Discussion with Archetypal Symbolist, psychology educator and Joseph Campbell aficionado Matthew Spencer Seely, about the relevance of the evolution of dominant myths through history to our current masculine over feminine imbalance in our culture and how this influences our values and actions and why there is a trend in the masses towards body practices, like yoga, as the collective unconscious is called to return to the wisdom of the body, and how illnesses, as Jung says have become our Gods.

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This is Gnosis of the body where we explore embodied wisdom and healing the mind body split through personal stories

using Jungian depth psychology, mythology, and following collective trends

and following wisdom stories of the body.

So when I was at my program at Columbia, I went there very specifically for this one teacher who had trained with James Hillman, Dr. Mark Kuras, who had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, but he was, I think, very much torn between the world of clinical psychology and behind his long training in Jungian depth psychology. And he was very, very focused on myth. And I specifically went to this program to study with him. And while I was there, I met today's guest, Matthew Spencer Seeley. And we not only studied with him, but we also went out because we didn't have quite enough young at Columbia, and we would go out to the few New York Institutes to classes they would have where we gained the title. The young Jungians from some of the many veterans that attended courses there. And they were very happy to see us come down from Columbia. And they said, Oh, there's never like younger students here. We really need more young blood in the union community. So Matt has his B.A. from Princeton in philosophy. We both have our masters in Clinical Psychology and Education from the Spirit and Mind Body Institute at Columbia University. He's a third level Reiki master, and he is also a teacher in Qigong. But mostly he spends his time both being a musician, a singer songwriter. He can tear up a piano and a guitar pretty beautifully and reading extensively myth and then exploring in the collective and in the world. He pretty much knows every single trend going on, whether it's in the news around the United States. And then he's always marrying that back to what he's seeing in the mythic world. So that's why I'm bringing him in here at the tail end of my conversation about where I went when I burned out and when I just sort of dove into this world of yoga and specifically when I dove out of the world to leave it and go study spiritual stuff for 30 days and train because he had some pretty interesting ideas about what my psyche was trying to heal. Because being young enough, we believe that the psyche is always trying to enter a process of self-renewal and to initiate death and rebirth and healing. So what did you think about everything I was saying there? I liked the introduction. It was nice. I agree with all of that. You're welcome. No, I specifically really remember Dr. Kuras always talking about what was missing in the dominant religion still now and was previously in Jung had tagged This was the feminine and how what is missing in the dominant spiritual modality of of a culture society will come out in other ways and that's what I think you're always you're looking at a lot of those archetypes, not just the feminine you're looking at, you're looking at everything. But I was specifically really, really interested when I heard Curtis say that to talk about what was going to come out both in, you know, dreams and in the collective, in art, and I felt really, really clichéd going to yoga. There's all of these like Western women, you know, dropping out, you know, throwing up shrines everywhere. And I really felt embarrassed being part of what I called hysterical yogis, which is sort of an idea I got not only looking at my own cohort, but looking at, you know, trends like Gwyneth Paltrow, bless her soul. Yeah. And you just stories have really interesting perspectives that tied all that together. And you really cottoned on the same way I did to a lot of those ideas that Curtis was. I was saying about how the feminine was missing, how we'd undone the feminine for years, but he was always really clear to separate it from the female where I wasn't. This is where you and I hit heads a lot of the time, cause you've got interesting perspectives that kind of round me out. Yeah, I have some thoughts on that opening question of what's missing in the culture, manifesting in the religion and how these things happen. And I think we'll get more into how we got into this mythological mess of masculinity over femininity. What is that mess? You know, I grew up reading Greek Myth. You're reading it all the time. So can you break that down for me? And a little simpler kind of way. What's this mess? Oh, sure. There's things that are the same for all myths. And there's things that are different. Regional for myths. Every culture is going to have the sun in the daytime and waking consciousness associated with it and the moon at night and dream consciousness associated with it, and darkness and fear and the unknown happening at night. But then you're going to have some myths with mountains and you're going to have some myths with rivers, and you're going to have some myths in the desert, which is interesting. Where we get our myths from is from desert peoples who got their myth from the Fertile Crescent people, which is not a desert. So the Fertile Crescent myths are all farming myths. They're Earth, Mother Earth myths. They're myths that are about birth and death and regeneration and life. And you see that in a lot of the equatorial myths verses the further north and south you get. You start getting into hunting tribes instead of the planting tribes. It's man based. The men are out hunting. You have the initiation ritual rites for the men to become hunters and they also have a different approach to death. Death is usually a violent death in those cultures for animals as well as humans. The animals of the packs that are older or weaker or injured are the ones that get picked off and eaten. And that's kind of this chain of life you don't have in the equatorial regions, the farming regions, that violent death. You have old age and natural death happening. So you need myths that account for birth. You grow up, you mature, but then you have this period of decrepitude and death and a kind of retreating into yourself and leaving some space for a coming generation. A new birth cycle. The myths that we get out of the Fertile Crescent are these kind of birth cycle, female based myths. You see these images of the female goddess and she's always naked. And if she's accompanied by a man, the man is some kind of wizard shaman. He's always dressed even in these idols that they make. It's like the primary element is the female, all of the Semitic tribes in that desert area at the time, they're getting their myths from the Fertile Crescent and from all these cultures that are happening around them. But they don't have this abundant earth mother. They have a desert where the earth, the goddess is not really doing much. So they take all of those myths and transform them from being feminine base to masculine base. The best example that Campbell, because this is Adam giving birth to Eve. It's like that's the only place where you have a man giving birth to a woman. It's so against everything that we know about how, you know, people work

holiday or science body farm. So you get this masculinization of these feminine myths reading out of Campbell's there art that he says that myths that originally had pointed to the goddess as the ultimate source are now pointing to the God. And these symbols speak directly to the psyche. When he talks about what myth is, he says it's a set of symbols that energetically they speak to the psyche, they activate energy and they direct that energy. And so we have these images, the the serpent god, the tree in the garden of Immortal Life fashioning of mankind from clay flood. These are feminine and images that strike us in our heart. We understand them as being feminine, but we have the clergymen, the people in charge of these religions telling us, This is the father, this is massive. This image represents the father. This image represents something masculine. And so rationally we're trying to process that. But in our hearts, we understand it intuitively that these are feminine symbols and they're being misrepresented to us logically. So that would have been part of what I was describing as the wordless education that I was getting through. For example, yoga philosophy being taught to me by my route teachers, because all of a sudden I'd very much been alienated from my Christian roots, had a little bit of trauma with a born again Christian grandmother trying to teach me about my home religion. But all of a sudden, even though I'm practicing kind of what I consider stretching and breathwork, I'm finding resonance in these alien foreign symbols so much to the level that, as I said, I'm decorating, I'm making altars, Hindu altars and putting up images. So that would be then that I'm responding on a subconscious level to those foreign images with something that had been missing for me. Yeah. So that idea of what's missing in your culture is going to manifest through religion or is going to manifest to the psyche. I think that's just a macro version of like for the individual, like Chris would say, if you're ignoring something, if you're pushing something into the unconscious, relegating it to the shadows, it's going to manifest as a symptom that's indicating to you that something is being ignored, pushed down, rejected. That's happening on this macro cosmic scale of we're rejecting the feminine. And that comes from like you talk about the feminine as being the body. And we're rejecting that from this kind of like Catholic puritanical standpoint, which if I can go off on a tangent on that real quick, because as I was just reading today, the infant, when he's going through the anal phase and potty training. Gotcha. Yes. And he's creating this shit that for him is magical and he is the creator of it. And it's this wonderful thing and immediate if he has any joy from it. The whole society says, No, absolutely not. That's wrong, that's bad, that's dirty, that's impure. And immediately you get sin identified with impurity, identified with the body and the good, identified with purity and holiness, and have holiness and spirit. You also get this identification of the female with the body from because every myth has the sun and the moon, every culture has these is foundational to their myths. For as long as we've been humans, that female menstrual cycle has coincided with the moon cycles. So you're going to have the identification of the female with the moon and with the earth and the body as contrasted to waking solar consciousness and the sacredness. And this darkness is going to mythologically just automatically almost as be associated with the feminine right. And it's also bad because like, think of Shakespeare, think of Juliet, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon. Her monthly changes in her. I think it's circular or I can't remember the quote exactly, but right away that's a bad, bad thing. But where is the reality is we deify that romantic story between that couple, which probably didn't last more than a single moon cycle, if even right, like it might have just been two weeks, a waning or a waxing of the moon. And then it was over. So we cling to the idea of permanency, which is very solar, right? Like we want to live forever. We don't want to go through that cycle of like getting old and going down. And for me, I was creating a super sin by jumping out of that solar work world where I was burning out. I couldn't keep going on a perpetual, perpetual study. I needed a cycle of like downtime. I needed out. I needed to be away and be hidden, which is very much why the anonymous came into my my thesis when I was reviewing all this and writing that in Columbia because it drew out exactly what you're speaking of these moon myth cultures, an ancient Babylonian scenario where a nana we're focusing on the three dark days of the moon and she's gone underground and I dropped out of the world. I went from being, you know, the person that you could contact every single day, as most of us are in all of our, like, personal lives and our work world, we have to be like, I can't. I texted you. Did you not hear from you? Didn't answer me like I sent you that email. When are you going to get this back on deadline? And I went from that world. That's very overwhelming. And I think sucking for all of us to giving myself specifically through the discipline of yoga, this permission for retreat and withdrawal so that I could cyclically rebuild. And I have previously referred to the French verb of sorcery going down to the sources. And I'm probably getting a little bit ahead here jumping back into the advancement. But, you know, this was my vibe was that anonymous often in myth and in the Greek version, the Persephone IMF, it's the water spirit that tells Demeter, I have seen your daughter when she's searching the earth for her daughter who's been abducted to the underworld by Hades. You know, it's the underground springs that have seen her. Which. Which is source. So again, back to where we started. You're like this mess we're in. How did we get to this imbalanced mess and how did this, you know, end up in a world where we're expected to just work, work, work, work, work? And how is that reflected back in religion and math? So part of where this mess comes from is like that taking of the female myths and accidentally masculine izing them. Sort of from this desert culture, we get monotheistic culture that's part of the masculine. I know that that's that's masculine izing the myth. We've also had since the Enlightenment this hyper emphasis on the rational, which is the masculine principle, which is now all we're taught in schools. You had the separation of church and state, and you're not learning heart wisdom anymore. You're just learning reason, pure reason, kind of at the expense of your intuition. And you're kind of being told to suppress your intuition in the classroom. If you want to get an A on this paper, you can't listen to your intuition. There's a right answer and there's wrong answer. So I think part of it comes from this mythological imbalance that we've inherited, and part of it comes from our overemphasis on logic and reason. And Campbell talks about these four functions of myth, you know, sociology, core function, which is like the caste system in India, is supported by their mythology of their sociological function, which also provides a moral structure with the Ten Commandments being the sociological, moral foundation. Every myth gives a cosmological function as well of how the world came to be. And we, from our science have a different understanding of that, and the myths don't fit that anymore. And so we reject the myths wholeheartedly almost because of that cosmological interpretation. Campbell's kind of saying, No, we don't need the cosmological interpretation of the myth anymore. We don't need myth to explain our cosmology. We don't need mythology. Likewise, to explain sociological, we have a better mechanism now for organizing the hierarchy of structure, then having to rely on myths, Campbell says. What we still need the myths for is one our connection to something greater than us. The conscious aware connection to the hidden unconscious, higher power. And we need myth to explain our development through life and our place in the world as a child, as an infant, as a mature person, as someone aging in this older decrepitude, and finally in acceptance of death. Since we're the only species that is aware of our own death, that's kind of where this need for myth comes from. So again, back to the question I was reflecting a little bit in the beginning and again, I always use my personal story as the entry here, but because it's such a huge trend in the West, all of these Westerners finding a path of back to their body and to spirituality through the practices of yoga. And again, I'm including whether you do meditation or you do yoga asana or you do breathwork, all of it. And in the back you can hear the yearning call of my cat Ostara, maybe kind of like the lonely soul of humanity crying out for God. So to pivot a little bit, because you know so much about Eastern religions as well, I'm always learning something new for you Every time I learn like a new a new chant or a new prayer, you're like, Oh, yeah, You mean like it's just know them all. What is it that I was getting in wisdom and what is it in the Eastern practices that is missing from the Western ones that left me feeling so empty? Like what is in their doctrines? Like, what's their what was it? Campbell gives us really clear distinction between Eastern myth and Western myth. And it's not based on femininity and sexuality. It's about connection to and relation to the Godhead, the Western myths from the Fertile Crescent onwards through the monotheistic faiths. They're all a creator and his creation, and we're the creation. And we can relate to the creator, but we are different from the Creator. The Eastern religions from India and China and Japan have always been You are that you and the Godhead are one and it's about you

in Eastern meditations introduced to me by my teachers, is the C word compassion. And I don't feel like that was anywhere in my Christian education. You know, I don't know that much about Judaism, but it does seem that there's also this angry, punishing God. And there's the idea of punishment versus compassion and having that distance as well from the deity, from the divine of like, you're all the way down here. Everything you do creates greater separation from the deity that makes you bad, it makes you wrong, as opposed to the deity having compassion and love for you. And then you're able to be part of that trauma. See that part that, you know, you get to be part of that and participate in it and there is no distance. Whereas the other doctrines are creating distance. In Judaism, the God is absolutely angry and does not come across as having a lot of compassion. And I think it's fascinating. By the time you get to Christianity and the God is the embodiment of compassion. But still, a lot of the churches and institutions don't teach it with any compassion and teach it as God is angry and you're going to hell and you're going to burn in hellfire, which I think is how a lot of us who are not with the Catholic Church, who maybe stepped away from Christian or any institutionalized churches, kind of views religion and that negative element of like if you don't do what we say, you're going to burn in eternal hellfire. I don't think people's images of religion, it's like you go there to be compassionate and have society have this communal experience with that, which is what it actually is and what most church experiences are like. I think we've been driven away from those experiences because of this now being called masculine ordering. Mm hmm. You know, I was part of this trend that I am always perpetually studying and was fascinated to find as a connected to archetype when I went to school. This trend of Western women going into yoga and finding a lot of a lot of healing in the body, but also finding a path back to spirituality. You know, they're primarily women of Abrahamic religions, so like to throw it out there. And what's this about? Like what was this trend that I became swept up and what was that about? Like, what were we learning? What were we looking for? I see it as a quest for embodied wisdom, and we've never been taught growing up that our body has any wisdom. And I think a lot of times as children, we get injured and we're told by a parent like we're fine and not to listen to what our bodies are saying, which helps them time so that the kid's not just crying all the time. But I think our society doesn't allow us to express our body is another big thing. Shama That I worked with, Alberto Violo would talk about the deer whenever they get into a little scuffle or something. Semi traumatic, what happened to them? They would do this little shiver from the nose out through the tail and they would be fine. When I go and watch the ducks in the pond and they start fighting with each other, they'd shake it off and then they're fine. They're not carrying that any embodied trauma from that experience. We're not allowed to do that in our culture. We can't just shake around. People think that we're weird. If we do that. We keep it all constricted and tight in our bodies and to ourselves from a very young age. We're told, Hey, don't do that. That looks stupid. We get made fun of. We keep our embodied wisdom to our self and we don't let it out. And it starts to get stuck and it starts to get lodged. Mm hmm. What do you have? What's that book?

Which book?

Trauma being lodged in the body. Your body keeps the score by vessel vendor classics at this point. Because it's so. It's so obviously true when you're reading it. And it's been so neglected by our society for so long. Yeah, but this is why specifically, instead of continuing on the path of like psychology training and psychoanalytical training, I've been sticking with, I teach people yoga, I teach people breathwork. I'm a psychologist, I do. Vocalizing somatic healing is because I don't think the hands on what to do is being taught. And my teacher, Esther Eckhart, who was a Dutch psychotherapist before she became a yoga teacher of pretty cool renown, she's like one of the first YouTube stars of yoga. So Esther teaches something that she got through poly vagal theory, which is trauma informed. So, Deb, Dayna, Stephen purchases poly vagal theory, teaches different ways to calm the nervous system. And so one she teaches is called the Shakeout. And she literally instructs us to do something that is very similar, like what you're describing of the animal shiver and shake. And she encourages us to jump up and down and yell and then look around the room in a very particular emotion, sort of like as though your eye would scan the theme of if you were in a regular room, you know, scan between the ceiling and where the the wall meet. And just to take it all the way to the corner of your eye and scan even behind you and really turn your head, but let your eyes leave the turning in your head. And those specific exercises send signals to your nervous system to drop out of the sympathetic nervous state fight flight porn as well to rest, digest and calm down. And I started teaching that after her, teaching before all of my private and group yoga sessions. And I remember someone who had suffered really extreme trauma throughout their childhood, had had it repressed in memory, and then had had the traumatic memories come back at a significant point in her life, she said. That's the first time I ever felt safe practicing yoga. And felt safe in my body. So I always, always, always teach that. And that's why I've moved on to things like vocalizing. But so then try and circle the soul back together. If that is so forbidden, like what is happening to the culture? So everyone's kind of at this breaking point and then they're running into like I was into a yoga class, like in a state of panic kind of.

There's definitely some element of people trying to escape the present situation and go to this more idealized world. I don't know that people are running in a panic to go be yoga teachers, but I do think that there is just like a sort of general panic in the society and a desire to get away from it. The kind of like general anxiety that's kind of swept over everybody and this kind of need to find something within you that can release you from it because we can't find the answers to our anxieties in the world. We can't wait for all of the problems in the world to be changed, or else we're just going to be anxious for a really long time waiting. We have to find that wisdom inside of ourselves that to fix it. But the culture that was teaching us, to find it outside, whether, you know, it's like a Xanax or like, you know, a raise or like a better apartment or a better house or something. The news trying to tell you how you feel. Mm hmm. So we're always just like that panicked child trying to, like, not feel the scraped knee. Not we're just, like, shoving that down and shoving that down and shoving that down. So that's to try and go back to the mythic. That's the masculine way. So it's the feminine way. I don't know that the masculine way is to business as early as shutting of things down. Mm hmm. Right. And overriding to me, it's an overriding a pushing down of it to, you know, stay consistent as opposed to having to go into that moon cyclical thing where you need a downtime. You need to sit with the scraped knee and cry. I think that's definitely true. Giving yourself the the time and the space for things that aren't necessarily valued by our society, which the things that are valued currently in our society are very masculine. Mm hmm. But then there's also, if we can go back to the wisdom of the scraped knee, kind of the thing, which I think is actually the title of a book somewhere, that's why it's coming to me, is that we again do this good, bad dichotomy in a lot of Abrahamic religions, and I certainly learned both through Young end up psychology and also through Eastern philosophy that the bad had a place in the divine, you know, in the Union world. I learned if I keep stubbing my toe, there's a symbol in that symptom of my stubbed toe that hurts or I twist my ankle. There's a symbol in there. So I started to have two different visions through uni and up psychology and through eastern religion of what we term as bad, what we have aversion to like injury, illness, disability, even going that far into the symptom.

I do think that those things illness and injury and death as being thought of as bad come from these masculine hunting tribes where everybody's dying. Everything is violence. So how did that switch happen? What was different about the Goddess Moon tribes with that perspective to those like, is this part of the masculine mass that you say?

I guess the the idea of those things as evil comes from a different place as the idea of. Okay, let me go in to this real quick. This or Campbell's classification of of three types of you have the primitive myths. Early myths are all they're life affirming in that they know that death is everything. Life feeds on life. There has to be death for there to be new life. And all of the old myths affirmed there. Like obviously there is death and the myths are about finding joy and wonder and awe within that mass of life, eating off of life. Then around the eighth century B.C., you have what he terms the great reversal and these religions that are epitomized by like early monastic Buddhism and Jainism of like were rejecting death like this world is a false world. And there's that true pure world where there is no harm and death and suffering. Then you have Zoroastrianism come in and say, There was a perfect world. It was corrupted and we can bring it back to that perfection and that Judaism is waiting on the Messiah. Christianity is the messianic religion of like there was a fall and now there's a redemption. So there is this perfect world and we just need to get back to it. We've corrupted it somehow. So that's again, back to also the idea that we are part of the bad and that's the good, right? Which is separation. Yeah. Versus. How is that differing from the Eastern? The Eastern, I think, sees good and bad as like the yin and the yang as being parts of the whole and not a fight of good versus evil. And it's more of a bringing the evil into yourself, understanding the evil in yourself, understanding the demons in yourself and awakening to yourself. So then how does illness in the body tie into that tie into the Eastern religion philosophy? There's the tantric perspective. Even what we consider evil is sacred, which is really, really hard for anyone from what Western side want to make this distinction between illness as an evil, which is not right. Mm hmm. Illness would be what's creating the sickness. I don't think that we see sickness, illness as evil. It's the things that are creating the illness. I think is where we go to bring in. Darryl Khalil again, we've already brought in dad, Joe Campbell here. So we're going to bring in Carl Jung. And he said the gods manifest nowadays. This is a very rough misquote, not a misquote, but changing the quote. He's like, we don't about how the gods have disappeared from our our daily lives in myth. And, you know, we're even not really even going to at least in in the West, to church as much as regularly as we used to. And you know, the medieval periods and the Renaissance illnesses have become our gods was the quote, essentially because to me, we fear illness like we live, you know, even as we become more and more aware of health, we tend to, you know, even blame. There's a really horrible culture of like blaming people who get sick a lot of the time. You know, I suppose the most obvious example of that would be lack of empathy for people with lung cancer. Like, as though they have brought that on themselves and they should just know better from my perspective, psychologically, they could have a lot of discomfort and anxiety and like this is this is a crutch that they need, you know, and you can get all yogic and go into like heart chakra issues and lack of self-love and like fear in the heart and the lungs being connected to that and like drawing in this this comforting poison again and again. But once again, if we stay with young and the idea that illnesses are our current manifestations of gods, there's the fear element, which is sort of like the Yahweh God thing. And then there's the perspective of othering, fearful punishment, and then there's connectedness and the yin yang perspective. So what is the symbol and the symptom of sickness? That's kind of what it made me think of, was back to this symptom allergy thing when you're talking about young. And that has I don't know where this notion comes from of his that illness as being the modern God basically. I don't know the context in which he's referring to that. But what it makes me think is that we're getting our symptoms through physical illnesses. Now, when we come into trouble in our lives, when we need to make a novel decision, which is of Julian Jaynes to explain who he is, he's he's a Princeton psychology teacher who wrote the origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is a really wonderful book that goes through all the cultures of Hebrew, the Greek, and looks at the language and kind of the development of consciousness through the language. But I bring it up in this context because

illness, he talks about how any time there was a novel situation, say, in like the Iliad, when character didn't know what to do, hadn't had, you know, a personal database of experiences that would tell them what to do. That's when the guard would come in and say, Here's what you do. Any time there was a novel experience. Then we started to lose our contact with the gods. The gods? Why have you forsaken me? We get in every culture now. The gods are talking through the body, which is interesting because we give reality to the body. The body is what's real now. Instead of the spirit, we're materialists. We we believe when the body is telling us something. So the gods are talking to us through these physical symptoms because that's what we're able to listen to now. We're not listening to voices of the Angels because we go, Oh, that's just, you know, some schizoid tendency. Mm hmm. But when there's something physical in your body, you can't ignore that from this materialist standpoint.