Finding Community in Spirituality: The Role of the Empyrean Deck

Hey, one more thing before you go. What if spirituality wasn't just a belief system, but a project, an ongoing journey of discovery, connection, and personal growth?And what if there was a tool designed specifically for those of us who don't fit into traditional religious spaces? Stay tuned.We're going to have a conversation about spirituality beyond tradition, the philosophy of neurodiversity, and how the Empyrean Deck serves as a guide for personal and communal transformation. I'm your host, Michael Herst. Welcome to One more thing before you go.Today we're sitting down with a guest whose path has been anything but conventional. Dr. Ashton Walden is a former Zen Buddhist monk turned philosopher, educator, and creator, and has dedicated a lifetime to.To studying religion, psychology, and the human experience.With a doctorate in world religions and extensive training in spiritual direction, he's worked across universities, churches, corporations, and hospice care, all while navigating the unique perspective of being neurodivergent. Their creation. The Empyrean Deck is more than a set of divination cards.It's a gateway to understanding ourselves, our relationships, and the deeper dimensions of human nature. Welcome to show.

Thank you so much for having me.

What an amazing journey that you've been on. I appreciate what you do for the world. Thank you for being here.

Yeah, it's been. It's been an unfolding mystery. You know, for. For much of my night, for much of my life, I just didn't know.I just really didn't know what I was doing. You know, I had things that I was interested in and I. And things that I pursued, but I. I just always struggled with.With sort of the big picture, but I was always looking for a project. I was always trying to figure out what that goal was. And over my lifetime, it's gotten clarified, clarified, clarified. And I feel like this product.Right. The Empyrean Deck is so satisfying because I feel like I've succeeded in kind of pulling together all these different threads.And so I just really hope that other people find it useful too.

I think it's a big approach. I love the background that you've got with regard to Zen, Buddhist and Buddhism, in that both philosophies. Actually.

Zen is usually considered a kind of subtype or a specific kind of Buddhism. But there's some ways in which Zen is sort of idiosyncratic. It's a little bit different from most of the rest of the Buddhist tradition. And for.For a couple different reasons. One. One is just the.The fact that it focuses so narrowly on meditation practice, particularly the way Zen has been taught in America to Westerners has really been sort of kind of back burnering the sutra study, the philosophy, the. The moral, ethical, social practices, and really focusing very, very narrowly on your direct experience, just doing this very, very simple practice.And that has its benefits, but it also has its drawbacks. So ultimately, although I felt like I got so much out of my time at the Zen center, it wasn't sort of the be all, end all for me.I really felt like I had to keep on exploring other paths, other traditions, in order to kind of fill in the blanks and learn the other things that I needed to learn.

Well, I always like to start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Massachusetts. A pretty. Pretty ordinary kind of suburban childhood. I was good in school, I guess. Good enough in school. I got good grades.But I always felt lonely and I always felt left out. And I always felt like I did not really understand what was going on around me.And these kinds of things I learned later are expressions or manifestations of autism.

How did that change your life in those around you? Did it make a significant impact.

At the time? At the time, I didn't know that that's what was going on for me.I just knew that I was interested in what I was interested in, which, which was really spirituality and philosophy, and I just wasn't really interested in anything else. And, and the way that I studied those things at first was primarily through. Through texts, right through.Through reading, because I did not have a good time. It was hard for me to connect with people, let me put it that way. I didn't really know how to make friends or.Or what to do with friends when I had them, because it seemed like a lot of the things that people talked about and a lot of things that people did together, it just wasn't all that interesting to me. And I just didn't really understand why people did what they did. So I was pretty kind of isolated.And it wasn't until I joined the Zen center that was. This was after college in my 20s, that I felt like I had something like a community or that I knew.I started to understand what it meant to be part of a community and why that was so important. So, yeah, that was a big kind of transformation.But I really, you know, I didn't actually realize that I was autistic, that that's sort of what my sort of situation was until just a few years ago.And it was actually at the same time that I was developing the empyrean deck, interestingly, that this That I was realizing and really integrating what it meant for me. Because, you know, just because you're autistic, that doesn't answer all your questions. Because different people are neurodivergent in diverse ways.Right. And so really the project is sort of understanding sort of generalities about sort of how your mind works and how that pans out.And like I said, over the last couple of years, as I've been integrating my particular neurotype, I guess I've been really understanding why I was interested in the things I was interested in, why I function the way I function, why my relationships and friendships and romantic relationships have gone the way they've gone. So, yeah, it's been a big difference for me to be doing that work. And it's an ongoing thing.I feel like I've done so much work and so much clearer about how I work and why I do the things that I do. You know, it's ongoing.

Tell me more about that. I have relatives that are on the spectrum, so I understand that from that perspective, but nothing that's close into my family.I think that we all should have a better understanding of exactly what neurodiversity means.

Oh, sure, That's a really tough question, and it's hard to summarize easily.The way we usually talk about neurodiversity is just to put side by side typical ways of functioning for neurotypical people and typical ways of functioning for neurodiverse people. I guess the first thing that I would say is that it has to do with how we learn about the world and how we engage with the world.Neuro typical people primarily engage with the world and learn about the world socially. There's a kind of social epistemology.So the way we figure out how to speak, how to behave, how to kind of learn the things that are really important in terms of values and forms of life, what goals we should have, how we should relate to each other. Most people primarily get that information from other people. They just, they. They believe what they believe everybody else believes, right?So if I believe that everybody else believes that gay people are cool, then I'm like, okay, fine, gay people are cool.But if I believe that everybody else believes that there's something weird or wrong with gay people, then I'm probably going to believe that there's something wrong with gay people. And that's true even if I turn out to be gay myself, right?And that's what's so kind of shocking and weird about neurotypical people, is that if there's a distinction or a. Or a conflict, let's say, between what they perceive everybody else believes and their own personal experience.Neurotypical people will assume that there's something wrong with them and that they're the problem. And there's this sense that it's a matter of loyalty and a matter of humility to conform, I guess, in terms of your beliefs and your values.For neurodiverse people, the proportion is different. Right. Everybody learns through kind of social interaction, social cues, and also through their own personal experience.But for neurodiverse people, the volume, I guess, of internal experience is much, much louder. And it's really hard to drown out. My experience is my experience, and it.And it kind of overwhelms whatever I get from the outside world about how I'm supposed to behaving or what I'm supposed to say. So it's a lot harder for me to pick up on social cues. And it's not because I'm deaf to social cues.It's just because my internal experience is so loud that it sort of overwhelms everything else.And so that ties into spirituality, ties into religion, ties into values, ties into ethics, ties into all these different dimensions of how we behave. Because our experience, our sense of what the world is like and what's important is different. Does that make sense?

It absolutely makes sense. I grew up Catholic. I'm not a practicing Catholic because I feel that they were too stringent in certain rules and certain beliefs.And I needed to step outside that box. I evolved from that to a more spiritual perspective.So I appreciate what you're doing because you and I both know that there's a larger expanse of what's available to us in the universe. I think especially in regard to religion and spiritual perspectives. I love your background in all things Zen and Buddhism.

Yeah. So I grew up. We're Jew, my family's Jewish. But we weren't practicing. We weren't observant Jews. We're sort of identified as cultural Jews, I guess.But even from a young age, I can remember being interested in Christianity, being interested in Eastern spirituality, being interested in mythology and fantasy and science fiction. So I was always very kind of imaginative. And I was always really interested in this idea of this kind of imaginative other world.And I always saw religion and spirituality as the way to explore or learn about and maybe even eventually enter into that other world, that sort of sacred space, which I wasn't. Which I really wasn't getting from my family. I mean, maybe if. If.If we'd been, you Know, going to temple every week, maybe then I would have become a rabbi. You know, things. Things might have gone very differently, but as it was, I didn't grow up with it.And so I was always searching for it through reading about, you know, reading Western philosophers, then, you know, picking up a copy of the Tao Te Ching when I was in high school, then later on Buddhism, later on Christianity, later on. And that was. So that was really, you know, sort of the defining point of my journey, I guess, was. Was the fact that I. My origin was.So I didn't have the story that I needed. I didn't grow up with an origin story or a sense of, kind of where I was coming from.So I was always sort of looking for a sense of my own spiritual and religious identity.

How has your experience as a Zen Buddhist monk and your studies in world religion influenced the design and purpose of this deck we're about to talk about?

Yeah, sure.So, like we've talked about, I've spent a good chunk of time studying a number of different religious traditions and also some kind of more modern spiritual practices as well. I did sort of training in Reiki and was interested in the Enneagram and a couple other modalities, I guess. And I.And I was always sort of putting these things together. I always had this sense that I was learning a lot, that whatever it was I was studying, I was. I was.That there was real value there, that there was really important insights that were being preserved in these traditions. But I didn't have the feeling that any one of these traditions, at least as I was experiencing them, had all the answers or had a complete system.And I now think that maybe the problem was not that they weren't complete systems, it's that they were complete systems 100 years ago or 500 years ago or 2000 years ago. And that the problem is just that our language and our experience and our. Of expectations and our politics have changed so much that we don't.We aren't able to access in some way the wisdom that these traditions preserve, that the signal is being drowned out by the noise of the economics of the institution, the politics of the institution, whether it be the Catholic Church or whether it be Israel or whether it be. You know, even.Even Buddhist monastic and lay organizations in America have had their own problems, and they have their own doctrines and they have their own sort of rules, right? Just like the Catholic Church. They have rules, they have doctrines, they have these structures.And the importance of the structure is really to maintain the institution, right. Rather than, you Know, with the idea being that it preserves the wisdom, but the wisdom that's being preserved is actually being corrupted by.By the institution itself.So in a way, I guess really what I wanted to do was find a way to bring together everything that was good and valuable and important about what these religious traditions and spirituality, these kind of spiritual systems were getting at, and to organize it in such a way that it was complete and accessible and as much as possible avoided problems of, like, an institutional setting. And, and part of that, not the whole thing, but part of that was a matter of accessibility. Right? I'm. I'm not going to go to a church.I'm not going to feel welcome in most churches, you know, most churches, you know, not. Not just because I'm autistic, but for a number of, you know, political reasons. There's. There's going to be reasons where I'm not.I'm not going to fit in well in those places. And so many people are, you know, are hungry for community.You know, there's a lot of people who are interested in tarot decks, astrology, spirituality, and again, there's a lot of wisdom there. But what they don't have is a community. They don't have a group of people that are keeping them on task, right.Keeping them focused, keeping them accountable. Because that's one thing that religious institutions in principle do provide. They. They provide some friction so they can say, you know, your.Your spirituality has gone out of whack. It's gone off track. So I think. I think that community is important. I think a common language is important.I think there has to be a way to balance your experience of what's important to you, of where you. Where you most typically encounter the sacred, but at the same time balances or contextualizes your experience within a language that's.That's communicable, right? That you can say, well, this is what I've experienced, and someone else can say, well, this is what I've experienced. And then you can.And you can talk about it. Because just because, you know, just because spiritual experience is meaningful and important doesn't mean that you've gotten it right. Right?Doesn't mean that you've integrated. Integrated it in a way that's sort of healthy. So this is sort of a. This is sort of a tangent, sort of a long way around the deck.The idea of the deck is that it's a language. The idea of the deck is that it's.That the cards are placeholders for different kinds of spiritual experiences, for different Ways in which we encounter the sacred. And it's. And it's meant to be sort of complete, right?It's meant to cover all the kind of diversity of spiritual experience, the diversity of the things that we think are important. But does it in such a way that says what the. The way you encounter this, if you're encountering this, truly is valid, right? So it's. It's.It's meant to sort of get that. Get that balance, get the book.

It works. And I think overall, at least to me, what I've just heard is the philosophy behind the period.The Imperium deck is kind of reflects the structure of our human psyche from all these perspectives.

Yeah, that was really important to me all the way going along.So along with the stuff in kind of spirituality and, you know, traditional religions, I was also reading a lot of empirical psychology, always reading stuff in, you know, economics, things that network theory. Information theory has been really interesting to me lately as a sort of a. As a kind of applied mathematics of everything.So I think that there's some really exciting stuff going on there.And the idea basically is that the diversity of the ways in which we experience the sacred just is the diversity of the ways in which we experience the world. The world is sort of structured in a certain way.And because the world is structured in a certain way, our perceptual systems, our cognitive systems are adapted around the way the world is structured.And because our perceptual and cognitive systems are adapted around the way the world is, the ways in which we experience the sacred are kind of like channels or shortcuts or circuits whereby we get to sort of cut through the noise, right? Cut through the kind of chaos of house of the sheer quantity of data that we're getting around the world.We get to kind of focus all that data, focus all those perceptions, memories, desires, interests around these sort of key points that serve as anchors. And when we find those anchors, we experience them as sacred because those are the. Because that's where the signal is, right?That's where we see where the real patterns are that reflect, again, how the world itself is structured. So it's not.I think a lot of people have this kind of matrix mentality that there's sort of a fundamental divide or divorce between how we experience the world, which is like a simulation versus the real world. And that's. And that's a product of, like a very particular kind of Cartesian history in Western philosophy. Right. But it's not true. Right.The reason we experience the world is because there's a relationship between our experience and. And the world itself.And so when we encounter the sacred, when we encounter something that seems intrinsically valuable, valuable, intrinsically true, intrinsically good and right, that's like a. That's like a flare that the psyche is sending up that we're getting something right.So the idea is that the more we organize our language and our culture and our desires and kind of organize our lives around those key anchors, the more we'll get right, both in terms of the objective truths of the natural world, scientifically, mathematically, culturally, but also in terms of our place in the world, what it means to be human. And that's. And that's where all of this kind of comes to a head. That's sort of the ultimate result. What does it mean to be human?How do we understand our place with respect to this very complex and strange world that we live in? And the answer is that we can sort of find it to the extent that we're looking for it, that we know where to look for. And we have good tools, right?Good tools, good language. And again, that's what the religious traditions are supposed to provide.Good tools, good language, good wisdom for attuning us to what's right and important and good. And that's. And that's our compass, right? That's our sense of direction about how do I. How do I live? How do I.You know, I've just lost my job, I've just retired, I've just been injured, I've just been divorced. What do I do now? How do I. How do I get my bearings?

And we all need that opportunity to kind of experience that, I think from different perspectives. It gives us a better understanding of how we are all connected and connected with the universe.You describe being human as a project rather than an identity. How does the deck support this idea?And I think it fosters community and peer support, especially for those who feel disconnected from the traditional religious spaces. So am I to understand that the deck incorporates elements of divination, cooperation, gameplay, and personality exploration?I think it's an opportunity for us to maybe kind of get a better understanding of ourselves on how to read these answers correct?

I hope so. There's no question, I think, and this is maybe a peculiar belief, but I think that cultures can be more or less good.You can have a culture which serves as sort of the software or the, you know, the languages, which provides people the wisdom and guidance that they need, or you can have a culture that is so materialistic, so kind of infused with money and Corruption, it's so kind of distorted, I guess, that culture is no longer doing its job, right?The culture is no longer helping us find a place in society, helping us find our sense of meaning, helping us find those greater projects, those greater aims and goals that give our lives meaning. Helping other people, building something, creativity.They're very specific things and very well known things that actually make humans happy, that actually make humans feel fulfilled.But our culture is really encouraging us not, not to do any of those things because it, because it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make the right people enough money somehow, right? What our culture is encouraging us to do is something else which makes them money.Maybe it's good for the economy, maybe, but it's not satisfying, right? It's not just killing us.So a good, a good culture, I think, just is a culture in which these basic ideas, right, the, the ideas that I've sort of encoded and summarized and catalog in the cards with the help of the Jungian archetypes, these are things that won't surprise anybody. It's not going to surprise anybody. I mean, just to give a couple of examples of the cards, there's one that's about intimacy.It's no surprise that that makes people happy and gives our lives value. There's one that's about hospitality. There's ones about reciprocity, about having good relationships that are sort of economic and fair.There, there are cards that relate to more broadly, kind of what we think of as ethical things. But there's also cards that relate to pleasure. There's cards that relate to.There's one that's music, there's one that's just music because music is so important, right? There's another one.And there's also cards that relate to our sense of self, being independent, being being able to draw boundaries, I guess in our relationship, saying this is what I am, this is where I am. And, and, and this. And, and I will go no further, right? This, this is what I'm willing to put up with.And this is where I say, no, I, I dissent, right? So there are all these elements that once you, once you look at these cards, you, you won't be surprised by any of them, probably.But, but what you, what you may be surprised by is that we spend so much time doing other things, that we spend so much time doing things that are just not fulfilling. And it's sort of mysterious why we do that when there are so many things that we could do that are so cheap. Go out for a walk in Nature, right?There's so many things that we could do that are so cheap, that we have access to, that are, that are so fulfilling. Why, why aren't we doing those things instead of all the stuff that sort of makes us miserable?

I agree with you. I think that the pandemic was kind of a double edged sword.It allowed us to reconsider what our major life situation is and to kind of appreciate what we've got. When the COVID took place and they shut everything down, we had the opportunity to redefine what our place in society was.My wife used to drive 45 minutes to an hour every day to work, 45 minutes to an hour every day. Home was stressed and so forth. And during that time period, she got to work from home for two years. Now she works a hybrid schedule.We used to go on the back patio, grab a cup of tea, sit down, listen to the birds, watch the hummingbirds go from flower to flower. We enjoyed nature. We got to understand the balance, the work life balance that we need in order to function in society in a better way.And she became more productive at work, I became more productive at home and our relationship improved.

You're being lazy, you are not being productive, you are not earning money, you are not contributing to the economy. You, you should not be doing that stuff. Right? Well, we have these voices, you're not good enough. You need to be accomplished or something.With these voices in our heads that are kind of downloaded from, from, from the society, from, from our culture.So the good news, again, hopefully, is that when people recognize, when people feel, feel that the culture is sort of collapsing around them, and I think a lot of people are cognizant of that. I think a lot of people have the sense that we're at a moment in our society of decline. Right.America has been growing, America has been producing wonderful science, wonderful art, has been at the cutting edge of human rights. And now we're in this state of. We've hit the high mark, we've hit the zenith of the American empire, economically, creatively, politically.And now we're in decline. And so people are sort of aware of that. People are looking for a new, not necessarily new, religion, right.They're not necessarily looking to join a cult, although some people are. For some people, that's sort of the answer.What we're really looking for is sort of a new way to make sense of things so that we can kind of remember where we got off track. Right. Remember whatever it was that we forgot.

I agree.Or whatever these people fit into I think collectively I would like to revisit the statement that you made where you describe people as being human as a project. I'm kind of really interested in how that plays out and how does that relate to all of what we just talked about in trying to, or find ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. So to be a human is to be in motion and to be in, to be going in a direction. And there's a number of different ways to sort of flesh this out, right?That we, we, we humans understand that we, we are moving towards enlightenment or financial success, moving towards social justice or kind of utopia moving towards that. The way we function well is as sort of vector quantities, right. We can't just be hanging out.We need to be kind of deepening, exploring, learning, remembering, synthesizing, putting things together. So again, what that looks like in people's lives may be pretty diverse, right. Some people are doing ocean science or marine biology.Other people are devoting their life to helping people, right? Through being a doctor or a nurse or a teacher. Caregiving rules, Parenting, right? Parenting is, Parenting is not just keeping your children alive.Parenting is, is, is a ideal about what kind of world the children are going to live in and how, what they're going to do to make that world possible. Everything we do. Well, so much of what we do is this can be described in terms of the direction that it's going towards.And generally speaking, that direction is synthesis, putting things together.I have, personally, I have some kind of pretty tactical, worked out ideas about what that's going to look like or what that has looked like in the human project. And we don't necessarily have to go that deep into that unless you're interested.But, but basically it's this idea that we're going for some kind of transcendence and when we forget that, when we stop moving in that direction, you know, whether, you know, again, we don't have to phrase it for ourselves in a religious or spiritual way. Could be in a more kind of social or political way.There's a number of different ways, or an artistic way, being on the cutting edge of science or applied mathematics.If we lose the sense of where we're going, if we lose that kind of intuitive connection that there's something there that we're reaching for or if we give up or if we just think we're not going to reach it. I think that happens to a lot of people.People we just sort of give up on the idea that we'll ever reach or accomplish the thing that we, that we want. Then, then we Founder. Right. And, and we kind of.We feel a loss, we feel confused, and we replace that with, with something that's easier to grab, easy to buy, easy to do. Whether or not that's really what we want, whether or not that's really healthy for us.So, yeah, being, being a human is, is finding that direction, identifying that direction, clarifying that direction and moving in that direction.

I think society and culture as we know it, just for that reason alone, we as a community, we always want to be able to support each other and to be able to understand that there are people there for us when we need them. We don't always recognize that or want to ask for that kind of help.I relied heavily upon community and peer support during my recoveries, during my accident, during everything.The times I was in a wheelchair, the depression, the anger, the resentment, the having to go through all eight operations, the rehabilitation, and all of this.During that time period, I think I felt that I failed my colleagues, I failed my family, I failed society because I put myself in a position that I got injured, and then these people that I had to rely on were forced to be able to do that. So from that perspective, I do understand that community.I think we have to foster that community of peer support, and I think we need to recognize it and foster it. I should say. Can the Emporium deck help with something like this?That for us to be able to gain community again, to commit to retain or obtain or recognize the community that we have for us to continue to support us.

I think that the Empyrean deck can help in two ways. One is that one is that a number of the cards are, are specifically about our relationships with other people, right?Because it's, it's, it's so basic, so intrinsic to how we function, not just as humans, but everything in the universe, right? This is sort of a basic Buddhist idea that everything is what it is precisely in and through its relationship with nearby others, right?That includes your family and friends, but it also includes all the, all of the networks that we are engaged in. Ecological networks, social networks, economic networks. So again, this is just a matter of paying attention to what's important. So if you. The.The idea of the cards, again, is to sort of focus in on those places in your life, wherever you find them, whatever they are, where you can make these sorts of connections, where you can find these sorts of relationships. Because when you do that, you get this energy, you get the support, you get protection, you get a good feeling, right?You get reinforcements for the ideas and the insights and the wisdom that help you get a clear perspective. Because it's not just. It's not just about feeling, right? It's about the truth of the matter. Right?The truth of the matter is that you are not a failure. The truth of the matter is that you did not let people down.Now, maybe there are other situations or other aspects of your life in which the other thing is true, right? And if that's true, well, then you need to know that truth as well. And again, there's actually cards in the deck that. That can.That can help you kind of face up to that one. One thing about the deck is that it's not. It's not designed to make you feel good, at least not immediately. My.My experience using this deck, you know, and I have experience, you know, playing with the tarot deck and having tarot readings done for me and. And other forms of, you know, astrology and other forms. Forms of other modalities, I guess, for. For wisdom and for insight.And sometimes this isn't kind of universal, but sometimes people really use these things just to get a good feeling, right? It's sort of a kind of commercialized spirituality. This deck doesn't do that. My experience with this deck is that it's sort of bossy and that it.It may, you know, because insofar as it's drawing your attention to the things that are important, some of those things that are important are things that you are trying your best not to notice, trying your best not to pay attention to.So whatever it is that you need to pay attention to, whatever it is you need to kind of focus on in your life to get closer to the truth of who you are and where you are and where you're going and what you need to do. The cards can help with that.And like I said, a lot of that, you know, 50% of that just is in and through your relationships with other people, in and through how you've plugged into a specific community, you may find that one community isn't working for you. That one community is really sort of. Is sort of holding you back or even doing damage.Maybe what you need is to draw some boundaries and leave that community and find a new community. Community, you know, community isn't universal good. You have to be a part of the right community.You have to be part of the right network of people who are mutually supportive and sincere and authentic.

So how does your deck compare to a tarot deck? Are they similar? Was that your launching, kind of your idea to launch it this way? What basically brought you to the.Creating this design and this type of deck.

Sure.

Yeah.

It was a launching point in the sense that it's a deck of cards. That's. That's. That's pretty much the whole thing. Right there's. For me, you know, I. You know, as I was.As I've been doing this reading and doing this work and doing this writing over the years, I always sort of wanted to create a great work. I always wanted to write a book, a Magnus opus. Right. And at different points, I thought, well, I. I'm just not going to be able to do that.I don't have the discipline. And in other points, I thought, well, maybe I could do it. But even if I did, who would read it?Especially since so much of the writing that I had been doing, especially while I was still in school and while I was teaching, was academic. It was academic prose for an academic audience. And I wasn't really interested in doing all that work. So at some point, it hit me like a bag of rocks.A deck. A deck of cards. And so as soon as I had that kind of realization, then I was sort of using the Tarot deck as a. As a kind of background.But I. I think that's pretty much where the similarities sort of start and end. I will say that there are. There are cards in the Tarot deck that are very, very similar to cards in the Empyrean deck.And that's not coincidence either. Right. I mean, the. The way the human. I mean, to the extent that the Tarot deck works, and I think it works pretty well, it's because it. It gets right.The archetypes, it gets right these sort of basic anchors of how. Of our experience. So it's not at all surprising that there should be correlations.And there's also correlations between my deck and other systems that I've studied, other systems that I've learned about the Enneagram, the I Ching. I was interested in Norse runes for a little while. You know, I'm not sure how much of that made it into the deck, but, you know, maybe a lot.So, yeah, all those stuff. All that stuff is there because it's. It's there because it's. It's sort of objective features of how our mind works, of how we experience the world.Yeah. So the idea of the blog is to sort of flesh out some of the. Some of the more philosophical stuff, you know, some kind of more.But also kind of practical application. The cards just by themselves don't say a lot. Right. I mean, you could have one of the cards just, is just journey.And it's a picture of a path, and it just says journey. Doesn't say you're on a journey. Doesn't say you should go on a journey. It's just journey. Right.Because the idea of a journey is really important to us. Like, it's a basic kind of aspect of how we function.

Your blog, Spirituality on the Spectrum, explores Buddhist, Taoism and Jungian perspectives. How do these philosophies intersect with the themes of the deck? And how can that relate to both kids as well as adults?

So the idea of the blog is just to sort of flesh out kind of the background philosophy, background ideas.I do take time to make some connections between stuff that's in the deck and some of the sources, I guess between that and Buddhism, Taoism, the Jungian archetypes. But more, at least that was the idea.A lot of what I've ended up using the blog for is, is really more reflections on neurodiversity and the relationship between neurodiverse people and neurotypical people and really just taking some time to reflect on my own experience.

How has your personal journey of discovering your neurodivergence shaped your understanding of spirituality in the human experience?

Yeah, yeah. As I said, the. The. The time period, I guess, was the same. Right? It's really been over the last three years that I.That I started working on the deck and putting it together.And it's really been about three years, give or take, that I've sort of been starting to realize and accept and integrate, I guess, my own neurodiversity, my own autism and learning about what that means. And, and so that's, again, it's one of those things that doesn't necessarily make it into the deck in, in any explicit way, but there's.There's ways in which I would say the deck is helpful because it's really. It's about being human. Those, again, those.Those of us who are on the spectrum really have a hard time understanding how humans work because we feel left out. We feel like. I think part of the neurodiverse experience for me is like, there's like a song playing over the loudspeakers.It's like the Smurf song or the song in that Lego Movie. And everybody else is. Is moving in time to that song. Everybody else is just marching along, doing their thing, because they are.And they're all like, in time. They're all coordinated because. Because they're coordinated by the music, because they're all just Listening to music, and they're all.And they all know the steps, right? And I feel like I'm sort of deaf to that song. I'm sort of deaf to that music.I can see people marching in time, and I can watch what they're doing and kind of march in the same ways, but. But I'm not actually hearing the music. So I look like a really clumsy person who can't dance, right? And that's tough.So what autistic people do when they're high masking like me, is they. Is they figure out the patterns. They figure out by observation and trial and error what other people doing what other people are doing.And they sort of learn to recognize the cues as best they can. And sometimes we do that well, and sometimes we do it not so well, and sometimes we give up and just stop trying, right? Which is actually.Actually the healthier thing to do.

It turns out the current chaos in the world today must have some kind of an impact on you as well as it does with the rest of society. I think we all are getting caught up and lost in the noise and the chaos and the noise, and we want to shut it out.We want to be able to kind of feel part of something good. But sometimes the chaos gets in the way.What advice would you give to someone who feels disconnected from the traditional spiritual practices, but seeking a deeper sense of meaning and connection or something different?

Well, the short answer is don't give up. The short answer is that you can find community if you look for it.And if you give yourself the time to find it, you may kind of plug into one community and find that it's not a good fit. Okay, try again. Don't give up.And more generally, with our sense of meaning, with our sense of direction, with our sense of place in the universe, don't give up. Right. I really believe that we as humans are hardwired. This is why the archetypes show up again and again and again and again and again.Not just in mythology, in contemporary religion, contemporary culture, Marvel movies, romance novels. You know, the thing. The same patterns show up because. Because we are attuned to them quite naturally.And so I. I think that we are hardwired to be able to find. Find the answers that we're looking for. If only we can phrase the question in a clear way.If we can do the kind of internal work, the internal reflection, to say, well, what is it that I'm looking for? What is it that might actually make me happy? Why is it that I'm. That this is Not a good fit for me.I think that asking the questions is, that is sort of the first and the most important step by far in reattuning yourself, readjusting yourself, kind of resetting the life levels, resetting the knobs and the dials on the machinery to kind of get a result within your life that answers those questions.That, that gives you that sense of community, gives you a sense of direction and purpose, gives you the sense of being worthwhile, of understanding that, you know, you're not a screw up, you're just different. Right. You have a place where you fit in. You have a place where you can convince, contribute your unique gifts to the world.And when you find that place, the world will benefit and you will benefit in such rich ways. And you can spend all of your life kind of getting closer and closer and closer to that fire, closer and closer to that perfect spot.And every time you make a step in that direction, you experience it, you feel it, you say, yes, this is better. This is better than where I was before. This is a better thing than what I was doing before. So do that, Listen to that, ask those questions.

That's brilliant. Very brilliant. As Bruce Lee says, every failure is a stepping stone to success. So don't be afraid to fail.You learn how to make it better or you learn how to change it.

Or how to avoid that, how not to go there. Don't do that, because that didn't work.

This has been great. How can everybody find you in the Empyrean deck?

Sure. So the, the, the quick and easy answer is just as it's listed on the screen there. It's www.empyreanproject.com.the idea of the project is to develop the deck and share the deck and get it out there, but also to use the deck as sort of a stepping stone for the teaching that I'm doing. Right.Like on, on shows like yours and elsewhere, to encourage people to explore spirituality and to give people a tool or maybe even a couple of tools to do that effectively and clearly and successfully. So empyreanproject.com will have within the month a link to a publisher.You can order the deck and the other and the book and the sort of pieces that go with it. You can order it directly from them through that website. The website also has the blog, if people find that interesting.And it has sort of a general introduction to my philosophy, my spirituality. Yeah. And it also has ways to get in touch with me.I'm, I'm, I'm open for people just to, to shoot me in an email if they have questions about the deck or questions about life. And I don't, I don't charge for that right now. It's, it's just, it's just me and I'm just, you know, available.

And that's amazing. I'll make sure that everybody has everything they need to get in touch with you by clicking a button. It's an easy way to find you.So I appreciate the journey that you've been taking. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom, your experience, and everything about you in regard to helping others move forward in a very positive way.So thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to have a conversation with you.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

This is One More Thing before you go. So do you have any words of wisdom that you haven't already said?

Don't give up.

So again, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and experience and thank you for everyone else out there.I want to make sure that the connection link will be there for everyone else for them to reach you out to you. Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before you go. That's a wrap for today's episode.I hope you found inspiration, motivation, a few new perspectives to take with you. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to, like, subscribe and follow us. It really helps us continue bringing you incredible stories and insights.This show thrives because of this amazing community and I appreciate each and every one of you for being part of it. So until next time, have a great day and even better week and remember to keep exploring, learning and growing.Thanks for tuning in to One More Thing before you Go.

Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before you Go. Check out our website at beforeyougopodcast. Com.You can find us as well as subscribe to the program and rate us on your favorite podcast listening platform.