John Churchill, Psy.D: Our Collective Psychological Development
Psychologist, John Churchill is the co-director of Karuna Mandala and co-founder of Samadhi Integral, which is focused on consciousness, human potential, and psychedelic integration. John does both initiatives with his wife, fellow therapist Nicole. In his early life, John became a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland—his book, Becoming Buddha, explores paradigm shifts of the dharmic wheel and serves as a gateway to integrating Buddhist theory and teachings into western psychology.
In today’s conversation, we talk about the dire need for our culture to evolve and grow up, the level of consciousness at which we’re creating technological advances like artificial intelligence, and the journey to self-realization. With vast expertise and experience, he invites us to explore our individual development and existence within the larger organism of our universe. This is a heady episode, as John has a fascinating brain—fair warning that you might need to listen more than once. And I highly recommend reading Ken Wilber if the topics we discuss stoke your mind—I’d start with A Brief History of Everything. John has studied and worked with Ken for decades. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM JOHN CHURCHILL:
Becoming Buddha: Buddhist Contemplative Psychology in a Western Context
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: It's so nice to meet you. As mentioned, I have listened to many of your conversations, some of which I can follow and some of which are beyond me, they're not really beyond me, I'm kind of teasing, but I love Ken Wilber and I can go go to most of those places with you, but will you talk a little bit about what you're about essentially and the different worlds that you're weaving together into a new kind of tapestry?
JOHN CHURCHILL: Yeah. Well, you know, it's clearly that we're facing this kind of fourth industrial revolution in terms of outer technologies, right? The kind of AI and computing power and the kind of bio revolution and what's gonna happen when those collide and frankly, that will be a disaster if we don't have a comparative, what we would call in the kind of contemplative tradition, like a fourth turning of the dharma. In our culture, the interior technologies probably start, you know, since Christianity kind of took political force, the interiors were really suppressed in favor of exoteric religion and also kind of exoteric science. And so we're at a point where that imbalance, it can't continue. So we have to meet the full power of these outer technologies and the world they're going to create with the full power of the world's interior psycho technologies and interior understanding and development. And, on the interior side, that involves an integration of understanding how all the contemplative traditions, how they all synthesize into a contemplative psychology, and then also an understanding how all psychology is synthesized and how those two are then integrated so that we have, for the first time, a planetary developmental system that really integrates and understands the depth of what it means to be human in our most human way, by depth here, I don't mean like something spiritual, I mean something like deeply human and relational and intimate, and how that integrates into what we might call the most spiritual and elevated.
Really, that involves understanding from a psychological interior perspective why we got to the situation that we've got in right now and the kind of the effect of multi-generational trauma on our whole psychological makeup. And, the thing about the technological revolution that we're facing right now, it will speed up whatever way we are going, it's gonna speed that up exponentially. So if we don't have a deep understanding of how humans unfold and flower and where we've got stuck, we will activate the opposite system, which then flip goes into the direction of disintegration, separation, isolation, and deeper levels of trauma.
ELISE: I work with this woman Carissa, and she talks about how we have made so much progress without evolution. And it also reminds me of that great E.O. Wilson quote, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology.” And you know, we've created many things that we don't have the capacity to manage and those horses are out of the stable. And it's interesting because I know you've worked with Ken Wilber and I love paradigms. And so I love a paradigm of a paradigm and the way that, I haven't read him fully or studied with him the way that you have, but the way that he has organized this, I think might be the click that people need to understand how these things are cocreative and coexistent, but that they all have to match, right? I mean, as you said this, the exoteric science, he talks about it right as me, we, it, it's, and how the objective qualities have been our, almost our exclusive focus while studying the brain but not understanding the mind or that the two are coexistent.
JOHN: Well, I mean, really what we're talking about is the good, the true, and the beautiful, and that the understanding of what causes truth and what is truth and the value and the injunctions around investigating truth are also sacred and so science, which is the exploration of truth is sacred and that it is concerned about truth. However, if you remove what is good, which is the interpersonal and what is beautiful, which is this pure subjective, then what happens is the shadow controls science, and that's what's happened. It isn't so much even that it's science, it's also that our science has been directed, or our investigation has been directed into a particular way of looking at reality for a few hundred years. And, for instance, the kind of vitalistic perspectives and the non-dual perspectives that would've been part of scientific investigation hundreds of years ago were slowly removed because the good and the beautiful weren't seemed to be as important as what was true.
ELISE: But even this idea of truth and the hunt for the truth or something that's objectively, factually valid, as science evolves, that also becomes increasingly evasive. Isn't truth somehow also, I mean, I know that there are many things that are true, but as we get into sort of quantum physics and things start moving and shifting that, I feel like it's we're being led to a point of understanding the limit of that, of trying to nail everything down as well.
JOHN: I don't know if that's true.
ELISE: Okay.
JOHN: I think that part of that has to do with the limitations of the level of development of scientists. And what I mean by that, and that's where the interior is so important, there's been a lot of research, well not actually a lot of research, but a fair amount of research in kind of human development over the last 50 years, very little of which has made its way into the mainstream and mainly cause the mainstream is governed by a particular level of development, the bracket's out and a thing above it because typically we don't like to hear of anything that's above us. So culture will always, just like for instance, pre Renaissance there, dark ages, there was a bracketing of like not allowing science, not allowing Copernicus or Galileo into the medieval consciousness, we are at a similar situation where actually scientism is a religion, and the more developed perspectives that would be in that could be integrated into science, though they aren't even part of the discourse because, they're not seen, they're not seen and under and even understood.
ELISE: And so in that next evolution of science that transcend and include idea, then the way that physics, Newtonian physics, and quantum physics break would be included and would make sense within a larger context.
JOHN: Yeah, exactly. Meaning most of, just kind of mathematically, most of science arises from third person perspective, that’s kind of Newtonian physics, kind of relativistic theory is fourth person perspective, but human consciousness can go fifth person perspective, sixth person, and seventh person perspective. But, in order to do that, we actually have to engage in contemplative transformative practices that transform how you experience yourself as a human being. And of course, when the scientist transforms themselves and then how they think changes as well, we get whole new, not just kind of systemic thinking, we get paradigmatic thinking or even meta paradigmatic thinking. So there is a relationship between the complexity of cognition and the level of development of that mind and not just, and frankly, actually it's not just the mind, it's actually the heart mind. I mean, this is where the reason why our culture kind of stopped really was when, where we are stuck is because of the split between the heart and the mind and the split between what's true and what's good and beautiful. At a certain point, you can't go any further, unless you have a radical reintegration of what it was that was left behind. Right?
ELISE: Is there an easy example of something outside the bracket that's circling around us but hasn't yet been integrated?
JOHN: If you look at how humans evolve, and this is a very simple first person, second person, third person model. Like first person is just me, just you know, and second person is you and me and we call that concreted operational. Are you in or you out, are you part of my clan or are you not part of my clan? And that kind of zero ones, which is basically like in and out kind of computation. And then third person is objective where you and I can agree about something that's over there, right? We call that third person because it's, both you and I are looking at a third thing and agreeing upon its objective qualities. And fourth person is about appreciating the context that that arises in. So that's got to do with pluralistic relativistic cognition of recognizing context, which is super important cause that allows us to reintegrate prior perspectives that have been left out just in terms of history. You know, the perspective of women, of the planet, of minorities, that kind of fourth person perspective is super aware of what's being left out of the conversation.
However, what fourth person perspective doesn't have a holarchical cognition, it doesn't necessarily understand that nature arises holarchically, like things evolve and fifth person perspective really understands the depth of development. And so at fifth person perspective, that's where you have the ability to, let's say, integrate the understanding of the shadow and psychology with the understanding of sociology and the understanding of technology, the ability to integrate multiple fields and to understand that there are levels of value, like the human being, we have, we are organized, we go through a developmental process as we unfold, right? We see if you've had children, you see the infant evolve well, and understanding those stages is very important in understanding how we heal and how we unfold. And also beginning to intuit that there might be stages even above where we're at. I mean, for instance, at fifth person and perspective, you'd begin to appreciate how important psychology is as a part of politics. Like the lack of integration and understanding of people's psychology, right? Like, you know, when you have sociopaths and psychopaths in positions of power and the inability to what to relate. So the lack of integration of the fields, you know, that's the capacity to integrate those and to develop new ways of thinking and that comes a fifth person perspective. But this is all very cognitive.
ELISE: What are most of us reaching towards? Fifth person or capable of fifth, or it just depends?
JOHN: I mean developmentally, I would say I think it's about 20% of the population are a fourth person perspective. The majority the mainstream, that kind of is held at around three per third person perspective and about 1% functions at fifth person. But the problem is the mainstream is kind of controlled by, well, at this point, that kind of woke psychology, that’s fourth person. And if that doesn't allow for transition to the next level, it itself will become a religion. It'll become, you know, concretized. That’s the danger. It will stop any further development beyond itself because that's what we do, right? We kind of, we build a little castle and we protect our positions.
ELISE: Quickly before we move on, you said holarchy, and I just wanted to define that for people cause I love this concept because we have such an aversion, understandably, to hierarchy, right? We equate it with dominance and oppression and this model, a holarchy is a nested hierarchy where a word ladders up to a sentence, ladders up to a paragraph, ladders up to a story, ladders up to a book. That's a version of a holarchy, right? And if you destroy a lower version of a holarchy, so if you made you destroyed words, then the whole thing collapses.
JOHN: We have to take back the word hierarchy. It literally means sacred order, right? The first thing, is reality sacred or is, or is it not? So if it's sacred and we see how the sacred unfolds itself, it unfolds itself in our interiors psychologically, but it also unfolds itself in terms of our physiology, right? Cells are held by cellular systems, are held by organs and so on and so forth, that that's how she unfolds. Like we unfold that way. And so we have to have a deep appreciation for the most fundamental levels. So for instance, in human psychology, that would be about really appreciating how the depth of our attachment system, the depth of our sense of how deeply safe and loved that we feel in reality and our ability to attune to others and attune to ourself is the process that we understand now allows for all higher healthy development. And if that trust is damaged psychologically, than so many of the personality disorders and the forms of psychological suffering that we see are due to the fact that they're not really lower, they're more fundamental levels when they get damaged than the whole stack gets fractured. And now if we look at the same thing in culture, right? What we've seen is the fracturing of trust, right? The interpersonal. So when trust, which is to our culture, what attachment in the sense of trust with reality is to an individual which allows for all health, the depth of trust that you internalize as a child allows for healthy unfolding. And the degree that we lack that is what affects complex developmental trauma, and pain and suffering. We look at our culture and we see what's happening and the fracturing of the trust of the commons and everything that was built on top of that, it was trust that allowed us to build. Like if you go to London, the Victorian sewer system underneath everything, you had to trust enough that it was valuable enough to build something to last for a few hundred years to come together with other people in trust. We are losing that, right? It's fracturing. And as it fractures and we lose trust, the whole social fabric will rip and everything built on top of that, the whole stack will come down. Just like with an individual, with a person.
ELISE: And in the context of the individual, I wanna talk to you about sort of the heart and your work in psychology and also spirituality in the soul and psychedelics. Because what I have observed, too, in that space is that people will, you can sort of hit a higher state and you can take this out to the social level or an individual level. You'll see people sort of get to a transcendent state, let's say, by psychedelics, but they're still completely, it's like a rubber band tethered to their emotional or psychological trauma, and obviously psychedelics can help people address that and heal that, but you can't bypass that integration. You might hit a state, but you're still at a certain, not lower stage, but a wounded stage that needs to be reconciled before you can actually hit that higher state as a stage, as something that you can stay at. Is that an accurate reflection?
JOHN: Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. There's a deep need for all of us to grow up, like we are now being handed tools of the gods, right? And so we have to grow up and we have to mature. And so those levels of deep heroic altruism that in the past may be reserved for the great saints and sages of the past, this will have to be democratized. It'll have to become something that is accessed to everybody. And so to do that, we're talking about a trait development, which means it has to become permanent. And so altered states is one thing, but an altered trait is a whole other process. And in order to have altered an altered trait developmentally, in order to really grow and then stay there, which is what you and I did, like you and I, we grew when we were 5 years old and we grew to 10, and then we grew to like 12 and 18. We went through completely different worlds. But the truth is, is most adults, we plateau and most people haven't probably grown through any other worlds for a decade, two decades, three or four decades.
And there's a reason for that. It's twofold. One is because of the injuries of the past that need to be healed. So we need to understand the depth of how we heal, which is one thing. And then we also need to have that integrated to understand how we grow and mature. So psychedelics are helpful in a number of ways. They're helpful in that they open up and reveal what needs to be healed. So they are a form of uncovering therapy. And that uncovering can be both uncovering what was left behind in the past and so you have to go back and do that work. And it can also uncover where you are headed in terms of the future, like a glimpse, right? So, and of course, roll of the dice as to which one it's gonna uncover. Now that's often set and setting can help angle that whether we wanna look into where we've been or where we are going to, but the uncovering itself, that's just one thing. Then you need the deep work of of integrating the past and of maturing and developing the kind of capacities that we can grow into.
If you and I, if we continued on a lifelong learning path, that didn't stop when we were 21 and then you're an adult, well, the tradition, you know, the contemplative traditions understand that Actually no, that's not even, that's just the beginning, right? So if we have that understanding that actually there is a path of real lifelong learning that leads to heroic altruism, increased cognitive complexity, deep embodiment, right, deep levels of bliss and the possibilities of what it means to be a human being. And if we understood that that was a developmental journey, we grow naturally into it if provided with the resources and the education right to do that. And to go back to where we began, that education has basically been removed from our culture for hundreds and hundreds of years.
ELISE: Yeah. And what do you think, I know that you talk about psychedelics as a type of technology, spiritual language, or spirituality as a type of technology, who are the appropriate teachers? Like what has been lost? And, you know, I love obviously all the people at MAPs, Rick Dobin's a dear friend, like, I'm a huge fan of that work. And in some ways it feels like a panacea. And in other ways it feels like it might be enough to open the door for people, but it's not enough to walk them through it inherently. Like the integration and all of this deeper work is essential. Where do you feel like to me, as someone who, as an adult, has gone deep into unaffiliated agnostic spirituality and reading widely from wisdom traditions, like, to me, that feels like one of the largest gaps in my own education. But where do you feel like you would most love to see a cultural intervention?
JOHN: That's been the question that on my mind for 30 years. Well, first thing, it's a really challenging question because it involves so many issues like hierarchy, for instance, being one of them. Like who gets to say, who is an authority, right? And then the question is, well, how do you protect from the mistakes of the past with authority, right? So you have to also answer the organizational question of how do you build a learning organization that allows for hierarchy and yet has integrated the understanding of the shadow and has the checks and balances so it's bottom up and top down. Right? So there's that. I mean, essentially we have to reawaken the wisdom schools, right? So, and the wisdom schools, right, like the love of Sophia, the love of wisdom. And that's difficult in a environment where everyone holds everyone like has their shingle out and say, you know, and there's no sense of how do these pieces fit together, right? There's no sense, right? And hierarchy isn't allowed, and therefore, where to go and study and who are you gonna learn with? And if you don't have hierarchy, you don't have a path because like a path on. So, these are all really big problems.
ELISE: Know what I would love to see, maybe you can build this and maybe this is where God-like technology helps, but I would like to see some sort of a way to map yourself to identify sort of where you are within this larger nested holarchy. And then to be presented with teachers ancient and new, and to choose who's resonant and maybe it's time bound the amount, so that again, to avoid sort of the guru reification or this instinct that we have to sort of give away our sovereignty to other people and just continue to recreate that relationship and that then you pass the baton continually as you figure out where you are emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and that people are, you know what I think is so interesting about Ken Wilber, is you can find someone who is, he talks about like Hitler effectively as being incredibly evolved and incredibly devolved, right? Like you, you we're all, maybe Hitler's a terrible example, but like you have someone who clearly is skilled in creating a fascist government and has a dead heart or whatever it is, whatever. So how do you, you know, people can be advanced and deeply not advanced in other parts. You can find someone who's incredibly spiritually alive and they're very ungrounded, right?They've lost a sense of any truth as you said, or objective reality, for example.
JOHN: Right. So the way that we're going to do this, I mean, the way that we are beginning to do this in my organization at Karuna is the first thing we have to understand is that the earliest lessons of development, the earliest ones are actually important all the way up the stack. And so when we start, as part of our contemplator practice, as start of our mediative practice, rather than going up but actually direct our attention back down to start shoring up and strengthening the most basic and fundamental and human levels of the psyche. When you do that and you go step by step from the bottom up, the psychological defenses that lead to things like projection can be dealt with early on. So part of the educational process is also relational. So these things always traditionally had to be learned in an apprentice relationship. So it does involve, you know, a level of commitment. Picking and choosing actually doesn't work very well because you actually, you need to be able to build an attachment relationship in order to receive an energetic download. Now, the issue is how do we heal our relational system so that we can be in relationship, in the Buddhist tradition, the kind of exemplar teacher is called a spiritual friend.
ELISE: Hmm. I love that.
JOHN: So the question, our quest, would be of like, for you and me, how do we become friends?
ELISE: Right.
JOHN: Like what are the psychological processes that allow for deep friendship with self and with other to evolve? When that happens, you don't get the kind of idealization and projection process, right? That has to be addressed as part of the educational journey. Because then you can continue in relationship with wise teachers and not get caught in the that guru game. And then the other piece of that is also about the interpersonal meaning, this journey now, traditionally in the traditional mystery schools of the past, in the great traditions and the mystical traditions, the yogic traditions, it was a very individual journey cause frankly, there were so few people who had the level of education to even get to the point to begin that journey. Like in Tibet for instance, whilst, you know, I don't know, a quarter of a population where in monasteries it was probably the elite Tokus, who were in the educational environment where they could actually get all the education in order to go on that journey. So now, it isn't so much of an individual, it's like actually we have to go on this journey together. And so if the emphasis is placed on how do we learn how to grow together and how do we learn to deepen the interpersonal field—now part of that journey, it's interesting, in order to really grow into the transpersonal, to beyond the self, you actually have to have a really deep level of individuation. You actually have to become a very individuated being because it's that individuation that allows for you to metabolize all of the mummy daddy stuff. So first you have to metabolize the mummy daddy stuff. If you don't metabolize the mummy daddy stuff and you project it onto the pope. So the first step is like, Elise, how does John become a uniquely individuated being autonomous with a strong sense of trust, healing the trust system, healing the attune in a attunement system, strengthening the sense of self. Then when you've taken care of those and the person is really individuated and they're not going to surrender self before the surrender of self is the appropriate step. Because everything is developmental. So if you, if you, if we are dissolving the self structure into a larger we, before we even have a self, that's problematic. But if you have a sense of self and then you grow into a larger sense of we, what happens is that sense of self stays, but now it's just connected to a deeper level of motivation and a deeper level of interpersonal connection and you don't lose that sense of autonomy.
ELISE: I was just reminding myself of the etymology of friend, going to Sacred Friend and the the root is free, it's shared with like to love and free and that's such a, like beautiful idea, but I think entirely correct if you haven't maybe done the, IFS work of recollecting all those parts of yourself. If you haven't done the mommy, daddy stuff, you're always slightly, you're always slightly hijacked, right? You're slightly, not incomplete because I really believe we're all whole, it's just recovering those parts of ourselves, pulling them out of shadow, I guess.
JOHN: Imagine if we lived in a culture where we really deeply understood, we had a department of friendship, like, really, how do we build strong, deep interpersonal relationships? We wouldn't have the othering politicaling that we do. I mean, all of that, all of that kind of partisan politics in expression of psychological projection and disowning of parts. Whether conservatives, disown their progressive parts or parts or, or progressives disown they're, they're, they're conservative parts. So if the foundation of the sacred journey, and I use sacred rather than spiritual because the term spiritual is very dualistic. It kind of assumes that there's something separate from spirit, which is really not how the path is. So if the sacred unfolds through deep healing, personal and then interpersonal, and then it moves into the universal, you don't end up with the mistakes of the past.
ELISE: Yeah. When you think about the crisis of loneliness, the disconnection that's rampant, the lack of friendliness, the political binaries, do you feel like this is a necessary breaking point for us to collectively evolve, or do you think we're about to spin out? Or could it go in either direction, I guess?
JOHN: I think that's what we're saying is it is once we add this first, this catalyst of these technologies, it's an amazing opportunity for it to go either way very, very quickly.
ELISE: Yeah. What do you think about AI? I mean, I know that's a big question.
JOHN: I'm working with a friend of mine on a deliberately developmental AI project, meaning part of the problem with mapping, this neural mapping of kind of the brain and then using that map as an AI, is that how you understand how the brain operates is based on your level of development? So what you are seeing is an AI that's an expression of a particular level of development, which has no understanding of holarchy, hierarchy, and has no understanding of the sacred and has no understanding of what leads into the direction of deep healing and no understanding of actually what leads to greater trauma and then evil. If you don't understand, we don't understand the depths of what it means to be human you shouldn't be allowed, but because all you're gonna do is create a technology that reflects your own psychology. And I think that that's, I do believe that we can create and it will happen, there’s gonna be wisdom AIs, and you know, that the name of our project is Matre, which essentially is like the name of the Buddha of friendliness of the future. Because there is a possibility to program a benevolent AI that has a deep understanding of how human beings develop, of how reality develops. But if you just, if you just kind of take it as if there's no depth and you vacuum the internet with information, then you just get an AI that has the psychology of surfaces.
ELISE: Yeah. No, it's fascinating. You mentioned evil, we've touched on shadow a little bit, I'm curious about deep shadow, what's present in our world, what I think many people are tapping into as an energy source, as sort of an archetypal energy source without being aware of what that power is or how to not be distorted by it. And I worry about it too in the context of psychedelics, and maybe that's too woo-woo, but I worry often about what people are tapping into and what they're bringing through and whether they can keep themselves safe and therefore keep other people safe. And I worry a lot about both spiritual grandiosity but also distortions. Do you have any thoughts about that?
JOHN: A lot. So I think that the first thing we have to appreciate is that as a civilization, Western civilization, that we have a traumatic history. So if a person doesn't understand that they're deeply traumatized and then they engage with all kinds of technologies, then all you will do is you will spread, you'll continue that, that trauma. So we have to appreciate, we have to, you know, whilst we have to really value like Judeo-Christian culture, we have to understand that Christianity, in specifically Rome, destroyed the indigenous mystery schools of the West, the Greek mystery schools, mysteries that won for around for a thousand years., the Egyptian, in fact the very general that wiped out Jerusalem turned around and went on, wiped out the Druids, like the Romans had a very, the Romans as forces of empire had a strategy to basically remove all of these educational, lifelong learning academies and, and basically gain control. And if if we don't understand that we've lost our own indigenousness, but we had that, that it existed, then we're not gonna be able to dig deep enough to understand the darkness that it has before in us, right? The shadow and not just our personal shadow, but the collective shadow, right? The shadow of empire, the shadow of Thanatos, right? Of the death drive. Meaning that when you are motivated by an avoidance of your own trauma, so when you avoid your own inner suffering and that continues multi-generationally, that leads to an avoidance of the present moment. And it leads to the tendency to start to, well, you project out into the world and into the world around you, if you've disowned your own suffering, you project it onto people out there and then you start trying to destroy them, right? So if we don't appreciate the destruction of the psychedelic tradition of the west, 2000 years ago, right, of the feminine wisdoms of the West. So we have to get a sense of we've lived within a machine that was first the church and then just became capitalism, but it's the same machine.
And the early Gnostics and the sacred tradition understood that this machine wasn't just physical, it was also mental, it was spiritual, meaning that humanities of our avoidanc, of our own healing has built an archetypal force, which is an archetypal expression of our own avoidance. And as it gets stronger and stronger, it becomes more and more destructive. So if you don't appreciate the shadow, not just inside of us, but essentially the shadow that we are living in and just like psychology has a super ego. The outer psyche, the world has a super ego that's like what's allowed into the public discourse and what isn’t. So those forces are eating the world, right? They're, are eating the world and they all continue to destroy the world, because if you don't want to face your own suffering, you're gonna destroy everything that reminds you of it, right? So if we lost our relationship to sacred world, and by that I mean to the sacred plants, I mean, our medical system has no, there's no longer any, the natural world is not medicine. And we think that that's normal.
But we are so divorced from sacred world. And by sacred world, I mean, when you take a psychedelic, you begin to see sacred world, the first level of the sacred, beyond this realm, not the non-dual, and not these vast open states, I just mean like seeing a different layer of nature, you know, the pixies and the gnomes and the salamanders of The Alchemist, right? The, the astral plane. I mean, essentially the nature has more going on than what our physical eyes can see. And part of what happens is when you suppress these educational systems that are meant to actually, these educational systems, whether they were from deep sensory deprivation or sacred sexuality or mediative practices, they were designed to slowly increase the DMT in the brain. So when they were initiated into sacred world, they slowly began to see that the world was sacred, because their chemistry began to evolve. And when your chemistry evolves slowly, not just like a an LSD trip or a ayahuasca journey, but as it slowly comes online and it becomes more and more of a trait and not just a state, you begin to see as a trait capacity that this world is alive in ways that our culture has lost, completely lost.
So with the psychedelics, we have to really appreciate that it's opening up sacred world, but when it opens up sacred world, it's also gonna open up everything that our culture has suppressed for 2000 years, cause it's like a part of our psyche that we didn't think even existed. So we might be super smart at one level, but at another level we are like babes that we've shut a door on a part of our psyche and a part of the world and a whole part of reality. And so we have to, you know, we have to, in my mind, we wanna need to approach that door informed by how our ancestors in the mystery schools understood it. Right? So yeah, we need some humility, we need some appreciation so we don't get inflated, which easy to happen. So this, the psychedelic revolution is gonna open, reopen a whole realm that we shut 2000 years ago. But the problem is we might not necessarily have the wisdom, like regain the wisdom. Right? And so then you're opening up Pandora's box, the whole realm without the wisdom, knowledge and then maybe going to other traditions, like indigenous traditions but not actually going to our own traditions, which is a, my mistake. Like we actually have and had traditions. They just had to go underground. They had to go, you know, whether it's the Alchemists or the Rosa Crucian or the, you know, the Cremas or all of these. Now, all of that western esoteric tradition, that all has to be updated, integrated into our understanding of Western psychology, integrated into the kind of Eastern contemplative understanding so that we have the right GPS as to how to enter into that world.
ELISE: Yeah, no, that makes so much sense, including the dislocation that we feel from our culture and the fact that it feels so many, it can feel so culture less here and then obviously the ongoing trauma, I mean, of being torn away from that and torn apart and how odd it feels to be sort of a Western person and to be unmoored and to think about the loss of, you know, I would argue that the, the desecration of the divine feminine is why, also, why we're careening towards devastation that until men particular reintegrate that essential energy for themselves were screwed.
JOHN: Yeah. And in her higher aspect that that is so fear, right?
ELISE: Yeah.
JOHN: Within the wisdom, within the mystery traditions, the highest aspect of wisdom is understood to be feminine.
ELISE: Yes.
JOHN: Like the loss of the feminine wasn't just the loss of like dancing and feeling our feelings and being embodied. We're talking about the loss of, this really deep archetypal understanding of the nature of reality and a kind of intelligence, right? That isn't just feelings and you know, like feminine intelligence, which is about knowing and directly experiencing the deep interconnection of all of reality.
ELISE: Yeah. One more big question, which might be impossible to answer, but what's your sense of, I don't even think universe is the right word, but what do you think? What are we moving towards? What are we part of? Climbing towards World 12, like World 24, what do you, how do you locate us in a bigger context?
JOHN: Well I mean, this is where the cosmology, the relationship between psychology and cosmology, right? I mean, if, so, of course, if we haven't repressed some basic dimensions of the sacred, then we won't integrate within ourselves, then we won't recognize the dimensions of the sacred of the planet. So, you know, if the planet is more than just, if our mother is more than just a matter but actually is like the mother consciousness. So within the nasik traditions, and when we integrate those into modern understanding, I mean essentially our planet is an evolving organism that depends upon humanity as its catalyst for its own evolution. So first we would talk about the planetary logos, like our planetary intelligence, which is then of course part of a solar logos and, and so on and so forth, right? So these are nested intelligences. So if we just start with our planet that from the perspective of, of these, the perennial traditions, so not just like the, we, I mean like the wisdom traditions of the whole planet.
When you look at those and you come up and you look at what the deep structure is and what are we told about the deep structure of our planet, our planet is an organism that archetypally, we are constructed in a very similar way. So just as we have a physical body and just as we have a desire imaginal, astral body and we have a mind and and so on and so forth, and we have these higher dimensions, these higher dimensions of our consciousness that the mystical traditions lead us into, and that actually are accessible to everybody, these aren't just interior states separated. And that's the problem with kind of western psychology and neuroscience within the traditions it's understood that you are also actually perceiving different dimensions of our planet. So she has tissues. So in Buddhism, for instance, they talk about the truth body. But in medicine, this term, ‘datu’ means tissue. So these levels of realizations, not only are they levels of psychological kind of unfolding and beginning to perceive reality in different ways, including new content, right? Like spirit, like realms. But actually what you're beginning to perceive are the difference, the subtler tissues of a centralized organism.
Those tissues, like we have physical tissues, imagine that there are subtler tissues, photo tissues made of photons, tissues made of substances that we just do not have yet the, the technology even to measure these tissues. To measure this substance. But if we take that as a thought of ex a thought experiment, that what the traditions say is that around our planet are these layers and these layers, these tissues, these are the tissues that are, you know, the beings are circulating through those tissues as they curate and reincarnate, and that there are complexes or organs within those tissues. And we call those heavens that, that, that collectives form within the tissues of our planet. And, and some of those tissues unfortunately, become kind of like cancerous. They become, uh, like, um, stagnant because our planet, because humanity is not fully awakened and we are fearful of things like death, right?
And are not, we're not with the program. Like we're not participating fully, we're not participating fully in that cycle. So if you understand where she is she is kind of half, if I would say like Gaia as a being. She's like a woman who really, she still has some trauma from childhood. There's a bunch of trauma from childhood. She's reading some books on self-help. She meditates, she still has a smoking problem, but she knows it's bad for her and she's addicted to coke and coffee, but she wants to win. So our planet right now, yeah, she needs to go into therapy. We need to go into therapy, right? And we need to clean up the past and we need to wake up and mature and begin to kind of wake up to, we are part of a planetary system that has realm, I mean, that has subtler realms, but it's all a single system. And as you begin to wake up to that, of course what happens is your chemistry begins to change.
The DMT begins to get secreted. And surely, but surely you have a revelation and they being to reweave themselves, right? So it's not about going up, it's about integration. Like, can we integrate the depth of matter into the height of spirit? And as human beings, our function is to make that happen. And, you know, and what does that look like? Well, it looks like a garden, right? Because there's no, like, if you wanna, what does heaven look like if it doesn't look like a garden? So it's that process of returning back and seeing our planet as a medicine planet and a place of great beauty and a place where the relative and the absolute can meet spirit and matter can meet. That’s the view of the traditions. It's not the view of like, we need to get out of here, but enlightened, that’s not the perennial, that was a way of controlling the population. That was never the perennial, that was never the wisdom schools. The wisdom schools was actually, this is where the miracle is, and weaving together of these different realms.
So that's, you know, that's the vision. And one of the things we understand about human development is the longer the vision that somebody has psychologically, like most people in our culture are concerned about the quarter, maybe that what's gonna happen this year. But you can't address the problems, right? So maturity as you consider the next generation, which we're even stretching to do that, right? But as you begin to stretch to encompass seven generations in your awareness and as we begin to make decisions based on that and what the traditions would say, you're doing that in your own self-interested. Cause frankly, as part of the circulatory recycling system, you will be that seventh generation. And even if, even if that isn't true, and what I'm saying is a fancy story, the thing is, is the brain responds to story. Like you, you know what I'm saying? So we need a story. We need a new story that's gonna encourage us enough to make some radical changes in what it means to be a human being. So a lot of this is, at least this is, this is the world's story. Like this is the story of our traditions, of our ancestors, of our indigenous ancestors in the West. This is our story and we just have to reawaken to it, stick off a little bit of empire and look at the amazing opportunity that presents itself to us.
ELISE: Hmm. Beautiful. I love it. Thank you. You have to come back cause I could talk to you for many hours. You have a fascinating brain. I'm sure you know this.
JOHN: Thank you.
ELISE: What a mind? I will definitely ask John to come so we can go deeper into his work and explore some of the concepts that I know are heady, particularly if you have never read Ken Wilber or explored some of these esoteric traditions. It’s interesting, he was talking about the cult of Dyonisis and Elysium; there’s a great book, The Immortality Key, by Brian Muraresku, which is a good read. I have interviewed him in my past life about the role of psychedelics in a Millenia ago—what happened to those rights and rituals. I have written a bit about Ken Wilber and wholarchies and transcend and include and ascending and descending and darkness in my newsletter (which if you are not getting it, please consider signing up, its EliseLoehnen.Substack.com) and I am curious for feedback on this and what you want to hear from John, because I have a feeling we’ll have many conversations. I’ll see you next week.
