Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign
A granular—let’s say quantum-sized—look at how RFK Jr.’s wealthiest and most influential New Age supporters are thinking about his candidacy. Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein disclosed it all on a two-hour podcast released on June 21, providing a nearly-perfect encapsulation of every theme of our beat. Their performance shows how dedicated conspiritualists keep the faith as they graduate out of the group-encounter retreat economy and into the mainstream political arena.
Show Notes
The Future Of The World Depends On Us w/ Charles Eisenstein
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Welcome to a Conspiratuality Brief called The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr.' 's Campaign.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
Today, I'm going to zoom in on the granular, perhaps we could say quantum-sized, details of how RFK Jr.' 's wealthiest and most influential New Age supporters are thinking about his candidacy.
This really didn't require any heavy research, because Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein just disclosed it all in a two-hour podcast released on June 21st.
So I'll be walking through that content today, because it provides a nearly perfect encapsulation of every theme we've examined so far.
And it also shows how dedicated conspiritualists keep the faith as they graduate out of the group encounter retreat economy and into the mainstream political arena.
Now, for those of you who are not familiar with Marcus and Eisenstein, we've covered them in numerous episodes.
You can just search their names in your pod feeder.
We've also covered them in our book, but here are the basic thumbnails.
Aubrey Marcus was born into a wealthy Texas family in 1981.
He's the co-owner, with Joe Rogan, of the supplement company Onnit, recently sold to Unilever for some huge sum.
He's a lifestyle coach in the New Age muscular genre, and he leads an encounter group called Fit for Service.
The interesting brand name papers over a disquieting aspect of New Age wellness culture, which doesn't tend to do any public service at all.
It's largely a transactional economy in which community is defined by subscription and workshop attendance instead of street-level participation and solidarity.
And I think that's really relevant for a discussion about how that economy moves into the political sphere.
Because that's part of the story here.
With the candidacy of Bobby, there will be a lot of New Age adherents who, for the first time, will be swept up in the thrill of in-real-life organizing.
For them, Bobby can provide a pathway out of the cultural fringe into their very own psychedelically tweaked Norman Rockwell painting.
Marcus is suave, he's well-spoken, his podcast is a favourite among the spiritual biohacking set.
He affects a real life-of-leisure playboy image, with no adventure or pleasure beyond the reach of his massive resources.
Lots of spiritual retreats, dressing up in faux-indigenous regalia to direct cosplay healing events for his coaching clients.
He says that he receives regular spiritual guidance from psychedelic trips, and that'll be a keynote in my report today.
But he doesn't just make things up.
He doesn't go it alone.
He does bend his burly knee.
He's recently named Mark Gaffney as his personal guru.
Now Gaffney is a New Age ex-rabbi and he brings with him a trainload of sexual misconduct allegations and is currently being sued by two women under the New York Child Victims Act for allegedly abusing them in the 1980s when they were 13 and 14 years old.
Gaffney was stripped of his orthodox rabbinical status over these abuse allegations.
For Marcus to hitch his star to Gaffney, it's an indicator that he isn't a self-conscious grifter, because Gaffney is really bad for business.
He's been publicly called out by petitions, he's been barred from presenting at Esalen Institute, he's been deplatformed by Tammy Simon of the New Age Publishing Platform, sounds true, And also denounced by leading New Age influencers, including Deepak Chopra.
And that's almost funny because this is a group with a pretty high tolerance when it comes to the sins of charismatic assholes.
Marcus also fancies himself as a spoken word poetry guy.
But, you know, he's just not that great.
We have a healthcare crisis.
And it's not some virus, some new itis.
The crisis is we don't care about our health.
Too busy mongering for cheese, getting that dough.
Nuts for the drip, flossing our gold teeth in our wallet.
Living life, climbing the mountain of do more.
Code red until we're dead.
It's New Age, grandiose, using the royal we, making the broadest statements possible about everybody's corruption but his own.
But this is another point on the side of Marcus's earnestness, because it takes real cojones to put this stuff out.
He wants to be a philosopher as well as Sewell, but he can't quite pull it off.
To his credit, he reaches out for support in areas where I think he knows he needs it.
And that's how Charles Eisenstein, the New Age author with a large back catalogue, came to serve as Marcus's court philosopher over the length of the pandemic.
Eisenstein shares Marcus's habit for grandiose abstraction.
He's the guy who put out a 9,000 word essay a week into the pandemic about how the coronavirus was a coronation of spiritual possibilities.
But Eisenstein is also a much more serious person than Marcus.
He has reasonable chops as a storyteller for the workshop scene, and he spent years working on many angles of a hook that's familiar to any student of New Thought or New Age philosophy, that our minds are conditioned by the story of separation, as he calls it, which distorts the blissful, non-dual reality of our true heritage into a world of conflict, false choices, and limited possibilities.
This handshake between wealthy fitness bro plus court philosopher is not new in the wellness world.
Of all of the spiritual muscle influencers I'm familiar with historically,
I can't think of anyone with aspirations to broad cultural significance
who didn't need to call in a bookish nerd to make them look smarter.
Although, it started, I think, by going in the other direction.
For instance, when the ex-theosophy messiah Jiddu Krishnamurti began hosting spiritual discourses in Gstaad, Switzerland in the 1960s.
He hired upcoming physical yoga superstar BKS Iyengar to get everyone well exercised between lecture sessions.
But then when we fast forward 40 years, we see an Iyengar inheritor, John Friend, take it the other way by hiring a whole posse of academically trained Sanskritists and religious studies scholars to help him sacralize his very American Tantra-inspired gymnastics.
And in my own way, I've played the intellectual role on the yoga teacher training circuit because for years I worked as a ringer teacher who came in not to teach postures but to give presentations on yoga history, culture, and philosophy.
In Eisenstein, Marcus found the court philosopher who could link the aspirational marketing of his brands, including Fit for Service, to the broadest possible New Age project of envisioning all global crises as products of consciousness, solvable by shifts in consciousness.
So those are the thumbnails.
And I'm not going to start at the beginning of the episode in question, but I'll start at the moment where Marcus tells the story of how he got on board the political salvation train on the day he recorded a podcast with RFK Jr.
So this drops at about an hour and 21 minutes into the two hours.
They've been talking about synchronicities, they've been tuning into destiny, and here's Marcus.
One of the things that happens on that path is if you're listening, There'll be some interesting synchronistic confirmation of what really feels like God's source, the universe, the weaver, whatever, wakan tonka, I don't care, whatever you want to call it, but there's like a wink.
There's a wink from the universe.
I'm actually going to pull something up.
This is actually a text that I sent to Bobby, and this was the wink for me.
That was really like confirmed that this vision that I saw was actually possible.
So we finished the podcast and again, I go into this journey and I see, I see him winning the presidency.
I just fucking saw it.
And I saw how powerful that could be, you know, for all of us, for our consciousness, for the world, for our country, for people, for the story.
I just could feel it all and see it all.
It just played out in front of me.
So I sent him a message.
I said, you know, this is Wednesday, March 15th.
I know this is gonna sound wild, but after you and Aaron left, so I was there with Aaron Rodgers, who is hanging in and listening in on the podcast, I tapped into my connection with God slash Source.
Which is my way through the medicine.
That's my pathway, my bridge.
And got an unbelievably clear message that if you run for president, you will win.
Because he was still debating at that point.
He was thinking he was gonna run.
You will win.
And then if you choose to run, I am to do everything in my power to support you in that campaign with all the resources, allies, and intention that I can possibly muster.
So consider this a pledge of my word and my sword.
Whenever it begins and I put a little sword emoji.
I said, I really enjoyed sharing time today and having that podcast.
Have a beautiful night.
And he texted me back.
He goes, funny, period.
Today for unknown reasons, this phrase came into my head.
Give me a sword and some ground to stand on and we will take back our country.
Thanks for an amazing day, Halbury.
And I like, Cause I could be crazy, right?
That could be crazy.
Everybody thinks it's crazy.
Like when I said that he's going to be president, he was like, no fucking way.
You know, like the consensus reality around me was like, it's crazy.
But instead of actually the people around me, you know, saying and keeping me sane, there was like a wink from the universe at this early stage where I just, I don't always say it.
I've never said to somebody, I give you my sword.
It's a very old thing to say, you know, like I have swords, but like, I don't use them.
You know, they're just like, that's not a, that's not my, that's not a thing I would normally say, but I, I was, I said that thing.
And then he said that that phrase came to his, came to his mind.
And it was just like this wink from the universe.
Yeah.
And I was like, you're on the right track, brother.
Yeah.
You know?
And, and those things mean a lot when you're listening.
Yeah.
These new realities that are held in community, they don't originate in community.
They originate in the way that you described, from the outside, from source, from God.
Yeah.
And in the commitment of community, And the sacrifice for that possibility, the continued participation of God is summoned.
That's the only way that it's possible.
Yeah.
Let's just start with Eisenstein's pauses.
Now, he explains in this episode that when he's speaking these days, he's more and more aware of doing something like channeling.
So that's what's going on.
He's pausing to receive the next sort of chunk of the download.
But the pauses are so long that I repeatedly thought that my podcast app had crashed mid-stream and that I was going to get the, you know, your phone memory is full notification.
You might find yourself thinking the same thing, so just be patient with it.
With normal podcast editing, you could trim all those pauses out and you'd shave 10 minutes off the total length, but Marcus publishes on YouTube as well and so that won't work and the Pregnant pauses, therefore, become kind of part of the ritual of the episode.
I'll just say that I think it's a little uncanny that Bobby, who has to struggle with his own vocal challenge, has a director of messaging who has this kind of dead air syndrome.
But, you know, something about it is working for them.
But turning to the content, honestly, I could end the episode right here because it pretty much sums it all up.
We have the social and professional connections that bring Marcus and Kennedy and Aaron Rodgers together, presented by Marcus as serendipitous, the wink of God.
It couldn't be about moneyed connections, about being colleagues in the alt health and podcasting businesses.
It couldn't be about how wealthy people just find and validate each other.
No, God put them together and that's why they can text each other.
Later, we'll hear Marcus disclose that he didn't know Bobby's full views, or his platform, that he's never voted.
But why now?
Because his journey, in other words his psychedelic trip, showed him the truth.
So, it's not just that the psychedelic substance exposed something about his brain, it gave him access to the future.
Marcus takes drugs, and he's a visionary.
Marcus also wastes no time in beginning to insert himself into the Bobby mythos.
He connects the sword emoji to Bobby's intuition about, quote, give me a piece of land and a sword, unquote, and I'll take back America.
And that phrase appeared in Bobby's presidential campaign announcement speech a month later.
But what's more likely to have happened is that Bobby probably remembered that phrase from his Tony education, probably reading the classics and coming across the sentence from Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician who said, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum and I will move the world.
And then maybe he saw the sword emoji and adapted the phrase.
It's a perfect multi-millionaire audience capture feedback loop.
Now to round it out, Eisenstein says that the message Marcus received is from God.
And he'll also contradict this throughout the episode by also saying that receiving and acting on that message is ordained but also dependent upon human choice.
That's the pith, that's the nut graph.
We can rewind now and get into the various and sundry themes of how they are describing Bobby's campaign.
And we can begin with Marcus introducing Eisenstein.
Charles Eisenstein consistently delivers a vision of the future.
He called this vision, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
And this vision of the future is really what we could call hope.
And part of that vision of the future that both he and I share is the belief that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., supported by the movement emerging naturally from within all of us, can be a pivotal part Of creating this more beautiful world our hearts know as possible.
That's the title of Eisenstein's most famous book, just FYI.
It seems ready-made for memeing and bumper stickers.
But the important part here is the movement emerging naturally from within all of us.
So, Bobby is organic, you see, a force of nature, part of a culture-wide awakening.
All right.
So I'm going to, I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell this story and I'm going to tell a story about, um, when I called you when I was in Costa Rica, because I called you because I just finished recording a podcast with Bobby and I actually, I was absolutely blown away, not only by what he had to say, but how he went about saying what he had to say and how actually precise he was with his language.
And how it built this level of trust that I had.
And also what I felt in my body, you know, I felt something in my body.
It was like, I fucking trust this guy.
Like, and I don't, I didn't know his whole platform.
I didn't know everything, but I just trusted that he was the type of person that would really listen and move with integrity, like forward genuinely.
So I went into my own medicine journey after the, after the podcast and I just got the clearest, picture of he has a chance to win the presidency of the United States, and if so, the world radically changes.
And very much like you wrote at the end of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, paradoxically, he's going to win, but it requires all of our effort Two points here.
the maximum capacity that we have.
And that's the paradox.
He's going to win.
And it requires all of us to give everything we got.
Two points here.
So as mentioned before, Marcus doesn't know his platform or the details.
And in the absence of that, he has a bodily feeling of trust.
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with New Age and wellness discourse, the body is this paradox of illusion and intuition.
On one hand, it is subservient to other realms and energies, as we'll see, up to and including a quality of non-reality that allows people to believe that cancer can be cured by the power of intention.
But on the other hand, it is the locus of truth, the only thing that gives you honest information.
And this is the same theme that shows up in recovered memory theory, for example.
In Marcus's case, if psychedelics confirm what he feels in his illusory body, the pathway forward is clear.
Marcus also flags the upcoming quantum metaphor, implying that Bobby has already won, but that also that outcome is dependent on everyone acting.
So there's an influence feedback loop that is set up.
And Eisenstein picks this up with his opening statement.
I think you actually hit on a key point when you said, when you mentioned the paradox that He's going to be president, and that doesn't mean that we can sit back and let it happen.
Yeah.
Because the impact, the change that his presidency represents co-resonates with an evolution of society and of our consciousness.
It's not going to happen outside of ourselves.
I don't want to make him into some heroic figure.
It's actually a bit of the opposite.
It's that the field from which someone like him could even be elected Has to change.
The existing political atmosphere of this country is not conducive to somebody with actual integrity, who's actually authentic.
What they begin to unpack is an extremely convoluted world in which politics is both passive, Bobby is destined to win, and active.
We have to make it happen.
And this is a contradiction that allows a new ager to be both particle and wave in the great slit experiment of life.
But unlike actual quantum mechanics models or experiments, in this milieu, there's no precision.
Enlightened intuition is the core strategy.
And so sometimes I advise him, I'm like, just put everything on the table.
Like everything that you were supposed to do as a politician, think through that again.
Like for example, you're supposed to have a plan.
You're supposed to have the answers.
But wouldn't it be refreshing for a politician to say, you know, I really don't know what to do about healthcare.
You know, some people say this, some people say that.
It's a complex puzzle.
So yeah, and there's conflicting values here, you know, gun control, abortion, like whatever the issue is.
Like, what if you actually don't know?
Because a lot of people don't know.
Yeah.
One key note of New Age cultural analysis is that the vast majority of people are stupid cows.
They don't know what they think about gun control and reproductive rights.
Or maybe racism?
Or maybe anti-trans bigotry?
They just don't know!
But in a more generous sense, Eisenstein's coding here, it is trying to echo, I think, the Zen literature, or the popular Zen literature, about beginner's mind, or know-nothing mind, which is typically invoked to ease a person into a more open and receptive attitude towards the mysteries of momentary experience.
Now this is a very common self-help refrain in New Age discourse, especially when the problems of the world are brought to the surface for consideration.
In more studious milieus, it becomes a theme in mindfulness-based stress reduction, where the cognitive behavioral therapy aspect persuades the person that curiosity is much healthier and more honest than reactive stress.
So, fine.
And it's natural that Eisenstein would give this advice, even if he can't take it himself when he writes long essays on COVID being illusory or even longer books on spiritual economics.
But what it ultimately does is that Bit by bit, it conflates personal self-help advice with political strategy, while also degrading the idea of expertise.
And that's crucial for advocates of COVID minimization and vaccine skepticism.
It's crucial to how they frame academic research and science journalism.
Because remember that in this world, the body or intuition is the ultimate arbiter of what is true and knowable.
And that's why this is the crowd that mocks Dr. Peter Hotez for being fat.
How can a fat guy really feel what's true with his body?
And therefore, how can a fat guy know anything about the immune system?
How can a fat guy design vaccines?
And if he does, they'll probably be as poisonous as the poisoned food that he eats.
The Know Nothing Mind is also where we see the ongoing impacts of depoliticization in the mainly middle-class demographic that has produced and consumed New Age and wellness content for decades.
Now, we outline this in our book in a chapter called, That's Us in a Headstand Losing Our Cognition, where the three of us discussed slipping deeper and deeper into a deracinated gig economy in the early 2000s.
As yoga teachers, we felt ourselves gradually pulled away from our political interests and heritage.
So I'll just quote from the book.
By the mid-aughts, we were all harried gig workers in an economy even more depoliticized than the mainstream zeitgeist.
In yoga and wellness worlds, it wasn't just seen as déclassé or even useless to be politically engaged.
Disengagement was a spiritual law tangled up in a consumer imperative.
It's hard to think about, let alone make time for, the revolution when you've got to work on the world-transcending aesthetic of your personal brand.
We had somehow fallen into a river in which the only acceptable politics, or the only politics anyone had time for, was an Orientalist universalism defined by good vibes and appeals to an ancient past.
And that riverhead snaked back to the 1893 splash made by Swami Vivekananda at the Chicago World's Fair Parliament of Religions.
The charismatic Hindu nationalist gave electric lectures that made yoga all the rage in the bourgeois salons of America.
Speaking to mainly Christian audiences, already primed by transcendentalist reveries of Emerson and Thoreau, Vivekananda proposed that his new form of homogenized and ecumenical Hinduism, sweetened by yoga, could put an end to sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism.
He didn't say how.
Nor did the alleged sex abuser Swami Sachidananda when he took the stage in white robes to open the Woodstock Festival in 1969.
Quote, Often we hear groups of people shouting, fight for peace, the Swami said into a PA ringing with feedback.
He may have been referring to the anti-Vietnam War movement or the civil rights clashes of previous years.
Quote, I still don't understand how they are going to fight and then find peace, he puzzled.
Therefore, let us not fight for peace, but let us find peace within ourselves first.
I'll just skip down to where we round off with the punchline.
Many North Americans who stuck with yoga after the 60s ended wanted a religion that wasn't a religion to bless a politics that wasn't political.
And they found their suppliers.
And I'll just note here that yoga in this passage, and then more generally in the book, usually stands in as a microcosm for wellness, alt-health, and syncretic New Age teachings more generally.
One gut reaction I have when I hear Eisenstein's know-nothing framework is to imagine that coming from this flaccid apoliticism is where Eisenstein is a liability to the Kennedy campaign that no politician can afford to just shrug in response to core battleground issues.
But as I watch Bobby dodge and weave through podcast after podcast, I'm not so sure that Eisenstein is wrong here.
It's possible that the Kennedy campaign will so thoroughly break political discourse that no-nothing mind will become an aspirational virtue among followers and then voters.
You know, it's not that the issues are irrelevant.
Right.
Our society is facing changes that are so profound that they don't fit into the categories of the issues.
And we're going to need somebody who can enter into that, I call it the fertile ground of bewilderment.
It's not just know nothing.
Being bewildered is fertile.
It's sexy.
It's where things happen.
When bewildered, Marcus and Eisenstein agree that core values are all that really matter.
And by implication, even though they are abstract, the core values will lead them to the best possible positions on abortion, gun rights, the environment, and vaccines.
And so in the absence of any clear epistemology, where will these guys turn for their certainty?
And so what do you rely on in the field of bewilderment?
You rely on values, right?
Like values and first principles really are like, to me, in my mind, is what forms a foundation, which is Honesty, integrity, care, love.
Those values are the things that are actually going to be the only things that are clear when everything gets foggy and you're lost in the wilderness.
What do you come back to?
If I'm in a psychedelic journey and I'm in a fucking crazy place where everything up is down and left is right and light is dark and dark is light and I'm confused.
I go back to the pillar of like, all right, I just have to love my way out of this.
Just have to love my way out of this love, whatever I can love, and I'll love my way out of this mess.
So it's like, it pushes me back to like the core values.
And that's, I think, something we've never seen in politics is someone who is who is like value driven, like bound by values rather than
issues and ideologies and reflexes.
And I see that in him. I see him as like a person of a man of value.
I feel like this passage pretty much sums up the central desires and anxieties of New Age thought
that believing in personal merit and goodness will provide all answers.
And this is why the first pathway to political sanity for them is the pathway of exercise, meditation, organic food.
They can't really see it any other way.
And I just want to underline that there's nothing really progressive about it.
It's an attitude that doesn't begin with an analysis of inequality or of questioning why capitalism functions to discourage mutual aid.
It begins with the status of the individual body and mind, and so it can't help but be anxious.
As the great anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin says in Mutual Aid, quote, Under any circumstances, sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.
And this is a consequentialist observation because you can always see the positive effects of helping others, but when your focus is self-improvement, you're really always looking into a black box.
Wondering how you're doing, whether you should be doing more, whether you really feel as optimized as you want to be.
But Marcus and Eisenstein aren't being that simplistic either because they do also mingle their individualism with notes of collectivism.
A reality is held by a group.
It's just human nature.
of the quantum Bobby.
And Eisenstein begins to expand on this from the point of view of his own pause-ridden
speaking style.
A reality is held by a group.
It's just human nature.
Like every time I do public speaking, and maybe even to some extent in this conversation
right now, I'm not just transmitting information.
In everything I say, there is always a question.
The question is, right?
Am I crazy here?
Do you resonate with us?
And so I look at your face.
I sense the energy in the room.
I hear the laughter or the tears and that helps me more deeply inhabit and receive the field of information that I am speaking from.
Yeah.
Like it's because, because the very definition of insanity is to hold a reality that's different from everybody else.
You know, I'm hearing voices, you know, I'm seeing things like, like how do I know what's real?
I turned to my brother.
Did you see that?
Have you thought that?
And so that's, that's what I do in my, uh, My job that I had before this, you know, and I'm keeping that thread alive also in order that I can actually stay sane and not become a creature of the system that I'm entering to change.
Right.
And I think that if I have a strong enough tether to a bigger reality, then instead of becoming its creature, it will migrate over into the consciousness and into the mythology, into the story that we on the margins have been preparing for a long time.
And that is arising in humanity, not just, you know, People in the psychedelic world or the consciousness world, but it's actually creeping in everywhere.
Easily a situation where every single person on the campaign has experienced psychedelics and other technologies of consciousness.
Yet, when they are in the logic of a political campaign, it's like they forget about all that.
Right.
Like that can happen to anybody.
It's not like I'm the only guy coming in there from a different worldview.
Right.
So in order not to default into political thinking as it has been conceived in the past, it requires an effort of will.
It requires, that's one ingredient.
And the other ingredient is a community, you know, and help.
So I'm like, yeah, I'm not different.
I need help.
On one hand we've got internal intuitive knowing, in Marcus's case provoked and validated by plant medicine, and on the other we've got Eisenstein appealing to a form of peer review by imagining that he's fact-checking himself in real time against the vibe of the group.
And what begins to emerge through this quantum bobby theme is a parody of the scientific or academic method, where instead of curious anecdotal evidence being explored by research that controls variables and then it's reviewed by peers, with Marcus and Eisenstein and the whole New Age scene, we have intuitive hypotheses tested by vibes.
Part of it is idealistic, part of it is ignorant and naive, and part of it, I think, is just impatient.
Because this is a demographic that is consumerist.
It wants experiences in the moment.
Transformation now or bust.
When you sign up for Fit for Service, which costs around $20,000 a year all-in to attend, you're signing up to have your mind blown within the first 3-4 day intensive workshop format.
Now, if Marcus was interviewing Marianne Williamson, she might easily cough up the old A Course in Miracles chestnut that miracles are instantaneous, so this is a kind of thinking that's everywhere.
And it's also why Williamson's actual policy answers often sound so thin, as if she'd be waving a fairy wand over global conflict or slavery reparations.
You never really get the sense from Williamson that politics and democracy is incredibly tedious and boring and uncertain and mostly unrewarding.
That it will never give you the serial dopamine hits that you've trained yourself to expect from spiritual retreats.
Movement building on the ground, getting ballots into boxes, it's all unglamorous in the extreme.
And part of me really wonders how long these guys will tough it out if they do any on the ground work at all.
With Bobby Kennedy, however, we have somebody who can bring a more dogged set of habits to the table with successful organizing experience in children's health defense and a long litigating career where pedantry and tedium are prized commodities.
But Bobby is also miracle-minded, as they say in A Course in Miracles.
And in another episode, I'll probably take a look at how this notion of the intuitive instant also resonates with the story he tells about his addiction recovery, which he attributes to a spiritual awakening prompted by reading Jung's Synchronicities book and also a chance meeting with a recovered addict who had joined the Moonies.
Next up, Marcus and Eisenstein veer into that synchronicity territory after discussing the strangeness of their own political power and influence, and who they deem worthy of paying attention to, and how much luck is involved in that, whose podcasts they'll go on according to how many followers, and maybe they'll choose to go on to some up-and-coming podcast just on an intuition.
It's a jaunt into magical territory where it's just not clear how or where the blessings of God will come from, but they're just sure that it's all going in the right direction.
You can't live in a world where you've seen synchronicities and coincidences.
So many times, and this is one of the topics that you love talking about, going to a festival is like going to a synchronicity machine, basically, where you're opening yourself to the universe, Burning Man, or something like that, where you don't know who anybody is, and you're in the dust, and you just bump into somebody, and it's like, holy shit, and this connection happens.
It's where I met my wife through a series of crazy coincidences that she happened to be in my camp, and all kinds of wild things happen.
Both, using strategy and having a plan and acknowledging that that's necessary and also listening for the whisper.
The whisper that comes from an intuition that I listen to, you know, when I'm looking at my DMs on Instagram.
Even the most mundane tasks in this world are part of a tantric playground for these guys.
Every DM might be a secret message.
Now, from here they discuss the folly of making strong plans, because you just never know who you'll meet on your way, or how important they'll be, how they'll change your trajectory, or what you will learn from them.
This is all more basic beginner mind stuff.
But then, bit by bit, there's another magical ingredient that begins to drip feed into their conversation.
And that's the value of non-judgment.
Of viewing everyone in pure innocence.
Assuming there are shared values that somehow combatants on either side of gun rights, abortion, and the environment have somehow missed or ignored.
At one point, they wade into this smooth-brained territory via their distaste for the Avatar movies, which pitch the indigenous populations of Pandora against the techno-fascist military contractors of Earth's Resources Development Administration.
Marcus and Eisenstein find it implausible and distasteful that Cameron's vision resolves in a violent war of resistance.
They really would prefer that the Na'vi and the humans just worked it out, perhaps through an encounter group.
And part of that is weird, because conspiritualists are also very fond of talking about Nazis, fascism, and spiritual warfare.
Like, a lot.
In previous coverage, we discussed Eisenstein talking at a gathering about his fantasies of punishing the pedophile elite.
And then Bobby is also prone to fire and brimstone.
We are in the last battle, he said on September 2, 2021.
He's giving a keynote address at an autism conference at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in California.
Quote, this is the apocalypse.
We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.
Then there's a quiet turn back into quantum navel-gazing, as Eisenstein seems to apply the Heisenberg principle to Bobby's campaign.
But listen to the implications for the space-time continuum.
You know, everything that I'm saying here, I'm describing the highest possibility of a Kennedy presidency.
It may be fulfilled 100%.
It, he may get elected and fulfill it 50% or, you know, I mean, he's a sovereign being.
He might make choices that, that are profoundly disappointing and, and he fulfills it 0%.
But I do see the possibility of, A radical healing of what, of the trauma that America suffered on November 22nd, 1963.
Yeah.
And the reconnection of the present to a past timeline that was truncated at that moment.
Because, you know, 1963, America was at the peak of its power.
Something like nearly half of all industrial production in the world is happening in this country.
We had limitless wealth.
We had some problems.
But the civil rights movement was underway.
The women's rights movement was underway.
We were gonna fix those problems.
We were gonna fix those problems.
And we were going to unwind American militarism.
You know, JFK wanted to get out of Vietnam.
You know, he wanted to support revolutionary movements around the world to throw off the yoke of colonialism.
He didn't want to just take over the British Empire.
He wanted to disband it.
Yeah.
And he wanted to loosen the grip of the military-industrial complex.
And all the alphabet agencies.
All that stuff, you know.
And he was assassinated.
And that timeline got cut short.
We entered Vietnam and the forever wars ever since.
And all of that money and all of that effort and all of that attention that could have gone toward healing our problems was directed toward violence.
And the core of our society began rotting out from the inside.
To the point where most people today say that they are worse off than their parents were and even their grandparents.
In 1963, that was impossible to conceive.
Just as it was impossible to conceive that the government would ever lie to us.
So JFK got assassinated and the root of the poison was that we swallowed the lie That it was a lone gunman, a crazed gunman.
Yeah.
When you accept a lie that deep down you know is a lie, it poisons everything.
Yeah.
And the result is that we now swim in a matrix, in an ocean of lies.
There's so much here.
So you caught the rejoin timeline bit at the top.
This is an appeal to parallel or multiple universe theory, which is a fringe topic in physics that's been taken up by new agers, in which each choice is said to steer a person down a pathway that leaves other pathways not only open, but real and continuous.
For instance, imagine that on November 4th, 2016, Trump's election not only steered the country deeper into chaos, It also spun off an alternative reality in which Hillary Clinton won.
There was less disinfo from the top about COVID.
No January 6th insurrection.
No Supreme Court appointments of Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
No overturning of Roe v. Wade.
But probably the same aggressive US foreign policy.
Parallel universe theory suggests that that universe exists somewhere.
It's ticking along just fine, but it's forever inaccessible to our own.
So, Eisenstein is saying the same thing about Jack Kennedy's death here.
If he hadn't been killed that day, his world would have continued without forever wars.
Civil rights for the marginalized would have been completed.
Actualized.
But in order to visualize this parallel universe, Eisenstein has to call on all of his creative faculties to create a chintzy, Potemkin vision of mid-century America, where Jack didn't actually escalate military deployment to Vietnam, where white men were on the verge of totally sharing power equally with black folks and women, and where Bobby Kennedy Sr.
Didn't order Martin Luther King Jr to be wiretapped.
A time when governments never lied or coerced anyone.
Where corruption was hardly a thing.
Where everyone had access to wealth.
Limitless wealth.
I mean, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at Eisenstein's idealizations here.
We're used to this kind of perfection nostalgia in New Age and Yogaland discourse.
If it's not the perfection of ancient India, it's the idyllic pre-Christian societies of Europe.
And if it's not those, it can be Camelot.
And how strange and apropos it is that a Gen Xer like Eisenstein is reaching back into the youth of his parents' generation to try to imagine what went wrong before things got hard, before you realized that being an adult was hard work, before you understood there were no easy answers.
The Marcus Eisenstein episode is very long, so I'll just cover one more bit.
Eisenstein is, as we've seen, proposing that we're entering a new timeline, or repairing an old one.
And in that timeline, the field of consciousness is such that alien disclosure can finally happen.
UFOs had to be on the sidelines of reality for a long time because as a society, we had not yet come to a place where we could accept this extreme disruption of our dominant paradigms.
The behavior of UFOs simply does not fit into standard physics.
And also the loss of our idea of our own primacy, we were not ready for that.
So they had to stay in the realm of fiction.
And you can't really fully understand the UFO phenomenon if you're too attached to objective reality.
The rational mind would like to think that independent of our beliefs and perceptions, there is a fact of the matter.
Either that UFO landed and, you know, abducted that person at point X comma Y comma Z on the map at time T, or it did not.
Either there is a secret program to reverse engineer captured alien craft, you know, in the dark ops of the Pentagon, or there isn't.
But that objectivist worldview is actually nonsense in quantum mechanics, where you say, well, you know, regardless of our measurement of that particle, either it was or it was not at that slit rather than the other.
No, wrong.
Right.
And philosophically, we've consigned such weirdness to the microcosm, but It at least suggests another way of looking at things, where the factualness of UFOs is connected to our own consciousness.
And that as our consciousness evolves, the ETs become more and more able to penetrate into consensus reality.
So, and we see this change now, the percentage of Americans who profess to believe in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs has gone up considerably in the last five years.
It used to be like 40%, you know, five or 10 years ago.
And now it's like 60% or something like that.
So, the field of acceptance, this is not just that more evidence has come in.
This is because, and it's not because people are being, in my view, expertly manipulated by a deliberate slow leak of information.
It's because the field of consciousness has come to a point where that information is erupting through the cracks.
People have been whistleblowing and credible people have been speaking out about it for a long time.
But they weren't believed.
People weren't ready to believe them or they would believe them, but compartmentalize that belief because their dominant reality was unable to accommodate that information.
And we see this all the time.
Like you can have a religious experience.
You can, you can, you can experience a miracle.
You can witness an incredible healing.
You can witness it.
You can see a UFO, you know, you can, you can, You know, hear Maladoma Sommé talk about initiation rituals among the daggera, you know, and describe things that are so far outside of our conventional beliefs about what's possible.
It's jaw-dropping and you believe him.
You don't think he's making it up.
You should listen to the audio book, which is him actually telling the story of Water and the Spirit.
In that moment, you know that he is speaking the truth.
So even if you haven't had the experience directly, but many of us have had, have had experiences directly that are flagrantly in violation of everything we were told is real.
Right.
But even secondhand, what do you do with that information when you go back to work?
It just doesn't fit into the structures that we live in and into the social structures, into the belief structures.
Yeah.
So we put it in the margins.
Today, those structures are dissolving and that allows They go back and forth a bit on how whistleblowers are prophets and how belief and sanity are a collective process.
and deeper into our own minds.
And once we accept that reality, everything changes.
Yeah.
They go back and forth a bit on how whistleblowers are profits
and how belief and sanity are a collective process.
And so we'll finish up here.
Ultimately, you cannot escape from the realm of communication with each other
and the group holding of a belief.
And when you understand that, then you can understand some of the weird behavior of extraterrestrial craft and extraterrestrial beings and missing time and the sharp right angles that they execute in the sky in complete defiance of Newtonian kinetics.
Right.
Like, in some sense, they are not in objective reality as we know it.
Right.
And we will never Accept them.
They will never become real.
As long as we don't transcend the mythology, the Cartesian-Newtonian mythology that we have inherited, the mythology of modernity, because there is no room in that reality for them.
And as I said before, that reality is breaking down.
So it's almost like, in a way, the emergence of Kennedy as president and the emergence of UFOs are both dependent upon the evolution of the field.
Yeah.
In certain ways.
Yeah, potentially.
And again, Kennedy is president.
Which Kennedy is it going to be?
Is it going to be his highest and best possible expression?
That really depends on everybody.
Because each one of us contributes to the field that co-resonates with who this person is.
In objective reality, i.e.
in our experience, in his intersection with ourselves.
Marcus and Eisenstein believe that Bobby is here to liberate our minds from Newtonian kinetics, just as the aliens will, if we are prepared to believe in miracles, and that's all up to us.
This would all be absurd if we forget or block out the fact that these guys did a two hour episode on the campaign they will be fundraising for and doing messaging for and they turned up their noses at the actual legal and policy issues at stake.
No discussion of Medicare for All, slavery reparations, electoral reform, wealth redistribution, the taxation of billionaires, immigration, social media regulation, climate change, abortion rights, or trans rights.
Any sense of urgency they feel seems philosophical or aesthetic and definitely very armchair.
And now they're going to have an extended moment in a brighter spotlight.
For the next 470 odd days, they'll be working on this story and we'll get to see how adaptable it is and just how many people they win over.
I'm not a political strategist, but my sense is that the challenge now faced by anyone who wants a sane 2024 outcome is to go out and have in-real-life contact with people you know about the issues you want to collaborate on, and then find or become the candidate who does real things in the world, because that's not what this crowd will be doing.
They'll be working out, going on retreats, collecting donations on Substack, doing juice fasts and psychedelics, and they'll be dreaming about being close to Bobby.
They'll be dreaming about being as relevant in politics or world history as they have been adored on the workshop circuit.
