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Episode: For the Intuitives (Part 2)

Author: Joshua Schrei
Duration: 01:58:57

Episode Shownotes

Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life,

and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity pushes the seer to the fringe — and once cast aside, seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. The rise of free market spirituality and New Age conspiracy is a result of the unmooring of the seer from traditional context. Yet what this points to isn't something 'wrong' with seeing or spirituality. It points to the need for context in a larger culture of disconnect and fragmentation, for slow learning and earned wisdom within a culture that always rushes things outwards. Dichotomized narratives that pit scientific rationalism against the spiritual, shamanic, or oracular ignore the central importance that spiritual movements play in culture. Visionary movements drive all aspects of culture, including scientific innovation. And ultimately — as science itself tells us — having a 'fringe' that sees things differently than the mainstream is absolutely essential to the growth of culture. So perhaps the modern-day seer must re-learn what it means to find anchor and context and earned wisdom, just as society must remember that the seer is vitally important. In a world of fragmentation and numbness, the seer comes to wake the culture up, to restore its sensitivities, and ultimately to drive culture forward. Featuring conversations with Sophie Strand and Healingfromhealing's Adam Aronovich and music by Peia, Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and more. Listen on a good sound system!Support the show

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_03
Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald.

00:00:28 Speaker_03
All that's happening on this green jewel in space. So, in part one of this episode series, we dove into the historic centrality and total normalcy of visionary experience.

00:00:51 Speaker_03
How culture is built upon visions, built upon the trembling utterances of oracles. How the body of culture needs those who feel, who see, who receive, whose eyes are flooded with sight and whose ears receive voices and songs.

00:01:10 Speaker_03
who listen to the river and translate for the river, and sing the song of the river aloud for all who might hear. People whose bodies, you could say, are the living antenna of culture. Sensitive, awake, feeling, and receiving.

00:01:28 Speaker_03
Receiving in states of heightened perception. Glimpses into the unfolding pattern of nature. and how that pattern translates into the lives of communities and ecologies.

00:01:43 Speaker_03
And we spoke about how all across the world traditional cultures have provided a container, an ecology for visions. Visions had a place in which to grow, to incubate, to be fostered, to live and to thrive.

00:01:59 Speaker_03
And so the intuitive, the visionary was not other, but was woven into the very fabric of culture. What is an ecology in which visions thrive? What does it look like? It looks like Iroquois dreaming culture.

00:02:17 Speaker_03
It looks like Achuar culture and Kaluli culture and the deep ancestral orientation of the cultures of the Solomon Islands. But it also looks like 15th century France. The French province of Lorraine was a fertile place for visions and voices.

00:02:35 Speaker_03
There were sacred groves, There were gatherings in those groves in which stories were whispered ear to ear. And sometimes, if the conditions were just right, a saint would pay a visit and speak to someone.

00:02:50 Speaker_03
A person would hear in their ear the reverberation of sanctified words and feel the sweet stir of sanctified breath upon the breeze. The breath of the saints, there in the grove of beech trees, because saints were not lofty, far-off figures.

00:03:10 Speaker_03
Saints lived in the waters and in the changes in the weather, and in the June blossoming of certain medicinal flowers, and in the charged space that exists between wounds and cures.

00:03:25 Speaker_03
Saints spoke with river voices and wind voices and sky voices and cavernous voices, And when there is an ecology for it, prophecies whisper from ear to ear. Into this ecology was born a girl that you've heard of. A girl named Joan.

00:03:45 Speaker_03
You all know the story, right? The story of the peasant girl from Lorraine? How, at 13 years old, she began receiving visitations in the garden. She heard voices in the garden. Voices that told her she had a role to play in great world events.

00:04:03 Speaker_03
She, a peasant girl who could barely read, would be instrumental in a great political upheaval that would shake all of Europe. As Sophie Strand tells us,

00:04:15 Speaker_01
You know, Joan was actually not atypical. There were many, many different visionaries of that time period. Marie Robin, we have Christine of Marquette, we have Marjorie Kemp, we have so many different visionaries.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
It wasn't actually considered a neurobiological issue like we do now. It was considered something that a lot of people had access to.

00:04:33 Speaker_03
And like in the villages, that's always been the case.

00:04:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. So there was also a culture of prophecy where there was, you know, people sometimes say like, oh my God, I can't believe a peasant girl did this.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
But there was a prophetic social belief system that already existed where people were kind of expecting this. There was a beach forest behind her house, her father's house.

00:04:55 Speaker_01
And the custom was to go to this old oak tree that was in the beech forest and that it was the fairy tree. And there were lots of different May Day festivals and children would go there and play and have miracles happen.

00:05:10 Speaker_01
And the story goes is that Joan had her first vision there, that she backformed and said that her visions came in her father's garden or at the church. But it seems as if her first experiences of the divine were in front of this tree.

00:05:24 Speaker_01
And so it's so interesting that one of the things that damns her is her relationship to this cisteri tree.

00:05:30 Speaker_03
Joan of Arc was born into an ecology that was welcoming to visions, that expected and fostered visionary experience in which prophecy flowed like water. And she died a short 19 years later

00:05:46 Speaker_03
within a larger ecology that had moved decidedly away from visions and visitations and voices, that had come to fear the visionary, vilify the visionary, burn the visionary.

00:06:01 Speaker_03
Her story is a clash of rural and urban, of agrarian animism deeply tied to place, and the fluidity of epiphany coming face to face with larger powers that needed to have total control over epiphany.

00:06:17 Speaker_03
And so the story of Joan, as much of a cliche as it has become, remains deeply potent. Because in it we see both an ecology that fosters visions, and a larger, civilizational, institutional ecology that vilifies them.

00:06:34 Speaker_03
And this larger ecology of civilization at odds with the intuitive would come to dominate Western theological and scientific narratives for many years to come. I'm sure you know this, right? That intuitives have been vilified for a very long time.

00:06:55 Speaker_03
Those who hear voices and attune their ears to the roar of far-off rivers in a world increasingly deaf to the roar of the river have to deal with a constant stream of discreditation. So this episode is going to explore this on a deeper level.

00:07:13 Speaker_03
What is the historic preoccupation with discrediting mystic experience? Why is the mystic deplored by religious structures and political structures and mainstream science alike?

00:07:25 Speaker_03
Why is mystic experience still to this day discredited in predominantly Puritan nations? And what happens to the mystic once set adrift? But back to Jones.

00:07:39 Speaker_03
But church authorities were so desperate to prove that Joan of Arc was a heretic, that her visions weren't actually of God, that she was interviewed and interrogated over weeks by a panel of all the greatest theological and medical minds of Europe, all men of course, whose sole intent was to show that she couldn't have actually been hearing the voices of the saints.

00:08:03 Speaker_03
And today we can understand pretty easily why a power structure like the church would find Joan threatening. But it didn't end with the church. Why have modern scientists been equally eager to discredit Joan's voices?

00:08:19 Speaker_03
I mean, it's not like she's still around to be a thorn in their side, right? Why would 21st century psychiatrists deem it necessary to try to prove that Joan of Arc's visions must be the result of a condition?

00:08:32 Speaker_03
epilepsy, or migraines, or schizophrenia, or bovine tuberculosis induced by unpasteurized milk. And this is a real thing. Psychiatrists trying to claim that Joan of Arc's visions were caused by unpasteurized milk.

00:08:49 Speaker_03
Right, you know, the girl who at age 13 began receiving angelic voices in the garden.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
who performed widely witnessed miracles, who predicted deaths just before they happened, who predicted her own blood spilling at the Battle of Orleans, who saw as a 13-year-old peasant girl that she had a role to play in reinstating the French Dauphin and then, against all odds, did.

00:09:12 Speaker_03
All of that came from unpasteurized milk. And I'll just say, you really have to have a pretty clear anti-visionary agenda to attribute years of luminous visions and voices that changed the course of history to unpasteurized milk.

00:09:31 Speaker_03
Why would the modern world still need to discredit mystic experience? Is the mystic, the intuitive really that much of a threat these days? Right?

00:09:41 Speaker_03
I mean, I know there's like, you know, some new age conspiratorial shenanigans going on, but is the mystic that much of a threat compared to the larger threats posed by, I don't know, like flagrant rage fueled militarism or AI tinkering or climate chaos?

00:09:59 Speaker_03
Why is it that the more civilized a country seemingly is, the more it vilifies intuitives? Why, you, Cassandra, have you not been mocked and scorned enough? Have you not been cast out enough? Why, to this day, focus all that attention on you?

00:10:22 Speaker_03
Perhaps it's because the mystic vision rubs against deeply held civilizational narratives of agency and control.

00:10:30 Speaker_03
The vision of human beings as instruments that are constantly being made use of by greater powers contradicts some of the very deep tenets of modern western humanism.

00:10:43 Speaker_03
As Eric Wargo says, quote, personalities who take comfort in a neat, orderly, well-defined world are bound to be threatened by causal arrows that pierce time in the wrong direction, or information that leaks in ways it shouldn't.

00:10:59 Speaker_03
But the fact is, causality, like nature herself, is not tidy. The voice of the mystic is unsettling.

00:11:08 Speaker_03
It speaks of predetermined futures, of uncontainable fluidities, of pasts strewn with ghosts, and of patterns and unfoldings that we have never foreseen and that have little to do with us. That is profoundly uncomfortable.

00:11:26 Speaker_03
But there's more to it, too, and it has to do directly with the rise of what we call civilization, and what that really is. because you can trace the rise of civilization concurrently with the rise of the persecution of the intuitive.

00:11:43 Speaker_03
They're so closely linked, it's almost as if civilization requires intuitives to persecute, as if city walls require a frenzied seer crying outside those walls, crying aloud that those walls will one day come tumbling down.

00:12:03 Speaker_03
And this civilizational narrative that vilifies intuitives is everywhere. Everywhere there's civilization, not just the modern West. In China, reports Dr. Mayfair Yang.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
There has been a cultural movement away from the shaman, the seer, the oracle, the spirit medium being honored as the intermediary between the living and the dead, the uplifter of the community, the validator of rulers, an exemplary being.

00:12:34 Speaker_03
to being seen as the worst type of human, a bedraggled, dirty swindler conning people out of their money.

00:12:42 Speaker_03
Quote, when I started field work in Wenzhou in the 1990s, Yang says, the dominant view in China of shamanism was that it is the lowest and least desirable form of religiosity, earning it the epithets feudal superstition and charlatanry for cheating people out of their money.

00:13:03 Speaker_03
whether in official discourse or in mainstream urban attitudes. Shamans were regarded with suspicion as either people with mental problems or people who fake possession in order to cheat the ignorant folk.

00:13:15 Speaker_03
Whereas in ancient times, she says, shamanism imparted political authority to rulers and its practitioners were described as percipacious, intelligent, and sagacious, today it is associated with old and mentally disturbed women at the lower margins of rural society.

00:13:37 Speaker_03
In China, this vilification of the oracle, the shaman, the trance medium, goes back to the 17th century, to the rise of civilizational industrialization, when the Qing dynasty rulers proclaimed this edict,

00:13:52 Speaker_03
All teachers and shamans and shamanesses who falsely call down heretical gods, write magical charms, make incantations over water, who use the divining planchette or pray to saints, who disseminate heterodox and deviant arts and techniques, who hide images or statues, burn incense and assemble crowds, who gather at night and disperse at dawn, pretending to do good deeds, those who are the leaders will be hanged or strangled.

00:14:21 Speaker_03
Those who are the followers are to receive 100 strokes of the cane and to be banished 3,000 miles.

00:14:32 Speaker_03
So, here you have a situation in which shamanism and spirit possession, which originally formed the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine, whose animate fingerprint is all over modern acupuncture and martial arts and Chinese philosophy,

00:14:47 Speaker_03
and is at the heart of the harmonic Confucian relationalities that still form the basis of Chinese statecraft, it's now vilified as charlatanry and deceit, as disreputable behavior.

00:15:02 Speaker_03
In China, the persecution of spirit possession that began in the 17th century reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, during which the old seeing and healing practices were utterly smashed.

00:15:16 Speaker_03
In Soviet Russia, quote, shamans were stripped of electoral rights in every election, including at village and district levels.

00:15:25 Speaker_03
In practice, this meant that such a person was excluded from the collective farming system, and as a result, deprived of all means of subsistence. Tortured, summarily executed, Soviet Russia despised shamans and oracles and intuitives.

00:15:41 Speaker_03
And after a certain point in history, so did pretty much everyone else. And I want to emphasize what a sea change this is. The oracular traditions that formed and still form the basis of culture suddenly marginalized.

00:15:58 Speaker_03
The understanding that any ecstasy, any receiving of visions, any hearing of voices, any oracular state is pathological. This is a seismic shift in a world whose foundation was built on oracular trance.

00:16:12 Speaker_03
And if we want to try to pinpoint when, globally, this seismic shift really occurred, we can look a lot of places. But one place, certainly, to look is the 17th century.

00:16:28 Speaker_03
The 17th century is when the European witch trials really took off, impacting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. And it's interesting, right? We tend to refer to the 800s or the 900s

00:16:41 Speaker_03
or the first couple centuries of the last millennium, we refer to these as the Dark Ages. But if you were an intuitive and herbalist, one whose body was a vessel for greater forces, one who trembled and heard voices, the 17th century was far darker.

00:16:58 Speaker_03
The height of the persecution of witches, of shamans, or seers happened not way back in the so-called Dark Ages, but concurrently with the rise of industrialization.

00:17:10 Speaker_03
concurrently with the rise of the Protestant Reformation, concurrently with the rise of humanism, concurrently with the rise of the scientific method, concurrently with the meteoric rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and concurrently with modern warfare.

00:17:27 Speaker_03
All of these things were at play in the 17th century, and they are more deeply and directly intertwined with the persecution of intuitives than we might imagine. What do I mean that these things are intertwined? What is this connection?

00:17:45 Speaker_03
This connection between the rise of humanism and the persecution of seers? Certainly the rise of humanism was a good thing, right? And sure, humanism brought its benefits in a church-dominated world.

00:17:59 Speaker_03
But in the very word, humanism is a clue about what happens to the more-than-human, the forces of nature, the river and the grasses, the spring and the mountain. the ancestor and the descendant, under a regime of humanism.

00:18:16 Speaker_03
Just look at how we used to live in relation with the dead, and how all of that changed with the rise of humanism. Humanism suggests a world in which all concerns are primarily human, and more than human forces are ignored.

00:18:32 Speaker_03
And in many traditional understandings, when more than human forces, spirit forces, ecological forces, ancestral forces, are ignored, they begin gnawing at humans.

00:18:48 Speaker_03
So the 17th century, along with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and humanism, also brought with it a drastic rise in the number of people dying in wars. The 30-year war alone in Europe brought 8 million dead.

00:19:06 Speaker_03
The transition from Ming to Qing rulership in China brought millions more, 25 million according to some estimates.

00:19:14 Speaker_03
This time period also brought with it, in both Europe and China, a steep rise in the persecution of oracles, of witches, of shamans, of healers, and all types of intermediaries. So tell me if you think these things are related.

00:19:31 Speaker_03
A sudden precipitous rise in the number of global dead. A sudden unwillingness to acknowledge the ancestral dead as a tangible presence that impacts our lives, on whose bones our lives are built, as agencies that must be fed and interacted with.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
And a sudden vilification of those who actually deal with the dead on a daily basis. I'm not making this connection up. The German witch trials of the 17th century literally arose as a way to explain the brutality of the Thirty Year War.

00:20:07 Speaker_03
It was so gruesome it couldn't possibly have been a natural outcome of the Reformation, of the Enlightenment, of the humanistic road to progress, right? It had to be witchcraft. But of course, the problem wasn't the intermediaries.

00:20:23 Speaker_03
The problem was the ever-growing mountain of bones that was accumulating on either side of our road to progress.

00:20:32 Speaker_03
A mountain that was only possible to ignore if we kept our gaze fixed firmly forward, shunning those backward souls who communed with the dead, who fed and spoke with them and so sought to reconcile past and present, and therefore ensure anything resembling the future.

00:20:54 Speaker_03
So people often scoff at oracles, at spirit mediums, because spirit possession, transmediumship, is considered backwards, right? This is a telling statement. It's backwards. What does that mean? Does that mean it's primitive or regressive?

00:21:11 Speaker_03
Or does it mean something else? Perhaps the spirit medium is taboo because they literally look back into the past, at the mountain of bones behind us. at the horde of dead behind us, at all that is ancestrally forgotten.

00:21:30 Speaker_03
And in a world that must always relentlessly charge forward, must move forward at all costs, this encouragement towards the backward glance is deeply unsettling.

00:21:43 Speaker_03
For modernity to look back and witness the unsatiated ancestors howling there, to witness the unacknowledged dead there,

00:21:53 Speaker_03
for modernity to gaze straight into the yawning chasm of all that we have sacrificed, all that we have left behind, all that we have been separated from. This has implications for the entire project of modernity and its relentless forward gaze.

00:22:17 Speaker_03
And so the more dead accumulate behind us, the more hell-bent we become on always gazing forward. not realizing that in doing so, we become vehicles, if some traditions are to be believed, through which the dead express an unsatiated hunger.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
It works like this. The more dead there are piling up all around us, unrecognized, unfed, unplacated, the more that humanity's anxious forward momentum grows. And then that forward momentum, as it consumes, creates more unsatiated dead.

00:22:50 Speaker_03
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The shunning of the ancestral dead ensures a future littered with bones. For what will the dead feast on if not on offered songs? If not on stories told around a fire?

00:23:06 Speaker_03
What will they feast on if not on milk and spirit plates of fruit and grain? If not on mantras and morsels of black sesame and rice? They will feast on our forward roving hunger. and our forward-roving hunger will feed them relentlessly with new dead.

00:23:27 Speaker_03
How many bodies is enough to feed the great hunger? Tom Hirons asks in his lament over the devastation of Gaza. How many bodies is enough to feed the great hunger? Underworld beings, it's said by some, are driven by a great hunger.

00:23:46 Speaker_03
In the absence of regular offering, they'll gladly take blood. Because blood flows downwards and feeds those who live underneath, in some understandings.

00:24:00 Speaker_03
In Chinese traditions, the unsatiated, unhonored dead return as earthbound spirits, of which there are hundreds of categories.

00:24:09 Speaker_03
These spirits take hold of people who unwittingly leave themselves open to such possession through their own roving, unmoored appetites. How does the possession of earthbound spirits manifest in these traditions?

00:24:23 Speaker_03
It can manifest as a perpetual moroseness or anxiety at the state of the world, says Lu Ming. It can manifest as stuckness, as the hardened, armor-like shell that paralyzes the faces of politicians, newscasters, and four-star generals.

00:24:42 Speaker_03
You've seen that stuckness. It can manifest as greater-than-human ambition. I want more than any human should have. I'm going to be a billionaire who lives forever. That right there is the sign of a culture that does not honor its dead.

00:24:57 Speaker_03
How can we possibly learn from the mistakes of our past if we ignore the dead?

00:25:02 Speaker_03
So Hirons says, quote, I will lie down with the bones of my dead fathers, hold tight the portion of wisdom they passed to me, and sleep the vital sleep in the black watered river.

00:25:16 Speaker_03
The dead fathers will look with their hollow eyes full of crying, and I'll bottle those tears to make salt for the meals at the long table at which I serve my loved ones, my life.

00:25:33 Speaker_03
Historically, intermediaries, spirit mediums, have served this absolutely vital role of dialogue with the dead.

00:25:42 Speaker_03
After the Cambodian Genocide, Buddhist monks, whose traditions forbade them from doing intermediary spirit work, gave up their monks' vows temporarily, long enough to attend to the thousands upon thousands of spirits that needed feeding and clearing.

00:25:57 Speaker_03
Its vital animist tradition teaches us to attend to ghosts. Personal, familial, societal, planetary ghosts. But at a certain point on the road to progress,

00:26:11 Speaker_03
Modernity found it was far easier to vilify those who spoke with the dead than to acknowledge the dead themselves. When we talk about the loss of the animate, the loss of animate vision, how we treat the dead is a huge part of it.

00:26:28 Speaker_03
The loss of the animate isn't simply the loss of a connection to trees and moss and forest ecosystems. The loss of the animate is disconnection from the ancestral dead.

00:26:40 Speaker_03
And when we lose that connection, then those who maintain it are easily ridiculed for their backwardness. Those who still dialogue with spirits may not even be seen as human at all.

00:26:54 Speaker_03
Spirit possession, says Paul Johnson, was purged from European culture after the Reformation, and then projected outward as an anthropological concept and applied to non-Western

00:27:06 Speaker_03
especially African cultures, as a sign of primitiveness and backwardness.

00:27:11 Speaker_03
Since Africa was the main source of slaves in European colonies, spirit possession came to be primarily associated with African cultures, where, in the European imagination, Africans were, quote, without will and overwhelmed by instinct and passion.

00:27:29 Speaker_03
In the 17th century, in a world increasingly obsessed with agency and control, the fact that African peoples practiced spirit possession was directly used as justification for their enslavement.

00:27:43 Speaker_03
The French Code Noir of 1685 questioned whether those who become possessed are capable of owning or controlling themselves, and therefore whether they are capable of self-governance.

00:27:55 Speaker_03
Spirit possession, says May Faryang, quote, disturbs mainstream society because the idea of the occupied body and spoken-through person goes against the development of the rational, autonomous, self-possessed individual imagined as the foundation of the modern state in Enlightenment discourse.

00:28:19 Speaker_03
Yes, the spirit medium lives in direct contradiction to the Protestant vision of bodies, the humanist vision of bodies, the scientific-industrialist vision of bodies, and so science and religion despise the spirit medium equally.

00:28:35 Speaker_03
The spirit medium arms open to larger breezes, Larger flows, arms open to the river, ear turned towards the river, tears brimming at the eyes at the sound of the rush of the river.

00:28:52 Speaker_03
Stands in direct contradiction to bodies that are meant to exist as individual isolated units in a cosmos that functions as a machine.

00:29:04 Speaker_03
In the 17th century, there is a seamless handoff, an unbroken line, a direct continuity from the church's diagnosis of the intuitive as a demonically possessed witch to the scientific pathologization of the intuitive as hysterical.

00:29:21 Speaker_03
So direct, in fact, that the first medical text describing hysteria was written by a doctor who was a medical witness at a witch trial. Let that one sink in.

00:29:32 Speaker_03
so direct that modern psychology inexplicably still spends an awful lot of time trying to retroactively pathologize witches.

00:29:41 Speaker_03
There are a whole lot of books on what was really wrong with all those mystics, because of course they couldn't have actually just been mystics, right? Saint Teresa could not have actually been receiving divine ecstasies and revelations.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
It must have been a hysteria thing. Christina Mazzoni in her book Saint Hysteria says, quote, within the medical profession the generalized consensus is to interpret the mystic as an undiagnosed hysteric.

00:30:12 Speaker_03
The BBC recently went a step further and declared that witches never existed at all. Because the powers they were accused of possessing weren't real, quote unquote, then there couldn't have been any such thing as witches. So there's a story, right?

00:30:27 Speaker_03
There's a progress narrative that says that spirit mediumship and shamanism have dwindled naturally since the rise of humanism, because the rise of modern science made all that obsolete, and so primitive practices kind of faded away to live on the fringe.

00:30:44 Speaker_03
I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson basically say this directly, that the shaman became irrelevant because of science. It's a nice story, but it's nowhere near the full picture. The intuitive didn't just fade away, they were erased.

00:31:00 Speaker_03
The intuitive, the oracle, the seer, the visionary, the neurodivergent, the highly sensitive person. was extricated from the Enlightenment industrialist body because their bodies do not fit with what modernity requires of bodies.

00:31:20 Speaker_03
For what is a body for in a regime of industrialism? Does a body exist to give voice to the waters? To enact and reflect a great permeability? To dance out the play of great forces all around us?

00:31:37 Speaker_03
to gesture through fingers and speak it through tongues, to feel, to perceive through direct revelation, to wail, to keen, to sing of great powers and of passing time.

00:31:51 Speaker_03
No, a body is to produce, to conform, to sit at the school desk and then the cubicle and then in the coffin, and anything other is pathology.

00:32:04 Speaker_03
Dr. Yang, writing of the change in attitudes toward spirit possession, wrote this, I propose that a possible reason why spirit possession is denigrated today is that it violates modernity's plan for the orderly, industrial, and state-disciplined body.

00:32:24 Speaker_03
Boom. Yeah, that's a mic drop for Mayfair Yang. Yes, the spirit medium's body With its ecstasies and unpredictabilities and constant surrenderings, its profound sensitivities does not fit into the capitalist-industrialist vision of what bodies are for.

00:32:43 Speaker_03
Nor does it fit into the communist-socialist utilitarianism of bodies, in which, as socialist hero Lei Feng described, bodies were to serve as common screws of the great machinery of industrialization and state-building.

00:32:58 Speaker_03
Nor does the spirit medium's body fit the wellness community's vision of a whole, perfect body actualized through a relentless focus on the self.

00:33:08 Speaker_03
With its perpetual turning over of agency, its alignment to a larger animacy rather than an ownership of its own traumas, the spirit medium's body does not fit the psychology world's vision of what individualized, well-adjusted bodies should be.

00:33:24 Speaker_03
The spirit medium's body certainly doesn't fit Roganesque visions of the reclaimed Bronze Age body, But neither does it necessarily conform to modern feminist visions of what supposedly embodied feminine power looks like either.

00:33:39 Speaker_03
With its repeated voluntary self-subjugation in favor of greater powers and agencies, the spirit medium's body calls into question all modern notions of power.

00:33:51 Speaker_03
It finds the power in the powerlessness, which is not a very popular thing to do or even talk about these days.

00:34:00 Speaker_03
In a world in which we are told that what we really want is autonomy and power, the idea that true power might dwell more in the unknowns than the knowns, and that power might flow through bodies without any regard for modern visions of acceptability and control, is a threat to any system, rationalist or religious, that wants to put human agency at the pinnacle of all creation.

00:34:24 Speaker_03
It's threatening to the church because it suggests that all people are intermediaries,

00:34:29 Speaker_03
It's threatening to the scientist because it suggests unprovable, unempirically verifiable forces still govern behavior, that a huge part of the human experience has never been informed by reason and never ever will be.

00:34:42 Speaker_03
It's threatening to the factory owner because it will not sit and conform.

00:34:47 Speaker_03
In the garment factories outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, young rural peasant women workers have fallen victim to local vengeful spirits called Nyakta, whose lands have been disturbed by the factory invasions.

00:35:01 Speaker_03
These spirits possess some women and bark out orders to others, causing mass fainting spells among the overworked female laborers and widespread work stoppages. Some factory managers have even placated the Nyakta with animal sacrifices.

00:35:16 Speaker_03
These days when Nyakta appear on the factory floor, they are helping the cause of Cambodia's largely young female and rural factory workforce by registering a kind of bodily objection to the harsh daily regimen of industrial capitalism.

00:35:32 Speaker_03
The shaking bodies of spirit mediums in trance, says Yang, showing the whites of their eyes or facial grimaces or foaming at the mouth. are not bodies in accord with the modern disciplinary culture that has penetrated the globe.

00:35:48 Speaker_03
Yes, there is a clash between the unfettered, expressive, and unpredictable spokesperson for the gods and the disciplined industrial or clerical laborer.

00:35:58 Speaker_03
There is a clash between sensitivity and the numbness required to carry out the industrialization project. Because if it's one thing modernity requires of us, it's numbness. The forging of the new world required numbness.

00:36:24 Speaker_03
To subject other human beings to the horror and suffering of slavery requires numbness. To institute large-scale environmental destruction requires numbness.

00:36:35 Speaker_03
To kill on a battlefield with the new, impossibly loud, impossibly shocking weapons of scientific industrialization requires numbness. To vivisect living beings for the sake of progress requires numbness.

00:36:52 Speaker_03
To sentence people to a life in the factory requires numbness. To work in the factory requires numbness. Modern culture must become insensate in order to function. Here's what Adam Aronovich from Healing from Healing has to say about all this.

00:37:12 Speaker_00
We become aware that our sensitivity is not necessarily a virtue in the modern world and that if we're not able to numb down, then life in Western society becomes unbearable.

00:37:27 Speaker_00
It is not a coincidence that emotional literacy amongst Western men is so low, that there is a very deep lack of emotional literacy that is by design. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

00:37:41 Speaker_00
When you think about hyper-capitalist extractive societies, the only reason how a system based on exploitation and colonization and imperialism and all the different isms are leading the world, or at least humanity, towards

00:37:57 Speaker_00
possible extinction, we are living through the sixth mass extinction that has been facilitated by a society that requires people to disconnect from their sensitivity in order to operate.

00:38:11 Speaker_00
It would be impossible to do what we do to the world and to each other if we hadn't been taught that feeling should be pathologized.

00:38:22 Speaker_03
Modernity is the persecution of the sensitive, the felt, the sensate. The walls that civilization places between it and the wilds are walls of numbness. And fluid, permeable nervous systems of individual bodies over time internalize those walls.

00:38:42 Speaker_03
And the outer walls of the city become inner walls of numbness.

00:38:51 Speaker_03
The seer Isaiah saw this in a vision long ago, that the dominant culture would, quote, make the heart of the people fat and leaden, and their ears heavy, and it would shut their eyes closed. Do you feel this numbness?

00:39:13 Speaker_03
In the relentless traffic on the 405? In the anesthetizing glow of fluorescent light? In the bloodstream of a culture that requires 9 billion gallons of coffee a year just to wake up in the morning and show up for life.

00:39:33 Speaker_03
A culture in which, as the saying goes, all things are full of weariness and there is nothing new under the sun. Don't you long to break free of the numbness? Haven't you had visions in which the culture en masse was uplifted out of its numbness?

00:39:54 Speaker_03
Haven't you seen us tearing ourselves free of the grey foamy skin that has grown over us, that has deadened our eyes and hearts? There is no possibility of newness until the numbness is broken. So the seer comes to alert culture to its numbness.

00:40:11 Speaker_03
The seer describes the state of the cultural body. The prophet, the visionary, the mad seer shouting wild-eyed at the city gates does not sugarcoat the situation.

00:40:24 Speaker_03
They do not say that everything is going to be alright, or that if you ask the universe for what you want, it will inevitably provide.

00:40:31 Speaker_03
They do not come extolling wellness narratives, or propounding the law of attraction, or saying, just hold tight, we're all going to ascend tomorrow. No, they come to announce times of doom and destruction.

00:40:45 Speaker_03
Times of societal stagnation, of untenable systems at odds with nature. Of human ignorance jackbooting its way through history yet again.

00:40:56 Speaker_03
Of the balance of millions of lives hanging upon the whims of the least capable and most petulant of men yet again. The seer laments the numbness that has overtaken culture. How can we do this to each other again? The seer cries. Do we not see?

00:41:17 Speaker_03
Do we not see? This is the voice crying in the wilderness. Jeremiah laments the state of the nation, the state of Israel, the state of the body, the state of the world, a world in the throes of great movements.

00:41:35 Speaker_03
I looked at the earth, he says, and, lo, it was waste and void, and to the heavens and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and, lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. The land was waste and void. Sound familiar?

00:41:57 Speaker_03
Seen the news recently?

00:42:00 Speaker_03
Oh, land, land, land, the prophet cries, lamenting the state of the body of the culture, lamenting a culture of profiteers, of warmongers, of selfishness, of blindness, of oblivious billionaires gorging and weapons dealers raking it in while children are bombed in the street.

00:42:27 Speaker_03
and my eye is a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the daughter of my people," says Jeremiah. The seer, the prophet, is not addressing behavioral problems, says Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination.

00:42:46 Speaker_03
He has only the hope that the ache of the divine could penetrate the numbness of history. The Prophet serves to offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial.

00:43:02 Speaker_03
The Prophet provides a way in which the stonewalling can be ended. So the seer, traditionally, wakes up the feeling body of a culture. The seer's sensitivity, their bare feet, their wild hair, their tear-brimmed eyes are a wake-up call to culture.

00:43:23 Speaker_03
The seer hopes only that the ache of the divine could penetrate the numbness of history. Have you felt this want? That the aching beauty of nature, the aching beauty of the trembling oak leaf in the sun at golden hour,

00:43:41 Speaker_03
the aching beauty of all that bleeds and sees, the aching beauty of death, the aching beauty of the living chandelier of stars above, that the aching beauty of the light that pours through in the strangest moments, during deep pauses, during brief glances, could wake us up, could wake the feeling body of the culture up.

00:44:05 Speaker_03
So in that honest, searing recognition of the state of things, the mad seer offers something besides doom and dismay. They offer an immediacy, a rawness, an urgency through which love can actually pour through.

00:44:21 Speaker_03
An invitation to wake up to the reality of this humble existence. that life has always been the most precarious of propositions, in whose maddening play we have never exerted much of what can be called control.

00:44:36 Speaker_03
But in the midst of all this, in the midst of the pain of a world determined to play out its cycles of anguish yet again, its victor and vanquished dramas again and again,

00:44:50 Speaker_03
A world determined to enact its own failings, its own miseries on another generation of children again. In the midst of all this, we can wake up. We can try in whatever small, seemingly insignificant ways, to be conduits for love to pass through us.

00:45:12 Speaker_03
We can feed each other. We can be there for each other. And we can, together, Echo the seer's cry that proclaims to the overarching culture, wake up from your numbness, wake up from your numbness and feel, feel, wake up from your numbness and feel.

00:45:35 Speaker_03
Sunbeams filter through black smoke, breezes stir. How desperately we long to feel. All of this pain we enact on each other, all of this perhaps is us longing, craving, wanting, wanting to truly feel.

00:46:06 Speaker_06
I feel free. I feel free.

00:46:17 Speaker_03
Everyone knows that the world, says Roberto Colasso, always finds a way of making itself felt. And every attempt to avoid its intrusions cannot last long. The world will find a way to make itself felt.

00:46:36 Speaker_03
We impose a regimen of numbness and bodies break under the pressure and visions start pouring through. We impose normalcy and neurodivergences flourish. We toxify the world and environmental sensitivities skyrocket.

00:46:51 Speaker_03
We tout reason and suppress the old gods, and then the unhonored gods bubble forth as war deities. The world will make us feel, one way or another. And this feeling, this feeling body, is a good thing.

00:47:12 Speaker_03
For most of human history, profound sensitivity was a good thing. a sought-after quality, even. The pathologization, othering, and ridicule of sensitivity is a modern thing, an internalization of civilizational walls.

00:47:28 Speaker_03
Sensitivity seen as emotional instability, as opposed to sensitivity as a profound cultural asset. So, un-othered, un-pathologized, sensitivity used to be evenly distributed throughout the culture.

00:47:45 Speaker_03
Spend time in indigenous traditions and you encounter a lot of very sensitive people. But not sensitive in the way that we're used to thinking of sensitive. Sensitive hunters. Sensitive weavers. The hunter wants sensitivity. The weaver wants sensitivity.

00:48:03 Speaker_03
It takes sensitivity to cross the stream with your child on your back and feel out a safe place to sleep for the night. It takes sensitivity to distinguish the edible from the inedible.

00:48:14 Speaker_03
Talk to any plant knowledgeable culture and they'll tell you that plants were navigated not through trial and error, but through sensitivity. Doctors for a long time were the most sensitive of people.

00:48:26 Speaker_03
In the Asclepian traditions, doctors had to have fluency in navigating the dream space. Dream navigation was a big part of being a doctor. Even the ruler wants sensitivity. They want to feel the realm as their own body.

00:48:41 Speaker_03
The Grail King is wounded and the land is wounded. The reciprocal relationship between king and land, land and king is felt in the sensitivities of the ruler's body. The swordsmith wants to feel the tip of the sword while holding the handle.

00:48:58 Speaker_03
The firekeeper wants hands that can assess the qualities of the wood by feel. We are sensitive. We are run through with the flaming spears of angels and we cry out like Saint Teresa. And like Joan, we see blazing visions in the garden.

00:49:17 Speaker_03
Old stories course through us, you and I. Dreams of times long past. Echoes in the garden. Do you hear the voices in the garden? Calling in the garden? Archangels in the garden? Do you hear?

00:49:32 Speaker_03
What are now labeled as hypervigilance, hypersensitivity, neurodivergence, these are part of a tapestry that used to live and find place and be distributed through the body of a culture.

00:49:45 Speaker_03
The sensitivities of a culture used to be distributed among all of its people. Sensitivity is outsourced to artists and to mental patients. Modernity wants numbness of us. But of course it doesn't want to believe that it wants numbness.

00:50:01 Speaker_03
So we empower a small subclass of sensitives. Modernity wants artists who traverse sensitive other worlds. Yet we want them clearly delineated in their boxes. There in those boxes we neuter their power.

00:50:17 Speaker_03
remove them from sacredness or from true cultural centrality.

00:50:21 Speaker_03
We enshrine sensitive artists, yet when their unanchored sensitivities get the best of them and they shave their heads and attack paparazzi with umbrellas, I see you, Brittany, then we publicly mock their instabilities.

00:50:36 Speaker_03
And if not mock, we explain away their instabilities. Not as larger driving forces in the body of a culture torn from its own ancestral sensitivities, but instead as pathologies to be rooted out and burned.

00:50:51 Speaker_03
I asked why it is that the intuitive has been vilified by civilization after civilization. Here's a follow-up question. What would civilization be without intuitives to persecute? For civilization is precisely that which banishes the mysterious.

00:51:11 Speaker_03
which is perpetually in the act of extricating the mysterious from its body. With its walls, and all-pervasive lighting, and neatly categorized social divides, civilization is all that is not mysterious. Unmapped geographies are mysterious.

00:51:28 Speaker_03
Let's map them. Humans are prone to speeding down lonely highways at night listening to mysterious music. Well, we'll make self-driving cars. Civilization is that very force which burns the mysterious thing.

00:51:43 Speaker_03
It must banish all hidden spaces, all suggestion that we are not the ones in control. It must banish greater-than-human narratives because the only controllable world is a humanist world.

00:51:58 Speaker_03
Since modernity is the banishing of the animate from day-to-day concern and consideration, then of course it vilifies those who speak aloud with animate forces.

00:52:09 Speaker_03
Since modernity cares nothing of ancestry, then of course it vilifies those who channel ancestry. Since modernity runs from death, of course it vilifies those who cross over into the other world.

00:52:21 Speaker_03
Since modernity defines agency as that which lives within one body isolated from all other bodies, then of course it vilifies those who dwell in a world of higher agencies, multiple bodies beyond our control.

00:52:38 Speaker_03
And here's where it gets really interesting. If we take Colasso's words, that the world will always find a way to make itself felt, then the persecution of intuitives too is a twisted societal attempt to find that feeling body.

00:52:54 Speaker_03
The persecution of the intuitive is simultaneously the attempt to extricate those who feel too much, and to restore its own feeling body because it's gotten so twisted that it can only feel when it is burning someone.

00:53:09 Speaker_03
It can only feel when it is bombing someone. Modernity burns those who feel as a way to itself feel. You know, that force that only loves most things because it loves to see them break. That says, someday, you will ache like I ache.

00:53:42 Speaker_03
Feel this, the first accuser, not accused, the first accuser in the Salem Witch Trials was a teenage girl who was uncomfortable with things that she was feeling. Itchings, burnings, goosebumps in the night, hidden things awakening.

00:54:00 Speaker_03
She took that feeling, externalized it, and put it on trial. And then how did she feel when she watched the accused burn? What arose then? Modernity bans feeling and then finds its own arrows through burning those who feel.

00:54:18 Speaker_03
It finds its arrows through war, through trial, through the temporary rush of relief brought by shouts and tears and flames in the night. So it's easy to say that modernity wants nothing to do with witches, but it's not so easy.

00:54:34 Speaker_03
Modernity wants witches to burn. It wants to repeat the same refrain over and over again about witches and shamans and intuitives and psychics. They are out of control and therefore will topple civilization.

00:54:51 Speaker_03
This you will topple civilization narrative was at play in the witch and werewolf trials of the 17th century. It was at play in the 1980s heavy metal panic.

00:55:02 Speaker_03
It's very much at play in the collision between the scientific rational and the New Age conspiratorial. Those New Age conspiracy theorists are a threat that will topple civilization.

00:55:14 Speaker_03
People scratch their heads at the rise of New Age conspiratorialism, but it's extremely simple.

00:55:20 Speaker_03
Whatever we describe in any given era as civilized, normal, informed, rational behavior, the intuitive, the madman on the fringe, the trickster at the gates will be articulating consciously or unconsciously the hidden feelings underneath.

00:55:37 Speaker_03
The ghosts of that proclamation, the buried bodies, the subverting narrative. It doesn't matter if those narratives are out there or woo or even flat out wrong. They serve a distinct somatic purpose within the body of a culture.

00:55:53 Speaker_03
It has to do with how we are with shadows, with sensitivities, with unspoken longings. Have you ever seen a family with buried narratives in which one sibling hacks out the hidden sensitivities? Right?

00:56:08 Speaker_03
They get sick a lot or they self-appoint as the familial sacrifice victim. You ever seen that? This is the same familial dynamic expanded societally. So the New Age conspiratorialist is not a tumor to be extricated. Not an aberration.

00:56:27 Speaker_03
If we actually believe in taking a whole systems approach to culture, then we have to be willing to see the role that everything plays and what everything is responding to. The fragmentations that are being acted out by what we call the fringe.

00:56:43 Speaker_03
The imbalances that are being responded to. The unvoiced sensitivities. This is a way that culture processes itself. And the prophet, the seer, the visionary invites the people into a sensitivity that cannot be quantified by the metrics of civilization.

00:57:01 Speaker_03
The seer invites dreams that have no ostensibly rational purpose. and do not fall along scientific narratives of validity or invalidity. The seer speaks of hidden shadows. The seer enacts all we ridicule and despise.

00:57:18 Speaker_03
They wear camel hair robes when camel hair is distinctly out of style. And all the civilizational narratives can do is point at the seer and accuse them of being vagabonds, charlatans, fringe, out there, woo.

00:57:36 Speaker_03
You're taking advantage of the people, civilization says. You know, civilization that is utterly built upon taking advantage of the people. You're feeding the people false narratives, civilization says.

00:57:51 Speaker_03
Civilization that is itself built on false narratives? You're charlatans, says civilization. Itself constructed by charlatans. See what I mean? Modernity has been accusing intuitives of being charlatans for a very long time.

00:58:12 Speaker_03
The 19th century in Europe and the United States saw a huge rise in the growth of Spiritism, of Spiritist traditions in which oracular vision, group rapture, and speaking with the dead were front and center. Spiritism at that time was hardly fringe.

00:58:31 Speaker_03
Spiritism drew many, many followers, and influenced not only other spiritual traditions across the New World, but also had a direct impact on modern science. Yes, there were spiritists from all walks of life, including a whole lot of scientists.

00:58:48 Speaker_03
Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the grandfathers of evolutionary biology and the theory of natural selection, was a spiritist.

00:58:55 Speaker_03
as was chemist and physicist William Crookes, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist and Nobel laureate Pierre Curie, and of course Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Sherlock Holmes.

00:59:08 Speaker_03
That's right, the creator of that classic deductive rationalist character Sherlock Holmes was himself a spiritist. Because shocking, right? There was not such a hard dichotomy between spirit and science then.

00:59:22 Speaker_03
But what's interesting is that if you look up the word spiritism now in the United States, what you mostly find is cases of investigations of fake seances.

00:59:32 Speaker_03
Fake seances, you know, someone behind a screen makes eerie voices and thumps the floor and people are tricked into thinking they're actually communicating with the dead. Kenneth Branagh's recent film A Haunting in Venice was all about this.

00:59:46 Speaker_03
If you open an inquiry into Spiritism these days, you might think that Spiritism was only fake seances. But, of course, that's not the full picture either. That, too, is a function of Western culture's othering of the intuitive.

01:00:03 Speaker_03
For if you research Espiritismo in its Cuban context, or Espiritismo in its Brazilian context, you'll find something very different.

01:00:12 Speaker_03
You'll find descriptions of traditions that form the lifeblood of communities, that are practiced far and wide, and respected and considered utterly and completely normal, that provide, according to anthropologists, a positive impact on their communities, that give people a means to grieve, and be in dialogue, and to process communal issues, and to heal.

01:00:36 Speaker_03
So why does the North American mind file spiritism away as fakery? Does this mean that there's something different about North American spiritism? That there are more charlatans here that need to be outed?

01:00:50 Speaker_03
Why do over a dozen states in the United States and several northern European nations still have laws against all forms of divination? For that matter, Why are anti-fortune-telling laws almost exclusively limited to Puritan nations?

01:01:08 Speaker_03
For 200 years of the so-called Enlightenment, fortune-telling, accessing occult powers, spirit mediumship, was punishable by death in England.

01:01:18 Speaker_03
The justification for such laws was that impressionable, gullible women needed to be protected against charlatans. Is that really what those laws were for? Protecting women?

01:01:31 Speaker_03
In 1824, British Parliament revised the law, but still maintained fortune-telling, astrology, and spiritualism as punishable offenses. New Zealand and Australia have historically had anti-fortune-telling laws, anti-spiritist laws. In the U.S.

01:01:48 Speaker_03
states of Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all forms of fortune-telling are illegal. And take a look. It's not the Catholic countries, not the Hindu countries, not the Yoruban countries.

01:02:02 Speaker_03
It's very specifically the Protestant countries. Is that because Protestant countries are inherently home to more charlatans? No. What's different is the ecology. The Puritan response to visions.

01:02:17 Speaker_03
Modern Western puritanically derived culture is much less accepting of anything that is not supported within the very narrow binary lens of scientific validity. Either something is valid or it's not. How could it be otherwise?

01:02:33 Speaker_03
Either the science backs it up or it doesn't. Either it's God or the devil. But, my friends, not everything in the universe requires a scientific discussion about real or fake. about valid or invalid.

01:02:49 Speaker_03
When the shaman pulls a smoking coal or a tooth out of a body, did it really come out of the body? When Sophie Strand says that theatricality is deeply important to healing, what's she talking about? Let's put it this way.

01:03:04 Speaker_03
What makes an effective séance is very different than what makes a good lab experiment. The metrics of a séance are a ceremony. do not simply fall into valid or not valid. Ritual is an ongoing, enacted dialogue.

01:03:23 Speaker_03
The theatricality, the enactment, opens a portal to embodied dialogue, whether or not you consider the spirit beings at the heart of it, quote-unquote, real or valid or not.

01:03:38 Speaker_03
In the bodies of communities, in relationships, in ongoing fluid situations between people, the metric is not always valid or invalid. The metric of human feeling and human thriving is not categorized by valid or invalid.

01:03:55 Speaker_03
And communities, ultimately, are navigated through feeling. If you want to reach communities, then you do so through the body of resonance, of feeling, of enacting, of ongoing somatic dialogue.

01:04:08 Speaker_03
Or you can try dismissing entire communities as invalid and see what happens. You can deride communities for seeing things differently, and then see if the change that you want happens. See if we get to anything new or different, right?

01:04:23 Speaker_03
Within the felt experience of communities all across the globe, forever and ever, acknowledging and performing the mysterious, the ineffable,

01:04:34 Speaker_03
acting as a crossover between the immediate and the vaster world, has had a very specific healing role to play in culture, and the results are tangible.

01:04:45 Speaker_03
I mean, if you haven't actually been to a trance possession ritual, then you really have very little to offer the discussion on real or unreal.

01:04:57 Speaker_03
Because when the music starts rising, and the beat starts pounding, and the chant grows in intensity, and a tremor takes the room, oh, a tremor takes the room, and the bodies begin to convulse. And I mean convulse.

01:05:15 Speaker_03
I mean children convulsing on the floor. And yes, Cassandra, the sky rips open as you've seen it do a thousand times. The sky rips open, my holy love, the angels spear all the flame.

01:05:31 Speaker_03
It would be extremely difficult to somehow categorize what's going on as unreal. And this gets at something important that's gonna inform the rest of this episode. Something I mentioned in the first part of the episode as well.

01:05:49 Speaker_03
The seer is responding to something real. Whether you or I like it or not, whether you or I agree with their conclusions or not, the intuitive is responding to something real. A real need in the culture. A real need in the body.

01:06:07 Speaker_03
The seer is not simply a charlatan. The seer is meeting the need of ongoing discourse with ancestors. meeting the need of bridging the worlds. The seer is enacting the sensitivity body of a culture that vilifies sensitivity.

01:06:23 Speaker_03
And not all of those enactments are going to conform to what scientific rationalism wants them to. The seer is meeting the need of navigating liminal spaces which one day may be very important to the overall culture.

01:06:36 Speaker_03
Because culture, far more often than not, moves towards where seers, where intuitives, where artists and visionaries point it.

01:06:49 Speaker_03
And here I'm going to offer a little parenthesis, because it's important to acknowledge the reality of spiritual charlatans and spiritual grift. It's important to acknowledge how unmoored and unanchored all this has gotten in the modern world.

01:07:05 Speaker_03
None of what I'm saying is to say that spiritual grift doesn't exist. Of course it does. Grift, right? You know the word. Grift. The con game. The scam. Just to be totally clear, there are false prophets.

01:07:19 Speaker_03
There is plenty of grade-A certified New Age fuckery out there.

01:07:24 Speaker_03
Have you seen the HBO series that just dropped, Love Has Won, about the Crestone, Colorado-based mother-god cult started by a former McDonald's employee and guided by a disembodied fifth-dimensional galactic team including Robin Williams and crocodile hunter Steve Irwin?

01:07:43 Speaker_03
Yeah, there are false prophets. Spiritual grift exists. There is plenty of charlatanism and fakery passing as spiritual. And people have practiced spiritual grift for a very long time.

01:07:57 Speaker_03
In 13th century Baghdad, a former spiritual charlatan outlined all the ways that people can get tricked by spiritual grift, chapter by chapter. It's called the Book of Charlatans. And it includes such gems as, quote,

01:08:13 Speaker_03
Exposé of the tricks of astrologers who ply their trade on the highway. Exposé of the tricks of spirit conjurers. Exposé of the tricks of those who manipulate fire. Exposé of the tricks of prestidigitators. And on and on. That's a whole lot of trickery.

01:08:30 Speaker_03
And there's a whole lot more.

01:08:33 Speaker_01
Well, I think we're seeing, you know, when you try and press the river down, it's going to shoot up somewhere. And I think we're seeing a lot of quote unquote visionaries on Instagram right now.

01:08:43 Speaker_06
Right.

01:08:44 Speaker_01
And a new age spirituality. Yeah. I think that everybody's claiming to be a channel of the Lemurians at this point, as far as I can tell.

01:08:52 Speaker_03
I grew up at the height of the first wave of the New Age movement. I'll tell you straight up, I saw a whole lot of grift. I mean, I was criticizing and satirizing New Age grift 30 years ago. Here's me at age 22 satirizing New Age grift.

01:09:09 Speaker_02
And I'm ready. I'm ready for the consciousness shift. I've said my mantras. I've cleaned my colon. I got Mary's message. I'm hip to 11-11. I've been abducted 37 times and received the High Arcturian enema. So I'm clean, man. And it's gonna happen soon.

01:09:31 Speaker_02
Any day now. Any day now.

01:09:36 Speaker_02
Any day now, the dolphins will arise from the great pink ocean and resume their forms as beings of light and teach us the secrets of fifth-dimensional sex and sublime ascension, and Rose Quark's dildos will rain down from the heavens, and Santa Fe will rise up off the earth and be joined to Sedona by a huge rainbow bridge.

01:09:59 Speaker_02
And we'll all communicate with crystals. And the Akashic Records will be always playing on the great cosmic jukebox up in the sky. And we won't have to eat. No, we'll just drink amethyst syrup. Because we won't have bodies.

01:10:16 Speaker_02
We'll abandon this rotting pus bag and just float upwards like intergalactic surfers riding waves of pink champagne. Up. Up. No pain. No pain.

01:10:31 Speaker_03
Yep, I saw people promising the ascension at least once a year and then I saw them scramble when the day passed and guess what?

01:10:39 Speaker_03
We were all still here and we still had to unclog the train and do the laundry and John Lennon didn't pick us up on the mothership. Spiritual grift happens. And this of course is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:10:51 Speaker_03
If you draw a false dichotomy between spiritual and rational, you can be sure people are going to live that dichotomy. If you push everything oracular to the side and other it, if you make something fringe, then it will become fringe.

01:11:06 Speaker_03
And this is part of why I say that it's more common in Puritan cultures, because Puritan cultures push spiritualism, push the visionary to the side, and then the visionary goes underground free of context.

01:11:20 Speaker_03
And once it becomes fringe, once it becomes unmoored from context, anyone can say anything. Anyone can claim anything. Anyone can say, source told me, and use it to justify anything that they want to. Like, how convenient, right?

01:11:36 Speaker_03
Source told me exactly what I wanted to hear again. I mean, is it source, or is it more just what you wanted to hear? You know what I mean? Is it source, or is it you? removed from context, untempered with communal accountability.

01:11:54 Speaker_03
You know, Source told me I'm on a divine mission. Source told me I'm infinitely special. Source told me to leave my partner because my true calling is polyamory. I mean, you know, it could happen. I guess Source could tell someone that.

01:12:10 Speaker_03
But is it Source, or is it anatomically maybe a little lower down? Like, is it Source, or is it possibly just you wanting to sleep around? In my rock and roll youth, you know, we just called it sleeping around.

01:12:26 Speaker_03
Now it's got to be couched in some larger spiritual terminology, right? Like, I'm composting colonial monogamy narratives in favor of conscious polyamory. Could it be that you're just sleeping around? Don't cancel me, Asheville. I still love you.

01:12:46 Speaker_03
So yeah, Source told me. Source told me the QAnon truth about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and somehow it all comes back to pizza. Source told me about direct energy weapons. Source told me poverty is a mindset.

01:13:00 Speaker_03
Source told me the universe favors me above everyone else. Source red-pilled me. Or wait, was I red-pilled or blue-pilled? Was I old-pilled or was I new-pilled? Was I me-pilled or you-pilled? Was I totally emptied or was I refilled?

01:13:16 Speaker_03
Or is the real question, why everybody's so pillable? Open up the mind and listen to the syllable. Tell me, did I decolonize or de-decolonize?

01:13:26 Speaker_03
And in emptying the colonial narratives on class, culture, gender, and race, was I actually emptied of anything? Or did another colonial narrative simply take that one's place?

01:13:36 Speaker_03
Was I fed regurgitated morsels from the knowledge of all ages past and lands abroad? And before I even took time to grow them into wisdom, I vomited them back up like the parrots of the Taittiriya Upanishad.

01:13:49 Speaker_03
I saw the best minds of my generation, healing from healing says, destroyed by TikTok wellness trend. Source told me I'm lost, wandering, searching, grasping. and wandering the unanchored mystic is subject to the other side of visions. Illusions.

01:14:10 Speaker_03
What Healing from Healing calls, quote, ego inflation, delusions of grandeur, messianic fever dreams, and generally ungrounded approaches to sense-making and meaning-making. Cassandra Unmoored.

01:14:25 Speaker_03
In an unanchored world, have we forgotten what anchored spirituality even looks like? Do we know that it could be anything other than a reinforcement of individual specialness?

01:14:36 Speaker_03
It's interesting because having studied an Indian tradition quite a bit and spent time in places like cremation grounds and this kind of thing, the overarching message of

01:14:48 Speaker_03
those spiritualities tends to be one of complete and total self-obliteration, which bears no resemblance at all to spirituality exists so that the universe can reinforce my absolutely special place in it.

01:15:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the solipsism, I think, is central to the Western, like, new spirituality, like that idea that everything... I'm the only real human and everybody else is just an actor or an NPC to some extent in my movie, right?

01:15:22 Speaker_00
It's kind of like...

01:15:23 Speaker_00
weird epistemology that is derived from, I guess, experiences with dimethyltryptamine that are not properly integrated, extrapolated with movies like The Matrix and also to different mythologies that are derived from kind of the solipsistic worldviews, whereas everybody feels themselves to be Neo inside The Matrix and everybody else is just a prop.

01:15:46 Speaker_03
Yeah. And kind of a misinterpretation of non-dualism, I think. Yeah.

01:15:51 Speaker_03
Because non-dualism in context was really anchored in communal activity and responsibility and years and years and years of navigating dualism before you got to experience those non-dual states.

01:16:05 Speaker_03
And if we just jump straight to it's all one and so and I'm God and everything that I do is divine and Nothing really matters.

01:16:16 Speaker_00
It's a good term for it. The term that I like is unearned wisdom.

01:16:19 Speaker_00
The sort of wisdom that is not necessarily earned through lived experience and rooted in anything other than just a couple of experiences, perhaps, that give the impression or the illusion of wisdom, whereas that's not necessarily something that is really embodied in the being of the person.

01:16:41 Speaker_00
And unearned wisdom, I think, is one of the main problems with modern kind of junk food, fast food, express spiritual practices that people, at least the thing that people mistake for spiritual practices, like going to an ayahuasca ceremony and mistaking that for having a spiritual practice or, you know, even practicing asana every day and mistaking that as having a spiritual practice without really delving into other aspects that are integral to the yogic system.

01:17:09 Speaker_03
And look, everyone's going to navigate the current circus the best they can. Everyone is navigating all this the best they can. I'll just say that I have some concern for the generation raised on digital wellness mixed spirituality.

01:17:24 Speaker_03
It must be extremely hard to know what the signs of a genuine tradition, a genuine wisdom keeper are in this climate.

01:17:33 Speaker_03
It must be extremely hard to know the difference between revelation and selling something, between saying all the right wise words and actually being a conduit for wisdom.

01:17:47 Speaker_03
Which is another thing that amazes me coming from Indian tradition, you know, and like, and I realized, like, when I talk like this, I can risk sounding like, you know, the old like curmudgeon or something like that.

01:17:57 Speaker_03
But like, the idea that in one's early 20s, that one would be able to guide someone else on their life is... Yeah, it's preposterous.

01:18:07 Speaker_00
I mean, I definitely think there is a correlation between lived experience and wisdom. I mean, this is the kind of thing that you cannot bypass.

01:18:15 Speaker_00
So, I mean, again, I'm not advocating necessarily for like gatekeeping or, you know, putting barriers again between people and wisdom, but just more humility when it comes to assessing what it is that actually, you know, we can offer others in this path.

01:18:30 Speaker_03
Well, and that the initiatory process might be important. There is, in fact, value to the stages. I mean, I just spent a year with folks like studying the myths and the very end, very, very end, I told a certain story.

01:18:48 Speaker_03
And that story wouldn't have had the same impact if I had told it on the second day. These days, like insights aren't in short supply. like there's a flood of insights, flood of insights available anywhere you go.

01:19:02 Speaker_03
You can go to your local bookstore and you can buy like the secret teachings of all the ages. You know, you can go on Instagram and there's a lot of people spouting regurgitated quotes from this kind of thing. Yeah.

01:19:13 Speaker_03
And perhaps all that ultimately matters is if you actually have a container to hold any of this knowledge whatsoever.

01:19:22 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:19:25 Speaker_03
It must be hard to know that there actually is such a thing as wisdom, as mastery, as a deliberately cultivated ecology in which mystic experience can thrive. For my experience anyway, wisdom has certain hallmarks, certain indicators.

01:19:45 Speaker_03
And those hallmarks, those indicators are quite often the exact opposite as the spirituality we see on social media. So this is fresh for me, right? Because I spent three hours yesterday on a Zoom call with an Aboriginal elder talking story.

01:20:03 Speaker_03
And then I went and I watched Love Has Won, the documentary about the Crestone cult, in which completely unmoored and unanchored 20-somethings are spewing fifth-dimensional celestial nonsense and thinking that they're God, right?

01:20:18 Speaker_03
And I'm feeling a little spiritual whiplash. And what it reminded me of and what it makes me want to say is, there's such a thing as good story and bad story. Tyson Yancoporta and I have talked about this.

01:20:29 Speaker_03
There's such a thing as story aligned with the cycles of nature and story completely unmoored. And there's a reason why wisdom traditions keep coming back to the same understandings over and over and over again.

01:20:44 Speaker_03
There is such a thing as spirituality that is utterly and completely grounded in the real, the felt experience of the real, and how the real unfolds over time. But the real, the real isn't always popular, because to connect to the real takes work.

01:21:05 Speaker_03
So, and again, all this is my opinion. You can take it or leave it. But from what I've studied, the real, the true wisdom isn't self-concerned. It doesn't broadcast itself. It isn't trying to show anything. So here's a paradox, right?

01:21:25 Speaker_03
Even in doing this podcast, I might just be showing all the ways in which I'm not yet wise. I mean, if I'd really figured all this stuff out, I wouldn't have to talk about it, right?

01:21:37 Speaker_03
And so, if I ever slip into the territory of trying to show something or prove something, and I'm sure I do, because we all do, if ever I'm trying to be mystical, trying to wow you, then those are the exact moments that I veered from wisdom.

01:21:55 Speaker_03
If I'm trying to show you who I am, Maybe I'm showing you who I'm not. What if there were a direct equation between how much we say we know and how little we actually know?

01:22:11 Speaker_03
And as the Tao Te Ching says, those who tell do not know and those who know do not tell. If I'm wearing the feathers but I haven't earned the feathers, wearing the robes but haven't earned the robes, wearing the mala but haven't earned the mala,

01:22:26 Speaker_03
then all I'm showing is everything that I haven't yet grasped, haven't yet earned. What if true wisdom is invisible to the untrained eye?

01:22:39 Speaker_03
What if instead of showy, instead of being couched in all the right adornments, all the right paraphernalia, all the right vernacular, what if it is close and transmitted in hidden acts of kindness? and passed on in wordless embraces?

01:22:59 Speaker_03
What if it is tucked away like an amulet in a hidden drawer?

01:23:03 Speaker_03
What if it is like the house of Tom Bombadil, in its simplicity, in its simple songs, in its warm hearth, in its stocked larder, in its welcoming hosts, its home to a magic so deep it's hard to even see?

01:23:24 Speaker_03
What if the true mystics are really, really hard to see? And what if to see them we have to change our whole way of seeing? Away from the show and into the real. The word mystic itself means what? It means hidden.

01:23:45 Speaker_03
That's something worth thinking about in an age when there are a lot of self-advertised mystics on the internet. the mystic, the hidden, is available specifically to those who are able to hold things and not broadcast them outwards.

01:24:02 Speaker_03
For sometimes, I'm sure you know, the moment you broadcast something out, spill it out, reveal too much, it's lost.

01:24:11 Speaker_03
And I'm not saying that, you know, one has to keep everything secret and everyone who makes a living in the spiritual marketplace or advertises their services is somehow wrong or something like that. Not at all.

01:24:24 Speaker_03
This isn't a judgment, this is an invitation. And what I'm talking about is an energetic thing. Broadcasting something outwards is not the same as having actually learned it. Saying something is not the same as living it.

01:24:41 Speaker_03
Anyone can broadcast all the right wisdom phrases. But when I'm alone, and there's no one for me to show anything to, Do I still speak to the winds? Do I still fall to my knees before the powers? Do I still attend to the shrine lovingly?

01:25:04 Speaker_03
Do I still sing your name in the night, holy mystery? Do I honor you over and over again? Turn it over to you over and over again? Do I practice? Tell me. How does one come by wisdom?

01:25:26 Speaker_03
Is there any other answer than through time, through the relentless pulse of life's repetitive fire? But who has time for that? Who has time to actually grow at the pace of change? And so this is perhaps the deeper grift.

01:25:46 Speaker_03
It's not that spirituality lends itself inherently to grifters. but that, like everything else, it's been subsumed completely into the marketplace. It's been sucked into the same market forces it supposedly decries.

01:26:02 Speaker_03
For me, a much more valid criticism of the New Age has not to do with the fact that it involves irrationality,

01:26:10 Speaker_03
or that its metrics of success are unverifiable, but that it has become indistinguishable from free-market capitalism, and the place of the mystic is now synonymous with the place of the online influencer.

01:26:25 Speaker_03
The grift is not that someone spoke to the dead or to the unseen forces. People have been doing that forever. The grift is that they immediately started selling a speak-to-the-dead-in-five-easy-steps course after one conversation.

01:26:38 Speaker_03
The grift is that premonition, sensitivity, intuition must translate into individualist notions of self-improvement and career advancement. That every vision is supposed to yield likes and opportunities to reach new audiences.

01:26:52 Speaker_03
That creativity must equal, as Scout Wiley says, productivity. This is the larger grift of capitalism. And because of this unmooring, spiritual New Age grift, intuitive grift, becomes inseparable from the larger culture of capitalist grift.

01:27:13 Speaker_03
So now we get to the real con, the real scam, the real grift. Capitalism, the greatest grift of all. The methodical, deliberate convincing that you are not complete as you are. That you must constantly want more.

01:27:30 Speaker_03
that life is inherently incomplete without a Heineken so frosty that it's beating with moisture.

01:27:37 Speaker_03
that you alone are the architect of your own isolated self-sufficient salvation, and this grift wraps its tendrils around intuitives, forces them into the what-am-I-to-do-with-these-gifts question, and how-can-I-convert-this-all-into-a-meaningful-career conversation that would be irrelevant in a communal culture where those gifts would have context in which to live.

01:28:05 Speaker_03
Cassandra wanders, through the tides of postmodern detritus, adrift in a sea of merch and schwag. Where do I turn? Cassandra asks. Where do I turn? Cassandra numbs herself. Cassandra doomscrolls just to feel something.

01:28:27 Speaker_03
Cassandra pours lattes eight hours a day and can't even pay the rent. Far from Apollo's temple. Far from the gods' golden feet. Cassandra is lost, victim of the deepest grift there is. So, charlatanism and capitalism are closely intertwined.

01:28:48 Speaker_03
Charlatanism is a function of having societal outliers. In an unanchored context, the intuitive lives on the fringe and then is prone to that most time-honored of fringe activities, the con.

01:29:02 Speaker_03
There's a whole lot of focus right now on spirituality as a con. If you were to listen to some, you might get the sense that all spirituality is a con. And I don't mind a good laugh at the expense of the wackiest aspects of the new age.

01:29:17 Speaker_03
But there's something about the growing critique, the post-COVID critique of anything that remotely goes against the status quo, of anything outside that extremely narrow metric of valid or invalid, that sounds a little like something other than good-natured criticism, sounds a little different than deep inquiry.

01:29:38 Speaker_03
or an attempt at conversation around what are truly legitimate issues, some of it is sounding a whole lot like burn the intuitives. You know, the implied flip side of trust the science?

01:29:51 Speaker_03
Don't trust anyone who's not a scientist or does not use scientific rationalism as their primary method of interacting with reality. All who do not get in line with the rationalist groupthink will be banished.

01:30:03 Speaker_03
And let's just make something really clear here. There are a whole lot of grifters out there, and only some of them are spiritual. charlatanism is not in any way limited to intuitive seers or spiritual seekers. It is equal opportunity.

01:30:20 Speaker_03
It touches every community and has participants from every community. So yeah, there's religious grift. There's also scientific grift. Plenty of it.

01:30:30 Speaker_03
Both in that there are fraudulent scientists, and there are scientists putting all their time and energy and legitimate rationalist science towards fraudulent premises. There is mainstream medical grift. There is insurance company grift.

01:30:44 Speaker_03
There is pharmaceutical grift. There is political grift. There is military grift. There is academic grift. A whole lot of that. There is right-wing grift. Absolutely, of course. And there's also possibly left-wing grift, too.

01:31:00 Speaker_03
Could it be that there's such a thing as anti-racist grift? Straight grift? Gay grift and trans grift? Black grift and white grift? Every community I've ever encountered has grifters.

01:31:11 Speaker_03
There are scientists across Korea and China fleecing people with fraudulent backyard gene editing technologies. Google scientific fraud and see what comes up. A whole lot.

01:31:23 Speaker_03
Sam Kean's book, The Icepick Surgeon, details the darker side of scientific history. complete with plenty of fraud, backstabbing, falsifying, not to mention human trafficking, unwilling experimentation, you know, grift with real life consequences.

01:31:41 Speaker_03
The title character, the ice pick surgeon, lobotomized thousands of women for being hysterics. You know what that means, right? He cut out parts of their brains to numb them to their sensitivities.

01:31:54 Speaker_03
Because of their inability or unwillingness to conform to a numb world, they were numbed permanently. Quote, Walter Freeman called himself the Henry Ford of psychosurgery, the man who took lobotomies to the masses.

01:32:09 Speaker_03
So there's medical grift, a long history of it. That same Persian book, The Book of Charlatans, that outlines all the varieties of spiritual grift, also outlines medical grift. But that was 13th century Baghdad, right? Surely things have changed.

01:32:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, they have and they haven't. Medical malpractice claims tens of thousands of lives per year in the US alone. 50,000 is the low estimate. There are estimates that are a lot higher.

01:32:39 Speaker_03
And that doesn't even count the hundreds of thousands more who are misdiagnosed, or the racial bias that is often implicit in that misdiagnosis, or the two million people abusing prescription opioids. So, a little newsflash here.

01:32:55 Speaker_03
The medical establishment is not the arbiter of all that is true, right, and rational in the world. It has its share of negligence, of fraud, of salesmanship, and grift.

01:33:06 Speaker_03
In a country in which the entire medical system is deeply bound up in the larger capitalist grift, criticism of the mainstream medical establishment is absolutely 100% unequivocally warranted. Do I agree with all the ways that criticism manifests?

01:33:26 Speaker_03
All the New Age pseudo-cures? All the ivermectin mania? No. But it's important to remember, the seer is responding to something real. When Jeremiah asks, is there no balm in Gilead? When he asks, in a country of medicine dealers, why is everyone sick?

01:33:46 Speaker_03
He's addressing something real. When he asks, is there no doctor? Is there no doctor in the land? He's addressing something real. Even the most conspiratorial of conspiracy theories is seeking ultimately to address something real. Fragmentation.

01:34:08 Speaker_03
Disconnect. So there are grifters everywhere. The system is a grift. Is there a place to criticize spiritual grift? Absolutely. As long as we remember that grift is not limited to spirituality. That empaths aren't actually the worst people in the world.

01:34:28 Speaker_03
You know the meme I'm talking about, right? I'm actually an empath, says literally the worst person you know. Yeah, that's a pretty good meme. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Like, we've all known that questionable empath, right?

01:34:41 Speaker_03
We all know smarmy festival dude who talks a big spiritual game and then tries to hit on your partner the minute you leave to go to the bathroom, right? We all know at this point, I would assume, some of the defining characteristics of New Age grift.

01:34:56 Speaker_03
But just to set things in their right place a bit, the worst people in the world aren't, in fact, empaths. The worst people in the world are people whose defining characteristic is lack of empathy. Like child traffickers. Or weapons dealers.

01:35:14 Speaker_03
Or the guy who designs newer and better landmines or cluster munitions or phosphorus bombs. Or the guy who bombs children because it's justified.

01:35:24 Speaker_03
Or the lawyer who legally defends Exxon as it poisons huge swaths of Ecuadorian rainforest and then, when pushed to answer why the indigenous people have sky-high rates of cancer, proclaims, well, I don't know, I mean, I do know that they're an unsanitary people.

01:35:40 Speaker_03
Look it up. Just as a reminder of the three most likely world-ending scenarios, the three most probable ways that human beings could off ourselves, You know, the most likely scenarios for human doomsdays?

01:35:56 Speaker_03
Guess what, they're not being brought to us by mystics and intuitives. They're being brought to us by scientists.

01:36:04 Speaker_03
The AI scenario, the nuclear war scenario, the climate change scenario, all are a result of relentless scientific innovation free from embodied ethics.

01:36:15 Speaker_03
And here's a place where it's important to be really plain about the current culture of enshrining scientists as selfless gods. Sure, modern Western science does a tremendous amount of good. Science makes all this possible 100%.

01:36:30 Speaker_03
And science has also played a major, major role in getting us into the mess we're in. The planetary environmental consequences that humanity faces right now were brought to us courtesy of Francis Bacon-style rapacious extractive science.

01:36:47 Speaker_03
The forever chemicals that are poisoning ecosystems were isolated by scientists who never paused to ask, should we, or is this a good idea? The power to destroy the world four times over was brought to us by scientists.

01:37:00 Speaker_03
War in the era of industrialization is made possible by scientists. Religious fanaticism gets its weaponry and its destructive capability from technological innovations brought to us through science.

01:37:13 Speaker_03
So science, when pointed towards the wonder of nature and the selfless search for cures for illnesses and the preservation of ecologies, is wonderful. But science is a methodology, not an end into itself.

01:37:26 Speaker_03
And that methodology is pointed a whole lot of other places too. As a little reality check, the majority of scientists in the world are not actually climate scientists tirelessly working to save the planet.

01:37:40 Speaker_03
There are far more military scientists working to create more efficient ways of blowing other people up than there are scientists whose sole objective is to save ecologies.

01:37:50 Speaker_03
Science serves ideologies, serves mythic narratives, just like everything else does. It serves get-rich-quick narratives. It serves transcendentalist narratives all the time.

01:38:02 Speaker_03
It serves extractive narratives and destructive narratives and narratives of violence every single day. The scientific method is a tried-and-true and wonderful way of arriving at objective truth.

01:38:15 Speaker_03
But, make no mistake, as it is practiced today, within the framework of global capitalism, it too is an ideology. The idea that the most natural thing to do with our lives is to continually extract more information out of the universe?

01:38:32 Speaker_03
and that that information is to be used for forward-moving societal progress, this is an ideology. It's a Promethean ideology. Science, when aligned with slow-growth ideology, with traditions that understand nature on nature's terms,

01:38:47 Speaker_03
that understand, as science is coming to, the value of whole systems thinking, the value of ecology and enacted reconnection to it, the value of lighting a candle to the ancestors, and the value that all parts of an ecosystem play in the health of the whole.

01:39:03 Speaker_03
This is beautiful. This is science that can be of good use. But which larger narrative science decides to point itself towards depends on the ability to feel. to see connections, to feel ethics in one's bones.

01:39:18 Speaker_03
And this requires realigning science to an ecological, ethical, dare I say mystical, heart that more often asks, how does this feel to work on this? Versus, I'm going to do this regardless of the cost, just because I can.

01:39:38 Speaker_03
And some won't believe this, but I'm not saying any of this to vilify science or scientists. I'm saying it all to say that when people don't just immediately fall in line to trust the science, there's a reason for it.

01:39:52 Speaker_03
Remember, the seer is responding to something real. The intuitive is responding to something real. The fringe is responding to something real. They're responding to the hollowness of the refrain, trust the experts. in a collapsing world.

01:40:11 Speaker_03
They're responding to the paralysis, the royal stasis that Brueggemann spoke about. Trust the market. Trust the science. The seer comes to say, really? Cassandra wanders the streets of Troy, barefoot. She can see beyond doubt, beyond words.

01:40:29 Speaker_03
She can see with illuminated fire, finely etched at the edges, the course that all this is taking. And all the while, what did the voices around her say? Trust the experts, Cassandra. Troy can't fall. Look at our achievements. We're indestructible.

01:40:47 Speaker_03
Can't we learn from the past? Can't we learn from other traditions? Can't we learn from our ancestors that there needs to be a container in which the ecstatic and the pragmatic, the sensitive and the anchored can live together indivisibly?

01:41:04 Speaker_03
that the science-spirit divide is totally pointless. And you know, I really only get into science-spirit discourse when I have to, when discourse gets so dichotomized that I feel it needs to be blown open.

01:41:19 Speaker_03
I only enter this territory when I feel it's absolutely necessary. Why? Because it's so fucking boring. Western discourse around the false dichotomy of science and spirit is boring. I mean, it's kindergarten type stuff. Science or spirit.

01:41:36 Speaker_03
Rationalism or intuition. The world doesn't work this way. There's no neat divide.

01:41:41 Speaker_03
History is full of scientists who saw visions, of fringe cultural movements that informed scientific revolutions, of vital cultural crossover between the fringe and the mainstream, of spiritual sciences, solomonic sciences, of hermetic wisdoms, of gods that ruled both magic and science at once.

01:42:00 Speaker_03
It's very well documented that there have been many, many scientists who had visions that informed their scientific work. In fact, there's almost always some type of vision at the heart of a scientific theory. You know about Ramanujan, right?

01:42:13 Speaker_03
The famous Indian mathematician who received his formulas in visions, in which a goddess inscribed them upon his tongue?

01:42:22 Speaker_03
Quote, Ramanujan eventually said that the formulas came to him in a dream, presented as mathematical truths by his family goddess, Namagiri Amon.

01:42:33 Speaker_03
Chemist August Kekulé had a, quote, somnolent vision of a snake biting its tail, a dream that revealed the true structure of the benzene ring. He describes it like this. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed.

01:42:49 Speaker_03
Again, the atoms were gambling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eyes, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations.

01:43:06 Speaker_03
Long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together, all twisting and turning in snake-like motion. But look, what was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.

01:43:20 Speaker_03
as if by a flash of lightning I awoke, and this time also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis." So there are scientific visionaries, yes.

01:43:33 Speaker_03
And science follows the cultural lead of seers, intuitives, spiritualists, and artists all the time.

01:43:39 Speaker_03
Ecological science would not be what it is today without the movement of Eastern spiritual traditions and their visions of interconnectedness to the West. The scientific vision of Gaia

01:43:49 Speaker_03
arose out of experiences of living ecology that the 60s generation had while in states of entheogenic rapture. In modern medicine today, antibiotics are prescribed far less than they used to be. Why?

01:44:03 Speaker_03
It's because fringe practitioners of alternative medicine pointed the way for 40-plus years first. Why is organic food mainstream? Because people on the fringe didn't trust the science. The science, you know, that said DDT is fine.

01:44:18 Speaker_03
Visionaries impact all aspects of culture. All of modern activist culture. All, including climate activism. It's all built on the foundations laid by visionary spiritual movements.

01:44:31 Speaker_03
The entire organizational structure and methodology of modern activist movements is derived from Gandhian Satyagraha and MLK's civil rights movement, which was decidedly spiritual. It goes on. AI is a big topic right now, right?

01:44:47 Speaker_03
AI culture is steeped in entheogenic ceremony. Trust me. Visions obtained in spiritual ceremony are driving AI science just as LSD drove the creation of the internet itself.

01:44:59 Speaker_03
So before we undertake a societal purge of all things pseudo, of all things we deem at this extremely limited, finite point in time to be quackery, let's remember what Arthur Conan Doyle, that rationalist-spiritist, said.

01:45:16 Speaker_03
He said, the quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. And he said, the charlatan is always the pioneer. And this gets to something interesting about the critical discourse around spiritual charlatanism.

01:45:32 Speaker_03
Of course we want abusive gurus to be exposed. Of course we want those on the fringe who are fleecing and harming people to face consequences.

01:45:41 Speaker_03
But it's also good to remember the role that the fringe plays, that movements that specifically ruffle our feathers play in culture. Having people on the fringe is important.

01:45:55 Speaker_03
For the fringe is the mangrove swamp of culture, where ideas percolate and new life generates. Where fresh and salt water mix and the resultant soup is a womb space for cultural transformation. There's a goddess that rules these spaces. Have you heard?

01:46:15 Speaker_03
Rules the mangrove swamp of culture. She does not conform to narratives of everything neat and tidy in its safe little boxes. She's the ocean itself that washes away all boundaries. She won't let science stay science or intuition stay intuition.

01:46:36 Speaker_03
Her song is a song of permeability and transportation, of new cultural possibilities emerging from unintentional womb spaces.

01:46:48 Speaker_03
She challenges us directly to let all things in culture flow, to let them be, even the things that we sometimes disagree with.

01:47:02 Speaker_03
Imagine a world so bound up in its categorical boxes that it could not imagine how the very perception of reality exists on a spectrum.

01:47:14 Speaker_03
Scientific studies show that 15 to 20 percent of the modern population are what they term HSPs, or highly sensitive people. They literally perceive differently. They gain insights differently.

01:47:30 Speaker_03
And the study says having a population of HSPs that remains just about at that percentile is culturally advantageous. In other words, it's good to have a fringe that sees things differently than you.

01:47:47 Speaker_03
To expect that people who literally perceive reality differently are always going to see things the way that we want them to, or even vote the way that we want them to, is to be blind to how ecologies actually work.

01:48:01 Speaker_03
Blind to what ecological diversity actually is. Recognizing difference means recognizing actual difference.

01:48:10 Speaker_03
Diverse ecology is not just people of all races and creeds and orientations viewing things exactly the same way and all lining up for the same causes together. Diverse ecology is the dynamics of actual difference.

01:48:26 Speaker_03
And it used to be that the progressive movement was that which specifically held space for such difference. That used to be the heart of progressivism. Progressivism used to hold space for alternatives.

01:48:40 Speaker_03
Alternative viewpoints, alternative medicine, alternative ways of seeing the world. What is it now, I wonder? In my view, we have to hold space for difference, even if difference challenges us. Especially if difference challenges us.

01:48:58 Speaker_03
Because it's possible that even in those spaces in which things are seen so differently than we see them, something might be unlocked or realized or come to life or come to be that moves culture in a particular direction that holds benefit for future generations.

01:49:16 Speaker_03
That is the Iranian unpredictability of how culture change happens. It's never been the case that only rationalists or only scientists move culture forward. Nor will it be the case, nor should it be the case.

01:49:31 Speaker_03
The equations that govern culture are not simply equations of safety and predictability. We are called in an age of rupture to develop a facility, a comfort even, in the precarity of multiplicity.

01:49:45 Speaker_03
We have to learn what it is to be more comfortable with expressions that don't look like what we consider normal, safe, or rational. And if the counterpoint is, but those expressions are dangerous, I have some news for you. Life is dangerous.

01:50:01 Speaker_03
Art is dangerous. Science is dangerous. Technology is dangerous. Your phone is dangerous. Right now you have technology in your pocket that could bankrupt your family and steal years from your life and leave you an agitated, broken mess.

01:50:16 Speaker_03
That's dangerous. Like, we're somehow okay with people hearing voices beamed at them incessantly by corporate marketing departments, but start hearing voices direct from the river or the tree and that's problematic, right? All of it is dangerous.

01:50:33 Speaker_03
A person could live their whole lives thinking that money brings happiness. That is dangerous. Within this sociocultural cauldron, alternative futures are not going to come from simply trusting the status quo.

01:50:46 Speaker_03
As Walter Brueggemann said, quote, in our achieved satiation, we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. Alternative futures are going to come from the edges.

01:51:00 Speaker_03
from Cassandras roaming the outskirts of Troy, from marginalized farm girls with angelic visions in the garden, from artists who are not relegated to merely entertain us, nor limited by a list of approved causes, from unlikely Jeremiahs, unforeseen paths into the future will spring.

01:51:22 Speaker_03
So the short form is this. For the intuitives, for the seers, to fully grow into their potentiality, visions must live within an ecology. Time must be spent on the mountain.

01:51:37 Speaker_03
Time must be spent within the circle of accountability, within the council of elders. Visions must stand the test of how they live within communities and bodies. Visions serve society best when anchored in context.

01:51:54 Speaker_03
And that context can only come with time. Study over time. And society You must honor the seer. You must honor the seer because the seer bears gifts. Gifts that can seem weird or woo or other, but that can shake culture away from its stasis.

01:52:18 Speaker_03
The visionary has a healing role to play in culture if we let the visionaries do their work. The more the intuitive is pushed to the fringe, the more fringe their ideas become.

01:52:30 Speaker_03
but make a place for the visionary, and then culture has space to move, and to breathe, and to see.

01:52:39 Speaker_03
At this precarious juncture in the modern world, in which we can't seem to lift our heads beyond next quarter to actually plan for anything resembling a future, in which we staunchly refuse to learn from the lessons of the past because we fear and deplore that past and its mountains of bones, we need the seer more than ever.

01:53:02 Speaker_03
to realign us to the flow of time, the flow of history, to exercise the possessing entities of our relentless forward charge. We need, one friend said, a mass cultural exorcism.

01:53:17 Speaker_03
The ghosts that are piling up on our road to progress aren't symbols or individual psychological forces. They require actual material recognition. They require food and singing.

01:53:31 Speaker_03
They ask that we pause right when the whole world wants to rush forward in anxiousness. In a world of sleeplessness, they ask that we dream again, and dream of something other than ourselves.

01:53:44 Speaker_03
The more precarious these times become, the more Cassandras will emerge, shouting doom for Troy. The more Jeremiahs will be crying from the mountaintops, calling for a numb world to wake. Will we listen?

01:54:00 Speaker_03
Will we repair broken threads that reach back a thousand generations? Will we make room for revelation? Oh, but we have to make room for revelation. We have to make room for trembling on the mountaintop.

01:54:19 Speaker_03
We have to hold our arms outstretched in the rain, do we not, my friends?

01:54:24 Speaker_03
We have to make room for precarious visions that may not fall into categories of valid or invalid, mainstream or fringe, acceptable or unacceptable, rather than focusing all of our discourse on what does and does not constitute acceptable behavior during a time of global cultural collapse.

01:54:46 Speaker_03
We need to reconnect to this primal ache, this primal longing. Remember the seer that wishes that only the ache of nature, ache of longing, ache of the heart of the mother goddess might penetrate the numbness of history.

01:55:05 Speaker_03
Might release this numb, numb world, That this numbness might crack open at last, At last, at last, that we might feel, At last, that we might feel.

01:55:47 Speaker_03
Many thanks to Adam Aronovich from Healing from Healing for taking the time to have a discussion that informed much of this episode, and the full discussion is available to podcast patrons.

01:55:59 Speaker_03
Many thanks also to Sophie Strand, to Maria Stark and Pia for providing some incredible music for this episode, to my friend Char from Round Mountain, to Lorraine Couture for doing research on this episode,

01:56:13 Speaker_03
Kevin Carr added some Shabrett pipes for this episode. And you can find out more about Kevin's music at kevincarr.org, at C-A-R-R. In this episode, I quote a five-part lecture series by Lu Ming on spirit possession in the Chinese medical traditions.

01:56:31 Speaker_03
And you can find out more about the work of Lu Ming at dayuancircle.org. That's D-A-Y-U-A-N circle.org. Highly recommended. And, as always, this episode contains reference to many books, movies, articles, etc.

01:56:47 Speaker_03
These include the Tao Te Ching, the 2009 film Crude about Exxon's exploits in Ecuador, the article Shamanism and Spirit Possession in Chinese Modernity by Mayfair Yang, The Book of Charlatans by Jamal al-Jawbari, The Leather Funnel by Arthur Conan Doyle, Time Loops by Eric Wargo, Saint Hysteria by Christina Mazzoni,

01:57:11 Speaker_03
This episode contained a sample of Manton Morland's 1965 comedy album That Ain't My Finger. If you can spot that sample, then you are well-versed in your 90s musical lore. The 2023 film A Haunting in Venice, directed by Kenneth Branagh,

01:57:26 Speaker_03
How Shamans Were Persecuted in the Soviet Union, an article in Russia Beyond in March 2022 by Ekaterina Senelsikova.

01:57:34 Speaker_03
From Culture to Experience, Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press by Justine Buck-Kihata, writing for the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University. The book The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Colasso. The Poetry of Tom Hirons.

01:57:49 Speaker_03
Automatic Religion and Spirited Things, two books by Paul Johnson that I also referenced in the last episode. The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. The Bible. The performance piece Katmandu by yours truly. Don't bother trying to look it up.

01:58:03 Speaker_03
You won't find it. The Ice Pick Surgeon by Sam Kean. A Century On This Math Prodigy's Formulas Are Finally Unraveled, an article by Amir Asel in Discover Magazine.

01:58:15 Speaker_03
The Benzene Ring Dream Analysis, an article in the New York Times, August 16, 1988, by Malcolm Brown. The Music of Kid C. Ghosts. the song Doll Parts by Hole, and of course the HBO documentary series Love Has Won.

01:58:30 Speaker_03
Whatever you do, do not fail yourself by making the mother of the universe the worst quesadilla ever known.

01:58:36 Speaker_02
And besides, when I was doing my weekly descent into the primordial subconscious shamanic underworld the other day, I had this