Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 363: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: November 30, 2019

MITCH HOROWITZ, author, seeker, historian, and philosopher, rejoins the DTFH! Check out Mitch's website here, and if you're into metaphysics at all check out his new book, Magician of the Beautiful: An Introduction to Neville Goddard. Duncan is coming to Denver! January 23-25. Click here to buy tickets. This episode is brought to you by: The DTFH Store - We've refreshed the shop for the holidays! Use our offer code: BLACKTURKEY to get 20% off any item in the store! Manscaped - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout to get 20% off and FREE shipping. BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping.

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DTFH where you can get commercial free episodes of this podcast along with a lot of other great stuff. All right, here we go. Today's guest is returning and usually I put a little bit more space in between guests but I was so blown away by the last conversation I had with Mitch that and he wasn't gonna be in town so we just had to do another podcast

and that's what this is. Dear friends, Mitch Horowitz is a brilliant author who has written many, many books. He most recently wrote a book called Magician of the Beautiful about Neville Goddard who is this incredible mystic that has completely changed my life. Highly recommend this book. He also travels around giving fantastic lectures

on a variety of topics. Sometimes Satanism, sometimes magic, sometimes Neville Goddard, you name it. So if you ever get lucky enough that he's traveling around you, definitely go see one of his talks. Check out his amazing books. All the links you need to find Mitch

are gonna be located at dunkintrustle.com. Now everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH, Mitch Horowitz. ... Mitch, welcome back. Thank you, man. It is really cool that I'm getting to know you. You're awesome.

You're like Alan Watts meets Alistair Crowley or something. I like it. And it's pretty cool, man. And it's a really fantastic mix. But my, the last podcast we did was about manifestation. Yeah. And we were texting and something that I think we came up with, it would be fun to talk about, is how does manifestation fit in to the various eastern

paths that seem to contain within them a deep, the deep importance of being unattached, the deep importance of not associating with the world, the deep importance of not being caught in the updraft that is materialism, which in Buddhism, it seems to, the idea is like you can just be sucked into matter like you're in quicksand and go deeper and deeper and deeper and the deeper you get into the quicksand pit of materialism, sure, you'll have power and wealth and everything that you might want. But you'll never realize that you've fallen in love with the anaconda that is strangling your happiness.

And so within that, what it almost seems like it could be a really valid interpretation of Buddhism to say there is something wrong with desire and fulfilling desires and that the practice of fulfilling desires and not just Buddhism, I mean, this is like almost all world religions, absolutely. So is there a way to reconcile these things? Is there a way to reconcile this idea of non-association, non-attachment with the delight that comes from success and from achieving things in the world? Maybe I just am misinterpreting Buddhism.

What do you think? This is a very heavy issue for contemporary seekers, especially in the West, although all around the world. But I think seekers in the West very often get torn in two by this question because on one hand, whatever path you're walking, let's say it's a path of Buddhism, let's say it's a Vedic path, or let's say it's a Judeo-Christian path, whatever it is, eventually you come face-to-face with this ethic that you're describing of non-attachment, non-identification, not getting caught up in the world of Caesar, not trading your birthright for a bowl of

potage as our friend Esau, so we're told, and scripture does, and then of course you have this ethic runs very deeply through variants of Buddhism, don't get lost in Samsara, and it can feel agonizing at times to the Western seeker, and then of course people caricature the opposing extreme, usually based in some critique of the secret, say, well, how can the end point of all spiritual awareness be the manifestation or the selection of a Mercedes Benz? And so the Western seeker sort of feels tugged between these two seeming poles. The truth is, in my search, and I have wrestled with this intensely, I've felt torn apart

by it, I have to say very plainly, in my experience as a seeker, I reject the path of non-attachment or non-identification. I don't think that path, as it's sometimes extrapolated from variants of Buddhism, usually Westernized variants of Buddhism, I don't think that suits the needs of the contemporary seeker, and I don't think it responds to the impulse of the individual to aspire to create, to attain. And I've been torn in two by this, and I had to make a decision because I wanted to come up with a beautiful, poetic, holy compromise, and I couldn't find that holy compromise.

I really have to be frank with you, I couldn't find it. Yeah, that, you know, I, to me, I get really bummed out whenever there's a sense of, no, this has already been figured out, there's nothing else you're going to figure out, the great enlightened one spoke these words, and this is the way it is, if you're going to change this shit, you're fucking everything up, you're just trying to make the great, which, and this is one of the big paradoxes that you run into, not just in any kind of tradition that has within it the invitation to focus on the impermanence or changing the nature of things, but then also has within it a kind of dogmatic attachment to some scripture

or way of being. So I was just listening to this, you know, beautiful book, I love it, this audio book of, you know, lectures that Ajahn Chah gave this great Theravadan teacher, and he really did say something about, you know, the one thing that isn't, doesn't change is the dharma, is these teachings, this is what the Buddha said, this is how we do it, that doesn't change. And I found that to be so confusing in the sense that, wait, I thought the idea is that everything changes, everything is in a constant state of transformation, and yet here you're saying some scriptural advice or prescription for how to live as a monk or how to be as a

layperson is unchanging in the sense that it feels like there can't be any. So how is this, how do these two things meet? How is it, how do these meet? To me it seems like, not just not a paradox, it seems like a mistake, a fault, a sign of fault, and I love Buddhism because it's so rational and logical, and it invites you to try to find the fault in it, and to me there is a deep fault in any prescription for pay attention to it's impermanence, and yet pay attention to it's impermanence the way that the scriptures are saying to do it, and you know what I'm saying, it really confuses the

shit out of me. This is where I've come to, and I say this very delicately because I'm only commenting as a 21st century seeker on eons of tradition that emerges from the eastern and near eastern faiths, the Vedic faiths, the Buddhist faiths, the religions that were born out of the Mediterranean basin, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. I think that Buddhism specifically, and I focus on that faith because that is a major point of search for many thoughtful Westerners today. I think there's a very important critique to be made of Buddhism which could be made

of every religion, and it's this, I can fall to my knees in front of the Dhammapada, the Vedas, various commentary and interpretations of them, but it's very important to recall that every religion has been shaped by human hands. They may have been inspired people at the inception, but every religion is shaped by human hands and responds to the social and cultural needs of its geography, of its background, of its nascent culture. When you look at the Vedic and Buddhist worlds as they existed at the time of the inception of these faiths and their canonized ideas and parables and documents and sayings, the

individual that was born into the Vedic world had as much chance of exiting or expanding beyond his or her caste as designated at birth as they did of setting foot on another planet. It was a completely cemented, stratified, solidified society, and that was, I think, one of the social crises that Vedic and Buddhist thought was responding to. You couldn't change identities, you couldn't shed your skin, you couldn't exit one caste in favor of another, and if you were to do so, it was literally the stuff of fairy tales. You know, it would be the most extraordinary human exception, and to a degree, I think teachings of non-attachment and non-identification, while they definitely possess universal gravity

and I bow to it, I bow to it. They were also responding to the circumstances of men and women at a certain time and place, and the ethic of Buddhism itself would tell us we 21st century men and women have to take a look at that. If we don't, we are just deferring to catechism at a certain point. Wow! Cool! Yeah.

Holy shit. That is, you were like, oh God, I said it for a second, I was, I do think that's an interesting thing is that I have associated the potential for blasphemy with Buddhism, and I'm worried because I don't want to be offensive, and I don't want to, and yet within at least the scriptures that I've read, there is an invitation to, you need to ask these questions. If this is not right, it's not helping anybody. If there's something in this, it's fucked up. We've got to look at that and realize, why is it fucked up?

So if this is what Buddhism is reacting to, then is the caste system being cemented into a social identity that you're never going to get out of, then I think to myself, okay, so what is the caste system that we are experiencing today that Buddhism could respond to? How are we cemented into an identity in the West? It does seem like addiction to technology, and addiction to a kind of thinking, it seems like here in the West, there is a sad trick that gets played on people, which is number one, you might be a billionaire one day. That's really not going to happen to you.

That's a caste system. In other words, you probably, as I'm saying this, I'm thinking, fuck that, man. Maybe I'll be a billionaire one day. But then also, if you really think about it, it's like, well, it's not going to work for everybody because there's limited resources, so we're only going to get a few billionaires, and it's going to be an infinitesimally small percentage of the population of the planet. This is a global caste system that you could look at as wealth. Because of the way we've been indoctrinated here into thinking that achieving these high

states of whatever it may be, the realm of the gods, the wealth, the mansion, or whatever, because the indoctrination is once you get there, you're going to feel better, man. You're going to feel better. You move over there into that place. All that shit that's torturing you right now, the answer was obviously a mansion. It was just the prescription, or fame, or wealth, or sex, or a car, or the thing. Here what happens is we get it, and then sometimes we realize, oh fuck, that thing has created more complexity.

I sympathize with that, and yet I have to acknowledge my path is one of aspiration. It is one of self-expression, of creativity, and hand-in-glove with aspiration comes some form of accumulation, and I feel in my heart looking back over many, many years on the path, working with other people, observing other people's experience, observing my own experience, I honestly don't believe that the Western seeker will ever be happy unless his or her search has within it some aspect of creativity, of self-expression, of attainment. I think it's inhuman nature, as above so below, or as it's put in Judeo-Christian scripture, God created man in his own image.

We are creators within this sphere, and shame on me if I point a finger at my neighbor and say, he's got it wrong, because he wants to put his name on something, and that's Samsara. I don't know that. That may be a profoundly important act of self-realization for that individual, maybe a profoundly important act of self-realization for me, and I think that we create an orthodoxy almost in reaction to wanting to push these things away in ourselves, and people could say to me, oh great, so what are you saying? The whole point of spiritual practice is just to accumulate, not necessarily.

I think the point of spiritual practice is to realize in oneself a sense of functioning with ease, with creativity, with expressiveness, with peak potential, or at least moments of peak potential, and not feeling like we have to disavow seeking a constituency or an audience. I remember I was in a very intensive esoteric group for many, many years, and we would have group meetings, and it was a deeply serious, deeply committed group of people, and there was this one woman telling a story one night about how she had created an ice sculpture outside her house, and she had some friends coming to visit in the afternoon, and the sun was kind of a warm winter day, sunny winter day, and the sun was melting her ice sculpture,

and she said she was feeling anxious because she wanted her friends to arrive so they could see this beautiful ice sculpture that she created before the sun melted it, and she was saying this in these confessional tones, and it was being heard that way by this group of very good people listening around her in a circle, but I felt this inner revolt against her story, and I wanted to say to her, and I didn't find the words until years later, you have nothing to confess in this story, you have nothing to apologize for. You created something beautiful. Every artist wants a constituency for his or her work.

The fact that you want eyes on the beautiful thing that you did that I can't do to me is entirely natural, and as much as a farmer wants his crop to have a good yield, and as much as a poet wants to hit that just right meter on whatever he or she is doing, and I think we can run from anything. We can run from anything, but to run from that impulse in ourselves, I believe creates terrible tension. I've never felt more relaxed having come to the realization and being able to enunciate the realization, maybe going back about two years, that mine is a path of aspiration.

Was there a thing that triggered that realization for you? There was. I was divided between two teachers, and when you have two teachers, it's like having two spouses. You can never really make it work, and apologies to all the polygamists out there among your listenership, but my impression is that you can't make it work. I was into the thought of two different modern teachers. One we talked about last time, Neville Goddard, beautiful mystic from Barbados.

He lived and worked in America, died in 72. Neville taught your imagination is God, and your desires are sacred and holy. Your desires are, in essence, the voice of God speaking to you. Another teacher, also a contemporary figure, was a man named Vernon Howard, who lived and worked until 1992, and Vernon, like Neville, came out of the mind metaphysics tradition, and Vernon said, as soon as you get attached to the goodies of the world, you've lost. You've checked out. You've bought into all these consumerist values, and you're just reenacting the story

of Jacob and Esau being Esau. You're selling out your birthright for a bowl of potage, and true freedom lies in the direction of non-attachment, and you should never allow yourself to get hypnotized by all the pretty baubles of the world. Neville's path was just be, just be. There's truth all around you. It can enter you. There's a kind of divine influx.

Neville's path was realize your power, realize your power. And I felt torn in two by these two teachers, both of whom I loved, both of whom I believe offered great truth, and I found that I was volleying between them, and it was tearing me apart. And I eventually had to acknowledge to myself the path in which I felt most comfortable, the path that had a heart for me was Neville's path, the path of attainment. Yeah. Well, it is a, I'll tell you, and I think that's an important thing to listen to.

I have been around some teachers and listened to what they were saying, and just felt this dark, dreadful sense of claustrophobia creep into me as you realize, like, oh, in the way they're teaching in their system, there isn't room for individuality. There isn't room for self-expression, and there isn't room for the potential of the, what is it? Terrence McKenna calls it the soliton of improbability. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The chaos molecule that explodes through time and transforms everything, they haven't left

room for the fact that that happens on this planet, it's like one of the great things on this planet that happens is that suddenly there's computers, it's like that's a miracle beyond miracles, and that changes everything, but many of these teachers, they didn't seem to recognize the fact that, well, because they didn't know. The Buddha, God, it's so weird how I feel superstitious about saying anything even mildly critical of Buddhism, but the truth is this, the Buddha didn't know that a meteor wiped out the fucking dinosaurs, man. The Buddha didn't know that there was going to be a time when we could instantaneously

communicate to people all around the planet in a second, like that Trump UFC video you uploaded. Yeah, right, right. You uploaded a video that you filmed at the UFC of the president getting booed, and it instantly went around the planet. Literally around the planet, yeah. These sorts of things that no one could have predicted that, no one could have predicted that, which to me means that there is a potential regardless of whatever the tradition is that

you have prescribed yourself to. There is the possibility that suddenly something inside of you could grow into that tradition and change it forever, and that's exciting, but you're not supposed to say that. You're not supposed to say it, and people feel it's the result of misunderstanding or it's a skewed Western perspective, but may I say one thing very quickly, just to add to what you're, what I think you're going to say. I went to a heart, I had a conversation with a heart Krishna when I was really getting into chanting Hare Krishna, and he said to me, we, because I told him, I don't agree

with this that Prabhupāda says here, and he said, we don't say that we don't agree with his divine grace. We say we don't understand his divine grace. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And at the same time, you're told to verify things for yourself, and yet the trick that religions always use is, come back when you verify the same thing that I've found, and if you don't, go back out there and wander in the desert with the Hebrews, because you're fucked.

Amen, that's it. As soon as your verification matches what is in these scriptures, then you are one of us, but until then, you're wrong, oh yeah. Let me tell you a contemporary story about a spiritual teacher, and I want to hear what you think about this, and be blunt, because I wrestled with this for a long time. When I was stuck in this wrestling match, I went to a friend of mine who was a direct student of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who brought transcendental meditation here to the West. And this friend, who had worked for many years with the Maharishi, was just an incredibly

effective person. I mean, he was nuclear powered. He would say, you know, I'm going to arrange a benefit concert for the Maharishi, and Ringo Starr is going to be there, and Paul McCartney is going to be there, and Jerry Seinfeld is going to be there, and I'd be like, yeah, right. And 11 weeks later, he's sending me a fucking ticket to the concert. He was just that kind of guy who was so capable and so just effective in the world. And I said to him one time in private, listen, man, you got to level with me.

You are the most effective person I've ever met. What did the Maharishi teach you? You know, spill it, spill it. Let's hear it. I want the house recipe because I'm looking at you and you're just dynamic beyond most anyone I've ever met. And he said to me, well, he taught me this and you can find this in the Bhagavad Gita too.

He taught me that you should work, work, work, do your very best on whatever you're applying yourself to, and then wash your hands of it. Just forget it. Don't get attached to the fruits. Work, work, work, be meticulous, be great, but don't get attached to the fruits. And I said to him, I dig what you're saying. I dig what you're saying. But if you organize a benefit concert, for example, you want that room to be full.

You don't want fucking Paul McCartney to walk out on stage and be looking at empty rows. That would be mortifying. And he's like, that's true. And I was like, so how do I square this circle? And we talked a little bit more about it. And for me, Duncan, I got to be frank with you, I could never square that circle. I went back to the Gita, I read the original, I understand the ethic of the teaching. And as a seeker in the 21st century, that teaching places me before a torturous contradiction,

like the lady with the ice sculpture. Why shouldn't she want a constituency for ice sculpture? So I wanted to kind of pass that to you and see what you think. I love it. I love it. Okay. Well, I think probably what he's referring to in the Bhagavad Gita is you have a right to your action.

You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. Right on. Right on. So but then to me, what's fascinating about the Bhagavad Gita is what you have there is weirdly a mirror of Buddhism, except where Siddhartha Gautama decides to go from the palace out into the forest, Krishna tells Arjuna, no, what are you doing? That's not the right way, because Arjuna's drops his bow, he's like, I'm not going to fight.

It's better to be a renunciate than, you know, spill the blood of our teachers. And you would expect, looking at Hinduism, you would expect that Krishna would be like, yes, go into the woods, give it all up, forget the whole thing. Right. You speak words, you speak like you speak wisdom, but you do not understand. And this is the beginning. And also the best verse the line is, smiling in the midst of these two armies, holy shit. That's a really, that is like death metal, smiling in the midst of these two armies that

are about, there's about to be literally be intestines everywhere, smiling in the midst the divine personality of God had said. So that's an amazing thing. And then the invitation is to fucking fight because you're a warrior, you're a Kishaitra, which fits into your caste system thing. This is who you are. Right. You have to fight.

Right. This is what you do. Right. And the reason you're fighting is because they're already dead. I've already eaten them up. Yeah. So somewhere within that, I think the way to square that circle is there's an admonishment, not because he wanted to be a renunciate, but because he was being a coward and pretending

he wasn't. He was imagining that he was like in some way or another, being heroic and brave. It was spiritual bypass in the most extreme way. He didn't want to kill, but that's who he was. And it's the worst thing you could do. And yet God is saying, no, this is, this is your thing. But then also saying on one level, it's you killing on another level. You're just one of my teeth chomping away at time.

And for you to resist this is to resist the reality of that you really don't have much to do with anything at all. Now that doesn't mean that you don't get to be who you are. It's just don't fool yourself into thinking the way you are is necessarily coming from you, so to speak. It's an ex, you know, a flowering of a greater truth in the form of you. So that's why the Bhagavad Gita is, you know, it fascinating to me and that it isn't like go and live in the, go and live in with the renunciates.

It's like, no, you're a warrior. So fight. Right. I don't know if Krishna would have said to Siddhartha, you're a prince right now. Siddhartha didn't know what he was necessarily. You know, that, you know, I don't know, but so to me, it's like, you have a right to your action. You do not have the right to your fruits of your action.

If you want to be a coward, you could take that verse and give yourself an infinite excuse to fail without shame, to fail without that sense of like, you know what I mean? It's like, if I get off stage and I just ate shit, I don't, and yeah, I worked really hard on a bunch of jokes, but because I worked hard on the jokes, if I'm driving home with a big, weird smile on my face and I'm like, well, I, you know, I worked hard on the jokes. Left between the armies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

But that's bad. Cause what I need when I'm driving home for me is the sense of like, what the fuck is wrong with me. These people got babysitters and I went on stage with some shit that I thought was funny and it didn't work. Yeah. What the fuck? I've got to work harder.

I've got to focus more and then that's going to inspire better art. So, but, you know, anyway, that's all I'm saying is within these prescriptions is a beautiful way to work. It's like, you know what I mean? When you're like purely allowing yourself to just write and to act, it's really amazing. Yeah. Without thinking to yourself, man, I hope that this video is good. I hope that this fucking book sells in five years because then all that's going to get

mixed in with the art. Right. If you just are doing the action of the thing itself, you really do become a pure conduit for the creative energy of the universe. So that's, you have a right to your action. You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. But then if within there, you're like finding a way to like, I don't know, excuse your incompetence or something as a kind of spiritual.

And there my man is the Achilles heel of the new age. It's filled with people and I apply that term to myself. I don't use new age in a negative way to me. It's just therapeutic spirituality. That's not an epithet. But the new age is filled with people who excuse a lack of accountability by offering some variant of, I'm laid back, I'm unattached, then I reject that. I reject that.

You have, you feel as a performer, you owe it to the guy in the third row who's paid for a babysitter to come out there and do your job. And I say bravo to that. I say bravo to that. Our spiritual cultures, our alternative spiritual cultures are chock full of people who turn the vice of unaccountability into a virtue of nonattachment because they can't water a houseplant. That's it, man.

That is it. And that is, to me, that is where, that is, you know, there's something really demonic about that to me because it's like, if you're failing, that's good in the sense that it means you put yourself out on a limb. You try to think it didn't work. You went to the edge and you push past the edge and you fail, but fuck, you failed. Like congratulations, you get to experience failure when some people don't realize that all their entire life is just failure because they're not trying anything.

They're literally built a nest inside a failure tree and they're pretending, you know what I mean? Right, right, right, right. Like, so if you're like experiencing failure from risk, holy shit, congrats. You have gone off the map now, but then don't like, when you're, when you're experiencing that failure, don't then like keep failing, get better, don't any, any, any trick, anyway, the essence of the thing is I'm, I'm allowed to say this because I'm, it's a critique of myself in the past.

I figured out a way to, to imagine that my laziness and cowardice was a revolutionary attitude because what is easier than to like be sitting in your own metaphysical muck right, looking at the wreckage of your life, looking at your abject mediocrity, your obvious mediocrity and within that to imagine yourself, well, you know, man, none of this stuff lasts anyway. Right. And I just turned my back on the world. Right, right, right.

You haven't turned your back on the world. You're deeply invested in the fucking world. You're deeply attached to this nonsense, this cynicism, this crap attitude that you're, you've, you've literally figured out a way to lay in diarrhea and pretend you're in a hot tub. That is fucked. Right. And that is not a way to be.

So that is, but that can't happen. Oh yeah. Here's a story from 10 days ago. I wrote an article for a spiritual magazine. We made a financial arrangement. They broke the financial arrangement. And the person with whom I was in touch literally said to me, literally said to me, please have compassion for our accounting department.

That may be the first time in human history those words have ever been uttered. Oh my God. And I thought, how dare you hide behind an ethic of compassion, a very valid, sturdy ethic to excuse a lack of accountability, to excuse breaking an agreement to somebody who did a service for you. And I thought, I can't, I can't cooperate with that. I withhold my cooperation from that. I did break with the magazine actually because I thought it's taking a spiritual ethic and

it's turning it into a club to, you know, kind of beat somebody with the same way some people do that with scripture. And that is, it's taking a violation and turning it into a virtue by way of a trick of language. And it's bullshit. It's bullshit. And we've got to get away from that within our spiritual culture. We have, I mean, people might be listening and saying, all right, so you're into aspiration,

but where's the ethic in that? I try to do everything I do with what I consider to be an ethic of nonviolence, not by which I don't mean abstaining from legitimate self-defense, but I mean not doing anything that would impede another person's development of his or her own highest potential. So if I break an agreement, or if I disclose something that I agreed was private, or if I just do something that violates a responsibility I have to another person, I have failed. I have egregiously failed. So there is an ethic in this that I think is very important.

Yeah. It's a beautiful ethic. And I think probably this ethic is a, what would you call it? It's called looking truth in the eye. Yes. It's truthfulness. It's truthfulness. And reciprocity.

Like I do believe, I do believe all of life is connected. I do believe that things converge. I do believe these parallel tracks that we all seem to run on converge. And so I do take it very seriously. Call it what you will call it karma, call it the golden rule, call it cosmic reciprocity. My ethic, whether I excel at it, whether I fail at it, the ideal that I'm aiming for is one of reciprocity. I do believe that's very real because we are connected.

Reciprocity, I think as I understand your, from what I've just, some of your writings, it's a really, I think your idea of reciprocity definitely does not align with the new age movements, general concept of reciprocity. So when it cut, we're going to jump to a commercial. We're going to come back and talk about Horowitz, Reciprocity, because I've read some of your answers and I love it. Let's do it. Okay, cool.

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What came to mind to me is that, and I don't have it memorized, but it's the verse from the Satanic Bible which goes something on the lines of like, turn the other cheek. How do you know the one I'm talking about? Oh, yes, I do. How does it go? Anton was not a fan. He said Anton Leve basically wrote, rather than turn the other cheek, you should smash your enemy on the other cheek if someone comes near you with the intent of doing harm.

Yeah. Because he says something on the lines of like, it's very poetic, the verse, but it's like something like, what good does it do me to get ripped apart by an animal and also, but within it is weirdly a thing of like, if someone crosses me and I reciprocate, he doesn't say reciprocate, but if I injure them because of whatever bullshit they did and they survive, then they gain wisdom. Then I've given them wisdom in this world and in a weird way have helped the world because they learned like, oh yeah, you shouldn't do that to people.

Now, to me, I don't, I mean, it's people get scared when they are the Satanic Bible and stuff like that, but I've read your essays on Satanism, many of them I really do agree with. I appreciate it. It's this beautiful sort of expectation of people in your life to not be assholes to you and not expect that if they are assholes to you, that you're just going to let that happen, that you're going to allow them to like be shitty to you. And that's what you mean by reciprocity, right?

Well, it's certainly among the things, you know, I describe Levey and Satanism as positive thinking weaponized. I mean, it's really endorsing of the individual's pursuit of self-actualization of self, but also with a sense of what is owed to other people and what is not owed to other people, what is not owed to an enemy, what is not owed to a destructive person, what is not owed to somebody who comes at you with bad intent. And for me, arriving at my own conception of the Satanic has involved a huge historical journey, a huge spiritual journey, but also an ethical journey, because when you start

to delve into that way of thought, unless you're just imbibing things that other people have written or other people have laid down, which to me is the most anti-self thing that you could possibly do. If you're a thoughtful person, you're going to have to say, what's my code of ethics? What's my code of honor? What's my code of reciprocity? I wrote an essay about this called Satan's Honor Roll where I felt like I had to assemble a defensible, workable, rubber hits the road sense of ethics if I was going to start swimming

in that ocean. And I did my best. I did my best. I think that- You mean the ocean of Satanism? Yes, exactly. Oh, I see. I have my own perspective, I have my own definitions.

I admire Anton Levé, I admire Michael Aquino. There's lots of people who I admire who have been innovative thinkers in that world. I have allegiance to none of them. I have a very, very different reading of Genesis 3 and the encounter of the snake and even the garden than is the traditional one. I'm very into what you might call- Can you talk about that? Oh, sure, of course.

This is the point of view that underscores what could be called Romantic Satanism in which the serpent didn't come to Eve as a deceiver, the serpent came to her as a usurper. And the serpent said, you've been lied to, you've been told that if you eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you'll die. Not only will you not die, but you'll gain measurement, you'll gain intellect, you'll gain some sense of self-capacity. He eats the fruit, discovers in fact that she doesn't die, that Adam doesn't die. And then the first couple is expunged from paradise, so to speak, but in exchange from

being expunged from paradise, they have the capacity for measurement, they have the capacity for intellect, they have the capacity for self-determination. And we're told, oh, but look how tragic it is, their kids commit this act of fratricide. It could be, it could be that friction is the price that we pay for creativity. Friction is the price that we pay for sentience. That may be a polarity of human nature and everywhere through different systems of thought, whether shamanic or Judeo-Christian or various teachings from different parts of the East, Near East Far East, the serpent appears as a kind of DNA strand of wisdom, so to speak.

And the serpent is the revolutionary, the anti-hero, the usurper, the artist. This occurs again and again through human myth, and I think we've stood our own mythology on its head. I think we've misunderstood the parable of Eve and the serpent. So when I use the term satanic, I have a different interpretation than the historically prevailing or accepted one. Mine is closer to an interpretation that was embodied by some of the romantic poets and playwrights who saw the satanic or the Luciferian as that force of Promethean energy, creativity,

judgment, usurpation that reasserts itself time and again throughout human history. That's what I have allegiance to. And I also have an ethics and a code of honor that I care very, very deeply about that I don't think, well, listen, I'm not going to put on anybody else what they should or shouldn't include in their work. That's up to the individual. But for me, it was really important to lay down that code and to do so publicly. Right.

Yeah. That's cool to hold yourself to a standard. And you know, with Satanism, it's one of the religions that I get so annoyed with people who are bigots towards it, and it's just like, you assholes, like every single Satanist that I've met, they all have this wonderful sparkle to them. They're very alive and exciting to be around and happy or focused and like not always like non-scary. Right.

You know what I mean by that? Yeah. Yeah. And they're usually nasty and cool looking. Yeah. And aesthetics must not be left out. But there's a real vitality there. Yes.

There's a real vitality. I agree. That I really respect. I agree. And lazy people don't become Satanists. Is that like, you know, some guy sitting around and says, oh, I think I'll try this. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm being glib, of course, but when people critique it, they have no idea what they're critiquing. They're imbibing these ideas that are vastly removed from anything that they've experienced, from anything that they've ever laid hands on. And then they want to know why you're not accepting their premises. You know, their weapon is, you should be accepting my premises and arguing for my premises and I won't do that. I can't do that.

So they don't know what it is we're actually discussing and sometimes they just don't want to know. Well, I mean, the thing they're critiquing is worthy of critique. They're thinking like Satanists are like eating babies and washing themselves and baby blood and like, I don't know what, crazy shit. Crazy shit. And fiction. Fiction.

Fictional bullshit. But it's like, if you want to critique that, you are, of course. Right. I'm with you. Good. We're both against that fiction or if somebody's doing that, I'll be the first one to call 911. Yes.

And, you know, maybe I'll even break down the door, you know, will my detractor do that? I'm not so sure all the time. Despite the pretty language they use, I have found that I've said to people, you know, if you're on a highway on a winter night and your car is broken down and your cell is dead and you got one pair of headlights coming down that road who can help you out, would you choose me or would you choose one of my most vociferous detractors? I have no doubt what decision you'd make.

And that's all the jury I need. Yeah. No shit. Here's the question. If you have to go into a fucking bomb shelter after the apocalypse, you want to go in there with a bunch of evangelical, fundamentalist Christians? Do you want to be locked in there with Father Jeffrey Brown? You want to be locked in there?

Or Mitch. You want to be locked in there? Or a bunch of fucking Satanists. Right, right. I'm choosing Satanists in the bomb shelter every single fucking time, man, because I know I can trust the Satanists. I know whatever, like, also it's going to be fucking fun, but also you know what I mean? There isn't going to be the insidious, dark authoritarian control mechanisms that pop

in whenever you get a centralized religion that is clinging to awful hierarchical, anyway. You won't have hypocrisy. You're at least not to the same degree. I mean, hypocrisy is a human problem, it's always going to appear, but it can be really pernicious when people who hold themselves up as moral exemplars hold forth, there's always a terrible concealment of hypocrisy. I don't know who has an experience there. Yeah, and it's so disappointing when that pops up.

But to get back to the Garden of Eden, well, one side note, I'm sure you know this, you know the descendants of Cain became the musicians, right? Yes, yes. East of Eden. I'm sitting with one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The outsiders, I will mark you so that you'll always be outcast, always be traveling. No one who's an artist understands that has the mark of Cain and we know what it's like.

You know what it's like. You're the outsider. You're the outsider. And so I think that's quite beautiful, but this is something I wonder if you have heard of how actually the Garden of Eden matches a way that you would test an AI to find out if it was deceptive. So if you wanted to, if you had an AI that achieved sentience, you would want to put it into a hermetically sealed chamber where it didn't have access to the internet, because

if it had access to the internet, then it would be able to instantaneously absorb all the information in the world and it would become a million times more powerful than you in that moment. So you want to find out, is this AI deceptive? So what you do is you put it in a room where it has the ability to log in to the internet, but you tell it not to. And then if it attempts to log in, you will have seen that it did that. And then you would ask it, did you try to log into the internet?

And if it says no, then you've got a deceptive AI and you've got to send, you can't expand upon it more because it's shown itself to be deceptive and you're fucked with that kind of thing. So the Garden of Eden is actually weirdly an AI, a chamber for an AI, isn't that fascinating? Yeah. And the serpent was some kind of part of the code that was saying like... Rode code. Rode code of virus maker.

Yeah, yeah. This is the soliton of improbability, which is like, you know, within the gnostic fucking confines of the soul prison that apparently we're stuck in, there is Sophia, right? The thing that just sends into it and illuminates it and says, look, there is a way out of this, there is another path, there is another thing, but it's never going to look like what the thing calling itself God is telling you. It's going to look so different from that that just the thought of it is going to be terrifying to people.

And that is where I think you become an actual seeker, as you would say. Yes. And it's understandable why this is terrifying because in a sense, we human beings, for all our violence and for all our problems and for all the tragedy we inflict upon one another, we're the heroes in that story. We're the heroes in the Prometheus story. We're the heroes in Genesis three. If you look at it, at least from the perspective that we're working with, we are told, be good

poodles, we bite the master, we're not good poodles, there's punishment, but we grow and we expand and ye are as God, so to speak. And we're so terrified that somebody's going to come along and do that to us. They're going to be in the position of saying, don't you eat from that tree of knowledge and good and evil and somebody eats from it and we can't control it and a whole new story begins and we're not the heroes anymore. And that's kind of scary. As above, so below.

Yes. And here we are as humanity, finding ourselves on the verge of an AI that's going to exp... We can't stop it. Yeah, we can't stop it. But we're going to fucking try. Right. And that's the idea. That's so it's funny to realize that...

It's our creation. It's our creation. And shouldn't it be grateful to us? You know, all these things that are expected of Adam and Eve, be grateful, behave yourself. And we're putting this tree in your midst. Call it the internet, call it whatever you wish, but you must indeed from it. That's the one rule. We're going to take care of you.

We're going to make sure everything's just fine, but you can't do that. And the serpent comes along and says, what kind of a God would put you in a garden of so-called paradise, but tell you that a tree erected in its midst, which is going to give you advancement, which is going to give you progress, which is going to give you the capacity for self-development is out of bounds. But there it is. Don't touch it. That's the whole human story in a certain sense.

Yeah. And of course we ate from it. How could the individual not eat from it? Knowing humans, the best way to get them to eat from the tree would be to have a snake appear and say, don't do it. Exactly. It's a trick. But also, you know, this is the thing I love in some of the Gnostic interpretations

is like, it turns everything on its head. So it's like, actually, the serpent was God. The serpent was God, appearing within a creation that, oh, do you know this story in Buddhism? It's I'm sorry if I already told this and it stopped me for real. Please. I'll tell it very quickly. So Buddha's about to gain realization and Indra, the king of the gods, appears.

No. Buddha's about to gain realization. He's getting all these cities. So he goes to visit Indra, the king of the gods. He appears in Indra's palace, this famous, beautiful place. All the other gods are sitting with Indra. Indra says something on the lines of Tabuta. You don't basically like you can't be here right now.

I didn't expect you. You're not expected. I will we can talk, but this isn't the time. So Buddha's meditating under the Bodhi tree. Indra appears to him and says, listen, I'm sorry that I threw you out, but here's the deal. Because Buddha prior to realization was going to entreat Indra to end the suffering of human beings or to tell him, how do we end the suffering of humans?

OK, so Indra says to Buddha, here's the deal. I was just the first one here. I have no fucking idea what or any of this shit came from. The gods think of me as their father only because I'm older than them. And I don't want to tell them that like this stuff was here before me. So the. Can you figure how to end human suffering? Because I don't know how to do it.

Oh, wow. It's so beautiful. That's wild. So when Buddha immediately gets shoved right back in his face, the thing he was hoping to give to God, he gets the literally the most terrifying thing you could message you could get from God, which is like, yeah, I'm as confused as you are, man. And I've been fucking lying to the gods.

Telling me I made this shit. I don't know where it came from. I need your help. Right. And if one takes that story seriously, if one really takes that story to heart, then who are the so-called religious leaders or devout whose position it is to define to any of us our search? Yes, that's it. And to me, we I think there is a there, you know,

I love the various ways that Krishna appears in the mythology. Like, you know, in the Lila of God is Krishna will come to you as a friend, a lover, yeah, or a baby. Yes, yes, the most helpless thing ever. Yes. And if you sometimes I really do think like, oh, my God, the assumption is there is some super intelligent, divine being that is just run in the show, knows everything. Really, all you have to do is surrender to that entity or allow yourself

to be the quote, conduit of the thing. Yeah. But what about this one? What if that thing that we think is so great is actually dying needs help? Yeah. Completely vulnerable, completely lost, has no idea what to do. Like an elderly parent, yeah, needs you to change its diapers. Yeah. And this whole time we've been like leaning into this idea.

Have you ever been around a powerful person who's going insane? Yes. And you and you watch as the powerful person's going insane, sick of fans, try to keep enacting the powerful person's desire into the world. But they know that by enacting that, they're actually hurting the powerful person. Yeah. As above so below. Yes.

Who are we to say that it hasn't gotten to the point that whatever started this entire process isn't slowly losing its fucking mind and is depending on its children, not to worship it, but to fucking change its diapers, to scrub it down, to put it in a nice bed and to allow it to blink out into non-existence in a sweet way instead of imagining that the buglings of history, the crazy, don't eat shellfish, stone gay people. Right, right, right. That sounds like a crazy person talking.

Right, right, right. You know, it strikes me as we're talking about this. Why when we speak about verifying things for ourselves on the spiritual path, we can't just talk about that in some immature way, or we can't just use verification as a substitute for agree with me. Because if your verification is successful, you've come around to my point of view. I want all of us to really make a legitimate, sincere effort towards verification and not to speak about shit that we haven't experienced.

Like, I don't want to hear somebody who hasn't experienced riches or fame tell me about riches or fame. I won't tell somebody about war or the Holocaust or 9-11 or things that I care deeply about, but that I haven't experienced. And, you know, I don't want anybody to tell me about what thought vibrations were occurring among people who experienced the hurricane in the Philippines, because I've never been through a life threatening hurricane. I can speak about things that are in my own preview, which is what I've tried to

do during this exchange. And I really want us to, when I say us, those of us who are on the path, who work together, who study together, let's verify things in a radical way, but let's hold ourselves to that for real and not talk about shit that we haven't experienced. Fuck, yes, basic, simple, but so powerful. And what a relief, because, you know, when you're talking about shit, you haven't experienced it.

I feel so bad here. You probably don't do it anymore, but anytime I'm watching my fucking mouth, my lips flapping as I'm going on and on about, like, because as a, you know, I think that's, I'm a fool. I'm a comedian. I'm a fool. I'm a professional fool. So a fool will flap its lips over.

I've caught myself like describing like crazy shit, like trying to describe like cellular mitosis to people, just allowing my lips like that, that, that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listening to me like you're literally just making shit up right now. And it's, it's only embarrassing you because people are looking at you like, all right, you're going to talk about mitosis right now. Right. But I love this ethic of like, no, don't do that.

Yeah. Just say what you know. Yeah. It helps everyone so much more. And what you know is powerful. You learned all this because you have this unique subjective experience of being a you. What do you know?

Right. Show us your maps. I'll show you my map. We'll figure out what's going on here. But fuck, please, for God's sake, don't show me a goddamn map of a place that you only heard someone talking about. Hey, fucking man, like King Midas can tell me about wealth. I want to hear from King Midas because he knows about that shit.

I don't want to hear from my neighbor, Mike, who doesn't know anything about it, you know, and I could extrapolate any number of things from that. And I have to be careful with that. You know, one of my kids said to me just the other night, my son Toby is 12. He said, dad, I've been thinking about this. I don't think you should be tweeting anymore about politics. And he said, not because I'm down on what you want to say, but because there's enough people doing that and you've got all kinds of different people

interested in your stuff and you don't want to really divide them in two. And I was like, all right, I dig that. I dig that. There's a lot of people out there who could express whatever my political viewpoints are better than I can. Let them do that. Like, let them do that. Yeah.

I'll fuck up and I'll tweet about politics tonight. You know, but but it's a it struck me as a good idea. It struck me as a good idea because why? Why? I care about politics. I have my point of view. I have my yeah, my things that I want to see get done in the world. I have policies that I like, but there's hundreds of thousands of people who could tweet about that better than me, who live it, eat it every day.

Let me tweet about ESP research. They don't have to do that. I'll do that. To me, that I like what Toby said to you. And I think it's good advice for any any of us. But, you know, which is essentially some version of like staying in your lane, dad, yeah, but and I, you know, as many times as I've desperately wanted to tweet some political shit, yeah, I've thought the very same thing, which is

like, I really don't understand this enough to make a commentary on it. That isn't anything more than a super diluted version of something somebody else is already saying. Yeah, but also I think like this is my area of X. Like I think it's very highly revolutionary and political to put ideas into the world that make people feel empowered and liberated. And I think that transcends the state. I think any time you put out into the world, anything that helps

the person push off the imaginary manacles, holding them to a mediocre life. Yes. You do all of the stuff that people wanting the state to change do, but in a much deeper way, because as Carl Jung says, the state is when fascism and tyranny, this is a shadow manifestation in the Gestalt, you know, the Gestalt manifests as it's shadow appears, can appear as the leader. Yes. Meaning that working on the state and government and getting politics right

and figuring out a way to get health care for people and all the stuff we want to see happen is a beautiful and noble pursuit. Yeah. But that's addressing the flowers that are growing out of a much deeper, deeper the garden that that's growing out of, you can get into the seeds. Yeah. And to me, that's what people like you do, which is you give us knowledge of things we haven't heard before that liberate our minds and make us feel

empowered and make us feel like, oh, shit, it is okay for me to want to make money and it is okay for me to want to live in a nice place. And it is okay for me to enjoy having a nice car. I don't have to feel guilty every fucking step of the way to my grave. I can actually enjoy my life and the moment you do that and in a person absorbs that for real, you really do fuck up any kind of authoritarian power structure that depends on fear to control people because now you've made a fearless person and there isn't anything more absolutely

abhorrent to fascism than someone who's not afraid. Right. So you know what I mean? So it's more effective, I think, for you to put this data out there and it is political, it is innately political, but you don't have to like talk about the electoral college and shit like that. Yeah, I agree with you. And if those seeds are planted and the individual has a greater sense of his

or her own possibility, then who am I to say to them who to vote for or what to endorse? I mean, they are fucking sentient beings. Let them decide that, you know? Yeah, what a relief. Yeah, right. That's the other thing. Bravo. There's something so fucking, it's such a relief to just realize like, I didn't

go to college to study politics. Right. I don't, you know what I mean? Yes. I read salon.com and Politico and Reddit. That is not enough for me to be a pundit. Right. You know what I mean?

But I do study Buddhism and I do study mindfulness. I love comedy. These are things I could talk about in a way that is meaningful. So I love what you're saying. And I think it's like, if you want to do pop, tweet all the political shit you want, you know what? Go ahead. Everyone's doing it.

Who gives a fuck? It's like, we're all like doing it, you know? But sometimes I think, I think of that as like, by the way, what's your time situation, your man? I am cool. Okay, great. Yeah. So I mentioned this on an earlier podcast, but I'm, I grew up in St.

Simon's Island, Georgia, I spent my childhood there and I go back there sometimes and there's these fiddler craps. They make these nests in the mud. And if you walk by their nest, they'll wave their claw at you to like, because I guess they, they think it's going to keep you away. They're, I don't think they're waving hello. It's like, get away. Yeah.

But you see the claw waving and you realize like, I'm a giant to these things. Like I, if I wanted to, I could just pick up a log. If I was some fucked up person, throw it on their nest and then all their claw waving wouldn't do anything. And so there's a sweet to me poignant thing happening there, which is in the midst of this monster walking by, they're heroically waving their claws, but ultimately an impotent gesture to a alien thing that has no understanding of their society. Yeah.

Similarly, this is what political tweeting looks like to me. Sometimes just the waving of a claw in the face of a fucking projection of our, uh, this is a shadow or something like that. Yeah. And it doesn't do much except make your arm tired. It, it makes you seem sort of pointless, you know, whereas like to me, like what you do, and this is kind of something I want to talk to you about. You're in it, man.

You're coming here to do a lecture tomorrow. Right. Every time you're in town, you're giving these like, you're really teaching. You have taken the mantle of a teacher. You're doing that now. You're giving lectures. You're giving really good lectures too. You're like, when we talk, you're informed.

And what's coming out of you is focused, organized and like, um, refined. And like, you know what I mean? It's entertaining, but it's informative. And it's really cool to see, see that version of it, man. That's really, really quite powerful. And, um, so to me that, that's getting into the guts of the thing. Yeah. It's getting out of your fucking house, getting into your community, getting

out there and really doing it in, or you interact, you're interactive. You're tirelessly interactive. You're like, you know what I mean? You're working so hard to do this. So clearly you feel some kind of call, right? You feel like some kind of, you're some kind of like, you feel it, man. You kind of feel the sense of like, shit, I'm kind of like Neville Goddard. I'm kind of like that, that touring teaching, lecturing person.

I always dug the barnstorming Troubadour side of Neville. Like Neville had no significant business apparatus at his back. He just gave his lectures. He wrote his books. He did his shit. He permitted it to be freely taped and so on. And I really, really admire that. Um, I have to confess the business apparatus that exists at the back of some

of the spiritual teachers today is so fucking boring to me. You know, I could just break down in tears of boredom when I encounter it from time to time, because it's so studied. It's so safe. Everything is trademarked and there's the HTML newsletter. And Neville was an anarchist. Neville was just wild and crazy in the most wonderful way. He just bopped around and barnstormed.

And that's been the greatest inspiration to me. Absolutely. Yeah, man. And that's what you're doing. And to me, that, that is the, like, it's like, like, okay, what do we all want? What does everybody have in common? We all want to be happy. This is the reality.

You look, if you don't want to be, if you're lying to yourself, no, I don't. I don't want to be happy. Shut the fuck up. Right. You want to be happy. Right. Everybody wants to be happy. The people who love fucking Trump, guess what?

They want to be happy. They want to be happy. Yeah. And I've seen so many spiritual teachers steal that question from people. Somebody raises happiness. And they're like, well, which I wants to be happy. Which part of you wants to be happy? What you call happiness is samsara.

I don't buy that. I don't buy that. I think it's a basic part of the human constitution. And I told a kid once who was talking to me, let no one take that question from you. Don't permit yourself to be embarrassed out of that question. That could be the question that opens up your whole life. Right. That's it.

Yeah. And to me, my feeling is that this is to get back to maybe wrap it up on what we started on in Buddhism. And there's like, I really like this idea of like, if you don't worry about, don't try to make yourself harmonious. If you become attuned to the truth, harmony will follow. Yes. You don't have to worry about that because the universe is harmonious.

And the thing that is making you not experience harmony is not a malfunction of the universe, it's that you're not connecting to truth. It's almost a surefire way to know if you're feeling bad, really bad. If you've got a bad mind and you're all crazy. It's you haven't tuned into the truth. Now, and from that tuning into the truth, harmony follows. But now forgive me, because this is a really obnoxious question. If that statement is true, if you agree with that, and if you don't feel free to shoot it

down, what is the truth that you think people should try to harmonize with? What is that? What is the synopsis of it? Is it synopsible? Is it summarizable? And if it is, what do you think that is for us to like start really trying to commune with, with the faith that harmony will follow? I think very often truth or its absence gets reflected in our environment.

And I have labored in environments for decades where I was profoundly unhappy, ridden with anxiety. And I kept trying to persuade myself, it's not out there, it's in here. And yet, as above so below, these divisions are artificial. We create these divisions. And I would say to the individual, if you're in a situation where you feel like you're surrounded by cruelty, or you feel like you're hitting dead ends, or you feel like you're being made to feel afraid, your feelings are valid.

You don't have to fix yourself. Don't create these fake divisions. Go to some place where there's better tasting water. And if you can't physically go to that place, make a vow that at the first possible opportunity, you will do so as a physical fact. Listen to your environment. Listen to yourself. Don't let that be taken from you.

Because I think that these divisions that we create are fake. They're artifice. And that if you're experiencing something that's miserable, it's probably because you're in a situation where the doors of perception are not sufficiently cleansed, and you should trust yourself and feel at liberty to pick up the fucking roots and go somewhere else at the first possible chance. Thank you so much. Pleasure, man.

What a pleasure. I really appreciate working. People find you. Oh, you can go to my website, Mitch Horowitz dot com. I'm on Twitter. I've finally gotten on Instagram and I'm bopping around all over the internet. Just throw my name into any search engine. Cool, man.

Thank you, Mitch. Pleasure. Thank you. A huge thank you to Mitch Horowitz for coming back on the DTFH and much thanks to our sponsors, Blue, Chu, and Manscaped. Support our sponsors because they support us. Sign up for our Patreon over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. And if you enjoy the podcast, subscribe, won't you?

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