Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Phoenix Aurelius on Alchemy and it's Relation to Modern Science, Psychology, Health and More!
253 Plays11 months ago
Join us this week as we explore the fascinating realm of Alchemy! In this episode, Phoenix Aurelius takes us on a journey through the transformative practice of Alchemy, from its ancient origins to its resurgence in the modern age. We begin by unraveling the essence of Alchemical health, probing the question of what Alchemy truly is and its significance in our understanding of well-being.
Next, we delve into the foundational principles of Alchemy, touching upon The Emerald Tablet and the Alchemical elements, revealing the rich tapestry of Hermetic wisdom. Moving forward, we trace Alchemy's connections to modern chemistry, exploring the influences of key figures like Paracelsus and the transformative processes embedded within Alchemy itself.
Shifting focus to the psychological realm, we unravel the threads of psychological Alchemy, drawing insights from luminaries such as Carl Jung and examining its integration into psychotherapy. We then explore how Alchemy can be harnessed for trauma healing, offering a potent tool for personal transformation.
We come full circle as our exploration culminates in a discussion on the resurgence of holism, where we talk about how alchemy, with its ancient wisdom, contributes to the revival of holistic approaches to a modern understanding of the cosmos, leading to superior health and well-being.
Join us for a captivating journey through the Alchemical landscape, where ancient wisdom converges with modern understanding.
I hope you enjoy the episode!
Learn from me
https://www.instagram.com/beyond.terrain/
https://linktr.ee/beyondterrain
Support the Vision
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/beyondterrain
ETH: beyondterrain.eth
BTC: bc1qqwc470ktgj3l4myqxr5hq67rnlqys0qm98u6f0
Support and Learn from Phoenix
https://www.instagram.com/phoenix.aurelius.alchemy/
https://www.phoenixaurelius.org/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Alchemy Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Beyond Train podcast. Today, episode seven, we have a very special guest on Phoenix Aurelius, and we're going to have a fantastic discussion, I'm sure, today on alchemy. And now we talked about alchemy a few times on the podcast so far, and
00:00:19
Speaker
in the respect that alchemy is more of a true science as it merges the physical and spiritual and mental aspects as well. It's the opposite of a reductionist way of looking at things and that's what I appreciate most about it because
00:00:37
Speaker
Although, you know, science can distract us from what's in front of us, right? If we get too into our mind where we're not taking action, it's still great to be able to look at things and understand things and ponder things, because it can also be entertaining. And in that sense, you can also find the truth too.
Defining Health and Alchemy's Broad Role
00:00:56
Speaker
So Phoenix or Elias, thank you so much for coming on. My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Leo.
00:01:04
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I like to start the podcast off, um, a little more general. I want to ask, uh, you know, what health means to you, right? Kind of give us your definition of, of what it is, what it looks like, what it feels like and how it manifests. Cool. Yeah. That's a fantastic question. So to me, um, health is basically the state that, uh, any, any organism, any living organism is able to attain
00:01:34
Speaker
should it avoid five main things or maybe even six main things? One would be problems due to the stars and antipathies based on a topocentric relationship to the heavens. The second thing would be lack of imbalances that arise due to diet and lifestyle and natural factors like, for instance, weather or climate and season.
00:02:04
Speaker
and your relationship to it. So, you know, it's cold here. It's 29 degrees when I woke up. I'm wearing wool. That's appropriate for the season. If you're not, then, you know, that's maybe not appropriate. So those types of things can create imbalances that impact health as well. Also to me, Enzveneni is another cause. So that would be like a lack of toxicity. And my definition of a toxin is anything provided to the organism in excess of what it demands for perfect homeostatic function.
00:02:32
Speaker
Um, then, uh, I would also say that any organism, um, that breaks its own conscience or does something that, uh, it knows to be wrong, but engages in that behavior anyway, that also creates a psychological or a mental state of, uh, you know, imbalance or unwellness and, and causes a lack of health. And, uh, the last thing would be interaction with electromagnetic.
00:03:00
Speaker
and hormone and entities, as we would refer to them in the alchemical paradigm, when we are
00:03:10
Speaker
able to retain a certain sovereignty inside of our own spiritual emanation, then that creates a series of health. And then the last thing would be to be able to protect against magical forces or what we could refer to as psychic attack, the evil eye, which would be negative attention placed on you by other individuals, either because of your position in life or because of your bragging or because of
00:03:37
Speaker
you know, some, some lack of humility or lack of virtue that usually attracts negative attention. Um, so those would be the elements that I would say are the most critical and most important to maintaining health from my clinical perspective here as an alchemist and a clinical specialist. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked the way you broke that down. So I guess this can lead us right into,
00:04:05
Speaker
maybe get your definition on what alchemy is, right? I feel like a few of the listeners might not have ever heard of alchemy. And to be quite honest, like we've touched on it, but it's kind of an abstract thing and it's hard to give a short format or two, right? And it's so applicable in so many different ways. So, you know, if you could give us your best explanation of what alchemy is and why is it even important? Like what is its use?
00:04:33
Speaker
Absolutely. So let me go as broad as possible, because I can answer this in an infinite of different ways, depending on what perspective we're looking at. But for our audience today, let's just go ahead and start really broad, as broad and macro cosmic as we can get.
00:04:51
Speaker
And what I can say is that from that perspective, alchemy appears to be a holographic and fractal series of patterns that everything abides by in the entire observable natural world. I might even go so far as to say the entire observable universe. And realistically, what I mean by holographic and fractal is that no matter how telescopic
00:05:17
Speaker
our perspective is, from macroscopic to microscopic or macrocosmic to microcosmic, the exact same underlying and underpinning themes and processes continually apply to absolutely everything. So, alchemy really is a process. It's something that the universe seems to be well-versed in.
00:05:43
Speaker
in that it's applicable to absolutely anything. Now, the purpose of alchemy is typically for transformation or transmutation. Or if we want to look at this under more colloquial terms, we can refer to transformation of species over time. We can refer to that as evolution if we wanted to. And we can see that whether evolution exists the way that modern neo-Darwinism
00:06:13
Speaker
kind of tries to push or whether it doesn't is really irrelevant because we can see that evolution happens like the evolution of an idea, for instance. You can start having an idea last week and by this week, it has evolved, it's grown, it's changed, it's morphed as new ideas, new information, new data become available. And so transformation, evolution, even transmutation, which is the literal changing of one substance into another,
00:06:41
Speaker
is all entirely possible through the set series of processes that the alchemical paradigm has been able to expose to us over millennia and millennia and multiple different cultures and different people being able to utilize this philosophy in many, many, many different regards, whether that be
00:07:03
Speaker
psychologically or spiritually or physiologically working with chemicals or even working with constituents inside of the body so we can see and we can demonstrate what alchemy is and so
00:07:15
Speaker
Really, if anybody is out there and being like, oh yeah, I've tried to look into alchemy and it's very obscure, I have to say that you're really just not looking in the right places because somebody like myself would be able to not only explain it exceptionally clearly to you, but to be able to demonstrate it in such a way that you could not deny what it is that you're seeing, regardless of the perspective from which you try to observe said demonstration. Yeah, that's fantastic.
00:07:44
Speaker
And I know one of the most clear texts for me was the Khybalion by the three initiates. And it went over, well, the seven hermetic principles. And I found that a very, very clear explanation for me after reading a couple of texts. But
00:08:07
Speaker
One, one of the things that I kind of understood well before I was getting into alchemy was this
Critique of the Khybalion and Hermetic Principles
00:08:14
Speaker
concept of as above, so below. And I feel like that's might be one of the most common concepts that is spread. And you may have a different opinion on that, but I feel like it's, it's, it's one that's very easy to see in nature too. Right. And one that I even learned in, in studying, you know, people like Hippocrates, where it was a very,
00:08:35
Speaker
like the notion of the microcosm of the body relates, you know, directly to the macrocosm of the cosmos of the universe, right? So we are almost direct representations of our outer world. And kind of this as above so low, but even so as within, so without is almost the second part of that. So
00:09:00
Speaker
maybe you want to open up and touch on the hermetic principles because I found those really, you know, it's the set of set of principles that, you know, alchemy is often known for too. So, sure. Yeah. So let me, um, let me respectfully address the Kivalian by saying that it's absolute trash. That's as respectfully, uh, address it.
00:09:24
Speaker
Now, with that being said, it can be a great icebreaker for individuals who are completely new to hermeticism, but it was born out of the 19th century occult revival. And none of those principles are actually principles. We can actually draw away almost all of those because they are not ubiquitous to every life form. They are very, very narrow.
00:09:52
Speaker
in their approach and they may have some applications in a very subjective type of aspect of 19th century occult revival type of teachings influenced very heavily by theosophical kind of things that were happening at the time, but they do not stand up at all to the test of time of any of the hermetic traditions that actually exist going back very, very early. So the Kabbalian
00:10:20
Speaker
can be a great introduction, but it should be just that and something that allows the individual to go deeper. If it was up to me, it would not be part of Colectaeonic Chemica or the Corpus Hermetica. In fact, it's not part of Colectaeonic Chemica, it's just part of the Corpus Hermetica of the modern age. But I would totally
00:10:42
Speaker
eliminate that particular text because it's very very deceiving and it doesn't connect much into either hermeticism or into alchemy. So with that being said though, what are some of the principles are things that we are able to see that are pretty much ubiquitous regardless of the perspective of the culture, the time period, the religious filtration of the culture or the people that are using it and so on and so forth.
Understanding Alchemical Elements and Processes
00:11:12
Speaker
And when we go back to the cornerstone of all Hermetic literature, there is a single piece of literature that only exists in Latin and Arabic today, but was once allegedly, according to historians, on display in Egypt and had been found by Alexander the Great and put into Alexandria. And this was called the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trishmagistus.
00:11:40
Speaker
Hermes or Hermes basically said exactly this Which is to go into and elaborate on what you said as above so below he says that which is above is as that which is below and that which is below is as that which is above for the Perpetration of the miracles of the one thing and just as all things come from this one thing through Adaptation so do all things return to this one thing through meditation and so
00:12:09
Speaker
we are able to see there that what this whole basic preamble is, you know, summarized today is just as above so below, basically is the quantum opening to the entire text saying that everything that happens on a macrocosmic level is exactly the same dynamics happening on a microcosmic level. And as he says, for the perpetration of the one thing, if we think of,
00:12:35
Speaker
The one singular aspect that all created things have in common, whether we're talking about stones or stars or people or thoughts or anything, tangible, intangible, whatever, it is simply that they are created. So the one thing itself is simply the act of creation. And as above so below is the coding sequence that must be in place in order to allow creation to happen because if it's so complex and it doesn't abide by the same rules,
00:13:05
Speaker
then we don't have a universe, we have a diverse or a tri-verse or a quadri-verse, right? There's no singularity, there's no source that everything can come back to. So this is kind of the quantum statement that says everything is holographic and fractal, and that even though things appear differently, they really aren't different. Now, the Emerald Tablet continues to go on to give us this very
00:13:34
Speaker
kind of cryptic statement that says, its father is the sun, its mother the moon, it was born in the belly of the wind, and the earth is its wet nurse, and its inherent strength is perfected if it be turned into earth. And what this is telling us is basically how to view and see the elements as forces of creation, as father, mother, you know, gestator, and then as wet nurse.
00:14:01
Speaker
And what this really is, the son being the father is going to be the element of fire and the processes of, say, calcination, incineration, sublimation, things that are going to use a high, hot, intense form of heat in order to catalyze. And it's the first and most important element because it is from fire that every other element is able to be volatilized or
00:14:26
Speaker
able to be catalyzed would be a really good term. So for instance, I can make water just as buoyant as air just by applying heat to it. And we do this all the time to bring water to a boil, right? And we see the steam and there it is. It's rising just like air.
00:14:41
Speaker
I can actually separate out hot air from cold air through thermodynamics, again, simply by applying heat or the lack thereof. I like to think of the lack of heat. In physics, they say there's no such thing as cold, it's just a lack of heat. I don't think that I like to use the term heat and coolth, coolth being a force of its own.
00:15:05
Speaker
So we would be able to do that. And likewise, I can separate out moisture from Earth by applying heat to it. So I can take any of the moisture that's inside of the Earth and I can eliminate it. And I can also make Earth very hot, like in the case
00:15:20
Speaker
of making like a sand bath or something. And if I wanted to, I could actually liquefy solids and get them into a molten state. And in fact, the vast majority of human technologies that have allowed us to progress beyond simple neolithic types of technologies are entirely dependent upon that aspect of being able to control fire to such a degree that we can put things into heat-based flux and then cast.
00:15:48
Speaker
In fact, that's what led us into the Bronze Age. And then again, we were able to do this with iron and carbon and lead us into the Iron Age and now with steel and so on and so forth. So fire is the most critical in the first element. The second thing it says its mother is the moon. The moon governs over the tides and all aspects of liquidity on this planet. And so this is dealing with the element of water.
00:16:11
Speaker
Then we see the wind carrying it in its belly. This is obviously wind. There's no encryption there. It kind of comes right out and tells us that we work with the element of wind. And wind deals with separation, right? If I put a pile of sand or salt in my hand and...
00:16:29
Speaker
blow over it. Now I'm separating those grains from that pile. Likewise, if I use, say, a filtration and I have a filter paper inside of a funnel and I put my liquid here, there is a space of air that is actually separating
00:16:46
Speaker
this liquid and any of the solids that are going to remain behind in that liquid on that filter paper and the purified liquid that comes through it's a sense of separation and so wind really deals with this archetypal process of filtration of separation of removal of things.
00:17:03
Speaker
Then with the Earth, then we are dealing again, very, very straightforward with the element of Earth, but the Earth deals with conjulation, fixation, crystallization, these aspects where we're able to take things that are either liquid, as in the case of crystallization, and to be able to condense them, usually through heat and pressure, or through cool and pressure, and begin to create Earth.
00:17:31
Speaker
inside of a liquid where before there was just one liquid solution. And this is, you know, very, very obvious for those people who have studied geology. They basically are taking a listen to what I'm saying now and saying, oh, yeah, these are the main forces that we know have actually formed the Earth as far as we can tell, based on, you know, the theories of how water would have formed from hydrogen sulfide gases
00:17:59
Speaker
millions and millions and millions, possibly billions and billions of years ago, through a state of constant reflux. I can, again, demonstrate this in the lab. If we want to reflux hydrogen sulfide for long enough, eventually there's going to be crystallization that happens. The sulfates drop out, oxygen comes in, carbon escapes, and then we end up having water over a longer period of time. H2O will be the result from hydrogen sulfide as a result of the crystallization of these sulfates.
00:18:27
Speaker
We can see from practical perspectives that this particular process of fire, then water, then air or wind, and then earth are ubiquitous in the formation of absolutely everything. And again, we refer to this as father or semen in this case, the seed.
00:18:49
Speaker
Then we have the mother, which is the one who is impregnated. Then we have the process of gestation itself, this growing, this separation and the ultimate separation of that moment of birth that distinguishes the growing organism from its host. And then lastly, the nourishing or the growing of this actual organism as its own thing through its maturation and lifestyle and ultimately to its own death.
00:19:19
Speaker
And then finally, there's three ladder processes that really deal with what we would call as alchemists, sulfur, mercury, and salt, which is to say, soul, spirit, and body. The soul is primarily had through the process of extraction. This can also sometimes be a method of fermentation that we see in nature. It doesn't always have to happen through fermentation though. Like for instance, extraction happens anytime that you make an infusion or a tea, right? You're extracting.
00:19:48
Speaker
with a solvent, in fact water, the universal solvent, the medicinal components, the soul, the healing nature of that herb that it is that you are making a tea from or an infusion from. So extraction would be the better principle. Then we have mercury that deals with the processes of distillation.
00:20:09
Speaker
and the elevation. The Emerald Tablet says, it rises from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, thereby combining within itself the powers of both the above and the below. And that's how it describes the process of distillation. So, you know, you take a body of water here on earth, you act with solar radiation, UVA, UVB, UVC rays that heat up
00:20:30
Speaker
the nature of the molecules. These, again, because they're acted upon by fire, become as buoyant as they are, and they rise up, and they create these enormous cloud systems, which become so heavy in the clouds, once again, that they fall back as water, but now it's a distilled water. There's none of the impurities, there's none of the algae, there's none of the bacteria, etc.
00:20:50
Speaker
that were found in the water source in the lake, it is now a pure distilled water source. And so it combines within itself, the powers of the above and the blow. It is liquid and it's fallen to earth, that's the below. The above part is its purity, its absolute purity that is symbolized by the heights of the cosmos and of the heavens. And then the very last process is really putting it all back together. And really the Emerald Tablet only says about this part,
00:21:20
Speaker
It tells us now you have all three parts of the knowledge of the whole world. And this tells us basically that once we've performed all of these other archetypal processes, that we can now put all of the individual components back together, and we can create something really, really spectacular. So the first four elements, they're corporeal, the fire, air, water, and earth, they really only exist
00:21:49
Speaker
I can't say that we can see those outside of terrestrial environments. They need a containment in order to be able to be fully present. So terrestrial or planetary environment, however you want to define that, luminarious environments, those contain the elements. And in Kabbalah, which is very intrinsically tied into hermeticism, especially of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance and
00:22:18
Speaker
you know, well into the 19th century cold revival and today. You see that the the Setra of Malchutz, which means kingdom, it's the very bottom setra on the tree of life. It is composed of four different quadrants that are representative of fire, air, water and earth. And so these are corporeal elements. And what we're doing when we work with these four processes of, you know, calcination, dissolution, filtration, crystallization, what we're really working with is
00:22:48
Speaker
revivifying and purifying the corpus of the material, the body of the material that we're working with. When we work with extraction, we're working with the soul of the material. And when we work with distillation, typically we're working with the spirit of the material. So those are the three different materials that we have. We call them sulfur, mercury, and salt, which are not chemical sulfur like brimstone, metallic mercury, and sodium chloride.
00:23:14
Speaker
These are archetypal principles. They've always been archetypal principles. We never in alchemical texts ever meant for those to be literal. And what they are are universal holographic and fractal aspects that everything contains. And that is the entire basis of alchemy is how do we utilize these laboratory processes that nature, that we have seen nature use in her geological and natural processes?
00:23:44
Speaker
And how do we harness these in order to separate out these three, we call them philosophic essentials of soul, spirit, and body, so that we can purify each of them in their own right, and then combine them back together to create a new octave of expression for the materials that we're working with and making. Wow. Wow, that was great, I feel like. Well, I just want to, I appreciate you bringing up the Caballion as,
00:24:14
Speaker
and giving your take on that. I think that's a fantastic point of view for sure.
Alchemy's Evolution into Modern Chemistry
00:24:19
Speaker
And especially off that explanation, I can certainly understand where you're coming from with that. Wow. I could, I really want to take this in a thousand different ways. I'm kind of having trouble trying to pick a direction, but what's standing out to me is, you know, much of what you're talking about, it seems to have been adopted by chemistry and obviously
00:24:43
Speaker
It's told in a much different story now in the labs, in the textbooks, in the universities.
00:24:52
Speaker
maybe you could just comment on what is the importance of understanding it in the way that you understand it rather than this reductionist way of it's all just material, right? Because there's this almost beautiful story that comes along with the study of alchemy, harnessing, like you said, the archetypal forms of these
00:25:15
Speaker
You know phenomenon and and it being written so beautifully, you know, i'd appreciate just any comments or any thoughts on that well again, this isn't as cut and dry as what most people might think and I really really appreciate modern chemistry and science because I can see it as Alchemy itself undergoing the process of alchemy and let me explain a little history history just to kind of give context to this
00:25:44
Speaker
When Paracelsus created the theory in the 1530s, basically, of sulfur, mercury, and salt. Now, before him in, I want to say some period between 600 to 900 AD, there was, and I can't pull the date straight off, so I know that that's a 300-year window, but feel free to look this up. But Jabir, even Hayan, or just known as Jabir, or Gabir, sometimes in the West, he,
00:26:12
Speaker
He came up with the sulfur mercury theory of alchemy. And that was this very polar opposite where solar was the masculine and mercury was the feminine and they were working with these things. Well, that continued for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years until the time of Paracelsus. And then Paracelsus got ahold of this and he started thinking about it and he said, you know, you guys are constantly creating salts, working with salts, but you've never actually
00:26:39
Speaker
incorporated this principle. So he revised that entire concept of sulfur, mercury, and salt, meaning that everything contains a sulfur, which is to say something that can be extracted that has medicinal value to it. So it doesn't matter what solvent you're using. You can use a solvent to extract some sort of phyto constituent from a plant, for instance, or some sort of mineral constituent from minerals and metals and so on and so forth.
00:27:07
Speaker
Then he also says that the Mercury principle is actually androgynous. It is, if anything, hermaphroditic, and it can swing both ways, because it is the thing that unifies the masculine principle of sulfur, this active, dynamic, fiery component, with the opposite component, which is completely sedentary and fixed and...
00:27:32
Speaker
Well, I guess that would be the best term. Just sedentary and fixed, and we would call that Earth, or we would call that salt. And he philosophizes this. He says that there are still four elements. There's fire, air, water, and Earth. But the combination of fire and air is what creates sulfur. So these are the most active and dynamic of the elements. They're both masculine elements. And ever since the time of ancient Greece, even Pythagorean, you know, pre-Platonic and pre-Aristotelian thought,
00:28:00
Speaker
The elements of fire and air were typically indicated by an upwards pointing triangle for fire, and then an upwards pointing triangle with a line through the top third of that triangle indicating air, again, showing that hot air rises and cool air condenses. So these are active, dynamic, and masculine, if we wanted to refer to that, positive charge, masculine, that type of archetype. Salt, on the other hand,
00:28:30
Speaker
entirely opposite. It's a combination of water and earth. And if you think of water, you're like, well, water is kind of active. And it's true, but water is aggressively lazy. And what I mean by that is that water will do anything. It will erode through mountains. It will come down in enormous gushes and glass and do anything to simply be at rest in a body of water.
00:28:54
Speaker
only wants to be at rest. And unfortunately, every other outside influences, you know, working against it, gravity and, you know, sunlight and heat and all these other things are like never allowing it to fully rest. Such must be its Dharma, but it is aggressively lazy and it would love to be at rest. And then we have the element of Earth, which is completely sedentary. It's very hard to move Earth. And anybody who has picked up a shovel and will barrow and move significant quantities of soil for any length of time or rocks will be able to.
00:29:23
Speaker
Tested that now within those four elements though There is one more grouping that we can actually have if they're lined up in this particular way and that's these two middle ones That's water and air and water and air he says or mercury and mercury because it shares one element each to sulfur and to salt it is the Intermediator and that's what he said by being kind of hermaphroditic or androgynous it can you know copulate with
00:29:51
Speaker
with the male, it can copulate with the female, it doesn't get impregnated so very easily, females can get impregnated, hermaphroditic can't get impregnated, but it can hold the essence of things, and it can also hold salts. So it becomes this very interesting menstrom-based kind of principle
00:30:14
Speaker
And so he is the one who created sulfur mercury and salt, and the concept of the four elements as we still have them in alchemical theory today, and it was exclusively because of him that we think of it in this way. Now, by the time Paracelsus died in the 1540s, he was bludgeoned in the back of the head, his skull was completely caved in, and he died very early, very, very early at around 43. It was just a tragedy.
00:30:44
Speaker
But what became of that was that his students were taking his theory. Now, Paracelsus was, like myself, a medical practitioner of alchemy. In fact, he was probably the first and most important individual to say, all of you people who are trying to turn lead into gold for vain, glorious purposes and for riches and to help your governments and whatever else,
00:31:08
Speaker
That's folly at best. And you don't have any concept of what gold making should really be for. Gold making is exclusively for making medicine. And if you are making it for purposes other than that, then that's ridiculous. By the way, he showed people how to make gold and wrote many treatises on this. But he also told people how to
00:31:31
Speaker
turn their alchemical practice into a medicine-making thing. And he was very, very good at it. In an age where people were suffering from diseases and suffering even worse from the treatments through Galenic medicine, he was treating syphilis and plague and leprosy and all these other things exceptionally well by utilizing his own theory and formulating his own medicines according to his own theory. And he was exceptionally, exceptionally
00:31:58
Speaker
well-versed at doing this and there are multiple different historical cases of him healing principalities when all other physicians in the land would not and so on and so forth so he was very very effective and we know this but what ended up happening is that he died and his writings and his students ended up teaching other students and for about 150 years after his death following 1540 until roughly about 1700 we started to see
00:32:27
Speaker
English and French Paracelsian physicians is what they were referred to following in his footsteps and also making this new form of medicine that was called by outside people, they called it chemical medicine, becoming very popular. And by the 1700s, we're starting to get out of the Renaissance and we're starting to get into early enlightenment. And so we have people like Sir Robert Boyle, and we have other individuals thinking about
00:32:53
Speaker
Alchemy and learning alchemy in university and that's you know, the main form of chemistry But they started to say and you know, Robert Boyle and a skeptical chemist actually said, you know, I I think it's like I can show that these things work but I think that there's more chemicals than just sulfur mercury salt and these four elements because I can show that a salt of this thing is a different than a salt from this thing, but they're both in the same kingdom and
00:33:23
Speaker
And it's getting really hard and convoluted to like describe the differences between these things in an age where we want to share intellectual ideas. And then shortly thereafter, you have people like Lavoisier discovering oxygen, you know, and now oxygen isn't just air, it's a component of air, but it's its own unique thing that we can isolate and so on and so forth. So alchemy itself as a holistic practice actually had to
00:33:52
Speaker
be subject to the alchemical process itself. And so what it did was that it took its physical component, which is to say the chemistry aspect of the laboratory work, and it separated that out. And we're still in the process of doing this so that we can dynamically describe through very, very clear terminology
00:34:17
Speaker
what types of salts we're talking about? Is this, say, cupric sulfate or is this sodium chloride or is this potassium carbonate or acetate or so on and so forth? And now we have terms for that and we're not just limited to say, this is the salt of salt of this plant or the salt of salt of this substance, which gets very convoluted and hard to describe. And even reading it, you would have to meditate on it and try and know what the hell the author is talking about. Simultaneously, the spiritual and the
00:34:45
Speaker
um psychological aspects that accompany alchemical lab work because again everything that we do when we are working with materials in the laboratory as alchemists we are using the quantum state of observation and acknowledging that as we observe this thing we are creating what is happening there and that that thing holographically and fractally is a component of our entirety our being our our psyche our spirit our body and that's why it can interact with our psyche our spirit and our body
00:35:15
Speaker
And so as we are purifying the material, we are using this quantum state of observation to be able to purify ourselves in the same way that our material is being purified. But that aspect of chemistry did not carry over.
00:35:29
Speaker
But what did happen is that those aspects also separated out and they went into two different directions. One of those went into what we would now refer to as kind of like Jungian psychology or relinquish to the realms of psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, so on and so forth, right?
00:35:45
Speaker
And then we also have the spiritual components that went into spiritual alchemical practices. Now, long before this ever happened in the West, we had the exact same things happen in ancient Taoist China. And they did the same thing. At first, their alchemy, their alchemical practices were actually using real cauldrons and actually sublimating various minerals and getting various distallets and different types of materials and then ingesting those materials. And they had a unified practice
00:36:15
Speaker
of alchemy that was a psycho-spiritual form as well. And over time, they said, oh, the chemical practice is actually too hard. There's not enough people to show it to you. So now it's relinquished to the practice of what we call today negong, which is basically psycho-spiritual alchemy that is done internally, an internal alchemy. And that is still part of the Taoist tradition today. And we have a very similar thing in India with the Rasa Shastra tradition.
00:36:45
Speaker
where they make basmas and they make lots of different types of medicines that have been talked about for a very long time. So they still have a laboratory aspect that is intact and theirs actually never got separated because of how strong the Hindu texts and the Vedas, the Vedantic texts actually were in maintaining a unified and holographic thing. I mean, you have a 10,000 year old tradition basically
00:37:15
Speaker
that still exists in India. But today you will get people taking those basmas and trying to chemically find out why it is that they work, even though it's not about that. The people who are performing this have sacred cow dungs that are stacked in certain measures high and wide and deep with their material to be sublime.
00:37:37
Speaker
inside of the middle of this amount of cow dung, which is different for every basma, different recitations of mantras, different numbers of recitations of mantras, different psychological states of the operator. All of those things are necessary in order to create a true basma that not only heals physical, but that is able to heal spiritual and mental imbalances as well. So we see this ubiquitously.
00:38:19
Speaker
maybe seeing it through a slightly different cultural lens, but if you reduce it to its basics, they're all using the exact same type of philosophy.
00:38:23
Speaker
all over the
Integrating Alchemy into Modern Practices
00:38:29
Speaker
And so today we are in this really beautiful space from my perspective, Liv, where alchemy itself has been alchemized, that's not a word, but let's use it, that we now have these kind of unique and modern
00:38:31
Speaker
world.
00:38:46
Speaker
modern and relevant practices of psychoanalysis and fields of depth psychology and other things like this, that we can integrate into the spiritual and mental components of alchemy. And we have this whole spiritual tradition that has cropped up since especially the 19th century occult revival, the Rosicrucians in the United States and France, or perhaps KORC, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rosicross in
00:39:15
Speaker
France and amork in the United States are especially Really really about this but there's tons of different Rosicrucian orders and they have taken the entire alchemical paradigm and
00:39:28
Speaker
They moved away from lab work. They tried to incorporate it for a while. They really did, but it just wasn't quite so popular. And so a lot of people these days who are Rosicrucians have never practiced alchemy, but they're practicing spiritual alchemy and they're using terms, sulfur, mercury, and salt, and they're doing this on this very deep kind of spiritual level. And then we have chemistry. And now we have the opportunity to, if we restore our understanding of alchemical philosophy in the modern age,
00:39:54
Speaker
We can take all three of these purified essentials, just like we would in the laboratory, and we can put them together and create a new unified practice that, in my opinion, is going to help to lead us to the next state of evolution for the human paradigm. And if we use it properly, it will not just benefit the human paradigm, it will benefit the entirety of our terrestrial paradigm, because we will be able to see and to understand
00:40:21
Speaker
sources of unity, where things have come from, where they're heading, and we'll be able to help them in that journey. So with alchemical sciences, for instance, we can take what would otherwise be a very negative and detrimental practice like agriculture, which deals
00:40:39
Speaker
regardless of whether you're doing it in very old ways of tilling with a wooden thing and dragging a horse, or whether you are doing it with modern tractors and agrochemicals.
00:40:52
Speaker
The same thing has always been true is that we deal with soil erosion. We deal with lack of nutrientization. We deal with all of these different things with the way that agriculture is traditionally done. But if we apply alchemical principles, we can see how nature in the forest regenerates without depletion. In fact, it increases nutrient density as time goes on. And we can begin to apply very similar principles to aspects like our agriculture so that we can benefit not only for ourselves, but our farm animals, the world as a whole,
00:41:22
Speaker
be able to save on water and so many other things. So all of the different aspects and applications of alchemy can really save us. If we just take these awesome components that we have separated out and really highly purified and put them back together, I think that that will give us probably the best chance for achieving a greater state of human potential in the next century or two. Yeah, that's amazing.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah. And like, you know, you can, you can speak about it in so many ways cause we've separated science and just speaking in science from scientific lens, like all the fields now, right? Cause even in biology, you have, you know, these sub biology, um, you know, little like studies, like you have the physiology or you have anatomy or you have whatever it may be. Um, and so it almost seems.
00:42:21
Speaker
infinitely divisible in my mind. So I couldn't agree more and I was going to honestly open the door for, but you got there already. You're one step ahead of me. Bringing it all back together kind of seems like the goal, right? And, and to complete this alchemical process, my wonder is if it's infinitely divisible, right? It's like, when, when do we bring it back together? It's like, and I guess, you know, we might not know, we don't know the answer to this question, but
00:42:51
Speaker
And that just may be the continuous cycle, right? Because once it's brought back together, the cycle will restart and it will happen once again on a greater scale and then be brought back once again, right? And I think that's kind of what you're hinting at. You're nodding your head here and it agrees. You know, no matter how much we know today, no matter how much we experience today, no matter how much we've transformed today, tomorrow, a deeper embrace can always be had.
00:43:20
Speaker
And that's the cool thing about this is that it's not, alchemy is not an event. It's not a singular action or a singular thing. It is a perpetual process of continual perfection. And that is what drives evolution. That is what drives transformation of everything. The things that we're finding fossils of and things that we're finding remnants of thousands of years ago, no longer exist in many cases.
00:43:50
Speaker
they've changed, they've altered their structure, they've adapted to fit the scenarios that they are now put in. And I think that's the most important thing for us to remember is that alchemy is perpetually applicable. And when something is no longer relevant, then it's time for that thing to undergo its natural and inherent death, and then to undergo the processes of transformation to attain a rebirth
00:44:19
Speaker
to be able to be relevant again to the portions of the population who are willing to use that. Fantastic. Yeah. And when I think of, you know, the modern world, it's, it's no wonder we're, we're at this point, right? And it's, it's like almost like, you know, our progression is, is certainly the cause of,
00:44:45
Speaker
are the state of the world. And like you were mentioning, the agricultural practice is obviously taking and stripping the soil of nutrients, right? It doesn't have to be like that. And you could apply that to many different scenarios, but, you know, it's like coming, coming back around with this, like with these alchemical teachings and this, this new understanding and bringing things together to rebuild the soil. So it's like,
00:45:14
Speaker
you know, all of the problems that we have with our new chemicals that we've created, say like, you know, the fish in the rivers are, are being, well, it's everything, everything, every living organism is being harmed by these artificial chemicals in my mind. And, you know, when we bring it all back together, it's going to, I would speculate that it's going to allow us to understand how to kind of rebuild that and, you know, rebuild our soil. And there are people that do that, you know, there are people who take the most barren land
00:45:44
Speaker
you think, you know, you couldn't grow a grass seed in there. And eventually it comes back, you know, over even short periods of times, five, 10 years, and they bring it back and they produce plants and animals and you name it on it. Right. And it's, it's quite a beautiful thing. So, you know, I think people are tapping in. People are ahead of their time too. Right. And, and obviously some people are behind a little bit, but, um, there will always be the majority of people who are behind the times because, you know, trauma,
Alchemy for Personal Growth and Trauma Transformation
00:46:13
Speaker
is really the name of the game for the majority of the human epoch. And that, see, here's the thing. Everybody is performing alchemy all the time, whether they're aware of it or whether they're not. But those who become conscious of it and utilize those forces are able to overcome whatever conditions it is that they find themselves in because they're able to utilize the principles of transformation that nature herself uses.
00:46:44
Speaker
Trauma is kind of the thing that actually gives us the opportunity to transform. Most people will do anything to resist admitting that that trauma really exists. And so they are using all of the capacity that they could use for their absolute amazing human potential and they are restricting it and confining it just to hold back these repressed emotions from their trauma.
00:47:09
Speaker
And if you are able to follow the alchemical processes of calcination, getting absolutely honest with yourself about the trauma, using dissolution or the element of water to be able to express the repressed emotion and get it out so that it's no longer reservoir and damming up.
00:47:25
Speaker
all of your etheric energy. And then if they can separate out their behaviors, thoughts, and lifestyles in order to no longer perpetuate the habits and things that they were using in order to deal with those traumas, but create new disciplines instead of habits, and then begin to live a life where they can simply crystallize through the solution of the ethers what it is that they want, you know, through the concepts of manifestation or however you want to talk about it in new age terms.
00:47:54
Speaker
to come to them and to manifest to them, then they will have at least taken care of that corporeal aspect where their lives are much more healthy and open and they will be much more connected to source. But people don't typically hear it like that and they don't have a context for it like that and they don't have guides for it like that in most places of the world.
00:48:17
Speaker
Or even if they do, you have to be open to receiving that message in the first place and be willing to do the work. Otherwise you will stay stuck. And so that really is what's holding the vast, vast, vast majority of humanity back. And, you know, this is why we keep coming back as species in order to continue to learn these things and to move past them, learn and move past and learn and move past. Because as we do that new aspects of our
00:48:46
Speaker
uninhibited nature are able to open up. And that's what allows for a beautiful humanity. And that's also the people that we see who are able to not utilize their traumas to hold them back, but are able to utilize their traumas to find their strengths, right? Like I got hurt when I was in high school and ended up studying a lot and got really deep into alchemy. That's so people would say, Oh,
00:49:13
Speaker
Phoenix now has this virtue of alchemical understanding that was born by the trauma. I couldn't have done it had I not had that physiological and psychological trauma, but I was able to utilize it in a proper way that is able to give me strength. And this is also what is meant from mining or transforming gold or lead into gold is that you take the
00:49:36
Speaker
the lead of your painful experiences and transform them into the goal of your self realized capacity and strengths. Yeah. Yeah. I guess to give my own example too, like through COVID, right? And, and obviously with the mindset that we kind of take on this channel with the terrain perspective, it, you know, obviously didn't make a whole lot of sense. And, and that was really challenging for me, you know, psychologically and socially, but throughout that, you know, like before
00:50:06
Speaker
this, the whole COVID thing hit. I, I didn't know about any of this. I didn't know about, about the terrain. I didn't know about health. I didn't care about any of that. Right. I was like money focused. Like that's the only thing I cared about. Right. And through it came this beautiful transformation. And so that's my own like short form micro cycle of this little process because it's ongoing. Right. And, and, um, when you apply it to the microcosm of your life, even.
00:50:33
Speaker
You know, you can see how life cyclically prepares you for the next chapter and you can cyclically get stronger. And, and I love the way you put that, that it's, you know, your trauma is kind of holding you back. And, and if you're using all of your energy, sorry, maybe not your trauma holding you back, but if you're using all of your energy to hold that trauma in, that's what's holding you back and, and kind of embracing your trauma and, and using it as a, as a
00:50:59
Speaker
catalyst for growth, I think is a great perspective. And I feel like we're kind of getting into the psychological aspect of alchemy here, which is actually the first thing I learned about because I studied a lot of Carl Jung and I study counseling and psychoanalysis or not psychotherapy and formally in school right now, I'm in my master's and, and I, so I have a great focus on that, especially from my, my alchemical lab, you know,
00:51:29
Speaker
knowings. And, um, I, I really liked this whole mental transformation and a reason why I think that it's, it's, it's, well, it's one, it's comfortable to hold your traumas in because the dark night of the soul, that many term the, this, you know, a stage in the process is a scary thing. And it's something that a lot of people talk about nowadays that even, you know, looking at your shadow,
00:52:00
Speaker
is a very scary, dark place, right? But it, but it's about harnessing what's in the shadow and even, you know, not looking at it in that dark light, but bringing out the gold from that, from your shadow and integrating that into your psyche. So maybe we can kind of get in. I know you kind of touched on it there a little bit, but any thoughts on Carl Jung and his idea on alchemy or, or just, you know, the mental transmutation in itself.
00:52:27
Speaker
Well, I have to say this, for never having actually practiced laboratory alchemy, Carl Jung really, I have to give him props. He was able to work out some really heavy ideas. Now, I have to say from a laboratory perspective, he didn't always come to the ideas that the alchemists themselves would have come to, but by reading alchemical concepts and not knowing what chemicals they were talking about or processes or labware and other things, he was able to use
00:52:57
Speaker
Imaginatio right in order to this unadulterated sense of the imagination in order to Philosophize what what is the end result of this and he did such a great job at that that he was able to bring the aspects of Many aspects at any rate of psychological alchemy to the for now one of the things that I see about psycho analysis and psychotherapy oftentimes today is
00:53:23
Speaker
that they're only walking a person through the first three maybe even two aspects, which is Relive the experience or tell the experience use aspects like talk therapy for instance for this in order to bring out the the trauma because then we can focus on it we can address it and Hopefully move past it or at least that's the idea and then they will get you to express the emotions
00:53:52
Speaker
but then there's very little about what to actually do after that. And so for many people who undergo psychotherapy, they will not go see another therapist ever again because all they did was reopen a wound and create scar tissue upon scar tissue. And so you hear this time and time and time and time and time again from individuals who go to psychotherapy sessions and are like, yeah, it doesn't work because blah, blah, blah.
00:54:21
Speaker
Well, I think that that's really just lack of understanding on behalf of the practitioners and lack of experience on behalf of the practitioners because a good practitioner can utilize this very same aspects of psychotherapy and begin to walk them through those first two aspects of calcinations and dissolution, but then walk them through this concept of filtration and show them
00:54:46
Speaker
Here's how you have to leave every one of your behaviors, your thoughts, your habits, your friends, your, you know, anything that you associated with. You have to let that die. And this is a really, really important aspect. You have to filter that out of your life and you have to create new goals for yourself. So if you don't want to feel like that, whatever that is, you know, whatever that trauma is, it's holding that individual back or that memory that
00:55:15
Speaker
whatever, you have to let it go. And you have to really completely forgive whoever it was, understanding that they were completely in ignorance as our 95% plus of the human species and that they're acting from their own state of survival and just doing what they're doing in order to survive or whatever else. And that you actually have a choice though. What do you want to do
00:55:45
Speaker
And then how do you want to do it? And you have to make very specific bullet pointed lists. And the way that I like to do that, I learned this part from Mark Joyner, you know, kind of the godfather of the internet. You visualize what the end goal is first and say, okay, I'm visualizing myself at that point. What is the last thing that would have to happen right before that?
00:56:11
Speaker
in order for me to achieve that. And then you just keep reverse engineering to your present moment. And then that literally creates a growth plan for the individual that allows them to move forward. And then after that, it's really just living that lifestyle for long enough and everything that you wanted will eventually just
00:56:34
Speaker
naturally come to you because you've already plotted this out and that's the process of crystallization, right, is that you've already created this filtered solution. All you need to do now is just give it time and a little bit of warmth, a little incubation, and crystals will form, which is to say that those things inside of your life will manifest and it will take form in the way that you hoped that it would take form.
00:56:56
Speaker
So to give an example, let's start with somebody who comes in and they are chronically overweight due to an emotional issue. So they have some sort of eating disorder like emotional eating where it's like, oh, sugar, chocolate, et cetera, works really well for me when I'm under states of stress or emotional duress or whatever. Calcination has to be the very first thing. You have to say, well, why are you overweight? And that person is going to try and give you some
00:57:26
Speaker
bullshit answers, pardon my French, like they're going to try and say things like, oh, well, you know, my doctor says that my thyroid hormones are slightly out of whack. And it's like, well, yeah, you eat like shit. So of course they would be. So why are you fat? And then they would say, oh, well, actually, you know, I was teased when I was little about my weight because I naturally have a proclivity to put on a little bit of weight or, you know, my parents fed me like crap and blah, blah, blah.
00:57:55
Speaker
Well, your parents fed you. I heard that in the past tense, but why are you overweight in the present tense? You're trying to deflect. You're trying to blame things on other people that have nothing to do with them. You may have been raised that way, but you have choices. You can make a different choice. Oh, well, I don't like the taste of we'll get over that. You have to not buy into that. And that's the intensity of fire. You have to not buy into any of the stories of the individual that you're working with because their stories are fake.
00:58:25
Speaker
And those fake stories are self-justifications for allowing them to be in the space that they are. And they will come up with an infinitude of justifications until somebody holds them accountable and says, that's not the case. And eventually they will keep calcining their reason down, grinding that down and burning it and grinding it and burning and grinding and burning it until they just come down to the very simple fact, I'm overweight and it's my own fault.
00:58:49
Speaker
I've never made the right choices. I've never done the right research. I've never experimented with what is right for me in all the different ways. I may have tried a few dietary fads and got sick of them or whatever else, but I haven't really given it my all. It's not the purpose of me doing the thing in order to ensure that I live a healthy life. I just don't care about my wellbeing is essentially what it comes down to. That alone, that moment of raw honesty,
00:59:19
Speaker
leads immediately into dissolution, into the process of the emotional release. Because once they're so raw with themselves, that emotion just comes right out. And you have to just simply ask, how does it make you feel that you are the one who is responsible for how you are right now? You are the one who's responsible for those thyroid hormones. You're the one who's responsible for these 50, 70, 200, 500, whatever pounds of extra weight. You're really the one who's responsible
00:59:49
Speaker
For not handling your own psychological stresses or finding healthier ways to be able to deal with it These are the things that are going to be so heavy and that have been so repressed that it doesn't take much You know those those damn walls are barely holding back that emotion as it is and they will the levees gonna burst Zeppelin starts playing no, just kidding, but the levee bursts and
01:00:16
Speaker
Everybody starts releasing their emotions So with that being said that leads as soon as that emotional release happens as soon now All of their etheric energy is flowing again. It's not dammed up. It's flowing through the astral circuitry of the body It's flowing and moving and moving and when that's moving that is the time to set the goal so it's like in the past you were stressed you ate this and
01:00:43
Speaker
now you anytime that you're stressed I want you to do this instead it has nothing to do with eating or taking something because that's too similar to the thread of what they did before that's just replacing one habit with another habit instead now what we have to do is we have to say what are you going to do are you replacing this with mindfulness meditation are you replacing this with chanting are you replacing this with
01:01:07
Speaker
something that does not have a singular thread to the behaviors before. And what friends were you hanging out with who would say, oh, I love you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and accepting you how you are and not being honest and real with you because those are not the types of friends or support group that you need to have. You need to have people who will hold you accountable and who will say the tough things to you. People who say the tough things to you, they may not always be nice, but they are your best friends.
01:01:35
Speaker
And that's because they push you to your greatest sense of growth, right? And so we would have to go through this type of process in order to slowly and incrementally build a new lifestyle that separates out the dross, you know, all of that material that can be filtered out from their old ways of life from new ways of life. And then it's simply at that point, having them really decide what is it that you want to do?
01:02:01
Speaker
Well, oh, you know what? I've lost so much weight. I think I wanna be a personal trainer or I wanna be a health coach or I wanna help other people like this. That's almost the first thing that anybody with a trauma does because it's eminent in their field and they have changed so much that they are the epitome of what can happen, the potential that they are inspirational to other people. And so that's the eminent thing to do. And then they'll do that for some period of time and you'll help them
01:02:30
Speaker
you know, eventually grow into that. And after a period of doing that, it's so second nature to their being that once again, they'll get bored and they'll realize maybe this isn't my full calling, but it worked for the time being. And then that's when the latter stages of transformation really kick in. That's when the dark night of the soul really ideally should kick in is to say, what is it that will make you feel fulfilled as an individual for the rest of your life?
01:02:57
Speaker
And that takes dreaming and dreaming takes death and death is the dark night of the soul. And so unless you can let your entire perception of who you are, where you came from, the transformation that you already underwent physiologically and psychologically, unless you can let all of that die and allow pure inspiration of how you want to feel because none of us are like, I want to be a billionaire. No, you don't care about being a billionaire. You care about success. You're chasing success. You're chasing virtue.
01:03:24
Speaker
And so what are the virtues that we want to embody? And then the latter three processes of transformation are all just about how to be able to attain those virtues. And they have really very little to do with day-to-day things. They have to do with the feelings with which we engage our entire existence. And that would be my take on alchemical psychology
01:03:53
Speaker
as applied to me in the way that I've taught my students for many years now. Hmm. That's fantastic. Yeah. So there's, there are these, you know, there are these aspects of dreaming and, you know, almost a visualization and the, you know, the kind of new age terms that come in the later parts of it. Um, but that's fairly interesting that it's almost like, you know, they're getting cut off right before it, it gets good. It's kind of funny. Hey, like, and.
01:04:23
Speaker
Um, no, I really liked the way you broke that down. That's fantastic. And you relate it so well to, to the alchemical principles. That's amazing. Um, you know, I, I always like, and when I, when I studied Carl young and, um, you know, he, he did like, I agree, he did a good job and, you know, maybe it's just coming to light to me now, but I can understand, you know, that aspect of.
01:04:51
Speaker
of him not relating it necessarily directly to the alchemical principles. And you said, you know, he did a phenomenal job for not doing any lab work. I suppose I'd want to ask like, is, is that, you know, is that a necessary thing? Is it, is it necessary to really get into the study and the practice of alchemy for pure growth moving forward?
Laboratory Alchemy and Beginner Advice
01:05:14
Speaker
I wonder, what's your take on that? Well,
01:05:19
Speaker
Let me, let me put it like this. It helps because it's a living diagram. Now I don't expect anybody, any of my students or anything that I've ever worked with to do this for life, but to do it once, at least in order to see the living diagram as it unfolds and to have the opportunity to experience that quantum state of consciousness that allows you to open up. So let's say that I'm working with an herb, say a hibiscus. Okay.
01:05:48
Speaker
Let's say that I'm working with hibiscus. Hibiscus has these aspects of us that are dampness draining. It helps to tonify the kidneys, which is to say the aspect of us that relates to venous as well, so these feminine aspects of us, but the healthy feminine aspects of us. It has vitamin C. It interfaces with the heart. It helps the blood move better. It helps stagnation in the body be able to be drained out and different types of things like this.
01:06:13
Speaker
When we take its physical characteristics and we say that the physical as above, so below, these are the below, the physical mirrors, the spiritual, what are the spiritual characteristics? Well, it helps us to drain out spiritual muck. It helps us to drain out all these different aspects. And then the psychological aspects of that too, all of this, you know, confused thoughts inside of our being and you know, all these different things, the different,
01:06:40
Speaker
items of pharmacopeia that we're able to make inside of the lab from from hibiscus, we can make 30, 40 different items that are able to work either on the body or on the spirit or on the soul or on all of them to certain different degrees. And they all have a different way of interacting. The different laboratory processes you use are going to open up different realizations that you have
01:07:09
Speaker
about your own nature as a result of the efficacy of the medicinal property or the virtue of that herb itself. And so you get to existentially experience these things when you're working in the laboratory with somebody who can guide you and show you how to utilize that quantum state of consciousness to be able to utilize that force to understand and ascertain these higher truths. So doing it a couple of times, in my opinion,
01:07:39
Speaker
really gets the information in there. And then once you do that, it can be a mental process from there. It can be a mental process. It can be a spiritual process. It can be a physical process alone if you wanted it to be, but you get to have the choice and you get to know how to engage and how to be able to ascertain these deep insights and to undergo the same transformation that the chemicals
01:08:06
Speaker
and materials that we're working with are able to undergo. And it gives you, step by step, a visual diagram of what those changes look like, and the end result is a medicine that you can actually also take that assists with those psychological, spiritual, or physiological components of yourself so that it's just so integrated and unified, right?
01:08:37
Speaker
That's why I think that the laboratory work is important for a wide number of individuals, but for short periods of study for most, because not everybody wants to be in the lab. And that's not, I wouldn't say that everybody should be in the lab for life or anything, but it does teach you a great deal. It's just like going to school. You need to have a certain amount of chemistry in order to get your generals, right? You need to have a certain amount of this subject and this subject. It's the same thing.
01:09:06
Speaker
you might specialize in, you know, psychological aspects, but you have done enough of the laboratory work to be able to speak intelligently and speak from experience, from existential experience about the nature of that transformation. Very good. So obviously it's not taught in schools. So, you know, maybe you can, uh, maybe share, you know, what, what can we do? What can you do at home? You know, what can you do? Maybe just,
01:09:34
Speaker
you know, going out and forging or, you know, how can you get into it from home? You know, if you're low budget, you're a student or whatever, you're just getting into the ideas and stuff like, is it better to start with the philosophical aspects of it? Is it better to get right into, you know, just practicing and failing and learning and, you know, continuing on? What's your tips for that?
01:09:54
Speaker
Well, I think that that really depends upon the nature of the individual. Some people are purely kinesthetic. And so just diving right in, making mistakes, and figuring it out would be a great way. Some people like myself, I like to have a good amount of theory before I engage in practice, because I'm a measure-twice-cut-once type of dude. But it's entirely just up to the individual, although there are some great resources for people who
01:10:25
Speaker
like you said, or a student or low income or whatever else. There are great resources that are written in very plain English that are available today. You can get lots of different types of books that talk about these things and how to undergo at least a basic Spigeric tincture, which is going to teach you a great deal.
01:10:49
Speaker
and it's going to present plenty of challenges and you get to work with every different process. So, you know, a couple of books would be Real Alchemy by Robert Allen Bartlett and his follow-up book, The Way of the Crucible, also by him. For people who want a more kind of holistic perspective on alchemy, the history, different cultures who've had it, modern practices, so on and so forth,
01:11:16
Speaker
The president of the International Alchemy Guild, his name is Dennis William Hauck. He has written a book called The Idiot's Guide to Alchemy, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy. And that's a fantastic book just because it's an idiot's guide. It's fantastic. I mean, it presents things in a very clear way and he presents things, we call them slightly different.
01:11:37
Speaker
the different processes, but I have been massively influenced by Dennis's work myself because he was on the scene and one of the modern authors around 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 when I was really starting to cut my teeth on this work as a young teenager and a very young adult. And so I've been influenced by his works a lot. I can't stand behind them enough actually because
01:12:04
Speaker
They are really good. He also has a book called The Sorcerer's Stone that is just purely a transpersonal type of applications towards alchemy. But he lays it out by explaining the laboratory processes in a way that you can see how there is a shared thread between the psychological and the laboratory thing. So even if you don't want to step into the laboratory, per se, or aren't ready for that, or don't think that you have enough money to do it,
01:12:30
Speaker
You know, other things like that. That's fine. That's fine. You can at least have some sort of philosophical understanding.
01:12:37
Speaker
And it's just as potent and just as powerful, really, as long as you understand that theoretical component and can really draw the lines and understand. So yeah, there are a couple of great books that have been published in more recent years that go into even more advanced aspects of alchemical and laboratory practice. And I have to say that not all of them are completely historically accurate or whatever else.
01:13:06
Speaker
everybody is doing a great job from the perspective that they're teaching in these books. And I have a great deal of respect for just about every modern alchemical author and teacher that exists. And we all just, it's always been like this throughout history. We all have our own different areas of special specialities. We all have our own kind of ways of viewing things or ways of practicing. And there are slight differentiations between this and that and theories and, you know, practice.
01:13:36
Speaker
But for the most part, there are far more commonalities than not. But just be aware that you might read something from one author that may be a little bit different from another author. And they're not wrong. They're just practicing differently. And yeah, that's kind of where my work comes in, is that I've taken every different piece of alchemical literature from about the last 900 years that I've been able to find modern
01:14:02
Speaker
or ancient, et cetera. And I zoom out as far as I can get. And I can say, what is the lowest common denominator? And let me teach from that place first to give the greatest foundation for this work. And then let's go ahead and zoom in to certain areas and I can teach more specified types of things. And of course, you may know, and maybe some of your listeners may know,
01:14:26
Speaker
that my particular form of alchemy is following in the footsteps of Paracelsus and using this for medical work. And because there's enough differences between my work and Paracelsus's work, we're separated by almost five or 600 years now. I have, I can't call it Paracelsian Spigeria necessarily. And so many people are calling Spigeria herbal alchemy today, which is not again historically quite accurate.
01:14:55
Speaker
that I've kind of created my own new branch of medicine, and we call this Aurelian Spageria. And it's got Paracelsian Spageria at its root, and I mean, almost everything is intact. It's just that there's some more things that have been added to it. So people who feel inclined to especially study the healing aspects, psychological, spiritual, and physiological healing and kind of physician-based aspects of it, that's kind of my own brand.
01:15:24
Speaker
And I'm available for folks too. I have free classes and teach workshops here. And they're relatively decently priced, 750 bucks. You can come in for a few days and come and make tinctures, make essences, make different things and experience that type of transformation for yourself with a group of people too, which is really fun. And you grow and develop camaraderie
01:15:54
Speaker
you know, kinship. Yeah, definitely. Well, and what I like about that is like what we're talking about earlier, it's, you know, we're getting to this point where it's about bringing things back in together and the way that you're, you study things holistically, and then I'd be able to kind of point in on these different things, right? It's like, um, you know, even within, you know, I might be more, um,
01:16:20
Speaker
tailored to the psychological aspects of things. But I'm kind of developing my own, I don't want to say theories, but compilations of all of these amazing works that have come before me and integrating them all together. I think it's a great way of going about it. Since we are in this age of information, it's really a blessing. And that's kind of what we were getting at earlier too, because we have all of these amazing works at the axis of our fingertips.
01:16:50
Speaker
And I guess what I like about what you're saying too there is that it is individual. And I will say that it's hard to, you know, unless you just pick it up by accident, but to read one book on alchemy or even one book on health, right? It tends to open up this, this rabbit hole and you know, it just really opens up, you know, because for every book that I read, everything that I learned in general, it opens up, you know,
01:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, me too. Thousand doors and different pathways that I want to explore, right? It's like the more I learn, the more I realize that, you know, I don't know anything and I want to learn more. And so it's like, these sound like great places to start. And, um, but it's a journey too, right? And especially if people are getting into alchemy and you see the people personally, I'm certainly seeing a resurgence, right? I can't really speak too far back, but what I see in the younger generations too, it's,
01:17:47
Speaker
We're getting back to this holistic nature of things and we're getting back to the alchemical thing. I hear the word alchemy everywhere, right? And maybe they're talking about it in different ways, but they're throwing the word out here and we have long lives to develop these things. So I'm excited for the years to come because I feel like, especially with this, with the whole terrain model moving forward, there's so many people talking about it now. It's amazing. We're talking about health in this light.
01:18:18
Speaker
We're talking about even the cell, you know, people like Gerald Pollock with the fourth phase of water, you know, the plasma, this new cellular biology, right? We're taking it into new places, right? And it's based on people before like Gilbert Lang or, you know, whoever may be, right? Like Harold Hellman.
01:18:37
Speaker
But we're kind of taking that and it's just, we're just building it and we're bringing it all back together. And so I, I, I just love what you were saying earlier about it's kind of completing this alchemical unisense. It's, it's fantastic. And, and I, I would agree that alchemy is one of those things that it's like, should be a course in school, right? It's something that should be taught because it is this macro, you know, well, not even, it's just this map. Yeah.
01:19:03
Speaker
It's beautiful. It's amazing. And I love it. I really love it. And the way it's written too, it's, you know, it's not always given in direct concrete terms either, which can be fun too, right? To kind of decipher the arcane and the, so I definitely like that aspect of it, but I can understand there are a certain amount of people who like the concrete and you know, some people could care less about studying. So, you know, it's good to have these different modalities of accessing this truth too, which,
01:19:33
Speaker
is encompassed within this study because as above so below, it is philosophical, it is physical, it is mental, it is spiritual. That's what stands out to me and that's what kind of grounds me in understanding that, hey, I think we're on to something here because
01:19:54
Speaker
Carl Jung didn't study alchemy until his later years, until he developed all of his theories and he kind of just realized, Hey, this really resembles this, you know, this teaching that's been around for a long time. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Like I said, I have great admiration for Jung in being able to put together what he did without like going and studying with actual laboratory alchemists. Like, yeah.
01:20:22
Speaker
He was being on the right point, I think, in many, many ways. Yeah. That's great. Well, I think this would be a good time to wrap it up. So you did mention earlier a way that the listener can support you. How else can the listener support you? You offer those classes and I know you make medicine as well and you have a
01:20:46
Speaker
in my mind, an amazing program where it's what is the Spigeria the month Spigerix of the month club or maybe you could speak a little more to that you know better than me. Sure, thank you. Yeah, so I think one of the best ways that people can support us is just through a monthly contribution. Now my entire business models I run the Phoenix Aurelius Research Academy and we are constantly
01:21:09
Speaker
researching in a clinical environment and in a scientific environment, how to incorporate Spageria into a model that can be used for a renewed system of health. And we call this Aurelian medicine. And I am deeply, deeply, deeply involved in this. And also how do we research what's called alchemical culture as well, which is alchemy applied to culture. And there are
01:21:31
Speaker
seven primary areas and facets I should say of our culture that we feel need to be transformed massively including like agriculture and ecology and you know our sociology and spirituality and religion and you know all these different aspects that we have outlined on our website. So these are the types of things that we research and it
01:21:55
Speaker
It is like an astronomical expense. I mean, we have just for the laboratory component of our research alone, $35,000 a month in overhead. And so it's astronomical to do the type of work that we do. My business model is one that is like Patreon, but it's just completely built into the website and the system so that every time that you're purchasing something from our website, that is actually what is paying
01:22:21
Speaker
for the research and then you get what it is that you bought. So I make astronomical calendars which are basically
01:22:29
Speaker
We call them astronomical because there's an astrological component to it, but it's based in astronomy. And so, you know, you would take a look in the heavens, and if the moon is here in the constellation of Pisces is right behind the moon, then the moon is in Pisces. We're not doing these bizarre tropical types of calculators. We're actually showing what's there. And I have proven over years and years, as Maria tuned, that
01:22:53
Speaker
these different types of cycles have an effect on agriculture and ecology. And I've also been able to demonstrate and show how these have an effect in the laboratory as well. And so people can support my research there by buying a calendar and getting to work their lives, work astral connections into their lives and begin to see how the planets and the constellations or the luminaries of the constellations, however you want to call that, are able to really
01:23:20
Speaker
draw archetypal influences into their lives and create a sense of meaning that otherwise they wouldn't see. The Spigerics of the Month Club is awesome because it gives you five new products every single month that are just released for that month and you get a five mil bottle of those sent to your door.
01:23:40
Speaker
A five-mil bottle for most people is about a 30-day supply, by the way, because Spigerics are infinitely more potent than our traditional herbal remedies. Because of the science of the atrochemistry that we use, the Spigeric process itself esterifies the material and makes it approximately 95% to 100% bioavailable and decreases the amount of dosage used very significantly.
01:24:03
Speaker
you get five new remedies sent to your door for $75 a month. If you're in the contiguous United States, the shipping is included. And if you're international, then we just charge whatever the international shipping is. I think it's like 20 Canadian in order to get up to Canada. So 95 Canadian a month will basically get you five new remedies every month.
01:24:27
Speaker
And then I have roughly about 500 remedies that are already released in the apothecary, ranging from psychological, different remedies that you can use for, those would primarily be essences, perdes de latio and philosophic spajeric essences. Those ones are the ones that work on our psyche the most. Our soul would be another term for psyche.
01:24:52
Speaker
We have some spiritualized remedies that work. Most of the items of pharmacopoeia are Spigeric tinctures, which work mostly on a corporeal, but they can work on other levels as well. I have some more advanced types of remedies, and we produce our own Shilajid and from here in the Rocky Mountains, and we have lots of different types of things. So anytime anybody purchases anything, even my meditation work classes,
01:25:17
Speaker
It all contributes to my research and allows me to continue to go on shows like this and present the bodies and the findings of what we have. And yeah, so that's kind of the thing. It's a very overwhelming site. So have fun. Reach out to our office manager, Rebecca, if you have any questions, because she's amazing and she can answer any question virtually. And if she can't, she just asks me and then I get back with you and we can kind of go back and forth from there.
01:25:48
Speaker
Yeah. Well, like what, what I like best about it is obviously there's a passion behind it and there's a, there's an energy going into it, right? It's not like it's, you know, it's mass produced machine made not devoid of any sort of substance at all. Right. Like when you're buying some name brand stuff at the store, right? So it's very, that, that I think would be my favorite part of it. So very cool. And I mean, like, you know, you can, you can hear it through.
01:26:17
Speaker
through what you're saying and through the work that you're doing, right? It's obvious that there's a great quality there and just beyond the physical product too. So anyways, Phoenix, I wanna thank you again for coming on. I really appreciate it. This has been a fantastic episode. It's my absolute pleasure. I think that we've covered some great things and still, I can't even say we scraped the surface. We maybe just blew across the surface today. So yeah, absolutely fantastic, man. Thank you so much.
01:26:47
Speaker
Yeah. Well, maybe we'll have to dig a little deeper there in the future. One of these days. So I'd be honored. Great. All right. Now I want to thank you, the listener. Um, you should all know that this is not medical advice for general informational purposes only. Uh, but also remember that we are responsible, sovereign, capable of thinking, criticizing and understanding anything we, the people with the greater forces are together, self healers, self-governable self teachers, and so much more. Please reach out to me.
01:27:16
Speaker
best place is Instagram beyond dot terrain. Uh, if you have any questions, comments, criticisms, anything, I love to chat. I love to talk about this. I'll talk about off me what I know and you know, I'll talk about anything really. I, I love to chat, especially about this stuff. So yeah, Instagram is the best place. Listen, I really appreciate everyone for, for listening today. And if you enjoyed it or found it informational or, or, um, you know,
01:27:40
Speaker
anything, right? Just leave a like and a comment or a share, whatever you can do to help support us and help us grow because we really want to get this message out here to who is ready to hear it and to as many people as possible, right? So just remember, there are two types of people in this world, those who believe they can, those who believe they can't, and they're both correct. Thanks for listening. Take care.