Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Buddhist Enlightenment: Impermanence, No Self, and the Dark Night of the Soul

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 28, 2021 Breht is joined by Dr. Daniel M. Ingram, author of "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", to discuss what Enlightenment is in the Buddhist tradition, what it feels like from the inside, what it can and cannot offer the individual and society, spirituality and mysticism on the fascist right, perennialism, the adaptability of capitalism, tips and advice for starting a spiritual journey, and so much more! Check out Daniel's website: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/ His book "MTCB" (free): https://www.mctb.org/ Dharma Overground: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/ The EPRC: https://theeprc.org/ ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I have a wonderful episode for you today. It's with Daniel M. Ingram, who is the author of mastering the core teachings of the Buddha, the founder of the Dharma Overground, and all around Buddhist, thinker, intellectual, practitioner, etc. We discuss a lot of things that it's hard to find guests to discuss. You almost have to have somebody that has been on. the path for so long that has achieved, you know, awakening within the Buddhist context to have, you know, honest, open, and precise conversations about what enlightenment is, what it feels

like from the inside. Why is it worth pursuing? After answering a bunch of those questions, we get into a lot of other stuff. You know, Daniel's also a leftist, and so we discuss politics, we discuss spirituality on the fascist right. We discuss capitalism, what meditation and even enlightenment can offer in terms of a socialist or emancipatory political project and what it can't offer, you know, what its limitations are. I think there's so much in here that deconstructs over-romanticized and over-idealized notions around what enlightenment is, and I think that's incredibly important, while also offering, you know, its full benefits because there are many to be had. And if there weren't, people wouldn't pursue

these spiritual practices. Daniel is also a perennialist, if you will, which means that he believes that the mystical traditions in all religions, right, mystical Judaism, mystical Christianity, Sufism and Islam, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. All more or less point in the same direction. And we get into a little bit of that and the debate surrounding it because that's not of you that everybody within the spiritual community shares. So I'm not going to give too much more away. Just suffice to say it's an absolutely fascinating conversation with a fascinating, kind and deeply intelligent human being.

And if you like this conversation, he has lots more podcasts out there. You can definitely search his name in any podcast app and get more of his stuff, which is something I'm certainly very into. and once I got a taste of what he was about, I got very into all of his podcast appearances, as well as his book mastering the core teachings of the Buddha. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful discussion with Daniel Ingram about Buddhist enlightenment and the intersection between meditation, enlightenment, and politics. Enjoy.

My name is Dr. Danube. Daniel Ingram, and I'm a retired ER physician, who is now the board chair and acting CEO of Emergence Benefactors, a new charity to help promote medical research and other things related to getting awareness of meditation and mystical and spiritual-related effects into the clinical and psychotherapeutic mainstream. So they are empowered to have some functional understanding of those through good science and data-driven methods. And I also created something called the Dharma Overground, which is an online forum, an open forum where people talk about their various meditation experiences. I wrote a book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the

Buddha, now out in its second edition, as well as co-authored with Shannon Stein, a book called The Fire Casina. And I also am helping to organize something called the EPRC or the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. which is a large multi-disciplinary research group who's going to do similar work to emergence benefactors and the charity is designed to support them. So that's kind of a long answer. But that's the short story. And then obviously there's a lot more.

Yeah, absolutely. And towards the end, we'll revisit the ERPC because I want to talk about that in light of the rest of our conversation. I think it's really interesting. So, you know, I'm a huge fan of your work. I love your down-to-earth approach when it comes to talking about this stuff. Thanks. A lot of the interviews you do are certainly more inside the community, deeper dives.

This is more of a general audience, but I think this conversation will be really interesting to my listenership as well. So let's just start with a basic discussion surrounding enlightenment or awakening or whatever you want to call it. I think there's lots of misconceptions about what exactly that is, et cetera. but let's just start with maybe your personal journey. Can you just talk a little bit about your journey through meditation and spirituality and kind of just outlined the path you took towards your own enlightenment?

Sure, yeah. So obviously the word is used a whole lot of different ways by a whole lot of different people. And I'm not here to, in a sort of a term war's kind of way to defend one definition or another, say this is the only correct definition or the only correct criteria or anything like that. Because, you know, obviously lots of people are free to use these words. wherever they find skillful and helpful in suiting their aesthetics and everything. But for my own life, I started having actually some interesting sort of meditative experiences when I was a really young kid, and then those went away.

And then as a young teenager, just playing around with flying dreams and trying to do some home-brewed visualization stuff to try to have better flying dreams. I ended up in what I later found out was sort of considered real, quote-unquote, territory described in old texts and things, and had my consciousness explode and traveled out of body and floated through the wall of my bedroom out over the driveway and things like that. And then got very philosophical and sort of existentially obsessed and obsessed with things like quantum physics and the weirdness of that and, you know, wave particle dualities and how those might apply to consciousness and that kind of thing. And then I continued to have a series of

strange experiences, including like my body becoming an energy vortex when dancing in a club one time and other stuff like that. And eventually ran into some people who had some idea what these things were and something about what to do with them that was skillful. These happen to be people in the Theravad and Vipassan, a tradition influenced by a guy named Mahasi Saidau, who was a monk who lived in Myanmar, or then it was Burma in the 20th century, who was sort of a very popular, something of a reformer and or reviver of insight meditation practices, particularly for lay people, something of a controversial figure as well. Anyway, but they had a lot of really great maps, and those maps were super inspiring, and the techniques that they taught me were also

able to reproducibly create what was on the maps, though I actually learned about the maps after I had had a whole lot of the effects. So it wasn't a question of scripting. It was just a question of, wow, they know what they're talking about. And since then, I had learned that them and lots of other people have reproducible spiritual technologies that actually lead to all kinds of cool effects, sometimes as described, sometimes sort of as described, sometimes not really as described at all, but you can sort of see kind of why they described it that way from a sort of propagandistic advertising point of view. And as I did more and more retreats, influenced by a bunch of people, including Hindu Vedanta and Thai forest and some people who were trained in

Zen and Vajriana and Mahayana practices and ended up reading stuff about Taoism, Sufis, and Christian mystics and all that, through this sort of amalgam of things and a lot of intensive practice, I realized that, hey, you can actually upgrade your consciousness. You can actually change something in your perception from modes that feel by comparison sort of irritated or seemingly wrong, which is not a very nice word to use, but that describes something of a feeling like before it felt like something was off and afterwards it felt like something was less off or then in some ways kind of entirely not off. And something in the problematic nature of duality that causes the mind to imagine it's this stable little thing in space somewhere

constantly being tossed around by thoughts and feelings and pleasure and pain and habits and all that can actually dissolve and realize it never was anything like what it thought it was and instead is just a bunch of transient immediate sensations happening now, which from an experiential point of view and those who are philosophically minded will notice actually is very much in line with what people such as, say, David Hume, the great British empiricist would say or the rest of the British empiricists and people influenced by their work as well. as plenty of other spiritual traditions that, you know, this is the only moment. There is time is an illusion. It's created by thoughts and thoughts of past and future that arise now and are transient and insubstantial and either a true self or a no self or however you want to phrase it, you know, that you can dissolve into the love of God or dissolve into emptiness or realize your true nature or, you know, pick your favorite terms for it. It turns out those things are actually doable by some people through various types of techniques. And that is the really cool thing. And so then I was lucky enough to find communities of people who also were into this

kind of stuff. And it turns out that plenty of other people can, you know, noticed a similar thing about the traditions that in my youth I would have thought were, you know, fanciful religions with interesting, hilarious promises that were probably entirely mythical and maybe they know something about calming down. Yeah, I was totally wrong in my ignorance. And so I was really happy to discover that it turns out these things are doable and largely reproducible. And so that's what I spend a lot of time one way or another in my life relating to these days, either from a scientific clinical point of view or just helping people on the path point of view or just hanging out with friends who like talking about this tough point of view. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. And you mentioned multiple spiritual traditions.

We've done episodes on Sufism within Islam, Christian mysticism, et cetera. But would you say the bulk of your path was within Buddhism itself and even more so within the Theravada tradition within Buddhism? Yeah, that's definitely true. Although if you look at my shelf and the people I've hung out with and talked with, it's still quite eclectic. And I should throw in various strains of magic, neo-pagan, traditional ceremonial, grimoic, etc., you know, Greek magical papyriac going on back. So I've actually come from a lot of traditions. And at one point, I was a, you know, a fervent Presbyterian and actually got a lot of benefit out of hanging out in that community as well with its emphasis on service and kindness and all that. So, yeah, so it's been a fascinating journey and clearly influenced as well by the tradition of academic, scientific, materialist, critical skepticism. So all of these somehow combined to produce whatever I am now and lots more, obviously. Yeah, wonderful. Now, two things you said in that answer just, I just want to make sure to clarify for listeners. You mentioned maps and you mentioned intensive practice.

I was hoping that you could elaborate a little bit on what each of those things mean in the context you're using them. Yeah, so intensive practice for me generally means, you know, when you get the dose above like five to six hours a day of formal meditation. And for a lot of my practice, when I'm on retreat, I like the 10 to 16 hour per day range. And I've spent over a year of my life doing that at this point, been on a lot of different retreats of various durations, the longest of which was a month long. And in various monasteries and meditation centers and just rented huts on the beach. beach and stuff like that and castles in Europe and things. So it's been a fun time. And so that's what intensive practice is. And that usually some alternation of sitting and walking in the traditions I tend to come from, you know, often like our sitting, hour walking or something

kind of like that, depending on the retreat structure, which have varied. And the techniques have varied a lot as well. So then, what was the second question? Just maps. What those mean? Oh, yeah, maps. So maps, it turns out that this stuff is weirdly pretty predictable. So there are some people who really don't like maps such as, you know, some of the Zen kids and stuff. And I get why they don't because they can cause all kinds of problems of comparison. And they're not all perfect. And they don't always unfold exactly like they're supposed to. And competition and judgment and, you know, all that, the problems that sort of ladders of attainment and scoring systems and all of that can do. But phenomenologically, it turns out, you know, people who have been meditating for thousands of years for countless thousands of hours for countless thousands of have figured out that there is something oddly reproducible to how a lot of people, though not necessarily quite everyone, go through the progression of the deepening development of attention. And they've also figured out reproducible stages and states that are relatively well described, again, still some controversy and debates over language and all of that and

proper criteria. But that's okay. It's kind of part of the fun. But there are reproducible states and stages and perceptual transformations that people can reproducibly do or achieve or realize or however you want to put it through various techniques. Now, there's a wide variation in dose dependency in how susceptible or unsusceptible people are to insights or magical experiences or deep states of concentration. Clearly, there's a wide range of talent, as was noted back in the day in the old, you know,

2,000-year-old or so books that talk about this stuff. But, you know, the cool thing is from an empirical point of view, in both senses of the word, as in Humian empiricism and scientific empiricism, one can experientially do the experiment and notice that, ah, one can actually learn to see thoughts as thoughts, one can see them come and go, one can dissolve one's body into energy, one can cross through dark nighty, you know, knowledge of suffering territory, one can get out to vast, expansive states of flowing easy equanimity that, and then, you know, permanently,

seemingly upgrade one's consciousness in the way one perceives reality in ways that are beneficial and provide not only some curiously, experientially satisfying answers to a lot of previously vexing existential questions, but also create hopefully generally better and clearer relationship to the sensations that make up thoughts, emotions, everyday experiences, and provides something of a perspective that simultaneously appreciates the brilliant immediate richness of reality and all its fullness, and its profoundly transient, empty aspects as well, or dreamlike aspects or whatever. So something that somehow paradoxically seems to achieve something of the best of both worlds, though is still obviously limited by the facts of birth and having been born into this

material body, which is obviously mortal and subject to conflict, sickness, decay, and death. Absolutely. Well said. So let's go ahead and talk about what enlightenment actually means. And so, you know, I want to talk about how you experience it on the phenomenological level. But first, I just want to kind of bring it to the conceptual level and abstract level. How would you describe enlightenment on that level for those who know little to nothing about it? And maybe you might want to mention the three insights as well. Sure. Well, starting super simply, you know, hopefully people have all noticed that thoughts come and go.

Our thoughts come and go. In fact, all of our experiences come and go moment to moment, while there is. clearly something of the sense of continuity, I look at the computer monitor, I look at the way, you know, I look away, I look back at the computer monitor. While it's a little bit different because the, you know, the colors have moved and the wave form that I'm recording has moved on, it seems to be basically kind of the same thing, right? So there's this sense of continuity, and we learn sort of something of object permanence very early in our development, and it seems so true, and it's obviously incredibly useful for functioning in the world. However,

it turns out an experiential level, if one begins to question this assumption in an extremely radical way and an experientially very complete way and begins to dissect everything that one believes is actually truly a stable self, such as all of one's intentions to perform actions, all of the mental impressions that, you know, occur somewhere in the head, these little wispy echoes of previous phenomena that seem to actually be the knowledge of them. One comes to notice, wait a second, our intentions actually arise on their own. Our mental impressions that seem to be the consciousness or knower of phenomena actually are nothing like the phenomena that they seem to pretend to know. And in fact, if we go far enough

into this, we come to such radical conclusions as the profound and hardwired experiential direct knowledge that all thoughts of past occur as thoughts now that are transient. All thoughts of future occur as thoughts now that are transient. All things in this moment are so transient is to be so utterly and substantial is to not be able to sustain the sense that there even is a continuous self in all of this anywhere. And something in that paradoxically does not destroy the ordinary capability to function in the world with a functional sense of past and future and self. But it does in some profoundly transformative and very helpful healing and clarifying way

destroy something of the problem of existential or spiritual crisis that somehow this self that seems to be in here somehow truly has to exist or must cling to the notion that it is a continuous thing or any of that. And it turns out the mental processes that create that entire process not only grossly distort a substantial portion of sense data in very much the way that if you're like trying to stream

a bunch of videos while trying to do a podcast, you know, multiple things on your Wi-Fi connection your podcast might start glitching out, right, because there's only so much bandwidth in the system. In the same kind of way, it just turns out that experientially, once one eliminates the habitual need to actually construct a stable self out of these unbelievably transient, utterly causal, perfectly naturally occurring sensations that just knew themselves where they were, it turns out that the system becomes vastly more clear, and that increased clarity helps with all kinds of things, including cognition and relationship to emotions, which become these wispy little sensations of body, mind and thought like they always actually were, except the habit is now to notice that

very, very directly, which means thoughts can move through much more easily, in fact, perfectly easily, because the notion that anything in this experiential world that could actually grasp or stabilize or hold onto or even relate to anything else in that sort of dualistic I am a true watcher kind of way, it turns out is not experientially true and be letting go of that illusion by degrees and finally completely, it turns out is actually achievable, and one can stay functional in the face of that, though sometimes along the way it can be pretty disorienting, to put it gently, and sometimes cause all kinds of life disruption. That's where sort of dark night theory or knowledge is of suffering and how to help people who are having

spiritual openings and crisis all comes in, which is what I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to research. But once the existential glitches in the system that come from upgrading the system while the code is running are over, then there is this delightful immediacy, natural presence, sense of everything flowing in a perfectly natural way, everything knowing itself in a way that is curiously clear and weirdly relieving in some profoundly deeply existential way. And in fact, it does seem to relate to questions of fear and death and all kinds of stuff. Not that it entirely relieves the problems with all of those, but it makes something in the relationship to them vastly better. And this is something that actually is not something one has to sustain

in terms of an exercise. This actually just gets seemingly directly hardwired into perception. So it's something that happens at one's baseline, kind of at the level of like pre-processing. And it's very much like an analogy I've used a lot is, you know, we look at sensations one way. And in the one way, it super seems that our intentions, of course, are coming from us because they originate somewhere in the area of the body, which we also assume as us. and the mental impressions of things that follow everything that occur somewhere somewhere in our head of course are us knowing things because they occur somewhere in the region of our eyes and nose and ears, which are the things that seem to know everything, of course, right?

And so that and some other little tricks of perception create the sense that, of course, all of this means there isn't us. How could it possibly not? And the weird thing is when one through meditative training gets more clarity about these exact same sensations, the thing flips over and of course intentions are just these wispy little things that arise on their own. And of course, mental impressions are just these wispy little things that know themselves where they are like everything else obviously did, you know, because how else could they even be generated if there wasn't already some direct comprehension of things that would then create the mental impression. And of course, time is an illusion. And of course, we aren't

a stable thing. And of course, this is utterly ephemeral and naturally luminous. And of course it is because it's just very straightforward in experience. But curiously enough, it's the same sensation. So it's almost very much like the drawing of the young woman and the old woman. And just depending on how you look at it, you see one or you see the other. In the way of the brain, it turns out once it gets a taste of the other way of perceiving things just through Sense 8 clarity, it vastly prefers it, regardless of any other ontological implications. It just happens to be profoundly nicer and achievable through straightforward methods that

actually seem curiously reasonable, like just pay attention to what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. And I love that you present. these things as as achievable for regular people, not something that only, you know, highly developed beings might be able to engage in or something beyond the reach of most people, although we'll get into what it takes to get to this level. I do want to before we move on.

There's a range, obviously, of talent, to put it gently. Yeah, and before we move on, though, I do kind of want to, I'm interested in this idea of other traditions leading to the same point or whether or not that's true. I mean, in Sufism, they talk about the, you know, the annihilation of self and God, you know, And in the Tao, they talk about the way. And there is something about this center point that appropriates experience sort of dissolving away. But if you really got into Sufism or really got into Christian mysticism, would you end up at more or less the same spot that you end up with when you do it with Buddhism? Well, this is the whole perennialist, you know, essentialism versus constructionism debate.

And I am very much on the side of essentialism and perennialism, just so I make my biases 100%. clear, is it clearly true that you, you know, if you've trained in a tradition that say emphasizes love and service over, you know, renunciation of the world and careful analysis of one's experience, yeah, you're likely to look and describe things relatively differently. But do I think that in some fundamental essential way that sensations actually are impermanent, yes, do I think that dissolving, you know, the sense that there is a true self is something that actually can be done, but we get into something called the descriptive fallacy. So I'm pretty far towards the end of people who hold to the philosophy that the mystics all basically

converge and the religions all argue with each other. And if you take, you know, deep spiritual contemplative practices that have some basis in paying attention to what's going on and noticing this heart, mind, the body system that the truths that reveal themselves are perennial. Now, I've got plenty of my orthodoxy friends who, let's just say get pretty annoyed with this point of view. But, you know, we all have our takes on things, and that just happens to be mine. Now, so from my point of view, it is very easy for me to read the Christian mystics and the Sufis and, you know, Rabia and Kabir and, you know, Rumi and St. John and, you know, St. Teresa and go, of course they're all pointing to the same thing. Bernadette Roberts, a classic case, Eckartola.

You know, it's very easy for me to just sort of go straightforwardly to equate these things. But my friends who, like, notice such things as, you know, extreme particular is like, you know, now this Christian mystic is saying, the love of God, you know, lives in their heart. You know, and a Buddhist, of course, would never say anything like that, presumably, you know, A, it's not particularly a theistic tradition. Although we could debate those kinds of things, Brahman's and, you know, all the gods and stuff. but you know and so we get and my friends who pick apart the specifics all think I'm I've totally lost my mind and I'm just ignoring particulars for convenience and I think they just need to do deeper spiritual practice and they would come to see how this is all beautiful poetry pointing towards the same thing and you know and there there's the debate yeah yeah interesting

yeah fascinating so so now let's move on to to how it feels from the inside and I guess I phrase it like how would you describe enlightenment phenomenologically or what is different about your moment to moment experience right now compared to before you began engaging in any of these practices at all yeah so the the profound differences are many but summarizing it's very much what i actually was just talking about because even though earlier was talking about theory i was actually talking from my own experience so immediately the difference is it is incredibly obvious that all thoughts of past and future occur now. It is incredibly immediately obvious that thoughts are just these wispy little things that occur in the room that are the vaguest fraction of experience. For example,

if all of you sitting there noticed the whole room or car or, you know, park or whatever you're sitting in or walking in or whatever, and notice all of the experiences, all the sites, all the sounds, and you compare the sheer volume of them to the volume of your thoughts, and you just notice, how strong are my thoughts as an actual experience in terms of something you could see here, feel, et cetera, locate in space, all of that, you know, experientially, how strong are they in comparison to the rest of the signal around you? And if you were like me, you would come to the conclusion, if you're being honest, that they are the vaguest, you know, they're the vaguest fraction of a hint. They aren't even 1% of experience. You know, volumetrically, they're probably 1,000th of experience if you just summed up all the bright pixels of, you know, On this three-dimensional screen, we appear to live in, you know, not meeting that's a permanent thing, but from the sort of meat brain creates a world somewhere that we appear to live in point of view, again, not meaning that as a strict ontology either. That's obviously extrapolated from experience, as David Hume would point out, sorry

for all the qualifiers. I realize they're a philosopher's in the audience. Anyway, but so that thoughts are obviously this incredibly transient things, and it seems ridiculous that they ever caused so much trouble emotionally, existentially, from any point of view, it seems totally preposterous. So it's also immediately obvious that everything is absolutely happening on its own, even the question of a choice or of effort arise so perfectly naturally it is impossible to believe the illusion that there is actually truly a separate Daniel that stands outside of the causal universe that is actually, you know, creating

things and that somehow like everything's happening, but I have control, like those, those are experientially, totally gone for me, and everything's just happening now, naturally. These lips are flapping. The words are coming out. There is literally no doer in any of it, though all the sensations that made up an intention stream in the monitoring process of, you know, how are the words doing? And it's just finally getting to some kind of point and all of that are still obviously happening. But they happen as naturally as they always did. It's just that is very, very clearly recognized as something that doesn't take any reflection. It's just what's going on. And so all of that has made a number of changes to the way emotions work, for example. So again,

if you notice what portion of your experience, taking into account the whole room, park, car, etc., you happen to be in, and what portion of that is actually any emotion you might feel? Well, actually, you know, little sensations of fear or happiness or sadness or peace or whatever that occur somewhere in the chest or neck or throat are actually quite mild in comparison to most things, and certainly very mild in comparison to say a kick in the shin or something like that. And then it becomes quite amazing that they were ever able to toss me around on the, there are horns with such force before I was able to clearly perceive these things. And so it's not that they don't have some impact. This is still a living mammal that can still become irritated and

hungry and annoyed and all kinds of things. Obviously true as anybody who's hung out with me for any length of time knows or enthusiastic or jump up and down with joy or whatever. But all of those are still just the natural unfolding of the thing. And the perception of them has this profound proportionality to it. So not only pleasant sensations have this proportionality to it, you realize there are profound transients, even the tastiest of foods or whatever other pleasurable activities. It's actually an incredibly small amount of sensation that we spend so much time working for, not that they can't be totally valid and enjoyable sensations, you know, whatever. But in the same kind of way, pain. So pain is actually a relatively small portion of my experience

and that proportionality that gives some perspective of, you know, the signal can get through so it's not ignored. In fact, the signals of my sensate reality are weirdly clear now that the processor time isn't being taken up with having to create a sense of self out of this transient naturalness, which was totally ridiculous from my point of view now, and how it ever actually even managed the illusion seems ridiculous because of how could you create something stable out of this natural transience? How could you truly create a stable sense of a watcher out of this? It seems preposterous, but before it obviously didn't until I had, you know, just done the things that it took to train my mind to perceive all these processes more clearly.

And so that's very much with the experience. It's like, though, I'm still a mammal. I still have pain. Like, I've got pain in my neck right now because I have a blown out C7T1 disc. My right knee gives me trouble, you know, when I get hungry and I'm a little thirsty right now. So I'm going to, you know, take my water and take a drink. And the ordinary problems of life still arise. And I will, of course, get sick and die one day.

And that's just the way things are. Yeah. Fascinating. Would you describe it on some level, at least, as like a shift in awareness from away from this sense that you exist behind your eyes and between your ears, more into this more robust sense that your awareness expands to cover and include the entire space in which your body is in? Is that a fair way of thinking about part of it, at least? Or you could also say that it was the recognition that everything always just knew itself where it was, and the notion that there is an awareness that

could expand or be mine is totally preposterous, that everything always was just happening exactly where it was from the beginning. And there's just a question of the straightforward and clear recognition of that. So you could look at it either way. I prefer the second, but I can totally see why developmentally it can sometimes be from the meditative's kind of instruction point of view, very helpful to use the first way. So I wouldn't cling to either of those ways of talking about it necessarily if they serve some pragmatic ends. Because in my heart of hearts, I am an ontologically agnostic empirical empirical pragmatist. So hopefully that all makes some kind of sense by this point. It does to me. Yeah, absolutely. And this little, the one thing I also want to

mention is, is your, is your sense that you have free will completely obliterated? Yep. Yeah. And that's a natural consequence. And you feel it as viscerally as you would feel a hot stove on, like, it's so immediately obvious that it doesn't need to take any intellectualizing to understand or come to terms with. The notion that this could possibly have created a sense of a true will out of this natural

transience is absolutely preposterous from this point of view. I mean, I get the sensations that made it up still occur. But it becomes harder and harder the longer I've been in this, which is now almost 18 years, you know, at this level of the thing to go, how did it do that? Like, how in the world was this system capable of creating that illusion? It just seems weird at this point. You know, I mean, I could, you know, you could sort of remember, like, how it thought this was, you know, actually doing things and some separate thing that wasn't influenced by everything and stood outside of causality. And I can still get it. But yeah, it's not something anybody has to do anything about.

It's just the way things are. And what's nice about that is everybody thinks, oh, my God, if I lost myself, I would lose control or whatever. No, you never existed, kids. Sorry for that. Yeah, never. There was never a separate self that was in control. And it turns out the illusion interferes with the clarity of the system

that would allow the system to better self-regulate and respond to various things. a skillful way, not that everything I do is now skillful or whatever. I don't claim anything like emotional or, you know, perfection or perfection, actions or speech. But this limited mortal mammalian system is vastly more able to do something useful with data now that some, you know, substantial portion of its mind time doesn't go into figuring out how to create an illusion of something that is pretty tough to create an illusion out of, oddly enough. Yeah. And that's very common whenever I read or engage with anybody who's made it well down this path. It's like

just becomes very obvious from their point of view that once the center, the false sense of self disappear, so does the sense that there's any free will and it's immediately, you know, approached and understood. And then there's like, I think that like in Taoism, it's sort of talked about really well. And if you don't have the experience, it can be difficult to understand what it means by the way and all these analogies and metaphors about water coming down in the, a mountain in the most free-flowing way possible and is like the fall into the Tao and just become like a basically part of the natural world, a natural process over which you have no control, right?

Yeah. And the notion of control, it turns out, was always an illusion and a problematic one. So you can let go of it and rest in the knowledge that it's vastly better on the other side. Yeah. So I want to talk about misconceptions. You know, we talk about what enlightenment is phenomenologically and intellectually, but what is it not? And what are some of the most common misconceptions about it that you've come across in your life? Yeah, the big common, dangerous ones that create all the trouble are, one, the notion that

this will make you a perfect person, that you will always say the right thing, you will always do the right thing, whatever the right thing or perfect is, you will always think the right thing. You will suddenly become perfectly psychologically self-integrated at the highest level, you know, that you will suddenly, you know, have no issues, no neuroses, no. conditioning, nothing residual from childhood, no consequence of karma, you know, all of those things. That unfortunately doesn't work out. Is it true that this perspective definitely helps one relate to the shit show that is having been born and grown up in whatever society and parental conditioning and mammalian body and biology? Does it make all of dealing with all that much

easier? Yeah, it does, but does it save you from all that? No. One of the other things that people often imagine is that it will, you know, do things like eliminate the defilements as a common one I deal with, that, you know, someone who had just noticed this nature of things couldn't ever, like, screw up in a sexual way or relationship to power or money. And then you have the endless scandals from whole communities that get built around people who get put on pedestals that, you know, then lack normal feedback and reinforced in whatever crazy, stupid thing they do and just get bizarre and more and more bizarre and eventually end up fucking up so badly that some board eventually stops trying to cover up for them and throws them out, you know. And,

you know, and then it breaks and then the cycle goes round again with some new group of naive seekers who are looking for their parental figure or whatever that is the perfect parent. And unfortunately, no such thing exists. Sorry, that was a little bit cynical, but you get the point. And, you know, the daily scandal sheets in the Dharma world, you know, let us know daily that this unfortunately is a problem and everybody, you know, goes, oh, they're just halfway up the mountain or whatever. Unfortunately, some of these people aren't. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at, some of these people actually have deep realization. And unfortunately, you know, whatever set of conditioning or idealism or, you know, whatever they found themselves in orthodoxy and dogma that just didn't hold up to reality testing, blinded everybody to the conditions that led to something, you know, really bad happening. And so, yeah, so that's one of the big ones. The other one is like the perfect transcendence that like pain would never be a problem again, right? So that's one of the big ones. Pain, you know, that if we perfectly transcend the world, we will be, you know, in the world, but not of the world. and most people translate that as to not feeling bad sensations, that these would have no impact.

You know, that's another one of the ones I deal with variance of a lot. And then there's the question of extinction, that if I, you know, actually realize that I don't exist as a stable, continuous entity, like, how could I be a good person? Why would I get off the couch? You know, why would I do anything? And so that one, of course, turns out it's not true. You never actually were a stable entity.

and somehow, even despite the irritating illusion, you were still able to function, hopefully, that one, or that it will solve all mental health issues. You know, I know people who are very, very deep and profoundly realized practitioners, who also seem to have things, whatever bipolar disorder is, or sometimes even worse, mental disorders, or that it will solve your personality disorder. So, unfortunately, there's abundant evidence that people with some of the, you know, the more troublesome personality disorders or clusters of symptoms that are described by those diagnostic categories, that meditation practice will totally resolve those.

Unfortunately, I have abundant evidence that that seems not to be true, though it is, you know, a mix of expert opinion and anecdotal. It would be nice to have large, long-term clinical trials. So those are some of the big ones, you know, yeah, or that everybody will describe this the same way, even if they have similar realization, or that everybody will get the exact same capabilities, which it turns out from a relative point of view is not true.

So some people can do magically powers these sorts of things, sorry for the muggles I just lost by saying that. Or that some people, you know, that everybody will be able to get into deep states of, you know, profound concentration. That's not actually true either. Those are skills that might be easier, but certainly for some people, have to be learned. Though some people seem to acquire them almost immediately on realization, there's a range out there. And, yeah, so those are some of the big myths I run into. Yeah, absolutely.

And so, you know, some people listening might be, okay, the thoughts I had about what enlightenment is have sort of been deconstructed. Um, I'm hearing that, you know, if it were that easy, that would be delightful. Unfortunately, it's not. We have profound habitual tendencies of what we're so sure this is, even if intellectually we think it isn't. And so in an internal family system sort of way, even if you just heard me say something like that. And even if you just believed it all, likely you, like me, also have, um, subconscious parts of ourselves that still are going to operate as if a lot of those things were true, let's just say. Totally. Totally. Totally. And that's important to point out as well. somebody listening to this though that aside would listen to your talk about the dissolution of the self or the fact that it was never there the obviousness of the lack of free will and they would say why is this even worth pursuing at all what actual benefits can it offer me as an individual in my life that would make this sometimes long protracted and arduous process with plenty of pitfalls along the way even worth pursuing in the first place what would you say to somebody like that yeah i'm not the best advertiser of this so i can i can give it a shot, right? Because I'm very much of the sense that people on the path are on the path and they're going to be on the path and God help them. Hopefully we can make their lives in their journey better and safer and more effective and all that. And people who aren't on the path aren't going to really get them or necessarily have any idea why the hell you would do this. And the vast majority of people have what it appears to be in relative terms

and or in direct experiential terms, no choice about that. And so I find evangelizing this stuff weird because if you're not ready for it or in a place where it makes any sense, it's just not going to stick to you, right? You can talk to people until you're blue in the face, you know, and you just seem like a zealot who's talking crazy to people. I've been that zealot. I never found it helpful ever once, period. And so, but people who are on the path, who for some reason when they hear this, they light up, they spark, they go, ah, yes, okay, cool, more of that. Those people, they're just the way they are. They're just going to keep looking until they find it hopefully. And so the notion of even evangelism or advertising to me is actually

a pretty strange one because I'm not sure it actually quite applies. It's almost like talking to people on the right or the left. They just kind of are. And while occasionally people sort of switch between one or the other, like how often does that really happen? It'd be a fascinating study. But I don't think it's a common phenomenon. I think this is kind of like that, though you could say there's something developmental as people go on more and more people will eventually inclined to spirituality is whatever maturation process happens in the blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think there's something kind of true about that, but that also kind of has a sort of a hierarchy to it that the leftist in me kind of doesn't like, right? I think, you know, plenty of people who have

never entered the spiritual path in any formal technical awakening insight stage or whatever kind of way are totally awesome people. And they just don't happen to be going through this sort of weird, called out destabilizing strange woo-woo kind of thing that the rest of us are. So I don't mean to create any artificial dualities by calling them muggles or us crazy spiritual zealots or whatever it is. You know, sorry to use the term muggle, if that was in any way offensive. But, you know, like, and so, right? I'm in my muggleist. Anyway, sorry. But seriously, like, it's totally fine. And the world needs people who are not on some spiritual quest and getting all bizarre and, like, you know, pouring through weird mystical texts and leaving their family to go off in retreats and wrecking their jobs and careers and all of that crap. And yet, it is also true that for the people who go through this bizarre process, There are some freaking amazing things that can happen as a result of it. You know, I have instant access, you know, literally within a second or two, to some unbelievably cool states of consciousness.

The simple fact of having dissolved the sense of self is freaking awesome. And literally, I think it's the most valuable and important thing I ever did in my life. And I've saved, you know, literally hundreds of lives in the emergency department. And weirdly enough, I would rank this over all of that because then it gives me the opportunity, hopefully, to spread this incredibly transformative insight to thousands or maybe more than thousands of people, you know, which is really cool, just like people were kind enough to freely do for me. And so there is benefit, but describing it as kind of hard, like why it is so nice, the universe just unfolding and everything being clear and utterly transient, something about the existential

resolution of this bizarre problem, the self that somehow is in here and trying to relate to reality that screws up everything, you know, related to philosophy and religion and, you know, all kinds of emotional stuff and psychological growth. Like, it's, it's, there's so much that is improved by that. It just isn't improved in the idealistic ways that the vast majority of the flowery orthodoxy maps advertise it, which, you know, but then explaining exactly how it is improved, unfortunately is kind of hard and requires a lot of time and nuance and doesn't make for nice advertising slogans, right?

So that's the problem. Yeah. Well, I definitely feel very seen listening to you talk like that. And I started this interest and really in some sense of fascination and obsession with early psychedelic experiences in my teens, a sort of dissolution of object, subject on a profoundly high dose of mushrooms when I was about 15 or 16. And then a friend, a coworker handed me a bunch of Alan Watts CDs when I was like 17 or 18. And ever since then, I've been sort of shot off in this direction. But there is this feeling, especially when I first got into it, I'm like,

this is fucking amazing. Like, I got to tell everybody, like, would try to tell my family and friends and just met with the, I was like that too. God help us. Yeah, met with the complete brick wall of like, who cares? And so that sort of, I think that tempered that aspect within me as well. So I do think there's really deep wisdom in that whole non-trying to go out of your way to embellate, like, promote this and try to get other people sort of quote unquote convert it over to it. People either feel it or they don't, and that's sort of where it has to be left. I have noticed in my, and I'm nowhere, you know, I've never done extended retreats, so I'm nowhere near anything like that. And even talking in those terms feels weird. But

I've noticed there are moments over the past 10, 12 years of my engagement with these practices where there seems to be bursts of advancement and then sometimes incredibly protracted periods of what feel a lot like backsliding and a lot of suffering that comes with that. Is there something about the non-linearity of this path that you can maybe bring some clarity and light to? Yeah, that is super friggin' important because the vast majority of advertising for a spiritual traditions is you will just get more calm and more peaceful and more radiant and more loving and it will just get more and more and more and more that way. It could not, unfortunately,

be farther for the truth for nearly every single person I know who's ever done this stuff, and I know literally thousands. So, yeah, there are these spiritual peaks, which we, you know, in my tradition, call the arising and passing away, or people call Kundalini awakening or peak experiences or breakthrough stuff or whatever. You know, there's always language for this kind of thing, or conversion experiences, you know, and then we, you know, most of us have noticed that it's followed by some mild to moderate to severe crash, which may last seconds or hours or months or years or decades, unfortunately, and which we call Dark Night and Knowledgees of Suffering and Journey Through the Underworld or Spiritual Crisis or, you know, pick your favorite

language for it. And then if people are lucky enough at some point, they may get up to something called equanimity. In my tradition, you know, there's lots of other names for it and other traditions, you know, we're sort of open, flowing, easy, natural, very clear, very ordinary, and yet incredibly profound at the same time, which is where, you know, deep transformations of consciousness and wisdom can take place. But most people that will then fall back and cycle through these stages again and again and again and again and again. In fact, the farther you get into this, the more you cycle and the faster you cycle and sometimes the more deeply you cycle. And then that's considered totally normal and a growth opportunity unless you're talking to

Western psychiatry in which they're liable to label you bipolar to, you know, rapid cycling or something, and sorting out which of these is sort of true functional mental illness from some biological thing, from spiritual opportunity is obviously a source of tremendous contention and debate and worthy of great scientific inquiry, particularly in the world I spend a lot of time in now. But just knowing that the path is nonlinear and simply having that in your mind can be incredibly normalizing. And that simple statement that if, you know, you went up and then you came down and then you went down further, that doesn't necessarily mean you're broken. That may actually, from some mappy point of view, be something that actually provides you with

opportunities to see something profound about the fact that you don't exist or the nature of suffering or the depths of your heart, mind, body structure or your shadow from a young end point of view or whatever, you know, and that's the kind of crisis that actually a lot of psychiatrists, weirdly enough, actually really like it when people get into because then they start getting real and their emotions are pouring out and suddenly like all the defenses are gone that are like, you know, crying and then having these epiphanies on the, you know, psychiatrist's couch or whatever, which is weird that they then pathologize them, you know, sort of when they get into the whole materialist biological model rather than the sort of Freudian, you know,

have a, you know, a breakthrough in your therapy kind of model, you know, after you really get to the deep shadowy stuff, you know, so psychiatry even has this bizarre relationship to these things. But just knowing that those ups and downs are, you know, for most of us, in fact, nearly all of us, an important part of the path and even potentially a growth opportunity if handled well is a key thing to understand. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I've come, I'm in my 30s now. And so I've engaged with texts like yours and other work that's made that very clear throughout my 20s. However, I had no teacher. I had no resources, really. And I went- sucks. I'm sorry. It fucking suck. I went through extended. Hopefully one day, popular culture will have

enough of this tech built into it that people will just have the resources because it's around like you know what the term muggle means yeah yeah for sure um and talking just about your cycling talk you know when i when i read your work i sometimes get confused because for me it was like this multiple like over a decade of you know maybe meditating a 30 to an hour every day and then over many years i would have uh all of a sudden a random spontaneous peak experience but then it would be followed by let's say six months of obsessive thinking about my own mortality, but then that, that obsessive dark, which at the time I called an existential crisis because I didn't have any better word for it. It ended in a period of like, I would only describe

it as like this radiant, selfless compassion where the suffering got so acute that it broke open and became very clear to me that this is like a human condition thing and it reoriented my compassion towards everybody around me in my life. But in your cycling, the way you talk about it sometimes, and maybe I'm mistaken, it feels as if it's like, within the context of very intensive retreat-based practices where you cycle through these things? Or could it be extended over the long periods of time, like I've just mentioned? God, I wish it were only on intensive retreats sometimes. But most of this stuff happened to me in daily life, actually, weirdly enough, even though I've done a lot of intensive

retreat. So I cross what we in my tradition would call the arising and passing away about six times in daily life in various circumstances, various variants, each of which led to some sort of dark-nighty kind of crash in my life starting at around age 14 or 15 and extending until I started doing intensive retreats in my mid-20s. And this happened without me having, you know, any sense that I was a meditator or on any spiritual path or any of that kind of stuff. And it was just happening. And that's happened to lots of other friends and people I know as well, you know, the sort of grace of the conversion, as the Christians point out all the time. And all of a sudden, you're just struck by the love of God or fall trembling to your knees or your consciousness explodes or whatever. And this can happen

during childbirth, during, doing hot yoga, definitely lots of the time on psychedelics, although some people take, you know, hundreds of doses of psychedelics and never have anything like this stuff happen. And other people like their first dose and blam, and all of a sudden they're in it and going up and down.

And why that is, we don't know, but it's certainly a fascinating topic to study. But yes, though this stuff definitely can happen for some people in daily life. And then you get other people who are weirdly insight resistance. They literally have gone on, you know, months and months and months of intensive retreats three months and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And it was all just psychology and their back

pain. And they never got to deep energetics. They never really were deconstructing the core aspects that, you know, make up an experiential self, you know, some fine particulate level or attaining to deep concentration states or magical experiences. None of that stuff happens to them. And why some people on whisper doses of meditation or seemingly on no meditation or just even sometimes in their youth, you know, will cross into powerful territory and then be in the throes of this stuff. And other people, you can, you know, have and do all the meditation, psychedelics you want and nothing happens to them that looks anything like this sort of weird cyclic, you know, what we would think of as some sort of insight or awakening developmental

process starts happening. We don't know. But again, there's this great range out there. And I think that's cool because if we're going to have a stable society, it's important to have all kinds of stable people. And this stuff doesn't always make people stable, though it can lead to a lot of amazing things, such as the world's major religions, which, you know, depending on your take on religion, think is a good or a bad thing. That's obviously highly debatable, but can also lead to all kinds of wild vision and philosophy. Like René Descartes, you know, for example, describes having some of these experiences before he became the whiz genius philosopher and mathematician that he was, et cetera. There is a bunch of them. Einstein is another classic case that clearly describes some of these

things and some letters to offend. And so it does seem to spark off some sort of weird, spiritual, visionary process in some people, which I think is clearly useful to society. but also sometimes in the short medium and occasionally long-term detrimental to the individuals that are having it happen to them, particularly in a society that is not good at recognizing it and or supporting it or valuing it. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's incredibly interesting to me. And do you think, like, there is, you know, people sometimes when you get into it, you can get in your echo chamber and think like, oh, more and more people every day are getting into these practices while the actual number remains relatively low. But do you think there's something in, like, I don't know, you know, you can get in your echo chamber and think, like, I don't know, you know, you can. could think about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche talking about the will or, you know, nature waking up to itself. Any sort of evolutionary process happening that manifests through this that could possibly be speeding up on some level, or do you think just thinking about it in that way is too conceptual and philosophical? Oh, this stuff is speeding up at unbelievable rates, which is why I'm

desperately trying to get up the science that will get the medical industry up for trying to handle this stuff, because that's going to take decades, and I don't think we have decades. So the number of people who one way or another are doing a practice that is either directly mindfulness or meditative or highly influenced by those things. It's now a mainstream part of popular culture. It's on major magazine cultures. There covers their articles about it. People are doing it in corporations. You know, it's yoga classes and all of this stuff. And psychedelics are scaling at furious rate. And yet the popular culture is not keeping up with it in some kind of sophisticated understanding of the deeper implications of what's possible from all that. And the

medical world is so far behind, like, we're in trouble because I think it will take probably generational change in two or three decades to get them on something like up to speed of a functional appreciation of what this means clinically and how to handle patients who might present to them, you know, with these kinds of experiences happening if you're like a neurologist or an ER doctor, emergency psychiatrist or a family practice or, you know, GP doctor, or a psychotherapist or whatever, you know, because tons of these psychotherapists are teaching their clients something mindfulness meditative, you know, you know, mindfulness influence, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy being one of the better examples of sort of incorporating map theory into their practice,

but the rest of them largely don't. And in fact, you know, MBSR sort of actively goes out of its way to try to pretend none of the stuff ever happens from MBSR. If it happened to you, it's because you're crazy or did some practice wrong or something, right? You know, and so, and that's now a $4 billion dollar a year industry or something globally, if I understand my numbers correctly. And so they and they have profound incentives to not let people know that this can cause some really wild effects, both really good and sometimes quite strange and sometimes very challenging, right? That's not part of the message as it enters the clinical mainstream, which is a problem because the only thing that's going to be big enough to handle this is the clinical mainstream. And so we have

this whole, I think this is actually a social justice issue. We have this whole category of people who are having experiences that are part of the human condition well described for thousands of years in both the East and West, whatever that means, you know, but that are totally ignored and or misunderstood by the mainstream medical and psychotherapeutic cultures. And that's a serious problem. And that's one of the other things that I'm hoping to do or help support the research to do to address. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on why you think that might be intensifying at this time, more than just cultural people becoming more. engage with it culturally. I mean, that's an effect of it, but do you have any thoughts on the underlying cause of why it seems to be intensifying? Yeah, you could also, from a very Maslow's hierarchy of human needs point of view, say that from a lot of points of view,

even despite all the starvation and problems and global warming and refugees and all of the bad stuff that still affects a substantial portion of the world's population on a daily basis, we do have a lot of people who have a, you know, leisure time, wealth, health, health, access to information. And so as people get higher up the pyramid, a lot of people will give more time to these things. Now, you don't necessarily have to be high up the pyramid to give time to these things, you know, very simple renunciates. And people who have very little money, obviously, have, you know, been great practitioners for, you know, since the beginning. In fact, you know, the whole tradition, you know, is essentially been carried by

mendicants who have almost nothing and people in monasteries who have almost nothing and lead incredibly simple, low-carbon footprint lives, right? But still, I think part of it is just that people who have all this material wealth and all this connection and, you know, a thousand, you know, Facebook friends and, you know, their Tesla and their whatever it is, and they're still not happy and going, what the fuck, right? What is it that will actually? make me happy. And they've had the opportunity to debunk a lot of the myths of happiness that previous generations sort of were disempowered by thinking, oh, if I just had that castle or that Tesla or whatever, you know, they didn't think about Tesla's in previous generations,

but you know what I mean, that whatever it was, that they would be happy. And then they thought that, you know, but now people have those things, a lot of them, right? You know, on a larger scale, though, obviously we could talk about the dissolution of the middle class and the regression of wages with regard to inflation, all that, obviously hot topics from a leftist radio point of view, right, and important. But still, there's so much access to information and technology now that these things are just spreading in a way they never were able to before. And I think mindfulness actually did us a great service of getting into popular culture, the notion that meditation might be a legitimate thing that even seriously

secular, you know, materialist, skeptical engineers and coders or whatever are taking super seriously, you know, as something that might, you know, from a spiritual technology, secular point of view, upgrade their performance as a worker be or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And I sometimes even think zooming out and thinking about intelligent life throughout the cosmos, if this is sort of an inevitable process, that intelligent, conscious, self-reflective beings eventually go through. And it's something that we're sort of going through. And it seems like multiple things are reaching a pinnacle. That's one of them, but also the environmental crisis, the sort of late capitalist, you know, a lot of the myths and the realities

that people held on to about capitalism seem to be crumbling away, particularly in the face of things like climate change and the pandemic. What are your thoughts on like that broader? Like, is this some force deeper than just humanity? And what are the implications for a system like capitalism if more and more people are sort of waking up

and realizing that the promises of capitalism don't actually make you happy? Yeah, and it's also the age of Aquarius, and it's also the whatever, you know, posts, what, 2012? and it's, you know, it's all these things, right? And so we could talk endlessly about the possible cosmic New Age-ish or whatever interpretations of all that, and I have no problems with any of that language. I swirl in magical worlds just fine.

Good times. But from a sort of a – this may sound like a strange thing. I'm slightly skeptical of the term post-capitalism, and I don't mean to seem intellectually unsophisticated to anybody who's certain that's really, really important. I actually watch capitalism and the fundamental forces that drive it, just redefine it and become more sophisticated at slipping through radar at influencing policy about rebranding itself, about, I see it morphing like a chameleon rather than actually changing its soul. I don't mean to be needlessly cynical, but I think even the notion that there's something post-capitalist maybe gives people hope and I can understand why people need. hope, but I wouldn't want it to blind people to the realities of the fact that still the great machine of stocks and bonds and short-term profits. And all of that is still the vast

majority of economies globally, you know, the ones that aren't state run. And even those are seriously subjected to market forces because it's not an entirely communist world that is free of such things. And even if it were, market forces may in some cynical way still be hardwired in some ways into the human psyche, not to be needlessly disparaging of people who are certain we could live in a happy utopia. Perhaps we could. But so in terms of, is there a true post-capitalism or is capitalism really dissolving? I see it really just reconfiguring itself in more sophisticated versions much more than I see anything post-capitalist. In fact, can you give me solid evidence that there is actually really such a thing. Yeah, I mean, the only sort of evidence

you could point to as to regarding, is there such a thing as post-capitalism, is the fact that all these previous systems, whether slavery, feudalism, et cetera, they arose, they had a lifespan, and they passed away. And it seems like some of the underlying incentives within capitalism, especially in the face of things like climate change, are failing to be able to solve those problems on increasingly important scales. And if we take seriously that all systems thus far throughout human civilization have arisen and fallen away eventually, although feudalism took thousands of years and capitalism's only been around for a couple hundred, it would seem like at least at some point, maybe not in our lifetimes, maybe not for several hundred years in a more

cynical view, at some point this system would need to be transcended. If for no other reason, then it reaches its own inherent contradictions and limitations and gives back. birth to something new, you know. Yeah, I hear all of that. And I would actually say that even feudalism and a lot of things still had at their roots a lot of the fundamental seeds that made capitalism or make capitalism capitalism. And so, you know, the notions of trade, notice of notions of wealthy merchants, notions of how much capital it would take to create a ship, for example, or a castle or whatever. Some form of something capitalistic has been going on as far back as I think there is human society so far as I can tell just in various variants and under

various labels. And certainly, obviously, the Industrial Revolution, all of that, or even, you know, going back to Dutch East India Company and things of that nature, obviously in some ways, you could say, are breaks from the past. But in other ways, are the same old greed, hatred, and delusion from a Buddhist point of view, you know, just rolling through in different form and different variance depending on, you know, the government, what government would allow. And I actually am relatively concerned that capitalism and fascism, which is its close cousin or sibling, just continue to get more and more sophisticated about how they rebrand themselves, how they conceal and or cloak power in terms of how they move. So, for example, I'm, you know, this is a leftist

podcasts, I'm going to get a little bit leftist here. What the heck? You know, I actually look at the, for example, the mainstream Democratic Party in the United States is essentially a center-right European party. So I don't think we have a functioning left really. And, you know, I actually think for most European, you know, sort of progressive European points of view, even like AOC, you know, are basically sort of centrist. like, you know, from a, because of course, like if you were in the U.K., yeah, the Tories might sort of dismantle a little bit of the health care system, but they still keep it around and they are, it's, you know, they're, or I guess they're now the conservative party or whatever, but the, you know, I call them the Tories because I'm old. But the Tories, like, would they say, oh, let's just totally throw out the NHS, you know, maybe on the far end, but not the mainstream generally, right? They're, they might, you know, fund it less or modified or try to make it more. efficient or whatever. But, you know, the notion, you know, are what we consider, you know, radicals are calling for things that are just normal policy in the vast majority of other industrialized

societies. And so the U.S. is from a U.S. point of view, we're shifted so far to the right, right? Yeah. That, like, you know, when we talk about capitalism, it's so baked into our politics in so many ways that even the theoretical, you know, parties that would put bounds on it. I mean, Bill Clinton, as I'm stealing somebody's quote here, drove the Democratic Party so far to the right that when the, you know, that the Republicans in effort to stay farther right essentially just jumped off a crazy cliff, you know, as we've been seeing. But like, you know, me as something of a leftist, when I look at like a real left, we don't have a real left in this country in any functional, meaningful way. I've never seen a single

candidate on a ballot, you know, and I've been voting since I was 18, that really represented the degree to which my leftist views really, you know, are in their full form. I've never actually seen one, right? Even Bernie Sanders looks just centrist to me, you know, so. Yeah. I could not agree more with every word you said. And I completely think that's, that's 100% on point. And your point also about capitalism continuing to evolve and shroud itself and take new forms and adapt has certainly been true thus far. I mean, if we look back at the Frankfurt School, for example, one of the reasons for its emergence was precisely trying to figure out, in light of the Bolshevik revolution, in light of Marxism being around for 100 years. Why is capitalism still so entrenched?

And a bunch of new insights were generated from that period of anti-capitalist thinking. But it's certainly been the case so far that that is what happens, that in the face of new crises, it simply adapts and is not yet overthrown. And so we'll have to see how that's still able to manifest itself in the face of the current issues. But I share your skepticism that it won't continue to do that. And as far as trade and the existence of capital throughout history, I also completely agree with that. I think something about capitalism that makes it unique is the division of labor, the mode of production, the social relations that it spawns, for example, the boss employee relationship as opposed to the Lord's surf relationship.

but zooming way out, you can definitely see how, even though capitalism can be seen as a rupture from feudalism, it's certainly carried over many aspects of its hierarchical framework. It's need to naturalize itself. So, you know, the divine rights of kings and feudalism is now what we would call capitalist realism or these ideas that actually capitalism is just human nature, and this is a permanent way of being. And so I definitely agree with all of that. It's certainly going to take a fight, and there's not going to release power without a fight. And when it is put under too much pressure, as you alluded to, it turns into fascism,

and we've already seen the claws and the fangs come out in many ways all across the world. So, yeah, it's going to be a protracted fight. There's no guaranteed end. I think Marx himself said, you know, class struggle could result in, you know, the common ruin of all classes. Or Rosa Luxembourg said it's barbarism or socialism, and barbarism is just as likely, if not more likely. I guess the next question would be based on that, what can meditation and these spiritual practices and even enlightenment itself offer to a political project? Is it, as it's so often presented in the spiritual circles, more or less apolitical, there even seems to be a suspicion

toward politics inherently in some of these communities, or at least a dismissal of it as unimportant? What can it offer to people engaged in a collective political project that seeks to, at least in some ways, radically transform the world for the better. Yeah, that's a seriously good question. I mean, the way Buddhism is advertised is, A, in some ways, it's a renunciate tradition, right? So a lot of Buddhism says, you should renounce the world. It's a greedy shit show of stupid people and kings and cabbages and all that, and screw it, just wander away into the jungle, get enlightened, you know, people are going to be greedy and dumb and horrible, have a nice day, period. They're going to be wars and chaos. And so that's sort of the sage point

a view of Buddhism, as I call it. And then Sage versus Mage, mage says, you know, no, actually there's, we should help the world. We have the compassion. We're all bodhisattvas. We're going to, you know, make this utopian place where everybody's awakened and everybody's loving and kind and compassionate and all of that stuff. Though, despite, you know, 2,500 years of Buddhism and, you know, hundreds of millions of Buddhists, that hasn't happened either. And so, and we seem to be seriously risking, destroying the livability of the planet that we live on. Obviously, something in the experiment having been done, point of view side of me, goes, yeah, that's not working out.

And then, you know, I can look at my own life to sort of rubber meets the road. You know, I was a doctor who got, A, got to help a whole lot of people. So a third of the people who came to me didn't pay. So from a certain point of view, very leftist, right? All the homeless people who came to me. I cared for them and got them MRIs and advanced care and all this cool stuff, even if, you know, they weren't giving me a sense. So that was very altruistic from another point of view. But from another point of view, I got paid an impressive amount of money and vastly more than the housekeepers or, you know, all of the other super important people that kept the place running that were absolutely as essential as me and still at risk and blood flying around and risk of exposure and doing something important to help society, right?

So that was totally capitalist unfair wages. Certainly nothing resembling equal at all, right? you know, and so, you know, and I during that period of time, you know, considered myself a pretty advanced practitioner with all kinds of capabilities, and yet from a certain point of view, was still participating in a system that while having its socialist, help the poor, and all that aspects, also in many ways is very much capitalist, you know, large healthcare systems and all of that. And so in my own life, did I see that my practice suddenly made me more or less of a leftist or, you know, did my carbon footprint go? down. Well, actually, it went up, you know, because I was able to take trips and fly and stuff because I was making money and could fly around the world and go visit people and still help with research and, you know, you know, go do practices in various countries, you know, and help people with meditation practice. But still, I think my carbon footprint wet up. So from a destroy the planet point of view, I can't say that I'm necessarily better than anybody else. And yeah, I'm mostly vegetarian and, you know, go weeks being mostly vegan sometimes. You know, so in that regard may be better. you know, but I'm still having to vote for people I consider center right. You know, I voted for Obama, who, you know, didn't do a darn thing to any of the people who nearly drove the global financial system in the ground, you know, and, you know, through that sort of crash and then make a bazillion dollars off its cycle, you know, we're able to substantially consolidate

capitalist power, you know, and so I have no option but to vote for these people who are still entrenching the system as fast as they can go from my point of view, despite their lip service rhetoric to changing it. And so am I suddenly as some practitioner or somebody who's like so much better and like the kind of model of how we're going to save the planet? I'm not really sure that's necessarily even true being as self-critical as I can reasonably be, you know, and go, well, okay, wait a second. What the hell then? But in theory, something in reducing greed, hatred, and delusion hopefully would help us be more caring for people around us and, you know, less hateful and greedy and planet destroying and robber barren capitalists and fascists and all of them. that. But weirdly enough, I have a number of my, um, spiritual teacher friends who are

rabid fascists. Damn. I hate saying that. You know, and so it didn't suddenly make them, you know, it's some leftist utopian. Like that's didn't, that's not what happened to them. And so unfortunately, my somewhat cynical reality testing of how does this kind of practice, like translate, you know, does it suddenly, you know, really sow the seeds of the destruction of capitalism. I'm not sure. And actually there's ample evidence and, you know, you know, pushback critique that it's just making people have, you know, happier, more tolerant, you know, cubicle workers who are really just saving their bosses money and health insurance costs because their cortisol levels are better or whatever, because now they're exercising and breathing and calming down, you know, and there are, you know,

cubicle jobs or whatever. And so maybe it's just making people more tolerant of the machine and the whole status quo that is rapidly destroying the planet based on short-term profit concerns. And so, you know, that's my sort of short take on the cynicism. What are your thoughts on any of that? Yeah, no, I think as always, that's a nuanced and radically honest answer. And I love that it deconstructs myths around this straightforward idea that there is this panacea that, you know, if we could just get enough people enlightened, things would radically change. On the other hand, I think there is, as you alluded to as well, something about the the machine of desiring that is played upon by the capitalist consumer society that in some

sense deeply benefits from this ingrained feeling that you're unworthy or that you have a void inside you that you need to fill often through consumption which is what we're taught and so if insofar as enlightenment or these spiritual practices can deconstruct that machine of desiring i think it can at least you know leverage a blow against the overall, at least blind consumer society that we live in, and that's just one angle. The morality that should be cultivated, and you make very clear in everything you do, morality is a radically important thing to cultivate alongside and parallel to the awakening practices, I think, can get us something closer to better, but I also agree that awakening in and of itself

is no guarantee of morality, much less a good politics. What do you think on that desiring point? Is that something that you think is more or less legitimate? It is definitely true that I am, I can talk from my own self, more satisfied because I can sit down and access great states of mind in seconds. I don't need a television or a drug or a fancy product or whatever to do that, which is super cool. And that was a great thing to be able to learn. And it was a learnable skill like anything. So that was really cool.

It is also definitely true that because the sensations of desire, are much more naturally perceived as these wispy little things, that they are much more easy to relate to and drive me with substantially less power than they did before, though not inconsequential. That said, I sit here in a studio with probably $1,000 worth of lights. I'm going to guess a few thousand dollars worth of microphones, a $4,000 camera, a $3,000 computer,

I'm talking to you on a microphone that was $700 into a $350 interface, you know, and I've got a whole similar rigged downstairs, you know, and so like there's, this is the latest and greatest and consumerist, you know, high tech podcasting gadgetry, you know, that, you know, based on, you know, exotic elements and gold that might have, you know, been based on mercury mining that, you know, was wrecking the oceans and conflict, you know, rare earth elements and God knows what. Right. And so, like, to be perfectly cynical, like somehow, even with all this reduced sensation of being driven by desire and the ability to satisfy myself, I could still justify all this that, yeah, the slightly better audio quality you get from a room that has $5,000 worth of, you know, acoustic treatment panels in it. It is going to enhance the, you know, the experience of the listener. But I could have done this in my bathroom on my, you know, my little ear pod microphone. And most people would have noticed, wouldn't have noticed the difference. And so this might just all be totally absurd. vanity, you know, rationalized by some sort of spiritual trip that, oh, will enhance their listening experience if it's like 3DB quieter or something, you know, which is what all that finally led to. And that could just be a totally my own rationalized bullshit. So am I necessarily anybody, you know, experientially better than anybody else? I don't know. Like, you tell me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's not even cynicism. I think that's just realism and radical honesty. And I appreciate that so much about everything you do.

Definitely food for thought and definitely works against any overly romantic and idealist conceptions of what the spiritual practice can lead to. Though certainly there are benefits as we talked throughout this episode. And we both agree that it wouldn't be a worse thing if more and more people were on these paths and reach levels of awakening. That's for sure. One more question on politics before we move towards the conclusion section. And I just, I could take this in a bunch of different ways. But I just did an episode on Carl Jung and trying to think through the psychology of fascism in particular. We see its resurgence around the world in multiple different forms.

And you're clearly aware of the threat of fascism. And you said that there's even people that would technically be categorized as fascist in the spiritual community. Oh, yeah. Actually, the cosmic right is huge. So people underestimate the cosmic right. And just Google the cosmic right and read until your eyes bleed. And you'll be like, oh, yeah. the notion that sort of spiritual technologies are going to make us all utopian leftists

is just not working out. Like go to Sedona, Arizona. Like, the vast majority of them are cosmic right. You know, my mom's cosmic right, and she's spent years on retreat, you know, and, you know, QAnon and all of that stuff. And so just, you know, just realize that's very, very, the notion that this will, you know, make us suddenly leftists is just not true at all. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on the psychology of fascism and the people that are pursuing spiritual practices. Do you think that they can reach high levels of enlightenment and still maintain a fascist politic? Or do you think there's something in the fascist politic that limits it? Oh, no, definitely. So like, because fascism is fascinating thing, right? So to give the fascists

their due, which is sort of a strange thing to do on a leftist podcast, but like, you know, I'm just going to sort of define fascism here for, you know, probably all of you could define it better than me, but just humor me for a second. If you assume that it's some sort of strong leader who has the notion of sort of xenophobic process, you know, where the rights of the state, you know, outweigh the rights of the individual and yet you're all going to be free and happy with abundance because the state's going to be so unbeliefably successful and sort of flying in on the twin wings of sort of xenophobic disenfranchisement of the workers, you know, against, you know, other nations or groups or whatever mixed with the delight of capital. feeling unrestricted and that they basically, that, you know, the business of the state is going to be business, you know, for the flourishing of the nation and its grand imperial project of the continuous, righteous war of the holy vision of we have the true best way and we're going to help everybody out because, of course, we are because we're the people who know what's right

and how to do it and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So if you look at fascism and that sort of, obviously that was a, you know, very quick kind of quick and dirty sort of thing of fascism, The notion of a strong leader is most of the world religions, right? The notion of a grand destiny, the notion of a profound purpose. That sort of rhetoric fires the right very much in some ways that sometimes fires the left. The notion that there is an order and there is a world order and that the Andromedans and the Federation and the Pleiadians and the God knows what are with their big powerful spaceships and their militaries are like going to fight the evil forces of the grave. and the Rothschild bankers and the Council of 500 and the Illuminati and the lizard people and whatever.

Like, you know, that sort of notion of grand battle and quest that is the forces of light and the forces of darkness battling it out to save the children from the pedophiles and blah, blah, blah. Like, that is the kind of fuel that has fueled QAnon that fuels the cosmic right. It's very much the same. And so the notion that we will all wake up and become the strong soldiers for wisdom,

You know, that's the same kind of mentality. And you see even in like Burma, as they, you know, the monks are blessing the troops to go kill the Rohingya and stuff. And it's the same kind of thing. And so the notion that the world's great, you know, religions, you know, and spirituality don't have significant rightish sort of fascisty kind of elements in them. Obviously they do, which is why people such as Karl Marx then said stuff like religion is the opiate of the masses. and sort of then the lines were drawn where the right was religious and the left is secular, atheist,

materialist, or whatever. And then the problem with that line having been drawn is that it cut off all of the beneficial, useful spiritual technologies and the people that were having spiritual experiences and or the people that found that religion was incredibly comforting and or provided some degree of social cohesion.

And that's, you know, the alignment between the right and religion, is not necessarily the way it needs to be. I think that's a bizarre historical artifact of certain things that came out of, you know, rationalism as it was perceived in the, you know, late stages of the Age of Enlightenment and stuff. And the notion that the left can't be profoundly spiritual in some ways still lingers in many, you know, communist minds and, you know, even people I know who are still influenced by that kind of dogma. And so, whereas actually, if you look at the teachings of, say, Jesus or Christianity, obviously helping the poor and that kind of

of stuff, which in theory the left is really into, like you would think those would be more natural alignments and how it was that, you know, Marx demonizing spirituality, you know, got them associated with the guns and Jesus crowd, like, you know, and then tied in with nationalist politics. Like, I think that may not have been the best move. You know, you can see obviously some of the consequences of that, you know, and from a spiritual technology point of view, it also made the left in a lot of countries somewhat skeptical of people who then, you know, from their point of view, get delusional crazy and, you know, high on the opiates of religion to go into this stuff. And so it's no surprise that we find a lot of religious and spiritual people

having rightest leanings, feeling, you know, somewhat rejected by still some residue of the rhetoric on the left. Yeah. Absolutely fascinating breakdown. And another example would be kamikazis that were Zen Buddhists in Imperial Japan. Well, that's a long history, actually, of military and mental training, right? And Nazis as well, well with some sort of notion that like the mental discipline that they were learning would make them supermen or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Superwomen.

Very intense. Very intense stuff. So let's go ahead and shift towards the end of this discussion. I've absolutely loved and been fascinated by everything we've discussed. I would love to have you back on at some point in the future. But just a final note before zooming into your work and wrapping up is many of my listeners are, you know, not necessarily deep into spiritual practice, but many are interested. For someone who wants to start out on a meditation journey in particular, what advice would you offer them?

And can you tell us what level of practice and what general timeline is realistic for anyone to expect who actually wants to actively seek enlightenment in the Buddhist context? Wow. Okay. So first, as I've said, a lot of times on previous podcasts, lead through strength. If you've got a particular technique or aesthetic or tradition that really calls to you, you just like the gray robes that the monks wear, or you really like the, the, you know, gold statue, or you just really love the chanting and the singing, or you really love the beautiful flowers or the something in its aesthetics or its dogma or doctrine, and it just really calls to you. And they're not just like some crazy exploitive culture, whatever, you know, hopefully keep your words about you. I would say go for that, right? Whatever it is. And feel encouraged to be able to explore, like to just be able to check stuff out for a while

and see what it's like to do various practices and various traditions and with various aesthetics and ontologies and, you know, suitoriologies, doctrines of salvation. And to see how that feels to you, because if your heart is in it in an aesthetic way that really works for your sensibilities and the intellectual tradition you're coming from or your sense store that you really are good at, you know, you're a visual person, your tactile person, or whatever, then I would say lead through strength. that's my first bit of advice and then when you start to buck up against the limitations of that definitely feel encouraged to branch out so that's the next thing. Once you've led through strength and you start to notice that your

tradition or your guru or your spiritual path or whatever may not seeming to be doing all the stuff you want for it, most of us have found that it actually takes a somewhat broad range of techniques and tricks to really fully, whatever that means, attempt to flush the thing

out. And so that would be the next thing And the next thing is if you really want to go for it, have high standards, not punishing standards of self-perfection, but high standards for your ability to attend to what's going on in some reasonable way that is also forgiving and loving and kind and not self-deprecating or judgmental or competitive, but that really says, hey, when I sit, I'm really going to do the technique or when I, you know, do whatever pose or when I chant whatever mantra or do whatever practice of service or devotion, really put your heart into it because you will likely get vastly more out of it. Be aware of scary cults. There are lots of them, although it is also true that plenty of cults have some good tech in them, which is part of the problem and why they get lots of adherence. So just watch for that. They're abundant and some of them are quite mainstream. What else? I really look up like, you know, if for some reason you're inspired to do the Buddhist thing, the two books I tend to recommend again and again are A Path with Heart by Jack Cornfield, which actually is sort of more ecumenical, though still has its heart sort of squarely within Buddhism, though.

I'm not sure he'd like me saying that, but I think it's still true. Anyway, and a book called Mindfulness in Plain English by Bonte Gunnaritana. There's plenty of super useful tech in these that is just really straightforward. And for a lot of people, if you're really going to give this a serious shot, unless you're one of the lucky ones, and the lucky ones do exist, you're probably going to have to go on some retreats of some reasonable duration, which reasonable duration, meaning two to three weeks at least, to get some serious foothold in the territory of insight. though plenty of people can get into some fascinating territory on 10 days, which are widely available. You know, they'll cross into the peak experience and then often crash into dark night or whatever. Okay, cool.

But, and then educate yourself about the actual risk benefits and alternatives. So what do these things actually lead to in terms of the good with the people who hopefully are honest enough to realistically describe that? And what are the downsides? Like, read the risks and say, hey, is that a risk that makes sense to me at this point in my life? Maybe I've got 2.3, you know, kids and 2.3 jobs. and you're not into being mentally destabilized or having some spiritual crisis right now, maybe that needs to be taken into your equation.

Or if you're a trustafari kid who can wander off to wherever, whenever COVID lets up or sit in your chalet or whatever and do weeks of practice, drinking your smoothies and stuff, then just recognize that there are wild highs and wild lows and strange things and make sure that you're a spiritual path

and its intensity also match as your risk tolerance for instability. And think about the paths that may be more or less stabilizing, because unfortunately there is some sort of correlation between the ones that are more fun, dramatic, wild, and make for good stories. And unfortunately, people wrecking just as in the world of high adventure or mountain climbing or athletics or whatever, same kind of thing. And be honest with yourself.

Like, do you really want to be a super athlete? I don't know. Like, are you going to be a super mental athlete? The sort of in some ways, the harder you push. the envelope, the more risks there are. Though there are plenty of techniques that are very well focused and can be relatively safe and stable. And debates about which of those are best is an endless game. But I would say check out a bunch and talk to a lot of people. And then definitely you want some friends on the spiritual path. So it is definitely easier if we have friends

who have had some depth of experience in these kinds of realms who we like and appreciate as people and who will talk honestly about what's gone on with them. That can be incredibly helpful. So those would be my generic pieces of advice. Yeah. Those are wonderful and realistic and pragmatic. Do you need a teacher is another question I'd ask? Most of us are going to benefit from the expertise of people who are better at this than ourselves, though the range of how that can look is incredibly wide. Everything from formal exclusive guru devotion to just some friends who just happen to know some cool tech and we'll talk about it and everything in between. And so it is true that the vast majority of us will benefit from the expertise of people far. along on the path. Though, like, you have to have a formal teacher and you're their student and all of that hierarchical stuff. Not necessarily, but if that's your kink and whatever and that's

what's going on and it works for you, cool. Cool. Awesome. So before we end, can you just talk a little, because you mentioned this at the beginning, the ERPC, the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. Can you talk a little bit about that organization and its goals? Yeah, the EPRC is now a 50-something person international research consortium that you can find at www.com.com. P-H-E-E-P-R-C, the-E-P-R-C, dot O-R-G. And there we are attempting to bring ontologically agnostic, rigorous science to the question of how to promote good outcomes in people who are having the highs, lows, and weirds, of the spiritual path, which we would call the emergent path, because we don't think the word spiritual is going to penetrate the mainstream in a helpful way or please the people who are more materialistically. atheistically, et cetera, minded. And so it's basically a probably multi-decade's long attempt to organize the massive teams

that will take to do all the science to actually do what the transpersonal people have been trying to do for a very long time, but to really sort of do it in a way that hopefully meets the needs of the clinical mainstream for it to be substantially more secular and diagnostic and management strategy and data-driven and all of that. and much less ontologically rich, you know, where a lot of the transpersonal literature is coming from some sort of a pseudo or semi or explicitly religious set of ontologies that are hard to prove and hard to understand why they might apply to say one's arms flapping or seeing a bright light or the feeling of powerful tingling or shaking going through one's body from a sort of a diagnostician clinical mainstream doctory point of view, you know, why those things are spiritual, who knows. And so that's the project, and in doing that, we hope to figure out, A, what practices lead to what kinds of effects, both good, bad, and a very neutral kind of a way, so that people can make their own decisions about efficacy and risk. And B, if strange or unwanted things occur, what are actually the best management strategies to deal with those, and what is some of the underlying physiology of all of that, and what is the role of medications and this kind of thing? and what is the, you know, what specialty will own this and all of that.

So we want to do the neuroscience, the phenomenology, the taxonomy, the management, the diagnosis, as well as from a public health point of view, how this integrated into public health programs and national health services and reimbursable by insurance. And then, you know, integrated into diagnostic codes, ICD10 or 11 coming out of the World Health Organization and the DSM-5 from, you know, the APA. And so to have it really as a fully functional even branch of medicine as opposed to what it is now, which is basically an entire class or category of people where the social justice is not very good, right? So all of their powerful experiences have no option but pathologization and largely just medication and or dismissal and or demonization and or stigma and or non reimbursement, et cetera, in the mainstream medical world. And that's as these practices that lead to these things scale, I don't think it's helpful for the practitioners that went into this to try to know something about people so they can help them, nor is it fair to the entire class of people on the right and the left who have powerful religious experiences, you know, and then should have reason to actively fear in some ways what can sometimes happen from mainstream health care systems, which again is not the situation my colleagues in medicine went into this to do.

but unfortunately is the reality as they simply lack the knowledge generally to do something helpful. And we need to provide them with that knowledge. And so the EPRC is the massive project to try to provide them with that knowledge so that they can be better health care providers in the face of these sorts of experiences. Yeah, absolutely admirable and important work. And I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes so people can immediately go check that out. And final question, where can listeners find your book, your website, and your other work online? Wonderful. So www.mc-t-B-O-R-G is the free book. One of them, www.f-I-R-E-K-A-S-I-N-A. So that's firecasina.org. You can find another website and another free book. And then the Dharma Overground, D-H-A-R-M-A-O-U-N-D.org.org is a free online forum where lots of people talk about the stuff. It's an online forum with all the joys and complexities of that. You know, it's still a really cool place.

And then you can find my own website at www. www. com. Wonderful. And I'll link to all of that in the show notes. And the fact that you offer your work for, your books for free is awesome. And definitely something that people who are at all interested in this conversation should take advantage of.

Daniel, I'm a huge fan. This was an absolute honor and a pleasure to speak with you. Let's absolutely do it again sometime. So much fun. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio

or make a one-time donation at buy me a coffee.com forward slash rev left radio. Links will be in the show notes. I'm going to be.