How to Survive "The Long Dark", with Francis Weller

All right, everybody, welcome back to the ManTalks show. 11 years going strong. I don't know if you know this, Francis, but I just celebrated 11 years of running the show, which is pretty wild. An interview every week for 11 years.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've talked to some, some really fun people and I've had the pleasure to talk to people like yourself. A couple times, and so I was very grateful that you agreed to come back on the show. Um, I've had you on a couple times, so for anybody that might be new, if you enjoy this conversation, I would definitely encourage you to go back and listen to some of my conversations with Francis before. They are phenomenal. Every single time that we, we, we talk, uh, I end up going back and listening to conversations. So I'd encourage you to go and listen to those. Um, it seems, Francis, that we are living through a kind of culture collapse, that we're in the midst of the decay, almost like culture is going through an egrado, you know, and is kind of getting pulled underneath the waters into the deep currents. And I'm curious if, one, if you agree with that general assessment, and two, if you do, if you can sort of outline some of the symptoms that you see or the impact that it has on the individual, because it seems like it sort of fraying the individual psyche at quite a significant level.

Oh yeah, I totally agree with that assessment. I think it's what I call the long dark, that we've, we've entered this period which from all observations could last at least two generations. This is a long process. We're not just talking about the end of an administration. We're really talking about something that has been initiated by all the choices we've made as a species around consumption and around fossil fuel use and so forth, that we have begun this very steep descent. We could say we've been on an ascension pattern for 3,000 or 4,000 years. Trying to dominate, control, create systems of supremacy over bodies, cultures, places, you name it. But we've certainly peaked at that, and now we have begun a very— again, like I say— a very steep descent into the underworld, into darkness. And so when I use the words long dark, I mean them both very meaningfully. Long meaning like I said, generations. My friend Duane Elgin wrote a book a while back called Choosing Earth, and he asked me to write the preface for it, which I think we may have talked about last time. But what Duane does is he looks at the next 5 decades, the 2020s through the 2070s, and from all of his research over 50 years makes basically some, you know, forecasts for each of these decades, and they are intense. And the levels of grief that are going to be continuing to be with us are not something that we can deny any longer. So I ended up writing that preface, and one of the phrases I had, that grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. So we are in this process of descent. So what does this do to the individual? Well, Well, if we have the fiction that we can face it alone, it causes the individual to basically contract and close down. Because the heart and the soul that's untethered to others, to community, to nature, to the world, to cosmos, it's an impossibility to try to face what's happening right now. So one of the things that's happening in the long dark is that we are being invited to cultivate different qualities of soul life. Silence, deep listening, humility, you know, restraint. We're trying to enter into this darkness not in the same way that we got, you know, into the trouble in the first place, with muscle, with force, with, you know, I've got this, that kind of unconscious masculine energy. Now this is inviting a very different response, a soul response. When I say descent, that means we're going into the territory of soul—vulnerability, grief, death, uncertainty, fear. This is a territory that's very familiar to soul. But if we don't have a framework for that or a language for that, it can feel very overwhelming, what we're facing right now.

Can, can you maybe articulate from, from your perspective what, what is the normal role that culture plays on a healthy psyche? Because I think that sometimes we don't necessarily think of culture as being something that— or maybe the average individual just going about their day, you know, fixing the toilets and the, you know, the electricity in the house and changing diapers and stuff like that isn't thinking like, oh, what role does culture have on my psyche? But it does seem to be that they're quite interconnected. And so I'm curious from your take, like, what, what role does culture have on the individual psyche? And when it starts to fray and collapse, is there a way for us to, to separate as humans, as people, even in small groups, from the dominant culture of modernity? Or are we just naturally influenced by it?

Well, I would first of all say that we don't live in a culture. We live in a disparate society. We don't have, in a sense, a collectively shared understanding and perspective of the world, our place in the world, a cosmological framework. We don't have that. We don't share that. So we're not culture. We live in, like I say, in a society that has some agreed-upon norms, but the deeper soul qualities of living culture— ritual, song, stories, elders, ancestors, land-based— those, that's what living culture generates, those qualities. And in a functioning society, the job of the, of the culture is to create competent robust individuals. It's the job of the robust individuals to sustain culture. So you create this beautiful symmetry between the individual and the collective. You can't have healthy individuals without healthy culture. You can't have healthy culture without healthy individuals. So traditionally, that was the job of the community, was to help to nurture someone who was responsive and responsible. To the living community. That was their job. That was culture's job. Robust, mature individuals don't just happen. They are shaped and cultivated by ritual, by initiations, by elders, you know, all the things that live in a culture that's sustainable. They're all designed to help for, you know, to, to call forth what's in the soul, what's in the individual.

Would you say that that's specifically that America lacks that culture that you're, that you're speaking of, or is it a Western thing, or are you saying that that culture globally has started to collapse?

I think wherever individualism, capitalism get a strong foothold, we're in danger of that happening. We, you know, we have supplanted a living mythology with an economic structure. That's what we believe in. That's what we pray to basically every day, is it's where we devote our energy, is towards making a living, earning a living, which is a horrible phrase, by the way. Just obscene that you have to earn a living. But that's what we are rallying around right now is both individualism and economic growth. I mean, that's a big issue, isn't it? It's growth, constant growth, always growing. So the very things that we profess and support are actually part of our demise as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because I I'm always trying to, in these conversations, hold the, the sort of argument against and the argument for steelmanning, you know, the case. And then, and I think like a real capitalist or like, you know, if there was an economist sitting on this, on this conversation, would probably say something along the lines of like, well, look what capitalism has done for pulling people out of poverty. And, you know, being able to reduce suffering and all those types of pieces are usually the, the main pieces that get put forward, you know. And so how do you— I guess, how do you square those things? Because it's like there are some, quote unquote, benefits that have happened, right? People maybe— people have, you know, live a little bit of a more easeful life, which you can argue whether or not that's a good thing or not. But, you know, we've helped to lift— and when I say we, I mean like capitalism, the economy. Again, I'm sort of like putting that economist's hat on, the sort of traditional capitalist hat on, of like, we've helped people, people, you know, there's less starving people in, in the world, there's, uh, less people that are suffering from diseases in the world, and etc., etc. And so how do you square those two things against one another?

Well, we're kind of jumping ahead of the story that why are people hungry? Why are they, you know, not being fed? Why are they, you know, disadvantaged? Well, incidentally, partly because of capitalism. You know, I've seen cultures where they had a subsistence living and they were completely content. Everything was— they had their food, they had their shelter, they had their community. They had their, you know, traditions. And then capitalism comes in and basically says none of this is valuable anymore. What you must do is aspire to this. So we create— I mentioned a little bit before we started that we create this system based on a feeling of emptiness, you know, that we're in a sense we're emptying out what it is that provided meaning over 300,000 years. What is it that satisfied us? Otherwise we wouldn't have survived as a species if we hadn't figured out something about the premises of what satisfies the soul. You know, communal gatherings, singing together, eating together, sharing dreams, doing ritual together, weeping together, giving thanks together, looking at the stars together, telling stories. These things shaped us. There was nothing about economics in that. If we went back to that as our premise, I know it'd be difficult, but if we went back to what I call primary satisfactions, the whole economic system would collapse in a minute. It's as if the economies that we're built on right now require constant sense of dissatisfaction. There's never enough. I always need more. I need the next gadget. I need the next car. I need the next cell phone. I need whatever it is, we're constantly being given this feeling of insufficiency. But when we're inside of primary satisfactions, when we're living inside of something that really gives the soul what it wants, that craving disappears. You know, I saw—

I'm gonna bring two pieces in here. I saw this hilarious reel like 6 months ago. Of course, I was, you know, on Instagram and flipping through, and I came— I think somebody sent it to me, and it's these two comedians, and they're dressed up as aliens, and it's the aliens looking at Earth, mocking the fact that, you know, the Earth is $320 million and $320 trillion in debt, right? That there's $320 trillion of debt in the, in the Earth, and that, you know, we've commodified things that are just there right? We've commodified wood and water and all of these things. And it was really one of those things where I was like, yeah, that's, that's fucking crazy. Like that, like when you put it like that, it's like, yeah, there's no other way to look at it. Be like, yeah, that's just so stupid, you know? Like, why the hell did we do that? Uh, and then there's this guy that I've, I've, I want to interview. I think his name is Jeff Booth, and he's like a, he's sort of like an economist, and I think he's a Bitcoin guy or whatnot. But he was talking about how true free market economies should be deflationary by nature, always trying to get us back to zero, that, that things, that goods and services don't actually cost anything, that, that should be what it, what it is. But our, our system is debt-based. And so it, it's interesting because as you're talking about this, it's almost like an inevitability that culture would sort of get— modernity would get hollowed out because it's debt-based, because it's built on the, on the back of scarcity, a sort of a deficit, right? It's really built off of a deficit. And that can't go on without eventually having some type of impact. Do you think that what we're experiencing right now is just that deficit has risen out of the unconscious and is so glaringly obvious to every single human being that, uh, that they can't look away from it, they can't not feel it? Like, how would you describe that?

Well, I wouldn't say it's a majority by any stretch. I mean, I'm hoping for that. I'm hoping that we reach some critical mass of people and go, what— like you said before, what the fuck? What, we're basing our lives on this? These are the premises that we want to go out on? And, uh, No. So repeat your question one more time, Connor.

Yeah, just, it seems as though what people are experiencing is this operating from a deficit, that that has, that's grown so much, right? The economy is so in debt now, and it's on the news all the time, and people are in debt, and culture, you know, is really struggling. It just seems like deficit, the, just like that word has become a kind of palpable experience for so many people.

Yeah, and again, the, the agreements or the, the foundational ideas is that we must constantly be in a process of growth, you know, and progress, always, always more. So the, the very beginning of the ideas are going to be problematic, aren't they? Because we can't be in a constant state of growth. The only thing that is is cancer. You know, cancer is an unrestrained growth process. Well, what would predicate these ideas if not some fundamental sense of emptiness? And I'm always looking to see where did this— where did capitalism begin? Well, it began in Northern Europe. The first was the British West Indies Company, you know. And the moment you basically make your ideas on profit, you have to take from someplace, whether it's the goods, whether it's the people. I mean, then you need to have slave labor to produce your product. And so much of the troubles that we're in right now are based on this feeling of emptiness that came out of white society a couple thousand years ago. And we have never even looked at it because we've been on this growth fiction, you know, that somehow we can economically advance ourselves so far that no one will be in trouble. Well, there's a lot of people on the planet right now who are struggling because of this model that benefits a few and deprives countless others of the basic decencies of water and shelter and food and home and safety and Um, the crisis right now is one that we're really being asked to look at all of these fundamental agreements and to see which ones support life and which ones detract.

Where I'm gonna bring in one more piece just for the, the complete picture— where do you think AI fits into all of this? Because It seems to be such a wild card, you know, that I hear people talking about it as if like we're creating a new species, which you could probably make an argument for. Some people are praising it as the sort of salvation of humanity. Other people are saying that it's going to be the end of humanity and existence, you know, everything that we know. And so it seems— it really seems to be this this double-sided or, you know, double-edged sword in, in some ways. And I think what's— I think what's interesting is how many people are using it for like self-help and therapy. And I think OpenAI came out with a piece of research and said the most common use for it in younger people is as like a coach or as a therapist for helping them with, with their problems. And so it's I, I find that somewhat alarming to, to go to a non-human and try and get some support, you know, that's, that's not even organic. I mean, go— I'd almost advocate going to talk to a tree or one of the birds or something like that. So I mean, like, listen, I, I use these things and they're, they're insanely interesting technologies and they really are fascinating. But you see things like AI-induced psychosis and people really sort of losing themselves. And so I know I'm open. I'm just— I'm going to just like open up the, you know, the flaming bag of dog poo and hand it over and say, like, what is this? Like, how do you— how do you square this with everything? Yeah. You see people interacting with it and what do you think is going to happen as a result of it?

You know, I don't know a lot about it, so I can't speak from any full understanding. But what my fear is, is this is the exponential abstraction of human life, moving further and further away from the sensual erotic reality of being in this flesh, being in this earth. See, well, whatever we're feeding the AI, it's concept, it's abstraction, it's idea., but it's not sensual, it's not poetic, it's not imaginative. It's, you know, there's not much soul. I can't see soul in this. So the other thing that comes to mind is, again, back to Duane Elgin. Duane's trying to do what he can around what is shaping AI right now is basically mechanistic, economic-based concept-based ideas, but there's no cosmological background to the information that's shaping it. So whatever we're teaching AI is what we'll get back from my AI. So it'll take all this quantums of ideas and data, and it will shape it based as if that is the world, as if this is the construct of the world, but there's nothing cosmological about it. There's nothing about the deep sense of belonging or the qualities of the sacred. Those are not being infused into the heart of— if we can use that language— of AI. Right now it's being shaped primarily through profit and power. Those are the two dynamics that seem to be what's shaping AI. And it's only going to profit a few. And I mean, yes, I could see that there's probably amazing things that happen out of medicine, or, you know, they're able to translate old texts, you know, amazing shit. But where, where is it taking us? You know, I wrote a piece a while back called A Trail on the Ground, and I'm looking, where, where is this trail leading us? Well, it's not leading us back to living culture. It's not leading us back to a sensual reality. It's not leading us back to community and ritual and song. It's taking us further and further into the abstraction of the human, but not into the immediate friendship communal context of what it is the soul needs. We're going to become even more stripped of meaning and depth.

It's interesting because I think in some ways, like, there's the concept in psychology and therapy of the, the rider and the elephant, right? And the rider being sort of the rational mind and the elephant being the body and the, the intelligence of the body and the intelligence of the intuition and instinct and whatnot. And it seems like we have— we're just going down. I don't know if we talked about this last time, but I, I have this sort of Jungian structure that I created of, of what we've done with technology, that we've sort of replicated externally the, uh, internal frameworks of the psyche. You know, we started with the collective unconscious, which was the internet, and then we moved forward to the, on the personal unconscious, which was social media, and now we're moving into trying to recreate the conscious. And that's just, that's artificial intelligence. And so it's really interesting to see the external manifestation of the internal structure of the psyche. And all of it has the shadow and, you know, all those other pieces there. But it's interesting because it almost sounds like what you're saying is that we creating intelligence without any type of biological rooting Yeah, I mean, no matter—

no, no, go ahead, please. Well, I mean, no matter what we create with AI, it's not going to have the mind of Badger. It's not going to have the imagination of Wren or Raven. That's going to be missing from the, from the conversation, you know. And as we become more abstracted from the living earth, you know, where our conversations are not with trees and stones and creek beds, but with digits and, you know, texts and keyboards. And we were removing ourselves and losing the intimacy with the living world. And again, this thing about AI is that it does not have the animating quality of a birdsong or That's not what's being informed into AI. So no matter how sophisticated it gets, it doesn't have that. It doesn't have the things that cause me to stop and drop to my knees in awe, you know, just being able to see the two fawns that we have in our yard most days now, and the way they kick around and bounce and show me that in AI. I mean, it might be able to recreate an image of it, but it's not what we're using to inform it.

Yeah, it's interesting because again, it's like such a dual experience, right? I mean, you have people using AI to, to try and create a language interpretation of certain animals, like we'll be able to understand whales and stuff like that, and and taking bird songs and trying to turn them into a language that we can understand. It's like, well, that's fascinating, you know, uh, but there does seem to be a removal of the awe or the wonder, you know, the sort of like whimsical nature of just standing out in the backyard listening to the birds or, or, you know, seeing the fawns. Or, I mean, we when we were upstate in New York, we were sitting there having dinner and across the yard through the trees, there's just like a black bear walking. And he had gotten into our garbage can and I was like, there he is. And we, you know, we all go running outside on the front porch and, you know, or the fox, all that kind of stuff. But I think, do you think that maybe this is a natural inflection point that happens with a species that's trying to take off for the stars, that's trying to explore outside of the planet, and that there's a sort of natural— I almost like this, like this, the, the collective psyche of humanity that's trying to venture off into the stars almost needs to like— not disassociate isn't the right word, but like really disconnect from the you know, what, what is and what's here to go venture off into the great beyond? Or is that, is that an excuse? Like, I'm, I'm curious about that. I, I don't know.

I mean, it would be, it'd be very interesting to see what AI would look like apart from profit and capitalism if those weren't prime generators behind the movement of AI. I'd be curious what we would create. But right now, that seems to be the primary motivation, is power and profit. So what we do, how we then shape this creation, will be to manifest, maximize those two things, power and profit. So does that lead us towards abstraction out into space? Possibly, probably. But what are we abandoning? What are we missing? I mean, we seem to be in this profound state of amnesia right now where we forgot what it means to be human and how to be human in right relations to watershed, to soil, to air, to animal. To bird. That amnesia is putting us really close to the edge of extinction. You know, that the farther we get from that reciprocity with the living world, the more likely it is that we will not be able to survive. So does AI take us further in that direction? Probably. Does it return us to the living fabric of the Earth? Not so much. I mean, again, I don't know enough about it to say it does or doesn't, but it seems to be, um, a distancing process.

Say more about why you feel like that is important to return to the Earth in that way. Like, what does it mean to be human based off of what you're saying?

Well, I think about how we were shaped as a species. Again, maybe 300,000 or 400,000 years— they keep pushing it back. But what was it that shaped us? And what was the context out of which human beings emerged? It wasn't apart from nature. It was completely enfolded in the grasslands and forests and streams and the hunt and the scavenging for food. And we were shaped by birdsong and wind and rain. And so the cadences and the rhythms of beings— well, just looking at the paintings on the oldest rock walls are animals for the most part, you know, like 95% of them are animals, not human. Some geometric patterns, but it spoke to a relational dynamic between the human and the more-than-human world. And as we've gone towards— more towards economic, more towards individualistic ideas, we've begun to fade in our relationships and our responsibilities to the world. I remember Brian Swimme, the mathematical cosmologist He was dear friends with Thomas Berry, and they wrote a number of books together about the evolution of the cosmos. And he was giving a talk one time, and a young person stood up and said, well, what, what about humans? Why are we here? We don't seem to serve any good purpose. The Earth would be so much better off without us. And he stopped and said, no, no, no, no, no, we were put here to gawk. And that our primary spiritual responsibility is to say thank you. Now, there's a pretty easy covenant, and most traditional cultures honored that covenant. They would not take too much. They would not take without asking. They would do reciprocity through their own rituals of, you know, sweat lodges or whatever to purify and to make themselves ready to engage the hunt, and there would always be gratitude. So there was a covenant between the human and the more-than-human world that we honored for a long, long time. It's only very recently that we have forgotten the original instructions of how to be human, how to be in good relations to the land around us.

What would you say happens to individual and the mind and the psyche when they're disconnected from that natural synchronicity?

Well, Paul Shepard wrote a whole book on it called Nature and Madness, and he was looking at the child-rearing practices from traditional indigenous cultures to modern society. And so the very process by which we raise children, whereas in traditional culture that, that raising was integral to animal life and plant life and soil life and water life. And so your psyche was entangled with the world. And in a sense, your identity was kind of commingled with all of that. Whereas modern society was raising kids to be basically little individualistic cells, sometimes bouncing off of other cells, but not entangled with the other, you know. So that he said basically we end up creating a society of mad people, you know. And when you read some of the native writings like Jack Forbes' book Columbus and Other Cannibals, he said what has happened by that rupture, by the loss of continuum between the human and the and the living world is that a disease sets in called wetiko. And wetiko means basically cannibalistic psychosis. And that's kind of what white society has become. We devour, we eat, we consume. You know, it takes about 1.5, 1.9 worlds right now yearly to supply all of what we need as a, as a species. But if everyone lived according to the United States' levels of consumption, it would take 4.5 Earths. I mean, just think about that, this level of unconscious entitlement. You know, we mentioned initiation early on before we got on, but I remember writing a piece once and I said that initiation moves one more towards a sensitivity to responsibilities than rights. More aware of entanglements than entitlements. And as we're speaking, you know, in our society, we use— we talk about rights and entitlements all the time, you know, but we don't talk about responsibilities. We don't talk about entanglements. What if we talked about that? You know, what's my responsibility? Yeah, I have a right to bear arms. Yeah, I understand, but what's my responsibility to the community? What's my responsibility to the generations yet to come? What's my responsibility to the land base that I'm on? You know, we don't ask those questions. We just want to make sure that I, you know, got mine, and screw the rest.

I'm exaggerating a little bit, but dramatic, dramatic intent. Yes, that's right. Well, it's interesting because it certainly seems as though stripping out that initiation process, stripping out the connection to nature and a kind of equilibrium that it seems that you're sort of hinting at, or what Jung would have called the synchronicity. And he, you know, he talked about synchronicity as like events that are happening, but also, you know, having some type of synchronization with your surroundings, with nature, with the psyche, with the collective, etc. And it sounds like the— maybe what you are getting at is that there's a deterioration of the psyche that happens as a result of that, and we disconnect from soul. And shifting through the maturation stages into elderhood becomes almost impossible. Is that a fair assessment, like those things that I'm laying out?

Mm-hmm. That's a very fair assessment. And why are there such a lack of elders in our culture? And, you know, we have basically premised society on rugged individualism, um, which means that we basically live our entire lifetime anxious about whether I belong or not. Am I in? Did I do a good enough job? Did I impress you enough? Did I, you know, convince you to at least give me a provisional welcome? And we spend much of our time, even in psychology, our therapy practices are designed to somehow reinforce a solid individual identity, a self. But it's not usually a self that's permeable. It's well-boundaried. We use words like mastery and, you know, control. And again, I'm not saying these are bad things, but they're not full. They're not the whole picture, you know, that we're not cultivating and creating individuals who are embedded in something much larger than themselves. And consequently, we tend to end up serving only the self. When our belonging is so tenuous, our focus is much more on self-improvement than on, you know, embedding myself into multiple layers of relationships that I'm part of. And that really has cost us deeply to be so anxious about my belonging that I'll basically spend my entire lifetime polishing, improving, you know, making myself better. But what's happening to my neighborhood? What's happening to the salmon? What's happening, you know, those things get forgotten by this kind of chronic self-obsession. And that's what I've spent my entire lifetime trying to respond to.

I think it's— I mean, it's fair, certainly. And I think it's interesting because when we— the place that we were living in New York, um, I always said to my wife, like, it feels like the land is very burdened, you know, just by the amount of people. I'd go hiking upstate New York, I'd go to the Catskills. It's just like everywhere just felt like the, the land, the, the nature, the trees just felt like is having to carry so much like a camel, just overweighted, or a horse that's just like packed to the gills. And it was funny because we had a few acres of land and we really did what we could to look at our— not necessarily our footprint on the land, but how— what would it look like to restore that land? What would it look like to be in harmony with it? What flowers could we plant? You know, what vegetables could we grow. And we lived there for 4 years, and it was interesting because we spent a bunch of time trying to sort of be in communion with the nature and be in relationship, like, with what was around us. And it was interesting because as time went on, more and more animals and more and more nature was just sort of, you know, wake up and there's just a deer outside the front door, you know, or the fox walking right across the lawn. And And that to me was fascinating. And I think part of this individualistic pull that modernity seems to install almost disincentivizes us from allowing ourselves to be influenced by other, whether it's— and it's other in the sense of other people, but it's other in this also in the sense of like the bumblebee and the birds and to be influenced and affected by being in awe or wonder or again, you know, whimsy of some of those things that surround us all the time. And, you know, we've— in the background of this conversation, we've been talking about soul the entire time. And I don't think we've necessarily defined it, which might be a hard thing to do. But I think for the average person, they hear that, they hear soul and they're like, okay, this is a nebulous thing, you know, it sort of feels big. I hear the word, I don't really have a context for it. So for the person that's tuning into this conversation and listening to us and like, okay, I agree with this, maybe disagree with that, and they keep hearing this word soul, can you just color that for them? Can you contextualize it for them and why it's sort of the center of what we're talking about?

Yeah. Remind me to come back to a comment by Paul Shepherd in a few minutes because just based on what you just I just shared a moment before that. Soul in my understanding isn't so much the metaphysical soul of Christianity or religion in general, but it's more about a way of seeing. And it's also about a geography. For me, soul has to do with depth. You know, we're going down into a place. You know, when we have You know, even today we're having, we're trying, we're hoping for a deep conversation, right? We don't want to be superficial. We don't want to be flighty. We want substance. We want ground. We want depth. Well, that means we're going down into someplace, and in the depths, that's where we experience vulnerability, intimacy, tenderness, loss. You know, sadness, grief. These are the qualities of soul. Soul invites us into what is most human in us, what is most sensitive. And when we meet there, there's a sense of true connection. It's not the superficial layers of, hey, how's it going? Yeah, great game last night. Yeah, yeah, Giants, they finally won one, you know. Again, we need that, that surface layer, but we also crave the layer of depth. And how do we get there? It's not through strength, it's not through power, it's not through privilege, it's not through rank. It's through vulnerability. It's through coming into what I call the commons of the soul, that we all know loss, we all know longing, we all know a desire to belong and to be part of something larger than us. So soul to me is more of a terrain, a dimension. Um, it's also the domain of beauty. Soul is in love with the beauty of this world, and whenever we are touched by beauty, in a sense, we're having another soulful moment of deep communion. It's also the, the abode of imagination. Carl Jung said that the primary activity of psyche, the primary activity of soul, is image-making. So its primary activity is generating images constantly, constantly. So when we stop and pay attention to soul, we're stopping to watch dreams, watch the images that arise. We're asked to create and participate in beauty making. It's also the domain of ritual, you know, so that all of that is what I speak of when I talk about that one word, soul.

Yeah, for the average person, the electrician tuning into this, a guy running the jiu-jitsu gym that hears what you're saying, feels the, feels a sort of tug at this, because I think— here's what I wanted to say. It seems like we are a very anti, uh, down society. Yes. No falling apart, that's bullshit. No letting the economy collapse, God forbid. No allowing yourself to cry and grieve. That's weakness. No showing insecurities or inferiorities. And so it seems like the, the whole game that we're often playing is a kind of facade to not, not go down into the negredo, into the, you know, the soil of ourselves. And it's, and it's interesting because a lot of the men that come into our ecosystem or come and work with me or whatever it is, it's like they've been holding on for so long to not allow things to fall apart. And then either they can't hold on anymore or something has happened and it's like drag them underneath and they're like, shit, I'm here now, what do I do? And that seems to be a huge part of it. How, how can you choose to allow things to fall apart? Can you choose to move into the negreo? Can you, can you grow deeper into who you are and do soul work consciously, intentionally? Um, why would somebody do that might be a question that, that a listener is pondering to themselves, because I think your proposition and what we're talking about is largely unsexy to the rational mind. You know, it's largely like, why on earth would I do that? And I always struggle with this because sometimes I'm like, how do I articulate this to a man without being like, here's your ROI, here's your benefit of doing this? So how can you frame any of this? I'm just— I know I've asked you like 5 different questions in one, But hopefully there's a thread in there that you want to pull on. And if not, please come back to the Paul Shepherd comment. Okay. Yeah, I left you with too much of a mess.

We are living in a very heroic culture, and the hero is the only image given to men and most genders nowadays, but particularly to men. The heroic is always successful, always rising above, always in control. Has the answer, doesn't need anybody, is invulnerable. I mean, the conditioning that men go through, as you are very well aware of, makes it very prohibitive around being able to confess. Jung had a phrase once, he said, there appears to be a conscience in mankind that severely punishes the man who does not somehow and in some way, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of being a man among men. So until we allow ourselves to fall, which is almost never the case— I remember writing a piece once called The Necessity of Defeat. That no man had ever walked into my office voluntarily. He came in because he got knocked off the horse through divorce, through illness, depression, addiction, loss of a job, the death of someone close to him. Something knocked him off the horse. And that to me was a moment of grace. And the, the hope in that moment for me sitting with them was that they didn't try looking for a next horse, that they found their life on the ground and they found that humility that comes from a connection to the ground. That was my hope. But the heroic is such a powerful conditioned reflex that we don't typically go there. We are taken there. Most of the times that soul erupts in our lives are times of disruption. Because we, you know, if we don't honor soul as we're growing up, as we age, we now have a convenient term for it. We call it midlife crisis. But what it is is an attempt by psyche to reorient. We want to move from a self-centered life to a soul-centered life. That's a crisis in our life. We don't know how to serve something like soul. We typically are used to just serving ourselves. And do we, do we get close to your question, Connor?

I think so, yeah. How, how does one begin to track that being in service of their soul? And because I, I think what you're articulating is very true from what I've seen. I mean, that was my story. Like, I was dragged kicking and screaming into this work and into my life and into, um, myself in a lot of ways. But, and I've been very fortunate. I think I'm a, I'm a sometimes, um, I mean, I'm very grateful because I've had a lot of mentors in my life men that are elders that have ushered me along the way. And so I think without them, I would be adrift. I would have gone straight back into, "Let me just be the champion again." And because it is intoxicating, you know, that heroic myth and experience is intoxicating. It's powerful. It's potent. And the other paths seem lesser, I think, sometimes, especially— I think especially because a lot of our— the masculine culture within our society is sort of predicated off of that myth and that mythology. So how does, how does a man start to track being in service to his own soul? What does that look like? Or just soul in general?

You begin to change the premise of your life from self-improvement to cultivating a friendship with one's own life. That the things I railed against in my 20s and probably my 30s, you know, my shame and my feelings of inadequacy. I mean, going to therapy in my late 20s and my opening gambit was, um, I want you to help me get rid of some parts of me. You know, if I can get rid of this weakness, this inadequacy, this, you know, this shame, I could just get rid of all that, I'd be good enough to belong. You know, and Michael chuckled a bit and obviously didn't take the hook. And, uh, you know, many years later, the relationship one has to one's own suffering changes radically. I think that's the first invitation from soul, is to come towards the inevitable encounters with loss and grief and failure and defeat and, you know, humiliation and so forth, and the harms that we cause. Can we hold our wounds not as commentaries, that this is the reason why I don't belong, But can I begin to see it mythically that this is the reason I do belong? That my wounds are part of what I share with others. I mean, show me a human being that doesn't know wounds. It doesn't exist. No, they don't exist. From a mythological point of view, from a soul point of view, the wounds are what bring me into communion with you. And when I'm not trying to hide them and defend them and and basically make you think I am a Superman. Um, that's our entry into, into closeness— mutual revelation, right? When we're both able to confess, yeah, this is the way I suffered, how about you? Suddenly there's that moment of dropping down into the third layer, into soul. That's what I'm hoping for. So how does a man do that? I'll begin to challenge some of the, the conditioning that they've, they've gone through that judges every, every failure, every inadequacy as a commentary that you're not worth it, you know, you don't belong. The only option is to fortify, reinforce, and double down on strength, muscle your way through, convince everybody you don't need anything, you're fine. You know, ultimately it's the loneliness, it's the depression, it's the addiction. Hopefully these things speak loud enough through soul that we begin to pay attention. I certainly had to pay attention, you know. You had to pay attention. The call was being made quite loudly and repeatedly.

And repeatedly. Yeah, and repeatedly. Yes, it's a— yeah, yeah, there was no— I mean, I think that was the thing for me is I just got to a point where, again, thankfully, I think my life had been very geared towards it. But at some point I was like, oh, I can't ignore this any longer, you know. I can't, or I'm gonna die, you know. I can't ignore it any longer, I'm gonna die. And, and that was a you know, that was both a terrifying and liberating acknowledgment of here's the fork in the road, you know, here's the impasse. And the first line of my book was, "A man's work begins with pain." And I wrote— I remember writing that down on an airplane and being like, yeah, that's, that's it. Like, until we begin to reconcile with how we are hurting as men, one, we'll never really feel known by others, and two, it becomes almost impossible for us to really understand who we are. And because that's— that was the sort of battle that had been going on for me for so long. Um, so I appreciate you bringing that forward because I think that's a very important piece. How, how else can a man begin to sort of track his deeper qualities. So maybe he hears what you're saying. He says, okay, I have to start to come to terms with my vulnerabilities, my insecurities, the things that— maybe I'll ask a more specific question is, what does a man do when he dislikes his specific brand of suffering? Because I think that's the thing that I see a lot of men grappling with is like, Okay, John's dealing with his suffering, but his isn't like mine. You know, my pain, my trauma, my— the shit that I've gone through, it's, you know, it's way bigger. It's way more embarrassing. How does somebody start to reconcile with this belief or this experience of, I wish I had different suffering. I wish this wasn't my circumstances.

I imagine that what we have to do is find ourselves in circles of men and begin to share our stories. When I was writing a piece on shame, I said there's 3 movements that have to happen. The first one is to move from worthless to wounded. So if I'm looking at this part of me and I'm judging it as worthless, there's no possible way I'm going to approach it with anything but contempt. Right, just sheer judgment. If I can begin to see that now, this is the wound I carry, and this requires the second move, which is from contempt to compassion. If I can see my wound not as, again, as some worthless part of me that I have to, you know, get rid of, banish, but actually this is the tenderness of my own suffering I can bring it to compassion, which allows the third movement, which is from silence to sharing. Men are very good at keeping their secrets around their shame, around their feelings of inadequacy, just to keep up the bravado of, I've got my shit together. But when we can confess it, like Jung said a moment ago, and if I can begin to share these stories, they are what bring me into into connection with you, you know. And the comparisons quickly begin to subside because they don't matter. It's the fact of mutual— that we all know suffering and we all know what it's like to be disconnected from others and basically isolated in the world.

Um, yeah, it's, um, it's a very interesting challenge I think that a lot of men end up facing in this is that this perception of being seen as weak, either by themselves or the people around them. And that does feel like it's part of the confrontation that you're talking about, is like moving from this place of contempt towards our insecurities or our fears or our pain or grief or whatever it is, towards a sense of compassion. And being able to hold those in a different way. I do think that sometimes that, you know, I had, I had my, my first mentor and he said I was really, I was really struggling. It was right after my sort of rock bottom moment and the beginning of the descent for me. And his name is Bernard, and he was this lovely French-Canadian man who's passed away quite a few years ago. And he said, "You know, Connor, sometimes people have to believe in you more than you believe in yourself. And I believe in you more than you believe in yourself right now. And that's okay. I'll hold that for you." And I just remember that breaking me down. You know, like, it just wrecked— I was sobbing. It can make me emotional right now. And I do think that the challenge that a lot of men have is twofold. One, this sort of internal belief of, no one genuinely cares about my pain and my suffering and what I'm going through. Nobody actually gives a shit. And, and two, that they don't, they don't have living examples or models of relationships where that's not true, or they have disconfirming evidence that goes against that experience. And so they get to keep holding that narrative of like, no, people don't actually care about what I'm dealing with. Um, so I do think that that is a huge part of it. Did we get to your Paul Shepard comment? I want— I don't want to pass it by. No, no.

Um, you were mentioning before about, you know, the— in a sense, the separation between the human and the world, nature. And, uh, Shepard said something very powerful. He was being interviewed by a man named Jonathan White And, uh, I can't remember the question Jonathan asked, but Paul's response was, the grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. That sentence just dropped me. You know, the grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality. Again, there's our psychology. I did something wrong to feel this emptiness. What did I fail to do? Was I not good enough? He's saying no, that it's actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. So that's when the world was still animated and alive. And the encounter with fox or deer. We had this little bouncy adolescent skunk, you know, bouncing along our driveway yesterday, which we both admired and feared. But that's the beautiful and strange otherness that typically we are not attending to. And it leaves us feeling empty inside to not have the this conversation with Wren and Lark and Alder and so forth, you know, the other part of that, of that phrase that caught me was that we're also supposed to see that beautiful and strange otherness in each other's eyes. That part of what has happened through enculturation is a radical sense of domestication, that our own aliveness, our own vitality, our own exuberance, our own Beauty has been blunted and contorted in ways that simply are meant to, um, advocate for our economic lives but not for our wild soul life, you know, the one that knows how to sing and dance, you know, and, and be foolish, you know, and be outrageous. The one that knows how to recite a poem by heart. Much of that wildness has been so blunted that what we see in each other now is shells at times of what was once meant to be something quite glorious.

Yeah, well, with that exhale I think that feels like a good place for us to pause. There's a few other channels that I'd like to dig in with you on, but I think we'll hold those for a longer, deeper exploration and a different conversation. Where can people go to find more about your work if they're interested? I think last year you— I think it was in 2025, you released In the Absence of the Ordinary. Um, so where would you like to— people to go to check out your book, your work?

Um, we'll go from there. Yeah, the only place right now is, uh, my website, francisweller.net. I've basically taken myself off of social medias of all kinds and, um, retired from my practice. I'm primarily doing things like this with you and writing and watching my grandkids play baseball. So it's, um, cool. Yeah, beautiful.

Well, thank you for spending some time with me, and I look forward to another conversation with you. Uh, everybody that's out there, we'll have the links for Francis Weller— Francis's website in the show notes, uh, and to the books as well. Um, so go check those out. As always, don't forget to man it forward if there's somebody that you know would enjoy this conversation. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off. Thank you.