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In November’s solo episode: Something stopped me in my tracks, offering a major reframe. What you might learn from the Trickster archetype. Little ways I’m finding meaning in the universe. Other ways of thinking about the process of evolution and change. How we might hold inspiration and discernment at once—and why this is crucial. Thoughts on the guru-ification of our culture and other things happening in our upside-down world. The (perhaps surprising) book I’m obsessed with right now. And more.

ELISE:

So I don’t know if you all are having a similar experience in this very wild, very upside down, increasingly absurd world that we find ourselves living in, but it feels to me, and I’m guessing some of you will agree, that there is so much unconscious material that is both pushing to the surface of our awareness and begging to be reconciled and that it feels ever more likely like a simulation or we’re watching some sort of absurdist theater production.

And not to diminish the intensity of what’s present because it’s really hard and scary and frightening, but it helps I think, in some ways to take that perspective to try to create as much psychological distance as possible to watch what’s unfolding and wondering about what really might be afoot. I wrote this Substack post, if you’re not on my newsletter, come and join us. It’s elise luna.substack.com. It’s also called Pulling the Thread about the archetype of the trickster, and it sort of took off in relative terms, not millions of views, but a little moment of virality. And it doesn’t surprise me because essentially it posits what if Trump is playing the trickster in our collective? And I’m going to talk a little bit about what that means and expand on it because I think it’s helpful, at least for me, as a way of feeling slightly less activated and more present in light of everything that’s unfolding right now.

So I wrote about, this is seven years ago, right after our current president was elected for his first term, and I was co-hosting the Goop podcast and I interviewed this activist. I offered to him that maybe at the time it was the very beginning of the administration, it was unclear exactly what was going to happen, although we had hints that it would be four years of cruelty and some pain. It was nothing like what we’re experiencing now though, looking back, I think we can all agree, and I offered to this activist, what if I called him? At the time, I didn’t know about this trickster archetype. What if Trump is really an unconscious martyr emphasis on unconscious meaning he hasn’t chosen this role. It’s being given to him to show us the cultural shadow, to really expose what’s present and somewhat perceptible to us. I think we can all feel into pockets of incredible shadow in our collective, but what if his job is to make it apparent?

I think I likened him to, I wrote this metaphor in on our best behavior, and I think it got taken out at some point because people were like, it’s too gross, but I’ll share it with you here, which is this image of Trump as maybe we’ll call him an unskilled facialist and that he is sort of tending to the acne of our nation and he is trying to sort of get the back out of it, but he is inflaming and infecting us in the interim, but that he’s taking off the foundation literally and exposing what’s unwell, unhealed beneath the surface. And as he brings it up, it’s our job to resolve it. I think that was the metaphor that I was working with and this activist who I was interviewing did not like that and he pushed back on me, I think rightly. But his point was sort of let’s not lionize or give him any credit. What he’s doing is not a gift. And I don’t like the idea of purpose being born out of people’s suffering. I don’t think that we need this level of trauma in order for people to come alive and show up. That’s a really fair point.

I think if you for a minute just keep holding a perspective that we’re watching something archetypal that maybe has a larger framework that’s outside of our grasp, but that there is some sort of underlying wisdom pattern or order to what’s unfolding and that we’re all playing specific roles. And I do think that we reincarnate, I’m going to get into all of that in a minute, that often suffering is what inspires our growth. That’s what feeds, that’s what sort of puts us into a process of evolution and change. And it can be very painful. And Chris Schumacher would say that yes, it’s possible to evolve through the light, but it’s not as common and it’s more difficult. Really what happens is she talks about it and the crucifixion is part of this if you hold it as a symbol, which is she talks about how on Thursday you go into the tomb Friday is this process of transformation, sort of dying to old stories, ideas, rules, relationships, whatever it is that the drive shaft of your own evolution in this life.

Or wait, maybe it’s Friday into the tomb, Saturday is the womb, and then Sunday is the resurrection. You guys know I’m going to mess up my Bible stuff, but it’s a three day or three part process, which is, you could call it the wisdom pattern, but the order to disorder, to the reordering. And this happens in our own lives and it happens in the collective and it happens to us all the time, frequently in both minor ways. When you go through an experience where you feel like it shifted, you changed, you grew you up a little bit matured, you changed your perspective and sometimes in really seismic and big ways, but that’s typically the drive shaft of our evolution and growth. It’s not just skipping along a really super linear up into the right path. It’s a cycle and it’s circular and it’s hard. So back to that podcast conversation, I think the hope that we could grow or evolve as a collective without this sort of tomb to the womb experience, I don’t know that it really holds unfortunately, but that was the end of our conversation.

And I took this idea that Trump might be an unconscious martyr in some way back into hiding because it really, it’s not necessarily a popular thing to say, but I just felt like he was playing some sort of role. I couldn’t really give him the credit intellectually to be this grand puppet master. I felt like he was definitely some sort of puppet. And I guess in many ways he is, and we’re finding out that he’s sort of a plebeian puppet, a mundane puppet, the puppet of different power brokers, a puppet to his own corruption and greed, and also I think in many ways a puppet of the divine. Again, don’t misunderstand me, please. I’m not suggesting that I think that he’s like a messiah. Let’s be real. Okay, so in the years after his first term, I read Sharon Blackie’s book, Haud, which is amazing.

She has a new book coming out next year. She’ll be back on the podcast and I’ll link our podcast conversation about haud. But I want to read you these paragraphs because they stopped me in my tracks when I read them and he wasn’t our president anymore. But here you go. And so the trickster can also be thought of as an archetype of the apocalypse in the original sense of that ancient Greek word, which means revelation, an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling. When civilizations start to become more abundant, when social, economic and political systems stagnate and empires become degenerate and unresponsive to the needs of the people in walks trickster to shake it all up, embodying that disruptive intelligence which all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change.

What follows after tricksters intervention of course depends on many things among them, the specific qualities of the trickster who happens along in the story we are living through. And although we don’t always get the trickster we imagine we might want, we mostly get the trickster we deserve because trickster is often in Jungian terms, the one who also reveals the cultural shadow in the same way that the personal shadow is the dark unacknowledged compliment of an individual’s persona. A culture will cast its own collective shadow, which includes all the things we imagine that other cultures are, but categorically believe that ours is not racist, sexist, xenophobic, or undemocratic. For example, whenever a society believes strongly in its own moral righteousness, superiority, or entitlement, the collective shadow is likely to be present in spades. And its then that we most need trickster. Trickster holds up a mirror to us and helps us to see what we have become.

So I remember reading that and thinking, oh wow, that to me is the experience of the last four years ushering in COVID and did we take our medicine? Did we acknowledge our blind spots? Are we done? Is the extractive facial finish and can we finally heal? And it turns out no. So trickster is back. And this time I think that we are witnessing what feels like an unmitigated disaster as our institutions have been just demolished and destroyed one by one as we have finally come out of the government shutdown, but we’re watching the lives of our most vulnerable be bartered away. It’s all so horrible. And now there’s the revelation of these Epstein files. I never really had paid that much attention to the Epstein files, but wow, it feels like the irony of these emails. It’s not lost on me and I’m not holding my breath that it will be enough because I honestly don’t think that we’re done with whatever collective unfolding is happening right now.

I think there’s more to come. I think we have to get to the bottom, but all of it, just the theatrical nature of everything, watching Greg Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago while Snap gets cut, his obsession with a certain White House toilet, the ballroom, and even that our president generated and posted an AI video where he dropped fecal matter on no King State protestors. And I’m bringing that up because as many of you might know, I’m obsessed with mythologist Michael Mead and his book from 2012, which I hadn’t read, but which he is coming on pulling the thread to discuss why the world doesn’t end. And in it, this book came out in 2012. He wrote, tricksters play essential roles in folk myths throughout the world. They throw dirt as well as toss rocks. They play with feces and throw it at people even at God. They keep the dirt and the earth and the earthiness in the stories of life they appear, especially when the old order of the world needs to change. They are change agents and provocateurs and wise and wise guy ways. They bring strange and unexpected pieces of wisdom that help to kickstart creation when it has collapsed or simply lapsed in its rhythm.

Their appearance breaks the spell of perfection and the rhythm of expectations. They might scare people a little or expose some shadow of pretense or self-importance. They might simply bend over and bear their bottoms in order to keep the backside of life more visible. So anyway, as I read that, it obviously reminded me of what Sharon Blackie had written and it feels so important, if not helpful again for creating some sort of larger structure or container to hold the events of today in place and examine them from that perspective without getting completely overwhelmed and lost to despair and dismay because I know that that is a tempting path. But what if we hold him as this figure who is exploding and exposing the culture’s shadow and then begging us to reconcile it, heal it, and never again it. I’ve talked a lot about Jamil Zaki and his book Hope for Cynics.

I’ll include a link to the podcast conversation I had with him as well. But I just want to remind you again that we’ve been in dark times before. It has been dark. We have experienced this level of inequity before, and he writes and hope for cynics that after the sort of Robert Baron Gilded Age, thank you HBO, but it was just a mess that in the intervening years we introduced a slate of progressive legislation. So he writes a chaotic and painful labor. The 20th century gave birth to a vibrant, progressive movement activist workers and civic leaders assembled into a vast array of new organizations. They built power through strikes, lobbying and public engagement and racked up staggering accomplishments. Here are just some of the policies passed between 1888 and 1920 women suffrage, the income tax, the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, federal Trade Commission and national forest and park system, child labor laws, the eight hour workday campaign, finance regulation and public kindergarten.

And then we obviously saw sweeping legislation after both world wars. And so I just want to offer, if we can see Trump as the instigator of chaos that puts us back into a cauldron of creativity. I think we’re going to see, we have to accept obviously as a baseline reality that our government has been gutted and will need to be renovated, which is of course ironic considering his fascination with renovation and gilding things with gold. But I think that in the coming years, we are going to see a tremendous amount of change beyond the rebuilding of these structures. I mean, I can’t imagine that we won’t finally fundamentally address healthcare, but we need anti-corruption laws, a severing of the pipeline between government and industry where people shuttle back and forth enriching themselves. We need term limits on Supreme Court Justices, a regulated tech industry campaign, finance reform, common sense gun laws, universal childcare, full rights over our own bodies, environmental regulations and reparations and appropriate tax code, which ensures that the uber wealthy pay more than their fair share.

And that corporate welfare ceases particularly to companies where there’s even a single employee reliant on snap. I think part of the process of what’s happening is a great education, and I count myself in this certainly of just exactly what sort of these so-called entitlement programs fund, and I’m sure you all know these statistics about the 42 million people who are reliant on snap, if 40% of them are children, 20% are elderly, 10% are disabled, and guess what? A vast majority, not obviously the children, but they have jobs. So I cited some reports, but as of 2020, nearly 15,000 Walmart employees needed snap. They’re being paid at below subsistence levels, 50% site food insecurity. Amazon, it’s like 23% need assistance, which is just disgusting. Jeff Bezos has $250 billion. So we need to repair all of those systems that make that level of equity possible. I don’t think any of us are voting for that.

We are voting for everyone having a chance to survive and ideally thrive and support their families. And when people get going on entitlements too. I just want to offer that beyond taking advantage of complicated legal tax codes, which is really the provenance of the wealthy, but the rest of us, I benefit from government entitlements. I was educated by way of a 5 29. My children have five 20 nines. I take advantage of government programs for sure, I think most of us do, and I’m grateful for that anyway. I guess my bigger meta point here is that holding what’s happening to a larger context, a larger spiritual context is incredibly prophylactic and protective. And you’re going to hear more about this actually on this week’s episode, which is with Dr. Lisa Miller who wrote The Awakened Brain, the Science of Spirituality, a book that has been a languishing on my shelf for years.

I was just found myself repelled by it, I think because I thought that something sacred to be would be reduced and in a fit of synchronicity to child psychiatrists in the span of three weeks we’re like, you must be best friends with Lisa Miller. I was like, no, I don’t know her. So anyway, so finally I was okay, I need to read this book and obviously I need to read it now. And it’s an incredible book and incredibly important scientific insight and research about spirituality, not religiosity, it doesn’t matter what you believe, being major prophylactic for mental health against depression, anxiety, et cetera. She cites, she’s done some incredible research and won so many grants, some of our most venerable grants, although it’s really hard, I think even for anyone to accept this as a scientific fact, we insist that there’s a binary there and that the two are not languages describing the same phenomena.

So that conversation is really fun, and I learned a lot from her that’s not heavily featured in the book, including about how psychologists psychiatrists really understand now that there are these three bridges of developmental depressions, one happening at 19 to 21 happening in midlife, one happening in the ascent to elderhood, and that these are sort of spiritual awakening moments. They’re not a chemical depression. They shouldn’t be pathologized as such, but often they’re these invitations to some deeper unknowing and they can really shake your worldview, sort of crack you up and expand you. Again, it goes to that idea that growth often comes through suffering, but I’m so grateful that I firmly believe that my spirituality is wildly protective, particularly in times like this. It’s ballast against what at times feels so chaotic and overwhelming and scary, and it’s also the way in which I can move forward searching for meaning and without getting swept away.

One of the things that Dr. Miller or Lisa talks about a lot is synchronicity and which is this Carl Jung concept that I’ve talked about and written about ad nauseum. Speaking of Satya and I are doing a workshop, you can find information on my substack included in the show notes at the end of the year. We’ve done it now for two years. This will be our third year about sort of consulting the etching together collectively and journaling and getting ready for the new year. It’s really fun. We’ll set you up so you don’t need to know how to use the etching to get a lot out of our time together, but we’ll be gathering for that. And the eing is really about synchronicity, as is any sort of ocular deck of any kind. And speaking of sort of signs and synchronicity, I wanted to share with you sort of a wild one.

I’m recording this on November 14th and my episode with Laura Lynne Jackson came out yesterday. For those of you who haven’t listened, it’s about her new book, guided Laura Lynne Jackson is an incredible intuitive psychic medium who I met now many years ago, shortly after my brother-in-law, Peter died, and Peter is obsessed with Laura and he in turn is sort of like a VVIP for her. Essentially, when she’s not channeling, she can shut herself down so that she is not picking up endless psychic material. But Peter has the ability to sort of gate crash. And this has happened to her many times when we didn’t really know each other, A couple of wild circumstances where Peter’s dad called into a radio show that Laura was on. She didn’t have any idea who he was. And Peter started flashing my photo to her and it ended up it was Peter’s dad, et cetera.

But I had to share this with you as a synchronicity sign. So yesterday when the episode came out, Laura’s book came out on Tuesday. My brother, who was Peter’s husband, texted me that Peter’s mom was at a hotel in London with her cousin having breakfast, and who was she seated next to? But Peter’s best friend from business school, they hadn’t seen each other. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’d ever actually met in person, but he recognized her and they happened to be at a hotel that Ben and Peter stayed at in 2016. So just a series of wild synchronicities and signs from Peter on the day when my episode with Laura Lynn Jackson came out. I just love this stuff and it gives an example of finding meaning in the universe and reminding me at least, okay, you might not understand. This might be way beyond your own conception or ability to process, but there is an underlying pattern force energy holding this together.

And yes, we don’t always get what we want. Maybe we’re getting what we need, and to be able to hold both of those things simultaneously is a really helpful way for moving forward. And speaking of intuition, synchronicity, and my favorite game in town, Satya, this was a surprise to me, but I shouldn’t be surprised, and I don’t know why I’m such a snob about this because I think obviously the DaVinci code was transformational in the culture for introducing people to the idea that Mary Magdalene was not the figure that she’s been sold to us over time. Her story, which I detail in on our best behavior, is significantly different and quite stunning and incredibly important to our conception and understanding both of women of the divine of the feminine in ourselves. And so Satya was like, you got to have you read the new Dan Brown book.

You’re going to freak out. It’s called The Secret of Secrets. And I had a work trip this week and I listened to it on Audible and I was riveted. I loved it. It is all about consciousness and ions and noetic studies. And what’s funny, I was like, I cannot believe that Dean Radden didn’t bring this up in our conversation. In the book, he’s mentioned in the book, and obviously he runs ions and is our lead noetic scientist, and we talked about Stargate, et cetera in our conversation. I’ll also link that one. But I realized when I went back to look that I had interviewed him, I had interviewed Dean a week before Dan Brown’s book came out, which is funny to me. But if you liked that conversation, if you like conversations about consciousness and you like Paige Turner thrillers, it is such a fun and fascinating book.

And it’s as stated in the audible, all the research that’s cited is real. It has wide ranging implications and the way that they describe it in the book and it does in life, but it’s essentially about what happens to us after we die. I’m trying not to give anything away, but one of my favorite small details from the beginning of the book, one of the main characters is a Harvard professor who focuses on religious symbolism and symbology. And this was shocking that the most commonly represented figure in terms of symbols, religious symbols in the world is not the cross, the crucifix, it’s the halo and the way that it shows up in the book as essentially a positing around is consciousness in the way that it was represented throughout time in art? Is this about people who are exalted and are sending out or are imminent with this sort of heightened perspective, these holy beings with this halo?

Or is it actually illustrating consciousness as a receiver and the halo as a receiver for all that we can’t see but is present? And I think that’s such a stunning and beautiful idea, and there’s so many details that are spooled in the book that explore it. So it was just so fun and it’s such a break as you can imagine, from the stuff that I normally read. I don’t get to read much fiction, but then I sort of go for the Booker Prize winner and I like to be punishing towards myself and then watch really dumb, dumb tv, hello real housewives of Salt Lake City. I didn’t know about these ladies until the people I work out with were like, how have you not ever seen this franchise? And so now I am deep in real housewives of Salt Lake City and The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown.

I highly, highly recommend listening and all of it. Laurel Lynn Jackson, Dean Raiden, their Friends, the Secret of Secrets, this archetypal play that we’re watching. I think what it begs of us beyond just being theatergoers watching it unfold, I think it obviously begs of us, what’s my role here? How am I participating in this? How am I feeding it? How am I helping to heal or resolve it? What part is mine? And also as part of it, how do I, and I really believe this is true and this is foundational to my next book as well, is that the more personal shadow work and collective shadow work that we can do, the more we can start to be present with what’s coming up that wants to be integrated, realized, resolved, the more our capacity or awareness expands. I think when we’re talking about being woke, that’s really what it’s about, this ability to calm or be present in the face of triggering and polarizing people and ideas and events, and to stay present and in curiosity rather than fear, and to expand the capacity to hold more and know more slash understand more.

And I think that that’s really what comes down to the development of our own individual intuition. You could think of it almost as an intellectual skill as well as sort of a woo woo skill, but it’s the ability to open up and process simultaneously. Both discern and Carissa would talk about it as a dual pedal of inspiration and discernment, taking information or inspiration in and discerning as we move forward. I think that’s also what keeps us safe is exercising both of those muscles, not just inspiration and intuition, not just, oh, this happened, therefore this is right, but what is this trying to tell me? And looking for both the light and the shadow in every experience and in every opportunity and in every person. I think that’s really what it’s calling us to do in that sort of dual pedal and to stay open, to stay grounded, to be present.

And of course, I mean, we’re at the very beginning of this Epstein stuff, although I know it’s been going on for decades as well, but in this first tranche that was released by the Epstein Estate, and I wasn’t surprised to see sort of one of the spiritual movements gurus in there. Not because I have access to any information referencing Deepak Chopra who’s in several, many emails talking about having a great time until 1:00 AM and hanging out with Woody Allen, and there’s some really not good stuff, and I do not know him. I’ve never interviewed him. I’ve never felt drawn to him. This is, again, it goes to the inspiration, discernment, dual pedaling, but also I think it’s important that people like that are in there because again, everything is not as it seems, both the good and the bad, and it’s really important to stay present, not cynical, but skeptical, and to maintain questioning and curiosity, and is this resonant and is this the right vibration for me?

And does this feel, and is there some part of me that’s hijacking this, that’s going along with this person because they’re peddling certainty to me or whatever it may be, or helping me justify my own dissonance. I think a lot about figures like that in the culture, the guru ification of our culture, which is dangerous when we again dismantle our own discernment and service to someone else and take them on as a teacher and become sort of their disciples in a way that I think can create a lot of grievous harm for ourselves and others. So I don’t know. I have many, many teachers, but I am a student of many and devoted to no single one, nor do I want to be anyone’s guru. There are different teachers for different times, but with every single person, and this is for me too, for anyone who’s listening to me, exercise your discernment always.

I think we all have to do that collectively and with each other. It is part of sort of taking accountability and keeping each other safe. So anywho, it’s been a wild year, right? I was just thinking about how this year started with the fires. This episode is coming out my birthday week, which is sort of my new year, which comes shortly before New Year, but I can’t believe how much has happened and how much is probably yet to come. And so I think building all of these muscles is a type of resilience, intuition, discernment, curiosity. What does it all mean? What is here for me to learn? How am I supposed to help metabolize and integrate whatever’s present without making it worse or creating more destabilization or fear? And what part is mine to play? That’s what I’ll be thinking about on my birthday. Just kidding. I’m sure it’ll be fun. I’m sure I’ll go to Hillstone’s with my kids and get some spinach dip and a hot fudge sundae and laugh and watch some real housewives. Don’t worry guys. But yeah, thanks for hanging. Thanks for listening. Again, if you’re not part of Substack, come join called Pulling the thread, elise luna.substack.com. I do some office hours workshops and work through some of this stuff real time. So if you’re not hanging out there, what are you waiting for? Alright, I’ll see you next time.

If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please sign up for my [email protected] or consider picking up copies of my book on our best behavior and the new workbook, choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. Thanks again, friends.