If you have watched the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, this podcast will blow your mind.

Because hidden within these fictional films, are true stories of value and reality drawn forth into existence by a force even greater than the writers themselves. So what deep mythic wisdom can we find hiding in the Guardians Of The Galaxy story?

You’ll have to join Dr. Marc Gafni and I to find out.
SPOILER ALERT! 

For a deeper understanding of the cosmo-erotic universe, check out the book A Return to Eros by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid.  

AUBREY: All right, Marc, we are here, my brother.
MARC: We are.
AUBREY: And we are here because when we talk, we often talk about how in our movies and in our stories, raise myths. Culture is speaking, but there's also a voice that speaking behind culture. It's a voice of truth, of a muse that comes from a higher order, mystery, intelligence, what we would call She or Shekinah. Like the voice of value, the voice of a true story that weaves its way through and sometimes gets lost, sometimes it's diverted. But all of these myths that we see on the big screen and that we read in our books, they are really an integral part of how we understand ourselves and how we orient our mind to reality. So, I wanted to dive in and start talking about these movies on a podcast. And I didn't just say, oh, which movies have you already done? I was like, no, I'm into "Guardians of the Galaxy" right now.
MARC: Really? And I said to you, "Really, do you really want to do Guardians of the Galaxy, really?" And he says, “I challenge you to do "Guardians of the Galaxy" man”. Okay, so the challenge is in the space, and I'm excited about it. Just say one thing about movies for a second, okay? So, we have a thing that you and I play with a lot, and we've talked about in previous podcasts; pre-tragic, tragic and post tragic. And just for those who haven't been with us, the 10 seconds is, let's just do it in the falling in love. Pre-tragic, I fell in love, oh my god, this is awesome. Nothing's ever going to hurt me again. Love conquers all. It's all good. Let's just be together and fuck it open, right? Pre-tragic. Then, "Oh my God, you bitch, you moved the toothpaste!" I mean, it's tragic.
AUBREY: It's complicated.
MARC: Complicated power struggle, the tragic. And post tragic is when you fall in love again at a higher level and you kind of get through the power struggle, and you find oh my God, there's no one I could be with but you. Now, those three; pre-tragic, tragic, and post tragic, of course you can have in a relationship in an hour, and you can have it over years. You go through the stages over years, and you can also go through all of them. But this applies to everything pre-tragic, tragic and post tragic. So pre-tragic is clarity. Post tragic is fuck, this is confusing, and tragic. And then beyond the confusion, the mysteries speak again and call you again. You hold the uncertainty, but the allure of the mystery and the clarity that life is good and that we're going somewhere and that this needs to be, and every place I've been I needed to be, and it's all good, is the post tragic. So, let's look at movies. Pre-tragic movies are Disney. The big screen, Mickey Mouse, or Hollywood, or Clark Gable, or the 50s, and this is America is great and Russia is horrible. And let's not even talk about China. This is what heroes look like, and cowboys, and it's great, pre-tragic, world's clear. Then we realize, tragic. Oh my God, the CIA's working with Hollywood, MK Ultra, Empire's actually mixed in. There's propagandizing going on, and they're commodifying our emotions in order to sell them back to us, and there's this jaded realization that I can't trust the big screen at all. That's like a place of corruption and of Empire. And that's true. There's a lot of truth to that. Tragic is real.
AUBREY: And also in the pre-tragic, there's also, "I'm just going to the movies."
MARC: "I'm just going to the movies."
AUBREY: "I'm just going to the movies, bro."
MARC: Popcorn.
AUBREY: Yeah, this is a way to get entertained, man. Whatever. It's just a movie.
MARC: Just a movie. So, pre-tragic, we just outlined.
AUBREY: Oh, it's complicated, yeah.
MARC: Yeah, yeah, complicated. MK Ultra, tragic.
AUBREY: Are they captured agents?
MARC: And then post tragic is what you described when we started, which is that somehow she, the muse, the goddess, spirit value, she speaks, she finds her way. And she finds her way through the writer, even though the writer may or may not realize it. There's a word we use for this in cosmo-erotic humanism, which is the name of the new story of value we're working on together at the Center, which is anthro-ontology. Anthro, human. Ontology, for fucking real. Or the mysteries are within us. And it's, we know value, we know truth, we know goodness, we know beauty, it actually lives in us. And if I listen deeply enough, it's actually always there inside of me. How do I know what I know? Because in my clarified depth, truth actually lives. It's why a mathematician can find mathematics, which allows the mathematician to reach to the farthest end of the cosmos, because mathematics lives in me. So, that's the anthro-ontology. So value lives in me. So there's a way in which value, even if the writer is not thinking about it, kind of finds its way through. And then the audience, the listeners, oh, a movie goes big sometimes because we recognize something's there, even though we're not quite sure what it is. But there's some truth there. And so, we're here to kind of point to this hidden, to lift the veil and to say, A, all the reviews of "Guardians of the Galaxy" and I must have read, I don't know, 50 reviews. And they were all fun and interesting. None of them actually even became close to finding that third level. They didn't even recognize the third level.
AUBREY: What is this really speaking, and what is it whispering?
MARC: What's really happening? And we're not saying the intention of the writer. We're saying no, no, something, there's magic here. It's lions and tigers and bears. Oh my, it's magic and mystery. So you said, I said, hey, let's do like... And you said, let's do Guardians of the Galaxy. So, I'm in, man. Guardians it is. So, fuck, let's start with the title.
AUBREY: Let's start with the title. What does it mean to be a guardian? Who do you have to be? And what is the fucking galaxy?
MARC: What is the galaxy? And what is a guardian? And what's a guardian of the galaxy? What an audacious title?
AUBREY: Right, and do they fulfill that title?
MARC: And do they do? And you know what, the crazy thing is they do. And you and I both, we both watched all three. And so I guess we should say going in, we're not just doing the one in the movie theater now. Because actually, they're a unit. So if you're watching this podcast, man, go back and watch the first fucking two.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's all one big text.
MARC: It's all one big tapestry. So "Guardians of the Galaxy" is this amazing idea. We would think the guardians of the galaxy are like six angels with wings, very beautiful angelic faces, and they're guardians of the galaxy. And this movie says, actually intuiting one of the greatest realizations of the greatest erotic mystics in the interior sciences and fucking history, that actually we might call this the democratization of greatness. That is actually a group of traumatized human beings, and we'll talk about this later. These are heroes. So, there's heroes. First theme, heroes. Two, heroes are actually precursors. They anticipate what we might call, allow me to use a word, the new human and the new humanity. They anticipate the fullest, most grand, most wondrous, possible human. That's what heroes do. Heroes are approximating the best in humanity. And the best in humanity is that actually, we can be traumatized, and we'll talk about later. But all six major figures are completely traumatized. I mean, maybe let's just play with it for a second bracket. The guardians, who do we got here? Who do we got? We got--
AUBREY: Star-Lord.
MARC: Star-Lord, how he got the name Star-Lord, we'll get to. So, Peter Quill, his mother says "Take my hand." She's got a tumor. He can't take her hand. Like this last second, she dies. She says, "Your grandfather will take care of you." He goes outside for a second, gets abducted by a UFO, Yondu. He is a guy commanding the UFO ship and off he goes. So trauma, mega trauma.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: Okay, who else we got?
AUBREY: Yeah, you have to talk to your psychiatrist about that.
MARC: You've got to talk to your psychiatrist about that. Oh my God, right?
AUBREY: "My mom just died, and then I got abducted by aliens, and they were trying to eat me."
MARC: They were trying to eat me the entire time. And the guy's blue who kind of abducted him, and he's got this arrow that he moves around that kills all his enemies. It's a bad scene.
AUBREY: And "I've got to steal stuff."
MARC: And I've got to steal shit, because they're called the Ravagers, to survive. So, trauma. He can get into a trauma group, okay? Nebula--
AUBREY: He'd get a score on the trauma score.
MARC: And anyone who's following with this kind of, who's listening, just follow with us. Do it with us. Okay, so Nebula is the daughter of fucking Thanos, who's like the evil Lord of the Empire. Thanos, we've got to do a whole podcast on. Thanos is like the dude. And he's the Avengers, he stars in Avengers one and two. And Thanos has this sister, Gamora.
AUBREY: No, it's another daughter.
MARC: I'm sorry, Thanos has another daughter, Gamora. Nebula and Gamora are sisters, which is a whole theme. That theme of Nebula and Gamora, of sisters, goes through all of "Guardians of the Galaxy". And every time they compete, when Gamora wins, Thanos takes an actual piece of Nebula's body out of her and replaces it with a mechanical part, so says Nebula in "Guardians of the Galaxy". Fuck. Gamora, trauma scene.
AUBREY: And also just the trauma of pitting your daughters against each other. It's sister versus sister, which is a big cultural theme of what many would say the patriarchy or whatever structure that's in place has organized, whether consciously or unconsciously, to pit sisters against each other. And there's a huge movement to bring the sisters back together. And so, that's one of these threads that "Guardians of the Galaxy" was playing with. Is it sister versus sister? Or is there a greater union between the sisters? Is this win lose metrics in competition between sisters? Or is there something else possible?
MARC: Gorgeous, right? So, Thanos, let's just replay some of what you said, and it's exactly fucking on the money. Thanos is the patriarch who's playing the sisters against each other. He says, “oh, you guys are both liberated”. But instead of sisterhood, you're going to be in win-lose metrics. And they wind up initially hating each other. And the story of their journey to sisterhood is this story, but that's the second trauma they have. Third trauma, Gamora says, there's a certain moment where Peter Quill says, "Oh, right, you're Thanos's daughter." She goes, "I'm not his daughter. He came and killed my parents in front of me. He then tortured me." I'm direct quoting, "And turned me into a weapon, and just totally destroyed me. And I only broke away from him when I saw that Ronan," this is in Volume One, " was demanding that he destroy a planet, Xandar or Xanandar, and I couldn't participate in that." So Gamora is massively traumatized. So, trauma three. We've got Peter, we got Nebula, we got Gamora. And who do we get?
AUBREY: Drax.
MARC: Drax the Destroyer.
AUBREY: Drax the Destroyer.
MARC: A lot of makeup there.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: A lot of makeup. So, Drax the Destroyer sees Ronan, key character in volume one, kill his daughter and wife and--
AUBREY: His non-dancing wife.
MARC: His non-dancing wife, we're going to get to dance--
AUBREY: Who he loves so much.
MARC: Who he loves so much because she refused to dance. And one of the themes we're going to get to, there's about 12 majors, but dance is a big one. So, that's Drax the Destroyer. And finally, we've got oh my God, we've got Rocket who is a raccoon who refuses to acknowledge he's a raccoon till the end of Volume 3, the third movie. And the raccoon is with Groot.
AUBREY: Groot.
MARC: "I am Groot."
AUBREY: Groot may be the only one without trauma.
MARC: Well, so Groot, it's interesting. Groot comes from this I think Planet X where there's this flora fauna, and they've got a little larynx thing going on. And so, the only thing you can hear him saying is, "I am Groot." But really they're speaking a whole language but it just comes out is, "I am Groot." He may be without trauma. You're right. Ain't that interesting? Groot's probably the only one without trauma.
AUBREY: Groot is almost like that Jiminy Cricket type of character where he's actually the solid one, he represents almost like the risen Christ in a way and like this Messiah.
MARC: He does. He's going to have a big message. There's a moment where he goes from "I am Groot" to "We are Groot." Which we'll get to. And then Groot, by the way, at the end of movie one disappears. And then there's little Groot.
AUBREY: He sacrifices himself.
MARC: He sacrifices himself to save everyone. And then there's little Groot. So I think we got the cast of characters.
AUBREY: Yep.
MARC: Okay, so in this cast of characters, these are the guardians of the galaxy. That's what's crazy, heroes, traumatized heroes. This is not Superman. Little kryptonite can take him down. But otherwise, he's basically perfectly. He looks perfect, he's all American boy. He's like, bring him home. None of these other people, people you want to bring home to the family. So, it's a different vision of the hero, that the hero is the traumatized hero, that we're all traumatized. And that we all have these very deep traumas that we go through. And that trauma is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. Which is a big deal today to say, the movie is challenging something in culture. Culture revolves around trauma today. The big sentence is, are you trauma informed? Now, again, I think you and I, I think, and you take issue with me, but we both think, I think that the trauma world is unbelievably important.
AUBREY: Of course. It's real.
MARC: And we honor it with all. And it's real. Trauma is absolutely real. And the movie gets that it's real, but the movie is kind of audacious and it says, and there's a great line in the movie in which Drax the Destroyer says to Raccoon in movie two.
AUBREY: Rocket.
MARC: To Rocket, thank you. In movie two, he says, "All of my..." It's in movie one, I apologize. He's taken on Ronan, hasn't gone well. Now they're all in danger. And he says, "I'm sorry. All of my anger and rage is to cover up my trauma." And then Rocket says, "Listen, man. Okay, you got a dead wife. You got a dead daughter. We all got dead people. That's not an excuse." It's like, whoa! Who says shit like that in a movie? It's like, whoa.
AUBREY: I mean, there's so many interesting things that are coming out of the fog here. For one, what it's pointing to is that a way out of trauma is when you bind yourself to a cause that's greater than your own separate self. And this is the thesis of Sebastian Junger's book, "Tribe" where he actually cites that when the bombs were dropping in London during the Blitzkrieg, that all the mental hospitals emptied, not because they were kicking people out, but because they were no longer mentally ill because they had a purpose. They wanted to repair the bricks, serve the food, care for the wounded. Everybody came together because there was a greater purpose. And there is this interesting thing that happens when there's this greater purpose. Like in the war itself, or in the struggle--
MARC: Oh my God, I love this.
AUBREY: In the kind of devotion to that higher purpose, then all of these things kind of actually find a different place in your relative--
MARC: This is fucking huge. This is so huge, what you just said. So, all of a sudden we're seeing, so let's see what we got here. We got "Guardians of the Galaxy", this is unimaginable, and again, we're at level three now. We're at post tragic, right? So you got "Guardians of the Galaxy" which is an audacious idea. Who's guardians of the galaxy? The hero. Who are the heroes? The traumatized heroes, three. Four, the movie challenges, it recognizes and honors trauma, but it challenges trauma and says, okay, you're traumatized, and it's been to society. Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a book called, she's a power feminist writer, great writer, called "The Therapeutic Culture" where she kind of challenges this culture of victimhood, this culture of complaint. And so, this movie is saying, okay, you're traumatized, it's fucking real. The movie is incredibly real and emotional and makes you cry, and--
AUBREY: When you go into Rocket's trauma in episode three, you're just bawling.
MARC: You're bawling. I half cried and half laughed for all the movies. I mean, you're crying out of one side of your mouth, and you're laughing out of the other side of your mouth. Then the music starts and you're like, oh my God, right? But this thing you just said, I want to just stay with us for a second. At the center, we're working with Lori Galperin, who is one of the best clinical trauma therapists in the country. She works with Mark Schwartz. And we're writing all of us together. And one of the projects is, exactly, you just, gorgeously, kind of said, and we haven't even talked about the project, which is, I'm trying to say it this way. The way we heal trauma today, and this is what so much like, it's hard to talk about trauma without crying, but we heal trauma by going to reorganize memories of the past. And basically what we're saying in the deeper work, and I think what the movie is saying is, you can't heal trauma unless you're called by the future. Yes, you've got to do the work of memory--
AUBREY: It's a yes and.
MARC: You've also got to recover a memory of the future. And the memory of the future is, motherfucker, you're a guardian of the galaxy.
AUBREY: Yeah, let's go.
MARC: Let's go. There's something for you to do, and that you are needed in reality. And we call that unique self-recovery, that if you can't recover your unique self, which is the unique heroism that's yours to live, it's the unique heroic poem that's yours to speak, it's the unique heroic song that's yours to sing. If you can't recover the memory of the future, you can spend all fucking yesterday and tomorrow and the day after recovering the memory of the past, you will not move out of your trauma. And that's heresy to say, but it's fucking true. And I think it's one of the great mistakes, and I'm not going to mention any names because they're all wonderful people, and dear colleagues who are doing really great work in trauma therapy. So I want to just bow to all of that, and it will not work unless you recover the call of the future.
AUBREY: And this series of movies actually demonstrates that, because through all of the movies, everybody's working through their trauma. Everybody gets their moment to work through their trauma. Peter Quill gets his moment to work through his dad's trauma. Drax gets his moment to work through his revenge trauma. Gamora and Nebula get the chance to work through their sister's trauma.
MARC: Their sister trauma and their father trauma. Rocket.
AUBREY: And then of course, Rocket gets a chance. Everybody gets a chance to work through it. And actually as they work through their trauma, those are the weak points in the guardians, is their own traumas, and then their trauma informs selfishness. Like when Drax goes to attack Ronan, and like, "This isn't the plan, man." Like, "What are you fucking doing?"
MARC: Or when Rocket steals the batteries.
AUBREY: He's like, "I don't care. I don't care about anything."
MARC: "I stole the batteries just because I wanted to."
AUBREY: He was dealing with his own fear of having friends because of the friends that he lost. So he was pretending, he was trying to sabotage--
MARC: The friends he lost which were the other animals in movie two--
AUBREY: In movie three.
MARC: We're at movie three. Loses all his friends who are animals.
AUBREY: Right, so in movie two, it's a big thing about him. Like, I'm not a friend to anybody. And even Peter says to him, "What are you trying to do? Just have no friends, you trying to be an asshole to everybody?" And I think you could see that that was a protector, that was a protective mechanism to keep him from actually engaging in the type of friendship and the type of bond that you would need in a team to function as guardians of the galaxy. But they overcame it, but he was still working out his fucking trauma.
MARC: So, this is awesome. Again, this is the voice of She speaking, invisible and hidden. And yet, like the goddess always is, right in front of us, and actually suggesting a formula. So let's see if we can kind of unpack. It's clarifying just now between us, as we're inside here. So on the one hand, it's the call of the future. It's your unique self call. It's stepping in to realize, I am actually a guardian of the galaxy. I am needed by All That Is. It gives me energy. It doesn't give me energy to bypass the old trauma. It's only with that energy that I can now turn to the old trauma. I can then work the old trauma, step two. Then step three, which he suggested implicitly and explicitly, then I realized that in order to be the full guardian that I need to be, I actually have to heal that unique trauma vortex because when I heal that, then I become the most unimaginable guardian that I can be.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: It's a three-part process. That actually blows away where we are now. I mean, that is so subtle and profound. And it's actually way beyond where the field is.
AUBREY: Yeah. And, also the understanding that when you fall because of your trauma, and when you make those mistakes, and when you act selfishly, and when you act impetuously, or you move out of rage or grief or whatever that might be, that even though your brothers and sisters in your Ohana, in your chosen family, because this is a lot about chosen family, they may go, "What the fuck?" Which is exactly what Peter does. "You stole the batteries, now we got a thousand of these drones chasing us." Like, "What the fuck, why did you do that?" And there's lots of what-the-fuck moments but they all stick together. They hold each other, even though they go, "What the fuck?" because that's what a friend does. What the fuck. And they stick together.
MARC: Stick together is huge, so we're going to have to get to that. That's such a big theme itself. And let's call that, and we'll get to it. Evolutionary family and biological family, which is a theme in this movie. But even before we get to that, which is huge. Before we finish "Guardians" , I want to say one more thing about "Guardians". I just want to notice what we're noticing. So the poets often come before the philosophers. The poets or the mystics. And the poets sometimes are the unwilling and unconscious poets. She hijacks the movie. Mysticism lives in front of us in public, and now, we're pulling the veil back. So, it seems like a couple of guys having an excited conversation. But it's actually so crazy profound. She reveals herself in public, she shouts out the secret, but you can't hear it unless you're listening. So, I read 50 reviews of "Guardian", none of them talked about any of this. "Great movie." Well, whoa, slow. Let's listen. As the poet goes before the philosopher, the poet speaking as she goes before the psychologist, and actually suggests a much more subtle relationship to trauma, memory of the future, empowers you, fills you with energy, you then step two, turn to the trauma. You then work the trauma. Step three, your unique working of the trauma then reenergizes you to address the call of the future. This is far beyond anything written in virtually any of the psychological and therapeutic literature today. It's a big deal. So, maybe before, just closing that, let's just go back to "Guardians of the Galaxy", just the words themselves for a second. To be a guardian of the galaxy, that's shocking.
AUBREY: Or to not be a guardian of the galaxy is shocking.
MARC: So, wow. Now it starts to be big, right?
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: Here, I want to just tenderly and I'm almost shaking when I say it, because it's so big, and it's so beyond big. And the word big, like Aquinas says ‘via negativa’, you can't use a positive word to describe the mystery, because it's too big for a positive word. You can just say what it's not. So, this is not small. So, if I had to sum up, brother, and you and I have spent a lot of time on this in our deep dives. If I had to sum up the deepest realization of the interior sciences, it is that I in my deepest clarified self, participate in the field of Eros, and I can actually affect the field. The way they say it in the interior science is Dalai lama. Know that which is above. Minha it comes from you. And they have a fancier word for it. So I apologize for the fancy words. So everyone can just press delete on this, but I'll just give it to you anyways. It's called theurgy, which is just a fancy word for saying, we arouse, we pour power into the divine. The divine holds us but we also participate in the divine. And we're partners. God's not just father, God's not just mother. God's also lover, an evolutionary partner. We're partnered with the divine in guarding of the galaxy, not as a metaphor, not as a cute idea, not as a new age declaration, and it's not the Jews or the Christians or the Buddhist, every human being actually won't feel whole. And that's what you were saying. How could you not be a guardian? I actually don't feel alright unless I'm a hero and a guardian of the galaxy, because that's why I actually am. Wow.
AUBREY: Yeah. And the realization of that actually puts you on the right storyline. That's the only way that you get on the right storyline, and that's the only way that you can have that memory of the future of who you really are, that can help you give you all the power to inform how to move through and have the energy to move through your trauma, and have a community that can support that. It's actually the thing.
MARC: It's not the elite, it's not the rabbis, it's not the priests, it's not the captains of industry, it's not the shamans. And those are all important people. Those are not the psychologists, it's not the political leaders, and those are all we, but really, it's a self-actualizing cosmos made up of unique self-symphonies, in which every person is playing their instrument, which is the music of reality. And we're calling for it, the movie's calling for it. I mean, it's everything we believe in for kind of a planetary awakening and love through unique self-symphonies, played by the guardians of the galaxy, who are fucking traumatized heroes, just like all of us.
AUBREY: Yeah. And I just want to say it's not the politicians, and not the captains of industry--
MARC: And not the shamans.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. All of them. Because I have seen a move where some people say, fuck all the politicians, fuck all the leaders, they'll never do anything for us. It's only about the people. I'm like, well, they're people, and they actually have roles that they play and influence that they have. Even when I post about Bobby Kennedy, people are like, why does it even matter? That system is blah, blah, blah. The audacity to imagine that somebody, him as a person speaking truth, and coming from value and integrity wouldn't have an influence even if he can't change the system, because it's so rigged against him, even him trying has immense unimaginable value. But people want to say, oh, it doesn't matter, it's just about the people. No, all people, all the people.
MARC: So, let's make that distinction. It's a really crazy, important distinction you're making, meaning this is not to say that everyone has the same role. Because what often happens in lots of new age thought is, there's a leveling of distinction, and there's no appropriate creative people playing their own unique self-instrument. So, for example, Bobby Kennedy is supposed to run for president now. That's his job. And that is a critical unique self-role in the unique self-symphony. A kindergarten teacher in Montana, as she's working with her 13 people or he's working with his 13 people in the kindergarten class, and she intends not only to help those 13 kids, but in what she's doing there for that to impact the fabric of reality. So she has an evolutionary intention. She becomes not only local, but actually galactic. She becomes a guardian of the galaxy. So, I became the guardian of the galaxy by intention. And here's the crazy thing, and I would say, and you correct me. You know Bobby, I haven't met Bobby. But this is a guess. I'd say he would completely agree that what he's doing is insanely important. And it's not more important than that woman being a kindergarten teacher. They're each playing their instrument. Once I get that, then I get to also support people in giving their gift. I get to be excited. Oh, I'm not supposed to, like you and I were talking yesterday. I don't want to start a Marc Gafni podcast, it's not my job. There shouldn't be a Marc Gafni podcast. There shouldn't be. There should be an Aubrey Marcus podcast. We have different roles. So when I get in the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, I'm like, fucking awesome, right? Onnit. "Oh, God, I should have started Onnit." I don't think so. Not my job. I mean, I can bench press a lot more than you. Alright, that's not true, I lied. So, you lie occasionally, because you have to, right? But in other words, I'm a guardian of the galaxy in my way with my instrument, then I get to be fucking delighted. And so when people don't feel like they're a guardian of the galaxy, they don't feel like they have a role, then no politicians, we can't actually have real leadership, so we destroy leaders.
AUBREY: Yes, that's a huge issue. And Charles Eisenstein actually wrote an essay called "The Myth of Scale" which actually beautifully explains this phenomenon where people try to reduce the actual effect of what they do, and quantify it in a way to say, whether or not their actions are important. And what we're saying, and what we're saying for anybody who's attached to the field of value, is actually your relationship is one to one with the All That Is, because you're in the field.
MARC: Because you're in the field of value.
AUBREY: And so your participation, even if the ripples of that and causation don't have the same kind of reverberation of scale, it doesn't matter. Because the energy that you're putting into the story of this, as Charles would say, more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, or this possibility of a future, this future timeline, this new story that we're creating, the energy that you're putting towards it is all the one to one relationship, and it all fucking matters. And there are different roles that have different gravitas in this one limited dimension.
MARC: This is just the last sentence because it's so huge, as we wrap this. So, the democratization of greatness means that we each have an instrument in the unique self-symphony, and I'm not held accountable for not playing your instrument. My job is not to play your instrument. But I am held accountable by cosmos, by the field of value itself which I live inside of, because my instrument changes the music of the symphony. But you might think, oh, I've got this little piece to play. But if you've ever listened to a symphony missing one instrument, if you really understand the music, the music is completely different. So, when I have an evolutionary intention for the sake of the all, for the sake of all in for all life, then I actually change reality. And that's what it means to be an erotic mystic. To know I'm in the field of Eros, and my intention is for the sake of the all. And we each have our own instrument to play. So, we are literally metaphysically, mystically, in terms of the interior sciences, we are literally guardians of the galaxy, and who fucking had the impedance, and the hutzpah if I can use a Yiddish word to say this, not the president, not an association of priests and rabbis. Actually She spoke. And She said, "I'm going to make these three movies." What are they going to be called? "Guardians of the Galaxy". And Marvel thought, and Mr. Gunn, and blessings to him thought, oh, there's a new project coming up. And Stan Lee was working on it when the comic book first came out in 1969. And it was like a good opening to make some money. No, no. She sees this project, and she puts this in the center of culture, traumatized heroes. We're all traumatized heroes, we're all traumatized. But actually, we can take our trauma, we can pour it in, access the memory of the future. We are all literally guardians of the galaxy. Wow.
AUBREY: Yep. And another theme of "Guardians of the Galaxy" as you walked back in to take your seat on this podcast, you talked a little shit to me. And the guardians actually exhibit this quality of friendship and family.
MARC: They do.
AUBREY: They fuck with each other all the time.
MARC: They shit talk all the time.
AUBREY: They shit talk all the time. And if I know anything about family, that's a part of fucking family.
MARC: That brings us, so our first theme as "Guardians of the Galaxy" this new vision of trauma. And our second theme is exactly complete that, that there's this new idea, this new vision of family. And there's actually, one of the things we've done, and I'm not sure what you're going to decide to do, brother, but maybe we'll get to offer people in the show notes like these, I mean, as our team has put together kind of like, we've recut the movie. We've taken themes and shown where a theme moves across all three movies, and we've done it with like 10 themes. So, one of them is, drumroll, this new notion, which we're going to call evolutionary family. There's evolutionary family and there's biological family. And there's this moment, this very gorgeous moment, and it's the beginning of the first volume. They can't become guardians of the galaxy until they first love each other. So what really happens is, and let's just do the storyline just for a second. For anyone who hasn't seen it in the first movie, you've got these different people. Drax the Destroyer is in prison, because he's in prison. And then, Gamora is off doing whatever she's doing. Nebula is off doing what she's doing. Rocket's a bounty hunter. Peter's kind of found this orb. He's not even sure what it is. And they all somehow get thrown together in prison, where they kind of find each other and they somehow decide, oh, my God, we're going to take care of each other. They just meet and something happens between them. We've got this clip in the beginning where they're all walking in, and they don't really know each other. And then something happens as they talk to each other. It hasn't happened yet. And then they each get sent to their own cells. And then there's--
AUBREY: Well, what you're seeing also is all of the projections of other, and all of the stories--
MARC: Right, they have about each other.
AUBREY: That they have about each other which have not been actually breached so that they can actually get the intimate truth about who they actually are, and start to love each other. But what comes first is their stories.
MARC: It's all surface, the stories. And then a little later, and maybe we'll get to look at the clip. But we'll just say what happens there for a second is Peter hears that they're taking Gamora to kill her, because she's Thanos's daughter. And he just says... Somehow, some intimacy is created between them. They recognize each other in the beginning in some way that they can't even understand, and they don't even say anything. And he says, fuck, we're in prison, I don't even know this broad, but I'm stepping in. And he steps in, and there's this exchange between him and Drax who wants to kill her because she's Thanos's daughter who supports Ronan who killed his wife. Something happens and they become guardians of each other. They become friends, but they become more than friends. They become family.
AUBREY: And it's interesting because this is like the micro-purpose mission. Their mission here is to protect each other and get out of prison. But it is very much tribal at this point. They don't care about the rest of the people in the prison.
MARC: Right now they just want to protect each other and get out of prison.
AUBREY: They just want to protect each other. And they're not going around saying, who else might be innocent in this fair prison here? They're just like, no, we see something in each other, we want to get out together. So it's part self-interest, and part some instinct, and part She whispering something greater by bringing them together.
MARC: They decide to take care of each other. And then they realize oh, there's this orb, and Ronin, and if the orb gets to Ronan who brings it to Thanos, a whole planet is going to be destroyed. Now that we're guardians of each other, okay, let's handle this. So, something happens in which when they come together, and they come together not just as friends but as family. They make this decision that they're family. And maybe we'll just take a look, one clip where he says we're not friends, we're family, This is where Drax is talking in one of the movies. And there's like 10 clips like this, which work through the movies where they keep saying, okay, we're family. And this theme of family moves through all three movies. There's this thing, we're family.
AUBREY: Yeah, so that's from episode two. That's the second one. So they had to go through a lot of shit before they got to that point.
MARC: They went through a lot of shit.
AUBREY: They had a very kind of loose arrangement. They were feeling each other out. They escaped from Kiln, the prison. And then they--
MARC: And they gradually become family, until there's this moment where, you're my sister, you're my brother, and at some point Gamora says, "I'll be grateful to die among family." And Peter says, you're my sister, And there's this, maybe eight different times in the movie, and then little Groot becomes kind of their kid. He becomes the kid of the family. And there's this sense, they become unfuckable to each other. And they're both friends and family together, best friends and family, like merging the best. And it's that theme that runs through all of the movies. The word family comes up about 18, 20 times in the movie. I just noticed again and again, they say, we're family, we're family, we're family. So I just want to just talk about that idea for a second. We've got a biological family. And then we've got this chosen family.
AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, the Hawaiians have a great word for it, they call it your Ohana.
MARC: Your Ohana.
AUBREY: And this is something that I think is important to land and culture. The guardians are well, there is not even really, perfectly biological family. Gamora and Nebula are not actually, but they're at least in the structure of a family, but they've chosen each other. And they're bound by a common mission. And they've gone through initiations and challenges. They've seen what's inside each other. And they're working out these family dynamics.
MARC: This is a very big deal, that you're saying, this ohana. I love that phrase. So, that actually there's two kinds of family. There's a biological family. And that's really important, and biology’s a big deal. But as the gender people point out correctly, biology is real, masculine and feminine are real. And then there's something that's also beyond biology where I can be both something deeper. I can integrate my masculine and feminine. And so how can we understand that gender thing? Which is a big conversation. They got one intuition they got right, which is that biology is real. You never leave it behind but it's not the end of the story. That's actually an interesting intuition. So, biological family is totally real. And you and I just went through a deep story with biological family with your dad.
AUBREY: Yep.
MARC: And there's the family that I choose. And this is modeling something in culture. And again, it's been modeled by this movie, which is this new notion that we actually have an evolutionary family. That it's actually family. And this is the audacious thing that people are afraid to say, that actually, I don't just have a biological family that I'm madly committed to. I actually have an evolutionary family that are not just my buddies. It's not just I've got a bunch of friends. No, no, there's this group of people that I'm unfuckable with. I share my money, I share my resources, I share my heart, I share my time, I lay it down for them. So this is introducing this massively original, gorgeous idea. In the lineage, they call it soul root family, you call it ohana from the Hawaiian tradition. Luria calls it in the 16th century, your soul root family. So to be able to know, find my evolutionary family, and that actually, you can't go through life without an evolutionary family. And those are the people I can share my deepest heart's desire with. Those are the people I can take my unique risk with. Those are the people I can be broken and whole with at the same time, in ways that I often can't be with my family, and that that's completely real. It's not an illusion. So, who's put this at the center of culture again? The Goddess, She, speaking to "Guardians of the Galaxy" places in all three movies the central notion of people willing to live and die for each other. We think we live and die for our son or daughter or mother or father. No, no, you live and die for your evolutionary family. That evolution of family is not just, we like each other, but we have a mission together. We have a vision together. We're whole mates, in some sense. That conversation that we haven't yet had in a podcast, but this notion that we're whole mates. We're not just role mates, we're not just soul mates, we're whole mates, this new notion of partnership, where we're in service to the larger whole, which is not just between two people but it's that a family can be a whole mate family. Wow.
AUBREY: Yeah. The backdrop of this series of movies is they have external crises that evoke these internal challenges that allow them to be trustable. Because the big key issue with a chosen family is trust. It's an issue with any family, chosen or biological. If it's family, trust is the strength of the family, and do you trust them? And you only really know if you trust somebody if you've seen how they react in the shit. Like, so sometimes if you're out with your friends, and then there's a fight that's going to happen or something like that, which of your friends show up and got your back? And which head for the back door, and is like, hope you guys figure it out. I'm out of here, I'm going to save myself. And there's all these moments. But those things are rare in our culture thankfully, praise She. We're not in a time of kinetic warfare all the time, and we're not in roving bands of thugs and street fights. There are places in the world where it's like that, unfortunately, still. So, as I've evolved my own ohana, an evolutionary family, you have to choose to go into hard situations together, medicine journeys, sweat lodges, breathwork, anything that's going to actually evoke something that's really hard, and then see how someone responds. And sometimes life will create those situations for you.
MARC: Or we can choose a mission, right? In other words, we can choose, so yes--
AUBREY: Well, that all nests underneath. The mission has to be chosen. But still, once the mission is chosen, you have to test the trust. And the only way to test the trust--
MARC: Is to go deep.
AUBREY: Is to go deep and have initiations. And we can't rely on the external world to give us the initiations to build the trust. All tribes had these different rituals. Sometimes it was diving off a tree with a bungee cord made of vine. Sometimes it was putting your hand in a kitchen mitt of thatched grass that was filled with bullet ant stingers on one side. My sister Huaira told me a story about an initiation where they draw two stingray spines through your tongue with white threads and you drip blood into a waterfall. And after somebody goes through that, you're like, oh yeah, I trust you, I trust you. I trust that when the pressure gets intense, when it gets hot, that you're going to actually stand. And I think in many ways, for many of us, the pandemic, the lockdowns, the pressure put externally, a lot of us got to see okay, who's going to stand with us? And who's going to run?
MARC: So, this is big. It seems like there's two stages here that we're seeing in the kind of Goddess speaking through guardians of the galaxy, and in our own experience. So, let me let me kind of pick up from your lead, brother, and share kind of personally. It's kind of 2006. I go through a major life trauma, and my biological family, and the people I expect it to be around are not quite around. They don't quite show up, they can't quite grok it. And then these other people come to the fore. And I remember at that moment in 2006, Ram Dass called me. He was in Maui then, and we had just spent a bunch of time together. He's like, "I'm with you, man." And then actually, the Dass brothers I guess, Krishna Das, who's a beautiful chanter, calls in and says, "Hey, man, I'm with you." And then this person and that person, people call from all over the world, who I had some beautiful encounters with, but never really expected to go deeper with. And it turned out, these are the people that showed up. Diane showed up, and Michael showed up, and Sally showed up, and Dalit showed up. And all of a sudden, this evolutionary family gathers around, and they stand. And I'm like, wow. And I remember someone, mad blessings to them. They've actually both passed away. But two people from my biological family, my brother and my sister-in-law who are beautiful, beautiful people and have both passed since, and may their memory be blessed. They call me and they say, "Yeah, we don't need to know anything. Just know that we think you're a great guy, and have a good life." And I said, "No, no, let's talk about it. So we can actually work with us." "No, no, no, no, no, we love you, we love you, whatever," and hung up the phone and that was it for a few years. In other words, this kind of perfunctory expression of love, but no real standing. And I'm like, fuck, what happened to biological family? And I realized, oh. This group of people gathered around me who were evolutionary family. It feels what the goddess is saying here is that we honor biological family. I want to just first say that. And our biological family is not an accident. And reality intended us to have that biological family. So there's stuff to be worked out, and there's loyalty and there's devotion, and there's transformations that totally need to happen there. So, big blessing to that. But it's insufficient. There's the second level of family that is part of the new human and new humanity, which is really family by choice. We actually choose our family. And so, what you're saying is, okay, so to know that that's real, we need to go through these really deep initiations. So that's the big, huge yes on that. And then I think, what the goddess is adding through "Guardians of the Galaxy" and we need to have a mission together. So, it's two things. Crazy deep initiations. And two, we're called, we see a future together, there's something that we need to do together. Does that make sense?
AUBREY: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, really, when you personalize this, which is, I think the invitation of all of these movies and myths, all of the kind of ideas that we're offering, you start to think about those moments where you have to decide between your mission or the kind of small self-desires of the person who you call family. And those are the tough choices that a guardian has to make. It's a question of how you honor both the relationships that you have, the structure that you have, and how you also serve the mission, and how you resolve those kinds of conflicts of, alright, I know that you want me to go to your niece's quinceañera or whatever, But however, I got this big thing over here to do, and so you have to kind of work all of these things, but it only makes sense. And the only way to resolve those is if you all actually truly understand. So, it goes back again to understand the greater mission, and see that, and understand the difficulty of the decisions. And I think people get very frustrated with each other because the mission that we share isn't explicit. We don't know that everybody in our family is on the same mission. So, it's always a comparison game where it's like, well, you did this with them, and you're not doing this with me. But we're not in this shared value structure, but--
MARC: And so, we get lonely in biological families. Can I just say that just straight out? We get really lonely in a biological family, because we actually don't share a vision of value often. We're not called together by the future, and we're not quite sure that people are really going to stand with us. So, we need to raise up biological family at a higher level and transform it for sure. But maybe what we're saying here, and I think we are, is that we need to take our Ohana, your word, our evolutionary family, our soul root family really seriously.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: That actually, that all of us who are engaged in this conversation right now need to ask, who's my evolutionary family? Who are those five people? Let me gather my evolutionary family and know who they are. And actually, the only way I can actually transcend loneliness, is to actually link hands with my evolutionary family, go through those deep initiations you're describing together, be willing to go deep, and then look together towards the future. Then we begin to have the self-organizing world of these evolutionary families that are playing their part in the unique self-symphony, and the world actually becomes a different place. A world that has evolutionary families looking to heal and transform reality, to do what we call a Tikun, a fixing, that's literally a different world. I mean, just imagine this for a second. World of biological families, which is basically win lose metrics of the family. The family has to survive the family. For the sake of its own survival, the racism of the family. Family has to survive. Why? Because the family has to survive. What if we change that? Yes, biological family, but actually, the world is organized by evolutionary families that are bonded to each other, because they chose each other, they were allured to each other. We go through these deep initiations, and then we say, okay, this is our fixing to do, we're guardians of the galaxy. Literally, Aub, that would change the source code of reality. We'd literally live in a different fucking planet. And that's what the Goddess is calling for.
AUBREY: Yeah, and one of the great challenges we face is that there are those that have a different vision of how to govern the cosmos, and how to actually control reality. So, there's really in many ways, not to be reductionist and call it two different sides, because everything is complex. However, there's the forces that are driving towards total dystopian control, control of everything. The transhumanist, surrender all of your sovereignty, everybody just becomes basically a drone in service of one. All slaves to one master, to use the computer term, not the human terms of that. And then there's another thing that says, no, no, no, we're all in service of all life, cosmo-erotic humanism. And these are the forces that actually the guardians are going up against. So now we're starting to--
MARC: So this is a whole new theme.
AUBREY: So this is a whole new theme. Now we're starting to get to, okay, who are the guardians? They've established--
MARC: Who are the guardians going up against?
AUBREY: And who were they going up against? What is the nature and quality and fabric of the thing that they're going up against? And that evolves.
MARC: Drumroll. Theme three, that's a new theme. Who's the enemy? That's fantastic. So let's do it. Movie one, Ronan. Typical, classical, evil motherfucker. Let's take him down. Okay, we got that. But it gets really interesting in two and three. So, in two, it's this narcissistic dad. But it's this dad who is this celestial being who says to Peter, "You're immortal with me. It's our job," he says, "It's our job. Only we can perfect the universe. No one else can. And if we don't do it, I'm going to destroy all the rest of the world. It's our purpose. There's no greater purpose than you and me planting ourselves across the cosmos, as we are the perfect authors of reality as the two immortals." Whoa.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's a one-world government kind of mentality.
MARC: One-world government kind of mortality.
AUBREY: Except less the kind of fascist, jackboots, guns, killing type of Mussolini move, and more on what we're actually experiencing now. Total control and domination by one, it's always one at the top. In the game of power and control, there's always the one at the very top.
MARC: And it looks like a beautiful planet on the second movie. It's Volume Two, beautiful planet, looks beautiful. It's sweet, it's lovely. There's lots of pseudo Eros. They're on the planet, they see these popping balloons and Drax says, it's so beautiful, "What a beautiful planet." And yet, the entire thing is controlled by a very, very small group that basically are taking all the decisions, and there's actually no sense of freedom, and there's no sense of value. And if it doesn't work, then those top people, they take it down and they change the game. Now in movie three, it's the same thing.
AUBREY: Same thing.
MARC: The High Evolutionary, who's doing evolutionary experiments. Everyone around him is kind of an augmented, enhanced, AI-implanted being. And this High Evolutionary says, someone says, "God." He says, "There's no God, that's why I've got to step in." And he says, "It's my job to perfect reality, and that's what I'm here to do." And he cites this old song, which says, the point of the song is, we've got to take biological reality, and then turn it into this perfection. And along the way, he kills and slaughters any experiment that doesn't work. And any experimental work that doesn't work, he razes and kills everyone and starts again. Because he's madly committed to this perfect vision that he's going to create. Whoa.
AUBREY: Hitlerian.
MARC: Hitlerian, but paradoxically, so much creepier in a certain sense, right?
AUBREY: Totally.
MARC: Because here he is doing these experiments. And Rocket is a product of his experiments. Rocket has a number. And Rocket somehow escapes, whatever that story is. So, you've got this image of, we're going to perfect all human beings but the perfector is the oppressor. As we move towards augmentation, I mean, we never had a world in which the wealthy who always thought they were better than anyone else, actually will be. Because we're going to actually move towards a world where only a very, very narrow percent of reality can augment themselves, can enhance their own cognition, can evolve themselves, have access to all the best resources. And so, you're going to have this little tiny percent of the world that are actually advanced and augmented, and actually controlling the system in which 99 and a half of the other percent won't have access to any of those resources. And they get thrown out.
AUBREY: I think one of the points of the film, though, is that they actually won't be better. Because the reason that Rocket was better than all of the augmentations was not because of his augmentations, it was because there was something in the unique self of Rocket, the raccoon. Some way in which She whispered through him that was better and higher. And that's what drove the High Evolutionary mad. Better and higher than all of his perfect AI augmentation technologies.
MARC: There was something in Rocket where rocket actually becomes his own intelligence. And he's able to figure out something that the High Evolutionary is not, and that therefore he can't control him. And the High Evolutionary goes mad. And in the end, when they take the High Evolutionary down, Rocket says, he says, "I just wanted to perfect everything." And he says, "No, no, you hated the world." And so there's this sense--
AUBREY: Which means, you hated yourself.
MARC: Which means you hated yourself. So, let's see if we could put this on the table, because this is a very, very big deal. So, there's one group that says, let the world just be as it is, there's nothing we can do. Don't step in, don't try and fix it. Don't try and perfect it. That's group one. Group two are, what we're going to call the utopians, which say, okay, we're going to fix it, we're going to heal it. We're going to take responsibility for it. So, the movie is very interesting is critiquing the second group and saying, man utopianism is crazy dangerous. And that's true. There's a history of dangerous utopianism. We've talked in other conversations about BF Skinner in "Walden Two" who visions a utopian community called Walden Two, which he completely radically and absolutely controls. And we've talked about the tragedy of techno-feudalism, or of the Klaus Schwab world of the World Economic Forum, which is basically, okay, this is the great reset. This is the moment to actually, and there's an enormous amount of data supporting this. This is the moment where we're going to actually perfect the world. We're going to augment, we're going to enhance, we're going to cognitively change, we're going to have AI become the oracle. There's a lot of moves that can be made in that direction. And this is this massive critique of that direction. But here's the problem. We do need to perfect the world. We do need to step in. So, what's the difference between, and I think this is the challenge here, which the movie didn't get. What is the difference? Okay, go.
AUBREY: It maybe kind of got it. Because the one line which is just the blow-away line of film three is when they were actually trying to cast judgment on the hands that made the animals, and there was a line that said, "What about the hands behind the hands that made you?
MARC: So first, there's this depression. He says, "Well, what about the hands that made us?" Meaning we're all made by these utopians trying to control us. And then the deeper line is that you're just pointing to it, but what about the hands that made the hands that made us? Your story is your story. You're in the right story.
AUBREY: Right. And that's pointing to. The thing that breaks all of this utopian, this dystopian utopianism if you want to call it. The thing that breaks it is when you see that the only force that can actually evolve humanity and the cosmos in the most perfected way is the force, is She, is God.

MARC: So, this is where it changes. I think like a billion percent, I think this is so crazy important. In other words, we do need a new vision of a new human and new humanity. And one of the things that happens is, a kind of World Economic Forum utopianism that gets attacked appropriately by multiple forces. But then we're left with, okay, let's not try and change the world. We do want to change the world. We do want to affect healing and transformation. And the difference is, do we do that from a place in which we're in the field of value?
AUBREY: Or do we do it from a place like the villain in number two, Ego?
MARC: Or like we do it as Ego.
AUBREY: Which is separate self.
MARC: Or as the High Evolutionary. So, we've got Ego who's the villain in number two, we've got the High Evolutionary, who's the kind of World Economic Forum villain in number three. Both of those are tragic forms of utopianism. And so, we need to move to a post-tragedy utopianism. We don't reject utopianism. Utopianism means, and you quoted your friend, Charles. Actually I just met Charles, lovely man. His notion of, very beautiful phrase, the most... What's this phrase?
AUBREY: The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
MARC: I love that. The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is we would call, we call it in cosmo-erotic humanism, homo amor. We go from Homo sapien to homo amor. And homo amor is the new human who knows I'm an irreducible, unique expression of the love, intelligence and love beauty of all that is, that lives in me, as me and through me, that never was, is, or will be other than through me. And as such, I can give my unique gift and you can give your unique gift and we can join hands, and we can come together in unique self-symphony. We can participate in the field of value as guardians of the galaxy and in healing and transforming reality. Fuck yes. So, here's the deal. There's a fuck yes to that. And this is where the movie goes a little, it points towards that. It says, yeah, and it's great. Wow. Wow, so it's like this? It's like there's two images in the movie. There's essentially villain utopianism, where we don't acknowledge our own trauma. We hold ourselves out as perfect, we're going to perfect everyone. There's no unique personhood. We get rid of people who don't fit the overall plan. The whole thing becomes genetically engineered as it were. That's one. Then there's the other vision of those that transforms the world who are the guardians of the galaxy. Who says they're also utopians, they're saying we're going to take responsibility for the galaxy? We're going to heal shit. We're going to own our trauma. And our imperfection.
AUBREY: Exactly, and how are we going to do it? So, when they actually, at the very end, and of course, if you haven't seen the movie, we're smashing through all spoilers.
MARC: We are. We are.
AUBREY: So, that'll be in the intro of this, whatever. But at the end, and this is going to lead into another theme, which is very important. Alright, so they offload from that giant ship all of the different animal species. So lower cognition species meeting super high cognition species, meeting augmented species at this critical moment. And the only thing for them to do is, they don't just sit down and have a big conversation because they'd be talking to raccoons and otters and all. What do they do? They put on some music and they dance. They get back to that movement of Eros that's moving through the body connecting them all to a shared field of value, and dance is the thing that does it.
MARC: I mean, drumroll. Theme four is dance, and we've got to dance into dance, because dance is a huge thing throughout the entire movie. It's like a huge theme. But just bracket for 10 seconds in dance, because I just want to close the thing that you said before that was so fucking good. So you created the trouble because you said these two different great things. I want to get the first thing though, for a second, which is we're saying something crazy, crazy critical. Meaning we do want to be utopians. We do want to create and transform reality. The difference is, we can only deal with two things. One, we own our own traumas, we own our own imperfection. There's a spirituality of Imperfection.
AUBREY: Yeah, we bring our shadow into the light. All of our shit.
MARC: We own our shadow, we own our shit, it's why we love Cohen when he sings the holy in the broken "Hallelujah". There's a holy in a broken "Hallelujah" and there's a blaze of light in every word. And we own that. And you can't trust a person who doesn't own their holy in broken "Hallelujah". And that's one and the second is, there's a field of value. So when the High Evolutionary says, "There's no God, that's why I had to step in," it's not about a pre-modern, egocentric or ethnocentric God who happens to be homophobic who's owned by one nation. We always say the God you don't believe in doesn't exist. It's God as the field of value. That actually the High Evolutionary has to bow like we all do to the intrinsic valleys of cosmos that live in us. And we want to align with the field of value, we want to evolve the field of value. But there's the good, there's the truth, there is the beautiful, there's fairness, there's harmony. And in the movie, they know intuitively those values. There's the sense in the movie of value that runs through the movie. And so, when Yondu meets Sylvester Stallone at a disreputable joint, and Sylvester sees Yondu there and he says, "This guy's here, this is the wrong kind of disreputable joint, I can't eat here," and he leaves. And he says to the club owner, "99 categories of Ravagers will not eat here, because you're serving this guy." And Yondu is like... Yondu goes crazy. And he says, "You broke the code. You dealt in children, and we don't do that." And Yondu says, "I tried to explain to you." He says, "You just got rich, you broke the code," and he walks out. He said, "You broke our hearts, you broke the code." And then when Yondu actually becomes a daddy, he actually stands with Peter, and he says, "That guy's your father, but not your daddy" and he gives him the one mask you need to get off the planet in Volume Two, and he gives up his life. And oh my god, he stands for him. And he dies and he saves his son's life. Then Rocket says, "I sent word to the Ravagers." And so, Sylvester Stallone had said to Yondu in that first scene, "Your funeral is going to be nothing. No one's going to come."
AUBREY: "You'll never see the lights. You'll never hear the horns."
MARC: "You'll never hear the horns." And then all the Ravagers come, because they realize, "Oh, actually, Yondu didn't disappoint us."
AUBREY: He redeemed himself, which also--
MARC: He stood for value.
AUBREY: He stood for value. And also, the Ravagers show that redemption is always possible.
MARC: That's a huge theme in the movie, right? There's always a second chance. And actually, who does it? Is it Groot or Rocket? They save Adam's life. Adam was created by the Sovereigns in movie two to kill the guardians of the galaxy. He is created at the end of movie two. And he goes into movie three in order to kill Peter and the guardians. And then Adam somehow evolves, and by the end of the movie, he's joined the Guardians of the Galaxy. But there's key moment--
AUBREY: And he saves Quill's life.
MARC: He saves Quill's life. And then when I think Groot saves Adam, he says, "Why are you saving me?" He says, "Because everyone gets a second chance." And that's a value. It's a value.
AUBREY: And without that value, everything would have been lost.
MARC: Everything would have been lost. So there's this deep field--
AUBREY: Well, at least Peter's life would have been lost. But yes.
MARC: Crazy, right? So there's this deep field of value that lives through the movie that's always happening, they're always standing for value in some way. So even though on the one hand, the movie gets caught in post modernity, and they're like, we don't believe in value. Sylvester Stallone says at the end of movie two, let's steal some shit. End of movie one, Peter says, let's do some good, some bad, what the fuck.
AUBREY: Well, in some ways--
MARC: They mock value?
AUBREY: Well, I don't know. They've just created their own particular field of value. There is the eternal field of value, then there's an evolving field of value. And it seems like, and I do believe in the just, the true, the beautiful that there's kind of a universality of value. But there's also this kind of code that can exist. Like you could say, thou shalt not kill, but if you're a Spartan, I wouldn't say that the Spartan was outside of the field of value.
MARC: Yeah, I get you, brother. We're going to fight in this one. I get you.
AUBREY: So what I'm saying is in this movie, they're in this Buccaneer.
MARC: Insane rogues.
AUBREY: They have a subtle field of value, which may not be our field of value. It actually is a wrong thing to steal the batteries from the Sovereigns even if they're being an asshole.
MARC: That's right. So you're talking about Rocket who steals--
AUBREY: Rocket who steals the battery.
MARC: And it gets him to trauma, “I did it just because I wanted to”.
AUBREY: Right. So, they have just kind of this pirate, buccaneer, maverick, outlaw--
MARC: They've got this outlaw, let's steal shit.
AUBREY: Different field of value that may not be the field of value of She, but I actually think that the field of value stands in the film. It's just different than what we might say is the highest field of value.
MARC: Let's play for a second. Totally, yes, yes, yes. And there's this other theme in the movie, which is, it's just not fucking postmodern cool to kind of stand in a field of value in which, hey, you don't steal shit. There's this great moment when Peter says, and I think we're now in movie three, says, "Let's go save our friend." And Drax says, "Yeah, let's go kill people." Peter says, "No, no, let's not kill people." And he says, "Okay, we'll just kill one person no one likes." Which is, of course, Dostoyevski, "Crime and Punishment" is all about, can you kill Raskolnikov? Raskolnikov asks this question, "Can I just kill that one old woman that no one knows and likes?" Dostoyevski is saying, is there a field of value? So, the movie is actually playing with this very deep idea. And the movie is so, in kind of number two, in its tragic mode. It's so postmodern, that it's just like, yeah, fuck value. And then value comes in on the other side, and kind of level three, post tragic, they completely stand for value, and they're willing to fucking die for value all through the movie. And the value is their love of each other, and their love of the galaxy. So, it's almost like the way they view classical value is as this pre-modern authoritarian, old religion stuff. So they're kind of charactering value as that--
AUBREY: And rebelling against it.
MARC: And correctly rebelling against it. But the movie hasn't yet gotten to, and it's utterly necessary, and the movie doesn't cover this. How would we actually articulate a shared grammar of value as a context for our diversity? And that's the project you and I are working on, which is critical. And the movie ducks around that because its level two tragic is, yeah, fuck value. Then level three, Goddess speaks, "No, no, value is fucking real." And it hasn't yet articulated the shared grammar of value, which we need. We can't actually heal a disorder unless we have a shared grammar of value. So, the movie ducks that one.
AUBREY: Yeah, in a way, although my sense of leaving it was actually that it was an adjusted field of value from what my own field of value would be. It wasn't exactly that, but also, it was not a field of value that I found repulsive in a certain way.
MARC: It was cool.
AUBREY: It was cool. I also felt like it was consistent, those consistent. There was a consistency to it.
MARC: And they kind of knew they were off also.
AUBREY: And they knew they were off, they acknowledged that they were off.
MARC: And it was almost like the outlaws, like Sylvester Stallone thing was, the whole fucking world's corrupt so we're going to steal some shit. The Ravagers, they were called by these guardians. I mean, the Ravagers were not Guardians of the Galaxy. It was the guardians that called them to be more. Like that?
AUBREY: Yep. Yep, totally.
MARC: Like that, right?
AUBREY: Totally.
MARC: Crazy. So let's dance.
AUBREY: Yeah, dance.
MARC: Let's dance. So we got a value theme. Four, now, let's go back to the one that you picked up before which is dance.
AUBREY: Yeah, which requires actually, this understanding of Eros, God, a field of value, which I do think is intact in their own field of value. But it requires this gnosis of the energy of life that moves through us, as us, and with us. And you're not really dancing until you surrender to that. Otherwise, you're just moving around and showing off. That's like the core tenant of ecstatic dance, that you have to surrender to the music that's being moved through your body.
MARC: That is so crazy beautiful what you're saying. And I'm going to just breathe for a second. I just apologize to everyone, I know we're racing through these movies. If you've seen these movies, you get all the references we're making. So we're going to--
AUBREY: If you haven't seen these movies, you're fucked.
MARC: But if you see them, you see we're weaving them into one tapestry. So let's just weave for a second. I'm going to slow down, we've moved too fast. Let's just play for a second, okay? Dance moves through all the movies, number one. So there's this moment at the beginning of movie three where Drax says to Mantis, who's starting to dance, "Only idiots dance." Now we go back--
AUBREY: Which is like eighth grade, middle school, when people are trying to be cool.
MARC: Trying to be cool. And then Drax says earlier, he says, "I love my wife because she didn't dance. Nothing would make her dance." And he says to him, "And you're into Gamora, Gamora doesn't dance. There's two kinds of people in the world. There's people who dance who are basically pathetic. And then there's people who don't dance." So that's the theme. That's three scenes. Then you've got this move in movie one, where Peter says to Gamora, he starts to dance with her on the balcony. And she says, "Why'd you go back for that Walkman?" Says, "Well, that Walkman my mother gave me the day that she died," and he does this really erotic thing. For him, it's the most erotic thing he can do. He takes this Walkman and puts it in her ears. And she says, "Wow, that's really pleasant. I like those sounds." And she can't quite get to dance. It's just movie one. And she says, "Fuck this pelvic sorcery." She didn't say the fuck this, but says your pelvic sorcery, like no. So it's pelvic sorcery. There's not yet magic of dance. Then we're kind of at the end of the first movie, and where kind of dance is coming on board. Drax is facing forward, and little Groot is kind of dancing kind of behind Drax.
AUBREY: Well, that's movie two.
MARC: Is that the end of movie two?
AUBREY: Movie two is where little Groot kind of--
MARC: So it's the end of movie two. It's the end of movie two. It's the very end of movie two. That's right. It's the very end of movie two. I apologize, thank you. It's the very end of movie two, and he's like dancing, little Groot. Really dancing. Then Drax looks behind him and he stops dancing. Drax looks forward, he starts dancing. And so, Drax is not yet into dancing. And then movie three opens with the same little group. There's a monster, they're fighting this monster.
AUBREY: So movie two opens with little Groot dancing, and they're fighting that cosmic beast.
MARC: Okay, so we've got to get the movie straight here. So that means the end of movie X is with Drax sitting, and little Groot's behind him. Which I believe is the end of movie one. I think I got it right. It's the end of movie one. Drax is sitting, little Groot's behind him because big Groot has protected them against. That's the end of movie one. Then the beginning of movie two--
AUBREY: Little Groot is dancing.
MARC: Right, so it was right. Is little Groot dancing. And there's this monster, and he kind of dances through the monster. So you get this image of like dancing is like a real thing. And then again, Peter dances with Gamora but this time she dances.
AUBREY: And that's in movie three.
MARC: That is the second dance with Gamora. So it's in one of the movies.
AUBREY: So, if I can track this dancing--
MARC: There's this dancing theme, yeah.
AUBREY: So, I think one of the significant moments that we're passing over actually, so dance is kind of throughout all of one. But one of the reasons that Star-Lord--
MARC: All of one and all of two, totally.
AUBREY: It's in all of them. But one of the reasons Star-Lord is Star-Lord is actually in that final showdown with Ronan--
MARC: That's another big dance moment.
AUBREY: He actually has the intuition to dance, and that actually buys them the time to save the world.
MARC: And he says, you know what, let's look at that clip for a second. That's a great clip to look at. Let's look at that clip of Star-Lord Peter Quill, turns to Ronan who's about to destroy Xandar and he starts to dance. It's a fantastic scene.
AUBREY: Just before we play it, the interesting thing about this is, he understands there's one thing that he can beat Ronan at for sure. And Ronan does not like to be beat. So, like this is the hidden intuition from Star-Lord, is that actually the destroyer archetype, the Ronan archetype which is actually Drax, I'll talk about this with Drax as well, because Drax turns from destroyer to something else when he finally dances. But the hidden intuition is there, that there's a special power for somebody who can dance. And if somebody's the most powerful destroyer and they can't dance, they're missing something–
MARC: They can't access it.
AUBREY: And you'll always be able to beat them at that. And the fact that he challenged him to a dance contest, and then that kind of threw Ronan off because actually, he knew that he'd been beat. It's like Johnny Rosin up your bow, play that fiddle hard moment.
MARC: Totally. So there's like 10 dance scenes. And as you already pointed to, we'll look at this. We already pointed to. We'll figure out two and three, and three and two, but basically in one and two, there's Gamora and Peter dancing. And in two, he says, and don't tell Drax. Gamora says, "Don't tell Drax." And then there's this key scene that you're referring to, is a great scene.
AUBREY: He just laid down the gauntlet and said, "You just got served, Ronan." "You just got served."
MARC: And the next line, he says, "I was distracting you." But actually, the writers themselves kind of put in, I'm distracting you. But actually, this theme of dance runs through the whole thing. But one more crazy scene at the very end, when Drax is surrounded by the group of kids, the movie climaxes with Drax dancing.
AUBREY: Who vowed, Drax vowed--
MARC: Only idiots dance.
AUBREY: Drax vowed he would never dance. And also, Drax carried the same moniker as Ronan, the destroyer.
MARC: I love that.
AUBREY: Ronan the Destroyer, Drax the Destroyer. The destroyer is disconnected from the field of Eros, from the field of value. Therefore, disconnected from the field of dance, and therefore can't actually live their unique self-story in the symphony of all life, because they're not connected to all life. So, this is the ultimate transformation of Drax when he actually dances.
MARC: So, anthro-ontology that we're talking about, anthro-ontology is when I know that value lives in my body. When I dance, how do I know what to do? So how do I know that my foot's going to fall in the right place? Because I trust the knowing and the wisdom of my body that actually dance works, that I'm aligned with this movement of the cosmos, that actually is right and sacred and beautiful and good that actually moves through me. And that's what you were pointing to in the beginning. This notion that dance is the field of value. That when you dance, dance is the way into the field of value. You and I were talking about this yesterday, and late at night, I was looking in the library at this wild text from the 16th century in the lineage. And I just wanted to share it with you. We didn't have a chance to talk. So, this text reads, the feminine and masculine pole of the Godhead. I'm translating from Aramaic. “The feminine and the masculine pole of the Godhead are brought into union”. “Through every movement of every limb of the body in the dance”. “When the human being becomes a chariot for the Goddess”. So, it's wild. And then another master says, “you can't taste any pleasure until you taste the pleasure of one Dharma of value”. But you haven't tasted the pleasure of this Dharma of value, until you know its dance. And when you know the movement of every movement of the dance, every movement of the dance is the movement of value in the dance. Wow. And so, somehow, intuitively, "Guardians of the Galaxy" it's this movement towards dance. It's kind of wild, right?
AUBREY: Yeah. And they chose just such a perfect, perfect metaphor for actually, and it's not even a metaphor. It's an actual structure of the cosmos.
MARC: It's an actual structure of the cosmos. Electrons dance.
AUBREY: Yeah, and it's the antithesis of the destroyer. It transforms the destroyer. When the destroyer can dance, then he's no longer--
MARC: He's not the destroyer anymore.
AUBREY: Because you're connected to the field, and you have anthro-ontologically moving through every cell of your body and understanding of the field of value.
MARC: And so, you need both value and dance, and they can't live without each other. And if we just dance, it opens it up to the field of value, but we don't have a grammar of value. So we need a grammar of value. They need to establish value. And we need dance because dance speaks the grammar of value in a way that words can't. Something like that. Let's look at Drax at the end. I love your point of Drax and Ronan. I didn't think of that when I was watching the movie.
AUBREY: Thanos don't dance either.
MARC: Thanos don't dance either. The scene at the end is the great transformation of Drax. This is the very end, this is the climax of the whole movie is this great dancing.
AUBREY: This is the transformation of Drax from Drax the Destroyer to Drax the Father, the father of the children of the galaxy. He's surrounded by children. He's shown his aptitude as a father. When all the other guardians were lost, he's the only one who has been a father, who lost his children.
MARC: That's gorgeous. And that's what Nebula says to him. Nebula says to him, you're not a destroyer. Earlier in the movie, Nebula says, "You're not a destroyer. You're a father." So he's surrounded by the children. He can't move. He's waiting. He can't move, he can't move, he can't move. And then the movie climax is oh my God, he dances, and we're ecstatic.
AUBREY: And it's almost like when his child, if you play out this trauma theme, when his actual child was killed, the child inside him was killed and he became the destroyer. There may be a backstory, like if they played a backstory where actually Drax was dancing with his first kid. And then develop this whole dogma about dancing, because he adopted the mantle of destroyer after his child was killed, which killed his own inner child. And then he lost his ability to access dance. And then he regained it, when he actually recaptured this relationship with his own inner child, with the children that he rescued, and the children of the world.
MARC: Right. That's gorgeous. And this is the theme we talked about earlier that they eat to shield their trauma. They're each shielding their trauma. So this is Drax healing his trauma. So, let's say Peter at the beginning of the movie, his mother says to him, "Take my hand," and he can't take her hand. And then later in the movie, we're now in movie one. We're still in movie one, where Peter takes the orb. The orb can only be held without being killed by an immortal. We don't know it until the second movie that he's half immortal, which is why he doesn't get killed immediately. But he's got it for a little bit. It's about to kill him. And then Gamora says, "Take my hand." And he's like “aahh”. He takes her hand. And then Gamora takes the hand of Nebula, and Rocket, and Drax, and they now all have taken each other's hand--
AUBREY: Which they're all risking their lives for each other.
MARC: They're all risking their lives for each other, and the trauma of not taking his mother's hand, biological family, has been healed by taking the hand of evolutionary family. It's like wow. So it's like moving through the movie, and sisterhood you talked about. So here's a scene, an incredible scene where sisterhood is healed in the movie. Gamora, that big scene where she says, kind of "I'll always be your sister. I don't want to win." So, the first two scenes of Nebula and Gamora, Gamora says, "I just want the money for the bounty for her. She's worth nothing to me more than the money for the bounty." The second scene, Nebula says to Gamora, "I get free, I'm just going to kill you." So they completely hate each other. And then something happens, they find each other. They've got to heal that trauma. They got to get out of the win Lose metrics and become sisters. And then there's these two incredible scenes that take place in movie two that kind of blow you away as they come together. So those two scenes are unbelievable. I mean, in the first scene, Nebula says, "I won! You always won. And every time you won, Thanos took a piece of me out and replaced it with a mechanical part." And Gamora can't see it. And then Gamora, in the later scenes says, "Oh, my God, I didn't see you there." And they couldn't see each other, and they found each other. They become sisters. They can hear each other, they can hear that they were both in crazy pain. They can hear each other's pain, and their traumas healed, which never would have been healed had they not had to come together for a larger vision, for a larger gorgeous Guardians of the Galaxy. In other words, had they gone therapy together, it may well not have worked. It was the energy of being Guardians of the Galaxy, of accessing a shared memory of the future that gave them the energy to go and look in each other's eyes and find each other.
AUBREY: They would have never gotten therapy together. They just wanted to kill each other.
MARC: They would have never gotten there.
AUBREY: They would have never gotten there. They would have not gotten in the same room. And I've been a part of mediating different situations between people who are upset with each other. And it's not a given that both parties are going to show up.
MARC: Not a given.
AUBREY: Not a given. There's a lot of factors that happen that keep people separated from actually coming together. It's in that way, there's not enough reason that they both feel that they're committed to the same purpose, mission, field of value, so there's not enough energy to draw them together. And so their own grievances, as justified as they may be, are more important than the larger mission of the Tikun, the fixing of that particular relationship. But this whole situation was of the kind of exponential largeness that actually allowed them the container, and that drove them together that actually allowed this sister wound to heal.
MARC: That's so crazy beautiful, Aub. Because you realize as you said, that normally people can't, they can't find the energy to come together. And in some sense, I want to say something kind of radical. But family used to, in the best vision of it, we're family and we're together in a field of value. So the family is not just biological family, blood. The family is that we're born, and we participate in this larger field of the nation, of the tribe. And what's happened is, the family has been decontextualized from the larger field of value. And the only value that remains is now the family. But then we're like, why? There's this realization that the family becomes a kind of glorified racism. My own little private racism is the survival of my family. I was talking to a friend of mine, and she said, my commitment is that my family survive for the next couple of generations. Now, that's very beautiful. So if I'm close to my family, and I love the people, and I love my family, which I should, then I should have a special commitment to them. So I just want to bow to that. But unless that's rooted in a transmission of value, if I just want to have my bloodline continue, right? I mean, you and I were talking yesterday. We were talking about, wow, this vision of you and Vy having kids, and you said, "Well, I want my kids to participate in carrying forward the vision." That's not, I want my bloodline to go forward. No, no, it's I want to transmit through my seed, through my partnership, they're going to carry on the mission. They're going to carry on the vision. We've lost that. Families don't feel like, and this is, we shudder to say it. And again, it's one of those things, the emperor has no clothes, but families have lost their raison d'etre. Like we participate in the field of value. The definition of a grandfather. Abraham becomes the first figure in the lineage in both Islam and in the Hebrew lineage, and by definition, therefore in the Christian lineage, because he becomes the first grandfather. He's able to transmit his values to Isaac, and then to Jacob. He is able to transmit his values to generations. And each one of them is unique. It's God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and God of Jacob. They have unique expressions of that value. It's evolving value, but an animal doesn't transmit their values through generations. But a grandfather does. It's powerful. So we've lost that. We don't transmit our values to generations. We've lost our place in the field of value in postmodern culture. And so, family becomes glorified racism. And there's certainly no energy to get together. So all the sudden, Nebula and Gamora find themselves in the field of value again. And then they can find each other. Then they can do the work.
AUBREY: There's two directions that I'm enticed to go to, both which open up larger conversations, but I can't resist. So, the first is the talk about widening your circle of intimacy, because you've talked about the smallness of just worrying about your family at the expense of all others. But also you have to honor that you do have a family, that your Ohana is there. And the Song of Songs, which you shared with me over a year ago, which talks about the four different songs; the song of the self, the song of your Ohana, the song of all mankind, which is your species. It's speciesist ultimately at that, that you prefer your species. And then, the song of the whole cosmos. And ultimately, the galaxy, "Guardians of the Galaxy" are moving through all of these different steps. The song of themselves, the fourfold song.
MARC: The song of the self, the song of the family, the song of the kind of, the nation, right? The song of all human beings, the song of the cosmos. Wow, right?
AUBREY: And the driver that moves you to widen and expand this circle of intimacy to include all life, why we say all in for all life, which is a song for, and actually the song of all of the songs--
MARC: Is that I hold all the songs.
AUBREY: Hold all the songs. It's the ultimate song, all in for all life, which includes you, includes your Ohana, includes all of your species, and includes all of the cosmos, and transcends it to be a harmony of all of that. The thing that drives you to that, what this movie is saying is, the only way we're going to get there is if there's a lot of pressure. And this is interesting, because it's kind of what's happening right now in the world. We're facing existential threats like we've never faced before.
MARC: A meta crisis.
AUBREY: A meta crisis. We're facing these utopian dystopians. Whether it's the World Economic Forum, or whether... Whatever you want, whatever face you want to put on it. We're facing this pressure, we're facing existential risk. And it's asking us to come together, and actually widen our circle of intimacy, and care more about, yes, I care about our family. Each step has to be honored, but include and transcend all the way up, so that we may actually have a chance. And the clarion call that I'm putting out and we're putting out is, now is the fucking time. Don't wait for Ronan to be at your door, the High Evolutionary to be dropping bombs, or Ego the celestial to start molting your planet from the inside out to reshape it on his own. Don't wait for that fucking moment because it may be too late. Come together now, get a head start because this shit is coming.
MARC: Homerun base is loaded. In other words, that is what the "Guardians of the Galaxy" is saying. It's saying, you called it pressure, crisis. Our crisis is a birth. Crisis is an evolutionary driver, and what Goddess, what she is kind of whispering through the movie is, wow, the High Evolutionary, the celestial, or the more obvious Ronan actually demands something from us. They demand us first off to reevaluate who we are. I'm not just a separate self, I'm actually, I'm part of true self. I'm part of the field of the one, the field of value. I'm a unique self, I'm unique expression of that field. I'm an evolutionary unique self, I'm evolving that field. So, I change who I am. I'm a guardian of the galaxy. That's real. And as you said so beautifully, I have to actually expand my field of intimacy. I want to just go back to that beautiful text that we studied a year ago. And I think you also did a fantastic podcast on it with a group of the gang at some point.
AUBREY: Yeah, the coaches at Fit For Service.
MARC: Right, gorgeous. I mean, I saw the write above and I was so happy. It was this beautiful text. I actually apologize, I misstated the text when I did the, actually, it's the fourfold song that you stated so correctly. So, the first level is me, but me is me and my family. That's also part of the first song. It's kind of an egocentric song, which is beautiful. The second song is the nation, the third song is the world, world centric. And the fourth song is the cosmos centric, the galaxy. And then you remembered stunningly the text, which is, and the fifth song is that I play all four of the songs. I don't leave anything behind. And I love what you said that the guardians have to go through all of them. They've got to work out their own stuff, they've got to find their tribe, they've got to care for the whole world, but then they've got to go galactic, the universe. So what does it mean to actually expand my circle of intimacy? That's the demand here, to expand my circle of intimacy. To actually change how I view myself. And here's the crazy thing, and this is the last thought on this, but it's a big one. You feel like shit when you don't. So, it's not just be altruistic. It's actually you don't feel at home in the universe unless you're connected to the universe, because that's who you are.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARC: And that's what you said earlier, you said, you can't not do this.
AUBREY: How can you not be a guardian of the galaxy?
MARC: How can you not be a guardian? So you might think--
AUBREY: Lots of Prozac.
MARC: Right, lots of Prozac. And what you're saying is, which is so gorgeous and so true. It's the deep realization of the lineages. And it's the deep realization, where we're trying to articulate together in this new story of value, cosmo-erotic humanism, the deep realization is, I'm not just a separate self, that's just not true. It's not who I am. My actual identity is that I actually am in the field of value. And if I try and live small, I'm in denial of my essential nature and therefore I feel empty. And therefore I use every form of pseudo, fake Eros, pseudo intimacy, to cover up the utter pit, the utter devastation that can only be transformed when I actually own my true identity, which is, I am a cosmo-centric human. I am cosmo-erotic humanism in person uniquely, and I have a unique gift to give that's needed by all that is. I am a guardian of the galaxy. Without that, I'm actually psychologically devastated. And so therefore, what we're saying is kind of, I just want to say it audaciously but tenderly, meaning all of contemporary psychology and therapy, which is giving enormous gifts. And it's obviously an enormously important evolution of love. And yet, and let's just say clearly, we receive that evolution of love. But it fails, as long as it's basically viewing the human being as a separate self, whose past traumas need to be reorganized, and there's no member of the future, and there's no deeper vision of who I am. And here the Goddess comes in, the Goddess says, "Okay, I'm not going to send you to the ancient texts, because you may not get there." You're not going to go to the Mahabharata, you're not going to go to Luria, the deep lineage, Solomon's lineage. Here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to make a movie. I'm going to make a trilogy, it's called "Guardians of the Galaxy". And I'm going to have the best music, and the sassiest and the hottest, and the most wild figures, but it's actually going to tell you something, traumatized heroes are Guardians of the Galaxy. You don't get to escape into your trauma. As Rocket says, not an excuse. Actually, you got to come together with your evolutionary family, and actually participate in the healing and transformation of reality. And as you said so beautifully, don't fucking wait till Ronan the Destroyer comes, and don't wait till the celestial comes, movie two. And don't wait till the High Evolutionary comes. Oh, my God, step in.
AUBREY: Step in. One thing I want to circle back to and bring through is, the scene that's coming to mind for me now is, and what I'm talking about is the moment where we were wrestling with each other a little bit about whether they were adhering to a field of value or not a field value. Is this post modernity where there is no such thing as value? And I was saying that there was--
MARC: There are ways to protect them.
AUBREY: I was saying that there was always a field of value. But my view of it is, my own personal view is that it's an evolving field of value. So they're in this debased cosmos. So, they've created their own kind of brigadier renegade code that they do adhere to, but it's evolving, and it's evolving more, and they're killing less. And then ultimately, there's a final scene where I think they're actually wrestling with actually the higher forms of this value. And that's when there's these crazy kangaroo looking fucking creatures. And they're running towards a village looking to completely demolish the village, and a couple of the guardians are just hanging out. Groot’s there, sleeping, and they're really relaxed. This is like a routine Monday afternoon saving the galaxy type of thing. And they're like, "Don't you feel bad for these crazy rabid kangaroos that we're going to have to lay waste to?" They didn't have traps. They were going to fucking blow them away. But those are life forms, and they just saved a bunch of life forms, but now they got to blow away these life forms. So they're playing with this understanding of an evolving field of value. And one of them says, "Well, yeah, it does suck that we have to kill these rabid kangaroos but we can't let them go destroy all the people in this village. We've got to lay them down. We've got to kill them."
MARC: Trying to remember that scene. I don't remember that exact scene but I'm with you in there's this evolution that takes place--
AUBREY: It came after the end credits. You might have shut the movie--
MARC: The end credits of movie three.
AUBREY: Of movie three.
MARC: That makes sense. Okay, so let's travel back. Okay, I got you. Now I'm with you.
AUBREY: So, end of movie three, end credits, Monday afternoon.
MARC: I got it, I got it. Now, I got it. So that makes perfect sense. I actually missed that scene. That's fantastic. So, you raise two things, and let's take them one at a time, because they're so crazy important. So, let's go, one. So one is, let's maybe do it this way. So here's another theme. I love what you just said. Here's another theme that runs through all three movies. So one of the things that you and I saw together, is we saw this raccoon theme. So there's about six, seven clips where Rocket hates being called a raccoon. And it starts with the very first scene in movie one.
AUBREY: This is a big theme.
MARC: This is a big one. This is a big theme. Where Peter says, “you're a raccoon”, and he says, "I'm not Raccoon, I'm me and I'm the only me there is." Unique self. He's got the sense of a unique self. And so he kind of denies his raccoon. There's this moment where the animals give themselves names. One calls himself Teefs, and another says, "I'm Rocket." The other says, I'm Lylla. And so there's this moment where the animals are coming into this realization of personhood. And anyone who knows anything about animals by the way knows, we think, "Oh, it's a cow." But it's not a cow, it's Daisy. It's absolutely true that animals actually are distinct. They have distinct qualities that are not just--
AUBREY: Somebody who has a pet knows that.
MARC: Anyone who has a pet knows that. Now their uniqueness is not as evolved in animals as human beings. Because there's an evolving, what you call an evolving value. There's evolving uniqueness. And so there's continuity between the animal world and the human world. There's also discontinuity. It's why we don't marry our dog. We love our dog but you generally don't marry your dog, because well, right? Fucking your dog, not so good. I should not--
AUBREY: Although, we can learn their style.
MARC: We can learn their style. I got it, I got it. We can learn their style. There's this very, very bad joke that Kristina tells, my partner, and only she can get away with telling it. Where this guy calls in sick, and says, "Hey, I'm sick. I can't come in." And the boss says, "You don't sound sick." And he says, "I'm fucking my dog, is that not sick enough for you?" That's bad. I apologize for it. KK pulls it off with Southern charm. I say it, it just sounds brutal and terrible. But the point is, there's a difference between, and we actually correctly think that actually, we're not sexual with animals because it actually violates the animal. And then there's something that gets complex about that. And we actually say no, no, there's a different, we don't marry our dog. Because there's continuity. Dogs are beautiful and sacred and filled with life. And yet there's a higher and different level of uniqueness in human beings. So for example, human beings build hospitals. They build hospitals to save other human beings who are vulnerable. And cats don't and leopards don't, as beautiful as leopards are. And leopards are unique. Leopards have unique personalities. And that actually, there's this very beautiful realization where the animals give themselves names. And then through the movie, then there's this moment, in movie three, where Yondu's lieutenant after Yondu says, "Bad dog!"
AUBREY: Oh, yeah, that was a hilarious part of the whole.
MARC: "What do you mean bad dog?"
AUBREY: That was the most hilarious part of the whole movie--
MARC: "What do you mean bad dog?" And then it's finally healed. Like three, four times, he keeps saying, bad dog, bad dog, is good dog. "Yeah, I knew you knew..." And so, it's very beautiful. So, you get this emergence of the animal, and in the text from Cook, that we studied a year ago, that you cited, and deepened and expanded because that's what you do when you study a text. You deepen your, in your Fit For Service dialogue. And when we go from world centric, which is I expand my circle of intimacy to include all human beings, that's the third song. Then the fourth song is, the whole cosmos meaning, including animals. I don't exclude animals. I'm not sure I want to take a lamb and put it in a cage for three months and make it fat so I can eat a particular kind of meat.
AUBREY: That would be a cow, and that would be veal.
MARC: That'd be a cow, and that'd be veal.
AUBREY: Yeah, because a lamb would just turn into a sheep.
MARC: Really? That's not good.
AUBREY: But it's the same with foie gras. So what you're pointing to is, the movie is showing us an evolving field of value.
MARC: It's evolution of intimacy.
AUBREY: And evolution of value itself.
MARC: Which is an evolution of value.
AUBREY: Right, and we're in this strange place now, where certain people are claiming, Vegans, for example, oftentimes take a moral stance about the eating of animals. And then debated by the hunters who are saying, this is necessary for animal control. And then there's subtleties in this, and then I find myself landing in a place where, all right, it depends on the quality of life of the animal that lived. I'm still eating animals, but I only eat animals that lived a certain quality of life and were killed in a certain type of fashion. So, it's grass fed beef. Our chef Donnie, he's finding farms that are growing the food in the right way and harvesting the animals in the right way. So, it's this interesting blend of morality as I'm trying my best to step into this song of the cosmos. There's very interesting questions which develop, which are, and I'm trying to make the correlation that they are kind of moving through this field of value where thieving is okay, killing is okay. And then killing animals is okay. But then eventually, they get a little bit more refined, more refined, more refined.
MARC: And Raccoon goes and risks everyone, Rocket goes and risks everyone's life, not just to save the children, but he goes to save the raccoons. And he only does that after he has this crazy fight with the High Evolutionary.
AUBREY: Yep. He claims his name story.
MARC: He claims Rocket, his name, and his raccoon. And it's only after he claims his raccoons, then the whole thread, that he then goes to save the raccoons. So, he claims his raccoonus. So, back to the eating animals thing. So, the board chair of the Center before you was also from Austin, John Mackey, who's kind of the local grocer. And John sat down with me, and he went through like his eight arguments at dinner once, on eating meat. He persuaded me, I have to say. He persuaded me. So, I went vegetarian. That doesn't make it the only position. We have to fight out that debate. That's a big debate. So grass fed is a usually important thing, not obliterating animals in kind of like concentration camps for animals is usually important. That's a massive step forward. Animals clearly kill each other. So, do we eat animals or not? The Baal Shem Tov, the master of the Hasidic movement, would only kill an animal according to the law, which followed no pain for an animal. He would cry before he would slaughter the animal with one painless shot. He would then take his tears, and use his tears to moisten the blade, and then kill the animal painlessly, and then serve meat. So, he was taking the position that you were taking. John takes this other position. But clearly, it's part of the same direction. And the direction is that animals are actually living beings, and we need to engage this. And that's a whole separate dialogue about what position we take on it, but that's where it's going.
AUBREY: Yeah, and I think the movie doesn't solve that. It just actually points to it, because we haven't solved that yet. It's still in a live debate. And I think there's grounds in which we can have that conversation, and we're still figuring out our evolving morality around this.
MARC: But we get that there has to be an evolution of intimacy. The Descartes got it wrong when he said that basically, animals don't feel. Animals feel and they're alive. And we need to actually engage that in a kind of serious way. So there's this major evolution of intimacy in the "Guardians of the Galaxy". This is this other theme about raccoons. Wow, right?
AUBREY: Yeah, it's really understanding, at what point is a species dispensable? I mean, there's some Buddhist traditions where you won't even kill a mosquito. A mosquito is going to bite you and you don't slap it, you brush it off. And most of us are pretty comfortable killing mosquitoes. In fact, the mosquito doesn't even have to land on me. I will go hunt it in my room to prevent it. Like prophylactically--
MARC: "I'm a mosquito hunter."
AUBREY: Yeah, I will prophylactically go out and stalk and hunt the mosquito and kill it. And then there's just varying degrees. As a child, I remember, and I'm not proud of this, but I remember having BB and pellet guns, and shooting at little lizards and things. And then I would actually be horrified when I would get them but it was this drive to see if I could, and then not understanding my own field of value hadn't evolved to recognize the sentience, to recognize the shared field of lifeforce--
MARC: Oh my God, and that's the scene. At the very, very beginning of movie one, when Peter comes into his mother, and his mother says, "Why are you fighting with the kids?" And he says, "Because they were killing a frog for no reason." And so, from the very beginning of the movie, you've got this wrestling as you say, with this theme, which is this new theme of okay, what's our relationship to the animal world? And we need to actually include the animal world in our field of intimacy. And of course, the biggest way the movie does it is that one of the figures who has personhood is a raccoon. In other words, he's been introduced into the field of personhood. Wow.
AUBREY: Yeah. I remember one moment when I was a kid, while I didn't have that kind of respect for the lizards at that point, I did have that kind of respect for dogs. And actually, I had a neighbor friend, who was putting tight rubber bands around his dog's legs. And I was like, "What the fuck are you doing?" He's like, "It doesn't matter, I can do this to the dog." And I literally grabbed his arm and put him in whatever my fifth grade version of an armbar was, and said, "How does that fucking feel? Don't you ever do that to your dog."
MARC: So you could feel the dog?
AUBREY: I could feel the dog.
MARC: And you couldn't feel the lizard?
AUBREY: And I couldn't feel the lizard. So it was a refinement. And right now, I can't feel the mosquito.
MARC: So there's no way you would do the lizard ever?
AUBREY: Oh, no.
MARC: Ever?
AUBREY: No.
MARC: But I can't yet feel the mosquito.
AUBREY: I can't yet feel the mosquito. And that is even including, I've had a conversation on ayahuasca with mosquitoes, because they are a particular bane of my existence. They love my blood for whatever reason. And in that conversation, I'll just share this story. It's quick.
MARC: Please.
AUBREY: I connect to the mosquito. And when you connect with mosquitoes, it's not like Jack the mosquito. You connect with the overmind of mosquitoes on ayahuasca. And I say you, and I mean me. So I connected with overmind of mosquitoes. I think it would be rare to connect with the personality structure of one mosquito. Mosquito is just a consciousness--
MARC: Has much less uniqueness. There's an evolution of uniqueness.
AUBREY: Right, so mosquitoes share a consciousness that you're able to connect with in this animistic kind of world that you enter on the medicine. And I was like, "Why are you sucking everybody's blood?" And they're like, "Whoa, whoa, man, why the rancor? Why the anger. We're just nature's tax collectors. We take a little of your blood, you got more than you need anyways. And then we fill our own bellies, and then the frogs eat us and they're filled, and the bats eat us and they're filled. And we participate in the tax collection of your blood in the circle of life. And then I was like, "Well, what about fucking malaria? That's fucked up. You're the harbingers of disease. So that should warrant your death." And the mosquito was like, "Whoa, don't talk to us about malaria. Malaria is a parasite to us that we carry. You've got to talk to malaria." And then I saw the consciousness of malaria, which didn't have a voice and was just this kind of chaotic energy. And I was like, "Fuck, no, I'm not talking to malaria. Conversation over." But nonetheless, it wasn't compelling enough for me to change my attitude yet. Because I'm leaving the possibility of opening myself to a field of value that says this is life and I won't destroy it. And it's not like I'm trying to DDT foreign lands of mosquitoes and exterminate them in a genocidal rage.
MARC: Right, this is not Aubrey the destroyer with Drax going after mosquitoes.
AUBREY: No, no, no, but if they're in my field, I take them out. I take them out.
MARC: So, let's find this here. So, one, there's an evolving field of intimacy in the movie. The raccoon gets included, and the raccoon embraces his raccoon and goes to save the raccoons. And then everyone joins Rocket in saving the raccoons risking their lives.
AUBREY: And that was also a beautiful scene. I don't want to brush over that. Because this was also a kind of crystallization of the Ohana. Because Rocket just walks, and they actually don't even say anything. Usually they bicker back and forth. Like, why are you doing this? Blah, blah, blah. And then one by one, everybody just turns and walks.
MARC: They follow him.
AUBREY: They follow him. They're like, "You're going I'm going."
MARC: "You're going I'm going." So, if you stand for that value, I stand for that value. And you caught the scene I didn't see in the credits, which is now they're opening up to this realization that actually animals have to be in the field in an entirely new way.
AUBREY: And then what's the right relation to when you take them out, and when you don't?
MARC: So, one last thing. So, you said earlier and we said we're going to talk about both, and it's really crazy important, we can just put this on the table. So, the rebellion against value that you were pointing to earlier in the movie, which is what we said is it's a rebellion, not against value, but against a caricature of value, which is viewed as eternal and not evolving. Now, as you know, brother. One of the core notions in what we're calling cosmo-erotic humanism is we have to solve the value thing. And we actually have up online, as you know, on the website of Office For The Future, which is kind of the holding, kind of structure of our center, of the think tank, we have a fantastic piece that Zak and I have been working on for a couple of years, that you're actually... You, me and Zak are now talking about how to restructure and move it, its next step. But the core of it is what we call first principles and first values of evolving perennialism. So, I just want to spend a minute on that, because it's a contradiction in terms. Perennialism means, the perennial philosophy is, eternal vows that are unchanging. And what we're saying is, no, no, there's evolving value. Values are both eternal and evolving. And this is where value theory just completely fucking collapsed. Because everyone said, oh, love is not a real value, because 1500 years ago, you said it was love, and it meant this. And 1500 years later, the same thing you call love means something completely different. So 1500 years ago, you were a Chinese patriarchy, you could slap your wife five times instead of breaking her arm when she violated your command because you loved her. Today, you slap her five times, you correctly go to jail. But we're calling them both love. So, for lots of reasons people looked at that... My friend Howard Blum in his book, "The Lucifer Principle" said, that's ridiculous, that's not value. That's just made up. And our friend Yuval Harari says, oh, all values are made up, because he's the parrot of post modernity. And Barack Obama comes along and says, wow, that's the best book that was ever written, Yuval. Because Barack is actually living in a postmodern paradigm, which refuses to recognize that there's something real in value. Why? Because they're critiquing values. Correctly, they're saying, oh, but it always changes. So it must be just me, human, made up. We're saying no, no, value's real, it's intrinsic to cosmos. Love is real, and it evolves at the same time. So, this idea of value is eternal, love is real, it always means something real, it means care, means concern, means deeper contact, means moving towards more wholeness, love is real, Eros is real. And love evolves. Reality is love, and the evolution of love is the essence of what we are together calling first principles and first values of an evolving perennialism. So what you tapped on earlier is just crazy important. And it's, of course, it's not this podcast, but they're playing with in the movie, and that's what you were sensing. You were sensing, I think, really deep that they're rejecting value. And the reason they're rejecting value is, and I think we just cracked it now. I think we're actually coming, that was the one thing we were kind of, the reason, I'm just getting it myself now. I'm getting all choked up about it so I'm going to have a little tea. The reason they're rejecting value is because the modern academy correctly said that value theory doesn't work. Because values are not eternal, they're all changing. So Yuval Harari, as I just said a second ago, kind of is a good parrot of post modernity, when he says, oh, values are just made up. They're complete contrivances. His words are figments of our imagination. Fictions and social constructs. And again, I just want to say this tenderly, when Barack Obama says, "Well, it's the best book ever," and then, can you imagine the president of the United States 50 years ago saying value is not real, I love that book. And then Bill Gates says, "Great book, that's my book. I'm in." And then our dear friend who founded Amazon, is trying to get to space also says, great book, that's my book. When he did his interview in the middle of COVID, one book behind him, "Homo Sapiens" which made that exact claim, that's tragic. Because they're saying, oh, value is not real. And then they become part of this technocracy, this techno feudalism.
AUBREY: Yeah, which is imposing their own self-serving value structure, by the fake vacuum that they--
MARC: The liberal left has become part of what one writer calls, global cap. And Obama's very much aligned with that position. Beautiful speeches and beautiful insight, and yet has very clearly aligned with the World Economic Forum kind of vision, which is about this kind of imposition of a kind of techno feudalist architecture on reality. Because the assumption is there's no field of value that can evolve new possibilities. So we need to therefore control the system. It's a very, very big deal. We're saying, no, this is such a huge breakthrough, and it's its own podcast. We're saying no, no, value's real. That's what the movie is saying. That's what I think you were intuiting. Value is real and it's evolving. And actually, the Ravagers, this is so exciting. The Ravagers, Stallone, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, they're saying no, no, we go with the academy. Eternal value, that's unchanging, doesn't work. And yet value's absolutely real. They're not saying it's a social contract. This movie is not aligning, my dear friend Yuval, in saying, no, no, value's a fiction.

AUBREY: No, because the Ravagers have a code, and they will honor the code.
MARC: And it's not just a contrived code. So, Yuval comes, "That's just their story, everyone lives by their story." No, no, no, they're actually accessing a field of value that's real. And the movie doesn't get there, but it's reaching for some notion. It's reaching for something. It's reaching, no, no, value is real. So, the movie kind of understand, this is crazy, exciting. Movie understands, okay, we can't go with eternal value, that's wrong. We get that. They can't quite articulate this notion of first principles and first values that are evolving values. They can't quite get to the notion that the eternal Tao, the field of value, is the evolving Tao. But they're reaching for it. That's crazy beautiful. So, we just added a whole big scene here. So last thing, Yondu. It's our last thing, Yondu. God, the blessing of the father. That's our last white like Yondu is this figure throughout the whole thing. Well, he's a figure throughout actually the end of movie two, because he dies at the end of movie two.
AUBREY: Well, but then he appears in movie three in a very, very important scene, where I forget his name, but he has inherited the prototype thing.
MARC: He does, that's right.
AUBREY: He appears in a vision. And he says, the guy is trying to guide that mystical arrow which can eliminate all enemies, trying to guide it with his mind. And he says, no, no, it's with your heart.
MARC: And he says that twice to Peter in movie two. He says “I don't do it with my head, I do it with my heart”. And then he says it to Peter about his heart. "I guide the arrow with my heart" when Peter's struggling with the celestial, his father. And then Peter accesses his memories of his own individual personal love. Then love breaks him out. And then he's able to actually become the Guardian of the Galaxy.
AUBREY: Yeah. It shows the failings of Yondu as a personal father. But in his transcendent moment, in his transcendent moment, he captures the essence of capital Father, which is love all the way.
MARC: In other words, sometimes the father manages to give the blessing of the father, even when he couldn't his whole life, when Yondu actually saves Peter. So he gives him a space suit, an arrow ring in the scene, knowing he's only got one of them. And essentially, Yondu has said, "You got to give it to me. I'm going to give it to Peter, and I'm going to die saving him." Yondu gives up his life, saves his son, and he says, "Ego might have been your father."
AUBREY: Biologically.
MARC: "He might have been your daddy, but he wasn't your father."
AUBREY: "He was your father, but he wasn't your daddy."
MARC: Right, right, right. Might have been your father but wasn't your daddy. And, he says, I'm so proud that I raised you, that you were--
AUBREY: Damn lucky that you're my son.
MARC: I'm lucky that you're my son.
AUBREY: You're my boy.
MARC: And he gives him at the very end the blessing of the father.
AUBREY: Which also, it's both the blessing of the Father and also supports the idea of redemption. "I ain't done nothing right my whole life." I'm sorry I didn't do it right my whole life. But in this final act, I can redeem myself.
MARC: I can redeem myself.
AUBREY: And this gift will live on.
MARC: There's always a second chance.
AUBREY: There's always a second chance. Yeah, and there's a couple of things that I picked up on that. One, when Peter was giving his eulogy so to speak, he said, he may not have had the voice of an angel, but he had the whistle of one. And that goes again back to his whistle was guided from his heart. And it actually was the whistle of an angel. The angelic realm is the place of the heart. It's the place where the heart is supreme. So, he's actually accurate when he's saying that he had the whistle of one because even though he was causing the death of his enemies, it was coming from his heart.
MARC: And the place that that was, so that's really beautiful. He says three different times in the movie, that I don't do that with my mind, I do it with my heart. And the most dramatic place we see the whistle is when Taserface leads the men to remove Yondu, it's in Volume Two, because he's too soft on Peter. So he refuses to take Peter down because it's his son. They go to kill him and take him down. And then he actually is with Rocket's help able to liberate himself. Then he frees the arrow, and that's the arrow's most dramatic thing. And actually, it takes down all the people, but it's actually his love of Peter. It's his love of Peter that's actually it. That's where his heart is. We all have a place, which is kind of the love we go to that gives us energy. So, that's what you're saying, I didn't think of it, it's really beautiful in the movie. That it's his love of Peter that's actually...
AUBREY: And that's ultimately the same thing that redeemed him.
MARC: It's the same thing that redeemed him.
AUBREY: Yeah, it was there all along. And he only could trust it in certain ways, and he wouldn't let it show like many of our daddies. Didn't know how to do it. But if they had that chance, and if the better nature of them was able to emerge, and they were really able to show what really drove them, I bet you would find that love in that whistle of the angel in many of them. However deep it was in the heart.
MARC: Yeah, and that's their salute.
AUBREY: Yeah, to the heart.
MARC: So, wow. I mean, as we finish, I mean, just to, like we do in music, to recapitulate just in one word, and we'll do it together. We have just the idea of "Guardians of the Galaxy". One, we have an evolutionary family and a biological family. Two, we have these two kinds of utopianism, the need to kind of challenge a flawed and broken utopianism. Three, four, we have dance. Five, we have, from win-lose metrics to sisterhood. Six, we have this notion of heroes. Seven, we have this new view of trauma. And that traumatized heroes, eight, can be Guardians of the Galaxy. Nine, we have sisterhood. 10, we have this expanded view of intimacy, this evolution of intimacy, where we include animals. 11, we have value. On the one hand, they don't have values. On the other hand, they completely claim the field of value. 12, we have the blessing of the Father. And so, maybe we can close with the Walkman.
AUBREY: Yeah, and look, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the one very dissonant aspect of this movie, that when I saw this with my brother, Aaron, who loves the "Guardians of the Galaxy" one and two, watches them all the time. We went to go see "Guardians 3" in the theater together, and he walked out, and he was pissed. And he was pissed because Gamora abandoned Peter and the Guardians family to go with the Ravager family, based on some very thin fast seal notion that she'd forgotten what she had experienced prior. And so, we finished the movie, and we're like, that didn't quite sit right. Then we did a little bit of research, and we found out that Zoe Saldana who plays Gamora was like, "I am not doing another fucking 'Guardians of the Galaxy'." So they couldn't actually let She, they couldn't let the Goddess actually speak through the story. They had to make a strategic move--
MARC: So, this validates everything we've said. And as you could feel, when some win lose metric strategy kind of entered and kind of violated the intrinsic thing that wanted to happen.
AUBREY: And you can almost feel the pain of the writers that were connected to the muse, and feel the pain of everybody who's like, "Fuck, how do we do this in a way that isn't a complete letdown for everybody when we continue making these movies? Oh, we're going to create this amnesia, and we're going to give her another family and--"
MARC: But you felt it.
AUBREY: But it was fucked up.
MARC: It's fucked up. But just to point to this, so you and Aaron walk out, and you feel it. You feel, oh, that's off. And so why do you feel it? And then you look it up, and it turns out, oh, actually, that was strategy, meaning that was out of the field of She. Something else took over. Which tells you exactly that this whole other thing is happening in the field is She, and here's the crazy thing. And we'll finish with Walkman. Again, I said in the beginning, and this is just absolutely true. I literally looked up one after the other after I watched the three movies, and we talked and we made notes together. And I looked up 50 reviews, and none of the stuff that we talked about is in them. And we just went through 12 themes not that we made up. If you look, and now I know the name, you look in the show notes, we've actually created these compilations. And if you want to take out that sensitive look in the show notes, if we don't want to use it. Let me say it again, without saying that. There's these compilations of scenes, of all the dance scenes, and all the Yondu scenes, and all the value scenes, and all the raccoon animal scenes, and all the evolutionary family scenes, and all of the sister scenes, and all of the healing trauma scenes, we've actually shown that there's 12 Goddess whispers. 12, and 12 is a big number, that actually run through all three movies. So that actually if you recut the movies, which is essentially what we've done, meaning we've said, okay, we want to like really go deep into this and trust She. Then in this post tragic level of this movie, there's this Goddess whisper that turns into a roar, which is just stunning, and that you can miss the whole thing. You can stay with the pre-tragic, it's a great movie. You can make it into tragic, it's all commodified, they're selling me shit. Or you can say, let me open my heart. Is she saying something here?
AUBREY: Well, you don't necessarily completely miss it when you just take the movie in the pre-tragic. It lands on subconscious archetypal Jungian way. It goes in--
MARC: Anthro-ontology, you recognize that your--
AUBREY: You feel it. But when you make it conscious, it becomes even more powerful.
MARC: That's the thing. If you would talk, if we'd go on the street now and we interview 100 people who saw "Guardians of the Galaxy" they'd say, right, there was something. We loved it, we're not sure, right? But when we come together, and we say, okay, you know what, we want to share this new vision of cosmo-erotic humanism, and we're going to share it from a text that everybody knows already. What's the text, it's called "Guardians of the Galaxy". Really? And all of a sudden, it's all there. Oh, it's all there. But if it doesn't become conscious, then it's unconscious evolution. When it's conscious, it's conscious evolution. You want to play Walkman with me? Last one.
AUBREY: Let's play some Walkman.
MARC: Let's play some Walkman. Last one. So Walkman is at the beginning. In movie one, he's got the Walkman when his grandfather comes in and says, "Mama wants to talk to you." She gives him a gift. She says, "Open it when I die." Or when I pass. And we only see later in the movie that when he opens it, she's given him a bunch of cassettes with songs. And then she signs it, my little Star-Lord. She prefers to him as my little Star-Lord. She refers to him as my little Star-Lord, signs it, love mom. So now we kind of understand why in movie one, when the guard at the prison takes his Walkman, he just dives out and gets tasered, because he wants his Walkman. And then when they're escaping the prison, he goes back to risk his life to get his Walkman.
AUBREY: Yeah, which is his connection to his mother.
MARC: You have this very beautiful sense of sacred objects, which is very deep in the lineage, your ritual objects. And this is his sacred object. His Walkman. And then he puts it on Gamora when he dances with her. And then as you move through, the Walkman is always playing. And by the beginning of movie three, Drax, not Drax. Rocket has the Walkman. And then when Gamora goes to visit Rocket, she listens to the Walkman and listens to the song. And when Rocket becomes the new head of the Guardians, he gives them the Walkman. The Walkman again runs through all three as this kind of sacred object. And I think what's so critical about it is that it's saying, anthro-ontology lives in dance. Anthro-ontology lives in value. Anthro-ontology lives in our pop songs. It's there.
AUBREY: Yeah, it may be hinting at something even deeper, I mean, this was a gift from the mother. And we refer to Shekhinah as She, which is like the Great Mother. It's the mother of all the cosmos. And it's almost as if the blessing of the mother of all the cosmos, which causes you to dance. It's her moving through you that causes you to dance. This is also just slightly hinting if you look really closely, that this is actually a sacred object that represents the mother, and represents Shekhinah, represents the great Goddess.
MARC: That's beautiful. That's beautiful, man, that you can't split between your mother and the mother. You've got to do the biological work with your mother. And there's the Great Mother. And when the celestial in movie two, who's his father but not his daddy, actually puts a tumor in his mother and kills her because she's not fulfilling his vision. In movie two, he says, "You killed my mother!" And then his father sings the songs "Brandy" and "Woman by The Sea" and the sea is always the ocean, Eros, the Goddess, the Mother. And then he breaks his Walkman in movie two. And then Yondu, his real daddy, gives him the energy, says, I access the arrow with my heart. Then he finds the images of his mother. Then he screams and he says, "You shouldn't have killed my mother, and you shouldn't have broken my Walkman."
AUBREY: Same thing.
MARC: Same thing. Beautiful. It's the mother and it's the Mother. I mean, what a crazy pleasure to do this with you.
AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely, brother.
MARC: Wow.
AUBREY: Absolutely.
MARC: There's like this new thing that we can read a text in culture.
AUBREY: Yeah, I love it.
MARC: I love it. I love you mad.
AUBREY: I love you mad as well. And thanks, everybody, for going on this wild ride. We're figuring it out, and we're having fun. So, hopefully you enjoyed it as well. So much love, "Guardians of the Galaxy." All in for all life, baby.
MARC: All in for all life, hot damn.
AUBREY: Hot damn. Thanks for tuning in to this wild podcast on the "Guardians of the Galaxy". And I want to turn it over here to my brother Marc, who has an invitation to join him in a mystery school, which actually is going to explore some of these concepts at far greater depth.
MARC: Yeah, thank you Aubrey. We're doing a mystery school this summer. It's actually our 11th or 12th year, and it's a five-day intensive. It's in Belgium. It's the 21st to the 25th of August. But what a mystery school means is, we enter into the field of Eros, and we live in the field for five days. And so, it's not just the Dharma we're going to do, meaning the deep dives. It's the people you meet on the path. You create friendships, love, Eros, depths, that really is life changing. Most stunningly beautiful moments of my own life personally have been at mystery school. And maybe the last sentence. It's mystery schools that create culture. Mystery schools are the source. It doesn't happen in the doctoral department of this or that. Historically, in the Renaissance, in the Eleusinian mysteries, in the East in the West, it's mystery schools that form culture. So, if you're willing to give yourself an insane gift of radical mad love, and unimaginable pleasure in response to the meta crisis, join us at mystery school. And to actually come to the mystery school, just go to the show notes. There's a link that says mystery school, you can sign up right there. Any questions? Christa, who's the director of the mystery school, her email's there, find her today and join us. Thank you. I can't wait to see you.
AUBREY: Yeah, very much like the same thing I could say about our Fit For Service. And I look forward to experiencing the mystery school one day, and I look forward to you experiencing what we're doing at Fit For Service.



MARC: Fir For Service and mystery school, they want to find each other.
AUBREY: Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
MARC: They do. Yay.
AUBREY: Thanks, everybody for tuning in, mad Love.