Hello beautiful souls! Neal Allan is back! At the end of our last interview, he stopped me and said, “Julie, you didn’t ask me about angels. I’d love to come back and talk about angels!” Today we are talking about angels and so much more! I truly feel that this episode is the epitome of how each of us finds our way through life, but how we can do so in a way where life can become, more so, Heaven on Earth. I love the line in his book where Neal says, “My only job is to be fascinated!” Perhaps we should all look at life that way. It would surely remove the pressure and heaviness of life if we all simply said, “Our only job is to be fascinated by life.” Give this episode a listen and then follow me on Instagram @angelpodcast and let me know what you think!

To learn more about Neal Allen and his work:
[Substack] @NealAllen
shapesoftruth.com

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TRANSCRIPT

Julie Jancius: Beautiful souls. Here’s a preview of today’s discussion.

Neal Allen: I realized, oh, if that’s all that angels are, I can believe in angels insofar as they’re a metaphor for some kind of weird form of grace that enters into my life periodically, sometimes in the form of a human, sometimes in the form of a book that just offers me respite from the absurd difficulty of living in this world.

Julie Jancius: Beautiful soul, have you ever wanted to speak to angels? Do you believe angels can support you in your daily life? If this is you, go to my website, homepage, theangelmediam.com and sign up for my weekly angel message email. As a gift for signing up, I’m giving you access to free resources, including 31 healing meditations that if you do daily, are going to help you hear your angels and your own intuition more clearly. Start using these today and you’ll see changes in 31 days. Now take a deep breath. Feel the presence of your angels as they fill you with love, joy, peace, bliss and ease. And remember, your angels. Say, the messages that resonate with you in today’s episode are meant just for you. Hello beautiful souls.

Julie Jancius: Welcome back to the Angels and Awakening podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius. And friends, as I was wrapping up my interview with Neal Allen, author of Better Days, Tame Your Inner Critic which is really a roundabout way of getting you to your intuition by getting to know that egoic mind that we all talk about here on the podcast. Well, at the end of that interview, Neal goes, you didn’t ask me about angels. You didn’t ask me if I believe in angels. And I said, oh, I’m sorry, you have to come back. So, Neal welcome back.

Neal Allen: Welcome. Thank you. I’ve never actually publicly talked about angels before, so I’m excited about this.

Julie Jancius: Oh, breaking news over here. I love it. So do you believe in angels?

Neal Allen: Well, yes, I do. I believe in angels the way I believe in other things, that beliefs are temporary systems that allow us to recognize ourselves and recognize our world and sort out self and other. So whether you’re in theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, any of the behavioral views of what it is to be a human, ultimately you’re looking at self and other, you’re looking at body and soul. And those two confusing and mixed up and puzzling forms of sorting things out require, systems. And one system that has happened to me. So I tend to think that the systems that have the most wisdom in them, I don’t pick, they happen to me and they kind of come into me. One system that has appeared in various guises is the system of angels. So, before I go on, tell me your definition of an angel, and then I’ll have something to riff against.

Julie Jancius: Oh, all right, perfect. So, I believe that God universe source is not a he or a she or a they. It’s all that is. It’s the energy. Every cell within our being, every molecule surrounding us, every molecule that makes up this microphone and computer and your headphones and everything. Vastly infinite infinities, large and infinite. Infinite small. I always tell my podcast audience that you might think it’s a silly movie, the movie Ant Man, but it really gives a great visual of how small small can be. And spirit always says that when we think about infinity, we think about expanding outward, but it actually goes inward, too. And I believe that what the angels are is that God universe source stacked the deck in our favor to help us come back to ourselves. I personally think we are, each soul is its own infinity, and that all that is, is all of us coming together as a collective. And so the angels are part of God universe sources energy that can take various different forms. Because, like, when I’m in my sessions, the angels always laugh at our limited notions of what the other side is. Like, do we just cross over to the other side and there’s nothing? Or, why is it that we think that we could have this beautiful physical reality here, and here’s the only place that we can have it?

Julie Jancius: No, we have it on the other side as well.

Julie Jancius: This is the only place that we have the duality of egoic mind, inner critic, intuitive voice. And so these angels can take many different shapes, forms, energetically to get through to us and help us come back to our own inner wisdom, intuition, that voice within us all, that’s really guiding us to live the life our soul came here to live.

Neal Allen: I, see, I like that it corresponds fairly neatly with my view of angels. So, first, let me talk a little bit about what I see as the purpose of the supernatural. So the supernatural, as a process of, examining who I am and examining where I am provides me with alternate conditions so that I can step out of what I call materialist empiricism. What you see is what you get. And this is a table, right? That’s where I live. It’s familiar, it gets heavy. And the supernatural, which just means an acceptance that I can visit a metaphysically different world, usually takes me into a world like the ones that you described, of, a kind of infinite determinism that can have a leader or a projection of a better or a, ah, purpose or not. It can have emptiness or fullness. It can have seamlessness or individuality. There are all sorts of different ways that I can see how there’s more going on, and it’s more interdependent than I think. And that allows me, when I return to my familiar life, basically to lighten it up. Right. This isn’t the only way it has to be. And I can get rid of a little bit of the crustiness of my judgmental view of this is a table, it’s only a table, and I want to keep this table, and nobody should take this table away from me. So the supernatural provides me with a way to first create a metaphor for determinism, since im so tied up in my free will small view, cause and effect kind of view that I can kind of picture it and get it in mind, and then I can actually visit it. And obviously the picture isnt the same thing as the visit. The picture is a belief. The visit is, is a sensory exploration more than it’s I still retain my mind and my mind still narrates and it still examines and gives me meaning at the same time that I’m able to actually experience being small or experience being nothing or experience being absorbed. A lot of people get caught up in the supernatural as, ooh, it’s better. Not really, it’s different. But I actually like living in the familiar world. And so for me, it’s a nice place to visit and it’s very, very attractive. But what the hell do I learn from a bliss state?

Julie Jancius: Right? Right.

Neal Allen: For whatever reason, as humans, we learn from mistakes and suffering and all of those sorts of things. And we get the sensation of freedom that can be sustained perfectly well within the familiar world, just as it can be sustained perfectly well in the deterministic world.

Julie Jancius: That’s the first chapter of my second book that I just wrote.

Neal Allen: Ah, nice. That’s very nice. That’s very nice. So my first view of angels, the first time angels really hit me was way before I entered into any kind of supernatural experiences or spiritual systems. And it was sitting in a movie theater with, I think it’s a vim vendors movie, wings of desire. And if you haven’t seen it, go to YouTube and look for the opening clip of wings of desire. It’s nine minutes, and it is the stage, it is the scene setting for the entire movie. It’s a beautiful movie all the way through. But the first nine minutes are amazing. So they objectify angels in Berlin in the eighties, in a very black and white, bleak kind of view, but ordinary view of Berlin. They objectify angels as human beings with, you know, they’ve got, special effect wings on them, who just kind of roost in the spires and roofs of, Berlin. And they chat among themselves and then they kind of look around and they look into people’s windows. And if they see somebody is really having a hard time in their head, right, is really suffering in their head, they just kind of fly in to an ordinary kitchen where a guy in a muscle shirt is worried about something and they just whisper, And that’s all they do. And then they fly back to their roost. And all these angels do is provide a short period of respite from the absurd difficulty of living in this confusing civilized world. It was written by a guy, I think he’s been cancelled, for white, nationalist views or something. I don’t remember what. He was written by a beautiful poet who apparently has bad ideas, but named Peter Hanke. And you can feel the poetry in the movie all the way through, not just in the dialogue, but in the visuals too. It’s just a mysterious film. but the first nine minutes are just remarkable. And I realized, oh, if that’s all that angels are, I can believe in angels insofar as they’re a metaphor for some kind of weird form of grace that enters into my life periodically, sometimes in the form of a human, sometimes in the form of a book.

Neal Allen: That just offers me respite from the absurd difficulty of living in this world, in the familiar world, and trying to figure it out and figure out who I am when I’m being told I’m never enough. Who am I if I’m not enough? A difficult question. And there are, you know, I wrote a book about that. And my book better days is about that. But what better days doesn’t talk about very much is my own route and my own way in. Because I think books like that are a little bit show offy and boring. And so I don’t talk about this. But there was a period in my life when for whatever reason, I had visions. I’m a rationalist, I’m a truth seeker. I’m skeptical. I am not interested in the paranormal as a thing in itself at all.

Julie Jancius: I’m not interested in ghosts or any of that.

Julie Jancius: Just the, spiritual.

Neal Allen: Yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden, one day I started having visions. And. And these visions started to show up. I had to accept them. They had, storylines usually, or metaphors in them, it’s hard to remember. I can remember a couple of them, quite vividly, but they had the sort of thing of seeing, like right in front of my face, like a foot and a half away from me. There was one vision where I saw the earth is, maybe like a globe, maybe a foot and a half in diameter. And out of it were pouring kind of ugly, things, demons and volcanic ash and stuff. And sitting on top was Krishna with his legs crossed, this hindu God. And he was kind of laughing and having a good time and rocking and slowly fire, was coming down and absorbing the earth and destroying the earth and turning it black while he sat up there at the top, turning it to black ash, slowly. And then behind it was. Of all the odd things, our lady of Guadalupe was standing there and instead of her aura coming out in rays, it was, a flow of, molten gold kind of just continuously going around in that same arc that the. That the rays make.

Julie Jancius: Did you know I give away a new free reading each month to a listener who leaves a five star rating of this show on Apple podcasts or Amazon? After you leave five stars, go over to the contact me page on my website, the angel me. Fill out the contact me form letting us know that you gave five stars. That way we can contact you when you win. The more five stars you leave, the more chances you have to win. And your name always stays in until you do. Don’t forget to stay subscribed to our, emails so that you know when you’ve won your free session with me, sending you so much love and gratitude for your support on this. Thank you. Now let’s dive back into the show.

Neal Allen: Now I’ve forgotten where there was something in it, where I also saw that the sky had turned to Gossamer. And I was kind of hit by this vision. At the beginning of an eight day retreat, in the period of the, day in which you raise your hand and ask about things or talk about things that have happened, I talked about it and I was curious about it and I was, like I explained, I’m not a visions person, but occasionally I get these. And I described the vision and it went on and on. There were more components and people were laughing their heads off because it was so elaborate, right? And at one point I described the sky as turning gossamer. And the teacher at the head of the room who was following along stopped me and said, what is gossamer? He was, German, and he didn’t know the word gossamer. And he said, what does gossamer mean? And I thought a second, I said, oh, it’s the stuff of angels wings. It’s kind of flimsy and feathery and light, and it’s got speckles of gold in it. Anyway. Oh, okay. And I realized right at that moment that something in me understood angels wings. and in this mystery school, there’s a catalog of what precious metals and colors and experiences mean universally to people. And gold means truth. And so that being speckled with gold means that angels bring me a little bit of truth right when they come in. But it’s a light and feathery truth, like grace. Like a light rain. Grace is a light rain. It’s like that. It’s not a, Here is what you’re supposed to believe. It’s. Here’s something that will lighten up the world to you. And then I asked him, what is it about these visions? And I noticed that he didn’t answer using the word visions. He said, well, what is it about premonitions? And bingo. I realized that, oh, every time I had a vision, I was actually seeing a metaphor for what was going to be studied next in my retreat group. And I still had to do the exact same amount of work as if I hadn’t had the vision. But it gave me a little more encouragement to have seen what the end was. And so I had seen it happened that that was one of those kind of end all and be all views of destroying your world. What would it be to destroy your world? So there’s Krishna destroying the world. And then that ray of gold going behind was a comforting sense that it’s okay, the truth sets you free. That kind of idea, right, was also built into it. And it had. I could interpret it right. There was nothing wrong with interpreting it. but it didn’t mean that I owned it in any way. It didn’t mean that. Oh, now I know that because these are things that you don’t know until you’ve done the work of getting things out of the way and experiencing them. And that takes work, and that’s hard work. And it kind of gave me my visions during that period, gave me an ability to, with alacrity, do very hard work and trust that it was safe to get rid of identities, safe to get rid of views that the world isn’t supposed to be destroyed, that I’m not supposed to start over, that I’m supposed to act as if I’m a, constant thread and I need to preserve my memory and my thread and all of that in order to exist in the world. Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s worth studying, worth experiencing the opposite.

Julie Jancius: So we’re the thread because, like, when I read better days, are you kind of tying it in with, one of the parts that you talk about in the book is the egoic mind? Actually, I think I wrote it down here. The super ego expects me to know things I don’t and do things I can’t. And I read that, and I was like, that just hit my heart. And you talk about how you’ll be working on a project and you’ll be really getting into the heart of the project and doing things, and then your ego will come in and be like, well, this isn’t good enough, and you need to make this better, and you need to do this. And you’re like, but I’m not there yet. Like, I don’t. And I resonated with that so much because sometimes you’ll be working on something in life, and then that superego comes in with this crushing criticism of, it’s got to be better, it’s got to be perfect. It’s got to be the best. Best. And you’ve been working on this thing with so much love and good intention and just heart, and it makes you, that super ego makes you want to just scrap it and, like, throw it all away and start over and do better. But being the thread of life, or part of the thread of life, makes perfect sense because you’re just woven into the fabric and you just have to keep going.

Neal Allen: So there’s that thread, and there’s the thread that I am the same person who was six years old and struggling. I am the same person who was an awkward teenager. I’m the same person who ran, half marathons and a marathon in my life. I’m the same person who did this achievement, and it no longer shows up in my life. Right? Those weigh me down, whether they’re good or bad, if I think that they are attached to the current me. So being present isn’t a nice, soft, meditative state that is outside of my familiar self. Right. Being present can be dynamic and writing a book or talking to a friend or taking a walk. That can be present. And I can be active in doing. Yeah, I can also be inactive in being, but I can be active in doing, and I can be present. But to do that, I have to wipe out the past. M so just the same way, I have to quit projecting into a better future, right? Most of the time, if we think about the future, we’re thinking about it as if we’re disappointed in some way with where we are right now. So that sense of presence, which can become available in a way and can stick around, also is supported by an acceptance and, a repetitive appearance of I don’t know. And that repetitive appearance of I don’t know allows me to start over again and look again and get a clearer view and a non prejudiced view. Because if I’m thinking about it through my past, I’m prejudiced. I’ve already decided what’s interesting and uninteresting about it. So if I get stuck and I start to get perfectionist, the way, one way out, there are a bunch of ways out. There are little tools that we can use. One way out is to look for an angel who will breathe respite into me. Right, that works. but another way out is to say, I don’t know, and go, oh, it’s okay to not know, and call in a lifeline from a friend, or go look somewhere else, or realize, actually, most of the quality that I’m capable of doing a project with is already baked in, and refining it is, I’ll worry about that later. And that’s what editors are for, right? They’re there to find my blind spots, which are much bigger than my proof. Corrections on my own can be m. And so, noticing that my quality is enough, it doesn’t need to be the highest standard possible.

Neal Allen: And that the world is not only easier, but more accurate. If I let mistakes happen quite often and notice that I’m perfectly good at adjusting to them when the time comes, rather than worrying about making mistakes so much, then I can be a little more open. I’m not saying naive. Naive means I don’t know enough to be able to do the task, but I can be spontaneous and innocent and open minded, along with my practical knowledge, even though it was collected in the past, is no longer belonging to me, but is just like a bucket of practical knowledge. My mastery at being able to write sentences or whatever it is, that kind of attitude of I don’t know, then sends me to the possibility that the buddhist notion of a bodhisattva, or a Buddha, having lived through thousands and thousands of lives, can be a beautiful allegory for the possibility that I can start my life over again in every moment of my life and still succeed and still be fed, clothed, housed, and safe, which are my only needs. And in the end, everything else is just a preference. But the idea of, I don’t know is it wipes out the past and I’m reborn in this moment with all my practical knowledge, oddly enough. Right? So I’m not naive or malfunctioning. I’m just reborn in this moment. And I get to, and I have a new life. And are all those passages in the early buddhist discourses about thousands and thousands of lives just helping me notice that in a day I have many, many moments that have a beginning, middle and end, and as each one ends do I notice that there’s a tiny bit of empty samadhi at the end of it before the next moment begins that can be used even consciously to wipe out the past. So if I’m in a difficult situation with a person in particular in a relationship, I find it quite handy the next time I meet them to wipe out all my memory of them and just walk in. And a somewhat different person appears to me who’s usually much more obviously suffering and defended. Not. I don’t say that as feeling like superior, that they’re pathetic in some way or need to be fixed in some way. It’s just to notice that the things that I looked at as aggressive and offensive were they’re just, they’re playing out their own defensive structure, just as I was playing out my own defensive structure.

Julie Jancius: I think that’s a good point of the book, too, that you talk about that we really didn’t get to cover in the last interview is there’s really these three defenses that when we’re triggered, you say we, we pretty much go to one of these three defenses and you’re like, we all have these three defenses. But if you look at modern psychology, they label them as diseases. And you’re like, we all have these. I don’t know why we’re labeling this, these diseases. Talk about that a little bit, because that part was really, really fascinating.

Neal Allen: Yeah. the medical model. Yeah, I’ll go on a digression, because I go on digressions. But until somewhere toward the end of the 19th and the early 20th century, psychology was mostly contained within drama. So we learned psychology by going to sea plays. And there were theories of drama that were our form of, studying psychology. Aristotle’s poetics is a great western theory of psychology seen through drama. And in India, there’s something called ancient India, there’s something called, rasa, which is, the aesthetics of plays, which is all about emotions and how they’re portrayed on stage and the appropriate way to portray them on stage and how they connect with other human beings. So we have a medical model now. And so we look at people as, when they are displaying their defenses and displaying their emotions as being neurotic. And we exaggerate the medical model into three particular pathologies. And they’re called. They’re kind of the standard defensive, pathological view of what it is to. To be scared in life, to be fearful in life. And one’s called the schizoid defense, and that’s withdrawal. And one’s called the borderline defense. And that’s anger. And one’s called the malignant narcissistic defense, and that’s called scorn. But all of us have all three, and all of us have to use them in the conflicts that we’re in. We’re raised to defend ourselves because we live next door to strangers, and we haven’t squared that circle yet. Right. For 300,000 years, we lived in small tribal clans. And a stranger was a barbarian who was dangerous, who seldom was seen. And most of the day, people defaulted to trust. They had no reason not to trust the people in their small clan. Once we got overlapping and busy and started living next door to strangers, what we call civilization, we defaulted to distrust. And so in defaulting to distrust, we have to have defenses. And the defenses, we think we have all sorts of defenses that cover all sorts of different circumstances. We actually have three. And the defensive withdrawal, the so called schizoid defense is usually played out by moving to another room or sulking. We usually call it sulking. And it’s got an underlying fear in it. So the person who first goes toward the withdrawal defense, who finds themselves mechanically moving into that defense whenever they’re in a conflict, has an exaggerated fear of not being seen. So the fear underlying it is not being seen. We all have the fear of not being seen. And we can all trace it back to a certain time in life, and it just afflicts all of us. But some people have that as their default fear, and so they’re going to be the sulkers. Now. Some people have as their default fear, the fear of not being in control, the frustration over not being in control. And they play that out as anger. So anger is always the frustration over not being in control. And then some people have the fear of not being seen as being right. And so they have the know it all, scornful. they talk over people, and they talk too much, right? And they’re default to that. Everybody’s got a default. Everybody’s got a strong second. When the default doesn’t work, you go to something second, and then usually the third is very weak and only is used occasionally. when the first two don’t work. Don’t work. For instance, I go to know it all first, and then I go to anger second, and then I go to withdrawal third, and then I’m out of defenses. It’s kind of it. so Annie, my wife, goes to withdrawal first, sulking first, no doubt. All second, being right, is second, and third is anger. and it’s a very distant third. I very, very seldom see any sign of anger in Annie, and I’m afraid she very, very seldom sees any sign of withdrawal from me. Right, because that’s my distant third. What that means is that in every single conflict my partner and I have, as soon as it gets heated, she’s moving into another room, and I’m following her, telling her how right I am. Now, what’s the use of knowing this? The use of knowing it is that you get to see just how mechanically you’re using your default over and over again, as if it’s the only right way to deal with the conflict. And by abstracting out, the mechanics of conflict, you can start to pull yourself out of it more quickly.

Neal Allen: I’m going to get triggered, and I’m going to get into a conflict, and I’m going to be reactive until the day I die. I don’t care about that. My super ego, my inner critic, has decades ahead of me, and I’m not supposed to be perfect at not hurting other people’s feelings or not having my feelings hurt. But I do want to know, as soon as the trance of the heat of the conflict is over, I want to be able to stop and say, what just happened. And m one thing I’m going to notice just happened was, oh, there we go again. She’s heading to Salk, and I’m heading to tell her exactly. Well, once I’ve kind of watched that movie 100 times, the 101st time, the movie’s going to be a little shorter, it’s going to be a little less believable. Right. Somewhere in me, it’s going to be shorter, less believable, and more important to me is I’m going to be able to think about it, when the movie’s over and realize, wow, that was a huge exaggeration of need. I didn’t actually need to win. And it doesn’t matter whether Annie believes the same thing, that she didn’t need to win. All I need to notice is that I didn’t need to win. And I can go back in and be an adult about it.

Julie Jancius: You talk in the book about how you know your partner, Annie, which if people don’t know. Cause I’ve been a writer for so long. And I gotta tell you, Neal I haven’t been in a writer’s circle or a workshop with publish, you know, publishers where somebody doesn’t bring up Annie because she’s just so world renown for her writing. But you talk about how she just needs to be seen, she just needs to be heard. She just needs to be validated. And I was like, man, if every partner could hear this of every listener, we’d, we’d change a lot of relationships just with this one conversation.

Neal Allen: Yeah. As long as we don’t make ourselves need to be better, right? Need to be more accurate is very different from need to be better. I’m going to say something that’s a little weird and radical, but in a certain way, I just don’t care whether I hurt somebody’s feelings. Not out of coldness, but out of the fact that if I’m focused on the hurt feeling, then I’m apologizing for myself instead of apologizing for having had an effect on Annie. If I’m all tied up in guilt and shame, I’m going to. I’m all tied up in myself. I’m deciding I’m a child and a needy child who needs to improve and needs a parental voice in order to be a better person and not get angry or not get mocking or not right. When in fact, I’m a conscious human who from time to time we’ll get into a defensive contest and both of us will be hurting each other’s feelings. And it just happens. So one thing I notice is that the other person is also on defense. And then if I notice they’re on defense, maybe I have an ability to, instead of worry about hurting their feelings, be interested and loving toward their suffering, which is compassion. Compassion clears away a hurt feeling in myself and in other people. But I have to let it arise on its own by focusing on the suffering and not focusing on somebody being wrong. So hurting, I mean, it’s just kind of weird. We know when we’re little kids, sticks and stones may break my bones, but when we’re adults, we don’t buy that. When we’re adults, we’re like all about our hurt feelings. And most gossip is in one way or another, about feelings being hurt. And we tie ourselves up in knots over hurt feelings. Well, hurt feelings happen. Get used to it. Don’t get cold to it, don’t be stoic about it. But look past the hurt feeling at, There’s a pattern here of defensiveness. Let’s see if we can suss that out.

Julie Jancius: I love it.

Julie Jancius: one of the other things that you say in your book is that you sometimes go back to this thought. My only job in this life is to be fascinated. And, I love that because it’s looking at life in general with this awe, ah. And this sacredness. And, I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Neal Allen: So anytime I’m judgmental, anytime I’m doing things to be better or useful or fitting in to the human justice system or political system or religious system or moral system, and I’m doing that consciously, right. I’m entering into a hierarchical system of judgment. And there’s as much judgment in saying something nice to somebody as there is in saying something mean to somebody. If it’s coming out of, like, it’s as much of a judgment to say, wow, you’re really smart, as it is to say, you’re really stupid, it’s basically saying, I’m going to measure you. And every time I’m measuring somebody, I’m separating them from me. And I’m looking at something in their kind of outward, shiny appearance, that’s their personality, and either admiring it or judging it as, faulty. And I just do that over and over and over again. And I’m required to do that within a lot of human interaction. We’re required to have jails, we’re required to have behavior. Ah. That is not tolerated. And it works. The trains run on time. All of that happens. But it’s weighty. It’s looking at people for their use value, no matter how. It’s quid pro quo. It’s transactional, always, and it separates me from other. Now, if I am, somehow excused from the system for a moment, I can be intimate, I can look at somebody with empathy, which means I’m looking at them as just another human being who got stuck with their role, who got pushed into their niche, pushed into their role by circumstances. The fact is, if I, if this brain and nervous system and all of that had been born into the embryo that became Adolf Hitler, I would have been Adolf Hitler. There’s no way around it. In one way, he didn’t ask to be Adolf Hitler. Trump didn’t ask to be Trump. Biden didn’t ask to be Biden. Nobody asks to be who they are. In a sense, right now, that sense is dismissed as an unimportant way of looking at life. We have to keep to the justice system and judge things. Maybe I want to question that. Once I question it, I can take things as they are. I can be objective about things. I can look at things with disinterest. So looking at things with uninterest means I don’t care about them. Looking at things with disinterest interest says, I’m not picking and choosing. I don’t have a dog in the hunt. I’m simply looking and seeing what will appear. Well, that’s called objectivity. That’s called truth. There’s actually an expansive way that I can live part of my day that way. This is absolutely no different to me from the message Jesus made when he said the radical statement, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God. He was always, he was never talking about the justice system, believe it or not, even though that’s in the pulpits and maybe belongs there, maybe doesn’t. He was never talking about it. he was always talking about, you’ve got a capacity and time during the day to appreciate the world as is, and it will come to you that you’re more kind and generous and open than you thought you were. because I’ve noticed that when I wander around that the people who are spending less time paying attention to the justice system are having a better time of it, and they’re less disconnected from the world. They’re more intimate. So I can be empathic only if I stop being judgmental. The two worlds don’t mix. I can act empathic, I can act charitable in the justice world, but I’m not actually able to view somebody as identical to me. I’m required to see their use value.

Julie Jancius: Ah.

Neal Allen: And there’s good reason. That’s species stuff. The species has a job to do. But I’m also an individual, and my self reflection lets me be. And so sometimes I think that in the kind of childlike, biblical God and angels view of the world, I’m supposed to be able to spend time in the world. And just like God, go. And it is good. There are two origin stories in the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, and, there are two origin stories, and there are two origin stories in Hinduism that are quite similar. And in other traditions, there are often two origin stories. And in the first one, all is good. And in the second one, judgment appears. And so the second one has the bad seed myth kind of stuck in there all the time. And everybody talks about the second origin story and thinks the first origin story is kind of metaphysically interesting about a time that used to exist. Right. Well, what if that’s possible for me now? Deep or confusing? But I end up. I do end up, noticing that if I take my eye off of, better and worse, I’m going to be more intimate with absolutely everything and that I can then return into the world where everybody around me is doing better and worse, and I can still function with a lot less sense of better and worse and a lot more sense of. These are preferences, and I still vote. I still watch, the news at 06:00 p.m. I still find myself bristling at certain things. And I don’t have to give up having a political stand. I don’t have to give up having a belief in a certain kind of fairness. But I have given up in any way believing that I chose those things and that they weren’t thrust on me, those opinions weren’t thrust on me. And also that I have no idea the consequences of my, in the long term, which is the only game that that world is really involved in, is the continued, expansion of the species. That’s all it cares about in the end. And I have no idea right now. I can’t predict whether the experiment of fascism, the experiment of democracy, the experiment of autocracy, the experiment, all these different political experiments that are being run, I can’t predict which ones are better or worse in the long run. They’re all experiments I would kind of mentally blow up if I thought about that all the time. So I stay in the playground of free will and, assumption that I can read the tea leaves in my very narrow view of time and space. And I also have the humility to realize, that’s a plaything. It’s not real. I have no idea of the consequence of anybody’s individual actions.

Julie Jancius: And that’s what it is you said instead of allowing it to just boil up inside of you, which is what we saw a couple of years ago. Everybody was these, pots of boiling water, and the lids were just coming off of everybody. There’s so much in our everyday lives that we’re just putting this pressure on ourselves, pressures within ourselves to hold certain energies and try and steer the ship. But what you’re really saying is we’re not really at the helm of the ship. We are not steering it. And I know that there’s a lot of spiritual teachers out there who say you, whatever it is, that you think your emotions, you are creating everything that happens to you. And I’m not of that belief. I don’t believe that we create our own cancers or the traumas that happen to us or the bigger things that play out within the collective consciousness. I believe that we are dealt cards randomly at different points within our lives and that we choose from our conscious point of view right then, right there. How are we going to work with these cards? What are we going to do with these cards? And what you’re saying is if you just release, I think. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. If you just release the trying to control. If you just release this pressure within your body and say, I don’t know. Because that’s the fact of the matter. Nobody here knows the way that this is going to play out and where everything is going to be 5100 years down the road. We want it to be good. We want it to be great for our kids and our grandkids, but we don’t know. So if you release that pressure energetically, there is something that happens within the physical body where you actually get to experience your everyday life, your moments, your minutes, these just days, completely differently. And it’s a wonderful experience of life.

Neal Allen: Yeah, that’s really well put. It’s weird, the burdens we add to ourselves when we don’t notice the most basic things sometimes like that. I’ve incorporated and everybody I know, with one or two exceptions who are people called sociopaths, but they’re very rare. And there are exceptions of people who have rather extreme mental illness that disorganizes their minds. But other than those two categories, everybody I know is moral.

Neal Allen: Because all being moral means is that I know right from wrong, good from bad. I know it. I learned it when I was six years old to twelve years old, mostly. And by the time I was 17, I pretty much had it. It doesn’t mean that everything I do, everybody will agree, is moral. But the basics, I know them and I know what the penalties are. And I know what this particular culture, how much criminality is allowed in this particular culture. I mean, it’s weird. We have a rights oriented culture instead of a compassion oriented culture. And what that means is that we allow a lot more criminality than most cultures do. And then we call them autocratic or, you know, we call them draconian and they’re like, yeah, but we don’t need a bunch of police around, you know, it’s safer, right? And, and we’re like, we’re like unable to look at ourselves. But at any rate, I put this pressure on myself to be responsible for all these other adults as if they’re needy children and they’re not. They’re responsible adults standing on their own 2ft. And my choices, oddly enough, are not between good and bad, right and wrong. They’re between good and good. Because I’m within a moral framework. Everybody I know is within a moral framework where all the decisions they make during the day are between good and good, right and right. None of them is fateful unless they’re on a, on a trail and there’s a rattlesnake in front of them. All of them have the potential to go sideways. And when they go sideways, my superpower isn’t my decision making and my achievements. My superpower as a human being is that I can adapt. It’s so cool. And I do. And the world organizes itself perfectly well around me in the next moment after things go sideways. And I’m not ever making a fateful decision that will lead me down a series of catastrophic events and land me in homelessness, which is our surrogate for the fear of chaos. We don’t notice that we’re scared of chaos. Not more than homelessness. We’re too scared to even think about chaos. But chaos, if it existed, I would have had to have known and experienced in some way or another a disorganized moment.

Neal Allen: And unless my mind is disorganized with mental illness, I have never had a disorganized moment and I never will. And that I can adapt to any moment that appears to me. With the exception. You know, there are natural disasters, but you can’t prepare for those. Anyway.

Julie Jancius: Yeah.

Neal Allen: The cards you’re dealt, the cards are your dealt.

Julie Jancius: Oh, Neal you are just such a phenomenal thinker, author. Thank you for sharing your time with us over here at the Angels and Awakening podcast. Please share with everybody where they can find you and your new book, better days.

Neal Allen: You can follow me on Substack at Neal Allen N E A l A l l e n or my website is shapesoftruth.com dot perfect.

Julie Jancius: Thank you, Neal.

Neal Allen: Thank you.

Julie Jancius: Beautiful soul. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name’s Julie. You know, I’m all about connecting you with messages from your angels and loved ones on the other side. If you’ve been listening today and you’re super excited and just have to know which angels are around you right now, who’s connecting with you and what messages they have for you, go to theangelmedium.com register for a session. You can do a reading with me or a member of my team. We’re all incredible. We all talk to Angels daily, and we can help you in making sure that your angels are doing the very best they can to support you and guide you to your best life. If this sounds like you virtual sessions, they’re only offered on my website. Sign up today, and if you’re the person who’s really excited, you’re ready to go all in. Developing all of your unique spiritual gifts, growing your intuition, starting your own healing business. You can sign up for my Angel Reiki school to become a certified angel messenger. That’s for the healers among us who feel called to grow their intuition to the max and serve humanity with their gifts. You’ll learn Reiki mediumship, how to deliver angel messages, and how to get clients. That’s the angel Reiki school@theangelmedium.com. Or dm m me m on Instagram angel podcast with any questions before you go. Connect with your angels by placing your hands on your heart. Take a deep breath. Imagine, a doorway filled with God’s unconditional love is right in front of you. Step into that love and feel it as it fills your body, chakras, and auric field. Now ask your angels, what would you have me know today? And open yourself to the positive, loving messages they have just for you.