We're so impoverished today on the level of experience.
We're not experiencing our lives.
We're just floating through it like in a dream.
We're not actually awake.
I wanted to make this a book about your own experience day to day to day
and how you can take these ideas and put them into practice.
That the world that you see through your senses is not reality.
It is not what a bat sees.
It is not what any other creature would see.
It is what our consciousness, our human brain is capable of presenting to us
and our brains are so powerful that we cannot take so much information in or overwhelms us.
Welcome to the Re-Patterning Podcast where we believe your mind body system is your domain
and that choosing the beliefs, habits and patterns that best support you is your birthright.
I'm your host, Arden Leigh, creator of the Re-Patterning Project,
an eight week course in learning to free yourself from the patterns of your past
and program your mind for your dreams of the future.
Join me for these extraordinary conversations as we unpack the keys to creating our reality.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Re-Patterning Podcast.
I'm your host, Arden Leigh and I am the creator and facilitator of the Re-Patterning Project,
the eight week course that inspires these conversations
with some of my favorite people, some of my favorite authors, thinkers and leaders
in today's contemporary world.
And today, speaking of some of my favorite authors and favorite thought leaders,
you guys, I cannot describe how ecstatic I feel today to be interviewing none other
than Robert Greene himself.
Some of you may have just been following me since maybe the start of this podcast
or since the launch of the Re-Patterning Project a few years ago.
But for those of you who may have known me from my much earlier work, especially back in the days
when I was a dating coach and a blogger in that sphere,
Robert's work was so influential on me in my thinking.
I cannot overstate the ways that his books have shaped my mind and my thoughts and my beliefs
and just approve it to you.
I'm going to show you that I have every single one of them by introducing the books he has written
us far.
Here we have the 48 laws of power.
This is his most popular one that you're probably most likely to have heard of.
And then next we have the 33 strategies of war.
Robert also co-authored a book with rapper 50 cent called the 50th law.
Next we have mastery by Robert Greene.
And then his most recent book, The Laws of Human Nature.
And of course he has an upcoming book which we're going to chat about today, which, oh my
gosh, what a privilege it is to have been able to read a little bit of the preface and
the summaries of the chapters before it's out and you guys, it's, I'm so excited for
this book.
I cannot, cannot overstate how excited I am for this side of Robert to come out.
But before we get into that, I have to of course show my copy of my favorite of Robert's
books.
I'm telling on myself, you guys a few years ago, I went to lunch with Robert and I brought
my copy of this book for him to sign and this is my copy of the art of seduction.
If you're not watching the video, I'll describe for you this book has, I've read it so many
times that it is literally into pieces.
It is cracked down the spine.
There is a huge chunk of the cover that's missing and Robert was so kind as to to sign it
right there on the, on the title page.
And Robert, I remember when I showed this to you when we first had lunch a few years ago,
I believe you told me that it was the most worn copy of that book of yours that you would
ever seen, which I personally, I, I count as a point of pride.
I think I can say that definitively yes.
I've seen some 48 laws of power that are pretty beat up, but that is definitely the most
beat up art of seduction.
Oh, man.
And you know what's so funny about it too is that I almost feel like the art of seduction
in a way was almost an introduction for me also into the world of the sublime because it
was by creating and curating experiences for other people that I either loved or had crushes
on or you know, just just had this abundance of feelings of affection for it.
And I feel like I was almost very desensitized to the world myself, you know, through trauma,
et cetera and things like that that I hadn't addressed at that point in time.
And creating and curating this experience as for others was my connection into that excitement
in the world to get to experience it through them vicariously.
And so I'm really excited to talk about your newest book today, The Law of the Sublime.
Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to tackle this topic.
Well, well, thank you for starting for having me.
That was quite a wonderful introduction.
It had been a subject that had fascinated me probably some 26, 27 years ago.
I read some literary book about the sublime and I thought, I'm always interested in ideas
that I've never come across before that make me think of the world in a different light.
This was a very academic book but it had that effect on me that this is a strange and interesting
concept but it's something very much having to do with our lives.
And so I had intended to write the book probably in around '06 or so is going to be my fourth book
I believe.
And then I got sidetracked by the 50 cent project by mastery by human nature.
And then in 2018 I had a stroke.
I came this close to dying and I'm in the ambulance taking me back home after a week in the hospital.
And when you have a kind of a near death experience like I had,
it tends to shake up your consciousness in a very profound way that no drugs, no other
experience in life can ever have that kind of effect.
And so I'm in the ambulance coming home and I'm going, this is the time to write the book
on the sublime that I've been thinking about for so many years because not only had I
come close to death but I felt it inside my body.
And when you feel that it's a strange eerie feeling, it's a power in it that's just so
intense.
It's very hard to just, you can't words can't describe it.
And the sublime is particularly any experience in life, you can almost define it this way that
words cannot possibly encompass.
I'm somebody who believes that a lot of our problems come from language, come from thinking
too much about things from, I think so many labels about the world that we never ever really
see or experience the world as it is.
We experience everything through words but when you touch the sublime it's like an electric
shock, it's like touching actually something that's going to make your whole body vibrate.
You can't find the words to describe it, it transcends language.
And I believe the most powerful experiences we can have in a human relationship and dealing
with animals and looking at the world around us in fact, just the fact of being alive are
things you can't really put into words and that's what the beauty of them is.
Now the paradox here is that I'm writing a 460 page book with words trying to describe
what words cannot encompass.
Right.
So it took me seven years to write such a book but there it is.
So that's sort of what's behind it all.
I feel like seven years also is just such an archetypal fairy tale length for a journey
too.
And we thought of that, that's interesting, yeah.
Right.
Well, part of the problem was, I didn't intend to
obviously no one ever intends to take seven years to write a book but from my stroke I had
a my left hand just doesn't function so I can't type.
So I had to write this entire hand write this entire book.
And of course at some point I dictated it into my computer but everything was hand written
and by the time I finally got to the final version of a chapter I would edit it with one
hand.
But I before that I had to do everything in this very Byzantine process of notebooks, one
notebook to another notebook, something from like the 13th century.
And so that added at least a year and then also not being able to take a walk to get outside
of myself to sort of being trapped in my body in my office.
Also added time to this book because I was somebody who was very, I like to go outdoors
a lot and get my mind outside of my, outside of my off, you know, my work.
I had no outlets.
So it was a really difficult, it was a wonderful book to write but it was so challenging.
I can't explain.
I can imagine and I feel like sometimes when we have those, it's that the freedom of structure
right, we have like limitations imposed upon us and it actually in some ways engenders
our creativity.
And I feel like writing a book like that out by hand which oh my goodness, I'm happy you
still have a right hand left because oh my gosh, I had to have been exhausting.
But I feel like in that there must be, and with your permission, I almost kind of want
to divine on this later and just ask spirit if there's anything there to the fact that
that hardship, that arduous process of it, of the writing it, there had to have almost
been something magical to that process or infusing the book with all of the work and the dedication
that it took to do that.
Well, you know, for thousands of years, and humans wrote books without computers.
I mean, they had pens, they had stones, they had everything imaginable but people managed
before computers to write a book.
And the thing is that the way the human brain is constructed, there's a very special
relationship between the brain and the hand.
And the feeling, I bought all these like fountain pens because I was so frustrated by this
process, the feeling of the hand on the page, it brings something different, different
channel in the brain than just typing away computer, you know, scrolling like everything
you do every day.
There's a different part of the brain that's activated.
So there's a different feel to the book because of that.
And then the second thing is because this process was so slow, I had to think even more deeply
than I would normally have to think.
It's hard to explain but the slowness of it, you know, it definitely affected and influenced
the way the book came out.
And so I do think there is some weird spiritual element to the physicality of this book.
It was like my whole body was somehow in it, it wasn't just like a virtual thing like how
we normally live.
It was a very kind of physical book for me to write.
I believe that entirely.
And I also think that when we're putting dedication and effort into a creative work that
there is a sort of almost like law, like a hermetic principle where the more effort or the
more work something takes us, the greater it comes out on the other.
Not necessarily even in quality of the project itself, although it can manifest that way.
But just in whatever way it happens to whether it's the power of the people that it touches
or the intent that it is released into the world with that goes out in a greater way.
I know I've experienced that with some of my projects.
So I don't know, maybe you'll find that as well.
I'm excited to see when the book comes out.
Oh completely.
I have a concept in chapter two when I talk about the biological sublime and how strange
it is just the chapter is called awake into the strangeness of being alive.
And I have this concept that I'd call embedded time.
And so I don't know if you've, do you ever see drag and flies if you take a walk?
Like just a drag and fly, a common drag and fly?
You know, not in years, but I can recall from year to now.
Well, they are the most strange, most miraculous creatures on this planet.
First of all, they're one of the oldest creatures that go back 200, 300 million years ago.
And they're probably the first creature that took to flight.
And the reason I talked about it in the book is we think that something we develop in
a couple of years on some projects, some applications, some computer thing.
We take two, three years.
It's going to be a really great product.
Well, think of evolution of something being created over millions and millions of millions of
years with all of these different dangers that are have to be overcome, all these changes
in climate, all these changes in predators around everything, you know, and adapting to different
flora, different fauna.
The drag and fly is the most remarkable flying creature on the planet.
It can hover, it can go backwards, it can go forwards, it can go like a helicopter.
People have tried studying it, they can't figure it out.
It has two sets of wings that can move independently of the other.
So this is a roundabout way to say something that takes so long to create over so much time
and so much trauma and so many challenges is going to end up being this miraculous creature
which is the drag and fly.
And in some ways, the human animal, which I don't think is as miraculous to me as a drag and fly,
that is pretty remarkable creature.
The millions of years, the hundreds of thousands of years that went into our evolution is created
who we are.
So time, when you put time as the coefficient in any kind of production, it is what makes
something great.
And it's the problem that so many people have now in the world today with things like AI.
People are averse to putting time into anything.
But our and I can tell you, time is what created the human animal is what differentiates us
from everything else.
We are the creature in time, we are the creature that creates history.
So the longer we take to make something, the more thinking goes in it, the more brilliant
the product will be, the more original it will be.
Not to say that my book is on the level of a drag and fly, so please don't get me wrong.
Anyway, that's sort of my answer to that.
Well, you're definitely speaking my language, especially as someone who feels facilitates
a course, especially when I first started putting it out there and I started getting into the
business coaching world, especially like right before the pandemic, there was like the business
coaching boom, the coach boom.
And there was all this rhetoric in those circles about like quantum leap, you know, you don't
need more certifications, you don't need more of this.
You can just, you know, immediately quantum leap yourself into your, you know, start premium,
stay premium.
And there's something that was so distasteful around that.
And I think that it actually in some ways, harken back to my reading of mastery, which is
like, you know, like you can't, you can't, there are certain, like as someone who loves to
play with time and who loves to like shorten and lengthen and things like that.
And like, I love, you know, I love finding ways around things.
I love finding, you know, those little hidden trapdoors and shortcuts, quote unquote, but
you really can't cut corners and expect the same quality.
You can maybe find some interesting ways around things, but it really is like when you're
talking about mastery, it really is time that does that in ways that nothing else really
will.
Yeah.
I mean, when I read a really great book, I can feel the time that went into it.
It has, it's a spiritual quality.
It's something invisible.
We can, we're so visual that everything is spatial and, and so we always think in spatial
terms.
We can't really see time, right?
And so we don't think of it as, as important, but when I read something or I see it, or he
wants to do a piece of music or see an artwork that I know took so much time, or even if I
don't know, I can feel, I can feel it, it's embedded inside of it.
It has a spirit that it happens to work.
I want to ask about my personal, well, gosh, it was hard to pick a favorite one of all
your different descriptions of the different archetypes of the sublime.
But the one that I will say is the most relevant at least to us here at the Re-Patterning podcast.
I think I know it's.
Yes, the neural sublime.
I'm just, oh, no, oh, really?
What, which one did you think it was going to be?
Oh, God.
I thought maybe it's going to be the love sublime.
Oh, well, that's relevant to me personally.
I have, don't worry.
I definitely have stuff written down about that too.
But I want to talk about that.
Okay, okay.
So in terms of Re-Patterning, and I'll share, you know, just a little bit of what you wrote in
the synopsis of that chapter, the neural sublime, you said, what we are actually experiencing
is a construction of the brain built on a series of illusions and filters it generates to
explore what lies outside this edited version of reality is perhaps the most sublime journey
we can take by peering into our own consciousness.
We can remove the filters and see through the illusions opening ourselves up to wider dimensions
of perception, thinking, and feeling.
And here at the Re-Patterning podcast and the course, the Re-Patterning project, that is what I
hope to engender in folks is a spirit of looking beyond our automated programming, our sort
of automated behaviors and processes and saying like, well, what if I thought this way
or that way, like to almost be able to see like above the wall, like beyond the curtain,
moment you see it, you know, my hope at least is for folks is that you can't unsee it and
that then changes everything.
But I would love to know what are some of your ways of guiding people through that process
or encouraging them to look beyond their typical ways of thinking.
Well, so in this book, the structure of it is, I begin with a story that kind of shows
the demonstrates it, then I describe some of the ideas in a section I call keys and
then I have more stories and then the final section, I have, I know it sounds sort of bano,
but I have exercises that will help you bring these kinds of things into your daily experience
because what I think is, we're so impoverished today and I really feel strongly about this,
is on the level of experience.
We're not experiencing our lives, we're just floating through it like in a dream, we're
not actually awake.
And so I wanted to make this a book about your own experience day to day to day and how
you can take these ideas and put them into practice.
Well, I think on this particular chapter, simply thinking about it and absorbing this idea
that the world that you see through your senses is not reality.
It is not what a bat sees, it is not what any other creature, it's not what an extraterrestrial
would see.
It is what our consciousness, our human brain is capable of presenting to us and our brains
are so powerful that we cannot take so much information in or overwhelms us.
So the way our brains evolved is it's a mechanism for kind of shortening everything down and
making everything simple.
And so I think, and I have a story that introduces this chapter about a woman, a neuroscientist who
has a stroke in her brain and as she has a stroke in her brain, everything starts to shut down
and she starts to see the world as it is before the brain starts constructing it.
So she sees visually what the world really is before our brains put it all together into
an image.
She sees the grainyness, she sees the pixelations.
She sees that her body is actually a part of the shower, is part of the room that she's
living in.
Our brains create a sense of having a separate body, as part of our brain that is just about
our own bodies and how we navigate the world.
So this reality of how the world looks, of how it feels to us is a complete construction.
And the idea is, if you can just for a second absorb it and stop sleep walking through
life, just absorb it for a minute, it will have a very powerful effect on you, right?
It will make you aware that well, maybe I'm not seeing everything that I could see and a
very important part of that chapter was Ados Huxley and the doors of perception and his
experimenting with drugs, with LSD and the peyote etc.
But he calls this big mind.
If we could get rid of all those filters, we would suddenly start seeing things that we've
never seen before, visually, perceptually, right?
And the world would look different to us.
And sometimes when you take drugs and I must confess that when I was in college and to
the years afterwards, I did take a lot of hallucinogenic, the world definitely looks different.
It has a vibrancy to it that you don't normally see.
Things out in the world are sparkling.
They're so intense when the sunlight on things, it's almost like insanity, how brilliant,
how vivid, how intense the visual world can be when you get rid of all these stupid filters.
Another person called it the survival mechanism, that in order to survive the brain shuts everything
down and limits the number of information, it's because a lot has to do with our fear of
death and the fact that we only want the information that we need to get by in our day-to-day
lives, when that mechanism, those filters disappear or vanish, the world appears very different.
And so I talk about how visually you can do that in just taking a walk and suddenly sort
of seeing what I call the fringes of consciousness, what the life is just beyond, but it also has
to do with your thinking, how your thinking is just so, is just so patterned, is so over
and over and over again, the same things day in, day out, day in, day out, that you can take
your thoughts into those fringes of consciousness and start thinking that the world is not really
what you think it is.
And so kind of imagining new ways of thinking and opening your mind, emotions, there's a
fringes of our emotional life, emotions we've never experienced before.
The sublime is a very strange emotional experience in that it combines pleasure, a pleasurable
feeling of your mind expanding with a fear of the feeling of terror, like the world is
strange.
These are unfamiliar things.
I don't really understand them.
You know, you look at the night sky, it's so immense, it almost makes you feel so insignificant
and small, but it's also fascinating.
And mixed of pain and pleasure is what creates the sublime creates that kind of tingly sensation
it gives.
These are emotions we don't normally feel.
So I'm trying to draw you into these fringes of consciousness and I give practical exercises
on doing it, but just realizing that the reality you take, what you take for reality is a
construction of your brain is enough to start triggering this process.
Believe me, you swallow that pill, you'll walk around in the world.
We'll start looking different to you.
Yes, oh my gosh, yes, absolutely.
Just thinking about it and starting to push those edges of consciousness, I agree 100%.
I have to say, Robert, I love this new spiritual side of you that I see coming out and this
side that's full of wonder because I know, you know, with a lot of your past books, you know,
you know this.
I've been publicly somewhat controversial figure.
Some of your books have been called Machiavellian, you know, that people will use them to play
these sort of, you know, the games of power and all of those things.
And for me personally, I'm just going to say, you know, when I came across the 48 laws
of power when I was much younger as an undiagnosed autistic femme who was very like hard on
her sleep.
You?
Oh, absolutely.
Are you kidding?
I mean, now I'm diagnosed, but yeah.
You're you're you're on the spectrum.
I am.
I got the tism, baby.
I would I would never ever think that I usually can kind of pick that up.
I would have never thought that interesting.
You know, it's funny is that for women, it presents very differently.
It's something that, you know, and I only learned this in last few years myself, but a lot
of women who like grow up is very like creative and daydreamy, but maybe also like have
trouble keeping friends sometimes or who like don't always like to meet for me like that's
why your books were in some ways so helpful is because the 48 laws of power actually taught
me about like, oh, people are not just going to be honest with you, the way that you are
honest with people and actually like being honest with them with is is not always the
best way to like navigate through the way, you know, when through your actions, not through
your argument, you know, always say less than necessary.
Like that was huge for me like that.
I feel like the difference between medicine and poison is dozed, you know, and for me, I
think those books were certainly medicine, but I know for, you know, you've received criticism,
like I'll just say it like, you know, you know, you know that.
But to see this, this other side that is like so full of wonder and like harkening back
to like the childhood sublime, for example, which I'd love to talk about too.
I just want to say like how cool it is to see this really like expansive beyond the sort
of like the social focus that so many of your books have focused on this sort of the greater,
like the greater mystery of the world around us.
Like I just want to say I love that side of you.
It's really awesome to see.
Oh, well, thank you.
Well, thank you very much.
I hope you still say that when you read the book, but yeah, you know, each one of us are
complex individuals.
We have many sides to us.
And when you write a book, part of yourself comes out into that book.
So the 48 laws of power is a part of me.
It's part of my personality.
So it's the artist's deduction.
So, but they're not the full picture.
That's not completely who I am.
So this is another side that's been inside me for many, many, many, many, many years.
You know, my interest, I originally wanted to be a novelist.
I really, really wanted to write literature.
And so there's another side to me that, yeah, I could express more deeply in this book.
So that's very perceptive of you.
Well, thank you.
And I wanted to ask you on that note, you have one of the archetypes of the sublime is
the pagan sublime.
And I'll share, I'll read just a little bit of what you wrote about that in your summary.
So our audience can follow along.
That it involves a return to the perspective of our early ancestors who sought to open
themselves up to the world and internalize its powers and energy and a reinterpretation
of the rituals and techniques they created to bring themselves closer to death in order
to feel reborn.
And obviously, you know, your near death experience that you spoke about at the beginning of our
talk.
Obviously, I feel like my fall into that category.
But I'm so curious as someone who, I don't know, I would describe myself as a pagan though
it's perhaps I'm pagan in pagan adjacent.
But as someone who is a practitioner, yeah, you know, like if you, if you, all right,
I love it.
Yeah.
As someone who is certainly a practitioner of magic and a student of the occult, I'm really
interested to hear what for you have been sort of your reimagining of perhaps some of those
pagan or or pagan adjacent rituals that maybe you've incorporated into your own life.
Well, have you heard of the Ellucinian mysteries?
You know, I've heard of the name, but I would not be able to define them on command.
Well, I tell the story of the Ellucinian mysteries.
It's one of the oldest, most amazing rituals that humans have ever created.
It existed for 1500 years.
It's probably the longest lasting ritual that just fascinated people in ancient Rome and
ancient, it started in ancient Greece.
And I did a lot of research and I tell a fictional story that recreates the Ellucinian mysteries
as if you're going through it.
And the point is is that our ancestors, now I'm not going to romanticize everything about
ancient Greece.
Obviously there was slavery.
Women were oppressed.
So I'm not going to go in that direction.
But on the level of experience and day to day experience, the closeness to being alive
and the emotional richness, the openness of the senses, the relationship to everything
around in the world was so much more intense than anything in our modern experience.
We can't even begin to imagine how it was to live in these kind of rituals, the intensity
of it, the spectacle of it was just unbelievable.
And in this particular Ellucinian mystery, they're trying to make you feel like you died,
right?
Literally trying to make you feel like in the midst of this experience you died and then
you are reborn and that is part of the mystery.
And it did involve probably some hallucinogenic plants that people drank, probably poppy
seeds, probably opium or whatever you want to call it.
But it was in this intense theater that involved so many different aspects of it.
And the idea is the pagan idea of a god is not what we think it is.
And I really try and go in and explain it.
We think of Zeus and Hera and all the other religions as being these kind of mythical fairy
like figures that live in the sky and do all these crazy things.
They're like humans but they're gods.
So that's not how they experience religion.
To them the gods were like spirits in the world.
They lived in nature and they possessed you.
So for instance, if Aphrodite possessed you, when you fell in love, you desired a person
so deep, so intensely you felt crazy.
What you thought of was that Aphrodite had literally taken possession of you.
She was inside of you.
In the Ellucinian mysteries, it was the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone who became
the goddess of the underworld who literally passed through you.
You felt their intensity.
You felt the fire of that person in you.
And so the idea of gods was possession.
It wasn't like an actual entity or person or thing.
It was actually a force that possessed you, a spiritual force that came inside your body.
So they called that in ancient Greek, they called that entheos which meant to be full of God.
There's nothing like anything in our religious experience.
Now some people in Pentecostal Christianity have that slight sense of possession of Christ
possessing them.
That's a slight modern remnant of it.
There are some Islamic things related to that have still survived.
But generally our relationship to religion is so dead, is so spiritless.
It's like this distant God out there who is kind of overlooking everything.
It has nothing to do with our day to day experience.
It's not something that possesses us in body and soul.
So I'm trying to give you the idea, humans out there, that there were things in pagan
world that are superior to us in all of our modern sophistication.
They had a way of relating things that was kind of closer to how life is.
They had less of those filth-dream mechanisms.
They lived less in that virtual world that were also trapped in.
And so I try and bring us back to what it felt like.
I'm not trying to intellectualize it.
I'm trying to tell you what it felt like to be religious in a society where there was no
differentiation between the spiritual world and the everyday world.
There was no division between art and society and religion.
Art and religion were one.
And your experience of everything in your life involved these elements that were very,
very intense.
And so the whole point of that chapter is to connect you to our human roots.
And indigenous cultures have this incredible, I've always, since I was a child, been fascinated
by indigenous cultures.
Something about it I can relate to in a way, I don't know why.
I see something in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of like Ancient Assyria and my brain
goes crazy.
I'm so excited about it.
Before I read and I have a chapter later on and I describe cave paintings in France, I
can't tell you how excited that makes me feel, I feel so connected to our ancient ancestors.
And I want everyone to start feeling that way because we're also disconnected from our past,
from who we are as human beings.
We have this incredibly rich history that stretches back tens of thousands of years.
So that was the point of this particular chapter.
I love that.
And I have to say though, I agree with you that so many of our religions, at least as practice,
especially in contemporary America and the corruptions of evangelical Christianity and
so much that's going on there and then the erudity of Protestantism and a lot of things
like that.
But I will say what you describe as there was no difference between the gods and everyday
life and from art and religion.
That's like, that's at my house every day.
So we can hang out more often if you want.
Okay, alright.
I've experienced possession.
I often kind of say half jokingly but it's kind of true, you know, the difference between
possession and channeling is consent.
It's like if I have, if I give consent to a being to speak through me, I've had that happen
at times.
And I've also had an experience earlier this year where I was partially possessed.
And when I didn't realize until about five days in and when I realized it, I was able to
clear it.
But yeah, it's, it's, you know, I'm in a pact.
I'm in a contract with the god Hermes for, you know, for success in my music career.
The messenger guy.
Yeah, yup, yup.
And, you know, the great, the great magician, Hermes Tristmagistus.
Tristmagistus?
Yes.
Yup.
The, the trickster of the crossroads and who's, you know, so interested also in like education
and in music, you know, who also mentored orpheus and things like that.
And I was saying on, on another episode we taped the season that I haven't yet seen the
fruits, fruits, you know, of, of what I am told, you know, has been to come.
But I have had so many things happen along this wild journey.
And, and I really, you know, part of my everyday spiritual practice is also to communicate
with these intelligences, these spirits.
They're not necessarily possessing me in that moment or even speaking through me, but
I'm using my divinatory tools to, and the answers that I get are very different from things
that I would think in my own head most of the time, which is how, you know, you can tell
it.
So, so yeah, anytime, anytime that you feel like experiencing more of that, you know, we
both live in LA, my home is always open to you.
Oh, please.
Yeah.
I'd be very excited to do that.
Yeah.
Anytime.
I mean, writing a book sometimes, what this really is, is the inspiration, the word
inspiration comes from a spirit inhabiting you.
And when you feel like that in any kind of creative venture, there is a moment where you feel
like something from the outside is coming inside of you, like you've become possessed.
And the writing is obviously better when that happens or the musico or whatever it is.
And so artists are very familiar with this sensation of something from the outside coming
to their bodies and bringing them ideas that they hadn't even thought of.
Now, what is that?
Is it some mystical occult thing?
I personally think it's just life itself, the energy of life itself, that you're suddenly
open to and it's coming inside of you.
And in mastery, I describe how when you reach such a certain level of so much work and labor,
these kinds of experiences happen all of the time.
But even in writing, I get these moments of possession quite often.
Yeah.
Well, of course, I want to talk about the love sublime, me being me.
Yes, okay.
And I'll share just a little bit of what you wrote in that summary was that the love sublime
is about to escape the prison of the ego and fall deeper and deeper into the world
of the beloved, the dissolving of boundaries between two people, the fusion of bodies and
souls.
And I would argue that probably a lot of people who read this on the surface would imagine
this as a big departure from the sort of things that you were speaking about in the art of
seduction.
And as I may be alluded to earlier in the conversation, I actually think they have more
in common, at least in my experience than they might appear on the surface.
But what do you think?
Does that feel like a very different approach from your earlier work in AOS or do you feel
like it's similar?
I mean, in our seduction, there are elements of a kind of a cold seduction where you're
playing a part and it's very theatrical and you're doing certain things to have an effect
upon the other person.
But I make the point in the introduction, the preface to the art of seduction that what
you are really doing is you're making the other person fall in love with you, right?
And you're using your knowledge of human psychology to make that person fall deeper and deeper
and deeper and deeper to their minds, to the, you literally possess their mind, your
inside their head.
Now there's an element of coldness to that in the book, I understand, but there's also
other stories that kind of sparkle with life and with love and I talk about that.
But this is a little bit different because this isn't about any kind of manipulation.
It's about letting go.
So most people I'm describing in the chapter, particularly nowadays, are afraid of being
hurt, right?
The word vulnerable comes from the Latin word meaning wound.
So to be vulnerable is to be open to being wounded and so many of us today are so defensive.
We wear like a suit of armor around us.
We don't want people to hurt us.
We don't want people.
We live inside these castles with our own thoughts, our own ideas.
We're so close to things and so when it comes to relationships with the other person,
for a moment we might fall for them, we might let go some of it, but then we, it frightens
us.
We step back and we don't want to let go any further and then all these kind of power
struggles in Sioux where we think that maybe the other person doesn't respect us enough
and da da da da.
But if you like, open yourself up to the other person and you give of your spirit, then
it's going to have a simple effect on them.
The metaphor I have is if you just keep falling and falling and falling and falling and
don't stop it as we usually do at some point we put the brakes on it, you will reach this
what I call sublime love or love sublime and it's a sense of kind of two people becoming
one.
There's sort of a strange eariness where you, it's both physical and and and and and psychological
where you feel boundaries have been transcended, you're outside your ego, you're not thinking
always about yourself and your interest and your defensiveness and your mind comes almost
possessed by the other person.
Now there are limits to that.
Obviously you can't become completely the other person.
I'm not saying that.
But if you let go of these defenses, more of that other world will come inside of you and
the story I tell in there is probably of one of the most famous, most infamous love stories
in Western history that of Abelard and Eloise.
It was in the 12th century and it's a magnificent story of a love affair between an older man and
a younger woman, both of whom are absolutely brilliant philosophers.
The woman is considered one of the greatest thinkers of her time and they have this intense
romance over a course of several months or years and they have this experience.
And what's so exciting about it is we have their letters, which is why their story is so
famous and we can see and we can feel how this happened.
And then of course he's discovered, he's the tutor, Peter Abelard is the tutor of Eloise,
the uncle of Eloise discovers this and he's so outraged that he has Abelard castrated.
Yes and then the story becomes something else and finally but she is so in love with him
that she won't let it stop and it goes into this other kind of spiritual realm where
they're still connected.
But it's something very real because you can suite it in their letters, you can sense that
they reached a different level there.
And so I'm just trying to indicate because I find in my interactions with younger people
often come to me for advice that there is a greater degree of defensiveness and then the
whole notion of love and dating in sex in our world has become the marketplace.
Yeah, well, it's about swiping and finding the perfect product like you're looking for
deodorant or something.
And it's not on this level at all and so unless love and sex and all that is just a physical
thing and it can't be virtual, it can't be part of the marketplace.
It has to have the human element and it has to be, you have to become vulnerable.
And if you get hurt, if the other person screws you around and leaves you, well, okay, you deal
with that pain and then you kind of, you own it and you go, well, that was great.
I feel alive because pain means you're alive.
It's better to feel pain than to be wrapped in this cocoon that you live in where you don't
want anything to hurt you.
And now you know that you want this experience and you're ready for the next one as opposed
to never going to have that happen to be ever again, you know.
So it's a chapter about basically letting go.
But you just said is almost exactly what I wrote in my own book on seduction back in the day,
way back in the day, called the new rules of attraction.
I have an epilogue in there that basically says, you know, to live a lifestyle of seduction
is an active bravery because you're constantly putting yourself out there and you may get rejected.
But you understand that it is worth living this life of extraordinary adventure.
And also, you know, I wonder if the perspective that I have of the art of seduction, how meaningful
it was to me, I know holding up my absolutely well-worn copy here, for me, I recognize that
perhaps my viewpoint was rather unique.
And I think this is also like where my autism shows a little bit, but I always believed that
seduction was inherently an active generosity because at its core, it is thinking about what
the other person wants.
What I have discovered is that my love language in toward another person is curiosity.
If I love you, if I feel limerence for you and I want to explore whether there is going
to be love even beyond that, I immediately go into this mode of like, I want to know everything
about you.
I want to know what makes you tick.
I want to know how you take your coffee.
I want to know what meals you like.
I want to know all these things.
And so the art of seduction in a way gave me, you know, again, as a young undiagnosed
autistic femme, it gave me, you know, quite literally a playbook to translate these things
into action steps in order to be able to create something extraordinary and meaningful for
another person that would also maybe bring them to the level of sublime where I got it wrong
was I was doing this in some way because I felt like I needed to be more than perhaps
what I was already like there was some sort of low self worth that was in there, which
again, growing up undiagnosed autistic femme, you're going to get a lot of sort of pushback
from people from the world saying, you know, you don't understand the way things are.
You miss social cues and you think, oh, maybe it's me, maybe I'm the problem and things
like that.
So my repotterning has absolutely involved a re-embracing of my own value and my own worth
and my own authentic self expression.
But there's so many parts of this that still really resonate with me so deeply because
it's like at the end of the day, part of falling that deeply with another person is taking
that risk and saying, let's go explore the world and do all these remarkable amazing things
together.
Yeah, that part of manipulation, that part of that coldness, I understand where people
feel that way, but I know for me, it always felt like it was actually a gesture of warmth
where I was saying like, I'm trying to make myself be even better than I am, which maybe
I was doing that in a maladaptive way.
But the intention, I think, was really pure saying like, I'm trying to make myself the
best self that I can be so that I can give to you, my partner, whom I love, the best
version of myself.
Right.
Well, just a couple of the things about that chapter that I would like to say is one thing
that you have to have in order to go into this process of falling, falling, falling is
there has to be equality.
And that doesn't mean that say it's a man and a woman that you are the same because men
and women are different.
It just means that on the level of power and respect and intelligence, there is no difference
because that sense of inequality is what will cut short that falling process and will bring
in power games.
And so the last point I say is I say at the end of one of the sections that think of the
love sublime as a big kind of f you to our world, to all the cynicism, to all the skepticism,
to all the defensiveness, to all the ugliness that lives in our world.
And I want young people to embrace this chapter as a kind of form of intense rebellion.
Yes.
Right.
My relationship with one other person is an act of rebellion against this ugly, disenchanted
world.
You know?
And I have at the end of that section with the story of Aphrodite and this goose because
she Aphrodite was born of the waves of the sea.
So she's an ocean creature.
And this is a seagull, sorry, not a goose.
A seagull comes flying up door and says Aphrodite, you have you have you're not living with
humans anymore.
You've left the human world.
She says, well, I got so disgusted with humans because they're not interested in me anymore.
So I'm just leaving them.
I can't care about them anymore.
And the seagull says, well, but since you've left, everything has just become so ugly and
people are so only interested in themselves.
And please come back and I'm kind of saying at the end, it's kind of the same situation in
our world as what the seagull was telling to Aphrodite and I'm saying, you know, we're trying
to invite her back into our world.
So those are my last words on that.
Oh, you are speaking my language with that entirely.
And I've been through processes too, especially in the last few years where I've been judged
and I've even had to maybe leave some friendships behind because there were people who were
in some ways, I don't want to use the word "trigger" just kind of overuse, but we're activated
or we're upset or it brought up fear for them that the generosity I was engaging with in
someone that I love to who needed help and who was not in a place where they could reciprocate.
And I was like, I don't care.
I don't care what I'm getting in return for this.
I don't get like this will either this will either pay off in the end or it won't
and either way I am making this wager and this is what I'm going to do.
And there were people who, you know, I had to say, I'm sorry if you can't support that's
fine, but I cannot be around you because I cannot have that influencing my commitment,
my dedication to this.
It was my own underworld journey, my own, you know, orpheus going down and rescuing euridacy
kind of thing from the dark underworld coming back from the brink of death.
Yeah, so I'm really excited to read that chapter.
Okay, that's good.
Well, I want to we have maybe time for me to ask about one more of these sublime archetypes
before we bring Tomi on for her final question that she's going to ask you as well.
And I think my next favorite must be and I'm sure you might be able to tell by the surroundings
in my background, which is actually my, you know, my living room and not, not a, not a virtual,
you know, I've been there.
I've been there.
You have you have and I have that brilliant picture of you with Edgar Allan Paul and
my cat.
I'm totally going to use the thumbnail.
Where is it?
You know, he hides whenever I'm talking too much.
I think he likes the quiet.
Otherwise I would, I would really is.
Yeah.
But as you can probably guess, but yeah, the audience might not, might not have known by now
that this is actually this is actually I'm actually phoning in from, from where I, where
I say I am, but you might, you might be able to guess that my next favorite chapter
naturally would be the aesthetic sublime.
There's so much that I talk about in the other course that I teach called myths and magic
about creating our environments in order to shift our own reality so that they reflect
the stories that we want to live.
You know, and for me, I'm someone who is, you know, again, a student of the occult and
a lover of beautiful things and a, you know, and a sort of romantic goth, perhaps in a way,
at least a goth light.
And so you can see that like my home that I live in reflects this to me.
It's also something that I think autistic people in particular are sensitive to because of,
I don't have a ton of time to get into this, but you know, like the default mode network
like is more overactive in our brains.
And so we are taking in more sensory information around us.
So having things that are identity affirming and things that we love around us is really,
really helpful.
It's the same reason I like going to Disneyland, you know, which again, we're both in L.A.
So if you ever want a Disney day, we're totally, totally down for that too.
And being surrounded by these extraordinary kind of, you know, things that get us out of the
normal mundane, you know, shopping centers and highways and things like that.
So yeah, share with me some of your, your favorite things about the aesthetics of blind.
Well, the aesthetics of blind, the title of it is called Disorder the Senses, which is a
phrase that comes from the poet Arthur Rabbo.
And he was basically saying that the goal of poetry is to disorder the senses.
And what I like about that idea is that, you know, we tend, we were too intellectual, we're
too left brain dominated in our worlds, right?
And even our films and our books, they're so analytical, they're so language bound.
And to me, the great works of art kind of scramble our senses and have that effect, like we
talked about the neurological sublime, the neuro sublime, have the effect of making us see
the world differently.
It shakes us up, right?
So that's kind of the, the things that I'm interested in because we tend to think that,
so I explain that when everything in our environment is familiar and we see it and everything is,
is something that we've seen before.
We don't pay attention anymore to our world, right?
We don't pay attention to what's around us.
We don't realize that the mundane, the everyday things around us, the plants, the trees, the
man-made objects are weird, they're strange.
If you look at them, they're actually like strange creatures, the things in your household,
just a simple cup, a bottle of shampoo.
It's a weird thing that maybe even is alive in some way.
I'm kind of animistic that way.
So your world is much stranger than you think, right?
You banalize this very weird world that we live in.
So the aesthetic sublime is something that shakes you up and makes you aware that time is
in what you think it is, spaces in what you think it is.
And so the story I have that illustrates is of one of my favorite composers of music is
a man named Alexander Screabin.
He was very much into mysticism and the occult.
And he wanted to create a music that would take you into outer space, that would take you
into a whole different landscape of sound, but he couldn't find it.
He's frustrated.
He tried over and over and over and over in an experiment, an experiment, an experiment.
And suddenly this one piece came to him and we were talking about possession that he wrote
as if somebody other spirit wasn't happening him.
And he composed it within a few days and then he played it for people and they go, that is
the strangest thing I have ever heard.
I don't know what that was, but it wasn't bad.
It was fascinating, right?
And then he went on, he wrote this symphony.
And I don't know if you don't like classical music, I understand, but I beg you to listen
to it.
It's called the poem of ecstasy, right?
And he originally called it the poem, the orgyastic poem because it is like an orgasm.
It is a musical orgasm.
And it just sort of, it builds to a climax and then it stops.
And it builds to a climax and it stops.
It does this like 20 times until in the end it just crashes.
This explosion of sound.
So it's like when you listen to his music, you are literally entering another world.
And the first man who ever orbited the Earth planet Earth was a Soviet cosmonaut and they
asked him what music he wanted to play as he was orbiting the planet.
He chose Screabins, Poe Maffire because it is literally like the music of outer space.
So I chose that because he literally disrupts how we normally listen to music.
He creates rhythms that you've never heard before.
It's always starting and stopping.
It's like a nervousness that is kind of irritating but fascinating at the same time.
And then he wrote, but he never got finished because he died at the age of 43.
He wrote this piece that he wanted to create the ultimate Ellucinian mystery, ultimate ritual,
ancient ritual in India called the Mysterium where he would combine music and image and colors
and sense and everything and create this kind of overwhelming experience for people that
would make them transcend being human beings.
I mean he was a little bit insane.
That's putting it mildly.
But it never got completed because he died.
Other people have completed it form.
Anyway I'm fascinated by people who do that who transcend the usual boundaries in writing
or in poetry or in art or in music.
So that's sort of the idea about there is scrambling the senses because the world has become too
familiar to you and art that does that has a very sublime effect.
You know it also reminds me of one of my favorite parts of the Art of Seduction is in the
very ending of the book about festival time and place.
Oh yeah.
And you talk also about Shangri-la.
Not Shangri-la.
It's the floating world.
Yeah.
Yeah exactly.
Yeah.
Seductive time and place and that was so inspiring to me because it was like let's get people
out of the ordinary.
And maybe I might be too autistic and I might be too much into like order and neatness to
have my senses jarred too much.
But the idea of getting out of the ordinary the mundane and going to these places and I
remember I had a crush on a guy when I was in my 20s just this beautiful tall like internationally
traveled photographer like such a crush on him.
I remember asking him out somewhere sometime and gosh where I think I believe where I took
him was like a Dadavantese show where they had you know all of these you know remarkable
thing and that we are somewhere else gosh you know where I was living in New York City
at the time.
But this sort of like exclusive very fancy or less kind of a thing and then there was
like an after party.
I can't remember where it was but he turned to me at one point and quite literally he said
do you just go to like all these opulent events all the time and I was like Robert Greene
would be so proud of me right now.
Yeah.
You told him that?
No, I thought it in my head.
So but here we are many years later and I get to share that with you.
I would be and I am proud of you.
That means the world to me.
Well, that's a brilliant note for me to wrap up my questions on.
I'll bring on Tomi to ask her question of you for the end of our episode.
Hi Tomi.
Hello.
Yeah, thank you, Arden.
And I'm glad you ended that on a note of transcending boundaries because I do have a rather
serious question on that note.
So Robert, your work has been recommended to me by friends and mentors of mine.
People I really respect.
From what I've read so far, I've really enjoyed what you've had to say on the power of
androgyny and embracing traits of the opposite sex.
With that said, I've also heard your work praised by some of the most outspoken anti-trans voices
in podcasting spaces.
So the first one that comes to mind would be Jordan Peterson.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's probably.
He doesn't actually like my work.
I've been on his podcast once and he was actually very kind of antagonistic.
Tomi's the most antagonistic podcast I've ever had to deal with.
I came across it, but I couldn't suffer listening to Jordan Peterson for an hour.
Yeah, I know.
So I didn't actually have the episode.
But I know there's a few others in these spaces for sure that like come across or I've seen
some praise.
And I'd love for us to call that out.
Or I'd like to hear your thoughts on that disconnect among those that can read your books
that encourage gender fluidity who at the same time, back at the idea of showing basic human
decency to the trans community.
Well, the gender fluidity is a part of the art of seduction.
I have one of the icons of seduction is the dandy figure who is a man who combines female
and masculine traits and a woman who does the same and how devilishly seductive it is.
And in the laws of human nature, I have a whole chapter on that.
And I try and explain that trying to explode your concept of what it means to be a man or
a woman that we are kind of trapped in our bodies, we're trapped in our genders in some
ways.
And that every man has a very strong feminine side that he either acknowledges or uses creatively
or represses and every woman has a very strong masculine side.
And so to kind of get out of this kind of rigid dichotomy that we all live under, it's
kind of oppressive.
And that for a man to touch his female side opens up a whole world to him, it opens up a
whole world of creativity.
And you'll call this the anima and the animus.
A man possesses an anima which is the female figure inside of him, heavily influenced
by the mother, the animus is what a woman has which is heavily influenced by the father.
And but it's also genetically, we men have estrogen, women have testosterone, we combine
elements of the two genders within all of us.
And so I just wanted to kind of open people's minds up to that fluidity.
And I had that in there because it's a law of human nature that we do possess these
traits of each gender within us.
And so I don't know, I don't think I have anything specifically about that in a sublime book.
I do talk about the poet Safo who is the first, what the word lesbian literally comes from
her life because she was born on the island of Lesbos and how her attraction to other women
have that in the love sublime chapter.
But I mean, I personally feel that it's something that the way people become phobic about
this is because they have to repress that other side of the other gender inside of their
afraid of it.
And it's what makes people afraid of black people, it makes a man afraid of women, it
makes people afraid of indigenous people.
It's the other, the stranger that's within us all that we can't come to terms with and
we'd rather just repress or hate.
And by what people hate, you can kind of, they reveal something about themselves, they
reveal about what they're repressing and what they're afraid of.
And so I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's sort of how I frame it, that
kind of phobic reaction is actually telling more about the person themselves.
Does that make sense in my answering question?
Yeah.
No, that absolutely makes sense.
And there is a certain commonality with the way I see these transphobic people and the
way they talk about the opposite sex and sometimes even their romantic partners when they
give a glimpse of that world that that totally checks out that there's a certain structure
and or fear towards there.
Well, I mean, the other.
Part of the thing that's always motivated me is an interest in how other people think and
to get sort of outside of myself.
So part of that is interest in how women think and how people on the spectrum think and
how every different possible variety of human consciousness, the diversity of it all.
And so people who have who are more strongly exhibiting the two sides of the gender equation
kind of fascinating me on the level of how they think.
And I've always had this idea that it's very, you feel this very strongly in music where
the male and the female sides are actually much more overt and musicians tend to have much
more of this kind of fluidity.
Because music goes to the right, the left brain in a way that language doesn't.
And so I'm kind of fascinated by people who bring that into their creative world and kind
of open this different way, this more fluid way of thinking.
I love that about music, by the way.
I've never thought of it as that, you know, uniting both halves of the brain way, but that
makes so much sense.
And I know that I feel that way personally as a musician.
And I also feel that way about, you know, a lot of the musicians that I end up being
attracted to also have that.
And, you know, I look for that sort of complimentary person who can meet both the feminine and masculine
and me as that kind of yin yang.
So it's really cool to think about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, did I answer you?
Yeah, I think so.
I appreciate that.
I think that gives me what I need to know.
So thank you for answering that.
It started to take us to such a serious place in their culture.
That's all right.
And there's some part of the sublime book that I made.
Talk about this, but I can't remember which puts chapters in, so excuse me on that.
Yeah, I love what you bring about.
The antibiotics.
I know for everyone watching today, by the way, you guys.
Robert has done this interview when he was feeling under the weather.
And I just want to also thank you, Robert, for showing up even when you're not.
And I think the conversation we had, I know I mentioned this before we started recording,
but it reminds me of what you're talking about in the book where you talk about the
second self that there is the social constructed self that we present to people.
And then there's that more wild and barrel self.
And I often think that sometimes when I'm not feeling well, my social constructed self
goes out the window.
So I maybe hope that maybe we've gotten actually a more raw and unfiltered version of you today.
But this was just just wait, just wait for the 10 more minutes and you'd see even more.
Well, it's too bad in that case that it's time for us to wrap up.
But I'm so grateful for you coming on and having this conversation with me today.
And again, you know what a great big fan I am.
I'm here work quite often.
You can't hide it.
Not even a little bit.
Nor would I ever want to.
So I will simply encourage.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I mean, you can't hide it when you see that cover.
Exactly.
And I will encourage everyone out there.
If you haven't read Robert's books, they're just so brilliant.
They're so fun to read.
I encourage you to check out the 48 laws of power, check out the art of seduction.
And if you have read Robert's books in the past and maybe even if you think that you have
an idea or a conception of the kind of things that Robert writes about, I know I'm so excited
for it.
The law of sublime to come out.
And I know just already from the summaries that I've read a bit so far that it's going
to have that different approach, that greater wider, expansive, more spiritual perspective.
So I would encourage you to challenge your existing preconceptions of Robert's writing and also
check out the law of the sublime.
Robert, thank you so much for joining us today.
It has been such a pleasure and an honor.
You're very welcome.
The book will be out in November, just a case.
Just a case people want to know.
Oh, great.
Well, I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for it for sure.
First day, it's in stores.
I'm going to be lined up outside Barnes and Noble.
Okay.
Well, you can pre-order it too on Amazon, but okay.
Excellent.
Thank you again.
And thank you, everyone, who tuned in today.
Thank you for checking out the Re-Patterning podcast.
You know where you can find us.
You can find more details about the Re-Patterning project and also myths and magic at the Re-Patterning
project.com.
You can support us on Patreon at patreon.com/therepatterningpodcast.
And we hope that you tune in and keep listening to the next exciting conversations that we will
be generously and seductively curating for you and your listening entertainment.
Thank you all, and we'll see you next time.
Thank you for listening to the Re-Patterning podcast.
If you're curious about the Re-Patterning project, the eight-week course in mental mastery and
creative freedom that inspires these conversations, you can check out more details at the Re-Patterning
project.com.
We run a cohort twice a year, or you can download the self-study version of the course and
get started today.
We also offer a four-week course on narrative, magic, and archetype titled "Mits and Magic,
Changing Your Life Through Story" also twice a year.
If you'd like to join our community, the Re-Patterning Parlor, on Discord, you can sign up for
$5 a month at patreon.com/therepatterningpodcast.
Thanks to everyone who makes the Re-Patterning podcast possible.
Firstly, our award-winning producer, Tomi Trembath, of the Keymaster Collective Network
of Podcasts.
She also produces Transcending Comics, Vision in the Void, and Giant-sized Violence.
Thanks also to Animation Studio Mortis and Madriacs, who created the video for our introduction,
as well as to Andrew Means, who composed and produced our theme music.
And also thanks to Al Alvarez, who took the photos of yours truly that you see on the cover
of each episode if you're watching the video version.
And finally, thanks to you, our listeners, who give meaning to this work.
Your greatest wishes that whatever you've heard today inspires you to live freely and begin
creating your reality from the inside out.
Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again soon.
(😫ącego chlopo)
(😫m styl *)