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March 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:39
695 Mysticism as Scar Tissue Part 1 (Video Available)
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Please allow me to introduce myself.
I'm a market anarchist.
I've been around for a long, long time, though you don't know I exist.
Just working on a few ditties to keep the movement going.
Hope you're doing well, Steph. I was rather struck by the formulation that we were talking about this morning, which was mysticism as the scar tissue of fundamentally moral guilt.
So I put some thought into it today while I was doing my marketing grindy data monkey stuff.
And so I thought I'd share a few ideas with you and you can tell me what you think.
Now, my experience with mysticism is really a tripartite, an unholy trinity, if you will.
And it is my mother, my father, and my brother, though not necessarily in that order.
Actually, my mother, my brother, and my father in that order.
First and foremost, my mother was a dyed-in-the-wool, hippy-dippy mystic.
When she was younger, the house was a swarm with German hippies, and they did all of the stuff that you would imagine people wracked with guilt.
And again, I'll get to the syllogisms if we can work them out in just a little bit.
They did tarot card readings, and they did attempted to contact past lives, people, and the dead, and they did theosophy and all this other kind of stuff.
And it really was pretty unpleasant.
You know, I hate to say it, but it's a bit of a girly world.
So for a robust youth like myself growing up in this kind of madcap, abstract, totally irrational, mystical, at one with the universe and intimate with nothing kind of world, it was kind of creepy, kind of gross. I think women are a little more drawn to it than men are, but that's not always the case, of course.
There are exceptions to most rules.
And my mother only got more mystical, and in the form of sort of how a mental illness manifested itself, it took the form of a kind of severe paranoia later on in her life.
And that was, of course, most unpleasant to just about everyone involved.
It became that the insurance companies were trying to kill her because she was suing the doctors who had injected her with bad things and all this, that, and the other.
And it was all, you know, remarkably not fun, but it was all wrapped in this nimbus of extraordinarily obtuse and abstract mysticism.
And it is certainly true, and I know I'm treading on thin ice here, but it certainly does seem to me to be true that The people who are mystical in the extreme tend to have Dare I say it?
Dare I? Yes, I think I dare.
They tend to have sort of extreme logaria.
Yes, I know we're almost 700 podcasts, but they have extreme logaria that's not connected to other people and to their emotional experiences and reality processing.
As I said, we can only meet in reality.
We cannot meet in fantasy.
We can only obscure each other's souls and kill each other's spirits in fantasy.
There is no meeting in fantasy.
There is only meeting. In direct, through reality processing.
So, the next thing that I sort of was exposed to when it came to mysticism of a generalized kind...
Actually, you know what?
Do I have to make a phone call? I forget it.
Was mysticism of a generalized kind was that of my father.
Now, my father was an atheist when he was younger, but he was an atheist really in terms of nihilism, more in terms of atheism.
In other words, it wasn't that he believed in something which resulted in him not believing in God.
It's more that he believed in nothing, and God was just one of those things that he didn't believe in.
And so it really wasn't an atheism that was, I think, at least honorable or intellectually respectable.
It was a, I don't believe in anything, one of those things happens to be God, but it's not because I have a positive standard of belief that excludes things which are false.
I don't believe in mathematics, not mathematics allows you to disbelieve that 2 plus 2 is 5.
So he became more spiritual.
I wish there were a better word.
More mad, I think is probably a better word.
He became more mad as he got older, and now he's very much embedded in this Anglican, yours in Christ kind of stuff.
He really has fallen back on standardized madness, which is not the individual kind, but it's sort of sold in a six-pack.
It's sold in a collective mold, which you can use to go mad with everyone else and so feel less mad, and that's the sort of religious.
And he's got a bit of a nationalistic thing going.
He's Irish. Hoyerland, it's the old sod, the old green turd.
It's supposed to be this great thing.
Not because of its sort of growing free market influences, but because starved peasants or something.
I mean, something like that. The seat of all cultural.
So that was a kind of growing mysticism that, like most people who are religious, there's quite a lot of rage there.
And if you don't see it, it's because you're not pushing them.
Religious people, it's kind of in your face, and it's so blatantly irrational and derived from the fantasies of other people and based on falsehoods that it's almost, it's petulant, and it's pugnacious is probably a better word.
It's very pugnacious, religion as a whole.
You see people say, well, there are these sweet old ladies who are religious and they're so nice and they give to charity and they do good works and so on.
And it's like, well, sure. Absolutely.
And Hitler was a pussycat when you agreed with him.
But see how gentle these religious people stay when you begin to confront them on their own insanity.
I mean, crazy people are nice if you agree with them.
So, stalkers are nice if you go on a date with them.
It's just that over time, it tends to be a little claustrophobic and destructive.
So, when people say to me, just sort of by the by, when people say to me, but religious people are very nice, my aunts are very nice, my uncles are very nice, my elderly grandmother, blah, blah, blah, is very nice.
All I know that they're saying is that I'm too chicken to confront them because I know they're not nice.
I mean, just do a little bit of a tangent if you don't mind.
That's all I hear. People say to me, but I know very many nice religious people.
All I know is that they're saying, I know that their bad stuff, but I don't want to have to confront them.
I know that they're insane, but I don't want to have to confront them.
And I'm not comfortable. With not confronting them.
I don't feel happy about not confronting them, so I have to pretend that I'm not confronting them because they're not mad.
They're not bad.
They're not destructive or dangerous people.
But fantasy is destructive.
Fantasy is dangerous. Fantasy gets people killed.
Religion's killed about a billion people throughout the course of human history.
Any one of those billion people could have cured cancer, could have cured AIDS, could have cured leukemia, could have finished the whole stem cells thing here and it might be 20 again.
So I take it very personally, all these deaths.
So that's the confession that people don't like to make, but which I hear very clearly.
I know many nice religious people.
They don't want to have you killed.
They're very nice people. They do good works for charity, and they kiss the cross, and they stroke their cats, and they're just wonderful, nice people.
So have you told them that there's no such thing as God, and proven them the case, and refuse to take blank outs for an answer?
Have you asked them to establish the truth of their madness?
That's why mad people get angry.
Behind madness is always rage.
Behind madness is always rage.
And I don't care if it's the most socially sanctioned mainstream madness on the planet.
Behind madness is always rage because behind madness, behind falsehood, behind fantasy, behind conformity is brutality, is a history of brutality.
People don't become religious because they love God.
people become religious because they fear their parents.
So what would cause someone...
Oh, so, sorry, just before we get started on that, it's not another tangent.
This is actually continuing the third part of the Unholy Trinity I started with, and that is my brother's mysticism, which is deep and abiding, and oh, so, Ellsworth, too-y-ish.
My brother's mysticism is much more formed along the basis of a rejection of empirical or rational absolutes.
My brother is absolutely devoted to and fetishistically rub up against and get an electrical static charge, PVC discharge into your pants, absolutely rubs up against any subjectivism he can come across.
It's just a big subjectivist orgy in his brain.
And he's the person who said, he said once, I think I mentioned this before, I certainly have mentioned it on the board.
He said to me when I was first getting imbibed in scientific philosophy, he said to me, Oh, Steph, I would just, I would be so overjoyed if one day you let go of a rock and it just floated upwards.
I would love to be there that day when all your certainties went bye-bye.
Which, of course, is an absolutely murderous impulse, and my whole family is composed of thwarted murderers.
Ah, but me. But me, of course.
The life-brigger, the truth-teller, the whiner, the screecher, and the tangential-er.
So, he would be very focused on and very invested in this subjectivism, which is a kind of mysticism as well.
It's a primacy of mind over matter.
It's a primacy that the error of consciousness can never occur relative to matter.
Mind cannot be erroneous relative to matter.
If there is a discrepancy between the mind and matter, it is matter that is erroneous and you can invent your own physics and your own reality.
It's like a Dungeons and Dragons world that you go and live in.
Thank you.
Although even that world has rules.
So this is the kind of mysticism that I was exposed to.
Now, all of these people have committed significant and serious harms against children.
I will only speak to my brother with me, and not about him with his own children, of which I remain largely ignorant.
But certainly he was very cruel to me as a child, very verbally and occasionally physically abusive.
My mother, of course, very violent towards her own children, and my father, who left when I was, I don't know, six months old, eight months old, something like that, and moved to Africa, and I saw him like once every half decade, he, of course, left his children in the care of this monstrous criminal, my mother. And so...
All of these three people have significant guilt.
This is, of course, not a perfect or universal sample.
I'm fully aware of that, and I'm not going to make this claim as a syllogistical proof.
But I certainly will make the claim that there is a significant pattern here that is well worth examining, I think.
The pattern is that this infliction of harm Relative to the addiction to mysticism, that mysticism is an escape hatched to nowhere, propelled by guilt, I think is worth having a look at.
We can bring, as a witness, our good friend the Theosophist, the past lives therapist who we chatted with a couple of weeks ago, but who sadly did not call back in to hear the distinct absence of any scientific proof of Theosophy.
Lying for money is a very dishonorable way to spend a life.
And listen, to her husband, she was cheesed that he no longer wants to go to temple.
Let me cheese her off even more.
She's a Jewish woman who is upset because I have no more respect for Judaism than I do for the Ku Klux Klan or for the imaginary power rangers of my mind or the people who wear invisible green shirts on St.
Patrick's Day and can levitate.
It's just a made-up bunch of nonsense categories that means nothing.
But to piss her off even more, I would say to her husband that you have a challenge on your hands.
The challenge is not me.
The challenge is not even your wife.
The challenge is your own integrity.
And I know you've been married, or at least I think you've been married for a long time, but if your wife makes claims which are false and basically is lying to people about their past lives thing, is lying to me, and is lying to you, of course, then she's an extraordinarily dishonorable person, barely, barely, barely.
Even, minorly, barely one step up from a con artist who simply steals based on having a silver tongue and a vaguely convincing personality.
So, I don't know.
You didn't sound like the springest of springy chickens in the world.
So, I'd like to sort of mention this to you that maybe you only have 20 years of life left or maybe you only have 10 years of life left.
And I would really...
Suggest that you have a look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you want to spend your remaining days with a lying thief.
Whether this is the kind of company that you wish to keep through the remainder of your sunset years or whether you wish to strike out for healthier pastures and brighter and sunnier lands with greater health and virtue and integrity or at least some of these things.
And that is, if you're going to do it, or if you're not going to do it, stop listening to this show, of course, because it's just going to torture you.
If you are going to do it, then do it now.
You don't want to do it. Like, you don't want to be on your deathbed saying, geez, I wish the last 20 years I hadn't been around this crazy, thieving Batwoman.
Then you'll feel real regret and I don't think that you should fade into eternity with that curse on your lips.
I think you should aim for something healthier and cleaner.
So, not going to temple is just the beginning.
The second thing that you need to recognize is that your wife is a liar and a thief and is basically lying to people to take their money as lying to people about past lives and so on and knows it, right?
Because she certainly pointed me towards things that did not exist.
Scientific proofs in peer-reviewed journals that just turned out to be a blind alley.
But of course, what kind of guilt is this woman carrying that she feels she must lie to people and hurt their reality, hurt their sense of reality, to enmesh them in the hell of distraction and dissociation and abstractions which do not exist?
To force them to live in dead clouds rather than the lithe green earth.
Well, she must have done some bad things in her life.
And whether or not she's actually done bad things in her life or whether or not she simply believes that she has done bad things in her life in an ordinary people kind of way, I don't know.
There's no way to really answer that question.
But, for sure, there is significant guilt in that, and the guilt is unbearable, and this is why the other realm is invented.
This is why the realm of ideal forms, or past lives, or gods, or countries, or whatever you have, and even the virtue of family, this is all based on guilt.
Because if we look at this other realm, and we talked about this when it came to our seedy friends, the agnostics, but it's worth touching on, I think, from this characteristic or from this standpoint.
When we look at what is meant by something like the soul in its spiritual sense or the other realm or some other realm and so on, if we look at what that means, what is it defined as?
What is it defined as?
Well, it's defined as the exact opposite of that which exists.
So if you look at something like the soul, the soul is immaterial consciousness.
Immaterial consciousness.
Now, there are certainly things that are immaterial.
A space is 99.9999% empty.
So the space between an atom and another atom, or an atom and electron, is empty, at least to our knowledge.
So there are definitely things which have no energy or matter, not composed of anything, and have no effects on energy or matter in the gravity kind of way.
Undetectable. So there are things which are immaterial for sure, but they're not alive and they're not conscious.
So when we're looking at something like a soul, and this is going to be something which we can expand to include all of these mad...
Imaginary, mystical realms.
It is the exact opposite.
You just take what is and define the exact opposite and say, I believe in that, and we'll get to why in a second.
So a soul is immaterial consciousness, and there are things, of course, that are immaterial.
Immaterialism is something that can be measured and detected and so on.
It's also the gap between one podcast and the next.
Immaterial! It cannot be measured.
Well, maybe at a subatomic scale.
And then we have immateriality and then we have consciousness.
Now, consciousness does exist, but consciousness is the exact opposite of immaterial.
Right? So, when people create mystical concepts, all they do is they take completely opposing concepts and jam them together and call them something new.
So, there's up and there's down, right?
But a mystic, their sum total in their claim to their addition to what they're adding to the fast store of human knowledge is to say there's up and there's down, but there's also a down or dup, which is the two together.
It's like, but they're opposite, up and down or opposite directions.
Yes, but if I say, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, if I put the two together, that is my addition to the vast store of human knowledge.
I have put two opposing and completely self-contradictory, when combined, concepts together, and I'm calling this something that exists.
So, immaterial consciousness is exactly the same as up-down.
Where something is immaterial, or where immateriality is present, so to speak, there's no consciousness.
Where consciousness is present, there is no immateriality.
There is no vacuum that thinks.
You've got thinking, which involves a brain, matter and energy, chemicals and so on.
And you have immateriality, which is the distinct absence of anything that could potentially be alive, because it's the distinct absence of anything at all.
Immaterial consciousness is just up-down.
Black-white. Up-down.
Square circle. Number opposite of number.
Car. Opposite of car.
Putting two words together does not create something metaphysically.
It does not create something in the real world.
And this stitching together of incompatible and complete opposite definitions and calling it something new is a total frankenfuck of a thinking type or a thinking style.
And it's completely not thinking.
It's the opposite of thinking. Thinking is supposed to be that which derives, synthesizes, abstracts, and organizes the principles that are observable within the behavior of matter and energy.
Boy, there's a mouthful. I think I've got a t-shirt.
Of course, you'd have to be 800 pounds to get the whole thing across in more than two-point font.
But hey, a t-shirt with all the podcasts transcribed and printed on.
Ooh, dusty. Needs to be cleaned.
Mysticism is just the pseudoscience of opposites.
A square circle is exactly what a mystic says that they're adding to the store of human knowledge.
Well, we have something that's square.
We have something that's a circle.
They have opposite, or at least non-incompatible properties.
Not exactly opposite properties, but they have incompatible properties.
If it's square, it ain't a circle.
If it's a circle, it ain't a square.
And just putting these two words together doesn't add anything new.
In fact, it is the complete opposite of thought.
It's saying that something exists and is the opposite of existence at the same time.
Something is up and down simultaneously.
Something is attracted and repelled simultaneously.
Something is black and white simultaneously.
Alive and dead simultaneously.
You're just taking opposite concepts, putting them together.
And why? Why would you want to do that?
Why would any... I mean, I have another theory, which is that if you have good language skills but you're kind of retarded, then you like to become a priest.
Or a mystic of some compatriot or something like that.
If you have language skills without wisdom, if you have intelligence or oratory without wisdom, then you just like to create stuff that baffles people, that confuses people, makes you seem smart.
To dumb people, a square circle might seem brilliant.
Like the Buddhist thing, you know?
You must have a strong desire to have no desire.
Yeah, fuck you, tubby. Would you like to put a few grains more thought into that before you just go around saying, it is the sound of one hand clapping.
Yeah, tough. Done.
I thought that meant masturbation when I was younger, but then what didn't I think meant masturbation when I was younger?
Oh, sorry. One hand slapping.
Anyway. Spanking?
We'll come back to that. New vidcast.
I will wait until I go full time.
I'll need the costume. Ah, the oiled ostrich, we call it.
Come back.
That's a tangent that's leading you down a bit.
So this is what they're trying to do, is they're just trying to put opposite concepts together.
What is God? Consciousness without matter.
Existence without creation. Perpetual existence.
Infinite power. Omniscient.
Omnipotent. All of these things which are completely contradictory.
Existence without evidence.
But without evidence is the opposite of existence.
It's how you confirm the non-existence of something.
There's no evidence there's a truck parked right in front of this car, so I'm going to keep driving.
Oh my God. It's embarrassing.
I mean, if you have... Any kind of common sense, which does not require a significant amount of intelligence.
I promise you.
It takes a significant amount of intelligence to destroy common sense, which is why it's so rare, sadly.
But this is what people are bent to do, is to bend to destroy people's ability to process reality.
And the question is why? Why?
Why would people be so driven to process other people's capacity to process reality?
Why, oh why, oh why would they want to do it?
Why? Well, my friends, I think that it is because of guilt, which we've talked about before, but something that leads...
To a particularly hellish state of mind, which is where I think that most mystics land, and which is why I know when people say that they know some really nice religious people, that all they're doing is not confronting them on their sickness, or not confronting them on their madness.
My dentist is great.
Really nice, you know? Never drills, never gives me any fillings, just gives me painkillers.
Well, let's see where that ends up.
First and foremost, why is it that reality is your enemy?
Why is it that reality is your enemy?
This is sort of to the mystics directly or in general.
Why is consistency your enemy?
It's not a question of vanity.
I think vanity is an after effect of these kinds of things.
I don't think it's a direct question of vanity or infliction of vanity.
Obviously, people who are not that bright, and I think we've all had these fantasies.
I certainly did when I was younger, and I thought, gee, wouldn't it be great if I just came up with the equals MC squared?
And it was so obvious that everyone just slapped their heads and said, oh my god, that's so obvious.
So now looking at it, I can't believe I never thought of it and it's something that I just tripped over.
In a sense, wouldn't it be great if I was so smart?
Not because I was smart, but because other people were just dumb.
I mean, wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't it be great if...
All of the really good actors got hit by a bus and then they had to give parts to me or something like that.
Or, you know, I don't know, all the really good singers or whatever.
Who knows, right? But I think we've all had that kind of fantasy, right?
I'm the last man alive.
I can get a date or whatever.
So that's, I think, part of a natural part of growing up.
But I don't think that's really the fundamental motivation.
I think that's just a passing fancy that we all have.
Why does it become a grim addiction?
There must be a contradiction that is accepted at the root that flowers into mysticism.
There must be a contradiction that flowers into mysticism.
Mysticism must be the effect of something deeper because there's no empirical evidence for it, so why would people believe in it?
And people don't live their lives consistently by mysticism and it's all just, it's reasoning after the fact.
They accept mysticism and then they argue for mysticism.
They don't look at all the evidence, go through all the rigorously scientifically peer-reviewed journals and say, aha, psychic phenomenon and UFOs and past lives and tarot card readings and all of this sort of nonsense.
All of that is true. That's not how people go about developing mysticism.
What they do is they have a belief, or they have an experience, or they have something, somewhere, somehow, that leads them, step by step, inevitably and directly towards a credulity with regards to this sort of nonsense contradiction, mysticism, the opposite of knowledge, the opposite of truth, the opposite of rationality and consistency and identity and existence.
There must be a contradiction That they accept in their heart of hearts, which then causes them to flower in an unholy, smoky way into this mystical death cave.
And it comes to the family.
Of course it's the family. It all starts with the family.
When you are a child and you are told that you are bad and your parents are good, Whether that's explicit or implicit.
Usually, I'm good is implicit.
You're bad is explicit.
And when I tell you that you're bad, by implication, I am good because I'm telling you that you're bad.
Because if I was bad and I was telling you that you're bad, you would in fact be good, so it wouldn't mean anything.
The implication of you're bad is I'm good.
And when children are attacked by And abused in this kind of manner, when they're told that they're bad, the implicit statement or principle that's at work there is, you're bad and I'm good.
You're bad is explicit, I'm bad is good.
If you've listened to Mommy's Letter, the podcast, I can't remember, I think I did it as a vidcast too, but have a look at that if none of this makes any sense to you, and maybe it'll make a little more sense to you in time.
Basically, you are posited with a contradiction.
Because bad people...
Sorry, let me start that again.
Good people would not attack a child.
It's a fundamental thing that we all get.
And totally understand. So if you get a weapon, you get beaten, you get smacked, you get screamed at, you get stuff thrown at you, you get ignored, you get bullied, you get manipulated, good people would never do such a thing.
Never do such a thing.
And I don't care what your child is doing.
Yes, you can raise your voice if you've lost track of them and they're about to wander into traffic, but that's your issue for losing track of them.
Yell at them and then apologize And I was oh Steph you don't have kids yet I worked as a daycare teacher, I know.
So, good people would not attack a child, would not undermine and destroy a child's capacity to think and feel secure and feel competent and rational and efficacious with regards to reality, which is the fundamental pro-life stance of any organism.
Competent with regards to reality.
So when a child is yelled at and you're bad, you're a bad child, then a massive contradiction is being put forward.
We the parents are good, you the child is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
But it's a total contradiction because a good person would never call a child bad.
See the fundamental contradiction?
Then this occurs in school, it occurs with your extended family, it occurs with your direct family, it definitely occurs with your siblings.
You are bad creates an essential contradiction.
And as human beings who struggle and strive to create something better out of our lives than the shitty mess that most of us inherited, we have to deal with that contradiction.
We don't have to, but I mean if we want to be decent people and we want to live a happy life, we have to deal with that contradiction.
We must deal with that contradiction.
Good people don't tell children that the children are bad.
That is the action of a bad person.
Intent on undermining, having power over, controlling, destroying, crushing the child.
So what do we do with that contradiction?
This is the cause of most of the, if not all of the, ugliness in the world, right?
This fundamental contradiction. Children being told they're bad and knowing deep down that good parents would never tell them that they were bad.
Especially when the children are very young.
That's basically like a bad carpenter calling his lopsided table bad, evil, evil table.
Evil! Should be straight.
The child is the handiwork of the parent.
If the child is bad, the parent is worse.
Both for provoking badness in the child and for calling it badness rather than for accepting responsibility for what they've done to cause the child to be bad.
Or haven't done. So...
This contradiction that is at the very heart of people's experience.
Maybe for this woman it's, Jews are good.
Jews are good. We Jews are good.
Why are we good? Is it because we believe in the principles of Judaism?
Yes. Oh, well then anyone who believes those principles is a Jew.
No! Because it's also racial.
Oh, so we're good because we are a particular race.
But then that can't be virtue because that's just genetic.
We're just born into it. And even if we are better, I can't feel any proud of it any more than I could feel proud for, I don't know, being good-looking, having a full head of hair, or being tall, or being eloquent, or whatever.
I can't be proud of that if it's genetic.
It's I didn't earn that. If it's something that you earn, then everyone can earn it.
And then anybody who does earn it is as equally morally valid and positive as you.
If it's not something that you earn, then you can't take any pride in it.
The fundamental contradiction of collectivism, right?
There's so many things that parents tell their children that are just out and out filthy fucking lies that...
It's so staggering to even stare at the smoking craters of the child's minds and everything that we have to struggle through to retain even a shred of our rationality and to grow it back like a fragile plant continually trodden beneath dinosaurs.
True dinosaurs. The contradictions that children are force-fed, the blatant fundamental contradictions, have pride in that which you did not earn.
You're bad, we're good.
Good people attack children.
Bad children try to fight back or try to defend themselves.
God exists.
Your country exists.
Your tribe is virtuous.
We, your parents, are good.
And every action totally belies that.
And all logic totally belies the bullshit that we're fed.
All of it. So we are detonated with contradictions from such an early age.
Such an early age.
We are sown with landmines of bullshit.
And this fundamental contradiction that is inflicted, all of these fundamental contradictions that are inflicted upon us, pounded into us, Ground into us, crushed into us, squeezed into us, claustrophobed into us.
All of these hellish contradictions are unbearable to face.
Because the level of stinking corruption, which we should take enormous relief in, in my view.
We should take enormous relief in these.
Because if these did not exist, my friends, we'd be totally fucked as a species.
If you're... You want the causes so you can get the cure.
You want the causes so you can get the cure.
That's absolutely essential. If your teeth are just mysteriously eroding and you go to the doctor and he says, oh, you're grinding your teeth at night.
Here's a mouth guard. You're like, oof, thank God.
There's a cause, so now there's a cure.
Oh, there's a cause, so now there's a cure.
How joyful, how happy, how wonderful, how relieved I am.
How excellent. And the evils and brutalities of the world that are out there and which the world is currently writhing and expiring under, if we could not find these fundamental contradictions right at the heart of what we're told as children, there would be no hope for the future.
There would be no hope for saving the world if we could not find a cause and therefore a cure.
So, these fundamental contradictions that we have inflicted upon us as children, we have a choice.
We either go through the agonizing process of resolving those contradictions, of finding the truth, which means almost inevitably ending up condemning our families and pursuing a life of semi-solitary integrity and so on.
It's a very difficult course, a very difficult path.
The opposite is simply to join in the cancer of the world and help the planet expire, which I don't think is a really good approach or idea.
But this...
This series of painful contradictions that are inflicted upon us as children lead us, if we don't confront them, lead us to the place where reality is our enemy.
Where logic, logic is our foe.
Empiricism is a dictator that wishes us harm.
We must avoid these contradictions at all costs.
So we must normalize these contradictions.
We must normalize these contradictions.
Now the world, right?
All this. This is not contradictory.
My webcam doesn't turn into a serpent.
This doesn't turn into an ice cream cone, though that would be kind of nice.
But it doesn't happen, right?
Reality is not contradictory. The contradictions that are inflicted upon us and what that means about our caregivers, quote, our parents, our teachers, and so on, all the way through grad school, all the way to our dying deathbed, to the priest who comes and swoops like a crow and feasts upon our dying.
What it says about all of these people is horrible.
It's absolutely horrible that they lied to you.
That they destroyed you, that they attacked you, that they undermined you, that they crushed you.
To serve their own, because they were crushed and they didn't process it.
I mean, somebody's got to stop it at some point.
Somebody's got to put a stop to it at some point.
And it's you and me, brother and sister.
You and me. We're going to stop this whole thing.
We're going to stop this whole unholy, soul-grinding, blood-squirting merry-go-round.
You and I are going to stop this thing together, and we're going to stop it by accepting that these contradictions only exist in the brutalities of those who taught us.
The contradictions do not exist in reality.
And this is why I say mysticism or the addiction to realms defined by the opposite of that which exists.
Mysticism is scar tissue of the early inflictions of contradictions.
When you don't process these contradictions, the contradictions that are inflicted upon you, you must make up a realm where they are valid, where they exist, where they are real, where they are the truth.
And of course, that's in direct opposition to That which is, that which exists.
Logic. Reality.
And this conversation. Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations. And again, I'm going to go on vacation.
I don't know what I'm going to get done on vacation.
I don't know if I'm going to get any podcasts done.
I'll bring some equipment just in case.
But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Hey! You know, it's a good chance for you to get caught up.
Thank you as always. So much for listening.
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