Daniel Z. Lieberman – Spellbound where Modern science meets ancient magick

I have to admit, my guest today is a bit of a personal scientific celebrity to me. Dr. Daniel Lieberman, author alongside his coauthor of the book The Molecule of More, is no stranger to public attention. He’s been interviewed on several other shows and podcasts. Quite frankly, the point of our discussion today was initially a bit of a surprise for me.

I always understood Dr. Daniel’s solid research, his well-published papers, especially in the area of dopamine and the interesting research around this and what it means for people. What I wasn’t fully aware of at the time was his passion and interest in the unconscious, specifically in the areas of magic. His new book, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious, was a fantastic read. If you’re interested, you’ll find links to the book in the description, and I do recommend you pick it up if you’re a serious student of the mind. His research is fascinating and grounds very interesting occult ideas into modern psychiatric research. He is no slouch in how he’s approached his work and explores a lot of different concepts on how the conscious mind relates to the unconscious mind, understanding why the purpose of personification, why we need to represent these forces, these parallel forces, if you will, of the unconscious in such human-like fashions with faces and personalities and qualities.

We are exploring that today. We’re going deeper into some of the mysteries. One of the reasons I really think you should be looking at this conversation is because, as you know, one of my fundamental premises of the show is the practice of responsible cultivation. In fact, you would note that I have even taken my own personal teachings that I put out on this channel and moved them to the membership area. It’s not that I’m keeping them there all the time. Whenever I bring out a teaching, it will be on the show and will be available for a week or two for free for anybody to watch. Then I want to move it into that area, primarily because the subject matter is so dense and complex, it’s very easy to be taken out of context.

At least I know if somebody subscribes, they want to get their money’s worth, and they’ll go look through all the videos and hopefully have some context of these ideas that we are trying to share. Dr. Daniel and I discussed today the exact effects here. That is, you know, some of the problems when exploring things like active imagination.

We live in the TikTok generation, for better or worse. Witch talk practitioners are throwing out ideas like they are gospel—the use of psychedelics, the use of practicing this right and that right without understanding the mind enough to provide solid instruction. It is a potential danger trap. If the human ego is not fully developed enough, it actually can be overrun by these forces.

We speak about this as well as some of the approaches in psychiatry to resolve some of these things and the development of the mind around these. What do these metaphors mean? What is your Venus? What are the seven metals? What are the tarot cards? In fact, if you pick up a copy of the book, you’ll find a fascinating journey as Dr. Lieberman explores the tarot card from a perspective of the unconscious in a psychiatric fashion filled with insights. A very credible discussion, one that I think you will take a lot of value from. So, without any further ado, I’m your host, Adam Nox, and remember to live deliciously.

Dan, thank you for taking the time to join me here on The Cult of You. It’s an absolute pleasure to sit down with you. Thanks so much for having me. I have to say, running across your work was actually pretty profound. You’ve got some other material out in the area of the brain, dopamine, and other interesting research. You’re obviously very knowledgeable, a practicing psychiatrist, dealing with the human condition for as long as you have. Now, to enter into the subject of the magical and the mythical and how it relates to the unconscious is quite a brave task. Even though it is content you’re obviously dealing with in your practice, what made you first decide that this piece of work needed to get out there? What was the calling inside of yourself that said this was a really important subject?

Yeah, you know, I first became interested in psychiatry when I happened just by chance to pick up a book by Carl Jung. It was Man and His Symbols, kind of a nice introduction. I had been a student of philosophy and history and literature as an undergraduate. I was absolutely amazed at how Jung pulled all of these things together. I went to a kind of special school called St. John’s College. There are no textbooks, no lectures, no exams. We read the great books of Western civilization—the most important things written in philosophy, history, science, and math—and discussed them. One of the things that emerged from all of this is the idea that knowledge is one, and that is in some ways a mystical concept.

It’s a difficult concept to understand, and I felt that Carl Jung absolutely nailed it by coming at a lot of these things from a psychological standpoint and saying some absolutely revolutionary things about the unconscious. Now, as I pursued my career, I was very much focused on helping sick people. I quickly discovered that I could be most effective by being an expert in psychopharmacology, the use of medications to make modifications to people’s brain chemistry.

That was most helpful, but I never lost this fascination with Jung. It really fed into a lifetime interest in magic and the supernatural all the way back to childhood. As I was working my way up the academic ladder, I wrote many scientific papers, which took me years to write. Very few people ever read them. I became a professor. I decided I wanted to write things that people would actually read. I wrote a book about dopamine, which was very well received. Then I thought, for my second book, I’m going to write about the things that are most interesting to me, that I care about the most. I felt that Carl Jung was neglected, and to the degree that people thought about the unconscious, they tended to think about Sigmund Freud.

He was a very important pioneer, but I think that his view of the unconscious was extremely limited. The way Jung expanded it was extremely productive. The other thing I found was that Jung is probably difficult to understand. I had to read thousands of pages before I really understood any of it. I had to read it twice and three times. I didn’t think it was really accessible to most people. So, I wanted to take these fascinating ideas and make them accessible to anybody.

That’s fantastic. Quite a brave act. Superstition and mixed concepts have such varied associations with the subject of magic as a whole. Everything from the unrealistic, the idea that you’re living in your head, to the impact it has on people’s lives, whether that impact is real to them or on a global scale. To set the frame for people just joining this conversation, we often use the terms “conscious,” “subconscious,” “unconscious.” There are different debates on what consciousness is. Is it awareness? If it’s awareness, how is there an unconscious? What exactly is the unconscious? How would you address this question of subconscious versus unconscious?

Yeah, so I believe that both Jung and Freud used “unconscious,” and I think that “subconscious” is more of a popular term. The reason they used “unconscious” rather than “subconscious” is that “sub” means below, and that’s a value judgment. The conscious part of the mind thinks it’s superior, but that’s not a particularly healthy way of looking at it. Jung identified aspects of the unconscious that we might talk about as being below consciousness, below rationality. These are called the cathartic aspects, the earthy aspects. This is our connection with the earth, the earth spirits, emotional things, connections to other people. But there was also something above rationality in the unconscious, which was the spiritual aspect, symbolized by things that fly in the air, birds, and angels. He conceptualized rational consciousness as like visible light. On one side, we’ve got the infrared below it. On the other side, we’ve got the ultraviolet above it. Other consciousness is trapped in between these two poles.

I think it was Joe Dispenza who said—I stand to be corrected on where he got the idea from—that the brain calculates 400 billion bits of information in the neocortex, only 2,000. I might get the numbers wrong here, but this notion that a portion of the self, if we could use that term correctly, is aware of a lot more data happening at these various levels, but we tend to shut it out. We get insights or moments in dreams and think they’re completely irrational. You say this nicely in your work, referring to the unconscious as this irrational threat sometimes to the ego. What’s the role of the ego in this? Most spiritual traditions try to flank it away, like you’re not supposed to have an ego, which seems like an unhealthy view of the model. Can you help us correct this perspective?

Yeah, so in common parlance, ego is associated with vanity, perhaps, or being self-centered. But in psychology, it’s used differently as a technical term. Ego is simply the Latin term for “I.” In psychology, it’s what we mean when we use the word “I.” I’m happy. I’m hungry. I enjoyed that movie. I’m curious. I think that for many people, they don’t know that there’s anything beyond that. They think that when they refer to “I,” they’re talking about the entirety of their mental activity. But you said something incredibly important: the brain activity we are unaware of is far more powerful than what we are aware of. The conscious mind is only capable of processing one thing at a time. We talk about multitasking; that’s nonsense. Nobody multitasks. We switch rapidly from task to task. If you’re reading a book, you can’t plan what to make for dinner. You can’t do both things at the same time. Sometimes we do two things at the same time. For example, I can drive a car and plan what I’m making for dinner. But the reason for that is I’ve offloaded the driving into my unconscious. I know that because I will sometimes arrive at a destination, my mind wandering the whole way. I don’t remember the trip. I don’t remember making decisions to hit the brake or the accelerator. The conscious mind works on one thing at a time.

The unconscious mind works in parallel. It’s processing all kinds of information simultaneously. The ratio of the processing power of the unconscious to the conscious is half a million to one. Because we’ve got all these parallel processes, unlike the conscious mind, which is more or less unified, we say “I” when we’re talking about one person. But the parallel processing of the unconscious means there are lots of different agents in there, sometimes cooperating, often competing. It’s very, very complicated. I use the satirical metaphor of “I am legion” to describe the plural nature of the unconscious and its relationship, where we look at the individual with the best intentions for their lives, but nothing works. There seems to be this unconscious sabotage because these different parts work together. I often add that it’s the hidden god for a person’s personal life, not necessarily the great full being, depending on people’s religious views. It has almost a governing control over life because the unconscious often has more charge, more decision-making because we tend to offload to it. How do we bridge a relationship? How do we begin to understand the unconscious and open that conversation? What are the real risks when we approach this honestly?

There are many ways to have a better relationship with the unconscious mind. The best relationship we can have is thinking about the relationship between the ego, the conscious mind, and the unconscious. One metaphor is friendship. Often, our unconscious and conscious minds are at odds. Typically, we just try to stamp down the unconscious. It doesn’t like that, so sometimes it will rebel, and we do things that are rather uncharacteristic of ourselves without even knowing why. We’ve all had the experience of blurting out something very insensitive that hurt somebody we didn’t want to hurt. We’re like, “Oh my God, where did that come from?” In psychology, we talk about the Freudian slip, where we say a truth without realizing what we are saying. We are at odds, and we don’t want to get into a fight. We don’t want to make the conscious mind a tyrant. We want to make it a friend of the unconscious.

Another metaphor is between a human being and its animal companion. Human beings are a strange chimera of the spiritual, the logical, and the animal. We don’t like to think about our animal nature that much because we think the rational side of ourselves is higher, and we want to leave our animal side behind. The animal side is embarrassing. It’s stinky, smelly, and uncontrollable. But the animal side of us is incredibly powerful. In my book, I write about fairy tales. A common theme is the protagonist makes friends with an animal, usually a magical animal, which enables them to do things that are superhuman and otherwise impossible. But animals need to be tamed. A horse can be an incredible weapon. In the old days, on the battlefield, the team of the horse and rider in Japan practiced archery on horseback, saying the horse and rider are one. In some ways, that’s how we need to treat our unconscious. We don’t want to be a tyrant, but we do need to be a trainer. We need to gain control over our unconscious to some degree so that it can become this companion, as we see in fairy tales.

It reminds me of the classic magician’s instructions, even in old orders like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where the idea of the magician working with the elemental plane was to be firm, respectful, but firm in direction. Speaking of fairy tale mythology, you shared something quite nice in the book: the Frog Princess. The Frog Prince represents the unconscious, and the princess represents the ego. This struck a chord with me because it reminded me of Iron John and Robert Bly’s work. Robert Bly referred to Iron John in the cage under the water, being the long-haired man representative of the wild nature, echoing what you’re saying about the unconscious. Can you open up a bit about the fairy tales and how they describe this relationship? How should we deal with that encounter and establish a relationship with this shadow, more shameful, ugly, or wild side of ourselves and our nature?

Yeah. The Frog Prince, Iron John, is a great example. Throughout the fairy tale, it emphasizes how ugly and disgusting the frog is. Early on, the princess drops her golden ball into a deep well and can’t retrieve it. The frog can dive into those depths and makes a deal with the princess: “I’ll get this ball for you, but you need to be my friend.” The unconscious wants to be friends with the consciousness. The princess, who represents the ego, is described as more beautiful than the sun. Our animal nature admires consciousness, its rationality, and beauty, but the admiration is not mutual. The princess, the ego, is disgusted by this animal nature. But the frog can do something she can’t. She makes this agreement, and the rest of the story is about them trying to come to terms with one another. In the end, they do. The ugly frog is transformed into a beautiful prince who completes the princess. There are symbols of fertility, creativity, new ideas, art, and literature. That’s what happens when we establish this relationship with the unconscious, transforming it from something ugly and disgusting into something beautiful that completes us.

The creative intelligence within ourselves separates us from the machine in many ways. You also shared the Garden of Eden symbolism of nudity and covering up, representing the unconsciousness. It brings up sexuality, sexual identity, and the plural nature of the unconscious. How does the unconscious experience us? How does our identification as sexual or spiritual beings play a role? If we get fixated at certain points during development and a block occurs, does that manifest as unconscious terrors, nightmares, fears, or societal projections?

Sexuality is another way to characterize the unconscious, highlighting its animal nature and instinct. Often, when we think of instinct, we think of primitive things like hunger, aggression, and sexuality. Freud viewed it that way too. But if we look at animals, instinct can be unbelievably sophisticated. Bees harvest leaves and grow edible fungus. They take aphids and raise them to produce a sugary liquid. These are complex behaviors, not passed down but in the DNA, as instinct. If insects can do that, imagine what humans can do. Sexuality is one of the most powerful instincts, but it’s just one character among many. It’s irrational. Some are lucky to be attracted to wonderful people, but often the unconscious has a different agenda. We can be attracted to people terrible for us consciously. Jung pointed out that couples constantly arguing may stay together because their unconscious is in love, unable to integrate that into a holistic relationship. Sex is powerful, but not the most interesting aspect of the unconscious.

One concept I love from Jung’s perspective is the Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered name of God, indicating unity within duality. This relates to the unconscious’s parallel processes needing unity. Inner Work by Robert Johnson discusses active imagination as negotiating with different parts of ourselves, whether projected externally or represented internally. There’s a risk of psychosis in this work. What are some of those risks? What does it look like?

Active imagination is dangerous as the ego, the conscious part of our brain, is fragile. When we’re born, we are only unconscious, and consciousness develops gradually. Rationality, an important aspect of consciousness, isn’t fully developed until our early to mid-20s because the brain’s frontal lobes need myelin sheaths. Teenagers, lacking full myelin sheaths, behave irrationally because they haven’t fully developed their conscious ego. Consciousness is fragile and can be overwhelmed by the unconscious. We might act uncharacteristically in rage or lust. Engaging in active imagination opens the door to the unconscious, inviting it in. I wouldn’t recommend this for teenagers; it’s unsafe. It’s better for older people who have had time to develop their conscious ego and strengthen it through discipline, resisting the unconscious while acknowledging it.

That’s crucial information. Even in mystical traditions like Kabbalah, studying it only at 40 makes sense to develop the ego and boundaries first. In exploring the mystical and occult orders, elemental development happens first: Earth, air, fire, water, and their symbolisms, seen in tarot cards. Male development also involves stages of the psyche growing to recognize boundaries and self-value. These old ritual designs seem guided by the unconscious, like the tarot cards representing developmental stages. Can you share your framework and interpretation of how the tarot relates to the unconscious?

The essence of my book is growth through coming to terms with the unconscious, moving towards transcendence. The tarot represents this progression, the steps we need to take, the archetypes we need to encounter, and the challenges we need to overcome to unify with our unconscious. This involves understanding ourselves and our relationships, recognizing the influences of different archetypes and synthesizing contradictions.

The process of active imagination or internal family systems can pose risks, so one must approach them cautiously, often under professional guidance. The best way to start is by listening and getting to know the unconscious, treating it as a friend. The brain evolved to cooperate with others for survival, so much of it is devoted to establishing relationships. This is why unconscious contents have been personified as magical creatures or gods throughout history. Myths weren’t about explaining natural phenomena but understanding the internal world, our unconscious. These divine animals are powerful and amoral, demanding respect. Reading myths and fairy tales can help recognize these influences in our own lives.

Understanding the unconscious is complex, involving the balance between biology and psychology. The conscious mind is limited and often projects personal aspects as external entities, influenced by cultural narratives. Accepting contradictions and avoiding duality is crucial. Forgiveness, for example, transcends duality by offering a spiritual solution. Addressing the unconscious requires a synthesis of different aspects, recognizing that things can have internal contradictions without needing to be sorted into right and wrong.

Suffering and challenges are essential for growth, but chronic unhappiness and inability to function indicate medical illness. Psychiatry can provide amazing results for mental illness, stabilizing the ego and helping individuals regain control. It’s important to create a stable environment with reliable routines and gentle discipline. Medications can help manage the balance between the conscious and unconscious, especially when dealing with overwhelming experiences or practicing occult arts. Proper training and responsible practice are essential to avoid being overwhelmed by the unconscious.

Dopamine plays a significant role in motivation and seeking a better future. Social media can deplete dopamine, distracting from meaningful activities. A detox isn’t enough; making a conscious decision to engage in productive activities and human connections is crucial. Recognizing the power of imagination and will in personal development helps navigate the balance between the conscious and unconscious.