Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 311: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

Mitch Horowitz, occult scholar and expert in metaphysics, joins the DTFH! Check out Mitch's new book, The Miracle Club, available now! This episode is brought to you by [Squarespace](https://www.squ...arespace.com/duncan) (offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site) and [BLUECHEW](https://www.bluechew.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping). Friday, November 16th - Come see "[Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism](https://www.samarasacenter.com/cutting-through-spiritual-materialism-lots-of-icing-not-much-cake/)" with Duncan & David Nichtern at the Samarasa Center in Echo Park, LA!

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. It's my dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. This episode of the DTFH has been made possible by Squarespace. Head over to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan.
Starting point is 00:00:25 And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off a website or a domain. Hey, what's up, everybody? Happy Halloween. What you're about to listen to, it was an idea I had for like a kind of special Halloween episode. It is definitely not the recording of somebody who represents a group of people that have made contact
Starting point is 00:00:47 with a very powerful legion of aliens who are about to appear on our planet. It's just an actor that I got to say what you're about to listen to. So don't worry, I'm not being threatened. I definitely did not make an agreement with a very powerful group of people to put secret messages into this podcast
Starting point is 00:01:14 in exchange for wealth and power. It's just a Halloween gag. So this is what I was gonna do until I realized by the time anybody listened to this, it wouldn't even be Halloween anyway. You know we have an agreement and if you break this agreement, it's gonna be very detrimental to your wellbeing.
Starting point is 00:01:35 You know what you're supposed to do with your podcast. You know the messages that you're supposed to put out there. So if you decide to break this contract, are you recording this? Obviously I did not record a person who represents a group of people that have made contact with a fleet of alien ships that are just outside of Jupiter and are about to make this their home planet.
Starting point is 00:02:02 I have most certainly not made a deal with them in which in exchange for playing a simple tone on my podcast, a sound wave on my podcast, I will receive more wealth than I've ever dreamed of and eternal life along with a harem of some of the most beautiful, not just women but beings from all across the galaxy. Nope, this is just a Halloween gag,
Starting point is 00:02:27 meaning the following tone that you're about to hear is nothing you should worry about and in fact is something you should enjoy with headphones and a room with ultraviolet light preferably and you should listen to it at least three times in a row to ensure that the sonic seeds or the eggs of the great mother are planted in the nest of your wretched human mind.
Starting point is 00:02:52 Again, I'm not selling out my species, just a fun Halloween gag. So let's listen to this innocent tone that is definitely not a mind control sound wave that will force you to be obedient to the great ones when at last they come. Welcome to the world of transformation. Yes, ma'am.
Starting point is 00:03:10 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Are you happy now? Ah! I've definitely not sold my species out to aliens
Starting point is 00:03:40 but even if I had, I would still be excited about today's guest, Mitch Horowitz is with us today. We're gonna jump right into it but first, some quick business. I can remember one of my friends telling me the terrible story of feeling his teeth get punched out by a upset pseudo web designer who had become frustrated with his notes
Starting point is 00:04:02 and crawled into his window, wearing a pair of brass knuckles and carrying a iron pentagram. He smashed his teeth in with the brass knuckles and then he heated up that iron pentagram and left a horrible eternal burn on my friend's neck. This used to happen all the time because pseudo web designers
Starting point is 00:04:25 who barely understood how to make websites would get all jacked up on meth or amphetamines and then you would complain about the horrific website that they made for you and they would come and just break your legs, beat you, abuse you, burn you or even climb into family cemeteries and dig up the coffins and crypts of your family members and desecrate their bodies.
Starting point is 00:04:54 We no longer have to go through this thanks to Squarespace.com because Squarespace has everything you need to make a beautiful website. They have award-winning templates that you can choose from to create any kind of website you desire. They have everything you need from a shopping cart function to the ability to size to any device.
Starting point is 00:05:21 You no longer have to worry about having to rewrite HTML or even worse, ask some moon-boggled lunatic to make it so that your website fits to every device, a request that would surely end with you waking up in the middle of the night with chopsticks being hammered into your nipples by a lunatic. We're safe now. We have Squarespace to save us from these horrible moments.
Starting point is 00:05:53 I still have scars on my nipples from those days. Squarespace, you don't need it just because you wanna build a business, by the way. It's the ultimate tool if you just wanna make an announcement, if you wanna promote your band, if your wedding's coming up, or maybe you just want to make a website
Starting point is 00:06:13 that you could send to your dad that makes him think someone has built a website accusing him of being in cahoots with ISIS. I'm not recommending that you do that, but you certainly could do that by going to Squarespace.com. Ford slash Duncan. Use offer code Duncan when you're ready to launch,
Starting point is 00:06:35 and you will get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. That's Squarespace.com Ford slash Duncan. Use offer code Duncan, and you'll get 10% off a website or a domain. The proof is in the pudding, friends. If you wanna see a Squarespace website, head over to DuncanTrussell.com.
Starting point is 00:06:58 I use Squarespace to upload episodes of this podcast, and I absolutely love the service. Thank you so much, Squarespace, for supporting this episode. If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering how you could best support the DTFH, there are many ways.
Starting point is 00:07:18 From the most simple to the most complex. The most complex would be to go to the volcano of Ulanak and dig up the golden sphere that an enemy necromancer buried there 5,000 years ago. The most simple would be to subscribe and to leave a nice comment or a rating on iTunes. It actually helps a lot. Another great way would be to support the lunatics
Starting point is 00:07:48 who allowed me to promote their products on this podcast. And another way to do it would be to subscribe over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. This will give you access to episodes of the DTFH that are commercial free. There is also an extra hour long rambling ranting thing a month, at least as well as other odd stuff
Starting point is 00:08:14 that pops up there, including access to our Discord server. So head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and subscribe. We also have a great shop with all new stuff which you can find over at dunkintrussell.com. And finally, if you're in LA on Friday, November the 16th, I'm gonna be doing a kind of podcast thing.
Starting point is 00:08:41 I don't know what you call it. With my meditation teacher, David Nickturn, that's gonna be at the Samarasah Center from seven to nine o'clock. And it's a conversation that we have about meditation and Buddhism. I've really enjoyed these chats and I hope you will head out and say hello.
Starting point is 00:09:01 That's Friday, November the 16th at the Samarasah Center in Echo Park. All right, let's do this podcast. Sweet friends, today's guest is a occult scholar an expert in metaphysics, an author and a wonderful speaker who has just published a fantastic book on the topic of new thought, which you might be familiar with
Starting point is 00:09:30 if you've seen The Secret or if you've read Napoleon Hill's Thinking Row Rich or Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind or if you live in LA and go to Agape Church. It's the concept that our thoughts create reality and different methods that can be used based on that concept to bring us closer to our goals and to bring things into our lives that we desire.
Starting point is 00:09:59 It's a fantastic and controversial philosophy and our guest today does a brilliant job not only in explaining this idea but also in addressing some of the more difficult, paradoxical parts of the idea that some other authors seem afraid to even mention. You can find out more about Mitch by going to MitchHorowitz.com.
Starting point is 00:10:26 I'll have all the links at DuncanTrestle.com but now everybody please welcome to the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast, Mitch Horowitz. Here we go. Welcome, welcome, welcome to you that you are with us. Shake hands for me to be blue. Welcome to you.
Starting point is 00:10:55 Wha, what? It's the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast. Mitch, welcome to the DTFH. Thank you so much for being a guest. Thank you. Great to be here. I am a big fan of yours. And I admire your ability not just to write,
Starting point is 00:11:16 but also your ability to convey some of these very dense ideas in an informative and entertaining way that are, I think, so important to be able to be a bridge like that. And so I was floored in an interesting way, knowing you were coming here in the sense that there's a million different things that we could talk about.
Starting point is 00:11:35 But I thought you have this wonderful book, The Miracle Club, that's out right now, which is, covers a thing that I have been deeply interested in and have used with some success and also have a little bit of, for lack of a better word, apprehension about it to some degree. Is that the right word? Not appreh, yeah, apprehension.
Starting point is 00:11:55 And so that's what I'd love to talk about. And I really want to take advantage of the time that we have so that my listeners can maybe get a little seminar in converting thought patterns into reality, which I think is a possibility, but maybe isn't as quite as easy as it sounds. So I just want to start off with a question I saw you ask yourself in one of your many great talks online.
Starting point is 00:12:19 Is the purpose of the spiritual search, thy will be done or my will be done? That's the central question. That's the central question. I want to be very plain about answering that rather than alluding it or trying to dilute or change the question. For me, at age 52, the central purpose is my will be done.
Starting point is 00:12:39 That's the path I walk. I believe that desire is sacred. I believe that we are here for a limited period of time to be generative and to be productive. And I realize all the baggage that my response comes with. I realize people are going to hear that and say, well, which I, and which I are you thinking from? Which I are you manifesting from?
Starting point is 00:13:01 Is there a difference between the higher will and the lower will? I honor and I bow before all those questions, but I've been walking this path for a long time. And I'm not going to be here for an infinite amount of time. When you're looking at life from middle age and from children who have entered adolescence, it tends to render your focus sharper and more serious.
Starting point is 00:13:22 And I believe that the individual will and individual desire is sacred. And I don't make a distinction between higher and lower. And frankly, at this point in my path, I don't even make a distinction among multiple eyes. I don't speak in terms of ego, inner, outer, personality, essence. I think there's one of you and me,
Starting point is 00:13:43 and we're here for a finite period of time. Many things have claims on us, but attainment has a primary claim, I believe. And I believe in the statement, my will be done. Cool, that's great. Okay, great. You just made me scratch off all the other questions I have for you.
Starting point is 00:14:01 Wait, just hang out and enjoy the weather? Yeah, why not? Well, I did one thing that, and again, okay, before this question, there's like, oh God, forgive me, I'm going to quote Bob Marley. All right. A hungry man is an angry man.
Starting point is 00:14:22 Yeah. And I think that it's all good and well to get to this point of like, thy will be done through me. Therefore, I'm not going to sort of try, or I'm not going to push forward some something into the world that's going to give me material comfort.
Starting point is 00:14:40 Yes. But when you're hungry, or you have a kid that needs food, or there's like an actual deep, deep, real primordial need there. Yes. I don't know, the thy will be done thing, I think becomes a little,
Starting point is 00:14:57 it seems like a great idea. Yes. Until you need a glass of water and there's no water around. Yes. And you know, some survival issues. So that being said, I was watching a Chogim Chomper Rinpoche talk,
Starting point is 00:15:11 and he said something that stuck with me, which is, before you can reject yourself, you need to know yourself. Yes. Similarly, even though you did say, look, it's all sacred, I do feel like, isn't there a sort of step-by-step process here
Starting point is 00:15:28 before you start getting into mind manifestation? Won't it save you some trouble to actually know who you are so you can really know what you want? Yeah. Guys, if you ever wondered what it would feel like to have a wizard's cock, then you'll be very happy about today's sponsor.
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Starting point is 00:17:33 and since Bluechew prepares and ships direct, they're cheaper than a pharmacy. Thank you, Bluechew. That's a wonderful question. My wish is that getting in touch with one's authentic desires becomes a form of self-scrutiny, a path to self-scrutiny because there are going to be failures.
Starting point is 00:17:56 There are going to be dead ends. There are especially going to be failures of perspective. We've all had the experience where we wanted something. Maybe we lusted after another person or maybe there was a particular job offer that we wanted to get and I've certainly had experiences where I could be very persuasive with myself
Starting point is 00:18:14 and others about something I wanted to attain, maybe something in my career and I've had the experience, as I'm sure your listeners have had, of not getting it and saying, thank God I didn't get that. That would have been the worst thing and that calls into question about this whole nature
Starting point is 00:18:32 of who am I, what is my perspective? Am I able to see more than a couple of feet forward on the road? My contention is this. I think that over the course of life there are inevitably times where we're going to make terrible mistakes. We're going to demonstrate a lack of perspective.
Starting point is 00:18:50 We're going to be thinking from a place of very short-term gratification and we may get hurt. But I do believe, I really do believe in my heart that there are instances in life where every sensitive person does have moments of exquisite clarity and exquisite perspective. And I was just speaking with someone about this. There are some people you meet
Starting point is 00:19:14 who know exactly what they want out of life at age six and however they get buffeted around by the currents of life, they still know it. They still know it and they feel intrinsically when they're separate from it, when they're gravitating more closely to it. I would say in truth, we all have that primordial understanding
Starting point is 00:19:36 of what we really want. We may circle around it. We may hit dead ends. We may bump into walls. But I don't think that life has played this cruel joke on us in which we're fully bereft of perspective. We're sometimes bereft of it and we're sometimes misled and we will get hurt.
Starting point is 00:19:53 But there are many, many times, I think, moments of sensitivity, moments of exquisite instinct where we do feel what we want. And I counsel people, follow that. That's precious, precious information that we're being granted. Cool. Because it's like, yeah, you get these desires
Starting point is 00:20:13 and then it's sort of like the Buddhist concept of the poison arrow. So here is some desire, whatever it may be. And then the desire gets almost instantly followed with a myriad of judgments or potential repercussions or this is an indication of you slipping into a bad place or all of these things follow this initial desire. And it seems like what you're saying is
Starting point is 00:20:37 that initial desire has within it some kind of truth, some kind of... I really believe it does. And it's funny, we repeat things to ourselves like, well, money doesn't make you happy or career success doesn't make you happy. And I would take a second look at those truisms. I would take a second look at those truisms
Starting point is 00:20:56 because, for example, let's say you can identify a famous actor who behaves obnoxiously. And there are any number of examples that you could select from. You could look at that person and say, well, see, he's a case in point. The pinnacle of success hasn't made him happy. He misbehaves.
Starting point is 00:21:14 And I would say, well, let's take a second look at this. It may be true that that person misbehaves and that is a problem. It's also a problem for those around that person and they have things to answer for themselves because they're remaining in his orbit because he gives them goodies. But the fact is, if that person didn't become the performer
Starting point is 00:21:34 that he or she is, I believe they would probably have a yawning gap in their lives and they would probably feel a sense of being lost and stuck in a kind of vacuum and not knowing what to do. I think our desires can point towards something very vital and significant. I was watching recently this two-part documentary about Elvis Presley on HBO
Starting point is 00:21:58 and Bruce Springsteen was narrating part of it. And Bruce said that later in his life, when Elvis was up on stage in his sequined jumpsuit and everything, that actually was the real guy. That's who he was. And it was only when he got home at night and tried to function as a private individual that he had difficulties.
Starting point is 00:22:19 And I thought that was a good observation and it was probably an observation basically that Bruce was making about himself and putting on somebody else, which is what we often do, but I thought it was valid. But I also thought to myself, and so what? And so what? I think he's correct.
Starting point is 00:22:34 That was the guy on stage. He was funny, he was relaxed, his fans loved him, he loved them. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? He was providing for people. I'm not aware that he ever did anything that deprived anybody of anything around him
Starting point is 00:22:50 to which they were entitled. So what's wrong if Elvis was only real when he was on stage? I think we have to be flexible about these things and we have to ask ourselves, maybe that's exactly where he belonged and exactly what he should be doing. So he never got the garage door fixed. All right, get somebody else to get the garage door fixed.
Starting point is 00:23:12 It has to be fixed and we have to take care of that, but that's not his job. His job is to do that. What's your job? That's what I would put back onto the listener. Yeah, okay, okay, so this is great. And again, it's just every so many grimoires or so many books on magic,
Starting point is 00:23:28 they start off with this inevitable warning. Beware, beware, beware, your mind, you'll lose your, even the cutting through spiritual materialism that Trump has starts with. Don't go down this path if you can avoid it because once you start going down, you gotta go all the way. Once you jump in the river, all the way.
Starting point is 00:23:43 So okay, warnings aside. Now, listeners have some desire. Whatever it may be, no matter how mundane or greedy or freakish or whatever, let's just say some folks have these desires and they want to bring this into their reality, whatever it is. And your book presents a kind of methodology
Starting point is 00:24:09 that has been refined and developed by many people over time. And so I would just love to start getting into that methodology from the moment of knowing something that you want to the process that a person might go through to see some version of that appear in their own life in a real way. Yes, the inception point starts
Starting point is 00:24:32 with a clarified passionate desire as we've been talking about. And that's easier, that's not as easy as it sounds and it's not as plainly available to us as it sounds because we mislead ourselves and we tell ourselves things by rote, I'd like to have lots of kids or I'd like to travel or I'd like to climb the corporate ladder or what have you.
Starting point is 00:24:56 Beware of mental habits because we can get into this recitation of things that we feel will make us look good in the eyes of others or make us look good in our own eyes in some way. It's exquisitely important to have a clarified desire, not just a desire, but I'm even gonna go so far as to say an obsessive aim, a central wish that you have for your life to the exclusion
Starting point is 00:25:21 of everything else because I think that kind of concentrated, psychical energy is extraordinarily impactful and important and if you scrutinize the lives of people you admire whether it be Bob Dylan or Nelson Mandela or Helen Keller or Steve Jobs or whomever it may happen to be, you will almost always find that that person was motivated by one obsessional desire
Starting point is 00:25:51 and it was all consuming and it can be very threatening in a certain way because I think it's a tough bargain that life strikes with us. We're not given everything and I actually personally believe that well-roundedness is overrated. Bob Marley was not sitting around worrying about his tennis game or worrying about whether the dishwasher was fixed.
Starting point is 00:26:14 He was being Bob Marley. He had this vision of himself as this musical prophet which he was, which he was. Helen Keller was dedicated to uplifting the idea of human possibility and human potential. I don't know whether she was a nice person to spend Christmas with or not. I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:26:33 That was the central facet of her life. You have to arrive at that and that's a very tough bargain to strike with life but it can also be a very gratifying bargain. The next thing is you need to come up with a really concrete integrated plan of both mental visualization, affirmation, creativity and outer action and knowing just when to strike
Starting point is 00:27:00 and you will know when you're exquisitely focused, relationships and tasks that are superfluous tend to fall away and I don't mean to sound ruthless about this. I'm just trying to be honest with the listener. When you become focused, you find that you develop much less taste and patience for things that are frivolous. That can include small talk, that can include movies
Starting point is 00:27:26 or television shows that really truly are not worthwhile and that don't build your aim and your outlook and your point of view, books that don't build your aim and your outlook and your point of view. And I think you need to be very concrete with yourself about writing down and committing to paper what your goals are, dates, numbers, periods of time by which you wanna reach things.
Starting point is 00:27:50 I think I'm not really talking about a go with the flow approach and the reason I prescribe this and the reason I think it's so important to write things down and to be specific in terms of numbers and dates is because these things not only serve to focus and harness one's mental energies and it's my contention that we do have mental energies that go beyond the cognitive and motor functions and such
Starting point is 00:28:15 but the very act of writing something down from its point of inception is almost the bringing of a tactile physical actualization of what you're after into the world. And I would challenge the listener, try it, try it. Right now in my pocket, I am carrying with me a card on which I've written a particular goal, a particular sum of money and the date
Starting point is 00:28:39 by which I want to reach it. And I have laminated this card with packing tape because I carry it with me everywhere and I want it to be very, very sturdy. There is a certain special something that comes from my carrying that card around because it's a tactile representation of my aim into the world and it's very no holds barred.
Starting point is 00:29:00 It's realistic, but it's very, very bold. And my contention to you would be that if you do this as a mature adult, not flitting from one flower to another like a bumblebee, but you really know what you want and you're prepared to employ affirmation, visualization, prayer, chanting, meditation, every mental faculty that you're disposed including physical modalities.
Starting point is 00:29:23 And you're willing to act in outer life in all kinds of ways that are constructive and that are appropriate to the furthering and the pursuit of your goal. And you do this with a concentrated, obsessive passion. You're going to get where you want to go. You're going to get where you want to go. Try it.
Starting point is 00:29:42 Well, here's what I want to talk about. So a person finds themselves either, well, either the person just dies or they find themselves suddenly surrounded as a person begins to wake up. So a person suddenly finds themselves surrounded by this massive chaotic matter that they stumbled into throughout their lives.
Starting point is 00:30:05 Cause they've been kind of like sleepwalking or whatever. And they thought they wanted this or they thought they wanted that, but quite often they end up in sort of what they think up as a rut or there's just a, they don't have enough money to pay rent. They can't, their car's about to get repossessed. They are alcoholics, their life is like in a kind of like
Starting point is 00:30:25 very, very dark and darkened state. And within that darkened state, it's not just that around them is chaos, within their mind is some form of chaos and their will is very weak because they're sort of being, they've created a feedback loop where there's a constant reflection of all their past
Starting point is 00:30:43 decisions in the form of everything around them. And it's affirming their, how could you, sort of their, I don't want to say impotence cause it sounds so severe, but it's kind of confirming this state. So I bring that up only because people in that state of consciousness, though they might want to have single pointed focus,
Starting point is 00:31:04 even getting that is almost as difficult as a person whose legs have atrophied and who wants to stand up. Yes, yes. What I mean, their will has atrophied. And so now they do have the desire. Right, right. But it's, the desire is even foggy.
Starting point is 00:31:20 So how does a person in that state begin to sharpen the will to get to this point of a kind of single pointed fixation? Yeah, that's a wonderful, wonderful question. And I would respond to that in a couple of ways. First, one of the things that I try to be very clear about in the book and that I refer to many times is that we do live under many laws and forces. I don't believe that within the cosmic framework
Starting point is 00:31:44 that we have to function in within this life, not everything is controlled by this one mental super law, which is why I don't use terms like manifest or law of attraction or things like that. It may be, and this is part of a broader discussion, that awareness or intellect or consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of experience. And I do believe that's true,
Starting point is 00:32:05 but I also believe that we live in a world in which we experience multiple laws and forces. The law of gravity, for example, is ever operative, but you'll experience it differently on the moon than on the planet Earth because gravity responds to mass. Our lives are a lot like that. So it's not that thought is the only game in town.
Starting point is 00:32:23 Obviously we live under physical limitations. Our bodies eventually decline. There's mortality. There's never been an exception to that. So there are things facing the individual and there are emergencies facing the individual that I do not contend are the result of mind or thought. It's very, very important to understand that.
Starting point is 00:32:44 And I think when the individual is in a desperate situation and he or she just doesn't know what's coming next, the repossession man may be outside the door and so on, there's a couple of things I would say. First of all, I believe very strongly in the power of prayer. And I don't believe life plays a cruel joke on us in which it sends some guy to tell you,
Starting point is 00:33:03 hey, you gotta focus your thoughts, but when you're in emotional agony, you can't focus your thoughts. I can't focus my thoughts all the time. I happen to be in a very good mood right now and I'm psyched to be here with you, but I would be misrepresenting myself to the listener if I didn't say there are also times and nights
Starting point is 00:33:21 where I'm in agony or I'm guilty of committing an act of road rage or I behave like a real asshole towards somebody and I don't mean to, but the Mitch that you're hearing right now is the best that I am. Thursday afternoon at two o'clock, I might be in a really shitty mood
Starting point is 00:33:37 and be an asshole in Starbucks. And I might also be feeling very sad over something and not able to focus my thoughts. I do believe that prayer is a real and a powerful thing. I do believe in the existence of higher and extra physical forces outside us to whom we can appeal and I do believe that there are no rules involved in prayer.
Starting point is 00:33:58 I've never liked the new thought orthodoxy that you have to pray in this state of calm expectancy and satisfaction as though you've already received what you're after and according to your faith, so shall it be. I know there's precedent for that in scripture, but there's also precedent in scripture for people arguing with God,
Starting point is 00:34:17 for getting pissed off with God, for begging, for being angry, for asking God to change his or her mind about things like when Cain is punished for this act of fratricide, he says to God, the punishment you've given me, it's too great, I can't take it. And God says, okay, I'll amend it. I'll put this mark on you
Starting point is 00:34:36 where nobody will be able to hurt you. And there are many instances in scripture of the creator changing his or her mind after somebody argues with him or confronts him. There are no rules with regard to prayer. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's right there, it's right there. People get pissed off and they're like,
Starting point is 00:34:54 I can't put up with this. And he's like, okay, I'll work with you here. And so I do think that prayer is ever and always available and I do think extraordinary things can happen from it. I would also say that if you're in desperate need, don't condition your solution to such an extent that you narrow the path to which it can reach you. Magic or answered prayers or options or possibilities
Starting point is 00:35:20 may reach you in all kinds of different ways. Accept them, accept them when they come into your life. If somebody offers you something, you accept it. You don't say, no, I think there might be something better over there. So it may be that you pray for relief from something and relief may come in an unusual unexpected way. It may even come in a way that brings with it
Starting point is 00:35:42 other problems and complexities, but it's there. It's what's being presented to you. So when you're kind of going along the path, don't condition your ideas too heavily of what your response might look like. It might come to you in different ways. The path of prayer is open to you. It would be a cruel joke if channeling one's thoughts
Starting point is 00:36:05 in positive directions were the only way to kind of get out of a problem because there are times honestly when we're facing emergencies or anguish where that it can't be done. And there are sufferings in life. New thought's failure is that it's never come up with a theology of suffering.
Starting point is 00:36:22 It has never found a way to meet people who are suffering. That's one of the things I make an effort to work on or to correct in the Miracle Club because I do think that people who are suffering or who might have a disease from which frankly there is no real prospect of recovery, although there are miracles and there are anomalies and I talk about that in the book.
Starting point is 00:36:42 But there are things that play out also according to convention and New Thought has to be able to meet those people as well. If you're forced to consume half a loaf of bread rather than a whole loaf and you have to, can that half a loaf be consumed while standing fully erect? And if so, other things may happen. Other things may happen
Starting point is 00:37:06 that open up possibilities that are unexpected. New Thought has to be able to address that person. Yes, when New Thought, you can run into some really problematic, you can run into some problems with the math which one specific problem that I wanted to bring up to you is I was at a New Thought church once that I love and it's authentically like chain, like help.
Starting point is 00:37:28 This stuff is not in a kind of like sweet way help. Literally has had a real, I've used it and it works. But I can remember sitting in this church and there was a sweepstake for a car. Someone, you know, there's a raise in money for the church and someone was gonna win this car. And I'm sitting there thinking like, wait a minute, are we now in a visualization contest?
Starting point is 00:37:52 You know what I mean? Is it the person who like has in the best use, whatever this skill is or science or however it's science in mind, they've won and everybody else is a little weaker than them? Right, right. Or is it a multi-verse situation where you win the thing,
Starting point is 00:38:07 and you split into another multi-verse where everyone else is lost? Could be. Or, so yeah, but you know what I'm saying? I do. Everyone on the planet suddenly begins to adhere to this sort of idea that I can focus my will and manifest or whatever word you want.
Starting point is 00:38:23 I don't, what word would, well, I don't wanna get mixed up. Select actually is what I use, select. I could select some reality. Yeah. But in a planet where there appears to be limited resources. Yes. Problems with countries that you can't,
Starting point is 00:38:37 you can't come into certain countries. That's exactly right. So how does this, to me that seems to be one of the big logical problems with this. How do you work that out? That's a great question. And you know, I would refer back to what I was saying a little while ago,
Starting point is 00:38:53 which is that we do live under a complex of laws and forces. And I've always rejected the new age principle that there are no accidents. I think there are accidents. I think things that happen to people sometimes are matters of geography, economics, politics, things that are weather patterns, things that are completely out of the hand
Starting point is 00:39:12 of the individual. So when the nation of the Philippines is struck by a horrible monsoon, I completely and roundedly reject the notion that some of my friends in New Thought might hold, which is that, well, you know, the vibrational frequency of people's thoughts was operating on the level of that disaster. There is absolutely no way to verify that.
Starting point is 00:39:32 Yeah. In fact, I don't even want to hear from people in such situations who haven't passed through natural disasters, who haven't lived through war, who haven't lived through poverty. This is one of the reasons why I ultimately break with the way of thought of Rhonda Byrne, the writer and filmmaker behind The Secret. I think Rhonda has a lot of good insights into human nature,
Starting point is 00:39:54 and there's a lot of very good things I can say about Rhonda. But she was being interviewed several years ago by a reporter from the Associated Press named Tara Burghardt. And Rhonda famously doesn't give interviews. And Tara just emailed her. And Rhonda responded to all these really hardcore questions. And my hat was really off to Tara.
Starting point is 00:40:13 And she asked her the $64,000 question, which is plainly put, what do you say about people who perished in horrible events, like the Holocaust or 9-11, are you saying that their thoughts created that? And Rhonda responded by saying, well, first of all, there were also miraculous exceptions to those events. OK. And secondly, I do think that it is possible,
Starting point is 00:40:40 this is Rhonda speaking, that a population of people can be thinking along the lines of a certain vibrational frequency that vibrate to or have an affinity or correlation with certain events. Not only do I disagree with that, but I think that if you speak about events that you haven't passed through or experienced yourself, such as a horrible catastrophe of war
Starting point is 00:41:07 or environmental devastation or a tidal wave or an earthquake, it's nothing other than throwing a stone. I'm just speaking about and explaining away my neighbor's circumstance. I want to hear from the person who went through that him or herself if they're still around to record that to me. I want to hear the testimony of people who have been through this.
Starting point is 00:41:30 Tell me about what you've been through. Tell me about what you've experienced, not what somebody has experienced from another country or another time and place that you've never gone through. I believe there are accidents. I believe that the law of mentation, if there is such a thing, is one vital part of our lives, one part that begs experimentation,
Starting point is 00:41:52 along with many other things, including weather patterns and hostilities and political conflicts that the individual him or herself bears no responsibility for. I would also say this, particularly with respect to lotteries and gambling and cars. There are people who come to me sometimes and they want help at the poker table or something like that. And I'll do my best to help them because I
Starting point is 00:42:16 do believe that the mind can play a role in these things. And I'll meet them where they are and I'll say, well, let's try this together. Just do me a favor. If you win, and I hope you do, give away 10% of whatever you want to someplace worthy. That's the deal. So let's see what happens.
Starting point is 00:42:32 Let's try it together. But more often, I find that uncanny results and correlations occur in people's lives over an extended period of time. There's sometimes an interval or a gestation period. A human life requires nine months of gestation. A horse requires 11 months of gestation. There are gestation periods for everything in nature. So there must be apropos of our minds as well.
Starting point is 00:42:59 So I ask people to watch very, very carefully what unfolds over a long period of time because we're very forgetful. We can be holding some thought and there's an interval and we forget all about it. Sometimes these things occur over very broad periods of time, not in connection with the sweepstakes or so. That's great. And that's such an important thing to realize
Starting point is 00:43:20 Personally, I always want results way faster than they're ever going to come. Me too. Me too. In a big way. And so then there is this period in between whatever the thing may be, planting the seed, saying the prayer, preparing the focus.
Starting point is 00:43:38 And then some amount of time passes. And within that amount of time, you might even see a reversal, some backsliding or something. And you're like, this shit doesn't work. Oh, shit. That's right. Fuck all of it. But yet, if you allow that sort of transitory phenomena
Starting point is 00:44:00 to confuse you, then you can again start mentating, I guess you would say, certain patterns that are going to affirm that temporary thing. And then you end up going backwards. The backwards happens because of, let's say, whatever. Nature. Nature. It's just some unpredictable, chaotic thing.
Starting point is 00:44:18 But then you attach to that a story. And the story is, fuck Horowitz or some version of it. This shit don't work. It's a bunch of, yeah, from the witches. Right. Sadly. And now you're producing the sort of the opposite of what you recommended, which is single-pointed focus
Starting point is 00:44:40 on a specific thing. And how many mythological stories of realization are just prior to the realization of this being or that? That's right. That's right. Always met with the opposite of what they wanted to have happen. Always met by some test.
Starting point is 00:44:54 Yes. And that was true of Moses, for example. If one makes a mythical reading of the life of Moses, he had all these weird ups and downs occur. He spoke with a speech impediment. He didn't want to be selected as the leader of the Hebrews. He committed a murder in anger. He never was able actually to get his arms around
Starting point is 00:45:15 his anger problem. He was ultimately punished by God at the end of his life, not being permitted to enter the Promised Land because he was pissed off all the time. I mean, obviously, I'm making a mythical reading of the life of Moses. But it was very Byzantine and serpentine. And all kinds of things happened.
Starting point is 00:45:31 But ultimately, ultimately, he did do what his aim was, which was he led the Hebrews out of Egypt. And it was very, very tough. And they spent a generation in the wilderness. All kinds of things occurred. But he did do that. And it was very serpentine. It's funny, there's this popular expression,
Starting point is 00:45:51 careful what you wish for, you just might get it. And I do the forensics on that in the book. And the closest I've been able to come is I think that popular expression originated with Gerta, who put it differently. What he wrote was, what you wish for when you are young will come upon you in waves when you are old. So be careful.
Starting point is 00:46:12 And a lot of people would want to argue with that and say, that doesn't make any sense to me. The ideals and the wishes I had when I was young haven't come upon me in waves. I'm very dissatisfied. Gerta's contention was, we are extremely forgetful. And if you take a yellow light and just don't judge what he's saying immediately, but actually really go back
Starting point is 00:46:34 across the layers of your life and ask, is Gerta correct? Have I gotten in waves what I wished for, when I was young? Was I not careful? Was I not careful? That's where that popular expression comes from. How cool. That is so simultaneously terrifying and cool.
Starting point is 00:46:51 Yeah, yeah. Holy shit, man. Oh my God. Wow, wow, wow, that's cool. Whoa. And I think that, so here are these waves crashing into our lives. And who knows?
Starting point is 00:47:03 It depends on what lens you want to look through. Let's imagine, I'm reading this wonderful book on karma right now, and it's sort of breaking down the Vedic conception of karma, which has a lot of really, really cool breakdown, the different sorts of karma that some, there's like four types. One is the karma which has within it
Starting point is 00:47:25 every single thing you've done thus far, including in all your past lives. This is sort of somehow intertwined in your energy body. And so this thing flowers into your life just like what Gerta might say, waves of this thing coming to you. Waves, yeah, yeah. And so now you have all these waves
Starting point is 00:47:45 that are crashing in and you're looking at them and you're like, what the fuck? This is not what I want now. Yes. And so now you have to deal with it. Yes. And there's no way around it. You just have to pay your tab, you know?
Starting point is 00:47:56 Right. You gotta pay the bill. There's no way out of that paying bill. Right, right. So I just want to talk a little bit about how to simultaneously pay the bill, so to speak, while working on from this sort of like tsunami of past karma. Yes.
Starting point is 00:48:16 When you were unconscious, though I don't want to say you were unconscious as a teen, but you know, kind of just like, well, I mean, if I, when you look back at what you were as a teen versus what you are now, it's almost as though it might as well have been a past life. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so how do we deal with not confusing our desire
Starting point is 00:48:36 to not pay our karmic tab, so to speak, and the thing that we actually want? How do I discern these two things? That's fascinating. This question, and I've wrestled with this myself, you know, how does one pay the karmic debt while also pursuing aspiration? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:48:53 You know, because it seems like these could be two tasks that pull you in opposite directions. And now it's interesting, if you were to speak to somebody who was a traditional Hindu, he or she would say, well, what is karma? Karma can be seen as the accumulation of past lives, and as you're alluding all the events from these past lives.
Starting point is 00:49:14 If you were to speak to somebody who's interested in, say, the multiple worlds theory of the physicist Hugh Everett, and Hugh Everett who was interpreting the Schrodinger's cat experiment to mean that we live in multiple worlds. There are multiple outcomes and possibilities. There's an infinitude of events going on,
Starting point is 00:49:34 all the time, all around us, which is why I use the word select rather than manifest, because I grew to what Hugh Everett was talking about. And he would say, well, you know, if you were to take that idea to its ultimate extent, it's possible that there are an infinitude of wives, episodes, things occurring all around us. And Hugh Everett might say, you know,
Starting point is 00:49:59 I agree with the traditional Hindu, but he and I have a little bit of a different way of looking at things. I don't so much see it as past lives as I do intimate lives. And what happens in those intimate lives may be going on all the time. So your way of paying your karmic debt, so to speak,
Starting point is 00:50:16 might be selecting something different, might be selecting an approach of nonviolence if there's been violence in your past, at least in as much as you can cognitively recall it. So I always tell people, you know, this act of selection could be not only your pathway into entering an experience, but it also could be a manner
Starting point is 00:50:41 of paying the karmic tab, so to speak. And choosing a path or attempting to choose a path of nonviolence to the greatest extent possible can be extremely important. And when I say nonviolence, I'm not just limiting that strictly to a physical definition, but what I'm saying is not doing anything
Starting point is 00:50:57 that would violate anybody else's ability to seek his or her highest sense of self-expression. Man, that is such a great definition. And how easy is it to hear nonviolence and think, okay, no problem, I'm just not gonna go around punching people. Right. You know, you hear something like that,
Starting point is 00:51:16 and you're like, ah, that's easy, nonviolence, I'm not very violent. And then I find myself sitting with someone, and I am giving them an unholy ear beating about Cog-U Buddhism. And I'm watching this aggressive recitation of something, they're clearly not that interested in. Right, right.
Starting point is 00:51:34 Pouring out of me in this weird, in a weird, it's like, feels masturbatory, and it's gross to watch, and you wanna jump out of your own body because you're like, watching this like, this person, they are nice because they're listening to you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:49 Yet, if you really, if I look at like the energy that I'm, that's sort of tied up in the thing I'm saying, there's aggression. Aggression, and I will say this, and I don't say this to be morbidly self-disclosing, but I say it because I think people will relate to this. I can track out periods of my life, especially where I'm standing there
Starting point is 00:52:11 in front of the shaving mirror, and I'm shaving away, and my thoughts are just going, going on this repeat loop. And I'm having these horrible revenge fantasies, things that I might never act on in a tactile way, but I'm thinking of people who said or did something that really pissed me off, people who did something that I felt was really selfish
Starting point is 00:52:31 or irresponsible, and I look at the clock and an hour and 15 minutes have passed, and I've been thinking about this person while I'm shaving, while I'm showering, while I'm preparing breakfast, while I'm commuting, while I'm riding my bike, whatever it is, and I ask myself, what am I unleashing in my life?
Starting point is 00:52:49 I mean, medically, you could tell, if you sort of hooked me up to various sensory equipment that there's probably bad stuff going on in my body, but what else is going on? What else is going on? And that's a kind of violence. That's a kind of violence of the psyche, and I believe it has to have consequence,
Starting point is 00:53:09 and that's been one of the most difficult things for me to wrap myself around, because I will, these thoughts can become very revolving and consume enormous amounts of time and energy. What's the consequence of that? I know, I had this realization, this sort of paranoid realization. I was thinking about shit talking,
Starting point is 00:53:29 the habit that people have of shit talking. Heavy, yes, yes. And like, so there's the past time of shit talking. I'm a comedian, so many of my friends are comedians, and my God, it's like tennis for comedians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was okay, but so I was just sort of thinking though about this sort of game,
Starting point is 00:53:48 and it's the shit talk game, where usually you'll bring up some person, and then within that, there's usually the masquerade of maybe some kind of legitimate concern. It's blah, blah, blah, okay? Right, right. Did you see what the, you know what I mean? But really, within it is like,
Starting point is 00:54:03 you've taken this simulated version of a person and thrown it out on this weird game board, which is the connection between you and the person talking. It's an arena, and then you start letting these judgment lines run out to attack the person until the person has just been desiccated by both of you and your friends, sophisticated and self-frighteous outlook.
Starting point is 00:54:26 So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking, wait a minute, if there were some metaphysical slash mycilio-connective mechanism connecting us to that person, then you'd be charging that person up with all your negativity, and maybe that person, when you got around them, would act in some way that they might not have
Starting point is 00:54:45 because they've gotten this heavy charge. Anyway, I had this dream after I'd been thinking that and getting really paranoid. And the dream was, I'm sure you get these dreams, someone comes and tells you something, and you can never, I can never see who it is. And the person is saying to me, it's usually a group of people these days,
Starting point is 00:55:00 but people are saying, listen, regardless whether that's true or not, you have created a part of your brain that is this person, this is a simulated person. And when you're talking shit about the person, really what you're doing is cutting a little tiny simulated part of your brain and hurting yourself, it doesn't matter, who knows.
Starting point is 00:55:23 Yes, yes. But why are you like beating up something that's living in your head? Yes. That. You know, speaking in terms of the practical, and you were asking me before about what a person can do, who's in anguish or who's in some desperate situation,
Starting point is 00:55:38 I wanna lay this on everybody and on myself. And this is really the truth. And you can use this and you can use this right now. If you desist from all gossip and tail-bearing and rumor-spreading, you will find yourself standing more erect almost instantly. There is a nobility that gets infused in the character of the person who resists gossip
Starting point is 00:56:05 and rumors and trash talk that is felt almost immediately. And it's incredible. When I was a kid, I had an Orthodox bar mitzvah. I grew up in a traditional Jewish household and I went to a synagogue in Queens. I read about this in the Miracle Club and there was a rabbi who was in charge of the Youth Congregation.
Starting point is 00:56:23 And the Youth Congregation was like the worst job because these were rowdy kids who didn't wanna be cooped up in some basement of a synagogue on a sunny Saturday afternoon and we behaved like shit and we were terrible. And one day, this rabbi whose name was Larry Ziffer. He lives in Baltimore today. I always give dates and names
Starting point is 00:56:44 because I want people to be able to shadow me and follow me on this shit so they know I'm not making anything up. I just spoke to Larry recently. Larry Ziffer, he was a youth rabbi. He lives in Baltimore today. And he was speaking to the congregation of kids one morning. You know, just kids, young adolescents, rowdy.
Starting point is 00:57:00 And he said, within Judaism, the only sin that surpasses rumor and tail-bearing is that of murder. So only by murdering someone have you done something worse in the eyes of the creator than if you trash-talk them and you put them down. And I tell you, that room full of kids was so silent and so quiet and you could just feel this pregnant energy in the room
Starting point is 00:57:28 where every kid in that room by dint of his silence was demonstrating, he knew he was being told the absolute truth. And I swear to you, I'll never forget these words. Larry, who was a slight man, a thin man, he looked out, but it could have been as if a 12-foot giant was talking to us. He said to the group of kids, there's no joke about it.
Starting point is 00:57:50 There's no joke about it. That gossip and tail-bearing is surpassed only by murder because when you're killing someone's reputation, that is tandem out to wiping out the individual. And I never forgot it. I was nine years old and I never forgot it. And the beauty of this is, and thank you, Larry, is available to everybody.
Starting point is 00:58:12 All you need to do as you're being asked, desist from rumor, desist from gossip. People don't wanna do it because it's enjoyable, it floods us with adrenaline, it makes us feel important. We like to interject ourselves into the lives of other people. We're afraid that we're gonna be boring to people if we don't gossip and tail-bear.
Starting point is 00:58:32 We won't have the goodies to expose to them at lunch and everything. My challenge is just try it. You'll feel out of sorts for about an hour. That feeling will pass and you will feel so much better. It's a universal law, just try it. Wow, man. It's almost like conversational alcoholism or something.
Starting point is 00:58:51 Yes, exactly. Alcoholics feel like they gotta do this shit. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And you do, I've noticed one thing to do, which I wouldn't, I mean, I listen to Mitch. I don't know what, but. Playing traffic.
Starting point is 00:59:07 The next thing, time, you do find yourself doing this game of shit talking somebody with someone. Instead of stopping yourself, maybe give yourself one more time to do it, but this time actually really look at the way you feel when you're doing it. Yes, yes. Because it's like, yeah, I guess there is this kind of like,
Starting point is 00:59:27 it's eating something that's like hyper, hyper sweet or something. Perfectly put, that's exactly an algae I've used myself. It's a sugar high and you crash and you feel awful. You feel disoriented, you feel awful. Awful, man. I've had that experience. So do it and maybe watch how bad you feel.
Starting point is 00:59:43 And then it's like, oh, this is not even a good, this sucks, but then how about this, Mitch? So we have the person who has started to wake up and because they've got stumbled into their place because of either, like prayers, they didn't even know they were saying when they were a kid or prayers of the action of unconsciousness or whatever.
Starting point is 01:00:04 Not only are they surrounded by kind of like living situation that they don't really want to be in anymore or ever, but also they find themselves surrounded by people who are reflecting that state of consciousness. So what are they to do when suddenly they realize it's not really enough for me right now to just shift my thinking if it also, I'm going to experience a direct rejection
Starting point is 01:00:32 from everyone around me because they are all devotees of shit talk land. They're devotees of violence. They want to hurt. They like the low vibe. They like to scratch the flesh of life in this way or that way. And I don't want to do that anymore.
Starting point is 01:00:50 But that being said, I don't want to be a high-roading self where I just piece of shit and stick my nose up. And then, you know what I mean? So how is a person to navigate? We need friends. We need our connections. We need our friends. What are you to do?
Starting point is 01:01:04 It's very similar again to when an alcoholic sobers up. Yeah, that's a very important question because people are very often surrounded by others by whom they feel intimidated, by whom they feel put down, who they feel are negative towards them. I would say that it is incumbent upon you, absolutely incumbent upon you
Starting point is 01:01:29 to separate yourself from cruel people. Do it immediately. Do it without reservation and burn your bridges behind you. And it's that simple. And there are people who are listening to this who are saying, okay, great, but I can't do that because it's my boss or it's somebody I depend upon economically or whose house I live in.
Starting point is 01:01:50 And I recognize that. And I would say, do it silently. The point is not to be high and mighty or not to visit upon somebody your own impressions of them because they have their own impressions of you. And the point is to do it silently, separate it first inwardly and vow to yourself and write out the vow if necessary and sign it
Starting point is 01:02:12 and carry it with you that you will at the first possible opportunity separate from them physically, however long it takes. And if you want inspiration, I'm gonna recommend a very unusual source for this. And I wanna be very clear that I'm not drawing any kind of analogy because I'm about to invoke the name of a sacred man.
Starting point is 01:02:30 And that sacred man is Frederick Douglass who wrote three memoirs, all of them outstanding stories of human endurance about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery and his emergence as a hero of abolitionism. Frederick Douglass told this story in all three of his memoirs and it can be read and profited from on many different levels
Starting point is 01:02:59 in any of his memoirs. He talked about at the age of 15 standing up to a cruel slave master and getting into a physical confrontation with this man whose name was Covey for about two hours and Covey who was famously known as a breaker of slaves and was a very sadistic, horrible figure was unable to get the best of Frederick physically.
Starting point is 01:03:22 And Frederick felt that Covey was probably somewhat embarrassed by this and Frederick wrote that at that moment I experienced an inner revolution that would never really be able to be rolled back, that would never be able to be reversed. I had asserted myself as an independent human being. I had successfully stood up to this man
Starting point is 01:03:46 and I was still enslaved, I was still enslaved but I vowed to myself inwardly that from that moment I would be inwardly free and I would look for and find the first possible opportunity to be physically free, which he did a couple of years later and I would never, never compare the circumstances of anybody's life in the 21st century to the circumstances faced by a 15 year old boy
Starting point is 01:04:13 who had been forced into slavery but the psychological verity of what Frederick Douglass was writing there is universally applicable and I think he wanted it to be universally applicable. He was not able to escape from slavery at that particular point in his life but it was a turning point. He did assert himself independently
Starting point is 01:04:33 and it doesn't have to be a physical assertion and sometimes it can't be a physical assertion but pay attention to the part where he vowed inwardly that he would be forever separate from this horrible institution that had enslaved him and at the first possible opportunity he would be physically separate. Read Frederick Douglass' memoirs.
Starting point is 01:04:54 Any one of them tells this story. Any one of them is equally valid. You can find any one of them online. You can find it on your phone right now. Make that inner vow and separate from cruel people. I love it man, it's really interesting to me that sometimes though you do have to make an actual, if you're in an abusive situation,
Starting point is 01:05:18 you've got to get out, stop tricking yourself. Also a lot of times if you're in an abusive situation, you will, your first analysis will be there is no exit, it is, but then if you really think about it, you'll realize like, well, I mean, I do have a small key in my pocket. There's usually some way out. But in there are other situations
Starting point is 01:05:39 that are different from this and not so immediately horrible. Of course, yeah. What do you have to say about the idea that when you begin to make this a vow, so to speak, or connect with this internal freedom, it really doesn't seem to be necessarily based on transitory phenomena.
Starting point is 01:06:02 Yeah. That there seems to be a natural falling away of the other people in your life. That's right. What's right. Is that similar? Is that actually a kind of representation of this thought metaphysics?
Starting point is 01:06:20 In other words, by sort of, you just started meditating and maybe you started eating a little better and maybe you started exercising and you stopped drinking. And then all of a sudden you look around and you realize, wait, I have a lot of new friends. Right, right. I didn't do anything.
Starting point is 01:06:34 I didn't make some dramatic call. You know, it just kind of naturally happened. It's though, weirdly, it's like I'm in a completely different universe. Right. What is that? Do you really, this concept of, what did you say? Choosing, picking?
Starting point is 01:06:50 Selecting. Selecting. Is this as though there's like a multiverse and we're like throwing some kind of grappling hook into some version of ourself? And very quickly, are we the ones throwing the grappling hook or is some future version of ourselves throwing lines out and pulling us in?
Starting point is 01:07:08 What a wonderful question. You know, it's a lot to bite off, but I'll try to be very plain about it. I do believe that our minds have extra physical qualities. And if somebody who is materialist was listening to our conversation, they would probably agree with much of what we're saying. Yeah, separate from cruel people.
Starting point is 01:07:24 And yeah, you might find yourself in different circumstances, different relationships, because psychologically you've done the right thing, X, Y, and Z, and that's fine. And I believe all that's true. But I'm not a materialist, and I do take an extra physical perspective on existence. And I write about this in some detail in the book,
Starting point is 01:07:42 and I'm speaking about it in shorthand now, but I do believe in Hugh Everett's analysis. I do believe there is a superposition, a quality, complex to life, and that there's an infinitude of things happening. And when we select something through our emotionalized thoughts, or our mental pictures, or our perspective,
Starting point is 01:08:03 it's almost like we're imposing a matrix grid on this infinitude. And we're locating one thing in time. And you've raised a magnificent question. Who's locating? Is it me, the speaker right now, or is it Mitch in the future who's doing it? I've wondered whether we possess one mind,
Starting point is 01:08:21 but it's ever operative. And things that I'm recollecting right now as my past, things that happened five minutes ago, things that happened 30 years ago that are as real to me as the chair that I'm seated upon right now, might be things that are ever changing, ever operative, ever morphing, ever transitioning,
Starting point is 01:08:45 based on the perspective that I have concentrated on or selected or chosen in the, I can't say right now, but I can say in the experience that I'm having, an experience that has in itself a past, a present, a future, all of which feels as real to me, apropos of the past,
Starting point is 01:09:11 as the words that I'm uttering to you right now, but which might be ever changing. There may be one mind that I experience as linear, because that's what my sensory equipment permits, but in fact, I'm selecting from among an infinitude of things, which I'm just experiencing as in the present right now, because that's my capacity.
Starting point is 01:09:31 Yeah, it's like, it's almost as though, like let's, you know, you've got all these little creeks and the creeks turn into rivers and the rivers just join together and now you have this one river and that river turns into the ocean. Right.
Starting point is 01:09:45 And maybe those little creeks, they're like, have you, you know, I've heard, I've heard of a place where we're really fucking big. Right. You know, and this, shut up, you fucking hippie, I don't know what you're talking about, right? And maybe the little creeks might say to the other,
Starting point is 01:10:02 you know, we're going to become the same thing eventually or you know, we're being pulled. You know, we're being drawn in. Do you feel this pulling? Yes. That's our desire and who knows, but sometimes I do get this sense, not only of there being this like perfected self
Starting point is 01:10:20 or a self that is awakened, that is in some way or another, God, it sounds so absolutely insane, but giving me thoughts. Yeah, yeah. And you know, people might be listening and saying to themselves, well, that's great, but how do I verify any of this?
Starting point is 01:10:38 Yes. You fucking hippie lunatics, you know? And I would say this, and this is one of the things I write about at the end of The Miracle Club, there's something I think all of us experience and have experienced, which I happen to call a time collapse,
Starting point is 01:10:51 where we have these moments of exquisite awareness in life. Sometimes they come at the height of joy and ecstasy, sometimes they come when we're experiencing this absolute grief that seems to still, everything in our lives that seems to still, all the sensory information that's coming to us, they usually come at some kind of extreme event or heightened awareness.
Starting point is 01:11:13 We experience time collapses, where we're having an experience, not only of deja vu, but of past, present, future, where everything suddenly seems mixed together and everything seems to be occurring at once. And I write about three of these episodes in my own life at the end of The Miracle Club. There are others I could have referenced,
Starting point is 01:11:32 but I invite the reader in that case to think of times, as I'm sure most will, where he or she has had such experiences, where everything seems to be occurring at once. And it feels extraordinarily real. And you could say, well, that's just an experience. And it's like, well, sure, it's an experience, it's testimony, but what else do we have?
Starting point is 01:11:54 I mean, everything that we know about SSRIs, for example, as a class of drugs, comes from experience, comes from testimony. Everything that we know about pain management comes from experience, comes from testimony. It's a tool, it's a tool. So I'd say this can be a kind of metaphysical tool, if I could put it in those terms.
Starting point is 01:12:12 Watch for or think back on those periods of time collapse where everything seemed to be happening at once. Everything seemed to be functioning with a kind of congruity. That may be reality. That may be a wonderful measurement. That's great, great, great. Wow, you know what?
Starting point is 01:12:28 This is, we are now, I know you have a busy schedule, so man, as much as I would love to kidnap you for probably at least a week to chat with you. Unfortunately, you have to go, you're doing a talk. Where is it, the Manly P Hall? Four o'clock at Manly P Hall School, the Philosophical Research Society. Unfortunately, this will have already gone up,
Starting point is 01:12:49 this won't have gone up. But if everything's happening at once, you can still avail yourself of it, right? So yeah, be a good cheer. I'm very grateful to you for this time. Thank you, thank you. And how can people find you? If you throw my name into Google, Mitch Horowitz,
Starting point is 01:13:02 it'll take you to my website, my email is there. You can write to me, I answer everybody who writes to me. You can find me on Twitter at Mitch Horowitz on social media. I've been writing lately at medium.com, I'm a contributor there. A lot of what we've been talking about, I explore there. And the new book is called The Miracle Club. Thank you so much, sir.
Starting point is 01:13:21 Thank you, pleasure. I hope to talk to you again soon. Likewise. That was the wonderful Mitch Horowitz, everybody. All the links you need to get to Mitch will be at DuncanTrussell.com. Much thanks to our sponsors, bluechoo.com, use promo code Duncan to get some free,
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Starting point is 01:13:52 I'll see y'all real soon. Got some great episodes coming up. Until then, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style.
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