Where Did You Stop Belonging

Episode Description

Something has gone missing beneath the surface of contemporary life. Not from politics or culture. From the interior of human experience itself.

In this first conversation with writer Corey Jung, who writes under the name Nobody on Substack at Humble Grail Embodied Wasteland, we enter the territory of the grail as a symbol of wholeness and the wasteland as a condition of inner severance.

We cover what happens psychologically when people lose contact with place, why the armored self cannot receive what it most needs, and the difference between desire that emerges from genuine need and desire that is quietly compensating for unresolved wounds.

This is Part 1. The conversation continues.

Transcript

Entering the Wasteland

SPEAKER_00 0:09

I was thinking to myself this morning that this conversation sits in very unusual territory because it's not about self-help or political commentary, and it's not even conventional spirituality. What we're entering is something closer to a civilizational diagnosis and a mythopoetic reckoning. It's a kind of modern Grail text that is written for people who feel that something fundamental has gone missing beneath the surface of contemporary life. I want to introduce my guest today, Corey Young, who writes on Substack under the name Humble Grail Embodied Wasteland.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Then my nom de plume is nobody.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

As you highlighted, a severance from place, from people, from prayer and from past, and from what you call the quest, which is the initiary dimension of becoming fully human. I want to be careful before we begin here, because this work should not be approached as an essay. It's easy to read through it as I was doing. I read through it a few times and thought to myself, this is not an essay. It almost functions as a liturgy, as an invocation, as a remembrance. And at certain points throughout the material, it reads like philosophy, like prophecy, like prayer. But the question underneath all of it is very real. What happens to human beings when life becomes increasingly abstracted, accelerated, technologized, is that a word? And severed from living relationship. What happens psychologically? What happens to the soul? And I want to be honest with you because I think this material requires discernment because grand narratives can illuminate, but they can also inflate. So part of what I want to explore today is not only the power of this vision, but also its tensions where it clarifies, where it risks romanticization and where myth becomes medicine.

Grail as Symbol

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Now, the recurring image I've seen through your work, Corey, is the grail. And I don't see that as a religious object, but as a symbol of wholeness, the vessel capable of holding life without violating it. And the central refrain running through everything you've written is the grail cannot be received by the armored. When I read that, I thought that raises a challenging question for all of us. Because I wrote down in my journal, what forms of armor has modern consciousness built in order to survive? And what do those same defenses now prevent us from feeling, perceiving, grieving, or becoming? That's where we're going today into the wasteland. The other thing I wanted to say before we get into it is this is not a review of your work. I see this as an encounter with it. And I've been sitting with the text for a couple of days now. And that's why when I read it a few times, I thought this is not an essay. It behaves more like a symbolic field. And at certain moments, the language stops describing experience and starts enacting it. As a reader, I stopped analyzing and I started remembering. There are other moments in the material where the intensity becomes almost total. The framework expands so widely that I thought it may risk absorbing everything into itself. It's not because the insights aren't real, but because the symbolic voltage rarely relaxes. So I want to explore both of those things because I think this work is attempting something unusually ambitious. At the archetypal level, it presents modern crisis not as a collection of separate problems, but as a condition of severance. Severance from place, from people, from prayer, from past. And from the initiatory dimension of becoming fully human. The wasteland in your work, and I've got to know your work quite well now. I don't see this as social collapse. I see it as psychic disembodiment. And this is a condition where people lose contact with soul, with memory, with reciprocity, with mortality, and a living relationship. The grail, I would suggest, becomes the counter symbol to that condition, not as an object, but as a vessel which is capable of holding life without dominational possession. The work also keeps insisting that what remains unconscious returns collectively. So ungrieved suffering becomes ideology, unmetabolized wounds repeat across families and nations and identities. At its strongest, the text asks whether modern humanity has mistaken acceleration for progress and information for wisdom and self-protection for wholeness. There are tensions inside the work worth examining carefully. So I want to move both through the beauty and the danger of the framework together,

Writing as Invocation

SPEAKER_00 7:05

but before we enter the ideas themselves, I want to ask you something more fundamental. What were you trying to make happen inside the reader when you wrote this?

SPEAKER_01 7:21

My hope was that people would have a revelation and that the unseen and also feel and return back home. I see as a threshold to the medicine that's within, really, to heal the wasteland within. It's difficult at best, really impossible to go about this through words. It's not about words. It's more about the spirit in this context, the word without the spirit is dead and trying to enliven people and therefore enliven the wasteland to live life forward and not backwards. And trying to do the impossible.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Absolutely. I recognize that the ambition, I don't mean ambition in the way of being ambitious, but the ambition of this writing is trying to do something impossible, as you've stated, but it's also something that needs to be brought into the foreground. It needs to breathe. What interests me is that despite the impossibility, and I'm trying to imagine you sitting down penning this kind of material, it's like you are the vessel. Psychologically, a vessel can only hold because it's empty enough to receive.

Awe and Hollow Bone

SPEAKER_01 9:16

I don't know if I've ever shared this with you before, but I live and work in a forest, and sometimes I find myself in old growth redwood forest and amongst trees that are perhaps a thousand to two thousand years old. It's like being in a cathedral, and it really helps me be in a place of awe, to be small. I I feel that's a good thing, that's healthy. It puts things in their proper place, it moves us from our hubris, and oftentimes people see themselves and perhaps humans generally within the central axis. So when we experience awe, that displaces us and it puts the sacred in the central axis. It's medicine once again. When I experience myself with place, I believe it's a Native American term. I imagine maybe there's other cultures that have an idea of this, but in their language they name it by something else. But hollow bone person, to be a hollow bone person, to empty oneself. I I empty myself, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Absolutely.

Fractals and Nervous System

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Engaging with nature practically, psychologically, and physiologically regulates the nervous system. The nervous system evolved inside environments structured by nested complexity rather than linear uniformity. The coastline or the cathedral of trees or a river system or a thundercloud or a mountain range contains repeating patterns across scale. So the small resembles the large without being mechanically identical. If you look at a blade of grass, they're not the same. Each blade of grass is different. So it tells me that nature rarely produces perfect symmetry or a sterile repetition. Instead, it generates recursive variation. And human perception is tuned for exactly this kind of informational density, if you will. When I'm in a fractal environment, I can feel the reduction of cognitive strain, but I am still maintaining a different kind of attentional engagement. If you're in an urban environment, which I'm not, but when I have been in urban environments, I sense a kind of hypervigilance or a disassociation with traffic and noise and notification systems and billboards and fluorescent lighting and hard geometric repetition, which creates, I would call it a sensory deadness. But natural fractal structures, they sit in a middle band because they're complex enough to hold attention, but they're also coherent enough not to overload it.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

What comes to my mind it's a balanced tensegrity. A lot of times when tensegrity comes up, they're thinking structurally. But I would say we could apply the principle of tense gritty to the mental, the emotional, the spiritual. It's all interwoven.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

It's interesting when we talk about the vessel and the emptying, and if we go into fractal engagement, that also carries symbolic and existential implications. If you think about the psyche, it suffers when you only perceive reality through isolated events. So fragmentation emerges when experiences cannot be contextualized within a larger recursive pattern. But when I look at nature, and we're talking about place here, you've got the demonstration of cycles within cycles. You've got death nested within regeneration, you've got instability participating in a larger order, and you also have differentiation without separation. When I think about the tree, you look at the branch of a tree, the branch resembles the tree, but the river delta resembles the bloodstream, and the weather resembles emotional systems.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah. The tree is our outer lungs.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah. And this seems deeply connected, talking about being empty enough to receive, this seems deeply connected to your idea of the armored self, the defended self, the ego structure that survives through control and certainty and distance or superiority. So when you wrote the grail cannot be received by the armored, what exactly are you pointing towards?

Armor and Patience

SPEAKER_01 14:22

What's coming to my mind in response to your question is I'm trying to get people more in touch with their right mind. I feel oftentimes in the West and perhaps the United States, even more that the United States is often seen as the place as bigger, better, faster now. So if there's a problem, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna fix it. Right? There's a time and a place for that. That's one tool, that's one way of going about things. But a lot of times, as Einstein's said, something along the lines that whatever helped to create the problem, you don't want to use that type of thinking to help you mitigate it or solve, because that's the same type of thinking that led to the problem in the first place. That's the definition of insanity, right? Not being so forceful, like pulling on the reins of a horse, for instance. I'd rather use a carrot and lure the horse. Be more gentle, be more patient, be more introspective, nuance, less is more a lot of times, patience. There's no shortcuts in nature, and I would say that's also true when it comes to the soul. There's no shortcuts. I don't know if they have this in the UK or Europe, but uh the US, we have a store, a business that's called Staples. Yeah, we have Staples. You remember that one commercial where they had the staples easy button? Oh yeah. That's not how life works, and especially when it comes to this matter. That's not how it works. And I feel a lot of times the modern world and technology, automation, we want now instant gratification. It's just hit a button. That's not how life works. And the same when it comes to this. So I'm just trying to get people to look more at the whole. This is a journey. This is an Odyssey. If we look at that one journey of the Odyssey, that was at least a 20-year process. If we look at native people, a lot of times the Iroquois Confederation comes to my mind, they would look, they would consider at least seven generations into the future. That's a good 200 plus amount of years. How long did it take us to get here too? Get to this place. It's gonna take us just as long, if not longer, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, we don't play the long game, do we? We want instant gratification. And that happens across all parts of society. You said less is more.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Yeah,

Less Is More

SPEAKER_01 17:00

the the medical profession, there's a term called minimal effective dose. So I feel that's a good principle, that's a good model when it comes to a number of matters, and not just within medicine and healthcare. It reminds me of that one children's story, Goldilocks, just right. We want just right, not too much, not too little.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

People say less is more. When you get additional quantity, it stops increasing coherence and starts degrading the quality of the signal, noise, right? Yeah, noise. I think the phrase is misunderstood as aesthetic minimalism, but actually it's about threshold dynamics because beyond a certain point, accumulation produces interference. Think about our attention span, it's finite, our working memory is narrow. To have perception, it relies on contrast. So if you've got too many elements that are competing simultaneously, the signal extraction deteriorates. So a room with one meaningful object creates an orientation. But if you've got 50 meaningful objects, that creates a perceptual flattening. The same applies psychologically. Too many goals weaken commitment, too much information weakens discernment.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

We're overloaded.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

We're overloaded. This is key because modern systems frequently mistake volume for value. If you look at digital economies, what do they reward? They reward saturation, more content, more optimization, more productivity layers, more stimulation. But cognition functions through selective exclusion. So intelligence is often subtraction rather than accumulation.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

Addition by way of subtraction.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Exactly. So psychologically, less is more reflects containment because intensity without containment spills into fragmentation. One of the things that I've been working on in writing is to have a single restrained sentence because that can carry more force than say 10 paragraphs. Tension remains concentrated rather than discharged. And this is what I see in your writing. When you have myth and ritual and poetry and symbols, they operate this way, they compress meaning, they don't over-explain themselves because the psyche participates in completing them.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

I feel those many points are working in harmony towards convergence.

Focus and No Mind

SPEAKER_01 20:01

When you were talking just moments ago, something interesting popped into my mind, and you might find it interesting, and audience might find it interesting. And so we might be talking about focus. That's one way we might say this. So you might be familiar, and some people listening might be familiar as well. The Japanese Zen art of Kyodol, the way of the bow. Are you familiar?

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

So years ago, when I was involved in martial arts in Zen, uh, I was looking in the Kyodo, and I remember one of the ways I heard it described was one arrow, one life. The Kyodo practitioner, when they release the arrow, send it toward its target, they do so upon seeing themselves within the target. Which like they're one.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

To borrow from the Japanese, because I imagine this was also happening, if I remember correctly, the term mushin, no mind, empty the mind. So it's like for a moment they emptied themselves within themselves, and so them and the target are one. So that's many bowstrings, as far as the mytho poetic poetic sinews of my writing are trying to have convergence.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

It's interesting what you say about the bow, because I remember with Olympic weightlifting, you have to be one with the bar, because the self becomes clearer, not when everything is added, but it's when what is unnecessary stops dominating your perception. If you're overloaded with stimulation or the little man who whispers in your ear and makes a vibration in your mind and tells you, hey, about 100 kilo weight, you're not. Gonna lift it. The noise of eventually loses. You're able to eliminate that noise, that stimulation, it loses experiential depth because consciousness becomes spread too thin across too many surfaces. If you're thinking about this, you're thinking about that, and what prevents you rather than what promotes you. So less becomes more when reduction restores the relationship to the essence rather merely removing the decoration of

Place as Covenant

SPEAKER_00 22:36

it. Let's begin with place, because you write that place is not scenery, property, or backdrop, but covenant. Many people will initially hear that as environmental language or ecological romanticism, but I don't think that's actually what you mean. In fact, I know that's not what you mean. So what is place psychologically, and why does severance from place matter so much in your framework?

SPEAKER_01 23:08

To go back to the Arthurian legend, the land and us are one. Tragically, today, the land and us are not well. And so they're reflections of each other. The inner severance, the inner disintegration, we can see outside of ourselves as well. A lot of times when it comes to environmentalism, you'll hear things along the lines of wildlife management. The wildlife and nature has been managing itself for a good four billion years or so. If we're honest with ourselves, uh it's not so much about wildlife management, it's more about managing ourselves. So if we are to recognize that and be honest with ourselves, what have I said a number of times, and I'm borrowing this from the saints, from the prophets, repent, change your mind, change your heart, turn around. So to the point that got us to where we are, as far as our inner world, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the outer world, and the sickness within, and the outside, as far as nature, is to repent, turn around, and to rebind. That's religious, right? So I'm just trying to highlight that truth, I would say, to people. Chief Seattle said this of the Duwamish and Duquamish people. He's the chief of those people which the city of Seattle is named after, Chief Seattle. He said something along the lines whatever man does to them himself, he does to the earth. So to reverse engineer that, to heal ourselves within, to heal the wasteland within, we help heal the outer wasteland. And so to remember that and to return back home. We were talking about this moments ago, that what we see oftentimes is the outer lungs, the outer organs, the lungs, the circulatory system, the soil is the digestive system, for instance. That's a few things when it comes to place. And to have reverence, to have respect.

Severance and Mobility

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Severance from place matters because our whole identity is not formed abstractly, it emerges through our repeated participation in particular environments, whether it's rhythms or memories or relationships and embodied orientations across time. So when place disappears, continuity destabilizes. What I see in modern culture is that it treats place as an interchangeable background. But psychologically, it rarely is that. Because this human organism evolved in stable ecological relationships with specific terrains. If you think about the encoding of place, food patterns, seasonal rhythms, danger signals, a sense of social belonging, cosmological orientation, memory structures, and the nervous system has learned where it was through repetition. You knew the sounds at night, you knew the shape of the horizon, you knew the smell of the rain, the timing of light across seasons. When you have that familiarity, that reduces an uncertainty load. But contemporary mobility disrupts this continuously because many people now inhabit transient environments which are designed for efficiency rather than attachment. We can look at airports, chain cafes, rental apartments, digital workspaces, algorithmic feeds. So the result is a low-grade derealization. I'm not saying you're dissociated, it's not a dramatic dissociation, but it's more of a persistent absence of rooted orientation. So you can still function while still feeling existentially unlocated. But it's also a mnemonic and it's symbolic because I was just thinking back to when I was a kid and think about all the places I went with my father, the childhood memories, the time when members of my family died, grief, your first love, the failures in life, the rituals, the ancestral continuity. So, in a way, places become containers for identity development. When severance occurs, and we see this with migration, displacement, gentrification, exile, social atomization, people may lose not only geography, but portions of themselves that were previously organized through that geography.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

A lot of these places are not living places, in my eyes, as well. The majority of our species, 97 to 99 percent, was that of being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they were in a living landscape, in an intact, healthy ecosystem, flora and fauna, to the point that where they lived was alive, was to the point that it would help to support their life. I would say the majority of nomadic hunter-gatherers lived in ecosystems that were more flourishing than not. The majority of them were environments, ecosystems were not that of deserts, because there's a lot less life in a desert compared to a temporal coastal environment. There's a lot more rich, nutrient-dense resources when you live by an ocean, a river, and perhaps a lake, than say a desert. So the point that the ecosystem was healthy and flourishing, alive and living, was to the point that it would help to support you as well. In the modern world, in a city, in a metropolitan, what dominates the landscape, concrete and steel. At last that I heard that those are not edible. The food that does make its way there might be shipped, say 2,000 or so miles, and maybe from other parts of the world to get shipped. So most cities only have a few days, a few weeks at best of food supply.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

It's a literal food desert.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

We're going to face some tough times with food shortages, with everything that's going on. I'm not predicting that. It's more of a forecast. And this is something when you cite place, it's huge. I know there are three other things we want to cover as well. I'm thinking about when I go to the beach or a coastline, or it might be a woodland or a churchyard, or even a mountain path. I experience a continuity between past and present self. So my memory becomes spatially anchored. Without this, identity becomes purely narrative and psychological. So it's constantly redescribed but insufficiently embodied. So I increasingly talk about myself rather than inhabit a lived continuity. At the same time, attachment to place is not automatically healthy because place can also track you in a rigid identity or an inherited prejudice or social suffocation or nostalgia mistaken for wisdom. And some people need severance to survive psychologically or materially. So I think there's a danger in romanticizing rootedness while ignoring economic reality because large populations move because local structures become non-viable. We see this with housing collapse, war, economic extraction, climate instability, social fragmentation, and the list goes on and on. So modern capitalism treats place instrumentally. Land, and you were talking about the respect for land, that becomes an asset class rather than lived ecology. And then communities become these temporary consumption zones, and the logic of optimization weakens long-term attachment because permanence obstructs liquidity, and that has psychic consequences. Humans appear poorly adapted to existing entirely inside transactional space. Like you were saying, you can't eat a building. A shopping center does not function psychologically like a village square, even if both technically gather people, because one organizes consumption, the other historically organized participation and recognition. There's a big difference. So place is not merely where the body exists, but it is where perception, memory, relationship, and meaning become patterned over time. And severance from place matters, as you've highlighted in your Substack post, because the psyche requires more than mobility and stimulation, it requires orientation. Without it, people often compensate through ideology, identity performance, endless movement, or compulsive construction. We still need grounding. It simply begins searching for it in increasingly abstract forms.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

I feel if people can look at place perhaps in a different way they might have been accustomed to. I'm gonna bring up Ian McGillcrest and the left and the right brain hemisphere. I remember him saying that the left basically views the world and tries to apprehend. And the right it's not so much about apprehension as much as it is comprehension. So the left apprehends, the right comprehends. So understanding, seeing our right place in the world, our right relationship with place, and that might be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Absolutely. Another thing that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, there was a line that stayed with me, and it was this the abstract human is dangerous. Because abstraction creates moral distance. Look, if I never see the river, I don't feel the poisoning. If I never see the landfill, consumption feels consequence free. If I never encounter the source, I stop experiencing consequence somatically now. Psychologically, that begins to resemble disassociation. It's not dramatic disassociation, but it's a normalized estrangement from embodiment and relationship. So let me ask you

Return to Place

SPEAKER_00 35:42

this: what does return actually look like? Not rhetorically, but practically. How does a modern person begin restoring relationship with place?

SPEAKER_01 35:57

I think you used the term emergence a while back.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Can't remember what I said, but I think so.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Yeah, it's so we as well as many other living beings are basically within our particular, we're the upright walking version of the earth. Each of us are a single, unique representation of the earth's consciousness. It's emergent. It's not like we were just dropped here from outer space, right? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, for instance. The ancient Greek, I think it's also Persian. If we look at the Bible, then Adam and Eve. Adam, I remember, means creature versus red earth. And Eve is spirit. So for us, we are a culmination of matter and spirit. Whatever we do to ourselves, we do outside as well. In some way to some degree. So what do we want? What do we want we want a little bit more of? A little bit more heaven or a little bit more hell? So to get right with ourselves and to get right with the real and that which has been here long before us and will be here much longer after us as well. So to realize this emergence, this connection, this relationship, and especially if you have family members, nieces, maybe you're a parent, you you have a responsibility not just to yourself and your lifetime, but to your family members and generations, even the generations before you, I would say, that you have a responsibility to help. So if we are honest with ourselves and if we see the wasteland, do we want more of that, or do we want to help to heal the wasteland? Because it came about through us, it just didn't happen on its own, the wasteland. It's a result from us, and so only we can help to turn that around. I feel this is related because there is quite a bit of focus on the material and success and progress nowadays, and to borrow from the Cree prophecy, I'm paraphrasing, it goes something along the lines of this that when you eat the last fish, when you poison the last river, when you cut the last tree, only then will you realize that you can't eat money.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

That you can't eat money.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

This is why we need to respect and look after the great mother, which is our planet, which is our place, because we are her inner arrangement. If we don't look after it, then we have to face the consequences of

Living in Modern Systems

SPEAKER_00 39:09

that. I also want to pressure test this a little bit because there's a version of this conversation that can quietly become anti-urban or romantically agrarian. We know it's not. But most human beings now live inside systems they didn't design. Right. Apartments, cities, digital infrastructures, global supply chains, and so on. And modern complexity emerged partly because billions of people require forms of coordination that pre-modern life never confronted. So is meaningful participation in place still possible under those conditions? And if so, in your view, what does it look like?

SPEAKER_01 40:09

First, is having awareness, recognition of that which you are, that we're not isolated just within our body, and we're not isolated to where we might live in particular, and to broaden your horizon, broaden the panorama as far as the big picture of the present, and also the big picture of our big history as far as where we came from. If you live in the middle of a densely modern metropolitan area, consider how long has it been that way. If you look back, you're gonna see there's quite a bit of history prior to it being within its present form. I I know, for instance, where I am is Wiotland, as far as the early people inhabitants or of where I am currently. So know some of the history, know some of the stories. And for myself, and maybe people might want to borrow if they'd like and apply this because trying to uh provide some possibilities to your question. Be as efficient as you can and try to do as much as you can with as little as you can. There's a lot of times talk about needs and wants, for instance. Need for me is a very strong word. I don't feel like I need much, I don't have many wants. There's a few needs, like essential life-supporting needs. Okay. And to keep my wants to a minimum, especially when it comes to consuming or traveling, for instance. Wherever I find myself, where there's a lot more nature and it's much more intact and with less modernization and construction and the like, I visit these places, I have a relationship, and I'm very respectful of. And also because I live and work on a farm, I I keep my food as local, as fresh, and as seasonal as possible. Those are just a few examples that come to my mind. Maybe uh a little bit more holistic view and relationship when it comes to place. And there's probably many more points we could touch upon when it comes to that.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

So you agree it is possible to have meaningful participation in place, even under the conditions we currently find ourselves in.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

You could be in Las Vegas. And when you turn on the tap, you're drinking water, where's that water coming from? What river, what reservoir, and how far and where is it traveling from? What many lands is it crossing to get to you? I'm minimal when it comes to lights at nighttime. I'll use more candles, for instance, or I'll just very minimal as far as electric lights, because in some places, whenever you turn on an electric switch, imagining a dam that's damming a river to help generate energy. What river is that damming? And then in respect to that river, what salmon might it be impeding, for instance? I'm trying not to create more of a demand for that. You see what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_00 43:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

So being mindful, oftentimes much of what we do has an impact somewhere to some degree. If I remember right, people in the US in particular, unfortunately, if everybody in the world lived Like the median standard lifestyle of us 330 some odd million people, that it would require the equivalent of perhaps five Earths, if I remember right. That's an example of what I'm getting at.

Needs Wants Integrity

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Yeah, the whole thing of needs and wants is really interesting because I remember doing a workshop on this, and one of the things I put before needs and wants is integrity. Because needs and wants emerge from different layers of the psyche. Some wants are authentic expressions of growth. There might be intimacy or competence or mastery or contribution or meaning. Others emerge as attempts to regulate unresolved internal instability. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Some people will use status to compensate for shame or control to compensate for fear or attention to compensate for invisibility or accumulation to compensate for inner emptiness. But without integrity, a person will find it very challenging to distinguish between these. So desire becomes contaminated by unconscious compensation. That's why people sometimes achieve exactly what they wanted, but they feel strangely unchanged afterwards. Because the external object was carrying an internal symbolic burden it could never resolve. So the relationship was supposed to repair abandonment, the success one has achieved was supposed to repair inadequacy, recognition was supposed to stabilize identity. So the pursuit itself is structurally distorted from the beginning, and integrity helps reality testing occur. Like you were saying about the example of candles. Do I genuinely value this or am I using it to stabilize something unexamined?

SPEAKER_01 46:31

I'm probably preaching the choir, but just to share with your audience, much of what you're sharing right now, really, if we look back at ourselves as far as our history and some of the examples that you bring up, where do we find as far as the beginnings, the origin stories? A lot of times our childhood, and a lot of times a relationship, or perhaps a lack, when it came to one or both of our parents, or our primary caregivers, and an attachment that was not secure.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Disorganized, avoidant, attachment, anxious. And for many people, there's a lack of awareness when it comes to this, and a lack of acceptance and integration and peace. Many of us still today are children in adult bodies.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

What is under the surface, like the undercurrent, is being driven by fear.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

That's the inner division. People think, oh, if you don't have integrity, that's immoral. But there's an internal split that goes on because one part wants security, another wants freedom, one wants truth, one wants approval, one wants transformation, another fears dissolution. So the problem is not contradiction itself because contradiction is human. The problem emerges when consciousness refuses awareness of the contradiction and acts as though every impulse is equally truthful. So then the desire, the wants, becomes chaotic because people will chase incompatible futures simultaneously and experience life like a repeated fragmentation.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

It's like they're chasing a biochemical drug high.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Yeah. The precursor to needs and wants in terms of integrity, because it's the capacity to remain in relationship with reality, even when reality destabilizes self-image. To admit, I want this, I fear this, I'm rationalizing, I'm divided, I may be pursuing symbolic compensation rather than need. That honesty changes the structure of desire itself. On the other extreme, when there's excessive emphasis on integrity, that can become paralyzing. Some people postpone living indefinitely while attempting to become psychologically purified first. You see this in a lot of spiritual circles. They endlessly analyze motives. Is this desire authentic? Is this what I need? Am I healed enough? Is this my ego? Is this compensation? So eventually that whole self-analysis becomes avoidance, becomes discharge rather than metabolization, and it's disguised as wisdom. We're not clean systems. Human beings are not clean systems. Because even when I examine my authentic desires, when I look at it psychologically, it can contain mixed motives.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

We're a beautiful mess.

SPEAKER_00 50:22

Yeah, it's a beautiful mess. I don't wait for total purity before acting because that leads us leads to stagnation. Life clarifies itself, and especially we're talking about place, it clarifies itself through participation, not just through introspection alone. Integrity is not a prerequisite for having needs and wants.

Closing and Next Episode

SPEAKER_00 51:27

Really interesting.