​​Josh Mortensen (00:00)

Vlado Šolc, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Vladislav Šolc (00:05)

Thank you, Josh. I’m happy to be here.

Josh Mortensen (00:07)

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think I came across you originally through another Jungian podcast called Jungian in the World, the Jungian in the World pod. And you were talking about this book that you’ve written and it’s on dark religion. And it’s something that’s very fascinating to me. So I wanted to reach out and have a conversation with you about it. ⁓ But before we jump into that, I’m always curious kind of about people’s background, their history, kind of your own personal story.

How long have you been in this kind Jungian world? when did you first come across Jung and what was it? What’s that story there as far as your connection to this Jungian world?

Vladislav Šolc (00:52)

⁓ okay. Well, I know that actually almost exactly because I bought a book in 1992. It was Tavi Stoke Lectures that I bought in Slovakia in a bookstore. And I started to read it and I just became fascinated. There is Jung talking about religion. There is Jung talking about symbols and he’s talking about taboo.

topics in sort of a psychological language, right? So I knew about Jung from reading Freud. Up to that point I was reading Freud and other psychoanalysts, but I only knew of Jung from Freud. Freud would mention Jung about his, you know, take on dreams. But then once I bought Jung’s book, that was it. It opened up the new universe for me.

Josh Mortensen (01:37)

Thank

Vladislav Šolc (01:52)

And I started to be interested and pursued him. And I was in air force at that time, but I decided that that wasn’t for me. So I decided to go and study psychology. And that’s when my journey started. I went to Prague and I studied clinical psychology in Charles University. And after that, I moved to United States and continued with Jungian Institute of Chicago.

Josh Mortensen (02:23)

Yeah, interesting. there was something about this book that, I don’t know, something about the way Jung described things through, was it like the symbol archetypes? Was this his model? Was it just something that kind of opened the world up for you in a way that you hadn’t seen it before?

Vladislav Šolc (02:42)

Yeah, it’s essentially what it was. Freud would sort of pathologize religion, right? Like Freud said, well, it’s kind of just a symptom of something else. it’s just the people are trying to make sense of this reality and they use the religion essentially as a defense mechanism and it helps them cope better. But Jung went right to the core and he said, no, you have to look at the religion as something that is primordial within ourselves.

It’s an instinct and exists and is like, are essentially spiritual beings. And he says, and this is how I look at it. And these are the roads into unconscious dreams, images, fantasies. So he basically, the pathologize religion, but in the same time, he showed that there is a religion that is more like a ⁓

indoctrination or it’s a sort of organized or prescribed religion, but there is also religion of the soul, which is like calling, finding our meaning and discovering the mysteries of life through our own insights rather than somebody tells us that’s what it is. So that was, ⁓ that’s what became fascinating for me.

Josh Mortensen (04:07)

can relate to that because I grew up in a very religious environment. I grew up in California and Arizona here in the United States. The family I was born into, were very like Mormon or LDS, the Latter-day Saint religion. And so we were ⁓ very much committed to this religion and ⁓ my mother still is. so…

I can really, understand what it is to be on that fundamentalist side where just your religion is your life. It’s like your framework for seeing everything. And so it’s how you conceptualize everything. And then I’ve also transitioned away from that religion. And I can now also see from a union perspective how the

Yeah, there’s this inner kind of image that your soul or your psyche wants to put forth and how that the, I don’t know, focusing on an existing religion can be so enticing or so it can make life so easy, but at the same time, it then stifles that inner thing that wants to come out.

I’m curious because of how much religion or the way that Freud and you looked at religion and the differences there and it stood out to you, what kind of a religious background did you come from? Were you raised in a very religious household?

Vladislav Šolc (05:50)

No, not at all. ⁓ I grew up in something that was a Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic at that time, which was pretty atheistic and they believed to ⁓ communism, which is a religious idea of itself, right? It’s the paradise on earth. It’s very similar maybe to Jehovah’s Witness ⁓ religion. But I was baptized because my grandma was a

Catholic and she was a woman of faith and she actually said well at least we should baptize Vlado and my sister so we were were baptized but I was not brought up in the religion. But that’s interesting that you were so how did you I mean do you mind me asking you like what ⁓ how did you transition like you you said you grew up as a more a Mormon tradition?

Josh Mortensen (06:48)

Yeah, that’s right.

Vladislav Šolc (06:49)

Like what happened? Like how did you just

realize that it wasn’t for you?

Josh Mortensen (06:53)

Well, it didn’t happen all at once. would say that, well, first of all, just growing up in a religion that was so, not just like a very strict religion, but also in the household I grew up in, it was very emphasized that this is what we’re doing. And there was this real sense that we needed to live in a certain way so that we could achieve salvation and then live together.

In the Mormon faith, there’s this idea that families live together in heaven as well. And so there was like a big desire to work that out as a family. The thing is though, that as I got older, ⁓ there’s like this inner pull towards certain personal experience or personal expression, which is.

I’d like to circle back around to maybe what you were saying earlier, but that might be like that inner spiritual nature of being a human being, but it’s gonna be unique for everybody. And I think over time, being in a religion that’s very structured and very strict, there was just a lot of emotional dissonance that I began to feel. And the longer I was part of the religion, and I went really far with it. I served in LDS mission in South Korea.

I was married to my wife in an LDS temple. We were the kind of people, we went to church every week, we did what we were supposed to do, we were very committed. But the longer I went on in my adult life doing that, the more and more just kind of emotionally despondent I became. was experiencing a lot of depression. So essentially I had this emotional dissonance.

And then over time, I started to allow myself to actually look at what I was experiencing and then couple that, I guess, with research around the foundations of the church, the beliefs of the church, the practices. And at some point I just, came to experience both emotionally and mentally or rationally just this feeling of discord.

And once those two had paired up, my thoughts and my emotions, in a similar way to interpreting dreams, once you have the image and it connects to the emotion, or you have the thought and it connects to the emotion, it’s just there, you just feel it, and then there’s no going back. And so then we just gradually, as far as attendance, we just gradually moved away from it. And in all honesty, that’s what led me to Jung because

Like I said, religion for me, the way that I was raised in it, religion was the framework for understanding my reality. And when that framework fell away, I think I experienced like a very Nietzschean kind of sudden distrust of all institutions. I became, you know, I started to lean towards nihilism and I just thought, well, that’s no way to live. And so I went on this new pursuit of trying to understand the world. And part of that was,

understanding science and simple things that I had never paid attention to before around physics and biology and evolution, and then also trying to understand humanity and my own experience. so then I got into psychology and I ended up reading a lot of Carl Jung and also a lot of people like Joseph Campbell and just understanding stories and humanity’s connection to story.

And yeah, that’s how I ended up here.

Vladislav Šolc (10:45)

Hmm, very interesting. You see what you described again, she’s kind of, I like to hear it because it really confirms that idea, the theory, right, what Jung brought. ⁓ But, know, George and I in that book, Dark Religion, that we wrote together, we really discovered this, that like in a dark religion, something is cut off, something is denied, something has to be kept at bay.

And no matter how loud it is knocking on the door, you just have to keep this door shut. Because if you don’t, you’re doing something sinful. There is a consequence for it. You’re going to be shamed from outside, or you’re going to be scared that you’re not going to go to heaven or you somehow are going to pay for it. And pretty much when Jung did it, said, nah, the soul is big and…

The concept or idea of the God or the God image, it’s immense and it can contain so many different things and we shouldn’t be really afraid of looking at it as it is because what Jung said, he said God is reality itself. So we have to assess the reality in our maximum capacity. We have to find the courage and look the reality to the eyes and say, there are some really horrible things that are happening.

And there are horrible and terrible things that are being done in the name of God, right? And why are people doing it? Because they identify with something great and beautiful, but the darkness is just being simply projected out. I am not that bad, you are, you are the infidel, you are the sinner and you are the source of ⁓ the evil in this world, so we have to eliminate you rather than…

what Jung would call it, withdrawing those projections and bringing it back home and say, I am responsible for it. I can change this world if I’m aware of the darkness within myself. And it is a terrifying thing to look in the mirror. And it’s, as Jung says, the most terrifying thing to acknowledge one’s own shadow. But once we do it, then we are becoming to be…

hopefully responsible people saying, what can we change? And we start with ourselves rather than trying to convert others.

Josh Mortensen (13:17)

Yeah, it does seem that when a religion becomes too concrete, then it puts a lot of things kind of into the collective shadow and the individual shadow. And once they’re there, they can’t really be addressed. just kind of, you know, they get a finger pointed at them and they get called bad. But I do want to take a step back and maybe talk, I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about ⁓ your conceptualization, maybe from a union perspective.

on what religion is inherently to humanity. Like, are we so centered around these images? And then also just to take that and then get to the idea of what youth consider a dark religion. How do you define that? yeah, like, I don’t know, kind of the source of religion for humans and what that means, and then also.

taking that to the place of a dark religion.

Vladislav Šolc (14:16)

Okay. Well, simply put, mean, we don’t know, right? I mean, like, what is religion and why psyche is speaking to us through images? ⁓ I think maybe the simple answer to that would be because that’s how psyche speaks. It’s a natural language of psyche is through the images and that

Image is not just the image as a sort of a picture, right? But the image connects with itself. It’s a certain compelling, certain behavior. It is also something that creates our thinking, but it is also something that is deeply emotionally connected with our bodies. So when we say image, it’s not only what we see, but also what we experience within ourselves.

Like you said, when you have a dream and there is this connection of image with this emotion, now you know you’re alive, right? Because you can’t lie to it because it connects you, right? When you smell something, when you touch something, when somebody hugs you or when you fell in love and you wanna be with that person, that is an emotional reaction that it’s not purely intellectual or rational.

So that reality of that image is actually essential experience of the reality itself. And we are off this universe, we are off this world and we are, if you will, maybe a little filters through which that universe is becoming known or through which we are discovering it. So the image is something that it’s there, it’s primordial archetypal a priori or whatever you call it, but it’s a fabric of the universe.

And we are becoming conscious through paying attention and somehow integrating part of the fabric to ourselves. And we are becoming self-conscious and essentially, you know, observing and experiencing that. So why is that happening? I mean, that’s a big mystery. That’s like asking why we are here or where we come from or who created it or why was it created? I mean, these are questions that we…

probably will never have answers to, or we will have answers to, but those answers will be only provisional answers. Those answers will be always open to new interpretations and sort of new mythologizing them and through, and will be open for our exploration. But these are mysteries and…

I think what Jung did, he looked at his mystery and he said, wow, that’s a pretty deep and compelling mystery. What are we going to make out of it and how are we going to make sense of it all? And he decided to make sense of it all through a psychological approach, which means he said, I’m the empiricist and I don’t know where it’s coming from. I don’t know where it is and what it is, but that’s how it is reflected through the psyche. This is the…

This is experience of it. That’s how people experience the unconscious images or the images that come from our unconscious to our consciousness. And he says, I don’t know the psyche or the archetypes by itself on sich, but I know how I experienced it. And that itself is fascinating. And I want to figure out what to do with that. So, I mean, we can talk about, you know, and I’m curious to know what you, what you think and what’s your take on it.

You’ve been through journey of being sort of in the collective religion and now how you look and how you view what religion is ⁓ in your state of consciousness now.

Josh Mortensen (18:15)

Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah. sorry. Go ahead. If you had more.

Vladislav Šolc (18:18)

I mean you can say that and then I can go to your second question like what is dark religion?

Josh Mortensen (18:24)

Yeah, sure. ⁓ Well, actually, I appreciate the way you laid it out. And I think I do.

I wouldn’t, it takes a long time of actually thinking about it and experiencing it to get to a point where you can see it, where you can see religion in a certain light. based on my story coming from where I came from, religion, like when I was a kid, religion was reality. It just was an explanation of reality. And at some point as an adult, I just, you I started to go, but

I don’t feel like this is reality. so then that falls away. And I think the first instinct for a lot of people who, and I’ve talked to a lot of people in person and on this podcast who have had the experience of growing up in strict religions and then leaving them. So it’s not just a Mormon thing, but all sorts of religions. And the first-

Vladislav Šolc (19:28)

It doesn’t even have to be a religion. Anything that mind is persuaded this is how it is, this is right and can be any other way.

Josh Mortensen (19:31)

Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s usually typically tied to a group. it could be taking part in a, it could be a sports team, it could be a school, it could be a political party, could be being employed by a business, it can be all these things, because in a way they’re all similar in that they have these mini cultures based around shared objectives. And what can happen particularly with religion though is when you leave the religion,

you can feel very betrayed by it. And because you feel like, they were lying to me the whole time, or they were using me, they were manipulating me. And it’s very easy to feel that way. And so then you can actually kind of extrapolate that betrayal onto all these other institutions that you have to participate in, being like, you your education and your employer. And even like the cult of the family, like the family itself can start to feel like, this was not what I thought it was supposed to be, right?

So for me, religion at first was reality and then it became this place, this idea of this is something that betrayed me. And then it took a long time to get back to a point where I see it now more the way that you’re describing it through a Jungian lens where as human beings, we exist in a physical world and there must be, you know, we’ve evolved or, you know, been given

or developed this certain intellect, this ability to experience the world the way we have. And we are not purely driven off of instincts in the way that some of the other animals are. We have a very different way of interacting with the world, which is we have these minds and this ability to process information. But the way I see it now is there’s this question of how.

Like how do you process the information? And so just like any other system, it must be running on a, some kind of a program for lack of a better word, there must be a process for taking in information, digesting it, integrating it into your worldview and then moving forward. so, yeah, I think that the images, images has got to be one of the oldest ways for

for any kind of intelligent being to interact with the world. think most mammals, probably all mammals, operate on an image-based understanding of the world. And then going forward, then we start adding things like language to that. And so on top of these images, we build up stories. And this is how we process in our own minds and through our own experience, kind of our conceptualization of what’s happening. And… ⁓

And then religion then just becomes the way that I would see religion is that it’s an extension of this processing where one person had an experience that was very, very profound for them and it changed them in a way. maybe from my reading, having read so much Joseph Campbell, I think of it as the psyche itself

it wants to become more conscious. It wants to become more aware. And so over time, our versions of the religious story has been pushing us closer and closer to some version of consciousness. And so when, when an individual say it’s the Buddha or Jesus, when somebody has this ability to kind of break through and create this new version of consciousness,

then oftentimes the myth around it becomes the new religion because everybody’s trying to also achieve that same experience. so I think religion then becomes, it starts just very basically like you’re describing, it’s our operating system on a fundamental level, but it becomes problematic when

when you have whole groups of people who are trying to have the same experiences that one person had one time in their time and place. When in reality, as spiritual beings, we probably should all be trying to have our own religious interaction with the world over time. I think that’s how I think about it now, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Vladislav Šolc (24:13)

Yeah, no, that’s a really good way of looking at it. ⁓ I just wanted to add to it, so it goes pre-mammals, like Jung thinks of the psyche, it goes all the way back ⁓ in the unconscious to the material world and to something really, really deep. And there it meets with the psyche as…

or the spirit that is something immaterial, but yet real. So he thought about this connection between material and immaterial as he called it the Unus Mundus or the psycho world, that there is something, it’s just a different aspect of reality, the psyche is part of it, and matter is also part of the whole archetype or the part of the whole.

these are connected somehow and that somehow ⁓ can communicate and create unity, right? Like when people say, well, somehow you imagine something, right? And you have an image of…

Josh Mortensen (25:10)

He’s

Vladislav Šolc (25:27)

what you even imagine a tree for example, right? So you have an image of in your mind of tree with the trunk and the leaves and the branches and so on. Somewhere it is unified and you have a brain that if you look at it as sort of like from the material perspective, it’s a lot of neurons, they’re firing some kind of electrochemical signals and they’re communicating and the lighting up in your brain.

So where is this unified symbol of the tree? What does that happen? What is the visual and experiential aspect of it? Somewhere it is connected, right? And it’s psychological and what is, is it first or the matter is the second? You can imagine something like the image is the first and then you have fighting and then your neurons are reacting. So there is a certain ⁓ psychophysiological

logical dualism that is happening. So Jung thought of essentially of the psyche as being its own kind, just like the matter of its own kind, and they unite at a certain point. So kind of like a light, right? Like there is like the dual aspect of light, is it a particle or is it a wave? I mean, it’s hard, it’s hard to say. So

But anyway, I got lost a little bit what I was saying. when you say it goes, the image goes really back to that. So image really goes back to this moment of the psyche and matter being connected like in this dual aspect of it. So we don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s not, Jung would say it’s a priori. It’s not human created. Even though there is a history and he speaks of this million.

years old man within ourselves that we have those feelings, have the reptilian brain and we have, you know, we have the cortex and we have all kinds of images that reflect some memories, but it goes really deeper. And that’s from how he thought about that’s what the religion arises is like you said, the universe wants to be conscious of itself. Very intelligent, right? It can be intelligent.

Josh Mortensen (27:40)

That’s fair.

Vladislav Šolc (27:44)

You might not be conscious, but it’s already intelligent. And that’s the difference between materialists like Freud. Everything first was unconscious, then it became conscious. Jung said, no, it’s already unconscious and then it emerged from the unconscious. If that makes sense, I don’t want to sound too esoteric.

Josh Mortensen (28:05)

I

love it, I love the esoteric nature of it. And I think what you’re saying is fair. And I didn’t necessarily mean to just pin it on mammals, but just to say that it does come from something in the past, I think that the symbols or the archetypes, the archetype or whatever it may be is most likely coded all the way down into our DNA. And that then obviously stretches, it goes all the way back to wherever that started.

That’s a huge question. Like, where did that start? it makes me kind of the way you’re describing it, it makes me think about one of Jung’s books, which is actually a collection of writings from other writers too called Man and His Symbols. And it’s very much about obviously symbols and image, but it’s also about dreams. And in that book, I want to say it’s Marie-Louise von Franz who says that essentially there’s

two sides to the same coin that explains it all, is one side of it is the outer world, maybe as explained or experienced through physics. And the other side of that coin is the inner world, psychology, our inner experience. so it may very well be, and I think I read this from Bertrand Russell once as well, it may very well be that everything is one thing. It’s just that there is an outer and an inner side of it. And so we experienced those two things very differently.

which I think maybe it goes far enough back like this idea of like materialism versus like panpsychism or something where the consciousness emerges. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s all very fascinating.

Vladislav Šolc (29:46)

Yeah, I like this analogy with the coin. Yeah, because it’s the filter through which we are perceiving it. I mean, like, how do we know about this? And I think we have this, I guess, disadvantage or we are locked in this…

Josh Mortensen (29:53)

But.

⁓

Vladislav Šolc (30:06)

in this paradigm that we cannot really see it other way than through the consciousness, right? And we are already observing something that we’re trying to observe by the same medium. It’s like, I cannot see itself without a mirror, right? So we only can infer and imagine how would it be that didn’t exist. And that’s the realm of imagination and fantasy.

Josh Mortensen (30:14)

but you know.

Vladislav Šolc (30:33)

that we naturally have to go to in order to sort of try to resolve those things.

Josh Mortensen (30:38)

And

then at some point along the way, those images feed the stories and then the stories get layered on top of each other and then something akin to religion emerges as part of just the way that we conceptualize the world, the way that we organize ourselves or maybe the way that we all orient ourselves in a similar direction. I think that I want to get into this question about dark religion, but it makes me think that

Vladislav Šolc (31:00)

Mm.

Josh Mortensen (31:09)

When I first left the religion of my upbringing, I had like a negative feeling towards religion in that it’s like a way, it’s a way to trap people or use people, manipulate people. And maybe those things are true, but at the same time, I think I came full circle to realizing that ⁓ we all have some kind of myth that we’re operating on.

Like it’s some myth is guiding our life, whether we’re conscious of it or unconscious of it. And it’s not necessarily true that myths are inherently negative. In fact, like everything has a light side and a dark side. And yeah, I guess, guess. ⁓

It just takes a lot of work. It takes a long while to get to the point where you can again see the positive side of religion. But yeah, I want to get to you. ⁓ I want to hear what you have to say about then dark religion. What is dark religion and what makes a religion dark?

Vladislav Šolc (32:10)

⁓ So what you felt like maybe perhaps you felt like betrayed, like there was something that you felt like, well, they didn’t tell me about this, right? Like if like a person discovering sexuality saying, well, they said it was all bad, sinful, right? Like how come, you know, I’m having so much fun. So part of that was how we look at a dark religion. It’s essentially, George came up with a name. It’s ⁓

an unconscious religion or is like dark means all of that that light is not covering or all that that is outside of the scope of consciousness. So other way of thinking about dark religion is the ego religion. It’s like how ego manipulates all that what we are talking about, all those energies, all those images, all those powerful archetypes that are ⁓ operating systems

of the psyche, how ego uses advantage of them, right? Ego possesses it, so we call it like, we came up with the term Teocalypse, which is pretty much like how this ego hiding behind the God, how the ego comes in and says, I know what God wants, I understand God’s mind, and that’s what it is. And let me tell you how the God’s mind operates, and I’m going to teach you

but in the same time, I’m going to take advantage of you. So I’m going to define what sin, what’s taboo, what’s prohibited, what’s not prohibited. And I will do it in such a skillful way that I will manipulate you and I will take advantage of that and I will have the power over you and you will be scared, unobedient and you will not ask certain questions. So all of what I’m saying, it’s kind of sounds like this is a plan for it.

But a lot of those things are just happening unconsciously. Just like narcissistic people are not thinking everything through, they just sort of instinctively are manipulated because that’s how they were brought up. dark religion is a religion of indoctrination and it’s the religion of signs rather than symbols. And it’s concrete rather ⁓ than symbolic.

It always aims to hide something, protect something, but in the same time, believe that that’s how it is in order to manipulate the reality. That brings me to what you were saying, religion, it’s about explanation of reality, but then it’s also explanation what doesn’t fit that reality. It has to be twisted.

and it has to be somehow adjusted so it fits better that reality. If that makes sense.

Josh Mortensen (35:14)

Yeah, it does make sense. Absolutely. And I find it interesting that being unconscious, it’s still, an unconscious religion can work so hard to make sure that it stays unconscious. If that makes sense. Like it puts so many things, it assigns so many things to the shadow. So I see it in the, just for example, in the Christian world, whether it’s Catholicism or Mormonism or evangelical, evangelical Christianism.

There’s this idea that there’s a God and a Jesus and a Holy Spirit and this is the Holy Trinity and this is like the good, the light, right? It’s like worshiping the sun. But then there’s this other side of it which is Lucifer or Satan, the devil. And so everything that’s bad, well, first of all, everything that’s good in this mythology is assigned to God and his son. And everything that’s bad gets assigned to Satan and his darkness.

you know, from a psychological perspective, it’s really easy to see that the one is the ego and the other one is the shadow. And that like, to keep everybody in line with the religion, you’re just putting everything that, this is the interesting thing to me about Christianity, is that everything that has the potential to lead to a greater enlightenment is put into the shadow. And so what I mean by that is sexuality,

you know, sexuality is just inherent to our nature and it does have a light side and a dark side. The dark side being like, you know, there’s a long list of things that can go wrong when it comes to sex, but the light side being you can have real connection with people, you can learn a lot about yourself, you can have transcended experiences that are very spiritual. And you know, the same thing kind of applies to

to drugs, for example, and an interesting one also is just other esoteric practices. In the Old Testament, God said, thou shalt have no other gods before me, and he meant it. He meant like, hey, we’re not doing anything that’s gonna point us to these other enlightening practices. And so a lot of esoteric practices around the tarot or yoga or astrology, a lot of these things are.

just labeled as evil and demonic in the Christian world. And so I guess my point is that being an unconscious religion, there is a lot of effort put forward to maintain that unconsciousness.

Vladislav Šolc (37:50)

Yeah, I agree with you. So what we are actually describing is like all of that which is unconscious doesn’t stop working, right? Like something that is denied or pushed or split off, it keeps operating and that operation underneath, if you will, if one is not aware, that creates all kinds of phenomena. It creates the prejudice, it creates the hate, creates…

all kinds of things that are then just in turn being projected because they’re not really fully understood. One of that, an example of it, you know, we say it falls under the definition of dark religion, it’s a conspiracism. There are certain conspiracy theories that people harbor and believe in, but they explain real psycho-physiological phenomena within the person.

but they’re mythologized, they are translated into this kind of so-called theory and then projected onto the others rather than work within themselves and figuring out, what is really bothering me? What is really happening to me? What is my trauma response to my upbringing or to whatever trauma I experienced that I can explain, but it doesn’t reach the level because it’s just the level of identification. So it becomes.

So like you say, a myth, but the myth that excludes certain things or the myth that doesn’t encompass the wholeness, but demonizes the other and try to eliminate the other or creates ⁓ paranoid theories, right? Like they really explain a phenomenon in a sort of a very ⁓ bizarre or unreal ways.

Josh Mortensen (39:39)

That’s actually really interesting. That’s super fascinating. So I’ve never thought about conspiracies that way. The more I spend time talking with people like you in the union world and the more books I read, the more I come to see that actually everything is kind of the same kind of thing. It’s happening. We just classify it. You we classify it over here as government and politics. And over here, we classify it as religion and spirituality, but it’s all these, it’s all these psychological projections that we’re using.

And so when you talk about conspiracies that way, go, yeah, of course. ⁓ It reminds me of ⁓ when kind of the flat earth conspiracy first got big. I had never heard about it. And then all of a sudden there was a documentary about it on Netflix. And I realized like, there are all these people online who have connected over this idea. And at the time, I probably just thought, this is just a way for them to find a community because they probably feel outcasts.

you know, amongst their physical community around them. But if they go online, they can find other people who will accept them as long as they all believe the same thing. And I think that’s probably true, but it just struck me now that as you’re saying this, that in the same way that a religion can be a mirror to the internal orientation of the psyche, or a political party can be the same, it can be a mirror of how the psyche has been organized, a conspiracy like this,

⁓ could also be a reflection of the psyche, the orientation of the psyche, what it has and what it lacks. And then it’s projecting that outward. And so then now I’m sitting here going, geez, like to think about the symbology of a conspiracy such as Flat Earth and what that would tell you about the internal psyche. It’s pretty fascinating actually.

Vladislav Šolc (41:26)

Yeah, I mean, there is so much to explore exactly on a symbolic level. that’s what George and I propose. Like, let’s look at the conspiracy theories in a sort of a, what is symbolically happening and how this symbol is being reduced to something concrete. How is this literal, right? Like ⁓ say, QAnon theory, ⁓ when they say, well, children are being abused and tortured.

and hormone is being extracted from the brain when they’re suffering this adrenochrome, this sort of a magical formula that gives you immortality, right? That’s what I believe. That’s an ancient idea of ⁓ la elixir of life, right? This is the idea of lapis filosoferum. This is the sort of the medicine of panacea of something that gives you immortality and ⁓ the power.

So they’re talking about the self, actually, that’s what Jung find in different religions. And now you think, why there is this suffering child? What does that have to do with that? And suffering child, what is symbolically, what is being projected here? Is that an inner child that experienced a certain suffering that needs healing? And now who has the healing, right? They have the healing. Those Democrats are… ⁓

or having access to it and those evil, sorrish people or whoever, whoever that is, who has the power, who they are unconsciously perhaps admiring or feeling that they have something they don’t. So they feel we have to get it back. But we don’t get it back on a symbolic level on sort of an individuation journey. We got to actually really do it in a sort of a physical way, right? We have to find that pizza place.

what is actually happening and free those children. And so that’s the fallacy, right? Like that’s the dark religion is like, it is has sort of the right idea. The symbol is there, but it’s just not being understood symbolically, but it’s rather just projected or taken as a concrete happening.

Josh Mortensen (43:47)

It almost seems that the, again, going back to me reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, and he provides these different methodologies for interpreting religion or reading myth, reading religion. And I think the… ⁓

I think in the Jewish kind of Kabbalist way of thinking as well, they have these different four separate ways of reading myth and Joseph Campbell’s lines up pretty much with theirs. But the first one is literal or concrete, like it’s a reality, this myth is real. when I think about my parents when I was growing up and they would teach us.

know, we’d read the Garden of Eden story in the Bible and they would say, this is really how it all started. And so there’s this literalizing of it.

Vladislav Šolc (44:41)

It was somewhere, right? Like historical and had a place, a physical place.

Josh Mortensen (44:46)

Exactly. So it’s historical and it’s real. And then another way of reading myth is allegorically or maybe metaphorically kind of, maybe that’s the way that we read fairy tales a lot of times. So there’s like, you know, the boy who cried wolf, and then you can say like, I shouldn’t lie because then people won’t trust me. And then there’s like, there’s the more the moral way of reading myth. And so, you know, these stories give us our morality so that we know how to behave like a good person. And a lot of times these go together, the literal and the moral.

But then the fourth way of reading myth then is kind of what we’ve been talking about just now with conspiracies. It’s the psychological way of reading myth. And so ⁓ the literalization of myth often leads people to this dark religion that you’re talking about. But then any myth, when you look at it as a mirror of your own psychology can actually help you figure things out in a way where myth can push you towards greater consciousness.

And so, you know, taking this example that you were just giving of somebody who gets wrapped up in QAnon and they have this fear that there’s some child out there that’s being mistreated, if they can then turn around and look internally and say, oh, there’s probably this archetype of an abused child inside of me. And it probably comes from a place of actual sadness and mistreatment. But by projecting it outward, I never actually have to face it. But when I…

when I pull back the projections and I realize this is me, then the myth can actually give me some insight into what may actually allow me to help or heal that child that is inside of me.

Vladislav Šolc (46:29)

That’s very true. I eloquently describe that. That’s very true. I would say that that aspect of not wanting to face it, that’s the act of splitting the religion. That’s the act of creating this darkness because it’s not mine, it’s out there and I’m projecting it. So really the way back, it’s the opposite of projection.

it’s recollection, like taking it back in and connecting with my own feelings, with my own self and making that image whole again, meaning I experience as it is within myself rather than imagine or projected or in any other way that is actually just breaking it apart. So if a person said, well, Jesus didn’t live then and there physically and did this or that,

but actually the Jesus lives in me every day and that I am Jesus myself. I mean, not literally, but like I go through my struggles, I carry my cross, I have to figure out things, I have to work on my extension of my own consciousness. That means it’s alive, present here and now rather than then and there or in some kind of a physical space.

Josh Mortensen (47:31)

Gee.

Vladislav Šolc (47:54)

And I think if we are working on this Jungian way of withdrawing those projections and living that myth within our own lives and have our own myths and question the limits and question how deeply they go and question what is split off and what is being dark, then we’re really doing the work. That’s the responsible work that we struggle and ponder and question.

and try to become more conscious.

Josh Mortensen (48:26)

Yeah. And for those who have, you know, those who have read the red book and kind of internalized it with the conversation we’re having now, especially around the Jesus myth, we all, you know, we all have that archetype of a God, know, whoever we’ve been worshiping, we have that archetype inside of us and to, to follow the example of the myth and sacrifice that thing. That’s in a sense, the psychological interpretation of

letting Christ be your exemplar, right? Like he’s your example. And so do what he did, sacrifice that God in a way that it can be resurrected inside of you and become, you know, like that actual, you know, all powerful being or like, you know, whatever it is that that thing that can actually be your, your guide, you know, that the Christian is especially in our time, in our time, obviously the Christian myth, that’s one of the things that when I talk about

leaving religion and then coming full circle to realizing, no, not only, I was just getting it wrong. And now the myth is like, it’s there for you if you want to go through with it. But the other thought I have about it is ⁓ even going back to like this QAnon idea and having that inner child inside of you, anytime you turn the myth inward, it’s going to be very painful. So,

It’s easy, it’s like a, the protection that you’re doing is actually by projecting outward, the thing that you’re protecting is the experience of actually having to feel something, to have to suffer through something. And one of the things that I experienced growing up in a religion, which I would call a dark religion in the way that you’re describing it, is that, ⁓

In the religion of my upbringing, anytime you wanted to know whether something was true, say it was like the Book of Mormon or that somebody was a prophet or that you should keep the commands, whatever it is, there’s this idea that if you pray about it, then God will send you these confirming feelings to help you know that it’s true. at least in that religion, those confirming feelings are always good feelings. They’re comforting, loving. ⁓

They make you feel warm, they make you feel safe. And the irony of that type of confirmation is that when you take the myth and you treat it, maybe how it’s more powerfully seen as a representation of your psyche, when you stop projecting outward and you turn inward, that truth of that child, that abused child archetype inside of you,

Feeling that is so painful and so unpleasant. that as an adult who’s actually gone through some of these processes, I’ve realized that truth usually doesn’t come to us through comforting feelings, friendly, nice, warm, cozy feelings. Truth hurts. It hurts really bad. And that’s why we avoid it so often by projecting these stories outward.

Vladislav Šolc (51:46)

Yeah, Jung said there is no coming to consciousness without tears. We have to suffer that and that’s exactly the darkness that we have to face. Not in a sort of objective and projected ways, but within ourselves. But that’s the only way how to minimize really the evil that we are, but are unconscious of it and are willingly and unconsciously created in this world.

because how much of the wars and how much of the persecutions, how much of the hurting other humans is really done because of this phenomenon of the split. Because we really are in the stage of becoming conscious and we are so as Jung said, pitifully unconscious of ourselves and we just really don’t know ourselves. And this is the highest task we can develop.

technologies and iPhones and AI or whatever it is, but really it all boils down to how good self-knowledge we have.

Josh Mortensen (52:56)

Yeah, it’s not easy. It’s like even maybe you could attest to this, having studied Jung for years and written on Jung, you probably still have the experience of realizing new things about yourself that you’ve been unconscious of. ⁓ something about the depth of the unconscious is such that you can never actually fully grasp it. I guess that’s kind of the point.

Vladislav Šolc (53:24)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we always learn and always grow. But in the same time, that’s the beautiful thing, right? Like that’s a task that we give to ourselves that really gives life a meaning, right? Like you are here because you are participating on this project, on this quest to become conscious. And essentially that means become a better person. I mean, what can be the more noble task that we can set ourselves?

Uh-oh.

Josh Mortensen (53:55)

Yeah, absolutely. on a, you know, it’s really easy to see it on a big scale with like wars and killing and, and, know, whatever these large scale shadow behaviors may be in the collective. But one way that I’ve seen it just in my own personal life, again, growing up in a very religious setting is that when you’re converted to these type of ego,

centric religions where you think you know what is and what isn’t, what’s good and what’s bad. A lot of the times, like I saw this all the time where a child in a family may misbehave and the parents feel like they have to punish the misbehavior out of the child in such a way where they’re behaving as if the devil actually has influenced the child and the child’s being evil.

and that child needs to be punished. And in reality, the child is probably acting out for a completely different reason. Maybe his needs are being ignored. He has some emotional distress that’s not being addressed. He has some desires that he’s not allowed to fulfill. It could be anger, could be sexuality. There are all these things that are being suppressed. so, like you were saying, those things don’t just go away, but they come out.

of us in an unconscious behavior. And when a parent has no concepts of the unconscious and the conscious mind, they just see things as good or bad. And then in this egocentric world, they have to punish the things that are bad. And I’ve seen so many families, I’ve seen so many families, including my own, where people just don’t have close relationships. It’s all kind of fake and artificial.

Vladislav Šolc (55:47)

That’s

exactly what I was going to say. They play the teether, right? Like there is a script, they play this teether because they believe that’s what it is. But they are not accessing in many aspects. I hope and I believe that there are many connecting moments, but largely there is a lot of unconscious sort of that are in this field that they just play these teethers, kind of like a Truman show that reminds me that it was like a sort of a great expression. He just realized, my goodness, I’m just…

I didn’t even know I was part of it. I was doing what I was indoctrinated to do, but I can be much more free than that. And I think that’s what, that is exactly the task we have. And Jung said it, like he was very clear about it. He said, I am going to choose, I’m choosing this quest because I know that if I remain unconscious, my children will have to deal with this. So the sooner I will address it, the sooner I will.

go and work on my own conscious, the better that is for my children. They don’t have to carry this burden that I sort of automatically project on them and they have to carry that to their own lives. So, go back to the… Yeah, I just wanted to say, so that kind of brings us back to like, what is the religion? Like, what is like why it is coming and what is it coming from? So the dark religion is like a fake religion or like unhealthy, well, but the true religion or spirituality

is the joy of discovering this freedom, that it is real, that it like you touch something and you know, and you say, wow, it’s so beautiful, right? Like you have a relationship with your child, you have a relationship with your partner and you’re working on it. And it’s not just scripted or behind the veil of this collective hypnosis, but it’s actually real.

Josh Mortensen (57:37)

Beautiful. Yeah, all I was gonna say is, cause you brought up children. And I think that that, didn’t mention it in my story before, but having children of my own and then seeing their experience with church and then seeing me kind of repeat patterns that my parents had, that was one of the biggest drivers for me to figure this stuff out and to become less unconscious. It’s a huge motivator. And then,

You know, just get to, you know, again, you can’t be perfect, but you can through actually addressing your unconscious, you can get to a point where you just do less harm. You do less harm in the world, into your relationships. And, and yeah, you start to, yeah, I have this experience now of knowing what it’s like to be really close to somebody in a genuine way. And I just wish that I wish the whole world could experience that. And I’m not, I’m almost certain that they haven’t, not the whole world.

Vladislav Šolc (58:36)

Yeah, and that’s kind of like a I mean like in a simple way to put like what’s the proof of God I think the proof is like once you are become conscious You don’t really want to voluntarily go back to become unconscious Even though it’s painful to be to be conscious and I mean you hold and you see the real opposites and you have to reconcile them somehow and like hold them together

but you don’t really have a conscious desire to go back and just go back to the previous thing. Like you’re not gonna sort of one day wake up and say, well, I told you through whatever I’m experiencing, I abandoned this, right? Like what you abandoning like yourself, right? If you go back to sort of a previous role.

Josh Mortensen (59:25)

Yeah, you can’t do it. You can’t go back. it’s not, consciousness is not always easy. In fact, it’s a lot more work and you actually have to, you have to like feel things in a way that you could have avoided before. And so you are having that feeling, but just like you were saying, you then get to have this like direct experience with life. Like you actually feel like you’re living it in a way that you weren’t before. And that is a beautiful thing.

Vladislav Šolc (59:53)

Yeah, that’s a reward of the life itself. Like Dalai Lama is not going to say, well, I’m going to be a fundamentalist now because there is just so many good benefits for my ego from it.

Josh Mortensen (1:00:05)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ve really yeah, Vlado, I think this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it. And if people want to find you your books, your work, what you’re up to, ⁓ where would they find you online? ⁓

Vladislav Šolc (1:00:23)

They can just Google my name. They can just Google the dark religion book. It was published by Kyron ⁓ publications. ⁓ I will send you some of the links that if you don’t mind, can, you can post with this interview. There is one lecture that I’ll be doing on December 20th ⁓ online. So I’ll just send you a link to it in case somebody would be interested.

Josh Mortensen (1:00:51)

Yeah, yeah, I’m happy to share and I would be interested to see, you know, future work lectures that you have. So yeah, always feel free to share them with me. I’d love it.

Vladislav Šolc (1:00:59)

Thank

you. Well, Josh, it was a pleasure. mean, I enjoy this conversation, but you know, certainly how we can continue sometimes online or not online and in person. That’s very interesting and actually fascinating that you have those great insights and you experienced the going through this yourself. I went through dark religion in the form of the socialism, right? Like there was like indoctrination on the sort of a materialistic side, right? Like

There is no God, there is no transcendent, it’s all it is. And you gotta obey what the communists telling you, because we’re gonna establish this perfect state.

Josh Mortensen (1:01:41)

Yeah, that would be actually really interesting to dive into that story more. So maybe we could, maybe if you don’t mind, we could do a follow-up sometime early next year and do a deeper dive on that subject.

Vladislav Šolc (1:01:53)

not at all. I enjoy it. That would be my pleasure.

Josh Mortensen (1:01:56)

Okay, awesome. Well, I’ve really enjoyed it too. Thank you so much.

Vladislav Šolc (1:02:00)

Well, thank you very much and hopefully we’ll see you again.

Josh Mortensen (1:02:03)

Yep.

Okay. Bye.