How Ancient Psyche Survives the Modern World with Rob Fauer Walker

Episode Transcript

Debra (00:01)
Hello, welcome Rob Faure Walker to the show. We’re so excited to have you here. ⁓ Wanted to just give you a chance to introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit about yourself.

Robert Faure Walker (00:13)
Sure. my name’s Rob. I’m an academic and an author and also an ecotherapist. And I suppose that’s the main part of my work that we’re talking about today. I work mostly in an ancient forest around where I live here in the south of England. And really kind of listening back to some of your podcasts, my work feels quite closely aligned to yours because I adopt a union lens with my ecotherapy.

I help my clients get into a state whereby aspects of their mind emerge within the forest around us and then that gives us something to work with together. It’s a great effect so far.

Debra (00:55)
Awesome.

Dr. Rob (00:56)
Sounds amazing. Welcome.

Debra (00:56)
You have a new book coming out. We’ll talk about that is called radical Jung. Can you tell us what made you write the book? I know you have some other books too. But why this book even this time?

Robert Faure Walker (01:05)
Yes, I mean, I guess with anyone that’s doing kind of writing about Jung, it’s entirely personal in many aspects. But I have spent many years ⁓ as a high school teacher and then as an academic in London. And I was quite involved in activist politics. That was always kind of part of my both as a teacher, working in predominantly Muslim neighborhood.

And lobbying the government around their promotion or challenging their promotion of Islamophobia through some of their counter-terrorism regimes. And then I developed that when I went into academia and my PhD looking at similar kinds of things. And then Natalie was kind of effective enough at that that I was invited to other universities to train other academics in how to use their research to affect change within.

Mostly within the British parliament, but within government systems generally. And, you know, maybe not surprisingly, after 10, 15 years of doing that, certainly the lobbying work for about 10 years, I was pretty burnt out. so I kind of obviously, you know, engaged in different kind of therapeutic modalities and was…

I suppose was frustrated from a kind of an activist perspective that these processes of introspection could lead to some form of kind of political stasis. And that seemed to be kind of what was on offer was like retreat from all of that active work, active political work into yourself. And then what? And I didn’t feel there was a huge amount of…

of where do you go with that? And so I suppose I started writing the book and wanting to explore that process of recovery for myself through kind of deep psychology and dealing with the archetypal realm. But also to sort of to ask that further question of sort of heal so that we know how to act better, which felt like the bit that was missing for me when I was engaging in other forms of healing. And I think I mean, I think it’s there in Jung’s writing.

But I don’t feel it’s sort of necessarily, I’ve tried to make it more overt. And it wasn’t just for me, because I mean, it’s sort of, as you mentioned previously, there are, know, whether you’re in the States or anywhere in the world, we’re bombarded by kind of apocalyptic experiences of climate change and war and all sorts. And so many people are overwhelmed. And particularly, you know, many of my kind of

fellow activists, political activists, I found were overwhelmed. And many of them were engaging with Jung as a way of healing. ⁓ But equally, know, so this was a, it was a sort of common theme that I was coming across. It wasn’t just something that was lived by me. ⁓ And so, yeah, so I said about writing the book and yeah, think, I mean, I think I’ve written, this is my third book and I think all of my books ultimately, know, perhaps slightly selfishly, I’ve kind of written for myself.

But in the hope that there’s kind of something in there that will help other people who, know, as we find out when we, as you know, when you start doing this work on yourself, you find that, you know, everyone else is experiencing this as well. And it can be overlaid. All of our experiences of the unconscious, know, self evidently can be shared and used to help other people as well.

Dr. Rob (04:46)
From this kind of your perspective, right, which is very kind of socially aware and kind of a global perspective. And then kind of bringing in the Jungian perspective, perspective to it. ⁓ Can you tell us a little bit about the social media aspect of this? What is it doing to our mind body?

Robert Faure Walker (05:12)
Yeah. I mean, the way I think the way I describe it in the book is that social media, which sits within the attention economy, and I want to make that pretty broad. The attention economy for me includes print media, includes our newspapers, includes social media. I think it particularly includes, you know, if you sit down of an evening to watch Netflix.

That’s social media, it’s driving the same, it’s going to the same kind of processes within your brain to suck you in. And the way that I describe the attention economy is it’s the most recent frontier of colonisation. The coloniser of this world, capitalism, has colonised all land.

Debra (05:39)
Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (06:01)
And, you know, there are a few small pockets which we can see emerging at the moment that are trying to be colonized further, you whether it’s Greenland or Venezuela or whatever else. But ultimately, kind of, they’ve done it. The land has been overrun. And so the next frontier are our minds. And we’re losing that battle. Our minds are being and have been colonized by the attention economy. And

Debra (06:19)
Hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (06:27)
And that’s, you know, I think that’s one of the major reasons that we have this sort of such a massive global mental health crisis. I don’t want to say that’s the only reason because there is also a reality of climate change and ecosystem collapse, which goes beyond that. But I think for our own experience, you know, our experience of the world is so much mediated by what we see through our phones and through our screens. And

So I talk about how we believe as we sit there with our telephone, we believe that we’re looking through a window into the world, but we’re not looking through a window into the We’re looking through a very carefully curated set of images that are, especially with the most recent iteration of the internet, which is filtering individualized content to all of us, which are designated, designed by the algorithm.

to solicit the greatest emotional response possible. And we’re losing that battle. I think the only way, if we don’t engage in seeking to understand our own deep psychology, we further lose that battle. And the only chance that we have to regain some level of agency is to understand the deep psychology.

that the algorithm has been training itself on against us for the last 15 years. I think, you know, there’s another author with the publisher that this book is published with Revol, wrote a book a couple of years ago, in which he talks about, Mike Watson talks about how even our sleep is now bookended by social media.

And so actually, so that’s a part of my practice, obviously, I, you know, I write my dreams down every night, come back to them later in the day, I often don’t know what I’ve written down until I come back to them. ⁓ But a really important part of that practice for me is meditation before and after sleep, so that I’m so that I’m no I’m no longer bookending my dreams with that kind of that algorithmically generated content.

Dr. Rob (08:50)
Well.

Debra (08:50)
Yeah,

and also too with the ⁓ social media and media and ⁓ news, it’s all about fear and driving your fear or anger, almost like our worst human nature emotions than love and inspiration and empowerment. it’s like, ⁓ if we don’t pay attention, we can get it. It really affects our psychology and we’re so conditioned, easily conditioned.

Robert Faure Walker (09:01)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, And

it’s fear. But actually, I was talking to someone about this the other day. And I’ve got another aspect of it that we were trying to work out what was going on. We’re trying to work out what was going on when you sit down in front of the TV of an evening and you haven’t got a plan for what you’re going to watch. And 40 minutes later, you’re still scrolling through content and watching trailers and you haven’t settled on something to watch. And what’s going on there?

And in the same way, when you’re looking through social media, you keep going through. And it’s fear. But the thing that’s driving that behaviour is hope. You’re hoping for something better. And to put a mythological bent on that, in the Greek pantheon, hope was what the gods gave us to torture us. It was the hope that was left at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

Debra (09:51)
⁓ yeah. Like escape almost, right? You’re looking for that. Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

Robert Faure Walker (10:09)
which was the thing that stopped us from killing ourselves. so I think, you know, and I think we need to kind of think about, you know, the forces of the attention economy are mythological, you know, that’s the only way really to think about.

Debra (10:12)
Mm.

Dr. Rob (10:26)
Yeah, they’re very primal, right? So these companies, of course, they they probably have psychologists kind of advising them on how to do this stuff. What can we do on our side, like on our end, right? We’re in our in our work, we focus on practicality, what can people actually do today and start to think about these things?

Robert Faure Walker (10:27)
Mm.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, one of the things that I found through writing the book, one of the ideas that I alighted on was shifting away from the anger and the fear that you spoke about. And this relates to my last book. My last book was about love and about how do we find ways to love in this world where we’re

Dr. Rob (11:03)
Thanks.

Robert Faure Walker (11:18)
every relationship has become transactional, or been gamified. And in this book, I mean, in my last book, I talked about finding non transactional acts of care to enact it. And one of the things I talked about in my last book was, was care for the dying as a really important thing. It’s one of the few areas of non transactional care that we can give because that person, by definition, can’t give back to you.

Although we obviously receive so much back when we do care. But in this book, in Radical Young, I settled on grief. When we look at the world around us and we look at the sort of horrors that are projected to us through social media, what I try and do is just catch myself, just stop for a moment for a 10 second meditation. Just stop, check in with yourself and…

It’s kind of, it’s one of those things where you actually almost have to do nothing. You have to just stop and have that kind of meditative moment and allow the grief to come. Because what we’re not doing, what we’re not doing when we’re looking at social media is we’re not breaking down in tears, which actually is, that’s the correct response. And I find it incredibly empowering when faced with these kind of barrage of images of allowing that grief to come through and

finding calm when you allow that in.

Debra (12:45)
Hmm.

Yeah, I’ve had tears. I remember when the Jewish war, the Israel and Palestine and seeing the kids running in horror. And I’m like, oh my God, I just cried just to see some of the images. And I think people are in their heads a lot when they’re on social media and online, and they’re not in their bodies. So I really think this is a great segue to your work with eco-therapy, because I think

Robert Faure Walker (13:02)
Yeah.

Debra (13:14)
you know, we’re in our heads so much, we’re disconnected from our bodies, but also disconnected from the earth and the world. mean, Rob and I are in DC right now, we’re moving to Colorado, because we want to be back in nature again, we were starved for that connection to nature. So I’d to hear more about what you do and how people work. And I know there’s like a Jung and kind of theme to your work with the eco therapy.

Robert Faure Walker (13:24)
nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so and actually, that’s one of the sort of drivers that started me on the pathway of writing this book was, so I work as an ecotherapist, and I suppose I’ll just tell you what that means before then going into sort of the connection to the book. so I, in very simple terms, I take people out into the woods. They sometimes cry and they come out feeling better. ⁓ But there’s a bit more complexity to that. I

Debra (14:03)
Hahaha

Dr. Rob (14:04)
Thank

Robert Faure Walker (14:07)
We take people into the woods either individually or in a group. we, we see what comes up to us from nature. So we’ll stop and we’ll listen to the birds, we’ll engage all our different senses, I’ll guide people in using different senses to experience the forest as fully as possible. And it’s, it’s kind of magical that

some of the people who’ve had the most profound effects that I’ve worked with have been people who’ve been in talking therapy for years. And then they come into the forest and they stop trying to find the answer. And the answers emerge for them. And that can happen, that either happens, or generally happens kind of internally. And I always say to people when we’re doing this work is that

Dr. Rob (14:43)
Okay.

Robert Faure Walker (15:02)
it’s not talking therapy. So you don’t have to talk at all. But if you want to, we can we can discuss stuff. And if I give you an example of when it becomes kind of this what I’ve mentioned before, of sort of externalizing mind within nature, what happens with me if I’m particularly if I’m doing one to one individual therapy sessions.

And I go with someone and we normally go to the same part of the forest every time we walk through the forest and we do these practices, we get to they get to know the trees and the plants and the animals and. And you know this this each session might be an hour and a half, two hours long and what very commonly happens in these sessions is after I’ve had two or three sessions with someone. I’ll then.

guide them into the forest, I’ll then say to them, well, you know, can take us to the next place that you want to go to. And this extraordinary thing happens and it’s happened, it happens frequently where the client will become completely disoriented. They don’t know which way to go. They’re in a place that they’re familiar with and they’re totally lost and they panic. At which point I’m able to step in and say, well, that’s why I’m here. I’m the guide. So it’s okay. ⁓ And we then start kind of

walking through the forest and kind of, you know, I’ll allow them to intuitively go where they feel they ought to go. And it’s extraordinary because even from my perspective, the forest is no longer a metaphor for mind, it becomes mind. And, you know, we’ll walk through the forest and we’ll come across different trees, different glades, different thickets.

and they’ll remind them of things that have happened in their past. And as they describe those things back to me, I’m there too, it’s present, we’re fully present with those things that have happened and are happening in the moment. And it’s happened a few times, not as frequently as the general journey, but it’s happened a few times that we then will work our way back and find a younger self in the forest.

I’ve had a few instances where the client has said, they’re here, we found them. And I’ll say, well, are you going to talk to them? And they’ll be a bit chieftain, they’ll what, here? And I’ll then leave, I’ll walk off a few meters away and just let them be with an aspect of themselves.

Debra (17:34)
you

Robert Faure Walker (17:43)
And it’s extraordinary. it’s I’m sort of sending these up on my spine as I think about it. And every time it happens, that it’s it’s it’s just a quite extraordinary process. And and as you said, you’re getting out of people’s heads. It’s it is fully embodied. You know, we’re walking through and and and the forest is is is present there with us. And I think it’s.

You know, this is what I know, in some of your podcasts, you sort of talk about about neuroscience, and you were talking about it in the last one on that I listened to one on nightmares about this. When in a dream state, the brain is calm, it’s not working so hard. And this sort of I suppose all of these things relate to kind of ongoing research on psychedelics and on dream states that that’s when you get into these states, there is a breakdown of duality, and you end up, you know,

mind becomes the world and world becomes the mind and there is no distinction. And I think that’s, I think that I, I’m, I believe that’s what’s happening. I can only describe my experience. I don’t know what’s going on in someone’s brain, but I think that’s what’s happening.

Dr. Rob (18:51)
Yeah, that’s interesting. ⁓ I mean, the idea that we’re alienated from nature, right, ⁓ goes back to Jung, of course. And ⁓ you’re talking about kind of reconnecting an individual to that natural world that is kind of our natural home, And it essentially is psyche because everything we’re perceiving

Robert Faure Walker (18:59)
Mm.

Mm.

Yeah.

Dr. Rob (19:21)
is our mind because it has to be filtered through our perception which then becomes an interpretation of what that nature is.

Robert Faure Walker (19:29)
Yeah. And

Jung, of course, know, he, Jung had to do this. He had to retreat to the tower and be on the edge of the lake. And, and he said, you know, he said, sometimes I feel that I sometimes I feel that I am spread out across the landscape and in the changing of the seasons. And, and yeah, I think that’s what I’m bringing people back to. And, and, and that, again, you know, coming back to the book, that’s where that was the second part of your earlier question was why I wrote the book was that

my training in eco therapy, as with many of these kind of, you know, sort of nature connection and more so new age modalities, borrows from a kind of pantheon of non Western indigenous ideas. And I think that’s fine, as long as it’s done with due respect. And we have to do that because we are so kind of broken and wounded in the West.

But I sort of set out before I knew I was going to write a book about Jung, I started sort of reading around and speaking to anthropologists and trying to work out why do we not have an indigenous nature connection in the West? And where do I find it? And so I started looking around and I suppose the first question is why do we not have this in the West?

is that we had the witch trials. And we terrorized the predominantly women, but some men who were engaging in these kind of nature practices, who were living in the woods, who were offering kind of herbal and other, you know, alternative solutions. And then, you know, then I don’t know exactly how I ended up on, I mean, I was already kind of interested in Jung person, I suppose. And so that’s where this comes in. But

And then I suppose I realized that as Jung wrote that he very much talks about the fact that he’s working with the evolution of mind and looking back at previous cultural states of mind. And he says, through alchemy, that he found a chain back to Gnosticism and thus basically back to Hinduism.

And so it feels like there’s something very, well, for me, it connects a lot of my kind of, I suppose, methodological and metaphysical interests. My last book was quite heavily kind of engaging in sort of Hindu philosophy. But also, for me, at least, offers something more coherent and cohesive.

Dr. Rob (22:01)
Mm.

Robert Faure Walker (22:14)
for my own practice, whether that’s for myself or with my clients as well, that there’s a lineage to this now.

Dr. Rob (22:21)
Absolutely.

Debra (22:23)
Yeah, I feel like well, our work, we base it on Eastern philosophy and the Western because we feel like that’s what’s missing with Young’s work. If you’re just doing it as a therapist, it becomes more of a Western model of, you know, fixing the person and diagnosing the person. And this is more that we are a one like the non dual philosophy. We’re one with everything. We’re pure consciousness. All those ideas help us.

Robert Faure Walker (22:31)
Mm.

Yeah.

Debra (22:49)
use Young’s work in a more profound way because we aren’t just fixing the little psyche of our personal life. We’re actually connecting to the bigger, more spiritual element of who we are. Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (22:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. And

that’s also something that I wanted to, with Jung, address. And I address it upfront in the book that when you read Jung’s autobiography, which I recommend to anyone that hasn’t, it’s fantastic. But then you get to the kind of final few chapters where he talks about what he’s learned from his travels in Africa and in India and other places. And suddenly you’re kind of you’re

sort of modern liberal liberal self is that, you know, careful what you’re saying here. ⁓ But the but there is, you know, there’s much in that. And unfortunately, that’s it’s in those chapters where he really starts engaging with the Tao and things like that. and, but that, you know, I mean, have to, well, the language he uses, but I’m going to go further than that. And I’m going to, I’m going to directly criticize him, because I think I think I think we have to I think

Debra (23:44)
language he uses is sometimes not PC. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (23:54)
I think we have to say that attitudes of care and respect to other people have always existed. And so therefore, just because it’s the style of the time to denounce someone or to dehumanize someone doesn’t necessarily excuse it. I think we can understand it, but I think we ought not to excuse it. And so therefore, we come back to the age old dilemma of

Should we be allowed to enjoy Wagner because he was a rampant anti-semite? And I think, yes, absolutely, we should be allowed to, but we also need to reference the man as well. And I don’t want to, in saying this, I don’t want to totally denounce Jung as a man because I think that many aspects of him are wonderful. And if anything, Jungian philosophy tells us that we all have a shadow and we all must recognize that there are problematic aspects of self.

anything, it just makes him ⁓ a more human character to have that side of him. But absolutely, yeah. And that’s, yeah, and that’s, and I think that’s the, you know, if, if, if I had one criticism of just, you know, how Jungianism or Jung, the field of Jung has developed, is that it can sometimes feel slightly religious, it does have a kind of religiosity to it.

Debra (24:56)
Instead of making him a guide and he’s this, you know, like a put him on a pedestal. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (25:22)
Certainly, if you look at training through the Jung institution, stuff like that, there are big barriers to entry and aspects of it that are slightly problematic, I would say.

Dr. Rob (25:34)
Absolutely. Yeah, a lot of hero worship going on.

Robert Faure Walker (25:38)
Yeah.

Dr. Rob (25:41)
Yeah, so this other aspect of your work, ⁓ kind of thinking about the climate and how, you know, how or why we don’t deal with it. Like, why is it not more important to us humans since it’s really our lungs and our whole health that we’re talking about?

Robert Faure Walker (26:01)
Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think as individuals, are mostly very, very troubled and bothered by it. think we are disenfranchised by our political systems to give up. I really struggle with, I mean, I do it, but I struggle with washing out a yogurt pot to put in the recycling as I’m watching.

a year’s worth of emissions being launched in missiles of an evening. yeah, well, governments and whatever, 70 private planes flying into Davos every half hour, whatever it is. So yeah, so that’s problematic.

Debra (26:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we’re making our contribution and the governments are just wiping it out.

Robert Faure Walker (27:01)
But when you get, I mean, certainly, I don’t know how much this has penetrated in the US, but in Europe, particularly, and increasingly in the UK, there are emergent political parties that are very much working from the ground up with community assemblies, establishing what they care about and setting their policy. And those community assemblies are always radically defensive of the environment and the climate.

And so then we need to ask, so what’s happening if people are bothered by this, then we need to look at what’s going on. And I take an idea from, there’s a brilliant book about the climate emergency called The Ministry of the Future. It’s a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. he has a, he ⁓ invents a pathology called Gotterdammeren syndrome. And Gotterdammeren syndrome is where he describes it as where powerful people, mostly men,

⁓ fear the loss of their power. And if they can’t, they can’t accept, I’m paraphrasing here, but they can’t accept the loss of their power. And so for them, they would rather destroy the earth than lose their own power. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I go into that with, mean, Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has been saying recently that companies need more masculine energy. It’s madness. I recently actually wrote an article about how

Debra (28:12)
Well, the earth is the anima, you know, it’s the feminine. Yeah.

You

Robert Faure Walker (28:26)
this idea of all of these tech oligarchs who keep going on about masculine energy, shows them to be fantastically immature because in any other worldview, elderhood comes from integrating the other gendered aspect of yourself. So these men going around saying more masculine energy, they’re demonstrating that they’re children.

Debra (28:48)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (28:55)
But I think that what’s going on, combining this with that Gotterdammering syndrome, where these people are willing to destroy the Earth, which they are with their data centers and everything else, I suggest in the book that the shadow that they are turning away from is their own privilege. And so if you look at what they do is they end up being

acting horrifically and harmfully and violently against the least privileged among us. And I think that is because they have failed to address the shadow of their own privilege. So they end up saying that migrants have got these privileges because they’re being, know, fallaciously suggesting they’re being given too much money is being spent on them or too much money on, you know, if you look at what was happening with Doge in the US, all this money on helping people who are underprivileged. ⁓ And because

the accusation being that those people were privileged from the most privileged men in the world, they’re not facing something there. And I think it’s their privilege because to face in the world as we see it, to face their own privilege would be a horrific thing.

Dr. Rob (29:56)
Yep. ⁓

Debra (30:04)
Hmm, yeah. I love that. Yeah.

Dr. Rob (30:06)
So this is like a collective shadow of the

technology.

Robert Faure Walker (30:09)
Yeah, think it’s shadow

of these powerful men.

Debra (30:15)
And yeah, I think of the technology is very logic, the animus and the anima. And in the US, they’re trying to take women’s rights away to vote. And like they’re trying to, you know, take their right to choose and, ⁓ and like not have women in power, you know, like that kind of ⁓ prejudice. I see it as where they’re afraid and there it’s like scared little boys instead of like, they’re so powerful. They’re, hanging on to like the old way of being. And I feel like

Robert Faure Walker (30:32)
Yeah. Any you cannot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Debra (30:45)
They know it’s the end. so I feel like it’s the women are emerging and it’s just the illusion is that the men have power, but eventually women are going to save the world as the Dalai Lama said, the Western women, but also the men getting into their own femininity. Like we work with the Jung and integrating the anima and men would be very powerful.

Robert Faure Walker (30:59)
Yeah, yeah,

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I do write about this in the book, I think it’s not just, we have to be careful not to say, you know, the emergence of women to save the world, because from a Gnostic perspective, actually, what saves the world is the primordial couple together. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, yeah. And I think, yeah.

Debra (31:26)
Yeah, yeah. But rebalancing in a way. Yeah, emerging, like reclaiming. Like the original goddess was a woman, and then they

kind of wrote her out, wrote her out of the Bible and all that. so it’s like, yeah, bringing her back up to equal. Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (31:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, but being careful

because actually, I mean, this is, I was talking to a friend the other day who’s an archaeologist about this because there does seem to be, if we go back sort of from what we can see in the archaeological record over the last few thousand years, certainly, so I live in Wiltshire, live, was at four o’clock this morning, I was at Stonehenge for the equinox sunrise because I lived just down the road from it. And so the landscape around here is

Debra (32:06)
⁓ yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (32:11)
full of Neolithic architecture, all surrounding us. And it’s interesting that you can see this of yo-yoing through the history of the raising up of the goddess and then the raising up of the masculine. And it seems to be something that kind of yo-yos. And I think, therefore, we maybe need to think, if we’re going to heal from this, is try not to swing the pendulum. We kind of need to catch the pendulum in the middle.

Debra (32:41)
Well, I see a lot of women, I know like women entrepreneurs that kind of talk about like they’re going to be leaders and they kind of denounce the patriarchy and it like makes the men the enemy, which is not helpful at all, I don’t think because, ⁓ you know, just making the other, the enemy is not really going to help. It’s all about integration and it’s a, and it shows a fear in women when they do that. So anytime you’re like making the other person the enemy, there’s something in view that you have to look at.

Robert Faure Walker (32:52)
Yeah.

Yeah. And

also, think, I think with, with, you know, particularly that sort of example that you’re using. And this is something that I one of the, you know, I pulled the book Radical Young, because I, for a number of reasons, but one of the radical things was trying to sort of take a slightly radical view of Jung’s ideas. And one of the one of the those that I tried to unpick was Jung’s appreciation of gender. And, and I think we need to

Debra (33:26)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (33:35)
going off your example of the of entrepreneurial businesswoman who perhaps is behaving in quite a masculine way, that we don’t necessarily certainly when Jung was writing, it would have been expected that those kind of gendered attributes were tied to biological gender from the outset. And then you bring in the anima or the animus. And I think like firstly from kind of

Debra (33:57)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (34:04)
the experience and lived life of millions of queer lives now suggests that that maybe is not the case. it’s an interesting near. So I’ve just take I’ve taken a note talking to friends recently that that queer friends do actually seem to have a kind of reverse process of integration in that in that that sort of a queer man may be integrating a masculine aspect.

Debra (34:09)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (34:34)
where you might have expected an animal. so I think we need to…

Debra (34:35)
Yeah, that’s what we found, too. We have a lot of,

⁓ you know, variety, even trans clients. and they we always say, you know, Jung came out with the women has an animus and the man has an anima. And we’re like, we don’t know, like, that was his time. It was very rigid Victorian times. And I do I love that idea, because I think people like when a preserve like most Jung is when a preserve Jung stuff like the Bible.

Robert Faure Walker (34:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Debra (35:02)
And we need to evolve it with our time and our time is, you know, we have to look at these concepts are great, but they are very limiting to certain populations. And I like, I saw that in your book when I was scanning through it. And yeah, we totally agree that we, we just say, like, if you’re interacting with the animal, see what shows up. And sometimes we need animus energy. Sometimes we need the anima energy. It’s not about based on gender or identity.

Robert Faure Walker (35:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, exactly that. we need to, and the way I describe it is that what you’re looking for is you’re looking for the polarity to that which you’ve have the understanding of, you’re looking for the polarity of that.

Debra (35:38)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Dr. Rob (35:46)
Our students won’t forgive us if we don’t ask you more about the psychedelics.

Debra (35:52)
Yes, they love this I could

Robert Faure Walker (35:52)
⁓

Dr. Rob (35:54)
And, ⁓ and.

Robert Faure Walker (35:55)
So actually, I I, the final chapter of the book is that is me describing a psychedelic trip. And

Yeah, I I’ve found personally, for me, psychedelics have been incredibly useful and healing for me. And I think I mean, I just go with the kind of standard trope, is that, you know, having a full-blown psychedelic trip is like doing 100 hours of therapy. And I think, I suppose…

it, I suppose that I mean, that’s maybe a bit too bit too lazy, because it kind of has to come with the therapy. And, and what’s been interesting for me was, as having when I was much younger, I’m in my mid 40s. Now, when I was in my kind of late teens and 20s, then we would recreationally use psychedelics. And, and it was all kind of fun, and sometimes scary and a bit crazy. And that was it. And then latterly,

Debra (36:38)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (37:02)
you know, having gone through, you know, very classical union sense, I’ve gone through my midlife crisis and kind of hit the buffers and had to engage, you know, start asking deeper questions of myself. As I’ve come to understand how to navigate this world of symbols, experiences that I had in psychedelic trips 20 years ago have suddenly gained meaning. And so that’s been kind of a ⁓

you know, it’s sort of a fascinating thing for me that it was always there to discover. But, yeah, it was always there to discover, but you know, it needed the tools to understand it. So, the person that I kind of talk about a bit, who’s often forgotten about in the history of psychedelics is that there was a British psychiatrist called Ronald Sanderson. And he

was practicing. He actually had he had a correspondence with Jung because he was a Jungian psychiatrist. And he was practicing in the UK in the 50s and 60s. And he was giving, whereas in the States, Timothy Leary and others were giving their students like massive doses of acid and kind of sitting down with rooms full of incense and kind of seeing what happens when you blow the doors off kind of thing. Ronald Samson was was was

giving people small doses of LSD and then having very long ⁓ psychotherapeutic sessions, Jungian informed sessions where there might be bit of art therapy, there’d be a lot of talking therapy and was having great, great results. And I, yeah, I wanted to kind of bring that back. Cause I mean, I suppose I found that

not in exactly the same same way, but I found that my approach is most similar to what I subsequently just read of him describing. And then the other and the thing that she really advanced it’s here, here, this I probably said, but this is a problem, I was just working on it. But he wrote a book called Simon’s Daughter, which is this is the only known copy that I’ve I know of. And I’ve been in touch with his

in touch with his widow to get the rights to it. So we’re currently ⁓ republishing this book, hopefully later this year. And it’s a novel in which he, I mean, you’d love it from a union sense, because he perfectly integrates dream experiences, psychedelic experiences, and daily life of his characters kind of seamlessly. And

Debra (39:30)
Mmm.

Dr. Rob (39:43)
Mm.

Debra (39:45)
wow.

Robert Faure Walker (39:49)
And my understanding with this will come out when I write the introduction to it. But my understanding is that, and from talking to his widow, that what we’re also reading when you read this book is we’re reading his process of integration. This was his work to integrate. to speak to the psychedelic side of things, the reason that there aren’t any copies of this, or one of the reasons, is that it was published in 1985 at the height of Reagan’s war on drugs. And so a book that’s got LSD written three or four times on the back cover,

Debra (40:00)
Hmm.

Dr. Rob (40:02)
Right.

Debra (40:15)
⁓

You

Robert Faure Walker (40:19)
was immediately

buried and no one really spoke about it. And so it’s only now coming up that, you know, people are re-engaging with psychedelics and their healing potential that it might be, you know, of use. actually, the reason I came to this is kind of quite seramidipitous and speaks to, speaks, I think, to a little bit to the way that synchronicities happen and the mind is manifest in the world around us.

I got to the point of writing this book because or working on this book because I’d ordered a book of essays from a publishing company called the Psychedelic Press in which one of the essays is about this book. And I ordered it online. And 10 minutes later, the author turned up on my doorstep with a copy of the book.

And it turns out that he lives down the road from me and is another another man called Rob, who writes books on psychedelics that lives about 100 meters. And so yeah, so so so we kind of took it from there. We’re now we’re now working on this book, which I think is going to be, you know, I hope that I hope that people will will read it because it’s, you know, like we said before, to engage with Jung is to engage is to feel your way and to engage in something kind of more mythological and think

Debra (41:11)
my gosh. ⁓

Dr. Rob (41:18)
There you go.

Debra (41:18)
It’s a

lot of robes in there.

Robert Faure Walker (41:40)
actually, you know, not enough people have done this, but engaging it through it as a novel is incredibly powerful.

Dr. Rob (41:48)
Yes, I can see…

Debra (41:48)
Yeah, because you’re just not you’re not learning.

You’re just immersing yourself in the story. Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (41:53)
Exactly. Yeah,

yeah.

Dr. Rob (41:55)
Yeah,

I can see that the Jungian model would be ideal for helping people integrate their psychedelic experiences.

Robert Faure Walker (42:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, yeah, completely. think it is. I mean, this is to go off on a slight tangent, but I think about it earlier. In my, as I say, you know, I’m an academic and in my academic work, I have found a few years ago, my last book, which is called Love and the Market, it came out of, ran for a year, I ran a reading group at University College London for a

a book called The Philosophy of Meta Reality, which is book on metaphysics by a philosopher called Roy Baskar. And it’s almost completely impenetrable, which is why I had to run a reading group for a year for us to kind of slowly work our way through this book. And having finished reading the book, I was talking to a friend who’s also an author.

Debra (42:50)
You

Robert Faure Walker (43:02)
academic, I was talking to a friend and he’s someone who’s interested in metaphysics. And we were talking about, as you do on WhatsApp, the nature of consciousness. And I typed something that was kind of related to this reading group that we’d had. And this was me on a kind of Friday morning, completely sober. And I suddenly had a bang, sort of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus, non-dual experience where everything that I looked at was

was consciousness, preceded materiality. And it was pretty terrifying. It would have been horrifying if I didn’t have an understanding of this world kind of academically. But what was interesting for me in that is that I had intellectually got myself to that point. I’d done it through thinking. And similarly,

with my chemotherapy work as I’ve sort of taken, know, I guess a more, to use the word very loosely, but a more kind of shamanic approach to healing that I’ve, you know, strange things happened. I’ve developed a relationship with birds and other animals and strange things happened. Yeah, so that was, ⁓ so the last two books that I’ve written,

Debra (44:21)
I know there’s a bird in your profile picture.

Robert Faure Walker (44:30)
The moment that I’ve shot my laptop having finished the final chapter and I’ve gone out for a walk up the hill behind our house, on both occasions I’ve had profound encounters with crows and ravens. the last one, the picture of the bird in the book was, so it was about a year ago, went out for a walk and discovered a fledgling crow that had fallen out of a nest. And I left it, because I was hoping its parents were still looking after it, went back 24 hours later and it was still there.

And I watched it for an hour, his parents weren’t following it. So I bought it home and kept feeding it. And we had this crow, Mr. Crowley, living with us for the last year. And it was extraordinary. He would fly off and join his flock, and then would come back. I’d be two miles away from here with a client or an ecotherapy group or on a picnic, and he’d fly out of the sky and land on my shoulder.

Dr. Rob (45:19)
.

Robert Faure Walker (45:26)
⁓ and then go back to his mob. And it was just quite extraordinary. of course, for Jung and with his research into alchemy, the crow or the raven are the symbol of the negrado, the midlife crisis in modern money. And so I’ve had this extraordinary experience for the last few years. There were other crows before that, but I’ve had a few years while I’ve been going through this journey.

Debra (45:27)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Faure Walker (45:57)
constantly accompanied by crows, particularly this Mr. Crowley character who every morning I’d go out to the back doorstep of my house with my coffee and he’d land on my shoulder and I’d feel like a hero. ⁓ so there’s a tragic ending to this that a few months ago he landed on an electricity junction box and was zapped. ⁓ And I think this speaks to, this kind of comes full circle to your questions about how do we deal with ⁓

social media and climate change and everything like that is that the world is symbolic. so while I did grieve and I cried when the crow died and my kids cried when the crow died, it was also a relief because the negrado was over. The crow had been killed. And I think that feels to me to be a really strong foil.

Debra (46:46)
Mmm, yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (46:56)
to the nature of the world, the attention economy, to being overwhelmed by climate change and war, is to understand the world symbolically. Because when we do, we can gain some distance from it. And we’re no longer just a pinball to our emotions.

Debra (47:15)
And we feel more connected when we see like, what is this current at this event happening? What does that correspond to me? And we see everything less heavy and through our ego and we see things through our higher consciousness and this kind of connectedness. Yeah. You’re speaking our language.

Robert Faure Walker (47:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Rob (47:33)
And death is the symbol of transformation. So it is the transformation of the shadow energy into potential.

Robert Faure Walker (47:36)
Absolutely.

Debra (47:36)
Yeah.

Robert Faure Walker (47:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. this is

They’re complete. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Debra (47:43)
And it makes the world feel more numinous, you know, we’re engaged

with this magical part of life and

Robert Faure Walker (47:49)
Yeah, yeah. there has to be, there does have to be space for magic, you know, there’s got to be some unknown, otherwise, what’s the point? Now, there was another fantastic thing with the crow, which I think does speak to sort of some aspects of shadow, is that in the village that I live in, there’s obviously kind of a local village WhatsApp group where everyone kind of, know, of scores are fought and lost and settled and stuff like that. And ⁓

Debra (47:54)
Yes.

Robert Faure Walker (48:20)
And while this crow was flying around the village, which was now familiar with humans, was befriending other people. And most people thought this was great. But there were a handful of people who constantly complained that were complaining about the crow and were being attacked by the crow and da da. But they were all people who had a grievance with me. the crow, and again, this is maybe part of the reason why it’s such a strong alchemical symbol.

Debra (48:44)
that’s funny.

The crow is like doing

your work for you.

Robert Faure Walker (48:50)
Yeah, the crow was

Dr. Rob (48:51)
That’s Bob’s Grove.

Robert Faure Walker (48:55)
a blank slate for them to project onto. But brilliantly meant that the lived experience of the village that my crow was attacking my enemies.

Debra (48:57)
Mm-hmm.

Well, I really, I mean, this, could talk to you forever, but we have, we know you have a hard stop and we have also have a hard stop, but ⁓ what a, what a wonderful ⁓ content you have information. I’m really excited to dive more into your book. We will put your book, the radical Jung in the, in the show notes for people that want to ⁓ find it. ⁓ And also ⁓ the right now it’s a waiting list, but it will be coming out in May.

The end of A.

Robert Faure Walker (49:38)
Yeah,

yeah, can pre-order it now.

Debra (49:40)
Okay, great. Well, it really is filled with a lot of you cover a lot of topics. So very rich. We just touched on them today, but we really appreciate you coming on.

Dr. Rob (49:52)
Absolutely. Thank you for your time.

Robert Faure Walker (49:53)
Well, thanks so much

for your work and thanks so much for having me on to have the conversation. ⁓

Debra (49:57)
You’re welcome.

Dr. Rob (49:58)
Absolutely.