Watch the full video of our conversation on the Spread Great Ideas YouTube channel.

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Full Transcript of Our Conversation

David Newell on Myths, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious

00:00:43.01 – Brian David Crane

I’m pleased to welcome my dear friend, David Newell, to the show. David wears many hats. He’s a writer, philosopher, consigliere, and more. He knows more about myths, the collective unconscious, and Carl Jung’s works than anyone I know.

And as he put it, the meaning and morality of one’s life comes from one within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. So thanks for coming on the show, David.

00:01:11.00 – David Newell

Pleasure.

Why Myths Matter: Consciousness, Learning, and Meaning-Making

00:01:13.03 – Brian David Crane

To start with, what is a myth and why should we care about them?

00:01:17.00 – David Newell

I think a myth could best be described as almost a unit of consciousness. There’s this idea in the I Ching and the Taoist philosophy that consciousness learns through impact. So there is being is then interrupted by an event and the being responds to that event in some way. And if you think about the nature of story, that’s always what’s happening, right?

There is a person, a protagonist, moving through time and space, and an event must happen. And indeed in fiction, we always say one of the golden rules of writing is always be escalating. You can’t have a story that just goes flat for so long. And so myth is the the very first, the earliest example of humans’ attempts to describe learnings of their consciousness through time.

And so you can imagine that sitting around sharing stories of learnings was the earliest form of
information and intelligence exchange. And these myths that have come up have essentially informed the deepest truths about human consciousness that we have.

And what’s interesting about them, and I think what kind of revolutionized Jung’s work and
latterly Joseph Campbell’s work, is that similar stories, similar myths, similar motifs would
appear in all of these different indigenous societies from all different parts of the world in
different timelines.

With know incredible similarities, which led Jung to posit that there was some sort of deeper
collective repository of wisdom that all of us had access to. And that was the kind of birth of his concept of archetypes in the collective unconscious.

00:03:33.00 – Brian David Crane

And when you say this, that there are myths across indigenous cultures, like give me an example of one myth of good and evil or a myth of… What is one of these stories that seem to have been conveyed across different cultures?

Inanna, Cinderella, and the Archetype of Death and Rebirth

00:03:53.00 – David Newell

Well, a classic one that we would know in Europe would be Cinderella. And obviously that’s been turned into Disney, well, a lot of Disney stories have come from myths, but there are many, many different cross parallels for that, the Sumerian version of that, which is one of the oldest myths ever, is the myth of Inanna.

And that’s the myth of two sisters, Inanna and Eshragal. And Eshragal is the queen of hell, or the underworld, as it’s called in that myth. And Inanna goes, wants to go see her. And in order to go see her she must descend through seven gates, and at each gate taking off each one of clothes until she gets to the bottom of the seventh gate and meets her sister–who out of envy hangs her up and kills her.

And then the townspeople are so concerned that they send people after her to gather her remains and then she’s rebirth and comes back into the world. And it’s the oldest myth we have of this concept of going into the underworld and dying and being reborn. And the parallels to Cinderella are that she is, of course, one of several sisters.

She’s fallen. She’s the one that’s picked on. She’s made to kind of roam through the houses and so forth and clean everything. And she’s the last person that you would expect to go through this rebirthing experience. And she, through, fate and fortune finds her way to this ball and puts on the silver of a glass slipper, and that’s the thing that redeems her basically and transforms her and allows this rebirth story and Cinder, Cinderella…

Cinder is this concept of ashes from death from fire. She is reborn again and there’s lots of different derivations of this same myth around, that’s the most prominent one that comes to mind.

Modern Relevance: How Myths Guide Adults in Self-Understanding

00:06:00.00 – Brian David Crane

But do you see myths nowadays in the 21st century as useful? That’s a really bad way to describe it. What I mean by the question is that you know you and I would not… We’re both you guys in our 30s and 40s would not necessarily talk about Cinderella, right?

You would talk about it with kids or something? Like, why is it still useful nowadays in terms of being able to understand the world as adults?

00:06:37.00 – David Newell

That’s a great one. So I think one of the things that we learn as adults will have to relearn. We’re taught as children, the concept of boundaries, right? Where everybody goes through the kind of toddler era. You have a young one at the moment where you’re instrumental in doing this, right? And alive in her at the moment is this Mars archetype, this kind of testing of boundaries. Aries is the archetype of war, just wants to blaze through everything with anger and fire and passion.

And that is what toddlers are doing at that age. And of course, they don’t yet have access to
a psychic framework that can hold those archetypal energies, which is why they’re just madness, right? That’s coming through them. And it’s the responsibility of the parents or the caregivers to mediate that archetypal energy that’s pouring through them and say, no, it’s not okay to throw the spoon across the kitchen or whatever.

And funnily enough, we re-go through this in adult life as we come out of what’s essentially our parents’ value system that is enforced and has to be there in order for us to be sort of acculturated civilized in society. We’ve all had that experience in our 20s and 30s where we see other people doing stuff that we feel uncomfortable with. And if we do enough self-inquiry, we realize that actually, we don’t really believe that stuff or we do, but it’s not, it’s our conditioning that’s made us there.

It’s what our parents have said, no, you know what? Maybe you shouldn’t run around naked at the swimming pool or whatever, when other people who maybe were raised in more hippie type families are perfectly comfortable with it. And you realize once you take your clothes off and jump in that, the whole idea of being ashamed of your nakedness is a bit ridiculous. It’s a civilized shame, right? And this battle between…but of course we do need boundaries.

So what you’re doing in adulthood is learning this what rather wonderful lesson of um true
discipline, true freedom comes from boundaries, but only when you set the boundaries. So you
become conscious of it, right? You can’t just run around naked around the city or whatever, but when you choose to take it off, then you can feel very, very free.

And so where this applies in myth is this concept in so far, in astrology, if we borrow from the archetypes, there you would have the myth of Uranus which is chaos is the archetype of chaos. And then you’d have Saturn, which is the archetype of time and boundaries. And these two are essentially at war with each other. Saturn Chronos castrated Uranus and so…

00:09:31.00 – Brian David Crane

But explain that Saturn castrated Uranus by cutting Uranus’s uhh…

00:09:37.00 – David Newell

Testicles.

00:09:38.00 – Brian David Crane

Testicles and throwing them in the water.

Chaos vs. Order: Uranus, Saturn, and Life’s Defining Crises

00:09:39.00 – David Newell

Correct which then birthed Venus Aphrodite yeah..

00:09:41.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. Okay cool.

Why myth provides frameworks for chaos and crisis.

00:09:43.00 – David Newell

What’s important about putting these ideas in mythic form is realizing that they need containment and that there and that you can’t be all of one thing. And some folks might think, why do I need to conceptualize such raw energies in these stories? And this is the heart of why myth is actually useful. And I’ll give you a good example of this.

I live in Bali and there’s lots of people that are going through crises, personal development
crises, trying to understand things and so forth. And there was a friend of mine, Russian guy, a
true artist, his mindset towards everything was just kind of like, screw it. Like I want to play and just be free and blah, blah, blah. And he had two children and a wife there, and they had kind of fled from the Ukraine conflict.

And they were in Bali and he was essentially going through you know a midlife crisis where funnily enough, that’s when the Uranus in your chart comes online at 41, 42. It’s called Uranus’ opposition. So his psyche was exploding with this energy.

And this is where people go out and commit adultery, drive sports cars, insert middle-aged cliche here. And his version of it was very interesting. It was an unrestrained desire to just do dance every single day, which is very popular in Uber, ecstatic dance, contact dance and so forth. This kind of 41 year old man.

Meanwhile, his financial position was absolutely like going through the floor. I mean, way in
debt, people after him, business issues. And we were in circle together and he would share about these things. And it was crazy quite challenging for us to listen to knowing that he had two young children to feed, right? This kind of sense of responsibility, where are you? Where are you taking the responsibility?

And, I would share with him basically like the archetypal struggle that was like playing out for him, between this Uranus energy that comes through and the Saturn money is a classic component of Saturn, right? Nothing will make you take responsibility more than not having any money anymore.

And yeah it was interesting to share with him that like these energies, these titanic energies in myth always end in disaster if you do too much of boundary or if you do too much of freedom. You’re going to end up polarizing to one of the extremes and we see disaster.

So I think it’s very useful to have a kind of a mytho poetic framework underneath, some of these bigger things because it really puts a frame around the chaos that can unfold even in adult life that necessarily happens in like adolescence but doesn’t necessarily happen. It doesn’t
necessarily need to happen in adult life.

00:12:52.00 – Brian David Crane

It’s interesting to use the word chaos because Jordan Peterson talks a lot about order and chaos. Is that the two Saturn and Uranus?

00:13:00.00 – David Newell

You could think, yeah. So there’s so many different archetypal languages or lenses from which tutorial based things but yes, that’s exactly right.

00:13:10.00 – Brian David Crane

Okay. So then, but as you’re talking to this friend of yours in circle, he’s going through
all this. Hmm. Do you ever sit there and go? Well, how do I say this? Like I am projecting onto him my own value set.

00:13:30.00 – David Newell

For sure! Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I am personally…

Myths as Moral Maps: Projection and the Power of Story Archetypes

00:13:35.00 – Brian David Crane

And I wanted to get into like moral relativism because that’s also the… I think to me, the way I understand myths is a lot of times it’s a way to convey stories that teach morality or these, yeah, like guidebooks, let’s say, right? Like practical philosophy. And you do it in a way that is easy to understand and that it has stood the test of time.

Which is why you see these myths that are replicable across different cultures. It’s like, we know that these things are the ways that like there’s a reason that like envy, Cain and Abel, like the stories, like the story of Abraham, the ones that Jordan Peterson talks about from the Bible are such that, they draw on universal truths, let’s say, right?

00:14:25.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. I mean, that idea about, am I projecting?

00:14:30.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

00:14:31.00 – David Newell

Yeah. It’s a great one. And projection is actually incredibly useful and having these situations and people around you where they’re describing these events is incredibly helpful because in my view all life is a stage.

We’re almost all walking around in a Shakespearean comedy or tragedy, whichever mood you’re in that day. And I see through the lens of life where anyone that comes in that brings in a story or an experience that’s going on in their life at the moment that I then have a particular judgment or a charge about, that is something of value to me.

That’s usually indicative. It’s symbolic of something that’s happening for me. And I always say
like, one is happenstance. Two is I don’t believe in coincidence, but we’ll call it coincidence.
And three is something you gotta look at.

And so if like two or three people are bringing in archetypal themes, they may have different stories. It’s easier when their stories or the situations are quite similar, cause then your logical mind can kind of like, oh yeah! two people are saying the same thing. What does this mean type thing?

00:15:45.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

00:15:46.00 – David Newell

But once you know the deeper language of archetype, you can recognize the tensions, the same tensions coming up in different settings of stories.

Then I think, okay. Why is this coming up? There’s clearly something that I’m not looking at about boundaries and freedom that’s going on for me right now. And time and again, it doesn’t pay very long for some self-inquiry to indicate what that is.

And that’s when you’re really in this like really profound, beautiful, like mythopoetic dance with
the invisible realms. And that’s kind of what Jung led, to posit the idea of synchronicity.

Synchronicity Explained: Jung’s Symbolic Coincidences

00:16:23.00 – Brian David Crane

What does that mean? The idea of synchronicity?

Jung’s concept of synchronicity and its link to quantum physics.

00:16:26.00 – David Newell

Well, the classic, the famous example of when he first came up with it was that he was in analysis with a patient of his in Switzerland, and the person being analyzed was describing a beetle that was in her dream. And it was a scarab beetle, which is quite an unusual type of beetle to find.

And at the point that Jung was contemplating it, he sort of got up and walked over to the window and a scarab beetle appeared at that moment right on the side of the glass just see as he was contemplating, like, what is the importance of this?

And it led him to believe that there is a strong force, an invisible force, if you like, that’s guiding events and from an invisible psychic realm that we can’t see, that’s connected with our thoughts.

00:17:23.00 – Brian David Crane

That’s beyond the realm of science.

00:17:24.00 – David Newell

That’s beyond the realms of science, yeah. And what’s funny about that is I’m probably going to butcher the name, but there’s a very famous physicist that came along maybe 10 or 20 years into Jung’s work called Wolfgang Pauli, I think it’s him.

And this was around the time that kind of quantum physics was really taking off. And this idea of there being an invisible field, avoid a quantum field that was out there. was obviously just following Einstein’s theory of relativity.

And so the things like the concept of the observer effect was taking fault. Jung and Pauli had a very profound and powerful professional collaboration, and like the last third of his professional life where essentially Pauli was trying to find in science, in quantum physics, a scientific backing for Jung’s positing of synchronicity.

And they came as close as one can do to trying to prove these things, but at least showing that consciousness affects consciousness and that there’s something going on between a human being paying attention and shaping the field beyond them .

And then from that place you know we end up with decades of new age manifestation philosophy but that’s a whole other kettle of fish, but yeah.

00:18:56.00 – Brian David Crane

Is that the same concept as Schrodinger’s cat?

00:19:00.00 – David Newell

Uhmm.. I’m not familiar.

00:19:07.00 – Brian David Crane

It’s a philosophical exercise from what I understand that says inside this cat, sorry, there’s a cat inside this box. And you’re asking the person if they believe that it’s dead or not. And that when they open the box, it is whatever, the state of the cat is whatever the person like believed it to be. And that prior to ever opening the box, it was in sort of a, it wasn’t defined like…

00:19:35.00 – David Newell

Yeah.

00:19:36.00 – Brian David Crane

And I’m doing a bad way of explaining that but it touches on this as well, which is the observer effect.

00:19:42.00 – David Newell

Yeah, it’s very similar parallels to.

00:19:47.00 – Brian David Crane

You had talked in the car prior to this podcast about Carl Jung and his journey, let’s say, back to Christ consciousness.

00:19:58.00 – David Newell

Yeah.

00:19:59.00 – Brian David Crane

Or to Christ consciousness. Can you explain that term and then also his journey to that, where he got to later in life?

Into the Unconscious: Jung’s Dreams, Madness, and the Inner Child

00:20:08.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. Well, Jung’s idea, one of many of them, but one of the central ideas of Jungian psychology is this concept of the self, self with a big S. It’s not the self of the ego self that we kind of commonly identify with as ourselves and our persona, our personality.

The self, as he saw it, was a central organizing force that lies deep within our consciousness that is constantly looking for unity, harmony and integration of opposites within our psyche. It’s what could be considered our soul or as described by our soul and other different modalities
or ways of thinking.

And he became very unnaturally incredibly fascinated with understanding what this self really was. He knew that there was something way beyond the ego, which I think a lot of psychologists had already kind of thought at that time, certainly Freud.

And, but was very keen to understand what the nature was of it. And dreams were his medium. If you like his portal to try and understand the unconscious and trying to understand he was like, what is actually dreaming because it’s not my ego, dreaming like who is this person dreaming and who is the person coming up?

Who is the, what is the like, the thing coming up with these dreams. And why is it that these dreams seem to have symbolic information and intelligence that if I follow and unpack has enormously beneficial.

00:21:49.00 – Brian David Crane

Insights.

00:21:50.00 – David Newell

Insights. Yeah, and improvements in my life. And so that became like a profound lifelong confrontation for him where he then very famously, think it was in like 1913 or so, just before the outbreak of World War 2, he had this famous kind of confrontation with his unconscious where he basically voluntarily drove himself to madness, by descending fully into his unconscious through several months worth of unpacking of dreams, and going deeper and deeper and deeper…

And allowing himself to go into what he called a divine madness, the kind of things that you read about like very old prophetic, a type of biblical scripture and so on. These mystics that kind of sit out in the deserts and just go a bit crazy on God. He essentially did a very thoughtful pre-planned version of that and then wrote about it every single day, the dreams he was having and the analysis that he was having. And what he…

00:23:02.00 – Brian David Crane

Fascinating experiment.

Jung’s Red Book: descending into the unconscious; “The path to salvation is not through the hero…

00:23:03.00 – David Newell

And what he started to discover as he was going slowly mad, was firstly, there’s a lot of value in going mad because if you wanna actually understand, it’s a bit like taking psychedelics, right? Like don’t expect to not be surprised because the point of psychedelics is to reveal your unconscious.

So if you’re gonna have a confrontation with your unconscious, expect to be surprised. It’s not gonna come from a framework of sanity. It’s gonna come from a place of insanity and madness. So there is true, true genius in madness if you can contain it.

Anyway what he basically started to understand was that the self that was appearing in his dreams was a child. It was a divine innocent child and it was him at the age 5, 6 or 7 and this child really was the soulful, the most soulful piece of him that was essentially guiding him along.

And if you think about his idea of like, you always have to integrate your opposite. As an adult, the way to get back to your happiest place is to go towards childhood. So it’s quite funny. I mean, there’s that classic like line in the Bible, right? Jesus would say, until you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

And that’s a little bit of a sneak peek as to where he starts moving towards the idea of Christ. So
this child, this like virginal, very innocent child would speak to him and it would basically say that he was disconnected from like really important parts of himself, parts of play, parts of things that would make his childlike part very happy.

And so he would, again, as part of this process of going slowly mad, he was like, building little rock forts and castles at his house, completely sort of upended his family. Just let his wife deal with the kids while he just kind of essentially regressed back to becoming like a 7 or 8 years old.

And by doing so, he managed to kind of go back through some pretty, pretty profound trauma. And of course, this is way before people even thought about the idea of trauma, way before they had any conception stuff. He’s just like wading back through pretty hardcore, like childhood memories of like, you massive alienation and depression.

And yeah confrontations with his parents and so forth. All to just try and get to this place of unification with this divine child. And what he realized in this process is children at that age
don’t really have an ego.

But of course, if you’re like at his age, a 35-year-old guy that’s already basically become one of if not the most important in psych person psychology ever you’re going to develop quite a sense of yourself um but of course his thirst for knowledge and for advancement of discovery of
human consciousness way outweighed that and so this child part of him was just essentially making him do things that would humble or humiliate you know his ego.

And he wrote something really fascinating in The Red Book, actually, where he basically wrote like, The path to salvation is not through the hero. This idea that like we have nowadays and it’s
like, in my opinion, the biggest modern malaise we have, that just by going out into the
world and conquering it and achieving a performance and the hero’s journey and so forth.

Which there is a value in that, but that’s not going to lead to any kind of unification with the self. And that’s why we just end up in this perpetual hamster wheel of people attempting to achieve and then needing to fill, need to set the other goal. And then you have the people blathering on about how it’s the journey, not the goal.

And actually, I don’t think it’s either of those things. I mean, it’s definitely more the journey than
the goal, but he would say that the redemption of the soul is not through the hero but through the savior through Christ, through love, and through being a service. So nothing to do with the ego. Nothing to do with the great eye going way beyond that.

And so that’s when we kind of birth on the shores of sort of Christ consciousness, and this idea that the biggest problem that there exists around Christianity is, and I’m going query up murder for blasphemy here, the problem is the idea that like the Christ myth or the Bible is a literal story. And this idea that, Christians tend to hang onto that a guy did actually exist 2000 years ago and died and be reborn.

And to be honest with, even if he did, it it doesn’t matter because the truth is way more powerful as a myth, as a psychological, as a metanarrative, as a journey of the soul. And the undying soul as that it is for the body, and so in the sense that when you understand it and sit with the crucifixion and the rebirth and the story of Jesus as a soul map, and as a journey of consciousness and what every single person is capable of doing.

I.e. Dying to your bullshit, dying to your ego, dying to your selfishness, your greed, your gluttony, your jealousy, the seven deadly sins and rebirthing in love and in service to others and in kindness and in those kinds of classic Christian teachings. That is available to everyone, and what the myth of Jesus and Christ is meant to say is exactly that is to let go of these egoic forms of relating that are necessary to make passage through the first half of life but are not at all appropriate for the second half of life. Where we really we should be, just being in service to
others. And that is paradoxically where we find the most happiness.

00:29:07.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

00:29:08.00 – David Newell

And so yeah, Christ consciousness is this concept of making Jesus not a savior to look up to, which is what happens when you make him…when you literalize him, but when you take it into metaphor, realize that you can become, you can embody Christ yourself. You that’s available and the purpose of the story and the reason he came was to show that that’s what you’re supposed to do.

So it all suddenly becomes like, it will suddenly make so much more sense. When you look at it from a soulful mythical standpoint versus the literal one where your mind is just getting stuck and trying to understand how on earth this could be possible.

00:29:49.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm. And well the last part you touched on there–that the golden rule or to do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself. That was a revolutionary idea of being a way of acting in the world in the sense of it took the rules and it upended them, and it basically said it’s self-referential?

00:30:13.00 – David Newell

Yep.

00:30:14.00 – Brian David Crane

How would I like to be treated by you, so therefore I should do that to you? and vice versa right?

00:30:19.00 – David Newell

And the funny thing is that it speaks to like one of the deepest and uncomfortable trees. And I think when you have a psychedelic experience or a mystical experience, you realize that you’re not really like this kind of flesh puppet that’s been walking around for 70 or 80 or 90 years.

Like we’re all essentially this sort of infinite spark of awareness. and this is in every single you
know monotheistic religion, as well as Buddhism and Taoism, we’re kind of just staring out
essentially at ourselves, like a giant mirror of ourselves.

And so this Christian edict of sort of ‘Love thy neighbor’ is essentially saying love what you’re
looking at in the mirror because it is actually you.

00:31:05.00 – Brian David Crane

Well the whole thing is love that neighbor as thyself that’s that’s the actual…

00:31:09.00 – David Newell

Exactly yeah! And the funny thing is it’s the same thing. It is actually the same thing and anyone that’s taking acid or mushrooms, whatever else will get that pretty fast. You are just looking walking around staring at a refracted version of yourself back to yourself. All of your judgments about other people are just judgments about yourself.

00:31:29.00 – Brian David Crane

What do you think about this the first part of the like – To do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Like the actions towards somebody else, right?

00:31:39.00 – David Newell

It’s just the same, it’s just the physical extension of the same thing. I mean we are, let’s be real here. We can get all kind of like meta-wanky and in our heads about it but we are in physical bodies, right? If you reach across here and hit me in the face it’s gonna hurt and say like you need a physical teaching we’re 50 earthly with 50 spiritual And so you need a right teaching for thinking and you need right teaching for doing.

00:32:06.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

00:32:07.00 – David Newell

Because I think like, I had an old spiritual teacher had a funny phrase. You would say that spirituality is about getting an STD, saying, thinking and doing in truth. When you get all those in alignment, that’s when you’re in harmony. And a lot of the time we’re incoherent and we suffer as what we say and we think and we do are actually not incoherent with each other.

00:32:28.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm. And that’s kind of the definition of being of psychosis, right? Or where your parts don’t align?

00:32:38.00 – David Newell

Yeah, and I think we’re all in it, definitely! I think that we’re all this conflagration, this symphony of parts, and this is like a lot of people nowadays, a very popular form of therapy is like Constellation Therapy or Part Space Therapy. And I think it’s really really useful to dialogue with all these different kinds of refractionated parts of ourselves, the inner child, the protector, the achiever.

All these different parts that split off because every single person on earth has experienced trauma, little T trauma for the most part, thankfully. And we’ve all become like cut off into different parts. Everybody experiences minor levels of disassociation and these different parts coming into union is the journey of coming into wholeness.

00:33:36.00 – Brian David Crane

And getting an STD.

00:33:37.00 – David Newell

Yeah. And I mean, religion literally means to unite. So it is to unite. Yoga is to yoke, is to unite. Like all of these different spiritual forms are trying to bring into integration, into wholeness.

That’s why Jung was so onto something with the concept of the self. Like there’s this constant
attempt to keep trying to bring the spirit and the soul into harmony.

00:34:00.00 – Brian David Crane

You had said in the past, not during this conversation, that when the soul experiences trauma early on that it goes unconscious. Can you expand a bit more on that and how it ties in with
young?

Trauma and the Fragmented Soul: Developmental Wounds in Adulthood

00:34:18.00 – David Newell

Yeah. It’s really fascinating, so I’ll speak a little bit about developmental trauma. So in an ideal world, when a child is born, a baby is born, for the first two to three years, they have a primary caregiver that is holding them and co-regulating their experience of the physical realm that they’re in, which is ultimately very overwhelming to them, and helping them mediate what’s called affect in in psychological terms.

Affect is essentially sensation in contact with the physical world, not just physical, but emotional, but any kind of stimulation that comes in from the earthly surroundings. Like if a car drives past really fast and the child gets startled, that’s Affect. If they bang their head, that’s Affect. If they feel hunger, that’s Affect. Any stimulation like that but you know…

00:35:20.00 – Brian David Crane

Can this caregiver help them make sense of it?

00:35:22.00 – David Newell

Absolutely. So the caregiver’s primary responsibility during this time is to mirror what the child is feeling so that they can see that their response makes sense to another human. And if it doesn’t, to receive the right kind of input and to help them regulate difficult experience.

A prime example of this was Sophia, right? Your little one at the weekend, and she banged her head. She’s obviously very upset. So the first thing to do is to put her into the arms of a caregiver, make her feel like she’s grounded because the nervous system of two-year-old is easily overwhelmed, obviously. It doesn’t have any kind of input. It hasn’t built enough strong force of containment so the role of the…

00:36:10.00 – Brian David Crane

You see them like hit stuff and just lash out and do stuff.

00:36:12.00 – David Newell

Exactly. So the role of a caregiver is to provide containment. And there’s way more of a physical kind of earthly sort of societal function of this, which is actually the spirit of that person is slowly landing into the body of that child, that human during this time. And so…

00:36:46.00 – Brian David Crane

Where does that idea come from? Is that a… Let’s come back to that.

00:36:51.00 – David Newell

Well, the answer will come when I start talking about what happens with trauma.

00:36:55.00 – Brian David Crane

Okay.

00:36:56.00 – David Newell

Trauma is basically a good definition, a good way to think about it. It’s just an experience that’s too much to have at the moment.

It’s too much, too overwhelming, whatever it is. Could it even be super too much happiness at one point in time? Yeah. And what happens is the psyche essentially is very very clever. It decides that, okay, this nervous system, in this child this is about to be completely, who is being overwhelmed or about to be completely overwhelmed by this.

How do we make them experience it in a safe way? Well, we chop it up. We’re going to chop up
this experience. And this chopping up is disassociation. And so what happens is, the visual image of the experience goes somewhere in the brain, tucked away. The physical experience of the body goes somewhere in the body, but is covered by numbness.

And the story or the meaning about it goes somewhere else entirely, because you cannot
understand the meaning of something unless you feel it and visually see it at the same time.
And so what happens is, if a child isn’t regulated in a period of time, or gets a very disruptive
or a different narrative to that about what happened, I’ll give you a great example of this.

So Donald Cowshed, who’s just like an amazing young writer who wrote this incredible book,
Trauma in the Soul. He gives an example of one of his clients who, when she was four years
old, um they had, her parents had just moved to this new house in the neighborhood. They were getting to know the neighbors and so forth. And she went off and she picked this flower from her mother.

It’s a beautiful day outside. And she went out to her and she gave the flower to her mom, and she’s super like open about it. And her mom turns around and goes, what have you done? You’ve picked that flower from the neighbour’s garden.

And she hit her and then marched her background and made her sort of apologise in tears to this neighbour for taking her flower, right? So here’s an example of little t trauma, but it actually is like a very very damaging experience for this child because they’ve not had many formative moments yet in their life of these primal experiences. So this is a four-year-old child extending like a really beautiful moment. You think about like the adult version of that. You think about what, you aged, 19, 20, taking like a massive leap of faith to tell someone you like them or whatever, right?

And then having like the adult version of that come back, right? Someone basically, I don’t know, slaps you and then publicly shames you about the experience. That’s the adult version. It’s usually absolutely horrifying. This is just like normal stuff happening to a child, right? Quote unquote normal.

And so this is little t trauma. And this is an example where, okay, the child then is basically going to disassociate from an experience like that because it’s too much for them to handle. And not only that they’re going to never want to repeat something like that. But the child cannot make the primary caregiver a negative force in their psyche because they’re completely reliant upon them.

00:40:31.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

00:40:33.00 – David Newell

And so what happens is they will internalize that mother’s reaction into their psyche, and this is
the split off part. This is where it gets really interesting.

00:40:48.00 – Brian David Crane

But they will internalize it how?

A Flower and a Lifetime of Shame: The Hidden Cost of Childhood

00:40:50.00 – David Newell

Yeah. So imagine the child is almost, it comes out of life as Christ consciousness. This is where the myth is going to come into play a bit later. It’s this pure, innocent child, and this was a pure, innocent action that was taken, right? And so this innocence was then created. Desperately hampered by this experience has just happened right? and so this innocence cannot bear to experience a pain in the humiliation like what’s just happened.

And so what the psyche submerges this section of innocence into the unconscious, and then a parallel, a dark force function, to keep it down there, splits off and stays conscious. And this parallel dark force, this defense mechanism, this protector part, stays in place and it becomes a shaming part, that exists and stays, add for the rest of your life into adulthood, ad infinitum. And this woman was in her 60s before she came to therapy then basically realized she was experiencing shame all through her life for extending gestures of love towards people that’s hampering her relationship with the children, with the husband and so on and so forth.

And it seems absolutely awful but it’s an attempt by the psyche to do the most loving thing which is split off, create this protector that then becomes a persecutor part that’s beating
you down saying, Don’t do this, don’t do this, you’re not good enough, you should
be ashamed of yourself or whatever, because that is better than the other two alternatives, which is one, re-experiencing the pain of that innocence that’s just been submerged, or two,
considering the idea that your mother, your primary caregiver, is mean or horrible, which is
which is inconceivable yeah for the psyche of that age. It just cannot be conceived of.

And incidents like this, is essentially what then starts to create submerge the innocence of the child into the unconscious. And as I said, to some degree this happens to everybody. We all have aspects of our childhoods that are quite difficult but in like meaningfully who traumatize people. What this will then create is, you know, depression, anxiety, and a deep sense of hollowness and emptiness and within and massive compensatory functions.

And indeed, as you know, my background is in investment banking from the early part of my life. And I often say, people in that industry are pathologically traumatized. I didn’t realize I should apply that title to myself as well but later in life, they’re traumatized and they’ve weaponized that trauma into performance they have learned that safety, which is what they’re now primarily craving, is coming in the form of money.

And that’s why it’s so hard to leave that industry because it’s so hard to repeat the same safety
that you think it’s giving you, because what they’re chasing so hard for and millions of pounds of bonuses every year and validation, right?

Being in the Financial Times, doing these big deals, it’s It’s all the things that they didn’t get
from the development. And a lot of these people were sent away to boarding school or the
sons and daughters of like very wealthy people that just didn’t have the times and have the
presence to be with them.

And again, we come back to presence and affect management and co-regulation. And that’s the primary thing. The funny thing is, a lot of people ask me this is like, you can go through not very much in your childhood and come out really fucking traumatized because of not being regulated. And Conversely, you can go through a shitload of dreadful stuff. but If you’re in a loving, regulating family, you’ll be fine.

It’s amazing how resilient children are. Children can survive war zones, a lot of very bad stuff. If there’s like affect regulation and co-regulation, loving environment is pretty amazing. The power of the human spirit but then also just what happens when you don’t shepherd that human spirit properly. What gets like really interesting is what Jung discovered is that this primal rupture that happens for people that have deep trauma, the psyche is so intelligent that you don’t just lose this innocence forever.

Although the people that have experienced it, do very much think that I mean, and that’s why it can take decades and truly harrowing amounts of suffering to experience before you go and speak to. And the shame of not having this sense of like wholeness inside that other people have thought that you’re the wrong one because you’re wrong like you did in childhood. And it’s so deep, so deep you just can’t see beyond it, but the psyche seems to bury the innocence in this kind of collective unconscious or this deeper part of your consciousness where archetypal forces come in and protect it.

And what that then gifts the traumatized person is often a very acute sensitivity and understanding or sort of gift towards the other side, the invisible realms and so a lot of artists that have had like profound trauma have this ability to see through to the other side. A lot of healers, shamans, Jung himself, because it forces the person who’s again being unconsciously driven to wholeness, as we all are, to be unconsciously driven to trying to make sense of that pain.

And if that’s made sense through or in Jung’s case, through coming up with depth psychology, or in other places through writing or through healing others, it will drive people to very, very profound depths in order to unconsciously trying to gather this innocence back. But it really only can come back through witnessing and reprocessing these awful childhood experiences.

00:47:46.00 – Brian David Crane

And like the primary experiences…

00:47:48.00 – David Newell

Precisely right. And that’s kind of why, analysis and depth psychology works quite well because the therapist essentially becomes the surrogate parent for a while. Now there’s problems with that with things like transference and things like that. But if it’s well held, then they can essentially be the temporary parent that you needed to witness and re-go back through these awful memories and experiences.

To then allow you to reprocess them, individuate and then not need to rely on a parent
anymore. Or, you can explore these things with like MDMA therapy or psychedelics
or that kind of thing as well, because they’re so buried. The only real way to get to these things is through dreams or things that open up and reveal the unconscious.

Most people really only end up in therapy because of like profound depression or anxiety or psychosomatic illnesses, autoimmune diseases know just really crippling levels of pain and again, because most people’s compensations to them are performative and they become very good at. It’s rewarding, it gets rewarded and it really only shows up in people convincingly through interpersonal relationships.

This is where the breakdown in these personal relationships where people cannot maintain long-term relationships or they’re so shielded around their children, that is where you see it because it’s going right to the heart of that caregiver aspect because it really is the child part in you. The innocent child part of you that loves that is capable of deep deep love both love of self and love of the other and so when that’s gone that’s what shows up in relationship with traumatized people.

00:49:44.00 – Brian David Crane

You had said to me when we were talking about this in the past that the opposite of love is not
actually hate, it’s power.

Reflection on love, power, and family lineage: personal story on parenting and control.

00:49:49.00 – David Newell

It’s power.

00:49:50.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, is that tied in with this?

Power vs. Love: Why Control, Not Hate, Is Love’s True Opposite

00:49:52.00 – David Newell

Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting. I mean, I can share about my experience here recently, but love is an expansive feeling and experience. When we love, we seek to share, we seek to grow.
And hate is not that. Hate is not the opposite. The opposite of love is power because power is domination and control. This is why I always say, like and if you love something, you should set it free. If you hate something, you don’t want to set it free, but it’s the power you want to control it.

And so, I don’t mind sharing about this now, but I recently had a fairly deep dive experience into some tricky childhood memories of mine and some kind of grievances with my mother, and some very difficult experiences, parenting experiences that my brother and I were on the receiving end of. And when I was going through this kind of regression experience using MDMA what I realized was it made it easier in a way was that my mom’s behavior towards us and some of the physical violence we experience wasn’t anything to do with like a love or an absence of love.

It was to do with control and power. She was a woman that was overwhelmed by the experience of mothering two young boys on her own, didn’t have much money and she didn’t have any support from any family nearby. And what would happen was we would act up to some degree, just like children would. And we would reach this point where her nervous system couldn’t tolerate the level of chaos going on. Because again, she’s coming from a place of her own trauma, doesn’t have containment.

And so as soon we hit a level of dysregulation and then bam, she goes into unconsciousness,
right? And the first thing you want to do is just control what is going on around you. And I
realized as was regressing to these memories of life violence that it wasn’t that she
didn’t love us. The love was I could feel all the love still there. That was the funny thing. It was about power and it was about oppression and it was about control.

00:52:08.00 – Brian David Crane

And what wasn’t it also about her just being unable to be your primary caregiver at that moment?

00:52:13.00 – David Newell

Absolutely yeah! For sure it was kind of flipping into unconsciousness, basically. And I suddenly
zoomed out. This is the most healing aspect of it as I came out of my personal story of the whole experience, and I suddenly saw everything, my lineage or even just like the lineage of modern society of this kind of patriarchal like control mechanism.

This power, this desire of power, this unwillingness to want to allow full emotional feeling and the feminine to come out. And I suddenly saw particularly my ancestral line of just layer after layer of generation after generation. Sort of like shut down this emotional expression and it’s scary. It’s chaotic. We need to control that.

00:53:08.00 – Brian David Crane

It doesn’t perform…

00:53:09.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. And it probably worked amazingly well for like back in 1850s, or when my great-great-grandfather was a minor or something, and they really did have to shut that stuff down, and get on with it so it was like an unbelievably like healing experience to finally see that and allow me to let go of a lot and just understand a lot, and just be like okay this is just a lineage of like poor affect, management and regulation. And it’s just about like widening the scope of the ability to deal with that.

00:53:43.00 – Brian David Crane

How does this then tie in with Jung’s journey back to Christ consciousness?

00:53:48.00 – David Newell

Well, the…

00:53:53.00 – Brian David Crane

Because you were reading this book and you were talking about this defense mechanism for innocence, for lack of a better way.

00:54:02.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. And that gets amazing. The life is going to happen, period. and shit’s going to happen. Poor Sophia hit her head. These things happen right is that your child is
going to experience pain. We all experience pain every single day. It’s like how’s the old
adage go, pain is guaranteed. So pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional, right? And so it is
inevitable that a child is going to come into this life innocent and essentially get quote unquote
crucified by the earthly experience of life. You cannot maintain that innocence.

Now trauma is the most extreme example of where that innocence is getting submerged but we all to some degree lose our childhood and we all know that like the happiest parts of ourselves come out. This is why people like writing novels or like going back into art, or trying to, when they do get depressed, go back to these places, right? Because this is where the soul really is.
And so what…

00:55:12.00 – Brian David Crane

Can I add something one thing as a father, what’s interesting though is that I have to both protect my daughter’s innocence and also prepare her for the world at large.

00:55:23.00 – David Newell

And accept the fact that she will lose her innocence through events that you cannot control. Yeah.

00:55:33.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. Despite what I try.

00:55:23.00 – David Newell

Yeah. Here’s where it gets beautiful and redeeming. And like the real power of the Christian myth and Christian consciousness, right? This is what’s incredible, which is like we all feel betrayed by life. We all came here hoping that we were going to get on paths of gold and live out our childhood dreams and aspirations and be as happy as we were right?

And we’ve all had that moment in our early 20s, when we sort of graduate or whatever going to work and be like shit. This is what paying bills is going to be like. And renting and dealing with shit of life. Oh now I get why adults weren’t as happy as me growing up right and we sort just became that right and the rest of life is this is sort of attempted reclamation to get back to the contentment whilst also dealing with the issues of maturation and so forth.

And so what’s in and this is why trauma survivors and the reintegration of that give us such a beautiful insights into this because what going back through trauma and we all do this, which is micro aversions, different gradations of it, like does is basically it’s the decision to consciously resubmit that deepest, most innocent childlike part of yourself back to the pain that you couldn’t experience before. So that is a conscious and adult…

Conscious Crucifixion: Pain, Healing, and the Christ Archetype

00:56:59.00 – Brian David Crane

As an adult…

00:57:00.00 – David Newell

As an adult, yeah. which is a conscious crucifixion. They always make the emphasis, right? That Christ went to the cross innocent. and he was nailed for other people’s sins, right?

00:57:13.00 – Brian David Crane

And that is a sense trade by those he loved.

00:57:16.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. So now look at it as in what you’re doing in therapy and healing, right? You are essentially gathering that most innocent part of you, taking it back, re-experiencing that pain, the crucifixion and doing it for the sins of others. And the betrayal that you experience in order to ultimately be reborn. The reborn to a mature view, that suffering, pain exists but we can be
innocent in it, and that’s the gift.

00:57:56.00 – Brian David Crane

And is it that gift and that idea that Jung came back to when he looked at this and said, we now understand the trajectory that from a child to an adult, that they can go through that we would like them to go through and the end of that trajectory, really is the the archetype of Christ and Christ consciousness I like to get back there is.

00:58:25.00 – David Newell

Yeah now what what he did have to say about it because he was he wrestled with
christianity all of his life and he deeply wrestled with the one-sidedness of the Christian
story what’s the one-sidedness the one-sidedness is that jesus is depicted as this all light
innocent figure which works really well for that narrative arc we just discussed there of like essentially coming back to redeem your divine innocent child self but what it negates and his big thing is the shadow.

And that it doesn’t look at what’s actually required you to individuate and go back in order to become whole again. And so he saw the downfall of Christianity as a religion that only emphasized the light and the innocence and the purity of Jesus and made him a savior with
while being blind to its own shadows. Which is interesting when you think about it because a lot
of the shadows of the church just in our modern times have all been sort of.

These awful like child abuse, pedophilic things, all involving children funnily enough and the corruption of the innocence of children by priests and pastors and so forth. So it’s very interesting to see that the shadow is even there in the divine. He almost predicted that would happen. And I’m sure it was happening for centuries before. Of course, we just don’t really know about it. and say just…

01:00:12.00 – Brian David Crane

There is one thing I want to add on that because I think that there is a thread in Christianity where it is taught that you should just throw your cares on Jesus, throw your concerns, it’s very… It’s not self-referential.

01:00:29.00 – David Newell

No. It’s an abdication of personal responsibility.

01:00:31.00 – Brian David Crane

But the thing it’s yes, but it’s the same thing with sort of new age thought which says that you shouldn’t actually go back and amend your heirs. That is also like you don’t want to focus on the dark. There are kind of two parts of the same coin which is like both of them.

In one, you’re absolving yourself by throwing it on Jesus. The other one is you’re
just like basically not going to acknowledge that there is any wrong or that you have
done something incorrectly. And I think with both of them, that will probably be what Jung
gets at, which is like there isn’t an element of action for you as an individual to integrate these things, right?

Christianity and the Shadow: Jung’s Critique of Suffering and Integration

01:01:13.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah and you’re not really thinking about the unconscious harm that you’re doing out of your shadow as a result of these things when I think about aspects of my past traumatic experiences they’ve corrupted by innocence or whatever else you said story but they’ve also made me behave in ways that cause harm to other people to become, sort of bit pathological
around business and just be like very cutting towards people. And so really that reclamation of that innocence for me is, not just a recognizance of that loss of innocence, but a recognizance of the harm of the lived life that I have experienced as a result of the harm that I’ve done, the shadow, the shadow of it, that dark splintering part.

The unlived life is, yeah, is an interesting one to pull back on. And so Jung basically… He
thought he wrestled with Christianity, he wrestled with this idea of it only having this pure
image. He deeply disliked the idea of like the Messiah complex, a pedestalling anyone that it
was all about.

Was all supposed to be self-referential? It is all supposed to be about conquering ourselves, our inner demons, our shadows and so forth. and so he wrote this in so amazing book called Answer To Job towards the end of his kind of professional life and in it he took the parable of job which is for people that don’t know the story where the devil basically shows up and says, these people are only following you because you’re nice to them.

And God’s like, no, it’s not, that’s not the case. And he’s like, I guarantee you they’ll stop
following you if you started, to treat them badly. And he’s like, no, I’ll prove it. So he picks Job, who’s his most loyal, most devoted servant and slowly and absolutely brutally and in only sort of the Old Testament way, destroys this man’s life. He takes away his animals, his farm, famine, children, and I think maybe eventually his wife, pestilence, just everything, basically. And so the whole parable is Job basically saying like, why God, why?

And again God just keeps handing him savage smackdowns. And I don’t think he ever breaks. I don’t think he breaks but I think he breaks. I think he commits all the way through. But a lot of people look at this parable and just look at it as like Old Testament evil. Again, I think going literal with it rather than the meta piece of it. But what Jung did was basically use it to show his theory that, and it’s quite something, that he believes that God is essentially unconscious of his own shadow.

And that the purpose of humans and human suffering is to show God his own shadow of causing pain and suffering. And that the countering value of humanity the countering force is to essentially ennoble themselves through suffering and pain and make God conscious of and aware of his actions. Which is a really, it became like this very dicey idea to put out there because obviously the Christians believe that God’s omnipotent, that there isn’t anything.

01:04:58.00 – Brian David Crane

Benevolent.

01:04:59.00 – David Newell

And benevolent, right? That there’s anything they wouldn’t know. But I kind of like it, as an idea. I think it’s a really, really interesting concept. It’s a bit frightening.

01:05:16.00 – Brian David Crane

Well, there is a bit of the Greco Roman idea that we’re here is to play things of the gods.

01:05:21.00 – David Newell

Yeah. Yeah. But then it kind of elevates us because it’s like God made man and his image.

01:05:30.00 – Brian David Crane

What image of an image? The shadow or image of the light?

01:05:33.00 – David Newell

Who knows? But we’re here to play with both, right? So it’s kind of a fascinating idea to sit with.

01:05:45.00 – Brian David Crane

And why has all this spoken to you?

01:05:49.00 – David Newell

Well, I mean…

01:05:54.00 – Brian David Crane

For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve had an interest in psychology, let’s say it is very broad. For it, myth…

01:06:05.00 – David Newell

Yeah I mean, I think, listen, I would fall in the category of someone that’s kind of described and spoken about a lot in sort of Donald Kalshed’s book of Chawarma and the Soul. I think I experienced, very very difficult first few years into life in terms of this kind of affect regulation and mediation.

I think that as a result, became a very performance achievement oriented person. So, when you become financially and business successful, people aren’t really pointing towards these things in you, but it became very clear to me from like my mid twenties onwards, that I was just suffering from like a severe sense of hollowness and emptiness that other people weren’t.

And then latterly like quite significant, like intrapersonal, relating difficulties, with romantic partners and yeah like very as you know difficult psychosomatic issues with like strong sense of disassociation and sleep issues and so forth. So and then, it’s Donald Kalshed’s theory that people with those kinds of primal ruptures in their psyche develop a strong affinity for things beyond the mundane of life.

Like you can’t really get too fussed about talking about I don’t know love island or whatever on the TV as good as that is. The psyche is just like operating at a different level, it’s operating because this is where I feel safe at the deeper level. And that makes a lot of sense,
right? I didn’t, I wasn’t, I didn’t feel safe when I was 3 years old in the earthly world.

So I’m kind of still stuck if you like swimming in this kind of mytho poetic soup, and I’m still
working through this kind of affect management and mediation to kind of like rebirth into normality.

01:08:19.00 – Brian David Crane

So you said that you saw that show up. There was a girl that you were dating who when she
was close to you, you felt that your HRV, your heart rate variability improved. Your aura ring
was.

01:08:34.00 – David Newell

Yes. Yeah yeah. Perfect example!

01:08:36.00 – Brian David Crane

That would be representative of what you’re describing.

01:08:39.00 – David Newell

Yeah, yeah. And this stuff takes a really long time to both identify that you have, to not feel like incredibly ashamed of, and because a lot of people with trauma that have like complex relationships towards that and towards their primary caregivers about it. And then also to face the pain of actually confronting it because it’s not pleasant. It’s not pleasant at all.

I can tell you that it’s agonizing therapy, like a lot of the examples in this book I was reading, people are in therapy for like 5, 6, 7 years. Sometimes 2 to 3 times a week, going through truly horrific memories of things that were just too difficult to experience. So yeah, I have a lot of compassion for people that go through these experiences and come out the other side of it.

But they also have a lot of gifts to give, which is great. And I think Jung did. I don’t think Jung
even realized what he was in. I mean, that’s the true bravery of him as a person, that none of this even existed before he came along. So he was truly, exactly truly in the wilderness, that man, so yeah.

01:10:03.00 – Brian David Crane

How do you think about Jordan Peterson’s work? Because he’s taken a lot of Jung’’s themes and concepts and expanded on them or brought them into the 21st century for people.

Jordan Peterson’s Archetypes: Masculinity, Shadow, and the Jungian Legacy

01:10:14.00 – David Newell

Yeah. Yeah. He’s a complex individual. I think, funnily enough, an artist friend of mine when
he was kind of breaking through in sort of 2013, 14, 15, said something really interesting about him which is that he said he didn’t feel like he had an integrated lover archetype, and at the time I was kind of really taken by his strength of word and kind of repopularization of a lot of these myths and so forth and helping young men find direction where we’re living in a society where there aren’t a lot of male good real role models around, there aren’t a lot of men, fathers around period because they’re working quite hard.

So men are mostly being raised by women, which is problematic for adolescents and beyond, and not so much in the early life. But the longer his time and tenure has gone on and in the public spotlight, the more I’ve revisited this remark that my artist friend said, and the more I think it’s true. I think that there’s a deep disconnection to sensitivity and compassion. And it’s not that he’s incapable of these things. In fact, funnily enough, you see him kind of blubbering quite a bit when people come up to him and thank him and he becomes overwhelmed by the support and service that he’s given.

It’s the kind of like the weaponization, I think, of some of his words and the way in which he goes after certain people. I think that there’s a struggle that I have with the kind of the embodiment of Christ consciousness within it. And I find it very very, very, interesting and very telling that a man of his intellectual accomplishment and reading has been suffering from very profound depression for several decades and has been medicating that. And for a man that studies young, has seen what he’s done to not see the value in descending into that depression himself and coming out the other side really points at something for me.

I think that the descent is where his like mis lover archetype is and I think that there’s something massively awry with that. And I never ever ever judge anyone for taking antidepressants. I’ve taken them in my life to get through truly hellish experiences but they’re not the long-term solution, and the long-term solution is to descend into the madness and to come out and get the gifts from it and I don’t think until you do so you’re whole and I think that you pass that on to future generations as the bible says right the sins of the father become the sins of the son, yeah.

01:13:26.00 – Brian David Crane

Seven fold, yeah. Seven generations.

01:13:29.00 – David Newell

And what do you think about?

01:13:33.00 – Brian David Crane

His early work had a very profound impact on me. And to mimic some of what you said, I kind of quit paying attention to him after I felt like I got what I needed from the first book and his early YouTube talks. And think he diluted his own strength and brand by getting more into the cultural because I think I can understand it.

I can understand why he did it. I just also think that talking at like a philosophical level or at a moral level sort of kept him out of the fray of political or ideological battles. Although it was, it manifests itself as political, and it manifests itself as ideologies. It’s just that he was very pleasant to talk at like a higher level early on.

I still like the guy. I mean, I still think 12 Rules For Life is an amazing book. I never read the second one. I don’t know. Maybe you did. Yeah.

01:14:51.00 – David Newell

No.

01:14:53.00 – Brian David Crane

Maybe on that note, we wrap, huh?

01:14:55.00 – David Newell

Yeah.

01:14:58.00 – Brian David Crane

Bit of a down note to stop on, but I do think that if people are more interested in your journey, You did run a podcast for a while, Inner Truth.

01:15:13.00 – David Newell

Mm-Hmm. Still on Spotify.

01:15:15.00 – Brian David Crane

You’re still on Spotify. That was both a writing platform and a podcast.

Recommended reading & parenting wrap-up: James Hollis and letting kids choose stories.

01:15:23.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah. I think if anyone is interested in the aspects we’ve been talking about today, I cannot recommend James Hollis enough. He’s an amazing Jungian writer that he speaks truly in kind of normal parlance and really interesting stories and thoughtful, anecdotes and fairy tales and his book, The Middle Passage was one of the most powerful books and impactful books I’ve read. Really really helpful for anyone in the kind of midlife search for meaning.

01:16:00.00 – Brian David Crane

I did have one following question since you mentioned James Hollis so imagine you have kids.
What are the stories that you would like them to read? Like the fairy tales or the myths that you would willingly read? Like, is there certain ones that you think carry more weight or there ones
that you think should be? They should steer clear or Frozen?

Parenting and Myth: Letting Children Choose Their Stories

01:16:25.00 – David Newell

If I’ve learned anything from my own childhood, it’s not to pick. It’s to allow the kids to pick.

01:16:33.00 – Brian David Crane

Okay.

01:16:22.00 – David Newell

Yeah. Whatever they want to go with. Yeah. I truly believe that if you operate from the mindset that you as a parent or a steward to a soul, a flower, a tree, that is unfolding and all you need to do is turn up and water it.

You don’t need to push your shit into, your boundaries are the kind of, you might put like a stick next to a tree right to help it grow up straight and that’s absolutely fine and appropriate but allow that child’s like profound curiosity to play out and I think that if you can achieve that then that is the gold standard my view of great parenting.

01:17:25.00 – Brian David Crane

Cool.

01:17:26.00 – David Newell

So let them pick the fairy tales.

01:17:29.00 – Brian David Crane

So long as it’s not on the phone.

01:17:31.00 – David Newell

Yeah yeah.

01:17:33.00 – Brian David Crane

The medium does matter. In addition to the message, yeah. All right thank you David. Appreciate you coming on. My pleasure.