We've spent three years tracking the slide from online wellness influencer to red-pilled conspiracy promoter, from yoga and breath work teacher to anti-vax ivermectin slinger, from vegan raw chocolate aficionado to anti-immigrant, transphobic, election denial. Turns out, the roots of this phenomenon run deep.
Along the way we've gotten a lot of praise, plenty of pushback, and a slew of sincere and heartbroken questions about what may be left for those in love with the positive gifts of contemplative practice and community, who now see the pitfalls we've pointed out. We speak to these today.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media handles, especially Instagram.
And I don't know, anything else going on this week, Julian?
Well, the most important thing going on.
I mean, there is the matter of a former president being indicted today, but our book is officially on sale.
This is a huge week for us.
So, dear listeners, please go and pick up a hardcover, an e-book or an audio book narrated by Matthew, as you may know.
If you already have one, hey, can we interest you in a second copy for a friend or family member?
And by today, you mean we record on Tuesdays, even though people won't be listening on Thursdays.
But you can still hit that.
You can smash that pre-order or order link.
No more pre-ordering in the show notes.
Oh, but you'll be two days late on like being in that group who get it on the first day.
And if you are already reading it or have finished it by the time you're listening to this episode, please do us the huge favor of leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon.
It really helps us in the algorithm war for visibility.
Yeah, we really hope you enjoy it.
And you can also always drop a review in for this podcast as well.
I recently posted the fact that we straddle one and five star reviews all over on Apple Podcasts, which I think means we're doing a good job.
But of course, more five stars or whatever you actually feel about us would be appreciated.
Yeah, where are the centrists with their three star reviews?
Please remember you can support us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions to get Monday bonus episodes.
Patreon supporters also listen to all of our up-to-date content without any ads and have the option to upgrade for live streams and behind-the-scenes videos.
Yeah, my bonus this past Monday focused on the anti-woke crusades and how many of the leading figures behind it are falling back on old tropes or basically identifying anything they don't agree with as woke.
I just saw Lauren Boebert this morning called every college degree a woke college degree.
But in our space, many of the influencers are monetizing the anti-woke fervor.
And in the bonus, I clip a few minutes of Barry Weiss talking to Jordan Peterson that you definitely do not want to hear.
But hopefully my commentary breaks it up a little bit and adds a little levity or anger, because it's pretty infuriating listening to Jordan Peterson saying that the only thing that can solve the problem of white colonization is white colonizers.
But that's where we've landed.
But Derek, they do make everything bright and clean.
They bring their cleaning products to the nether regions of such chaos and devolution that can't even be believed.
Conspiratuality 158.
Conspiratuality 158.
Spirituality without the con.
We've spent the last three years tracking the slide from online wellness influencer
to red-pilled conspiracy promoter, from yoga and breathwork teacher
to anti-vax ivermectin slinger, from vegan raw chocolate aficionado
to anti-immigrant transphobic election denialism.
Turns out, the roots of this phenomenon run really deep.
Along the way, we've gotten a lot of praise and plenty of pushback, and a slew of sincere and heartbroken questions about what might be left for those in love with the positive gifts of contemplative practice and community, who now see the pitfalls that we've pointed out.
We'll speak to these today.
This is the second of three episodes we're doing around the release of our book as a
bit of a primer on what we've learned about the phenomenon of conspirituality, but it's
also a response to the questions we've gotten from listeners who may enjoy wellness, contemplative
practices and community, but are wondering how to stay in touch with the good stuff.
A lot of people are going to be like, oh, I'm going to be a lawyer.
Last week Derek talked about science and media literacy, and next week Matthew will lead the discussion talking about cult dynamics.
I've chosen to discuss what often gets left out of spiritual practice and ideas, but probably shouldn't be, and what gets included but maybe should be left out.
Now, I came to this project, full disclosure, with a lot of ideas about how a science and psychology-informed philosophy could really serve spirituality, or as I prefer to call it, awareness practice.
I was the author of many a contentious philosophical Facebook thread back in the day, published many articles on Elephant Journal and on a website that Derek and I collaborated on called Yoga Brains, as well as my own now defunct blog that never really went anywhere called Science and the Sacred.
Which actually, the first thing I published there was a critique of Zeitgeist, the first Zeitgeist movie.
Kind of early conspirituality in terms of our era.
And then another more recent site that I had hosted articles and interviews that was called Freedom Becomes You.
In my yoga teacher training and then workshops for teachers that I gave up at Esalen, I was always trying to find ways to formulate and discuss how to examine and often, I must admit, torch the underlying beliefs that seem to be taken for granted in yoga and wellness culture as a way of then proposing what I thought were better ones.
You had a small degree of fame with all of that, Julian.
Or infamy.
Or infamy, yeah.
Now, has your position changed much, do you think?
I don't think my position has changed much at all, but my personality has improved.
Right.
I've evolved a lot in terms of delivery and conversational tone.
I think I had to learn from experience that not having conversational empathy around what these different perspectives might really mean to people and the function they serve for them psychologically or culturally was just sort of self-defeating.
Yeah, so you're still a really hard-ass atheist, but you try hard not to be an asshole about it, at least in conversation.
That is never a sentence I would say about myself, but yeah.
So let me just say right off the top, I think awareness practices and community have many benefits.
They meet many valid needs.
They can be framed in ways that build greater immunity, actually, to what we describe as conspirituality.
And this is really interesting territory to get into.
So I'm glad we're doing this today, guys, because some of the thoughtful criticism we've gotten says we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Like, we now see all alternative medicine and spirituality through the lens of cults, conspiracies, and pseudoscience.
And in so doing, people will often say, look, you're negating meaning and mystery and the inner life, ways of being in an ecstatic, contemplative, humble relationship to the universe that don't actually inevitably lead to the bad place.
And it's like I hear them saying, after you've scraped all the conspirituality and cult dynamics and magical herbalism and belief in the power of intention out of the practices that give us meaning and empowerment, is there anything left?
They might also be saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, hold on.
Me and many of my friends didn't fall down the rabbit hole.
And we believe in a lot of the things you say make spiritual people vulnerable to being red-pilled.
So what about us?
I think this is really a fair question.
I also think some of the things we've identified as perhaps greasing the pipeline from wellness to conspirituality may be necessary but not sufficient.
Or may exist in zones where one could maybe still be susceptible to MLMs or magical thinking or having faith in perhaps alternative medicine that doesn't have a lot of evidence to support it.
While still drawing the line at QAnon or anti-vax beliefs or rightward trending political moral panics.
I've personally spent a lot of time in recent months really thinking about that line.
In fact, next weekend, I'm dropping a brief called An Atheist's Guide to Spirituality, which I'm going to sort of put forward some of my ideas about that.
Like we shared a love for Ramachandran, for example.
And I think there's a lot of scientists who really put spirituality broadly in very beautiful context.
So I'm going to go through some of my favorites.
Personally, I'm not a dualist, so every time someone makes a metaphysical claim, I'm not going to agree with it.
But I also don't feel it's worth my time arguing with someone about whether or not their deceased relative is really speaking to them.
If it brings them comfort, great.
When it becomes someone making a medical claim without any evidence, then I believe it's fair game for debate because it can and does cause real-world harm.
So that's where I'm currently landed.
Does your claim have the potential to harm people and possibly enrich you, often financially or algorithmically, in the process?
And if so, then I think it's a little more open for what we do.
Yeah, Derek, I think that sounds like a clear heuristic, especially the relationship between the claim and the prophet when we're trying to decide when and how to speak about a particular belief.
Now I also believe it can sometimes get culturally complicated when two sorts of claims are put together as they usually are.
So a felt literal intimacy with ancestors, for example, can very easily translate into a sense of guidance.
And then aspects of physical health might be on the table in relation to that guidance.
So is that the dividing line?
I have to interject.
I'm so sorry.
You said felt?
Yeah.
And then literal.
You said felt and then literal intimacy.
Yeah, I did.
I don't think that's a contradiction.
Okay.
I mean, I didn't say perceived and literal.
I can, I can literally feel an intimacy, but I get what you're, I see what you're trying to do.
You fucking like you.
Well, I mean, the intimacy is literal and felt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, just save your interruptions for just like 30 seconds.
I want to ask whether that's the dividing line when the guidance that proceeds from a kind of intimacy with one's ancestors crosses over into The material realm into aspects of psychological health.
So if the guidance is moral or psychologically, I have the feeling that we would say most of us would say that that's okay.
But if the ancestors give us cancer advice that that's stupid and I think it's a tricky argument to make and actually we saw it come up recently.
with Bobby Kennedy, where he commented somewhere that when he's in prayer every day, he talks to the dead, particularly his uncle and his father.
And then when he was called on it, he had to like walk it back and quickly clarify that he didn't receive literal guidance from them.
It's a one-way conversation.
Yes, right.
Yeah, that he was contemplating their memory to invoke inspiration.
And I'm, you know, I'm sure that kind of disappoints Charles Eisenstein a little bit with that one as the director of communications.
You know, I'm sure he wants Bobby to stay on point.
Brokenhearted.
Well, I'm going to, I'm going to Julian you for a moment because when you say, when you say aspects of physical health on the table, what comes up in my mind is genetics.
Like I come from a history of immunosuppression problems on my family.
So.
So those are the ancestors.
Yes, exactly.
To me.
Literally.
And felt.
And with measurable consequences in the material world.
That you can feel.
Yeah, that's exactly how I would respond to that.
But overall, I hear you about it being tricky, but I also think it's how humans function in the real world, in the sense that not just three people on a podcast or all the different versions of that we see.
For example, last weekend I went on a bike ride with a friend who was visiting from Los Angeles, and his father passed away last year while he was on a bike ride with his uncle.
And my friend likes to imagine that his father's spirit just kept riding when his body dropped off because he died instantly on the bike.
And I'm not going to, you know, he was telling me this story while we're riding.
I'm not going to be like, dude, that's not true.
Because you're not Beckham's Razor.
You're not that much of an asshole.
Yes, yes, and it gives some comfort, and I actually think it's a really beautiful story of narrative continuity.
I made some comments about astrology and UFOs recently, and I don't mind the imagination being used in that way.
It gives us literature.
It gives us hope.
But if he then said to me, and now my dad tells me not to use sunscreen because the sun is light nutrition, I might stop and be like, hey, can we talk this through for a moment?
And I feel like philosophy fails when we place it against how we actually operate as individuals with relationships and as societies.
So I'm pretty comfortable navigating certain levels of discernment when it comes to situations like this.
Yeah, I mean both of you just, there's something that this is turning on that I think you both just, you know, pointed towards, which is, and so the way I would frame it is that when you have a felt, a meaningful felt emotional sense of communicating with someone that you loved who has died, I would imagine you've internalized the relationship with that person and so it's as if you can imagine what they would say and how it would feel to be with them and that is beautiful and I'm sure gives a lot of solace and it's very sort of poetic and expansive and I absolutely love that.
When, as Derek just referenced, there are claims about A non-physical entity telling you the truth.
And you believe it's literally coming from them instead of it's coming from your own psyche, your own biases.
And memory.
Your own memory, your own conditioning, right?
Like, like someone who says, I just talked to the aliens and they, and they told me such and such about how Trump is a light worker.
Well, that's actually, you think Trump might be a light worker and you're embedded in a whole set of, um, you know, propaganda and ideology and, and ways in which your new age beliefs are getting, uh, red pilled.
But it's being given the authority now that can't actually be questioned because no one else has that privileged access to this source of authoritarian proclamation.
Sure.
I accept all of that.
And I would also like to point out that there are acceptable answers and unacceptable answers according to social circumstance and standing.
And I think what's clear about Bobby's conundrum in that answer is that he gave the proper answer for, like, a white, blue-blood Ivy League grad whose family's position has always necessitated showing that they weren't religious fundamentalists, that they weren't the puppets of the Pope in Rome.
But if we change the figures and the cultural landscape a little bit to think about what it means for like a First Nations people, person, to call on ancestors to feel their presence and to take their guidance, we have a different set of needs in play within which this whole discussion of is it inside them or outside them, I think for me it fades away because for them there's no special prohibition against the literalization of the spiritual world.
And in comparison to the Kennedys, their emotional and community reliance on that world might be actually crucial.
So when someone who wants to argue against spirituality complicating the sciences, context and positionality I think matters.
Because if you imagine losing your territorial rights Colonizers infecting you with European diseases if they don't outright shoot you.
Imagine if you just survive all of that and then their great-grandchildren, like, they kind of divide up into two groups, you know, one of which wants to make startup companies selling sage at Burning Man and the other, like, comes around to say that, you know, belief in ancestors is unscientific.
I think we have to be careful around the presumption that a felt and perhaps literal belief in ancestors, angels, that those things mean a rejection of medical science.
On the other hand, because, you know, case in point, the Navajo Nation clocked one of the highest and fastest vaccination rates in the US after this initial period of devastation.
I think it's complicated.
Yeah, I agree that not being able to read and understand data is also a real issue, which you kind of hinted at there, and we discussed that last week.
We also bring up misperceptions around Tuskegee and vaccines in our book, and you recently mentioned, Matthew, how Black Panthers were opening free medical clinics that included vaccines in the early 70s, which is the exact opposite argument anti-vaxxers make today.
When they try to win people over to their side and there are so many layers here and overall in the beginning I was just pointing out a heuristic and not claiming that a belief in metaphysics implies an automatic rejection of science because it totally doesn't.
But it does seem to be the case with a fair amount of the wellness industry that we cover.
Yeah, I agree.
One last complication, Julian, you have so much to offer, but I want to raise this thing that a listener that we have, who's a very devoted and highly articulate and very poetic listener, he's also a devotee of A Course in Miracles, and he and I debate.
And he says, Matthew, you give Indigenous or racially oppressed people more latitude with their spirituality than folks like me and Marianne Williamson.
So why is that?
Why is your generosity so selective?
And I think it's a good question.
And my knee-jerk answer is that Marianne Williamson should fucking well know better than to spread nonsense about meditation protecting against COVID.
But actually, when I look deeper into that really good question, it's more that I think that it's hypocritical for people to want their cake and to eat it too.
To believe in fairy tales while both rejecting and benefiting from the medical consensus that is the real legacy of their culture and The other aspect is that when Eisenstein, for example, invokes indigenous wisdom to suggest that vaccines are the wrong approach to the body, he's ignoring that Navajo story, that reliance on vaccines, at the same time that he's claiming ownership over a spirituality that he didn't earn.
Yeah.
It is complex.
It is complex.
And we will soldier on.
Someone else who appreciates us commented recently that it just seemed to them we had jumped the shark, right?
They've appreciated our work so far, but then we did this episode debunking Joe Dispenza.
Oh, shock, horror.
I think the reasoning there is that de Spenza didn't promote QAnon, so why is that our beat, right?
He didn't say Trump was a lightworker.
He's just outside of the mainstream with his visionary fusion of spiritual healing and quantum physics.
Never mind the fact that on our episode, we mostly focused on how he has this sort of updated faith healing that includes fraudulent claims of curing cancer and Parkinson's.
He held large indoor events at the height of COVID, presumably based on some transcendent quantum natural immunity and the incredible energy field that he talks about being able to facilitate.
So even though this person, the sincere person who's offering this take, didn't get red-pilled themselves, I would still worry for them and for the hundreds of people that they influence online that the philosophical commitments that lead one to be swayed by a Joe Dispenza's rhetoric could be deadly at the very worst or just extremely expensive and counterproductive at the least because those retreats in exotic luxury locations are pricey.
Yes, and I think you're bringing up the slippery slope problem, or the gateway drug problem, and also how people like Dispenza really launder snake oil upwards into respectability, sometimes through just social setting.
One of the things we discussed when including a chapter on Dispenza in our book is that his pretensions to neuroscience and, you know, whatever else, they give him a kind of pseudo credibility And when that's placed in the Gaia TV rotation carousel alongside David Icke, there is a slippery slope that opens up.
And then he might get invited to Omega, or your old stomping grounds at Esalen, which is a step up from Gaia TV, but is it really?
Yeah, big time.
And suddenly, and suddenly you have middle class yoga moms from like Connecticut or the
valley quoting Dispenza when they go to their general practitioners.
Yeah, yeah, big time.
I mean, I think as we're talking about it right now, I just I keep getting this image
in my mind, which is basically what on what basis is someone saying that certain claims
about the nature of reality can be immune from a sort of scientific examination or evidence,
Right.
And I think there are all sorts of claims and all sorts of ways of talking about rich contemplative experience and emotional meaning and
tradition and, you know, nature and love. So, so many different things with, while stopping
short of making claims about the nature of reality that, you know, are pretty easy to,
to say there's no scientific evidence for that. That to me, that's the question is for
these things to exist harmoniously in the same human being, in the same communities, in the
same world, where that line is, I think makes a big difference.
One thing about Dispenza that's troubled me of the many, but one for this conversation
is that he's a chiropractor and he was accredited at a school that has lost its accreditation.
But besides that, on Twitter he says he has neuroscience listed in his bio.
I don't know if he still does, but he did when we did that episode.
And he often talks about how he studies neuroscience, but what does that mean?
I have 12, 15 books about neuroscience right behind me in my office right now.
Does that mean I study it?
I am a fan of learning about it, but then I would not go there and say, hey, I study it.
And all of this relates to what I said a moment ago, but here's a more concrete example.
When I used to do meditation workshops with Dharmamitra, and he told us that rubbing our eyes while they were closed allows you to see the actual stars during breathwork.
I ignored that part, and I focused on the breathing and the meditation, which I got a lot out of.
But when Dispenza is selling, as Matthew just said, $1,000 workshops, and you have to pay in La Jolla for the hotels as well, and then he's telling people that he's helped cure people of cancer and helped disabled people walk, I'm going to say, show me the evidence, and from him, I've never actually seen any of it.
For me, Julian, the line that you're talking about between legitimate work and, you know, jumping the shark is really also about scale and qualities of care.
Because with Dispenza, we have this influencer celebrity scale going on where charismatic performance is like the main product.
And in our book, we told the story of Mary, who came onto the podcast to describe how she cared for her husband, Louis.
through his death from pancreatic cancer and when he almost went off chemo because of Dispenza's breathing techniques.
And from that, we really get the sense of how reckless and kind of impersonal grift can really endanger a person.
Yes.
And the same thing is going on with the medical medium story as told by Dan Adler that you covered, Derek, where Stephanie Tizon got somewhat close to the celery man himself, but not close enough for him to really provide care as she died.
But early on in the pandemic, I invited two naturopathic doctors on to talk about their distress at how many of their colleagues had fallen off the evidence cliff into anti-vax territory.
And they described how they were trying to advocate for policy statements from their colleges, and they were trying to get their colleagues to stop posting, you know, Christiane Northrup bullshit.
And they knew that their discipline was vulnerable to Zack Bush and Kelly Brogan and the rest of them, and they were working against that, and I thought that that was a good thing.
Now, this was before, full disclosure, the three of us had a firm process for choosing guests, you know, not based on whether we agree with each other 100%, that's not how we do it, but whether the guest and theme is correct for the project.
And Julian, you expressed reservations about having the so-called good naturopaths on the show, and your argument was a version of this slippery slope.
Now as I remember it, you said that it's great that NDs are out there arguing for medical basics, but the risk is that they launder and legitimize the discipline which will always have evidence problems and epistemological holes.
In other words, we risk endorsing naturopaths by spotlighting the good apples.
Was that pretty much what you had to say?
Yeah, I would just add that I think there are really wonderful, sincere people who are naturopaths and who visit naturopaths.
But yeah, I think in terms of us covering them on the show and saying, here are the naturopaths who are abiding by some sense of fidelity to science, and they're criticizing the other naturopaths who are becoming anti-vaxxers, we risk setting up a legitimizing kind of distinction that is only partially true.
Right.
Now, I just want to underline my main point again, which is that there's a difference between what they are doing in their small clinical neighborhood practices and what we get in the celebrity influencer set.
And I think that's important as a distinction to keep in mind.
But the two questions that I have following on that is that, you know, last week Derek invoked Ross's 70% rule and the pragmatism of working politically.
In my view, that depends.
you mostly agree with, such as naturopathic doctors who promote
vaccines, or who are moving in the right direction. Now, do we
not want that to apply to alternative health? In my view,
that depends. Like, for example, I would be willing to talk to a chiropractor
who works with chiropractic as one modality of physical health,
and who also offers things like massage and physical therapy exercises.
My last two chiropractors, when I started with them, both said, I want to get you well enough to not come back to me.
And they both did, to their credit.
I would be less inclined to talk to a straight, which is a chiropractor who believes that almost every disease can be fixed with one spinal adjustment.
So hold on, only the queer chiropractors for you then, eh?
Absolutely.
It's Pride Month.
Absolutely.
I'd also be less likely to talk to a homeopathist because that's just pure mysticism.
Yeah, okay, so to the point about, you know, rapport and care, one of the main things that naturopaths offer, which I know personally, but then also this is what people report, is that they have this firm grounding in building rapport with patients, in listening, sometimes connecting clinical and community spaces.
You know, I know here in Toronto of acupuncture clinics that open pop-ups in low-income neighborhoods.
And so, these are aspects that can serve social and maybe even spiritual needs.
And so, maybe one question that I have for both of you is, do you think that it's good that they do This work because maybe this will push clinical medicine towards being like warmer and more holistic over time I think that's possible and I've seen it in action in my own experience with medical doctors my old dentist in Los Angeles is one example of someone who learned a great deal from her spiritual practices and While nothing in her treatments were woo her bedside Well her chairside manner was incredible and from her own telling she was greatly influenced by doing things like sound baths
paths in yoga?
You know, one of the, one of the things that I've, that I've struggled with over the, over
many years is that I've always had a sense that integrating these different approaches
was possible and would be really good.
You know, so, so for example, integrating like theories from psychology with like meditation
and yoga practice, integrating aspects of alternative and complementary medicine that
are, that do have these aspects of care and sort of space for experience and really listening
and empathy.
But with regular medical science, but I think what often happens is the integration goes the wrong way.
So it's one thing to say, you know, we're going to follow all of the best science we have and all of the diagnostic and prescriptive techniques that we have to really, you know, give you the best quality medical care we can.
And then as part of that, we're going to integrate, you know, being more empathic listeners and suggesting that you do things to improve, How you're managing your stress and ask you questions about your family and about your emotions, you know, in a way that is sort of holistic in the best sense.
But typically it goes the other way, is that the more kind of alternative stuff starts to come in and say, oh actually we're going to defy these aspects of medical science and we're going to have our own unique Kind of mystical or ancient or just like intuitive sense of how to diagnose and how to prescribe and what we think things mean and how to be very literal, actually, in how we how we talk about mind-body connection and the psychological basis of illness and the energy blockage, etc, etc.
So, I think integration is good.
And I think too that what we see from a lot of the critical literature about how complementary medicine has been integrated into How doctors are educated is that it has all of these same problems.
And so, yes, I think it's good, Matthew, to your question that there are spaces for people to experience a more empathic attunement and time and space to really feel like they're being treated as complete human beings.
But there's a downside.
It hasn't been formulated by everyone concerned in a way that I can get behind.
Yeah.
Alright.
Yeah.
So another good faith critique we get is more philosophical.
That we are defaulting to a kind of scientific materialism and that this goes too far because we include a blanket rejection of metaphysical claims in our critique of conspirituality.
This makes it seem like spirituality in general is just invalid.
Okay, and you were going to let us know a little bit later about what spirituality without metaphysical claims might mean.
Is that right?
Well, any philosopher listening will be like, good luck with that because you've got all kinds of metaphysical claims that you're, that you're, so there's a specific types of metaphysical claims I think we do well to sort of have, have a healthy skepticism about.
So that is jumping the gun slightly, but the thumbnail heuristic here is, as I've said so far already, claims of special knowledge, special powers, access to otherworldly intelligences.
These sorts of things seem to be necessary but not sufficient in terms of what makes the phenomenon of conspirituality tick.
And so I think if you take them away, conspirituality to some extent dies on the vine.
Not completely, but there's a powerful relationship there.
That special knowledge idea has always bothered me.
I mean, it's a quick hop from, I know things that no one else does, like the medical medium claims, to, I'm above sex and all binaries, so when I sleep with your wives, I'm really doing it for them, which we have seen with some gurus.
And Matthew, you talked about the slippery slope before, and that is that slope.
The people I get the most from are humble and they don't claim any special knowledge, especially of things that they don't know.
I mean, no expert would actually do that, which is why the only thing a number of people we study are really experts in is manipulation.
And again, not being a dualist, if a claim is made, I want to see some evidence.
Okay, Julian, you've got more to deliver, but I want to clarify one thing that I've heard you say many times, which is that when you speak about what you describe as awareness practice, you imply that these things can actually strengthen discernment and compassionate resilience in the face of existential facts more so than those same practices associated with metaphysical beliefs.
And in so doing, you know, it's possible to not perpetuate and strengthen forms of self-deception.
I've always wondered how you answer the question of, like, how would you test the difference between, like, a materialist self-awareness and a metaphysical, you know, metaphysically coded self-awareness?
And wouldn't it just be like saying, you know, meditation should make me a better person morally and help me develop better politics?
Like, isn't there magic in both of those?
Well, I mean, to the second part of your question, I feel like...
We definitely agree that there's a major fallacy at play, and it's perhaps the same kind of concretizing fallacy that I'm critiquing in Fundamentalists, right?
Or, you know, closeted Fundamentalists.
The literal interpretations of those kinds of experiences can also then have its mirror image when we see someone like Sam Harris saying, you know, if you meditate for long enough, your politics will show up in a certain way because you'll see certain truths about the nature of reality, the nature of being human, the nature of consciousness, which will mean that inevitably you are a colorblind liberal.
Yeah, you'll be post-racist.
Yeah.
And so we've done, all three of us have done plenty of criticism of well-meaning kind of yoga activism that says, really, yoga is about this social justice.
You know, if you really understand yoga, it's going to show you this thing about social justice.
And then you like listen to Modi and Modi's like, if you really understand yoga, essentially you're going to be like, okay, with persecuting Muslims.
I mean, it's, it's, it's wacky.
So, so yeah, I'm not saying anything like that.
I'm really saying That in my experience, there's well actually here's what I'm doing.
I'm making a psychological argument.
I'm saying that and we'll get into this more a little bit later.
There are existential There are sources of existential anxiety that we have, and I believe that practices of inner work, meditation, cultivating compassion, being able to sit with an awareness of one's inner world and sort of observing and bearing witness of thought processes and beliefs and reactions and defenses, all of that sort of thing, can support us in coming to terms with the facts of life
Instead of strengthening through kind of altered state experiences and then interpreting those in overly concrete ways to represent something supernatural, instead of strengthening what I actually see as defenses against dealing with that existential anxiety.
So it really is as simple as that.
Right.
Okay, so now there are also some who appreciate our work, who also promote holistic approaches to medicine, which might include things like acupuncture, naturopathy, functional medicine, or homeopathy.
And they see us as perpetuating a very limiting, patriarchal, Western, mainstream model of medical science.
That refused us to acknowledge the validity and evidence for a broader range of hopeful, humanizing, and progressive perspectives and modalities.
What do you guys say about that?
Well, the problem with this sort of question that you were also hinting at before, Matthew, is that we've seen all this a number of times, and is that acupuncture and homeopathy are wildly different fields, but people lump them together into a broader alt-med or holistic medicine category.
So, I'm open to acupuncture having efficacy, and I'd like to know how it's done, and I think there are some researchers who would actually like to know that as well.
But homeopathy is just garbage all the way through and it shouldn't be treated in the same way as other things that we've talked about.
Even naturopathy is confusing because it uses herbal medicines which could work for certain conditions, but it also uses homeopathy which can't work because there's nothing actually in the dilutions.
So we're back to a problem that we often face.
Every question takes us so long to answer that by the time we drill down on one point, another ten come flying at us.
Yeah, it's a good distinction to make between acupuncture and homeopathy, but I'll invoke culture again and go a little bit farther because I'm a little bit more predisposed to be generous to something that has centuries of medico-religious history to it.
Which is what we have with at least the root principles of acupuncture where the points are not just like mechanical buttons that you press in the right order, but they're also, you know, maps for bodily contemplation.
But with Samuel Hahnemann, we have like someone inventing something in an irritated response to actual medical progress.
You know, homeopathy is like a reactionary practice that way.
It's not preserving any old cultural value so much as it's like spinning magic out of nothing in order to stop feeling stupid about medical advances you're not making yourself or that you can't understand.
So, Hahnemann's whole invention was born in a kind of resentment and stubbornness.
Pulling back a bit, I'm sympathetic with the position that some naturopathic and alternative health, you know, proponents take up to the point at which it's clear that to work, these approaches really depend on the charisma of the practitioner.
Because that too is prone to a form of power imbalance or patriarchy in which the mystical vision of the practitioner is the key to healing.
So, I always want to ask, to what extent does the holistic practitioner depend on the performance of a kind of charismatic or religious certainty to provoke a meaning response or a placebo effect?
Yeah, and I think that question translates across multiple modalities regardless of which culture they come from or of the sort of, you know, last name and ethnicity of the practitioner, right?
Right, yeah.
Now, there's also the old one-two punch conspiritualist combo.
First, they say we unfairly generalize about all alternative healing methods and spiritual beliefs because we've decided everything is a cultish conspiracy or a scam, so that's our narrative.
Yeah.
But then hot on the heels comes the second claim.
We are just too convinced that our subjective, naive, mainstream assessments of what counts as a conspiracy theory are valid.
We're not open-minded enough to their evidence and reasoning for 9-11.
Antivax and other conspiracy claims.
But no matter the footwork underneath this combination of punches, it's always about destabilizing standards of evidence and reasoning and really the very possibility of knowing anything itself.
And I have tended to call this freshman skepticism.
And I've always wanted to ask you, like, what is sophomore skepticism?
What's the upgraded version?
Touché.
Well, I mean, this perhaps disparaging-seeming freshman designation refers to how a first-year philosophy student or someone who recently read Deepak Chopra is encountering concepts around skepticism, relativism, you know, like asking what we really know, or can you know anything about reality?
And they very commonly go off down this road of flattening flattening out knowledge claims as if everything is really
just up for grabs because nobody really knows anything anyway.
And where the freshman or big Lebowski version of this can get caught in that
dizzying loop-de-loop around all knowledge being subjective, biased, or
impossible to really prove, I would say the next stage, maybe your sophomore
skepticism, takes a more systematic view about what we base knowledge upon, how
we evaluate the likeliness of new hypotheses based on existing knowledge,
and what it takes to overturn well-established theories that are built
on the very robust networks of carefully tested and replicated evidence that go
into establishing scientific consensus.
Now, as an aside here, this style of conspiratorial and pseudoscience reasoning is actually central to what a flimflam artist in the political field like Tucker Carlson was doing for four million viewers every night at Fox News.
It's all of this kind of, well, we don't really know this and what does it say about that?
And could it be that this, I don't know, I'm just asking questions.
It's the same kind of freshman skepticism, kind of a two-step, right?
That's exactly what he was doing.
It's true.
Yeah.
Now, there may be slivers of freshman skepticism in the other arguments that we've talked about so far, but it's really full-blown here when we start to get to the people who are saying, well, you're just closed-minded and so you think you get to designate what's really a conspiracy theory, and wouldn't you know it, you also don't believe, you know, that what happens under anesthesia proves life after death or something.
As I've said, these three episodes represent us sharing what was really a kind of an alternate ending for the book, right?
I have my ideas from that writing broken down into two sections.
The first is what often gets left out of modern spirituality, but shouldn't.
The second is what gets included, but would be better left out.
And perhaps listeners are already kind of having a sense, but let's just nail it down.
So we'll start with what gets left out, but shouldn't.
And the first one for me is critical thinking, which of course is a contested term.
But there's something about it that I think is bedrock.
If someone tells you that your critical thinking is only your judgmental ego, And it's in the way of the enlightenment they're offering.
Walk away, please.
Discernment should never be abdicated in the quest for enlightenment.
I think it's easy to say, Julian, but like, what would the top three rules be for critical thinking?
Because there were a lot of COVID dissidents, as they're now calling themselves, Yeah, well, I would say they were using freshman skepticism, but let's go into it a little.
In this case, I'm specifically talking about being in a spiritual community and taking on board a set of spiritual beliefs, and I'm saying that there's this big red flag in this area, which is The more questioning things that don't add up or that are presented without evidence is then reflected back from the power structure as, oh, that's just your ego, or you're being judgmental because you're in fear, or you should have more faith in the special authority of the teachings.
Anytime there's that kind of dynamic in play, I think we're really in dangerous territory.
Where this overlaps then with conspiracism is that the type of skepticism that this type of, you know, confused skepticism directed, say, at vaccines or at a virus causing COVID or at public health measures, really being about saving lives, this is based not on evaluating evidence, but on an amplified credulity toward paranoid, generalized, conspiratorial models of the
world, often with completely un-evidenced claims of prophecy,
channeling, alternative cures or immune protection products that they're selling
around the back, tacked on for good measure. So this pious abdication of critical thinking
in the spiritual sense of having more faith and being less judgmental is selective,
and it's self-serving. It only applies to the in-group articles of faith, but then it's weaponized
as a sort of radically skeptical, unreasonable paranoia that rejects mainstream narratives
that are brought by the profane outsiders. So number two, being science-informed.
Now, as we've discussed many times on the podcast, and especially in last week's episode, there's always been a tension between religion and science.
So Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Hypatia, and Galileo are only the most famous examples who paid the price, in days gone by for sure, for daring to acknowledge that their scientific observations of the world contradicted supernatural dogmas, which were much more powerful then than they are now, certainly in democracies.
Now, of course, branches of most religions have evolved to accept scientific facts like heliocentrism and, in fact, evolution.
But many metaphysical belief systems and their proponents will position themselves as outside of a scientific worldview, even as they make what are actually scientifically testable claims about reality.
Talking about being science-informed often then gets interpreted as some hard rejection of any reference to emotions, consciousness, or experience, but I don't think it needs to be that.
I think there's a way that getting clear on what sorts of beliefs or claims are scientifically testable creates a sort of guardrail against overly literal misguided concretizations of awareness practice.
So an example of this might be you go into a state of deep meditation and in that state of deep meditation we actually sort of have good supporting neuroscience evidence now for some of the things that happen.
The sense of the boundary between your body and the rest of the world dissolving, the sense of time.
You know, you can no longer keep track of time.
You recognize that time is an illusion would be the way of saying it.
Right.
The sense that you're merging with all things and that you are at the center of the universe, right?
These are very profound experiences that have all sorts of measurable benefits and just purely experientially they're fascinating and can be very exciting and beautiful and nourishing.
The concretization would say in meditation I discovered these truths about the nature of the universe and they relate then to these supernatural metaphysical claims that are a part of some religious tradition.
Or this now proves what the Guru has been saying and so therefore I should continue having complete faith in the Guru's teachings.
And that also implies that an experience that might actually clinically classify as a psychotic break can be reframed and co-opted by the nearest religious tradition that gets its hands onto that story.
I think that's actually one of the things that happened to the first leader of the group or the leader of the first group that I was in, Michael Roach, who I think he had a very deep breakdown experience but then had been reading all kinds of descriptions of meditative ecstasy in Tibetan Buddhism and he had a ready-made story to sort of justify and really
Glorifying what he had gone through and convince himself that it meant that he was a different type of human being.
And I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing to have happened to him, that contextualization process, because the other way it can go is pathology.
But unfortunately, it did convince him that he had some special insight into the nature of the universe and he was going to communicate it to everybody.
And Canadian postmodern novelists.
Yeah, exactly.
people, and Chinese oligarchs who are trying to profit from the invasion of Tibet.
Yeah, and Canadian postmodern novelists.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, the most powerful category among them.
What I was describing was not intended to be a psychotic breakdown.
Just to be clear about that, I think there's a range of kind of altered states that verge on mild and beneficial and go actually into, I think, being quite profound and beneficial and interesting, depending on how they're contextualized and supported.
And then there are, yes, very intense experiences that I think probably would be understood as perhaps being in the psychiatric or Evidence of some kind of neurological condition that one would, I think, it would be better to be diagnosed and understood and treated in a responsible way that's not, you know, pathologizing in the extreme sense, but, you know, really knowing there's a difference between you having broken through to the ultimate truth of the universe and you having, you know, a bipolar mania.
And I think that practices that do evoke really interesting states of consciousness have tended to magnetize a lot of people who were trying to make sense of various psychiatric symptoms.
And I think often that has not gone very well.
We're in tricky territory.
Agreed.
So here's another idea here that acceptance of vulnerability, randomness and where we don't have power is a key aspect that I think is often missing but should be included.
This is really about spiritual bypass and it's that bypass is usually around difficult emotions.
I think there is such a thing as healing and growth in self-awareness But it has more to do with our psychological habits and defenses and the dynamics we grew up with, you know, in our families and cultures than with this sort of idealized ego project that spirituality often entails about, you know, breaking through into the higher truth and the wisdom that only the inner circle really knows.
What I'm describing is more messy.
It has to do with tolerating vulnerability and imperfection and often emotions that we've been conditioned to be ashamed of.
Why do you think, Julian, that most spiritualities are so good at the bypass thing?
Like the old Freudian answer, which you're appealing to a number of times, is that religions are like formalized defenses against despair.
They're repression machines.
I mean, I don't know that I necessarily want to endorse Freud at this point, but I would say that...
These sorts of beliefs, I think, evolve to manage or repress anxiety.
And at the same time, the practices can be used to actually build resilience.
So my sense is that there's an existential maturation piece here about recognizing where we do and don't have power and accepting that randomness plays a much bigger role in everyone's life than we'd like to admit.
And that acknowledging that unfair and painful things happen to most of us to some extent is actually not playing the victim or failing to step into your power of manifestation, right?
It's very hard to do within a heritage of sin and atonement, which actually New Age spirituality is
kind of like the the chiaroscuro version of the flip of that.
Okay, Julian, so you've got a great list there of what gets left out but shouldn't get left out and
And we've got critical thinking, being science informed, and our acceptance of vulnerability.
Now you've got a list that says what gets included, but shouldn't be included.
So, so what's in that list?
Yeah, homestretch here.
I mean, top of the list is cult of personality.
Oh God, yeah.
Yeah, and we've talked a lot over the last three years about how Instagram and TikTok gave wellness influences a potent new pathway into the minds of their legions of followers.
Gurus and charlatans have always relied on creating an aura of specialness, of being unique in their divinely inspired insights.
But during the pandemic, we saw how renegade doctors and contrarian spirit channelers and Q-pilled life coaches and yoga teachers could leverage cult of personality via these digital platforms very effectively and they could monetize it as well.
Right.
This is a new iteration of that old psychological trick that focuses infallible authority on a special individual without examining the evidence for their claims.
It's also like thinner.
I'll talk about this more next week, but it's thinner.
It's less earned.
There's something about it being online that means that there's always more flash than substance.
But anyway, it has something that has been stable over the years.
It's also changed quite a bit.
And so I'll be tracking some of that next week.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, you're right.
You know, there's a way in which there used to be just a few Very, very talented gurus who kind of really understood, they could talk the talk.
They had studied the text, they'd come up in some kind of lineage, and then they'd bolted themselves into this special status of being like the god man or the, you know, the divine mother.
Now it's like anyone who's, you know, passingly familiar with any of that stuff could just set up their phone and... Yeah, very difficult to corner the market these days because the marketplace has exploded.
Yep.
The claims in this case of the cult of personality, the charismatic leader, could be about paranormal powers.
It could be about communication with advanced alien intelligences.
And notice here, the assumption is that the further you go in terms of your spiritual advancement, the more the evidence for this might be that the aliens are talking to you or that you have some special, you know, magical abilities.
And that to me is a major fallacy.
That once you know that, you're just like, eh, no thanks.
You know, I certainly do.
I walk away.
But during the pandemic, as conspiracism infiltrated spiritual communities, it also masqueraded, as you've pointed out so far, Matthew, as being truly skeptical of the mainstream narrative.
But at the same time, evoking unquestioning credulity about the blood drinking cabal.
Yeah.
Right.
We're the real skeptics.
By the way, there are vampires.
That 5G was causing COVID, that there were nanobots in the vaccines, that Trump was a lightworker, bringing about a planetary shift into fifth dimensional reality.
So we can see, I think there's this phenomenon and I'm really interested to hear what you say about this next week.
There's the cult of personality sort of translating from guru, or maybe Pope, although less so with Pope because it's less about charisma, to conspiracist influencer, to political demagogue.
And maybe this has something to do with the power of social media and digital technology.
In each case, Cult of personality shows up as bonding and identifying with any kind of leader in ways that accept everything they're saying as gospel, regardless of facts, evidence, or qualifications.
And there's a whole group of these people right now gathering at Mar-a-Lago, gathering outside the courthouse in Miami, right?
Gathering online who are invested in the cult of personality of this, you know, god-awful human being.
Yeah, and the acceptance of everything as gospel, regardless of facts, evidence, or qualifications, I'm going to next week get into the premise that that can't really be locked in without some kind of in-the-moment relational alchemy, a kind of dominance or interpersonal power that is very difficult to To feel happening before it's actually happening and that's why being recruited into a cult is actually such a strange experience.
So sovereign intuition is next on my list.
This is probably the most powerful hinge point that we've looked at between conspiracism and spirituality.
It's like been the most prevalent.
It also becomes the site of this overlap between what we might call culturally liberal Health libertarianism and then right-wing politics.
The idealizing of this individual sovereignty, free to not be tread upon, as the Gadsden flag says, to pull oneself up by their bootstraps and be captain of one's own ship, which we get equally from like conservative libertarians who, you know, think having a social safety net is the government falling to Marxism.
We see this as well within the entrepreneurial New Age ideology.
And to make one's own choices about living dangerous freedom instead of having peaceful slavery imposed by government.
You know, all of these libertarian impulses found receptivity in spiritual circles during the pandemic.
The spiritual conviction that fans of stigmatized knowledge, alternative medicine, mind over matter, and that you create your own reality, those style of beliefs dovetailed with don't-tell-me-what-to-do libertarianism.
While Big Pharma is suppressing my favorite holistic healing claim, metastasized into COVID denialism and anti-vax activism.
But I think the additional ingredient for the sovereign spiritual folks, for that cadre, was this commitment to intuitive knowing.
Whether that intuitive knowing is framed as being heart-centered, as J.P.
Sears always does, or body wisdom generated, or channeled from divine or extraterrestrial intelligence, as in the case of Laurie Ladd, these claims of knowing that transcended mere medical science in its authority I think really showed how dangerous it is when faced with difficult facts about the objective world that we're collectively facing at the same time.
And I want to also flag a political context here.
While plugging my first op-ed in the national newspaper here in Canada, I wrote about how the new premier of Alberta, Daniel Smith, of the right-wing United Conservative Party in Alberta rode to victory in part on these COVID dissident attitudes and medical libertarianism.
So I wrote, it only makes sense that right-leaning populists in both the US and Canada get a lot of mileage out of rising healthcare anxieties.
There's been decades of union busting, the erosion of social programs, the rise of exhausting gig work, a lot of thumb twiddling while carbon warms the oceans, plus the fragmentation of online life.
And all of these depress institutional trust and coalition building.
Concurrently, the U.S.
alternative health scene, buoyed by rising tides of deregulation, has grown from cooperatively run health food stores in the 1970s and living room spirit channeling sessions in the 1980s to what is now a $32 billion a year industry in the United States.
So, in the alternative health world to which Ms.
Smith is drawn, and I'll just as an aside here, from which Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is coming, and with which Marianne Williamson flirts, the body is the ultimate frontier for privatization.
It's a place where those who fear government corruption and pharmaceutical profiteering can regain a feeling of agency.
Where people can control their food choices and treat their stress through mindfulness, they can do their own research and invest in self-improvement regimes that appeal to their unique constitutions, which is part of why the proven success of vaccines is disturbing enough that they must deny it.
Because the notion that everyone can benefit from the same 0.5 milliliter dose of colorless liquid is an insult to the world of designer treatments based on temperament, body type, or astrological sign.
Ultimately, the real world magic of vaccination tells the wellness world consumer that they are not unique, that health is not a meritocracy, that everyone's immune system is vulnerable to a novel coronavirus, and that their crystals and herbs won't help them when their oxygen counts dive.
The mechanism and effectiveness of vaccination tells the alternative health enthusiast that they may in fact be like everyone else and therefore might stand to benefit from the collectivist logic of public health.
Oh, everyone should go and read that entire piece.
Thank you for sharing that excerpt, Matthew.
Look, as we're winding down here, at the end of the day, I know I'm taking a very specific philosophical stance.
In relation to the mythopoetic, the contemplative, even the mystical literature and experiences that comprise what most people call spirituality.
I'm saying none of it is literal or transcends our human mortality or the laws of physics.
It just can't.
None of it imbues anyone with magical powers or infallible intuition.
No one is literally in contact with otherworldly intelligence that gives them special information or prophecy.
And I know it sounds like, you know, harsh or oversimplified, but I really think once that's clear, things do actually get a lot simpler.
Ultimately, for me, I see the concretizing of metaphors as, you know, in everything that I just referenced, as overlooking what is truly valuable and salvageable.
A relationship to our inner lives, to a sense of locating the sacred in the real world, to an awestruck sense of wonder in the face of nature and science and love and the actual miracle and mystery of everyday human consciousness and the flow states that can be integrated through practices with a grounded orientation toward reality.
So my question for you, Julian, is can't people do both?
Because I remember as a young Catholic Being very much attracted to Teilhard de Chardin, who was both a Jesuit mystic and a paleontologist.
And a fantastic writer.
An amazing writer.
And some of his peak writing came from Probably weeks of insomnia as he worked as a stretcher bearer in the First World War and he would have to stay awake all night huddled in the forest and he had his notebook and he wrote a number of sort of wonderful poems during that time.
And I think he excelled in both paleontology and And I think he located the sacred in the real world in part by really committing to some basic things within the Catholic mass, such as the statement of consecration of this is my body, which will be given up for you.
Which, to me, is one of the most non-dual statements of materialist love and service that a person could make.
Yeah, so there are many incredible humans.
I think many of them are mystics.
You know, meaning they have this kind of very sophisticated way of thinking and feeling their way through these kinds of ideas.
And they balance this equation really, really well.
I think it's a kind of sliding scale.
The further one goes into fundamentalism and literalism and a focus on the supernatural aspects of faith, the worse the prognosis gets for how one thinks about the world today and bringing those ideas and feelings and beliefs into the world.
My stance is that this is because those supernatural axioms are simply untrue.
I also see them, as I've said, as ways of defending against, instead of coming to terms with existential anxiety, which, you know, we can do.
That's not to say, I should hasten to add, that all who embrace supernatural or fundamentalist beliefs are conspiritualists.
It's also not to say that all who reject them are model humans.
But I think that I can say this.
Awareness practices and philosophies that embrace the inescapable reality of death The random unfannerous of so much of our suffering and that there's no paranormal or supernatural solution or special knowledge that will make our human vulnerability into something else.
When we're able to go down that path, I think there's a kind of resilient clarity that's developed.
And my sense is it renders many of the corrosive beliefs that we cover on the podcast largely unappealing.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
Join us next week when Matthew focuses on cult dynamics in Part 3 of our series.
And again, please order our book if you are so inclined.
