Bonus: Yoga Teachers Are Not Doctors, Doctors Are Not Priests
Do famous people become famous for staying in their lane? Do some find fame by carving out a lane that never existed before? What is the disruptive promise of charisma in this wellness space, which draws consumers burdened by a double disillusionment? They arrive, disillusioned by conventional medicine and conventional religion. What can the charismatic influencer offer them, and how do they do it?In this last free bonus episode, Matthew explores the charismatic logic of wellness, in which yoga teachers can become famous by playing at being doctors, and doctors can become famous by playing at being priests. Starting with the strange tale of BKS Iyengar (and how he stretched his way into all three roles through sheer will), this journey will lay out how the basic schtick of the 20th-century the wellness personality has primed the ground for our current explosion in conspirituality.Matthew will look at how MDs like Tom Cowan, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, and Zach Bush all run the “Iyengar Arc” in reverse. Where the yoga master was unschooled in medicine, these doctors are unschooled in spirituality. But that doesn’t stop them from pretending to be experts in a weird cocktail that fails both. In their aspirations to spiritual leadership, they each screw the pooch. Cowan ends up shilling for Rudolf Steiner, who knew nothing about viruses, and even less about how not to be a racist. Brogan thinks that Kundalini Yoga is “thousands of years old” even though it was invented by a sociopath in the 1970s. Northrup seems to think that angel channelers are qualified to tell people how to live. And Zach Bush recounts a mystical experience to a group of retreatants in Italy, in which he became a sardine, and realized he wasn’t afraid to die—partly why he uses Reiki instead of pain medication when he’s on the hospice shift.Ultimately, the “charismatic collapse” between doctor and priest distorts medicine and makes spirituality banal. Perhaps if we see this clearly, we’ll look for better leaders.Show NotesIyengar’s Light on Yoga wikiFoucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses wikiBrogan’s Vital Life ProjectAnne Cushman interviews BKS Iyengar for Yoga Journal, 1997 About Siddha Yoga Tom Cowan’s disciplinary rap sheetCowan’s disinfo vidCBC debunks CowanDr. Wilson
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Matthew spent a ton of time on it.
I think you're really going to be impressed with what he's uncovered here.
1966 saw the publication of what is now the best-selling yoga book in the world.
Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar now has over 3 million copies in print.
I'll tell a story about Iyengar in a moment, because it's a good place to start if we're thinking about the charismatic logic of wellness, in which yoga teachers can become famous by playing at being doctors, but then doctors can become famous by playing at being priests.
Iyengar, bless his creative and conflicted soul, played all three roles.
1966 also saw the publication of Les mots et les choses, or Of Words and Things, by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault.
This rhapsodic interrogation of European modes of rational knowledge opens with the celebration of a passage from Argentine magic realist Jorge Luis Borges, who is describing a fantastical book.
The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which Borges purports to be translated from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, divides up the animal kingdom according to dreamlike categories.
A. Belonging to the Emperor.
B. Embalmed.
C. Tame.
D. Sucking Pigs.
E. Sirens.
F. Fabulous.
G. Stray Dogs.
H. Included in the present classification.
I. Frenzied.
J. Innumerable.
K. Drawn with a very fine camel hair brush.
L. Etc.
With M having just broken the water pitcher, N that from a long way off look like flies.
Quote, In the wonderment of this taxonomy, comments Foucault, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
So in this episode, I'm going to argue that the exotic charm of thinking that impossible thing, the thrill of feeling the limitation of one's system of thought break down, that this is a key driving force behind conspirituality in its attempt to re-enchant a rationalized, medicalized, compartmentalized, and thoroughly regulated world.
It's true that the figures we follow in this space monetize their content through internet-savvy and cultic techniques.
But they also do it by teasing and then breaking the taboos that govern content and separate disciplines.
And in the process, they harken back to a former age in which doctoring had to apply itself to both body and soul, or it wasn't doctoring at all.
So when holistic psychiatrist Dr. Kelly Brogan has the audacity to say that she rejects germ theory, she enters the world of magic realism.
When Dr. Zach Bush dares to imply that vaccine development is misguided or unnecessary, but then sells his magic prebiotic dirt, he enters the pre-enlightenment where every doctor is a nature wizard in disguise.
Along with Tom Cowan and Christiane Northrup, these doctors go full Borges when they make the collisions between disciplines and categories of content explicit.
Because in one sentence they'll be talking about their board certifications, or the inside baseball of the medical system, or the most recent research they read.
But in the next, they're suddenly talking about the dark night of the soul, starseeds, and death as a transition between planes of light.
Their success counts on followers being turned on by that jagged flip.
In online marketing, the term is disruption.
But I think the psychoanalytic flavor of transgression is more on the nose here.
Because the charismatic is always offering something forbidden.
It's no surprise when their cause is helped by being able to draw a kind of mass erotic transference.
Doctors Brogan and Bush go viral by blurring the lines between medicine and religion, but also by becoming love objects to legions of their fans who may never admit it.
Brogan presents as fashionably enlightened, and Bush flashes an organic Marlboro Man mystique.
The secret knowledge they carry, that the real virus is fear, or sickness is merely purification, or death is actually a new beginning, is mirrored by their followers' secret yearnings for closeness, for contact.
They are the beautiful wizards, and if they gaze on us, they can cure us of our doubt.
How lucky that for only $40 a month, you can join Brogan's online community.
And when the pandemic is over, you'll probably be able to go on retreat with the dreamy Dr. Bush.
Do famous people ever become famous by staying in their lane?
Right.
Or do some people find fame by carving out a lane that never existed before?
What is the disruptive promise of charisma in this wellness space that draws consumers who are burdened by a double disillusionment?
They're disillusioned by conventional medicine.
They're disillusioned by conventional spirituality.
What can the charismatic influencer offer them?
And how do they do it?
To explore these questions, I'm going to start with a story about the youth of BKS Iyengar, who would go on to become the world's leading evangelist of modern yoga.
I think his story tells us a lot about how the wellness and spirituality worlds prepare their populations for conspirituality.
After finishing my 50 years of practice, so that how yoga has to be practiced uninterruptedly, so that how yoga has to be practiced uninterruptedly, irrespective of time, place, and space.
At the age of 17, Iyengar was in precarious shape.
He was orphaned, dirt poor, just recovering from a childhood of chronic disease, and had been working as a house servant for his brother-in-law, the moody and violent Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, now widely known as the founder of what we call modern postural yoga.
After Krishnamacharya's main yoga demonstrator fled his beatings, Krishnamacharya deigned to give Iyengar three days of intense physical instruction, mainly in backbending, so that the young man could himself become a demonstrator of yoga.
By the way, let's put a pin in this for a future episode.
You can store it away that the leading world evangelist of yoga made his career as a yoga performer.
I mean, today we like to be snobby about yoga on Instagram to say, oh, that's just about style and clothes and showing off and circus tricks.
But for over a century, postural yoga has gone meme-ified through performance.
And it's grown through the power of a paradox that spirituality is something that can be physically demonstrated.
We might even say that yoga is the perfect religion for what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle.
After Iyengar's brief training, Krishnamacharya sent him to several towns north of Mysore to promote the kingdom-wide yoga program of his benefactor, the Maharaja of Wadiur.
It's unlikely that the teen would have had a clear idea of the politics involved in what his guru, decades later, would frankly name as propaganda for a nascent Indian and Hindu nationalism.
Iyengar was a hit amongst the housewives, but also he caught the eye of a certain Dr. V.B.
Gokula, who saw Iyengar perform his mostly improvised skills and was very impressed.
So this is 1936.
He was impressed by my performance, Iyengar told a Yoga Journal interviewer in 1997.
Though he saw I had no muscles at all, he asked, why your body is not developed?
I explained to him about my poverty, my diseases.
He said, I have not seen anything in my life as a surgeon like what I am seeing in that presentation.
A few months later, Gokala sent Krishnamacharya a request that the teenager be sent to Pune to work as a yoga instructor for the Deccan Gymkhana, which means South Indian Gymnastics Club, as well as the nearby engineering and industrial colleges.
The young Iyengar was to be paid 60 rupees, or $2 per month minus 70 cents for room and He had just enough money left over to maintain two cotton dhotis and one razor for shaving.
He had just enough facility with English to get by in the bustling metropolis, but no knowledge of Marathi, the language of Pune.
The Gymkhana was a hotbed of wrestling, bodybuilding, and nationalist organization.
It had been named by none other than Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the first leader of the Indian independence movement and an early advocate of Swaraj, or self-rule, a political philosophy of self-discipline and self-governance that found expression
In a robust physicalist culture that updated South Indian martial arts with European training techniques and apparati, Iyengar would maintain an arm's-length relationship with Hindu nationalist causes for the rest of his life.
Now for what it's worth, I thought about excluding this stuff, but I've left it in because I think it's important to remember that all physical culture is influenced, if not driven by, the political and economic forces that it usually hides.
So when we're thinking about why yoga people in 2020 come out in support of Trump's vision of nationalism and personal strength, this provides some context, if not relief, to realize that the image of yoga practice as a liberal or progressive hobby is actually a very thin veneer on top of something more historically solid, that yoga has been a tool to help build a national body politic.
It was a testing time of tears, failures, and anxieties, Iyengar later said about that time.
The college students often made fun of me as they were older and better educated.
But nonetheless, Dr. Gokula had Iyengar perform yoga for his fellow students and university dignitaries and they struck up a tag team relationship.
Quote, Gokula used to give talks and I used to give demonstrations, he told Yoga Journal.
Because I could not speak on yoga, and I was not knowing philosophy.
He said, the body is known to me, you leave it to me, I will explain very accurately, and you do the poses.
It was a really good combination.
I was really happy, and while he was explaining, I started getting the anatomical words, which helped me a great deal to develop my subject.
So let's just take a pause here, because here we have a boy whose only skill in the world, his only money ticket, is the performance of difficult and often painful yoga postures.
He never got to go to high school, he knows nothing about medicine, but he does have a fierce survivalist attitude in relation to his childhood struggles.
Now by a stroke of luck, he is on tour with a doctor who knows nothing about yoga, but is nonetheless convinced that yoga will be a curative in ways that the conventional medicine he was trained in falls short of.
So what we see here is the beginning of Iyengar preaching his gospel through unearned medical terms, and the doctor preaching his gospel through a very foggy and motivated lens on yoga.
Now it goes deeper.
Before long, Gokula was referring elite clients to Iyengar for improvised yoga cures.
In 1937, he asked the teenager to minister to an elderly scholar suffering from dysentery.
Iyengar told Yoga Journal, I said, he can't stand, he can't sit, what can I do?
And Dr. Gokula said, you are the servant of the Gymkhana, you have to take these people or face the consequences if you say no.
That was the treatment I was given.
Whoever comes, I have to give.
That was the first lesson I had in how to teach.
How to make him do yoga when he can't stand.
So I started teaching Trikonasana, lying down.
I had to lift his chest to the side.
I had to lift his chest like that, all my movements only, so that the intestines get a little movement.
Since he could not spread the legs, I used to stick his walking stick between the two legs to keep the legs from coming together.
So that's how I learned.
And I did one person after the other, just by instinct.
The stories that Iyengar tells are at once modern and new-worldy, but they also harken back to a more magical period.
One bit of cultural nostalgia here is that Iyengar learned medical language, or at least seemed to, in the same way that Brahmin boys in India have learned mantras for millennia, by hearing words he couldn't understand at first and then repeating them until they took on a life of their own.
This learning habit crystallized into the text that then became Light on Yoga, which became the best-selling yoga manual in history not only because of its encyclopedic richness, but also, arguably, because it blended the scientific language that made his English readers feel modern with religious incantations that made them feel like they could touch a mystery again.
By the 1980s, Iyengar was traveling the world giving literal medical yoga classes in which he would purport to treat people with heart conditions, infertility, and even cancer.
Stories of miraculous healings followed him wherever he went, but no systematic data has been gathered to verify any of the lore or to track who the guru's interventions didn't work for.
And here's something really weird.
Light on Yoga has gone through more than a dozen printings and its publisher still hasn't impressed the front leaves with a disclaimer that would inform readers that Iyengar's medical claims, which are littered over every page, aren't actually to be taken as medical claims.
Those blank pages are lasting testimony to the power of his charisma, which for his publishers continues to overpower modern conventions like citation and peer review with the certainty of Iyengar's ritual speech.
You can see here how the knuckles of my toes, the knee, the hip, the ankle, The waste, everything stretches in that freedom, doing its job independently, at the same time remaining in contact with the inner intellect.
But it's not just certainty, it's also formal structure.
The Vedas themselves, which date back anywhere from 1500 BCE to the dawn of humanity depending upon who you're talking to, are layered collections of aphorisms, hymns, stories, commentaries, ritual instructions, philosophical speculations, and lists of remedies grouped by theme.
One group focuses on mythic stories, another on liturgies for fire ceremonies, a third on how melodies hold knowledge, and the fourth is a collection of charms and spells.
In Appendix 2 of Light on Yoga, Iyengar assembles his own Vedic collection by grouping together Under the chapter heading, Curative Asanas for Various Diseases, the next series, it's a list of Sanskrit posture names that read like long threads of mantra under subtitles that mash together categories of focus and centuries of discourse.
The subtitles include acidity, ankles, arms and abdominal organs, brain, loss of memory, chest, chill, coronary thrombosis, deformity in legs, epilepsy, eyes, flatulence, giddiness, halitosis, hamstrings, hernia, impotency, kidneys, labor pain, nasal catarrh, polio, piles, pleurisy, ulcer, and dribbling urine.
There's this old saying that if it isn't described in the Veda, it doesn't exist.
And by design or by accident, Iyengar reaches for a similar effect in Light on Yoga through a combination of cultural memory and personal bombast.
And in the end, his famous book ends up concealing a Borkesian jumble of subjects within a format that looks very orderly and clinical.
It's this perfect blend of the irrational and the rational.
So what Iyengar did is that he captured a cultural moment, stretching the sinews of his English readers out of their scientific stiffness.
And this was part of Iyengar's magic.
He asked people to feel and think impossible things.
to simultaneously medicalize ancient spirituality while using it to break the spell of modern medicine.
In my other life, in the now pandemic collapsing yoga world, in the now pandemic collapsing yoga world, I freelance as a teacher trainer.
I use Iyengar's story to show how the role of the modern, globalizing yoga teacher is built on a melding of cultures and a confusion of categories, and then monetized by charismatics who learn how to appeal to rationalists who want mystery, but also spiritual types who want something solid to embody their virtue, not to mention something they can buy and work on in stages, like good posture.
And I suggest that it's a case study for the wellness world and its intersections of values and yearnings and how its lack of boundaries and definitions can be manipulated.
I also always bring up the case of one of Iyengar's more famous, but also apostate, students.
His name was John Friend, and he broke away from the old man to create his own brand called Anusara.
Like Iyengar, Friend had no medical training, and yet also like Iyengar, followers saw him as some kind of medical intuitive who could improvise expert physiotherapy on the spot, based largely on stuff that he just made up.
But in Friend's back pocket was another strong influence.
As a former member of the Siddha Yoga cult, founded by the sexual predator Swami Muktananda in upstate New York, Friend also had ultra-spiritual content in a kind of tantra flavor, and he used it to frame his physical culture.
What this allowed him to do, and Iyengar did this, and Patapi Joyce did this, and Bikram Chowdhury did this as well, was that they were able to constantly change the goalposts for their followers based on the feedback they got.
So if a friend fell down on his promises of physical healing, well at least he had also slathered you with spiritual inspiration.
And in the worst cases, I'm thinking about Iyengar and Joyce, the physical healing part actually injured people, which of course meant that injury in yoga became a sign of spiritual progress.
But on the other hand, if the spirituality rang hollow, Friend would say, well hey, or he could say, well hey, at least you got a top-notch workout.
So, this bait-and-switch spotlights the dirty secret at the heart of the yoga world.
It's a $40 billion industry that doesn't know what the fuck it is.
And this works to the advantage of the charismatic who is willing to twist and stretch it into whatever they want it to be.
Now, this long-term, very economically entrenched cultural patterning is part of what allows Dr. Brogan and Dr. Bush and others to waltz into this consumer base and to say, I'm a doctor, but actually I'm much more than that.
Or, I'm a priest and medicine is my sacrament.
And the consumers who are starved for any transgression in their banal neoliberal lives just lap it up like they're dying of thirst.
Now, to be fair, over the past decade or so, the yoga world has gotten better at realizing that it can no longer be the Iyengar show in which unevidenced medical claims are just the norm.
Yoga teachers, now struggling to distinguish themselves in a saturated gig economy, are upping the quest for cultural and scientific legitimacy, and so a whole research class of teachers are now coming up who know that charisma is not the pathway to ultimate value.
If yoga therapists, for instance, want their content to be paid for by insurers, they know they're going to have to bring their receipts.
So I was talking about this with a friend of the podcast, Theo Wildcroft, my good friend, who just published a gorgeous book partly on this stuff, which we'll link to, and she proposed this thought experiment.
She said, imagine that you're in, you know, a city you've never been to before, you're there for work or something like that, and you have some time off on a Tuesday morning and you really want to take in a yoga class, so you sort of, you know, Throw the dice and you choose a place and you show up at 10 o'clock and the teacher walks in and says, you know, today we're starting a really powerful series of postures that I'll teach over the next eight weeks.
And they're specifically designed for helping people with their mental health.
And this series is so powerful that if you're on any psychiatric medications right now, By week two, you may want to even start experimenting with withdrawing from them because these postures I'm telling you are really amazing.
And by week three, you may want to just try dropping the medications altogether because they'll start to interrupt the real progress that you're making.
Okay, so that's the opening pitch.
And the question that Theo asked is, okay, so in 2020, how many people walking into that class hear that pitch and then they walk right back out?
And we both agreed that it would be like a high percentage of people.
And it would also be contagious.
It's like if, you know, half the class just stood up and rolled up their mats that, you know, the other half would follow.
But let's just take it another step, which is, you've walked out of that class because obviously this person is nuts and totally irresponsible, and you, you know, you're in a You're in a major urban center, so you can just walk down the block and there's another yoga studio and it's only 11 o'clock, so you can still catch a class, thank goodness.
But you walk in and the teacher says, good morning class, today we're going to learn a very powerful set of vinyasas from the fifth book of the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali, which is a 5,000 year old tradition.
And it's very powerful for, you know, physiological benefits.
And the Yoga Sutras, by the way, is all about uniting your soul with God.
And so I really hope you enjoy this flowing class.
And she puts on some music and, you know, starts to do her thing.
Now, how many people in 2020 roll up their mats and leave?
and And we kind of guessed that only a few, you know, many in the class might feel uncomfortable and feel like this person is overselling something, but that most people would stick it out.
And, you know, when I run this thought experiment in training groups, most people will say, you know, I would stay to just check it out.
I mean, it sounds like this person is a wingnut, but like, you know, whatever, I'll stay.
And that's really interesting because arguably what the second teacher is doing is just as dangerous as what the first teacher is doing.
Now if you're a yoga insider, you might have caught that the instruction given by the second teacher was just riddled with bullshit.
Like, there are no vinyasa sequences in the Yoga Sutras.
The Yoga Sutras is not 5,000 years old.
It's not about uniting the soul to God and it doesn't say anything about physiological benefit.
What do you do when you encounter just blatant lies about something that is not seen as being scientific?
I mean, why do we have different outcomes for these two experiments?
Because I think we probably do.
And as we talked about it, we thought that for some reason we just don't demand competence from the influencers that are tasked with delivering humanity's content.
We know that the yoga teacher's scope of practice should restrict them from making dietary, physiotherapeutic, or psychological diagnoses or protocols.
We know that yoga teachers are not qualified to care for cancer or to give people marital advice.
Why then do we assume that speaking about spiritual content is just some fucking free-for-all?
You know, my co-host Julian regularly makes this really astute point, that in new age and wellness circles, spirituality is simultaneously too important to do without, but not important enough to actually investigate critically.
And here's the scary thing.
I've spent the last six years investigating yoga and Buddhism cults.
And every cultic organization recruits members through deception, by promising something other than what is on offer.
No one signed up for Bikram Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga so that they could be sexually assaulted by Bikram Chowdhury or Pattabhi Jois.
And on a subtler level, Iyengar's promises of physical healing, like John Friend's, were all hat and very few cattle.
People who signed up in the belief that these products were therapeutically sound or time-tested were deceived.
However, the content about which people are most easily deceived is spiritual content.
Now, the conspiritualist doctors I'll talk about in a moment, notwithstanding, on the whole, I feel the culture is getting better at sniffing out dodgy medical claims.
But for a whole bunch of reasons that I pointed out in the bonus episode about Hay House, we're still terrible as a culture in figuring out who has the competency to speak with integrity about spiritual stuff.
And just to underline the point, Fewer people get recruited into cults based on the false promise of medical healing than based on the false promise of heaven.
So here's where I'm going to next.
The medical wing of the conspirituality movement is following the Iyengar arc, but in reverse.
They're standing there like Dr. Gokula, mesmerized by the young Iyengar's body, making medical shit up about someone's performance of spirituality, and then wondering how he can use it to sanctify his politics and enhance his brand.
Recently on Instagram, I was talking about how COVID denialist Tom Cowan is a doctor.
He's an MD, but he's actually performing the role of priest. - Interesting.
In this viral video from April, he uses his medical credentials to make his conspiratorial BS sound legitimate, but he's also very upfront about his main commitment, which is to spread the gospel of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.
I remarked that this was common in our era of charismatic collapse in disciplines.
And what I mean by that is that Cowan doesn't seem happy to stick to his licensed MD work in which he has no expertise in virology or epidemiology.
He felt compelled to make grandiose statements about COVID, about which very little was known at the time.
This was April, for God's sake.
And that compulsion of his led to a viral video.
And whether you think Cowan is personally charismatic or not, that virality is a charismatic event.
Now, I first came across Cowan through Kelly Brogan's own viral video, also released in late April.
It was called A Message to Dispel Fear.
I wrote about this extensively for Jen at Medium.
Now, this coming-out message that she produced framed the pandemic as, quote, a unique moment in time to question seemingly foundational assumptions about biological health.
She said that just as in her psychiatric practice she abandoned the serotonin theory of depression, she had also abandoned the germ theory of disease, describing it as an infantile projection of, quote, badness, unquote, outside of us, stoked by a mainstream media intent on, quote, curating reality, unquote, to make us distrustful of each other and more easily controllable by totalitarian, quote, dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust, unquote.
I love her use of the word curated as though her entire Instagram feed, her entire presentation is not highly curated.
Now, for evidence, she cited a viral video from the previous day.
So that was the one put out by Cowan.
And we can sort of also note the giddy sort of tag team opportunism here that Dr. Cowan hits it big with a COVID denialist video and naturally Brogan sits down and hits the record button.
Now, side note on Cowan, he's San Francisco based, he's an MD, he's also on disciplinary probation for, get this, treating a cancer patient with an unregulated alternative remedy without reviewing her prior medical records or seeing her in person.
He treated cancer evidently remotely and he doesn't list any formal training in virology or epidemiology.
Now, Cowan opens this viral video of his, and he closes it by referring to Rudolf Steiner.
This is what he says in the beginning.
So again, when you know Steiner, you have the answers to the test.
But you have to then figure out the details.
In 1918, after the biggest pandemic, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, Steiner was asked, what was this all about?
And he said, well, viruses are simply excretions of a toxic cell.
Viruses are pieces of DNA or RNA with a few other proteins.
They bud out from the cell.
They happen when the cell is poisoned.
They are not the cause of anything.
Now, He gets a bunch of crap wrong in this video.
He claims that viruses are cell debris.
They're not.
He says that COVID hasn't been isolated when it has.
He claims that the Spanish flu erupted in tandem with the global adoption of radio waves in 1918, but that didn't happen until 1920.
He says that Boston doctors tried to purposefully spread the Spanish flu infection in 1918, but they couldn't do it, but his only reference is his own newsletter.
He also says that 5G is next-level EM poisoning and that it was first rolled out in Wuhan, which is also false and also doesn't account for the fact that, you know, places like Iran didn't have 5G when there was a springtime spike of COVID.
So anyway, Lots of facts wrong, 400,000 views anyway.
And look, if he'd even gotten one thing wrong, that would be terrible when we're talking about swaying public opinion on an infectious disease in a liberal democracy where it's now totally clear that health responses are dependent upon public buy-in.
So, you know, despite all of that, his own Steinerite framing of this stupid speech tells you everything you need to know about why facts don't matter to him.
He says at the end, quoting from Steiner, in times when there were no electrical currents, when the air was not swarming with electrical influences, we're talking 1917, it was easier to be human for this reason.
In order to be human at all today, it is necessary to expend much stronger spiritual capacities than was necessary a century ago.
So I just leave you with, do whatever you can to increase your spiritual capacities because it's really damn hard to be a human being these days.
Here at least he's honest.
He's functioning as a cleric and not a doctor.
Now he's the co-author of a book called The Contagion Myth which has been banned by Amazon but boosted by Kelly Brogan.
But here's the question.
Is he even a good cleric?
I haven't seen anything that suggests he's educated or skilled in pastoral care.
Quoting Steiner and telling people to, quote, increase your spiritual capacities is provocative, but it's totally vague.
Now, to be fair, it might be a good thing that he's a bad anthroposophical priest given what Steiner actually taught.
Steiner was no darling of the fascists in his era, but nonetheless he held deeply racist views.
And Jennifer Sapio wrote an article on Medium.
She was a Waldorf teacher and then she went digging into the history.
She writes, I read about Steiner's folk souls, his theories about the hierarchies of human evolution, in order to see in Steiner's own words what he thinks about the black and yellow races.
And let me tell you, it's revolting.
He writes that humans are on an evolutionary journey through reincarnation and that as souls are refined and purified, they move up from the African to the Asian and finally to the European races.
Then Sapio directly quotes Steiner.
The spot in Africa corresponds to those forces of the earth which imprint upon man the characteristics of early childhood.
The spot in Asia corresponds to those which give man the characteristics of youth, and the ripest characteristics are imprinted on man by the corresponding spot in Europe.
This is simply a law.
As all persons in their different incarnations pass through the various races, therefore, Although it may be argued that the European has the advantage over the black and yellow races, we should not be prejudiced thereby.
His truth may indeed be sometimes veiled, but you see that with the help of spiritual science we really do come upon remarkable truths.
So, there we have Tom Cowan, garbage science from a doctor who's acting as a priest for a garbage religion.
Now, if you look at some of the other figures we've studied, there are a lot of influencers doing this double dip.
Christiane Northrup has been embarrassing herself for months with her COVID denialism and anti-vax propaganda.
And just last week, she got her ass handed to her for an interview in which she says things like the COVID vaccine would change our DNA.
But that doesn't matter because she spends most of her time directing her fans towards angel channelers and new-age prophets with her near-daily 12-minute sermons that seem to function like solo prayer meetings.
But as a priestess, I think she falls down as well, because you'll never hear anything substantial in her teaching or instruction.
No texts, scriptures, ethics, that's for sure.
nothing that comes from anywhere deeper than her connections at Hay House or on New Age YouTube.
But let's go back to Kelly Brogan, who provides a starker example of the doctor who abdicates medicine while touting who provides a starker example of the doctor who abdicates medicine while touting a spirituality she knows Yeah.
In Dr. Brogan's most recent book, Own Your Life, there's a chapter on tapering from psychiatric medicines.
Now this is her wheelhouse, this is what she has helped some of her patients do, and she has some valid things to say here.
In the chapter, she points to some of the nascent research on tapering, which is widely known to be very difficult and very dangerous.
But the chapter also marks a clear turn away from her evidence-based critique of psychiatry and polypharmacy, and into the world of spiritual journeying.
On page one of the book, Brogan identifies herself as a doctor of the soul, just for context.
Because for Brogan, the solution to a history of mediocre psychiatric science isn't better research and care practices, it's religion.
Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling.
It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.
These words are intended to support that rebirth process." Brogan doesn't disclose whether she herself has ever tapered off a psychiatric medication, but she writes that the process is, quote, a marathon of heroic proportions, unquote.
And she also confesses that she has, quote, no mentors, unquote, and has learned from, quote, patients and the arduous road of direct clinical experience, unquote.
Now, while for Brogan, psychiatric diagnoses and germ theory might be fictions, she does believe that withdrawal syndrome, which hits tapering patients, is a material fact.
But in keeping with her policy of reframing experiences through the lens of empowerment, she appeals to the medieval mysticism of John of the Cross, The terrible symptoms of medication withdrawal, she explains, are a dark night of the soul that her clients should welcome, accept, and move through.
And while Brogan warns that the process can be arduous and should only be undertaken with many levels of support, her language is also tinted with the miraculous, creating the impression that deprescribing might be accomplished spontaneously.
And when I interviewed some of the clients in her online program, they said that although Brogan doesn't directly instruct online program participants how and when to taper, the whole bias of the content leads many participants to adopt a fast-track approach.
So here's where Brogan the Priestess comes in.
Or maybe Swami.
Because she uses Kundalini Yoga as a support for her online program.
It's called Vital Mind Reset and more than 2,600 people have paid up to $1,000 to join over the past several years.
Now, there are many modern yoga brands that boast life-changing results, but Kundalini Advertising just stands out for its claims of quick transformation and dramatic transformations and impacts.
Brogan writes that she was certified to teach kundalini yoga in 2015, so not even that long ago, and she opens the Vital Mind Reset instructional material with a video in which she instructs a kundalini meditation that she doesn't reference or cite, while seemingly floating in space, garbed in the characteristic white clothes.
Now, just note, this is the first instructional material in her Big Ticket content, and in its brief minutes, she says a bunch of bullshit.
She says that Kundalini is, quote, an ancient technology, unquote, that has, quote, withstood the test of thousands of years, unquote, and is now being verified scientifically.
In reality, kundalini yoga is the IP of the unscrupulous Harbhajan Singh Puri, also known as Yogi Bhajan, who died in 2004.
Yogi Bhajan made constant claims about the antiquity of his brand, but research by former kundalini practitioner and yoga scholar Philip Dislip shows that Yogi Bhajan largely constructed his method after immigrating to the U.S.
from India in 1968.
Yogi Bhajan is now widely understood to have been a cult-leading fraud and sexual abuser.
A suit filed this past June 29th in the California Superior Court alleges years of sexual abuse by Yogi Bhajan against the plaintiff, who was a minor at the time, and accuses Yogi Bhajan's community of negligence.
So here's Dr. Kelly Brogan rejecting medicine in favor of teaching a religion she didn't take the time to bloody well google.
Now it's true that kundalini devotees in the sciences are doing smallish, low-quality studies on kundalini yoga as an intervention, but they're nowhere near verifying it, whatever that would mean.
But Brogan is a person who wants her own work in alternative psychiatry to look legitimate by publishing low-impact case studies of her clients' successes.
So this is someone who's kind of half-assing evidence in medicine while rejecting it altogether in religion.
What I hate most about this is that the laziness, the romanticism, the orientalism, the mystification we see here, devoid of honesty and substance, reduced to performance, turns spirituality itself into a LARP.
I'm not a religious person, but I respect religion enough to realize that it gives people life and hope and community, and it shouldn't be sold as a fucking game or window dressing for the fact that your science has God-sized holes in it.
So.
Cowan's pivot to Steiner is pretty weak.
Northrop's handoff to astrologers is goofy.
And Brogan's play-acting at Kundalini is just insulting.
But I'm going to end here with a study of Dr. Zach Bush, who is perhaps the most troubling of doctors who want to be priests, because he is super compelling at it, but in a way that is totally off the rails.
In the speech I'll study here, Bush offers all of the flash of mysticism, but no reference to the safety of religious community or pastoral care.
Now I want to finish with Bush because I want to show that the most skillful, charismatic overreach by a doctor preaching religion can lead to some nihilistic and even psychotic places which, dressed up in organic beauty, can hide a fascist-themed death wish.
Now in a podcast episode with New Age broadcaster Rich Roll, recorded on a retreat in Italy, Bush launches into one of his trance state sermons about the holistic oneness of everything.
I've got the transcript of about eight minutes here, and I'll read it and break in places to point things out, and I'll try to capture some of Bush's vocal rhythm and vocal fry.
I do want to say up front that I find this to be a hauntingly beautiful monologue.
I truly appreciate what Bush is describing here about a very private ecstasy, but given his growing role in the COVID contrarian circus, I think it's crucial to look carefully at how he uses his spirituality.
So I had a moment when I was snorkeling off the coast of Tulum, Mexico, many years ago now, but this was in my alone phase.
I had decided I was going to become a monk, so my first couple of conversations with Jen was how I was a monk and I was not going to be in another relationship and all of this.
She apparently saw through all of that a bullshit story I was creating for myself and so I had a new identity of I'm a monk and so I was in my monk mode and I was I'm feeling disconnected and wanting to connect to my life and where I often feel most connected is in floating in the ocean alone over a coral reef and just watching this civilization below me that I don't really feel any belonging to but I just watch it and all of its beautiful connectivity.
So he sets us up to think about his earlier life as an aspiring renunciate.
And it's tongue-in-cheek and very affable, but the iconography is pretty solid.
And I think the most important point here is that the experience that follows is framed as entirely lonely and triumphantly individualist.
And I'm fascinated by the tiniest things in coral reefs, right?
Like the big fish are cool, but I'm just fascinated by little hair-like structures that wave back and forth and just do it again like, whoa, yeah, like how those things are finding purpose and just being a hair that weighs back and forth all day in the ocean.
It just goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And that little hair, that little thing on the coral reef has never woken up with an identity crisis.
It's like, no, this is what I do, man.
I'm in flow.
I'm like, I got the ocean and it has the waves.
And I could sense what was going on in the other side of the ocean because there's ripples that happen through it.
And I can sense that and be connected.
And I'm like, I'm the sensory system for the entire planet that's over 70% water.
And I'm like, God, how beautiful is that to be a sensory fiber for the ocean itself and just know what's happening on the planet?
And I am coral reef.
And you get into that state and it's like, okay, okay, this is freaking beautiful.
And you start to get yourself in there.
So here we get introduced to both the personification of nature as well as naturalistic fallacy and pathetic fallacy that Bush relies on.
These are age-old dramatic tropes perfected by 19th century Romanticists, who viewed themselves at the crossroads of nature and progress, and who opted to project their needs and longings onto the natural world in a way that only looked like it was rejecting the appropriation of nature.
Because for the Romantics, nature was not valuable on its own terms, but in terms of how it reflected human passions.
So, Bush is swimming out farther and farther, not completely aware of where he's going or how far he is from the shore.
And I popped my head back, looked out, and realized I was way further away from the shore than I've ever really been.
And I got a little panicked, because I'm not like a super swimmer dude or anything like that, and just like...
That little moment of like, oh my God, I hope I can get back, like that's a long ways.
And so I started back and I'm swimming back and, you know, quickly got over that little panic and be like, OK, I just keep at it and got my head back down in the water and just cruising.
And suddenly I got surrounded by a massive school of sardines that went on for 45 minutes that I was in the swarm of sardines.
And it's more life than you can even really begin to describe.
It's important to note here that classically, the heroic narrative has swept him out to sea and to the edge of death.
And now, somehow, like Noah of old, we will meet with him the full glory and terror of nature and God.
I mean this thing might have been a quarter mile in length at least you know this massive school of fish and interestingly as soon as I saw it coming and I didn't you know I didn't know what it was it looked like a ship or something like that like it looked like a big solid structure coming to me and I look above the water and there's nothing there and it's coming at me so fast that it wasn't like I'm gonna run away from this thing it was like I'm gonna get hit by this thing and by the time they were about 10 feet away I could start to pick out that they were all these silver heads of all these fish
And then they swarmed, came around me and they respected my field too.
I'd say probably exactly, almost exactly six inches.
Like they were just completely around me and I was completely engulfed and had very quickly lost orientation whereas you know you lose sense of up and down because there's no sunlight you're just in silver just flashing silver up down all around and I got so excited I was like they can see me and I could push my hands fast as I could out in the water and I couldn't touch a fish you know and there's just like a they'd be six inches all the way around my arm.
And then I looked and I pulled my arm back and I couldn't even see a hole like that would close in on that space so fast and my eye couldn't sense the speed.
And so they were this ultimate quorum right there, this ultimate organism made of probably hundreds of millions of fish.
They're all like a few inches long and they covered, you know, and they're moving past me pretty quickly over this 45 minute period.
So are you totally red-pilled yet?
Because I sure am.
And I've got a couple of things to point out.
First, the 45-minute period seems significant in terms of ritual time.
You know, peak experiences in meditation are often said to last from 20 minutes to an hour.
The Catholic Mass is about 45 minutes if the sermon is short.
The tantric ceremonies I've participated in when I practiced Tibetan Buddhism lasted for about 45 minutes.
Now secondly, and I'm sorry if this is a little TMI, but there's something extremely sexual and birth canali about this picture.
It's like the good doctor has floated down the cosmic fallopian and is now swarmed by the silver ejaculate of the universe, which embodies strength and grace and love.
The poetic frame is that Bush is being impregnated by realization.
Now it's not for nothing Bush was raised Christian and the mysticism of the male god and the female earth seems strong in him.
And something that's rarely discussed is that the monkhood he opens his story with is traditionally understood in this old-timey heteronormative paradigm as a conscious feminization of the male body to allow for mystical union.
And of course, the ensuing birth process, which will both erase and transform his sense of being, is also terrifying.
Some minutes into this, I start to get really panicked because I think I'm starting to become a sardine.
I'm starting to have so much sardine energy around me.
It was exciting for those first few minutes.
It was like, I'm having a once-in-a-lifetime moment, you know.
You all have had those moments where you're like, this will never happen to me again.
I'm probably the only human experiencing this right now on the planet.
And you're in that elated sense.
And then pretty soon you're like, yeah, I don't know what life is going to be like after this moment.
Like nothing's the same after this moment.
So this is the epiphany of ego loss.
Bush is dying and being reborn in an orgasm of pointillated silver light.
And he is at the center of his universe.
No one else could possibly exist.
It's the pinnacle experience of his life and he cannot share it with anyone else.
Unless, many years later, he's playing the role of Pentecostal raconteur on retreat in Italy.
And I would say that many of you this week are in a sardine moment of you're starting to sense an energy field.
There's an organism that you're starting to plug into that you've always been craving, but you're feeling fear of loss of identity because nothing's going to be the same when you go back.
And if it is, you missed a big opportunity.
You need to become sardine here.
Okay?
So note the gesture at the buffalo, you know, massacred of course, which subtly connects this vision to First Nations discourse.
Now, I don't know what the deal is with the retreat, who organized it, what it was all about, how much it cost, who its speakers were, and so on, but you can hear what sounds like maybe 40 or 50 people in the room chuckling at the one-liners and sighing at the beauty of his story.
He's extremely engaging.
And, you know, if you know events like this, you can visualize the formula.
The space is beautiful.
It's mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and the sun is streaming into the warm, engaged circle of seekers.
The speaker's on a dais, the listeners sit on the floor, some are wrapped up in chadors or blankets.
It's either before or after a big vegan buffet and people are sipping tea and gazing at the speaker.
And what this speaker is doing is wrapping them up in the love of a transcendent experience before showing them a gleaming knife.
Because listen to what happens next.
And so Sardine was such an interesting experience.
And I didn't even realize this, but this is freaking profound.
It comes right back to where we started, which is about some minutes into this experience.
I become Sardine.
I'd become relaxed into that.
I'm okay.
I'm probably still going to be human on the other side of this.
I will be changed, but I'm not actually Sardine yet.
And I got past that panic attack and then suddenly there's these explosions of bubbles around me.
Just massive micro bubble explosions and I couldn't figure out what it was for some time.
And then I happened to have a little clearing in the fish long enough for me to see pelican feet on the water surface around me and realize That the pelicans were bursting in but they're traversing through the water and then back up with a fish and her mouth was so fast that my eye couldn't be quick enough in that ten thousandth of a second to see it.
Your eye can perceive it about that ten thousandth of a second rate and so by the time I was sensing something all I could see was bubbles.
And so I couldn't track their trajectory through the water because it was beyond that that speed at which my eyes are capable of capturing neurologically what I was seeing.
And as soon as I saw the pelican feet, and split second I figured out what was going on, I feel this immediate emotional reaction of, my friends are getting eaten.
Like this is terrible, that we're having loss.
And I said, and I went there just for a split second, and Sardine said back to me like somebody's screaming at me, no, like wrong.
And I tied back into that energy and there had been in the elation event in this group of fish.
They were elated in this moment of pelicans hitting.
So Bush is so enraptured, so sardined, that the sardines are shouting at him.
Or his inner sardine is shouting at him and telling him that sardines are not afraid of dying.
Now, he's not content to speak for the sardines.
Bush then goes on to suggest that this is what human men feel, or they should feel, as they march into the machine guns.
And there was this rise in energy happening, and this thing, this transformation was happening at a very high, very energetic level, and so there was zero empathy for the loss of their brethren.
And you see that same thing when one million men march into war.
There's a loss of empathy for the individual.
And there's only a sense of there's human suffering and there's human victory and I want to be part of that.
And I'm just as willing to be part of the human suffering and loss of life as I am to be part of the victory.
And that is just the blind...
And so I think in warfare, we can reach the state of non-empathic presence.
And so our challenge now as humans is, I believe, to reach non-empathic presence without war.
What if we can not empathically witness loss of life?
Wow.
What indeed?
What would remain intolerable?
Now for me, the phantasm of noble human sacrifice blends Bush's Christian paradigm with images from the Bhagavad Gita at this point, where God as Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that the bodies of those who are dying are like clothes, that no matter how many die in the coming war, Everything glorifies the might and the dread of creation.
And so Arjuna's job is to fight and possibly die as an act of total surrender and worship.
And everything is good.
Now the published date for this podcast episode was July of 2019.
This is well before COVID hit.
But as we know from Bush's raptures with Del Bigtree and others during the pandemic, that his content hasn't really changed.
He's still referring to this transcendent stuff.
Now, it might be unfair to read this story through the lens of the pandemic, but I can't shake the image of his personification of the sardines transposed onto the teeming masses of humanity that swirl around him, and how, in his idealized world, when the pelican virus strikes down into the swarm and picks off mouthful after mouthful, the human sardines are so enlightened, they are elated to be eaten.
It wouldn't occur to the sardines to be afraid.
Divine nature has always already conquered death.
Now, Bush goes on to describe one way in which this non-empathic presence plays out for him as a hospice doctor.
He repeats a question he evidently gets regularly.
How can we possibly not treat with opiates somebody who's suffering at the end of life because we feel for them?
Well, that's where we fucked things up.
I think as we started having all these emotional responses to this situation, which inevitably is selfish because your emotions have nothing to do with that person's journey, And you're putting your journey on that person's thing, projecting all your crap on that situation of somebody who's in a transition.
And what is that going to do to their energy field?
It's going to drop their energy and they're going to suffer more for it.
And so my nurses in the hospice environment did the best thing in the world, which was touch patients.
And the most powerful ones used Reiki, which is an age-old technique for not touching them just with skin, but touching them with energy and raising their vibration and pain goes down immediately, immediately.
And so a non-empathic approach to pain and loss of life raises vibration.
And these fish demonstrated this incredible way of that they realized that there was a cycle of life happening right now, and they wanted to be a part of that.
And they were not afraid of that cycle of life.
They were in fact excited.
They were thrilled by the opportunity to be engaged in the cycle of life, which was death and rebirth.
I'll just pause there with the quoting because my brain is melting.
He's using his natural fallacy fantasy of sardines being excited to die to justify a non-empathic approach to pain and loss of life in relation to his hospice patients.
Later on in this speech, he cites an Austrian forester named Victor Schauberger in a similar vein.
He describes how Schauberger, with no formal biology training, intuited deep mysteries of nature, including how he believed fish actually leap up into the talons of eagles on purpose in order to experience the bliss of flying, and of seeing how small their lake was, and of transitioning to a higher plane of existence.
I'm not making this up.
There's a core narcissistic paradox in Bush's reasoning here.
Because all the talk about letting the patient have their journey is dependent on his version of reality, which he transposes onto the patient.
He's pretending to give them agency, but only according to his beliefs about their spiritual transition.
He appears to be so confused about consent and boundaries that he believes opiates, which presumably a patient or their power of attorney would be asking for, are intrusive, but that the magic of Reiki, by which he seems to believe he's engaging the very soul of the patient, is perfectly fine.
This brings up a lot of questions for me about the medical sovereignty these folks are always going on about.
Because how exactly do you get informed consent for Reiki when nobody knows what the fuck it is?
It sounds like Bush is convinced he knows the universal truth for everyone.
That pain and death are not just natural, but to be welcomed, encouraged, even worshipped Now is this the doctor you want taking care of your family member in hospice?
Is this the doctor you'll turn to when your country is facing mass casualties in a pandemic?
To end this, I'm going to pull back from the divine amoral chaos of Bush's vision just a little and recall the story of Iyengar.
BKS Iyengar, as that young man, didn't set out to become a physician or someone who could pretend to be a physician.
It just happened by accident.
Gradually, he began to integrate medical jargon into his yoga instruction.
And the more Western his students were, the more they lapped it up.
And as he was rewarded for it, he doubled down.
And why wouldn't he?
People told him he was saving their lives.
But medicine was never his primary skill or training.
It was a series of increasingly bold guesses laid over his passion for movement and sensation and discipline.
He was never a doctor.
And here's a tragic irony.
I don't think Iyengar trusted doctors despite how much he wanted to be accepted as one.
It's abundantly clear that the man was in chronic pain for much of his later life, but he would try to hide it.
I interviewed one of his senior students who was hosting him in her European city.
When she phoned his advanced people to tell them that the lift to the second floor studio was out of order, they arranged to bring him to the service stairwell hours before the event began so that he could struggle painfully up the stairs one at a time, pulling himself up on the railing so that no one would see him.
Now given the crazy splits he spent his adult years doing, I'm betting he needed both hips replaced, and likely both knees.
But he was too much of a performer to take time out for surgery, to admit that he wasn't in the end his own doctor, or to admit that his medicine was hard to tell apart from a religion of pain.
Dr. Cowan, Dr. Northrup, Dr. Brogan, and Dr. Bush are all doctors, but they were never educated as theologians or in pastoral care.
And how could they be?
Becoming board certified is a major life accomplishment, but so is becoming a proper priest, rabbi, minister, or medicine person.
Some clerics go through more than a decade of formal education.
And if you're a Brahmin in South India, that education might have started when you were four years old.
This isn't Sunday school we're talking about, but daily, hours-long memorization exercises under the eagle eyes of your father.
Real spirituality is a rigorous art form, not something you play at or monetize as a side piece to your regular gig.
From what I've heard him say about his youth, I'm betting that Zach Bush has the deepest religious education of the lot.
But let's be clear that having a mystical experience, or even several, does not qualify him to doctor people's souls.
The sardines are amazing, but teenagers can go through similar things on MDMA.
Everybody needs peak experiences and deserves them, but no one has the right to turn private ecstasies into social capital and then use that capital to influence public health.
There are modern priests and ministers who actually manage to stretch their work into other realms.
Teilhard de Chardin remained a Jesuit priest throughout the horror of World War I. He wrote his mystical poems in between stretcher runs while the bombs fell around him.
He kept his collar on through the height of his paleontology research, which actually helped explode the last vestiges of creationism in his church.
Then there are black religious leaders in the U.S.
that are all over this double duty beat, and they have been for generations.
I mean, Martin Luther King comes to mind, but then today we have Reverend Samuel Barber and others.
Now, aren't these two men charismatic as well?
Aren't they doing the same thing as the conspiritualist influencer?
Not one bit.
Here's the difference.
They don't use their charisma to collapse professional categories into this kind of soundbite mush.
Their roots in pastoral care would forbid them from the spiritual libertarianism we see from the conspiritualists.
They embody deep, lifelong training in their religious institutions, but then also connected grassroots experience in political organizing.
You will hear them mix discourses, but not in such a way as to make their politics narcissistic or their religion maudlin.
We all know that minutes before he died, King was testifying about the political and spiritual promised land, and it sure sounded like he wanted to enter it in the flesh, and I would like to doubt that he welcomed those bullets as a transition to Bush's higher plane.
He didn't want that.
He didn't jump into the air to be shot.
He was connected to his people and the network of history and, I believe, to the warp and weft of life.
He wasn't a sardine.
I'm recording this as November comes to an end in southwest Ontario.
Our COVID case numbers are skyrocketing.
Here in Toronto, anti-vaxxers spurred on by QAnon-type propaganda are out in the streets protesting even the most sensible lockdown restrictions.
The doctors I've covered in this episode give folks like this, who are now threatening the lives of their fellow citizens with their breath and spittle, what they believe is credentialed support.
But these same doctors speak directly to the heart of their spiritual and existential needs.
And it doesn't matter whether they're qualified to do that, or whether that speech merely provokes as opposed to providing answers or care.
If Cowan, Northrop Brogan, and Bush weren't so dangerous to our liberal democracies, where public health depends on political will and political will depends on public perception, I would feel sad for them.
I would empathize with working so hard and long to become a doctor and then having to deal with endless crises in an uncertain process.
To watch patients languish or die or to deal with predatory insurers or bean-counting hospital administrators.
I understand the disillusionment.
But it's tragic to waste hard-earned disillusionment.
And it's shameful to manipulate the disillusionment of your followers by falling back on your looks, your connections to East Coast society, your mom's MLM, your ability to turn a phrase, or your charisma as though nothing else were real.
As if that adulation you get online or at the encounter group could replace the hard work that makes up history.
I'm just going to address them directly to close out.
Maybe it's just midlife stress, good doctors.
Maybe you just gotta get through it.
You don't have to be the best doctor.
You don't have to have the magical answer to COVID to do really good work.
You also don't have to be the best spiritual leader.
It's okay if you're not the center of the universe.
Sticking to consensus reality is a noble path.
And you don't have to worry, because real medicine and real religion will still be here long after you're gone.
Thank you so much for listening.
Just as a reminder, this is our last freely available bonus episode.
To help us fund this ongoing work, the Monday releases from this point on will be available to our Patreon subscribers.
So if you value work like this, you'll have access for as little as $5 a month, along with access to other bits of bonus content.
You can find us at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
