Evolutionary Funeral: The Blessings Of The Father Pt 2 w/ Dr. Marc Gafni

AUBREY: Cha.

MARC: Cha.

AUBREY: Marc, my brother.

MARC: Cha. God, what a week!

AUBREY: What a week.

MARC: Oh my god, we're a bit exhausted, huh?

AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, we sat seven days of Shiva house, blended in Shabbat table technology or shamanic technology--

MARC: We journeyed.

AUBREY: We journeyed together. We blew it away in the ceremony. I have never felt the response from anything I've done other than what we did in that ceremony that's been more powerful from just people receiving it. It's just a beautiful reflection of a legendary man who got to get sent off in a legendary way. So here we are for part two of "The Blessings of the Father". One of the things that we talked about in the ceremony was, of course, that one of the blessings of the father was that we got to actually go through this process. One of the huge blessings was that we got to actually evolve and weave the threads of all of our mastery together to create something that's never been done before, really.

MARC: First off, just love you mad. What a week. It's almost like when you go through this with someone and you think you know each other, and you think you couldn't be closer, it's just this great realization that love is actually infinite. When love is real, like Aubrey and Vylana... If I really love Vylana, actually, three years from now, I'm going to love her crazy more and I'm going to look back at three years ago... It's how you know intimacy is infinite. You can always go deeper. So we went deeper this week. Maybe before we dive in, also just blessings to brotherhood in the world. We need more brothers in the world and sisters--

AUBREY: And all my brothers showed up and all my sisters showed up. For those of you who follow me, you know that I commemorate these brothers and sisters with a bead exchange on my necklace. Every bead on the necklace showed up and many more that we're still forming and crystallizing the depth of that connection, everybody showed up. Just mad gratitude for everyone who supported me through this process and supported my dad through this process.

MARC: I was actually reading last night at like 2:00 a.m., I was reading that chapter on your dad from the book on traders.

AUBREY: "Market Wizards" by Jack Schwager.

MARC: You had mentioned the book to me and just integrity between brothers I just... Maybe 2:00 a.m, I looked at the chapter and that's a different conversation. So let's go for the blessing of the father. Everyone, wherever they are in the world, there's this moment, there's this window of time, when the doors are open. Now you can always open the doors. But there's also moments in time where there's a particular invitation. In Hebrew, the word for time is invitation is zemn, Z-E-M-N. Time means invitation. There's a door open now. We were talking before... There's a lot we could talk about this week but actually, we all have fathers, and there's the great father in culture. We're really committed this week... Michael's energy is cause and because his energy is cause it actually allows him to rise. So the son goes to find the father in these dialogues by creating energy that he's the cause of that allows the father to rise. That is also just for me, for you, for anyone... When I lose a parent, the way to liberate the parent is to allow them to be cause in your life. So mystically, when I die, I become impotent, at least relative to this world. I can't play anymore. I can't make any more trades. I can make trades in the next part of the journey. No more trades here. No more futures. But the son can liberate the father. We created this week in which Michael was so fucking alive and cause that the son liberates the father. We're in that. The gate's still open. Next time we podcast, it'll be about something else but the gates fucking open now--

AUBREY: Yeah. Thursday, on 4/6, we're going to be actually putting my father into the ground. We've done the seven days of Shiva house. We did the eighth day, the liberation, the celebration, the commemoration, brought everybody together and gave it our full hearts and our full tears and all of it. Now we're in another mini bardo as we integrate all of the unbelievable miracles of this week and all of the great blessings of the father and blessings of the sisters and brothers and blessings universally, then this little bardo where we'll finally close this chapter but also leave open all of the threads that the blessings have opened.

MARC: All the threads the blessings have opened. For those people who track these things closely, we're not just doing the old lineage. The old lineage, you first do the burial and then you do the seven days. So for those people listening, "They're doing it in the wrong order," what we're actually doing is we're taking pieces from different technologies and we're weaving together a vision of world religions. So we did ceremony. We did Shabbat psychotech kinetics, and we did Shiva. It's all coming together. So let's put a frame on the table that can be a frame for us. So pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic. For me, it's helped me through life. It's one of those frames that she whispered, at some point a decade ago. Let me unpack it and then let's see how this plays out in your story this week. I'm going to weave things that I heard. I've sat in seven Shiva house tables with people gathered around and raising glasses and crying and laughing. Each night it was a different vision of Michael.

AUBREY: That was also really remarkable to see how the spirit of my dad evoked and a different version of him. It's like the multifaceted prism of his unique self.. Through every different angle that you looked at and through everybody else's prism, he actually appeared differently. It was a great lesson from that.

MARC: Different person appeared. It's what we do for each other. There's a part of Marc that appears only when he's talking to Aubrey and a part of Aubrey that appears only when he's talking to Marc. There's a part of Vylana that appears only when she's talking to Aubrey and another part that appears when she's having a conversation with Caitlyn. So what love does is love evokes a dimension of the person that can't appear in any other way. That's what it means... It's a wild thing. The lineage has this insanely beautiful realization; it's not an idea, it's a knowing; that we do the same thing for God. I know we've got a podcast with God. So we’ve got to do a full just-let's-talk-about-God but for now, let's just say God the infinite, God source, God geist, implicate order; Atman is Brahman, Adonai Elohim, the great sky, whatever that means, but that thing that's larger than us that holds us, that's in us and that makes it all meaningful--

AUBREY: Amen.

MARC: God/Goddess. Amen. Just feel into this for a second. The lineage has this realization that we do that for God. Now Aubrey evokes a dimension of God. What does that even mean? That no one else can evoke. So God experiences a shocking self-recognition in her/his conversation with Aubrey that he/she can't experience talking to Christian or talking to Marc or talking to Aaron. In that sense, we need our beloveds. We need our beloveds. We don't only love them; we love them, we see them, we bracket ourselves to be in devotion to them. And they give us ourselves back. So when you have a real lover, your lover gifts you with yourself, because something of you shows up in a way that no one else can evoke it? Every one of those Shiva nights, each group of people evoked your dad in a different way and it was like seven different Michaels appeared every night. So gathering from the Shiva house, we got these three images and we're going to, with your permission, brother, we're going to use your life as our sacred text. That's our mantra for this week. All of this is just words until we land in the stories of our lives. So Aubrey's life as a sacred autobiography but also love as a chapter in the sacred autobiography of God. That's what it means to be a unique self, that my life is a chapter in the sacred autobiography of God. It's a very precise idea. So Aubrey, we heard during the week about dad asks Aubrey, "What do you want your room to look like?" Aubrey says, "A cave." That's a story that ran through the week. Dad gets the best fucking cave people in America that go, "Make a cave."

AUBREY: Yeah. Special-effect cave-people like spelunkers.

MARC: Real cave people. Real cave people. So this is the dad larger than life. This is Aubrey, dad... This is the pre-tragic stage. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Pre-tragic is good. It's a gorgeous day.

AUBREY: Anything was possible in dad's magical kingdom.

MARC: Anything was possible. Then you ran into the tragic, brother. You ran into the tragic, that you and I talked for 18 months straight without this ever coming up, meaning it had gotten put away. We talked about everything and we only talked about your dad like three weeks ago. So dad ran into the dark night of the soul that ripped his heart apart, then he just went through a... Just listening to your description, we went to the house and went through a decade plus of just being alone in a tormented and painful place that he couldn't access anyone and no one could access him.

AUBREY: I wouldn't even say ripped his heart apart. I don't think the heart can be ripped apart from my conception of it, but it denied him access to it. His prism got so dense and secured by the fog of distortion and delusion and the voices that came in his head that actually the light couldn't shine through up from his heart or down from the true clear light, Panim El Panim, face to face with the truth, source, love, God, great spirit. He got lost in the dark forest.

MARC: You feel like your heart's ripped apart.

AUBREY: Yeah. And you can be convinced.

MARC: It's always the one heart. It's always the one love, but we feel... I remember in 2006, my heart felt ripped apart even though I knew it wasn't.

AUBREY: Heartbreak is that paradox of: you feel it but it's not true.

MARC: You actually feel it. You realize, "Oh, that's why that word is there." My heart's heavy. Your heart's actually heavy. So he's in the tragic, and then your relationship with him is in the tragic because you can't find your hero. You can't find dad. It could be over there but then something happens. And what happens is death and death opens a door. Death actually pressed us into life. As dad stepped into the next world, out of the tragic, the tragic falls away; the mist, the distortion of the tragic falls away; and then Aubrey can find dad again. For seven days, Vylana meets dad, for the first time. She didn't really... Dad's awake and there's joy and there's stories and we choose which stories to tell.

AUBREY: And recovered memories.

MARC: And recovered memories.

AUBREY: There's whole chapters of things that it seems impossible that I would have forgotten. I didn't forget because as soon as the spark was there, it illuminated a whole pathway, a whole neural encoding of files that were just zipped in my brain. I was like, "Holy shit! That Grand Prix racing game where we had an open challenge to any competitor to come and race him in the old arcade game in Monaco that he had in his office," and things that I was like, "Oh my god, how did I forget that?" It was so beautiful to bring him alive in the fullness of my own memory, and also to feel him and actually connect with him through the shamanic journey technology that we have as well, connect with him and hear his laughter and cry with him the tears and feel him as well. It was really, really beautiful.

MARC: And there's the post-tragic. That's the post-tragic. The post-tragic includes but transcends the deepest pre-tragic. We went through all the pre-tragic, gorgeous, memories but it doesn't bypass the heartbreak, the distortion, the illusion, the pain of the tragic. It doesn't get stuck there. There's a moment where we grieve and then when we grieve, we cast out the remorse that deadens us. So there's this poem that I always love by Yeats, that captures this. I want to just gift you with it. This was you this week: we're grieving, we're sad but in that sadness, we feel those feelings to completion, and then joy steps in. "When such as I cast out remorse, so great a sweetness fills my breast. We can dance and we can sing. We're blessed by everything and everything we look upon, is blessed." Post-tragic.

AUBREY: It's the capital K Kingdom. It's the more beautiful world. It's a whole perspective shift. It's the regular world but at a different octave.

MARC: I can see with God's eyes. To be a lover is to see with God's eyes. You could see your love of your dad. It never disappeared, ever; but it came back online in this new way. It never disappeared. AUBREY: It was always there. There always letters and emails, and I would send a photo and try and reach him, try and reach him and penetrate that dark forest always holding on to hope that maybe he would find his way just to a clearing, a clearing where he would just respond even a little bit so that we could rekindle something, have just some little bit of wood. If there's a little bit of wood there, we can make a little bit of a spark. And if we can make a little bit of a spark, maybe we can illuminate the darkness of this forest. It never came.

MARC: But here's the thing and let me offer this to you, brother: had you not done all those things that never came, you wouldn't have been able to do this week because you would have been too far away. You wouldn't have been able to cross the chasm. But all the things that you did, all the seeds you planted that looked like they didn't bear fruit actually opened the door for this week. In this world's religion, as a context for our diversity, which is the great father that we're together with, with our whole group of friends and beloveds, trying to bring into the world, we're offering a frame. This is a big one, friends. This is fucking huge. Pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic. So maybe let's just spend a few, just five minutes. Let's just stay on this for a second. So let me throw out just one or two examples and we'll just play with them. I don't think there's a person listening in the world, not a part of me that's listening, not a part of you that's listening that doesn't... We need the technology of the post-tragic. If you asked me, if you would push me to the wall and say, "Okay, Marc, as I've invited you into my medicine world... Marc, what do you think about my medicine world?" I'd say medicine together with dharma... But medicine is very important, opens you to the post-tragic. It doesn't answer the tragic. It doesn't take you back... Wrong use of medicine is an attempt to get back to the pre-tragic. So that's what crack, misused cocaine, misused cannabis--

AUBREY: Misused anything.

MARC: Let's take medicine, turn it into a drug or an opioid that takes you back to the pre-tragic. I can't handle the tragic so I'm going to access this journey to take me back to the pre-tragic, that's exactly not medicine.

AUBREY: No, it's regressive.

MARC: Medicine takes you, what gorgeous distinction, from the tragic to the post-tragic. So the difference between medicine and regressive drugs: regressive drugs takes your pre-tragic; medicine takes you to post-tragic.

AUBREY: It's beautiful.

MARC: Beautiful, right? One of the exciting things about this moment is we're doing this for real life, so this isn't just coming up between us right now. We've never thought about this distinction before, it just landed for us right now.

AUBREY: I want to go take a note on my phone right now so I can make sure that I include that in my next book that I'm writing about psychonautics because it's so true.

MARC: It's such a gorgeous distinction. It just came down for us right now. Wow. Thank you, She. It's exciting. It's exciting.

AUBREY: And She being another name for the Great Divine.

MARC: She being another name. And as you know, that's the name I use all the time. That's the name that She--

AUBREY: Shekhinah.

MARC: Shekhinah. And God again. I'm so looking forward to talking about God/Goddess with you. But let's stay here.

AUBREY: For sure.

MARC: Let's play this for a second. This as a realm, I understand, that you don't know much about but I'll try and talk a little bit about sexuality. No, no, no, I guess you probably... Okay, sorry. I apologize. I'm sorry.

AUBREY: I have a lot more to learn.

MARC: Oh my god, don't we all?

AUBREY: Me and Vylana need to continue practicing.

MARC: Teach me, brother. Teach me, sister. Teach me goddess. So let's have sex for a second, sexuality. Pre-tragic sexing, it's very subtle to get the pre-tragic. There's two kinds of pre-tragic sexing. One is: everything goes, do what you'd like meaning it's all fine. It's all good. There are no rules. It's just totally good all the time, meaning there's no complexity. You're not dealing with the hurt, you're not dealing with the ecstasy. It just becomes a purely biological act. Let's have lunch. Let's have sex. It's pre-tragic.

AUBREY: Do you think that anybody actually gets to live that pre-tragic? It feels like almost that's denied us--

MARC: No one ever lives that. It's an illusion. It's an illusion.

AUBREY: It's a time in the past that we can imagine or maybe some cultures that still have maintained it. Very complicated.

MARC: "Sex Before Dawn", that book, tried to elucidate it but even there, it was very, very complex--

AUBREY: "Sex at Dawn" by Chris Ryan is what you're--

MARC: By Chris Ryan. Right. Right. Right. Right. "Sex at Dawn". Who knows what was going on before dawn? The hot stuff was before dawn.

AUBREY: There was some Gomorrah happening.

MARC: There was some Gomorrah happening. But one image of pre-tragic sex is it's all good but it's pretty rare. We never get there. But there's this thing, "Wow. Can you imagine..." I remember watching with KK, with my partner, late night, we couldn't sleep. She flips on her computer and there's some movie about a guy who a woman's invited him to no-strings-attached sex and he says, "There's no such thing. What do you mean?" He's crossing the country to get there for this... So that's pre-tragic but there's another kind of pre-tragic. Pre-tragic means everything's clear. There's no complexity. The other kind of pre-tragic sex is the religions that say that sex is negative. It's also pre-tragic. It's also clear. It's clear it's bad. It's clear it's good. When you think you have total clarity, you're in pre-tragic. Pre tragic is it's all clear, there are no questions, we understand the whole map. Either it's all bad or it's all good, but it's pre-tragic. You're not in the tragic because you know exactly what to do or what not to do. Pre-tragic. Tragic is, "Oh my god, we have no sexual narrative. We don't know how to understand our own desire. We're dealing with, on the one hand, #MeToo, on the other hand, split off desire. On the other hand, we're dealing with abuse. On the other hand, we're dealing with monogamies are breaking down all over the country because they can't sustain desire. We're dealing with a broken sexuality all over the world. We're dealing with cultures where people are having less and less sex because we can't actually understand why we're... So this enormous complexity in which the narrative of desire breaks down. We don't have a story of desire equal to our experience, and there's utter rampant tragic confusion around sexing. No story that equals our sexuality, tragic. So we're in that place now in culture. Tragic. Post-tragic would mean let's tell a new story about sexuality. Let's reimagine it.

AUBREY: While learning all of the lessons from the tragic, all of the very true points that all the Me Too Movements, all of these other things are illuminating and shining a flashlight on, some dark and vicious corners of what is possible out there. It's like, "All right, let's be aware of this and let's make the intentional choice, as an act of will, to move, to incorporate and include all of that and transcend--

MARC: Into the post-tragic.

AUBREY: To the post-tragic.

MARC: Big part of what you and I are doing in one part of our lives is doing this phenomenology of Eros, with the center, with Kristina, which is this 12 volumes that retells the story of sexing. That's a whole other conversation, but that means we're going to post-tragic. So that's pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic. Just one more example just so we can feel and people can take it into their lives, suffering. So pre-tragic is you haven't suffered or you've suffered but your priest or rabbi or shaman or psychologist is telling you exactly why meaning there's clarity. You think you got it all worked out. "You suffered? Because you sinned." "You suffered because you attracted it into your life," New Age version of the classical religious position. In other words, there's complete clarity. Either you haven't suffered is pre-tragic or you suffer and you don't have any question about it because you've got all the answers whether it's fundamentalist New Age or fundamentalist religion.

AUBREY: Would you say that also pain, in a way, is always pre-tragic. It's just pain. It's a stimulus, a sensation. Suffering is our response to pain, which always... Actually in the word itself, and this is being a little granular but suffering... Shinzen Young, a kind of Zen practitioner, I had him on the podcast, and he distinguished between pain and suffering as pain being the sensation and suffering being our response and resistance to that pain which, inherently, somehow contains a little bit of the tragic with it, because there's some way in which we don't understand it, we're resisting it in a way.

MARC: That's beautiful. One form of pre-tragic is, “I haven't suffered.” Another form of pre-tragic is, “I've suffered but actually I know why, I think I know why, in quotation marks; some theology, new age or classical religion explains to me why so I have clarity or I'm literally not even at the experience of suffering. I'm just in pain. It's animal pain and it's just there. It's pretty tragic. It hasn't moved through the depth of my consciousness and been articulated as existential suffering.” So three forms of pre-tragic. Tragic. "Oh, my God, now I realize I'm suffering. I'm moved from," in your image, "from pain to suffering. I realize that the fundamentalist explanation to my suffering doesn't hold. No, God doesn't kill people who don't accept Christ in a particular way, or Jews who don't do it, or Tibetan Buddhists who leave the lineage, not the way it works. All the explanations don't work. No, I didn't lose something precious to me because I attracted it into my life as they told me in my new age seminar. Actually, there's a great mystery of suffering.

AUBREY: Yeah. Why? Fucking why?

MARC: Fucking why? I'm willing to stay in the uncertainty and I don't have any easy answer. I am living in tragedy. That's the tragic. Post-tragic and suffering is not that I provide an answer but post-tragic is this other very subtle, unimaginably beautiful realization where I realize I'm never going to remove the mystery. The mystery is always going to be there. But I know that the universe is a love story. I know we live in an intimate universe because if we didn't live in an intimate universe, there's no reason I'd be upset by suffering. If the world wasn't fair, why am I upset that it's not fair? The reason I feel the horror of suffering is because it is a love story and anything that violates the love story, I know isn't as it should be. So I can't answer suffering. There's no answer but I can reclaim the goodness of Eros. I can begin to celebrate again. People in my family who went through the Holocaust and then came to the United States, they didn't explain the Holocaust but they re-embraced life. They said, "You know what? The world is good and it is true, and it is beautiful. There's this mystery of suffering and we refuse to give any pre-tragic explanation to it but we're going to... We're not going to forget. We're going to live in remorse. We're going to cast out remorse and we're going to marry again. And we're going to love again. We're going to have children and we're going to write and we're going to create." So the re-embracing of life and the realization that the great uncertainty doesn't undo the certainty of life's goodness and I begin to live the dream again while I hold the mystery. Post-tragic. The greatest movement of enlightenment is the ability to move from tragic to post-tragic. That's in some sense, love, what you've done this week with your dad. You've moved from tragic into post-tragic. I've actually, as a lot of us did, watched it happen all through the week.

AUBREY: Yeah. It was in real time.

MARC: Then we'll move deep into the mystical and the Atlantis in this world in a minute. But I remember we landed, you got the call, you came downstairs, your face was stricken with pain. Right?

AUBREY: Stricken with pain.

MARC: And you cried all through the weekend. And every time you cried, you cried for all the times you never cried before. You open up gates crying, because all the gates are closed... The gates of tears are never closed. You literally modeled this movement from tragic to post-tragic. So wow, deep bow, brother.

AUBREY: It was this beautiful braid of grief and celebration and laughter that if I just rode that rainbow bridge and continued to ride my grief and laughter and pain and sorrow and joy and memory, if I just continued to ride the bridge, it was going to take me all the way through the different levels.

MARC: That's gorgeous and anyone who has unfinished business... And who doesn't have unfinished business? I do. Anyone can do this journey. It's not that you answer the tragic; that's where we get lost. It's like a medicine journey. There's a gate that if you go in that gate, you're lost. There's another gate, where you, "Oh, post-tragic."

AUBREY: And having that story and being able to choose that story was also another thing that emerged. It was like we have, available to us... If we consider ourselves a multi- dimensional being... You reference Atman as Brahman in your very brief, terse description of the infinite and the many names of God, which means that the God within mirrors the God without, the full God. When you really understand and feel all of those different threads and can actually get it in your body and feel the principle of correspondence, as the Hermeticists say, there's so much more that starts to just become available to you in choosing the story that you want. If you're in that multi-dimensional space, then there's stories from every different perspective. First of all, there's lateral stories you could tell, which is two perspectives of the same thing, plenty of studies of multiple eyewitnesses, all seeing different things. It's the idea that no two people see the same movie, because they're all seeing through their own prism of consciousness.

MARC: And the DNA actually communicates... There's a book by James Shapiro, the DNA communicates, in the human being, multiple story strands at the same time.

AUBREY: The ability to choose your story and have some solid stories that make sense like pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic and apply that, it helps you actually purify and clarify your story. So much of the week was about that. It was about choosing a story that actually wove through all of the multidimensionality of who we are; not bypassing; including all of the other stories, but saying, "This is the story that I'm going to ride. This is the story of it's all fucked up and it's all perfect, and it's a story that says we can hold paradox. I'm able to do this and it's not bypassing because I'm feeling all of the feelings. But this is the story that we're going to weave through. That was really beautiful."

MARC: It's gorgeous. It's everything. You just actually stunningly recapitulated so much of the week. We try to resolve the contradiction and what we've been saying all week is... Aristotle's law of the excluded middle says work out the contradiction. We're doing deeper wisdom, we're doing the wisdom of paradox. We're saying that the Garden of Eden is not paradise. It's paradox. Post-tragic is about paradox. So the tragic is you're lost in the contradiction, you try and get out of the contradiction by going back to the pre-tragic, doesn't work. You don't know where to go so you just basically turn off your joy. So many people, you just look and the glint is not in their eye, or in the gait, it's not in their step and you can't feel because somehow the contradiction deadens them. They were right to catch the contradiction and their own integrity, their goodness, not their... "I can't resolve the contradiction. I can't..." No, but you can go to paradox. Paradox is post-tragic. And as you said, as we said, we don't bypass but we're actually trembling before She in amazing joy. I guess the gift that we want to offer to each other right now and to anyone is there's a road to the post-tragic. The post tragic doesn't require any giving up of integrity. It's actually the highest integrity. I don't give up my true uncertainty. I dance in the uncertainty, but I reclaim the utter fucking certainty of the unimaginable goodness of life. Cha. We're in "The Blessing of the Father" this week so let's go wide and personal at the same time. I want to offer you something and tell me how it resonates in terms of an ancient mystery, Atlantis kind of text about your dad, who when we went into the house, you saw that he was deep into all sorts of very serious explorations, we saw books on prayer and books on different esoteric spiritual paths and he clearly was... There's lots of information that you have on this for 20 years that we talked about. He was clearly trying to, in the language of the lineage, he was trying to enter the Garden. It's called the pardes, the pardes, the great orchard, the garden. There's an old text. It's one of my most beloved texts. I laugh and cry whenever I read it. It's in [inaudible 36:08] that particular tomb in the third-century, fourth-century Aramaic texts. It says, "Four enter the orchard." Four, the four masters. One went insane. A second, died young. A third betrayed his faith. And the fourth, Akiva, entered in peace and left in peace. It's like a journey. I remember sitting with my dear friend over the last few years of his life, Richard Alpert, Ram Dass. I was with him in his room a bunch of years back, before he passed in 2005, and he said to me, "So many of my friends knew how to get in, but they couldn't get out." I shared this text with them. Your father was in the orchard. He had found his way in. He had enormous heart, and depth and penetration. I offer this with such tenderness. It's not that he was lost exactly. He wasn't in delusion. He had actually found his way into the garden. But in the garden, it seems like, so tenderly, he couldn't find his way out. How does that feel with you? And throw it out, delete it but I'm offering it as a way to begin to feel into this and to liberate the father.

AUBREY: Certainly, my father had found his way in. I think what is coming through me now is that he found his way in and then he knew that there was a place, there was a place that he was looking for that was real. There was a place that he was looking for that was real. But the place that he was looking for that was real wasn't good enough. So he actually said... In some ways, he discarded the real garden and went deeper looking for an illusory garden, a garden in his mind that would give him access to the type of information and experience that an unintegrated part of him wanted. So he was in the garden and he could make his way out of that garden but that garden wasn't quite good enough. In some ways, just as he wasn't quite good enough for himself, the garden wasn't quite good enough for him either. Both were actually inextricable. There was a not-quite-good-enough quality to it. He was going in, says, "No, I want a better garden. I want a garden where I have access to even more information and access to even more." He actually went past the garden, this is what I feel, he went past the garden into the dark forest, which is no longer the garden anymore. It's almost like it goes all the way around to the upside-down garden.

MARC: This is deep. This is deep, love. This is deep, brother. This is really a conversation between two mystics, about how we describe. We're now trying to give language to... And we're trying to trace Michael with honor, to liberate him from loneliness. So I'm going to share with you just... I think we're saying something very, very similar. We're using a different way of... So when you go into the garden, you go into the garden, you've actually found your way in. There is a way in which when you want more, you can't receive the blessing of what you've received and let it bring you back into the world. So then the garden itself draws you deeper and deeper in and you can't find your way back. In Zen Buddhism, the 10th ox-herding picture is when the master turns and goes back to the marketplace. There's a place in which the garden keeps drawing you in, and the garden becomes the dark forest, which is what you're describing. So we're describing the same thing in a slightly different phenomenology, which is how you get, by the way, different mysticisms. But it's the same. We're describing the same phenomenology. It somehow became a dark forest and you could see by the writings he left in the house that he was convinced it was the garden. But it wasn't. It was lost. That's what we mean by lost in the garden. Akiva, who's in the lineage of Solomon, he's holding the lineage. Akiva, he [inaudible 40:55]. He enters in peace, [inaudible 40:58], he actually is able to leave the garden and take everything with him back to the marketplace. Cha. So let's see if we can just, for the sake of liberating the father and for the sake of offering a path, if we can make this distinction, which is really, really important. It's not enough to hear voices. I can hear voices and the voices are real. My therapist will tell me the voices aren't real but I know my therapist is wrong. I know the voices are real and I'm right. The voices are real, but the voices being real is insufficient. It's not enough that the voices are real. I can have... It's why, in the lineage, there's a prophet and a beautiful but false prophet. Sometimes, within one person, there's a real prophet and a false prophet in the same person. False prophet means not bad person, means I hear voices but there's a hermeneutic prism--

AUBREY: Love that word.

MARC: Love that word. Hermes, god of interpretation. So I have an experience, have an experience but I think that that experience yields this conclusion. But I don't realize that I'm actually interpreting the experience. So my experience is real. Therapy tells me it's not real. Modern, materialist, society tells me it's not real, but I know it's fucking real and I'm right. What I don't realize is that, actually, there's your hermeneutic prism of interpretation that's happening inside of me that's reading the experience in a particular way. This is; and I'm going to pass this to you, brother; this is where psychics and mediums and different masters of the occult that are actually holding true gifts, that are having real experiences, but actually can also do great damage because they think that they're actually transmitting the reading or the message and they're unaware of the fact that there's a prism of interpretation that goes through their ego and their complexity and their own dark forest.

AUBREY: This discussion has come up. This is my general aversion to psychics and mediums, with certain exceptions where someone has passed through the crucible, where I actually trust their prism, Paul Selig being one of them, many-time podcast-guest. I actually trust that not only is the signal true, but actually his prism is clear. So the words that he speaks, they reverberate through my whole body like I was a drum that was tightly wound or a flute that was made by a master craftsman so that the reverberation through the read is just perfect. I feel it, I feel it in my body. Other times, there have been psychics who've been incredibly accurate but actually, their prism of interpretation has left little mines, little broken glass shards, that I'm going to step on along my way, because they've implanted certain beliefs and certain ways that they've interpreted things--

MARC: That gets embedded in my leg, that piece of glass. It gets infected.

AUBREY: As a general, that's a huge caveat and one of the reasons why, typically, I'll almost never... I take it with a very explorer's skeptic mind where I almost intentionally don't let anything in--

MARC: And you're very practiced, love. It's very hard for a person to do that. So when people ask me or ask you... When people say to me, "I was at this psychic, I was at this medium," I say, "Wait, wait." In other words, yes, they may be a beautiful people. Let's even give them that. They may be hearing real voices but there's a prism of interpretation that's not trustworthy. That's really important to realize in our culture today. The mediums are getting mad. They're like, [inaudible 45:09].

AUBREY: They're like, "And now you can't speak!"

MARC: We claim voice. And this is so important for people to know because... I can't tell you the amount of people I've talked to over the years who had an experience with a psychic or with a medium who were good people but actually, they said something that they thought was direct transmission, which was actually interpretation and then that actually affected the vector of the person's entire life. So in some sense, and let's take this the next step, because it's so big, the medium, the psychic, the channel is looking to hear the god voice. We go to the medium and the psychic can channel it because we think that that's a way to access the god voice. But we're responsible to disambiguate the god voice. That's a huge sentence. In other words, we reject the materialist monoculture that says, "There's no god voice." The materialist culture says, "No, no. There's no god voice. And look at the mistake they made there and look at the mistake..." No, no, there's a god voice.

AUBREY: "It's all schizophrenia."

MARC: "It's all schizophrenia." No, no, the god voice is real. The god voice is ultimately real in the eye of the spirit and the eye of consciousness and the eye of the heart and the eye of contemplation, which are epistemological disclosures, real gnosis, it's real. And it goes through a prism of interpretation.

AUBREY: Yeah. I think about my dad. If he would have had one piece of what we call amongst us, the Dharma... The Dharma is the unfuckable truth. It's almost like a perennial philosophy but it's an evolving perennial philosophy--

MARC: We call it an evolving perennialism. That's a big sense. We'll bracket that one.

AUBREY: We'll bracket that but it's something that's like... One of those is there's certain things that the god voice just won't tell you at least as far as I understand it. Now, maybe that evolves but the god voice isn't going to tell you which way the stock market's going to go, which way the futures market is going to go, which way this is going to happen, who's going to win the next Bulls game or the next Jets game, whatever the thing is. It's not going to tell you that.

MARC: When it pretends to, be careful.

AUBREY: Be careful. The reason why it can't is because if it did, then it would be denying all of the individual sovereign actors who are making individual sovereign choices that are actually creating and co-creating that reality and allowing this game to actually flourish, allowing this to be real. So if my father would have had that, he would have said, "Well, this voice can't be real because it's trying to tell me things." There would have been some checks and balances. He entered that dangerous part of the garden but without simple principles of... It'd be like entering a war zone without basic principles of combat, entering a jungle without basic principles of poisonous plants and dangerous animals. He didn't have the explorer's guide to the garden, to the dark forest.

MARC: Maybe, as you know, our dear friend, David J. Temple, who we haven't yet introduced to people but who's a great writer, is going to be sharing in the world in about six, eight weeks, this first book on evolving perennialism, what we're calling the Dharma. So maybe when that book comes out, we'll talk to David. Maybe we'll see if we can have that conversation about that book. So evolving perennialism, what we mean by that, by the Dharma is huge but for now, let's just stay with the... When we say the Dharma what we mean is that we live in a story of value that's real. It's not just made up. There's actually a plotline to cosmos. That story of value is rooted in what we call, here's the quote, "A story of value rooted in evolving first principles and first values," end quote, which is actually a map of reality, but not a fundamentalist map that removes all the uncertainty and says there's no mystery but actually, as you said, really beautifully, I love the phrase, an explorer's guide. In other words, it actually allows you to orient yourself to get your bearings in the field of value. So that's a big conversation which is huge and gorgeous. Hopefully, in six-eight weeks, if we can find David J. Temple... I'm excited to announce that he's putting out that book and we'll talk about that. But let me get back to the psychic and your dad and lost in the garden, voices that are real. Our obligation... When we were in the journey, the medicine, we kept hearing the voice, "Purify, clarify." The two voices I was hearing was purify, clarify and all in for all life. We were whispering to each other, "Purify, clarify, all in for all life. Purify, clarify, all in for all life."

AUBREY: It was like a mantra.

MARC: It was like a mantra. We were sitting so close to each other, and we just felt those words going back and forth. Can I tell you a story, like a crazy story?

AUBREY: Please.

MARC: It's a crazy story. This is unimaginable. We're going to just try trembling before She, [inaudible 50:27] that's unimaginable. So the most famous story about the god voice in Western history, Kierkegaard, the great Christian theologian, wrote a book about it called "Fear and Trembling". All the great traditions refer to it: Islam, Christianity, Christendom and, of course, Hebrewicism is the story of Abraham, who is commanded by God, in the 22nd chapter of the book of Genesis, to sacrifice his son. This is the father and the son. That's who we're doing this with, the father and the son. The entire Book of Genesis is about the blessing of the father. When you came downstairs on Saturday night, you were grief-stricken and then your grief went into me and I actually didn't know what to say. We didn't actually have words until the next morning. I walked downstairs and we sat on the couch and looked at each other. The words that came down were, "Blessing of the father." Then we just together plunged into the blessing of the father. So now let's honor the lineage. The place that it incepted in me is deep in the lineage, when you really read the book of Genesis, the source text of Western civilization, it's about the blessing of the father. Adam, two sons, Cain and Abel. Who gets the blessing of the father? How do you learn to get the blessing of the father? Noah, three children: Shem, Ham and Japheth; who knows how to get the blessing of the father? Ibrahim, Abraham who was the son of Terah, he leaves his father, he has a son, Isaac. Isaac wants the blessing of the father. Isaac is going to have two sons. Who gets the blessing of the father? Jacob has 12 children. Who gets the blessing of the father? The entire story of the book of Genesis is about the blessing of the father. What is the blessing of the father? How is it transmitted? When does the son need to come to liberate the blessing from the father? When is the father able to transmit it? It's all about the blessing of the father. We all yearn for the blessing of the father. So Isaac wants the blessing of the father and his father says, "Hey, son, let's go on a camping trip." Isaac says, "Great, maybe I'll get the blessing of the father." There's a donkey and there's a couple of assistants and they go to Mount Moriah. They ascend the mountain. The text begins in chapter 22, "And God tested Abraham. And God said to Abraham," this is the text, "God said to Abraham, [inaudible 52:59]. Take your son, your only son, the son that you love, Isaac, [inaudible 53:09] and raise him up there as a sacrifice [inaudible 53:13] on one of the mountains, which I'm going to show you." Abraham's like, "Fuck, God voice." The tradition usually reads this, Maimonides, clear god voice. "Prophecy is absolutely clear," says Maimonides, "You would never go sacrifice your son if the God voice didn't tell you." And so he takes him up the mountain. He lays him out there on the slab of the rock. He raises his hand. It was an incredible text that we read on the New Year in the lineage. He's got a knife in his hand and he's about to slaughter his son. The voice of the angel says [inaudible 53:52], "Don't stretch your hand forth against the boy." Abraham steps back, he sees a ram, sacrifices the ram instead. That's the story. And the story is always read as the absolute clarity of the god voice. Abraham has to sacrifice his son. Kierkegaard, speaking for Christianity says this is the teleological suspension of ethical in front of the overpowering God voice. That's the old religion. And now we have to reread this text. This text is, oh my god. I understand the text. Anyone who sends a child to war knows. I moved to Israel knowing my children would join the army, an incredibly painful decision. In that sense, I put them in danger. They both entered special forces in the army and their lives were at risk all the time. So we do sometimes have an ideal and a value for which we're willing to put ourselves and our children at risk. It's a very painful text. The text is obviously not a model but it becomes the center of the old religion. So I want to share something crazy with you and then turn it back to you and to your story and this week. There's an unimaginably secret hidden text in the Solomon lineage which says, the text says, "And God tested Abraham." So the Zohar, page 120, Aramaic says [inaudible 55:31] God is the evil inclination. The Zohar says that God's voice wasn't God. He heard it wrong. He couldn't clarify the prism. The Zohar's words are almost the exact words you used, brother, [inaudible 55:48]. It was an unclear prism. So actually the test wasn't will you sacrifice your son and to be obedient to God. The test was will you take responsibility to disambiguate the god voice and realize that voice in your head that's telling you to sacrifice your son, motherfucker, isn't God? Abraham is liberated when he actually realizes oh, my god, that wasn't the god voice. I'm going to go one more step and then it's all yours. So what voice was it? It gets really personal and intimate and I say this with mad love and honor, it's a trembling moment. So if you read carefully in the hidden lineage, you come across a story, a text that says that Abraham's father takes Abraham to the god-king Nimrod and offers Abraham up as a sacrifice. He's thrown into a fury fire and only emerges by a miracle. But his father goes to sacrifice him. So what is Abraham doing? Freud, repetition compulsion. He's going to do to his son what his father did to him. He thinks it's the god voice. It's actually the voice of the father that lives in his head. Repetition compulsion. It's Abraham's call as a prophet-king to disambiguate the god's voice and say, "No, no, that's the voice of father I'm not talking with me. I'm going to find my own way to the god voice. And God's telling me not to sacrifice the son". That's a lot.

AUBREY: There's a lot of things that arise, but I want to just take it to the personal because--

MARC: Take it to the personal.

AUBREY: There's an unfinished loop from our last series of conversations that we had before, day three and four of the Shiva. I think it was on day four when we recorded. It was an opportunity for me to give my father full forgiveness. This is bringing me right back to that point because I always believed that my father had a choice. I couldn't ever really let that go; that, "Dad, you had a choice. You had a choice to disambiguate from that voice and to understand that that voice was the false voice. That voice was driving you away from everything that you love," everything that clearly he loved. His house was filled with all of the games we used to play when I was a kid, all the dice; well, actually only one dice; but all the cards, all the Scrabble, all the Boggle, everything that was there that was everything that he really loved, and even cigars. My dad knew that I loved cigars. We told a story of when Uncle Dave... I loved cigars so much, even before I was even allowed to have cigars. I loved cigars so much, Uncle Dave, my father's brother, got me a theatrical beard so I could go into the humidor myself and get cigars. My dad never liked cigars but he had a box of cigars.

MARC: Cha.

AUBREY: It was like he craved... I was there the whole time but he couldn't actually make the choice to choose to disambiguate. That's where I found him and I judged him guilty. That's where it's been difficult for me to forgive. The story that I can tell now, which offers forgiveness is only possible after this week of eight days of miracles.

MARC: Post-tragic.

AUBREY: Where I can say, "Dad, I fucking forgive you. I forgive you because this week happened." This week was so special. It was, in many ways, the greatest eight days of my life, the greatest eight days of my life, filled with all of every emotion, every pain, every joy, every laughter, every reconnection, new things emerging, this opportunity to offer this, as we're doing now, share this, open-source it so I can ride a story from a different octave and say, "Dad, yeah, maybe you did have a choice. But actually, maybe there was an even higher force that was riding through you. And that was leading you right to this moment right here where everything is redeemed by this choice and through this choice that we've made to honor you and bring you into your fullness, that everything was perfect, dad. So I forgive you, dad. I fully forgive you because we've made the choice to fully redeem. That's what was needed, the whole completion of this week in its perfect fucked-up-edness.

MARC: You couldn't do that a week ago, brother.

AUBREY: I couldn't do that a week ago. But I can do that now and I can do that with a clear heart and say, "I forgive you, dad. I forgive you."

MARC: You can do it now [inaudible 1:01:24]. Oh my god. Wow. And you're saying two huge things, three. One is the story of the binding of Isaac, the way we're rereading it for world religion says we're radically responsible to disambiguate the god voice. That's part one. But here's part two: sometimes we can't. Sometimes we can't, that you just spoke. That is the post-tragic. The tragic is when you think we could have done it differently and it's tragic we didn't. But then we have this realization that you just spoke. If I could try and put it into words, every place we've been, we needed to be. You set up the funeral really beautifully. And that was the beginning where you could feel it shifting in you, "Who am I to say that it could have been any different?"

AUBREY: I caught myself.

MARC: There's this place and there's a way that we can feel this in realization, in some sense, anything that's about to happen, we have a choice in. Anything that's about to happen, we have choice of some level. We can disambiguate the god voice. We can choose. But once it's already happened, and death tells us it's past then we realize, actually, it couldn't have been any different. Paradox. Not contradiction. Wow. Wow, it's like we're totally responsible to be Abraham and to disambiguate the god voice and take responsibility for the god voice and once it's already happened, every place you've been you needed to be.

AUBREY: I could feel so many of the other mourners there were close to my father, his best friend Craig Dinkel--

MARC: Craig. Howard.

AUBREY: And so many other people. Another one was Howard, another one of his good friends. They could see the tragic of like, "Man, everything Michael ever wanted was right there before him. He could watch his son..." He loved me so fucking much. He could have watched his son flourish in the way that I've flourished and to feel that and to be right there with me through this whole process, like heaven was there and they saw the tragic. I think they got a glimpse of the post-tragic through me as they saw me step into the post-tragic of, "Yeah, you're right, Craig, and you're right, Howard. That's true and it's all perfect." I can't say that I would have changed it because I can't see with perfect clarity which way would have been better, ultimately, for the course of destiny, my life, for humanity. Actually, that's still a mystery. The mystery is called a mystery for a reason.

MARC: That's right. It's hidden.

AUBREY: And I'm choosing to believe that there was a mystery that was hidden that was so deep, that actually it was fucking perfect. In there lies the redemption and lies--

MARC: The liberation.

AUBREY: The liberation and the forgiveness.

MARC: And lies the seat of the new world religion. In the old religion, we said there's a mystery and therefore, we don't act. There's a mystery and therefore, we can just be obedient. There's a mystery; therefore, we give up human agency and responsibility. We're saying no, no, in this new world religion that comes out of the deepest lineages of all the ancients and yet weaves together the best of sciences and evolutionary sciences, and all the technologies of shamanism, we actually realize anything that's in the future, anything that's from the second on, we are fully fucking responsible. We are on. We are on the court, we are not in the stands. We hear the god voice, it's our responsibility to disambiguate the god voice, that's the Abraham story and it's mine to do. But once it's already happened, we then rest in the mystery. That moment has died. And then we realize... The lineage calls this... It's hidden, it's nowhere in the public texts, calls it [inaudible 1:06:01] the higher goddess is the realization that in some ultimate sense it couldn't be any different than it was, but not as a future position, not a position on the future. It's a position on recovering the past. That moves us to the pre-tragic. I literally watched people walk into your house, Aubrey, all week, and they thought they were coming to visit you in the tragic. Well, we got to come visit your father's friends, your friends, you're right. But also they came into the house and they weren't in the pre-tragic, but they weren't in the tragic. Something else was happening. It was post-tragic. Post-tragic was this is what was, there's goodness, there's mystery and we can hold the mystery together. It's so beautiful.

AUBREY: The reflex response is, "I'm sorry for your loss." It's what everybody believes that they need to say. And actually, Christian, who's in this room, got that that didn't really land for me because yes, of course, of course, "I'm sorry for your loss." Yes, thank you. Thank you for that blessing actually, in that act of compassion, to be sorry for my loss. Also, it's true but partial. Actually, Christian came to me and said, "I'm grateful for your gain."

MARC: Yeah, beautiful.

AUBREY: I was like, "That's it, my man." That's it, that's the story that I'm choosing to ride--

MARC: That's post-tragic.

AUBREY: It doesn't negate doesn't negate that I'm sorry for your loss but I'm also grateful for your gain. Both need to be expressed for actually that sentiment for me to actually receive it, because I wasn't going to get sucked back into the tragedy when I was looking for the post. I felt tragic, believe me even all the way up to... I had a moment of this. So Vylana is doing her sound healing which is this unbelievable sound bowls and voice and channeling, the spirit of that one particular moment. I was drawn through, actually, no intention of mine, other than to tell something to the sound guy, which needed to happen to close the ceremony down... It just occurred to me, but actually, he already knew. He didn't really need to go there. But as I was walking, I saw the table of all of the photos that we had put out, framed photos of me and my father and my father in different stages of his life. I just started weeping deep, deep, deep tears as I looked through every single photo. I was feeling the tragedy of my father, Michael Phillip Marcus, of everything we missed, of everything that he missed, the tragedy of it all and then I found one photo of him where it was just his full presence, his smile, and I found it and I just locked onto it. I could feel him there with me now in the perfection of that moment. I just started to smile and I just said, "We did it, dad. We did it, dad."

MARC: "We did it, dad." Right then... It was right when I walked... I remember exactly...

AUBREY: "We did it, dad."

MARC: "We did it, dad." And does everyone, just to share with everyone anyplace wherever we are, Aub, you're not saying, we're not saying this new Dharma, is not saying... As long as your dad was alive, you could not say... It would be a violation to say, "Dad, we're yards where you need to be." You got to reach out in any way you could and keep hoping. If action was impossible, then you pray or you send just a few months before, you send an email reaching, trying to find... You have to do everything you can do as long as it's still in play. But then, when the moment comes to pass, when death comes, you can either go into the tragic and the bitterness of it or you can actually... It's not just that you're choosing a better story. There is a better story. It's actually a more accurate story, and the more accurate story is every place you've been, you needed to be. You can feel it in your body. Actually, no, I can't actually say it could have been different. Until the moment of death, you can't say that, until it's past. As long as there's a play to be made, we're on the field. The second there's no play to be made, our whole perspective transmutes and transfigures. Medicine gives you that realization and so does dharma. From a logical, only a logical conceptual perspective, that's a contradiction. What do you mean? From a deeper perspective, that's a paradox.

AUBREY: And when you live it, you can live--

MARC: You can feel it!

AUBREY: You can live the resolution of the contradiction and the acceptance of that paradox.

MARC: Every place you've been, you needed to be.

AUBREY: As Hafez said, "Wherever you are right now, God circled that place on a map for you."

MARC: For you and it couldn't be any different. So I want to ask you one more question, love, about the blessing of the father. So let's stay with Abraham and Isaac. So we're in this deep lineage and we're recovering this lineage from the past and moving into the memory of the future, and we're enacting this new world religion as a context for diversity coming out of this blessing of the Father. So Isaac is there. Let's move from Abraham. We've been looking at Abraham. Now let's shift the lens. Let's look at Isaac. He's laying there. He sees his father and he sees madness in his father's eyes. Isaac is the son who sees madness in his father's eyes. I'm thinking about you and your father; I'm thinking about my father now and I'm thinking about anyone who's ever seen madness in their mother or father’s eyes. That can be just when they lose their temper and there's madness for a moment, and it's imprinted on you. And it could be deeper and longer. So there's Isaac, he's laying back, he sees his father holding a knife, metaphorically, mystically, archetypally, and he can't cry. The lineage records in a hidden text that in that moment, tears of angels fell in his eyes. Tears of angels fell in his eyes. In Israel, the song tears of angels taken from this text as a major song in the culture of the country. Now, stay with me just for a second, just a little lineage story. So the lineage doesn't tell us about these tears of angels when they happen, meaning in chapter 22 of the book of Genesis, when the binding of the Isaac story is told, there's no mention of tears of angels. And no one needs any background to get this. Five chapters later, chapter 27, when Isaac is older, [inaudible 1:13:05] Isaac is older now he's about to have children, he has children, he has to choose which son to bless. It says [inaudible 1:13:14], Isaac's vision is blurred he can't see well. So the lineage says why can't he see well? Its hidden text. Lineage says because the tears of angels fell in his eyes back then. So tears of angels means trauma, trauma. So the trauma, which is so painful, that he couldn't even cry, so angels cried for him, that trauma, those tears of angels, they blur his eyes, and stop him from doing the right action in the world. Here's a wild, deep question for you, brother, for me, for you, but for all of us, and through you for all of us, it's a question we need to address in this new context, this new story of value, therapy has its answer, when do we need to go back and cry the tears of angels and when do we need to move on? That's such a huge question. When is it critical? God, I need to do that therapy again. I need you to do that process again. I need to go into the darkness again. When do I need to get up and roar and act and be a lion? The text almost suggests as long as you're living your life... Isaac is very successful. He goes through five chapters of success, tears of angels, trauma doesn't affect them. But then he's got to create a new lineage. He's got to give the blessing of the father, he's about to... Imagine you're about to become a father and all of a sudden, all the tears I didn't cry, those tears of angels, when they cried for me, do I need to go back and cry to them myself in order to clear my vision? So how does that feel, brother? Wow.

AUBREY: I actually have a very clear answer to that, which is a very complex question and a very beautiful question. The challenge is that we don't know when we have to cry those tears. We just don't always know. Sometimes there's another question of okay, I know I need to cry the tears, I don't know how to cry the tears. But actually, the answer is the same in that you go through a process that will evoke and call forth whatever is left there to be, that hasn't been cried, anything that you haven't expressed. The processes that I'm thinking of, of course, there are the medicine journeys, which can do that but there's two non-medicine... I mean, everything is medicine, but non-psychedelic as far as a plant or a substance processes and that's breath work and the sweat lodge or Temazcal. Whenever I do breath work, I am often surprised that there are wells of tears that are there. Sometimes they have a story, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're just locked in my soma somewhere and they just emerge as the breath fills my body and the hyper-oxygenation takes off my ordinary consciousness of perception, melts the walls where these pockets of trauma and these uncried tears live and they just pour forth. Sometimes they have a story, sometimes they don't. In the lodge, door three, which is often an hour and a half, two hours in, you've been sweating, you've been praying, you've been listening to the drum and the smoke and the sweet grass and the sage and the cedar, and the copal, or whatever your tradition of lodge that you sit in, you'll find something there, if it's there. To me, that's been the way that I've actually known. It's not that my cognitive mind says, "I think there's some more tears there," because I don't know. But I just put myself in a position where if there are tears, I'll melt away all of the walls that keep me from seeing it, all of the parts of my prism that are obscured and then whatever needs to come forth will come forth. So having those is like a regular check and balance to the practice, where you have something that you can do. There is nothing, absolutely no reason why you can't do breathwork frequently. I don't care what... AA, 12-step program or whatever you want, nobody says you shouldn't breathe--

MARC: Breathing is good.

AUBREY: Nobody says that. To me, breathwork becomes one of these crucial practices to bring in, into this world religion, into these ideas because it'll allow you to actually find out what's there. It's not the only one but it's just the clearest, no hesitation, I recommend this universally. Do those shamanic breathwork practices to see what might be there. Is it rage that's there? Is it tears that's there? What's left that's been repressed that needs to be expressed?

MARC: That's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. I love every word you say and I just want to be in it with you for a second. One of the primary texts of this new world religion is the texts of laughter and silence and tears. Let's focus on tears for a second. Tears are a text. There's a language of tears. Tears have a voice. What you're saying is that and there's a deep, deep truth is you can't just wait for tears to happen to you, you have to actually practice to invite the tears and give them space.

AUBREY: Amen.

MARC: And breath work and medicine, but you're focusing on breath work and sweat lodge are a practice that invites the tears. It's so beautiful and so wildly important. It's one of these places, again, that we meet so beautifully. You've never talked about this before. It's beautiful. I wrote a book on tears. It's actually on Amazon, although it shouldn't be there because we're going to reissue it because it was badly edited. So if anyone buys it, I apologize for the editing. There'll be another but it's about tears. It's about 12 different forms of tears. I missed this breathwork sweat lodge thing. Actually in the new edition, I want to set you on that. I didn't have access to that as a practice. It's really beautiful. It's really beautiful. Tears clarify us.

AUBREY: They do.

MARC: Tears... One of my masters whispered in my ear from the 16th century. He talks about the tears from below, which is the feminine waters, the feminine wetness and the masculine expression of the sticky tears from below. Then he says there's the tears from above, which he calls, if I translate literally, the semen of the eyes, the wetness of the eyes. It's an incredible... Hiyyam Vital, a major student of Luria, 16th century in Safed by the Sea of the Galilee, and he says it's the Eros of tears. Tears matter so much. So when do we go back, this question we started with. When do we go back and cry tears of angels? Aubrey, part of what you're saying is you have to have regular practice to evoke tears. Again, it's a wonderful place to meet. I've said to my students all through the years, that you have to keep a tears journal. You have to keep a journal of tears and give the tears voice. Tears is such a beautiful word. Tears in English is it tears something open but tears not in a bad way, it opens the space.

AUBREY: Often, until you've cried, you don't actually see that you needed to cry or why you were crying. It almost wipes away your lens of perception--

MARC: It clarifies.

AUBREY: All of the obscurity, all of the obfuscation of, and the opacity of your prism actually moves out through the liquid of your eyes, and then you can see clearly and then you go, "Oh my god, I needed that."

MARC: This is a wild thing that's gorgeous. Just like in sexing... We're working together on this phenomenology of Eros where we chart seven levels of sexing. And no, we're not going to talk about that. There's tall forms of tears but that's not just being clever. If a person just cries, just like medicine, medicine needs dharma and dharma needs medicine, tears need dharma. For example, the molecular structure and pattern of tears that come from different experiences are different. Wow, when you actually look at pictures of the tears, they're literally different. Each time I cry, it's telling me a story. Tears are a prism of revelation, but they're utterly personal.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's beautiful.

MARC: It's beautiful. Wow. I don't think there's anything more beautiful than for people to cry together. Crying can be ecstatic crying. You can make love with ecstatic tears and crying can be broken crying, and crying to be crying of liberation. At a different time, we're not going to get seduced there now but we'll talk more about tears. But tears are so important in a world religion, where the text is, the text of your own tears, the text lives in you, you are the sacred text and your laughter, and your tears and your holy unbroken hallelujah is the text of your sacred autobiography. So let's see if we can go back and see if we can wrap this piece which is unwrappable, and conclude this piece which can't be concluded. So I'm going to ask you the question one more time, we're just going to go back and forth one more time. Just tell you a little story, not from a text. I was thinking about this tears-of-angels text many years ago. We actually did a show on it in my Israel television kind of Oprah stage when we were doing this show, which is very beautiful. It's a beautiful context. I miss the joy of connecting to a country, there's a great joy in it. You're supposed to be embarrassed by having a joy in it but actually it was one of the most enjoyable things I ever did, you can feel like you can talk to a country. I think it's very much what you're doing on a podcast, the gorgeousness of just feeling this deep connection with people, and we get to love each other. So we were in that stage. And I had just finished giving a talk someplace in Jerusalem about the show we did on tears of angels. I had Diet Coke in my hand. No, I never drink Diet Coke, but I happened to have one in my hand.

AUBREY: Weird.

MARC: There we go. And I had my ring of keys, which had the keys to my apartment. I didn't drive; still don't now because I always get lost in thought and wind up crashing into things, which is bad. So I'm walking with this group of students who are beautiful people and they would always walk me afterwards to the bus. I got my diet coke and I got my keys in my hand. We passed one of those big dumps, huge green dumps filled with garbage. I throw my diet coke can and the keys go on with it.

AUBREY: Oh boy.

MARC: None of the students noticed. So I'm like, "Okay, fuck. Do I go on and save dignity and humiliation and just get another fucking set of keys or do I go look in this trash dump to find the keys?" All of a sudden I realized, "Oh, that's the question of tears of angels." When do I need to go into the dump and turn it over and look for the keys in my life? Because there's the keys to my house, and I can't get in. And when do I not? This goes through my mind. I said, "Okay, it's a sign from She." I tell them I lost my keys. They look at me trying to suppress laughter, knowing that I'm going to have to turn over. So I turn over this dump, and I'm looking for these keys. 10 minutes go by, couldn't find them. And the bus comes. Then this other thought occurs to me. "Oh, okay, I've looked. I've done the best I can. When's the time to stop looking and get on the bus?" I think what you say is very wise, which is, brother, there's no easy formula. Easy formula is old fundamentalisms, it's a deeply personal decision but you've got to be in that conversation with yourself. Because until I feel a feeling through to completion, it will hijack the story of my life. So tears of angels. Isaac doesn't get the blessing of the father until he can cry the tears of angels and then he can go and liberate the father. And then he can actually find Abraham. That's what happens at the end of his life. Isaac actually finds Abraham. He liberates the father and the father and son come together and something's transformed. Wow. Blessing of the father.

AUBREY: Blessing of the father.

MARC: Blessing of the father. Wow. Let's see if we can go one more step. You up for it?

AUBREY: I'm up for it.

MARC: Up for it. Okay. We're at the memorial service together. What was it, two days ago? We're not going to be able to talk about this this way in a week, because this is the moment, this is the time. We talked about this incredible other cornerstone of a world religion, which is confession. But in the old religion, confession was confession of sin. "I fucked up." "Confess your sin." Let's get clear. Sin can be a bad form of sin, meaning a pathological form of sin offered by a distorted god voice. You had sex. You shouldn't have. You self-pleasured. You shouldn't have. That's the kind of scene we can do without. We need to leave those voices behind, the voices that denied human aliveness.

AUBREY: Voices that were not all in for all life.

MARC: That were not all in for all life and that didn't disambiguate the god voice. Sin also can mean, in the original Hebrew, to miss the mark, [inaudible 1:28:05] Sin can also be, "Well, I fucked up. I can recognize I fucked up." That's okay. But at the center of the new world religion as a context for our diversity, we need a different kind of confession. And it's what we've talked about deeply before, to confess your greatness. Can I confess my greatness? That's huge. And actually, in the lineage, the place that confession comes online, is when the person comes to Jerusalem, they come before the priest shaman and they say [inaudible 1:28:42], I've done perfectly, perfectly and the shaman says you've done it perfectly. [inaudible 1:28:47] I've done it perfectly. The lineage says that's confession. So confession is the only thing that actually obligates me in the world. The only thing that is my real confession is not that I'm a worm. I confess I'm a worm. What does anyone want from a worm? I confess my greatness. And where do I find my greatness? I'm going to ask you to give me one example of this just to model it for people because it's not an easy thing to do. It takes a holy audacity to do it. So I'm going to put you on the spot in about a second so get ready. Okay, so to confess my greatness means--

AUBREY: I'm pretty comfortable in the spot.

MARC: Yeah. You're doing okay. You're doing okay. You're doing, brother. Oh my god, as you do. I love you mad. So to confess my greatness is to find the place where I was at my best. There's one lineage master, Abraham Cook, who says it's so beautifully, he says, "Who are you?" He says, [inaudible 1:29:45], the essence of who I am is revealed in my moment of greatness. We do the opposite. We freeze-frame people in their moment of scandal, their moment of fall, their moment of breaking. We say, "That's who you are." But everyone falls, everyone makes mistakes. "But who you are," says the lineages, "who you really are is your moment of greatness, when you ran faster than you ever did. You were clear, you were kinder, you were loving, you were open, [inaudible 1:30:20] the darkness, the deadness was gone, you were in your full aliveness," and the word [inaudible 1:30:26] just for people haven't heard it means the other side. You and I have talked about it a lot, when the deadness or aliveness falls away, you're in your full Eros. And you are just gorgeous. That's confession. So there's this actual practice... and we're going to bring this practice right next to sweat lodge, right next to the Dharma, right next to medicine, the practice of confessing your greatness. Everyone that I have the privilege of studying with, my one demand is confess your greatness. So to brothers, to sisters. Brother, we're wildly spontaneous, don't know what's happening here but it's happening now. So give us a moment and model for people, it's not easy to do because we get this knee-jerk humility but that's not the God voice. That's the devil voice, if you will. The God voice is divine pride, not arrogance, not ego self, but my unique self in which She moved through me. So give us a moment. Maybe that's a hidden moment that is like, "Oh my god," that's who I am. Confess your greatness, model first what to do and then maybe, if I can be crazy audacious, anyone who's listening can do the same thing. Send it to Aub. Your confession of greatness. Confess your greatness in public and inspire this ripple effect all through the world of thousands and tens of thousands of people confessing their greatness. That's the beginning of the democratization of greatness. I'm your holy priest. Can you confess your greatness, my son? Oh my god.

AUBREY: You invited us, in the service, to actually, everybody, find a partner, and confess your greatness to your partner in the service. Vylana and I... I was up in the front and you were up in the front--

MARC: I saw you guys together.

AUBREY: She came up and knelt before me and we were confessing. We were confessing our greatness to each other. All we could say, with tears in our eyes and our hearts so full, is, "Our confession of greatness is right now, right now, right now." There were a million voices saying, "I could have done this differently." I had seven different confessions of my father's greatness and then the seven, and I know you're about to probably get there, the seven ways that that greatness that I actually could see in my father... His greatness was also a double-edged sword that contained his vulnerability. So for an example of that, which I was sharing, first one was possibility, the cave room, everything was possible for my dad. He was able to turn a very small amount of money into a huge fortune. Everything was possible. But in that vulnerability was that it was possible that these voices were telling him impossible things. Possibility was both his greatness and his vulnerability. The greatness in that moment was actually to be able to feel that, "Yeah, of course, I could have said something better." At one point, I actually jumbled up the order. I had a whole mnemonic device that I was going to be able to go in the right order and I forgot for a second, but I just went on to the next one and said--

MARC: I saw it in your eyes. You were awesome.

AUBREY: I said, "I'll trust that I'll be able to get back to this." And I did. Could I have done it better? Well, on one hand, I could have. So maybe this was a moment of the fall. Maybe, man, I should have practiced that mnemonic device a little bit more. But no, it was perfect. And in this moment, I was as good as I could possibly be and that's always enough. That was always enough. My greatness was not a past tense or a future tense. It was reifying, making real that that moment was me at my very, very, very best.

MARC: It's so good that I want to just reflect back to you. I lived in Marin County for two years. They reflect things back so it wore off for just a second. It's so beautiful. What you're saying is that my confession of greatness was the ability to deflect the voices that said, "I didn't do it enough," and to actually know I just did the absolute best that I can and my best is totally enough and that is greatness.

AUBREY: Yeah. Amen.

MARC: That's gorgeous.

AUBREY: Amen.

MARC: That's gorgeous. That's really what we did at the memorial service. We did confession of greatness as this new practice and you confessed your father's greatness and you confessed your greatness and people turned to each other, as you said, and confessed their greatness. Then we realize that there's a holy and broken hallelujah. We realized that even though it all went wrong, we stand before the Lord of song with nothing in our tongues but Hallelujah and we remembered that hallelujah is, in the original Hebrew, drunken, broken, intoxication of the worst kind, the kind that's not beautiful, the kind that we can't find ourselves. And its pristine, gorgeous beauty. It's both. It's the holy and the broken hallelujah. And we went to confess vulnerability. Again, I'm going to tenderly... And I apologize for the surprise. Of course, it's a slightly insincere apology. But, just for a moment, model for us, what does it mean to confess, brother, sweet love, wondrous man? What does it mean to confess vulnerability? Confess your vulnerability--

AUBREY: The best vulnerability is right now also. It's right now also, because right now, we spent eight days and I was holding court in this way and doing my best in every moment. And I was many, many times, filled with this divine roar, the roar of Dragonheart--

MARC: The lion.

AUBREY: Yes! The lion of Judah, the Dragonheart was pouring through me and I was filled with this aliveness and this clarity. Here, now, I'm tired.

MARC: We're tired, right?

AUBREY: I'm tired.

MARC: Yeah, I feel you.

AUBREY: I've been broken and mended, broken and mended. I've been forged like a nihonto, like one of those Japanese swords that they put back into the fire because there's another tempering and it goes back to heat, and back to folded, and back to not sharp at all anymore. Still in one of these points where I haven't been sharpened back up yet. There's still hammered dings in places where the steel is still molten. So I'm vulnerable right now. Am I going to come out of this and say, "That was it. Cha. That was Aubrey at his greatness as Dragonheart through the whole process"? No, but also, it's my best. It's my best. So the vulnerability also is right now and they live--

MARC: And they're right next to each other, aren't they?

AUBREY: Right next to each other.

MARC: My confession of greatness and my confession of vulnerability. One of the things that came so clearly this week and it's right now. And the name of God is now, the future that lives in [inaudible 1:37:56] and the eternity of the now. As we move towards conclusion here, we're tenderly, friends. I think everyone can hear we're in a different place than last week. You're exhausted. I'm exhausted. I'm so glad that we're getting this time.

AUBREY: I agree.

MARC: Because this window, it's now. My friend, the previous chair at the center, John, John Mackey who's also local here in Austin, John said to me one day in a conversation, he said, "Mark..." It was one of the most beautiful things he said to me, he said, "The moment is so ephemeral. Grab it." That's true. It's how he started. This moment in time is never going to come again. There's a unique self of a person, there's a unique self of time. Part of this unique self of time is being exhausted together and collecting these days. We've tenderly... And we've said a few times today, we're trembling before She today but it's a tender and fierce trembling and we're introducing these two new core practices that live side by side with prayer, and side by side with medicine, and side by side with Dharma, and side by side with sweat lodge and side by side with breathwork. But there's the confession of greatness and there's actually... I want to say something a little bit fierce now. You cannot be a good human being unless you're willing, every day, to confess your greatness and confess your vulnerability. That's the new world. That's the new. Confess our greatness, confess our vulnerability. So maybe I want to, on my side, and you'll conclude for us, brother, and if there's any place else you want to go... But I want to conclude by reminding us of a miracle. Just flashed into my mind and no one's going to believe this, but we're going to tell them anyway. It's unbelievable. So, about five weeks ago, Aubrey and I were deep in the study in what we call Holy of Holies and we're studying together the Tree of Life, which is this unimaginable architectonic Dharma of the nature of reality, and it applies to politics and economics, and to art, and to spirit and to sexuality. It's the Tree of Life, the nature of reality. Many people understand Leonardo da Vinci's famous man as being an expression of the Tree of Life. Then we walk in and we've never mentioned your father when we did the tree of life; it's five weeks ago... Then it's two weeks later. We're again in Holy of Holies and there's a Mardi Gras festival in the lineage called Purim in which you have to drink wine, and we've drunk quite a bit of wine. We start talking about six. We'd never talked about your father before and you told me the story of the fourth six. That's two. Then three, as we're getting off the phone, you say, "We need to talk more about my father. When you come to Austin, we'll talk about my father." That's three. Four, we get to Austin, your dad dies and all we do for eight days is tell stories about your father. Five, we go into your dad's house. Vylana is there, holding space in that beautiful song and as she's there, you look on the piano and there's a six.

AUBREY: On his keyboard actually.

MARC: On his keyboard, the place he wanted to play music. The fourth six is there, the sixth is there. Six, in the major space, the major space in the middle of the open air of the house, there's a counter, there's one book on the counter. It's this large, oversized dramatic book about wisdom traditions but it's huge and it has this huge, it's open to the Tree of Life that we had just finished studying, that you had no information that your dad had access to or was in, he's in the Tree of Life. Then we get to the ceremony, we finish the ceremony and you say to everybody, "Hey, we just put up this unimaginable statute. Come see it. And so everyone's going down, and I said to KK, "It's great they're going down." We were exhausted, "We'll sit." And then we said, "No, we got to come see it." And then you sent a message back, "No, you got to come see it." Oh, my God.

AUBREY: Telepathically sent a message.

MARC: Telepathically, you sent a message. I felt, "No, we got to come see it." We come down and then this unimaginable architecture, which has dragons all around it... Now I'm just reminding everyone of something that you don't know. So I don't know why I'm reminding them, just sharing. 20 years before I met Aubrey, I wrote a book called "The Way of the Dragon" Aubrey knew nothing about. Aubrey entering deep into this world of dragon and Dragonheart, central to your lineage but then without you asking, this person you had empowered to do whatever they wanted–

AUBREY: Daniel Popper.

MARC: Daniel Popper, it's all dragons. But then on the inside of this aghast unimaginable... I don't know what to call it. It's not a sculpture. It's so much bigger than a sculpture. It's this entire artifact, this entire... What's a word for it? Installation? I don't know a word for it.

AUBREY: I don't know. It doesn't even have a word.

MARC: Didn't have a word. So on the inside of it. He had put, without asking you, he had put four times this elaborate huge Tree of Life. We think she doesn't speak anymore. She speaks. She whispers. So just in mad gratitude for her whisper, in mad humility.

AUBREY: So the sculpture monument that we're talking about was... It was a moment where I was feeling what moves through my father which was a possibility. I saw one of the great living artists of our time who makes these monuments, these sculptures, his name's Daniel Popper, and I was so moved by his work. It's like, "I want one of these on our sacred land in Lockhart, at the Gardeners of Eden Farm. In honor of my teacher who passed, Don Howard, I wanted the inspiration to be Estela Raimondi. Now the Estela Raimondi is flat relief. It's like 3000 years old from the medicine culture of Chavin. In the medicine culture of Chavin, it has a smiling jaguar holding two stalks of huachuma which is the San Pedro cactus. His face is the face of a jaguar but it's smiling subtly because the jaguar is a symbol of that fearlessness. And in fearlessness, there is nothing to do but smile. And he's holding the huachuma stalks which is opening his heart to his own fullness. For them, it was a jaguar, not a dragon. But Daniel Popper, he feels me and he was making this installation on my land. All we had talked about was a Ford... a three dimensional four-sided Estela Raimondi in 3D and I saw some early models of it. It was really very close to what actually the Chavin artifact was, the Estela Raimondi. And then he was like, "There's going to be something that's going to hold the pieces together, the four different statues that are linked together that are mirrors of each other." He knew that I was studying the wisdom of Solomon. He said, "All right, we'll put a Star of David at the top." That's where we left it. And then through a few whispers, he said, "I have some surprises. I'm just going to leave it at that. I want you to be wowed by this, as long as you trust me." And I was like, "Of course, I trust you. You're one of the greatest artists I've ever seen. So I trust you." That was another one of the seven confessions of my father's greatness was trust. I trusted him. I didn't need to micromanage this thing. We walked down there. He had added 14 dragons on each side of the Estela Raimondi, and I was like, "Holy shit!" And then on the inside, he had put the Tree of Life and there was no Star of David because we haven't even gone into the Star of David teachings yet.

MARC: You actually brought this inquiry about the Star of David. And just to see, this is how the intimate universe whispers, we didn't go there. He doesn't know any of this. He's completely unaware that this is happening. We don't go to the Star of David. We go instead to the Tree of Life and to the dragon teachings. He doesn't know this is happening. We're exchanging dragons as it were. We're deep in the Tree of Life. Without any communication, and he's creating this art expression of reality, which is dragons, the Tree of Life, that he finishes, let me just add number 10 or whatever it is, he finishes literally, it's unveiled and finished the day of your father's ceremony. Right?

AUBREY: It's unimaginable.

MARC: It's unimaginable. Part of the tragic is when we think that... In the old days, there was prophecy. In the old day, she spoke. In the old days, she revealed herself and today, she's hidden. No, no, no, no. She's speaking. She's whispering.

AUBREY: It was so beyond a whisper at that point. It was a broadcast.

MARC: It's a broadcast but only if you're listening.

AUBREY: And it was only possible because he was listening.

MARC: Because he was listening.

AUBREY: And we were listening. And all of us had our ears and our hearts connected to the same field and the field is fucking real.

MARC: And the field is fucking real. And when you are relisting, the whisper becomes a roar. Let the lion roar brother. Cha.

AUBREY: So to wrap this up, I just want to speak to that and say even when it doesn't look like it, even when you can't feel it, you can't hear it, you can't find it, she's there; she being Shekhinah, she being any great spirit, whatever word you want to use; and again, we'll open that up at another time; whatever you want to use for that divine intelligence that animates all of cosmos, she's there. We find it in little ways and we may want to dismiss it because it doesn't fit with our story of reality. But she's there. And also, there's the other voice that's there, the sitra achra, the voice of confusion, the voice of distortion.

MARC: Sitra achra…

AUBREY: That's there too. And to know that both of those forces are always there. They're always present. And if we actually can purify, clarify, we'll be able to disambiguate those voices. We'll be able to then receive the blessings that she just wants to pour into our life. I just feel so grateful that I was there to receive the blessings, to withstand the challenges. We didn't even go into that and I don't want to go into this podcast. Not today.

MARC: Not today.

AUBREY: But there were many challenges from sitra achra--

MARC: Not on this day.

AUBREY: And sitra achra was also, I will just say one thing, was also very clear. The whisper of sitra achra was also a roar at times where impossible things would happen, lights that would flicker off and on and pots that were burning and wild things that were happening, Bluetooths being hijacked by strange, confused voices, crazy shit. And also, the overriding current was that she was with us the whole time, all the way and that she's never left us. And if I look back, and tell the story of my life and tell the story of my father's life, I can tell the story that she never left us, she never abandoned us. Not for a moment.

MARC: Amen, let's...

AUBREY: Amen. Amen.

MARC: Amen.

AUBREY: Thank you all for being on this journey with me and my brother Marc and everybody who's been a part of this. Thank you to everyone who supported me and my team and everybody here. We've all worked an impossible amount and given and really bled and sweat, and cried. Thank you to everybody for being there with me and deepest, deepest bow. And thank you, thank you for being here with me on this journey, brother.

MARC: Quiet, joy together. Quiet joy together, brother. Love mad.

AUBREY: Yeah, amen.

MARC: Cha.