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Mollie Adler

Back from the Borderline

A Spirituality , Religion & Spirituality and Society & Culture podcast Explicit

#5 in Spirituality · 🇳🇿 #7 in Spirituality · 🇿🇦
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About the show

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Newest episodes

Who Would I Have Been Without Antidepressants?

1 hr 56 min

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 GUESTSCameron LaBar (Cold Plunge Cam)Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coldplungecam/ Anders SørensenWebsite: https://www.psykologanders.dk/ Writing: https://crossingzero.substack.com/ Book, Crossing Zero: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Zero-Science-S...

The More You Know About Yourself, the Less You Understand

1 hr 28 min

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 epis...

You’ve Studied the Mysteries. But Have They Changed You? (Anne Baring, Part 9: Epilogue)

1 hr 54 min

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...

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All episodes

The newest 50 of 367 episodes

Who Would I Have Been Without Antidepressants?

1 hr 56 min

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 GUESTSCameron LaBar (Cold Plunge Cam)Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coldplungecam/ Anders SørensenWebsite: https://www.psykologanders.dk/ Writing: https://crossingzero.substack.com/ Book, Crossing Zero: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Zero-Science-S...

The More You Know About Yourself, the Less You Understand

1 hr 28 min

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 epis...

You’ve Studied the Mysteries. But Have They Changed You? (Anne Baring, Part 9: Epilogue)

1 hr 54 min

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...

The Way of the Rose: Healing the Heart & the Sacred Marriage (Anne Baring, Part 8)

1 hr 4 min

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 School PLACES & PRACTICES Chartres Cathedral: Medieval labyrinth and rose windowsHeartMath Institute: Heart-focused contemplative practicesSufi whirl...

The Cathars, the Inquisition and the Women Who Defied Rome (Anne Baring Part 7)

1 hr 45 min

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. ☽ 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. ☿ 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....

The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition (Anne Baring Part 6)

1 hr 18 min

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. ☽ 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’s From Ritual to Romance, which Anne recommends during our conversation....

Mary Magdalene, The Beloved Companion (Anne Baring Part 5)

1 hr 16 min

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. ☽ 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...

The Essenes and the Women Around Yeshua (Anne Baring Part 4)

1 hr 21 min

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...

Gnostic Sophia and the Suppressed Christian Mysteries (Anne Baring Part 3)

1 hr 25 min

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 co...

The Lost Civilization of the Goddess (Anne Baring Part 2)

1 hr 5 min

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 list...

The Forgotten Feminine Face of God (Anne Baring Part 1)

1 hr 29 min

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...

How to Tell When a Spiritual Teacher Is Full of Shit

1 hr 58 min

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 f**k 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. Click here or visit patreon.com/backfromtheborderline. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aleister Crowley’s Thelema: Sex Magick and the Problem With the Prophet

1 hr 53 min

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 ☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021) If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://ap...

The Braced Body: The Spiritual Cost of Always Being in Control (Part 3)

56 min

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, yo...

The Braced Body: Why Rest Feel Unsafe & How to Let Go (Part 2)

1 hr 4 min

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) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Braced Body: Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong (Part 1)

56 min

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.com is 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 → htt...

What Do We Do With a Broken Spiritual Inheritance?

1 hr 4 min

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 everythi...

UFOs, AI, and the Religion of the Unconscious (Live at Contact in the Desert 2026)

1 hr 11 min

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....

Mary Magdalene and the End of Spiritual Childhood

51 min

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 3 CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ W...

The Occult Teacher We Need Right Now: Dion Fortune, Psychic Hygiene, and the Magick of the Mind

1 hr 36 min

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 wee...

The Skill AI Can Never Replace (And Why I’m Teaching Tarot)

31 min

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 DeckThroughout 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.

The Arrogance of Too Much Empathy

1 hr 5 min

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...

Gay Men Have Always Loved a “Difficult” Woman

50 min

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.

The Female Shadow

1 hr 12 min

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.

The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 1)

43 min

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.

Why Everyone Sounds Religious About AI [Consciousness Stream for May 2026]

26 min

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...

The Body Keeps the Mileage (On Mortality & Wellness Panic)

1 hr 0 min

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...

Why Tarot Feels So Accurate, And How to Actually Read a Card

25 min

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 at patreon.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 at moods.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.

The Intelligence of Madness, Part Two: How We Come Back

1 hr 19 min

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.

Why “Disclosure” is a Distraction and How to Stay Sane as Reality Crumbles

27 min

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/backfromtheborderline DOWNLOAD 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...

The Intelligence of Madness, Part One: Who Gets Called Insane?

59 min

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 i...

Why Your Mind Feels Broken in the Age of Babel

45 min

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...

Stop Healing Your Inner Child and Shed Your Dead Trauma Skin

1 hr 11 min

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-defi...

The missing piece of your soul and the lost technology of Mary Magdalene

1 hr 41 min

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...

Why your repetitive trauma cycles are fueling a reality that feeds on you

2 hr 3 min

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 fo...

The Internet is Dead and The Goddess is SO Back [April 2026 - Week 1]

30 min

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 filter...

Being a Young Woman Feels Like Being HUNTED

1 hr 13 min

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/...

Stop Blaming Yourself for the Mother Wound

32 min

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. ·...

Why the Elite Rely on Your Spiritual Ignorance

1 hr 13 min

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 po...

How to Sniff Out and Stop Tolerating B******t

48 min

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 B******t 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) access Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Loneliness at the End of Manifestation Culture (Part 1)

38 min

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 at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline. You can...

Your Existential Dread is a Completely Rational Response

51 min

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 at moods.world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unbothered & Feral: Astrology & Tarot for March 7 - 14 (2026)

24 min

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 at patreon.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.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI is a Time Machine: The Vertical Plane, UFOs & The Digital Daimon

1 hr 22 min

"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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday School Psyop: How the Ancient Priests Invented God and Erased His Wife

47 min

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 by clicking here or signing up a...

Epstein, Eugenics, and the False Gods of Silicon Valley Buried in the Dirt at Zorro Ranch

45 min

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...

How to Outsource Your Biggest Problems to Your Intuition

31 min

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. ⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.co...

The PINK Psyop: Les Wexner, Epstein & The Occult Inversion of the Angel

30 min

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...

The Machines Are Praying: Moltbook, Gnosticism, & The Digital Mirror

51 min

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 building MOODS, a tool designed to use this technology for deep inner work instead of data extraction. Join the Waitlist at moods.world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why the Death of TikTok is a Spiritual Crisis

48 min

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.

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