[Music] Hey fellow and tears, those of us like a spirit jelly with a twist. So we have been doing a series uh on one of the ideas that comes from the psychologist Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague. And it's part of what we've been doing a lot of in 2025, which is the uh what the hell is up with America theme of the year, trying to figure that out. And we've been talking about that in different ways, just trying to give different perspectives on how to think about this stuff. And then specifically, this episode is going to be a little bit more of a fleshing out of the emotional plague. Ultimately, we're going to do a little mashup with our TCM ideas. And we were alluding that in our last podcast if you happen to be following along. But, uh, I talked with Daniel about it, and he was very magnanimous about doing this a little bit more about the emotional plague overall. uh especially given like uh the time in which we're recording this. We're recording this in September of 2025. We don't like to do news of the week episodes. But I thought it was an interesting thing just like I had my own experiences of like thinking about emotional plague over the last few weeks. So I thought I would just throw it at Daniel and this would be our little our uh deeper exploration of the emotional plague and and we'll see how it goes. Mhm.

But um before we get into the details, I'm do the same thing that everyone always asks you to do, which is to like and subscribe, maybe write a review, maybe shoot an episode off to a friend. It's again, as people always keep saying, it really helps out uh with the emotional plague of the algorithm. So, you know, I wanted to do this Daniel because the last few weeks in America have been so odd and I'm not really doing it again, like I said, as a news of the week, but I had kind of like I just thought we hadn't we we couldn't have come up with a better time to start talking about this idea of emotional plague from uh Reich because it was a pretty like wild experience for me personally. So, I'm just going to share my own sort of sense of like the last few weeks in America, and I'm curious what your sense of that was. And uh uh and I thought I just kept thinking about our episode and like, wow, emotional plague, emotional plague. And it became sort of like one of the core things for me that was like my filter of looking at the events. So, we didn't record last week, but we recorded a couple weeks ago. And uh since that time we recorded uh we had the it was a bigger deal for me, but we had the Shy Shypocalypse now thing that was going on where our particular El Presidentede had sent out this meme that depicted him as Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now. And the text was uh Chicago uh about to find out why it's called the Department of War and like all collapse. And I was thinking emotional plague. Yes. Just toxic, right? And again, Reich's idea is that and we'll go into deeper things about this, but this idea of like things go toxic in a society or a culture. And I was like, that's really toxic. And I actually have like a friend of the show, Justin Key, who's been on here in the past, and uh law degree, maybe not practicing lawyer now. And I was like, well, that's kind of like a threat, isn't it? Like if your neighbor sent you that, wouldn't you like send it over to the local police? And he was like, hm, interesting question. And maybe. So we had that that went on. That was part of my experience of the last few weeks. And then the US started bombing Venezuelan boats. So that happened and uh our vice president when it was pointed out that these are war crimes replied by saying I don't give a [...] what you call it. So that happened and I was thinking emotional plague. And then we went into the next week and we had what's like rattling the country um which is the murder of political activist right-wing political activist and provocator you know uh Charlie Kirk. No one wants to see anyone hurt obviously. Uh I was just thinking like you know homie didn't deserve to die and we can say homie because he's literally grew up like within like a 45minut drive of where I am right now. So that kind of violence happening and then this then triggering all these cries of like war. It's war and now uh people potentially being prosecuted for things that they said. So, attacks on free speech and then ultimately like talking with friends about whoever the the details of this murderer are, which seems to be kind of an insane 22year-old kid in a culture where a lot of 22-year-old kids seem to be a subculture of kids losing it and like devolving into horrific violence. And then there was another school shooting like the same afternoon. So, I was like looking at all of that. Uh I know what my my experience like you know after doing our episode was like uh emotional plague and it was sort of a theme that carried me through like since we did our last recording and I'll throw that to you Daniel now. What was your reaction?

Let's give a little background on emotional plague in case people haven't heard because you know most of the audience is always knew right.

Yeah. So emotional play comes from this psychologist named Wilhelm Reich who was in this circle of people who were kind of powerful psychological figures around Sigman Freud but like a lot of them just kind of branch out and go their own direction. So Carl Jung very famously did this as one of the other psychologists we love on the show and we like Wilhelm Reich and Will the emotional plague has to do with this idea that um you can get toxicities within a culture and it's kind of a way of framing it like a medical model almost like it's a contagion. So I think that use of the word plague is really powerful and it like spreads throughout a culture or a society and then that society goes toxic and all of a sudden you'll see a lot of psychopathology that just spreads through all kinds of layers of that culture in the since we did the last episode I kind of went back to one of you know Reich's books on this. I've read a lot of him. He's kind of an interesting person to read because some of the stuff you're like I don't know about that but other parts you're like oh that's a really powerful idea. So he's a little bit like that when you read him. But he has this book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism. And I want to talk about that one. So we'll dig more into how he thinks this emotional plague things works. But it's kind of framing toxicity in a culture and sort of a medical model having to do with like contagious toxic things that spread out through the culture and then the culture becomes kind of diseased. So anyways, that's a kind of a rough and ready explanation of it. What was it like for you? Were you thinking about emotional plague over the last few weeks or did you have that?

Yeah, I mean I think there's always there there's layers to things right so you have the external layer of reality that is occurring a shared kind of communal experience where you know these things are happening on a on a larger national level if you will happening at different places at different times but because they're so well broadcast that they have an effect on people's lives whether they want to be or not. for those who are engaged in that way anyways you know so you have this as a stressor in the background especially if you're around people again who are plugged in in that way they're definitely drawn into it and want to have conversations around it and want to share thoughts and then if you have some emotional investment then you probably have feelings and thoughts on things you know so there's there's that on one hand and then of course we all have our own lives and you know you had other things happen that we won't you know talk about on air with the family and stuff like this

that family illness happened.

Yeah, family illness you know for thankfully everything you know resolved and is you know at least manageable and good. Um so we so we have this happening too right and so people who are you know listening or myself you know there we're balancing you know you have the external life and then you have your internal life and for a lot of people I think now the internal life is very stressful and in part because the outside life is stressful you know uh economics are changing and you know things like this so it's just people are are online a lot more a lot more than before it's you know relatively cheap you have to basically a phone, you know, and then then everything comes from that thing. It's like your own personal television and then the algorithm that gets tailored to your uh your preferences and then it feeds you what you want to

see and hear or what you don't want to see and hear. But you're pissed off either way, you know, at something or upset, you know, in one way or another. But then you have to deal with your own life stressors, you know, family illness or, you know, relationship drama, work things, financial instability, whatever the case is, you know, emotional stuff. And so this has to be balanced. And I think, you know, for myself, it's been a very uh, you know, tumultuous kind of couple weeks and that everything seems to be very charged. Everything seems to be charged. Now, could that be because that's part of the outside charging everything and making the inside charge as well? Sure. But I I seem to be having a similar discussion with people around their people who they surround themselves with and the environment that gets created when they surround themselves with those people and questioning on whether or not it's worth it to surround themselves with those people. And sometimes that question is their, you know, they're questioning their family, they're questioning their friends, they're questioning the relationships with their in-laws, with colleagues, you know, and they find it to be very acrimonious and asking, is it worth it? Is it worth it to have these relationships? And I I think this is I have been wrestling with this now for the last I don't know 12 months or so. Is it worth it? Are these relationships worth it? And I think about um there's an author that I've read a few of his books over in in the last year um with Ken Mloud. He's uh yeah,

right. And so he's written a couple really great I recommend his books. I we should try to have him on. He's a really good dude. Um and he talks about when people find themselves further down the kind of spiritual path that naturally their group of friends will shift and change and to not try to change it back to just be accepting that these are the people that are going to nourish the next phases of your growth. You don't know where who they are, where they're coming from, but the places that you'll find yourself are going to be in more in alignment where you're going. And so you allow for those people to go as they go or grow with you or not, whatever. And then when you're in a new space, you'll find people who are now are more meeting you with where you are in line now with in line with where you're going. For me, I find that a little bit of a hard pill to swallow. I'm a loyal person. I love long-standing relationships. There's a familiarity, a beauty if I can use uh a euphemism in these kind of relationships where people have seen you grow, where they know you well and you can have conversations

uh not with not with with innuendo that you guys have, you know, stories that you they carry things that they've known they've watched you through some trials and tribulations. on the other side of that coin, you're fixed. Your identity for them is fixed relatively speaking or or fundamentally speaking, you know, and that oh, you're Eric. That's Eric. In the clinic, it's Dr. Baker. And in the classroom, it's professor, but for your buddies or whoever, you know, your family members or whatever, they're like, "Oh, that's Big E. You know, we we, you know, we go way back.

E, he's E dog. you know, we used to eat the sour cream and cheddar uh you know, chips in the back of the school bus or whatever. You know what I'm saying? And so, it's a but it's a it's a delicate balance. And this is kind of like what I've been as I'm going through and as we all are going through what's been happening in people's lives and in the the larger collective life of of a society. It's what do I want to surround myself with? And that's the kind of as every as we go through stuff, this is what's been this is what's been coming up for me. And as I look at society's reaction to things and then and then as a as we've said many times or at least I've said many times society is just a larger version of our own group right and then I look at my own group and say is this what I want to be around or is this the kind of reaction that I want to subject myself to in terms of my friends who family or whoever who I keep near me is this worth it because I don't want to prune people because I don't agree with them or I share the same views or whatever. I think that that can also be very toxic as well because then now you're not exposing yourself to other ideas and then now it's you're one step away from joining a cult. You know what I'm saying? Oh, these people all agree with me. They must be great cuz I'm right, of course. And so they're right because they agree with, you know, so so that doesn't do well either. So I'm just trying to find that the the line between those things. And it's it's not a very clearly delineated one from my perspective. This is awesome because we both are kind of just talking from the heart. I think we both are, right? And it like it does wrap around to part of what I was like kind of thinking about with this emotional plague stuff, you know, because there's a kind of a a very personal model within that too. And then there's a way of talking about kind of collective and it does hit on what you're talking about. I know what you're going to think about kind of maybe what Reich has to say about some of those issues. But, you know, I'm curious what you think. But, you know, it is a medical model.

And part of what he says is that there's always a kind of an undercurrent of like a kind of insanity within a society.

There's always a bit of crazy going on. And uh you know his argument with that goes and I'm maybe more I don't even know Daniel I might be a little bit more of a radical believer in this than you are but we can kick it around you know where he's like you know there's this kind of um things that you find in Dowism and in Tantra and so on where you have the society always kind of little crazy always trying to stifle the individual person and their spiritual development and it has to be transcended in some way in the sense that they kind of disturb

the natural sort of expression and evolution of individual can get kind of smooshed. So, this is sort of like the chronic problem of emotional plague and he's kind of hardcore on that and I do believe that in that in some level when I was going back and looking at this mass psychology of fascism book again, you know, again, one of the rarer books I didn't read from him. I read a bunch back in the day.

Mhm.

And uh I I'll throw the theory out and you can see what you think and then I think it does apply to like how we surround ourselves with people too because he's has something kind of powerful to say about that. We'll get your feedback on it. So he kind of says that the core of human nature is good.

I would

and I think there's a kind of a Dowist or Buddhist vibe. Sometimes you call that Buddha nature, sometimes you call that the original Shen. There's a kind of a core thing and we mention it in different episodes when this has come up with him in the mass psychology of fascism. He says, "Well, people want to love, people want to learn and gather knowledge, and people want to be involved in create productive activity. That's the core of human nature." And I like that idea, right? So very positive kind of values

and he's like the way he kind of frames his model and this is something that maybe each of us can try to maybe visualize like you know you can almost imagine like that's the core of the thing and there's going to be these outer layers kind of surrounding

like an onion.

Like an onion. So much of life is like an onion.

Makes you cry.

Uh yes. And then it feels spicy when you eat it. Um, so, um, so then what he says is like, and he does pin this, some of these things can be based on like personal traumas, but a lot of this has to do with like his idea of the emotional plague overall. And what I find striking about it was like you have these kind of good sort of instinctive drives within people and they get distorted by external conditions and kind of and and in the distortion they become kind of toxic. So this is kind of an interesting take. You know, you can have natural instincts for love and knowledge and creativity and those things get stifled or they get kind of distorted. And then those energies that want to express itself in these positive ways kind of go chaotic or go toxic and you get this layer inside the person that has all of this conflict and all this potential toxic emotionality around it. Like he talks that way,

you know? So I think that's a very interesting idea. It probably has some overlap with like Buddhist ideas of like ego or something like that too where you get all these distorted kind of things going on.

He doesn't reference anything that's you know Asian culture at all

but he does talk that way and I thought okay so that's a model he's building up right the core is positive and then there's another layer he's proposing that this kind of goes distorted and toxic because the energies get again distorted. It's an interesting way of framing energy, right? The energies can't go to their natural conclusions. So, they get all like diverted and and just like distorted again to use that word or like misdirected and all of a sudden they become internal pathology within people. This seems to be his experience of like working with people

you know. M I have been you know if you're if people are paying attention to what's been happening I think in general over the la you know this year basically you if you want to have conversations around and and get people's thoughts and share your own I I've been asking my I've been asking people before we engage in a conversation there has to be some clear understandings on what we think about human beings

and the kind of the Couple questions I ask are three. One, do you believe that everybody is good at heart? Their core is good. Do you believe this? And number two, do you believe that everybody is an equal?

And then number three, do you believe that everybody deserves, you know, life, liberty, the health, the pursuit of happiness? Do you think believe that everybody has the same rights as a being? Because you could say everybody's equal, but these people deserve more. You know what I'm saying? So,

or like Yeah. Or like rights to love, knowledge, creative, you could frame it even in that way if you want to tap into like the core positivities, you know, however you want to do it.

Yes.

Yeah. But those those three things, if the answer is yes to those three things, then we can have a a civil discourse and agree on how we're going to come to conclusions or agreeing to disagree or we just we're looking at a problem from a different perspective, but ultimately we're we're trying to come to a conclusion that would be beneficial for a group or hopefully the larger group, but at least some people within this group. But if the answer to those other questions is no, that you don't believe that people are good at heart or only some are. I said all people, it has to be, it has to be all, all or none. This is one of the few times that I'll do that, right? And you don't believe that all people are equal. And that you don't believe that people have uh a a basic right to pursue love and wisdom and health and you know, happiness and all this other kind of stuff, right? If you don't believe in those things, they're kind of I know for me, and I don't want to put walls up, but there's not we're we're we're already off. We're already looking at things because I I can't really engage in a in an intellectual or even forget intellectuality in a heart in a heart-c centered discussion on on humanity and human beings existence because we don't hold human beings existence in the same light. There's the chosen ones and then there's the trash. And I don't believe that. So I may not agree with you, but because I think the way that I do and I feel the way that I do, I believe that you, this invisible argument person, has the same rights to life, liberty, happiness, wisdom, everything else that I do. I believe that we both have the same core, and I believe that we are both equals. We just see things differently. Other than that though, I'm not really going to be able to discuss policy or ideas on how to fix problems because we're not looking to fix the same problem in a different way. You're looking to do something else that is not part of this discussion.

Yeah. It's interesting because it like frames like some grounded conversation that you have to have as a place just to start. If we can't agree on these fundamental things,

correct? But if we get on the same page with these fundamental things, hey, maybe we do have an opportunity to go further and flush this out. Those are like obviously very deep questions to ask people. I don't want to

put you on the spot to share anything too personal with who you talk to about it, but how have people responded when you ask them that kind of stuff?

So far,

people in your own circle, so

people in my own circle, yeah, so far fine. You know, I I only ask, and here's the thing, I only ask them when I question if they believe it. people who I know I probably don't ask because I already kind of know.

Just a full confession, Daniel uh Daniel hasn't asked me these questions yet.

I have not asked you these questions yet.

The answer will be yes.

Three yeses.

So I generally ask them uh for people who I believe very differently from.

You're trying to establish ground. Let's find some common ground that we

Let's find some common ground. Yeah, we can still disagree. I mean, human beings like to resonate close together. It's just a natural tendency of talking in person, which is why when you're doing things online, you have this level of uh disassociation from the other person's energy and you can totally argue with them with on everything because there's the natural tendency to try and find commonality is gone. And then by the time you might see them in person, you've already demonized or vilified them to be something that is, you know, worth, you know, demonizing or worth injuring or worth, you know, not worth talking to as a a normal human being that you would see if you met on the street.

You also get the Key and Peel effect in my mind. You know, they have that bit where the two dudes are texting each other. Yeah. And everything goes off the rails.

Yeah.

And uh who is it? Jordan Peele, right? and he's kind of like just high and playing video games and everything's cool with him and the other's guy's getting more and more mad.

Because he thinks he's mistreating him and these texts he's getting more and more pissed off. If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth a search, you know.

That's right. Yeah.

By the end, they're meeting up in the bar and the one guy's bringing in a baseball bat full of nails. He's going to the guy with it

and his buddy's like, "Hey."

You know, and I won't ruin the end of the bit because it's funny. I don't want to no spoilers beyond that, but you know, it's funny to watch, right? Yeah. And it does capture like you can write things that you'd never be able to say to somebody's face. You just wouldn't be able to do it. It'd be so

to obviously toxic.

Also, you might get punched before you get that that far. Anyways, you know what I'm saying?

I think like the emotional plague part of it then is like I think Reich would say something like if you can't come to an agreement and those are three powerful questions. If you can't come to that then I think he's going to start diagnosing it. We can agree or disagree on that, you know, but I think he's going to start saying, "Okay, if you can't come to those fundamental principle ideas and say, okay, yeah, I'm in." Then there's some kind of emotional plague operative because then it's kind of a way of medicalizing this for what it's worth. And then he would say, "Yeah, it's part of something that's gone wrong." And maybe this is a comfortable spot for us to be in, Daniel, because I do feel, you know, with all the funky [...] that's happened in the bigger spirit things in the last few weeks. I feel much more comfortable talking about it in a clinical way because we're clinicians and I find it to be helpful, you know, so let's clinicalize this, you know, and say, okay, well, without even really, it's an optimistic model in what would seem like a pessimistic thing.

Yes. You start saying emotional plague, everyone's like, "Oh man, that sounds really pessimistic." But he's not pessimistic at the core and in a certain sense it's optimistic because you can say, "Well, if we can get past or start to sort out these aspects of EP, emotional plague, then we can get to a place where probably at the core we can come to a much more compassionate, loving, accepting part of like human nature. But it's this [...] in the middle." Then he has one other piece that he adds. And again, this is kind of based on his clinical experience and you know, he was a clinician like we're clinicians maybe, you know, uh we can all get maybe get if you're not a clinician, you get in a clinical mindset and thinking about this because he was working one-on-one with people and as he started to kind of like explore what he thought felt was going on in the human psyche and we'll also talk about future episodes how this affects the body. We referenced that last episode. We'll get back to it. But

but the idea that um then there's a kind of an outer facade that gets formed around people.

And it's interesting the way he talks about it because in some ways it's a little bit like I still have to function in the world. I have all these sort of like inner anxieties and angers and bitternesses that are part of this emotional plague part. And at the core there's a much more positive part. So it's like a threepart onion. And the outer layer is more like, okay, I might have what would look like a kind of a nicer persona or something, right? But maybe in my private moments, I go home and I'm super angry online and I'm like swearing at people and saying all kinds of toxic [...] and it just pours out, you know? But I go to work the next day and I'm like that that's put on the shelf for that time or that's suppressed on some level and I function throughout the day and then you know given the right circumstances all this stuff will get a chance to vent itself out.

And it fits into that online thing. You know people get that moment like now the emotional plague is going to finally come out because I was like you know nice the whole day or something. Right.

That's an interesting kind of take. I thought that's an interesting way to think about human beings you know.

Yeah. uh you know you can do whatever you want with this you know we're all trying to learn by looking at these thinkers you know that's part of what we try to do on the pod but I was like that's interesting you know and people will be have this outer layer that seems much more socialized on some level that they can like interact with others and then there's this more toxic part so I found that to be really interesting to think about over the last couple of weeks since we did the other episode because I was like yeah that's an interesting model you get the outer core you get the inner core the facade on the outside you get the inner core which is full of all this positive energy that then all that energy again like we were talking about before gets distorted and takes on this sort of toxicity if you can straighten it out or get through it then you can get back to something much more positive at the root so I I'm really attracted to the idea I like it

you know he does frame it as sort of like a chronic problem and as I was medicalizing this for myself I was like well this is sort of the chronic illness of things right this is sort of a perpetual problem, you know, that you have to work through if you're trying to sort yourself out as a person and that's a very individual level. I think for what you were talking about earlier, and I don't know what I think totally about this, but he does he takes a hardcore position in part of the towards part of this which we may not agree with, but part of his position is if you are trying to straighten yourself out when you get around other people who are emotional plagy, it [...] with you. So he does say that, you know, it'll be hard for you to like if you are straightening this out, it'll be hard to be around other people who are kind of emotional plagy or maybe they'll be harder in the beginning. So I know what you think about that, but he kind of says he almost frames it like because it's a like a contagion, you'll get like reinfected or something. So it's a hardline position. I don't know if I agree with it, but I'm throwing it out there.

Yeah, I feel like that's resonance, right? And that's um we talked about I I talked about this just a little bit ago in terms of people keeping people around, you know, and checking that being critical a little bit about your relationships and deciding on who and how you want to have people around you and what they do to you right on based on their reactions. If so, where I would agree is that like if you're not fully settled into your current beliefs cuz our beliefs are changing. I mean, some things are tenants. You know, they're there forever basically and some things are, you know, we're searching still. You know, I feel like it's, you know, there's like a civ and the things that get through stay at the bottom. They're there. Other things are keep they keep getting filtered. They keep getting filtered as they should be. You know,

if you're still in the in the deep filtration process and not a lot of things have made it through the civ to the bottom to really be solidified, yes, you're going to be knocked off your rocker much more easily as one would expect. However, if you are I don't want to say ingrained because it seems maybe cultish, but like if you are grounded in what it is that you believe, if you have if you've worked through it, if you've seen it in practice or if you've lived it long enough that you have seen the positive effects that whatever you're doing or believing have on your life, then other people who don't share those beliefs or even share contrary beliefs doesn't phase You can hold two disperate ideas simultaneously and not be broken by that, you know, because the the it's not so much that it's changing you in and what you think. is just it brings up a challenge and maybe you can find some merits in what someone's saying, but ultimately it's not changing the gold that you have found in the things that have brought you peace and harmony in your life because that is not it's not giving that to them or at least you don't believe that to be the case because if it was then this conversation will look entirely different. Well, it's kind of like a buddy sappa thing, too, because you can go out into an area and still hold your own energy and like then you're trying to uh I mean this is this is true what people will say about this in the kind of a Buddhist tantric world or dowist world or whatever world we're in

that you know that person who's coalistic Sufic whatever you know uh Sufi world you know that that person's able to hold this space of a kind of a positivity

even though there may be negative things going around around Mhm.

Sometimes what might be useful for this kind of thing is, and it's it sounds harsh and potentially judgmental, but sometimes you can just say, "Oh, well, that's an emotional plague thing going on with this person." And it's a little bit of a harsher thing to think or say,

but you can It's maybe what I found to be a little bit I'm not talking about at an individual level now. I'll get to the social level in a second, but sometimes that's just helpful to do.

Mhm. just to be able to say, "Oh, there's a toxicity going on in this particular relationship or this particular group of people. This has gone emotional plague and okay, you know, and you can just feel comfortable saying, okay, that's what it is, and that's the reason I'm having conflict in this situation." And all right, that's my diagnosis. So, we're being clinical

and it sometimes it like takes the it takes the tension and the complexity out of things and just like go, okay,

all right, you know, this person's having like this is what Reich would do. Well, this person's having an attack of the emotional plague. That's fine. All right. They're going through an attack of the emotional plague, and you know, we we'll try to do what we can. This will calm down, and we'll be able to interact again or something, you know?

So, he would talk that way. Like, it would be an illness that would flare in people.

I could go that way.

Let me let me

little harsh, but clinically kind of interesting and sometimes psychologically helpful. Sorry. Yeah.

No, you're good. Let me run this analogy by you. So the way that I think about this and I have thought about this and I've you know talked about this before at various teachings and whatnot that that I have done that we have done is that I if you know you have a couple let's say tuning forks and I hope I hope people know what tuning forks are but let's hope that they understand what those are. And if you you whack one and you put it next to another one, the other tuning fork will start to vibrate because the vibrations from the first tuning fork will affect the second tuning fork. Well, if we imagine ourselves as tuning forks, when we are in community with other people, they're all tuning forks. They're all everybody's affecting each other, right? And this kind of like uh cohesive effect in a negative sense is the emotional plague,

right?

And so if you think of somebody who is unaffected by this plague, if you will, their tuning fork is not really affected by the other ones. And this is kind of like, you know, the the bodhic sappa or say a saint or something like this, you know, um or just a good person in general. In my from my understanding, it's not that they are protecting their tuning fork. They're not guarding their own personal resonance because that would take too much energy and they would probably not be able to function. If you imagine hundreds of thousands of tuning forks in in Times Square and maybe one or two that were unaffected from all of the other, you know, sounds and tunes from the other forks, it would require so much energy. You'd have to be on guard all the time. You'd be like an egg that eventually would something would crush you and now you're all your energy would have been built up, you know, in order to protect yourself and there would be not much to protect on the inside because you'd be just doing more protecting than cultivating. you know that I have found and I and I think I think my understanding is right. We'll see what you think. Um that it's not about protecting that resonance. It's actually about deeply letting it go and that realizing that everything is connected and everything is resonating but not at the frequency that we believe that we're resonating on. There is a much larger unified resonance that occurs through all things. And these, as we like to say, temporary localized phenomenon resonate and dissipate like anything and everything else because everything is impermanent. And so you don't have to necessarily, you know, protect or guard or, you know, try to keep all the kind of like darkness away. It's that you're not there as you believe yourself to be. Yes, on one hand you're a tuning fork for sure, but on the other hand, you're totally [...] not. And your resonance is actually, in my opinion, in my opinion, not touched, not deeply touched anyways by the rest of these people's frequencies and resonances that they're sharing with you because you're not attached to it. You're you're operating independently. Even though you're still totally connected, you're also independent. I know that these things that that this idea or these ideas are um they're juxtaposed to each other and there's some maybe amount of like cognitive dissonance that exists within there. But that level of understanding, that challenge on making those things that seem dissonant and opposite are for me what I believe is just layers of ignorance and within myself and in the ability to explain that at this particular time in my understanding. So with that as the preamble,

just as a like a little bit a thing, we have this uh bit in the pod dedication comes up called the shower curtain of wisdom,

which is a shower curtain in the bathroom across this hall over here. And one of the quotes is from one of our favorite people, Robert Thurman, Bobby T has been a guest on our podcast a couple of times. You can check out the episodes, Uma's dad. and he says something like I'm paraphrasing but something like enlightenment is the ability to transcend cognitive dissonance or something like that.

Wow. Okay.

So anyways, it's on the little shower curtain over there. I have all these quotes from sort of like uh great people like Robert Thurman uh has given to me as a gift. Anyways, yeah, I hear it. And you know, I there's a martial arts way of thinking about this maybe which is like I can put up shields.

But there's another way of doing it and I think for me it came from one of my Chinese traditional Chinese men medicine mentors and Dowist mentors, Master Shangley Wong, Dr. Wong, who I studied with back when I was getting my, you know, TCM traditional Chinese medicine training and degree in grad school. And uh he did it differently. It was a little bit more what you're talking about because you're interconnected with this great sea of energy. You're in the great you're part of the great sea of energy. It's not just you your energy. You know, you're tapped into all of this. And if you can get into that space, then uh what is happening with other people isn't that powerful. You know, if you feel like you're connected to the ocean, some little wave over here or there isn't going to be as disturbing to you,

you know, because you're like an ocean, right? Mhm.

And uh and that kind of affected me a lot. And I think

I used to worry about that kind of stuff. Do I have to shield myself?

You know, and you can do shielding things. I mean, you can do them and they work and they're cool and there's Buddhist tantra versions of shielding and so on. But, you know, in a lot of the more powerful stuff, Tibetan things and Dowist things and so on, it's this connection to the this bigger field of energy. Mhm.

And then it's not just your little resonance having to compete with the resonance against other people who will be resonating other ways. You're part of a big sea of resonance.

So that's kind of how I have felt about those things.

Cool. All right. Well, I guess I'll go like so in Reich's thing and I agree with that there's kind of a chronic illness of emotional plague and I again could be a little bit more radical on it. We can all decide where we want to be on a continuum of how we would think about this. But I tend to think a lot of stuff is emotional plague. It's a big theme in the podcast and like get away from it. You want to change your life, get away from emotional plague, you know, and that fits in the Raikian model. You want to get to that core thing, jettison the emotional plague. And then you'll find yourself much easier to get to these things that are the loving and the knowledge and the creative like productive activity. I love that model. I think it's awesome. And it's kind of like bases on the idea there's something chronic. If we use the infectious disease thing, what hit me as I was thinking about it is that sometimes this emotional plague goes like acute and that can happen in an individual. They can flare, right? Like someone who has like a risk of something flaring, a chronic illness or something or this might happen like in a social sense, you know, and he does try to address this question, you know, sometimes you can get things going toxic all over the place within a culture or within a society. And I thought, well, that in a weird way, all this stuff felt very comforting to me, even though things have been very chaotic over the last few weeks, you know, and I kind of shared my experience of it. So, and I kind of thought, well, it's a little bit like there's a chronic illness and then it may flare like and I the metaphor maybe medically, you know, might be like someone has an autoimmune disease, you know, and they're okay and it's a little bit they're ill and it's whatever and then that disease may flare. and all of a sudden you see it like rupture out, right? If you're not that medical of a person, you can imagine like maybe people who have something like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, they're okay, they're okay, things aren't perfect, but they're in this range and all of a sudden everything flares, you know, and they have all these symptoms. And I thought, okay, that's kind of what we're going through. But we're going through like a flaring of, you know, the chronic has exploded into something acute and we're just like kind of in the in the raw of that for a little bit. You know, there's this insidious thing that we may all have to deal with and then suddenly that autoimmune disease goes goes acute and toxic and then you all of a sudden you have this acute flaring. And I thought, okay, that kind of fits as a medical model for me, too. you know, we're in the midst of sort of like a flaring of something kind of toxic. And again, I don't know how this feels to other people, but I felt I found this again like oddly comforting just to like recognize that and go, okay,

this is what's happening around us. And it's kind of like through all the different layers, you might say in the social world that we're living through now, all kinds of toxic [...] is happening like everywhere. It's going really toxic, right? And it's a flaring of this emotional plague. Maybe recognizing that doesn't solve it, but it like to me it like it was a sort of a simplifying thing to realize, you know, maybe the simplicity of it kind of appealed to me. I don't know what you think, Daniel, but I was like, "Okay, I get it." You know, whether it's something that's happening on a big governmental level or things that are happening within other parts. Okay, we're in the midst of like a flaring of the emotional plague. It's not good, you know, it's not good, but at least I can kind of frame and say, okay, that's what it is. And there's again something in the simplicity of that. Maybe it is medical, too. And maybe it's like being medical thinkers. You know, you had a whole bunch of symptoms in someone and you're like, what the [...] is happening? Why are all these symptoms flaring? And you say, oh, it's that.

Okay, at least now we have a place to start.

That's what it is. you know, like someone who has I mean, I guess a lupus is one of the good examples of this. If we're going to go fully medical, you might have all kinds of crazy symptoms and you know, we've all talked to patients who like you and I both talked to patients who have this, maybe other people, you know, you know, someone who's gone through something medical mystery, what's going on, you know, they go in and eventually someone says, you know, it's this and at least you have a place to start, you know, and it simplifies things out. I know. Does that resonate with you all at all, Daniel? It was helpful to me.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean it's a it's an opportunity to understand phenomenon that seem to be lacking description on a rational level without having this understanding. And so while this doesn't necessarily explain everything, but it does give you a bit of a understanding as to what's happening. And then you know we love to you know analogies help people understand. So you say okay society is an organism. This is an illness within that organism. The only question I have is who is this organism's doctor? Is it God?

Yeah. Well, it's going to have to be like us as the microbes within the organism trying to fix [...]

That's what we are. We're two little macrofasages just running around. Although we're we're we're skilled, so we're probably more like tea cells, you

We're trying to be like this. That's it. We're trying. killer T- cells, not the T8s. We're trying to be like the Yeah, we wouldn't take that name on oursel. Yeah,

we're we're cytoines for those who are familiar with molecular biology at this point, you know.

Um but yeah, no, I agree. And that's uh that's the gist of the show in general.

Yeah, I mean I think like I get and again if this speaks to anybody else, you know, I kind of like Okay, got it. You know, because I was listening to different people, even people that I like before we did the podcast, there was like I hit on something with like Scott Galloway, Professor G, right? And I'll listen to him occasionally. He's not someone I listen to all the time, but I know you listen to him sometimes, too. He's good.

Yeah, he's good. Yeah.

And I was listening to him try to like explain what was going on, you know, his impressions. And he's a smart guy, very articulate.

Yeah. Professor Galloway. Yeah. What's funny about him is that his newsletters and his speaking voice sound the same. He writes like he talks.

Yes, for sure.

Yeah. So, I was like kind of going like, okay. And I I was listening to him and I was like, you know, emotional plague, you know, and I was listening to somebody else. Everyone's having explanations for things.

Right.

And I was like, you know what? Time out. Emotional plague. Right. And then you can go through and you can say well the toxic parts of something like uh Trumpism and MAGA those toxic things are emotional plague and the political violence is emotional plague and the school shootings are an emotional plague and okay we have something going toxic in the culture right

and so I maybe the simplifying of that felt kind of good

right and you know then you can kind of spread it out and maybe even gets over both sides of them because I was like I don't want to be a both sides person. I do think that there's real danger in what's happening in the political climate now. I think this is a dangerous administration.

I'm not going to softball that, right? But at the same time, like, you know, the Dems tried to put up a dementia patient to run against this guy and that's emotional plague, too. It's toxic. There's something wrong, right? And I don't know if that helps us all in the end, but maybe there's this thing of just recognizing, okay, something's gone toxic. And maybe that's a place to

And say, hey, time out. we got going something going on that's kind of toxic and maybe if we realize that more and more then maybe we're able to like snap ourselves out of it or something right

that's hope

and stop being well overwhelmed by like the toxicity but maybe that's a start you go okay let's make a diagnosis

you know and we'll just make it I know it's sweeping on some level but I think Reich is trying to be sweeping on some level because sometimes things just go they just go funky ass right and this has gone funky

I always keep a broom nearby, you know.

Yeah. Yes. So, things go bad. Things go bad and you have to go, okay,

that's what it is.

Maybe we diagnose this thing and it simplifies it down. So, okay.

All right.

That's our emotional plague episode.

That's it. Well, thank you as always.

Thank you,

audience. Thank you for uh thank you for tuning in. Thanks for listening. Uh like, comment, subscribe, share our work, do the things that people ask you to do because it's free and uh it helps. If you have any uh questions, comments, concerns, complaints, the the micro C that no one likes to talk about, please feel free leave a comment in the YouTube section. Uh usually we get back to you. Uh unless I really don't like what you say, then my mom told me if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all. Uh so that's that. Or send us an email at jinantandragmail.com or hit us up on the gram. The Jin and Tantra podcast for Eric. This is Daniel. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.