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I don’t know that I’m go ahead, yeah, moving forward. I don’t know that I’m gonna ever do death as a standalone topic anymore. Because really, what the through line for me is this concept of Tantra, which, you know, gets diluted and distorted and confusing. And you know, there’s 1000 names and 10,000 expressions of it, but for me, you know, in a word, in a sentence and a phrase, it is the art of living, right? And you get better at The Art of Living when you look at the art of dying. And so these are, like, you know, interwoven DNA strands in in my work and in my life. And so I had been keeping these two topics really separate in my life, because I thought, oh, you know, people are going to hear Tantra and think sex. And now I’m like, I don’t care.

Like, it is, it is life force, you know. And so, you know, these are the, the two halves of the Yin Yang, you know. And they are the merged soul mates. So that’s sort of how I in my heart, how I hold it, tantra, uh, is such a great jumping off point, because it want for at least from my kind of angle, it, for one immediately gets us into the realm of paradox, because my understanding of Tantra is, on the one hand, my understanding of Tantra is that it’s a, it was a kind of evolution. Of some of these eastern messages, like, you know, the the Bucha went from eating a grain of rice today to having figured this thing out, having figured out some kind of allowing and trust and acceptance and some kind of flow, some kind of embodiment of all of it, taking all of that in and without judgment, just saying,

Well, this is life happening. Something’s going on here. And he’s sitting there eating a bowl of porridge or whatever, and his, his other, his, the other, you know, gurus come to him and are like, Hey, what the heck are you doing? You supposed to be eating one grain of rice a day. And he’s like, No, full stop, you don’t, you don’t. You don’t get it right. And so we’re we, we’re playing into this. It’s kind of a funny thing to say, but so Gordon White is one of my, one of my favorite thinkers in terms of animism and things like this. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he has, he puts Platonism, okay? He puts this kind of mind, this kind of, this kind of dualistic mentality, specifically in the Platonic context, in this way. And I love to, I love this.

I love to start conversations like this. I love this idea of Tantra. So he says that Platonism can be summarized by saying, matter, bad, spirit, good. And to the extent to which there’s this tantric move, which is kind of like an evolution, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, you know, you’ve got Advaita Vedanta and all these other things in there, but we commit this fallacy, both in our organized religion, and very, very, very much. So this is something I’m really passionate about very much. So in the kind of cobbled together New Age spirituality, that is that a lot of people have kind of glommed onto as a solution to something without this tantric component, without without an ear and an eye to the divinity of absolutely everything, full full stop.

So the Tantra, my understanding of Tantra is that it is the divination of the world through our perception, without any effort on our part. And this is very much, this is very much in line with the message that I find myself talking about. I don’t call it Tantra, but my understanding of Tantra is totally in line, in line with that so is you talk about tantra being the art of living. And when I, when I think of Tantra, I think of this kind of the the spiritualization of matter and the material.

Realization of spirit and that kind of interplay there is not actually something that asks anything of us. It’s not a it’s not a behavior, it’s not a performance. It’s not something that we are we’re not enjoying to like be in the world in any particular way other than the way in which we find ourselves, in the moment in which we find ourselves. And that is a turn, yeah. What do you what do you think? Lee,

you know, one of the things, one of the many, many things I love about tantra is that it’s, you know, it’s, it’s always, it’s not there. It’s almost, there’s almost. It’s an impossibility to dogmatize it, it right? And like, when people say, like, this is the definition of Tantra, I think of tantra being like, yes. Exact opposite. This is the definition of Tantra, yes. You know Tantra in a way. And I love that, yes. And I think that the essence, or one of the seed crystals of the thing you were talking about is called, in Tantra, often the sacred marriage, you know, this idea that we are marrying opposites, you know, and that and and the one of the core of those that we have separated for so long, culturally and through religious abuse, In a way, is the separation between spirit and matter.

And many systems, many traditions, are bringing those back together at this time. But from my perspective, how I read things, tantra has been doing that for eons, right? And it never really, you know, it never fell into the separation of spirit and matter. Because, how could you separate Shakti and Shiva? How could you, how could you separate in breath and out breath? How could you separate life and death, living and dying? There is no separating it. It’s, it’s much like the DAO in that way, you know, or then in that way, it’s, it’s looking at the principles of the universe and and making sense of them in ways that are artful.

You know. I think another definition of tantra that I love is it’s a book of questions, because the questions are always changing, and yet they’re all real, true, cosmic oriented questions are mystical. We’re always in mystical inquiry, and it’s the target is always moving. What What fun would life be if it wasn’t always moving, you know, if we we somehow could figure it out, we wouldn’t be enchanted.

The definition of Tantra. You said that yes, that’s the and Yes, that too, and yes, that too. So yes, there’s, there’s, there’s this radical permittance and accept and sort of like this self assimilation of all perspectives. And that’s the thing that that what I think we we both mean by by Tantra. I think one of the things that it’s doing is it’s widening, it’s it’s doing what I call zooming out sufficiently so as to render all perspectives as both, kind of like holistically inclusive of of of everything that could ever possibly be said.

And one of the things that I take, not that I take anything seriously, but I find that often when we ask these, when we ask questions of ourselves or of life, or of science or philosophy or each other, or anything like that, we engage in what we call narrow focus, what Les feuci calls, you know, narrow focus on the object of inquiry. And we, we sort of, we apply this linearly oriented way of seeing to the question and to the answer.

And think that we essentially like try and make science out of everyday things, right? And you said that, you said that it’s you. That the that the perspectives that we come up with are artful. I found that absolutely fascinating. And also there’s a paradox there too. You said that there are artful answers to the most important questions, or something like that, and there’s a lot there. There’s a lot there early.

But what I love is that we’re you and I are absolutely going to be just simply doing the only thing that we could ever possibly do in language, which is to dance around you, said the DAO around whatever it is that’s could ever possibly be going on here, this singular thing, the whole thing that you got you, and I think most deeply connected right from the get go is the concept of an immovable center. So you’ve got right out the gate, you’ve got this paradox of the radical inclusiveness of all possible perspectives.

So there’s this subjectivity and inter subjectivity to our individual ways of languaging, what’s going on here and at the same time, tantra, I think, also, would tell us that the union of Shiva and Shakti is so absolute, so absolute, that there’s nowhere to go from that perspective that I can’t use, I can’t use, not in not in truth, not in reality, in this way, which, again, is a paradox. I can’t jump off of. I can’t use Shiva, Shakti unified, or the Tao as a footstool to then make any sense of the world in terms of the way that I my consciousness wants to bifurcate it and split it. Yeah, say that last piece. Again, that’s worth repeating.

I can’t use Shiva and Shakti as a footstool to to try and make sense of the world in a way like that’s what’s actually going on. Is this union. And so in other words, again, there’s always paradox here, but the and the the truth with a capital T is this kind of ineffable, absolute, universal absolute, this immovable center, and it’s both mysterious. It is unified with itself to the extent to which I, in my artful way of living and of seeing the world, I can see a reflection of it in myself or in my own life. Then I then I’m doing something.

Then that’s that kind of delicious, beautiful, tantric way of of being in the world that just it just what it does talk about reproduction. It multiplies itself in its own, in its in its seeing of itself as what it is. And what we do, what we do with these Conscious Minds is we, which we, we try and take that the this fundamental unity, and we try and create for ourselves stable footing, which is ultimately not stable, but we try and perceive under our feet something which we can stand on to make sense of the world in a way that I can refer to in The future as being stable and solid science, in other words, science and the conscious minds tendency to see separation and identify with separation.

Let’s get back to science. I want a bullet. I want to post it note science, but I want to highlight what’s happening between us right now by saying, What if the entire universe was a creation was an act of love making? What if? What if? What if our conversation is an act of love making, absolutely. What if the elements here of the marriage of this moment, you know, and even in the genders that you and I are expressing, which you know, I could certainly get in trouble for this all the way around.

But let’s just play with it. Let me take the risk you know, your structure, your framework, your foundation, you know. And Tantra is very much this metaphor of the river bank and the river the water needs the structure of the river bank, right, but the water is the life force. We’re only here for the water, like we only care about the water, but we need the river bank, right? We’re gonna have a mud puddle we’re gonna have overflowing, you know, destruction. We need containment, you know.

And this is the relationship where you talk about like, you know, your beautiful intellect and your, in many ways, your beautiful maleness, like and. Because we are so in harmony about these things, it triggers the sort of yin in me to, like, go my Shakti. It Shaktis me.

This is my this is because this is my tantric path I’m in, in a deep, feminine devotional path, you know, and but yet this conversation is opening my heart, you know, and all I want to do is talk about love making, love making in even as regards to death, even as regards to what either of us are doing in our lives, even as regards to what this, you know, what this conversation may elicit in other people, it’s all love making, all of it, you know, and so, you know, I think what so to circle back to science and say it is one half of the love making we have.

We have a, basically a masturbatory experience. We have one half of the equation, the other half is mystical. We we know nothing, right? I was having this conversation last week in our last class of this 13 week end of life immersion course that I was teaching, which is the definition of entropy is, is now in science, whatever we don’t know. Like, how much do you actually we know? We know thing we know a paper and a piece of paper, about the body, about the heart, about life, about the universe, about it, nothing. Shakti is the nothing. Right?

Shakti is the we know thing. It’s the river. And the what we think we know is the river bank. And science is claiming to know, and wants you know. And it’s beautiful. There’s but true scientists, true scientists who are really leaning consistently into not knowing. Are almost non existent. They’re almost they. And then they flip over, and guess what? They become. They become mystics. They become when you are truly leaning into, I know nothing, scientist animistic, right? So it’s like, it’s this, it’s the snake, it’s the orobora, it’s the snaking its tail. Yeah. Anyway, there’s my enthusiasm for Shakti.

Absolutely beautiful. And the point, so what’s funny is, thank you. Thank you, Lee. And my intention is I found myself, you know, as funny as I’m reflecting, I’m like, I can wax philosophical, right about the nature of the thing which cannot be languished. And I can do that. And what is also important to me, there’s this kind of practical component. It says in doubt that it says in the daging chapter 67 it says people say my my philosophy is is lofty and impractical. But to those who plummets depths, they will, you know, they will find they will find it deep, and who, to those who use it, they will find it most practical.

So, hmm, on the one hand, there’s these artful like, there’s this holistic kind of tantric, artful way of seeing and accepting. And on the other hand, there’s the question of, well, what the hell do I do with this mystical philosophy? And of course, my answer to that is, well, it’s actually, first of all, ironically, you don’t, you don’t need to do anything with anything. So there’s no answer to how, what do I? What do I do? And yet, at the same time, to the extent to which I dance, I kind of like, as you’re talking I’m seeing my own message as like, both yin and yang, yes, and seeing like I’m holding on to in a way which is a really, which is, I love this. I love this because it’s a paradox.

And also, I’m holding on for dear life to the thing which cannot be held onto. And there’s this, that point of intercourse. There is a there is some mysteriously, and the Taoists talk a lot about this. There’s, there is mysteriously, some point. It’s like a pointless point in spaceless space. Of of union. There’s a, there’s, there’s, there’s, if yin and yang, to the extent to which my consciousness, again, wants to bifurcate the world into these disparate components, or or energies or something. They are, they both exist as manifestations of something separate from one another, yet, in their essence, are unified.

And if that’s the case, where do they meet? Where do they where do they touch? And so for me, there is this kind of perspective. Which I can hold onto, again, just to use this kind of purposefully problematic, paradoxical language, right? You know, I’m holding on for dear life to the thing which cannot be held onto. It’s this, it’s this, there’s a there’s a pivot, there’s a spine, there’s a way of centering myself as squarely, equally holy, between heaven and earth, and watching what unfolds from there.

So yes, on the one hand, science is like usefulness. It’s like the most the ultimate young expression of of usefulness itself, and what I find super, super fascinating. To your point, I quote this thing all the time. I make this quote all the time, but I forget who it is that said it it’s, I may actually have been shroding Or, if not, it was Paulie, or one of the, one of the, these sort of grandfathers of quantum mechanics said that at the first sip of the glass of natural sciences, of the natural sciences, you are an atheist, right?

And at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you, and you’ve got these guys who ran their mathematics. This is, this is before we had any experimental evidence about entanglement or superposition, or any of these, or quantum tunneling, or any of the effects that they see the weird ways in which this kind of hologram can kind of like overlap itself, the perception, the perception of space and time can kind of like fold in on itself in ways that break our meaning, making machine about the world it, you know, probability, things start to look more like they function in terms of probability.

And then if you tinker with the instrumentation, if you tinker with the instrumentation, they start to, you know, the probability keeps its functions, but it but you can push it into more of a yin or a yang expression of itself. So all of these guys, these, these guys, you know, Marie Curie and these, these people notwithstanding, but these the sort of forefathers of of quantum mechanics. They were absolutely mystics. And Schrodinger slept with the Bhagavad Gita under his pillow.

And so what, what is funny about, what you’re talking about is, I, you know, I was at at my favorite Hot Spring resort in New Mexico recently here, and one of the people that I really connected with, just a guy that I was soaking with, was this person in the natural sciences. He was, I mean, this guy had experienced colliding, not colliding electrons, because you can’t I don’t think they know how to do that, but he had an electron accelerator, and he he was doing all sorts of experiments at at the university level, on deep physics.

Man, like you know, was as qualified of a scientist in the physical sciences as anyone and statistically, statistically, this is true, right? That people who are in the physical sciences often have a religious foundation to how they see the world. This is statistically the case for them. I think that’s valuable. I think that’s fascinating. I think that it’s, it’s, it’s nice when, however we try and marry these things, social perspectives and scientific perspectives, or philosophical perspectives and scientific perspectives, which is not which is a false dichotomy.

All that’s a false dichotomy. I. Uh, it’s fun when we can appreciate that there’s something else going on here other than the contents of what my conscious mind thinks it understands.

So, yeah, I’m not sure which thread to pick up. There good ones. I made some notes. I was going to actually go look for a similar quote. You know, the natural scientists. That’s not the mystic. Is not the natural scientist like we, you know, there was, you know, a book back in the 70s that became really popular for the conjunction of reasons, but it was Zen in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know, yeah, yeah. And so you had asked, like, what, what, how, how is mysticism helpful?

I mean, there’s so many ways to come. How is it practical? How is it helpful? And, you know, I think you know from the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or however, you know, biohacking, or whatever, these days we would call it, like, whatever you’re into, you know, your relationship with all that is is only going to make whatever you’re into more fun, and it’s going to make you better at it, you know, like, That’s just, that’s just sort of, that is the science about the thing, right? And, and on another hand, you know, I will say, I don’t know.

Why did we come here? Why did we incarnate here? You know, many people have many theories. But the real interesting part of it is that every single one of us asks those questions. We’re all if, if, at any point in our lives, incarnated in these bodies, we ask the question, What is this about? We are a mystic. That’s all that’s required. That’s all that is required, which means we are all mystics. And, you know, some of us would like to be, you know, are good at, or have an orientation to, or have an affinity for being in those spaces a lot of the time.

And we might be poets, or we might be philosophers, or we might be, you know, academics, or whatever it is where we’re, like, really pondering these questions, and that’s great. That’s our place on the wheel. It’s not better or worse than someone who’s a janitor or someone who’s running a dump truck or whatever else. The we all have our place, you know. But I think to minimize mysticism is much how we minimize the right hemisphere of the brain, you know, we minimize and it atrophies. Our imaginations atrophy, our perception of our, you know, autism, artistic nature, our perception of Slow Food, our perception of slow sex, our perception of real relationships, our perception of how to care for our children in a healthy and attached way.

This all atrophies, right? Because we over emphasize the sort of, sorry, yeah, the right, the left brain around like the linear, structured, oriented way of being in the world. It’s like taking art out of schools and thinking that’s a good idea in the long term, right? That we’re not going to recess, right? We’re not going to cultivate the soul or the artistic expression of our children, that we’re just going to teach them these linear topics, and that somehow we won’t lose the soul of our own essence of our own culture, you know. And so I think you know, yeah, you know you’re, you’re, yeah, you spoke to it so beautifully. But I think you know, is mysticism practical?

Well, I’ll just tell you this from a perspective about death. It makes the difference between being terrified of dying and being celebratory of dying. To me, the difference between those two things, you know, is universal. Like, I don’t know how to I don’t even know how to quantify the difference between being terrified of dying and being celebratory of dying. That’s what mysticism does to us, having sacred relationships, having, you know, having a big picture view of what’s going on here and what’s happening within us. I mean, to me, we could all use a bigger dose of all of that.

And it comes in so many different forms, and for so many people, this is actually entirely satisfied by their their religiosity or their religion. You know, what I think is, what I think is really interesting is that, you know, I talk about God a lot. You. In my message, and we’ve been seeing a kind of turn in the social sphere of people languaging this in in a way that isn’t strictly you’re kind of, you know, consensus, pre packaged, New Age cosmology of whatever, whatever words we have for higher power for, for me, I think so so mysticism and you know, again, mysticism as well is maligned, it depending on the the religious assumptions of whatever denomination or whatever it is, you know, I know there’s, there’s, there’s certain, there’s certain Christian denominations that this The M word here, is, is is bad because it says somewhere, you know, God is no respecter of persons.

God is no respecter of persons. And I think, but the Christian mystics were some of the greatest mystics that ever lived, Meister Eckhart, so, so my god, William Blake, I couldn’t, I couldn’t get into Jacob Burma, or Jacob I couldn’t get into Jacob Burma. But anyway, you know, to say, God is no respecter of persons. Or, you know, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, there is a, there is a sort of a trope that I’ve heard in especially in certain in certain denominations. I’m not going to name, names, but there’s, I’ve heard this trope that make, to make sure that you are worshiping the God of of the of of the of the text of our sacred text, and not the God of Your own imagination.

And and then they, they, there’s a, there’s, you know, God is no respecter of persons. And I think, well, first of all, the interesting turn in the conversation. But for one thing that is, to me, to my mind, that is actually in part, a, a forgetting of the entire Protestant impulse in the first place, which is that there are no mediators between me and my relationship with the divine. That is some perception of another person, or even to take into its logical end, taken to its logical extreme, even the text itself, or whatever, whatever, whatever set of doctrines I hold sacred in this tradition, the divine itself is nearer than anything outside, anything past the tips of my fingers, right?

And so that, on the one hand, is, is important to me, and on the other hand, God being no respecter of persons, I, I have a sort of a reframe here, where, in the in the union of Shiva and Shakti, at this, at this, at this point in in spaceless space of whatever is going on there, you, you, you don’t exist. The person right now who thinks that their name is Connor, and they’re making their mouth move and words are coming out, right this, this whole perception of of linear time and space is something that you and I would agree I think, God, is both so intimately like it to say that God is in that makes it is almost a it’s a misnomer, right to to even, to even imply that there is anywhere which God is not on the one hand and on on the other, the very perception of the thing itself, the very invitation in time that that my life has brought me to the moment in which I find myself making my mouth move to make The words come out which say that there is nothing which is not divine is is the invitation of God into the perception of itself as what it is.

So I kind of, I kind of alluded to earlier this like Hall of Mirrors. Laura rose gage calls it like the Infinity. Mirror effect when you tilt at the right angle and you see the thing, or your Zoom Room, you know, because that’s what that’s the kind of playground that we’re playing in here as as childlike imitators of God. That is, as it says in in the Torah so has been available to maybe high initiates for a long time. But here’s what I think is happening now, which is, and we give the new age a hard time, as we should, you know, and yet, I believe there’s been a progression, and the New Age has been important, much like science has been important. They are almost like polar opposites of each other.

They keep each other like lifted up, you know. But I think here’s what’s happening around and I’m going to bring in the concept of sacred marriage again, which is for the first time in in, you know, human history, let’s say modern human history. I don’t know some, some amount of time we are really as a species, coming to question and coming to recognize that this idea that we are God, that is radical. That is a very radical idea. And the and the way that that’s going to be, you know, like realized is, you know, involution and evolution meeting, right, the Making love of involution and evolution, which is complete embodiment, right?

And it’s almost the biggest paradox that we can imagine, which is, what is ascension mean? You know, people think this, ascension is up and out, ascension is actually down and in, ascension is actually trusting our inhabiting, embodying ourselves, trusting our actual, physical, messy existence that is very in that it you know that does all the things the body does, and being here so fully that our spiritual selves can descend fully inside of us. That is what ascension means. And I think that’s where the New Age has gotten it a little upside down and backwards.

And that’s okay, because they had a piece of the truth. And they’re, you know, building on the industrial revolution where, you know, the idea that we were machines and, like, no, there’s something higher, right? Like integration is what’s happening now, you know? And certainly there are innovators, and there are early adopters, and there’s some of us who are, can hear the field, feel the field, see what’s happening and what coming. But and reason we’re reaching for these mystics, you know, the reason that we’re calling on these people who’ve sort of seen the way Roca is another one for me, I’m like, Oh, my God, that man and his ability to live in the causal plane, I mean, just takes me to my knees, you know?

And the reason we’re reaching for these people, because this is our time, right? And this is for the everyday man, woman, person, to be here, to be in their divinity, which is inside their physical being, inside here. And so when you say, God is no further than my fingertips, absolutely it’s no further than our heartbeat. It’s no further than every cell of our Greg Braden talks about this. We’re whoever wrote the god molecule like it’s in here. And the way we unlock it, because there is an unlocking process that needs to happen is we have to work through our trauma, and we have to work through our stories, and we have to own our shadows, which is 90% of who we are. It’s not some nice shiny surface.

And we have to get in the mess. We have to be willing to be in this mess in order to flip on those God molecules. That’s how it’s happening. And this is the inner marriage. This is the sacred marriage of spirit and matter, and it’s messy, and it’s not what many of us want most of the time. And it’s you have to feel a lot of feelings that we don’t like to feel like terror, and that’s where the action is happening. That’s where it’s happening. And so if we want to, you know, start to see, look ahead at like, where the new human is. This is where it is. It’s embodied, and that’s what the new. Didn’t have legs underneath the ideas that were going on, right? And this is where science needs its other half, like this is where we’re integrating all of these pieces,

fascinating. Okay, on the one hand, you have, I think, I think, what? Yes, you hear me poo poo the New Age quite a bit. And I don’t, I don’t actually poopoo anything. I just observe. And, you know, it’s, it’s also pretty nuanced out there as well, because there’s there’s so many different expressions of it, as you damn well know. And we also have the emergence of kind of, like secular, scientific New Age, you know, there’s, there’s people like Joe Dispenza who say that science is the modern language of mysticism.

And I think this is false. I think this is actually not I don’t think that that’s true. I think what we mean by those different concepts, uh, are distinct enough in their uh, expression in the world, and what we mean by them to for me to make the claim, I don’t actually think that that’s right. So um, on the on the one hand, you know, no, I, you and I would, I think, agree on this. I say this interesting foundation. I say that the the language of mysticism is poetry. The language of mysticism is the feeling that emerges in me of rapture and all and and all of all of all of that. I don’t need to qualify it.

The the, the what that is is an emergent property of the moment in which I find myself in as a as an agent of consciousness, experiencing consciousness in in some at some place in these dimensions of space and time. And so there is a essence and a core. There’s a heart that is this, this kind of unmoved mover, this immovable center that somehow spatially, non spatially, is like the center of that. And it’s and simultaneously, it is itself. It is its own essence.

It is the thing which is looking out in this kind of fractal, toroidal, holographic self perception, self Invitational, way to perceive itself as what it is, okay, like all that is happening, there’s really only one thing happening. There’s only one thing happening. And to me, I’m going to, I use the word quibble. I’m going to quibble with you, Lee, and I think our conception of again, and I know you’ll agree with this, right?

So I’m not really quibbling with you, but the perception of anything one outside of the one thing which it is that we actually are when we perceive ourselves and the world and life correctly, correctly being a paradox, correctly being a misnomer, because there’s nothing which is incorrect. That’s the tantric turn of of radical, the kind of unfolding and unfolding of of being here now, and so we take that mystical perspective and to say, on the one hand, that the enlivening of of God molecules into or even the ascension is really a a dissension of spirit into matter and all this kind of stuff.

Again, what, what? And I don’t want anyone listening to this to just to to because it’s nuanced, right? And so and in being this kind of paradoxical, mystical, tantric perspective on things, we wouldn’t, on the one hand, say that the way to do it is to wake up the god mom and like there’s this linear process, because Tantra admits of the divinity of every moment in which we find ourselves. And so, like, I like, when I got on the call with you and I started saying, hey, look, the past few days for me, Have I been a vegetable?

The past few days I’ve been an absolute vegetable. The past few days I have been I have sent more reels. I don’t even have. Have social media apps on my phone. I don’t have Instagram on my phone. I don’t have Facebook on my phone. I have LinkedIn, right? So I don’t scroll reels or shorts, and I have sent more more friends, more more links to reels and shorts than I have in six months in the past 48 hours, right?

And part of my journey the past 48 hours, because, you know, it’s on a short time scale, this, this whole unfolding, is like I, like I was saying, before we, before we hit record. Trust, always trust, never not trust, right? Of of Connor’s vegetable state as something also divine, right? So, you know, it’s, it’s really fun to me, like we have these things like new age, and we have science and we have mysticism, and we have quantum mechanics, and we have God, God molecules, and we have, we have all these things.

And you and I think would agree that it only ever, actually ever comes down to my perception of self and world and how those two things interplay in the moment in which I find myself. So this, this tantric turn, the question of where you know, how practical is this? Well, can we just, can we just be, and in just being, is, is that maybe, is that the mechanism by which these, you know, I’m going to say, supposed God molecules, is that, is that the mechanism by which these things come alive in us is, what is the mechanism by which there’s, paradoxically, some way of seeing the world, which is correct again, what the hell you know, there’s a, there’s a there’s a way of you can’t possibly fuck this up.

You can’t possibly fuck this up, and at the same time, life can be enlivened and enriched and enchanted, right by our seeing, by a by a, again, for lack of a better word, a proper act of of, of seeing. So, so what is that?

Again, I’m, I’m never sure which thread to pull. I mean, I could pull the thread of like, what’s why practical? Why is practical important? You know, I could pull the thread of like, why is why are some of these Joe Dispenza types walking through the door of science? That’s a fascinating conversation. I’m not actually sure what the quibble was. I was, I was wanting to, like, go towards the quibble, but I couldn’t actually hear it.

Okay, oh, you want me to double down on it? You want me to double down on it? Okay, I’ll double down on it. There is nowhere to go. There is nothing. There is nothing to do. And so the extent, the extent to which we the narrative that emerges from us that we say, when we say, you know, this is how it’s got to happen. This is how it’s going to be. There’s a perspective in me that says, again, there’s nothing to do and there’s nowhere to go.

So for me, healing for me, for me, trauma is is a blessing. It’s a circumstantial perception of self that invites of itself, the seeing of itself as what it actually is, in even deeper and even deeper ways, right? You know trauma is, it’s, it’s life asking of you how much separation. You know it, how much of this delicious perception of separation could you possibly identify with in this life? Oh, my God. It goes deep. It goes deep. We might call it 3d or what, what have you, my objective, my my my intention, what I what I choose to choose as often as I think that I can, is the perspective which one admits of everything in this tantric way, and two doesn’t ask of itself anything again, in this tantric ways, is just a sitting with the the all.

Ultimate unfolding and and and and and doesn’t I try my best to really abstain from placing conditions or criteria on the achievement or attainment of anything, because what I what I see happening here is, is one thing, one moment, one unfolding, yeah, and, and the the greater the extent to which I do this weird, wacky turn in consciousness of fully embracing. And talk you talk about embodying, well, I want to embody all of it, none of it, both and neither, like all those things.

And I want what’s embodied here to be So, admitting of what it what it thinks it perceives, and what it thinks it experiences, that I’m not the one creating my own own resistance, right? I’m not the one. My perception of self is not the one is not the one slowing this train down, because healing, in my opinion, happens automatically. And by automatically, I mean something that the the the condition that’s most often asked of us, or that we are invited to, I should say, I would say, in the process of healing is not you did this, you, you, you did it.

You achieved it. You, you overcame that mountain. On the other hand, what I think is actually the mechanism at play is trust. And I think the the mechanism at play is a kind of conditionless condition. It’s most often more of a taking a hands taking of our hands off the wheel, or a stopping, white knuckling of the wheel and discovering that it’s a self driving car than it is then it is by dent of hard work and effort that we heal. Yeah,

I see and appreciate that difference. I hear, you know, I hear what you’re saying and it also, there is an element to what you’re saying. For me that is, I think, for the average person, maybe a little unattainable, or maybe a little pure, or maybe a little out of reach, in a way, you know, and I actually use the word practical to describe myself when I when I call myself a practical mystic, because I do understand that people are in bodies that sometimes have struggles, and they often have children, and there’s complexities of life, and they’re in The the nitty gritty of relationships, where they’re playing out their lineage stuff.

And, you know, we’re trying to figure out how to be here. And I, you know, again, as a feminine, erotic, devotional path, I’m not trying to ignore that. It’s really important to me to not ignore that, to not reduce that down to, well, you know, if we could have trust, or it’s really only this moment, or it’s, you know, like I, it’s I, part of my wanting to be embodied is to be in the mess of it all. And so when you’re speaking, I feel like there’s profound spiritual truths in that.

And sometimes I used to say this all the time when I was farming, and I lived in this community of people, and there were spiritual teachers coming, and I remember saying, you know, all great spiritual teachers, but I would like them to teach me how to keep my chickens in the fence and have them not get killed by predators. That would be a really great spiritual lesson that I would like to learn, and otherwise, I’m not interested in going to that spiritual lecture, right?

And so, you know, I’m, and maybe this is my, you know, my stellium, and two earth signs of like, I’m really interested in, I’m really interested in what it is to be here and, you know, and to be a mystic, in embodied mystic, a practical mystic. So I think, you know, I think that when you speak of those things, I think, yes, philosophically, conceptually, cosmologically, you’re probably right, but it there’s a limit to how juicy that can be for me, there’s a limit to how that’s going to help me keep my chickens in the fence or cook a meal for my beloved or care for my children or pay my bills like there and so I think for me again, as a long time studying of the wise woman tradition.

And of earth based traditions, of land based living place based, like, I’m often wanting to bring it down into like, really hear what’s here. And that’s, I think, where the marriage of what you and I are talking about, where the intersection and maybe it’s discordant, or maybe it’s quibble, or maybe it’s push, but it’s actually rich. It’s fertile right there, because I want to understand how to trust, given a history of trauma where trust is a core issue, given my orientation towards something that I don’t a god, that I don’t actually believe in, that I was raised with. What does trust mean?

There, right there, in that sweet spot, what is the Agony and Ecstasy of that concept of trust? I’m not really interested in it. Otherwise. I’m not interested in it as a philosophical concept. I’m interested in my butts. What is it in my actual body? So I think that’s where you and I are dancing around. And I don’t know that we’re speaking so much like different ideas, but I think it is the yin yang of it. I think it is me saying, you know, the very classical ways in India of conveying information and and one of my beloved friends and teachers, Rudy, wrote a book Swami Ravi wrote a book called Kali rising, and it’s done in the very same traditions, is done as India, which is Shiva, is Telling a concept of something philosophical to Shakti, who then takes it into her body and is like, well, what does it mean in this concept?

So you and I are still playing out this tantric principle where you’re saying, but look at this and I’m saying, I’m like, I don’t really care about that, unless it can be in my life and in my heart and in my pussy and in my belly and in my body, right? Like, what does it mean there? And what it means there is different to every single person given their circumstances, and if healing really can be quantum, meaning we don’t have to worry about our lineage trauma yet, you know, the experience is, wow, I’ve got this thing that I’ve been dealing with for decades, like, how, you know, can we be compassionate and empathetic and reflective of how hard that’s been? You know? So again, I think we’re, I think we’re dancing in this place where it’s a both, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a quibble.

I agree I because when I’m first of all, I get this a lot. I’ve been on I’ve been on podcast where I was on the relationship podcast once, and my position was I was doubling down on the extent to which this is, this is you, like this is this is you, and as a matter of fact, you and your relationship with you is, is primary. And all other relationships in your life are going to be sort of an outpouring and an out picturing of that relationship. So, right? So, so doubling down on that, to the extent to the exclusion of, let’s, let’s just put it that way, which is funny, right?

Inclusive of everything, and yet exclusive of that’s the turn for me. That’s the that’s the turn where, where my spiritual pivot, this spine upon which I want the the weight of this, the foundation of the earth, and the weight of the sky and everything to just kind of be just perfectly situated upon is, to me, the being, being aware of the extent to which I buy into this, The story of separation between myself and anything else, anything else in my life, a memory, a narrative, God, my body, time and space so like, as I’m as I as I hear about the chickens, My message like, so let’s say it was me. Let’s say it was me at the at giving the lecture and and someone stands up and says, Yeah, but what about my chickens?

My response is, i. Hmm. First of all, the choice to be at a spiritual lecture or something like that, is you, and if what life has called you to attend to, if what you desire and what life has called you to attend to, the intersection of your narrative, your story, your sense of self, time and space and all of that coming together in the moment. Would actually rather have you elsewhere or paradoxically, also trusting, having, taking the invitation to trust that in any message you desire your chickens, well, one trust that trust, trust, take the invitation to trust that whatever is going on here, this relationship between self and other, consciousness,

God, life, Time, space, love, all of it kind of comes together at this point in which I can, I can again. I can choose. I can make this choice to see myself as limited, see myself as what I would say and I don’t. This is not what you’re saying, but merely embodied and or embodied in all of it, embodied and divine embodied and the center of the whole fucking universe, right? So as the as the sovereign, sovereign center of the whole fucking universe, the whole sovereign center of the whole fucking universe doesn’t necessarily when it understands itself to be what it is.

It doesn’t question the nature of the lecture and its ability to render the answers that it seeks and that it desires about the chickens, because knocking and the door shall be open to you seek and you shall find which includes chickens and and how not to chickens, right? It does. So I love that. I need to wrap it up here soon. But I, yeah, I, I think that the core piece of where you and I have gotten is, like the we’ve gotten to the dance, to the core of the dance, yeah, and I, and I love that which is, which is, actually, it’s exceptionally beautiful. It is exceptionally beautiful. You the core and the dance. And the difference, if we want to see it that way, as something going on here is something that, ooh, oh, it’s delicious. Because often in these kinds of conversations, when there is this like, I’m like, Well, I see myself as as a as kind of standing, sort of upholding, not as a mantle or as a mission, but I’m, I’m here to represent that as a perspective and as the possibility of as an invitation which we can take in any moment, which we find ourselves. And then what I find so delicious and beautiful is that you’re saying, Well, yeah, there’s a tension there. Of course there is. That’s what it means to be embodied. So the so the deliciousness is in, is in the very dance which you have, you have explicated and called out, and we have said, Look, well, yeah, that’s, that’s called being here, right?

I love that. The conversation is highlighting, yeah, the perspectives. That’s really good. Yeah, yeah. Thank you excellent, dear Lee. Thank you so much for coming. And hope we can do this again when we feel like it.

Yeah. Well, I’d love to see how you, you know, edit it, and what you make of it, and what clips you’re happy with. And let’s, why?

Why don’t you let people know we’re still recording this. So why don’t you let people know how they can find you and learn more about your work

and all that? Yeah, that’s a great idea. Probably the best place right now is queen of death.org QUEEN OF death.org and it’s where I’m doing my death oriented work, which also includes my Tantra based work, yes, so once you get on my mailing list, then you’ll be apprised of what’s coming up for me.

Excellent. queenofdeath.org. Thank you so much. Lee. Much love to you, my friend. Much love to you. Connor, you.