Undoctrinate Yourself - #54 - Paul Chek

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

In this episode, I had the honor and pleasure of sitting down (virtually, for now) with Paul Chek, the man who introduced me to the world of holistic health back in 2015 and who changed my life irrevocably as a result. This episode is a masterclass on the study of archetypes through the tarot. We first meander through Paul's motivations and formative experiences, the concepts of archetypes, the heroes journey, rites of passage, and the roles of cult(ure) and religion as psyche-shaping forces. In the last third of the podcast, we go one by one through the 22 cards of the major arcana. I hope you enjoy this, and write down an questions or comments you have as you go because we will likely do a follow up Q&A and/or IG live on this topic to continue the fun and exploration!LINKSSpirit Gym Membership: ⁠https://www.myspiritgym.com/⁠Spirit Gym Podcast: ⁠https://paulchek.com/podcast/⁠Paul's website: ⁠https://paulchek.com/⁠Chek Institute: ⁠https://chekinstitute.com/⁠Jung & Tarot: An Archetypal Journey ⁠https://archive.org/details/jungtarot...

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Undoctrinate Yourself. Today is like a legendary podcast episode for me. I'm sitting down with Paul Check virtually, unfortunately, for now, but we do want to connect in person, hopefully soon. I was on Paul's podcast a few months ago, and it was a very full circle moment for me because when I first started listening to podcasts back in like 2015, Paul was really the one that like introduced me to holistic health. And I felt on the rabbit hole in his work and just, was completely kind of enchanted by it and my life was improved so much as a result of it. And so to come, you know, this way, start my own podcast, be interviewed by Paul and now have him on my show as well. It's really just like a kind of pinch me moment. So I'm so excited to have him on today. And to share him with many of you, I'm sure you are familiar with him, but to hopefully shed some light on things that maybe people don't talk about too much that can be very helpful from a self-development and self-empowerment perspective. And specifically, we're going to be getting into the Tarot today, which, as we chatted briefly before we started recording, a lot of people

think is like devil worship, satanic, like dark. And it just couldn't be further from the truth. So I'm really excited to get into that with Paul today. But first, I just want to welcome you on my show. And just thank you so much for spending the time with me today. Oh, it's my pleasure. I've been waiting to do this with you. And any chance I get to hang out with the great Alexis Cowan is awesome. And my podcast with you is still rocking. People, just ate it up. I wouldn't doubt if it's the most listened to podcast this year, actually. Really? Well, it felt very magical for me, and I got a lot of good feedback. And it just, I feel like we had a really good chemistry in the conversation. We could have talked for

probably double the amount of time, but for a thousand years. Probably, yes. So, yes, just thank you so much for sharing time with me. I know you're a very, very busy man. But I think this work is really important and this message is important. And so maybe we can start by just introducing maybe introduce yourself a little bit for the odd few out that don't know who you are already. And then maybe we can introduce the Toro and just get a broad understanding of what it is before we dive into some of the details around using it as like a practice and a meditation, a tool for self-empowerment. Okay. Well, an introduction to me, how do I do that briefly? Well, I'm a holistic health practitioner by license. my career now spends 41 almost 42 years it's 42 years in January

I was raised on a fully functional working farm on Vancouver Island British Columbia 142 acre farm where I really learned a lot about the cycles of life and death and how energy works and flows in nature and things that you have to be very aware of as a farmer, or you will starve to death, and the sort of the brutality of natural law. You know, Mother Nature is very loving, but brutally honest,

and she does not reward, she does not play favorites. If you're not vital enough to contribute, she put you back in the dirt to be recycled as food for microorganisms and plants and the cycle of life. And, you know, one of the things I learned in my career is that we have used the medical system to drug and to numb and subvert our relationship with our body and our responsibility to our body and our instincts. And where pain, I have a saying called the pain teacher, what pain is there to bring your awareness to what you need to be aware of so you can either make important changes such as if you hurt yourself acutely,

like falling off a ladder, we instantly know we've got to clean ice, do the things you have to do in acute care. but most of the people's problems out there are chronic problems. And so when we don't listen to our instincts to breathe, to poop, pee, move, sleep, seek warmth and shelter, love, and creativity and procreation, those are all key instincts. and those instincts are there to enhance our survivability. But as we've gotten so up in our heads and trapped in the world of ideas and the world of images and the world of social media, television, and distractions and drugs,

we have gotten further and further away from an intimate relationship with an understanding of our own. body and our own instincts, which are there to help us not only survive, but to thrive. And so my work has really been a lot about how do we understand the language of the body, how do we look at the life that we're living and the choices we're making and get clear on what it is that's really worth living for and dying for, which requires that we be aware of what values we're living, because most people just live their values unconsciously. And COVID was a great bomb of an example of what happens when you wait till a crisis to figure out what your values are and start taking care of your health.

And it's also a booming example of how dangerous a disease maintenance system is versus a real health care system. And so, you know, I took my knowledge of farming and I was always a very competitive athlete in many different sports. And I became, you know, the trainer of the Army boxing team. I was a fighter on the Army boxing team. I represented the Army and triathlon, but they wanted me to become the trainer because they couldn't figure out how the hell I could train for triathlon and box full time at the same time because it's very hard to be an elite. amateur fighter on the boxing team. At that time, it was a third ranked amateur boxing team in the world. And so long story made short, I spent two years working with an osteopathic physician, and my job was to design the nutrition programs, the conditioning programs. I implemented the

sports massage therapy program in the Army for the boxers. I wrote all their conditions, programs and did them all with them personally instead of pointing fingers. And then I left the Army, became a certified sports massage therapist, a clinical certified neuromuscular therapist. I studied medical exercise therapy, the Norwegian system and other systems. And I worked for a chiropractor that specialized in sports injuries when I left sports massage therapy school for two years. And I worked in the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego with 22 physical therapists, athletic trainers, 13 orthopedic and neurosurgeons, our own surgical center. I did five cadaver dissections through my career to really

master the anatomy. And I traveled the world extensively for 20 plus years, studying from the best doctors and therapists all over the world on the topics and subject matter that I felt was most important because I kept running into these kinds of problems and nobody knew what to do with them. And then I left in my partner and I who had a master's degree in physical therapy and was highly qualified. And I teamed up. We joined and started our own physical therapy clinic, which I owned in La Jolla, California for three years, but we just couldn't make a living because the insurance companies were ripping us off so bad. So at that time, I sold the physical therapy clinic took the money we made from that and started the Czech Institute in 1995 and developed an

integrated multidisciplinary education system so that people from medical doctors to nurses, to chiropractors, to osteopaths, to physios, to athletic trainers, to housewives and truck drivers could all come in and get an integrated training that included the anatomy, the physiology, and all the manual therapy and things so that each person could within the scope of their own license and their own training truly practice integrated holistic health and then they could learn from each other in the training

so that they could be in a class with a medical doctor and osteopath, a chiropractor, a nurse, an acupuncturist, a herbologist, personal trainer, a strength coach, and others and each could share their perspectives on the different challenges people have. So I developed a system of cross-pollination so that we all learn not only how to see through the eyes of different professions and mindsets, but how to know when to refer to each other so that we didn't try to be a jack of all trades, master of none, because the human body is extremely complex.

And it, you know, it takes, you can spend your entire career just studying the hormonal system. or the nervous system or any one of the systems of the body, let alone the psyche. And so that was really what my soul brought me to the world to do. And then I founded Spirit Jim at the beginning of the pandemic, which I'd been working on for 10 years, researching and developing, because I really saw through all my years of working with people

that you can write the best programs in the world for people. You can give them the best diet and lifestyle advice, but they often go off and don't do it. They just go right back to the habits that got them trouble in the first place. And so I always found it amazing that people would pay me thousands of dollars to help them solve their problems, and they'd do well for a week or two, but then they would just fall right off the wagon and go right back to the same old stuff.

and because I have a lot of pride in my work, I thought, you know, what's the point of me writing all these comprehensive programs and giving people very comprehensive evaluations and doing all the manual therapy? But then they just go right back to drinking the alcohol and eating the junk food and staying up late in night. And so I realized many years ago, I really had to put a lot of effort into studying psychology and behavioral change. and that, you know, that was coupled with, I studied all the systems of schools of psychology and I studied depth psychology, which I've been studying for over 30 years now. I studied Steiner's work for the last 30 years. And so I slowly and progressively integrated all this into the Czech Institute, but when I started Spirit Jim, I really wanted to help people understand what

we're doing here. Why are we here? And what does it mean to be human and what's the function and purpose of a human life in relationship to the bigger picture of spiritual evolution or what is God? And why do we have all these problems with the idea of God and, you know, religious wars are the number one cause of war to this very day. And so as I would analyze my patients, I was shocked at how common that when I got to the real root issues of why people didn't heal, why they didn't follow their programs after they paid lots of money for them, what was the actual reason for all these physical, emotional and mental challenges?

It was just mind-blowing to me how many times it tracked right back to some religious belief that they had or some way they'd interpreted a passage from the Bible or some other scripture and all the rules and regulations and all the guilt and all the shame because they couldn't live up to the expectations of the God that they had chosen and that a lot of them were just basically in this terrible relationship between themselves and themselves. they were trying to be perfect in the eyes of the God that they had chosen, but because of the way religions are set up and because of the fact that religious dictates and commandments

pit us right against our instincts, there's almost nothing you can do that doesn't leave you a sinner, a fallen person, and feeling insecure about your relationship with God or what's going to happen when you die. And so I found that most of this stuff happens in childhood in the first 12 years of our developmental life, which is when we're really the most susceptible because we're unconscious and we have no means of discerning what's being told to us. But then we end up living the rest of our lives with all this stuff in the unconscious, pushing and pulling our inner strings.

And so things like sex become very challenging. For example, if you're a Christian and you have sex before you get married, you're already a sinner. Then if you get married and you find out that you're just not compatible with someone, then you're going and you want a divorce. Now you're breaking the commitment of till death do we part that you gave at marriage. And so I've seen countless people with serious health problems due to the fact that ultimately they were worried

of what God was going to do because they got a divorce. And so when you look at all the issues that religion controls from clothing to sex, to music, to money, to food, to times and days of worship, to, you know, art, people thinking tarot is the devil's work. That's religious ideology.

what you find is that it's a very, very challenging system of indoctrination that almost everybody goes through 85 out of every hundred people claim religious affiliation. So most of this begins at childhood, but then as people's intellectual mind comes online and they start asking questions, they often find themselves in conflict with their religious ideology or the God that their family indoctrinated them into. And so they can intellectually convince themselves that they're no longer practicing that stuff, but as soon as there's a taboo that comes along, such as an extramarital affair or doing anything that goes against the programming, now you're at war with yourself on the inside. And sadly, I've had patients with cancer and other diseases many times that I found

that they were basically making an agreement with themselves, that if they punish themselves badly enough, for God than when they died it wouldn't be so painful and they and they thought somehow God would be more forgiving for them

and when you see how these secret stories play out inside of people and how much money the medical system is making off it in the religious systems you know the corporate religion is the most successful industry ever so Spirit Jim

was really my offering to the world to say, let me put a stolen context for you. Let me help you understand the importance of myth and mythology and the story you're telling yourself about your life and help you realize that there's two pathways in life. One is that you live out your fate because you don't challenge your programming and become a co-author of your own myth,

which means you're faded. Or you take responsibility for the fact that ultimately God is unconditional love, so the answer is always yes, so you might as well live your dream and become a co-creator with God and develop a myth that is dream affirmative and life affirmative that you have values

to support being that person and then go off into the world and go on the hero's journey and do your very best to live and love fully and know that that's the best thing that we can do, for each other is to live and love fully. And so Spirit Gym is really a comprehensive system of 75 lessons over 80-something hours. And then I have sangas each week where I give small lessons or visit key pieces of lessons

and then answer questions. And then I just do life coaching for people and health coaching on any issue that they have. to support them in their own growth and development and work together as a, you know, a community, a Sanga to support each other in our own evolution and healing and transformation so that we can do our best to be living examples for everybody and help them create their destiny instead of being fated and instead of having these kind of paradoxical, scary love-hate relationships with God to have a deep personal relationship with God or whatever a person believes their highest power is.

It doesn't have to be God. So ultimately, Spirit Jim's a meta-myth system that shows the principles and the structure of the psyche and why myth is so fundamental and how to create your own myth, but understand the structure of myth and understand how to ask deep personal questions and get the answers to deep personal questions

and how to develop an intimate relationship with your own soul and let your own soul guide you because the soul is God within you. Only God can give a soul. And so all souls are really expressions of the divine. And so there's a lot of teaching in Spirit, Jim, about how to make contact with your own heart and your own soul and your own spirit

and how to work with your unconscious and it just turns out that tarot happens to be one of the most amazing mediums by which we can understand the human psyche and the human process and the hero's journey that we're all on every one of us whether we know it or not and i've been studying tarot for a long time i'll study it for the rest of my life and when you look at There's a lot of debate about where it came from, but I would like to point out that a lot of these debates can be settled. If you study the law of one book series by Raw in book four, Raa explains that they created the tarot and that it's an ancient system of archetypes which the Egyptian priests were trained in to understand how the mind works, how relationships work and how to effectively counsel people.

And then there's a great book called Arrows of Light from Egyptian Tarot by John H. DeKour, which you can see in my hands. And it also gives the Egyptian roots of the tarot. Most people think it started off as a pack of playing cards and some say it started in Europe in the 1400s or that it came from gypsies. I've probably read 50 books on tarot and a lot of very deep scholarly works.

So you get all sorts of opinions. But I do inner research. So I go to my soul and ask for guidance and go into meditation and work through that channel to get answers to questions. And that's how I've been guided in my life for a very long time. helped me to get through the confusion on a lot of things, create a lot of things that have helped a lot of people. And I've got no question because I've taught thousands of people to do it. Once you make contact with your soul and you're being guided by the heart and the hearts connected to the mind, that your life is radically transformed.

And then you have the most important thing of all, which is an intimate personal relationship with God. not some preconceived notion or set of dogmas or doctrines that guide you most of which hardly anybody understands. Anyhow, which is why I love Shankara's statement. Sean Kara was a Hindu philosopher, sage that he was very, very enlightened. He began walking India at age eight debating all the famous gurus of his day and never lost a debate even as an eight-year-old. he wrote a great book called the Crest Jewel of Discrimination. Shankara said no man can understand scripture until he's enlightened, and when he's enlightened, he does not need scripture.

And I think that's truer than true. And when you consider, Oshow says it takes about six billion people to produce one truly enlightened person. That means that the world is full of churches, synagogues, and Sunday schools, where children are being taught by very unenlightened people, mostly the things that scared the hell out of them are just being passed forward into the children. And so it leads to exactly what we've got in the world today, which is religion that's not helping people become enlightened at all

and scaring the hell out of people and confusing people. There are obviously benefits to religion, but one of the challenges is that it keeps you in the child archetype because you're always leaning to some authority, be it a priest or a pastor or some patriarchal ideology. And then you've got the Abrahamic religions all have sky gods. So they're all big daddy in the sky and their gods not in the world. And all this stuff, which is to anybody that's done any real inner work,

like a real yogi, for example, who seeks to answer the question, who am I? They find out that all that stuff is, you know, dangerously. leading, but as I show in Spirit Jim, and Terro really describes this, we all come here like the fool in Terro, which is God, on a journey. And we need to have a period of indoctrination to understand how a family works, how relationships work, how a society works, what it means to be part of a culture, so that we can develop a moment. that can interface with the my loo in which we're entering into the next stage of our own spiritual evolution in human form. And that's the beginning of a new hero's journey. And so the first thing

that we have to do is we have to build the mind that can interface with the my loo that we're in. But through spiritual practice, we come face to face with our mind. And as we go deeper inward, If we're doing the right practices with the right mindset and an open-hearted commitment to really exploring what life and what God is, we begin to have mystical experiences and union experiences. And those can be called enlightenment experiences where we realize our oneness with the world

and our oneness with all living beings and our oneness with the universe, et cetera. And those are the experiences that blow our mind. But if we didn't have a mind to put those experiences of unity into context, they would have no meaning because when a baby is born, it's fully enlightened, but it's not conscious, and it has no framework of perception to realize who and what it is. In fact, a child does not have a sense of self

until it begins to emit the words I or no, which happens around two years of age. And in a healthy culture, it takes about 25 years for the ego to develop. So we're the slowest of all the animals to kind of become self-sufficient and aware. Today, research shows that the average person doesn't develop an ego until about 36 to 42 years of age and may never develop one. and current research shows that 70 to 72% of the world population at any age is still in the child archetype, which is an extremely dangerous thing to have happened. And in native tribal societies, they had right of passage ceremonies so that when boys went through puberty,

they had to go through a right of passage ceremony to become a man and a warrior and to know exactly what they were living for, fighting for, and were committed to dying for, to protect their people, their tribe. And women had to go through a rite of passage with a birthing process and other practices to help them understand the difference between a girl and a woman. But we've lost those rites of passages as we've destroyed native societies and incorporated them into the industrial machine and all the things that have happened. And so now we have all these people that are lost and confused,

but still falling very victim to patriarchal father figure types, be it corporations, presidents, CEOs, religious ideologies. And we don't really have a system to help people grow up. And in a tribal society, they had to have these practices of initiation because you had to hunt and gather to feed everybody, and you had to take care of the animals, and you had to take care of, you know, tents and equipment. And so you could only carry so many children before the burden on the adults was too much.

And they couldn't survive. You would basically exhaust the adults as the base of children got too big. So the reality of it was is if you didn't make it through your right of passage ceremony, many tribes with your extricate you or kill you because they simply couldn't carry you. In some tribes, they would give the young men another year with the women. but then if they couldn't make it through, they either killed them or extricated them because otherwise it would be death to the tribe.

And so these rite of passage ceremonies were set up by the wisest people in the tribe, the elders and the chief, the medicine man, the shaman, to make sure that they didn't kill people, but they took them as close to death as they could without disabling them so that they had to confront what it means to be an adult and be a warrior and so they could put their childhood completely behind them.

And this is why you see a lot of cultures like the Maori have all these tattoos all over them because those tattoos are done with bamboo sticks and little hammers. And they're very, very painful and teeth getting knocked out. And there's an African tribe that will cut the clitoris out of women as part of their initiation process, which I don't recommend. But the point is that there's always... something significant that marks the individual when they go through a rite of passage ceremony. So there's no question that they're not a child anymore, not a question to them or anybody around them.

But now there's massive billions and billions and trillions of dollars being made by keeping people in the child archetype, keeping them in patriarchal daddy worship, keeping them subservient. and you see what happened when COVID came, how people believed in whatever experts were saying and believed in the safe, effective choice. Well, now, here we are five years later with somewhere between 22 and 25 million dead. And that's what happens when you don't have a sense of inner authority. You don't know what your values are. You don't have enough discernment to do your own research and ask the who, what, why, why, where, when, and how of important.

questions and you just become a sheep and a herd and off to slaughter you go. And so, interestingly enough, the study of tarot is actually the study of the whole life process of humanity. And it is the hero's journey. And the reason the Christian church tried to get rid of it is because tarot actually tells you the story of what's going on here. and helps you realize who you are and what the consequences are of not becoming whole unto yourself, answering questions, healing yourself, purifying yourself, and having a deep intimate relationship

with source or God. And so you can't have people learning that stuff because, one, people that are self-actuated and sovereign and individual warriors are very, very hard to control, which is why it was very hard for them to control Native American tribes and many tribes. It's why they stopped Native Americans from doing their tribal dances, because if they did those dances, they were just super powerful, and they're not afraid to die. And as soon as you take fear of death away from people,

you lose your trump card, so now, you know, you've got a battle on your hands. So the whole concept of the tarot being the work of the devil, well, that is the work of the devil. If you get my point. You know, there's an old saying the devil's favorite place to hide is in the church. And if you study the history of the church, almost everything that could set you free is the work of the devil. So. Convenient. I just actually had a note about how our culture, in addition to benefiting off people, keeping people in

the child archetype also benefits tremendously by emasculating men and basically kind of domesticating humans, but particularly men, because men are the ones that are actually able to mount a, you know, a fight or a fight against the power structures. And you really, you know, see that playing out, not only in demeanor, but physically as well. I feel like, you know, with testosterone levels on the decline and fertility. Oh, yes. Things, like this is all a result of the culture that we've built. And I was also like, laughing because when you said culture, I kind of realized for the first time that the word cult is right in there.

It is. It is. It's very in there. And I mean, if you really study what a cult is, you'll see all the world religions are cults. Unfortunately, now, Osho said the Eastern religions are religions for adults, the Western religions or religions for children. And, you know, he was making a very important point because in the Eastern religions, it's very, very clear that the most challenging thing you'll ever have to manage is your mind and they and so the onus of the responsibility of the circumstances of your life is handed back to you so you've got the pancha pontaguli patonguli sutras and yoga you know and and they're very similar to the buddhist precepts of you know how to you know right living and right thinking and and so but the point is is

that it's really it puts the responsibility of your wholeness and solving your challenges and becoming a contributing person onto you as an individual, but the Western religions, it's always about to authority all the way up the chain like a military chain of command where you really have very little say in anything. It's always referred to the book. I have to remind people, those books were written by human beings, and there are a record of somebody else's experiences. And for you to just memorize that stuff and believe it is to completely avoid the responsibility of having your own relationship with source and taking responsibility for how you manage yourself and taking responsibility for what you create in and out of your own life

versus just fitting in and being a good little boy to get brownie points to get in. to get into heaven or however you want to slice it. You know, the original function of religion was two functions. One, the founders of the religion shared what practices help them reach a state of union with God where they really had a deep understanding of that relationship and what it really meant. And two, religion is designed to create a set of

values, morals, ethics, and principles that hold a society together because a tribe usually starts to break down around 55 to 65 people because it just gets to be too many opinions and too many people to manage. So historically, we've learned that whenever you start putting larger numbers of people together, if you don't have a system of laws, principles, practices, and values to bind them together, then what you end up with is piracy. And that's what's going on in the world today. And you see people like Bill Gates, World Economic Forum, world health organization. These organizations are eroding the values of Christianity and religion. They're basically eroding connection to God and soul, eroding personal sovereignty,

changing definitions in dictionary so even our language and our words don't mean the same things are secretly passing laws to erode our rights and freedoms. And so what you've got now is another patriarchal game, more like fascism, fascism or or, you know, some kind of top-down control system, communism, socialism, none of which have ever worked. but all the money is being channeled up to a few so we're right back to, you know, emperors and kings and that whole story. So strangely, we're moving forward in our technology

backward in our morality. We're moving forward in the ability to control people, but the control is now in the hands of a very few instead of the many, while the many that have phones think they're in control and think they're free, they don't realize that their mind and their time and their energy

and their money and their resources are being almost stolen from them while they think that they're free, which just means that the technology has basically been created and utilized by people that don't really have our best interest at heart. And I don't think anyone listening is in need of me to start exciting scientific resources and research on that because the Internet's a beautiful thing because there's just as much truth as there is bullshit if you know where to look and and and you know covid is a perfect example of exactly what a top down control system looks like and it looks what social engineering looks like and if you read the book control leagarks by shamus bruner he gives you a psychological breakdown on all the six top minds behind it all and

shows you what's really going on and there's many many others such as the real Anthony Fauci by RFK and we all should know better by now is all I'm saying so that's a long way of saying tarot is really an incredible system that's been in place for a very long time and no matter what the Christians say about it the number of Christians that use it is through the roof because there's an inner truth buzzer that goes off whenever we're looking at something that reaches fundamental truths and the tarot is really a system of archetypes and to put that into perspective we must understand the word archetype it means original or primal pattern if you study plato these were you know the purest forms and ideas so uh for example if you want to go past

archetypes that act on you directly to more universal archetypes, consciousness requires space, time, and movement. You can't be conscious of something for your thoughts, for you to be conscious of your thoughts. There has to be time for you to perceive it, and you have to have the mental space to perceive it. So a thought flows. It has a beginning, and middle, and then,

what will I do for dinner tonight? So there has to be space. If you didn't have space, you'd have no, body, you have to have mental space, you have to have time, because everything would be happening all at once without time, and you have to have movement. So it turns out that space, time, and movement are fundamental to the experience of being alive and being conscious and to having the ability to live in relationships to persons, places, and things. So those are archetypes, anything to do with movement relates to the archetype of movement.

Anything could do with space, the archetype of space, anything to do with time, the archetype of time. So that the tarot itself is really more related to the archetypes that are fundamental in the human psyche. Now, Carl Jung was really the pioneer that did the most to help us understand the human psyche in my observation. Certainly there was other contributors, but there was nobody. that did more to advance our understanding of the human psyche and what was really going on inside of us than Jung.

And what Jung identified by studying myths and fairy tales from around the world from vast different time periods from as far back as cave paintings and rock art and things could go to more recent times, and what Jung showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that well before cultures on either side of the globe could have ever been hanging out with each other because they didn't have the ability to get to each other, that the same exact motifs or themes underpinned their myths and their stories and their fairy tales.

For example, all myths have something to do with the process of birth, life, and death. there's always something to do with birth, life, and death. Well, we all know that we have to have a mother to come into the world and she can't give birth to you without a father. So right there you see the archetype of the mother at a personal level would be a physical mother, but at the highest level would be divine mother, which is the feminine of God.

we all have a father whether you know who your father is or not now today you can do artificial insemination but there's still somebody's sperm involved and so there's an archetype so what eum showed is that there are archetypes that are common to all people regardless of the language they speak it doesn't matter what language you speak there's a word for mother father teacher there's a word for storyteller builder there's a word for um soul there's a word for justice you know so these are their fundamental archetypes one moment of of a celebration love it little tobacco and herbs to keep the spirit flowing? I'll actually chime in really quickly while you're enjoying that because I was thinking about

Jung earlier, also when we were talking about, like, religion. And I believe it's his quote that says like organized religion, its function is to protect you from the direct experience of God. Yes. And I'm also thinking about how Toro and the hero's journey is kind of like alchemy in a way, right? Because you're taking something from a lower level and you're distilling it and purifying it to reach a higher form. And I guess as we go through the tarot cards also, we'll kind of see how that alchemization happens.

And one other thing I'll ask you about before handing the mic back to you is I know that you're familiar with Itzac Bentoff because I'm pretty sure I learned about him from you. And I had this really kind of amazing experience with my partner where we were having like a shared visual during a psychedelic experience. And it was a white background with these black scrolling Hebrew characters and neither of us have any experience with Hebrew whatsoever. But then we ended up after that at some point watching from Adam to Cosmos from Itzhak Bentov. And he talked about how it seemed like the Hebrew characters were kind of intuited by the initial, you know, group of church fathers or whatever you want to call it that kind of created or channeled that language in a way and that they were actually these symbols were somehow like part of the fabric of reality, which kind of blew my mind because we both saw that and completely, you know, we're different people having the same visual. And I'm just wondering if you have any ideas about like the Hebrew characters as part of like the fabric of the matrix in some way. Well, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily.

I mean, yes, there are Hebrew characters. I'm very familiar with that. You know, I'm sure you're aware of I've conducted over a thousand healing ceremonies with plant medicines. And I've gone very, very deep on plant medicines. and I've reached states of complete and utter union through meditation and Tai Chi many, many times. So because my mother joined the Self-Realization Fellowship, when I was 12, I was exposed to the yogis and to Paramahansi Yogananda's teaching. I spent my 15th summer and summer camp with the monks learning more meditation techniques

and getting more guidance and getting questions answered. and so the point that I'm making is what you're looking at are archetypes Hebrew happens to be an ancient region of the world where humanity had

civilizations we have pyramids there we have Gobeckle-Tepi we have all these ancient sites there's so many different theories of human origins I won't go down that road because it would take too long. But we have to also remember that Sanskrit is older than Hebrew,

and there's even some forms of language older than that. If you look at the work of archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, she found out something that goes right in line with Jung's identification. She spent, I think, 10 years with her husband traveling all over the world, studying cave art, rock art artifacts dated many of these artifacts to 85,000 years of age. And what happened was is she identified 32 symbols that showed up all over the world. And from what archaeologists and linguists can tell, these symbols meant the same thing.

Wow. So one of them was the symbol of a heart, like we draw a heart. one is the hand a picture a little pictogram of a hand and so what she showed is that there's some kind of archetypal symbology working through all of us because how could these people have come up with these symbols for the most basic level of communication and what we would call primitive societies

which we have to be careful with the word primitive because, you know, if you look at the guesstimates of the age of the pyramids and you go look at the pyramids, which we can't even build today, which universities still give degrees for telling you that they built them by rolling 100 ton blocks of stone up wood roller, wooden rollers 440 feet in the air and anybody that's ever lifted stones like I have would know that's absolutely completely and utterly ridiculous. So what I'm saying is that what we call primitive is not primitive. It's just they had different tools than we do, but they put emphasis on different things. You know, I would call a Native American Indian that can understand the language of a crow and learn how to build tools from a crow, somebody that has advanced technology because of their study of nature. and they were far less destructive to the world than we are with our so-called advanced technology. So the point I'm making is that what we think of as primitive actually turns out to be not very primitive.

For example, if you look at Robert McCarrison, Major General Robert McCarrison, who was tasked by the British military to figure out why so many people were sick and unable to pass their physical exam. to come into the military during the first and second World War, he was tasked with finding who the healthiest people were in the world, doing research on them, and then building a diet that could be used by the British to have enough young people battle ready, because in the first World War, 49% of recruits that were typically 17 to 19 years of age, young men failed due to an inability to medical,

health problem of malnourishment being very common. Second World War, it went up to 51%, so the United States started getting involved in this investigation, and currently estimates say about 70 to 75% of our youth that should be battle ready, wouldn't pass a military entrance physical examination because they're too unhealthy. So Robert McCarrison identified the Hunza of northern India. were the healthiest people in the world at the time. He went there, studied their diet, studied the way they lived. He found out that nobody for long, long time, hundreds of years had ever gone to war with them because nobody could ever beat them. They lived very high in the mountains. They had very elaborate water systems that if we tried to reproduce today would be hard to do. they were living in a very high regions where it's very hard to grow food but they grew amazing

food and they have very elaborate catchment and water control systems he found that there was men 110 years of age still working the fields and siring new children with young women he took approximately 2,000 rats put half of them on the Hunza diet exactly the proportion and the foods that the Huns were eating, studied them for the two years of a typical rat's life cycle. And then he put another thousand rats on the exact diet that the typical British citizen was eating. He did medical grade autopsies on all of them. He found that there was no maternal damage or problems whatsoever amongst the Hunza diet rats. They lived happily, they grew healthy, they had healthy coats, healthy bodies.

And then when he studied the rats that were modeled on the English diet, they had in exactly the same proportion as the English population, the same diseases. They had extreme problems with miscarriages, with stillborns, with diseases. by the 16th day of the experiment, the rats became so violent towards each other. They had to separate them into separate cages.

I don't know if you've ever been to a British soccer game and seen what happens when their favorite team is losing, but I was in London once when a riot broke out because somebody was playing in the Chelsea arena and the people didn't like what happened. So they started flipping cars and lighting all the buildings on fire and it was the craziest thing I ever saw. And so, you know, McCarrison showed this was coming right from the food.

But what's the point? The point is here we're studying people that are supposed to be primitive, but they're not primitive at all. They're a lot smarter and a lot more well managed and came up with elaborate systems that, you know, most people today wouldn't figure out even with AI's help. So, you know, so how does that link back to the tarot? Well, the tarot is over 2,000 years of age. It was brought in by, well, if you study raw, raw is considered a social memory complex,

so they're beings that have evolved out of the need for a body. They apparently came from Venus. So this gets quite mystical. Some people might just blow it off. But if you read the Law of One book series, it's mind-blowing. And there's tons of stuff in there that when it was channeled,

I believe in the mid to late 80s, Raw made statements about how the universe functions and many other things that hadn't been scientifically validated yet have been scientifically validated since then, proving that whoever Raw was or however that information got here was very, very accurate. And so what we have, is this system of archetypes. Now, why I wanted to point out Jung's work and Genevieve von PetSingers

in an association with what you were saying is when you look at what Jung called the objective psyche, so you have a personal psyche, so nobody has, very few people have access to Alexa's inner world. you know that's a sacred place for each of us there are people capable of reading thoughts and you know people that have extra sensory abilities I'm clairvoyant so if I wanted to I could read your energy field but I don't ever do that except for to support people with their permission

I don't just walk around reading people that would be black magic and I don't want the karma of that but essentially we have our inner psychic domain which is completely and utterly private to each soul and then we have the collective psyche of humanity which yume called the objective psyche because it contains the archetypes that are common to all of us um now before i forget i wanted to before I dive into the Tarot and take you through the journey and your listeners through the journey, I wanted

to loop back and say, it's not uncommon to see Hebrew letters because they're very deep in the psyche of man. They're very ancient and the origins of man. The same could be said of

Sanskrit and having done many deep shamanic journeys with DMT and a number of of other plant medicines, one of the things that you commonly have, if you get deep enough in, not very common on DMT, is you also see geometrical forms. So dodecrahedrons, the whole panoply of geometric forms from circles to cubes to squares to octons, you know, all of them, right? And then if you study Pythagorean

number theory and form, you can correlate each number from one to nine and sometimes higher with a geometrical form. So four works out to be a cube or a square. So you see the correlation between geometry and number. And what Terro does, and this is why it takes a long time to really understand in taro and to use it to its potential, because tarot is an integrated system of systems that are all very, very fundamental.

For example, the cards are numbered and they correlate to the Hebrew letters. So they correlate to the tree of life in Kabbalah. So you can make a direct correlation between the Kabbalah and tarot. Terro correlates directly with alchemy in the ancient history and science of alchemy. Terro correlates to color therapy and the chakra system and color theory. Terro correlates to numerology. It correlates to shamanism. It correlates to many of the themes of world religion.

Astrology too, right? And it's heavily linked to astrology. just trying to remember all the systems. Ultimately, like there's a lot of systems. And so one of the things that's always been deeply fascinating to me is who in the hell had the depth of understanding to create a system of archetypes that's on 56 cards? Now, the minor archa came after, they're more of a modern invention. That's the musings of human beings.

but the original 22 major arcana, those are very, very old and very, very linked to the objective psyche, which will be more clear. But so the thing is, I was alluding to, yes, people see Hebrew letters, but they see lots of other things. And when you look at what the differences between the material world and the spiritual world, well, Steiner says very clearly, the spiritual world is the world of causes.

The physical world is what is being created by the spiritual world. And so when you have a deep enough medicine experience, you're looking into the matrix, into the structure of creation itself. And that's why we see all these geometrical forms in Hebrew letters and Sanskrit letters. and it also depends on your cultural conditioning, because I've found that having conducted so many ceremonies,

that people of different religious backgrounds, different cultural orientations on the same medicine at the same time, see very, very different things. And I've observed for sure that they're almost always related to the myeloo in which they were raised. In fact, Dustin DiPerna in the excellent book Streams of Wisdom that looks at the structure stages of how consciousness develops over not only the span of thousands and thousands of years through the beginning from the beginning of human evolution.

How does consciousness grow and evolve? But how does it grow and evolve potentially in one lifetime? So you have different structure stages of consciousness. And so DePerna makes a very powerful statement. He says, no Christian ever. meets the Buddha in an enlightenment experience. Why? Because they don't have a conceptual framework for a Buddha. So you only, whatever your idea of God is, the only way you can perceive it is through the matrix of your own mental structure, which is your cultural imprint. So a lot of people do

see Hebrew letters, but a lot of people see other things as well. And I believe in reincarnation for a lot of reasons. So I think each soul has its own, call it library of past life experiences, which are inherently in the psyche of that individual. So depending on where we've been and what lives we've lived and what experiences we've had and what education we've had, we each have a very unique mental perceptual framework. And so I think it's my point is we want to be careful not to just think it's only Hebrew because it's not only Hebrew. And if you study David Bohm, David Bowman describes two orders of creation, the implicate

order, which is the enfolded order, which is immeasurable. It's beyond the speed of light. it's it's the realm of spirit it's called implicate because it's invisible so we can't see your thoughts and your feelings but we can see your facial gestures and your posture and your expression so the implicate of you the inner aspects of your self thought in steiner's conception is spirit itself so our thoughts feelings and emotions are implicate but how they manifest in physical form so we can determine whether Alex is interested or not interested happy or not happy because her body tells us that that would be explicate.

So what's enfolded is the matrix of creation. That would be what actually creates the structure within which physical manifestation, be it planet, stars, galaxies, universes, or bodies emerge from. Steiner would say that's the spiritual world or the spiritual dimension, which is the source of the physical world. Spiritual world is the world of causes. The physical world is more of a world of cause and effect. You throw a ball at a wall, it bounces back at you. But the idea of the ball would have been an archetype of a sphere, which would fit Plato's idea.

Then Plato's cave tells us that we're really. sitting in a world of shadows because the truth of it all is in the spiritual dimension. It's like a projection. Yes. So the implicate order is not wayable or measurable. The explicate order is what we can weigh and measure, and it begins with the speed of light because the speed of light turns out to be the speed limit of manifestation in the physical world.

So in this dimension, metaphorically, whatever God dreams up manifests here at the speed of light or whatever we dream up, right? You know, if you have a dream, if you want to say, I love you to yourself, you can't do it faster than the speed of light. That's the speed of limit on manifestation in the 3D plus time dimension. Now, if you look at William A. Tiller's research, William A. Tiller was a very, very famous scientists with many, many awards. It was a Stanford University professor,

wrote many excellent books, but he shows you in his analysis of the chakra systems that the speed of light goes up significantly as you go up the chakra system to multiples of the speed of light, which we only now are beginning to have the technology to image or analyze

or calculate. So, unfortunately, a lot of people's ideas are just not up with the pace that the leading scientists are at. especially people like David Bome, that were very, very spiritual. Einstein was very spiritual man. I could give you a long list of scientists,

but probably one of the greatest physicists that I've studied who's very deeply spiritual and written phenomenal books is Fred Allen Wolf. And you've got to meet with Swami. I mean, there's a lot of people that are kind of got one foot in the world of the spiritual dimension and one foot in the world of the material dimension, and they're easy to find because usually the hardcore scientists hate them, but can't deny that they keep solving big problems, like David Bohm developed an entire system of explanation of quantum physics.

And, you know, anybody that, and it's at Bentov was a very, very scientific man. He was the first one to do really solid scientific research on meditation. He's got a number of inventions that he, is credited for. He was a deeply spiritual man and his book stalking the wild pendulum and his other two books are just mind-blowingly good. And so he was a hardcore scientist. He was a remote viewer. He identified what the rings of Saturn were made of years before NASA figured it out and he was exactly right. So, you know, we've got all these amazing parallels. But that's just sort of my way of setting the stage, answering your questions regarding what people are seeing during DMT.

I'm pointing out that primitive is not primitive. So if Terra is 2,000 years old, when you look at the system and how wickedly, wildly, integrated and complex it is, yet quite paradoxically simple, you have to say, who in the world? 2,000 years ago, if that's when it was brought to Earth by Raw, as Raw says, could figure something like that. Well, I'll tell you what,

it's the same people who had the technology to build a pyramid. And a lot of people don't believe in tarot, but I'll tell you something that I want to share in that regard. As a guy who's now spent probably 13 to 15 years studying it and practicing it intensely, I've got 16 volumes of my own tarot draws and practices and meditations. And I followed the system Raw laid out in the law of

one book four for how they trained the Egyptian priests. Exactly. It took me 18 months to do it committing one to three hours a day to the practices. And I've got journals full of notes and drawings I did and he guide you to, the Torah guide you to meeting each of these archetypes doing what Jung would call active imagination. So you meet with each of them. You ask them questions. They tell you what their function is. Then you,

they raw design pairs. So you meet them in pairs. Then you do them in a trio. So to do all that takes some time. But when I teach my students, I tell them you've got to be very careful about reading books because what you're reading is other people's ideas. And that's not how you do tarot.

you have to, and if you really want to do, Terry, you've got to invest the time in meditation to go meet these archetypes one of the time. And because they're actually aspects of your own psyche, it's not like you have to go very far. These are non-local realities. So, you know, I want to just jump back a little bit and say, wait a minute, how did all this shit get here? well if God is God by definition God means that for which there is no other there's nothing behind God there's nothing bigger than God God is the ultimate of the ultimate God is the only being that can create and sustain itself the devil can't do that nothing can do that you and I can't do that

Lao Tzu says speaking of the Dow it is blacker than black, deeper than deep, it is older than God. What's he saying? The Tao, the unspoken Dow, there's two Daos, the unspoken Tao, which is Boeum's Implicate Order, and there's the spoken Tao, which is the explicate order or the created manifest reality. It's deeper than deep means you can't measure it. It's blacker than black means you can't see it. It's older than means it's beyond ideas because what we call God, unfortunately, is just a bunch of ideas that we believe in until you actually have your own experience. And the reason Carl Jung said, all religious systems are designed to protect you from the direct experience of God,

because in order to have an experience of God, unfortunately, you enter into a state of complete union with all that is, which means your ego is completely annihilated, so it's a full-on death experience. And if you don't have adequate preparation for that experience, which is why you have to be very careful with psychedelic drugs, you will go through a death experience, you will lose any sense of who you are, what you are, or where you are, and you will, may not come back. And I've known six people to die in shamanic journeys because they went too deep, especially on DMT.

They just, they forget that they have a body. They stop breathing and they don't come back. Is this related at all to like what Steiner says about like developing your spiritual sense organs while you're alive? And then so if you go into that more liminal space, that non-local space that you actually have the ability to perceive more in that plane, versus just feeling totally like you lost yourself?

Yeah, Steiner says you will no more see in the spiritual dimension without spiritual development than a human fetus could see in the physical world without having developed eyes in the womb. So for each of our senses, we have an extra sensory sense. We can see with our physical eyes, but we can develop clairvoyance, which means to see through.

to see through the material world into the spiritual dimensions, to see energy fields, to see what's actually there, to see causes. We have clear audience, which is to hear beyond what the ear can hear. We have intuitive knowing, which is to somehow know things that don't require a cognitive process. We just know. So we have clear audience, clericent. sentience, clairvoyance, and we have intuitive knowing. But if you go to each of the senses, sight, smell, touch, all of them, there's an extra sensory ability. And through spiritual development, you actually develop the organ of perception.

So Steiner describes how for each of the organs and glands in our body through spiritual practices, we develop a subtle energy copy of them. And once we reach a certain point in spiritual development, we will stay conscious when we lose our body. We won't go unconscious and just wake up in another body and not know how we got there. So what we do is we actually learn to listen more deeply, see through, feel more deeply,

and come into a much deeper relationship with nature and with life and with the forces of nature. And as we do those exercises, we become conscious of much, much more than we ever realized. You know, like people think space is empty. Well, I can tell you as a clairvoyant and as a guy who's done a lot of shamanic journeys, spaces chalk a block with life. We look out the window, what we think empty is full, the astral dimensions right here. All the dimensions are nested within each other.

You know, a great way to understand this is to understand one of the definitions of God. Joseph Campbell shares this. Blaise Pascal developed a version of this. God is an intelligible sphere whose circumference is nowhere and a center whose presence is everywhere. So God is an intelligible sphere

means that God is spherical. The sphere is a very primal archetype. Look at all the planets and stars and you see it copying itself everywhere. And the symbol for the sun in astrology is the sphere with the dot in the center. Which is also the symbol of the self. Yeah.

Right? And the sun in your chart is the most important aspect of yourself. So God is an intelligible sphere whose circumference is nowhere means God is actually intelligible. You can't know God directly because you'd have to become God. There'd be nobody there to tell you about it. That's why we have to be very careful with religious ideology because it's written down as though it's the word of God. But nobody can actually know what God wants until you become God.

And when you become God, there's nobody there to record it. you lose consciousness as you go into God and you become super conscious because when you're one with God, you're one with all that is and more. You're infinite. Well, how do you ask a question if you're infinite? Because you are everything. Then when you come out of the experience, you awaken. So anyone that's done a full hit of DMT would probably have had the experience of their body dissolving,

going through the geometrical spheres, the Hebrew writing, and very, other forms and all of a sudden they just have an experience of bliss that can't even be described in words but there's not a person there to say anything there's nothing to talk about or write about what you're talking about and writing about is the experience of moving into union with God and then the experience of coming out of it so the problem with all these religious ideologies is They're just other people's ideas, but they're a human conception of what God says or what God is or what God wants. And God doesn't demand anything because there's nothing here but God. That's another thing.

Everybody's looking for God everywhere, looking for God. Well, if God is God, then this is God's body. This is the manifestation of God. That's one of God's favorite jokes is to have people looking around for God. That's so funny. And this is why, by the way, when people used to go to St. Francis of Vasisi, one of the most common questions they asked him is, how do I find God? How do I find God? And he said to them, what you are looking for is what's looking.

And there it is, right? Isn't that just the bullseye, right? so the point that I was leading to sorry for the circumambulation but the point that I was leading to is I had countless Christians say to me old taros the work of the devil every time I put a tarot workshop on I get bombarded with all this stuff I will recite it for fear of upsetting Christians but it's just sad but people have the same view points about astrology, don't they? Oh, big time.

Very misunderstood. I also feel like a lot of the systems that one might leverage for their own empowerment and individuation are the ones that are demonized. Of course. And anything that helps you become an autonomous individual is bad for the system, right? And, you know, if you listen to my podcast with Robert Forte, who's an expert on psychedelics in the history of psychedelics. He makes it very clear. The CIA and Timothy Lurie were very involved in blanketing the United States with as much of those drugs as you could

because they turn everybody into flower children that won't fight for anything, won't stand up for themselves, which is exactly what the government wants when they're pulling all their shady shit on everybody, ripping off other countries stealing their resources. You know, nothing's changed. So you just basically fill them all full of drugs and turn them into flower children that won't stand up for anything and will just ask, you know, their favorite deity to come rescue them or whatever. Now, certainly, you know, I've had nothing but mind-blowingly beautiful experiences with psychedelics. Some of very powerful, painful journeys, but they taught me exactly what I needed to wake up to the parts of myself that could use a tune-up.

but the point I'm wanting to share is this I heard an interview with a very skilled astrologer I believe it was Jeffrey Mischlove on the new Thinking Aloud or one of his interviewers he's wonderful he's awesome I've had him on my podcast too and the lady said the interviewer said to the lady the astrologer she goes what do you have to say about all the people that believe astrology is just a bunch of bunk, woo-woo. She said, you know, a lot of people do have that opinion. There was a time that in my life, I admit I had that opinion, but she said, I've found something very interesting.

I've never met a single person in my life that's actually studied astrology that doesn't believe in it. And I will say, bull's eye, though I'm not an astrologer, I've studied several very good books on it to try to understand it, because anything that hangs around. around that long you should pay attention to. And I mean, we all know you mentioned right at the beginning, Mertrie is in retrograde where we were talking. And we know that, you know,

the moon moves the tides on our planet. And without the sun, we'd be frozen in eight minutes. So if you don't believe in astrology, you just start with what's obvious. You know, it's pretty obvious. Menstrual cycles are real and they're linked to the moon. That's astrology.

And so the same is true of tarot. I don't know anyone that's honestly studied tarot that doesn't just stand in complete and utter awe of it. Because it's like, who in the world did this? How did you do this? So anyhow, that's sort of, you know, me and you having a nice rap session to sort of get ready for it. Would you like to journey in now? Yeah, let's do it. Let's see how far we can get.

We may have to schedule a part too, which I'm totally cool with as well. Yeah. How much time do you want me to pack this into just so I can kind of regulate myself? Well, we have about 30 minutes. Okay. Obviously, that's probably not feasible to get through everything that we'd like to cover. So maybe we do what we can and then schedule a second round. I would stay longer, but I have a dance class in a little while, like an hour.

Oh, that's okay. I'll sort of do a bit of an introduction then. Great. Okay. So let's start with some basic structural concepts. The major arcana are the archetypes that relate to our inner sense of our self, which is our psyche. So your psyche is what is the bridge between the material aspects of your body, your bones, your teeth, your flesh, the water, and our mind. and the mind has a lower level,

which is called lower mind in a lot of systems, which is your personal mind where you have your own programming, your own ideology, your own beliefs, and it's also where we carry our own shadow, which is the parts of ourselves that we don't want to look at. And then we have an unconscious, which is everything that we're aware of,

that we're not aware that we're aware of. And so to realize how powerful the unconscious, all you've got to do is look into what hypnosis of this hypnotists have discovered a hypnotist can put you under hypnosis and find out exactly where you're at on your third birthday you could give him a exquisite description of the cake the people who was there and you can even tell him what was behind you without your eyes being able to see it so when you start looking at what hypnotists can get out of the unconscious it's dead clear that the unconscious is not unconscious at all it's only referred to as the unconscious because it's out of the perceptual range of

the ego structure which has to narrow consciousness down to something we can focus on or our chances of getting killed or too good so we have to be able to look at what's right in front of us so we don't get run over by a car or cut our hand off with a saw or whatever but the concept of the unconscious being unconscious is just wrong because the unconscious is actually the intelligent energy of God that creates everything in existence, which I call spirit jim. All that is existence is spirit jim. So the psyche ranges all the way up to the highest archetypes and to spirit itself. And to matter at the bottom, the seven chakras that we're familiar with represent ranges of vibration, or octaves of manifestation that are the colored rainbow bridge.

So on the left hand, you would have black for inert matter. Then you have red for the root chakra. The lower three are the animal chakras that are relating to our instincts. The heart integrates the higher and lower together. The fifth, sixth, and seventh I call the angelic chakras because they relate to the invisible realm of information and spirit. and so the psyche or the soul is what is interacting and is invested in our body and gives us feeling the soul is the animating force of our body and it is what interfaces with our mind so that we can make meaning

and the soul is what gives us perception it's because you have a soul that you can hear right now and that you can understand things so the soul interfaces with mind lower mind personal mind higher mind archetypes so the tarot is a collection of archetypes that are common to all human beings and have been throughout the history of humanity largely okay so the journey begins with the fool but i'll just give you a little image here from my teaching because I took my Spirit Gym students through a comprehensive understanding of each of the major arcana because I wanted them to understand how it functions in their life because you can't grow spiritually without an understanding of these archetypes because really they're the basis

of spiritual growth. And so this system here, I derive from an excellent book called Jung and Terro an archetypal journey by Sally Nichols with an introduction by Laura Vanderpost. But this is not a beginner's book. This is a deep exploration of union psychology as it relates to tarot. So this is something for people that have a fair bit of experience and maybe at least some background in psychology, but anyone could read it and get a lot out of it. It would just be heavy reading. Now, there's a number of systems like this.

I just find this one to be so far the most rational based on my own experience of taro and working with it with clients and patients. And I also use taro as prep work for a shamanic ceremony because it allows me to see what the state of the individual is and help me determine whether I should make modifications to keep somebody safe. So in this model, you have three rows of seven. Remember, there's 21 major arcana, the fool is number two. The fool is zero.

So zero is outside of, yet paradoxically, within the archetypes. So when we look at this model, you can see there's a three-tier structure. So the first seven rows represent the formative forces. So that's like the soul coming into the body and realizing it's here. human and it's having a human experience. So if you take the journey of the fool, it begins at one and it ends at 22 if you can complete the hero's journey, which is very, very hard to do. Otherwise, you just, from lifetime to lifetime, you recycle and sort of begin with the

level of development. You left off. But as you'll see, all these archetypes are at play all the time. The second row is basically called the row of man, the ego, earthly reality. And it's the series of lessons in taro where we learn to create equilibrium in our life. So we're not just getting batted around by our programming, our mind, and by the events of life. And it's the first level of the purification process because ultimately the goal is to return back to God, which is what tarot 21 the world is all about.

And then row 15, which starts with the devil and ends at the world, is the row of illumination, self-realization, and the final purification to get you ready for union with God again, which you have to do a fair bit of purification to handle that. And that's again what real religion is supposed to do. Real religion is supposed to prepare you for union. experience and help you be aware of what will block you from having an experience of union with God. That's real religion, which is unfortunately very, very rare. A little insight, the devil card tarot 15 was not originally called the devil card. It was called the raw card. Raw was the sun

and the sun god of Egypt. So Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, I worship raw. So it was actually called the raw card, and it symbolized freedom, not the devil. The Christians changed it to the devil card. Wow. So right off the bat, we already have the Christians going into tarot and manipulating it and there's many books that I've studied on tarot that I can barely get through because the Christian restructuring of tarot to a guy like me that studied it very deeply, it disturbs me

because it's it's really a way to manipulate people's minds and lie to them and use something that was really sacred and manipulate it as another tool of control, which is unfortunate, which is why I teach my students before you read books. let me teach you how to have an intimate relationship with these archetypes and develop your own understanding of them directly from the archetype and that brings me back to something I wanted to point out that if you an archetype is a very hard thing to wrap your head around because I could go you know I can do a long comprehensive explanation of archetypes

very scientific and deep and in spirit gem I have a lot of deep training and all these things but imagine that if you're God, you're absolute, you're infinite, there's nothing behind you. There's ultimately nothing here but you. Everything that exists can only exist within you. Lout Suises all things have their back to the mother, the mother being the Tao, or word God. There's nothing behind God. And since God is infinite, there's really no way for God. to have an experience, God, and most people believe God is unconditional love. Well, that which is

unconditional is unconditional. There's no thing there. That would be a condition. So if you said God is a tree, that would be a condition. So because God as unconditional love has no way to know experience or relate to itself, the only thing God can do is dream. God doesn't yet have a mind. mind takes two points of sentience to exchange energy and information without which you don't have a mind. You can have an information processor, but it's not conscious. In other words, information can move between two chips or processors in a computer, but it wouldn't matter if you were talking about kinky sex, money, or God. The computer hasn't got a clue, just like a hose doesn't know if you're running water or wind through it. So the only way God can come to know and experience itself is to dream itself into existence.

And that is what the fool represents. It represents God as zero, unconditional love. That symbol means the unconditional, that for which there is no way to measure it. Pure potential. If you take zero and give it a twist, it's the infinite. So one saying is God is zero with a twist. So the fool represents God dreaming itself into existence. And the journey of God is to pour itself into its own dream and experience the characters in the dream.

But the intensity of God's creative ability, God has infinite processing power, infinite energy, infinite amounts of information, infinite processing, speed, infinite processing power, infinite creativity. So there's really nothing God cannot manifest because there's no limitations on God. So God dreams itself into existence, but literally becomes the characters. Through that experience of limitation, now you can't have a soul without limitation. If there was no limitation to what you perceive of as Alexis, well, then how would you know who you were? how would I know who you were? You look in the mirror and you say, there I am.

You're not confused about who's there because there's a limitation. So the illusion of limitation turns out to be what is necessary for God to have an experience of itself and as many potentials as possible. And all beings of all type, from the single-celled organisms to every type of alien you can imagine, and the universe is heavily populated with self-aware beings, which are all God experiencing itself in different ways. Alan Watts said the universe is a peopleing universe.

What he means not humaning, it means beings that are self-aware, that are having an experience that have the capacity to perceive self-relative to other, without which you cannot have an experience. So the fool represents the concept that we're all, being dreamed into existence, and that ultimately we're all God on a journey to realize itself, and that's what the hero's journey is from a spiritual perspective, is to actually answer the question, who am I, what am I, and why am I here?

And the answer to that is your God, having an experience of a unique potential that only you can carry as yourself, because God is Eros, and Eros penetrates and creates novelty. Eros does not ever penetrate and copy. There's no two sand grains the same, no two snowflakes the same, no two people's fingerprints the same. Nothing on this planet is ever the same twice, even if you try to make it that way, you can't do it. Plato said only the archetypes themselves are pure.

So what I'm saying is I've imagined, God looks into itself what the archetypes are as an analogy. If you look at all the creation stories, they all begin with water and chaos. So water is very much like a crystal. It acts like a liquid crystal. So if God looks into itself and what we have in there is a dreaming nature, the same way you put light through a prism and it refracts into the colors of the rainbow when God looks into itself, what seems to happen is that God's consciousness refracts into the archetypes. And those archetypes are essential as carriers of meaning.

For example, what would it mean to be alive if you didn't have a mother or a father? You would be a machine. you know how did i get here what am i right if you look at all languages have alphabets the 26 letters of the english language are on every keyboard you'll ever type on even your phone and if you were to take one of them away it would disable your ability to communicate so if you begin a sentence with a we already are asking question a what a cow a human a cat so archetypes are actually letters as well because they're carriers of meaning. And so there you see archetypes are actually inherent to the psyche because without them,

we cannot make meaning. And if we don't make meaning, paradoxically, spirit does not flow. If you, if I ask you to do something that's completely meaningless, do you get all excited and say, oh, wow, I'm really going to do a good job at that? or do you have a sense of what for? Right? So whenever we don't have a sense of meaning, meaning and values are directly related like two signs of a coin.

What's meaningful to you has a connection to a field of value. It's meaningful to honor your marriage vows if you make a vow because you really want to focus on growing and evolving in that relationship out of commitment. So there's not only meaning to that, but there's value to that. If there's meaning to eating good food, there's value to eating good food.

So you see, archetypes allow us to have meaning and connects us to a field of value. And whenever we have a shared sense of meaning and value, spirit flows. And when spirit flows, the more people that you have with common sense of meaning and value, the more spirit flows, the more potential or power to create.

create that you have. A thousand people following the same blueprint can build something a lot quicker, quicker, faster than 10 people, right? Mm-hmm. So it's very important to understand that these archetypes are not only modes of understanding or meaning-making, but they're also connecting you to a field of value. So now what I'll do because of the lack of time is I will just, tell you that the story of tarot is actually the story of the fool coming into a body

and going through the life process and it describes what is happening at each stage of development and what kind of challenges are there. So each of the tarot archetypes is telling you what is the process that that archetype is involved in. How does it show up in your psyche and in your life? and what are some of the challenges inherent to each of these archetypes that are a necessary process of growth and development without which we could not have physical evolution, emotional evolution, mental evolution, or spiritual evolution, or self-realization. So it begins with the fool.

Notice the fool, which symbolizes God, has a little dog, and he's very close to a cliff, and he's in a state of bliss, and the dog is barking at them. The dog represents the instincts. If you get too bliss out and you don't pay attention to your instincts, it's easy to die. Your instincts are built by 4.9 billion years of evolution on this planet to keep you alive. And the dog also represents your ego,

which is a reminder that you came here to have the experience of being a self to being a unique expression of the divine. And if you lose your ego before you figured out, out who and what you are, you will abort the journey. Okay. So the next card is the magician. Now, the magician, there's different ways to look at it, but I'll have to use mythology and allegory and metaphor.

In one myth, God needed a way to self-reflect. So in that myth, God. God had to turn to the highest, most powerful angel, which God also dreamed up by the name of Lucifer. And so Lucifer is said by some like Rustle Sturgis, who wrote an excellent book called the spiritual roots of tarot, which is very good. But he equates the magician to Lucifer. And so what God did was said to Lucifer, I need you to create a mode or a means by which I can self-reflect so I can come to experience and know myself because without self-reflection, I don't even know who or what I am.

Is that kind of like polarity? Well, yes, yes. So what Lucifer did is create the matrix so that God could go into itself, but have a mode of self-reflection. So you see on the table, what is a table? it's where we do work it's where we make things happen the table represents the field

like Einstein's field Rumi says beyond judgment there's a field I'll meet you there that's God beyond judgment beyond mind there's a field I meet you there on the table there are four implements notice around the magician's waist

is the auriboris God has nothing to eat but itself God can only sustain itself on itself and only god can create and sustain itself the magician's got one hand pointing up with a double-ended one which means it can heal in either polarity and create positively or negatively and the other hand pointing to the ground which means the alchemical dictum as above so below whatever you think you shall create the infinity sign above the egyptian's head means that mind is all powerful, so be careful how you use it. On the table, you see something

very interesting. Only half of the table is there, because these cards include alchemy. A table has four legs. Those four legs represent the elements, earth, water, fire, and air. But fire is spirit. It's invisible. And air is invisible. And so you can't see them. So the two legs on the table represent water and earth, which are passive elements in alchemy, fire and error volatile, which means they make things move and change. On the table, you have a wand which represents fire, the element of fire, which is power, the power to make things happen, fire represents desire, God's desire to know and experience in itself and to love. Then you have a sword which represents mind, in order to comprehend anything within God, you have to cut something out.

If I point to a crowd of people and say to a child, you see your mother? Well, if there's 200 people standing there, it might not be able to recognize its mother. And the child will say, no, I can't see my mom. I say, look at the, see the lady over there with the blonde hair and the black jacket with white boots on? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, that's my mom, and off the kid goes. So the mind has to cut out something that it can grasp in order to have some tangibility to create meaning. So the sword is an ancient symbol of the fact that the mind is always cutting, which is why you can never know God with a mind because you can only talk about God.

You can't penetrate God with mind because mind's cutting into pieces. So remember, whenever you're reading what people write about God, it's always about, not in or through. You can only get direct experience of God within yourself. Okay? So simply put the swords in tarot, which is all these are sweets of cards, represents mind. The cup represents love and emotion. All that has to do with love and emotion, and the coins represent the material dimension. and money and physicality and bodies.

So anything physical that you can weigh or measure relates to coins. So the magician is saying, God, I am going to create a matrix. You will not be able to see once you enter the matrix how it's being created because spirit and mind will become invisible. But what you will see is what you are creating while you're in the matrix, will be represented by water and earth, and you will see that you're creating it because those things will not move themselves.

You will have to move them with your mind and with your ingenuity. How long do you have to stand next to a pile of rocks before a toaster oven or a Rolex jumps out forever, unless you do something with those rocks? The flowers represent that you have the capacity to create and grow life and beauty all around you by using your mind effectively, but you also have the power to destroy. And so the double-ended wand is symbolizing the mind has the capacity to create positively and negatively. But it's also saying the mind has the capacity to heal whatever it creates that's not in harmony

with life and love. So the magician's wearing white, which is purity, he's wearing a red cloak, which means ultimately the best way to use your mind is to create safety and security for everybody. Otherwise, you just create problems, and spiritual growth means you eventually see the other side of the table that's invisible, but that's what you have to go on the journey to learn to do. So the matrix says, God, you will be born into my matrix that I have created for you, you will be made of earth, water, fire, and air, and you will go through a set of experiences in which you will learn to use power, love, mind, and material things to realize yourself, and you will be trapped until you figure it out. And only then will you be able to get

out of the matrix of your own creation and come home to be who and what you've always been. the trick is you will always think you're somebody else and never realize that you've always been God, you always are God, you always will be God. But in order for you to have that experience, we must create conditions and limitations on the infinite or you cannot know and experience yourself. But since you have all the time there will ever be,

don't worry, if you get trapped in there for a million lifetimes, it's really just a flash and a pan relative to that which was never born and never died. So that's the first step. The fool represents the soul and the spirit. So the soul means self-awareness, self-reference, coming into existence to have an experience. So God is the soul that gives all souls.

Only a soul can come. Only God can give a soul. Souls can't come from anything but God. So the fool represents all souls that step into the matrix. of experience and spiritual evolution for self-awareness. Now, I'll go fairly quick for time's sake, but I'll just sort of introduce you to each step. Next is the high priestess.

She represents the soul. So the magician gives you mind, which is spirit, the flow of energy and information, and says this is how mind is structured. She says you are going to have an experience, but ultimately I am the only aspect of you that really knows what is going on because I am what is using mine to have an experience. Those two pillars, one black, one whiteish, represent yin and yang.

So it says all of creation is made of these two aspects of God. The empty, yin, the dark, the full yang, the created, and they're interacting constantly. and she has a hat, a headdress on with the phases of the moon, which symbolizes that she is in touch with all the flow of time, life, and experience. Here you see a crescent moon. Her gown is made of water, which represents the unconscious. So she says, I as your soul have the capacity for self-reflection.

And what are you reflecting? Whatever you believe, whatever you think, whatever you experience all by way of mind. So before we come in, we are given the matrix, we're given the potential for mind, we're given the soul, and we come in by way of the empress, which represents the divine feminine, all mothers. So that's the archetype of the mother. But we couldn't get here without a father, so the emperor represents the father archetype. So all fathers, she represents the feminine expression in the physical. represents the masculine and human form, and their relationship is what produces a child that gives the fool a body and a place for its mind and its soul to exist in space, time, and have an experience.

Eventually, the child begins to get indoctrinated quite early, and so the 85% of the world population has religious affiliation and indoctrination. So the hierophant represents that when you go through indoctrination, you're going to be exposed to ideologies. Notice there's two understudies here in front of the priest. One's got blue and white gown and one's got black and red. So that represents the two forces of consciousness, the light and the dark, good and evil, using the mind to create good and using religious ideas and teachings to trap oneself or to trap others.

The hierophant has a triple-tiered crown and scepter because the hierophant has deep knowledge of the physical, the mental, emotional, and spiritual plane. So to be a hierophon, you actually have to have mastery of those three planes or you can't really guide people. And so there's meanings to the hand signals. notice the two posts again, you know, to really explain all this would take a long time. That's why I have hours and hours of training in Spiritjum. The two keys mean the kingdom, the keys to the kingdom, which there's more to that, but I'll leave it there. Now, once the child reaches puberty and starts to reject mom and dad, it goes out into the world and starts to figure out who its people are, what its ideology is.

So these two people represent the young person that's left home and is now out finding itself, figuring out its own values, who are its own people. And the problem is as soon as you start wandering out in the world, you're highly susceptible to trickery and indoctrination by authority figures, religious figures, and cults. So that symbolizes the youth out there trying to figure out who it is, but having to deal with the dangers of God that's not God. Then the fool reaches the age where it starts having sex

and engaging in intimate relationships. So the lover's card is all about learning to deal with the beauty and the challenges of intimate personal relationships. And there's a tremendous amount of growth that we all get through intimate personal relationships and relating to other human beings. So this is a really tough path because we have the paradox that love and sex feels very good, but oftentimes it goes south and feels very painful and can be very, very wounding. So there's an angel to try to mediate all that.

You see the tree of the knowledge of good and evil behind Eve and the tree of life behind Adam. That represents Adam and Eve or God's original dreaming of itself in human form. through the challenges of love and relationship we come to realize wow these relationships are not easy and i've been through a bunch of them but at some point we realize we can't keep blaming everybody else so we have to start looking into ourselves taking responsibility for ourselves so we get to tarot number seven the chariot the chariot sitting in a chariot with no rigging and no reins and two sphinxes which represent the forces of consciousness the yin feminine dart as of consciousness, unconscious, Yang, masculine light, conscious aspects of consciousness.

And in order to stay balanced, we have to learn to balance the forces of consciousness, but he's wearing battle armor not to protect him against anybody else. But that armor represents, I must be conscious of what I'm doing to myself with my own mind, my own judgments, fears, insecurities, and criticisms. So this is the beginning of the awakening of the fact that, that I am 50% of all my personal relationships, and I gotta stop blaming everybody else. And in order to go into myself deeply enough to get balanced,

I'm going to have to develop armor to protect myself from my own programming and my own shadow. So that's the beginning of the commitment to taking responsibility for your spiritual growth. Then, Tero 8 represents the meeting of the soul. The lion is an alchemical symbol for the ego. we eventually realize our ego is a very lousy tour guide,

no matter how smart we are, how rich we are, we keep creating more problems for ourselves than good. So ultimately, all the religion and all the blah, blah, blah, we realize that the only authority we can trust is this miraculous thing inside of us that somehow speaks to us through inner knowing, intuition, conscience, and that's the soul. so that this card shows you that the soul has the power to tame the lion, the ego, and only love can tame the ego.

And so the only way to grow spiritually is to learn to love yourself, tame your ego, and develop the relationship with your soul, which is really God. That's why you see the infinity symbol above her head. Once we realize that communicating with our soul is not very easy because our ego keeps getting in the way and we are often afraid to hear what. the soul really wants for fear that we might not get what we want, we come to the realization that for real spiritual growth to happen, we have to go isolate ourselves somewhere deeply where we can have enough quiet and work potentially with one skilled mentor, but often by ourselves, where we've got to face our shadows, our darkness, and get clear on what our values are and what we really want to create and who we really are. So the hermit goes off into isolation

to grow connection to God and soul and to become clear on what is and isn't something that it wants to keep energizing as beliefs and behaviors. And so the practice grows consciousness, which is the lantern showing light, the wisdom that is accumulated is represented by the wand,

which represents the fire element, which is the desire to realize who you are. So you have to go into a period of isolation and purification, or you will never unify yourself with your spirit and your soul, you'll always be ego governed. Then you come to 10, which is the wheel of fortune, and for the first time you come to realization after hermitting yourself

and doing legitimate spiritual practices for long enough to get pure enough to see that the world is a living mirror and that everything around you is what you're creating with your unconscious and conscious intentions, and how you manage yourself in relationship, the symbols in the four corners represent the cardinal points of astrology. Then you have the Anubis, which represents our habit of tricking ourselves, and the sphinx at the top is the riddler.

Whenever you meet the sphinx, you'll be given a riddle if you don't answer it. The sphinx will kill you, and life is the riddle. All those symbols are symbols that relate to tarot. But ultimately, here we reach for the first time a level of awareness where we realize everything happening in our life is largely of our own creation and our own conscious or unconscious intention. And so now the spiritual practice extends itself out

into an honest commitment to seeing what we're creating and not blaming everybody else and taking more responsibility for the power of our love and our mind to do and to create what we want, not what we don't want. And if it's in your life, you can say you had something to do with it being there. 11, we come to the realization that we're not a very good judge of ourselves,

and no matter how hard we try, we create problems for ourselves and others. So the archetype of justice says we have to reach deep enough into ourself and into our heart to connect to the archetype of justice to realize what is or isn't just, and only the heart can deliver justice to the head. so Lady Justice is really all about connecting the heart to the head so that you don't use that sword to kill but you use it to create balance she's holding a balance beam scale one pan represents the female the other

represents the male the beam between them is neither male or female and that represents the judge who is not caught in either but she's beyond it but able to give you wise counsel because she's not caught in your story she's outside of it. Then we get to 12. The hang man. The hang man is the emperor upside down. Notice his legs make the number four, which is the emperor.

So the hang man has two key meanings. One, if you're being a shitty emperor in your life, you're going to hang yourself up, and you're probably going to blame everybody else for it. But your relationships fall apart. Your business follows apart. You're always walking around complaining. I don't have enough.

People did this to me, victim, whatever. Or you realize that the journey is a lot deeper than you thought. So the positive expression of the hang man is to invert your consciousness and spend enough time in meditation and self-reflection to be honest about the powers of your own creation and where you can do better at managing yourself so that you're more in harmony with your own stated dream goals and objectives and values.

That's the spiritual practice. So the hang man actually is a symbol in the positive that you take time out of your day to do the inner work necessary to grow consciousness instead of just repeating the behaviors that everybody else does while expecting some daddy figure to rescue you, which doesn't ever really happen. Then if you get to 13, now you have to deal with the fact that in order to grow into a truly spiritual person, then we have to let the parts of ourselves die that are slowing us down, deluding us, disabling us, and others. And that if we get too attached to material things,

they will disappear. So death not only means literal death, but it means the figurative death of learning to let go of what no longer serves us or others in relationship or serves the world, or the angel of death comes to get us because we have basically broken the rules of the game, and we have to pay the consequences. We realize that it's very challenging to do, and we need help. So we need the angel of temperance, and she is there to help us learn to love more fully, to be better listeners, to be more patient,

and to let you know that it's not only God in the game, but it's also God that didn't enter the game so that there is unconditional love there to support you. So she represents the fact that all you've got to do is ask, and God's angels will always help, but you have to ask and you have to be honest because you can't bullshit an angel. Then we come to 15, the devil,

which really is a symbol of being aware of the ways we're limiting our own freedom, holding ourselves back, and using our powers, our God-given powers to create, to limit the freedom of other people in any way, shape, or form. And so the devil is there because we always have, the free will to choose to love or not love, to be honest or dishonest, to be good or evil. And that gives us free will. God gives us the power to love or not love, to care or not care. So the devil represents service to self, above and beyond service to or care for other.

and our own hubris and our own hedonism always leads to some kind of problem in our life. And so there's lots of symbology. I could go for a lot deeper on these. But basically the devil means whatever you're doing to limit your freedom, the positive is where do you need a little more devil because you're too rigid,

too righteous, too caught up in a dogma, and it's killing you. In other words, sometimes it's good to get out of the missionary position and try something new and the devil says, yes, give it a go. It's all God. Ultimately, if we don't become aware of where we're deviling ourselves and others and where our ego is limiting us, we get to the tower and our ego will create destruction and our beliefs will create destruction, will destroy key relationships, and we'll tear down everything that we built for the wrong reasons, such as chasing

after money, fame or success at the expense of spending time realizing who and what we are and learning to live and love more fully. The tower can also mean flashes of insight and intuition, but in order to get flashes of insight and intuition, you've got to get your head out of the way. So this means, be careful, you don't get too fully yourself because you can destroy yourself with the same powers that you've been mismanaging in relationship. That's like the Tower of Babel story as well. It is. That's all linked in there.

Yeah. Yeah. There's many, many religious themes. That tarot is like, you know, so rich. It'll take you 50 years of hard study just to get warmed up. Finally, we get to 17, not finally. Next, we get to 17, the star. OSHA says, if you want to be a star, you better learn to play with fire. So the star is about being careful not to put too much of our energy into getting other people's approval, validation, kudos, externalizing ourselves so heavily that we forget that we are unique and that we have inner work to do.

So she is actually now the hermit coming back at a later stage to saying, I must isolate myself, get naked with God, be very honest with who I am and with myself and with God, and learn to manage the forces of the unconscious so I don't derail myself. You notice there's, these represent the chakras. One's falling.

So there's something going on in her life that she has to focus on because it's throwing her out of balance. And this central star represents the self, the true authentic self that she is. So she's doing the committed work of spiritual development, which again requires isolation. One foot in the water means in the unconscious, the other foot on land means the conscious.

So she's learning to consciously become aware of what's in the unconscious. That's a limitation to good beauty and truth, without which she will never know who she is, nor can she use the power of God invested in her in ways that make stardom last. Finally, not finally next, we come to the moon, which is a juxtaposition, an eclipse of the sun and the moon. the sun represents our conscious self,

the moon represents our unconscious self, and the lobster represents the exoskeleton of all the baggage we haven't yet healed. The two dogs represent the inner ego and the outer ego, our inner relationship with our self and our outer relationship with our self until those are harmonized. We're always at war with ourselves and always has something to do with what we've believed and what we've been programmed to believe,

but we can't make it down the journey of enlightenment, those two pillars, mean yin and yang, until we actually deeply self-reflect and bring the inner self and the outer self into harmony. So there's only one of us there. There's not a secret story or a story gap that we're maintaining. Secret story is you're telling yourself a story on the inside that's different than what you're telling others on the outside of story gap. Is there's a gap between the story you tell yourself and the story you tell others?

and it always leads to insecurity because you're never really being authentic with who you are. So this is a very important card of purification. Once we do the purification, then we join our childlike nature, except now we're a wise child. The sun represents consciousness. The four flowers represents our potential for wholeness and growth. The horse is a symbol of freedom. So now we're the wise child, the big orange banner, means you now have a lot of libido or creativity, but the wall means there's something behind there you cannot see, so the journey must continue.

Then we get to 20, which is judgment, and that means that once we reach deep enough into our consciousness and have enlightenment experiences with God, we realize all of our own judgments against, and other, and we realize that there's nobody here but God and everybody that we didn't like for different race, creed, color, or otherwise was actually God, and they were all playing in a grand Maya play or drama within which we work with other aspects of God called other, like you and I and mom and dad and friends, and those that we don't like and those that we do like, ultimately as a means of awakening to who and what we really are, but this time being conscious of the truth.

So the angel blowing the trumpet says it's time to wake up and realize that there's never been anybody here but God. And you can't die because the soul can't die and spirit can't die. It was all just a great big, fun play where we created a matrix of self-reflection or a school yard so God could itself wake up, but be conscious that it's God. Because God before the journey was super conscious,

which is everything happening at once, so there's nothing to know. And unconscious, so there's nothing to know. So through the journey, we've just talked about you actually become conscious that you're God, and then that's when God becomes conscious that it's God. So it doesn't matter how enlightened Alexis is, or Paul is, or Buddha is.

We don't know that God. we only know the God within us. So God actually recreates the matrix and the journey in every single individual and has no idea what everybody else is doing. So only when we wake up to God does God realize itself in and as us and through us. And that's what Judgment Day says. But if you wake up and you haven't healed yourself of all this stuff, then you will be afraid of God because you'll still be afraid of yourself.

Because you'll still realize that you have evil in you, the willingness to kill, control, compete, destroy, create limitations. And so you'll have to come back to the beginning of the journey to start over again to do the work that you could have done by the time you got here. And the final stop on the journey is the world. And the world shows a great big, beautiful green wreath. Those key elements represent different aspects of our psyche. I won't go through them because it'll take too long.

Notice that she's quite naked. She's got a white scarf wrapped around her. She is dancing. That's the divine mother. She represents Shakti. That is the womb. So that's the opening to the womb of Shakti. Beyond her is the emptiness of God, the spiritual world.

The unity of God. Notice the opening to the womb is in the shape of a which is that which is unconditional and then you see the little red scarf which is the ultimate safety and security is in the infinity of god's love she's got a double healing double-ended one in each hand which means before you can enter the womb of god and return back to where you came from you have to be healed of any imbalances both from the masculine perspective and the feminine perspective and these four forces of consciousness will all be acting through you, which is the symbols of the zodiac. So yeah, I won't go into those. It'll be more than we can do.

But to truly reach nirvana, which means to blow out or extinguish, which means the drop returns to the ocean. Remember, Rumi says you're not a drop of the ocean. You're the ocean in a drop. So once you pass through the gate, there is no more individuality anymore. There is no more history. You have to be ready to completely and utter let go of any sense of self and return to the infinite abyss of oneness with God and hand over your story and your history to the unknown. and that is not easy to do.

And that's the end of the hero's journey. And if you make it through the gate back to the womb of Shakti, you become one with God again, and Joseph Campbell says don't rush because you might pop out as a cockroach and start all over again because God's got nothing else to do but play this favorite game of hide and go seek. So once you get there,

you can decide if you want to enter into complete unity with God and just trust that whatever's going to happen is going to happen, or you can come back. And each time you go through the hero's journey, you become wiser and wiser. Eventually, you reach the point where you're coming back strictly to help. The rest of God could you realize all of creation is a garden for souls where God grows souls to wake up to who and what it is. And the ultimate gift is to become a co-creator with God to add more love, more good, and more

beauty so that God wakes up, cleans up, grows up, and shows up to the party faster, and that we use our creative ability to create more things that are loving and supportive of life and love itself. So once you reach enough of awareness in your spiritual evolution to realize what's really going on who we all are, then most souls come back because they realize God is so abys. committed to this process that unfortunately God puts itself in harm's way, goes through a tremendous amount of pain and sadness and suffering, ultimately so that it can wake up. So just the way we wouldn't want our own children to go through unnecessary pain and suffering,

when you realize that you are God and everybody else is God and your heart opens, the tarot says when you get to that point in the journey, you can either drop can either return to the ocean and you just let go or you come back and see if you can help create something that's a little less painful for God to have to go through to realize itself. And by giving more love and more support, God wakes up sooner with less torture. So that's what I think inspires Alexis to do her podcast and Paul to do his podcast and start an institute.

and help people because at some level we realize everybody that doesn't know how to eat, move, or be healthy is actually making the journey to self-realization a little more painful than it needs to be and longer often than it needs to be so those that are slightly more or a lot more awake always do their best to extend a hand to try to awaken people in ways that are loving and supportive

so that we can all realize that we are Ram Das. Rom, God, Das, worker. We are God experiencing itself, coming to realize itself so that we can all celebrate who and what we are together. And the more you realize that you're a worker for God, then the more special each day becomes and the more capable you are of working through your challenges because you know who you're working for.

And I guess in that way, we kind of have to thank Bill Gates and the Weff and all them for serving as the negative polarity to wake us up to the... Yeah, that's their job. Yeah. Because without them, everybody would just smoke, pot, drink alcohol, surf social media, nobody would grow and evolve. Yeah.

So those are the negative polarity holders. That's also what the devil represents. I will come awaken you to the fact that free will is very tricky. And if you give yourself a lot of what you think you want, but ultimately it turns out to be a limitation, to your growth and development or to God's growth and development, or you start telling people that the untrue is true, or you start breaking the rules set by the magician,

which is the rules of the matrix. That's all there to help wake God up. So paradoxically, the devil is there to give you the free will to do whatever you want to yourself and other people, but the devil is also the one that quicken, consciousness and says, well, now that you're super filthy, rich, and you've got a family that's all broken and all you've ever cared about was money, like the myth of Midas, how are you doing? You still want to keep doing it?

Or do you want to play a little different game? So paradoxically, the devil really symbolizes the freedom to love or not love, to care or not care. But the devil is also the great deliver of the wake-up call that says, oh, you want to play that again, well, let's just vaccinate the shit out of you and see what happens when you're sick and dying if you're interested in God now or if you still want to just play games with social media and machines. So, you know, when you get deep enough into God, you realize even the ugliest of the

ugly is actually there to serve us in some way. And the nastiest, meanest people, the Adolf Hitler's, the Gingus Kans, the whoever you want to put on the list, George Soros, Bill Gates, whoever your favorite bad guy is, they're there to make sure that we don't just lay down and get stoned and have no reason to love and support each other and grow and create together because if they're going to build a jail around you, then you better figure out quickly how to do something that stops them from building the jail. In other words, it's all God becoming conscious of itself. and this is exactly why the most popular scripture

in all the Hindu scriptures is the Bhagavad Gita, which is all about Krishna and Arjuna on a battlefield where Arjuna's got to go to war with his own family members and do all sorts of atrocious things. But Arjuna is schooling him and why he's here in the battlefield and says it's all God. You can't really kill these people. That's just an illusion.

But the illusion is so real. It's very, very hard to get out of it because God's that committed. You know, the way I described God to my students is God is like a genius child that loves to play games. So what God does is creates a game and then says, now I'm going to jump into the game so fully

that I forgot that I created it and the only way I can get out of it is to win the game. So God jumps into all these video games. God jumps into the game of life, the game of sex, the game of money, the game of politics, the game of war, the game of farming, the game of education so fully. And the only way God can get out is to win the game. And how do you win the game?

You realize who you are. You realize what the world is, what the universe is, and who everybody else is. And you realize it's all God dreaming itself into an experience of awakening to what it really is, but being conscious of it. Because God, as God, is super conscious, which is, you know, if you know everything, paradoxically, there's nothing to think about. So you have no reason to look. That's what quantum physics shows you.

Until you look, there's nothing there. And if you're unconscious, you're unaware that you're dreaming like we so often do at night. So between the super conscious of God and the unconscious of God, nature exists. And that's where the unconscious, the habit of dreaming creates nature and the super conscious gives us the ability to create with our mind and our intention. But it's only through the soul going through this journey in the middle between the unconscious and the super conscious as progressively more conscious that God finally wakes up and says, oh my God, I get it. Here I am. I am. and that's the pursuit of real religion, that's the pursuit of yoga.

And that's actually all that's really going on in life is we're all here as agents, unique expressions of the divine working to the very best we can with the level of knowledge, experience and support we have to wake up to what love really is and who we're really here to love. and the more awake somebody is to who and what they really are, the less violent they are, the less destructive they are, and the more they clean, feed, nurture, and protect life. And so that paradoxically is what the tarot is about. And the fact that the Christians and many religions try to get rid of it

should tell you very much about how busy the devil is inside of religions, because anybody that wants to get rid of the story I just told wants to get rid of life and love itself. Wow. This has been such a masterclass and like so much to absorb. I know for myself I'm going to be listening to this back and I wish we could keep going. Like I know you're probably getting exhausted. This has been not at all, man. I'm so turned on.

Oh, good. Like once I start doing this, I don't need food or water or anything else. Spirit just channels right through me. Now, this is a very fast description. In Spirit, Jim, in the Sanga lessons, I go through each of these archetypes. I give meditation exercises. I give various types of exercises. I give self-reflection exercises. And then after each of those songs, I have a meeting with the students where I do questions and answers and help them come clear. And so we go through all the major arcana. It took almost a year to do that training in each of those meetings is between three and four hours. So there's,

wow, there's, you know, I just did an hour and a few minutes what I really do in about, I don't know, 22 times four, whatever that is, hours. Wow. About a hundred hours of deeper training, which is still compared to what I could teach very quick, but it's very profound. And I do teach tarot workshops called tarot for soul guidance, where I show you how to use the tarot as a means of gaining more connection to your soul. So that ultimately you get to the point where you don't need the tarot because you've got a means by which you can now understand what your soul is telling you and communicating. So the goal for me of taro is to not need the tarot. That's how you know you've used tarot for

what it's really for. It brings you to the point where your inner vision, your inner hearing, your inner senses of perception and connection to your own inner consciousness, your spirit, and your soul are so conscious and vivified that you don't need the tarot anymore because you are it. You eat, sleep, breathe, and shit it. You don't need an external. So the tarot is really like training wheels for legitimate spiritual development and is to help you, realize why you're here and what's going on and why the world is always the way it is, because it is a garden of souls. And it's like a gymnasium. That's why Spirit Gym is called Spirit Jim. You go there to grow not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

So the whole of existence is God's Spirit Gym, where it goes to swing on the monkey bars and lift and push and pull and struggle and spar and scrap and, fight and pretend to not be conscious and to not be God while it wakes up. And the saints and the sages and the gurus try to hold the balance so we don't completely annihilate life while the schoolyard runs. Incredible. And actually, I had the privilege of going through Spirit Gym a bit for at least a couple months.

And it's just such an incredible repository and resource. So I'd highly recommend all of you listening, go and check it out. I'll include links also in the show. show notes. So if you want to check out the program, sign up, you can do monthly, I believe, an annual, right? Yeah, it's myspiritjim.com is the URL, my spiritjim.com. And then all my holistic health teachings are at the Czech Institute, C-H-E-K Institute.com. And I've got 1,300 videos for free on almost every topic on YouTube.com, dot com forward slash paul check c h e k paul check live and that's free then my paulchek dot com is like a hub

where you can see my podcast spirit gem with paul check and all sorts of other things and blogs so there's lots to to play with i've been at this long time and i've poured my heart into the world to to the best of my ability yes and i think anybody who's uh you know kind of worked with you or worked with your content can certainly attest to that. The amount of information you give away for free is just tremendous. So if people don't have the funds to enroll in Spirit Gym right now, start with the free content, start incorporating that. It makes your life so much better. And it's very simple things too. And yeah, I think it's just so wonderful what you're doing. It's such an honor to be connected with you after years of admiring your work. And I just want to thank you so much for your

commitment to this work and sharing it with the world and improving all of our lives. It's really just quite remarkable. Well, I have the same degree of love and appreciation for you, Alexis. You have got a gift from God for taking very technical material and making it understandable to the masses. And, you know, you have the love and the heart of a woman. So you take a lot of information that's batted around by males, but bring it down into where, we get to feel the nurture and the love of the mother archetype. And like, I love listening to you because I get to learn while hearing from this beautiful female angel

instead of getting ramrodded with $10 words left right and center. Yeah, it's honestly, I kind of feel similar to you. Whenever I'm podcasting or making content, it just feels more like channeling than I'm not thinking while it's happening. you know, it's just kind of coming through you, but it's, it's amazing. And I'm just happy to be gotten to a place in my life where I can share with people and, and help people, you know, live more fulfilled lives that are less unconscious and more intentional. It's, it's an honor. It really is. Well, what else is there to do at the end of the day? You know, I reached the point in my life where I realized, you know, what gives me the most joy is doing things that help other people.

If I had a ton of money and I was just living like a king in the castle, staring at a big, screen television all day and everybody out there was struggling and having a hard time and poisoning themselves and blah blah blah well then you know i i wouldn't be able to face myself every day and sleep with myself so i i think you know you can tell where a person's at in their spiritual journey because i grows into an awareness of we and ultimately we grows into an awareness of all and all grows into awareness that the cosmos is God's body and that grows into a magical awareness that God is no thing and everything at once so it's every breath is a chance to celebrate life

and to worship the beauty of it all and to just do our best to nurture and love the manifest God in children and in nature and everything and to be a good gardener of souls Amen. I think maybe that's a good place to call it for today. I hope I again sometime. I'm really in person as well. Yeah, I love it. magical. But this all probably post tonight. So I will send out. Wow, that's fast. Yeah, I'm going to get, I mean, I don't need to edit anything. This was just amazing. So I'm just going to put it up, share it with the world. I'll send the links to you. I'll probably make some like clips as well.

And we can post them on socials and, you know, get it out there. Yeah. You know, have you ever been? connected to my media manager, Kirstie? I don't think so. Okay, I'll link you by text to Kirstie. Okay. Because she handled all my social media and marketing and all that. So she's the person to do links and any of that. I don't even have a clue how that works.

I just talk and let people do stuff with it. Sounds good. Yeah, I'll connect with her then and we'll get the word out about this incredible masterclass, frankly. And I'm hoping that it's going to help a lot of people. I know it will. Me too. Let me know how the feedback goes.

I'd love to hear. I love you. Love you too.