Christiane Northrup addresses her followers as “angel warriors.” JP Sears counsels his supplement customers to never “outsource their own truth.” Mikki Willis says he was once a “hero of the left”, and now tells audiences that he’s willing to die for the truth of his message. It’s all very grand, and it doesn’t come from nowhere. Trendy spiritualities of the privileged and disconnected have always focused on the heroic triumph of the individual, which has made them easily co-optable by the right.But what is a real hero? Joseph Campbell contextualized their journey as a ritual of selfless wandering, undertaken on behalf of the community. The concept of the monomyth, which Campbell defined as the Hero’s Journey, has stages, and they have influenced popular culture in profound and, at times, troubling ways.In this episode, we’ll look at how certain influencers confuse heroism for megalomania and forget that heroes and their societies are interdependent. Derek and Julian measure some of the usual suspects against Campbell’s ruler while Matthew asks questions about what makes a theory vulnerable to distortion. In The Jab, Julian looks at the three top questions vaccine-hesitant folks have about the mRNA vaccines currently approved for COVID. In a closing essay, Matthew reflects on a space where the painful splits of conspirituality might be calmed: how the home hospice can bring together public health and private spirituality.Show NotesJake Angeli, “Q-Shaman”, describing his New-Age servicesCNN on Angeli, “Baked Alaska” and BarnettThe Q shaman — conspirituality runs riot on Capitol HillBarnett and “Save Our Children” event in AR in OctoberJP Sears echoes a justification for ransacking Pelosi’s officeAnti-maskers Storm California Mall, Harass Shoppers and Refuse to LeaveWhy Lisa Guerrero Abruptly Ended Interview With Anti-Mask WearerTommy John Sr. hospitalized for COVIDDr. Tommy John denies his father hospitalized with COVID has COVID(Tommy’s follow-up post shows his son (?) playing a video game in a COVID-denyi
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I don't know if there's anything to talk about this week, but we're going to do our best.
You can stay up with us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.
We just passed 1,000 subscribers there, so thank you.
Also on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can access our bonus weekend content as well as our Monday bonus episodes if you help to support this podcast.
Conspiratuality 33, Manipulating the Hero's Journey.
Christiane Northrup addresses her followers as angel warriors.
J.P.
Sears counsels his supplement customers to never outsource their own truth.
Mickey Willis says he was once a hero of the left and now tells audiences that he's willing to die for the truth of his message.
It's all very grand, and it doesn't come from nowhere.
Trendy spiritualities of the privileged and disconnected have always focused on the heroic triumph of the individual, which has made them easily co-optable by the right.
But what is a real hero?
Joseph Campbell contextualized their journey as an adventurous personal quest undertaken on behalf of the community.
The concept of the Monomyth, which Campbell defined as the hero's journey, has stages and they have influenced popular culture in profound and at times troubling ways.
In this episode, we'll look at how certain influencers confuse heroism for megalomania, and forget that heroes and their societies are interdependent.
Derek and I measure some of the usual suspects against Campbell's ruler, while Matthew asks questions about what makes a theory vulnerable to distortion.
In the jab, I'll be looking at the three top questions vaccine-hesitant folks have about the messenger RNA vaccines currently approved for COVID.
And in his closing essay, Matthew reflects on a space where the painful splits of conspirituality might be calmed, how the home hospice can bring together public health and private spirituality.
This is the Conspiratuality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Q is in the building.
The events of yesterday, involving a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol building, left four people dead, 52 arrested, and 14 police officers injured.
Dead from a gunshot wound, 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashley Babbitt was a QAnon supporter from Ocean Beach, California, who had tweeted Tuesday morning, nothing will stop us and the storm is coming.
Now the latter you might recognize as a QAnon hashtag, which refers to the reckoning prophesied to be visited upon Democrats and Hollywood elites during this post-election phase when the conspiracy theory's timeline predicted the climactic Great Awakening.
There were QAnon signs visible in the crowd outside the building, and several photos of a man in a Q-branded hoodie brazenly taunting police officers inside.
We've also all by now seen images of the Q-shaman Jake Angeli, who is About as on the nose for the Conspiratuality Archive as possible.
He's 32, tall, lean, and shirtless, tatted up, and wearing what looks like a Native American-style fur and buffalo-horned headdress, colorful face paint, and carrying an American flag and a bullhorn.
Angeli was front and center in a lot of the photos that have since been circulating online of what went down inside the Capitol buildings.
At one point he was even pictured standing and shouting from the dais of the Senate chamber itself.
This guy has been spotted at multiple quarantine protests and Stop the Steel rallies, either brandishing a revolutionary war era rifle or a spear.
But this was, shall we say, the apotheosis of his red-pilled hero's journey.
No surprise that he's an out-of-work actor who describes himself in his parlor bio as a published author, a spiritual warrior of God, shamanic practitioner, QAnon digital soldier, and behavioral health tech?
And has called himself an energy healer on Facebook.
Now here's 20 seconds of him at a Trump rally explaining to a reporter about his multi-dimensional powers.
All right, so we're all very familiar with that.
I am able to perceive multiple different frequencies of light beyond my five senses.
And it allows me to see into these other higher dimensions that these entities, these pedophiles, these rapists, these murderers, these really high up people, that they almost like hide in the shadows.
Nobody can see that because the third eye ain't open.
All right.
So we're all very familiar with that.
Incredible stuff.
I mean, I feel, I don't know about you guys, but I feel like taking a big breath and I don't know, I don't know, just kind of getting clear on the circles of influence we've been covering on the podcast and how conspirituality is adjacent to the kind of conspiracism that helped drive yesterday's terrible insurrection.
Now, I mean, to my eye, Anjali is like an obvious crossover figure, but he's also kind of a mascot or a cartoon character.
I mean, he's unarmed, yeah, he brings these props around, but really he comes off as a LARPer.
But then he's photographed alongside, and of course he's rallying alongside militia types who, there was that guy who was walking through the Capitol with zip ties and, you know, ostensibly ready to take congressional members hostage.
There's a couple of reporters who work on Parler who were saying that The hostage motif or prediction was common in discussions that preceded this, and for which obviously police weren't prepared or didn't care to be prepared.
But then while Jake is standing behind Pence's desk, then we have 60-year-old Richard Barnett putting his feet up on Pelosi's desk.
And he's a right-wing gun group organizer in Arkansas, and he's collaborated on a Save Our Children event in October.
So, I mean, I think we're in a very strange, but also recognizable position in which we've been constantly saying for months that there's an aiding and abetting aspect going on within the sort of subject demographic that we've been studying that has helped to normalize a kind of militarized or violent rhetoric.
Yeah, I mean, Angeli is really interesting in that regard because he's, you're right, he's a mascot, he's a jester, he's someone who's willing to show up in costume for the photo op, right, for his own, he's obviously in search of his own kind of infamy in those moments, and yet, yeah, who is he?
Who is he flanked by?
And I wonder too whether his actual wellness services have been aided by his activism over the past little while because that's the other thing that I wonder about somebody like him is, you know, he's been a fixture at QAnon events for the last You know, several months.
And that's a lot of travel.
And it's a lot of hotel stays.
I'm wondering if he's doing consultations on Zoom or something like that for tantric healing or whatever.
What's interesting about that, I don't know if you saw, some of the reporting said that he had publicly tried to do some fundraising for his activism.
Oh, okay.
And the response was tumbleweeds.
He got $150 donation.
He was trying to raise just a few hundred dollars for one of his adventures.
It's interesting because I would wonder how much the people he's consorting with actually take his shit seriously.
Jules Evans published a nice little roundup this morning on Medium.
I'll link to it in the show notes that goes through Anjali's social media feeds and points out various beliefs that he has.
I thought it was a nice way of understanding some of what led him to the indoctrination of QAnon and some of the beliefs and the crossovers that we talk about often on this podcast.
And to the extent that he has some wellness cred, at least in his bio, it, you know, made me wonder, well, what are the usual suspects doing in the wake of yesterday's events?
And so I took a tour through, you know, the feeds of Northrop and Sasha Stone and David Wolf and Mickey Willis and Lori Ladd and others.
And mainly crickets.
Ladd is, as per usual, kind of doing vague deepities around turning points and what 2021 is going to be like and how it's so different from 2020 and who's ready for this and who's not ready for that.
And completely like content free.
But it really made me see that, you know, the other thing that we're dealing with in the subjects that we study is the ability to really hide from conflict when it emerges.
In a way that really points out the fact that conspirituality itself is a bifurcated or a split or a schizoid process.
You know, they can participate in online agitation and militarized speech, but then they always have this fallback position where You know, they can concentrate on their supplements or not say anything at all when, you know, the big storm is going down.
I looked at Christiane Northrup's video posting, Great Awakening video posting from, I guess, the day before, so from Tuesday, and she was talking about how she was beginning the first day of a seven-day water fast.
So she's now gone into retreat, and it just really highlighted this, you know, kind of dual role that these people play that means that they don't actually have to stand anywhere and take any responsibility for anything.
They can rabble-rouse.
on the conspiracy side of things, but the spirituality side of things allows them a kind of exit or a way out when there's heat in the kitchen.
Yeah.
So we'll predict a really big cataclysmic day for weeks or months.
And then when it finally comes, oh, I'm communing with the Galactic Council and fasting and meditating today.
So I also think that the same was true of a lot of these insurrectionists is probably the right word, white nationals, whatever you want to call them, Because if you watch the videos, when they're breaking through the police barrier, it's obviously violent.
But when they're inside the chambers, it became an Instagram photo op for a lot of them.
And when you look at them touring the halls, like taking video of it, I think back of all of the different protests that I've seen in the Middle East over my life and how the people were rising up against the power and the look on their faces and the sense of purpose they had.
And I saw almost none of that from when they were inside of the chambers.
It really felt like they were just doing photo op.
They weren't actually there to create a revolution like they said they were.
I actually attribute that, at least in part, to this dissonance between what, you know, Matthew always calls the LARPing that we're seeing online constantly, but then they're actually, oh, here's their opportunity, here's their big chance to take these people hostage, and they're just, they're like deer in headlights.
It's like, wait until the people on the message board see the video that I captured, more so than actual, like, you know, what we might see in the Middle East or what I saw in South Africa.
One of the most disturbing aspects, just fuck Mitch McConnell and fuck Josh Hawley.
At least Kelly Loeffler had the decency to, and I'm not giving her a pass here, but to be like, you know what?
I was going to protest Biden, but after today, I'm going to step back.
We're just going to do this.
But watching last night, The speeches of these people who have been aiding and abetting Trump for years and then acting holier than thou, as if they're the protectors of democracy.
I was so glad the New York Times, I just tweeted it out before we started recording, but I said, the New York Times now has their red-pilled list, which is 147 people who voted against Biden.
They put it up on their site.
And I'm like, good, because if these people aren't held to account, then we're not actually going to progress.
One last thing I wanted to add, listening to foreign policy experts this morning on the news, They were just pointing out that there were definitely Russian operatives inside of the Capitol.
There was infiltration on a foreign level, and the foreign news services, what they were saying about this, we are so vulnerable and exposed as a country right now, and we're so locked into this battle of left versus right, that we don't even realize that global powers right now are just chomping at the bit right now, waiting for moments like this, and are going to exploit it.
I hate to say it, but what happened yesterday wasn't an ending of something.
It wasn't the culmination.
It was the beginning of the next phase of what has been happening for the last few years.
We're just now seeing it spill over on a mass level into physical action.
And it's not like it's going to stop with that.
Because if you can watch people get up into Nancy Pelosi's office and get to the dais and be there, you think others aren't going to exploit that?
So after that fun bit you might have seen this weekend in our neighborhood of Los Angeles, at least my neighborhood and not far from Julian, the anti-maskers were harassing shoppers when a group of Los Angeles rebels stormed the upscale Westfield Mall in Century City and nearby Ralphs to declare their freedom from the tyranny of masks.
Now, this one hit a little too close to home, literally.
I used to teach at the Equinox in that mall, and I still shop at those grocery stores.
So I'm regularly there, and I'm glad I didn't run into that, because I don't know how I would have taken it.
These rallies, and there are more planned, are led by a white fitness instructor named Shiva, because of course they are.
Sheva, who lives in the not-at-all-privileged Beverly Hills, was interviewed by Inside Edition reporter Lisa Guerrero.
And let's hear how that went.
Sheva Bagheri is an anti-mask leader.
Maskless shopping is for people that believe in freedom over fear.
We are not going to be controlled by the media.
We have our own thoughts and we have our own reasons for not doing things.
And we're not breaking a law by not wearing a mask.
So do you believe that COVID-19 can be spread from people not wearing masks?
It can be spread no matter what.
Those masks don't do anything.
So you don't think the masks help?
They don't help.
One person is dying in Los Angeles every 10 minutes because of COVID.
I don't want to keep hearing these fake statistics.
They're fake.
That's not fake.
They're all fake.
And your point is what?
My point is freedom.
You do not tell us what to do with our faces.
And what you're doing is you're part of a satanic mask-wearing ritual wearing that thing.
One thing we're going to have to continue to track on this podcast is how the QAnon language both evolves and is adopted by people in various situations.
Although I did watch one video Shiva posted on Facebook, and I'd say that she's pretty deep into the Q-hole.
You know, when you said, Derek, that this was close to home, that you knew the mall, that you shopped there, I mean, The close to home question for me is, well, so what would you have done?
What do we do if that anti-mask protest ends up?
Surrounding us or our families in the parking lot or in a in an enclosure.
You know, there was a there was an exchange that I had with perhaps one of our listeners and I'm not quite sure how familiar they were with the podcast, but it was on Instagram and they were arguing that from their perspective.
whatever police enforcement they had seen of lockdown measures, especially in relation to anti-mask protesting, constituted police violence.
And I was asking for some examples, and he brought up the fact that the Berlin police had employed water cannon at a particular point during a large-scale protest, and they used it to separate anti-mask protesters from citizens who were trying to move about and get on and they used it to separate anti-mask protesters from citizens who were trying And they also deployed the water cannon after they had been asked to disperse.
And so there was this weird conversation about, well, what is enforcement of public health regulations supposed to look like?
I mean, because if you dig down into that argument deep enough, you're going to get COVID denialism.
It's not going to be justified for any kind of enforcement action to take place because we should really just rely on everybody's goodwill and their best personal decisions.
But that's not tenable.
I mean, if you were in that mall, you would be endangered.
And so would the people in your family.
Well, there's always that question of what I think I would do in my head and what actually happens when you're in the situation, which are two different things for most of us.
And it's difficult.
I will say, before we recorded, I was on a Zoom with my friend who's currently in Abu Dhabi and he was supposed to fly back this weekend.
He's like, I'm not coming back till after the inauguration.
There's no way right now.
But he was making the broader point of, he was traveling throughout this holiday and he was in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Egypt.
And he said, you know, everywhere I went, there was no question of whether or not the vaccines are worth it or work.
There was no question of whether you're wearing a mask in public or not.
And he's like, sure, you can definitely have the argument about like autocratic governments and things like that.
But the people were, are just civil everywhere I go here.
And if I'm in that situation, I've never been one to shy away from public confrontation with people about things.
It is different because I don't want these people spitting on me when I'm in that range.
So that, that does.
And they will, and they will because we've seen that in the footage, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I, I don't know, but I will say one thing you're, you, I mean, one theme we're seeing from this week is in Los Angeles and in DC, look at the people who are protesting and look at the lack of arrests and police involvement compared to the protests we had over the summer.
Like, there's not even in comparison, and we're gonna have to reckon with that at some point.
We're reckoning with it now, but where we go from there, I am not against people like that who are obviously pushing open doors of stores that have no mask policies.
They should be arrested.
Yeah, so this brings up a lot of questions for me.
it really exposes my ignorance as to the logistics of policing, like how many people in uniform you actually have to have in the mall to secure an area to actually, uh, to, to, to, to cuff people or restrain them in whatever way you're going to do that and to, and to lead them into a safe place.
Like that's, that's a whole, there's a whole numbers thing there that I just have no grasp on whatsoever.
I just sort of assumed to give a little insight on that mall.
Uh, my, My wife's friend designed it, so I know a bit about the back of it.
And I'm not a mall person, but it's actually a lovely experience in LA.
It's the only one I go to because it doesn't fit the normal idea of what people think of as a mall.
And there's a lot of stores together, but it's set up In a way that's made for browsing and for hanging out, as well as having different experiences.
And I taught there.
So there's that vibe.
So it is not heavily policed.
It is just a place that people go and it's one of the best places in LA to congregate.
Kind of like the Grove, although that's a little bit...
crowded at times.
This one is not usually that crowded, but they picked a time on the weekend when it would be to make their case.
And you have mall cops there.
You don't have a strong police presence.
So that could be part of it, but just watching their behavior, it's really disgusting.
But you are talking about numbers, right?
We're talking about 100 people, 150 people who, as defined by public health regulations currently, I believe, they're actually committing assault, aren't they?
They're committing physical assault.
No, I'm not talking about even the pushing of the doors, but if you knowingly go into a place unmasked and you're speaking loudly and you're laughing about how you're spreading COVID, which you don't believe in, and you're aerosolizing the air, I think we need a new definition for assault at a certain point.
Yeah, I have no problem with them being arrested immediately either.
But then you're going to get into the case that they're saying their freedoms are taken away and they're going to become martyrs for the situation and that's part of the problem.
Again, look at the people.
I remember when the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter protests were happening.
I live near Culver City and our protest was very mellow because Culver City is a very mellow area comparatively, the main one in Hollywood.
It's one of the places where people... Downtown and Hollywood are basically where the main pressure points are in Los Angeles for people to congregate, whatever side of the spectrum they're on.
And when those were happening, I remember there was a video from a helicopter of about 50 to 60 people, mostly looked like teens and in their 20s, on a rooftop in an apartment building.
And the reason they were being chased by the police was because it was after curfew.
They hadn't actually done anything wrong.
It was just after curfew that day, and so they were chased and they were hiding out.
When they came down off the building, because the police surrounded it eventually, they were all hogtied.
They were pushed on the ground and hogtied.
And today, when I see that the FBI is looking for Jake Angeli and is looking for these people, why were they not arrested there?
You said 52 people were arrested.
They were the ones in the chamber.
They were kind of in a locked position if they wanted to be arrested at that time.
But we're accepting tips from the public because we need help with this because it was it was such a, you know, hard to track what was going on.
There is the question of Trump did not release the National Guard.
He wouldn't.
And so that is that's another question.
But you have the D.C.
the D.C.
police themselves that weren't involved until the very end.
And so there's there's so many questions with this.
But again, it's just a point.
It's going to take a long time to sort out.
I mean, I don't know if you saw the video footage of the Capitol Police removing the barriers at one of the entrances to the grounds, seemingly either because they made the choice that it was safer to not be overwhelmed physically, or because they They are compromised internally.
Because there's also video of, and this isn't the overwhelming number, but there is video of some of them cheering on the insurrectionists as it is in downtown LA yesterday.
There was a video that came out of a Trump rally and there was two fleets of cops that drove by and the cops are waving to the Trump rally.
Yeah.
And then to what you're saying, Derek, too, you know, there were two pipe bombs found close to the Capitol building.
There were Molotov cocktails found.
If any one of those individuals who did break through were able to get into contact with some of the representatives that they wanted to harass or hogtie or, you know, do whatever, there could have been a very, very, you know, tragic, serious event.
To lighten things up a little, sort of, Yankees star's chiropractor's son pitches a fit.
So, we've wondered, both on the pod and on social media, when a prominent COVID denialist would have to publicly manage a serious case of COVID-19.
Matthew did some reporting on JP Sears' close friend Jordan Bowditch, who goes by Conscious Bro.
Formerly goes by Conscious Bro.
He was de-platformed.
Bowditch and his fiance, Alexa Martinez, who goes by ThatSexChick.
Has she been taken down too?
No.
We've been blocked by both of them, which I find funny, but no, no, she's still on there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matthew did some really good Instagram posts about their odyssey.
They tested positive and then shared posts about hugging upwards of a hundred people at a Christmas party the week before and having no regrets.
Well, at several different events, let's just be clear about that.
There was a men's meeting, there were a bunch of different gatherings, there was a basketball game that he was talking about.
He said that he also hugged people that he didn't know, but then he claimed that he contacted them all and whatever, yeah.
Yeah, he did some good contact tracing.
So multiple events to get to that number of upwards of 100, to quote him, right?
Also, we were first alerted to this because they posted stuff of them walking their dogs maskless and joking about spreading COVID.
But they both seem to be okay, last we heard, for now.
Well, we don't.
We have no idea.
We have no idea.
Right.
Yeah.
Which brings me.
We hope.
Yeah, we hope.
We hope they're okay.
Which brings me to Tommy John, who we've talked about on the podcast before.
He's the chiropractor from San Diego with 71,000 followers on Instagram, who's a huge COVID denialist, he's an ableist, he's a natural health and freedom advocate, he's a cross-promotional associate of Kelly Brogan and Sayer G, so he has the conspiritualist credentials.
It turns out his father, I didn't know this, is an iconic former New York Yankees pitcher.
Yeah, Tommy John.
You might have to help me, Matthew.
Is that kind of like cricket?
No, no, it's baseball.
Is it like hockey?
No, it's baseball.
And Tommy John is kind of interesting, and it's interesting given his son's, you know, kind of fetish for the natural and iconic, or organic rather, because Tommy John is famous for having had a particular surgery on his throwing arm that gave him another 14 years of pitching life, so he's kind of bionic that way.
Yeah, he's AI, right?
The New York Post reported Wednesday that the elder John lost control, lost motor control, when trying to get out of the car in Nashville outside the hotel he was staying at, and then had to be helped off the plane by several people on returning to California the following day.
A day later, he was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with COVID-19.
The Daily Beast reported that in a phone interview, the former athlete confirmed being hospitalized several times but remained unsure if his symptoms were COVID-related, saying with regard to the oxygen he was attached to, these people will put you on anything.
But here's the kicker.
I'm reporting on these facts right now.
Everything I've just shared with you, and I then went and checked it out and followed up, comes from Tommy John III, our chiropractic conspiracist, who posted all of this to his Instagram.
He created slides from the New York Post and Daily Beast articles, including quotes of himself telling his dad, you do not have COVID-19.
You never did.
Stop giving it permission and power by acting like it is a real thing.
Underneath this post in the long Instagram caption, John the Younger writes that people had been telling him he would be singing a different tune if someone close to him was affected by the virus.
And then, dude just goes all caps for 16 straight lines of vitriol, denying the pandemic, the virus, the test, masks, vaccines, and then he finishes up with, our immune systems end pandemics.
This is not a pandemic.
It's worse.
Yeah, this is such a tragic story.
I talked a fair bit about Tommy John's rhetorical style in one of the bonus episodes that I did, but yeah, I mean here we have this father-son relationship that's obviously built on a kind of toxic pride and, you know, uh, I don't know, immunological hubris or something like that.
Um, but I don't know if you saw the quote from Tommy John's, the elder's girlfriend, which was kind of gold.
Um, I don't, I don't have her, her first name here.
Her last name is Zeldin.
Um, but, uh, they're talking to her about whether or not he's going to get vaccinated.
And she says, he's getting the vaccination.
Trust me, uh, because she was diagnosed with a virus around the same time, uh, he was.
And then, and then the, the article finishes by saying later referring to his son, uh, she says she told him the senior, we're not going to tell Tommy you're getting it, but you're getting it.
Um, so, But yeah, I was just thinking about this father and son pair, both denialists, and kind of sharing that and their kind of, I don't know, belligerence against common sense and basic public health information.
Instead of sharing something else, which would be, oh dad, are you doing okay?
What's going on with your oxygen levels and how do you feel?
I mean, maybe that stuff is happening between them as well, but I don't know.
It just feels like something else going on, something very armored.
I really felt for the guy.
I mean, he's 77 years old and it sounds like his son is berating him and bullying him and telling him he needs to... Oh no, I don't know about that quote.
You quoted, you said, you do not have COVID-19, never did... I don't know if he's saying that to dad because dad himself is denying it.
Yeah, because he's on record not believing it with that Daily Beast article.
But yeah, but the younger Tommy John's rhetoric towards his followers, especially like that, is you don't have it, you never did.
I mean, I guess he's telling that to infected people.
Yeah.
I mean, either way, the elder seems like he's caught between a rock and a hard place with his girlfriend and his son, right?
Yeah.
Well, good luck to them both.
Okay, next up, we have, uh, this terrible story from Wisconsin, uh, The pharmacist who sabotaged the Moderna vaccine.
So this is a story out of Grafton, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, population just under 12,000.
The pharmacist's name is Steven Brandenburg and he was convinced that the Moderna vaccine would alter DNA.
This is false of course, it doesn't work that way.
It's an RNA vaccine, it doesn't reverse engineer your DNA or something like that.
Anyway, there's a family tragedy at the heart of this story as well.
It's reported that he was recently divorced, that he has recently brought his gun to work.
And I'd just like to say that family or financial distress seems to be a common comorbidity for a conspirituality or QAnon related violence.
One example here from Canada is that Cory Heron drove his armed pickup through the gates at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, which is where the Prime Minister lives.
He was financially desperate.
He talked about, you know, potentially losing his truck after he lost his business.
And yeah, then there's been several incidents of QAnon inspired parents kidnapping or attempting to kidnap their children in the midst of custody disputes.
And so from the article, it says that Brandenburg's wife of eight years filed for divorce in June.
The couple has two small children.
According to an affidavit, his wife filed on December 30th.
So this is really fresh.
The day before Brandenburg was arrested in the vaccine tampering incident, he stopped off at her house.
And dropped off a water purifier and two 30-day supplies of food telling her that the world was crashing down and she was in denial.
He said the government was planning cyber attacks and was going to shut down the power grid.
She added that he was storing food in bulk along with guns and rental units and she no longer felt safe around him.
A court commissioner on Monday found that Brandenburg's children were in imminent danger and temporarily prohibited them from staying with him.
And online records indicate that Brandenburg's divorce attorney withdrew from the case on December 28th, so he's completely on his own now.
And yeah.
And then as a pharmacist, he will have pinned to his name, yeah, I sabotaged vaccines.
And so too would be a happier story, which is coming from NPR, that the Cherokee Nation is allocating vaccines to Cherokee speakers, right? that the Cherokee Nation is allocating vaccines to Cherokee speakers, This is a really amazing story that focuses on a woman named Maida Nix.
She's 72.
She's one of the only 2,000 surviving Cherokee speakers in their nation.
And 20 native speakers have died of COVID so far.
There's 63 deaths in total for the nation, which counts 141,000 in its population on its territory in Northeastern Oklahoma, but also 380,000 worldwide.
So Nix grew up in a Cherokee speaking home but she didn't learn the language or I guess become fluent in it until after retirement and there's this little bit in the article that shows why that might have been easier than with other First Nations languages that are harder to access or now even lost so this was cool for me to learn.
Cherokee actually had really robust growth as a language in the 19th century before the U.S.
deported nation members to Oklahoma away from their traditional lands further south.
So, they had a writing system, they were publishing newspapers, but I think the most interesting thing for the three of us to consider on this podcast is the fact that Nyx was Vax hesitant but then changed her mind because of her Christian faith.
So, from the article It says that today Nix reads a Bible that's in both English and in Cherokee.
I think that's in reference to her teaching in Sunday school.
And she says, Nix says that when she was first offered a coronavirus vaccine, I wasn't going to take it.
And what changed her mind was listening to a Zoom call that involved COVID specialists and tribal elders.
I felt a lot better about it, she said, until the week the vaccines arrived.
I got scared again, she said.
What changed her mind a second time was her faith.
Quote, I said, I believe in God and I believe in his sovereignty and I believe what he says.
And he said, I'm going to be with you.
I'm not going to forsake you and we'll take care of you.
And I believe that unquote.
And last month she got the first shot with no significant side effects and is awaiting the second.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Today on The Jab, I want to cover three common concerns about the COVID vaccines.
First, it is understandable that the speed with which these vaccines have been developed can create a sense of suspicion or not trusting that they are safe.
Vaccines typically take years, not months, to develop.
And especially under the dumpster fire inside a clown car driven by a barking stray dog that is the Trump administration, some skepticism seems warranted.
But here is what's so incredible about the way these vaccines have come to be.
The currently approved COVID vaccines use something called messenger RNA.
This is a new development.
But let's backtrack one step to say that vaccines as we have known them so far have relied on taking the actual pathogen which causes the disease and then either attenuating, which means weakening it, Or inactivating it entirely and then just using fragments of it to provide your immune system with an exposure that makes it then create antibodies.
This allows us to recognize that specific pathogen and fight it when exposed to the live version of it out in the world.
Now here's what's so interesting and relevant.
The virus itself is made up either of DNA or RNA, depending on the type it is, wrapped in a protein casing, if you will.
Now that protein casing is created by the virus using what is called messenger RNA, specifically structured to create that specific protein.
So it's like a signature.
Scientists have been working on how to engineer that specific messenger or mRNA to use in a new type of vaccine for about 30 years and it can now be made relatively quickly in comparison to how much longer the process is required to grow and then reconfigure the pathogen itself for use in a vaccine.
Lucky for us, that process was reaching fruition in time for this COVID crisis.
The genetic structure of COVID-19, including the genes that make the spike protein, were sequenced within weeks of the outbreak and published online by Chinese scientists, so that scientists then all over the world could get to work creating and testing these highly effective vaccines that they discovered not only stimulate production of antibodies, but also of immune system killer cells.
This was all done within less than a year.
So, how it works is that the messenger RNA vaccine teaches your immune system how to make the COVID-19 spike protein, which is then recognized as an invader and destroyed.
And voila!
We have learned a new immune response.
Now this second one is that the messenger RNA cannot alter your DNA, as some conspiritualist influencers, most notably for us, Christiane Northrup, have claimed.
Messenger RNA simply cannot enter the nucleus of the cell where the DNA itself exists.
And in fact, the instructions that it provides are broken down by your cells within 72 hours and just ejected.
The only remnant left in your body is an ability to fight the disease.
This is a very streamlined incarnation of vaccine-generated immunity, and it's the result of decades of research and experimentation.
So, yay science!
Now third, many people who are vaccine hesitant have formed the impression that the ingredients in vaccines sound scary and so therefore must be dangerous, unnatural, or toxic.
But in vaccines that we've had so far, these tiny amounts have never been harmful, except in rare cases of severe allergies.
And when I say tiny amounts, I mean like smaller than you would naturally ingest in a single day via the air, drinking water, or various foods of things like aluminum or
Ethylmercury, which though actually completely safe, was taken out of most vaccines due to people confusing it with the actually toxic methylmercury and being influenced by the false claims of a disgraced former doctor who tried to link ethylmercury called thimerosal to autism for his own personal financial gain.
But all of that aside, These new COVID vaccines, we don't have to worry about it because these new COVID vaccines only contain messenger RNA which is not even actually made from the virus itself but it's just the code.
It's brilliant.
And that messenger RNA is then coded in a delivery system of naturally occurring lipids and these are like fats that protect the messenger RNA so it can get to where it's going just like in some of the supplements most people in the wellness space already take.
Along with injectable saline solution, you know, like you use to rinse your contact lenses.
That's it.
That's all that's in these COVID vaccines.
In other good news, messenger RNA technology is a very promising avenue for the future in terms of developing cancer treatments.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell left behind nearly 50 years of writing and lectures that continue to influence popular culture today. - Okay.
Perhaps nothing is more well-known than his concept of the hero's journey.
In this clip with Bill Moyers during the classic interview series, The Power of Myth, he briefly explains the role of the hero.
Why the hero with a thousand faces?
Well, because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions, which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many, many periods of history.
And I think it's essentially, you might say, the one deed done by many, many different people.
As the scholar Max Mueller said, he who knows one religion knows none.
And Campbell exemplified what it meant to study all of the world's traditions.
Here he discusses the evolution of the hero motif.
Do these stories of the hero vary from culture to culture?
Well, it's the degree of the illumination or action that makes him different.
There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters.
Now that is in the period of history when man is shaping his world out of a wild, savage, unshaped world.
Well, it has another shape, but it's not the shape for man.
He goes around killing monsters.
So the hero evolves over time, like most other concepts and ideas.
Well, he evolves as the culture evolves.
Now, Moses is a hero figure.
In his ascent of the mountain, he is meeting with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and coming back with the rules for the formation of a whole new society.
That's the Hero Act.
Departure.
fulfillment, return.
And on the way, there are adventures that can be paralleled also in other traditions. - The hero's journey consists of 17 stages, but they occur in three phases, as he mentioned.
And they are departure, which is when the hero is called to go on a journey, either of their own volition or due to some inner trauma.
Initiation, Erce called it fulfillment, which is the heart of the journey, in which the hero comes across challenges and trials, and often travels through some sort of underworld.
And return, which is when the hero returns to their society with some sort of newly acquired knowledge that ends up transforming their culture.
This outline has been hugely influential on many writers, poets, filmmakers, and even businessmen.
I spoke at both editions of the conference Mythic Journeys in 2004 and 2006, and I was surprised to learn that former Krispy Kreme CEO Scott Livingood based his business model on the hero's journey.
He called it a methodology.
Campbell famously visited George Lucas during the filming of Star Wars to help lay the groundwork of the plot.
So in many ways, most Hollywood movies follow this script because it reflects what so many people desire.
An epic journey after a fall from grace to ultimately lead to redemption.
You might even say a religion or two is being created from such a myth.
And there were criticisms of Campbell's work, and we're going to touch upon these.
Some felt his books overlooked important differences in various cultures.
Yet Campbell knew this was the case.
Even when writing his debut book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he understood that he was bucking academic norms, and part of him even enjoyed being a dilettante.
Summating the function of the hero's journey, Campbell wrote, A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder.
Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won.
The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
This journey, which is also known as the Monomyth, didn't originate with Campbell.
He was a popularizer, and nuance will be lost in the process.
What he did was make the academic world of mythology and religion accessible to a large audience, and the messages he brought forth remain meaningful to so many people today.
For 50 years, Campbell was calling for all of us to live up to the myths of our day, and even to create the mythologies that we feel called to live.
And yet that's led to an interesting juncture we find ourselves at.
Where the many hero's journeys we're living are at the moment are in conflict with one another.
Over the past year I've heard the term hero's journey uttered a lot.
As a speaker at the Red Pill Expo, Mickey Willis discussed his journey from left-wing hero to right-wing advocate in Campbellian terms.
So I went on to become an activist.
A left-leaning, far left, I would even say activist.
And again, I was a hero of the left.
A listener sent us this clip from integration teacher Sister Shanti, and I want to play it in full.
There's so many things that I want to say to you, but what's most heavily in my awareness right now is the divide that's occurring.
And what we're seeing is we're seeing two different groups of people.
One group is beginning to unlock and remember and understand that to be sovereign is to be connected to source.
It is when you begin to co-create with This power, this source energy.
And you remember yourself as this free and sovereign being.
And you take responsibility for yourself as such.
And then there's another group who is in a victim state, a victim mentality.
And they look outside of them for saviors, for answers, for solutions.
And because of that, they stay in a karmic cycle of pain.
and suffering.
And they're going to stay in that cycle of pain and suffering until they turn their eyes inward and they become the hero of their own story and they begin to integrate their duality.
Notice her use of hero in the context of a split between, basically, those who are woke and those who believe the dominant narrative.
Like the many sovereignty-loving, anti-masking, and anti-vaxxing wellness influencers we cover on this podcast, both Sister Shanzi and Mickey Willis are missing the point of the function of the hero's journey, and that's why I wanted to record this episode.
It's exhausting listening to devotees of the cult of individualism co-opt a framework that was designed to unite people.
As we know, ancient myths are extremely tribal because that suited the world at that time.
As Campbell mentioned earlier, borrowing a sentiment from Albert Camus, the stories of the culture must evolve every generation in order to track with the temperament of the times.
So the individual says, my sovereignty guides my every thought and action.
But the person who cares about the collective considers how their thoughts and actions affect others.
And that's what frustrates me most about people who intentionally distort information about vaccines, masks, and public health to serve their agenda of individualism.
They'll likely say it's for the good of everyone, and they probably believe it.
The problem is that not everyone that works in healthcare is out to get you, or us, or whatever.
They've let their concerns over the real and evil greed of executives cloud their judgment.
Most nurses, doctors, and hospital workers, they're there to help.
It's not surprising that America has produced and exported such a paranoid mindset, and to be clear, we're not the only culture guilty of this.
But we certainly have packaged it up and sold a lot of it, especially domestically.
What I really have a problem understanding is that we are experiencing a number of crises due to the pharmaceutical industry, including opioids and antidepressant medications as well as lack of government oversight for the FDA approval process.
If you care about the health of society, there are plenty of battles that need to be waged right now.
But instead, these self-proclaimed heroes attack one of the most effective classes of drugs ever developed and confuse basic public health protocols with some perceived assault on freedom.
But like I've been saying all last year, watch what they say, and then watch what they sell.
So if we can't understand right now, as we sit here overlooking a daunting ledge into a world irreversibly damaged by the climate change that our actions have led to, that the tribe needs to consider the entire planet, then we're missing a fundamental component of the hero's journey, which is to bring healing and knowledge to those who need it most.
Julian was also heavily influenced by Campbell's work, and I want to hear your feelings about the representation of the hero's journey in the era of COVID.
I'm going to jump right in here at the place where the conspirituality journey started for me.
Like you, Derek, I've been deeply influenced by Campbell, and as you mentioned, so has Hollywood.
Most famously, of course, in the Star Wars franchise, but for the generation that came after, the first movie in the Matrix trilogy is without doubt the singular iconic example.
The link then to conspirituality is perhaps the famous choice between the red and blue pill that our nascent hero, Neo, is given by his soon-to-be mentor, Morpheus, in that first movie.
This is classic hero's journey, call-to-adventure territory.
Do you want to know what it is?
The Matrix is everywhere.
It is all around us.
Even now in this very room.
You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television.
You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
What truth?
That you are a slave, Neo.
Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch.
A prison for your mind.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.
*clicks* You have to see it for yourself.
This is your last chance.
After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more.
Follow me.
In those final moments, we just heard Neo swallowing the red pill with a sip of water from the glass beside him, thus accepting the call to adventure and choosing to awaken from the dream of slavery.
And is it the dark truth that lies behind the illusion that has been polled over the world?
In mythic terms, we see a theme here that appeals to those of us drawn to contemplative paths like yoga and meditation.
The idea of awakening out of a slumber into a sense of being perhaps more present or self-realized.
Perhaps even more, those pulled toward psychedelic sacramental awakening in which you're literally taking something that wakes you up and puts you in an altered state of consciousness.
I would argue that the meaning of these quests is discovered via the process they catalyze toward becoming more free from the limited consciousness say of ego defenses, traumatic associations, or cultural conditioning, or perhaps the spell of powerful parental influence that may be occluding a more authentic self who has yet to discover their own path or maybe their destiny.
But when taken at face value, As many do in spiritual terms, awakening seems to be about literally seeing the material world as an illusion and discovering an ultimate reality beyond that is perhaps deathless, fearless, a realm of perfection beyond good and evil or right and wrong, a perfect state of unity consciousness, a recognition of one's true identity as inherently divine.
In the case of Neo, this also seems to be about realizing that by freeing your mind, you can perform feats of paranormal magic, a theme of course very appealing to most New Agers.
It's not really what the film is saying though, because Neo's magical powers only obtain within the computer program reality of the Matrix itself.
The real world is a place that is much more bleak and vulnerable and dangerous, and that's the world he's being anointed to save as The One.
In conspiritualist terms, we are faced with the extremely literal interpretation of the red pill moment as being about waking up And answering the call to arms against the reptilian pedophile cabal, that again, intent on enslaving us via microchips in vaccines that plug us into the 5G surveillance state mainframe.
Like Neo, this waking up to a dystopian and diabolical reality behind the naive illusion of democracy, earnest philanthropy, yes, I'm talking about Bill Gates, journalistic integrity, Otherwise known as the mainstream media and medical science, as represented by Anthony Fauci in the service of public health, represents for the conspiritualist the beginning of a destiny as what Dr. Christiane Northrup calls being warriors of light.
Tragically, these COVID denialist anti-vax quarantine phobic true believers are fighting an imaginary enemy, but with dire consequences in the real world.
Now, true to the Campbell clip you shared, Derek, there's a question of orientation here that is crucial, and it goes to how we think about mythology in relationship to psychology, to culture, our time and place in the world.
Like most Joseph Campbell fans, I appreciate Carl Jung immensely too, but I find that very often people deeply into Jung tend to mistakenly see mythology as a coded set of transmissions from a literal great beyond.
They often see archetypes as having a sort of independent existence, as kind of literal deities interacting with us or through us, instead of what I think is more correct, seeing them as symbolic expressions that come out of our own psyches and only seeing them as symbolic expressions that come out of our own psyches and only really have relevance based on our particular lives, our culture, stage of development, our core and the history.
A process oriented grounded in the real world psychological purpose to all of this can easily get lost in the reverie of contemplating the rich pantheon of mythic figures and narratives and via the more new age mood, becoming preoccupied with all the signs and symbols and synchronicities of everyday life as indicating some coded messaging from an authoritative and intentional transcendent source.
But what I get from Campbell is more that we have these universal existential conflicts and that these, if you will, are dressed up in the clothing of cultural specificity and shaped by the tensions each individual feels between things like familial expectations and personal temperament, societal restrictions and the desire for freedom or authenticity, the stresses of work and money and self-sacrifice as measured against the drive
To self-actualize the demons that haunt our nightmares and the brave vision that calls us forward to become who we already are, but do not know it yet.
None of that is about waking up to some patty cake spiritual bypass notion of divine perfection.
And none of it is about a semi-psychotic, semi-psychotic conspiritualist investment in an unhinged and prophetic alternate reality.
These mistaken interpretations, though, are not new in our time.
Think Osho.
Think David Koresh.
What it might all be about, though, is coming to terms with what is oppressive or immoral about your society and seeking, via the path of activism, to change those things.
In this way, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr.
fits the template of the hero's journey, but as much as he preached otherwise, his generational dark opposite, Charlie Manson, simply does not.
So it's not enough just to take the acid, join the cult, transgress the social taboos, to give in to your primal urges or renounce the supposedly illusory world of materialist preoccupations in the name of some higher revelation.
Something has to happen in the phase that Joseph Campbell calls being in the belly of the beast.
Some Negotiating of a universal conflict as understood through your unique personal situation that then produces greater maturity, empathy, insight, grace, and honesty in the face of the abyss must occur for the journey to really bear fruit.
This, of course, is where our conspiritualists fail in spades, but it doesn't stop them from borrowing certain aspects of the hero's journey structure to tell their well-rehearsed narrative via social media.
Because following your bliss has become a marketing slogan, and promises of radical life-changing awakening are central to any entry-level online course these days, the hyper-amplified spiritual signifiers are stacked and hybridized into a pitch that's market-tested to get conversions, even though what it delivers is usually very thin.
As an aside, my wife works in hotel marketing and she would say that conspiritualists and sort of the marketers that they've learned their shtick from are usually selling the sizzle but ain't got no steak.
She's from the South and another characteristic bovine turn of phrase comes to mind here.
Big hat, no cattle.
Perhaps then it was inevitable that the rise of social media celebrity facilitating the peak explosion of teacher trainings and master coaching intensives would produce almost as many heroes of their own myth as out-of-work screenwriters at the local coffee shop.
Although we can talk about so many, I want to look at just two of the conspirituality icons who will be familiar to listeners of this podcast, Zach Bush and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Zach Bush can spend as much time as you'll give him spinning a seductively emotional and poetic story that sounds full to the brim with cutting-edge science, but with an afterglow that makes you want to go out and hug a tree, rub sacred mud all over your body, and howl at the moon in an intuitive and spontaneous ritual created to honor our oneness with all bacteria and viruses.
Oh, wait, that's just me?
Never mind.
Anyway, here's how he structures his narrative.
He was a young and shirtless doctor in a tool belt, working with his son on the space they were turning into a clinic when a woman walked up to him and said, I'm supposed to work with you.
In hero's journey terms, this is the call to adventure, which will draw our protagonist out of the ordinary world.
He almost refuses the call because he thinks at first that she's there to help with the drywall or the plumbing, but then she explains that she is an acupuncturist, something he knows nothing about.
What follows is an initiatory experience for him, after which we found out that, as in most myths or fairy tales, there was a hidden dilemma or problem he had to face prior to this special meeting.
I took over this old plumbing building and my son and I were renovating this plumbing building into something that could surmise as a clinic.
And this woman walked up and said, I'm supposed to work with you.
Great.
And you do drywall, painting.
I was in my tool belt, sure enough.
It's hot.
It's Virginia day.
And we were just in this parking lot.
She said, no, I do acupuncture.
I had no idea, like I'm coming out of my allopathic, you know, cancer researcher, you know, marbled halls of academia.
I was like, isn't that that needle thing?
I think it was my response.
And she's like, suddenly realized that she had an uphill climb with this guy.
And she said, well, instead of me trying to convince you it works or tell you about it, why don't you just experience it?
Well, unbeknownst to her and, you know, unbeknownst really to my entire community, because I had really kept this thing so suppressed in my experience, I had been suffering from severe depression for a couple years.
And to the point of suicidal ideation, where I had picked the bridge that I could drive off of, which would make it look like I fell asleep on the way home from a 36-hour shift at the hospital.
I had gotten a life insurance policy that had a suicide payment.
I had researched the hell out of that thing to make sure that my kids would be taking care of all this.
That's the degree of darkness that was in my mind and how little I was valuing my capacity at that point.
And I hadn't gotten any antidepressants.
I hadn't actually really internalized the belief that I had depression.
I just knew I was in this extreme state of existence.
I was being stretched, is what it felt like, and near a breaking point.
And she got me on this table, I was on a massage table, and I'm looking up through the skylight above this table.
And she does this pulse reading, which I had never experienced or even heard of before.
And within minutes, she's telling me my life story by just reading my radial pulse.
And as a physician, I suddenly, and as, you know, grew up in a Judeo-Christian mind, I suddenly went to kind of that paranoia thing of like, is this a witch doctor?
Like, how does she know this stuff?
Like, what is going on here?
And she was very good at just talking me through the biology of pulse and what's a reading in Chinese, you know, science and all of this.
She said that pretty much there's enough chaos in your body right now that I think the only thing you can handle comfortably right now is a five needle balancing therapy.
And so she threw a little needle in both wrists on top of both feet and then threw that fifth needle right at my belly button and felt Literally like I'd been shocked like it was like 240 volts right into my belly for just a split second It was enough to like make a noise and then it was gone Five needles sitting there.
She said I'm gonna give you a moment just to relax here and just experience this and I'll be back in 15 minutes So I'm laying there on the back on my back and it's important to realize that this may may have also not just been acupuncture this was the first time anybody asked me to do nothing for 15 minutes and My whole life I had been in this frenetic production phase and striking that from childhood all the way through.
No kindergarten teacher ever told me to stop and do nothing for 15 minutes.
Nobody had ever told me to do that.
And so this woman with this five-needle system in me says, do nothing for 15 minutes.
Just be.
Just be.
So I'm staring up through this You know, glimpse of the sky, this little skylight, blue sky, beautiful, you know, day in the middle of Virginia.
And suddenly this little tiny white cloud starts to float across my vision of the skylight.
And I suddenly became so present with that cloud that I felt like I could taste it.
I was like just having this moment of, my God, that's the most real thing I've ever seen is that thing.
Because for the first time in my life, I was paying attention.
And in that presence of being, I had an ecstatic event with this cloud.
And in that, I instantaneously solved for depression.
And I went home knowing that something profound had happened, but within three days realized I was so full of life, so clear on what I wanted to do next.
So full of energy for the next thing.
I was so curious about the next thing.
And I realized I had lost curiosity for life.
And that's probably the best description of depression in some ways, is the loss of curiosity.
Because it's phenomenally interesting to be alive.
You've never been that next body in a millionth of a second.
You've never been there.
You've never had the opportunities that body has.
You've never had the knowledge.
It's so interesting and curious that sitting right here I have my new distillation of a 10-year clinic that I've literally spent thousands of hours and I have whole teams that think about how do we translate what we're doing.
And just sitting here with you in this space held between These incredible pieces of art that depict an indigenous wisdom and the future of mankind, suddenly this new word comes into mind, of it's just about ecstasy.
And I've said pleasure many times, but the word ecstasy I think captures it on a whole different level, which is, if a cloud can make you ecstatic and heal your depression instantly, what God are we reaching for when we ask for a pharmaceutical intervention?
What God are we reaching for when we admit ourselves to a hospital?
Now, not to knock these kinds of experiences.
I'm sure many listeners can relate to aspects of what he is saying.
I can too.
In a way, that's part of the problem.
But Zach's conviction that one acupuncture session cured his seriously progressed suicidal depression becomes a foundational aspect of the story of his awakening.
Very quickly, perhaps I would wonder too quickly, he has found what Campbell calls the ultimate treasure, and he is engaged in what we now know is a heroic destiny.
For Campbell, finding the treasure, vanquishing the dragon, escaping the maze, etc.
transitions then to the return, in which the hero brings what he has learned back to the community.
Zach returns from his quest offering everything from pseudoscience diagnostic machinery to encouragement to conceive of a radical new paradigm of medicine that embraces death and finds himself riding a huge wave of exposure during COVID that includes appearing to endorse everything from anti-vaccine rhetoric to both COVID and AIDS denialism on the way of course to selling a lot of supplements and espousing the possibility of how
For you, being treated at his clinic could lead to having something called a phase angle of 13, at which point you can heal disease before a virus even thinks to replicate.
I'll talk about RFK Jr.' 's strange narrative arc or weird heroic journey, if you like, from Camelot to denouncing Bill Gates and fear-mongering about 5G on a Berlin stage at an anti-quarantine rally last year in a moment.
But first, I'd love to hear from Matthew.
What's your take on all this so far?
Well, first of all, I just want to say that I really appreciate the time that you both put into compiling your thoughts on Campbell and his work.
I've learned a lot, and at the risk of being that guy who comes in with the kind of troubling deconstruction at the end,
I'm gonna throw just a little cold water on the angle as it's developed here so far and suggest that while it's quite true that we're seeing grifters ride and distort cultural mythologies that, you know, are laid out really carefully by folks like Campbell, at the same time it could be that there's something about Campbell's cultural influence that is already vulnerable or Perhaps even just kind of asking to be corrupted in a way.
It seems that his themes and method are awfully easy to weaponize.
And, you know, we've got a lot to say about how people like Mickey Willis and Zach Bush are like empty heroes, but I think we should also note how the rich Campbellian universe of Heroes and Journeying itself seems to be like catnip for them, at least in its popular or its devolved form.
So, you know, I came into this episode not as familiar with Campbell as either of you, but I see three things happening in connection with these themes.
First of all, no matter how sophisticated it's presented, the notion of the hero can't help but to reify the individual.
And that's something that we talk about on the podcast all the time.
Secondly, the journey motif can be conflated with, you know, something as broad as the colonial project or simply something as venal as spiritual tourism.
And then thirdly, I think the process of triumph that is described in the monomyth or learning and I suppose it's not triumph when the hero returns, but there's kind of like a reconciliation and an enrichment of the whole.
It seems like the narrative arc seems to depend upon a kind of bipolar landscape of, you know, there's a banal world and there's a magical world.
There's a homeland and then there's foreignness.
And I think that, like in the crudest terms, we see this in the simplicity, which is very much, talk about catnip, my kids love it, of Star Wars, right?
where we have very clearly defined good and bad sources of energy in the universe, and then something kind of vague that connects it all.
So with regard to that first thing, the hero itself seems to be an individualistic concept, Eric emphasized that Campbell's hero creates meaning to the extent that he brings knowledge back to the family or culture, and so that clip about Moses is a good one there.
How that sharing actually happens, it always seems to be a footnote.
It's like in the denouement of a lot of the stories that I seem to be familiar with.
And just to go back to Star Wars for a moment, have you ever noticed how poorly defined the Alliance is?
Or like how thin the vision of the peaceful planet actually was?
I mean, I guess at the end of that movie, when everybody's on the Ewok planet, that seems to be very happy.
But that doesn't last for very long because there's no real story anymore.
The forest moon, I know, the forest moon.
So when the heroes return to their homes, what are they actually returning to?
And some of them don't return or reintegrate with society at all.
So I'm looking at you, Luke Skywalker and Yoda and Ben Kenobi.
And how is it that when Princess Leia puts those gold medals around the necks of Han and Luke and Chewie, that this isn't simply like another version of Empire?
So, you know, just to take Star Wars as an example, the story is about revolutionary renewal through a kind of heroism.
But the bias is on individual actions and arcs.
And so, I don't think it's surprising that the heroic groove or meme can be taken up by grifters who foreground their own personal transformation stories for the purpose of generating, you know, quote-unquote, community online.
And, you know, here I'll bring up the example I've studied most here, which is that of Kelly Brogan and Sayer G, who are all about the personal transformation, especially Brogan, and, you know, she references it or performs it in every bit of content.
But when conflict comes, when the war comes, when opposition arises and the transhumanist agenda is in her face, she expresses her rebellion and risks getting cast out of the realm of mainstream social media, which is basically all that's ever risked for these people.
And so she has to ask for community.
Which is also her consumer base to follow her to Telegram or MeWe or to her subscription model.
So yeah, the individualism of this theme really stands out.
Can I just bring in one thing about that though?
And I do agree with that point, I think it is important.
I often talk about the lack of scientific literacy, but we can also talk about the lack of mythological literacy at times like this.
Because if you read the oldest extant Surviving full mythology, which is the epic of Gilgamesh, there is all of these amazing moments in the secret forest and the quest to actually find the plan of immortality and losing it to the fish.
But the point of the story was that when Gilgamesh returned to Yurok, he was a better ruler.
He was an asshole before that, and he came back and he unified the society.
And I partly blame Campbell for that, because he did put The onus on the individual in certain capacities.
Sometimes, not always.
The problem with deconstructing Campbell too much is that people usually just default to the Bill Moyers series, which was a culmination of life.
It was posthumous when it was released, so he never actually saw his influence at the level that we understand it now.
But if you read his 15 other books, as I have, There is a lot more that's not about individualism, but point being, I think your overall reference that it has permeated the general culture as a totem for individualism, I think that is true.
Well, I mean, you know, I think we brought this up on Slack that like the The marketing key for the wellness influencer, but also the marketer themselves and the person who sells marketing strategies and workshops and so on, is very much based upon, you know, are you, the language is always, are you telling your
um audience what you're about and what you've been through and how have you centered your story and how have you um you know have you figured out your why uh and so there's this constant reference not to any actual work or or to any actual data or to anything that would have social value but to the sort of reification or the elevation of the personal story to oh that's going to catch on
And that's what's going to be really fire for your market.
Yeah, so there's an interesting layer to this, which I think is primarily psychological, right?
So, when you say the focus is on the individual, I think when we're talking about mythology, where do myths come from, right?
They're cultural, but they're also Profoundly psychological.
There's someone writing down a story that is almost in a way coming from this dream landscape of how to conceive of, in symbolic and metaphorical terms, the journey of an individual life in which you struggle through all of these different conflicts, right?
So I think it's sort of inevitable that that's going to be there, although I do take what both of you are saying, I do agree with what both of you are saying about how you can emphasize different things and you'll find perhaps more variety in the myths than Campbell sort of was homing in on.
Yeah, and then I think the other point is it's, I think that it's difficult to apply ideological lenses of interpretation.
I mean, maybe it's not difficult, I don't know if it's necessarily super useful, in my opinion, to apply a sort of ideological lens to mythology that, you know, I feel like it's coming from a different place.
There will be ideologies embedded within myths, but Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if critiquing mythologies as a whole or maybe Campbell's choice of mythologies as being too individualistic and not collectivist enough.
Well, I think that's kind of where we are though.
I mean, you both have brought Campbell as kind of like the model for Like a cultural interpretation that's being taken in a particular direction by the influencers we've studied.
And so, yeah.
And I think that's some of the criticism that comes up that I've seen of Campbell, is that he represents a particular wedge of viewpoint and literary approach towards mythology in general.
There's one more point I want to make before you go to your second point, which is that Part of what we see with these influencers is that the hero's journey stops with them, and there is a perceived end point.
That's what the Great Awakening is, this perceived end point.
But if you read mythology, these stories never stop.
So in the Ramayana, Rama finds Sita and they're happy and united.
But a little while later in another story, they get divorced.
They break up.
We look at the Bhagavad Gita and we're like, Arjuna is the hero, but he dies.
His mother finds the glory.
So, you know, we take these moments and we're like, this is it, but we forget that there's always a continuation.
And I never see that idea.
And I think that's why we've seen radio silence from these influencers from after this week, because they were like, oh shit, this is real now.
I can see all of the Great Awakening isn't what I thought it was.
It's the Q Shaman on the dais and what are we doing right now?
And so, because they stopped at the story where the hero is glorified, they didn't see what happens after, they didn't follow those next steps.
Yeah, and then with the influencers and the marketing, the coaching kind of meme that you were referring to before, Matthew, I feel like that's a way in which it's been co-opted as well, right?
That the storytelling and the way you create an emotional connection with your audience who can identify with your heroic journey is more important than the content or the qualifications, right?
Yeah, so we have, I don't know, it's like everything in our discussion to me points back to, you know, the Debord Society of the spectacle that somehow we have
This rich literature that emerges not only from time out of mind, but then it's very carefully crafted through various skill levels of scholarship through the years, and now it's just purely commodified.
It's like the skim of it is just taken off the top and it's made as iconic and as reduced as possible.
But yeah, I mean, I guess my thoughts in relation to what you dug up this week are that, you know, where can we find in this notion of the hero's journey the kind of predictors for how those reductions would take place?
And so that second thing is, you know, what's the journey?
My understanding, I mean, maybe you guys can answer this for me, but In a real heroic journey, the hero has no idea what's happening.
Is that part of it?
No, not true.
In the Arthurian legends, the knights often don't even have a goal, but they know they have to quest, so they purposefully enter the darkest part of the forest to go find that quest.
So, the journey sometimes is unconscious, but sometimes it's actually chased to the point of they don't even know what they're going for, they just know they have to journey.
I guess, but I guess it's not like there's a... A map.
A map, or the objective that an influencer would have, right?
Like, however Sasha Stone produces his next bit of content, He's going to be journeying around figuring out what seems to be resonant for him, but maybe what I'm saying is that the heroic journey doesn't have an agenda for success, per se.
Is that fair to say?
Well, let's go back to Gilgamesh.
He found the plan of immortality, right?
He found it, he had it in his hand, but the one rule was he couldn't fall asleep until he got back to Yurok.
And he did.
And so, when he got back to Yurok, he realized that the actual point of the story, the transformation, was that he misses his best friend and he becomes a more benevolent and kind ruler because of that.
But there was a perceived goal in the journey, it just happened to be a different lesson that he learned.
But no, very often there are clear goals with some of the journeys, not all of them, but with a lot of them.
Persephone makes another one.
Even if there are clear goals, what I hear you trying to get at, Matthew, is that the journey itself is a process of discovery and surprise and finding out that what you thought you were trying to do is actually not the point or that something about you actually needs to be remedied, right?
That the outcome could be surprising.
And the way that the Red Pill Gateway is offered to potential recruits is over-determined.
The, you know, do your research or follow the white rabbit or, you know, watch follow the cabal is not directing the digital soldier towards an internal realization that would be unique for them based upon their particular circumstances.
Yeah, it's about indoctrination.
Right, right.
Maybe this is what I'm saying, is that the heroic journey is not the journey to indoctrination.
But what are journeys?
I mean, the second, it sounds like I liked how you detailed the three parts, Derek, that we have the journey there in the center as the quest.
But I wonder whether the fact that it's often into a supernatural realm of revelation, knowledge also provides some sort of catnip template for these guys, because it has a psychedelic and mystical flavor that, you know, carries all of the vulnerabilities that we've described so many carries all of the vulnerabilities that we've described so many times on the podcast.
The tendency to objectify intensely meaningful or peak experiences into points of personal certainty that then apparently have universal application and monetizability.
You know, there's also, like, there's so much journeying and traveling and rhetoric around discovery within the New Age that I wonder if that's another sort of, I don't know, bolderization of what Campbell has brought to the surface.
I mean, the journey is internal when we're talking about the way in which myth is absorbed into a culture.
Am I right about that?
Exactly!
So I think Campbell is saying, hey, here are these stories that have this fantasy component to them, right?
myth, fairy tale, folklore, fantasy, dream.
And here's how we can perhaps interpret them psychologically.
He was very, very much coming from using a psychological lens.
And I hear you pointing out how the conspiritualists heavily literalize in a very superficial way.
And they're allowed to by the economy that they operate in, which allows them to fly wherever the fuck they want on credit cards with zero pain and basically no rigor whatsoever involved in journeying other than booking your Airbnb.
It's like there's nothing, there's no cost, and yet these kind of faux pilgrimages that are really about consumer late consumer capitalism.
They're photo ops.
They're photo ops, right.
That there's no price to them.
Yeah, it's that frictionless concept that you've used a lot about the online space.
I think it applies to some extent here, too.
But I wanted to loop back around just to The Matrix, because I used that in my vid earlier.
One of my observations is that the first Matrix movie is so incredibly beloved.
It's so popular.
It's so influential on a whole generation of people, but especially of spiritual people.
And I'm sure on a lot of our conspiritualists.
The second one, a lot of people hated.
The second and third are not as beloved.
A lot of people were really disappointed by the second movie and it's interesting because the first movie fits a very, very oversimplified heroic narrative that's really about Neo accepting and embracing and then becoming the one, becoming the world savior.
In the second movie, that is deconstructed mercilessly.
The second movie is basically a series of philosophical conversations interspersed with action scenes.
In which he is completely humbled and ripped to shreds, and he's shown that his John the Baptist figure, Morpheus, is actually oversimplifying everything and kind of full of shit.
Wow.
Yeah, it's been so long since I've seen the second one.
The first one has stuck in my mind.
Exactly, right?
Probably because it follows the rules.
There's also this sense in which, you know, you talked on Slack, Derek, about how somebody like Campbell contributes, and there's other folklorists as well, but there's thousands and thousands of pages that are compiled that describe this literature, you know, varying degrees of accuracy and qualities of ethnography and so on.
But I also feel like, you know, especially when we see this material get utilized within entertainment structures, that
There's this vulnerability that the thing that the folklorist or the mythographer describes ends up becoming something that's prescribed, something that should be followed, or something that should be pursued, whereas, you know, are there any of these, are any heroes that Campbell talks about, do any of them know before they have that initiatory event that something is going to happen?
No, no, that's not a requirement.
Because sometimes you can enter the journey consciously, but sometimes it's trauma.
Sometimes it's something... Right.
Often it's the last thing in the world you want to happen, and you just can't avoid it for some reason.
Cancer is a good example.
The hero's journey is often applied to cancer because of that.
Because you're living your life, and then all of a sudden you have to stop life to deal with this disease, or you will die.
And so, I think it's a good motif for that, but that's an example of something that they weren't planning on, but you're called to do it for your survival, so you have to.
Yeah, and I've mentioned Donald Colshed in some of our episodes before, and his book, The Inner World of Trauma, is all about that.
And he uses Eros and Psyche from Greek mythology, and the fairy tale of Rapunzel.
He uses Bluebeard the pirate.
And some others, which in each case, there is some kind of traumatic event or you can interpret what happens in the story as being something that suddenly ruptures ordinary everyday safe existence and then reveals a whole set of conflicts that have to be navigated in a very sort of treacherous and terrifying way.
I think we're running down on time, and maybe I'll put this onto Instagram, that this third point that I have, maybe you can just speak briefly to it, is that it seems like a perpetual motif amongst the influencers that is that it seems like a perpetual motif amongst the influencers that we look at is this kind of bipolar constellation of things being good or
I mean, I talk about it in reference to, you know, Cultic discourse as well and black and white thinking, but you know, there's a banal world.
There's a world full of sheep.
There's a world full of awakening people.
There's magic or there's a lack of magic.
There's, you know, the grace and beauty of your organic home versus the coldness of institutions.
In your reading of Campbell and mythology in general, do you find that somebody, well let's just say somebody like Campbell, is creating this very kind of dualistic world through his model?
I'm currently reading the Norton World Anthology of Religions.
It's 4,400 pages, and I've had it for years and I used to flip through it, but I want to read it from beginning to end.
And Jack Miles, the general editor of the series, talks about how comparative religion only exists because we can compare to other cultures.
So I think that sense of dualism you reference, it just naturally exists in language.
Language only exists because we can compare something to something else.
In that sense, everything is a metaphor.
And I think what Campbell was trying to do, especially if you look at the time when you look at thousands of pages of literature that were produced in the Golden Bow and produced elsewhere about these mythologies, is Part of the reason for his own personal success and why he is meaningful to people, and I fully agree that people have co-opted or misunderstood the intention of some of these mythologies, but is because you have to compare
You have to make constant comparisons to other things in order to understand and to understand it into your own system.
My undergraduate degree, my thesis was on how Buddhism gets mistranslated coming into America because there are a lot of points that we miss.
But you can't help but not do that.
Because you only have your own cultural frame of reference, so there has to be some comparative.
And I think what Campbell was pointing out in a lot of this was that he purposely looked for that, and I think Julian would agree in terms of the Matrix, this everyday world, and then the other world of magic that you enter into when you're in that space.
My argument would be that First of all, these are cultures that were a lot more reliant on their imagination than we are.
They didn't have the media that we have, so really, you know, they weren't traveling around the world, they weren't, the travel was cumbersome and long, and so these are people who had their imagination to create these stories, so they were pushing their imagination to the furthest possible reaches, and what you're going to do is you're going to take metaphors and create storytelling out of it.
So, where else would you go but to a magical world that's different than this other world?
Yeah, and this is how human beings tell stories.
One of the things that I've puzzled over a lot with regard to all of this, because I'm hugely influenced by Campbell as well, there is a way where I sometimes step back and I go, okay, hold on a second.
All of these people, often ancient people, who are coming up with these stories, they weren't very carefully crafting a set of metaphorical symbols with the desire to, you know, deliberately espouse a particular kind of wisdom.
It's a much more intuitive, psychological, creative, archetypal sort of process, and it's why I think Jung is a good reference point for a lot of this stuff.
Look at, again, Indian literature.
In one story, Shiva will go from meditating as an ascetic in the forest for 20 years to sleeping with all of the forest nymphs on the next page.
So carefully crafted is perfectly put.
And that's why in the Bible you can find, because it was written by many people, you can find something to suit your argument no matter what.
Yeah, yeah.
And so the lens that stays in touch with the fact that this is storytelling, that it's not a source of pure and perfect deliberate wisdom, that it's a link into the imaginal realm that is part of the psychological legacy of being human.
One last piece I want to bring into this because I think it will wrap together a conversation we've collectively been having on Instagram.
It has to do with consciousness and thinking about previous cultures.
That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about taking these stories from ancient cultures and applying them today.
There is nothing in our life that I can think of, and I usually use technology as an example.
If your phone started operating like the first iPhone today, speeds and everything, you would probably freak out and throw it away or find out what's going on from your service provider.
If your house, if you had to light a fire every night instead of flipping a button to get the exact temperature you want, you'd probably be pretty upset by that.
And everything in our life is about forward progress except our spiritual inclinations.
We always yearn for this other time in the past, this romanticized past.
And one of the points that I've brought up in these feeds that we've been talking about is that when people say that whether or not consciousness is body dependent, It's pretty proven in neuroscience circles.
It hasn't pervaded the general populace in the sense that evolutionary biology did, and obviously that doesn't even stick with a lot of people.
But we are always forward progressing, and Campbell said that we need to update our mythologies every generation to suit the temperament of the times.
And a lot of, I think, to bring this together, a lot of what we're watching With the influencers and their sort of immature take on the Hermos journey is just that they're looking at a romanticized time without understanding the pain and suffering and the real work that's done on the journey to get to the place, to get to the end of the journey.
And they're also not recognizing that when you reach the end of the journey, there's probably another journey waiting for you so it's not over.
Yeah, so to that end, Derek, I found myself, as we were preparing, really interested in the narrative arc of one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who we've talked about quite a bit already on the podcast.
And I see him really as going from Camelot, Camelot lot, which is what the John F. Kennedy presidency was referred to in the media and the culture in general from the Arthurian romances.
Here's our noble king, John F. Kennedy, from there via environmental law to ending up at that rally in Berlin.
And I wonder if this is the one you were referring to earlier, Matthew, where a significant chunk of the people at this protest against quarantine measures ended up storming the parliament in Berlin.
And he's on the stage with a known Holocaust denier.
RFK is on the stage of an event that is put together by the German equivalent of the Sovereign Citizen Movement in Germany.
And what's he doing?
He's spouting 5G and Bill Gates and the pandemic is really an excuse for the elites to institute martial law and destroy the middle class and, you know, put us all into slavery.
How do you get from Camelot to there?
I just found this really interesting and it looks to me like His arc starts in 1989, because Kennedy writes the foreword to a book called The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, which tries to link vaccines to what they refer to as an epidemic of food allergies, especially to peanuts.
And then in 1998, His son is born, Connor, and actually, I'm sorry, in 94 his son is born and it's not until 1998 that Kennedy is a founding board member of the Food Allergy Initiative.
So, I just found myself wondering, like, is there a cataclysmic moment, right, where they discover the food allergy of Connor?
They discover that he goes into anaphylactic shock if he ingests peanuts.
And maybe if this sets Kennedy off on his Don Quixotean kind of hero's quest, where he sort of falls in love with every conspiracy theory he comes across, but he paints himself as the hero protecting children.
He ends up founding in 2016 the World Mercury Project, which is now called Children's Health Defense.
And, you know, they're focused on how vaccines, pesticides, paracetamol, fluoride, aluminum, and cell phone radiations are all potential causes of everything from autism to ADHD, food allergies, autoimmune conditions, and cancer.
When I hear about the problems with chemicals that we have in our society right now, it is absolutely true.
But obviously, Kennedy has not been honest with the evidence, and that's one of the problems, and that's why we bring them up a lot.
Would he have the same reach and influence if he stuck to the science and was honest about it and maybe had a problem with thimerosal and then realized it wasn't as bad and went on but continued to do his environmental work?
Do you think he'd still have that same influence?
Would it be the same story that he'd be telling?
I don't think so.
I think that just looking at his Instagram feed, it does seem like he gets really drawn to multiple different conspiracy theories and that's his I would speculate that that's his thinking style.
And so when he comes across a narrative that can connect the dots and say, well, it's glyphosate and it's the mercury in the vaccines and it's the flame retardants that are in the furniture, this is all leading.
I wonder if it feels, I wonder if that's his Arthurian forest, right?
It's like if there's something that's unexplained or seems to be a little bit ominous that's in his horizon or that's in his peripheral vision that it just feels compulsive to go towards that and to unearth the fact that there's some skullduggery going on or there's some corruption that seeks to control children because Maybe that's the quest, right?
Yeah, so he's in search of a quest and then he finds one and then as I was trying to sort of think through in terms of his narrative arc as I was calling it, it feels like the intensity and the outrageousness of the conspiracies and the quests keeps adding and multiplying exponentially so that you end up going from, I'm an environmental lawyer who is dealing with legitimate
Objections to what's happening to the environment and therefore perhaps to our health to, you know, being on that stage in Berlin.
Well, just to finish up, I want to say one more thing, which is that in looking at Campbell's work, there are some folklorists, contemporary folklorists who object to what they describe as his poor ethnography and his reductionism and stuff like that.
There's also a couple of reports of him in his private life saying some anti-Semitic things, so I just want to refer to those and say that maybe I'll put more of that into Patreon or onto Instagram and discuss what that might mean.
But Derek, I was happy to see, came up with the full quote for Follow Your Bliss, which of course has been amputated out and just sort of like passed around like a candy.
And I just wanted to read it and I want you, see, and here's maybe the...
I'm not really talking about Campbell, but really what a discourse ends up being used for.
Because, all right, I'll just read it and then I'm going to put a question to you.
So it says, I have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience, but in knowing the experience of other people.
When you follow your bliss, and by bliss, I mean the deep sense of being in it, and doing what the push is out of your own existence.
It may not be fun, but it's your bliss.
And there's bliss behind pain too.
You follow that and doors will open where there were no doors before, where you would not have thought there'd be doors and where there wouldn't be a door for anybody else.
There's something about the integrity of a life and the world moves in and helps.
It really does.
And so I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss.
If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you're on the wrong track.
I mean, you need instruction.
Know where your bliss is.
And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself.
So I just want you to imagine that quote read by Zach Bush, because I think the real, one additional problem with this sort of generalized language of, that is aspirational and that is rich and, you know, seemingly penetrating is that it can be easily co-opted or mimicked by just whoever.
So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there.
And I agree.
And you kind of come to the heart of, I think one thing that people have asked of my work in the past is how does an atheist study religion and love mythology?
I love storytelling.
I get taken by a story.
Like I can tell that it's not real, but that it also points to themes.
And I think that quote always, what always struck me about that quote and why I included it in an earlier draft and why I love bringing it out is because it talks about the fact that The bliss is your suffering and your pain.
And that's really what I pull from it as well.
It's the work that's done.
It's not the outcome.
It's not that everything is going to be great.
In terms of the world moving in and all that stuff, in one sense, your attention goes to whatever you put your consciousness to, whatever you're focused on.
So, in terms of the doors opening, it's just like if you are focused on something, then all of your attention goes there while you tend to start to move your life in a direction Derek, you're sounding so pilled right now.
No, I don't think there's anything mystical to that.
I mean, consciousness is what you give your attention to.
But I will admit, when I've read that in my early 20s, I was definitely more pilled in that sense.
Absolutely.
Now, I just look at it in terms of a function of consciousness, and I don't agree with everything that Campbell says.
There's also that.
But you get what I'm saying, right?
Absolutely, I fully agree.
So I think it's this weird, weird culture we're living in which is really post-modern in the sense that everything can be lifted and remixed and mimicked and spat back out for a particular consumer base with gravitas and meaning really stripped out.
Yeah, and the point I really hear you making here is that that kind of language, that kind of tone where you get elevated into that place where it's very poetic and it's very inspirational can easily be misused or can easily be applied in whatever way you want to because it has that emotional lift to it, right?
Yeah, like are you a literary theorist?
Are you a folklorist?
Or are you a preacher?
And I think what I'm getting from Campbell is that there's a little bit of both there.
And I think what we have with our influencers is that they're always going to pick up on the latter because they want to be preachers.
Home is where the heart is.
hospice is. - Yes.
I've changed some names in this account.
My mother died peacefully at home just after 5 in the morning on December 28, 2020.
I was at one side of her bed and my father was at the other.
At the foot of the bed stood the personal care worker who had kept watch through the night and roused us when my mother's breathing changed one last time.
Her name is Rosa.
There's a whole lifetime of things I will think and feel and eventually be able to say about my mother personally.
That won't be my focus here.
I think it's enough to say that between and within us there was all the joy and trouble we know as love.
And if I take away the personal psychology of the two weeks I spent helping to nurse my mother at home, I can see more clearly that that home hospice became a kind of meeting place that I think answers some of the painful questions raised by conspirituality.
Now I want to be upfront about the fact that my father and I were privileged to be able to do this.
My parents' house is in the same district as one of the top hospice care centers in the province.
The Dorothy Lay Hospice in Etobicoke.
They coordinated the care.
And neither of us were compelled through hunger or other scarcity to have to work during those two weeks.
And we had neighbors who brought great food for us, including two full Christmas dinners for us to warm up on that particularly lonely day.
But for all of this privilege, I wonder about the raw accounting.
Whether in Canada, with socialized medicine, we actually eased the system by taking mom home, freeing up a bed, a room, and duty nurses.
And if in the end, this was less expensive.
I wonder if it is actually accessible, or it could be, even to those who are poor.
Of course, the caregivers would have to have two weeks' wages to spare, or maybe even a month, because there's no certainty as to how long it takes.
On this podcast, we've taken our lead from Charlotte Ward and David Voas's elegant description of conspirituality, which is a paradoxical movement.
We've presented this many times on air, but at the risk of getting too heady, I'll read their abstract one more time here from the paper that they published in 2011.
They write, The female-dominated New Age, with its positive focus on self, and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory, with its negative focus on global politics, may seem antithetical.
There is a synthesis of the two, however, that we call conspirituality.
We define, describe, and analyze this hybrid system of belief.
It has been noticed before without receiving much scholarly attention.
Conspirituality is a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews.
It has international celebrities, bestsellers, radio and TV stations.
It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions.
The first, traditional to conspiracy theory, And the second rooted in the New Age.
One, a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order.
And two, humanity is undergoing a quote-unquote paradigm shift in consciousness.
Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian, quote-unquote, new world order is to act in accordance with an awakened, quote, new paradigm, unquote, worldview.
So I'd like to spotlight two things.
Ward and Voas' phrase is, quote, a rapidly growing web movement, unquote.
Now in the closing segment for episode 32, I spoke about the medium of conspirituality as being intrinsic to its message and emotional impact, and to the charisma of those who market it.
The digital sphere is fast, accelerative, limitless, and frictionless.
In that piece, I spoke about how the home hospice experience I was going through at that time was very much the opposite.
I'll unpack that a little bit more here.
But the second thing I'll spotlight is how conspirituality attempts to reconcile binaries, but in a toxic way.
Ward and Voas identify New Age culture as female-dominated, which is a simplification but nonetheless fair when we look at consumer statistics such as who practices yoga, for instance, which is 70-80% women.
They also identify conspiracy culture as male-dominated.
And they don't provide data for this, but to the extent that the most powerful conspiracism of recent years has come from where the Manosphere meets the image boards, I'll buy it.
We could also just remember that it was Henry Ford who flagged up the fictional document Protocols of the Elders of Zion for use by the Nazis.
Ward and Voas are describing a union of opposites, in a way.
But to my eye, it seems more bipolar than integrated.
That the threats of conspiracists stand beside the promises of the new age.
Bad cop, good cop.
Harsh father, welcoming mother.
The devotee to conspirituality is buffeted between these, never quite knowing which will show its face.
So when we talk about the cultic dynamics at the heart of conspirituality, this is the dichotomy and oscillation that creates what Alexandra Stein says is the primary condition of cult membership, disorganized attachment.
You never know what you're going to get, and therefore you live in a state of constantly activated fear and apprehension.
From aesthetic and archetypal perspectives, this strained duet between the New Age and the political right makes sense.
But it also carries a clue that the conspiritualist might be trying to reconcile some very primal tensions between the need for order and the need for love and care.
So what does all of this have to do with hospice in the home?
Well, if I hold that first longing for being offline, Alongside the second longing for a true reconciliation between paradigms, it kind of makes me think of Jejomar, who was one of the palliative home care nurses.
After more days in the hospital than she wanted, and while the various agencies scrambled over the last weekend before Christmas to find a hospital bed that could be lent to the home and staff that could inherit her care and charts, Mom arrived home on a Sunday afternoon.
We knew that we needed help and medications, and we weren't entirely sure when they would come or who would tell us how to administer them.
But somehow everything happened.
The drugs arrived, and they came in boxes with a lot of bags of other things.
I had to show ID at the door to receive the hydromorphone.
J. Jomar unpacked the boxes at the dining room table.
Now, this table is an antique.
It has a story to it.
It came from a long ways away, and it's at the heart of the home.
He sat on a chair that my mom had recaned after years of dinners had made the seat sag.
And he opened a binder on her crocheted tablecloth.
He had to move candles and a centerpiece.
And on the far end of the table, there was a stack of photo albums.
He didn't have to move them.
My mom had put them out for me to look at.
And in a short time, he seemed very much at home.
And it kind of reminded me of some of the craft-type things through which my mother expressed her endless industry.
He was just doing his stuff, and he might have stood out in his blue scrubs and mask and booties, but he was still at home.
Of course, he was unwrapping things that were foreign to the house.
Handfuls of one milligram plungers, the tubes wrapped separately from the syringe sharps.
There were bottles of medication, and those joined the ranks of the other medications in the home, except that these contained these little brown files.
Clawed glass, I think it used to be called.
And he took out stacks of alcohol wipes and arranged them in a neat pile beside some napkins that my mom or dad had folded neatly perhaps weeks before.
Before the whole hospital expedition.
before this whole chain reaction that had brought her to this bed from which she would not get up.
Jejomar needed to give my mother four subcutaneous ports for the possible medications we would be using for pain, anxiety, agonal breathing.
And he needed to draw up the syringes, teach us how to use them, and then organize them for us on the table.
So he asked for masking tape, scissors, and four juice glasses.
So we brought them out and then he drew the syringes and placed them in each in their proper juice glass like they were flowers with only stems.
And he carefully wrote the medication names out and the dosage times on the masking tape and he labeled each.
And then to cut the masking tape he used a pair of my mother's sewing scissors.
They're small, they look like they're gold-plated, and they have that finger handle for your pinky.
And later, we used the same scissors to cut slits in the pajamas so that various ports would be accessible.
Then, around the table, we had a quiet conversation about what each drug did, and the interactions, and how the ports wouldn't be flushed and so they couldn't be cross-contaminated.
And it was all a matter of fact, and J. Jomar did it from memory, and it kind of reminded me of the dozens of recipes that my mother would recite to me as I half-listened.
Knowing I really should remember how to make pumpkin pie or key lime pie because she's not going to be here forever.
Now I'm describing all of this because with Jejumar and everyone else that entered the house during that time, there was a seamless meeting of worlds that are usually very far apart.
They brought the hospital to the home, and, representing the home, we opened the cupboards and the laundry to the hospital.
It's understandable that so many conspiritualists, especially if they are American and traumatized by a predatory for-profit especially if they are American and traumatized by a predatory for-profit system, have such distrust for institutionalized
I can't help to think, however, that with more exposure to the actual people who practice it, as people, in the world, in homes, that something more human would take shape.
But I also don't think it's all about institutional distrust.
I studied and practiced Ayurveda for many years, and there's one particular therapeutic principle that has always haunted me with its simplicity.
It's called very simply the application of opposites, and I think it's consistent with many of the practices of other pre-modern medicines.
It's simple.
If something is cold, you warm it.
If it's too wet, you dry it.
If it's too fast, you slow it down.
If it's too bitter, you sweeten it.
It makes a lot of intuitive sense, but on closer examination, it's more aesthetic than biological.
That's another story.
I did have a Vedic Studies teacher who pointed out that the modern clinical space was imbalanced according to this mechanism.
Hospitals are cold, brightly lit, with hard surfaces, and the aesthetics are partly about cleanliness.
But there's something else that it took reading Michel Foucault to understand.
In The Birth of a Clinic, he describes brightly lit spaces that transform the healing art from an epistemology of touch, where physicians are feeling pulses and smelling urine, to One of the visual world in which bodies can be cut into and looked at and examined after they are draped and segmented and reduced to a collection of objects.
In Ayurvedic terms, the clinical space is cold and hard and super smooth up to the point of scalpel edges.
It doesn't feel like cuddling.
It doesn't feel parental and caregiving.
It doesn't feel maternal.
I don't think it's a mistake that many of us crave for softer and warmer spaces when we are sick or even dying.
In fact, to listen to Brit Hermes tell it way back in episode 7 of our podcast, modern naturopathy is pretty attuned to this and actually trains practitioners to mitigate the clinical space with better finishes and textures and even clothing.
So, I think we can forgive ourselves a bit in recognizing that in evolutionary terms, we're just not used to clinical spaces.
We have grown up in homes and towns and markets and places of worship.
We have built institutional spaces with the naive assumption that they will simply welcome us if they are large and clean.
But all of this conflict and contrast just melts away when J. Jomar walks through the door.
He's bringing an institutional knowledge with him, but he's entering a home, and that changes things.
I mean, he's also a guy, and this flipped something as well.
There were four other nurses who circulated through, and one of the others was also a man.
Maxim was older, in his 60s, and either Russian or Ukrainian, I didn't ask.
He had a slow and deliberate manner about him, and the sense that he'd seen, like, really difficult situations.
And he sat at that same dining room table, reorganizing materials, and I thought about how natural it would be to pour some tea for him and get out the chess set.
Annika was also Eastern European.
She was a little abrupt, I think, because she had back pain and she was also very busy, but at one point she was able to take the time to say, we come here in pain, referring to childbirth.
It is such a gift and a responsibility that we can lead people out of here without pain.
Now it makes sense that the personal care workers added a whole other level of hospital-home integration.
They asked for pitchers, washbowls, soap, washcloths, paper towels, fabric towels, lotion, new pajamas, pillows, and more pillows.
Taught us how to clean, and turn, and position, and prop.
And I don't know if this was standard, but all of the care workers very naturally called my mother, Mummy, as they explained to us and to her what they were doing.
And as soon as I heard this, I regressed back to using that word too.
Mummy.
All of this work goes on in hospitals as well, but it seems to move in another, less visible lane.
And when the food person brings the tray to the room, it's not in their scope to ask if anything else is needed.
And the nurses in the hospitals I've been in can do everything, but of course their time is very limited.
But in the home, everyone is sharing these tasks.
The binder keeps everything in order, but there's no sense of traffic control.
So it would have been odd, given how personal this whole environment was, if we hadn't engaged these care workers in conversation as they came in the door and put on their PPE.
So we learned a little bit about where they came from.
Of course, this highlighted the whiteness of our own home.
They came from South America, the Philippines, I didn't ask Inaya where she was from, but I think it was from North Africa, because when I thanked her, especially for working on Christmas Day, she said, well, I am Muslim.
And I replied, but Muslims accept Jesus, right?
And she said very seriously, yes we do, but not Christmas because we do not accept anything make-believe.
So I laughed and I agreed with her that yes, Christmas was an old pagan holiday that we'd just appropriated, really.
And she nodded.
The night before my mother died, we had to confer with Rosa about waking us up should something change in her condition.
And when I went to say that very simple thing, that if she should notice something, etc., etc., she just started nodding.
And my voice choked.
And she looked at me over her mask and her glasses and she said, I know, it's very hard.
She really didn't need us to give her instructions.
In many ways, she was there to guide us.
Just before 5:00 AM, Rosa called my name up the stairs. Rosa called my name up the stairs.
I put on my clothes and a new KN95 mask.
I'd been wearing them for 14 days non-stop and there were welts on my ears from the straps so it really hurt.
I came down and sat beside the bed and leaned in.
Rosa stood at the foot of the bed looking down over the three of us.
When mom finally stopped breathing, there was a pause.
Then Rosa whispered, 5-10.
She kept time for us.
We didn't move for a really long time.
At 8am, the lead nurse came to make the pronouncement and helped us disconnect all the tubing and put clean pajamas on.
And the light gathered in the room.
I've been in hospital rooms with my mom as the light came up in the morning, but this was different.
The light that came in here was going to be part of the rest of the day.
It was going to be part of the house.
And when the nurse left, we did an impromptu funeral with readings.
And at 11 a.m., the funeral directors came, and even they entered comfortably into the home as if they were nephews.
What makes conspirituality so effective is that it takes two worlds,
the world of institutional fear and the world of spiritual promise, and the world of institutional fear and the world of spiritual promise, and it packages them together across this division between the pre-modern and the modern worlds in a trauma bond that's purpose-built for social media provocation.
What the home hospice experience showed me was that, at least in some circumstances, the hospital and the home may not be as irreconcilable as we think, or at least not in a way that needs revolutionary or charismatic healing.
Perhaps this also applies to technology and the body.
Perhaps even to the state and the person.
And maybe these things are bound together and reconcilable because people are the common denominator, and people can cross thresholds and adapt.
Our homes do not typically feel like hospitals, either to our senses or in terms of the chain of command or whether we are entirely free to care for ourselves as we wish.
But who are we kidding as globalization and design also bring these spaces together for so many people who choose it?
Think of the finishes in the typical starter condo in any major city in the world.
How much stainless steel is used?
How much molded plastic?
How many veneers?
And how much colder and harder have these spaces become?
I don't think we can ignore the drive towards the minimalist and the aseptic.
I personally find it very hard to believe that Marie Kondo would ever get COVID.
It's just too clean.
And I think this is the appeal of the private space of the clean Kondo set apart from the city.
Even so, the condo is a home, and people can die in condos, and if they have care when they do, it will be given by people who come in and out.
They'll be able to hear the clothes brushing and the gentle clatter as they put the kettle on, and they're not going to be aware of anything that's zipping around on social media.
Perhaps you've heard those monstrous stories of people dying in hospital of COVID but telling their nurses that it's not true, that they can't possibly have it because COVID is a hoax, that they've been tricked.
Against our whole history of terrible deaths, it's hard to imagine something worse.
For me, this would be like dying slowly as I gazed into my murderer's eyes with this sense of paranoid betrayal.
I really think this must be the worst possible outcome of conspirituality.
The feeling of being overcome by the conspiracy part, by deception, but then also abandoned by the spiritual promise that could never be fulfilled.
But in a typical and maybe better death, I'm guessing here because I've only witnessed two deaths, whatever fear there is would not be about the Illuminati.
But about something extremely close and internal.
Something that couldn't be named.
And whatever spiritual promise one might be able to cognize I believe it would be felt mainly through the ability to sense breath or light.
And so this exaggerated, algorithm-driven dream of hell versus heaven, the cabal versus 5D consciousness, I imagine it would all just evaporate.
And so maybe the task is to help it evaporate in life as well, by finding spaces where this bipolar wound can be healed.
Because I'm coming around to the thought that one thing that conspirituality is, is a cleft between our institutional and private lives, between our fears and aspirations, between our need for order and our need to just collapse into messy emotions.
I don't know anything about Rosa personally, And I know that in my vulnerable state it would be natural to project all manner of things onto her.
But even so, it seemed to me then, and now, that she was somehow stood perfectly in that gap between the institutional and the private.
The place that conspirituality doesn't know about, or has forgotten.
It's a place of service and trust in which the empathy of those in the room is so evident that any thought that everything could be totally wrong is just implausible.
It's a place where literally thousands of years of research and care converge to do very simple and necessary things.
There are no fantasies in this place.
There's breathing, there's textures, there's drips, and a hand brushing a cheek.
I don't know how long Rosa waited after she whispered, 5-10, holding that privacy.
But soon, the rhythm of shared care just started up again, and I found myself across from her, doing the working part of things, moving my mother's body into a better position for traveling.
And then moving towards the hall with Rosa, where she removed her PPE, as we whispered out, thank you.
She took off her gloves and sanitized her hands.
There's a pandemic on and she has more homes to visit.