Conspiritualists are compelling for numerous reasons: they’re charismatic; they claim to transcend polarized politics; they claim to speak the unspeakable in a quest for hidden truths. It makes sense that a key rhetorical instrument in their toolbox is poetry.
“The real virus is fear” is a unifying metaphor for conspiritualists, but there are others. In conspiritual-ese, the immune system is like the Christian soul: eternal, perfect, and solitary. Masks are signs of submission that symbolize the suppression of free speech and even slavery. Public health departments are bureaucracies of death. Vaccines are poisons designed to demand compliance. Vaccinators are Satanic agents compelled to enter the sacred space of the body — especially the child’s body — in order to possess it.
In this episode, Derek (cancer survivor), Matthew (pulmonary embolism survivor), and Julian (Lyme disease in remission) discuss the function of the beautiful and delusional metaphors of illness and transcendence in conspiritual-ese, applying the discoveries of Susan Sontag and Eula Biss. Maggie Levantovskaya, an Adjunct Lecturer at Santa Clara University, discusses her essay, “My Disease is Not a Metaphor.”
Show Notes
“My Disease is Not a Metaphor” — Maggie Levantovskaya
“Don’t Thank Me for My Sacrifice” — Maggie Levantovskaya
Resilience and Possibility Conversation with Zach Bush MD
Mary Baker Eddy: American Religious Leader
The Science of Mind — Ernest Holmes
“The Trouble With Medicine’s Metaphors” — Dhruv Khullar
Travis View on adrenochrome
Internalised Ableism: The Tyranny Within
Ableism and internalized ableism
“Will you Go with a War-Cry or a Whimper?” — Ben Ralston
On Immunity: An Inoculation — Eula Biss
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And last week we launched our Patreon effort and we've had a really good response.
So I just want to throw out there that the more time we spend on this podcast and we want to really make it a resource.
One thing we're finding out from people is that these conversations are happening on very individualized levels and we're trying to take all of this wonderful feedback from the community and really explore some of these topics in depth.
So if you're interested in helping us To create something here, you can check out patreon.com slash conspirituality and follow us on Facebook.
That's our main avenue of communication where there's very lively conversations going on every day.
So thank you very much for everyone who's just giving us ideas and just really giving us both constructive criticism and positive feedback, and we really appreciate those things.
Right, so episode five, our title this week is Disease as a Metaphor.
Now, conspiritualists are compelling for a bunch of different reasons.
They're charismatic, they claim to transcend polarized politics, they claim to speak the unspeakable in a quest for hidden truths.
So it makes sense that a key rhetorical instrument in their toolbox is poetry.
The real virus is fear is a unifying metaphor for conspiritualists, but there are others.
In conspiritualities, the immune system is like the Christian soul, eternal, perfect, and solitary.
Masks are signs of submission that symbolize the suppression of free speech and even slavery.
Public health departments are bureaucracies of death.
Vaccines are poisons designed to extract compliance.
And vaccinators are satanic agents compelled to enter the sacred space of the body, especially the child's body, in order to possess it.
Now in this episode, Derek, who's a cancer survivor, myself, Matthew, I'm a survivor of pulmonary embolism, and Julian, who has Lyme disease in remission, we're going to discuss the function of the beautiful and delusional metaphors of illness and transcendence in conspiratualities.
And we'll be applying the discoveries of Susan Sontag and Eula Biss.
Derek also interviews Maggie Levantoskaya, an adjunct lecturer at Santa Clara University, and they discuss her excellent essay, My Disease is Not a Metaphor.
But first up, Derek, what have you got for this week in conspirituality?
Well, we're going to take a trip to Bali because last weekend over 100 people piled into the House of Aum outside of Ubud in Bali.
This is a treehouse style yoga and meditation center that predominantly caters to tourists and expats that have congregated and settled into Bali's spiritual scene, which I've never been there, but it apparently is pretty thriving.
Now, the fact that this group was having a kirtan during the pandemic is bad enough.
It's mostly an open-air treehouse.
There is a ceiling, but there is a flow of air through it.
But more importantly, they were singing.
Over 100 of these people were doing a kirtan, which has been shown to spread the transmission of the coronavirus.
And normally I'd let a story like this pass by, but it was really the owner's response that gave me pause.
When he was confronted about the event, someone had seen photos on social media and then confronted him about it, the owner Wissam Barakeh, he claimed that the photos were from 2019.
And then more Instagram sharing went on from different people and finally he admitted that it was a recent event.
Now, once Bali's health ministry found out, they said that the House of Om violated coronavirus restrictions and Barakay, a Syrian resident, he had his temporary stay permit revoked.
The House of Om's Instagram page has since been taken down.
So apparently there's something going on there.
Now when I posted this article, a friend of mine who moved to Bali after living in LA for many years, he replied that this organization does a lot of charitable work and he felt that the article was one-sided.
And I replied, I said, my criticism is purely from the fact that the yoga studio lied in order to save their face.
Anytime a so-called organization calls itself spiritual, I would hope that they live up to the moral codes of their professed faith.
And in this case, being a yoga studio, there is the Yama known as Satya, which means virtue.
And the definition is that you're truthful in your thought, speech, and action, none of which were on display in this situation.
Now, near the end, there was criticism by Balinese social activists saying the influx of predominantly white tourists that have rooted in the island, they do not have any connection to the native people.
Now, as I said, I've had many friends attend yoga festivals there, and honestly, I generally tune out any language of any place being magical.
But one thing you're seeing in this situation is colonialism never really ended.
We're just doing it differently these days.
And I'm sure there are great people there who want to live somewhere beautiful in a community they vibe with.
I get that.
That's totally fine.
But according to local reporting, the number of COVID infections is on the rise in Bali, as it is in many places.
And Indonesians account for 99% of the cases.
And they've taken the major economic hit during the pandemic.
One thing I've been told, and this is an exclusive to Bali, is how cheap it is to live and visit there.
And it always amazes me because it's never cheap for the people who are actually from these places.
For example, I've been to Morocco four times, and I've traveled through a lot of the country, and the disparities, even within the medinas, the walled cities, one building will basically be a tenement whose residents want to get out to get to other parts of the city, But the very next building is a Riyadh that's owned by a foreigner, and it costs $500 a night to stay there.
And, you know, in New York City, you see these disparities, but in Morocco, it's just so much more in your face.
So again, I don't know what the experience of being in Bali is like.
The island was occupied by the Portuguese for almost four centuries, and its post-colonial history since 1945 hasn't been pretty.
Bali is the only Hindu-majority province in a Muslim nation, so there's been a lot of problems with terrorism, and there will continue to be.
Now, tourism is the main economic driver of the country, agriculture is second, and it's not exclusively a white endeavor.
China, Japan, and India provide the top three number of tourists.
But there is something off when a spiritual community makes claims that it cannot back up.
If you want to help indigenous people, it's probably best to put their health at the top of the list and let go of your own personal connection with spirit.
Wow.
What a story.
What a story.
It reminds me of being in India.
A growing discomfort I experienced even as a sort of a 23-year-old with spiritual tourism and the kind of, the de facto segregation between the tourists and the local people and the idealization of some projection of the local culture by the spiritual tourists is wild.
Yeah, well, in a somewhat unrelated but nonetheless overlapping way, my thing that I noticed this week is that every now and again Depending on what's going on in the world, there's a message that goes around social media, and I'm sympathetic to it, but I think it's problematic in some ways.
And this message is that if you're a true yogi, there's something about the practice of yoga that leads one almost inevitably to have social justice values and to become a social justice activist, right?
And I get it, and I support social justice, and I love yoga.
But a couple things jumped out at me this week.
One was that it was Juneteenth on Friday.
Right?
And most people know Juneteenth is the commemoration or the anniversary of the day in 1865 of the emancipation of the American slaves.
A couple days later, we had the International Day of Yoga.
And the International Day of Yoga is an event that's been happening every year for the last five years, inspired primarily by India's current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
And these two things happening so close to one another, combined with this appeal to what a true yogi is from a lot of my liberal and progressive friends, made me reflect on something really ironic, which is that India has the shameful distinction of being the country with the most slaves in the world today.
So depending on, based on the Global Slavery, coming from the Global Slavery Index's numbers and research, Depending on whether or not you include child brides, forced child labor, and sex trafficking, the numbers vary between 8 and 18 million.
So a lot of slaves in India, a lot of people living in absolutely abject conditions.
The other thing that stood out to me is that if you dig a little deeper, the International Day of Yoga is kind of an attempt at creating a global cultural display, which for Modi, is an expression of religious supremacy.
For anyone who doesn't know, the Modi government in India propagates Hindu nationalism, which is essentially this idea of taking pride in an Indian nationalistic identity that is defined as being Hindu, and that practicing yoga is associated with this Very strong nationalistic pride that has a religious component to it.
So much so that the 172 million minority Muslims in India are suffering terribly right now under this regime.
They're attacked by mobs.
They're lynched at times.
There's just terrible violence that happens against Muslims.
People are attacked for being involved at all in the meat industry because this runs contrary to some forms of Hindu fundamentalism.
And not only does the Modi administration tend to turn a blind eye to this kind of Islamophobia, directly from the government comes the message to the Muslims that it would have been better if in 1947 all of them had been sent to Pakistan when the partition had happened.
So there's a lot going on in India, which kind of leads one to wonder, If this idea that being a true yogi and practicing yoga inevitably leads to the discovery of internal universal truths that makes one an advocate of social justice.
And so for me, I'm filing my This Week in Conspiratuality under the heading, The World is Complicated.
And when we try to make pleasing, simple images by connecting the dots in a very complex world, sometimes we just get it wrong.
Right.
Thanks a lot, Julian.
I've got two things I hope you indulge me.
The first one fairly brief.
I was sent a video interview with Zach Bush produced by a wellness company called Panchamama.
Now back in episode two I covered how Dr. Bush in his now famous interview with anti-vax activist Del Bigtree takes the last 10 minutes of that interview to like catapult himself into a full-on non-duality sermon.
Now this flip Is, I argue, at the heart of conspirituality technique.
The tactic is when the validity of the science is exhausted, the speaker transports the exhausted viewer with a transcendent vision of a divine health paradigm in which disasters raise consciousness and terror is a gateway to love.
Now, I noted all of this without knowing anything of Bush's background, and typically I don't pay much attention to background when I'm thinking about public figures, but, you know, this video shows up, and lo and behold, in the Panchamama interview, he discloses a couple of things.
He was the firstborn child, as he says, into a Boulder-based evangelical home church that he describes as having violent recruitment methods.
He describes the ministers grabbing hippies in the street and throwing them up against the wall and threatening them that they've got to come to church, but they're also going to get a meal when they come.
And so that's how his father was picked up and he went on to become a senior minister there over 40 years.
Now, this is really interesting.
And I'm not bringing this up to suggest that biography is destiny or something like that.
But when Bush, like, speaks in the spirit, so to speak, that's not coming from nowhere.
It has cultural and familial roots.
And poignantly, he also tells the moving story of being parentified.
early on in his life and as a child having to hold space for his mother as she went through seizures and that when he was a boy he saw the seizures or in them this intersection of both chaos and divine blessing that I think the quote is that something could be terribly wrong but everything was also okay at the same time.
Now, I think I want to point out that seizures in some forms of evangelicalism are often associated with spiritual possession or clairvoyance.
But also I think maybe hiding in there is this connection that's often made in the whole natural health movement between seizures and chemical or vaccine poisoning.
So we'll put the link to that video in the show notes.
The second thing is I want to go back to Ben Ralston this week because he does something that I think is really notable.
He uses a kind of grammar I want to unfold a little bit.
I call it the second person intrusive omniscient.
We've got another article by him in the show notes.
Now Julian, you flagged Ben Ralston last week.
I remember him from a decade ago as a yoga writer on Elephant Journal back when EJ was the only Like non-glossy yoga medium platform around and like they would give you your own login and you could just post stuff and it would you know Somehow get promoted or whatever.
So there's a lot of people doing that back then now he's still writing there and Julian you you covered his screed about the Floyd protests being this big psyop now that text was actually so bad that Elephant Journal founder and Shambhala Dharma brat Waylon Lewis Had to step in and add corrections.
So like, you know, there's something wrong when Waylon has to give you a reality check Anyway, Ralston, I believe is living in Croatia He says he was trained in the Shivananda yoga organization, which by the way has just been exposed for decades of institutional abuse He says he's a therapist, doesn't show any credential for that, and he's got a sizable following on Facebook, like 9,000 people, and he runs an online sangha that he says meets three to four times per week.
So, this week he's back with another blockbuster sermon on Elephant Journal, which is mainly an invite to these online groups.
And I'm not bringing this up because I think 9,000 followers on Facebook is significant, I mean, on the other hand, you know, a person can cause a lot of harm in small groups.
I also don't, but I also don't think that his, the essay itself is worth picking apart because it's just like, it's bananas.
So I'll just, we'll put it into the show notes.
I want to highlight the fact that he uses a kind of grammar that is common in charismatic rhetoric.
And I think it's becoming standard in conspirituality rhetoric as well.
Back in episode one, when we covered Eisenstein's The Coronation, I pointed out that the grammar of the whole thing was rooted in the first-person plural omniscient, whereby the writer creates this impression that they're writing on behalf of everyone in the universe.
This is not a good choice for a white male writer.
Now, Ralston uses an even more delusional grammar, the second-person intrusive omniscient.
So here's a sample.
I'll try to read it straight.
The empire is falling, sand runs through my fingers, the ages have turned, and here we stand, all of us together, on the edge of this precipice.
How will you go?
Will you jump, or do you want weight to be pushed?
Will you go with a war cry, or a whimper?
Will you carry the regret of ignorance onwards with you, or the joyful abandon of your true innocence?
These are serious questions.
These are contemplations that most people cannot fathom.
But this is not for the masses.
This is not for those that never took the time to try to think for themselves.
This is not for those that chose to turn their backs on the calling.
This is for the few who are chosen and not the many who were called.
This is for you and I, my love.
This is for you and I, magical creatures in a magical world who have taken the time to remember ourselves in our truth, in our beauty, and in our power.
All right, so, if you want to pause there and take a break, listeners, feel free.
Take, you know, I don't know, take a shower or something.
But, like, this is the second person intrusive omniscient, like, in its full glory.
This is a text that's basically breathing down your neck.
It's super, super intrusive.
It assumes who the reader is, what they need, and it has this, like, hunting quality.
And it also tries to merge with the reader in the end.
Like, this is for you and I, my love.
And I'm bringing it up because it's super common.
Dr. Bush uses it in that sermon that I've referred to.
Christiane Northrup uses it in her Facebook videos every single day.
This diction is everywhere.
And it's kind of like a forced intimacy and an urgency.
And I think it's really key to understanding some of the emotional I think also, I love how deeply you dive into the different tenses and how the language is used.
I remember, in a positive note, I've taught at the Yoga Sanctuary in Toronto four times.
This was a while ago, but I remember the first time I became friends with Cynthia, the owner, and she said to me after, if you were to cue Lift your right leg instead of lift the right leg.
It would change the relationship to students, and I started doing it ever since.
And it was just, that was a very positive usage of it, but it's really important to point out that little changes in grammar and how you approach things make a big, much different imprint in people's consciousness as they read or hear text like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it gets right under the skin.
This week's topic is disease as a metaphor.
And I was thinking about when I started my yoga practice over 20 years ago, the very first institution was Jiva Mukti when it was in the Lower East Side.
And I remember there was this languaging, and Matthew and I have talked about this, because from what I understand, it comes from Michael Roche.
And it was this idea that if you cannot backbend, your heart isn't open enough.
Now, I suffered a lot of injuries when I was a child, broken many bones in my body, spent a lot of time in hospitals.
And hearing that language in this context really affected me at first, because I thought that there was something wrong with me.
For not being able to backbend better.
Fortunately, having had so many injuries and being in the hospital so much, I kind of got over that quickly, but I can understand that if you're in a spiritual community, how that would impact you in a negative way, especially if you're trying to advance your practice.
And as a cancer survivor, I have to say when I went through it, most people were overwhelmingly positive and helpful, but there's still those people who say things and you're like, if you don't know any better, it can seem a little bit off and it's very easy to spiral from there.
And so really this episode, what we'll be talking about is this idea, but also specifically, and I'll wrap this up at the end in my little monologue, about how this language is affecting us right now during the pandemic and how this idea as about how this language is affecting us right now during the pandemic and how this idea as the term that we've been using, sovereignty or self-sovereignty, and the immune system shaming that's going on is really, really
and the immune system shaming that's going on is really, really unfortunate, especially coming from people who you would hope would know better.
And so I'll let Julian take it from here and explore this topic a little more deeply.
Yeah.
Wow, I'm sorry that you went through that.
I certainly experienced versions of that myself in dealing with Lyme disease.
I'm actually just really grateful that by the time I got Lyme disease, I was already through with my youthful rejection of medical science, such that I did get appropriate medical treatment and did go into remission and I'm healthier than I've ever been.
That was 15 years ago.
But if I'd gotten it five years previous, I would have refused, you know, All of it.
And I wouldn't have been on antibiotics, which is what you need with Lyme disease, it appears.
Today, I'm going to talk about Mary Baker Eddy.
And a lot of people may not know about Mary Baker Eddy, but she is an absolutely seminal figure in terms of the creation of what becomes New Age, or what was called earlier, New Thought spirituality.
And before I do, I just want to say that in the episodes so far, to our listeners, I want to say, I may have created the impression That I think that having New Age beliefs inevitably leads to buying into conspiracy theories.
And I want to be really clear that I'm not saying that.
What I am saying is that there's enough overlap between the underlying ways of looking at the world that people who have New Age beliefs have this vulnerability to conspiracy theories some of the time.
Of course, there are other factors.
And I have a feeling, Matthew, you and I are going to start to have some interesting exchanges about this, about how we sort of unpack these things and I understand these relationships.
So that said, because I know some of our listeners probably are thinking, well, I have these beliefs, but I'm having a real problem with all this conspiracy bullshit, right?
So just to name that, let's talk about Mary Baker Eddy.
She was born in New Hampshire in 1821.
Her biographers say that growing up, she had a history of frequent illness.
She was a sickly child.
Some of that had to do with her relationship with her father.
Her father was a very disciplinary and fire-and-brimstone religious Protestant man, and they butted heads all the time, so much so that she would sometimes fall on the ground and have what were called emotional fits.
Maybe we can interpret those as seizures.
That's an interesting tie-in back to what you were talking about a little bit ago, Matthew.
And as part of that, she had a lot of issues with digestion and developed an eating disorder.
So tough, tough growing up experience.
Her illness and suffering as a child led her to say, from childhood, I have had a hunger for immaterial divine beings, for something higher and better than matter, something apart from it.
So a more perfect description of mind-body dualism and seeking disembodied experience as a result of suffering, you'd be hard pressed to find, right?
But it's not until 1866, At 45 years old, that Mary Baker Elliott is out walking and she slips on some ice and appears to injure her spine.
For three days, she is bedridden and in incredible pain.
But after three days, she reads a passage in the Bible.
She's quite religious.
And in the Bible, she reads about Jesus healing a man who had palsy.
And this is her revelation.
This is her moment of revelation.
So Mary Baker Eddy goes on to found Christian Science, or what is officially called the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which in and of itself is a fascinating concept, right?
was in better health than I had ever before enjoyed.
So Mary Baker Eddy goes on to found Christian science, or what is officially called the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which in and of itself is a fascinating concept, right?
But she's referred to by her roughly 400,000 followers around the world as having discovered Christian science.
And this goes back a little bit to the sort of ontological claims about a true yogi discovers these inner truths which inevitably lead to these political beliefs, right?
She's talked about as having discovered the truths of Christian science.
Now, 400,000 members worldwide is not a big church, especially given that the church has been around now for, what is it, 150 years or something.
But she does have one most significant text, which is called Science and Health, that has sold 9 million copies since it was published.
Wow.
Here's a little bit about the core teachings.
So, central to Christian science is the idea that illness can be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and, check this out, an explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene, and medicine.
Based on the observation that Jesus himself did not use any of these methods for healing.
Okay?
So, as her life goes on, for a period there, Mary Baker Eddy is associated with spiritualism, seances, the kind of occult fascination that went on on the East Coast in the middle and late 1800s.
On occasion, she claimed to channel the recently deceased Abraham Lincoln.
But over time, she came to denounce spiritualism.
And her central difference with what was called spiritualism at the time, which is kind of theosophy in a way, historically, all those historical roots I think are really interesting.
But her main difference is that she believed spirit manifestations, which is what we are, spirit manifestations never really had bodies in the first place, because matter is unreal.
And all that really exists is spirit before and after death.
As an aside, she also believed in malicious animal magnetism, or that people can enact mental assassination of other people.
And sadly, in her later years, she was paranoid that she believed 50,000 people were trying to kill her by projecting evil thoughts in her direction.
Some of the main ideas.
Sickness can be healed by prayer.
The material world and body and illness are an illusion that is cured by revelation of and right thinking about God and the spiritual nature of reality.
These ideas are all really huge in New Age philosophy or beliefs, but they're often not cited.
People don't realize they have kind of a Christian origin, even though it's a pretty unique version of Christianity.
Christian scientists believe that disease is a mental error rather than a physical disorder, that the sick should be treated not by medicine, but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.
Wow.
Some Christian scientists will refuse medicine when they are sick, believing that to do so, to accept it, would indicate a lack of faith.
And some have, quite famously, done this on behalf of their sick children, resulting in their children dying.
Now, in the last 20, 30 years or so, that has been less of an occurrence because the Church realizes this is really terrible PR when children die because of religious beliefs.
So here's what's interesting.
A later Derivation of Christian science is called science of mind.
And this is created by someone named Ernest Holmes, who is active from around the 1920s onwards.
He takes these ideas from Mary Baker Eddy and other influences like New England transcendentalism.
So we're talking here about Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, who I bet we're all quite passionate about.
He remixes all of this together into an idea of God as a universal presence already operating through universal laws.
In our consciousness, the hugely popular New Age law of attraction, right?
Which is how you use the power of your mind to call out to set intentions and put them out into the universe and then you get exactly what you want as a result.
This, that was taught in the bestselling book and DVD, The Secret, comes directly from Ernest Holmes and his science of mind.
You know, of course, through some, some, there's a lineage there of different people adding their spin.
Also, The key to science of mind is the idea that taking personal responsibility for everything in your life is important, right?
You have created your reality.
You have manifested what is happening as the way that we hear it nowadays.
Take responsibility.
Here's some of that overlap with the libertarian, don't tread on me, don't force me to wear a mask kind of thing, right?
The belief is that people can lead more fulfilling lives through forms of affirmative prayer, In which one states the desired outcome as if it has already happened.
Yeah?
And so lastly, one of these core affirmative statements in Science of Mind is this part of like a creed that people will recite.
We believe in healing the sick through the power of mind.
And mind is capitalized as sort of like the divine, omnipresent mind.
Now wouldn't you know it, Reverend Michael Beckwith, who we talked about a little bit last time, is an ordained Science of Mind minister.
Rev.
Michael Beckwith, who started the Agape Church in Santa Monica, that's hugely influential in the yoga community.
Rev.
Michael Beckwith, who was in the movie The Secret, that is, I think, one of the best-selling DVDs of all time.
And Rev.
Michael Beckwith, who was involved in another project that is nowhere near as well-known, for reasons that will become obvious when I tell you the title.
The title is, thank God, I was raped.
What?
Yes.
And this again goes to Julian's whole theory that beliefs actually matter and have weird outcomes if the beliefs are crazy.
So in this project, Reverend Michael Beckwith and some colleagues invited people to submit their written stories of their most horrific traumas to demonstrate how those traumas led them to spiritual awakening and so ultimately they're grateful for these horrific traumas.
And that project was scrapped because it turned out to be exposed as a scam, because they were planning to publish 18 or 20 volumes of these stories, and that to be included in the book, you had to pay a fee.
Oh, right.
Yeah, right?
Submit your story, pay a fee, and it was a significant fee, and we'll include you in this in this huge Collection of things.
So, you know, a lot of people may like Reverend Michael Beckwith.
I apologize if you feel like I'm speaking out of turn, but I notice these sorts of things and I'm not cool with them.
And wouldn't you know it, Matthew, Zach Bush, MD, grew up in Unity Church of Boulder, which is also an offshoot of Christian Science with an almost identical creed and affirmative prayer techniques and beliefs around healing sickness.
So I pulled some quotes out of the Bush interview you were looking at this week.
He says, if you're frustrated, By your health, or your aging, or whatever it is you're facing right now, it is because you've been handed a very small belief system and a very small toolbox for how to build a better body for tomorrow.
So we have this really wonderful moment of cooperation and co-creation as philosophers, as scientists, as human beings, as beings of light.
What are we going to create together?
COVID is not really a biological event on the planet.
It's a ripple on the planet of something that happens every week, every year.
We have this extraordinary opportunity to realize the singularity moment in which quantum physics, human biology, and our understanding of consciousness, which is a vibration on water and its interaction with the biological world of DNA, the DNA acting as an antenna by the way, the reason you know who you are because you have a completely unique energy about you, this is all demanding that the sciences open themselves up to spirituality.
And this, by the way, is one another one of those sort of visionary poetic riffs that he goes on specifically when the interviewer asks him, what is some of this?
What is some of the evidence for these claims you're making about how all of medicine is going to change based on, you know, various kinds of spiritual realizations that somehow are connected to quantum physics?
He goes into this riff.
So I just found this fascinating to this history.
And so in conclusion, It is Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science that we have to thank to a significant extent for COVID denialism in the current new age and yoga communities.
That's a great review.
One fact check thing that I want to just clarify is Zach Bush, I think, describes himself as growing up in a home church, but it's Del Bigtree whose father is the pastor at Unity Church in Boulder.
Have I got that right?
I may have transposed the two somehow, yeah.
Right, I mean, obviously Bush and Big Tree are collaborating through that blockbuster interview, but yeah, what an amazing thread of themes.
I have a question, a pressing question.
Do you understand how the contradiction at the heart of this is negotiated in, what's the main book, Science of Mind?
Science, uh, Mary Baker Eddy's book.
Yeah Let's see.
I think I believe it's called science and healing science and healing.
So this what's if if Illness is a mental error error that can be corrected by sort of rejuvenated perception or something like that.
Yeah isn't incarnation itself a mental error like it doesn't sound like The healed body is really something that, that would be the consolation prize.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not even, it's, it's, you, you, you heal the, like, why do they want to heal the body if, if they, if they're going to resolve to spirit anyway after death?
I'm not quite sure about that.
Do you understand?
Yeah, I totally understand.
I think that you may be asking for a level of coherence from something that is, that is incoherent.
But I think your question is absolutely logical and reasonable.
My understanding is that the idea is that all that exists, it's idealism in the philosophical sense, all that exists is spirit or mind, and everything else is a misperception.
Because spirit is perfect, our physical condition is perfect, even though it's also illusory, right?
How you make sense of that, I'm not sure.
Any kind of illness is really a mistake in perception that can be corrected through shifting your consciousness to see the perfection correctly.
Right, okay, so now I was not going to, I did not expect to disclose this on episode 5, but the second cult that I was recruited into was, well I think I said this in the first episode, but it was based around a charismatic teacher who taught out of A Course in Miracles, and all of this stuff is in there as well.
It's like almost verbatim, and what I want to say is that
The way in which the contradiction is resolved in a group circumstance that involves charismatic preaching is that the sick person in our group, or the person who is feeling depressed because maybe they were isolated from their family, or maybe they'd been emotionally abused by lieutenants in the group that morning, but the person who presented themselves for healing, for spiritual healing,
We're told this mixed message of you are not your body You are pure spirit and pure healing comes from being a pure spirit and not being a body anyway and but the pressure of that contradiction was actually Ratcheted up to the point at which the person would often have a kind of euphoric collapse and feel as though and feel as though
And sometimes there was this almost Kundalini jitterbug activity within the group sessions, but it's almost as if the contradiction in real time somatically had this impact that was going to give you a sense of
Transcendental realization for maybe a couple of hours if you were lucky but ten minutes would be enough and then you would be told by the group that oh That's when you were truly aligned or that's when your body was fully healed or it didn't really matter that your cancer came back the next day or what your oncologist said You experienced true healing and you know the illusory nature of the body now and it's but but I just want to just flag for the for our listeners that
Well, in real life situations where this stuff is applied with great intensity, it's the contradiction itself that provokes a kind of, I believe, a stress response, or it can anyway, that gives people the impression that they've been transported to another reality.
Well, that's why Kundalini Jitterbug is such a powerful pose.
Right, exactly, right.
I'm stealing that phrase, I love it.
Oh, okay, so I'm up.
Yeah, all right.
I read this week an incredible book called On Immunity, An Inoculation.
It's by an author that I wasn't familiar with before.
Her name is Eula Biss.
She's American.
Book was published in 2014.
There's a bunch of people who recommended this book to me, and so you know who you are.
Thank you so much.
This book is a gorgeous meditation on bodies, fear, interdependence, medicine as mystery, and ultimately, immunity or at least resilience as a collective rather than an individual project.
Now Biss's main materials are the metaphors of disease and doctoring and she encapsulates the poetic power of the vaccine in the public imagination really succinctly and I'm bringing this to the table because it's absolutely on point for our COVID era.
She writes, the natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination where a single needle penetrates both.
Which is just, like, fantastic.
Earlier, she goes into a little bit more detail, saying, if we source our understanding of the world from our own bodies, it seems inevitable that vaccination would become emblematic.
A needle breaks the skin, a site so profound that it causes some people to faint, and a foreign substance is injected directly into the flesh.
The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution.
Now, this shows how the external signs and internal meanings of vaccination have always threatened religious ideas about the body, and especially as medicine has displaced God, and this has gone way back to the beginning of vaccination.
Now at one point she quotes a cleric who likens the vaccination to fermentation inside the body that intoxicates and debases the soul.
She writes, throughout the 19th century vaccination left a wound that would scar, the mark of the beast some feared.
In an Anglican Archbishop's 1882 sermon, vaccination was akin to an injection of sin, an abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites.
These are all brewing metaphors.
That in afterlife may foam upon the spirit and develop hell within and overwhelm the soul.
It was the poison of adders, the blood, entrails, and excretions of rats, bats, toads, and sucking whelps that was imagined into vaccines of the 19th century.
Now, this was the kind of organic matter the filth believed responsible for most disease at the time.
It was also a plausible recipe for a witch's brew.
But then this points out that the witch-like substances are now medical mystery substances that are also environmental pollutants.
So there's been this seamless transition from one distrusted pharmacopoeia to another.
She writes, now our vaccines are, if all is well, sterile.
Some contain preservatives to prevent the growth of bacteria.
So now it is In the anti-vax activist Jenny McCarthy's words, the frickin mercury, the ether, the aluminum, the antifreeze that we fear in our vaccines.
Our witch's brew is chemical.
There is not actually any ether or antifreeze in vaccines, but these substances speak to anxieties about our industrial world.
They evoke the chemicals on which we now blame our bad health and the pollutants that now threaten our environment.
And I would say that that environmental connection feeds into the one world holism of conspirituality.
And that's what I, and it's part of what I think makes Bush, somebody like Bush, so compelling.
He seems to be speaking about the individual body and the world as one.
And a lot of people really love that.
But then the next metaphoric sort of area that this examines is super cool because it involves vampires.
She says, known to feed on the blood of babies, the vampires of the Victorian period became a ready metaphor for the vaccinators who inflicted wounds on infants.
Now as you listen to these quotes, you're going to hear some resonances that are very apropos of today.
You know, she also starts bringing up the sex and money themes that are involved in vampirism.
She writes, blood-sucking monsters of ancient folklore were hideous, but Victorian vampires could be seductive.
The macabre sexuality of the vampire dramatized the fear that there was something sexual in the act of vaccination, an anxiety that was only reinforced when sexually transmitted diseases were spread through arm-to-arm vaccination.
Victorian vampires, like Victorian doctors, were associated not just with corruption of the blood, but also with economic corruption.
Having virtually invented a paid profession and being almost exclusively available to the rich, doctors were suspect to the working class.
Is this sounding familiar?
How about Fauci and Gates tied together in this discourse, like with Jeffrey Epstein standing in the background?
How about the way in which conspiracism intersects with populism, even when some of its main influencers are clearly in the 1%?
Again, she writes, vampires sucked the blood out of the sleeping in ancient Greece, and they spread plague in medieval Europe.
But after the Industrial Revolution, novels began to feature a new kind of vampire, the well-dressed gentleman who would become an enduring emblem of capitalism.
All right, I'd say that we can't pass by here without noting that we can read in this a kind of prophecy of the most intense conflation of all of these terrors, and we find it in the QAnon fascination with something called adrenochrome.
Now, I'll put an explanatory link in the show notes, but I'll just say that adrenochrome is a real substance.
Like, apparently, according to my understanding, it's oxidized adrenaline.
And QAnoners believe that the elites, so mainly Jews in Hollywood, Jewish bankers, the Clinton family, are all adrenochrome addicts.
Now, I'd like to give a trigger warning now, because this feature of QAnon fantasy life is about child abuse.
It's common within this particular conspiracy set to believe that countless children have been stolen or born into captivity and are being held in underground bunkers.
Now, if it's in the subway tunnels of New York City, they're called the mole children, and they are trafficked, and specifically, they are sexually abused intentionally to increase their adrenaline production, which is then extracted by evil doctors to be mainlined by the elites.
The Clintons, the Gateses, everyone in that category are all believed within QAnon to be kept alive by the stolen fluids of abused children.
So it's this perfect horror story that expresses the endpoint logic of the conspiracy side of conspirituality.
This also points out the classism and populism at play in vaccine scares.
And these are absolutely resonant today as well, as conspiritualists express concerns about governmental coercion.
She writes that when smallpox broke out in New York City, this is in the 1920s or so, police officers were sent to help enforce the vaccination of Italian and Irish immigrants in the tenements.
And when smallpox arrived in Middlesbrough, Kentucky, everyone in the black section of town who resisted vaccination was vaccinated at gunpoint.
These campaigns did limit the spread of the disease, but all the risk of the vaccination, which at that time could lead to infection with tetanus and other diseases, was absorbed by the most vulnerable groups.
The poor were enlisted in the protection of the privileged, And debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.
The working class people who resisted Britain's 1853 provision for free mandatory vaccination were concerned, in part, with their own freedom.
Faced with fines, imprisonment, and the seizure of their property if they did not vaccinate their infants, they sometimes compared their predicament to slavery.
So it's incredible to see now how the demographic has flipped so that the loudest anti-vax voices are coming from places of historical and financial privilege.
People living in communities that have lower infection risks.
So finally, I'd just like to add, and this is totally not a criticism of this work, but One thing that isn't explored in it is the overlap between vaccine fears, vampirism, greedy bankers, and the ancient blood libel claim against Jews, used for centuries in Europe to fuel anti-Semitism and pogroms.
It was the paranoid fantasy that Jews stole Christian babies to drain them of blood for their satanic rituals.
And so when the anti-vax movements of today intersect with wider conspiracy theories, Jews are still in the crosshairs, especially in the form of George Soros.
So in the show notes, we'll post some work from QAnon researcher Travis View, who unpacks this blood libel connection really thoroughly.
So anyway, I can't recommend this book highly enough, not only for its research and wisdom and its beautiful writing, but also for the great care that this takes in unfolding the very real anxieties that inform our metaphors and confound this area of conspirituality.
One thing that came up for me when you were reading her excerpts is when you think about the way that Science writers explain science and the biological process.
It's always so empowering.
Good writers do.
She does.
I think of Siddhartha Mukherjee writing on cancer, V.S.
Ramachandran writing on neuroscience, Neil deGrasse Tyson when he talks about astrophysics.
There's this sense of you feel as if you're a part of something and then contrast that with So many of these figures we're talking about, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-COVID, and it's all fear-based.
It raises your levels of adrenaline and cortisol.
It doesn't make you feel a part of the process.
It makes you feel separate from, like you're being invaded.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Yeah, it's just because of that writing is so beautiful.
I'm definitely reading that book now, but the writing is so lucid and beautiful and really gives you a sense that my favorite quote has always been Alan Watts.
We were not born into this world.
We grew up out of it.
And when you look at science and even religion, and I will talk about this in my last part, but like when you look at it as we're part of this process of nature, not we were put here and we have to fight everything.
It just completely changes your mindset.
So with that in mind, we'll move to my interview with Maggie Levant-Vaskaya, which I asked her to pronounce her last name and I didn't record that part, so I apologize.
My Ukrainian is not very good at all, but she was awesome to talk to.
And when I was researching for this episode, I came across her essay, My Disease is Not a Metaphor.
She's an adjunct lecturer in the Department of English at Santa Clara University, and she also has been dealing with lupus for the past 10 years.
So, during our discussion, we talk a bit about how she feels when she sees these conspiracy theories, when people are saying, hey, this is your fault that your immune system is not good.
If you are healthier, I have immunosuppression problems that are genetic, and she is, with lupus, is one of the most endangered populations.
So we'll turn to my interview and then we'll talk about it after.
We're doing this episode on disease as a metaphor and inspired by Susan Sontag's work, Illness as a Metaphor.
And when I was researching it, I have my own personal feelings on the subject, but as I was researching it, I came across your wonderful essay, My Disease is Not a Metaphor.
So first off, Maggie, thank you for taking the time out to talk.
Thanks for having me.
And writing of Cancer, Susan Sontag notes, the Romanic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease.
Now, you were diagnosed with lupus a number of years ago, and I wonder, First off, how you felt when you were diagnosed and if at any point, especially in the early phase, that you felt that the diagnosis was partly your own fault.
So, you know, when I was first diagnosed, I think like a lot of people who get their first chronic illness diagnosis, and you know, I've actually had multiple.
I was just completely taken aback.
You know, it was just one of those moments when a kind of fear or phobia that you had comes true, right?
I think a lot of us live with the fear of getting an incurable disease, right?
So, you know, there was this sort of, oh, shit, this happened to me moment.
You know, I was afraid of it.
I didn't think it would actually happen to me, right?
It was just sort of this really vague fear that I think a lot of us live with.
So, you know, it was very strange, very confusing.
I had very poor communication with my doctor, who was a university professor as well.
I was at UC San Diego doing my PhD at the time.
So I was going to the hospital there.
So, yeah, there was just sort of a lot of confusion at the beginning.
And, you know, there were some moments when I kind of wondered, was it something that I did, you You know, I had been a very occasional social smoker, you know, was it cigarettes or something?
But for the most part, I didn't really think that it was my fault.
I didn't feel responsible for my diagnosis, not in a serious way.
I did, however, feel Very responsible for how I managed the disease and responded to it, right?
And, you know, there were times when I felt judged by others about, you know, the things that I was doing or was not doing in my attempts to manage this, you know, still largely mysterious and very, very variable disease.
You know, people can experience it pretty differently.
And, you know, there were moments when Well, not exactly moments, but periods of time when I would, you know, lose health coverage because my employment situation was unstable and I couldn't help but, you know, go into those dark places of thinking that, you know, I hadn't worked hard enough, I hadn't pushed through the obstacles to put myself in a situation where I could have You know, steady, reliable health care.
And I did sort of blame myself for it, even though I was aware of all the problems with our medical industrial complex, our health insurance companies, just the whole system of having affordable health care be dependent on your employment.
Right?
I knew how problematic it was to blame myself for all that stuff, but I still couldn't help it.
Right, that's a tough one.
We lost, my wife and I lost our health insurance because of this pandemic.
She's an events director.
And the fact that healthcare is tethered to your employment in this country is problematic because if things like this happen, you just, you're at a loss.
And fortunately, we both live in California, which has a pretty good public health system, but it's still taken a while for it to I'm not at the moment.
Are you still having any issues with healthcare in any capacity or has that worked itself out?
I'm not at the moment.
You know, I've had various healthcare issues related to COVID-19, just not being able to see my doctor in person, you know, not being able to go in and do my lab work.
Also, a medicine that I take, hydroxychloroquine, was a drug that was touted by Trump as, you know, this magic, you know, the silver bullet for COVID-19.
And so there was a shortage of this medication that I've taken every day of my life for the past 10 years to help manage my lupus.
So it was really stressful to, you know, first not be able to get a refill on my prescription and, you know, making all these phone calls.
to finally get this drug and then only get rations of it, right?
Because, you know, doctors were over-prescribing it for patients, you know, doctors who had never prescribed this drug before were writing prescriptions to themselves and their friends and, you know, hospitals were spending It's just come out that certain hospitals have spent like a million dollars on this drug and now it's just sitting there because it hasn't been proven to be effective for this particular disease.
Right.
And you have an inflammatory disease and stress helps create inflammation in your body.
So I actually thought about that when this was all going on because I have a couple of friends with lupus and I know at least some of the challenges from afar and I can't imagine being in that situation.
Now, in your essay, you write, I knew that the military metaphors and the mind-body dualism were harmful to me.
And there is this very, I mean, we can take the approach to COVID by our current administration, there's always this military metaphor.
But I wonder, when you came across these, what ways were these metaphors harmful to you personally?
Yeah, you know, and I tried to be careful in the essay by saying, to me.
Because I know that that language can be empowering for people, you know, and, you know, folks who are going through these very difficult situations of having to manage these rare diseases.
In a certain sense, I say whatever works for you to get through it, right?
This is more kind of my comment on, you know, the larger patterns of the way in which we talk about diseases and the relationships that doctors have to them and that patients have to them.
And, you know, maybe specifically in this case about diseases that currently are incurable, right?
You know, the phrase lupus warrior is actually used pretty commonly among lupus patients, but to be honest, I just never identified with it.
I just never felt like a warrior.
I felt like an ordinary, you know, individual just trying to go about my life, just trying to survive this thing, you know, and talk of, you know, Engaging in these battles against the disease, you know, seeing my immune system as an enemy, that did not seem productive for me.
That didn't seem like a good recipe for living with this new situation, right?
And there's actually an essay that I link to in my essay that I highly recommend to your listeners.
It's called The Trouble with Medicine's Metaphors and it was published in the Atlantic A bunch of years ago now.
I believe it was written by a doctor, so I highly recommend that people read it because it discusses, yeah, the sort of, you know, rhetorical power of framing disease as some sort of a military conflict that needs to be won by the patient, right?
In a certain sense, it sets those of us who deal with incurable diseases for failure.
Right?
Because currently there's no way that I can completely defeat this quote-unquote enemy.
Right, and that brings us really to the larger topic of this entire episode that we're doing, which is about the COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
The three of us who host this podcast all have decades of experience in what we call the wellness industry, but yoga instructors, I'm a health and science journalist, you know, Matthew has experiences in cult research, and there has been of a groundswell over the last decade, especially of wellness influencers.
And these are people who, you know, have some ideas about health, might not have any certifications or education in it, but become very popular for saying certain things.
And right now, there is a lot of conspiracy talk.
And one of the main topics has to do with immune systems and people saying, well, if your immune system was healthy in the first place, then you wouldn't be affected by COVID.
And And for people who have Genetic illnesses or diseases that they have, it has nothing to do, you could live the healthiest possible lifestyle and you will still have it.
I found that mindset that these people have taken just really, really dangerous and coming from a level of privilege that I don't think they even recognize.
And I'm wondering if you've come across to any such posts or talk of this nature and if you have, how you would respond to it?
You know, these voices might be extra loud right now, but I feel like I've been hearing them forever, you know?
And part of it might be also that I've spent such a huge chunk of my life living in California, where we do have so many, you know, wellness and woo-woo communities and
You know, it's almost hard to have a conversation with a lot of folks around here about your chronic illness without them giving you just, just overwhelming you with unsolicited advice about, you know, your diet, your exercise, you know, whatever the latest fad in that is.
And so, you know, throughout the years, I've just sort of learned to, you know, protect myself from those conversations in various ways.
And, you know, at times it's caused me to stop interacting with certain people, to be honest.
And as far as, you know, seeing that stuff online, I've blocked, unfollowed, you know, left all sorts of groups just because, yeah, I found them, you know, really stressful and frustrating.
And I think that it's really hard to engage in real dialogue online in general.
to convince people that, you know, some of the claims that they're making are nonsensical or not evidence-based, you know.
So to be honest, I've just sort of focused my energy on amplifying the voices of immunocompromised and disabled folks who have been sharing their experiences of dealing with COVID-19.
And, you know, I've tried to sort of immerse myself in that community and to also read as much as I can in disability studies scholarship to have more of a systemic analysis of things like disease, of things like disability in our culture.
And that helps me understand Whatever is happening, you know, including COVID-19, from a much more structural perspective, right?
And so, you know, all this talk of diet, for example, for, you know, as a kind of individual solution, I mean, that might work for some people.
But I'm not particularly interested in that, you know, it's something that I've experimented with and it hasn't worked for me.
But the kind of more interesting question for me is what sorts of, you know, local, state and national changes can we make in order to support people?
Better who become sick or who become disabled or who were, you know, born sick and disabled and who need care but are currently not getting it for, you know, various reasons that have to do with how our social world is currently structured.
So just kind of thinking in those directions makes it pretty easy to ignore The baseless chatter that's out there and has always been out there, right?
But it's maybe especially annoying and dangerous right now.
Yeah, I mean, I grew up on the East Coast in New Jersey.
I lived in New York for a long time, but I've been out here nine years and I knew about the culture here.
And fortunately, there's a lot of transplants from all over here, so you can find some pretty good discourse.
But for the most part, there's a lot of that woo out here.
But one thing that I was thinking about when you were talking was there has been this whole also rush of Activists, especially in Orange County.
And these are people who, I would argue, have a certain level of privilege.
And this is probably the first time in their entire lives that they've ever been told not to do something, go outside, or to do something, which is wearing masks.
And they're rebelling against it.
Some of the sheriffs have said, we're not going to follow nuisance.
All this is going on.
And I wonder, as a writer and educator, if you've written anything on this coming from someone who's immunocompromised, You are someone who is susceptible to the ravages of this, if you were to get it.
And I know in San Diego, for example, that the hotels never closed, that they've been open this entire time.
My wife works in hotels, or did, so that I know.
So I don't know how San Diego looks compared to either LA or OC, but I'm guessing there's some resistance there.
And I wonder if you've done anything in terms of speaking out or writing on this subject from the voice of someone who is susceptible.
I have, yeah.
There were a couple of essays that I've written on the topic.
One essay was about my struggle to get hydroxychloroquine.
And I, so that essay is called, it's actually on Medium, really easy to access.
It's called Don't Take Me for My Sacrifice.
And it's essentially just me sort of sharing my experience of learning about this shortage from a BuzzFeed article, right, and then just sort of dealing with this problem of getting this medicine that, you know, lupus patients and patients with rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions that
uh that um sorry respond to this drug right um the folks who take it have um have had a lot of trouble getting their hands on it um so i did want to bring that to light and actually tried to pitch that as an op-ed to a bunch of places but they just were not interested in it and i don't know if maybe it's just still too niche or what um and then there was also an essay that i wrote
As a response to my university's plans to reopen for partial in-person instruction in the fall, So, you know, as somebody who is immunocompromised, I'm very worried about this as a policy, right?
And there has been, you know, a lot of upheaval, a lot of debate at my university about whether or not to reopen, how to reopen, all of that stuff.
But, you know, I didn't hear A disability perspective on any of this, right?
So much of it seemed to be driven by the economic condition of the university.
I teach at a private institution and, you know, the fears of losing money from students choosing not to come there, you know, not wanting to pay the high tuition for remote instruction.
You know, students not being on campus also means that they don't pay room and board, right?
So my university has taken a big financial hit and I recognize that, right?
But I also believe that now is the time for it to really step up and lead and say, you know, we're going to look at how the most vulnerable Individuals in our community would be affected by all this, right?
And we're going to enact a policy that protects everybody, right?
So I wrote an op-ed that I published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, essentially making the case for not reopening for in-person instruction.
Because, you know, I teach at a university where a high percentage of the students live in the dorms.
Right?
We're not a commuter campus.
And so, you know, those living quarters, the dining spaces, the classrooms, even with social distancing, just seem like the perfect environments for spreading the virus.
Right?
And yeah, I mean, it worries me still.
So, you know, I'm just sort of waiting to see what happens in the fall.
Yeah, that's frightening.
I know John Oliver did a segment on prisons this past Sunday and how it spreads in that condition.
And dorm rooms, I mean, the dorm that I lived in when I was in school, which is at Rutgers, was actually designed by a prison architect.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, because when it was built in the 60s, they knew that a lot of minority students were going to go there.
And so they had a prison architect design it.
So that shows you sort of the mindset they were taking.
But, you know, being in that, I couldn't imagine being in those quarters right now.
You also write in your essay, embodiment to me is inseparable from lupus.
Since my disease has begun to express itself, I have seen it as an inextricable part of my identity.
And we talked a little bit about the warrior mentality, but I'm wondering if you have learned things about yourself through your disease and if you want to share any of those.
Definitely.
I mean, I think I learned countless things, right?
Just because your life changes so dramatically when you experience the symptoms.
That's already a change, right?
Because even if you don't get a diagnosis, and some people go years undiagnosed for various reasons, right?
Either because they don't have health insurance and can't see doctors or because, you know, their doctors just can't figure out what's wrong with them.
But yeah, so even just experiencing this, the symptoms already just made me feel so much more vulnerable to the world, right?
It's almost like that barrier Between you and the world.
That barrier, I guess, is supposed to be your body suddenly can't be trusted in a way, and you just, you feel very, very vulnerable, very exposed.
To different dangers.
So, you know, it made me more cautious in a lot of ways I mean it also a lot of the time made me appreciate my own resilience right of just Living with things like chronic pain living with uncertainty Right, and then of course, you know getting a diagnosis just gives you this lens through which you start to see your existence right it changes how You see your trajectory, right?
How long you're gonna live, you know, even if you don't know exactly, right?
It's something that, um, that starts to, you know, really kind of haunt you, right?
This question in a new way, you know, how long you're gonna live and how you're gonna live your life, right?
So these are sort of the big, I guess, existential things that I think happen to people Um, and, you know, some of what I guess I learned about myself was how much unlearning I had to do, how much internalized ableism I had, right?
You know, before I was diagnosed with This incurable illness, you know, I thought all kinds of things.
I thought, you know, well my life wouldn't be worth living if I was in pain, you know, five days out of the week or something.
Or my life wouldn't be worth living if, you know, I had this big rash over my face or something, you know.
And after I became sick and, you know, experienced all kinds of symptoms, I realized that no, my life is still very much worth living.
And in some ways it's actually more precious to me now.
In some ways I have another purpose in my life, right.
Or various different purposes, you know, survival, you know, raising awareness, um, you know, learning more.
Um, so, you know, it's, it's definitely a mixed bag, right?
There are all sorts of kind of scary and negative ways in which having a diagnosis impacts you, but there are also, you know, surprisingly fruitful and empowering ways, right.
Um, But it's a constant push and pull between those.
Yeah.
Part of the problem is, of course, you know, you're trying to live with a disease, with disabilities, in a world that is not built for that, right?
Our world is built for Able-bodied people, right?
And so you're, you're going to keep bumping up against that obstacle the whole time, right?
And, you know, that, so you learn stuff about yourself, but you also learn a lot about your world, right?
Whom it accommodates, to whom it's accessible.
And all that has been, you know, at times very illuminating and other times very depressing.
Yeah.
I mean, health is never just a personal thing.
It's always environmental, both in environment in terms of climate and all that, but also your immediate environment and the structures.
And I remember reading in the sixties how handicapped people had to fight for the right for ramps just to be able to access buildings.
And that's a social concern as well.
Um, last question, the word lupus comes from a wolf because in the 13th century, the, uh, the, the, they thought that, um, The rashes look like a wolf's bite and I know you write about this and you had talked about a tattoo so I was wondering if you ever got that tattoo.
I did end up getting it actually.
Yeah, I actually got it late last summer.
Yeah.
Um, you know, as, as a writer and, and an educator, I believe in the power of externalizing, you know, that that can be, you know, that can be useful.
It can be healing, you know, if imperfectly so.
And yeah, so I finally chose this as a gesture through which to externalize this.
And I ended up getting this tattoo of a wolf and it's a single line drawing.
So yeah, I mean, that had some symbolic meaning for me because I like the kind of sense of continuity of the single line drawing, but it's still just an outline, right?
So this, you know, this tattoo, although it is, you know, a kind of commemoration, it's very, it's incomplete, right?
It can't possibly capture the fullness of the experience of living with illness.
It's just a sketch.
It's just an outline.
Okay, I love that essay.
It was a great interview.
I really appreciate the care she takes in not coming out hard and dictating that the metaphors of autoimmune disease as being all about self-criticism and so on.
Are like illegal for her or that they're not gonna work for everyone or at all times and that that really points to this distinction that that I'll make later between What's public and what's private in these conversations around disease?
I had to laugh when she said I've been hearing that stuff forever in California and I know that you guys are both in in California and I'd like to know a little bit more about I'd like to know a little bit more about that.
Maybe we can do an episode entirely on California.
I loved her references to unsolicited advice.
There's so much there.
It feels like conspirituality itself is built on unsolicited advice.
Hey, there's something terrible happening to you and us.
And hey, here's the transformative answer.
But actually, unsolicited advice is the bedrock of wellness social exchanges.
And I mean, first of all, it's just rude, but there's a context for it.
We have an unregulated industry.
We have wellness brands turning consumers into advertisers for their tribes.
At the worst excesses of that, we have MLM companies swooping into yoga communities like vultures.
And then within all of that, especially in the US, we have people largely abandoned by a predatory medical system.
So of course, people are going to give each other advice, not just because they have bad manners, but because they're being encouraged to sell stuff to each other in the absence of good public health policy.
Also, I like hearing her speak about disability studies made me like, Google, just start looking into a whole world that I have been aware of a little bit, but I would love to learn more of.
It's got to be a major inquiry because it really brings the blatant ableism of conspirituality into striking focus.
Because every sermon about the holy immune system You know, and the mystical power of the body is so easily merged with an erasure of the fact of chronic disease and trauma conditions for which there really aren't, like, you know, universal solutions.
Also, the phrase internalized ableism just blew my mind.
It's something that I want to, you know, think about for a long time because I mean, people who grow up in wellness ideology really face a kind of betrayal that's hanging over their heads when you spend your life in ableist themes that tell you to equate health with, I don't know, handstands or whatever.
When you lose that mobility, who are you going to blame for your changing condition except yourself?
So I really wonder how many wellness professionals and consumers we have running around out there hating themselves because they chanted the handstand health mantra for 20 years and then they got sick because the spell didn't work.
Yeah, so I just loved it.
Great work, Derek.
Yeah, I was very happy.
She, again, you know, she didn't know us at all.
She listened to one episode and really enjoyed it and she agreed to come on and it was a solid interview.
Yeah, it's a great interview and a wonderful piece of writing.
The stuff that you're referring to, Matthew, really jumps out at me as well.
The idea of internalized ableism, an idea that part of what happens When you get a diagnosis, when one gets a diagnosis or has some kind of injury, I think whether we're conscious of it or not, there's often something going on mentally that says, have I now crossed over into this other group of marginalized people where I won't get to have the privileges that I've had of someone who has been able-bodied and healthy?
And I know for myself, you know, You were riffing on sort of speculation about, you know, how is this possible and why does it happen, Matthew?
I think it's a grift.
And it's one that I've been part of, so I can speak about it.
You know, I had a mentor for a long time who was really into the relationship between Kunalini-type experiences and healing from various sorts of physical pain syndromes and doing cleanses.
And he had a machine that he would hook people up to that would measure the strength of their meridian lines, and he would prescribe different supplements that were incredibly expensive, where you would go and see him, and you'd end up walking away with a list of supplements to buy that was going to cost you five or six hundred dollars.
And this was the way to become fully healthy, fully energetically patent, right?
Filled with the spirit, so to speak.
And, you know, I bought into that for some time and I sold supplements like that and in my mind there was a connection between how you responded to certain forms of body work, what this meant about the health of your organs, how that health could be improved through various kinds of cleanses that were none of which had any science behind it but would make me money.
And at a certain point I just started to feel like, oh, this is not ethical and I can't support it anymore.
Right.
Wow.
That's a show.
You've got a lot of shows.
I would love to do a California show.
Can I just say one thing about this, about the public-private thing with regard to unsolicited advice?
Like, one of the things that the Conspiratuality discourse plays on super hard is this technique I think we're all familiar with in the yoga world around charismatic teachers who gain market share by either actively or passively confusing public and private life.
I always think about the example of John Friend who came up with the Anussara yoga brand and then that crashed and burned in about 2012, or he crashed and burned it.
The brand sounded old, but it wasn't, and it featured the universal principles of alignment, which he made up, but also sounds old.
But it sounds like he discovered them in a cave in India or something like that.
The honest marketing would have been, these are things that I like to do in my middle-aged body.
Do you want to get high and try them out with me?
But he gave it this universalism and this packaging that separated it from his personal experience when it was his actual personal experience.
And the whole wellness vibe is about commodifying private experience as universally applicable.
And then social media is like built for this and the top yoga liberties leverage it to the max.
I remember like this one extreme case of one yoga person live streaming hours of their life on Periscope every day back when Periscope was even a thing.
So there was practice, smoothie time, beach time, practice.
Beach meditation, herbal tea, there was like probably six hours of a day on Periscope.
And it's a world in which there's no privacy that remains unmonetized.
So, like Derek, I was thinking this week about your experience with cancer, Derek, which we'll hear about in the outro.
But when I think about it, and I think about your career in the wellness industry, It's like there's a lot of people who have survived diseases or who are in remission who have then gone on to sort of monetize their personal pathway through that experience.
Like that particular cancer could have been the gateway to a whole different career teaching meditation or whatever on the second chakra.
But, like, you're not built that way, but the industry could have pulled that out of you, and it could have encouraged you to commodify private meanings and interpretations.
So, like, it's baked into the culture that we've been in.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to say, is that we have this wellness influencer thing where private experience becomes a product.
And because it's a product, it seems to be, or it's presented as being universally applicable.
And these are just two different categories of behavior, right?
Like internal metaphors are meaningful and they can help us therapeutically for sure.
But, you know, I shouldn't be selling them to you.
Well, and also, I'm writing this book on psychedelic therapy, and it's half research journalism, but it's half memoir, and it's the first time I'm taking an extensive dive into memoir, which has always been difficult for me, but I also realized that I love reading good memoirs.
Like, Pablo and Neruda's memoirs are just mind-blowing.
And so I wanted to, I said, okay, you know, because there is something about touching into somebody's personal life.
I've, so many people have come to me over the years and said something.
I'm like, how do you know that?
And they're like, well, you said it on your YouTube class.
And I'm like, oh, because when I'm, you know, they're just little asides.
And I think what, when you were speaking about this is the difference between memoir and becoming a brand.
And that distinction is what has always irked me.
I've mentioned this, I think, on this podcast before, but I know more than one person who espouses a vegan lifestyle on social media, and they're not vegan, but they get paid by vegan companies to do that.
And so they cannot go out to restaurants, because there was that example last year of a woman who was caught, she was outed, and I know some of those people, and I'm like, how How do you, and you know, usually the response is, well, it's a tough industry.
We have to, you know, we have to make a living.
And I'm like, but is that really how you want to make a living?
Like it goes back to the house of home.
It's like, if you're going to practice this, then practice it.
But you can only practice it when it suits you because that's not a spiritual practice.
I heard a story about Jiva Mukti teachers in New York City who had taken a pledge to become vegans, but because they didn't want to do that and they couldn't maintain it after a while, they would go to a particular restaurant, but they would find a back booth and at every meal they would post somebody at Century in front of the restaurant
To like text people inside to warn if anybody from the community was coming down the street.
Uh, so, yeah.
That, I mean, you're talking, I mean, I, I know that community well and it's, it's, it's, at some point it might have been voluntary, but at some point when you went through the teacher training, it was not voluntary.
Right, right.
Like, there's signs in that, in that studio that if you wear leather inside, you can't come in and practice.
Right, right.
It's, it's, you know, there is, and I've had great experiences.
I have a lot of friends there, but yeah, you're, yeah.
Robin Carhart Harris is the head of the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.
In 2014, he published a paper in which he speculates that the psychedelic experience is akin to a primitive state of consciousness.
Psilocybin, for example, causes an elevated entropy in certain brain functions.
There's a collapse in communication between brain regions that normally cooperate, relationships that result in what we call consciousness.
The neuroscientist Dan Levitin explains it this way.
Consciousness is not a thing and it is not localizable in the brain.
It's simply the name we put to ideas and perceptions that enter the awareness of our central executive, a system of very limited capacity that can generally attend to a maximum of four or five things at a time.
Translation.
Our brains don't have a ton of processing power.
And that power, the power that it has achieved, is the result of a piecemeal process.
It's not due to some grand design.
We ourselves are a process billions of years in the making, and our perception, like every other animal, is designed to maximize our chances for survival.
A number of evolutionary forces conspired to help us to reach the top of the animal kingdom, and a big one was communication.
Not only did we learn how to hunt, we learned to tell stories about how to hunt.
And that is arguably one of the most important coordination technologies in history.
And at root, storytelling is a survival skill.
That's because all language is a metaphor for something else.
We give life to objects and ideas through words that point to but are never the thing in itself.
Language is a tool that helped all of those brain regions coordinate into this form of consciousness we experience today.
But as expansive as language is, there are limitations.
Our memory works by grouping similar objects and ideas into categories.
It's called chunking.
Comparison is how we can remember so much.
We compare this to this, and then we put it in that category, and then it stays.
It's an extremely valuable tool, but it has its downsides.
The stories are how we planned our hunts, it's how we built shelter, and it's how we planted food.
And at each step, we understood reality the best we could by the evidence that was at hand.
Over time, we dominated every other species, yet there were still forces we couldn't control because we didn't know how to name them.
We thought we did.
The names we chose for these forces were gods, and they were responsible for our sickness as well as our health.
Being diseased meant you weren't in alignment with the appropriate deity.
For a long time, there was no technology powerful enough to confirm the existence of microbes, so it was easy to have faith in invisible men that looked like us, but impossible to believe in viruses so small the naked eye couldn't detect them.
Even though today we do have technologies powerful enough, some people would still rather choose to believe in invisible men over visible pathogens.
That's one of the greatest challenges we face today is updating our language to represent our shared reality.
A vocabulary designed for tribes of 150 people does not work very well in a global village.
And a language that still attributes diseases to divine forces is equally outdated.
Even Hippocrates knew that.
Yet still this archaic way that we phrase our relationship to disease persists.
Now, every pandemic throughout history has resulted in a societal crisis.
Even though we've advanced so much in medicine, viruses are much, much older than us.
And they'll be around a lot longer than we will be.
And what we've been experiencing during this coronavirus, with wellness influencers victim-shaming people's immune systems and championing self-sovereignty without recognizing our complex relationship with viruses, is nothing new, it's certainly not revolutionary, and it's not leading us into the world we've been waiting for.
If anything, their boasting is a sign of regression, without the benefits of being in a psychedelic state.
When I found out I had cancer six years ago, I had enough awareness to understand it wasn't my fault.
When I was young, I had an undescended testicle.
What doctors didn't know in the 80s, but they do know now, is that when you have that condition, there's over a 90% chance you'll get testicular cancer later on in life.
Now back then, testicular cancer had an 85% survival rate, but by the time I got it, it was over 99%.
And that's how medicine works.
And I'm grateful that I only required one surgery and one round of chemotherapy to eliminate this cancer.
Not everyone is so lucky.
But there was nothing mystical about the process.
That doesn't mean I didn't learn about my resilience and mindset, but attributing disease to some inner flaw would have added layers of anxiety to my already stressful life, which would have in turn actually thwarted my immune response.
And this is what I wish these wellness devotees would realize.
Victim shaming people for their disease ultimately decreases their chance for recovery and survival.
And to what end?
To get a few more likes on your Instagram meme?
When I was going through cancer, I read Susan Sontag's wonderful essay, Illness as Metaphor.
And in it, she writes, our views about cancer and the metaphors we impose on it are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our shallow attitude toward death, for our anxieties about feeling, and for our reckless and provident responses to our real problems of growth.
For our inability to construct an advanced industrial society that properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasing violent course of history.
The cancer metaphor will be made obsolete, I would predict, long before the problems it has reflected so vividly will be resolved.
And that is true.
We treat cancer much differently now than in 1978.
But that mindset has shifted to COVID-19.
And it will shift again if we don't learn a new language.
And by that I mean a new mindset.
Disease will always be a metaphor because language is a metaphor.
But we can certainly do better with language than we're doing right now.
There are many of us out here with pre-existing conditions that has nothing to do with a personal failure.
And the more you use your platform as a soapbox showing off your sovereign immune system, the less you're actually doing for people as an influencer.
Think a moment about the foundations of a spiritual practice.
Grace, charity, and compassion.
These are universal across many different practices.
And when you think about those, consider finding a language to express those ideals, because that is the vocabulary we all need right now.
