← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Radical Jung: The Ancient Psyche and Surviving the Modern World - Interview with Rob Faure Walker
00:46:41
Loading summary
Transcript88 lines
- [00:00]
Deborah Maldonado
Foreign welcome to Jung on Purpose with Creativemind hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started.
- [00:35]
Rob Fower Walker
Hello.
- [00:35]
Rob Maldonado
We are interviewing a great guest. His name is Rob Fower Walker. He's the author of Radical Young that's coming out in late May and it's just an incredible conversation we had about young. It's very hard for us to find
- [00:49]
Deborah Maldonado
youngins that are as radical as us.
- [00:51]
Rob Maldonado
So we're really excited to share this interview with Mr. Walker and I want to tell you a little bit about him before we bring him on the show. Rob is an eco therapist and author. He has previously worked as a teacher in schools in north and East London and as an academic at the University College London and SOAS University of London where he founded systems to help academics provide the UK Parliament with research based evidence to support lawmaking. His previous books have explored Western government's misguided promotion of of counter extremism strategies and how to find loving transcendence while being forced to live in a transactional market economy. His coming book is called Radical Young and it's going to be out in late May and explores healing through gnostic introspection so that we can act better in the world. We talk about eco therapy, we talk about the social media and the attention economy and we also talk a little bit about psychedelics as well.
- [01:53]
Deborah Maldonado
We hope you enjoy this interview that's beginning right now.
- [01:56]
Rob Maldonado
Hello. Welcome Rob Fauer Walker to the show. We're so excited to have you here. Wanted to just give you a chance to introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit about yourself.
- [02:07]
Rob Fower Walker
Sure. My name's Rob. I'm an academic and an author and also an eco therapist. And I suppose that's the main part of my work that we're talking about today. I work in mostly in an ancient forest around where I live here in the south of England. And really kind of listening back to some of your podcasts, my work feels quite closely aligned to yours because I adopt a Jungian lens with my eco therapy. I help my clients get into a state whereby aspects of their mind emerge within the forest around us and then that gives us something to work with together. Great effect so far.
- [02:42]
Rob Maldonado
Awesome.
- [02:42]
Unidentified Male Host
Sounds amazing.
- [02:44]
Rob Maldonado
And you have a new book coming out. We'll talk about that. It's called Radical Young. Can you tell us what Made you write the book. I know you have some other books too.
- [02:51]
Rob Fower Walker
Sure.
- [02:52]
Rob Maldonado
But why this book this time?
- [02:54]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah. So, I mean, I guess with anyone that's doing kind of writing about Jung, it's. It's entirely personal in many aspects that I have spent many years, firstly as a high school teacher and then as a. As an academic in London and was quite. I was quite involved in activist politics. That was always kind of part of my. Both as a teacher working in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood and lobbying the government around their promotion or challenging their promotion of Islamophobia through some of their counterterrorism regimes. And then I developed that when I went into academia and did my PhD looking at similar kinds of things, and then latterly was kind of effective enough at that that I was invited to other universities to train other academics in how to. How to use their research to affect change within. Mostly within the British Parliament, but within government systems generally. And, you know, maybe not surprisingly, after 10, 15 years of doing that, certainly the lobbying work for about 10 years, I was pretty burnt out. And so I kind of obviously engaged in different kind of therapeutic modalities and I suppose was frustrated from a kind of an activist perspective, that these processes of introspection could lead to some form of kind of political stasis that seemed to be kind of what was on offer was like retreat from all of that active work, active political work into yourself. And then what. And I didn't feel there was a huge amount of, where do you go with that? And so I suppose I started writing the book and wanting to explore that process of recovery for myself through kind of deep psychology and, and dealing with the archetypal realm, but also to sort of. To ask that further question of. Of sort of heal so that we know how to act better. Which felt like the bit that was missing for me when I was engaging in other forms of healing. And I think, I mean, I think it's. It's there in Jung's writing, but I don't feel it's sort of necessarily. I've tried to make it more overt. And it wasn't just for me because I. I mean, it's sort of, as you mentioned previously, there are, you know, whether you're in the States or anywhere in the world, we're bombarded by kind of apocalyptic experiences of climate change and war and, and all sorts. And so many people are overwhelmed. And particularly, you know, many of my kind of fellow activists, political activists, I found, were overwhelmed. And many of them were engaging with Jung as a. As a Way of a way of healing, but equally, you know, so this was a. It was a sort of common theme that I was coming across. It wasn't just something that was lived by me. And so, yeah, so I set about writing the book and yeah, I think. I mean, I think I've written. This is my third book and I think all of my books, ultimately, you know, perhaps slightly selfishly, I've kind of written for myself, but in the. In the hope that there's kind of something in there that will help other people who, you know, as we find out, when we. As, you know, when you start doing this work on yourself, you find that, you know, everyone else is experiencing this as well, and it can be overlaid. All of our experiences of the unconscious, you know, self evidently can be shared and used to help other people as well.
- [05:59]
Unidentified Male Host
I love that. Yeah. From this kind of your perspective, Right. Which is very kind of socially aware and kind of a global perspective and then kind of bringing in the Jungian perspective perspective to it. Can you tell us a little bit about the social media aspect of this?
- [06:19]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah.
- [06:19]
Unidentified Male Host
What is it doing to our mind body?
- [06:22]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think the way I describe it in the book is that social media, which sits within the attention economy, and I want to make that pretty broad, the attention economy for me includes print media, it includes our newspapers, it includes social media. I think it particularly includes, if you sit down of an evening to watch Netflix, that's social media. It's driving the same. It's going to the same kind of processes within your brain to suck you in. And the way that I describe the attention economy is it's the most recent frontier of colonization. The colonizers of this world. Capitalism has colonized all land. And there are a few small pockets which we can see emerging at the moment that are trying to be colonized further, whether it's Greenland or Venezuela or whatever else. But ultimately they've done it. The land has been overrun. And so the next frontier are our minds, and we're losing that battle. Our minds are being and have been colonized by the attention economy. And that's, you know, I think that's one of the major reasons that we have this sort of such a massive global mental health crisis. I don't want to say that's the only reason because there is also a reality of climate change and ecosystem collapse, which, which goes beyond that. But I think for, for our, For. From. For our inexperience, you know, our experience of the world is so much mediated by what we see through our phones and through our screens. So I, you know, so I talk about how we believe, as we sit there with our telephone, we believe that we're, that we're looking at. Through a window into the world, but we're not looking through a window into the world. We're looking through a very carefully curated set of images that are, especially with the most recent iteration of the Internet, which is, which is filtering individualized content to all of us, which are designated, designed by the algorithm to solicit the greatest emotional response possible. And we're losing that battle. I think the only way, if we don't engage in seeking to understand our own deep psychology, we further lose that battle. And the only chance that we have to gain some level of agency, regain some level of agency is, is to understand the deep psychology that the algorithm has been training itself on against us for the last 15 years. And I, and I think, you know that that's. There's a, Another author with the, the publisher that I, that this book is published with. Revol wrote a book a couple of years ago in which he talks about. Mike Watson, talks about how even our sleep is now bookended by social media. And so actually, so that's a part of my practice. Obviously. I, you know, I write my dreams down every night, come back to them later in the day. I often don't know what I've written down until I come back to them. But, But a really important part of that practice for me is meditation before and after sleep so that I'm, so that I'm. No, I'm no longer bookending my dreams with that kind of, that, that algorithmically generated content. Yeah.
- [09:28]
Rob Maldonado
And also too, with the social media and media and news, it's all about fear, like, and, and driving your fear or anger, like our, almost like our worst human nature emotions than, than love and inspiration and empowerment. And it's like if we don't pay attention, we can get it. It really affects our psychology, and we're so conditioned.
- [09:50]
Rob Fower Walker
It's fear. But actually, I was talking to someone about this other day, and I've got another aspect of it that we kind of. We were trying to work out what was going on. We're trying to work out what was going on. When you sit down in front of the TV of an evening and you haven't got a plan for what you're gonna watch, and 40 minutes later you're still scrolling through content and watching trailers and you haven't settled on something to watch and what's going on there. And in the same way when you, when you're looking through social media, you, you, you keep going through and it's fear, but it, but the thing that's driving that behavior is hope. You're hoping for something better like escape almost.
- [10:25]
Rob Maldonado
Right? You're looking for that.
- [10:26]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, to put a kind of mythological bent on that. In the Greek pantheon, hope was what the, was what the gods gave us to torture us. It was the hope, the hope that was, that was left at the battle of Pandora's box, which was the thing that stopped us from killing ourselves. So, and so I think, you know, and I think we need to kind of think about, you know, these, the forces of the attention economy are mythological. You know, that's the only way really to think about.
- [10:52]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, they're very primal.
- [10:54]
Rob Fower Walker
Right.
- [10:56]
Unidentified Male Host
So these companies, of course they, they probably have psychologists kind of advising them on how to do this stuff. What can we do on our side? Like on our end? Right. We're in our, in our work, we focus on practicality. What can people actually do today and
- [11:17]
Rob Fower Walker
start to, to think about these things? Well, one of, one of the things that I found through writing the book or one of the ideas that I alighted on was shifting, shifting away from the anger and the fear that you spoke about. And, and this relates to my last book. My last book was about love and, and, and about how do we find ways to love in this world where we're. Every, every relationship has been become transactional or been gamified. And, and in, in this book, I, I mean in my last book I talked about finding non transactional acts of care to enact in. And, and one of the things I talked about in my last book was, was care for the dying as a really important thing. It's one of the few areas of non transactional care that we can give because that person by definition can't give back to you. Although we obviously receive so much back when we do care. But in this book, in Radical Jung, I settled on grief. When we look at the world around us and we look at the sort of horrors that are projected to us through social media, what I try and do is just catch myself, just stop for a moment for, you know, a 10 second meditation, just stop, check in with yourself. And it's kind of, it's, it's, it's one of those things where you actually almost have to do nothing. You have to, you have to just stop and have that kind of meditative moment and allow the grief to come. Because what we're not doing what we're not doing when we're looking at social media is we're not breaking down in tears, which actually is. That's. That's the correct response. I found it incredibly empowering when. When faced with these kind of barrage of images of allowing that grief to come through and finding calm when you allow that in.
- [12:56]
Rob Maldonado
Yeah, I've had tears. I remember when the Iran. I mean, the Jewish war, the Israel and Palestine, and seeing the kids and running in horror, and I'm like, oh, my God. Like, I just cried just through some of the images. And I think people are in their heads a lot when they're on social media and online, and they're not like, in their bodies.
- [13:17]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah.
- [13:17]
Rob Maldonado
I really think this is a great segue to your work with eco therapy because I think, you know, we're in our head so much. We're disconnected from our body bodies, but also disconnected from the earth and the world. I mean, Rob and I are in D.C. right now. We're moving to Colorado because we want to be back in nature again. We're starved for that connection to nature. So I'd love to hear more about what you do and how people work. And I know there's like a Jungian kind of theme to your work with the ecotherapy.
- [13:45]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah. So. And actually, that's one of the sort of drivers that started me on the pathway of writing this book was. So I work as an ecotherapist, and I suppose I'll just tell you what that means before then going into sort of the connection of the book. So I. In very simple terms, I take people out into the woods. They sometimes cry and they come out feeling better, but there's a bit more complexity to that. But I take people into the woods, either individually or in a group, and we see what comes up to us from nature. So we'll stop and we'll listen to the birds. We'll engage all our different senses. I'll guide people in using different senses to experience the forest as fully as possible. And it's. It's kind of magical that some of the people who've had the most profound effects that I've worked with have been people who've been in talking therapy for years. And then they come into the forest and they stop trying to find the answer, and. And the answers emerge for them. Um, and that can happen. You know, that either happens or generally happens kind of internally. And I always say to people when we're doing this work is that it's not talking therapy. So you don't have to talk at all. But if you want to, we can discuss stuff. And if I give you an example of when it becomes kind of this, what I've mentioned before, of sort of externalizing mind within nature, what happens with me if I'm. Particularly if I'm doing one to one individual therapy sessions and I go with someone and we normally go to the same part of the forest. Every time we walk through the forest and we do these practices, we get to, they get to know the trees and the plants and the animals and, and you know, this, this. Each session might be an hour and a half, two hours long. And what very commonly happens in these sessions is after I've had two or three sessions with someone, I'll then guide them into the forest. I'll then say to them, well, you know, you can take us to the next place that you want to go to. And this extraordinary thing happens. And it's happened, it happens frequently where the client will become completely disoriented. They don't know which way to go. They're in a place that they're familiar with and they're totally lost and they panic. At which point I'm able to step in and say, well, that's, that's why I'm here, I'm the guide, so it's okay. And we then start kind of walking through the forest and kind of, you know, I'll allow them to intuitively go where they feel they ought to go. And it's, it's extraordinary because even from my perspective, the forest is no longer a metaphor for mind, it becomes mind. And, you know, and we have what, we'll walk through the forest and we'll come across different trees, different glades, different thickets, and they'll remind them of things that have happened in their past. And as they describe those things back to me, I'm there too. It's present. We're fully present with those things that have happened and are happening in the moment. And it's happened a few times, not as frequently as the general journey, but it's happened a few times that we then will work our way back and forth, find a younger self in the forest. And I've had a few instances where the client has sort of said, they're here, you know, we found them. And I'll say, well, are you going to talk to them? And they'll be a bit cheaper to say what here, What? And I'll then kind of leave. I'll walk off a few meters away and just let them be with an aspect of their selves. And it's extraordinary. I mean, I'm sort of sending these thoughts down my spine as I think about it and every time it happens that it's just a quite extraordinary process.
- [17:18]
Deborah Maldonado
You've spent years building success and achieving what others would only imagine, but yet something deeper is calling. A desire for work that's meaningful, transformative, and rooted in who you really are. At CreativeMind, we train professionals to guide others through real psychological, psychological transformation using Jungian principles, Eastern spirituality and social neuroscience. No cliches, no surface level tools, just depth, structure and purpose. Our ICF accredited Jungian life coach training program provides a profound professional training in small cohorts that includes personal transformation with a dedicated coach and powerful tools to help you guide others in a deep, lasting transformation. Step into that next chapter of your personal and professional evolution. Join us by visiting creativemindlife.com and speak to an admission specialist today. That's creativemindlife.com.
- [18:30]
Rob Fower Walker
And, and as you said, yeah, getting out of people's heads. It's, it is fully embodied. You know, we're walking through and, and, and the forest is, is, is present there with us. And I think it's, you know, I mean this is what I know in some of your podcasts you sort of talk about, about neuroscience and you were talking about it in the last one on, that I listened to on, on nightmares about this. When in a dream state, the brain is, is calm, it's not working so hard. And this sort of, I suppose all of these things relate to kind of ongoing research on psychedelics and on dream states that, that when you get into these states there is a breakdown of duality and you, and you end up, you know, mind becomes the world and world becomes the mind and there is no distinction. And I think that's, I think that I, I'm im. I believe that's what's happening. I can only tell, describe my experience. I don't know what's going on in someone's brain, but I think that's what's happening.
- [19:23]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean the idea that we're alien, alienated from nature, all right, is, goes back to Jung, of course. And you're, you're talking about kind of re. Reconnecting an individual to that natural world that is kind of our natural home. Right. And it essentially is psyche because everything we're perceiving is our mind because it has to be filtered through our perception, which then becomes an interpretation of what that means.
- [19:55]
Rob Fower Walker
And Jung, of course, you know, he, Jung had to do this. He had to retreat to the tower and be on the edge of the lake. And, and he said, you know, he said, sometimes I feel that I, sometimes I feel that I am spread out across the landscape and in the changing of the seasons. And yeah, I think that's what I'm bringing people back to. And that again, you know, coming back to the book, that's where that was. The second part of your earlier question was why I wrote the book was that my training in ecotherapy, as with many of these kind of, you know, sort of nature connection and more sort of New Age modalities, borrows from a kind of pantheon of non Western indigenous ideas. And I think that's fine as long as it's done with due respect. And we have to do that because we are so kind of broken and wounded in the West. But I sort of set out before I knew I was going to write a book about Jung. I started sort of reading around and speaking to anthropologists and trying to work out why, why do we not have an indigenous nature connection in the west and where do I find it? And so I started looking around and, and I suppose the first question is why do we not have this in the west? Is that we had the witch trials and we, we, we terrorized the predominantly women, but some men who were engaging in these kind of nature practices, who were living in the woods, who were offering kind of herbal and other alternative solutions. And then, you know, then I, I, I don't know exactly how I ended up on, I mean, I was already kind of interested in Jung personally, I suppose. And so that's where, where this comes in. But, and then I suppose I, I realized that as, as Jung wrote that he, he, he very much talks about the fact that he's working with the evolution of mind and looking back at previous cultural states of mind. Um, he says, you know, through. It was through alchemy that he found a chain back to Gnosticism and thus back to basically back to Hinduism. And so it feels like there's something very well, for me, it connects a lot of my kind of, I suppose, methodological and metaphysical interests. My last book was quite heavily kind of engaging in sort of Hindu philosophy, but also for me at least offers something more coherent and cohesive for my own practice, whether that's for myself or with my clients as well, that there's this kind of, there's a, there's a lineage to this now.
- [22:23]
Unidentified Male Host
Absolutely, yeah.
- [22:24]
Rob Maldonado
I feel like, well, our work, we base it on Eastern philosophy and the Western because we Feel like that's what's missing with Jung's work. If you're just doing it as a therapist, it becomes more of a Western model of, you know, fixing the person and diagnosing the person. And this is more that we are all one, like the non dual philosophy. We're one with everything, we're pure consciousness. All those ideas help us use Jung's work in a more profound way because we aren't just fixing the little psyche of our personal life, we're actually connecting to the bigger, more spiritual element of who we are.
- [23:00]
Rob Fower Walker
And that's also something that I wanted to, with Jung address and I address it up front in the book, that when you read Jung's autobiography, which I recommend to anyone that hasn't, it's fantastic. But then you get to the kind of final few chapters where he talks about what he's learned from his travels in Africa and in India and other places and suddenly your kind of your sort of modern liberal self is ah, you know, careful what you're saying here. But, but there is, you know, there's much in that. And unfortunately that's, it's in those chapters where he really starts engaging with the dao and things like that. And, but that, you know, I mean
- [23:35]
Rob Maldonado
the language he uses is sometimes not
- [23:36]
Rob Fower Walker
PC well, the language he uses. But I'm going to go further than that and I'm going to, I'm going to directly criticize him because I think, I think, I think we have to, I think, yeah, I think, I think we have to say that attitudes of care and respect to other people have always existed. So therefore, just because it's the style of the time to denounce someone or to dehumanize someone doesn't necessarily excuse it. I think we can understand it, but I think we ought not to excuse it. And so therefore we come back to the kind of, you know, the age old dilemma of should we be allowed to enjoy Wagner because he was a rampant anti Semite? And I think yes, absolutely, we should be allowed to, but we also need to reference the man as well. And I don't want to in saying this, I don't want to totally denounce Jung as a man because I think the many aspects of him are wonderful and, and if anything, Jungian philosophy tells us that, that we all have a shadow and we all must, you know, recognize that there are problematic aspects of self. And I think it just makes him a more human character to have that side of him.
- [24:41]
Rob Maldonado
But instead of making him a guide and he's this.
- [24:44]
Rob Fower Walker
Absolutely, yeah.
- [24:45]
Rob Maldonado
Like, put him on a pedestal. Yeah, yeah.
- [24:48]
Rob Fower Walker
And that's, and I think that's the, you know, if, if, if I had one criticism of just, you know, how, how Jungianism or young. Young. The field of Jung has developed is that it, it can sometimes feel slightly religious. It does have a kind of religiosity to it. Certainly, if you look at sort of, sort of training through the Jung institution, stuff like that, there are, you know, big barriers to entry and aspects of it that are slightly problematic, I would say.
- [25:15]
Unidentified Male Host
Absolutely, yeah. A lot of hero worship going on. Yeah. So this, this other aspect of your work, kind of thinking about the climate and how, you know, how or why we don't deal with it, like, why is it not more important to us humans since. Yeah, it's, it's really our lungs and our. Yeah, yeah, whole health that we're talking about.
- [25:40]
Rob Fower Walker
I mean, I think, I think, I think as individuals are mostly very, very troubled and bothered by it. I think, I think we're, I think we are disenfranchised by our political systems to, to give up and, you know, and that, you know, I really struggle with. I mean, I do it, but I struggle with, increasingly struggle with washing out a yogurt pot to put in the recycling. As I'm watching, you know, a year's worth of emissions being being launched in missiles of an evening, we're making our
- [26:10]
Rob Maldonado
contribution and the governments are just like,
- [26:13]
Rob Fower Walker
yeah, and, you know, whatever, 70 private planes flying, flying into Davos every half hour or whatever it is. So, yeah, so that's, that's, that's problematic. But when you get. I mean, certainly, I don't know how much this has penetrated in the us, but in Europe particularly, and increasingly in the uk, there are emergent political parties that are very much working from the ground up with community assemblies establishing what they, what they, what they care about and setting their policy. And those community assemblies are always radically defensive of the environment and the climate. And so, so then we, so then we need to ask, so what's happening? If, if people are bothered by this, then we need to look at what's going on. And, and, and I take an idea from. There's a brilliant book about the climate emergency called the Ministry of the Future. It's a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. And he has a. He invents a pathology called Gotterdammerman Syndrome. And Gotta Dameron Syndrome is where he describes it as where powerful, powerful people, mostly men, fear the loss of their power. And if, and they can't they can't accept, I'm paraphrasing here, but they can't accept the loss of their power. And so for them, they would rather destroy the earth than lose their own power.
- [27:25]
Rob Maldonado
Well, the earth is the anima. You know, it's the foundation.
- [27:29]
Rob Fower Walker
And I go into that with, I mean, Mark Zuckenberg, for example, has been saying recently that companies need more masculine energy. It's madness. I recently actually wrote an article about how this idea of, of, of, of all of these, all of these tech oligarchs who keep going on about masculine energy shows a, shows a. It shows them to be fantastically immature because in any other worldview, elderhood comes from integrating the other gendered aspect of yourself. So these, these men going around say more masculine energy that, that, that demonstrating that they're, that they're children. But, but I think that what's going on, combining this with that gotta Dameron syndrome, where these people are willing to destroy the earth, which they are with their, their data centers and everything else, I suggest the shadow that they are turning away from is their own privilege. And so if you look at what, what they do is they end up being, acting horrifically and harmfully and violently against the least privileged among us. And I think that is because they have failed to address the shadow of their own privilege. So they end up saying that migrants have got these privileges because they're being, you know, fallaciously suggesting they're being given, you know, too much money is being spent on them or, or too much money on, you know, if you look at what was happening with Doge in the US all this money helping people who are underprivileged and because the accusation being that those people were privileged from the most privileged men in the world, they're not facing something there. And I think it's, it's their privilege because. Because to face in, in the world as we see it, to face their own privilege would be a horrific thing.
- [29:03]
Rob Maldonado
Yeah.
- [29:04]
Unidentified Male Host
So this is like a collective shadow.
- [29:07]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, I think it's, it's a, well, it's, it's a shadow of those, of these powerful men.
- [29:11]
Rob Maldonado
And yeah, they think of them. The technology is very logic, the animus and the anima. And in the US they're trying to take women's rights away to vote and like they're trying to, you know, take their right to choose and, and like not have women in power. You know, like that kind of. I see it as where they're afraid and they're like scared little boys instead of like they're so powerful. They're, they're hanging on to like the old way of being and I feel like they know it's their. The end. So I feel like it's. The women are emerging and it's just the illusion is that the men have power but eventually women are going to save the world. As the Dalai Lama said, the Western women, but also the men getting into their own femininity, like we work with the Jungian, integrating the anima and men would be very powerful.
- [30:00]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean I do write about this in the book. I think it's not just. We have to be careful not to say, you know, the emergence of women to save the world because from a, from a Gnostic perspective, actually what saves the world is the primordial couple together.
- [30:16]
Rob Maldonado
Yeah, yeah, well, rebalancing. Yeah, yeah, emerging like reclaiming. And I think like the original goddess was a woman and then they kind of wrote her out, wrote her out of the Bible and all that. And so it's like. Yeah, bringing her back up to.
- [30:32]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, yeah, equal. But being careful because actually, I mean this is. I was talking to a friend the other day who's an archeologist about this because there does seem to be, if we go back sort of from what we can see in the archaeological record over the last few thousand years, certainly. So I live in Wiltshire. I live. I was this at 4 o' clock this morning. I was at Stonehenge for the equinox sunrise because I live just on the road from it. And so the landscape around here is full of Neolithic architecture, like surrounding this. And it's interesting that you can see this kind of yo yoing through the history of the raising up of the goddess and then the raising up of the masculine. And it seems, it seems to be something that kind of yo yos. And I think therefore, you know, we maybe need to think if, if we're going to, to heal from this is try not to swing the pendulum. We really need to kind of need to use the pendulum in the middle.
- [31:23]
Rob Maldonado
Well, I see a lot of women, I know, like women entrepreneurs that kind of talk about like they're wannabe leaders and they kind of denounce the patriarchy and it like makes the men the enemy, which is not helpful at all, I don't think because, you know, just making the other the. The enemy is not really going to help. It's all about integration and it's a. And I. It shows a fear in woman when they do that. So anytime you're like making the other person the enemy. There's something in you that you have to look at.
- [31:51]
Rob Fower Walker
And also, I think, I think with, with, you know, particularly that sort of example that you're using. And this is something that I, One of the, you know, I called the book Radical Young because I. For a number of reasons. But one of the radical things was trying to sort of take a slightly radical view of Jung's ideas. And one of the, One of the, Those that I tried to unpick was Jung's appreciation of gender. And I think we need to going off your example of the kind of entrepreneurial businesswoman who perhaps is behaving in quite a masculine way that we don't necessarily. Certainly when Jung was writing, it would have been expected that those kind of gendered attributes were tied to biological gender from the outset. And then, and then you bring in the animal or the animus. And I think, like, firstly, firstly from kind of the, the experience and lived life of millions of queered lives now suggests that that maybe is not the case. And it's. I mean, interestingly, I've just take. I've taken a note talking to friends recently that, that queer friends do actually seem to have a kind of reverse process of integration in the. In that. That. That a sort of a queer man may be integrating a masculine aspect where you might have expected an anima. And so, so, yeah, that's what we found too.
- [33:08]
Rob Maldonado
We have a lot of, you know, variety, even trans clients. And. And they. We always say, you know, Jung came out with the women has an animus and the man has an anima. And we're like, we don't know. Like, that was his time. It was very rigid Victorian times.
- [33:23]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Rob Maldonado
And I do, I love that idea because I think people, like, want to preserve, like most youngins want to preserve young stuff like the Bible. And we need to evolve it with our time. And our time is, you know, we have to look at. These concepts are great, but they are very limiting to certain populations. And I, like, I saw that in your book when I was scanning through it and yeah, we totally agree that we, we just say, like, if you're interacting with the anima, animus, see what shows up. And sometimes we need animus energy, sometimes we need anima energy. It's. It's not about. Based on gender or identity.
- [33:57]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, yeah, and. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. And we need to. And the way I describe it is that what you're looking for is you're looking for the polarity to that which you already have understanding of you're looking for the polarity of that.
- [34:12]
Unidentified Male Host
Our students won't forgive us if we don't ask you more about the psychedelics.
- [34:18]
Rob Maldonado
Yes, they love the psychedelic.
- [34:20]
Rob Fower Walker
And so actually, I mean I, I, the final chapter of the book is that is me describing a psychedelic trip. Yeah, I mean I've, I've, I've found personally for me, psychedelics have been incredibly useful and healing for me. And, and I think, I mean, I just go with, with the kind of standard trope which is that, you know, having it, having a full blown psychedelic trip is like doing 100 hours of therapy. And, and I think, I suppose it, I suppose, I mean, that's maybe a bit too, a bit too lazy because it kind of has to come with the therapy. And, and what's been interesting for me was having, when I was much younger, I'm in my mid-40s now, when I was in my kind of late teens and twenties then we would recreationally use psychedelics and, and it was all kind of fun and sometimes scary and a bit crazy and that was it. And then latterly, you know, having gone through, you know, very classical Jungian sense, having gone through my midlife crisis and kind of hit the buffers and had to engage, you know, start asking deeper questions of myself as I've come to understand how to navigate this world of symbols, experiences that I had in Psychedelic trips 20 years ago have suddenly gained meaning. So that's been kind of a, you know, it's sort of a fascinating thing for me that it's all, it was always there to discover, but. Yeah, it was always there to discover, but it needed the tools to understand it. So the person that I kind of talk about a bit, who's often forgotten about in the history of psychedelics is that there was a British psychiatrist called Ronald Sanderson and he was practicing, he actually had a correspondence with Jung because he was a Jungian psychiatrist and he was practicing in the UK in the 50s and 60s and he was giving. Whereas in the States Timothy Leary and others were giving their students like massive doses of acid and kind of sitting down with rooms full of incense and kind of seeing what happens when you blow the doors off kind of thing. Ronald Sanderson was giving people small doses of LSD and then having very long psychotherapeutic sessions, Jungian informed sessions where there might be a bit of art therapy, there'd be a lot of talking therapy and was having great, great results. And I, yeah, I wanted to kind of bring, bring that back because I mean, I suppose I found that not in exactly the same. Same way, but I found that my approach is most similar to what I subsequently read of him describing. And then the other. And the thing that actually really, in fact, it's here, here, this. I promise you, I didn't put this in as a prop. I was just working on it. But he wrote a book called Simon's Daughter, which is. This is the only known copy that I've. That I've. That I know of. And I've been in touch with his. In touch with his. His widow to. To get the rights to it. So we're now. We're currently republishing this book hopefully later this year. Um, and it's a novel in which he. I mean, you, you. You'd love it from a Jungian sense because he perfectly integrates dream experiences, psychedelic experiences and the daily life of his characters kind of seamlessly. And my understanding this will come out when I write the introduction to it. But my understanding is, and from talking to his widow, that what we're also reading when you read this book is we're reading his process of integration. This was his work to integrate and it's. And to speak to the psychedelic side of things. The reason that there aren't any copies of this or one of the reasons is that it was published in 1985 at the height of Reagan's war on drugs. And so a book that's got LSD written three or four times on the back cover was immediately buried and no one really spoke about it. And so it's only now coming up that, you know, people are re. Engaging with psychedelics and their healing potential that it. That it might be, you know, of use. And actually the reason I came to this is kind of quite serendipitous and speaks to. Speaks, I think said a little bit to the way that synchronicities happen and the mind is manifest in the world around us. I got to the point of writing this book because. Or working on this book because I'd ordered a book of essays from a publishing company called the Psychedelic Press in which one of the essays is about this book. And I ordered it online and 10 minutes later the author turned up on my doorstep with a copy of the book. And it turns out that he lives down the road from me and it's another man called Rob who writes books on psychedelics that lives about a hundred years away. And so, yeah, so we kind of took it from there and we're now working on this book which I think is going to be, you Know, I hope that. I hope that people will. Will read it because it's, you know, like we said before, to engage with young is to engage, is to feel your way and to engage in something kind of more mythological. And I think actually, you know, not enough people have done this, but engaging it through it as a novel is. Is incredibly powerful.
- [39:18]
Rob Maldonado
Yeah. Because you're. You're just. You're not learning, you're just immersing yourself in the story.
- [39:24]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, Yeah, I can see that the Jungian model would be ideal for helping people integrate their psychedelic experiences.
- [39:33]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah. No, yeah, completely. I think it is. I mean, this is to go off on a slight tangent, but I was thinking about it earlier in my. As I say, you know, I'm an academic, and in my academic work, I have found. A few years ago, my last book, which is called Love and the Market it came out of, I ran for a year. I ran a reading group at University College London for a book called the Philosophy of Meta Reality, which is the book on metaphysics by a philosopher called Roy Bhaskar. And it's. It's almost completely impenetrable, which is why I had to run a reading group for a year, for us to kind of slowly work our way through this book. And having finished reading the book, I. I was talking to a friend who's also an author and an academic. I was talking to a friend, and he's someone who's interested in metaphysics. And we were talking about, as you do on WhatsApp, the nature of consciousness. And I typed something that was kind of related to this reading group that we'd had. And this was me on a kind of Friday morning, completely sober, and I suddenly had a bang, sort of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Non dual experience where everything. Everything that I looked at was consciousness. Consciousness preceded materiality. And it was pretty terrifying. It would have been horrifying if I didn't have an understanding of this world kind of academically. But what was interesting for me in that is that I had intellectually got myself to that point. I'd done it through thinking and similarly with my ecotherapy work as I've sort of taken, you know, I guess a more, to use the word very loosely, but a more kind of shamanic approach to healing that I've. You know, strange things happened. I've developed a relationship with birds and other animals and strange things happened. I know.
- [41:25]
Rob Maldonado
There's a bird in your profile picture.
- [41:27]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, well, so that was. That was. So the last two books that I've written The moment that I've shut my laptop, having finished the final chapter, and I've gone out for a walk up the hill behind our house. On both occasions, I've had profound encounters with crows and ravens. And the last one, the picture of the bird in the book was. So it was about a year ago, went out for a walk and discovered a fledgling crow that had fallen out of a nest. And I left it because I was hoping its parents were still looking after it. Went back 24 hours later and it was still there. And I watched it for an hour. Its parents weren't following it, so I bought it home and kept feeding it. And we had. We had this crow, Mr. Crowley, living. Living with us for the last year. And it was extraordinary. He would fly off and join his flock and then would come back. I'd be two miles away from here with a client or an ecotherapy group or on a picnic, and he'd fly out of the sky and land on my shoulder and then go back to his mom. And it was just quite extraordinary. And of course, for Jung and with his research into alchemy, the crow or the raven are the symbol of the Negredo, the midlife crisis in modern money. And so there's been. I've had this extraordinary experience for the last few years. You know, there were other crows before that, but I've had a few years while I've been going through this, kind of constantly accompanied by crows, particularly this Mr. Crowley character who every morning I'd go out onto the back doorstep of my house with my coffee and he'd land on my shoulder and I'd feel like a hero. And so there's a tragic ending to this, that a few months ago, he landed on an electricity junction box and was zapped. And I think this speaks to. This kind of comes full circle to your questions about how do we deal with social media and this kind of. And climate change and everything like that, is that the world is symbolic. So while I did grieve and I cried when the crow died, and my kids cried when the crow died, it was also a relief because that was. The Negredo was over. The crow had. And I think that feels to me to be a really strong foil to the nature of the world, to the attention economy, to being overwhelmed by climate change and war, is to understand the world symbolically, because when we do, we can gain some distance from it and we're no longer just a pinball to
- [43:49]
Rob Maldonado
our emotions, and we feel more connected when we see what is this event happening. What does that correspond to? Me. And we see everything less heavy and through our ego, and we see things through our higher consciousness and this kind of connectedness. Yeah, you're speaking our language.
- [44:07]
Unidentified Male Host
And death is the symbol of transformation.
- [44:10]
Rob Fower Walker
Absolutely.
- [44:11]
Unidentified Male Host
It is the transformation of the shadow energy into the potential.
- [44:17]
Rob Maldonado
And it makes the world feel more numinous, you know.
- [44:19]
Rob Fower Walker
Absolutely.
- [44:20]
Rob Maldonado
We're engaged with this magical part of life.
- [44:22]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah, yeah. And there has to be. There does have to be space for magic. You know, there's got to be some unknown, otherwise, what's the point? In other words, there was another fantastic thing with the crow, which I think does speak to sort of some aspects of shadow, is that in the village that I live in, there's. There's obviously kind of a local village WhatsApp group where everyone kind of, you know, kind of scores a fort and lost and settled and stuff like that. And. And while this crow was flying around the village which was now familiar with humans, it was. It was befriending other people. And most people thought this was great, but there are a handful of people who constantly complained that were complaining about the crow and were being attacked by the crow. And. But they were. They were all people who had a grievance with me. So the. The crow. And again, this is maybe part of the reasons why it's such.
- [45:13]
Rob Maldonado
Doing your work for you.
- [45:14]
Rob Fower Walker
Yeah. Was a blank slate for them to project onto. Sure. But brilliantly meant that the lived experience of the village, that my crow was attacking my enemies.
- [45:27]
Rob Maldonado
Well, I really. I mean this. We could talk to you forever. I'm really excited to dive more into your book. We will put your book, the Radical Young in the. In the show notes for people that want to find it. And also the. Right now, it's a waiting list, but it will be coming out in May. The end of May.
- [45:43]
Rob Fower Walker
Yes. Yeah, yeah. You can. You can pre order it now.
- [45:44]
Rob Maldonado
Okay, great. Well, it really is filled with a lot of. You cover a lot of topics, so very rich. We just touched on them today, but we really appreciate you coming on.
- [45:55]
Unidentified Male Host
Absolutely.
- [45:56]
Rob Fower Walker
Well, thank you. Well, thanks so much for your work and thanks so much for having me on to have the conversation.
- [46:00]
Rob Maldonado
You're welcome.
- [46:01]
Unidentified Male Host
Absolutely.
- [46:04]
Deborah Maldonado
Thank you for joining us for Jung on Purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our Pioneer podcast before you leave and join us each week. We'll see you soon.