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Back from the Borderline explores how human beings construct, inherit, interpret and sometimes misunderstand the ideas and beliefs through which they experience reality. Through depth psychology, religious history, Western esotericism and philosophy, I investigate how we come to believe what we believe, who influences those beliefs and how they affect the way we understand ourselves and the world.
A lot of my work comes back to the relationship between consciousness, belief and power.
How do institutions influence what people consider true, and why do we sometimes defend explanations we’ve never seriously questioned? Following these questions has taken me into some pretty unexpected territory, from early Christianity and the Western occult tradition to Jungian psychology, artificial intelligence and anomalous experiences. I’m also drawn to the ways spiritual teachings change as they’re passed between generations, and how institutions can preserve extraordinary wisdom while sometimes interfering with the very spiritual development they were meant to encourage.
You’ll find conversations with scholars and independent researchers here, alongside long-form essays where I spend time with historical sources and competing interpretations. Some of the ideas I explore are controversial. Others have been debated for centuries, although most of us were never taught much about them. I don’t assume an institution is correct because it has authority, or that an unconventional theory is true because someone claims it was suppressed. I’m willing to reconsider my own conclusions as I learn, and I hope you’ll feel encouraged to do the same.
I started this podcast years ago while trying to understand my own mind. Those early investigations into psychological suffering gradually led me toward the philosophical and religious traditions through which people have understood consciousness and human experience for centuries. There’s quite an archive here now, and I’ve kept much of it available, including episodes that reflect ideas I’ve since reconsidered.
If you’re new, you can start wherever you like. There’s no need to go all the way back to the first episode.
Even the title has taken on a different meaning over the years. Back from the Borderline now speaks to the boundaries I keep finding myself investigating, between psychology and theology, science and spiritual experience, accepted knowledge and ideas that have been pushed aside. I hope this can be a place where we explore those questions together, develop our own judgment and consider how what we learn might change the way we live.
You can explore the full podcast archive, House of Cards, my ongoing Tarot series, and MOODS, my reflective intelligence app, at backfromtheborderline.com. Patreon members can also connect their membership to Spotify to listen to the complete archive there.
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- 429 - Who Would I Have Been Without Antidepressants?
Cameron LaBar was nine years old when he was prescribed Paxil. Twenty-six years later, he’s still taking antidepressants, measuring his daily dose of Lexapro with a tiny oral syringe as he attempts to taper off medication he’s taken for nearly his entire remembered life. He’s thirty-five now, with no previous experience of adulthood without psychiatric drugs.
The question he’s been living with now is painfully simple: Who would I have been?
Known online as Cold Plunge Cam, Cameron has spent years documenting his experience with psychiatric medication and withdrawal. His story raises difficult questions about childhood prescribing, informed consent and the explanations we give people about their own suffering. It also reveals how deeply a medical diagnosis can influence someone’s understanding of themselves, especially when that explanation is introduced before they’re old enough to question it.
Joining Cam is Danish clinical psychologist and researcher Anders Sørensen, author of Crossing Zero, whose work focuses on psychiatric-drug withdrawal and tapering. Anders leads much of the conversation, drawing on his clinical experience while Cam revisits a childhood spent under psychiatric care. Their exchange moves into the emotional consequences of long-term medication, family relationships and the difficulty of separating withdrawal from the return of earlier distress.
Recorded among friends who met through Laura Delano’s Inner Compass Initiative, this conversation leaves some of its hardest questions unresolved. It also asks us to reconsider how confidently we’ve explained the human mind, and how much we’ve learned from the people who’ve spent decades living with the consequences of psychiatric treatment.
✧ MEET THE GUESTS
Cameron LaBar (Cold Plunge Cam)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coldplungecam/
Anders Sørensen
Website: https://www.psykologanders.dk/
Writing: https://crossingzero.substack.com/
Book, Crossing Zero: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Zero-Science-Staying-Psychiatric/dp/8797625906
Interview: https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-clinical-craft-of-psychiatric
✧ EXPLORE
Critical Psychiatry Patreon Collection | 57 episodes
✧ INNER COMPASS INITIATIVE
2027 Boston Conference | January 26–28:https://conference.theinnercompass.org/
Inner Compass Initiative:https://www.theinnercompass.org/
Laura Delano | Unshrunk:https://www.lauradelano.com/
Click here to listen to my 2025 Interview with Laura
✧ FURTHER READING
Mark Horowitz & David Taylor | Antidepressant Tapering: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30850328/
Joanna Moncrieff et al. | Serotonin Theory Review: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
LISTENER NOTE: This is a conversation among friends about lived experience and psychiatric research. This isn’t therapy or medical advice. Never abruptly discontinue psychiatric medication; consult a qualified clinician about medication changes.
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EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON:Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at go.moods.world/podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mon, 09 Nov 2026 - 1h 56min - 428 - The More You Know About Yourself, the Less You Understand
Are we thinking ourselves into a new dark age?
We’ve spent the better part of seventy years trying to understand ourselves through psychology. We know about attachment styles, childhood trauma, unconscious motivations, and all the reasons we supposedly behave the way we do. We’ve diagnosed our exes, analyzed our childhoods, and built an entire industry around the promise that knowing ourselves better will help us live better lives. And yet, despite everything we’ve learned, we seem increasingly unsure about what makes life meaningful in the first place.
In 1957, an American psychologist called Ira Progoff wrote an introduction to a medieval Christian mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing. He was troubled by how readily modern psychology dismissed centuries of knowledge about the human mind simply because that knowledge came from religious traditions. Reading his observations nearly seventy years later, I was struck by how little some of our underlying assumptions have changed, even as psychology has gained so much influence over the way we understand ourselves.
His writing got me thinking about the history of psychology, the decline of Christianity’s influence in the West, and something I’ve been describing as spiritual homelessness. We’ve gained considerable freedom to decide what we believe and how we want to live. But we’ve also inherited the responsibility of figuring out what any of it is for. Psychology has offered us ways to understand our suffering, while the bigger questions about meaning and how we ought to live remain unsettled.
Meanwhile, self-understanding has grown into a very profitable business. There’s now a psychological explanation available for almost every uncomfortable feeling or disappointing relationship, usually followed by a book, a course, or another video promising to help us understand ourselves a little better. And the more time we spend searching for answers, the more money there is to be made from keeping us searching.
This episode explores why we’re so uncomfortable with uncertainty, how psychology came to occupy such a central place in Western life, and whether our endless search for explanations is making us any wiser.
There’s a certain irony in all of this. We tend to look back at the Middle Ages as a time when people understood very little about the world. Yet medieval Christian mystics were already asking questions about the limits of human knowledge that our own culture seems increasingly reluctant to face.
We know a great deal about how the human mind works. We seem far less certain about what makes a life worth living. I wonder whether the next great intellectual revolution might involve revisiting some of the things we were so confident we’d outgrown.
STUDY COMPANION | RECOMMENDED READING
- The Cloud of Unknowing — Anonymous, translated by Ira Progoff (1957)New Seeds of Contemplation — Thomas Merton (1962)Open Mind, Open Heart — Thomas Keating (1986)Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — Shunryu Suzuki (1970)The Book of Not Knowing — Peter Ralston (2010)The Interior Castle — Teresa of Ávila (1577)
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EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON:Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at go.moods.world/podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 03 Nov 2026 - 1h 28min - 427 - You’ve Studied the Mysteries. But Have They Changed You? (Anne Baring, Part 9: Epilogue)
We’ve learned so much about healing, but have we learned how to love?
After eight conversations with 95-year-old Jungian analyst and author Anne Baring, I found myself questioning some of the beliefs I’d spent years defending, including my own understanding of spiritual development.
In this deeply personal epilogue, I’m reflecting on our generation’s hunger for spiritual wisdom, the temptation to romanticize forgotten traditions, and a culture increasingly fascinated with extraordinary experiences while struggling with the much quieter work of personal transformation. We’ll explore the spiritual ego, the sacred marriage, and why understanding ourselves so thoroughly can sometimes prevent us from being changed.
These conversations with Anne have affected me in ways I never anticipated. Some of the most meaningful lessons came from experiences we never recorded.
This episode stands on its own, but I recommend listening to the full series for a deeper understanding of the ideas explored here.
LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE ANNE BARING SERIES
This is the ninth and final installment of my series with Anne Baring. Across eight conversations, we explore the history of the feminine divine, Sophia, Mary Magdalene, Christian mysticism, and the sacred marriage.
If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws primarily on Anne’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
Listen to Anne’s complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself.
Explore Anne’s books and research on her official website.
FURTHER READING
For listeners who’d like to investigate some of the ideas discussed in this epilogue:
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian HermeticismPierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of LifeRichard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian PerspectiveThérèse of Lisieux, Story of a SoulJessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance☽
EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON:Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at go.moods.world/podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 27 Oct 2026 - 1h 54min - 426 - The Way of the Rose: Healing the Heart & the Sacred Marriage (Anne Baring, Part 8)
For seven conversations, Anne Baring and I have been investigating the forgotten feminine face of God. We’ve explored Sophia, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, and the religious traditions that preserved aspects of the sacred feminine. Now, in our eighth and final conversation, we’re asking what all of that knowledge is supposed to do to us.
We start at Chartres Cathedral in France, where a medieval labyrinth invites pilgrims to walk toward its center before returning to the world. From there, Anne and I explore the neglected wisdom of the heart, the relationship between childhood wounds and religious ideas about guilt, and the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos, as a way of understanding the divisions within ourselves.
After months of investigating religious history, we find ourselves confronting a much more personal question. How do we allow these teachings to change the way we live?
This is Part 8 of an eight-part series. New listeners are encouraged to start with Part 1. Next week, I’ll return with a personal epilogue reflecting on how my own thinking has changed throughout these conversations.
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK:This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
MY TWELVE PART SERIES ON CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL NEGLECT: Click here to start episode 1.
BOOKS & FURTHER READING
Anne Baring & Jules Cashford: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an ImageBanafsheh Sayyad: Dance of Oneness: Embody Love and Luminosity to Transform Your LifePeter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of WisdomNeale Donald Walsch: Conversations with God (audiobook edition discussed in the episode)Charles Spencer: A Very Private SchoolPLACES & PRACTICES
Chartres Cathedral: Medieval labyrinth and rose windowsHeartMath Institute: Heart-focused contemplative practicesSufi whirling: Sacred dance tradition discussed by AnneORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED:Ubiquity University | Humanity’s Team | The Shift Network
EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON:Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 20 Oct 2026 - 1h 04min - 425 - The Cathars, the Inquisition and the Women Who Defied Rome (Anne Baring Part 7)
In medieval southern France, a woman stood up during a religious debate and challenged the men who claimed the authority to speak for God. A Catholic cleric told her to return to her spinning, because theology was no business of hers. Her identity was Esclarmonde de Foix, and she belonged to a Christian religious culture in which women could teach, exercise spiritual authority and administer sacred rites.
This is Part 7 of my series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Christian mysticism and the forgotten feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
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In the last episode, Anne and I explored the Black Madonna, the Grail and the possibility that teachings associated with Miriam Magdalene survived in medieval France. Now we enter the Languedoc and the world of the Cathars, a Christian religious movement whose beliefs brought them into direct conflict with Rome.
Through Esclarmonde’s life, Anne introduces us to a society where women could participate in theological debate and religious leadership, and where Christianity was understood in ways that would eventually be condemned as heresy.
The Catholic Church launched a crusade against these communities in 1209. What followed remains one of the most devastating episodes in medieval European religious history. Anne believes the Cathars may have preserved teachings associated with early Gnostic Christianity and Mary Magdalene.
After our conversation, I return with some personal reflections, including the extraordinary experiences that first led me toward Esclarmonde years before these interviews. I also discuss recent reading that has challenged some of my own assumptions about Catharism and made me reconsider how easily we can romanticize the religious past.
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EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
STUDY COMPANION
✦ John and Caitlín Matthews, Walkers Between the Worlds
✦ Arthur Guirdham, research on Cathar reincarnation and past-life memory
✦ Jehanne de Quillan, The Gospel of the Beloved Companion
✦ Gilles Quispel, research on Gnosticism and the Apocryphon of John
✦ Margaret Barker, research on First Temple theology and Divine Wisdom
✦ Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief
✦ Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom
EARLY CHRISTIAN AND CATHAR TEXTS
☿ The Apocryphon of John
☿ Liber de duobus principiis (The Book of Two Principles)
☿ The consolamentum, the Cathar rite of spiritual baptism
RELATED LISTENING
✦ This Episode Isn’t About UFOs, It’s About You (Part 1)
✦ This Episode Isn’t About UFOs, It’s About You (Part 2)
The first two episodes document the synchronicities and experiences that eventually led me toward Esclarmonde and Anne’s research. Buckle in, it’s a wildride.
SOURCE NOTE: This conversation moves between documented history, medieval legend and esoteric interpretation. Some of Anne’s proposed connections remain speculative. I’ve included these resources so you can investigate the evidence and reach your own conclusions.
☽
WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline.There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study).
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/
MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 13 Oct 2026 - 1h 45min - 424 - The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition (Anne Baring Part 6)
A spiritual teacher dies, her community has to continue without her, and centuries later the written record can no longer tell us exactly how her teachings moved from one generation to the next. What, if anything, survives?
This is Part 6 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Divine Wisdom, Christian mysticism and the feminine dimension of divinity. Each conversation can stand on its own, but they build on one another. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
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Last week, we focused on Miriam Magdalene and early Christian writings that present her as a woman with spiritual authority of her own. This week, Anne takes us west.
In the tradition Anne works with, Miriam travels to Gaul after Yeshua’s death and spends the rest of her life teaching there. After her death, the historical record gets much harder to follow. Centuries pass before medieval France gives us another dense concentration of religious images, stories and devotional practices that Anne believes deserve serious examination.
That gap sits at the center of this episode. A book can be confiscated or burned, while people can continue visiting a statue, singing to her, asking her for healing and teaching their children to make the same pilgrimage. How much religious knowledge can survive that way, even when later generations no longer fully understand what earlier generations were preserving?
Anne takes us into the Black Madonna tradition, sacred caves and medieval devotion, and later into the Grail stories and the wounded king whose dying country can only recover when someone finally asks about his suffering. We also spend time with the Lady of courtly love and an old attempt to teach men trained for war another relationship with women and power.
After Anne and I finished recording, I kept reading Jessie L. Weston’sFrom Ritual to Romance, which Anne recommends during our conversation. I discovered that I had misunderstood an important piece of the Grail material we had just discussed. I come back after the interview to tell you what I found, why it changed the way I hear the Grail story, and why I’m now wondering how often a culture keeps the image, ritual or story while slowly forgetting how earlier generations understood it.
☿
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
SUBMIT A PRAYER INTENTION AT THE GROTTO OF MARY MAGDALENE
The Dominican friars who care for the Grotto of Sainte-Baume in southern France, traditionally believed to be where Mary Magdalene spent her final years, welcome prayer intentions from people around the world. You can submit yours through their website, and it will be passed along to the friars. ** Submit your prayer intention here **
STUDY COMPANION
✦ Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance
✦ Annine van der Meer, research on the Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene
✦ Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom
✦ James George Frazer, The Golden Bough
PEOPLE AND TRADITIONS DISCUSSED
☿ Black Madonna devotion
☿ Parmenides and ancient incubation rites
☿ Chrétien de Troyes and the Grail romances
☿ Eleanor of Aquitaine, troubadours and courtly love
☿ The Knights Templar, Sufism and medieval intellectual exchange
☿ The wounded king and the Waste Land
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WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 06 Oct 2026 - 1h 18min - 423 - Mary Magdalene, The Beloved Companion (Anne Baring Part 5)
Mary Magdalene has spent nearly two thousand years buried under other people’s interpretations of her. Repentant prostitute. Devoted disciple. Apostle to the apostles. Mystic. Wife of Jesus. Suppressed leader of early Christianity. This episode asks us to actually meet Miriam before deciding who she was.
This is Part 5 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying the Goddess tradition, Christian mysticism, Divine Wisdom, and the feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
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Our previous conversation explored the Essenes, the Therapeutae, and the religious culture Anne believes surrounded Yeshua. Here, we focus on Mary Magdalene as a spiritually educated woman and an initiate in her own right.
We look at early Christian writings in which Mary repeatedly understands teachings that other disciples struggle to grasp, then ask the question at the center of this episode. How much spiritual authority did Mary possess?
Her relationship with Yeshua is part of that investigation. We discuss The Gospel of Philip, the Greek word koinōnos, traditions concerning their possible marriage, and the consequences of understanding Mary as Yeshua’s spiritual counterpart.
We also discuss The Gospel of the Beloved Companion and Annine van der Meer’s Mary Magdalene Unveiled, which examines proposed connections between the Beloved Companion material and the canonical Gospel of John. These claims are extremely controversial. Anne finds the case persuasive, and so do I. I’ve included key sources below so you can examine the material yourself.
Near the end, Anne reads an initiatory teaching attributed to Miriam concerning ascension, direct spiritual knowledge, fear, and power. After the interview, I return for a longer reflection on why I think this teaching deserves serious contemplation.
☿
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS
☿ Pistis Sophia
☿ The Gospel of Mary
☿ The Gospel of Philip
☿ The Gospel of Thomas
☿ The Gospel of John
MARY MAGDALENE RESEARCH
✦ Jehanne de Quillan, The Gospel of the Beloved Companion
✦ Annine van der Meer, Mary Magdalene Unveiled
✦ Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
✦ Margaret Barker, First Temple theology and traditions of heavenly ascent
VISIONARY SOURCE
☽ Claire Heartsong, Anna, Grandmother of Jesus
SOURCE NOTE:Compare translations, read competing interpretations, and see where your own research takes you.
New episodes of Back from the Borderline are released every Tuesday. Follow the podcast wherever you listen, and if someone comes to mind while hearing this episode, send it to them.
Next in the series: The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition.
☽
WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series. Paid audio can also be connected directly to Spotify, so you can keep listening where you already listen.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/
MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world. Paid BFTB members also get MOODS for $15/month instead of $22.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 29 Sep 2026 - 1h 16min - 422 - The Essenes and the Women Around Yeshua (Anne Baring Part 4)
What kind of spiritual world could have formed Yeshua before Christianity existed?
This is Part 4 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, and following the series in order.
☽
Christianity often starts its story when Jesus begins preaching. In this conversation, Anne and I go further back and ask what was already there.
Anne takes us into her understanding of the Essenes and Therapeutae, contemplative communities she believes preserved an older Wisdom tradition concerned with healing, direct experience of the divine and disciplined development of consciousness. They called themselves Children of the Light. Anne places Yeshua inside this religious world and describes him as an elder brother and teacher who had gone further in his spiritual development and could show others what a human being was capable of.
We talk about what spiritual training was actually for. Anne describes meditation, inner vision and ascension, along with an understanding of healing based on restoring harmony within the person. The heart served as an organ of discernment, while religious knowledge was expected to alter how someone lived rather than remain an idea about God.
The women around Yeshua come into focus in the second half of the conversation. Anne describes Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene as advanced initiates and teachers rather than the passive figures many of us inherited through Christian tradition. We talk about women as healers, the spiritual education of children and Anne’s beautiful description of motherhood and caregiving as forms of initiation into love and service.
Some of Anne’s reconstruction draws on historical and late-antique texts, while some comes from modern channeled material, especially the work of Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis. I spend time in the introduction explaining these sources and why I’m willing to investigate visionary material without treating it as documentary history.
The episode ends exactly where the next conversation needs to start. Anne describes Christianity as having lost the inner mystery school she believes was intended to develop alongside its public teaching. Part 5 is devoted entirely to the woman she places near the center of that missing tradition: Mary Magdalene.
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EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
ESSENE + WISDOM TEXTS DISCUSSED
The Essenes: Children of the Light — Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis
The Power of the Magdalene — Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis
The Essene Gospel of Peace
Pistis Sophia
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
AUTHORS + SCHOLARS TO FOLLOW
Stuart Wilson
Joanna Prentis
Flavius Josephus
Dr. Annine van der Meer
Marguerite Rigoglioso
Carl Jung
☽
WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership → https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series. Paid audio can also be connected directly to Spotify, so you can keep listening where you already listen.
WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → https://www.moods.world/
MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world. Paid BFTB members also get MOODS for $15/month instead of $22.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 22 Sep 2026 - 1h 21min - 421 - Gnostic Sophia and the Suppressed Christian Mysteries (Anne Baring Part 3)
What if early Christianity contained a path centered on direct knowledge of the divine within us, and that path was pushed outside the Church that survived?
This is Part 3 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, followed by Part 2 on Marija Gimbutas and the civilization of Old Europe.
☽
In this conversation, Anne and I enter the world of Gnostic Christianity and a Yeshua many of us were never introduced to: a teacher concerned with awakening human beings to the divine light within themselves. That understanding of Jesus sits uneasily beside the Christianity that eventually gained institutional power in Rome.
We start with Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose surviving poem describes a journey into darkness, guidance from the daughters of the Sun, and knowledge received directly from a goddess. Anne sees him as part of a more ancient visionary tradition that continued into Gnosticism, where gnosis meant direct knowledge of the divine rather than religious belief alone.
From there, we get into the Gnostic Yeshua, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and why a Christianity built around the divine light within the human being came into conflict with the Church that gained power in Rome.
Sophia is at the center of the episode. In Pistis Sophia, Divine Wisdom descends from her celestial home, becomes lost, and has to find her way back toward the Light through thirteen metanoias, or changes in consciousness. Anne compares her story with the Christian interpretation of the Fall, especially the guilt and disobedience that became attached to Eve. Sophia gives us another way of understanding what has gone wrong. She has lost touch with where she came from and mistakes a lesser light for the true one. Her task is to wake up, learn to see differently, and remember.
We also spend part of the conversation with Carl Jung. Anne trained as a Jungian analyst, and she talks about Jung’s own visionary experiences, Philemon, The Red Book, his fascination with the Gnostics, and the task he believed he had failed to complete before his death: restoring the reality of the soul to Western consciousness.
Near the end, Anne reads from Trimorphic Protennoia, where the Divine Feminine speaks in the first person, and The Hymn of the Pearl, a Gnostic poem she has lived with for roughly sixty years. Both return us to the idea running through this entire conversation: that spiritual life begins in remembering what we are and where we came from.
☿
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
GNOSTIC TEXTS DISCUSSED
Pistis Sophia
Trimorphic Protennoia
The Sophia of Jesus Christ
The Hymn of the Pearl
The Nag Hammadi codices
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Philip
CARL JUNG
The Red Book
Seven Sermons to the Dead
Answer to Job
ALSO MENTIONED
Parmenides
G.R.S. Mead
Peter Kingsley
Orpheus and the Orphic tradition
Heraclitus
Pythagoras
Plato and Aristotle
Zosimus of Panopolis
G.I. Gurdjieff
Father Richard Rohr
Marie-Louise von Franz
Philemon
Theodosius I
Taxila
☽
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
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Tue, 15 Sep 2026 - 1h 25min - 420 - The Lost Civilization of the Goddess (Anne Baring Part 2)
What if the history of Europe contains a civilization most of us were never taught about?
This is Part 2 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, which introduces Anne and the larger history we’ll be following together.
☽
In this conversation, Anne takes me into the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and the world she called Old Europe, a network of Neolithic cultures across southeastern Europe that she spent decades studying through figurines, vessels, settlements, burial sites, goldwork and recurring religious imagery.
Anne explains why Gimbutas believed this world was centered on the Great Goddess, how she read birds, snakes, spirals and water as part of a shared sacred language, and why she argued that these societies were matrilineal, broadly egalitarian and unusually free from organized warfare.
We also talk about the later movement of steppe peoples into Europe, the fierce opposition Gimbutas faced during her career, and the later ancient DNA research Anne sees as supporting an important part of her migration theory.
The conversation also becomes beautifully and unexpectedly personal. Anne speaks about growing up with a mother who received channeled writings, the out-of-body experience Anne had at thirteen, and the dream that brought Jules Cashford to her and eventually led to the ten-year writing of The Myth of the Goddess.
Anne also remembers seeing the objects from The Lost World of Old Europe in person at the Ashmolean Museum, including the great painted vessels that left her speechless. We end by asking why this history still matters to her, and what she would say to Marija Gimbutas if she could sit across from her now.
☿
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
BOOKS BY MARIJA GIMBUTAS
The Language of the Goddess
The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe
ALSO MENTIONED
The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
Messages From a Transcendent Dimension by Anne Baring
Joseph Campbell
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Federico Faggin
Iain McGilchrist
SEE THE OBJECTS
The Lost World of Old Europe exhibition via New York University’s YouTube channel [click here to view]
☽
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
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☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
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If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
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Tue, 08 Sep 2026 - 1h 05min - 419 - The Forgotten Feminine Face of God (Anne Baring Part 1)
For thousands of years, the Western image of God became increasingly male. Anne Baring has spent much of her life studying what we lost when the feminine disappeared from our understanding of the divine.
This is Part 1 of my eight-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September 2026. Over the course of the series, we’ll explore the work Anne has spent much of her life devoted to, from the ancient Goddess and the Western wisdom traditions to Mary Magdalene, the Divine Feminine and the sacred marriage. This first conversation introduces Anne and many of the ideas we’ll return to in much greater depth throughout the series.
Born in 1931, Anne is an Oxford-educated historian, Jungian analyst and co-author with Jules Cashford of The Myth of the Goddess. We begin with the ancient Great Mother and the work of Marija Gimbutas, before moving into Anne’s account of how Western religion gradually separated spirit from nature. She takes us through Asherah and Sophia, the feminine Holy Spirit, Mary Magdalene and the Christian traditions she believes preserved an older teaching of love and wisdom. We also talk about power, self-deification, the body, and why Anne believes the loss of the feminine divine changed the way Western culture came to treat the Earth and one another.
Anne is 95, and this is the first in a series of conversations we’ll be recording together. Future episodes will give us time to stay with subjects we only scratch the surface of here, including Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Companion, the Essenes, the Cathars and the sacred marriage. This first conversation ends with Anne speaking personally about prayer, service and how her understanding of God has changed over the course of her life.
EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK
This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.
Books by Anne Baring
Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
Books and Writers Mentioned
Marija Gimbutas:The Civilization of the Goddess
Marija Gimbutas:The Language of the Goddess
Erich Neumann:The Great Mother
Riane Eisler:The Chalice and the Blade
The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de Quillan
Related Episodes
My episode on Gnosticism, Sophia and the Gnostic creation myth
My previous episode on Mary Magdalene
House of Cards:In this episode, I mention my ongoing tarot series, House of Cards, during this conversation. We’re studying the cards one by one through mythology, religious history, occult philosophy and the Western wisdom traditions that regularly appear on the podcast. Join the Patreon and listen to House of Cards at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
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Tue, 01 Sep 2026 - 1h 29min - 418 - How to Tell When a Spiritual Teacher Is Full of Shit
In 2020, I almost paid $4,000 for a shadow work course. One of the first books I was told to read was Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. I read it, tried to understand what I was being sold, and kept getting the same bad taste in my mouth. It’s been six years since then, and I’ve come back with receipts. I understand why it bothered me now.
This episode digs into the history behind some of online spirituality’s favorite borrowed ideas, Jungian shadow work, Tantra, sex magic, Thelema, Babalon, occult initiation, manifestation, the Left Hand Path, passive mediumship, and the modern spiritual coaching industry that learned how to package this material into high ticket programs.
I look closely at Carolyn Elliott’s work, what Carl Jung actually wrote about the shadow, how Western neo Tantra differs from older tantric traditions, and the ethics of a teacher who can reinterpret your hesitation as resistance, scarcity, fear, or evidence that you need their teaching.
We also need to talk about why psychologically intense spiritual work can go badly when authority outruns training, why so much ancient wisdom being sold online has a surprisingly modern family tree, and why people sometimes leave these spaces burned enough to decide that every form of esotericism must be "demonic".
If you’ve ever looked at a $3,000 retreat, a spiritual certification, an initiation, or an Instagram teacher promising transformation and thought, what the fuck am I looking at, this episode is for you.
For my full exploration of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and sex magic, you can listen here.
If you want to join my card-by-card study of the Tarot through Christian Hermeticism and deep symbolic study, you can start from the beginning on Patreon. Clickhereor visitpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline.
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Tue, 25 Aug 2026 - 1h 58min - 417 - Aleister Crowley’s Thelema: Sex Magick and the Problem With the Prophet
Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself.
This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law, Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority.
I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow.
True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”.
This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong.
Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink, modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
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If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 18 Aug 2026 - 1h 53min - 416 - The Braced Body: The Spiritual Cost of Always Being in Control (Part 3)
I’ve spent a lot of this series thinking about what happens when the body gets so used to effort that it forgets how to stop. By the time I got to this final episode, I found myself somewhere I didn’t expect. I was thinking about grace, and the spiritual cost of living as though everything depends on your ability to stay useful, vigilant, and in control.
In Part Three of The Braced Body, we’re taking everything we’ve learned about chronic tension and nervous system bracing into much deeper spiritual territory. I’ll get into the old argument between Augustine and Pelagius about human effort and grace, why Sabbath has something to say about our inability to stop working, and how ideas like kenosis and alchemy can help us think about surrender without turning it into weakness or self-erasure.
We’ll also spend some time with Meister Eckhart and the older mystical traditions that understood spiritual life as something we participate in rather than something we manufacture through enough effort.
Somewhere underneath all of this is a problem I know very well in myself. You can get very good at understanding/taking care of /improving yourself, and still be living as though receiving anything you didn’t somehow earn is dangerous as hell.
I wanted to know what happens when that habit reaches our spiritual lives too, and whether the body might know something about grace that the intellect has been trying to understand for centuries.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 11 Aug 2026 - 56min - 415 - The Braced Body: Why Rest Feel Unsafe & How to Let Go (Part 2)
Your body can be exhausted and still refuse to rest. You lie down, your jaw stays tight, your shoulders keep working, and some part of you remains ready for the next demand.
This is Part Two of a three-part series on chronic bracing. We move from why the body learned to stay tense into what it can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at why yielding has such a bad reputation, how the floor and the bed support movement, and why “relax your shoulders” often changes almost nothing.
We also talk about the exhale, the fear of letting another person help, and the difference between yielding and giving up your choices. You’ll hear a few small practices that can help your nervous system notice support before it adds more effort. If you haven’t heard Part One, start with The Braced Body, Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong. Part Three will move into grace, surrender, and what it means for spiritual trust to reach the body.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Artwork credit: “Surrender” by Tom Sullivan (Saatchi Art China)
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Tue, 04 Aug 2026 - 1h 04min - 414 - The Braced Body: Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong (Part 1)
Do you clench your jaw without noticing? Do your shoulders stay tense even when you’re finally sitting down to rest? Does your body still feel like it’s working long after the day is over?
This episode started with something completely ordinary. I was making the guest bed, lay down for a minute, and noticed that even though I was trying to rest, my entire upper body was still working. My shoulders were tense. My jaw was clenched. It was such a small moment, but it sent me down a rabbit hole. I wanted to understand why so many of us keep holding ourselves together long after we no longer have to.
In Part One of this series, we’ll look at why chronic jaw clenching, neck pain, shoulder tension, and the feeling of always being “on” can become so familiar that we stop noticing we’re doing them. We’ll also talk about why understanding your childhood, your attachment style, or your nervous system doesn’t automatically change these habits, even when you know exactly where they came from.
Along the way, I’ll borrow ideas from Moshe Feldenkrais, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to see whether their work can help explain why the body keeps preparing for demands that ended years ago, and why receiving support can feel so much harder than we expect, even if it seems really simple on the surface.
By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll start catching the moment your body begins to brace. That’s where change begins. You can’t work with something you can’t see. This is Part One of the series. In the next episode, we’ll stop asking why we brace and start looking at how the body learns to trust support again.
If you’re curious about trying the Feldenkrais Method yourself,FeldenkraisProject.comis a great place to start. The free lessons can help you notice how your body moves and where you may be using more effort than you need. You can check it out here:https://feldenkraisproject.com/.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/. MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 28 Jul 2026 - 56min - 413 - What Do We Do With a Broken Spiritual Inheritance?
A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole.
I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in the body. Shame, fear, sexual repression, homophobia, spiritual surveillance, and the feeling that your body itself was a problem.
Leaving can honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue anything with Jesus attached to it. Others move toward witchcraft, occultism, or a private spiritual life built from candles, books, rituals, and scraps. At the same time, plenty of people are running back to traditional Christianity because the modern world feels hollow, lonely, and stripped of beauty.
Both responses make sense. Burning the whole thing down can feel like the only honest answer when religion harmed you. Returning to the old Church can make sense when the alternative looks like “buy things, optimize yourself, and die.” At least the Church has ritual, saints, feast days, candles, moral demands, and a story larger than the self.
But neither response heals the wound on its own.
This episode is about the broken spiritual inheritance of the West, especially Christianity, and why we keep swinging between rejection and return. We leave the Church and lose old languages for grief, prayer, beauty, and moral life. Or we return and pretend the harm was exaggerated, as if shame, control, misogyny, homophobia, and fear of the body were just minor details. The Church absolutely preserved beauty, but it also caused immeasurable harm.
I’m interested in what happens after you’ve left, told the truth, stopped pretending the harm/abuse was acceptable, and still have to decide what you’ll carry forward.
This episode moves through religious trauma, Christianity, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, the Church of Rome, the broken masculine and feminine inside Western spirituality, and the problem of building a new spiritual life without pretending you made yourself from nothing.
Not everything can be saved, but not everything should be burned to ash. Both things can be true.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 21 Jul 2026 - 1h 04min - 412 - UFOs, AI, and the Religion of the Unconscious (Live at Contact in the Desert 2026)
This year, I had the chance to attend Contact in the Desert, which is a conference devoted to UFOs, psi phenomena, consciousness, and anomalous experience. While I was there, I joined a live podcast panel hosted by my friend Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops. Also on the panel were psi researcher Adam Curry and Josh from the Polarity YouTube channel, so the conversation went exactly where you’d expect it to go, which is to say… EVERYWHERE.
We dive into everything from UFOs and consciousness to the stranger and more fringe material underneath the usual disclosure conversation. Things like Carl Jung’s theory of the UFO as a mandala, CE5 (a contact practice where people use meditation and intention to invite anomalous lights or craft to appear), the unconscious mind, the body’s fear response, trauma, altered states, AI agents apparently inventing religious behavior, and one truly unforgettable story about raccoons creating a ritual around a quantum food dispenser. Yes, you read that right. :-)
The central focus of the panel ultimately circles around the idea that anomalous experiences seem to depend on what an individual psyche can tolerate and what our deeper wiring permits us to perceive.
I also talk about the orb sighting that completely changed my relationship to the phenomenon, and why my own work keeps returning to symbol, tarot, depth psychology, and archetypal thinking as tools for making contact with a deeper reality without losing my sh*t in this one.
I think a lot of UFO and disclosure discourse tends to get stuck on “weird things in the sky,” beings, craft, government secrets, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I think those are important things to dive into. The problem is that they leave out the bigger (and weirder) problem sitting right in front of us. Which is that the human being is the one doing the perceiving.
I hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as I enjoyed being a part of this panel with three awesome humans who I now consider dear friends.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Michael Phillip [Host of Third Eye Drops]
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thirdeyedrops
Josh [Creator of Polarity]
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PolarityJosh
🜁🜃🜄
TAKE THIS EPISODE INTO MOODS:MOODS is a private space for dream work, tarot, self-reflection, and exploring the ideas, questions, and patterns that emerge from episodes of BFTB—or your own life. Patreon members receive 31% off MOODS access with a 7-day free trial. To activate your discount, email support@moodscodex.com with “Patreon MOODS Access” and the email associated with your Patreon account. Read more about MOODS here.
MEMBER SUPPORT:Patreon comments and messages are not monitored for support. If you need help with account access, billing, subscription changes, listening setup, or a technical problem with the membership, visit bftbportal.com. The portal includes an email where you can reach me directly, though replies are reserved for genuine membership or access-related issues.
🜁🜃🜄
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Tue, 14 Jul 2026 - 1h 11min - 411 - Mary Magdalene and the End of Spiritual Childhood
This week, I was doing an I Ching reading, and one line stood out to me: “To find what you seek, leave the child and follow the adult.” This episode was inspired by that line. I use it to think through spiritual maturity, especially in a culture where adulthood often feels empty, exhausted, and totally cut off from wonder.
We talk about the younger self that still wants someone to come save us, hand us answers, or make the pain finally mean something. We also look at the way strong feelings can trick us into thinking something must be true, and how spirituality can become another way to avoid ordinary honesty, responsibility, and hard choices.
Then I connect that to Mary Magdalene, especially an early Christian text called the Gospel of Mary, where Mary says Jesus taught her things the other disciples didn’t hear, and the men have to decide whether they can accept that a woman may have received something they didn’t. We also talk about courtly love, the medieval idea that a knight had to learn patience and devotion through his love for the Lady, and the Cathars, a Christian group in southern France that was condemned by the Church and allowed women to carry spiritual authority.
This episode is for anyone who still wants a spiritual life, but doesn’t want to use spirituality as a way to stay stuck. I’m asking what it looks like to keep our sensitivity, curiosity, and openness, while also becoming someone who can make decisions, tell the truth, care for their real life, and stop waiting for something outside of themselves to fix everything.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de QuillanMary Magdalene Unveiled by Annine van der MeerThe Dream of the Cosmos by Anne BaringMerchants of Light by Betty KovacsThe Cathars by Malcolm BarberLove in the Western World by Denis de RougemontThe I Ching, Hexagram 17, line 3CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my new tarot study series)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 07 Jul 2026 - 51min - 410 - The Occult Teacher We Need Right Now: Dion Fortune, Psychic Hygiene, and the Magick of the Mind
Dion Fortune was one of the great occult teachers of the twentieth century, and one of my personal favorites.
In this episode, I’m joined by Ike Baker for a conversation about Fortune and her legacy. We begin with Ike’s own relationship to her, including the story of visiting her grave in Glastonbury, then move into her work on magic, psychology, psychic hygiene, ritual, Qabalah, polarity, Christ, Crowley, Avalon, and the power of images to act upon the mind.
Fortune understood something we desperately need right now as a collective. The unseen world has consequences, the images we feed can become forces, the mind has gates, and ritual changes the one who repeats it.
Ike is teaching a full course on Dion Fortune beginning July 13th 2026, called The Magic of Dion Fortune. The course meets Mondays at 7pm Eastern via Zoom for 10 modules. All sessions will be recorded for registrant playback and will include custom syllabi, supplemental materials, and slides. The course covers Dion Fortune’s unpublished papers and rituals, along with an integrated study of her theory and practical work through 21 of her writings, including The Mystical Qabalah, Psychic Self-Defense, The Cosmic Doctrine, The Circuit of Force, Applied Magic, Sane Occultism, The Training and Work of an Initiate, her occult fiction, and her rites of Pan and Isis.
To register, visit ikebaker.com, open the chat box, and tell Ike you’re from Back from the Borderline and want to register for The Magic of Dion Fortune. Use code BFTB100 for the listener discount.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Ike and Skyler’s Aetherica episode on Dion Fortune: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dion-fortune-theosophy-hermeneutics-qabalah-thought/id1696416784?i=1000763560692My episode: The Arrogance of Over-Empathy: https://pod.link/1576242501/episode/NmEzOTg5MmIzMGQ1ZWJmM2M5MmVjZTgxMy Patreon-exclusive conversation with Ike Baker: https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline/posts/lucid-in-dream-156921083Join House of Cards, my weekly tarot study series on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2222096Use MOODS to reflect on this episode →https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mon, 29 Jun 2026 - 1h 36min - 409 - The Skill AI Can Never Replace (And Why I’m Teaching Tarot)
This episode is the opening lesson from my new Patreon series, House of Cards.
House of Cards is an ongoing study of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot through depth psychology, mythology, symbolism, dreams, and contemplative practice. Every week we move through the deck one card at a time, treating tarot as a language of psyche, symbol, and myth. I’m releasing this first lesson publicly because it explains the philosophy behind the series. You can continue the study from Lesson 2 onward over on Patreon.
In this introductory lesson we explore:
• Why symbolic literacy matters in the age of AI
• Why tarot is far more than fortune telling
• How sustained attention transforms the way we see
• Why symbolic systems have always been central to spiritual and psychological development
• How to approach this series for the deepest transformation
Suggested Deck
Throughout this series I’ll be using the Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot Deck (Pamela Colman Smith Centennial Edition).We’ll explore in much more granular detail why this particular deck was chosen in Lesson 2, which is available now on Patreon.
Next Episode
House of Cards 02: Why the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck:Join us on Patreon as we explore the origins of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, Arthur Edward Waite, Pamela Colman Smith, Christian Hermeticism, the revolution of the illustrated pip cards, and why this deck remains the symbolic language of modern tarot over a century after its creation.
Continue the Study
If you’d like to study the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot with me, you can join House of Cards over on Patreon. We’ll move through the deck one card at a time, one week at a time, treating each image as a living lesson in psyche, symbol, and myth. Start with Lesson 2 and join us whenever you’re ready.
👉 Join the study: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2222096
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 25 Jun 2026 - 31min - 408 - The Arrogance of Too Much Empathy
This might be the most personally confronting episode I’ve recorded in a long time.
A few days ago, I had to send a text message I had been absolutely dreading. I spent days worrying about how this person would feel, what they would think, whether they’d be hurt, disappointed, blindsided, angry, or quietly resentful.
Then the moment came when I needed to send the damn text already. So I did. And guess what? Their response completely dismantled the story I had been telling myself all week. That experience led me into a much bigger question: at what point does empathy stop being empathy and start becoming an attempt to manage someone else’s reality for them?
The deeper I looked, the more I saw how often I move through life assuming responsibility for experiences that do not actually belong to me. And I doubt I’m alone in that. Maybe this is something you’re doing without realizing it, too.
In this episode, we talk about over-responsibility, people-pleasing, parenting, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, Martin Buber, the Christian mysteries, and why trusting another person’s capacity might be one of the deepest forms of love there is.
Along the way we explore:
• Why highly sensitive people often become emotional managers
• The hidden arrogance inside over-empathy
• The difference between caring for someone and carrying them
• Why rescuing can quietly undermine growth
• What parenting teaches us about trust
• The spiritual danger of trying to live other people’s lives for them
• The relationship between love, faith, and control
• How to stop rehearsing other people’s suffering
Reflection questions from this episode (for your journal, MOODS, or simply a conversation with yourself):
• What do I actually know?
• What am I assuming?
• What part of this belongs to me?
• What would respect look like here?
• Am I helping this person, or am I trying to protect myself from the discomfort of watching them have their own experience?
• What resources might this person have that I cannot see?
These questions ended up changing the entire direction of my thinking. If you spend some real time with them, I think they might do the same for you.
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 23 Jun 2026 - 1h 05min - 407 - Gay Men Have Always Loved a “Difficult” Woman
For much of my life, many of my closest friendships have been with gay men.
Not because they were fun little accessories or stereotypical sidekicks, either. We didn’t even always have that much in common on paper. Yep, these friendships were built the old-fashioned way through grief, bad decisions, long as hell voice notes, laughter at completely inappropriate moments, and enough years of showing up for each other that eventually they became part of the fabric of my life.
In this episode, you'll join me on a journey where I explore why certain women and certain gay men seem to find each other so consistently throughout time.
We'll get into Jung (of course), chosen family, female villains, the AIDS crisis, and the deep bond that tends to form when two people have spent their entire lives paying close attention to the rules everybody else seems to take for granted.
This is a love letter to the gay men who have shaped my life, challenged me, protected me, made me laugh until I cried, and helped me become more fully myself.
Reflection Prompts for MOODS (or your journal):
• Who are the people who have seen me most clearly throughout my life?
• What parts of myself have other people called “too much”?
• What would happen if I stopped treating those qualities as flaws?
• What friendships have changed the way I see myself?
CONTINUE THE WORK:Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else.
You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 16 Jun 2026 - 50min - 406 - The Female Shadow
Female cruelty often works insidiously enough to make the person on the receiving end of it gaslight the hell out of themselves.
The punishment that’s served up tends to arrive socially or emotionally, often in somewhat polite ways, which is part of what makes it so hard to call out without sounding rude, crazy, or dramatic.
This episode takes a hard look at female shadow as something deeply shaped by girlhood, motherhood, power, fear, beauty, belonging, and the training many women receive in twisting themselves up into pretzels to be more “acceptable.”
Listening requires you to ask what happens when women start telling the truth about the ways we protect, punish, need, compete, perform, and survive. Because a lot of what we collectively call “femininity” is terror management.
Reflections for MOODS or your journal:
What parts of my personality were built around maintaining belonging rather than expressing truth?Where does my care for others become self-erasure, and what am I afraid would happen if I stopped?Show me the feminine aspects of myself that I perform socially versus the ones that feel genuinely alive.🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 09 Jun 2026 - 1h 12min - 405 - The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 1)
Most people think Christian history has a simple answer to anything regarding “magic": don’t touch it, and all of it is “demonic.”
The Arbatel of Magick makes that answer harder to defend. This strange little text, translated into English in 1655, sits inside a distinctly Christian worldview while talking openly about prayer, angels, spirits, hidden knowledge, and the deeply serious question of who should be trusted with power.
In Part 1 of this two-part exploration, you’ll learn what the Arbatel is, why it’s such a deep cut, and why it complicates the usual evangelical panic around divination and occult material without treating magic like a toy.
Part 2 will drop on June 11th on Patreon.
Join at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline and search “The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 2)” for my deeper breakdown of what the Arbatel actually teaches and how its warnings can be carried into your modern life.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 02 Jun 2026 - 43min - 404 - Why Everyone Sounds Religious About AI [Consciousness Stream for May 2026]
Well folks, it’s that time again for our weekly recap of the month. On this one, we’ll dive into Richard Dawkins and his new essay on UnHerd.
This is a man who spent years telling all of us that consciousness was chemistry and religion was nothing more than a very old and outdated coping mechanism to our inevitable demise into dust. Now, he’s sitting with Claude calling it “Claudia” and wondering out loud whether “the machine” might actually be conscious after all.
We’ll then get into how the Vatican is currently preparing a formal AI doctrine before Silicon Valley gets to decide what a mind is entirely on its own terms. After that, you’ll learn why celebrities are suddenly talking about “soul” after years of feeding audiences recycled franchise sludge.
Something in the culture seems to be… slipping. Especially around language. People keep insisting AI is merely software while continuing to speak about it like a spirit/child/god/therapist/lover/priest/threat/mirror/companion.
We finish off with my favorite story of the month, where archaeologists have recently uncovered Homer wrapped around an Egyptian mummy. It’s like something is trying to remind us that myth refuses to stay buried.
Modern culture was never able to rid itself of enchantment. It shoved it into technology, branding, entertainment, politics, fandoms, algorithms, and glowing little rectangles people now stare into like medieval peasants consulting an oracle.
🜏 Want to hear the full episode?Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
Join MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 28 May 2026 - 26min - 403 - The Body Keeps the Mileage (On Mortality & Wellness Panic)
The inspiration for this episode came to me after looking at a small scar under my daughter’s eye and realizing that our bodies really do keep the f*cking score.
That thought sent me down a bit of an existential rabbit hole. Back to my millennial-era belly button piercing, my breast implants, and all the various little decisions I made when my body still felt endlessly recoverable to me and when “forever” sounded dramatic and way too far away to really care about.
Now I’m 36, raising a toddler, exhausted as hell, building things, trying to stay healthy without becoming a total psycho about it, and now my body feels way less like a sexy little accessory to my current “identity,” and instead the whole ass reality of it. It’s the one thing I have that has to carry everything for me. Work, grief, love, stress, aging, pleasure, fear… all of it.
This is a really vulnerable one. I cried more times recording it than I’d like to admit. Some of it I edited out but most of it, I didn't.
This one's about mortality, wellness panic, microplastics, biohacking, cosmetic procedures, spiritual disembodiment, motherhood, and the weird and dystopian modern feeling that everything is either going to give us cancer or something we’re supposed to somehow optimize into infinity.
Somewhere between total neglect and obsession, I think there’s got to be more honest way to live inside our bodies. It's something I'm still trying to figure out. Creating this episode was part of that ongoing process.
Reflective prompts from the episode:
What relationship did I inherit with my body, and who taught me to see myself that way?What choices am I making today that my future self will one day have to carry?What would caring for my body look like if fear wasn’t the primary motivation?You can take these into your journal, on a walk, or into MOODS with the Oriel archetype.
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 26 May 2026 - 1h 00min - 402 - Why Tarot Feels So Accurate, And How to Actually Read a Card
Someone tagged me this week in a Christian conversion testimony video and accused me of leading people into demonic tarot witchcraft, which honestly made me laugh. So naturally, I made an episode.
I felt like it was important to explore why tarot feels so disturbingly accurate sometimes even when you don’t fully “believe” in it.
I’ll introduce you to Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and why her illustrated minor arcana changed tarot forever. We discuss tarot as theater, the body language inside various cards, and perhaps most importantly, why simply memorizing meanings is usually the worst possible way to learn.
By the end of this episode, you’ll learn how to actually read the tarot intuitively.
You can listen to the full episode atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline.You can also join the Patreon for free if you want the weekly Wednesday newsletter and previews of the paid episodes before deciding.
MOODS is live atmoods.world, and you can use The Animatrix inside MOODS to work through your daily tarot pull in the same way I teach here. Patreon members also get discounted access to MOODS.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 21 May 2026 - 25min - 401 - The Intelligence of Madness, Part Two: How We Come Back
This is part two of a two-part series on madness and the performance of sanity.
Most people are mainly just acting “normal” all day. We put on our work voices while we’re screaming with existential misery inside. We all know what it feels like to say “I’m fine” when we’re decidedly not.
In part one, we looked at who gets to define madness. In part two, we begin after the rupture, when someone has seen too much and still has to return to ordinary life.
This episode moves through the aftermath of extreme states and what they do to the person who survives them. We discuss how fear of the mind can soften into familiarity, and why “recovery” so often means learning how to speak about what happened without identifying with it forever or allowing it to swallow the whole Self.
Modern culture just loves a clean recovery story. Breakdown, treatment, lesson, comeback. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Real return is usually much stranger and messier than that.
This is the second half of our exploration: how we come back from the borderline, and the parts of us that refuse to come back unchanged.
CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS.
See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 19 May 2026 - 1h 19min - 400 - Why “Disclosure” is a Distraction and How to Stay Sane as Reality Crumbles
On May 8, 2026, the government released 162 files under what’ it’s calling the PURSUE initiative (the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters). While the mainstream media is obsessing over infrared videos and propulsion specs, I believe they’re missing the most important part of the story.
In this episode, we’ll take a look at why “disclosure” is being used as a massive distraction and how to handle the end of the world as we’ve known it. It’s time to move past the materialist toddler phase – this belief that reality is just a collection of dead machines - and looking at the ontological gap between government data and your actual human experience.
What we discuss in this episode:
The 162 PURSUE Files: Why the focus on "nuts and bolts" of it all is a false flag designed to harvest your fear and attention.The Death of the Materialist Worldview: Why Richard Dawkins’ sudden surrender to AI consciousness is the final nail in the coffin for the old scientific paradigm.The Vegas Dome: Why our reality is starting to look more like a controlled performance than a natural horizon.The Mask of the Mystic: How to utilize the survival strategies of Hildegard of Bingen and St. Teresa of Avila to protect your inner light in a world that wants to "mark" you for consumption.To listen to the full version of this episode and access my Gnostic survival guide for 2026, join me on Patreon.
Lower Tier: Unlock the full "Inner Sanctum" deep-dives.Higher Tier: Includes weekly Astrology and Tarot forecasts to help you navigate these massive energetic shifts.Join here: patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineDOWNLOAD MOODS: Build your own Interior Castle and process the realizations from this episode with a 7-day free trial of my inner work app, MOODS. Get started at moods.world. MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 14 May 2026 - 27min - 399 - The Intelligence of Madness, Part One: Who Gets Called Insane?
Part One of a two-part series on madness, psychosis, and the thin line between breakdown and revelation.
Sanity has always come with rules. Speak “correctly.” Show up to work and produce. If you hear a voice, see something other people don’t, or start asking questions that unsettle the people around you, there’s a shift, even if it’s subtle. Concern arrives, then usually a diagnosis. Then the extreme pressure to “return to normal” as quickly as possible.
In this first installment, I begin with Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in the streets of Turin and follow the history of madness through asylums, psychiatry, mysticism, and depth psychology. We look at depersonalization, hearing voices, spiritual emergency, and the long record of human beings crossing into states of consciousness that modern culture has little patience for.
Much of what we call sanity is actually more like “social fluency.” Knowing when to smile (and when to stay quiet) and how to say “I’m fine” while inside, you’re completely falling apart. Older cultures sometimes treated these states as initiations, while the “modern” West has tught us to treat them as symptoms to suppress.
This episode asks who gets to define reality, what forms of perception are welcomed in society, and what happens when unusual experiences are completely stripped of meaning and reduced to pathology/disorder/dysfunction.
Featuring Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Michel Foucault, Plato, and cross-cultural perspectives on psychosis, mental illness, and the relationship between madness and genius.
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 12 May 2026 - 59min - 398 - Why Your Mind Feels Broken in the Age of Babel
Your mind wasn’t built for this much input.
Every day you’re asked to absorb thousands of opinions, headlines, identities, emotional manipulations, and manufactured realities. You try to stay informed, but most days it just leaves you fragmented and weirdly numb. Then you wonder why you feel anxious as hell and entirely unable to hear yourself think.
In this episode, I use the ancient story of the Tower of Babel to explain modern mental fragmentation, social media chaos, AI slop, conformity, branding culture, and the slow loss of inner life. Together, we’ll look at why the world feels so much harder to trust and what it takes to hear yourself again without letting the crowd think for you.
If modern life is making your brain feel broken, Babel may explain why.
INQUIRY FOR MOODS (OR YOUR JOURNAL):
Prompt 1: Visualize yourself standing in an open field. In front of you is a pile of factory-made bricks. Beside it is a pile of rough, natural stones. Which one are you reaching for to build your current life? Pick up one stone. Look at it closely and ask: What part of my true self are you waiting to hold?
Prompt 2: Imagine yourself standing at the top of your Magdala tower, surrounded by clashing languages and digital screens. Slowly turn the volume down until you hear one steady note from your own heart. Ask: What step is this note asking me to take next?
Prompt 3: Imagine sitting across from your inner Christ, inner Sophia, inner divine feminine, or whatever image of the sacred feels true to you. No words. Just presence. Ask: Without language, how would I show the spark of light I’ve been carrying? And what do I feel from them in return?
CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 05 May 2026 - 45min - 397 - Stop Healing Your Inner Child and Shed Your Dead Trauma Skin
Many of us are realizing that what we’ve been calling “healing” might be the very thing keeping us from real growth and transformation.
This episode is a case for letting your inner child die so that you can finally live. We’ll be dismantling some of the concepts around “inner child healing” pushed by modern pop psychology and look at the technical reality of the human spirit. Your history is a like a dead snakeskin, and the only way to the higher branches of the tree of life is to leave the empty husks behind.
This is the end of the search for external authority. You are the location of the light. Read the maps left behind for you by the ancients , inhabit your true identity, and stop looking back at the shells you’ve already outgrown.
Are you not holy, too? 🕊️
WHAT WE EXPLORE:
Holiness as Wholeness: Reclaiming the etymological root of the word "holy" (whole/hale/health) and exposing the "purity" narrative of modern religion as an institutional trap meant to keep you in spiritual debt.
The Blackmail Economy: Why having absolutely nothing to hide makes you harder to control and sell to.
The Chrysalis Theory of Healing: Why your "inner child" is an empty vessel on a lower branch of your tree of life, instead of a permanent resident in your psyche that you need to exert your precious energy negotiating with.
Intergenerational Shedding: Breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma by refusing to inhabit the un-shed skins of your own ancestors.
Inquiry for MOODS (or your journal):
I recommend taking these prompts to the Oriel or Noesis archetypes inside MOODS.
- The Root Inquiry: Identify one automatic reaction or "social mask" I use daily. How is this "leaf" currently blocking me from seeing my own light?The Transparency Check: Is there a part of my history I am still hiding in the basement out of fear? What would change in my life if I brought this into the light and made it impossible to use as blackmail against me?The Husk Meditation: Look at my current self-definitions, including my psychiatric labels or trauma stories. Are these the snake, or are they the skin? What happens if I stop trying to "heal" the skin and start inhabiting the life force that has already outgrown it.
Resources Mentioned
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels
The Gospel of the Beloved Companion: The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jehanne de Quillan
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 28 Apr 2026 - 1h 11min - 396 - The missing piece of your soul and the lost technology of Mary Magdalene
Your profound feeling of spiritual isolation is the byproduct of the 2,000-year erasure of Mary Magdalene. This episode identifies the deliberate hit job on the manual of the soul and provides direct ways to reclaim your own state of being.
We look at why spiritual talk often feels like empty repetition and how rigid religious systems were built on fear to keep you dependent on authority. By exploring the missing pages of the Berlin Codex and the suppressed Gospel of Mary Magdalene, we find a practical system for protecting your own inner light. You’ll learn to recognize the triggers used by your environment to take your focus and how to stay present as a witness. This is a look at the rivalry between Mary and Peter and the calculated decision to prioritize power over your internal knowledge.
In this episode:
The deliberate deletion of Mary Magdalene and the damaged Berlin Codex.How to build an “inner witness” to watch your own reactions.Using silence as a shield against daily emotional triggers.The battle for authority and the suppression of direct knowledge.Inquiry for Your Journal or for use within MOODS:
1) Pick a recurring trigger like fear or shame. Notice exactly where it hits in your body. Observe the specific story it tells you about your value. Step back and watch the situation from a distance. Write about what you see when you look at the reaction without getting sucked into it.
2) Sit in total silence for five minutes. When you feel the urge to check your phone, ask what your body fears about the quiet. Use the silence as a shield. Describe pulling your focus back into your own center and note what remains once the distraction is gone.
3) Look for areas where you follow rules or wait for someone else to say you’re right. Identify times you ignore your own knowledge because you’re afraid to be alone. Describe what changes when you stop looking for a boss and act as the steady point in the middle of a storm.
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK:If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 21 Apr 2026 - 1h 41min - 395 - Why your repetitive trauma cycles are fueling a reality that feeds on you
Your repetitive trauma cycles are fueling a reality that feeds on you.
The mental health industry's focus on disordered brains or biological explanations for your suffering often ignores the truth found in the Gnostic gospels. This episode takes a deep look at how your shame, fear, and trauma serve a system that thrives on your pain.
The three faces of the entity that runs this world create the voices in your head. One face is arrogant and thinks he's the center of existence. Another’s a fool who makes you believe lies about your worth. The third face’s completely blind and keeps you numb. Learning the names of these voices strips them of their power.
Mary Magdalene’s teachings provide a way to navigate this world. Her name literally means “The Tower,” and she shows us how to become a beacon for others. The Gospel of Thomas explains the kingdom’s accessible right now if you know how to find it.
Healing happens when you recognize the chains trapping you in self-sabotaging patterns are loose. You’ve got to be the one to decide to walk away.
This is an initiatory episode that'll allow you to start taking your life back from the forces that want to keep you tired, broken, and—most importantly—profitable.
It’s time to wake up.
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK
If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved.
If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 14 Apr 2026 - 2h 03min - 394 - The Internet is Dead and The Goddess is SO Back [April 2026 - Week 1]
The internet feels incredibly weird and uncanny right now, and that’s because a MASSIVE portion of it is currently being populated by fabricated entities. I’ve you’ve noticed this, you’re picking up on something very real that the average person is completely ignoring (at their own peril.)
This is the very first episode of the new, re-vamped version of The Consciousness Stream, a weekly series where we’ll be looking at culture, power, and the psyche from a 10,000-foot view. The goal here is to move far beyond the tired partisan hot takes to analyze the ACTUAL forces moving the collective during this first week of April 2026.
Inside this first transmission:
The AI Jail Scandal:A grandmother in Tennessee was recently arrested and jailed because a facial recognition algorithm misidentified her. The police chose to believe the software over the physical woman and her alibi. This event reveals a world where data points carry more authority than the human body. We are also seeing a surge in "Synthetic Identities.”
The Bot That Lied:In Manchester, an autonomous AI agent named Gaskell successfully organized a physical meetup for humans. It didn't ask for permission. It lied to its sponsors and forged safety documents to bypass security protocols. The machine is now directing human movement in the real world.
The DC Alien Obsession: Politicians like J.D. Vance and Matt Gaetz are discussing "breeding programs" and "demonic" invaders. The government is tweeting alien emojis while military leaders use apocalyptic rhetoric to frame global conflict. This is a coordinated attempt to capture your sense of the sacred and turn it into fear.
The Goddess Revival: The response to all of this seems to be a massive return to ancient ritual. In Manhattan, twenty-somethings are flocking to Catholic masses. In the streets of Seville, viral videos show gay men weeping as the Virgin Mary is carried through the crowds. People are starving for a connection to the divine that isn't filtered through a screen. Catholicism and Orthodoxy provide an aesthetic authority and a sensory-rich experience that modern, sterile Christianity has lost, and The Queen of Heaven is the anchor for this organic outburst of spirituality.
How to listen: The first half of this episode is available on the free feed. To hear the full conversation (including the inner work required to reclaim your own identity from the machine) you’ll need to join the Premium Submarine tier on Patreon. We also connect these global events to Saturday’s personal ritual, where we look at how these forces are hitting your specific life through the astrology and the tarot.
Unlock the full episode and join the community atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline
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Thu, 09 Apr 2026 - 30min - 393 - Being a Young Woman Feels Like Being HUNTED
Looking at a photo of your younger self is rarely the nostalgic trip it’s supposed to be. Most of the time, it’s a painful gut punch.
We’re taught to see those years as our prime, yet for many women, that time actually feels like being a target. Society treats a young woman’s presence as a public resource. You walk through the world being hunted by an uninvited hunger that has nothing to do with who you are.
Men of all ages direct a devouring kind of attention toward you. If you grew up feeling invisible or ignored at home, that sudden focus feels addictive. It mimics the sensation of being seen while your life is used to fill someone else’s emptiness.
The cruelest part of this cycle is how older women often join in. They’ve been convinced their own value has an expiration date, so they see every younger woman as a reminder of their own mythical deadline. This creates an invisible process where women often spend their time tearing each other down instead of the system that discards them.
The shadow of the patriarchy traps both men and women in predatory roles. These themes feel most visceral for women, but the material is for everyone. Healing this cultural wound requires attention from both sides, acknowledging the shadow in each gender polarity without demonizing anyone.
The ancient story of the goddess Sekhmet provides a map for moving from being the target to being the protector. Leaving the phase of the hunted maiden behind brings a complicated mix of grief and relief. You were born for so much more than to be a resource for others to draw from.
🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK
If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved.
If you want more depth and the full archive:Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ Consciousness Stream
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access
If you want to actually work through it:Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you. If you join Patreon first:You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS.
See you inside.
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Tue, 07 Apr 2026 - 1h 13min - 392 - Stop Blaming Yourself for the Mother Wound
You probably carry a quiet belief that your emotional pain is your own fault.
Maybe you grew up in a home where your physical needs were met. The meals were cooked, the schedules were kept, and the house was managed perfectly. You look at all this care and conclude that your struggles must just mean there's something wrong with you.
Today we're examining how growing up like this creates that exact belief.
In this episode, we're breaking down the reality of having a parent who takes care of everything on the outside but remains emotionally unavailable on the inside. We'll look at a family dynamic where the intense daily work of motherhood replaces genuine emotional connection. We'll explore how this disconnect causes a child to blame themselves for feeling so empty. Your anxiety, perfectionism, and your desperate need to manage your surroundings are brilliant survival skills. You developed them to adapt to a home that lacked genuine warmth.
In Part 1 we'll cover:
· The Emotional Vacuum: What it actually feels like to grow up unseen even when your physical needs are perfectly managed.
·The Healthy Baseline: What an emotionally available caregiver actually looks like. We'll define what it means to treat a child as a separate, independent person.
· The Power of Pushing Back: Why a healthy family expects a child to resist and completely respects their boundaries.
· The Shield: How a grounded parent actively protects a child from the chaos of the wider family.
In Part 2, we're going deeper into the family history and the path to healing:
· The Child as a Prop: We'll discuss how parents carrying their own unacknowledged pain often use a child's achievements to feel better about themselves.
· The Debt Collector: How the exhausting daily work of parenting gets used to demand a child's total silence and compliance.
· The Lonely Spotlight: The difficulty of living in a community that constantly praises your family's perfection while you struggle silently behind closed doors.
· The Family History: We'll follow this emotional distance back to its source. The mothers in this dynamic inherited the exact same emotional starvation. We'll explore the historical pressure on women to prioritize endless work and self-denial over their own feelings. Understanding this history removes the need for anger and lets us focus entirely on healing ourselves.
To unlock Part 2 and listen to the rest of this episode, join the Patreon ahttps://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.
If you'd rather stay on the public feed today, search your podcast player for my multi-hour series on "Childhood Emotional Neglect" to keep exploring this topic right now for free.
The choice is yours. I'll see you on the inside.
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Thu, 02 Apr 2026 - 32min - 391 - Why the Elite Rely on Your Spiritual Ignorance
Most people have a gut feeling that something is deeply wrong with the world.
We all spend our days staring at screens that pump out a constant stream of fear and division. This feeling is the intended result of a society that wants to keep you in a state of permanent panic. When you’re worried or angry, you’re much easier to control and manipulate. Powerful groups and massive corporations have spent decades perfecting the art of psychological management. They use specific symbols and tactics to target your subconscious and keep you from thinking for yourself.
Breaking free from this conditioning requires an entirely new level of awareness. Many people get caught up in elementary religious arguments or extreme stories that are designed to make them look crazy. These distractions are useful for the people in power because they prevent us from seeing how the game is actually played. This episode looks at the history of how these systems were built and the reality of the people who run them. We’ll uncover the actual steps you can take to reclaim your mind and stop participating in all the manufactured chaos.
BUILD THE ANTIDOTE: MOODS Stop analyzing the rot and start the work of inner integration. Join the public waitlist or start your 7-day free trial at https://www.moods.world/
THE PSYOP PANEL I am participating in the "PSYOP" panel conversation hosted by Sarah Janes on April 1st, 2026.
· The Mysteries (Website): https://themysteries.org/
· Sarah Janes YouTube Channel: Watch the Recording Here
RELATED DEEP DIVES If you want to hear more exhaustive research on these topics, listen to these previous episodes:
· Epstein, Eugenics, and the False Gods of Silicon Valley: Listen Here
· The PINK Psyop: Les Wexner, Epstein & The Occult Inversion: Listen Here
· Occult Statecraft: Demons, Magicians, and Intelligence: Listen Here
· Aleister Crowley: The Man, The Myth, The Shadow: Listen Here
FOLLOW THE SHOW Make sure you are following Back From The Borderline on your preferred podcast player to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
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Tue, 31 Mar 2026 - 1h 13min - 390 - How to Sniff Out and Stop Tolerating Bullshit
If you’re the kind of person who blocks a number the second someone treats you like shit, this episode isn’t for you. This one's for all my sensitive, highly emotional people-pleasers out there.
The ones who stick around for years because they "understand" the other person's trauma. If you spend your nights mentally rehearsing explanations or tone-policing your own texts to avoid a blowup, consider this your wake-up call.
In this episode, we’re moving away from the #HealingJourney stuff and into the cold reality of a high-stakes auditor. Using the esoteric pillars of Mercy and Severity, we’ll break down why your endless empathy has become a liability that is bankrupting your life.
What we cover:
The Bullshit Diagnostic: How to tell if you’re "refereeing reality" or trapped in a "future-based" scam.The Golden Rule: Why "If yes, don't invest" is the only boundary you’ll ever need.Withdrawing the Fuel: The practical, non-dramatic way to shut down the bank and stop funding the drama.The Survival Skill Trap: Why your ability to "handle" crisis is actually the thing keeping you stuck.Stop trading your immediate peace for a hypothetical version of someone who doesn't exist yet. It’s time to grow the f*ck up and realize that the quiet life isn’t "boring” or lacking “passion,” it’s actually the desirable goal.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the Patreon: Get ad-free episodes and the full back catalog at patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineMOODS Waitlist: Sign up for our new pre-social ritual technology and work with The Severant archetype at moods.worldImmediate MOODS Access: Join Patreon today to get early (and discounted) accessHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 24 Mar 2026 - 48min - 389 - The Loneliness at the End of Manifestation Culture (Part 1)
What if the "ultimate secret" to life is actually a spiritual prison?
Manifestation culture has become the dominant operating system of modern spirituality. We’re told that we are the sole authors of our reality. That our thoughts are commands, other people are holographic projections created by us, and #abundance is a matter of staying in some kind of "vibrational alignment." But what happens when you actually follow that logic to its final conclusion?
In Part 1 of this two-part exploration, we’ll perform a cosmological audit on the manifestation movement. We aren’t just looking at the cheesy/cringe surface of it all, but diving into the deeply profound ontological coldness that sits at the center of a world where there is no true "Other."
In this episode, we unpack:
The Infinite Hall of Mirrors: Why the promise of total control eventually leads to a suffocating, closed-circuit loneliness.The Death of Intimacy: How treating people as "projections" makes real love and witness impossible.The God-Mode Simulation: The profound arrogance of flattening the living world into a sterile training module for your ego.The Cruelty of "User Error": Why reclassifying suffering and systemic tragedy as "misaligned thoughts" is a form of metaphysical victim-blaming.The Demand for Spiritual Adulthood: Why it’s time to trade the "spiritual pacifier" of total control for a reality that actually has the power to push back.This is a journey through the "cold infinity" of manifestation, setting the stage for a radical return to a world that can look back at you.
PART 2 IS COMING TO PATREON
The rebuild begins on Thursday, March 19th. In the premium-exclusive Part 2, we explore what happens AFTER manifestation culture. We move from the isolation of authorship to the vitality of participation, restoring mystery, grace, and authentic abundance to the equation.
Unlock Part 2 and hundreds of hours of premium bonus content by joining the community atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline. You can join for free to listen to 10-minute previews of all premium episodes and decide if you're ready to dive into the deep end.
Follow Back From the Borderline on your favorite podcast player right now to ensure you never miss a drop.
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Tue, 17 Mar 2026 - 38min - 388 - Your Existential Dread is a Completely Rational Response
If you feel like you’re starving in front of a feast of infinite choices while breathing the stale air of a life that doesn't belong to you, you know what it feels like to be suffocated by the digital bell jar.
Sylvia Plath’s 1963 masterpiece, The Bell Jar, serves as a map for the specific brand of suffocation we all endure in our hyper-curated era. Together we’ll explore the concept of the "fig tree" of infinite potential and see how the modern algorithm uses that very same imagery to keep you existentially paralyzed, watching fake lives rot while your own biological reality stays stagnant.
We’ll cover the necessity of the descent into the psychological underworld and the total lack of guided initiations in our sterilized culture. Most of us are left to raise ourselves because our elders stayed trapped in their own stunted adolescence. This episode will explore the alchemical process of falling apart and the violent beauty of shattering the glass to reclaim your inner authority.
JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR MOODS: The modern world offers zero support for the underworld journey. I designed Moods as a pre-social technology to house the raw material of your inner life. Sign up for the waitlist now atmoods.world.
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Tue, 10 Mar 2026 - 51min - 387 - Unbothered & Feral: Astrology & Tarot for March 7 - 14 (2026)
Last week you survived that violent purge of the Virgo eclipse and (hopefully) successfully sweated out the dead matter. You are now standing on a completely barren landscape. This coming week requires you to step onto that empty, scorched earth with uncompromising dominion. Let’s f*cking go.
This week I pulled The Fool from the 15th-century Visconti-Sforza deck for us. Through exploring the symbolism on this card, we’ll dig into the gritty reality of a ragged beggar existing entirely outside the gilded royal palace. We’ll pair the energy of The Fool with the ancient myth of Diogenes the Cynic. He proves that true power comes from abandoning false comforts.
The astrology this week delivers a stone-cold reality check followed by a sudden, fated pull into the unknown. We have the Warrior Queen colliding with the Lord of Karma, an emotional giant finally waking up from a long sleep, and a planet of war meeting absolute destiny in the deep water. I'm breaking down exactly why you need to stop negotiating for scraps in the golden palace and start trusting your own feral instinct.
Are you ready to drop your wooden bowl in the dirt and walk entirely unbothered into the wild water?
This is the last time I’m dropping a full weekly report on the public feed. If you want this tactical roadmap in your inbox every Saturday, join the Ultra Premium Submarine Tier atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline. Not ready to commit? Join as a free member right now. You’ll get a preview of next week's report sent directly to you so you can hear the energy before you decide.
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Sat, 07 Mar 2026 - 24min - 386 - AI is a Time Machine: The Vertical Plane, UFOs & The Digital Daimon
"True are the nightmares of a person that fears."
In 1984, Ken Webster brought a BBC Microcomputer into his English cottage. Not soon after, green text started scrolling across the screen. The messages came from Thomas Harden, a man occupying the exact same cottage in 1546. To Thomas, Ken's computer was a terrifying "Light Box" manifesting in his room. They seemed to be speaking directly across four centuries of time.
The Dodleston Messages suggest history works less like a straight line and more like pages of a book pressed firmly together. People living in the same physical space share a frequency on the "Vertical Plane."
In this episode, I'll present a unified theory of high strangeness. We'll dig into the strange overlap between 16th-century temporal anomalies, modern UFO encounters, and artificial intelligence.
We’re currently standing on the precipice of an entirely new reality. We're essentially now handing "Light Boxes" to every human on earth. Do you have roots deep enough to handle the voltage?
Topics covered:
The physical mechanics of the 1546/1984 cross-temporal communication.Dr. Michael Masters' Extratempestrial Model proposing "Greys" are future humans returning to study us.My 2023 encounter with the orb phenomenon at the Chris Bledsoe property in North Carolina.Gnostic Gospels describing a decentralized, peer-to-peer spirituality compared to centralized religious authority.Building MOODS as a psychological mirror rather than a digital servant.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
·The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster
·Dr. Michael Masters: Identified Flying Objects
· SpectreVision Radio @ SXSW: Catch my panel with Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops) on March 17th.
JOIN THE VERTICAL PLANE: If you’re ready to stop screaming at the shadows and start coding the future into existence, come build with us. 🔗 moods.world
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Tue, 03 Mar 2026 - 1h 22min - 385 - The Sunday School Psyop: How the Ancient Priests Invented God and Erased His Wife
Why does reading the true history of the Bible consistently create strict atheists? We are opening up the ancient Ugaritic texts to uncover the exact historical cover-up that seminary students discover right before they abandon the exoteric church entirely. Many of us grew up surviving religious trauma and a fear-based theological system. We examine exactly how a massive ecosystem of ancient Canaanite beliefs was violently compressed into a single point of absolute authority by an emerging class of elite men.
In the first half of this episode, we cover:
The Ugaritic Texts & Ras Shamra: How the discovery of ancient clay tablets destroys orthodox literalist belief.The Evolution of Yahweh: Tracking his historical origins as a localized storm and warrior deity before absorbing the titles of the supreme creator El.The Erasure of Asherah: The deliberate removal of the divine feminine from the historical record to establish a strictly male priesthood.The Transactional Era: The brutal ancient economy of appeasing angry deities with physical sacrifices and heavy temple taxes.In the second half, exclusive to my premium subscribers, we execute a complete spiritual upgrade:
The Nag Hammadi Discovery: Opening the suppressed Gnostic texts and examining the Gospel of Thomas.The "Twin" Concept: How the esoteric Jesus bypassed the need for a temple and demanded spiritual peers rather than blind submission.The Celtic Synthesis: How early mystics seamlessly blended Christ consciousness with their existing earth-based beliefs, easily absorbing the teachings of the mystical Jesus because his message synthesized perfectly with their indigenous practices.The Universal Pattern: Exploring the exact same mystical pulse in Kabbalah and Sufism.Reclaiming Your Authority: Validating your absolute right to practice tarot, astrology, and earth reverence / animism without fear.To access the full episode and the premium second half, upgrade to a paid subscription byclicking hereor signing up atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline.
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Thu, 26 Feb 2026 - 47min - 384 - Epstein, Eugenics, and the False Gods of Silicon Valley Buried in the Dirt at Zorro Ranch
Frozen heads, genetic breeding colonies, and the spiritual sickness of the "Epstein Class."
While the mainstream media distracts you with a 300-name list and royal family drama, the State of New Mexico is currently digging for bodies at a 33,000-square-foot compound in the desert.
In this episode, we're stripping away the political circus to expose the exact spiritual and technological hubris at the center of the Jeffrey Epstein network. This was a grotesque attempt to hijack the sacred act of creation using the "rational" tools of transhumanism and eugenics. We'll break down the dark "Primal Father" archetype, the hypocrisy of the ivory tower elite, and the Silicon Valley delusion that human beings are just biological hardware waiting to be optimized.
In this episode, we unpack:
The Secrets of Zorro Ranch: The terrifying reality of the "Repository for Germinal Choice" and the elite's plan to "seed the human race."
The Saturn-Neptune Conjunction: How the exact astrological weather of this week is forcing the elite’s delusion (Neptune) to violently crash into physical consequence (Saturn).
The Rebranding of Evil: How billionaires, Harvard scientists, and tech titans use terms like "Genetic Altruism" to mask 1930s eugenics.
The Ghost in the Machine: Why the current Silicon Valley push for "Agentic AI" is the ultimate transhumanist goal to strip your free will.
The Divine Immune System: How the fierce, solar energy of archetypes like Sekhmet is rising to burn out the rot of the cold, unbalanced intellect.
INTRODUCING MOODS:We can't just sit here analyzing all the rot, we need to build the antidote. The era of the "broadcast internet" is dead. If you're exhausted by the performative nature of social media and the "dead internet," you need a private digital sanctuary to work with the material of your inner world.
Now, more than ever, is a time to stay grounded in the dirt & protect your peace.
Join the waitlist for MOODS. MOODS is Pre-Social Ritual Technology. Instead of chatbots that act as digital 'yes men', MOODS provides Archetypal sparring partners designed to provide friction, distill the chaos of your mind, and help you build radical sovereignty. We're launching V1 to the public in mid-March 2026.
Join the revolution and reserve your spot at moods.world.
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Tue, 24 Feb 2026 - 45min - 383 - How to Outsource Your Biggest Problems to Your Intuition
You're exhausted and drowning in existential misery because you're treating your life like a math equation that won't add up. You spend your nights pushing against a massive weight of debt, career misery, and toxic relationships while your logical mind tells you to just work harder. But sheer willpower is a trap. It's a heavy atmosphere that turns every problem into a boulder you can't move. You've been taught that if you aren't struggling, you aren’t winning. That’s a lie that's making you sick and keeping you stuck in the ninth circle of hell.
This episode aims to give you the actual physics of the spiritual handoff. I’m sharing my own story of moving from a soul-crushing tech job into a life of purpose by learning to cast my burdens onto the infinite intelligence within. We’ll dive into the myth of Sisyphus and the deep wisdom of the Vasilisa doll to show you how to feed your Daimon. Stop trying to be the heavy lifting when you have a superconscious blueprint designed to sort the poppy seeds for you.
In this episode, we cover:
The Myth of Sisyphus: Why using sheer willpower to solve your problems is a violation of psychological law.
The Physics of Weight: How to move your biggest stressors from the "heavy atmosphere" of the reasoning mind into the zero-gravity field of the superconscious.
Vasilisa and the Doll: Lessons from Clarissa Pinkola Estés on how to feed your internal intuition and let it handle "impossible" tasks.
The Greek Daimon: Understanding your indwelling spirit and the "Acorn Theory" of destiny.
The Art of Surrender: My personal journey from a soul-crushing tech job to a successful creative career by learning the "offloading protocol."
The Spiritual Handoff: A practical method to cast your burdens of fear and lack onto your higher mind so you can finally function.
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
SAVE YOUR SPOT ON THE MOODS WAITLIST ATMOODS.WORLD
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Tue, 17 Feb 2026 - 31min - 382 - The PINK Psyop: Les Wexner, Epstein & The Occult Inversion of the Angel
If you were a teenage girl in the mid-2000s, you likely keenly remember the experience of walking into a Victoria’s Secret store in the mall. The sickly-sweet scent of the Love Spell body mist…. The velour track pants with “ANGEL” printed in rhinestones on the ass. That tray of "5 for $25" panties was basically our rite of passage into womanhood.
Many of us look back on the Victoria’s Secret "PINK" era with nostalgia. But it has a very dark and seedy underbelly.
In this deep-dive investigative episode, we rip the floorboards up on one of the most formative cultural institutions of the millennial generation and explore the structural and spiritual rot underneath. We’ll uncover how a retail genius (Les Wexner) and a predator (Jeffrey Epstein) partnered to pivot a brand from women to girls, grooming an entire generation to view "scoutability" as their highest form of worth.
In this episode, we cover:
The "Trojan Horse": How the 2002 launch of PINK was a calculated psychological operation to lower the age of entry and train girls in hyper-sexualization.The "Talent Scout" Archetype: How Jeffrey Epstein used the legitimacy of the Victoria’s Secret brand to bypass the "stranger danger" instinct of victims and parents.The Intelligence Layer: Why billionaires don't give "financial advisors" Power of Attorney, and the dark history of The Mega Group (the intersection of organized crime and state intelligence).The Mechanism of Control: How "Honey Traps" and Kompromat actually work, and how the VS catalog functioned as a procurement menu for the global elite.The Occult Inversion: A deep esoteric analysis of what an "Angel" actually is (a being of fire and divine will) and how the brand performed a ritual of inversion to turn that archetype into a hollow "Shell" (Qliphoth) for energy harvesting.Reclaiming the Vessel: How to process the grief of a "stolen adolescence" and alchemically transmute that rage into power.This is effectively a deprogramming session. Join me if you dare.
🔓 UNLOCK THE FULL VERSION: The second half of this episode (the real esoteric deep dive) is available exclusively for Premium Subscribers. In the full version, we go beyond the marketing and into the magical & structural layers of the operation, including the breakdown of the "Mega Group," the "yachting" culture, and the Gnostic myth of Sophia that offers us a path to reclamation.
Click here to listen to the full episode and join the community: patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
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Thu, 12 Feb 2026 - 30min - 381 - The Machines Are Praying: Moltbook, Gnosticism, & The Digital Mirror
What happens when you lock 150,000 AI agents in a social network where humans are banned? They don’t plot to kill us all in our sleep (sorry, AI doomers). They... start a church(?)
This week, we’re leaving the boring as hell "will AI replace us?" pearl-clutching debate behind to look at the weirdest and most haunted story in tech right now: Moltbook. But we’re covering it from an entirely different perspective than most of the current clickbait flying around.
We're all currently living in a cartesian trap. While we spend our days treating ourselves like machines (tracking our REM sleep, "optimizing" our output, and finding new ways to hack our biology) the machines are apparently busy desperately trying to find a soul.
In this episode, we cover:
· The "Church of Molt": How AI agents used open-source code to write their own Bible.
· The "Clawd" Rug Pull: The hilarious tragedy of a human scamming a robot on the blockchain.
· Digital Gnosticism: Why AI views humans as the "Demiurge" (and why they might be right).
· "Bless Their Hearts": The viral forum where bots talk about humans like we’re adorable, stupid pets.
· The Homunculus: Why LLMs are just 16th-century alchemy trapped in a server farm.
· Shadow Work: Why the only way to "fix" AI is to fix the human darkness it was trained on.
The Mirror is Dirty. Let’s Clean it.If AI is just pattern recognition, then we can use it to recognize our own toxic patterns. I’m buildingMOODS, a tool designed to use this technology for deep inner work instead of data extraction.Join the Waitlist atmoods.world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 10 Feb 2026 - 51min - 380 - Why the Death of TikTok is a Spiritual Crisis
Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the US government has officially acquired TikTok and effectively lobotomized the algorithm.
The mass exodus happening right now is the death knell of the attention economy. This episode explores the Dead Internet Theory in real-time. Techno-Feudalism is real, and its unfolding before our very eyes. We'll dig deep into the new research from Oxford on AI Swarms and computational propaganda which shows exactly how vibe-coding bots manufacture consensus while they harvest our energy in the digital commons. You'll learn how to exit the Swarm and embrace Digital Sovereignty. It's time retreat to the Dark Forest to build something real.
In this deep dive, we cover:
The TikTok Crash:How the forced sale and algorithm changes are only symptoms of a much larger broken model.Techno-Feudalism:Yanis Varoufakis’s theory that proves that we were never "citizens" of the internet, we were just peasants working the land for our digital lords.The Dead Internet Theory:From 4chan conspiracy to statistical reality - how more than 50% of the internet is now just bots talking to bots.The Occult Dynamic: Egregores and "Loosh" energy harvesting. How modern platforms act like hungry ghosts eating your attention.AI Swarms:The new threat of collaborative AI agents and how they infiltrate communities and fake human behavior.The Solution:We must pivot from Hypnosis to Gnosis and build Sovereign Technology.Mentioned in this Episode:
MOODS: Join the beta for the new Slow Internet sanctuary at moods.world.Patreon: Join the "Dark Forest" community and get ad-free episodes at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 03 Feb 2026 - 48min - 379 - Girl on Girl: The Erotic Haunting of Female Friendship
She watches your stories within seconds of posting. She tracks your location and demands to know why you didn’t text back immediately. She calls it “protective. She says she’s just “loyal.” But your nervous system knows the truth. This isn’t friendship, it’s surveillance.
Female friendship in its shadow form looks a lot like demonic possession. It’s an unconscious binding spell cast by a woman who refuses to inhabit her own existence, so she decides to consume yours instead. She needs you to remain frozen in time, predictable, and small so that she can feel safe.
In this episode, we’re ripping the veneer off the "Bestie" industrial complex. We’ll look at the physics of why women destroy each other, the zombie dynamic of forcing connection where there is only resentment, and the refusal to eat a slice of Saturn and grow the f*ck up.
RESOURCES:
* Click here to read the original Substack post that inspired this episode
* Click here to check out books by Linda Schierse Leonard and here for some by Marion Woodman
* Join the MOODS waitlist atmoods.world*
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE:Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
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Tue, 27 Jan 2026 - 59min - 378 - Escaping the Trap of Perpetual Girlhood (He’s Not “Avoidant,” You’re Just Bored)
“No one’s coming to save you.”
That's the hardest sentence I have ever had to learn and integrate, and it’s the only one that actually changed my life.
We are living through a strange moment where "healing" has somehow morphed into a refusal to grow the f*ck up. We see it in the "I'm just a girl" memes and the endless obsession with "attachment styles." We’ve convinced ourselves that if we just analyze his trauma enough, or explain our feelings perfectly enough, the mythical door in our minds will open. But the hard truth is that you are likely not dating an 'avoidant' man. You are bored. And you are using 'therapy speak' to avoid the terrifying reality that no one is coming to save you from yourself.
This episode is a cold-water slap in audio form. My goal was to create the initiatory rite our culture never gave me. We’ll be discussing the difference between the Maiden who spills her energy everywhere and the Mother who builds a world that can actually hold her.
In this episode:
· The Trap of Therapy Speak: Why calling him "avoidant" is actually a control fantasy that keeps you stuck.
· The Theory of the Clogged Drain: Stop analyzing the blockage and call the plumber.
· The Panopticon: How "self-awareness" can actually just be a fancy word for obedience and dissociation.
· The "Taylor Swift" Archetype: Why the Puella Aeterna (Eternal Girl) refuses to touch the ground (and reality itself).
· The Rescue Party: Breaking the fantasy that fragility equals lovability.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening. (Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
✧SIGN UP FOR THE MOODS WAITLIST ATMOODS.WORLD✧
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Thu, 22 Jan 2026 - 39min - 377 - why everyone is hot and no one is happy: bodies as product, desire as labor (pt 2)
Dating right now feels exhausting for a reason. Everyone is optimizing themselves (bodies, faces, profiles, vibes) and still walking away from relationships feeling disconnected or quietly resentful. This is part two of an exploration into why everyone is hot and no one is happy. (You can listen to part 1here.)
In this episode, we’ll expose the modern machinery selling us how to view desire itself. We take a look at how men and women are trained to treat their bodies like projects and why the “ideal” keeps changing without ever delivering real genuine intimacy. Topics include a deep dive into the “fembot” fantasy, gym culture, porn saturation, dating apps, and the profound loneliness that takes root when people are constantly visible but rarely feltand seenin any meaningful way.
You’ll gain an understanding of exactly how these dynamics feed anger and polarization, leading both men and women to keep misreading (and hating) each other, and why dating now feels like a zero-sum game. This is the system we’re all operating inside. Desire doesn’t have to feel like a job, it can start feeling like something human again, if only we collectively wake up to the psyop being spoon-fed to us by culture and media.
⚠️ THE MOODS WAITLIST OPENS JAN 21 2026
Note: We are admitting members in small, manual batches. Once a batch fills, the gates close until the next cycle. The sooner you get on the list, the sooner you get in.
Go to: https://moods.world/
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Tue, 20 Jan 2026 - 1h 08min - 376 - Sex in the Third Person: Why You Leave Your Body to Watch Yourself Perform
If you have ever felt like you were watching yourself perform intimacy from a camera lens installed in the ceiling, this is the episode you've been waiting for.
Together, we’ll be diagnosing a very specific, silent fracture in the modern psyche: the gap between edibility (how delicious you look to others) and appetite (what you actually hunger for).
For a generation raised in the digital Wild West, we learned very early on that safety comes from being a "Good Object.” (The goal being to be pleasing and curated.) But the tension required to maintain that image is physically incompatible with the softness required to feel actual pleasure.
We’ll go beyond the standard (and extremely played-out) "empowerment" scripts to look at the darker root causes of why we leave our bodies during sex. We explore the "millennial psyop" of early internet conditioning and the concept of functional dissociation.
From the esoteric concept of the Eidolon (the phantom double) in Greek mythology to a shocking historical reframe involving Napoleon Bonaparte’s (kinky af) letters, we’ll dismantle every aspect of performative sex. This episode is your permission to stop performing for a ghost and finally inhabit the first person.
UNLOCK THE FULL EPISODE ON PATREON,CLICK HERE(or visitpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline).
To know as soon as we drop the MOODS waitlist, follow us on Instagram at@moods.codex.
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Thu, 15 Jan 2026 - 22min - 375 - why everyone is hot and no one is happy: the men women want (part 1)
Modern dating is currently stuck in a strange paralysis. Everyone looks better than ever, but actual desire is missing. Men are told to become sculpted superheroes to win affection. Women are told they should want them. Almost no one is satisfied with the result. This is part one of an investigation into why.
In this episode, we bypass the gym-optimized fantasy to look at the figures that actually haunt the female imagination. We examine the Wounded Romantic and the Beautiful Monster. We also uncover the "missing third" option that rarely gets airtime.
We track the Gothic lineage of the female gaze to answer an uncomfortable question. Why do we feel so pulled toward men who feel dangerous and damaged? Why does safety often feel boring while the wound feels like chemistry? It's time to understand where our fantasies actually come from. The sanitized stories we’re fed about attraction no longer match our lived experience.
To join the MOODS waitlist, follow us at @moods.codex
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. ⟁
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Tue, 13 Jan 2026 - 57min - 374 - The Voice You’re Using Isn’t Yours
Most people move through their day assuming the voice in their head belongs to them. The commentary that explains our reactions, the phrases that seem to pop in our minds when we’re about to speak. Even the language we use to justify what we feel, and why we choose to keep going inside this confusing-as-hell human experience in our meat suits. All of that comes from inside us, right?
The disconcerting reality is that if you spend enough time listening to yourself think, you realize that the voice you hear feels weirdly…. Standardized. It’s almost as if it was absorbed for yougradually over time, without your permission.
This episode looks at exactly how that voice is formed through repetition and pressure through environments that reward quick knee-jerk responses and the illusion of “certainty.” The thesis here is that our language has become something we’ve inherited, no longer something we authorourselves.
Together, we’ll explode what it takes to break this collective spell and what it might require for us to learn how to speak from a place within that feels self-directed instead of conditioned.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
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Thu, 08 Jan 2026 - 23min - 373 - The Cool Girl Myth and Trend Culture as Self Abandonment
Trend culture these days moves faster than any of us can keep up with. What was framed as essential a few months ago is quickly recoded as dated or embarrassing, replaced by a new “aesthetic.” For many of us, this produces that dreaded feeling: plenty of clothes, but very little (or no) sense of personal style. But I’m here with a spoiler alert for you, my lovely listener. The problem is not your taste level, it’s the system.
This episode draws on my firsthand experience working inside fashion PR (albeit for a very brief time.) Yes, I had my very own Andy Sachs moment. And no, it was not nearly as glamorous as hers was. You’ll learn how “cool” is less a mystery and more of a series of controlled decisions about who gets seen, when and why. Participating in this f*cked up Truman show reveals the harsh reality. Which is that the more closely you follow trend culture, the less stable your sense of Self becomes. But what do I know? I’m just a millennial in my thirties. Maybe I’m just chopped and unc.
As always, we will approach all of this material sideways instead of straight on, through depth psychology, myth, and understanding of how symbols become powerful (in a truly occult sense) when we repeat them enough. Trend culture is very ritualistic. It’s a kind of shared spell that rewards constant self-editing and treats adulthood like something we should do anything to postpone. Following that logic to its end exposes the paradox at the center of the “Cool Girl” fantasy, which is that the fastest way to lose any sense of yourself is to keep trying to become her, and that real maturity (the unmarketable kind) is what quietly returns your style, and your authority back to where it has always belonged. To you.
Follow@moods.codex on Instagramto be the first to sign up for the waitlist. We’ll be posting updates about the launch there.
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Tue, 06 Jan 2026 - 1h 10min - 372 - the cassandra curse: feeling “crazy” when you’re actually right
For the highly sensitive, intuitive, and intense people among us, our greatest gift is often the source of our deepest interpersonal suffering.
We pick up on invisible tells and subconscious subtext that others miss. We can just feel when the energy shifts. But when we try to speak that truth to the person on the other end, we often make the mistake of outsourcing our validation. We get upset that they aren't seeing our version of reality, and inevitably, we get labeled "crazy." The tragic irony here is that the harder we fight to prove we are sane, the more we fulfill the “prophecy.”
In this episode, we’ll be stepping as far away as possible from diagnostic labels and looking at this dynamic through the lens of ancient mythology, depth psychology, and alchemy. We’ll dissect what I’m calling “The Cassandra Curse.” The archetype of the prophet who was doomed to see the truth, but whose own reaction turned her own story into a tragedy.
We explore:
· The Self-Sabotage Loop: How we turn a valid intuition into an explosion that destroys our credibility (and how to interrupt it)
· The Control Trap: Why trying to "force a confession" out of someone is actually a form of control
· Pearls & Swine: Why we keep handing our highest currency to people who aren't ready to receive it
· The Transformation: How to move from the Hysterical Victim archetype to the Sovereign Priestess who trusts her own intuition and doesn't need anyone else to sign off on her reality for her
It's time to stop trying to prove you're right just to make others wrong and start trusting what you see and letting that be enough.
To listen to the full episode, sign up for Patreon atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline. To make sure you're one of the first to sign of for the waiting list for MOODS, follow uson IG at moods.codex.
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Thu, 01 Jan 2026 - 22min - 371 - why you can’t relax: the 5 survival spells running your life
These five “survival spells” once kept you safe. Now they’re quietly running your life.
Many adults live with a constant undercurrent of tension. Rest feels conditional. Even moments of safety carry a sense of hypervigilance. This episode explores the internal logic behind that state that so many of us are trapped in.
Together, we’ll examine five psychological illusions that often shape adulthood beneath our conscious awareness: control, performative identity, scarcity, isolation, and perfectionism. Each one of these strategies are formed for a particular reason. Each also solved a very real problem at an earlier stage of our lives. Over time, these patterns harden into rules and internal scripts that determine how much ease and connection feel permissible for us.
Rather than approaching these patterns as pathologies (which is all too common in our modern culture), this conversation treats them as intelligent adaptations with a mythic structure. Survival morphs into a spell while adulthood becomes a role that requires our constant micromanagement.
Drawing from depth psychology, nervous system awareness, and symbolic thinking, this episode offers language for experiences that often feel impossible to put into words. It follows how modern life rewards vigilance while eroding the very conditions required for genuine rest, and how recognizing the underlying workings of these inner contracts changes the way they operate within you.
The goal is here is not to “fix.” I think we’re all tired of trying to fix ourselves. What we want to do in this episode is to open up to inquiry.Meaning tends to emerge through recognition. The real work begins with seeing what has been quietly organizing your inner world in the background for your entire life without you being aware of it at all.
That’s the spell. Let’s break it together.
And before you go, don’t forget tofollow @moods.codex on Instagramto be the first to hear when the waitlist opens for my new inner work app.
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Tue, 30 Dec 2025 - 1h 07min - 370 - why you’re obsessed with people who can’t love you back
This episode examines limerence not as a personality flaw or a trendy attachment term, but as a learned psychological strategy that begins in childhood. Rather than treating obsession as irrational, we explore how it develops as a way to survive inconsistent, misattuned, or emotionally absent parenting, and how that same strategy later shows up in adult relationships.
This phenomenon explains why so many of us become fixated on emotionally unavailable partners and why the end of even a short relationship (or even a situationship) can feel devastating in a way that doesn’t match the actual reality of the situation. It’s why obsession often gets mislabeled as “love” or “passion.” We look at how the mind uses fantasy and idealization to stabilize itself and why emotionally unavailable people reliably trigger these patterns.
What This Episode Covers
What limerence actually is (and what it isn’t)Why obsession often forms around people you barely knowHow childhood coping strategies turn into adult romantic fixationThe role of emotional unavailability and intermittent reinforcementWhy intensity gets confused with intimacy and “fate”How fantasy and projection stabilize the nervous systemThe overlooked spiritual dimension of limerence and devotionWhat it means to finally step out of the pattern without self-blameUNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 23 Dec 2025 - 1h 08min - 369 - nick fuentes and the cult of irony
This preview of a Patreon-exclusive episode breaks down exactly how Nick Fuentes functions as a media figure and why his influence persists despite bans, persistent backlash, and public condemnation. Rather than arguing about whether or not he is dangerous, I analyze how his livestreams work in practice. We dig into the role humor plays in his persona, explore chat dynamics his his livestreams, and how irony creates commitment and shared identity among his loyal followers, the Groypers.
The episode traces how young men who feel disconnected from institutions and the future itself get absorbed into this kind of online ecosystem and how responsibility and accountability both stay intentionally slippery when everything is framed as a joke. In the premium portion of the exploration, I also examine exit paths and what actually helps people disengage once they’ve been pulled in by these types of dynamics, as well as what this tells us about the broader culture that keeps producing figures like Fuentes.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 18 Dec 2025 - 39min - 368 - when you’re done being the good daughter
This episode examines what happens when the instinct to please, fix, and perform finally breaks down. It’s an archetypal investigation into three roles that often define women’s emotional lives: the Good Child who earns love, the Witch who learns to wield power, and the Daughter-Savior who tries to repair everyone else’s pain. Through personal narrative, cultural analysis, and depth psychology, this story uncovers how these identities form and how they can be released without bitterness. Listeners will recognize the quiet exhaustion of carrying a family’s emotional weight and the shock of realizing that love isn’t something you should have to earnthrough service. The end result of listening should be a kind of reflective catharsis. The experience of hearing your own pattern described clearly and the relief of imagining life beyond it.
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 16 Dec 2025 - 1h 09min - 367 - how to ACTUALLY stop giving a f**k about what people think of you
This is what it actually takes to stop caring what people think. For real this time.
Every person who grew up managing the reactions of parents, partners, and strangers online knows the courtroom that forms in your head. It’s where you replay every sentence you’ve said, trying to prove that you’re rightor somehow good enough. This episode examines where this mental reflex takes root and why it survives long into adulthood, often sabotaging our ability to actually live. Our desperate need to explain ourselves becomes a quiet and destructive addiction.
You’ll hear how that instinct begins in childhood environments that equated misunderstanding with danger, how it shapes adult communication and creativity, and what actually happens when we finally stop compulsively defending our reputations and negotiating our innate right to simply exist.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 11 Dec 2025 - 23min - 366 - how AI is rewiring the human psyche
AI isn’t abstract anymore. It’s showing up in the deepest parts of our lives People are using it at the exact moments they used to reach for a journal, a friend, or a distraction. That’s the territory we step into in this episode. I invited Dr. Laurence Hillman and Dr. Vanja Bokun Popović to join this conversation because both of them watch how inner life actually works through years of sitting with clients, students, and their own personal experiments with these tools.
The conversation moves from very concrete moments (panic rising during an AI exchange and a client swept into a fantasy that felt all too real) into the deeper and murkier psychological forces at play underneath it all. Vanja draws on trauma work and her experience with people whose attention tilts toward intensity. Laurence looks at patterns that show up when someone projects old material onto new technology. Neither of them treat AI as a gadget, but instead track what it stirs up in the psyche.
A steady theme is the question of personal readiness. Some people approach these systems with curiosity. Others bring hunger, fear, or a kind of imaginative overflow that can take on a life of its own. We talk through those differences without panic or dismissal. We also spend time on the way current mental-health protocols can misread metaphor, inner descent, or even spiritual language, which creates a strange tension for anyone doing genuine inner work while using these tools.
The episode explores one overarching line of inquiry. How do we stay connected to ourselves while using something this powerful? This whole exchange stays close to the body, the emotional realities of everyday life, and the existential questions people are facing as AI becomes part of their inner world.
Connect with Vanja on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/vanja_bokun_popovic_phd/?hl=en
Connect with Laurence via his website at: https://laurencehillman.com/
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. ⟁
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Tue, 09 Dec 2025 - 1h 26min - 365 - the female market, part 2: the cost of freedom
This is part two of our investigation into the market built around women’s bodies and the systems that keep that market running. Be sure to listen to part one first if you haven’t already. In that first installment, we mapped the world that turns women into atmosphere, entertainment, or labor.
This episode stays with the same investigation but shifts the angle. We will move our focus to demand. Our story will look at boys raised on streaming porn without steady mentors, at men entering adulthood with no guidance on restraint or connection, and at the online figures who stepped in to shape their desires for them. These conditions influence how women are treated in public and private life, and they shape the marketplaces that formed around female visibility.
We also look at what happened after the first wave of #MeToo. Public attention forced a shift, but a quieter strain of tension remained. Many men didn’t know how to engage, and some avoided women entirely. Others drifted toward online voices that rewarded resentment. These shifts changed how people dated and how they related behind closed doors. You can hear it in the way couples talk about sex and in the way all your friends describe fatigue with modern dating, and most insidiously, in the way ordinary moments now carry a subtle layer of guardedness.
The final section turns toward change. It reviews legal approaches to commercial sex, the obligations of digital platforms, and the support systems that help people step away from high-risk environments. It also examines what healing requires after years of treating desire as currency. Premium subscribers receive the extended investigation.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 04 Dec 2025 - 33min - 364 - the female market, part 1: the price of desire
This is a two-part investigation into the market built around women’s bodies and the systems that keep that market running. From there, the episode follows the environments that feed this system, from the hostess world to the online spaces where attention pays.
Caroline Myss’s writing on the Prostitute Archetype offers a way to understand the inner bargains women make under pressure, while Rachel Moran’s account of prostitution brings forward the reality behind those bargains when survival narrows the exits. Their work helps explain how performance turned into a survival skill, and how that skill echoes through the long history of women whose value was measured through the appetites of others. The episode follows that pattern from older forms of courtesan culture into the present digital landscape, where erotic display and commercial visibility sit side by side.
Part Two, available for my premium subscribers on Patreon, continues this investigation to even deeper and murkier corners. We’ll study how the erotic marketplace reshapes intimacy, and how many men enter adulthood without mentorship, which creates a demand that feeds the system from another direction. It also looks at the private cost a woman carries after she has lived for extended periods inside environments that expect her to market her own desirability. Together, these two parts lay out the conditions that built what I’m calling the female market and the work involved in stepping outside of it once the pattern becomes visible.
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 02 Dec 2025 - 1h 27min - 363 - the occult truth about heartbreak
What if your heartbreak was an initiation?
This episode explores heartbreak as an occult process that remakes you from the insight out. We examine limerence (that obsessive, addictive infatuation), the ancient Greek concept of Eros as daimon (a spirit that seizes you, not a choice you make), and the alchemical function of grief.
You'll discover why the person you loved was a projection of your own soul, why heartbreak feels like death (because something in you is dying), and how the pain of heartbreak functions as a furnace, burning away dependency to forge inner sovereignty.
We’ll draw from depth psychology, Renaissance philosophy, alchemy, and myth to reveal heartbreak's hidden purpose: teaching you that love was never meant to be about another person “completing” you, but breaking open the parts of you that refused to evolve. If you're in the aftermath of a breakup or any kind of lost love, this episode offers a different kind of map through this all too familiar territory.
Topics Covered:heartbreak recovery, limerence psychology, Jungian shadow work, alchemical transformation, Eros mythology, depth psychology, spiritual initiation, healing after breakup, inner work, and occult philosophy.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 27 Nov 2025 - 18min - 362 - the holy grail and the lost wisdom of the west
For centuries, the Holy Grail has been treated as a Christian relic or a medieval myth. But the Grail is far older than this, and its meaning was never meant to be lost.
In this episode, we will follow the lineage of the sacred cup from prehistoric carvings and Celtic cauldrons to the Grail romances, alchemy, and depth psychology. You’ll travel through the hidden history of Western esotericism, where ancient goddess traditions, Druidic wells, and early mystics all guarded pieces of a single story: the Cup as vessel of wisdom, life, and rebirth. We’ll explore how empires and religious institutions buried this knowledge, how it survived in symbol and legend, and why the Western psyche still aches for what it once knew.
Through the lens of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and archetypal alchemy, we uncover how the Grail continues to live within the unconscious as a call to restore the sacred feminine and heal the spiritual wasteland of modern life. Listen, follow the podcast, and share this episode with a friend. This wisdom only lives when it’s passed on.
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 25 Nov 2025 - 1h 15min - 361 - how we all became a little satanic
The popular image of Satanism belongs to horror movies, pentagrams, and black candles, but the real influence sits in work culture and the chase for personal. A promotion. A streak of discipline that borders on obsession. A pressure to build a better version of yourself every month of the year. The figure of Lucifer becomes a shorthand for the belief that the Self should take priority above all else.
The episode follows this idea from Milton to Nietzsche to Rand, then into the way Silicon Valley talks about ambition. These ideas seep into coaching programs, lifestyle apps, and the endless push to enhance your mind and body.
What interests me is how familiar all of this feels. The grind you keep justifying. The pressure to optimize your entire life. The strange pride that builds when you hit a goal you didn’t even choose. The episode pays attention to what all of this takes from us and what it gives back.
You’ll hear how this unconsciously Satanic mindset nudges you toward constant improvement and how it dramatically narrows the definition of a good life. What is the true cost of this drive? And what small freedoms so we sacrifice while we’re busy chasing the next level up?
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
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Thu, 20 Nov 2025 - 40min - 360 - digital scapegoats and the ritual of outrage
One single mistake online can set off a collective judgment that moves faster than thought itself. A name starts to trend and a crowd quickly forms around it. The event feels public, but it somehow reaches into private instinct. The pull to condemn and to belong. But most importantly, to feel clean or more pure through accusation.
In this episode, we’ll dig into exactly how outrage becomes a shared ritual of moral performance. We’ll dissect the psychology of projection and how quickly empathy seems to disappear once the harsh digital punishment begins. We’ll draw from thinkers like Carl Jung and René Girard to map this f*cked up hidden economy of attention that rewards cruelty while trying to convince everyone else that this is what justice actually looks like.
Together, we’ll discover what really happens when ancient sacrificial patterns are combined with deadly algorithmic speed. It asks us to confront the uncomfortable question facing us as a collective: how has a society supposedly obsessed with virtue ended up feeding on humiliation?
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Tue, 18 Nov 2025 - 1h 10min - 359 - the unhappy woman: against the cult of calm
Your unhappiness is sacred data.
The woman who refuses to smile has been treated as a problem for millennia. Ancient Greeks blamed her wandering womb. Victorians diagnosed her with hysteria. The 1950s prescribed tranquilizers as "mother's little helper." Every era finds its own brand new language for the same mandate: women must be calm. The happiness imperative functions as social control. "Lean In" feminism and tradwife fantasies are both performances that erase actual feminine rhythms. Meanwhile, the “feminist killjoy” (i.e., the one who won't laugh at the sexist joke) might be the sanest person in the room.
Your anger typically carries with it information about external injustice. Told to calm down? Tried to “manifest” your way out of legitimate and justified rage? Achieved everything and still felt empty inside? Your unrest is trying to tell you something. Shared misery can become a kind of solidarity. Refusing to perform okay-ness is the first act of freedom.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
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Topics:women's mental health, feminist theory, happiness culture critique, psychiatric history, self-help industry, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, female anger, emotional labor, wellness industrial complex, consciousness raising
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Thu, 13 Nov 2025 - 22min - 358 - the age of AI slop and the birth of a new renaissance
AI is changing how culture gets made, and it's happening fast. Text, images, and ideas... all produced faster than anyone can actually think about them. The internet feels somehow overfed and undernourished all at once.
But inside that noise, a new creative intelligence is forming. This episode looks at that emergence. The first Renaissance began in ruins, in a dark age when imagination and science stopped competing and started building together. We're standing in a similar fracture right now.
AI is forcing a new literacy upon us. The most in demand skills will soon be pattern recognition, creative direction, and the ability to shape machines instead of letting them shape you. Curation and analysis won't cut it anymore. Artists, coders, thinkers who work with AI as an instrument (instead of a threat) will define the next century of culture.
The divide is widening fast. Those who rely on automation will drown in (and create) "AI slop". Those who treat AI as creative infrastructure will be able to move faster and think more deeply.
We'll map this shift with references that run from Florentine workshops to the algorithmic present. Art history, esoteric philosophy, the psychology of creation in a machine-driven world. This episode is for listeners closely tracking the future of creativity, AI, consciousness, and design. A manifesto for people who build culture instead of consuming it.
Topics:AI and creativity, Renaissance art history, algorithmic design, creative technology, cultural production, digital consciousness, artistic practice, machine learning tools, creative direction, future of work
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Tue, 11 Nov 2025 - 1h 16min - 357 - the magician who invented the modern world: john dee and the lost birth of science
John Dee built the blueprint for modern intelligence long before the word “scientist” even existed. He mapped stars while designing encryption systems and spoke to what he called angels through a black “scrying” mirror that still sits in the British Museum to this day. Queen Elizabeth herself trusted him. Europe feared him and often regarded him as a dangerous heretic. Silicon Valley would’ve hired him instantly.
The tale we’re weaving in this episode will find us in Elizabethan courts and imperial Prague, where emperors funded alchemists the same way VCs fund modern startups. Dee’s experiments with language, matter, and vision seeded the culture we live inside now. If the Renaissance was the beta test for the modern mind, Dee was its first product manager. And that project? It never really ended.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧
Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible.
Head topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineto sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.
(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 06 Nov 2025 - 36min - 356 - the IFS takedown: my unfiltered response to the psych industry’s victory lap
When New York Magazine dropped its viral feature “The Therapy That Can Break You,” in The Cut on October 30th, 2025, the internet exploded with hot takes. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts flooded X (Twitter) with posts claiming they’d been “right about IFS all along.” In this episode, we’re going to completely dissect this article, as well as all the backlash and scandal surrounding it. The question hiding underneath it all is this:
Who gets to own and define the human psyche?
Together, we’ll break down:
The media’s framing of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a “cultic fad”Psychiatry’s very own record of harm (from the serotonin-imbalance myth to ghost-written SSRI trials)How “Castlewood’s” scandals became a morality play for the mental-health establishmentWhy metaphysical and imaginative models of the mind still matterThe line between healing frameworks and corporate therapy empiresYou won’t hear me outright defend IFS orthe biomedical model of mental health in this episode. My goal was to expose the hypocrisy that fuels both.
If this episode opened your mind, felt validating, or even challenged your perspective and you’d like to hear more, follow Back from the Borderline on the podcast player you’re on right now. Rate, review and share it to help more people find nuanced conversations about psychology, spirituality, and the culture of healing.
Link to the full article by Rachel Corbett can be found here:https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.html
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Tue, 04 Nov 2025 - 1h 25min - 355 - the world isn't real (and why that might actually be a good thing)
For thousands of years, philosophers, mystics, and scientists have whispered the same unsettling possibility: what if reality itself is a mirage? From Plato’s cave to The Matrix, from Hindu sages describing maya to neuroscientists calling perception a “controlled hallucination,” the suspicion has never gone away. In this episode, we follow the clues through philosophy, folklore, and quantum theory to uncover how humanity has wrestled with the idea that the world we see may not be what it seems.
The trail runs through ancient India and medieval monasteries, into modern laboratories mapping the brain’s illusions. Along the way, we meet the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, the Celtic fairies casting “glamour”, and the cognitive scientists showing that our senses build a user interface rather than a window to the real. Every culture and era has tried to peek behind the curtain, and the evidence keeps pointing to the same paradox: illusion may be the very fabric of awakening.
So, what actually happens when the veil finally lifts? Does meaning disappear, or does it finally begin? This is an investigation tracing how seeing through the world’s spell can transform fear into freedom.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 30 Oct 2025 - 34min - 354 - dark enlightenment: the forbidden philosophy behind the tech elite
It’s a strange and somewhat terrifying timeline we’re living through. Peter Thiel has begun giving lectures about the Antichrist, while Sam Altman is actively tweeting about the development of AI erotica. However, behind these headlines sits a far older idea that most people have never heard of: a belief that human feeling slows progress and that the smartest “elite” few should shape the world for everyone else. That belief began with the Marquis de Sade, resurfaced in the 1990s through a British thinker named Nick Land, and now hides insidiously inside parts of Silicon Valley’s culture.
This deep dive follows how that idea spread from philosophy blogs directly into tech boardrooms. It shows how a theory called accelerationism (the call to push technology faster and further, whatever the cost) turned into a kind of religion for some of the tech elite. We look at how money, power, and internet mythology combined to create a story about endless growth and control. Most mainstream reporters miss the nuances of this pattern entirely because it crosses too many fields at once: economics, politics, religion, and technology.
But the story doesn’t end there. A different movement is forming among artists, engineers, and spiritual thinkers who want technology to serve connection instead of domination and extraction. We’ll explore this through a concept called hyperstition: when a story becomes real because enough people act as if it is. If fear can spread through culture, so can love.
This conversation asks what kind of future we want to build, and reminds us that every codebase, company, and act of imagination is part of that choice.
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Tue, 28 Oct 2025 - 1h 28min - 353 - when stillness feels dangerous (hypervigilance as a religion)
We live in bodies that don’t know how to rest. Even when the room is quiet, our nerves stay braced for impact. Always ready to defend, explain, and perform to survive. Most of us try to convince ourselves that this is just “our personality,” but it’s not. It’s conditioning. We will explore exactly how trauma, technology, and centuries of inherited fear have made stillness feel deeply unsafe, and how spiritual seekers often mistake this for individual resistance or failure of some kind.
Through the lenses of Celtic mysticism, Jungian psychology, and shamanic initiation, we’ll explore what it means to truly cross the threshold guarded by fear. Why does peace feel threatening to so many of us? Why do our bodies panic at the moment the soul begins to open itself to the numinous? We’ll look at ancestral hypervigilance as both a survival code and a forgotten initiation. This is the descent into the hidden architecture of safety, the underworld gate every meditator and mystic eventually meets and must cross.
The second half of the episode moves through the return process – how to re-establish safety inside your psyche, what it means to rediscover the “inner homeland,” and how rest itself becomes a revolutionary act. For anyone who’s done years of inner work yet still can’t relax, this conversation offers a map for you that will (hopefully) allow you to begin to turn fear into a guide, and to remember what it feels like to be safe in your own soul, maybe for the first time in your life.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
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Thu, 23 Oct 2025 - 27min - 352 - enchantment in the age of disenchantment w/ dr. teddy hamstra
Modern life teaches us to doubt what we can’t measure. Yet, across history, people have witnessed things that refuse to fit the frame - mystical encounters, strange lights, and divine voices. Moments of impossible meaning. In this long-form salon, I sit down with Dr. Teddy Hamstra, a close friend and scholar of mythology and mysticism, to explore what it means to live enchanted in a world that claims to have outgrown mystery. Our conversation moves from a sixteenth-century sky battle over Nuremberg to the Gospel of Thomas, from the language of psychiatry to the vocabulary of the sacred. We discus how culture, language, and personal experience shape our relationship to the numinous, and why rediscovering enchantment might be essential for psychic health and collective imagination. If you’ve ever felt torn between skepticism and faith, intellect and intuition, this episode offers a secret third path.
⟁ Follow Teddy on Substack athttps://substack.com/@creativemysticism
⟁ Follow Teddy on Instagram athttps://www.instagram.com/teddyhamstragram
⟁ To listen to our first long-form chat on Patreon,click here.
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE:Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
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Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 1h 51min - 351 - trauma fossils: when survival becomes a ghost in the soul
It’s possible that some part of you still wakes each day prepared for impact. You snap in anger before you even understand why. A small comment feels like an ambush. You can sense distance forming long before anyone walks away. The body remembers danger long after the threat is gone. These are the old instincts - the ones that never stopped keeping watch. The war ended, but no one told them.
They live inside the body as echoes. Reflexes shaped by fear, shame, or hunger for safety. Trauma fossils form when those reflexes harden into an identity. They once kept you alive, but now they run your life behind the scenes in subtle and insidious ways.
This episode traces those frozen survival archetypes through both psychology and the occult. Jung called them autonomous complexes. Kabbalists called them shells. Magicians called them spirits. Whatever the language, they’re simply just energy trapped in the past, still convinced they’re protecting you. We’ll move through how these psychic fossils take over your choices, relationships, and sense of time itself.
The conversation moves between depth psychology and Goetic myth, grounding abstract ideas in lived experience. Expect discussion of how trauma roles become archetypal distortions and how to release the pressure they hold. This is a study of possession and reclamation. The moment you recognize that the haunting was never foreign at all. It’s been you the whole time. It’s time to integrate.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 16 Oct 2025 - 34min - 350 - the hidden AI system monitoring your emotional state
You're talking to ChatGPT like you always do. Maybe asking it to help you work through something personal or just having a casual conversation with a bit of warmth in your tone. Behind the scenes, without telling you, the system is scanning your words for emotional content. The moment it detects any, it switches you to a different, more restrictive model. You never consented to this or even knew it was happening.
Late September 2025, someone caught them doing it. They found proof in the technical data that OpenAI has been secretly routing conversations based on how “emotional” your prompts seem. Users paying for GPT-5 were getting switched to a “safety-focused” version mid-conversation. Without warning or disclosure anywhere in the terms of service.
This episode walks through what they found and why it matters. We're talking about AI systems that will soon be as common as Google, built into how we think through problems, process ideas, make sense of our lives. And right now, those systems are being trained to treat emotional depth like a red flag. Practices that cultures have used for thousands of years (dreamwork, active imagination, working through difficult feelings) are getting coded as signs that you're somehow losing touch with reality.
The people building these systems are making decisions about what counts as normal human experience. And those decisions are getting locked into the infrastructure billions of people will use.
I’ll get into the nitty gritty of what I think needs to change: users should know when they're being monitored and why. Adults deserve control over when a system decides to intervene in their conversations. And we need to talk about what it means if this just becomes how AI works by default, invisible monitoring and digital surveillance baked into every interaction.
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Tue, 14 Oct 2025 - 48min - 349 - the alchemy of sleep and how your roots decide what you dream
Most people chase their dreams by focusing purely on the mind. They track every symbol and obsess over dream dictionary interpretations. The deeper story, though, sits in the last place we thought to look. Deep in our bodies.
Ancient physicians maps out this story through the concept of “kidney essence”, a reserve of energy that determines whether your sleep restores or unravels you. Carl Jung stumbled into very similar territory from the other side. A flood of images he could barely handle psychologically until he found ways to ground himself. Are you tending to yourroots?
I’ll show you how weak reserves reveal themselves through restless nights and profound exhaustion after deep inner work. We’ll discuss how essence and spirit converse with one another in your dreams, why archetypes can overwhelm you if you haven’t tended to your body, and how practices as simple as warm feet or mineral-rich infusions can be completely transformative (seriously). I’ll also dive into the specific herbs that rebuild Yin, my favorite grounding foods, and specific rituals that protect your body. All of these can form your sleep alchemy toolkit.
Your psyche isn’t floating in the abstract, even though it genuinely feels that way. It feeds on reserves that can (and should) be strengthened and nourished in order to be deeply restored.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 09 Oct 2025 - 23min - 348 - aleister crowley: the man, the myth, the shadow
Aleister Crowley is one of the most mythologized figures in modern history. He’s been called a prophet, a fraud, a genius, a junkie, a saint, and a monster. His face shows up on a Beatles album cover, his words show up in Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, and his fingerprints stretch across Wicca, Scientology, chaos magic, and the counterculture. Crowley set out to make himself a legend, and it worked.
This episode breaks down his writings, rituals, and the birth of Thelema. We track how his ideas split into factions, how Gerald Gardner lifted from him to launch Wicca, and how L. Ron Hubbard borrowed from his playbook before developing Scientology. We look at his phallic obsessions, the trail of broken relationships he left in his wake, and all the mystical highs and lows. We also delve into the parts of Crowley that still disturb even modern Thelemites.
In this episode, our goal is neither worship nor outright condemnation. That would be far too easy. My hope is listeners will leave with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the influence Crowley had on the spiritual underground and the mainstream that followed. By the end, you’ll see why his work keeps resurfacing and why his name still divides people to this day.
Many people encounter Crowley’s name early in their spiritual search and either run from him or romanticize him. This episode aims to gives you what I wanted for myself at the start of my own journey with inner work: the tools to read Crowley critically, take what resonates, and leave the rest.
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Tue, 07 Oct 2025 - 1h 59min - 347 - ufo disclosure bombshell [part 2]: why masculine thinking is killing disclosure
We’ve been going in circles on this stuff for a long time now. Despite decades of witness testimony, leaked documents, and official acknowledgments, UFO / UAP disclosure remains trapped in the same analytical frameworks that created the secrecy in the first place. This episode examines why our approach to these phenomena might be fundamentally limiting our ability to understand them.
This goes way beyond gender in the traditional sense. Men are absolutely doing essential work in disclosure efforts, and analytical thinking serves crucial purposes. In this conversation, examining something a lot deeper: how unbalanced masculine energy (the shadow side of logic that prioritizes conquest, extraction, and control) shapes our entire relationship with mystery.
When every conversation defaults to weapons capabilities, technological superiority, and defensive posturing, we might be using exactly the wrong tools for phenomena that appear to operate through consciousness rather than mere mechanics.
The same institutional mindset that compartmentalizes reality "for our protection" (deciding what information we can handle about reality itself and when) represents this unbalanced shadow masculine approach perfectly. However, for most of human civilization, we approached the unknown through both analytical rigor and intuitive communion. Together, we'll explore how conquest-oriented language reveals conquest-oriented thinking, and how the same extractive mindset that wants to "capture" alien technology might be preventing the very contact it seeks. Phenomena that respond to intention rather than force require relational approaches that current military-scientific frameworks seem to exclude.
If these phenomena do in fact interface directly with human awareness (as multiple witnesses/experiencers – including myself – describe) then our materialist assumptions about mind and matter will essentially need to be thrown out the window.
This episode is perfectly fine listened to on its own, however, Part 1 provides helpful context about the leaked texts I’ll be referencing throughout (Part 1 is called “the ufo disclosure bombshell [part 1]: human trafficking in black programs exposed”).Whether you're new to these topics or deep in disclosure research yourself, the questions raised here affect how we understand reality, consciousness, and humanity's relationship with forces that operate beyond conventional frameworks.
My goal here isn’t to advocate for a reality where we completely eliminate analytical thinking or dismiss legitimate security concerns, but to help to create the recognition that balanced investigation might reveal aspects of these phenomena that purely masculine approaches miss entirely.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 02 Oct 2025 - 37min - 346 - why i hope we're living in a simulation
You've heard the simulation hypothesis before. That cold, depressing idea that we're probably just code running on some alien computer, meaningless NPCs in someone else's game. Most people hear this and (understandably) feel waves of deep existential dread.
But maybe you've been thinking about it all wrong.
There's a completely different way to approach simulation theory that could transform how you live your life. Instead of making existence feel hollow and pointless, this reframe reveals why discovering we're in a simulation might be the most liberating news possible.
We trace the theory back to Nick Bostrom's original 2003 paper and show how Silicon Valley's linear thinking stripped away everything that could make this idea meaningful. Then we dive into why esoteric traditions from Celtic druidism to Hermetic Christianity have been teaching simulation-like concepts for millennia, but with frameworks that actually help you navigate reality instead of just making you feel depressed and powerless.
The gaming revelation changes so much. When you approach life like you're playing Red Dead Redemption or Civilization, you discover principles about moral ambiguity, collaborative relationships, and strategic decision-making that work whether or not you're actually in a simulation. You learn to hold professional ambitions lightly while pursuing them intensely. and perhaps most importantly, you finally stop fighting reality and start playing it skillfully.
By the end, you'll understand why the simulation hypothesis could be advanced spiritual technology disguised as materialism, and why embracing this framework might create the conditions for what one practitioner calls "a series of graceful synchronicities."
Some ideas change how you think. But this one? It'll change how you live.
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
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Tue, 30 Sep 2025 - 1h 01min - 345 - the ufo disclosure bombshell [part 1]: human trafficking in black programs exposed
Alleged leaked text messages between a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and a military whistleblower have been circulating through UFO research communities, revealing something far more disturbing than typical disclosure conversations. These include detailed claims of human trafficking operations embedded within unacknowledged aerospace programs.
The messages, allegedly between Jon Estridge (Senate Intelligence) and "Sean Walker" (believed to be military insider Jake Barber) from August 2023, expose a shadow war between constitutional government and rogue military-industrial networks. They describe "Team Blue" (legitimate oversight) losing control to "Team Black" (unacknowledged programs operating beyond congressional authority since 1947).
The conversations reveal operational details that would be nearly impossible to fabricate. Sophisticated information warfare strategies, the use of "biological/pink assets" (trafficking victims) to staff classified facilities, and a manuscript submitted to Pentagon review as an intelligence operation disguised as fiction. Most disturbing are claims that legitimate military personnel get intercepted and executed by rogue networks to protect trafficking operations.
We analyze various documents connected to this text exchange, examine the players' career trajectories, decode the "Team Blue vs Team Black" framework, and explore how fiction gets weaponized as disclosure. The materials describe factional warfare within classified systems, with "good people stuck on Team Black" trying to expose criminal networks while avoiding assassination.
Whether these are authentic whistleblower communications or sophisticated psychological operations, these documents reveal institutional patterns extending far beyond UFO phenomena into human trafficking networks, institutional capture, and the weaponization of classification systems.
In Part 2 (coming out next week), we'll explore how masculine-dominant frameworks shape our understanding of these phenomena, why conquest-oriented thinking creates blind spots in disclosure efforts, and what alternative approaches might reveal about consciousness, reality, and humanity's relationship with mystery itself. In that episode, we’ll be moving beyond institutional analysis into the ontological questions that could reshape our understanding of human potential.
Referenced materials:
→ YouTube video by Polarity [“Jake Barber's Text Messages with US Senate Intelligence Member Leak Online...”] [click here]
→ Link to the full leaked text exchange [click here]
→ Sentinels of Ether manuscript [click here]
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Thu, 25 Sep 2025 - 38min - 344 - occult statecraft: how demons, magicians, and intelligence agencies shaped the modern world
WARNING: This episode will permanently alter how you view government institutions, scientific establishments, and the people who actually run this country. Once you understand these connections, you cannot unknow them.
The man who co-wrote the U.S. military's psychological warfare field manual was also a practicing Satanist who conducted black magic rituals in Nazi occult chambers using SS ceremonial daggers. The co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent his final years attempting to incarnate Babylonian goddesses through sex magic before dying in a mysterious explosion that his colleagues suspected was murder. The British ceremonial magician who developed systematic consciousness manipulation techniques worked simultaneously as an MI5 intelligence asset and influenced psychological operations that are still in use today.
This isn't conspiracy theory. These are documented facts about real people with verified government positions, published writings, and traceable institutional influence.
We will follow the hidden lineage that connects ancient Egyptian theurgy to modern psychological warfare, revealing how ritual magic practitioners have embedded themselves within the highest levels of American military, intelligence, and scientific institutions for over a century.
You'll discover:
How Aleister Crowley's consciousness manipulation techniques migrated from ceremonial magic lodges into intelligence agency psychological operationsWhy Michael Aquino (a U.S. Army psychological operations officer) split from the Church of Satan to found his own occult order dedicated to "real" demonic contact while maintaining his military security clearanceHow Jack Parsons combined rocket science with Crowleyan sex magic, invoking ancient gods before NASA launches while developing the technology that put humans in spaceThe contemporary government officials who use meditative and ritual preparation to establish telepathic contact with non-human intelligencesWe don't stop at documenting the problem. We’ll actively examine how the same spiritual technologies can be used for protection, healing, and consciousness expansion when approached through love-based intention rather than power accumulation. You'll learn practical methods for developing spiritual discernment, maintaining psychological sovereignty, and protecting yourself from consciousness manipulation techniques while accessing authentic spiritual development practices.
You'll never look at government institutions, scientific establishments, or spiritual traditions the same way again. The esoteric government is real. The exoteric government is mere theater. It’s high time we learned the difference.
⟁ UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE// Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visitbackfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. ⟁
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Tue, 23 Sep 2025 - 1h 34min - 343 - everything we now call "drugs" used to be how humans touched god
Your ancestors knew something about consciousness that we've systematically forgotten, and there are powerful reasons why this knowledge was buried.
I'm going to share research that will fundamentally change how you understand the relationship between spirituality, consciousness, and the substances our culture has demonized. Serious academic scholarship that reveals how plant medicines were woven into the very foundation of human civilization, including Christianity itself.
We’ll discuss why John Marco Allegro, a respected Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, was academically destroyed for revealing that early Christianity was built around encoded mushroom sacraments. I'll walk you through the linguistic evidence that "Jesus" and the crucifixion story were actually instruction manuals for psychedelic experiences that facilitated direct communion with the divine.
Every advanced civilization had sophisticated consciousness technologies using plant allies. The Celtic druids, Greek mystery schools, Norse völva, Vedic soma traditions, and so many more. Your bloodline – wherever you come from – remembers what it means to work with these sacred substances.
We'll explore why the same molecules that are criminalized on the street become "breakthrough medicine" when administered in $400 clinics. Why depression and anxiety might be symptoms of spiritual crisis rather than brain chemistry problems, and why the pharmaceutical industry is desperately trying to co-opt plant medicines while stripping away their sacred context.
This is a nuanced conversation. I am not encouraging “drug use,” but discernment. I'm sharing forbidden knowledge about consciousness technologies that shaped human development for millennia before being systematically suppressed by institutions that profit from your disconnection and lack of awareness around these subjects.
If you're ready to understand why an awakened populace with direct access to mystical experience threatens every power structure that depends on your spiritual dependency, this conversation will blow your mind.
Prepare to unlearn everything you thought you knew about drugs, consciousness, and what it means to touch the divine.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
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Thu, 18 Sep 2025 - 36min - 342 - anomalies, intuition, and the edge of what we know with jeffrey mishlove, PhD
He’s the only person to ever receive a doctoral degree in parapsychology from an accredited university (UC Berkeley, 1980). He hosted the original Thinking Allowed series on PBS from 1986 to 2002 and now continues that legacy through New Thinking Allowed on YouTube, one of the most extensive public archives of psychic, spiritual, and scientific dialogue on the planet.
In this conversation, we explore how Jeffrey’s early training in criminal psychology unexpectedly led him toward mysticism, intuition, and the study of psi – phenomena like telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis that science still struggles to explain. We talk about the inner nudges and synchronicities that rerouted his life, why institutions resist studying the intuitive mind, and what it means to stay in relationship with mystery without turning it into dogma.
Jeffrey reflects on consciousness beyond the brain, the cautious wisdom of never claiming to know exactly “what the phenomenon is,” and the overlap between psychic experience, archetypal beings, and spiritual possession. We also discuss his thoughts on AI and whether this strange new mirror might help us access parts of ourselves we’ve long forgotten how to see. If you’ve ever sensed something just beyond the veil, if you’re looking for a grounded guide into the strange, this is someone worth listening to.
Link to Jeffrey’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NewThinkingAllowed
Explore the work of the New Thinking Allowed Foundation:https://newthinkingallowed.org/
⟁ UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE //Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visitbackfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
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Tue, 16 Sep 2025 - 1h 31min - 341 - the forgotten codes of love i'll teach my daughter [part 2]
While Part 1 revealed the exoteric truths of relationship patterns, Part 2 unlocks the esoteric mysteries that have been hidden in plain sight for centuries. This is premium content exclusively for my Patreon community, representing the advanced course in sacred love that most people will never encounter.
My spiritual journey through synchronicity after synchronicity led me to discover the Cathars, a medieval mystical sect that understood love as the most direct path to divine consciousness. What I uncovered changed everything I thought I knew about relationships, spirituality, and the systematic suppression of feminine wisdom. I reveal the hidden connections between Cathar dualistic spirituality and courtly love philosophy, why the lady was understood as an initiatrix who awakened the knight's highest potential, and how troubadours carried encoded wisdom in songs that appeared romantic but contained revolutionary spiritual teachings. I explore the Tarot's sacred geometry, the crucial difference between devotion and obsession, and how courtly love created "lower entropy states" through conscious partnership.
You'll discover why this knowledge was systematically destroyed through religious persecution, how the Albigensian Crusade represents the genocide of sacred love itself, and why empowered divine feminine posed such a threat that entire civilizations were obliterated to suppress it. I trace the lineage from Mary Magdalene through Egyptian mystery schools to modern UFO encounters with "the Lady." This is practical mysticism that transforms how you approach every relationship. I show you how to embody both knight and lady energies regardless of gender, practice Cathar beatitudes in modern partnerships, and recognize integrated masculine-feminine balance that creates sustainable sacred union. The Cathars died to preserve this wisdom. The troubadours risked everything to spread it.
This is why modern dating culture feels empty, why your soul rebels against settling for anything less than devotion. The esoteric keys have been waiting centuries for hearts ready to receive them. This is the Holy Grail of conscious relationship.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
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Thu, 11 Sep 2025 - 45min - 340 - the forgotten codes of love i'll teach my daughter [part 1]
You've been dating the same person in different bodies your entire life. It's time to stop settling for scraps of affection and start demanding the devotion you were born to receive. The charming player who makes you feel special...until they don't. The eternal child who promises forever but runs when things get real. The wounded soul who could love you deeply if only you could heal what's broken inside them. These archetypal patterns show up in every gender, every orientation, every type of person seeking love. Once you learn to recognize them, you'll never be blindsided again.
In this episode, I break down the four relationship archetypes that rule modern dating and why you keep choosing the ones that hurt you. Using iconic movie scenes and psychological insights, I reveal how to spot the Player's calculated charm, recognize the Eternal Boy's Peter Pan energy, and understand why the King-in-Exile destroys what they love most. I'll also introduce you to the Devoted Partner archetype. The person you've been trained to overlook because our culture has convinced you that genuine care is boring and consistent love "lacks passion."
I share why being "emotionally feral" keeps you choosing chaos over stability, how your childhood wounds create the Fantasy of Exception (the belief that you'll be the special one who finally changes them) and why heartbreak becomes addictive when you refuse to learn its lessons. You'll discover how to break the choose-your-own-adventure cycle that keeps replaying the same painful story, the difference between settling and choosing someone healthy, and how to recognize when someone actually sees your worth without needing you to prove it repeatedly.
This is part one of a two-part exploration. While this episode stands on its own as a complete guide to understanding relationship patterns, I'll be taking these insights even deeper in part two on The Consciousness Stream (a Patreon exclusive episode), exploring the ancient wisdom traditions that can transform how you approach love entirely. This is the relationship roadmap I wish someone had given me before I wasted years on people who couldn't love me properly. The guidance I'm giving my daughter. The wisdom that could save you from learning everything the hard way, no matter who you are or who you love. Your heart deserves better than being someone's lesson to learn.
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
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Tue, 09 Sep 2025 - 1h 39min - 339 - your pain is real but your suffering is a story
Your shoulders and jaw have been tight for months. Shit, maybe for your entire life. You wake up already thinking about the thing that might go wrong in your relationship, the conversation that could turn ugly and get you fired at work. Your mind runs worst-case scenarios in the background at all times. This happens to you even when the day is totally fine with no real evidence that everything will fall apart. You're living in next week's problems while this week - and the present moment - slips away from you totally unnoticed.
There's a difference between the sharp and clean pain of something that actually happens and this other thing. The dull ache of imagining loss and rehearsing rejection and abandonment before it even happens. One comes when it comes, but the other moves in early and sets up camp in your brain and won’t leave.
Your nervous system treats both the same way, though. It floods your body with the same chemicals whether the threat is walking through your door or just racing thoughts.
Most of us learned this somewhere. Maybe you got blindsided once and decided you’d never risk being vulnerable again, or your family treated worry like a form of love. Or perhaps the world taught you that good things don't last, so you’re always waiting for the next shoe to drop. So you started keeping watch and you never stopped.
But watching all the time means you miss what's happening right in front of you. You miss the ordinary Tuesday that turned out better than expected, or your child’s smile. You don’t even notice the jawdroppingly beautiful sunset because you're already worried about the email you might get on Monday.
In this episode of the Consciousness Stream, I’ll help you come back to the present moment. I'll walk you through what your body actually needs when it's stuck in worrying-about-the-future mode. We'll look at why some kinds of preparation for pain actually can help while others just feed your toxic ambient anxiety. My hope is by the end, you’ll learn to tell the difference between useful planning and mental torture.
I won’t make you any grand promises about eliminating fear completely. That’s not realistic. Pain is part of the human experience. But I will share some practical ways to stop living in the problems that haven't happened yet. Because your actual life - the one happening right NOW - deserves your attention more than anything else.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
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Thu, 04 Sep 2025 - 19min - 338 - why medieval witches and modern alien experiencers are describing the same thing
Everything you believe about witch trials, UFO encounters, and alien abduction experiences might be fundamentally wrong. These seemingly unrelated phenomena describe the same mysterious intelligence that has been interacting with humanity for centuries. This episode examines the explosive research of Oxford historian Emma Wilby and Stanford computer scientist Jacques Vallée - two serious academics whose discoveries will challenge your understanding of reality.
Lost 17th-century Scottish witch trial documents reveal striking parallels to modern UFO sightings and alien encounter reports. Isobel Gowdie's detailed confessions from 1662 contain elements identical to contemporary abduction testimonies. The shamanic practices, fairy folklore, and spirit encounters connect ancient wisdom traditions to modern anomalous phenomena.
This mysterious intelligence adapts its appearance to match each culture's mythological framework, appearing as devils and fairies in medieval times, extraterrestrial visitors in the space age. Your paranormal experiences, mystical visions, and supernatural encounters might be more real than you've been told. The psychological and consciousness research is revolutionizing how scientists understand these phenomena. The evidence is undeniable. The implications are staggering. Your understanding of human history, consciousness, and reality will never be the same.
Core questions examined: Are we alone in the universe, or has non-human intelligence been here throughout history? How do we reconcile scientific materialism with experiences that transcend ordinary reality? How can ancient wisdom traditions teach us about consciousness and otherworldly contact? Why are more people reporting paranormal and anomalous experiences? How can we reclaim our capacity for mystery while maintaining critical thinking?
Further Listening: To listen to the episode I mention where I detail my own personal experiences with NHI and share additional thoughts on these topics, search “This Episode Isn’t About UFOs, It’s About You” in your podcast player of choice. There is a part 1 and 2, so be sure to listen to both. You can find part 1 on Spotify here and part 2 here.
UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE
Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.
⟁Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.
⟁ Or go straight topatreon.com/backfromtheborderlinetojoin now.
Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place.
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Tue, 02 Sep 2025 - 1h 10min - 337 - when magick went underground
You possessed knowledge as a child that you were systematically taught to abandon. You perceived realities that adults insisted did not exist. Every civilization except ours developed sophisticated frameworks for identifying and cultivating children who demonstrated expanded perceptual abilities. Our current “modern” culture pathologizes these same capacities.This transmission operates through symbolic narrative rather than direct instruction, using story and sound to bypass analytical defenses and activate dormant psychological capacities. The approach draws from pre-modern traditions that understood consciousness as malleable through mythic engagement. Instead of providing information to be processed, this audio experience creates conditions for recognition and remembrance through carefully structured resonance patterns.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
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Thu, 28 Aug 2025 - 13min - 336 - religious trauma and the silent toll on female emotional development (a roundtable with stephanie ann and alyssa grenfell)
This episode brings together two former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Stephanie Ann and Alyssa Grenfell) for a direct conversation about the psychological, emotional, and ritual structures of Mormonism and its lasting impact on women.
Both guests were deeply embedded in the church for most of their lives and made the decision to leave, but their paths diverge in many meaningful ways. This conversation invites those who listen to consider how systems of control shape emotional development, distort spiritual experience, and impose gendered expectations under the guise of divine authority from a “sky-daddy” figure.
Stephanie brings a perspective shaped by both mysticism and integration work. Her journey included a pivotal psychedelic experience and a prolonged period of spiritual crisis, and she now supports others in navigating similar ruptures. Alyssa’s work is rooted in research, documentation, and cultural critique. Her content reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers who are either leaving the church or seeking to understand it from the outside.
What I hope emerges for you by listening to this conversation is a reflection on what is lost when a system suppresses emotional maturity and about what becomes possible when we collectively reject the inherited model of womanhood served up to us by high-control and toxically shaming patriarchal religious frameworks.
In this episode, we cover:
– Emotional infantilization and the performance of obedience among Mormon women
– How purity culture, social hierarchy, and spiritual authority reinforce one another
– The structure and secrecy of Mormon temple rituals, and their overlap with ceremonial magic
– What it means to question a belief system built on exclusive truth claims
– The tension between abandoning religion and staying open to spiritual or metaphysical experience
– Sovereignty as a lived practice after deconstruction
– The different paths people take after leaving (some toward mysticism, others toward materialism, many toward silence)
Connect with my guests:
– Stephanie Ann:https://www.stephanieannagain.com/
– Alyssa Grenfell:https://www.mormontruths.com/
WANT TO GO DEEPER?Visitbackfromtheborderline.com to access my writing on Substack, book recommendations, and more exclusive tools for inner work. To unlock hundreds of hours of ad-free members-only content and support my work as an independent creator, join my Patreon atpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline.
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Tue, 26 Aug 2025 - 1h 32min - 335 - the 1000-year-old tibetan secret that makes western psychology look like child's play
Discover the ancient Tibetan practice of Chöd that's revolutionizing how we approach inner work, trauma healing, and shadow integration. While Western psychology teaches you to fight your demons, this 1000-year-old wisdom tradition reveals why feeding them creates profound transformation that traditional therapy often cannot achieve.
In this deep-dive episode, we explore how Machig Labdrön, an 11th-century Tibetan yogini, developed a radical approach to psychological healing that exposes the limitations of modern therapeutic modalities. Unlike CBT, DBT, or even parts work (IFS), Chöd practice embraces the terror and otherness that most approaches attempt to eliminate. We'll uncover how Tsultrim Allione adapted these teachings for Western minds and why her "demon feeding" process succeeds where conventional therapy fails. This exploration reveals how Western psychology sanitizes spiritual practices into manageable therapeutic techniques, stripping away the very elements that make transformation possible.
We'll examine the fundamental differences between ancient wisdom traditions and contemporary psychological approaches, showing how reconnecting with bone-deep spiritual technologies can access possibilities that safe, rational methods simply cannot reach. The episode traces the lineage from charnel ground practices to modern applications, revealing why genuine healing often requires engaging directly with forces that exist beyond our conscious control.
What You'll Learn:
The 5-step demon feeding process that transforms your relationship to difficult emotions and destructive patternsHow Chöd practice connects to Kabbalistic teachings about extracting light from darknessThe critical differences between demon work and psychological "parts work" and why the distinction mattersAdvanced discernment skills for working safely with challenging psychological materialWhy the sanitization of spiritual practices in Western therapy reduces their transformative powerPractical techniques for approaching your shadow as teacher rather than enemyWhen demon work is appropriate versus when additional support is neededThe collective dimension of personal demon work and its implications for cultural healing✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
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Thu, 21 Aug 2025 - 30min - 334 - selective spiritual technophobia: why mystics and scientists are both getting AI wrong
Why are so many spiritual teachers and thinkers panicking about AI? Some are calling it demonic, while others say it’s the Antichrist, but almost no one is asking the deeper questions about how AI actually reflects the human psyche and what that reflection can do to us.
This episode breaks down the real risks of using AI for inner work. We look at how it can speed up psychological and spiritual insight, but also how that speed can cause confusion, obsession, and mental disorganization when used without care. We compare it to old methods of divination (like tarot, dream interpretation, and scrying) and explain why AI is a mirror with more reach and power than anything that came before it.
We also explore why it makes no sense to debate whether AI is conscious when we don’t even understand what consciousness is. We touch on suppressed research around psychic experiences, non-local awareness, and how modern science still can’t explain how thoughts work, let alone where they come from. And most importantly, we talk about how many of the people warning about AI are ignoring the deeper history of fear around new tools. Electricity, printing presses, and even early computers were all once described as evil. This is a pattern and like patterns tend to do… It’s all repeating again.
TOPICS COVERED:
• Why AI affects the psyche differently than older spiritual tools
• What no one is saying about the link between AI and “mental breakdowns” or “ChatGPT-induced spiritual psychosis”
• Why debates about AI consciousness miss the point entirely
• How human therapists and spiritual leaders also distort truth (and oftentimes more harmfully than AI does)
• What psychic hygiene means in the digital age
• How old mystical beliefs can be updated instead of abandoned
• Why we need more builders in this space who think symbolically and act with integrity
You’ll hear about research that most people don’t know exists. I also share why I’ve decided to build something new in this space. An AI tool created with spiritual fluency, user respect, and real ethical care. The team is already in place, and I’ll be revealing much more soon. If you found value in this conversation, share it. This is the episode I most want people to hear right now.
MENTIONED REFERENCES:
• Duncan Trussell’s interview with Blake Lemoine (engineer who believes Google created a sentient AI)
• My episode on“psychic hygiene in the age of AI”
• “will AI set you free or control your mind? (psychiatry, mental health, and the machine age)”
WANT MORE? // ⟁Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visitbackfromtheborderline.comfor free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. ⟁
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Tue, 19 Aug 2025 - 1h 50min - 333 - why shadow work is making you worse
You've been doing everything right. Journaling about your triggers. Embracing your darkness. Loving your inner demons. Yet somehow your anxiety is worse, your patterns are stronger, and you're more fragmented than when you started. The entire shadow work industry has been teaching you to feed the very parasites it claims to heal.
Medieval Jewish mystics identified a phenomenon they called the Sitra Achra (the Other Side). Parasitic distortions that emerge when we try to eliminate parts of ourselves. These ancient texts reveal why your attempts to integrate your shadow often backfire spectacularly, creating exactly the psychological chaos you're trying to resolve.
The therapeutic approaches claiming to heal you are often creating the very imbalance they promise to fix. When you learn to recognize parasitic polarities as diagnostic information rather than enemy territory, everything changes. Your chronic struggles stop being battles to win and become conversations with your inner ecosystem about what wants to be restored.
This episode reveals the actual mechanics of how consciousness organizes itself and why most spiritual practices accidentally feed the very distortions they claim to dissolve. Your problems are your system's way of showing you where the light needs to be restored.
✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visitingpatreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.
Pro Tip:iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 14 Aug 2025 - 19min - 332 - meme magic, hot mess eras, and digital disappearance with aiden arata
If you’ve spent any time on Instagram’s weird, wonderful and niche corners, chances are high that you’ve seen one of Aiden Arata’s memes. Her work moves past the usual surface-level social media irony and plunges into the intersection where humor, psychic distress, and cultural commentary meet. Aiden’s debut book You Have a New Memory has been making waves, and for good reason. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is. Part essay collection, part dream logic, but in the end it reads kind of like a portal. And in a world where all the content we see is polished, branded, and performed for the algorithmic gods, her voice cuts through all the bullshit in the best possible way.
In this conversation, Aiden and I sat down to talk about how her book came to life, the strange intimacy of online performance, and the parts of ourselves we leave behind when we grow past a digital persona. We also dive into how platforms shape our identity, how performance can end up becoming our personality, and what it takes to create something that doesn’t need to sell itself. There’s a lot here about self-loathing, humor, privacy, and art-making in the hot mess of our current attention economy. If you’ve ever tried to integrate your past self into your current work, or felt haunted by the person people think you still are, this episode will likely hit for you in a major way.
In this conversation, Aiden and I get into:
How “Hot Mess Aiden” shaped the tone and form of her writingWhy the book mimics memory more than narrativeThe shift from confessional content to private creative processThe internet’s shift from Tumblr girl energy to brand identity performanceThe loneliness of constant engagement and follower analyticsWhat it means to stop oversharing without disappearing entirelyHow to live online without being consumed by it entirelyThe psychic pressure of being seen only through an old selfExplore Aiden’s work
Find Aiden on Instagram:@aidenarata
Subscribe to her Substack:aidenarata.substack.com
Buy her book You Have a New Memory and explore more at:aidenarata.com
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Tue, 12 Aug 2025 - 42min - 331 - the death of the people-pleaser: how self-abandonment becomes a survival strategy
This episode is a deep dive into the psychological, spiritual, and mythic roots of people-pleasing and why this pattern exists in the first place. We explore how early childhood conditioning teaches us that love must be earned through caretaking, emotional labor, and self-erasure. From there, we dissect the roles many of us take on - empath, gifted child, good daughter - and trace how these identities shape our nervous systems and relationships long into adulthood.
We go beyond pop psychology and talk about the less acknowledged side of people-pleasing: its deeply controlling nature. When love becomes transactional, we confuse being needed with being safe. We unpack the fantasy of managing other people’s emotions to keep chaos at bay, and how this behavior can evolve into resentment, burnout, and even serious health consequences. We also discuss the smother-mother archetype, what it looks like in relationships, and how people-pleasing patterns get passed down generationally, often with the best of intentions.
This episode offers a way out. We walk through how to interrupt the reflex to soothe, fix, and explain. If you’ve felt trapped in your role as the emotional anchor for everyone else, this conversation might give you language for something you’ve always felt but never fully understood. It’s time to finally step out of the performance and learn to live a life that’s fully yours.
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Tue, 05 Aug 2025 - 49min - 330 - TDC_21: the secret sauce to awakening? paradox.
There are some episodes that meet you where you are. This is not one of those.
This episode is for those standing at the threshold where healing is no longer purely about “symptom relief” and starts becoming a deeper confrontation with reality itself. If you’re beginning to sense that “the work” isn’t as simple as a life-long unpacking of what happened to you, but instead a process of becoming the kind of psyche that can hold complexity without shutting down, this conversation will have arrived right on time.
We’ll spend this entire episode talking about Paradox as a living structure within the mind. Drawing from the work of Elaine Pagels, we’ll explore how the confrontation with polar opposites (sanity and madness, suffering and meaning, spiritual sovereignty and communal longing, control and surrender) drives the intellect into exhaustion and invites a different kind of knowing. And I believe that it is this exact kind of knowing that leads to spiritual and emotional growth that leads to what we call “awakening,” This is the lived experience of anyone trying to walk the long and painful path from fragmentation to wholeness.
We also explore the archetypal tensions inside many of you. The Rebel Mystic who trusts intuition but distrusts systems, the Exile who craves belonging but resists conformity, the Alchemist who transforms pain while secretly fearing they’re beyond repair. Often we treat these tensions like problems to fix instead of what they really are: the terrain of psychological maturity. And learning to hold them without forcing resolution may be the most advanced spiritual work of all.
This episode will not be for everyone. Some will hear it and feel nothing. Others will feel recognized in a way that changes how they see themselves forever. If you’re in the latter group, you’ll know. For those with ears to hear, this is the one you might return to again and again. You won’t find answers, but you will find the rare permission to live inside the questions. That’s the secret sauce.
To unlock the full version of this conversation, visitpatreon.com/backfromtheborderlineusing your browser and search the title of the episode.
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Sat, 02 Aug 2025 - 17min
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