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Corruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous! · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We can fantasize that purity is any number of things.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The difficulty is that it's an illusion, particularly in the
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: realm of the human psyche, that we try to attain
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: purity by disavowing all kinds of realities inside of us.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And once we decide that the pure person never desires
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: sex or never desires money or the pure person always
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: does this and never does that, depends on splitting. And
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: as soon as we become overly excited about splitting off
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: everything that doesn't meet my fantasy of purity, then the
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: shadow becomes incredibly powerful. It takes enormous energy to suppress
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: the shadow, and then that can become institutionalized in as
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: much as the leader reassures us, your purity will be
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: protected and I too will go to any lengths to
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: make sure that that shadow is destroyed.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. This week,
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: we are going to wind our way into the topic
• 1:55
  Speaker 4: and reality of of corruption. Very often when we think
• 2:00
  Speaker 4: about corruption, we think of it as being out there.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: It's out there in public life or groups, but it's
• 2:11
  Speaker 4: somewhat embedded in a cultural context. But of course, as
• 2:16
  Speaker 4: you can well expect, there is internal corruption as well.
• 2:22
  Speaker 4: So there are social effects and there are mythological examples,
• 2:27
  Speaker 4: there's some research, and we will just dive in and
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: take you along with us, I hope. I want to start, though,
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: as we usually do with the etymology, which I really
• 2:42
  Speaker 4: liked for this one, that the com for the source
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: of corruption, com means together, and romper means to break
• 2:53
  Speaker 4: into pieces.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: To destroy.
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: And as I was saying, it's usually sort of a
• 3:00
  Speaker 4: social context, and it's used to describe moral decay or
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: bribery or fraud. So interpersonal, interrelational, social kinds of dynamics.
• 3:13
  Speaker 4: In essence, it's about dishonesty and fraud.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: And I love the etymology, the idea that you're breaking something,
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: you know, that something's getting broken, something that was that
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: was originally built or constructed or a whole naturally gets broken,
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: whether it's a kind of social contract that gets broken, perhaps,
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: or norms that get broken. So, see, the idea of
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: corruption as the breaking of something.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: And I think if we're looking at it culturally, it's
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: the breaking of trust. There's an abuse of entrusted power
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: for private gain and the private could be simply psychological
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: gain because it compensates for some discomfort inside so from
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: a meta level we're looking at the internal enabling conditions
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: that make abuse of power feel justified invisible or even
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: necessary so we're in that realm which has already been
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: said of this kind of cognitive moral distortion, rationalizing things,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: just taking someone's order, a kind of decay of feeling
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: and atrophy of conscience, that the feeling evaluation is somehow deadened.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: There's a kind of relational deformity, treating people as if
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: they're just functions or people are just obstacles or people
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: are just numbers. And there's, from our standpoint, an archetypal inflation,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: where people do inhuman things when they feel superhuman.
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: There's a well-known quote by a man who was named
• 4:57
  Speaker 4: John Dahlberg, a 19th century English historian, who later became
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: Lord Acton, and he's more popularly known by that. And
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: he's the author of the well-known quote that absolute power
• 5:11
  Speaker 4: corrupts absolutely. And that that's what happens, is we arrogate
• 5:17
  Speaker 4: power to ourselves so that what is, we believe, you know,
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  Speaker 4: to one's personal advantage takes precedence over what is, you know,
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: what the effect is on other people. More for me
• 5:33
  Speaker 4: and less for thee. And what Jung has to say
• 5:37
  Speaker 4: about this is that where love reigns, there is no
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: will to power, but where the will to power is paramount,
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: the other. So we've got a link here between corruption
• 5:55
  Speaker 4: and power.
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: And Deb, I want to pick up on that. And
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: I'm so glad you brought that quote in. I've always
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: heard the full quote. I don't know if this is
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: a bastardization of it or not, but that power corrupts
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it says something, you know,
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: exactly where you were going, that there is this relationship
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: between power and corruption. And I think we can understand
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: that psychologically. We can understand that relationship is having to
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: do with what Joseph mentioned, which is inflation. So that
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  Speaker 3: when we have power, we start to, I want to
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  Speaker 3: say we start to identify with an archetype and we
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: start to think of ourselves as something kind of more
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  Speaker 3: than human or we don't have to play by the
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  Speaker 3: ordinary human rules. And That is always dangerous. You know,
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  Speaker 3: the Romans thought of that as superbia and the Greeks
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  Speaker 3: thought of it as hubris. And that always meant that
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: you were really treading on pretty thin ice. And in fact,
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: when the Roman emperor was being crowned, he would ride
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: through the streets of Rome and there would be a
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  Speaker 3: slave whispering in his ear, remember you are mortal. And
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: that was meant to temper that identification with the archetype
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: of a kind of a sort of godlike power to
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: try to check that tendency toward corruption, which, as we know,
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: often didn't work.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: So inflation is, from our standpoint, is when unconscious content,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: which can be very powerful and often has an archetypal
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: dimension to it, begins to push into the ego, often
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  Speaker 1: below the threshold of awareness, tricking the ego into thinking
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  Speaker 1: that it is more powerful than it actually is, that
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  Speaker 1: it's entitled to more than its fair share, and on
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: and on. And depending on what's activated inside of us,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: it could be something small, let's say the The eternal
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: child is activated and fills us up. We might find
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: ourselves just crying out that people should just give us
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  Speaker 1: anything that we want. The people around us might roll
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: their eyes, maybe they tolerate it. But there are other
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: archetypal activations that suggest more frightening behaviors, which are normal
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: to the archetype, but problematic or even dangerous to oneself
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: or to the environment. So the inflation is a bridge
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: from kind of the ordinary compromise to a systemic kind
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: of corruption or deviation from its true purpose. And something
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  Speaker 1: that should actually be kept at a distance has now
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  Speaker 1: flushed into us, which gives us a false sense of
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: rightness and destiny and exceptionalism or necessity. That in hindsight,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: we'll often feel ashamed of that once Once the archetype
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: leaves and we collapse back down, often people are somewhat
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: horrified by the aftermath. And I used to see this
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: all the time, actually, both when I worked in the
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: psych hospital, particularly people would go into manic episodes, which
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: is a form of wild inflation. They would barely remember
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: things that they had said or done. And then afterwards,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: when the family would come and say, Do you realize
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: that you spent the entire college fund for me? What
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: did you do with it? And the person maybe went
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: to Vegas or gave it away under the influence of
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: these overwhelming psychological forces. And then sooner or later, we
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: can't sustain that. We become ordinary. and then we're kind
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: of frightened. So the inflated person becomes less conscious while
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: feeling more certain. Boy, that's a tricky thing. We also
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: see this when we're drunk. Most of us have had
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: at some point, even if it was just in college,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: you had too much to drink. Boy, When you're drunk,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: you're sure that person was flirting with you, and you're
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: sure you're the sexiest thing in the room. And you're
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: going to go and approach from that position only for
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: your friends to tell you the next day what you
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: said and did to your own horror.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: Liquid courage.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Liquid courage.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: So it goes back.
• 10:45
  Speaker 4: you know, to what you said at the beginning, the breaking,
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  Speaker 4: the destruction of trust.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 4: That, you know, that somebody is entrusted with oversight of
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  Speaker 4: a child's college funds and gets inflated and breaks the trust,
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: corrupting the relationship with, let's say, teenager, adult, child. And
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  Speaker 4: social trust is broken when we act inappropriately, you know,
• 11:17
  Speaker 4: under the influence of anything. And it's relationships that get broken.
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  Speaker 4: So I'm taking it to sort of the more macro world,
• 11:28
  Speaker 4: the world of politics and communities and societies, because that's
• 11:34
  Speaker 4: often where we look first when we're thinking about corruption
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  Speaker 4: is You know, the official whose name is suddenly in
• 11:43
  Speaker 4: the paper. The list is absolutely as long as your arm,
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: probably some number of arms. But it often takes a
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: group and a group name, you know, sort of an official,
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: an officially designated function. Some kind of group or governance position,
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  Speaker 4: a social group. to confer a legitimate kind of power
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  Speaker 4: upon a leader. And this man named Docker Keltner, who's
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley,
• 12:24
  Speaker 4: says that the paradox of power is that the skills
• 12:29
  Speaker 4: most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the
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  Speaker 4: very same skills that deteriorate. once a person has power.
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  Speaker 4: So we're back to Lord Acton's quote about power corrupting.
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  Speaker 4: And I just want to bring in a couple of
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  Speaker 4: interesting social research paradigms here. There's an evaluative or assessment
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  Speaker 4: tool that is called the social dominance orientation. And what
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: its results say is that Because, quote, it's a jungle
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  Speaker 4: out there, unquote, it's okay to seek power. The world
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: is competitive. The more there is for other people, the
• 13:16
  Speaker 4: less there is for me. You better get it while
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  Speaker 4: you can, as Janis Joplin sang. Or the way I
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  Speaker 4: think of it is, it's like an endless game of
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  Speaker 4: musical chairs. And you better fight for one of those chairs.
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  Speaker 4: The other instrument is called the right-wing authoritarianism assessment. And
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  Speaker 4: in that one, what they posit is that the world
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  Speaker 4: is perceived as dangerous. And therefore, you establish authorities require obedience.
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  Speaker 4: Without social control, because the world is dangerous, things could
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: really fall apart. And punishment is therefore in order. But
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  Speaker 4: I think that's interesting that life is competitive and or
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: life is dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: And of course, the difficulty is sometimes life is competitive
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  Speaker 1: and sometimes life is dangerous.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 1: So like you can find evidence of that. The question is,
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  Speaker 1: is the response disproportionate to the actual reality? It's dangerous
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  Speaker 1: to drive your car. But are we responding to that
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  Speaker 1: intelligently and with wisdom or are we responding in ways
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  Speaker 1: that are frightening.
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  Speaker 3: My guess is, this.
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  Speaker 4: Is just where I go based on these research studies,
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  Speaker 4: that if a person attains a position of power in
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  Speaker 4: a community group or some kind of governmental position, you know,
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: even a family, that if there is an underlying belief
• 14:49
  Speaker 4: that the world is either competitive or dangerous, that that
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  Speaker 4: power will then be exercised in ways that can be
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: perceived as corrupt, because those elements are not necessarily made conscious.
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  Speaker 1: So it seems to me it's not so much that
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  Speaker 1: someone is saying life can sometimes be dangerous, but that
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: life is always dangerous. So one has to split off
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: all kinds of information to make it only one thing,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: which then it requires one response. If life is always dangerous,
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: then we always need some kind of aggressive defender to
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: have any semblance of safety. It's often the complexification of
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: things that gives us room to consider many things. So
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: you're right. When fear is present or fear is stirred,
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: it narrows our capacity to attend to factors because we're
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: looking at the thing that we become convinced is the
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: danger to us. And then the solutions can become simplistic.
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: I want to amplify that with a fairy tale image.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: There's a Norwegian fairy tale called The Giant Who Had
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: No Heart in His Body. And I'm not going to
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: tell the whole tale, but, you know, a giant is
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: a pretty good image of a power complex. And this
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: particular giant in the tale is holding captive at least
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: one damsel in distress. Sometimes it's multiples, depending on the
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: version of the story. But the young man who comes
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: to rescue her can only rescue her if he can
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: find the giant's heart. And it turns out that there's
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: some trickery involved in discovering where the heart is. And
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: the heart is often in some kind of series of
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: nested containers. The heart is on an island, down a well,
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: inside a duck, in an egg, that kind of thing.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: And once the hero can kind of get hold of
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: the heart, then he can best the giant. And Deb,
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: it actually is a lovely counterpart to the Jung quote
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: that you read about the relationship between power and love.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: Because in order to kind of be in an out-of-control
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: power complex, one may have to split off one's feeling function.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: One may have to split off one's open-heartedness or ability
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: to love. And that is actually how this giant manages
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: to do it, and it's ultimately his vulnerability.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Also, I would like to say that the statement that
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Jung offers, which I think is not unpacked often enough,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: is when someone says that love is the shadow of
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: power and power is the shadow of love, it's also
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: saying that there is a secret way in which there
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: are two extremes of one spectrum of relatedness. And this
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: is why we sometimes see in certain relationships, one person
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: might exercise an enormous amount of power so that they
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: feel safe enough to experience love. So there can be
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: a kind of an antiodromia or an attempt to effect
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: an antiodromia. Sometimes people's love is so intense that it
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: flips into control because the loved object becomes so desperately needed.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: that the love then becomes a power. So it's not
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: that one is against the other, it's that one is
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: always dancing with the other in ways that are often
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: not obvious at all. But as we were saying, anything
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: to its extreme, when it forgets its opposite, becomes a
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: big problem.
• 18:33
  Speaker 4: Part of our discussion kind of takes me back to
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: my predilection for tracing developmental issues trajectory of how does
• 18:42
  Speaker 4: this get started? Where does it go? How does it grow?
• 18:45
  Speaker 4: And it seems the orientation toward power, and I really
• 18:51
  Speaker 4: like what you said, Joseph, of that they're connected. But
• 18:57
  Speaker 4: one could be like on a seesaw that one side
• 19:01
  Speaker 4: gets so heavily weighted, the other side is really not apparent.
• 19:06
  Speaker 4: But developmentally, it seems to have its roots in seeds
• 19:12
  Speaker 4: of resentment and discontent of not having a secure base,
• 19:19
  Speaker 4: a basic sense of real attachment and security, which then
• 19:26
  Speaker 4: turns into the need for recognition. And parents may value
• 19:31
  Speaker 4: a child who is, you know, bright or funny or
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: performs or has a talent or whatever it might be,
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: but The child learns that instead of what is really
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: craved from a parent or both parents, that what he
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: can have is recognition. This can grow into a habit,
• 19:55
  Speaker 4: a pattern, that a way to achieve the illusion of
• 20:00
  Speaker 4: happiness is through power, through performing, through attention, getting great grades,
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: whatever form it might take. And what happens is that
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: the existing insecurities are masked by lording it over other people,
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: seeking power in all kinds of sort of overt and
• 20:27
  Speaker 4: not so overt ways. So if you don't get love,
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: you can go for power instead. And then as adults
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: and in society and so on, it moves to being legitimized.
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: through normalizing. So you organize a group or a movement
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: that has legitimate values and purpose, you know, so people
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: may well believe. But then it becomes very insular. There's
• 20:59
  Speaker 4: the group of people who belong, and then there are
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: the outsiders. So that gets kind of rigid. There's an
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: us and there's a them. and increasing pressure for members
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: of the group to identify with the group and swear
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: fealty to the beliefs and values of the group. And
• 21:22
  Speaker 4: it exerts power, and this kind of leadership exerts a
• 21:27
  Speaker 4: pull on people. What studies have shown is that power
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: is highly contagious. Even when it becomes corrupt, people still
• 21:39
  Speaker 4: adhere to it because it becomes difficult and dangerous to
• 21:44
  Speaker 4: leave or to disagree. So if you have to have
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: one thing in excess, it masks a shadow of insecurity
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: and perhaps lacking skills and being deficient in attachment or
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: relationship and feeling truly deeply loved.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: So what I'd like to do for a moment is
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: just broaden and narrow, just looking at the word power.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: And one of the dangers is by ascribing only negative
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: qualities to the word power, it then makes people banish
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the word from their language, which means the power dynamics
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: then are under the surface because they don't have a
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: name and they can't be admitted to. So let's take
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: a moment to just think about power as its own
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: psychological and circumstantial reality. So power is the capacity to
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: effect outcomes in the world. So if we then say, well,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: all power is bad, we then would be saying, no
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: one should truly have the capacity to effect an outcome,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: which is not something any of us would agree to.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: it takes a certain amount of power to kind of
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: navigate with your school system to make sure your kid gets,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: let's say, the special education they might need, that we
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: have to, we simply have to exercise some amount of
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: energy if we have a desired outcome. So power is
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: that capacity to cause, to prevent, to shape events. It's
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: the power to engage behaviors and meanings that in the
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: face of resistance. So power in and of itself is neutral.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: How it's applied and in how much intensity it is
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: should be examined. But for anyone to think that having
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: power or exercising power is bad and they should never
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: do it would actually mean you probably could barely survive
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: in the environment And what often happens is people that
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: really decide that they shouldn't, couldn't, wouldn't become wildly submissive
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: and they seek alignment with people who are more dominant
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: because the power must live in someone else because I've
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: been convinced that any evidence that I have a relationship
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: even to appropriate power is infernal.
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: Or they exercise power in a kind of passive-aggressive way.
• 24:31
  Speaker 5: Exactly.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: So just to unpack it a bit more, power has
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: a kind of causal dimension to it, which is just
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: the ability to produce an effect. That's the most minimal definition,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: and physics uses it all the time in systems theory.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: So one force or an agent or a structure can
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: bring about a change in another. It's natural. It's universal.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: a certain amount of power is everywhere inside of everyone
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: who's listening to this. Now, power also can show up
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: in relational asymmetry, and our culture is spending a lot
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: of time talking about this, the ability of one actor
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: to secure compliance or deference from another. And so there's
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of watching, you know, should the boss date
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: an employee, there's an asymmetry of power, shouldn't happen, et cetera,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: et cetera. That's a sensitivity to that. It doesn't mean
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: no one should ever be a boss. It doesn't mean
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: no one should ever be an employee. It's just raising
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: consciousness to the fact that power is in relationship. Power
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: can show up in terms of control of resources. We
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: can't say that that's bad because if you've ever been
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: a mom who's looking at their refrigerator and you're yelling
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: at the kids, it's like, I just made that for dinner.
• 25:55
  Speaker 5: Leave it alone.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: We need to control some amount of resources so that
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: we can make certain things happen. Could that be oppressive? Absolutely.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: It's also normal. Control of resources. Control yourself. So you're
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: looking at how much money you make. Exercising some power
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: over how that is spent. The power to set agendas. Kids,
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: get in that car right now. We're going here at
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: 4 o'clock and I don't want to hear anything about it.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: That's not It's not demonic. It's actually part of setting
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: an agenda, making certain things happen. If it's discussable, thinkable,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: you know, agreed upon, that's fine. But sometimes you just
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: kind of say, it's my way or the highway, kids.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Don't make me pull this car over. That's a reality.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: And then there's internalized power. We all want the power
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: to shape a desire. to create a self-concept. We need
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: a sense of personal power so that we can even
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: set an expectation that we can attain anything. And when
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: people have made a decision that they're not even able,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: they're not even allowed to know that they could be
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: powerful enough to choose a new career because the word
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: power has been banished and it's wrong, creates a lot
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: of problems because it all goes underground. So there's power over,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: which we might call domination, the power to, which is
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: to effect something, the power with, which is kind of
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: a collective capacity, and the power within, which is about
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: a grounded internal authority. Any of those dynamics can become imbalanced.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Either there's too little or there's too much. But power
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: in and of itself is a fact and it's neutral,
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: much like electricity. So now I'm going to get off
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: my little lecturing soapbox and step away. But I just
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: think it's important because the word power has taken on
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: qualities that I think are a disservice to most of us.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: Well, and our relationship to power, right, just like on
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: a personal level, our own power. I mean, first of all,
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of people who come into
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: analysis who struggle with claiming their own power. And Ettinger
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: said something like most people who enter therapy need to
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: get more comfortable with the idea that they are a
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: center of personal power. And I do find that with
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: many of my analysands, that that winds up being the work,
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: is helping them kind of take more power. And, you know,
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: in a personal sense, not that not so much the
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: power over, but just kind of claiming their own power
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: and authority. But I think where this is really relevant
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: to our discussion about corruption is this idea about shadow.
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: Because when we can have a conscious relationship with power,
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: then we can maybe keep our eye on the shadow aspect,
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: which goes to Lord Acton's great quote, you know, that
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: the problem with power, as you said, Joseph, is not
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: power in of itself, but there is the effect that
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: it has on us. And I will say, as per
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: Lord Acton, this is universal. This is not that person
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: out there who gets corrupt when he has power. It's us.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: So I think we can say, where might we have
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: a tendency toward corruption? Where do we have so much
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: power that we sometimes take it for granted. Maybe we
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: have power over our kids, and that sometimes leads us
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: to not be thoughtful in something that we do, you know?
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, we can interrogate that within ourselves. And I
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: think that it's important to accept that we all have
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: a legitimate right to seek power. that power can increase
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: our effectiveness, that power, like you say, Joseph, is neutral,
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: and a certain kind of power in excess may lead
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: to corruption, that that is a universal human truth. And
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: I want to say that the framers of our Constitution
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: understood this. And the beautiful thing about our system of government,
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: it's very psychological, this notion of checks and balances. Checks
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: and balances are there because the framers of the Constitution
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: understood that we're all susceptible to corruption. We all have
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: a shadow. And we can address that not by aiming
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: for personal perfection, but by kind of creating systems that
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: force us to be reined in. on a kind of
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: collective level, that's the best answer I think we've come
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: up with so far as a species. Yeah.
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: So what we're going back to in this going back
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: and forth between our internal systems and dynamics and how
• 31:12
  Speaker 4: we use power without corrupting ourselves psychically and sort of
• 31:18
  Speaker 4: the external world and social power because we're social animals.
• 31:24
  Speaker 4: And so we live in hierarchies, you know, of whether
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: it's the mom telling the kids get in the car
• 31:31
  Speaker 4: this minute or else. But, you know, wolves have hierarchies,
• 31:37
  Speaker 4: apes have hierarchies. And so here we are from the
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: get-go embedded in a hierarchy. And what researchers have found
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: I want to cite this man named Ronald Riggio, who
• 31:51
  Speaker 4: writes about power. And he, in turn, cites the work
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: of a man named John Antonakis, with other researchers, published
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: in something called the Leadership Quarterly. And they arranged a game,
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: you know, how do people behave? So this game called
• 32:10
  Speaker 4: the dictator game, in which the leaders have autonomy, whatever
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: the leader says goes. And What they found is that
• 32:20
  Speaker 4: the number of followers and the amount of discretionary choices
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: predicted leader corruption. So there's something about the social contagion,
• 32:35
  Speaker 4: which we touched on earlier, that once you are the
• 32:40
  Speaker 4: leader of a band of I don't know how many people,
• 32:46
  Speaker 4: there's something intoxicating about it.
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: Well, you see this every time you break out your
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: version of Monopoly, don't you?
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: Or read about the Greek gods, you know, as Zeus
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: can hurl a thunderbolt whenever he pleases. The sense of
• 33:03
  Speaker 4: power as, you know, but I can. I do it
• 33:08
  Speaker 4: because I can.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, once you own Park Place, you just, you start
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: to feel really entitled to collect whatever it is, you know?
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: It's like, Come on, pay up.
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: That is actually such a great example because I don't think,
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: I know I've played Monopoly and I could see it
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: in others as well as myself. I was like, yeah,
• 33:29
  Speaker 4: you know, once I own Pacific and Park Place and Broadway,
• 33:34
  Speaker 4: I gotcha. So it does live in us and it
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: lives very strongly in social context. From families on up
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: to large organizations, autocratic governments, and quite a long list,
• 33:54
  Speaker 4: I'm sure.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: So we're breaking out from the central idea of the
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: ubiquitousness of power showing up everywhere to the specific concerns
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: of when does the feeling of power become exaggerated and why?
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: how does that change our perception of ourself and others,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: often to the end of justifying whatever is required in
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: order to continue to relate to this larger, possibly euphoric state?
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: So there's always, in the exaggeration of inequality, and there
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: are many exaggerations, something about our own human vulnerability or
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: the complexity of ourselves and the situations that we're in
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: has been overridden or made invisible to us. And that's
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: often the problem. One of the things that can really
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: evaporate is the other person's experience of our exercise of power.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: So for instance, something that in our social work training,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: you know, over and over again, is brought up is,
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: are we considering the clinician's power over their patient or
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: their client? And that needs to be observed because if
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: it slips out of consciousness, even the helper can be
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: sure that you should do these six things and exert
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: a lot of tension because we're certain that this is
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: good for the other person. Now, one of the wise
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: admonitions is be suspicious of certainty. That certainty is the
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: beginning of something decomplexifying the actual situation. And when inflation
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: gets really hot inside of us, then anything that challenges
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: the certainty becomes a problem. And then we want to
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: control the media, control the message. I don't think this
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: person should work in my office because they seem to
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: be interfering with my certainty.
• 36:24
  Speaker 4: And I think, you know, there are some sort of
• 36:27
  Speaker 4: brain studies that really reinforce just exactly what you're saying
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: is the whole dynamic here is one thing leads to another,
• 36:36
  Speaker 4: leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. And
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: That the part of the brain that propels us toward goals,
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: that wants things and seeks things in ways that you
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: delineated that are perfectly healthy. You know, I want to
• 36:53
  Speaker 4: run a 5K race, whatever it might be. But as
• 36:57
  Speaker 4: it becomes socially embedded with authority and power in incremental
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: unnoticed ways, that part that wants and seeks is never satisfied.
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: It always wants more.
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: You know, we can relate this to cravings and addiction.
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: That part is very powerful, and it's supposed to be
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: talking in dialogue with the frontal cortex, a part of
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: the brain. I always love these words here, dorsal anterior
• 37:29
  Speaker 4: cingulate cortex, that can say, no, no, no, wait a minute.
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: Let's think about that. What are the likely consequences or
• 37:39
  Speaker 4: that calls us to reflect and weigh things in a
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: more objective way, it gets overridden because that certainty that
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: comes along and grows and grows as people get promoted
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: up the ladder or elected to higher office or whatever
• 37:57
  Speaker 4: it might be, gets more and more reinforced just by
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: the context that it's in.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: And one of the considerations I think is, is certainty
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: and power purely something that is bestowed by the social environment.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: Because in that formularies, as people get promoted or they
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: get elected, that then this illness propagates. And I wonder
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: about that, because the inflation is actually only happening in
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: the individual. It is an intra-psychic event. It might be
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: supported by the system. And I think that we can
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: find ourselves where there's a little bit of inflation. It
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: becomes evidenced. The system rewards us for being overly certain,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: which is in a way relieving other people of their anxiety.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: And it's true, corruption does thrive in ever-growing certainty because
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: the doubt, remorse, and even self-reflection feels like treason against everyone.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: the new grandiose identity. So that's the thing. It always
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: comes back to what's going on in the inner government, actually.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: It's the inner organization where all these machinations are going on.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: So even a thought that I might have made a mistake,
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: the thought in myself is a treason against my certainty
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: and has to be banished and suppressed.
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: It's complicated, but I think that the interactive social dynamics
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: of a group organization play a really big role. Maybe
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: You know, the inner world can go there without a
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: lot of external world, without a lot of reinforcement. But
• 39:53
  Speaker 4: for corruption to really wreak havoc, I put a lot
• 39:58
  Speaker 4: of weight on interactional social dynamics because that's when people
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: are really deeply affected. So I think it's a both and,
• 40:12
  Speaker 4: internal world and external world.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: It's a dance, yeah.
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: I want to take this up a level into a
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: different register, this idea of corruption, because it has a
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: religious and a spiritual and a kind of archetypal and
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: symbolic resonance that might enlarge our conversation. And specifically, Jung
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: spoke about that which was corruptible and incorruptible in the
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: context of alchemy. that I hope we can get to
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: for a minute, but I just wanted to bring in
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: some mythology. In Norse mythology, the world is created when
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: there's a kind of exchange between fire and ice. And
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: the ice is the icy rivers of Olivagar. And a
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: part of the world of ice is a substance that's
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: called eiter. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. But it's
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: basically a poison. And the Aitor is there right from
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: the beginning, and it's part of what makes possible life.
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: But it also is understood that because Aitor is present,
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: that the world will end in what is called in
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: Norse mythology Ragnarok. So the idea is that existence is
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: sort of corrupted or corruptible or contains within it, maybe
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: more precisely, the seeds of its ultimate corruption right from
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: its inception. And I think that that's an idea that's also,
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: we find that in Christianity, we find that in different
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: religious systems, and there is a particular take on that
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: in alchemy. So the alchemists spent a lot of time
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: talking about what was corruptible, and they were seeking that
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: which was incorruptible. And one version of that is the lapis,
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: and another could be considered to be gold. Gold was
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: considered an incorruptible metal because if you dig up a
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: gold brooch that's 3,000 years old, it's shiny and golden.
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: It hasn't tarnished, it hasn't rusted. And of course, you know,
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: the alchemists were playing around with chemical substances in their labs,
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: And they could see that some substances were easily changed
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: and transmuted when subjected to different processes. And so they
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: could be easily corrupted. And so what is it psychospiritually
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: in us that is incorruptible?
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: It does bring up something that I've been thinking about
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: is the archetype of purity and the loss of purity.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: What is pure? And how do we respond to that?
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: And the idea of purity collects an enormous amount of
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: power in all kinds of different systems. Once the religion
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: started thinking that virginity was pure and sexuality was contaminating,
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: then we wind up trying to convince our kids that
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: they must be pure, so please put this ring on
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: and promise you won't have sex until you are married,
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: whatever age that occurs. So there's a fantasy that purity
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: means protection from sexuality, and an enormous amount of energy
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: goes into that. We can fantasize that purity is any
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: number of things, but I think what the difficulty is
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: is that it's an illusion, particularly in the realm of
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: the human psyche, that we try to to attain purity
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: by disavowing all kinds of realities inside of us. And
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: once we decide that the pure person never desires sex
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: or never desires money or the pure person always does
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: this and never does that, then purity depends on splitting.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: And as soon as we become overly excited about splitting
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: off everything that doesn't meet my fantasy of purity, then
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: the shadow becomes incredibly powerful. It takes enormous energy to
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: suppress the shadow, and then that can become institutionalized in
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: as much as the leader reassures us, your purity will
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: be protected, and I too will go to any lengths
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: to make sure that that shadow is destroyed. Look, it's
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: over there. Go after them. Look, it's over here. We've
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: tightened up these laws lest those people misbehave and contaminate
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: our purity and on and on and on. So I
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: think part of the problem is even the fantasy of purity.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: If we really gave up that false goal, we'd probably
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: stay connected to our own complexity. We'd acknowledge that in
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: other people and we'd become suspicious of people that are
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: making promises that are not psychologically possible or even culturally
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: hygienic in that way. But in the world of science,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: it might be possible to have a pure substance, a
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: water that has no contaminants. It's only H2O. There's nothing
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: else in it. So if we distill it and we
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: do this and that and the contaminants, mercury is the
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: substance that the alchemists were fascinated by because, it could
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: temporarily dissolve gold and other elements. And then when you
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: boiled it, it went up through a cooling coil and
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: dripped into the container, and it was once again perfectly pure.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: So it could act as an agent of dissolution, but
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: in and of itself, it's never changed. So we are
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: kind of fascinated, and there are actual very real chemical
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: values to these discoveries. Can a human being ever be that?
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: I think not.
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: I think, you know, that goes back to my earlier point.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: We are all corruptible. I think Jung and the alchemists
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: would say that there may be some incorruptible essence within us,
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: or at least we have some access to an incorruptible
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: transpersonal value. But that it might just be that corruptibility
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: is part of our human nature and that we will
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: ever need to struggle with that and find some way
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: to contain it or bring it into consciousness.
• 47:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that may sounds like the place we
• 47:12
  Speaker 4: have wended our way to and have to settle into
• 47:17
  Speaker 4: with humility.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: We are all corruptible.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: If we think about the movement in the myth of
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: the Garden of Eden, some might say that Adam and
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Eve had to corrupt their relationship to the self in
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: order for humanity to develop consciousness, that the God of
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: the Garden of Eden seems to have been the God
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: of pure instinct. And there may be a great bliss
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: in never having to make a decision, that we see
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: the worm and something inside of us says to eat it,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: or a the weather changes and something inside of us
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: commands us to move to another area of the globe,
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: to fly down to Mexico if we're a butterfly, and
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: that this congruence with the god of instincts may actually
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: be a remarkably non-neurotic relationship, Freud's initial fantasy perhaps, and
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: in order for us to develop discernment, consciousness, ethics, art,
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: all the all the realities of human consciousness, we had
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: to contaminate our relationship to purely instinctive impulses and introduce.
• 48:33
  Speaker 5: A layer of thinking, a layer of.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: Consideration that can be used in any number of ways.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: And what I would suggest is a layer of power,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: which is that ability to make something happen in accordance
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: with with the ego's idea of what it wants to
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: bring forward. And the great endeavor of human beings is
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: to actually become masterful at that so it doesn't turn
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: into a disaster.
• 49:03
  Speaker 6: Today's dreamer is a 39-year-old male who is an author.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: And he titles his dream Cloud Bow. And here's the dream.
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: I live on a little hidden lake that is surrounded
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: by a forest, and in its center there is a
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: small island. It was this lake that I was looking
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: out upon from where I stood in my dream. The
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: sky above was both stormy and brilliant. and the thought
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: occurred to me that this is spelling rainbow weather, and
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: I absolutely cherish a good rainbow moment. I went outside
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: to the south of my house and stood gazing out
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: at the lake that seemed in my dream to be
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: the size not of a small lake, but of a
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: vast ocean. It was draped in numinous mist, and the
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: mist seemed to cloak numerous unexplored islands and secret inlets.
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: Untold adventures lay hidden in this body of water, and
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: above the sky was becoming all the more dramatic in
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: its symphony of storm cloud and opalescent light. I heard
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: voices then, neighbors chatting beside the lake. I didn't want
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: this moment to be interrupted by others, so I hid
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: amidst the towering bean stalks that had sprouted up near
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: where I stood beside the house. But as the weather
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: continued to transform, I realized I would miss my rainbow
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: moment if I didn't emerge and have an exchange with
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: my neighbors. So I decided to walk out and join
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: them near the lone dock that in my dream was
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: collapsing into the gentle lake water. When I did join
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: my two neighbors, the conversation was fine, convivial, and not
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: inappropriate for the miraculous happenings in the sky. Reverently, the
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: three of us watched the sky as a colossal arc
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: made of cloud, and not rainbow, formed in the west.
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: I walked out upon the sunken dock without fear that
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: it was collapsing into the lake and gazed upon the
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: hidden immensities woven through the mist below this bow of cloud,
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: waiting to see if it would begin to grow prismatic
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: and refract light. Then I awoke. For context, the dreamer says,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: I'm about to turn 40 years old and also about
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: to have two years of solid sobriety, God willing, for
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: the first time in my adult life. I'm also about
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: to embark on a solo journey to the mountains of
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: Japan to make a kind of pilgrimage to honor this
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: next phase of my life. I am in a tumultuous
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: relationship with my girlfriend, who very much wanted to travel
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: with me, but decided to make this journey by myself,
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: feeling that I need a solitary adventure with much time
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: to walk and be contemplative in a land unknown to me.
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: My girlfriend is very unhappy with this decision. I've also
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: decided to leave my day job as a waiter to
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: commit fully to my work as a poet and writer
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: and director of a literary arts non-profit. He writes his
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: main feelings in the dream were awe, excitement, anxiety, surrender,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: and anticipation. And he adds a bit more. I'd recently
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: discovered your wonderful podcast and had just listened to the
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: Jack and the Beanstalk episode. Beanstalks to me are links
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: between the visible and invisible worlds, as are rainbows. Rainbows
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: for me represent faith, covenants, nature's grace, and faith in
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: a higher power. I've always said that getting to live
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: where I do feels like living in a myth. Well,
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: I can see in the way that he recorded his
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: dream that he does have a poetic sensibility.
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: This is a complex dream, I think. I had a
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: sort of emotional reaction to it that was like a
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: little bit of maybe wariness, I think. There's so much
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: that's here that's really beautiful and positive. You know, the
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: the untold adventures that seem to be hidden in the mist.
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: Although I guess we don't know they're there. The ego
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: thinks they're there. But then there are these towering beanstalks,
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: which of course, you know, I mean, I love Jack
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: and the Beanstalk. And that, you know, beanstalks don't actually
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: really tower on their own. They, you know, they run
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: up a pole, basically, if you let them. But otherwise,
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: you know, it's not like it is in the fairy tale.
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: So it seems to be a clear reference to the
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: fairy tale. And You know, Jack has a kind of innocent,
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: youthful hubris where he thinks that these five magic beans
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: are a great deal. And it turns out they are.
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: But I, you know, okay, here's, I'm thinking while I'm talking.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: Jack and the Beanstalk is, that is a dynamic that
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: is appropriate to the first half of life. And I
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: don't know that you ought to be investing in magic
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: beans when you're about to turn 40. I mean, I'm
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: not sure about that. I'm a little tentative. But, you know,
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you the image that made me go, hmm,
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: was the sinking dock. I didn't like that.
• 54:55
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 54:57
  Speaker 4: I seized upon the contrast between sort of the wonderfulness
• 55:03
  Speaker 4: of the center of the island, this brilliant stormy sky.
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: the rainbow is coming, beanstalks, etc. It's all very sort
• 55:14
  Speaker 4: of magical. And then he said he had to go
• 55:18
  Speaker 4: out and have an exchange with his neighbors. So I
• 55:21
  Speaker 4: decided to walk out and join them near the lone
• 55:24
  Speaker 4: dock that in my dream was collapsing into the gentle
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: lake water. And he chats with the neighbors, sees this
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: big cloud arc like a rainbow, but out of clouds.
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: And then he says, I walked out on the sunken
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: dock without fear that it was collapsing into the lake
• 55:48
  Speaker 4: and gazed upon the hidden immensities roving through the mist
• 55:52
  Speaker 4: below this bow of cloud, waiting to see if it
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: would begin to grow prismatic and refract light. So maybe
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: it would act somewhat like a rainbow. But a dock
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: is not supposed to be underwater. That is not its function.
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: You know, and we often talk about forgive me here,
• 56:09
  Speaker 4: in our book, Dreamwise, about using explanation to understand a
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: particular symbol or event in a dream.
• 56:23
  Speaker 3: What is it?
• 56:24
  Speaker 4: Well, what is a dock? It is something that extends
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: out over the water so that people can walk out
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: on something dry and tie their boats and so on
• 56:37
  Speaker 4: to it. So I was, I really paid attention to
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: the fact that it was sunken. And then again, everything
• 56:47
  Speaker 4: is really marvelous, that there are hidden immensities. So I'm
• 56:52
  Speaker 4: kind of wondering if there is, you know, kind of
• 56:55
  Speaker 4: two polarities here. One that is very magical, mystical. And
• 57:02
  Speaker 4: then the other that is, in the first place, more
• 57:04
  Speaker 4: ordinary of chatting with the neighbors. And then something that's
• 57:10
  Speaker 4: just really wrong, which is a sunken dock that doesn't
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: arouse any kind of questioning of like, oh, you know,
• 57:17
  Speaker 4: this is weird.
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: And maybe I should be careful. Exactly.
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: Well, because I live on the water and I have
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: a 200-foot dock in the back of my house, I
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: have to say that. The dock that is failing is
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: not dangerous, unlike being on a suspension bridge that's failing.
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: It's not life-threatening. You know, he's walked maybe, you know, whatever,
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: several dozen feet from the shore. If he slides into
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: the water, he can probably walk back to the shore.
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: It's not dangerous. And it's collapsing into gentle water, which
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: I think is something more about dissolution, not catastrophe.
• 57:57
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: And there is an evaluation like, well, it's mushy. When
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: I first moved into this house, the dock had been
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: ruined by a hurricane. It was very mushy and I
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: had to have it rebuilt. I get it. It's losing
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: its utility in as much as often the dock allows
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: access to deeper water. You have water from here, but
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: if you want to have a boat or something else,
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: you kind of need a way to moor it further away.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: So the dock is a way of getting further into
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: the water without getting wet. Now that's an interesting thing.
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: It may have something to do with just being objective.
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: As analysts, we kind of want to go deeper into
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: the water, but we can't get saturated by every information
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: that our clients give or every dream. We kind of
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: depend on internal docs so we can observe and not
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: be compromised. But for him, you know, there's something that's
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: probably not going to last very long unless he makes
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: a decision because docks are ego structures. Maybe he wants it.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Maybe he doesn't. Some of my neighbor's docks here in
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: North Carolina were destroyed by hurricanes and they just they're
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: just not going to rebuild them. They're just going to
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: let them fall into dissolution. So, yes, it's a compromised structure.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: It's not dangerous. I have to say that the lack
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: of fear suggests that there's an ability to kind of
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: take a step into the water not too far have
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: an experience it seems somewhat meaningful I think the more
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: important transition relative to his context has to do with
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: what we were saying about purity earlier in the podcast
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: there is an imagining that there is a transcendent purity
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: that one can only experience alone yeah And in the dream,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: the question is, is he going to just hide so
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: that he can have a solitary experience, but the hiding
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: actually is interfering with his ability to see the things
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: he wants to see. And so he has to take
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: the experiment in the dream of being related to the
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: neighbors to discover it didn't ruin the experience and maybe
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: could have added something. which goes to the decision of
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: the conflict with the girlfriend is, will she corrupt my
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: experience by virtue of another voice being with me? The
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: dream is suggesting, maybe not. Maybe another voice, a companion
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: in observing the numinous, could be at the very least okay.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: If not, maybe add something else. There's also another correction
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: in the dream where The dreamer has such a strong
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: expectation of what the psyche will provide. It's going to
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: be a rainbow.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: And he discovers that it is numinous, and it surprised him.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: It's something other than what he anticipated, which in a
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: sense is something that is native to the fact of numinosity.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: If it is the thing you expected, then it becomes
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: the ordinary. Oh, those old, you know, rainbows, blah, blah, blah. Mm-hmm.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: You know, Joseph, I really appreciate your kind of corrective
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: about the hit that Deb and I had about the dock.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: You're right. It's not a catastrophe. I mean, I think
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: depending on how far out it goes and how much
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: it's rotting, you know, there might be, I might assess
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: personally that there would be a little more danger there.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: But you're right. It's probably not life or death. And
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: that is important, I think, in dreams. And I appreciate
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: you taking us there. But I do want to say there,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: I think that the little whiff I get in this
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: dream is there's a little bit of kind of grandiosity,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: which I think you touch upon, like that he's going
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: to know what the sky is going to deliver and
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: that what is hidden behind the mist must be this
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: wonderful thing and that he has access to the beanstalks.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: And like, I think that a little bit of grandiosity
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: is kind of what gets us out of bed every morning.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: And any valuable thing that we ever, ever do, we
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: do because we have a little bit of grandiosity. If
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: I say, you know, oh, gosh, like, I don't know,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: the three of us, let's start a podcast. I mean, like, whatever,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: you know, that was, we had a little healthy dose
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: of grandiosity to start that. And, you know, and everything valuable,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: I think, starts with a little bit of conviction that
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: we might have something special to offer. So I don't
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: think it's all bad. But the other thing that comes
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: up for me is this image of a cloud bow.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: Because in my mind, it's this kind of like a
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: structured cloud. And when I think of sort of a
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: cloud with structure, I think of a cyclone. It's almost
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: like a cyclonic sort of twisted rope of cloud, although
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: he didn't describe it like that. That's what my psyche provided.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: That's just in the shape of a bow. And it
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: might start refracting light and make these beautiful images, or
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: it could become dangerous. I mean, that's a novel weather phenomenon.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: How do you know what's going to happen? That sense
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: of wariness is somehow still there for me.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it is for me too. And I agree that,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 4: you know, It's not the dock. The sunken dock is
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 4: not catastrophic. On the other hand, it's not functional. It's
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 4: not functioning as a dock. And if we take your analysis,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 4: and I do, that a dock is an ego structure
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: built out into an ocean or water. So it's a
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 4: wonderful image of the relationship between ego or consciousness and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 4: the unconscious. It's a little worrisome that the dock is underwater.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 4: So I would be curious about that. You know, I'm
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 4: also curious, like, oh my goodness, that is quite a pilgrimage,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 4: having to go all the way to Japan to mark
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: the two-year anniversary of his sobriety.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: That's quite a fur piece.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: So I think we're, you know, teasing out this sort
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 4: of part that gets a little inflated, a little big,
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: a little grandiose. and the parts that are ordinary, chatting
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: with the neighbors, having a dock that's above the water,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: and maybe a mountain trip that's a little closer to home.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: I do want to say I think there's a lot
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: of good stuff here.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean? Like, the beanstalks are good,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: and the sense of numinosity is good. And I guess
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 3: I wish there were a sturdier dock. You know?
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 5: As would I.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: But if I step way back, there's the visible ordinary
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: world of the neighbors and social exchange, the familiar shoreline,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: the girlfriend, waiting tables. And there's the invisible, numinous lake
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: as the ocean, the mist, the inlets, all the potential
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: that's inferred and the way we project things onto clouds
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: and the miracle of rainbows. And that's all big and numinous.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: And then there's a couple of connecting structures. One is horizontal.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: Let's walk out into the water horizontally. One is vertical.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: These infinite beanstalks going up into the sky, and those
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: are bridges. So visible, invisible, and connecting structures. And what
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: shall I do about that? And he chooses. There's a
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: kind of economy in the dream. It's like, oh, I
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: really want to get a glimpse of this. Oh, I've
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: got to give up hiding. I can't be schizoid. I
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: can't just be in a box. Oh, damn it.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 5: Hello, neighbors. How are you doing?
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: And, you know, that to me, that's like the climax
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: of the dream. It's tension, tension, tension. What am I
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: going to do?
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: And then he decides to have the ordinary exchange with
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: the neighbors.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: Exactly. I think what obscures the dream subtly, and I
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: say this with all goodwill as an aspiring pseudo-poet of
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: my own, is that the telling of the dream is
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: so enhanced by heightened language, which is always difficult when
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: we're trying to describe an artifact of a dream. The
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: clouds were this way, they were gray, they arced in
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: this way, it was in this distance. And then we
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: want to layer heightened and poetic sentiments. over that so
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: as a trait it is totally reasonable but when we
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: are trying to convince ourselves to orient to something we
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: will sometimes self-narrate enhancements upon that thing as a way
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: of trying to stay connected he's had two years of
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: sobriety I don't know how that was achieved, but let's
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: just say it's in a 12-step program. That the higher
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: power needs to accumulate a lot of enhanced language because
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: you're putting your hands into it and it's supposed to
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: make you well. And restoring the ego self-access is in
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: fact the primary task of the 12-step program of one
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: who's working it. turning oneself over to the self because
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: the ego has become a problem. The ego that built
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: the dock is a problem. The divine is the solution.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: The other thing that I think is we're all vulnerable
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: to is our idealization of the transcendent prior to encountering it.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: So I'm often tempered by a Zen saying, Aphorism. Before enlightenment,
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: the laundry. After enlightenment, the laundry.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 5: It's like the clouds and the rainbows and this paranormal
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 5: swirling and the duck may need to be replaced and
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 5: the neighbors are talking about, you know, their kids or
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 5: the dogs or something.
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: That it's that tension between the exultant and taking a
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: shower in the morning and discovering that you have an
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: infection in your toe the tension between those things and
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: one of the ways that we try to stay motivated
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: is to elevate the self-narration of something which I don't
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: want to take away from this person, as well as
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: him wanting us to experience him as a burgeoning poet
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: as he writes his dream and offers it to us.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: So I appreciate and like this fellow. I think he's
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: a storyteller. He's got a vision. It's really heightened. He's
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: a poet. He's going to really experiment with this numinous
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: and particularly religious language. in this telling and is on
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: a search. Hopefully, I hope he takes the search because
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: there's the fantasy of traversing the mountains of Japan and
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: then there's the reality of hiking up very difficult terrains
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: in very inglorious circumstances. And often in Eastern mysticism, the enlightenments.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 5: Are Natural.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: My friends who, who spend years, decades in Zen work
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: and they talk about enlightenment. So you're working at suspending
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: the ego, suspending the ego, suspending the ego, and suddenly
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: you behold the tree without the lens of everything between
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: you and the tree. And there's a sense of the
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: glory of the moment, which then instantly disappears.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 5: Hmm.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: So in many ways, the Eastern approach to enlightenment doesn't
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: involve angels and movie scores and rainbows. It's between you
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: and the mushroom.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 3: It's kind of ordinary, yeah.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: There's an ordinariness to the beauty and that the beauty
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: is already present. It doesn't require enhancement, but it might
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: require figuring out how to clean off the lens so
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: that for just a moment, There's a vision and then
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: it's gone, much like a rainbow.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great. Thanks for listening. To
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: submit a dream, suggest an episode topic, or join our
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: mailing list, visit our website, thisunionlife.com. If you enjoyed this episode,
• 1:11:37
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• 1:11:55
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