Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] On Mysticism: Ego, Suffering, & Love

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 20, 2024   On this episode of Red Menace, Alyson and Breht had some things come up such that they couldn't record their planned episode on Marx's 18th Brumaire (coming soon!), so instead they have a deep, organic and wide-ranging conversation on mysticism; together they explore humanities religious and spiritual traditions and the mystical strain within them, discuss atheism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, mystical experiences, the role of suffering, holy union and oneness, the dissolution of subject/object duality, the role of psychedelics historically and experientially, dialectics, and whether or not any of this has any relevance for political struggle. ---------------------------------------------------- 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/

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. It's been a little while since we've done our last episode, but Allison and I are back for another conversation. Now, we were going to do the 18th Broomer by Marks, and we're still going to do that for sure. But today we're going to have a sort of side convo. We have some things going on in our lives, making it difficult to get that text fully done and to put the time and energy we need into that text in particular. So while we're still working on that behind the scenes, we decided to come on and have an interesting conversation about mysticism. This is even the word might confuse some people.

It's not something that we talk about very often. Although on Rev. Left, I've certainly mentioned it quite a bit. And Allison and I have certainly touched on it in the past. But I don't think Allison and I have actually done an entire episode on it. So we're going to definitely try to try to touch on politics and how this comes in to the political arena and how Marxists should think about this stuff. But also just on its own, it's just a part of life that we're very interested in exploring. And so we hope people will stick around and just hear us out and see where the conversation goes. even if you know absolutely nothing about mysticism, the traditions of mysticism, spirituality, etc.

It's something that plays an important role in Allison and mine lives. And we wanted to share it with people and have an interesting conversation about something that you don't very often hear people talk about. So first of all, how are you doing, Allison? I am doing good. Everything in my life is kind of in a state of chaos at the moment due to some housing stuff around mold and a shitty landlord. but making it through excited to have this conversation and yeah just like honestly you know you mentioned it I think on like some of our Patreon episodes we've discussed this with each other briefly this is a thing that both you and I know have an interest in but I don't think we've ever really on red minutes had a real conversation about other than again we kind of referenced

it on the blah episode some but I think it'll be good to kind of dive into it definitely now before we get into like the the topic at hand I'm just kind of interested in how you personally got interested in this sort of realm of thought, maybe how you got interested in mysticism in particular, but also how you got interested in religion more broadly. Yeah. So I have had a weird relationship to religion and mysticism in my life. I was raised an evangelical Christian, which I would actually say is a like shockingly non-mystical religion in many ways. So I was raised within that world. I went to Bible college originally. And it actually is at Bible College that I feel like I really discovered mysticism in interesting ways. I remember

reading a lot of, I've read most of Plato's dialogues, which I actually think have the seeds of a lot of later mysticism that develops. And Christian mysticism and Islamic mysticism in particular. And I also read the one work that kind of blew my mind at the time was reading pseudodionysius, who is this early Christian saint who argues for kind of the fundamental oneness of God. And the the possibility of human unity with that oneness. So in that context, I think I started to kind of pick up on these strains of mysticism. And interestingly, kind of left religion for a very long time actually considered myself very much an atheist. I still might consider myself an atheist in some ways we just can do that are very complicated, but really stepped away

from that world. But the whole time of kind of maintained an interest in mystical traditions and what I would call monist traditions, like that emphasize oneness and unity. And so, yeah, I kind of came into that through encountering academic spiritual Christian works. And then I've since spent a lot of time studying it outside of that context as well. Very interesting because there's obviously parallels with me as well in that I have been and still consider myself and have considered myself since I was a teenager, an atheist, maybe an agnostic atheist. If I had to make a bet about how things actually are, I would. put my money on atheism, but that does not in any way detract from a deep abiding interest

in mysticism in religious experiences and really in the possibility of anything being true because as I always tell everybody when we get in this conversation, the fact that we're here at all, the fact that we are able to sit here and reflect on the cosmos that we can have penetrating insights into some laws of nature, the fact that in the chaos of the of the whirling, whirling universe and cosmos, there can be little islands of stability where we can sit and enjoy a nice, warm day in the sun is already so miraculous, so unthinkable, so hard to explain that anything is on the table. And another thing I come back to, and I've been thinking about recently, is whether you believe in God, whether you're an atheist, whatever your model

of the cosmos is, it always ends in the final contradiction, which is how do we get something from nothing. There are attempts in deep, you know, physics to try quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, to try and grapple with this question, perturbations in the quantum field or whatever it may be, you know, but regardless of where you stand, the truth is, that fundamental contradiction is not resolved and is perhaps unresolvable. And that keeps open a huge question mark at the end of any inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and how we got here, which is how do you get something from nothing? Because if you want to posit a God, where God come from, you want to posit a multiverse, where did the multiverse come from? You want to posit a quantum field in

the void. You have to explain where the void came from, because what is void? It's space. Space is half of space time. So where did space come from, right? So the fact that there's always a question mark at the end of this road of inquiry, and given the miraculous nature, that we exist at all, that always leaves the door open for me, that anything could be true, you know, and that that's kind of scary and also liberating in some ways. But the last thing I wanted to say is it's interesting because while you seem to come to mysticism through the Abrahamic traditions, right, almost entirely, and I came through it almost entirely through the Eastern traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, and the mystical forms of

Hinduism, which I got deeply, deeply into all three of those things in my teen years and was synonymous with my sort of spiritual journey. So it's very interesting that going through the east or going through the West, you still can come to these traditions and explore them, and that's fascinating. And the last thing I'll say just on a definitional point, because as Marxists, a word that we hear a lot is mystification. And that's a, that has, it's a pejorative connotation because mystification means that it's sort of an ideological fog, that something, as being withheld or obscured, some truth, and mysticism, because it shares the etymological roots with mystification, can sometimes seem like, you know, anti-Marxist, like you mystifying

people. But in so many ways, and hopefully it will become clear throughout this conversation, mysticism is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of mystification. It's not intended to obscure. It's intended to get beyond obscurantism, to get to a sort of inner clarity that, is that is sort of a, and touch, touch fundamental truths through an inward journey that are actually deeply clarifying and the opposite of mystification. So much of what you overcome in the mystical traditions is you overcome the mystification of your own ego, your own identity, etc. And so I think that's a point worth making up front. Yeah, no, I think that's a really important distinction. And I think like, you know, the kind of framing that I want to

offer for this a little bit too is that I would just encourage being open mind. it about these questions when we're getting into this discussion for our audience. I think oftentimes what is hard when talking about this subject is that it can sound like a lot of kind of like pop wooey sort of nonsense that I think people are right to be very skeptical of. And I think it's important to emphasize that, yeah, there are kind of like pop spiritualities that have drawn on a lot of the language that I think we're going to use here. But those aren't identical necessarily with the traditions that we're talking about. And I think one of the things that that you got at that I find just fascinating about the subject, Brett, is that, again, you and I are coming from very different traditions to these very similar conclusions. And I've always felt like the fact that so many traditions reach this same point from remarkably different starting premises is kind of reason enough that it's worth exploring, right? There's kind of a demand built into that to take it seriously. So I hope that that is enough for people at least to understand why this might be something worth talking about and engaging with. Yes, and at its absolute best, it is in some sense, and this is kind of crude, but kind of true, a possibility of a sort of scientific approach to this stuff in that it's not a third party objective science, right, but it is a sort of inward journey that you must take by yourself that can't be validated by any third person. So that doesn't make, that makes it non-science for sure. But you have an experimental aspect to this, that whatever we say is not just stuff we're sitting in an armchair making up. but are things that any human being, I think, could experience or could explore for themselves experientially if they're willing to, quote, unquote, run the experiment within themselves, right? And that means to if you're interested in this stuff, and even if you remain skeptical, which I think is healthy and you should be, you have this option to actually try it out for

yourself. And, you know, there's different practices. Of course, I come from a more Buddhist-oriented tradition of meditation, which, you know, is something I've tested and I can say does fucking work. But there's always that option. None of this, and actually this is anathema to this, none of this is about believing

certain claims about the world as it is. We're not making metaphysical assertions. We're not saying the universe is like this. We're not saying God does or does not exist. We're not making any objective claims about the cosmos. We're making subjective claims about

experiences one can have and humans have had in all traditions going back millennia that you could at least try and replicate within yourself to see if there's anything here. And I would argue if somebody sat down even for two weeks

and did 30 minutes of meditation every single day, you're going to discover something. Something is going to shift within you. Something is going to be revelatory about that experience and you're going to see why this stuff is worthwhile and why two, I hope you think, intelligent

people like Allison and I, are interested in this stuff. You know, Allison and I, if you know anything about us, you know we're not prone to supernaturalism. We're not prone to idealism. We're not just sitting back and venting hypotheticals. And so hopefully we've established our credentials enough for even the most skeptical listener to come along this journey with us. All right. Well, do you just want to jump in the first question?

Yeah, let's go for it. Okay. So what is your relation to mysticism and spirituality? what do you understand those terms to mean? What is the relationship between those concepts, practices, and organized religion, in your opinion? Yeah. So I wanted to kind of do some like definitional work up front here because I think this is important. You know, like you said, Brat, mysticism as a word, sounds very similar to mystification. So I think trying these things out. And obviously we both come from a Marxist tradition that is very critical of religion, right? And that

understands religion through a lens of ideology. So I think doing definition, initial work can help us kind of untangle some of the complications there. So when I'm talking about mysticism, at least, which is the word that I usually fall back on when discussing sort of the spinovina that we're getting, I'm talking about a whole source of traditions that exist across different religious movements that get at kind of a few big ideas. One of the, I think, kind of like core ideas that is true across mystical traditions is sort of monism. So an assertion of a fundamental unity that underlies a reality, or maybe is reality itself, and non-dualism in response to that. So the kind of pushing back against the ego that sets ourselves apart

and outside from that reality, and I think in a lot of ways beyond just those ideas, mysticism refers to a set of traditions that also have practices that allow people to experience that unity, right? So that can take many different forms. So you take the form of meditation in Sufism, Islamic mysticism, we see that in ecstatic dance, actually, in some instances, these various techniques that can be employed in order for an experience of unity to be achieved and for the kind of dualism that we see to fall apart, even if only for a moment. So that's kind of what I'm getting at when I talk about mysticism. And spirituality to me is a much broader term, and it refers, I think, to sort of religious

and spiritual practices, which may or may not be mystical in their content. Mystical practices I think often fall within the broad terms of spirituality, but I also think it kind transcends that category. And we can actually be very skeptical of the idea of spirituality or a spiritual world while also embracing mysticism in ways that I think are important to kind of unpack there. Mysticism, in my mind, is actually very compatible with a materialist view of the world in some very interesting ways. The sort of monism at the core of mysticism, I don't think has to assert what kind of thing it is that fundamentally exist. That could be a material thing even. And there are kind of monistic materialisms that exist as well. So I think it's important to say that while mysticism and

spirituality often intertwine with each other, they're not identical to each other. And mysticism does, I think, go beyond those categories in a lot of ways. The final part of the question that I actually think is really worth wrestling with, too, is that mysticism is distinct from religion in a lot of ways, because organized mainstream religions are often very skeptical of their mystical traditions in ways that I think are interesting. So again, I come to mysticism largely through the Abrahamic tradition, so having done a fair amount of research and some practice within Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, where within those three religions, you have schools that develop this mystical ideal, which often are in contradiction or conflict with the

broader religion. In Christianity, you have these fascinating histories throughout the Middle Ages of monastic figures who are having these mystical experiences of union with God, who often then end up in almost legal conflict with the church more broadly, who is very skeptical of those experiences. You see this also throughout parts of Jewish history and Islamic history as well. One of the notes that I noted down that I think is like this very interesting example of this that comes up in Islam is this famous, very famous Sufi master, Hussein Mansoor al-Halaj, who, while engaged in ecstatic worship practice, exclaimed, I am God, which is a really interesting thing for someone to say. And that was met with actual prosecution at the hands of the

state because of it being heresy. But within the mystical tradition, that statement isn't understood as an individual exclaiming that they are literally God. It's understood as someone transcending the self, the disillusion of the ego and expressing the fundamental unity with God. And so in that example, I think we can see those tensions that exist between the religion more broadly and the mystical traditions that exist within that religion. In contemporary Islam, there actually is a lot of kind of controversy around this with more slothist and reformist schools of Islam actually seeing Sufist mysticism as a deviation from the religion and often kind of persecuting it in some way. So for me, I think it's very important to say, yeah, we can talk about mysticism and it can't be cleanly separated from the religion. in which it develops, but it can often be in conflict with them in ways that are, you know, important to emphasize. So all that definitional work out there, I will say broadly for me, what my relationship to all that is is that I personally find mystical experiences to be fascinating. I can account a couple experiences that I have had in my life that I would say had hints

of a mystical experience. Some of those due to the help of certain substances that can help one kind of achieve those experiences, not just personal spiritual cultivation. But I think there's something there within those traditions that I feel like I have at least caught a glimpse of in my life and that people throughout history have caught glimpses of. And that kind of creates the motivation for me to have a relationship to this concept, to these traditions, and to care deeply about it. So that's kind of how I relate to all of that as well. That's really, really good. Yeah, we have an episode on Sufism with Adnan from Grill History. We did like two years ago. If somebody wants to have a full episode just on the mystical tradition within Islam.

And, yeah, we'd also discuss how it has historically and continues in some ways to conflict with mainstream religious traditions in the church or whatever it may be. Now, in the Christian mystical tradition, you have figures like St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart, and I would even include St. Francis to be very much within this mystical tradition within Christianity. St. Francis obviously is a huge figure for me. I have a whole episode of St. Francis, and people are interested. But also, you know, I see Jesus as a fundamentally mystical figure. Because you said earlier, right, the Islamic mystic who said, I am God.

And that creates a huge backlash. You're not. You know, people flip out about that. I mean, what happened with Jesus Christ? I'm the son of God, right? And you can read a lot of what he says in the New Testament in a mystical, through a mystical lens that I find incredibly fascinating. The Zen Buddhist Adyashanti has an entire book on Jesus where he walks through the New Testament and the entire life of Jesus Christ and helps you understand it through the mystical lens. And that's coming from somebody with a Zen Buddhist background.

Right. So I highly recommend that if any of that interested in you. But one thing I did want to ask is you said that you had mystical experiences. I believe I have as well. do you want to talk about what those mystical experiences were like or felt like or do you feel comfortable doing that? Yeah. So it is kind of embarrassing because I think the most mystical experience I've had has been on LSD, which, you know, has a way of creating those kind of experiences. And I have two minds of this, right? Because I think one thing that is very true of mystical traditions is often an emphasis on discipline and self-cultivation as a part of achieving a mystical experience. And at the same time, it takes very little discipline and self-cultivation to just do a lot of acid.

So, you know, I go back and forth on that. But there was a period of my life in which I used quite a bit of acid. And one particular experience that actually stopped me from doing hallucinogens ever again. I just kind of was like, I'm good after that was a trip that I would actually describe as a very bad trip in a lot of ways. I took a bigger dose than I expected to take. I found it very overwhelming. And eventually I did what is usually the smart thing to do in a bad trip, which is I found the darkest room that I could and I just laid there, right? And tried to reduce my sensory input.

And if you've never done a fair amount of acid before, one of the things that's really tough about it is that it's a long trip, right? It can be like 10 hours. And at least for me, it's always had a very kind of energizing side of it and I can never fall asleep on it. So I found myself in this kind of miserable experience of laying on the floor in this room, having a terrible, terrible experience, tripping way too hard and being forced to be conscious through it, which was not fun, but I kind of was laying there and I kind of just let go and decided to go with it. And in a way that I don't quite know how to put into words, I really had this experience of letting go and just going along with this thing where it felt like my consciousness was

moving in ways that were completely beyond my control. And that kind of led to this weird breakthrough for only a moment of realizing, like, my consciousness isn't me in a really interesting way. My consciousness is this thing that can move separate for me, that can do its own things. And I am something else outside of that. And I can step outside of and feel myself external to my consciousness and my ego. And weirdly, that realization was right. remarkably calming. It's a horrifying realization in some ways. That is so destabilizing. But at the same time, it was also very much an experience of, oh, I'm okay in this moment, right? It's not me that is experiencing this. It is something that I've held on to and told myself as me desperately,

but something that is separate. And I think in that there was kind of this unfolding of then just an experience of, oh, I am part of something bigger and I am not just this little tiny, that I've held on to and defied myself around, and a real sense of just kind of unity that came from that, eventually kind of saw me through what could have been a much more horrible multi-hour waiting out a bad trip. So I don't think that is a full-blown experience of unity, but it was a hint of it. It was a glimpse of something tied with kind of a realization that to me has become really important and is one of, I think, the ideas and mysticism that I find very meaningful, which is that I'm not my ego. I'm not the voice in internal monologue inside of my head. It is easy to

misidentify myself with that thing, but that is not who I am. And in fact, if I want to define who I am, I probably have to step outside of that thing completely. And for me, that was kind of this experience that really took a lot of these ideas that I had read before and put it into something experiential. And it's something that I've caught hints and glimpses of when a tempting meditative practice, but I would say I'm very bad at meditation. So, you know, that is something that where a space where I will have to apply discipline and work to try to achieve something. But that is the experience that really stands out to me. Again, I can give a rational explanation of that, right, which is that my brain was flooded with chemicals that cause certain hallucinatory

experiences and that those experiences were entirely a result of mental and neurological processes is taking place within my brain. But I got to say that even after I sobered up, that realization really has stuck with me for the rest of my life in ways that I find hard to attribute to just a change in neurochemistry, maybe. Absolutely.

Beautifully said, and there is a long, deep tradition of psychedelics opening the door for people. I do think it's limited, right? You're not going to just use psychedelics to stabilize non-duality or reach enlightenment or anything like that. But what it does time and time again, when I'm listening to people in mystical traditions, people that are, you know, very accomplished in Buddhist traditions or, you know, Christian mysticism, et cetera, very often, you'll, you'll come to hear that the first experience they had that pushed them in this direction was under the influence of some sort of psychedelics.

Psychedelics go way, way back in human history as well. I interviewed, I can't even say his name Brian. How did Mirra Askew? He was even on Joe Rogan's podcast. But he wrote a book called The Immortality Key, where he goes back to the origins of Western civilization, right? Ancient Greece, the rise of the earliest Christianity. And he makes a really evidence-based scholarly attempt to show that psychedelic use was incredibly prevalent in these early days of the Western tradition and of the Christian tradition. And that I think is at least worth exploring to show the power that psychedelics, the generative power,

psychedelics can have now my first mystical experience also came under the influence of psychedelics but this time for me it was psilocybin mushrooms i was i told the story many times before but the the the quick and brief version is that me and my friend each got 3.5 grams each my friend backed out he got he got too scared um i had no experience with psychedelics had no clue what was going to happen just 16 you're just trying to do something fun on a saturday night i take his 3.5 and my own I'm reaching a heroic dose of seven grams of mushrooms and very stupid but I'm so is the best mistake I ever made because what happened was I was in the parking lot of a movie theater because we're 16. We don't have a house to go to. We're just in my friend's mom's van. I take all seven

grams. It comes on incredibly quickly, incredibly powerfully. And I find myself, I fell to the ground in this little patch of grass and I looked up at the at the stars and I felt this orgasmic euphoric feeling of the subject object uh distinction collapsing entirely it felt as if the stars were raining into me that's that's the language I used at the time not having any mystical um you know knowledge having no clue that mysticism I you ask 16 year old brett what is mysticism I've never heard that word so I had no context no you know pre you know pre idea about what was happening or anything like that. But what I've come to realize is that this was this complete collapse of subject and object. And there was no more me in here and the universe

or the stars or the night sky out there. It all was one thing. And it was absolutely euphoric in a way that I've never experienced since. Now, after that, my friends were like, you're making a scene. There's like people with the kids walking into the movie theater. They violently grabbed me, ripped me up from the ground, threw me into the van and that like bandaid rip of being in the oceanic oneness and being thrown into the back of a shitty van by other 16 year old adolescent boys was it took my trip in the opposite direction so then then i had two hours of going through hell where i was vomiting what i thought was blood i thought there were creatures in my blood i saw snakes and spiders coming out of the

every vent in the van coming at me and i had like an insane experience like to the point where my friends were scared like we don't know what's happening right um but but coming out of that that's what really pushed me in this direction of like okay that's one way to do it the a door was certainly opened some experience was certainly revealed to me i'm i'm definitely going to try that again but over time it became very clear to me that okay yes you can open the door you can peek inside but when the trip ends you might have a couple revelations you can hold on to but there's nothing lasting there. And so if you, you know, the classic analogy is that psychedelics will shoot you on a rocket to the top of the mountain and then bring you back down, whereas meditation or these other spiritual

practices are a long hike up the mountain. And eventually when you get to the top, you're, you're allowed to perhaps stay maybe. So for that more enduring mystical tradition or experience or journey, if you will, that's going to take these spiritual practices. And psychedelics are really only a kicking open of the door and a slamming of that door shut again. And there have been people, especially in the 60s, who made the error of thinking that if they just kept doing it, if they just stayed high enough, if they just continued using LSD and mushrooms all the time, that they could somehow reach the stage of enlightenment. And people burned out. People fried their brains. It was obviously a dead end at some point. And the famous sort of mystic Ram Dass,

who was, you know, used to be Richard Alpert. He was a Harvard psychologist. wanted to test psychedelics and was actually kicked out of Harvard for his use of psychedelics in the in a lab experiment he he went that path he tried psychedelics he said i've done lsd thousands of times there was periods of my life where i was on a psychedelic every single day and eventually it became very clear to me that i was only going to be able to get so far and that's when he he he got fired from harvard and he took this journey to the east and meditated and under the auspices of of really advanced teachers in India and so forth, Southeast Asia, and was able to, you know, garner real spiritual understanding through these traditions of the East that were long-lasting. He died a few years ago in the ripe age of 90 something. And I encourage people to go check out his life story

because I think it's really instructive and really fascinating. And he's just a really funny, down-to-earth, insightful guy that is fun to listen to. So I encourage people to do that. But that was my first mystical experience, and I have to say I have had other mystical experiences, not under the influence of any substance whatsoever. And in those instances, which I have talked about before, it wasn't a complete collapse of subject-object dualism. But what it was was this overwhelming sense, this ego-less sense of love that came as a sort of pinnacle of existential and spiritual suffering, long periods of suffering, months, in my case. in two different instances of deep internal suffering that peaked and the wave crested in this moment of euphoric love where you literally feel as if you are loved there is no more me in there loving other people out there there is just love and when you get in it only last lasted for me for a few moments both times i experienced it but it was like you know the cliche of love is everything or something's deep about love or all these mystical traditions talk about love. They use the word love. And if you haven't had these experiences, it does

sound kind of trite, kind of like a platitude. But if you have these experiences of literally feeling as if you are love, a selfless, egoless swamping of the self by love, it's a profound experience. And you look at complete strangers as if they are yourself. And isn't that what Jesus told us? Love your neighbor as if it was yourself. And that is a profound spiritual, mystical dictate to love a total stranger as much as you love yourself or as much as you love your own children. And to be able to experience that and to touch that, for me, that erased any doubt that there's something of value here to be explored. I don't have all the experiences. I can't stabilize that feeling. I have a lot of work to do. But those acute

experiences proved without a shadow of a doubt for me that there is something of real value here. and that is, that is more or less sort of kept me on the path. Yeah, I'll expand a little bit to, um, on my experience as well. So beyond the drug use, I think I've mentioned this to you before, Brett. Like for me, I feel like I've had moments of insight like this in the context of nature and like intense physical expenditure, basically, which again, I could explain very easily scientifically, right? As like when one is climbing a mountain, there's an incredible endorphin release, right?

That occurs there. that is going to evoke certain emotional stages. But also at the same time, like, I have had experiences of literally standing on top of a mountain where something about the exhaustion and the place has had this incredible profound experience of my own smallness, in a sense, right? And I think they're, again, not quite a full mystical experience, but these moments of seeing like, oh, my gosh, this whole, for me, it always comes back to ego, this whole ego that I built up around myself. that needs to climb a mountain, right, to say that I did that, is so stupid once I'm on top of it, because it is so minuscule and meaningless in the broader unity of existence. And the idea that there's this distinction between the me who needs to conquer a mountain and the mountain is meaningless once you're just laying on top of it exhausted and defeated, right? And I think, again, this isn't a full-blown mystical experience. And I think what I realized is that what I was chasing through hallucinogens,

I eventually started to chase through just encounters with nature in a lot of ways, which has led me to a point in my life of realizing that I probably need something more disciplined and not just chasing these small, little experiences that can be gained in these other ways. But yeah, I don't know. I think there's these experiences that you can have that once you start to catch glimpses of this thing, it's hard to let go of it, right? And it's hard to not want to devote some part of your life to understanding. And I think as you really got at stabilizing that, some way. Yes. And for me, what makes them so profound is they're not just like really cool experiences. They're not just like, you know, I've had many cool experiences. They're the most deep, enriching, grounding in some sense, but also ungrounding experiences in my entire life. If, you know, they're the most profound things I've ever felt. And so that, that right there is like they stand head and shoulders above any other mere experience. And it's precisely that element of the ego disappearing.

Only momentarily, because the question of whether or not you can stabilize that over the long term, I'm sure some people can. It's a whole other question. But the thing that's unique in all of the situations that Allison and I have just described is this dropping away of that little voice inside your head, that incessant little chatter, the need to cling on to good things, to push away bad things, to run away from pain, to try to hold on to things that you love, that by the nature of them change and fall. the way that creates a whole level of suffering and we carry this burden around with us all the time this egoic burden this this little sense of self that constantly needs to be um defended that is constantly being buffeted by the winds of life that is ultimately unstable and ultimately ends in complete annihilation yeah and as long as you are identifying with that ego your entire life you are a tiny tiny tiny little being falling through the void and it's terrifying And of course it is. And death horrifies you because what is death but the end of the ego?

And, you know, what is, I forget who says it, but, you know, the whole point of philosophy is to learn how to die before you die. Right, right. And that is, what they're saying is to let that sense of self die while you're still alive, you know, so you can experience the liberation from the fear of death, which is a fascinating aspect of all this as well. But the one point I wanted to make about nature, one of the best things you could do. whether you're into this stuff or just want to clear your head or whatever is i find if you spend prolonged periods of time in nature alone it's really fascinating because you you begin to one get into tune of how the ebbs and flows of the natural world are right light comes the the sun sets you know birds and animals become active at other parts of the day they're not you get really in tune

with that but the the other important thing is that you're not performing for anybody when you're social situations, which we almost all are all the time, you are putting on a mask, whether you know it or not. I'm playing the role of dad. Now I'm playing the role of coworker. Now I'm playing the role of a co-worker. Now I'm playing the role at the guy checking out at the grocery store. And I'm talking to the clerk in that sort of dynamic, right? That social dynamic, etc. When you're out in nature, there's nobody to perform for. You're out there long enough. Naturally, your mind doesn't start quieting down. Like your mind, you'll continue talking to yourself, of course, but a sort of more authentic version of you begins to be able to bloom because you're

not performing a social role. You're completely liberated from any social context. You're embedded in nature and that in and of itself can be really conducive to being content. But if you're also on a spiritual journey, you're also mixing in meditation and spiritual practices in that context. It really amplifies the entire experience and creates a really perfect foundation for you to be able to use those spiritual practices and those techniques in that context. So I find that very liberating in its own right. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to go ahead and I think jump into our next question, if that's okay with you,

because this is one where I am super interested in your thoughts on this, because I wish I had a clear-cut answer, and I feel like it's something that you may have wrestled with a little bit more than I have. So my question for you, which we can go back and forth on, is, you know, how do you justify engaging with all of this while also being a Marxist materialist, right? Like, I think people are going to sense contradiction or tension between those things. So I'm curious how you navigate that. I navigate it from a dialectical perspective, which is to say that every component that has an objective side has a subjective

side. Let's just talk about science before we get into Marxism in particular. Science is this third party attempt, right, third party meaning that not just one person can come to a scientific conclusion. It has to be tested. Third party, there has to be an arena of people searching for a similar truth that you can bounce your ideas off, run tests, advance hypotheses, you know, be overturned, have somebody else come with a new hypotheses. But the basic thing of, if it's going to be a scientific fact, it's not going to be, oh, this culture realizes it versus this culture or this person in this place of time realizes it and this person over here doesn't, it has to be true for everybody you know science are universal truths if the big bang theory is

correct it's true no matter what planet you live on no matter what country you live on no matter what culture you come from so that is an investigation of the objective side of reality i truly believe that our sentience our consciousness is the subjective side of the cosmos if it has an objective side the thing you can look out you can google right now what does the milky way look like what is the cosmological model look like let me see a picture of the big bang all those things will come up i'm sure in your head right now that some of those images are popping up because we've all seen them a million times we use science we use physics we use chemistry we use biology to explore this objective side of the cosmos to understand our place within it our inner lives

our sentience our consciousness what can it be if not the subjective side of the cosmos there's no differentiation. It's not like we are placed into the cosmos from outside of it. We bloom and blossom from within it. We are just as much part of the cosmos as the rings of Saturn or the sun that lights, that heats up our solar system or nebulae far off in the distance. There's that objective sense, but subjectively we feel alien. Subjectively, we feel like the cosmos is so big and overwhelming. We are just a little thing that was placed inside of it. This is our ego talking about. right right this little vulnerable thing inside of this magisterial domain of complete mystery and profundity but we are fundamentally vulnerable in weak and we will be washed away by it and and that that leads to a lot of fear and neurosis etc but if you can kind of see intellectually and then hopefully experientially that and this happens when the ego drops away that you are and every sentient being across the cosmos is the subjective side of the cosmos, I think right there we have some, the rubber's hitting the road. We have something to work with there without having

to displace or undermine science in any way. Right. And I think a very similar thing is true with Marxism. When I get into a mystical state, again, as I said in the beginning, I'm not drawing metaphysical conclusions about the way the cosmos is objectively, because now you're applying subjective revelations and experiences and you're trying to project them onto an objective truth about the reality of the cosmos. So what I think is that there's Marxism, materialism, because when we're looking at the world around us, that is by far in a way the best method of analyzing the way that societies evolve over time, the best way of analyzing political and social problems. That's the lens it's meant for. And it would be absurd for me to go into

deep Buddhist meditation to get some insight and then to try to cram it into Marxism, right? Because you're using two different things. Just like it would be insane to take a subjective experience that I have and then try to make an objective metaphysical claim about the objective cosmos. So, you know, this idea of how do you engage with these things while also being Marxist? I'm a Marxist and I'm a materialist when it comes to understanding the objective world. When it comes to understanding my society, political economic structures, how to go about making change in this world, et cetera. When I'm engaged in a mystical practice,

I'm not trying to generate objective claims about the material world. I'm looking inwardly and I'm exploring the subjective dimension of my own existence and of the cosmos. And there's nothing, there need not be a contradiction unless and until you attempt to apply one lens where it doesn't belong. Then you're making a categorical error. You're trying to apply a lens meant for one category in a totally different category, and you're going to run into errors. So I don't think we need to necessarily piece this whole thing together, nor do I think we necessarily have to insist that the mystical tradition is something that Marxists have permission to do.

It is just you exploring a different side of life. You know, there's, like I've talked about this in the context of psychoanalysis before. When you're trying to understand individual psychology, maybe you do pick up a tool like psychoanalysis and try to understand what's going on. Whatever, whatever, what am I repressing? It depends if you're skeptical of that whole field of study or not. I find it to be useful and generative of some interesting insights. But, you know, I need not try to force that square peg into the round hole of Marxism or to make those two things fit together. So for me, it's like I don't need to encourage Marxists that they need to do this to be a good Marxist.

this is like outside of that if you're you're also in addition to being a marxist in a collective struggle you're also an individual with your own existential concerns your own psychology your own body and mind that you can also explore and now does is there bleed over i think there's interesting ways in which these mystical and spiritual traditions profoundly humble you that then is useful in a marxist context you know but i and i think there's ways that by understanding your own psychology and your own mind at deeper and deeper and deeper levels, you come to be able to understand other people at deeper and deeper levels, which makes it easier and more effective for you to engage with people from a wide variety of

backgrounds. So there's some overlap and there's some skills that transfer. But at the end of the day, we don't need to try to smash these things together. We can take the subject, object distinction and kind of run with it. But I'm interested if any of that makes sense to you or if you disagree with anything there. No, I mean, I think I agree with all that. I think that there is, I think you're right to say that these are kind of two different categories. And I think the individual versus collective side of things is important. Because for me, like, you know, when I think about mysticism, it's not something that I am encouraging anyone else to necessarily investigate unless they want to, right? It's not something that I would ever want

to be like proselytizey about. It's something that's important to me, right, that I feel like I have to engage with. And that's not something I would demand of anyone else. And then the other thing I think, like you said, is yes, like we engage in collective struggles as Marxists, but we are individuals with our own needs, right? And for me, there are things that I gain as an individual from this that I actually think any will need to go out and do things better, right? And we can get into that a little bit. But like, one thing that I think you hint to that, that I feel a lot is that a lot of the times these insights can really help to have empathy with others, help to respect differences with others, help to be able to just engage with others in more humane and being

ways, and so that can be really important. The other thing that I want to touch on, too, though, is that I think even, like, materialism in, like, the strict ontological sense doesn't have to be at odds with any of what we're talking about, which is what's, to me, always kind of interesting, right? Certainly the mystical traditions that I've discussed within the Abrahamic religions aren't particularly materialist in their orientations. But I do think that even if we take, like, the most kind of harsh ontological materialist view of the world, world and materialist view of consciousness, where you have a lot of theorists of consciousness who say, like, consciousness is just an emergent property of matter reaching a level of complexity and some electricity running through it, that suddenly it starts thinking, right? This is kind of like the hard-blind materialist approach to what consciousness is, trying not to posit some sort of soul that might go with it, some sort of force that animates it. It's just the brain reached a level of complexity, their signals moving through it, and oops, consciousness emerges out that. Even if that's true, I think that's fully compatible with

everything we've been discussing here, right? Because in that case, I think you are correct. And yes, consciousness is just the subjective experience of reality, right? The subjective experience of that matter doing its thing in these very complicated ways. And, you know, a book that I've been wrestling through recently is this book called Everything is God by Jay Michelson, which is a very fascinating engagement with both Jewish and Buddhist mysticism. in interesting ways. He practices both traditions. And, you know, he kind of talks about this, and he says, there's a way to read the mystical tradition in this very spiritual, like, oh, we're all one with a divine spirit that transcends everything. But you can also read it in this very beautifully

materialist way of there just is matter. That is the single thing in the universe and sometimes matter develops consciousness in ways that we may not yet have a good philosophical explanation of. And mystical experiences can be us realizing that, no, that isn't some unique special soul that I have, which I am above everything else. I am the universe, right? I am that matter having its own experiential process. And so you can read it in both of these ways. And I think for me, that's an important thing for kind of pushing past potential contradictions with the underlying philosophies of Marxism is that I think I can assert, like, yeah, I would probably call myself an atheist in ways that would make. both atheists and theists uncomfortable perhaps, but I think I can apply that to myself and still affirm a lot of what we're discussing here and a lot of the truths of the mystical traditions, even

as they've been articulated by people who absolutely weren't atheists, right? And I think that's one of the complicated things to kind of unpack and untangle here. Yeah, I think one of the huge benefits of philosophical monism, which is something you mentioned early on, and something that I've always been

very sympathetic to, is that it sort of undermines this need to reduce one to the other, to reduce the subjective to the objective or vice versa, but to rather see them as two sides of the same coin. An objective side needs to have a subjective side, like night needs to have day to make even sense. And so monism, instead of insisting that, I mean, we're talking philosophical, we're talking cosmological, we're not merely talking about how to analyze societies and their evolution over time. I think materialism is clearly superior in that case. But if you're looking at like the foundations of ontology, what is reality, what is

reality ultimately. A materialist will say, well, all the consciousness, all the subjectivity is ultimately reducible to matter, to material. And maybe that's true. An idealist will say all of this matter, everything, the atoms, the physicality of the world is actually all a projection of whatever, God's mind, and is absolutely, and ultimately reducible to this consciousness or to whatever, this divine spirit, et cetera. And so monism is really useful because it says, well, one, we don't know. We can't ever know that answer. Right. But it makes much more sense, I think, to say that there are two sides of the same coin.

What that ultimate foundation is might not necessarily be purely material nor purely idealist or consciousness. They could come into existence at more or less the same time. Now, you have to have material arranged in a certain way to generate subjectivity. So I think materialist in that sense might have a little advantage there to say. Well, yes, subjectivity, consciousness is a feature of the cosmos for sure, but that is a downstream effect of matter being organized in a certain way, ergo materialism is still ontologically the foundation of reality. And that might be the case. But yeah, I think the deep urge to reduce one to the other or to eliminate one side of that coin, I think is always going to result ultimately in error. And philosophical monism allows us to not do that. Another thing I wanted to mention that connects Marxism with my spiritual traditions that I'm interested in, and this is an argument I've made incredibly explicit, is dialectics. There's a deep dialectical aspect to Buddhism, to Taoism, to these spiritual traditions that I'm personally interested in. I think also to mysticism inherently, because it's a lot of what we're talking about, right?

Subjective, objective, et cetera, this interplay, this relational reality, this ever-changing reality. thing you immediately get beaten to your head if you're engaging with Buddhism the only constant is change everything is relentless cascade of change and we suffer when we try to reject that truth when we try

to cling on to things that we don't want to change in a universe that necessitates their change we suffer unnecessarily so I think there's a really interesting aspect there and I wanted to bounce this off of you Allison and see if this comports with your experiences doing spiritual

practices of any sort but and this is you know a quintessential dialectical image for me is uh the sort of spiral or the double helix right of this thing of like and i think even marks has talked about communism as this return to community at a higher level right and that that really really intensifies this image of an upward spiral where you sort of objectively as humanity evolves we kind of there's a way in which history rhymes there's a way in which we deal with the same problems, but there's a way in which we deal with them as we evolve at higher and higher levels. And individually and spiritually, I found that exact mechanism to be at play because my spiritual engagement comes cyclically. It comes sort of

seasonality, right? It comes in a spiral. So what I mean by that is I will go, and this has been true since I got into this stuff in my teens, I will go through a prolonged period of sort of perhaps suffering, existential crises, depression, whatever it may be, a prolonged period of suffering. And because of this suffering, I'm pushed deeply to go to what I know, which is this meditation practice, these spiritual practices. All of a sudden I'm reading, all my books, I'm reading our spiritual books. All, you know, all the time I'm thinking about meditation practice, deepening it, expanding it, trying to go for, can I meditate for an hour, can I meditate for three hours? Can I go camping by myself so I can meditate? My whole world is focused on this stuff.

And by suffering and by doing these spiritual practices, eventually what happens, and this has happened several times throughout my life in these big year-long cycles, multiple, multi-year-long cycles, is eventually that suffering will culminate in some deep spiritual experience, often deeply intertwined with this deep feeling of love and connection and radical compassion for all sentient beings and that sort of that sort of signals the end of this cycle of suffering right i'm coming out of winter the ice is starting to thaw and then i'll go into this new period of expanded capacities of expanded wisdom of expanded depth i'll spend two to five years two to three mostly on average of not interested i'm actually no longer really reading spiritual books i

sometimes will let my set my meditation practice aside for a year or two um i'm not going to retreats, right? And now, but I'm exploring other aspects of myself. So in this last, this last cycle that I went through a couple years ago, it, same thing, long period of suffering. I was dealing with a lot of loss. COVID was also a huge stress. All these things sort of culminated to this big spiritual crisis I had. I lost a baby. I lost my dad. And all of that culminated in another, this sense, the sensation of love. I talked about being in the target parking lot and being overwhelmed with love for the strangers that I feel. And now, right now, I'm in this spring and summer that followed that winter.

So I'm not meditating. I haven't meditated for the last year, really, in any consistent way, not as interested in spiritual practices, but all of a sudden I have these new capacities. So I have this capacity I've never had before for discipline. So, you know, I don't know where this comes from. It feels like I'm leveling up. But I have this profound endogenous discipline now that I apply to my nutrition, to my exercise, and to my body.

So I'm getting out of my mind and I'm getting back in my body. I'm doing sports. I'm playing softball. I'm playing volleyball. I'm weight training four days a week. When you weight train that much, you're deeply interested in nutrition. You're learning nutritional science. You know, now I have this thing where I'm counting my calories and my protein to ensure I'm getting the exact amount to maximize muscle growth, et cetera, right?

And then so I'll do that and I have this discipline. I never had it in my 20s. I've always wanted it, never had it. All of a sudden it's here. I don't even have to try for it. and then eventually the summer wears on the deep humid August of my inner life happens and I'm still doing all this outward focus stuff and then eventually these little things start to happen I start to feel the depression coming back on or I start to have a new spiritual or existential question or conundrum or contradiction or suffering that just begins to poke the veil

and I'm entering my own autumn right and then I go through this cycle again and then I start getting deep I turn away sort of from the outside world a little bit I get much more into my inner life. I'm meditating a lot more, et cetera, and the cycle plays again. But every time I come out of a dark winter, I am elevated in some new way. I'm able to love the people in my life better. I'm able to more easily spew what I hope to be wise insights about the human condition. I'm more easily able to understand where other people are coming from and to have my knee-jerk response is compassion, even for annoying people or people that, you know, I don't, I don't like quote unquote to find the thing in them that that makes me love them and i have compassion for their suffering and what made them this way right uh so so that's a fascinating experience the

question is will that cycle ever stop will there be a time when i'm unable to navigate the dark winters and i get stuck there um is there a ceiling to all of those are all unresolved questions but does does that cyclical um spiritual thing and everybody's different but does that resonate with you at all? Yeah, extremely. So I have so many thoughts, actually. I think you hit on so many fascinating things here. So I'm going to try to break it out into a few different things. So first, yes, that very strongly relates to my experience. So like I said, I was raised Christian, right? So I grew up in religion, like inundated in spirituality. It was built into my education. It was built into everything that I was taught to believe. And as a young adult when I got to Bible college,

my religion and my faith in anything completely collapsed. In a lot of ways, I attribute that to being queer and transphobic in a homophobic and transphobic context and just not being able to reconcile religion with those things. I also attribute that to finally engaging with philosophy that challenged me, engaging with existentialism, and really Camus was remarkably important for me in terms of being able to let go of those beliefs and those practices that I had been raised with. And so there was a period in my early 20s, really, where I felt just extremely liberated to not have spirituality or religion in my life at all, right? If it was, I'm an atheist, I have answers. I am happy. I am good. I could leave all that behind. End of story. And in a sense,

it would be so nice if I could have just stayed in that place. But ultimately, what I have found time and time again is that, yeah, life comes at you in ways that makes it hard for that to be enough, I guess maybe is what I would say you lose friends, you lose family members, you experience horrible things that do kind of send you in search for something more. And one of the hardest things for me that I had to come to terms with, as I've matured, I think, is to recognize, like, yeah, in my childhood, religion and spirituality were horrifically regressive reactionary things. And also, God, I don't think I can live without them on some level. And so I do find that cyclical experience of coming back. There will be times where all I do is

read political philosophy and all I do is engage in essentially a secular life and then something will come up, usually depression, usually anxiety or some sort of personal crisis that drives me back to a mean to engage with these things. And it's been weird, right? Like for me to, I'm certainly not a Christian. I'm not in any way Christian, but I still engage in reading Christian mystical insights because I think there's something there. And this just kind of returning to these things over and over again is very much the pattern of it. So I definitely relate to that. I think, where do I want to go with this? So the other thought that I have actually, and this is, I think, interesting, is that I think that cyclical going back and forth is actually perhaps where we ought to end up in a lot of

ways. So we talked about, you know, is it ever possible to stabilize the mystical experience? And one of the things that I think you see in a lot of mystical traditions is that you wouldn't want to even if you could, right? So one of the difficulties is that if mysticism is built around this profound realization of unity and experience of unity and transcendence of duality and the ego, there's also the fact that we live in a world of duality, right? Whether or not it is ultimately illusory or not, which is a question that I feel like the Eastern traditions engage with much more directly than the Abrahamic traditions. But regardless of whether or not it is all illusory, it is still what we experience and what we are embedded in every day is a world of duality.

And so if mysticism becomes a thing that just keeps us forever pulled away from that reality, I think that's a mistake as well in a lot of ways. I think that, and this is the thing that I've tried to combat in myself, when you have these experiences, you know, you described it as orgasmic earlier, right? And I think that's not wrong, right? Like there's something about it that is so profoundly euphoric and you can fall into a state of thinking, that's all I ever want. And I actually think that's an error, right? That, you know, just politically is an abandoning of our responsibility to others. It is a running away from a world where suffering does, in fact, exist and is experienced by people, whether or not the source of

that suffering is, you know, whatever we would attribute it to, it does exist. And so in book that I mentioned by Jane Michelson, everything is God. This is what he kind of argues, where he says, ultimately, the goal of the mystical insight actually needs to be to have the insight, to see the unity, and then to allow us to return to a world of duality with profound compassion. Because now within all the differentiation that we can see in the universe where dual duality is at least phenomenologically real, we can see the oneness that undergirds all of it, right? And we can start to see difference and. others as a manifestation of something that we share with them. And so the cyclical nature of it, I think, is almost has to be a part of mysticism if mysticism is going to be anything of value. In the Buddhist tradition, right, I often think about one of the most beautiful concepts in my mind is the bodhisattva, right? And you have the bodhisattva figure who chooses to forego personal liberation, right, in order to share the path to liberation with others. And so if mysticism does have this cyclical going back and forth between, I need to dive into this.

I need to see that thing that I caught a glimpse of. And then also stepping away from it and living in the world, I actually think that's the higher form of it that we need to achieve in a lot of ways. Absolutely love that. I completely agree. It is useless if all these insights and this deep love and compassion is not put into action, you know, then you're just, then it becomes this sort of narcissistic, navel-gazy. I can just go sit in a cave, I have no responsibilities, no.

Whenever I have an insight of love and unity, it drives me deeper and more profoundly and more rabidly to go out and help other people. I can't help but want to help. I had a recent mushroom experience a couple years ago during COVID actually. I was by myself in a dark basement. I set up the whole thing.

And I remember as the trip got heavier and heavier, I had this moment where I collapsed to the ground out of love for all sentient beings and I was weeping by myself unprovoked and a voice came to me that said you know it was authoritative it didn't seem like it was my own inner voice but it was also deeply loving and gentle it just commanded me to do more and it just kept repeating that reverberating throughout my consciousness do more do more do more do more and I interpreted that as do more do whatever you can to love other people to care for other people to to alleviate the they're suffering when and where you can not to try to save the world you can't do that but you can

help people in your own life every single day there's an opportunity for you to be more compassionate more loving more open and to take that as like a dictate from on high to love other people and do more so yeah i completely agree this idea that you could and you do see this in spiritual communities where it becomes an escape from responsibility where you you become a solipsistic it's just about me and my own. This is like new age spirituality is so narcissistic. Right. Far from destroying the ego, you have elevated to grotesque heights in a lot of instances. And I think that is the way the spiritual path can completely be aborted and go off to a dark off the rails deep end sort of thing where you've now lost the plot. But on the other side, that's also true because we see

people who, even in the Marxist world, right, who have these visions for a better world, who want more equality, et cetera, but who themselves are often limited in what they can do by their own lack of internal depth, their own lack of internal self-knowledge, their lack of knowledge, their lack of knowledge about other people where other people are coming from, a lack of humanness, a lack of compassion. They're still very, you know, in all these different ways, greedy, self-absorbed, narcissistic and that limits what they can do politically. And so I feel like in good balance, the middle path, if you will, is to fully develop both sides of your being, both sides of your existence and to let them fuel one another in a positive way. Yeah, this back and forth

seems to be an inherent feature. And if you find yourself only on one side all the time, you are making an error. So I think that's interesting. Now, another aspect of this sort of dialectics and the zooming in or zooming out aspect is in Hinduism and Buddhism there's this funny thing about the self because in Hinduism, Moksha,

right? Liberation, Enlightenment is synonymous with a capital S self, where you stop identifying with lowercase S self, little egoic me and you expand to the I am God statement, right? I am everything. I am the cosmos, the big

self. And in Buddhism, that exact same experience is framed as no self, right? The obliteration of the self. In both instances, the lowercase s self is transcended, at least momentarily, is overcome. But whether the self is everything or the self is nothing, it's actually the same thing. And I've always loved that about Hinduism and Buddhism. And of course, Buddhism comes out of Hinduism, right? Just like Jesus was Jewish and founded Christianity, the Buddha grew up in a Hindu context and created Buddhism. And so I always found that dialectical relationship also fascinating, that continuity and that rupture, fascinating, if you will. And so, yeah, I love all of that for sure.

Yeah, definitely. And then I think one other thing that I want to say about the cyclical nature of things, because it strikes me as interesting, actually, is to touch on, like, my personal spiritual practice some. So again, I was raised Christian. I went through a pretty much completely irreligious phase. I tried as an adult progressive Christianity. I found that I think the connotations of Christianity were a little too tainted for me, based on my experiences for that to be something that I could really dive into. Currently, where I am at Matt in my life, my partner and I attend synagogue services

through an anti-Zionist synagogue, actually. They do their services online, so that's been a really incredible thing to get to do. And that just looks like, you know, Kabbalat Shabbat service on Friday night, welcoming in Shabbat, and, you know, there's a set of prayers. There's a set of songs that traditionally go with that. And so it's led to this very interesting spiritual practice where every Friday, you know, we set aside an hour. We get together with other people. We engage in communal spiritual practice. We also engage in our personal spiritual practice here, candle lighting, saying Kiddish, blessing the bread, all of these other things. And then, And also closing out Shabbat on Saturday night with Hofdala, which is a little ritual with some spices, wine, and a candle that marks the end of Shabbat in the beginning of the secular week. And one of the really interesting things that I've found is that that spiritual practice introduces a cyclical nature to your wife in a really interesting way, where every week it's like it's doubling back on itself in this one particular moment, where a period of time is set aside for spirituality. I try to on Shabbat, spend time not engaging in the kind of things I would engage in the rest of the week, take time to read theology, take time to study, we go to a Torah study on Sunday morning, or a Saturday morning, take time to engage with these things. And it creates this cyclical pattern that I think is really beautiful in a way, where during the rest of the week, it's not like I'm not interested in these things, but in the rest of the week there's organizing work to do, there's work work to do, but there is this time set aside to come back to. to really focus on spiritual development. And that spiritual development in that experience, I think is really interesting, because it's not separate from the stuff that happens in the rest of the week, in a sense, because every day of my life, I want to see capitalism destroyed, right? I want to see imperialism destroyed. I want to see a world without those things. That is true in every mode of my life. But a really interesting teaching in Judaism is this idea that Shabbat, so that day, is one 60th of what the world to come will be like.

And at the services we go to, this often gets emphasized, is that on Shabbat, we ought to take the time to recharge and refill and recognize that we want to fight for a world to come without capitalism, without imperialism, without Zionism, without colonialism, without all of these things, and that it can be necessary to have that cultivation and that set aside cyclical cycle that we go back to over and over again. And I think it represents in my life increasingly that experience of the broader cyclical. oh, I step away from all of this, and then I find myself in a moment of crisis, and I come back to spirituality, where now I have my week that is full of stress, that is full of crisis in so many ways that has been miserable recently, but there's also a day that I come back to that is forced to be separate from all of that, to be set aside from all of that, and to be something generative in a way that that can't be, and I think it's been a really fascinating kind of formalization of that cyclical experience in a lot of ways. I'm sure over time, my feelings will develop. on that more clearly, but I do think it's interesting that you emphasize the cycle, because I think that practice integrates the cycle into your week as a structure of your life in a really interesting way. Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. And I think there is some, I mean, I love the seasonality and the, in apprehending time cyclically. My favorite cosmological model is the breathing universe, as I call it, where you, you know, you have a big bang. It reaches, it expands

outward, gives, gives all of life creation. And then at some point, reaches its limits, slows down, begins to reverse, goes back to an infinitely dense singular point, and then that becomes unstable and it expands out again. I love that idea because it's cyclical, right? Because it's not linear. And everything else in nature seems to have, at least to some extent, a cyclical nature. And so for the whole cosmos to merely be linear, seems like it's sort of asymmetrical with a lot of other realities that we deal with, but it's hard to exactly suss that out. But I do believe that like that that grounding, that ritual, that's that cyclical coming back inward, communally. It can be so helpful. And I think there's lots of people in our modern

secular, you know, consumerist society who have rejected the religion of their youth as, as you and I have, right? I converted to Christianity out of my own. Nobody in my family who was religious. I'm a weird fucking kid. 13 years old. I wanted to. to convert to Christianity. I got baptized. I got confirmed, all that shit. And then, you know, I had my falling out from religion, my new atheist phase. I think like every phase of that was necessary to build up to the next point. And now when I was in a new atheist, I look back at my earlier religious phase as naive and immature. And now I look back on my new atheist phase as naive and immature. And I'm coming back to spirituality and religion at a higher level. It feels like that. And it

feels like that's what you're doing as well. But I feel like so many people in our society, because they've turned their back to that, rightfully so in most cases, they write off religion, they write off spirituality forever, they suffer in ways that they need that component in their life, but they've already shut themselves off to it such that they just suffer. And I think a lot of people say stuff like, I feel empty. You know, I don't have any meaning. What's my purpose? Who even am I? And then sometimes anti-capitalist politics can become an escape because what you do is instead of dealing with your own internal hurt and pain, you project it all onto society, which in a lot of ways is

fair and you seek to change the whole world in order for you to finally feel okay. And that limits your actual ability to change that world because you are of the old world. You carry with you the burden of generations of suffering and trauma that is not being dealt with. and then when you go out and try to change the world that comes along with you so it feels like these cycles of going inward and going inward and going outward and going outward as you were saying in so many ways really helps both sides of that spectrum and and for the people out there listening who have rejected traditional mainstream religion so have alison and i right but there's it doesn't mean you should shut yourself off to these other possibilities and this inner work more broadly because this is the empty feeling that we all have and it can be addressed on an individual level by engaging in some of these traditions. And once you engage in those traditions, you become better prepared in some ways to create the external world that is actually better. But if it's the same old broken people under capitalism trying to

create a better world, we're going to carry that brokenness with us. And so it behooves us on the individual level to do this work. And that's also the dialectic between collective and individual. Oh, this is individualist. Well, yeah. What is a community except a, what is a healthy community except a group of healthy individuals and how do you make a healthy individual you give them healthy community these things are inseparable from one another and so we don't want to dismiss everything that is individual because that's half of life as well you know when you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror it's just you and you know a lot most of your day it's just spent with yourself and so you to try to say like the only thing that matters is collective struggle

is like sort of cutting yourself in half and I think it limits possibilities on all side. And another thing I'll say is even in a deeply secular, non-religious society, like the one we live in, very, very empiricist, very much sensory overload, very much out there, go out and buy things to express yourself, right? Is that my thing I always come back to is everybody worship something. And just like with ideology, the people who don't think they have an ideology are the most ideological. The people that don't think they're worshipping something, worship worse things harder than they know and one of the one of the things we worship in our society is the self is the ego we we extend the individual self to a deified status our consumption

patterns are about expressing ourselves through consumption everything is about like go on instagram present yourself as a brand right everything is like that so we do we worship the ego and then we feel utterly empty and we wonder why because people that are convinced they don't worship anything worship worse things and so if you're going to worship something which we all do in one way or another it might as well be the good things with millennia of evidence behind them right like god and love and spirituality and these depths of of inner compassion etc than it is money and status and fame and things right which our society tells us is actually the path to happiness capitalism tells you american capitalism says to be really happy

you got to have a lot of money, you got to have status, you got to have fame. People have to recognize you. People have to validate you. And stemming back to our, you know, Protestant origins. Being wealthy is indicative of a good character. And being impoverished is indicative of a bad one. And that's still with us. And it cripples people every fucking day, you know? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think there's a lot there. And I do think you're right. The conclusion that I came to you is like exactly like you said, my life will have something. thing that I worship in it. And I'd rather get to choose what that is, I think, than let it be something horrible. And, you know, in periods of my life, I have felt that be bad things. I felt that be substance abuse at times, right? Or consumption at times. It can be all sorts of different things. And I think being intentional is really what, you know, is the goal at this point. And then I know we are so off of like the kind of questions that we have written out. But one thing that you said that I do really want to hit on, because I think for me it hits something important. important is that, yeah, you and I, I think, both went through, like, a new atheist phase, right?

I certainly had a period of time where that was really important for me when I left Christianity and escaped from it. And, you know, I think you said something interesting, right? Where it's like, it's easy to look back on that kind of like with embarrassment, but also as something that needed to happen. And I think one of like the most fascinating things that you actually see this very clearly in Christian mysticism in a way that I find fascinating is that I actually do feel like, yeah, having that phase was actually really necessary for me to be able to have a healthier spirituality later on. Within you know, Christianism and the Abrahamic mystic tradition, there's this notion of apathetic theology. So the idea that when we talk about God, we can only say what God isn't. We can't

make positive assertions about God, only negative assertions about God. And the reason for that's pretty straightforward, the moment that we make a positive assertion about God, we're committing idolatry, essentially, because if God is an infinite oneness, you know, is beyond all description, the moment that we attribute a positive attribute to that, we're putting limitations onto that. And so in the apathetic tradition, you get this very interesting thing, where we can only say what God isn't. We can only talk about God through negation and through opposites. And this, again, is very big in Christian mysticism. And one of the things in Christian mysticism that you find over and over again,

that I think is very related to this, is that to truly embrace that mystical vision of God, you almost have to lose God in a certain way, because at that point, the thing that you're talking about, is it some comprehensible being or some big man in the sky, right? It is something that transcends the category of being, actually. It is something that goes so far beyond that. And a thing that you hear in the lives of Christian mystics who wrote about their lives is this experience, like it's called the Dark Night of the Soul. this experience of the loss of God, actually, where after having these profound mystical insights,

often coming after moments of union, just a total loss and a disbelief and a sense of disconnection. And there are, those are them the mystic tradition who point out that that is actually the moment. That is the moment that you've made the breakthrough, right? And that in an interesting way, in order to truly understand what God is, in order to have a theism that's not just idolatry, one has to experience. atheism. And atheism, in a sense, then, is a prerequisite for any sort of true theism. And again, all of this is in the way that this is always says, it sounds like talking in riddles if you're not too methodical about it. But I really think that is a true thing, which for me to have any sort of relationship with these ideas. Now, I had to kill the God idea that I had in my head, right? And new atheism as a crude tool for that has many problems. But in a sense, it was like, a very necessary step that I don't see in opposition necessarily to where

I've landed now. That's so interesting. I'm just looking up this quote. Yeah. From, you know, the Nietzsche's death of God. Yeah, yeah. You know, we've killed God. Who will get the blood off our hands? Yeah. I can't find the exact quote. But yeah, it's a very interesting thing that you have to

engage with yeah, traditional religion and then with atheism and then you continue on to a higher level. And Nietzsche's asking us like, what are we going to do to avoid nihilism? And he, himself had this spiritual or this euphoric dimension to his work that often gets overlooked where he's trying to maybe in a half-hearted way or maybe he was limited in his own ways point to this possibility of this higher level of maturity and being cut off from the daddy and mommy in the

sky if you will forces us to grow up yeah we're kicked out of the nest and when you first kicked out of the nest it's scary what the fuck are we going to do nihilism is a problem you're your wings could not work and you could smash into the fucking ground. But insofar as you can get those things flapping, something new can happen. And I didn't mean to rhyme there, but it works. But I like that idea so much. And the Dark Night of the Soul has a version in Buddhism as well, which is very interesting. Of course, it comes out of Christian mysticism, St. John of the Cross, I believe, exactly what Allison was saying in the Christian context.

In the Buddhist one, it's very similar, but minus the God talk, right? So, like, you'll have a deep experience. A lot of people, what they do is they get in over their heads at retreat. So they have very little experience in meditation prior. And then for one reason or another, they want to get into it. Or a friend says, come with me. And then all of a sudden, they find themselves in, like, a 10 day or two-week retreat, which is just, it's like taking 10 grams of mushrooms when you've never even smoked

weed. Like, it's just too much. And people will have these profound, this profound opening up experiences. And it's precisely when you've opened up so much unexpectedly, and then you close off again, that you suffer more than ever. Because you were closed off before you experienced the radical opening and you weren't necessarily overtly having a dark night of the soul. But because you've now had the experience of opening up and then had to close that off, there's this profound suffering. There's this profound disorientation. Some people have it in the realm of no self where not having a self.

is radically disorienting and and people fall into these little ruts of like okay i have this insane experience of of no self what is there left to do i feel like i'm just like a disembodied and floating around like i i you know i there's no agency anymore and people can really become radically disoriented and suffer what in buddhism they also refer to at least in western buddhism um ushering in this christian concept of the dark night of the soul in the buddhist context but it's very much similar, right? Instead of like opening up to God and then closing off to God, it's like opening up to this no-self or this profound spiritual,

mystical collapse of dualism and whatever, and then also having that experience of not being able to get back there that is very hurtful and disorienting, et cetera. So, yeah, very interesting. So I kind of want to take it in a little different direction. I think. Kind of towards the last, towards the end of this conversation. Totally.

Which is these, these core concepts that come up again. and again in this context, and three of them that jump out to me are love, suffering, and desire. And maybe we can take them one by one here. And I want to offer a vision of love and why it seems to come up over and over and over again in this tradition and see what you think of at first and four months. Sure. Yeah. So when I think about the importance of love, especially unconditional, universal love, right, the sort of love that like Jesus Christ was talking about is it's fundamentally a unifying force and what is mysticism if not the ultimate unity the ultimate overcoming of alienation of separation love is this sort of gravitational force

that brings things together in the inner spiritual existential world so even on the political level it's it's it's maybe vulgar to say something like this but i think it's also true it's true for me that it's love that is the gravitational force behind solidarity. It is love that makes me want to team up with complete strangers to make a better world for all of us. When you feel weeping compassion for a stranger, right? You're watching something, you're watching a child be pulled out of the rubble of Gaza. You don't know those people. You don't speak their language.

Their suffering need not impact your life at all. And yet you find yourself weeping. What is that if not love? this bringing together you feel connected with this total stranger and so when we're talking about solidarity and politics we're talking about compassion we're talking about these mystical experiences time and time again they're defined by love and it's like love is whether it's a metaphysical reality or it's the thing that pushes subjectivity forward it serves this fundamental role in all of this stuff objective and objective that brings people together interpersonally right we are born alone and we die alone to be

an ego in the cosmos is terrifying how do we overcome it we love other people right we get in relationships we have children we have friends we go over and have events communally we're social animals it brings us together and if if the goal of mysticism the goal of spirituality and even religion in its proper form is total unity with what is with god or whatever that that that feels like love, right? And so that's why a seemingly trite platitude, like love is everything or love is all you need, becomes deeply profound, existential and spiritual because it is this sort of gravitational force. And if we didn't have the capacity to feel love, I don't think we'd have the capacity to do any of these other things, to feel compassion, to come together with other

people to create a better world, et cetera. And so that's, I think, the fundamental role of love And to have a mystical experience and to feel nothing but love, not even a self, but to just feel love, I think for me, especially that experience kind of validated that entire concept, that love really is the important thing. And it's way, way, way deeper than our pop culture often tends to allow for. Right. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot there. And I think, you know, you're hitting at this. It's so hard, right? Because all of this can sound so trite the way that this has been packaged in.

pop culture, and it's so hard to want to push back against that. But yeah, I think love in the other word that I always come back to that I think you hear a lot actually in the Buddhist tradition is compassion, right? And finding yourself in this place of compassion from mysticism. And I think that can look like, like you said, like a motivating factor, why do we engage in the world, right? At the end of the day, one of the things that I always struggle with with Marxism is that I can give you the very determinist scientific version of Marxism, which says the reason this matters is because there's a dialectic playing out whether or not humans matter or not, essentially, and it is going to do its thing, and it is going to resolve in this way, and we get to participate in it. And that's nice in a sense, but it's not personally or existentially grounding, right? And it also is hard to stay motivated based on that. But something more, something like love or something like compassion can provide a drive that goes beyond that. And I'm not going to pretend that that means that marks. is ultimately driven by love. My engagement with it is in many ways. But it itself, I think,

is this more complicated scientific thing. But that doesn't make that subjective part of it irrelevant, right? It doesn't mean that I'm not a human that means to have a motivation. And we shouldn't pretend that it does. And I do think if there's something to take away from mysticism, from spirituality, that is meaningful. It is that love and compassion, which sometimes can look exactly like you said, when we feel the pain of others and feel compelled to act on it, there is something there. And just even, you know, in the weirdest way that can penetrate parts of our lives that I think can be almost surprising. One of the things that I really struggle with is I live in Los Angeles, where the traffic is very bad, and I spend a lot of my life in a car angry at other people,

which is not a state that I like to be in. No one really likes to be there. And actually, one of the things that I've really challenged myself to try to do is in those moments, take a second, step back from that anger and say, this is the ego, right? That is what this is. This is maybe the pettiest manifestation of the ego to do. Like, I am mad because I got slowed down going to the grocery store, right? Like, how fundamentally absurd. And this person that I'm bad at isn't my enemy. They're not someone who I ought to hate. They are someone who is a part of this same incredible universe. worse than I am, right? And I actually onto in this moment, be able to love them and feel compassion for them in this annoyance, right? And so even in these petty little things, actually, I think we can find this manifestation of love and compassion that hopefully when we are at our best can help us to step back from behaving destructively, from feeling destructively, from engaging in emotional and behavioral patterns that hurt us and other people around us, right? And I think, you know, if there's something practical, which, you know, I'm skeptical of the idea that these

conversations ought to be about practicality. But if there is something practical to take away from all of this, I think I find that is what it is. Yes. Beautifully said, I completely resonate with that. And one of the capacities, I think, that you're pointing to right there, and that is part and parcel of the mystical journey, specifically my engagement with Buddhism. This has been deeply true, and this is deeply emphasized within Buddhism. And it's sort of whittled down to this one phrase of observe don't absorb which is not not a buddhist phrase but it just kind of gets to the point which is when you're when you have these mental states like anger like jealousy like sadness whatever these these things are like moods come and go like weather

patterns right you're never going to get to a state where you're just happy all the time that's just never going to happen um but what happens when you get in these negative mental states is you expect let's just use rage as an example because that's what you put on the table you feel the feelings, the emotions of rage, of anger, and you immediately, without even thinking, you identify with those feelings. I'm angry. I'm pissed the fuck off. How dare that asshole cut me off or whatever the fuck. Now I'm going to drive all fast. And I'm going to cut him off and I'm going to escalate. And somebody's going to pull a gun. It's not going to go well. But rather than identifying with that emotion, just like rather than identifying with your sense of self,

right, that's the ultimate. But these smaller emotional things are practiced for not, no, for disidentifying with the ego, which is to watch anger manifest in your body physiologically to have that place in your mind where instead of immediately identifying with that rage, justifying it and perpetuating it by their justifications, because you get mad and you start saying, no, he really is an asshole. He really did cut me off. I really am in the right. You know, fuck this guy. You know, now you're off to the races. Instead of doing that, if you can just feel it as a physiological manifestation in your body, which meditation trains you to do because meditation says sit with what is you sit down for 15 20 30 minutes an hour

whatever maybe 10 minutes five minutes and you just are present with what is you're not trying to change your mood you're not trying to change your sensations maybe you're sitting there and you have pain in your left knee instead of immediately moving that to escape that discomfort you start to train yourself to sit there and be able to look at the pain what does the pain actually feel like what are the sensations that i'm feeling this is all training for you know big and bigger and bigger moments and being able to do that with emotions, negative emotions in particular, but even positive ones, it's also very interesting to do this with, to observe them instead of identifying with them.

That in and of itself is spiritual practice, and it also liberates you immediately from being a prisoner of those feelings. Nothing is worse than being pissed off or being jealous or being in a bad mood, knowing intellectually it's bullshit, it's not serving you, but being unable to get out of it regardless. Right. It truly is a prison. And the moment you can shift your consciousness to drop back, to stop identifying with those emotions, but to watch them with loving curiosity, then you've made the spiritual move. You've shifted your attention in a positive and productive way. And you are no longer a prisoner of that emotion or mental state. And I think that's crazy. Yeah. In the best way possible. Absolutely. But let me also say something about determinism. yeah this gets very interesting because in buddhism it's taken for granted and i believe this and i've had experiences of this when there's no self and whether it's momentary or whatever you also immediately realize there's no control there's no will in fact the manifestation of a self

is our desperate attempt to control what we cannot and so there is a sense in which these mystical traditions lead to a sort of determinism where I increasingly feel myself and this is it sounds scary it sounds like oh you don't have free will you're a prisoner of determinism it sounds scary but actually it's fascinatingly liberating to realize that you don't have control that that you are not in the driver's seat of anything that if you don't even have a self you surely don't have a self that has a will that you can exert on the world right and so what you're you begin to feel yourself as, and this can lead to a dark night of the soul, what I was saying earlier, when people lose their self, lose their will, and they are disoriented by it.

But the positive side is, and this is true for me, I genuinely begin to feel myself as a force of nature. I begin to feel myself as if something is expressing itself through me. There is no me to control that process. I am blooming and blossoming in precisely the way nature wants me to and far from these spiritual practices deadening my personality or making it one dimensional or somehow you know no longer having a sense of humor which sometimes people fear like if i lose my ego then i lose my personality well people like that i make them laugh and and i like watching football and what happens to that and all these other questions right and i've even had those questions but i begin to feel myself liberated from having to control things life manifest through me

and that that actually brings out the true originality of my personality because I'm not trying to force anything. I don't have the delusion that I'm in control of anything. I am letting me as a natural force just like a weather storm is a natural force or the tide is a natural force or gravitation is a natural force. This is what this thing that I call Brett is doing here and now. And if you can step aside and let life happen through you, this is very Taoist and this is very Zen Buddhist.

you can actually get to a deeper level of authenticity so far from obliterating your personality or making you a drone or something you are radically authentic because nature never blooms the same way twice no two flowers are exactly the same no two clouds are exactly the same no two planets are exactly the same no two people are exactly the same you don't need to try to be unique and different you already are and when you try to be something you're not you become less unique you become more conformist you're comparing yourself to other people when you let life and nature flow through you and you feel yourself to no longer be in control but to be an expression of the whole cosmos it's a radical feeling of liberation and a true authentic you begins to emerge and there's a paradox there because there is no you but there's a more authentic version of you but yeah there's no the flower doesn't have a self but still it blooms right the flower doesn't have control but still it gives right to these exotic colors and it invites the bumblebee to come and do the pollination thing and all this other stuff, you don't need to be in control for that to happen. And the less and less

you need control, the more and more willing you are to let go, to surrender to the process, the more authentic you actually are. And the more unique aspects of who you are begin to blossom freely. Yeah. No, and I think that relates to that idea that I was talking about too, right? this is the coming back to multiplicity in a way, right? The you can't stay in the obliteration forever, right? And there's a second move that comes after that. And I think it's so easy to lose that, right? It's so easy to want just the obliteration. I think just the total loss. But in the end, I think that true authenticity that you're talking about is precisely that idea of we come back to the world, right? After these moments. And that is,

I don't know. I think so important to emphasize because I think there's so much error that comes if you forget that part. Definitely. So let me throw something about suffering and desire in your way. Maybe we can end on this if you're cool. Yeah, sounds good. So I made a post the other day and I got an interesting response and I responded to that response and it's all about suffering and desire. So let's walk through it. So here's the post I posted. I said, and this is on our shoeless Instagram. I said, suffering is the catalyst to inner growth. If you you're always comfortable and you're never willing to face your own mortality your own pain your own suffering you become small limited and stuck let life destroy and rebuild you over and over again

let your heart be broken by the pain of the world and let your own inevitable death liberate you from doing what others want you to do or caring about what others think of you there is no or this is the path to true authenticity and depth no one can walk it for you so then i got a i got a response from a listener who said, really good question. This is like raising the paradoxes inherent in mysticism and these traditions. She said, if desire is the root of all suffering and suffering is necessary for growth, is desire actually good? Is it conducive to self-development, not to be rejected within ourselves?

And I love this because this gets at the root of a certain sort of paradox, right? Because suffering is often the thing that leads us to this direction, but the Buddha says, we can get rid of suffering. Desire is the thing that causes suffering. So there seems to be some paradox here. And this was my response to her. I said, there are many paradoxes within Buddhism like this that urge us to embrace the totality of opposites and sit with the contradictions that they generate. One approach is to say that in life there is necessary suffering and there is unnecessary suffering. When we desire, which is a form of clinging or rejecting, we suffer needlessly. This needless suffering is not generative in the way that necessary suffering is. Losing loved ones, seeing innocent people hurt, contemplating our own deaths, etc. Can be if you set your ego aside and embrace that suffering. I don't think we should reject desire as much as we should become curious about it. Explore it.

Sit with it consciously and understand its underlying mechanisms and how they are related to the sense of self. There are no perfect answers, of course, but that's the direction I take. tend to take these paradoxes. And then I finish with this. One thing about desire is that the more you feed it, the more you desire. Instead of seeking to fulfill every desire, which is hedonism, we should strive to investigate and become aware of our desire, which over time reduces our constant desiring and allows us to be content with very little. Ultimately, you find that you are happier by having less desires and suffer more by trying to mindlessly fulfill every one of them. I hope that begins to address your question. And I think that that's paradoxical in some ways. But there's also

this paradox about suffering, which is we want to alleviate it. The idea behind the Bodhisattva is I will not liberate myself until all beings are liberated. But there's this paradox that at the same time suffering pushes people in this direction. And perhaps there are some forms of suffering that are necessary and unavoidable. The Buddha still died, right? You still have pain. You still have pain. You still lose people you love. That is the sort of necessary, unavoidable suffering that is just part and parcel of life. This tragic dimension of being a finite, self-aware creature in the cosmos is that you suffer. But there's this whole other realm of unnecessary suffering that we impose on ourselves and on others, either spiritually, psychologically, you know, existentially, or politically, socioeconomically,

etc. You know, suffering is generative when it's necessary and it's the right sort of suffering. But making people just be homeless under capitalism while another guy down the street owns a trillion fucking dollars is unnecessary suffering and obliteration that isn't generative. The suffering of the homeless person that can't afford a house or to raise their family isn't generative in the way that coming to terms with loss can be very generative, right? And so I think this, this paradox that sometimes we think like with the buddhas four noble truths like you know life is suffering there's a way out of that suffering desire is the driver of suffering etc that we take that to mean that if we do buddhism enough we could we could never suffer again that will always be in

this perpetual state of happiness but buddhism says everything has changed there is no perpetual state of anything there is no even self to be perpetual inside of that state and so the real dynamic here is not overcoming suffering so we can live in a state of bliss for the rest of our lives, but is rather this deep ability to abide and be with change and suffering the ups and downs without being destabilized by it and without being destroyed by it, that you can sit with change, you can sit with discomfort, right? Sometimes you just get pain. Like sometimes you have like raw doubling over pain for whatever reason. If I went up and shot the Buddha, in the stomach he would fall in the ground and hold his stomach you know what i'm saying and so there's

no way to meditate your way out of that but you could still be completely liberated internally like the buddha could still be completely liberated internally but physiologically he grabs his side and he yells as he falls to the ground right and so i don't know i think there's some interesting paradoxes there there's some distinctions to be made and ultimately i wanted to push back against this idea that any of these mystical traditions lead to some end permanent state that is for once and for all going to stay the same. It's quite the opposite, right? It's not that it's not that change stops happening. It's that you get radically okay with relentless change. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much there, I think. On the one level, I think your listeners question is so very

Nietzchen in a very interesting way. Their response and I kind of appreciate what's happening there. But yeah, so a couple things to unpack. On the one hand, I think the point that you come back to, and this is like such a dialectical point is this idea that there is only change, right? The idea of reaching a place of stasis is a mistake in and of itself. And outside of Buddhism, I think that is true as well, right? Again, going back to the dark night of the soul, right? After one has the experiencing unity, the experience of unification is this profound loss, right? This profound difficulty, this profound return to the world that is painful, that is suffering in its own way. And so I think to believe that the claim of the mystical tradition is that absolutely all

suffering can be escaped is incorrect, right? I think it is a question of how we orient to it. And I'll be very frank, this is one of the reasons that I've always been somewhat skeptical of Buddhism myself, right? Is that I think there is this reductive read of the four truths that you can do that basically has two issues that I sort of have a concern with. One is the issue that your reader raises, which is like that we may mean suffering in our life in a certain way. And the other thing is that I think that there's a kind of crass articulation of that that can then say, therefore, let's not try to engage the world, right? Therefore, the only thing that matters is the escape from desire. So I think that has always been a concern of mine. And for me, been easier to

sidest up by not being a Buddhist, right? That has always made it somewhat simpler. But I do think that you're making a good distinction there, which is that at the end of the the day, there are different kinds of suffering that are going to be experienced. And I think, yeah, I think you make it very concrete. If I get shot, the source of my pain is not my desire in that particular case, right? There will be other kinds of pain and suffering layered upon that experience that would come from desire. So, for example, if I were shot in the stomach right now, I would be scared to die, right? And that fear of death, that comes from desire, I think. That comes from the ego. That comes from clinging and holding on to this thing. But the raw physical pain does it. But in that

example, I think we can see those two kinds of suffering that are different. There's one that is inevitable, that is there, that I'm going to have an orientation to. And there's another one that I can let go of, right? That I can choose to give up. And I actually think, you know, across the spiritual tradition, going back to something you said very early in the episode, you know, there's this philosophy, I think you said, it's all about learning how to die, right? I think mysticism is about that too, right? Because ultimately, even though we will suffer in life, we will have these forms of suffering. So much of our suffering is about trying to cling on to that ego and cling on to being in this world exactly as we are now, right? I want to assert, Allison is this thing

that I am that experiences these emotions that are me and I want it to exist and continue, right? And that is a not necessary form of desire. And that is a form of desire that brings about all sorts of suffering that are different than the raw physiological pain of getting shot in the stomach, right? That brings about fear and anxiety and frustrations. It brings about me causing pain to other people because of that whole egoism. And I think it is exactly those forms of suffering, that it is what we escape. And at the end of the day, all of us are going to die, right? That is the truth that we have to face. And there will be a level of suffering in that reality in every single person's life that is inevitable. But regardless,

of that. It's a question of whether or not layered upon that will be a whole complex of interpersonal, emotional violence and suffering and turmoil that is not necessary, right? That can actually be escaped. And that is kind of where I see things. And for me, that is where there's almost like a therapeutic aspect to some of this, right? Because at the end of the day, I do experience suffering about that. One of the hard things about leftism and Marxism and communism is it asks us to sacrifice ourselves, right? The life of a communist is not an easy life, right? It is not a happy life. It often ends in personal loss, right? You may, in moments of intense crisis, have to give yourself up for something bigger. And one of the things that I think mysticism gives us that we can then take to that moment is being willing to accept that, right? Because if I've already let go of my ego, if I've already let go to that holding on to all of the complexes built around that, then I think there's something that makes that a little bit easier.

You mentioned Ram Dass earlier, and there's this story that always comes up that I think that he tells that I think really gets at this, which is the classic story of the waves crashing into the ocean, right? And so he kind of explains it like this, that there are two waves that are rushing towards the shore, right? And one wave looks forward and sees all the waves breaking on the shore and disappearing, and then looks at the other wave and says, oh, my God, we are going to die, right? And the other wave says to him, well, I can tell you something that is going to alleviate all

that fear right now. And so the wave says, okay, what? What is it that is going to alleviate my fear? And the other wave tells him, you're not a wave, you're the ocean, right? You've misunderstood what you're seeing here and who you are in relationship to that. And once you realize that, it is easier to give yourself up to these things that are bigger than us in political context, too, to allow ourselves to grow as people who want to engage the world and change the world. And so the weird paradoxical thing is if there's this greater movement for making the world a different and a better place and it demands that we give ourselves to it, then weirdly the giving up of desire of unnecessary the desire, the escape from the ego, better enables us to do that

in a really fascinating way. And to recognize that if I lose myself for that greater thing, oh well, I'm not the wave. Right. And there's this very bizarre thing that I think actually allows us to engage with politics and the need for change through that giving up. And again, I have my reservations around it that I am not a Buddhist, but there is some truth there that I think ultimately, again, this weird paradoxical way, there's suffering that is inevitable and that we have to experience, but the suffering that has to be changed can best be changed through that giving up. Absolutely. Yeah, it reminds me of this thing that Mao quoted from like some Han Dynasty historian, he took it in a different direction that I'm going to take it

today. But the original quote was, though death befalls all men alike, and may be heavy as Mount Thai or as light as a feather. And then Mao goes on to talk about it, the significance of a death. He says to die as a reactionary, is lighter than a feather, meaningless. To die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Thai. And that's the significance of the death. But I think we invert that a little bit and say that when you die before you die, when you let go of the ego that when you die when you let go ultimately at the at the fucking at the end of life when death forces you to let go of your ego right your death can be as light as a feather in a positive sense meaning you're just the last letting go you've already let go so much and there's just this

last little thing and you you let go whatever comes after death who knows but you're letting go in this lightweight whereas it's not a catastrophe if you're clinging to your ego if you reify your sense of self, your entire life, and you never are able to step outside of it, death is the scariest thing in the world. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a desperate crisis moment. It is Mount Thai, right? It's, it's, it's this enormous, weighty, unwieldy fucking thing that, that makes you suffer deeply.

I remember reading a Leo Tolstoy's death of Ivan Ellis, right, in the day. And that's the perfect, and Leo Tolstoy had deep existential crises and dealt with these exact, many of these exact things, not Buddhism, of course, but, you know, mysticism and, and, and, and, and, life and meaning and all this shit existential crises and the death of iven ilich is like this is the inauthentic way to live a life and so as as ivan approaches death he's lived his entire life and this persona of his career and his ego and his um you know his reputation socially and his little community such that there's no there's nothing there so when death comes he finds everybody else around him to be preoccupied there's this complete lack of authenticity and his death becomes a

torturous hellish landscape where he realizes he's lived his entire life fraudulently, inauthentically for other people, dominated by the ego. And so his death becomes this terrifying incident. Whereas when the Buddha died, it was like the last poof of smoke from a candle, right? And it was this, it's a beautiful way to let go ultimately. So I think that's interesting and kind of speaks to what you're saying. But on the way here, and maybe this is one of the last things we'll say here, because we're almost like two hours.

Of course, you have a chance to say any last words. On the way here, I was listening to a Zen Buddhist wrestling with this paradox of suffering, you know, to alleviate other people's suffering, but also realizing that suffering is part and parcel of life and that it's also very generative if navigated in the correct way. And he said, his quote was, obliterating all suffering would be its own form of suffering. And this is sort of the paradox of heaven, right? Right.

Because if everything is good all the time, then good loses its meaning. you can only understand things in contrast so to have a heavenly realm where nothing ever goes wrong nobody ever suffers you're stuck there for eternity it sounds boring as hell you almost you have to create a hell to put the other side of the coin somewhere right so then now you've split ontologically the the the cosmic realms into heaven and hell because you can't actually separate the bad from the good the light from the dark etc it's and so So that creates this whole other level of suffering where now these two things are the places you end up when you die, depending on how you act. A lot of suffering, unnecessary suffering comes from that. So the suffering of paradoxes, the paradox of heaven and hell, how could you live forever in a state of complete and total bliss? It's just unfathomable to us. So, yeah, that made me think of that for sure. But do you have anything to say about that or any last words before we wrap up this conversation?

No, I mean, in terms of last words, you know, I think just very thankful to get to have this conversation. It's so funny to me that actually exactly when I think about this topic, I always think of that exact same mouth quote. Yeah, which is really interesting to me. And yeah, I don't know. I just, I am so thankful, Brett, that these are the kind of conversations that we can have. All the time, I always tell people, I'm like, it's so absurd to me that I get to do a podcast with Brett because we have so many weird things in common. Absolutely. Both in terms of politics and in terms of, yeah, mysticism and spirituality and these other things. And I think it is such a privilege to be able to get to have these conversations. So mostly I just want to, yeah, conclude with gratitude for that. Because I think this has been a really, really, really great conversation to have. And I'm just so thankful to have a comrade who we can talk about these things with. Yeah, I don't think I've ever met another human being that is so much like me in so many ways. And it's just, it happened organically and actually. And accidentally. We had that conference. We hung out a little bit. We had this idea. My other podcast ended and I was like, I'm going to start something else. Allison is the one I want to do

something with. And then just organically and just, it seems accidentally, but hindsight is weird because when you look back, it feels like it was serendipitous that everything was supposed to play out this way. That is too good to be true. Some other mystical hand is at play making us come together to do this sort of work. It really does feel that way sometimes. But I absolutely feel that same sense of like uncanny strangeness when I talk to you we're from different families different parts of the country different upbringings

but somehow we're so damn similar it's shocking sometimes but it's a real pleasure to have this conversation I'm not sure there's many other people I personally know that I could have this level of deep conversation about a topic like this and then also have an equally deep conversation about Marxism and dialectical materialism

or philosophy and Nietzsche and existentialism so we're we have some sort of twin spirit energy going on for sure. Totally. If there is multiple lives, we've hung out in many of them. Absolutely. All right, everybody, that's going to wrap it up for today. Next time you hear us, Allison and I will be covering the 18th Premier by Marx, getting

back to our bread and butter of Red Menace, which is, you know, exploring these crucial Marxist texts, very different episode than this one. But I'm so proud of an episode like this. I'm so happy to get it out to people. And I know it's not going to hit with everybody. but even if like five people listen to this and are as moved as I've been by things that I've listened to

like this in the past, it will have totally been worth it. So we hope some people get some value out of this. Absolutely. All right. Love and solidarity, everybody. Thank you.