active energetic constructions within our human consciousness. And I have been most interested in these archetypes within the goddess palette. And so Kali, so within the archetype, the archetype of the goddess, which we could also refer to as the deep feminine, has many different aspects in many different faces. And if you simply, and if gender language is boring or not interesting or a turnoff, we don't have to call, we don't have to name it feminine.

The only reason I use the gender language is I'm trying to make points about patriarchy. And this is where Colley actually becomes very helpful. Because if we, if we can visualize this internalized patriarchal system as, you know, I'm going a little bit off topic here, but I think I'll bring it all back together. when I think about the inner patriarch, the one thing I find Donald Trump very useful for, he's like a perfect embodiment of the inner patriarch. And if you, you know, for anyone who has trouble, you know, what do I mean and how do I identify my own inner? Just think about Donald Trump.

Think about what he looks like. Think about how he acts. Think about how freaking dissociated he is. Yeah. Think about how fear-based he is. what this bloviating, blustering bully? And that is very much a mirror of our own inner patriarch. It may not hopefully look as horrific as he looks,

but it's a very nasty presence within the mind. And again, it's not our masculine. The masculine is a beautiful, beautiful, crucial, essential function in all of us. A healthy masculine is what I call our doing function. we want a healthy, fabulous masculine. But the masculine has been so co-opted and deformed by the patriarch. And so, coming back to Kali, if you think within our being realm, within the great ocean of consciousness, beneath the mind,

there are all these archetypes. And one of them is the energy field personified as the goddess collie, which is considered the most fierce aspect of the so-called deep feminine. And the best metaphor, I think, to understand that energy field, if you think of a mother bear protecting her young, or I just read the other day in the, I read an article in the New York Times about one of these trophy hunters who was evidently mauled by a female elephant protecting her babies. And it's like that very fierce protective energy

is very much personified in the goddess collie. It's a fierce protective power that destroys that which causes harm. It's a protector of truth and it protects truth by destroying that which, dares to destroy truth. And so right now, to me, when we're living in this time, again, back to patriarchy, of patriarchy on steroids, and bad enough that we've got this crew of clowns and grifters running the show, we've also got this internalized patriarchal ranking system

that's determined to keep us dissociated from the truth of our own power. This energy field personified as colleague, it rises up inside of us. So again, back to that ocean metaphor. If you just imagine this fear is protective. No, rising up inside of us. It literally grabs hold to that patriarchal mindset. It just grabs it by its knees and it yanks it down. And it removes the person.

patriarchal mask and liberates the true masculine. And I think patriarchy is a very powerful deforming of the true masculine. And so we need a very powerful aspect of the feminine in order to bring it to its knees and balance it so that it can become what it's supposed to be, which is a very loving, alive masculine. And I think the image, the art of Kali, it's like always

spoke to me even before I understood anything about it and understood the Hindu culture out of which it emerged and understood even what Kali was. The imagery is so raw, so powerful. Most people, if you don't even know what we mean by Kali, you'll have seen the image, certainly,

but you can easily Google it and it'll be like oh yeah, that's what that is. powerful, potent, terrifying in some way. And she always has around her neck this sort of necklace of skulls, but often they're depicted as the heads of men. And she's holding a decapitated, you know, male head in many instances. And this is this powerful metaphorical sort of statement that you really give, I think, really interesting articulation to of like this inner patriarch and the power.

of this sort of divine feminine, you know, the mother elephant just trampling the life out of a threat to her children. And in some ways, I think about, you know, as capitalism continues to pollute the planet and to destroy the world, nature itself sort of rebels against it. You know, nature itself pulls the rug out from underneath the delusions this system is built on. And that's collie, right? Yes, yes. I mean, nature is definitely, and again, at a certain point for me, although when we talk masculine feminine, we're in a dualistic frame. Ultimately, to me, the frame falls apart and it's all one. But in the process of trying to understand all this stuff, yes,

the nature is personified as the goddess. That nature right now is under the earth is under attack, and it is fighting back hard and fierce. And I think in the end it will win, because I think it's actually more powerful. Absolutely. And then there's this element of death, right? Collie is associated with death.

And death is the ultimate stripping away of all illusion. And it comes for everyone who tries to assault the balance of things. Yes. And Collie is also time. Collie's a very, very, very complex archetypal field. And again, back to that imagery, people always see that image. and they're so freaked out by it. But yeah, that head that she holds,

that actually represents the patriarchal ego. That's what it represents. And actually the garland of skulls around her neck, believe it or not, they actually represent the 52 letters of the Sonsprud alphabet, which is an alphabet that is, how can I say,

oh, just for that, we could simply say it holds the entire universe within its letters. and the sound of the letters is keeping the universe going. There's a lot in that system about the power of sound and vibration. And Collie, you know, Collie holds all of that. Cully embodies all of that. And, yeah, she's one of my favorite things about Cully.

I tell the story in the book, one of the creation myth of Cali, collie arises when there's a war between the so-called demons, which we could say, you know, the patriarchal mind and the gods who are the non-patriarchs is trying to live in peace. And of course, the demons are always winning. And the reason they're winning this particular war is because the head demon got a boon a long time ago,

back to greed. One of the gods who was actually full of pride gave this demon the boon that he would, because the demon was worshipping him, he liked being worshipped. So he gave him a boon, and the boon was, you will never be killed by a man. And in this patriarchal system, only men are warriors. So this war goes on for hundreds of years, and finally, collie arises. We need the fierce feminine to come and clean this mess up. So, Collie comes, and there's a huge battle, and basically, Collie is triumphant. And at the end of the battle, all these dead demons, you know, hundreds, thousands of demons

are lying on the field, and Collie has basically annihilated the entire demon arm. Well, she's, I'll give also, there's another goddess Durga. Collie is the most fierce potency of Durga, the warrior goddess. And if the Collie leaps from Durga's brow and demolishes, the entire goddesses the entire goddess, demon army. Anyway, so at the end of the battle, the demons are all just dead on the battlefield, and Collie is still in this dance of destruction. And her consort, who is called Lord Shuvah, sacred masculine, lies down on the fields in the form of a crying infant, because he knows that that will stop her dance. And lo and behold, here's Collie just in this dance of destruction,

destroying evil, destroying that which harms life, and she sort of trips over this crying baby and immediately stops, plops herself down right there, and starts nursing the crying infant. And I love that image of the warrior goddess surrounded by all these demons that she has annihilated and just tenderly and lovingly nursing this infant. And then, you know, in the memory,

and then she sets the baby down and then of course she resumes its true form as the sacred masculine consort and she just withdraws back into the body of the great goddess from which she came. No, she doesn't even need to be thanked.

She's just doing her Dharma. She's doing her service. She's doing what she's called to do. No must, no fuss. And back into pure consciousness. And I love that imagery. I, yes. It's gorgeous, yeah.

It's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, so much to say here. I think when you're talking about collie representing time and death and nature, these are things that, you know, the patriarchal ego subjectively at the level of psychology pushes into the background. These are things that it kind of runs from or doesn't face up. but they always impose themselves in the final instance. Yes, they do. Yes, they do.

And you mentioned Trump being this sort of grotesque figure of the patriarch and the pathology of the patriarchy. And I always say, like, if you want to see the exact opposite of an enlightened Buddhist, you know, look at Trump. And I don't think it's a coincidence that he rises to power at this time in American history. He is like the sort of, he's been called, you know, the American id, this grotesque interface of what America has become, you know, globally, what it is domestically, economically, just this greedy, gluttonous thing that is violent, that stomps on nature, right? He unleashes fossil fuels on the atmosphere. He bombs little girl schools in Iran. He is consumed entirely by his ego, totally and curious, totally unsophisticated in any more. or intellectual or artistic sense, just completely trapped by the ego, which makes him an incredibly

dangerous person. It makes him an incredibly, I mean, deeply insecure person who is always trying to compensate. He's a pathetic figure. And the fact that he is presented by those that support him as this ultimate manly figure who's taking, it's just all so laughable. It's so pathetic. And anybody with eyes to see can see this is the patriarchy. dancing around on the stage.

And it is, we should, I mean, it is, it's cruel, it's scary. It will kill and destroy. But it's also fucking pathetic. Yes, yes. And I think the more that people really, oh, really see how pathetic it is, the sooner the whole thing collapses. Yes. To kind of, you know, kill the Trump in your own head. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's, and that's the work that we all need to do. And again, kill it because what we want is to restore the true masculine.

Absolutely. Yeah. So let's go ahead and move into this next question. I know we go on our detours, but I think they're also very generative and good, and I hope people enjoy it. But getting back to the book itself, you describe modern people as dismembered, which is a powerful image. And I think it really does speak to something deep about how we, we experience our own lives, this hyper-fragmented sort of postmodern reality we live in and our alienation from ourselves. Can you kind of talk about what you mean by that? What it actually feels like from the inside and how someone who isn't familiar with all of this might recognize that condition in their own life? Sure, of course. And I mean, and you just described it very well. When I use the term dismemberment, which is another word I think for disassociation, I'm talking about how as we're growing up, we're taught usually from a very early age and usually by the people that we love the most to discard certain parts of ourselves

that for whatever reason are not approved of in the family system. And often we'll be shamed for these parts. And it can be something, it can be how we look, It can be how smart or not smart we are. It can be anything. You know, when I was growing up, I used to love to sit at the piano and sing. And everybody in the family made fun of me. And so everybody made fun of my voice.

And I grew up thinking I had a terrible voice. And I grew up with a lot of shame around my voice. And so I kind of put my voice away. You know, when I was trained as a musician, I was trained as a classical piano. And so most of my musical energy wanted to play in the piano, which was fine. But I always, I just really always wanted to sing, but I was so ashamed of my voice. And then after my daughter was born, I would just nurse her and I would sing to her while I nursed her. And she seemed to like my singing. And I thought, oh, maybe it's not that bad. And little by little, I kind of plucked up the

courage to kind of go back to the piano and sing at the piano. And one thing led to another, and I ended up on a rather profound healing journey. And one of the things that came out of that journey was I became a professional singer. And this kid grew up thinking she had a terrible voice and was shamed by her voice to find myself 20 years later giving concerts and people coming up to me afterwards and saying, oh, my God, your voice is so beautiful. beautiful. I could listen to your voice for hours. And it took me years. It would be like this weird double take because inside I was still the little girl with the voice that everybody made fun of. And I think it's a very, it's kind of, it's a profound example of I was tricked into cutting

myself from my voice and putting my voice away. Because I was so, I was shamed. And it just, on so many levels. We're ashamed about our body. I meet with people all the time who were told they weren't smart. And it turns out they're really smart. They just had another kind of intelligence, and they ended up putting that away. And so we end up discarding really essential parts of ourselves. And those parts are generally the portals into our most powerful creative truth. And so in the book, I talk about this dismembering that happens. And how how what we need to do is remember ourselves. And that to me, the reason I like that word dismember is because the healing of dismembering is remembering and the way we remember ourselves.

One of the stories I tell in my book is when a young woman in my 20s lying out in the sun one day on a summer day and I just was lying there and I realized I couldn't feel in my belly. and this is way before we were talking about mind-body stuff, and I had no awareness of a mind-body connection or anything like that. I was just lying out in the sun, but I realized I couldn't feel my belly, and I realized I could feel my body from the waist up, and I could kind of feel my body from the legs down,

but that whole pelvic region, it was like it was dead, and it was just like, whoa, this is weird, and I put my hands on my belly to see if I could feel it if I touched it, and I suddenly started remembering, all these moments between me and my mom where she shamed me about my body. Because she hated her own body. Again, we grew up in the system where if you're not, you know, five, nine and 99 pounds, there's something wrong with you.

And we were shorter, rounder women. We were perfectly fine. We just weren't that ideal. But she had tremendous issues around her own body, and she projected them all onto me. So she trained me to hate my poor, lovely little bell. and basically it kind of died on me. And this day lying out in the sun,

I became aware of that. And again, I didn't have the language, then I didn't have the language of dismember. But I knew in that moment I have been dismembered, and I need to remember myself. And that was in many ways one of the beginnings of my own inner journey of healing. And I do think it requires us to remember.

It requires us in order to repair the dismayer, remembering, we have to remember all the parts of ourself that we buried in order to survive. And we have to just get into the unconscious and dig up all these buried pieces of ourselves, remember them, and bring them back up, and make friends with them, and make a conscious decision. Do you need to be part of me? or do I need to allow you to compost back into the soil of my soul? But that's a conversation we're going to have together and we're going to make consciously rather than unconsciously discard something of myself because I've been shamed by it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that has to resonate with so many people. You know, whether we're struggling with addiction, various forms of mental, suffering, bodily insecurity or insecurity about who we are. This feeling, this persistent feeling that we're incomplete, that we haven't arrived, that sometime in the future will finally maybe, if everything falls into place, be okay. If I can just get that or get this, get my life in this situation, get this much money, get that type of spouse, then I'll finally feel whole, then I'll be happy.

The sense of walking around missing something and kind of on a low level, even unconscious level searching for a completeness that we just don't feel inside and whether we turn to the bottle or drugs or other self, in so many forms of self-destructive behavior in desperate pursuit and often unconscious pursuit of a wholeness that we feel, you know, if we can really look at it, was stripped away from us often sometimes in childhood, right? The two-year-old isn't necessarily self-conscious. It's self-consciousness is a very very very very. developed through social judgment. You know, my daughter, for example, you know, when she was young in elementary school, she was, she would have no problem singing in front of the whole

family, doing her dances, performing in front of people. As she developed into a teenager, you know, she became much, much more self-conscious, which is probably natural. But to see that part of her go away, to see, to see her watch videos when she was nine years old singing and feel nothing but cringe as she says. You know, it's cringy to watch little me. It breaks my heart because that's the little eight or nine year old girl that I love. And I still, of course, love her. And she's still in all these ways talented.

And I know that with time, she can rediscover some of that. And, you know, but, you know, a teenage girl or teenage boy, that's the most insecure you'll ever be in your whole life. Yes. But to see that go away in her, yeah, it breaks my heart, you know. and I talked to her about it, and she's still a very confident, very confident young woman. She's not crippled by it, but just in those little ways, you see it kind of die in children, and it's so sad. No, and it's a heartbreaking thing to see. And again, I fault the external system and its values.

Yes. It's, you know, it's interesting. It's another reason that I chose patriarchy as a central frame of this book. because I want to be really clear about this, I see so much shame that people carry consolated around their so-called issues, so much self-blame. And one of the things that, you know, in my work as a therapist and a wisdom teacher,

I sit with people who are convinced there's something fundamentally wrong with them. Just what you're talking about now, you know, I think about the A-D-D-D-D diagnosis. This is a diagnosis that makes my blood well. And because I see over and over and over again, I don't think it's a disorder. I think a person has a natural way of being in the world

and it's been totally pathologized by the system that demands a certain kind of linear, productive relationship with time and attention. Right? And it's a system that I think is frankly psychotic. And it's a system that's dissociated from its own humanity. And rather than questioning the system, we diagnose the person. And I think what patriarchy does, it turns its own pathology into our individual personal failings. And it's a horrifying thing to witness.

And so for me, you know, one of the great gifts I want to give to people with this book is permission to stop blaming yourself. Let's name the real villain. The villain is not you. The villain is this system that's so severed from its own humanity, from that AKA feminine ground, that it's normalized its own dissociation and freaking calls its civilization. It's insane. And where Kali comes back in, it's like, yes, I want everyone to find their race, their appropriate. rage, that calmly the force field that is enraged at that which dares to destroy our authenticity and our innocence and our wisdom and try to turn us into these little patriarchal robots. And I really, I just, I want people to grow out of the shaming and the self-blaming

and understand that real transformation is possible by simply allowing themselves to be who they actually are, not who they've been told they should be. Yeah, absolutely. When you say that story of Collie on the battlefield, annihilating demons and then tripping on the infant and sitting down and holding it, it makes, and all we're talking about here, about how this process often happens in childhood, it's really interesting to think to judge the health of a society by how it treats its children. And from free lunches to Epstein Island to the Monob School in Iran to the genocide in Palestine,

look at how this system treats its children. That's the biggest indictment against it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely 100%. Absolutely. And that James Baldwin quote is like, you know, the children of the world are ours. And if you can't see that, you're incapable of morality. I'm paraphrasing. But the idea that every children everywhere, on any part of this planet are our children. That's fundamentally different than how this patriarchal death system views it. Yes, absolutely. I'm just even listening to I have chills throughout my whole body.

And exactly. And once we understand that, once we get that, once we live in that, then the whole world is us. And it's like, I feel all the suffering all the time. It's, yes. Well, that's one of the things that happens when you do sort of, sort of do these practices when you understand this stuff, when you deepen yourself existentially in this particular way, you do begin to, your heart opens up to suffering that it was otherwise

closed to. And you begin to feel with increasing intensity, desperate intensity, the suffering of other people, even people across the planet who you don't know, you'll never meet, you don't speak their language. You start to see that that's feeling of separation. They're over there. over here. They believe in that God. I believe in this God. They speak that language. I speak that. That's all bullshit. And once those barriers start crumbling through particularly these concerted practices, the heart opens up towards unity, towards wholeness. And the byproduct of that is that the suffering of the world starts to flood into you. The ego actually presents a pretty, you know, decent, if ultimately false barrier of separation where you can kind of look away from the pain and

suffering of other people, especially when they're far away. But when you engage in this sort of deepening of, you know, being, you can't do that anymore. And that's actually a sign of progress, but it is something that is difficult to navigate sometimes when the suffering of the world is so ubiquitous. It's everywhere, and it breaks your heart every single day. And this is why another one of the ideas I try to really flesh out for people in my book is the important. It's the important. importance of building a sense of self, which I think of as a container of our sense of self, that can really hold all of that and not go down with the ship. And I think a big part of any quote-unquote spiritual evolutionary training process

essential to build a very strong container of self, that can hold all the suffering and all the joy and hold it all and live in that awareness, which I think makes us do whatever we can to alleviate suffering but not drown in it because then we're not of any use to anyone. Absolutely. Yeah, alongside the letting in of the letting in of, the suffering, there's an ability, hopefully, over time, to not be destroyed by that suffering, to be, to be, you know, energized to go out in the world and tend to it, even to break down

weeping in the face of it, but not for it to destroy you or to cripple you in any inward way, right? And that's where the love comes, and the other side of that is love, and that's edifying. That keeps you strong. Exactly. That has been my experience. Yes. And we talk about, you talk about the evolution of consciousness. And I do think, you know, interestingly, the communicative technologies of our time, which, you know, we're so ready to criticize and we should, but for all the downsides of social media and the internet, it connects human beings across the world like never before. That is like a sort of process whereby the separation, the illusion of separation between different parts of the world and different peoples is crumbling. And that represents an

evolution of morality, right? As consciousness evolves, as it broadens and deepens, we can also see a sphere of moral concern widening to include more and more people. If you go back 500 years and you ask an average American, you know, American 500 years ago, sorry, you go back 100 years ago and ask a farmer in Nebraska what he thinks about, you know, a child suffering in Palestine or India. And, you know, he might have some abstract. moral thing, but for the most part, they don't really feel it. They definitely can't see it. Maybe

they get a newspaper article if they even read that. And you go back further in time, go back 5,000 years and ask somebody, do you care about the suffering of this random stranger across the world? And they probably don't have the capacity to do that, right? There's like an in-group and an out-group, and that's kind of a lower form of human consciousness that we've evolved out of. And I think we're evolving in the direction of expanding our moral sphere of concern, to include all human beings, all animals, the planet itself, right? And if somebody out there, even if they don't engage in spiritual practices, if you're capable of weeping in the face of the suffering of a complete stranger,

whether you know it or not, you are participating in this evolution of consciousness that is broadening our sphere of moral concern. And when you look at Palestine and you cry along with a mother searching for her children in the rubble, you are actually at in some sense the cutting edge of human moral development, which is to say the evolution of human consciousness. Yes, I totally agree with that. Absolutely agree with that. I will also be a little bit Debbie Down here, but not really Debbie Downer so much as more when I look at social media, it's, again, we need a very strong container of sense. to use social media in the way that you're talking about it, rather than being consumed and addicted to it.

So again, it's the difference. When the patriarchal mind is controlling us, it wants us addicted. And so rather than using social media as a way to, you know, as you just so beautifully put it, be able to really connect and feel the suffering and the joy of the entire world will instead be consumed by whatever our feet is giving us and become very addicted to do it. You know, end up spending whatever 12 hours a day scrolling on the phone, whatever it is. And it's like once again, we're under the influence of that quote unquote patriarchal,

impulsion to dissociate and get lost in this isolation and aloneness. That's crucial. Yeah. Yeah. And I think probably the overarching impact is that. The overarching impact of social media is negative. But it's like an indicative of this communicative expansion where the possibility is finally there for the first time.

And that's what I want. I want, that's the thing. You know, I look at these technologies. and now with AI these chatbats, I mean, this is extraordinary technology. And I want to get it out of the hands of this patriarchal mind and get it into what I call an integrated consciousness that really wants to work collaboratively with all of these technologies to make life better for everyone.

and that I that's that's that's what I'm working towards absolutely and you've you've done that your you're you know so much of your life has been dedicated to pushing in that direction I really admire that um and yeah of course you know the the the wanting to use that technology for the betterment of all humanity is part of this consciousness that is seeking unity and and dismantling separation yeah so let's go let's go ahead and move into this other aspect of your book and a lot of your work talks about the difference between being and doing. So can you kind of, perhaps people will intuitively have some sense of what that means, but like what's a simple concrete example perhaps of the difference between those two modes of

living and when does someone know that they've shifted perhaps from one into the other? What does it actually look like in our day to day life? Right, right. And it's a very interesting way, the way you frame the question. And I just want to pull back a little bit because I think I don't want to think of being and doing or doing and being as two separate modes of living. I want people to understand they nest together. Doing is what we do. Being is what we are.

What we are has to move through our doing function. Without a doing function, nothing that we are ever happens. Doing is everything we think. Say, act. Doing is everything we do. being is what infuses or animates our doing. That's what I think of doing as the container. And again, why I use the patriarchal frame,

if our doing container is formed in the patriarchal system, then one of the things that's going to constantly be doing is crushing our being. Whatever is rising up through our being, our doing function is in the grab hold of it and try to destroy it. What we want is a doing function that's just clean and wide open and beautiful. And being moves through that in a very beautiful, clear way. Here, small example, this conversation we're having right now.

The words, the back and forth questions that we're having, the listening, the thinking, that's all the container, that's the doing part of this conversation. But underneath that container of our words are back and forth questioning and speaking and responding, underneath that is this presence, and it's a presence of listening, it's a presence of curiosity. And I think between you and me, it's like heart speaking to heart. there's a depth of feeling and respect and a genuine interest to create understanding back and forth between us. And that's all the being that's animating, the doing of our conversation.

And that makes it, I think, for both of us and hopefully your audience are just a very enjoyable, meaningful, uplifting, expanding, regenerative, etc. Conversation. If we were coming to this, if the container of our conversation, our back and forth questioning, you know, if you were just very adversarial in order to make me look like an idiot, and if I was, you know, very defensive and resentful, and so I wouldn't like your questions, and your questions would make me, you know, not sound intelligent, and I would come back with some kind of retort against you. And it would just be this really, I mean, again, not to keep bringing back the political,

but what's her name? Caroline Levin, it would be like one of her press conferences. So, I mean, that's a very patriarchal, disgusting container. And what's in the container is also very rotten and putrid. And so I want our doing function. I don't want a patriarchal container. I want a healthy, masculine, beautiful, fabulous, container that just it serves the beauty and the wisdom and the clarity and the intelligence

of our human possibility. And that's the nesting of being and doing that I'm interested in encouraging people to cultivate inside of themselves. Yes, and your point about them not being opposites, but being compliments, I think really is essential. We live in an era where we're way over our skis into doing and not. at all in being. And that that actually distorts the doing. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the doing has got to be grounded in being or it turns into a

patriarchal dissociative, doing, you know, over hyperactive, doing function. You know, I talk in the book about are you a human doing or are you a human being? And the irony that we're called human beings when most of us are human doings. And human doings right now are running around destroying planet Earth and have been for thousands of years. And right now, they're on steroids doing it. Absolutely. It's like reaching a crescendo and it gets more manic as it approaches its final iteration. Yes, exactly. I was, you know, before this conversation, we were kind of going back and forth and, you know, we were talking about me going to work and doing classes and writing a book and podcast with three kids and you know you were just like you know that's a lot of doing and i was like

yeah and some people in my life or sometimes like you know how are you how are you not burnt out and one thing i try to do although i've been slipping lately to be completely honest and and it's to my you know kind of great shame that i haven't been able to keep this up but uh for a while there and i'm getting back to it this week but i wake up because i start work very very early um you know in the blue collar trades construction site kind of atmosphere and there's a lot of doing all day long it's doing and I go to class and I come home to the kids and I'm doing doing doing and so the when I'm really on point what I do is I wake up at 5 a.m. in the morning when everything in my house is completely quiet all my family is asleep the sun hasn't even come up yet and I spend 30 minutes

at the beginning of my very doing day being and what do I mean by that is is meditating which is to say calming down the intercompulsive thinking coming into my body breathing my way into my body resting ultimately when I can get enough concentration, resting in pure awareness, the awareness that is prior to the content of experience, right? There's always in the background of everything that you do and think. Your whole consciousness is lit, is sort of backlit by this pure awareness. And all your thoughts, all your behaviors, all your perceptions, they're on the screen, right? They're kind of on the screen of your consciousness.

but meditation can train you to begin to be able to rest in that prior peer awareness. That is without self. It's without ego. It's without grasping and clinging and doing. It is being and you're in the present moment, even when it's uncomfortable, right? Even when you're super tired or your left knee hurts or whatever, you're being present with what is. You're refusing to run away from the present moment as we do in a million different ways all day long,

run away from the present moment. And that kind of is able to ground me to be able to not only allow me to do things without burning out, but it begins to leak into the character of my doing and rises the level of how I interact with my family, the people in my life, more moral, more thoughtful. I'm more able to drop into the present moment when I have some time to myself, instead of thinking compulsively or going to my phone and starting to scroll. And that is, that's what we were meaning by the compliment. And if you never spend any time in being, your whole life is just this manic doing.

Well, of course, that leads to burnout. It leads to chaos, right? And I'll just add one thing to what you said and you say it so beautifully, that awareness that you talked about. And there was, you use the word light in there. Do you remember your exact terminology? How did you exactly put that? Kind of backlit, the backlight. Yeah, the backlit.

Yeah, I love that metaphor. before. That's when we talk about the goddess, I mean, that's what we're personifying as goddess. We don't have to. We don't have to personify it as goddess. But when we do personify it, that's all we're talking about, that back-lit,

back-lighting awareness that is always here inside of us. That is the ground of being. Yeah. And that is, that's that gravitational force field that holds us no matter what is arising. And the more

we learn to turn into it, back to that original question, what do you mean when you talk about turning within? That's what we want to turn into. We want to turn into that very mysterious backlighting awareness that is inside of us. And it really is inside of us. And it is available 24-7. And the one thing I will say to you as someone who earns part of her living as a meditation teacher, Like right now, you are in a time of your life that is the world demands tremendous amounts of your energy. You have three kids. You have a business. You have work.

You have your own inner calling. Now you're writing a book. You have the podcast. You have so much that you are called to do. and to also get up at 5 a.m. every day and sit for half an hour may just not be possible. You sometimes maybe need to sleep until six. And I think it's essential to remember that it's always here available to you and you can shift into it, no matter what you're doing, working on the construction crew, driving your kids here and there,

helping, you know, wash the dishes after dinner, whatever it is, stopping in the grocery store on the way home from work, to get food, whatever it is, we can always shift into being fully present. It's just, it's that patriarchal implant that wants to pull. us out of the present moment because it wants us to suffer. It wants us dissociated. And it wants us blaming ourselves. And I'm not saying that you're saying this now, but there's such a setup here to then go into self-blame. Oh, my God, what's wrong with me? I'm not getting up at 5 a.m. I really need to sit every morning for half an hour. When I don't do that, I don't feel well,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's already creating this whole narrative in the mind. And that's just going to make you feel worse. Yeah, I actually remember you telling me something like this. A year, two years, I can't remember how long ago. But you said the same thing. I was telling, I was kind of, you know, disdainful of myself for not being able to keep up a meditation practice. And you, you kind of said, your life is so busy right now, don't add this extra layer

of suffering where you're trying to do this other thing when you're already doing so much. It's like your spiritual development, your existential development is still happening. It's still, the process is still happening, just right now in this season of your life, you're being called to do these different things. So don't beat yourself up about it. And, you know, I really do keep that in mind. It resonates and rings in my head all the time. It's like, okay, yes, it would be nice to get up at 5 a.m. And sometimes I'll be able to do it. Sometimes I do just need that extra sleep. And that's okay. I'm not losing something. I'm not, you know, de-optimized or whatever it may be, right? And so you've been helpful on that. Yes, exactly, because that fear of the, you know, we're de-optimizing and we're blah-blah, that's the that's the inner patriarch. And it's very, it's a very sneaky, very insidious inner voice. Oh, yeah. Mine is like, because I, you know, I've been at this for a really a long time. And my mind is very well behaved.

and my inner patriarch is pretty much defanged and neutered. But it's a very tricky, it's a very tricky aspect of mind. And it really is a trickster. So mine loves to masquerade as this really kind inner voice. So for instance, let's say, I've been working all day. So, and so, and, and my, my main work right now is in my work as a, as a therapist and, and teacher.

And so let's say I, I, I do a bunch of sessions during the day, along with all the other stuff. And let's say I finish work by around seven, seven, seven, three p.m. And then I still need to eat something and cook. up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And maybe by the time, 10 o'clock rolls around, that's all done. And now I'm tired, but I need some downtime. And I have, I love the French language.

And so I love to watch these French detective shows because I love listening to the French, and it helps me learn French in this sort of fun way. So often at the end of the day, like around 10 o'clock at night, I'll just sit and I'll watch one of my French detective shows, and then I'll climb into bed. But that means that I may not get into bed. By the time I'm done, the show is over,

and then I have to wash up, and then I have to read for a while. I may not actually fall asleep until 12 or 12.30. So whereas before when I was younger, and by younger I mean in my 60s, I didn't seem to need as much sleep as I seemed to have needed in my 70s. and and so mostly I'm fine with this but every now and then I just start wrestling with myself and the other

so on the other day I was sort of putting myself through what you're putting yourself through and and that trickster patriarchal voice will say well yeah you know it's okay you know you you don't you you don't you can watch your French your French detective show, that's okay. And you can sleep in in the morning and that's okay. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it was circuit because that fierce, my true masculine,

very much infused with the collierly voice said, okay, this is ridiculous. You can have it all. Why do you think you can't have it all? Why can't you watch your detective show and then set the alarm? And when the alarm goes off, get out of bed. You want to meditate?

Get out of bed. And it was like, right, I can do it all. And I'm not saying this to you because I think you should do it all because I think you have a lot more demand. I'm in my 70s. I live alone. I only have a cat that I have to serve. It's a very different stage of life.

And so, but again, it was that really interesting little inner battle between the trickster wanting me to actually sleep through my morning and that very fierce, colliery-esque energy field, saying, no, girl, you want to watch French detective show, fine. But you also want to get out about early because you actually like your morning time. And it's like that trickster, I think we really have to learn to not let the trickster masquerading as our best friend

trick us into thinking it's anything that it's, It's not because what it really is is the inner saboteur. That's so interesting and so insightful. So, yeah, let's go ahead. And one of the things I do love about this book and about your work is, you know, you admit, like, yeah, you come from a political environment. Your work does focus on the inner transformation aspect of life. But you're also emphasizing this need to stay engaged with the world to make it not, as you put in the book, you know, not about you. It's about the world.

And many of the issues people are struggling with today, like burnout, like burnout, out like anxiety, like alienation, are also, which you know, never hide from, shaped by broader economic and social conditions, right? Lots of spirituality can really try to step back from or divorce itself from political and social context. They don't want to divide their audience. They don't want to stress people out. But it's a part of life that shapes the very things that we're trying to deal with in spirituality. So I don't think we can run away from them. So how do you think about this relationship between the inner work that you're discussing here and just the kinds of systemic structural changes that people are desperately calling for at this moment in human history.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and it's so complex. I think one of the essential gifts of doing inner work, and by inner work, I mean a combination of both psychological and spiritual, you know, consciousness evolutioning work. It makes us less and less reactive. It makes us more present and more connected. It holds us much more grounded in that inner ground. And I think we then exponentially become much more effective in our life in the world. Michael and I used to talk about this a lot. It used to drive him crazy. the lack of strategic thinking on the left. And I think when we get lost in reactivity,

and it's easy, especially in this, there's a lot, especially right now, to be very reactive about. I mean, what is going on right now in the world, I personally find absolutely enraging. and but I'm not going to allow my rage to push me into reactivity. I'm going to channel that rage into strategic thinking and intelligent thinking and creative thinking. Because I want to be effective in the world and I want to be a force that people,

I want to be respected as someone who when you interact with me you come away from the interaction just feeling better I don't want to be someone who you come away from an interaction with me feeling some combination of just sort of half-dead kind of judgy just like what the hell was that I don't want that

I want to be a I want to be I mean sounds so corny, but I want to be a beacon of light in the world. And the only way I can do that is to live from a place of reverence for this amazing thing called life and this incredible planet Earth. And to me, I want to live from presence, not reactivity. And so to me, the goal at the point of any kind of inner work is just to keep strengthening the connection to the inner ground so that I can live in presence, not fear, and that I won't get caught in reactivity. And I can be really open. And whatever I have to navigate, whether it's conflict or too much on my plate or whatever it is, I can hold it all and keep meaning.

it. Again, I think reverence is, it's a very important word here. And I think it's something the patriarchal mind can't even it doesn't get reverence. And it doesn't want us to

inhabit ourselves with our own presence and our own beauty and our own magnificence. Again, it wants us always running scare. And so again, to me, if we want to be effective in the world if we want to be effective in the political sphere. I think it's so, it's crucial to grow our presence into something that's so wonderful. Everybody who comes in contact

with wants what we have. They don't even know what it is, but they just feel something. And they want that. And we want to just spread that. And then I think things begin to get better. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a sense in which we, this, these sorts of practices helps us embrace life as it is, not trying to change what we can't, control what we can't, have certainty about what we can never have certainty about, letting go of all of that. And then navigating this life with the sense of reverent awe because it's, the mystery of being is gorgeous and fascinating. The earth is a garden of Eden that we walk in every single day. Yes. And that's the, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's just, it's like the earth is perfect. And the system is designed so magnificently to absolutely support and sustain all life. And that these patriarchal man people, these patriarchal men and women who were trying to dominate and control and destroy. and rape, this extraordinary planet that just wants to give us life and hold us and sustain. It's like everything we have is here.

It just, again, I find it astonishing that anybody would want to do anything but love and revere and live in awe. It's like, why live in misery when you can live in awe? Yeah. Right, why live in cruelty when you can live in wonder? But we know the answer because this patriarchal bludgeoning is very strong right now. Absolutely. And it needs to be dismantled, screw by screw, plank by plank, brick by brick. And when you look at figures like Trump or Pete Higgseth or Elon Musk or Netanyahu, like, you know, these are not happy people.

These are not people that are in touch with their own life. It dismembers you to be identified with this petulant, silly ego. They actually, they make themselves pathetic. Yes. By their identification with this thing. But they cause a lot of human suffering in the meantime. They stomp on throats of innocent people all across the planet. And let us hope that when they are no more, there's a real reckoning.

And we have a real kind of Nuremberg trial. I think they need to be held to account. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, you know, with the, I always say with, you know, the Iraq war, everybody, eventually, all politicians, all the immediate people that cheered it on during it, eventually they come out later when it's safe to do so, when all the people are already dead, the country's already invaded, all that, and they say, oh, we're against this. And then everybody's surprised that we immediately go into war with Iran. Well, why is that? Because nobody was held accountable. Not a single person was held accountable. for the crimes of Iraq. And so it might be politically popular to say you're against it. But actually, there's no fear and no accountability that anything will actually happen. So they say, well, we can make a bunch of money. We can make Israel happy.

We can show that I'm powerful and a strong man. And we're going to do this. And you just replicate the exact thing that insanely Trump ran on explicitly not doing. It's just so broken. It's really. And I mean, just to add to that, I mean, it's beautifully said, and I completely agree. I look at, I mean, I'm an American Jew. So this whole situation with Israel is particularly horrific for me.

Because, again, although I was raised in a non-religious, my parents were atheists, and we didn't have, like, religious training. I didn't, I was never a mitzvirt or anything like that. But even so, I grew up in a home where Israel was kind of revered, you know. It was just like this place where, and I mean, my grandmother's sister was killed in World War II. I'm named after my grandmother's sister who never even made it to the camp. They were in Lithuania and they were shoved into one of the ghettos in Vilna, the town where they lived, and they were killed in the ghetto.

And I've, you know, so along with my, my mom. My Marxist mother, you know, I mean, I also grew up with a profound awareness of what had just happened to my own ancestors. And so Israel was always, it wasn't a place I was particularly driven to go visit or anything like that. But it was just sort of this place. I knew about it on planet Earth. It was like a safe haven for Jews. And I never really thought about it much more than that. And I never really studied the history. I did, oh, I don't know, at a certain point, I, became aware that there was something not quite right going on with the Palestinian people. And so I knew that there's something not right. But again, it wasn't really big on my radar. And then it was. And I now, I mean, I've been supporting, there's a theater, a freedom theater in the West Bank now that I learned about several years ago.

And I've been supporting them, send them $20 a month now for several years. and obviously what happened in the latest war, I mean, obviously it totally opened my eyes. And I began studying the history much more carefully and seriously than I ever had before. And the more I wrestle with all of this, it's like we are dealing, and I think this is true of Trump. It's true of Netanyahu. It's true of the entire Israeli government. I think probably the whole country, you know, these are people who have so much unresolved trauma. And I think right now, more than ever, the entire world is being held hostage by people who have enormous depths of unresolved trauma.

And I think we see this in the entire Trump White House. We see this with the Israeli ruling class. We see it. I just, I mean, I can't even say more than that. All I can say is unresolved trauma, because. becomes a very potent weapon of the inner patriarch. And we are seeing that now played out on the world stage in a horrifying, horrifying way. And to me, that's another reason that it's so important to wake up

and tune into that back-lit awareness and find out what we truly are and get all that unresolved trauma up and out of the unconscious and properly worked with and properly integrate. and or discard it. And I think, again, I think that work is essential. I think you speak powerfully on that.

And I think with Israel and the Israeli society, settler colonial societies in general, you've seen this with the U.S. as well, through Jim Crow, through the genocide of the Native Americans as well. It's this hyper separation. You see the other as not as human as you,

driven by fear, you know, It's always underneath, like, what if they rebel? What if they fight back? You constantly rationalizing an unjust situation. And it just distorts this, the entire ideological framework of an entire society down to the psychologies of people that live in that society. And if you look at the average American during Jim Crow or during the genocide, which is still ongoing, of course, but the acute phase of the colonialist genocide, yeah, they were supportive of it.

And you look at the average Israeli, they're supportive. of eradicating Palestinians or ethnically cleansing them or destroying Iran and you can see it's all fear based which turns into hate and separation and they're not us destroyed them and somehow by destroying them

then we'll be made safe and then you actually have this horrific historical irony where the Jewish people who were genocided in World War II brutalized traumatized that not all of them of course many Jewish brave Jewish voices across the planet speak out

against this. But for those that are there and still identify with Israel and the system, they begin to perpetuate the same violent, insane, pathological cruelty on a different people. And that repetition of the trauma, it's just, it's gut-wrenching, but it's fascinating in a morbid way. And that's exactly what I'm saying. I mean, we're seeing, and it is gut-wrenching, and it's horrifying. It's horrifying to see this unresolved trauma. It's like, what is it, Stockhausen syndrome, is that what it's called? Oh, Stockholm syndrome? Yeah, Stockholm syndrome, yes, thank you.

You know, it's just this horrifying identification with the oppressor. It's not really fine, and yet here it is. So, yeah, again, we got a lot of work to do, and I want to see it happen on both levels. You know, I want to see it happen inside of us as individuals. I want that internal patriarchal mind to be completely demolished so that our true, healthy, loving, masculine can emerge. And I want to see the outer forms to destroy. Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and I think we're going to wrap it up there. But I want to give you a chance to say any last words. Of course, you know, an interview, even a two-hour interview cannot cover all the content. in this book. So if you like this discussion, if this resonates with you on any level, I would encourage you to go get the goddess remedy, check out Susan's work and read this, read this wonderful book and deepen your spiritual practice and take seriously the work of inner transformation that we've gestured at today. But Susan, I also want to give you a chance to say.

Anything else you want to say about the book? Any last words at all for this interview? And then just let people perhaps know where they can find you and end your book online. can I say? I mean, thanks to everyone who's listening, and I hope you have found this conversation enlivening and engaging and has piqued your curiosity. And of course, I hope everyone will go get the book, which is available wherever you can get. I mean, it's available in all the online places. And the audiobook actually just came out last week, so it's also available. No, it was an audio book. And you can find me online, just Susan Green, S-Z-I-N, Green, G-R-E-N. what else can I say?

It's always a joy to talk to you, Brett, and let us all just continue the great work of making ourselves more and more human to become the true human beings and let the human doings have a good time at rest that they need. And thank you. Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to also say that you and I were brought together

in large part in the wake of, of the tragedy of Michael Brooks's death. And so I just wanted to continue to allude to him and his life and his work and his legacy that continues to live on. And, you know, more than any other guest on Rev Left, you know, the listeners will never know the true depth of it. But, you know, I just wanted to point out the fact that you individually have helped me so much over the years, even though we sometimes go many, many months without even contacting each other. But every time we reconnect, it's seamless. and we fall right back into our old relationship.

And you helped me through incredibly perhaps the most difficult times in my life in the last several years. And I'm deeply grateful for you as a human being, for the help and the time that you came into my life and helped me going through those periods of time. And just a huge fan of you as a human being and of your work. And I just want to thank you for all the positive impact you've made, not only on me, but on other human beings as I know you have. and I just urge you to keep up, keep up the amazing work.

Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, it seems like I'm going strong as I approach. I just turned 78 last week, so I'm two years away from 80, but I'm going strong. Oh, yeah. It's, I will tell your audience, here's a nice thing. 78 is fabulous. I've got to say, it's great. Highly recommend it.

I highly recommend aging. consciously. It's a wonderful thing. And also, and thank you for acknowledging Michael, you know, and Michael is the reason that we met. And I miss Michael every day since he's gone. And he was truly an incredible human being. In fact, my book is dedicated to Michael. And I hope that this conversation that we've had today, some will also carry some of the spirit of Michael and some of the clarity of Michael. And I know he would have loved to be here. And we all miss him very much. Absolutely. But his legacy truly does live on. I see people continue to mention him. I still find people who rediscover him, who find me through him to this day. So, you know,

He, again, his work and his impact has outlasted him, and I think it will continue to do so. Yes, it will. And in fact, his sister Alicia is working on a documentary, and they're going to, the filming, the final filming is going to be happening in June. And then it'll go into post-production. And so there will be a documentary about Michael. I imagine, if not by the end of this year, by the end of next year. Wonderful. And that's something we can all look forward. too. And I'll do everything I can with this platform to, uh, to spread the word about it and get it out and let more people, uh, become aware of it and go out and see it. So, let's keep in touch about that for

sure. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I'll definitely keep in touch with you about that. So yes, well, listen, good luck with everything. And I hope to speak to you soon rather than later. And, um, much love to you and your family and all your listeners. Thank you, Susan. All righty. Bye.