Esoteric Platonism & The Lost Wisdom of the Ancients | Dr. Gregory Shaw

• Platonism and Neoplatonism represent a living tradition combining rational philosophy with deep spiritual experience, emphasizing beauty, truth, and soul connection.

• Theurgy, especially in Iamblichus’s form, challenges the primacy of rationality by privileging ritual, chant, and possession as means of divine engagement.

• The distinction between theurgy and sorcery is crucial: theurgy seeks self-emptying receptivity, sorcery seeks egoic empowerment.

• Contemporary seekers benefit from integrating both scholarly rigor and personal experience to truly engage with these traditions.

• Concepts like sunma (divine signatures) and the daemon provide frameworks for understanding spiritual experience and vocation within a Western esoteric context.

• Synchronicity and ritual practice serve as gateways to the numinous, revealing interconnectedness beyond ordinary perception.

• Modern experiences of psychedelics may parallel ancient theurgical practices by opening perception to divine realities, though evidence of their historical use is Not specified.

• Theurgy remains partly mysterious but is accessible through openness, ritual, and imaginal engagement rather than secret knowledge.

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there's something in Plato and he's very explicit about it where he realizes that beyond our rational explanation of things there's a deeper understanding that can never be explained but can only be experienced and once you've experienced it then you hear all and look at all of these rational explanations and they and they and you can read them from a different point of view because you're not outside looking in but you're inside seeing how those those discourses Express who you really


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are think today our culture needs to feel a sense of meaning in life our religions are they work for some people and it's beautiful and I'm glad that it that it does work for some people and science is basically dominating the discourse and it's just information and what platonism is it's it's not about information it's about the sound of the Soul connecting to other souls and rationality is just a vehicle through which that those deeper sounds are expressed welcome back to the


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transmission my friends what is it about ancient Mysteries and esoteric secrets that we find so compelling I mean on one hand I think it's obvious we suspect that said ancients uh you know fat air quotes around that phrase we suspect that they had some real connection to the mystery or to the Divine that we've now lost I mean how is that idea not magnetic in a time where so many of us are just psychos spiritually sacredly parched on the other hand though I really think that if 95% of us found what we were


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looking for we wouldn't even really know what to do with it or we would be too afraid to follow that mystery because it would probably require doing things way too disruptive living a way of life that really would not harmonize with modern obligations very well but there are ways to split the difference I think and that's where the wise wonderful really downto Earth Professor Gregory Shaw comes in he spent his career as a professor of religious studies at Stonehill College and is the author of


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theor and the soul and his new book helenic Tantra Dr Shaw is a real expert on the esoteric particularly the neoplatonic flavor but what I love about him is he's also a real Seeker he has sailed those spiritual Waters himself and just to uh gush a bit more he's become an important teacher for me personally I absolutely loved his book theg in the soul I thought about it I'm not going to really broach the following topics in these introductory musings here but I do want to mention them for


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the completely uninitiated because they're fairly Niche topics that we get into in the second half of this one in particular the neoplatonic philosopher Sage I amus and this mysterious practice of his theery a Greek word that translates to something like God workking to get the most out of this mind meld you may want to do a quick goo on I amus and theery all of the links that you will need for the great Dr Gregory Shaw are in the description same for third ey drops and on the note of this media vessel we require that you


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tickle that algorithm with a like a sub a comment a share it really is of the utmost importance my friends and if you're enjoying the mind melds and you would like more check out our back catalog because we've got hundreds of them with truly brilliant beings but you can only hear them on podcast platforms so do subscribe to third ey drops wherever you listen and speaking of mysteries if you would like to initiate yourself into our Wonder Lodge head over to patreon.com third ey drops and sign up


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we do Patron only book clubs every month we do Wonder gym hangs in fact we just had one and I rambled at length about a lot of the topics that we're going to talk about in this one we've got a patron only Discord server and you can get physical rewards like stickers pins shirts and more it really is a lovely supportive insightful community so I hope that you will join us over there but for now my friends let's meld Minds with the wise and wonderful Dr Gregory Shaw Dr Gregory Shaw thank you so much


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for your time today like I said you've been a massive guide for me you've been a total I don't know if psychop pom's the right word because we're not exactly going into the underworld um in this conversation but you're just one of those rare people like I was saying to you before we hit record that has a really unique breath of both knowledge and experience and and that is something you know there's a lot of Scholars actually there's not there's not as as I wish there were but there's a lot of


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Scholars there's a lot of seekers but there aren't a lot that really Square the circle between the two so I'm very excited to wrap with you today sir okay that's great Michael and I think you're right um some Scholars are really brilliant and excellent in their scholarship but um don't take you to a deep place where you can feel it and there are some people who have a lot of feeling uh but they take you nowhere except for their own feelings and all right great for that and I also know that there are some


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Scholars who do combine a depth of feeling with their scholarship um if I might just say I I recently or helped organize a conference at Harvard where we invited people to um address platonism as a living tradition and these Scholars were just fantastic they they had an they have an exist potential connection to to the work that they um focus on so it was an enriching experience I wish I I wish I could have been a fly in the wall there I think I think I knew that because I uh talked to Dr Tom cheum recently oh yeah Tom he he


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came to that conference right yeah he said he kind of crashed it he said I wasn't really invited but I showed up and it was great um oh I'm glad he showed up I I like his work and and he's he's really good presence yeah yeah he's got a great yeah really really great uh just this whole aura about him for lack of a better term but you I I guess let's let's touch on that because it seems to me and I understand why this would be the case that if you're a scholar you know I I went to


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school for journalism back in the day and there was still this idea that you had to maintain some level of objectivity as a journalist back then which seems like a joke at this point but yeah you're you're really you're really cast that that's really driven into your head when you're going through your education that you need to maintain objectivity personal stuff really shouldn't come into the scholarly world or the journalistic world in my case and I feel like that must be even more true


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when you're going through like a PhD level program that there's this idea that obviously you can't cite personal experience in in anything that's going into a journal but at the same time you have to imagine that behind the veil of that scholar there's got to be some deep interest there's got to be some deep yearning to even want to dig into the type of things that that you're digging into go well that's an important observation and my my immediate sort of reaction to it is you're completely


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right uh The Way We Were trained in my PhD program is that you keep your your personal op opinions or your your normative ideas about how things ought to be out of it and you just look at the texts and you say what's in the text and that's it but in order to say what's in the text somebody has to say it and that's your voice and that's the way you write and I think that um those of us who feel drawn to what I would call the Mysteries or the deeper aspect of life and who find that the material that we're


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reading or looking at moves us we can sometimes Express that connection to the material in the way that we write not changing what's in the text but just the way that we present it um it's a style of writing is is where the um you could say the subjective or or the personal connection can come in at least I think so yeah yet with with you and this is one of the things that again really draws me to you is that even you know I I know you mentioned your your newer book seems to be even more of an exemplification of


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what I'm about to say though I haven't read that one yet but I can just tell that but you know in the and the soul that your own experiences are a major even though you're never saying I experienced this I experienc that in this book I can tell that your understanding of a lot of these um you know without without getting into terminology in in the conversation yet that will need contextualization and definition but for lack of a better term be being in inspired States Altered States Peak


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States the way you write about these things makes it clear to me that you're a person who knows what that means on more than a theoretical level you know and I know enough about your biography to know a couple of things and I know this is well wor in territory for you at this point but I would love for you to share your own Tales of seeking and what compelled you to go down the path of really I I guess dedicating your life to being an esoteric scholar uh so uh well I don't know what you know um and and if you're asking me


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how I ended up in this field I I could give you a version of a story if you want please but um okay um it started really when I was a freshman in college and I started to learn how to meditate and discovered that uh meditation had incredibly powerful effects on me and I had a series of um in intense dreams that seemed uh more real than daily life and so I was just kind of like um swept in uh like if you're out there fishing and a fish pulls you not just pulls on the line but pulls you into the water I got pulled in


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and I trusted where I was going um and I did one thing that led to another thing and I became a yogi and I meditated a lot and um so at the same time I I was following the path of kind of a yoga and Hinduism and being an American guy grew up in Nebraska you know lived in Arizona to go to school uh there's a sense in which there's a sort of artificiality that happens with a lot of folks and I even see it today I mean they're beautiful people but a lot of people have um kind of taken up Tibetan


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Buddhist sort of whole Entourage of Tibetan Buddhism and I don't sometimes it seems like an awkward fit that people are trying to act like they're Hindus or like they're they're Tibetans we're not you know we're Americans and and and it's okay to be an America and I didn't quite know how to do it but I was doing all this Hindu practice and yoga practice and I wondered if there was a way in which I could find the same depth in Western tradition and that's when I


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discovered uh the neoplatonists and I discovered the translations by Thomas Taylor who translated virtually everything that neoplatonist did and everything that I had been attracted to in Hinduism and and in in uh kind of a deeper level of Buddhism I was Finding in the neoplatonists they knew this stuff and they they explained it in a way that I guess felt more familiar to me uh more um you know I grew up in the west I grew up with the Greek myths and with Christianity and Judaism and uh it just


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it just fit a little bit better for me so I became immersed in the neoplatonists um there's a second part of this particular story and that's uh there's the neoplatonism of plotus yeah which is it's been characterized I think maybe unfairly sometimes as a world denying kind of platonism I don't really think the platinus was World deny but he was he was more than anything concerned about waking up this Divine element in the soul that he had himself experienced and his technique or his


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method for doing that was to withdraw from external things um that's what a lot of the yoga that I was doing included the meditation and I found that it sorted cut me off from the world cut me off from relationships and that what I'm I think that I needed was to get messed up to get in relationships to be more part of the world um if anybody's ever been in an and we all have been in romantic relationships it doesn't go well you know I mean it does sometimes which is a blissful part of it and it also goes


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really horribly sometimes and you get very confused and distressed and that's okay I used to think I have to avoid those things like the plague and I realized no maybe I there's something really important to learn in being down here in that world and that's about the same time I realized that I discovered e amus who said that the way to realize the experiences of platinus is not to say no to the world but to say yes to the world to embrace the images of the world the images of our imagination to embrace material


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reality our own bods and I thought wow that's that works for me so then I became immersed in the amemus and um one thing led to another yeah yeah I love that story and I relate to that story so much because and I have to say that I've even experienced this to a degree with some of the more uh homebaked kinds of Western ESO terum this phenomenon you talked about where you feel like you're almost do you know the word laring um I know what larpers are yeah yeah yeah yes exactly that yeah that


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that there's this kind of almost when you dig into some of these esoteric Traditions that have this whole cultural milia that they're coming out of and you have to adopt that to some degree and you know the language the terminology the clothing it it feels a bit larpy you know it feels a bit like particularly with the Eastern stuff for for me personally and I do it's like who are you kidding you know right yeah yeah and I do and I and you know I'm close to people very close to people who are are Buddhist or go


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down that more yogic path and I love it and I think it's an an absolutely for for whatever my two senses worth valid um path and you know we I wanted to get into this question about about perennialism later but part of what really I think is this this golden thread of real mystical experiences that runs throughout history runs throughout Traditions but at the same time um it feels like there there there's something else that needs to be born something else that needs to be remembered or like some kind of


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anamnesis maybe needs to occur about the things that we've lost um that that are part of a more Western tradition and this gets into some really major questions about what this tradition really is because for for the last couple of years I've been I've just been really diving into platonism pretty heavily and first of all one of the things you realize is just how incredibly rich and multifaceted it is and that it is rational and logically rigorous yet it also is I think the most mysterious most


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rewarding tradition to to explore on a personal level and also you come to realize you really don't understand Western ESO terorism at all if you don't have a decent grip on platonism the teachings the dialogues the the major figures in platonism there's and I always find that interesting because you know people love to talk about gnosticism people love to talk about hermeticism and neoplatonism to some degree is starting to pop up more in the Zeitgeist but I still think a lot of people don't understand when you say


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platonism when you say neoplatonism what do these terms mean yeah and in some ways it's kind of like what I was telling you before we recorded reading your book is that I didn't expect to come out of this book having any solid answers like I I really expected to have more and better questions and in a lot of ways that that's this entire tradition it's just is just you know throwing more beautiful more comp more compelling more complex questions uh over the top of questions you already had but but how I mean I


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mean I don't know if anybody actually asks you this question but if someone were to ask you the question what what is platonism why is platonism so appealing this kind of neoplatonism in particular what what are these things and why why are they so compelling okay I I think it's great that you put it in just a direct and and and plain way like that because I think it's an important um question to keep in mind for me platonism and neoplatonism relates in a powerful way to the kind of situation we're in today


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we really value thinking and being rational and there's there's no question that that you see from Plato's dialogues and in the neoplatonic writings and the commentaries they're very very rational um they're as rational and as precise and clear as we've ever seen in terms of philosophic tradition we need that we value that um it's kind of but but that kind of rationality has to be connected to some depth that makes it valuable that makes it beautiful because in in platonism


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it's not only truth but it's beauty that moves them and when rationality is disconnected from beauty then it starts to lose something that's why you need the Arts that's why you need um poetry and and just the power of of somebody like a Socrates when he spoke that literally um transfixed his listen lers into states of ecstasy when they listen to him it wasn't just what he said but it was how he said it so there's rationality connected with a kind of depth experience um and it's connected to


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beauty and there's something there's something in Plato and he's very explicit about it where you realizes that beyond our rational explanation of things there's a deeper understanding that can never be explained but can only be experienced that you have to know it you have to experience it to know it and once you've experienced it then you hear all and look at all of these rational explanations and they and they and you can read them from a different point of view and and they somehow mean something


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more than they did before because you're not outside looking in but you're inside seeing how those those discourses Express who you really are and who we really are I think today our culture our young people old people everybody needs to feel a sense of meaning in life and right now we don't have a cultural sort of language that makes us all feel like all life has meaning our religions are they work for some people and that's beautiful and I'm glad that it that it does work for some people but for a lot


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of people it doesn't and we're largely secular and science is basically dominating the discourse and but what science claims to be is some an explanation about data which is not really a a a a journey into Beauty it's just information and what platonism is it's it's not about information it's about the sound of the Soul connecting to other souls and rationality is just a vehicle through which that those deeper sounds are expressed yeah um and I think that theery is an important development


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of platonism because yamus makes it very explicit that it's not a matter of conceptual uh knowing it's a matter of experiencing through activity um and that's an important um correction to anyone who thinks that platonism is just about being rational it's more than being rational yeah it it's connecting us to what's most meaningful in our lives and um so I think platonism for me that's what it is it's it's unfortunately uh in the west we have and I think Pythagoras is the same he's in


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the same school these are people who had profound mystical experiences and found a way to share them with others that was articulate and understandable and with Pythagoras even mathematically uh dis you know portray um and it's sort of the basis of Western culture and and this was why Western culture became so creative because it was rooted in these profound thinkers and we've created this world but then we've lost our Roots we've just got out into the branches of being comple uh


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complicated you know details and being cut off from from The Roots it starts to dry up and then people get swept into all kinds of strange you know mentalities and ideologies that's where we are now is right people people's meaning is not rooted in something deep but in in these shallow wance I think yeah it could be politics be other things I don't know right yeah oh my God we we can't even touch politics we can't even touch it or I'll I'll lose my mind but this reminds


00:24:27 - 00:25:57
me I I love this conversation this reminds me a lot of a conversation I had recently with Rick tares about how essentially the things that you lose from Gaining so much from a materialist reductionist perspective you know it's you know we've we we've got uh darwinian Evolution we've got um incredibly precise precise materialistic science that can break things down into infinim small parts into a manery of incredibly complex systems that no single human can ever understand and in doing that of


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course we have completely removed the vital Essence the soul the quintessence the magic from reality because it's just not needed you know where is it you look under a microscope it's not there um it's irrelevant but what right yeah but what but what platonism and I think that that's why On a related note I think that that's why you're starting to see this this swing back into like there at least in the Zeitgeist there's been this swing back to um even people who were kind of part of


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the new atheist movement joining mainstream religions again and I think that that's what happens because you you become so starved for for that missing sacred element in life that you're that that you can just be like oh well I can get that over here and now and now i' I found coherence and I found community and i' and I found something larger and and that satisfies that to a degree but for people like me many people listening and I'm sure for you it feels like there should be a way


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to square that Circle without sacrificing anything rational and that's why I platonism so much because um like I I just recently did a pretty um from from a a scholarly perspective irresponsible kind of exod Jesus on Plato's Cave and why I think that that's such a immensely important map for epistemological and ontological meaning making making you know I touched on a couple of neoplatonist in that video and and their sort of more uh esoteric hermeneutical um techniques that they that they used


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on the allegory um which I won't get I won't get into all that yet at least but that is such a fantastic place I think for people who are just getting their feet wet in this and trying to understand what we're talking about because it shows how there is a logical progression to this mystery that you're talking about to you know what the platonist would call The Noose or the intelligible Realm and it it is logical one you know start starting on a ladder from the material and then asking questions and


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investigating the material and then eventually getting into the conceptual getting into the intelligible and then into the mathematical and and finding that all of these things continuously imply some kind of higher order that is logically must be there gets more and more mysterious and hidden as you approach it and then the only way to your point before that you can ever come to understand it is through these non-rational kinds of experience through noesis through you know direct experiences of things beyond the


00:28:18 - 00:29:34
empirical and yeah yeah go ahead that's well and I'm sure that as as you did uh your exploration of of of the Cave the allegory of the cave that's such a a a profound story and it's so evocative that you know basically inviting everyone to see that our consensus reality is in fact an illusion it's a kind of illusory world of Shadows and that you know Plato is inviting us to move to a a deeper place it's not someplace else it's here but it's being here with a different way of seeing it


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and that's that's some people tend and I think it's understandable that we tend to literalize the metaphors and allegories you know it's like there's some other place to get and one of the problems with the neoplatonic material is is that it is very um nuanced and leveled there's there level of noesis and dioa dioa and all these other different levels of knowing and what we who are raised in this culture which is more of an information culture which is sort of like um everything's a


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a datum that we should then analyze uh a thing we reify these platonic um experiences into things subtle things and think that if we can analyze the one and then there's the news and there's the world soul that we understand it yeah no we don't we were just able to articulate these these terms but what passes sometimes for scholarship on on platonism is a knowledge of the terminology and not an acquaintance with where the terminology wants to lead us and that's that's the key thing I think


00:30:16 - 00:31:46
um and it's no simple thing and and even to assume that you could communicate this material in writing is uh kind of presumptuous I mean It's tricky at best oh I did want to say something about um writing though for me I think I've come to discover or come to realize that the active writing itself is a kind of ritual activity and and it's a it's a ritual activity that actually puts me into a deeper place so that um it's not so much I'm writing but I'm being written yeah um a friend of


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mine Jeffrey kryple talks about being written is part of the process of of creative writing and I think that that happens when you're really in sync with the material that you're working with it's not just that you're writing about it it's it is writing through you yeah and then you are conduit for um perception a deeper reality well great great synchronicity great synchronicity because I'm actually talking to Jeffrey in a couple of days for the first time really excited for


00:31:34 - 00:32:48
that one too um but yeah now now now you're getting into some of these fundamental Mysteries that I find compelling I and and I think people who watch this channel like the these are the kinds of admittedly irresponsible yet just endlessly seductive questions that I can't help but answer look for answers for even though I know that there really are no answers to be had you know and and this is why Plato SL Socrates I think would would answer an allegory so much of the time I mean I mean Socrates says it


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right when he's talking when when Glon asks him about the form of the good and he's like I can't answer the question but I can but I can tell you what it's like and I can tell you this K of allegory and I can tell you these things that will sort of get you prop uh anagogic oriented so that you can go toward the truth even though the truth will always be this kind of ever uh elusive numinous Vapor that you're chasing after but I'm going to be irresponsible and I'm going to ask


00:32:48 - 00:34:21
you for a kind of combination of what you think what you think um Plato thought in terms of these big unanswerable questions about you know and you touched on some of them already but well like so so then what is this Human Experience what is this world what what is this Consciousness that we are having this you know movie like experience of uh qual well at least what today we would call qualia of subjective experience of sensory experience what what is the state of the human being what what is reality or reality as


00:33:35 - 00:34:53
we experience it well I'm stupid enough to try to answer that question so let fantastic uh in in terms of Plato he said that um it's in his seventh letter you're probably familiar with this he said that about which I am most concerned and what is most important to me I've never written about it and I never will and anybody who says I have they're distorting what I've I've done so he said acquaintance with this can only come after immersion or studying or engage being engaged with it probably in


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concert with others and then he says and then like a spark that that traveles over and and lights them up then they then they get it but it's an experience that can't be described you can't write about it it is something that you simply have to experience um we can't find it because we are it is another sort of paradoxical way of of looking at this the truth or the meaning of all things can't be discovered because we're looking we're trying to look and try to find our own


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facei we carry it with us and the interesting thing is that we only can really kind of realize Who We Are by engaging it through others and by sharing who what we want and what we're interested in with others who may be similarly inclined we start to realize oh my God we're after the same faith maybe we are in some deeper way the same thing but just expressing it in different ways you could as some people like to say we're like um the Universe becoming aware of itself through human beings and I think there's a lot of uh


00:35:33 - 00:36:57
truth to that and and that is a a useful sort of metaphor or image to sort of uh carry with us um we're not that separate I mean you know if you think about life in general if use the scientific information we have being on this planet together we profoundly interconnected and and we're probably much more alike than we you know even realize and in some sense we're the same mind trying to recognize itself through different faces and voices um I think that that's the Divine mind of of Plato


00:36:17 - 00:37:39
the demor um who when he according to Plato creates the world he tries to make um he creates it in order that everyone might experience what he's experiencing so that that's the reason why creation exists to invite everybody to realize that we are that that we are participants in the creation of the reality that we're in yeah and I think that's what theor was trying to um achieve um is to wake us up to the fact that we're embodied creators embodied Dem or is the platonic language for it


00:36:57 - 00:38:02
yeah I definitely want to get into theor G properly in this conversation eventually but before before we do that I want to do this F first of all I love everything you were saying and yeah I do I do remember that quote about this notion of uh isn't there something in that quote about like two mind Minds striking Together Like Flint or something like that creating a spark or it's that's the implication of it yeah Plato says um and and it's almost like um like Buddhists talk about


00:37:30 - 00:38:49
transmission yeah or like a Ken show kind of yeah yes exactly and suddenly the disciple wakes up yeah and and it's yeah and in my experience you know on at least in terms of on the NCH experiences I have had a couple of experiences like that in my life that almost just seem to kind of just just recontextualize things and you know for me it almost feels like this overwhelming Omni emotional like you don't know if you want to laugh or cry or what there's like there there's nothing you can really do to express it


00:38:09 - 00:39:17
properly but it's this kind of full body full mind knowing and then it it goes away very quickly and pretty soon you're back into consensus reality type of Consciousness and you can almost convince yourself it didn't it didn't happen so I can you know if I can be uh foolish enough to say maybe I've kind of experienced a little bit of what he was describing there it it it does seem to be somewhat like that for me do you think he was describing anamnesis yeah I do think it's anamnesis


00:38:44 - 00:40:03
I do think it's recollection that it just happens and um Plato actually says it's through engagement with things in the world and that that they these things in the world can wake you up to yeah this deeper connection you have to Divine reality and we use words like Divine reality and and you know we're we're we're using kind of poetic images and metaphoric language to talk about a deeper affective intelligence I think yeah and um yeah I'm sure that you have had those experiences and so have I


00:39:24 - 00:40:35
and then you move away from them and you're back into driving your car and you know people are honking at you and pissing you off and right get back to regular life um and I'd like to think that we could integrate that too that that's okay that we don't have to think that we could never be mad or that we can never you know have ordinary experience that's part of who we are as human beings that's part of why we're here is to um I wouldn't want I wouldn't want to uh deprive the div mind of being


00:39:59 - 00:41:17
able to experience weirdness or confusion that we all experience as human beings um that's part of what it is to be here I sometimes wish it weren't I you know I I really like my life to be really smooth and always positive and glorious and joyous and upbeat all that but it could never be that unless there were ordinary times too back to consensus reality what would be wonderful if there was a reliable way to seek refuge in that kind of an experience you know that so that you could reliably touch that numinosity and


00:40:38 - 00:41:53
interconnection you know and I think that's probably what theor G if it really worked if it was really this thing that was more than this you know Phil a bunch of philosophers and Mystics uh trying to create some kind of air of I I don't know in initiatory uh erudition or something um which I I do think it was something I definitely think it was something I've had enough personal experiences to know that it's absolutely possible to have experiences far beyond the veil of consensus reality


00:41:15 - 00:42:29
um oh but before we get too far away from it I I never really thought about this until just the way that we were discussing anamnesis just now but in in some strange way I think think that synchronicity and anamnesis are like conjoined twins or something because it almost sounds like talking about the exact same phenomenon from a somewhat different perspective in that synchronicities are these things that dissolve the boundary between psycho and physical and imply a sort of interconnection that you are at the Cent


00:41:52 - 00:43:08
that at least your Consciousness is at the sort of Nexus of and anamnesis does sort of the same thing but I think it the the context that it's usually discussed in is kind of a different way because like you know using the famous analogy or the famous story that of you know Socrates showing the boy how to do geometry or something it it really is almost like when you see how the the pieces fit there is this almost sort of like time and space and Boundary dissolving to it once you see how the pie fit it


00:42:31 - 00:43:55
can't be unseen s of sensation well ionicity in in in in the sense that I've experienced it understand and understand it is it's those moments where your mind becomes in sync with the Mind At Large with like your a small M mind becomes somehow connected with the mind with a capital m and and usually it's just momentary but get this glimpse of whoa what um and and it's a taste of that deeper meaning those moments of synchronicity I think um and back to those what you were referring to is um if there could be


00:43:11 - 00:44:29
some sort of guaranteed way to sort of you know elicit this anamnesis um what would it be I mean there's some people who you know constantly um smoke hashish or or drop or eat mushrooms or whatever they think that'll do it and I'm sure it works but is it I don't know um maybe they have some very uh rigorous U physiological constitutions they can handle that okay good for them but I think it could also be done by like that somebody's profoundly Catholic Grandma who goes into the church and does a


00:43:50 - 00:45:13
Rosary in the afternoons and and by doing that ritual and reciting that prayer and sitting in that Pew and looking up at the image of Christ and and Mary she moves into that same kind of place that people do this maybe more often than we realize and I think that we tend to not notice the you know the quiet Mystics like you know your grandma or somebody like that who just does her little ritual thing without thinking she's some important person or you know having an Entourage of of U groupies to say oh


00:44:31 - 00:45:45
tell us more about the rosary uh Grandma you know Jones you know oh let me she's not interested in that she just wants to do the rosary right yeah and I think the same might be said for us that um because we're so starved for meeting um that when somebody is able to share like let's say in my case share sh something that's really meaningful that speaks to other people about what the plists were doing um it's easy to fall into thinking wow I really know this stuff and I'm


00:45:09 - 00:46:22
gonna you know now I'm GNA start wearing robes and call myself um FR somebody or yeah you know and and they create a whole sort of persona around this these moments of anamnesis that I've been privileged enough to have or to share and it's not about that but I understand why people do that because um we all want to feel like our life's worth something that we love to get attention from other people I certainly do uh it's a quality of attention that I think we we need to be more discriminating about


00:45:45 - 00:46:48
right yeah and if you if you use those things just as a way to Peacock or position yourself socially you're you're really not doing what the plists were doing you're not doing theor I think in your book you do a good job of sort of juxtaposing you know what the Greeks would have called theor versus Goa if I'm saying that correctly and I think you are saying it correctly yeah if if you're doing what you just described I think you're you're engaging in in Goa not fear G because you're trying to


00:46:17 - 00:47:36
somehow that's right you're right exactly right you know in the sort of popular new age manifestation type of way you're trying to make yourself this locus of being special and using some sort of nebulous power to attract things to you and increase your personal status and that is runs completely counter I mean for for all of the things that all the people under the umbrella of this tradition disagree on or quibble about that does not seem to be one the idea of like orienting yourself for lack of a better term


00:46:56 - 00:48:36
cleanly toward the higher that that is you know free as free as possible of egoic trappings that seems to be a very Central Point to how the more so so so so tricky because I think that no matter who we are or how sincere we want to be um we're all going to be drawn into that U path of sorcery of trying to draw attention to ourselves I mean amus does he he's very very rigorous about drawing the distinction between Goa and thei and he's hard on the sorcerers um why because the difference is dramatic um this the


00:47:45 - 00:49:04
theorist becomes U cleansed and empty and receptive so that she can take on the shape of the Gods yeah so that the theorist takes on the shape of the Gods the sorcerer on the other hand invokes these powers and so on so that they can take on the shape of that person's ego they that they empower the individual rather than the individual blending into the hole and theor is the individual Blends into the hole and then allows the hole to act through the individual the sorcerer is trying to draw the powers of the whole


00:48:25 - 00:49:33
into its individual self and implement it it you know power that way and I guess you know since since we're all human I I want to be somewhat forgiving to the some degree about that not be too high and mighty about oh you stupid Sorcerers because we've all been um you know attracted to wanting to do things to get personal attention and of course dry things to ourselves and I do a podcast oh I know that's a kind that's a kind of a attention seeking sorcery let's let's not let's not kid ourselves


00:49:00 - 00:50:10
and and that's the good thing is that you can see it for what it is and know that the very means by which you want to communicate these things that you love requires you to do things that are like what the sorcerer does to trying to draw and capture people's attention but that's okay you know as long as you're not driven by that as your as your goal that's that's not the Telos so or the purpose yeah of your podcasting your podcasting is because you're crazy enough to be hungry for things you don't


00:49:34 - 00:50:47
even understand but are drawn to it and are following following your instinct to want to talk to different people who seem to be relevant to the very thing that you're attracted to like you want to talk to kle um yeah in a week he's fantastic you you know he'll talk about you know how do you describe the impossible and he and he's he's made a life of doing just that and meeting people who have experienced those things um and why do you want to talk to him well in a way you don't entirely


00:50:10 - 00:51:30
understand why right right but but but you trust your hunger for that yeah and and it's been taking you to a place that is satisfying something deep in you and making you feel like a little bit wiser say if I could use that language and and more articulate in what you do understand and don't that's we can only go by what we experience right yes you you have expertly divined used your Mantic abilities to to see to see right through me Greg that that was that was that that was very very accurate in terms of my


00:50:50 - 00:52:10
motivations um and I I want to get more into theg proper but I also want to touch on um you were talking about this sort of nebulous guiding something that I think everybody feels and you know as soon as I read Souls code by James Hilman and he introduced this idea of the Dion which of course comes from uh Plato's Republic myth of or at least that's where he was pulling from and then sure I think I think that in many ways is what is what lit the wick of me really diving deeper down the platonic rabbit hole is


00:51:31 - 00:52:22
realizing like I got to go back and read pl's Republic I got to go back and read more of these dialogues and then and then you know you slowly you know how it goes like once you remove once you look under one rock and you start seeing other names thrown around it's like wait so who is this platinus who is this iamus who is this procus and then and then you start you know going down and you just realize this is going to be a lifetime of study if I want to even have the foggiest idea of what they thought


00:51:57 - 00:53:24
what was going on here what they were doing um but without even getting as esoteric as referencing all of these people I think everybody innately feels what Hilman and all of the above people were referring to when they were referring to this guiding force that is nebulous that is it's you you feel like it's right there yet you can't talk directly to it it's something like a a your conscience but it's or or maybe even subconscious um or both but it's also it almost it almost has this like


00:52:40 - 00:53:52
Mercurial quality where it feels like it can take on a multitude of faces you know sometimes and hman would talk about this in the book is that you know the the diamon would would become a demon if you don't give it its uh proper catharsis you know and that to me is just such a compelling idea and I'm curious if you if if that's something you've spent a lot of time thinking about or trying to make sense of personally well I would have to say first right off that I think Hilman is a


00:53:15 - 00:54:31
genius and and one of the most um insightful writers that that um I've ever come across and the souls code is a great book um and he really helps us in fact when I uh taught my class on neoplatonism I had them read the chapter on finding your dime on as the first chapter to read and when have they noticed that that they realized that they were compelled to you know do something when they were young and some people really kind of got it and some people kind of came up with what they thought they


00:53:53 - 00:55:26
should say yeah you know um uh but yeah it's there and I don't know I kind of feel like um the daon um shows up in ways that maybe are not socially recognizable um like maybe in the way that you were dreamy or um when I was a kid I was kind of dreamy and sort of like kind of attracted certain fantasies and things like that and I didn't really think anything about that you know um but somehow I do think that there's a presence in us that influences our decision- making and that when


00:54:40 - 00:56:04
we now I'm not sure that I'm saying this because it sounds like it's a platonic catechism or it's my own experience but I think that when we when we follow those promptings follow our heart or as Joseph Campbell said follow your Bliss or whatever you want to say that things work out for you in a more positive way um when I woke up to my being interested in spiritual things it wasn't so much oh I should do this I was dragged into it um by these powerful dreams and and I had it was no choice


00:55:22 - 00:56:43
but I had to do this because I felt like I was called to do it and the problem with that sort of feeling like you're called to do something is that if you're just an ordinary guy as I was um how does your ordinary guy mentality uh handle feeling like you're called by some great Cosmic mind you know how do you integrate that and um if you grow up in our culture um the only people who ever got pulled into some great Cosmic mind were was Jesus right you know he was the son of God you know because it's it's an overwhelming


00:56:02 - 00:57:07
thing when these Divine other worldly presences become uh relevant and and and demand your attention and basically say we're we are the same thing to you and you know that it's true and so what pattern do we have culturally to make sense of that we didn't have many many patterns you know we don't have that in our culture except if you grow up and say oh I'm a Christian so maybe that's like Jesus then say what am I supposed to be Jesus and then no I don't know I mean it can be very confusing for a


00:56:35 - 00:57:47
young guy um and maybe if you're a Jew you think well maybe I'm supposed to be some great Rabbi or something but but we really need um models and I think that's one thing that becoming more conscious of the platonic tradition could be helpful for people um in the literary and and philosophic world or just in in our culture in in general if we know that there are these people who who exemplify this deeper way of living and we can say I'm not that strange Pythagoras was like this Plato


00:57:11 - 00:58:24
was like this procus was like this iamus was like this and and you can run down a whole list of of people that you don't have to pile it all into one guide say Jesus then you get confused and say well how can I be Jesus you know we need we need a larger vocabulary to express our um deep experiences and the souls code was good because she sort of gave us a lot of cards to look at so so important to yeah great Point great Point Yung Hilman and Al also the platonist they really bring a lot of nuance a lot of Concepts a lot


00:57:48 - 00:58:49
of vocabulary to these things that we are pretty bere of in terms of vocabulary to your point like if you're just growing up in the mainstream your religious so you're not there's there's you know there's one God you don't have a lot to work with there and and it feels like there's a giant Gulf between you and this like big mystery called God but yeah you start bringing dreams into it you start bringing the idea of diamons and later PL in as uh Angels Spirits um you know


00:58:19 - 00:59:28
that that's one way to go with it or you can go the the more yian psychospiritual mythopoetic way or both or a combination um and you know yeah I mean I just relate so much to what you were saying about feeling called because I have no idea what it is that has pushed me to do this incessantly now for you know years and years and years releasing something every single week for however many hundreds of weeks in a row but it feels like one of the only thing you know I I said before this give the dimeon some


00:58:53 - 01:00:01
kind of catharsis and it feels like this is one of the only things that does that is having these and pushing these ideas out to as many people as it it feels oddly satisfying yet like it's never enough in a weird way and that I have to just continue to do this and it's one of the only things I've ever done in my life that feels like I could just probably do this Forever Until I physically give out it it feels like that's kind of the path that I'm on and other than evoking you


00:59:26 - 01:00:42
know some big nebulous concept like the daon or uh Jung's individuation and capital S self and that whole story arc it's really hard to know what kind of language you could put on it interesting you say you do this every week and um I would I would describe this as as you are honoring the Dion by doing this because this the Dion is what is compelling you if you want to use helman's language the Soul's code it's compelling you to do this and rather than resisting it you're saying yes to


01:00:04 - 01:01:37
it and you're honoring that Dione that asks for this expression by honoring that Dione you um eventually it's just like you um you absorb what that Dione is for you so that the difference between you Michael as an ordinary guy and the dimonic presence that expresses itself through you becomes less and less that yeah when when people see you they feel the Dao that that lives in you because you're honoring it and um the catharsis as I kind of get it is like um is what allows you to honor it in a clean way


01:00:54 - 01:02:04
rather than confusing it something that it's not it's like um I'm going to become the most hot podcaster and maybe I can wear some you know like sexy outfits when I podcast and you know attract all kinds of people that that would be that would repel people I think but you might think you might hope that it would repel people you'd be surprised though what some people are drawn to we live in a really confused culture people are attracted to all kinds of disturbing things but um you're you're honoring your Dion and


01:01:28 - 01:02:40
you're keeping it clean by the attitude that you bring to it by recognizing that as you said you don't know but you're doing it and that's that's the uh I don't know want to use the word the worshipful attitude or or the sort of the humble attitude towards uh honoring the DI that's the appropriate that's like the attitude of the little grandmother that goes into the church and does a rosary you know this is your Rosary you're doing it yeah no it it really does and and I I can't help but


01:02:03 - 01:03:13
feel like an absolute bug in the face of people like you pe you know these people that we're talking about or talking around in this conversation this body of wisdom that has existed throughout the ages and the Mysteries that created the you know the physical manifestations and linguistic manifestations of of that wisdom we have to pull from but but on that point you know and first of all thank you because I I I appreciate that I feel that for you a thousand perc I mean you're I mean people if if you don't


01:02:40 - 01:03:48
even if you if you happen to go to a bookstore that has theg in the soul even if you're not going to read it I mean look at the bibliography in this thing like I I would have to be I think demonically possessed in a good way to be able to synthesize the amount of information that you synthesize for this book alone and then put into like you know get give birth to this book from all of that informational synthesis it's it's like a Herculean task that not enough people appreciate so one I want


01:03:14 - 01:04:28
to appreciate you for doing that but two this book is almost impossible to bring up in the confines of a single conversation so that's why I've been keeping some of the things more General so far but I do I do want to get into some of these more esoteric questions and okay and you know elements of of this thing so so we started to set the stage a little bit by talking about platinus ju toos against I amus so just a little bit of background platinus is this thinker Who is credited really with


01:03:51 - 01:05:03
being the sort of father of neoplatonism right like he's this and and some don't even like this word neoplatonism because it's just all within the Corpus and history of platonism but that aside he he comes along and from my understanding correct me at any point here he he starts to make inward practice a really central part of his personal philosophy in a way that was never really overt through Plato like there's a lot of and there's a lot of fun speculation that I would love to do with you about about what you


01:04:27 - 01:05:32
think they were doing was there an esoteric element to the platonic Academy you know I would love to talk about that but platinus really brings it front and center and encourages if you want to know what I'm talking about yes you must be rational yes you must be educated but you got to turn away from the sensory world you got to go inside and once you go inside you'll start to have more beautiful experiences than you can possibly imagine than anything you've ever seen before and it's just this beautiful you


01:05:00 - 01:06:02
know and you were saying before that he gets accused of being this sort of world denier that's that's kind of what I get when I read the anad you know it's it's he's not you know he's not degra saying the world is he's not going the Gnostic path of saying the world is Evil by any means in fact he rails against that notion right but he does put matter at the very bottom of the ontological ladder you know he he basically calls it a lucer and if you want to know what's


01:05:32 - 01:06:43
true if you want to know what's beautiful if you want to know what you really are you got to go deep inside and almost kind of push the Sens sensory World out like that that's that is kind of what I get from him and and with ptinus I've thought a lot about him and the language that you're using to describe him there's two ways for platinus to talk about matter and the body from the top down or from the bottom up and when he's talking from the top down it's all good it's all a manifestation


01:06:06 - 01:07:28
of the one matter itself is the last reverberation of the one so the one is present in matter from the top down from the bottom up from my own particular sort of self-absorbed perspective where I develop aggressive habits about grabbing different material things or or wanting certain sorts of objects whether they're mental or physical I get um caught up in materiality and at that level materiality is bad for you and you need to sort of let go of those things or those habits in order to recover this


01:06:48 - 01:08:14
presence of the one that's in you so when platus is talking about the need to purify the soul he says things like matter is bad or the body is a pollution or matter is absolute evil but and that makes him sound dualist and it does sound dualist yeah but I think ultimately he's not a duelist from the top down it's all good and it's only in this practical psychological situation we're trying to purify ourselves that platis uses this sort of negative language about matter so that's how I make sense of platinus


01:07:30 - 01:09:02
but because he does do that uh and and people kind of emphasized that as the way to follow a spiritual life amus kind of pushed against that and said no um we have to remember that that the one and and the gods are fully being revealed in nature and in matter and it's up to us to try to recover our own Divinity by engaging the Divine as we find it around us and so it's a different kind of spiritual practice that he encouraged with the ory yeah yeah so where as to very again oversimplify it platinus is this almost


01:08:16 - 01:09:43
withdrawn to me very yogic contemplative sort of Mystic you get this you get the next major figure other than poery who so por again the the little the little little necessary historical tendril as toy is platinus probably best known student and pory ends up writing all of platinus teachings down into what today today we have called the enats so poery in his own right becomes a major philosopher major religious scholar and apparently teaches iamus for a while but then iamus goes on to become a Egyptian priest and you know this this


01:09:00 - 01:10:26
like Mages type character who right like is a like it is an initiate of all sorts of things that I would love to know more about what they were and he comes from this lineage of sort of almost like um these magical mystical sorts of holy men um he talks a lot about what today sounds like almost ritual magic sorts of experiences that involve symbols various Materia knowing specific words doing things you know um if anybody's looked at any kind of Western esotericism the As Above So Below motif


01:09:44 - 01:10:51
of correspondences and doing things at the right time this is all part of I amicus's um Ecology of practices whereas platinus again is like the exact oppos it's like no withdraw go inward that's basically the prescription and and I'm not trying to sell short platinus here because the enods are absolutely mind-blowing he's a genius he's an incredibly important thinker but amus really brings this whole different flavor and this whole different emphasis and the idea that there is a right way


01:10:17 - 01:11:35
to do things and you don't just get lucky and you stumble into hosis to use their words like it's a it's a specific path there's things you have to do um and those things that you have to do are this nebulous but again so enticing like really really enticing question for me about doing something called theor and this well let me let me let me jump in just a little bit here um yeah um I've characterized it I think it's accurate is to say that am amus incarnates the kind of um deep spiritual


01:10:55 - 01:12:27
insights of potius he embodies it he makes it an embodied kind of way of life whereas potius tends to not so much embrace the body and amus says no let's bring all of those insights into our physical reality um in terms of who he is he is a Syrian um he comes from Syria uh apamea was the town that that he's attached to he was the descendant of Syria priests and Kings so he did have a kind of um a noble sort of uh Heritage uh behind him uh but his so-called Egyptian uh identity is largely known to us because


01:11:41 - 01:13:02
of the way he responded to a series of questions that porfy put to him yeah after potius died porfy expected to be the leader of the platonic school because platinus was and and atitis was just well you he's like God in human form you know I mean yeah people people just they were mindblown by PL it was like Daron you go into the room with platinus and it changes your life and the guy had it profoundly and poyy spent time with him and he wrote his nads uh collections of nine um and he expected to be the leader


01:12:25 - 01:13:41
of the platonic tradition and yet this student of his the amus who also studied Pythagorean stuff and traveled around and probably traveled to Egypt as well set up another school platonic School in Syria in apamea and a lot of people started to be attracted to am ambl as's School my theory may not be fair to pyy is that he might have felt a little bit of professional jealousy about the attention that yamus this Guru kind of guy was getting over in apamea and with his theurgy which is performing rituals and and and and


01:13:03 - 01:14:11
inviting uh people to go into trans States and being possessed by uh Gods and Goddesses that didn't sound like platonism to py and he wasn't even so sure that yamus was teaching a decent kind of platonism and he was a little bit irritated at maybe the attention that he was getting in his school so he wrote this letter challenging yamas to answer all kinds of questions about theori um some of the most important being why are you chanting names that don't have any meaning I mean how can


01:13:37 - 01:14:53
that be rational right and what's going on with these people being possessed by by different gods and goddesses what are we talking about here and and all of this ecstasy you what's going on with ecstasy ecstasy just leads people into delusion so he really challenged yam and so amus responded with this what is now known as the um on the Mysteries um to is response to P's letter and since pory wrote it to a supposed disciple of an Egyptian priest he wrote it to somebody named ano and


01:14:15 - 01:15:23
and ebla says okay you're pretending to write to one of my disciples you're calling him an Egyptian student I'll pretend to be an Egyptian priest he call myself abon and all these symbolic names and so he plays the role of an Egyptian priest when he writes back to poery so you think this is a a Persona not a not something that he was truly a member of okay I think well I think primarily it's a Persona how much Egyptian um magic did he know I'm not sure he could very well have known some


01:14:50 - 01:15:50
Egyptian magic because some of the things he says are very consistent with what we know from Egyptian texts and uh the books of the dead and and and some of the different um rituals that Egyptians performed but he does take perhaps we should even I'm sorry to interrupt I was going to say perhaps we should even asterisk this and say that some people don't think that this is a am as this abam abam man figure um and and I don't know I have I don't have the scholarly chops to have any kind of


01:15:20 - 01:16:38
opinion on that but I just remember reading it in your book yeah uh there are some people who have even question whether um the author of on the Mysteries is he amus um I'm virtually certain that it is and virtually every scholar who's an expert in both neoplatonism as well as knowledgeable about Egyptian stuff thinks yeah it was the amplius but but he did this in the sort of kind of playful sort of uh playing this Persona of aama the Egyptian priest but going to um what the how the was so different from what porfy


01:15:58 - 01:17:15
thought um philosophy should be is that eus has these people chanting what he calls ASA anoma and that means meaningless names um mantras they would call them in in um Indian tradition that doesn't sound rational at all you know um reciting names that you don't even know what they mean and po had said what he wrote to and said well what do these things mean what do these names mean uh you know tell me what they mean and he applic says it's not about what they mean it's not meaningful for


01:16:36 - 01:17:51
us but the gods understand them and by chanting these names were able to wake up the presence of the gods that are associated with these sounds The Sounds themselves carry the presence of the Gods now that's very nonrational yeah okay to say that The Sounds themselves carry the presence of the Gods and by reciting them we wake up to that presence in ourselves that's a very different technique than what you see in platinus say um and poery kind of didn't get it in that sense and the Amica sort


01:17:14 - 01:18:18
of talks down to him sometimes by saying it's not about what it means it's not about meaning it's not about what it's not information mantras these these um meaningless names aren't supposed to give us information the fact that we don't understand them is what makes them sacred so the fact that you don't know why you're doing this is what makes it sacred for you I mean that's what the amus would say that the the not knowing part is an important way that the Divine


01:17:46 - 01:19:09
transmits its presence to us for amus anyway so yeah and and having people possessed I'm on a roll here but I wanted to say this when when we had this conference in at Harvard uh in May one of the people we invited is a um a man who is a scholar of neoplatonism and he's written um he wrote a a PhD disseration on procas and what procus wrote about how to perform thei his name is Jose Rando he's also an astrologer he's also a cantaria priest he lives in Mexico City and and as a priest of


01:18:27 - 01:19:43
santaria um his disciples on a regular basis have rituals where they chant use drums burd incense and they become possessed by what they call the orishas which are these Divine presences the Angelic beings that come in and they take possession of these different individuals um now that's exactly the kind of thing that amus said that the SE just were were doing is they were becoming possessed by these individuals and people like me and a lot of other academics who read about that we can try to be sympathetic to it and you know


01:19:06 - 01:20:09
kind of get it and respect it but Jose Rando is doing it yeah he's conducting rituals where these people are becoming possessed and he said you can tell whether they're being possessed in a light way or a deeper way or completely possessed by the features that they they manifest in their possession and you can also tell if somebody's not really possessed but is just faking it for attention of course because we're human beings that's bound to happen too and so there along with these possessions which


01:19:37 - 01:20:56
just very kind of irrational kind of events they use a very discriminating kind of awareness to see how they're possessed so there's a lot of um intelligence that's used to make sense of this and he was asked by one of our participants have you been possessed which is a million-dollar question of course and he says yes he has I have and he carried a kind of a I think um Tom cheetah may have been there for that U presentation and and Jose randoo carries a kind of humble kind of persona was


01:20:17 - 01:21:30
like yeah I've been possessed now she he was just describing what he does but um there are people who still engage in this as a living practice I was delighted that he was at our conference it was a real privilege to have in and I'm sorry I got carried away with that story I wanted to point out how how different e amicus's kind of theorical practices were from Po's you know come more cerebral kind of conceptual idea of what um the philosophic life would be or the spiritual life would be yeah yeah


01:20:53 - 01:22:10
and to to bring some some Nuance into this comparison between um what was his name the scholar who is it Jose Rond Rondo okay yeah and how do do you think that his map and I amicus's map in terms of you know this really being aimed at you use the word demiurgy right like that you that you are trying um and again it gets into some metaphysical stickiness and particulars here in terms of like what the human soul is capable of and not capable of and what its station is and all that kind of stuff which is another thing


01:21:32 - 01:22:43
that platinus and amamus disagreed on but for iamus to do this successfully was to make yourself as Godlike as possible Right was to try to make yourself as demiurge like as or demiurg if I'm saying that wrong like as possible and another asterisk I think it's so deep in the Zeitgeist at this point that when you use that phrase people think you're talking about like the evilos Demi and that's a later invention that has nothing to do with this it's essentially this is the Creator God the Divine mind yes that's


01:22:08 - 01:23:28
right Divine mind is a good translation in Creator and divine right yeah yeah it's it's there's nothing negative there's no negative connotation it's just the opposite so it's kind of w waking up your Divinity by becoming like this thing this Divine mind but it but it happens in in almost like um and this is something I wanted to ask you about is like this the stages this seems to occur in is you having like an anamnesis of certain sunma within yourself and then gaining new levels of understanding about what


01:22:47 - 01:23:56
you are what your soul is um I don't know I don't even know if there's a clean question in there these are just things that I've been thinking about and that I'm really interested in um I guess I started out with comparing the two but this I mean my my connection with Jose Redondo is is directly related to the fact that he was already on his path and then he uh read some of the stuff I've written and he felt like oh that that's what I'm doing and he felt like so what I'm doing at centeria is


01:23:22 - 01:24:52
being expressed uh or was expressed in the western esoteric tradition with the amus an theology I might add that um people like him exist and um he he told me because I I know him pretty well he told me that he and and his I think his mother or grandmother was a some kind of a shamanic woman yeah in in her neighborhood and people would come to her so he he has this in his genetic back background he said he had some very intense dreams uh and in one of them he was given an address in Mexico City that he should go


01:24:07 - 01:25:22
to he didn't know why he didn't know he'd never been there he'd never been in that part of Mexico City but he went to that address and knocked on the door and the man who opened the door turned out to be his uh teacher uh in Sant Aria a shaman who um was Jose's teacher I mean that that kind of story just makes you think there's more than what our materialist sort of reductionist mindset understands that there are like that synchronicity idea you were talking about there are


01:24:45 - 01:26:04
connections underneath what we think is making sense but he had a dream went to the address and that was his teacher I mean what a story you know yeah this is amazing um but you are on to what do we do when we when we feel like say we're chanting these sounds whatever they are and we start to wake up to some sort of presence I think when people do mantras in um in eastern practices it's the same kind of thing these are techniques to take us out of our ordinary thinking and and allow us to wait wake


01:25:24 - 01:26:33
up to some sort of internal presence yeah yeah yeah this idea um I started to to hit on is one that I've been really obsessed with since I stumbled across it I think I think I was reading about procus when I first saw the word syntha and yeah that that is another one of these missing pieces of nuance that I just had like clunky language for prior you know this idea that there are essentially these Divine signatures for lack of term that are dispersed that's exactly what they are yeah yeah they're


01:25:59 - 01:27:08
and and they're like dispersed all throughout at least according to more am I Aman and later platonist sorts of thought that there are these Divine signatures all over everything plants animals within you one of the things I underline in the book is at a certain point that you say that the physical body is like a sunma of the soul and I was just like that that's a mind-blowing idea um and yeah I would love to just hear you talk a little bit more about what they are why they're important how


01:26:33 - 01:27:54
how you think about them okay well uh syntha literally means like signature um we could use the word symbol and effectively works the same kind of way and they are sometimes translated as signatures or like seen presences of the Divine mind sprinkled throughout the world manifest in everything and we have the same signatures in ourselves but according to the platal tradition after the birth trauma we sort of become unaware of carrying all these Divine signatures because ideally speaking the world Soul which is what we


01:27:14 - 01:28:39
see in the heavens is you know the whole kind of Cosmos is the body of the world soul and Plato calls it a Divine animal and each one of us human beings is a miniature World Soul or a microcosm of the macrocosm but because of the birth trauma the coordination of the of the parts of our small world get scrambled up and we lose connection with those Divine elements in ourselves and in order to remember them or recollect them and amnis we need to go out and find the corresponding elements in nature and do a ritual that


01:27:56 - 01:29:21
relates to that divine presence that we might find in a rock or a tree or in an animal or in a color or in a piece of music um and and do a ritual that allows us to honor that but by honoring that we awaken the corresponding presence in ourselves so that we literally sew ourselves back into our divine body Peace by piece and that's how a am sees the role of the Syma or the synata to be plural out in the world and the person who who did this in the Renaissance was melio ficino yes uh and and he had the


01:28:39 - 01:29:51
same kind of understanding that the Divine mind has sprinkled its presence throughout the Universe and he in his astrological theorey uh would try to connect people with their um the gods that they needed to be connected with through these elements in nature oh ficino's great that way he's a is a great a great link to that ancient world yeah everything I've seen from him is really interesting really beautiful really interesting just biographical story from what I know about him I need


01:29:14 - 01:30:42
to dive more into his the the meat of his writings and the technical elements of his writings because like like you and I when we're reading someone like I amus who's you know um coming from what is it was he born in the two 200s ad two 240 yeah yeah he was 242 and died in 325 yeah yeah so so we're a long way from the specifics of of what you just described this process of right um you know the the the nuts and bolts of of this theurgical practice as this an antic prescription that that he's putting


01:29:59 - 01:31:12
forth but ficino comes along in the Renaissance and he translates a lot of this stuff for the first time is he the first translator of amus uh I don't know if he's the first but he definitely translated the on the Mysteries into last okay yeah yeah yeah um and then he attempts to actually recreate a lot of these things and is patroned by the right to to do all this stff and basically given uh a blank check to reverse engineer the esoteric secrets of the Ancients um that's right it was


01:30:35 - 01:31:53
amazing yeah and and he does to to some degree but I I mean it sounds like most people have you know as a scholar of this stuff I wonder what you you said nice things about him already but what do you think of his attempt to to do that well I think that it was in uh incredibly ambitious and he was really successful he had the medich behind him he was to some degree constrained by the fact that he was also a Catholic priest yeah but instead of thinking of it as only a a a problem it might have been a benefit for


01:31:15 - 01:32:43
him as well because I think that sometimes I and other people who study platonism tend to have sort of an antagonistic attitude towards Ward The Church and for good reason um because it was a kind of a you know this institutional sort of bully in the ancient world but it also preserved a lot of deep practices and um you know in a way Christ is a manifestation of the Divine becoming human which is what the goal of theery is so um at least he kept that alive and anyway ficino I I think of him as as a model uh figure a great a


01:31:59 - 01:33:06
great figure another person who I think also doesn't maybe get as much attention as he should is Ralph Waldo Emerson oh wow em Emerson is a platonist a neoplatonist and he read all these people he read Thomas Taylor he read um so he read all the Mysteries he read procus he um the thing about Emerson though is that he doesn't footnote anything he just absorbed it and it became his own voice and so it it just flows through his writing but anyone who's familiar with the neoplatonist can


01:32:32 - 01:33:54
see them in many of the uh essays that Emerson wrote at one point he he talks about even so-called ugly things in the world can be um through the poet's eye and you think the just here through the poet's eye can be seen as um um signatures that wake us up to the Divine mind yeah um and he really got it he really I I think Emerson's book the PO uh essay the poet is a very theurgical essay but there's a lot of um neoplatonic stuff Emerson I wanted to mention in terms of ficino there's a good book called The


01:33:13 - 01:34:39
Planets Within by an author named Tom Moore or Thomas Moore o o r e and and is the death psychologist yeah he is oh okay and he's a great admirer of Hilman as you probably know uh he wrote a a book called The Planets within which is about the um astrological platonism of ficino um it's a good book and um another scholar who really brings this neoplatonic material alive in a profoundly intellectual way but also in an inspiring way is Sarah rra r a p p she's somebody who's really worth


01:33:56 - 01:34:49
reading she's written a book on Socrates as a kind of Avatar um and she's also well she I would just look her up and and and read anything that captures your your attention by her fabulous she's yeah yeah yeah I I absolutely will do that and there's so like there's so many we're we're getting deep into this conversation and there's still so many like stones I'd love to look under with you and I'm like oh I got to ask him about this I got to ask him about that


01:34:23 - 01:35:23
um just there I mean I was thinking about some of the more cryptic things uh Socrates said particularly close to his death that I've always wondered you know what the hell is he getting at there but um you know like things like the true Earth being a do decahedron and such but um right right right but that may be uh that that may be a bit too far a field for where we're at in this conversation though if you do have thoughts feel free but well I'll tell you the Sarah rra could could go on and on about what


01:34:53 - 01:35:56
Socrates might have made at any mo moment she's really this book she wrote about Socrates is really really good book awesome yeah I will look that up as soon as we're done but yeah this idea that there are these Divine signatures all throughout nature all throughout you all throughout everything I mean um you know you briefly touched on psychedelic experiences earlier and I've noticed that that is a a touchy subject in the context of Classics and in the context for some for some people more for some


01:35:24 - 01:36:54
more than others but I have to say in my own experiences those experiences have been the most let's put it this way they they they've taken those these Concepts like sunma from abstract and like well maybe it's this maybe it's that to a felt reality of just being you know blasted by yeah geomet like like hyperbolic geometry and and just feelings of Deep deep uh Aeros and uh is it felos um intercon yeah love and just interconnectivity of course but then also feeling like you are absolutely in


01:36:09 - 01:37:38
an ecosystem of intelligences and the idea that you're separate is really you know a nice illusion on the NCH but as soon as you enter into these more uh I don't know open States it really feels like there's living thoughts coming in and out and archetypes and maybe maybe daon maybe who whatever terminology you want to put on it um and I wonder do you do you think that these were tools that would have been used by someone like I amus in a sort of um you know in a in in a sacramental


01:36:53 - 01:38:14
kind of way and would probably be kept obscure and not not talked about specifically for for obvious reasons um what are what are your thoughts on that yeah I you know I've been asked about that on several occasions be partly because people like you and people like me and many others have under the experience of some sort of psychedelic whether it's just some good pot or something else yeah suddenly understand what the amus is saying from inside out right yeah and oh my God this guy really was writing about this and I


01:37:33 - 01:38:48
know now I get it um but there's no evidence that's concrete that he was um encouraging the use of substances there's one passage where pyy asked about the use of some substances and liquids and he likeus doesn't really address it much so I'm not so sure that um that he did or uh but do I think he would have probably you know I mean why wouldn't somebody um right especially because those those stigmas didn't really they didn't exist no they did not they there's a book that you may already


01:38:10 - 01:39:28
know about this is it um yeah yeah paulen explains very clearly what's happening neurologically when you're on a psychedelic compared to your ordinary State and we sort of move into the state of of sort of the the infant whose mind is wide open and whose perceptual field is not narrow but but it's all inclusive and he that's the state that neurologically they find people are put into when they're on mushrooms or um another psychedelic right um and so it makes perfect sense that you you're


01:38:50 - 01:39:56
describing you're describing a whole different world that we're allowed to see because the aperture through which we're seeing the world has been changed right through psychedelics yeah yeah yeah and and I want to give respect to you know when I was younger I was like th come on this is 100% what was going on you know but now now as I've gotten deeper into studying this stuff I don't at all discount the idea that some of the language they were putting over the top of this is exactly


01:39:22 - 01:40:39
what it sounds like you you are doing something ritualistically to attract something change something enter something through doing uh almost like a hieratic science that we just don't understand anymore and that we've lost we've we've just like lost access to too many of the grammatical pieces to put it all together and and you know even to get F like further out there we know so little about Consciousness that there could I've played with this idea that perhaps a you know to use a a


01:40:02 - 01:41:08
sort of yian term like a like you know he of course has this famous idea of the collective unconscious but he also had ideas of collective consciousness of like civilizations and cultures Collective Shadows of civilizations and cultures may maybe within the context of these different eras of Consciousness different things were possible you know it's I mean that that's an idea that I don't even really know how to talk about responsibly but it's it's a it's a nagging thought that


01:40:34 - 01:41:49
I've had numerous times you're on it I mean look I don't know how much traveling you've done but um people who go to say and spend months in India it's a different reality right that they're in or if you spend time in Bali where these people do what they do it's a different reality this um kind of um Western economic kind of hity that we live in in in the United States is not the world that everybody else lives in and even in the United States there's certain little enclaves where people


01:41:12 - 01:42:22
right if you go and live along them you start to experience reality in a different way so reality is shaped by the environment that we're in and um it is exactly the way that we're we're sort of hypnotized into the world that we live in by the way it's mirrored To Us by parents and Friends absolutely yeah I'm not a um I'm not a dead head but I I wanted to bring up this story that I heard because it really uh made the hair on the back of my neck stand up because the most profound synchronicity


01:41:47 - 01:42:48
that I've ever had in my life had to do with a rose and I've told that story on the show before so I won't reash the whole thing and I know we're getting long in the I haven heard it before but go ahead well I would I'm happy to tell you if you want to know um all right so so my friend my friend and I good good friend has been on the show a number of times he's a amazing musician and artist named Colin franchetto he and I were going to Peru to do an iasa Retreat first one we ever did and still only one


01:42:17 - 01:43:28
I ever did but he was traveling from Portland I was traveling from Chicago and long story short he gets on his flight successfully just before I get on my flight at O'Hare it gets cancelled and so that kind of sends him into this anxious state it sends me into this anxious State because um we're going to aitos which is this place like right on the um you know sort of outer edge of the rainforest that a lot of iasa tourists go and there's not a lot of flights into this city so if you miss a


01:42:53 - 01:43:56
flight it could completely just upend your entire trip so I'm in the state of uncertainty he's in the state of uncertainty and we're texting back and forth and he lands at his connection and he said man I'm just doing this meditation my wife taught me where it's supposed to reduce anxiety where I just sit down and I start to imagine roses growing around me and Roses covering me and protecting me and he's like it's it's really calming and I'm like oh that's that's really


01:43:24 - 01:44:23
interesting so I'm trying to get on another flight and you know I I'm not successful so I realized I'm going to have to stay overnight in Chicago and I pick a hotel at random I'm like this hotel looks nice it's close it's not very expensive I'm just going to stay here so I sit down at the hotel I I go back I pick my phone up again I start texting Colin and he's like man you are not going to believe what just happened and I'm like okay what what happened he's like so I'm doing the rose


01:43:53 - 01:44:55
meditation and I open my eyes and there's a guy standing in front of me his luggage is covered in roses his arm is tattooed in roses his he's got rose tattoos on his neck and the S the sides of his head are shaved and he's got rose tattoos on his head and he's sending me pictures of this and mean a real guy he really yeah yeah I and I have the pictures I have the pictures I did a whole I did a whole um I did a whole video on this and posted the pictures and the text and everything yeah so so


01:44:25 - 01:45:21
and then this is the part that I'm I'm getting chills right now thinking about it the hotel that I chose at complete random was called the Rose Hotel and I'm sitting there it's in Rosemont Illinois it's just right next to rir basically and I look down you know as he's telling me this I have a menu sitting next to me because I'm sitting at the bar and emboss on the menu uh in like capital letters it says Rose and I I don't even respond to him I'm just like I'm I'm


01:44:53 - 01:45:51
like I think I'm short Circ right now and I just send him a me the picture of the Rose thing and yeah so to this day that's one of those things that I'm just like and now I think about the rose in the context of sunma and I'm like what the hell is that a sunma of and like um but anyway the Dead the The Grateful Dead story is that apparently and this is on a lot of their merchandise I guess for this reason is apparently at some show the the band and the crowd all collectively had the vision of a rose


01:45:21 - 01:46:39
like like above the stage or above them or something like that yeah I've seen that image of aose ungrateful dead um logo somewhere yeah is they had a vision of it then apparently that's what I heard yeah like I said I could be wrong about the lore I'm not really a dead head but um heard your story is is like um it's one of those fantastic synchronicities that made you feel really uh profound connected with this project that you were on your connection with Colin and that in some


01:46:00 - 01:47:09
way uh the Divine mind was taking care of things you know we're gonna have you stay at the Rose Hotel here yeah and not to mention we're hon our way to do iasa of all things which is a very like charged scary intimidating profound thing in its own well all yeah all the more meaningful that these things would be coming in at that time yeah um wow well you're just I mean we we could talk probably for the rest of the F day I I absolutely could I yeah go ahead I wanted to ask you one last question but


01:46:35 - 01:47:34
all right let's let's go because I think we should wrap it up soon so let's go to your last question yes okay so we've we've started to touch on this idea of theg it's such a deep question such a mysterious question the the short of it is that nobody really knows exactly what was being done but there's a lot of talk around it to a point where you know not only does this concept of sunma come up that there's this these Divine signatures from the above all over the


01:47:04 - 01:48:14
below yeah you get into different grades of them in the book you know material syntha what you call intermediate zma U either noetic or metaphysical I don't remember which words yeah yeah you use but have you personally I mean I I would think that given how much research you've done and how much Blood Sweat and Tears you've poured into this you must have started to try to understand or reverse engineer some of these things for yourself and have have you done that or have you found other sources that you


01:47:39 - 01:48:56
think these people figured it out better than I could figure it out yeah I gotta know yeah I'm not quite sure how to answer the question it's not like I'm holding back like oh yeah I could tell him about this secret thing I did once and it tells me everything because I don't really have that secret moment where I did things it tells me everything but I've had a series of not so much me creating a ritual to do it but but being open to experiences like you described with the rose that um and and allowing myself to


01:48:21 - 01:49:58
string those together and to trust them and to feel as if that becomes my ritual space in what you would call an imaginal world uh using the language of Henry Corban that's a it's a reality that I've been invited into and that I live inside and that I honor um there are moments sure when I will um I think actually I my first theurgical experience was before I even knew what theurgy meant I was chanting uh in the desert in Arizona and um as I was doing these chants and um my breath control was like


01:49:10 - 01:50:35
lasting a a chant lasted a really long time um I experienced in the middle of the chant that I wasn't chanting but I was being chanted and the chant The Sounds were coming through me the chance had uh agency I no longer had the agency The Sounds had the agency and I was just allowing it to manifest itself through me and my experience was that it it extended my awareness my identity awareness to cover the whole desert so that I became you know I became the whole landscape that I was in through the


01:49:52 - 01:51:16
medium of the sound and um I didn't know what that meant I really liked it um and it was later when I read amus and he describes how the names of the Gods um invite us that they are themselves the presence of the Gods and that it's not so much that we're doing them but they're doing us that they have the agency I thought this guy understood exactly what I experienced in the desert and so it made me trust his um understanding of those spiritual sorts of experiences so excuse me I had that as an experience


01:50:35 - 01:51:37
and I suppose I've had other types of experience that are like that but that was more a more distinctly and profound one that sort of opened me up to amus once I started to read him and realized that he was explaining what happened to me yeah that yeah that that really makes sense that really sense and and I remember hearing you tell the story about how um when you first it was the dods translation that you read right that your yes your um adviser told you to read because he he had a sneaking


01:51:05 - 01:52:35
suspicion that the type of experiences that you had already had you may find something beautiful yet lacking in that particular translation that I guess yeah does really translate he he wrote an essay about the okay okay and and it was a critique of it as as representing the demise of platonism falling into Superstition um just like um the Victorian e Europeans around him were falling into spiritualist seances and just as that he saw some you know intelligent men and women being attracted to the seances and the mediums


01:51:50 - 01:53:14
and he disparaged that so he thought that was happening back in deus's day and that D amus was pushing it and so he criticized damus for what he was doing um heer he referred to his work as um spiritualist Dil and um so my professor invited me to read dod's essay on theor and to read on the Mysteries and come up with what I thought and it was it's a real gift to me that he did that because sent you down a how many decades how many decades of a path yeah exactly he he really set me going well thank you for your time today


01:52:32 - 01:53:32
GRE I really appreciate our I could I sincerely could riff with you forever I hope we can do it again sometime I will absolutely gladly share your books and anything else you you'd like me to share just let me know and I'll I will do so gladly well Michael thank you and you're obviously doing a lot of things right um you've got a really crisp clear deep Vibe and I really appreciate talking to you thanks a lot I take that as an enormous compliment a as do you