Decoding Lord Of The Rings: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni #466

Aubrey Marcus
Is Tolkien's story the Lord of the Rings just a story? Or is it a prophecy written for a time very much like the time we're in now, what are the two towers? Who are the dark wizards? Who are the heroes? And how do the heroes gather together to stand for what is good, what is true, what is just, what is beautiful?

How do we fight for middle earth? In this podcast with Doctor Mark Gaffney, a religious scholar and master teacher, we explore the hidden codes of Lord of the Rings. Before we get started, a word from our sponsors. First up, we have four visions, and I just want to send a little bit of gratitude to them for continuing to be a sponsor of the podcast. And it makes sense because I'm continually a sponsor of their business, because wherever I go I have some four visions happe and oftentimes some of the four visions caripe and the tools for using this sacred tobacco snuff that is created in full cooperation with the indigenous wisdom keepers of Central and South America.

Speaker B
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Aubrey Marcus
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Mark, my brother. Here we are. Ah, but we didn't sleep a lot last night. We didn't sleep a lot last night. The ring.

The ring. The ring. I wanted to talk to you about the fellowship of the ring, because this is a formative myth for me and so many other different people. And it actually, you know, when you reference something like the eye of Sauron, it's like. It's in culture, you understand it.

When you reference the fellowship, it's in culture, you understand it. Right? This has become one of those things. It's part of our lexicon. It's part of.

It's formed our subconscious and our conscious mind. Every place. 600 million copies, by the way. 600 million copies. I don't know how many people watched.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
The movies, and the movie was just. You know, it blew it away. 17 Academy Awards. Insane. They filmed it in four months.

And there's Tolkien. When I did my doctorate at Oxford, I would try and write in the same cafes that Tolkien wrote in Oxford when he was writing the Lord of the Rings. He did most of the writing between 1937 and 1949. And our deal was, we talked yesterday. We're not talking about the books today.

Just the text of culture in the movie. Yes, that's our text. That's our. And one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about it is it feels like now is the time. Now is the time where the eye.

Aubrey Marcus
Of Sauron is forming, right? And the two towers are rising, and one of the. You know, and we're just going to dive right into here. And as we've explained in the Guardians of the Galaxy, we're going to find the ways that not only Tolkien might have had a bead. Because I do give a lot of credit to Tolkien as a writer and Peter Jackson as a director.

I think they are actually tapped into the field. But also how the goddess was speaking, perhaps in ways that they weren't even aware. How the goddess speaks through and just speaks through texts of culture. And just to say in our state of kind of having been up, you know, both of us kind of in the wee hours of the night, in the early morning. I'm so happy to be.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
To be having this conversation with you, brother. It's such an important conversation. And it's so pregnant and there's almost a trembling in it. It's such a moment. I mean, and there's.

I remember our guardians of the Galaxy conversation. I think we found like twelve themes, you know, along the way. Maybe we'll get to reference guardians. It might have been ten. Cause I think you repeated one a couple times.

There's like many things, but I just can't start shit talking you in front of everyone. Just at like 730 in the morning. But give me a few minutes. Well, we have understood both of these texts of culture that if we're actually friends like Gimli and Legolas. Right.

Aubrey Marcus
We have to consistently talk to each other. So actually we do a pretty good job of that. That's right. We did edit out when you confused which movie was which and confused me in the middle of the thing. I think we edited it out.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
But anyway, let's not go there. Okay. Oh, my God. Here we go. Here we go.

Aubrey Marcus
Here we go. It occurs to me, and I know this wasn't one of the things that we talked about, but it's really pregnant in my mind right now. As I'm thinking about the eye of Sauron, I'm thinking about how this world of techno feudalism, surveillance of all things, somebody is always watching. The big brother is always watching. And the intentions of that surveillance are absolutely questionable.

And we're just kind of now seeing that there is an eye forming and we're kind of understanding that maybe the eye that's forming is not a benevolent eye. It is not the eye of providence like it is on the dollar bill. It's the other eye. It's the eye of citra akra. I mean, oh my God, that's so good.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
So let's start there as our first theme, the Eye of Saron. And let's just say that we're going to be talking about all three movies as one. We'll identify the themes, but we're not going to take them. The general title, lord of the Rings. And the first movie is fellowship of the Ring.

And the second is the two towers and the third is the return of the King. So those are the three kind of subtitles of the General Lord of the Rings and the Eye of Sauron plays, of course, through all three. And the great success of the quest when the Ring is. And how that happens, we'll get to. But the ring is finally dissolved in Mount Doom.

The eye of Sauron Falls, disappears, is closed. And so you point to very beautifully. We were talking last night, this parallel between the Eye of Sauron and the eye of Providence. So we start there. So there's this eye of Providence that's on the currency of the United States which is the sense that there's this gaze that loves us.

So I just start there. There's the gaze that loves us. When I look at you and we're loving each other, our eyes catch each other. There's this beautiful gaze. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And this is spoken about, I just got back from Egypt. This reminds me of the eye of Horus. And the eye of Horus, the watchful eye of Horus. Horus being the falcon God at the top of the pyramid looking benevolently and watching. So that's providence.

He didn't maybe could have watched a little more closely for the 400 years of slavery of the hebrew people, our ancestors. He could have maybe walked. I blinked there for a second, right? Short blink. And we have this idea of anthro ontology.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Anthro inside of me. Ontology, it's for realsies. And for those of you who've heard us talk, you know that term, so we can feel that eye inside of us. So when your eye looks to Violana, so she's in the male gaze or the friends are in each other's gaze. But there's a gaze where I place attention on you because I love you madly.

And it can be an erotic gaze in the sense of an erotic, sexual gaze, it can be the gaze of friendship. I remember once when I was teaching and I saw a friend of mine, Arthur, a friend of mine at the time, Arthur, looking over at his wife, Phyllis. And the gaze was so insanely beautiful. And the erotic sexual gaze is the placing of attention. And in the lineage, the divine is that suffuses all, is also the infinity of intimacy, the field of the intimate that's madly, erotically in love with all being.

So this eye of providence is very beautiful. And then there's the lecherous gaze. And then there's the gaze of control. There's so many different types of gazes. So this is big, and I want to just share.

Aubrey Marcus
Another aspect of gaze is, you know, being the watchful eye of the kingdom that I've been developing, whether it's the kingdom of on it, or the kingdom of fit for service, or the kingdom of my team, the podcast, or whatever it might be. What I find is when I turn the attention of the gaze, all things grow. It's like the sun that grows plants and flowers. Gorgeous. It actually, what grows is what's under the gaze.

And that which I'm not looking at may grow because there may be other eyes that are watching, but it won't grow in exactly the same way as that which I'm focusing on. So beautiful. So let's just. We'll just spend a second in our first theme, the Eye of Saron. So we've got the gaze that blooms reality.

Yes. The placing of attention that blooms reality. And then we have the placing of attention that withers. Right. And it's a withering gaze because it's a mocking gaze, because it's a lecherous gaze, or it's a controlling gaze, which is the surveillance gaze.

Right. So the flip side. And there's a beautiful text in the Solomon wisdom text, zelu Umad zeb bar alohim. Reality creates polarities, opposites. So there's the eye of Providence, the madly loving, erotic gaze, and then there's the eye of Sauron, which is the gaze which mocks, which undermines and which seeks to control.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And in surveillance, in this notion, and our colleague Shoshana Zuboff wrote this book, surveillance capitalism, which was about the eye of Sharon incarnate in the digital structure, where you think you're watching the computer, but actually the computer is watching you. Yeah, I mean, it's this complete reversal. And this eye of Sauron is omnipresent and seeks to become omniscient. I mean, Larry Page writes, Zuckerberg writes, sergey Brin writes, Eric Schmidt writes, we want to see everything. We want to literally write that.

We want to see everything and know everything about you. We want to infer from that information predictive capacity about what you're going to do in order to benevolently control you. And actually not because they're evil, because we want to avoid collapse, we want to avoid existential risk. It's the first order in Star wars. We want to create order, right, against the forces of chaos.

But actually, it's a totalitarianism that emerges, and we're afraid of this orwellian totalitarianism. And Orwell writes around the same time Tolkien does. But orwellian totalitarianism is Stalinism. Right? Is this overt dictatorship?

It's Putin and Russia. But what you're pointing to is far more insidious and far more frightening, which is a benevolent totalitarianism, which seems benevolent in quotation marks. You don't even see that it's watching you, but it actually watches everything, you know. Do you remember Sting's song? What was that in, like, 1982?

Every move you make, every breath you take. Yeah, it's a little creepy, actually. I'll be watching you. So it's a creepy song. He had just broken up with his wife.

He actually had a relationship with his neighbor who became his beloved, and he kind of retreated to the Caribbean. He kind of wrote the song late at night. And he wrote it as a creepy song. He wrote it as a song about kind of the obsessive lover with the withering gaze and about surveillance. And then he said, then people come up to him and say, I played that at my wedding.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually, the reason is. The reason people get confused is because there's two kinds of gaze, and the eye of Sauron is the eye of surveillance. Now, I just want to say one more thing, because this is also really important. Shoshana Zuboff also, and this is critical because these are the themes that come up in the book, Shoshana Zuboff and surveillance.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Capitalism also got it wrong because she doesn't actually understand that we live in a world that's completely interconnected, in which we actually have to try and track who's going to create a potential existential risk, which is not an atomic bomb that's emerging from a country with a national architecture that you can monitor. We actually do need, for safety, some sort of surveillance. Nick Boston writes on that in his 2019 se vulnerability hypothesis. But we need surveillance. That's meaning we need a watching.

We need a gaze that's suffused with value and with love. Yeah. Benevolent gaze. Because that's a big breakthrough to get that. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
Because what's happening is not only surveillance for the predictive capacity or the defensive capacity, it's a gaze that evokes a certain. It actually. It actually compels people to become like orcs, where they're just fiendishly masturbating to the most intensified pornography, where they're compulsively buying and shopping for some goods that they don't need. It's drawing them towards. It's a deeper and deeper pseudo eros.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
It's beautifully said. It's a gaze that emerges from these exponentially upgraded algorithms which, as you say, exponentially downgrade human beings. And the problem with that kind of pornography is that it ceases your attention, your gaze, based on its gaze of you. That doesn't actually give you what you truly desire. There's actually an algorithm organizing and controlling your desire so you can't actually get to your own unique desire, your own native desire, your own pure desire.

Because the gaze on you is used to control you and then to seize your own ability to place your attention in mad love. Because what is beautiful erosion? What is beautiful erotic sexuality? The placing of my attention on you with the purity of my desire. So all of this is the eye of Sauron.

Aubrey Marcus
And interesting, going with the orc concept. Let's think about orcs. One, they're androgynous. You don't see female and male orcs. So there's no love.

There's no actual Eros between. There's no clear Eros. There's no clear Eos. And there's maybe the dark eros of lustful rage and violence which we're seeing in the increased polarization which the algorithms, which the eyes is actually feeding. It's trying to feed us.

Exactly. The most radicalized thing that'll get us pitted against each other. That'll downgrade me to an orc. That'll downgrade you to an orc. And the other thing about an orc is I can't recall any of the orcs, even the Orc battle leaders, having a name.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
They don't have a name. And they never laugh. They never laugh. They never laugh. They never dance.

They never dance. There's no dance. They have no name. No name. Presumably no sex.

And presumably no sex. Right? And they're generated by Saruman. In other words, Saruman, who is actually the leader of the order that Gandalf is part of. So Gandalf actually, in the first movie, goes to him for advice.

Doesn't realize that he's been corrupted. That we actually can take heads of religious orders and heads of society. And actually they get corrupted by Sauron. And he goes to Saruman. And he realizes, and you realize through the movies that Saruman is generating the Orcs.

So the Tower of Isengard, which is in relationship to the Tower of Mordor are generating technologies. That's actually what's happening. There's this realization of technology emergent where the new technologies are generating the Orcs. So the orcs didn't exist before they're actually a new, degraded humanity that emerges from the technologies that are made possible by the eye of Sauron. And the parallel kind of pseudo eye.

Right? It's called the Palantir. It's a kind of miniature eye. The orb that's used by Saruman. So that's our first theme.

That's a big theme. And the way that these orcs are generated it's also showing that they're cutting down all of the trees. It's this extractive model of let's destroy the living down the breathing, living Gaia and make these kind of machine beings, these orcs that are just pure demiurge and pure violence. And we get. That's the second theme, is we get disconnected.

The other day, I don't remember who we were talking to but we were having conversation with us and I think someone else. And we were talking about this idea that, you know, when someone walks in nature and they're deeply connected to nature they become somewhat more trustworthy. And there's a line in the movie in which one of the trees. E v e s. How do you pronounce it?

Aubrey Marcus
The ents. The ents. E n t s. Right, ents. The ents.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Right. The ents. They say, the white wizard used to walk in my forests and we haven't seen him for such a long time. Right. And so Saruman used to be connected to nature.

And this disassociation from nature and from the living presence of nature radicalizes him towards evil. Yeah. There's a couple of things here. One is we're just getting started. We're just getting warmed up.

Aubrey Marcus
One of the things is it almost feels like that Saruman is the actual embodiment of an archonic energy an extra dimensional energy of Sarah archon has, in. Steiner's idea of the archon, right? This other side, in the Covenant. This other side, right. Some other discarnate energy that's actually driving and then corrupting people who are actually wielding the technology.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Saruman gets hijacked by Sauron. Right? Right. Saron is actually a king. Right.

Sauron's actually. He's a human being. Wa was. Was, right. And kind of to go through Sauron's stages.

He's a human being. He rises. Right. He develops. And maybe this is our third theme.

Our third theme is power and how power plays here because Saruman is corrupted and he's corrupted by power. And the relationship to power is maybe the third massive theme. What's our relationship to power? Before we get into power, there's one more idea that I just want to wrap up on the eye of Sauron. So one of the things that you.

And we'll get back to Saruman in power. Yes, we're going to get back. Power is the next stage. We're going to go to put Saruman at though. So we'll get back to that.

Go. Aya Saran. Ayasaron. So one of the things that you've talked about is sitra Accra literally translates to the turning of the face from the divine. Right.

Right. The other side. But the other side because a word Akher is as opposed to Panima's face. Akher is when I turn my back on you. Right.

So it's a turning. I've turned away. Yeah. And interestingly, there's a couple different types of evil. Right?

Aubrey Marcus
There's the evil where you're just not looking at it. And I think all of us in some way have experienced this type of, quote, evil where we just don't look at the things that we're doing. We're actually turning away from all of the different evil that exists in the world because maybe we feel like we can't do anything about it. Maybe it's too much to bear. It's the turning of the face from the truth.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Turning my face. But I haven't given you my back. But I haven't fully. But then the eye of Sauron is something different. It's intentionally intentional evil.

Aubrey Marcus
Right? Like, there is no idea that actually Sauron is doing this because he thinks that it's for the betterment of middle earth, that actually he's creating a more beautiful world where you could even argue that somebody, let's take the worst interpretation of Klaus Schwab. You would probably still argue like a bond villain or like Thanos even himself is like, I had to kill all these people. This is the cosmos. Thanos still has an altruistic motive.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And there's this Thanos complex we've been talking about for five years. And Schwab and Bf Skinner, we've talked about. Right. And the MIT media lab have that. Right.

Have that sense of we think we're being altruistic. Right. But Sauron's interesting because it's actually evil. It's intended malice, like it's intended mountain, like the destruction of life. It's anti life energy.

Okay? So this is big. Okay. And of course we'll. And this takes us into the power issue.

Okay, so, so important what you said. Let's just take this slow just so we can kind of think clearly and she should bless us.

So there's this moment where I turn my face but I haven't given you my back. But when I actually turn on and give you my back, it's because I'm looking in a different direction now. Yeah. And that's what you're pointing to. And at Sauron, the eye of Sauron is this experience of the ultimate pseudo Eros.

Meaning this experience of vast emptiness that is so infinitely painful that I cover it with some wild addiction. But the addiction to heroin or to book writing, right, or to, you know, any kind of acting out is all paltry in relationship to the addiction to power. And the addiction to power translates into its own sense of, you actually think it's Eros. And the turning away is I freed myself from everything. And I have this experience that I'm free.

I've thrown off all constraint, any constraints I've thrown off. I have the sense of that I'm totally free because I think there's no value in the world. So there's nothing to be aligned with. There's nothing to bind me. I'm bound to you, my friend.

I'm bound to my wife, KK. So I'm bound when there's love, when there's Eros, when there's value, when there's no Eros and no value, there's nothing to be bound to. And actually, the pseudo Eros is to break every attachment. Now, Sartre talks about that in being a nothingness. And Sartre, who writes this unbelievably beautiful book, being in nothingness, but gets too easily hijacked into.

Just like Nietzsche, who was gorgeous, got hijacked by Nazism, which Nazism was the sense we've thrown off every constraint and we're now merged with power itself. And that power itself is the ultimate elixir. So it's the precise shadow of the divine. The divine is the infinity of power. But the divine is also the infinity of intimacy.

So the infinity of power and the infinity of intimacy are inextricable. And the value of divinity is God is Eros. Reality is Eros. Reality is relationships. Reality is fellowship.

That's how we'll get to the fellowship of the ring. If I split power from intimacy, then what I've done is I've actually engaged in the utter dissociation and alienation of reality from its own nature. I've alienated power from intimacy. And that's Sauron. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And you explained so beautifully last night in our late night session. As we're preparing, Sauron invested the entirety of his power into an object which was a ring. And so as he invested his power into the ring, the one ring to rule them all, he separated his power. From actually his body, his own inherent nature. His own inherent nature, his body which you can't separate your body from the field of all that is right, because it lives in you as you and through you, the waters, the elemental beings, the air, you know, the cells, the bacteria, the food that you have to consume, you know, like you.

It's. As long as it's in the body, there's a built in safeguard. But if you invest power purely into the ring, the ring, an object that is eternal, can't be destroyed, doesn't need to breathe, doesn't need to be connected to the field. Which is why I think I was saying that Sauron's energy, he once was a man and that man may have been dark, but as the ring and as this discarnate being, it's the ultimate evil because it allows him to be completely separated from the field. It's pure power.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
It's pure power. Right? So he throws. Yes, he puts all of his energy into the ring which means that as you're unpacking and we were talking late last night, he's no longer, as you say, brother, beautifully. He's no longer participatory in the field.

He's not in the field of Eros. He's not in the field of value. And the ring, my precious. My precious, right? So precious means value, right.

Precious. A ring is you give to your beloved. Who do you give a ring to? To your beloved. And you say to the beloved.

Right? Let me put your finger, which is the phallus on the man or the woman? The phallus, into the ring, which is the yoni, which is. So the ring and the finger are always Tejeros gamos. It's always the merging of the masculine and feminine in whatever form.

Man, man, woman. Woman. Man, woman. But it's that heros gamus, it's the king and the queen. But then when the ring becomes by itself, you just have the ring and the ring is the ring of power.

And Sauron becomes, in the storyline, he disguises himself in the elf forge smithery. If we can make up a word where they're forging the rings, they're forging these other rings for the elves, the dwarves and the men. And he makes the one ring that binds them all, that rules them all. And he invests his power in that ring. So he pours all of his power into that ring.

To give it energy to dominate everyone. But all of a sudden, that power is in the ring and not in him. So the ring are his nukes. Yeah. Right?

You can feel with Putin today, right? He keeps referring to nuclear weapons. The nukes are, in this tragic way, part of his ring. But America may develop its own version of a ring, right? There's lots of versions.

Aubrey Marcus
I mean, we got plenty of nukes. We've got plenty of nukes, right? And I think one of the. This distribution of power. I mean, this is what our country is founded on.

There's, you know, the Congress, there's the Senate, there's the legislative branch, there's the judicial branch, there's the president branch. There's a distribution of power, and there's a distribution of power in the world. And I think that was the original idea of the distribution of the rings to the different species, nations. So there's one ring, but then secretly one ring rules them all. And you might say that's the finance system, which underneath all things, the deep state, which actually runs everything.

There's a lot of conspiracy ideas about that. I'm not going down that rabbit hole. But there. People are hypothesizing that there is a one ring that rules them all, and all the governments are just puppets. That would be the potential eye of Sauron.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Well, I would say two things. One is, I think the one ring that rules them all is not a cabal. Right? I don't think there's a cabal. I think that's a mistake.

I think the conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are looking for something real. What they realize is we don't get the storyline. There's something going on here. And conspiracy is conspire, like inspire.

What's the breath that's moving reality? What's the direction? What's the storyline? We've lost the narrative plot line. There's a sense we've lost the narrative plot line.

There's a sense that the public propagandist narrative plotline is not the accurate one. So let's try and find the deeper one. And that's legitimate in its motivation. But I think what's actually happening is far more insidious. What's actually happening is that the actual structure of reality itself, the storyline of reality, is a broken story.

It's a storyline not of Eros, but of win lose metrics. It's a storyline of success story governed by Winlow's metrics, that itself generates fragile and complicated systems. And when it's Winloo's metrics, all the way up and all the way down. When everyone's governed by anti Eros. Right?

When smeargle kills Diego in order to get the ring right, which is the Cain and Abel story reenacted we'll come back to that. So the conspiracy is not a cabal. A cabal we could handle. Now it's actually the field of anti value and it's the ring. Precious is paradoxically anti value and it's the field of anti value which is the reason we would like to get on our horse and charge.

Because that works. Right? And there's some gorgeous getting on the horse and charging scenes even in the face of hopelessness. When Aragon says to Theoden, you know, in movie two when it looks like Helm's Deep is about to fall it says, let's do one last charge. And of course, Gandalf comes in the last second and saves the day from one side.

And there's a whole. And who else? Who else saves the day there? And the army of the dead that Aragon has liberated. That's not in number two.

Aubrey Marcus
That's in number three. That's in three. That's in three. So that's a different save day. So they saved the day.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
But there's another army that saves the day in two, I think. Is it the Rohan riders? Rohan, right. The riders of Rohan. It's the riders of Rohan.

Right, right. So there's this real. So we like to charge, but actually.

And in the moment in which he's writing this trilogy, Tolkien, there are armies to charge. Yeah. Right. It's 1937 to 1949. We're in this new moment where it's not Hitler who you've got to take on on the western front and where Patton can roll through Rommel, if he's a brilliant general and heroism can take the day on the kind of battlefield we need.

Heroism. And the battlefield is just as real. But the battlefield is the revolution is that we need to step forward and tell a new story of value. If the precious is anti value and the academic conversation has deconstructed all value and said value's not real. And the.

The de facto position of postmodernity is the decoding of value. In other words, essentially the commodifications inherent in the economic structure of the win lose metrics essentially devalue anything. Everything's rolled over and everything's reduced to one kind of value, economic value. So no intrinsic value remains. Nothing that's immeasurable actually still has value.

So what we have to do is the revolutionists like revolution, is to tell a new story and a new story that's true of value. And that's what Tolkien does. It's interesting. What Tolkien does is he doesn't write a book on value theory, which needs to be done, and we're working on that. A book on first principles and first values is critical.

But this huge realization. And back to you. But this huge realization that blew me away, like, two years ago, I wake up in the morning and I realize, no, no, it's not enough to have first principles and first values. First principles and first values need to be embedded in a story of value. And that's what Lord of the Rings is.

It's a story. And one of these values that we need to rescue is actually the value of power. And this is one of. This is one of the things that I think has been really pervasive. People have seen the misuse and abuse of power.

Aubrey Marcus
And so you get Lord active, and. They'Ve made power into the devil. Yes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So people try to push away their power.

But. But what you really see in the substructure is that this is a way to disempower people while the real power actually seizes more and more control because it makes all of us impotent. And I make a post and trying to make an inspiring post about standing, and I have so many people who've bought into that, saying, like, it'll never matter. Heroes don't exist. It's all a bunch of bullshit.

Might as well just go get a piece of land and just let the world burn, right? They've been disempowered of their own potency and their own hope and their own heroism. And you see this as a subtle, insidious psyop of empire to get people allergic to power itself and their own power. This is wildly important. So the Lord act in, quote, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Is exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. Demonic power corrupts, abusive power corrupts. But we've identified power, we've interrogated power and identified it with its abusive form.

And in fact, there's a sacred, ethical obligation to be power hungry, to be power hungry for clarified power, to actually realize that if all the interior sciences called the field of value the divine, what we call in Cosmo rotic, the infinite, intimate atman, is Brahman Adonai Elohim mat the Geist. However you tell that story, the earth and sky called God. And we always say every time we podcast the God you don't believe in doesn't exist. Not that God, but that God, right? So if God is called the infinity of power, so how can you demonize power?

Clearly what that means is that power by its nature is sacred. And one of the places, by the way, anthro ontology, we feel that is if, let's say sexuality is getting a little flaccid and weak, a little moment of the play of power pours energy through it, because power is an incredible source of energy, aliveness. But at their core, clarified aliveness, not pseudo aliveness, but clarified aliveness, is goodness. And a child knows that goodness and aliveness are connected. So we need to actually re access our power, because to be a unique self, a phrase we've talked about a lot, I'm a unique self means I'm a unique incarnation of the phrase field of power.

And I'm held accountable for the power that I didn't use and I left on the table at a time right when the greatest battles of the world are being fought. Oof. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's something that should really be felt by everybody.

Aubrey Marcus
I just want to double click on this idea that every description of God, even the gods that you don't believe in, right, even if it's the christian capital r religious God, they will describe that God is omnipotent, omnipotent and potent, all powerful. And potency has an erotic cast to it, right? And so if you're actually describing the divine as all powerful, but then demonizing. All power, you're demonizing the divine. Exactly.

Do you not see the contradiction here right now? Paradoxically, where the religions themselves went wrong is they often got God as the infinity of power, and they didn't articulate clearly enough what we've made central in cosmotic humanism, the new story of value. God as the infinite, intimate, the infinity of intimacy. And we talked about that 20 minutes ago, the alienation of power and intimacy. And by the way, the same thing anthro ontologically.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Just use that word, drive everyone crazy. Meaning mysteries are within us. You know it in your body. If you're in sexing and there's an alienation between your play of power and your intimacy, then you're actually in the realm which is not sacred. But when your heart's wide open and your intimacy and your power are inextricably linked, then you're in the field of aliveness.

Now there's an allurement to power. People are allured to power and actually allured and allergic, allured and allergic at the same time. Gollum loves and hates the ring but notice Aragon refuses to put the ring on who else does? Gandalf refuses to put the ring on Legolas won't put the ring on so let's, again, we haven't mentioned the people Gandalf the prophet Gandalf the Grey Aragon, the king who's the hidden heir to the throne of Gondor who appears as a ranger he's called Rider and he's actually rejected his throne not just throwing his throne because he's afraid of power and he first meets Arwen, his future beloved she says, you have your broken blade why are you afraid of the past? And he says, I came from the same blood and he means the blood of Isildur, right?

His ancestor who actually kills Sauron originally cuts off his finger with the ring and because, as we said earlier Sauron is dependent on the ring he's given his power into the ring so Sauron disappears into the spirit world and then Isildur takes the ring and takes it for himself. So there's this sense Aragon's afraid of power. So Gimli, the dwarf, they're all afraid to put on the ring. It's only the Hobbits who have a more clarified relationship to power that they're not as allured by power only the Hobbits, right. Can actually undertake the quest which is wild yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
Which is interesting because we talked about they have a strong relationship to Eros not necessarily in the sexual that models the erotic but the Eros of the Shire is strong. Eros of the Shire is strong. There's dancing, there's music, there's fireworks. There's mischief. There's deep, deep friendship.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
There's allurement. They have six meals a day. They got six meals a day. Second breakfast, they got supper. And they're allured to reality.

Aubrey Marcus
They're allured to reality itself. So that becomes their protection, their buffer. They're so connected to their community. They're so connected to the field of Eros. And I think there may be some slight homoerotic tendencies in the Shire but.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
We bless Marian Pippen. We bless them for that. Amen. All of the gay. What is going on with merry and Pippen?

Right? Right. They're awesome. They're awesome. I mean, the Hobbits have this.

It's really. It's not a pre tragic innocence, actually. It's not a first innocence. They actually understand the world's complex. So there's kind of first innocence.

There's all the guilt of the world and then there's this ability to engage the goodness of everyday life at a level of second innocence and the Shire has a kind of second innocence a kind of beauty. And you have to protect the Shire actually Ranger which is Aragon's job. His name is Strider. Strider. Strider.

Strider. He protects the Shire. So let's go back. Let's see if we can get this. So the Hobbits.

So on our theme of power the Hobbits have a different relationship to power. Not all the Hobbits because Smeagol is the name of the Hobbit who actually kills Diego. Right. His relative. And takes the ring so the Hobbits can be corrupted and he becomes Gollum.

Aubrey Marcus
And Bilbo had a tough time and. Bilbo had a tough time at that very end. That scene we saw just before he podcasted Bilbo at the very end of his before he's going to the undying land said what did happen to that ring? And he's almost taken by. I very much would have liked to touch it just one more time.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And he tries to take it right in the first movie from Frodo and he wants it. So the ring is powerful. And Gandalf refuses to put it on as we said. And Aragorn refuses to put it on. And Legolas and Gimlion Boromir who's the son of Denethor who's the steward of.

He's the steward of Gondor. Because Aragon hasn't come back. Boromir, his son, who's a beautiful man actually gets corrupted and tries to steal the ring redeems himself, you know by saving merry and Pippin from the Orcs. So the Ring is powerful. And so how do we.

How do we. How do we respond to the allurement of the Ring? To the allurement of power? And I had this whisper that I shared with you the other day when we were. We were walking and we said, it will.

It'll come up at a certain moment. It just came up in my mind right now. Right. I had this whisper and I was talking to your beloved vi about it when we were talking in holy of holies.

She said it so clearly. And I think this is the response to the allurement of power in its unclarified form. In its broken form which is what's the one thing we're ever held accountable for? What's the one thing. The only thing that should ever matter to us is are we alluring to God?

Are we alluring to God? Would God want to smell me? Would God want to taste me. Right. And you can actually feel it in the words.

Right. It just cuts through everything. Am I alluring to God? And since she whispered that to me, like, two weeks ago, I just. In every act I do, I say, wow, is this alluring to God?

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah. And one of the things that immediately came to me when you said that is, is God alluring to you? And on that very same walk that we were walking, I watched you go by a tree that was blooming with some kind of Vermont version of a honeysuckle. I don't know what it is. It's purple.

It has a beautiful fragrance. Smell. And you just stopped the walk in the middle of an intense conversation, as we always have, and you just, like, smell these. Smell these flowers, right. So in that same way, your allurement to God, as expressed through these purple vermontean honeysuckles is also what makes you alluring to God.

It's like this bilateral. Bilateral relationship. You speak rather beautiful words. Right? It's so beautiful.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Right? In other words, we've talked many times about this notion of unique self, right? And everyone listening. If you've listened to us, you know exactly the next 10 seconds. Ten second recapitulation.

Separate self. I'm a skin encapsulated ego. No, that's not exactly true. Albert Einstein. Separateness is the optical delusion of consciousness.

Deeper sense of self, true self. I'm part of the field of value, the field of eros, even deeper. Unique self. And that's what we've written about. I've spent my life writing about it.

Unique self. I'm a discrete and unique expression of the field. Now, let's bring this into Lord of the Rings show. I'm a unique expression of power. I'm a unique configuration of power.

Aubrey is a unique configuration of power. Power is a quality of eros. And I'm also a unique set of allurements. And to be a unique self is to clarify my allurements and to follow them. My allurements are not the opposite of ethos.

My allurements guide me to my unique ethos. And when I clarify my allurements, when I know which flowers to smell and how to inhale them deeply, I become alluring to God. And it's very beautiful. And so Aubrey's set of allurements are not Mark's. Now, we have overlapping allurements, as we should, because we're part of.

We're playing unique instruments in the symphony, but it's all music. But yet there's an allurement which is Aubrey's allurements that create a new fragrance called Aubrey. It's Aubrey Ness. And that fragrance never existed before. And part of the reason people come and listen to your podcast is not just because you say good things, right?

Super smart, dude. Yeah, you smart dude. But that's not quite why they come. My guesses, they come because. Oh, Auburnis.

Yeah, that's beautiful, right? I trust that. I can feel that. And that's beautiful. And so the one question I ever want to ask myself is, am I alluring to God?

And if I'm not asking myself that question, then that's the ultimate erotic question. When I'm not in Eros, then pseudo Eros has its way with me. And then the allurement to power is almost impossible to resist. All right, so we've established the rise of Sauron and Saruman, the two towers, and we've established how there's a correlation to what's happening in our own world with what was happening there. Although it's a little bit different because there's no armies to charge against.

Aubrey Marcus
It's actually all Sauron. It's all like, underneath the surface structure. And these two towers, just these two towers, relates back to what you said about the orcs. There's just phallus. It's toxic maxillon, there's a toxic masculine.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
There's no feminine. There's no feminine orcs, she said. So you basically have these two phalluses. But it's not the beauty of homoerotic love. So you have in very beautifully, you've got Mary and Pippin, who are one male dyad who are homoerotic.

Whether they're actively homoerotic in the sense of the sexual sense, is irrelevant. It's more like David and Jonathan, right? In the Bible, where there's always scholarship which tries to figure out were they sleeping together or not. That's not the issue. The issue is David and Jonathan and loved each other, and Mary and Pippin love each other.

It's this beautiful homoerotic relationship you've got. Of course, Sam and Frodo. Mary's at the bottom.

I'm just going to keep going here. I'm just keeping going here. Right? And then you've got this other contra homoerotic relationship which is degraded, which is between sarin and saruman. The names are even similar.

It's the two towers. And the two towers are this tragedy. It's that which is the transformation of the Migdal, which is a tower becomes Magdalene, it becomes love. But the tower by itself, is a phallus. And the phalluses don't touch each other.

There's these two phalluses of Sauron and Saruman which don't love each other. There's never any conversation between Sauron and Saruman. Right? It's this very, very degraded, brutal relationship which is the opposite of Salmon Frodo and the opposite of Marion Pippin. So you've got these models of relationship which are very beautiful.

And on the side of value, you have these beautiful women. You have Galadriel. You have Ewen, the daughter of Theoden. Right? The king of Rohan.

Of course. You have Arwen. Right? You have Rosie Cotton, who Sam is madly in love with. You've got these very powerful and beautiful women who are the key figures.

It's Galadriel who goes to Elrond and says, the elves should honor their pact with men. And the elves go to helms deep because of Galadriel. Arwen is the one who goes to her father and says, reforge Narsil the sword and bring it to Aragon. So you've got this very beautiful, very beautiful male male relationships. Very beautiful.

Harris, gamus. Men. Women. And then you just have a brutal, dissociated, non brotherhood men with upright phalluses without any feminine. The Orcs.

Without any feminine. On the other side, this play, right. These two towers. There's an interesting. And again, I want to get to how the rise of these towers then actually creates the fellowship.

Aubrey Marcus
Without the two towers, there wouldn't have been a fellowship. All of these people who didn't normally get along wouldn't have gotten along. The elves and the Dwarves, they wouldn't have gotten together without that. I want to get to that, but I want to talk. And again, the names are escaping me.

But I think it's the king of Rohan that's been corrupted by Theoden. Theoden? Yeah, that's been corrupted by Saruman. No, Theoden was the king of Gondor. No, no, Theoden is the king of Rohan.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Okay. Okay. Right. And then. And then Gondor has a steward.

Denethor. Denethor, got it. Okay. So Theoden, who is. He was corrupted then.

Aubrey Marcus
And he has a lackey, right? And the lackey was madly in love with the princess. With the princess. And the lackey is being controlled by Saruman. The lackey is enticed by Saruman in a way.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Wormtongue. So Wormtongue and Wormtongue. So the way that Saruman controls him is. Wormtongue is lecherously interested in the princess. The lecherous gaze, the lecherous gaze on the princess.

Aubrey Marcus
And the princess's brother, the rider of Rohan notices it and is like, I see you always looking at my fucking. Sister, Eomeir, who's Eowyn's brother, right? And it's like you see you looking at my sister, motherfucker. And I see you whispering in the king's ear and calls him out on it. But he still has the power of Saruman behind him.

But it's this that's another type of relationship where you see that actually one of the things that can compel you to evil is this feeling like I am not a good enough man to actually have the goddess love me. I'm not worthy. So I need to capture the goddess through nefarious, insidious means and control her through sheer power. Absolutely. And rape, basically.

Like it would be rape if Wormtongue got with Iowan. If Wormtongue got with Eowyn, it would be rape. And this notion I want to go to, the first thing you said, like three good things that each we could talk about were so beautiful forever. But let's go to the middle one. Just cause we gotta pick one, right?

Dr. Mark Gaffney
So you said, I dont feel Im worthy to actually merit the goddess. So if someone gives. So I remembered it flashed into my mind as you said it, the first movie about greed that swept America with Michael Douglas. Wall street. And Michael Douglas says greed is good.

And Michael Douglas has an apprentice. And the way he gets the apprentice to cross the line into all sorts of ethical violation is he sets him up with a woman that he thinks is just out of his class. He could never get her. He would never deserve her. And its a much more hip and funny and sophisticated notion.

But its the same notion. The guy doesnt believe that I deserve the goddess. I can get the goddess. And by the way, thats one of the places the goddess has to take responsibility. Its one of the places that, just like the objective gaze, which only objectifies of the masculine and which looks at the body of the woman and not the soul of the woman, there's a feminine gaze that objectifies and looks at the body of the car that the man's driving and not the man, which then makes the man feel, wow, I'm not worthy unless I make a certain amount of money.

And unless I'm have my phallus rising in a particular way, and I'm on a particular kind of horse, I'm not worthy. And part of the sacred obligation of the new feminine, which has to take responsibility for itself. The feminine rising is to actually shift the nature of the feminine gaze. Just like the masculine has to shift the nature of the masculine gaze. I mean, I mean, here's like, let's get personal for a second, right?

Now. Let's say you were super poor. You know what I mean? Like, okay, so that's. Will I get the same woman?

That's a crazy thing. Now, the truth is, you would, because you happen to be beautiful. So you're beauty and your depth. And I say that sincerely. You have enormous beauty and depth.

You actually would. Right? But actually, most people wouldn't, right? You can get a great woman with depth and laughter. And I at least laugh.

Well, so I love to laugh. So I got the best woman ever, other than your best woman for you. But in other words, and I'm dancing around the serious history because it's actually so serious. No doubt. And this plays out in other movies of culture, like Scarface, the famous line, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the wall, right?

And women become trophies. But it's because the feminine allows for it. And sometimes it's not even a trophy. Sometimes there's a genuine. Actually, you could potentially call it a pseudo allurement.

Aubrey Marcus
You could call it an unclarified allurement. But there is an allurement to power. Just like there's an allurement to well shaped breasts that appear to a man a particular way. So the clarification of the male gaze and the feminine gaze is a very big deal. And what you're pointing to is that Saruman uses the unworthiness in Wormtongue to bring him Ewen, the king's daughter, which he feels, in your words, he could never be worthy of.

Not even close. Not even close. And that's actually becomes the hook and bait, just like we use hook and bait in culture today to actually shift our gaze right away from what's really happening. And, you know, this is a big deal. There's another example I want to bring up, which is, I know, personal to your family, because I know that you had family that was affected in the Holocaust.

But you imagine, you know, that Hitler, who had, you know, certain sexual malformities and dysfunctions. And you can imagine that actually, if he'd had the blessing of a loving goddess, someone who was able to see beyond and everything that was unworthy and weak and broken in him, he may not have become Hitler, but in his own unworthiness and in his own inability to actually express his eros, he literally, as Sauron fucked the world in the worst way. When your sense of fuck is shamed, then you go in the worst way, right, to fuck the world. And your point about Hitler and the entire nazi elite was they didn't celebrate kink. They actually embraced degraded forms as kink, as degradation.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And their arousal was that they were embracing what they thought was degradation. Instead of actually celebrating unique and gorgeous patterns of desire. They merged their own patterns of desire with sadism because they were actually shamed by their own desires. Whether it was their own homosexuality, which could have been a beautiful and holy desire. They didn't have a holy sense of homoeroticism like in the David and Jonathan or what we've labeled as the Marion Pip.

And we're gonna get in a lot of trouble for that. Right. But in other words, they didn't have it. They actually degraded their own desire. They shamed their own fuck.

And their intense sense of shame, right. Clearly merged with a thousand other factors and generated intense evil. I mean, there's no. Almost no words for it. I mean, we're in the realm of just like, of.

You can feel it tingling on your body, but what you're pointing to is that some sense of intense shame right. Around their own sense of desire. Yeah. Right. Was at the root of evil.

And one of the things you and I and KK talk about in the phenomenology is shame as the root of all evil. And when we say shame is root of all evil, we mean toxic shame. Yeah. And so you're pointing to such an extreme example of it. Right.

Aubrey Marcus
It occurs to me, too. I spent some time in Berlin, and they have one of the most open kink scenes in the whole world, which. Is like a fixing of Nazi. Which is a fixing. It's like a spoon of Nazi.

It's just fully celebrated fixing of Nazism in all the ways you can go to all of these clubs where wild, wild, kinky things are happening all over the place. And the society is very kind of. It's very peaceful. There's a deep shalom in Germany that you feel now, because actually all of that's been brought forward in national surveys. I saw national surveys.

Germany had the highest reported rate of homosexuality. It's almost like shame has been lifted from sexuality in Germany. I think it was, like, above 10%. Whereas it doesn't mean that there is more homosexuals, but their ability to actually acknowledge themselves as such, because shame in that category has been lifted. Because perhaps it was necessary as the Tikkun of Nazism.

It's an interesting phenomenon. That's happened in Germany, where that liberation has actually created what feels, when I feel Germany like, oh, this is not a bellicose society.

There's peace here. Yeah. No, that's a big conversation and beautiful insight. I think just like the United States, there was a moment when shame lifted. There was a moment of sexual liberation.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
There was a moment of liberation in Germany. And I think both in the United States and Germany, the veil of shame has. Has again fallen deeply. Not in a kind of world war two way, but in a sense that in Germany and in the United States, in the general western world, theres no narrative of desire. So we liberated sexuality from the sex negative narrative of the churches and from the degraded narratives, lets say in Germany, of Nazism.

But Germany hasn't articulated, nor has the United States. And it's one of the things we're working on, an actual narrative of desire which actually understands, actually, the dignity of desire as part of the field of divine Eros. But that's a different conversation. That's a different conversation. All right, so let's go back to.

Back to Lord of the Rings. Back to Lord of the Rings. The fellowship of the Ring, which was drawn together by the intensification of existential threat. And that's where we are. This is actually a similar theme to what happened in Guardians of the galaxy.

Aubrey Marcus
Is like. Like there's some gnarly shit going on. And so now we need to come together and stand. We asked the question in our guardians conversation. How could you not be a guardian of the Galaxy?

And asking this same question. How could you not join in the fellowship of the Ring at a time like this? Right? I mean, it's incredible. The fellowship of the Ring.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
It's an incredible scene. Yeah. The fellow for the scene happens in which Elrond, they realize that the ring needs to be. The elves have met with the dwarves and men that the ring can only be dissolved. And we have to talk about why that's true.

Can only be dissolved in Mount Doom, which is the place from which it emerged. And someone needs to bring the Ring to Mount Doom. And Legolas Gimli, they realize they can't do it. And then Frodo steps forward. This is his moment of choice.

He chooses his destiny. Everybody's arguing amongst themselves. Everyone's arguing among themselves, right? They're also arguing. And maybe we'll see the scene in a second.

And Frodo says, I'll bring the Ring. And everyone recognizes, wow, maybe only a Hobbit can. And then Gimli says, you have my axe and Legolas, you have my bow. And Aragon, you have my sword. And then Merry and Pippin, we're coming.

And Sam says, of course I'm coming. And Gandalf is coming. And then Boromir, who's the son of the steward of Gondor, he says, okay, I'm there. Those are the nine. That's the fellowship of the Ring.

They come together, and Elrond the Elf declares, this is the fellowship of the Ring. And everything depends. There's this moment we realize. Everything depends on the fellowship of the Ring. And so the fellowship of the Ring stands against anti value.

So in other. The Ring of power is anti value. It's complete alienation. Sauron and Saruman don't ever even see each other. It's these dissociated, toxic phalluses, not the sacred phallus.

And it's the Orcs. It's everything that we've described. It's this place in which anti value becomes its own eros. It's liberated from any constraint of intrinsic value. So it's seduced by the one experience that remains, which is power.

And so, what stands against the ring? The fellowship of. And fellowship means, right, the ring is put on a finger, right? The phallus and the yoni meet. There's a heros, gamos and there's this fellowship between these nine, this band, these brothers, these beautiful people who say, we're the fellowship of the Ring.

We've come together at this time. And the fate of middle earth, the fate of the world depends on us. And that binds us in this unimaginable way, as you say. Much like the Guardians of the Galaxy. In such a different crowd, right?

To different crowd, but each with their own traumas, like we noticed in the Guardians. But it's much more hidden in the Guardians. It's. You know, it's 50 years later, 60 years later, 70 years later there's this obvious group of traumatized heroes. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And we're more trauma informed. We're more trauma informed. So it weaves into our story. I mean, even though the movies were recently in our. In the two thousands, right?

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Peter Jackson Reshot, reshot them. But it's still based on. Based on Tolkien, who wrote him a lot earlier. But I think now we understand the nature of trauma. So even Gimli, who very well could and should have been traumatized by the decimation of his dwarf community.

Aubrey Marcus
Dwarf community in the mines. And also by their own greed digging too deep. And Balrog and the goblins and the whole fucking thing. You know, he doesn't really express his trauma. Legolas is largely free of it.

You know, they don't have the trauma information that we have. And even the concept of PTSD from soldiers coming back from World War Two was not really the same concept as we started to understand post Vietnam war. And then, of course, it's worse now than it's ever been. As far as, if you measure it by the amount of suicides and active duty soldiers, it's up to, like, 40 a day. I mean, it's really this gnarly situation that we're facing right now where trauma is actually coming to the forefront.

But it's interesting. It's there, but it's just kind of like an earlier understanding. Earlier. And there's this also yes, yes and yes and yes and no, bud, just an ant. And there's also a sense that it's before the therapeutic culture.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And the therapeutic culture both brings great bombs, the bombs of therapy, but it also brings great bane, which is freeing the person from the obligation to put it together. Clean up your room, chart your direction, figure it out, take responsibility. So we mock that notion of be a man because. What do you mean? Men don't cry.

But men do cry. But you can cry beautifully. And also be a man. And be a man means be a man, be a woman, be a human being means that we hold our pain, we feel the pain, we cry the tears, and we take responsibility, and we step in. And that's actually part of the critique we saw when we read guardians of the Galaxy.

Part of its critique of the trauma culture was the failure to take responsibility to be guardians of the galaxy, because I'm too lost in my trauma. And here in the Lord of the Rings, you've got this fellowship of the Ring who clearly each have their stories, and yet. And yet they work them, and they come together. And the thread line of the movies is, when is the fellowship threatened? When the fellowship is threatened, then the Ring will not make it to Mordor.

And if the ring doesn't make it to Mordor, then the eye of Sauron wins. And so it's the love relationships, and it's the depth between Sam and Frodo, who struggle. They struggle. And there's moments in which Golem, Sam, Smeagol, Golam, my precious, succeeds in splitting between Sam and Frodo and when deceit actually wins. And there's moments when Legolas wants to give up, but it's those moments where they actually find each other.

There's that great scene in. What is it? In episode three as they're at the gates of Mordor and Aragon has decided let's attack Mordor to take the Eye of Sharon away from Sam and Frodo. And he gives this incredible speech. This is an incredible scene where there he is.

Aragon. Yeah, they're about to attack. They're about to attack Mordor. They actually can't win. They know they can't win.

And right before he gives the speech is it Legolas? Gimli the dwarf says to Legolas, I never thought I'd die fighting next to an elf. And then Legolas says, ah, but you could die fighting next to a friend. So they know that this is a right. And then he says, right.

It is not this day that the fellowship falls. Yeah. It is not this day that the. Kurds may be wolves in broken shields someday in the future but not this day. It is not this day.

And that is Aragon. Aragon the king and this is this new theme. The king and the king and the king and the queen who represent hope they're holding the vision of hope. And when Arwen and Aragon meet so it's king and queen. She's of the elves.

She can be immortal. She gives him the even star. And the even star is, of course, as we know, the symbol of the goddess. And it's the symbol of their love. And it's the symbol of, in the hebrew lineage, Ayeleta Shachar.

The morning Star, which is the goddess. Is she. So she gives him she. Yeah. There's a whole interesting rabbit hole about the morning star which is Venus, which is Astarte.

Venus. She, which is Venus which then gets recast as Lucifer. The morning star. There's a whole rabbit hole. That's right.

Because the morning star, which is the even star and we'll see in these two scenes is not just love. It's Eros. Love, fuck desire. It's all of it. It's shiastarte.

So when you dissociate the full rawness of that from the depth of Eros and love so then it does it go Lucifer. That's the play. Right? So you've got Arwen and Aragon. He's looking at the broken sword, Narciel, which is the sword of his ancestors which has been broken.

Aubrey Marcus
Excalibur, if you will. Excalibur, if you will. And this is the sword that actually didn't ultimately triumph. That actually his ancestors, Isildur who cuts the ring finger with the ring off of Sauron in the inn keeps the ring gets blinded by its power. And so Aragon refuses his destiny as the heir to the throne of Gondor because he says, same blood, same weakness.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And she calls him, she's Arwen. She's the queen. She calls him. She calls him to his kingship. She calls him to his greatness.

She says, the shadow doesn't fall on you and me. That we have this space that has enormous power. And she says, I'm willing to forsake. I swore. I don't want to live alone forever.

I want to live one life one mortal life with you. And I give you the gift of my immortality to be your queen. And she gives some dependent which is the symbol of her immortality and of her love and of her eros and desire and gives him the even star. What occurs to me is we just had this conversation about how a whole mate relationship is what allows you to step into eternal love because it binds you to the field of love itself. And so while she's giving up the immortality of her actual flesh beautiful.

Aubrey Marcus
She's actually stepping into the immortality of love because the eternity of love because. She steps in it's beautiful. And this is. I mean, and your intuition is gorgeous. This is the model of what we called in that dialogue.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
I don't even know if we published it yet. But the homemate relationship which is they're sharing and participating in the field of Eros together and they call each other in the field. And that's the thing. And it doesn't really matter who's the king and who's the queen and which relationship it can move between man and woman. But whole mates, the king and queen wholemates means I'm not just a local love.

I'm a king and queen. And king and queen means we have a mission, we have a vision, we have a gift. We have a devotion to the larger whole. But I can't hold that devotion if I'm not called. And I need my beloved to call me I need my beloved.

No one can call themselves we need to be called. We need to call each other. And in the fellowship of the ring they're calling each other. But there's these inner crucial nodes of evolutionary partnership of homemade partnership in which the beloveds call each other. So the beloveds like neo and Trinity in the matrix the beloveds are not only local love their local love, their Eros, their fuck.

Their desire is what gives them the potency, your word to call each other when we get lost in and ab. We all get lost. We all get lost. And who calls us? And I mean, if you would ask me if someone would ask me, you know, if someone would ask you, you know, you're with your.

Your community at fit for service, and I'm sure the question comes up, how do I. How do I know who to pick? All right? How do I know who to choose? Because it's no longer, you know, role mate, where we viscerally need each other to survive.

Aubrey Marcus
Right? I've got to choose. So I would say I choose someone who I trust will call me when I get lost. Like, wow. Yeah.

Will draw me into my potential. Will draw me into my kingship, my mahout. That's the. That's why, Lana, for me, my malhot, my kingship. I remember when we first were starting to open to potentially having a romantic relationship.

I remember a moment where we went out dancing, and we just went out dancing, and it was actually. I've told this story before on different podcasts, but it was actually Cisco's, the thong song that was playing in the dance hall. And it's a grimy dance hall on the east side in Austin, a place called Volstead. So we're dancing in Volstead, and we're, you know, this was, like, really the first date that we were going on, but there were still boundaries within that date because it was, like, there was still entanglements that were still. So we weren't kissing.

We just went out dancing. That was it. And I just stopped. And I, like, broke down in tears, and I just. I couldn't stop crying.

And she thought I was, like, doing a really bad dance move because I was heaving into my own sobs, and I couldn't stop crying because I realized, like, the man that I could become if I had a love like violanas. I saw it. I just felt it. I was like. And I told her.

I was like, I feel now like the man that I can become with your love. And I feel that without that, I'll never be able to reach the potential of who I'm capable of being. That's the king and queen, right? And it's so gorgeous in it. We've taken relationship, in some sense, to its lowest common denominator, which is necessary sometimes and noble.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Right? What we call role mates. We need each other to survive and is beautiful. Or to just romantic love for its own sense of personal fulfillment. Soul mates, which has enormous value.

But that's not king and queen. And if we're talking about the democratization of greatness, we're talking about the democratization of royalty, which means that each of us, in our own way, are in some way, king or queen, meaning in some way, we participate in the field of eros and power, and we affect the entire field. That's what a king does. A king affects the entire field, and the king experiences the pleasure of power. If you had asked me, why did Barack Obama run for office?

And I'm not going to say Donald Trump, because everyone will say he was just running for power. Well, Barack Obama was running for power. He was running for the pleasure of power. And when we talk about it, it's a different podcast and a different book. When we talk about power, there's six levels of power, and the highest level of power is the pleasure of power, which is the pleasure of impact, which is the pleasure of knowing that evolution is moving through me and I affect the entire thing, which is actually an evolutionary expression of the lineage's realization that every human being is actually royalty.

It's why we're attracted to royalty. Why we're attracted to royalty. They just did the coronation of Charles, and there's a scepter and there's an orb and there's the horses. I don't know where they keep those horses when they're not doing a coronation, right? But all of a sudden, the entire world watches because there's this reminder of.

Aubrey Marcus
Something I didn't watch. Didn't watch because I think it's a fucking circus. Right? But it's a circus because we've exiled royalty to those two people, to a caricature. It's a circus because actually every person is fit for service, in your language.

And there for service is fit for royalty. Exactly. And there are potential kings that can rise. I mean, I believe that's why. I mean, and I mention it frequently, but that's why I believe Bobby Kennedy can be that king.

It can be the return of the king. And that coronation, if that happens, I'll be ready to watch. Join the fears in my eyes. Exactly. I'm joining the fellowship now as best I can, calling as many people together, because I see it.

And of course, I've got to convince people that the towers are rising. A lot of people are like, ah, no, it's fine. Pandemic's over, we're good, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is important. This is important.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And we talked about this when we talked about guardians of the Galaxy. I remember that this came up also, when we say everyone's a king, we don't mean that democratization of greatness doesn't mean that everyone has the same quality of greatness. I want to really emphasize that it's not a leveling of differences. Difference or uniqueness is inherent to cosmos. So, for example, you know our friend Aaron, right?

You know, I mean, I'm obviously. I have a much better football arm than him. No, clearly. Clearly, right? As a matter of fact, they wanted me for the quarterback.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah, the jets. He was second choice, man. Yeah, I know. I know. It's crazy, right?

Dr. Mark Gaffney
So, of course. That's just so absurd. Right? So I don't say to myself, man, why am I not quarterback of an NFL team? Thought never occurred to me.

Right? It's not. It's not my destiny. It's not my kingship. It's brother Aaron's.

Right. And so when you actually get that. So I don't need to. I don't need to become king. By leveling differences.

Bobby Kennedy should run for president. Yup. Not my job in this incarnation. Right. My job is to write a new story of value to evolve the source code.

Good job. Let's do it together.

Aubrey Marcus
And there is a democratization, as you were mentioning, of king and queen and everyone's royalty. And I think the question is, which is a question that's actually posed in both the fellowship of the Ring series and the Lord of the Rings series. And it's also really, really crystallized in the king Arthur, the guy Richie, King Arthur, where the mage, the priestess, the galadriel of that story they just call the mage when Arthur is trying to grab Excalibur, which is a symbol of his acceptance as Arthur, his actual willingness. To wield the power of the king, which is Narsiel. Right, right.

Which is Narsiel in this movie, which is also what Aragon doesn't want to grab but doesn't want to hold the sword and claim his kingdom. And until Arwen takes that broken sword and reforges it for him. Yeah, the goddess draws him towards it, just like the mage draws Arthur towards actually holding the sword. But she also says, don't worry, everybody looks away. Everybody looks away.

And there's this kind of, like. I loved when she said that. Tell me what. Tell me. Tell me how you're reading that.

So what I'm reading there is. He's. He's playing with Excalibur in. In like a stream, right? Right.

And he's trying to grab it, but it's. It's. The power is too much. He. He doesn't feel like he can hold it.

Maybe he doesn't feel like he's worthy. Maybe he doesn't feel like he deserves it. Whatever is going on in his own psychodrama is not revealed but for some reason he's not willing to seize his power. And she sees that from a higher perspective the Galadriel priestess goddess perspective as she looking at him and says, don't worry, everybody looks away. Everybody looks away at some point which is basically saying everybody looks away from their own kingship, their own queenship, their own royalty.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Beautiful. At some point. And it's okay. It's okay that you're looking away. One day you won't look away.

Aubrey Marcus
And she has the faith that he will grab the sword but she also gives him the freedom to say, ah, you're not a king. If you were a real king, you would have grabbed that sword already and we'd be charging you know, we'd be charging against Mordred already by now. Europe, you know, give. Put that sword back in the fucking lake. You know what I mean?

He actually tries to throw it back in the lake like. But it's like it's this understanding from the goddess and this compassion from the goddess that says, I know, I know. I know, sweetheart. Everybody looks away. But you're still a king.

And that's a message to everybody listening. Like, we all look away. I've looked away. You've looked away, I'm sure at certain points and said, let me just throw the sword back in the lake. Let me give up my royalty and just be, you know, an ordinary an ordinary citizen just doing my thing, blah blah blah.

But there's a way that we can actually not look away and actualize our destiny as one of the fellowship, one of the riders of Rohan, whatever our role may be. Even the young children at helms deep are holding swords who are too young to wield a sword. And the king does a beautiful thing there which is calling these boys into at least their warrior version of their king. The juvenile version of the king which is to claim their warrior. And he grabs one sword from a boy who is totally scared.

Of course he's totally scared. He's like twelve and he feels the sword and it's the emergent king. He feels the sword and he wields it around. He says, this is a good sword. Yeah, Aragon, right?

Aragon says this is a good sword. Yeah. And then the boy holds a sword and the king just told him this is a good sword. And Aragon's the king. Yeah, he is the king.

He hasn't fully claimed it yet, but he's not. That's Helm's deep. He's not quite there yet. Not quite there yet. But there's this beautiful act of kingship, of Malchut, of kingship, where he says to the boy, this is a good sword just to give him the courage.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Yes, this is the moment that Aragon calls the boy. And we all look away, and then we all have this moment where we can turn towards again and actually claim that sword and claim our royalty. And this is very important to understand that this is not a psychological idea. This is not a nice story we tell ourselves. It's actually my true nature.

My true nature is that I quite literally participate in the field. The field. I live in an intimate universe, but the intimate universe, quite literally, metaphysically, structurally, scientifically, lives in mechanical. And every move I make, every breath I take affects the entire field. And actually, I won't be filled with joy until I claim my power.

And as long as I'm not willing to say, I'm willing to play a larger game, I'm willing to participate in the evolution of love. I actually won't be in joy because, I mean, they say in Lord of the Rings, the great battle, the greatest battle of reality is shaping up. So we're in that moment. And in that moment, the difference is, will I claim my pace? Will I actually step out of the ordinary and take my seat at the table of history?

Or will I spend all my time engaging my trauma and not let my trauma transform me into my greatness? And we need someone to call us. I wonder. I wonder if one of the reasons why, I mean, there's people right now, and we're friends with some of these people, right? You know, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Zack Stein, they're beating the war drum.

Aubrey Marcus
And there's lots of people who are doing this, beating the war drum, saying, like, listen, y'all, like, this is the time. This is the time. But so many people don't want to look at it. And I think one of the reasons why they don't want to look at it is because they realize if they look at it, they have to actually step into their own kingship. They have to actually, they ha.

They have to. That. This is part of the looking away. Part of the looking away is looking away from the threats that are actually coming. So if you actually look at it, it's going to draw forth.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
It creates power, right? It creates and just to. Right. So Zach, who is my dear friend, student, colleague, interlocutor, and the co chair of the center, and Daniel, who's deeply involved with this at the center, and you've stepped in as actually the board chair at the center. So the four of us are actually working together.

And then you're working in the kind of the kingdom, Vabri, in other fields, in beautiful fields, and we're all kind of coming together, and we're saying this very, very difficult thing. We're saying that this is the moment of destiny, and it's a much more dramatic moment of destiny even than Tolkien is pointing to, because Tolkien is at the moment of the nuclear bomb. He's the moment of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is set off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as he's finishing lord of the Rings. And so this is the first moment where we realize our unimaginable power, exponential power, and we realize we don't have a story equal to our power.

But we're in a moment now which is unimaginably different. We're in a moment in which we have not nation controlled atomic power. We have exponential technology, which creates exponential risk. We have global civilizations that have all fallen, and now global civilizations and rogue state actors are actually armed with existential risk technologies, and everyone's trying to fix the infrastructure and fix the social structure, which are really, really important. Create new laws, create new safeguards, create surveillance.

And what we're saying together as the fellowship of the ring. Right? And in other words, just to, if I can, with permission, and you and me and Daniel and Zach and others with us, and, you know, we're in the fellowship of the ring together. That's actually how we wake up in the morning. Not in a grandiose way.

The fellowship of the ring is not grandiose. It's just what is. What we're saying is that at this moment, as we're poised between utopia and dystopia, we can't turn away, and we actually have to be kings and queens together and respond. And the response has to be to tell a new story and to tell a new story of value. So Tolkien writes a story.

That's what he does. But Tolkien avoids how you actually solve the issue of value. He just assumes christian value, like his friend Cs Lewis did sitting in Oxford. They just assumed, okay, let's go. Christianity, mere Christianity, that's not going to work.

That move's not going to work. We have to actually articulate a new vision of value, and that which unites us is greater than that which divides us. A world spirituality, a world religion, a shared grammar of value as a context for our diversity, to actually articulate. This is a renaissance moment. We're a time between worlds, but a renaissance moment with exponential technologies and that which inspired Tolkien was the rise of exponential technology.

Exponential power. Without a story equal to its power, we now have exponentialized exponentialized power beyond the atom bomb in the hands of non state actors with a danger to the actual survival of humanity. Or the survival of our humanity. Right? Upgraded algorithms, downgraded human beings.

And so, actually, we have to reconvene the fellowship of the ring. And I say that, and you almost. People are afraid to say that. Does that sound grandiose? No, actually, the Hobbits weren't grandiose.

That's not what Marian Pippen are about. It wasn't about grandiosity. And Salmon Frodo warned about grandiosity. And Legolas and Gimli weren't about grandiosity. Gandalf, he had a great white beard.

Gandalf the Grey. And Boromir got a little caught up, but he redeemed himself. We have to be the fellowship of the Ring. And not just we, those that we've mentioned, but everyone needs to convene their own fellowship with the ring and say, okay, what's my part to play in this unique self symphony? And this is real.

Aubrey Marcus
It's real. It's real, and we need Arwen to call us. There's this great scene of Arwen in which he actually calls him. He says, my path is hidden from me. And she says, no, your path is before you.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
You must go with Frodo. He says, no, but my path is hidden from me. And she says, trust this. And she points to the even star. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And she says, you cannot falter now. You cannot falter now. Trust the even star. And then she says, trust us. And they enter the kiss, and they enter lovemaking.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And so this is this moment we're calling for a reconvening of the fellowship of the ring. And that's what we're calling for. But we can't do that without trusting us, without trusting the dignity of our desire, without trusting the goodness of Eros, without trusting that the fellowship. Eros is a core value of cosmos. And that's what she says.

She says, trust our Eros. Trust the goodness and dignity of our fuck. Of our love. And the even star is at her breast. And there's this sense that to create a new fellowship of the ring, we need to create a new field of Eros.

A new field of possibility. Yeah. And, you know, we had this conversation on a walk that we took. We did. And it was really about me recognizing that there's a deeper level of trust in the goddess, in she, in who?

Aubrey Marcus
Matthias, Stefano. Calls the weaver. You know, there's many names for this force that's kind of encouraging and guiding. Not overriding our free will, but just. But the wind at our back in this way.

And I think for me, one of my own great struggles is to have faith that there is this force that's supporting and that it's true that I can't falter. Because I remember all of my own failures and all the places where I've been broken and all of the. And I also remember my triumphs and I remember all of this. But I lose faith sometimes and I waver. And if I really listen closely to what the lineage calls the Lahisha, the whisper of the goddess, it reminds me to have faith and reminds me that I can't falter.

And that if I actually trust in the love of the goddess. In this case, standing in to that is Arwen. In my case, standing in for that is Vailana. But if I really trust that they represent the goddess and that the path is really laid before laid before me, then that's what allows me. It opens me to actually step into my own kingship, to step into my own role in my own place, to drive forward.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And it's Violana. It's Arwen and Aragon. It's Mark and Christina. And it's the fellowship. And that's important.

And it's not the old vision. It's the fellowship of the Ring. It's the men and women. Coke writes, abraham Cook was one of the great erotic mystics of this century, the last century, he writes, who are the chosen ones? It's not the priests and it's not the kings, right.

And it's not the politicians, although those are all valuable and important. We need everyone to play the role in the symphony. But it's those who self understand. They hear what he calls it, a fluttering in their heart. And they know that they cannot be less.

As you said in our guardians of the Galaxy dialogue, they can't be less than the guardians of the Galaxy. I can't be less than the fellowship of the Ring. And we trust the dignity of the Eros that binds us. We trust that. And that's huge.

And that maybe brings us to this notion of hope. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I want to get there, but I want to get to.

Take us in, brother. One of the other things she says in that clip is, you must go with Frodo. You must go with Frodo. And Frodo has this crazy mission where he has to dissolve the ring of power. In its source fire, Frodo has to.

Dissolve the ring of power in its source fire. And we see, and there's two questions. One, why does he have to dissolve into it? And that was the question I asked you late last night. Right.

Late last night. And I have, you know, so I'm going to tell a quick story, which is similar, but actually, there's another layer that you added, which doesn't necessarily apply directly to my story, but it was interesting. So, in one of the most intense ayahuasca visions that I've ever had, and I'm writing about it in my book, psychonaut, and I've told the story before on Rogan's podcast and fighter and the kid. And it's a three hour story if I tell the whole story, and it's a long chapter in the book. Book.

Aubrey Marcus
But ultimately, I was tricked by. I was tricked by a devil, a demon, whatever you want to call it, who tricked me into believing that they had stolen my heart, stolen my even star, stolen my actual. My actual heart. And then they gave this red gem back to me, and they said, okay, we'll give it back to you. And I, greedily, because I thought my heart had been taken, I put it back in my heart, felt that, actually, no, this isn't my heart.

This isn't love. This is power. And this is the destructive nature of power. So I pull it right back out of my heart. So then I have this red stone representing, like, the ring, this ultimate, ultimate power that was in my hand, that was completely destructive.

So my first instinct is I had built this little place in my own astral visions called my medicine world. And it's a beautiful place. It has a cave with a waterfall and rose bushes, down a garden, and then it moves on down to another waterfall and a pool and brooks and mountains. And I was like, all right, I'm going to put this stone in this place so I can get it out of there, at least be out of my field, and I won't have to deal with it. But as soon as I put it in that beautiful place that I would go in my meditations, it started to destroy it.

All of the roses started to wilter, all of the. Although the water turned stagnant and putrid, the waterfalls stopped flowing. I was like. So I pulled it out. I was like, I can't destroy this world by putting it there.

So I was like, what the fuck do I do with it? And the, you know, by grace. Cause I also had the voice of grace also in my ear. The whole time as well. Calling me to trust and calling me to have faith.

The only thing I could do with it was to dissolve it back into the entire cosmos because actually only the whole cosmos could hold the consecration of that amount of darkness, evil, power. Only the whole cosmos could hold it. And so I dissolved it back into the whole cosmos. And then that was part of the liberation that ultimately, then the angelic voices came and they said, no one can steal your heart. It's always been with you the whole time.

Don't allow these forces to trick you. It was all just a trick. And then I was flying with the eagles and flying with the angels. Beautiful scene. But it reminds me of this scene because Frodo has to take the ring and dissolve it back in the source fire, which in some way represents cosmos itself.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
Yeah, no, it's good, it's good, it's good. First off, amen on a beautiful, beautiful vision and beautiful story. And in order to be royalty, I have to be a psychonaut. In order to be royalty, I need to be in the field of dharma and the field of medicine. Medicine and emergent from the field.

We were talking last night in the field of Darman. You just brought a story from the field of medicine and let's bring them together. You can't dissolve evil by doing psychology. And that's really what this is saying. It's really what the Lord of the Rings understands, that actually everyone's being corrupted by the Ring of power.

But then when you try and deal with it with the tools of psychology which view the human being as a separate self, you ultimately fail. Everyone is somehow seduced by power. And so what you need to do is you need to take the elixir of power in its corrupt form, not the beauty of power that we talked about. You've got to take the elixir of the allurement to the brokenness that lives in all of us and lives in Frodo. So if we remember, hold the tape.

What's his name? Fuck me. Iseldor. Again. If we remember, Iseldor at the key battle cuts off Saren's finger that has the ring on it and Gollum bites off Frodo's finger that has the ring on it at the very moment where Frodo wants to keep the ring.

So in that moment, literally, Frodo's become Sauron. It's an incredible moment. So Shadow, he's become Sauron. He's become Gollum. It's why he's attracted to Gollum.

It's why he can't see when Sam tells him that Gollum is deceiving him. So it's very, very powerful. You can't heal that with psychology. You can only Ein Hadin. Right?

The Ring or the din or the force of evil. Nim Taka can't be sweetened. El Bishore sho only in its root. And that's the intuition you had in this beautiful dream. You can only bring the quality and the power.

Right, of power itself in its source. When you alienate it from intimacy, it becomes evil. You've got to bring it back into the field. Yeah. And also the first instinct, of course, was Gimli's instinct when the ring was on the altar and he tries to just smash it with his axe.

Doesn't work. Yeah. You can't destroy evil with evil. You can't destroy evil with force. You have to actually bring the darkness back into the field of light and realize that the field of light and darkness actually are part of this larger one.

But if you isolate the darkness, there's a very beautiful text. Greater is light than darkness. Solomon. It's a Solomon text. But then in the Solomon hidden lineage, they say not greater is light than darkness.

Light can never triumph over darkness. They say greater is light that comes from the darkness, that the darkness and light need to be in the same field. And I need to actually understand that everything and every quality in me is in devotion to the larger field. And I've got to trace any quality that lives inside of me back to its root. What's the root of jealousy?

What's the root of my contraction? And if I trace it back to the root, I realize that I'm actually, whenever I'm on my knees, I'm always on my knees to she. I'm always reaching for my depth. I'm actually always reaching for goodness, right? That at its core, hatred is a distortion of Eros and that everything lives in the field of Eros.

But if there's no field of Eros, meaning if you live in the illusion that there's no field of Eros, you live in the illusion that there's no field of value. You. Then when the quality of evil and the quality of grasping right and the quality of contraction rises in you, you don't know what to do with it. You're devastated. And that's when you're shamed and you're shamed by that quality rising in you.

You hide it and you split it off and then it festers in the darkness and it grabs you. So what I've got to do is I've got to bring it to light and pour it back into the flame of Eros itself. Yeah. And another thing you mentioned yesterday was bring it back to the origin that created the split in the first place. And it was actually the fires of Mordor that was the place.

Aubrey Marcus
It was the origin source of where the split off happened. Where did the trauma happen? So if there's a trauma in your life and let's say there's something that happened that is so traumatic in your life, could be a person, it could be an event in your life, it could be a moment of failure. You have to go back to that moment and then to before that moment and actually find yourself. You have to return to the moment before that trauma existed and relocate yourself at source.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And then what happens is then everything that was created from that moment of trauma disappears. But you have to actually go back before the trauma and find your most pure essence. It's what we do intuitively in the last 40 years in original child work. We actually go back and we find the child, and we have a dialogue with the child. And who was I before the trauma?

And I then grow myself again from that place. You can't enter into the traumatized child and heal a child. You have to find the child before the traumatized child and then embrace that child. And so they've got to go back before the trauma, find the original innocence, reclaim that original innocence. But it can't be done just psychologically.

That's the point that you were adding. You can't just do it psychologically. And that's where original child work breaks down. And it's where attachment work breaks down because it tries to work in separate self. I've got to reenter the field, which means I have to dance.

I dance in the field. I have to chant, I have to sing. I have to make love. Because when I make love, if I'm really making love, I'm making love. I'm in the field of eros itself.

I'm not just in a separate self place. And I've got to become part of the larger field, part of the whole, and let the whole pour into me. The hole has the power to heal me. Yep. One of the next place I wanna go here.

Aubrey Marcus
And beautifully said. And beautifully said. And then the next place I wanna go here is actually what I would say would be a critique of the way that this myth is told, in a way, because one of the themes that we talked about in Guardians of the Galaxy is there's always redemption and again, not to cross too many different movies. That's a whole podcast on its own. Maybe you didn't see it.

Maybe you're watching fellowship. You have nothing to do about guardians. But every character gets a chance for redemption, virtually even the character Adam, who has his. In Guardians. In Guardians, he's sent to kill the Guardians, sent to kill the Guardians, joins them.

In the end, he has a chance for redemption. And in this, we, just before the podcast, we watched a scene where Frodo has to leave the Shire, which presumably he was trying to protect, which is the place he loved the most when. He'S at the very end of the movie. At the very end of the movie. End of movie three.

End of movie three. He's dying on a rock. He's dying on a rock with Sam. He thinks he's dying. That's a little earlier.

A little earlier. He's dying on a rock with Sam and he says, remember the Shire. Remember the Shire. Remember the fireworks and remember the dancing, the tree that we danced around. And like you could see that his love is for the Shire and this beauty is for the Shire.

But then he gets back to the. Shire after succeeding, ostensibly after succeeding in. The quest, succeeding in the mission. But he had that moment where the darkness overtook him. It was weighing on him.

Weighing on him. Weighing on him in the final moment, you know, the darkness. The darkness overtook him and by the ring overtook him. And he wanted to keep the ring. Yeah.

And by divine intervention, by the way that Gollum, the way that she was weaving in all of the ways, Golem takes the. Takes the ring, cuts his finger off. Yeah. Goes into. Falls in.

Falls into the falls into the fires with the ring. With the ring. There's. What I would like the story to tell is a story where even Frodo, having become broken in that moment, having succumbed, has a chance to still be whole in the shire. But what the movie is saying is, like, once you've engaged with that level of evil, you're irredeemable in a way.

Even though he can still smile, and you pointed this out, he couldn't cry. He doesn't cry. Everybody else is crying. We're at that last scene in Mary and Pippin and Sam are there and they each embrace him. You see there are tears rolling and he can't cry.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
He's lost access to his tears. And tears that purify, that clarify. I don't think that he's irredeemable, but I completely hear what you're saying. And what you're saying is, I think, and you'll correct me, is that Frodo is like Jacob who wrestles with the angel in the book of Genesis. And he's wounded in his thigh.

He's wounded in his as thy. As his eros. His eros gets wounded in a fundamental way. And there are wounds which we learn to live with but from which we don't recover. Right.

And this is a. You know, let me. Let me flip movies for a second, with your permission. There was a movie called a beautiful mind. It was about a physicist, if you remember it.

And it's a physicist who kind of goes mad. And we actually see in the movie these figures, and we actually go mad with him. We don't realize that these are figures that live only in a psychosis. So he goes through this very deep process of healing. And we're at the very end of the movie.

And him and his wife are in a movie theater in Princeton where I think he's getting maybe the Nobel Prize, but some major prize in physics. And they walk out of the movie theater, and there are those three figures of his madness. He looks at them. They're not disappeared. They're there.

He kind of nods to them and walks out of the theater with his wife. And one of the things I share with people ab. And this is just get real. Real here, is that the kind of new age pop psychology notion that you go into the wound and then the wound disappears is not true. Right.

We learn to live with the wound. We become wounded healers. Yeah, but the wound then can become a gift. And then the wound turns into a gift. And Christina and the movie that we're working on talks about the wound.

Christina Kincaid, my partner. But the wound actually becoming a gift. So what I would like the story to tell, to tell what I feel is the true story. This is the next chapter of Frodo. That speaks through me.

Aubrey Marcus
It would be Frodo saying, hey, guys, I'll be back. I need to go. I need to go with the elves, the highest wisdom healers of our world. I need to go with Gandalf. And there's a wound that I can't heal here in the Shire.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
And that wound is. I think that's beautiful, man. And I want to come back to that, Frodo, in a second. I want to go backwards and forwards because I just want to make sure we made clear to ourselves and to all of us who are together in this conversation, what wounds Frodo is two things, is the closeness to evil, the carrying of the ring. The quest wounds him almost mortally.

But then what wounds him is shame. In that last second, he went to take the ring and actually had Gollum not bitten his finger off, he would have ostensibly, in that. In that story, he would have taken the ring. And the intensity of his shame around that, he just. He can't live with.

And here, I think it's just so heartrending, which is that we can only live as part of the fellowship. We can only live. And I'm searching for my words here carefully. We can only be fully alive. We can only be in Eros if we recognize that every single one of us has a moment in which the ring can take us.

Aubrey Marcus
We're fallible. We're deeply imperfect. We're deeply imperfect vessels for the light. And I think that the mistake here that's made is, and I agree with your critique, is a bad christian view of sin, that Tolkien, and I think you're absolutely right, it's the weakest part of the movie. The christian notion of sin is based on a linear idea of Tolkien.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
If you did that, it's done, and there's nothing you can do to undo it, so you can. And there's no way you can reverse the error of time. But a deeper understanding of time is that time is actually a circle and a line, which means that you're going to come around to that exact dynamic again. And that's actually. The actual english word is repentance is a horrific word.

The hebrew word is teshuvah, where you turn the wheel turns, and you're going to always come to that moment again, to that same situation, to that same dynamic in which that scene is going to be reenacted. And I think we all know in the sacred autobiography of our lives, because all of this is just words until it's written in the stories of our lives that we keep coming around to that same point. And then when we live that moment differently in the actual physics of time, we then reverse. Right. Everything that happened up till then, transformation bleeds backwards and forwards in time.

So when you come to that moment and you live it with your greatness, you have actually changed structurally the actual quality of time. And if you actually check the literature now in physics, there's this very strong notion that the space time continuum, quoting one article, the space time continuum is dead. That actually, we have a much deeper understanding now than the classical spacetime continuum in terms of our model of reality. The space time continuum is a simulation of reality, if you will. But underneath the spacetime continuum is what we call eternity.

And eternity is not lots of time. Eternity is beneath time. And when you actually come back to that moment, to that challenge, to that, and you relive it, you've actually gone underneath time, and you've literally reconfigured. And that is brother in the lineage. That's the notion of a holy day.

Holy day means that's why we do anniversaries, it's why we do birthdays. It's why we come back, because there's a cycle of time. And you just gorgeously, intuitively nailed it here. Where actually Tolkien, this and in many other issues, right. Is operating.

He's trying to do the CS Lewis move, which is his buddy is his good friend. He's trying to say, let me share with you Christianity without calling it Christianity. And so it's got much of the beauty of Christianity, but it also has much of the weakness. And one of it is the inability to actually fully transform once you've been wounded. Wow.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah. Cha cha. Right? Yeah. But one of the things that I think they do get right and to finish on this in the message is hopefully hope.

And this is one of the things that is, as we face all of these threats and all of these challenges, if we lose hope, all hope is lost. And hope is a memory of the future. Yeah. Right. And a memory of the future.

Dr. Mark Gaffney
It's our job as the fellowship of the ring. When I say our, I mean you and meab and Zach and Daniel and Christina and Violana. Right. And a million other people who we. Don'T know, anyone who's listening, who says, I want to be part of the fellowship.

We have to articulate a memory of the future, and we have to begin. And with permission, this is. And I turn to afterwards to close us. We have to begin by becoming the new human, by joining the fellowship, by saying, I'm going to live in relationship to the whole. I'm going to become omniconsiderate for the sake of the whole, I'm going to actually know that I'm royalty.

And I'll tell you something. We talk a lot about shame being the root of all evil, but shame's also a trickster. Reality is a trickster. Sometimes we shame shame. So there's one kind of shame that's valid.

There's an important shame, which is this is your mother at her best when she says, you're Aubrey Marcus, you don't do that. You should be ashamed of yourself. What she's meaning is your royalty and her best self. Not the shaming mother voice, but the Holy Mother voice. The goddess Arwen.

You're Aragon. So we're shamed. We're not being royal, right. We're shamed when we feel that we're an extra on the set. We're shamed.

I mean, when a person feels like a spare, right. They become shamed because they desperately want to be royalty. And that's the strange and almost grotesque caricature of the whole Meghan Harry story. I desperately want to be royalty. But actually, what Harry's standing for, although unconsciously, is that we all desperately want to be royalty.

But here's the deal. We are. Yeah, we are. That's the democratization of royalty. And so we have to be the memory of the future.

We have to cross to the other side. We have to be Abraham. Right? Let's cross to the other side, brother. Be the new human.

Aubrey Marcus
Homo more. Be homo amor. Not just homo sapien. Yep. And we'll talk about that more in podcasts and books and things to come.

But you mentioned this, the appropriate shame that can come. And I tell Vi, you know, I'll sometimes lose hope, and I'll sometimes feel impotent or powerless. I'll feel overwhelmed. I'll feel small. I'll allow myself to get smaller and smaller.

I'll look away from my power, and she can try to. One of the worst things, strategies for me just saying personally, is to coddle me, right? And that, like, oh, baby, I know you got so much to do. And it's. And then I'm like, yeah, I do.

It's so hard. And I stay fucking stuck. And it's a very sweet thing to do. It's a natural, loving, nurturing thing to do. Like, oh, poor baby.

But then when you say poor baby, then you become a baby, not a king, right? So I say, listen, the magic words to say is to call me are, yeah, to call me. Call me by the name of my king. And I've created a tonka. To borrow the buddhist concept.

A tonka is like this vision of who we could be, which is all our dark, all our memory of the future. A memory of the future which to me is dragon heart. And I say, you know, just call my name. Call my name. We got to call each other's name.

And if she calls my name, yeah, it's like, I can't stay small anymore. And sometimes they'll try. I'll be like, I'm not dragging heart. And she's like, yes, you are. Yes, you are.

This is who you are. And that little. It's not that she's trying to shame me. But she's calling me to a memory of who I am and who I am at my best. And it's not saying you're not being dragon heart right now.

That's not the right tone. It's like, dragon heart. Dragon heart. Like, I know who you are. That's the holiest voice of shame, which is not shaming me.

Yeah. It's calling me by my name, Aubrey. I love you, Matt. I love you, Matt. Cha cha.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. This is the start of something new, and there'll be many more to come. Because if nothing else, even if none of you like watching this shit, we like doing it. We're having a great time. Having a great time.

Thank you for all this time in Vermont. Thank you, KK and every Derek and everybody who's been, you know, everybody who's been helping us pull all of this together, Krista, the whole team, it's been a huge project to get this off the ground, and we're finding our. We're finding our way through. It's been really beautiful to share this time and to develop this new genre with you and I think I from a meta structure. Hopefully we're inviting people to watch movies with a different eye, an eye to see how culture is speaking and to see how the whisper of the goddess.

The whisper of the goddess is speaking through all of these films and stories and myths that are being told. Yay. Mad. Mad love. Mad love.

Mad love, everybody. Bye bye. Thanks for tuning into this podcast with Doctor Mark Gaffney. Make sure you check out the other shows that we have done, including Guardians of the Galaxy and so many other incredible podcasts. We love you guys.

See you next week.

Decoding Lord Of The Rings: A Revelatory Exploration w/ Dr. Marc Gafni #466

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1. Introduction to Themes

2. The Allure and Dangers of Power

3. Symbolism of the Eye of Sauron

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