So people were to take one thing away from my work and one thing only get away from cruel
people, get away from cruel people.
We underestimate the extent to which abiding cruelty just degrades our lives and selves
and it's unnecessary.
I really do believe in my heart of hearts that if one thing were taken from my work, let
it be that.
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 birth
right.
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.
Welcome back everyone to the Re-Patterning Podcast.
I am your host, Arden Lee and I am so excited to welcome today's guest, Mitch Horowitz.
Mitch Horowitz is one of today's foremost contemporary thought leaders on the occult,
the esoteric and new thought changing your mind through changing your beliefs, which
of course, as we know is a whole Re-Patterning mood.
He is a pen award winning historian, writer and lecturer who explores the intersections
of metaphysics, ethics and self transformation.
He is the author as of now since his new book is just coming out.
He is the author of 20 books, 20.
And so I'm so excited to welcome him today to discuss his new book, Esoterika, with us
today on the show.
He is also featured in critics choice nominated and Sundance premiering films and he's also
shown on numerous TV shows as an occult expert and historian.
And I'm so excited today to discuss with Mitch his new book, Esoterika, formulas against
the false self, which I've been lucky to read an advanced copy of right here on my iPad
so we can chat about it today.
And I also recently read Mitch's book, Daydream Believer, we actually studied this in my advanced
container, the magnificent order of advanced Re-Patterning last month.
So it's also fresh in my mind.
So I'm really excited to get to now ask Mitch all the questions that I have about his work,
which is quite prolific.
Mitch, how are you doing today?
I'm great and it's wonderful to be here.
Thank you, NT, you and your group for reading Daydream Believer.
That's a favorite book of mine as well.
We really enjoyed it.
It was really fun.
And we got to try out some of the suggestions and exercises that you put in the book and
we had some really cool results as well.
So maybe at some point in the conversation we'll share about that today.
But I know that we're mostly here to discuss your new book,Esoterika.
So first of all, I also wanted to say before we dive into that that I'm aware that you
posted on your Instagram not too long ago that you recently had a hospital stay.
So I wanted to say first of all, thank you for being here in both the greater and more
immediate senses of that meaning.
And how are you doing?
Well, I'm doing really well.
I'm very much on the man feeling vastly, vastly better.
It was a scary episode.
It wasn't cardiac related, but I had my hemoglobin levels that shot way down.
We didn't know why.
We still don't know why, but my recovery has been stellar and all is going well.
I'm so curious if you used any of your new thought exercises in order to think your way
into a healthy timeline after that happened.
Well, I've always had a focus on dynamic physical presence.
And it's funny, Arden, in a certain way.
I think that we all have to be careful not to retrofit meaning to events because there's
a natural human tendency to want to reinterpret accidents according to some map or intentional
framework.
If that caution said, I find it's not uncommon that when the individual names a goal, and
I had named a goal as being possessed of real dynamism physically, that was a goal that
I was very, very focused on for various reasons.
These things can reach us through whatever are the most readily available channels.
And those channels can be very unexpected.
Mother Nature will cooperate with us in her own way, not necessarily in the way that matches
my mind's eye picture of what should be happening.
So dig this as I write about in Esoterika because I believe that spiritual communicators owe
it to their audience to be very transparent.
I was consuming booze and weed almost every night.
It's just a simple matter of enjoyment and stress, but it was excessive.
It was simply excessive.
And I knew it as transparent with my doc about it.
And organically everything's fine with me, but that can't be a good thing.
Drinking tumblers of bourbon and toking up every single night can present issues.
And so quite frankly, this health episode, I know it sounds so common to say this, but
I can't avoid the truth.
It jared me to a place of changing those habits.
So the passages that readers will encounter in Esoterika, which I'm proud of because they're
transparent and they're real, where I talk about excessive substance use, that has changed.
And so a wish, which in my case was physical dynamism, a wish will reach you in unexpected
and sometimes jarring and disruptive ways.
Don't condition it because if you condition it, I think it will delay arrival, which is
not always a bad thing in and of itself.
There may be a place for conditioning a wish.
Apropos of ethics and things of that nature, which have due cause.
But I didn't condition it.
And yes, it reached me.
So that's my, that's my health story.
That was actually one of the things that I really loved about reading Esoterika was your
unpacking so brilliantly, the ways that, and I feel like this is the quintessential question
that every magician faces, which is like a lifelong question, which is, do you leave it open?
Do you say like, whatever is in my highest good, do you leave it as big as possible?
Or do you get super specific?
As exactly as you said, the more specific you get, the smaller the available channels or
like the lesser the probability of something being able to come in.
At the same time, if you leave it super big, sometimes, you know, I always joke in when I
start teaching people magic in some of my classes, I always joke about the story that I heard
about a woman who wished for a man to show her the world.
And what happened was one of her clients started sending her all his vacation photos.
Right.
So it's like, how specific do you get?
So what is your process around that when you make a wish or when you cast a spell or do some
sort of a ritual or set an intention?
Where do you find that sweet spot?
That's a wonderful, wonderful question.
I take very seriously as do you and your audience members the efficacy of cyclical intention.
I do believe it is lawful.
In my estimation, it's not a super law.
I don't think we function under one mental super law.
There are all kinds of counter-vailing currents in our world.
We live under a complexity of laws and forces and a law in order to be such must be consistent.
But of course, water, H2O, will take different forms depending upon temperature.
Gravity will take different forms depending upon mass.
So none of this is particularly easy or responsive to expectation.
In consistency is part of the process as well because of surrounding conditions.
That said, I really honor your question because it seems to mean that the magician, the seeker,
if he or she works with cyclical intent, which really we're all doing all the time in one
measure or another, including those of us who engage in petitioner prayer, for example.
The question is where and when is conditioning called for.
Now one of the things I write about in Esoterika is that conditioning is a reasonable thing
to do.
It can slow arrival because it restricts the channels of natural occurrence.
And things will reach us as I was alluding through familiar channels and those channels or I might
add a caveat to that, familiar channels that might sometimes seem mundane so much so
that were apt to disregard arrival, but also unusual channels, channels that might challenge
us.
For example, somebody who's into alopathic medicine might find a solution through some alternative
modality and vice versa and vice versa.
You know one really can be very challenged.
There are areas where I will condition a wish.
For example, I do a lot of television and screen work.
There are things I will not do in that world.
I will not, for example, engage in anything that humiliates another person or that derives
entertainment from witnessing another person humiliated.
And frankly, that's a big part of unscripted television and there's a big chunk of my
medium in which I will not participate for that very reason.
That's sacrosanct that cannot be be altered.
But there are other areas of life and I ask people to listen to this very carefully.
If you feel there's something for which you're so truly hungry that it almost feels like
the drawing of breath itself, there may be instances where abstaining from conditioning will
hasten arrival.
Arrival may come in a way that's jarring.
I wasn't expecting to be hospitalized.
When I asked for physical dynamism, I wasn't particularly specific and I didn't expect
that a health crisis would help move me off of problematic habits, but there it was.
So if you want something and you want it the way that a parched person wants a drink of
water, don't condition it.
But one must be prepared.
I want to tell very briefly a sardonic story, apropos of what you were saying about your
colleague who suddenly discovered someone who started sending her his vacation photos.
This is really a true story and I swear to God it's going to sound made up because it's
just so bizarre but it's a simple fact.
I correspond with prisoners and I correspond with a man who's in prison out west in Brooklyn
in New York City.
And he is a therapist.
He has an advanced degree in social work and he does therapy in a peer to peer program
within his prison.
And he told me in a letter that at some juncture of his life, he was so excited about his therapeutic
training that he made the wish.
I just want to do therapy all day long.
I don't care about the money.
I just want to roof over my head, a place to sleep in three meals and he was like, well, now
I've got it.
And one has to pull out for that human admission and he saw the sardonic humor in it.
Is there a direct connection?
I leave it up to the listener.
But these are questions that we face determining whether the condition things are not, even
if the stakes aren't as high as what my colleague was depicting.
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
What a heartbreaking but terrific example of that.
I loved in the very beginning and the introduction of Esoterika.
You wrote this sentence where you're talking about because of course the subtitle of Esoterika
is formulas against the false self.
And so you introduced the false self.
And it's so spoke to me and the work that I do in Re-Patterning and the sentence was that we
traverse life with a menu of say 20 or so responses and claim selfhood.
Like we get into these automated patterns of responding to things around us and we slip
into automaticity.
You know, we slip into into just going on autopilot and doing the things that we were conditioned
to do.
And share with us how Esoterika helps us to create greater agency, you know, maybe going
from 20 responses to hopefully maybe about a hundred or so or thinking more about what
responses we're giving.
Well chiefly, I want people to feel at liberty to express themselves in how their life is
conducted.
And as much as I greatly value the therapeutic culture and I value the manner in which
the therapeutic culture has given us concepts and language that weren't available to previous
generations, I think there are areas where one must be very astringent in life.
For example, I believe that both adults and children or adolescents are sometimes just
a gregiously misplaced.
They're living in the wrong place.
They're in the wrong company.
They're in the wrong setting and it will drain the life out of a person to get inert to this
idea that I have to build up some sort of verbal jujitsu where I have to find a place of non-response
within myself.
We're not built that way.
We're emotional beings asking the individual to abide a place of non-response is literally
like asking a horse not to jump at a loud noise.
It's in the nature of the being.
And when the individual feels diminished or insulted or smeared with backhanded compliments
or subtle put downs, which a lot of people feel in their social circles, they feel they have
to put up with it.
They feel they have to find a solution from within.
They feel they have to find some method or means of dealing with it.
And I think that's diametrically mistaken and immense lives of suffering that can be better,
happier, more agentic lives.
So that's one manner in which I referred to the false self in the subtitle.
I think that our spiritual traditions, including our alternative spiritual traditions, our
therapeutic traditions, positives they are in some regards, and just general peer pressure
cement us into lives that we don't want and shouldn't put up with.
And this is true for young adolescents as well.
And I just don't want people to feel that they have to obey the rules of the road, which
can be corrupt.
You know, I noticed a bit of a tonal shift between daydream believer and Esoterika.
And daydream believer, I really found to be an overall really optimistic book, an optimism
that is perhaps at times fraught, you know, you admit to struggling, I want to say struggling
with, but dealing with anxiety throughout your life.
And an optimism that is very transparently strived for in many ways, but nonetheless that
driving, you know, wish, try, be, you know, create.
And I noticed in Esoterika, there was a tendency toward unpacking some of the more negative
aspects of life, like a trail, like you talk about peer pressure and things like that.
And it's interesting because it actually, it comes to me at a time where I am dealing
with probably one of the biggest betrayal traumas that I've faced in my life.
So there was a part of me that was like, like, oh, Mitch, like, I want to see you reach
for the stars again.
And there was another part of me that was like, oh, I feel this.
So hard right now and I can't wait to have this conversation when we take the episode.
So I'm curious, like, what for you?
Do you think, you know, inspired you to speak about those more kind of, you know, grievous
or difficult aspects of the world we live in?
I appreciate that question.
It is in a stringent book.
It's written with a great wish for the reader's happiness, but there is a very marked
astringency in it. And I am worried, you know, here on the eve of the book that that
astringency may be too coarse at times or at least for certain readers, but it has a purpose
behind it and has a very great wish behind it.
And that is to acknowledge these areas of life where we often encounter friction and
suffering.
And I think that we as a culture as full-throated as we are in so many ways as granting of license
as we are in so many ways, but do a poor job addressing problems of betrayal, humiliation,
cruelty.
These are parts of life from which I will not turn away in so far as it would be corrupt.
You know, it really would be corrupt.
I mean, life is a yin yang.
Life is as above so below.
Life is a DNA strand.
You know, this interwoven with happiness, joyousness and tragedy and suffering.
The world right now in 2026 and this is going to hold true permanently is in a kind of downward
spiral.
I think we as a human community are increasingly mechanical or increasingly given to a kind
of airsets, existence, the ancient sex that are referred to under the label of nosticism.
I think ponte us rightly for defining something very real about our era.
And I appreciate your sharing that you just suffered of betrayal.
I write about betrayal in the book.
I had someone who I considered a very close friend who betrayed me in a business arrangement.
It's shocking to me to this day.
It will remain so.
We haven't the way to digest these things because we as individuals yearn for safety, relationship,
all the natural things that make a person feel that he or she has a rain-resistant roof overhead.
And when we discover that that's not necessarily true, it's deeply shocking.
We also function, I'm speaking to those of us here in the United States or North America.
Most of us, most of the time, function with a relative degree of physical safety, security.
You turn on a light switch, the electricity comes on, you go to your refrigerator, there's
something to eat, you turn on the faucet, there's clean water.
Vast numbers of people in the world cannot count on that.
And we've grown so cushy in our outlook on life sometimes, even as we suffer, that I feel
that a more astringent point of view proves necessary.
And I encounter people all the time within new age culture, in which I've been in sconce
for decades, including widely known teachers, including people who are household or near
household names.
And I can assure you from direct experience, they are as weak or weaker than I am.
They fly into rage over nothing, they get wildly angry of some reward to which they believe
themselves do is withheld.
And yet all of this vanishes when the camera goes on.
And I resent that because it leaves audience members with the misimpression that so and so
has it together.
And if only I could be like him, and it's a fallacy.
And if that fallacy is exposed, which I attempt to do in the book without naming names, because
I'm not into sensationalism.
But if that fallacy is--
You want participate in humiliation of another person.
I really try not to.
If that fallacy is exposed, then it's good because it helps us realize that we're all
basing the same circumstance and so and so because he or she has ten bestselling books
or appears on your favorite show is not liberated from the circumstances that you or I face Tuesday
at 3 p.m. in the afternoon or whatever it is.
And why can't we start there?
Why can't we start there?
If we could start there, it would make us feel more possessed of real exchange, real search
and realism.
So this book is an attempt at restoration of realism, but also as I said, with a great
wish for the reader's happiness because the things that I'm attempting to prescribe
or suggest if the individual wants to try them will, I believe, result in greater happiness.
Yeah, I really appreciate it also what you said about, like, don't tolerate disrespect.
I think you may have said it this way in the book, but once is enough, one instance of disrespect.
That, I guess, that too is a question that I have is that oftentimes we walk away from people
because of that kind of disrespect, even when we give them the opportunity to fix it, even
when we feel like we have really been above board and just being like, "Okay, well, then
that's your choice, goodbye or whatever."
And that those folks rather than have a corrective conversation and say, "Hey, you know
what?
I'd like to repair our friendship.
Maybe I don't even understand maybe why you walked away because maybe the behavior I'm
doing is so unconscious that, you know, but I'm open to hearing or can we talk about this
or whatever?"
And instead, they're so angry that you walked away from them that they literally try to
destroy you.
So I guess what I wanted to ask you today is also about the dangers of revoking access
to yourself from dangerous or disrespectful people.
You know, what would you recommend in terms of safeguarding?
Well, I would say that most of us maintain too many relationships.
We do the digital culture probably come in touch with more people in a day that our prime
evil ancestors may have in a lifetime.
And I think we as a culture, due to the artifice of digital media, maintain really an
excessive degree of relationships.
As a parallel to that, I would say, disrespect always repeats when it occurs, unless it's
a mistake or a misunderstanding and clearly so.
And usually that will out itself, that will sort itself out, you know.
When, when disrespect occurs, especially when you feel it kind of on this subtle level,
it repeats.
And my perception is that a lot of people suffer that silently, feeling the embarrassment
that, oh, I don't want to say anything, I don't want to seem reactive, I don't want to
seem negative or, well, my shrink says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I think that we as a human community stagger under an excess of hostility.
I would say hostility is the chief problem of human nature.
And look, everyone to a person around the globe to render this macro for just a moment in
service of bringing it back to the intimate, you would not meet a single person anywhere
on earth in any time setting or circumstance who wouldn't agree that war is horrible.
We all want an end to war.
It's irrational, it's crazy, it results in nothing positive.
And yet that attitude, which we all profess to hold in a full-hearted way, produces exactly
nothing, exactly nothing.
We stagger, we stagger as a human community under tremendous amounts of hostility and stress.
Most of it, in terms of our private lives, our intimate lives, there are global conditions,
planetary conditions that have a greater macro stream, but in terms of our individual
lives, we don't sufficiently avail ourselves of possibilities and necessities for getting
away from that.
And you'll find that there are enormous degrees of pure conformity that we get locked
into, apropos of those problems.
And so I'm trying to give people a sense that this kind of descending relationship and taking
is widely recognized in esoteric philosophy.
And it's not something in which we need to feel locked in.
I say to people, for example, who are looking for relationships, I understand the pains and
the pain of loneliness, and it is something I wish on no one, but I warrant that it is finer
and better to be nobly alone than it is to settle for a compromised company.
Return to that, there is an ability in the individual, and it starts with self-observation,
and it starts with a certain degree of self-standards.
And if only we realized how radical and yet also exquisitely available, some of these steps
are.
You actually provide in the book a three-part approach to separating from cruel people.
Would you like to share some of that?
I'd love to hear you talk about that.
Sure.
My suggestion is to get away from cruelty immediately and burn your bridges behind you.
There are cases where that's impossible because of domestic situations, economic situations,
employment situations, and I really do recognize that.
First and foremost, it's important to just acknowledge the problem to oneself, absolutely
acknowledge the problem, and do not confront the other individual with the acknowledgement
because you will get wounded all over again.
You talked about 20 stock ways of behaving.
Every bully has five stock ways of behaving, and it starts with, I was only joking, you're
being too sensitive.
I don't know what you're talking about.
You will get wounded all over again.
The purpose is to acknowledge it within, not to seek out confrontation that will only result
in further sorrow.
The second thing is to vow with deadly seriousness that you recognize the dynamic that's going
on, and even if you're locked in place, and some of people are locked in place, that's just
a fact of life.
You will at the first possible physical opportunity get away from that situation, person, circumstance,
what have you.
Then, third and finally, when that opportunity comes, act on it without fear of consequence.
There will be consequence.
I could never say to somebody there's not going to be consequence, but frequently try to
dig this.
Anxiety by its very nature is anticipatory, and it's not what's occurring, it's what I'm afraid
is going to occur, and anxiety by its very nature is amplifying.
The consequences, they will exist, but they're usually a great deal milder than one expects.
For example, let's say of a hostile in-law, just to choose a random example, and you want
that person, persona, non-grata in your house.
Well, my spouse will be angry, there'll be this problem, there'll be that problem.
Try it, try it.
The consequences will probably be a good deal milder than you believe.
I would also add a proposal of our relationships, which is usually the areas in life where
we experience the greatest suffering.
There are, let's say, person as kids, and they want positive adults in the life of that kid.
There are lots of positive adults in the world.
If you have a family situation or a domestic situation where there's suffering or sorrow
or unhappiness, you can find positive influences.
They're there, but they may not become available unless one is willing to step off the
off of a currently occupied rung.
I think there's a metaphysical, quick pro quo in that.
Something has to be given up, something has to be sacrificed.
Our primeval ancestors made sacrifices all the time.
That term runs throughout spiritual literature, especially here in the West, and a kind of
sacrifice is leaving behind a situation.
That sacrifice will, I believe, make you a creditor versus a debtor and nature will place
itself at your back.
Yeah, I have had that experience as well.
Something that I talk about in the Re-Patterning project all the time is just this idea that
there are eight billion people on the planet.
Whatever you think you need that you're getting from someone, can you at least expand your
mind to imagine that there might be a different person out there from whom you could get
that same need met without the disrespect that is coming from your present situation?
The one thing I will say that I differ on, not necessarily disagree because I think we
agree on the values of it is about going back and letting that person know what their behavior
is.
What I agree with you on is I don't do it from a place of seeking their approval or actually
expecting them to change.
I do it from a place of I know from myself now and my own integrity that I have warned you
that I have been explicit to that I have said exactly what I see is going on.
And then if you continue to deny it, I would say, oh, you're too sensitive or you're this
or whatever, then it's like, okay.
And for me, also, I think that gives me a certain, like, permission also to walk away and
to know that I at least tried.
I'm like, okay.
I gave it that last shot.
You didn't take it.
So, oh, well.
I understand.
I understand where you're coming from.
So one thing I really loved also toward the end of the book, you talk about capacity before
achievement.
You talk about when you're making that wish or doing that ritual, setting that intention,
whatever that looks like for the individual practitioner, you talk about the difference
between asking for the thing, the final result versus asking to become the person who can
hold that.
And of course, I also think that we can do both.
But this has been for me one of the primary ideas that I've tried to push with Re-Patterning
is that the Re-Patterning project is all about become the person who can have the thing that
you want.
And that is going to make all the difference.
And quote, a person in the book by the name of, I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly,
San Ray Duffout.
Yes.
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Go me.
It's this beautiful quote.
If you want to manifest love into your life, the correct and fastest way to do that is to
work on making yourself into the ideal partner for the partner that you want.
And of course, for me, this is also very relevant to the twin flame path, which the twin
flame path, when done correctly without all the distortions and the cultic nonsense that
is out there is about undoing all of the barriers and all the conditioning in yourself that
is blocking the receiving of true love.
And so the mythology goes that if you do that in yourself, that other person who is spiritually
yoked to you, if they truly are, and it's not just your, you know, limerence casting a
delusion of attachment or whatever, then that person will also rise with you because you
are accorded in that manner.
And then, you know, you get to that inner union, which produces your external union, etc.
And I've had this debate with so many occultists in particular who really, you know, the difference
between say like, all right, I'm going to, like, I'm going to do this on myself.
I'm going to change myself.
And then I'm going to ask for the things that are in my high as good, that are a part
of my true will, that are a part of my Dharma.
Knowing because I have a good amount of self worth that those things that are meant for me
are actually going to be amazing and not any kind of compromise.
And then you have these occultists over here who were like, I just want the thing that
I want.
And they think that asking for the thing that they are actually in alignment with is going
to get them a substandard result, which is I'm like, I'm telling, you're telling on yourself.
You're telling what you think of yourself, you know?
And I've asked this to like a few guests on the podcast because it's something that still
I feel like is an argument that is so difficult to make to people who are entrenched
in those beliefs where they're just like, no, I just want what I want.
How do you tell those people like, how do you convince them to do it in this other, again,
capacity before achievement?
It's an interesting question.
And I mean this not as a dodge, but with total sincerity.
I respect both sides of the equation because I understand, for example, that an individual
might feel that here she wants something so completely.
And it feels so completely right that they won't condition it even to the point of
being ready for it.
And maybe that's what happened to me with my hospital stay.
And I'm not saying that in a somber or melancholy way, it's just the nature of life and its
currents.
And I think that if the individual is prepared to shoulder the risk of receiving without
necessarily being prepared, I won't box that person in.
It's a danger.
And I go back and forth myself.
Sonres, comment, touched me very deeply.
I had heard that comment from him at a time where I was getting together with Dr. Tony
Nader, who's a lovely man, a neuroscientist and MD, who's the head of the worldwide transcendental
meditation movement, which is a movement that's very important to me.
It was interesting, Dr. Nader makes the point that consciousness is all there is, that everything
that is contains some degree of consciousness is just a question of strata or scale.
So if you were to ask him, is or can AI ever be conscious to which most people are
possibly saying, no, of course not because it is in solsar sense of selfhood.
He said, well, of course, you know, it is conscious and it will become more conscious in the
same vein that, you know, the table that's in front of me is conscious to the extent that
it might feel the impact of gravity or weight, which he would describe as a certain scale
of consciousness, even though it's particularly compared to the human being.
So the idea is, do I possess the awareness, the capacity, the patterning as you put it
to sustain the thing wanted?
And the answer to that may sometimes be no and the individual can work on that, what
might be root issue and that might be a longer road and that might also be a road that goes
someplace that the me that wants doesn't necessarily like.
Then again, the me that wants also has its claim, its legit claim.
And one of the things I try to be careful of in spiritual culture, and you'll see this
as a carryover from from daydream believer, I think sometimes, I think sometimes the individual
sense of what would make him or her happy gets gets taken.
It will get either conditioned or a swaddessant spiritual teacher will frame the question
of, well, which eye inside you is asking for this or what have you.
And my content is that the mature sensitive individual, including an adolescent for that
matter, knows what would make him or her happy.
I don't, I don't want to see that question that wish, you know, get taken from the individual.
So I think we're given the prospect of playing both sides of the street.
I've seen people who can't gain fame, for example, and they egregiously fuck it up and they
suffer and their relationship suffer because, well, I don't even need to finish a sentence
because they just weren't prepared to pay the price in terms of selfhood that maybe would
have made that circumstance happier for them in some ultimate sense or happier to live
with.
And would they do it over?
Would they give up the thing that they attained to avert the pain that that was caused?
Only the individual knows.
And sometimes the individual has to attain something to see its true worth.
I certainly don't accept anybody's, how can I put it?
Like platitudinous approaches to achievement or attainment.
You know why?
We'll occasionally encounter best-selling writers say, oh, it doesn't really mean anything,
really.
So this thing you've spent your whole life pursuing doesn't really mean anything.
So can we strip it away from you?
Do you want to give back all the money and everything because it doesn't mean anything?
I'm not so sure.
At the same time, that doesn't relieve suffering that perhaps comes with it or this melancholy
or on-weigh that it's not that it doesn't mean anything, certainly it does, but maybe it
doesn't mean everything.
So I could see both sides of it.
And I know there are areas in my life where I have to experience adjustments, very serious,
organic adjustments in order to come into something that I might want going back to the portion
of the book that you quoted.
So I can see both sides of it.
You know as Gurgief said, every stick has two ends.
And so wishing, for example, which I take very seriously, very seriously, a wish is extremely
powerful when it intently felt very powerful.
I could see that having two ends being prepared and being unprepared for the thing itself.
So be careful.
I love that you bring up that idea of calling in fame before you're ready to handle it because
that's actually something that I've been thinking about for the last couple years because
I have intended to call that in on some level.
I have been told by my spirits, by my divinations, that there is a degree of that that is going
to be available to me in the future, probably if they're correct, a degree that will be surprising
even to me.
And so thinking about that and getting my mind into that like mental practice mode, which
I believe is something else that you bring up.
And I can't remember whether it was an esoteric or a daydream believer.
Yes, it was daydream believer.
The idea of wishing from a place of passion and from a place of passion that maybe comes
from black because you're sad because you don't have the thing versus needing to put
yourself into the illusion of already having it.
And I found in my own personal practice that it's almost a gradient, like I can start from
this place, but then maybe I better be at this other, like I can start from this place
of making the wish from the place of black, but I kind of better be in the mental practice
mode of having it by the time it arrives, you know?
Yeah, I did.
I think that part of what I'm driving at in that point is that the individual is going
to experience periods of depression or grief or excessive anxiety.
And sometimes when in need of the greatest help, the greatest barriers can also appear.
If we abide by a kind of standard new thought practice of think from the end, live from
the end, which I honor.
I mean, I have Neville Goddard over here, my spiritual hero tattooed on my own.
I love him.
And I believe in Neville's ideas.
He's been one of the greatest influences in my life.
But if I could have an exchange with him, my exchange would focus on exactly that, which
is that when the individual is in the most acute need, living from the end, enacting the
feeling state is, it's next to impossible.
It's next to impossible.
And so I got to wondering whether at the back of all of our, whatever one wants to call
it, manifesting, repatterning, selecting, spell work, whatever one wants to call it, at the
back of all that is the wish.
So I began to ask myself, and I think that occupies the first chapter in a Sotarika.
And I actually, yeah, it occupies the first chapter following the introduction.
I raised the question of whether the wish is enough, the wish is sufficient.
And I'm really interested in that because all of our metaphysical work, whatever it's nature,
whether it be prayer, whether it be spell work, whether it be the power of intent, whatever
it's nature, all of our metaphysical work is psychical enactment is the wish to psychically
push out one's mental picture, one's emotive thought into the world.
And in such cases, especially when a person is suffering is the wish enough, is the well-patterned,
well-formed, passionately felt, very specifically formulated wish is that sufficient.
And I'm, I'm really interested in that.
I feel like logically it almost must be in the sense that if I refer to magic as causative
ritual, if magic is real, if magic works.
And I believe it does, albeit amid a wild degree of countervailing factors and a complexity
of laws and forces, then it could be that the wish is sufficient if our psychies have some
capacity of selection, which I believe they do.
And I'm really interested at this juncture in my search of very, very simple things like
that, very, very simple things.
So people always want to talk to us about the entities they've met and the non-human intelligences
and I met Jehovah or I met this God or I met that God and this happened on this trip.
And we want to talk about these experiences.
But am I undergoing that right now?
Am I feeling that right now?
And if I'm not feeling that right now, then it's the equivalent of just showing people
my vacation photos.
Yes.
You know, and how much do I really want to look at more pictures of Angkor Wat or of the
Parthenon or whatever, showing people my vacation photos is not experiencing that as right
now.
And so rather than collect experiences or necessarily go through the complexities of
liturgy, which is wonderful if it works for the individual.
I'm the first in line to shake hands with that person is the wish sufficient.
So I'm really trying to work with very stripped down ideas at this point in my search.
Yeah.
I would agree with you.
I would say there are times in my practice where I have, it has been from a place of impassion
meant rather than mental fulfillment and it's still, it's, it's still gotten me there
eventually.
One of my favorite parts of Esoterika, I'll be at a brief section, but it was definitely
one of my favorites was the part about musicians making a pact at the crossroads with the devil
or skills and music.
And I wanted to share with you that I actually, I did that in 2021, although it was, it was
not with the devil as in St. Norlucifer or the poser as we might think or even, you know,
Alegua as in some of the other traditions.
It was hermys.
It was and hermys specifically showed up because I had put out a video on YouTube in spring
of 2021 and I basically just said, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to
commit to using magic to make it music and I don't know, you know, I don't know what that's
going to look like, but I'm just stating my intention and all of a sudden, all of these
crazy synchronicities deal with the devil, what I start showing up in my life.
And I'm like, okay, well, who is this?
Who's, you know, and I managed to figure it out.
Actually, I did a series of videos about this process of figuring out all the way up
into crafting the pact and, you know, going to the crossroads.
So I documented, you know, what was showing up for me and figured out, you know, oh, this
is hermys who is showing up, which felt a lot better to me than doing like a St. Norlucifer.
I know that you are a St. Nist.
I passed no judgment, but I know for me, hermys was a much more comfortable figure.
And you asked the question in the book, does it work?
And I certainly don't yet have the physical fruits to prove it yet.
And it has, you know, been an amount of time.
But I also, I was not asking for skills and music, what I was asking for was the best possible
record deal for this album that I made that was a hyper sigil of the twin plane path.
And of course, the steps that had to happen were like, okay, well, if we need you to do that,
we actually need you to make an entire new album because that needs to be a stepping.
So you're not going to get a great deal.
You haven't put out anything in years.
So like, you're not someone, no one's going to just hand you that.
So there are a number of things that need to happen.
And the things that started showing up, which I have not yet been public about because, like
you, I also believe, like let's keep our mat, you know, to a degree anyway.
Let's keep our manifestations, you know, sacred and secret until those trees bear fruit.
But the things that showed up, which I would be happy to tell you in private, if you're ever
curious.
And the stepping stones along the way have just been the wildest and craziest journey.
So I wanted to share that with you before we wrap up the conversation because my experience
is yes, it does work.
And your other question about when you said, not question, but your supposition where you
said, it could be that deity does not afford you favors, but grants you the strength to
attain favors.
And I would say yes, both of those are true because I know for me, one of the first thing
Hermes did was like, okay, you need to do a lot more magic than you're doing because I
can't just do everything over here.
I will tell you what magic to cast, but you need to do that.
You need to set those intentions, do those rituals so that all these things can come to
be.
And I went from doing maybe, you know, a spell every couple months when I really needed
something big to doing literally like 10 to 20 per week.
And I become so feral.
It's that, oh, did I sell my soul to the devil?
No, but in some ways, I really did sign up to be transformed.
So that was, that was a remarkable experience that I'll, I'm happy to share more with you
if you're ever curious.
I appreciate it.
I think that level of intensity and dedication is so important.
And I think throwing oneself into the deep end of the pool is very important.
Life avails nothing towards those of us who engage in halfway measures.
A book of Revelation says, if you are Luke Warmer, I will spit thee out of my mouth.
And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.
I think that life responds to no half way measures, life responds to absolute passion.
And I suppose for people, there's a question of risk.
There's the what if risk.
I think we have a very limited time within this form of life that we know.
I don't know what the invisible world is.
We experience the invisible world through mediation, metaphor, points of reference, consensus,
traditions, which are very often a lot more modern than we believe they are.
Show me a traditionalist and I'll show you an unconscious modernist.
You know, our range and traditions are very often remade, re-adapted, rendered into novelty,
including some of the most hallowed ones that we think extend back to deepest antiquity.
Very little that we possess has any really primeval consistency or antiquity or lineage.
So we're in a position of peaking through a keyhole on our knees.
And I personally opted a long time ago to favor risk.
That's my approach.
If that's not somebody's approach, they probably won't like my books very much.
But I also favor that risk with a very deep wish and a need to honor the sanctity and sovereignty
of another person.
My ethic on the path is, is I would never do anything knowingly to disrupt the same reach
or potential in another person that I want in myself.
And in a certain sense, the whole subpoint of Esoterika is moving through life in a way
that's non-violative, not accepting, violent behavior unto yourself, trying your very,
very best to the extent that we can be aware, not to engage in violent behavior towards others,
which is damn near impossible in our world because we're all in debt.
I mean, look, the very devices that we're speaking to one another on have lithium batteries,
which are not particularly good for the earth.
And eventually these devices are going to wind up in landfill in the backyard of some
poor kid in the Philippines or something.
And this is reality that we turn from constantly.
So I'm not really into declarations of purity in the sense that we are all engaged in
cycles of taking that we are completely unaware of and most of the time, frankly, very
uninterested in, but the degree to which we can practice awareness let it be non-violent.
Yeah.
Wow.
That revelations quote, "If you are lukewarm, I will spitty from my mouth."
Was that it?
Yeah.
If I had a dating profile, you can use it.
If I had, if I used dating profiles instead of, you know, lover drawing magic, I would.
Yeah.
Well, I want to bring on Tomi to ask her question as we wrap up the end of the episode.
Tomi, I know you have a great question for Mitch today.
Good Tomi.
Yeah.
Hello.
Thank you, Arden.
Thank you, Mitch.
So today's question actually comes from "Front of the Show Drew Smith."
And he asks about your interview with David Lynch from years ago where you had said that
his cowboy scene from the whole drive contained within it an entire philosophy of life so much
so that if we were on an alien planet and this is all we had, we would be okay.
We could figure it out just from that alone.
So in a similar vein, if you could ensure that just one book, one article, or one talk
you've given would survive to the next generations of seekers, after ours, which one would you
choose?
I would choose the principal, Tomi and Drew, whose name I recognize and I appreciate
the question.
I would choose the principal if people were to take one thing away from my work and one
thing only get away from cruel people, get away from cruel people.
We underestimate the extent to which abiding cruelty just degrades our lives and selves
and it's unnecessary.
I really do believe in my heart of hearts that if one thing were taken from my work, let
it be that.
I will keep talks from time to time on practical magic or magic for non-believers, which
I might do if I'm at a tech conference or something like that.
The thing that I come to again and again is that all the spell work in the world, all the
petitioner prayer in the world, all the self-developmental efforts in the world, valuable
as those things are.
I believe from experience will not sum up in value the greatness that the individual will
experience when removing him or herself from this smog of cruelty.
And I trust the individual.
I really, really trust the individual, including adolescents, to render that decision for themselves.
I think we know.
I think the mature seeking sensitive person knows just like when you put something in
your mouth and it's rancid and you say to yourself, this is not good and yet somehow pure
pressure in very, very forms impels us to swallow that and then swallow it again.
Come on, be a good sport.
You're being too sensitive.
I was only joking.
You know, get away from cruel people and you will blossom.
That would be the one thing.
Does that advice extend to identifying the cruelty within ourselves?
What insight could you share for people trying to not just separate cruel people from themselves,
but also identify where they are cruel and apply that question?
I wonder that question.
That's a very, very, very legit question and framing.
But I limit myself for this reason only, for this reason only, not because I want to
revert or sidestep the very, very sound and good point you just made.
And I have been cruel to people, not meaning to be.
I have hurt people, not meaning to.
But I'm going to limit myself.
I'm going to limit myself only because I don't think we as individuals can grow and begin
that valuable process that you just described until we remove ourselves from proximity of
cruelty, even if that means being alone, for example.
And as I said earlier, I think, aloneness, it's a bad rap.
And I think all things become possible, including the very, very keen and sound thing you were
just driving at when the individual gets to a place where he or she feels at home in their
skin.
And that can't happen if we're in environments of cruelty, broadly defined.
Thank you.
I appreciate the answer and I know Drew will be looking forward to this.
Thank you.
I especially appreciate it a lot too.
Thank you so much for being on the show today, Mitch.
I am so delighted and honored to have you here.
It's been such a pleasure chatting with you.
I also want to tell folks that if you enjoyed this episode, and if you also enjoyed last season's
episode with Douglas Rushkopf, you can also listen to Mitch's most recent episode on Doug's
show, Team Human, which was great.
And I was so honored because you guys spent a bunch of time talking about me and I was so happy
about that.
So everyone, you can watch that one too.
It was terrific.
And also, Mitch, you have a substack that people can find and can subscribe to your writing
there.
You are incredibly prolific.
I also follow you on Instagram.
And as we've talked about, you have literally 20 bucks.
So I encourage everyone out there to check out DaydreamBeliever, check out the new book,
Esoterika, Formula's Against the Fall Self.
Where else, Mitch, can folks find you or what else would you like to leave them with?
Well, I'm on Instagram at Mitch Harrow, it's 23.
For those of you who live in or around New York City, we'll be doing a launch event for Esoterika
on June 21st, which is some resulstus at a performance space called TVI here in New York.
You can find the links and so on on my social media.
John Newsom, the artist who did the cover, will be there.
He'll be displaying his original and quite enormous pencil drawing.
Of the cover image, which we'll talk about among other things.
Substack, my newsletter is Mystery Achievement.
Lots of practical stuff there, lots of historical stuff.
And I'm always happy to hear from people.
You can find me also on Twitter at Mitch Harrow, it's the book Esoterika is out in audio as
well.
And I do the narration if that's somebody's preference.
Thank you again so much for being here with us today, Mitch.
Thank you guys.
Check out Mitch's work, check out if you enjoy these discussions, if you want to dive even deeper
into the Re-Patterning ideas we're talking about, you can check out therepatterningproject.com.
We run courses twice a year and you can also check out the self-study course, which is available
for download at any time.
And also if you enjoy the podcast and you want to support us on Patreon, it is only $5
a month and it gives you access to our private discord channel.
You can go to patreon.com/therepatterningpodcasts.
So be sure to check all of those out and thank you guys for joining us.
And we'll see you next time.
And in the meantime, go forth, repattern, and as Mitch says, try.
We'll see you next time.
Thank you for listening to the repatting podcast.
If you're curious about the repatting project, the eight week course in mental mastery and
creative freedom that inspires these conversations, you can check out more details.
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 "Mitzen Magic,
Changing Your Life Through Story" also twice a year.
If you'd like to join our community, the repatting parlour on discord, you can sign up for
$5 a month at patreon.com/therepattingpodcast.
Thanks to everyone who makes the repatting podcast possible.
But firstly, our award-winning producer, Tomi Trembath, of the key master 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 Meens, 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.
Our greatest wish is 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.
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