The Taproot Podcast - 🌐Healing the Modern Soul Part 4: Poetry of the Spheres

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1    Part 2    Part 3     Part 4 ��    Healing the Modern Soul Appendix    "Spheres of the Self: Navigating Identity, Emotions, and Relationships in Therapy" Art: Are Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven Anselm Kiefer German In this thought-provoking podcast, we explore the complex interplay between the self, emotions, and relationships through the lens of Peter Sloterdijk's spherology and the history of Western thought. Each episode delves into the ways in which individuals construct and inhabit their own "spheres" of meaning, and how these spheres shape their sense of identity, emotional experiences, and interpersonal dynamics. We examine how the binary opposition between the self and the other, and between reason and emotion, has influenced therapeutic approaches throughout history, and how contemporary theories and practices are challenging these dichotomies. Our expert guests, including therapists, philosophers, and cultural critics, offer insights into the fluid, dynamic nature of the self and the importance of recognizing the complex interplay between individual and collective spheres.   https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Through case studies, personal anecdotes, and philosophical reflections, we explore how therapy can help individuals navigate the challenges of constructing and maintaining a coherent sense of self in an increasingly globalized, technologically mediated, and ecologically fragile world. We discuss the role of emotions, relationships, and embodied experiences in shaping the self, and how therapists can support clients in developing more flexible, adaptive, and inclusive spheres of meaning. Whether you're a therapist, a philosopher, or simply someone interested in the mysteries of the human psyche, this podcast offers a stimulating and accessible exploration of the complex dynamics of selfhood and relationality in the contemporary world. Hashtags: #spherology #selfhood #identity #emotions #relationships #therapy #philosophy #culture #poststructuralism #deconstruction #globalization #technology #ecology #embodiment #adaptability #inclusivity #Sloterdijk #binaryopposition #reasonandemotion #psychotherapy https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ #sloterdijk #theory #philosophy #spheres #walterbenjamin #frankfurtschool #therapy #simulacrum #psychology #anthropology   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

Let me ask you something, Red. Yeah? How did we get into this? Well, bare judgment would be the most general explanation. It was just, in certain stages it seemed a natural thing to do. Because other people I knew were doing it and seemed to enjoy it. Yeah, well nobody where I was at when I got interested in the subject was doing it, I can tell you. I was over in the damn Pacific War.

But I had an anthology of poetry that some girl sent me. And I think my whole orientation in my life and my career and work and everything else changed on the use of one word and one poem. It was about the carpe diem theme seize the day live while you can and it was especially poignant to some young soldier i was 20 21 years old over the damn pacific who was fixing to get killed almost every day and that especially in my case every night of the war and i read it and it's the lines were apollo springing naked to the, and all his island shivered into flowers. I thought, my God, isn't that wonderful? Shivered? Now, who shivered into flowers?

What an image. I mean, it's like this. I mean, you can see the movement of the delicate shaking of the flowers, living things that are perfectly beautiful and perfectly mindless. And all these islands shivered, shivered into flowers. I thought, this is for me. I must see what I can do. Hey guys, this is Joel with the Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast, and welcome to part four of Healing the Modern Soul.

If you've made it this far, I'm not going to do too much of a preamble here. The clip at the beginning will be explained a little bit at the end, but not too much. And let's get going. So we have a subjective experience that we live within. But it is constantly communicating with an outer world through necessities of thought and action and concept. And the inner world is immediate and it is implicit and it is filled with things like curiosity and gut reaction and warm feelings and icky aversions and unknowing unknowing without holding knowledge and it can't talk it can only feel like a baby that is gumming the carpet on its tummy. If I'm a mom that just gave you, I mean, not if I'm a mom, if you were a mom and I just

gave you an icky feeling, imagine the baby is on a blanket, gumming the blanket until it starts to cry. And that's what the subjective world's experience is like. And there is also this outer world that is material and it is cold and it is distant. And we have to learn to survive within that. And it cares about things like taxes and genetic predisposition and prison walls and retirement and cancer. And imagined ego immortality. And neither the world, neither world can quite touch the other one, but sometimes we pretend they can and they feel like they can touch each other. And maybe they can sometimes in ways that

we don't even understand yet. But even though they're separate and they can't quite touch, they are entangled together across this brainstem through the precuneus and the prefrontal cortex. You know, ancient and modern forgotten and unremembered forces are all howling and screaming to be fed and to be made center and to be made self for just a minute. And the self is this constantly shrinking and orbiting and eclipsing and waning thing that we remember and we forget and we hold and we put down. And maybe that is why, you know, antonyms describe the self so well. Maybe antonyms are the only thing that can really describe it. Or maybe I'm just a really bad poet. You know, it's like the first time that somebody at your high school smokes weed. They're like, maybe everything is nothing. Maybe big is small. Or when...

So maybe that's the case. But here's the really messy part about the self is that there are also other people out there with selves too. And we have to smush this mess up into couples and families and societies. and then what do we do you know how did we get here so one of the reasons that trends in american politics are kind of hard to talk about um is that there's no event and i don't mean hard to talk about like you get in trouble i mean hard to talk about like everything, everything you say about, like, well, after the Vietnam War, most Americans reported for the first time in history that this country was not one of the best countries on earth, or that their life would not be the same as their parents during the 70s, and Carter and Ornaburger. All those things are constantly relevant from one angle, and also

not relevant from another angle. There's no like one event in American culture that is monadic or, um, no, no matter how important one event seems from our historical perspective, it is also unimportant when you're studying another force or another group of people. And because there's never just one thing going on, anything big that happens as a culmination of like lots of forces together in American politics or culture. And so like any perspective on a cultural and historical hinge point in society will inevitably, inevitably it will be irrelevant to any other large group. Or it'll evoke a contradictory emotional response and in a different demographic that says, no,

that's when things were getting bad. The 50s is better than the 60s. One example might be something like the Kennedy assassination, which is something most Americans would point to as a big deal or a hinge point or a place where things just change, even if they can't say, well, it was the statistic where people said that they no longer trusted the government,

or then combined with Nixon. Even if it's not that it's that the feeling of america was different after that for me and that feeling was happening in lots of people so even if they weren't looking at it as a statistic that they didn't know they were a part of they all said yeah that's when it was different you know um but say you look at african americans um who were a demographic that you know um but say you look at african-americans um who were a demographic that you know had really been obstructed from voting with literacy tests and poll taxes and violence and intimidation and grandfather clauses which um are a really insane thing and they couldn't vote you know in the 56 election i think like 25 percent or something of african-american voters even participated and more i think it was like 30 or 40 you know for

the kennedy assassination or for kennedy's election which um you know more people participated but it wasn't their president from a certain perspective like um a lot of people that were african-american didn't feel like i mean a lot of dead i'm African American didn't feel like, I mean, a lot of did. I'm not painting with too broad a brush. I'm saying that this is why these are complicated. If you didn't feel like your government officials represented you or they weren't my representative, you know, like you're not representing me or you're part of an electoral process

that I've been excluded from, you may not feel the same reaction to your vote not mattering or somebody taking your vote away or, you know, whatever that is. And this is just one example. I mean, I'm not trying to go too far into Kennedy, but, you know, that shifting self-image of how this country perceives itself and what parts of self are relevant. You know, somebody's always popping up and saying, no, no, no, we're doing history wrong because we need to look at it from this angle and say, actually, that article's always been written and it will continue to be. And it can never quite be wrong.

Different parts of self are the same. They have different opinions about one another and each other's relevance, and they're always sort of fighting to see who could drive the car. And, you know, self within an individual and a civilization, it's not a fixed and immutable entity, but it's a dynamic and ever-changing landscape that's shaped by constant transitioning of forces and partially connected forces fighting for expression and repression. In this process of trying to partially connected forces fighting for expression and repression in this process of trying to find something like equilibrium for just a minute. I'm drawing a parallel there to the sense of self, the sensation of self I described in the

beginning, and the way that we make history of a country because they are similar. And the history of psychotherapy itself can be seen as a civilization, you know, as a whole having a conversation about what self is. Because, you know, like I talked about in the last one, you sort of, your concept of self is integral to every part of how you are conceiving of what psychotherapy is, what its goals are, you know, who the person is in contact with, what they are is inherently relevant to a model that is supposed to be one, contacting them and two, doing something to them, you know. And I've argued in the first one, two, and three, you know, part of this series that we can look at movements and schools of psychotherapy and we can,

you know, be able to read things about our civilization from those. We can glean its intuitions and its fears and its neuroses and its psychoses as therapy changed. Often wars between schools of psychotherapy and there are wars. A lot of stuff is just so funny, man. Like I remember a conference conference long time ago, I hope there's a video of this, but there's like a conference where Salvatore Mnuchin, who's like the family therapy guy, um, or they're both family therapy people, but Mnuchin was like the structural person. He was like, throw out all of emotion. Don't ask them how they feel.

Don't look at any of that. Don't tell them to love each other. Just draw a diagram of the family and say the mom and dad are too close together and it's excluding the child. I guess that wouldn't normally be a problem. The mom and the child are too close together because there's tension with the father and there's enmeshment here and here's the triangulation and then bust up the structure and fix it that way. You know, he's a structural family guy. And Johnson was all about emotion-focused therapy and that you should only just go into the emotion and don't worry about diagnosis, don't worry about analysis. And they're, like, presenting at the same conference at one point and they're saying, like, the complete opposite thing and then responding to questions.

And the audience is uncomfortable and, like, each of them are shooting these glances at each other. And, you know, it's like it's not just the freudians and the unions which get like a lot of ink like there's just people who are therapists that hate each other and i always just got such a kick out of that because it's so funny but it's because of this thing it's because of self you know and like you can see you know in the early ruptures of the psychoanalytic institutes where you know the american and the uk you know they pivot towards cognitive therapy in the 80s but you know freud and adler they laid this foundation for this depth-oriented psychotherapy and it emphasized the importance of the unconscious

mind and symbolic and archetypal dimensions and you know freud the self was divided into these three components id ego superego Each of those played this role in feelings and behaviors. And then Jung said, no, you know, there's a collective unconscious and there's something that we share that is kind of mystical. And I know it's there because I can feel it. And when I talk to my patients, they also know this experience, even though we haven't lived it, it's sort of inborn. But it isn't just mine. It isn't just my repression of how I individuated from my mom as a baby or, you know, went through this hatching stage as a baby. It's deeper. It's older. It shows up in myths. I can recognize it when I read history.

You know, Freud wanted to psychoanalyze history as this repression of sexuality, but he didn't really want to identify with it. He was trying to separate himself from history, separate himself from anthropology. Freud wanted to dominate all of those things and his model of therapy was kind of telling on himself. You know, I don't think it's a bad model for describing Freud's psychology. I think it's a stretch to try and apply it to other people. And you know, as therapy evolved, 20th century, there's this growing emphasis on developing more empirical and rapid techniques you know how do we do psychoanalysis faster because all these

rich people wasted all this money and all this time um you know paying freud and jung for psychoanalysis because it was incredibly expensive uh you know how do we apply a wider range of clinical settings quicker? And you get gestalt therapy and Hakomi and voice dialogue. And all of these individuals that start these modalities are trying to get somebody to be aware of this internal experience of self in a different way. And to integrate different aspects of self in a you know more holistic and experimental way sometimes and like the humanistic psychology movement was carl rogers and abraham maslow and they maslow like they emphasize this important of self-actualization and the need for a more

holistic and person-centered approach to therapy. They saw people seeing people for who they were and not the model of therapy as much, but the person and the way that they were making meaning is more important. There was sort of an existential bent to that. It was tempered with a new age, numinous quality, but it was more existential in that I want to see how you want to make meaning, not how I make meaning, and then I show you how to do that. And similarly, there's this transpersonal psychology movement in the 60s and 70s that was trying to expand the boundaries of self beyond individual ego and to explore, you know, spiritual and transcendent dimensions. Maybe the self didn't come from here.

Maybe it's not even my life. Maybe it's, I was like, I knew you on Atlantis and that's why I knew that you had a therapist. Maybe the self is outside of time. You get a cosmological and physical, you know, deconstruction of self that's bigger than whatever. And, you know, Stanislav Grof and Ken, you know, Ken Wilber, like they were arguing for this more integrative and comprehensive view of self that could encompass both personal and transpersonal. So you didn't have to just do kind of weird crystal chanting spiritual stuff. You could sort of oscillate before a personal, this is my life here right now. Yeah, I am going to meditate on Atlantis and whatever.

Because people in the 70s wanted to do that in therapy a lot um you probably had a lot of bad poetry that they were writing that had a lot of antonyms in it if you know what i mean and they but you could sit with the trans dimensional part of yourself that felt like it was older than the stars but then also realized that you needed to get up and drive the kids to school and that you had some stuff to work out with your family. Because I think those guys and some of those integrative therapists later, they saw the New Age movement as a little bit avoidant, which it was. And one of those key figures who contributed to this understanding that is interesting was Artie Lange. And Lange was an anti-psychiatry guy.

I don't love everything that he did, but some of it is really neat. And one of the things that he said is just the connection is healing. You know, he would have, he would taught his students, he did himself too, but the account that I read was from a student and she was just like, this will never work. And there was a lady who had schizophrenia and she was screaming and pulling her hair out. And I think she had defecated on herself and she threw the mattress or ripped the mattress up. And the graduate student was like, well, I can't go in here.

And he was like, no, you have to be with this person until they're better. And slowly just being in the chaos of that room at first was so overwhelming to the student. And then she realized, oh, I'm getting used to it. I'm regulating. I entered her sphere that was chaotic this cell and now i'm able to calm down and then she realized the person was calm and then they were talking you know and and she and it took like a week like i mean i think she was in there for days i mean it was this was wild west uh never could do that in grad school again uh uh, or in psychology broadly, but, um, supposedly the

person was able to respond to medication and was able to come back, you know, from wherever they were. Um, and like so many of these, uh, RD Lang, you probably, if you, everything I'm saying, you probably haven't heard of, but if you heard of him in school it was the empty doll thud like he was that guy um but he wasn't the one that did the empty doll thud experiment that was rosenhan but they were part of this anti-psychiatry movement and i don't have any evidence for it but i'm i'm sure you know in the in the waters of that world like when lang writes the divided self in 1960 and then rosenhan does that experiment in 73, and Lang's making a ton of noise in 1970 with, like, his rabble rousing, that those movements are

together, they knew about each other, he's influencing that, and, you know, by the time Rosenhan makes this experiment, and that experiment, if you're not familiar with it, was that, you know, they said, okay, psychiatrists, you guys say that you have this magical ability that no one else has to just talk to somebody and then diagnose them, right? So we're going to get our graduate school students, and our graduate school students are going to go into a hospital. And they're just going to say, I don't have any symptoms at all, but I hear empty, dull thought. I just hear a voice that says empty, dull, thud. And in some versions of the experiment, I think they just said thud. But it's been a minute since I read this one in high school. But that's all they did.

And the psychiatrist said, okay, you've got schizophrenia. And they're like, I don't think I have that. I don't have any other symptoms. And they're like, no, you've got schizophrenia. We're psychiatrists. We know that we're right. And they get committed for weeks. They. We know that we're right. And the, the, they get committed for weeks. They don't know when they're getting out and they can't convince anyone that

they're not sick and they're not sick because they're graduate school students that are lying from Ivy leagues, um, are doing an experiment rather than we're lying. They were doing science. So, um, those that makes this whole idea of like, you're turning medicine into the oppressor. Good dude. You're just saying you have a special power. It's magic, but you don't actually. There's a ton of why the medical establishment starts to get so medical and hard science and with um psychology is it's a soft science we said let's use your intuition a little bit now you've embarrassed us you know and now we're

going to have a screener where if you check these boxes it will tell you what you have the psychiatrist is just the administer of empirically derived tests that tell us if you're depressed or not. That tell us if you have schizophrenia. That tells us what is wrong with yourself. It doesn't really matter what you think as much. And that's when the movement moves away from person-centered therapy. In a way that it pretty hard moves away from. Really until now. There's pushback and things changing.

And Lange's work was really influential in making therapy political. And I think that's why there was this pushback to say, no, this is empirical, it is not political. Get out of here. Get out of here with this idea that a political and an activist and an engaged cultural force can come in and analyze this profession. It is numbers, it is boring. This struggle that the counterculture is having with the corporate

and largely kind of military wealthy whatever every all these power struggles in the 60s there's a lot of racial things in there too um it's out over because that those are opinions and this is a science um and so his ideas resonated in not a way I think he would like. The counterculture, he fired them up. And then that fired the medical establishment up to push any avenues for that kind of thinking out of the profession or to make anybody who made therapy an incredibly political project an outlier, which they still kind of are. You know, there's very right-wing and left- wing people that go on the news and talk

about whatever, but they're usually more influencers than therapists. And so this vision of like a more socially and politically engaged psychotherapy goes away. All of that transpersonal and human is, I mean, people like Virginia Satir are on tape talking about how they're going to change the entire world, that people are going to heal trauma and the trauma healing is going to go out and you're going to learn as a patient how to have an encounter group and you're going to inadvertently become a healer and there's a snowball reaction. This was a political, not just a political project for them. It was almost, especially with gestalt therapy some of these things were trying to make therapy almost be a humanistic religion you know humanism was a religion to these people the human potential movement is an attempt to turn humanism into a religion

and that is all pushed out because that i brief moment um there's an economic recession, a restructuring of society. Carter gives the crisis of confidence speech and says, maybe the myth that you think that America is is wrong or it's not possible anymore. And this oil embargo, we need to think about what the new myth of america can be can you engage me in this project and everyone says no we hate the crisis of confidence speech we don't like this we refuse to give up our idea of what this sphere of life is supposed to be and then oil got cheaper again so they didn't really have to and because, like, a lot of people in the oil embargo, they didn't think that the oil was going to come back.

I mean, if you've been to Seaside, Florida, if you've been to 30A, right? It's a place, I don't know if you've got international listeners, but it's associated with new urbanism. It's associated with this architectural movement about recentering things about pedestrians, community, getting rid of the car. And those are good ideas. And those design movements are still really popular. But the reason they existed is because Leon Krier and a lot of those architects that mentored the people like Duany, who went on to make those movements were like, we're going to design towns along wind lines in the 70s. We're going to build these like 1920s um you know american towns where

there's crisscrossing bike lanes through pedestrian streets and like the car is an afterthought and because they thought that society may look the arrow of time would reverse and this boom of oil and post-industrialization that came after world war ii would just kind of go back where it was. And people really thought that that would happen. Obviously it didn't. Oil got cheaper. The 1980s happened. Ronald Reagan happens. Margaret Thatcher happens in the UK. And when that happens, there's this era of individualism. Not only is the myth of America as the self-made country that diverged from europe and made its own future and now it has to go clean up europe's messes and world wars like not only is that gone um not only not gone not only is that back in a way that you know carter was kind of responding to the

whole crisis by being like maybe we should wonder who we are and everyone says no we know who we are not only are we um what we used to be we're even more of what we used to be than we used to be we're the the myth of the wild west is back it is not just individual and and uh country it is individual people and there's this market-driven approach to social and political life where you say you know and, and of course it's under the guise of promoting government accountability and efficiency. We've got to privatize it. So Reagan and Thatcher say there's this vision of society where the role of the state is to be gotten rid of in favor of private enterprise and individual responsibility. and we're going to do that by running all of these you know empirical tests to see if you deserve the money you're getting only the hospitals that treat above 80 percent will get anything you

know of course this doesn't ever work you know what happens is that people start just saying oh you want us to treat 80 of patients well now we're going to change the definition of treat to mean that they're in the waiting room literally Literally, literally that happened in the UK. And you just change the definition, meet the metric. It never really is to try and reward a good guy and get rid of a bad guy. It's because you want to defund things and then you do it to act like, well, they deserve it. And anyway, that takes over and it rips this vision up. And it's damaging to mental health at the community level

because you defunded and you dismantled all of this community-based mental health programs and institutions that had been painstakingly built, some of them since the 20s. A lot of it since the New Deal, but some of it was even older than that. And that community infrastructure, when you defunded it, is gone. If you see the movie Joker, that's of it was even older than that. And that community infrastructure, when you defunded it is gone. Um, if you see the movie Joker, you know, that's what it's about. That's what's

happening to him in the beginning of the movie, where you listening to the social worker and she seems like she is the bad guy. And then slowly she's like, no, look, you think I'm the bad guy. It's way worse than this, you know, and I don't have any choice. And that that's what's happening is his community, community mental health thing is being shut down. And, you know, and I don't have any choice. And that's what's happening is his community mental health thing is being shut down. And, you know, in place of this community-based approach, this new kind of, you know, increasingly very neoliberal free market laissez-faire order said we want individualized, medicalized mental health. And that means that we have to use psychopharmacology and behavior. We don't

really want you to talk about mom anymore. We just want to tell you, if you do this, it's bad. If you do this, it's good. And if you're having trouble doing the thing that we told you was good and not doing the thing we told you was bad, we're going to give you drugs. And this is done with varying degrees of success. I realize this works for some people. It felt very dehumanizing and upsetting to a whole lot of other people. But that's increasingly circa post-1980, like what everybody was going to pay for with the public options in the U.K., the private options in the U.K., or the private options in the U.S. And when you do that, that becomes what most providers do because they take money to, you know, live and they're going to go where the money is. And so, you know, these approaches are short term and they provide, you know, relief for some

people, but they often fail to get at underlying social and political factors that psychology used to be in touch with. And so, you know, for Freud and for Jung and for Adler and for Perls, you know, this whole generation of people and the generation after them, therapy wasn't a political project, I don't think, for them, but it was a way to speak truth to power. It was a way to kind of be movers and shakers of the world that were challenging the status quo. And in this period, therapy moves into the pocket of the status quo in a way that it still hasn't separated itself from. And like, one of the things that is hard to measure is that a ton of these things, what you're doing is you're making the symptom go

down to the same way the hospital's measured. Oh, okay. Well now we're going to redefine a waiting room as a patient who's been treated in a bed. And now a hundred percent of our patients have been treated. Please don't cut our funding in the same way that that happens. Therapy starts to become this chicken and the egg thing or not chicken and egg, like the shell game where the pea is under the shell, right? And you're moving it around. And so you're saying, oh, no, it's not here anymore. It's here. But you're taking anxiety that may be causing somebody to drink or do something that is not healthy. And then you're just, you're not saying, why is that anxiety there? What is the psyche doing? What is it compensating for? You're just saying, put it over here. And if you can't put it over there, we'll give you medication and the

medication will change that for you. And it will lower that anxiety. And you're not looking at, when you only look at the symptom, you lose the rest of the self. And so like people like Lange in the anti-psychiatry movement, which in a lot of places were crazy and wrong. I'm not defending any of these people entirely. But I think when someone has good ideas that move the world that are relevant to history, it was this important challenge to that dominant individualistic metaclass paradigm that won. And in the 70s, one of the things that we like sort of lost in therapy, and I also think it's one of the reasons why like medical healthcare and I don't mean empiricism is bad. I mean, empirical only, the only things you can measure are the only things you allow in psychology, which is going to be behavior in certain limited kinds of cognition,

very, very top level, very, very explicit cognition. When you do that, you lose the subjective experience and these abstract realms of consciousness that people were exploring in the 70s. And to a certain extent, I think that the LSD, psilocybin, whatever, got so weird, that everyone as a whole kind of woke up and said, what did we do? When the money ran out in the 70s, when the party was over, those people lost so much credibility. A lot of them were drug addicts. A lot of them had made all of these supernatural almost promises about

this coming eon and epoch and what was going to happen. And all of those were kind of panning out to be like hokum. And so it was pretty easy for everybody to say oh we never believed in any of that i mean of course the dod was paying for it they were giving people lsd and putting uh you know twins together in different rooms and seeing if they could read each other's minds and having people stare at farm animals to see if they could mentally kill them with telepathy i mean no one really knew you know google uh what's his name? John C. Lilly. Google, uh, Lilly's dolphin experiments. I mean, that, that was all DOD money. Um, so when people realize like, oh my gosh, feeding LSD to this dolphin doesn't actually let me talk to God. That was

a bad idea. There's an insecurity that makes the world pivot pretty hard in the eighties when the money comes back on to something entirely else. And psychology is always these reactions and overreactions to itself, essentially, its core. And so when that happens, just like the Freudians, the pivot to cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy was too hard, too harsh. And now you're seeing a pivot back, you know, really as the millennials come of age and age into the profession and the boomers kids are saying no, you know, to that, um, you know, and this, that, that retreat, I think into the unconscious in the seventies, um, that fascination with these altered states and people like Carlos, uh,

Castaneda and, um, you know, psychedelic journeys and even the word, you know, acid trip implies that you're taking your, it's taking you somewhere else. And that's somewhere it's real, you know, uh, all of those people, uh, sort of were paving the way for the destruction of their own perspective in a certain way. You know, there are people like Kurt Vonnegut, who I like, you know, Thomas Pynchon, who I like, Hunter S. Thompson, who I think is kind of limited. He's more of a stylist than like an intuitive thinker. But like, well, I mean he he had some that please don't have me come at me for that but you know they captured this kind of fragmenting and distort and disorienting nature of this post-modern self through looking at things like absurdity and paranoia and dark humor and people lying to themselves, and self-delusion, and all these chaotic images, you know, these

reflected images of, like, uncertain times. I mean, and even in the one of the, that's one of the reasons why Thompson, even though I don't, like, love him the most as a writer, like, his stuff works, because he kind of just jumps into an experience, like, as a concert journalist, and, like, follows it around, and writes down all this weird stuff, and then at the end end is like i don't know what the point was maybe it was this you know which to me feels kind of dashed off but it is a reflection of kind of like you know how something works that appeals to people on different levels but there was this hallucinatory glimpse into this dark side of the american dream and like echoing disillusionment that all these people were starting to feel as kennedy nyes and nixon comes in, and then Nixon is revealed to be a crook. And then, you know, we're getting

rumors that the CIA is trying to overthrow countries and that it's assassinating, you know, leaders of the black civil rights movements. And all of these, all of these things, um, were happening at the same time that there's this digital age, there's this advent of personal computers, um, you know, in the homes and the workplaces and keep in mind they cost. Yeah. Yeah. There was a home computer, but it costs the amount that a helicopter costs. Like when they're just like, well, Bill Gates just dropped out of Harvard and fired up his computer. It's like, yeah, like that's like saying you're just like well bill gates just dropped out of harvard and fired up his computer it's like yeah like that's like saying you're gonna drop out of school and be self-made by firing up your lamborghini and you've got some um funding you know to fund your dropout so like well there's all this like promising i don't know if gates dropped out of harvard it was

some ivy like i can't remember uh but uh maybe it was berkeley i don't i need to look that up anyway there is this deluge of information that hits um this promise that there's going to be unprecedented access to all information that it's going to be connected that this technological revolution also you know it it it is exciting but it's also stressful you know to america's vision of a future and it's a time where we needed a vision of a future and so people get into fields like cybernetics and systems theory and you know trying to understand this relationship between humans and machines and what if a machine is just like a human that we haven't made smart enough to wake up and you know have sentience at or what if humans are just machines man um what if you could put them together what could you put a computer in a brain

could you put a brain in a computer you know and but this shift towards the digital emphasized this retreat from a tangible real people moved into a realm of abstraction they're moving away from like i'm a farmer i grew a plant to like can i turn my computer into a plant basically or can i describe the nature of plants with a computer like the thing that is the dream becomes a representation of something real but no longer a thing that directly is real in a way that i think is inherently stressful um to society the individuals that make up the psychology and these lines between self and technology become blurred there, right? That's kind of what I'm saying. It's like, what is a machine and what isn't? That is a redefinition of self in a way that we don't always talk about

as being separate from these movements. You know, these are all part of the same thing. And those countercultural movements in the 60s and the 70s, like they were striving for this individual liberation, this individual spiritual enlightenment. And that, I think, paved the way for their own inevitable co-option and destruction. Because they were prioritizing the subjective experience and embracing abstract realms of consciousness, but that left them vulnerable to the dominance of personal narratives. And this idea that there were going to be technological forces coming in and the myth of the individual and the self-made person. I mean, when you're kind of a hippie in the woods going off and trying to find God, you look incredibly unmarketable to the 80s that are coming.

That is all about what I can create out here in the world and you're trying to create that in this inner world that i don't see and so when the culture pivots to a hyper objective lens of what are you what can you see touch taste how much money can you make none of that personal subjected inward wisdom and a lot of it wasn't really wisdom, but that's what they were trying to cultivate, was completely worthless all of a sudden. And you get a million interesting reactions to that, like the back-to-the-landers hippies and different things. But it really was such a fast turn in culture. You know, when oil got cheap again and our political preferences changed all of a sudden, and a lot more people had a, you know, opinion about the capital gains tax for some reason. And so like psychotherapy largely changes, you know, as these overreactions to itself,

which are overreactions to the nature of self is kind of what I'm getting at. You know, Freud split with that Jung and then Adler kind of thought both of them were immature and silly and trying to be visionary leaders. And then Reich, he gets kicked out of the psychoanalytic conference for, you know, wearing a knife and beating a stick on the ground and glaring at people, which would still probably get you kicked out of the psychoanalytic conference. And there's this emergence of a feminist and a multicultural approach to therapy too, that can kind of be seen as a response to the limitations of traditional psychoanalytic and humanistic models. Um, they, which those models were failing to account for the ways in the seventies and the sixties and seventies. Um,

and some of this endured until the eighties and where things like gender or race or other forms of social identity were shaping our experiences, um, and opportunities in the world. So if I went into, you started to see, you know, like for example,

a lot of second wave feminists became young and you know they're they're older but a lot of those guys are still working and um a lot of people said well psychoanalysis is inherently racist i'm gonna do this new type of thing but there was this reaction to the world has changed. And so the self and the individual identity of the person is different because the world has changed. And so your model talking about this old conception of self that is trying to encompass everybody, I don't fit into that anymore. And we need a new model of therapy. So you get this sort of like individualization and more specialization of things. That, you know, academia, the medical profession, they like that. They like specificity. They like specialization. You know, like we want

there to be 150 credentials, not just, oh, I'm a therapist. I'm doing therapy. What kind of therapy are you doing? Yeah, you know, a little of this, a little of that. No, you have to be doing DBT therapy with a focus on complex, um, PTSD or complex trauma informed quality care to certificate, whatever you get that out of that idea, you know, in the, in the same way that they were radicals and leftists kind of did that in the 60s and the 70s to therapy but when they did it i don't think they saw that it was um something that was taking it was going to be taken away from them and used against them essentially um that need for this kind of academic insecurity of like high specialization of everything was another thing that in the 80s the left was kind of paving its way for its own destruction in the field

or to have any sort of say in where the field was going um and you know these uh you know liberation psychology and some things like that in the 80s and the 90s are also i mean i think you can see those as reactions to, well, you know, I'm indicating that I'm a safe kind of therapy for a certain kind of person that feels alienated by a different, the mainstream type of therapy. But largely those things never were very influential in the 80s and 90s to my memory. And you don't find them now. You know, I don't know that I could go out and find like a liberation therapist in Birmingham today in anywhere in Alabama. Um, I've never come across one, but my point here is that therapy is not driven by these abstract theoretical concerns. Really.

It's driven by like concrete needs and demands of individuals and communities seeking to make sense of their own experience and challenge oppressive and limiting narratives that shape their lives. And that happens as the world changes, and then people bring that into therapy, and then the therapy models start to break up because the therapist doesn't feel it represents their people, or they're not making money, and the modality dies out. And so that process is messy, just like talking about the self of a person or the history and soul of a country. But I think it's interesting. And I also think it's something that

we need to reflect on. And the limitations of any model of therapy, right? They're going to be essentially limitations in its theory of self, because that theory, you know, of psychotherapy has to presuppose the way that the therapist understands and solves the problem. And if that process, you know, problem detection and problem conception, and then solution to the problem, feedback loop is broken, then you get stuck and you can't move out of it because the person is, you know, detecting the problem wrong or hearing the problem wrong or treating the problem wrong. And then going back to the same solution. And I'll give a couple examples of what I mean, because that's a messy idea, but I'll just give two, like I'm running really long, but like

when you do that, uh, those different models of therapy like so when i when i go through these examples like my point here is not that they're bad models my point is that any model of therapy when it is taken as absolute and the therapist can't see outside of the model anymore and you lose the force for the trees. Like that's when the model becomes bad. And so if you cling too rigidly to your model of therapy, you're going to end up traumatizing somebody because if they stick around and they keep coming back, you know, you're insisting that somebody, something about your model's conceptualization must cure them and work for them. And when they're not getting better, it's not working for them. And you're

not integrative. You can't just pivot to another one, or you're not flexible. And you can't just be like, Hey man, I don't think this is working for you. You want me to try something else? You want to do whatever you get stuck in these feedback loops where the information that's going in is putting you back at the beginning and you can't get out of it. And a lot of that is based on a concept of self and how therapy is supposed to work. So here's an example, psychodynamic therapy, right? Um, a lot of psychodynamic therapy is about how this relationship between the parent and the child becomes the child's relationship to the world later. And in therapy, the therapist can detect and intuit that relationship by talking to the

person and seeing how they relate to the therapist and then saying, oh, that must be how you related to the parent and you're projecting on me. And therefore you're projecting that same thing onto the world. And this is creating your problem. And I was going in and holding the projection of your parent I'm going to you know give you this reparative experience or insight and when you have that insight you will change your relationship to the parent that's internalized therefore change your relationship to the therapist and the world and then the world's your oyster or whatever that's sometimes

true right like there's a lot, as a therapist or just as a person, I mean, whether or not you're able to see it, you're probably holding a bunch of projections of people's parents, but not everybody. There's a ton of therapists that I've seen that I projected because I've seen a lot of therapists. There's a couple of therapists that I've seen that I definitely projected a parental energy on and, you know, like reacted to them based on my own stuff. There's also ones who I didn't project anything on because that just wasn't how I saw them. I was kind of going to them for something different. They didn't have anything that activated that in me. But if you are psychoanalytic and everything is this projection of unresolved neuroses going back to childhood and I am the parent and you

are projecting that on me and yet that isn't working because the patient's not doing that and you're inflexible and you don't have another tool then you just decide that you know that this person is projecting on you like a parent you keep trying to solve problems that way but that isn't what's happening, right? Like, I had a therapist a long time ago that was really, really bad, and he did some stuff that was not, I won't go into all that.

Like, there were things that he did that were just illegal, if not a board rule. They weren't like, you know, it wasn't sexual, it wasn't anything like that. he broke confidentiality just like not a competent guy older guy and he kept telling me um because he was super psychodynamic and he kept telling me all this stuff about how i like he would give me these ideas and i would just be like i mean a little bit i just i don't know man i was there and I don't think people think that about me It was a good guess, you know, like there's nothing wrong with forget. It's okay to be wrong. I considered your perspective

I just don't see it and then it was I was in a power struggle with him Because he was the parent and I was the child and I wasn't accepting him and he needed I was gonna be in a fight for the world until I learned how to grow up and not be angry with daddy. And I was like, I just don't really see you that way. I just think you're not right, um, on this issue. And so I took his perspective that he was telling me these people had these thoughts about me or whatever, and my wife and my friends, and they were like, no, um, don't talk to that guy. That's not right. You know, he's not making room for you in therapy, but I wasn't a therapist yet. I had been through graduate school, but I was really insecure about

whether or not I could do it. So I stayed around a lot longer than I should. It was like, maybe he's doing psychodrama. Maybe he's lying to me because what he's saying is getting like more and more weird. Then finally I found out like a bunch of, uh, I found out that there were other people who were seeing him that I knew. Um, also like if you're going to see multiple people from somebody's family and then not tell them about it and then use information from those sessions, that's not ethical. Don't do that. He was doing that. Um, but anyway, like, so this will tell you like, uh, I'm, I'm telling on myself, like being a bad patient. But so like, I ask one of the people, I was like, Hey, when you ask about this idea, what does he say?

Cause whatever I say, which I think is kind of thoughtful and nice. Like, it's not like he's like, Oh, I just don't agree with you or something. He just says, that's wrong. That's absolutely wrong. You can't believe that. And I'm like, well, you know, whatever. Um, I, I just disagree with you. Like one of the things he would always tell me is like, nobody can be a therapist until they're 40 years old. And I was like, well, I'd kind of like to be a therapist for the next five years, and I don't know that that's true because there's a lot of therapists. No, no, no, no one can be a therapist until they're 40 years old

because there won't be enough seasoning on the pot. And I was like, well, I know a lot of therapists that aren't 40, Bill. I don't know what you mean. Oh, you might know therapists that aren't 40, but nobody can be a therapist. Just whatever, weird stuff like that. So I was like, okay, tell me something that he told you about, what particular issue, not relevant to that person, but just in general about the nature of therapy.

And so I went into therapy, and i just told him that exact same thing like i was like hey here's the thing that i think which i didn't think but it was what he had just told somebody who i knew that was also seeing it the day before and he exploded he's like that's the worst thing ever why would you why do you think you can come in here and say inflammatory things to me? And I was like, I didn't. I was just pretending to have a thought that I didn't actually have. But, you know, whatever. And that was when I realized, like, oh, it doesn't matter what I say.

Like, the point of this is that you want me to say, I'm sorry, daddy, I'm wrong. And that not for me, but for you, this is a weird relationship where every time I have insight or I'm right, I'm failing to live into this paternal dynamic that you think underlies reality of guy comes in, he's a little boy. If he doesn't get a scent to me, whatever. It was very weird. You, you see things like that where the person's like, Oh, well you see feedback loops like this, right? You know, cognitive behavioral therapy, where do you get feedback loops there? Well, you know, like CBT is interesting and it's good, um, for, for some things, but those things are largely intellectual. And even when you're getting into emotion, like you're still getting into talking about emotion or handling emotion with thought.

So it's a pretty top level kind of therapy. It's pretty psychoeducational. Some people need it. But what you get is, you know, the scope of what like is, and CBT is not terribly deep. I've never read where Beck says this is where my theory of emotion comes from, but I think it was just things that were around then. There's definitely RABT in it. He knew Alice.

There's probably some two-factor theory of emotion stuff. There's cognitive appraisal theory. None of these theories of emotion, most of them have kind of been replaced, and they're not terribly interesting. And so as a result, I think cognitive behavioral therapy is not great at doing things like processing flashback re-experiencing of PTSD. I think it's good at teaching you how to white knuckle through things and make you endure distress tolerance. But if I can take distress away, there's stress tolerance is a great skill to have, but if you can take distress away,

you don't need it. So when somebody is coming in, you know, in CBT and they're saying like that, um, they're saying that like they're having this bad thing and it's not affecting their behavior a lot of the cbt therapists and there's cbt therapists who are great but they're not following cbt as it's written or as beck thought um they're saying i'm doing cbt and they're using what you should do in therapy which is you learn your model or you learn a couple models and then you apply them until they become your own and you have realizations and discoveries and you take things in a new direction. So like with something like CBT, if the thing is not affecting behavior, the therapist tends to

act like it isn't relevant because it's not measurable. Even if it's not detect, even when it's affecting emotion, if you're not saying, well, I feel one out of 10 sad, and I feel two out of, you know, 10 afraid, you know, that emotion may be consciously there. You still may be avoiding huge parts of your life and you need somebody to help pull you back into a series of self, but I think if you apply CBT in a thick paste, in a vacuum, it misses. It misses the depth and complexity of self. And so the person sometimes is asking for things that the therapist doesn't pick up on. So those are kind of the feedback loops that I mean, just two examples of how that can work.

Because like no model of psychotherapy can 100% contain the self, especially ones that have a limited definition of it. No relationship between two people is 100% psychodynamic attachment projections. It's just not. There's more going on. And no, like, you know, just, you know, cognitive and then behaviors based on that cognition leading to a belief that is completely conscious and I stated and know it. Neither can that contain the series of self and the way that CBT, I think, tries to make it. And one of the reasons why I think CBT and ABA are kind of nefarious and a lot of cognitive therapies or any of those things that came in the nineties that had like solution focused or brief treatment or time limited, just strapped onto the top of it, you know, time limited psychodynamic, uh, you know, whatever, what the reason I think they were kind of nefarious is that they either knew or they were selected by a system that knew that we wanted therapy to be shorter

and cheaper at the expense of therapy being good. And that wasn't just therapy. I mean, look at the eighties. Would you rather drive a Cadillac from the fifties or would you rather drive a Cadillac from the seventies? Would you rather anything that GM made? I mean, have you ever seen a GM product from the 70s on the road? We made everything cheaper at the expense of it being good. We charged a lot of money to it. Maybe you paid the same amount, but it was cheaper for GM to make, which is why they made a whole lot more money. Well, they didn't really make a lot of money in the 70s because stuff got terrible, but you know what I mean. When you make something for less money and you sell it for the same price, you make more money. And the 80s was really into that kind of thinking, short-term thinking.

And so the world around the self is something that we haven't talked about a ton in 2 and 3. And I want to talk about it in part 4 of this series which is why we kind of go through the world changing around therapy so that it doesn't sound like therapy just changes around the world you know these things are connected in a way that is interesting to me and a lot of Jungian thinking explains that stuff and a language that I like, but I'm always looking for other languages that describe things well, because I think the more, um, that you know, uh, the more ways you know how to say something. And I don't mean languages like German and English. I mean,

languages like Jungian thought, Freudian thought, Nietzsche existentialism like phenomenology these things that are a language that's philosophical that kind of becomes a lens to let you see something and the more ways that you can say the same thing the more the people keep that can kind of hear you can see it better but also the more ways that like you can see it clearer because you're looking maybe at the same gem, but through different faucets of that same gem, you know, different angles of the same thing. Um, so there's a guy, um, German philosopher, um, Peter Sloterdijk, uh, or Deke, maybe, I don't know. It's, I think it's a Dutch name on a German guy, but, um but he's like a cultural theorist that has this idea of spheres that I think is really relevant and

kind of interesting. And again, I'm trying to do more philosophy on this one, but I'm not a philosophy guy. I'm dilettante and I can't teach a class on these people. So it's not like I'm an expert. I'm not trying to be, I'm trying to relate these things back to psychotherapy and psychotherapy to these things But his concept of spheres is relational and it's also kind of topological It's this way to understand human existence as sort of psychic territories That just like that nature of self from the beginning wax Wayne eclipse and self from the beginning wax, wane, eclipse. And these spheres can be thought of as like networks of relationships that carry in a, they carry in human beings. And so with individuals, they sort of emerge as nodes within these dense interconnected networks. This is a very like post-digital type of philosophy, which is maybe why it's interesting to

me. Like there's a lot of, it would be very hard for someone to have this kind of vision without knowing, even if it is tangentially about computers through the world, you know. And these spheres, they have no clear boundaries, but they have some relations that extend further than others, and they create this complex and open-ended web of connection. And the metaphor of a network is useful, but he's hesitant to use network, he said, because it implies that the human being is at the center, and he doesn't see that. The sphere just is the center, and it has human beings in it and so you know instead he suggests that all the spheres are they're like um they just extend in all in a direction but without a clear core without a clear center they're sort of like uh ripples maybe is a better term like ripples of influence and in in slaughter deke's view like humans don't exist as individuals, but they're always a part of intimate spheres. And so you're getting rid of the idea of the individual and looking at

specific ideology and cultural movements, but not in a historical way. In a way, that those things are people who are insulating themselves from reality with a certain kind of belief. Like they're protecting themselves and understanding something by believing these things together. And no one person believing something makes it a sphere. You need a whole lot of people sheltering under these umbrellas of belief in order to be able to make one. And so, you know, in his theory, there's humans first, they all coexist within this shared sphere. And then later they reemerge as differentiated people. And this challenges, you know, a lot of philosophical language about a self-contained subject. And

like, while he's making a cosmology, he's not super interested in being specific about it. It's sort of heaps of metaphors and relational gesticulating. So you can't say like, like you could with some philosophers with specificity exactly what they're saying. He says Nietzsche is kind of his guy, but in the way that he sort of just throws on a concept and doesn't care what it blows up.

And then also doesn't bother to like explain what it means and how allegorical. I mean, I think he's more similar to Plato than maybe he would say, um, because we still don't know how to read Plato, um, any better than the people listening to him being like,

what do you mean? You know, are you saying that there's actually like a spiritual place where the idea of form gives the chair its chairness or is this just like an idea about whatever and you know there's still a lot of debate about what plato meant um but the this idea of like the individual you know is not really an individual. They're always, like, occupying multiple positions and multiple spheres. And that there's this multiplicity of perspective is interesting. And so there's this notion of having this fixed identity and secure place in the world. And for Slenderdeak, like, that is this illusion of this philosophy

of consciousness. Instead, being in a sphere is this ongoing act of creation where human beings must actively construct a home for themselves. But it's not a home in the wilderness. It's a home in the cosmos of figuring out what the self is and what the world around them is and what that means. And then that is done in different spheres of life. Who I am as a Christian, who I am as an American, who I am as a person, who I am as a material being, a subjective being. The natures of those things change wildly, you know, over time. And there's some people, philosophers usually,

who come in and they have an idea that's like so influential, right? That you have to like engage with them whether or not you know who they are for the rest of time. Like, you know, Plato, when Neoplatonism happens, you can't have Christianity anymore and ignore it. You have to have some way of answering these questions that Plato brings up or addressing them. Like, you know, Gnosticism is this attempt to deal with a lot of those things. You know, all religion is sort of in that conversation because before then the Greeks were just being like, I don't know, like there's like maybe there's stuff and things that makes it alive.

Like there's like a juice that you could pull out of it that makes me alive if you pulled the juice out of me, but the rock doesn't have the juice. So it's not alive. Or maybe like there's different kinds of life. There's like the ability to be alive and die, but there's also the ability to move, which is a different kind of life. And then there's also like the ability to like think and reason, which is a kind of life only men have. And there's just three types of it. And then Plato kind of comes in and says, there's a spiritual immaterial world. And then there's also a material objective world. And

maybe they're somehow in communication with each other or one is good and one is bad and we should reject the other, whatever. But everyone has to like wrestle with this idea of like, oh yeah, we do have an internal conception and then live in this outer world that doesn't really care forever. You know, and you get like mid neoplatonism and it moves further away from anything he would have thought, but it's people struggling with like the, the, the problems that he creates. And those things sort of create these spheres, right? Like you can't go back and, and forget, even if you can't, even if you don't have the intellectual knowledge or historical knowledge to trace that development back to plato you're still in a different sphere

that has broken the old one and it can never go back to where it used to be and and he says you know slaughter deke says that we do this for protective immunization. Not as individual subjects, but, you know, co-subjects. Like, we have to share norms and values and symbolic practices, and we have to do that to insulate the world from these external irritants that come in, like a question Plato asked, maybe, right? You can't start a religion and not engage with the difference between the material and the spiritual or the objective and the subjective. You can't really create a big movement without doing that anymore. Humanity sort of can't forget what it knows, even if it doesn't remember why it And so these external irritants are anxiety creating. And he sees the spheres as this kind of greenhouse that we build.

He says, I think, air conditioning at one point. But it's not just this matter of like complexity reduction and and trying to like have an easier life the spheres are like also characterized by this kind of complex interplay of multiple perspectives and possibilities which allows for a flexible and creative response to different kinds of situations to new. So it's a mode of being, um, which I think is why he says that he is basically writing where Heidegger started to get it wrong because Heidegger is into, you know, Dasein, right? You know, being, uh, how to, how to let being be, or you rest being into being. And I think that's what he means here is the

spheres aren't just about like, here's a clump of beliefs to reduce anxiety. It becomes a new mode of being human, of being self that has to be shared or else we don't feel like it's real. So it's this messy meshing of subject and object, subject and objectivity you know that it is my individual like unseen belief but also i have to have multiple people believing that same belief or else it's not a sphere um so you know there's this constant negotiation between the inside and the outside the self and the other and the familiar and the strange that is this ongoing process where we develop identities and positionalities and you know a lot of this again in the language of digital things the legend language of quantum physics right like molecular entanglement you know i think that he never says

that uh in a way that i remember but but like that, not metaphor, but just reference point is there, sphere is there, right? We're in the age where somebody who has a degree in philosophy has encountered this stuff and is going to refer to those concepts as an image in their brain. And so, you know, the spherology offers this radically relational and decentered understanding of human existence, where it challenges all of these, you know, ideas of individual autonomy and territorial boundaries that we want to draw on a map and says, no, we're kind of there's, and I'm granted, I'm, I'm not an expert on this person, but from what I understand, you know, there's this first sphere, which are these bubbles, which is this maternal sphere.

And, or, and it represents this primordial and innate and symbiotic relationship between the mother and the child and the womb and it'seness and unity and it's not terribly complex. Then there's this metaphysical sphere of globes and that sphere emerges with the development of ancient civilizations and it's characterized by this belief in a cosmic order, divine creation, a sense of belonging to a larger whole. It includes this idea of a celestial sphere that encompasses the earth. Even before we knew the earth was a sphere, we talk about the dome, you know, or the firmament. You look up, what do you see with your eyes? You see a ball, right? And that was the world. That was the sphere sphere we were all kind of participating in it and people were roughly aligned into that is what that was our mode of being you know that was

our potentiality and then there's this terrestrial sphere foam and that sphere is associated with this modern era and it's characterized by the fragmentation of the metaphysical sphere into multiple interconnected and overlapping spaces and it's a result of globalization and technological advancement and the proliferation of communication networks and and that you start to get this breaking up of that dome of the earth into these smaller things where people are believing diverse suffocation, diverse philosophies and ideologies. And, you know, there's, there's still a big dome, but we've,

we've broken this communal understanding where we're sort of all under the shared space. And then the digital sphere you know the the continuing degradation of the foam you know by that point he says the digital age represents this existential i mean excuse me this extension of the like terrestrial sphere where virtual spaces and networks create new forms of interconnectedness and globalization. And these spheres, they are characterized by the increasing importance of information, data, digital, and there's a fragment, more of a fragmentation, where we become less and less able to share a language with very many people

at the same time right it's not like you're picking a sphere and then you hop to another one your life is separated into spheres of understanding different things different ways and in the beginning it's almost total overlap you know there is no Venn diagram and then we mean if there was one it was like this is my tribe this is yours or you know i'm dying and you're alive or you're alive whatever you know very simple things under this one cosmology and now like you know you have to believe things about politics about metaphysics about values about life about nationality even if you an American, you have to have different opinions on this war, um, different, uh, opinions about the same religion from within the same religion,

from within the same sect of the same religion. And it's very unlikely that you line up with anyone at all in a way that is completely meaningful and overlapping and, um, all of yourself being present with all of theirs. It's harder to do, right? Or at least it's harder to do in these areas. Um, and, or it's harder to do all at once, if that makes sense. I remember there was this thing that I felt in high school that I was, like, journaling about badly, where I felt like there were people who understood parts of me, but I couldn't really be who all of I was around all of anybody. And I think that that feeling is very modern,

and that he's right there. And I mean, his personality is weird. Like he's a German, he's known for being very unconventional and provocative, you know, as a public persona. His work often blends these elements of like philosophy and psychology and anthropology and cultural criticism. And those make him very difficult to categorize within academic discipline because academia doesn't really like it when you're that integrative because it puts the whole notion of specialization which academia likes into well under a microscope it threatens the way that they want to operate because western academia especially like the language is based on celebrating the person who knows very much about one small area of knowledge.

But if you have a broad knowledge, then academia will at first try and be like, oh, you're just a dilettante. You know a little bit about everything. But if you know a lot about a lot, then you just become a threat to the status quo of that. No, to know a lot means to know a lot about one thing, not a lot about many things. And he's just one of those people, you know, probably similar to Jung who kind of knew too much about too much, um, in a way where he started to make connections at very high levels about very high levels of knowledge that was very specialized. Um, and so I think that is probably why you get ripples of things like quantum mechanics and things like programming and things like cultural anthropology. You know, Jung in there, even though he doesn't always say that's what this is.

He doesn't have to. And this is probably part of his point, right? Like, I think Slaughter Deke wants to deconstruct by, like, dismissing all of these disciplines in a humorous and sometimes flippant way like he's not terribly nice he's also not super self-serious and then um he also rather than like engaging directly with criticisms or clarifying his position he wants to just kind of like throw out this abstract philosophical um like like logic or something. He lodged this ideological explosive at perspectives that he doesn't like, or not even doesn't like, he just thinks are wrong and are failing. And then he wants to retreat to things that he finds interesting that are more speculative.

And like the, to me, like that kind of reminds me of Terrence McKenna, where Terrence McKenna was, you know, the psychonaut in the 70s. He was like wrong about almost everything. But one of the things that makes him still relevant or people like still into him is he was just so open to like any new idea and any new mode and way of being and any possibility like he was studying potentiality in a way that i think was liberating for a generation that was sort of gen xy and they didn't have a voice and um you know they weren't into derrida uh they wanted a more of an experiential thing and mckenna did that and i think slaughter duke is similar to mckenna in that he wants to just say like not this is what the future is but like this is what like it could be. And like, let's just talk about like the potential of where this thing can go.

And he also isn't interested in a way that I like at deconstructing. Like, here's a million reasons that Marxism doesn't work. And then here's a reason that liberal capital doesn't work. And here's let me explain to you the failure of these things. He just sort of takes it for granted that if you're reading it, you know, the stuff that's not working and then it has to be replaced or that it should be or that it could be. And he's not really making a case for like this bad. So this next thing, good. He's just talking about, yeah, you feel that it doesn't work. So let's just talk about the inevitability of change and where that might go um so he's he's a loose

writer you know it's uh he's he's making a net not a cloth and like this ambiguity is compounded um by like his tendency to be ironic or be to use hyperbole and rhetorical devices that challenge you know establish ways of thinking and push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse. And he also, as a poach, is never like, I'm going to reduce this to nothing and take this to a logical extreme. And then I'm not, I'm not just going to like, take this thing apart. I'm going to, I'm going to not reduce it to some logical extreme and then reveal its inherent flaws. He's just like, yeah, these ideologies don't work. Like, look around, they don't. And here's, like, because they're dying, like, what might be coming.

And a lot of times I think what might be coming is scary to him. Like, he doesn't have an answer, but he's saying that, like, we have to have one, so what will it be? A lot of the directions that history moves in are not good. And so, like, in that sense, I think his critique is more gestural, and he's, like, using provocative language and examples to draw attention to blind spots and things. But he's not really associated with any sort of ideology because his persona has to be, you know, deconstructing them.

And so he'll say things that are like wildly right wing fascist left wing concepts. And then he draws a lot of controversy. Like, I don't know everything about him. And like, I'm not going to defend all of it, but I think there's an ideological ambiguity that also isn't avoidant, right? Like a lot of times when people are like, I'm afraid of conflict, so the truth is in the middle. Like he's not doing that. He's just being, I like this, I like that, I like this, I like that. And people are like, wait, those don't fit into a pile together.

And he doesn't care. So, you know, that is interesting too. And I think the reason I'm talking about his persona is because I think it's part of the philosophy because that clashes with, you know, Germany, German culture of, um, you know, like it's known to be a very socially liberal place, um, and values that sort of like social liberality, but also deeply culturally entrenched, um, hierarchies and traditions and structure,

uh, that he's saying essentially like, isn't relevant or real or there are important or eternal in a way that if you've ever been to Germany, um, or, you know, if you,

if you're familiar with German culture would upset a German and has a lot. Uh, so his critiques of society, I think, call for this radical rethinking of human experience. Um, they can be seen as a challenge or an invitation and therapy has to engage with these questions. I don't know where it goes. Like so much of this is about like, where's therapy not being relevant? Where does it go? I think Slaughter Deke is doing that with culture. Um, and remember psychotherapy is a point of culture. He's not terribly well read over here, but that's why I think he's important and relevant to this discussion, because the point of this is not for me to tell you where therapy is going, because I don't know.

It's to tell you the questions, like Plato, that psychotherapy has to address if it's going to stay relevant and if it's going to, like, keep its soul. If it's not just going to become this, like, external apparatus to the medical industry where medicine finds something inconvenient to do and punts it at a social worker. If it's going to be half art, half science in the way that I think it should be, the art and the science have to engage with the things that I've brought up in these four parts. I think. What why they tell you when you're writing an essay never say i think because if you're if you wrote it you thought it um i need

a public speaking class but like for most of his career he was outside of the university and um he basically just sort of wrote himself into relevance because he wrote a 3 000 page book uh lit like literally it's a more than two it's like 2500 something pages um the spheres trilogy and uh there was a philosophical work that was thousands of pages and also sold really well which even germany is hard to do. And so academia sort of had to deal with them. And so the spheres, if you want to look at like, why did I bring that up? What relates these things to therapy is like, I think trauma is something that we could learn a lot from in these things.

And that kind of lends to look at because look at how, you know, somebody doing the same psychoanalysis in the 50s, it no longer worked in the 70s because somebody was saying like, I'm black, I'm a woman, I'm this, and this isn't for me anymore. And then it had to change.

Like, listen to those things in therapy because like what I see is so many people not wanting to engage with this world. And therapists who have been saying to sometimes the same patient for, like, seven years now, just wait until it goes back to normal. Just hang in there and it'll go. It's not going to go back to normal, right? Because, like, when has there been a normal and, like, when has history ever gone back to anything like we have to figure out where we're going which is partially an analysis and understanding of the world which i think is more of a felt sense than an intellectual analytical one

and also what that means for the conception of self that our patients are coming in with and so like when trauma happens what does spheres have to do with trauma, right? Yeah. There's a traumatic event. I have PTSD. I have flashbacks to the PTSD. I want to get rid of the PTSD, you know, something like brain spotting or neurostem or whatever, like, you know, emotional transformation therapy, somatic experiencing, lifespan integration. Now I'm not having the nightmares. Now I don't feel bad, but all of a sudden the trauma is not gone. Can I still call it trauma?

Because I don't feel good. And the reason that I don't feel good is that that experience made me know things about the world that I didn't want to know. I know I know them and I don't feel normal. Can you help me? I don't even know how to say what this problem is to my therapist. You know, and that could be Trump gets elected. I think that Trump is bad. I think that most people who are in my friends and family think that he's bad or the bad is bad, yet they are liking him or something. And then they're telling me all these things that they believe. And before that, I could just be like, well, Republicans and Democrats want the same thing. They just want to go about it a different way or whatever they told me in eighth grade. And then I'm sitting here and no, they don't. They want very different things. And I don't know how to reconcile that because I believe

that I love my grandfather. I believe that all families have to get along in this way. Or I believe that the self is a monad. It's a single entity and it doesn't have multiple parts. And now I'm trying to decide, do I have to cancel Grandan? Or should I just be avoided and pretend that he doesn't say or think any of the things he says and thinks? You know, parts-based therapy can answer that by saying, okay, you can love this person and love their potential and love these parts of them. And you can say, I think you're running from something here.

I don't think what you're doing is loving, not to these other people, but to these other people, because you don't love yourself in this one, whatever. That's an, that's an ability to engage with this process, right? Like most of the things that trauma digs up are not the direct effect it has. It's that it makes ourself change. And we don't want to change ourself because we want the old self back because we know how to be that one. And we don't have the option, right? Of like all believing the same

thing politically anymore. Like not having that anxiety, no matter what you believe, like we don't have it. Like if you're going off and you're going to die in world war one for the Kaiser and you know that you probably are going to die. Maybe you don't like that, but you know, like all of you are going off to do that because it's brave and it's noble and the Kaiser is there for a reason and like he's cool and this is the way the world works and we're all in this sphere. You don't have that ability now. You're either avoiding information about the people who run the world,

or you are letting yourself know it. And either one is creating anxiety, because, like, there wasn't internet. There wasn't someone who had to go, yeah, I'm going to die in this conflict that's going to kill all these people and then the World War I is going to throw this huge existential snowball at philosophy and no one will know why anything exists anymore. But it's fine. I'm happy to do that because I'm reading on the Internet and the Kaiser is just this weird dude who should never have been in charge and isn't a good politician.

And he's obsessed with his mother's hands in a weird way and uh once you have that information you don't want to go die in world war one once the existential snowball like hits europe you can't go back and have world war one again you know you have to have world war two very different wars and it's not because technology changed it's because the spheres changed about why we did things and who we thought we were and and these cultural traumas do the same thing as individual traumas and where all of a sudden like i don't know who i am anymore and i think that that is something that has to be a part of where therapy goes. You know, you can see through the lies of society now, for the lack of a better word.

And now what you're having is people have to accept too much and they have to understand too much. I didn't have to know how politics worked. I didn't have to watch CNN. I didn't have to have an opinion on the war, right? In Germany, like, I just went out and died. And while maybe that sucked, it wasn't complicated. Now it is. It's complicated to be alive. Like, if you think one of these sides of politics going on now, pick a side, doesn't have to be American, whatever. This one's good and an angel and that one's bad and it's a devil and this one wants to

help me and that one wants to hurt me. No, like this is a bloody compromise and people are starting to realize that whether or not they admit it and it's making everyone incredibly anxious. And one of the ways of conceptualizing that anxiety is that there are all of these spheres. If you're a Democrat, if you're a Republican, or if you're whatever, you have to have an opinion on like 800 million issues, and I don't even overlap with the other people in my party or my church. Again, the Venn diagram used to be that everyone was in a circle, and then the circle became a Venn diagram, and then it became, you know, a Venn diagram with three, four, five, six, and now it's a foam. And like, how unlikely is it that I line up with anybody who believes these shared things? Is there a community that can transcend that thing that can overlap through those things?

You know, a definition of self that can do something like that. And also, you know, that kind of conception of trauma, like gives you a way into thinking about implicit memory. You know, that a lot of the things that we actually believe, we don't know we believe, you know, no, no, no, I'm not mad. I'm not mad. I'm not mad. I'm not mad. Stop asking me if I'm mad. I've had a hard day. I did all these things. I come home and I didn't want to do any of them. I stopped by the store for you. And now you're here asking me if I'm mad. Well, I think you were mad, man. Like, I think you just didn't know it. I mean, these are the, so many of the things that we're digging out of people to help them understand

and deal with our emotions that we don't know we're feeling, you know, they're, they're not explicit, they're implied. And, and because of that, you know, implication, we don't always know the sphere that we're in. Implicit memory is encoded with the brain through these repeated experiences and interactions with the environment. It creates these neural networks and those associations operate automatically and without conscious effort. These memories from the basis of our habits and skills and our emotional responses they're all tied to these specific spheres and contexts you know i get excited when i hear communism or i get angry because communism's bad you know that relates to a kind of emotional encoding that we don't get at with logic. And, you know, for example, like a person

who grows up in a family sphere, that's got emotional neglect. I mean, they may have implicit memories of isolation and worth unworthiness. And why, why wasn't I special enough for somebody to notice me that shape their relationships and expectations when they're talking to somebody in a Walmart and they're not making eye contact and they're not doing this, you ask them if they're fine, but they don't know that the base of their brain is assuming all of these things because of the sphere of like what family and relationship is. And, you know, um, the, the, the idea of immunology is that there's this, that Slaughter, Decazes, this idea of idea of defense of a sphere that can be seen as, you know, analogous to the unconscious defenses of the psyche, that a lot of the ways that the

sphere reacts defensively to attack or exclude people or neutralize perceived threats or try and like embrace and take over another sphere like a cell those are ego defenses right but their ego defenses played out at the societal level so you may hate slaughter deke's thing like you may choke on all that and be like why would you need this weird language and that's fine um you know not all of it is 100 for me um but what I'm trying to do is take a lot of different people who are feeling the same thing and then collect their languages and put them in these kind of verbal essays so that maybe somebody who's not geared to, you know, hear this as a Jungian perspective or something can kind of hear it and get into it. Um, but I think what therapy needs to be

is this kind of safe, supportive therapeutic sphere that is bigger. That just says like, you can go into these places where there is somebody who maybe like in the old world, a shaman used to be like, I'm not a huge advocate for returning all the way back to old school shamanism techniques. Some people do that. That's fine. I don't think that that's going to transform the profession, right? But in a modern way, like a shaman, these people are holding space for a bigger sphere where everyone is welcome, where you won't be judged, where they're not pretending that they know the answer, where they're not explaining all of these things to you, where they're just making room for yourself as you need to recontextualize it and reconceive of it and learn to self-reflect and self-regulate

and hear the music of the spheres, man, like all of these things conjuncting. I think that's the role. I hesitate to call that something like neo-shamanism or whatever and leak myself too much to that, but I think that there's an idea that this is a place that is a break that is outside time where you find you. It's something that therapy used to say better and louder and be associated more with. And we've turned it into something that is more practical and empirical and transactional that it always, it will never get away from those things entirely. Um, but that we've made them the point, uh, we've let them take over the sphere of mental health as we conceive of it and its goals too much so one of the things that's

kind of interesting about slaughter duke too is that like he criticizes that the past generation especially of like lefty leaning philosophers have been really good about diagnosing like all of the problems and directions that society is going but they have no solutions to make it go back. They're criticizing things, but they haven't really built a path towards anything, even like a blueprint. And you could say the same thing about him because he shies away from kind of a concrete vision of the future or even like a concrete vision of the past. Uh, but he does have these ideas for how to reduce the anxiety of the foam, you know, and like a way according to his ideology. And a lot of those things I think are relevant to psychotherapy.

And one of them is that he says we have to reconnect with this maternal sphere and remember, you know, and it can be a spiritual vision for you. It can be a part of your faith. It can also be, I think, cultivated in a secular space where you say, let's go back to the place where we were in the womb, um, where we had like nurturing intimacy and this sense of belonging in a world that feels fragmented and disconnected um we can cultivate this healthier sense of space and relationship and we need a place where there's kind of like safety and comfort and where the tension from the foam turns off and we're just back with the one we also like have to reinterpret i think the way that or you know he says the way that the metaphysical sphere operates like the the traditional metaphysical sphere may no longer

be relevant um and we can still find meaning and purpose by engaging with art culture and philosophy as new spheres but we have something that doesn't really celebrate like art and culture and philosophy anymore. Like our culture largely is faced based around what people can create. And a lot of the community spaces or artistic practices that we had like went away after COVID, um, you know, digitally, analogically, he he's suggesting pathways, but he doesn't have kind of practical ways that you could do that. But those, there needs to be some reconnection with a larger whole, I think is the broader point of what he's saying and maybe the broader point of what I'm asking psychotherapy to do. And so navigating that foam, you know, one of the things he says is that the modern world is characterized by all these spaces, networks, identities.

But to have a healthier sense of self, we need to learn to navigate the spheres and find meaningful connections. That we have to kind of hop between them or make them blur together a little bit more. And find some kind of coherence, even though the world is fragmented, that makes living in multiple spheres, cause that's not going to go away, makes sense to us. And we have to harness the potential or make that be less fragmenting. Um, he sees, he's not afraid of technology. Um, he sees a lot more potential digitally, even like weird avenues of like that, that i don't really see is like relevant to psychotherapy or possible of like he sees like genetic engineering or cybernetically linking brains together or something it's some way of creating some new thing i think that is more of

a meditation on possibility for me that's where that works i don't see those digital tools as something you can do but like he's he's not afraid of them. Um, and then the bigger idea of making immunity somehow, you know, maybe psychotherapy's role is to make immunity, you know, and he argues that, you know, in a world where there's global risk and uncertainty, we have to develop that sense of immunity, not just in the biological sense, but also in our ability to like adapt and create boundaries and maintain a sense of immunity not just in the biological sense but also in our ability to like adapt and create boundaries and maintain a sense of identity in the middle of change one of the reason the self is so hard to navigate is because the world is changing so fast

i mean there used to be like you could spot 20 year culture cycles cycles, and then you get up to the 50s, 40s, well, I guess maybe the 20s. But things start changing really noticeably every 10 years. Now it's like things are different in two months. Style, not just like the news cycle. I mean, like, style is moving at light speed, you know? Like, aesthetic things that used to take a long time to change. And we have to find some kind of permanence.

I think we have to find something that doesn't because that pace of culture is probably not going to slow down. And psychotherapy as it moves forward has to be in conversation with that need for stillness. I think more than it is now But you know self is a dialectic process and it emphasizes One thing and then it downplays another and then it downplays what it was just emphasizing. And the parts of self disagree. The self will primarily be this dialogue between an inner world that is just us. But is sort of unexpressible. And unshareable in a way that is isolating and upsetting. and then also this external world and in that external world

um we are sort of irrelevant in a way that we don't want to be you know so much of these like neuroses and false quests for immortality building pyramids or hoarding wealth or whatever uh hoarding anything really i think becomes this like need to last more than we can in the external world. You know, um, Robert Pogue Harrison says in his book that like the site of ruins is upsetting and evocative. And like, we put that on places of contemplation, just like an old Greek temple with like Ivy on it and light streaming through, because it makes us remember that no matter, not just that it makes us remember that no matter not just that we die but that no matter what we do no matter what we build it will just kind of be

eaten by the earth in a way that makes us reflect and also makes us calm and there may be something about an awareness and a relationship with death and impermanence that becomes the thing that therapy needs to embrace that can give us a sense of permanence, there might be something there. But when we focus too heavily on this inner world, we risk losing the sight of the important role that both worlds play, that the outside world affects the inner world, the self is affected by the world that it inhabits. And if we become overly absorbed in our inner world, we become disconnected from the reality of our surroundings and the basic necessities of life, where we feel like we have magical powers in an external sense that

our ego inflation are not real. I think the key to a healthy and authentic self is this ability to engage in the dialectical process of being aware of the waxing and waning and the transitions of kind of who you are. It's not getting somewhere. It's not scratching symptoms off a list. It's not even feeling a certain way. It's a sort of presentness that is very hard to articulate. And it's an awareness that is very hard to explain. And I don't know. So to wrap up, there's the philosopher A, the, um, philosopher Ayn Rand. This might be apocryphal, but I've heard it, a different version of it from a couple of people who kind of fell out with her at the end of her life. She died, um, in the eighties and, uh, she was, had kind of fell out with almost everybody.

Um, but when she was older, there is like a quote that has been shared a couple times that i've heard where people would ask her in an interview or privately in a qa or something or you know in a qa or privately or whatever like you know you have all these ideas about politics and objectivism and they've had this big effect on the world and silicon valley's a thing and the government's very right-wing and like what do you like what do you uh think about that um you know how do you feel about the fact that when you die there'll be this legacy you left behind that a lot of people are saying is not good or it's controversial whatever and what she said was some variant of when when I die, there is no world.

Or when I die, the world will go away with me. Because I think when you were a purely objectivist like Ayn Rand was, you mistake the subject for the object. And when Ayn Rand says that she will work for no other man's happiness and no other man can work for hers, I mean, she means more than politics there. She means that she is fundamentally alone and that there's probably a clue early in her, one of her journals, she says that she wanted to call objectivism realism, but then she realized that realism was already taken and associated with all this stuff that she hated and didn't think was quote unquote real. And I think there's a clue there because fundamentally Ayn Rand thought that she was the only thing that was real. And the subject agency, you know, of ego self was so overpowering that no one else had a right to soul. No one else really existed

unless they were aligned with her fundamental self interest, which was the only sphere that she inhabited. Even if they were lovers and friends or students or successors. These people were just kind of tools for your rational self-interest. And so sometimes they overlapped with yours, but ultimately it was just that. It was just a temporary alignment of each individual moving towards a rational self-interest. And when you die, that rational self-interest ends. And it has no more need for a relationship with a world that never really, you know, was you anyway. That clip at the beginning was James Dickey

the author who wrote Deliverance and several other things talking about poetry with Robert Penn Warren Penn Warren wrote the last poem that I closed the series with I'm going to read one more by him to close this one. His stuff is hard to find. The stuff that isn't digitally available is kind of lost. You

can't really get his books. You know, if you find books of his poetry, they're usually pretty expensive. I used to have some that I've lost, unfortunately. But this one is called A Way to Love God. And that clip from Dickie and Penn Warren talking comes from YouTube. And it's funny, they had these conversations and it was you know pretty much at the end of dickie's life and warren lived a little bit longer but dickie drank himself to death um he actually died right after he spoke at swanee which was my school i mean i didn't see him or anything i was a kid but um that was the last thing he did and they had an interesting chemistry that i think got at something

that I was trying to say with this. But here's Penn Warren, A Way to Love God. Here's the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true, and the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific first leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know about submarine geography and your father's death rattle. Provides all biographical data required for the who's who of the dead. And I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least I can say how night long I have lain under the stars and heard mountains moan in their sleep.

By daylight, they remember nothing and they go about their lawful occasions or not going anywhere except in slow disintegration at night. They remember, however, there is something they cannot remember. So moan. Theirs is the perfect pain of conscience, that of forgetting the crime. And I hope you have not suffered it. I have. I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but I urge you to think on the slug's white belly how slick and soft. On the hairless star's silver, silver while the silence blows like wind. And on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled to give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon.

And in the distance in plaza, piazza, place, plats, and square, boot heels like history being born on cobbles bang, everything seems an echo of something else. And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head of Mary of Scots, the lips kept moving but without sound. The lips, they were trying to say something very important. But I had forgotten to mention an upland of wind-tortured stone, white in darkness and tall. But when no wind mist gathers, and once on the saray at night, midnight, I watched the sheep huddling, their eyes

stared into nothingness, and in the mist-diffused light their eyes were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water, or of a scholar who has lost the faith in his calling and their jaws did not move. Shreds of dry grass, gray in the gray mist, light hung from the side of a jaw, unmoving. You would think that nothing would ever happen. That may be a way to love God. And this time, this point, I will not explain. This one I wrote to Red Warren and dedicate to him. He writes wonderfully about hawks. His totem bird, the thing overhead, you know, in wings, is the hawk. Mine is the buzzard. And so this is about going with your friend and climbing a mountain in North Georgia.

This is a place near Hogback Ridge. And the friend, impersonated by Mr. Warren, this never happened, but it's gonna, you know, has some beer because he likes to, you know, drink beer. And I do too, but I can't drink it because I'm sick, you see. And I'm on these diets and all that stuff, and I gotta keep my blood sugar at a certain level and all that stuff, you know. And it's about that, and it's about that and

it's about the throwing out the window of all of that medical business you know and just doing what's right you know what you want to do you know well you know whether the buzzards come or not this is called under buzzards dedicated dedicated to Robert Penn Warren and it goes like this heavy summer heavy companion if we climb our mortal bodies high with great effort we shall find ourselves flying with the life of the birds of death. We have come up under buzzards. They face us slowly, slowly circling, and as we watch them, they turn us around, and you and I spin slowly, slowly rounding out the hill. We are level exactly on this moment, exactly on the same bird plane with those deaths they are the salvation of our sense of glorious movement brother it is right for us to face them every which way and come to ourselves and come from every

direction there is whirl and stand fast whence cometh death, O Lord? On the downwind riding fire of Hogback Ridge. But listen, what is dead here, they are not falling, but waiting, but waiting, riding. And they may know the rotten, nervous sweetness of my blood. Somewhere riding the updraft of a far forest fire, they sensed the city sugar the doctors found in time. My eyes are green as lettuce with my diet. My weight is down, one pocket nailed with needles and injections, the other dragging with sugar cubes to balance me in life and hold my blood level, level. Tell me, black riders, does this do any good? Tell me what I need to know about my time in the world.

Oh, out of the fiery furnace of pine woods, in the sap smoke and crown fire of needles, say when I'll die, when will the sugar rise boiling against me and my brain be sweetened to death? In heavy summer, like this day. All right, physicians, witness. I will shoot my veins full of insulin.

Let the needle burn in. From your terrible heads the flight blood drains and you are falling back, back to the body raising fire. Heavy summer, heavy. My blood is clear for a time. Is it too clear? Heat waves are rising without birds, but something is gone from me, friend. This is too sensible. Really, it is better to know when to die, better for my blood to stream with the death wish of birds. You know, I had just as soon crushed this doomed syringe between two mountain rocks and bury this needle in needles of trees. Companion, open that bill. How the body works, how hard it works for its medical books is not everything. Everything is how much glory is in it. Heavy summer is right for a long drink of beer.

Red sugar of my eyeballs feels them turn blindly in the fire, rising, turning, turning back to Hogback Ridge, and it is all delicious, brother. My body is turning, is flashing unbalanced sweetness everywhere, and I am calling my birds. Thank you.