the normality in our society is that people are disconnected from who they are the consumer culture and the culture of people influencing each other it's our part of a culture of disconnection the reason so many people are suffering physical and mental illness it all comes from this disconnection for our nature these so-called mentally ill behaviors they all serve a function dealing with the trauma that has not been addressed are we aware are we conscious are we making deliberate choices or are we driven by unconscious pain which kind of pain would you rather be the pain of self-suppression or the pain of losing some attachments do you see a Divine Design Within our wounding there's something about our nature there's a kind of intelligence in it that wants us to be authentic to ourselves people need freedom freedom politically Freedom economically Freedom socially freedom from their unconscious emotions so they can be themselves and that's I think the essential Endeavor of all the great work that has been done in the world is the desire for freedom [Music] hello beautiful humans welcome back to the know thyself podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart to see how we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us today is part two of an incredible conversation and dialogue that is very needed right now on the planet my guest today is Dr gavar mate as you may know he is an expert on a range of topics and has been speaking and writing books for many years on stress addiction childhood development the implications of trauma on culture and he's written multiple best-selling books such as in the realm of hungry ghosts when the body says no scattered Minds just to name a few and his new book The Myth of normal which I absolutely adore and is available now that you can all go check out in the link below in the description is uh is bringing up a very uh timely subject for our species as a humanity and where we are and how we got to the point where we are now how disconnected we've become with nature so again last night we had a live Community kind of podcast and the conversation was really beautiful everyone was so touched thank you for coming in the studio to do a follow-up well it's great to be back again yeah so good so I thought we'd just start because I really loved this quote in the beginning of the book uh which is from Eric Fromm and it says the fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane yeah I think it's a beautiful way to open up our dialogue today because and and if you would share your overview of how unnatural our normalized society has become the quotas from Eric Fromm who was a great um psychologist in the first half of the 20th century originally from Germany and settled the United States he wrote a book um around the mid-century called the sane Society which already he was pointing out this is three quarters of a century oh no it was already pointing out that in the most advanced societies there's a greater preponderance of mental illness and so when you said in your introduction Andre that I wrote this book about our disconnection from nature it's primarily about a disconnection from our own nature as human beings and the normality in our society is is that people are disconnected from who they are and the consumer culture and the culture of Fame and the culture of um momentary attention and the culture of people influencing each other in engaging in totally meaningless activities that's our departure it's our political culture of disconnection and so that the reason so many people are suffering physical and mental illness I mean 70 percent of American adults are taking at least one medication 70 so number one hand we have this richest Society in the history of the world on the other hand you have a large percentage of population who got health issues of mind or body or both it all comes from this disconnection for our nature and so that's the biggest normality quote-unquote of our culture and and so when France says that just because a whole lot of people buy into something that doesn't make it normal or sane basically they have taken that and updated it to our present time but I'm riffing on the themes that he raised all those years ago yeah and you in this book so eloquently dive into all the different ways in which toxicity has become normalized in the far-reaching uh corners of our culture and you you also share I love that you know in Aldous huxley's Brave New World individuals are so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave yeah and you give these character traits that I think are really beautiful that I'll kind of just briefly mention here because it's very descriptive of the place that we've gotten to individually and collectively so you give three the first character trait is separation from self and I'll just read a quote here in an image mad culture that sustains itself in large part by making people feel inadequate about themselves or more insidiously capitalizing on these pre-existing feelings the media holds out ideals of physical Perfection against which young and old measure themselves in which lead people to be ashamed of their very bodies and that is descriptive to the separation from self-recare the character trait um number one the second one is the character trait of consumption hunger and just briefly uh love this this part here you say what the advertisers need to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer yeah and the third is Hypnotic passivity and it's this hypnotic state that we've I believe gotten to in a culture and you share it is we who are made in the image of our distorted disordered denatured world the better keep it running even as it runs us into the ground so you give beautiful descriptions as to how we've taken on these character traits but also how culture Society social media the news advertisers feed on this yeah so so like from who we began coding talked about the social character and a social character is the personality traits that a society would seek to inculcate and its members in order to keep itself going again I've sort of updated that no in the hockey's Brave New World people are literally gestating in a test tube and they're biochemically and environmentally trained and developed to fulfill certain roles and to be happy with those roles no we're not gestated in test tubes that we're not mechanically programmed like that but it's but uh but almost like we were because as parxley points out in the brain New World the thing is to want to do what Society expects you to do so that what we end up wanting to do has got nothing to do with our own particular needs or true nature it has to do with other societies expects of us so there's three trades so we always we're not programmed like in Brave New World but Huxley wrote that brand new world not as some kind of a fantasy he voted because this is where he saw Society going and it's only become more acute since he wrote that book in the 30s I think yeah and since since Eric from wrote and spoke in in the mid 20th century so these character traits of this connection from ourselves this Society needs us to be disconnected from ourselves otherwise we wouldn't elect the politicians that we elect if we're connected to our gut feelings there's a very interesting story about Ronald Reagan um Oliver Sachs who was a American neural British American neurologist and and writer he wrote the man who mistook his wife for hat and other very famous books and he worked with neurologically challenged patients and it describes an experience that he witnessed on a ward where there were patients who were aphasiac that means they had a stroke they lost their capacity for processing language they call it physics uh these are physic patients the group are watching Ronald Reagan the president on television and most of them are laughing and some of them are outraged and sex asked himself is it that they don't understand Reagan or is that they understand them all too well and what it was is these big people could not be mesmerized by the words because they didn't understand the words they're reading his body language and they read that he was a complete phony and why was Reagan a funny because not that he intended to be but because he was a traumatized child his father was a heavy alcoholic and Reagan developed this Teflon non-involved emotionally distant inauthentic Persona as a way of surviving his childhood in this insane world that above it reassuring presence was seen as a political strength and his Ephesians who didn't buy into the words they just saw the real person they didn't buy it for a minute so what I'm saying is that if we were connected to a gut feelings there's a lot of things we wouldn't be choosing a lot of things we wouldn't buy that we don't need a lot of people we wouldn't follow who are actually um not authentic themselves so the big way that this Society survives is by people disconnect from their gut feelings so that's what I mean by as an essential part of our social character is to be disconnected from ourselves and the society wants us to be disconnected right because it keeps the machine going it's very much so and the way you describe it it's almost like I think of the Matrix less like a movie and more like a documentary showing you know exactly exactly how plugged into the system we are into the Matrix and it's like a very real thing there's this hypnotic rhythm in which people don't even realize they're in much like the Matrix that feed into the system that supports people at the top people the oligarchy of America that it has become and um so is there anything you want to speak to just like how the mass hypnosis continues to propagate in how we can start to dismantle that well interesting you mentioned the Matrix because I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that I've heard the story that the people that wrote The Matrix did so after they took part in a self-awareness program which I won't mention but they did you know so that they could see all of a sudden the gap between how they lived and and the reality you know um well look massive Moses uh let's take something simple let's take America's Wars since the 1970s um America's been involved in several Wars each time there's a war sooner or later it transpires that it was based on a pack of Lies and this is true in American history the Mexican-American war was based on Tobacco lies the Spanish-American was baked based on Tobacco lies um the Vietnam War that all these things were documented there's not even controversial anymore but at the time everybody bought into it now anybody who've done a research at the time would have known right away that they're being fed lies and despite the fact that or say the um the lie about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which never existed anybody with eyes in their heads knew that that was a manipulation and wasn't true the result was that thousands of Americans and half a million Iraqis died despite the fact that each time the lives are exposed when the next world comes along everybody still goes along with it of SMS hypnosis it's like there's all this history and if you take the average American ask them to string together two intelligent sentences about the history of Afghanistan they couldn't tell you anything the Ukraine war right now without going to the politics of it ask the average American to give you two sentences on the history of Ukraine two intelligent consecutive sentences on history of Ukraine that didn't start last year but still going back into history they couldn't and yet they get swept along every time into the narrative and I'm only talking about these words I could talk about any number of political issues you know it takes a kind of a passivity or take an issue that surely affects us all climate change this is we're talking today this is January the 16th I think today there's another article about Greenland how about how the ice mass of Greenland is melting at a faster rate than it has for over a millionaire no we all see it happening but we're all totally passive in the face of it it takes the hypnotic state of passivity I mean we're actually seeing the Earth changing because of our own activities nobody denies that except people and utter emotional denial States or unless you work for an oil company where it's your job to deny it but nobody else can ignore what's going on but you and I we live our lives as if it wasn't happening well that's a state of hypnotic passivity so and and so this Society of course thrives on that because we get to be led into foreign policy Adventures or economic policies that are turned out to be utterly ultimately harmful or we were I don't even say willing participants but we're passive participants and I could go on but there's a kind of passivity about us and it's the passivity that allows advertisers to beam programs into our homes and into our machines that addict our our infants our infants are getting addicted to technology you can cheat on brain scans you can see it in their behavior would you allow drug dealers into your house to inject heroin into your infants but we're loving it so that takes a tremendous amount of passivity yeah it's like a mass psychosis that has become so normalized and just accepted as just the status quo just carry on as business as usual and there's a part of my time like you know six seven years ago when I got very much so into seeing this and waking up to this and I think it's important to become aware of what's happening on a global scale but then also reclaiming the personal responsibility to see where am I still asleep in my own life right yeah absolutely bringing that back home within ourselves because that's ultimately the only thing we have control over so is there anything you want to speak to into inviting people just to before trying to wake up the world and Liberate the world we got to start where our feet are well sure and and I was speaking just a few days ago with this wonderful Buddhist Meditation teacher uh Tara Brock and and she talks about the trans that we're all in so you know the chances when we're not aware that we're there that we're not aware of ourselves you know we just sort of automatically carrying on with something and you know there I am at my hotel room last night you know talking from one YouTube video to another and I was saying yes I'm in a trance what am I doing nothing useful I'm not even doing anything that entertaining I'm just an automatic pilot so you're totally right and we all find ourselves in this Trends much of the time lack of lacking aware of our bodies and our minds and what our life intentions are I mean I I tell you I I hate the idea of being on my desk but then looking at oh my God what did I do with all that time you know even now you know yeah so um yeah so that waking up and not taking responsibility is a daily task again this culture tends to love us it's designed to allow us to sleep all the time um with um Thomas Merton who's a Catholic monk also an animistic and he also lived in mid 20th century and in his um [Music] autobiography called the seven story Mountain he talks about that this whole society is designed to allow us to sleep with our products and our Hollywood films and everything else to to keep us in a state of [Music] passivity yeah controlled controlled yeah yeah so and and and of course willingly unwittingly we get to be willing participants in this Mass hypnosis yeah and it it doesn't make it easier that for example with social media that algorithms are literally meant to keep us as engaged with the least amount of effort that we can just sit there and they'll they'll even do the scrolling for us now we just have to stare at the screen and keep getting dopamine yeah well and and those devices are designed with um addictive blandishments in mind they're designed to keep there's a company called dopamine lab which helps design programs for cell phones you know dopamine is is the chemical that we need for life but when we don't generate it through meaningful activity we get it we get hooked into um false activities that that'll Spike our dopamine for us and it's a very deliberate attempt it's not they call it neural marketing they're actually marketing stuff to get our nervous system hooked you know and uh be participating yeah I I want to touch on how oftentimes the society around us will capitalize right then before our minds make the environment the environment makes us right yeah who we are as individuals when we come into the world you know we are these some might say we are connected to our true nature in this blank state but I actually want to touch on and ask you about intergenerational trauma because of course you know we have the traumas that we've occurred in this lifetime but also as a species as a culture as a people African-Americans Middle Easterns we all have our own individuation of trauma that is within our bloodline and how do you see that stored in the unconscious because let's say I'm in my 20s and 30s and I haven't you know I have I have some sort of repression of emotion or something that I can't necessarily point to an event that happened in my life and maybe it didn't happen in this life but how do you see it can is everything just coming from this life or is it essentially the genes and how they uh impress upon us well so some people believe in past lives even you know my mind has never been able to go there uh I I usually find it sufficient to look at a person's life in this temporal State and find enough reasons for why they are the way they are that doesn't mean that past Generations don't come into it but what I am saying is that the effect of past generation is past Generations is passed on to us in this lifetime yeah so in Canada there's a terrible history of our native people being horribly abused by the state their children were abducted for 100 years and sent a terrible residential schools where they were sexually emotionally and physically abused and many of them died at the hands of the church in the state it so happens that our indigenous Canadians also make up the large percentage of our prison population they have much higher rates of addiction suicide mental health issues physical illnesses that they never used to have before colonization and unfortunately and and whereas they used to parent in a much healthier way than so-called Advanced societies parent they really knew about a parent hold kids support them give them an environment that revered them to be confident self-assured social connected human beings they knew how to do it they were much closer to our nature that's been largely extirpated as a result now they abuse their kids so each generation then passes on his trauma to the next so in a lot of native communities it's almost impossible to find young girls by the time they're teenagers who had not been sexually abused now that's the impact of the past but it's being exerted in this particular lifetime then you have what's called epigenetic transmission which means that the the way the genes function if one generation is traumatized that alters not the gene structure but the genetic functioning and those that genetic function can be passed onto a few Generations that's a new science I don't think we fully know yet how strong those epigenetic effects are it's an emerging field it means it's a very interesting research but in general and certainly it's already true that when a mother carries an infant the stresses and traumas that she is burdened with can affect the developing brain and personality of the child already in the womb already so yes the experience you know as a Jew I can tell you that the traumas of previous generations certainly have an impact on you know as a as a part Palestinian you know you know the same thing yeah and uh in fact there's been an unfortunate set of circumstances that have they might be imposed the term of one people onto another people we're here today yeah and learning Embrace yeah um so so the past trauma does happen and Eckhart Tolle the spiritual teacher talks about the pain body which is really accumulated traumas that affect us and he talks about that pain body can exist on the social and historical level as well so women you know because of the persecution of women the witch hunts the oppression of women the rape and so on women carry that pain body and and uh certain peoples carry a heavier pain body than other peoples so yeah it's all multi-generational it's all historical and I think that the effects always exerted in this particular lifetime yeah yeah absolutely I think in the middle part of the book you give so many examples of how the trauma that we store within us lead to the manifestations of illness for example racism leading to asthma or even within culturally How African Americans deal with hypertension more frequently and how sometimes we just look at the diagnosis of whatever the disease is and think that um that's it but like there's all these psychosomatic emotional elements that we just are not aware of are that are often the real reason for why we have the manifestation of a disease or a diagnosis so is there anything you want to speak to there because I thought it was so fascinating and all the examples from gender to race to um the different things that we hold within us that create the illness sure so this is where my profession the medical profession is so remiss in his duties because we had the science now I mean we have the science elegantly delineated showing the unity of mind and body showing our emotions affect physiology which also means that our relationships affect physiology because our relationships um program our emotions so when there's a study that shows that parents whose kids are parents are very stressed their kids are more likely to have asthma it's because the stress of the parents affect the facility of the child that's been known for decades it's not even controversial and yet you go to the average physician with asthma they'll never talk to you about stress they'll just give you inhalers which is necessary but not sufficient to deal with the issue same way there's been a study that showed that the moral experiences of racism a black American woman had to endure the greater risk for asthma now the physiology is very simple I'm not going to go into it here but it's very simple and very straightforward not even controversial and how do we treat asthma by the way you know how we treat it we give people stress hormones we give adrenaline and cortisol in a form of injections or inhalers should we maybe ask ourselves gosh retreating in the distress hormones they'll stress has something to do with it maybe as a matter of fact everyone asks oneself which medications are used most commonly across the board if you come in with inflammation of the intestines as in colitis or the joints as in rheumatoid arthritis or the skin as an eczema or psoriasis or the nervous system is in multiple sclerosis or the lungs what to give people we give people steroids what are steroids they're stress they're the stress hormones that are adrenal gland manufacturers maybe we should see that there's a connection between stress and all these conditions and there is so great pioneers of medicine who I won't name now but they're in the book in the 19th century already identified as multiple sclerosis rheumatoid arthritis and breast cancer were related to stress they had no science then they're just Giants of Medicine with tremendous insight since then there's been 100 Years of research showing the relationship between say stress trauma and rheumatoid arthritis and there's women by the way who developed 70 80 percent of autoimmune diseases nobody understands why well they just happen to be the more the stress absorbers of their whole families and of their men as well that's why they have more stress related conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis much more it's also simple it's also straightforward and it's also scientific to go back to black Americans and hypertension you know there's this they have a high risk black American men have a higher risk of high blood pressure hypertension is called their genetic relatives in Africa don't it's not genetic so what is it well let's do a simple linguistic uh exercise take the word hypertension and split it hypertension hyper tension oh too much tension black American kids already have higher blood pressure than white kids you know and why because of the stress of racism and just to conclude this um a wonderful American physician called George Engel back in 1972 called for what he turned a bio cycle social view of medicine which is to recognize that her biology is then separable from our psychology which is inseparable from our social relationships we are bio psychosocial creatures and all those influences determine our health or our illness once you see it it's like obvious right yeah do you feel like the medical professionals is just a it's a problem of ignorance or is it really malevolent intent from higher up corporations that I mean obviously profit from the ongoing cycles of not creating cures but keeping customers well it is true that pharmaceutical companies want to create products that people love to take for a long time so they're not particularly interested in cures but they don't even have that vision but what makes the medical you know and and you know and there's lots of examples of chicanery in the pharmaceutical industry where drugs are promoted is much more effective than they really are or the side effects that are known are kind of denied or diminished you know so they're not above as any profit-making entity their bottom line is profit ethics is not high on the list they're not unique in that you know airline industry the automaking industry the fossil fuel industry the food industry the entertainment industry ethics isn't you know corporate ethics is kind of like a oxymoron like you know in the like Military Intelligence you know like yeah the two don't go together like you say in the book you're not it's not like they're trying to kill people they're just trying to make money and if they kill people it's just like yeah they're not trying to kill you they just don't care if you die you know like they'll sell you junk Foods knowing how harmful they are yeah they're not trying to kill you they're just trying to make money but they don't care if you die I don't care no but what makes a medical profession so susceptible to that kind of pressure that's not the fault of the foreign Circle companies that has to do with both ignorance and the arrogance of the medical profession the ignorance comes in not looking at the science that I've been referring to not looking at the studies linking multiple sclerosis and stress and Trauma plenty of them not looking at the physiology of how trauma inflames the nervous system not looking at the physiology of our people traumatized in childhood carry higher markers inflammatory chemicals in their bloodstream it's still there not looking at how trauma and stress in childhood affects the functioning of one's chromosomes I mean the science is is there so there's any kind of ignorance there the arrogance is in assuming that doctors don't think they know everything but the arrogance comes into thinking that what they don't know is not worth knowing so wisdom of indigenous people for example which has shown the mind-body unity forever not shown it recognize it modern science has shown it indigenous wisdom has always maintained it so what I'm saying to you about the biostack or social nature of human beings and illness that's not used to any indigenous healer arrogance is in dismissing the wisdom of other people's and of human tradition you know I mean our science is amazing nobody can deny its achievements um nobody can I mean it's it's miraculous what modern medicine can do it's also very limited and the arrogance is in not recognizing the limitations the degree in which we experience joy and suffering in our life oftentimes comes in like depending upon the constitution of her personality you said that if a parent doesn't know how to hold a child a child will develop a mind to hold itself right yeah that came from a therapist great um and so the minds that we develop to hold ourselves become the colored tinted glasses in which we view the world and like we spoke to earlier with the reference to the medical industry it's like if we see a problem or we see a a leaf on a tree that has turned brown or fruit that isn't it's like the solution oftentimes is to paint over the fruit with the color red paint instead of treating the root and giving the nutrients to the soil likewise as an individual with our within our own nature if we have come to this withered crippled place within our own psyche you know because of the personality that we that we've developed I just would love for you to share how we can one gain Awareness on what the personality is and then how inextricably connected it is to the amount of suffering and joy that we have yeah so we talk about for example the winning personality what is the personality winning it's winning approval or an admiration of others why does somebody have to win why somebody compelled to win that because they didn't have it they didn't have the acceptance and the admiration just for who they are in the early childhood so developed as a winning personality until they get depressed because it wasn't they weren't being their true self because people who are very nice very nice I worry about the very nice people because that niceness is very often I personally treat in which they actually repress their healthy aggression the healthy capacity to set boundaries and to express healthy anger when somebody's transgressing and they take on the needs of others so everybody thinks that they're so nice and when they go to the funeral how nice they were and that niceness is what killed them because that Nations reflected a repression of their their healthy anger anger you know so the personality is not who we are and and the problem is and and this is of course a spiritual teacher teaching that goes way back to ancient India at least that the personality that we developed not actually the essential ourselves so modern psychology is beautifully studied and depicted how the personality develops and the person that develops an interaction with the environment and basically kids will develop traits that will help them fit in with the environment if their moment doesn't accept them for they actually are then we develop these personality traits that are designed to make success make it acceptable so I'll be Charming I'll be winning personality I'll be very nice or I'll be very consumed by being attractive so I can attract attention to me it's very sad phenomena of people as they age desperately trying to look younger because they're so dead and fight with their attractiveness who am I if I'm not being attractive but that's a function of their childhood programming reinforced by cultural conditioning um so you have the multi-billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry article Time Magazine today about science is discovering the ways to reverse aging we just can't accept the reality that to get old you know you know what it's all going to lead nowhere because there's such thing as nature you know and uh the wisdom isn't part of get around nature is how to align with it you know in this Society doesn't get that at all [Music] um there's a way of getting old aging physically without aging in our essential self and in our in our minds you know so that you can be a very youthful 90 year old or you can be a very old 45 year old you know and it's all has to do with internal Dynamics so um I'm not even sure what a question I'm answering anymore I'm sure it's a good answer but I don't know too what it was a great answer and I think it's just important to interlate how the personalities we develop then then uh become deleterious obviously within our experience in ways we're not aware of that lead to addictions that we we can't seem to resolve right and you said don't ask why the addiction why the pain yeah the pains that we hold oftentimes were the origins of the personality being developed in the first place that Persona that we develop which is a mask yeah um that is the the barrier between us and the wound so like serves as the protection mechanism as it did earlier in our childhood but then it also becomes the barrier to Joy as we as we age absolutely and you said it very succinctly um well to give you a personal example so um as a physician I was a work called like doctor now I genuinely wanted to serve people so learn to serve Humanity wasn't any kind of a false personality trait it was January on the expressive of who I am as of many of my colleagues but it doesn't operate it's on its own it operates in a context in conjunction with other dynamics that are not so pure so one Dynamic that certainly I could own to is I really believe that if I go to medical school I'll have respect finally they'll respect me well why they even need that because I didn't respect myself and you know the white cold you know no I'm somebody so there's that not so healthy but even more subtle is the need to be needed they need to be wanted as an infant for reasons I won't go into now but it's explained in the book I got the message as an infant that I wasn't wanted that's how I interpreted the world's actions