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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Observable Unknown, where science meets the unexplained. I'm Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscopper.com and after two decades of working at the intersection of comparative religious studies, grief counseling, anthropology, quantum mechanics, and consciousness studies, I've discovered that our most profound human experiences often exist in the space between what we can prove and. And what we can perceive. In this podcast, we'll explore the measurable influences of immeasurable forces, those hidden factors that shape our reality but often escape our traditional scientific frameworks. From the latest research in consciousness studies to the ancient wisdom that's now finding validation in neuroscience and quantum physics, we're here to bridge the gap between academic rigor and spiritual insight. Whether you're a skeptic, a seeker, or simply curious about the deeper mechanics of human experience, you're in the right place. Together, we'll examine the evidence, challenge our assumptions, and explore what happens when we dare to look beyond the obvious. In today's episode, you'll have a chance to get to know me a lot better than perhaps you have in the past. My wife, Jessica, will read questions submitted through our website by our listeners for me to answer and give you an intimate portrait where previously, perhaps one did not exist. So, without any further ado, let's join the conversation.
- [01:41]
B
Welcome to today's episode of the Observable Unknown. I am your guest host, Jessica Ray, here to introduce your host, Dr. Juan Carlos Ray. We're here to get to know you a little bit better through your listeners questions. We did this seventh episode, now being the 14th, and I'm so happy that this experience is happening again. Thank you, Dr. Ray.
- [02:04]
A
Absolutely. I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to sit with me this evening, Jessica.
- [02:08]
B
Of course, getting to our listeners questions is very important to me as well as to you. So let's jump right in the shadow. What shadows have you had to wrestle with on this path? Is a question one of our listeners had.
- [02:21]
A
Every seeker who dares to gaze into mystery must always first descend into their own opacity. My shadows have never been monstrous. They've been mundane. Impatience disguised as urgency, pride veiled as purpose, longing confused with love. Each revealed itself as a distortion of light, not its absence. Wrestling with them has taught me that illumination isn't conquest, but instead conversation with the unseen self.
- [02:51]
B
So when you're having that conversation with the unseen self and you're thinking about that shadow, maybe as an enemy, maybe as a teacher, how do you see it in. In many faces? Break that down for me first, I.
- [03:03]
A
See it as an enemy, it opposes the ego's self image. Then I see it as a teacher. It educates through dissonance and conflict. Finally, I see it as a companion. The and walks beside me, reminding me that wholeness is impossible without contradiction, without duplicity. The shadow is the soul's necessary counterpoint, the dark matter of consciousness without which no galaxy of meaning could hold shape.
- [03:30]
B
That leads me to thinking, diving deeper, so to speak. How has facing your shadow influenced the way you teach and share with others? Looking at a shadow, even speaking about the shadow, I think if we take a pause, it might be intimidating, it might be scary, it might be exhilarating. Maybe you long for the shadow. I'm not sure. How does this influence you?
- [03:54]
A
It's replaced my impulse to persuade with my willingness to accompany. A teacher who has not confronted their own fragmentation risks necessarily transmitting the disease of certainty. My pedagogy now begins with humility, the awareness that we guide not from superiority, but from shared bewilderment.
- [04:13]
B
And so with that wonderlust of life, thinking about that and the humility of it, how do you. How do you have such grand experiences and then find the humility to still come sit at the table? Maybe you haven't found yourself at in a long time.
- [04:30]
A
I believe my sentiment is more tied to the idea that fearing the shadow isn't really necessary. It's not valuable. When people fear their shadows, they. They shrink into the distance, they fall into the darkness. What you fear within you, it's already shown mercy by revealing itself. The truly perilous shadows are those that you can't see, those that are still unseen. To fear one's shadow is to fear the evidence of being alive. For light alone casts darkness. The shadow is proof that you exist in relation to illumination.
- [05:10]
B
What do you say to people who fear their own shadow, who can't see it so poetically or beautifully or from a different perspective than maybe everybody else, maybe a place of wholeness. What do you say to those people who find fear they can't find their way out of?
- [05:28]
A
You've only made it this far because of your shadow. You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the crucible that you've walked through. So if it has carried you to here, then you should trust it'll carry you further.
- [05:41]
B
That's a breathable moment, a pause moment, right? That I would tell people from my point of view, you survived every day up until this point. The shadow helped you survive life up until this point. And so that's where the Two ideas meet.
- [05:55]
A
Absolutely. I think the shadow is an essential feature, an essential element in the identity. It can't be destroyed or ignored without cleaving away the better part of ourselves. Someone might not like, for instance, the way they look. They might not like where they live. They might not like a member of their family. But cutting any one of these things out, it's detrimental and sometimes not even survivable. The same should be said of the shadow. If we remove all of our rough edges, if we remove all of our difficult points, then we lose character, we lose the details that give us our soul.
- [06:37]
B
How do we put it into practice? What sustains you daily in your work with the unknown is a question one of our listeners had.
- [06:44]
A
Ritual study. I think ritual anchors are the most tangible in gesture study disciplines. Curiosity into coherence. Silence returns me to my origins, to the unspoken place from which all language really arises. I like to believe I move among them as a pilgrim moves among shrines.
- [07:05]
B
But what would you tell somebody who struggles with the ritual part of it? You know, what is ritual? Washing your face, brushing your teeth? We find ourselves in patterns or rituals. How would you help someone like you said, lean into you. You lean into the ritual, the study and the embodiment of these practices. How would you bring that into daily life? If you might be a woman who has kids, who takes more time than you have, or you have to cook and clean and go to work and do all the things that humans have to, how would you help them, you know, move past that fear. You've survived it, you've white knuckled it. But then take that practice that sustains your daily life with your work with the unknown, and tell me how to break that down into something we can digest as the everyday listener. How could I do that if I wasn't sure what direction to go? How. How do I get to know you, Dr. Ray, more intimately in your practices? Not giving away your. Your secrets, but just how did you incorporate a new practice? How did you decide what pattern going to cultivate for learning and communing with the unknown?
- [08:08]
A
I believe that everything we want to integrate completely into our lives has to first become habit. After it becomes habit, we have to make it a dedicated practice, something we don't stray from. Consistency counts more than almost anything else. Once you have a consistent habit, something you can trust, something you understand and you can predict, then you can call it a ritual. I believe ritual and the embodiment thereof have to be inseparable. So for me, each morning begins with movement. Of course, I Have to get out of bed. I breathe. I might adjust my posture. For me, it's the simple acknowledgment of the body as an instrument to move through my day and the steps ahead of me. But I consider reading itself a ritual act, a sacrament of the intellect. To me, the pages that I read are altars in and of themselves. I think it's valuable. I have always espoused that true education only comes from reading. It's something that we should be very thankful that we have as a tool in our toolkit.
- [09:13]
B
I mean, it does seem to set us apart, for sure. And it helps evolve, you know, our skill sets, like you said, and thinking about evolving and your practices and I hear you talking about. First I put my feet on the floor. You know, you're. You're evolving your practices from your foundational points. Give me a little bit more insight. How has your practices evolved over the years? Share with your audience, your listeners, a little bit of how you. You went through the evolution.
- [09:39]
A
Well, it's. It's grown quieter. In all honesty. When I was a younger man, I sought transcendence through excess. Long vigils, ecstatic states, and sometimes the sacrament of plant teachers, the theater of the sacred. Now I find the divine in calibration, in measured inhalations and exhalations, the turning of pages, the lighting of candles, holding my gaze on a fixed point for some period of time. The more subtle the gesture, the more profound its resonance.
- [10:09]
B
Those solid years of life, right?
- [10:12]
A
The joy of aging. I think that aging is a gift. The fact that we're allowed to persist longer than maybe nature would like for us to is such a comfort. I think it's something that separates us from a lot of the other species that we share this planet with. We have the ability to really encapsulate what we think of the world in our retrospection and then apply that to not only our view of the future, but to our introspection.
- [10:43]
B
If your practices were stripped down to one essential thing, what would remain? Dr. Ray? What. What would be the one thing that carries you through? You're here in these salad years. You're here in the quiet spaces and the gaps and really enjoying the gift of ancestral pathways forward. But what be the one thing you. You keep cultivating and never lose hope of because it keeps you young in the process, so to speak. Or it carries you through when nothing else will, when you find yourself in the mud.
- [11:12]
A
Probably the most valuable thing in our current zeitgeist. Attention. Pure unornamented attention. It's the rarest sacrament in the modern world. Every genuine transformation begins when attention ceases to wander. Even prayer and knowledge are just its offspring.
- [11:33]
B
Right. The distractions of life. I mean, we're flooded in the information, and we believe we're becoming more efficient and we're smarter and we're bigger and all of these wonderful things. But like you said, attention is rare, because what can you pay attention to if there's a hundred things in front of you?
- [11:49]
A
Once we realize the goal of the flood is to erode attention, it's easier to sharpen it, to maintain it, to protect it and to uphold it. But unfortunately, because of what technology has done to us, because of what changing social climates have done to us, the ability to retain attention, to focus it, and to allow it what its ultimate nature is. And that's a tool. That's something that I think has been lost. And it's. It's quickly losing its footing in the handful of places that it still persists.
- [12:29]
B
Absolutely. And thinking about tools and thinking about that and thinking about what a wonderful storyteller, if nothing else, that you are much less an educator, a facilitator, and all of the wonderful things that we could go on forever about. But you often use myth and poetry and narrative. Why do stories matter in the work of the unknown, do you think?
- [12:52]
A
Because the unknown resists definition but yields to narration? A story is the intellect's way of performing reverence. Myth doesn't explain the cosmos, it harmonizes our astonishment before it. Stories always remind us that meaning isn't discovered, it's composed. You have meaning because you find a way to build it out of the remains of other things. We find meaning in our life because we have scrapped together different pieces that we didn't even realize were broken off and built something new every time we recreate ourselves. And most people do this after a few years of deciding that they've failed enough at something. You only can put together a new form because of piecing together what was left from your last venture, from your last narrative, from your last story. There's no such thing as a new story. There's just a lot of recycling that goes on. Almost everything is derivative. So we have to compose our meaning by looking at myths, at poetry, at other narratives, whether we've lived those narratives or taken them from other people.
- [14:07]
B
What do you think in that influential way, the one story that has shaped you more in your life than any other?
- [14:14]
A
I actually think we touched on this from another listener's question on the seventh episode. But for me, it's the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in its countless incarnations, not for its tragedy, but for its instruction. That descent is part of artistry and that every act of creation risks loss. To turn back as human, to sing after turning, is divine. For me, it's the archetype of all artistic courage.
- [14:45]
B
Courage. I think that too, you know, attention and courage. Those are some things that feel really prominent right now when we're telling each other stories and learning and growing and finding those illuminations. Do you find yourself as a keeper of forgotten stories? Do you find yourself as that illumination? Where do you find yourself in that?
- [15:04]
A
I don't fancy myself a keeper, but. But maybe more a restorer. Stories don't die. They go dormant in the cultural soil until someone listens deeply enough to unearth them. My role isn't archival, but more archaeological, to brush away the sediment of familiarity and reveal the hidden pulse beneath. I think every story requires deep and repetitive examination. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing can be understood at face value. I think everything has to be scratched. And so revealing what's beneath the surface is what every story wants. Every story wants to be understood from angles that no one even knew were possible. That's what I think I do. That's what I try to do.
- [15:56]
B
I think of the magic of storytelling and the magic of, like you said, digging in the dirt and finding those historical relics or things that lead to more stories, and the magic of that, whether you find that in a cartoon or a history book or anything in between. Do you take that just as a literary magic, taking you away from your problems in a daytime? Or is that a real form of magic? Like, is there really something to that, that once we dig up that dirt the same way, once we put flour, water, sugar and cocoa together, we have a beautiful chocolate cake. Is there some magic, physical, literal, to magic, of digging in the dirt and bringing up someone's story and then reliving it over and over and over? Is it just the twinkling in the eye or is it something more?
- [16:47]
A
I believe stories are older than our concept of magic. I believe stories and storytelling created magic. All enchantment is linguistic, architecture, sound and symbol rearranged. To bend perception to tell a story is to perform alchemy upon reality. I think to listen to one is to consent to transformation. Every story changes us, it adjusts us, it forces us into growth. And so to listen to one is allowing yourself, permitting yourself to go through the changes precipitated by the story. When I was a much younger man, I was very fond of the Grimm's fairy tales, most particularly the story of Hansel and Gretel. And I thought of it as a very interesting take on the concept of the hero. Obviously, it's because we have a young heroine standing as the champion of the story, and yet there's no real sense of where that should have placed her sense of success. It left me wanting. I think it probably left me with such a gap. I didn't fully grasp its impact, its significance, until much older. Now I look at that story, and I view it as this poor old woman who obviously is segregated from society. And here she has probably fallen on hard times and unfortunately has resorted to unpleasant practices to keep yourself sustained. She happens across these two children. She plans terrible things for one of them, but she wants to take the other one on as an apprentice. That's not how Gretel sees it. Gretel sees only the desire to save her brother and, of course, herself, and to do the witch in. There's something to that. It's always left me mystified, wondering why here Gretel is suffering under societal stress, feeling like she has to be the champion of her brother or to further marginalize this poor old woman who could have just been run away from instead of having to be murdered. That's the strange piece to this. By saving herself, Gretel really becomes a murderess. I'm. I'm not sure if that's something that sat with me for its depth or if it sat with me for how many empty spaces are left in that narrative, but it left me touched and changed. And it's the one story I always go back to whenever I think of the Grimm's Fairy tales. So I believe that stories are at the core of what we think of when we consider the origin point of magic storytelling. Narratives are the way we weave magic around other humans, and hopefully it's the magic that we live through. It's the way we'll be remembered in the future. A person's only remembered by what they've left behind. That goes without saying, but I believe that writers are the best remembered and storytellers especially good storytellers, because the stories that they've told have hopefully left someone imprinted. I mentioned earlier that I'm left very touched and very changed, I think, by the story of Orpheus and Euroche. I have now explored so many different iterations of that story and tried to understand it. Every time I come across a version or a retelling of it, I always think, what perspective is it? Being told from what. What piece is being resurrected from that myth in this retelling, it leaves me questioning myself, questioning my own identity, wondering whether or not I've evolved into what I have wanted to evolve into, much the same way the story of Hansel and Gretel has. I think that looking at that story now as an adult, here I am five decades in, I think of my own grandchildren, especially my grandson Adrian. He was my first grandchild and the most like me. I think in many ways his olfactory capabilities are very similar to my own. And I. I feel that seeing young people being instructed by stories, I. I never the appreciation for that until being a grandparent and seeing the way my grandchildren not only lean into stories and storytelling, but also what mysteries they think they'll find in a language they can understand. That's probably the point to fairy tales and bedtime stories and even some of the fables reading them, Aesop's Fables. There's something about being able to communicate the mysteries that even adults struggle with to children. For a time, I instructed Adrian. We had him homeschooled. And so I was his. I was his instructor. And I remember how much he really seemed to adore hearing about Greek myths and Roman myths and Egyptian myths. That's what honestly resonated with him more than math or the principles of science. And I believe that's probably at the heart of a child's wonder is the stories that convey lessons they might not have an opportunity to learn in real life. And then getting to hear those stories or see those stories through the eyes of a child, I think is probably one of the only real advantages to procreation.
- [22:22]
B
Yes, he did love those stories for sure. And while I'm listening to you speak and I'm thinking about Adrian and homeschooling and all the adventures of storytelling we went through with museums and schooling and Greek and Rome and Egypt. I think about that gap that you're speaking about. I think about in the foundational storytellings of the monster to the hero, to the quest to these gaps and the Hansel and Gretel and the old woman. And she just, like you said, has to be murderous to make her escape now. But then what point does she become exiled from the city and then learn those lessons again? So it's these cycles I think we are learning through watching you, observing you explain to us the observable unknown through your colleagues experiences, your guests experiences, those kinds of things. Do you believe that you've not only been called to be a seeker, but maybe a Presenter of these mysteries. I know that we're doing that in the podcast, and I know you are doing the observable unknown. I am doing Everybody has something to say a little bit lighter take. It's kind of like our listeners now asking these questions. We want to unveil, unveil and figure out life through those storytellings. So that gap that you're speaking about, you know, and you're supposed to be presenting these, and it sounds like you have watched yourself evolve through the stories and then become the storyteller and now the presenter. But where do you find yourself the most comfortable as the guide, as the witness, or the provocateur?
- [23:58]
A
I actually want to circle back to something that occurs to me while we're going through this chain of questions from our listeners. You had mentioned something, and I'm not thinking that I can quote you verbatim, but you had mentioned something about the role that Gretel played. And I believe the point of the story, in my estimation, is that you bring up a good issue. Her becoming an exile. You know, that's. That's unique. And in some of the more recent renderings, even some cinematic renderings I've seen recently, that's very much the case. Gretel was always meant to be the witch. In many ways, Gretel is the witch. She doesn't want to be what she thinks of as horrific. She wants to be a savior to her little brother. And for that moment, perhaps, she. She is. She kills the witch, she frees her brother, and the two of them leave the cottage. But through that act of murder, in one way, we see that Gretel has already become more heinous than the witch. She has become swallowed by her shadow. That brings us back to the conversation we had earlier about shadows. Gretel becomes something that is more horrendous and horrific than even the monster she was fighting. By fighting the monster unethically, she became the monster. That's why she deserves exile, and that's actually why I think her exile and some of these other renderings of that same story is such that it is because it's very badly, I think. But still attempting to intimate that in the desire to eliminate a threat, we become a threat, not just to the thing we're eliminating, but maybe to those things we thought we were protecting. That's what. That's what Gretel does. She. She kills the witch. She pushes the witch into the oven so that her brother doesn't have to be pushed into the oven. But did she really know what the witch's agenda was. I've known lots of old ladies, and I can tell you there's one thing that they like doing that's playing games with people. They're old and they're bored and they want entertainment. She was keeping them fed. Maybe it was a bad time for a little bit, but how do we know what the end of that story was going to look like? She was a lonely old woman. She was marginalized by society. And the fact that Gretel, obviously, out of fear, decided she was going to push the old woman into the oven, but it made Gretel the most horrific creature in the story. There's something to that. There's something about leaning into the shadow so far that it consumes you completely. It has to be balanced. It has to be something that we accept. We have to embrace our shadow. Dr. Carl Costa Jung was very clear about that. You can't integrate the identity if you don't embrace the shadow. But believing that somehow the motivations the shadow imbues us with are necessarily negative all the time probably is the bigger piece. Timing is everything. To do something today means something different than to do something yesterday. I can do something in this time and space that people a hundred years ago would have thought was an atrocity. They would have thought it was a violation of everything they held dear. There are things that people did 200 years ago that we today, as ethically evolved as we in some circles, happen to be, would think of as barbarous and awful. So I believe there's something to that that needs a certain amount of attention. Coming back to this point that you brought up about mysteries and engaging mysteries, it's because knowledge, without articulation, stagnates. The seeker internalizes truth. The presenter distributes it. I believe my vocation, as I've come to understand it at least, is to translate ineffable perception into intelligible beauty, to act as the membrane between revelation and resonance. Coming back to Hansel and Gretel, that's the piece that people will miss. It's very easy to look at it transparently. Bruno Bettelheim in the Uses of Enchantment, actually articulates this much better than I'm trying to right now. The idea that the story attempts to convey to the listener something that they won't realize until they have seen some aspect of the story play out in the life that they have realized. I believe you can, as a great teacher, as a great instructor, as a great storyteller, help someone act upon what they're learning. By being the membrane between the revelation and the resonance that a story presents them with. You were asking me about whether or not I saw myself as a provocateur.
- [28:57]
B
Well, a guide. A guide, a witness or a provocateur. But again with our lovely banter that people are always so looking forward to and why I'm your guest host. Let's come back to that also gap. Let's circle back and come back through the side door, as I like to do. We're talking about the we brought into attention. Attention needs to be brought back into this time and space. But then look at the attention of that story, Hansel and Gretel and the witch and her over focusing on protecting herself and her brother, missing the point of the witch, missing the point of the old woman and what happened. And so look at how it works both ways. Bringing it back again through the other side door to the right, the shadow, the shadow side of hyper attention. And how do we play between that? Just like you and I do play between our words and play between those concepts, concepts of attention and then the shadow side of attention and where you miss the bigger picture, the forest for the trees. That at some point she will become the witch and the exiled. At some point she will hold on so tight that she'll be consumed by the monstrous things she did, thinking that she was paying attention and protecting and guiding and moving forward. Let's stop and pause in that gap of hero to monster to monster to hero and quest and say, well, how much attention is enough attention, the right attention and, and love all of it? Or is there a lesson in that and we should have the right kind of tempered attention.
- [30:26]
A
The idea of attention, just generally speaking as a concept, it's something that has really become the new currency. It's everywhere. Whether we're talking about social media and the fact that it has brought forth a generation of influencers. If we think about political agents of change and the fact that they only exist in the theater of public affairs, if we think about important aspects of public identity and how much attention needs to be focused on a public individual. A forward facing representation of someone's identity only flourishes with the attention that it receives. There's something about where the attention is focused and what's done with it that really allows significant understanding, appreciation and I would surmise growth to come from any information that we consume. It's about tenacity, it's about dedication. The kind of attention that we spend as the currency that is now the most valuable really has to be to be Effective. It has to be spread evenly. That's something people don't do. Most individuals become positively myopic. They're only looking at one thing. They're allowing the spotlight of their consciousness to focus in on something almost too diligently. There's something about balancing a spread out sense of diligence to be able to appreciate not only the observable unknown, but I think any mystery we're facing, I'll bring it back to Gretel because. And. And I think we should probably move on from this because we're probably talking about it too much. With Gretel, she was so squarely focused on her goal, the goal of rescuing her brother and escaping, that it pushed her to the only real serious crime that was committed in that fairy tale. I can't help but to think that if she had relaxed her grip, if she had looked less intently, if she had blurred her vision, maybe she would have seen something different. Maybe she would have realized, well, here this old woman just wants time and someone to chat with, some children, to feed candy to. Maybe this is someone who isn't well mentally and needs to have assistance of some kind brought to her. There are lots of different takes on that. I'm not saying the witch had to be forgiven. I'm not saying that she had a good agenda. I'm not saying that she did anything right. But it brings me in the way that it should back to the story of Medea, which we also did talk about in episode seven. It is transformational to see someone suffer deeply and survive. It is transformational to see someone go through things we fear we might ourselves have to go through and make it. It infects us. It's like a contagion to see that someone or some character in a narrative can manage to overcome whatever obstacles are in front of them, even if it takes some terrible gesture. There's something about that. It does change us. It leaves us imprinted. I'm not sure if I think the idea of having to spare no expense in your attempts to save a sibling or a friend or a lover is the right way, but it's certainly, it is certainly an option. And I think being tainted by that option, through observation, through hearing the story, through accepting, consuming and digesting the narrative, is one of the things that. That makes so many of those stories, so many of these narratives so appealing, so absolutely tantalizing, that we can't imagine fitting the life that we're living into a framework outside of the stories we've heard. I have for a long time Believed that whether this is because I was influenced by the work of Dr. Eric Byrne or because I am a great consumer of art and literature, there isn't a life path, someone, anyone is on that hasn't been played out in some very entertaining story that they've probably heard and, to one degree, another, are imitating in their life. I genuinely believe that the first few movies or stories someone hears or sees, they build their life on. And if we think about that, we could probably see the stories that we hear, whether they're fairy tales or their fables or their myths played out in the lives of the people around us. It's because if you're paying enough attention, you'll understand these patterns that replay over and over and over again really are the key to all of this. If the observable unknown is anything, it is the unrecognized pattern. How could we possibly know something if it doesn't fit into the framework that we are capable of seeing? How could we understand something if it doesn't match the rules that we believe? Truth has to follow, reality has to obey. If we. If we have these guide rails, if we have these principles that we follow for understanding what's in front of us, we only have them because of the stories we've heard. We only have them because of how one storyteller picked a particularly didactic narrative or another to teach something. My favorite is the Boy who Called Wolf. That's a brilliant, brilliant story, and it is so valuable. It teaches children to. As awful as I'm sure this sounds, to know better than to ask for assistance when it's not necessary. If you ask for assistance when it's not necessary, you're rocking the boat, you're upsetting the apple cart. And that's a key component in what's happening, I think, in Western civilization today. Too many people are seeking too much attention in a community of thinkers and actors that have very little attention to give. So demanding it parasitically or symbiotically, sometimes causes consequences and ripple effect that nobody's expecting.
- [37:01]
B
I was sitting here with more questions. You were like, we're gonna wrap this up. And I was like, but wait, I have one more question. I have one more question. And you answered it. I was going to ask, what could Gretel do? What could Gretel do? To see it from both ends and give us advice and. And tell her how to change the story and not become the exiled witch that she saw in front of her. And more so because now she deserves it. We don't know what the. The old lady deserved it. Or not, because we didn't get the beginning of that story. Maybe, or maybe somebody did and I didn't. But you answered it, and you brought us back to the begin story and the beginning of our podcast tonight and saying the reading is your greatest tool. Reading is your greatest tool. And through that explanation, you weren't sure if we squirreled our way back through the front and the back door and both left and right. You did reading, right. How many fables and stories can we hear? How many times can we listen to the observable unknown? You're an amazing facilitator and curator of this information and that medium in between of answering my questions before I asked it 45 minutes ago. So congratulations. So it brings me back to reading. If Gretel or Hansel had read a story about why old people get exiled, maybe, or. Or had heard something different, or maybe the time where a parent could have done something different. That's what I hear you saying. I hear you saying that you curate, facilitate, guide, witness, and provoke people into reading. That's what I hear.
- [38:27]
A
Well, that's absolutely the truth. I will stand by that to my dying day. There is no greater thing a person can do to enrich themselves than to read. And I don't mean unnecessary fiction, even though those narratives are valuable. I mean reading something that is going to give them a growth that they weren't expecting and that they're probably uncomfortable with. When you were bringing up the issue of how Grail approaches the witch as an exile, it's such a significant story, and I can't help but to barrel down on it. Think about how this story starts out. Hansel and Gretel themselves are exiles. Remember, their father can't afford to feed them anymore. That's why they're led out into the woods to die. That's terrible. Obviously, that's. That's an awful, awful way to manage children you don't know what to do with. But they themselves are exiles. How do they find their power but by conquering the next exile they find? It reminds me of Cicero, who said that the slave doesn't want to be free, the slave wants his own slave. As exiles, Hansel and Gretel don't care necessarily about the old woman. They want to be able to stand over her. They want to be able to exert power over her. And clearly the continuity that the story gives us is that that's exactly how they succeed. By killing the w. By exiling another exile, they find their way back home. To their father. It's a strange way of rewarding cruelty that I'm not sure if we should be training children with, but perhaps it's not my place to say. The idea that by further isolating people who are marginalized, who are not inside of our framework of what we can understand, we might glean power. There's a lot of that in today's political sphere. There's a lot of empowerment through the disenfranchisement of others. And it's been getting worse. I think it's something that started a long time ago, and it feels like it with each political cycle, just gets worse and worse and worse, not just in this country, but in other countries.
- [40:43]
B
Right.
- [40:44]
A
It's something that. I don't know if we want to blame the Brothers Grimm or if that's a way of thinking that existed before them, but this concept of finding your lunch because you stole it from your neighbor just seems like something we have to pay more attention to. We have to understand it better.
- [41:05]
B
Yeah. Or how about this? Did Hansel and Gretel try to earn their credit back by doing away with the exile? Nobody wanted to look at anymore and not realizing they sacrificed a part of their core identity. What do you do with that? Where do you put a pin in it? And where do you say, do I participate in the story? Do I not participate in the story? Am I. Am I even capable of making that choice? Is it the observable unknown, the pattern finding entertainment and keeping it going by disrupting the very thing it is, which is the pattern, which is then job security because everybody's scrambling to play the exile. I'll do my part. I'll do my part, right? I don't know. That's. That's what you leave me pondering, Pondering. When I listen to the observable unknown, every episode leaves me pondering whether it's an interlude or a story from a guest or a colleague, I. I'm left pondering who said it, who did it. Was that the observable unknown? Or was it. Was it your free will or your choice? Or was it the pattern disrupting itself to keep itself going because it didn't want to atrophy either? I mean, we could go on forever with that. But I just bring it back to. It's the stories. And I do think it's important to tell the children, maybe not necessarily age range children, but the who haven't heard that story yet that see the forest for the trees, see that Maybe the exile does away with the exile because you can't stand to think that's your fate. Nor the village can afford to keep looking at the ones they had to get rid of long before they got rid of the ones they wanted to get rid of. I don't know. You leave me pondering.
- [42:38]
A
Well, the broader praxis here is how we choose to apply what we learn from stories. What do we do with what these narratives teach us? Do we grow from them? Do we. Do we break? Do we suffer under the weight of a narrative that we can't maintain? Look at how many people live through the structure of a family and they aren't capable of meeting the standards established for them by their parents or by their. Their older siblings. That's what makes people rebel. And it makes people regret and resent the relationships that they've had. It's because standards much like the idea of safety, they're illusions. They're methods of control. They're the exertions of authority and will over others. There's something to be said for people being left to their own agency, no matter how they found it. I understand that, and I can appreciate that there's a certain beauty in letting things just be. But then there's the question of survival. If Gretel, for instance, coming back to her as an example, really thought that she was threatened or her brother was genuinely threatened, then maybe her efforts, while misguided and over calculated, could have been right. Meaning they could have been justified. That doesn't mean that what she did was the best thing. It's not what maybe someone a decade older than her would have done. It's not necessarily what her father would have done. Let's say maybe it's not something that under different circumstances, she would have even done. Let's take this a bit differently. Let's say Hansel wasn't in tow and Gretel came upon that cottage on her own. She met the old woman. Do you really think that the old woman would have engaged in the same kind of plan? She had a whole house of candy. I don't think she was interested in eating children. She didn't need the food or the calories. It's a metaphor. It's the idea of, let's you and I, little girl, get rid of what's really threatening us. It's the man. It's the male. And that circles back to the beginning of the story. Hans, Loretta's father, was the one who allowed the stepmother to make the choice that they would be led into the woods and left so that they wouldn't be responsible for feeding them anymore. There's something to that. There's something about that story that's intrinsically misogynistic. No doubt about that. And while being intrinsically misogynistic is also very much a story of female empowerment, there is something to this. And I don't necessarily mean female in terms of genitalia. I'm speaking about passive versus active, dominant versus subordinate. If you think about players in society, we have people, even today here in America, who are not properly represented because they might look different or they might speak a different language. And so they're subjugated to terrible things. They're exiled. They're the outsiders. They're the ones who suffer the consequences of policies that weren't properly managed for generations. The same thing is to be said for the witch who sits in the cottage, a cottage made of candy and gingerbread. She wants to have, obviously, children to take care of to one degree or another. That's exactly what she's trying to do. It starts out very nice, doesn't it? She's feeding them. She's fattening Hansel up. Isn't that the antithesis of what his family did for him? His family was letting him starve to death. These are kids chasing crumbs of bread through the woods so that they have something to eat. If that's not heinous and ridiculous and terrible. The only monster in Hansel and Gretel, in my opinion, unless we're looking at it as though it's Gretel for murdering the witch, would have to be their parents. Why would you ever even want to return to a home like that? Why would you want to go back to someone who let you get led out into the woods with nothing to eat? That's terrible. So here's this rather nice seeming woman who has a house made of gingerbread and candy, who's inviting children. Obviously the house is designed to attract children. No doubt about that. And why would she be wanting to do that? She. She clearly wants the attention. It's saying something about the role of the exile as both the innocent and the enemy. This happens in global politics. This happens all the time in personal relationships. I know firsthand of families where someone is exiled because they're misunderstood. Happens a lot. I feel like that's part of what happened to me in my own family. As a child, I felt like I was in exile because I wasn't really properly understood by my parents or by my siblings. I think this happens more often than anyone even wants to talk about, because of how Uncomfortable of a topic. It is, but it is that story of accepting the shadow. The macrocosm has to be a reflection of the microcosm. And the microcosm in itself is a reflection of the macrocosm. If the shadow within ourselves is something that we have to integrate, but can only integrate by giving it at least as much air time as we give the ego, then don't we have to give the exile, the refugee, the outcast, at least as much time and attention as we give the accuser, as we give the judge, as we give the jury member? Don't we have to let the person who is on trial for whatever they have been perceived to have done? That's something that we're deficient in, terribly deficient in, as a species and as a culture. I'm not sure if there's been a single human culture that's ever given enough time to see every angle of the story. The problem is that history is written by winners, and winners don't want their vulnerabilities exposed because that's when they stop winning. So what happens is they end up positioning themselves in a place of dominance, and they postulate that that dominance was well earned and well deserved. They're righteous about the fact that they've subjugated someone else. My feeling is that if we could appreciate a story, perhaps by rereading it many times, or if we could understand a story by seeing it reflect in the lives of people around us, if we could take myth and any of the narratives that we consume and digest and insert them into the patterns that we live through, and we'd live them better. I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell. Most people know this pretty well because of how frequently I inject him into lecture. He had a wonderful notion that myth gives you a scaffolding to put the story of your life into. It's almost like having a cookie cutter. And that phrase has gotten a lot of bad press. People complain about how things are cookie cutter, saying that they're imitative of other things. But you know what isn't derivative? All of reality is derived from something else. Every aspect of existence and experience is taken from something that has already existed. I think it was Lucretius in De Rerum Natura who wrote Nihil novi subsole. There's nothing new under the sun that's true. It was as true for Lucretius as it is true for us. The idea that something is novel, something is fresh or interesting or original, is more because it's just a perspective on something old We've just realized it's not because it itself is new. It's because we finally cleared away what was clouding our vision. We finally have looked at it from a different perspective and presumably a perspective that we haven't had in the past. That's what makes novelty is adjusting our view and perhaps assuming the seat of someone else, assuming the vantage point of someone else and what ultimately is the greatest vantage point but your opponent, the downtrodden, the exile. If we could see our monstrosity from the perspective of the exile, we'd probably be a lot less monstrous.
- [51:20]
B
A lot less monstrous. Right? Absolutely. You know, so I think I've decided something. I think I've come to a conclusion here in 50 something minutes. I, I think I excited that I see you as a guide, a witness, and a provocateur in that swirling of storytelling and, and, and what you're saying and looking at the big picture. You can't become a storyteller if you haven't read something. And so reading is the most important. So to me, who are you? You are the guide, the witness, and the provocateur that keeps these stories going and have inspired me to, you know, break out on my own and see things from your perspective, but from that heart. Heart song plays, you know, and bring that story through. And everybody has something to say. And so my podcast, Everybody has Something to Say is, you know, when you find yourself in that heart song, both the witch and Gretel, both the exiled and the empowered, both the story and the provocateur, both the exiled and the important, both the masochist and the sadist or the masculine or feminine and not speaking to anyone's genitalia, but just, just. Yeah, everybody has something to say, and it's bringing it back to your last statement of why I've made my decision. The honeymoon of remembering. You have just explained the beautiful dance and the pain of the honeymoon of remembering. You know, if you have that honeymoon, I have to bring it back to myself. I love you and I've stayed in a perpetual honeymoon with you, but we also know that some days we have to get up and pay bills and make podcasts and do these things to carry the story forward. And so it's that honeymoon of remembering, and it's the, it's the honeymoon of, oh, this is the best thing that ever happens, and you have to wake up the next day and go deploy for some adulting you have to do. So thank you. Thank you for being a guide, a witness, and a provocateur of these stories, of the tools of reading and knowledge, is wisdom and preparedness meets circumstance. All the things you've taught me through the love of being in the honeymoon, of remembering with you and what you're doing for our audience and these listeners who are bringing us these questions. So thank you for having this 14th episode of Jessica's impromptu interview with Getting to Know Dr. Ray through his listeners. I appreciate that very much.
- [53:42]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm honored at the labels you've affixed to me. I think I have to be a witness first because witnessing precedes guiding. If I'm a provocateur, it's completely by accident. I think that's only when silence itself becomes too eloquent. Oh, the genuine guide doesn't lead the traveler to a destination, but instead to a state of disorientation profound enough to be fruitful. That's the goal, I think, in any good story. We've talked about a couple tonight, and there's a significance there. If we reflect heavily on a story like the Medea, or we think of Hansel and Gretel, or we think of Orpheus and Eurydice, if we think of any of these templates for life and living, what are they but leading us to some state of disorientation and then abandoning us so that we can figure out what to do next? You can take the ugliest. And I think that's the example we gave of Hansel and Gretel. What did they do? They allow themselves to be consumed back into the society that exiled them, and they won their admission back into that society by murdering and exiling style. Look at Orpheus and Eurydice. I think of that as a painful but beautiful example of how, through the disorientation of losing his love, Orpheus challenged reality. He did something in his mind and in his time no one had done before. And while still failing in his ultimate goal, he succeeded by changing the standard, by changing the rules, and I think presented us with a story that will long outlive all of us. And then thinking about the story of the Medea, she has become an archetype in and of herself. The angry woman and the beauty that has to be annihilated in order for progress to be made. No one wants to think about killing an aspect of themselves in order to survive. No one wants to think about getting rid of a part of their identity to become something better. But that's what I think Medea represents. She has had to kill her identity as a mother in order to survive a terribly unfair set of circumstances presented by way of a bad relationship. Most people can probably relate to that, not necessarily taking the extreme measures that she did. I'm certainly not advocating infanticide, but I think what happens is people are pushed to a point in every lifetime. Everyone is pushed to a point in their lifetime where they have to cut away something they love dearly in order to be able to move on in a better way, in a stronger way, in a more significant way, in order to be something superior to what they used to be. So I think that's the only way we, we can be fruitful is by accepting that disorientation that the guide leads us to, that the guide leaves every traveler to a destination that's not really a place but a state. The state of disorientation. That's what we'll grow from, is the imbalance that we suffer.
- [57:08]
B
And so as we round this interview out. Thank you, Dr. Ray. You know know, leave us with one responsibility and one reward from your personal story. We've heard lots of stories tonight. We've heard a little bit about Dr. Ray, but we've heard mostly about the stories we all should have in common. And if we don't, you're bringing them back into popularity. So thank you for that. But give us one more unveiling of you, Dr. Ray. The listeners want to hear about you. So as we close tonight in just a few moments, tell us what is the one thing you take away as a responsibility and a reward for your public role of being the facilitator and the curator of the observable unknown?
- [57:48]
A
The responsibility to resist performance. I think it's easy for people to fall into the conundrum of wanting to show too much, to seek validation where it's not necessary. So that's my responsibility. I resist performance. Visibility tempts one towards spectacular practical the sacred demands sincerity, the utmost sincerity. My task isn't to appear enlightened, but to remain porous. To let ideas pass through without mistaking myself for their source. I'm not. I'm a curator. These aren't my ideas. These are ideas that were had long before I was ever a twinkling in my father's eye. I believe that the ideas that I convey and allow to spread said are valuable. I've seen them play out in the world and prove tremendous change in the places where they've been allowed to flourish. So it's my responsibility to remain porous and to let these ideas just flow into the ears of my listeners. So I think that's my responsibility to really resist that spectacle, the spectacle that takes away sincerity from the sacred. The reward, I believe the reward is that through this opportunity to act as a porous membrane from whence information finds itself conveyed, I can't help but to grow from it. I can't help but to collect some of it for myself. I can't help but to see it through the lens of whoever's sitting with me and I'm chatting with. Through the lens of the way I imagine listeners receiving it, the way I think it might sit with them or upset them. I've, I'm sure, insulted many people already, and that's not the goal. But if maybe through some injury or insult, some growth happens, how wonderful can that be? I'm going to bring it back to my grandson, Adrian. I remember some time ago I had made an offer. I told him that I would pay him $50 if he could recite his Alphabet backwards. Not because it was entertaining, but more because that is such a contortion of how society teaches consciousness to sit with us, how rules tell us they have to be obeyed. It's planting a seed. If someone can defy the logic of something as routine and structured as the Alphabet by speaking it backwards and understanding the value in that, the power in that, then that serves reward. It's defying structure. It's defying what's obvious. It's defying what's acceptable. And it's seeking something deeper. It's seeking something more meaningful. It's seeking an acceptance of the reversal. It's seeking an acceptance of the shadow. So I think about how important it is to put even the ugly and the unpleasant in front of people. I don't do a great deal of that, but on occasion, when there's a taste of it in one of my lectures or one of my public speaking engagements, I feel that that's probably the most valuable piece because it's probably motivating the most. Growth. Growth.
- [61:15]
B
That's my reward is your reward? Yes, growth is your reward. And you know what? Adrian is smart. I bet he already has it figured out. So I'm sure he's going to impress you someday with that, for sure. You know, it's a good thing to leave people with the reward and the responsibility of growth, because isn't that really the totality of it? Like you said, you want to be porous, but it's really about your growth, because are you born poorest? Well, we could have a whole nother conversation conversation about that, but let's just speak concretely. As what we're taught. Like you said, the Alphabet forwards were taught. Nope, we're solid. Let's not look at it at anything else. So you even unveiling to say, no, I'm porous, you're porous, we're porous, let's grow. I think we should end on that beautiful note. And you do an amazing job of staying humble. Thank you for being porous. Thank you for teaching us to grow and to move and to expand and to learn the Alphabet backwards and to learn to read, read, read. Knowledge is power. So thank you for having me tonight as your guest host. Thank you for answering our questions of our listeners and unveiling in front of us and letting us get to know you just a little bit better and more personally through your stories and through your experiences of growth and being porous.
- [62:27]
A
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to ask those questions and to facilitate tonight's meeting. I also want to point out that that I do believe there's great benefit to your podcast. Everyone has something to say. I think it's now available. You said on Apple and on Spotify, is that correct?
- [62:44]
B
Yes. So we have the one episode, the introductory. It's a little bit of that woman unveiling. I'm 50, you hear me. We're clearly two voices, one current. You bring it from that academic perspective. I'm bringing it from a woman who like you said, was I the witch or was I Hansel or Gretel? We don't know in 50 years but they everybody has something to say. The concept is, isn't God within all of us? You know, I don't care what we call God. The observable unknown, isn't it within all of us? I am, I am has something to say. Everybody has something to say. I find the I am in everybody. So with that being said, I'm going to have a seven part series of kindness to compassion. And what does that mean? It is going to show you the reward and the responsibility to both of those concepts. And how has that helped me learn, understand and write my book of the art of unveiling and any mess can holy if you bless it. So thank you for mentioning that. But it grows out of our relationship. It grows out of my looking in the mirror and deciding am I Hansel, Gretel or the witch at any given moment and you helping me see the observable unknown in my own life and see my own patterns and my own disruptions, whether they come from internal and myself or the external observable unknown if it's really external. So thank you. Thank you for plugging my podcast. Thank you for loving me. And thank you for loving your audience enough to stay porous, humble, and growing every day. And staying dedicated to us growing every day too. So thank you.
- [64:18]
A
It's absolutely a pleasure. I appreciate the recognition. And thank you for being a voice to so many people who are unheard. I appreciate that immensely.
- [64:28]
B
You know, exile to empowerment. So thank you so much.
- [64:31]
A
Absolutely. Have a great night. Cheers. In today's episode, I was able to answer a handful of questions taken from the most frequently submitted through our website, crowscubboard.com those questions submitted by our listeners and clients, those who wanted to have a better understanding of not only who I am as a person, but what my motivations are. With this podcast and with much of the work we do through crowscopper.com I was happy to share my insights and I found the questions invigorating. I look forward to many more coming in the future. Whenever we consider what makes a person tick, if you will, we should always think about what has shaped them, what has influenced influenced them, what seeds were left in them. You might be surprised by what kinds of seeds were left and how those seeds were deposited. Sometimes it is normal for us to judge a book by its cover, but that doesn't make it wise. Remember, what appears unknowable often stands right before us, waiting to be observed through both the lens the of of science and the wisdom of spirit. Until next time, this is Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscover.com inviting you to look deeper into the observable unknown.