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June 3, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:31
1377 The Psychology of Mysticism Part One

God lives in the medulla.

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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope that you're doing most excellently.
It's Steph and Isabella out for a little afternoon stroll.
Catch a few. Rays shed.
Yay, verily, a few thoughts.
So, sorry if there's a little wind here.
I've got a double, triple windscreen on the old microphone, but sometimes it's no enough for Turnero Alley, Mississauga.
So, I'd like to do a speculato cast On the psychology of the supernatural.
And I hope that you will find it of interest.
It's stuff that I've been mulling over.
It really is, this may sound judgmental, but it is actually my attempt, you know, for better or for worse, to try and find some empathy for our good friend, the mystics.
And we'll see if it makes any sense to you.
So, of course, a tad framework before we start.
In the way that I look at things, the unconscious is the repository of the supernatural, right?
There are no gods in the sky.
There are but gods in the mind.
There are no ghosts in the halls.
There are but ghosts in the thoughts.
And if you look at a typical horror movie formulation, you'll see that a couple moves into a house and there's a ghost who is giving esoteric and oblique cues or clues as to wanting and needing something and they can't figure it out.
And then there's that prickly moment of delicious horror when they realize that They are being communicated to about some crime, and the ghost leads them to the body, and the children are exhumed, and the bodies are put to rest, and then the ghost vanishes, right?
Which is obviously a metaphor for intergenerational child abuse, particularly child abuse, though it could be other kinds of abuse.
So... In that example, of course, there is no ghost in the house, right?
The house is in the mind because it's in a movie, thus was imagined, and the ghosts in the house in the mind are obviously in the mind, right?
If you put oranges in a box and put a box on a train, the oranges are on a train.
And if you put a ghost into a mental conception called a movie house, then the ghosts clearly are also mental conceptions.
So, the supernatural is...
The projection of the unconscious into the world, right?
And we can, we will do the psychological analysis of Christian myths is something very interesting, worth pursuing, and we'll do that at another time, but this is just supernaturalism in general.
And there are so many aspects of the supernatural that reflect aspects of the unconscious that we could spend quite a series on them, and I'll just touch on some of them briefly here.
The supernatural often contains within it extreme and frightening passions, right?
Whether it's the passion of the Christ or of Zeus or of horror movies and so on, right?
The supernatural... Contains savage and often perceived as negative emotions, but these things generally lead to the truth.
And so, of course, you know, passionate, terrifying passions that lead to the truth, which are repressed and which...
Continue to escalate until they are accepted, in which case the truth is gathered.
That is, of course, a perfect metaphor, really, for the process of individuation.
And what often goes on in the realm of psychology, right?
Think of the movie The Sixth Sense, right?
That the ghosts simply want to have communication with the living, right?
That the dead feelings, the dead selves, The murdered or disowned self simply wants to have communication with the living, and it only appears aggressive until it is accepted, and then it is often quite calm, and that is something that is such a direct metaphor for the unconscious that you don't even need me to translate it, I'm sure. Sorry, that sounded a little insulting.
I apologize. Excuse me, oh brilliant listeners.
But, I mean, the unconscious is a A fearful servant and a timid master.
So if we treat the unconscious as an enemy and we try to control it and we treat it as a slave, then it is fearful to us.
And if we allow it to be our masters in a sense to give us all of the benefits of its intuition and its rationality and its knowledge and its perceptiveness, Then it is a very timid master, and it actually goes back to being a good helper, or rather, in a way, we're a good helper to it.
So, for me, supernaturalism is always, always, always, always the mark of the unconscious, and we can see this, I think, relatively well proven, or at least well substantiated, in the well-known phenomenon that the more primitive the society is, The more supernatural it is, right?
So the more primitive the society, and just think of sort of, I don't know, aboriginals in the outback of Australia or the pre-Western wilds of America.
This is a primitive society, and therefore it's...
Projects the human unconscious onto everything.
They apologize when they have to move a rock.
They apologize to animals before they eat them.
They think that the clouds are alive.
The whole universe is infused with psychological projection.
And that is a very, very tough thing to break out of, as we can see throughout most of human history and even up to the present.
As society gets more rational, more intelligent, the level of supernaturalism It diminishes or declines, and certainly if we look at the South, which is Thomas, the South of America, which Thomas Sewell has correctly sort of identified, comes out of a very, very low rent aspect or section of British culture.
The more primitive, the society, which really is the South, The more religious it is.
In other words, the more primitive it is, the more superstitious it is.
And since primitivism is fundamentally defined as a projection of self onto the world, the superstition, we would fully expect it to be more superstitious, the more primitive it is.
And again, primitive, I don't just mean, it's not a tautology, I'm not just defining primitive as more supernaturally based or more mystical.
But primitive in terms of social organization, rights for women and children, Empathy, technology, you know, all those other kinds of things.
I'm trying not to define it in ways that are convenient to me.
But that, I think, is strong evidence for the thesis that supernaturalism is the projection of the unconscious into the world.
And if you want a pretty vivid snapshot of the psychology or of what is really going on for people in their own minds.
If you want a really vivid snapshot of that, all you have to do is look at the content of the psychology that they're projecting into the realm of the supernatural.
Hi. I mean, my mother was a very primitive soul and a brutal soul and was, accordingly, supernatural and mystical.
And my father was more rational and scientific when he was younger, but as the crimes of his life began to accumulate, he turned more and more to superstition, to religion, and to the infinite forgiveness of a God he invented because nobody else could or would or should forgive him for what he had done.
So, if you want to look at what it's like to be a very religious person, all you have to do is look at the fantasies that are projected by religion That is a direct window into the unconscious, right?
So the eschatological fantasies of the Armageddon, end-of-the-world fantasies, the The fantasies that are the religious mindset are very much a window into the unconscious.
They're not describing religion, right?
They're describing themselves. They're not describing God.
They're describing their unconscious.
They're not describing the devil. They're describing their id, for want of a better phrase.
And so, when you see a raging God, the Old Testament God, the God of fire and brimstone, and smiting enemies and slaughter and rape and murder, well, this, of course, is simply a direct window into the primitive Mind, which takes everything personally because there is nothing objective in the universe, but everything is part of a punitive or praising story, and therefore everything must be taken personally.
Unlike the other Buddhist extreme, which is dissociation.
The reason I dislike Buddhism is that it is fundamentally a philosophy of emotional dissociation, which I consider to be anti-human, anti-life in a very fundamental way.
But we can talk about that perhaps later if people are interested.
I'll just start off with the more familiar religiosity that is all around us.
And this is also borne out by the psychological reality, which is fairly well established, that people who have higher self-esteem, who are religious, tend to have visions of a loving God, whereas people who have had lower self-esteem tend to have images of a punitive God, right?
And so Those who've been talked into, loved into, tricked into through positive emotionality, being religious, have the image of a loving God because that is what exists in their unconscious.
I'm using the word loving pretty loosely here.
Hi, how's it going? Where are you guys coming from?
Ah, very nice. We're not going to school yet.
Just ambling around.
Hi, say hello.
Bye. Sorry, our neighbors.
Sorry about your ears if I hollered.
Whereas those who have positive self-esteem is a more nurturing environment, no lower self-esteem or negative self-esteem is a hateful, usually violent or abusive environment.
So people who have been abused have taken that rage and anger and abuse, internalized it, of course, as we all do, and then projected it into an angry God.
And those who were Brought to religion more gently, you could say, have the image of a loving God, and this is pretty well correlated statistically, and again, it's another sort of piece of proof for what it is that I'm putting down the tracks that I am laying with the down, the shapes that I am throwing in the brain.
So, if you look at people who are more mystical and more religious, You will, in general, in my experience, and again, this is not all universal.
These are principles extracted from reason and evidence, though I can scarcely say that they are airtight, ironclad, all proven all the time.
That would not be rational in and of itself.
But those people who are more mystical will tend to be They tend to have several characteristics.
A suspicion of psychology, as I talked about in How Not To Achieve Freedom.
Psychology is the enemy of religion because psychology takes God and gods and puts them where they belong, which is where they actually are in the realm of the unconscious, not out there in the sky.
They will be pretty hostile or indifferent to introspection or psychology.
This, of course, will result in a confident and peculiar helplessness, which is unconscious, and an inevitability about their lives.
These people usually cannot be turned from the disasters that so often await the religious and the unconscious.
That's lots of other characteristics as well.
But what I wanted to particularly talk about today was this question of agnosticism, you know, the foggy bridge between supernaturalism and reason, and so often the bridge where the trolls pull you down forever.
Those are real challenges.
And so let's talk a little bit about the psychology of agnosticism, which I think is well worth talking about.
So, our good friend, the agnostics.
And if we can accept, at least for the moment, the thesis that whatever is represented by the supernatural is actually a projection of the unconscious, then when people talk about their spiritual or mystical or supernatural or religious beliefs, they're giving you an extraordinary window into their very soul.
And I know that sounds...
Yes, I use the words all...
Deal, baby! And I think that's a very important thing to understand when talking particularly with agnostics, right?
Because there are two defenses that intelligent people use, not just two, but two of the most important ones that intellectuals in particular use in the face of overwhelming, i.e.
repressed and rejected, unconscious stimuli or emotions.
The first defense that is used is intellectualism, right?
Intellectualization. And intellectualization is where you layer a thick, treacly, and deadening coating of rationality And, quote, perspective and reasonability and so on over your, you know, primal passions.
And that, I think, is a grave, grave, grave error, and one that is all too common, and one that, heavens to Betsy knows, I have more than one occasion used as well.
So, intellectualization is one of the toughest defenses to overcome.
So, that's the first.
And the second, which is really a correlation of The intellectualization is dissociation.
For instance, if you've ever had a breakup, and I was talking to someone about a breakup recently, and what she did was she was saying, well, I feel angry at my partner.
And then I think, well, but I chose that person, and well, but it takes two to tango, and well, I must be getting some secondary gains out of it, and then I would basically stifle my anger.
And that really is a core process or a core aspect of...
intellectualization is talking yourself in and out of things or and you'll you'll notice what really happens is that anytime an extreme emotion comes up and again I use the word extreme rather loosely and from the perspective of the defense every time an extreme emotion comes up or a strong feeling comes up the quote balance the balancing viewpoint is immediately thrown against it to stifle it,
right? So if someone feels angry with a lover or a partner, a husband or wife, then, you know, in a divorce or whatever, then almost immediately they will say, well, but, you know, I chose them for a reason, and it's not like I wasn't there in the relationship, and if I was silent it was because I preferred that, and they will start to immediately diffuse their anger And paralyzed.
They're emotional. It's like every time you have a muscle, you must move an opposing muscle.
Well, all that ends up with paralysis.
So when a strong upsurge of anger comes along, people have this very common habit of just talking themselves out of it immediately.
And that is a process of intellectual defense.
And it really does lead to paralysis.
And a really, really chilling and terrifying kind of paralysis as well.
So that's one aspect.
And the result of opposing your strong feelings by constantly coming up with the counter-argument and becoming the courtroom of inertia, inaction, and paralysis in your head, the result of that is dissociation, right?
So if your emotions know, if your ecosystem knows that every time a strong feeling comes up, people are just going to be thrown back down into the dungeon because of, sort of, quote, perspective and reasonability and this, that, and the other.
Man, oh man, it's windy.
Anyway, I hope this isn't coming through too windy.
We shall see. Yes, we shall.
Yeah, sweet gums.
Let me try going up another side street here.
And here's this contractor turning all over the place.
So, sorry about that.
Ah, dissociation, right? So anytime a strong feeling comes up, whether it's a passion, right?
So people think, oh, I feel really attracted to this person.
Oh, it must be codependence or, you know, I haven't known them that long or it's just lust or won't let the feeling flow and get to the root of it.
And fear, you know, they talk themselves out of it.
It's nothing to be that scared of.
It probably is something from my childhood and they will immediately start to dismantle.
Any strength of passion that occurs, and that results in dissociation because every feeling, your feelings just give up, right?
If you can't ever get your voice across, you stop talking, right?
If you can't ever be heard, you will stop opening your mouth.
And if every time strong feelings come along, people simply dismantle and disarm them, then those strong feelings will stop coming along to be replaced by dysthymia, depression, resentment, and bizarrely aggressive fights in unrelated or seemingly unrelated matters.
Whereas, you know, my sort of feeling is very strongly, you know, let the passion rip and be open in time to alternative viewpoints, right?
So, because if you simply cut off your emotions, you're not getting anywhere.
And the problem is then, in the future, you don't have the strong passions which can keep you out of paralyzed, difficult, or abusive situations.
So, I think, yeah, let it rip, right?
So, when it came to my mother, you know, rather than I would say, well, my mother was bad, I'd say, yes, well, but she had a bad childhood or My mother was bad, yes, well, but she was a single mother.
My mother was bad, yes, well, but my father didn't pay much money, so she was constantly worried about money.
My mother was bad, yes, but, well, you know, all that kind of nonsense, which is pseudo-maturity, right?
Real maturity, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, real maturity is not the constant opposition of your own feelings with invented non-emotional excuses and oppositions.
Real maturity is, yeah, my mother was bad, and letting that rip, letting that feel, let that feeling go, and then being open to feelings in the future of other perspectives, but not by using these cold-blooded intellectual layers of icy gels to smother the fires of true feeling.
I mean, successful sportsmen don't sit there and say, I really want to win.
Yes, well, but I guess the other person wants to win as well as I do, and so maybe...
You just go, and then if you lose, you lose.
So, I would say that agnosticism is a very severe form of this kind of intellectualization and dissociation.
And why? Well, because...
The unconscious is where supernaturalism resides and agnosticism places the realm of the supernatural in some external, abstracted, pseudo-philosophical, alternate or oppositional dimension.
Where God may or may not live, but is presumed to be.
And by the by, it's sort of interesting that agnostics use the term God rather than gods, right?
It's another realm. We have no idea what's in there, but I know there's only one of them, right?
I mean, that's just silly. And these are the kinds of people who find That psychological constructs like the ontological argument, like God exists in the world because we have the idea in our mind, the argument from first causes and so on, these very abstract and bloodless, quote, proofs for the existence of a God, that that is the container which suitably holds their own unconscious.
And how dissociated and bloodless does your unconscious have to be In order for you to find agnosticism to be a suitable place to hold it.
I mean, the vividity and fear and anger and terror of, you know, ye olde baptist fire-breathing brimstone religion, at least there is an energy and crazy nutty vividness to that kind of unconscious,
right? But the unconscious of the dry as dust Bloodless, dissociated intellectual is where agnosticism makes its home.
Or rather, where the unconscious is able to make its home in agnosticism because it's that distant and dissociated that it emotionally resonates as another dimension opposite to and beyond the comprehension of this one.
Because people are talking about God They're talking about their unconscious, right?
They're talking about themselves. And that, I think, is really very, very important.
And I've yet to meet...
Again, this is no proof.
This is the experience that I bring to bear on these theories.
I've yet to meet an agnostic who is not emotionally dissociated.
Intense, right? And hyper-controlled as far as emotionality goes.
Again, this is just my experience and maybe people will jump into your mind who don't fit this model, but I've now met quite a few of them.
Hundreds, really, in my inbox and on the board and video comments and back and forth and so on.
I often tend to be engineers or computer people to stereotype.
But the pseudo-rationality of hyper-controlled opposites is not really rational in my mind.
It's not rational to oppose your instincts.
It's not rational to oppose your feelings.
It's not rational to act out on them as if they're always true.
But that is the great challenge, right?
To surf the true self to the beach destination of authenticity.
And there's lots of cross-currents and lots of complexities.
And in this way, some of the more primitive religions with the multifaceted gods, I mean the Greek and Roman religions in particular, you could look at early Egyptian as well as some more modern Indian religions where there are 5,000 gods kind of thing.
And, of course, the saints, right?
That there is an aspect of the mycosystem that works better in a polytheistic religiosity.
I mean, in a sense, it's more fragmented and more projected, but also, in a very real way, it's more authentic.
This war of the gods for the cause of victory and virtue is, again, I don't view the mycosystem as a war unless...
It's rejected, but there is more in common with the complexity and ambivalence and ambiguity of the human mind.
It works better and is better reflected, in my opinion, by a A polytheistic religion rather than a monotheistic religion, which is why the great advances in philosophy were under a monotheistic religion.
Philosophy was invented under a polytheistic religion with the first mixtures in of science, rationality, and empiricism.
And the tension, of course, between that which is within our mind going outwards in the realm of projection and that which is within reality coming inwards in terms of empiricism is the great tension and the great reason for philosophy.
I mean, if we never projected, we'd be completely rational and not evolved.
We wouldn't have evolved from anything, we'd be robots.
And if we only projected, we'd be completely primitive and would not develop science because we would not test our projections with empiricism.
But the complexity of the relationship between projection and empiricism, which both are needed for, you know, happiness occurs in our minds, not in the world.
So we have to tend things in our minds and not just look at things in the world.
And so there's lots of ways that you can look at this formulation that the supernatural is the projection of the unconscious.
But I think it's particularly interesting And exciting, almost, to examine in the realm of agnosticism.
And I hope that you found it useful.
Thank you so much for all of your support.
And thank you again to those who came up to the Cassidy FDR. Almost 40 people came up.
It was a wonderful time. And I hope that we'll have even more next year.
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