[music]

Hey fellow G&T ears, those who like their spirituality with a twist. Daniel was trying to screw up my intro. He's always the playful Daniel.

[laughter]

All right, love you Daniel. It's awesome. So, okay, we have been doing what would be like a passion project, especially of Daniel's, which is to always try to remember COVID anniversary day and look at how those events continue to relate to our present admittedly [...] up situation. This is kind of the capper episode in that little project of ours. We had previously looked at like big picture changes that led to the current disaster that we're in. And you know, that was those are great episodes, you can check those out, but I had the idea of also wanting to look at like the implications on more of an individual level. And I was really I've been intrigued by this idea the great resignation. Everyone remember that? The great resignation? We'll remind you if you forgot, right? And how did it affect individuals? And along the way we're going to do a very G&T thing cuz we're going to look at some other things that are um thought-provoking, especially things from the great philosopher Hannah Arendt. And how she talks about uh how you handle things when life gets rough in this way. So, that'll be one of the big questions for us. How does Hannah Arendt's concept of spontaneity help us to deal with psycho-spiritual things and especially when the environment is getting kind of oppressive. So, that's our thought question of the day, I suppose. Um before we get into the episode, um let's kind of do the usuals though. If you could do whatever one constantly asks you to do to like and subscribe, to share an episode, to write a review. Do all the great things, you know, uh we're going to try to uh you know, keep bringing out good spiritual stuff and we appreciate your help in helping that our little pod grow and thrive. Thanks so much. All right. Um So, I had this idea of really putting together like some different things to talk about this whole set of issues, the great resignation. And what happened to individuals as we went through this kind of shared experience of uh the COVID times, you know. So, I thought, well, we'll do a typical G&T thing. We'll put up put a bunch of stuff in the cocktail shaker. We'll give it a shake and we'll see what comes out. And uh first off, starting with the whole concept of the great resignation and like what was that? And my thinking on that, Daniel, was it was on the on the one hand it had to do with like people think rethinking their work lives, right? Was part of that idea and when the COVID events happened, people began to think, why am I doing this crap [...] with my life the way I normally am? Cuz it kind of again shook everything up for people and people started to really question. And I also saw in that at the time and still do sort of like deeper implications. Like maybe it would be not only just questioning what was happening in the workplace, but questioning like what was going on in people's lives like overall. Like, why am I doing these things? And that incredible thing that can happen when like obviously the sweeping thing of mortality and then the huge shake-ups around that all happened and it led to a lot of sort of existential questioning for a lot of people. Uh so, to my mind that really kind of gets to the spiritual idea of like uh in the tantric Buddhist path, this idea of preciousness of human life, you start to really question why you know, or realize the value of your life and then the next thing that happens is my life isn't going to go on forever and that probably should use it in the best way possible. So, those are sort of like the first of these things. Those are sort of my thoughts around that great resignation thing. I think it was partially about work, but I think it was also partially about like existential meaning and what you felt like your life was about. Did that strike you in a similar way? Yeah, I I thought it was almost some necessity also. Like there was a a pushback from society or from people, you know, but it was it was a shared feeling on what they should be doing and what they should value and a lot of how they were raised and and what it is that should be important to them. Mhm. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think I agree. I think we're on the same page. I think it had to do with work, but it had to do with a lot of bigger questions where people are like things got shaken down to the core and people started asking these very, you know, pressing questions. And then part of my theory on this and we'll see what you think too is that like I think was in a certain sense kind of threatening. You know, I think it offered a threat to the system if you want to be Bob Marley about it. That's that's just it and I actually heard somebody give a talk today and so she was she was talking about how actually like, you know, cuz we're recording during this, you know, sort of like axis of Epstein war uh with Iran. And she was saying Iran doesn't need a nuclear weapon because what what is what do nuclear weapons do? They provide uh deterrence, you know? And and the deterrent is not how many people it can kill because you can kill many people with tradition traditional bombing. Many many many. We killed more people in Japan with napalm than we did with the atomic bombs. But it's economic enforcement of your will upon global economic or global economics. And Iraq could just open and close the Strait of Hormuz, which serves much more uh of an impact has much more of an impact on the global economics than the threat of a nuclear bomb. And why that matters because when you can affect economics, you can affect policy and you can affect change. And so if we go back and we look at COVID, what was the biggest effect? Was the economic impact of people not working. And so, you know, regardless of what people think about the effectiveness of vaccines or should we have worn masks or not worn masks or whatever, lots of people died during that period. But that wasn't really the issue. The issue was that economic production had dipped. And that had to be addressed sooner rather than later because that was had effects on the mar very real effects on the market. It was even recently J.D. Vance was like, yeah, we're not going after PP people who took PPP money for less than like 2 million. So, that means there are people who took PPP money, of some whom I know, of 800,000, million, million and a half, free. Don't worry. How did you

That was the stuff that was happening during like the pandemic to help like finance stuff out and it was trickling through Yep. Yep. So, it just goes to it's always money, man. It's always And I was thinking about that. Obviously, you know, it is what do you call it? The the axis the axis of Epstein or something.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um So, yeah, there's the the obviously the threat's economic. We don't have to talk about it, but it is strange whether whether people really get how threatening this is. It's really threatening obviously economically what's happening now for everybody. Um but if you lash back in the time machine, again, that was I was thinking about, you know, the great resignation and people started going, why am I working this way in these jobs that I don't like? Especially when your mortality comes into question, you can go, why am I doing this? You know, when I think about my life being more finite, all of a sudden you have that hidden spectrum of like mortality thing coming out again, which is of course primary spiritual question. Why am I living my life the way I am when I know it's finite? You know, it's one of those it's the first question, right? In the tantric stages of the path, that's the one. Um and then, you know, again with the same thoughts like how threatening that is. And I've been kind of into the idea of like to be to pursue an enlightenment mind, right? You want to be able to have sweeping observations and part of it is about economics, right? To recognize how that affects people. Yeah. Which has been kind of a subject in some of our episodes, you know, we've been addressing questions. Yeah. Well, the other thing I want to add to it to the mix of our little cocktail this conversation was I'm going to go one more time to the Robert Kagan stuff. He's kind of a conservative political writer in some ways. Yeah. But um he has this book rebellion and like I said, I'm always researching for our pod, G&T ears. I'm always trying to do something. So, you know, that was the whole idea of the liberal versus anti-liberal forces that have come up in some of our conversations. And I see this then what we're going through now is kind of like the big anti-liberal in his sense backlash, right? The backlash has happened and we're living in the confines of that and this is going to affect everybody like psycho-spiritually. You had this moment of like questioning and uh now you get the backlash effect. And I'm interested in the anti-liberal thing is, you know, again, not just being an American thing, but being kind of like just a general force in in human life and history that you're always having

Yeah, give me the two definitions again cuz we talked about that last episode. Yeah, yeah, it's it's liberal, which is always emphasizing the idea of personal freedom, personal choice of identity. This level of freedom would be the word that would probably go with it most clearly. And then the anti-liberal is always kind of resisting that to force things into something that's much more controlled and potentially much more oppressive. Mhm. So, it's a big subject matter, I know, and I I I really kind of enjoyed the book, so I can recommend it if, you know, you're interested in these kinds of things. If you want to make it super concrete in terms of American life, you can have uh you know, uh basic aspects of American history that kind of fit within this, like, uh, racism as an anti-liberal thing throughout the history of America, and, you know, the more toxic aspects of religion, those parts that become oppressive and controlling, right? As part of the American anti-liberal thing. And these are all subjects that we care about, obviously, in our pod. Misogyny and patriarchy, a big one for us, too, right? The oppression of women being part of this. Uh, homophobia as being and especially if you go to that whole period of time around COVID, a lot of just anti-LGBTQ stuff overall. And kind of this backlash against people's expression of sort of gender identity and being able to assert their own kind of sense of their own who of they want to be. You know, these are all sorts of things that were really like exploded out in that time period, almost across the board. And then there's we're living in a backlash. And Kagan's framing would be like, "Okay, this is what happens. You get a surge of individual liberty and the pursuit of like self-expression, self-freedom, and then you get the oppressive backlash, and there's a tension." Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but yeah.

you're good. Yeah, but so like if you think if we even go back a little bit further, you know, before COVID, you had the Me Too movement, right? Which was which was like sort of like I mean, there's not a woman here to discuss it, but from from a not from a man's perspective, from an outside perspective, I guess I would refer to myself as having one, is the peak of feminine power, if you will. From a societal perspective, it doesn't necessarily mean like in the boardroom there's more women hired or or anything else like this, but women's voices were were were put forth. Surge in any case, right? That surge forwards of assertion of like, "Okay, enough, right? Enough."

Yeah. Yeah, and then, you know, obviously, Harvey Weinstein and all this kind of stuff, right? And then that went right into COVID, and then you had the like the the gender identity things and the trans stuff. And so we still have the the echoes of that are still happening now, but look at what the the rebound to that, right? So the reb- in my mind, the rebound to Me Too was the loss of abortion rights. Yeah. Mhm. And the rebound to the identity stuff is the supreme vilification of sexual identity at this particular time. Mhm. So while you have one movement happen that seems to sort of like erupt naturally, now there might be conspiracy folks that say that those things are agendas put forward by the, you know, liberal billionaires or whatever, but I think it I I feel like genuinely they they take a long time to bubble up. You know, Harvey Weinstein had to rape like a lot of women before one of them or few of them spoke to somebody that took it seriously. You know, so it didn't just happen overnight. And the the backlash to that is almost always as much as the initial, uh, rise in the first place. And so there's there's the these personal freedoms, these liberal and anti-liberal forces are always at play. They're always at play. Yeah, I'm like I'm interested in them as like psycho-spiritual forces, you know? And it does fit in the context of the Gnostic stuff that we were talking about some episodes ago. Because, you know, that's part of the framing of like Gnostic Jesus, right? We have freedom sources that want to get back to these these places of authenticity and true connection to the source of things, and then you have these oppressive forces. And so yeah, so I I think what I found interesting in the Kagan book, I was like, "Yeah, I can I hear what you're saying about America." I think he's making the broader statement that this is always sort of happening, too, that I agree with. And then in the context of our podcast, well, that's a psycho-spiritual question then for us, you know? Cuz we're obviously very proponents, big proponents, of the the liberal forces, right? The parts that have to do with authenticity and spiritual freedom and psychological freedom and so on. So that strikes me as like very meaningful for what we were trying to do. And you know, and for for people who've been listening for a long time or if you're new, you know, what I think that that the point that the part of that word to stress is is liberal, not from the perspective of being like progressive liberal. It It Those are liberating forces. Those are forces that are more akin to being free, having choice. I mean, we're pro-choice, all the choices. Whatever choice. Pants, shorts, you decide, you know? Yeah. Right? Like we can change our hair, we change our facial hair, it's all a choice. It's all a choice. So that's those are pro-choice, and the, um, the kind of like inclusion of, you know, talking about like the oppressive forces as homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, those are included for us because we're pro-equality. Mhm. That's That's where So the the ideas that that get shared on a like contemporary socio-political, uh, linguistic forum in in that way, we're we're coming from a place of like people being their more authentic selves. And anything that is standing in the way of that, especially intentionally, we view those as harmful. As harmful to the authentic expression of the person, which that which leads to oppression, which then leads to other issues because you can't express who you are, and therefore you subjugate yourself, and then those urges get subverted into other other things that are generally not positive for society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good that you clarified cuz when you say liberal, people think liberal, conservative, and it just has to do with some spectrum in the United States. But it's right, it's liberation is the idea, right? It's liberal in that sense, you know? And then this is a psycho-spiritual question in the sense that, you know, psycho-spirituality in some part is about freedom, right?

Yes. And in the absence of freedom, it's hard to do psycho-spiritual stuff, right? Those two things are like exactly parallel to one another or like intimately intertwined in some unescapable way. And even your idea of like, which I'm glad you brought up the word like equality, that's one of the the wisdoms in like Buddhist Tantric philosophy, right? The wisdom of equality. It has to do with the the water energies, if you want to get into energetic kind of stuff, right? But it's the wisdom of seeing seeing things accurately, but also part of that accuracy is to realize the equality of all living things, right? The equality of all life. And so yeah, it's a big deal. And I I again, it's a political book, but it's been fun for me to take the thing and make it into our project, the psycho-spiritual project that's hidden within that language. So okay. Yeah, it's I think it's really important, right? And I think you're right about the backlash element, and that the backlash happens and these things get oppressed. And one of the things we know about oppression and repression is then things tend to come out in uglier and uglier ways, right? Mhm. Yeah, well said. All right. So the next ingredient ingredient I wanted to like spin into the pot here that we're cooking is, uh, Hannah Arendt. I want to do a little bit on her, and we'll look at her idea per the question at the beginning of the episode, spontaneity. You know, she's famous for different things. I think in some ways she'll deserve maybe an episode for some of her ideas just overall. We've done some things where our commentary is on individual people. Uh, but I just want to share this one idea cuz I wasn't familiar with it. So if you don't know anything about her at all, she's a Ger- German Jewish philosopher. She lived through World War II. She was, um, involved with the German philosopher Heidegger. They were sort of, uh, romantically involved with one another, uh, and so, you know, Heidegger eventually had like weird stuff where his Germanic aspects brought him a little bit closer to Nazism. So she lived through lots of complexity in her life. She's kind of a fascinating person. Eventually fled. Um, I think she's really most famous for this phrase, the banality of evil.

[clears throat]

She had written a book called, sorry, voice is being funny, Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she was there covering the trials of the the Nazi war criminals. And she talked about she came up this amazing phrase, the banality of evil, cuz she was watching him and she's like, "He's kind of like a bureaucrat on some level. As much as he is like evil, his his version of evil is so is so banal, right?"

And that struck me as a useful phrase for our time here. You know, maybe this isn't our main thing to talk about, but even like the Project 2025 stuff, which is very trying to be oppressive to lots of people, especially women, and we had talked about the idea that part of that project is try to like financially attack women. Came up in some episodes back some weeks ago where they're trying to like attack the professions that are mostly pursued by women cuz they're trying to disempower them, right? And it's it's evil, but it's kind of evil in a very like bureaucratic kind of banal way, actually, you know? It's like, "Okay, we're going to undermine people financially. We're going to do these kind of petty things, And there's a banality to it, right? A lot of this stuff starts to feel that way. Even these terrible, you know, we're involved in these terrible wars where you're like, "They're kind of ridiculous on some level. They're kind of like absurd. They're awful, and so many people are being hurt, but they're kind of just ridiculous." So there's a banality to it. So that's her banality of evil thing. Um, uh, I don't know if you're familiar with that phrase, Daniel, before I move on from it. No. It's a great one, you know? And maybe it's something that we can drop in episodes further as it goes on. But um she had this amazing thing that I had never heard before. She talks about freedom and spontaneity. And this is spontaneity when there are forces that want to control you from the outside. And then one of the most powerful things you can do, the word she chooses is spontaneous. To be spontaneous in creative and then free in your responses and that's harder to control. So let me give a context for it real quick and I'll get your feedback, Daniel. You know, she kind of says, "Well, you have authoritarianism. That's when the government wants to be taken over and wants to be oppressive of people." And then she says, "You can get into situations what you what you're really talking about is totalitarianism. Where people really want to control not just on the governmental level, but they want to impact people's lives. Like we're going to financially attack your financial future. We're trying to control your life in a very like immediate way. We're not just trying to rob from the government. We're doing something more than that. We're going to try to control you and how you're you're behaving and that's kind of the project 2025 mindset kind of things that we were talking about. You know, especially we could take the example of things directed towards women and you know, these this kind of a really want to control people's lives. And she says, "When when you're up against that, this desire of a system to really try to control life overall, you know, whether that's political or corporate or even the elements of toxic religion that's come up in a lot of our episodes lately, right? You know, they're trying to make some kind of inclusive level of control. You know, even things that are big on your mind a lot of time, Daniel, like uh social media things for control and algorithmic things for control and you know, spying on people for control. You're trying to create some kind of locus of control to dominate over people's lives. And you know, she's a great writer on this. Obviously living the life that she lived and she said, "You know, one of the things that you have to have is this spontaneity. You know, and I'll go into more about it, but I'll throw it back to you. What do you think of the concept just in general?" The concept of larger forces wanting to have control over their population? Yeah.

Okay, that's like here's a here's a golf ball, here's a tee, whack. Yeah, yeah. There's no there's no doubt. And and you know, we've talked about this that many times before. So we don't want to beat a dead horse. But generally, if your ideas are palatable to the masses, you don't have to force the masses to go along with them. Or you can do a lot of like manipulative things, too, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if people are are behind what you're doing, then you don't have to force them to get behind you. They're already there. I mean, the New Deal had like 70% approval. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, you don't have to force when yeah, you're going that way. You don't have to force it. Like, you know, the the support for what's going on now is super low. So of course they have to, you know, suppress because people are going to search for the things that they know to be true. They feel it. Yeah. You can say whatever you want, but like it's like saying like I'm 7 ft tall and I'm the best basketball player in Croatia. Obviously, I'm not. You're the best basketball player in Croatia. Yeah, I think Croatia. You're in the the north suburbs of Chicago. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, the whole yeah, that's the point you're making with it. Yeah, totally agreed. If you just said things that people like, here's universal health care for everyone. We'd be like, "Yay!" Cuz it's like 80% of the people want it. Mhm. Yeah, you have to force that through. That did come up in the past week. We can't do universal health care. We have to like do these wars. We can barely do Medicaid. Medicare? No, we have to get rid of those, too. We got to do these wars.

get your priorities straight, man. Yeah. Yeah, that's well said. And so but the whole idea of like this idea of spontaneity just in that word is kind of like an everyday word in a way, but she uses it with this sort of special flair, right? Mhm. Okay, so I'll give an idea. She was saying a little bit long, but her notion was, you know, this is like the core of human freedom. To be spontaneous in the moment, right? And then the core of like if you're trying to do political action, too. There's a spontaneity which like again expresses a kind of freedom against anti-liberal forces, if you want to use that phraseology. And she says, "What represents the capacity to initiate new things, things that are unexpected, things that are unpredictable." Interesting. It is the power to break the chain of causality and start things anew. And it serves as a countermeasure measure against whenever you have forces like this, totalitarian-esque forces that want to reduce people to being predictable, robotic and isolated. And I thought that's a hell of a concept. Especially around a word that's so accessible, right? It's just a very everyday word, but to give it that spin, I thought that's pretty beautiful, right? Especially idea when you have forces that want to make you predictable, robotic and isolated. I thought that's pretty amazing. Yeah. Mhm. And um and then she had some other pieces to this, which is, you know, the idea of reflective thought. She adds to this, too. Again, kind of a nice phrase. And she says, "You know, to be truly spontaneous also requires at times a pausing or withdrawal from the noise of the world to engage in inner dialogue to find out where you actually stand, what your actual feelings are." And I was like, "That's really in our wheelhouse, for sure." Of what we're trying to always kind of talk with people about and share, right? Ensuring actions are not merely automatic processes to the environment. So you're not trapped in that automaton kind of space. Or what we were talking ahead of time about like the default no mode network. We did episodes on that way back in the day. You're not just in that reactive space. So it's to be spontaneous, it's also to take some time, which is I think meditative, right? Reflective thought to be meditative. And to take some time to figure out, okay, what's my true core in this? What's my true center in this? Let me locate that and I'll know I'm acting from that space, not to have these kind of robotic uh reactions, too. So I I I hadn't heard this part of her language and this part of her ideas, but I thought, "Oh man, that's really I really liked it." So I wanted to share people. It's really kind of again, things that we talk about a lot in our own language in the context of things like spirituality and tantra and Zen and Taoism and few says a few Sufism and the things that we love, right? All have this quality to it, right? And it was just interesting to hear her take on it and especially her take in the context of like, "Yeah, there are people who are trying to control us." You know, and I don't want to make any false equivalencies between what she might have gone through in her life experiences being under the threats that she was under and how she had to respond to those things at that time. But you know, the concept is still there, that that tension that tension in that need to have this resistance. I mean, we're living through it now in our own ways, you know. I can I don't want to falsely equivalence things, but it's still very real in where we're at now. So I thought that was like interesting to share. I'll throw it back to you, Daniel. Have stuff you want to add to that? Yeah, there's um I was watching this video yesterday on emotional debt, which I thought was just a a really interesting way of framing what that is and and that's sort of relating I I I want to relate that to what you're saying. Um we are operating off of programs. Like you're talking about like this default mode network. This these sort of natural programs that we have. Of course, there are some that we inherit from our previous, you know, ancestors. We could say mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. Maybe that makes more sense to people who are listening. And what they overcame in their life. So we would call this epigenetic changes, meaning the changes that you experience prior to giving birth or having a child get passed down to that progeny. And this has been shown over multiple experiments now. It it's this not is this past theoretical. The question is how much, not if at this particular point. And so we have that as part of our operating system. But then we have our own experience that is part of our operating system. And our the the point of this video was talking about what happens is that when you are a kid and not always, but primarily when you're a child, you have let's say something happens to you and uh somebody passes away and you are told to to be tough. Eric, you're 10. And your your your grandfather passed away. You got to be tough, okay? Show us how strong you are. You can you can do this. Don't cry at the funeral. Don't you buckle up. This doesn't allow you to actually complete that cycle, that cycle in your nervous system of fight or flight or freeze or fawn or friend or whatever it is, right? Any of the F words. Fart, who knows? But when you don't get to do that, that creates a gap. There's a debt that has to be paid in order for that cycle to complete so that you can move on, But over time, there are so many cycles that don't get repeated or that don't get completed, I should say. So if there's someone, you know, you have to chase somebody or someone's chasing you and you don't get a chance to fight them, but you don't get a chance to go punch the pillow or the wall or kick something to let that energy out, it stays inside. The cycle is not completed. There's a future debt. And so as time goes on, we operate much more off of those debts than we do our own authentic self because now every situation looks like one that happened previous and one that happened previous to that and we could take this all the way back and then eventually how this relates now we lose our sense of spontaneity we lose our authentic self because of what it is that we've inherited A and B what it is that we've accumulated ourselves by not completing the cycle by not actually going through the entirety of the thing so not crying not acknowledging the sadness not grieving by not letting that thing go by still holding on by not you know giving giving anger its voice giving frustration its voice and so I wanted to add that because I I really found that to be quite enlightening and I think it it fits at in this conversation as to another layer that keeps us from being our natural kind of authentic selves and is sort of an internally oppressive force keeping us in the same kind of mold which then will lead us to want to look for other places to rebel like in society when we have an opportunity when things break like they did during COVID and people did the you know the the the great resignation taking it all the way back up 10 layers to the beginning that is how you do things audience that's how you do that right there. Yeah so the whole thing that like the the imagery around that's pretty amazing there's like you know one of the things I always jumps out to me whenever that thing comes up is um you could see these like I don't know gazelles or something being chased in Africa by some predator or some lion is trying to chase down and the gazelle escapes and it's so full of all of this tension it just falls on the ground and rise in the dirt. Yes. And I can remember when I was in the Zen studies I did they had a really great kind of bodywork philosophy that they did like deep intense physical bodywork massage stuff and I can remember just having gone through a lot of pain in my life I had a lot of uh you know the psycho-emotional stuff but the physical stuff too I had medical issues when I was a kid that were pretty painful and just you know my body just like writhing like on the table just trying to release all that [...] And I didn't realize it at the time you know but I was like I was like the the gazelle trying to roll around in the dirt right to get that [...] out it was very powerful and then when you get into even like our tantric stuff sometimes it's along the spine and you're trying to free out what you might call the Vajra body things right the subtle channels and all these things you're just flopping around trying to like get those things to disperse themselves And so in the physical nervous system and then also in the more subtle start parts and the other part is like you know if you add the other piece of it sometimes it's not just something goes wrong between the parent and the child sometimes what you really have is what or one of our other phrases the emotional plague yeah people who are trying to oppress you trying to induce fear in you trying to do these things Yeah and then you're get you're back to that part the anti-liberal forces. Yeah. Um as we get to the end of the episode the spontaneity thing I was thinking about this in different spiritual traditions I have one that I want to share because it's kind of a running thing between us but I want to bring up Carlos Castaneda in a positive light. Oh good that's

Daniel's the Daniel's the positive Carlos Castaneda one that I'm always the Carlos Castaneda doubter. The hater hater not doubter you're a hater. I know hater I was trying to do doubter to be polite.

Well he's fake but okay we won't get into the details you can self research audience. Yeah but anyways one of the things about that you know on the positive side of Castaneda right? Yeah you know the parts of his writing there was like a fascinating thing I had a friend who was really into him he was like you got to read these books I was like okay I'll give them a tumble and I read them. And I remember one of the things was like the shaman should be unpredictable. Right it was one of his ideas because otherwise the forces that are oppressive will block the shaman. Right like needs to be unpredictable you need to be unpredictable I think he was talking about the imagery of death as a hunter too you have to be unpredictable cuz death is a hunter that goes back to the COVID idea but the unpredictable predictability of the shaman is part of the power of the shaman right? And it has a pure spiritual power to it. And so you know and I that part of Castaneda I do think about right? And then when I was listening to Hannah Arendt I was like oh that's like the Carlos Castaneda thing. You know there's a power in that that informs spiritual spontaneity right? And then the other part that jumped out to me was like the Zen part of things right? This idea that you want to be able to be Zen spontaneous And it's very powerful again I studied Zen seriously you know so I do have the background in that and the whole idea of you know that being so much a part of that tradition to like to not have those as you were saying what were they emotional what was it again? What was the phrase you used Daniel I'm sorry? Emotional. It was emotional baggage or Oh emotional debt. Emotional debt you're so unfettered by those you don't have those that you're able to have that spontaneity in the moment you don't have those obstructions locked into your physical system into the energetic system into the system of your mind your consciousness and your spirit so you're able to be free spontaneous like in the moment I mean that's a hallmark of like Zen idea that you're able to do that and it has that power right? That you're you're you're not held in place by imposed frameworks from others or imposed frameworks from the past or imposed frameworks from wherever they're from and that way you're able to like do this thing one of my favorite Zen Zen sayings around this that hasn't popped up in an episode in a while is energy before form.

You allow the energy to express itself and then you're able to do that and that has a Zen power a tantric power a shamanic power that sort of ability of the the the spirit the soul to be free in that way and it has like these multiple purposes actually if you can feel it which is partially there's a power in that spontaneous activity. In the way Hannah Arendt is talking about it the idea like okay there's oppressive forces if you're spontaneous they're not going to be able to predict what you're going to do their whole point is to make you be programmatic so don't be programmatic and then people won't know how to respond right? There's that and then it's the Carlos Castaneda thing too be spontaneous death won't be able to get you. That's right.

forces won't be able to see you they're not expecting it right? You're invisible to them or you're they're you're surprising to them right? Yeah.

And then of course in the Zen world you have that spontaneity that allows you to be more effective and then in a way if you think about people being multi-layered creatures going all the way back to some Buddha nature thing that spontaneity spontaneity of action eventually you realize is coming from that core place. And that's what they're trying to get you at least partially to feel in aspects of Zen to feel that spontaneous thing is connected to the core of who you are and that's a powerful place to be obviously. No matter who you are shamanic or otherwise so I mean I think it's it's awesome thing to think about. Well I have a I have a a Carlos Castaneda quote here one of my maybe my favorite one. Okay lay it on me. All right so from the book The Power of Silence you have something called the four moods. The four moods I'll read it to you. Ruthlessness cunning patience and sweetness. Ruthlessness should not be harshness. Cunning should not be cruelty. Patience should not be negligence. Sweetness sweetness should not be foolishness. A mood of abandon but not reckless a mood of caring but not indulgence. Be ruthless but charming. Be cunning but nice. Be patient but active. Be sweet but lethal. Ruthless without being self without being self-important. Ruthless the opposite of self-pity. Ruthlessness is a total lack of pity. Ruthlessness is sobriety. That nice yeah. It does resonate with the idea like in the tantric world of like the four powers too right? Fierce action and charming action. Right power and charm and then generosity patience like those are all kind of things that fit into those practices there's a universality to those ideas right? Yeah. So I guess it's yeah I think it's I think it's spot Yeah sounds good we're trying to get to the the major points right? So we I mean it's the things that like were threatening probably in the great resignation I mean if we go back that was threatening. Yeah right cuz you might not be able to predict how people are going to behave that's threatening. Yeah. And then you get to the like no we're going to shove all this [...] back in the bottle or we're going to cork it we're going to wrap it up in a box we're going to bury it in the ground you know.

We're going to bury it in the ground. Yeah. And then we're going to hit you with inflation just FYI so everything's going to get more expensive so you're going to have to work more oh and then we're going to stop making new jobs so good luck. And we have to do our best y'all. Yeah I for real it's Be spontaneous in the face of it yeah.

Yes yes that's that's right that's right. Well Eric gracias amigo audience thank you for tuning in you know do all the things like comment subscribe, leave a comment. We we love to get the interaction from people. Even the hate, we love that [...] too. Bring it on, mate. Um, you know, I'll I know how awesome Carlos Castaneda is, and I'm a complete idiot for not seeing it. It's totally fine. I'll take it.

Yeah, yeah, it's all good. I got my reasons, but I'll take it. It's fine.

Yeah, yeah. Um, you know,

man, and I'll take it. Leave us a comment here on the YouTube, or uh, please feel free to hit us up at ginandtantra@gmail.com. Catch us on uh, on the gram at the Gin and Tantra podcast. For Eric, this is Daniel. We'll catch you guys at the next one. Peace.