Was Lord of the Rings just a story or was it a prophesy?
What does it have to tell us about our current time and the struggles we face? What is the meaning of the two towers, and the ring of power?
I sit down with master teacher and religious scholar Dr. Marc Gafni to decode the hidden meaning in this timeless tale.
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TRANSCRIPT:
AUBREY MARCUS: Mark, my brother, here we are.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Ah, but we didn't sleep a lot last night.
AUBREY MARCUS: We didn't sleep a lot last night.
DR. MARC GAFNI: The ring.
AUBREY MARCUS: The ring.
DR. MARC GAFNI: The ring.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. This has become one of those things. It's part of our lexicon. It's formed our subconscious and our conscious mind.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Every place. 600 million copies, by the way.
AUBREY MARCUS: 600 million copies. I don't know how many people watched the movies.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And the movie was just, you know,
AUBREY MARCUS: Blew, it blew it away.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yes.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's our text.
AUBREY MARCUS: And one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about it is it feels like now is the time
DR. MARC GAFNI: Now is the time.
AUBREY MARCUS: Where the Eye of Sauron is forming, right? And the two towers are rising. And we're just gonna dive right into here. And as we've explained in the Guardians of the Galaxy, we're gonna 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: How the goddess speaks through and just speaks through texts of culture and just to say in our state 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 having this conversation with you, brother. It's such an important conversation and it's so pregnant and there's almost trembling in it. It's such a moment. I mean, and I remember our Guardians of the Galaxy conversation, where I think we found like 12 themes, you know, along the way, maybe we'll get to reference Guardians.
AUBREY MARCUS: It might have been 10, because I think you repeated one a couple times.
DR. MARC GAFNI: There's like many things, but I just can't start shit talking you in front of everyone. Just at like 7:30 in the morning, but give me a few minutes.
AUBREY MARCUS: Well, we have understood
DR. MARC GAFNI: I’m coming back
AUBREY MARCUS: Both of these texts of culture that if we're actually friends, like Gimli and Legolas, we have to constantly talk shit to each other. So actually we do a pretty good job of that.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, but anyway, let's not go there. Okay. Oh my God. Here we go.
AUBREY MARCUS: Here we go. Here we go. And 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 Ochre.
DR. MARC GAFNI: I mean, oh my God, that's so good. Let's start there. As our first thing that Eye of Sauron 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 and the three, you know, 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 kinds of subtitles of the general Lord of the rings. And the Eye of Sauron plays, of course, through all three and that 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, you know, falls, disappears, right? 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, right, of the United States, which is the sense that there's this gaze that loves us. So I just started 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and this is spoken about. I just got back from Egypt. This reminds me of the eye of Horus.
DR. MARC GAFNI: The eye of Horus
AUBREY MARCUS: The watchful eye of Horus. Horus being the Falcon God at the top of the pyramid
DR. MARC GAFNI: Who's watching
AUBREY MARCUS: Looking benevolently and watching.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So that's Providence.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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've maybe watched,
DR. MARC GAFNI: That I blinked there for a second, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: It is a short blink.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Short blink, and we have this idea of Anthro ontology. Anthro, right, 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 Vylana, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 a lineage, the divine that suffuses all is also the infinity of intimacy, the field of the intimate that's madly erotically in love with all beings. So this Eye of Providence is very beautiful. And then there's the lecherous gaze. And then there's the gaze of control.
AUBREY MARCUS: There's so many different types of gazes.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So this is big.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I want to just share another aspect of the gazes. You know, being the watchful eye of the kingdom that I've been developing. Whether it's the kingdom of Onnit 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Gorgeous.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: But it won't grow in exactly the same way as that which I'm focusing on.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So beautiful. So let's just, we'll just spend a second in our first theme, the Eye of Sauron. So we've got the gaze that blooms reality.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yes.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So the flip side, and there's a beautiful text in the Solomon wisdom text, zelumadzeb bar Elohim, 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 and in surveillance, and in this notion in our colleague, Shoshana Zuboff wrote this book, Surveillance Capitalism, which was about the eye of Sauron incarnate in the digital structure where you think you're watching the computer, but actually the computer is watching you. 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, you know, Eric Schmidt writes, we want to see everything. We want to, literally, they 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, you know, 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Benevolent in quotes
DR. MARC GAFNI: Benevolent in quotation marks, you don't even see that it's watching you, but it actually watches everything, you know, do you remember a sting song? What was that like in 1982? Every move you make every breath you take?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, it's a little creepy actually
DR. MARC GAFNI: I'll be watching you. So it's a creepy song. He had just broken up with his wife and he actually had a relationship with his neighbor who became his beloved and 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's right. But actually the reason is, the reason people get confused is because there's two kinds of gaze.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 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, you know, which is not an atomic bomb that's, you know, emerged 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, I mean, we need watching, we need a gaze that's suffused with value and with love.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, benevolent gaze, because
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's a big breakthrough to get that.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, 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 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: It’s deeper and
AUBREY MARCUS: Deeper pseudo eros.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right, no. It's beautifully said, it's a gaze that emerges from these exponentially upgraded algorithms, which, as you say, exponentially downgrade human beings, right? 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So you can't actually get to your own unique desire, your own native desire, your own pure desire, right? Because the gaze on you is used to control you and then to seize your own ability to control you. To place your attention in mad love, because what is beautiful eros? 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: an interesting going with the Orc concept.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: There's no clear eros.
AUBREY MARCUS: There's no clear eros. 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 eye is actually feeding. It's trying to feed us.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly the most radicalized thing that'll get us pitted against each other.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That'll downgrade me to an orc.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. MARC GAFNI: That's right. They don't have a name and they never laugh.
AUBREY MARCUS: They never laugh. They never dance.
DR. MARC GAFNI: They never dance. There's no dance.
AUBREY MARCUS: They have no name.
DR. MARC GAFNI: They have no name.
AUBREY MARCUS: Presumably no sex.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, right, 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, you know, pseudo eye, right? It's called the Palantir, right? It's a kind of a miniature eye, right? The orb that's used by Saruman. So, that's our first theme. That's a big theme.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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, breathing, living Gaia and make these kinds of machine beings, these orcs that are just pure Demiurge and pure violence.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's the second theme is we get disconnected with, you know, the other day, I don't remember who we were talking to, but we were having a 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And there's a line in the movie in which one of the trees, how, E V E S, how do you pronounce it?
AUBREY MARCUS: The Ents.
DR. MARC GAFNI: The Ents, E N T S, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: E N T S, the Ents, right? The Ents, they say, the white wizard used to walk in my forest. 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, right? And from the living presence of nature radicalizes him towards evil.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. There's a couple of things here. One is we're just,
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're just getting started.
AUBREY MARCUS: We're just getting warmed up. One of the things is it. It almost feels like Saruman is the actual embodiment of an arconic energy, an extra dimensional energy of the Sitra
DR. MARC GAFNI: Archon as in the Steiner’s idea of the archon
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And the Sitra Achra, this other side in the Kabbalah.
AUBREY MARCUS: This other side, right? Some other discarnate energy. Energy that's actually driving and then corrupting people who are actually wielding the technology
DR. MARC GAFNI: Saruman gets hijacked by Sauron, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Sauron is actually a king, right? Sauron's actually, you know, he's a human being.
AUBREY MARCUS: Well, was
DR. MARC GAFNI: Was, right? You know, and kind of to go through Sauron stages, you know, 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, right? What's our relationship to power?
AUBREY MARCUS: 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: So we’ll get back to Saruman and power.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yes. We're going to get back to power. Power is the next stage. We're going to go to
DR. MARC GAFNI: You put Saruman at those. We'll get back to that. Go.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Eye of Sauron.
AUBREY MARCUS: Eye of Sauron. So one of the things that you've talked about is Sitra Achra literally translates to the turning of the face from the divine, right?
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right. Sitra Achra the other side, but the other side because archer the word Archer is as opposed to pan’s face, occurs when I turn my back on you
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It's a turning, I've turned away.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And interestingly, there's a couple different types of evil,
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 ‘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. MARC GAFNI: Turning my face, but I haven't given you my back,
AUBREY MARCUS: But I haven't fully, but then the eye of Sauron is something different. It's intentionally intentional evil, 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 to save the cosmos.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Thanos still has an altruistic motive. 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 has that, right? Have that sense of, we think we're being altruistic.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right. But Sauron's interesting because it's actually evil. It's intended malice. Like its intended malice, like the destruction of life. It's anti life energy.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Okay. So this is big. Okay. And of course, well, and this takes us into the power issue. Okay. So important what you said, and 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 around and give you my back, it's because I'm looking in a different direction now.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 relation to the addiction to power. And the addiction to power translates into its own sense of, you actually think it's aeros. And the turning away is I've freed myself from everything. And I have this experience that I'm free. I've thrown off all constraints, any constraint I've thrown off. I have this sense 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. Right, 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 and Nothingness. And Sartre, who writes this unbelievably beautiful book being in nothingness, but gets too easily hijacked right into just like Nietzsche, who was gorgeous, right? 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. Right? 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 for minimacy, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: His own inherent nature
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 as long as it's in the body, there's a built in safeguard, but if you invest power purely into
DR. MARC GAFNI: The ring
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. MARC GAFNI: 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 the haros gamos it's always the merging of the masculine and feminine in whatever form man man, woman woman, man woman, but it's that haros gamos 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 is his nukes.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right? You can feel with Putin today, right? The pie keeps referring to nuclear weapons. The nukes are in this tragic way, right? Part of his ring, but America may develop its own version of a ring, right? There's lots of
AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, we got plenty of nukes.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We got plenty of nukes, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: And I think one of the distributions 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So there's one ring
AUBREY MARCUS: But then secretly one ring rules them all. And you might say, that's not true. The finance system, which underneath all things, the deep state, which actually runs everything's a lot of conspiracy ideas about that. I'm not going down that rabbit hole, but people are hypothesizing that there is one ring that rules them all. And all the governments are just puppets. That would be the potential eye of Sauron.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, right? I think that's a mistake. I think that 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 plotline. There's a sense we've lost the narrative plotline. There's a sense that the public propaganda's 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 story line of success stories governed by win-lose metrics that itself generates fragile and complicated systems. And when it's win-lose metrics all the way up and all the way down, when everyone's governed by anti eros, right? When Smeagol kills Deagol in order to get the ring, right? Which is the cane and abel story reenacted. We'll come back to that. So the conspiracy is not a cabal, a cabal we could handle. It's actually the field of anti value.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, he says, let's do one last charge. And of course, Gandalf comes in at the last second and saves the day, you know, from one side, and there's a whole, and who else saves the day there? And the army of the dead that Aragon, right, has liberated.
AUBREY MARCUS: That's not in number two, that's in number three.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's in three, that's in three, right. So that's a different save day. So the ‘save the day’. But there's another army that saves the day in two.
AUBREY MARCUS: I think it's the Rohan
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's Rohan, right? The Riders of Rohan.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It's the Riders of Rohan. 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, right? 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, right, is that we need to step forward and tell a new story of value, right? If the precious is anti value and the academic conversation has deconstructed all value and said value's not real, you know, and the de facto position of postmodernity is the decoding of value. In other words, essentially, the commodifications inherent in the economic structure, 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 we have to do is the revolution is like revolution is telling 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 woke up in the morning. And I realized, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: And one of these values that we need to rescue is actually the value of power. And this is one of the things that I think has been really pervasive. People have seen the misuse and abuse of power. And so you get Lord active
DR. MARC GAFNI: And they've made power into the devil.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yes. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. So people try to push away their power. 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Absolutely.
AUBREY MARCUS: Because it makes all of us impotent and I make a post. 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 likely been disempowered of their own potency and their own hope and their own heroism. And this, you see this as like a subtle, insidious psyop of empire to get people allergic to their power itself and their own power
DR. MARC GAFNI: This is wildly important. So that the Lord acts and ‘power corrupts’ and absolute power, corrupts absolutely, is exactly wrong.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly wrong.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 hauled the field of value. The divine, what we call in cosmarchismism, the infinite, intimate, Atman is Brahman, Adonai Elohim, Mat, 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, 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 of, let's say, sexuality is getting a little flaccid and weak at a little moment of the play of power, right? It 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 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. When the greatest battles of the world are being fought.
AUBREY MARCUS: Oof.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Wow.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I mean that's something that should really be felt by everybody. And I just wanna 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 as omnipotent,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Omnipotent, and potent,
AUBREY MARCUS: All powerful.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And potency has an erotic cast to it.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right. And so if you're actually describing the divine is all powerful, but then demonizing all power,
DR. MARC GAFNI: You're demonizing the divine.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. Do you not see the contradiction here?
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 Cosmo-erotic 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, 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Allured and allergic.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Allured and allergic at the same time. Gollum loves and hates the ring. But notice, Aragorn 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, so let's just, we haven't mentioned the people. Gandalf the prophet, the Gandalf the Grey, Aragorn 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, right? Cuts off his finger with the ring. And because, as we said earlier, Sauron is dependent on the ring, right? He's given his power into the ring. So Sauron disappears into the spirit world, and then Isildur takes the ring, right? And takes it for himself. So there's this sense Aragorn'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, right? Only the hobbits, right, can actually undertake the quest, which is wild.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Eros of the Shire is strong.
AUBREY MARCUS: There's dancing. There's music. There's fireworks, there's mischief, there's deep, deep friendship.
DR. MARC GAFNI: There’s allurement.
AUBREY MARCUS: They have six meals a day. They got second breakfast, they got supper and
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 we bless them
DR. MARC GAFNI: Merry and Pippin.
AUBREY MARCUS: We bless them for that, you know, all of the gay hobbits.
DR. MARC GAFNI: What is going on with Merry and Pippin? Right? They're awesome. They're awesome. I mean, the hobbits have this, 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
AUBREY MARCUS: Strider
DR. MARC GAFNI: Strider?
AUBREY MARCUS: Strider
DR. MARC GAFNI: Strider. He protects the Shire. So let's go back. Let's see if we can get this. So the hobbits, so we're on our theme of power, the hobbits have a different relationship to power. Not all the hobbits, cause Smeagol, is the name of the hobbit who actually kills Deagol, right? His relative, and takes the ring. So the hobbits can be corrupted and he becomes golem.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And Bilbo had a tough time
DR. MARC GAFNI: And Bilbo had a tough time at that very end scene, we saw just before he podcasted Bilbo at the very end of his, before he's going to the Undying Land. So what happened to that ring? He’s almost taken by.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I very much would have liked to touch it just one more time
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 Gimli and Boromir, right? Who's the son of Denethor, who's the steward of, he's the steward of Gondor because Aragorn hasn't come back. Right. 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 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 walking and we said it'll come up at a certain moment. It just came up in my mind right now. I had this whisper and I was talking to your beloved Vy about it and we were talking Holy of Holies. And I just have, she said it so clearly, and I think this is the response to the allurement of power in its unclarified form and its broken form, which is, what's the one thing 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. It just cuts through everything. And 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 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, fragrant smell.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Beautiful. Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 Vermontian honeysuckles, is also what makes you alluring to God. It's like this bilateral,
DR. MARC GAFNI: So beautiful
AUBREY MARCUS: Bilateral relationship.
DR. MARC GAFNI: You speak rather beautiful words, right? It's so beautiful, right? In other words, we've talked many times about this notion of unique self, right? And everyone listening, if you listen to us, you know exactly the next 10 seconds, 10 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. So I'm a unique expression of power. I'm a unique configuration of power. Aubrey's a unique configuration of power. Power is the equality 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. Right. And it's very beautiful. And so Aubrey’s set of allurements are not Marks. Now we have overlapping allurements, as we should, because we're playing unique instruments in the symphony, but it's all music. But yet there's an allurement, right, which is Aubrey’s allurements that create a new fragrance called Aubrey. It’s Aubreyness. 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, he's a smart dude. But that's not quite why they come. My guess is, they come because, oh, Aubreyness. Yeah, let me, that's beautiful, right? I trust that. I can feel that. And that's beautiful. Right? 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, right, that's the question. That's the ultimate erotic question. When I'm not an Eros, then pseudo Eros has its way with me.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And then the allurement to power is almost impossible to resist.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. It's actually all Sauron it's all like underneath this the surface structure
DR. MARC GAFNI: And these two towers relate back to what you said about the orcs. There's just phallus. It's toxic masculine. There's a toxic masculine. There's no feminine. There's no feminine orcs, you said. So you basically have these two phalluses. But it's not the beauty of homoerotic love. So you haven't, very beautifully you've got Merry 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 right, you know. Were they sleeping together or not? That's not the issue, this was David and Jonathan loved each other and Merry and Pippin love each other. It's this beautiful homoerotic relationship. You've got of course Sam And Frodo
AUBREY MARCUS: Merry’s the bottom.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And 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 Sauron and Saruman, the names are even similar.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It's the two towers, right? And the two towers are this tragedy, right? It's that which is the transformation of the Migdal, which is a tower, that becomes Magdalen. It becomes love, right? But the tower by itself, right, 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 degraded, brutal relationship, which is the opposite of Sam and Frodo, and the opposite of Merry and 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 Eowyn, the daughter of Theoden, right? The king of Rohan. Of course, you have Arwen, right? You have Rosie Cotton, right? 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 Helm's Deep because of Galadriel. Arwen is the one who goes to her father and says, reforge Narsil, right? The sword and bring it to Aragon. So you've got this very beautiful, very beautiful male-male relationship, very beautiful Harris, Gamos, men, women. And then you just have brutal dissociated non-brotherhood men with upright phalluses, right, without any feminine, the orcs without any feminine, right, on the other side. So it’s this play, right, these two towers.
AUBREY MARCUS: There's an interesting, and again, I want to get to how the rise of these towers then actually creates the fellowship 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Theoden.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. That's been corrupted by Saruman. No, Theoden was the King of Gondor.
DR. MARC GAFNI: No, no. Theoden is the King of Rohan. Okay.
AUBREY MARCUS: Okay.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right. And then, Gondor has a steward, Denethor.
AUBREY MARCUS: Denethor. Got it. Okay. So Theoden, who is, he was corrupted, and he has a lackey.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And the lackey was madly in love with the princess.
DR. MARC GAFNI: With the princess. And the lackey is being controlled by Saruman.
AUBREY MARCUS: The lackey is enticed by Saruman in a way
DR. MARC GAFNI: Wormtongue
AUBREY MARCUS: So Wormtongue and worm tongue, so the way that Saruman controls him is worm tongue is lecherously interested in the princess and
DR. MARC GAFNI: The lecherous gaze
AUBREY MARCUS: The lecherous gaze on the princess and the princess's brother, the writer of Rohan notices it is like, I see you always looking at my fucking sister
DR. MARC GAFNI: Eomer, who is Eowyn's brother.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right? And it's like, you see, you looking at my sister motherfucker and I see you whispering in the King's ear. And like calls him out on it. But he still has the power of Saruman behind him. But 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Absolutely.
AUBREY MARCUS: And rape, basically. Like, it would be rape if Wormtongue got with Eowyn.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 got to pick one, right? So you said, I don't feel I'm worthy to actually merit the goddess. So if someone gives, so I remember to flash 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, you know, 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 it's a much more hip and, you know, funny and sophisticated notion. But it's the same notion. The guy doesn't believe that I deserve the goddess
AUBREY MARCUS: Right
DR. MARC GAFNI: And I can get the goddess. And by the way, that's one of the places the goddess has to take responsibility. And it's one of the places that just like the objective gaze which only objectifies 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 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, let's get personal for a second, right? Now, let's say you were super poor, right? You know what I mean? Like, okay, so, well, I get the same woman. That's a crazy thing. Now, the truth is you would because you happen to be beautiful, so your 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? Now, you can get a great woman with depth, right? And laughter. Right. And I at least laugh well. Right. So I love to laugh. So I got the best woman ever. Right. Other than your best woman for you. And I'm dancing around serious history because it's actually so serious.
AUBREY MARCUS: No doubt. I mean, 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 woman.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right. And women become trophies, but it's because the feminine allows for it.
AUBREY MARCUS: And sometimes it's not even a trophy. Sometimes there's a genuine, actually, you could potentially call it a pseudo allurement. You could call it an unclarified allurement, but there is an allurement to power.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Just like there's an allurement to well shaped breasts that appear to a man in 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, right, to bring him Eowyn, the king's daughter, which he feels, in your words, he was never could never be worthy of.
AUBREY MARCUS: Not even close.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Not even close. And that's actually, right, becomes the hook and bait, just like we use hook and bait, right, in culture today, right, to actually shift our gaze right away from what's really happening
AUBREY MARCUS: And you know, this is
DR. MARC GAFNI: That’s a big deal.
AUBREY MARCUS: There's another example I want to bring up which is, I know, personal to your family because I know that you had a family that was affected in the holocaust. But 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 is able to see beyond, you know, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 and their arousal was that they were embracing what they thought was degradation instead of actually celebrating unique and gorgeous patterns of desire, right? 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, right, of homoeroticism, like in the David and Jonathan, or what we've labeled as the Merry and Pip, and we're going to 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 they're intense sense of shame, right? Clearly merged with a thousand other factors and generated intense evil. I mean, almost no words for it. I mean, we're in the realm of just like, you can feel it tingling on your body, but what you're pointing to is that some sense of intense shame around their own sense of desire, right, was at the root of evil. And one of the things you and I and KK talk about in phenomenology is shame as the root of all evil. And when we say shame is the root of all evil, we mean toxic shame.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And so you're pointing to such an extreme example of it.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right. 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Which is like the fixing of Nazi.
AUBREY MARCUS: Which is a fixing. It's like, yeah, it's just fully celebrated
DR. MARC GAFNI: Fixing of Nazism
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 percent. It doesn't mean that there are 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 tycoon of Nazism. It's an interesting phenomenon that's happened in Germany where that liberation has actually created what feels and just when I feel Germany, like, Oh, this is not a bellicose society. There's peace here.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, there was a moment of liberation in Germany. And I think both in the United States and Germany, the veil of shame has again, fallen deeply not in a kind of World War II way, but in the sense that in Germany and in the United States and the general Western world, there's no narrative of desire. So we liberated sexuality from the sex negative narrative of the churches and from the degraded narratives, let's 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, you know, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's a different conversation.
AUBREY MARCUS: Alright So let's go back to
DR. MARC GAFNI: Back to lord of the rings
AubreyMarcus: Back to the lord of the rings, the fellowship of the ring which was drawn together by these intensification of existential threat and that's where we are. This is actually a similar thing to what happened in guardians of the galaxy is 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?
DR. MARC GAFNI: Isn't it right? I mean, it's incredible. The Fellowship of the Ring is an incredible scene.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And the Fellowship, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Everybody's arguing amongst themselves.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Everyone's arguing among themselves, right? They're also, you know, 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, you know, Gimli says, you have my axe, you know, and Legolas, you know, 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, right? 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 to 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, right? 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 Hieros Gamos and there's this fellowship between these nine, right? This band, right? These brothers, right? 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 and such a different crowd. It's a 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 50 years later, 60 years later, 70 years later, there's this obvious group of traumatized heroes.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and we're more trauma informed.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're more trauma informed.
AUBREY MARCUS: So it weaves into our story. I mean, even though the movies were, you know, recently in our, you know, in the 2000s, right?
DR. MARC GAFNI: Jackson reshot
AUBREY MARCUS: Reshot him, but it's still based on
DR. MARC GAFNI: Tolkien
AUBREY MARCUS: 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Dwarf community
AUBREY MARCUS: Dwarf community
DR. MARC GAFNI: By the Saruman
AUBREY MARCUS: In the mines. And also by their own greed, digging too deep in Balrog and the goblins and the whole fucking thing. You know, he doesn't really express his trauma. Legolas is largely free of it. They don't have the trauma information that we have. And even the concept of PTSD from soldiers coming back from World War II 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 in 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Earlier. And there's this also, yes, yes, and yes, and yes, and no, no, no but just an ant. And there's also a sense that. It's before therapeutic culture, and 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 in here, in the Lord of the Rings, you've got this Fellowship of the Ring, who clearly each have their stories, 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, they have, right? And there's moments in which Gollum, Smeagol, right? Gollum, my precious, succeeds in splitting between Sam and Frodo. And when Deceit actually wins and there's moments when Legolas wants to give up, right, you know, but it's those moments where they actually find each other, you know, there's that great scene in, what is it, in Episode 3 as they're at the gates of Mordor. And Aragorn has decided, let's attack Mordor to take the Eye of Sauron away from Sam and Frodo. And he gives this incredible speech. This is an incredible scene where there he is, Aragorn.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Hmm.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So they know that this is a right. And then he says, right, it is not this day that the fellowship falls.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It is not this day that the courage of men fail
AUBREY MARCUS: Maybe wolves and broken shields someday in the future, but not this day.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It is not this day. And that is Aragon. Aragon is the king. And this is this new theme, the king, and the king and the queen who represent hope
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: They're holding the vision of hope. And when Arwen and Aragorn meet, so it's king and queen, she's of the elves. She can be immortal. She gives him the Evenstar. And the Evenstar 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, you know, in the Hebrew lineage, Ayelet HaShachar, the morning star, which is the goddess, is she, so she gives him she.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, there's a whole interesting rabbit hole about the morning, the morning star, which is Venus.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Astarte, Venus, she.
AUBREY MARCUS: Which is Venus, which then gets recast as Lucifer. The Morning Star. This is a whole rabbit hole of very strange things that
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's right. Because the Morning Star, which is the Even Star, and we'll see it in these two scenes, is not just love. It's Eros, love, fuck, desire. That's all of it. It's she, as Astarte. So when you dissociate the full rawness of that from the depth of Eros of love. So then it doesn't go to Lucifer. That's the play, right? So you've got Arwen and Aragon, he's looking at the broken sword and our seal, which is the sort of his ancestors, which has been broken
AUBREY MARCUS: Excalibur if you will
DR. MARC GAFNI: Excalibur if you will. And this is the sword that actually didn't ultimately triumph and that actually his Ancestors Isildur, who cuts the ring finger with the ring off of Sauron in the end, keeps the ring, gets blinded by its power, and so Aragorn refuses his destiny as the heir to the throne of Gondor because he says, same blood, same weakness. 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, right, on you and me. Right, 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 him the pendant, which is the symbol of her immortality and of her love and of her Eros and desire and gives him the even star.
AUBREY MARCUS: What occurs to me is we just had this conversation about how a wholemate 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Beautiful.
AUBREY MARCUS: She's actually stepping into the immortality of love
DR. MARC GAFNI: Because she
AUBREY MARCUS: The eternity of love
DR. MARC GAFNI: Because she's stepsons, beautiful. And this is, I mean, and your intuition is gorgeous. This is the model of what we called in that dialogue. I don't even know if we published it yet, but the homemade 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 can move between man and woman. But holmates, the king and queen. Holmates 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 beloved like Neo and Trinity, in the Matrix, the Beloveds are not only local love. They're local love, they're Eros, they're fuck, they're desire. And so it gives them the potency, your word, to call each other. When we get lost in, we all get lost.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 community at Fit for Service and I'm sure the question comes up. How do I pick? How do I know who to pick? All right. How do I know who to choose? Because it's no longer roommate where we viscerally need each other to survive, but I've got to choose. So I would say I choose someone who I trust will call me when I get lost. Like, wow.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It will draw me into my potential, will draw me into my kingship, my malchut. You know, that's Vylana for me.
DR. MARC GAFNI: My malchut, my kingship.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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, 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 this was like really the first date that we were going on, but there were still boundaries within that date
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Because it was like, there were still entanglements that were still, so we weren't kissing. We just went out dancing. That was it. And I just stopped and I broke down in tears and I just couldn't stop crying. And she thought I was like doing a really bad dance move because I was heaving and 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 Vylana
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right
AUBREY MARCUS: I saw it. I just felt it. I was like, and I told her, I was like, I feel now, you know, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's the king and queen, right? And it's so gorgeous in it. We've taken the relationship in some sense to its lowest common denominator, which is necessary, sometimes noble, right? What we call roommates, we need each other to survive and it's beautiful, or to just romantic love for its own sense of personal fulfillment, soulmates, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Why are we attracted to royalty? I mean, they just did the coronation of Charles and there's a scepter and there's an orb. Right? And then 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 something.
AUBREY MARCUS: I didn't watch. Because I think it's a fucking circus.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right, but it's a circus because we've exiled royalty to those two people.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: To a caricature. It's a circus because actually every person is fit for service in your language.
AUBREY MARCUS: And they're
DR. MARC GAFNI: Fit for service is fit for royalty.
AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. And there are potential kings that can rise. I mean, I believe that's why I mean, and I mentioned 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 peers in my eyes.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Join the fellowship.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: So this is important. This is important. 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: No, clearly.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Clearly, right? As a matter of fact, they wanted me for the quarterback.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, the Jets.
DR. MARC GAFNI: He was the second choice, man.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: I know. It's crazy, right? Yeah. 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 my destiny. It's not my kingship. It's brother Aaron's, right? And so when you actually get that, I don't need to become king by leveling differences. Bobby Kennedy should run for president. Not my job in this incarnation.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: My job is to write a new story of value to evolve the source code.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Good job. Let's do it together.
AUBREY MARCUS: And I think there is a democratization, as you were mentioning, of king and queen.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And everyone's royalty.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 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,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Which is Narsil, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Which is Narsil in this movie, which is also what Aragon doesn't want to grab, but doesn't want to hold the sword and claim his
DR. MARC GAFNI: And until Arwen takes that broken sword and reforges it for him.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. And there's this kind of like, I loved when she said that.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Tell me how you're reading that.
AUBREY MARCUS: So what I'm reading there is he's playing with Excalibur in like a stream.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: And he's trying to grab it. But the power is too much. 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's 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 looks 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 at some point, and it's okay. It's okay that you're looking away. One day, you won't look away. 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 he'd be charging against Mordred already by now. Put that sword back in the fucking lake. You know what I mean? He actually tries to throw it back in the lake, but it's like understanding from the goddess and this compassion from the goddess that says, 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 an ordinary citizen, just doing my thing, 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 writers of Rohan, whatever our role may be. Even the young children at Helm's Deep, 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, he was totally scared, of course, he's totally scared. He's like 12 and he feels the sword and it's the emergent King. He feels the sword. And he said, he wields it around. He says, this is a good sword.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Yeah. Aragon, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Aragon says, this is a good sword.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Yeah. Agon, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: And then the boy held a sword and the king just told him, this is a good sword.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And Aragon's the king.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. He is the king. He hasn't fully claimed it yet but he is
DR. MARC GAFNI: He's not. Right. That's Helm's deep. He's not quite there yet.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. That just to give him the courage.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 me, 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, right? 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 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: I wonder if one of the reasons why, I mean, there's people right now and we're friends with some of these people, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Zach Stein, they're beating the war drum. 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, this is part of 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 to own power
DR. MARC GAFNI: It creates. Right. So Zach, who is my dear friend, student, colleague, interlocutor, and co chair of the center and Daniel, who's deeply involved with us 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 of Aubrey, right. In other fields and in beautiful fields, we're all kind of coming together and we're saying this very difficult thing. We're saying that this is the moment onf destiny.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 at 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 do not have nation controlled atomic power, we have exponential technology, right? 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, if I can with permission and you and me and Daniel and Zach and others with us, and 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, 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 values. Like his friend C.S Lewis did. Sitting in Oxford, they just assumed, okay, let's go Christianity, mere Christianity. That's not going to work. That move is not going to work. We have to actually articulate a new vision of value, that which unites us is greater than that which divides us, right? A world spirituality, a world religion, a shared grammar of value as a context for diversity to actually articulate. Right. 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 power beyond the atom bomb, right? In the hands of non-state actors, right? 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, people are afraid to say that. Does that sound grandiose? No, actually, the hobbits weren't grandiose. That's not what Merry and Pip weren't about. It wasn't about grandiosity. And Sam and Frodo weren't about grandiosity. And Legolas and Gimli weren't about grandiosity. Gandalf, he had a great white beard, right? Gandalf the Grey, right? And Boromir got a little caught up, but he redeemed himself. We have to be the Fellowship of the Ring. 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It's real and we need Arwen to call us. There's this great scene of Arwen right in which she actually calls him. He says my path is hidden from me And she says, no, your path is before you. 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And she says, you cannot falter now.
DR. MARC GAFNI: You cannot falter now. Trust the even star. And then she says, trust us. And they enter the kiss and they enter lovemaking. And so this is this moment. We're calling for a reconvening of the Fellowship of the Ring, 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 the sense that to create a new fellowship of the ring, we need to create a new field of Eros,
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
DR. MARC GAFNI: A new field of possibility.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and we had this conversation on a walk that we took.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We did.
AUBREY MARCUS: And it was really about me recognizing that there's a deeper level of trust, in the goddess, in she, in who Mattias DeStefano 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 the wind at our back in this way. And I think for me, one of my own great struggles is to have that there is this force that's supporting and that it's true that I can't falter. Cause I remember all of my own failures and all the places where I've been broken 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 then 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 Vylana. But if I really trust that they represent the goddess and that the path is really 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, And to drive forward
DR. MARC GAFNI: And it's Vylana, it's Arwen and Aragon, it's Marc and Christina, and it's the fellowship, right? And that's important. And as it's not the old vision, it's the fellowship of the ring. It's the men and women. Cooke writes, Abraham Cooke is 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 we call today, 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
DR. MARC GAFNI: And that's huge and that maybe brings us to this notion of hope not yet
AUBREY MARCUS: Not yet.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Not yet.
AUBREY MARCUS: I want to get there, but I want to get to
DR. MARC GAFNI: Take us in brother
AUBREY MARCUS: One of the other things she says in that clip is you must go with Frodo.
DR. MARC GAFNI: You must go with Frodo
AUBREY MARCUS: And Frodo has this crazy mission where he has to dissolve the Ring of Power in its source fire.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Frodo has to dissolve the Ring of Power in its source fire, and there's two questions. One, why does he have to dissolve it?
AUBREY MARCUS: And that was the question I asked you late last night, right?
DR. MARC GAFNI: Late last night.
Aubrey Mracus: 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 in the kid. And it's a three hour story. If I tell the whole story and it's a long chapter in the book, but ultimately 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 Evenstar, stolen my actual heart. And then they gave this red gem back to me. And they said, Hey, 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. And then I 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 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 the, 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 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 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. You know, 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. And this is a 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. MARC GAFNI: Yeah, no, it's good. It's good. First off, amen on a 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 Darwin and the field of medicine. And emergent from the field we were talking about last night in the field of Darwin, 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 it 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, right, to the brokenness that lives in all of us and lives in Frodo. If we remember, hold the tape. What's his name? Fuck me. Isildur. Again. If we remember, Isildur at the key battle cuts off Sauron'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, and 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 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 tak, it can't be sweetened, Elibish or show 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Doesn't work.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, you can't destroy evil with evil. You can't destroy evil with force.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, you know, there's a very beautiful text, greater is light than darkness. 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, 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, right? And it grabs you. So what I've got to do is I've got to bring it to light and pour it back right into the flame of Eros itself.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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. It was the origin source of where the split off happened.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Where did the trauma happen?
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right. 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, 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, 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. Now 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 re-enter the field, which means I have to dance. I dance in the field, right? 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. I've got to become part of the larger field, part of the whole and let the whole pour into me. The whole has the power to heal me.
AUBREY MARCUS: One of the next places I want to go here and beautifully said, and in the next place I want to 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,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right
AUBREY MARCUS: You know, 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. You know, even the character Adam, who's has this
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right, in guardians
Aubrey Marcyus: In guardians
DR. MARC GAFNI: Sent to kill the guardians
AUBREY MARCUS: 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: At the very end of the movie,
AUBREY MARCUS: The very end of movie
DR. MARC GAFNI: End of movie three
AUBREY MARCUS: End of movie three. He's dying on a rock with Sam. He thinks
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's a little earlier.
AUBREY MARCUS: A little earlier. He's dying on a rock with Sam and he says, remember the shire,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Remember the shire
AUBREY MARCUS: Remember the fireworks and remember the dancing, the tree that we danced around and 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: After succeeding in the quest.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 overtook him and by
DR. MARC GAFNI: And the ring overtook him and he wanted to keep the ring.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And by divine intervention, by the way,
DR. MARC GAFNI: The golem
AUBREY MARCUS: The way that she was weaving and all of the ways golem takes the ring
DR. MARC GAFNI: Cuts his finger off.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Goes into
DR. MARC GAFNI: Falls in
AUBREY MARCUS: Falls into the fires with the ring
DR. MARC GAFNI: With the ring.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: He doesn't cry.
AUBREY MARCUS: Everybody else is crying
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're at that last scene and Merry and Pippin and Sam are there and they each embrace him. You see their tears rolling and he can't cry. 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, and he's wounded in his thigh 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 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, right? 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 them. 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 he 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. Kind of nods to them and walks out of the theater with his wife. One of the things I share with people, this is just getting 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, right? We become wounded healers.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, but the wound then can become a gift.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And then the wound turns into a gift. And Christina, in the movie that we're working on, talks about the wound, Christina Kincaid, my partner, but the wound actually becoming a gift.
AUBREY MARCUS: So what I would like the story to tell, to tell what I feel is the true story
DR. MARC GAFNI: What’s the next chapter of Frodo?
AUBREY MARCUS: That speaks through me, 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. MARC GAFNI: And that wound is, you know, 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 make 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: The carrying of the ring, right? The quest, right? Wounds him, right? Almost mortally, but then what wounds him is shame. And in that last second
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah
DR. MARC GAFNI: He went to take the ring, right? And actually had Gollum not bitten his finger off, right? He would have ostensibly 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 heart rending, that we can only live as part of the fellowship, we can only live, and I'm searching for my words here, you know, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're deeply imperfect.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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 it's, I think you're absolutely right. It's the weakest part of the movie, right? The Christian notion of sin is based on a linear idea of time. If you did that, it's done.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, there the wheel turns, and you're always going to come to that moment again, to that same situation, to that same dynamic, right? 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.
AUBREY MARCUS: Right.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, right, there's this very strong notion that the space time continuum, quoting one article, the space time continuum is dead. But then actually, we have a much deeper understanding now than the classical space time continuum in terms of our model of reality. The space time continuum is a simulation of reality, if you will. But underneath the space time continuum is what we call eternity. And eternity is not lots of time. Right. Eternity is beneath time and when you actually come back to that moment, to that challenge, that and you relive it, you've actually gone underneath time and you've literally reconfigured and that is brother in the lineage, right? 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 kind of nailed it here, right, where actually, Tolkien, and in many other issues, right, is operating, he's trying to do the C.S 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 what once you've been wounded.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Cha.
AUBREY MARCUS: Cha.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. But one of the things that I think they do get right. And to finish on this and the message is hope and
DR. MARC GAFNI: Hope.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And hope is a memory of the future, right? And a memory of the future, it's our job as the Fellowship of the Ring. When I say our, I mean you and Aub and Zach and Daniel and Christina and Vylana, right?
AUBREY MARCUS: And a million other people who we don't know their names.
DR. MARC GAFNI: And 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, 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 a relationship to the whole, I'm going to become omni considerate 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 is also a trickster, reality is a trickster, sometimes we shame shame, right, 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 means is your royalty and her best self, not the shaming mother voice, but the holy mother voice, the goddess Arwen, your Aragon. So we're shamed, we're not being royal.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: 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, they become shamed because they desperately want to be royalty. And that's the strange and almost grotesque caricature of the whole Megan 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, 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. Let's cross to the other side, brother.
AUBREY MARCUS: To be the new human, homo amor.
DR. MARC GAFNI: To be homo amor, not just homosapien
AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. And we'll talk about that more in podcasts and books and things to come. But, you know, you mentioned this, the appropriate shame that can come. And I tell Vy, you know, I'll sometimes lose hope and I'll sometimes feel impotent or powerless. I'll feel overwhelmed. I'll feel small, 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Right
AUBREY MARCUS: And that like oh, baby. I know you got so much to do and then I'm like, yeah, I do it's al hard, but 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
DR. MARC GAFNI: Arwen.
AUBREY MARCUS: 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 darkness, all our memory of the future, which to me is a dragon heart. And I say, you know, just call my name,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Call my name. We got to call each other's names.
AUBREY MARCUS: And if she calls my name,
DR. MARC GAFNI: Yeah.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's like I can't stay small anymore and sometimes I'll try I'll be like, I'm not dragging my heart and she's like, Yes, you are. That's just who you are. And that little, it's not, 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 Dragonheart right now. You know, that's not the right tone. It's like, Dragonheart, Dragonheart, like, I know who you are.
DR. MARC GAFNI: That's the holiest voice of shame, which is not shaming me.
AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.
DR. MARC GAFNI: It's calling me by my name. Aubrey, I love you, man.
AUBREY MARCUS: I love you, Man.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Cha
AUBREY MARCUS: 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.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're having a great time.
AUBREY MARCUS: We're having a great time. Thank you for all this time in Vermont. Thank you KK and every Derek and everybody who's been helping us pull all of this together. Krista, the whole team
DR. MARC GAFNI: Krista, unbelievable.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's been a huge project to get this off the ground and we're finding our way through finding our way.
DR. MARC GAFNI: We're finding our way.
AUBREY MARCUS: It's been really beautiful to share this time and to develop this new genre with you. And
DR. MARC GAFNI: Of course
AUBREY MARCUS: And I think 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 is speaking through all of these films and stories and myths that are being told.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Yay. Mad.
AUBREY MARCUS: Mad love.
DR. MARC GAFNI: Mad love.
AUBREY MARCUS: Mad love everybody. Bye bye.