Josh Mortensen (00:00.546)

Luke McBain, welcome back to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Luke McBain

Thank you, Josh. It’s been a long time.

Josh Mortensen

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you being patient with me here. We’re having some audio video issues, but we were talking a little bit about meditation and you’ve kind of had this experience. I guess you’ve kind of run an experiment on yourself trying to figure out meditation and what good it can do for you. And it sounds like you’ve had some actually some pretty interesting experiences. So I would love to jump into that with you.

Yeah.

Luke McBain (00:35.951)

Yeah, absolutely. I am actually now since one year facilitating a small meditation group here in Berlin, largely because I had very positive experiences with it my own personal life. And once you experience something positive, you want to share with others. So I guess

That’s why I’m doing this. And yeah, I mean, I have in the past dived also very deeply, just like you, into questions of psychology and self-exploration, let’s put it this way, and trying to understand where certain aspects of your own character come from.

why we are who we are, why we experience life in a certain way, why we have moments of inspiration. And especially the inspiration part kept me pretty busy for a number of years and trying to figure things out, how we are creative and all that. And then, yeah, through this process,

And actually also thanks to Jung, which is very strange because Jung is not known for a meditation master or somebody who prescribes meditation, but it’s very strange how that was inspiring, especially his work on the mystical union, right? So he writes about the mystical union and alchemy.

And when I immersed myself into this subject, I had the inspiration that actually what the alchemists were describing as a meditation process.

Luke McBain (02:39.79)

And what got me was the form in which they describe it. They visualized that through images and through poetry. basically they were like yogis who described how they arrived at moments of inspiration. So that’s what they were trying to describe.

And it’s very simple. I myself have been in the past, before I got into this subject, also been a practitioner of meditation, especially yoga meditation, where you focus on a certain mantra or a certain chakra and all that. while it had positive effects, didn’t quite, it never, I don’t know, it never amounted to.

a lot. Let’s put it this way, mildly. It helped, somehow didn’t catch on or become a lifelong practice. And with alchemy, it was quite different because the tendency of the alchemists to visualize things in images, which I found very appealing. So when you look at the

imagery you sense that they were onto something, they were trying to describe the mind with the means of their time, which was images and poetry. So they were trying to describe what was happening to them. And in the mystical union, they described the marriage of the queen and the king and even Jung would go as far to say, well, you know, one is the conscious side of the mind and the other is the subconscious. And then you have the

a chemical wedding of both sides of the mind. then inspiration enters through that union, basically through the mind, symbolized usually through a white dove which comes from heaven and can also be seen as the Holy Ghost or sometimes the alchemists will call this Mercury or the Holy Spirit and so on and so forth. I said after doing a lot of self-exploration and

Luke McBain (04:55.854)

on a psychological level, said, well, let’s put this whole business into practice and meditate in this, see it as a prescription how to meditate, which is to sit and try to marry these two sides of the mind, the conscious and the subconscious, and let’s see what happens, right? And ever since then, I’ve stuck with it and have had certain types of experiences, some of them quite astonishing.

And when people ask me who are not meditation practitioners, well, how do you meditate? I say it’s very easy. You don’t need to do, you don’t need to learn anything from anybody. You don’t actually need a mantra. You don’t need an initiation. You don’t need a master. It’s very simple. You just sit down, you relax. And then you see that, you know, the mind has two major functions. One is, you know, your thoughts which come up, start thinking, you see your thoughts moving.

all the time and thinking about the day. And if you relax a little bit more and just focus on your breathing, you see that images start coming up. So it’s the same process when basically just going to bed and falling asleep, right? It’s the same process. You go to sleep and if you can’t sleep, it’s usually because your mind is very active and produces thoughts. But once you’re able to let go of that, so images come up and then you’re gone basically, then you’re already asleep. So…

in this alchemical way of meditation, what you do is you try to let go of the thoughts, but not to immerse yourself in the imagery. So to try to stay in the middle of this mystical union and not to give way to either thoughts or the imagery in that process. So that’s it. It’s very simple. I mean, the first six months or so are a little bit challenging.

it gets easier as you move along. again, what’s interesting, it seems to, it’s all out there. It’s a very simple process. They’ve described it in great detail, these alchemists, and of course Jung also in his work describes it, and anybody can do it.

Josh Mortensen (07:15.49)

Yeah, that’s interesting. actually spoke just recently, I spoke with Dr. Connie Zweig, and she’s a Jungian who started off in the transcendental meditation space and she moved away from that eventually. But she then became very focused on the shadow and doing shadow work. And she has a very interesting process for doing shadow work, which in a sense, it sounds similar to what you’re describing where she says,

you start with, you start with grounding yourself, meditation, you know, it could be anything. You could be walking, you could go for a walk, but just, you know, be paying attention to yourself and kind of grounding yourself. And then as you do that, you pay attention to the thoughts and images that arise in such a way that for her, she was speaking specifically about dealing with the shadow, the kind of the

self-sabotaging aspects of the shadow where you may have some behaviors, you may have some thoughts or core beliefs that eventually they trip you up in life in an unconscious way and you don’t understand why you keep kind of making the same mistakes that hold you back. And she was saying that what you do is you spend time thinking about the, or just kind of observing the things that arise within you. And then rather than push them off, rather than ignore them, you

you actually engage with them where you interact with them. You ask them questions, you ask them who they are. She recommends labeling them. So if you think about it from a archetypal perspective, these characters arise within you. And, you know, it may be the character that wants to overeat, the character that wants to overwork, the character that wants to stay up late at night and be very tired the next day. And so you start labeling these characters.

And then once they’re labeled, you can actually interact with them as if they’re, as if they’re some real thing. And they are, they are a part of you in a way. And so from her perspective, this is shadow work in the sense that you start to see what’s in the shadow, you start to label it, and then you start to interact with it, asking it what it needs, why it’s behaving this way. And you do it in a, in a kind of an explorative, you know, in an explorative sense where you are trying to genuinely

Josh Mortensen (09:40.738)

get to know this aspect of yourself and make it feel heard, make it feel understood. And in that way, you gradually kind of release these energies that have control over you. from a Jungian perspective, you might say, integrate these aspects of you that have some control over you. And it sounds very similar. It’s interesting because

Yeah, this balance between seeing the images and noticing your thoughts, but then not becoming entangled with either one of them, kind of walking that middle point where you’re, it’s all very connected to kind of your idea of liminosophy in a sense, because it’s always that liminal space where you’re not fully on either side of the line. How do you do that? How do you, is there a specific way?

or method for just staying in that space and observing without getting pulled one direction to the other.

Yeah, mean, yes and no. I think it is helpful in a meditation process to be able to do what you just described, to have a very good understanding of yourself and also what you and…

your acquaintance calls the shadow and certain aspects of the mind. I think that that is helpful because of course in meditation also there is this aspect then of sometimes being just overwhelmed by certain images or things happening to you or in dreams where you get like honestly very confused.

Luke McBain (11:29.76)

and say, what is happening to me in that moment? I mean, even if you decide not to follow the images, there could be something happening in that process where you go like, my God, what did I just experience? What just happens? And that is something… One could always say, well, it’s a psychological issue which is happening, but it could also be something else. And I think many meditation practitioners and many

let’s say, spiritual teachers are not very articulate about what that is, you know, what is going on in that moment when you have certain types of experience. And it’s very interesting that if you look at the psychological literature, especially Jung, and then you look at other literature which comes, which sees more the spiritual side of things, they

They seem to be describing the same thing, but in different perspectives. Like I would say what Jung would call the shadow or part of a persona even. It’s like fluid. like one sort of flows into the next. Probably Rudolf Steiner would call the guardian of the threshold. And it’s

although probably both of them would say, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. You can clearly see that there is a connection, what we would call or what we want to understand something which makes an important part of our personality and which we use in this world to understand this world basically. So we walk and talk through that part of our being.

And at the same time, this being seems to be something which stands between us and higher knowledge. So it’s right on the threshold of things. And it serves a purpose and all that. That’s clear. And of course, part of the purpose is not to be overwhelmed by certain types of experiences. And in Jung’s world, probably that would be psychological.

Luke McBain (13:49.454)

experiences, but in Steiner’s world, these would be spiritual experiences. So somehow to protect yourself also from that. this, so yeah, the, Jung talks about integration, Steiner would call that probably something like transformation. So to transform that aspect of yourself into something which becomes more translucent and helpful, because it tends to

grow stronger, the more you meditate, basically, that part of you also gets more energy and becomes more vivid even. And I guess that’s something not a lot of meditation practitioners talk about, that’s part of the process. And it’s not always pleasant. It’s not always pleasant to see that part of you actually

having more energy than even though you are transforming it at the same time, but because you’re getting more and more sensitive, then also this part is becoming more more alive. yeah. As as I the connection, yeah.

Yeah, can be. Yeah, I could imagine. Well, also just experiencing some of that in my own life when you start to bring that other part of you into the more. You know, we talked about it before where it’s about balance and for a lot of people, they’re actually very imbalanced because they lean one way the other as far as personality types, as far as introversion versus extroversion. And any time you start to become more balanced, it is.

it can be very painful. can be very uncomfortable because you’re starting to rely on parts of yourself that have been honestly have been neglected for a good chunk of your life where you’ve, you know, this one aspect of yourself has worked so well. And at some point it gets fatigued or you just want to feel more balanced. You want to feel more transformed or integrated and to then lean on that, you know, that part of you that’s been underused.

Josh Mortensen (15:53.934)

It’s very uncomfortable, have to strengthen it over time.

Yeah, and what surprised me is that meditation actually does quite a number on being able to transform that part of your personality. And that is something I think I would have never said one year before, but that, let’s say, qualities you have, which are

as you said, like maybe self sabotaging or standing in your way or causing your problems and that these can be mitigated and transformed through meditation. wouldn’t have thought that was possible. And especially in terms of, as I said, I was a little bit dismissive of yoga just when we started, but actually there is something to that where you can

meditate on certain energy centers and the energy in those centers starts to transform, starts to, I don’t know, be more mild or more benign and not so forceful. And therefore you’re not overwhelmed so quickly by certain impulses, which are part probably of that.

character or that shadow or whatever. And that was very strange. Like, that was very, very, very strange for me not like just to, I mean, you mentioned also the word energy behind that to be able to address the energy behind that directly and to see how that can be observed and changed over time just through meditation, just to focus in focusing your mind.

Luke McBain (17:49.12)

on certain parts of your body and seeing how that then changes you as a person. It’s very weird, very strange, because it moves away from the idea of integration and understanding through psychological means your own mind and trying to shine light into the subconscious space.

which I’ve been doing a lot. again, with luminosity, you can sort of like do that. You can see how their subconscious mind works. And so you shine a lot of light into that, but then you work more with the energy behind the image, basically, which projects this image. It’s very strange, very odd, but it does something. Like it does really change things. And I would say,

To the better.

Yeah, it’s interesting to me because there’s there is like a mystical side of almost every religion that we’re aware of. So we don’t often think about it, but there is a version of Christianity that’s a mystical Christianity. A lot of that’s been stamped out over time over the last, you know, two millennia. But there is a mystical side of it. The mainstream religions aren’t interested in, you you know, displaying that to you. But there’s there’s the mystical side of

the of Judaism, there’s a mystical side of Islam. That’s you know, that’s who Rumi was. He was a he was a mystic Islam. And, and so those in the Western world, at least those mystic side that mystic side of all the religions is where you would find meditation, as you’re describing the you know, the meditative practice of say, the alchemist. But in general, when we think of meditation, we think of the Eastern

Josh Mortensen (19:51.852)

belief systems, the Eastern philosophies, so Buddhism and Hinduism and such, where they have a very different maybe approach or even reason to be meditating from a Buddhist perspective, you’re meditating to release your ego or abolish your ego and to remove yourself from desires. But it seems to be that this practice that you’re describing is something very different where you’re not trying to necessarily just, you know, remove

remove all association with, you know, sensory inputs and your thoughts and your feelings and emotions. But what you’re actually trying to do is spend time with them and give like, allow the way that you said it is the energy puts forward an image or projects an image. And it’s as if you’re trying to spend time with both the image, but also then get down to the energy where it’s coming from, whatever that spiritual thing is that’s putting forth.

the image, you’re trying to spend time with it. And in that way, not simply just remove yourself from these things, but actually allow them to transform inside of you. And in that way, I would guess the strange experience that you’re speaking of is that transformation that you feel inside yourself.

That’s it. mean, the difference also being that, and I’ve also done some Buddhist practice, and I really love Buddhism, and I was very much interested in Buddhism for longer time period, as well as yoga. And they’re amazing practices, would say. And of course, if you feel inspired by these practices, that’s probably good thing, right? So if it helps you, should

You should do what helps you. What didn’t keep me there was that, at least where I was, or with the groups and teachers I was, they weren’t able to navigate this liminal space in a spiritual manner, so that in-between space. And I don’t mean that just from a

Luke McBain (22:09.23)

psychological point of view, although that is also important, sort of like to understand what happens to you psychologically when you start to meditate, but even beyond that. and I guess a lot of like, I guess a lot of people start meditating or do a lot of meditation do have very, let’s say odd experiences, which are, which can be many fold. And then that’s probably a good

place where a group or a teacher is helpful to say, yeah, we know this happens and that’s what it is and can explain these phenomena to you. And of course, the phenomena are also very much tied to the culture which you are associating with.

And I think that’s where the challenge arises, especially in Buddhism, but also in yoga, is of course that they originate in a different culture. So their description of this liminal space is quite different and foreign to what we know from our own traditions. they have their, you know, they have their own supernatural beings, they have their own description, how they describe the afterlife and…

what happens and what visions somebody might have when they really meditate a lot. But they’re very far from removed from our own traditions in the West. So I guess if you sort of like can relate to them and feel inspired by these descriptions, that’s a good thing. But if you always feel them as foreign and just exotic,

Maybe it’s good to look into your own traditions and try to understand why we see other things in that space, why we have other symbols and images which come up there, and what are they? And so yeah, that’s the reason why I didn’t stick around for that, although I really respect, and I’ve learned a lot there, and I really respect the approach.

Luke McBain (24:29.614)

I think there is a lot there to give, but yeah, that’s just the difference I see in terms of what is the experience? How can we talk about it? we have common language? Do we have common imagery to say, if you experience that, that’s probably because of this. I don’t know if that makes sense, but yeah.

Yeah, I think it makes sense to me. In fact, I think that Jung would probably agree with a lot of that. And he wrote about how a lot of people in the Western world, when they lose their religion, they still have this desire for spirituality. And so they go looking for it in the Eastern myths. And one of the big challenges there is that the symbols are so different, and the processes are so different, the rituals are different, the stories and the myths are different. And it’s not an insignificant thing, because

you know, us here in the Western world, Europe and North America, you know, the kind of the monotheistic world, the myths that we’ve that exist around us and the symbols that are correlated with them. It’s not like they just appeared. They’ve been developing for thousands of years. And along with that, our biology has been interacting with those for thousands of years. So we have this kind of. You know, this genetic

connection and this cultural connection to the Western world in such a way that these are the symbols that connect with us, the cross and the other Christian symbols and the Judaic symbols. even going back, I really connect with a lot of the Norse mythology and the Norse symbols and the runes. It’s not like I can read them, but when I see them, there’s something about them that’s very inspirational to me. And there’s a reason why

we connect with those symbols because they’ve been around for so long with all of our, you know, our forebearers. At the same time, if you go to the Eastern world, you could really, you know, I’ve read a lot about Buddhism and I’ve practiced certain types of meditation that are more in the Eastern, you know, the Eastern version of meditation. But there’s, there’s just something there where you can never fully connect with the symbols and you can never fully connect with that.

Josh Mortensen (26:50.392)

philosophy of life in a sense. from my experience, you know, there are a lot of Westerners who have gone over to Buddhism and stuck with it. And they’re great people, I’m sure that, you know, I have no, no judgment against them. But it is odd to see a Western born person who’s practiced a lot of Buddhist meditation, because there’s just some kind of difference in their eyes. And in a way, you can see that they really did obliterate their ego or

you know, they snapped out of something and there is kind of a strange kind of loftiness in their eyes. And for some people, you know, maybe that’s what they want, maybe that’s what they need. But for me, personally, and I’m sure for a lot of people in the West, it’s actually far more important for us, or it’s been more useful for me to just wrestle with the symbols of my own world, to go back and try to understand where they came from.

what they meant in the past, what they mean now, and then what do they mean to me and how do I connect with them? And to me, that seems much more valuable.

Yeah, because if you, let’s say, I can’t speak for every Buddhist or every yoga practitioner, but the challenge there, of course, being that if you share certain experiences, also certain dreams, or certain insights gained during meditation, then perhaps there’s the tendency to say, well, that’s just something psychological, right? It’s not like this world is

informing you in a meaningful way on your spiritual progress or on your spiritual journey. That’s just psychology and you can ignore that. That’s just your psyche acting up. I I sort of had a yoga teacher who had that sort of tendency, but I find that not to be true. It’s just because they are meaningful events and they are, let’s say, helpful in your

Luke McBain (28:54.922)

in your general orientation when you have a spiritual journey or spiritual practice. So it’s not, it’s, I don’t think it can be just dismissed like that, or it can only be dismissed in a way where you are not navigating that space in a meaningful way or not able to, because your whole system is oriented somewhere else. And you go like, yeah, well,

I don’t even know what that means, what you’re talking about. In my system, there’s no place for that. We have the Bodhisattvas and then they appear and so if the Bodhisattva doesn’t appear for you, I don’t know. Instead maybe some Christian angel appears. What do do then? I mean, that’s what I’m trying to talk about, that there are certain spiritual experiences which only make sense in your own culture. I think the…

Even the Dalai Lama said that once. And I remember that distinctly in an interview what he said, because at the time I was practicing Buddhism that he said in an interview, well, if you are spiritually inclined, try to look first in your own culture before you go somewhere else. And I think that in that context, now it makes much more sense. Back then, I had no clue why. I was almost offended. said, You don’t want me? But now it makes sense.

Because you need basically the culture and all that is a and also the scripture and all that is all means for orientation and help. So other people have gone that path before the, let’s say a mystical path. They’ve written about it, but of course they’ve written about it in your language or in used imagery, which you can understand or relate to and not, which might not make sense somewhere else where people go like, no, I.

I didn’t see that in that way. So yeah.

Josh Mortensen (30:53.516)

Language is so important too. I mean, to really be able to talk about something, to wrestle with it, to explore it, you’ve got to be able to put a word to it. You have to label it. Language is this magical thing where once something has a word that describes it, it pulls it into reality and it makes it tangible in a sense. without, you know, obviously there is language to describe all of the symbols and the stories and the characters from other myths, but

It’s not your language. in the same way you were describing, you know, the characters or the appearances in the Eastern world, you know, those words don’t mean anything to us because they’re from a different language. It’s like when I was younger, I served an LDS mission in Korea. And while I’m there, I’m learning Korean. And part of doing that was I learned, you know, just not in my studies, but just being around other people and on the streets.

I learned a lot of the Korean swear words. And if I was to say a Korean, like not that I did, cause I was a missionary, but if I was to say a swear word in front of a Korean in their language, they would have an emotional reaction to that word. But for me being a foreigner, they didn’t mean anything to me. They were just sounds and I had no emotional connection to them. And I found that fascinating. And in the same way, you know, when you’re out on the street, you run a…

you come across Korean kids, high school kids or whatever, and they all learn English over there, and so they want to speak with you, but they also know the swear words, and so they’re throwing out these swear words in English at us, and they have no emotional connection to those swear words, but me, I’m like, my gosh, I can’t believe these kids are saying this, but it’s just because that’s how language works, and in the same vein, in the spiritual realm, even in the psychological realm,

you use these words to describe things. And so when you say angel or demon in the Western world, everybody has like a firm, at least a personal understanding of what that word means, even if it’s not the same as the collective, at least you have an intimate understanding of what that word is. And when you go into other places and you experience other symbols and words to describe those symbols, you just don’t have that same

Josh Mortensen (33:15.072)

long-standing kind of emotional connection with them. And I think it’s really important as far as the workings of the psyche or spiritual work, which is interesting also because you in your meditation have distinguished between kind of psychology and spirituality. And I’m actually curious to hear you kind of explain that a little further. How do you differentiate the two and

what language would you use in this meditative practice that is more in line with spiritual? What differentiates the two? What distinguishes the psychological from the spiritual?

That’s a good question. think the

I think it’s all a matter of perspective in the end. Let’s say, and it’s really, really difficult to explain that because it’s a matter of experience and it’s a matter of maybe partly also belief. But for example, if we dive together into a liminal experience and look at it,

we can say, this is all psychology. So this is all produced by my mind. And I might as go as far to say, okay, our minds or there is something even like a collective subconscious which produces a culture and all that. it’s still, it’s still a mind issue. It’s still produced by our minds maybe. And the other perspective is then to say, well, there seems to be something present which is not in our mind anymore.

Luke McBain (35:03.574)

And that would be something spiritual. So, and then you can say, I accept that, or I don’t accept that. So that’s, that’s a matter of choice. And that’s totally fine. Like you can say, no, I don’t believe that doesn’t, doesn’t exist. Or you say, and I guess the, the differential factor is what helps you to, to, understand your life better and helps you to have a better life and to be a better person. And if you are.

you know, happy with the psychological explanation and that satisfies these needs, then that’s fine. But there seems to be too many unanswered questions, which I think cannot be explained anymore by psychology itself. So there is this, for example, there is this very strange and anybody can try that out is to

Just take any childhood memory, which is important to you, and not see it as a actual event, but a dream event. And if you do that, like as I said, sometimes things are just a matter of perspective. If you change the perspective and say that was just a dream, or just a dream is good, but let me see that as a dream. Immediately what happens is you see this as an important spiritual event.

It’s very strange how that happens, but I can just recommend everybody doing that and saying, if this were a dream, if that is something I had dreamed and what would be the significance of this dream, then the significance usually always is a spiritual significance. It’s very, very strange. and how can you explain that? Like, why does that happen? And why does that happen to a lot of people? You do that with

I’ve, you know, I’ve done a lot of these sessions with people where they, where you ask them to do that. And immediately they feel uplifted, they feel that they’re part of something much bigger, which higher significance, which transcends themselves as individuals. And they are sort of relieved of the of this notion that life is just cause and effect. Like, this insight is almost instantaneous, that they are

Luke McBain (37:31.424)

liberated from the notion, it’s my life is just like cause and effect, or my life is a production of my psyche, whatever, you know, so you could say either circumstances or psyche. And because circumstances and psyche both have the tendency to say what’s all cause and effect, because I’m this person, this happens to me, or I have these actions, or because I was growing up like that, that happened to me.

It might help at the beginning, actually the more you look at it, becomes like a mini another, just another prison. It’s like very constrictive. So once you look at the memory and say, if this is just a dream, you notice that there’s something higher in the play of creating that dream. It transcends you as an individual, it transcends you as…

as a psychological being, it transcends the circumstances which the event happened in. It’s very strange, but it happens and then people feel liberated. And that’s, think, the most important part is to find ways where we feel liberated, we feel free of these constraints which we experience every day. And that’s one of the ways how you can have a different perspective on yourself instantaneously, very quickly.

without years of meditation.

Yeah, spoke to just recently, I spoke to another Jungian analyst named Robert Hopke. And he talked to me in depth about Jung’s idea of synchronicity. And one of the mistakes that people often make is assuming that synchronicity means cause and effect. Whereas Jung specifically called it an a causal phenomenon, meaning that there is there isn’t this like thing going on out here. It’s rather

Josh Mortensen (39:25.076)

any kind of meaning making that you feel or that you experience through the course of your life, like the connection between internal and external things or just two external things. That connection is a causal, meaning that there is no real cause and effect. It’s just that your mind is making connections. And in a sense, to me that when those kinds of things do happen, and they happen for me all the time,

it does feel spiritual in a way where perhaps it just feels like there is something bigger going on that I don’t actually have control over. it’s kind of like these little, it’s like the universe winking at you and saying like something’s going on. There’s a bigger story at play here. And yeah, I think the way that you describe this feeling that people have that there is something else maybe beyond who they are,

that also does feel in a sense, it seems like that’s what religion has done for people for a long time. in our Western world, have, in the Christian world, we have these ideas of God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and this gospel and this salvation and resurrection. And these are things much bigger than us that we can’t really control. But if they’re there, then…

then it does feel like we have this spiritual purpose or this spiritual existence. But the challenge with that is that as with all myths, eventually they kind of run their course. And you can see in the Western world, particularly in Europe in the late 1800s, the gradual falling away from Christianity and you see it in the United States, maybe not as much, but it’s happening more and more where people are stepping away from their religion.

and they might say, still believe in a higher power, I still believe in a god, but I don’t believe in these religions anymore. I’m no longer tied to this particular brand of theism. And I wonder if what you’re describing is the thing that came before the religion was set in place, because all these religions kind of, they kind of, I use the word literalized.

Josh Mortensen (41:51.192)

but they make everything so concrete and it’s helpful for people for some time, but eventually those myths start to fall away and you have to find that next thing that gives you that sense of something bigger than yourself, some kind of spiritual existence. And I wonder if what you’re describing is that process on an individual basis, experiencing through memories and treating them as dreams as if that

just gives you that, it opens that window for you so you can experience it in a way that’s not necessarily tied to the bigger religions, but you just experience it for yourself.

Yeah, and that would be a mystical experience, right? think I’m not a theologian, so I can’t really speak to the world religions and say, what’s going on or something like that. But I see more merit in them than in the past, for sure. The more I meditate and practice, I see the merit in that.

And I would say that it’s again, I think what whatever speaks to you and does something positive for you, I think that’s where you should be going. So having a mystical experiencing or doing experience or doing a mystical practice is can be at times, I think a little bit lonely. So it’s more for people who are a lot by themselves. And but I think there’s a lot of merit in being in communities and

having a communal experience, I think that’s very helpful. Even like when people meditate together, you can sense that this is a different type of experience than if you just sit by yourself. So there seems to be something which is helpful in groups when they come together and create something and pray together and all these sort of things. So I think there’s something there and religion

Luke McBain (43:59.552)

enables that, right? It gives the framework for people to congregate and practice together. It gives the rules and prescriptions for that. So I think that is important. again, liminosophy or having a joint liminal experience also does that. It’s something where you feel something good is happening here in this moment when a group practices together. It’s not

It’s something positive and uplifting, which is happening in that moment. So I think there is some merit. then there’s probably people who say, I just feel I need to do that. I need to do that by myself. It’s just that that’s the pathway I need to go. I feel inspired by certain mystical practices.

teachers and all that. So listen to them or work with them. So I guess it’s just a matter where you feel at home with your spiritual inclinations, I guess, and where you feel that something important is going on. Again, this question of transcendence. So if you’re in a gospel choir and you feel touched or something, then that’s the place where you probably should be practicing.

And yeah, apart from that, really don’t know. Do we miss a lot of these aspects in everyday life? Sure. I can only agree with you there. So I don’t know what’s happening, but we certainly do miss that. I think a lot of you’ve been talking about that a lot, what’s going on. Why do we have that experience of

the lack of meaning and how to infuse our lives again more with that. I don’t know, but can we hope for the religions? The religions probably used to afford that a lot.

Luke McBain (46:11.054)

Maybe now in the West, not as much as now. So I don’t know, it’s a big question.

It is a big question. The, when I think about religion or myths in general, I see them as going through an evolutionary process, very similar to, you know, the, way that biological evolution is described. And in that way, all of our modern myths have within them, the mimetic code from the myths that came before them. And so they kind of grow and build on each other. And it is a, it is an interesting question to me to wonder.

where the myths are headed today. And I don’t have a solid answer. I mean, it’s going to play out over a long period of time, but it is interesting to consider that the myths that came before us and gave us the world that we live in, they’re going to evolve into something else going forward. it’ll be very curious. I’m very curious to know what the world looks like in a hundred years or a thousand years when it comes to mythology and what people believe collectively or maybe in our Western world individually.

It’s very fascinating. But I do think that it’s interesting to hear you say that you are more, I guess, sympathetic or understanding of the religions now than you maybe were in the past. And it’s interesting for me because I feel the same way. Coming from a very strict religious background as a child and then even in my early adult life, very strict Mormonism. And for me,

The experience was that the religion was very literalized. It was very concrete. It was so real in the sense that it was the framework through which I viewed everything else. And then to have that framework kind of fall down around me and then have to start over, there’s a real sense of when you step away from a religion, there’s a real sense that you’ve been betrayed.

Josh Mortensen (48:13.078)

because you come to see all of it as this big falsehood, this big lie. I don’t necessarily think it’s that anymore. In fact, I’m in the same way that you said you see the religions differently now. I feel the same way. I’m much more sympathetic towards the, maybe not the leaders of the religions, but even then I don’t always think that even the people at the very top of a religion know exactly what they’re doing as far as perhaps leading people astray.

I think everybody for the most part is pretty sincere. And it’s just that that’s how the human psyche orients itself is through these collective stories. And so when I look at the, when I look at people who are very religious, who have a very literal interpretation of their religion and think that that’s reality, I have a lot more kind of understanding and sympathy for them. No, I’m not saying pity. I’m just saying I understand where they’re coming from because

This is how humans have organized themselves for almost as long as we’ve been humans. We’ve been organizing ourselves based on collective ideas, collective stories, symbols, and the archetypes that kind of lead those myths in whatever era they are in. Because I think those are the ones that the people needed at that time to get through whatever time period they’re in. yeah, in that sense.

I think of Christianity very differently than I used to. I think of the Christian myth as probably the culmination of the hero story. You can’t really think of a hero who came from less, endured more, misbehaved less than Jesus Christ. He’s probably that culmination of the hero myth.

Well, you said a lot of things, there’s something, and I might be wrong. But it appears to me that a new belief system or practice or whatever you would like to call it has to reflect in a certain way what we experience today in the West. so, and I was thinking about that, I think what we experience is

Luke McBain (50:32.13)

This again, as we know, like high individualism, like very much fragmented, everybody struggles for themselves, we’re still part of a collective, but somehow we try to, and that’s what just what we experience. it could be that whatever spiritual practice

Mm.

is there would need to reflect that as well to say actually what you’re experiencing is not something bad it’s something necessary and it’s something very good in fact and since we all experience that there is already this communion again of people who say yeah we all have this but when we come together we have that again that transcendental experience together so and

I’m much more optimistic now than I was a couple of years ago because that seems almost like impossible, like to think even this thought to say, how can you accommodate everybody? That’s not possible. Right. I assume, but I don’t know is that, you know, in your experience of Mormonism or what other people say is that, okay, we have to, we adopt these practices because we believe they’re beneficial for us.

But after several years, I don’t see the point or the benefit of what’s going on. when I look around me, I also don’t see any benefit in all. So I really am disappointed in what’s going on. But I think that’s how they were thought at a certain point is if, if you do that, then it’ll have a positive spiritual effect on you. And what happens now is it could be the other way around that whatever needs to be

Luke McBain (52:12.98)

done for people is very much incorporate that type of experience here, which we have and say, it’s totally fine because there’s another thing which where you said collective stories and collective myths and which what came to mind is that a lot of these aspects also where it was puzzling about that and said, what are our collective stories, what we are collective myths, everything is fragmented everywhere. There’s an opinion people see different

things all the time or have a different opinion about everything. Where I got like, well, maybe that is part of our collective experience. And maybe sometimes things are even much closer and we’re just not able to see them clearly because everything has become so close to us. I don’t even know how to say that, but let’s say cinema or

Netflix or everybody watches that stuff and actually what you’re always engaging in is some sort of collective mythological experience, but we it’s just like we take it for granted. It happens every day. We talk about it with friends and so on and so forth. So some things seem to be going on, which that’s what I’m trying to say. There’s a lot of things going on which we which we are taking for granted, but which have actually much higher significance than we sometimes ascribe to them.

So, well, this is just entertainment or this is just for fun or whatever, but actually there is something more important going on. So these two points I just wanted to make is that…

I think it’s okay if a practice responds to what’s happening and reflects what’s happening in our society. And I think that is probably something which is needed. And the other part is once you distance yourself from these events, these everyday events, you start to see their significance and you go like, there are important things going on. We just don’t label them as important. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Josh Mortensen (54:21.088)

It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The way that you describe, you know, going to the cinema, going to the movies and you think of it just as entertainment. That’s how the that’s how that’s when a story goes from just being a story to a myth is when the people no longer see it as anything that’s influencing them. They just see it as reality. This is just what we do. This is just how we live. This is just what this is just how things are. And in in truth.

It’s not just how things are, it’s how things are right now because we don’t see them as these myth-making experiences. We just accept them, you know, in the way that we accept national borders and we accept money and we accept, you know, we accept allegiance to an athletic team. These just seem like normal things to us. They just seem to be the way that things are. But all of these things are things that we created. We invented all of them.

And that’s the power of myth is to present a reality to you in such a way that you don’t even know it’s being presented. You just think that it is. And I find that fascinating. And then also going back to what you’re saying about, you know, everybody having their own opinions and everybody having their own thoughts about everything. And it does feel that way. But I think that that’s part of, that’s the result of worshiping a monotheistic God.

for the last few thousand years in the Western world because from a Joseph Campbell perspective, to worship something is to emulate it. And it makes a lot of sense. Anytime you’re trying to worship any of the ancient gods or you’re trying to worship Jesus Christ, what you’re trying to do is be like Jesus Christ. What would Jesus do? How would Jesus act? What would Jesus say? How would he treat his brothers and sisters? And so to worship something is to emulate it.

And way that the myths work is that over time we worship those gods long enough that it has the effect on us as a collective that we actually become more and more like that thing. And so when you worship a monotheistic god, a god who’s an individual, there’s only one of them, all of a sudden the gods aren’t collective. God is an individual. And if we worship that god long enough, we all start to feel like we’re individuals.

Josh Mortensen (56:45.888)

It may not be an actual reality, but it is the way that our psyches become oriented. And so then you end up in a world like this, where we have all these underlying myths that we actually most likely agree on because we’re not even conscious that we’re agreeing on them. But in the Western world, you end up with all these individuals who, about every political issue and every cultural issue and every, you know, everything that’s going on, they have, everybody has their own opinion about what’s going on because we’ve

we’ve moved so far towards the individualistic side of things and away from that collective side. And have my own theories about where part of the myth is headed around that individualism. And I think if you’ve ever read Carl Jung’s Red Book, you would kind of see where his mind was going with this idea of where the individual is going.

But who knows, and it may just be a pocket of the entire world that heads in that direction, because there are so many different branches on this tree that we really don’t know where everything’s gonna end up.

I think also I see that a little bit also more positive now with this individualism because I see it as an expression of freedom. and apparently we are becoming more free to think all sorts of things. And so it’s becoming more different and diverse and fragmented. But so it just depends. I think that the main point is then what do do with that freedom? How do you use it? Do you use it to

express yourself and your opinion and try to, you know, just make your opinion the right opinion or make it about yourself or is you do use this freedom for something else, something bigger, maybe something more benign and more beneficial. And so it’s your decision how to use that. And I think that’s actually, again, something I find them more optimistic because

Luke McBain (58:53.352)

I like that idea. I like the idea that it’s up to us how we develop and what we develop ourselves into. And we have to trust basically the bedying nature of us as a species to say, it’s all good. That’s actually a good thing that we have that freedom and all this diversity because that means every person has the option to

go on that exploratory pathway through different means, arriving again at the same goal in the end. But that could be something positive. again, there’s a little slight more optimism now on my end, because I see freedom as something really important. And as you said, doesn’t mean that this is the only way. There could be still something which is

which is benign in a collective manner or prescriptive manner. I’m not saying that, but that’s why I derive my optimism now from that. go like, this could be something good.

Yeah, I think so. I freedom is very important. But I also think that, I mean, this kind of brings it full circle to the way you were describing meditation at the beginning, where if we’re going to have individuals and we’re going to have freedoms, we need people who are conscious. And the type of meditation that you’re talking about where you sit between your conscious side and your unconscious side and you let those two interact, that’s, you know,

whether you want to call it transformation, transcendence, integration, sublimation, individualization, whatever you want to call it, it’s a process for becoming more conscious as a person, for ensuring that your shadow doesn’t control you, for ensuring that your unconscious isn’t guiding your life. And I think that, I think in essence, what myth has been trying to move us toward for

Josh Mortensen (01:00:57.934)

all of human existence is towards more consciousness. And I think the, I don’t know, this was an interesting conversation because the way that you describe it, think that is a process for doing that very thing.

You said it perfectly. Maybe we should let that stand there.

Yeah, I think this is a good place to stop. So if anybody wants to find you, your work in the professional world, in the spiritual mystical world, or meditation, where would they find you Luke?

Luke McBain

I guess just Google my name, Luke McBain. I do have still a YouTube channel. I just don’t know for how long. I also have a website, but it doesn’t have a really good domain. So I bet it’s just best to Google my name. think then people will find me.