About

EXPLORER POET

About Me

I’m a storyteller exploring my own mythology.

In the modern world, we are called to become individuals, to follow the soul’s high adventure, but first we must peel away the successive layers of story that have bound us to our time and place. I affectionately refer to these layers as bubbles. Akin to the comfort of a womb, these bubbles provide a sense of safety, but altogether hold us back from the levels of conscious awareness that the sacrifices of our ancestors demand we push toward.

Born in the West, I came up in a large, financially and emotionally impoverished, religiously-fanatical family. Homeschooled in wine grape country, I had little chance to learn of society, its norms, or expectations; and so began telling my own stories. Though isolated to ensure religious monogamy, I connected far more with the sky and streams, with the flora and fauna, and the gods of my ancestors amongst whom I unconsciously walked alone throughout the days, then I ever could with the tyrannical “god of my parents.”

Though it took me well into my adult years, I have learned for myself that Mormonism, and its narcism, are not true. But, the collapse of one god does not immediately provide the wellspring for re-connection with the others, and though I had slain Nietzsche’s dragon, the evil, thou shalt, I was perilously close to slipping into a void of Nihilism and despair. For the death of god took far more than my faith.

With my bubbles burst, I went in search of Truth, and have found good, honest people doing their best to tell the story correctly. These people follow a genuine curiosity, subscribe to openness, and quest for inner and outer harmony; not through coercion, as I’ve seen in my past, but through compassion and a willingness to adapt to new truths – both empirical and esoteric.

Nothing energizes me more than learning from these people, hence the Explorer Poet Podcast.

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E44: Jason Smith

June 4, 2023

My guest today is Jason Smith, a Jungian analyst, author, and podcastor. Jason is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute–New England and holds a Master’s degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is the past president of the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston and has over 20 years of clinical experience. Jason is the author of ‘Religious but Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life’ and the creator of the ‘Digital Jung’ podcast. I truly enjoyed my conversation with Jason and I hope you do as well.

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About the Podcast

The purpose of the Explorer Poet Podcast is to explore the blurry line between our physical world and our abstract realities. I do this through conversations with people who are also exploring our Physical Reality (nature, science, physics, chemistry, biology, space, and technology; and our Abstract Reality (history, psychology, culture, religion, spirituality, art, creativity, and magic).

As Joseph Campbell so aptly summarizes in his Creative Mythology, the final culmination to his Masks of God series, and his personal conclusion, as to the future of story, art, and society:

For we move – each – in two worlds: the inward of our own awareness, and an outward participation in the history of our time and place. The scientist and historians serve the latter: the world, that is to say, of things out there, where people are interchangeable and language serves to communicate information and commands.

Creative artist, on the other hand, are mankind‘s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement of the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the voided space and time from one center of consciousness to another.