Sense of Soul - Examining the Psychological Thriller Within Through the Lense of Jungian Psychology

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Today on Sense of Soul we have best selling author Colm Holland, he is an Alchemical Psychotherapist, Founder of the School of Alchemy Transformation, and a MA Student in Jungian Studies University of Essex. Colm spent twenty-five years working in sales and marketing in the publishing industry. He was a member the Harper Collins team which published Paul Coelho's The Alchemist in 1993. Later becoming the bestselling author of The Secret of The Alchemist. Colm was a guest on Sense of Soul twice prior to share his journey of how he was lead to writing his best seller and again to share the republished book he edited, The True Origins of Jesus: The Myth behind the Man, written by the late Geoff Roberts. In this episode Colm shares he’s newest book a gripping psychological thriller called By Accident Most Strange: If Thoughts Could Kill, the first book of his The JP Mystery series. This book will put you on the edge of your seat and wanting more! JP is the psychopath you'll feel sorry for - well sometimes! The plot twists and turns, and keeps you guessing to the end. Colm in this episode connects a character in his new book with a significant life experience. Colm teaches the art of alchemy in everyday life, and he has devoted his life to true empowerment through inner transformation. His background in spiritual alchemy continues to influence his writing, bringing a unique depth to the narrative. If you're interested in exploring Holland's blend of mystery and spiritual insights, this new novel is a great read. https://www.colmholland.com linkedin.com/in/colm-holland youtube.com/c/colmholland facebook.com/ColmHollandPage twitter.com/Holland_Colm instagram.com/colm_holland/ www.senseofsoulpodcast.com

Today on Sense of Soul, I have the honor of having back for the third time, It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, I have the honor of having back for the third time, author Colm Holland. He is a best-selling author and now chemical psychotherapist and the founder of the School of Alchemy Transformation. Colm spent 25 years working in sales and marketing in the publishing industry. He was a member of the HarperCollins team, which published Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist in 1993. Colm teaches the art of alchemy in everyday life, and he has devoted his life to true empowerment through inner transformation. Years ago, he came on to talk about his best-selling book, The Secret of the Alchemist, and then he came on to tell us about The True Origins of Jesus, The Myth Behind the Man, which was written by the late Jeff Roberts and edited by Colin.

Today, he's joining us to tell us about his gripping psychological thriller called By Accident Most Strange If Thoughts Could Kill. I always enjoy my conversations with Colin, and it's my honor to have him back with us again today. So please welcome Colin Holland. surprise me you know from the secret of the alchemist to jesus to now a thriller there's a connection there somewhere oh i like that are you still podcasting no not at the moment i paused um i may get back to it but i i did stop because I was just too busy writing. But yeah, your new book is book one. Yeah, book one in three parts. Man, that's exciting. You know, what's funny is that I was sitting here wondering about you earlier.

I daydream a lot about situations and in my mind, they become characters. Okay, that's interesting. So because I'm a student of Carl Jung, and I've read and studied for years now, most of his work, one of the premises of his thinking, which is easy for us after the fact to take for granted, is that he was actually trying to say to the world,

the human psyche has two elements to it. And one of those I'm going to call the unconscious, he said. Now, for many of us now, that's sort of common knowledge. Well, let's put it this way. We accept that as a probable case. But at the time, the psychiatrists of his contemporaries didn't really give much credence to that at all. There was a handful of them.

And the reason why Jung and Freud got on so well together, just digressing slightly here, is because Freud was talking about the unconscious. And Freud was trying to say the unconscious is the dominant part of the psyche. We think that our daytime conscious life is completely independent of our dreams or our imaginations or anything else that's going on in the psyche or in the mind and this is it and that you know occasional bad dream and stuff it's just low level stuff freud said no no no we are controlled by our unconscious and young in his studies of schizophrenics at the hospital where he worked

he came up with the same theory so the two of them got together and let's say you and i and all of us now who accept the reality of an unconscious part of the mind we have them to thank for that and another guy called adler as well the three of them really pioneered that and modern psychiatry sort of still tips its hat to this as a concept but it's not a controlling concept for Carl Jung the unconscious is what rules us we are driven by our unconscious. And our thought life, our dream life, our daydream life, all of those things. I mean, you told me that, you know, sometimes you start daydreaming and the people start appearing, you know, and they take on personas. Well, Carl Jung would have loved you. And in the latter years of his life, which is quite amusing, really,

he admitted that a lot of the time he was helping people get through their complexes, which is why most of them went to see him as a psychiatrist. But what he was really doing, he admitted in his later work, was that he wanted to know what was going on in those people's unconscious minds. And how did it manifest itself? How does it make an appearance? Does it come through our thoughts? Does it come through our behaviors, repetitive behaviors? Does it come through our priorities, things that we think are important in life?

How much of that is that? Do we actually reason? Do we actually sit down and make a list and choose consciously, choose all these things? Oh, this is how I'm going to think. Oh, these are the things I think are important. Oh, this is the person I'm going to marry or not. And he said that most of that is controlled from the part of the psyche that he called the unconscious the thing is that the persona which is the ego which is the conscious part of a mind is very proud so the ego and the persona the various personas that we've created as adults from childhood is very proud and it it wants to take the credit for who we are you know I made these decisions oh this is me you know this is all my doing I know I'm not under any other kind of influence and then

Carl Jung said typically what happens is sort of middle age and he was quite strong about this he said up until middle age which can be anything between 30 and 50 depending on how quick you mature as it were then up until that point really what your psyche is doing it's just learning it's like artificial intelligence it's just picking up stuff picking up stuff from the parents the people who raised us picking up stuff from our peers from our siblings picking up stuff from the media picking up stuff from just the world in general and basically sorting it out and deciding where you fit in this thing called the human race, basically. And then he said, when he gets about middle age, the unconscious typically says, OK, I'm going to manifest the unexpressed parts of my existence onto the

conscious mind, who quite frankly has been ignoring me all these years. So the whole concept of of pushing down trauma, of trying to push away pain and abuse that's, you know, occurred. The conscious mind has been busy, you know, managing these things, trying to deal with them and push them down. And then Jung said, quite frankly, they won't go away. They're like, you know, it's like trying to push you know a barrel of apples they keep they're always going to want to float to the surface and the unconscious mind always wants to manifest its contents always and when we get to middle age it sort of goes into what we call a rebellion enough's enough it says now i'm going to make my presence felt i mean it has been usually quite making its presence felt over time but i'm really going

to make my presence felt and this is called quite often we've coined the phrase of midlife crisis you don't hear people talking about midlife crisis as much as we did when I was younger, but it still exists. We've now given it more biological names for women and men differently, you know, male menopause, you know, all that stuff. We've sort of started to categorize it in other ways but whether you're male or female round about whatever middle ages for you if you haven't been listening to your unconscious if you haven't been trying to take notice of it and the way you could discover if you have or you haven't is really simple I've got a simple trick, by the way, which I recommend to everybody. The next time somebody upsets you, triggers you off, makes you angry, makes you pissed off,

whatever, makes you unhappy, makes you feel this big. Have a look at what that was that got triggered what did you feel what did how did it make you feel and can you think of other occasions in the past when you've all or you know when you felt like that before um have a good sit down you know once you've calmed down once you've stopped blaming everybody else once you've you know you you made me feel like this is all your fault why do you keep doing this to me you know every time you say that that you know how much that winds me up you know all of that stuff that feeling that anger that frustration whatever it is is sitting on top of repressed emotion in the unconscious so that's a great way to find out my book my new book which is a psychological thriller is my attempt to actually do something quite selfish i have to confess this book was a really selfish project i thought what why don't i give my unconscious free reign

why don't i you know in the privacy yeah i know in the privacy of my office and then i'll make it open it to the world but in the privacy of my own office when i write a book that's coming straight out of my unconscious oh my goodness i couldn't well I am how I'm sorry I do apologize to everybody that's going to read it but it's um oh sneaky stuff wow you know it's like one of my first readers who have huge respect for she called me halfway through the reading the book for the first time and she said oh oh my goodness Colm, she said, where does all this where did all this come from? I'm going

well, I know is that me really? Yeah, it must be so what I discovered was that I have in my unconscious there is and I think I'm not the only one not many people I'll put my hand up.

I'll be prepared to admit it. There is a secret psychopath who wants his own way, who believes that a means justifies the end, or the end justifies the means rather or both actually that to employ what Carl Jung called the archetype of the trickster if you've read any of Jung's

archetypes he's definitely in there but most importantly and this is where the connection goes with my other books The Secret of the Alchemist and The Trials of Jesus the understanding that Carl Jung had of the way that we personify good. So I was raised in a Christian environment. So the imagery, the mythology that I was raised in, I can't help that, just how it was and jesus that's the reason for the jesus book for me why why i needed to produce help produce that book was you know jesus personifies everything that's good

he's sinless according to christian mythology christian theology you know he he's love incarnate he's god incarnate he's everything that's good about humanity and the divinity so great carl jung said that's great he said but i've got a problem with that and that's i don't always feel like that in fact on the contrary, I have really, you know, sinister thoughts. And if I look around me and the world around me, you know, at the drop of a hat, we go to war. At the drop of a hat, people commit murder. At the drop of a hat, people abuse other people. At the drop of a hat, children are treated terribly.

So he really had a problem with this. So where does that come from? If we're made in the image of God, according to the Christian faith, how does all this work? Where does all this other stuff come from? Is it the devil? Is it, you know, and he said, well, I don't, you know, I don't really buy that because I think it's in me.

So what is that then? And that's when he was getting interested in alchemy. Now we're going back to the secret of the alchemist. So he said, what I love about alchemy is that it doesn't pretend to just personify good and love, which many of the early alchemists in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe were committed Christian. I mean, they were that that was part of their life.

Being a Christian, there was no question that that was what they were. And yet they were acknowledging that another force. And so Carl Jung said, well, what was how did they personify this other force? Here we've got Jesus over here. Who's over here? And it wasn't the devil it was this character called mercurius and it's in all the if you google it if you google mercurius same as in the spelling of mercury but i u s mercurius what you discover is that he is the sort of the quicksilver of everything that isn't all love, love and goodness, love and light. He represents the part of the human mind and psyche and persona that is quite happy to play tricks on people, is quite happy to see somebody else's demise, if it means that he's going to gain from it and this Mercurius character sometimes called Merlin by the way and Merlin is a character in my

new thriller so my main character in my book is has emerged out of my own unconscious he is called Jean-Patrick you'll read about why he called himself Jean-Patrick he's actually Irish, I'm of Irish ancestry so that's a whole other story

but Merlin appears when he's abused by this man Jean-Pat he's abused by his, this man, Jean-Patrick, is abused by his father. So there's a route to the way that Jean-Patrick is. He was terribly treated by his father. It was quite brutal to him. And out of that, Jean-Patrick began to hear a voice. And the voice is Merlin

and Merlin says let's do a deal there's a pact I'll enable you to be a clairvoyant because I can see dead people he says you can become a clairvoyant as long as you let me get my way

when I want it. Ooh, deal with the devil. So he says yes. And the first victim is the boy's father. Oh. No reference to Freud's Oedipus complex at all, obviously. Oh, my gosh. So there's the connection between The Secret of the Alchemist,

the whole concept of Jung and alchemy, and Paolo Calo's wonderful fable, The Alchemist, and then my book about Jesus, really understanding the mythology of the origins of the of the christ figure and then now this is probably my most daring book in as much as i'm daring to go into my own unconscious my own psyche and examine the parts of that that i maybe have suppressed i don't know. I don't see any harm. You know, I've never killed anybody, by the way. I've never wished anybody dead. And have you thought of it?

Yeah, no, I don't. Maybe, no. You know, it is funny because sometimes you might wish on somebody something bad. Like, gosh, I wish they would stub their toe. They just piss me off. And then they do. And then it doesn't make you feel good. But it is that voice, that trickster that comes up and you're right. It's something that comes deeply from you and comes to the surface. And I like what you said about, you know, just noticing when you're triggered or at those times.

For me, I've learned to really pay attention to those times and pause immediately. And I like Tara Brock has the, it's called RAIN. It's like recognize, accept, investigate, and nurture. I love that. And that has helped me because in that moment, there's many things that happen. I mean, you have an opportunity to react differently. I also find it in my body. Where is this? And kind of sit with it. And I've discovered many things. And usually they go back to childhood yeah and you're right they are coming out if

you're not aware of them and you're living not in control yeah no we're not as in control um as we'd like to think i've got a lovely quote of kyle young's here which i spotted the other day i've got a small group and we're reading memories dreams reflections Carl Jung's autobiography together which is really fascinating to do it with other people by the way he said that everything in the unconscious in the unconscious mind seeks outward manifestation so there's not much we can do about it he reckons it was a default

mode built into the human psyche that the unconscious mind wants to manifest its existence whatever we've and we've aided and abetted the unconscious by when we repress so when we're children

we i mean you don't it's not a choice we particularly make it's a defense mechanism and sometimes it saves our lives you know there's nothing wrong there's no right or wrong here this is just facts really so you know when i wrote the secret of the alchemist and, you know, when I wrote The Secret of the Alchemist, and I, you know, I talk about how I, I needed to find the root of my anger. You know, I discovered that, you know, there was a very small boy, a very angry small boy in my psyche. And so I was able, very fortunate to be able to personify all the pain and the hurt that caused the anger into into him and like you say in in the the nurturing it is one thing to look at the unconscious and the pain in the unconscious it's another thing to be able to embrace it that's a that's a whole another that, that's the hard work. You know, in my opinion, that's the great work of alchemy.

That's the thing that, you know, the tiniest percentage of human beings ever really dare to do. But if you dare to do that, the benefits on the other side of that are unmeasurable. You know, you talk to many people who have been through, you know, death of the ego and inner child healing. They will all tell you basically the same thing. You know, now I'm free. You know, now I can live my own life. I'm free of whatever control that I had over me.

But more than that that in my case what i discovered was that this little boy buried deep within me that i'd locked away um he actually was my greatest asset i i thought you know I'm the adult in the room. How wrong is that? I'm the adult in the room. I'm the one that's going to bring salvation to the child. You know, I'm the one that's going to redeem the child from its pain. No, that's not what happened. What I discovered was that he was the wise one.

He's the one speaking the truth he's the one who was actually the treasure in the cupboard that I needed to discover so that he was the beginning of my hero's journey and Carl Jung had similar I only read I mean I did that work when I was in my late 20s so many moons ago and I only started reading Jung much later several decades later really and then I discovered that he had exactly the same experience and so his child became person number one, as he called it. And then that became the unconscious. And so that was it. So no wonder I'm such a fan of his, because I'd already been there.

I'd already, oh, my gosh, yes, he's right. So the thing we despise the most becomes our greatest treasure. That's the secret of the alchemist. To do that, though, we have to discover something else in the psyche. And these two things balance each other. And that is we also have within us, every one of us, we also have this deep root of unconditional love within every human being no matter how despicable they are it whether it's unlocked or not i mean

it can be really locked away and for many people it's got locked away years and years ago but there is a deep root of unconditional if we are prepared to unleash that and then bring that to bear on the on the things in our unconscious that need nurturing where all the deepest pains do exist then that's where the two sides the two opposing sides of the psyche can come together and that is the philosopher's child that is the birth of the philosopher's stone the philosopher's child in the alchemical terms in harry potter as well you know this the same thing marriage right yeah the marriage the divine marriage yeah absolutely so the divine love deep and conditional love as well as the mercurial, painful, buried treasure.

When these two can come together, then that's so that's, you know, my mission. So writing a book, writing a thriller was a confessional it's a it's a sort of a confessional in a way to from me to the world to say you know i'm prepared to put my hand up and reveal you know what i've got going on in my unconscious life but but the but i'm in less danger to the world if i'm prepared to admit to it true i'm only a danger to the world if i don't admit to it it's like a pressure valve isn't it it's just yeah you know it builds up and then one day it's just gonna go boom so when the people who work with potential serial killers horrendous you know massacres in school you know these young guys who for reasons we can't even begin to comprehend why

they why they commit such you know atrocious uh massacres then you know when you think about the psyche um there is that in in all of us and for some it's it's more dangerous than others. But we all need to take care of ourselves because we, you know, we may not do what they've done. But, you know, every now and again, we, you know, we're in danger of exploding. We're in danger of hitting out. We're in danger of hitting out in anger, as it were. And it also affects our relationships right because usually what is within you is for reflection of your relationships unfortunately we go to well romantic relationships in particular we attach ourselves to you know another

uh in the hope that they're going to give us love of course you know to love and be loved that is nothing that's it that's that's what life's all about really to love and be loved um but you notice that phrase is to love and be loved so i've always been of the theory that you you get as much love as you give so that's why in my secret of the alchemist book i i talk a lot about self-love if we can learn to love ourselves then we'll find it much easier to love other people and we will have less requirement on them to make things better for us in my opinion a relationship particularly romantic relationships um whether whether it's heterosexual same-sex you know irrelevant really any romantic relationship where we're hoping that the other person is going to make up for something that's missing in us, that relationship's in danger from day one. We should come with a sign across our foreheads, you know.

I'm looking for some, yeah, I'm in danger. I'm looking for somebody to make up, you know, what I can't do for myself, because they'll fail you. Of course, they'll fail you. I can't think of any, you know, when I think of all the lovely people I've known over the years, who are no longer together, for various, you know, tragically, in some cases, that it was always a case of unrealistic expectations. But falling in love is such an unpredictable thing. I mean, there's a great case of the unconscious being in charge over,

you know, one of the things I'm doing in my spare time, when I say spare time, is I'm doing this read-along. I'm doing a slow read of 10 yeah you've seen that I follow you yes I have and the latest one is called 11 minutes according to Paolo Calo it's it's the average time to have sexual intercourse that sounds about right he based it on a book called he got the idea from a book called seven minutes and i'm not saying he timed himself but he decided that was too short it was kind of specific isn't it not 10 minutes he wrote a whole novel called 11 minutes and it's about and we're just finishing studying it now together and it's about uh it's based on a true story of a woman that he met who fell into a life of prostitution who decided that love was not

something that she could have ever attained to so why why bother why not just allow herself to fall into a life where sex just meant in a way making money and so as i said in my opening remarks when we were selling this book explicit sex not something you expect from paolo caleb makes me want to read it in some weird way oh it's very explicit um from a female yeah not what you expect in fact i've had to put most of it behind a paid wall because i didn't want it out there yeah i didn't put it i didn't want it out there with my name on it and free free for his um was that his unconscious book yeah i'm not commenting on that because i think it's too personal you know i comment about him

and you know i've sort of i'm his self-appointed psychoanalyst really um uh but you know without him asking for it but I you know I can sort of usually I can see through most of the unconscious archetypes that he's portraying in many you know including the alchemist with the hero's journey and that that was the most obvious of all of them really but in 11 minutes where he's exploring this this relationship between sex and love through the eyes of this woman. The happy ending is that she does find love in the end. So thank goodness for that. Otherwise, that would have been too much.

That's a good thing. I thought about when you said how we all have love within us. And then I thought about, you know, these children or people who are, you know these children or people who are you know committing mass murders without even blinking an eye the louder of the hate right that shadow is so strong and just bearing up that that love that we all have a thinness i mean you you you have to wonder like how broken they are after the fact when you know that hate seems to simmer down you know and how destroyed they must feel you know my heart goes out sincerely to everybody who's been a victim of any of those situations um just can't even begin to imagine how they feel guess what guess what just happened this is a perfect unconscious uh situation so when i was 17 i worked at a place here in

colorado called chucky cheese have you heard of it yeah i know chucky cheese yeah it's a place okay i didn't know if you had him over there and um oh yeah i think we do there are some turkey cheeses good for kids food is bad but so it was like one of my first jobs and besides working for my dad but i uh i had a friend i had friends that worked there from high school and i had um made a good friend um in the kitchen and I mean, he was so nice. He had a brother that worked there too. They were completely opposite. But one night he just flipped out and he came in and he shot, I think like five people, killing all of them but one. And that's where that came from, that comment that I made.

And I didn't think about him, but it's deep inside of me. Because I always felt like I knew him and he was nice. And we had a funny relationship, joked with each other. And I didn't know him as a mass martyr. And so that was always very confusing for me it still it still is but especially as a child right 17 yeah confusing he killed a good friend of mine yeah no horrendous horrendous and you know you can imagine his his parents and brother and the guilt the guilt that they that they have to carry then for the rest of their lives as well

for not knowing and feeling so bad for the victims' families. So Jung was conscious of all of this. I mean, his years of work with schizophrenics, I mean, he really devoted the first half of his life trying to solve that problem through therapy. And of course, what we now know is that most of that problem has to be solved through medication. You know, there are ways of medicating to stop that being so severe, even if it never fully goes away. I mean, he was trying to do it through therapy and talk therapy in particular.

Not really that successful. Most of his success was with so-called normal people, people who weren't in mental institutions or suffering from any kind of chronic mental illness. People like we all like to think we are so you know like i'm a normal person yeah i'm normal yeah i'm normal you're normal whatever that is but uh yeah he said you know the psyche is so delicate it is such uh a unfathomable almost i mean he never felt that he ever really he said you know my idea of how the psyche works he said it's just my idea you know somebody else has got a better idea than my idea but you know fine go for it because i don't know you know i think i've got an idea he said you know this is my idea this is my myth he called it this is my story this is

this is how i understand myself i mean he had a massive nervous breakdown which lasted about two years again not meant you know not many people sort of want to talk about that part of koh-yong he also had three affairs as well while he was married as well. I mean, his wife almost left him many times. So, hey, here's a guy who has created this philosophy which works for lots of people. of how I see life, still not fully able to apply it to his own mind and his own psyche. But when he went into that nervous breakdown, I mean, you've probably read about this. The Red Book.

Yeah, The Red Book. I don't know if you've ever read The Red Book. I've read some of it. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever read the Red Book. I've read some of it. It's pretty crazy. Yeah, well, like you said, I'm going to go mad for two years. That's okay with everybody. His salvation during that time was out of his madness appeared a character who he ended up calling Philemon, named after a character in an ancient myth, a Greek myth, actually. I think the Romans had it as well, one of those borrowed ones.

And Philemon became his wise old man. So somewhere in here, he said, I've got a wise old man who can help me interpret this other stuff that's going on in my head. And it got to the point where he'd walk around the grounds of his home having full blown conversations with Philemon. And then he recalled them. So he said, OK, Philemon said this, Philemon said that. And for a while, he lent on that almost psychotic experience, really. And Philemon was almost a psychotic episode. Now, I'm not claiming that the character is in my book. But we have had a few conversations but any writer will tell you that anybody writes fiction in particular yeah charles dickens who

famously said you know oh all i have to do is sit down in my office and start writing and guess what the artful dodger will appear in the corner um you know Mr Bumblewick will appear you know and so and sometimes he said there's just too many of them and I tell them to be quiet I just want to listen to you for now and then he you know he'd be writing away all writers do that and so writing So writing, dramatizing, having outward conversations, keeping a dream diary, even though it looks like it's complete nonsense. Mind test. Yeah, I've just gone through a whole spell. So what the only thing the only disturbing thing is that when I'm writing my fiction, I start dreaming so vividly.

My dreams become really vivid, even if they bear no relationship. It's like, oh, okay. It's like free reign. Yeah. So my counsel to people who struggle, there might be people listening to Shana who's sort of saying well this is all very interesting but i i don't you know i don't have any daydreams i don't have any now how do i know if my unconscious is having a control over me in a way that i you know i don't you know i've tried self-awareness i'm not going well start trying to be creative

is my recommendation get into drama or start writing poetry or join a writers club or start painting anything yeah anything that will

enable you to unleash those parts of the mind that, you know, you probably locked away somewhere down the track. We forget that we are creators as well. Yeah, yeah. And even if we think it's nonsense, you don't have to write, you know, a publishable novel to write. You can write anything. You can, you know, what happened to me today, and fantasize about it, make something up. If I had 10 million bucks, this is what I'd do with it,

just create this whole fantasy world. Because we do all that daydreaming anyway, but we don't give it credit because it doesn't seem valuable. It doesn't seem to have any intrinsic value to itself. Koyung would encourage, sometimes it encourages clients in their sessions, his therapy session, to just dance. He said, when was the last time you did a silly dance? And they look at him like, am I paying you?

Oh, my gosh. I sing. I mean, not everybody enjoys it. My kids say, what is your life like a musical? You're always singing. It is kind of. It fills up with some time. So what do you sing?

I just sing. No, I mean, sometimes it's a song, but sometimes it's, I don't want to be up right now. I want to be in bed. You know? You know, in the mornings, my kids hate when I sing to them in the mornings, which is why I do it. But what did Einstein say about imagination,

that it was like one of the most important things. He said that as well. If you want to solve a problem, then you need a really good imagination. Because his, and Carl Jung and Einstein were contemporaries, of course. They were around in the world at the same time. And they did meet. Did they? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. they were around in the world at the same time and they did meet so they did have some yeah yeah

yeah um in fact i think it was Einstein that introduced young to Wolfgang Pauli the quantum physicist who was equally famous in his day with with einstein for his discoveries i mean wolfgang paul he was the guy who said our thoughts can influence an experiment and he would he would uh have his students doing experiments in the in the laboratory on some really complex quantum physics problems that they were trying to solve and they think they were beginning to get some sort of result and and so he would get his mind into a state of this experiment is not going to work it's a complete waste of time and he would get himself into that state of mind and he'd walk into the room and he would just sit there and the whole thing would collapse.

And he said, well, I'm sorry, but I just needed to prove something to myself. He said, I'm going to go away and do this experiment two or three more times. And of course, it would work. He and Jung had a field day together. So Jung says, I'll analyze your dreams and powerly says well i'll help you see if i can prove any connection between the human psyche and events in the real world and it was because you know powerly said well i've got i've got concrete examples i could influence an experiment just from my thoughts scientifically of course it can't be proven. Lots of people have had a go.

There are even people in my book, The Seeker of the Alchemist, who talk about one English professor, a probability, you know, a professor of facts and probability. And he advises the government on probability solutions to problems and he he started to collect people's examples of synchronicity he should have talked to me i could have filled a book should have talked to you yeah i love it um it's normal life for us you know you and I we've just adopted it as part of life

you know I'm not surprised when something I'm thinking about over here something happens and it's exactly what I needed to know I mean I just go okay thanks thank you whatever and carry on now but you know I can remember the early days

when that all started happening for me. So, Young and Powley sort of came to the conclusion that there is a mysterious link. It's just one of those mysteries of life, that for the individual who has something happen simultaneously or synchronous at the same moment that they're thinking about you know they get a phone call from somebody and say oh wow you won't believe it i was only just thinking about you like half an hour ago and you know that stuff he said that the event only has meaning and purpose for the individual

concern true that even when you start telling people you know i've tried it you know i can bore you at a dinner party no right yes because i think it's fascinating right and everyone else is like oh oh yeah and that's because it's important to you because it happened to you and so it's it's quite a treasure that in that sense if you think about it i mean we like to think we could prove everything that sign there's a scientific answer to everything. And if we could just prove this, then that kind of validates it. He was saying it doesn't need validating by science. That's right, because it's your experience. You're the validator.

You kind of make it happen because you're open to it. The universe, which i hate to personify the universe but for the sake of just using that language the universe somehow is connected to that and it provides whatever your psyche needs at that particular moment as some sort of reinforcement or validation for what it is you're thinking should i do this or shouldn't i do that but colin colin it seems unconscious though oh it is yeah yeah yeah i mean that's why young loved it you know it was one of his in the end if you had a list of his proofs of an unconscious mind that was one of them yeah in fact it probably went to the top it was something that he worked at much later in life but it validated for him the existence of an unconscious presence

in the psyche that has for the want of a better word magical or mysterious powers to manifest stuff but manifesting though is more conscious is it not let me go back to that quote that I quoted a boil back from young to where he said everything in the unconscious was. So if we keep going with that sentence, he then says that the personality or the ego also desires to evolve, to grow up, to get out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself

as a whole. In other words words both sides of the psyche the unconscious part of the psyche and the conscious part of the psyche both have the same default desire to become whole so i don't believe that you can manifest purely consciously. I don't. I don't. I think when you think you're doing it consciously, all you're really doing is you're unconsciously inviting the unconscious to get involved. Make a magic spell.

No. No. No. Harry Potter. I mean, you'd all be doing it all day. Yeah. to get involved. Make a magic spell. No, no, no. Harry Potter. I mean, we'd all be doing it all day. Yeah. Great. Let's do it.

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. Win the lottery tonight. Yeah, just write down the numbers. Yeah, life doesn't work like that. What I also challenge in my novel, my thriller, is our relationship to money. There are two main characters in the book, which is in three parts, so there's three stories involving the same two primary characters, the protagonists. The female protagonist is a failed actress.

Well, she didn't even give it much of a try, actually. It lasted five seconds. And that, oh, dear, dear, no, it's just, oh, God, no wonder. I've just worked out where that's come from. When I was 13 years... Oh, talking talking to Charlie this is you you should charge me for this um when I was 13 I was really into drama and I was invited to join a theatre company a major major theatre company professional theatre company as a boy as a boy actor and because of my teachers and my parents it got turned down because

everybody said well you can't make a living out of being an actor you know you'll just be poor for the rest of your life and they said oh you've definitely got an academic career you should focus on that so now I've got this character who happens to be female who has

a five minute go of being an actress and fails oh my goodness that's where that came from oh there you go I'll have to blog that another example there you go

straight out of my unconscious repressed her other issue is that she wants quick money and when she bumps into jean patrick on a ferry to mallorca and the mediterranean to go and work in an art gallery who is a friend of her aunt's what she discovers is that he has managed to manipulate his way into the life of a millionaires. And when she comes along, the millionaires is really, he's an octogenarian, so she hasn't got long to live, really. So where's all this money going to go?

She figures that out. In a split second, she's got it sorted like this guy's sitting on a gold mine and he's about to let it just fall through his fingers how can i get involved and salvage the money for my benefit and so that's really the first plot in my so these two carmen her name is no offense to any carmen's out there um so carmen and jp who we call him they form a sort of an unconscious pact the question i have about them and i haven't really decided yet is whether they really know that they're committing fraud or they deluded themselves into not seeing it as anything wrong. Anyway, they're successful at it. I won't spoil the story.

This sounds really fascinating. You're still obviously connecting things as you just did with yourself, but also still even trying to like analyze the situation, the characters. I mean, it seems like this is like a living story, almost like The Alchemist. Yeah, I think that's the fun of fiction is that, you know, you can read something 10 times. I mean, I'm a huge fan, by the way, of a British author, which you may, in the States, you may or may not have heard of, called Dame Hilary Mantel. Dame Hilary Mantel wrote a historical series of books, which PBS broadcast in the States,

called Wolf Hall. It's a historical series. Wolf Hall is the home of Jane Seymour. Oh, Wolf Hall. Yes, that's right. Jane Seymour's home. And it was an inspired choice of title.

So she follows Henry VIII's chief advisor, a guy called Thomas Cromwell, who changed England. i won't bore you with english history right now but you can google it and find out in a couple of paragraphs how he changed england but the way she wrote it and uh we just i just held a weekend in honor of hillary in my spare time we had a you have so much time on your hands. Yeah, we had quite a few of our brothers and sisters

from the United States there as well, which was lovely, because she's got a lot of fans in the States. Yeah, we had a whole weekend of speakers, and it was fabulous academics, because she was quite an academic writer. She was as much a historian as she was a fiction. But one of the things we all said about this the reason i'm going to this is that she said the dead are not really dead and the

people of our you know of our past that we've known who have now moved on are still with us because of us and she had this incredible ability to connect or to connect with the spirits really of these historical characters I mean everybody who's into her style of writing says oh my goodness Thomas Cromwell was as i'm reading the book i feel like he's standing next to me that's the power of her ability her ability um so she would create these characters in a way that they were totally believable the motivations that she gave them the reasons they did what they did the reason henry the eighth you know did what he did and even the beheading of amberlynn and and all of that but as you're reading it it's you just think yeah well of course um you know the rationale behind all of that doesn't seem out of place

because it's she manages to do the content if you you're into history. I would love that. Yeah, the first three books, 2,000 pages, be prepared to commit a year of your life. Really? Yeah, so that was quite transformational for me in the way I thought about fictional characters. So even though my characters are fictional, it doesn't mean they're not real. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. So even in the way how you just had discovered your younger self within the story, I mean. Thanks, Shona. That's pretty amazing. That is quite funny, really. Well, Colin, I just adore you. I can't wait to have you back on for the other two books because I want to read them all.

Your wisdom is just amazing. And the way I receive it is something I can actually understand. You speak very well. You know, sometimes I read some of Carl Jung's stuff and I have to read the same sentence like four times. But you have a way of really connecting kind of like in the Gnostic Gospels. They say all the time, you know, for those who have ears, let them hear. And I'm definitely hearing you and receiving it. So thank you so much.

Everybody can go to your website. Columholland.com. Yeah. And the book, if you just type Columholland into Amazon, my books will come up there now. So yeah, that's the best way to find. I'm actually writing book too. So busy, busy. Yeah. I can't believe you wrote a whole book and working on your second since I talked to you last. It's's amazing i need to get on it i'm gonna ask you how's that going you're ready to come on you need to get that out there i know keep keep me posted won't you i will of course i will we'll tell the world on your behalf thank you thank you all right take care love and blessings thank you you