 That's three faces of Eve, from way back in 1957. But they knew what's up. They understood shadow work and young. But they didn't understand the connection with Patanjali. At least not nearly as much as today's guest, Dr. Leanne Whitney. And that's what I'm saying, if this moment is anything, it's also a moment to call us towards fearlessness. And that's what Patanjali, you know, pushes us towards more so than young does. So the shadow work may be something that we do have to experience on the way towards Patanjali's transcendent seat of we're co-creators and everything. So just relax. Everything's perfect the way it is. There's no way to get to that comfortable seat without doing all that work. Welcome to Skepticole, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sikaris. And today we're joined by Dr. Leanne Whitney. And she's the author of Consciousness in Young and Patanjali. Very interesting, intriguing title. And she sent me an email and I was immediately drawn in because these are kind of on the fringes of stuff we talked about. And then I looked more into Dr. Whitney's work. Super fascinating. Listen to this holistic and integrative mental health specialist specializing in the intersection of Western psychology and yoga. Yay. So this is going to be a deep dive kind of discussion. It's a deep dive kind of book. It's rigorous. It doesn't shy away, but it still makes this stuff somewhat accessible. And I'm really looking forward to this. So Leanne, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Alex. Nice to be here. Nice to be with you. So tell us tell us more about about who you are and how you came to do, you know, this particular work in this particular way. Oh, boy, it was a long, slow climb or a long descent, I guess, that way too. In my 20s, actually, I was really quite ill. My immune system collapsed and in retrospect, now I look at it as sort of a spiritual crisis. So that was a lot to grapple with in my 20s, you know, a lot of my friends were, you know, clubbing and enjoying life in ways that I wasn't able to. So it took me switching into holistic modalities to get my body back on track and in feeling better. And then as I sort of healed from that, I was began practicing yoga and I was in a yoga room and I had what's known in the religious studies literature as a pure consciousness event. And then that radically reshifted my way of looking at the world, even more so than the illness in my 20s, that pure consciousness event happened in my early 30s. So those two things shifted my way of being in the world completely. I was in the film world, I had done some acting, I was making a documentary film. I went to make a documentary about the evolution of human consciousness. And then I sort of took a big pivot and went back into academia and that's where I got my degree in depth psychology. And now I've been, you know, working on the lines of East West, the shamanic tradition, you know, looking at basically a lot of different ways that we seem to be rooted or not on this planet. Well, you know, it's so cool because you're kind of balancing a lot of different things. I can already tell in, you know, your sketch of the life, like, you know, you're in your 20s, you're obviously a very attractive woman. I'm sure that in our society, I just say that because in our society, that means something and steers someone down a course, which usually doesn't easily intersect with either the spiritual awakening and or the deep intellectual, you know, I'll just go get a PhD in depth psychology kind of thing. And, you know, you said you're even pulled towards the acting thing, which again kind of plays into that. This is what the culture is feeding back to you about who you are and who you need to be. I am fascinated with how you kind of navigated that. Yeah, let's start there because I actually took a turn towards acting after the illness. I had acted in grade school and in high school. I did some of the musical theater and productions in my grade school and high school. But it was the illness that actually made the term back to acting because I knew that there was a lot of emotions that needed to be discharged. And I felt like creating characters was one possible way of doing that. So actually the head towards art, towards acting, towards filmmaking was me trying to carve my way into healing as well. OK, and fair enough, I don't want to push on to kind of personal stuff. I just I just think that's kind of an interesting, I mean, like for me, you know, being a guy, the thing was more money, right, and success. And that's where I was totally geared. Now, all along, I had this idea that I had to probe some of these deeper questions. So I had a high tech startup and I'm doing the mail order mail in things with Self realization fellowship, you know, I'm in Texas and I'm getting so I always had those things. But I was pulled towards because society, culture and family that, hey, man, you know, get the MBA, get a good job and then make the money, you know. And it almost sounds like your story had a couple of those shifts and not even mentioned the, you know, Kundalini kind of thing that some people don't even recover from that. I mean, that just kind of takes them a long time to reintegrate that. I mean, is any of that stuff resonate with you? Oh, God, it's taken me a very long time to integrate that. But to go back to what I think you're getting at is the cultural influence on our psyche. And that I could say played a big part in why I'm calling it now in my 20s, why it was a psychospiritual crisis, because the cultural pieces were weighing so heavily on me at that time. I came from a family, you know, where my father was very successful by the time I was at university the first time. You know, he was making a lot of money and what you're saying that influence of money materialism. So egoic. How do I make my place in the world. Sure. Those those factors were all influencing me. And in a way that sent me into a crisis eventually, and that that's what that first crisis was in my 20s, for sure, a lot of the cultural pieces collapsing in on me. You know, and I don't want to take it too far in another direction, but I do think it's super relevant in a way, and that that's that sooner or later, you have to face if you're thinking about things if you're waking up at all and thinking about these things, even intellectually not spiritually with your opening which we can get to. But you're going to face the crisis right you can't be looking at just what you described the cultural kind of thing. There's all this money there's all this get egoic there's all this demands on what I'm supposed to do home supposed to fit in. If you're religious at all, you know if you're Christian and then you go to college a lot of people face that first person that comes along says that's bullshit. Don't you know this and this and this and it's like, no I didn't I was raised in a, you know, in a world where everyone kind of told me all this stuff makes sense. You know, no one told me there was this kind of wink and nod yeah well we know it's not literally true it's you know what I mean. So. All right, so I was brought up Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. So there was a lot of regimentation there a lot of control a lot of control in my elementary school life and then there was a lot of control also in my in my family situation. But in particular to go into the Catholicism aspect. Boy, how do I articulate this succinctly. My body always knew when I look back on it. I, my body was telling me, I'm hearing these messages about Jesus and about love, but the nuns and the priest, the, what they were emanating was not that. So the, the, the conflict was being literally this really lived in my body. You know, and by the time I got to high school I told my parents no more Catholic school like we're gonna have to find a way around this because this doesn't work for me. I just, you know the tension was building even then you know I couldn't again back down. I even in some way struggle to articulate about it now but back then I couldn't articulate at all. But now I see working in holistic and integrative medicine. The body keeps the score as Bethel van der Kolk so beautifully said on a title of his book, the body is keeping the score. There's no way to run from consciousness. There's just, you can't run away from it. That's beautifully and that's a great, great beautifully put insight, link that up for us with your yoga practice, because we share this in common, a long time yoga practitioner I am. And it took me years and years and years to realize it's not the least bit about the poses and that it's deeper on so many levels, and yet at the same time like you're just living to hell yes it's about the poses, you know. Because the body that that's such a beautiful insight and I think there's some truth there that yoga is trying to get at, even though it's, it has its same co opting corruption kind of elements as as everybody else does to which we can talk about but thoughts on that. Sure within sort of the guru traditions that there can be corruption that happens there. Yeah, the way I like to frame it is the body is a metaphor. So where the, the both the poses I'm sorry, the poses the opposite poses are a metaphor. So we're looking, you know, for balance. We're looking at the right left in out up down. We're looking to find as the Buddha succinctly said the middle way. So, psychologically, you know, physically, and so when we get on our mat and do the asana. What we're doing is we're living out sort of the metaphor of what we're attempting also psychologically to get our mind balanced and therefore in alignment with what perhaps we could say pure consciousness and we could go deeper in this conversation also about the archetypal but that's, that's the way I frame the asana and the pranayama component the breathing component is just so critically important because the breath helps us understand where the fear is located where the binds are where the blocks are. And if there is, you know, if this moment in time is about the realization that the body keeps the score I would say this moment in time is also about the realization that it's imperative that we begin to eradicate fear. That's awesome. And you kind of laid it out only slightly differently but actual than I would, although you kind of came back around to exactly where where my kind of accumulated intuitive limited intuitive very very limited intuitive and what I would have feel of it is that it is about releasing. It's about breathing and releasing, and that the poses the asanas the physical positions can help release the blockages, but that's what it's really all about. My experience is that anyone who does five minutes of meditation realizes that the shit that's coming up is, you know, of their creation, and that the only way to get rid of it is to release it to allow it to be and to allow it to release itself because you've kind of created the message, you got to kind of clean it up and I think I love your idea of the of the metaphor. But it's almost like the first part of what you said is kind of true to the body is a metaphor. The poses are metaphor but the body is also a metaphor for what we're experiencing, you know, at this time so God there's so many different ways we could go there. But I love this conversation because in my experience, yoga is so misunderstood and so taught so poorly. I would say capitalism will devour anything in its path I mean it's like a giant Pac-Man I mean it just it has an insatiable predatory capitalism it seems to have an insatiable appetite so it certainly has gobbled up yoga at least in America, you know, Euro American culture, I probably can say. Let me let me interject because I don't know that I don't know that we're on the same page there necessarily and staying out of it because I don't think capitalism comes into it. You know I have a really interesting dialogue a year ago when I was writing this book with a woman named Annika Lucas and I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She started something in New York upstate New York called prison liberation yoga. She does yoga for inmates and primarily women who are incarcerated and is dealing with all that kind of stuff. But the reason I contacted to her is she was a victim of that satanic ritual abuse cult in Belgium back in the 80s and just horrible experience from time she was six years old. But where the story really gets interesting so we're talking about all that she goes yeah, and then I met Patabi Joyce, and he sexually assaulted me. And then you go on and you look for Patabi Joyce. There's hundreds of women that have come forward and said, yeah, you did that. Look at Iyengar. So I started with Iyengar in Dallas. And, you know, he was the slap guy, you know, come around he's just rude and obnoxious and would slap people but everyone had to go you know, that's part of his, you know, thing or you don't know what he's been through with his brown skin and all the rest I don't know but if that's the fruits of his work, it doesn't seem right. And then there's the same kind of sexual misconduct going on there. So that you got to take capitalism out of the out of the thing there and it starts looking like all these other cults. It looks like every other cult we've run into and when power is concentrated. You know, particularly with, in this case, men who are great who are raised in one culture, India, who are kind of thrust into this other culture and they can't deal with some of the stuff that comes with that culture. It's very human. It ain't very complicated on a deep psychology level it's just they're working out their shit and they haven't done it. And in that respect, that doesn't have anything to do with capitalism, but I think that is the root cause of the problem with yoga. The problem with yoga is it needs a serious disintermediation. It needs, you don't need me to show you the fucking poses. You can just, that's, that's not the hard part. What you need me to do is help create an experience through which you can understand who you are by a combination of these very simple poses and breathing which aren't magical but we just kind of do them and they kind of help. Yeah, I'm, I'm so with you with the guru culture where we were actually talking about two different things where I was going with capitalism was this idea of, you know, buying $150 yoga pants and having a pert butt and there's a lot of money is $6 billion, I think at last count or something like that. There's a lot of money in the yoga industry. So that the money that gets exchanged between all the products and I don't know about the studios but again there's money out there to be had and I think that's part of the corruption, but also for sure the guru culture is part of the corruption as well. And if we could go into that just a little bit further because I think it ties it does tie in will eventually get to your awesome book and all the rest that stuff. I think the guru culture, because I think the guru culture is reflection of the cultish way that we've approached spirituality through religion. So what they're doing is they're just replicating the hierarchy right so you go to the Catholic Church and Catholic Church says, God is awesome and all powerful. And we will be your intermediary, your soul intermediary to experiencing that divine consciousness. And then the yogis are doing the same thing, whether they realize it or not they're saying, we will intermediate that for you. There's no way you could directly access that. Well, of course you can't directly access it then it isn't real. And I think yoga runs the risk of making that same mistake has made that same yoga in the West is built on those same principles and they need to be ripped out of it to the extent that it is. Yes, I wouldn't make such a big statement, but it's there. It's definitely there. There's no doubt about it. Is it everywhere. I'm not sure about that. But it's definitely there. Yeah, and I agree with you. Ultimately yoga, like young is pointing us towards direct experience. I mean, that's what, you know, what the vision is the vision is not mediated by another person that you're working to clear the distortions from your lens, which goes back to what you were talking about. That's what we're doing here. If consciousness is all there is, this is a big letting go. This is a big clearing of blocks. This is about gaining anything. This is about letting go of a lot of things which have to do with, you know, distorted thought patterns and confused tendencies in the mind. And then pure consciousness is right there to show itself. It was either hidden inside, you know, you know, there wasn't good vagal tone or it was, you know, hidden down in the nervous system somewhere and we were clenched in fight, flight or fear for long periods of time. And then those nerve endings, those noddies, those channels begin to open. And then that material becomes more available to us to process and integrate and, you know, stand stronger in the body because of So how does this relate to young and Patanjali. What sent you down that path what needed to be explored and exposed in that kind of juxtaposition. So I was in a yoga room when I had that pure consciousness event. And again, I, you know, I've said this in other interviews I didn't ask for it. Didn't even know at that point I hadn't even studied the philosophy. I had been turned on to yoga because I was sick in my 20s. I was looking to feel better into heal but I hadn't in any way explored the philosophy or the psychology. But I had that event. And then I started to look deeper into the first text actually I went to was the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Thankfully, and that was a big relief to read that text and realize that the pure awareness that I had been, you know, if you could, if I could loosely say awakened into that that was already existing and being talked about. And then, then I began to study Patanjali, somebody introduced me to young, and, you know, for the next eight years prior to going to the Academy I studied young and Patanjali, that young. And I just studied them both consecutively. So, tell us, tell us, tell us, what, what do you find in that, you know, kind of interesting interplay you just did it with your hands. Tell us. You know, there's a lot of places where they meet. They have a lot of similarities right they're both interested in the healing of human suffering. They're both interested in the religious function of the psyche, we could say, affect as an empirical means of entering the psyche. But ultimately, after studying them for a long period of time and it really ended up being looking like, you know, a needle in a haystack. And it's finding that where young used capital S self this term the self, the archetype of the self, and he was pulling from the Eastern traditions from the wisdom traditions from yoga, because he himself, going up in Protestantism, he wanted to use the term God, so he borrowed this term. But when you, when you really look at it young self has both conscious and unconscious components. He's mostly talking about the contents of consciousness. And what Patanjali is ultimately pointing to is this ontic reality of pure consciousness that the reality of our being it's pure consciousness. So it can never go unconscious. So representation in other words. Yes, yes, I'm interested in this middle ground. Because if you think about this very deeply. And again, you have you're an extremely deep thinker and it's so awesome to encounter somebody who is relatable and can speak on so many different levels but this book. I mean, I don't want to like steer people away from it, but look inside the Amazon and make sure you're up for it because it's not like just the kind of quick breezy read you know, which everything shouldn't be a quick breezy read you know, but the bottom line for me is the middle ground, the middle territory, you know, and young stops there in my in my read of it is young is all about that young is all about okay, where are we where are we with the shadow, where are we with the angels and demons I mean young is about you know, hypothesized spirit entities that are interacting with you know whatever. And Patanjali is kind of the traditional yogi like, Why would you want to stop there. Just go past that keep asking what's next, what's fundamental what's at the base of all this. One, I guess I want to know if that's your read of it, and then what you make of that. Well, I would say what Patanjali does what Patanjali view does and potentially can do is it, therefore it changes the perception the field of perception the paradigm. Reality ends up looking quite holographic which, as I say in my book right, we know Karl Perber was pointing towards that we know David bone was pointing towards that. Now, now Sedona I think his name is there's definitely quantum physicists currently who are pointing towards that. And no, you know, young points towards synchronicity. There's, he doesn't comprehensively put all his phenomenology together all his theory and phenomenology together to him, you know, the psyche is this ongoing dynamic and you know rightly so. But what Patanjali outlook does it allows us to take a comfortable seat, more so in the body. I don't think we can ever take a comfortable seat in young middle path, because suffering always remains and you know patanjali continuing to see through all that and not get caught in it and that's why I'm saying if this moment is anything. It's also a moment to call us towards fearlessness. And that's what patanjali, you know, pushes us towards more so than young does. Yeah, young helps for sure. Shadow work is beautiful and amazing and right in alignment with the self inquiry of Patanjali yoga. No doubt about it. You know, awesome. I mean there's like we could spend an hour talking about all that. But I'm just going to ask you to keep going with this. Because I don't know if, if everyone's understanding, I don't know if I'm understanding, I think I'm understanding I think we're on the same page here. So the shadow work, maybe something that we do have to experience on the way towards Patanjali's transcendent seat of we're co creators and everything so just relax everything's perfect the way it is. We may have to go through. It's not perfect because the shadow it's not perfect because what entities are interacting with me. So, how do you see people who come to you for help. How are they dealing with that path towards Patanjali seat of awareness. If I can just say look, in chapters one and chapter two, I think Patanjali makes it clear we absolutely have to deal with this material. There's no way to get to that comfortable seat without doing all that work, both the growth phenomena on the but also the more subtle phenomena, all feelings all subtle thought forms on the interior of our eyes that this all has to be looked at it potentially is very clear on that I think. Right, right, but hold on because there's a bunch of people in the non dual community or whatever you want to call it readers and you know thinkers about Patanjali who kind of spend it a different way which has merit which is, as soon as you realize that as soon as you read chapters one to two it is kind of over right because I have to work through that. Okay, that's done. I did you know my all I need to do is wake up to the reality that that is the reality and then there really is no work to do. Right. I mean there is that interpretation of it that is. You know I'm not saying it's it's a lot of people wake up to you know there's no me here there's no anything you know and I'm not saying I'm in that camp but I do see a certain inescapable you know reality to that too you know it's like how long you're going to play the game. Right here what you're saying it's so interesting right like talking to, you know, because again everybody's interpretation of young and Patanjali are different I really set myself up for a challenge, taking these two scholars because it's like a hornet's nest, no matter what way you turn you know, if you look at like all the young Ian societies now in England and Chicago they all end up breaking apart to even the young Ian can't agree on what young saying right and then everybody reads Patanjali differently. So, but you know both these scholars, maybe we could say are so broad in a way so everybody put their read into it. If I were to present to you and say, Leanne you're not talking to Alex you're talking to what is being presented as Alex now to you but the real me is, you know, that I realize is beyond that and is always with me and I can play this game here of this egoic game of Alex but I am so aware that that's not who I am I kind of move in and out of even being able to play that game. Well, I would say actually I always talk to people I talked to the Buddha within people. And when I sweep my the pathway up to my house every day I'm sweeping it for the Buddha to walk in. I'm always talking to that aspect of people because that's just kind of where I'm at that that that Buddha seed isn't all of us. To me, it's still my hair just stood on end actually it's still within the realm of possibility that we can wake up to that. But we need the right environment and I think that's part of, you know, what we're talking about now with like the fearlessness or, you know, a paradigm shift. We need the right environment in order for, you know, as many people as possible to stabilize enough moves past enough fear where that realization can really take hold. So again, it's already in all of us. It's not, it's not something that right there already. So, tell us this Lee and for people who are intrigued with the way you're approaching this. How can you, and how do you kind of help people and in your work if people want to work with you. We talked about earlier when we were saying about the body keeps the score. I definitely look at, you know, what is the, what is manifesting within the body, and then where is the mind bound in particular thought patterns that aren't allowing the energy to freely move out the channels in the body. So I kind of take a two pronged approach, look back to see where things might have gotten bound. Sometimes you can find them sometimes you can't you know they're either in cultural pieces, family pieces, you know, work pieces, but then also very teleological ie where does the psyche want to go where does that energy feel like it wants to move, you know, creatively, does it does it want to eradicate. Does that fear want to be eradicated do you want peace. You know I always ask people what are their values what are they looking for. And then we try to get where that energy is bound and so it becomes available so they can move it along different lines. But again the not I always say the knowledge is in you I always tell my clients the knowledge is in you right I'm I'm here and we're having a safe container but that knowledge will bubble up from within not be imputed from without. So, where do you see clinical psychology heading in terms of its ability to do this kind of integration that you're trying to do with really extended consciousness. And it's tricky because you know the young and extended consciousness includes the angel demon thing. I mean I just talked to a guy Dr Bernardo Castro but I don't know if you know but he's a PhD philosopher and computer scientists and just wrote a book on young. We're talking about the metaphysics of young and if you, you know, it's like, he's right there he's saying he has that religious background but he's saying yeah angels and demons there. You got to deal with him. So that's one aspect of this extended consciousness realm that in some ways, you know, psychology has zero chance in terms of academic psychology zero chance they're just can't clinical psychology. There's an opening there because they're more kind of artistic kind of freewheeling and kind of stuff. And then, when you get over to potentially, and that kind of where you're heading in that, well let's just move past all that. Then, where, what are the opportunities and challenges for psychology with all this extended consciousness stuff. Now the frame that I use on that these are all contents of consciousness. That's the way that I would frame and not necessarily extended consciousness maybe deeper realms of the cosmos. For me, I like to keep pure consciousness in its own category, if you will the fear, establishing its own nature so it's seeing and what is it seeing well it's seeing phenomena, but it's again, consciousness is all there is so it's, you know, how is this manifestation happening and to the clinical psychology makes a turn towards the soul, right psychology right turns towards the soul then yes we have a chance the more it turns towards by what is current day psychiatry in a more dualistic materialistic all brain based. Then, yeah, there's there's lots of problems there but when clinical psychology opens its doors to soul, then we definitely have opportunities. You just have to be very careful at how quickly with we pathologize and that's where they're the strength I think is in the yummy and camp is it's really anti pathologizing it. Hey, let's get a lot of space so we can look at all this phenomena. Awesome. Awesome. I hope that sounds somewhat interesting to somebody out there. What else do we need to talk about there were a lot of you know you were very, very nice and generous to play along with my little questionnaire that I sent you. You're someone of a guinea pig. I've been sending these out to all my guests, but you were kind of the first one to get a previous version of that. You know, I'm interested in a couple of different things that are a little bit off topic, but not really one you touched on this idea that we need to get enough people, and that we need to you know this often gets kind of tied into some kind of political or parapolitical kind of you know we need to raise the vibratory level of so many people and this and that. I wonder what your thoughts are on that and in particular, you know, what that means in terms of environmentalism, but particularly what it means in terms of conspiracy. And let me stop there but then I want to stop there but then I can't really stop there because I haven't given you. I believe that scientific materialism as we've come to understand it as it is enshrined in psychiatry and psychology that you are a biological robot and a meaningless universe that you can never be more than an epiphenomenon of your brain. I didn't see this at the beginning but I see that as highly conspiratorial. I see that as just too convenient for a social engineering disempowering mechanism to control people to be accidental. And I also find it to be too absurd just as a notion philosophically that is an absurd idea it's just absurd, you know, that you are not. You are not experiencing anything right now you are an illusion it's just an absurd idea. So that leads me to the conclusion that it's it's somewhat conspiratorial it's it's somewhat related to some kind of social engineering project. And I would relate it back to you know is consciousness run the risk of being co-opted in the same way. I'm saying well called consciousness is being co-opted by anybody who's in an egoic separate self mindset that's exactly what's happening they're appropriating consciousness, they're binding it. And you know there's there tightening it up and then they're acting it out by trying to control people or have power over people. You know part of what we want to talk about, perhaps, globally if we got psychologists from all different nations together is, you know, making sure that our leaders are have a view that has to do with a holistic, non-violence, truth, non-greed, non-stealing, we need leadership that's going to, you know, allow that to permeate multiple cultures across the world so again people can feel comfortable in their culture and, you know, move about in the world in a way that's comfortable based and a lot of what comes out is fear based because leadership is in the power over model and trying to grab power in the egoic way but ultimately this is the thing. Consciousness knows exactly what the mind is doing at all times, pure consciousness, the fear, right, the consciousness, what's another way for me to say this, there's a very, the universe is in balance, right, there's harmony that allows the earth to be on its axis and rotate on its axis and rotate around the sun, right, there's a harmony to the universe. Now we come along and we want to, again, take power, grab, to greed, to stealing, but ultimately it can't be done because we'll blow ourselves up, we'll be gone. Well, we've probably done that a lot of times in the past and this is where I think we won't be able to kind of get into all this territory because it's too far but, you know, it's just hard for me to reconcile that with history, with any history. I always like to go to Christianity because it's easy and people can wrap their arms around it. Christianity, if you go back to the first century and you go back to the idea that the Bible is pro-Roman, I just did a show on this. How the fuck can the Bible be pro-Roman? The Bible is pro-Roman because it was a social engineering project. Now it wasn't like designed perfectly in terms of how they do it, how they did it, but go look at the Ark of Titus. It's a big statue. You go look at the thing. And you can go see where the Romans kicked their ass, those people in Judea who are giving them all those problems. The cult in Judea, right? Because it was a cult. They were like following all these rules down to the nth degree. A cult. So they're all cults, but this was a cult. And then they took all the stuff out and they had a historian who documented everything that they did, every step of the way. His name is Josephus. Probably a fictional character because it doesn't really make sense that the Romans would land in Galilee and just wrap their arms around this Jewish rabbi and say, come write the history for us. But that being what it is. Josephus is historical account, whichever historian says Josephus, Josephus is the most reliable record. Josephus winds up in the Bible. So all the Bible writers are writing out of this Roman historian. This is a Psiop. This is a control mechanism. This is given to Caesar what is Caesar go the extra mile, which means carry the backpack of the Roman soldier and extra mile. It doesn't mean that spiritual transcendency can't arise out of this spiritual tradition because it can arise out of it. But if we don't start unraveling these things, I just don't see how we're going to be able to connect that to what you're saying of that. We got to get rid of these greedy capitalist and then the greedy capitalist come along and say, well, we're not really your enemy. Your enemy is China. Your enemy is North Korea, because that's how they want everyone to live. And you go, oh, I don't want that. And then you come over in the US and they said, well, we're really doing the same thing. We're just not telling you go, I don't want that. Well, then it's like, what do you want because ultimately you do want to be able to live your life. So I just don't think it's that simple. And until we are willing to embrace the complexity of it and the conspiratorial nature of it. We just don't even have a chance of really understanding this stuff. Yeah, oh, I definitely don't think it's simple either by any chance by any means. I mean, again, I'm saying, you know, we would need psychologists from all over the globe to come together. We're in a global brain now with the internet in particular. If we want to bring some level of harmony forward, then we need leadership that want literally wants that, that feeling for the people in each nation they want it. And then I hear what you're saying is a big grab for power and control through religion. You know, that's not what I'm saying so much. I'm saying that sounds that always one winds up sounding to me like backdoor materialism. Like, okay, we need to give it, we need to give up control. We grab it back and say, okay, what we really really meant by giving up control is we have to make sure that this happens and that social justice happens in this way that I define as social justice and that these people are penalized in this way as I understand it. I'll go back to my story with my friend Annika Lucas, right, so she's sold into a satanic ritual abuse cult at six years old. I can't tell you how many people cannot accept that deal with that they turn off to not I go will just go. They have the photos of the guy who was arrested in Belgium. They have pictures of the kids in cages. They have kids who died because while he was in prison awaiting trial. They were told to go and feed the kids that he was peddling to elites right and people are still like no no no no no. I wouldn't believe it even if it was true because it doesn't fit into their thing. But then here's the problem with with Annika is go talk to people are doing between life research and between life research and they say well she her soul chose that first chose her soul chose that as part of this experience for whatever lesson she was going to get out of that now I can't wrap my head around that, but I can't dismiss that either. And that just sends us in a whole different direction in terms of how this stuff is supposed to play out, not only on an individual level but on a, you know, global level on a national level on a cultural level. Yeah, I mean that's where the deep, the depth comes in right because it really is it's so complex and there's so many elements to it, but that's why I mean at least through the lineages of young and potentially this turn that we each have to make the place within to find where that evil is within us where where any of that aggression where any of that power over is within us, because when we understand how it's playing out within us and we have a better understanding of then how it's playing out in other people. So I hear you, but really until I don't know what enough of us would be but it's, if there is strength and numbers, then it's taking that deep deep turn within to process our own deep levels of like we're talking about an evil, but I also like to say fear for sure because the fear ends up manifesting as a power over as some kind of aggression that I can somehow alleviate my own internal fear by controlling people in my external world. And again when we do that work within we have a better understanding of why people other people are doing it. Oh, absolutely. And I really like the way that the way that you put that. So, Leanne, how, how's the best way for people to connect with you is it through this book, I see that you actually, I said the book is pretty dense, you've actually put together like a training course that people can kind of go through, but is that the material that people are finding most useful and I love the way you say making that turn you know what's what's the best way for people to connect with what you're doing. My book is definitely academic, you know, it's definitely academic so it's definitely for people who who want a deep dive but through an academic lens into both young and Patanjali. I do hope to write a book that's more has more mass appeal to it in short order but I do I teach, I teach yoga online often. I have an upcoming course in January. I have some events with the young society coming up, but overall the best way to if they wanted to reach out to me directly as to my website Leanne Whitney calm. Great. Leanne Whitney calm easy you got the URL surprise you must have gotten it a long time ago that's good. I did. Well, it's been absolutely super connecting with you really fun conversation. I hope somebody out there has an interest enough in this kind of deep deep dive but there's so much meat there so been awesome having you on thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me Alex nice to be with you. Thanks again to Dr. Leanne Whitney for joining me today on skeptical. I really enjoyed the conversation and the way we were able to really bring this back to some of the fundamental questions about spirituality. So the natural question to tee up from this interview is which superhero do you choose young or Patanjali. I like to hear your thoughts on that place to do it skeptical form. Check it out and do stick around. I have a lot of great shows coming up until next time. Take care. Bye for now.