We’re grounding down. We’re letting go. We are going deep. We are finding the metta in our meta and tuning in to Source. This week we’ll either answer or transcend the core questions our listeners post in moments of parasocial vulnerability:Do you guys believe in anything at all? Are there any wholesome spiritual communities out there? Are all spiritual teachers toxic?This four-hour immersive encounter between three white guys is not to be missed!(Seriously tho: we’ve got some huge interviews and investigative pieces coming up in the next few weeks, so we’re kicking back a little here to talk basics and regroup.)
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Conspirituality 71.
So, do we believe in anything at all?
We're grounding down.
We're letting go.
We're going deep.
We're finding the meta in our meta and tuning into Source.
This week, we'll either answer or transcend the core questions our listeners post in moments of parasocial vulnerability.
Do you guys believe in anything at all?
Are there wholesome spiritual communities out there?
Are all spiritual teachers toxic?
This four hour immersive encounter between three white guys is not to be missed.
It's really important.
Seriously though, it's not going to be that long.
We've got some huge interviews and investigative pieces coming up in the next few weeks.
So we are kicking back a little here to talk basics and regroup.
Wait a second.
I blocked off four hours for this.
What are you talking about?
I'll let you guys take the last two.
Right.
I think it's best to start with, you know, why do we get these questions?
Because, and I'll just say that personally, my first responses to them have in the past been allergic, like, it's none of your business what I believe, you know.
I don't know where to find a good spiritual community.
I just write about bad ones.
I even cut about a bonus episode with that title.
I'm a little bit less allergic to these questions now because I understand that they really are about trust.
And yes, we make a crack about parasocial vulnerability off of the lead there, but I think we do have to acknowledge that we're doing long-form podcasting and it's really intimate We're in people's earbuds talking about spirituality and religion and bodies in some depth.
And it's natural that I think listeners drawn to the content are going to have fundamental questions about trust and values.
And that's especially true if we are in the position of picking apart or mocking beliefs.
You know, the old saying, it's easy to tear things down and it's hard to build things up.
And I think it's also true if we're talking about influencers who in some ways are in the same position that we are.
You know, people who want to produce attractive content but who may eventually show themselves to be cynical or even manipulative.
And then also I think these questions speak to the sort of technological landscape because we're talking within this alienating and frictionless and low filter landscape with way too much data to process so it's natural to reach for some relational foothold like what so what do you really like?
And I think the values footholds might be simple in some ways.
The bars for trust in some ways could be pretty low.
I think too, Matthew, that we're, you know, what we're doing is so sort of content heavy in terms of all of the different stuff that we analyze.
And for a lot of people, many of whom are really appreciative, but are also frank about it being like a big a big change in terms of their worldview interacting with our content, then inevitably underneath that are the philosophical questions.
Like, okay, so what are the implications of all of this for my deeper philosophical attitudes about life and being human and spirituality, if we want to use that word?
Yeah, I agree.
So we've organized, or we've picked three questions that we may not have received verbatim in the last week, but we've received versions of them over time.
So we're just going to sort of start an opening round by responding to Each of these three.
So, the first one is more of a statement.
It's like, it feels like you guys don't believe in anything.
I guess the question would be, what's up with that?
Or do you?
The second one is, so are there good spiritual communities out there?
Or are all of them toxic?
And then the third one would be, so are there good spiritual teachers out there?
Or are all of them toxic?
So, who wants to take a crack at number one?
I will rehash a story I've told before, but it's pertinent here, which is that I arrived in college without having grown up with any religion.
My father's side was Russian Orthodox, my mother's side was Catholic, but they didn't push any religion on me.
I went to CCD for a little bit and then said, I don't want to go anywhere.
They're like, okay, that's fine.
So when I got to college, I was wide open.
I didn't have any sort of training or any sort of, I don't want to say indoctrination, but I didn't think that this one religion was better than any others.
I I didn't have that.
So when I decided to major in religion and become a religion journalist for the school newspapers at Rutgers, I got to talk to a lot of religious leaders.
And then, you know, I'll talk to Muslim leaders and Jewish leaders, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, like all Rutgers has a very diverse campus.
And all of them thought they had the special sauce.
And after, you know, doing this for a few years and reading all of the texts in a comparative manner, I realized, and this does dip over into the other questions though, that these communities were really good for people to be involved with because they gave a sense of camaraderie between people.
But the problem was, was everyone thought they were right.
And that's just impossible.
You can't have that.
So, I don't believe in any particular sanctioned religion.
And as I'll get to as we progress here, I find problems with the word spirituality in general.
I find problems with the word religion in general.
And that's not just me.
Religious scholars can't define religion.
There are actual fights that go on about what religion actually means.
And you can extrapolate from that and apply it to spirituality as well, because everyone's going to have a definition.
And what I've found is people usually mean some physical and emotional feeling that I have and I have experienced, which I then take to believe that that experience is the same for everyone.
And to me, that's problematic in itself because it's anecdotal, even in a communal setting.
So I'll turn it back when you say something like, don't believe in anything, that is the most vague statement because it's like, well, what are you really asking?
Yeah, I agree with that.
The question sort of has baked into it when included in the definition of belief is belief in something supernatural or belief in something that cannot be touched by science or reason.
I think like both of you, I was very drawn to investigating and exploring religious traditions and ideas and mythology and especially spiritual poetry and practices.
And I was very interested in the first-person subjective direct experience that practices promised from traditions that were very practice-heavy.
And to echo what you just said, Derek, I feel like one of the wrong turns that certainly I've taken and that I see a lot of people take is to is to interpret a direct first person experience as disclosing something universal about the ultimate nature of reality, about the metaphysical existence of some kind of, you know, domain based on my direct experience.
And typically what happens is that interpretation is based on your pre-existing beliefs anyway, or on the pre-existing beliefs of the community within which you have the experience, whatever that experience is.
So I think for me, over time, I just, I became more interested in being science informed and so now I sort of see science as a primary value that makes all other spheres of inquiry better.
It kind of creates a demarcation around what sorts of claims are acceptable to make.
And which are probably really suspect.
And this also has a psychological component and for me it's very embedded in an embrace of the body as sacred in and of itself.
And we know that many certainly traditional religious ideologies did not really do that.
So it's a sort of almost maybe a humanistic spiritual principle that combines with the sense that scientific method is good.
What I hear both of you saying is that some kind of experiential phenomenon translates into a belief state that ends up creating faith claims.
And I think there's a bridge there to look at that reveals something about the way in which we use the word belief.
And I'm going to answer this question with a little bit of etymology.
And to just say to begin that I think this conversation is
Especially between three guys approaching or in middle age, can't help but to be influenced, especially with the content that we deal with, which is to, you know, analyze, you know, spiritual new age content, that it can't help but be influenced and perhaps overshadowed by the echo of, you know, early aughts or even 1990s rationalism, the skeptic movement, the new atheist movement.
And there's a politics and there's an attitude that goes along with that stuff that, you know, we could do a whole other show on.
But I'll just limit it to say that, you know, the nugget that I take away from that era and that zone comes from Peter Boghossian's Manual for Creating Atheists, which I read A long time ago, in which he defined, and he actually kind of, he conflated faith and belief with this definition.
He said that faith is belief without evidence and the state of pretending to know things that you don't know.
But, what I want to say is that this relies on a historically bound understanding of belief that is fairly narrow and that, again, it conflates two different things.
The state of knowing something and the state of feeling something.
So, if we go back, something happens to the word belief in the English language.
Somewhere prior to the 12th century, we have Old English and Germanic meanings of the precursors to belief.
I don't know how to pronounce these.
Galefa, Galauben.
But the general feeling of these words is that which we hold dear, that which we find beloved, that which we esteem.
And then at a certain point, especially maybe with the rise of scholasticism, maybe with the influence of monastic learning and the Catholic Church in the 13th and 14th centuries in England, we have the introduction of fides, or faith, from the Latin, which is really a way of describing a set of claims that will sort of define you with a religious identity.
And those two words begin to combine.
And so, when Boghossian uses a word like belief or words like belief and faith somewhat interchangeably, I think what he's doing is he's missing the fact that When people say that they believe something, when they hold a belief, they might be talking about what they love as much as what they think.
And that's a really important distinction because, you know, when you think about, if I were to imagine like the typical Evangelical participant in a megachurch down south somewhere, swaying to music and holding their heart and, you know, raising a hand in praise and with their eyes closed.
And you hear them say the word, I believe in Jesus.
Are they making a claim in that moment about who and what Jesus is or what Jesus means?
Or are they saying, I love the idea of Jesus?
I love the meaning of Jesus in my life.
And what I've noticed about the Discourse that a lot of, you know, our landscape inherits from, you know, from rationalism, skepticism, new atheism, is that the notion that people are actually talking about what they hold dear is lost.
And this is not to say that beliefs can't have negative outcomes, but it is to say that if you don't address the fact that when people say that
you know they're they believe in something and what they really mean is that they love the idea of you know acupuncture or Reiki they love the worldview or the feeling that they get when they encounter astrology then they're talking about something different than whether or not astrology has predictive power in any kind of like measurable sense and I think if we miss that if we miss that then we're
Then we're going to miss culture in a lot of ways.
I don't live by beliefs in the sense of these are the things that I know to be true.
I live in a world of trust and endearments, like these are the things that I love.
So, anyway, that's what I wanted to say about what I believe.
And then following from that is like, oh, I can list all of the things that I love, but I don't really use those things or focus upon them as articles of truth or, you know, things that will never change or things that are just sort of etched in stone.
Well, you're saying, you're putting in your own kind of frame something that I'm going to come back to again and again today, which is that
The differentiating of meaningful experience and emotional connection, whether that's to that experience or to the group of people with whom one bonds during that experience, that teasing that apart from faith claims and from the metaphysical ideology, whether it's explicit or implicit, in which that is happening, I think is a really worthwhile endeavor.
And I think that even though the person in that megachurch may not be saying when they say, I love Jesus, That they believe in some very specific set of factual claims.
The preacher is saying that.
And the preacher is selling them on the idea that if you believe these things, you will go to heaven, you will have eternal life, you will not die, which is a core thing that people are really afraid of.
You will be saved by having this personal relationship with Jesus, who is not just a metaphorical mythic symbol, but in that context is the living God.
That through him you shall come to salvation.
And so I think it's really tricky to... They might have doctrinal training that way, it's true.
And they might be repeating what they've learned in seminary.
Who, the preacher?
Yes, the preacher.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that I mean, there's this distinction, Derek, you were talking about religious studies and its struggles with defining religion.
Well, yeah, and one of the most compelling ideas that I've come across in the last 10 years or so is, I can't remember who was the pioneer of this, but the notion of lived religion is to try to find the distinction between what people enjoy doing in terms of their spiritual meaning and how they identify in terms of doctrinal tenets.
And there's usually a huge difference between those things when you really do the sociology on them, right?
Like the person who practices Catholicism in Mexico with elements of Santeria and whatever is saying that they hold the doctrinal tenets of the Catholic Church but what they're actually doing in their lives from day to day reflects something much different and so
Yeah, there's a wedge in there and I think we have to like walk a line because I'm sure our listeners are filled with, you know, this split world of experience versus claims as well.
Or at least they live there too.
That would look a lot more like AOC than Ted Cruz today.
Right.
Which would infuriate conservative Republicans in America.
But if you want to actually talk social structure and policy, that's just the reality.
So when people say they're waiting for Jesus to come back, no they're not.
Not really.
Because you wouldn't recognize that.
And if you did, you would reject it.
Exactly what we're seeing play out in America.
When you say look like, you mean in terms of policy, right?
Yes, not physically.
Correct.
Well, the hair too, I guess.
But the romanticization aspect of spirituality, I mean, we're so accustomed to it from yoga, the yoga land, where there's this idea of there were these yogis who just meditated to bliss, spent their days and everything.
It reminds me of a conversation, and I think I brought this up in one of the music episodes, Back in my DJing days, I used to DJ with someone named Rekha who founded Basement Bhangra.
And in the early aughts, there was this moment where Indian music was having a moment in hip-hop where Jay-Z sampled Punjabi MC and Missy Elliott in Timberland took a tabla sample for one of her big hits.
And so there was a talk because I was predominantly DJing and hanging out with the South Asian community.
And Rekha warned, because when I asked her, I said, how do you feel about Bhangra reaching mainstream acceptance now all of a sudden after all these years?
She said it really bothered her, this happy natives story that was around Bhangra from the general population, meaning that this is all music of the happy Indians in the fields dancing as they gathered the crops and planted meaning that this is all music of the happy Indians in the fields And she's like, that's not the reality of what Indians go through.
And, you know, we've, of course, in our circles, we know about the problems with Monsanto in India, very real problems that happen with trademarks and how high the suicide rate is in farming in India.
But it's not like that's a new problem.
This is something.
Sustenance farming across Asia has been an issue for thousands of years, probably since the dawn of agriculture.
So the distance between our idea of what a spirituality is and what the lived reality of the people are is vast.
As I've often said, if you live a middle class or better lifestyle in America, where those concerns aren't really affecting you, then of course you can have all sorts, your imagination can go anywhere you want to think that there is this ideal time that you'll reach if you just do these things that your yoga instructor has told you to do.
Well let's get concrete though with it, because with the issues that we cover, if we look at what's the evidentiary basis for people saying that something like acupuncture works, or why do people believe, to use that word, in Reiki.
When somebody believes in Reiki, whether they are, you know, describing something that they love, or whether they're making a claim about the energy moving through the hands, how do we, like, our title is, So Do We Believe in Anything?
Like, how do we approach statements and sentiments like that?
Well, I think for me the point there, the distinction I would make there is between the experience that is happening that involves trust and relaxation and having someone being there for you in a loving and supportive way.
and the sort of wonders that emerge in that kind of relational experiential space that includes touch, that includes a certain kind of nervous system entrainment, that includes having space to decompress and maybe open up emotionally or to release physical tension, whatever the thing may be.
It's differentiating that from what I still see as a very specific claim, which is that there is this energy, it's called Reiki, and you can take this training and it costs this much money to learn how to be attuned to the special Reiki energy that comes through this lineage from this special person who was in some way superhuman. and you can take this training and it costs this And
And even if that's not being leaned on heavily, it's still part of that superstructure, you know, the idea that people can engage in practices together that are beneficial and healing that we might be able to understand through neuroscience or through relational psychology or through just general sort of physiology and some sort of mind-body process, or that we may not be able to fully explain.
Accepting that and valuing that is very different than saying that the metaphysical framework that it comes in is sort of neutral or harmless or doesn't matter what you call it because actually there are some pretty strong things being smuggled in there that I think are potentially problematic.
I'd also look at it just from what the claims are.
Very often, and it's also indicative of social media and how we're reacting and interacting with the people that listen to us, is you'll hear us say something and then it'll be like, well you just don't know.
And usually, speaking for myself, a lot of these modalities I've done many times.
Like when we've talked about chiropractic.
I've had over 500 chiropractic sessions in my life, so I know a bit about it.
I had very serious hip problems when I was younger.
Let's go to acupuncture, because honestly I don't know much about Reiki at all.
But with acupuncture, I've had dozens of sessions, and I will say that it's very relaxing.
I really enjoyed them, the music, the lying there with the music and the points.
I don't feel it, but when I leave, I feel lighter because I just laid on a table for 45 minutes and listened to music and meditated, basically.
Yes, I feel good.
Will this have positive effects on my immune system?
Very possibly.
But will it cure this or that thing?
Well, then you have to look at what was my immune response from the music, from the meditation aspect, from the lying down, not just the meridian points.
You have to look at it holistically.
And then you have to take a data sample of many people who've had similar experiences, and it's really hard to do science.
So, a lot of these modalities we talk about and critique, I have no problems with.
Some I do, but not all of them.
And if they bring somebody healing or joy, I'm all for them.
But when the claims are made, that's when I get Triggered by it because I'm like, you can't make those claims because then people who may need serious medical help are going to instead turn to those modalities because they're believing your claims and when they don't work, there's going to be guilt, there's going to be harm done, and the people that perpetuated that myth are never going to take responsibility for it.
So it's like, for me, it's seeing these modalities that are more experiential, that are sort of outside the realm of conventional medical science, seeing them as sort of life enhancing and potentially supportive of some kind of healing process, but that they're not an alternative to actual medical care.
And that they certainly don't rise to the level of being something that is going to be prescribed for, you know, really serious injuries or that is going to claim to be effective for really serious injuries or diseases.
And unfortunately, as with a lot of people we cover, this is what we see happening because the underlying philosophy buys into this idea that, oh no, this is actually what real healing looks like.
If you're really holistic and taking responsibility for your health and all the rest of it, and you've rejected Big Pharma and Western medicine, then you'll do these things even, you know, to the extent of COVID or cancer or something like that.
I think with the alt-health zones where we can appeal to, well, did this work and do we have enough studies to show that it works, we're in a fairly tangible territory.
But we also, when we're speaking about the belief in something working, we're in a fairly tangible territory.
There's a huge spectrum and maybe on the farthest edge we have something like mediumship or, you know, psychic skills.
And I want to bring up that, you know, I posted onto Instagram Something about MLMs, I can't remember what the post was, but into the comments came a very enthusiastic defender of their own MLM.
She was very earnest, and she had all of the explanations and everything that MLM defenders say.
This is not a pyramid scheme.
This is like any other business.
I've been doing this for 35 years, so it must be okay.
There are assholes in every business, and so on and so forth.
But I clicked through.
The profile and I found that the person also makes money as a medium talking to dead people and so I posted to Instagram that feeling when or to Twitter that feeling when an MLM defender crashes your IG with a lot of earnest sounding arguments about how their unnamed MLM is not exploitative and then you click through and learn that they charge $200 for 90 minutes of channeling dead people.
And when I tweeted that, I went into Slack and I said, Derek, is this is this a low blow?
Is this is this too much?
Is this cruel?
I mean, I'm not naming the person and, you know, people who are on the page or they're going to know what the what exchange I'm referring to.
But nonetheless, This is somebody who has made their living in MLMs and they also sell sessions in which they communicate with dead people.
Now, are those two things connected in your mind?
Is it fair to discredit A person's comments or their opinions based on this combination of career choices.
There's an idea that how you do one thing is how you do everything.
Some people believe that.
I don't think that's totally true, but it does cut across occupations sometimes.
For example, my work with conspirituality and my full-time work happens to do with flow states, which I'll talk about at some point.
There's some crossover in terms of what I do and I would expect that of a lot of people.
There's very few people who do very distinct things.
I want to latch on to that medium thing because I think that makes an ideal segment for this conversation, which when we get to there, do I believe that's possible?
And the answer is very clear, no.
Because I believe consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that occurs due to the That's an example where it's a very clear cut answer.
It's a world that's open to charlatans.
I am going to guess that some people who think they're channeling are very earnest.
You brought up that word.
and think it's true, I don't think it's possible.
Nothing in the study of consciousness has opened me up to believing it, and I've never seen proof of that.
Well, this is why I'm bringing it up, is that my comments on Instagram prompted objections from people who practice psychic mediumship and who will say, well, what I do is not is that my comments on Instagram prompted objections from people who practice psychic mediumship and who will say, well, I resent being, you know, lumped together like this.
And that, it gives me pause.
So, you know, one question that comes out for me is, well, can people act as mediums without hurting others?
And how would they do that?
I think it kind of spills over into the idea of good spiritual communities.
It's one of those things, the human imagination is incredible.
It's one of the driving principles of our evolution culturally.
And if it's bringing somebody a sense of closure in their lives, or if they feel complete, if it helps them, I guess it's not totally bad to me.
I mean, there's a lot of things like that.
It's a placebo.
So, it can be done with a sense of humility, possibly.
I don't have a lot of experience with that.
But overall, I still don't think that you're doing anyone any good by saying false things or things you can't actually verify.
And it spills over into something we've all said in various ways.
If you're talking to alien civilizations that are ancient and futuristic and have all these amazing powers, Bring back a cure for cancer.
Bring back something useful.
Don't bring back, oh, they love you and you're going to be great in life.
I've never seen a message from a medium or a channeler that made me think, wow, that's really valuable information.
Yeah, or deep and profound insight.
What you have both spoken to, though, can really be defined by a certain kind of cultural narrowness in terms of exposure, though, right?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I would add, because I know where you're going next, Matthew, I would just add before you do that, I think that I think that it's even stronger than placebo.
Derek brought up placebo when you're dealing with something like mediumship.
In terms of looking into it, you know, admittedly from a skeptical point of view, although when I was younger I would have been quite open to that kind of thing, there's a profound experience that's happening, right?
There's a deeply emotional experience that someone is getting to have in that context where they believe that the person sitting there is talking for or talking to their deceased loved one.
Maybe some kind of closure happens, maybe just an opportunity to grieve or just to come to a new place in that process of loss.
And I think that that's incredibly valuable.
But like Derek, I find that the crossing over into that territory where the claims about life and death and the afterlife that are the basis for the monetary exchange, that are the basis for the belief system that then the person is going to walk away with.
Like I had this experience and therefore it means this and this about the ultimate nature of the human soul, for example.
To me, that's the opposite direction of what I think healthy awareness practice goes in.
And I think we're all hyper-vigilant about the fraudulent aspects or the capacity for deception.
And just to give away the script a little bit, next week we've got a very rich episode about John of God.
Uh, based upon the, uh, the popularity of the recent Netflix special.
And just in my notes, I've characterized him, in the research that I've done so far, as a raping, gangster, strong man who used spirituality to con millions.
And he enjoyed the support of the police and the military, and we have to say, also the New Age consumer pipeline all the way to the global north.
But then, I'm doing, as I'm compiling the work for the episode, or some of it, I'm speaking to a Brazilian feminist journalist, her name is Myrna Wabisabi, doing an interview, and she's hypercritical of the grift of the misogyny and patriarchy of the strongman stuff.
But then when I turn to talk about how there are Afro-Brazilian ritual and animist practices that inform what John of God did in his healing quote-unquote sessions, I ask her about how one of the women, the survivors, who's featured in the Netflix documentary, her name is Lora Hanyi, I don't know how to say the name, but
I say that she has actually taken to Candomblé, which is one of these traditions, as a restorative practice after her experience with John of God.
And so, John of God is a spiritist, and so his whole thing is that he can embody dead doctors and saints.
He imports some of these West African aspects into his ritual and spectacle.
And so, as I understand it, Candomblé is, you know, spiritist-like possession by West African gods that the slaves brought with them for protection.
And the practices involve complex rituals, exorcisms, sacrifices, and mediumship.
And I'm talking to Myrna and I find out that she identifies as a practitioner of this, right?
And that she has found it to be incredibly rich and profound.
And I'm like, wow, what would it be like to have this eagle eye upon the way in which a medium could be an absolute charlatan and then at the same time invest in a kind of metaphysics that takes what would it be like to have this eagle eye upon the way in which a medium could be an absolute charlatan and then Like, that's amazing.
And I don't know, I personally don't know what that would be like because I think I'm so poisoned by what I see in stories like John of God and, you know, all of my cult experiences that I just couldn't get there.
In the run-up to this show, you had mentioned, Matthew, that you have trouble with peak experiences.
And that is something that Flowstates evolved from Maslow's idea of peak experiences.
So it's just a linguistic thing, but it's essentially the same idea.
So I want to respond to that in two parts.
Candomble is West African, so I don't know that much about Yoruba and Bantu, but I know a little bit more about Gnawa, so North African, same general trance ideas.
Which is, the ceremony will start at sundown or shortly thereafter, and the music goes on for eight to ten hours until the sun rises, and the dancers are predominantly dancing the entire time, the singers are chanting.
And so, from my perspective, I want to look at it in terms of the physiology of what's happening to their nervous systems if you get into a trance state by dancing for six to eight hours and what is possible at that time.
Now, you brought up the idea of sort of a Western belief or looking at it that way, but in terms of flow state research, Hundreds, or probably at this point, thousands of people have been studied under fMRI technology while engaging in flow state activities.
And what they found was there was a shutting down of the prefrontal cortex.
And when this research started in the 1980s, it thought that there was going to be hyperactivity in the brain.
It actually turned out to be hypoactivity.
So the areas of the prefrontal cortex that were shut down were actually parts of the brain that had to deal with identity.
And so what does that mean?
I mean, well, there's an immersion in your surroundings.
There's a sense of the boundaries between your body and then your environment dissolving so that the activity you are doing and your personal history and baggage and everything that goes along with it are now dissolved so that you feel at one with that activity.
And what's amazing is with flow states, It can only happen if you're enjoying the activity, so it has to be something you're passionate about.
It can be reading, but it's often correlated with physical activities.
So we have a way of looking at these things and measuring them To say, well, across all domains, even though they're vastly different rituals that are happening, the same activity neurologically is happening.
Does that mean that the brain is causing it?
No, it's environmental, it's social, there's a lot more to that.
But we have a way of actually looking at these phenomenon and being like, wow, there are actually activities that cut across cultures and domains and times that we can investigate and learn from.
And I think some of that Almost a mysticism of science when you look at it from that way, as Ramachandran would say.
It is really useful for us, but we get so caught up in our own specific domain that we forget that those states are possible in other domains as well.
Well, let me add to that too, Derek.
I love what you were just saying in terms of how you're unpacking flow states and kind of the universality of the human organism, right?
That our nervous systems and brains are the same, and so it cuts across different cultures.
And while the entry point may be different, People in all times and places have figured out ways to access these states that we find beneficial, meaningful, etc.
Not only is it about the dissolving of the boundaries between self and environment and self and other, but also a sense of timelessness, right?
Also a sense of being at the center of the universe itself, connected with everyone, a sense of great peace and effortless kind of awareness, just doing what it does.
Yeah, I want to second all of that and I also want to say that I would never want to, on an interpersonal level, I would never ever want to take away from what you were describing Myrna as, you know, having this practice that does that for her, that does what we've just been describing.
I would never want to take away from this woman who has healed from horrific experiences using what she has available to her from her culture within her particular environment And that being beneficial to her, I think that people who get bitten by the rationalist bug just maybe have a certain kind of temperament where we say, well, yes, all of that and it matters at the end of the day.
What we think is really true and figuring out what's true in these kind of ultimate ways is a worthwhile endeavor.
And so the experiences can be meaningful and valid and not be true.
And as you've highlighted and underlined beautifully, Matthew, that that can be problematic in certain cases.
And maybe in other cases, it just is what it is.
And a healthy dose of humility and acceptance of other people's path is a good thing.
Well, I think that I really focused on this juxtaposition between people finding a kind of resistance within contemplé and also umbandas, the other practice.
In response to the kind of Christofascism that we see in John of God, but to go back to this premise of the universality of flow states and the fact that, you know, they are just accessible to everybody and we are starting to understand the organics of it.
The reason that this comparison is really amazing to me is that when people are sitting in the quote-unquote flow at the Khaza in Abidjania with John of God, they're in flow states too.
And that's how they are being abused.
And so, you know, it's like...
It feels like the organic and biological descriptions of the flow states are one thing, and then there's this other question of, well, what's the community of care that's actually holding them?
Group flow is also a studied phenomenon.
Charles Lim at Johns Hopkins studied jazz and hip-hop improvisational artists where he hooked up them to fMRI while they were playing and found that their brainwaves synchronized while they were performing together.
And take that at a large scale, you can really call college football in America chances for group flow to happen.
It's soccer, right, around the world.
That completely happens.
That's why people lose their identity and sometimes the violence that happens after their team loses because they're so invested in that.
And both counts, the comparison to religion that's often made, I think, is a valid one.
For them, football is a religion.
And just like our talks that we've had in previous weeks about psychedelics, these are content-free experiences.
So if your thing is going off and listening to this guy and you're doing the reporting on John of God, I'm not that familiar, but if you're in a state where you're Meditating together, dancing together, whatever that ritual environment you're in, if that is something that gives you a sense of community, then whatever content is being put out there, once you reach that state, you are going to be open like a book for them to put that content in there.
And that, to me, is part of the indoctrination process.
Yeah, and that flow states are also highly suggestible.
So we're susceptible both to our motivated reasoning that says, oh, I had this experience, it must mean this.
And we're susceptible to others who we trust saying, ah, now you've had the knowledge, as Prem Rawat calls it, right?
And so now you know that I'm really God on earth, for example.
Let's bring it back to our listeners, though, because I think that this question, which my comparison of the, or my pointing out that the MLM seller also talks to dead people, that really sort of touched a nerve.
And I think the nerve is, and I think the nerve also gets touched in the comparison between what's happening in John of God's Casa and Condomblee, perhaps, which is that
To criticize or to analyze the use of spirituality in La Casa implies that, I think for some people, that people who do this are unethical or they are more liable to hurt others than if they had gone to business management school or whatever.
That if they chose something else to do with their lives.
I think that's really where the question hits home for a lot of people.
That's my sense anyway.
I think that's really good.
You know what I mean?
When somebody comes in and says, they say, they say, well, you know, I'm a practicing psychic and I don't abuse people.
They, they may be lying, but, or they may be so unselfaware that they have no idea that through the process of like unexamined transference and countertransference, they are fucking up people actually, and they shouldn't be taking money and they should have gone to school instead.
It is possible, it is very possible, that in their own contexts, in their own communities of care, they are providing valuable services.
And I think that our demographics, our Global North consumer demographics, do not really give us insight into how these things work in places where they have worked more continuously for longer periods of time.
Where you know maybe the the I mean my instinct is my instinct my gut feeling when somebody says that they practice mediumship in Toronto is that they're fucking people over like that's that's that's what my gut instinct says and I don't think it's fair and I want to really interrogate that in in myself because
Maybe it is actually more often true than not in Toronto, but that doesn't give me permission to say that it is true in, I don't know, in South and Central America or in India.
Well, we're dealing with, again, these media.
We are not built for social media, culturally.
We just, humans have never had this sort of experience before.
And we, as middle-aged men, we watched it unfold in our lifetimes.
Like, we had access to international news when we were growing up, but not at the rapidity which we do now, and not in the ways that we do now.
So, this is really new territory.
I still don't think though that there are not fields of study that cross cultures that can be beneficial.
It is a challenging subject to talk about.
Levi Strauss was criticized for his views on anthropology, but he still brought a lot to the field.
So, there's no other way to look at reality than through your own experiences.
You can build empathy in yourself and try to understand, but you're still going to take your experiences.
And that's as true of us as Americans and Canadians as it is of anyone else around the world.
They're going to take their experiences and bring it with them.
There are both cultural nuances that we should account for when we're looking at it, but I think there are also biological experiences that we can also investigate and understand that cut across those cultures as well if we understand the entry point of the content and the culture for those people.
And I want to say to Matthew that I agree with what you're saying.
I think that there are people who show up in our comments threads who say, you know, I do mediumship or I'm a psychic and you know I'm very I'm very ethical about how I do it and I'm not making the kinds of mistakes that you're pointing out.
And I think that may be absolutely true for them and it may well be that the people who receive their services feel really good about it and it might be a lovely thing within that community.
Because of my temperament, I tend to think that Ultimately, they're being misled in some important way.
And I think that the trickiest part in all of this is the moment you step over into the paranormal, you are claiming some special knowledge or ability that has a kind of authority attached to it that's really distinct.
It's a really specific kind of authority, because I'm the one who can talk to those on the other side, or I'm the one who has the psychic ability to foretell the future.
And for me, that's just...
really dangerous and untrue, even though the person may be having an experience that they believe warrants that interpretation.
I think, you know, when I hear and I read a little bit about a West African and now Afro-Brazilian indigenized religious tradition that calls upon gods that, and, or entities, I'm not quite sure
or entities, I'm not quite sure the terminology, that will give them information that is protective and reflective of their terrible passage from their homeland and will help sustain them and give them hope and, you know, if not optimism.
It's very, very difficult for me to continue to say that there's anything about that that's misleading.
I mean, if you can sort of connect the dots between that and some kind of fraud or emotional abuse, then there you have it.
Yeah, this is just kind of a new avenue for me.
It's like I realize that I have a bias towards saying, okay, well, you're, you know, at some point you're going to grow out of that.
And that's just, it's just, it's like, that's, it's not my place.
The elephant in the room is a kind of cultural imperialism, right?
Totally.
Yeah, yeah.
And so within the historical context that you're gesturing towards, within the kind of cultural sensitivity that you're modeling right now, I completely agree with you.
I do think that in practice, any time, whatever the culture is, whatever the historical context is, and European people have had plenty of this as well,
In our history, and perhaps still today in some places, whenever that paranormal thing is in the room, the sense that you're maybe paying someone to cast a spell so that things go this way or go that way in your life, that's sort of the underlying psychology that I think is universal to human beings.
And I just don't think it works.
So there may be some archetypal, psychological, emotional ways that people find a sense of hope, and I think that that's beautiful.
But yeah, to me it does come down to the sense of like, are you putting your faith and your money and your energy and your beliefs about reality into something that is ultimately empty and will not actually give you the relief that you're hoping it will give you existentially?
Or are you coming to terms with what it is to be human in a way that I do think is universal?
And I'm willing to look at that if that is a kind of, you know, massive cultural bias blind spot.
Well, that's a good entry point into I want to focus a little on the other two questions about asking whether there are good spiritual communities and good spiritual teachers out there and unequivocally I will say yes.
I've long said about my friends who are Catholic or Christian or some One of the thousands of sects of Christianity that exist out there, if their church brings them a sense of community, that's awesome.
I feel the same way about yoga studios.
Mine was Equinox for 17 years.
Yes, I worked there, but my people were there because I spent all of my time there when I wasn't at my desk working.
I would take the word spiritual out of there.
Are there good communities and good teachers?
Then the answer is yes.
I know many people who do not take advantage of their students and many communities that don't have power struggles, that have regular human dynamics, but that there's no Sharlatan at the top trying to take advantage of people?
These are totally possible.
And unfortunately, I think for people involved in them, they know that and they go there and whether you're talking about Christianity or Islam, Sufism, which I know a little about, or yoga, whatever that is, as soon as it spills over into the metaphysics, I kind of tap out.
But if you're talking about the real world interactions among people, and just being together in a tribe, I think there are plenty of places that people will naturally gravitate toward.
There's also this problem of, like, functional communities don't advertise themselves, right?
They don't have anything to sell.
I'm glad that you're questioning, like, the usefulness of the word spiritual there, because I think as soon as that word is in there, for me, the notion of the spiritual organization and whether or not it can be toxic is actually more of an economic question than anything else.
Because I think a lot of the cultures and subcultures and groups that we study on this podcast feature just a network of people who have professionalized into spirituality as a commodity in the globalization era and that's where we get businesses and we get cults that are kind of
tasked with producing meaning into and sort of plugging the meaning gaps in the culture, then there's another possibility, which is that people can institutionalize into spirituality instead of professionalize.
And in that sense, we get churches.
And And so I would say, you know, are there good spiritual communities out there?
The basic business model difference between what Rama Yoga in Venice, California does and what William Barber's Black Church does, I'm not even sure where it is, is probably like very, very strong.
Like in the latter, there's going to be You know, a history of practices and policies and there's going to be a board of directors and there's going to be some sort of like hierarchy of responsibility that is rooted in a social project.
It's not rooted in making money, necessarily, at all.
It's rooted actually in, yeah, the social project of equality.
And in any case, I'm, you know, I'm I lean towards now number two, in terms of the definition of a good spiritual community, that which is institutionalized, as just having, through history, more tools at hand in general for accountability and leadership standards.
And I'm saying that as an ex-Catholic, right?
That's pretty strong.
Right.
I mean, I have to hold my nose while I say that, actually.
I have to, um, I have to hold my nose while I say that actually, uh, because it's, it's, it's really, I mean, I grew up in a, basically a criminal organization.
Uh, and, but, you know, what's, what's the, what's the globalized spirituality as commodity option, We have, I mean, we have businesses and we have cults and I don't really see a lot of disambiguation.
I don't really see a lot of disambiguation.
I have a sense that religion and spirituality have always been connected to commerce in some sense, right?
So we know that the Catholic Church was for a few hundred years selling indulgences where you could show up and make your donation and be absolved of whatever sins were going to get you into purgatory.
We know that if you travel through India, you will find that every town has their resident holy man who has learned a set of magic tricks from his mentor and that he uses that to sort of make his way in the world and gain money and fame and everything that comes with it.
I think it's really tricky.
So when you say spirituality, though, specifically, you're talking about institutions, correct?
Because if you go to pre-Harappan civilization, then you're talking about tribes in the numbers of hundreds gathering and no real forms of commerce to trade, but I would tend to think that the I agree with you on that.
and the feelings that we associate with what we call spirituality are baked into the human condition.
Yeah, no, I agree with you on that.
Yeah, and if you're going to go back that far, then maybe not always.
Well, I think it's an important point because there is something about when a religion gets institutionalized in a manner that I don't know what the threshold is at Every religion started as a cult, right?
But I don't know when it becomes accepted.
You say that.
Okay.
We can, we can leave that.
A cult in the very open sense of what that word means, right?
A small, not, not very well organized, right?
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
I know.
I know whenever I say that word, I see Matthew's face and I, No, don't do that.
I know there's going to be a long Slack thread coming soon.
No, no, no.
I had my outburst.
We don't have to do Slack.
So I do believe, I mean, we don't have to talk like stone monkey theory, but I do believe that these feelings are probably are part of what drove Religion and the human imagination for a long time.
But what happens when you get large gatherings of people together and power structures and commerce are introduced, that's when the institutionalization kicks in.
And what we're dealing with is the consequences of that going back five, six thousand years.
Okay, but let's get really specific to our IG feed and the 24-year-old person who is like on a gap year or something like that and they're saying, oh my god, every time you bring up a yoga group or a Buddhist organization, it's like an intergenerational abuse nightmare.
Are there good spiritual communities out there?
And to speak to that specific question, You know, another version of that question is, what yoga teacher training program should I go to because so many of them are attached to schools that have all these unresolved abuse issues?
And my basic shrugging kind of sorry answer is, you know, we're talking about groups that have emerged in
Neoliberal, like commercial contexts that have created commodities out of spiritual content and invented, you know, jobs really for a certain kind of privileged class of people.
And so, we're not talking about groups that have Um, you know, institutional memory or history or elders or ways of ways of self-correcting.
We're really talking about businesses out there right now.
And so that's why.
Yeah, that's why I just want to pick at this distinction a little bit between, you know, is your spiritual group, how far back does it go?
When was it founded?
You know, does it know who its great-grandparents are?
And what have its figures done in that history that is now exemplary for the present generation?
And if we're talking about historical black churches, then, you know, we've got sort of A line and a theory of change and a kind of social strategy for actually doing something.
I mean, that's the other thing I've said on this podcast many times is that modern spiritual communities function as businesses without products except for the aspirational self.
And so, when a person says, what YTT program should I go to?
I'm like, okay, well, what kind of aspirational self do you want to buy and how much money do you have to spend?
Like, because you may find friends, but that's not going to be based upon the quality of the spiritual community.
It's going to be based upon the luck of who fucking shows up.
That's it.
Yeah.
Well, I just want to interject here too that, you know, Sai Baba probably had about six, some estimates say at about six million followers worldwide.
He was treated as a god man.
He did all sorts of magic tricks.
He had people showing up to see him in their thousands every day of his life.
Total criminal.
And yeah, just an absolutely despicable person in the final analysis.
He died with a net worth of about nine billion.
Billion dollars?
Nine billion, yeah.
I did not know that.
I did hear about people driving cars away from the ashram after he was barely cold with cars stuffed full of cash.
I did hear about that.
The Catholic Church today, the Vatican is estimated to be worth about $30 billion.
The Church of Latter Day Saints, around $100 billion.
So, I mean, I don't know.
Which one is more involved in making money?
I think that if you're going to look at spirituality as a thing that is free of money, you're missing a point, or you're missing a large component of what this practice is.
I mean, if you need to be spiritual and have those feelings, you can sit and meditate in your room where you live and have those experiences.
When I ran my first teacher training at Equinox, we had 36 students, and I remember very early in the program, I said, look around the room, and in a few years, I would say, guess that maybe two of you will be teachers making a living doing yoga.
And at that time, people were like, what?
You know, because people were trying to transition their career.
And then I told them... What year was that, Derek?
2008.
Oh, you, you, you gave that talk early then.
Yeah.
Cause I didn't start saying that until about four years later, four or five years later, but you were right.
I think.
And I told, then I told them what it took for me to make a living as a yoga instructor where at that time in my life, most of my money teaching 19 classes a week, running teacher trainings and whatever workshops I did when I explained my commute from Jersey city and then Brooklyn, when I moved to the, To all the different equinox when I told them the amount of time I spent on subways and what I had to do in preparation for all the classes.
Everyone was like, oh, yeah, that's a lot of work.
And I just one thing that I've talked to yoga instructors from different schools.
That had a very different experience, that they were presented, change your life, you're going to make your living because this is your passion.
And then they ran around town for $20 a class for 90 minutes teaching and they went broke or they had to get other jobs and they were like, They felt like they were sold a false good of bills.
They were.
And they absolutely were.
And that is where I have problems with spiritual communities.
This secret idea, this manifestation idea that if you follow it, it's just going to happen.
If you want to make a living doing that sort of work, you have to be a business person and you have to hustle, just like any other industry that exists.
And that is one of the issues I take with broader spiritual communities that present this idea that following your passion will bring you everything that you need.
I agree with that.
And I also hear what you're saying, Matthew, in terms of just that neoliberal reality of the environment within which these forms of spiritual commerce have emerged.
I also think, for me, the beliefs really matter, the teachings really matter, the extent to which a community sees certain individuals as being literally divine or infallible, the extent to which They get structured as rigid hierarchies, the extent to which they teach anti-psychological denial of vulnerability or denial of suffering and rejection of critical thinking and embrace some kind of prophetic grand supernatural mission.
Those things to me are really strong red flags in terms of something potentially being very toxic, but even if those things are not there, it can still be exploitive to your point, right?
And it can still be disengaged from taking action in the world the way you're flagging the black church as doing.
Well, rounding it towards home, what about spiritual teachers?
Are there good spiritual teachers out there?
Or is that all bullshit?
You know, I've pointed to him many times.
I think Dharmamitra, as far as I know, there have not been any scandals around him.
That's a pretty low bar!
Because a teacher of that stature hasn't had any that I've come across, which is great.
Some of his students have that I practiced with.
But I bring that up because here's someone who would do visualization, cosmic meditation workshops.
He would say things that I would just be like, okay, when I rub my eyes a lot, those aren't real stars that I'm seeing, right?
So let's just move past that.
But the actual training and what I got from the community there, because in his old studio in the room, When you were with people, you just would assist people.
There would just be a very hands-on, non-confrontational environment.
Like if you saw someone trying to do a handstand and they needed help, you'd go and help them.
It was just a playground, and it's actually how I tried to create my classes from that after those experiences.
But it was somebody who was deeply invested in the practice, had beliefs that I didn't necessarily believe in, but that community and being in that brought something very important to me where here 15 years later, I'm still remembering fondly those experiences.
And personally, I didn't have any negative experiences at all in that time.
And I would imagine that there are plenty of other people again, but you know what?
It's hard to market being good.
Usually it's controversial or the fallout.
There's an inverse relationship to charisma, right?
Yes, yes.
Some people and and it was a slow build.
He had been teaching in New York City since the 70s.
So it was just like he was doing it because he loved it.
So I would say that, yes, I think there are people that can give great guidance out there.
I'm going to refer to the hypothetical 24 year old on Instagram who is asking for endorsements.
And what I would say is
uh whoever is labeling i mean there's a whole tiktok generation that i know very little about and i'm sure that very some very young people are calling themselves spiritual teachers or positioning themselves that way i think elizabeth april for example is like 28 years old or whatever but um in general i think people are saying uh who would give me spiritual leadership who would be an elder and my my question my first question is okay so if you're in your mid-20s right now
People who are in that position are in their 40s or older.
They're in their 50s.
They're in their 60s.
And you have to ask yourself, what have they done with their lives?
Like, what if they are, if they are, you know, I'll just throw out a name like Adyashanti.
What has he done?
Like, why is he in the position, or Eckhart Tolle, why are they in the position where they can sit, you know, on a throne at Omega Institute and speak to a thousand people at a time and pull in a whole bunch of money?
Or why is Pema Chodron somebody who everybody will gather around?
Like, what have these people done In the world to merit that kind of attention and there will be a range of answers like all of these people have biographies and maybe some of them got into quote-unquote spiritual teaching at the end of careers and you know maybe they were I don't know climate activists before and then they retired and they got into Zen poetry and they started giving Dharma talks or whatever.
But I would just take that question and then project it forward and say, for the person who's in their 20s, can you imagine what it would mean in your life to become a quote-unquote spiritual teacher?
Like, what would you give up in order to do that?
What other career sort of pathways would close for you?
And what would you base that on?
And what would it actually be?
Like, given the world that you live in right now, And all of the work that needs to be done and all of the intersecting tragedies that we're all too well aware of.
Could that ever be a valid choice or a productive choice going forward?
Can you imagine justifying that?
Those would be the questions that I'd start with.
I would just respond simply that if someone's looking again at the word spiritual being loaded, but if they are looking for a spiritual teacher, I'd ask what they mean by that.
And if they're looking for some assurances that life is going to be okay, I would say go read Ernest Becker.
And then just try to absorb that and have a little bit more of a broader view of existence and then... Right, because if they don't, if they're not satisfied with Ernest Becker or with Viktor Frankl or any other, you know, classic that we can point to, then I have the sense that what we feel they might be asking for is somebody that they can project a whole bunch of stuff onto.
Yeah, what are you really looking for?
And I like that you just went there, Derek.
It's like, okay, these really, if what you're talking about is the deep questions of what it is to be human, then there's a lot of literature and there's a lot of ways that you can explore that that are substantive.
If you are seeking out a teacher, why?
If you are seeking out a community, what are you hoping to get from it?
I would say that I think there are good teachers out there.
They certainly don't claim to be enlightened or to be holy, to be in touch with some ultimate truth that is beyond mere mortal understanding.
For me, that's always a big red flag, so go the other way.
But what they will do is share tools and ideas and encourage a kind of open-ended practice that makes space for the actual, like, gritty authenticity and vulnerability of being human without, like, layering all kinds of metaphysical oversimplification on top of that.
And they'll also do things like refer out to therapists and defer to science and be frank about where they're learning and growing and what they actually don't know.
These, for me, are all good signs of a trustworthy teacher.
I would like some examples, please.
You've created your ideal list, but who are you actually talking about?
My ideal mentor at this point would be, like, a good novelist.
Not because, you know, I would hang out with them or need to get a psychotherapy referral from them, but because, you know, I want to figure out how they, you know, inhabit the subjectivities of other people and how they do their artistry.
Yeah, I like that.
I think like Derek said too, and what you're alluding to is broadening your scope of how you think about what you mean by quote unquote spirituality.
I know that there are people who have criticisms.
I have always felt that the Jack Kornfield kind of spirit rock group of teachers fit the bill of what I just described.
You know, one thing that I want to say is that that connects these two questions, are there good spiritual communities and are there good spiritual teachers, is that often people will offer endorsements for spiritual teachers that connect is that often people will offer endorsements for spiritual teachers that connect their content with some kind of social
you know uh project so people will say oh well you know Lama Rod Owens is doing this great work and um you know in in uh spirituality and equality and Angel Kyoto Williams and you know Plum Village is this wonderful example of it's I guess all of my examples are Buddhist here which speaks a little bit to the fact that uh you know Buddhist discourse is a little bit more interested in this stuff and you know I always feel like oh that's
That's well and good, but there seems to be this thing where people want, what they really want, is they want a just world.
And if they can be inspired to encounter or nurture a just world by somebody who's wearing a robe or somebody who is using Buddhism to reason out the justness or the possible justness of the world, then that will feel better.
But I don't know.
I also think that there's sometimes a way in which teachers like this end up presenting things like Buddhism in this kind of way that overcompensates for the fact that the organizations that they're coming from are filled with abuse or that they haven't been on point in terms of social justice for decades.
So I'm just ambivalent there.
It feels like if you want a just world, you do social action and organization and you find a group that has a And if you think that your Buddhist organization is really doing that, I would ask, well, is it really?
And I would say, well, what material changes has it actually made in your world?
It's really interesting to me, I just want to comment on it that all three of us have slightly different angles in terms of where our skepticism is and where we make space for things that we don't necessarily agree with on this topic.
