Speaker 1: Welcome to Destiny.
Speaker 2: Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
Speaker 3: I gotta say the energetic news lately has been dire.
Speaker 3: In fact, there's been articles on Calai Yuga, the end
Speaker 3: of the Yuga cycle, as being this month, the month
Speaker 3: of August, and I don't think the authors, the writers
Speaker 3: quite understand that it's not a single day like a calendar.
Speaker 3: Remember in twenty twelve the calendar of the Maya ended
Speaker 3: and people were like, the world's going to end. You know,
Speaker 3: what are we going to do now? And I remember
Speaker 3: my mentor Humban's men, the Mayan elder, said.
Speaker 1: To me, this is just one end.
Speaker 3: It's one calendar ending, and there's a new wants starting.
Speaker 3: And as a daykeeper, he was very much in touch
Speaker 3: with these cyclic calendars which started and stopped over thousands
Speaker 3: and thousands of years. Hey, this is Cliff, your host
Speaker 3: of Destiny, and today we're going to talk about energy
Speaker 3: trauma and how to work with these energetics in the
Speaker 3: coming age. If Kelly Yuga is ending, that means dwar
Speaker 3: Pa Yuga is beginning. So we're gonna get some positives
Speaker 3: of the energy in the next thousands of thousands of years.
Speaker 3: Bleeding into our current existence. And what's really tough right
Speaker 3: now is my son generation x Z and so forth.
Speaker 3: These younger generations are really being challenged with the current
Speaker 3: society status quo. This is the disruption of of the economy,
Speaker 3: the disruption of society.
Speaker 1: When I was coming.
Speaker 3: Up, it was easy to get a job, went out
Speaker 3: of college. You know, I had many jobs and it
Speaker 3: wasn't a big deal. Today it's hard to get a
Speaker 3: job that you like. It's hard to keep a job
Speaker 3: if it's chaotic. It's hard to work for some people.
Speaker 3: It's hard to work in big groups.
Speaker 1: I am one.
Speaker 3: Who came up working for the corporate world and quickly
Speaker 3: found out in about a decade that I was not tooned.
Speaker 3: I was not really ideally situated to be able to
Speaker 3: work with a whole bunch of people. And you know,
Speaker 3: here in northern California, I've worked with the Apple computer,
Speaker 3: I worked with Google. One of my last corporate jobs
Speaker 3: was with PayPal, and I was just a number and
Speaker 3: I didn't like it. And I mean, I've been to
Speaker 3: school and I came up and I was a terrible
Speaker 3: student in high school, terrible, I think. I when I graduated,
Speaker 3: I had like a C C plus average or whatever.
Speaker 3: And the only way I got into college wasn't wasn't
Speaker 3: because of my grade point average. It was because I
Speaker 3: had had a pretty good portfolio. And I transferred from
Speaker 3: high school to a Long Beach state which had an
Speaker 3: amazing animation department and illustration apartment, and I studied animation.
Speaker 3: And it's the same school that Stephen Spielberg went to,
Speaker 3: and their animation department was fabulous. Back then, they had
Speaker 3: what they called it was one of the only colleges
Speaker 3: that had the multi plane camera, which in those days
Speaker 3: was you would have multi sheets of backgrounds and figures
Speaker 3: and and you would shoot image.
Speaker 1: You'd shoot it through.
Speaker 3: These pieces of film. You'd have like five or six
Speaker 3: or up to ten sheets of film that you shut
Speaker 3: your image through, and then you slowly have your characters
Speaker 3: crossing over through the image and so forth and so on. Anyhow,
Speaker 3: that's before the that's before the digital I really aging myself.
Speaker 3: That's before the digital technology got going. And it's a
Speaker 3: whole different ball game. But in those days, you had
Speaker 3: to be an artist. You had to be able to
Speaker 3: render images, render figures. They wanted you to do quite
Speaker 3: a bit in the classic style where you would copy
Speaker 3: the masters Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubin's
Speaker 3: people like that who are real master draftsmen. But college
Speaker 3: is completely different now. And my son graduated with a
Speaker 3: videographics degree, and he was working for a few years
Speaker 3: and then the whole industry went belly up. This was
Speaker 3: before COVID, and he he struggled and he's held jobs
Speaker 3: everything from a carpenter to growing cannabis here in northern
Speaker 3: California on a farm and developing his own gummies and things.
Speaker 3: So and if you followed along, I was a big
Speaker 3: advocate for cannabis. I still am, but I find the
Speaker 3: older like I get, the less the less opportunities I
Speaker 3: have for consumption of the thac the active psychoactive component
Speaker 3: of cannabis. So I'm I'm I'm less active smoking or
Speaker 3: or or and don't I'm not a real fan of gummies.
Speaker 1: A lot of people like the gummies.
Speaker 3: But I just I don't like. I don't like the sensation.
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm in a fog when I'm when
Speaker 3: I'm chewing a gummy. But my point is that things
Speaker 3: have changed energetically, and the younger generations are having a
Speaker 3: tough time of it. My son's dealing with some depression
Speaker 3: and things like that, and this is all the finishing
Speaker 3: of kali yuga. And we're able to identify this now.
Speaker 3: And I'm really happy to have discovered the yoga system
Speaker 3: because we're able to understand that we're just not having,
Speaker 3: you know, emotional problems for nothing. This is a cyclic situation.
Speaker 3: We're slowly coming out of thousands of years of cali
Speaker 3: yuga and we're moving into the next phase, which is
Speaker 3: much more light, much more positive, and much more energetic.
Speaker 3: Now you can look at these phases of the yoga
Speaker 3: and if Caliga calli yuga is the dark phase or
Speaker 3: the most heavy, then you can see what it looks
Speaker 3: like politically. Looking like politically, what are we looking at economically,
Speaker 3: what are we looking at it echo wise, ecosystems, the
Speaker 3: ecology of the planet, and.
Speaker 1: What positive things that we have looking forward to.
Speaker 3: And this is I think one of the problems with
Speaker 3: our younger generations. They don't see and they don't feel
Speaker 3: that there is anything positive to look forward to. And
Speaker 3: this is the problem. And so my guest today who's
Speaker 3: a psychologist, is going to really shed light on what
Speaker 3: we can look forward to, but not only that, how
Speaker 3: to process this dark period, how to go through, how
Speaker 3: to work it in a manner that is more fulfilling,
Speaker 3: less depressing, and sheds more light on what we can expect,
Speaker 3: because as a cycle, it's going to be highlights, low lights,
Speaker 3: dark lights, and it's tough.
Speaker 1: It's tough.
Speaker 3: I remember growing up and i'd ha parers who an like,
Speaker 3: what the hell? This is just the pits and you
Speaker 3: kind of hate life. I think we've all gone through
Speaker 3: that as young people. It's like, what the hell am
Speaker 3: I learning? Why am I going to college? I am
Speaker 3: not getting anything out of college. I asked that of
Speaker 3: myself many times. And I didn't have a real stable
Speaker 3: family life. My parents were not happy with each other,
Speaker 3: and so there was a period just before I went
Speaker 3: to college where my parents got divorced, and it was
Speaker 3: it shook everything up. Of course, I felt the vibe
Speaker 3: between my parents, and I knew that things were not good.
Speaker 3: But when you have parents who divorce, that's a very
Speaker 3: powerful energy, very depressing and sad and debilitating. And so
Speaker 3: I went away to school. I left the Bay Area
Speaker 3: and went to Los Angeles and went to college because
Speaker 3: I didn't want to be around it. You know, I'm
Speaker 3: just hyper sensitive, but I didn't want to be around it.
Speaker 3: So we're going to learn a bit about processing with
Speaker 3: this wonderful, wonderful psychologist. And his name is Miles Neil,
Speaker 3: and the book we're talking about has just come out.
Speaker 3: It's called Return with Elixir, Four Maps for the Soul's
Speaker 3: Pilgrimage through Death and Rebirth. So that's our program today,
Speaker 3: and I think it's going to be a little bit
Speaker 3: longer than normal, but I think you're going to really
Speaker 3: if you work with it, if you really follow the program,
Speaker 3: I think there's something to be gained from this interview.
Speaker 3: You know, every so often I do a tour that
Speaker 3: I consider a vision quiz. This is where you start
Speaker 3: and you finish and you have been transformed in some
Speaker 3: respect from the interaction with pyramids, with shaman, with special people.
Speaker 3: And we have one coming up this December call called
Speaker 3: Sacred Temple Tour of Guatemala. It's gonna be December first
Speaker 3: to the twelfth of the month. This is the chance
Speaker 3: to meet with shaman and archaeologists and people who understand energy,
Speaker 3: ancient energy, all in one area. You may have heard
Speaker 3: one of the hosts of the program that's going to
Speaker 3: be doctor Lydia Di Leong and her partner Arturo, and
Speaker 3: we're going to be led through a series of programs initiations,
Speaker 3: but the majority of this tour is interacting with buildings,
Speaker 3: ancient temples, pyramids that we don't sit and look at,
Speaker 3: we actually interact with through ceremony, through meditation, and through connecting.
Speaker 3: To join this tour, go to Earth Ancients dot com
Speaker 3: forward slash tours. Check it out and the itinerary is fantastic.
Speaker 3: We'll be in Guatemala, which is the heart of one
Speaker 3: of the largest Mayan cities in the world, and we
Speaker 3: will go to many other.
Speaker 1: Places as well.
Speaker 3: For all the details again go to earth Agents dot
Speaker 3: com forward slash Tours. If you have any questions whatsoever,
Speaker 3: send me an email. Send it to Earth Ancients the
Speaker 3: number four of the letter you at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3: Come out, do this vision quest and heal, invigorate and transform.
Speaker 3: My guest today is Miles Neil. He is a psychotherapists.
Speaker 3: He's written a new book called Return with Elixor and
Speaker 3: I've been passing through it and I got to tell you,
Speaker 3: the guy's got his hand on a lot of really
Speaker 3: important material. And what makes this book fun is he
Speaker 3: kind of went through his own journey, came out on
Speaker 3: the other end, and has a whole bunch of contemplative
Speaker 3: material that I think is a good read. He is
Speaker 3: a psychotherapist psychology instructor, and he's written two books, one
Speaker 3: called Gradual Awakening and he goes, excuse me. He's co
Speaker 3: editor of Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy and would you believe
Speaker 3: he's coming to us today from Bali, Indonesia, which is
Speaker 3: an amazing place. So we're going to find out what
Speaker 3: he has come up with, what he has passed, how
Speaker 3: he has passed through the fire and come out, and
Speaker 3: what we're going to get. So, Miles, welcome to Destiny.
Speaker 3: Great to have you on the program.
Speaker 4: Oh thanks so much, Cliff.
Speaker 5: I'm delighted to have a conversation with you. Things podcast
Speaker 5: like these, you know, high caliber podcasts and experienced interview doers.
Speaker 4: What excites me most is you just never.
Speaker 5: Know where what labyrinth, door and passageway we'll enter into.
Speaker 5: So I'm very excited. I've been a big fan and
Speaker 5: follower of your work and so I'm so so honored
Speaker 5: to sit with you and have a chat and see
Speaker 5: where our journey takes us.
Speaker 1: Got to ask you, you're from Manhattan, what the heck
Speaker 1: are you doing in BALI.
Speaker 5: Well, it's partly listening to the soul, as I write
Speaker 5: in my book, you know, and partly it's because you know,
Speaker 5: I have two kids, and so I think, you know.
Speaker 5: I was reading the tea leaves and things in the
Speaker 5: United States are going through its own Saturn return, which
Speaker 5: is an astrological.
Speaker 4: Phase for a deep reckoning.
Speaker 5: And with all the costs, right, and the sort of
Speaker 5: paralysis and sort of polarization and just the politicization and
Speaker 5: all the rest of it. I was really looking for
Speaker 5: a new start, basically, and to give my kids an
Speaker 5: international exposure which I had growing up. I was born
Speaker 5: in Singapore and raised in Hong Kong. I lived in
Speaker 5: Hong Kong for eighteen years, and I did a whole
Speaker 5: long and lengthy chapter of my education and my career
Speaker 5: in New York City, and by the time we hit
Speaker 5: the pandemic, my radar was up for a new start.
Speaker 5: So that's the short that's the short and very comfortable answer.
Speaker 3: That's such an exotic place, but it's also very tranquil
Speaker 3: and ancient in many ways too, And after reading a
Speaker 3: lot of your book, I can get a sense that
Speaker 3: you're this ancient soul that kind of had a need
Speaker 3: to go back to home base in a way and
Speaker 3: kind of absorb the energy of an ancient place like that.
Speaker 4: That's very true. I mean, deep soul is something I'm
Speaker 4: oriented towards.
Speaker 5: You know, I've done a lot of traveling in my life,
Speaker 5: and you know, a place speaks to us. It can
Speaker 5: resonate at a kind of vibration that either aligns with
Speaker 5: us or not. And so when I go to places
Speaker 5: like Greece, for example, I mean I can feel my
Speaker 5: DNA spinning at a different rate and I just know
Speaker 5: there's something here. And Bali's one of those places too.
Speaker 5: It's not without its own challenges, of course, It's not
Speaker 5: like a paradise it's but it is offering something that
Speaker 5: was missing and necessary for this sort of new chapter.
Speaker 4: Of my life.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 3: The book Return with elix Or feels like a cathartic
Speaker 3: release to me from your soul. Talk about writing the
Speaker 3: book and it feels like a journey to me. But
Speaker 3: I'd like to hear from you exactly why you decided
Speaker 3: to write the book, but also what happened in the
Speaker 3: process of writing the book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Cliff, thanks so much for that. That's you know,
Speaker 5: it strikes to the heart of the inner narrative of
Speaker 5: Return with the Elixir. I mean, it's a book about
Speaker 5: multiple maps. It's a book or a kind of mythopoetic
Speaker 5: guide for people who are doing a reboat or reset
Speaker 5: or rebirth in.
Speaker 4: Their own life.
Speaker 5: But it really grew out of my own sort of
Speaker 5: breakdown and break through, if you will. It was it
Speaker 5: was really I would start this way. In contrast to
Speaker 5: my first book, Gradual Awakening, Return with the Elixir was
Speaker 5: about a very deep listening. I mean, the first book
Speaker 5: twenty five years I spent as a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism,
Speaker 5: and I was really trying to do some integrative work
Speaker 5: presenting a fourteenth century text on Tibetan Buddhism that was
Speaker 5: the roadmap or cookbook to awakening. And so it was
Speaker 5: really kind of an intellectual exercise. How could I take
Speaker 5: old material and synthesize it in a new way start
Speaker 5: to finish the Tibetan Buddhist path. Return with the Lickxir
Speaker 5: was a turning inward and a really sort of a
Speaker 5: deep listening to my own personal experience. And it was
Speaker 5: a crossroad. It was a turning point for me because
Speaker 5: in a way I had established myself in New York
Speaker 5: City as a therapist. I had a niche working with
Speaker 5: yogis and contemplative people and people interested in the meditation movement,
Speaker 5: spiritual you know, people who wanted to work on psychology
Speaker 5: and spirituality at the same time. And I was very
Speaker 5: content to kids nice house in Westchester. You know, it
Speaker 5: was kind of like it was kind of like the
Speaker 5: pinnacle of a career. I couldn't have asked for anything more.
Speaker 5: But something was a miss something was off, and I
Speaker 5: couldn't put my finger on it. And I started having visions.
Speaker 5: And you know, I don't say that lightly because I
Speaker 5: don't don't want to come across as sort of a
Speaker 5: prophet or whatever. I actually write in the book that
Speaker 5: I think many of us have kind of visionary experience
Speaker 5: or dream dreams, potent side of synchronicities, and we kind
Speaker 5: of just dismissed them because we live in a very
Speaker 5: sort of banal, kind of clinical, dry, disenchanted world, as
Speaker 5: Rick Tarnis might put it. But for me, I started
Speaker 5: really orienting to these intuitions and these visions, and in
Speaker 5: a way I later learned through Jung that those intuitions
Speaker 5: was really kind of the soul's compass, my soul's compass.
Speaker 5: And then somewhere along the line, I had a really
Speaker 5: nasty ordeal what Joseph Campbell might call the card six
Speaker 5: o'clock moment, just the a terrifying, debasing, absolutely soul destroying moment.
Speaker 4: Which I write in the book.
Speaker 5: It had to do with a sort of betrayal and
Speaker 5: a spiritual community with my personal teacher who i'd been
Speaker 5: serving and have been an apprentice and a mentee of
Speaker 5: for some twenty years, and it really did destroy me.
Speaker 5: And in my efforts to try to reclaim my life
Speaker 5: and piece it all together, I went on a long
Speaker 5: adventure and I just documented it. And so Return of
Speaker 5: the Lickxur is part map, multiple maps, actually, but it's
Speaker 5: also just a way of chronicling and tracking my own
Speaker 5: my own journey.
Speaker 4: Into dissolution, you know.
Speaker 5: And I really want to emphasize that that I have
Speaker 5: this sort of recollection because people ask me, I've been
Speaker 5: a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, for a very long time.
Speaker 5: I've been a psychologist for equally long. You know, how
Speaker 5: did your practices help you when you were in an
Speaker 5: absolute crisis? And I want to be honest about it.
Speaker 5: The fact of the matter is nothing worked. Nothing worked
Speaker 5: in the sense that nothing held me together, nothing kept
Speaker 5: me above water. And there was something in all of
Speaker 5: these traditions that I think is if it's if there's
Speaker 5: one take home from the book, whether it be yoga
Speaker 5: or Tibetan Buddhism, or astrology or jung or alchemy, the
Speaker 5: esoteric or the mystical traditions, all are saying something very
Speaker 5: similar that.
Speaker 2: You you you can't raise or rise to the summit
Speaker 2: without doing an underworld journey, without going to the depths,
Speaker 2: and without being obliterated.
Speaker 5: So to say, you know, when people ask me, what
Speaker 5: how is your You have such a big toolkit, you
Speaker 5: have so many things to draw on, I say, no,
Speaker 5: none of them worked, because that's the nature of a real,
Speaker 5: true crisis of the soul. You are. You are destined
Speaker 5: to absolutely become obliterated. And not many people like to
Speaker 5: go there, and they know definitely don't like to talk
Speaker 5: about it.
Speaker 3: I would like you to talk just a brief moment
Speaker 3: about the panic attack that led you as kind of
Speaker 3: a kickstart to move beyond your work and give up
Speaker 3: your practice.
Speaker 1: Number one.
Speaker 3: But the thing that I'm also interested in, if you
Speaker 3: are anointed in this Eastern philosophy where you're meditating, you're
Speaker 3: doing perhaps yoga or some form of movement, why that
Speaker 3: wasn't helpful enough for you to say, Okay, I can
Speaker 3: stabilize myself here. What it seems to me was happening
Speaker 3: was that you were transforming or you had had enough.
Speaker 3: And you're right about this, and we're going to talk
Speaker 3: about this in a minute. How younger people are not
Speaker 3: able because they don't have the tools to transform and
Speaker 3: move beyond the personal crisis a lot of people are
Speaker 3: having right now. But I want to hear from you
Speaker 3: real quickly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a great question, Cliff, Thank you. It's I think
Speaker 4: it's a clash of.
Speaker 5: Paradigm what you're asking, because if you look and it's
Speaker 5: it's not just you, it's the way that you frame
Speaker 5: the question has some underlying assumptions, not the least most
Speaker 5: important of which is if you have a toolkit, you
Speaker 5: should be able to stabilize yourself. And if and if
Speaker 5: and if if you don't have a toolkit, then you're
Speaker 5: you're a mess or you're vulnerable. So the underlying assumption
Speaker 5: is that we should be able to overcome our you know,
Speaker 5: handle it or or man up, or become so resilient
Speaker 5: or you know, as Dave asp recalls it, become bulletproof.
Speaker 5: It's part of our ethos, especially in an American culture,
Speaker 5: that we we could become iron men and women. We
Speaker 5: should be transcendent. So to go back a little bit,
Speaker 5: you asked me about panic attacks, and I could be
Speaker 5: very transparent about it. I was in an office building
Speaker 5: in Manhattan where I was receiving my psychotherapy clients. I'm
Speaker 5: on like the ten third, eleventh floor. I remember now
Speaker 5: it's been so long and it's part of my past
Speaker 5: life narrative. I can hardly remember anymore. But you know,
Speaker 5: Manhattan is a congested place, and it spins at a
Speaker 5: certain kind of vortex that makes you feel absolutely like
Speaker 5: you're chasing your tail. And it's no longer a nine
Speaker 5: to five, it's like a seven to eight ordeal every day,
Speaker 5: and everything is confined, and everything is constricted, and the
Speaker 5: world was spinning at such a pace that like come
Speaker 5: Monday morning, journeying from one box in a moving box
Speaker 5: to my office box, and then most importantly, feeling that
Speaker 5: the world view that I was in was a kind
Speaker 5: of restrictive, confining box. And having neck up conversations with
Speaker 5: people about the problem is sort of what Freud called
Speaker 5: the working well. I started having panic attacks because I
Speaker 5: felt very confined I was. I was feeling very limited
Speaker 5: not only by my space, but also so by my profession.
Speaker 5: The confines of my profession. Insurance companies pay for eight sessions.
Speaker 5: You're supposed to do therapy just this way. You're supposed
Speaker 5: to move people out of crisis so that they can
Speaker 5: get back to work as quickly as possible. And all
Speaker 5: of that just became too confining. And so in a way,
Speaker 5: if I had gone to a psychiatrist and gotten some medication,
Speaker 5: or if I was so called just doing my meditation
Speaker 5: practice just right, what would have inevitably happened is I
Speaker 5: would have just been anesthesizing myself and keeping myself bound
Speaker 5: in a paradigm or of an invisible prison. And it's
Speaker 5: I liken this to like if you sprain your ankle
Speaker 5: and your body is giving you signals not to bear
Speaker 5: any weight on it. But you bandage it and you
Speaker 5: take some sort of painkillers, you're denying yourself important information
Speaker 5: from a deeper part of your being that's trying to
Speaker 5: orient you to something, a new horizon. And so for me,
Speaker 5: the panic attacks weren't a symptom to be ameliorated. And
Speaker 5: this goes back now to the bigger question that you pose.
Speaker 5: Panic attacks for me were a soul's beckoning. It was
Speaker 5: a call to adventure. It was some part of my
Speaker 5: soul recognizing like I had reached the tail end of
Speaker 5: this kind of edifice of the life that I had
Speaker 5: constructed over twenty years. I had some success. I had
Speaker 5: a nice I was doing publications. I had a nice,
Speaker 5: cushy job. I had a stream steady stream of clients.
Speaker 5: My kids lived in a nice house in Westchester. It
Speaker 5: was all the kind of accoutrement of a decent life.
Speaker 5: And I have nothing, no bad things to say about it.
Speaker 5: But it was the end cliff, and that end.
Speaker 4: Started.
Speaker 5: It's the floor beneath me started to shake, and the
Speaker 5: edifice of this construction of deck of cards started to erode.
Speaker 5: And in a way, I have to say, it was
Speaker 5: a mirror for what I think all of us are
Speaker 5: experiencing in civilization right now. There are telltale signs the
Speaker 5: so called panic attacks of civilization are amidst us. And
Speaker 5: rather than ducking and burying our heads like ostriches in
Speaker 5: the sand and getting on with business and just you know,
Speaker 5: being ultra distracted or ultra polarized or ultra you know,
Speaker 5: spoon fed propaganda, I think we have to register that
Speaker 5: something deeper is afoot and allow ourselves to follow a
Speaker 5: deeper calling during this monumental moment. So that was happening
Speaker 5: both on an individual level for me, and nothing is
Speaker 5: going to stem the tide, is my point. Whether we're
Speaker 5: talking a collective or we're talking an individual, there's no
Speaker 5: it doesn't behoove us to find a tool to kick
Speaker 5: the can down the road and stabilize what the esoteric
Speaker 5: traditions are saying. And what I try to recapture in
Speaker 5: my book and recount in my book is go with
Speaker 5: the dissolution, Surrender to the dissolusion.
Speaker 4: There is another world waiting for us.
Speaker 5: Let's not hold on to this one which is barely working.
Speaker 3: But if you surrender and you don't have the tool,
Speaker 3: because I've been meditating for thirty years, and I understand
Speaker 3: where you're coming from. I use meditation as a governor
Speaker 3: also a way to balance what's going on. It's not
Speaker 3: always a solution. But I'm interested to hear from you
Speaker 3: because you write very succinctly about our youth feeling apathetic,
Speaker 3: feeling depressed. My son is dealing with depression now. He's
Speaker 3: only in his early thirties, and I'm feeling for him
Speaker 3: because he's successful, but he is hypersensitive to society's activities
Speaker 3: right now. And as a psychotherapist, I'm interested to hear
Speaker 3: from you. We proceed into this journey that you had,
Speaker 3: what you were seeing perhaps in your practice that was
Speaker 3: triggering you, because if you're seeing people who are in
Speaker 3: despair and apathetic, it's like, what the hell? You know?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, first of all, I'm sorry as a father
Speaker 5: to hear that. It's a hard road to watch your
Speaker 5: son go through difficult times. Okay, and since he has success,
Speaker 5: you can't question it. It's not his ability or his will.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: I don't mean to analyze your son, just mean to
Speaker 5: empathize with you, and empathize with anyone listening that has
Speaker 5: close ones who go through this. But to highlight. What
Speaker 5: I'm really suggesting is you have choices. You could send
Speaker 5: your son to a therapist, You could send your son
Speaker 5: to a psychiatrist, you could find some sort of symptom relief.
Speaker 5: And as a parent, I would never judge that, because
Speaker 5: your heart is being pulled. You want the best for him,
Speaker 5: you want him to throw.
Speaker 1: But what if it.
Speaker 5: Wasn't about maintenance. What if it was actually something inside
Speaker 5: The youth of today is registering an awareness that the
Speaker 5: edifice of the civilization that they have been bequeathed is
Speaker 5: at its tail end, and we're actually all undergoing a
Speaker 5: death process, and we're in a very specific time period
Speaker 5: where the old is collapsing that much we know the
Speaker 5: new one has yet to emerge. And so you and
Speaker 5: me consider here and go. Young people don't know if
Speaker 5: it's worth going to college, if AI is going to
Speaker 5: steal their job, if there's anything after that two hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty thousand dollars in school debt that's ever going
Speaker 5: to give them a payout. If everybody seems to be
Speaker 5: absolutely invested and hijacked by propaganda and news media. They're
Speaker 5: hooked to their cell phones, they're addicted out of the
Speaker 5: gate there's a lot to be unhappy about, and a
Speaker 5: lot to be worried about, and a lot to be.
Speaker 4: Concerned about.
Speaker 5: And there's a heavy burden on people growing up right
Speaker 5: now that certainly your generation didn't have. My parents' generation
Speaker 5: enjoyed a whole run where they could envision in life
Speaker 5: of a stable home, an income, with a corporation that
Speaker 5: gave them a pension, a white picket fence, with two kids.
Speaker 4: We don't live in that world anymore.
Speaker 5: I'm of a generation where I enjoyed most of my career.
Speaker 5: I enjoyed that kind of stability and predictability. People coming
Speaker 5: up right now do not have even a year long
Speaker 5: vision out. They can't do it because so much of
Speaker 5: the landscape changes. What is it in us that says
Speaker 5: that symptoms that you describe your John as having aren't
Speaker 5: absolutely appropriate for a sane person, exactly absolutely appropriate. We
Speaker 5: don't The sands underneath our feet are shifting. We don't
Speaker 5: know what the horizon line looks like. We're scared out
Speaker 5: of hell. We feel alienated, we feel a lack of
Speaker 5: a lack of meaning and purpose. Why go to a
Speaker 5: mechanized institution and and and get spit out? Four years
Speaker 5: later where you're absolutely unprepared for the future. People, young
Speaker 5: people know this intuitively, and when then we and then
Speaker 5: we look at them with care and concern and as parents,
Speaker 5: and we say we give them advices that we would
Speaker 5: have given, we would have been given for an older
Speaker 5: time that no longer works. So what I'm suggesting is, yes,
Speaker 5: there could be real cases where clinical depression may be
Speaker 5: really maybe really warrant. Someone needs a stable a stable
Speaker 5: ground for a minute. I'm not whitewashing and generalizing every case.
Speaker 5: What I'm suggesting, though, is to open the parameter from
Speaker 5: this very narrow clinical symptom management type of present presentation like, oh,
Speaker 5: some you have you have symptoms here. If we could
Speaker 5: just get this, we could just ameliorate the symptoms. We
Speaker 5: could get you back to work and you'll have a
Speaker 5: perfect light. What I'm saying is there's a spiritual or
Speaker 5: an existential underpinning, which is it's sort of listening to
Speaker 5: your soul that says. What if he was listening and
Speaker 5: he translated it as I don't fit in this world, yeah,
Speaker 5: or this world doesn't make sense. What if it had
Speaker 5: a language and it was whispering in your ear and
Speaker 5: he was saying something like, there's no place for me here.
Speaker 4: Then what would be the.
Speaker 5: Remedy is is listen and acknowledge and instead of divide
Speaker 5: him against himself where there's kind of like an underlying
Speaker 5: judgment there's something wrong with you.
Speaker 4: Oh what if it was.
Speaker 5: No, there's something absolutely attuned with you, and we have
Speaker 5: to work together to help recreate the environment so that
Speaker 5: it's more suitable to your journey instead of the other
Speaker 5: way round. So it beckons a series of further questions.
Speaker 5: It's different kinds of questions. And these are the kinds
Speaker 5: of questions I was asking myself on my own personal journey.
Speaker 5: It wasn't like how can I make my feel self
Speaker 5: feel better? It's what what is my soul really trying
Speaker 5: to tell me? That's a completely different The question, just
Speaker 5: like in a scientific experiment, sets up the entire experiment
Speaker 5: and determines what kind of results you get. So these
Speaker 5: esoteric traditions are suggesting that maybe some of these symptoms
Speaker 5: are bang on. Maybe there's a part of our being
Speaker 5: that isn't just intellectual, it's intuitive, and it's deeper than that.
Speaker 5: It's registering that we're living in a crisis situation. It's
Speaker 5: asking us to go through the crisis in a particular way.
Speaker 5: Maybe there's nothing wrong with us per se as human beings.
Speaker 5: Maybe we're registering that the environment is undergoing a dramatic,
Speaker 5: cataclysmic shift and we have to go with that current
Speaker 5: through the other side. And part of that might mean
Speaker 5: a hell of a lot of very scary letting go.
Speaker 1: That's great, Yeah, I you right that.
Speaker 3: These strains are what you consider the collapse of society, ecology,
Speaker 3: the economy, and geopolitical problems or geopolitical unrest. That's a
Speaker 3: lot for the younger generations to handle. And we've been
Speaker 3: through it, you know. I'm in my sixties, and I'm
Speaker 3: able to deal with it a little bit better or
Speaker 3: I try to ignore it. But somebody who's a magnet
Speaker 3: to this information, who needs to hear about these societal changes,
Speaker 3: may not be able to release it quite in the
Speaker 3: same way that we do. And you made some great
Speaker 3: points about Eastern philosophies and these tried and true programs
Speaker 3: and practices that help buffer these these problems. If someone
Speaker 3: is not able to accept in Eastern philosophy like we have,
Speaker 3: what are their options?
Speaker 5: Well, this is where it's you know, I don't disparage
Speaker 5: sort of the clinical use of meditation or anything like that.
Speaker 5: I think it serves a kind of purpose. What I'm
Speaker 5: suggesting is, if we open the telephoto lens, there are
Speaker 5: multiple options for someone who's really destabilized and maybe can't
Speaker 5: handle a deeper dark Night of the soul journey. I mean,
Speaker 5: in a way, I'm putting this to you so that
Speaker 5: they're your listeners have options. But in and another way,
Speaker 5: if it's really truly a dark Knight of the soul,
Speaker 5: what I'm suggesting is tools won't work by definition in
Speaker 5: a way, if it's a true dissolution or dark Knight
Speaker 5: of the soul, by definition, our tools won't help. But
Speaker 5: if it's short of a true dark Knight of the soul, yes,
Speaker 5: it's possible that community places of safety and refuge practices
Speaker 5: for self regulation, which meditation and yoga are wonderful at.
Speaker 5: These are natural and natural medicines and natural remedies, the
Speaker 5: sound music, art literature. These all can serve as bastions
Speaker 5: of support and inner reliance what are called inner refuges.
Speaker 5: They create safety. It's all about the sense of coherence
Speaker 5: and safety when you're feeling fragment, the best one that
Speaker 5: is recommended by our human design we overlook all the time,
Speaker 5: and in fact we're having the biggest influx of disruptor.
Speaker 5: It's an actual face of somebody else in proximity that's
Speaker 5: more regulated than us. By design. We have facial recognition,
Speaker 5: We have a vagus nerve that regulates our neural pathways
Speaker 5: and our ability to regulate our emotions. If we're just
Speaker 5: in the presence of someone who has some level of
Speaker 5: self regulation, some level of kindness and empathy, offers a
Speaker 5: calm demeanor and a soothing voice. The sound of a
Speaker 5: soothing voice, and the wonderful thing for people who want
Speaker 5: to take that role it may be parents or example, spouses, partners.
Speaker 5: The trick and the key and the wonderful liberating thing
Speaker 5: about this is you don't have to do anything. You
Speaker 5: don't have to fix the problem. Ten minutes of being
Speaker 5: with somebody with an open heart and a calm demeanor
Speaker 5: and a present face is enough to help someone come
Speaker 5: from disequilibrium back online to find their own.
Speaker 4: Vibration of stability.
Speaker 5: And this is a wonderful gift that we can give
Speaker 5: each other that we forget in an era of disruption
Speaker 5: and we're all distracted and we're more focused on our
Speaker 5: phones than on the human presence aspect. So it is
Speaker 5: like a gift, and I think the burden that we
Speaker 5: often too often fall into as partners spouses in our
Speaker 5: relations we go for the problem solving and we don't
Speaker 5: go for enough of the presence. And you can never
Speaker 5: problem solve anyway if you're disregulated and fragmented. So really,
Speaker 5: to help someone learn how to cope with their reality,
Speaker 5: they have to shift from being disregulated into wise mind,
Speaker 5: into reclaiming their nervous system and all the only thing
Speaker 5: that we have to do is just be willing to
Speaker 5: be with them in their state of distress. And of
Speaker 5: course the problem is is when we see someone in distress,
Speaker 5: especially someone we love, what happens.
Speaker 1: To us, Yeah, throws this off too.
Speaker 5: It throws us off. So the whole mechanism goes topsy turvy,
Speaker 5: you know. So if we can just remember, actually, the
Speaker 5: gift that I have to give is my own calm
Speaker 5: nervous system. Someone's just going through a wave in the ocean.
Speaker 5: If I just sit with them long enough, we'll pass
Speaker 5: through that current together. I'm free of the burden of
Speaker 5: trying to fix them. They can fix themselves or learn
Speaker 5: how to fix themselves, or learn how to tinker with
Speaker 5: the bigger picture of reality. And we're just surviving a
Speaker 5: tumult here. That can be a really big learning lesson
Speaker 5: for both the receiver and the giver.
Speaker 3: I'm kind of translating that to me somebody who might
Speaker 3: be grounded and maybe something isn't really kind of chaotic
Speaker 3: and wanting to know what the hell does what's going
Speaker 3: to happen next, and not really having any balance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's emotional and it becomes cognitive too, So yes,
Speaker 5: I mean, if you feel emotionally grounded and in your
Speaker 5: body and your nervous system, and you remain calm and connected,
Speaker 5: let's say there's two very it's not just you, you're also connected,
Speaker 5: which means you can empathize with somebody without getting overwhelmed
Speaker 5: by their distress. This is what therapists and first responders learn.
Speaker 5: They learn how to be available without getting overwhelmed. Now,
Speaker 5: part of their mechanism could be to shut things off,
Speaker 5: and we don't want that. So you know, if you
Speaker 5: walk into your doctor's office, or you walk into a
Speaker 5: trauma surgery, or you walk into you sometimes get first
Speaker 5: responders who learn to be present without being empathic. Now,
Speaker 5: I'm sure your listeners and you and I have had
Speaker 5: that experience of walking into a doctor's office where we're
Speaker 5: just like meat on the conveyor belt. You know, it's
Speaker 5: like too many, you know that. But how do you
Speaker 5: stay connected with someone and empathic without getting overwhelmed by
Speaker 5: whatever is happening in their bit of reality? That's an art.
Speaker 5: But that art, if we were to learn, and we
Speaker 5: were to extend as a gift to our loved ones,
Speaker 5: would go a very very long way. Now, what we're
Speaker 5: just to orient, we're still talking about coming short of
Speaker 5: a true dark knight of the soul, Like, how can
Speaker 5: we be effective? How could you work with your son?
Speaker 5: How could you stabilize people that aren't willing or ready
Speaker 5: to be on a long term, very very deep spiritual
Speaker 5: journey of disintegration, voluntary disintegration.
Speaker 4: That's the bigger question.
Speaker 5: This is more of a kind of a smaller question,
Speaker 5: is how do I just survive the ebb and flow
Speaker 5: of such and flux of such a rapid change. Well,
Speaker 5: we really need to stick together and we could all
Speaker 5: afford to learn some very basic coregulation deeper empathy and enhance,
Speaker 5: just as AI is booming, enhance our human and pathy
Speaker 5: in our deep social emotional intelligence.
Speaker 4: It would go a long way.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
Speaker 3: our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly
Speaker 3: with my guests today, Miles Neil discussing his latest book,
Speaker 3: Return with Elixor, will be right back. My guest today
Speaker 3: is Miles Neil. He is a psychologist who does pilgrimage
Speaker 3: to sacred sites and through these programs he is able
Speaker 3: to help people realign and prepare for the future. His
Speaker 3: latest book is Return with Elixor, Four Maps for the
Speaker 3: Soul's Pilgrimage through Death and Rebirth. I want to get
Speaker 3: into system vibrations like the Yugas. But before I do that,
Speaker 3: you use the term pilgrimage quite a bit in your book,
Speaker 3: and this is an important key that I found that
Speaker 3: I have fallen into. When I mean I need to
Speaker 3: get away, I need to go to another country or
Speaker 3: another area, or I'm here in California, so I have
Speaker 3: a lot of landscape that I can go and do
Speaker 3: vision quest But why are pilgrimages so important when we're
Speaker 3: trying to release, not only trauma, but perhaps realign.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a great question. It's one of my favorite questions.
Speaker 5: Pilgrimage has become front and center my new form of therapy.
Speaker 5: So I did twenty five years of conventional therapy, then
Speaker 5: I started integrating Buddhist techniques, and then I started integrating
Speaker 5: young But I've crossed a rubicon entirely now where I
Speaker 5: view pilgrimage as a therapeutic intervention and people think I'm
Speaker 5: nuts for that, but it's worthy of exploration. I mean,
Speaker 5: there are many kinds of pilgrimages. In the Tibetan tradition.
Speaker 5: There are at least three types or categories of pilgrimage.
Speaker 5: One is the outer pilgrimage to a sacred destination. One
Speaker 5: is an inner pilgrimage. It is a journey into the
Speaker 5: inner landscape of one's mind, into the labyrinth of one's mind,
Speaker 5: if you will. And the third is called the secret pilgrimage,
Speaker 5: and that has more to do with the pilgrimage of
Speaker 5: aligning your internal vibration and energy prana. So it's an
Speaker 5: energetic it's an esoteric pilgrimage. It's considered secret or contric
Speaker 5: because if you monkey around too much with that kind
Speaker 5: of energy system, without the right initiation or support, you
Speaker 5: could actually hurt yourself. So those three pilgrimages are beautiful opportunities.
Speaker 5: They are all defined by one principle. They're disruptors of
Speaker 5: ordinary reality. So when you ask me, what purpose does
Speaker 5: a pilgrimage serve, you know, people think of pilgrimage as
Speaker 5: in terms of a kind of travel. Well, the way
Speaker 5: that we travel these days. Actually most of us look
Speaker 5: for comforts. If you're working hard, Cliff, and I'm working hard,
Speaker 5: you know, we want to come to Bali and we
Speaker 5: want to put our feet up and we want to
Speaker 5: sit with you know, we want to relax in the
Speaker 5: swimming pool with a nice drink and some you know,
Speaker 5: smoothie bowls as we look over look the ocean. But
Speaker 5: that's not a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage in a true sense,
Speaker 5: if it's really worked well, first of all, it's answering
Speaker 5: a deeper call. It's not the call of can I,
Speaker 5: you know, where can I find a respite? Where can
Speaker 5: I have a moment of you know, a break from
Speaker 5: my reality? So can so I can recharge, so I
Speaker 5: can go back to the rat race. It's a disruptor,
Speaker 5: a disruptor of what. It disrupts everything from your ordinary
Speaker 5: routine to your mentality, how you see the world, your worldview,
Speaker 5: to your own identity, the way that you hold yourself
Speaker 5: and see yourself in the world.
Speaker 4: A true spiritual pilgrimage.
Speaker 5: Is designed to disrupt the ordinary routine and the centrifuical
Speaker 5: force or the gravitational pull of your ego identity. And
Speaker 5: so you know, for me why it's so therapeutic is
Speaker 5: we live in a culture where we try to gather
Speaker 5: all the accouterments oriented mostly by ego boosting. You know
Speaker 5: how many likes, how many fans, how good am I doing?
Speaker 5: How slender am I know? How many cars? What's my accolade?
Speaker 5: It's and comfort. We're also an extremely comfort oriented civilization,
Speaker 5: and we have done incredibly well at doing this. We
Speaker 5: have the highest tech. You can walk into a smart house.
Speaker 6: Where your car and your house know exactly the perfect
Speaker 6: temperature that's going to be perfect for you, so you
Speaker 6: can sleep and have a beautiful meal on delivery and
Speaker 6: put your tootsies up and watch the television and anesthetize yourself.
Speaker 5: Pilgrimage is designed instead to absolutely disorient and disrupt and
Speaker 5: to change the value system. Maybe the world isn't just
Speaker 5: about me. Maybe the world isn't just about collecting. Maybe
Speaker 5: the world isn't just about comfort. What are some alternatives? Well,
Speaker 5: the ancient traditions had a different paradigm in worldview, and
Speaker 5: pilgrimage was situated within those worldviews and acted as a
Speaker 5: kind of crucible or a method for realizing different kinds
Speaker 5: of qualities and different kinds of attributes and having different
Speaker 5: kinds of experiences. So or, for example, in the Buddhist
Speaker 5: tradition of pilgrimage is about awakening. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it.
Speaker 5: Let's go on a pilgrimage for awakening. Well, you can't
Speaker 5: have awakening without having what's called And these are more
Speaker 5: archaic terms, and we can find updated terms for them.
Speaker 5: A pilgrimage, at least in the Buddhist tradition, is just
Speaker 5: defined by two things. The orientation towards a spiritual destination
Speaker 5: with the aspiration to awaken your mind.
Speaker 4: Sounds wonderful. How is it done?
Speaker 5: It has two wings, just like a bird that flies.
Speaker 5: One of it is called purification and the other one
Speaker 5: is called accumulation. So what you're trying to do is
Speaker 5: you're trying to disrupt the status quo of your identity,
Speaker 5: which is fixated on meanness and comforts, and it has
Speaker 5: very it has a whole structure of defense mechanisms and
Speaker 5: avoidance patterns that wants to look at the kind of
Speaker 5: ugliness inside of you and the hedonic urges and the
Speaker 5: aggressive urges when you go on pilgrimage, And why it's
Speaker 5: therapeutic is that you work on taking a healthy look
Speaker 5: at yourself and taking responsibility for those impulses that are
Speaker 5: actually creating your and other people's dissatisfaction, having an honest
Speaker 5: inventory and accounting and wanting to work on that.
Speaker 4: So, if you don't like the word purification, which.
Speaker 5: Comes out of old world kind of archaic language, even
Speaker 5: though it's right there in psychedelics, you could look at
Speaker 5: it in terms of processing.
Speaker 4: You could be working.
Speaker 5: On processing trauma, processing grievances, processing places where you're stuck,
Speaker 5: processing places where your routine eyed sense of identity is alcified,
Speaker 5: processing knee jerk reactions and imputivity. What's the other side
Speaker 5: of it, accumulation.
Speaker 4: Don't like that.
Speaker 5: Word, what about a culturation or cultivating good attributes cultivating
Speaker 5: open heartedness, cultivating resilience, cultivating generosity, cultivating patients, all those
Speaker 5: attributes that would actually help your sense of self extend,
Speaker 5: expand become more resilient, become more empathic, become higher IQ.
Speaker 5: Then all these things together, the deterioration or the dismantling
Speaker 5: of the old structures the building of the new based
Speaker 5: on this ethos of awakening, Then you can see that
Speaker 5: this is an intervention. This is just like this is
Speaker 5: the old world's remedy for the dark Knight of the soul.
Speaker 5: But short of the dark Knight of the soul, this
Speaker 5: is a way of transformation. Pilgrimage is a literal transformation
Speaker 5: in motion. It's not just transformation on your meditation cushion.
Speaker 5: It takes advantage of the fact that as you orient
Speaker 5: towards spiritual destination and you've gone to many there it
Speaker 5: be Egypt or Peru, or Nepal or Bali, there's something
Speaker 5: in these sacred sites. Just a few months ago, I
Speaker 5: was on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Okay. This
Speaker 5: is a thousand year old pilgrimage route that heads towards
Speaker 5: Santiago to Compostella, where.
Speaker 4: There is a grand.
Speaker 5: A grand cathedral. There chapel that houses the relics of
Speaker 5: Saint John or is it Saint James, I can't remember exactly,
Speaker 5: but either way, one of the top three disciples of Christ.
Speaker 5: And so all of that, what does that mean? It
Speaker 5: means for a thousand years, pilgrims made great efforts walking
Speaker 5: in some cases barefoot, in some cases with very sparse conditions,
Speaker 5: in some cases, through torrential weather in some cases, for
Speaker 5: many months along route, in order to process there. At
Speaker 5: that time, in a Christian metaphor, in Christian ethos, it
Speaker 5: was in order to atone for sin, but also to
Speaker 5: connect with the divine and to accentuate and amplify their devotion.
Speaker 5: And so what happened is that over a month or
Speaker 5: three months, or six months, however long it took them
Speaker 5: to get to their destination, they were actively and voluntarily
Speaker 5: engaged in a process of self transformation. By the time
Speaker 5: they hit the destination of Santiago to Compastella, they had
Speaker 5: already transformed. It wasn't just the arrival at that place.
Speaker 5: Although if you go to Abados, or you go to Dandera,
Speaker 5: or you go to Machipicu.
Speaker 4: Or you go to Bugaya.
Speaker 5: Those places are filled with power. They have a long legacy,
Speaker 5: They have a collective ethos of shared energy and vibration.
Speaker 5: You could feel it in the ground. I have this
Speaker 5: really interesting observation on my Comino to Santiago pilgrimage, which
Speaker 5: I want to share with you because I was absolutely
Speaker 5: blown away. I had a group of twenty people joined
Speaker 5: me for this long trip. We were going one hundred
Speaker 5: miles in two weeks, which is approximately twelve to fifteen
Speaker 5: miles seven to eight hours a day of walking. These
Speaker 5: were people who I had no connection with. They were
Speaker 5: complete strangers when we started. When we ended, it was
Speaker 5: a completely different picture. But one of the observations I had,
Speaker 5: which was incredible, was that by the first order of
Speaker 5: the trip, half of the cohort were experiencing or were
Speaker 5: deepening ass life for Gressia, past life memories. And I
Speaker 5: wasn't anticipating that. But I put two and two together
Speaker 5: and I thought to myself, No, yes, of course, we
Speaker 5: can say that this is a self selected group of
Speaker 5: people who had volunteered for spiritual pilgrimage. But on the
Speaker 5: other hand, there's something about the path, There's something about
Speaker 5: the terrain in which thousands and thousands and thousands of
Speaker 5: oriented pilgrims over centuries have imbued that space with a
Speaker 5: kind of energetic charge that when you go with the right,
Speaker 5: right intention, something shifts inside of you. That might not happen.
Speaker 5: And if you're just at your local cafe in France,
Speaker 5: or your therapist's office in New York City, or at
Speaker 5: the beach in the Bay Area, it might not happen
Speaker 5: because those places don't have the same kind of energetic charge.
Speaker 5: This might I've never been to Egypt, but since you
Speaker 5: have a lot of people that are interested in Egypt
Speaker 5: in your in, your in your in your fan base,
Speaker 5: you you can't deny that going to those places has
Speaker 5: a kind of energetic signature all of its own. Well,
Speaker 5: what happens to the human psyche in those places, Something
Speaker 5: very deep and unpredictable is touched and is amplified and
Speaker 5: is augmented. So what if you go with a spiritual intention,
Speaker 5: open minded, I don't know what's going to happen, but
Speaker 5: whatever happens has meaning. Yeah, suddenly we were putting pieces
Speaker 5: together on long walks. I was almost doing psychotherapy at
Speaker 5: the back of the line with people who were It
Speaker 5: was awesome. It was like people would come talk to me.
Speaker 5: We had there was no And see this goes back
Speaker 5: to the question you asked me about being confined in
Speaker 5: New York City. I was confined brick and mortar. I
Speaker 5: was confined by forty five minute sessions. I was confined
Speaker 5: to just getting people working well back to the office
Speaker 5: so they could come back into my box and out
Speaker 5: to their box, back to my box, band aids and
Speaker 5: here on the comino, I had hours of time, no pressure,
Speaker 5: an absolutely beautiful vista, a trail imbued with meaning of centuries,
Speaker 5: following a path oriented by a spiritual inclination. People would
Speaker 5: come and just converse with me, or I would converse
Speaker 5: with them, or they would converse with each other, and
Speaker 5: things were being activated and they were oriented. Not to
Speaker 5: dismiss them as symptoms as craziness, but as as opportunities.
Speaker 4: This is both the.
Speaker 5: Outer pilgrimage and the inner pilgrimage combined. The outer pilgrimage
Speaker 5: goes to a sacred destination and which is imbued with
Speaker 5: all kinds of meaning and opportunity. You could get lost,
Speaker 5: and that's that could benefit you. You could find what
Speaker 5: you're looking for, and that could benefit you. It's all
Speaker 5: the matter of how you're oriented, but also an inner pilgrimage.
Speaker 5: What gets stirred up is not an obstacle, is an opportunity.
Speaker 5: Can you go deeper? Can you go deeper and deeper?
Speaker 5: Can you go deeper to the places that you're not
Speaker 5: familiar with, the places that scare you, the places that
Speaker 5: are unknown to you? Can you start listening to a
Speaker 5: new way instead of being oriented five senses outward, what
Speaker 5: about oriented five senses inward? What does the inner landscape
Speaker 5: have to teach us? These are all the questions about pilgrimage,
Speaker 5: which I'm so fascinated with. I'm taking so much of
Speaker 5: your time. I'm not.
Speaker 3: Every year, and I got one coming up in Guatemala
Speaker 3: that is dealing with shaman and you need They're telling
Speaker 3: us that you need to set the intention ahead of time,
Speaker 3: to set the setting.
Speaker 5: Yes, and the dieta and the prescriptions or before you
Speaker 5: even get on the trail or into the ceremony are
Speaker 5: part of the preparation. And they would fall into the
Speaker 5: Buddhist terminology a part of the purification starts early. So
Speaker 5: they may ask you, of course you know all this,
Speaker 5: but your listeners they may ask you to change your diet,
Speaker 5: change your lifestyle, maybe abstained from sex, maybe routine eyes,
Speaker 5: more your sleep pattern, you know, maybe not interact in
Speaker 5: ways that are terribly aggravating or upsetting to your mind.
Speaker 5: What they're asking you do is not only cultivate the
Speaker 5: outer conditions or circumstances for a breakthrough, but actually treat
Speaker 5: your inner environment as part of the remedy and recipe
Speaker 5: for for awakening. And so a diet, a lifestyle change,
Speaker 5: and attitude adjustment. I love that attitude adjustment. We need,
Speaker 5: we all need an attitude adjustment. They may happen, we may,
Speaker 5: It may happen a month before you even set foot.
Speaker 5: So then when you get there and the shaman invites
Speaker 5: you into ceremony, you're well intended, you're well oriented, your
Speaker 5: body is receptive, you've you've dissolve all some of the
Speaker 5: obstacles already you are, and listen, it's not easy to
Speaker 5: do those things. When you change your diet, even if
Speaker 5: you stop using sugar or eating meat, and that's something
Speaker 5: familiar to you. What happens, Cliff, what happens to you?
Speaker 5: You get irritated, you get angry, you start having upsetting feelings,
Speaker 5: You have maybe disrupts your sleep pattern, maybe it triggered.
Speaker 5: All of that is not secondary. That's part of the journey.
Speaker 5: How do you show up for that? How do you
Speaker 5: relate to that? What does that teaching you? Maybe it's
Speaker 5: not all cognitive, and maybe it doesn't all make sense,
Speaker 5: But your body is going through purifications, it's launching off
Speaker 5: things that weren't, you know, toxins, So it's all meaningful.
Speaker 5: It's not arbitrary.
Speaker 4: Oh I didn't.
Speaker 3: There you go, You're good, it clicked right where you
Speaker 3: were finish.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, we'll clean it up.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. I was just saying.
Speaker 5: I was just saying that the preliminaries for going to
Speaker 5: ceremony or going on pilgrimage, it doesn't necessarily need to
Speaker 5: make cognitive sense. We often are looking too much for
Speaker 5: an explanation. It can just be the body has an
Speaker 5: opportunity to throw off toxins, the psyche has an opportunity
Speaker 5: to throw off dreams, memories, traumatic patterns, and habits release energy.
Speaker 5: If we volunteer for that and it's held in a
Speaker 5: safe container. Maybe it doesn't always make sense. I mean
Speaker 5: trauma therapy, for example, you can have a shard of
Speaker 5: experience come up in a completely anomalous, unrecognizable way. You
Speaker 5: just have get a moment of anger, and nothing in
Speaker 5: your immediate environment seems to be congruent with it. But
Speaker 5: if you understand it from a trauma lens, it's it's release,
Speaker 5: it's it's and if you can just allow that something
Speaker 5: in your psyche is actually taking authority or own ship
Speaker 5: over your well being and saying, okay, now is the
Speaker 5: time to let go of this thing so that you
Speaker 5: can expand who you are and reclaim parts or fragments
Speaker 5: of your being that you disavowed or let go of
Speaker 5: or couldn't handle when you were younger or in a
Speaker 5: different type period or a different context. This brings up
Speaker 5: a bigger question. Maybe we can pin it. But Jung
Speaker 5: had this wonderful thing to say about the psyche, which
Speaker 5: is that the unconscious is not your adversary. The unconscious
Speaker 5: is your ally. Cliff, this was revolutionary for me, man,
Speaker 5: It was really revolutionary for me in my process. I'm
Speaker 5: a kind of guy that wants to know, wants to
Speaker 5: be in control. The world prize that it made a
Speaker 5: scientist of me. I went to get a PhD. You
Speaker 5: did too. It's like the world tries to get you
Speaker 5: to be uber rational so that you can control your dominion.
Speaker 5: And we learn some way through pop culture or other
Speaker 5: ways that the unconscious, what's inside of us, is threat.
Speaker 5: You know, keep vigilant about this is definitely freud. Keep
Speaker 5: vigilant about what's inside of you because it could upturn
Speaker 5: the apple cart. Jung had a different opinion about it.
Speaker 5: Jung was, no, the unconscious is like a deeper mind.
Speaker 5: It has a deeper knowing. It knows exactly when you're
Speaker 5: ready to have an upsetting moment, because that's not designed
Speaker 5: to derail you. It's temporarily designed to disrupt you, to
Speaker 5: open you. And so Jung was always oriented towards what
Speaker 5: are these anomalous experiences getting upset, being irritated, being angry?
Speaker 5: What is the unconscious trying to teach us? What if
Speaker 5: it takes you in a new direction? What if you
Speaker 5: have a massive breakup, and in my case, what if
Speaker 5: you have a massive betrayal. He would suggest that these
Speaker 5: are all happening for our benefit and your son, for example,
Speaker 5: what would Jung say about your son's depression? He would
Speaker 5: say something like maybe, just maybe, maybe. He didn't put
Speaker 5: it in a hundred percent guarantee. But just maybe these
Speaker 5: symptoms are alerting your son to go on a bigger
Speaker 5: adventure that his culture has limited to him to this
Speaker 5: kind of bird path of going to high school, going
Speaker 5: to college, and getting a job. And he knows at
Speaker 5: some deeper level that's not going to work. And so
Speaker 5: why not take a year off and go to France
Speaker 5: or go to go to Peru, or why not study
Speaker 5: something completely atypical and outside the norm. Why not follow
Speaker 5: his intuition to learn how to sail around the world.
Speaker 5: Why not, you know, go splunking in some cave in
Speaker 5: southern France or learn agriculture in Bali. I you know
Speaker 5: you and I would look at him and go, that's crazy.
Speaker 5: You know you need to get you need to be
Speaker 5: prepared for a job.
Speaker 4: No, that world is gone. That world is gone.
Speaker 5: So all I'm saying is Jung was really a master
Speaker 5: at really validating something deeper in our intuition about going
Speaker 5: on the journey, processing whatever comes up as food to
Speaker 5: nourish your soul. Wow, what a great invitation. So I
Speaker 5: loved it so much when I first came into contact
Speaker 5: with that.
Speaker 3: I want to stay into that same area and discuss
Speaker 3: which is where we go next, the living death and
Speaker 3: then the rebirth. In other words, not physically dying, but.
Speaker 4: Dying.
Speaker 3: I would think one persona am cultivating the new persona.
Speaker 3: That's the language I will use. You're more eloquent in
Speaker 3: your book on this whole process. But why is that
Speaker 3: so important?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, well, of course we can start with
Speaker 5: the idea that the real death, the big d death,
Speaker 5: is inevitable for all of us. Right, Okay, So if
Speaker 5: I ask you, and since you do these great tours
Speaker 5: to engage with shamans and wisdom traditions, they all know
Speaker 5: this and forgot it totally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they they all know the secret to life
Speaker 4: is that it's cyclic.
Speaker 5: We actually think that life is linear and that somehow
Speaker 5: if we just you know, within the next five years,
Speaker 5: we're gonna have a secret AI pill that goes into
Speaker 5: our nervous system and gives us longevity. If we just
Speaker 5: we're gonna bio hack our way to longevity. You know,
Speaker 5: we're staving off the inevitable. We don't see that life
Speaker 5: you can't have You can't have life without death. You
Speaker 5: can't have joy without sadness, you can't have you can't
Speaker 5: have integration without fragmentation. The dualities always come together. Your
Speaker 5: Shamans know this. They come from a culture that never
Speaker 5: lost this or is you know, even though modernity has
Speaker 5: made its impact on them, the pockets, the bastions of
Speaker 5: wisdom culture across the planet, whether it be in Bali
Speaker 5: or in Peru or in India, they still understand this.
Speaker 5: So one of the things about the Big d death,
Speaker 5: it's it's also there's also metaphoric death within a lifetime, okay,
Speaker 5: and you know, given the astrology, we're also going through
Speaker 5: a civilizational death. This is another way it's important to us,
Speaker 5: you and me and your listeners. There is the civilizational
Speaker 5: death that we're amidst. If we go through it with
Speaker 5: the same kind of fear response and avoidance response and
Speaker 5: sort of hubris, it's going to crush us. If we
Speaker 5: go through the big civilizational death with more of the
Speaker 5: wisdom eye or the third eye of the Shamans or
Speaker 5: the wisdom keepers, it'll be a much more graci gracious death.
Speaker 5: Although it may be painful, it will have meaning, greater
Speaker 5: meaning and will actually come out the other end all
Speaker 5: the better for it. Right, So there are little deaths
Speaker 5: across a lifetime, and then there's probably there's definitely a
Speaker 5: big one, a big d death at the end of
Speaker 5: a lifetime. Then there's the micro deaths, which is waking
Speaker 5: up and going to bed every day, or you know,
Speaker 5: moments of your day. Micro moments of your day could
Speaker 5: be moments where you have these opportunities that we miss
Speaker 5: all the time for reclaiming gratitude, reclaiming all, reclaiming compassion,
Speaker 5: reclaiming you know, vitality, you know, if you're if you
Speaker 5: if we just reset our mindset and our heart as
Speaker 5: many times as we reach for our phone in a.
Speaker 3: Day, that's a trip.
Speaker 5: But you know, the most the most important thing for
Speaker 5: me is yes, the thing books like the Tibetan Book
Speaker 5: of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, although
Speaker 5: both of these are probably not called that that's the
Speaker 5: popular version. They're manuals for preparation. They understood life is cyclic.
Speaker 5: They understand that how you go through a crisis and
Speaker 5: how you go through the doorway or their threshold is
Speaker 5: important because once you're in between worlds, and this is
Speaker 5: a metaphor, there is the death phase. There's what's called
Speaker 5: the liminal phase or the Bardo in Tibetan.
Speaker 4: And then there's the.
Speaker 5: Rebirth phase, the death phase. You have to go with
Speaker 5: the heart of surrender. You can't buttress and and and
Speaker 5: become rigid again in the face of death. You have
Speaker 5: to surrender. You have to actually use consciousness and breath
Speaker 5: and forgiveness to open and not contract during the stages
Speaker 5: of dissillusion. Once you're in the liminal phase, which is
Speaker 5: a symbolic phase for incubation, you they say there you're
Speaker 5: assailed by all your past traumas and also your past
Speaker 5: grievances and your past missteps, your regrets. So for example,
Speaker 5: I've never been to Egypt, but there's iconography in Egypt
Speaker 5: of one of the one of the gods holding a
Speaker 5: scale where a feather balanced, the feather of truth is
Speaker 5: balanced against all your negativities. And the Tibetans have the
Speaker 5: same kind of imagery, and so it's a universal archetype
Speaker 5: amongst the wisdom cultures. And I'm sure in your Shamans
Speaker 5: would have something similar, which is you can't outrun your past.
Speaker 5: You will have a moment of recognition and you will
Speaker 5: have a moment of revelation, and you will stare nakedly
Speaker 5: into the mirror of your past deeds and all are
Speaker 5: you going to be ready for it? And Cliff I
Speaker 5: get very animated during this moment because we're not only
Speaker 5: going to have to do that individually and clean up
Speaker 5: our damn mess, but we also have to do it civilizationally,
Speaker 5: which is happening right now. It's happening right now just
Speaker 5: as all the systems and institutions are breaking down the
Speaker 5: underbelly the ugliness of our centuries of hedonistic and imperialistic
Speaker 5: and misogynistic and exclusivity and all of that, all our
Speaker 5: desirous clinging and our reaping and raping the earth and
Speaker 5: a pillaging of the cultures, all of that is now
Speaker 5: coming full circle and we can't outrun it. There's no
Speaker 5: secret ivory tower that the rich folk are going to
Speaker 5: build in New Zealand that's going to exempt them from
Speaker 5: the destruction of their grandiose and asinine emissions. And we're
Speaker 5: all implicated, and we're all complicit. And so that's the
Speaker 5: grand scale Bardo, which is if you can tolerate that,
Speaker 5: and you can take responsibility for that, and you can
Speaker 5: atone for that, and you can learn from that, then
Speaker 5: there's also the treasure, which is that you also have
Speaker 5: an opportunity to redesign yourself, to use that learning as
Speaker 5: awakening fodder, to mulch it so that you can redesign
Speaker 5: yourself as more altruistic, more sensitive to the planet, a
Speaker 5: more egalitarian leader, a better father, a better husband, a
Speaker 5: better parent, whatever.
Speaker 4: It might be.
Speaker 5: You can use that slap in the face, you could
Speaker 5: take one on the chin to orient you to how
Speaker 5: to do it better and how to redesign it. And
Speaker 5: if that's possible for an individual in the liminal space
Speaker 5: right before the reboot, it is also possible in the
Speaker 5: long scale for civilizations to equally do that redesign civilization
Speaker 5: to be more aligned with the incoming area energies of
Speaker 5: the incoming ages. So we're right right now on a
Speaker 5: cusp of a transition between two ages.
Speaker 4: We can hold on.
Speaker 5: For dear life and try to mimic the economic, political, energy,
Speaker 5: medical sectors and institutions of the past, because we're terrified
Speaker 5: of new innovation, and we will we will slam our
Speaker 5: heads into into into into the wall. Or we can
Speaker 5: let go gracefully learn the powerful lessons of what didn't
Speaker 5: work so well, open to the deeper psyche and deeper
Speaker 5: intuitive knowledge of where the energetic signatures of the incoming
Speaker 5: hr and go that way with the most open heart
Speaker 5: and decency. We need decency and dignity and humanity as
Speaker 5: we orient towards the new civilization.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
Speaker 3: our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly
Speaker 3: with my guest today, Miles Neil, discussing his latest book,
Speaker 3: Return with Elixir, will be right back. I guess today
Speaker 3: is Miles' Neil. He has written a new book called
Speaker 3: Return with Elix, or four Maps for the Soul's Pilgrimage
Speaker 3: through Death and Rebirth. We were talking about the Hindus
Speaker 3: Keli Yuga, which is what we're in right now, the
Speaker 3: Yugas system, and my listeners are very well acquainted with
Speaker 3: the Yugas.
Speaker 1: How do we pass.
Speaker 3: Through it as elegantly as we can? And perhaps you
Speaker 3: can give us some suggested technique from your book that
Speaker 3: would Obviously we want people to read your book, but
Speaker 3: you know, when you're dealing with a transition as brutal
Speaker 3: as we're dealing with right now, where we have a
Speaker 3: political nightmare, we have echo systems that are familed. We
Speaker 3: have an economy that's up in the air. This is
Speaker 3: tremendously distabling.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and will be for some time. Okay, so we're
Speaker 5: talking about You know, I'm no expert on the Yuga cycle.
Speaker 5: I learned just enough in my book to weave it
Speaker 5: together with other maps of similar in ILK. So in
Speaker 5: my book, I talk about cosmology as an infinite life
Speaker 5: cycle with its own epochs. I talk about Jung's model
Speaker 5: as a cycle of individuation in which you let go
Speaker 5: of one identity, fall into the dark knight of the soul,
Speaker 5: and reclaim a larger identity. I talk about Joseph Campbell's
Speaker 5: mythopoetic cycle, which is a departure from an ordinary world
Speaker 5: into an unknown world so you can face a terrifying
Speaker 5: ordeal but also reclaim a lost treasure and return back
Speaker 5: with a gift. And I talk about the Tibetan cycle.
Speaker 5: The Tibetan book a cycle of death and rebirth, which
Speaker 5: is a soul's journey through the stages of dissolution at
Speaker 5: the time of death to enter into the sparto or
Speaker 5: liminal phase, so that you can reboot yourself as an
Speaker 5: altruistic angel or avatar to come back to the world
Speaker 5: in a more purposeful way. All of these maps follow
Speaker 5: this one alchemical motto that I discovered across the five
Speaker 5: year writing of my book, which I want to share
Speaker 5: with your listeners, and then return to the cosmological map,
Speaker 5: because it underpins all these maps, and my hypothesis is
Speaker 5: it underpins many more maps, not just the four that
Speaker 5: I discovered. This alchemical motto is called salvee e coagula.
Speaker 5: It solve ae is a Latin term that is a
Speaker 5: cognate for dissolve. It means and and coagula is the
Speaker 5: cognate for coagulation, which means to regenerate or to come
Speaker 5: back to renew. And so this idea that you can't
Speaker 5: just jump to the high point of the mountain. You
Speaker 5: have to go through a disillusion. You can't just have
Speaker 5: new life without death. And I say it with a
Speaker 5: smile on my face, and I remember when I was
Speaker 5: going through the death processes, and it is enough to
Speaker 5: make me cry. And as it might be as a
Speaker 5: father to see your own son go through the dark night.
Speaker 5: It's not a laughing matter, it's not a one night thing.
Speaker 5: It can be months, if not years, it can be
Speaker 5: and for anyone listening, your dark night is your invitation
Speaker 5: to rebirth. But it makes it no less terrifying and
Speaker 5: no less painful. And you're and I want to speak
Speaker 5: directly to your soul, you're not doing anything wrong. If
Speaker 5: it's painful and it's long and enduring and it's unbearable,
Speaker 5: it's not that you're doing anything wrong. It's it's this
Speaker 5: is how it is. This is how the journey goes.
Speaker 5: If you can just hold on, if you can just
Speaker 5: open even that little bit, if you can just accept
Speaker 5: the tumult, if you can just accept the fragmentation, if
Speaker 5: you can just accept the not knowing and the lack
Speaker 5: of ability to control your situation for one more day,
Speaker 5: with a with A with a hint of faith in
Speaker 5: the larger enterprise, that all of these wisdom traditions are
Speaker 5: telling us that life is cyclic, and you will make
Speaker 5: it through to the new dawn. You won't fall into
Speaker 5: the abyss and be forever obliterated. It's an impossibility. Let go,
Speaker 5: Let go, Let go, noble one, the hour has come
Speaker 5: for your dissolution. The liminals doorway, this doorway into the
Speaker 5: liminality is here go through with a noble heart and learn.
Speaker 5: This is what the Tibetan Book of the Dead is
Speaker 5: encouraging all of us to do it. It hurts like hell,
Speaker 5: it burns like fire. It's so disorienting, you don't even
Speaker 5: know who you are.
Speaker 4: But then in the.
Speaker 5: Midst of it, there, if you can just open, another
Speaker 5: voice will appear to you, just like in the psychedelic movement.
Speaker 5: The psychedelics is a microcosma of death, your psychedelic journey,
Speaker 5: of all your preparation for one month, you get to
Speaker 5: the shaman, you take the substance, whatever it might be,
Speaker 5: the medicine, and you go through the same dark night.
Speaker 5: You have to dissolve, You have to be confronted, you
Speaker 5: have to be assailed. You might not know who you are,
Speaker 5: where you are, why you are. And if you can
Speaker 5: just open that, that is a huge teaching, a counter
Speaker 5: Hubris teaching to open you to humility. Then humility sheds
Speaker 5: you of all your knowingness and maybe then some drop
Speaker 5: of wisdom from a deeper source can then fill your cup.
Speaker 5: But we don't want to let go. We want to know,
Speaker 5: We want to know, we want we want to be
Speaker 5: in cont want to have it all together. So this
Speaker 5: is the invitation, both at the large scale and at
Speaker 5: the individual scale. The Yuga cycle as a metaphor is
Speaker 5: saying that life is cyclic. We have reached from if
Speaker 5: life was a clock of twenty four thousand years, twelve
Speaker 5: o'clock at the top and six o'clock at the bottom.
Speaker 5: The six o'clock is at the darkest night, and we
Speaker 5: have just according to experts like Biboo Mishra, who you've
Speaker 5: had on your show, incredible expert on the subject. Is
Speaker 5: he basically recalculated tree you tek Shwarz from his Holy
Speaker 5: Science book, which is the book that I used as
Speaker 5: reference point. He's basically suggesting that sometime in May twenty
Speaker 5: twenty five, we cross a threshold. I don't mind so
Speaker 5: much whether it's here or there, to be honest with you,
Speaker 5: because I look at it as a construct as a metaphor.
Speaker 5: I don't look at it. I'm not trying to track
Speaker 5: it as precisely as Bibou, although I think it's important.
Speaker 5: But for me, all that's important is a couple of
Speaker 5: things to alert my unconscious and your listener's unconscious to
Speaker 5: the fact that time is cyclic and that we're on
Speaker 5: a great and long journey together as civilization, and we
Speaker 5: have reached our apex, our tipping point of decline, and
Speaker 5: we're actually on the upswing, which is an incredibly hopeful
Speaker 5: message we need to hear and we need to spread. Yes,
Speaker 5: the systems are dissolving, Yes, the institutions are fragmenting. Yes,
Speaker 5: we are all going to actually have to tighten our
Speaker 5: belts and lose our jobs and like you know, the
Speaker 5: party is over. Okay, we have to know that your
Speaker 5: kids know it already, which is why either symptomatic, but
Speaker 5: if they see it in terms of the bigger picture,
Speaker 5: it provides orientation. Cliff, It's not just if you're too
Speaker 5: close to the trees. It just can't be enough to
Speaker 5: destabilize you. But if you can take us big step
Speaker 5: back and see the long arc of the longer journey
Speaker 5: and see, I'm a soul being reincarnated through time and space,
Speaker 5: and I happen to be born at a time where
Speaker 5: I'm at this absolutely pivotal, cataclysmic and creative opportunity, then
Speaker 5: I have a place. I have a role to play here.
Speaker 5: Your kids and my kids have a role to play,
Speaker 5: and your listeners and you and me have a role
Speaker 5: to play, and you're doing exactly. So you've been following
Speaker 5: and I don't even know you, but i've your soul
Speaker 5: has been guiding you to broadcast these wisdom messages and
Speaker 5: take people on pilgrim images because it understood in this lifetime.
Speaker 5: And I don't know what you were in a prior lifetime,
Speaker 5: whether you were in marketing or your CEO or something
Speaker 5: in entertainment. I don't know what it was, but something
Speaker 5: called you into this role. And now it's prophetic because
Speaker 5: now people need this content, this wisdom content. They need
Speaker 5: access to wisdom traditions. They need to go on a
Speaker 5: method of pilgrimage for disillusion and reawakening. And you're a
Speaker 5: wisdom keeper for that. You're a bridge, your bridge to
Speaker 5: old traditions. Your platform serves to amplify a message that
Speaker 5: is underlying it is a message of hope. We yes,
Speaker 5: we are in crisis, but there's a new dawn coming
Speaker 5: and actually we can't just be passive observers. We have
Speaker 5: to be active participants in it. That's the call. How
Speaker 5: do we be active participants in the reconstruction of a
Speaker 5: new world When we're talking about long time spances, so
Speaker 5: we're entering from Collie into Duarpa, right, Okay. Dwarpa is
Speaker 5: somewhere on the order of two thousand, between two thousand,
Speaker 5: five hundred and three thousand years. Of course, Bibu can
Speaker 5: give you the better math. I have the math in
Speaker 5: my book, but again I don't. Again, I'm not so
Speaker 5: precise about it, not because I dismissed the precision. I'm
Speaker 5: just looking for swaths of mythopoetic interpretation. And so what
Speaker 5: I like to say to people is we're actually on
Speaker 5: the cusp of two transitions, not just the Coliyugo, which
Speaker 5: there are four gold, silver, iron, and bronze and iron
Speaker 5: we're dark, but also twelve epochs of the equinoc the
Speaker 5: procession of the equinoxes. Okay, and this is a transition
Speaker 5: between the Pissian age and the Aquarium age. That's a
Speaker 5: that's also you know, these two match each other perfectly.
Speaker 5: We're talking about the same long cycle of twenty five
Speaker 5: about twenty four to twenty five thousand years, but within
Speaker 5: it cut differently. The yugas are cut into four, the
Speaker 5: astrological cycles are cut into twelve. What's the importance of them, Well,
Speaker 5: they're the duration in which we are transitioning has a
Speaker 5: particular energetic signature. This is what's important. The dwarp dwarpa
Speaker 5: yuga has a particular energetic signature. It is a time
Speaker 5: of I would distill it this way, and this is
Speaker 5: not just me, This is treat U tek Shwaraz, my
Speaker 5: source and also young knew this too. The age that
Speaker 5: we're heading into, which is on the upcycle from the
Speaker 5: dark night, heading all the way back to the high
Speaker 5: point of civilization Satya yoga, our technological prowess will far
Speaker 5: exceed our moral compass over the next two thousand years.
Speaker 5: What we're trying to do is catch up morally to
Speaker 5: our technological ingenuity. So this is just one signature which
Speaker 5: your listeners can contemplate with the age of AI coming
Speaker 5: and with the you know, with the with the Kurtzweils
Speaker 5: sort of you know, moment of singularity amidst us in
Speaker 5: our lifetime possibly right and AI, you know, general artificial
Speaker 5: intelligence almost there, if not, depends who you talk to.
Speaker 5: We're talking about power we have never conceived of. But
Speaker 5: if you look at the Yugas and you talk to
Speaker 5: people like Bibu and others that you've had on your show,
Speaker 5: they'll all say that since time of recyclic there were
Speaker 5: past civilizations that had unbelievable powers, unbelievable technologies. These are
Speaker 5: not new things. We had telepathy and we have you know,
Speaker 5: incredible actual machines. You go to Egypt and you can't
Speaker 5: explain how you constructed it, and you wonder on a
Speaker 5: linear map, how is it possible? Because we're brainwashed to
Speaker 5: think that people were primitive and we're now we're at
Speaker 5: the apex unbelievable hubrious. There were people, there were prior
Speaker 5: civilizations and people who had unbelievable, unfathomable capabilities both internal
Speaker 5: and external, at their capacity for us lift for us.
Speaker 5: What we're trying to understand and how people can orient
Speaker 5: themselves is have hope. We have to move through this
Speaker 5: voluntarily and gracefully. We have to let go. It's going
Speaker 5: to get bumpy. We've enjoyed a long stint of stability,
Speaker 5: and now it's going to be unstable. We've enjoyed a
Speaker 5: long period of coherence and now it's going to become fragmented.
Speaker 5: We've enjoyed a long period of you know, institutional marketing,
Speaker 5: you know, but it's all a deck of cards, it's
Speaker 5: all a deck of cards. It's a it's a bubble
Speaker 5: and it's about to burst, and it's death, and death
Speaker 5: hurts and there's no way around it. And there will
Speaker 5: be grieving, and there will be anxiety, and there will
Speaker 5: be unpleasantness, and there may be civil unrest and all
Speaker 5: the rest of it is coming. But if you can breathe,
Speaker 5: and you can listen to the guidance of the wisdom keeper,
Speaker 5: and you can coregulate in small pockets and small communities
Speaker 5: and local communities where you gather around higher intelligence, and
Speaker 5: you can open to this fact that what is being
Speaker 5: called and asked of us in this moment is make
Speaker 5: your life an instrument of ethics. That is, that is
Speaker 5: now here's one analogy I'd like to offer your listeners.
Speaker 5: When the big megalithic builders and builders of the great
Speaker 5: cathedrals of Europe in the Middle Ages were building, the
Speaker 5: Stonemasons would have a vision of a of a of
Speaker 5: a temple or church or cathedral that would last one
Speaker 5: thousand years that they would never see the end of.
Speaker 5: They would never see the fruit of their labor.
Speaker 4: But they built.
Speaker 5: Nonetheless, they put stone together and maybe a generation would
Speaker 5: die off and a new generation would come in to
Speaker 5: complete the project. Right, and that is a great metaphor
Speaker 5: for you and me raising our kids. We are coming
Speaker 5: through the threshold now. One epoch is dying, another one
Speaker 5: is emerging. Technology will far exceed our moral compass. Each
Speaker 5: of us is being called to become more authentic, genuine,
Speaker 5: aligned with virtue. We will be the foundation builders of
Speaker 5: a new civilization that we won't be around in this
Speaker 5: form to witness, but we will bequeath that to our
Speaker 5: heirs and to our own souls to read, to reanimate,
Speaker 5: or to reinhabit. And so ethics is our strongest play.
Speaker 5: Clean up your life, have moral integrity. I say, you know,
Speaker 5: most people when they take the wide angle view and
Speaker 5: they see the institutions collapsing, they see the ecological system collapsing,
Speaker 5: They see the absolute you know, hypocrisy and corruption in governments.
Speaker 5: There's no one to trust anymore. It's you know, fifteen
Speaker 5: minute cities, and everybody's trying to overstep and overreach and
Speaker 5: control us. The propaganda over the over the airwaves, and
Speaker 5: the deep deception is only going to get more tenacious
Speaker 5: deep deception. And how do I know that? I know
Speaker 5: that because the aquarian age has at least four signatures
Speaker 5: that I write about in the book. If you want
Speaker 5: to orient yourself properly to the future, the first thing
Speaker 5: that we need is to understand that we're going from
Speaker 5: a pyramid to a mandola. Is one of the archetype
Speaker 5: or the energetic signatures of the incoming age. It means
Speaker 5: that this whole thing of like Trump on top and
Speaker 5: the rest of us lowly folk on the bottom, that's
Speaker 5: about to upturn itself. But before it upturns itself, the
Speaker 5: oligarchs on top are going to double down, which is
Speaker 5: what's happening right now, in order for us to recalibrate
Speaker 5: and re harmonize and align with the new civilization that's
Speaker 5: coming in, which will be more architectically designed around a mandola,
Speaker 5: where all of us understand that we have a we
Speaker 5: are in a decentralized network where we all have we
Speaker 5: all have innate power and dignity, and we all have
Speaker 5: a role to play. That's one archetype. Another one is discernment.
Speaker 5: Why is that important? Because we are going to live
Speaker 5: through a time period where we are going to be
Speaker 5: assaulted by deep fake everywhere. We will never know for
Speaker 5: sure the truth, and if we only use our intellectual capacities,
Speaker 5: we will be outsmarted by technologies and by bad actors.
Speaker 5: And so we have to trust something. We have to
Speaker 5: train and trust something deeper inside of us, the wisdom eye,
Speaker 5: the third eye of intuition that can discern between augmented
Speaker 5: reality and virtual reality and propaganda and all of that stuff. Anyway,
Speaker 5: what I'm trying to say, and the other one is dignity.
Speaker 5: There's this idea that we have lost our humanity. If
Speaker 5: do you just look at the geopolitical situation between Israel
Speaker 5: and Palestine. I mean, it's an absolute travesty of both
Speaker 5: are losers on all sides, and we're completely we have
Speaker 5: no solutions because we're completely looking at it in a
Speaker 5: binary way. One's right and one's wrong. And this is
Speaker 5: the same with our political system in the United States.
Speaker 5: We're being played. We're absolutely being played. What we're forgetting
Speaker 5: is that we have to work on ourselves. You don't
Speaker 5: like the leadership, work on yourself. You think that everything
Speaker 5: is corrupt, become more you think that it's all disharmonized.
Speaker 5: Find small pockets where you can harmonize and try to
Speaker 5: keep your own equilibrium, stop outsourcing, bring back the responsibility
Speaker 5: right to your own body and to your own local
Speaker 5: sphere of influence. And so, just to wrap this up,
Speaker 5: because it's long winded, and I'm sorry for that, but
Speaker 5: I get animated about these kinds of questions because I
Speaker 5: think there are important questions for all of us, because
Speaker 5: we're all in this together, and we're all experiencing the
Speaker 5: same disillusion of our civilization. And there's one message that
Speaker 5: came through in the book, and it's the one message
Speaker 5: I'm repeating here, is as we live into the thresholds
Speaker 5: of the new civilization, the most important thing that each
Speaker 5: of us can do is try to clean up our
Speaker 5: own mess and be as morally intact and morally upright
Speaker 5: as possible. And if that means other people cheat us,
Speaker 5: and if that means other people slap us on one
Speaker 5: face the side of the face, if that means people
Speaker 5: other other people steal with from us, we have to
Speaker 5: do the higher We have to go the higher row.
Speaker 5: That's the energetic legacy that we will leave.
Speaker 3: I love it amazing. I love this integrity, having the
Speaker 3: integrity and keeping that as your mantle for the future.
Speaker 3: The book's called Return with elixir. My guest today has
Speaker 3: been Miles Neil. As we conclude, Miles, how do people
Speaker 3: use your book? How would you like to see them
Speaker 3: their use the material in your book?
Speaker 5: Well, okay, so the book is dense. It's four hundred
Speaker 5: and forty pages. It's not like going to be a
Speaker 5: linear read in a way, if I'm not to be cheeky,
Speaker 5: but in a way, if you come away with this
Speaker 5: notion that there's some deeper wisdom inside of you, listen
Speaker 5: to that more than any book, including my own.
Speaker 3: Okay, if God, okay, because there is a lot to
Speaker 3: cover in your book. You just did a brain dump
Speaker 3: in that book, which is great because we get a
Speaker 3: sense of where your your own personal journey and your
Speaker 3: practice in seeing other people and their journey, which makes
Speaker 3: it even more of a must read and also very insightful.
Speaker 3: But again, would you suggest you just need to read
Speaker 3: through it or.
Speaker 5: Take your time with it? I mean, pick it up,
Speaker 5: look at the maps, start to see visually that we're
Speaker 5: on a cyclic journey together.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: And also it's particularly suited for people who feel the call,
Speaker 5: feel that buzz, feel that that are they're symptomatic, feel
Speaker 5: that they're there's something as they say, as Morpheus said
Speaker 5: in the First Matrix, he said, there's a thorn in
Speaker 5: the mind. If you're a listener and you're you're on
Speaker 5: your work wheel, or you're on your bird path, a
Speaker 5: familiar path, but something underlying you and deep inside of
Speaker 5: you is stirring. And recognize as there's a mismatch here.
Speaker 5: There's something that they're not telling us. There's something that's
Speaker 5: not apparent. There's something there's a disturbance in the force,
Speaker 5: but you just can't quite get your hands wrapped around it.
Speaker 5: Then this book serves as a doorway, and it gives
Speaker 5: you four doorways. You like cosmology, you can go through
Speaker 5: the Largest Map. You like mythopoetics and stories and narratives,
Speaker 5: you can go through the Campbell Map. If you like psychology,
Speaker 5: you can go through the psychology portal of Jung. And
Speaker 5: if you like spirituality, you can go through the Deep
Speaker 5: Science of rebirth of the Tibetan tradition. And if you're
Speaker 5: someone like your listeners who may go to Peru and
Speaker 5: they like shamanism, or they like alchemy, or they like
Speaker 5: this one, you can go through the universal map that
Speaker 5: we describe together in our conversation of solve a coagula,
Speaker 5: and you can put yourself in the deepest understanding that
Speaker 5: there must be a dissillusion and a complete fragmentation in
Speaker 5: order for there to be a reclaiming and a renewal,
Speaker 5: and that we're right there on the cusp. We are
Speaker 5: right there on the cusps, so pivotal. So take your
Speaker 5: time with it, trust your intuition with it. See is
Speaker 5: that it's its own pilgrimage. You have stories in there.
Speaker 5: You have Young in Theirs, Young's breakdown to break through,
Speaker 5: you have christ breakdown to break through, you have Buddha's
Speaker 5: break down to break through. You have my clients breakdown
Speaker 5: to break through. Tell your son that a breakthrough is
Speaker 5: a breakthrough, is imminent because he's breaking down. Encourage him
Speaker 5: to keep going, Encourage tell him that he's not crazy.
Speaker 5: Tell him that it's a mismatch for his society and
Speaker 5: his civilization, and that you know there are cultures that
Speaker 5: would understand him and validate him and support him through.
Speaker 5: This is a vision quest. This is a long enduring
Speaker 5: vision quest without substance for him, and that he will
Speaker 5: be okay, and that he will be a contributor. And
Speaker 5: I want your son to know that. I want everybody
Speaker 5: listening to know that, and I want us to remember
Speaker 5: that we're all in this together. That the worst thing
Speaker 5: that we can do is fragment and like you know,
Speaker 5: feel appssolutely lost in the corner of our mind. This
Speaker 5: is a time for us to come together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, great stuff, Neil. Really pleasure having you on
Speaker 3: the program. I'm going to have to have you back.
Speaker 3: How can people learn more about you? Give us your
Speaker 3: social media tags and perhaps upcoming pilgrimages that you're leading.
Speaker 5: Okay, so I mean Miles, Neil, m I L E.
Speaker 5: S N E A L E is my website and
Speaker 5: all my tags both on YouTube and on Instagram. Those
Speaker 5: are the only two that I use for social My
Speaker 5: uphill coming pilgrimages that I'm excited about. I will be
Speaker 5: leading a tour to Bhuton with my spiritual master, Guessha
Speaker 5: tenzenz Opa, Tibetan master. We're going to buton to the
Speaker 5: power places and caves of Patma Sambaba to do tantric
Speaker 5: visualizations in these sacred caves and landscapes. That's in October
Speaker 5: twenty twenty six. Is a big year for me because
Speaker 5: you got me at the right time. Cliff, at the
Speaker 5: beginning of the show, I told you how valuable and
Speaker 5: important I think pilgrimages are, and so I'm pivoting out
Speaker 5: of one on one work, although I still do a
Speaker 5: little bit of it into pilgrimages, leading pilgrimages as you do.
Speaker 5: I'm going to have four of them next year. One
Speaker 5: is to Java for conscious leadership. Java is in Indonesia
Speaker 5: where they have these great temples and the largest mandola
Speaker 5: on the planet. We never get to talk about it,
Speaker 5: but since you do all the ancient civilizations, the Silundra
Speaker 5: dynasty built the biggest mandola on the planet in jet
Speaker 5: and central Java, and I'll be doing visualizations there for
Speaker 5: conscious leadership, altruistic training people how to become not just influencers.
Speaker 4: But agents of change.
Speaker 5: Then I'll be going to Japan to the Komano Koto Trails,
Speaker 5: which are the sister trails of the Camino de Santiago
Speaker 5: in Spain.
Speaker 4: There are two.
Speaker 5: Pilgrimage routes, both a thousand years old, that are World
Speaker 5: Heritage designated, and so I'll be going to Japan. I'll
Speaker 5: also be going to some valley in the High Himalayas
Speaker 5: of Nepal with my teacher, and there's one other to Turkey,
Speaker 5: which is at the end of next year. I know
Speaker 5: a lot of people are going to Turkey because they
Speaker 5: like go Beckley Teppe. I'm going actually with two other healers,
Speaker 5: so we're going to do a healing journey in Turkey.
Speaker 5: I'm going to have a Balanese alchemist and an Arivedic
Speaker 5: physician and myself a Buddhist psychologist, going to reanimate, not
Speaker 5: just look at these ancient sites. Okay, this may be
Speaker 5: one of the difference between my clinical background. I'm not
Speaker 5: a historian, I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not an anthropologist.
Speaker 5: I'm a healer. So I've collaborated with two other healers.
Speaker 5: We want to go to Turkey and we want to
Speaker 5: go to places like Kapadokia and to go Beckley Teppe
Speaker 5: and to Pergamon where they have the Esclepeon. I know
Speaker 5: you had Sarah James on your show once and I'm
Speaker 5: a big fan of Sarah James. She and I recently
Speaker 5: went to the Esclepeon in Greece. I'll be going to
Speaker 5: the Escleppeon in Pergamon, Turkey and doing and reviving it
Speaker 5: with Tibetan healing techniques. So we're not just inviting travelers
Speaker 5: to look at the stone and to and to have
Speaker 5: awe about our ancient ancestors, but also to move forward.
Speaker 5: How do we reactivate these sites, Cliff, this is very important.
Speaker 5: How do we reactivate them so that they're ready to
Speaker 5: initiate larger populations of people for the new world that's coming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. Wow, you're busy next year? Fantastic.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you, do you have a YouTube
Speaker 3: channel with.
Speaker 1: Some of yesogs.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all my talks are up there, the whole I
Speaker 5: did a whole free series of twelve lectures, their long
Speaker 5: format lectures, you know, so in the age of people
Speaker 5: liking three minutes, I don't have a lot of short
Speaker 5: form guard content, but I alert people to go find
Speaker 5: the Crucible. The Crucible was my twelve part lecture series
Speaker 5: which is about the book. So if you want to
Speaker 5: do a study the book with me online for free,
Speaker 5: you go to my YouTube channel, you find the Crucible.
Speaker 4: It's a twelve part series.
Speaker 5: Yes, they're two hour long format, but they take you
Speaker 5: through all four maps. So I have three classes on
Speaker 5: the Yuga cycle. I have three classes on young, three
Speaker 5: classes on Campbell, and three classes on Tibn Buddhism, and
Speaker 5: we and we do meditations together, we talk about the content.
Speaker 5: It's much more experiential. So I invite people to join.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The last question is did you you had your book
Speaker 3: published by Inner Traditions and I love those guys. Did
Speaker 3: they have you read it through audible?
Speaker 1: Are you on audible?
Speaker 5: I'm not on audible, but Cliff, do me a favor
Speaker 5: and talk to people at the Talk to the people
Speaker 5: like they're.
Speaker 1: Gonna put this that you gotta you're.
Speaker 5: Great, Tell me that, tell them that be an advocate
Speaker 5: for me.
Speaker 4: I'm ask them.
Speaker 5: I would love to do my own voice on my
Speaker 5: own journey. I can't imagine somebody else doing that. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's so personal. My book is so personal. So Cliff,
Speaker 5: do me a huge favor, do.
Speaker 4: Do me a solid. We'll try it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Hey, Miles, fantastic having you on. Let's do it again.
Speaker 3: It was really my pleasure meeting you. Thanks for joining
Speaker 3: me today.
Speaker 5: Well let me just say say before you jump off, Cliff,
Speaker 5: thanks for all you do. I'm sorry I didn't have
Speaker 5: enough time to talk about you and all the wonderful
Speaker 5: things that you do. I know that your listeners already
Speaker 5: know that, But for me, I'm sincere in my aspirations
Speaker 5: and I feel very connected with you. We do similar
Speaker 5: things for the same purpose on the planet at the
Speaker 5: little time. For that, I thank you.
Speaker 3: All right, man, chairs, Wow, that was amazing. I really
Speaker 3: got caught up in that interview. You may have noticed
Speaker 3: because I'm not saying a lot. I'm letting Miles carry
Speaker 3: the energy, which he did very, very well, and there
Speaker 3: was a lot to unfold in that interview. I hope
Speaker 3: you enjoyed it as much as I did. His book
Speaker 3: has just come out return with Elix or you can
Speaker 3: get it wherever you get your books, digital books too,
Speaker 3: And I wanted and I didn't know this, he hasn't
Speaker 3: done it, and uh he hasn't recorded it in uh audible.
Speaker 3: It should be recorded, and he agreed because he's got
Speaker 3: a good narrative type of voice, and so I reached
Speaker 3: out to his publicist and recommended that. So it's funny
Speaker 3: because I just don't have time to read. And it's
Speaker 3: really a challenge when I get somebody who sends me
Speaker 3: a huge.
Speaker 1: Book and they're like, please read this, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't have time. I just don't have time.
Speaker 3: So I definitely want to have Neil back on the
Speaker 3: program in the future because that was great.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: We have our own tours coming up. We have a
Speaker 3: Sacred Pyramid tour in Guatemala December first through the twelfth.
Speaker 3: The beauty of this tour is that we will be
Speaker 3: with Maya Shaman and we're going to be doing a
Speaker 3: number of different ceremon But when you're around these daykeepers,
Speaker 3: these are the clindical experts. The real calendar watchers are
Speaker 3: called daykeepers, and they are telling us and working with
Speaker 3: us andbuing us with this energy of these sacred sites.
Speaker 3: For all the details on this tour, go to earth
Speaker 3: Ancients dot com forward slash tours and register if you can.
Speaker 3: We're about half full. We're only taking about twenty maybe
Speaker 3: twenty five people. I don't know if I want to
Speaker 3: go that far because we're we want to stay in
Speaker 3: a bus and get around comfortably, so I think we'll
Speaker 3: cap it at twenty five.
Speaker 1: For all the.
Speaker 3: Details, again, go to earth Ancients dot com forward slash tours.
Speaker 3: If you have questions, send me an email to earth
Speaker 3: Ancients the number four of the letter you at gmail
Speaker 3: dot com and ask me anything you want and I'll
Speaker 3: try to get back to you. I want to also
Speaker 3: mention we just listed our twenty twenty six early your calendar.
Speaker 3: We're gonna be in Egypt for a megalithic tour. It's
Speaker 3: gonna be April twenty eight through May tenth. This is
Speaker 3: not to be missed because we're with Mohammed Embraheim and
Speaker 3: he is another one that kind of gets into the
Speaker 3: sacredness of these ancient sites. We'll do some meditations and
Speaker 3: we will definitely see some of the most amazing sites
Speaker 3: in all of Egypt, if not all of the world,
Speaker 3: including the megalithic statuary that I'm fascinated with and you'll
Speaker 3: have a chance to see.
Speaker 1: Up close and personal.
Speaker 3: That's also listed on the website. Go to Earthacients dot
Speaker 3: com forward slash Tours. All right, that's it for this program.
Speaker 3: I want to thank my guest today, Miles and Neil
Speaker 3: by the way, he was coming to us from Ballet, Indonesia.
Speaker 1: That's a long ways away.
Speaker 3: As always, the team of Gail Tour, Mark Foster and
Speaker 3: Basel Pavey.
Speaker 1: You guys rock.
Speaker 3: All right, take care of you will and we will
Speaker 3: talk to you next time.
Speaker 4: M count