Who was Hermes Trismegistus and what are his teachings? What can we learn today from this esoteric wisdom that withstood the passage of time, kept alive for thousands of years? Polymath Robert Edward Grant is a wealth of wisdom in a great many fields, and today he came on the podcast to explore these very questions. We dive into the seven hermetic principles as described by the Kybalion, one of the great foundational esoteric teachings from whence we source quotes such as ‘As above; So below.’ As well as this deep dive into the Kybalion, Robert decodes other profound esoteric teachings rooted in other ancient sources, such as The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Book Of Enoch, The Emerald Tablets, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, and many other related works.

AUBREY: Robert, you're back.

ROBERT: Good to see you. 

AUBREY: And I called you back for a very specific reason, because after we finished our last meeting, I read this book called "The Kybalion" and it was first published I think, in 1906, and it was the resurfacing of some, what they claimed to be mystery school wisdom from Hermes Trismegistus, that resurfaced in 1906, and then resurfaced again in a reprinting, and someone recommended it to me. It was actually my brother Mikado. And I was like, "Oh, shit!" A lot of this, I'd heard and I found myself quoting Hermes Trismegistus but didn't really know the source material from where it came from. And this is something that you know a lot about. So I was like, "Man, we gotta get back here. And we got to talk about it." Where I want to start is who, who was Hermes?

ROBERT: Well, that's a big question. I think he probably had many characters through what we would consider our history, through different incarnations. A lot of people talk about Enoch, being related to Hermes--

AUBREY: Who's Enoch?

ROBERT: Okay, so we're going deep now. Okay.

AUBREY: Let's go. Why not? Fuck it.

ROBERT: So there's a noncanonical book of the Bible and one of them is called the Book of Enoch. So Enoch tells a story of an antediluvian or prediluvian, pre-flood period of time. In the period--

AUBREY: Where are these books found? Where are these non-biblical books found?

ROBERT: So in 325 AD--

AUBREY: Council of Nicaea!

ROBERT: Council of Nicaea, exactly. So Constantine, who was also the Emperor of Rome at the time, decided to declare himself the Pope. If you can't beat them, the Christians at the time, let's join them. So let's set the rules for it. We're going to bring together all the bishops and everything. They looked at this as a big spiritual awakening but we need to make the official statement that these are the books of the Bible. Until that time, there were many, many other books. A lot of books didn't make it into this canonization.

AUBREY: But where did they go? 

ROBERT: They're still around. They're still around. The Gospel of Thomas is another good example of this. Some of them are called the Apocrypha, if you've ever heard of the Apocrypha. These are like esoteric wisdom teachings that often the Essenes or the Gnostics also held and kept for literally thousands of years. So basically, what you find, even in Qumran when they had the Dead Sea Scrolls, references were made inside of those and of the Dead Sea Scrolls to some of these non-canonised books of the Bible.

AUBREY: And when you think about the Council of Nicaea, you have to think about an imperial structure that saw that the slave classes loved this new teaching both for its virtue, of course. There's so much virtue in the truth of Christianity and the teachings of Yeshua when you can actually look through some of the ways in which the “church” has twisted those teachings. But if you looked at the deep core of it, such powerful wisdom, number one; number two, it started to flip and reverse the power structure because there was just a few wealthy aristocrats and there was tonnes and tonnes of poor peasants, proletariat, whatever you want to call them and this religion started to flourish amongst them. Blessed are the meek. Flipped everything on its head. It was all about the virtue of your inner world, of your heart, of your compassion, of your kindness, of your love of your service, not the strength of your arm and your armor and your conquering. So it flipped this whole Roman paradigm on its head, so you got an emperor there who's organizing a council and being like, we got to take all these texts, and we got to make them work for us. And that alone should give people a little bit of a question about what's in the Bible.

ROBERT: Totally! This doesn't agree with my policies so this is not going in the Bible.

AUBREY: It would be like if the current government was like, all these spiritual teachings, we gotta take what we want, and we got to eliminate the rest and say that we're spiritual. Why would you trust them to make the cuts? They're not the right editor. They have a vested interest. They're not an unbiased source.

ROBERT: In fact, arguably the opposite. The one that you should be most skeptical of, well, the book of Enoch is one of those such books. You can find tonnes and tonnes of references to this all across the internet. Just type in the Book of Enoch, you'll find a bunch of stuff, even rabbinical students and even rabbis themselves who will talk about this in Kaaba law, but also across Christianity and everything. So this is well-known. The Book of Enoch tells a story about Enoch.

Now Enoch was a man who became godlike. He built a city. The city of Enoch became so holy that it transcended this dimension, as it's described in this book--

AUBREY: So it was the kingdom?

ROBERT: It was like a kingdom--

AUBREY: Or the kingdom--

ROBERT: Maybe like a Shambhala, like a spiritual domain. He sort of transcended these things. Now, a lot of people, myself included, believe that Enoch came back in several incarnations. And this was Hermes Trismegistus, also referred to in the Egyptian pantheon as Thoth, also pronounced thought just like a thought inside your head. In addition, you have other references, where it might be that Melchizedek was also one of these incarnations. So you've heard of the Keys of Melchizedek--

AUBREY: That's Paul Selig, who's been on my podcast many times, if he's forced and pressed, does he give a name to the guides that he's talking to, it's Melchizedek.

ROBERT: And Melchizedek means melek sedeq. It's a Hebrew word. You probably know that Jerusalem is like peace. Salem, it's like Shalom. It's like peace be with you, a concept, the way we say Shalom. And when you talk about Abraham, Abraham paid tithes to the chief priest at the time, and he went to visit him, lived in Salem, and his name was Melchisedech. And melech means king, like melech, or even the name Malik in Indian, the Hindu means king also. So it is ancient stuff through etymology that's got all over the place. Sedeq also can mean justice or peace. 

AUBREY: The king of peace.

ROBERT: The king of peace and justice in a way, save like that. So basically, you have this personage who is reincarnated through time, and always brought, with that incarnation, lots of wisdom.

AUBREY: So now when we say incarnation, some people can have a very literal, linear, way that you look at this. But fundamentally, you can have your own unique body and your own unique configuration. Of course you do, you have different flesh and different things. You could even be a different, potentially, iteration of something, but actually tap into the current and the frequency, because in those non-physical dimensions, as I understand them through all of my journeys, and through all of my studies, things are recorded in vibrations. And these vibrations, you have the ability to access. Like Paul Selig can access the vibration of Melchizedek and allow that vibrational channel through. There's a lot of ways that when we say incarnation, it doesn't mean like, I was fucking Marcus Aurelius in a past life--

ROBERT: Although you would have made a very good Marcus Aurelius. I could see you in that breastplate and everything.

AUBREY: Thanks! Thanks, Robert. It's an unnecessary compliment, but I will accept. I will fucking accept, but nonetheless, when you think about this, just think about somebody who's tapping into, at the very least, the energy of what the vibrational signature and collected intelligence of this being that we call Hermes might be.

ROBERT: And that could very well be the case too. But there are certain signatures and throughout Scripture, we see references to people getting keys. We've all heard about the keys of Peter, the keys of Melchizedek, the Keys of Enoch. There's a book called "The Keys of Enoch" as well by JJ Hurtak that's worth reading, if you're interested to learn more about this. I remember when we first met via text, I think I asked you if you were into hermeticism, the very first time as well, and you hadn't yet read "Kybalion". And then when we talked last time, you were like, "I just read 'Kybalion'." That was wow. I feel like there is this frequency, maybe it's a frequency connection, it might be an incarnation connection, that ties several of these people throughout history together, where we see these kinds of keys, keys of Solomon, another man of great wisdom, who I know you've studied a lot about as well. And they all have sigils, as well, which is kind of interesting. So there's kind of a different meaning--

AUBREY: I think I'm wearing David's sigil on my necklace.

ROBERT: Yeah, you've got the Star with David. That turned into the Seal of Solomon as well. So I think there's some depth to this. And even as recently as someone like Saint Germain, you may have heard of Saint Germain. 

AUBREY: The Violet Purple Flame of Saint Germain.

ROBERT: Exactly! So Saint Germain was this very interesting character from the 18th century that everyone thought lived for possibly hundreds of years even. He was very charismatic. He could hold a conversation, but he never ate at dinner. 

AUBREY: Maybe that's why he looks so old. 

ROBERT: He never aged though. That's the thing, he didn't age. That's what people claim about him. You'll find him throughout history, involved in things like the American Revolution. He's like showing up in different places. How could he have been at all these different places?

AUBREY: Like the movie "Highlander"

ROBERT: Exactly. It's like the movie "Highlander". This guy is really interesting, because he speaks many languages, he's extremely charismatic and people thought he must be a charlatan, because he couldn't possibly have done all the things that he seems to have known and done in his lifetime because he had to have lived many lifetimes. So there's all kinds of huge lore around this guy. A lot of people believe that, again, tapping into that same frequency or possibly incarnation of Thoth or Hermes.

AUBREY: Also, that traces, potentially, all the way to St. Germain, is what you're saying. It could go Enoch, it could go Thoth, it could go Hermes, Melchizedek, Hermes, all of these different characters in a different iteration, articulation. And one of the teachings of Solomon and the teachings of the deep mystical Kabbalah and Torah is that we all have the potential to actually merge our own will and consciousness with divine will. But it's not that we become effaced, it's not that we lose everything that makes us unique. The divine moves through us as us, integrated, as us. What we see through our lens and our perspective, and our portal, actually supersedes any text that had gone before because it's the right information for this time and this context. As we all know, if you give advice out of context, it could be pretty fucking useless. Sometimes it's universal, sometimes it's at the wrong time. This idea that you can always rewrite the Torah, rewrite the Scripture, if you're able to step into your own highest divine consciousness as you, not just the divine, somewhere neutral, but the divine as you, then you actually can deliver a message, which is why all of these messages, even if it is the same being or the same frequency, could seem quite different, because it was specifically filtered through the lens of that person at that time in that specific way. The information, of course, is going to be different, because it's going to be serving and meeting the needs of exactly the people and the place that he was occupied.

ROBERT: I fully agree. And it reminds me of the sixth hermetic principle, which is cause and effect, that every cause has an effect and every effect has a cause. 

AUBREY: Everything has its cause and its effect. Chance is but a name for law not recognised.

ROBERT: Exactly. And that's how I feel about randomness. I don't believe in randomness. Randomness is just our inability to perceive God's pattern encryption.

AUBREY: Yeah.

ROBERT: It's there. I don't care what the number sequence is, I've always been able to find patterns in it if I really deeply look. We talked about this last time. What is randomness? It's just a boundary condition where our knowledge ends and our ignorance begins. And as we expand human consciousness, we push the boundary out further and further. That expands probably at something like the speed of light, interesting that the universe is expanding about that same speed too, maybe it's just our consciousness.

AUBREY: And that goes to the first principle of hermeticism--

ROBERT: Mentalism.

AUBREY: The principle of mentalism. The “All his mind, the universe is mental.” I read this, and I was like, "No shit." I came to that conclusion, after trying three times to write a book called "Master Your Mind"--

ROBERT: 60,000 words! 

AUBREY: 60,000 words thrice. All stillborn because finally it had to bring me to the conclusion, hey, dummy, you can't separate the mind from anything else. So how were you going to master the mind? I might as well write a book, "Master The Universe" and put a picture of fucking He-Man on the cover and make it a comic? I had no chance. I kept running into that problem.

ROBERT: I just want to know who Skeletor is.

AUBREY: That's a good question. I think if we put that question out in the polls, we'd get a lot of similar answers, probably. I realized that and I was like, "You have to define", whether you call it mind or whether you call it something else, you could call it love, if you like but I think the mind is a good way for us to think about it, "you have to define it all as the same substrate to actually understand it." So call it mind or call it something but it is actually all the same substrate, really, of just different densities. 

ROBERT: And there's a great quote by Max Planck, who was pretty much the mentor that made Einstein famous. Because Einstein, working as a patent clerk, needed somebody to sponsor him, who was going to be well regarded in the academic community. And that was Max Planck. Max Planck is famous for many things, particularly in quantum physics. He and Einstein didn't agree on everything. He was more of the mindset that the universe is based on mind. He said, "There is no matter as such, we must conclude that at the base of everything, is really just a conscious mind." And when you think about it, in those terms, you start to then realize, and that's why I've come to the conclusion that we have a you and you have a you-inverse around you. All of it is a mental construct. There is no such thing as true objective reality in the context that we all see the world through our own prism. So that is what we believe to be objective. We all think that our perception of a thing is objective. But as we start to expand our awareness, we realize there's different ways of looking at the same things or circumstances. That's why we have crime and there are 30 eyewitnesses that have entirely different accounts of the exact same occurrence.

AUBREY: So this is something that I was definitely hoping that we would get into, because the idea of the perspectival nature of all of our perception is pretty much unquestionable. Nobody watches the same movie, because you're watching it through your own lens, and through your own eyes, and your own associations and everything that's coming. And nobody reads the same book, nobody knows the same person. We're all living in our own multiverse within the universe, the one verse, which is our own perspective. However, that doesn't mean that everything is just a story, and nothing is real, necessarily. I think that's the way that post-modernity has taken it, that everything's just a story, nothing's real, nothing matters. One of the things that I've been really studying with Rabbi Gafni is actually the correlation between, in the Kabbalist lineage, the goddess Shekhinah, and the Tao. It's basically a set of first principles and first values like the law. So if you read the "Tao Te Ching", it says, the Tao is older than God. I don't know what created it, but the Tao is older than God. It's like the law that's underneath perspective itself. That's why they're saying it's even earlier, it was even older than God.

ROBERT: That's where I would place the seven hermetic principles.

AUBREY: And that's where this seems to be reaching. 

ROBERT: It's like the laws of the construct. 

AUBREY: Basically, the hermetic principles are getting to the Tao. Maybe Lao Tzu was another iteration of this Hermes Trismegistus thought in just another way and another mystic, maybe Rumi was as well, who said, "You are not a drop in the ocean. You're the ocean in a drop." Obviously, that's the principle of correspondence, spoken extremely poetically, but either way, people are accessing this particular type of wisdom and it seems to be reaching for that thing, the first principles and first values of the entire everything, the all that ever is, and then all of the creations are built upon that stack.

ROBERT: I believe, fundamentally, that part of the struggle that we face right now as a people, as humanity, is we are still very much clinging to this anachronistic, I believe, notion of materialism. This leads to reductionism. It leads to more and more confirmation bias of that reductionism and materialism. It's all stacked on itself. So this is one of the biggest challenges relative to our educational system right now, that's becoming an anachronism in our world today. 

AUBREY: Well, it's not only our education system, it's our medical system, it's your financial system, every system is trying to reduce it to the smallest part that you can understand. Even using words to describe a thing is incredibly reductionist. If I say, "Hey, Robert, I'm reducing you to a symbol that can be placed in a name." Yes, it means something bigger but we sometimes forget that the word is just a placeholder that clumsily approximates something that would be impossible to actually describe.

ROBERT: And this is one of the reasons I reject the notion of being titled in one area. Someone will ask you, and the way over here, in the Uber, the Uber driver asked me, he goes, "So what are you doing here?" I said, "I'm doing a podcast with Aubrey Marcus." And then he goes, "Okay, are you going to need a ride back later this afternoon, or whatever?" And I said, "Probably I got another podcast with Danica, Danica Patrick." And he's like, "What do you do?" He goes, "What are your expertise?" And now I'm, all of a sudden, feeling this gravitational pull towards just coming up with a convenient answer.

AUBREY: Give him something he can hang on to, so he can quickly understand and then dismiss.

ROBERT: Which is more narrow than what I actually am. 

AUBREY: Do you think we crave that because there's a discomfort when we don't understand something and there's dissonance? So the discomfort comes why? What is he doing that allows him to get this? There's a little bit of discomfort and then if they get something that they can just slide in, and the discomfort stops and they're like, "Ah, everything makes sense."

ROBERT: Yeah, because we all feel comfortable when we can categorize something.

AUBREY: Yeah, totally.

ROBERT: Okay, he's a policeman. I know how policemen think. But he's not going to talk to me about anything outside of police stuff that I'm going to listen to. I can then sort of shut it down. And we all do this. When we see a circumstance or event, it doesn't matter what it is, we want to categorize it that fast. And by categorizing it too quickly, we keep ourselves stuck in this world of judgment, rather than just pure observation. We can learn a lot more by looking at things, taking a moment and saying, without being so quick to judge it, saying, "Okay, let me see what the other ways to look at this are," because maybe the only true objective truth would be a mathematical equation. It's a mathematical equation, which is the sum of all perspectives. So what I try to do now is I try to look at things through other lenses that would be juxtaposed to my own, even if I don't feel like I can agree with it right away. I want to try to do that, so that I can step into another person's consciousness, another person's shoes. And, in a way, I think that in and of itself, if we can strive for look at things that way, then that helps us to find forgiveness. It helps us to find empathy, it helps us to look at the world, probably the way that maybe God would look at the world.

AUBREY: And if that all sounds too highbrow for you, and you're like, "Not interested," it'll make you a better lover, it'll make you a better leader, it'll make you a better friend.

ROBERT: Better listener.

AUBREY: Are these things you care about, being a lover, a leader and a friend? Well, then these principles are important, the ability to step inside the inside of somebody else's experience, and not keep your safe distance. And it's really vulnerable when you do that, because you're subject to feel what they feel and experience what they experience. Obviously, you need to choose those people you do it with wisely or do it from afar. You obviously don't want to go step into anybody, who's sniffing spray paint on the street corner or whatever.

ROBERT: l don't need to step in every shoe maybe.

AUBREY: You want to be able to imagine it, just not actually step into it. But nonetheless, it's still important to step in there, so you don't have that judgment when he's talking to her, she's talking to herself. It's such a valuable skill and then it's an even more important skill when you actually have somebody that you love and you trust and is in your inner circle, your tribe and then you can step into each other's experience and that is what solves the great problem of loneliness, because you'll see see yourself as a mirror in that person that you're stepping inside.

ROBERT: And that's the U inverse. That's the U inverse. So when you realize that the universe is mental, and there's a reason why the first of the hermetic principles is mentalism, it's so core to understanding all the rest, each stacks on each other. And when you realize that, then you start realizing that every experience that you have, is not just happening to you, it's actually happening for you. Whether you're conscious of it or not, is up to you. You may not be aware of it until later on. We just think that the world's happening to us. Oh my gosh, something bad happened. Life is difficult. Woe is me. I'm a victim, blah, blah, blah. If you look at it differently, and you say what my you-inverse or my subconscious mind, the lens through which I'm seeing the world trying to teach me, my higher self, trying to project back to me, so that I will come to that realization? You could go to school for years and years and years and study the didactics but until you experience it, in some sort of a roleplay that you believe is actually real, you haven't really fully learned it. Often people will say, "Well, what does all this stuff mean? How does this help or save the whale or how does this save deforestation or whatever?" Well, if you actually study further into this, you'll realize that what we judge will just continue to be projected back to us. So, in a way, when you start to really go down this rabbit hole of okay, I'm going to be an advocate for this, that or the other thing, by your own judgments of those things--

AUBREY: Especially advocate against.

ROBERT: Yeah, exactly. You will only perpetuate those things. It's the hammer and nail situation. And that comes out of all of this understanding of the hermetic principles. I think that's why it's so powerful for me. One thing I want to mention also, and you asked who is Thoth and who is Hermes, Hermes, you can learn a lot about him also. There are several books. "Kybalion" is one. It's excellent, "By the Three Initiates", I love it. You can listen to it on YouTube, it's fantastic. Around the same time, there was a translation that came out of the "Emerald Tablets". So talking about the early 20th century. And in the early 20th century, there was a bit of a mini-renaissance that was happening. You saw a lot of advances in physics that were happening at that time. You saw people like Walter Russell. They started creating societies of polymathic thought, like the Twilight club in New York City, that Walter Russell was a founder of. And I'm excited because I'm going to probably go and speak at his university in Virginia here in the next few weeks or so. Basically, there was a small, little, mini, I'd say, right around the turn of the century, up until probably around the crash in 1929. There was this really interesting time happening. It was the roaring '20s. It was a very different philosophy of thought. Art was also exploding at that time. What you find during that period of time, is that people were going through these sorts of expansions. You hear about also, leading up into that, the 19th century, Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner and other people that were luminaries during this period of the world. There was this expansion going on. One of those things that came out of this, was not only the work by The Three Initiates and the "Kybalion" but also the "Emerald Tablets" of Thoth. Now "Emerald Tablets" have been around for a long time, but there were different translations of it. This was a channel translation that was done by a guy by the name of Doreal. So I would definitely look into that because it tells a story also of Thoth, the Atlantean. It goes all the way back in time, and tells a story, and he actually claims in this writing that he built the Pyramid, that he was the designer of it. It's funny because in Egyptian history, they tell the story of a guy by the name of Hemiunu. Hemiunu would have been the architect for the Great Pyramid. But Hemiunu sounds a lot like Hamiunu. It could definitely be some sort of connection between the two. And when you get into that, you can learn the whole story about how Atlantis fell and then how civilization was maintained, how they moved to camp, the land of camp, Egypt.

AUBREY: Which is where, if people have listened to my podcast, Matias de Stefano remembers the life he lived as a woman with a child and sings the songs and it's pretty remarkable. He tells stories as a being, as a being in the flesh, not just a deity that's an aggregation of energy that people are worshiping. But no, it was a being.

ROBERT: Yeah. You could think of him as the king of the land also for thousands of years, in fact. Depending on which historical timeline you prescribed to, one of them is the pyramids or something on the order more of about 13,000 years old, some are even older still, that it was before the Younger Dryas, and we had some major calamity that happened after that time, also, the flood kind of plays into this. But basically, that story is worth reading, it's worth going through. There's something about it, where we all have this ability to know if something is worth listening to, or reading. And as the words permeate into your consciousness, there's something very powerful about that particular book. It's fascinating. And it's written in a very prose kind of way. So it's beautifully written, it feels like scripture, in a way. It's got this holy feeling to it. I probably read it and listened to it at least 200 times. 

AUBREY: Wow. 

ROBERT: And every time I listen to it, or read it, I get something entirely new from it. There's something very powerful about it. Same thing with "Kybalion". "Kybalion" is another good one. "Hermeticum" is also another one that is worth reading. It's a short book. And it's a reiteration of a lot of these principles that have been passed down, generation after generation, sometimes through hidden secret society type stuff. It's hidden so that it can be found.

AUBREY: So if we do our job, you'll both not need to read these books and be even more excited to read these books.

ROBERT: Yes, that's right.

AUBREY: So that's what we're here to do. So let me go through a couple of these different notes that I had. The first note, this is a quote from the "Kybalion": The principles of truth are seven. He who knows these understandingly possesses the magic key before whose touch, all the doors of the temple fly open. The keys. That's exactly what they have been. These have been keys for me to start unlocking these different rooms in my psyche. If I can use this key correctly, and we'll talk about some of the ways that I've used these keys already but I just know I'm just now getting on the journey.

ROBERT: Scratching the surface. 

AUBREY: But when you were talking about the principle of mentalism, this one key, the all is mind, the universe is mental, what you were previously saying about how things that you're projecting out into the world are reflected back to you, well, if you think of it as all one mind, then, of course, that's going to be the way that it's going for. And of course, also, the other thing that you can look at with this key is if it is all one mind, everything is happening in right reason and right accord. Whatever is going on, we may not be able to understand it from our perspective but from the largest mental perspective, it may make perfect sense. Matias talks about this a lot. For part of the necessity of creation, of course, is polarity, and we'll talk about the principle of polarity, but part of polarity requires distortion. And distortion is a force that prevents us from seeing everything as the same, seeing everything is all as one. Distortion comes in and says, "I am separate." It's also been called maya, the illusion. There's a lot of ways that you can look at this, but some way in which we're not seeing the absolute truth because if we saw the absolute truth, it'd be one note, one color, one sound, we would see beyond all of the differentiation.

ROBERT: We wouldn't get to experience our own differentiation.

AUBREY: Exactly! Exactly. So within that, you start to understand maybe this is all just a part of the symphony. And right now we could be in a part of the song. It's like the deep, low, strident, viola part that's kind of building the intensity, the anxiety. That's okay. It's all part of a big, grander, symphony. Co-creatively, we're the conductors deciding how this orchestra goes.

ROBERT: You're absolutely right. I met Deepak Chopra, I think it was 2014. He came to my office and I wrote up on the whiteboard the ohm symbol. I said you know what this actually also means, and he's like, "What?" It's 369. And the nine is backwards, because it's the way Sanskrit basically would write. And then you've got this that looks like an I at the top with a little dot in the center, and that's one of the ways to write the number six. So 369. And he said, "Wow." He was blown away by that. And I said, "Nikola Tesla talks about this." And he goes, "How would Tesla know about this?" And I said, "Well, because his guru was Swami Vivekananda," who was a famous Swami. It was Yogananda level, a guy in the late 19th century, early 20th century that came to the United States and taught, and Tesla was a devout of that person. He was definitely someone who followed him very closely. So he invited me. He said, "You need to come with me." We're in a big meeting with a lot of people around. He took me in this other room, he goes, "You need to come with me to Kerala. Come with me to Kerala. It's in southern India. And there's a big temple there, a very old temple with these two snakes on the doors. It's super famous. There's supposed to be a vimana in the base of it and everything. I was like, "Okay, this sounds really cool." So he invites me to go. And at the last second, I unfortunately couldn't go because I had a board meeting I'd called. I was going through a major crisis at the time, it was a difficult situation. So I called him up. And I said, "I, unfortunately, can't make it." And he said, "Don't worry, Robert. Everything is as it should be." And I didn't really know what that meant because at that moment in time, I was still thinking that, no, no, we make the world happen. Whatever it is that we do, we can either let it happen to us, or we make it happen. I didn't realize at that time that I now believe very strongly that everything is connected.

AUBREY: And both are true. This is the hard part, is that we have to be able to embrace paradox to understand any aspect of the universe. Yeah, you  gotta make it happen. And the universe is making you happen. And you're making it happen and the universe is making you happen, and everything else around you happens.

ROBERT: Because it's all in my mind.

AUBREY: Right, right. 

ROBERT: And that's how it can work. When you think about it, I'll give you another example, it's pretty funny. I was on Instagram and I saw this post from this gentleman page or whatever that I follow. This guy had a neck brace on and this pretty girl walks down the street right by him and he jerks his neck to look at her. He's like, "Ah, that hurt," like this. And then another one walks by this way, he does it again. He's like, "Oh, it hurts." And it says men will be men. I was just laughing about this and not 30 minutes later, I got on a conference call with my attorneys to work on some licensing agreement on patents. Our attorney gets on and he's got a big ass neck brace on. And I was thinking, I've never had a call with lawyers where there was a guy with a neck brace and I just saw this, like 10 minutes ago. Is this another form of mentalism? Where the things that we are seeing and registering consciously are starting to become manifested in the world around us very rapidly through synchronicities. It's another pattern of connection.

AUBREY: And of course, obviously, you're not saying that you, looking at that post, caused the guy's neck to break, right? But what you're saying is that there's a correlation and a plane of causation that's far higher and far beyond what we even understand and it puts something in motion, which creates a spray paint effect of this kind of splatter gun of okay, now neck brace is going to enter this aspect of consciousness. Again, this would go back to this principle of cause and effect, chance is but a name for law not recognised. So what you're suggesting is part of that principle of cause and effect, that all right, yeah, that's a chance. Right now, as far as we know, it's a chance but there may be a law that we're not recognising a plane that we don't have access to.

ROBERT: I don't believe in coincidences. I used to. When I was very much a materialistic thinker, I believe in coincidences. Now, I don't believe in coincidences at all, at all, because I've had way too many examples where I had thought previously something was coincidence and I've realized later that it was all part of a macro pattern that was just too large for me to see from my zoomed in too close to the tree to see the forest perspective. As soon as you zoom out and start looking at things from a larger standpoint, then those patterns start to become more visible to the naked eye. You start realizing I'm learning something through this. And it's a beautiful process. Now that you've read "Kybalion", I'm sure that if you haven't yet, you will soon start experiencing more synchronicities. And this is one of the things that Carl Jung talks about. The surest sign of the path to enlightenment, or what he called the individuation process is the number of synchronicities you start to register and experience in your day to day life.

AUBREY: I just had one right before you came. So we had an old Onnit employee that I knew, but I knew him in the Onnit context. He really got this urge to connect to me and really show me what he was all about. He loves playing different tabletop games like "Pokémon", "Digimon". He didn't know that I was an old school "Magic: The Gathering" player and went deep into that world. So I shared that with him. He's like, "Oh, man," and he gets really excited and he's like, "I'm going to make some things for you." Made this awesome gift box. It was hilarious and had watercolors and I had one very special "Magic: The Gathering" pack. It was a pack that was in an entire giant box, the pack was full of ultra rare cards, right? It was cool. What a fucking gift? I haven't opened up a booster pack in a fucking long time too. So I opened it up and put the premium card in the whole deck, so there's the rares, and then there's a super rares, is a card that's the, I forget his name, but it's the astral dragon. Now, if you know I just released a documentary called "Dragon of the Jungle", which is literally about an astral dragon, which has been since that, and that was released a week ago. And it's also been a way that I've been experiencing consciousness through the realm through the lens of this mythical creature, a being of power, and trying to connect to the astral dragon energy.

ROBERT: So here's another synchronicity. 

AUBREY: Exactly, that's what I'm saying. A dragon? Sure. It's Magic the Gathering, there's dragons all over the place. An astral dragon, as the rare card in the one pack that I got. It's coincidence, or this is just a wink from the divine being like, "There you go, boy," make sure you're paying attention.

ROBERT: So I'll give you another week, tied to the astral dragon. So on April 23rd and 24th, I spent the night in the Great Pyramid. A couple of months ago, three months ago. And it was the holiest night of the year. It was Ramadan, the pyramids are closed during the day. I was supposed to be there with the CEO of a major network, a television network thing. He couldn't make it last second. So I said, "I'll just go to the pyramid by myself." So I went in and I spent four hours in the pyramid by myself. And while I was there, I looked at the wall. My wife, Susie, actually found the Bull and the Cow on the wall that matched the one on the Last Supper painting on the right side. But above the Bull and the Cow, we'd seen this writing. It was always writing and I kept seeing writing up there and it was like this swishy kind of shape, like a sine-cosine wave. This time I went in there, I noticed I could see the pattern. It's a dragon. In fact, it wasn't one dragon it was three, three dragons and they're attached to a tree. Now, you may have seen when the queen had her diamond jubilee thing recently.

AUBREY: What queen? I didn't--

ROBERT: Queen of England, Queen of England. She lit up this, it was very bizarre, there's this globe on the royal pillow and the globe. She goes and pushes on the globe and, all of a sudden, these lights go in the shape of three-strand DNA. And then they connect to like a tree of life and light up the tree of life. That was a month after I'd found that on the wall inside the King's Chamber. I haven't even released this, or the photographs of it anywhere yet. But this dragon has been all about Kundalini and the third dragon which is the Shin. It's what happens through the staff of Hermes. You get into one mind. And it's no longer yin-yang. It's now Yin Shen Yang.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's the line in between the yin and the yang.

ROBERT: So you talked about Shekhinah. It's relative to that. This whole thing, you mentioned the dragon when I was at your conference, I bought a ring because they had vendors there. I felt like it was at Woodstock or something. 

AUBREY: It was pretty off. Robert spoke at ARKADIA. 

ROBERT: And I saw this ring there. I put on this ring and it was made of copper. I was like, "Okay, I like the look of copper. Cool." And it's a dragon. This dragon energy, the astral dragon energy has been very much of very high meaning to me for the last two, three months. So the fact that you just released your thing on this, that's how we would look at this now is I would say, "Okay, you telling me that story is another synchronicity." So it builds on even the synchronicity you have, and then it might serve for you to be a synchronicity. When we realize that it's all mind, we're all one. And we're all collectively connected through this consciousness. And then once you get past that notion, it takes a lot to break away from materialism, to get into mentalism. But once you do, then you can go into correspondence. This the second principle of the seven hermetic principles and correspondence is embodied in the statement: As above, so below. What does that mean? I think the first place that I started to recognise that was, before I even really knew much about any of this, I started to study fractal geometry. And what does fractal geometry even mean? So if you were to zoom in on a EKG of your heart wave, so you got a QRS complex and a T-wave, QRS complex and a T-wave. It's interesting because if you zoom in further into the parts that look totally flatline, so you've got this wave that goes like this up and down, then you got a T-wave, and then it goes up again, this is called the QRS complex, and it goes like this. We've all seen what an EKG thing is. But if you zoom in on the dead space in between, keep zooming and zooming and zooming in, you'll see the same wave, again, as a fractal form, a smaller form of it.

AUBREY: I suppose one of the limitations is, maybe they don't do this anymore, but you used to see those with ink. They would have a little machine that would be writing it out. But now that it's digital, it just depends on how sensitive the equipment is to actually be able to register. It could probably go all the way up and all the way down, registering all the ways. So if you even zoomed in, like the Mandelbrot set.

ROBERT: The Mandelbrot set, that's exactly what the geometry is. 

AUBREY: So even if you looked into the EKG, it would be little patterns, upon patterns, upon patterns and you could just keep zooming in. Obviously, we don't have instruments that are sensitive enough to detect that and actually print it.

ROBERT: We're starting to build them. 

AUBREY: But they will, and ultimately, I think that's when we'll start to show this principle of correspondence in a lot easier way. And also we now have the James Webb Telescope looking out farther and farther. And I don't know how useful it is right now at this stage. But it's pretty cool.

ROBERT: Yes, very cool. You could see the cool nebula and stuff. It's super clear photographs and everything that we've never been able to see before. It's not a coincidence now that we're now able to observe what it looks like to see a black hole, as of a couple of years ago. And when that photograph got released on the Internet of that I can't remember her name, the woman who basically is doing the research and caught a photograph of a black hole. We're pushing that boundary of ignorance farther and farther out. We still don't understand what is dark matter  and what is dark energy. And as we start to understand this dark matter, dark energy, maybe this is really just an analogue for the own aspects of our own subconscious mind we're yet to become consciously aware of.

AUBREY: Thinking out loud, I haven't really thought about this till now but is it possible that dark energy and dark matter and again, my astrophysics and quantum physics is very amateur, but could it be possible that that is actually a window into the Tao, the all, the Shekinah and actually we're looking at the void and the void has a form because the form is the first values and first principles of the Tao, of the Shekhinah, of the hermetic principles and we're actually seeing some kind of representation come through the blackness. So it's not nothing. And that's what we're saying. It's not nothing and that's what we're saying. 

ROBERT: Definitely not nothing.

AUBREY: It's not nothing. It seems like nothing. But if you actually really looked, there would be an encoding in the nothing. And the encoding is that thing that was older than God.

ROBERT: Yeah. And maybe it's all about our own mindset

AUBREY: And there's probably some physicists like, "Dummy, that's a terrible idea." But maybe not.

ROBERT: No, I think it's 100% correct. In 2012, they discovered the Higgs boson, right? And they co-named that the God particle. Amongst large circles within some of the physics community, as you continue to go further and further into this, we could go down this reductionistic path and just realize that every time we look for something, whatever we're looking for, we will find. 

AUBREY: So the observer effect.

ROBERT: Exactly. It's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Whatever we get in this world is not necessarily what we deserve in life. It's what we expected that we're  going to get, whether you expected it consciously or expected subconsciously and that manifested in anxiety, you are creating the living circumstance that we have on a day to day basis. Now what happens is you start looking at an atom and the way Max Planck described it--

AUBREY: Before we go further, I just want to keep people out of a dangerous rabbit hole of that. That doesn't mean that the woman that gets raped called forth the rape from her own. There are agents that can act and usurp another person's will and usurp another person's attraction and projection and actually force them to participate in their own attraction projection, internal game. What you're talking about is the internal landscape.

ROBERT: How you perceive it. 

AUBREY: And often that correlates to something external, because you'll find it, you'll search it, you'll look for it, you'll notice it, you'll follow that path, you'll draw it to you. But however, it is a principle that absolutely applies to your internal landscape.

ROBERT: 90% of what happens to us is not actually what happens to us. It's what we believe to happen to us. Again, that's getting to that mental space of it's a mental universe so what can I learn from this experience? Why am I projecting this experience or why am I seeing it through this prism? What is it that I can learn from this? So in that context, every person you meet, you can learn something from. Every circumstance that comes up, you can find a synchronicity in it or not. It's up to you.

AUBREY: There's something that comes to mind when I'm talking about this, and it is very much a hermetic principle of alchemy, being able to turn lead into gold. And this is a mechanism of perception, not actually having anything to do with metals on the periodic table, although many people have tried a foolhardy approach.

ROBERT: It's symbolic.

AUBREY: It's symbolic and one of the great stories of this is the, I think she was Taoist tantric teacher and in some ways, the founder of this kind of school of thought, Yeshe Tsogyal, and Jamie Wheal talks about in his book, "Recapture the Rapture". She's traveling alone on one of those, call it the King's Road, if you've watched "Game of Thrones", on King's Road, dangerous place, some brigands find her on King's Road, and they go to rape her. And she was in such a state of consciousness that actually she saw, not the rape that was occurring, but she saw the pain and the sorrow and the trauma, and the sadness that was in each of these men. And she held in the frequency of seeing that and the men actually carried through. They were in the heat of their passions and in their full blood lust and violence, carried through with the “rape”, which, of course, it was. And it was, this is the paradox, but she didn't see it as that and because she didn't see it as that, when they finished and she saw them as the humans, the flawed, broken humans in pain that were reaching out to try to claim some power, she saw something different. And they broke down in tears. This is the story. They broke down in tears, and then they all said that we will protect you and fight for you, for the rest of our life to make up for what we've done. Because you've shown us the truth of who we really are, and beneath this and showed us something different in this world. In the story, it's like she didn't record the violence aspect of it. She recorded something different and they recorded something different. And then it shifted the timeline radically for her, for those men, and then for the world, from that act of alchemy. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should be able to do this. It's not a ‘should’ game. But this is showing the alchemical principle, the possibility.

ROBERT: That it's a divine aspect. I think another good example of what you're describing is how Christ took being crucified? The whole thing,

AUBREY: It's a stoic principle. It's the whole thing.

ROBERT: Yeah, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." He's probably going into their consciousness in the same way that this woman did, and seeing the broken and finding within his own suffering, he still had total power over how he was going to perceive and how he was going to experience this horrific experience. And to me, that is a personification of the Divine. And being able to see the world that way. I did a podcast recently in LA with Amber Khan, who I love dearly, she's awesome. She's a follower of Islam. And she started asking me, because she knows I take more of a Buddhist approach on duality. She's like, "But what about all these people that do these really heinous, horrible things? How do you perceive that?" So I stood my ground. It was an interesting conversation. But at the end of it, she started talking to someone else in the crowd who said, "I don't feel good enough. I don't feel good enough and I feel like I've sinned so much in life, I've done so much stuff wrong, God could never possibly love me." And her response was, "In the Quran, it says that God loves you 40,000 times more than..." I love how they put a mathematical number to it; why 40,000? " 40,000 times more than your mother." He doesn't see you for the sin, he sees you for the person. Abhor the sin but love the sinner. And she could look at it in that context--

AUBREY: You can hate the war but love the soldier.

ROBERT: Exactly, she saw it in that context, looking at it in the eyes of God. And so then I said, "What you just described explains how I feel about non-duality." It's not that I condone the horrible, abhorrent act. I don't. I don't condone it. I don't want to see those things happen in the world. But at the same time, I realized that all of us are human beings. We all are imperfect, we all are making mistakes. And at the end of the day, everybody that claims to be only good is not only good. 

AUBREY: Bullshit!

ROBERT: The only people we should be probably concerned about are the people that claim to be only good, because that is narcissism. It's the people that know that, as Alan Watts says, they're their rascals at their core. The people that don't know that they're rascals at the core, those are the ones that still haven't yet discovered what the darkness is. What is dark matter? What is dark energy? Maybe it's just the things that we don't want to allow to even be in our consciousness.

AUBREY: And that aspect of distortion that I was talking about, distortion is a force and you could personify that force, and it's been called many names: the beast, the Antichrist. Antichrist is an interesting word I've been playing with. I want to touch on one thing. So if we say Melchizedek is in the frequency of Hermes, in the frequency of hermetic teachings, one of the quotes that I pulled out of a recent book from Paul Selig is, "How you change the world by how you see the world." And this is exactly what Yeshe Tsogyal demonstrated is by her act of seeing the world differently, the world actually changed, her world changed, she recorded something different. Viktor Frankl did something similar in Auschwitz, people making these incredibly wild and radical perspective changes that seem impossibly divine. You do that, and it actually changes the world. And this was really the guiding principle behind ARKADIA, that festival we threw, let's see the more beautiful world and let's bring it into form now--

ROBERT: What an epic place that room was too? That was so cool.

AUBREY: It was unbelievable.

ROBERT: That is cool. Talk about feeling like you're in a 5D kind of a world. Really well done on that. That was really cool. But you're right, I think it comes down to, you want to change your world, start by changing your perspective on the world. Start to try to see a different way of seeing it than you've seen it before. Seeing it the same way over and over again, and you're not happy, some might call it delusional. I don't. I actually call it ascended. If you can start to see the world, in the context that you would like to see the world, then the world will start to reflect more of that back to you. It's a mathematical equation. Another person that I think would be tied to Thoth and Hermes would be Metatron. So it's just the angelic form. And you've probably heard of the 72 names of God. So Metatron is known also in the non-canonized books of the Bible as being the highest of the Archangels. And there's some connection as well. Sometimes people refer to Metatron as the lesser Yahweh, Yahweh being the name of God. And it's interesting, because there seems to be this connection also between Metatron, angelic representation, Thoth, hermetic principles and geometry.

AUBREY: And if we're right here, we've haven't gone too far past the second principle, the principle of correspondence. The one note that I have here from the "Kybalion" is in studying the monad, which is the divine spark that we hold inside, you understand the archangel, as within, so without; as above, so below. So actually, if we want to understand Metatron and if we want to understand all of these angelic beings, look inside yourself, and you'll find it. Also, if you want to find and understand the demonic beings, look inside yourself.

ROBERT: Look inside yourself. And be willing to confront it. 

AUBREY: And this has been a big part of my journey, actually. It started in ARKADIA, I did a ketamine-cannabis journey to prepare myself for this big week ahead. And it was a very surprising journey because it showed me, and this is skipping ahead a little bit, to the principle of polarity, which we'll get to, but it showed that I'm choosing to embody a particular type of polarity upon the spectrum but I'm the entire pole. I'm the whole pole. And what it showed me was the opposite polarity of what I'm choosing to express right now, the vision that it gave me was a black hole with teeth. It was like full Shiva the Destroyer. I was a monster. I was a monster and I was like, "Holy shit. That's me too? A black hole with teeth?" It was like the fucking pit.

ROBERT: You're like Luke Skywalker going in the cave, dude. 

AUBREY: It was intense, man. And that journey has continued by showing me all of the darkness that you could possibly imagine in the world, but showing it as me. And in that journey, it's deep, and it's intense. It causes a flinch, because it's one thing to look at the darkness and not flinch, see a shitty movie with some torture or something like that, and you want to close your eyes and turn your head and not look at it, of course. But then to see it, as you, that's a whole other fucking level and in the ceremony space, if you try to look away, if you try to run from these different aspects, it's like a bear that's just going to chase you and start eating you asshole first. 

ROBERT: That doesn't sound good.

AUBREY: It doesn't care. It doesn't care. You can't run away from these different things, which is one of the reasons why I really have such deep reverence for the plant medicine path is that in the psychedelic medicine path it reveals things. 

ROBERT: It reveals things to you.

AUBREY: And you don't have a choice. You do have a choice but the best choice is to surrender and see what it's actually trying to show you, without trying to change it or without trying to flinch. And actually in this process of seeing that opposite polarity, the anti Aubrey, which is also the Aubrey, the Christ and the Antichrist are also like in transpose and we'll get into that principle, polarity. By seeing the anti-Aubrey, it actually made me, in a way, more Aubrey, because then I realized that I was choosing to be Aubrey. I just didn't come out of the fucking womb. "Boom, here I am. I'm Aubrey." No, I'm a full spectrum being and I'm choosing this and in choosing that, there was a strength, there was like, "Oh, I'm choosing this." I trusted myself, I trusted myself to be able to choose which polarity I wanted to express at just a little bit more from that journey. So just the deepest gratitude for actually embracing the entirety of my darkness so that I'm now reinforcing my choice to participate in the light. And of course, also, I love talking shit. I love being a fucking rascal. I love all of the--

ROBERT: You're definitely a rascal.

AUBREY: Of course, of course.

ROBERT: But I think you do see that in yourself, which is what is so endearing. That, to me, is one of your greatest qualities. It's very Alan Watts in its field. Which is, Alan knows, he'll call out rascal stuff, he's like, "I'm the worst rascal of all." Are you kidding me? He loves to joke and he loves to rib people. But that's just who he is. And he's good with that. This is back to the individuation process Carl Jung is referencing. And that's what alchemy is all about. All Carl Jung did is he took alchemy and put it into words that would be fitting to the scientific community. What you're really talking about here is just shadow integration. And us understanding or not understanding dark matter, dark energy, to me, is just a larger metaphor for us starting to now understand our shadow, collectively. Its own mind. When we look at it from that context, everything shifts, everything shifts. You look at Jesus, Okay, Jesus, what did he do? He just told everybody, "Judge not lest you judge yourself. Love God with all your heart, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself." That's really all He taught. You got the Beatitudes, a few other things, that the meek shall inherit the earth. But man, did he ever get attacked, he got attacked. So it's not about seeing things. I used to say that we see things from our own vantage point. Now I change that to say we see things from our own advantage point. This is our perspective. The thing that I think is going to benefit me is how I'm going to see whatever it is that I see. And until I can break away from that, I can never see the dark demon with the teeth that I am. And as soon as we start to see that, then the power that demon has over you diminishes dramatically. Because the more you try to repress it and say, "No, it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist," it will just come out and, like you said, eat you asshole first every time. And you won't even know until it's already consumed a good portion of you. And then you're like, how did this happen? I'm finding myself in the same situation again, I'm experiencing the same pattern over and over again. That's what hermeticism is really about. It's not about looking at the world and saying, "Here's what's fucked up about the world around me." It's about looking at yourself and going within and saying, Who am I? Who am I in my full spectrum and then being able to be at one, ‘at-one-ment’ with that, or atone to that way of thinking,

AUBREY: This is making me think of, and they have this, I think, in the recent printing of the Kybalion, at least. I don't know about the original. But they have a painting by Michelangelo, which I think we talked about on our last podcast, and you mentioned how God is showing up in a human brain. You did a lot of cool geometry things with that. But I don't know if we'd necessarily touched on it or if I just didn't recall it, but how that was actually showing that the universe is mental, that actually God was inside a brain in the Sistine Chapel, and then reaching towards Adam. And if you look at Adam, he's lazily putting his finger up and turning away like, basically, like, "I know, God, I know. But I'm  going to look away just enough that I can go play this game over here and live this experience of separation so that I can have maximum complexity, creation, all the different things. I don't want to look straight at you, face to face to God, and see all of the truth revealed, because then I'm not actually in polarity. I'm not actually having this experience. So, man, just turns away and lazily says, "Yes, God, I see you. You're right there, all is mind. But I'm going to play this game for real just like I play one-on-one basketball. I'm going and playing to the death."

ROBERT: Yeah, like shuffleboard? Crush me. Thank you.

AUBREY: Yes, exactly. Exactly. If we just stared at each other, when we're playing shuffleboard right before this, and I just looked at you and said, "I see you Robert as God as me. Namaste."

ROBERT: I'm going to win, motherfucker.

AUBREY: Why are we even rolling these pucks in the first place? Of course, no, we just skipped to, "I'm going to win, motherfucker." That's what made it fun. And that's why Adam is like, "Yeah, I see you God." And I think it's important to do both. It's important to be like, Yes, God. Yes. God. I know. And me as Adam, I want to play like this. I want to experience it like this. 

ROBERT: Yeah, totally. This is what we're here for, to have this experience. There's another part of that painting on the Sistine Chapel. It's so beautiful. You look up and you see this entire massive thing. Of course, their bodies are almost hyperbolistically over everything. Their proportions are bizarrely off, but still beautiful. And one of the things that you notice about it, because we never talk about a heavenly mother. And yet, if you look closely at the Sistine Chapel, that particular image, you will find Sophia, under the arm of God the Father, inside the brain. Now she's not going the same direction. If you look at it closely, the way Adam's body and his leg is curved and laying there and he's got his hand up like this and God has actually got his finger straight out, he's very deliberate. Adam is, like you said, looking away and not really fully paying attention. Maybe there's something there, maybe I'm not fully aware of it but the way his leg is curved is matching the way that God's body and leg is curved also, as a mirror reflection, you'll see that. But you'll also see Sophia, this younger woman, He's got this white hair and everything and Sophia is this beautiful woman, he's got his arm around her. And the way she's positioned is in the form of an X. So she's positioned crossed where God is positioned. So it forms this X. Now what that X actually represents is the optic chiasm. The optic chiasm is where your right eye meets up with your left brain, and your left eye meets up with your right brain. It happens right at the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is the feminine aspect inside of what's called the cave of Brahman, cave or the wedding hall, as it's often referred to. We talk about this, wedding halls and last supper and all this stuff that we see in the Bible. All of these analogies and metaphors are relating back to some physiology, even in our brain that's part of ancient Kabbalah, that's part of gnosticism, that's part also of hermeticism. What this is basically pointing to is that you've got a masculine principle, you've got a feminine principle, the pituitary gland is right at the optic chiasm. And then you've got the pineal gland, which is shaped like a human anatomy, but the masculine form of it. The pituitary is actually shaped like the feminine form of anatomy. And there is a breathing exercise that you can actually do to raise those to the same plane. It's part and parcel, you probably heard about this caecum or it's also referred to as the Christos, coming up the spine to light up the chakras. When you do this process, it's an alchemical process, what you then will start to realize is that you create a marriage between these masculine-feminine aspects of the brain. And this is the birth of the spiritual aspect of the self. That's why it's also called the womb, not only the cave of Brahman, but it's shaped just like a womb. If you look at a view of it as a photograph, the thalamus is shaped just like the womb is shaped. It's identical. And inside that, there's a little walnut-shaped thing that's right at the top, coming right up the sushumna. So you got the ida, pingala, the masculine form, the feminine form, these two snakes, creating the staff of Hermes and right at the top of that, is this thalamus and this thalamus becomes a new entry doorway for the initiate to then be able to experience Shambhala. You'll find this across many, many different esoteric teachings. This is a process that becomes a true second birth, or a spiritual birth, following your resurrection. And it's all following Joseph Campbell's hero's journey as well, that each of us has a hero's journey in this matrix of mind. I do believe that it's all literally planned out because of cause and effect. We are experiencing a retro-causality in time in both directions. The future determines the past as much as the past determines the future. We've all seen this. We all experience things that are bad or hard to fix sometimes. And we can't have the opportunity to see the wider perspective that maybe this is a good thing that's happening. We think it's a bad thing. But with the perspective of time, sometimes the polarity of that experience shifts to the positive.

AUBREY: This is bringing up something for me that I wanted to talk about. We're jumping ahead to principle six again, the principle of cause and effect. If I read this correctly, the "Kybalion" is basically saying that the all, which is what they call it, many names for that source, God, whatever you want, the all is the causeless cause, basically. And in some way--

ROBERT: It's like the formless form.

AUBREY: The formless form, the causeless cause. And that's the only thing that's outside of this law of cause and effect, that each new cause has a former effect. To me, my understanding of freewill actually dovetails with this in that we participate in the all and there's the intent, which was also you could say, God's. What I've always understood from all of the medicine journeys, long before I had any texts that made sense, was that God said one thing, and that was yes, that was the choice, it was yes. And there was a choice and that was the intent. Everything else flowed based upon all of the little pieces of God making additional yes choices, making additional intentions. It seems to me that we have freewill to the extent that we can access the I Am that participates in the field of the all. We can actually generate a causeless cause if if we're able to tap into that aspect of us that participates in the original causeless cause, but otherwise, we're just going to be that log, they talk about this the "Kybalion" the log in the river that is bouncing between one bank and the other and getting stuck on rocks, but we can actually start to swim a little bit. We won't be able to escape cause and effect, but we could just swim a little bit to maybe avoid this eddy, maybe move toward this thing, maybe find a way that we can get to take a rest on the riverbank for a little while. That's, I think, a deeper understanding, at least, for me that works about what freewill really is.

ROBERT: I look at it in a very different way than I did only a few years ago. I'm just on the path of learning. This is more of my opinion than anything else. I feel as though what we refer to as free will, or what we refer to rather as destiny, let's start from the destiny standpoint, maybe is just the freewill of the higher self.

AUBREY: And we're saying that it's something similar.

ROBERT: We're applying the context of a linear perspective of time when all dimensions of time exist simultaneously. There's just a study and a new scientific theory that just came out, I think it was from MIT, about two weeks ago, that basically said, okay, we now believe that all dimensions of time exist simultaneously. It's kind of funny because academia is now becoming the last to know everything. And then they claim their ownership of the idea, even though this has been around for thousands of years. A lot of the context that we have in a scientific sense is just the confirmation at the end where the reductionist says, "Yes, that's what it is." I think that's one of the things that, unfortunately, is still kind of upside down in society to a certain extent. We don't recognise that science and spirituality are not juxtaposed. I delineate between religion and spirituality. To me, religion has the tendency to be more about teaching and purveying judgment, and especially organized religion, whereas spirituality is kind of the opposite of that, it's about looking within, without judging the outside, and learning to no longer judge yourself internally. And through that process, you can now take on empathy for everybody else. And that actually starts to ease your suffering.

AUBREY: And look, if you want to see the correlation between spirituality and science, the basic fundamental, if you actually get down to the core pure essence of what each is, it's just asking questions. It's just curiosity. It's just fucking asking questions and never claiming to have an answer.

ROBERT: Now we're not allowed to even ask questions.

AUBREY: Because science is becoming more like religion. And religion, you were never allowed to ask questions. Well, why did the people who never heard of Jesus go to hell? That doesn't seem fair. I asked that question when I got honeydicked into some fucking Bible study on a ski trip that I thought was just a ski trip when I first moved to Texas. I was like, "This doesn't make any sense." There were people for thousands and thousands of years that never heard of Jesus. You're saying they're all in hell? 80,000 years of humans all in hell, because this person hadn't been born yet and they hadn't heard about it? What about that person in the fucking village that never heard anything? They're like, "Well, that's why we send missionaries." This is not a God then if they're putting people in hell for something they had no agency over. This is a demon. This is a demon. And they're like, "Okay, maybe you should just go ski." And I was like, "Thank you. I appreciate that." It's all I wanted to do anyway, is fucking ski. You guys sort out your not-asking-question ass and let me go ski. But that's the idea. And we entered a period of science where people were doing the same thing. We weren't allowed to explore, discuss, talk about all of these concepts.

ROBERT: Questions are the things that are most provocative and problematic, people asking questions. Look what happened during COVID? People simply ask questions getting censored like crazy. You're not allowed to think that. Even in Canada, they actually refer to it as, what was the term that Justin Trudeau used? Something like unlawful thoughts or inappropriate thinking? It's like, "Wait, what?" It's beyond bizarre, but this is going to the principle of rhythm. 

AUBREY: Principle number five!

ROBERT: I refer to this as rhythmic balanced interchange. Walter Russell, he was a polymath in the 20th century, often referred to as Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century. Walter talks about rhythmic balanced interchange all the time. I'm  going to put it in more concretized terms. A lot of people don't know this, when you think about the party that is very much oriented around NAACP is going to be the Democratic Party but a lot of people don't realize that that was the party of slavery.It was Lincoln and the Republicans who basically said, "No, no, this is wrong." The North was very much about this sort of Republican thinking, Democrat thinking was in the south, but the parties were exactly juxtaposed to where they are. How can something like this even happen? Now, first of all, you got to polarity and the principle of polarity. Is it a coincidence that the elections swing by 1%, and that's really not based on there being more Democrats or Republicans in the two-party system? It swings based on who's more angry than the other. That's really what's happening. Who's going to actually have voter turnout more than the other because they're more angry? And so we go through this cyclicality, but when you look at it from a macro perspective, even the principles upon which parties stand, their general foundation and basis can flip 190 degrees in 170 years, it happens all the time. And this is the nature of rhythmicity.

AUBREY: And it feels like it's actually flipping again. 

ROBERT: Yes. 

AUBREY: Which is an interesting thing. And, of course, words carry a lot of weight but if you think of ideas that surrounded totalitarianism and fascism and control, top down control, those were always associated with the right. And it started to flip in an interesting way where that's now becoming associated with the left.

ROBERT: Antifa was supposed to be anti-fascist, but why does it act and feel like fascist?

AUBREY: Right, it's this very interesting and we're in this interesting liminal space, a time between times, a time between stories, as Rabbi Gafni says. A time between stories and in this time between stories, polarities are up in the air and different things are all all in flux. It's the most interesting time.

ROBERT: Think about it. We look at North Korea. Is North Korea a social communist regime, as they claim to be, a social democratic party? Have you ever noticed that that's the way it's positioned? Even Hitler ran on a social democratic platform, but he very quickly became a fascist? Every single time throughout history, we'll see this rhythmicity, we'll see this cycle. Whoever it is, whether it's Castro, Chavez, whoever it is, that becomes authoritarian and fascist in the way and the way you know it's fascist is when you look up and you see on the walls, giant photographs of the father figure. When you go to a country that's got this gigantic picture, like you go to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and you see at The Forbidden City, this gigantic photograph of Mao Zedong, then you know, you're in a fascist regime. This is not communist, everyone's equal, united order concept. It's like everyone's equal, but some are more equal than others and in absolute control, and it's authoritarian. And so what's happened is, you notice that it's not linear. When someone is to the far left, they make one step and they're actually popping out on the other side, because it's a circle, or it's a sphere.

AUBREY: They make the loop. We think of the pole as a line, like a pole, but it's not. It's a hoop. It's a hula hoop. And this was what my own journey through the darkness showed. They were harrowing journeys that I've been on, where I'm going into see, and darkness on all levels from even the disgust impulse was an interesting portal that I went into, all of the things I was disgusted at, because if you're disgusted by something, whether it's feces or whether it's bugs, or whatever it is, then that thing is something you judge. Until you get beyond that, you're going to be still lost in judgment, you're not going to have any hope for unconditionality. There's a quote from Nietzsche, and I'm paraphrasing, "Be wary of staring in the abyss, lest the abyss stares back at you." What they missed was, okay, then what happens? When the abyss is staring back at you, then what happens? Well, keep walking, and keep walking and hold the faith that you're going to make the loop, make the loop of the pole, and find your way around the other side. And that's one cycle of the hero's journey, one cycle of the hero's journey through the darkness, back into the light, bringing back to home new wisdom, new insight, new discoveries that you found. Guess what? Back again, back into the darkness, up into the light. This is the process of evolution. This is the principle of rhythm, just shown in a circular pattern rather than in a sine wave form.

ROBERT: And that is circular in a way. It's just looking at a two-dimensional view of that circularity.

AUBREY: Right. Right. And that's another thing that Matias says is, what we're trying to do now is the fact that we're in another cycle where things are being torn down and we're in this cycle, it's like the down, call it, up-down, whatever, this is a very mammalian perspective. But up-down; down being the bad. Likely that could be easily reversed--

ROBERT: Could be good.

AUBREY: But, ultimately, down being the down cycle, the goal is to just minimize the extremities of the cycle of the principle of rhythm, so that the work that we're doing is to try and keep us from crashing so deep and so far down, that we suffer more than is necessary. So it's just holding things in love together and making the transformation so that we can find the bottom faster, and then level out the swing. And then be wary lest we get to the top too fast and there needs to be a steeper crash. Just trying to kind of level things out a little more balanced because the extremes are just gnarly in our density of polarity. They just are. They may be fine from a cosmic perspective, but they hurt, people starving hurts, people suffering hurts, people dying hurts, it hurts. So trying to minimize that as much as we can, that's the Bodhisattva compassion, that's like no, let's just hold each other. Even though we can't stop the cycle, let's hold each other. And that's what they talk about in the principle of rhythm. It's like, can you polarize yourself in a different position, that you're not actually stopping the principle of rhythm because you can't stop the principle of rhythm but you can polarize yourself in a way that the principle of rhythm doesn't affect you. 

ROBERT: You can raise your vibration. 

AUBREY: You can raise your vibration, which goes above principle.

ROBERT: And that's exactly what you described with the woman who got raped on the side of the road. 

AUBREY: Yeshe Tsogyal.

ROBERT: She raised her vibration, was able to go through this very traumatic, difficult experience and changed the lives of all those people in the process. That's also Yeshua. It's the same concept. Principle of polarity and rhythmicity tied in together. So here's how we can apply this to something, where we live. Does the earth spin clockwise or does it spin counterclockwise? 

AUBREY: I don't know. I should know that.

ROBERT: It spins counterclockwise. People would say--

AUBREY: Of course, I was just testing you.

ROBERT: The real answer is it depends. I thought my whole life spanned counterclockwise. And then I realized that, no, that really just depends on what your reference point is. Because if you're looking at the Earth from the North Pole, then it spins counterclockwise. But when you're looking at the Earth from the South Pole. And who determines what's upside down in space? There's no upside down in space. It's not like we're imagining people that are upside down in Australia or semi upside down or in Antarctica. If you look at the reference point, and change the perception, and really change the polarity of your perception, because perception is polarized. And that is your collective conditioning biases, and all the things that go into how you determine who you decided to be, and how you will see the world, maybe in this life, and maybe several past lives as well, you're carrying this accumulated baggage of perception. We look at it and say, well, maybe this is really just a point of advantage. The people that were setting up school curriculums in universities and the Nobel Prizes, everything, they all say it's counterclockwise, because they're all in the northern hemisphere. It's a point of advantage. So it’s a different way of looking at it.

AUBREY: For us, we think, oh, the Sun's up. Sun's up. Well, not at night. Sun's down. Sun's underneath our feet on a different part of the world where for them, it's up. But for us, it's down.

ROBERT: That's why when you flush the toilet in Australia, just like in "The Simpsons", it actually does spin the opposite direction, just like a cycle and spin the opposite direction, from a hurricane in the northern hemisphere. It all depends on your point of reference. And we can take something and say, "This is scientific fact. It's scientific fact that it spins counterclockwise." No, it really depends. Let's change our polarity. Is it negative versus positive? I don't really think so. People will say, well, wait a minute, you're saying that women are negative because it's a negative pole? Isn't that a negative term?

AUBREY: We got to get to that. I got a lot to talk about. That's the seventh principle, the principle of gender but I'm not finished with the principle of vibration here. Let's stick with number three. And the principle of gender is really interesting. It's the seventh principle. So principle of vibration, number three, this was one of the quotes from the "Kybalion", the atom of matter, the unit of force, the mind of man and the being of the Archangel are but one degree in one scale, and all fundamentally the same. The difference being between solely a matter of degree and rate of vibration. So basically referring again to the principle of mentalism, all is mind that is articulating and manifesting in just different degrees of vibration. That's the principle of vibration. Now vibration could probably be exchanged with other words that are synonyms for vibration, but nonetheless, frequency is another way to say vibration. But that's basically what it's saying, it's all the same thing. It's just at a different rate of speed. And also, the most incredibly rapid speed appears very solid, like the atoms moving in this table, that feels very wood-like, it's just moving so fucking fast, it's solid. You know what I mean? And it's very interesting,

ROBERT: I look at matter as light that is suspended between the centripetal force of gravity and the centrifugal force of radiation. It's basically light. That's the way to think about it. It's a suspended light. Now we have this, probably luminiferous ether is what people refer to it as. It was a real travesty when Einstein said, "There's no ether." I think he wanted to revise some of that thinking towards later in his life when he couldn't figure out an answer to gravity still, even though he purported to support the Kaluza-Klein theory. The point is that each of us can be deliberate about our own vibrational experience. What holds us to the lower dimension of vibrational experience? And what is vibration? It cycles per second. It's a way to think about it. So cycles per second. So if I do a vibration, and I do a beat, it would just be “bop, bop, bop”, you could count how many of those sounds I could make per second. Maybe it was like one and a half, or maybe it's less, I don't know. But if I take it up to 432 cycles per second, it's going to play an A note in the fifth octave of sound. So as you take it up further, let's take it all the way up from where we're looking at sound by another 55 octaves, to get it up to the terra frame now you're in light. So sound and light, even though the scientists on the call would say, "Whoa, wait a minute," on this podcast would say, "Wait, you can't mix longitudinal waves with transverse waves." Well, yes, you actually can. They're related. You have an artifact of sound which is phonon and you have an artifact of light which is photon. Phonons carry mass. Photons are massless. The two are related. One is just traveling at different speeds. The speed of sound, depending on what medium it's going through the air, goes 343 meters per seconds. That would be 730 miles per hour is the speed of sound. So, when you have a jet that's like traveling, you'll hear that “boom” sound right behind it.

AUBREY: It happens a lot more when there were Concorde jets. But now they kind of retired those things.

ROBERT: I just saw the latest "Top Gun" movie, it was interesting. Got to Mach 10, like 10 times the speed of sound, which was so incredulous, but also fun to watch this movie. But basically, we have light speed and we have sound. The two are actually connected. One is just a transverse representation of the other. One is a reflection of the other's absorption, the two are connected, absolutely connected. So when we think about our own vibration, does this mean then that if we could raise our own vibration, we all have these feelings of okay, I can get into different brainwave states. So you've got delta brainwaves, you've got theta brainwaves, which is what we're doing with sleep and subconscious responses, autonomic bodily responses, et cetera. And then you go beyond that to an alpha state, which is what happens when you go into meditation. Alpha state is between eight and 12 hertz, cycles per second. So I close my eyes and if I get to above eight, and Earth is at 7.83, it's called the Schumann resonance. If I get myself to get in that place, and the fastest way to get there is to either get on your knees and pray, or to just close your eyes in meditation. And as you close your eyes, you're still conscious, you're awake, but you close your eyes, you can get your brain to the coherence of this higher state of vibration. That's when you start getting a whole new experience of life. And that's why meditation becomes so critically important. And it's been around for thousands of years. They weren't counting the cycles per second. But that's actually what it's doing.

AUBREY: And another interesting thing that I think about what these brainwave states are, actually, so there's certain psychedelics that can get you to a waking delta, so delta is between one and four hertz, it's the slowest brainwave state. And when you're in waking delta through a ketamine experience, or through a nitrous experience, it's very much a unicity experience. But you also get a very similar experience if you're talking to Joe Dispenza's top meditators who's hooked up to the EKG machines and they're looking at it. It's EEG actually, for the brain?

ROBERT: Electroencephalogram. Right.

AUBREY: Yeah. So they hook him up to the EEG, and they're actually in high gamma of several thousand hertz, which is very much mimicking what you're experiencing in the low delta range. The low and the high are actually giving you very similar experiences. And then somewhere in between you find your spot. Obviously, in beta, we're handling shit and are stressed out.

ROBERT: Beta is where we are now. We're talking. It's good for--

AUBREY: Maybe you, bro. I'm fucking straight alpha the whole way! Let's get back to the shuffleboard table. There was those Muse headbands where you could gamify and compete with people about how deep you could get into alpha state or even if you're just 

ROBERT: I'm building, right now, a spiritual game which is called Cyber Verse, it's going to be really cool. And in this game, you can pick your avatar, you come to Earth, you could pick all of your zodiac, your numerology, you could pick all of your different aspects of your avatar that you want. And that will then dictate a lot of the types of experiences that come your way. Sound familiar? It's like training wheels for you to look at the world in a virtual reality or augmented reality world. It's a different way for you to look at our own experience now and then how each of those experiences that come at you. The base principles are the seven hermetic principles as well. I thought, there's no game like this. We learn through games, we learn through experiences, it's more than just didactic. So I thought this could be kind of cool. People like this type of stuff. Who knows? So we're building this. The thing is I believe that you can raise your vibration. You can get to these higher gamma states. You can get beyond beta, Beta is between 12 and say, 30 hertz, in that range. But then when you get up to the 100 Hertz range, then you're looking at gamma brainwave states. And that's where you get this bliss feeling as well. It's this total bliss feeling. You're then going into another dimensional frame and very likely, as you go higher and higher, because the comment you just read there is that the angelic being is really the same thing just in a different vibrational state from what you and I are. That, to me, gives me hope because it basically says, then I can raise my frequency, no matter what happens to me, I saw something recently, I love the post that you did. It's like, "If you want to see joy, then be the joy. If you want to see love, then be the love. Be the change you want to see in the world." I love that. To me, enlightenment is when you can cross the street and someone could hurl all kinds of terrible insults at you, and you're unfazed, you're completely unfazed, you're not anxious about the future, you're not anxious about the past. You are in this place of zen, which is like nothing is going to faze me, I'm determining my experience with my surroundings, not the other way around. And that requires, first of all, the conscious decision that you know that your vibration impacts the experience in the world around you. And you can raise that no matter what that experience and world around you is. And if you don't, then you'll just continue to feed into that same loop cycle. The hammer and the nail analogy comes back again. It's like, oh, there I am again, I'm getting victimized again. Dammit, they always hate me. Why is I always treated unfairly? It's like can't do, can't do. The only real obstacles we face in this world are the ones we truly believe in.

AUBREY: Whatever you believe, you're most likely right. 

ROBERT: If you think you can, or you think you can't, you'll be right. That's Henry Ford's famous quote, "If you think you can, or you think you can't, you'll be right." And it goes back to the whole story of "Star Wars", which is another hero's journey. Luke Skywalker had to find his own darkness. He had to go and battle Darth Vader, who later he finds out is his father. He had to crack his mask and then see that it was his face inside the helmet. We all have to go through that moment. We all have it. And that's the shadow integration part, that precedes being able to raise to higher states of consciousness and awareness. If you can integrate your shadow, that's what hermeticism absolutely teaches above all else, integrate your shadow, understand who you are, understand these principles are all principles that must carry through, they're the base fabric of this existence, or what I would refer to as a construct. And as I've been making this game, and designing this game architecture with my teams, I'm like, "Whoa, this is trippy, because I don't know that I would make much of a different world than the one we live in."

AUBREY: That's the whole Alan Watts thing about dreaming. You dream something further and further far out until actually you forget that it's a game and there's actual chance, and that there's things that appear to you, not by cause and effect, but appear to you as chaos. Because you can't even recognise the law because you don't have the purview to see the law, so it feels very real to you that you've got blood in the game. I think that's one of the things I realize too, is we want to have blood in the game. It's the argument that Sebastian Junger bases the book "Tribe" upon, the thesis that we want blood in the game, we actually do want blood in the game. It also helps you understand, I got some friends who are preppers, who are building their own bunker and their own thing. And I got a farm and stuff. I'm down, whatever. 

ROBERT: I had this friend also, Billy Carson, who literally built an entire city of--

AUBREY: Underground?

ROBERT: Underground. 500 feet underground in Georgia.

AUBREY: Ultimately, I get it. But there’s also what other thing that you have to get is the part that's a little disturbing to me, and it's kept me away from it is, you know that some part of them wants some shit to go down. So then I would find myself judging that like, man, you want something to go down. Why else would you be doing all of this stuff if some part of you secretly didn't actually want it? They never admit it, because it's horrible. It'd be a horrible experience. But there's some part that wants it, but then I just realized, well, they’re wanting something to go down, it's probably just because they want to feel like they got skin in the game. Life is too easy. Everything is too comfortable, everything is too in its same routine, in its same pattern, and it's boring, and they don't feel alive. I just was rewatching "Game of Thrones" and my buddy Ed Skrein, he shows up in season three as Daario Naharis, such a great character. I hated it so much when they changed him. 

ROBERT: Daario? Is that the guy that died in the battle?

AUBREY: Khaleesi's boyfriend, with long hair. Yeah. Yeah.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah, that guy? He never speaks, he just grunts. 

AUBREY: Well, Ed's character spoke. He says, "I'm a very simple man, Khaleesi. I live for fucking a beautiful woman who wants to be fucked, and killing a man who wants to kill me." That was his simple life philosophy.

ROBERT: I thought you're going to say killing a man who wants to die.

AUBREY: That wasn't going to cut it for him, doesn't want to be an executioner. But this idea of what he's talking about is that he lives for radical aliveness, eros or dark eros as Rabbi Gafni would call it, which is the eros of experiencing the erotic through the entanglement of a goddess who wants to make love to you. He was contrasting it with his other leaders of the Second Sons who just paid for whores back in this world that we're creating, not for me, I wouldn't do that because I want to fuck a woman who wants to be fucked by me. That was eros.

ROBERT: There's a certain attractiveness in that.

AUBREY: Yes, to say the very least. That or the dark eros of, "Oh, you want to kill me? Excellent. I have a sword. And let's go." Because if you do both of those moments right, you are so radically in the moment. I've never been in an actual sword fight, I do kendo matches, which is like an approximation. We do them without the armor, so we have just a helmet, so we get slapped, and gloves. So it hurts but whatever, it doesn't really matter, ultimately. But nonetheless, it gets your blood up. And there's nothing else that you're thinking about but your bamboo shinai and the other person's bamboo shinai and the combat that you're in.

ROBERT: It hurts when you get hit with those things, if you hit hard with it.

AUBREY: I could only imagine how much more into it, and how much more alive you would be if those swords were metal and those swords were real. We can't even fathom that. I think the closest approximation would be MMA or something like that. And I haven't also stepped into that world in a serious enough way beyond training.

ROBERT: Could you make an announcement, we’re going to do it now

AUBREY: I actually thought I was at some point--

ROBERT: Live kendo with swords in a decagon.

AUBREY: They do have those. They're all in Russia. Medieval knights that fight each other. But nonetheless, the point being is that we want to feel alive, we want to feel alive. Basically, what he's saying is, I want to feel the most alive. These are the two portals. These are the two doorways that make me the most alive. It's a very honest way of him saying, "You want to understand me, I'm quite simple. I want to be the most alive. And the ways I get most alive is by fucking a woman who wants to fuck me or killing a man who wants to kill me."

ROBERT: So take that exact same thinking and apply it to mentalism. So we're building a game. Would I want the game to be absolutely real? I would think it's so damn real. And after I got to a stage, I'd be like, I want to go back. I can do that again. I'll do better next time! It was so real. I just got this pair of Oculus Rift goggles. I had dinner with this Palmer Luckey fantastic, interesting guy. He's the founder of Oculus, and he got fired from Facebook. He's a ball of flames guy. I'm really very interested in how he thinks. I put on my Oculus Rift goggles or whatever. And they took me to the guy, that TV show that was the one where he climbed El Capitan with Alex or something like that.

AUBREY: Oh yeah, with no ropes.

ROBERT: With no ropes. Wow. Most people spend days trying to climb this thing. And he's like, "Nah, if I can't do it in four hours with no ropes, I'm just going to go do that thing." I think to myself, that's not a sport that I would probably choose even though I've done rock climbing before. It's scary as hell. It's literally scary as hell, especially when you're up there, and I was climbing in Idyllwild. And there's helicopters. I was like, "What are the helicopters there for?" "Oh, if somebody fell." Okay, but the shit feels really real.

AUBREY: And it's that radical aliveness. People will chase it.

ROBERT: You're sleeping on the edge of a knife. It's that radical aliveness. And for me, I didn't choose that. But if I had chosen to be a climber of Mount Everest, and as you're climbing up, and you're seeing all the frozen dead bodies along the way, there is something about this that it's that radical aliveness. We get very attached to that radical aliveness. But if you were designing a game construct, let's say you're putting yourself in the shoes of the higher self, the lower self would say, "Is this destiny or my free will?" And you were designing this game as your higher self and you would say, "Okay, Aubrey is going to have a certain experience. I've chosen for him, he's going to be Aries or he's going to be whatever zodiac sign you are. He's going to think that it's all chance but actually, because astrology, alchemy, all these things, esoteric wisdom, they're all tied together, the weights and measures, all of this, because also Thoth, Metatron, the same same figures throughout history are ones who actually gave us weights and measures. We think that it's all arbitrary. They're actually all mathematical constants, all of them. Do you know that six feet, which is a fathom, which is really just father-mother, fathom, mother backwards. Six feet minus one meter is the Euler number. Euler number is the second most important mathematical concept that there is. It's probably equally important to pi. We think that these are all just arbitrary units of measure. Isn't the foot just some king's foot? No, in a mental construct, in a game of mentalism, all of these things are deliberate. So maybe by the choice of your Zodiac in this game construct, Maya, it determines how successful and abundant life you'll have. You thought that this was all just your own work. Things maybe just came easier for you in some ways. And other things were harder for you, because this was the path you chose along your hero's journey. It's beautiful when you start to look at it from that perspective. You start to become one with this higher mind, and realize that there is a purpose to my life. It's not just to be here and die. I'm here to learn something. I'm here to learn love. I'm here to learn acceptances. I'm not here to learn judgment. I'm here to learn and transcend judgment and experience love. Does that resonate?

AUBREY: Of course, and as you're talking, it brings me back to this idea that when we had this idea that a foot was actually the king's foot and it would constantly change, and this idea how it fucking annoying, it's a foot. It used to be a foot and now it's not a foot, do we have to change our measurement, put out all whole new rulers and redo the whole structure of everything? How crazy that would be because it's the denial of law. It's saying there is no law, everything is subjective. However big this king's foot is, that's how big the foot is for now, whatever this word means now, there is no law, there is no absolute truth, first principle, first value. This is, I think the flaw of post-modernity is, yes, questioning everything and recognising that everything is a story. However, we still have to hold true to the laws like these principles. And it doesn't mean that we can't maneuver within the laws. I mean, one of the guiding points of the "Kybalion" is to use law against law. The master knows how to use the principle of vibration to escape the principle of cause and effect to a certain degree. You can play within the rules. That's what a master actually does. But you acknowledge and respect the laws, it's the creative constraint to life itself. And that's fucking beautiful too. I think postmodernity has gone way too far, in saying nothing is real, everything is subjective. No, wrong. A lot is subjective but there is law.

ROBERT: One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence is, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," that they are basically endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To ensure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers. Interesting, the use of the word, 'just powers'. From the consent of the governed. There's always a balancing act, even the founding fathers, when they're looking at that. And by the way, all the founding fathers are Hermeticists. If you look at the list of people that were the signers of the Declaration of Independence, they were all hermeticists, almost to a person. They all believed in the same principles, whether it was Benjamin Franklin or George Washington who said, "I don't want to be a king, even though they want to make me king." He wanted to step out of that role. He was like, “Okay, I'll be subject to being president, out of duty”, and then he's like, "I want out of this thing, as soon as possible." He lived to his word on that, and he died not long after. He'd spent only a few more years after he was no longer president that he passed away. The point being that what we look at in the world, we have to be able to take a step back and say, "Okay, this is the laws of the land." And then also, here's the laws and the context of the universe in this hermetic principle, whether you ascribe to this or not. I think everybody can probably look at some of the seven hermetic principles, and say, "Okay, there's probably some wisdom in there," even without accepting the first one, which is the most important and that is that it's a mental construct, that it is a maya. It's not only hermeticism that says this. Maybe hermeticism is what permeated into the concepts of Hinduism, that permeated into Taoism and Buddhism. Who knows? Maybe it's that same reincarnation, or that same matching of frequency over and over again. If we can be able to step back from that and realise that everybody that ever did anything horrible through society, for the most part, if you interviewed them, genocide, people that were despotic autocrats that killed people that were against them, they would probably say they believe they were doing it for a greater good.

AUBREY: Like Thanos. 

ROBERT: Thanos, it's their point of advantage. It's not their vantage point. It's a point of advantage. And what hermeticism is about is being able to see that in yourself and say, "Whoa, it's not the world around me that needs to change. It's me that needs to change."

AUBREY: And it gives you some keys that you can start to use to try to alchemize.

ROBERT: And that's what's the keys throughout history, keys of Metatron, keys of Melchizedek, keys of Thoth, keys of Peter, keys of St. Germain. There are all these different keys and that term key keeps coming back over and over again, and you'll read it a lot as well in the Emerald Tablets.

AUBREY: So we're talking right now about alchemy. And these are some of the keys that are beyond the laws. And we gotta get back to the principle of gender, we will. That's the seventh principle. I'm just going to read a couple things here from alchemy. Use law against laws, the higher against the lower end by the art of alchemy, transmute that which is undesirable into that which is worthy. And they give two examples: to change your mood or mental state, change your vibration. One may change his mental vibrations by an effort of will in the direction of deliberately fixing the attention upon a more desirable state. To destroy an undesirable rate of mental vibration, put into operation the principle of polarity and concentrate upon the opposite pole, to that which you desire to suppress. Kill the undesirable by changing its polarity. And so some of the examples that come to mind are, alright, you're afraid. If you try to go kill your fear, that's not using this hermetic principle. You don't go try to kill your fear. You apply the opposite pole, which is bravery.

ROBERT: Or love and bravery, courage or gratitude.

AUBREY: So you apply a different thing. And then that's actually what counteracts. That's alchemy.

ROBERT: That's alchemy.

AUBREY: Or focusing your attention on a different thing.

ROBERT: That's led to gold.

AUBREY: That's led to gold. Recently I had a discussion with someone. He's very focused on the darkness of the world. He's into this, there's this giant conspiracy of sorts, that's trying to derail us and fuck us up and lizard people, that whole thing we've heard it before. All of its different variations, some more plausible than the others. Some part of me is like, "Yeah, dude, maybe. Maybe." However, the more that you try to focus on that thing and kill it, it's not going to fucking work. 

ROBERT: It's getting worse. 

AUBREY: You might be right, you might be smoking bath salts, I'm not sure but there's some good reason to think that maybe some of the things you're saying are correct. But the pragmatism of what you're doing is where I draw some questions. Yeah, okay, it's good to be in awareness of it, but to continue to focus on that thing and try to destroy that thing rather than try to apply the opposite polarity to that thing. Which is like we have this principle of the Antichrist, what about the anti-Satan or the anti-distortion? Well, then you get to Christ anyways. So you're actually applying the opposite. You want to fight the darkness, well, fucking be the light. Apply the light. Don't fight darkness with darkness. And there are certain instances where fighting fire with fire actually makes sense. Sometimes you do need to actually contain something. They do this in forest services, a controlled burn, to stop a bigger burn. I get it, I get it. There's times in which things are needed, sometimes actually eliminating someone or putting someone in, I understand all that, I'm not saying this is some pollyannaish world where you can just apply this. Again, we're talking to mental principles, sometimes in 3D, actions need to be taken. Fully understand that but, overall, from a meta concept, looking at the whole thing, these principles are actually going to get us where we want to go.

ROBERT: You're so right on this. The best example I can think of is when I was leaving Bausch + Lomb. I had left Allergan, which was a giant company. I had a very successful career selling Botox and Juvederm and LapBand and LATISSE, and launched all those products. I took a job. I got recruited by one of the largest private equity funds in the world and I was at that stage of my life where I was living out my persona. Here I was, 40 years old, being a badass dude, ballin', I'm ballin' and running a multibillion dollar organization. I'm like, "Yeah, this is badass." I come to my national sales meetings, they'd be playing Tony Stark music and I'm coming down on this platform-type thing, they got a video of me, they've got my face superimposed on Tom Cruise, El Capitan or something, doing this Ironman type of a climb. And I'm like, "Yeah, this is my life. I'm living it." And I got recruited by Bausch + Lomb and by Warburg Pincus, one of the largest private equity groups in the world, the one that's like a badass group, like the kind of KKR plus, even more boutiquey but the same size. Beautiful offices.

AUBREY: There were seven people who know what you just said, but don't worry about that. For you, seven, who understood who KKR was, good for you.

ROBERT: KKR is a large private equity group.

AUBREY: Mad props.

ROBERT: So the point being that I'm living this, and then all of a sudden, my hopes were dashed. Because I was  going to take this company public and spin it out, take it public, live my dreams of okay, I created this thing and now I'm really personified. This is what I want to achieve. I was 41 and, all of a sudden, they changed their mind. Now your business is doing really well. We're not going to spin it out. We're not going to take it public. We're going to sell the whole thing to the archenemy of archenemies, which is this company called Valeant and it was not Valiant, which would be V-A-L-I-A-N-T, it was with an E, like L-E-A-N-T. Wait a minute, does that mean it's really valeant or like a skew. And the company ended up going through a lot of stuff. And they really were not customer-oriented. It was just total anathema to what I wanted to be working with. So I decided to leave. And here I was, I basically got fired from this company even though I'd been very, very successful with it. So I fly on the way home, I'm on this plane, and I throw up in the bathroom, my terrible life was broken for me. And I'm like, "What the heck did I leave the job that I had for?" I'd only been there for not even two years yet. The next morning I woke up, I was feeling this depression set in. I walk outside of my house in Laguna Beach and go to pick up the paper because we still had newspapers back then, not that long ago. I go to pick up the paper, I remember reaching down, I'm in my robes. It's probably already like 10 o'clock in the morning, but I'm in this depression and something triggered in me, and I thought to myself today will either be the best day of my life or the worst, the choice is mine.

AUBREY: High Stakes bet.

ROBERT: How do I then transpose this thing that was terrible that happened? I made a bet and I lost the bet. I thought, I'm successful in this, I'll be able to do the things based on the success that I had. No, it was the exact opposite. I had to think about this differently. I said, "How can I recreate the circumstance to make it the very best thing that ever happened to me?" That was the moment I decided to start my own company. It turned out to be one of those seminal moments where I was like, "Because of this, I am free now to go and build whatever I want to build. It became that absolutely crux moment, which was like, now I can go and do all the things I really want to do without having to compromise. I really want to be able to experience this and that was actually what set me on, in a way, a spiritual path. Because up until that time, I couldn't really speak about my own spirituality of what I was experiencing. I was already going through it at that time. But I couldn't speak about it. Now I said to myself, You know what? I'm not going to compromise, what I believe would be the ideal situation, I want to create that situation. I had other bumps and difficulties and crises along the way but it was one of the best things I ever did. So everything that happens to us we can flip the polarity of it.

AUBREY: And change your mental state by an effort of will. You may, through effort of will, decide to make that day a different day than what the path was laid before. You said no. One of the first teachings I came across when I was in high school was Carlos Castaneda's work. And they talked about intent. Don Juan was always talking about the power of intent. This was the power of the nagual, the one who paints their own masterpiece of life, nagual meaning artist, tonal, being basically the canvas upon which life paints you. The defining characteristic of the nagual, of the one who can paint their own masterpiece was that they were able to imply intent. And really, that's again, another hermetic principle of saying, by this force of will, by will, you can change, and by what you focus on--

ROBERT: And then flipping the polarity of your perception. 

AUBREY: You can shift things and you have agency, more agency. They called those people wizards because of what they were able to manifest within themselves and also in the world. That's magic.

ROBERT: Actually what you're bordering into now, are the next stages. If you go back and look at what was the first historical reference to astrology, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was almost identical to the Western astrology we have today. So who started this? It does seem remarkably accurate on so many levels. Numerology can be crazy accurate. When you start digging into it, you're like, "Who established all this stuff?" The 52-card playing deck even? Where did all this stuff come from? You're going to find that literally all of it, this esoteric wisdom that seems to have withstood the passage of time all came through Hermes Trismegistus.

AUBREY: We've left one principle out. I'm going to cover it because this is an interesting one. It's the principle of gender. And they write, “Gender is in everything. Everything has its masculine and feminine principles.” Let me say that, again. “Everything has its masculine and feminine principles. Gender manifests on all planes.” Now, of course, we've reduced gender to a discussion about biological man versus biological woman. This is something that actually current post-modernity culture has got right. Yeah, it is kind of silly, actually, to determine your gender by your genitals. That's another thing that's a biological thing that is important. No, no, no, this is still important. We can't erase the fact that this is biologically a man or biologically a woman. There is no pregnant man--

ROBERT: Some have tried.

AUBREY: However many emojis you want to put on my fucking phone, there's not going to be a pregnant man. It's just not going to happen. 

ROBERT: I saw a picture of one recently, not that there's anything wrong with that...

AUBREY: It's the law. It's the Tao. There's certain things that are the law that we can't change, but nonetheless, to understand that there's a spark of truth in that, being that, yeah, gender is in everything, and within us is all an infinitely complex unique multiplicity of genders, a unique gender. And so it is reductionist to say you're a man because of this genital package that you have and this testosterone ratio, or whatever the fuck biological measure, which is all true but there's also something to say, well, let's look beyond that and let's look a little deeper and understand the deeper principles of gender, which apply all the way through the universe and try to get out of our mammalian biological frame of man versus woman. And get into another frame where we see these as archetypal energies of the universe that we all participate in to different degrees.

ROBERT: So I see this also as another form of metaphor. We talked about optic chiasm. It's shaped like an X, that's why it's called a chiasm. Chi is the Greek letter X. If you look at the left brain, which then connects to the right eye, and the right brain, which is the creative seat, connects to the left eye. In Egyptology, we talk about the Eye of Horus. This is the myth of Osiris, and actually Osiris is relative to Orion, the constellation Orion. That's why the belt of Orion is the exact match to where the pyramids were or where they're placed, not only there but also in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in China as well, where there are pyramids and several locations around the planet. This Orion representation of Osiris is telling a story. Now, the story of Osiris is, Osiris was this Greek, sorry, he's actually represented across many, many different pantheons. So we start with Sumerian. Sumerian had seven gods in their pantheon. And then you've got the Greek gods that come out of that as well. They're all the same. They're just different names. Same thing with the nine gods of the Egyptian pantheon, and then you go to the Norse gods, and they're also the same, they're just under different names. So you got Wotan, Odin, Thor, Thor's day, Thor is relative to Jupiter, that's why it's Juedi for French, which is Thursday. They're all relatives. They're all the same. You could go across cultures. And since the beginning of our recorded history like this. It's fascinating and I've studied this stuff. You could spend a lifetime just studying the etymology of these things, literally. But the point I'm trying to make is that when you look at this context, reference point, of all of these things through history, it's basically giving us a story of Osiris, Osiris going through periods of reincarnation, maybe Osiris is also relative to Thoth, who knows? The story includes Thoth. And the way the story goes is this: Osiris has a brother. His brother is Seth, Seth-en, Set. It's the same kind of concept. Again, etymologically, it's a match. So Seth, this guy with his hooked-nose. He's not very popular. He's always represented very dark in his complexion, even though probably Osiris was also dark as well, but he's always represented as green or blue.

AUBREY: They just chose a different identification point in their polarity. 

ROBERT: They just chose a different identification point. 

AUBREY: Maybe they were the same being of opposite polarities.

ROBERT: Here's how the story goes. People don't ever talk about it, but Osiris slept with Seth's wife. She was hot, she was hot.

AUBREY: Rude.

ROBERT: It's very rude. That's not cool. And that's his brother. So he slept with his brother's wife. Not a cool thing to do back then, not cool today.

AUBREY: What was his wife's name?

ROBERT: Nephthys. Nephthys was super hot. And Nephthys was, in the Greek pantheon was, actually, Athena. She's got some moxie. Innana was the god of Samaria, who was both Aphrodite and Athena wrapped into one. So she was the goddess of love, sexual love, and war, and romanticism, all these things wrapped into one. That broke in the Egyptian pantheon because they only had seven gods in the Sumerian pantheon. Then it went to the Egyptian pantheon where there's nine. Then that breaks into Isis, which is analogous to Aphrodite, and Nephthys, which is analogous to Athena. Again, a goddess of war and sexual love, but also represented as a virgin, interestingly, right? 

AUBREY: Not after Osiris.

ROBERT: That's right. Osiris, he handles that. And Seth finds out, he gets really upset. And Isis is like boys will be boys type of thing.

AUBREY: Isis is?

ROBERT: Is the wife of Osiris, yes. Wife of Osiris and this is Aphrodite. She's like, "Look, I'm the most beautiful woman in the world and you're going off with Nephthys. So he sleeps with Nephthys and afterwards, Seth and Osiris are at this party, like a banquet festival or something, and Seth wants to give a gift to his brother. So he makes this coffin for him. This coffin is this big wooden box type of thing. And he says, "The person who can lay in this coffin and fit in this coffin, deserves the kingdom. So he has Osiris lay in the coffin, and as soon as he does, it's like a slapstick comedy, closes the lid on him, nails it shut, throws him in the river. He then gets the box, takes him out. To make sure he's dead, he cuts them into 14 parts, cuts him into 14 parts. Now, it's interesting that the Vitruvian Man on Da Vinci's very famous iconic illustration of the man within the Circle in the Square, the circle representing the feminine, the square representing the masculine, cut him into 14 parts also. It's a representation of Osiris. This is Egyptian mythology now. So what does he do? Cuts him into 14 parts and the one part that gets lost, it goes to all different parts of the Nile across the valley and everything, but one part that's gone is his penis. So Isis recruits the help of Nephthys, the woman who slept with her husband.

AUBREY: She's like, "You know what this thing looks like. Help me find it, baby girl.”

ROBERT: That's right. To find the penis. And they don't find it. It's missing. So then the rumor is it must have been lost to the fishes. Some people think that Nephthys stole it and she kept it. She kept it but Isis said, "No matter."

AUBREY: Nothing like that god dildo when you really need it.

ROBERT: That's right. Isis said, "No matter, I'm going to make a new one made of quartz crystal." And this is going to be the magic form of it. And so when she does this, he's resurrected from the dead, they have sex, and they end up having this child called Horus. Horus wants to avenge his father years later, picks a fight with Seth. And what does Seth do? Seth gouges out his left eye. This is why it's called the Left Eye of Horus. Now, who was it that brings back and fixed using magic, this left eye? Thoth, sometimes referred to as the Left Eye of Thoth as well. Now what it's actually doing is it's connecting the left eye to the right brain. The right brain is the seed of creativity, intuition. So now we've got a linear side of our brain, which is our left brain, which is mathematics, it's rational thought, it's the no, not the yes. And then you got the creative side of your brain, which is the right side of your brain, assuming you're right handed. If you're left handed, it's the opposite. And you've got the left eye that connects to the right brain, which becomes the eye of intuition. So the return of the Left Eye of Horus means that you're bringing into balance this masculine and feminine principle, one being the feminine. So the right brain being the omega, the Chi, the optic chiasmus. The optic chiasm is the X that connects the eyes to those different sides of the brain. And you've got linear on the left side, you've got curvilinear on the right side and irrationality, on the right side, the feminine principle. So now we bring our brain into balance. Alpha, chi, omega, it's in balance. So this is the balancing act that's going on. So I look at this from the standpoint of gender. I don't see one as positive and one as negative. That's just a convenience for us. It's opposing forces.

AUBREY: And I think it's actually a trap. It's a semantic trap actually, because negative means many other different things that are, quite frankly, negative in the sense of that word. And so the association of negative with feminine, masculine with positive is something that the "Kybalion" actually started me on a path to understand. It gave me a key to understand alright, so what does this really mean? They go into this, feminine being the womb of creation, the place that actually sources energy, that's the source point of energy, the positive being, that thing that carries energy for the evolutionary purpose of transferring data and information and energy, basically inseminating ideas, moving it from one place to another, through that linear phallic line of let me go now impregnate this, whether it's DNA, or whether it's a concept or an idea, but it all comes from the womb, from the source point of creation. This is the principle at the higher level. So we look at a battery, and there's the negative part of it, and then there's a positive part of it. And what they're pointing to in the "Kybalion" is alright, well, if we apply the principle of gender and stop just saying negative and positive, then there's the feminine part of the battery and then there's the masculine part of the battery. Which point is the one with the little knob that's pointing out? Well, of course, that's the masculine part of the battery. That would make sense. And where's the energy actually stored in the battery? Well, it's in the negative pole, or the feminine pole. So that's where the feminine energy is actually from. And then that brought me down this whole line of thinking, they talk a lot about how the health properties of negative ions. And negative ions are found, and I actually wrote this down, negative ions are abundant in nature, especially around waterfalls, on the ocean surf, at the beach, and widespread in mountains and forests. They neutralize free radicals. So that's the point. And you go into these natural places, you're like, ah, the negative ions. I was like, no, that's not negative ions. That's feminine energy. You're in Gaia. You're in the Great Mother, and you're receiving negative, but it's feminine energy, it's at the beach. It's why Aphrodite comes out of the seafoam. It's why Venus was painted that way from Botticelli. It's understanding that in that different way, and then saying. What are positive ions? I look that up. In nature, positive ions are commonly formed by strong winds, dust, humidity, and pollution. They are at their highest levels before an electrical storm. In general, anything that's toxic, or has electromagnetic capabilities will generate harmful positive ions. 

ROBERT: But they neutralized. 

AUBREY: That's right. It's masculine energy and masculine energy can have a toxic effect when it's not being directed towards the right purpose.

ROBERT: It needs the feminine.

AUBREY: And also, right before an electrical storm, forget all the pollution. But right before an electrical storm, there's the possibility of that lightning bolt coming and carrying information. And actually, when I got this download, I talked to Matias about it. I was like, "When lightning strikes the Earth, is it carrying information from one place to another and transferring it to the mycelial network? I actually heard Paul Stamets talk about this, that when lightning strikes, the mycelial network of the Earth actually responds in a different way.

ROBERT: It's like the tree network on the planet is no different than synapses.

AUBREY: And it's receiving new information but also the positive is transferring that information from one place, from the ether, from the clouds, from the air down to the earth, the mycelial network, that Womb of Gaia, all spread throughout the surface, is receiving that energy. Now I look at the whole world in a whole different way and I've started thinking about, man, it's not just time in nature, they call it nature bathing or forest bathing. It's great, but it's actually bathing in the mother, it's bathing in feminine energy, and that's healing and nurturing and restorative. Of course it is. Of course it is. So is, if you have a sweet mom, going and spending time with your mom and giving her a long big hug. That's going to be restorative too.

ROBERT: You're so right. And what's also interesting is you look at the seven hermetic principles, they're actually matching our chakras. So we think about the first, of mentalism, and how does that relate to the root chakra? Well, because we're born into this world, and we're given a construct, that's all about materialism. We have to learn to transcend that and realize that there's a higher mind aspect to this. But the construct has to be that it's throwing projection at us all the time about the harsh reality, the suffering, the difficulty of being here, Adam will live by the sweat of his brow once he's ejected from the Garden of Eden. Each one of these different principles are different aspects of our own chakra system as it comes up. The highest relates to the crown chakra, is about understanding this principle of gender. It's funny, I saw this excerpt from Bill Maher. Do you watch Bill Maher at all? 

AUBREY: It's been a while since I've seen him.

ROBERT: Sometimes he's totally whacked out. Sometimes he says some really crazy stuff. The presentation he gave, he's like, "Okay, here's the deal, guys." He tries to be more libertarian, I think, at times. But sometimes he veers more into the left side of things, and I'm very much right at the center. So I just kind of looked at it as assigned to either party but he basically gave this presentation, we had a PowerPoint, he said, "Look, here's what they're saying. Here's how much the population has increased in its tendency towards homosexuality." And non-gender, non-binary associations and all this pronoun usage, you're on social media, she, he, him, whatever, all these different things, they or x. Now it's x, which I also find an interesting synchronicity of reflection, because here we are with quantum computing, where we're going from a binary code of ones and zeros now to advancing from one zero to x, a superposition. Now, you may not know this, but the other reference to Hermes is the divine hermaphrodite.

AUBREY: The rebus.

ROBERT: That's right. It doesn't mean that Hermes is one sex or the other per se, or that you have to be in between and become this non-gender, non-binary type of person, although some may choose that. What it means is that he's in perfect balance, in perfect balance. And that perfect balance manifests itself because what it really is a reference to, I believe, is the way we perceive information, take information in, and how we process it and then what we do as a result of that. It's the left brain-right brain. The right brain is the feminine aspect of the brain. It's the creativity, it's the intuition, it's the nonlinear. Wait, this doesn't make sense; it's the emotional side, being able to tap into that motion. When we can embrace our subconscious mind, we can then move beyond, in this individuation process, from the conscious mind construct, which is very limited, to being able to tap into our own subconscious mind as well. And when the conscious becomes conscious of the subconscious, and that being itself as well, then the superconscious mind emerges. And that's what the x, the Chi represents, superconsciousness. That's why you'll see imagery, I believe, throughout society, today, all about the X. You're  going to see x stuff everywhere. We're seeing it as well. And it's funny, Bill Maher's representation is gee, if this trend continues, 100% of the population, by the year 2030, will all be either gay or transgender. He's like, "That can't be right!" So something's either wrong with this with this graph but I think what it's actually showing, again, is this representation we never had when we were growing up. It was not this whole thing where transgender was this really, really huge thing. Now it's becoming this very, very huge thing. And to me, I look at it more as again, in a mental construct of the universe, another reflection back of what is changing in the world. You're going to see all aspects of that. It's not necessarily that it's all going to be perceived by us as this positive thing. There's always going to be polarity with everything that we see. And our perception will always be polarized until we can step out of that and say, "Okay, hold on a second. I'm falling in the same traps that I had before. Let me try to look at this differently," and go to the opposite pole of judgment towards acceptance and love.

AUBREY: It seems like, in this gender-change phenomenon, ultimately, we all have the ability to express as any variety of different genders. That's within our capability. That is the principle of polarity, that we're the whole pole from masculine to feminine. Now, the body is binary. Well, I guess sometimes you could get some kind of actual, literal, hermaphrodite situation where there is, actually literal blended gender in the body in some way. And I think people are creating that in a way. But the challenge is, if you keep trying to chase the body to match what's in your mind, your mind might be a moving target that's going, I feel like this gender now and I feel like this gender now. When I was a little boy, I would play for one hour with my little ponies and my older step-brothers would look at me and be like, "Man, I don't know about him. I don't know about that Aubrey." And then the next hour, I'd be playing with my He-Man. And one point, I got my little brush out and I'm combing my little pony hair. And another point, clashing different figurines together and holding my sword and pretending to master the universe, or whatever He-Man claimed himself to be. But nonetheless, this is something that's going to be playing throughout our life. And I think it's beautiful that we can actually, if we decide, that we want to polarize at one point, and be Caitlyn, instead of Bruce, great. Fucking go for it. Go for it. Where it gets challenging is if your brain is still forming, and you're all over the place in the polarity, then making a switch, that you're not able to switch because it's not the mind you're actually surgically doing things or chemically doing things with the body, that's where it becomes a problem. You may be right, maybe you got it right. But just chill for a little bit and make sure, and if you're sure, one of my great, great friends is Dr. Curtis Crane, and he is one of the best sex-change doctors in the whole world. He shows me how he actually grows a penis on the forearm by bending. It's unbelievable what he creates. He's a like the fucking Botticelli of gender-change operations. It's unbelievable what he's doing. And also the stories about the people who are suicidal, the lives that he changed, he's really deeply invested in this and it's fucking beautiful to see that. And I just think it's an include and transcend. That's great but also just be aware that we're all the genders all the time.

ROBERT: I'm still a man. I'm very much aligned with that. But I am now tapped more than I was before into the feminine aspect. What does that mean? I'm more in touch with my emotions than I was before. I'm more in touch with my intuition than I was before. I can still balance that with all the logos. It's when the pathos and the logos combine, then you have heart-brain consciousness. That is the true reference, to me, about understanding this principle of gender to move into the superconscious mind. The superconscious mind can tap into both sides equally. But the physical representation you come into, it's more a state of thinking than it requires. It doesn't need to be a state of physical being, although some may choose that, and I don't judge that. I think it's totally fine. I didn't know my brother was gay until I was 27 because he was freaked out to tell me, which was one of the things that broke my heart because I was like, "Why would you not even tell me?" I had to call one day. I was living in Australia. I was in the States attending the American College of Cardiology in Orlando, Florida. I thought I'll call my brother up just before I fly back to Australia, just say hello. So I called him up. I knew I had a roommate and he was just out of college, a few years, and his roommate answered the phone and I said, "Can I talk to Michael?" And he goes, "Yeah." Within half a second, my brother's like, "Hello?" And I'm like, "Hey, do you guys have a room with a small little table in between your beds or something like that?" It was like that. I didn't even know what to think. I was like wait a minute. That's like, whoa. So I called him up. I said, "Are you gay?" He's like, "Yes." And I said, "I love you." He was so relieved. He was so relieved. I agree with you on this, especially. I live in California. I have a son who is three years old. My son, he's got a sister and he's going to have another sister soon. The thing is, I don't want the schools to be imposing on him by basically saying, at five years old, or six years old. "Hey, what do you more identify with?" Because of the point you just made.

AUBREY: Because literally, it's a day-by-day thing. 

ROBERT: Because it's a day by day thing. It's funny because he's very different from my daughter. I have three kids. I have an older daughter that's much older and then I have two little ones, six and three and then a new one coming. He already is just this boisterous thing. And to me, that's not toxic masculinity. I don't even like the term, because I think it's assigned to so many things. Men don't even know what to be anymore. To me, that's a really, really sad situation for society. They just feel like the shit kicked out of them, so many times. Guess what, guys, you can be in touch with your feminine side. You can still be a man--

AUBREY: It makes you more of a man. 

ROBERT: It makes you more of a man!

AUBREY: Otherwise, you're just constantly afraid of some aspect of yourself which is real. If you're afraid of the feminine side of yourself, it's such folly, and it lacks so much courage. To really embrace that element of yourself, that's what a true, strong, solid man is able to do, embrace their darkness, embrace their femininity, and not only embrace it. And the darkness, you embrace it, but you don't act on it, obviously, because the darkness is dark. But on the feminine side, bring that forward, be nurturing and loving and listening and caring and all of these things we may associate with the opposite gender. But really it's not. Be the womb that other people can impregnate ideas to which is listening. Be open to change your mind, all of these different aspects of, let me be impregnated by your ideas, beautiful. I love that. Allowing yourself to do that, that's, I think, the redefinition of masculinity that I think is happening. Again, we're in the time between stories where there were some elements of masculinity, which is way out of control, elements of the patriarchy and elements of different things that had long standing roots. Yes, it needs to be dismantled, but it also needs to be replaced, included, transcended, replaced with something that's actually better. Well, a better, a better, truer system.

ROBERT: And you look at the last 2000 years, we've been in the Age of Pisces, now we've moved into Aquarius. But Pisces, the opposite sign, the shadow of Pisces is Virgo, six months apart from each other. So that means that a lot of the archetypes that we're going to see through society during the last 2000 years are going to be venerating virginity. That's what Virgo means. So why do you think we worship the Virgin Mary?

AUBREY: And chastity is such a virtue.

ROBERT: And chastity and all these things. There's a repression in society and the two fish swimming opposite directions are tied together with a rope. That's what Pisces is. And actually, if you look back through history, you have Moses who comes down from the mountain and says, "Hey, what are you doing with the golden calf?" Well, that's because they weren't in the age of Taurus anymore. They were now in the age of Aries. All the symbology was the blood of a lamb, put lambs blood on your door. The lamb is going to come but lions and lambs will lay together. This is a reference to the Messianic, the Messiah. But then by the time Jesus came, it was already Pisces, I shall make you fishermen of men. You see these macro patterns throughout history. And the shadow context is this chaste, virtuous, judgmental aspect, across society both masculine and feminine, are looking at society saying, "Okay, well, it's better to be a virgin. It's better to be a chaste celibate monk." Or it's better to be a priest. You go back to Colossians or Corinthians where you've got the epistle of Paul, it's like, if you're going to go be a missionary, go be a missionary. But people often mis-reference that because they think of it as, okay, you're going to be a missionary, you should be chaste and celibate. No he's just saying, it's easier to be a missionary.

AUBREY: That hasn't worked out so well. 

ROBERT: That hasn't worked out so well because every time we repress some aspect of ourselves, we create darkness, we create ignorance of that thing. We believe we're only good then we do things that are so horrifically bad to society. The moment that we can start to embrace and integrate those opposite aspects of ourselves, bringing them out of the darkness, this is why the things that people are studying in society right now, dark matter, dark energy. I've got my own podcast and I'm going to have Lawrence Krauss on that. His work led to two Nobel prizes on dark matter and dark energy. I see the understanding that we have of these aspects of darkness, the things we don't understand as part and parcel of the rise of the feminine. What's happening is that we're now starting to acknowledge intuition, magic. We're starting to acknowledge these aspects of society that we've always looked at women and say, "Okay, she's tapped in." We've all said this. I don't know, she's got some extra sensory capability. Women are closer to that because it's part of the right-brain context.

AUBREY: And if you're a guy listening to this, guess what? The rise of the feminine is you too. Yes, it is the goddesses and the priestesses in your women and your daughters and your mothers. Yes, it's all of that, but it's also you. The rise of the feminine is within all of us. So it's a yes. It needs to be universal. Universally, we need to embrace these feminine levels of consciousness because we've been out of balance. The scales have not been balanced for too many years and there were a lot of structures in place to make sure that the scales never got balanced. Now we're balancing the scales and it's messy. And it's a messy, confusing, challenging time.

ROBERT: It's organic.

 AUBREY: It's like life itself. It's like birth itself. It's fucking messy. There's blood and placenta. And if you see it from that perspective, you can stop getting so riled up and find the beauty in all of these impulses, even the pronoun impulses. Yeah, it's beautiful. Recognise how diverse and unique you are. I've said this before. But my encouragement is just take it all the way, that you're actually infinitely complex in your gender, infinitely complex in your expression of good or bad or honest or dishonest. If you go back, it's fractal geometry. If you go back and look even more fine, even more fine, you'll see even more complexity to the answer to that question. And so no amount of labels are ever going to do a justice. However, if you like this label, fucking go for it. Go for it. And if you felt a certain way, for a certain amount of time, that your body is expressing the wrong thing for your psyche, great, change it, just embrace also the full spectrum of who you are and just also have a little bit of humility for the complexity and confusion of the time that we're in. You see that and everything starts to look, wow, it's all beautiful. It's just a little messy. It's all beautiful. It's just a little messy.

ROBERT: Let me just say one, one last thing and it relates to the feminine, the women, it's also time for the feminine to embody that rise. It's being acknowledged, it's real. But it's also important that you let go, that the feminine also let go of some of the hang ups that the feminine might have accumulated along the way, these feelings of shame, and guilt, particularly when it comes to things like sexuality, for example. That virginal construct is no longer the shadow of our society. Now the shadow, in the background, what is it? Aquarius is Leo, the shadow is Leo. So we're  going to start seeing more symbology in this mental construct of lions. We're going to start seeing more gold. Gold's going to become more popular than silver was. We see trend lines, little little trend lines. Again, it's all about this rhythmicity. And with that gold, represents this crown chakra awakening, that means that we understand the role of gender, and how it plays. One is not negative, and the other is positive. That's just a convenience that we've used etymologically, that we've used in order to explain something, we don't really have a different way of explaining other than it's just the opposite condition. That's all that it is. When the feminine fully embodies that, then humanity will embrace the notion that when the heart thinks, and the mind feels, then the river of wisdom flows. To me, that's where society is now going next, that we can get there. The most significant change is change in perception, how we see ourselves. So we can address things like consciousness, and then as we address consciousness and get to higher awareness states and raise our vibration, then systems will start to morph and change in ways that are more reflective of that consciousness.

AUBREY: This is very much everything that I'm feeling right now, same with my partner, Vylana who you know as well. She's releasing her album titled, "GODDESS RISE" about the rise of the feminine. That's what she's working on. Our next Fit For Service summit in Sedona is Bringing Light to the Shadow, going in, and becoming aware of the full spectrum polarity of who we are. These are the things that I think I innately feel, and I think so many people feel are the necessary remediation to where we've been, applying the opposite principle. Okay, we've gone a little too far on the masculine-gendered polarity. Let's apply the other principle alchemically in the feminine principle and then allow ourselves to correct and find that Chi point, find the balance point between both. I think that's what you and I and so many other people are here to do is to really help just do our best, to lend our support, energy, love, heart, intuition, intelligence, everything we got, hands, when necessary, to bringing about this new shift to consciousness.

ROBERT: Well, I think we had a great discussion about hermeticism. 

AUBREY: We did. We could talk about a billion other things, but we got into it. And it's no simple concept. So I'll go through the seven principles and we'll let you guys, I don't know, decide to explore or say enough of this shit. First principle, the principle of mentalism. Second, the principle of correspondence. Third, the principle of vibration. Fourth, the principle of polarity. Fifth, the principle of rhythm. Sixth, the principle of cause and effect and seventh, the principle of gender. And allow these, as you go deeper, just allow these to be little keys, see what they unlock in your life.

ROBERT: Thank you very much. Good to be here again with you.

AUBREY: Absolutely brother. This is  going to become a habit.

ROBERT: I know. I have a feeling. I do have a feeling. I want to get you on mine as well. I love the way you see the world and I see how curious you are, that you have this curiosity that you want to really truly understand why things are the way they are and delve into the deeper questions. I think that's the most powerful aspect of what you're doing because it's causing other people to look at the world in that light. And when they all do, then we all start to understand ourselves better. And I think that's the whole reason why we're here, to find out and remember who we actually are

AUBREY: And get a little lost along the way. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We love you. Bye.