Welcome to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton. And today we're going to be talking about the price of freedom.

What is the price of freedom both personally and collectively as we seem to be entering into more and more chaos and uncertainty as the days go on?

I feel very deeply that the external events and the crisis and the chaos

that we are experiencing in some ways a manifest and an example of what happens internally

within our psyche, within our minds, when we descend into our own chaos, into our own

darkness, into our own negrado, as the alchemists call it, the period of blackening, the dissolving

of what's there. Some in the spiritual community call this the dark night of the soul. So I'm going to talk about

this briefly, but I want to start off with a quote by Carl Jung. He said, people will do anything,

no matter how absurd in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga

and all of its exercises, observe a strict regime of diet, learn theosophy by heart,

or mechanically repeat mystics texts from the literature of the whole world, all because they

cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could

ever come out of their own souls.

So in some ways, you know, I think what's interesting here is, you know,

Jung is talking about the facing of the soul as a form of liberation.

And this is one of the things that he talked about in his work, especially in his later work. I think he even has a book called

Man's Search for a Soul. I think I might be botching that title. But in a lot of his work,

the actualization of the soul was a part of the human endeavor, that we have lost this tether

and this connection to growing down, to growing

downwards, right, to sort of deepening our roots, and that we have become obsessed, addicted,

and inundated with brightness and positivity and the light and ascension.

And we live in some ways in an ascension culture.

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