Bonus Sample: Reality Bites: The Tragedy of Magical Thinking
Julian traces the roots of today’s pandemic-era conspirituality back to What The Bleep’s quantum woo, The Secret’s privileged denial and grandiosity, and the dark lessons of why beliefs really matter, as revealed by James Arthur Ray’s deadly Spiritual Warrior Retreat.Show NotesLaura Tucker’s response to Nine Perfect StrangersGuru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
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This combination of pseudoscience and profoundly reductionist anti-psychological messaging would come to dominate the yoga and wellness sphere for at least the next decade.
And make no mistake, this is Spiritual Bypass in a Nutshell.
In the dictionary, next to the term spiritual bypass, you will see a picture of this particular nutshell with the ideas from what the bleep contained in it.
Because what they're saying is that your painful emotions are really just an addictive chemical process that you can be free of when you realize you have a choice.
And this is because of the higher scientific truth of quantum physics.
Now in seeking out clips to share, I thought it was just fascinating that in this particular discussion that you've just heard about the neuroendocrine aspect of emotions, The animation on the screen with those funny voices that you could hear in the background is about hunger.
It's kind of this weird mismatch.
I'm hungry!
The cells are yelling up to the brain saying, we haven't gotten our fix today.
And it's going to start sending impressions to the brain and the brain is going to start to formulate imagery.
It's going to sound like voices in our head.
Think of a reason why we should be depressed.
Think of a reason why we should be confused.
Think of a reason for our own suffering.
And the body is going to be telling the brain that it's not getting its chemical need.
Chemical needs met.
And so the brain will then activate and start going to our past situations and flashing pictures to our frontal lobe.
And then there's live action narrative stuff interspersed in which our female protagonist is being a photographer at a wedding.
And in the animated scene at the same time, with the hungry cells, we also switch back to an overweight man who's a guest gorging himself on the wedding buffet.
And then we cut to chiropractor Dr. Joe Dispenza talking about how our minds manufacture illusory reasons to be depressed by creating links to our past.
And then cut again to the fat man stuffing his face.
Well my definition of an addiction is something really simple.
Something that you can't stop.
We bring to ourselves situations that will fulfill the biochemical craving of the cells of our body by creating situations that meet our chemical needs.
It always happens to me!
Why?
Why?
So my definition really means that if you can't control your emotional state, you must be addicted to it.
The people that we really love are people who are willing to share our emotional needs, our feelings, whatever they are.
Whether they're sexual, whether they are victimized, poor me, poor you, whether they are power.
You need somebody to control you so you feel like you're in control.
The more I sit with this, and even just describing it to you right now, the more painful and demeaning this really is on several levels.
And then Dispenza goes into the mention of addiction, and we have his key statement here that if you can't control your emotional state, you must be addicted to it.
Thank you.
Let me transition to the nondescript fake accent and ersatz psychoanalytic riff by Jay-Z Knight, complete with the vintage pipe she's holding in her hand to cement the claim that she really is channeling a 35,000-year-old king named Ramtha because he would smoke a pipe.
So, I should mention that What the Bleep Do We Know is a film created primarily by three people, William Arntz, Betsy Chase, and Mark Vicente, all three of whom were at the time students of Romtha's School of Enlightenment.
You may recognize the name Mark Vicente as the creator and star, in a way, of the HBO documentary about NXIVM called The Vow.
That's some quite high-profile cult-hopping and documenting going on there.
Now on this account of human psychology, the answer to suffering isn't therapy or medication or even meditation.
It's not finding loving relationships in which we feel accepted and supported.
Rather, the answer is to recognize that on the quantum level, We are recreating these unpleasant experiences ourselves and need to realize that we can absolutely always choose to manifest whatever reality we really want by using our consciousness to select it from the infinite fluid potentiality of electrons in their superposition.
Simple.
So it's hard not to come away with the impression that if your life isn't blissful and prosperous, it's your own damn fault for not recognizing that your mind creates reality at the quantum level.
The talking heads do plenty of poo-pooing of the boogeyman of scientific materialism, instead positioning consciousness as central to the existence of the universe.
And they anecdotally recite paranormal research claims, none of which have ever passed basic standards of peer review and replication.
And then they smilingly perpetuate the sleight of hand that confirms that the mesmerizing anomalies of the incredibly tiny realm of subatomic particles, which we've known about, by the way, for close to 100 years, represent THE radical new paradigm for psychology and spiritual growth.
If only.
The double-slit experiment, which shows that our concepts of waves and particles at the level of the electron simply break down, somehow really meant that we could solve all of our personal and global problems through choosing to perceive reality however we'd like it to be.
If only quantum entanglement really did mean that loneliness, relational dysfunction, or political polarization was just an illusion that could be overcome in the blink of an eye.
But these pseudo-profound claims are actually a kind of philosophy porn that exploits our deep longing for genuine insight and relief from suffering.
If only the probabilistic nature of electrons meant that we could all be superheroes with the ability to pass through walls or fly through the air or be immune to the inevitability of death and taxes.
Ever since the first early human shoved a bear thigh bone through a bear skull and then placed it with care upon a flattened and smoothed stone altar, people of all cultures have reached out for a hopeful imaginary link between rituals, prayers, and intention as a way to influence events in the material world.
They've done this by petitioning the invisible forces that they thought must animate nature, or by honoring the great bear spirit that surely gave birth to the bears we hunted to stay alive, or by positing a kind of sympathetic or imitative magic of ritual enactment in order to bring the rains, or give protection from predators, or to hasten the death of their enemies.
You know, it's almost like the most primordial level of our basic anxiety-soothing cognitive distortions intuitively knew all about quantum woo.
Or maybe soothing our own anxiety by constructing ways to magically gain control over the world is just a side effect of our evolved ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and experiment internally.
We have a kind of simulator that tries out different strategies for overcoming threats and danger and trying to get what we want, none of which is guaranteed.
This kind of imaginative thinking can lead to creative and effective problem solving, which is great.
But if it becomes untethered enough from reality, things go wrong.
And when an entire industry thrives on encouraging that kind of disconnection from reality as if it were a virtue, as if it was a step forward on the path toward enlightenment, the environment this creates becomes very receptive to scams, charlatans,
