Who is a Profit, and Who is Profiteering? (Monthly Solo Episode)

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After finally getting to meet the incredible Richard Rohr (interview coming to the podcast soon), I sat down to reflect on: The unlikely road I’ve been on to become so immersed in Christian writers (was never on my bingo card), and what I misunderstood in my original interpretation of Jesus. What I’ve learned about dying to your small self and growing into your big self. What it means to be a prophet—not a fortune-teller, but a truth-teller—and in this age of profiteering online, how we can be more aware of when people are profiting by pretending to be a prophet. How we can avoid marketing drama triangles. And, the tools that are helping me, in this moment, to get fear out of my body.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I have been trying for years to go and see Father Rohr, and finally I got the nod. This has been in the calendar for a year contingent on everyone feeling well and up to it, and so I hadn't wanted to really say anything about it for fear that it would fall through, but it happened and I went to Albuquerque.

They offered doing it online, which is how I do most of my interviews, and there was no way that I was not going to show up and see Father Rohr in person. It was wonderful. We laughed a lot. He was so moving. Of course, I almost cried as is my way and as incredibly fun as dorky as I thought it would be to round out on all of the little bows that his work finds. I was saying to Kiki, who helps me with the podcast and we work together forever, previously, more recently back together. I was like, it's just funny because I would never have pegged myself as someone who would really be going so hard on Jesus. I just did not foresee myself as that person at all. For those who don't know, I was raised Jewish, my father's Jewish by way of South Africa.

My grandmother went to South Africa from Poland, my grandfather from Germany before World War ii. Fortunately for them and for me, my real last name is Lowenstein, as it were actually, my grandfather changed his name and my mother was raised Catholic in Iowa, the oldest of seven kids, and she would call herself a recovering Catholic, definitely elapsed Catholic, but she is, and I understand this, quite terrified of organized religion. And so I grew up going to Jewish services in Missoula, Montana. They were very chill. We had a female rabbi who came in I think once a month from San Francisco, very progressive. And so that was my early religious education. And then I went to an Episcopalian high school, which was lovely. I sang in the choir and that was it. And I was saying to Richard Rohr that I found his work actually through Cynthia Bourgeault, who's been on the podcast.

I've interviewed her a couple of times through Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene features prominently in my book on our best behavior. She was the one to whom Pope Gregory assigned the Cardinal vices otherwise known as the Seven Deadly Sins and a homily in 590 A.D.. He said, she's the carrier of the seven Deadly Vices. She's the same woman who anoints Jesus' feet with her hair and she's a penitent prostitute. So that's where that story started. So I read Cynthia Bau and her book, which is Beautiful on Mary Magdalene. And then I was like, this is really interesting to me. And I kept going with Cynthia Bourgeault and I read The Wisdom Jesus and The Holy Trinity and The Eye of the Heart, which is such a beautiful book about GI Gurdjieff who's one of the people who brought the Enneagram forward, although the Enneagram started with Evagrius Ponticus who wrote down the what became the seven deadly sins.

So anyway, I'm bringing this to a head, I promise. As I was writing on our best behavior, all these really weird Evagrius Ponticus father of the Enneagram, which is also sourced in the seven deadly sins. And then through Cynthia Brize I found Richard Rohr. Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, and Cynthia Au was on the faculty and is still, I think an emus there. So it was really through her that I was like, what's this about? Because to me he had always seemed sort of like Wonder Bread blonde surfer bro who said things and wasn't a real prophet. So that's how I came to Father Richard Rohr is through Cynthia Bourgeault. And then it was just like my mind exploded because for me, not only does Richard Wright in such a, we call him Richard now, friends, don't worry in such a incredibly clear, simple, essential way, but with him it's never, and he would probably say this is the second half of life thing, but it's never about the knowledge.

It's always about the wisdom for him. And so his books I read, almost all of them just knock me over. I think the wisdom pattern is my favorite. I know breathing underwater and falling upwards are many people's favorites. Those I think are about really about recovery, but about these cycles of initiation that are so central to so much of his work that where you really die to your small self and grow into your big cell. And the reason I think too that I love Richard Rohr so much is one, you can apply this, maybe you'd call it a vertical wisdom or this spirituality or this progressive Christianity to the horizontal life. He writes about politics in a way that is so incredibly clarifying within the construct of a larger order. Well, he would say it's order disorder reorder that you can trace it throughout time and throughout history.

This is also I think the spiral within our own personal development and growth. He has this concept called the cosmic egg, which is that the me story is nestled in the We story, which is part of the story. But in our culture, we've lost the story. Very few of us share any collective memory stories or belief systems. Most of those frameworks have shattered to some extent, and we struggle with the We Story as well. We're very interested in the me story. Me, me, me, me, me. That's where our culture really is right now. And so I think there's a lot to learn from that. What is it to take your story and connect it to a larger We story and then frame it within the story? I think we're craving that sort of unity, that sort of context, that feeling that we belong to something that's much bigger than ourselves.

And so I think that's a frame that really moves me. And then the other reason that Richard Rohrer's work is so incredible and applicable is that he wouldn't probably call himself a Jungian, but he understands Carl Young, in depth psychology deeply and weaves that into his work. And he also understands developmental psychology and weaves that into his work. He writes a lot about Ken Wilbur. I love reading Ken Wilbur. I don't agree with him on everything, but I think his frames are so reassuring and makes so much sense. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, Ken Wilbur really forwarded the work of Clare Graves who was a contemporary of Abraham Maslow, and I don't remember its original name. It was something completely cumbersome and impossible to remember, but it ultimately became spiral dynamics. And I've done a podcast with Nicole Churchill about spiral dynamics.

I've also done a podcast with Ken Wilbur. I'll link them in the show notes because those are worth re-listening to particularly right now. Because what it is is a model of both personal and cultural psychological development. And once you understand where someone's center of gravity is and who they represent, where their center of gravity is, everything starts to cohere and make so much sense. And I find it deeply reassuring. I guess I'm like, there's someone who's deeply green, being deeply green. There's someone who's deeply orange being deeply orange. At least it feels to me like it's a little bit like a closet that I can hang some pieces of clothing in and create at least some sense of order. And Richard Rohr incorporates spiral dynamics into his work. He incorporates Rene Gerard into his work, which is really interesting right now because Rene Gerard, who is this polyglot professor who a literature professor, but he wrote about primarily, I mean he was very Christian and he wrote about Jesus and the scapegoat mechanism, which is this idea throughout time, and I'm going to talk a bit about this because this is present and one of the things that drives fear for us, but that we have this pattern that precedes Jesus.

He's a representative of it or a culmination of it as well, that our culture is founded on murder and that it's founded on a scapegoat mechanism where when we feel a certain amount of anxiety, anger, energy, we need to discharge it and we pick a scapegoat and we collectively align this is an unconscious mechanism and destroy that entity, that contaminating element, and they used to call it the pharmakos, which is interesting. That's the same route as pharmacy. They would pick someone in the culture and this is Jesus, right? But it didn't quite work or it broke the model. It's heady stuff. And he also has this theory which you might've encountered in the culture called mimetic desire, which is that we all come to want or desire the same things. It's an interesting theory. It don't think it, it's as compelling as a scapegoat mechanism if we're going to rank his theories, but it is interesting.

Gerard is long dead, but what's really interesting is that a lot of people on the far right, like JD Vance, Peter Thiel, I think Peter Thiel sort of started it would call themselves they love Renee Gerard, and I was talking about this with Richard Ros team at the Center for Action and Contemplation because one of the things that they look at and understandably and deeply is the rise of Christian nationalism on the right and how to counter that with more progressive Christianity, which is in my humble opinion, far more aligned with scripture and with what Jesus talks about than what's happening over there. It's definitely not prosperity gospel, which is Paula Kane White's thing, who's our new, she runs the faith office. She's married to the ex journey guy and she's a televangelist. Anyway, Dawson on the team was saying how the alt-right or the Girardians picked up on something, a throwaway phrase that Girard said late in his career about how we become overly consumed with the victim.

But it wasn't until I guess Jesus or I think after that we came to even think of people as victims started to see the mechanism and not just see it as a God given right to clear the air with the scapegoat. It was just a given. It was part of that Jews would drive the scapegoat off a cliff. It was a ritual all throughout different cultures. And so Gerard made some comment about how we had become overly consumed with victims, and I just have to wonder if he would be rolling in his grave right now to know that that has been picked up. What's ironic of course, is that particularly in the way that these guys talk about immigrants, for example, they certainly talk about them as a contaminating influence and there's creating scapegoats all over the place, scapegoats in our bureaucracy. The scapegoats right now are federal employees. You keep our skies safe and the cancer research going and so on and so forth. But it's just interesting. We're truly living in an upside down world.

But just to close it out on Father Rohr, who to me is a culmination of all of the things that I've come to understand in my research in the last five or six years, and again, I would never on my bingo card have said, oh, I'm going to become deeply immersed in Christian theology or Christian writers. To be fair, I love myself as Sufi mystic too. My conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan Lee is still one of my favorites that I've ever had on the podcast, but here we are. These are my people, and there's something about that I had never had understood in my original interpretation of Jesus, I had never understood that what this is modeling for us is a system of personal development and collective development. Should we start to be able to actually identify structural sin. And the book that I was invited to talk to Father Rohr about is called The Tears of Things.

It's out in about a week. Please pre-order it, give the book some momentum. It's so beautiful and I've been writing a bit about it because it's about the Jewish prophets, but it's about a modern application of what they were trying to show us and model for us, and keep in mind that all the Jewish prophets were murdered and Jesus was murdered as well. So it's not a popular or an easy or a convenient role, but the book and the idea of the book is to distinguish between a priest and a prophet, and this is such a big idea with secular connotations as well. A priest stands in front of his or her group and he talks about the other, and he critiques the other and he identifies the sin that is not in here but is out there. Meanwhile, the prophet critiques its own group, its own tribe.

The prophet says, look in the mirror. Look at what we're doing. Look at the evil that we're perpetuating. Look at the lies that we're dissembling. This is not who we are. We need to get better. We need to integrate this. We need to grow. We need to not create collective or structural sin. This is not a popular opinion, but it is an essential and a vital one. It is a self critiquing part of growth where you hit the mirror. The prophet is really the mirror to say, look at this. This is not who you profess to be. You are not living up to your values that shadow, that sin that you are so intent on finding out there is right here, and it's your job to tend to it, integrate it and grow from it. So the word prophet, the etymology means essentially to foretell.

And I think in many of our minds, we think of prophet and we think, oh, this is someone who's predicting the future and it really has this idea of speaking for God. But I think you could make the argument that anyone can speak for God so long as they're aligned, truly aligned with unvarnished truth, not the truth as they would like the truth to be, and they're truth tellers. But what's so interesting about this particular moment of time is if you go on any online platform, you will find endless array of people who profess to be truth tellers and they're telling you about government bureaucracy and corruption, conspiracy, deep state, whatever it may be. What they're telling you about the truth that they're telling you is always about some entity out there and it's not being a profit. It is profiteering because these people are monetizing our collective attention.

They're building influence, they're building power, they're selling courses, they're selling products, they're selling aids, they're selling their followings. That's just the function of what's happened to media as it's moved online when very few publications or creators are subsidized through nonprofits, right? It's subscriptions, it's advertising and the advertising. The way that it works is it's a CPM. It's however many impressions you can deliver is essentially how much money you make, or once you deliver enough impressions against that ad, it goes away and it's replaced by another. That's how an online ad marketplace works. So it becomes about scale. It becomes about quantity, not quality. It's becomes a race to the bottom. This has been happening in media for the last 15 or 20 years. You saw it with women's magazines where suddenly websites were flooded with 20, 30 articles a day with Click Beatty titles trying to drag and draw your attention.

This is what happened with cable news, which became a 24 hour outrageous, incredibly dramatic affair that we all got really drunk and sick on. And now in the world of online influencers and digital creators, this is the game. People sell their followers in sponsored brand deals or they're leveraging for them for influence in this new administration or they use it to raise venture capital. There are a million different ways in which people profit by pretending to be profits. There is such a distinction, a profit because not only do they have nothing to gain, but they actually have much to lose. There's nothing convenient about it, and they have to carry a hidden truth forward, a truth that is always unpleasant for people to perceive. Oh man, it's not an easy job and in the context, and the reason that I think Richard Rohr talks about priests and prophets is he talks about the Center for Action and Contemplation being a school for profits, a center to develop religious leaders who are willing to say the truth to the church and help that institution evolve and grow and attend to its sometimes quite profound and painful shadow.

And so that's a really clean and clear example I think of this essential function that we've more or less erased from our institutions. So okay, I'm going to read you a bit. This is from the tiers of things. Profits then are full truth tellers, not fortune tellers. They pull back the veil to radically reframe our preferred storyline of history, the boring and predictable narrative of winners and losers, rewards and punishments. They are by definition those rare individuals who see reality in its fullness and dimension rather than in dualities, like totally right or totally wrong, all good or all bad. There must be someone in every age who can tell the faith, community and society at large, your first egoic glance at life and God is largely wrong, and it is largely engendered by fear. No one else is your problem, says the prophet, you are your own problem.

What you think is goodness is too often delusion and what you think is bad just might be your spiritual best friend. In doing so, they offer not only criticism, but also visions of a more just more merciful, more peaceful society and call the people to live into it. Any religion or philosophy that teaches group blindness instead of full singing is standing in the way of such clarity as Isaiah put it, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. He is describing how all of us use words and feelings to deceive ourselves and others. For example, the American political party that most blatantly hates law and order is invariably the one that loudly repeats the words law and order at every convention. Meanwhile, the party that knows it should be for immigrants acts as though it does not really want them in their backyard. Leaders who rail against impurity are too often the ones with a mistress. When we lack self-knowledge, we will unconsciously project our disliked and unknown self onto others, condemning them for the very faults we share. It is no wonder then that most of the prophets were murdered as Jesus notes accusingly in Matthew 2331.

He's so good. I mean, as you can see just in that passage, there's Jungian shadow work. It's all there. Everything belongs, everything is there. It's so profound and so true, and I want to move into what he mentioned there, which is that the first ego at glance at life and God is largely wrong and it is largely engendered by fear. Fear, oh my God, here's another amazing Richard Rohr transition. I'd see, I don't even plan these things, you guys, they just come together sometimes. So Richard was telling me, although he claims he hasn't counted, but this has been what's reported to him, that the words be not afraid are the most common phrase in the Bible, which is so stunning to me because let me tell you, as an Enneagram 6, God, there's a lot to freak me out. I think we're all totally freaked out.

Our nervous systems are afraid. I wrote a newsletter about this as well, but coming out of the fires and functioning through them, I'd have these moments in the car where I would be wanting to sob or wanting to fully express my sadness, but my kids were there and we were getting to the hotel or whatever it was, we were functioning through it, and I never really had time, not even time, because I feel like if you don't attend to it immediately, it settles in your body. So I just couldn't figure it out how to get that fear that had settled into my body out. I got to go skiing for a couple of days, and that really helped, I think just in some ways exhausting myself to the point where I had sewing machine legs because as my friend Courtney Smith, who's been on the podcast would tell you and was saying to me, and I know this, I had James Gordon on who he runs the center for MINDBODY Medicine, and he goes all over the globe working with highly traumatized groups, whether it's earthquakes in Haiti or it's in Gaza, and one of their methods that they teach, and a lot of people do this inherently.

A lot of tribes do this certainly, but it's shaking and dancing and that there is a somatic way, particularly with the flavor of fear that is f flee because there's flea fight, faint freeze, fa. Those are the flavors of fear.

So I think that the antidote for Flee, for example, and you see wild animals do this after they've escaped being killed by a predator, but they shake you, shake, you can do it. I've started doing it again. I found myself actually doing it yesterday just spontaneously, and I had thought I was somatically working on myself. I do a dance cardio class, but it doesn't really work if it's choreographed. You got to really shake and get it out. Fight. The antidote is to sort of move your body, wave it around in a non-linear way, and Courtney would say that you do that while you're actually wanting to fight. It's really hard to maintain that stature when you're moving around like a blob. This is from Katie Hendrix, and you can Google it and you'll find this, I think when you want to faint, you do these love scoops where you just source yourself with energy.

When you have a tendency to freeze, you root yourself, you get low, really feel the ground and can just cycle through these. There's no determined length, there's no amount, but just do that. I sort of do them all and then see what happens and see if that helps you a little bit. Somatically, I was talking to my friend Taryn Toomey too, who started the class. She's going to come on the podcast at some point soon and talk about some of this, but that's a very, I think that process is really good for getting fear that gets stuck out of the body. So I think that just by nature, there's a fair amount of fear that circulates that can really capture us. But I think what's also happening in this current climate is that fear has become mind control. If you remember from previous conversations, and I think solo episodes, but previous conversations with Courtney Smith about being above or below the line, fear sends us immediately below the line, and typically you have fear of loss of safety and security, fear of loss of control, fear of loss of approval.

Those seemed to be the primary threats. Safety and security, you could say is sort of the meta threat. And I think everyone is feeling that what's happening, I don't understand what's the end of this? What's the vision? When does this end? What's going to happen? All of that. There's some fear of loss of control there as well, but it sends you immediately below the line and when you go below the line, you are in the drama triangle. I'm not going to go into sort of how we are in the drama triangle in our daily lives because that's a bigger conversation, and I've done some podcasts about that. But I do just want to point out, and I'll write a newsletter about this too, to really hammer it out that what's happening in our collective and certainly on social media is the intent. I don't know how conscious it is or whether these people even know the drama triangle, but the drama triangle is an incredible marketing tool for a minute because it spikes that it's so intuitive, it goes right to that scapegoat mechanism that we all have.

That's part of our unconscious wiring. So once you realize this, you start to see it everywhere. It's a terrible long-term marketing strategy, and I'll explain why, and you can probably figure out why it is besides being fear-based and that never being good, but if you use the drama triangle to market an idea or a product or your point of view or your platform, it can be incredibly intoxicating because in the drama triangle is a victim and a villain and a hero. Okay? So I'm going to use a painful example of the #MAHA hashtag #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain, RFK JR initiative that helped get Trump elected and get RFK junior appointed as the head of Health and Human Services. So that whole thing was predicated on the drama triangle, and this is how it goes. The people are the victims, the villains are big ag doctors, western medicine, science, big pharma.

And I'm not saying that there's not totally corruption and that we don't have a broken healthcare system. I understand that. I recognize that. But let me tell you, I'm pretty dependent on some pharmaceutical drugs, as are my children, and I would argue that 99.99999% of doctors are really well-intentioned. Same with scientists. So anyway, I digress. But in this model, they're the villain. The people are the victim, and these wellness influencers and RFK Junior, they're the heroes. They're going to fix this. I have no idea how or how that's going to work, but they're the heroes. We are the victims, and those are those specious villains over there, and it works. This is a dynamic that we recognize and intuitively understand. Again, it's the scapegoat mechanism. It is if we can just identify the contaminating element, the bad actor, the sin, the badness, and it's over there, and if we can eradicate it, everything's great.

I guess that's not how it works. We know this. We see this again and again, that is not prophetic. That is a massive failure that just perpetuates the scapegoat mechanism, perpetuates pain, perpetuates trauma. None of this is about reforming, restoring, evolving, growing, expanding, loving, being above the line, which is not predicated on fear, but when you go above the line, which is hard to do and rare, and most of us spend most of our days below the line most of the time, but those three roles, the victim, villain, hero, become the challenger, the coach and the creator, and you get into a totally different paradigm where you are trying to hold the order and the disorder simultaneously in pursuit of the reorder. You are not just destroying you are not just destruction, you are not just fear at all. It's not fear based. It's love based.

It is empowering. It is seeing yourself as a creator in the world and not a victim of the world. And it's where we all need to be as we imagine our futures and how to hold a positive vision for what is possible. I get that it doesn't feel possible necessarily right now. Maybe it does to some of you, and hopefully you have a positive vision that's large enough and expansive enough to hold all of us. But in marketing, when you start recognizing that drama triangle, it's a watch out. It's very compelling, particularly if you're trying to disrupt an industry that needs to be disrupted, right? You could say that the whole clean beauty movement was predicated on the drama triangle, and there was some validity to that. Definitely a lot of work that needed to be done to clean up the industry, to make safer personal care products for all of us.

And that's why one drama triangle burns itself out because then you have to continue to find new victims and villains, or you have to insist that the problem never be solved. But if it does get solved and suddenly the whole market, it's somewhat, what's happened in personal care products is like, oh, there's real demand here. We need to clean up our acts. We need to really invest in a cleaner preservative. We need to really reformulate to get some of the things that we don't necessarily need in here out of here. And so if that's the basis of which you create and market your products, they better be pretty great products on their own because after a minute, once this is recognized as something that needs to be resolved, your advantage doesn't exist anymore. And you could say that that's definitely a good thing. That's a social win.

You've achieved what you wanted to achieve. But it's interesting because one of the things that Courtney and I talk about sometimes, and she coaches, she coaches businesses and corporations, but she said that sometimes NGO work and nonprofit work is really difficult with the drama triangle because their entire existence is predicated on staying below the line where there's a villain and they get to be a hero, and there are victims. And once you resolve the problem, then maybe you don't have a reason to be. So it's sort of an interesting concept, but I wanted to just bring it to everyone's attention because if you can catch, oh, this person's sending me below the line this, suddenly I'm in fear, suddenly I'm like, who's the villain? Oh my God, I'm a victim. Then you're in the drama triangle and you got to try and get out of it. Even just recognizing it, seeing that's what's happening in action for me is usually enough to be like, oh, whoa, whoa, wake up. Just have to be a little bit more conscious about it.

Oh man, I always sit down to do like 20 minutes and then suddenly here we are. I just want to close. I hope you all listen to the episode with Loretta Ross. She's amazing. Her work is amazing, and she is living this. She is living what Richard Rohr is talking about every day. She is walking those values into the world as she brings people out of the, she doesn't do this anymore, but she brought people out of the KKK. She went and worked with rapists who wanted to understand why they were raping women and men. She herself, as many of you may know, is a survivor of rape and incest. She of anyone can teach us how to walk these values into the world, and she doesn't use this frame, but what she is coaching is this is how you don't go below the line with people, particularly when you are not under a direct threat and there's an opportunity for you to reach out to someone and talk them through what they're expressing and maybe calling them to their highest values.

She always gives the story of her uncle who is really, really, I guess saying he's anti-immigrants, would be polite, I think, from what I recall, is really homophobic and really disparaging of other groups. And at a Thanksgiving dinner, after listening to him go on a tage, she talks about how she finally got through to him by saying, this isn't who I know you to be. I know you to be so loving and kind and fun, and I think if a building were on fire, you would go in and save everyone regardless of whether they might be gay or Mexican. And it just startled him into an awareness of what he was saying, and he certainly stopped saying that stuff around her, which that's not what we're necessarily, we're not trying to sanitize our own surroundings, but I think what she was intimating is that it forced him to see himself as falling short of his own values in a way that was not confrontational and didn't put him into fear.

Again, one of the big fears is fear of loss of approval, and when we shame people and we go after them, that's the fear trigger that we hit. Alright, friends, I'll be back on Thursday and I hope you all are hanging in there. If you don't follow me on Substack, please come join me there, Elise lunan@substack.com. I send one newsletter a week. It's free. I occasionally do a paid workshop or the archives I believe are under a paywall and it's obviously lovely when people chip in support for the newsletter and the show, but it is not obligated. Alright, I actually, I just looked at my calendar. I have a really, really good episode that will make you laugh coming on Thursday that is interestingly related to these themes as well, but it's with an unexpected person, so I will see you again shortly.

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