TRANSCRIPT
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I really dislike the concept of conventional spirituality because the conventional concept of spirituality, to me, has very little to do with the real human spirit. And to me, honest spirituality is all about being consciously connected with the real human spirit and letting the real truth of the human spirit out.
What I see conventional spirituality as is people who are so split off from their deep real spirit that they’re desperate for something to make them feel good. Most religions are centered around this false concept of spirituality that makes people feel good and makes them feel connected to their spirit, but it’s really a fake connection to their spirit. In the same way that alcohol, a certain alcohol, is known as spirits, it makes people feel spirited. It makes them feel connected to their spirit, but it’s fake. It’s not something that really lasts, and it’s not something that’s a real conscious connection with the deep truth that’s within us.
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What I find amazing is how many conventionally recognized spiritual leaders, to me, are not spiritual at all. I think of the Pope or the Dalai Lama. They’re fake spiritual leaders, and they can make people feel good. A big part of it is that people project a massive amount onto them, but they don’t see these people for who they really are. And I don’t see these so-called leaders as seeing themselves for who they really are. I don’t think they have much of a real honest connection with themselves.
Now, of course, people can argue, “How can you say that about the Dalai Lama? The Dalai Lama is one of the most spiritual holy people out there alive today.” That’s not my impression of him. Not only by having listened to him speak, watched videos of him, and read his books. What I see is a very average conventional person who makes people feel comfortable in their state of being unreal. And someone who gets paraded around as a spiritual leader, but he’s perfect for the modern world—the unchanging, stuck, miserable, dissociated modern world—to hold up as a spiritual leader because he doesn’t really challenge people. He says some things that I like. It’s not like he’s all bad. And even the Pope, there, you know, there’s some things about him that I like too. And it could be the same thing for a lot of political leaders. There’s certain things that they say that I like, but deep down, they’re not true leaders to me. They’re not leaders in getting real, and I really think deep down they’re leading people away from their true spirit.
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The whole point of my philosophy is to take people into their spirit, to take people into the hell and torment of their past, to try to resolve it. That’s what I struggle to do in my own life, with some success. And the more I do that, the more I really connect with my spirit.
A wonderful thing that I love about children, especially very young children, is how natively and intuitively they’re connected with their real spirit. And that’s if they’re not traumatized. Some people can be traumatized very, very young. Some people can be traumatized long before they’re born, and in the womb, and they’re already— their connection with their spirit is compromised by the time they’re born. But as people get older and older, it becomes quite the norm to become very disconnected with your spirit. So, to me, it’s a tragedy to see a three or four-year-old who’s already dissociated and already disconnected with his or her spirit and has already lost, therefore, his or her spiritual connection. Not a spiritual being anymore.
And oddly enough, sometimes when people are the most disconnected—well, often in our modern world, people who are the most disconnected and yet can talk the right talk and say the right things and talk about their connection with God and their belief and everything’s going to be okay—a very Zen sort of Buddhist kind of attitude—that they can be labeled as being very, very spiritual. But I know so many people that are considered so spiritual that, to me, are terrifying people because they’re so out of touch with themselves. And also, what’s fascinating is how much rage they have just below the surface.
I don’t know how other people view it, but when I look at the Pope, I see an enraged man. And I wonder that about the Dalai Lama too—how angry he really is below the surface about his own unresolved traumas.
A real spiritual leader in this modern world, in this very, very confused, disturbed modern world—a world where we’re in the middle of destroying our planet—a real spiritual leader is going to be speaking against that and is going to feel an obligation to be speaking against that. So when the Pope says, “Go ahead, keep having children, don’t practice birth control except the Rhythm method,” and when the Dalai Lama says, “Go ahead, keep having children, it’s no problem,” I just can’t possibly see them as being spiritually connected people because it’s not only unreality to go on saying what people are doing is okay; it’s, to me, criminal, especially if you have power, especially if you have a mouthpiece that can reach millions or billions of people.
The form of spirituality that I espouse, it’s self-therapy. It’s getting to know yourself, to thine own self be true, and really getting to know not just the falseness about oneself, but the truth of oneself—the truth of who one really is and who we were all meant to be. And I believe we all were meant to be someone, not in the God sense of there’s a pre-ordained meant to from up above, but that we all have a perfection deep within us—that’s our soul or the core of our personality. It’s the same thing to me—our true self. And we are meant to connect with that on this Earth, and that’s our job as individuals—to evolve into our own individual enlightenment. And it’s also our job as an entire species to all collectively evolve into a connection with our true self.
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