Deep Cut: The OG New Age Grifter: Madame Blavatsky
Born in 1831, Helena "Madame" Blavatsky pioneered the New Age grift. The Russian aristocrat plagiarized her books while claiming to be channeling the “Masters of Ancient Wisdom” to tell a dodgy heroic back-story. She founded the Theosophical Society in New York, claimed to have learned a secret Tibetan language, and laid the foundation for alien channelers and Woo-Anon. She also inspired the Nazis.
In the latest episode from a series on the pseudoscience New Age roots of today’s conspirituality phenomenon, Julian pins Blavatsky on the cork-board map.
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Welcome to Conspiracuality.
I'm Julian Walker and today we're releasing a deep cut.
This is a bonus episode I created a couple months back.
It's part of a series I've been doing that traces the roots of the conspirituality phenomenon going as far back as the mid-19th century.
You don't have to have heard the previous episodes to make sense of this one, although I encourage you to go back and listen to them.
They're available in our bonus feed for Patreon subscribers.
But to give you a quick sort of sketch, this is a period of great social upheaval in the United States.
We're talking about the 1840s, and you have the Second Great Awakening, which is this passionate evangelical revivalism, also associated to progressive ideas of social reform.
But wrapped up in all of it is the notion that Jesus is coming soon.
And people have calculated the exact date that he's going to return.
And so, inevitably, the Great Awakening turns into the Great Disappointment.
And out of the Great Disappointment, you have the emergence of the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
And again, this profusion of religious fervor in the American psyche.
Alongside this, you have the emergence of spirit mediums who would do big shows in theaters in New York City claiming to talk to the dead, and then the development of parapsychology, where scientists are attempting to study supposedly paranormal phenomena to find out if they can get real evidence that there's something going on beyond mere charlatanry.
But what happens next in our story is what you will hear about in this episode, which is the coming onto the scene of Madame Helena Blavatsky, who I call the original New Age grifter.
She's a Russian aristocrat.
She's a world traveler.
She claims to be understanding the underlying message of all the world religions in preparation for a great transformation that is to come and you will hear so many contemporary New Age pop spirituality ideas that originate from her and have lasted ever since and there are some interesting connections to World War II that you're going to want to learn about as well There was once an ancient and sacred time when we lived in harmony with the earth,
in touch with intuitive knowing, open to spiritual guidance.
We're not from here, you see.
We were descended from another world, and then we lived on the islands of Atlantis and Lemuria before they were destroyed.
Our true origins lie in the immaterial domain, and our destiny is to reawaken.
To our innate but slumbering paranormal abilities and divine true nature.
There is an ancient and secret group of masters who've developed great wisdom and supernatural powers.
Some of them are in human form, but others have ascended and they speak to us through channelers.
We stand at a turning point in human evolution and must overcome the forces of animalistic darkness in order for light to prevail.
Now, this is all no doubt familiar, but I have a wild tale to tell you about the origins of these kinds of ideas and a shocking connection that reveals how even these romantic and fanciful, maybe kind of harmless-seeming spiritual notions can drive some of the darkest impulses in human history.
We're going to talk today about the OG New Age grifter, Madame Blavatsky.
As well as, toward the end, Heinrich Himmler.
He's the man who ran the terrifying SS and engineered the Nazi death camps.
And all of this was inspired and justified to some extent by his occult beliefs that intersected with something called theosophy.
So this harmless-sounding fantasy style of metaphysical beliefs has been circulating in the West for quite some time.
It became widespread during the 80s and 90s as New Age spirituality, and this is during a time when natural living and holistic wellness and Yoga, meditation collided with a kind of science fiction mythology around UFOs and alien beings and so-called channelers who claimed to be delivering their messages to humanity.
This new-ish cosmology was expressed in books like Bringers of the Dawn by Barbara Marsaniac, and that kicked off the whole trend of Pleiadians and messages from the Pleiades.
And it was borrowed by people like David Icke and then Alex Jones and morphed into the QAnon fantasies about evil reptilian aliens amongst us.
And it gave birth to a whole slew of enlightened alien-channeled teachers like Jay-Z Knight, who says she has a 35,000-year-old Lemurian king named Ramtha speaking through her, and this has made her a millionaire.
It's the lingua franca of things like the Conscious Life Expo and the material Gaia TV presents in a dizzying blend of alien disclosure and interdimensional spirit channeling and, of course, yoga, and then paranoid conspiracy documentaries.
And we all know what happened during 2020 as this caught fire.
Just days before the January 6th insurrection, supposed Galactic Federation channeler Lori Ladd told her 200,000 followers on Instagram it was time for lightworkers to charge forward in their armor.
But there are two things we haven't looked at in depth yet on this podcast.
First, the person most responsible for popularizing the core ideas of New Age culture that underlie all of this.
Her name is Helena Blavatsky, and she was born in 1831 to an aristocratic family in the town of Yekaterinoslav in Ukraine, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire.
And second... Remember that five-sentence description of New Age-sounding ideas that I started with?
You know, living in intuitive harmony with the Earth, having a divine destiny to awaken to a new plane of paranormal consciousness, having originated in an ancient magical time on Lemuria or Atlantis.
This is all usually associated with light and love neo-hippie types, and more recently the yoga and wellness folks, some of whom got red-pilled into the far-right pipeline since 2020.
Well, hold on to your crystals, because those ideas actually also characterize the spiritual worldview held by some prominent Nazis obsessed with the occult and indeed with a remixed version of Helena Blavatsky's ideas.
So let's start with Madame Helena Blavatsky, or as she was named at birth in 1831, Helena Petrovna Hamm von Rottenstern.
She was an aristocratic army brat whose father was in the military, so they moved around the Russian Empire a lot with their servants, of course.
As a child, she had contact through the colonial duties of her grandfather with some Kelmic Mongolian people who practiced Tibetan Buddhism.
From them, she would learn to ride horses and even to speak some Tibetan.
As a preteen, she had access to the personal esoteric library of a great-grandfather who had been a Freemason.
She says that it was during this period she began to have visions in which she encountered a mysterious Indian man.
In the ensuing years, says Helena, she began to astral travel.
And stop me if you've heard this before, because this is like the website bio of every New Age grifter we've covered, right?
Helena von Rottenstern was married briefly at age 17 to a man in his 40s named Nikifor Blavatsky.
But she escaped this marriage while retaining the name and began traveling the world, presumably financed by her wealthy father.
At this point, the facts and the fiction of our heroine start to become indistinguishable.
And that's the way she likes it.
She befriends a Hungarian opera singer, apparently after saving him from being murdered in Constantinople.
She meets other aristocrats and travels with one of them extensively through the Middle East and Europe.
Helena meets magicians and hypnotists and then, in England, walks into a room full of people to find the mysterious Indian man from her childhood visions is there in the flesh.
Now, each time she tells this story, the details are different.
It happens in different places.
How they talk to each other changes.
But nonetheless, his name is Master Moria.
And he gives her a special mission that involves traveling to Tibet.
But first, she goes to Canada and the US in search of tribal magic there, and then on to India, supposedly following the instructions of Moira.
She's denied access to Tibet at that time, and then supposedly survives a shipwreck close to South Africa on the way back to Europe.
But her travels continue.
And I should say here, you can't knock her adventurous spirit.
And she was almost certainly sincere in her attempts to find her holy grail, even with all of the grandiose embellishments.
More time in the Americas, and then back to India.
And finally, at the ripe old age of 25, Helena Blavatsky finds herself in Tibet.
We don't know what exactly happens there, but three years later, she's back with her family in Russia, and she says she starts to manifest more paranormal powers and experiences.
You know, the house creaks and strange rapping sounds are heard, and what else could explain it?
But then she falls from a horse and And is in a coma with a spinal fracture for some months.
And stop me if you've heard this before, but upon recovering from her catastrophic injuries, Helena claims to now have fully awakened to her paranormal abilities.
She returns to Tibet with Master Morya and meets his associate, Kut Kumi.
She learns a secret Tibetan language no one has heard of before or since, called Senzar, and so is able to translate previously secret texts.
Spiritual master Kuthumi, who will become the main source she claims for her future books, is kind of speaking through her, teaches Helena the full range of psychic powers, you know, clairvoyance, clairaudience, controlling the minds of others, making objects materialize and disappear, the Juge. She's now almost 40. The majority of scholars of religion and history are skeptical
about every aspect of Blavatsky's spiritual autobiography.
They point out the myriad inconsistencies, contradictions, and aspects of her stories that do not accord with events during these years in those countries or indeed with those religious traditions. But This is what our self-made world traveler and spiritual seeker rolls with in her second act.
Now, if you've listened to this loosely connected series so far, which actually started back on May 20th with an episode titled, Russell Brand is Christian Now that explored pseudoscience at the heart of spirituality.
This series is on the roots of today's conspirituality and on the pseudoscience at the heart of the new age.
If you've been listening, you'll know that the late 19th century, roughly concurrent with Helena's globetrotting, finds us in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment in the burned-over district of New York, where the Second Great Awakening had crashed on the rocks of William Miller's failed prophecy of the exact date and time of Jesus' second coming.
And out of this great awakening turned great disappointment, we know we will see the rise of Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists as co-founded by Ellen G. White.
Remember her? She's the young temporal lobe epileptic I talked about for the July 1st episode, The Prophet and the Electrical Storm.
You can go back and listen to these.
She founded a church based on visions she had during...
What we now think are temporal lobe epileptic seizures, based on several good pieces of evidence, after having been a devout follower of William Miller.
As the passionate revivalist movement in the Northeast was struggling to recover from that great disappointment, you know, many had sold their farms and left their businesses and climbed up onto hills and rooftops and into trees dressed in especially woven white robes to welcome Jesus literally descending through the clouds.
After that, it didn't happen.
The Adventists would craft their own interpretation of why the day had passed without the Savior's earthly arrival, and Ellen G. White would be at the center of that new movement.
So this is all context here, because at the same time, the Spiritualist Movement, with a capital S, the Spiritualist Movement, as I covered in the June 10th episode, Speak Through Me, In which people who claimed to be communicating with the dead were turning a thriving trade performing in theaters.
This was all wildly popular in New York.
And that's where Madame Blavatsky would go next.
Now, Ellen G. White also performed her trance states in front of audiences, but she bristled at any comparison to the spiritualists.
You see, she was a prophet and God was showing her visions And according to her, the spiritualists were likely being spoken through by demons.
It's completely different.
Stop me if you've heard this before, but Helena came to New York intent on helping the world to see that the spiritualists really were in touch with the spirit world, just like she was.
And to absorb their stage routine into her detailed taxonomy of higher spiritual knowledge as revealed on her travels to her by the Ascended Masters.
Now, as I mentioned, Helena is the grandmother of popular New Age beliefs.
And she's the prototype of its charismatic grift.
Whether they know it or not, Jay-Z Knight, Lori Ladd, and the others, you know, David Wilcock, Magenta Pixie, April Elizabeth, Kaya Ra, as many others, they're all following a blueprint laid down not by actual cosmic architects signposted by invisible guides to higher truth, but in fact by a chain-smoking, plagiarizing, continent-hopping habitual liar from the 19th century.
Helena's Got It All Who doesn't seem to have ever existed.
She claims to have fought in a war and suffered bullet wounds.
To have learned a forgotten Tibetan language that no one's ever come across so as to understand secret scriptures.
She claims to have learned the spiritual secrets of American Indians and to have survived a shipwreck twice and lived to tell the tale.
More than that, these journeys and the books she wrote were all apparently guided by a mysterious group she claimed to be in touch with called the Masters of Ancient Wisdom, the main one of whom is her teacher, Kut Humi, and she was on a mission to reveal the ancient and universal occult science behind all of religion.
I'll get personal for a moment here.
I'll never forget as a young man, relatively new to California, sitting down to my first dinner party at which I was introduced to guests as a very spiritual yoga teacher.
I was a young man who'd been reading the comparative religion of Houston Smith and the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung and the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell, popularizations of Zen Buddhism by people like Charlotte Joko Beck and Alan Watts.
And then Pema Chodron's take on Vajrayana Buddhism.
I was dedicated to my meditation and Hatha Yoga, and also reading Ken Wilber and Jack Kornfield's approaches to integrating Western psychology and contemplative practice.
Now, of course, I've since come to a variety of opinions about each of those authors, but my point is...
That I was deep into what I considered to be a kind of serious spirituality, which had to do with a quite sober approach to living the examined life.
And what followed at the dinner party was the first of many similar experiences in which it would dawn on me that I was, once again, surrounded by people who associated meditation and yoga with visiting psychics and astrologers,
staying on the lookout for the clock Reading 1111, so as to make a wish, manifesting parking spaces through the power of intention, and remembering at all times the higher truth that all suffering, trauma, or oppression, and yes, even the Holocaust, they would always assure me with unblinking clarity, was for the highest good, once you'd let go of judgment and the illusion that there was such a thing as a victim.
These people would always be delighted to meet me and then predictably severely disappointed once they got to know me.
It was painful all around, mostly because I spoke my mind without much concern for diplomacy.
Now it is true, as I would later learn, that the mostly boomer generation Western intellectuals I was reading had cherry-picked the most philosophically sophisticated and either metaphorically pragmatic, Campbell's hero's journey as applied to our self-actualizing life struggles, or mystically abstract, like the non-dual Advaita Vedanta aspects of Eastern spirituality.
These folks had de-emphasized The ubiquitous superstitions of everyday Hindu and Buddhist cultures and the blatant charlatanry running through the sadhu tradition, for example, which really does claim paranormal abilities.
And this was all perfectly crafted for a consumer like myself looking for a more rational and secular, pragmatic, humanistic approach to contemplative practice.
But what Helena Blavatsky did was popularize her own completely fabricated version of a perennial esoteric tradition rooted in the East in which supposedly secret knowledge and paranormal powers and authoritative channeled texts We're front and center.
In this aesthetic, the purpose of any kind of yoga or contemplative practice was to develop or really reclaim psychic abilities and further to make contact with an invisible domain of supernatural guidance.
So, in short, I blame Blavatsky for what I see as the split between awareness practice that seeks existential clarity, compassion, and resilience, and the dominant New Age mood of escapist and self-aggrandizing delusion.
Now, as I said, Blavatsky spent time in New York, and she was a supporter of spiritualism.
But her angle was really to try to position herself as the next-level mystical expert who understood that spiritualism was just one parlor-trick aspect of this deeper map of the spirit world and making contact with the ascended masters so as to reveal the new world religion.
As a rule, the New Age marketplace depends on pseudoscience.
This series that we're in the midst of is sort of informal and spread out across multiple months.
It's a series of bonus episodes discussing how conspirituality therefore has pseudoscience at its center.
And we're looking at topics like the history of paranormal research and the evolution of quantum woo, how alternative medicine enacts pseudoscience, and how science fiction has in turn influenced new religions.
The field of parapsychology gets its start in the late 1800s in London, running parallel to the beginnings of this new religion called theosophy.
The first parapsychology organization founded in 1882 was called the Society for Psychical Research.
It began this still completely unsuccessful endeavor of scientifically validating what they imagined could be the real paranormal phenomena of spiritualism and separating that out from all the fraudulent ones.
Helena founded Theosophy in New York with a new associate named Henry Steele Olcott in 1875.
And even if you've never heard of it, you've no doubt recognized so much of the now standard New Age or pop spirituality worldview in its tenets.
Shortly after arriving in Manhattan in 1873, and after surviving another supposed shipwreck where the boat blew up for some reason, Blavatsky's father died, and she came into a large inheritance.
She arrived in New York with her largely fabricated backstory not to take part in spiritualism, but But to take over by situating for its consumers these popular stage performances of communication with the spirit world into her own larger metaphysical narrative.
Now, Helena's travels, as it turns out, don't end here.
She writes the first official text of Theosophy whilst in New York.
It's titled Isis Unveiled, and she claims it's written by a second consciousness within her that she calls The Lodger.
It is widely criticized in the press as plagiarizing over 100 other books, but nonetheless is very popular.
But by 1879, Helena is back in India, where, as it turns out, theosophy had really caught on, to some extent because it hooked up with the Hindu reform movement, which was pushing back against the incursion of Christian missionaries from the West.
Which is deeply ironic because now you have a, I guess, non-Christian remixed Eastern spirituality missionary from a non-Indian place.
Anyway, the Theosophical Society boasted of multiple branches around the country.
And as ever, she explored the local religion, but then made claims like having found secret underground passageways at ancient Buddhist caves, which, as it turned out, connected to meeting places of the immaterial masters who had been guiding her all along.
She writes her other major theosophical text, 1888's The Secret Doctrine, whilst back in Europe, after a series of controversies, there were accusations of her being a Russian spy, and some people within her organization began accusing her also of being a fraud who had faked any of her paranormal abilities. And then Helena dies at 59 years old in London
during a flu epidemic, succumbing to the virus after having struggled for some time with Bright's disease.
When I say her ideas are central to popular New Age spirituality as we know it, here's what I mean.
Consider this loose summary.
I'll elaborate a little bit more than I had before.
There is an ancient and secret group of masters who have developed great wisdom and supernatural powers.
Some of these are in human form.
Others have ascended and might speak through channelers when in trance.
The masters seek to disseminate the lost universal truths that underlie all seemingly separate religions.
They're also described as belonging to the great white brotherhood that watches over humanity and guides our evolution.
Blavatsky claimed they were using her as a vessel to this end.
She said that she was herself in contact with a master named Kuthumi.
Who lived in India? As you might imagine, for a universalist, almost postmodern tradition like this, the great figures of various religions, Christ, the Buddha, Solomon, Moses, Confucius, and so on, were all actually ascended masters of the White Brotherhood.
Through arduous spiritual practice, one could become a master themselves, which would include developing clairvoyance, astral projection, and a very long lifespan.
In her writings, Blavatsky professed access to a secret doctrine that underpinned all the world's religions, and that was known to Plato, of course, and the early Hindu sages.
This doctrine held the key to understanding psychic phenomena, reincarnation, and miracles.
These ideas contained not only the seeds of today's New Age movement, as I'm sure you'll agree, they also influenced, as I said earlier, the development of Nazism.
Even in the 1880s, we find an early expression of the idea that ascended masters are also part of a hierarchical structure through which different solar systems are governed or watched over by representatives of the spirit world.
In her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky also postulated a kind of cosmic basis to what she called root races, tracing back to supposed lost continents like Lemuria, And Atlantis, ancient man, was pure spirit, but had descended into the material world and developed human intellect.
He lost touch with the psychic abilities of spiritual consciousness.
We are destined, however, to regain these, and the emergent Aryan race, she says, is the start of that turning point.
After the sinking of Atlantis, the people who had become the Aryans migrated into Asia and would go on to create the Hindu, Persian, Greco-Roman, and later European cultures.
In that 1888 text, she talked about superior and inferior races designating Aryans as the most spiritual people on earth, While describing Jews as having a religion of hate and malice toward everything and everyone outside of itself.
Scholars have pointed out echoes of these ideas in the later words of Adolf Hitler.
The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.
He must have come from another root of the human race.
I set the Aryan and the Jew over against each other, and if I call one of them a human being, I must call the other something else.
The two are as widely separated as man and beast.
Not that I would call the Jew a beast.
He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans.
He is a creature outside nature, And alien to nature.
According to the book Hitler Speaks by Hermann Rauschning, the fur herd does appear to have been familiar with Blavatsky's ideas.
As do a whole German subculture of occultists in the late 1800s and early 1900s who combined German ethno-nationalist nature mysticism with philosophy in what would later come to be called Ariosophy.
Arian, Theosophy, Areosophy.
The Areosophists sought to weave together theosophical ideas with paganism, holistic philosophy, Christianity, the Romantic movement's rejection of the rational Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, In favor of a return to nature and the guiding wisdom of spiritual intuition, imagination, and pure emotion.
Stop me if you've heard this before.
Where Blavatsky used the swastika as the seal of the Theosophical Society, prominent Areosophist Guido von List saw the swastika as the occult symbol representing the victory of the Aryans over other races.
Starting as early as 1899, von List propagated an occult-infused pseudo-history of the Germanic people as an Aryan super-race and embraced the swastika and runic symbols, the runes, and romantic blood-and-soil volkish movement that sought to return to the land and move away from the industrialization of city life.
He also rejected Christianity as having been imposed by the Jews and championed a return to paganism and ways of being less restricted by Christian morality.
Von List was very influenced by Madame Blavatsky in this regard.
By 1908, he had founded the influential Guido Von List Society organized around what he called Arminism at the time.
Von List dies in 1919, and his ideas and society are actually persecuted as the Nazis are on the rise.
And this is in part because an occultist named Karl Maria Willigut disagreed with aspects of their beliefs.
Near enemies are often the worst kind, right?
Willigott had a strong influence over Heinrich Himmler, who had become the head of Hitler's SS, transforming it from less than 300 men to a fighting force of 3,000.
Between 1929 and 1930.
And by 1933, with Hitler in power, the SS numbered over 50,000 soldiers and was engaged in brutal rounding up, imprisoning, and killing of Jews.
SS members were required to fit the criterion of exemplifying pure Aryan genetics.
And Himmler also oversaw a program that sought to marry these SS men to similarly Aryan women to produce master race children.
Himmler would bring Willigut into the SS where they worked together on various despicable projects driven by these beliefs.
Himmler took over a castle called Wiewelsberg and transformed it into a kind of medieval retreat temple for the SS, complete with rooms designed and named after characters in the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail.
Here, the SS marriages arranged by Himmler to propagate the master race took place.
It's not fair to entirely blame Helena Bovarsky for the way Himmler enacted his occult-infused racial cleansing project.
But following another key German thinker in what would come to be called Ariosophy, this is a former monk named George Lanz Liebenfels, Himmler saw non-Aryans as some human beasts who had polluted the blood of the master race and diluted their spiritual consciousness and paranormal abilities.
Liebenfels actually believed that Aryans were descended from interstellar beings who reproduced via electricity and that the lower races were produced by interbreeding between humans and ape men.
He founded the Order of the New Templars in 1900 and coined the term Ariosophy in 1915.
The Order of the New Templars used the swastika on its flag and sought to disseminate esoteric beliefs in the Aryan master race as a justification for violence against the racially impure.
By 1918, the Thule Society was founded in Munich.
I may be pronouncing that wrong, T-H-U-L-E, the Thule or Thule Society, German speakers can correct me, was founded in Munich, and they would play a role in the establishment of the German Workers' Party that would eventually morph into the National Socialist Party.
The Thule Society based many of their ideas on the earlier work of von List and Lance Liebenfels, maintaining the swastika as a prominent symbol, as well as the notion of Aryans as surviving descendants of Atlantis.
Historians will point out that there's no evidence of direct connections between all of this occult stuff and Hitler himself.
Occult beliefs and organizations actually had a fraught relationship with Hitler and the Nazi party, at times being brutally repressed if they were seen as gaining too much power and influence.
There are also several supernatural conspiracy theories that utilize these occult underpinnings to try to explain how the Nazis came to power through some kind of demonic agency, and obviously, that's all nonsense.
At the same time, we do know that Heinrich Himmler was obsessed with this cosmology.
The iconic SS symbol is actually taken from two runic symbols created by Guido von Liszt in 1908.
Himmler created a scholarly group called the Annanerba in his free time in between overseeing the creation of death camps.
And the Annanerba launched research expeditions between 1935 and 1945 in search of scientific proof.
Of the occult history of the Aryan race.
They went to Scandinavia, Eurasia, throughout Germany.
They went to Italy, France, Tibet, Poland, and Ukraine.
They even planned expeditions as far afield as Bolivia and Iran, believing that the Aryan people had predated cultures there too.
Himmler used the pseudoscientific research of the ananurb, which means something like ancestral heritage, to justify many of the escalations in what would come to be known as the Holocaust of Jews, homosexuals, communists, the Romani people, and other ethnic and religious minorities.
Well... We've done it again, or I should say I've done it again.
I've taken you on a turn into some very ugly history.
I'm sorry about that.
But we find ourselves again at the juncture of metaphysical beliefs and actions in the world.
As I've noted, it's not fair to blame Helena Blavatsky for how von List and Lance Liebenfeld would blend her ideas with pagan German ethno-nationalism, or what Himmler would use these occult ideas to justify.
We also can't just lay on her doorstep the crimes of the many cult leaders whose ideologies and ways of claiming supernatural authority can trace back to her made-up cosmology.
We can't say if some other early grifter...
May not have had an equal role in creating the online charismatic influencers who gain spiritual authority today via fantastical fictional backstories and claims of paranormal powers and supernatural insights.
But what this series might do is explore and reflect upon how our human proclivity for building psychological identification and cultural histories upon elaborate self-deception, wishful thinking, and charismatic manipulation expresses itself again and again in ways that actually undermine and subvert the search for meaning and self-actualization.
And to me... That's the huge and crucial irony.
In seeking supernatural higher knowledge and experience, we often lose touch with human decency, rational and emotional intelligence, and the resilient capacity to locate the sacred in our bittersweet, mortal, and vulnerable embodied humanity – And I want to underline this, which we are lying about.
We lose touch with it because we're lying about it.
The very thing that we're seeking gets occluded by the illusion, the delusion, the fantasy, the buying into what someone is telling us who, let's face it, is either lying or mentally unwell.
In seeking utopia, we at times create hell on earth.
The ashram of morally superior spiritual adepts devolves into lord of the flies.
Again and again, the leader held up as god on earth turns out to be a sociopathic abuser, high on the power of absolute authority and empty of the human qualities we rightly admire in friends and spouses or would want our children to get involved with.
If anything, as examined on other episodes here, the cult dynamic tragically amplifies the dysfunction of both the cult member and its leader in the name of some kind of higher consciousness.
I have no problem finding people willing to make the counter-argument here that it's not the beliefs that matter, but how they're used by the individuals involved.
Which, of course, is somewhat true, but I think it might miss the point.
If we accept the premise that it is better to not believe things that are false, whether that is political misinformation or scientific disinformation or lies based on racial stereotypes or propagandistic smears, for example, why would we not extend that same premise into what so many of us claim is the most valued domain of our humanity?
As you likely know, I prefer the term awareness practice to spirituality due to the supernatural baggage around that second word.
And for me, awareness practice ought to have as one imperative the examination of falsehoods that we are prone to believing for psychological, emotional, or cultural reasons, if it is to be an honest exploration of what it is to be human.
I likewise have no shortage of interlocutors who will agree here that, yes, the literal interpretation of all of these myths and stories is indeed problematic, but that is merely the domain of fundamentalism.
And I used to find this argument very compelling.
I heard it most artfully posited by Joseph Campbell in a lecture that he began by asking, what is mythology?
And answering, other people's religion.
What then, he continued, is religion?
To which he replied, misunderstood mythology.
I still think that is mostly right.
But it implies that all the various myths and legends and indeed the types of stories that not only Madame Blavatsky but all kinds of channelers and gurus and prophets and priests have told are either consciously or unconsciously metaphorical whether they say so or not.
They're never intended to be taken literally, but rather refer to something that cannot be spoken about directly, but is nonetheless of profound importance.
Lately, this sometimes just seems like it is too easily used for gaslighting, for moving the goalposts.
Nonetheless, for a time, this did fit quite well with a non-dual stance, that the perennial tradition of contemplative literature was pointing towards ways of knowing or states of consciousness that transcended limited dualistic notions of true and false,
spirit and flesh, self and other, that they represented a poetry Reaching for but never quite able to grasp or define the ultimate ground of being that we glimpsed sometimes in meditation or in the throes of sexual union or whilst peaking on psychedelics.
That we are in this phenomenological realm here that discloses an ontology for which words are inadequate and mere material or rational epistemologies are insufficient.
In other words, we cannot F the ineffable.
And all of this rhymed, for me, with a kind of Zen Buddhist attitude toward recognizing the primordial consciousness that is already free of conceptual thought when you just stop trying to figure it out, right?
So, hopefully it's clear to you, as a sincere practitioner-seeker, As a fascinated mystic intellectual, I've taken all of this very seriously, very earnestly.
I've read many thousands of pages, committed to decades of disciplined practice.
I've sat at the feet of the masters and availed myself of all the healing modalities.
At some point, I began to think, well, some of these myths, as unpacked by Joseph Campbell, with reference, of course, to Carl Jung, can clearly be seen to contain psychological insights, or at the very least, to be creative and intuitive outpicturings of universal core conflicts that we experience as human beings between self and tribe, instinct and empathy, sacrifice and triumph.
Like, how do we reconcile these conflicts?
But so much of it doesn't really work as a metaphor.
And those most enamored of it mostly don't talk about it in poetic ways.
And even when they do, the metaphor, if that is the correct word, still inevitably points towards something transcendent or supernatural, something beyond the material world or our limited human awareness.
And that is the object, however vaguely defined, of some kind of literal faith.
So if the supernatural assertions, which are the mythic part, right, the poetic part, the otherworldly part, if that's metaphorical, then it must do the work of referring to something in us or in the world.
And most often, what it's referring to is just never really clear.
So it's unsatisfying in terms of any kind of depth of Beyond it means different things to different people, which you wouldn't say about great literature or great poetry, right?
Or veracity beyond these are truths that transcend rational or scientific evidence.
And more and more, those have seemed to me not to really refer to something profound at all, but rather to something superficial and empty.
It's as if the pseudo-profundity is really just a cover for a sentimental attachment to stories or traditions, with this underlying belief that the existential anxieties that we believe they soothe would just be unbearable otherwise.
And when I say that this seems like gaslighting, it's because there is a slipperiness about it all, which seems to deliberately confound understanding and then call that lack of clarity mystical.
And it's precisely that slippery maneuver that charlatans rely on if it's not clearly differentiated from what actually can be very rich and Spiritual, I'll use that word, explorations of the ambiguity of our emotional lives or the ephemeral nature of identity or even the difficulty of establishing objective truth.
Okay, I've asked for your indulgence for too long now.
Thank you. If you're still listening, I appreciate you.
I'll end by saying that it seems to me that all forms of pseudoscience All cultic power games, all false conspiracy theories, all in-group spiritual bypass routines, and yes, all theocratic authoritarianism rely on either forbidding or avoiding the These kinds of questions because they rely on belief without evidence,
on supernatural authority, and on philosophical sophistry that blurs the lines between figurative and literal language.
