How To Become Integrated: Mental + Emotional + Spiritual Ascension

A person could wake up spiritually but still be highly underdeveloped emotionally and psychologically. If we're just focused on spirituality as our path for development, then we're missing a huge part of who we are that must be developed. It's important for one to ask oneself, what's the purpose in my development? Do I want to heal? Do I want to grow? Do I want to evolve? Do I want to contribute? What are the reasons why one would commit to the development of their self? To be willing to go through the crucibles of burning away the falseness of who we're not, to find who we are. This is not a painless process.

In order for us to be truly integrated, to live an integral life, we have to be shattered to be humble enough to even have a relationship with God.

99 plus percent of humans will always choose the path of pain. I was a dead man. I had brain damage, kidney damage, liver damage. I was in really, really bad shape, you know, and I just wanted to live. And I was desperate to live. And I didn't know that I was going to have to have a spiritual awakening as a result of taking a course of action to get free from the BO Bondage of selfishness, the bondage of alcoholism, the bondage of addiction. My willingness to never go back to the way I lived was so resolute that God showed up. Man. Life is the experience of remembering who we are. We get all gung ho about development and try to work towards a thing. Yet the thing that we're working towards is already ever present right now and always has been. That which we want to become is already who we are now.

Scott, I got a lot of gratitude for you today.

Thanks, man. Yeah.

You see my little boy coming out right now?

You're, like, glowing.

Listen, I was. I was sitting this morning and I was thinking, what are we actually doing here? Like, what is this connection you and I have? And it's always been about mentorship and friendship.

Yeah.

Which is such a powerful thing. Right. And I was thinking, okay, what does this remind me of in my life? When I was, like, 10 years old, dude. Being raised on welfare in La Mesa, California, I was listening to Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew on loveline. Wow. And getting advice and learning about sexuality. My dad was out of the home, so they were kind of like my surrogate fathers.

Wow.

And I realized that when people are hungry for wisdom, they. They just are drawn to it. They seek it out wherever they can. And so that is my intention with this podcast. Make it Like a loveline for the soul. Because so many people are hungry for soul wisdom. And this phrase, integral, like, man, there has never been a time where it's more necessary than now. We're in a metacrisis, my bro. We're in a metacrisis.

We are.

And you yourself have been through a crisis. And beauty. And beauty. Both the duality. Right. Maybe non duality, which we can talk about. But, bro, I just. I really care about you and you're a friend. You're a ment.

Mentor.

So it's great to have you back on the podcast, Scott.

Thank you. I'm really. Thank you for those kind of loving words. And, you know, mentorship is mentor. Mentorship and friendship are beautiful things. And there's something that I personally value, you know, mentorship. It's. I'm. I'm really fortunate, you know, my. In. In some ways, I think, because my path, my spiritual path over the past, you know, 20 plus years has been one that's had a traditional element to it in the sense of I choose a teacher and I work with that teacher, and I trust the process. And, you know, and. And there's, you know, all the ancient traditions and ancient ways and. And mystery traditions and wisdom traditions all have that kind of teacher, student, mentor, mentee relationship. Right. There's like wisdom gets handed down. And I've been really, you know, my. The. The addiction that I went through for all those years and this. The absolute destruction that it had of me and my life and everything around me, but it's. I needed that because it brought me to that place of surrender and humility that was required for a knucklehead like me to ask for help. And I was a knucklehead. Like, I was just a stubborn bastard, right? And like. And I was gonna pretty much die. And. And for whatever reason, when I was surrendered, I was surrendered, man. And I asked for help and so ushered in the opportunity to work with people and the humility necessary for the ego to be out of the way to. To ask for help. So mentorship is a. That were just my. My, you know, my internal kind of world around it is a. Pretty. Is a beautiful thing to me. I don't know. I think we're. I feel like we're losing it more now.

Sure.

You know what I mean? I kind of.

Well, there's almost like a pseudo form of mentorship because people are subscribed to, like, IG channels, but actual human connection when we breathe together in the same room.

Yeah.

That is actually an art form that only the really select few can practice.

Yeah. And that's. So it's like. Is that the. Well, you know, it's like the impact of the technical age and the digital age information. Right. Like everything's got a shadow and the light side. Right. And so while we've got so much wisdom, information available to us could be wisdom.

Right.

There's also maybe there's. Sometimes there's so much that I think people's focus is scattered and pinging all over the place and missing possibly the. The opportunity to. To work with someone and focused in a way on a path over time. Right. There's so many shiny things now and.

There'S literally an entire economy built on monetizing our distraction.

Yeah.

Which, so. Which is why what you do is so incredibly important right now. So, you know, like a year and a half since you've been on the pod.

Yeah.

People know 555, which is actually a really cool number. Mike Dillard, our friend. And then our episode number will link down here below too. And I think about like numerology and numbers and timing and timelines, which I learned from you and the neuro linguistic programming training. Dude, we are in such a crazy timeline. It's almost as if, like when you came into the studio today, time doesn't exist right now. What do you make of this? And also this question of how do we integrate ourselves in this spaciousness where time doesn't even seem real for me anymore. I'm like, I'm going to be 44 this year. I'm learning what integration is in a way that I never even thought was possible. So, dude, two bomb drops to start our cliff dive right now. What do you make of time? And then what do people need to know about integral wisdom?

Well, okay, so I find paradoxes in everything, Right. Generally speaking, there's a lot of paradoxes on, on the path of, I think, waking up and spiritually and growing up emotionally and psychologically. Right. So waking up and growing up. So we could say time is just all a construct. It's not real. And there's only now. And that's true. And we could also say there is past, there is now, there is future. And that also can be true. Right. So there's the paradox of that. The, the, for me, the everything happens now. Everything happens in the now. Even, you know, if I'm having a memory, a memory is just a memory of a former now, you know, and if I'm imagining a future different than the one I have, I'm imagining that in the future, but I'm feeling and experiencing it in the now. So everything happens now, right? I think a lot of our suffering though, is caused by fear based relationship to time, right? Like, I'm not going to get what I want or I'm going to lose something that I got, or I'm going to lose somebody that I love or. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, think about it. How many times have you been scared of something in the future that didn't happen, but you still were totally run around by the fear of it? Right?

Intimate relationship. Oh man.

And that's kind of the. It's often we used to call it sex and checks, right? Like, it's like relationships and money are the two things that could really have us caught up in. In the fear of, of that thing in time.

No doubt at all.

Yeah. So it's, you know, there's, there's that and developing a real presence. Practice takes time. It takes intention and energy to bring our awareness back to the now. To bring our. To keep bringing my attention to the now, my awareness, my presence to the now. Like right now I'm here with you, 100% present with you in this space and there's no other thing, right? But how many times have we been, you know, we're supposedly with somebody, but our mind's in our phone, our minds in our calendar, our minds in that thing next week. You know what I mean? So there's, it takes conscious intention. Meditation's a really, really helpful tool for developing and cultivating presence in experience. And this is important consistency in any kind of stillness, internal stillness, practice. I think whatever that may be, whatever faith or path it may come from or developmental model, it all can be really valuable for someone being able to spend more time in the now. It's certainly, you know, I think it's a place many of us seldom visit, right? But it's nice the more we start visiting, being here in the now. And then we can use time, right? We can from presence. From now we can use this concept of time with intentionality, right? But without attachment to it. Like, hey, we're gonna have a goal, we're gonna have this thing, we're gonna manifest or create or whatever. And we put it out there, we set the intention, we do the, the day to day chopping of the wood and the carrying the water to have that thing. The key is, to me is no attachment, right? Like if you, if you say what is one of the things? I think that's a great gift or benefit of a really an intentional spiritual practice and path, developmental path over time is the. The dissolution of attachment and emotional attachment. Right? Attachment to. To money, to things, to outcomes, to relationships, to people, to living and dying. These are. I was thinking about it when I was coming over here to meet you. I don't know why. It was just popped in my head. I was thinking about suffering and human suffering. And while we suffer and I'm like, you know, we can say multiple things, but I can't find, if I really think about it hard back to all my suffering throughout, all the choices I've made to suffer throughout this life and the people I've worked with and observed in them. Like, it's generally always around something we're attached to, you know, something we're afraid of losing or. Or not getting or being unable to control, you know, and. And that kind of. And then that shows us. That can show us to the work, right? That's one of the things that can point us to the work. Because moving from this idea of a conversation around time into what is integral wisdom, I mean, that's a. There's lots of ways to answer it, but I want to answer it this way because it's like the things point me back to the truth, relative, subjective truth in the now within myself. So meaning for me, 20 plus years ago, when I got sober, I didn't know that I was committing to a path of personal development. I didn't know that I was committed to a spiritual path. I had no idea. I was desperate, man. I had brain damage, kidney damage, liver damage. I was in really, really bad shape, you know, And I just wanted to live, and I was desperate to live. And that desperation to live connected with the humility that came from that desperation, which I mentioned to you earlier, enabled me to ask for help. And it made me teachable. It made me teachable. And what began to happen was somebody would say, okay, get on your knees and pray or read this book or take this action or do this meditation. And you know what I said every time? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. That's all. I didn't fight. I just said, okay, I'll do it. And I started seeking, right? I started seeking. And I didn't know that I was going to have to have a spiritual awakening as a result of taking a course of action to get free from the bondage of selfishness, the bondage of alcoholism, the bondage of addiction. I didn't know that's what was going to happen. But my surrender was so complete and my willingness to never Go back to the way I lived. Was so resolute that God showed up, man. And then I'm going to use the word God. But, you know, you call it what you want. For anyone listening, I like the word God. And as one word and, you know. But one of the blessings I had was I wasn't conditioned with a lot religiously. Like, I didn't. I was atheist till I was 25.

And your parents weren't religious either?

No, they weren't. They were my parents. It's a whole different thing, man. It was all about success in business. So, you know, like our church and my debt for my dad, it was a church of success. Like, he had to be successful in business because he came from such poverty and he was never going to let us live through that. So he made sure. No, he made sure. He worked really hard for us to be successful, but he was unable to deal with all the damage he would cause emotionally and physically and psychologically in me over the years. But that's a whole nother story, which we may get to. Even though I was raised in the south, right? Like, generally it's like, okay, Southern. It's like Bible belt, you know, like Southern Baptist or check out Bibles. Yeah, man. So it's kind of. But it just wasn't. I just never got down with any of it. I wasn't really made to go to church. I went sometimes with my grandmother or something, but I just kind of was like, yeah, I don't really buy any of this. And that was kind of it for me. So the great benefit for me in that was that after I went through all I went through with addiction and when I finally got ready to get sober, when I came to the place of seeking God, I was a blank slate, man. I was a canvas that was ready to be painted on. And so they'd say, go to this church. And I'd go. They say, go to the synagogue, I'd go. Go to the mosque, I'd go. I don't give a damn if anybody said go there. God was there. I'd go. And that's the way I started. Get this book, read it, do the thing, okay? And that was just my start, man. I was that willing, you know. And so I'm so grateful for that. I'm really grateful for that. That. That's my experience in this life. That I wasn't really. I didn't have a lot of limitation around pursuing God. And the truth was. My truth in this experience was that I began to experience. I have begin to have little spiritual experiences. I called them God shots back in the day, you know, just. I would experience the presence of something that was unknown to me. And I began to recognize those as connection, like conscious contact with. With my creator, right? And so it's like, oh, two plus two equals four. If I get up in the morning and I. And I do the prayers and I read the books and I do the disciplines, then that's going to produce these results. And then that's. And, dude, it was so simple for me because they were like, you just got to stay sober one day at a time. And if you do these simple things, you. You'll be kept sober. You can't keep yourself sober, but God will keep you sober and you'll be all right. And I trusted him. I said, okay, I said I gotta trust him. Because nothing else had ever worked for me, right? I had to trust him. Because if I couldn't trust them, I was doomed, man. And that's the truth of it. I was a dead man. And so. But that was the humility, right? The surrender of it all. And I just threw myself into that process with complete abandon, dude.

What's crazy is that sometimes. Well, seems like definitely for you. In order for us to be truly integrated, to live an integral life, we have to be shattered. We have to be shattered to seek God, to be humble enough to even have a relationship with God. Maybe on a clean slate, maybe not. But it seems like, man, I wonder how you feel about this. To live integrated, you have to forget what made you disintegrated in the first place.

Well, I would agree with that. And integral development, man, like to be. Because I really haven't talked about what it is, but to be integrated. I mean, we hear this word a lot now, right? And because the medicine space has become very popular as a healing modality, right? As a. And I'm generally speaking around plant medicines, right? But there's so much. There's so much blossoming right now for healing, right? And we do hear the word a lot post ceremony, post retreat, post experience, integration. So that. What does that tell us? There's an awareness of the value of integration, right?

Yeah.

That's kind of permeating and growing in consciousness right now, which I think is really fantastic. It took me a while. I think sometimes I'm slow, you know, I, I was so committed to the spiritual path and, and, and this is through Eastern traditions, Western anything, man. I just, you know, like through discipline and consistency and, and, and personal in relationship to my creator. And for years but you know, it was. I didn't really start doing psychological. So if we think about. Okay, so look at it like this. We got waking up, I said it earlier. Waking up and growing up. So you can imagine that a person could wake up spiritually but still be highly underdeveloped emotionally and psychologically. Does that make sense? I mean, if someone spent all their time in an ashram and in a spiritual community, could be highly spiritually developed and awake, yet could have the emotional intelligence of, let's say, this table, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like there is what we know now. Thank God we know this now because prior to 100 years ago, we didn't. What's happened in the past 100 years from an understanding of the human psyche, the subconscious mind, different therapeutic models for, for healing, for growth, for emotional development, psychological development, you know, the unfolding of what's happened psychologically, globally over the past hundred years. Absolutely profound. Because prior to it, we didn't have any of it. Right? We didn't have any of it. So we didn't have an awareness or we didn't have an awareness of the need for psychological development and for emotional development and maturity and evolution. Nor do we have the path or the way to do it.

It was reserved for the wealthy.

Yeah.

But now we actually have the space or the resources to even explore spiritual development. We do the bottom of Maslow's triangle.

Right? Right. We are at a higher place in the triangle. So people can look towards self actualization and towards these things that happen at higher levels of security. Right. Because yeah, back then there was so many more people that didn't have even base fundamental security. Right? Yeah, so, yeah, so but the, if we think about, I mean, you were trained because you went through a training where we taught, you know, values levels which are really, really from Claire Graves, this work from the 60s and 70s, but really, really, really important information and massively influential information in informing psychological development through stages of development that exist globally based on the values of a particular area, the environment of a particular area. Right. And the actual. The humans that exist within that area. So these three things make up these kind of stages or levels of development which now we know through tons of data and research are real. They do exist globally. The whole field of clear Graves values work evolved into spiral dynamics with Don Beck and Chris Cowan. And you know, these are the guys who directly had a massive impact on ending apartheid. Right. As a result of spiral dynamics and the ability to create win win relationships between massively conflicted parties. Right through this developmental model. So my point being though is what's so important now about being integrally developed is like if we're just focused on spirituality as our path for development, then we're missing a huge part of who we are that must be developed. So one. But then I think one has to go, even at kind of the beginning of this conversation, it's important to. For one to ask oneself, what's the purpose in my development? You know, what am I doing this for? You know, because there's different motivations for that, right? Like the. Do I want to heal, do I want to grow, do I want to evolve, do I want to contribute? Do I want to be a better son, a better husband, a better partner, a better father? You know what I mean? Like, what are the reasons why one would commit to the development of their self? To be willing to go through the crucibles of. Of burning away the falseness of who we're not defined who we are. This is not a painless process. Waking up is not always easy, right? Waking up can be painful, as, you know, because you said a minute ago, do we just have to basically burn it all down? Do we have to tear it all down? And you know, sometimes we do, man. Sometimes we do. Actually, you know, I've. I have the calamity created out of my own self centered bullshit through different phases of the developmental cycle, right. Have caused great motivation to change and grow. That makes sense, right? So it's like, what do they say? You know, like. Well, there's a saying actually comes from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's hilarious. It's a good saying. It says most alkies have to be pretty badly mangled before they commence to solve their problems. And I've seen that across, you know, not just with addicts and alkies, because I've worked with a bunch, but also with people generally seeking, generally speaking, who really want change. There seems to and are willing to do whatever they have to do to have it. To break through their own limitations or their pain or their trauma. There has to be some. Generally some degree of it just ain't working anymore the way life is. And that could be really dramatic or not as. But you know what it's like, right?

The pain of staying still is actually so fundamentally worse than the pain of movement that the only choice is to move forward. There's no way you can stay still.

Well, some people. Crazy thing is, some people can, man, you know, and thank God you're not one of them.

Well, that's a mysterious dharmic question.

It is, it is, it is, it's, it's fascinating. You know, and that's, that is kind. That is part of the thing right now that's so important for us is, you know, for me personally in what we're doing with, you know, Mandorala, integral wisdom and with the messaging and the conversations we're up to having now, right? Like, how do we inspire more and more people to really want to grow, to develop? You know, I mean, I'm, I'm a master trainer in nlp. I understand a lot about how our minds work and how our values drive us and how motivation is connected to our values. And, you know, I get all of this. I guess for me right now, I'm not a place where I'm, I'm, I'm not interested in having people be success, successful financially or helping with that. You know, it's like, if that's the thing I want, I want to be successful financially. And that's the reason I want to change. That's great as a motivator, right? And, but right now I'm like, I'm so curious as to how can we, and I mean we, because I'm not the only guy thinking this. I'm not the only person thinking this, nor can I do or any of this be done alone. But how can we inspire, touch, move, inspire more of humanity to want to grow and develop? For if we really wanted to boil it down to one word for love, how can we inspire? Because I believe that the nature of reality is love and that God is everything. So all of reality is that. And I don't believe anything exists outside of love, because if it did, it'd have to exist outside of God. And if it did, then that would mean God and love are finite. And if I believe that, then I'm fucked up.

So truly the only way you can know God and know love, however, is to also understand what duality is. Well, if you don't know what duality is, then there can't be non dual living. There can't be an understanding of what you even need to integrate in the first place.

Of course there can't. Right? And, and so we, but that also happens, you know, one can have their own. We can, we can conceptually go, okay, what's duality? Right this. And then through enough discipline, we'll have our experience of moving from dual to non dual. Now here's a cool thing about that is if you've ever had an altered state, maybe you're doing some kind of a healing ceremony or maybe you're doing a breathwork session, man, where you went into an altered state. And I've talked to lots of people do this, go into an altered state and experience non dual reality. Meaning they are one. They are like, you know, true self, one with all that is, no separation of any form. And they know the bliss and the love of that moment, right? And then come back into the body, back into the conditioned self, conditioned egoic awareness. And we call that the separate self, right? So we. So from a developmental perspective, we all start as separate self. You get it? Like we all start. We all start the same place. We all begin to know ourselves as separate. As soon as we start forming language and realizing that dada is da da da mama's mama or whatever, you know, like, we start creating separate self, right? So that's just a part of it. We are separate self. Meaning, you know, like I'm Scott and you're Josh and I'm separate than you. I'm a white man from this place and you're a white man from that place. And you know what I mean? Like we're different, right? But no, we're not. No, we're not. From a true self perspective, we're the one. How many true selves are there in the universe? One. How many true selves? So, one. So we move from separate self to true self. But this happens the altered states which occur, and they can occur many ways through consistency, in meditation, through plant medicines, through breath work, through whatever method, right? And then at, at some point though we can begin to. And this has been my experience personally and plus that of many people I've talked to who are longtime meditators, right? We begin to spend more time in this place of true self, meaning more time not separate than anything. More time connected to all that is one with all that is. Therefore meaning, not separate self. My experience is. I've never abided there permanently, but I have spent some good bits of time in that place. But something pulls me back.

And what is that something?

I think it's the ego. So I don't think my, my personal experience at this point. And just I know there's some other people who agree with this, what I'm going to say, and I'm not saying it's law or anything I'm saying is law. I'm just sharing my experience. I think that shadow will always exist within all of us. So that part of consciousness that we're unconscious of, like, and I fall asleep, meaning I forget That I am love. I forget that I am one. I forget that I am not separate. And that happens because things in my environment that are still unresolved in my shadow trigger me or have me still be conditioned to old ways of being that may be mild and uneventful, that don't even give cause to really make me want to have to do, change, work on it. You know what I mean? Just kind of the regular disconnection that can. That can occur, being in my own world or what have you. So not a big deal. But the point is, is that we. I fall asleep to that. Right. And now why is that? I don't know. That's a great question. And I really wouldn't know. I. I'd say it's part of the cosmic comedy of it all.

It's part of the design.

It's part of the design. And, you know, may it be easier if I claimed. If I took the path, or any of us took the path of the. Of renouncing the world and maybe the path of the hermit. Right. Does we still have to deal with our shit then? Of course. And I've spent some significant time in silence. And it's a lot easier for me personally to be in silence and in a little room by myself, meditating for almost all day every day and not interacting with humans at all. As soon as I settle into that, I'm in heaven, of course. And I'm in heaven, man. And there's no conflict, there's no drama. You know what I mean?

This is the metaphor of the healer in the white robe floating on the mountain, who never comes down and shares.

It with the people.

Exactly. The easiest place you could ever be is just in pursuit of meditation.

There you go. And. And so it's. But the. The thing is, is that life happens. I believe this with my whole heart, man, because I've strongly considered the path of the renunciant. I have. I've literally considered it a few times where I really sat, with this path as a possible path for me. And every time I've been brought back to this, that life happens in relationship. And if I, as. As a. As a. As a wisdom keeper, as a person who has a responsibility in this life to help, to contribute, to share, to love. If I'd go in the cave, metaphorically speaking, and choose that path, then I'm not doing my dharma. I'm not living my dharma. I'm living someone else's dharma.

There's a cast of characters, these people that live in caves, they're they're playing a character in the movie, right? And so. So are you. And in your movie, you've chosen this path where you're actually in union. You have a mate. That way you can integrate all the lessons from your mate.

Yeah.

Otherwise, why the hell are we here? Now, if you wanted to go the monastic path and just sit in a cave, you could have done that. But you chose to come here and be with the people so that many things could come up for you. And really what this is for all of us is like, if we want to live an integrated life, there is absolutely no way we can do it without some pain and suffering. Maybe even a lot. Right. But the culmination of that question comes from my own curiosity. Ever since I was listening to Loveline, it's like, what was I actually seeking? I was seeking peace, I was seeking relief, I was seeking less suffering and understanding how I can live my life in a more peaceful way, in a more powerful way. I think that's what we all want with this question of what even. What even is integration? How do we integrate and suffer less? Or maybe that's even the wrong question. It's like, in the pursuit of suffering less, could we suffer more?

Well, temporarily. So to make it a quick answer, in the pursuit of suffering less, could we suffer more? Actually, temporarily, if the pursuit of suffering less, if that's truly our focus, right. Then we could bring up something that makes it nastier, that we have to deal with in the moment, so it increases suffering. But I think if we change, if we say, hey, I'm going to go forward, I know I'm going to suffer, then I'm probably definitely going to suffer. Right? And that's fine. Suffering seems to be a real part of the human condition, in my experience. I heard. So my first introduction to Marianne Williamson was, like, 20 years ago in a unity church. And I just bought this little CD set out of the bookstore. It was called Conquering Fear. It was like four CDs.

Wow. Do y' all remember CD players?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who knows what a CD player is?

You remember they used to be in cars.

Yeah, man, totally. And. And so I bought this little set of CDs, and I bet I still have them somewhere. But anyways, she. She said this one thing, man, and it hit me, like, there was a couple things she said. That thing just hit me like arrows in my heart. But this one did. And she said, you know humans, there's two paths to the path of joy. When she's talking about the path of love, the path of the one. There's two paths, she said the path of. The path of pain or the path of joy. She there's two paths to know God. There's two paths to know love. Path of pain and the path of Joy. She said 99 plus percent of humans will always choose the path of pain. And I was like, damn. And so as I've looked over the past 20 years, I'd. Pretty accurate. Pretty accurate, I would say. Right.

And so yourself.

Definitely, for me. And I've worked with a lot of people.

Right.

But. But then connect it back to if we really understand. And this is where getting integrally informed and educated and understanding, you know, integral development, integral psychology, integral theory is important. There are stages of our development that are. By the nature of the stage of development, we're going to suffer more. Meaning we're going to have the ability to feel certain complex emotions come online that hadn't been available at earlier stages in our development. And the nature of those emotions is so painful that it creates so much suffering. You follow me? So like with shame and guilt, when we can actually feel those emotions and go through them, they hurt men. You know, when we stop avoiding and actually have to embrace those emotions for our own development, those are real and those are painful. And so could we say that equals suffering? Probably for most people, the ones that.

Have been repressed the most, not suppressed, but repressed. The things that are so deep buried that we don't even know. We don't know. Right. First stage that I learned from you in Rewire was unconscious incompetence. I don't even know that. I don't know.

Yeah.

Which was such a cool understanding. I'm like, cool. I have blind spots.

Yeah.

They're there for me.

It gives you some reprieve. Right.

But one of the blind spots is if I don't know that I don't know, then what is inside of me that's hurting me so much that I don't even know that I don't know it's there. And how beautiful could my life be and how much less suffering if I chose the path of integrating that? Because really, that chaos is seeking order inside of me, but I can't see it. And I don't even know that I can't see it.

Yeah. Well, but if you can feel it and you can discern that it's something, even if you don't know what it is, that's a huge step. Right.

So just the feeling of grief or the feeling of malaise or apathy well, it's.

Okay. So the. Okay, so, for example, like the ability to feel guilt and shame don't come online till a certain developmental level. Right. It'll be completely rejected at earlier levels. So. But when that is to come online in someone, that's generally around the place where conventional religion sets in as a method for, you know, authoritarian structure and. And structure becoming a big part of what creates safety for that person. Because the values change, right? To safety. So it's like now. But does a person know they're going through any of that when they're going through it from a developmental perspective? Not at all. That whole place of development is. I don't know that. I don't know that I'm in it. It's first stage of learning, right? So the. So. So kind of the part of. Of a huge responsibility that we have meaning Joni and I and the people we're collaborating with and all the other people in the world who are in this conversation right now because they're in the conversation around the reality of. Of love lived as a value that exists for the whole planet and. And us being integrally developed such that we can live that way together and solve problems together, right? This part of what I feel like our. Indeed. And you're doing it with wellness and wisdom, right? We're all contributing, right? So many of us are contributing right now to the evolution of consciousness on this planet in whatever way or ways, we're contributing. Part of my personal obligation right now and duty and joyful duty is to integrally inform and educate, right? So that means have the conversations that help people to know what they didn't know, to bring awareness to what was completely out of awareness. Because we have to con. If we connect the value of that to how we can solve problems together as a species rather than continuing to create more through separation, then it's. It's very big deal, right? It's a very big deal. So that's. It's really what's driving me and motivating me now is this need to, like. Yeah, we've got to inform people. We've got to create new conversations. We've got to inspire curiosity and thought and openness, willingness to look at our problems and our dysfunction in ourselves interpersonally, interrelationally, nationally, racially. You know what I mean? Like, sexually, man was like all this dysfunction and disconnection. You know, if we God in the rest of this life, man, however much it's here, like, that's the Dharma, right? That's the Dharma to. For Me personally, is to contribute absolutely as much as I can to bringing humans into love and bringing humanity into love. And I'm not talking about some, like, pie in the sky, like, silly idea here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about that. That all of reality is love, man. This is the. This is the idea, the nate. All of reality is love. The nature of that reality is desire. And that if all of our reality, all of reality is love and the nature of that reality is desire, then all the calamity we see, the disconnection, the pain, the suffering, the harm, the hurt is because that love story, our. Our reality is so distorted that we don't know how to get there. And so that's my passion right now. That's where the. As this past year changed so much for me, man, as so many things integrated within myself, the passing of my dad, the work that started happening in the feminine within myself, my own healing journey with cancer. I mean, all these things, man, like, together have created this perfect storm of. Of integration and ascension within me. You know, that's. And it's not. I haven't arrived anywhere. I'm just moving, right? I'm just moving and changing. And so it changed. It had me look within myself and see where I had fragmented things off, where I had spirituality as its own container and then personal development as its own container and psychological as its own thing. And it was like, that's not integrated. And unnoticed began to notice that, right? And I was like, oh, all of these things get to be integrated now. So I've. I've been literally working on that. And somehow in the midst of it all, man, there's something has opened in me that has the. The. The compassion and the empathy that I feel, the capacity that's. There is unlike anything I've ever known.

Where. Where is it in you?

It's all it is. It's in my heart, but it spreads to everything. I can't. It's. It's indescribable. Like I. What I feel, what I feel for people, what I feel people are going through on a collective level, right? And how much pain there is in the world, how much pain there is in humanity. And this isn't, you know, like I said, it's not some airy fairy kind of concept of love. It's like, no, man, what if we're living love? If we are love? If the nature of reality is love, then what does that look like? You know, who am I going to be as I stand for that in the world?

And what's your role in the love story? And how much pain and suffering do you personally go through in order to play out your role? What's the dharmic connection to that? What's the way that we're actually living our life so we can be humble like you did when you were healing initially from drugs and alcohol? How can we be humble enough to even hear the wisdom in the first place? Right? That's the first step. What's the humility where we can even drop to a knee and say, okay, God, I'm actually at a place now where I don't want to go the other way. I have to be with you. And then once I commit to being with you, how can I truly be humble enough to hear what you're telling me? That's the big step, right? Can I actually take it in? You know, we've danced around it, Scott, but I'd love for you to just drop it on us here. If you had to define what wisdom really is, what integral wisdom really is, what do you believe that is? And why now have you morphed into this? Because I've seen you go through a journey, brother, in the past two years. So actually, I think I've known you for three years. Or when did I first meet you? Three years ago?

About three years. About three years ago.

So in the past two years, and. And we're going to unpack all of this because it's so needed, because your journey is probably a mirror of many people's journey when it comes to loss and also moving through things that are chaos, wanting order. So in the past two years, like, I've seen you morph from nlp, which really, in the past, I almost felt like put you in a box where you could only teach nlp now at Mandora Ranch, which I've gone to, y', all, and you need to check this out. It's on the screen right now. Mandora integral wisdom.com. the beauty of this is that in order to integrate, we first have to be humble enough to admit where we are, what needs to be integrated. So what do you make of this? Like, what do you make of this cosmic question of your own journey and how that relates to your definition now, what is your definition now of integral wisdom? And why should we even care, by the way? Why should we even care what integration actually is?

I actually experienced integral wisdom almost occur in me in a way back when, right after my father transitioned back in March of 23, which that whole time was quite profound. Yeah, I'll probably write a book on it. There's a good chance I will, just because it was such a phenomenal time and experience. But what happened in. In March and into April, part of what occurred was, you know, and other people around me who were really close to me could see it, but I couldn't see what I couldn't see yet. And. And Joni was often like, scott, you need to share the teachings that you have more widely. You need to share with people. And I was like, nope, I'm not putting that on the interwebs. And, like, I'm not playing that game. And. Because here's why. And I had to really. This is what got dismantled in this time. I. I asked for initiation in traditional spiritual path, right, with an Eastern teacher. And I followed the ways, the old ways. And so I had a great honor and respect for tradition in the old ways. And for me to go out and start sharing teachings, like on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, just far and wide when people hadn't asked for them was just a violation of tradition, because that.

Was the only way you would get the wisdom is by actually asking for it.

Your student relation. That's right. And the old ways, it's handed down from mouth to earth, from teacher to student. Many traditions are this way, you know, especially mystery and wisdom traditions, right? So the wisdom gets passed that way. So. But I had a conflict with this. And honestly, I didn't dismantle it with my conscious mind or my own cognition. It kind of was dismantled within me as I was going through this. This spiritual awakening of my father transitioning and like, him and I completing our healing in this life and our whole timeline in the past and forward. Crazy. I mean, I've talked to you a little bit about it, right? But I had this incredible healing. I held my father as he left his body and was one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced in my life. While I held my mother and sister and they held them on one side, I got to be in this precious, precious experience of my dad, who, for all his shadow and light, had been my hero in a lot of ways, especially as a young. As a boy and a young man, right? And I had such healing and completion with him that over the subsequent weeks, a lot of stuff started moving within me. And part of that was this conversation around how I had somehow decided to keep my, like, my spiritual path separate from the psychological path and the emotional developmental path, right? Which I'd been on for quite a while. And in all of that, just Integrated within. It just happened. It's not like I can go, hey, you got to do this to have this happen. Because it literally just happened. It's like it was getting ready for a long time. And then there was a catalyst experience right with my dad passing and just the unfolding of that time. Because I literally was in this profound experience of bliss and oneness with God for almost 12 weeks.

I remember you were talking to me and you said, you're standing on the back deck at your house. It was at your childhood house.

My parents. No, my parents house on the lake in Georgia.

Yes. And you said to me, I feel like I'm actually touching what it is to, to be a king. I'm actually touching the kingship of life.

The real conscious kingship. You have like that, that archetype. I, I experienced the ascension into a complete conscious expression of the king, complete and whole, benevolent, loving, and with the warrior and the lover and the magician all integrated. And I experienced that. And it was then, and that was prior to my dad was still in his body when that happened. He left a couple weeks later. And then this next unfolding occurred. Trust me, it's been unfolding still and it's got. Yeah, it went from really light and bright to really dark, which was necessary for me.

It's almost like healing is a spiral.

It is ascension and well, healing is. And you know, if we look at spiral dynamics, there is a beautiful. I agree with it, you know, like it is a three dimensional spiral. And, and one of the things, a little note I'll just drop because a lot of times when people get into their developmental work, like they start doing work and I know you even gone through this, we think we've completed healing on something or get resolution with something, and then maybe a year later it shows up again in another way. But it's the same thing, just shows up differently or maybe a little more subtly. And then what generally happens is that place we beat ourselves up, we go, oh, but I thought I did this. Oh, I'm a piece of shit, I didn't do it. Or oh, that old stuff. Please, if you've ever done this or doing this, drop it. Meaning, here's why it happens. What we heal at one place on the spiral. My experience is we, we, we resolve what can be resolved at that place in our evolution. And then as we're prepared for more to come up, if there is more to come up, it comes up again. But it's different, right? So, so if we can, if we can give ourselves that grace you know, one of the things that's really hard when we get into our own healing work and our developmental work in the beginning is we still can beat ourselves up and shame ourselves a lot around. And, like, we're like the worst agents of shaming ourselves. Right.

I almost feel like the more work you do, the more challenging it might be to not shame yourself. Because the dragon comes up and says, you are already healed this, bro.

Well, that's. I call that the subtle. I call that the. The craftiness of the ego.

Yes. That I've already healed this.

Yeah.

Why is this coming up again?

Yeah. So there's two things happening. First of all, if we shame ourselves for something coming up again, then I just implore you to drop it. And in the sense of give yourselves some compassion, some understanding, and going, you did the best you could with the resources you had, and now, guess what? You get to do a little more work on it. Yay. Because that means you're going to be even better off after you do. Right. So it's awesome. So give yourself some gr. Um, and I. I guess, you know, the. Developing spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, in my experience, is not a clean, streamlined process. It's not linear. It's spherical and linear. Sometimes we need to do focused work to heal something. Really. We're masculine. Its energetic signature. Sometimes healing and growth and expansion can occur massively in just holding and being with something, being with the pain, being with the loss, being with the grief process of losing someone, you know, or something. And this is the. I call it the circle. But this is also. Would be more of a feminine, a goddess quality. Right. Where we. We hold things. I mean, we're, you know, as men, especially men can be very. We're aggressive in our approach to deal with things. Right. We want to. We want to. Every problem's a nail and every solution's a hammer. Yeah. And that's just not the way it is.

The unintegrated.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, all of us, you know, to actually be. If we. To truly be integrated men. Like, if you say, Scott, are you integrated? I would say no. I mean, probably more than some. But, you know, if we said integrated is a zero and a one. You mean an on and off. Right. Which it's not. Then I would say absolutely not. Because there are so many facets. It's. I mean, Ken Wilber, God bless him, he's the. You know, if your readers or subscribers don't know, Ken, a great place to start would be maybe read if you want to learn some great things about integral theory. There's so many good books out there, but a brief history of everything may be a great place to start. Anyways, this guy is the great American philosopher of my time. That's my opinion for sure. And he's brilliant. But the amount of work he put into to research and development of integral theory is so profound, it's just absolutely astonishing. So I have a profound respect for him and the contribution he's done, but it's a complex field and a complex conversation. So I like to start it off simply by just saying, hey, we've. We are more than just, you know, we've got a physical body, we've got an emotional body, we've got a mental, psychological body, and we certainly have a spiritual body, right? And so. And guess what? We actually can develop all of those things. All of those things have amazing facets of. And, and paths that are available for developing spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, such that we are integrated. Such that we become integrated in our thinking and in our behaviors. Because the truth is, is that from a. There's. There's kind of a couple of. Once we get to. In integral theory, like you learned values levels from Claire Graves. I taught you that when we did the training in Montana, Right? Because I taught. As a part of our developmental work, we've taught clear grace values work for about eight years. So in integral theory, they're called basically moral levels of development, right. Instead of values levels. And they're also obviously modified some. But once one gets to an integral level of thinking or an integral the level of development, there's exponential more internal resources available to someone. And then when you have multiple someones who are thinking at this level and then you get those people together for solving problems, we can come up with some profound solutions. I think that's how you change the world. This is my thinking now at this point, right? Like this is how we truly change the world. We have to. I mean, look, this isn't. And this is no new thing. I was just talking with a good friend of mine who's been a part of. Of attempting to affect policy change in D.C. for about 15 years by having integral conversations with right and left. And it's profound. Some of the experiences he's had. Right. Of being able to actually, because he's obviously an integral thinker. But he takes somebody who's really dug in on the right or, you know, policymakers really dug in on the right, and then policymakers really dug in on the left, and they're not really at an integral level of thinking, yet they're still more in a pluralistic, relative level of thinking or more of a conservative, authoritarian level of thinking. Right.

So this could potentially be the war between conservatives and liberals.

Yeah, yeah.

The labeling of two parties.

Sure. And I described it loosely just then from a. From more of an integral perspective. But, you know, here's the thing. If. If one knows how to understand the thinking and the problems and the values and the needs of each of those groups of people and can. And both people are willing to come to the table to talk, then that person can help facilitate a conversation where needs are met, where both sides are respected. This is. This is crucial to our development. Right. That we actually can develop this way because we're in such division right now as a people man.

So if we need integral thinkers in the world now more than ever, it's 20, 24, y', all, whenever you listen to this. But I'm sure in 25, 26, it's gonna be the same.

Same.

Maybe. Maybe the intensity is more.

Yeah.

If we need integral thinkers, then what exactly is that? What is. What is someone. What are the characteristics and qualities? What's the way of being for somebody who's an integral thinker?

There's no way for me, I don't think there's a way for me really, to answer that. It's like. Like, because I don't want to box anyone in, but it's more of. In a sense of. Let me kind of generalize it like this. At an integral level of development, one will is able to see, empathize with, and clearly understand all the perspectives that are going on in the conversation. Do you understand? So this is a real important element to be able to. There's a basic Prince. There's a basic assumption that when. When Ken was. Was starting to work with this, was that in integral theory, basically everybody has got it partially right. So we bring everybody to the conversation. Everybody, no matter what your perspective is or what your beliefs are, but that you've got it partially right. And so we start from that place, right, that everyone's got it partially right. And so an integrally developed thinker at some level is going to be thinking like that, right? Like, my way is not the only way. You know, you get it. Like, this is. This is a problem. Like, that creates repulsion, right? That creates this when we think like this. But to literally, if we had, you know, 10 people sitting around this table and all of us had a different level of thinking and different values and different things, but we wanted to come to solution. We wanted to come to an actionable solution together for a purpose. Right. An integral thinker or integral thinkers would be able to see and understand the perspectives of everyone in the group and be able to communicate and connect in such a way that we can create connection and workability in those relationships rather than separation, conflict, and division.

What's so powerful about that is that, and this is one of the core tenets of NLP, to respect someone else's model of the world.

100.

So if I can respect your model of the world without necessarily agreeing with it.

Yeah.

Then there's a peaceful starting place.

Yeah.

Any look at. Look at our world right now, dude. I can't tell you how many messages I get on social media where people actually say, you, you're stupid. I hate this. People commenting, you look.

People actually say this. The people, like, just out of the blue, say you, too, out of the blue.

I mean, we're putting out some content like this. That means. Makes people a little uncomfortable, but they.

Literally say things like that, too.

Absolutely.

Wow.

Absolutely. And what I. It used to bother me when I first started, but now I actually say good, which is something I heard Jocko Willing say. Right. Good.

You're stirring stuff. Because moving stuff is the worst thing.

In podcasting and media is crickets. That's. That's when you know that no change is being affected. I actually. It's not like I enjoy it, dude. I'm not glutton for pain or anything.

No.

You know, we can go on a long hike together and shoot guns in the cold. That's cool. I like that. But. But I don't want to receive judgment from other people. But when I do, I just know. Okay. And this is through some of the training we've done together, I can just respect their model of the world. So I've trained my staff to either delete it if it's real nasty or just respond by saying, hey, you know, I'm sorry that you might feel that way and, you know, it's okay that we disagree or something like that. Some kind of diffusion language. And I think this is really big, man, because if we just grind against each other, all we're going to get is more grinding. All we're going to get is more disease, more friction. And so the war in you, which I want to unpack, and the war in me, I think the war in all of us. This is actually what Gaffney is calling the peace that's needed in the world. This is on your website. It's on the screen right now, you guys, and this is really, really important. So if the world is full of outrageous pain, the only response is outrageous love.

Yeah. Yeah.

Now, that might be a platitude that people feel or hear, but it's not a platitude. Like, I can tell that it affects you.

Just me saying it does deeply.

The website is brand new. The. The teachings from Gaffney is part of your own spiritual integration and just where we are in life with your own journey. Like, it's big. Because if we're experiencing so much devastation on a personal and a collective level, dude. How do we develop the courage and the strength to respect others model of the world to actually give outrageous amounts of love back to them? That's the core question. That's the juice.

Actually, here's the thing, and I'm. I'm gonna. It's. Thank you for everything you said, man. And here's the really cool thing, is that we can choose to outrageously love at any moment. This is the. This is the beauty of. Of the teaching. Let me give you. Like, you got to make it personal in a sense like this. Like, one of the things I'll do is, like, if sometimes I come across to Joni in a way that has her shut down, like, I'll commute, I'll communicate like my dad communicated with me. I'll have the exact same auditory signature tonality, just way of communicating men, you know?

Yeah.

I'm asleep. I'm unconscious. And she's like, nope, Shut down. Not gonna deal with that. Yeah. And then I catch it sometimes, and I go, oh, wow. And an act of outrageous love in that moment could be instead of me just staying in, the contraction is me opening to the feeling of what I just contributed. Had her feel that way. And then going, I apologize. I love you. Please forgive me. Thank you. And opening to her and saying, can I hug you or hold you? And no matter what she says, yes or no, it's irrelevant because the act in and of itself was an act of outrageous love. You follow me? Yeah.

The Hawaiian prayer.

Yeah. So it's. Well, that was a part of it, right? That was ho' oponopolis pono. But the thing is, you could do. It's subjective, right. It's like outrageous love could be you do the opposite of thing you always.

Do when every single catecholamine in your body is screaming at you to do the same thing you've always done, to just stay stuck.

Yep. And then you move, you step out of it, and you take One step into love. And let me tell you, that may be outrageous love, man, and that's beautiful. So like we don't have to complicate it into this thing that it's not right. It's like first we have to consider the possibility that, I mean if, you know, it just all clicked and connected for me really easily, I think because I believed my personal experience of God over the past 20 years so many times has been love. And so it just became evident to me that God is love and that the nature of all. And when I started my spiritual path, man as a shaking and baking drunk, drying out, you know, like a guy said to me, he said, Scott, all God needs to be is three things. All loving, all powerful and everywhere. Those were the first three things I accepted about the nature of God. All loving, all powerful everywhere. And when I accepted those three things I pursued open heartedly. And so what came from that is my own subjective personal understanding that love is all there is. And so when, and I talk about Dr. Mark Gaffney a lot because he's had a huge impact on me personally. And I think what he's doing in the world is so, so, so, so, so important right now. Sharing of this idea that all of, all of, if all of reality is love, then all of reality is a love story. And so all of reality is comprised of all of our, our love stories, right? As distorted as they may be. And so for me to get connected to that and go, it just landed in me as like, yep, this is so right. And, and so and because I'm, I am trained in values levels. I am trained and I am trained and pretty masterful at what I do with the work I've been doing for the years, right? Over the years with NLP along with all the other things. And, and no matter what, when we go into companies and have done values alignments within the small and medium and large corporate context, or whether I've done values alignments and interpersonal relationships and couples, we've always found consistently that dysfunction and disconnection and problems existed on just relationships of two people up to big groups of people when values were all over the place and completely disagreed upon. So people's individual values or team values were in conflict with others, right? This creates conflict. This creates conflict. And so understanding that makes me go. When we, when I heard Mark first say how do we really solve this for humanity is we've got to get humanity to share and agree upon love being the value that is most important to us all that love is the reality. Now if. Think about what's possible. If, if we could all agree to that. Yeah, see, think about what's possible because it's the thing that could bring us all, we, no matter what level of development we're at, whether we have. So if we think of, of, of, of kind of egocentric, all out self ethnocentric, which is group focused, world centric, which is caring about the world, or cosmo centric, which is care and love for the whole cosmos, all sentient beings, all creatures great and small, everything. Right. If we look at it on that kind of developmental slider, the cool thing is man, if we could all agree that love is the thing that matters the most, that can be expressed uniquely, outrageously through each unique individual in their own way, at every level of development, all the way up and all the way down. That's my belief. So we don't have to arrive somewhere to start solving the problem. You follow me? Yeah, we need enough people who are able to bring the conversation together and kind of facilitate this thing. But also this was something that dismantled for me in the past year, which was really important, was that I have to arrive somewhere to be able to do a thing. You follow me? Like I need so much development or so much integration or so much awakening to actually be there. And it's like, okay, sure, and not really. Because truth is, love can be expressed at any level. Our unique self can express at any level of our development. And having this understanding has changed so much for me because now it's no longer that I have to take the path of the Masters for 20 years to reach this place of transcendental love, of transpersonal non dual awareness, which yeah, maybe it takes that much time, but also I can uniquely, if we could all agree right now that love is the most important thing and that love is a shared value that once we agree on that, it will bring us to the table to solve the, the real, real, real problems of humanity, then we can all work together and we can develop at the rates we develop at. But, so this is my thinking now.

So if that's the truth, that love is all there is, and really this life is a practice of knowing and being that in certain ways with my own language, then when exactly does this awareness come online? In other words, when is somebody actually drawn to having integral wisdom? You know, at what stage of the, the four that you mentioned?

I don't, you know, I don't know, Honestly, I don't know that. What if there is like a place that's the definitive place where that happens, or even if it happens in that way, didn't really happen for me in that way. My. My dude, personally, I. Everything I did was to know God. And it's just that pursuit that's led me to all the different things I've been led to. To, you know, the. The teachings from different teachers of different fates and different traditions, to the psychological and performance and therapeutic and emotional, all of these different methods and. And modalities that I've learned over the years. Have I. I think I decided somewhere early on that, you know, the difference between an aim goal and an end goal. Right, sure. Yeah. So to me, there's never been a place really to arrive on the spiritual path. It's always just been that I'm just going to know God more deeply. I'm going to know my creator. I'm going to know. And now what's happened is now it's actually, you hear me use the word God. But what's really happening now is I'm actually starting to develop and cultivate a relationship with Goddess. And that is changing everything for a guy like me.

So with respect, I'll ask this then. Your dad. Your dad passes.

Yeah.

And one of the things that comes from that is an understanding of the wounding around the feminine. And it wouldn't have come unless you had held your dad and he had passed.

I don't think it would have.

Which you shared with me. So, you know, when your mentor once told you, you know, it's really important to share your shadow. And so, you know, please share that with us because it's a part of your story encapsulated here in time when your dad passes. And how does that come up for you? The actual wounding of the feminine through the passing of your own own father, which seems paradoxical, right? Why would the wounding of the feminine come up when your father transitions from the world? Doesn't seem like it connects, but it does.

Well, good question. Okay, so the. The truth is, for me, you know, I spent a significant portion of 20 years of my life was spent on dealing with the wound of my father and the wounds with my father and our relationship, as wounded as it was. And so my dad had this kind of big energy about him, you know, and it was almost like he kind of took up all the space in the sense of. My mother was always focused on worrying about him. You know, it was kind of her thing. Right. Was to like, constantly take care of my dad or make sure. I mean, they were partners in life and created a lot of success together and hit their goals, you know, in a lot of ways. But the one thing that was really, I put it this way, he just kind of took up all the space in the family. And so I never realized that because the womb, when my dad was so evident, because there was so much violence in the way my dad raised me. He raised me violently. He was violent emotionally, mentally, physically. He hurt me. He. In a lot of ways. And not because he was a bad man. He was a deeply wounded man.

That was his level of consciousness, and.

That was all he could do. And my addiction, my behavior scared him so badly, and he had no way to control his fear, so he controlled his. Tried to control me with violence because he was so terrified of losing me. And. Yeah, so it just. My. I'm still. After all these years, I'm still dismantling things in my psyche that are ways of thinking that I learned from him, Ways of speaking, ways of communicating. And I've been dealing with it in layers and layers and layers up the spiral. So to answer your question, because it's a really good question, I thought, because I'd done a significant amount of work around, like, I'd made amends to my mother through the step process, like, her and I had what I thought was a good relationship, what was a close relationship. I mean, she was able to talk to me about a lot of things privately that she didn't really talk to other people about. So we had a closeness to. To our relationship. So I didn't see the wound that was there or feel the wound that was there. And I told you earlier, sometimes I'm slow, man. Slow af. Right. And so I just. The wound is evident for me and the feminine now, looking back, but it wasn't then. It was more masked by my own arrogance and egoic stuff back then.

Did you say I'm healed of the feminine? I don't have.

No. I just didn't even think about it. I was like, you know, I was still carrying. It just was out of awareness for me, man. Honestly, it was just out of awareness, and I didn't think about it. There was so much energy put towards the healing of my dad. Right. And our relationship and that wound. And so when he died, when he transitioned, it was. I was complete almost immediately. I mean, the whole thing was. It was. It was profoundly beautiful for me personally, the spiritual experience of it, what I got to do, and actually helping him leave his body, like, it was. It was really. Those are. Some wisdom teachings have been handed down to me years earlier that I got to actually do for the first time with my dad as I helped him leave his body. And I mean, what a gift, man. What a beautiful, beautiful thing. And it truly was. But, man, that was in March, and in mid April, I came back to visit my mom because I was coming back as much as I could to see her from Montana to Georgia. And I walked into the house, man, and it was like this dark cloud had descended in the home. Like, the energy was dark and painful and thick and palpable. And my poor mom had just been in. I mean, they were together 54 years, married 53. They were each other's whole lives, you know. And she's grieving in the way she was grieving, and there was a lot of pain still left in the house from him, from her, you know. But, man, we ended up. I spent a week with my mom that week, and we ended up having this. What was. Seemed like a nothing, this conversation that turned into an explosion. Like, my mom got triggered by something I said. And she said back to me. She said, I've been being told what to do for 53 years and nobody's going to tell me what to do again. And I was like. And somehow she heard my dad through me. And it was like her reaction hit me, like, wrecking ball, man, right in my chest. And we had this like, like, flare up where we were back and forth for like a minute. And then we just separated. And I, like, went outside and, dude, I didn't know what happened. Like, I went outside and just started weeping. Like, I couldn't even process, like, the amount of motion that came up in that moment. Like, I know where the came from. My guy's done a lot of work, right? Like, I didn't even get where all this emotion was coming from. I'm like weeping, man. I go back in a little while later, my mom's already in bed. She's in bed, like. And she's in bed with the lights off, like, weeping, body, crying, weeping, right? And I just went and got in bed and sat down beside her, and she sat up beside me, and we just held each other and just wept in the dark, man, and just wept, wept, wept. And that was. And I'm sitting there, like, just pouring emotion out. She's pouring emotion out. And at the same time, there's an awareness in me going, what just happened? What is happening right now? And that happening. I even said to mom, I had the awareness in the moment to go, mom, I don't know what's just happened, but it's big, and I'm going to need some time to unpack it and figure it out and process it, because there's something valuable here, and I knew it right away, but I didn't know what it was. And so a few days later, a few days later, I got back to Montana, and, man, I descended into what is the most. One of the most dark, one of the darkest and most painful places that I can recall, especially in the past, I'd say 18 years of my life. And I spent about 48 hours in that place. And this. I'm going to get really real here. This is still ongoing, like, the. The healing of this process for me, coming up on a year now. But somehow in there, man, I. I found myself connected to all female pain. And that's the only way I can relate, can. Can articulate it is like I felt the pain of the oppression and the abuse and the harm of women for all of time and, and, and dude. And what was crazy is in that darkness, I was responsible for all of it. And it felt like it was going to kill me. Like I could bear it, right? It was the most unbearable thing I'd ever known. And. And I was in that for a few days. And then Joni sat down with me one day and she goes, baby, is it possible that you're feeling all of this because. Not because you're responsible for it, but because you're supposed to heal and help others? And I was like, well, that feels a lot better. You know, maybe you're. That feels a lot better. So you. Maybe, you know. And it was. But, man, the past year has now for my mom and I. My mom and I are closer than we've ever been. We're cultivating a really, like, for me, a precious and dear relationship that my dad had to be out of the way up for us to have. And I'm grateful for that because I get to be with her now in a way I never have known, because there's space. There's space. Like, he was. Like, there was. He was just in the way. And I don't mean that insensitively, but we needed space to heal without him there. And so there's a gift in his. For me personally, there's a gift in his transitioning when he did selfishly for me and my mom and bigger than me and my mom, because I needed to be. I needed to be so pulled into this experience to. In my. Not saying that I can understand the pain of women or what they've gone through, but to have or go through or that I've put them through, you know, to. To be connected to it in this way, in a way of deep. For me, deep care and compassion and empathy is something I'd never had in my life and I so desperately needed it. It's crucial to my development in this life and whatever contribution there is for me to contribute. Right. Because I know that there's something in here for me in working with men and helping men to heal their wound in relation to the feminine form. Yeah. You know, and for me, it turned into men. Like it's all the way up and all the way down. Meaning it's like my. My relationship with. With Goddess, with the Divine Mother into my relationship with my mother all the way back in the womb. My grandmother, my whole experience of her, which was trauma and all kind of trauma. My grandmother was a very traumatic relationship for most everybody around her. This is my mom's mom. But just all this wounding that's there, right? And that I never knew was there. Even though you think that, you know, based on evidence of failed relationships, that I had to have some awareness. But it was something that I.

How many times you get bludgeon with a hammer?

Seriously? Seriously. Just seriously, right. Every time I got hit in the face with a two by four. Right. So I said, man, sometimes I'm slow, bro. I own it. But that. That's. So to answer your question, a very long and emotional way, which I did, I didn't see coming that that's how my dad's transitioning enabled me to find the. The pure gold of this dude.

I can feel I'm present with you here, but I can feel the heart of so many men and women that just heard that or saw that. I hope so, because that wound is in all of us. Like, I for sure have a wound around my mom. And you brought that up for me. And I. It's funny when you're. It's not funny, but it's serious because the weight of you sitting next to your mom on the bed actually felt like I was there with you, you know, like next to her in the way you described that. So to be able to understand that we're wounded and it's okay that we're wounded. There's no shame that we're wounded. We just are, I think is the. I just did a solo cast yesterday and part and parcel, like your mentorship. The mentorship of so many people I've had on the podcast. Right. That's what's allowed me to see. I don't have to know why the trauma occurred. I don't have to know exactly how it occurred and what was the divine purpose and all that. I just simply have to acknowledge. I get to acknowledge that it did occur and that's it. And then the healing can come through from there, for sure. And I think about in my own life, like, my mom, manic bipolar, and I never really had a mom who was just present. I mean, she did the best she.

Could with what she had.

Love you, right?

Yeah.

Dad was gone, and. And in your story and my story, all of our stories are like this amalgam of what maybe Gaffney talked about with the outrageous love that's needed to deal with the outrageous level of pain.

That's it.

And all of us have it on some level, whether it's capital T, lowercase T, trauma, it's not. And I want to get your take on this. It's not figuring out how and why, because that's an intellectual loop. You could have sat next to your mom, disconnected, and said, well, I wonder why Mom's doing instead. But you felt with your heart, like, this is actually what's present. Instead of my mind having to figure out why or how there's some kind of attunement that I want you to describe to us. What is that process of attunement where you can just use your heart to feel what's actually going on instead of using your logical faculty to figure out why?

Well, this is a really good question, so I'll kind of go big picture to more specific in my response. So, you know, somatic awareness, meaning awareness of somatic sensation, physiological sensation. The body is actually a developmental line, meaning it's not a given that we have awareness somatically. So, you know, like, if you feel. If you feel scared, like, if I say, okay, I feel the emotion of fear. Fear is actually a label of a kinesthetic, subjective experience. You understand what I mean by that? So when you feel fear, you feel it in your body, right? If you're present, if you're somatically aware, you'll notice, like, maybe the throat closes. Or for me, oftentimes when I'm fearful, there'll be a constriction on my heart. And right here, like the set. The third chakra, right, like this. There's just kind of this tightening that happens here. And, like, I can go, oh, and I go right into that and just open to it, right? That's one of the things I'll do with that. Yet many people are. Are. And I Miss making a generalization. We've trained thousands of people over the past eight years, and I would say more than 50% of people generally we've seen in this developmental context that we take people through or have taken people through, are really identified with their thinking mind, but really disconnected from what's going on in their body, of course. Do you follow me?

I mean, this is Hawkins work. The greatest distance is the head from the heart.

There you go.

That's his whole ethos.

There you go. It is. So there's not just a direct line answer for this for people, because if someone is got a really incredible intellectual or cognitive developed line or lines, right. But they have an underdeveloped emotional development and somatic developmental line, then two things are going on there. First of all, they're having a hard time feeling what's happening in their body. And then they don't have a way to articulate what's happening in their body. Right. So this is more of the somatic, which is the feeling of the direct subjective sensation in the physical body. Then the articulation of the awareness of, oh, that actually I feel scared. Because when you did that, it reminded me of when my first girlfriend broke up with me. And I felt like it triggered my thing around abandonment. Right. See, that takes an awareness, right? So it's like to be able to know that. So. So that's first. So I told you we kind of go big picture to specific. Now me, for whatever reason, I'm highly kinesthetic. Meaning I feel. I've always felt and always been able to feel a lot, you know, like even since I was a kid.

Yeah, same.

Not everybody else is that way. We're both Taurus. Maybe it's. There's a Taurian thing there, but I don't know. But I've always. I'm a double Earth sign. So I'm like. I'm connected to the Earth. I feel. I've always felt. So for me, there's like, there's profound wisdom in my body. And so my body will tell me what's going on. Like, if something scares me, me and I contract or something opens and I feel open and loving and like I can hold everything right. Like all of those sensations and everything in between, I'm pretty aware of. So when it's I. I tend to think then I'm almost always better if I connect from the heart with people. So I'm quite intentional about that. I even sit down, like I've been connected with my heart to you since we sat down together. But it's an intentional practice. I do when I sit down across people, I literally send out energy and I connect my heart into your heart. Right. So I'm here with you and I feel you and you feel me and. And we can be in our hearts and not up here so much. Not that up here is bad. I just want to be here in my embodied. You know that word embodied, right? Embodied means I'm in my body, I'm feeling life and I'm experiencing life in my body present in the now. And then hopefully I have the ability to articulate what's happening too. Right. I have the. The intellectual or psychological ability to understand, okay, this is what I'm feeling and this is what's happening. So in that experience with my mom, I mean, I was in. Dude, it was like a wellspring of emotion had been pierced, right. Exploded and all this emotion's coming out and I just was led. Right. Part of it is like just trusting where we're being led in the moment. Trusting that own internal compass. And I feel like I have this internal emotional compass that takes me to the right place, you know, and then I don't have to think much about it with my mind. And so like, even in that, I don't need to do a bunch of second guessing. Right. There's an awareness, a body awareness, a somatic awareness that has me know that what I'm doing feels congruent and good. You follow me? And so even walking into my mom's bedroom that night when we had just had this explosion and it's pitch do pitch black, pitch black. And I'm like walking through the dark and my mom, I can hear her weeping in the bed. And I'm just drawn to that. Right. I'm drawn to be there with her not knowing what to do because my mind couldn't know what to do with that. But the wisdom in my heart, my body said go. So I trust that. So really, if I was going to answer your question, I think it's a glorious thing. The more we trust ourselves, the more we can cultivate a relationship with our inner self such that we trust our internal pulls and calls, you know, our intuition. I'd say it's intuition. And that the mind doesn't get too much into picking that apart or looking for reasons not to do it. Because there can be strategies for sabotage and sure. In that kind of thing.

So out of fear of future pain.

Yeah. Or fear of looking bad or failure or go doing the wrong, you know, making the wrong choice, wrong decision. Yeah. You know, all those things keep us from. Dude, from so much the.

It's like the mind is this beautiful. It's so beautiful. Like, you ever see that movie A Beautiful Mind?

Oh, yeah.

Such a good movie.

It's a really great movie.

So good. And he was such an intellectual guy, and he was doing math on the windows and everything, but the whole movie was about him, connected to his heart. And that's what you just shared with your mom.

Yeah.

And really, the wisdom here that I want everyone to feel somatically, the wisdom is if Hawkins talks about the space between head and the heart being so challenging for so many of us. And also we have Mark Wolin, who did a session with Carrie and I a few months back and told me that this is live. He doesn't do sessions with people individually anymore, but he. But he actually made an exception for us. And I was sharing, and Carrie was sharing. It was after the journey we did here with Margo. And I believe I shared this with you.

You did.

And the same wisdom then is the same wisdom now when you share it about your mom. And it is that everything actually starts with the mother, all of it. Everyone has a mother wound because we are from the mother, and we don't get wounded until later on in life from the father. Right. It's not like we can be wounded in the first two weeks by our dad. It comes from the mom. Right? I mean, there could be physical abuse or whatever.

Yeah.

But I'm just saying.

But even it comes from him through her.

Through her. But it starts with the mom. So it's like he even shared that his blindness came from his mom leaving for two weeks, and that's what made him blind. And when he was able to go to India in an ashram, he was told by the healer, you need to heal your relationship with your mother. And he was like, what the hell does that have to do with my blindness?

Everything. Everything, everything.

And so it. It begs this next question, you know, to whatever your comfort level is for sharing. You asked me, why, Josh, do you have sinus infection? After sinus infection, why did you.

You.

You told me on the phone once, why did you choose to have chronic sinusitis?

I say why, but I never say why.

But how are you.

How did you put it? Yeah.

Why did you choose?

For what purpose? Yeah, what's purpose? Yeah.

Thank you for the language. So for what purpose did I choose to have chronic sinusitis? And it honestly wasn't until. This is why our podcast is in perfect divine timing. It wasn't until the book you referred me to the Psychic Roots of Disease and understanding what that really was. You know, I had heard these things time and time again, much like some of the wisdom that you were trying to be given by source, but you weren't ready for it. And the wisdom for me was there's a true psychosomatic connection between my level of stress and the story that I used to tell myself about overwhelm not being able to handle it all. And how do I do it all? How do I hold my responsibility? But still, yet young Josh come out to play. Yeah, I can't do both, man. I have to choose one or the other. It's all lie. It's all but good for you. But it came from. It came from initially this mother wound because I spent the majority of my life just taking care of my mom y and being angry that my dad wasn't at home and just trying to figure out what the hell do I do with all this grief. And, like, I used humor as a way to cover that up for so long. When I got into my late 30s and early 40s, I'm like, I'm not being fake anymore. I don't want to just use humor to cover shit up anymore. I want to be the real, real Josh. And so now I'm at this place, and I'm curious how you feel about this in your own maturation, where I really do feel like I'm not perfect at it, but at least I have an understanding of how to integrate my responsibility and my child heart and actually fuse them together and have them be within me. It's what makes our conversation so great.

Right.

So how does that. How has that worked its way in your life? The holding of, you know, at first glance, separate worlds, but they're not separate at all. Right?

They're.

They're one and the same. Right. So. So from an integrative perspective, how. How would you describe those two things in your own life? And how do the lessons from you sitting with your mom and the passing of your father allow you to handle the fucking weight of responsibility that you hold in your healing journey with cancer and also still hold on to your child inside young Scott that just wants to play and build bikes and, you know, do his thing? Right. How do you hold both of those worlds? It's one of my favorite questions to holding of two worlds that. That may seem opposite, but they're one and the same.

Well, you know, I guess the. The container around it. Thank you for the question. The container around it is the belief that, that I hold a belief that they're not separate. And so they're. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, I, I don't. When I think of separate, I think of parts oftentimes like, like fragmented. Part of me separate from me. You know, you've learned parts integration, which.

Used to trigger the. Out of me, and now I'm like, cool, bring it.

Yeah. Well, you integrated, you integrated some things, right. You had some, some really powerful integrations. And, and so there was healing.

Thank you for that, by the way.

You're welcome. You're welcome. And so there's, it's, it's held that it's, it's all, it's all me, meaning the, the, the, the, the grown, the householder. Right. If we look at it from like a, a yogic perspective. Right. There's the one who has to, you know, make the money and, and do the things and hold the responsibility and.

You know, lightning just struck outside.

That's right.

Right. Scott said that whatever he's about to say is going to be good.

So there's, there's, there's that element that also the little boy, the tenderness within us, the playfulness within us is not separate from that. Right. Like they actually are one. Like, I don't. I can be responsible and do all the things that the man has to do while holding the boy in my heart with still his love and curiosity and playfulness be present there. Right.

How do you hold them both?

How do I not? You know, I think for me it's probably. It's just a matter of integration over time. Right. Like over time. I mean, I started working. It was the moment I met my inner child, which was January of 2010. It changed the direction of my life. You remember the exact date almost to the day. I could go back to the calendar and probably find the date if I looked at it, but it was January 2010. Yeah, it was a very significant time in life. A very, you know, you're on the path long enough, you have milestones on the path. Right. You start to look back over the path and go, wow, that, that thing that happened created a bifurcation. We're in a whole different direction. Right. And that was certainly what occurred for me back at that point. But meeting that little boy, I mean, I was this, you know, Harley riding gun carrying, tough son of a. Pretty much. And, and I had become that way based on my environment, my lifesty know. And, and even though I was six years sober and on a spiritual path, I still carried that energy about me. And that presence about me everywhere I went and everything I did. And when I met that little boy, I was literally floored. And I found a tenderness and a sensitivity deep within myself that. That had been so distorted in my interpersonal relationships, especially with women, but had so desperately. That little boy wanted to be loved and wanted to be cared for and wanted to be accepted. All the shit that didn't happen for him when he was a real little boy. So desperately needed and was expressing through pathological ways. Right. As an adult man, which is how our, you know, codependent shows up and control and. And fighting and all the. That shows.

Like, Like, I. E. Drugs and.

Oh, no, no, I'm sober at this point. No, no, I'm talking about just the stuff that showed up in interpersonal relationships still. My own insecurity in my skin. Gotcha.

Gotcha.

My own comfort within myself, you know. You know what it's like. You've been through it in your own way.

Right.

So the. The finding peace in sovereignty as a man, you know, in relationship is not an easy thing. Especially if you got child wounds. Right.

Especially if you got a powerful woman, too.

Yeah. And you got.

A powerful woman touches all the parts of you.

It does, because she reflects back all of our wounds. Right. And that's. And literally I'm going through this right now with Joni, man. Like, it's. This. Is this when I. When I descended into. I call it dissension, because I. I just. I feel like I descended down into this wound of the collective right that I was talking about earlier. And I knew something major was going to come from it. Like, I knew I had work to do right away. I knew was going to be a big deal, but I couldn't know what that's going to look like. And I. It's still unfolding. It's still unfolding. I'm still working on it. I'm still. We're working on it. Like she's steal a mirror back to me for all of my stuff that's still unresolved in relation to the feminine. Right. And so the. The meeting of that little boy that I had way back in 2010, in January, would. Would. Then it just would change the direction of my life because Mark, my teacher, would die right after that. Then Mooney Schwarzi would come into my life, and then I would take a formal, you know, student disciple relation or teacher disciple relationship and followed that path for many years, working with him closely and other teachers and so. But in the. Working with him, you know, because our path truly was in our lineage was an integral path. It was. He even said, before I took initiation, he said, you understand I don't have all the answers and that there is an optimal path for you to awakening and enlightenment that is tailored for you between you and God, and I'll help you to figure out what that is.

He gave you a warning.

Yeah. And he said, but also, he also said, but if you're going to do this, if you're going to make this commitment, then you got to be willing to go where I tell you to go because I don't have all the answers and other teachers are out there for you. And I said, I'm in. You know, I'm in. So the. So the great gift in that was that he, a teacher I respected and adored, gave me permission to explore everything, which I already really had permission. I'd already was attracting teachers that gave me permission in that way. Right. Like, because I was already on that path of being, being willing to explore everything. And so my spiritual teacher, who I like I said adored and respected and loved so much, said part of the work he did was inner child work. He did deep inner child work with me and he also sent me to some other people to do work with. Right. And so this process of getting to know that little boy, not as a part of me that separate in the context of like fragmented off psyche. No. Yeah. But that is an intrinsic part of who I am, that little boy. And then, you know, the ongoing nurturing of that relationship is required, especially in the beginning. Especially in the beginning. So I know, like, there's probably a lot. Maybe there's guys that hear this, they're like, I don't want nothing to do with this. Or maybe it causes them to put up some resistance. I get it. You know, there's. That was the way it used to be. I used to. Before the experience of really being forced into me meeting minor child. And it wasn't like somebody forced me to. It was just conditions of life in that moment was when it happened. But man, I mean, an hour before it, if I would have said it's a bunch of psychological mumbo jumbo bullshit, you know, because that was just the kind of tough guy thing that I carried. And then all of that was dismantled just like that within me, and it was undeniable.

This is just more evidence to the question I asked you when we started. Do you have to be disintegrated, Disintegrated in order to be integrated?

I don't think anybody. There's no way, not because you're a karmic path. But all of us are, because we start. If you go back to developmental, we start as separate self. We start as separate self. Right. We start and we truly believe in our development that we're separate. And so. And then we're going to go through ethnocentric development, then hopefully world centric, hopefully cosmo centric. But we, you know, as. As long as we're in that separate self, which all of us have to go through, we have to. Some will stay in their whole life. Some will actually move through it, evolve through it. Right. But in that is the nature of. I think we're not integral. We can't be integral until we develop integrally. Right. So that means there has to be some intentionality around our own development. And that's. That's kind of the thing I really want to inspire people to, like, do like. Yeah, you go, I want to develop because I want to make a gazillion dollars. Awesome. I want to develop because I want to have the greatest family or huge house or all these things, material things or whatever. Oh, that's fine. Cool, cool, cool. Like, that's a part like making money, having material things, like going through that is a part of our developmental process in consciousness. We need to go through it. It's not bad or evil or wicked. It's just a part of it. Yet. What I hope is that right now with what's happening in the world, with this, the.

The.

The awareness of the need for healing, of growth, of development. Right. I mean, we've got so many people who are contributing now in so many different ways to this conversation. And not just the conversation, but the enactment of the embodiment of the realization of the. The outcomes that are hoped for from these conversations. Right. I mean, it's. It's happening a lot right now. It's happening a lot right now. And, and what I hope is that we. I would just love it if more and more people are inspired just to develop, just to develop. You know what I mean? Like, just because they want to know their creator more deeply, they want to express love more deeply. And like, you know, and then everything else comes as a result of it.

I think. I wonder how you feel on this. I think the reason why some people resist development or knowing the self is because A, they don't understand it or they don't even know they don't know, or B, something that I've really found irritating is this adage specifically by, I guess you could say, and I hate to Even use the label, but we'll just use the label for nomenclature sake. People that are hyper liberal in their thinking or hyper progressive in their thinking. There's this mindset I found in relationship with some of these humans, and they say things like, well, it's for progress. We're doing this for progress.

Sure.

And when I really get down to it, in conversation for them, much like AI, which I want to jam with you about because it contributes to the metacrisis, which is directly impacted by your work of integrating the self so that there's no meta crisis at all. But these people, they'll say things like, well, it's progress just for progress's sake, just to see what we can do. And it's like, well, that's very different than developing the self to actualize one's potential. They're. They're. They are completely separate. One of them to come from the intentionality is like, well, let's just see what AI can do, and let's just see how much money I can make just for the.

Actually, one of them's. One of them is a shadow expression, and one of them is the conscious expression.

Okay, so then please share because. Well, you just said I've been irritated by that line of thinking. Like, the further we break off and are disconnected from nature. Like, you live in a beautiful space, man. Mandora Rant Bench. We're gonna put some B roll in right now. You guys check how beautiful this is? Like green grass. And maybe there's some bears rolling around with honey pots. I mean, it's freaking gorgeous out there. Check out the drone shot that we're looking at. It's a beautiful space. You're in nature. You're literally living in nature. So you're being bathed and refueled by nature from nature's self. And so there's no. You're not gonna like, buzz down the trees just because you can.

No, of course. Right.

You have to have intentionality behind what you do with your land and how you connect.

Oh, we think about as we build things, like, how do we do it without taking trees down?

Cool. But the come from is the most important thing, right? So my come from is pure. And this, this construct, this mental way of thinking which I want you to describe the shadow of it. Progress just for progress sake is actually not good for the all progress because one wants to know oneself to be more love, to be more of service. That's of service to the all and the I and the wealth. What's the shadow? What's the Purpose of this shadow even existing.

Well, okay, this is a really. I really like this question and this conversation, and I love that you are able to articulate this thing you're noticing and how it kind of bothers you and irritates you.

Definitely irritates me.

No, it's. It's good.

Specifically in Silicon Valley, this conversation happens a lot.

Well, it's definitely a lot wider than in Silicon Valley, but it certainly does so. All right, well, you remember when we taught you values level. SO Values Level 6 was an established level of thinking. Now if we kind of look at that through spiral dynamics, it's considered what's called the values meme, or the green level has nothing to do with numbers anymore. It changes. In spiral dynamics, we take numbers away and use colors to denote the difference in levels. So how that morphed into integral theory and from a moral developmental level is actually called. You're speaking about where the majority of the conversations you're having and the majority of people in our kind of conscious culture right now are more in this type of thinking. You follow me? You tracking with me? Which is what would be called pluralistic relativism. So now there's, remember, paradoxes, right? So the developmental place in our thinking, which is what integral theory would call pluralistic relativism, has only happened. Been happening since about the 60s, right? So with what happened in the 60s with the free love movement, with the protest against Vietnam War, the explosion of kind of that free love, open love consciousness that happened, right. You know, like that was a really big deal that time. Massive shift happening from a consciousness perspective, from a values perspective, really important time in our history developmentally. Right. Civil rights movement, everything was just crazy what was going on energetically at that time and from an evolution perspective. So what we have now, we know that there's. Once we go above that, we move to actually what's called an integral level of thinking. And above that we move to a transpersonal level of thinking. There's eight defined levels in integral theory. And what we're seeing right now is like we do it just to do it or do it for the sake of. Or do it for my group because my group says it's right. Right. Is more of the pluralistic level of thinking that's happening right now. And like, here's the paradox of it. This level of thinking creates actually a lot of separation in people because it's quite. Can be quite ethnocentric in its thinking. Does that make sense? Like group focused, like my group, my sex group, or my Business group or my environmental group or whatever the group is. Right. That I'm carrying the banner for very care about the group very much and its values and its wants, but also can be very separate from everyone else. Does that make sense? Okay, so this is one aspect of it, which is where the shadow kind of comes from. But there's also the other aspect of it, when you look at it from a higher level, from a developmental perspective, that now we have approximately 20% of the population of the planet, which is about 1.6 billion people that actually are thinking at this level now. Now it's a level that creates an integral theory, what's called Flatland, which is kind of what you're describing. And in Flatland, all hierarchies get flattened. All, everyone. It's egalitarian, you know what I mean? Like, everybody's the same. All consciousness is the same. And that's problematic. That's problematic because in that type of thinking, what happens is one says that all consciousness is of the same value. So the consciousness of the goldfish in the bowl is the same value as the consciousness of a human. And I couldn't disagree more.

Yeah.

Do you follow me?

Same.

Because the human can contribute so much more than the goldfish can.

I remember it was actually in the very first. The first chapter of A Theory of Everything. I've been listening to it.

Oh, you have?

Yeah.

And he talks about this. Yes, he does.

Literally, to say that one and all are exactly the same and the value of the consciousness expressed by each piece is the same would actually implode the whole system. It doesn't work that way.

Yeah. And. And see, and there's a huge part of the system that's trying to say that right? Now that's the thing with pluralistic relativism, right. Is this egalitarian perspective that creates this thing called Flatland, that everybody exists on Flatland and that there's no whole Archy. Not hierarchy, but no natural. Let's call it whole Archy. Naturally occurring hierarchy. Right. That's there in this naturally occurring hierarchy, basically. In a whole Archy. A whole Archie transcends and includes everything at the level below. Below it. Right? So, for example, I'll give you an example of a whole Archy. A letter is a part of a sentence, right? A sentence transcends and transcends and includes a letter. A letter can exist in and of itself on its own, but a sentence can't exist without letters. Right. Or a word can't exist without letters. So you got letter to word, word to sentence, sentence to paragraph. Does that make sense? So it's a nested whole, Archy. So each thing below is included in the thing above it. Right. Okay. So consciousness develops the same way. If we look at the stages of consciousness development from a structural perspective, if we look at it like in spiral dynamics or kind of the great wave or nest of being, we look at our most primitive starting place in consciousness, and then each level beyond it, as we develop, transcends and includes that which is before it. So this pluralistic flatland, because of how separate many people have created themselves, this is part of the meta crisis, Right. That there's no hierarchy. All hierarchy is oppressive. All hierarchy is repressive.

Yeah.

Therefore, no one can be at a different level than anyone else. This is tragic. This is tragic thinking.

One of the examples of this is actually what was done with Mao when communism started in China. He would actually eradicate gender differences.

Yep.

So, yeah, put everybody with the same clothing, genderless society.

Everybody wore exactly the same uniforms. Yeah. Boys and girls. Yep.

There's no such thing. And we see it in America now. Look, we don't have to get deep in the weeds on that. Y' all already know how I feel at this point. But. But it's an example of the metacrisis and the meta.

It's one aspect of it. It's one aspect.

It has many different pieces. Right. So. So if we really break down the metacrisis, this is what Gaffney talks about, about with the outrageous pain. Right. We're experiencing this ecology for the planet that you've mentioned. Gender identity, gender dysphoria, war with countries, excessive materialism, exploitation, political division. Political division, Mainstream media driven by the. The name of progress, progress for progress sakes. Who or what exactly is this energy in the world?

Right.

Is it even important to know who or what it is? Or is it just like trauma healing, where we actually just identify that it's there, the flatland, and then we do our work individually, then collectively, to transcend that.

You know, it's such a good question, man. And here's the thing. First of all, to me, the answer to do we do our individual work? Always is a yes. It's always a yes. The reason being is because if we. We start focusing, if we. If any individual starts to focus on developing themselves, and they say, okay, I want to develop spiritually, mentally, and emotionally, that's just going to be my objective, and I'm going to find various paths and ways to do that then. Because there's no one path Right. There's all kinds of paths that could bring about.

Summit, many paths.

Yeah, there one summit, many paths, my friend. There you go. And so that will. Will give way to higher. More. Let's call it this. Let's not use higher. Higher is not an operative word. Let's. Let's use expanded, more complex levels of thinking and behaving more. Expanded, complex ways of solving problems. And so we'll move from egocentric because we could start self development completely from an egocentric perspective. Right. 100% go. I want to change because I'm tired of living this way and I hate myself living this way. And I'm, you know, I'm like 200 pounds overweight and I'm. No way I'm gonna live this way. I'm gonna do whatever I gotta do to change, Right?

Yep.

Completely egocentric for the self. But then over time, that gives way to. All of a sudden we start loving a group and caring about our group in a way. And it's not just about us anymore. It's about something.

Well, because we've actually got some love to give at that point.

Yeah. And then more development over time. Then all of a sudden we start thinking on a planetary level. We're thinking about the world. We make decisions. When I go to throw that. That can away and I don't see a recycle can around, do I just throw it in the can or do I look for a place to recycle it or do I just throw it in the forebod of the car? Because I know I got a recycle can at home. Because I think about the impact of the world on that one thing. You follow me? I mean, it's just a little bitty thing. Right. But it's still in our thought. Right. It's in our thinking because we start thinking about the world.

Can I give an example to that?

Sure.

I used to litter. I literally be driving and I'd be like, who cares? And I would throw stuff out the window.

I did.

When I was a teenager, this came up. I was driving to the airport to go get carrying the babies. And I had this little top of my zen spray. And I'm like, ah, nobody's gonna notice. And I watched myself just put it in the door, pocket it because it would actually hurt me to throw it out the window. You go, like, it would hurt me because I would knowingly be hurting others.

And look how you. And look how you.

And see.

And you didn't directly go at that. Right. To develop that thing, but through Your own development.

Yeah.

Working on your own healing, your own growth, your own expansion. All of a sudden you became aware that, wow, this thing, if I do this, this actually causes harm.

And it's just this tiny little piece.

Of plastic, but it causes harm and you get connected to that and you change your behavior. That's pretty phenomenal. It's no small thing. Even though it's a small thing, remember the paradoxes, right? Because that tells you that, wow, now an awareness has increased, values have changed, and I'm thinking differently. Right. And therefore behaving differently.

And it's not self serving. It's not like, oh, look how evolved I am. I mean, it's just one example, right?

Sure.

But there can be in the spiritual circles, which we'll come right back to.

Where we're talking about.

It's a. It's a little sidebar. There can be in spiritual circles, Scott, this almost spiritual elitism where, oh, look at how evolved I am. I mean, there's podcasts out there, y', all, not this one, that are like that, where they just talk about how spiritual they are. And I actually am more like you, where I like to just share the shadow part because then it brings more light anyways. And then I'm actually being honest. So. So to bring it back to what we were talking about, though, like, there is just this. There's this stair stepping when it comes from the self, the egocentric model that you talk about. And it goes on to the next four. I just think that it's the same thing that Rudolph Steiner talked about. Like, the spirit has to be pure. You have to be pure to get the teaching from the master. Your intention for the knowledge and the wisdom, the wisdom specifically, it has to be pure. If it's not pure, it could be convoluted. You don't actually deserve it, in my opinion. You don't deserve it.

It.

If your intention isn't pure to receive it.

I don't know. You know, I can get down with that. I. I look at it through my, like that particular statement, you know, like, if I look, if I really sat back, you know, like, and really sat and thought about all these years of discipline and work and breakdown and growth and, you know, it's like, how pure was my intention? It's probably unanswerable. I mean, I can think at times. I've been so deeply surrendered to the process that it's like the surrender creates the experience of like a hollow bone, you know, I mean by hollow bone. So it's a metaphor for Being lived by spirit. When I'm a hollow bone, spirit flows through, right? Flows through cleanly without refraction. And there are times when I think I've experienced purity like that, you know, or whatever that may be. But then you take the understanding I have of how our minds work and how we delete, distort and generalize information as it comes through. You know, how. What is purity and how pure can one be if one always has shadow? You know, so it's one of those things that I kind of. I mean, it's a philosophical conversation that really has no definitive answer.

I think I would assume if you had Lady Liberty and you had purity on one side and shadow on the other, as long as the purity outweighs the shadow, even in the byproduct of the shadow being there, that it's more pure. More pure. Not more good, just more pure to come from.

You know, I think it. For me, it's. It's. It's more like my desire. There's a prayer by Thomas Merton that is so, so beautiful. Where. And I'll. I'll paraphrase it, but we've got it framed. It's hanging in. In the library of Mandorla, where he basically says, God, it. I don't know if I'm doing your will, and I don't even know if I'm doing it well. But I believe that my desire to do your will, to truly do your will, pleases you, even if I it all up. You know, that to me, is the thing, right? Like, it's more of my desire. See, I think if all of reality is love and all of reality is a love story, the nature of that reality is. Is desire. And when I've sat and thought about this, like, really contemplated this, and I've looked back through all of the distorted expressions of. Of how I've wanted to get love in my life, have tried to get love, how I've even caused pain in my attempt to be loved. They all came. Desire was present in all of it. Desires present in all of it. Right. And that level of distortion to. To clarity or more clear, has happened over time. You know, over time. And then one last thing. And.

Yeah.

So that desire has been pure and of the heart, such that it's almost like I make a connection to what you're calling purity. Because that desire enables the teachings to come in. You follow me? And it makes me receptive because there's. That. There's a humility in it. Sure. Yeah, sure.

So the question is, what's the Difference, then on a somatic level of desire versus craving, how do you know which one is which?

Well, I would say this is a really great question. I'm going to tell you the very first thing that comes up. Craving is obsessive desires. Not craving becomes obsessive of the mind. Do you follow me?

So it loops.

Yeah. It becomes an obsession. It. Craving, to me now, this is my take. Doesn't mean it has anybody else to agree with it, but it's. It's distinctly different because craving is. The mind gets involved with obsessive thinking about the thing, and that becomes pathological. That becomes pathological. Yeah.

Yeah, that feels true.

Yeah, that feels true.

Because anybody that knows has had any addictive behavior at all, it's like, even with the phone, like, people craving their phone. Y. I've had to catch myself. I wake up and I'm like, don't check your phone, dude.

Good for you. Good for you.

That shit's real. We're being trained, Scott.

Oh, I get it, man. That's why I'm really on the other side of the pendulum, man.

In the flatland, dude. We're in the flatland.

Okay, okay.

I'll speak for myself. At times, Josh Trent finds himself in the flatland. Other times, I'm in a different place. But. But, you know, when we look at this, I guess we've been talking so much about spirals and growing. The self. Look at the whole self. The whole self. It's in my logo. So this is on the screen, too. The upside down triangle is water. It's the feminine that I've had so much pain and just discomfort with. And I think that might even be a wound that we've shared in different and unique ways. Just understanding first what the feminine is. How do I love it? How do I respect it? The Pentagon with the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial mastery that I'm learning here. And then the circle. That's our logo. The circle is wholeness, completeness. And we had a call, and you said, you know, how do we choose to develop ourselves? But more importantly, how do we develop our whole self? And that hit. I'm like, yeah, that's actually. Who cares about developing the self just for the sake of it?

There you go.

How do I feel wholeness? Because from that, wholeness gives me the capacity to give outrageous love.

There you go.

Like, you're talking about, like Gaffney talks about. How do we make sense of that, dude? And how did you come on to that? I mean, when did that come through for you? Because it's very different. Healing the self, acknowledging the self and growing the self, but actually like making the self circular and whole.

You know, that first hit me about eight years ago, man, this realization. It was when I got introduced to, you know, I had been being my teacher. Munuswarji had. Had spent a lot of time with me around intentional use of language. Like, just in the way he spoke and the way he presents himself and the way he taught and things he taught me, language became really important. So when I got to, you know, I went to NLP out of his guidance. He said, you should be trained by this man whenever you're ready. And so that was why I went and got trained in nlp. I had no idea I'd go on to become a trainer than a master trainer. And it was just a path I ended up following for a while, which was deeply meaningful for me because it thrust me into this. I mean, I think a lot of people have such a misunderstanding of what NLP is, but when for me, doing that work in NLP and using it as. As a part of intrinsically, inherently for psychological and emotional development, like for my own growth and expansion and the increasing of behavioral flexibility, the increasing of complexity in the way I think the ability to solve more problems and think critically, like, it was profound, right? It was really wonderful to get to. To look at those aspects because I had been solely focused in spiritual path. Like, that was my. And then I realized, like, wow, a whole self is more than, like, I am a very complex being. All of us are as humans. We have neofrontal cortexes. We can create. We do create ego. And, you know, like, there's so much to a human being and that doesn't exist anywhere else in nature. And so some became very exciting to me when I realized that, wow, there's this whole ocean of things to learn psychologically, things to learn emotionally, how to go about using language as a healing tool. I mean, that's, you know, the. The power of language as a healing tool. We're actually doing a retreat on that coming up, right? Like, how we can use. I mean, if language can create so many wounds, how do we use it to create healing? How do we create. Use it to create ascension, right? So I became really excited about exploring psychological and emotional development. The. The thing that ended up limiting me personally was that inside the label of NLP and under. Under board certifications, it was like, not okay to talk about spiritual development because it wasn't technically traditional nlp. And that was where the conflict started to grow in me. Over time was I kind of had limited myself and I had this wisdom teachings from the old ways. Right. That I was keeping them myself. But like my heart wants to share while I'm teaching psychological and emotional development, but doing it with a light spirituality in the conversation. Always with the way I taught. Right. But also respecting the boundaries of the container of what we were doing and teaching. So there became a kind of a conflict with me in that. Because I realized that what I was doing was whole self development. What I was doing and exploring was my own path to integral development. Right. And. And so that was. That kind of gave way to this as what's unfolded over the past year, you know, as we've dissolved the NLP training business and now have launched Mandora Integral Wisdom and are launching one Summit, many paths and are doing the things we're doing to have a different conversation and to. And also different more expanded integral courses of action to produce whole self development for the human being. And that's part of what our contribution is to be right is. Is developing where it's developed, but sharing and teaching and growing with individuals that want to try and experience the path to integral development that we're laying out.

So then what is the whole self exactly?

Well, on the individual level, like if we were to put it into the individual level, in the context of this conversation, I would say it is the whole of our consciousness and our spiritual body, our mental body, our emotional body and our physical body. Not compromise comprise the whole self of Josh Trent. And this unique expression of yourself, your unique self expression in this life. Unique self expression of Scott Jackson in this life, of Joni Dillon in this life, of Mike Dillard in this life. You know what I mean? Like the unique expression of who we are. Whole integrated expressions of love.

You could also describe it as a unique point of consciousness.

Sure.

Experiencing itself there.

You could. Could one could one could one could, couldn't they?

So then if there's two schools of thought. Actually there's probably many more than two, but maybe a couple schools of thought would be that it's predestined. This is our dharmic path. We also have a spiritual credit card that karma is paid out upon. So there's really no. There's no logic for us to figure out why things occur. Exactly. Or you know, why is this happening to me? And.

Well, there's some ancient teachings that. That speak to it. Sure. But you know, you gotta study them and to see if you believe them or not. Do they resonate with you?

Sure. Do they resonate so, so I'm pulling the E brake because I go back on this concept of whole self. Like in order to be whole there has to be a remembrance of who you are, but then there also has to be an inventory and a piece with who you are as well.

Well, let me tell you this. I based, I do have an assumption that I've based on my life on for probably 15 years or so. Is that this assumption that we are.

Whole and complete already, right now?

Already whole and complete. Yeah. And so the, it's. If we believe we come from spirit, then we come from true self. We come from all that is right. Yet we come into the human form and the comedy is we have to start at stage one and we forget that we're really just a whole, right? We forget that that's separate self. And then life is especially, you know, I've heard different teachers say this one may live their whole life and it may be right at the moment of death. Death, they know the truth, but they'll know the truth right at that moment, which is that we are all that is and not separate. Fortunately for us, we're, we're doing a lot of work much earlier than that such that we have these experiences earlier than waiting till the moment of death, right? The moment of leaving the physical body to have experiences of wholeness, of oneness, of connectedness to all samadhi, you know, experiences. So it's kind of the comedy is life is the experience of remembering who we are, right? Remembering who we are. And so all this work we do is to detangle, demesh, untangle, heal, you know, not only the stuff that's created in this lifetime, which is, you know, there's three types of karma. One of the karmas is the karma of this lifetime. Another type of karma is a karma of past lives. And if you believe in past lives, then from the, the old, the Vedic teachings, right? Then those past lives we carry forward karmas that are incomplete. And so we have those karmas to work out in this life plus the karmas we create in this life. And then whatever we don't solve in this life then gets it's there in the next.

No pressure to be loving and good.

Well there, doesn't it? Here's the paradox again. Another paradox. The paradox of it is, is that we get all gung ho about development and try to work towards a thing. Yet the thing that we're working towards is already ever present right now and always has been. That which we want to become is already who we are. Now, now, this is paradox, and it's true truth. So how do we. The truth is, there's value in development because development, over time, has us begin to live more and more in that place. Right?

Deeper into the remembrance.

Deeper into it.

An embodiment of the actual remembrance.

There you go.

Instead of just an intellectual.

There you go. There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is why there's so much value in walking the path, man. To me. Yeah.

It's so deep. Here. I have a myth and I have a metaphor, okay? So the myth is in Greek mythology, there's the River Leth, where supposedly we are dunked into it. And the river Leith is the river of forgetfulness. So we forget who we are on purpose. Then we come into. This is Greek mythology. I mean, y' all can pick whatever you like. I'm not here to tell you what to believe. I just think it's interesting. I think it's kind of a cool story. And then we come into the world and we meet all these other deities, and we meet. Embody all these other archetypes, or not. Kind of like king, warrior, magician, lovers, and then we eventually remember who we are. I like that. I like that story. I like that myth.

It's a beautiful myth.

And the metaphor could be, okay, well, if God has a big ball of Christmas lights, then as God unravels all the Christmas lights, they finally work, like in that movie National Lampoons, right? So, like, there's. There's. There's so much to be said here. And, like, I feel like it can so simplistically be said by you. But I wonder, man, because that's all I do. A lot of times I just wonder. I wonder for you, like, how do you take such complex things and teach them to people in a way where it's not just the mind? I mean, this is, again, what you're doing at Mandorla, right? And I want to say this, too. Like, we go to the light. This is from you. You told me this, actually, when I first came to your property. So the Mandorla. You guys, this is so cool. The Mandorla was actually said to be on the Ark of the Covenant.

It was.

So it is a. Literally and figuratively. It is this. It is this symbol, and it's on the screen right now, the symbol of the Mandorla. And you had said something that really stuck to me. You said, we go to the light, the Mandorla, the contemplative space for sanctuary. We are also called to be this for each other. But again, we need the balance of. To get. We need. We need the balance of together and alone being and doing. The sanctuary is that space in between where we can hold this tension in peace.

Yeah.

And I really love that, because if it's good enough for the Ark of the Covenant, I guess it's good enough for your ranch.

Right. So the cool thing is it's a place that exists within all of us. Yes. It's a place we all can abide in.

I know there's not enough time because we've already been rocking for like, two and a half hours.

We've been going that long.

Yes, we have. But it's been amazing.

You and I lose time, man.

Yeah, it's been amazing and fun. Well, as I said when you came in, time is a construct.

Yeah.

So one thing I've loved, and actually going to Mandora a couple times now, has just been the tranquility of the space.

Yeah.

And I know the owners were. Were into a lot of things that were similar yet different than you, and there just already was this kind of healing energy there that you stepped into. And we don't have time to go into the whole story of how you, you know, got the property and you were going on a healing journey and you met the woman there, and then you just get enough money raised to get the property. I mean, it's just wild how these breadcrumbs connect. But if you had to describe the kind of men and women across the world that go to Mandorla and, you know, what they actually receive from Mandorla, I think that quote that I read some surmises at all, or at least starts to. Who are these people, man? Who are these people? Who are the men and women that. That are being attracted and magnetized to Mandorla and the integral wisdom, essentially.

Well, you know, interestingly, it's. It's a big group of that. That population of. Of more of the pluralistic thinkers now, because we also have, you know, in that group is this explosion of. Of individuals who are seeking the development of their own consciousness in some way. Consciousness has become a commonplace conversation. Healing has become a commonplace conversation in our society today, and certainly in certain circles. And so the people who are coming are, I think, twofold. You know, it's ones who are a little earlier in their healing journey, and they really want. Want to heal and grow and expand because they want to contribute more to their businesses and their families and their lives. And the other is. Is more people who have maybe created some success for themselves already and maybe been at it for a while and starting to think they're starting to see the world in a way. This is when you start seeing the world in a way of the dire need of the world world and are realizing that bitching about the problems of the world isn't going to solve anything. That we actually need collaboration, we need communication, we need connection and we need action, right? And to start solving our problems, ecologically speaking, culturally speaking, societally speaking. And so it's kind of twofold. The people who really want to develop themselves for greater contribution and then the people who realize that the time is now to start having new conversation in the world. Do you get what I mean by that? A new conversation. This conversation. That's right.

See, that was a huge thunderclap, Huge thunderclap, whole studio when he said that, like at the exact same time.

Yeah, because that's. That is. Look, man, the importance of knowing how to communicate, the importance of understanding language, the importance of understanding and being able to see and feel what people are going through when we're communicating to them or when they're communicating to us is so crucial to our development. Because. Because it's not just for our own sake. Because the more flexibility we have in the way we think and we can understand and the more empathy and compassion we can have, the more we can work with individuals that are of different values, different beliefs. And man, this is the key, right? Like we. If, man, early on, when I started in on my path in AA and Getting Sober, there's a book by a guy named Chuck Chamberlain. He was actually one of the co founders of AA Sponsor. He sponsored Bill Wilson for a time. And he wrote a book called A New Pair of Glasses in the very beginning in this book, dude. And I read this book for the first time in like 2004, maybe 2005. But dude, all the way back then, and he wrote this book in like the 60s, right? He said when he was talking about people in recovery, he said the problem, problem, generally speaking, is conscious separation. And if the problem is conscious separation, then the solution is conscious unity. How fucking simple, conceptually. He said this all these years ago, right? A guy who was a spiritual teacher and a 12 step and the very first 12 step fellowship. And it's still the thing, right? And today our separation, it's greater than it's ever been in my lifetime. So I assume it's greater it's ever been your lifetime and maybe greater than it's ever been in the history of humanity. You know, we have the ability to see what everybody's doing everywhere, all over the world now. And we've become so opinionated and divisive and dug in, in our positions. And I'm speaking generally, you know, that we're, we're at a, a terrible time of, and I say terrible, not really knowing that it really is terrible. But we're at this time of, of real conscious separation. And so this, this desire for people to come in and do their own healing work, their own growth work, their own expansion and ascension work contributes to conscious unity. And then the people who want to actually start working in collaborative ways and action based ways to help solve, solving problems on a global scale also contributes or can contribute to conscious unity as well. So, and think about it. If we all agree, if we could all agree that love is a thing, if we could all have a clarified, as Mark would say it, a clarified field of value of love, if we could all agree that this is, this is everything is love, all of reality of love and the nature of that reality is desire. And that all the suffering and pain and division and warring and everything we're seeing in the world, that's a part of the metacrisis, I.e. the metacrisis is actually a distortion of love. Well, if love is distorted, then how do we clarify love? Well, we got to agree on something first, right? And then if we can agree that love is the thing and enough of us can't agree, not that 8 billion of us need to agree, but I think if enough of us can't agree me, then enough of us together can make a difference. And I mean a real difference. Okay. And I'm going to say this last thing. I don't know that the metacrisis because I don't know what it really looks like. As far as, you know, I don't like to be in doom and gloom. I'm kind of past that part of my life. I used to think in conspiracy theories and all that stuff and like I'm not really anymore, it's nice to be prepared.

But to ruminate causes disease.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's not that we want to perpetuate that as a form of suffering, right, or separation. It's more of like, okay, I don't know that we can actually avert the metacrisis. It can be averted, you know, like we're maybe too far down the rabbit hole. Okay. If that's the case, that's the case. So how do we prepare ourselves? How do we deal with the day after and the day after that and the day after that. Right. Because in, in, in when, if you look back, like Covid as an example, Covid was really telling to me from like looking at global behavior and thinking, you see a massive part of the world regress into more Maslow's hierarchy, level one. Right. But then you see a smaller percentage of the world actually ascend and create solutions and ways to think and ways to solve and ways to heal and ways to grow through this thing. You follow me? That's pretty amazing. We also saw the bigger number is more of a regression, I think, than there was a progression through thinking. But that told us something that gave us some evidence of, wow, real crisis, global crisis. We saw how people behaved, right? And it was kind of to be expected, honestly. If you had enough awareness around development and thinking of people, then, then one could go, okay, this makes sense what's happening. And I understand why this group or these people are reverting back to fighting for toilet paper and things like on a real base level of survival, right? What's going on there from our developmental perspective and also seeing kind of the cream also rise too, to where people were like, oh, this is an opportunity for us to grow this opportunity for us to create new solutions. Opportunity for us to create new ways to do business when old ways of business are failing.

You know, dude, I remember when it first hit, we had just moved into our place in Cardiff, in San Diego, in Encinitas, and I felt like maybe one or two days of fear. And then I saw somebody that I totally respected. His name was Daniel Schmachtenberger. Some people call him a savant. He's been on Joe Rogan and I remember him doing this big Facebook post about, oh, you need to Lysol your packages, you need to do. He was actually spreading fear and I hope he's changed his stance now because at the time I was like, wow, if this guy that I respect so much is in fear and I'm feeling like this isn't about me being afraid at all, then something is off here.

There's a big delta there, right?

A huge delta. And then Carrie and I were like, okay, what can we do? So we did like some live breath work for people. I made the most money that I'd ever made in my whole life in 2020.

Yeah.

And you went on the road and we just had incredible year that year.

We helped a lot of people.

You went to the board in NLP and you're like, hey guys, I'm going to change the whole system. No worries. Like, we're just going to teach people, test this.

And we did it successfully.

But it's that it's not a focus on positivity. It's, it's a, it's a becoming resourceful. Like Tony Robbins said, there are no unresourceful people, only unresourceful states.

Yeah.

So, like, you and I are the same. We have the same resources available. There's 24 hours in a day, dude. So it begs this question. If the world needs emotionally intelligent cowboys as men and it needs women who are integrated in their feminine, masculine as well, is that where you're building it? Mandorla? Are you building emotionally intelligent cowboys? Are you building emotionally intelligent, powerful peacemakers? Men and women, Right? Emotionally intelligent, powerful peacemakers? Is that what's really going down in Montana?

You know, what a beautiful question, man.

I mean, it's a softball. But it's what I feel. That's what I feel is going on.

I mean, it's a, it is one, I think, great way of articulating it. Absolutely. The, the balancing of the feminine and the masculine energies within us is an entrance we were actually talking about a little bit before the, of podcast. Right. But it's an, it is an essential and intrinsic part of our development. And we will, and, and I, and I'm speaking directly through my own subjective personal experience, we will be limited in our ability to develop as much as we are limited in our ability to look at these aspects within ourselves, especially if we're masculine looking at, at the feminine or feminine looking at the masculine. Right. And learning how do these archetypes and energies play out within ourselves in a conscious way and being able to develop that. And so that is, is, I think, because when we move up to that place of transpersonal, like integral, then even into transpersonal, then we are talking about integrated, balanced systems, right? To where we can choose. Like, okay, so like if, if you said Josh, if you said Scott, this terrible thing just happened and I'm so heartbroken, right? See, if I were to go at that, in that moment and say, oh, okay, let's fix this. That's, that's line energy or masculine. But that's not at all probably what that needs. What you probably need in that moment is me to go, brother, can I hold you? Can I hold you? Because I have no fix for what you're feeling because it doesn't need to be fixed. You follow me? So if I'm aware of that within myself and of the need of you needing to be held in the feminine, in the divine, Mother, then I as a man can actually transmit that for you and be that for you in the moment. Moment. And hold you and love you in that way, either physically or non. Physically, right? But if I don't have that awareness, then if all I've got is a. Is the. I'm going to fix everything because everything that's a problem means it's broken, then I may go at trying to fix that in a way that doesn't actually serve you and probably won't serve you, right? Like, if you ever been in your relationship with your partner and you wanted to share something with her and you didn't want her to say anything back, you just wanted her to hear what you said and love you the way you are. Of course. And that's all you wanted.

Of course.

That's the mother. That's the divine mother. That's the feminine holding, right? That's the being held. But maybe she says, oh, well, that's not a problem. Or, oh, you shouldn't be worried about that. Or, you know, then it's like, oh, you ever feel something like that? Right? It's like, oh, that need to be held in that moment was not honored. Right? So there is, you know, the more. One other thing I've. I have found that I've seen across people as we. The more we develop the. We. We begin to develop the gift of discernment, you know, and discernment is really important, man. I mean, it's. It's. It's something we want to cultivate within ourselves, right? The ability to be present in the moment to what's occurring like that and discern what actually is going to serve in the highest good in this moment. And then being able to let that live through us. Hollow bone.

Yeah, I've experienced that for sure. And I know she, Carrie, Michelle has too. Where we all have been like, hey, here's a hammer and a nail.

Yeah, sure, man.

Oh, baby, you're complaining about something. Let me solve that for you. Yeah, actually, a couple nights ago, I did a really good job. I felt the constriction come up and I just. I learned this from John Gray. I'm sure you talked about it, the retreats as well. I just said, what else, babe? It's that simple. You guys, like, you just ask your woman, what else, babe?

That's it.

But not, not disingenuously.

No. It's got to be from the heart. It's got to be like, authentic.

Because some guys are like, what's the strategy? I have one guy write me Once. Like, what are the five ways that I just diffuse a woman's pain or shut down her argument? It's like, you're already.

Yeah. And it's all. It's all masculine. Yeah. Yeah. So you are.

What else, babe? Man, I've so enjoyed this. And, you know, again, this is the third time I've said this, like, with respect. Right. I ask you this next question.

Yeah.

If I chose to have chronic sinusitis in my life, and there was a purpose behind that that I've shared, and that purpose is that I needed to understand that I stressed myself out, that I put myself through hell when it's just, why am I doing that? Oh, my God. It's because I get to understand how to love Josh. Like, Josh doesn't need to be in chaos all the time. That's not an expression of me loving myself that I want to. I don't play that game anymore.

Okay.

I think that's the meaning that I'm really getting from sinusitis. What is the purpose of you on this cancer journey? You know? What is the true purpose of this for you?

Well, to heal the feminine. To heal the wound and the feminine for me and for the collective. Yeah, that's.

It feels true when you say it.

Yeah.

And the fact that you don't need some long story to say it. It's like that pure. Is that real? It's like that palpable. Yeah, man. Well, I believe in you.

Thank you, ma'. Am.

I know language is spells. Language is so, so powerful. I mean, out of all the. The mentors, teachers, friends that I've had, I would say that the. The structure of language and the conscious use of language. I had already been kind of practicing it before I met you. But just the way even before we recorded, you were like, nice catch on your language, because I was saying something that actually I. Oh, yeah. The universe doesn't hear no's.

Yeah.

All the universe hears just. The universe doesn't hear negatives. God, I just. I. I love you. I believe in you. I already see you in the highest vitality. I mean, I've told you this on the phone a bunch of times.

You have.

But I'm telling you, and I know we all feel you and see you in that, and just. Thank you for connecting the dots, you know? Thank you for connecting the dots. It's not easy.

No.

It might be simple in the way.

You explain it, but actually, something can be simple. Doesn't mean it's easy.

Yeah, you explained it.

It.

But people don't See, that's the tip of the iceberg, right, that you just explained. Like, oh yeah, I'm actually here to heal my own and our collective wound of the feminine. How fucking simple that might seem. Yeah, but the iceberg under the water is like millennia. Yeah, it's millennia for that to. To come to fruition. So how do you guess? How do you guess this will play out for you?

Oh, I guess I'm not much in the guessing work. I don't think about that much. This being what specifically?

The healing journey that you're on. We'll take out the word guess well, you know, replace the word guess.

Well, what's very interesting, man, is. And this is going to go a different direction, but it is where we're going. So having cancer, being on a three year journey with cancer is. I've gone through, through two definitive existential crises. And you know, like we manifested a 30 year dream of mine in the middle of this being Mandorla. And almost 30 years, 28 years. And the just so much beauty and amazingness has happened in the course of the past three years. There are times when I'm like, those existential crises were like, I'm going to die and not get to fulfill my work. I'm going to die and not get to fulfill the next part of my dharmic mission and duty on the, in this life, on this planet. And that was. And I'm going to leave Joni and you know, and like leave her with all this shit that, that she needs me to take care of with her. Right. Like she needs my help because I do a lot of stuff and can contribute a lot in a lot of ways on the mundane, to the complex levels. And, and so it's like those were, those were part of the crises. And what are the essence of the crises? You know, the fear of that loss. And so what. But what I had to do was I had to go into my attachments. I had to go in and explore just like all the way back when I started at that way down in the spiral, you know, 20 something years ago when I started exploring, when Anthony DeMello became a teacher to me. And the Way to Love was a book. I started studying and I started. And everybody get. I invite you to get the Way to Love by Anthony DeMello. It's a book we suggest on our website, but it started teaching me the nature of attachment and how my attachment was suffering and how that actually I was already happy and I was already in love and I already always was that way. But the Only reason I couldn't see it was because of my attachment. And so here I'm all these years later, all this experience and wisdom later, and I'm up against the same thing. Terrified of losing my attachment and in crisis because of it. And so what I did was I spent about two weeks exploring death, or I went and I literally sat and I meditated in death and I meditated in what it was to die, what it was to leave this. Leave this life, leave this body, leave this storyline. And what happened was it all kind of just dissolved. And I, I really have my own experience of there is no death. There is no death, right? And so whatever, if I die next week or die in 30 years or 50 years, it's really of no consequence. You know, my job back to now is to do what is present now, to be love now, to contribute now, not to worry. Like, who cares about time, cares about what time there is left. It's of no consequence. And with no attachment, I'm free. I'm free to be non attached to what happens to Mandorla, to anything, right? It's like, okay, if I'm free, I'm free. And then what's left? Truth is, what's left is to love. That answer your question?

It did. It did.

Okay.

Thank you for sharing, brother.

You're welcome, brother. Thank you.

This podcast has been just exceptional.

Yeah.

And there's so many clips that are going to touch people, people that we're going to share. But I wonder, like, what's a clip or what's a truth that gets to be said that hasn't yet been said? And I'll frame it also, specifically, what is a truth about living this integral wisdom that has not been said?

You know, the thing that just keeps coming. As soon as you asked a question, the thing that was right in my throat was, you're worth it. And I think that comes because. And you're worth what? You're worthy of love, meaning any. All of us, right. You're worthy of knowing yourself as love, you're worthy of being loved, you're worthy of giving love. And I would say it's even at a certain level, all of our obligations and really the only thing that matters, right? So the. Even if. Because depending on where somebody starts, you know, I mean, and I haven't met anybody yet in all these years, work with people that hasn't had some relationship to not being good enough or not being worthy or being a piece of, you know, like all the terrible things we say about ourselves. And no matter where you are or what your story is, whether you're doing really heinous to stay alive, or whether you're contributing in a way that, that, that is making a difference in the world, you're worth it. The thing about it is that everybody would do the work if it were easy, probably. But it's not, you know, it's not. If you want an easier, softer way out of development of the self. I don't know one, you know, it's. We've got to go into it courageously once into the breach again, my dear friend, you know, and the breach is the breach of the shadow of the self, the separation. And so you're worthy of, of the courage it takes to do that and the love that comes from that of yourself and others. And if we're gonna really change the world, you know, for the better or save the world after the meta crisis, we're gonna have to do it from a different place than what got us here, man. You know, we, we've, we've got to do it differently. We've got to do it differently. And so that means we've got to learn to think differently, we gotta learn to behave differently, we gotta learn to understand, have compassion, empathy, care for other people, you know, care for people outside of our own groups, our own families. It's all important. But also we gotta go beyond ethnocentric care to world centric care, hopefully even to cosmo centric. Here, this is, this is where wisdom, I think this is where wisdom should take us.

I know it will. There's a part of me that knows it will. So let's say just to play a game, that we're in cosmo centric right now. We're there, look back and describe how we lived. Well, what is the wellness that we lived in order to be in cosmo centric?

Oh man, what is that? It's. Well, it's. Okay, two major things that are solved in that place is homelessness and starvation. Okay? These are two major things. You take a huge part of the population of this planet, live in poverty, right? And live without education and don't have anything except poverty. So we've somehow, and I hate to use this word, but I don't know how to use it really. This is why we need more people thinking and solving these problems, you know, but we've allocate our resources more and more to helping people rather than strengthening our division between people. Right? So that's a. So what we, the, the higher, more developed, affluent parts of society are, have Contributed. Right. In a way that enables the people who are really suffering at the low levels, who can't get out because of the trap they're in, at least to have a standard quality of life, you know, that cares about the human being. Man. You know, this is. That didn't used to fit in my thinking, but now it does. I can't not see it. You know what I mean? It's like, so it's like that's a big part of it. And then on, on the, on the bigger levels, we, we actually, I think it would look like. I mean, we. This gets tricky. But we can't live anymore as a species on the planet with the separation that we have between borders and values and belief systems and ideals. Used to. It was fine, but now we've got the Internet and everything's connected. Right. We live in a global civilization, not local civilizations anymore. We got to make that distinction. It's important. Important. So, so how do we. And I'm not, I'm not saying one world government, that kind of thing. I don't even know what the answer is. I truly don't. But that we do have a one world system of communicating and solving problems and working together. Right. And that, that generally the, the culture of humanity is a culture of love. If we could look back on it after we had successfully accomplished this evolution into what could be like a golden age of enlightenment or what have you, is that we live predominantly on the planet as a culture of love. And that. And then it gets into a whole. It can get into a whole deeper conversation. Well then. But there are cultures of death on the planet. And how do you deal with those? Because they'd want nothing to do with love. And then it gets into complex conversations because you can't love a culture of death into a culture of love. I don't think. And so that may have to be dealt with in other ways. Yeah.

That's a whole nother three hour.

It's a whole nother three hour podcast. But it's. Do you see when you think.

Absolutely.

When like I. Look, I haven't ever been posed that question you just asked. And I'm grateful that you asked it because I had to answer it in the moment and I really thought about it and look at what a good question to kind of look back after we'd arrived somewhere and like, how did we get there? Like, what did it look like? Like. And then that. That's what comes up for me.

Yeah. So good. So good, man. I, I think about it. What is that? Thing that love. The love story that we're in. Yeah. And the love story is this easily said from your teachings, but I think very challenging to integrate for many of us, and it is. Can I love so generously? You know, my friend passed this year.

Yeah.

He was killed. Christian. Christian Oliver and his two daughters were killed in a plane crash.

I'm sorry for your loss.

And, like, I'm still emotional about it because I did a vision quest with him, and we were there for two weeks, and we bonded, and we. And the one thing that he shared, man, that was so special, he. He shared with Taylor, his. His girlfriend, and she was on a call with us, and we were all, you know, just mourning and going through grief. And she said, you know, he looked at me a day or two before he died, and he said, wow. I. I really understand now what it is to unconditionally love someone.

Wow.

And I'm like, what a. What a gift that was for him.

Wow. Two days before.

What a gift. A day or two before he died.

Right? Wow.

And I'm just like, wow. And I told Taylor, I'm like, thank you so much for giving him that gift.

Yeah, man.

Because that was how Christian and I bonded was our shared pain around understanding the feminine, around integrating the feminine. That's why it's in my logo, you know, Else. That's why it's there, y'. All. So, yeah. That's the love story that I want to write, is that we all, in our lifetime, can just touch unconditional love.

We can, and we can even be it. All right?

So tell them where to go. Tell them where to go, where they can begin the journey.

Okay. For unconditional love. Yeah. Yeah.

And shout out on honoring. To Taylor and to Christian.

Yeah.

And the two girls that are no longer with us.

All the love to you, Taylor and Chris, Christian. And girls, thank you for your contribution.

Yeah. Thank you for reminding me about living generously.

Amen.

You know, where I've already allowed parts of myself to die, and I'm. I'm bullshitting myself. Can I live? Can I fully live now? So thanks to Christian for being that reminder for me to be generous with my life, my time.

Because it's precious, isn't it?

It's so precious.

It's so precious. It is so precious. Yeah. So. Well, there's a few places. Mandora, Integral Wisdom dot com. M A N D O R L A Integral wisdom dot com. And you can just. If you want to sign up there for our newsletter, and we have lots of content that's going to be coming out. We'll just keep you, we'll keep everybody posted on what we're doing and what we're sharing. Content wise. I think we want to share a lot of information and have other people in too that are going to be sharing information through video, audio and written forms. So we want to, like, that's, that's that part of that education information, like helping, you know, to expand this conversation is really important to us. We'll never spam you with a bunch of crap, I promise. Not our thing. Also on IG@mandorla.integralwisdom and personally, you can get me at Scott jackson.miw M as in mandorla I as an integral W's in wisdom. Scott Jackson M I W Dude, so.

Grateful that we got to encapsulate this time.

Yeah, man, me too.

I mean, the, the world is like this, ever changing. We lead full lives and all these cool forces came together. So we could sit here for three hours today, which. This might be the longest podcast we've ever done. Honestly, you and Paul. Check, man.

The biggest.

The biggest podcast we've ever done. Just thank you, man. Thank you for the impact you've made in my life. The positive impact. Your friendship, your mentorship. Just cool conversations about everything. By the way, you can shoot guns and be spiritual.

You can. It's actually fascinating.

Six, five Creedmoors. You can do long distance shooting. Like, it's all spiritual, y', all, because it's all God. From my heart to yours. Thank you for being here with us for the podcast today. Really appreciate you.

Thank you, Josh. Thank you for your love. Thank you for your commitment to what you're doing in the world and your contribution, man, because you're. You're telling your love story, bro.

Let's make it a good one.

It is.

Okay. From my heart to yours. Until Scott and I see you again. I'm sure we'll see him again.

We'll see him again.

We're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, don't go anywhere. Now that you're here, let me say thank you for being a part of this podcast. Click any of the buttons on this screen here or here or anything, anywhere. Because these are specifically matched episodes that you'll really love based on what you just saw. Just tap one of these buttons on the screen and while you're at it, subscribe to the podcast.