Show Notes
In this unforgettable episode, Dr. John Price sits down with writer, ritualist, and mytho-technologist Sean Manseau, whose work bridges depth psychology, psychedelics, performance, and esoteric theology. Together, they explore Entheogenic Fitness Training (EFT)—a radical spiritual system designed for the metamodern age.
EFT combines physical resistance training, psychedelic states, mythic storytelling, and ritual performance to create a structured path of transformation. At its core is the archetype of the Phonomancer—a shamanic superhero trained to channel divine energy through movement, voice, and ecstatic states.
Sean also shares the inner journey behind his visionary book The Devil You Know, a Jungian-style self-analysis written as a dialogue between two imagined selves. This conversation offers a deep dive into imagination, magic, trauma, shadow work, and the struggle to maintain integrity while mapping new sacred ground.
From ayahuasca visions to ecstatic dance, from black magic to simulated belief, this is a conversation for those willing to question what’s real, what’s possible, and what the future of spiritual practice might become.
Topics Covered:
How suffering can become sacred resistance Psychedelics as initiatory stressors (not just therapy) Make-Believe vs. Make-Belief as spiritual technology Designing a religion for the age of simulation The adversary as a real force in consciousness Ritual performance as a container for ego death From anima to AI: dialoguing with the inner divine Addiction, psychosis, and how to build inner structure The idea of “Functional Enlightenment” and training spiritual capacity Gnosis, the Christ archetype, and becoming a conscious myth-maker
In This Episode (00:00) Introduction and updates (06:35) Ayahuasca, ritual, and the origin of EFT (13:00) Phonomantic method and psychedelic training (17:00) Make-believe, religion, and sacred play (22:00) Ecstatic states, magic, and the imaginal (30:00) Dark magic, possession, and archetypal rage (35:00) Writing The Devil You Know as active imagination (41:00) Addiction, psychosis, and safety in altered states (49:00) Resistance, shamanic ecology, and loving the adversary (57:00) What is Functional Enlightenment? (1:14:00) Christ 2.0 and the collective evolution of soul (1:26:00) Ending the psychedelic Tower of Babel
Subscribe to stay connected to conversations on psychology, mysticism, imagination, and the evolving face of spiritual practice.
Find Sean at: https://www.phonomancer.com/home
Learn more: www.drjohnwprice.com Sign up for the newsletter Follow on Instagram: @thesacredspeaks Check us out at www.thecenterforhas.com
More from The Sacred Speaks
What happens when a life built around success, intelligence, and achievement is no longer able to hold the deeper questions beginning to move through you?
What happens when someone who has spent nearly his entire life understanding code, data, and technological systems begins questioning the nature of reality itself?
Simon Yugler has spent time inside traditions ranging from Aboriginal Australia to the Shipibo lineage in Peru. Most of us will only ever read about experiences like that. I admire the ground he's stood on, and what it has done to his worldview.
Robert Forte has been at every major inflection point of the psychedelic movement for half a century, and he is skeptical of where it is going. That skepticism, coming from someone who knew Wasson, Hofmann, Grof, and Eliade personally.
In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father. Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture. John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime. The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.