Pints With Aquinas - Is Yoga Evil? w/ (Former Yogi) Alex Frank

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Alex and I sit down and discuss his search for truth, discovering Yoga, uncovering the evil behind Yogic teaching. 🍺 Support Pints Directly! (THANK YOU): https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd  🟧�� http://exodus90.com/matt 🙏 Join Hallow's Advent #Pray25 Challenge! https://hallow.com/partner-mattfradd/?utm_source=influencer&shortlink=59c565e&utm_campaign=mattfradd&utm_medium=email&referrer=mattfradd&c=Matt%20Fradd%20Custom%20Landing%20Page&pid=Influencer&af_channel=Influencer

Hey, Matt Fradd here. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting us directly at pints with aquinas.com slash give or at patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. Any dollar amount would be a blessing to us. Thank you so much for considering. Alex Frank, it is so nice to have you on plants with Aquinas. Nice to meet you, Matt. Glad to be here. Thank you. You reached out to me because of the wonderful Dominicans in the East Province here in the States. How did that happen? Did they just... They really helped to bring me to the faith.

I just graduated from Yale at the time and I was converted to Catholicism. Now I'm studying with them. Wow. Awesome. So for those who aren't aware of you, and I'm sure that's most people since I don't think you have a big online presence, do you? No. Give us just sort of sum up your story before before we dive into it. I grew up in Washington, DC, where I searched through almost everything that secular society has to offer all the different personal growth systems, all the different truths.

to offer, all the different personal growth systems, all the different truths. The main one was Kashmir Shaavism, a sophisticated type of yoga, which I went really in depth into. That brought some good things, but also some bad things, a lot of bad things. All these smaller truths led me finally to Catholicism. I was especially inspired by the glory of Christ

in sacrificing himself to raise all of us up to more truth and love. When were you baptized? I was baptized two and a half years ago at the Dominican House of Studies. Wow, and what about your family? Were they Christian, you weren't baptized? No, my family and my upbringing in general were very

anti-Christian. Oh wow. I had a lot of bad stereotypes about the church. I was saying to you before this show like I'm so pumped to chat with you like sometimes I'll have someone on the show and I know basically their story but I have to ask them questions to bring it out for the audience but I'm just super pumped to kind of get to know you and and learn about your story from myself. I hope that sharing it can do some good service to the church. Indeed. Yeah. Well, why don't we start with your upbringing, if you don't mind talking about why your parents

were anti-Christian and how that influenced your view of Christianity. Certainly. I was raised ostensibly Jewish, but really scientific materialist. I went to Hebrew school a little bit, I was bar mitzvahed, but the Jewish faith wasn't really a part of our lives. My family really just dismissed it because they thought it contradicted with science, they thought it was a lot of superstition, they thought that religion was very bigoted, they didn't appreciate the spiritual side of life

because they were very focused on scientific materialism. And then likewise with all the people around me, I was growing up in the Washington DC elites and things are very focused on politics and worldly things there. I had to leave DC just to figure out how to have a normal conversation that didn't involve politics. So they were very anti-religion, but at the same time, I did have some intuition

that there was more there. I was studying physics a lot. I got a bachelor's degree in physics. I was attracted by the rigor of it, especially because there were so many confusing perspectives in DC that didn't really seem to have much rigor. So I ran to physics, especially, to gain that sense of rigor. Will your folks, they sound, I mean, if they're talking about scientific materialism, is that the kind of language that they would use?

No. Oh, okay. I wasn't sure. Are they kind intellectuals your folks in that sense or they are intellectuals, but Mostly focused on politics. Oh, I see and so this this sort of this this this Scientific materialism is really just something they've sort of imbibed and shared with you. Maybe not explicitly but Okay, exactly That's one of the things I realized is that's actually a very prominent worldview. And a lot of people just go through life with those assumptions, even if they're not conscious of it or explicit. Yeah, that's a great point. So you started studying physics. What was your opinion of

Christians at this point? Was your opinion of Christians the same as it was for other religions like Judaism and Islam? Or did you have a particular animus for Christianity? I had a particular animus for Christianity. Yeah, okay, so how would have you explained that in college? well, I bought into all the Stereotypes that are common in secular society about Christianity that it causes wars that it's very anti-science that it's a lot

of superstition, and I was very suspicious of Christianity's attempts to gain influence in politics because I thought that we only needed to follow secular things and scientific things or secular philosophies in the public sphere. Now at my school, I was, it was a pretty liberal school, so I was raised with even a more positive view of Islam than Christianity. Christianity had all these bad stereotypes associated with it, but Islam was highly regarded, and then also tribal animistic religions too were talked about in a good way. We actually did some Native American rituals. I didn't realize at the time they were rituals and things like

that but now I can look back and say okay those were actual animistic things. Judaism held a higher status just because the Jews were victimized in the past by some very bad secular philosophies. Okay, so you started studying physics? Started studying physics. And that was very good because it held a lot of rigor, but it couldn't tell me where my dog would be three seconds from now.

What does that mean? So the laws of physics are very elegant. They have a lot of explanatory power. They can explain so many things, and they've led to all sorts of great technology and many other things. But when it comes to other sides of life, they just fail completely at explaining things,

even where my dog will be three seconds from now. Is this a common phrase? I haven't heard anybody say that. So there is someone that I got that phrase from. It's a Zen Buddhist philosopher named Ken Wilbur and he was one of the first ones that started to open me up to the spiritual side of things and he guided me along a lot of the path. He looked beyond a lot of the bad parts of dominant secular philosophies, but then there were some problems later on that led me to Catholicism. Okay, so you were dissatisfied with scientific materialism,

studying physics, and would you say there was this sort of desire in you to, for there to be more in life and to see if there was a spiritual element? How did you start going down that path? Definitely. First, I could see that I really admired just the sense of purpose and the sense of depth in a lot of the Jewish people that took the Torah seriously and would spend a long time just meditating on this. It really struck me that this was something significant and important that shaped them

in a good way. At the same time, I was suspicious of that because it seemed like it would inconvenience my personal life to have to buy into, especially the ethics around it. Whereas secular society just kind of lets you do with you what you want with hedonism and playing lots of video games and things like that. Yeah. Okay. And so at that point, if you had of embraced Judaism, and not in the sort of Larry David Bagel-Kirbjerg enthusiasm sense, but in the like in the actual religious weight of Judaism, how would your parents have responded to that, do you think? They would have found it a little strange, but they would not have been very threatened

by it as they would have been with Christianity. They would have thought I was going off a little weird, but Judaism is something they're more familiar with and don't have as many biases against. Yeah, I know it's like, I think it's probably a straw man, right, to say, and you're not saying this, but to say, well, atheists don't want to submit to Christianity because they are aware that there's many things they would have to stop doing and begin doing that would sort of impede their life of hedonism. That might be true some of the time, maybe a lot of the time, but I think there are good willed atheists who are looking for the truth and are really open

to changing their lives, should it be true. That said, I remember as a teenager, I would say things like, I'm spiritual, not religious. And if I was to like examine why I said that, it's because I wanted a sort of depth to the universe, a purpose to the universe, but I didn't want to have to do anything that I didn't want to do. So how did you start getting interested in Eastern religions? Was that for the same sort of same reason, spiritual but not religious as it were? Certainly. They seem to have a lot of technical sophistication and rigor to their practice without having any ethical demands. So they didn't seem to have any beliefs or worldview associated with them. They didn't seem to demand that you change your life in any meaningful ways.

It was just, oh, here's a technique that will help you enhance your consciousness, your awareness, and then that will make you more spiritual. Yeah, it sort of seems grounded in the scientific, it's scientific truths in a sense, like here is a technique that when you do, you know, this will follow it. That's part of it, I think what's attractive about it. It's like we want the spirituality, but we don't want to have to adopt the supernatural as it were.

That's a good point. It did seem to match the scientific worldview that was very technocratic and technically focused Hmm seemingly so who is Ken Wilber because I've heard his name a lot and you mentioned him He is a philosopher that has founded integral philosophy What he's done is he's looked at many different truth systems Especially a lot of psychology and then a lot of Eastern religions. And he's tried to find some way to some reference frame to integrate them together.

He's looked for what he calls orienting generalizations. OK, for these general principles about each different truth system. And then he's tried to put them into one integral map. And his map is pretty sophisticated but it's also pretty simple with its elegance at the same time. He does a pretty good job in that he gets away from a lot of the perspectivalism, a lot of this oh just whatever I believe is the truth and my truth is my truth of the postmodernists, of a lot of dominant trends in secular society. And he did open me up to the spiritual side of life. He has, he talks about the great chain of being, the great nest of being. These are the different

levels of reality, the gross material world, the world of the soul, the subtle world, he calls it, and then the causal world, which is the pure, still ground of being. Eternal, formless awareness. Interesting. That's what he would call it. So was he the first person you encountered that got you down this path? Yes. Okay, so tell us how that happened. How did you first encounter his teachings and what was that like? I was graduating Duke at the time, where I got my bachelor's degree in physics.

That was good in many respects. My physics education was very good. Learned a lot about history and studied some of the other humanities, but I realized I knew very little about life, actually, once I graduated from school, once I had some time to reflect on all my experiences. Further, I was about to go into the army at the time, and I was going to be an infantry officer. So I was facing up to leading soldiers in combat, and I didn't really know why I was

asking them to risk their lives or how I was going to do it So I figured that I needed to figure that out. I Started asking more of these deep questions. I started looking into philosophy, especially Ken Wilbur and I started to look into all these different secular personal growth systems for an understanding of how to Lead and how to understand the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, all these other things. Other than Ken Wilber, who else were you looking to who you found inspiring at the time? There were a couple other Buddhist teachers that were very inspiring.

And then I was also searching through people like Eckhart Tolle, some of the ones that are very common in those circles, Adyashanti would be another one. And then I was looking through a lot of the personal growth, people like Jack Welch for leadership, and then some developmental psychologists like Robert Keegan from Harvard to understand the stages of development and how to work on yourself to grow into a more complete person. And was this how how did this bless you? How did this help you? We don't tend to engage

in things if there's an immediate negative repercussion. So clearly there must have been something in it that you are seeking that you were beginning to find. Oh yes, that's definitely true. First it just explained a lot of the things that I was unsure about. It made me realize that not everything can be explained by science. And I was frustrated because even though I had studied a lot of physics and I knew a lot of people with more advanced studies in physics and would talk with them about these things, I could see the limitations of science whereas this just helped to set the proper boundaries of it.

That then helped me to understand the important parts of the human world much more. That especially comes to things like how certain military units can be better than others. There just aren't material explanations for how certain military units can be better than others. There are- In what sense do you mean better? So, more effective, more combat effective than others. Units can have way more equipment and better equipment

and more people, but they can just be much worse. Interesting. Than units with much less people, less equipment. And passion. Yes, passion has a lot to do with it. The spirit of a military unit really matters a lot. It's sense of cohesion and and its sense of purposefulness. These personal growth philosophies at least help me

to wrap my mind around these things and start thinking about them in a more complete way. Yeah, okay. It also helped with the world of women. I was a pretty nerdy guy growing up at first. I was into physics and in my high school then I wasn't very popular in those areas, but they helped me to show they helped show me the importance of the emotional world of

passion and of bringing These types of things more to the forefront in a way that can create more human connection and lead to meaningful relationships in a very vague sense of the word. I realized later on that meaningful is a difficult term for them. Okay, very cool.

So you're going through all this stuff, is this before you were in Afghanistan? I presume you ended up going there. This is before I was in Afghanistan. Okay. I should tell you that, so a lot of, you asked for some of the people that I was interested in.

So I searched through a lot of, for example, the relationship of dating coaches in secular society. And some of the first people I stumbled upon, for example, was the pickup artists. But luckily I had enough sense even at that time thanks to some of the vestiges of my Jewish upbringing to recognize that they're just shamelessly manipulating people.

So that was a big wake-up call for me. Then I went to some of the other dating coaches that at least were sort of better at masking their egotism. They were pursuing what they thought were meaningful relationships and they at least did get me outside of my shell and able to sort of relate in a more authentic way. In a good way. You know, when you say you were studying physics and maybe there was this desire for there

to be more, what can you and I see that you're pointing to there's going to be something more than just good artillery, well organized and things like this. But was there some were you were you reading reading the new atheists at the time? Were you not sort of convinced by them? Because presumably they would all have responses to maybe some of the doubts you had about a materialist world. I wasn't reading new atheist philosophy at the time, but the general perspectives in American military history made that very clear to me. I was studying a lot of military history and they talked a lot about the material side of war.

That's very important, the logistics especially. And the United States has been great, always awesome at the material side of war. In Vietnam, we managed to sustain a million soldiers in that one small country, you know, halfway across the world. Afghanistan was an even harder logistical problem because it's a landlocked country and Pakistan is ostensibly our ally but not the best and then we had Russian allied countries

on the top. So it was very hard to sustain ourselves logistically there. Speaking of water, we even flew in enough bottled water to sustain all the American soldiers there. We were drinking bottled water in the middle of this landlocked country that was imported all the way from, I think, India or some other place.

So, logistically, we accomplished a lot on the United States in the American way of war, but it became clear to me through those studies that that was insufficient. I mean, I would read the people that would argue more for the materialistic side of war, but their explanations were just not complete for issues like Afghanistan and Iraq. Okay. All right, so you're looking into these different coaches, you're looking into these different sort of, what would you

call them, Buddhist teachers. Yes. How did that begin influencing your life, maybe ritualistically? Did you start to engage in meditation and things like this and how did that process to your interest in yoga? At that point, it didn't change my life too much because I didn't really appreciate the importance of aligning habits and rituals to these types of values. The philosophy was very abstract and was just very focused on these are sort of big high flying principles and these are sort of vague notions

of how to cultivate more awareness. So they didn't really emphasize the importance initially of changing my life and of doing those kinds of things. What it did do though is it did change my thinking, so I started to pontificate next in amount on these issues. To who and how did that go? St. Augustine talks about this, how there were just a lot of

sophists basically pontificating about different partial truths that they were very confident in. And they just had this vague notion of like sharing the truth and engaging in free flowing conversation. There's a lot good that can come from free flowing conversation of course, but a lot good that can come from free flowing conversation, of course,

but a lot of that was just pontificating on sort of your basic understanding of things as if you really knew what was going on. That was in a lot of random conversations with people while I was traveling in Europe. And it was also with people in the military. And the- Did they consider you preachy?

So, some of them did. But at the time, I still had some sense of humility, again, I think from my Jewish upbringing, a little bit of it. Yeah. So that helped a little bit of it. So that helped a little bit. Some of them were more intrigued because I was talking about things that were common in the secular media, so it didn't come across as me preaching to them. These types of personal growth systems don't really present themselves as philosophies or theologies. So I came to

realize later on though that it's more of a marketing ploy. I mean I really was kind of preaching to them even though I myself wasn't aware of that at the time. But there really was a big change in mentality that I was undergoing myself and that I was preaching to them. So eventually I started to see the importance of worldviews, especially guided by Ken Wilbur. He talks a lot about the importance of them. And how did you get introduced to yoga?

So I went through my military time, was deployed to Afghanistan, and then got back from Afghanistan, was in garrison in Germany for two years where we were just doing a normal garrison life, which is a pretty normal job, physical fitness in the morning, administrative work, training. Throughout all of this, I started to have back problems, things like that. And yoga seemed to provide a good solution to that. Seems something that would heal my body, but at the same time, like you were saying, that there's this attraction with more depth to something,

I could feel that in yoga, even though I wasn't willing to admit it at the time, because I just thought I was getting into it for health issues. Looking back, I can say that there was also this attraction to sort of something more, something happening in the universe. So I started practicing just the very common hatha yoga.

And how are you doing this in Germany? Were they yoga teachers, are you doing this online? I started to do it in earnest when I got back to the United States, just in a normal yoga studio. Okay. And then it was when I got out of the army that I started to go in much more depth with it. Okay, well tell us about your immediate experience with yoga and how you got deep into it. So the postures were certainly helpful in bringing more alignment to my body. I was very stiff at that time. I'd been through ranger school and a lot of other military training

in a year in Afghanistan patrolling in the desert. And then military physical fitness as well was a big wear and tear. It helped with all those things and it also started to again bring through more emotional awareness and emotional discipline as they would call it. They talk a lot about improving your feeling tone. That's a lot of the goal of yoga. Yoga teachers say that the whole purpose of the asanas is to improve your feeling tone. Now the whole purpose of the what? Of the yoga postures. The postures I see. The physical postures. Yeah. Called asanas. Okay thanks. It is to improve your feeling tone. I was only practicing the superficial common yoga. Yeah. That's out

there in the West and I mean it it was also nice because it seemed like a good way to meet women since there were far more of them in the class than men. Yeah. But I also realized that yoga was, I had started to study a lot of psychology at that time. Carl Jung for example, the posture seemed to have some kind of symbolic aspect to them. Right. They had a symbolic meaning. They, one of them is called warrior pose for example. Yeah I know what it is, yeah. Virabhadra. This is where you wrap one leg around the other and put your hands together. Is this the one?

No. Okay. Warrior pose is like a lunge. Oh, I know what it is. Yeah. Yeah, we would do that. Like, we wouldn't call it that necessarily, like in CrossFit, right? Before you, it's kind of a stretch before you work out.

Yes, it's certainly possible just to lunge and not have that be yoga. In fact, a lot of these postures were taken from Western gymnastics by Chris Murty back 100 years ago. Gosh, where do we go from here? Because I wanna know, like I wanna ask you so many questions all at once. I wanna ask you about the origins of yoga.

I wanna ask you like, what if some person just wants to stretch their back out and they go and see Gladys, the pseudo yoga teacher at the gym and how, is that even bad? And I have said, where do you want to, where do you want to begin with this? Should we begin with a sort of origins of yoga that maybe a lot of us don't know of or? Sure. The origins would be good or I can just sort of tell chronologically how I came to it. Sure. Let's do that.

Okay. It wasn't until later on that I came to realize the origins of yoga, because they're not very upfront with what they are. I have no idea what they are. Like I know it comes from Hinduism, that's all I know. Or maybe I don't even know that, so okay. Yeah. That took me a while to realize. I mean I started to see that the postures

had some kind of symbolic value to them, I was becoming more emotionally aware. So I started to feel that they did actually change my emotions in a way. In a way that I wasn't conscious of at first. There were some real changes happening in my soul from doing the practice. Most of them were initially positive. I mean, I could feel that my emotions were becoming

sort of more disciplined, more aligned, more alive. But then I started to notice some weird and quirky ones at first too. So for example, I started to sense that it was just weird boundaries being in a room full of people wearing skimpy clothes and bending our bodies into weird postures. It's even worse with things like Bikram yoga. You'll have to explain these terms to me and my audience. I'm not sure what that means. So Bikram yoga is a form of yoga founded by Mr. Bikram and they actually get in a really hot

room together, strip to their underwear and then do the same sequence of poses over and over again. Ali did that twice. Is this hot yoga? Is that what is that the same thing or similar? Hot yoga is a general term. Okay. For those types of yoga and then within Hatha yoga is the main one that's practiced in the West. That's the most common form. Within Hatha yoga there's a lot of different sects that are affiliated with different teachers. They're usually named after the teacher. For example, Forest Yoga was founded by,

I think her name is Anna Forest. And as different teachers grow through the ranks, then they become more prominent and found their own style of Hatha Yoga that emphasizes different parts. They all have a certain commonality to them, but then they change based on the style of the teacher. It sounds like martial arts in a way.

Different martial arts schools kind of evolve as somebody rises in the ranks, and that school is then named after them. Yeah, that's a good analogy. There's certainly a lot of different masters, and they're always competing for disciples with different people and forming their own cliques of disciples. Okay. When I got out of the army I started to go much more in depth into

this stuff. I spent three months in a Zen monastery. You gotta tell us about that. I was in upstate New York, Okay. In the Catskill Mountains. How does one spend three months in a Zen monastery? Do they have a website? Like how did you find them? How did you contact them? I've been doing a lot more reading. So when I was in the army, I was mostly just focused on that.

I was learning about counterinsurgency. I was doing it in Afghanistan. I was focusing on becoming a better officer. I was learning about all the different difficulties we were having with Iraq and Afghanistan. That was my focus and mission at the time. Then I started to move more towards the spiritual side because of the seeds that had been planted earlier that I was talking about. I started to read especially a biography of Zen Master Jumpo Dennis Kelly Roshi who was actually a I think it was the third largest LSD dealer in California during the 1970s until he got busted by the FBI. He was

also a Zen Master. He thought that drugs could help bring people to more awareness. And this is a common trend in Eastern religions. But at the time it didn't seem like much of a problem to me, unfortunately. So I read about this monastery in his biography. And then, yes, they do have a website. You can just go to the website and email them and say I'm interested in spending more time in your monastery. And I had only done some meditation practice on my own at the time actually. I mean with some formal

teaching but not much from what I would say now. I mean in hindsight that was really weird to me because These were messing with sort of the very depths of our mind You want to do that in the well thought out way, you know I just want to kind of throw practices out there and things like that. Okay All right. So they said yeah come and spend three months. How does that work? She offer a donation. Do you pay? I'm super interested. I don't want to go. I'm just interested Well, there were a lot of interesting things about it I mean it

was very Japanese they did charge yeah a certain amount of money yeah for spending some time there. And how many people were part of this? They were not those who ran it necessarily but those who I'm asking like who's showing up there are there like hundreds of people there for for sort of meditation ran it necessarily but those who I'm The other three weeks of the month were just normal practice time where we would meditate about three hours a day. Wow We kept a pretty strict monastic orarium There were services every morning I was really shocked to even find services because I just thought that it was about you know Techniques to improve your consciousness and and things like that

but no they gather they chant some of the Buddhist sutras and then they have a sort of drumbeat that they go to. And they did a chant, a really intense chant, every morning to Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, also called Avalokitesvara. You have to explain that to me, I'm sorry. The Bodhisattvas are sort of like the Buddhist saints. Okay. And Avalokitesvara is the most important of the Buddhist saints. Interesting. In a lot of strands of Buddhism it's a she, in some of the earlier ones it's a he actually, and she was one of the Buddha's closest associates, closest disciples. And so she's in Mahayana Buddhism,

the second major trend in Buddhism after the first one, she is considered to be one of the main figures there. So in this service, what are you doing, so like in a Catholic service, one might pray to a saint, asking them to pray to God. What are you doing with these figures who are associates of the Buddha? Are you offering sacrifices? Are you talking to them? What's the?

You're mostly doing ritual chants. And for what end? That was a good question. I actually didn't really know what end we were doing them to. I didn't understand it at that point. Did you just think we're honoring them or something? I just thought that it was some exercise to do to improve awareness. Okay. And I thought that these I thought of these people maybe as role models. They were good meditators and we were supposed to try and imitate them and get their aid maybe in some vague way that I didn't really understand

in becoming better meditators. Just real quick before you go on, because I'm super interested in what a day in the life of a Buddhist monastery looks like. So you wake up at what time? During the retreat periods, we woke up at 4.30. Okay. Every day. And then I think during the normal periods, it was six. And you say you have three hours of meditation a day.

So what is, just real quickly, what does a day in the life look, a typical day? It wasn't so different than what you'd find in a Benedictine monastery. I see. There's a lot of work and meditation. Cool, what kind of work did you do? I would do a lot of cleaning.

They do this Japanese ritual, for example, called zokinin, which is where instead of a mop, you take just a rag, dip it in a bucket, and then you do a sort of downward dog, bend on the floor, and you run across the floor to clean off the floor, holding a bend on the floor and you run across the floor to clean off the floor holding the rag on the floor. See that sounds like a cool way to do cleaning in a Zen monastery. It would suck if you showed up for three months and they're like here are the toilets. Well the toilets were immaculate and I did clean some of them too. It was a lot of cleaning.

Did you at least do it in a cool way? like make a cool hand gesture and run around the bowl No, okay. Well all of these things were supposed to be ways of cultivating more awareness You're supposed to do them with a lot of care. That's neat. Yeah Okay, cool. I know cuz and when were the three hours of meditation were they all at once in the morning or this? No First I think we did if I remember correctly we did just one hour in the morning of meditation, then about one hour of a service, then we did a half hour right before lunch after the morning work period, then we would have a brief break, then we'd do yoga in the afternoon, then a little bit more work, then more, then we go to dinner and

then we'd have about another hour and a half of meditation after dinner. Okay, cool. Thank you for sharing that with me. All right, so you're going to these services, you're not terribly sure why we're maybe invoking someone, but still thinking about higher awareness. All right, so what happened over the course of these three months? someone but still thinking about higher awareness. Alright, so what happened over the course of these three months? How did your opinion change one way or the other?

So I started to certainly sense that the spiritual side mattered more. It did start to open me up and I was inspired to pursue some of these things more as well. There were lots of stories about just very rigorous Zen masters who endured all sorts of difficulties in order to rise to higher states of awareness and things like that. I was pretty inspired by those stories. I thought that they were really interesting, the ascetical mortifications that they would do. At the same time, I thought that Zen was a little weird in two things. First, they were trying really hard to be Japanese, it seemed to me. They had, they

did a lot of the chants in Japanese and they had a lot of Japanese customs. They had a lot of Japanese art, they had a lot of Japanese art, which seemed to depict spiritual things like Maras, which are their version of spirits, and a lot of them frankly looked pretty demonic. So I started to think that maybe there was more to it than that, that there was really a sense of a deity. A lot of this was from Japanese Shintoism, mind you. But those

things just heavily influenced Zen religion because they were in a Shinto culture. Also, even though I admired the rigor of it, and I did start to sense that it gave me more sort of self mastery over my mind. There were problems within what to do with these experiences that I was becoming more conscious of. It started to turn me on to one of the major problems with just focusing on awareness. Consciousness is a vague amorphous term. That's the center of the religion. That's what everyone talked about, but I never really understood what it was during these first few times that I was these first few serious endeavors into

it. So it was usually presented without much explanation and then with a lot of vague mysterious hand waves of, oh this is consciousness, it's great, cultivate more of it. And it was usually said in a very mysterious low voice that was kind of weird. So I started to try and figure that out but I realized that I was becoming more conscious of a lot of feelings, difficulties, and I'd just gotten out of the army, so I was adjusting to life in the civilian world. But that consciousness didn't really tell me what to do

with all of these different feelings and emotions and things like that that were coming up and different life difficulties and trials. One of the things you pointed out earlier is that as you were engaging in yoga, you noticed some positive things happening, but you also said some quirky. What does that mean?

I think you used the word quirky. Yeah. Strange. There certainly were some quirky things, and it was things like the Mara statues in the Japanese monastery And I I also just felt weird movements in my soul that I didn't know Exactly what they they were talking about what what was going on? What does that mean weird movements in your soul? uh weird weird feelings

and uh weird Nothing that was that off the wall. I mean, I was able to keep myself really grounded largely thanks to I think some of my physics training and just my general common sense that I gleaned from the military. But they certainly, they're certainly trying to open you up to a lot of things.

They say just to open, and there was constant talk of opening your heart and opening to different feelings, especially in the yoga world, not as much in the Zen. Some of those things I just didn't understand what they were. And how to, why I was opening myself up to these things. How to? Why I was opening myself up to these things. Hmm Is Zen Buddhism Always associated with yoga. I wasn't aware of this. So at the monastery you're saying you're you're you're going through yoga every day

Yeah, is that is that common in Buddhism? Buddhism originally comes from yoga the Buddha was originally a yogi. What? Yeah. Back in about 2500 BC, the Buddha went off and spent a lot of time with some extreme ascetical yogis. This is blowing my mind. Like I knew the Buddha, if we can call him that, was from India and he was a Hindu at the time. Is that correct or no?

He was a Hindu, and he was a very well-to-do one. He was in a palace, if I remember correctly. He had a marriage to a very proud and beautiful princess. I looked into it a little bit myself. There was like a similarity to St. Francis in a sense, that he encountered poverty and then kind of got rid of his wealth. was like a similarity to St. Francis in a sense, that he encountered poverty and then kind of got rid of his wealth and, well, you could tell the story better than me, I'm sorry. No, that's absolutely accurate and that is, to his credit in some respects, he was really

willing to sacrifice his worldly position to try and seek some kind of truth. Then he went really in depth into some of these extreme yoga ascetical traditions but was turned off by them and so he veered more towards the middle path which isn't so extreme in its asceticism as the the yogic path that he was doing. And he developed a few different doctrines so one of the main ones, for example, is that Buddhism doesn't believe in the soul, actually. So it doesn't believe that you have an individual identity, it has the doctrine of non-self.

Versus yoga believes in a soul. Buddhism says that you are supposed to just realize your own impersonal awareness which is what you really are which is the formless ground of all eternity, the divine emptiness. You're supposed to completely empty yourself of yourself. Whereas yoga you're supposed to grow yourself, empower yourself and then realize that yourself is actually the divine. Okay, so how does this, how do they reconcile this in a Zen Buddhist monastery where they're

practicing yoga? Does it depend on the monastery? That's a good question and there's been a lot of different changes and evolution on this over the centuries and even in recent times. We were practicing yoga in the monastery mostly because of this guy, Jumpo Dennis Kelly, who over the centuries and even in recent times we were practicing yoga in the monastery mostly because of this guy Jumpo Dennis Kelly Roshi he realized that the Zen... Super cool name by the way if you're going to be a yogi or whatever that's a great name Matt Fradd not a good yogi teacher name no yeah like that lady you were saying

last name was Forest Forest yoga that sounds. It's got a good ring to it Fred yoga, they would never take off. They are very clever Very clever marketers. Yes, I don't think Alex Frank yoga would take It sounds too Frank in nice Real quick. I mean, I don't mean to oversimplify this and and and the last thing I want to do is sort of make a straw Man of things I don't even understand so please feel free to push back on me. But it sounds like just generally what you're saying is the belief in Buddhism is there is no self. And the belief in yoga is your self is God.

So your two options are you're either nothing or God. Yes. Is that accurate? OK. I mean, ultimately, they lead towards roughly the same spot, which is The Buddhist will say things like your true self is the divine especially some of the more modern Buddhists But it is two different paths. There's one of sort of denying the the ego Buddhism the ego is the real enemy and then there's one of sort of trance

Buddhism, the ego is the real enemy. And then there's one of sort of trance. So you might be a little difficult to say that there's another of building up of sort of developing more of an identity, but then realizing that identity is the divine is God. Does one lead itself to hedonism in a way that the other doesn't? That's a good question. I think that yoga does lead more towards hedonism than Buddhism necessarily, because Buddhism just doesn't deal with those types of things. It doesn't deal with the world of emotions as much.

And that's sort of what led me actually more towards yoga from Buddhism. After I got out of this Zen monastery, then I actually went to do the yoga teacher training and spent some time in the Amazon rainforest. Gosh, that sounds so cool. I know I shouldn't find it cool, but like doing yoga in a Amazon rainforest, or that sounds, yeah, cool. There's a lot of romantic appeal.

Yeah, that's what it is, yeah. I got kind of swept up into that a little bit myself. I mean, the military was some romanticism on my part. I wanted to go off and do great things for my country and a lot of it was pretty good but it's important to then get grounded. Yeah. What did your folks think about you going to a Zen Buddhist monastery for three months? So they were fine with it as long as it didn't thwart my worldly success. Aha. Similar to what was going on in St. Augustine where they weren't so concerned with my spiritual well-being.

Because you went to Yale, to law school at Yale, is that right? I went to Yale after all of these experiences. I had just, actually, when I was in the car to go to the Zen monastery, it was when I found out that I got into Yale. So that's when I knew that that's where I was going. All right, so you get out of this Buddhist monastery

and you want to take the kind of yoga path more than the Buddhist path. Yes. Now, help me, is a yogi a yoga teacher? Is that what a yogi is? What is a yogi? A yoga practitioner. Oh, okay.

One who practices yoga. What is a yoga teacher called? That's a good question there's a 400 hour certification, holy for yoga teacher and So you blow in my mind I had no idea that Buddha was a Was he a yoga teacher or a yogi? yogi he founded basically Different people would say different things about exactly how this went. Yeah, he's definitely started off as a yogi Okay, he learned a lot of his important ideas from yoga

Okay, and then he went off and founded his own sect that became more Buddhism rather than yoga See this is fascinating like I think my ignorance is probably illustrative of most Americans ignorance when it comes to Yoga like yoga just sounds like it's kind of like a newer thing and you like no like predated Christ Yes It predated Christ But at the same time there were some interesting parallels in the development with it. You know, you had in the Jewish tradition you had the the Mosaic Law that came down, which was similar to the Hindu-Burminic, very loose analogy to the Hindu-Burminic,

and then you had a more mystical, ascetical strand grow in it. And that was similar with how the prophet Elijah started the mystical, ascetical strand in Judaism, which then went to the Carmelites, for example, in Christianity, in Catholicism. So when you say you went to be a Yogurint teacher, You did that in the Amazon rainforest? You couldn't just do that in DC somewhere yet again? That was actually in the rainforest of Costa Rica. Oh, I'm sorry. OK, wow, wow.

So that's where you went to become a yoga teacher. At a very posh place, yes. Really? Blue Spirit. Wow. Tell us about that. Everyone was walking around in leggings, but the food was very good.

The resort was very nice. It was very luxurious. Was it was very nice. It was very luxurious Was it expensive? Yes, it was pretty expensive. Yeah, and That's sort of what I was alluding to earlier and this stuff has become very commercialized one of my teachers charged this was after I I was one of his students, but he charges a thousand dollars for two and a half hours of his time. Mm-hmm.

Mindfulness has become a 1.1 billion dollar industry according to IBS world. Some people call it Mcmindfulness. So there's a lot of money in it and lululemon pants are very expensive. The what? Lululemon. Oh, you have heard of that. The main brand with the Omega symbol. Okay. They're very expensive I think they run $150 for a workout pan. Trust America to just take something and run it into the ground and make as much money as we can from it. Yes these things do tend to get commercialized and they're good at making it seem like it's a new cool thing. Yeah. That is not that big of a deal. They want to make it seem like it's not too threatening.

It doesn't involve many changes to your life. You can just sort of use it as a way to enhance yourself as a person or to grow as a person. Coming from a Zen Buddhist monastery, were you turned off by the the commercialization of it at this resort? I did have some common sense then largely thanks to the military and some of my Jewish upbringing. So I was suspicious of it but what I didn't have at the time was the moral integrity to that I actually put my foot down and say, no, I'm gonna do something different. I didn't have the sense of, okay, well, if I actually think this way,

if I'm a little put off by the commercial aspect of it, then I should do something else maybe, even maybe found my own yoga sector, found, find a teacher that wasn't so commercial. Yeah. What's the general thought and attitude towards sexuality? I assume there may not be any specific teachings, but as you're at this place in Costa Rica, what's the general consensus or view of human sexuality?

That's a good question. So, you have to disentangle first some of the traditional views that come from the tradition that's heavily influenced by the cultures from where these places come. The Hindu caste system was very influential on the development of yoga. And in places like Japan, they had Japanese Shintoism, they had Confucianism in China. So those views on sexuality influenced a lot of the tradition but then in the West it's gotten heavily hijacked by the New Left, by the countercultural revolution in the 1960s and 70s. It was those kinds of people who were bringing it into the West and so they have brought a lot of their own

Decadence decadence. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean the extreme version of it is modern neo-tantra Which has devolved into a lot of crazed sex parties I mean I I I met people that were involved in that and I kind of knew what was going on But again, thanks to my Jewish upbringing, I still had some sense of boundaries luckily. But I know a lot of people who fell into that stuff. And along with sexuality, there was also a big interest in drugs, like I was alluding to there is that Zen master who was the LSD dealer. And then at the Zen monastery I went to there was a good amount of drugs and there was a good amount of sexual hedonism not too much

but a good amount I'm just kind of wondering like as somebody who hasn't hung out with a bunch of yoga teachers I'm wondering if I sat down as a fellow yoga teacher and just had the thought that human beings are sacred and we shouldn't treat people as means to ends and that we should perhaps save that powerful gift of sexuality to someone that we should perhaps save that powerful gift of sexuality to someone that we wanna be with forever. Like, that kind of language, how would that go over with these folks, do you think?

I know we're just sort of speculating. Well, I did ask these questions. So you're absolutely right in that the initial teachings would say something like, oh just follow your desires but in a respectful way. That's the kind of crap I was told as a teenager that didn't work at all. It's like telling someone you just got to be happy you know just do what makes you happy you're like respect people it's like so vague so generic. A lot of it was to just improve your feeling tone and

they had a lot of psychological language about reducing sexual tension. generic. A lot of it was to just improve your feeling tone, and they had a lot of psychological language about reducing sexual tension. A lot of it I realized later was very Freudian in its understanding because Freud was very influential in the New Left counter-cultural revolution. So a lot of it was just about being in tune with your desires and kind of going along with these things. And just the context that they put you in breeds that kind of loose sense of boundaries as well. It does, yeah.

You're bending your body into weird positions with people. Yeah. So this three week experience in this rainforest in Costa Rica, was it cool? Was it, did you begin to sense perhaps the demonic? Yes. Did you begin to sense perhaps the demonic? Yes, I did sense it a little bit there. There were Shippibo there who are master ayahuasca. They're a tribe of people who have the best reputation for this kind of stuff.

And I didn't directly see it myself, but I talked to a lot of people there about it and about what the demonic okay there was a lot of bad stuff going on so for example there were two other young men on this retreat with me one of them then later overdose on opioids and is to neo-nazi communists he'd be telling you all sorts of weird things about what the Zionists have supposedly done. Ah, okay. Well, let's not have him on the show. He thinks that the Holocaust was actually a Jewish conspiracy to eliminate the part of the Jews that don't go along with it. Y'all did that really well, that conspiracy then.

Masterfully. But this is one of the things that it leads to because you start to really lose your grip on reality. Especially the people who are bringing drugs into it. There are a good amount of teachers that don't do drugs and there are a good amount of teachers that don't indulge in a sexual hedonism, but they're not willing to really denounce it or talk about the reasons why it could lead to bad things. The spiritual director that I ended up hiring two years down the line from then did talk about the important sides of sexuality And in what sense so he started to make me realize that in order to really have a deep love To build something lasting you needed to commit to one other person cool

The masculine desire is for multiplicity is what they would say okay, and I think there's something to it. There is some natural Masculine desire in us to like have different flavors That we can taste that's the language that they would use it and I don't think that's good language Sure, but that's what they would use. Yeah, that's what they would say Whereas it's a good Mortification and a good practice for us to get over that selfish desire to commit to one and that at the end of the day is what really will nourish us. That is what will lead towards deeper consciousness and

awareness because you can really by committing to one woman she will then have the trust to be able to actually really open up to you and give herself to you. There's truth in that. Whereas a lot of the stuff that was happening before was just men can use their superior consciousness, can use these techniques to basically force their souls into a state of attentiveness and care and so they give the woman a lot of attention. they're very attentive with her in a way that makes her feel good and Then they have a nice little fling or something like that in their mind but then that's taken away they just go their separate ways because they don't have a sense of committing to anything deeper and

The the women sort of knew what was going on I mean they were kind of into this out of a sense mostly a feminine empowerment. I think but It was very That devolved into a lot of hedonism At the end of the day and it was really bad. I realized that these things were first they're just distracting from the higher things that I was talking about before of committing to one,

of really doing the hard thing that could lead to something greater, something better. That's not something easy to do, so we really need to order our lives towards that. We need to have things like marriage, and these sacraments are such a great gift in helping us rise to that difficulty. The second thing that they do is they really start to just fracture us

because we're being very attentive to this one person and then them leaving us and then being very attentive to this other person leaving us. They would say that you need to practice severance, which is how you cut yourself off energetically from these other people, but that never works. As one Dominican friar said, you can only offer yourself so many times to another person before it starts to have significant effects on the soul, but luckily Christ grace is very healing. Was your view of Christianity evolving or devolving during this time?

Or were you not really aware of it? Or were you trying to do the Ken Wilber thing where there's a sort of religious differentism where Christianity has its truth to say? That's what I believed at the time. I was starting to become a little warmer to it, especially to the Trappists. I learned a little bit about Thomas Merton, and when I was stationed in Georgia in the United States for the second time, I went to a Trappist monastery very briefly. And then also in the army, I started to have more of a positive view of Christians. They weren't the neurominded bigots that was the stereotype in my upbringing. And moreover, I was just really impressed at how they could maintain such a strong sense of purpose

while also being very humane and very warm and heartfelt. These were some of the things that I was trying to research through different personal growth gurus and things like that to figure out How to do that whereas these Christians just seem to have a natural way of doing it. Hmm and then I Listened to a few Trappist monks talk about Christianity. I I learned a little bit about contemplative prayer But like you were saying I just viewed as one truth among many prayer but like you were saying I just viewed it as one truth among many. Thomas Merton, how much research did you do into him? I really really loved his

book Seven Story Mountain. Yes. Excellent writer. Some of his little maxims are terrific but I understand he got involved somewhat in Buddhism, maybe just a respectful interest. What's your opinion of how Thomas Merton's life sort of ended? I don't mean how he died, but. I didn't read much of his work, but when I did sit down to read his work, actually I just haphazardly opened it right to the portion

where he was talking about Buddhism and also his forays into neo-Marxism. Oh wow, yep. And I had already explored all those things. I could see why he was enticed by it because there were some of the same things that enticed me into it at first. But there were a lot of problems that that was a dark rabbit hole that I could see him going down and it was kind of naive to put a lot of stock in those things I think.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Thomas Aquinas when he talks about other gods, he's pretty clear as his scripture that these are demons. These aren't just sort of different faces of the one true father. These are demonic. And I wonder if Christians don't take that seriously enough. We see these different images. For example, I'm sure you'll know the answer to this. Who's that multi-armed elephant Hindu thing? Ganesh. Tell us about that. If I remember correctly, he's the god of good luck. Okay. So he is a demon. or a mere illusion, but any sort of sort of a religious reverence we may give to an illusion in that sort of form, I don't see how that isn't demonic. It's at a minimum, it is certainly misplaced reverence. You're absolutely right. In St. Augustine in City of God says that the good pagans are worshipping angels.

Ah, okay. Which is still misplaced. Yes. Also, I think his definition of good pagans is very narrow given the rest of his theologies. So, yes, it's only a very small portion of very ethically good pagans who are actually worshipping the good side of these things. But because they don't have revelation and because of other problems, they're just opening to these spiritual things without really understanding them. It gets heavily perverted by the demonic. So Ganesh, is that the name? Ganesh.

Do you know much about this figure? You say the god of good luck. You're allowed to say no. I mean, I'm asking you a lot here, but. Well, he was an elephant, so I thought it was kind of ridiculous to hear something like that. And I didn't practice his pose much. So I didn't get much very interested in him. What I was interested in was warrior pose,

and there was another one, Kali pose, that also seemed to have a lot of interest for me. Later on, I did more research into these to try and understand. Like I was saying, Carl Jung talked about the symbolic version of these things, and he really emphasizes how the symbols really do change your soul in a major way.

What symbols you revere and even just doing small acts of reverence to them, even just imitating them, does change your soul in a major way and a lot of psychologists have talked about this. There's a lot of neuroscience to support it in how, for example, our brains process 11 million bits of data every second, but only 40 of those are conscious.

So there's a lot going out there. Wow. Yeah, yeah. You can see this in your own experience. When you allow yourself to fall in love with somebody, you go through a lot of changes that aren't what you intend. Yeah.

You may think love is going to be this way and I'm going to grow as a person this way, but it's a great point. There's other things. When new soldiers come into the army, they think it's going to be a certain way, maybe from movies or something like that. They intend to get some things out of it, but it changes them in more ways than just what they intend a lot of them are very

Fresh faced and kind of get this durian headlights look if if that's too far from what they were expecting Let me ask you sort of a direct question that I'm sure many people who are watching this video want to know Let's say there's someone watching right now and they're sore and their chiropractor or better yet physical therapist has told them, you know, you really should go do some yoga at the Y. What's your answer to them if you could speak to them? I would tell them to do Pilates. Okay.

Instead, don't do yoga. You're saying don't do yoga. Definitely not do yoga. Do not do you. That's okay. Don't do yoga. Now. Okay. So the response to that sometimes is okay fine

I get that this stuff can have sort of religious Undertones and and it can even be something of a gateway drug But look, I just know this woman and her name's Gladys and she has blue hair and she's super limber and she just wants to teach Me some yoga, but she's not talking about cleansing my aura or chakras or anything like that. Why can't I do that? That kind of stuff is right there beneath the surface of it about cleansing my aura or chakras or anything like that, why can't I do that? That kind of stuff is right there beneath the surface of it. So the first thing I would say is yes, these things are just exercises on their own.

Like I was saying at the beginning, a lot of these actually came from Western gymnastics. Krishnamurti brought them in about 100 years ago to yoga. There are some asanas that probably come from earlier on in yogic history. There's paintings and there's actually a major debate in academia about the extent to which these different exercises come from gymnastics versus yoga. Interesting. Yeah. So what we're not saying is that certain bodily positions are intrinsically evil. Right. It's not saying is that certain bodily positions are intrinsically evil.

Right. It's not as if the demons have a claim on how we move our arms and legs and backs and things. The body is intrinsically good. I mean, in the Christian tradition, it participates in the glory of the soul by overflow is the term that Thomas Aquinas uses. Our soul directly participates with God,

but the body participates by overflow. And yoga did show me how the body can be used to glorify these things. The way that we manifest ourselves physically can show importance to different things. It can show our awareness, our astuteness. It can show our awareness, our a lot of Australians as I was playing rugby. And the way that even just you

look and you move can have an impact on other people, on their soul. Okay, so no to yoga, yes to Pilates. What's the difference? The problem with yoga is that the second that you intend to participate in something like that, then you bring on the other things with it. Then you open yourself to those other things. Then the bodily postures can become gateways to the things that it's talking about, regardless of your subjective intent in doing it. Why does that have to be the case though? So there is an objective quality to our actions that goes beyond just our subjective intent.

Like I was talking about earlier, there's lots of influences with the unconscious. When we fall in love with somebody, it affects our unconscious in ways we don't subjectively intend. Now, the first thing I would say to show people this is that yoga does claim to not be a religion and and to just be exercise sometimes. But we have to be skeptical of these claims because it is very commercial. Mindfulness is a $1.1 billion industry. My yoga spiritual director was very, very good, but he charged me a lot of money for it.

One commentator has turned mindfulness, mcmindfulness, because of how it's become a great industry. So let me ask you this. When McDonald's says that its hamburgers are the tastiest out there and will make you fall in love or something, I'm loving it as the motto, do you take those claims at face value? No, I disbelieve them. Yes. So it's similar with yoga. I mean we have to treat some of these claims as very commercial. Okay. As sort of similar to the claims that we have in commercials.

I just want to push you a bit here. Suppose I'm online and I see some kind of stretch, turns out to be a yoga stretch, but I didn't know that. And so I do it and it helps my back a great deal. And then you come to me and you say I've got a sore lower back I'm like well, I did this stretch. I really helped do this. Am I teaching you yoga? That's a good question starts to get into murky waters, but I'd say once If you just see a body posture online and you're not really intending to do yoga You're not out of formal yoga class and you don't say in your mind I'm going to intend to do yoga then you're not out of formal yoga class and you don't say in your mind I'm going to intend to do yoga, then you're probably not opening it up to

it. That would be a good question for a lot of theologians to answer. The reason I ask that is because otherwise it sounds like you're saying Hinduism has a monopoly on certain body postures. No, definitely not. Once you put your intent behind it, then you start to participate in these Hindu rituals. Okay. And the proofs for that,

you don't have to take my word for it. For example, I mentioned before Kali pose. If you go on Yoga Journal, which is the main source for yoga information in the United States, you'll find an article there that says that Kali poses, that goddess poses, they call it Invokes Kali. They changed the name to Goddess Pose to make it more marketable. And in the article it actually uses the term Invoke Kali.

Of course, most people don't know what Kali is, even when I was doing the pose and they called it Kali pose, I didn't know who Kali was. But if you just Google her, you'll see a very fierce goddess with a necklace of severed human heads and a loincloth of severed human arms, triumphantly standing over a decapitated corpse That she's just topped off the head of So this is a very fierce Demon I Was pretty put off by that once I found it. Yeah, it made me much more skeptical of some of the claims that they have And then when I was doing these postures, I could just sort of feel myself becoming more like them people imitate So by doing these postures, I could just sort of feel myself becoming more like them. People imitate tennis players to play tennis, and then they sort of become more like them

in a way, if you have a really close relationship with a tennis instructor. It can be the same way with these people, where because you're sort of making them role models, you become closer to them, and I could feel that changing some of my emotional disposition to be closer to them and I could feel that changing some of my emotional disposition to be closer to them. Another good example is warrior pose, Virabhadra. So warrior pose is named after a Hindu mythical warrior named Virabhadra. What happened is that he was created by Shiva. Shiva's wife was angry at her father, Shiva's father-in-law, because her father didn't invite her to some sacrifice, so she actually committed suicide. Shiva was so distraught at this that he created Vyabadhara to get revenge on his father-in-law.

Now, Warrior poses a three-part, three-series pose. In the first one, he puts his arms up in the air, that's him sprouting out of the ground near his target. In the second one, he sees his target, it's in his sights. And in the third one, he lunges for his target and decapitates him. Wow. So hiring a hitman to murder your father-in-law is pretty serious business and not something I wanted to get too involved. How interesting. Yeah, that's thank you for clearing that up.

Yeah, I suppose you could say that it would be as problematic and if you agree with this for a Catholic to practice yoga as it would be problematic to a Hindu's Hinduism to come and practice Catholic rituals like no come kneel down you'll still notice and we pray to Mary we wouldn't intend that she hears us and and then this will just help you. You could see somebody like really commercializing Catholicism almost prima facie gutting it of its religious significance. But this is clearly Catholic acts that the Hindu would be engaging in in this thought experiment.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like saying, come participate in mass, receive the Eucharist just to make you feel better. Yeah. And just to enjoy the nice singing. Yeah. I mean, it's all well and good to come to mass for those reasons, but there's a lot more happening.

Okay, that's a great analogy, yeah. With the sacraments, there's much more happening that we're not conscious of. Yeah. I mean, we're just, I was just talking earlier with my fiance about how she realized St. Elizabeth, the Trinity was interceding for her recently, but she realized it a long while after the intercessions actually happened. It takes a while sometimes to recognize the actual spiritual effects. When you put your trust in something, it does have big implications and you get a lot more from them than you think you're getting, than you're aware that you're getting. That's true for anything. Who you put

your trust in matters a lot and if you put your trust in these yogic gods like Kali and Virabhadra then it becomes problematic. Now I actually don't know what Pilates is. So when I'm asking you what is Pilates, I'm not asking you for like a deep, like I just don't even know, it has something to do with stretching but why would you suggest if someone's like I want to yoga because I'm sore and this has helped me, what is Pilates and why would you suggest if someone's like I want to yoga because I am sore and this this has helped me What is Pilates and why would you tell them to do that? Pilates was founded by mr. Yosef Pilates back about a hundred years ago at around the same time that modern Hatha yoga was coming with

Krishna Murti and He also based a lot in the Western gymnastics movement at the time. He basically wanted to get a lot of the movements from Western gymnastics to help people prepare for it. So what it does do that's really good is it helps you to gain more alignment and gain more flexibility with your movements, be more conscious of them, but also in a way that synchronizes those movements with your breathing. What that allows you to do is to really go deep into your neuromuscular programming to really realign your body in a good way. Okay, but it's not based on Hindu or other pagan religions. No, it's really based on sort of Western gymnastics and his, I think his father was a gymnastics instructor and his mother was a naturopath, healer.

So it's rooted in those two ways of thinking. Now, if someone's like, okay, I'll go to Pilates, but the same lady who teaches yoga is the only one in town who teaches Pilates, can I go to this yoga instructor for Pilates? I would say yes. I mean, like we were saying earlier it's not like Hinduism has monopoly over these postures mm-hmm you can do them as

Pilates but if she starts doing yoga then I would get away from that what would be some sort of buzzwords that we should consider red flags from the instructor if they start I mean or if they start speaking in the kind of very weird yoga voice? What's that sound? Well, you may not want to do it, but what is the weird yoga voice? The weird yoga voice is a very kind of

therapy voice where you speak in this kind of, oh, I'm just going to grab your hips in a very awkward way and it wouldn't be okay unless I was using this voice to do it. There's a lot of weird touching in yoga classes, but they do the voice to sort of make it seem

like it's okay. I see. Once they start doing weird things like that, then I would go away from it when they start umming or make references to some of the Sanskrit parts of yoga, to the Sanskrit gods and goddesses the Sanskrit names. Yeah, this is cool.

Hmm. What was I going to ask you? Yoga. How did you start getting in like getting away from it and why did you start getting away from it? did you start getting away from it? So first I I should say that I hired a really good yoga spiritual director. I think that his spiritual direction was about as good as you can get in yoga. I mean I looked at a lot of different teachers and I talked to a lot of people about their teachers and he was an

excellent teacher. He started off actually as a fitness trainer, but he learned from a lot of very prominent people. One of his teachers was Adidas' greatest student, for example. Adidas was a major figure in Western yoga. He was one of the first people to bring it to the West in a major way. And I started to work with him in a way that started to get beyond a lot of

these problems we were talking about. He started to help me see the destructiveness of just kind of doing what you feel. The heart can be very deceiving as it says in Scripture. Some more rigorous yoga teachers will admit this when they say things like the heart has many feelings rooted in ignorance. So he started to help me see the the importance of this and and help make my practice more rigorous and this was also when I started at Yale that I hired him. Now, Yale was a place where there was a lot of these types of

beliefs going around. There was a lot of postmodernism, the same beliefs from the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s that I had encountered in the yoga world, but I was starting to get dissatisfied with yoga at the time, and I was also pretty dissatisfied with things were happening at Yale. There's a lot of criticisms in the military that were very unfair. And there was a lot of criticisms of policing that I also thought were very unfair based on a lot of the firsthand experience I had and the research I was doing in policing at the time. So I started to get dissatisfied with that.

That led me to really throw myself into these yoga teachings in a big way. I started to more realize the importance of changing my life. I started to actually face up to that. Before I had this idea that I was entitled to my own lifestyle and I could just live however I wanted, like you were saying earlier.

That's a very common view out in secular society. But it's not easy to then make a strong commitment to actually moving towards something more. It's not easy to make a strong commitment to the demands of a more ethical life, to structure your life in a way that turns it towards what's most important. He really started to get me to see the importance of these things and how good it was to start to change some of the ways that I was doing things to change my habits more towards the, towards realizing good things.

I started to meditate every morning. I started to set some boundaries on my smartphone. We were talking about that earlier how smartphones can really suck up. The way I understood at the time was smartphones can really suck up a lot of your consciousness. Sort of degrade the quality of your consciousness if they dominate your life too much. Because then you're not as present in your actual life, what's going on at the time.

So I started to put more boundaries on that. And that was good because it did actually start to, I did start to gain more contemplative intuition at the time. At the same time Yale was honing my thinking in a lot of different areas. I was studying a lot of interesting parts of constitutional law. I was doing a lot of interesting police research.

That all made me realize, it got me thinking about things like human dignity in a much more rigorous way. And also how to organize cultural life in a good way. What are some really important values to build the culture around that lead to things like good community policing? I was asking these questions and doing a lot of research into them. So once, so I was asking probing intellectual questions about important

aspects of life with contemplative intuition. The first thing that opened me up to Christianity was actually this yoga spiritual director. He mentioned Christ is just a good example of that because Christ was willing to offer himself so completely as a sacrifice, taking the burdens of everyone else, the suffering of everyone else onto himself, so that he could raise us up towards more truth and love, freeing us from the bonds of what kept us back from it. I didn't believe necessarily in his divinity at the time

or anything like that, but I was just really impressed by his sense of purpose and how he was willing to do that for everyone else. It was really impressive for the sake of greater truth and love. So that opened me up to the possibility of Catholicism. Once I was to the possibility of Christianity in general, once I started to give it a fair chance and I was asking questions with some intellectual rigor and with the still heart of contemplation of meditating, then Catholicism very quickly became the only

answer. And this is while you were at Yale. Yes. Now, where did you direct your questions? How did you learn about Catholicism? I didn't really have that good of a avenue to. I had one friend from the rugby team who was a big help. And then his friends also who were studying at Yale

gave me a good model of the Catholic life. And I realized also later on that they were praying for me at the time because they had some intuition that I was really seeking. So their help was very much appreciated. And he sort of helped me wrap my mind around a few issues. For example, I was frustrated because I thought that the police were being scapegoated. The more I did my research into these things, the more I realized some of the systematic

problems that people were talking about were general problems that weren't just the fault of the rank-and-file police But they were being blamed with them and I was telling him about this. He said oh, yes in in Catholicism We only have one scapegoat and that's Christ everyone Really? So that makes for good cultural system Those are some good values for having a cultural life, because then you can have ethical rigor, you can actually rise towards something good,

but you're not then so puritanical and harsh on people when they fail in those things. Sounds pretty good to me. They modeled the prayer life pretty well, they invited me to some good parties, they had good alcohol at those parties. I realized later on that Catholicism has some of the best alcohol.

I'd spent two years in Germany and I really got into German beer. Everyone likes Hofbrau when they first get there, which is the secular court beer. Hof literally means the court beer or the crown beer. But then once you really get into it, you usually find one of the other breweries. Mine was Augustinabrau, which was originally

brewed by the Augustinians. And then I also like Tegensee, which was brewed by the Benedictines at Tegensee in Germany. So they just modeled a really nice good Catholic cultural life. Then the second major source for me was St. Teresa of Avila. I really was valued the contemplative life. I really saw its value. Yoga was showing me the importance of it, but at the same time I saw that there were a lot of problems, you know. Yoga contemplation can't open you up in a deep, it's good to go deeper into contemplation, but the deeper you go, the more you become open

to some of these things that we were talking about earlier, some of these bad influences, there's even more bad influences that I can talk about later that are even more problematic than this. So because I value the contemplative life, I just googled good book on Catholic contemplation because I knew they had monasteries, but I didn't really know if they had a sophisticated. And you had already been to that Trappist monastery by this point? I'd already been to the Trappist monastery. Yeah, so there was some sense of respect that you had towards Catholicism. Yep. All right.

So and what book did you find by Teresa? I read a book about her the fulfillment of all desire. Oh by Ralph Martin. Yeah, that's incredible I just had him on the show a couple of weeks ago. Oh What a guy the fulfillment of all desire and I actually the first book I read was a Different one just by about her and St. John of the Cross. Fire Within by Thomas DuBey. And that one was excellent. Just from picking it up in the first page.

Yeah, because he sort of critiques and contrasts sort of Buddhism mysticism to Christian mysticism, doesn't he? Almost right away. He does, and his contrasts are right on. I was coming from it at that point so I thought that maybe like you were saying he could set up straw man arguments. Yeah, but like Aquinas He was very honest about setting up steel men. Yeah steel men not straw men Exactly to the extent that you can I mean, there's a lot of people that Might say oh, well, this isn't true for my form of yoga because it's like this but there's a tremendous number of things. When I talk about these

things I'm mostly talking about mindfulness, the way it's practiced here, and Kashmiri Shaavism which is the most prominent form practice in the West. It's what birth Hatha yoga which is the main type of yoga in the West. The second most prominent form in the West is Kundalini yoga, which is also from Kashmiri Shalvism. Now, just speak a little about mindfulness, because just like there's nothing inherently wrong with certain bodily postures, especially without intent and surely deciding to be aware of my body

and aware of the present moment, this could be defined as mindfulness, and I doubt you would say that's wrong. Well, I definitely not, and that's a strong vein in the Catholic tradition. The Desert Fathers talked about watchfulness, and St. Teresa of Avila gives us one of her first councils for prayer

to just cultivate a basic attentiveness in your prayer. Yeah, recollection too is another word she uses. Yes, recollection is very important. And I didn't realize it, but that's what a lot of the yogic exercises I was doing actually were, were active recollection. And St. Teresa praises this greatly. Explain how someone can be actively recollected if they haven't heard this terminology before. So recollection is where you really go into your soul and ground yourself more there, so that you're more focused on what's important and more there with the presence of God in your soul.

and more there with the presence of God in your soul. You can do recollection in lesser forms, for example, where you recollect your thoughts, where you go into your head for a second to organize your thoughts. You know, all right, I'm not really sure where to proceed from here, let me organize my thoughts, and then we can think about this in a better way. That's recollection of the mind, recollection of the soul is

where you do something similar with your whole spirit. Okay. So what's your response when people say like, what's your opinion on Catholic mindfulness? That gets very dicey because usually it's associated with the mindfulness that's in secular society. The term mindfulness itself can just mean being aware of your mind. Being mindful just means being conscious of what's happening. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with terms like awareness and consciousness. It's just that they kind of use a big hand wave and say, well, consciousness is the divide and that's everything and that's what everything is reducible to. And then they use Buddhist techniques to realize that.

You don't have to take my word for that again. Also just look at John Kabat-Zinn, who's the father of modern mindfulness. He is a doctor and he's really the leading figure in the modern mindfulness movement. Now, John Kabat-Zinn himself in an interview said, I assiduously avoid using the word secular because once you use the term secular you abstract the sacred out of it. Mindfulness is not secular according to this guy the father of mindfulness and it's a practice to realize the sacred John Cabot Zinn was trained by Buddhists. He was Zen Buddhist actually and He admits that his teachings that mindfulness is the essence of Buddhism so he's basically just Taking a part of Buddhism of stripping it down, which Zen is already a

very stripped down form of Buddhism, and then attaching his own stamp to it and bringing it to the West. So would you prefer then that somebody use the term instead of Catholic mindfulness, watchfulness or recollection, because you're kind of, you're blurring, you're blurring into something else when you talk about Catholic mindfulness. Is that your thought? Yes, I think Catholic recollection would especially be a really good term because recollection is something that's sorely needed. You know, when we're so busy and moving this way and that way and on our smartphones constantly, it really harms our recollection. And that's one of the basic contemplative practices that can do so much good for lay people out in the world.

Yeah, that's cool. Alright, so you're reading this book by Thomas Dubay and then our friend Ralph Martin. At what point did you encounter the Dominicans? Right after Yale, I deployed to Afghanistan actually to apply my police research there. I Was working on staff this time in Kabul not on the front lines in Kandahar province like my first tour While I was there I I decided that I wanted to convert right before deploying I approached a Czech military priest while I was in Kabul and I approached a Czech military priest while I was in Kabul, and actually to his credit, he was very skeptical at first of me because he thought, oh, maybe he's in war, that's sort of leading him to

want to make these drastic life decisions. We want to make sure that this is actually a really firm choice, a firm commitment that he's well thought through. But then I talked to him about all the different things I'd gone through and my understanding of the Catholic faith. And so then he started working with me. I also had help from an American deacon of the Archdiocese of Arlington who was deployed as a contractor there. I just read the Catechism to get a sense of the faith and I was really impressed by it.

It's incredible. What do you call it? Document book, Catechism. It's incredible. What do you call it? Document book, catechism. It's absolutely incredible. Oh yes. I mean, they just offer so many great truths that have been carefully pruned over 2000 years of discourse between people who have really consecrated their whole lives to the

truth. Yeah. In a way, and I say this loosely, it's like a modern summa theologiae, because the footnotes are, I mean, we're just sort of drawing upon the wisdom of the saints to show the teachings of the Catholic Church. And those saints have been people who have developed themselves in every way, you know. They're not just people who are good academics, but they really led lives of holiness. They committed themselves entirely to God, to his truth. It's been over lots of time and culture.

St. Augustine was a Bear Bear, St. Thomas Aquinas Italian, St. Teresa Villa was Spanish. Those are all people cited prominently in the Catechism. It answered so many different questions. And like you said, the footnotes were so rich. I mean, I spent a lot of time just looking at the people in the footnotes trying to figure out who are these people, what motivated them. Who is this Thomas Aquinas fellow?

And some of the lesser known ones are from the Middle East, who are a sight in there. Origen is a fascinating figure. I just read the Wikipedia articles on these guys. You know, it's not like I was reading from Catholic sources necessarily, but I was just so impressed by the lives that they led. So. Now, as you're looking into Catholicism,

and is this essentially RCIA that you're going through with this deacon and priest? Informal RCIA, in Afghanistan. I don't mean to keep bringing your parents into it, I presume they're still alive and I don't mean to have you talk about things you'd rather not talk about but what what how did they take this you're getting serious about Christianity and Catholicism in particular secular society really claims to be respectful of all the choices that people make. This is not true. Yeah. They do sort of give their assent to these kinds of

things at first but then often that leads to a lot of weirdness afterwards. So it was okay with my family. I mean they were respectful at first but it was okay with my family. They were respectful at first, but it was also a little bit hard on them because they didn't really understand where I was going and they had their own preconceived notions about some of these things. Okay. Well, I want to take a break and Neil, what we'll do is we'll just do the two minute break. We won't do the ad. And then when we come back, I got there's a ton of questions. I know we're going to have in the comment section. I'd love to get into that anything else you want to touch touch upon. Sure thing.

All right, cool. I'm going to start with an ASMR drink. What is there? I apologize to everybody watching. Have you did you go down the ASMR world you familiar with it? No. Oh, okay. Well, that made no sense to you. I don't even know what it means ASMR. Audio sensory, something or other. Yeah, I would recommend people not check it out. It's like, it's basically people like you can you can go on YouTube and watch people eating fried chicken into a microphone.

You may have discussed that with you. So I did that in your ear, but at the same time, it's kind of cool. You know, in a little bit. No, gross. You imagine how disgusting that would be if someone did that in your ear, but at the same time it's kinda cool. You know what I mean? Little bit, no, gross. You know how you're kind of annoyed, but in a cool way? Like, stop kicking my chair, but it also kinda feels good.

No, all right, well anyway. The goal is to get that tingly spine. Yeah, tingly spine thing, that's the goal. Well, that's sort of one of the goals of yoga. Oh. And it's very much about taking your bodily senses and also some senses of your soul and then manipulating them in a way

that you can get these sort of tingly nice feelings in your spine. And that can open you up to even weirder things. Do you, you were at Stanford, I mean, the Dominicans go to these, you know, Thomist Institute, did you meet a Dominican there when you were there? No. So how did you get hooked up with the Dominicans in DC?

After I returned from Afghanistan, this Swiss friend from the rugby team, Sam, he advised that I look up the Dominicans because he said they're very learned. I only knew about the Carmelites at the time, so I just googled Dominicans in Washington DC and then emailed them and said, hey I've already undergone some catechesis in Afghanistan and I want to convert. The prior actually, Father Aquinas Colboa met with me a few times and completed my catechesis. He corrected some of the misperceptions I had from my yogic thinking on some things, but in a way that was very good.

I mean, he had a lot of very interesting justifications for these things rooted in, especially, Aristotelian epistemology and philosophy, not only that. So it really helped to transform my thinking and get me to see just the wonder of all the well integrated theology that the Catholic Church bases everything on. I'm going to put this maybe offensively, but I think it's true. How did Aquinas sober you up from your yoga drunkenness? That's certainly accurate I mean a lot of the yogis were drunk frankly some of them

and There's one story I should tell you about drunken yogis is actually how Hatha yoga was founded, okay alright So first I'll say Aquinas was just very good because he's very grounded and no nonsense. He really brings a lot of specificity and he does it in a way that's so related to everything else. All these other systems that I was looking into before

had a part of the truth. They all had little bits of the truth and I was attracted to them because whatever I was studying before had some good things, but then I would get a little disillusioned with it because it would bring up new issues and problems once the old ones were solved. And then I'd say, oh, this next new thing

solves these other issues that I had before, but then a whole new crop of issues would come up. So each of them had a small portion of the truth, but failed as a complete system. Yeah. And I imagine too that as you're sort of assessing these different worldviews or schools of thought, they're all sort of joined together with this sort of mysterious nothing, which you just refer to in mystical language because there's nothing to connect it all together Yeah, there is just some vague notion of consciousness, right? Okay, you can be conscious of something, but I've no idea what to do with it

I mean I can be aware of an object, but it's another thing to interpret it. Yeah, it's another thing to form a Intention towards it and then it's another thing to actualize that intention So there are three very different things that all seem to have to happen but drunken yoga Alright, so this is the way that Hatha yoga was founded I remember that Hatha yoga is the most common form of yoga in the West right now The second most common form is Kundalini yoga. Okay, which is similar and they both stem from Kashmiri Shaavism. Let me take a step back and this will illustrate something very interesting. So Kashmiri Shaavism refers to Kashmir the place and then

Shaavism refers to Shiva. Shiva is one of their gods and he is the aloof first principle the the judge of everything That is similar to the father in our understanding there's an analogy to the father not saying he is the other of course The there's three other major strands of Hinduism Shaavism is one of the major large families of Hinduism and then there's three other major families of it. The second one is Shaktism. Shaktism is the pure flowing life force, the life energy, the giver of life that animates all of creation. That's similar to the Holy Spirit. Vaishnavism is the third one. They have the most impressive monastic tradition and they worship Vishnu who has incarnated several times depending on the sect in order to set things right on earth. So he's the God that comes down to redeem the earth that's similar to Christ. The fourth major branch of Hinduism, which isn't very prominent, is called Smartism.

That takes these three gods and then attempts to sort of integrate them in a Trinity-like structure, where there's Brahman and Atman, which are the... They're two slightly different terms, and I forget which one is the fundamental ground, but there's the fundamental sort of godhead, the essence of god and then these are the three persons of god but then they also tack on clumsily two other gods including Ganesh, the elephant god. So an elephant is one of the persons of god in Smartism, this last Hindu branch. That seems to me to parallel the Trinity in an interesting way. Of course, be very careful with these kinds of analogies, but I think what this is showing is just that there's some truth to its evidence for the Catholic Trinity, but because they didn't have the grace of revelation, because they didn't have God's grace, they couldn't arrive at a complete notion of it.

Okay. It's like Thomas Aquinas says, you can arrive at a understanding of God through natural reason, but you can't arrive at certain doctrines of the church otherwise. Yeah. This is probably says more about my baseness than anything but drunken yoga. So Kashmiri Shaavism. This is the Shaavism is the most common form of yoga and Kashmiri Shaavism I would say is the most impressive kind. It had its heyday around 1000 AD with this teacher named Abhinav Gupta but then the Muslims started to invade India after that and And that was a very, very difficult thing for the Indians. That's an understatement.

The Muslim invasion of India was one of the most brutal invasions in all of history. Conflict is my other major area, and I've studied lots of different types of conflict. The Muslim invasion of India was not pretty. One of the first places they invaded was Kashmir. This absolutely devastated the institutional support for Kashmiri Shaavism. They used to have impressive monasteries and impressive academic and theological discourse, but that devastated all that. So the Kashmiri Shaavistic gurus spread out to different parts of India. This is in the 12th and 13th century in India. One of them was named Matsyayandra.

Now, you remember how yoga is a lot about becoming more aware of different feelings and currents in the soul and then manipulating them for the purpose of your own awareness. Now that's very ruthlessly focused on your own awareness, on enhancing consciousness. And the ethics around it can be a little relativistic. They have some system of ethics but it's not as complete as the ones that we're used to. So what this guru did is he used his magical yoga occult powers to infiltrate a king's palace, seduce the king's wife, and then have his

way with the king's 1600 dancing girls. And also the king's wine supply. So he was cavorting with wine and women, and he was approached by a very ardent student named Garakshinath. The ardent student approached him without any judgment while the guru was cavorting with wine and women at the time and thereby gained initiation from the guru. Then Garakshinath brought the guru out of this state of affairs, killed the son that the guru had had with the queen, and then skinned the son, hence symbolizing yogic purification. Now after this rampage of murder, of fraud, of corpse desecration, of probable mass sexual slavery, probable mass rape, they

went on to found Hatha Yoga. Mason- This, the disciple and this other fella. David- Matsyayandra and Grakshnath, exactly. Mason- Yeah, and this is the foundings of yoga in the West. David- Very different than the foundations of Christianity. Yes. Christ came to sacrifice himself in order to raise us up,

whereas this guy just kind of errantly went trying to raise up his own personal power to empower himself and went into an errantness of drunkenness. So since I can't pronounce him, I'm just going to refer to him as this other fellow. So when you say he went into this kingdom and seduced the king's wife, you may have alluded to this, I missed it. But how did he even do that? How did he breach the kingdom?

So I looked up three different sources on this. A lot of it now is shrouded in mystery. One of the things I realized when I came to Catholicism is just how well documented our foundation is, especially vis-a-vis other sources of the ancient world. We've studied a lot of ancient history and we don't have nearly as many witnesses to a lot of other important events from the time period. And this is no exception in that there's not very good sources that get into a lot of specifics with it, but I looked it up in three different sources because I was so shocked by the story.

What it appears from these sources, and I am reading into them a little bit based on my experience with yoga, is that he was just able to manipulate his consciousness in such a way as to earn the trust of the king. When you are so attuned to the the currents in your soul and you have these technical these finally honed technical practices then it is possible at that point to just sort of convince people of things and gain their trust and to to do it in a way that

is very self-serving though. Okay. Well, that's fascinating. Had no idea. It gets into even darker areas. Let's do it. So sorry, that was to let's try this edit that out and I'll try it again. Let's do it.

We definitely should be zealous about getting this stuff out there because it is important for people to know. Yeah. Are we going back in time or forward in time? Forward in time. Okay. To more recent times. There's this figure called Alistair Crawley who died in 1962. He was a major inspiration of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s. He was very influential in that. He was probably the West's most powerful occultist of the past couple hundred years. He got his start by studying the same form of yoga

that I studied, Kashmiri Shaavism, as well as some advanced tantric Buddhism, as well as some neo-pagan religions. He actually thought that he was the recipient of revelation from Egyptian gods. His one rule is, do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law, love shall be the whole of the law.

Very Nietzsche-esque, about just doing whatever you will, doing whatever you desire. And this is a common thread in yoga, even if the more traditional ones would really look down on the way that he was doing this. Now a lot of his revelation actually has support for child sacrifice. And he ironically bragged about it. Where did this bloke live? He lived in the mostly in the first part of the 20th century.

So he died in 1962. And he's a man American. He was English. Okay. And then lived there. He traveled a good amount. Okay. But he was a yoga instructor. No. He was influenced a lot by yoga. Okay. So he's very much a figure like this Matsyandara. Okay. And a

lot of his occult powers came from studying the same form of yoga. He wasn't a formal yoga instructor. Okay. This is one of the other things that I was saying before, you know, there's a lot of complicated different strands in yoga. It's hard to tease all of them out with one another. But what happened is, is that he, a lot of these new left things like these neo-pagan religions got integrated with yoga by figures like Alistair Crowley. And that's the current form we're dealing with. Ah, yeah. So as if pure yoga wasn't bad enough, you now have it mixed with these

other sort of hedonistic and even demonic revelations. Definitely demonic. I mean, Alistair Crowley was mixing in with some weird things. And like I was saying, he was talking about child sacrifice. How was he talking about child sacrifice in a way that was palatable to people? So it was in a way where he just wanted to show a lot of disdain for Christianity. And at the time, that's when a lot of anti-Christian intellectual currents were gaining a lot of traction.

So he talked about it in the way of sort of mocking Christian views on procreation and sexuality. And a lot of people were starting to buy into this stuff at the time. You know, divorce laws were being liberalized. Before that, there was Schopenhauer who bragged, Schopenhauer said, for example that that peteresty you know bad relations with young with young boys is acceptable to avoid other worse evils for example and he was a major influence then on Freud and Nietzsche and other people like that so there were a lot of these intellectual currents that were starting to mock Christian sexual ethics.

And so that's how Aleister Crowley did it. And he bragged that when he was engaging in the conjugal act without the intent to procreating, that he was sacrificing children. It's how he did it. He was also a cocaine addict and a frequentor of prostitutes. He supported both nazism and communism at the same time because they had less of this Christian slave mentality that Nietzsche would say, they're more about personal empowerment and the strong dominating the weak and being free of these bad constraining structures that Christianity puts on people in his view. He had a lot of

influence on especially the neo-pagan strands in the the Cultural Revolution. There is a lot of music artists that pay homage to him. He's on one of the Beatles albums. David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, cite him as major influences. Say this bloke's name again. Alastair Crawley. Alastair Crawley. And is he, did he write anything? Is he often cited in modern Western yoga circles or is he more like the founder of Planned Parenthood? Who we'd like to pretend wasn't a raging racist wicked woman He's more like that but there are still some corners that cite his work and hold them up that the Gaia TV website for example is one of them and

That's gaining a good amount of traction in those types of circles But he doesn't have that much direct influence on the yoga world, but they were certainly influenced by a lot of his sort of occult and neo-pagan ideas. A lot of those came from him, I would say. Have you gotten the chance to perhaps go to India or at least study when you were kind of a yogi, did you have the chance to perhaps go to India or at least study when you were kind

of a yogi. Did you have the chance to study with people who weren't sort of tainted by that sort of more Western element? I did not have that much chance to do that. What I did do is I looked through some of the original sources and some people who were trying to revive a more traditional approach to it. And would you say that this more, I mean both are bad, I presume, but you would you say that this more traditional element is much much more less bad? It's less bad, yeah. There's still some weird things that happen in the traditional element, some weird areas that people go to,

like the story I told you about the foundation of yoga. What's interesting is if we take the Christian story seriously and accept that the demonic is a reality, then it isn't surprising that demonic forces would co-join in order to propagate a false gospel. That's what they do. I mean, they kind of, they're very good at taking things that seem good at the beginning. And that's what was happening with me was I was going through all these different systems and I would take some parts of the truth and it would help me at first. But then they're so good at then taking what starts off as a good and perverting it into something else. So when you stick with any of these things,

then I think eventually they start going down a really bad rabbit hole, even if they can be helpful for a time before that. Yeah, yeah. Saint Ignatius of Loyola makes this point in his spiritual exercise as well. Yeah, this is an important thing to realize. Just because something is helpful,

it doesn't mean it's good. You know, like something can be helpful. I mean, Aquinas talks about this, right? Like no one chooses evil because of evil. We choose evil because of an apparent good or a real good. You might think of say, alcohol, alcohol, right? Like you want a glass of beer, you want to take the edge off, you want to commune better with your friends. And this is a good thing. But it can lead to something wicked. Alcoholism, for example, drunkenness. Marxism rightfully points out a lot of the problems with capitalism, but then it leads down some really bad rabbit holes after that. Yeah.

Okay, are you okay if we take some questions, or is there anything else you wanted to touch on? I know this is such a massive topic, and I hope you're gonna write a book about this soon, or at least one day. I've started some writing. Yeah, certainly. I hope that this this can benefit the church. Well, it will indeed, because I before our interview,

if you had to say to me, what's wrong with yoga? I think I would have said something like, well, it's like a gateway drug. You know, like most people who are practicing yoga, it's not a big deal. They're stretching and I get the hesitancy or the reluctance to engage in it. But I didn't really, it just when people tried to argue against it, it was sort of like when people tried to argue against Harry Potter. I'm like, okay, maybe you're right. And Harry Potter is not great to read, but like the arguments you're giving aren't convincing me. But I think you've done a good job at just kind of stepping us back

and showing us why it is an issue. If I can convince you, I'm glad for that. Thomas Aquinas sets up steelmen, as you say, and that's really good to have. I mean, it is important to really put out good arguments. I was put off by Christianity at first because one of the reasons was that it seemed to just quibble over a lot of small theological issues in the public that didn't seem that important

with me, for me. But then I started to see that there is a real deep soul to the faith and the things that were written by the Carmelites especially, combined with the Dominican technical precision, were just amazing. Yeah, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Jesus prayer in the Orthodox Church. Yeah. But whenever you read a, well, not whenever, but a lot of the time when you read about the Jesus prayer, there is this condemnation of treating it as a technique, as a sort of pagan Eastern technique. a technique, as a sort of pagan Eastern technique. You know, so they're kind of like warning people against that. And I think that is a lot of people's attraction to it is when they

hear about the breathing and things like this, they assume that this is kind of like Buddhism or some form of Buddhist meditation, but for Christians. But you know, I mean, part of the reason for the breath is just so you don't have to use a prayer rope. So it's like, you know, I mean, part of the reason for the breath is just so you don't have to use a prayer rope. So it's like, you could use a prayer rope and you don't even have to worry about your breath is what a lot of kind of Eastern Orthodox priests or monks will say. But then if, you know, you don't have a prayer rope, well, then you can attach it to your inhaling and exhaling, but not in a sort of mechanistic sense.

Yes. There's a big danger in any of that technical sophistication that it should become a dry technical exercise. Yeah. That was one of the first things that started to make me question yoga at least and mindfulness is it did seem very dry and technical. So I was interested in what was really going on and what was more beyond it. And what was true. Yeah, what's true and at first I just realized that in order for these practices even to be effective and To make sense to do them you need to have some worldview some belief

You need to believe that it's important to empty yourself that divinity is emptiness Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to just sit and watch your breath. Yeah as a spiritual practice You can do that to improve your mind. Theoretical question. Somebody says to you, I'm going to start a Christian yoga studio. What do you say to them? And no, that's blending two things that are very contradictory to one another. You could found a Christian inspired physical exercise that does exercise or Pilates in a Christian light

that does it in a way that's more prayerful and that does it in a way that invites you to reflect on your body in in a good Christian way, so I think that there are a lot of good Christian practices that can fill a lot of the gaps that yoga has filled, that people view as missing from Christianity but isn't true. For example, the Carmelites have great contemplative prayer and recollection like we were just talking about. And then another area that I found is in scripture, I realized that there's a good amount of references

to your relationship to your body, for example. It'd be very easy just to do Lectio Divina on those. I have one written that I've talked about with my fiance that's called The Body of Mary, where I meditate on different things that she happened and sort of the emotions that she must have been feeling when she did the visitation, things like that. And there'd be a good, another good one for men

based on Christ. Now, I just assume this must exist, though I don't know for sure, I haven't looked into it, but there must be people out there who have been like, all right, yoga, I get the problem with it, so I'm gonna create essentially a Christian yoga where I come up with certain movements and sort of associate them with maybe the Bible or like, you know, the resurrection and people are doing things with their arms and hands and things like this. That's got to exist, does it? I don't know. I promise it must. It has

to exist. You know, I think you're not sure. You're not sure you think it doesn't. know promise it must it has to you know, I think you're not sure you're not sure you think it doesn't I Promise it exists you type in Christian yoga. I there's someone somewhere Making bank and even not in a negative sense just kind of making living by so is that a problem? If you then brought in explicit yoga things, then it would not be a problem But if you brought explicit yoga things, then it would be a problem and it not be a problem. But... If you brought explicit yoga things, then it would be a problem? Then it would be a problem. Yes, it would be a problem, certainly. If you called it Christian yoga,

or just did any yoga intentionality, or called the pose Vrbhad Asana. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because then you're invoking... What if you're using Latin terms? Yeah, that would be a good way to do it. Okay, so there's a way to do it. But yeah, but I see what you mean.

Like Christian yoga, I mean, it's kind of like, once you realize the origins of yoga and the Hinduism with which it's associated, not to mention these other things, you might just wanna stay away from the term yoga. Yes. Yeah. Yoga, the term means to yoke. And you are yoking yourself to something spiritually,

even if you don't subjectively intend to do that. Okay. Just not the best things. Yeah. Okay, thanks. That's really helpful. All right, we might take some questions, Neil. Okay, so we have a question from Adosaphiosis. Yeah, my boy, Derek.

They are asking, why is it that my son goes to an evangelical church, preschool, and they sometimes do do kids yoga as an exercise. Could I be concerned? Can I hear your voice through that? Do I need to repeat it? He's asking about he sends his kid to a evangelical kid Christian school and his kids are doing yoga.

They have kids yoga. Kids yoga. Was it as an exercise. Should he be concerned? Yes, definitely. There is room for... For all the reasons you've said. I mean it's pretty clear at this point in the interview. Yes, there's room for doing slower exercise through Pilates and that would be good for children but not yoga. Here's a question from Ruth.

Yeah, for you, Alex, how does coming to the church change the way you look back at your military service and deployments or your time abroad? Reformulate the question in your answers for those who didn't hear that. The way in which coming to the church has made me reinterpret my military experiences, has made me look back on them. That's a really good question. On the one hand, in the military we were fighting for some of the vestiges of Christian civilization that remained.

We were fighting to bring liberal democracy and some of the Christian elements that make it work in a good way. And also the military definitely did help me to come to Christianity for some of the reasons I was discussing. It showed me the value of servant leadership, for example. That was one of the things that really inspired me once I started to learn more about Catholicism. I saw the importance of servant leadership in the military,

and then I realized the person who invented servant leadership is Jesus. He was the one that said, no, we really have to lead in a strong way. He wasn't just pandering to his followers. He was really trying to bring them to something more But he was doing it in a way where he served them where he wasn't just being a tyrant who looked down on them from on high Now at the same time there there were some bad influences in the military Especially from the hedonistic side and a lot of the counter-cultural revolution that make me glad that I'm not in it anymore.

Yeah. I didn't ask this but I'm interested. Your family and friends from prior to this, did they go to your baptism? How did they take it? A lot of sure that's gonna be hard hey when they think it might be part of a continuum of choices. Yes.

But you have solid friends in the faith who know that you've arrived. Now I feel like I really come home. Glory to Jesus Christ, man. That's beautiful. By His grace. And also with the military experience, I can look back now and see that there were times

where God definitely intervened in my life then in a big way. We, in Afghanistan on my first tour, we took a suicide bomber who is just about 15 or 20 meters away from us when he detonated, but I could, I'm certain that God was with me then. And there are other things that I don't think I could have accomplished except for him intervening in my life at that time. As an Australian, I'm interested in what you think or what how you feel when people say to you, thank you for your service. Is that how do you take that? Um, I think that services is something that should be done more as with humility, with service.

more as with humility, with service. So it's not good to be too brazen with it. There is some of that nowadays. Do you remember the advertisement of from Budweiser about that guy coming home and then his fiance or something had organized an entire parade for him just because he came home from deployment. So it was this ad that was maybe, it was about seven or eight years ago, I would say. And everyone in the military hated that guy because it was just kind of singling out him as this grand, do is very in your face thank you that was too much and actually he was also violating uniform standards in the advertisement which a lot of people didn't realize he was missing his rank on his uniform and was wearing a jacket that you're only allowed to wear on the the aviation flight line so that kind of overly grandiose stuff is bad it's important to remind

soldiers their humility sometimes. But the gratitude on behalf of the American people is something you think that should be encouraged? Authentic gratitude is a great part of Christianity as well, and that is something that should be encouraged. I mean, military people do make a lot of sacrifice to commit themselves to fighting the good fight, to doing important work. Thomas Aquinas actually was very big on this.

This is one of the areas where he departed from a lot of other Christian theologians in saying that some of these acts that people do by the natural law, even if they're not ordering them to God and they're not doing them with perfect charity, they still have some merit to them. They have a lot of virtue to them, which he attracted a lot of criticism for in his day. And like I was saying, that gratitude shouldn't be too grandiose. You know, Christ makes a lot of references to okay if you do these good things if you fast don't then just look all Low so that everyone can see that you're fasting don't sound your trumpets. Yeah the marketplace about it. Gotcha. Thanks

Anything else Neil it came through Thanks Jacob. Have you read or heard of the gurus, the young man and elder Asios? I think you'd be super interested in it. It's really good. I haven't heard of that, but there is a lot to be said about gurus. So it's a good suggestion to talk about that because the the guru student relationship is a very weird one And I don't know the criticism that that kind of book makes But even in the traditional way of doing yoga The guru actually takes over your karma So the karma is kind of the residue in your character from the actions that you've done,

the effects in your soul. It's analogous maybe to character in a way. When you gain initiation from a guru in the tradition, he actually takes control of your karma. And then you're supposed to revere him as if he is Shiva embodied in Kashmiri Shaavism. So that led to a lot of cultish dependency issues where yogis were really turned in on themselves on their little guru clique

in weird ways. Christopher Wallace, one of the yoga instructors I was citing earlier, who's also a professor, he has criticized this in saying that it's just led to a lot of guru self-absorption. People have absorbed their entire selves into a guru that many of the gurus have been happy to go along with. So it's very much incompatible with the Western and Christian way of forming a good identity and then uniting that to God.

That's one of the key distinctions between us and yoga. We aim to build up a healthy sense of self, healthy ego. Ego is a pretty neutral term. It just means I. St. Augustine mentions it in the Confessions just offhand as something that's kind of a given. Okay, we all have a sense of self. Hopefully it is more attuned to what's actually going on. One of the bad things about pride is it makes us very self-inflated in thinking we're way better than we are and we can do everything by ourselves. But the ego itself isn't bad. Prideful ego is good, is bad. Humble ego is good. A lot of the ways that Eastern thought has infiltrated a lot of the secular discourses through these types of terms of just saying that the ego is bad, the ego is bad. This wasn't even prominent in someone like Freud who tried to

Who tried to build up a healthy ego? He contrasted the ego with the id and it was kind of the refuge of all the bad Our weird desires and everything like that. So he was trying to build a more integrated ego. Yeah Before we go to maybe a final question. I'm not sure how many we got there. I got to say thanks to our advertiser Exodus 90. Have you heard of Exodus 90? I have. That's very good stuff. Did you ever do it?

I haven't done it, but I've done some similar practices. Yeah. I think like as somebody who's been into the ascetical life and someone who's been in the military, it probably appeals to you because of its severity. Yes. So for those who aren't aware, Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men, where for 90 days, you and a small band of brothers read through the book of Exodus, and you live a profoundly intentional Christian life. You're praying for an hour a day,

you're giving up hot showers. That was the worst part about it for me, I'll be honest. hot showers. That was the worst part about it for me, I'll be honest. You're giving up sweets and alcohol entirely. It's hard, but it's really great. I would encourage people to click the link in the description below, Exodus90.com slash Matt, Exodus90.com slash Matt. Click the link below so they know that we sent you. They also have a great program throughout Advent. So we're already into Advent, but maybe you're like, man, I should be doing more with my Advent. Well, it's not too late. Exodus90.com slash Matt. And they have modified the sort of ascetical practices that you would do in a

actual 90 day block to make it a little easier for you. For example, I don't think there are cold showers, so go check it out. They've put a lot of money into the app and I'm so proud of them for it. It used to be the case that we would say it's good for a Catholic app or good for whatever. But this is this is really good stuff. So go check them out. The other thing is that a whole host of men like thousands of men are going to be beginning Exodus 90, I think January 17th, men are going to be beginning Exodus 90, I think January 17th, so that they can end on Easter Sunday. So right now is the time, I think, to make that decision so that you, along with these

thousands of men, can journey together towards Easter to become a better man. Exodus 90, that's exodus90.com slash Matt. Link is in the description below. Check them out and seriously consider it. I did it with a group of men, was it last year or the year before? It was so traumatic that I've just basically gotten rid of it out of my subconscious. But yeah, I would really recommend people check that out. Yeah. Cool. This is going to sound like another ad and it's not meant

to be, but you've heard of Halo? Yes. The reason I bring it up is I interviewed the founder of Halo, and he was into Buddhism too. And he got into it because of that mindfulness app. And I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about, but a Buddhist runs it. Could you look that up, that app? Not Calm. It's something else.

But yeah, Calm is another one of these ones where I started getting into that back when I had a smartphone because it was just legitimately helpful. And you start noticing some, oh, that's a bit weird. Like the kind of language that they start using. It starts getting. They really are trying to bring you to a radical theological shift. The claims that they make are calm specifically.

I don't know too much about calm. shift. The claims that they make are radical. Calm specifically? I don't know too much about calm. Sure. But these types of apps. These types of apps, especially when they start talking about the badness of the ego and when they talk about how awareness is everything that you need to cultivate, that's a really radical theological claim that they're making. They present it as if they're not trying to convert you, but again, marketing. Hmm, yeah.

Whereas that is a really radical thing to say, and that does induce a major change in your thinking if you actually buy into it, maybe without you even realizing what's going on, which is the definition of a conversion. What's the impetus to evangelize in Hinduism? And you know, like you're saying it's this marketing that sort of veils the sort of desire to convert. I see why one would do that in Christianity if you believe that Jesus Christ is God or that he's commissioned you to do that. You're called to do that. You should do that. You also want to see people flourish, you know. What's the impetus to evangelize, as it were,

in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition? Like we were saying earlier with Aquinas, there's always some kind of natural good that can get perverted. Yeah. It's natural that when we realize something of the truth that we want to share it with others. You know, it's kind of selfish just to hide out in your own cave if you've cultivated some deep wisdom,

as in a lot of secular societies, tending in that direction where people just kind of hide wisdom themselves or they share it only for a lot of money from other people. But the Church realizes it's a great act of service to share the truth that you've developed, to develop it in a rigorous way with other people first, and then to teach it and evangelize it. So I think there is a little bit of that just natural impetus in it, but then it gets mixed up in a lot of these other shellfish motivations of looking to avoid the rigors of Christianity, to subvert its place in the society, and then to also gain a lot of money.

It's become quite an industry. Yeah, just yesterday I was unfortunately, yet accidentally listening to NPR, turned on their annoying voices. And they were sort of of I guess what happened yesterday with the row overturning row thing did you I didn't follow the news right so so there's roe versus wade thing is being threatened right yes in some capacity and the bullshit that these NPR hosts were spewing was remarkably deceptive. Just the way they talk about child

sacrifice and the rights that women have to sacrifice their children, to pay hitmen to kill their children. The absolute layer and layer upon crap that they have to indoctrinate you with to make child sacrifice impalatable. And the way they have to demonize those who would say you probably shouldn't kill innocent humans. It is remarkable. And all this, I think, you know, like if you've bought into that lie, that demonic lie, and yet you've been made for more than the merely material. You can see why things like Buddhism and Hinduism become attractive and I'm not there by you know

Speaking negatively of every practitioner of these religions. They may have the same horror that I do an outrage. I do for abortion No, that was one of the spiritual dynamics I came to realize especially looking into a lot of the neo-pagan religions, was anytime you gain something spiritually, there's a sacrifice that needs to be made. You need to leave behind a little bit of your selfishness, some of your smallness to gain new things, to possess new things. In Christianity, that's first a gift from God and it's made possible by Christ's sacrifice first and foremost even though we suffer a lot. Now that does

bring out a lot of suffering when you lose those things. When that's something that you're just doing for your own power, a lot of times they demand sacrifice from other people in order to raise themselves up. So I came to think of abortion as basically like a child's sacrifice on the altar of personal convenience. Amen, that's what it is. Yeah, that's what it is. It's disgusting and despicable, and it's worse than you think that it is

because you don't know the dignity of every human being. You don't even know the dignity of one human being and that Christ Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, shed his blood for that soul and we sacrifice them at the altar of supposed sexual liberation like it's it's absolutely repugnant anyway sorry just thought I no need to apologize that's so what's what's the future look like for you you're living in DC with your beautiful fiancee. Yes We're going to move to Denver. Okay, and I am applying now to get a master's degree at the Augusta Institute

Sweet man, awesome. We're also interested in the community be attitudes. Yes. Good. My next-door neighbors are part of that community Would you believe that from England? Okay, is this where it found it was founded in England was founded in France Yeah, France is what I meant. Sorry. that's what I meant. Jacques Philippe. Father Jacques Philippe. I gotta introduce you to these people who live a couple doors down if you'd be into that. Yeah. They would love to meet you. Sounds good. They're beautiful souls. I mean, he teaches theology. He's a doctor. He teaches theology at the university. And it's so beautiful when you see Christians who love Jesus. You know what I'm saying? Like, he teaches theology and every day him and his wife go take a holy hour. They've got like four, five kids, take a holy hour and then get coffee together. They're just, they're so in love with their

Lord. The community of Beatitudes really tries to bring more cultural integration, to bring lay into a real authentic spiritual life. And also, they do a lot with the Eastern rites. And they do it with a very Carmelite inspiration. And is this prominent in Denver? They have their main house in the US in Denver. Okay. Their only house in the US. My fiance spent nine months with them, three months in Israel and six months in France in a monastery. Glory to God man. We're excited about that and then I'm discerning what I want to do with that.

I want to do some kind of church service. I'm interested in maybe church administration, but I'm also interested in apologetics and writing on some of the things that we're discussing now. Well, you really do have, you know, firsthand experience of this in a way that a lot of people in the church wouldn't. So that would be such a gift for us. I hope I can warn others about it. And I certainly wouldn't recommend this path

that I've been onto others, but there are a lot of good things to learn about it. Some positive things, like I was saying, about doing Lectio Divina based on more bodily things to live more embodied and to recognize the dignity of the body in a way that's rigorous, still maintains Christian chastity and does it for Christian purposes. That doesn't just evolve into a way of sort of idolizing the body and empowering yourself.

Are you findable online somewhere? If people wanted to maybe get in touch with you or see some of the stuff you've written, is there somewhere you'd point them? I don't have much that's written online, a few articles in Small Wars Journal and one about the abuse crisis, talking about how along with some of these sexual issues I learned about in yoga and Buddhism, I mean I realized there was also tons of problems with child abuse. One of the the Hare Krishna cardinal equivalents, he was the top of the religion in the US, actually was convicted of sexually abusing minors, then he was indicted for hiring a hit man

to try and silence the people who were accusing him of this. And then there was tons of other problems in other areas as well. So I wrote an article about that. I'd certainly be happy to share my email. Would you? Yeah. All right, are you sure you wanna do this?

I'll give it to you and share it some other way. You can share it, I can put it in the description below. But just so you know, when Jacob Imam was on my show, he said he got 400 emails over the course of a few weeks. So if you wanna do it, we can do it, man. But I have exams in the next upcoming week, but maybe later I should have time. All right. And so that we could discuss that.

Yeah. And if you agree, we'll put it in the description below. Yeah, I'm certainly interested in connecting with more people who are interested in these kinds of things and talking about how to bring good, good Christian practices, but also educate people on the dangers of this. Now where would, since you know, the Lord hasn't, it doesn't seem he's called you, at least at this point, to begin a sort of apostolate and educating people about this. If someone was out there like, okay, where can I learn more about the problems with yoga? Is there a place you'd point them to online?

There's one secular discouts Carmelite who has written a few articles on this and she didn't practice it but she has some pretty well-written things okay that talk about it. Do you know her name? If we think of she's on the website women of grace She's written a few articles about that Okay So so that's one good area to look if and she recommends brother Lawrence from the Carmelite tradition Mm-hmm as a good antidote to that. He had a good sense. I didn't realize he was a Carmelite Yeah practice the presence of God right practice the presence of God. Yeah, I

Think of him as sort of a masculine version of st. Teresa this year. Yeah, it's very little way. Yeah In your journeys, have you become familiar at all with? father Richard raw a little bit Would you be interested to know that I went on his mail initiation rite of passage in New Mexico? I Am interested to know about it Yeah, yeah, you know enough to be interested. I don't want to tell you something. You don't really care about

Yeah, gosh he's one of these guys who's like such a gifted, gifted presenter. And he speaks with, I think, a real authority. And he also says many things that are just incredibly helpful. But it's also intermingled with a sort of, what do you say, edgeless mysticism, Christianity that blends into other things. It sort of seems like, I'm not sure if the critiques against the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, I'm not sure how much stock I should put in those objections because I haven't

really looked into it. But he seems to sort of be running in that direction. And it was a problematic conference for many reasons. I've seen some of his talks where he talks about the dualism of the Christian tradition. Right. And those are very problematic. I mean, yoga goes in mindfulness as well,

and Buddhism go in one of two directions, extreme dualism or extreme non-dualism. Dualism is where there's only formless, eternal stillness, awareness, and everything else is a mere illusion. And then non-dualness is where they say, all right, this stuff is actually real, but its true nature is illusionary,

and that its true nature is actually consciousness. Everything is consciousness. And people like St. John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas have dealt with this with incredible precision. John of the Cross says that, even though the soul appears to be God, because so much of God's light is shining through it but it remains ontologically different and its actual

being it remains it substantially different yeah it's like having a window where the sunlight is shining through it and the glass is so pure that you can mistake the window for the light source exactly it just appears to be pure light but the window is still different than the light yeah cool oh shit we have a super chat about related but I could be wrong about like crystals rock crystals that's really some rock crystal this is where some of the yoga stuff gets mixed in with the neo-pagan things. There's a lot of different interpretations of the extent to which they bring in a lot of the old traditional Hindu pagan beliefs. Some of the modern traditions like Kashmir Shaavism are monotheistic, so they don't give much credence to things like this, but then there is a lot of this traditional animistic magical things where they attribute some spiritual being to things like rocks or planets, which is astrology. Astrology by the way is very common in secular society and they're claiming their stuff is not anti science

But then they have a horoscope column the basis of which is that the planets have some spiritual quality to them Yeah, and their position relative to us then affects our soul spiritually. Yeah in some way that's pretty anti science and and I mean That's pretty anti-science and and I mean When you look at something like a rock or a crystal it can change your soul just from your appreciation of beauty Of it. There's a really good understanding of beauty in the Catholic tradition about how it can bring your soul into a good state and Being in cathedrals was one of the things that helped influence my conversion Wow

Because it was such a still pure feel to it, you know, I was meditating and Becoming sensitive to these things, but at the same time it wasn't one that was just kind of hanging out there It was also trying to lift me up towards something more. I could feel I didn't understand what that was at the time but now I know what it is the beatific vision and union with God and the kingdom of heaven but so it's certainly rocks can affect your feelings in a certain way yeah but to attribute magical powers to them and things like that I'm also seeing this sort of idea in doTERRA and other essential oil people. I'm not saying doTERRA specifically, but you know what I'm saying about the oils? People have all these like random things.

Yeah. I've encountered Christians who are like, no, this helps with depression and this helps with cancer. I'm like, OK, but like, does it though? Because... So there's some validity to some naturopathy and those might have some effects. It's just natural healing techniques. St. Hildegard of Bingen was a naturopath herself. People are still making her cookie recipes, a thousand years almost after she died. And there's no marijuana in those cookies, is it? a thousand years almost after she died and... There's a marijuana in those cookies, isn't there?

No. She would have been anti-drug, certainly. Talk about a power woman. She was a composer, a natural historian, the precursor to biology, a mystic, a theologian, and a naturopath. And people are still reading her writings and things like that almost a thousand years later. Whereas in Kashmiri Shabism, there was one lineage founded by a woman one main lineage, but

It's extinct and we don't have any of her writings anymore. They didn't maintain any of it. Hmm, but Naturopathy can have some validity to it, but a lot of that stuff can devolve into superstition. Yeah Well, it's interesting. I mean, I, if you want to categorize it this way, I know some people don't like the term supernatural, but I mean, if you wanted to categorize it that way, you've got like the natural way things are, and then there's a supernatural way. Like those are the only options. And so if lavender oil is going to cure me of depression, there's either a scientific sort of basis for this, like a basis in the material world, or it's supernatural. And that's the problem when people start going into these things like reflexology and other things like this where people

are talking about the spiritual world. It's not Christianity they're talking about. No. And there's like, there's good and bad. There's no like medium. So it's either demons or angels and so... This all gets back to the division between the spiritual and the worldly. In non-dual yoga and Buddhism, they fuse those two together so it can lead to a lot of these things of overly attributing spiritual causes to things that are just natural and getting lost in spiritual things. Whereas then there's too much dualism where you think that spiritual things are completely divorced from the world

Yeah, we as Thomas Aquinas say we ride the mean yes between those in Christianity so there's still very important differences between the spiritual and the worldly and Things that make sense in the spiritual world like having a lot of suffering might not make sense in worldly logic That's a common hang up that people have sense and worldly logic that's a common hang up that people have but they are integrated with one another at the same time and ultimately we our whole purpose in life is to unite ourselves with the divine mmm I mean Alex thank you so much for taking the effort to come down here and be on the show thank you for having me on I appreciate it cool