TrueLife - Dr. David Salomon - Integration

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/It is my privilege to introduce Dr. David A. Salomon, a distinguished scholar and educator whose career embodies a deep passion for the history of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. With a foundation in English literature, Dr. Salomon has spent over two decades inspiring and challenging students, first at Black Hills State University and then for thirteen years at The Sage Colleges, where he served in various leadership roles, including department chair, director of study abroad, and faculty advisor.Dr. Salomon’s journey is a testament to his dedication to interdisciplinary education and academic excellence. As the founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity at Christopher Newport University, he continues to champion intellectual curiosity and guide students in their search for truth. His contributions to academia include several published books, such as The Seven Deadly Sins: How Sin Influenced the West from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era and An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria as Medieval Hypertext, reflecting his deep interest in medieval and Renaissance literature, religion, and culture.Beyond his scholarly achievements, Dr. Salomon has made a significant impact as Chair of the Undergraduate Research Programs Division of the Council for Undergraduate Research, a co-founder of the Network for Undergraduate Research in Virginia, and a member of the Foundation Board for the Newport News Public Library. His work embodies a commitment to fostering curiosity, expanding knowledge, and inspiring future generations of thinkers.Please join me in welcoming Dr. David A. Salomon, a true advocate for the transformative power of education and a guiding light in the pursuit of truth and wisdom. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Fearers through ruins maze lights my war cry born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope that everyone is having a beautiful day. I hope that the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the wind is at your back. I got with me a friend of the show, a friend of mine, an incredible individual. Sorry about that.

I have one more. Okay. For those longtime listeners of the True Life podcast, you will know a huge favorite of mine. And as someone who is a great author, a distinguished scholar from a distinguished scholar with a passion for the history of ideas. and a profound commitment to education. With an impressive academic career, he has served as professor of English at Black Hill State University, the Sage Colleges,

and now at Christopher Newport University, where he is the founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity. Throughout his journey, Dr. Solomon has championed the pursuit of knowledge, embodying what Socrates called a cooperative search for the truth and his students and colleagues, and we're so thankful to have him here today. His new book, Why Sin Still Matters, is a must read.

I would suggest everybody, within the sound of my voice, run out and grab it now. It'll make you a better person. Dr. David Sullivan, how are you today? Good, good, good. It's good to see you again, George. It's been a while. Yeah, it sure has. It sure has. We, previously, we had gone deep into, you know, different sort of mystics that we talked about. We had a series on that. And I just kind of wanted to, the word integration has been coming up with me. I've been talking to a lot of people in the startup community who are working on different ways of working in a psychedelic community. But this idea of integration has been something that has been at the forefront of my awareness.

And I wanted to talk to you about it today. I know that you are such an incredible scholar on medieval mystics and literature. And you speak all these different languages. I thought who better a person to talk to about integration? So let me just kind of leave it there for you. When I say integration to you, what do you think about? Yeah, well, I mean, we were talking offline a little bit. and, you know, the sort of the idea of how we might blend together some of the spiritual practices that we've talked about often with everyday life.

And the ways in which people have done that in the past, recent past, and the movement that's afoot, it seems today, to have people really re-engage in those kinds of spiritual practices, reconnect with nature and the world. world. And so I've been actually talking about that quite a bit with my honors class this semester. We've been, we've kind of tackled the topic of civility and how we can reintroduce civility into the world. And so we've been touching on a lot of issues that relate to how technology dominates modern life and how that really, in a lot of different ways, it serves as a, as, as, a challenge and an obstacle to really having a better understanding of who you are as a human being. And my students have really embraced this. I've been very impressed.

I mean, we're only in the six week of class, I think. And we're having some really good discussions. And their eyes are being open to some things that they hadn't thought about previously. I'll give you one example. So one of the very first things I had them do was something which is completely counterintuitive to their daily lives. So we have a really great art gallery on campus here and just opened a few years ago. And our current exhibition is the sculptures of a woman named Anna Hyatt Huntington. Most people haven't heard of her, 20th century American sculptor.

She was actually from this area, from Newport News. and for a while in the early 20th century, she was one of the most famous female sculptors, if not just sculptors in the world. Her work was being displayed everywhere. It's really impressive. It's mostly animal sculpture. Okay.

So we have a show that's ongoing right now in our gallery. It actually closes next week, which is essentially a kind of a retrospective of her work. It's an amazing show. that our curators put together. They ended up borrowing pieces from 33 different museums. And it chronicles her work from her early days until her death, really.

So I had my students do something I was calling the patience exercise. They were to go over there to the exhibit and were to take 25 minutes and pick out a particular piece that they thought was, striking. I mean, they were to walk through the entire gallery and then pick out a piece that they thought was particularly engaging and sit in front of that piece for 25 minutes. No phones, no earbuds, no distractions, and just kind of record what they were experiencing and what they were feeling and then reflect on that a little bit. And then they wrote that up. And their responses were really interesting. I mean, they had said, I mean, that is something that they've never done before. They hadn't realized some of them said how much of an intrusion their phones were into their lives

until they forced themselves not to look or use them for a finite period of time. I really encouraged them to have a sensory experience to engage all their senses. So just know, what did you hear? Yeah. You see. and it was it was it was really kind of eye-opening for them and and and an eye-opening for me as well and and so I think that speaks to this idea of integration you know because my goal with that exercise and with a lot of the other things that we've been talking about in the course is trying to get

them to re-engage with the world around them and to figure out how to better integrate daily spiritual practice, regardless of what that might look like, into their lives. And, you know, maybe that is just occasionally saying, you know what, I'm having a really rough day. I need a break from everything. I'm going to go over to the gallery and just sit in the gallery for 20 minutes. Because I've done that. Yeah.

I mean, you know, and I guess part of it, well, no, I think I'd come up with the exercise before I did it. But there was a point in the last eight weeks or so when I was just, everything was just sort of coming at me. And it was overwhelming. And I was like, you know what? I need a break. And so I walked over to the gallery without my phone. And I sat down in front of one of the pieces for about 20 minutes.

And it was a kind of a reset for the day. It was almost a mental high colonic, right? Right. and just sneering out the cobwebs. And it's also, you know, and the other, one of the other things that we've been focusing on is the importance of focus and attention. Yeah. And, you know, they read a chapter from Jenny Odell's book, which is called How to Do Nothing.

And I'm having them read some Alan Watts. So, you know, various things. They can sort of figure out, how do you engage without, you know, these damn things? Yeah. And because they don't know any other way. Their generation that grew up with cell phones, you know, most of them got their first cell phones, they tell me when they were in third or fourth grade. Yeah. Which, you know, it's kind of mind-boggling, but, I mean, that's part for the course these days now.

And it becomes an appendage. It becomes an extension. You know, I mean, it's trying to remember. I think Ron Debert talks about this in his book. He talks about the fact that basically we've already become cyborgs. You know, because we, this is really become an extension of our person. You see people walking around and, you know, God forbid they don't have their phone with them. I agree.

It is a dumb phone. There's a much smart about it. I mean, it's funny that you say that lighter because when we first introduced the, what we were calling smart boards into the classroom, it was funny because I would go into a classroom and not all the classrooms had them. And so, you know, it was a big whiteboard in front of the room. And I always wonder, you know, is this a smart board? And, you know, I would tap it.

And I go, no, it's a stupid board, you know. You can't do anything. But, yeah, so that's kind of what I've been working on lately. And, you know, it really does sort of connect with a lot of things that we have talked about the past. You know, I was thinking in particular about somebody like Thomas Merton, who lived his life as a mystic, basically, a highly spiritual person. And Merton, who was a trappist monk living in America, even though he was born in France. And he, you know, really embraced in the 1960s in particular pacifism and civil rights and nonviolence. He opposed nuclear arms.

And he wrote 50 books about a variety of topics. But most of them emphasize the importance of contemplation in daily life. And he does have at least one book where he does that. a crossover into Buddhism. He had a, I think he co-wrote a book with, with Suzuki, if I remember correctly. But this, all of these themes of kind of inner stillness and mindfulness, there are things that are back again in the, in the popular conscience, embracing silence, contemplative awareness, social justice, right? I mean, and the connections between all of these things.

and I just think it's kind of interesting how somebody like Merton and certainly there are others really aim to try to set an example of how you could affect that integration, as we're saying. Yeah, it's fascinating to me to, I'm getting the idea in my mind of what Victor Franco called that moment between stimulus and response. It's like once you, and that in itself, the awareness of that moment is spiritual in itself. It's almost like you're reconnecting with your ability to a higher awareness because you're like, I have a choice in this. I can put the phone down. I can sit in front of this painting, which may be 20 minutes, but it could feel like an hour. I could feel like 40 minutes.

And the clarity or peace of mind that's achieved in that moment. And then it can be reached back to on some level. It's almost like a state of awareness that you're building. And maybe that's what's hatred feed from us in a long time. Yeah. And one of my students noted that last night we were talking about the problems with the cultivation of rare earth metals and the like and all these technological devices that we have and what it's doing to the earth. I showed them the Google Earth shot of buy an oboe in China and the strip mines that are sitting there that just look like pox in the earth, you know. And one of my students interesting, she said we were talking about consumerism and how that's really driving everything.

And she said, yeah, she said, this class has really made me stop before buying something and taking a beat and saying, wait a minute, do I, do I really need that? Whereas, you know, normally we live in such a consumerist society. We don't give much thought to that. As you say, that moment between stimulus and response, right? We do everything in a knee-jerk way. And part of that is the current movement that's about slowing down, right? We live in such a fast-paced world.

And if we slow down, we can make better decisions. and we can realize, as you just said, that we do have choices. Yeah. It makes me wonder when we start talking about the world we live in in consumerism, I can't help but think of fear. Like it seems to me that fear is the salesman of consumerism. You know, he comes out there, you're not enough. You don't have this.

You'll never be this. And in some ways, what we're talking about, this integration, it's, it is the, sitting in front peacefully in front of fear and be like, okay, I'm not afraid of you. Standing in front of fear seems to be the antidote to consumerism on some level. Is that makes sense? Yeah. I mean, walking into a store and looking at something and walking away without buying it is like, I mean, for some people, that's like a tremendous accomplishment.

Yeah. Because they're just not used to doing that, you know. Right. And it's, it just speaks to, you know, And so you say, so one of the things we watched last night in class was I showed them an ad for a new television. The ad ran in 1958. It's a great ad. It's on YouTube.

It's a for Philco, P-H-I-L-C-O, Philco TV, a 1958 ad. And it presents this new television as if it's the Ark of the Covenant. It really does create this kind of mystical, I mean, way that it's shown, people are kind of walking around it. It reminded me of the, of the, the, the, uh, the apes at the beginning of 2001, right, find the monolith. It's like they're walking around and looking at it. It's like, what is this? Oh, my gosh. And the great tagline in the commercial was 1958. And it said, it's 1958, but you'll think it's 1965. So this technology that they were introducing was a whole seven years ahead of its time. But you

had to have this, you know. And it, and this is part of, you know, in the 1950s, the baby boom generation and the rise of affluence after World War II. And the fact that people were buying, buying, buying, because they could. And in some ways, we're living, excuse me, we're living in that time again, because, you know, for most folks and probably most folks who are listening to us, we come from or we live a somewhat privileged life. Yeah. You know, and a somewhat affluent life. And as a result, that really does have an impact on not only on us, but on the world around us.

You know, I don't know if you've seen the documentary. It's a great documentary that came out right after COVID. It's called Year the Earth Changed. It's on Apple TV. It was an Apple produced, narrated by David Attenborough. It's a nature documentary about the way the world changed during COVID and the way nature reacted. It's brilliantly done. As I say, I showed it in class the last week and it was the third time I've seen it.

And my students were incredibly enthralled. In fact, when it was over, and it's only 48 minutes long, when it was over and the credits were running, I got up to turn the lights on and they were just all sitting there. I said, I've never heard you all so quiet. I said, what's your reaction? Because the point of the film is that during COVID, the animal world reacted in a way that basically was, if they could speak, was where the hell did everybody go? And it shows how they adapted to this new situation where there were no people around. And it also shows how some animals were able to re-engage in the kinds of existences that they had

thousands of years ago probably before people were intruding. And so when we were done, I said to my students, I said, so, you know, what do you think? How does this make you feel? And, you know, they admitted that, I mean, it was a little depressing. And it is a little depressing. And one of them said, you know, it tells us that, you know, we really have to. up the world, and we have. But it does end on a somewhat positive note, which is, you know, we can change some of this, even if we just change it in just a minute way, it can make a big

difference. So to give you an example, one of the things they show is turtles on the beach. I forget what country it's in because it's all over the world that they travel. The turtles, they come on the beach to lay their eggs. And, you, you know, Usually the beach is completely taken up with tourists. Well, the tourists were gone. So now it was more likely that the turtles were going to hatch and survive. And the whole message of it is really kind of interesting. The year the earth changed on Apple TV.

And I'm not getting any kickbacks. Although David Adpon would be liked to, you know. George has my name. Yeah. But it's just, you know, so I think if we, I mean, I'm in higher ed. So, I mean, I try to be more intentional and conscious of what I'm putting in front of my students. And I'm not proselytizing. I'm not a Luddite.

I'm not saying, you know, all technology is bad. It's just like we talked about with the medieval mystical way. You know, there's there's there's complete complete um, um, complete, um, a complete ascetic where you just, you know, live like a, a recluse in a room by yourself. And then, you know, the polar opposite is, well, you're just out in the world and every day and so engaged. And the medieval mystics wanted to find what they call the via media, the middle way. Right. And that's what we need to find to,

day and we have a lot of hard time doing it because you know again one of my students last night said because the problem is that we see everything as black and white we don't see the shades of gray we're very polarized in many ways right and politically as well we have a hard time seeing that middle way and that's really what we need to refine yeah that brings up a lot of i've been thinking about this idea about technology rewilding COVID and all the technological mediums that are sort of popping up. And this is something that's kind of, I've been, this question is coming to me now as you're talking. It was philo-Judeus who said that the next logos will be a language to be beheld. And it seems to me on some level with the

technology we have, while maybe making us atrophy in some levels, your ability to put on a somewhat spiritual movie that speaks the language of the earth and shows that to your students. Are we on the cusp of like a new language? It seems to me for the first time we're beginning to have meaningful communication where people can thoroughly understand the message. And I think the technology is part of that, like the imagery is coming forth. What would you take on that? I mean, I would agree with that.

I think we're a long way from getting there because it's going to have to do somehow intrude upon the mainstream. And I don't know if we're there yet. I mean, that's part of the reason why I chose civility as a topic for this course. We've got the election coming up. And, you know, the death of civil discourse is just mind bogg. Yes. And my fear, and I was afraid of this, you know, years ago, was that,

this is what our kids were learning, right? I mean, you know, George, you're old enough to know the CSNY teach your children, right? You know, teach your children well. And it's, you know, what are we teaching our children? And that's something that has, you know, bothered me for some time now when it comes to our political realm. I grew up, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s, and one of the most transforming events in my youth was the resignation of Richard Nixon. That sounds odd. You're like, well, why would that bother a kid? Because up until that time, I had really believed, and I know it's a myth, but I had believed it, that the president was the president. he could pretty much do no wrong.

You know, I didn't think he was infallible, but, you know, I held the president up as someone to be respected and admired. And the fall of Richard Nixon, which coincided with a time in my life in my intellectual and emotional development, when I came to the realization that my father wasn't a God, Those two things together, holy crap, those really pulled the rug out from Andeya. And I don't think in many ways that mainstream American society has really ever recovered from what happened with First Kennedy and the supposed cover up of the assassination and whatever, what did really happen. and then Nixon. And then it's just now it's just been, it's like we're just on a conveyor belt.

It's just like, okay, what's next? You know, okay, so Mayor Adams of New York City is indicted on felony chart. It's like, what's going on? What's going on? And then when we look at how that then overlaps with the incredible lack of civility in public discourse today, the fact that a former president who is currently running for president can refer to his opponent as mentally impaired. What is that?

I don't know what kind of world that is. And I think that, you know, I think you're right. I mean, I love that line from Philo about, you know, the next. The next logos. Right. And, you know, I think that that will come. I think it's just, it's going to be slow. Because these kinds of things that we're talking about are culture changes.

And changes in culture, they take a long time. They don't happen overnight. You know, you could argue it took us a long time to get to this point. It's going to take us a while to get out of it. Yeah, it's like that big the big container ship or any kind of a cruise ship like you can turn it around but or an aircraft carrier you can turn it around but it doesn't happen that fast and no no it's slow and and the and the the the the the ripple effect speaking of yes you know it doesn't it doesn't automatically subside right away yeah I mean there's still a wake that you have to deal with you know as a Hawaii guy yeah you know and you know and you're. And so, you know, it's not an instant. And so I think we, I think we wish it would be. I wish it, you know, I wish we could just hook a switch.

But we have to just try to make these small inroads, I think, on our, on an individual level in our lives, in the hopes that eventually, you know, it would become a grassroots movement and take over. Yeah. Well, now we're back to Julian of Norwich, who was like, all. will be well, all will be well. You know, and that that brings up the idea of faith. And I see it from where I sit in the people that I talk to is this sort of reembracing of spirituality. And it comes with rewilding, the same way that documentary showed the animals rewilding themselves. I see that as a call to action for us as individuals to sort of rewild ourselves.

That which controlled us or this ideas that we believed in that we gave. so much faith to that these particular political figures would have our best interest in mind. Like that is part of the shift. That's the wake that's moving away from us. And we're like, okay, somewhere we went astray. And it's no one person's fault. It's all of our faults. Like, we let it get to this. And you see the younger generation, in my opinion, that's beginning to reembrace spirituality, whether it's being a judist like yourself, you know, or a embracing these incredible ideas of Sufi poetry and a return to resilience in language and linguistics. Just look at the like the word trans.

It's all over. It's trans this. But is that, isn't that the world talking to us through us? Like we are in a transition period. You know, is that too, is that too heavy or is that too crazy? No, I think that's, that's an astute observation. I think that's, that's probably a good, a good way to look at. You know, we are in a period of transition.

It's on so many levels and in so many spheres. It just, I think the frightening thing about it is that in so many ways, we are in complete control of where that's going to go. And the great fear is what's going to happen. Because, you know, it doesn't always go the way you hope it's going to go. I mean, you know, I was just reading yet again about, you know, the rise of Nazi Germany and how do that happen? Right. You know, it can easily happen.

Right. And if you don't think it can easily happen, you know, turn on the news. But so, you know, so I think there is, you know, you're talking about fear earlier on. I mean, I think there is also a big sort of aspect of fear here of people worrying about what, going to happen you know I mean the the the the the dark humor about it is you know well you know humanity had a good run you know as if this is the end it seems to be as you say a transitional point and the future will probably look quite different and we don't know what that is you know I mean we we have been engaged so much

in the last six months and talking about AI. And oh my God, you know, it's either the savior and the panacea for everything or it's going to kill us all. You know, and again, it's black or white, right? No, there's got to be a way to figure out how we can use this in a way that makes sense for us as human beings. It's here. It's not going away. and we've done that so often in our history with various technological advances

going all the way back to the invention of writing. And it's just I think the difference today is the pace at which it all happens. It just happens so quickly. And the fact that there are more people living on this planet than ever before and we are um we're crowded um and it's it's becoming more and more difficult to find space to truly be alone um there's a there's a guy who does research i forget where he is

i want to say yale but that's i don't think that's right and he does research on natural sound. Okay. Actually, he was mentioned in Hillel Schwartz's book on sound, which is a great book. And, you know, he goes out to look for really the last places where you can just hear only natural sound. Nothing else will, you know, will interject, you know, no hum from electrical lines, no airplane flying overhead. And it's becoming increasingly difficult to find any place like that.

You know, it's why, you know, I was talking with students about this a couple of weeks ago. It's why if the power goes off in your house, all of a sudden it just seems completely bizarre because it really is quiet. And you don't realize how much background noise there is from all of that stuff that's just running, you know, the vampire effect of, you know, the refrigerator and, the lights and et cetera. And the interesting thing is that when that does happen, the first way that you notice it in your house is if you have pets, the pets notice it. Right?

The pets realize it first before you even do. I always think that's kind of interesting at how they react. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, the same thing with earthquakes or any kind of natural disaster. You can see the birds flying away. You're like, uh-oh. Yeah.

I can't help but bring it back to language on some level. Like, have we lost the ability to communicate with nature? And is that the spirituality that we're not only longing for, but we've been missing for so long. Like, even if you sit down in front of a painting, you are sitting down in front of something that you labeled as striking. So someone is finding something that speaks to them on a level that is more than words. And I think maybe we can, I think that this is a pretty good through line. for not only your first book, The Seven Deadly Sins, but why sin still matters. Like, there's a through line to where we're going and a lot of the research you've done on

that. Maybe you could, maybe you could show people that Ariadne thread. Yeah, well, I mean, it's, I mean, really the thing that holds all of my work together is this, this assessment that we need to re-engage in what makes us human beings. Yes. need to reengage in our humanity. And whether that's, I think, in how we treat each other as human beings, but then on another level, it's also then how we treat the natural world. You know, I keep thinking every time there's some horrible natural disaster, I mean,

the hurricane that just went through and just basically has wiped out much of Western North Carolina. It's really unbelievable, which is not far from where I am here in Virginia. it's it's just absolutely incredible i mean the western part of north carolina the state is still saying is closed um don't go there because the road you're you can't get through right um and whenever something like that happens i always think that that's in some way um the goddess telling us you know hey dummies you know what are you doing um and some reaction that the earth is having to the way that we're treating it.

You know, one of the things that's noted in that documentary is that scientists recorded a lower level of sound underground during that COVID lockdown period than they ever had before because things like fracking and drilling and all of that had stopped. And so, you know, he shows this one scene, and forgive me, I just, I can't remember where these places are. I think this was outside Alaska, where white whales, killer whales, are talking to each other and using more extensive language than they'd ever recorded before. because for the first time, the shipping lanes were clear because the ships were all in dry dock because of lockdown. And so they had more freedom. It's just, so I think it is, it does speak a lot about the way.

And I mean, again, this is the kind of the moral of the story in my, in my book is, you know, it's, it's just the way we lead our lives. How do we lead our lives? What decisions do we make about how we're going to. to treat each other and treat the world. And I think that for so many people, they're on autopilot when it comes to that. And what we're talking about is, is taking that beat where you sort of say, wait a minute, stop, I have a choice. Wait a minute. Let me look at the choice, right? Maybe this is the better way to go, right? I mean, as, you know, Robert Frost said, the road not taken, right? You know, I mean, maybe that's the better choice. I mean, he says it made all the difference, right,

in that great poem, that he took the road less traveled by, and that made all the difference. And so I think for a lot of people, that that's something that we can learn, is that, you know, sometimes you don't have to just walk on the same path that everybody else is walking on. Yeah. I'm reminded of the great Arthurian myths, the King Arthur myths, where they, each individual had to go into a part of the forest that they thought was the darkest part for them. And then they would have to, and that's where you find the grail, right? That's where you find that which calls to you is by finding that thing that scares you the most, standing in front of it and making your way on that road less travel.

And the thing is that going down that that path that someone hasn't walked or going into the dark forest, as you say, I mean, it's probably going to scare the crap out of you because you're going to have. have to confront things that you, you know, had never looked at before. You know, Rose reminds me of the great scene and the Emperor strikes back when Luke goes into the cave and finds Darth Vader and he kills him. And when he strikes off his head, it ends up it's Luke. Because what he had to do was he had to confront his shadow cell from a Jungian reading. Yeah.

And really look at that before he could move on. And we don't do that a lot anymore, you know, at least as a rule. it's not something that we often engage in. And now if we do, it has to be an intentional conscious choice to do it. Because the everyday world and everyday life is not going to make that happen for you. You're going to have to make it happen. Because the world would rather you just go out and buy stuff. Yes. Yeah.

I think this brings up a fascinating point right here in that. On some level, I think what we're trying to do is to get the individual, at least from my point of view, it seems like this transition is trying to show the youth the hero's journey on some level. Like, look, you and you alone have to slay the dragon. You and you alone have to figure out what it is that's going to make you the best human. But then you had this radical thing called culture. And culture is like, hey, don't rock the boat. Here's these preconceived cutouts of what you can be in life. Just choose one of those.

But no one, you know, a lot of people get it to their 50s and they realize the corporate ladder that they've climbed is up against the wrong wall. You're just like, what is going on? Maybe this is this right of passage that we see so much in the mystical tradition, this sort of fear and faith, you know, the Yin and Yang coming together. Maybe that's the transition worry. Maybe you could speak to this idea a little bit. Well, it's also about taking a chance, right? I mean, you know, the fact is that that, you know, when we talk about the medieval mystics, in particular, particular, you know, the experiences that they have.

Yeah. If you look at what they went through, I mean, you wouldn't be too much to say that they were brave. Because, you know, when they initially have these experiences, they could easily just say, I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm just going to keep on what I got to do. Block that off. Pretend I don't hear it. But, you know, I think it takes a lot of courage to walk off the path that everybody else is, is walking and walk your own path and make your own path.

Regardless of what that is, whether that's the person who's, you know, as you say, climbing the corporate ladder and realizing he's, I like that up against the wrong wall, which a lot of people do, right? Or even just when you're younger, you know, going into college and deciding that you're going to major in whatever it is and then finding out that that's not your thing. and it takes a lot of bravery to make that decision to change. And I really encourage my students to do that. I tell them when they come in,

if they've already got this notion about what they want to do with the rest of their lives, that's fantastic. But do not be blind to the other opportunities that might pop up, that all of a sudden you might find something that you're like, oh, I didn't even know that existed. And I see students do that all the time. You know, I have a student in one of my classes. She started college as a neuroscience major.

She is currently a major in classics. Nice. How did she get from point A to point B? You know, part of it was taking some classes that she didn't do well in, but also figuring out that that's not what she wanted to do. You know, and being brave. enough to, you know, change trains, right? You know, without a transfer, you know, and to just say, you know, well, this isn't the

right place for me. I'm going to go over there and see what that's like. But that's, that, that takes, that takes courage, whether you're 18 or 50 or 60, right, to do that. I think it takes even more courage if you're 50 or 60. Yeah. I, I, on some level, I feel like it is the. the courage to embrace uncertainty.

And I think that that is what's going to turn this big ship around. And I think a lot of youth are. And I think it's like one, I think that you as a professional, professional as a teacher, as a scholar, are set aside because you have a lineage of with Dr. Sweeney,

I think was one of your mentors. The, uh, and, and beyond that, like in your writings, like you practice what you preach in the, the level of scholar. by the medieval mystics and being able to speak all the languages,

I really think that you are set aside in helping the kids reach this particular activity of finding courage, finding faith. When I read the books, The Seven Deadly Sins or Why Sins Still Matters, there's a very strong connection to faith and courage. And like, that, I think, is necessary in order for us to turn this world we're in around right now. It's a good foundation. Yeah. No, I think you're right.

Right. I mean, it, it is a good time. Yeah. And we've got, we've got a challenging time. It's a challenging time, but we've got, we've got so many opportunities. Yes. To change things. And the question is whether or not we're going to do it. Right. I mean, I now I sound like, you know, I sound like Kamala Harris, but, you know, that, that is, I mean, there are. There's a lot of opportunities. And it's the question about whether or not we're going to be brave to, to take them up.

Yeah. It's, it, I think if people are honest with themselves and they take a moment in, in silence, or they take a moment where they're alone, they can see that the one thing they suffer from is uncertainty. And if you can see that in yourself, you can apply it to the world we live in today. And a lot of people are afraid, but they're, they're afraid of the uncertainty of what might happen if this person's one. What happens if this person's one? What happens if this economy goes down? But the truth is, all you can really control is, is. becoming the best version of yourself and finding the courage to switch from neuroscience to

classics or from classics to neuroscience, whatever one it is. But it is this embrace of uncertainty. And I feel like we're in a right of passage on some level. It seems mystical and that takes us back to integration in some way. Yeah. No, I think that's correct. And it's interesting that it is expressing itself in this generation in a very non-conventionally religious way. They're not flocking to church necessarily, their synagogue or the mosque. They're not

looking to embrace conventional religion, the conventional religion of their parents or their grandparents. They really are looking at spirituality as a separate thing from religion, which is something I've been talking about for decades, right? You know, you can be a spiritual person and not be religious. Right. And I think that this generation, really does understand that. Yeah. It's interesting. I was in a recent podcast,

I was talking with Aitin Koter, who is, he has a platform where they're bringing live shopping. I guess it's like a big craze in China. He was telling about some of the numbers over there and how that source seems to be the future of e-commerce. But in our conversation, he had mentioned to me that the younger generation,

when they look at the ads or when they're scrolling through YouTube or they're looking to buy something, they don't even see the ad. just swipe right through them. Like, nope, add, add, I'm not going to look at any of that. And I thought to myself, like, wow, they're really learning at a level that to try and look for something more meaningful, whether it's in spirituality, whether it's in content. And that gives me hope when I sneeze, people are spending a lot more time online. I don't know if we can fix that, but I think that on some level we're learning to look for meaningful content, which that seems

to be a bonus to me. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think that kids today, especially are much better at at sifting through things. Yeah. Yes. Than probably we were. And it's funny because I've always used for decades, I've used advertising in my classes in some shape or form to show something. And often now I'll say, you know, did you see this ad?

And they're like, no. And I keep forgetting that they don't watch commercial television, which is where they would see most of those ads. you know i i i i showed the um the the the the 1984 ad for apple um you know that ad the big brother ad which only every year starting the super bowl um and we were talking about the you know they they were they were intrigued by the ad um but they also we also were talking about how quickly everything has progressed. So in other words, first I showed them an ad for a Commodore 64,

which I think it was a 1978 ad for Radio Shack or something. And then the Mac ad in 1984. And then I showed them that the Mac PC ads. Remember that campaign? I'm a Mac on PC with, what's his name? Woodman, the writer, yeah. and just, you know, and talking about the fact that all of this has happened very quickly. And if you look at the time period that's elapsed, the amount of time that's elapsed and compare it to the time that elapsed between other incredible changes.

I mean, you know, you look at, you say, you know, the flight was 100 years ago. I mean, you know, that's just, and now we're talking about going to Mars. Yeah. It happens quick. And the fact of the matter is that technology is able to do that more than ever. And as I always say, you know, the question is should we? Right. You know, we don't give ourselves enough space and enough time to think about it and answer that question.

We just say, oh, we can do that. We should. It's like, uh, maybe not. But then it's difficult because, you know, you can't put the tooth. space back in the tube. So, you know, all of a sudden you're going to say, as some talking heads want to upset an op-eds, you know, oh, we should just outlaw AI, you know, it shouldn't be allowed. Like, well, good luck, you know, that's not going to happen. We need to figure out how to how to live with it, maybe how to regulate it. Well, I don't even know if that's possible. But it needs to be a kind

of an agreed-upon attitude about how we're going to use this and allow it to be a factor in our lives. I mean, last year, I wouldn't let my students use AI at all. Right. My syllabus statement was, you can't use. ChatGPT had just come out. I said, you can't use it. After what's gone on in the last six months and a lot of times, talking about it over the summer with a lot of different people. I wrote a new policy for this

year and I'm actually encouraging them to use it now. It's part of their lives and they're going to figure out how to use it. But I have strict guidelines for it and guardrail set up. And if they do use it, they need to note that in their piece that they're submitting, that they use chat GPT to help in the writing of the piece or whatever the case may be. And I've told them that this is probably probably the future. Yeah, of course. That you no longer should overwrite your files when you write. Because you might be called to account for the fact that, yeah, I wrote that.

And the only way you can show that is if you keep your drafts rather than just overwriting the file when you're working on something. Because you can't track the history that way. And I mean, we're seeing cases already where, you know, big name people are being called on the carpet and saying, you know, I think that was written by AI. And it's difficult to to prove. That was tangential. Sorry. No, it's, it's, I think it's right on the money. I read an article a while back where I forgot what school it was, but they said they were no longer going to accept dissertations that that used chat.

You know it was just this huge backlash. Like, what do you mean? I can't use that to write? And I was like, oh, my God, I didn't know. Like, how would you, how can you? And at some level, you know, it passes that sort of touring test. Like, how do you know? So why not you're going to have to embrace it on some level?

Does it seem more creative on some level is the stuff that you're seeing now used in conjunction with chat VT showing a different dimension? Not yet. Okay. Not yet because I don't think that students, I don't think we have figured out how to use it in that way yet. Right. It's so new. And there are so few guidelines in place that it's difficult. And I mean, when it comes to, I mean, let's just stick with chat GPT and not talk about the others because, you know, it's too much.

But, I mean, chat GPT can't, is not creative. And, you know, we know that AI is going to give you the information that's going to make you happy. That's what it's trying to do. And if it has to make that up, it's going to. You know, they call it the hallucinatory piece, right, where it just, it doesn't know, so it makes it up. And we need to really be aware of that and alert to it. I mean, I ran into that, not this past summer, but the year before in the work that I do with high school teachers, chat GPT had just come out and they were all up in arms.

And so I brought it up on the screen. I was doing a consulting job and I brought it up on the screen and I said, okay, you know, what's a text that you often teach? And they said, To Kill a Mockingberg. And so I typed in, you know, give me 10 sources for To Killamockenberg. And it gave us 10 sources. And everybody was like, oh, see, it's horrible. It's horrible.

And then there was a beat. And somebody in the back of the room said, wait a minute. And we looked at the list. They were all made up. They weren't real sources. And so, you know, I mean, it's progressing. But, you know, that was a good example of, you know, it's going to, it wants to please you. Right.

Yeah. I think it was our, I think it was in Tameas where Toth talks about the inventor of a technology is not necessarily the best person to talk about what it's going to end up doing. That's right. That's right. But, you know, then again, I mean, look at how, you know, Socrates was so worried about writing as a thing. Yeah.

So, I mean, any new technology has had that. Yes. Right. I mean, you know, I love the, the article I have at some place, the clip. from the New York Times in the early 1970s of, you know, the high school math teachers on a picket line picketing against calculators. Right. It just, you know, we had to figure out how to use it.

Yep. Yeah, it's so much more manageable when you look at it from that angle of like, okay, here's, here's the next thing. Here's the next thing. And yeah, it's scary because in some level, Maybe it speaks volumes of us as humans of like, it's going to do this. Like it just plays on our fears.

Like we automatically go to the worst case scenario. Like it's going to do this. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Now we do go to worst case scenario. Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe that's what it takes. Maybe that's part of turning the ship around is for us, the people that have seen or are comfortable, we see radical change on the forefront. And we're like, I just finished building this thing. Damn it. Now this thing's coming in. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I remember driving, you know, when I was in graduate school, we drove to, oh, I forget what it was called, but it was one of the big box stores that's all computers. Okay. And we were driving home, and I turned to my wife in the car, and I said, for the next 10 minutes, you have the best technology that's out there. By the time we unbox it, they'll have something new, you know. Yeah. And that's happened. I mean, you know, it's slowed down a little bit now with computers. Right.

Yeah. It's interesting to me just to see all these changes coming. I've walked you up here, David, to the end of the hour. And it's so fast. Our conversations, I'm so thankful that we start off about mystics and we get into technology. But more than that, I think that we're covering a lot of really interesting topics about how life is moving. And I'm just thankful to get to be here with you. But before I let you go, what do you got coming up?

Where can people find you? What are you excited about? The word on the street is you might be consulting for some tech bros here in San Francisco. And what else you got going on? Well, I mean, I'm real excited about my teaching, as I always am. Got good students this semester, which is really nice. Makes it a lot more pleasant to go into class, to be sure. What I've got coming up,

Got some book signings, some other podcast gigs, some more work here with George, I'm sure, coming up. Yes. My wife and I are finishing up a book on Angels and Demons and Pop Culture, which I hope will be out probably next fall. We're just about finished with it. And I'm starting a new project on Carl Jung and San Augustine. So that's a long-term project. that I'll be looking for a a publisher for. Very nice.

Are you going to, is that, are you looking for grad students to help you on that book? Or is that just a solo mission? I'm looking for any, I'm always looking for help. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's that. What is, maybe give us a little, can you give us a little bit more info on that project?

Yeah. So, I mean, I think that both Jung and Augustine have very interesting things to say about the self. And in many ways, what they're saying really does overlap. And so the book that I am proposing basically is Young reading Augustine. Wow. It's almost as if, you know, the reader reading Young through reading Augustine through young, it's a, it's very meta.

But before a general audience, you know, not an academic book, but to look at their ideas about the self and how they are somewhat similar and how they can further help us today. I can't help but bring up this idea of awareness again. What a great way to get to understand two person's point of view. It's like through reading it through that, that sort of lens. Like how did you, is that? What inspired you do that? Have you read something like that before?

Is that something you're seeing with your students? I have. I mean, I mean, in reading, I mean, I've been a big reader of both authors. And just in, I teach a course on Jungian archetypes and in reading, rereading and reading Young and reading more Young all the time. I just all of a sudden it started popping up. It's like, wait a minute, that's Augustine. Augustine says that. And even though Young, I don't think ever cites Augustine. I think he mentions him once in his entire work.

There seems to be a lot of connection there. And, you know, I mean, it would be very Jungian to talk about the synchronicity, wouldn't it? Absolutely. I got our friend Clint Kyle's coming in. I think you've been on his podcast and probably probably will be on there again, I'm sure. Clint, thanks for reaching out. And Clint has an amazing podcast called the Psychedelic Christian podcast where he gets into different mystical experiences. But he's an incredible individual.

I would recommend everybody to go check out Clint. files. David, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Hang on briefly afterwards. To everybody who's spent time with us today, I hope you have a beautiful day. Go down to the show notes. Check out the books already written by Dr. David Solomon. Reach out to him. If you liked what we were talking about today, he does some consulting work. He is hands down, one of my favorite people to talk to. And I'm thankful for your time. That's all we got, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.