With Enrique Enriquez

Are you ready to go deep? Andrew McGregor and Enrique Enriquez take a deep dive into the mysteries of presence, dreams, divination, and the ever-unfolding journey of the soul. They explore the impact of our physical presence on the world around us, the wisdom hidden within our dreams, and how divination can serve as a guiding light through life’s uncertainties.

Enrique shares his thoughts on the soul as a dynamic process of engagement with the world. The discussion expands into the distinction between understanding and knowing, the metaphor of gardens as a way to think about presence and connection, and the intriguing concept of the invisible as the space between things. Through personal stories, humour, and wisdom, Andrew and Enrique highlight the importance of self-discovery, embracing fluidity, and finding meaning in the unknown.

Whether you’re looking to deepen your awareness, explore the symbolic world, or reflect on your own place in the grand tapestry of existence, this episode is a must-listen. 

Listen to the episode on all the platforms. Or use the player below.

You can download the audio here.

You can find us on the socials. Or Enrique is emailable here and Andrew is here.

Episodes with drop biweekly going forward. Help me let the world know I’m back by sharing on socials and leaving review on the platform on which you listen to us.

Much love

Andrew

PS Enrique’s favourite late cretaceous animal is the Stegosaurus.

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Presence and Meaning

03:21 The Role of Dreams in Our Lives

11:24 Divination and Understanding Uncertainty

19:28 The Nature of the Soul and Presence

31:06 The Balance of Online and Offline Presence

41:46 Understanding vs. Knowing: A Distinction

45:13 The Nature of Questions and Inner Dialogue

49:27 The Garden Metaphor: Presence and Connection

53:41 The Invisible: Negotiating Relationships

01:00:21 Visions and Choices: Crossing the Bridge of Life

Transcript

Andrew McGregor (00:01)
Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today I have my dear friend Enrique on and having Enrique on is a wonderful exploration in being alive, speaking words, speaking to birds and being tuned into the universe. These episodes always have no clear structure ahead of time. And whenever we speak, it always seems to go somewhere significant and inspirational.

So that’s the ride you’re on for today. Enrique has been on a number of times before and you’ll be able to find the previous episodes in the show notes. For folks who don’t know who you are and given that you’ve sort of stepped away from social media at this point in time, why don’t you give us a quick introduction?

Enrique Enriquez (00:48)
Well, thank you, Andrew. It’s always great to hear you and to see you.

and to talk to you has been a long time. I’m not quite sure what I do. I think I had lost my name, but I do pay attention to the world and try to listen to what things have to say. And as you said, I talk to the birds or at least I listen to them. And I’m fundamentally interested in our relationship with the symbolic world or maybe on living a symbolic relationship with the world.

and the poetry that that brings about.

Andrew McGregor (01:27)
And for you these days, is that a your your presence as a poetic statement or is that more something else?

Enrique Enriquez (01:38)
Yes, mean, for a long time now, I have been convinced that presence is meaning and presence is performance. By that, mean we all have a presence, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not. But the moment we show up, we change the configuration of the moment for others. So we need to be aware of that and we need to be aware of the responsibility that that entails.

My suspicion these days is that our real duty as human beings is to make other people’s lives more interesting. And so we can’t just be, you know…

flippant about our own presence. So I do privilege now actual physical presence over anything else. I still email people and text message, but as you said, I’m out of social media and I don’t have any big poster. just don’t know what to do with that. But yeah, I think I still go and sit at the same cafe.

I’m trying to be a little bit more relaxed. used to go there every single morning and now I’m just going when I have somebody to see, I’m available or I make myself available to talk to people and maybe discuss these images that they have in their minds or they carry with them. I still talk to the birds and I have an active practice of visiting people in their dreams.

Andrew McGregor (03:21)
Hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (03:21)
which

is very fulfilling for me. So yeah, all those are, of course, extensions of presence. Presence is the body. Once the body extends, it’s lineaments. It’s no longer what, you know, as far as the hand can touch or as far as the eye can reach, it goes beyond that. Your presence exceeds, or our presence exceeds, or all that. It’s like a big, big, long shadow.

Andrew McGregor (03:48)
Yeah, often find that there’s a way of being in the world that is engaged differently. And really, it comes back to what is my most regular tarot question for myself, which is, how do I show up fully today? You know, and maybe in your language, how do I be fully present today? And

Enrique Enriquez (04:08)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (04:15)
You know, once I slide into that space, so many different things happen or maybe the same things happen, but I experienced them differently. But I do think it’s a multi-directional, you know, my, my presence impacts the situations around me and things move differently according to that.

Enrique Enriquez (04:36)
Yes, and we change the moment. I think we all have our rituals, or at least I have a very ritualized life in which I repeat myself constantly. And I think that in rituals, we offer our dissolution to the world. We dissolve ourselves in our rituals, but it’s not an immolation. It’s not martyrdom. It’s more like a wedge. We put a wedge

a wedge in reality and reality tilts a little bit. And I think that is what presence is. Because by presence, I don’t mean paying attention only, being present in that sense. I mean being there. You are there as a physical or sometimes more than physical entity or reality. So I agree with you. I think it has a lot to do with slowness or speed. So time.

Andrew McGregor (05:16)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (05:36)
You slow down, you are more deliberate about looking at things or about trying to understand what is which that thing is manifesting in the world by its own presence too. And I don’t just feel that accounts for human beings or even animals, but objects and trees, everything is somehow, you know, by its presence, suggesting modes of beings, things that we could.

incorporate to our lives. So yeah, it is really about being aware of that and being aware and mindful of how other people perceive these things. So I’m always happy to talk about what other another person saw, experienced, felt or dreamt.

Andrew McGregor (06:21)
I’ve been having a well, I had a dream a while ago at one of my favorite places where I go camping sometimes and spend time when I can get there. And I’ve been thinking about this dream where in the dream, I was on my campsite and I made an offering. And this giant bird started to circle.

And, you know, by giant bird, mean, like pterodactyl size, huge, right. And but full of feathers, brightly, brightly rainbowed feathers. And everybody else disappeared, ran away. And I just sat down and waited for it for it to come. And it sort of circled around a few times, came down, landed behind me.

walked around in front of me, took up the offering and then there was some kind of exchange, it wasn’t really words, but there was some kind of knowing exchange between the two of us. And I think because I’m planning on returning to this place this summer, I’ve been thinking about this dream a lot, but I’m curious if anything stands out for you in that.

Enrique Enriquez (07:46)
Well, no, it sounds like a very straightforward transaction. You made an offering and the bird came and accepted it. Which seems, I mean, I think there is something beautiful about that in terms of how you woke up without a sense of something incomplete. There was no, what now, right? I don’t, I mean, I’m very interested in the way dreams

mixed with reality and vice versa. Not so much at interpreting dreams because I mean, I don’t know if this is extraordinarily silly, simple, simplistic or preposterous, but I think that our very idea of death and what happens after death comes from our experience of dreams.

from the beginning of time when we saw people laying down. And of course you can’t really tell is this guy dead or just sleeping. Well, you know how that looks or how that person looks. And then of course we have the other side of the experience. We were asleep and we saw all these things somewhere else. And then we woke up. And I think that that gave us at the beginning the idea of another world.

And that doesn’t mean it may be another world or not. I’m not saying it’s real or not. I’m just saying that’s how we saw it, by dreaming. And you can almost feel like if you wake up, well, that’s the day you didn’t die, right? mean, otherwise you will just keep sleeping and dreaming and that will be it. And maybe it’s lovely. Who knows? Maybe it’s just, I don’t remember my dream. So for me, will just be black, maybe.

thinking a lot about, I mean, dreams or the time of sleep as an agate stone. You know, you have these stones that when you pick them up on the ground, are dull and gray. But if you cut them, then they are colorful and vibrant. They’re beautiful. It’s like, you know, they carry the Northern Lights inside. And I think that that’s how dreams are.

a dream, but our dream life, we enter the Agate stone. And unless something breaks the stone, unless we are woken suddenly or we wake up in the morning, we don’t really know what went on there. So we remember very little of what that life is. Gerard de Nerval, the French poet, to say that dreams are other lives.

For me, a dream is because precisely because that, because it’s some sort of, I don’t know if it’s a rehearsal for death or death itself. We are, when we dream, we go to a place where we could meet people who are already dead or people who live very far away or people, you know, are in other planes or whatever that is. And I don’t want to be.

I mean all this very poetically, but I think that you went to that place and you made an offering and that birth came. That’s what I’m trying to say. To me, that experience has the same weight as any experience in your waking life.

Andrew McGregor (11:24)
Mm-hmm, for sure. It’s been years since I had that dream and I still think about it frequently. yeah. Do you think you’d be as interested in dreams if you dreamt yourself?

Enrique Enriquez (11:36)
I’m not sure. Do you know what happened? These days, it’s like the stone broke a couple of times. This happens to me sometimes. If I wake up suddenly, I will remember something. So I know that I do dream. I just don’t remember my dreams. But all the dreams I remember are me going to a place. And usually there will be like seasons of going to the same place. So in the last weeks, I have been going to this

that I don’t know where it is. could be Mexico, could be Spain or Italy. And there is this bar and there is this church, but the church pews are outside, so people are praying outside. And there is this guy who sells something, but I don’t know where he sells, but he has hanging on his neck this saint carved in wood that is very crude, so it’s really not…

these or that saint, but sainthood itself. And I have an interaction with him and I think I feel compelled to offer money for that thing hanging on his neck, not for whatever it is that he’s selling. But that’s all I remember. And it has happened to me through my life that I will remember with vivid detail a bakery or a hardware store or a restaurant.

Years later, realize, I mean, I mean that I remember it as if it’s real. And then one day, when I’m awake, I realize, no, that place doesn’t exist in this world. I have never been there awake. It’s a place I go to when I’m asleep. So, but it’s very, yeah, it’s very, those are very brief, recurrent things. I wonder, I mean, I think I have an interest in dreams.

Not only because there is something very beautiful about this idea that we dream, but also because for 12 years now I have been seeing in other people’s dreams and I’m always very excited about that extension of presence where you say, you can go visit somebody, has a meaningful interaction with someone while you are asleep.

Andrew McGregor (13:55)
Maybe you signed

a non-disclosure before going into their dream space and that’s why you don’t remember so much.

Enrique Enriquez (14:01)
Who knows? Yes, it’s very, very peculiar. don’t remember. They are the ones who tell me, saw you, you did this. I’m actually working on a talk I want to give that is, I already gave the talk in a dream. And the person woke up and remember every single image I show and every single thing I say. So I decided I need to make this a deja vu.

I’m going to turn this into real talk. So that’s one of the things I’m contemplating right now.

Andrew McGregor (14:36)
So if the world splits asunder, we know what happens.

Enrique Enriquez (14:39)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (14:44)
Do still spend time with the cards? I know that you were so tentative about even sort of accepting any reference to being a tarot reader, instead sort of identifying as a poet, but do you spend time with the cards these days at all?

Enrique Enriquez (14:59)
No, not at all. think, but okay, I don’t. But last night I went to see this Italian philosopher talk about metamorphosis and it was a very beautiful talk. His name is Emanuele, I think. Coscia is an Italian philosopher who is visiting. He wrote a book about metamorphosis and yesterday he was talking about this book, although the book is old and he complained.

that the book was sold. But his main idea is that they’re probably oversimplifying, but that the entire planet is a metamorphic being and that somehow there is only one soul moving through everything. And to me, this is a clear

I mean, to me, this is second nature because of the tarot. So when he was speaking, I thought, yeah, of course, it’s the same idea that there are forms that move through images or through objects or through incarnations of things. And it’s the same thing moving always. And everything is always, at least in the symbolic world, everything is moving, everything is changing. So I have a foundation on how I look at life that I acquired in the tarot.

Andrew McGregor (16:25)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (16:26)
And I’m very thankful for that, but I don’t feel the need to look at the cards. But I can tell you something that is important and made me more, put me in, ease my mind about that. The other day I went to a restaurant with a friend to have dinner, but it was very early and the place was empty, except for one guy sitting at the bar.

And he was a man I knew, an Argentinian art dealer that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I used to read the cards for him. And he told me, he was very happy to see me, and then he told me, I am waiting for a friend who looks exactly like you.

Okay, so I went to have dinner and after a little while he came to our table and say, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I need you to meet my friend because you have too many things in common. And this guy was indeed, you know, he was wearing all black and he had a white beard and he had long hair and he is a tarot reader.

So, of course, I decided maybe I am still a Tarot reader somewhere else. Maybe that guy in the world is me being a Tarot reader. I I left not knowing if I left or he left. So, but I, at least as in my conscious awareness of my own body and presence, I am not looking at the cards anymore.

Andrew McGregor (18:02)
I spent yesterday at a sauna. There’s a place I like to go and when I when I can take much of a day and I’ll just go and read and sweat and journal and so on but it also coincided with I completed a journal which I’ve been using since like last summer or so has Godzilla on the front of it and

Enrique Enriquez (18:29)
You

Andrew McGregor (18:30)
And I finished it and when I finish a journal I go through and I reread everything and I Look for the patterns and you know see things that I forgot maybe or questions that I left hanging that I might want to revisit and so on and you know, just just pay attention and As I was reading through it for the first time in a while it struck me how much my life seems to be in like

two week cycle of things, because the same kinds of energetics and situations and ups and downs and whatever seem to more or less flow along that kind of timeline. And for the first time that I can remember, I wrote below this, this, you know, this sort of summary of my last six months or so, what is the

Enrique Enriquez (19:01)
Hmm.

Andrew McGregor (19:28)
point of divination? If everything is just a cycle? And yeah, so I’m kind of curious to put that to you. What is the point of divination if it’s all cyclical or or otherwise?

Enrique Enriquez (19:31)
Hmm.

Well,

Noah, I like that question very much. have been asking that question myself for a long time. And one thing I have noticed is that we are material, we human beings, we are made out of uncertainty. And we deal, or we have dealt through history with uncertainty. I’m sorry, uncertainty.

Poetically, pretty much every single culture in this world, since we have memory, had some form of divination, which is nothing other than that. I mean, we are going to deal with uncertainty in poetic terms. There is a moment in which we could call it a hermeneutics of nature.

And by that I mean, yes, we know if the clouds are dark, that it’s going to rain. And we know if that star is aligned with that star, that means home. And we knew that, we still do that. But there was a moment there where that ceased to be the guiding light. And we drew images on the stars.

started attributing emotional states to the clouds, or we decided that the flight of a bird that way meant this, different from when the bird flies this other way. And those things just make space. They create a space of possibility for us to understand reality. And I, of course, am not

I think that saying that we can’t the future is as silly as saying that we cannot predict the future precisely because the only thing that is prophetic in human beings is attention. And when we pay attention to a thing, as you did with your journals and your notebooks, we uncover its propensity.

we see the way the thing behaves in time. And somehow we can understand where it’s going.

So I just feel that.

Sometimes we are so trapped in our thought patterns that we need that notch, that wedge, as I was saying before, that comes in the forms of symbols delivered by chance. And then we can imagine other scenarios. So, but of course, and that’s half of it, or maybe not even half of it, most divination across nations.

has nothing to do with the future. It has to do with figuring out why we are the we are and somehow diagnosing the reason why we are, the reason of our predicament, so to speak. And besides that, a lot of this divination channels the knowledge of a culture that rests in the…

Andrew McGregor (23:07)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (23:24)
on the shoulders of the diviner, on the memory of the diviner. And many times this implies modes of interaction with the culture that bring people together through divination. I think it’s a way more complex practice than what we think it is here. You know, when we see on television people putting tarot cards and saying, this is going to happen or you’re going to do that.

Andrew McGregor (23:53)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Enrique Enriquez (23:55)
And so at the same time, I do feel that I am very interested in understanding how all those things can be activated, engaged with from our moment without, again, being exotic in any way or trying to mimic, imitate, borrow. Can we have a dialogue with reality now here?

and we have an alley with that tree or with a window and it seems to work as well as cards or bones or anything.

Andrew McGregor (24:36)
Yeah, I wrote, I wrote a few answers below that question, most of which didn’t feel satisfying. But the one that did feel satisfying, at least for the time being, was that Taro is a good friend who holds my hand as I walk along the road.

Enrique Enriquez (24:57)
That’s very good.

Andrew McGregor (24:58)
you know,

because, you know, to me, in, you know, definitely in my personal practice, it moves further and further away from where am I going? And sometimes even, you know, there is why am I here for sure? Or how did I get into this situation? But it’s also what is what is going on in this dialogue? How do I you know,

Enrique Enriquez (25:24)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (25:27)
get to that presence that we’ve been discussing, right? And it’s the process of going through it helps me get to that place. You know, and it’s almost like the, the, this particular case, the understanding of how I’m in this place that I’m in was in the, the bigger reflection over the longer arcs, but it still raises the question of whether that is

Enrique Enriquez (25:37)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (25:55)
anything that is even changeable necessarily, you know, so it’s not even a, even if there’s a will to change, you know, the question of what is even malleable here is always remains as a question, you know.

Enrique Enriquez (25:59)
Yes.

And a very important question. Well, I like your answer. I would say that the role of a friend is always to make our life better. And by that definition, there are many things that are friends to us, not only other people. So the tarot could be a friend. But also, in a way, I feel that I…

I only have bad news because in the past year I have spoken with many people that, I mean, they come and they tell me their experiences with a bird. And they’re very different experiences and very beautiful, very meaningful. I really mean, I don’t mean bird watchers or.

Andrew McGregor (26:46)
Uh-huh.

Enrique Enriquez (27:10)
I mean people who had a symbolic encounter with a bird. And in every single instance, when that happened, they knew what it was. They knew what that bird meant.

So they were not coming to me for an analysis or an interpretation, an explanation. They just wanted to share this happened to me. And when I was using the cards, I always felt that you can’t really know the meaning of a card if you don’t know who is looking at it. Because whatever that is on the table changes depending on who the other person is.

At this point, will push that further and say if a sign appears and you don’t know what it means, you just don’t know your life. If you know your life, you will know. Or of course, there’s a chance that it was not a sign or at least it was not for you. But so there is something there that has become more urgent for me, which is this idea of how do we know our soul?

Andrew McGregor (28:18)
Yes.

Enrique Enriquez (28:31)
And I know the soul is a loaded word and is owned by some multinational corporations, but it’s a useful… Yes. But I can’t really find a better word for it. Because yeah, we can say, you have to know yourself. Or we could say, well, we have to know that which is subtle in us, not only the dense.

Andrew McGregor (28:41)
don’t worry we’ll we’ll pay our royalties on it later before we publish

Enrique Enriquez (28:58)
But there is something about the soul as a, not as a thing, but as a process. The soul as a, you know, based on, on the one hand in the Spanish version Alma, Alma has to do with the breath. So it really has to do with the diaphragm moving up and down. You push air out and you bring it back in.

In English, I was looking at this and I found that the word soul at some point connects in an etymological root with the word see, the see. So we have again this idea of the ties that go and, you know, come forward, they recede. There is a movement always in and out, in and out, in and out. And that became very important for me in terms of understanding what

Andrew McGregor (29:48)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (29:53)
the soul is, and the soul is that process in which we extend our presence through the world and then we bring the world inside ourselves. the soul is always changing, it’s always transforming, and it depends very much on what we ingest, so to speak. I have become a great, big fan of osmosis.

I think that most of the time our relationship with the world is of an osmotic nature. We look at a chair and we feel settled. We look at a tree and we feel a sense of expansion. It’s almost like by contact these things instill in us modes of being that we forget ourselves in the thing we’re looking at and then we become that thing for a little bit. So we extend ourselves.

And that is to me the soul at play. So I do feel that.

Andrew McGregor (30:55)
Has that

changed for you since you’ve stepped away from living part of your life engaging with the online world?

Enrique Enriquez (31:05)
I mean, I don’t know. I don’t have anything against the online world because I do think that that is another extension of our presence, which is, you know, we grew. I just don’t know how to go about it. It felt like too much noise and I decided I don’t really need this.

But so it was more like an editorial decision. I don’t want to spend time doing this. But also perhaps, yes, I don’t want to be found. want to be, I know, I mean, when people want to find me, they find me, but I’m not sitting by the window all the time to be seen. But yeah, I mean, so I’m not sure if that is different. I do think.

I think that there is no difference between our presence online to some extent, our presence in the real world. mean, the social media, whatever that is, is another dream world. We’re just there. Of course, it’s maybe more edited or more conscious.

But it’s part of the same dynamic in which you’re putting something out and then bringing something back in. I started thinking about this one day that I went to my usual cafe and there are a couple of old men that go there all the time and they always sit on the same tables. They say, we all have our place. And one day one of them was misplaced and then…

when that table finally got free.

I was about to sit there now because I just arrived and then I stopped and said, wait, no, do you want to sit there? So I take your table. But that meant that for some reason the other old man also had to move. So we all shuffled ourselves through the, you know, we switched tables. And I thought, this is so insane that we really feel better in our table, which is not even our table. I mean, it’s owned by the lovely French lady who owns the cafe.

Andrew McGregor (33:19)
Yeah, at my local coffee shop, it’s the same, you know, especially on the weekends, there there are people who are expected to sit in certain spots, they have a, like a counter with stools in the window, you know, and there’s this person spot and that person spot and my spot and whatever. And yeah, people will adjust or offer to adjust if they arrive and they’re part of the regulars. And they’re like, you know,

Enrique Enriquez (33:19)
And could I?

Andrew McGregor (33:46)
Dale, please take your seat over there. Dale will be like, great, thanks. And everybody settles into their proper orbit, which is deeply amusing.

Enrique Enriquez (33:55)
It is, it’s lovely. so I started to think, well, maybe we somehow, we left part of ourselves here. So we go back to it. We go back to pick it up, to re-encounter that thing. To the extent that maybe if somebody else comes there in years, they will see us, you know, when they close their eyes. That’s the preposterous assumption that we remain there.

Andrew McGregor (34:22)
For me, think it’s also

very interesting. Sorry, I cut you off. sort of, tend to be a high novelty seeking person. You know, I’m always interested in what’s new. I really love going places I’ve never been. I don’t rewatch things or reread things very much. You know, I’m always sort of looking for something new and inspiring at some level. And yet there are these anchors of

Enrique Enriquez (34:26)
Yes, yes.

Okay.

Andrew McGregor (34:53)
my seat on that stool at this at this coffee shop on Friday and Saturday and Sunday every week pretty much and this and that and you know for me it’s like the maybe it is a piece of the soul there it leaves a chord back to my life when I go out into the expansive possibility of things but there’s this dance between that sort of

highly structured

thing that’s always the same and then this highly unstructured you know exploration of things which they go so hand in hand for

Enrique Enriquez (35:34)
Yeah, there is a good balance. I we are all looking for some sort of balance. yeah, I live a very repetitive life, I guess, very simple life, and I rarely live this few blocks.

Then the absence of noise, so to speak, the fact that everything becomes this flat line underlines when something extraordinary happens and allows me to notice a thing that maybe is new, as you say. So I’m always looking for that thing and noticing a thing. And then of course, trying to understand if I can present that thing I notice in language so I can share it with others.

And I guess since the last time we spoke, I now have this list, some sort of subscription, where I share with people the things I notice. And I think that has been going for two years or three years. So I have this constant contemplation of reality that decants in these brief phrases or paragraphs where I notice a thing and I put it out there.

So, of course, that’s also very, it’s very pleasant because I feel it’s like levitating when you are engaged with your own language inside your head as counterbalance of a thing that is outside of yourself and has its own presence. And so how can I put that in my words so another person can see it? And funnily enough, I do spend a

big amount of time every day working on these things. And I share them and that’s fine. what brings me extraordinary joy is when I spend a week or two working on a thing that I want to say. And when I finally get it right and I feel this is how this thing should be said, I realize that it doesn’t need to be said and I deleted it. And those are the moments of great

Andrew McGregor (37:53)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (37:54)
greatest joy. So I feel that to some extent the things I send every week, two or three times a week, are just my failures. When I fail to realize this didn’t need to be said. But because the process, the process of going through this translation of the experience into language is what the work is.

At the end, the final sentence is nice or whatever it is, but it’s just a fact that you can find that balance between the outside world and the inner world and somehow have one mirror in the other.

Andrew McGregor (38:29)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it reminds me of I went on this journey. I don’t even remember when now many years ago to back when I was doing written blogs a lot more and I wanted to try and articulate how tarot works. And, you know, I wrote a lot of different ideas about things and I’ll put a link to them all. There’s like, I don’t know, seven or eight posts about it. But

but they ended up feeling like a collection of nice stories about it as opposed to an explanation. And when I got to the place where I felt like there was an explanation, it was the final, probably the final sentence of the whole thing, which ended up being, Taro is a machine that runs on mystery and spits out truth. And…

Enrique Enriquez (39:37)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew McGregor (39:39)
It’s funny because I’ve been doing a lot of web redevelopment and going back, business, business, whatever, whatever, modern internet stuff. it’s resurfaced things that I have, for the most part, largely forgotten that I did. there was something about coming to that phrase, and I feel like I should have.

added a trademark and made a bunch of shirts and she made bumper stickers and you know, whatever, right? But in its way, it was an explanation that brought an end to any need to ask the question anymore. And, you know, and I wonder, you know, what is the point of divination? I’m curious what will make it so that question no longer needs to be asked anymore. You know?

Enrique Enriquez (40:36)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (40:37)
And it’s just such a different thing, right? And it also reminds me of the start of this podcast when I started it in 2011. I started off by asking a variety of really, really experienced tarot readers, Mary Greer, Rachel Pollock, other great names that everybody probably knows. You can find them if you scroll back through the podcast or look at my website. Why is it some people change and other people don’t?

you know and I think it was it was Lon Duquette who said well when when the person asks the right question then they can change and they no longer need to look at that question anymore and you know that was such a satisfying answer to me in the end we just haven’t asked the right question because that person’s not there yet but again it’s not an answer per se right it is the articulation of something

Enrique Enriquez (41:06)
Hm

Andrew McGregor (41:36)
that needed an articulation but doesn’t have an explanation. And that feels a lot like what you’re talking about here too in its way.

Enrique Enriquez (41:46)
Yes, well, actually, mean, lately, I think that we don’t need to understand something to appreciate it or to like it or to love it. And we don’t even have to understand ourselves. We just have to know ourselves, which is different.

Andrew McGregor (42:00)
Hmm.

Tell me about that distinction for you.

Enrique Enriquez (42:06)
Well, I think that I don’t need to understand why I don’t like to go to the beach, which I don’t. I just need to know that I don’t like to go to the beach. And this is a very silly example. But to try to, I find, I feel or find myself being very reactive to our, to this idea that everything has an explanation that we have somehow repressed and that if we go back to

Andrew McGregor (42:13)
Yes.

Enrique Enriquez (42:35)
in our childhood, I will find out that somebody stole my sand castle and that’s why I don’t like to go to the beach or something like that.

Andrew McGregor (42:44)
Your dad refused to buy you an ice cream and that’s the end of it

Enrique Enriquez (42:46)
Exactly. think

especially, will say, because life is one thing, but then you have art and poetry. I find all that especially sad when people look at the work of an artist and say, yeah, he liked blue because when he was a kid, he was always in Mallorca or something like that, looking at the sky. It’s so silly to dismiss the greatness of human creation by finding silly explanations.

I do know I had a, I have a friend and she likes to go in these excursions to readers and sidekicks and things. So I go with her and I found myself in the Bronx having a conversation with this lovely reader. She read Spanish cards which she was in a botanica and funnily enough we’re looking for shells.

Nobody had red shells. Everybody had Spanish cards. And she was lovely. And she asked me to cut the deck three times or something like that and ask three questions. And I told her, I just don’t think like that. I don’t have questions about daily life because I think that daily life takes care of itself. As you say before, there are things that are cyclical. There are things that are the way they are.

There are things that, you know, when I find a job, what is the alternative? You will find one job or another. I mean, but what is very unlikely is that you will turn into an eucalyptus tree. So I told her I just don’t have questions. And the questions I have are so abstract that I don’t even know how to ask you. And she said, that’s very beautiful. You must be a poet. But I disagree completely.

I have saved many lives on this table because I have seen a bullet coming or cancer or a crash in a car. And I don’t doubt that. And I realize that’s not what I’m seeking or that’s not what I’m after. I also suspect that if you really understand, again, if you know who you are, you will deal with the crash or the bullet or whatever it is in a certain way.

Andrew McGregor (45:00)
you

Enrique Enriquez (45:13)
can go around docking bullets that aren’t coming yet. And again, this is all very personal, right? So I have less and less interesting questions in that sense. Although my question these days, I’m going to ask you my question, is how do you know your soul? What do you think?

Andrew McGregor (45:37)
boy, just an easy question, huh?

I mean, I think that how I know my soul comes from spending a lot of time.

being quiet, making space for it, observing, know, reviewing, looking backwards, and coming to coming to understand my nature, who I am, right? You know, I mean, and, and I think that the the challenge for me with a question like this is because I hold a few different points of view.

Enrique Enriquez (46:12)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (46:23)
As a priest of Shango in Lukumi or Santa Ria as it’s commonly called, I understand the advice about my destiny and my nature from my initiation and the divinations that I’ve been through. And that provides a lot of insight, understanding and guidance, which I navigate towards, right? As I move from,

Enrique Enriquez (46:27)
The first

Yes.

Andrew McGregor (46:53)
being unaligned with that towards hopefully being more aligned with that. So that’s one piece of it. Then there’s me as the person who enjoys this and doesn’t enjoy that. I love the beach. I prefer the beach over the pool. loved yesterday I was at the sauna and the steam room was so hot that it almost hurt your skin to walk in there. And it was so delightful.

And then the cold tub, because it was very cold here right now, was so cold that after it took your breath away, and after probably less than 30 seconds, I was so cold I had to get out despite being roasted. I love the contradiction of those things. So what does that tell me about my soul? I don’t know, but it tells me something, right?

Enrique Enriquez (47:45)
Well,

yes, well, there is a common element in all those things you’re saying, which is that there is an otherness. There is the hotness of the water or the coldness of the water. I do think that we have to find silence, but also eventually we only understand our outline when we are faced with the contrast of a background.

So when you go out there and something happens and then you react to it and you notice, this is this is doing to me, then you start to know yourself. Because I guess the self or, again, let’s use that word, the soul, which by the way, if there is a soul that most people will say there is not, if there is a soul,

Andrew McGregor (48:25)
Yes.

Enrique Enriquez (48:45)
It doesn’t need us to know what it is to be there. So we’re fine. We’re going to be fine anyway. If we don’t find the answer, it’s okay. But we…

Andrew McGregor (48:53)
If there is

an eternal part of ourselves, it is eternal and it will sort itself out eventually.

Enrique Enriquez (48:58)
Yes, exactly,

or even it already knows, you know, it’s just automatic pilot, who knows. So we don’t have to figure this out, but I do feel that I am more interested in, you know, this is a very maybe silly thing that happened to me last year, but I, the weather allows it, which is not the case right now. I sit a lot outside in gardens.

New York is full of gardens where you can just go and sit. And I would just sit there for hours and wait and look at things and think about things. And something I noticed is that there are two ways to enter a garden. You have the person who enters in a kind of matter of fact way. And they don’t really look around. They take for granted that that thing is there.

and they sit, they eat their sandwich, they read their book, whatever it is that they’re doing. They go there to do something, which is fine, it’s great. Because people really know how to use the garden. And they live. And then there are, the other way to enter the garden is these people who enter the garden with this big smile. And they look around in awe because they cannot believe that thing is there for them to enjoy and it is free.

So they are slower and they look around. So I noticed this a million times. And then one day I was coming back from the supermarket and I noticed this young man was looking at me with the same smile as he had entered the garden. And I decided right there and then that I wanted to be the garden.

Andrew McGregor (50:56)
Hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (50:56)
for these

people. want, we go back, it goes back to presence. I hope that by me being there, appearing in their lives, I can make them feel the way they feel when they enter the garden. And it’s a very tall order and maybe completely grandiose and misguided, but it’s also very simple.

Andrew McGregor (51:21)
Yeah, I have the great fortune to have a relatively large front garden that’s south facing and so I grow lots of things there and you know, last year, the last few years especially, it got dug up for, you know, city maintenance kind of reasons but…

So I’ve been rebuilding it over the last couple of years, including moving plants that I moved elsewhere to save and stuff like that. And the more time I spend there and I spent a lot of time that I spend, probably an hour every day. And once the weather turns nice enough, whether it’s a dirt patch, cause it’s just starting or, you know, it’s, it’s fallen. have to bundle up. I spent a lot of time there and it’s one of the

Enrique Enriquez (52:06)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (52:15)
greatest pleasures to just be with it to to walk around and see what looks different to see what looks the same to you know contemplate and

Enrique Enriquez (52:20)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (52:30)
feel like I got a new I love journals you get the sense of that from from listening to me talk. I started a gardening journal this year. My kiddo got me a really nice journal that I had eyeballed somewhere and I started it and on the front page I wrote something like this is the journal of a garden dreaming of becoming a person and a person dreaming of becoming a garden.

Enrique Enriquez (52:36)
He

Andrew McGregor (53:00)
And I feel like the two sides of us dream towards each other and all sorts of wonderful things sort of emerge through that process, you know? And obviously I’m making choices and doing things, but I’m also listening and paying attention and hearing it and, you know, sending ideas into it and being like, hey, what do you think about this, know, Mr. Garden, Mrs. Garden?

And there’s a dance in that, which I think is just amazing. And as you say, delightful and divinatory in its way.

Enrique Enriquez (53:37)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (53:40)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (53:41)
Well, yes, and…

I guess the other side of the thing with questions is that, I mean, it has been a long time since I have been thinking that more than a question, a specific question, what we carry is an inner dialogue. In the moment we are dealing with this and that and we wonder about the outcome and the thing, but we have this running dialogue.

that sooner or later finds its response in real life. Something happens and we say, that could be a confirmation, a denial, an expansion, derailment of what I’m here, what I’m processing. And it’s not, it doesn’t end when the thing appears in that sense of saying, oh, that’s the answer to the question. Or at least I don’t find that that interesting. I think it just.

fuels that inner dialogue and then you move on and I find, you know, I have been thinking a lot on the fact that we all need to negotiate our relationship with the invisible.

sooner or later. And of course, the invisible is already my way to negotiate my relationship to that thing I call the invisible, but other people could call God or the metaphysical, you know, the other world. So I call it the invisible. And then I realized, well, it’s very daunting if the invisible is this immensity behind a curtain that somehow you have to peek through.

Andrew McGregor (55:28)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (55:28)
or figure

out, you know, how do I enter, how do I… So I decided to think, well, let’s think that the invisible is just the space in between things. The space between people, between people and objects, between objects and other objects, between nature and humans. So it’s a space that we don’t see.

unless we detect a connection between two things. And then that space becomes visible. It brings something forward that was there, was hiding or invisible again, and now it became evident. So I decided, okay, I’m going to think of the invisible as a series of interspaces. And we are always bringing something from the invisible the moment we

pay attention to the way things are connected. But then, when a sign appears, when a thing appears, that you say, okay, this fits my inner dialogue, I understand, it’s speaking to me now. Rather than feeling that that settles the matter, I keep waiting because that thing in another incarnation, in another way or form, will reappear here or there.

And now I have another piece of the invisible that I mapped out.

Andrew McGregor (56:54)
the tide, the waves, right?

Enrique Enriquez (56:56)
Yes, exactly. And I find it easier to tackle like that.

Andrew McGregor (57:05)
Yeah, I think that there’s a desire to arrive at an answer, desire to be done, desire to to be able to sum it up. That is so human and such a thing, you know, and that idea of, I’m going to take a little longer, I’m going to allow time to tell me whether that’s in one moment, one experience or

Enrique Enriquez (57:11)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (57:34)
over the arc of other collection of experiences, think that slowing down and saying, don’t need to summarize or decide or come to the conclusion now, but I can note this point and see what else interacts with it to describe something further.

Enrique Enriquez (57:54)
Yes, because it is an open process. And I do think that time is important. It is true that we don’t like to wait. We don’t like uncertainty. We don’t like the invisible. We don’t like to wait. We want everything explained to us and everything clear and black and white.

Andrew McGregor (58:08)
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, and I think that there’s.

the dance of urgency is sometimes completely necessary, right? You know, we have bodies and we’re in that space and that urgency is important and necessary.

Enrique Enriquez (58:15)
Yeah.

Yes, and maybe that’s a good way to put it in the sense that, the body has an urgency that the mind sometimes obeys to and has to obey to. But then there are those aspects of the mind or the spirit that don’t need that urgency. And we don’t have to feed the spirit or the soul with the same

regularity that we feed the body, for example. I mean, the other day I was thinking in the way that, you know, the great mystics of the Middle Ages will spend 20, 30 years, 40 years writing or thinking and trying to figure out one mystic vision they have.

that define their lives. And now we want to have ayahuasca every weekend. I think, I mean, how are you giving time for that thing to give something, make something in you if you’re just doing it again and again and again? It’s like a ride or something. And yeah, so of course, again, all this is very personal and I…

Andrew McGregor (59:39)
Yeah.

Enrique Enriquez (59:45)
very much agree with you that if you cut your finger you need immediately to apply pressure you can’t just wait and see the blood and lost yourself in the contemplation of threat because you may just die but

Andrew McGregor (59:57)
But tell me this. So if you if you were Middle Ages mystic, what what what would be your defining vision? Do you have one? you that you might share? Do feel like there’s a thing that sort of sparked all of this contemplation that’s come since then?

Enrique Enriquez (1:00:21)
Well, I mean, I don’t know if there is an initial vision that I can remember. I really have a problem with remembering. And it’s silly. That’s why I started writing things down, when I look at things or I see things, because I know that I’m going to get really excited about a thing that happened with an owl or with a thing, you know. And then two weeks later, I don’t remember. if people ask me, you know the thing about the owl? say, what? And I just don’t remember.

So I started writing these things down, but I can tell you one that happened to me last year that was important, important enough that I actually, not only that I actually kept it, but I never wrote it down.

And I went to, I wanted to go to Greenpoint in Brooklyn. And it was on a weekend, so I couldn’t really go the way I usually go. And the subway suggested go to Queens and cross a bridge on foot and then you will be in Greenpoint. And okay, I love that kind of excursion, so I did it.

First of all, I got to the point where I was supposed to get on a bridge, and the bridge was up there, like 10 stores up, and it was down here. And Google did that thing. Google does it, say, just go up. But there was no way of going up until I finally figured out I saw a couple coming down some stairs. So I went up, and it was really, really steep. And when I got all the way up on the right side of this bridge,

Andrew McGregor (1:01:50)
breath.

Enrique Enriquez (1:02:05)
I saw a billboard that said, are you going to heaven or hell?

which was incredible because I was going to Brooklyn, but who knows what that is.

Andrew McGregor (1:02:18)
depends on the day

Enrique Enriquez (1:02:19)
And it was, you know, on the right side, the traffic was going in that direction towards Brooklyn. And that was the big question there. Are you going to heaven or hell? And as I’m pondering the, I don’t know, absurdity, the coincidence, the grace of this billboard, a crow started calling me.

So in the exact opposite side of the bridge, there was a crow calling me. And I am always, I take all these things with a pinch of salt, so I decided, let’s see if he’s really talking to me. So I took 10 step down and the guy just keep pointing at me with his beak and calling. And then I went the other way, I walk.

I’m upsetting everybody who was running and biking and whatever. And the guy just keep looking at me. mean, was following me with his peak. I could see his eye even though he was on the other side of the bridge. He wasn’t that big of a bridge. And I understood. I understood. First of all, there is a micro vision before this vision on the subway.

Before I got there, I had seen this skeleton dancing with a very tiny man, dancing salsa on the subway. So, you know, it’s like a tiny guy, I guess, from Ecuador or Colombia or whatever, who straps a skeleton on the skeleton. He puts a dress and a wig on the skeleton, and then they dance. And I, as I took the subway, I thought, I wonder if this guy knows that he is enacting.

one of the most ubiquitous motives of medieval art, is the dance of death.

he probably just thought this was cool, but this is actually a thing. And so when I was there and I had the billboard on the right, which is basically the message of organized religion, the Bible, all that, and the…

The crow, the living bird on the left. And of course you can trace all the relationships between, you know, the right is rational, the left is intuitive. On the right side, the traffic was going away from me. On the left, it was coming towards me. All that. I realized, well, these are the two books of the Middle Ages, the Bible and the Green Book.

You go by the question, are you going to heaven or hell? Or you go by the bird. You listen to the birds. You listen to nature. And I, of course, realized, well, this is a confirmation. All I have been trying to do all this time is to follow the bird, follow the voice of the birds, follow the voice of nature. But at the same time, what became evident is that there only one bridge.

Andrew McGregor (1:05:12)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (1:05:35)
There are not two ways. It’s just one way and you choose. Yes, exactly. You choose how you cross that bridge. But that’s a matter of choice. go, you know, it’s the same thing people talk about the dry way, the alchemist or the wet way. It all came down to that big image of how you choose to cross the bridge. that has been in my mind since…

Andrew McGregor (1:05:38)
There’s no fork in the road here.

Enrique Enriquez (1:06:01)
as a big, I mentioned this to a friend of mine and he said, was that a dream or was it, said no, no, I saw that with my eyes open. The fact that I saw it with my eyes open doesn’t mean it wasn’t a vision.

Andrew McGregor (1:06:16)
Yes.

Enrique Enriquez (1:06:19)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (1:06:25)
feel like, number one, I love that. And I don’t want to add anything to it. Just let that sit there. I think there’s, there’s nothing else to say.

Enrique Enriquez (1:06:31)
You

Andrew McGregor (1:06:36)
think for me, there was…

I was hit by a truck and almost died when I was 14. And it took me a year to learn how to walk properly afterwards. And…

Enrique Enriquez (1:06:50)
Well.

Andrew McGregor (1:06:59)
that experience, I had already been curious. I was already curious about many things, but I awoke from that experience, as it were, and leaned into the world and said, I need to understand everything. And that experience,

created encouraged this drive and though that experience in and of itself wasn’t a vision per se or a dream it led me to I don’t know a half dozen or a dozen experiences that all more or less ended the same way

Enrique Enriquez (1:07:36)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (1:07:54)
You’ve gone far enough down this part of the road and you are what you are seeking. Now go, now go this other, now the path changes. Now go do this other thing. Because again, as you say, it’s not really, it wasn’t really a fork in the road. It was much more like now this road changes names and becomes a different road. And it was always, you know, it took me a long time to really realize, you know,

kind of apropos of our conversation today, that we are searching for, or I was, I won’t speak for everyone, I was searching for myself. I was searching to understand. And even though that initial awakening pointed outwards, you know, and I would go find religious people and holy people and people who I thought had answers and I’d be like, I got questions, let’s talk.

Enrique Enriquez (1:08:34)
Yeah.

Andrew McGregor (1:08:53)
and I would just put them on the spot. And perhaps I was a little precocious for 14 in that way. Dear Mr. Jesuit, I have a lot of questions for you. And I was also very fortunate that the majority of those people were like, great, let’s talk. But yeah, it’s very interesting to me that those questions always return to the same answer.

Enrique Enriquez (1:08:58)
you.

Andrew McGregor (1:09:18)
you’ve you’ve learned you’ve learned enough down this part of the path. Now, now realize it’s you you’re looking for. And again, kind of like the waves, right? There’s a sort of cresting and realization, and then a re merging and almost a forgetting, you know, and it took a number of rounds before that settled in and became so clear.

Enrique Enriquez (1:09:32)
Yes.

Yeah, yes. mean, we are all sandcastles in that sense that, we build ourselves with great care. And at the end of the day, the tide will just take everything down. So we do our best. We spend our lives. I mean, if we are so inclined, trying to figure that out, trying to find ourselves, we’re trying to find our souls, we’re trying to know ourselves. And the better we get, the closer we get to that point in which…

Andrew McGregor (1:10:02)
Mm-hmm.

Enrique Enriquez (1:10:17)
we will be just taken by the wave. It’s very funny.

Andrew McGregor (1:10:22)
And also I think for me, know, perhaps this just the nature of whether it’s the nature of aging or the nature of my, my journey. I don’t lose the sense of it so much anymore. And I, even though the, you know, I know the sand castle is metaphor for life, but more so maybe sand castle is metaphor for times at the beach, you know,

As it it washes away i’m like well that was a nice one. All right, what’s next? maybe i’m going to do this. i have a friend who wants to be buried up to their neck in sand great let’s do that now and There’s a continuity that happens even though the external shifting and waves Theoretically even it out and make everything return back to the same neutral state

Enrique Enriquez (1:11:11)
Yes.

Andrew McGregor (1:11:12)
Mm-hmm.

Well, maybe that’s a good place to put an end to it and say, have fun at the beach people.

Is there anything that you wanted to say before we wrap up today or how you feel?

Enrique Enriquez (1:11:29)
No, I feel great. think this is a good point to say goodbye and I’m always very grateful when you appear in my life. It has been too long, but now we’re here and we don’t have to disappear for too long again. And yeah, I just feel that, I mean…

Andrew McGregor (1:11:36)
same.

Yes.

100%.

Enrique Enriquez (1:11:50)
I guess, yeah, I don’t have any major thing to say. I think this was a very lovely conversation as it usually is with you.

Andrew McGregor (1:12:00)
If folks are intrigued, are there any pathways to accessing you available these days?

Enrique Enriquez (1:12:08)
Well, I have my email, which maybe you can then share down there or something. I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but yeah. I mean, I think if you Google me, my email appears somewhere. That’s the main way people can access me. I can tell you this, which is just to be mean. Last year, I published a secret book. That is a book that doesn’t exist anywhere.

Andrew McGregor (1:12:20)
Put it in the show notes.

Enrique Enriquez (1:12:37)
and it’s only delivered by me when I meet somebody in person. So maybe people who are willing to come all the way here for that can do so, free in client to do so. But no, yes, I have a big rule which is that if you write to me or you try to contact me, I will answer. I don’t understand when people don’t do that.

Andrew McGregor (1:13:03)
Great.

Yeah, same.

Enrique Enriquez (1:13:06)
So I’m here, yes.

Andrew McGregor (1:13:09)
Wonderful. All right. Well, thanks for thanks for recording with me, Enrique.

Enrique Enriquez (1:13:14)
No, thank you.