Rev Left Radio - Jesus Christ: The Revolutionary Mystic

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

In this Christmas special, Alyson and Breht reinterpret Jesus through Jewish mysticism, Christian contemplative traditions, and Buddhist conceptions of Enlightenment, offering an understanding of his teachings and words as attempts to articulate the ineffable and non-dual, rather than metaphysical propositions to be believed. Drawing heavily on the Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, the Christian concept of Agape, and early Christian scholarship, they explore the possibility of a Christianity beyond fear, hell, and conceptual belief -- one rooted in a radical transformation of consciousness, a revolutionary confrontation with injustice everywhere, and an embodied love for all creation. Merry Christmas.  ---------------------------------------------------- Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello and welcome to Red Minus. This is Allison. I am here with Brett, and this lovely December, we are doing a very special episode for you. We discussed what we should do this month and when we were talking about it. We decided we were going to do kind of like a Christmas episode. You know, I was recently at an event in L.A. and I was talking to someone who listens to our podcast and they were saying, it's really awesome that you all talk about spirituality and religion and like don't back down from that and are willing to engage in. that. And it's one of the things that I think Brett and I always come back to as a subject. So today we want to do a Christmas episode talking broadly about Jesus, our understanding of him, how we relate to the notion of Jesus. And yeah, Brett will give some context about exactly how we're approaching that. But hopefully this will be interesting for people. I think it will be building on a lot of ideas that we've thrown around before. I'll definitely talk a little bit about why I think there's like political importance to this as well. But yeah, I'll pass over to Brett, who's going to break down a little bit methodologically,

maybe what we're trying to do here. Yeah, and I think we should just say this up front. We'll add all the caveats and the nuances and the complexities as we go. But just to state very cleanly and clearly what we're doing in this episode is that if people that are familiar with our episodes on, I mean, mysticism, we've done many episodes on mysticism, on Christian mysticism, Sufism, Buddhism, of course. and we're always Spinoza philosophy even, and we're always trying to pull out a certain thread

from all of these traditions. And, you know, people that are familiar with the show will know that we've, you know, doven into these topics so many times before. And so what our project here today is, is to interpret. I wouldn't even say reinterpret because that assumes that there's some baseline true

or mainstream or right way of interpreting it. And this is like an alternative view, I think the interpretation we're going to give it is historically very much present from the very beginning of Christianity itself and is historically legitimate. But it is basically a interpretation of the Jesus story of the message of Christ that is not literalist, that is not doctrinaire, that is not propositional or belief oriented, but is rather mystical experiential. that the figure of Jesus is actually a great spiritual teacher who had access to what we might call enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition, awakening a mode of consciousness that transcends the ego, and that Jesus was fundamentally trying to convey that experiential insight through the language of the Jewish tradition in which he was operating in. and so we're going to kind of give that interpretation of Jesus.

We're going to flesh it out. We're going to talk about our own experiences over time and our changing relationships with Christianity and Jesus. I mean, people that are listeners of the show will know that, you know, Allison is coming from the Jewish tradition. I'm much more centered in the Buddhist tradition, but we've grown up in the West. Christianity has influenced us deeply for better or worse throughout our entire lives. Allison can speak probably about her experience with it growing up. I went for several years to Catholic school. I converted to Catholicism when I was 13 and I went communion and all of that. So it's been a huge influence in our lives. And we just live in a society that in so many,

Western society that in so many ways good and bad has been shaped by Christianity or at least different people's interpretation of Christianity. So ideally we would like to reclaim Jesus from the reactionary right and we would like to reclaim Jesus from as Marx talks about the idea that religion is often used as the opiate of the masses as a sort of salve on the souls of the exploited

so that they can further put up with the status quo and that they might be promised a redemption in a later life in another life right? We want to kind of challenge both of those readings and kind of advance a Jesus that is not only a mystic of imminence, but actually deeply revolutionary, because the message of Christ in this

interpretation is implicitly radical and revolutionary as it is dethroning the egoic mode of consciousness itself and pointing to a higher mode of being that is radically open to all of us, right, as opposed to, as I was telling Allison before we started recording, as opposed to the rigid pyramid of hierarchy within Christianity and the notion of punishment and reward. We are trying to reclaim a revolutionary mysticism of imminence that is radically democratic and open to all. So that's kind of our project stated up front. And Allison, is there anything that you would like to add to that before we get going? Yeah, we'll definitely talk about like our own interpretations of Jesus and our own relationship to the figure. I do think, you know, again,

And we're coming at this from a perspective of two people who I think are both non-Christians. I think that's fair to say, coming from varying spiritual traditions. But, you know, I think it's important to say that, like, regardless of what you're coming from, I think there is something to be gained from this discussion. I think that realistically, if we're thinking about the historical development of Christianity, like, it is a very particular iteration of interpreting Jesus that became Christian orthodoxy. And even within Christian Orthodoxy, there has always been a kind of non-dual mystical tradition that has found a more like esoteric reading of Jesus and the Gospels.

So I think whether or not you are comfortable in that orthodoxy or are more comfortable outside of that orthodoxy, there's still something that's worth engaging here. And I think, you know, even if you are fairly like hostile to Christianity, it is still one of, you know, I think the largest religion in the world. It is massive in terms of its influence. it is a social force that we need to figure out how to engage with, and that I don't think we can politically just throw aside. And so I would suggest even if it is not a religion that you particularly feel the need

to do the reinterpretive work yourself, that there might be value to engaging slightly with it just from a political perspective. I also think there's just a lot of beauty in it, even as someone outside of it, that also is worth engaging with. And that might be another way of trying to, like, come at this whole project. Absolutely, and it fits well within what Allison and I have argued and described in detail in the past as a sort of post-Atheism, as a sort of dialectical negation of the negation. I would say that the dialectical approach to religion is not the atheistic rejection and mockery of it. I think that's a step in the dialectical process, but actually coming back to religion, finding the liberatory kernels in every religion, the radical mysticism, the imminence, the challenge to, to, to, the, the challenge to, to, seated authority that is implicit in all of these religions and working that out, pulling on

that thread, developing that interpretation of a given religion, I think that is more important, more generative, more constructive than a sort of relatively infantile, though, you know, Allison and I have both engaged in this in our lives, but a relatively infantile outright rejection, which is often reactionary in nature, right? You're coming to a hard Reddit atheism because you've come up in a religious context that you found stifling, superstitious, et cetera, and you're breaking out of that. And that breaking out of that often comes in the form of a sort of militant atheism, which we are understanding of and compassionate toward and ourselves have gave expression to. But we would say that dialectically keep going, that you need to

keep moving forward and engage with this stuff at an even deeper level than mere rejection. So, and that's another part of our broader project that we're trying to do here. But also just saying up front, there is a form of Christianity that we're straight up rejecting. And that is like a biblical literalism. That is the reactionary weaponizing of the Bible and the message of Christ for brutal political projects of fascism and reaction. You know, the Bible says that being gay is wrong. Like, you know, those are things that we're completely obliterating. and rejecting outright. Well, we are not rejecting, even though we are going to challenge a merely

propositional belief-oriented approach to Christianity, right? Where Christianity means to say, I believe that Jesus is the son of God. I believe that he did rise from the dead. I believe that if we abide by the Word of God, that we will go to heaven and those who do not abide, we'll go to hell. Like, you know, there's a way in which that general approach to Christianity can absolutely, maybe not the hell part, we'll get to that. But that, that, that, that, that, that belief propositional orientation of Christianity, which, let's be honest, 99% of Christians have, is to some degree, as long as it's not reactionary, as long as it's not literalist, can coexist with this layer of interpretation that Allison and I are offering. So, if you are a Christian out there

and you say, I just have, you know, I have a certainly a more liberatory perception of my Christianity. If you're listening to a show like this, you're probably engaged with some version of liberation theology, that's awesome, that's great. If you have that Christianity, we're not saying that you need to discard that belief in propositional orientation to your religion. We're merely saying that this is something you can add to it, to deepen it and to make it transformative and experiential, not merely propositional. And there's a whole strain within Christianity called Christian mysticism that, you know, we'll get to in a second, that does exactly that, right? That has respect for the doctrine as such that doesn't read it literally but takes it seriously, engages in the sacraments,

etc. But also are using that as the vehicle through which they can, you know, obliterate their self into God, that they can have unity with God, that they're not alienated from God through mere conceptual thought, but can actually viscerally and existentially come to one with God, come into unity, non-dual unity. So for those Christians out there, I think this is compatible with your already existing belief system. I wanted to make that clear up front. I think very well said. All right.

Well, with that out of the way, people basically have their orientation to what we're going to do. Now we're going to do it. But before we do, I want to talk briefly about our experiences. Longtime listeners will probably have heard some basics from Allison and I on our experiences with Christianity over time and how that's evolved. But let's just revisit that more or less quickly. before we get into this to kind of, you know, show our personal relationship with Christianity and Jesus and how it's transformed over time. Allison, would you like to just say something briefly and biographically about yourself in that regard? Yeah. So Jesus has been a very complicated

figure in my life personally. I think I've talked about some of this before. I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist household and community was like religiously homeschooled in that community. And so growing up in my youth, Jesus was very much this kind of like the very literalist understanding. Jesus is God made flesh, made man, who now is who we direct our prayers to, is part of the Trinity. And, you know, the Bible is this fully literal account in the first half of prophecy about his coming. And then in the second half about his life and what happened after he came. And so I grew up with this very extremely literalist. inerentist view of the biblical story. And Jesus, to me, growing up, was often kind of a

figure of fear, honestly, because I associated Jesus with the concept of hell. I associated him with the idea of eternal punishment. And even though, obviously, in that literalist understanding, salvation is still made available. The message is always kind of like Jesus had to come and die for us because we're such utter irredeemable pieces of shit because of original sin that Jesus had to do this. And so, Jesus was never a very, like, positive figure in my mind growing up, if I'm being completely honest. When I got to high school, I started to develop an interest in philosophy, and I started to have the opportunity to study theology alongside of it. I got very interested in Platonism, and I also started to read some of the early church figures.

I remember in high school reading St. Athanasius for the first time, and St. Athanasius has this famous line of God became man so that man could become God. And when I read that, that I think was honestly kind of a turning point in my life. I didn't understand what it meant. It sounded so outside of the Christianity that I had understood. And I really felt like that was this very profound idea that I just had to figure out the meaning of. That sparked, I think, from high school on, some interest in mysticism. I, by the time I was in Bible College, was trying to learn more about Christian mysticism. reading some of these older sources like Pseudodionysius, who are very important for that tradition,

but also engaging with some of the later Catholic figures like St. Teresa of Avalar, these various mystical figures. And I was also starting to develop an interest in non-Christian mysticism. It was at that time that I first started to engage with Sufism a little bit more. And I think that was also probably around the period that I first became exposed to like Kabbalistic mysticism. And I really was highly interested. interested in it. At the same time, by Bible College, I was growing increasingly resentful of religion, honestly, and reaching a point where I felt the need to leave Christianity and kind of just leave religiousness behind for quite a while. And I lived, I would say, a good period of my adult life,

dropping some of that mystical interest, really living with a sort of resentment and scorn towards religion, really living with a lot of anger towards it, and a view of religion as just a purely repressive and oppressive and horrible force that I kind of hated. Later in adulthood, I think I started to face some realizations about the limits of resentment, the way that living in resentment had led myself and others that I cared about to some kind of dark places, the way that living in pure negation and rejection really does not produce a good thing. life and I found myself really starting to engage with religion again. In adulthood, I started to get more interested in Judaism and began to participate in a Jewish community. I eventually converted to

Judaism and now am Jewish and have definitely a ritual and religious practice in my life that is very important to me. I no longer feel that religion is just kind of this horrific thing. And I would say in the last year, I also have started to integrate some practices that traditionally come from Buddhism into my life. I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist at all. I think I'm like the very classic and sort of cliche, like, Jew who's into some Buddhism, which is like very much an archetype, you know, but that's more or less where I fall into it. And for me, spirituality has become pretty important. I think mysticism is a thing that I once again engaged with and that I find very valuable. Non-duality, is an increasingly important outlook to me. And yeah, that's really where I'm engaging.

The other thing that I'll say is like Christianity is not really the religion that I look to for my personal inspiration, but Christianity is a religion that I still have to have some form of relationship to, obviously. Having gotten more involved in the LA Tenants Union, one of the things about the Tenants Union is that it is really not afraid to talk religion and engage in discourses of religion and liberation theology. The base of the Tenants Union is by and large, Latin American Catholics. And like last night, I spent eight hours helping participate in and do some like safety work around a posada, which for those who don't know is a Latin American Catholic tradition. It's a little march that marks the nativity, followed by a religious service at the

end of it, and then a big party. And in the lead up to that, our local spent time talking with the people that we organize about their understanding of the Gospels, their understanding of the nativity, what the politics of that is, the reality of Roman imperialism, how that relates to their experience as migrants today. And we've done a lot of work kind of explicitly engaging in this religious discourse around the political organizing that we do. So I still very much have to have a relationship to Christianity and the Christian tradition just because that is one of the terrains that we engage in organizationally. And so it's important to me for me to have a way of reading Christianity that I don't have to just like, reject it as, oh, this is like a deviation of Judaism that is inherently flawed, et cetera, et cetera, which would be the easiest thing to do. But to try to find what is meaningful and beautiful in it still,

even if that's not my personal spiritual tradition, as one that I am very much still adjacent to and have to engage in in some way or another. So much. And yeah, that's basically where I'm at. So much important stuff in there. And just the idea of engaging, you know, engaging with the Catholicism of the masses that you're engaged in organizing with. And like, how much better is that to try to engage seriously with that tradition than to have this smug denial of it. Like imagine how quickly you would alienate people in that context. Yeah. If you were just like, it's just a stupid fairy tale and superstition, it's like, okay, this guy's a

fucking freak. I'm not talking to this asshole. You know, but if you come in with a whole different approach that respects that tradition learns from it, has an understanding of it, that's dialectical, that's organizing, etc. So, you know, there's always going to be somebody in the comments that's like, religion is stupid, blah, blah, blah. And I just look at that with understanding and amusement and move on, right? So it is what it is.

And I also do have to say that there's something about raw, you know, materialist reductionism, atheism that is engaged in this deconstruction of the sacred that fits quite well with the commodification of everything. When there's nothing greater, there's nothing higher than the self, there's nothing sacred about the world anymore. everything is flattened, everything's a fairy tale, we're just accidents of nature, apes that got prefrontal cortexes that swole up a little bit too much, we're all going to die and this is all for not. Well, what is there left to do but to grab at money and comfort and hedonism in this life and try to get as much of that for yourself as you can before the lights go out? So I think that there's actually something revolutionary about this post-Atheism that we are presenting to you that tries to reintroduce the sacred at a higher level.

And it's not about believing this or that claim about the universe. Rather, it is about a radical transformative experience that each one of us can have if we engage in certain practices that actually, you know, in the Buddhist tradition, eventually obliterates what is called the three poisons of hate, delusion, and greed. And think about those three things, hatred, delusion, and greed, organized at the societal level. level. Like that is like the ego and capitalism are so enmeshed. I would argue the ego and class society are so a mesh that when you take a strike at the ego in this sense, when you, when you take a shot at transcending that mode of consciousness to a higher one, that is an implicitly revolutionary act. It's not sufficient in and of itself. There needs to be outward revolution, of course, but it is an inward

orientation that fundamentally strikes at the root of the psychology of class society. And so that will always be deeply revolutionary and much more radical, in my opinion, than a mere reductionist materialist atheism that has been fairly common, more or less since the Enlightenment, but certainly in our modern secular age. So with all that said, I'm not going to tell my whole story. You know, basically converted to Catholicism at 13. I was raised in a basically agnostic house. Like, religion just wasn't present on both my mom and my dad's side. It just was never brought up. Nobody went to church.

Nobody talked about God. So I kind of came to it in my own way in my early teens, engaged with it in that very propositional, orthodox way, went through the sacraments, all of that. Had my new atheist phase as I grew into my late teens, early 20s, rejecting not only Catholicism but religion at large. And then obviously through specifically Buddhist practices, I think I've come back around and grown beyond that atheism

into what, you know, the stuff that Allison and I talk about today and in that process kind of had a reorientation to the Jesus, to the message of Christ, to Christianity, and I started finding beauty in it again. I've often said that I've had experiences where I was so emotionally moved by the iconography or the, you know, rhetoric of Jesus that, you know, if you give a hundred people that emotional experience, at least half of them would view that as a conversion experience, right? Something as easy as hearing the phrase, forgive them, Father, for the know not what they do in the context of Jesus being nailed to the cross and just being overcome with love and grief at the same time and weeping and driving over a hill in the middle of the night to see a lighted cross

and immediately being overwhelmed with love and some weird grief that I can't explain and being moved in these deep ways that I've had those experiences time and time again and again I wouldn't say I'm a Christian in the belief propositional way because I just straight up reject those propositions on some level but if I do consider myself a follower of Christ

and I kind of see my religious or spiritual outlook as a combination of Buddhist practice and like you know Christ consciousness cultivation or the cultivation of the sacred heart of Jesus Christ, which is this overflowing love. And I've talked about my mystical experiences before. I won't go into them in detail, but I do say that the overwhelming orientation of those

feelings is an egoless, unconditional love for everybody. That this love that poured through my being in these spiritual or mystical experiences that I've had, I looked at random strangers on the street and was in love with them in like the way that I would assume an all loving God would feel towards his creation. And I identified that, even though I was practicing Buddhist meditation leading up to that and going through, you know, dark nights of the soul in that context or whatever, I interpreted that as the heart of Christ. And so my fundamental orientation to religion is can I cultivate the heart of Christ and the mind of the Buddha? That's kind of how I see my spiritual path. And of course, in Buddhism, there's the Bodhisattva, which I think does that and is that. But, you know,

I come from a Western tradition. I'm immersed in a Christian or post-Christian society, and the orientation to Christianity is not something I reject, but something I embrace in my own way. And I've always found the iconography of Christianity, not only the beauty and the allure of the cathedrals, going to Europe and visiting 900-year-old cathedrals, being moved deeply by the beauty of the architecture

and the grandeur of the inside of these churches. But Jesus on the cross, right this shared human condition of of suffering as it is condensed into a singular image of a human being on a cross being crucified that is a deeply powerful thing and for me a deeply uniting thing that we all suffer that to be human the cost of coming into this life is that we will suffer and we will die and that that fundamental human can and we're aware of that right that fundamental human condition is something that actually radically unites all of us across our many, many differences. And if we can embrace that shared human condition, that is in some sense the basis of an existential solidarity that I think is really, really important and is radical in today's society.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a good way of looking at it. And I think, you know, one of the things I want to hit on, you talk about that idea of like the mind of the Buddha and the heart of Jesus, which I think is a very, useful framing, right? And one of the things that I think you, you know, I want to like draw out in our reading is that for me, like one of the things that I really love about Buddhism is that it is a tradition that uses the language of liberation. And it doesn't mean exactly in terms of liberation what, you know, that might mean in a straightforward political idea. But when the Buddha says, you know, I came to preach basically suffering in the cessation or transformation of suffering, that is this like liberatory message. And I think you see the same thing. You see the same thing in Jesus as a figure also preaching this liberatory message that is very valuable. And reading

those two things alongside of each other, I think, is very, very useful, right? We'll get into exactly what Jesus's message was. Again, I think we're going to suggest it is something more ineffitable than propositional. It is something that, like, has to be spiritually and experientially developed in order to really grasp it. But there's this incredible, like, parallel between those two figures, I think, as figures that come teaching a type of liberation. That for me is like the thing that I've kind of had in my mind the whole time I've been prepping for this episode that I want to like highlight as we go through potentially. Yeah, absolutely. And imagine, you know, them in their very distinct historical and cultural contexts operating out of very distinct religious traditions,

trying at the same time to see themselves in lineage with that tradition as well as as rupturing from it, dialectically, if you will. And they're the east and the west as well. So there's sort of this unifying aspect to their message and where they came from. And I would ultimately argue, and this might be controversial to some, but I would argue that more or less what the Buddha and what Jesus were saying was the same thing. They were having the same experience and they used the language of their traditions and existing culture to try to articulate what is ultimately inarticulatable. And, you know, but, you know, Both of those messages can be seen in this mystical way and experienced and seen as a path to follow,

or they can both be turned into a sort of doctrine, a dogma, an ego identity. And, you know, Buddhists engaged in violence against Muslims or the Zen kamikaze pilots, Christian nationalists. You know, we see Jewish people who come from a beautiful tradition of oppression and liberation, you know, arguing for a settler, colonial, genocidal regime. In every instance of all religions, there is this. ossified reactionary ego identity that some people build around their religion and there is always at the same time this alternative liberatory radical revolutionary inwardly and outward message in these traditions and finding that and cultivating that I think is is the work of revolutionaries on the

terrain of religion as it were yeah absolutely so just very quickly um you know this is kind of an aside but I think it is an important thing to state gnosticism the Gnostic gospel are often confused or seen as more or less as the same thing as Christian mysticism. And I would argue that Christian mysticism is much more aligned with what Allison and I are trying to articulate as it manifests in the Christian tradition. And Gnosticism, I think, is an interesting sort of esoteric system that is still fundamentally oriented towards a belief system, right? It sort of has a radical dualism to it, like there's spirit.

which is good and there's matter which is flawed or corrupt. There's sort of a cosmic alienation that the world is not our true home. They have this idea of the demiurge or a flawed creator that the God that is worshipped in the Bible is actually a sort of inverted God and a sort of satanic figure in some ways and that salvation is through awakening to what the true creator wants. So I'm not an expert on Gnosticism at all, but Gnosticism is this sort of radical alternative interpretation of Christianity that's still in the world of proposition and beliefs and claims but is in a very different world of proposition and beliefs and

claims that sees Jesus as sort of a revealer of a truth behind illusion as opposed to a sort of redeemer and you know you can see why this would be rejected by orthodox Christianity it's just a different belief terrain than Orthodox Christianity so it can be rejected on that front. Now, Christian mysticism actually is very different in that it emerges within Orthodox Christianity. It never fully rejects the fundamentals of Christianity, incarnation, you know, creation, you know, the Jesus as, as Savior, you know, the Son of God, those things. But it seeks visceral, existential, an immediate union with God, right? Or, you know, Canosis, which is this self-empting. in Sufism in Islam they talk about the annihilation of the self in God and and Sufism is very much the

mystical branch within Islam that that tries to transform consciousness itself beyond ego identification to experience the imminence of God you know which is only possible beyond ego identification and love is the thing that emerges when the ego dissolves right love is to experience this overflowing, unconditional love is to experience God, right, in some ways. And these are generalizations. These are broad and rich traditions with their own disagreements and different approaches within them. But fundamentally, that's the difference between Gnosticism and Christian mysticism. And even when we're going to get into the Gnostic Gospels later, as compared to the synoptic Gospels, right? The four Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

There's also these Gnostic Gospels, as they're often called, including and especially the Gospel of Thomas. But that's sort of a misnomer because I think the Gospel of Thomas is much more in line with the Christian mysticism and not with the Gnosticism in the sense that I just described. So I just wanted to kind of clear that up for most people that will be immaterial and irrelevant to their overall engagement with this. But for some people out there that have heard those terms, I hope that that's somewhat as cursory as it is. I hope that's helpful. Yeah, I think that's super useful. And we'll get into some of those distinctions more, but I think it's worth adding that up front. So let me try to take a shot at giving the story of Jesus and the narrative of Jesus's life based on what we have. So it's worth noting, like Brett said, there's the four canonical gospels, which are, you know, some of the earlier sources actually that we do have to go off of over who Jesus was and what he said and what he did. And one of the tricky things about trying to say, like, is the story of Jesus is that those gospels often diverge, right? Mark, Luke, and Macu tend to have the most overlap. They tend to have sections that are like directly identical to each other.

And then John tends to have some really wild stuff that is not found in any of the other ones. And then even on a narrative level, there's kind of differences. Parts of the nativity are really most fleshed out in Luke and then don't really develop anywhere else in the, you know, actual other Gospels. And so tracing together exactly what is the story of Jesus requires us holding all of these potential contradictions or differences between the accounts and tension. It's also worth noting that one of the other important texts, I think, for understanding who Jesus was is the Gospel of Thomas, which is a non-narrative text. The Gospel of Thomas is just the sayings of Jesus. It is no longer considered part of the Christian canon, but there's pretty good evidence that early on in the church,

the Gospel of Thomas was taken as fairly authoritative before getting later excluded from the canon. And it also is one of the earlier texts that we have and is generally treated by historians who are trying to do a reconstruction of the Jesus narrative to be a really important text for understanding who Jesus was. So you will hear us reference the Gospel of Thomas as well, because it has a lot of value as one of those early sources. So broadly, though, Jesus is this really fascinating figure, right? We are told this story of a human being who, if you read it through the Christian interpretation, is also God, but who through the text itself at least makes this complicated claim to be the son of God or the son of man, which we can try

to unpack what that means later on. But Jesus' birth is foretold within the nativity story in Luke, where Mary is, you know, found to be pregnant, even though she is a virgin. And where Jesus is coming actually is understood by Mary and by Elizabeth, who's the mother of John the Baptist, as this powerful transformative moment. This early section of Luke talks about how is the coming of a person who's going to flip the world on its head, who's going to liberate the oppressed, and who's going to bring the rich to the, you know, to ashes, basically. It's this very incredible prophecy of turning around before Jesus is even born. And then in the narrative, we obviously have the birth of Jesus, which takes place in the nativity story. Again, the nativity story is told

differently across the different gospels, but there are a couple of themes that we see come up, including the being turned away because there's not enough room, in an inn, having to be born in a manger instead of in a proper room within the end. Also, we get this story of Roman imperialism, a census that was called for all people in Rome. And in one of the gospels, we also get a narrative of Mary Joseph and the baby Jesus having to flee immediate persecution from Herod, who was the ruler of what was basically a Jewish puppet state under Roman control at the time, who wanted to kill Jesus because he saw him perhaps as some sort of political threat in response to the prophecies that was told about him. We don't get that narrative in all the Gospels, but it is in one of them.

We don't hear a lot about Jesus' childhood. There are non-canonical Gospels that really go in depth. into that, but again, there's good reason to think that those come from slightly more of the Gnostic tradition, which makes them a bit thornier to engage with, and we won't really go into the details of those. But by adulthood, Jesus is essentially an itinerant preacher who is going around recruiting followers and preaching very complicated and controversial messages. Included in his messages seem to be the idea of some sort of imminent coming apocalypse. And by apocalypse, I don't mean necessarily, like, you know, as we imagine it now, like an apocalyptic film, an asteroid hits the earth or something, but as an unveiling and transformation of the world into a new order.

And as Jesus talks about this coming apocalyptic transformation, the theme of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven begins to develop. And throughout his teaching, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is going to be defined by a massive reversal of how things are on earth. We are told that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, that the meek and the humble and the poor are going to inherit the earth, that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And so this kingdom is this transformation that Jesus is preaching. And at the same time, we also see Jesus preaching this message that is kind of internally focused about the spirit of God being within people, about a sort of inward turn away from outward. expressions of religiosity into some sort of cultivation of an internalized spirituality that very much challenges the spirituality of the time. Jesus speaks in criticism of the temple practices of Judaism at the time is highly critical of the economic system that has developed

around temple sacrifices. Jesus pushes back against an overemphasis on halakhic law that is developing at the time in his eyes and really tries to repaint spirituality again with a more internal focus. So we get this internal turn alongside this preaching of a coming apocalypse that is going to fundamentally transform the world. And it seems like also the internal turn becomes this necessary thing that people must go through in order to prepare and become ready to live in that kind of world that is going to be created. As the prophecy, or as the story develops, we get the story of Jesus' betrayal by Judas Ascariat, one of his followers, this very strange moment in the Bible where it often is hard to tell whether or not Judas really chooses

to betray Jesus, whether or not Judas is forced to do it because Jesus says that he will. All of these complicated, weird, mystical readings develop around this, and Jesus is betrayed, handed over to the Roman government, and there are calls for his execution by the Sadducees, which is a religious group associated with temple worship at the time, and who had a more conciliatory relationship towards the Roman state than a lot of the other Jewish groups did at the time. And Jesus is ultimately crucified and he is killed after his betrayal. Then his tomb is found empty three days later and Jesus appears to the apostles. He appears to his followers proclaiming that he has risen from the dead before finally ascending into heaven.

And so this is, you know, broadly the narrative that we get again from the canonical gospels. and some of those teachings are also in the Gospel of Thomas. And Christians, of course, read this very much through a sort of like sacrificial theology, where it's the story about God becoming man to die for our sins so that we would no longer be on the hook for all the sins that we've committed and not have to go burn in hell. But there are other ways of reading this, and we are going to try to read it in some of those different ways today. Jesus's teachings actually seem to be a lot more focused about how we're living our lives here in a lot of ways, how we're cultivating our own relationship to others around us, how we're cultivating a spiritual relationship rather than just like a sacrifice for a future life so that we'll get into some spiritual heaven someday. There's something more that can be found in the text if we want to engage with it that way. And that's kind of what we're going to try to dive into a little bit here today.

Absolutely, and that's where imminence, I think, comes in and features heavily. You know, the penultimate spiritual tradition of radical imminence is, I think, Zen Buddhism. It's all about dropping conceptual thought and directly experiencing without the mediation of conceptual thought or the ego itself, reality in that non-dual sense where there's a disillusion, a collapse between subject, object, duality. And there is an intimate oneness with your own experience. that is no longer alienated psychologically. But I think if we're reinterpreting Jesus in this way, he is saying the same stuff. And let's look at some of the things that Allison just put on the table.

This apocalyptic coming of a new age, right? From the perspective of Jesus as enlightened, right, could you see that he is peering into the possibility of a higher mode of consciousness and is in fact engaged in it that is experiencing life through it and seeing that if this is to spread like wildfire, if this mode of consciousness is not only possible, but perhaps a prelude of what is going to become the norm in humanity, that this would be apocalyptic or so radically ruptuous and transformative that it would basically be the end of life as we know it.

Now, there is a sort of perhaps tragedy here, which is that Jesus was way ahead of his time. And, you know, what he thought was this imminent transformation of consciousness from his own perspective of having experienced it. And it seems like Jesus is one of these figures in history. You find them in Buddhism as well where enlightenment was spontaneous, that it was not the product of a cultivated practice. For most of us, it's going to be a gradual dawning that comes through spiritual practice like, you know, Buddhist meditation in particular. But, you know, all these traditions have their own practices. And over time, the ego is slowly and steadily and gradually transcended.

For some people, it happens automatically without practice. And it's very rare, but it happens throughout the history of these traditions. And we could see Jesus as possibly something like that. I'm not exactly sure, right? The story of Jesus before he was an adult is very blurry. It's not included in a lot of the Gospels. There's very little known about Jesus' child. adulthood and adolescence. So perhaps there were practices that he was engaged in. Who knows?

In either instance, let's just say that he's operating from this a higher mode of consciousness. When he says something like the meek and the poor and the humble should inherit the earth, meek does not necessarily mean like physically or spiritually weak people. It means gentle, humble people. Think about a St. Francis type figure, right? Somebody who could have access to a life of relative comfort and a class privilege rejects that to live amongst the lowly. Jesus himself seeks out the marginalized, the outcasts of society and lives amongst them, not because he is weak of spirit or meek in the way that we mean it, but because beyond ego is no longer a need for domination over people,

no longer a need to cling on to status, to elevate the self over other selves, but is actually it gives rise to this figure of profound love, unconditional love and gentleness. St. Francis even manifests that to the animal world, right? That's why St. Francis is such as beautiful figure in Christian mysticism. You know, that St. Francis talks about the sun and the moon as brother and sister, that he has such an intimate relationship with the natural world that he can communicate with animals, right? And this is not an ego project. This is a project that can only come about after the dissolution of the ego itself.

When Jesus talks about, you know, I've always loved this phrase for obvious explicit political reasons, but also inward consciousness reasons. You know, it is harder, it is easier for the camel to get through the eye of the needle than it is for the rich man to enter into heaven. Why? Because the rich man is obsessed with greed and power and hoarding, which comes from the ego. To pursue wealth, to hoard wealth is an ego project. It's an ego project based fundamentally out of the fear of not having enough.

It's an ego project based fundamentally on the power that comes with money. It's an ego project in the sense that with money you can satisfy more and more of your egoic desires. And insofar as you're pursuing that type of life, the life, by the way, that capitalism still promotes as the mainstream way that people can succeed and be successful. Right. Insofar as you're pursuing that, you are pursuing an ego project. And you will, unless you give that up, sell all your position. possessions and follow me. Are you even in the prerequisite state to enter this not kingdom of heaven as somewhere out there when you die, you'll go to hell because you were rich. Rather, you are fundamentally prohibited by the ego itself from entering into this state of consciousness. And that is what Jesus is saying. So if you, you know, in Buddhism, we talk about getting rid of hate, delusion and greed, right? As as like something that is uprooted, fundamentally uprooted from your psychology in the higher echelons of Buddhist practice. Jesus is trying to say this same thing.

And so, you know, the literist approach, which a lot of like gospel theology people and evangelicals don't like this quote or they'll have their way of torturing it and making it fit into their preconceived notions. But on the left, we obviously see that as like, oh, Jesus is saying like people that are rich exploiters, you know, they're going to go to hell because they spent their life exploiting their fellow man for their own benefit. And I think what Jesus is saying in this interpretive lens is even. deeper. It's like you are prohibiting yourself from entering the kingdom of heaven, which is here,

it's just here and now and enterable by your own life project of egoic amassing, right, clinging to the outwardly world. And so I think that is powerful. And again, I wanted to make this point. Jesus is often talking in parables. And if Christianity were meant to be a system of hard propositions. This is true. This is false. Believe this and you go to heaven. Believe this. You go to hell. A parable is like a terrible teaching method. But if Christianity, if the message of Christ is trying to give language to the ineffable inward experience of enlightenment, if you want to call it that, that we're discussing, then parables actually function a lot like Coan's function in Buddhism, which are either ways of, in the Buddhist tradition,

They're explicit ways of frustrating the intellect and making the practitioner give up on the logical mind and its conceptual imaginations. Parables are a little different, but they're trying to convey a deeper message through a story, through a narrative that people can enter into through the narrative arc and then try to extract the meaning from. Jesus is trying to teach again something that is so beyond language using language, and that's always going to be difficult. And people, what do people do? they cling on to the language itself. And what is biblical literalism? Then a desperate clinging on to every syllable is literally true, right? But again, if he was trying to do that, then I think parables,

he would move much more in the direction of hardcore commandments than merely parables. And so I think that's an interesting thing. But again, if the goal is inter-transformation, then the parable method, I think, makes perfect sense. And the other thing I wanted to say about the Jesus story really quickly, throughout the gospels you see that the disciples are frustrated and and jesus is frustrated by them because why the disciples don't really understand what the fuck he's saying they're trying that they know that this is a person of spiritual profundity right they are they are they are listening to him they are following him they're doing some of the things he says they're kind of giving up their own lives and pursuit of this spiritual truth

but time and time again precisely because they are stuck through their own ego they're taking his stuff literally, they're thinking about and pursuing their own power fantasies or whatever they may be. And time and time again, Jesus is kind of like frustrated in a loving sense with their inability to grasp what he's actually saying. And what do his disciples and followers, at least some of them do in the wake of his death? They go and they build the church. And it's a belief claim, propositional theology. And, you know, then through Greek philosophy and Aristotelianism, Christianity really gets set into this this propositional belief-centered religion

that if you believe these claims and take these propositions seriously that determines whether you're a Christian or not and they get away from what I would argue Jesus is really trying to teach which is the radical imminent transformation of consciousness but imagine trying to explain ego transcendence to you know I mean I'm not trying to be disrespectful here but trying to explain it to a 10 year old right You're trying to explain like the deepest teachings of like a Buddhism or something and what enlightenment means to a 10 year old.

They're literally not cognitively equipped yet because they're still going through these earlier phases of consciousness development to grasp the message. And so in some sense, his disciples like well-meaning children, trying to learn and understand fundamentally can't even understand. And he's trying all these different methods of trying to articulate what is inarticulable and frustrating. you know, it's kind of a mistranslation thing going on, more or less constantly throughout the Gospels, which I find amusing and funny, but also, like, you can see why that would happen if our interpretation is the correct one. Right. Yeah, no, I think that's very useful. And I think on the misunderstanding, too, one point on eminence that I want to spend, like, maybe a little bit of time clarifying if it's okay with you is, like, what this idea of the kingdom of heaven means and, like, the historical context of what Jesus was, would have been referencing when he's used. using that phrase. Do you mind if I dive into that a little bit? Please do. Please do. Totally. Yeah. So I think like you know, you hit at something funny, Brett, right? Which is like there's

this tragedy to the Jesus story and that he comes like preaching this fundamental like imminent apocalypse and the transformation of the world. And then he dies and the world isn't really transformed, right? Like the Roman Empire still exists after the death of Christ and after the supposed resurrection. and the Roman Empire actually assimilates Christianity ultimately and makes it into a tool of imperialism eventually. And it becomes a tool for then the Byzantines and for other imperial forces. And so that transformation doesn't appear to have occurred. And I think that one of the difficult things with like Orthodox Christianity that it had to wrestle with in its development is that, okay, it appears that the figure that we believe was God on Earth was proclaiming this. coming kingdom of heaven, and yet it hasn't arrived. And that has led to the development of an

understanding of the kingdom of heaven and an understanding of heaven in this purely spiritual and immaterial sense, right, where heaven is a place that you go to after you die. And for evangelical Christians today, often the kingdom of heaven is a thing that's going to come after the rapture and the end times and this cosmic battle, and then there will be some kind of kingdom of heaven. And none of that really comports with what seems to be being said in the gospel narratives that we have, where again, Jesus famously says the kingdom of heaven is within you or could also be translated among you. It is this present reality that he is talking about. And I think that's one of the reasons that we need to try to do this more imminent reading of Jesus. I also think historically,

if we try to understand Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet, we can get a long way with this, because during the Second Temple period where Jesus was preaching, this notion of like a purely spiritual afterlife simply was not the predominant concept of an afterlife or of heaven that would have existed. During the Second Temple time, the various Jewish movements had massive disagreements about what death meant and what happened after it. Some of them taught the preservation of some kind of soul. Some of them taught the resurrection of the dead. Others rejected the resurrection of the dead believed in a obliteration of the soul, and more mystical sects like the Essines, also believed in this kind of coming apocalyptic moment that, based on our understanding of

their belief, wasn't like, oh, there's going to be some spiritual realm above and beyond the earth, but that the earth itself is going to be transformed in some way. And Judaism has maintained this with the notion of, like, Olam Habab, the world to come, which is not necessarily understood to be a spiritual world. different Jewish thinkers have interpreted it differently, but like Gnachmonides, for example, really believed it would include material reality as well and be something that could be understood as in this world. So in the Jewish tradition that Jesus is coming from, that notion of like this spiritual heaven that is a reward someday becomes, you know, I think very

non-tenable when we try to understand these verses. And so throughout the Gospels, when we see Jesus talking about this coming kingdom of heaven, or sometimes this present kingdom of heaven, I think it's really necessary for us to like try to wrestle with that, again, imminent understanding of what that means, whether or not that was an immediately coming apocalypse, or perhaps that the kingdom of heaven is a sort of thing that is developed inwardly, which is another way of reading that argument about, you know, the kingdom of heaven is within you. You could read that quite literally in that way. But when you start to take this view that Jesus is not talking about some future heavenly reward and some spiritual afterlife, but is

talking about something more imminent, I do think you start to see like an incredible amount of overlap in a lot of these teachings with Buddhism, right? I think oftentimes actually in Jesus's discussions of wealth, of riches, of greed, and all of these things, there really is this notion of impermanence that permeates a lot of his teachings, right? The famous like teaching about not laying up your treasures on earth where he says, Moth and Rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal, but instead in heaven where things are in some way not destroy. destroyed by these processes really gets at this idea of impermanence that is so important across multiple mystical traditions. And I think in the Buddhist tradition in particular, impermanence

becomes a very important early insight that people develop. And that's kind of all over Jesus's teaching. And so on a very basic level, you can read the condemnation of riches and wealth as a condemnation of like the social iniquities that are associated with those things. And I think that is present as well. But there's also kind of this like critique of the way. that humans grasp onto riches, to wealth, to goods as an attempt to make themselves whole, as an attempt to feel safe and secure, that is a reality denial of the temporariness of those things, the impermanence of them, and the impossibility of holding on to them. And so the Kingdom of Heaven as this place where we've gotten beyond holding on to things

that are destroyed can really start to take on, I think, this more like imminent, esoteric meaning that really comports itself quite well with the various mystical traditions. that focus on impermanence as one of their kind of starting points. Absolutely. And we'll get into the hell discussion here in a second. But I think Jesus in his words is constantly internalizing eschatology. It's not some outward thing. He says, you know, stuff like the kingdom of God is within you.

Eternal life is knowing God. Those who hear my words have passed from death into life. And what would that mean to hear his words you've passed into death or into life? Well, certainly from a literalist, perspective. It's like, oh, if I hear Jesus' teachings and I believe that he is the son of God, I can pass after I die into heaven into a new life. But he is actually saying that there's something deathly or confined about living within the ego. And throughout traditions, you'll hear stuff like, you know, die unto yourself. In Buddhism, they talk about no birth, no death. Because fundamentally,

what they mean by this is that when you transcend to this mode of consciousness that is above and beyond that transcends and includes dialectically ego identification, you literally obliterate the foundation of the fear of death because it is the ego, the trembling little separate being that looks out of its eyes at a world that is not it, that is fundamentally alien and hostile to it, that is scared of death because it is confined. You are identifying as the subject inside this flabby bag of skin that is already decaying and will one day rot, back into the earth. And the ego can't comprehend that. And so it feels fear in the face of its own obliteration. And it will create stories about its own perpetuation in another life. And when people

think of going up into heaven, what do they think? They kind of think of their own ego self continuing on and they meet the other ego selves that they experienced in life and that you kind of exist as like the perfect age and perfection of your actual life in the next one. But in reality, the obliteration of the ego is the obliteration of the foundation of the fear of death itself. Because you are no longer identified in this dualistic way with the subject who comes into contact with an outside objective world and eventually dies. But non-duality is the experience of the collapse of that division, that you are the cosmos. And in fact, your raw awareness, which when you identify with pure awareness beyond the ego,

you realize that pure awareness itself never stops. That pure awareness itself, de-egoized awareness, is present in the very fabric of the cosmos itself. And, you know, as the Smith said, there is a light and it never goes out. And I love that line. I listen to that song all the time. And I'm like, holy shit,

there's some deep spiritual teaching here. But I don't know if you meant it that way or not. But, you know, the Smiths are great. In any case, I also wanted to compare this idea. shifting a little bit to the politics of it with the message from the radical right lately in the U.S., which is Christ is king, right? What image?

And if you listen to Nick Fuentes, he's always condemning everybody to hell, right? Every Protestant is going to hell. Every atheist is going to hell. Everybody that's not a Catholic is going to hell. And this is just, I mean, just startlingly in contrast to the basic orientation of Jesus Christ, this idea that everybody except a small handful of people who believe certain propositional

claims are going to burn in hell for eternity for the unforgivable crime of not believing the right sentence. It is insane when you think about it. But the reactionary conception of God, Christ is king, that's a feudal, monarchical conception of the creator of the cosmos, that the creator of the cosmos somehow creates a universal hierarchy that, that is a universal hierarchy that resembles feudalism from the medieval era of human evolution? It is so tiny. It's so belittling. It is so pathetic to try to comprehend the creator of the cosmos, this vast mystery and majesty as this petulant petty tyrant that is fundamentally upset with the vast majority of his own creation and condemns them to an eternity of suffering. It is reactionary. And so I think a part of this project that we're, advancing is a Christianity that completely rejects the notion of hell.

That actually, if we're going to internalize this idea, that heaven and hell are more understandable as mind states that you can be in on earth, right? That anybody that has been in the throes of deep insecurity, in the throes of deep jealousy, in the throes of hatred and anger, you are literally in hell. in those moments, right? Addiction, like people that are deeply addicted, you are in psychological hell. It is not a place that the all-loving, all-knowing creator of the universe sends you when you die for the pathetic little failures of a temporary creature in his creation.

That's this crazy. It's a mind state that you are in that is fundamentally fueled by ego identification. And in heaven, in this sense, the transcendence of, of that is a mindset that is completely outside of fear and clinging and hatred and groping for safety in a world that offers none, groping for control and certainty in a world that offers none fundamentally under the delusion that you are separate from all of life. That is a state of kind of being, you know, you can call it as being alienated from God, right? Alienated from God.

Some people describe how, well, it's not literally a lake of fire. it is just eternal alienation from God. Okay, I like that definition a little bit better, and it serves even more this idea of a psychological state rather than a literal place you go when you die. And think about how many children in particular have been tortured through the centuries by the idea that every little flaw in foible,

their sins, well, very well might send them to fucking hell. When I was going to Catholic Church, we had confession and I went in and I think I confessed that I had premarital sex I was like 16 years old that like I don't know that I masturbated and had premarital sex something like that and the priest looked at me and he said if you would have died in a car crash on the way to this confession do you understand that you would have been sent to hell and I was just like what the fuck like that was one of my first like openings up of shifting away from this belief system I'm like what that because I touched myself and had sex that I was going to be

as a fucking out of lesson who doesn't know shit, that I'm somehow, if I didn't come to this priest and confess and ask for forgiveness, that I was going to be sent to hell forever by an all loving God. It just completely ruptured the logic of the system that I had imposed on myself and was the beginning of my shift out of Christianity. But I can see like, I don't know, I see that as like a cruelty.

And when you inflicted on children, when you make them tremble in their bed at night, another story from my life really quick, when my dad went to prison, right, he got arrested when I was, I think I was like eight, nine, 10 years old, something like that. He got arrested. He was into drug dealing and stuff, right? And he went to jail. And I remember when he was in prison and I was in this belief system, I would lay in bed at night and like with my stomach and knots, like begging God, please don't send him to hell. Right? A little kid, I have no fucking resources to find my way. out of this, just tormented by the idea that because my dad was going to prison, that means he was bad

and had sin, and also he wasn't a Christian, so I know he wasn't going to confession or anything, that he was definitely bound for hell and just tormenting myself, rolling around in my bed at night, begging God, please don't send him to hell. Like, that is a cruelty to inflict on anybody, especially

the countless children over the millennia that have had that idea beaten into their head. And if we want a liberated Christ and a liberated Christianity, the first thing we do, I think, is obliterate that idea. Yeah. No, I mean, I think the hell thing is important. And I think, like, you know, it's so, that hell is such a frustrating concept, I think, because it is so counter to everything that you see if you try to read the Jesus narrative outside of, like, Orthodox theology. And that, like, to a certain degree, hell is, as it's conceptualized traditionally, just like the most kind of pure resentment possible, right? The you wronged me, God and therefore eternal conscious torment is a form of resentment that, like, it's not becoming

of anything that we would call God, right? That is not compatible with anything that is worth calling God. And so I think it, you know, has always stood out to me as a huge problem theologically. Honestly, most of the people I know who left Orthodox Christianity, hell was the thing that made them leave it, right? This notion became irreconcilable with anything that they thought was possible with it are positive within Christianity as a system and really broke down any possible commitment they could have had to Christianity as a religion. And I think if you look at the gospel narratives and if you take the life of Jesus seriously from historical perspective, the notion of hell that Christianity has developed is again actually alien to this narrative

and alien to the cultural context in which it developed. The notion of eternal conscious torment or even of, you know, torment per se, just was not a universally agreed upon view within the Jewish milieu that Jesus was born into. It in fact was barely a view at all. It was not a majority. It was not particularly popular. And there's no reason to believe that these later conceptions of hell that we read into it are actually really, you know, what would have been culturally accessible to Jesus at the time that he was teaching. And so I think a lot of that teaching does come again from a later reinterpretation of a lot of his thought and light of Christian orthodoxy in a way that's very frustrating. And I think more importantly, though,

that Jesus that we see in the narrative is the kind of figure who would only feel compassion towards people in hell, right? Who would have this view of hell that you got at Brett of hell as a kind of self-inflicted condition. You know, addiction, I think, is really always the example that I go back to when I think of hell. Or even just, an inability to let go of one's own resentment can be from a form of hell in so many ways. And the teachings that we see in these texts are ones that have an incredible ethical aspect to them. They have an incredible compassionate aspect to them. And they really do orient towards other people in a way that makes that concept of hell very difficult to kind of see fitting

within the teachings that we see present here. And I think, you know, within the Christian tradition, there are these moments of, you know, breaking up this idea. In 1 Peter, there's this first that talks about how when Christ was put to death, he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. And exactly what that means has been debated by many Christians. But at least within the early church, when the Apostles' Creed developed, that was understood to mean that during the time that he was dead, Jesus went into hell to liberate the people there and preach to them that there was good news and that they could escape, right? And hell then becomes a thing that has to be overcome by the teaching of Jesus, not the eternal punishment that he came to preach. And for me, I think that's really, really quite a beautiful message, right? Because I think that hell as a concept becomes most meaningful when we understand it as a thing that we create through our attachments. And to the extent that Jesus is preaching something going beyond mere material attachments and desire, then there is a liberation from hell that is preached. Again, that still does even exist within some of that early Christian

tradition. And we can reject this idea of a petty, vengeful God who's just out to get even with the humanity that has wronged him and start to see liberation from hell as an emptying of hell, as hell becoming a thing which no one is subjected to. You know, if we're talking about musicians, Path the Bunny, he keeps using this phrase recently, may all the lower realms be empty, right? This kind of emptying out of hell, this compassion towards those who are caught in cycles of suffering sometimes of their own creation and can't let go of it. And I think that emptying out of hell really can be found in these narratives too if we choose to step aside from that traditional theology. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in Buddhism there's the like the land of the hungry ghosts,

right? Huge stomachs, tiny little mouths and this never being satiated. And we can also think of this psychological state as being hell with both Buddhist and Christian traditions. You know, Buddha as he is meditating under the Bodhi tree he is visited by Maya or illusion and it is like the last attempt for the ego to reassert itself and and Jesus you know in the desert is hounded by Satan promising him all these egoic rewards and hounding him sort of egoically and Satan in this in this instance is not somewhere down in a realm outside of earth that you get sent to after you die is hounding Jesus in real time through the egoic states and the temptations and desires that are present or implicit within them. So in both the

Jesus narrative and the Buddha narrative, there is a period of going through really serious hardship on this spiritual path as you uproot and transcend the ego, ego, egoism, ego identification. They talk about the dark night of the soul, which is actually a term that comes out of Christian mysticism, but is applied within the Buddhist context for a very similar parallel experience of this process beyond ego identification is one in which you are kind of violently ripped apart from your ego and actually the ego experiences it as death. So on the brink of awakening or you know all these different words, enlightenment, you know, Ken show, these different words we might use for this broad thing we're calling enlightenment or this higher mode of

consciousness is this dark night of the soul or this deep anxiety. and trembling that the ego feels because the foundations of it have been so weakened, that its transcendence to the ego feels like a death. And so you literally feel as if you are dying when you go through this process. And the resurrection, if you will, can be seen in the same way that as you go through this process, as the ego does die in this sense, or at least ego identification dies away, it feels like a real death to the ego, but once it is no longer the main mode of identification,

there is a resurrection, a new life that you have, that is this higher realm of consciousness, that is an imminent non-dual perceptive reality that you engage with life now from that point of view, and there is a process of embodying that, right? So at first, that rupture, it feels disorienting. You know, in Buddhism we call it the great groundlessness. You have no ground to stand on any.

more. It is a disturbing and disorienting process and it is not for the faint of heart. It is incredibly challenging. You have to face every insecurity and every trauma, process them on this path to a higher awakening. You know, why would you not? There's no shortcut around all that stuff, right? We have to deal with the baggage of our human condition, our unconscious, all the things that haunt us in the backgrounds of our minds. We have to deal with it all, bring it all out into the light, face it all courageously as a part of this transformative process. And that is not an easy one. It's a scary one. And it comes with lots of challenges that you need courage to overcome. When I have as a slight shift here, when I've been in the depths of depression, when I've

been in the depths of hardcore anxiety, when I've been in the depths of a hellish OCD episode, it is so clear to me that this is hell. That for the time being, I am living in fucking hell. And anybody that has experienced those mind states or anything relative to those, you know, addiction is a great one. You are locked in to hell. And the getting out of those feels like a sort of minor or mini resurrection of the sort. When you come out of a depressive episode, it feels like a renewal.

Like a springtime has finally dawned on your life again. And there's a sense of like, of, yeah, of resurrection. in a small way coming out of these things. And that's not 100% the same as ego transcendence, but it's these small ways in which we kind of do elevate beyond our own hell, sort of speak. But a last thing I want to say is that when Jesus uses the word that is commonly translated as hell,

he is almost always actually using the word Gahat, Gahena, I believe is pronounced. And Gahena was the actual real valley outside of Jerusalem. and it was a sort of cultural symbol, a shorthand, a reference to a destruction, waste, societal collapse for all of these historic and cultural reasons. It was associated very much with kind of suffering in this world, not eternal torture. So the word that Jesus uses that is presented to us as hell and we think of as this otherworldly realm that we're sent to when we die if we're bad is actually an imminent real place in the real world that has. that has this cultural baggage that is often, we've often lost sense of living in the modern world, re-reading those texts, getting them translated, etc.

Jesus is basically saying that living in these sorts of ways that he's condemning leads to Gehenna, leads to this symbolic state of collapse and waste and destruction. And that, again, very much is in line with our interpretation of all of this stuff. Yeah, yeah, the Gehenna bit is important, right? And I think also, like, you know, the term Gahina gets referenced within the Hebrew Bible as well, right, as like the site of child sacrifice is what it's associated with. So it very much is associated not just with like social decay, but with like horrible, unjust and gratuitous violence, right? That is really kind of what it, you know, is referencing. And so again, I think there's this later imposed theological thing on it that is, you know, something that we need to overcome because it can't fit into a compassionate or liberator. reading of these texts whatsoever, honestly. I think the other thing about Jesus that I want to emphasize,

and this is where, you know, I think there's something worth engaging here with, even if you, you know, come from another spiritual tradition, is that what's fascinating about, like, the Jesus narratives is that in addition to, I think, teaching this, like, internal focus on spirituality, this inward turn that I find very interesting, and this apocalypticism and this coming transformation, there really is this huge focus on like an ethical way of living, right? And I don't think that one should read Jesus as just giving like a bunch of like feel good ethics. There's like a certain liberal reading of Jesus that wants to do that, that I think this is the

point of the apocalypticism, that this is the point of Jesus preaching something quite intense. But there still are these really interesting ethical teachings there. And what I think is fascinating about these narratives is that we see Jesus as this figure who not only I think has developed a viewpoint outside of the egoic self, but who also then is saying that that viewpoint requires you to live differently, right? It requires you to engage with the world and with others in a different way. And so this idea of service to others becomes very important in Jesus' teaching. This idea of becoming a servant to all becomes very important. And I think this makes sense as a logical outflow of that non-egoic understanding, right? Once you get past that,

then you no longer are the center of the universe. Your needs are not the thing that needs to be sustained at all costs to which others can be subjected and made tools that merely, you know, need to be treated as means to an end. You can actually have this relationship to others that is really quite beautiful. And so there's this ethical dimension that flows out of this that I think is very clear in the Jesus narrative that I find very powerful. And I think when you look at the Christian mystical tradition, in the best of that mystical tradition, you see this, right? I mean, I think for you and I, Brett, it's like St. Francis that will probably always go back to for this, where St. Francis not only has these mystical insights and experiences of divine unity, essentially,

which I would understand as a non-duality and an overcoming of ego, but is prompted then to live among the most poor, the most hurt in society to become this figure who wants to preach liberation to those people and who then develops this very ethical relationship that the Catholic church within parts of it still maintains this kind of Franciscan service to the poor framework that I think is one of the actual true emanating things that has lasted from a lot of these narratives. And so what I think is so cool is that oftentimes in a lot of mystical traditions, how you relate to others and how you relate to this world kind of gets lost, right? I think especially even in some Christian mysticism, like divine union, this experience of non-egoic self becomes a potential

escape from reality. But in Jesus's narrative, and again, I think in the life of St. Francis, you see a way that these experiences actually then become a reframing of engagement with reality. And it's in that way that for me, I see quite a lot of parallel between this narrative and the Bodhisattva concept, right? Where Jesus's return after death could almost be seen as that kind of return from experiencing enlightenment to then try to bring liberation to the rest of the world. And so this service theme and this ethical theme that exists throughout this text I think is very important. And again, it's not just like feel good hippie ethics of, oh yeah, just be nice to each other. There's something more profound to it, this idea that this shift in viewpoint that

could occur when one escapes the ego and escapes duality actually then fundamentally ethically reorients you towards everything else in existence is really a very profound part of the text that I think is just like worth thinking about a little bit. And again, where we start see some of that overlap with like the bodhisattva tradition as well 100% and when you go through the enlightenment process there's a process of embodying that realization as is how it's described within the buddhist tradition and that just literally means that you have to now bring this into your real life that that the the the higher state of consciousness flows through your being you are a vehicle for this for this um this non-dual realization that is not your

doors. You no longer own it. The ego wants ownership and wants to grasp onto something and say that this is mine. That's completely obliterated. And it can be, as I said, disorienting at first. And then the process afterwards is this constant embodying and bringing it back into the world. I was talking earlier about Jesus in the desert for 40 days being tempted by the devil. And what is, you know, Jesus is fasting and stuff much like the Buddha did in his time under the Bodhi tree, right? He sat down and didn't move for long periods of time until he was going to get this realization no matter what and that's when he was attacked by Maya and similarly Jesus in the desert is attacked by Satan and there's like basically like three trials that are you know if I remember correctly

that are being imposed on Jesus Jesus is hungry right he's fasting so the first one is like turning stones into bread so that he could satisfy his obvious hunger this is a low level base instinct, right? If we're instinct identified like an animal, an animal is hungry, it goes out and seeks to eat, right? A dog is fundamentally unable to fast because too fast would be an imposition of rational ego over the instinct identification. And what makes humans different than animals is that animals are on instinct identification. We've developed a stage beyond that level of consciousness to ego identification, which is capable of rational thought, self-awareness, and reflection. We still have instincts, right? We still have instincts to eat, to have sex, to go to

sleep, but we have a higher level of consciousness from which we can interact with those instincts, veto them, you know, use reason to overcome them. You don't just act on your instincts. In the same exact way, when you transcend ego and you get to these higher states of consciousness, it's not that there's no more that the ego is dead or obliterated or killed. It's that it's that it's, been transcended in the same way that we relate to our instincts, this higher level of consciousness relates to its own ego. And the ego might still be there. It will have its machinations.

You're no longer identified from it. You're seeing it from a higher sense of awareness, which I think is just an interesting thing to point out and show that consciousness itself does evolve, that consciousness in the cosmos evolves in these things that can be kind of crudely seen as stages. and the jump from from animal to human intelligence and self-awareness is obviously a jump in consciousness. The dog and the animal and the owl and the tree are all conscious, but they have a lower level of consciousness. They're not capable of, and that's what sets us apart. So why would we think that that evolutionary process stops at where we are?

In the same exact way as a historical materialist would say, hold on, capitalism evolved from these prior modes of production. why in the fuck would we think that capitalism is now the end-all-be-all of these systems? The evolutionary process is still in motion. Dialectics teaches us that these processes are always in motion. And so it's the same thing to think that we've reached the pinnacle of consciousness evolution at ego identification. Of course not. And so if you just accept that basic premise, then you accept implicitly that there are at least the possibility of higher stages of consciousness. and then you're already in our realm of being able to understand

and grapple with what we're talking about. So anyways, the devil's tempting him with bread to satisfy his hunger. Jesus turns it down. The next thing is jumping from a high place in the temple to trust God's protection, right? Satan is basically like, do you really trust God? Are you really sure that your insights are real? And in Buddhism, we talk about uprooting doubt,

that when you have your first awakening experience, one of the things that is that is uprooted is the doubt about the Buddha's teachings that you know you awaken to it you see it firsthand you see it viscerally and experientially and you know for a fact that what the Buddha was teaching is true right and that that that enlightenment might very well and often does close again you go back into ego identification but having seen it once at least doubt is uprooted greed hate and delusion are not yet that's further down the road but you've uprooted the the doubt. So Satan is playing on his instincts first, hunger, then he's playing on his doubt. Are you sure that you're about all this stuff? And then what does he finally go to? In exchange for worshipping me,

Satan or ego, you can have all the kingdoms of the world. So then he goes to the ego's need for power and control, the uplifting of the ego as such to dominate over others. And in each one of these instances, Jesus is hounded by these temptations and rejects them. And one of the most beautiful paintings in my personal belief, you know, my personal subjective artistic opinion is the famous painting of Christ in the wild wilderness

by I think Ivan Kramskoy or something. I'm not sure who that artist is. But it's a picture of Jesus sitting on a rock in the desert just looking conflicted. And you can tell that there's no Satan in the picture. Satan is not over his back hounding him. It's an internal fight that Jesus is going through. Jesus is being wracked with this

inner torture that he is having to overcome in the process of his full awakening and enlightenment. And if you've ever been in a state of serious addiction, you've ever been in a state of an OCD episode of depression or anxiety, you zoom in on this picture and look at Jesus's face the way he's clutching his hands together and looking downward, and you can tell what's really going on is this deep inner conflict he's having, that he is squirming inside of himself.

And he has to go through that. And so if you've never seen that, you know, go look at up Christ in the wilderness or Christ in the desert, I forget the exact name of the artwork. But it's beautiful and is like a visual instantiation of human suffering internally. If you've gone through any sort of psychological or mental health issue in your life, you'll immediately relate to it. And the way that the artist depicts the face and the hands and the posture, I think,

it resonates so strongly. So I'm going to go into ethics next, but I wanted to give Allison a chance to say anything about any of that. Yeah. Do you mind if I try to like demystify this consciousness talk a little bit for, our listeners in a way that I know helped me quite a bit with trying to wrestle with this idea. Yeah. So I mean, I think, you know, in previous episodes, I have talked a little bit about like, yeah, I don't know if I like believe this idea of enlightenment or like evolved consciousness as a sustainable thing, right? I've definitely expressed some hesitancy around that idea, which I have

reassessed in the time sense. And so when we talk about like Jesus reaching this enlightened state or reaching this like space of consciousness that is beyond the ego, I mean, I think the thing that I do want to emphasize to like try to like demystify that a little bit is that that doesn't have to be some like metaphysically wild thing. I actually think like the thing that had to click for me in trying to wrestle with this stuff was to understand that like there are ways to reach glimpses of that state of consciousness that you can just do and you can experientially work to try to get glimpses of it. It is just a reality that I think plenty of people listening to the show have probably had psychedelic experiences where they experience some level of non-duality,

where they experience potentially even something like ego death, where they experience some sense of unity in the universe. And, you know, that is definitely what my early experiences were that led me to kind of suspect that there's something to mysticism. But there are also, like, techniques of meditation and inward turning through which you can, without having to assume a very complex cosmology of the universe that assumes some certain level spiritual truth, just start to kind of probe at where the self is, start to probe at what consciousness is, where you can start to catch these little glimpses, actually, of non-duality, these little moments potentially of insight where you are directly experiencing some of these things.

And I think Sam Harris is a figure who I have a very complicated relationship to, because I find his politics rather abhorrent, but I find some of his kind of secularization of these ideas were useful for trying to wrestle with them. But Sam Harris, you know, in an interview I was listening to with some Theravod and monks actually, was talking about the idea of, you know, enlightenment as the point at which those insights, which people have often grasped through meditative practice, through psychedelic experiences, actually stabilize, right, and becomes a consistent way of being in consciousness and being a space of consciousness, where it's no longer just those little glimpses, but is like a stabilized thing.

And again, this is definitely a secularization of enlightenment, but for me, that was a really useful concept, I think, for starting to become more open to this, because I know empirically that I have had brief glimpses of non-duality, and the idea that those could become stabilized, actually does kind of make sense to a certain degree once you've begun to do some of the experimentation of turning inward that can get you there. And so when we're having this talk about like a higher level of consciousness, reaching that of enlightenment, I think it's really easy to want to like throw that away completely. I felt this impulse inside of myself as just like woo-woo kind of high abstracted spirituality. But part of the contemplative tradition in Christianity, the contemplative tradition in Christianity, the contemplative, templative tradition in all of these different schools actually kind of says you can empirically go and kind of look for some of these insights and you can find them. And Harris's framework of that

higher level of consciousness as a stabilization of these insights, I will just say it was very useful for me. And so I want to offer that as something that might be useful for other people who feel kind of put off by some of this language as maybe a way into starting to wrestle with it a little bit. That's great. And you know, in the Zen tradition, they also emphasize this very, that that enlightenment in this sense is not some perpetual state of bliss and fireworks that actually it's already present, that it's very ordinary. You know, the famous Zen saying is like, before I was enlightened, I carried water and chopped wood. After I was enlightened, I carried water and chopped wood. It's very imminent. It's very natural. It's very here and now. It is not some drifting

off into spaciousness and sometimes on the on the path you can get into these different mind states um that feel very you know very spacious and all these things and of course non-duality is a very it's an intense spaciousness because you're no longer contracted psychologically into the ego but if enlightenment or awakening sound too woo-woo we can just talk about it as liberation from ego identification that there is a there is a form of consciousness that is bigger broader and wider than ego contraction and you can actually see that You can experience it momentarily. You can cultivate it within yourself and you can eventually stabilize it. One of the tricks of meditation and it's hard to get into this if you have no

practice at all, but it's like, can you become aware of awareness itself? What shape and size is awareness itself? Right. And what I think, though, is required is the ability to concentrate your mind. So when you get into meditation, they'll be like, follow your breath and, you know, count to 10 and if you lose your breath and you start thinking just become aware of the fact that you've become distracted and go back to your breath what is that actually training you it's training you to have a mind that can concentrate on something because when you go to look for awareness when you go to look for the self and you lack that capacity to concentrate on a thing it's fucking hard to find it it's hard to stick with it you know that in the eightfold path there's right meditation or right mindfulness and there's right concentration. These are two different things. Trying to practice mindfulness without a capacity to concentrate deeply is incredibly fucking hard. The mind is the monkey mind. It swings from thought to thought from abstraction to abstraction, the past, the present. Your mind is always going on the hamster wheel of thought. And in fact, to bring that hamster wheel

to a complete stop is a threat to the ego because the ego is maintained through perpetual inner chatter and conceptualizations and abstractions. And so it is constantly engaging that. You lay down at night to go to bed and your mind goes fucking bonkers. Your mind is racing, thinking about what you're doing tomorrow, thinking about what you did today. People find it hard to go to sleep to turn off the noise in their head. That is precisely the ego's hamster wheel perpetuating itself.

And so to get past that, though, you have to cultivate this sort of ability to concentrate. And in our hyper-distracted world where you don't even have to deal with bored anymore. You can just pop out your phone and get a dopamine hit and scroll and scroll. Like concentration and intention itself is being fragmented and attacked. And it's no, it's no accident that the purveyors of this attack on concentration and awareness and attention itself are these tech oligarchs. They're not doing it consciously. They're not thinking, let's keep all these people super distracted and fragmented so that their attention can not concentrate. They're not doing that. They're doing it because it is profitable, but the function is

the same, that they're stripping people of their ability to focus deeply on things, to concentrate deeply on things. And if you lose that ability, you really do, I think, lose this core capacity that is essential for these higher states of consciousness or even just to have a sort of stabilization in your own life. And we all do feel very torn in a million directions and very fragmented. It's kind of the psychological content of postmodernism is this inner fragmentation and dissolution that we sometimes feel it in the modern world. So I wanted to make that point, but I wanted to emphasize what Allison is saying is that don't think of enlightenment as something outside of yourself, as this amazing state of

perfect happiness to achieve. It's not that, right? Even after Jesus is teaching and stuff, he's still susceptible to things like angry, he flips over the table and the, you know, the money lenders and the money exchangers. He's flipping over the table. You know, he's still a human being. And what happens, I think, on this spiritual path is what a lot of people will fall victim to is an inauthentic ability or an attempt to try to show off a detached enlightenment that's not really realized. So people will pretend like things don't bother them.

People will pretend like they're not susceptible to petty emotions like anger. And this is an ego charade, right? This is a game the ego plays with itself. And, you know, it's called, it's called spiritual materialism where actually the ego co-ops the spiritual path itself and turns itself into a spiritual ego. I'm somebody that wears beads and grows my hair out in a very certain way because I want to let other people know that I am sort of, I'm this sort of person. And it's like, you're just putting on another mask, right?

Real, real enlightenment, real liberation from ego is a total rejection and the total lack of any need to do any of that. Like, it's almost laughable to think that I'd have to put on a show for somebody or to present myself in a certain way to be taken seriously in this other way. So there's a very ordinary aspect to it that needs to always be remembered. It's not something that the ego can chase down and get for itself. You know, it's like we're very productivist and we're very goal-oriented in modern society. If you want to become good at playing the piano or, you know, learning an instrument or what, you have to go out, you know, you know, you know, getting a job, you have to go out and do things.

And the ego has to go through this process of learning and developing and grasping. And that whole process, if you apply it to this, it just slips out of your hand like water. Because it's still the ego trying to get something for itself. The ego likes the idea of becoming enlightened, right? The ego likes the idea of being able to possibly escape these terrible feelings of depression or anxiety. And so the ego begins to want it. And the only way around that is to kind of cultivate an inner silence. where the ego, at least for very brief moments at first, is no longer the thing in charge

and that you're beginning to develop this capacity to be aware and present beyond what the ego is doing. And what do you do in meditation? You begin to step back from the ego and watch it go crazy. When you're trying to follow your breath and you realize that you can't get three fucking breaths in before you become distracted and your mind starts, what are you actually doing in that moment where you recognize you're distracted? you are taking a you are stepping back in your own awareness and becoming aware of your ego you begin

to watch it oh i see how it does that oh i see how it gets prickly when this one insecurity of mine is mentioned oh i see how it wants to kind of reach out and grab this thing for itself even though it might hurt somebody else i'm starting to watch it instead of automatically be identified with it and that i think is the beginning of the path here you have to first become aware of it step back from it and watch it, then you understand how it operates, and then it has less of a hold over you over time, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that watching the ego go crazy thing is a very apt description of what that experience is. Like, it is this very like, oh my God, this thing that I have identified as me for so long is so out of control. And out of my control in some sense. It's a very

destabilizing thing when you first start to watch it. Totally. So I want to quickly just go into the Jesus ethics and kind of wrestle with some of his ethical commandments, if you were, from the point of view that these are not coming as moral commands from one ego to another, but they're coming from a place within Jesus that has transcended ego consciousness. So he'll say things like love your enemies, turn the other cheek, judge not. Those who lose their life will find it. And life in this sense is the life that the ego thinks it has, right? And I've always said this too, one of the craziest commandments of Jesus is love your neighbor as yourself.

And from the perspective of ego, this is utterly impossible. There's no way in fucking hell that you can love your neighbor over there as much as yourself. You can wish the best for your neighbor. You can think about all the good traits of your neighbor. You can well wish them and all this stuff.

If they need anything, you can go help them. But think about how much you think about yourself all day compared to how much you think about your neighbor. And if love here just means a fix. fixation on, right? You know, even people who are engaged in self-loathing are still loving themselves in this sense because you're fixated and obsessed with the self, with the ego and the story it's telling about itself. And self-loathing is sort of an inversion of ego obsession, right? You're still fixated on the self. So from an ego perspective, even the most well-intentioned people

will never be able to love their neighbor as much as they love themselves, as much as they are concerned with themselves, think about themselves, right? So this commandment can only come from a place where you have transcended that ego obsession. And you are entered into a non-dual state where the other is you. To love your neighbor as yourself is to literally see them as you. That subject and object and subject and subject, that boundary has dissolved. And it's not this state where you live in this perpetual confusion of like, where does my body end and their body begin? No, no, no.

That's naive. It is a sort of psychological state of awareness wherein you realize the radical imminent interdependence of everything. And that you are a manifestation of this broader fabric from which everything else also emerges. And that broader, deeper fabric is what we all share in common in and what is the only thing there is, right? non-dualities is the implication or the explicit statement that there is no difference between here and there, me and them, inside and outside, ultimately, and that this realization need not only be intellectual. All of us can understand that intellectually, but it can be a felt psychological state from which you operate. And when Jesus is on the cross, getting nails driven through his hands and

feet, being stabbed in his side with a sphere, and he looks up and he says, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do, that is a declaration of radical love and compassion, even for your own tormentors, because Jesus understands where they're coming from psychologically, right? He gets it. You know, I'm not saying that I'm by any means as achieved as these great spiritual figures, but there's a part of me that understands the reactionary. You know, when I listen to, even like a Nick Fuentes or something, somebody that is the complete opposite part of the spectrum of me, still a political enemy, we still have to fight over the future of the world with people like that, for sure. That struggle is inevitable. But I understand kind of where he's coming from. There's a part of

me that can step back from even my own judgments and see the ego operating in the background. And that takes a lot of the bite out of like hate. And compassion, I heard this wonderful phrase. Compassion in this sense does not mean we don't fight. It means we don't hate. You still got to fight these motherfuckers. There's no if-ans or butts about that. To protect the innocent, to cultivate a future where people are taking care of and stuff, like you have to fight reactionaries. Can we do it without hating them?

Because hate is a psychological state that we embody. You know, you can, you know, in Buddhism, like, if you're angry at somebody, it's like it's like holding a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at somebody, you're the one that's getting burned. If you're in a mindset of hate, delusion, greed, you know, that is a mindset that you are in. And hatred often feels like you're aiming it outward at them, but it's actually a state that you are in. It's not a state that they're in. Your hating is actually forming and shaping your own psychological state.

So we still fight, but can we transcend hate and can we understand? And Jesus in that moment, he's understanding. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. He's not hating. He's not even fighting at this point. He is purely understanding and thinking about them as he is the one being tormented. What is more beyond the ego than that? Yeah.

No, I think that is like the beautiful, like beyond empathy as like a feeling, but empathy as like a full outlook on reality, right? Where like you truly can see the dissolution of those divisions. And I think like the hate thing is the thing I've really been wrestling with recently. Because I think for a lot of my life, hate was like a very important thing for me politically. Like yeah, I hate the people got to beat them. Like that's an easy form of politics to do. But I think, you know, as you dig into this more and I think.

think you see this in that moment of like hatred is I think like you said right it's self-undermining right like it actually has an inward focus that undermines your own position and that takes away your ability to act in a intentional way in a lot of ways and even if that intentionality has to be used to fight you know there still is the necessity of doing that intentionality that hate robs you of in a lot of ways and I think the they know not what they do thing you know is the thing that I've wrestled with a lot and that I've been trying to, you know, kind of think about, like, yeah, a lot of the people out there that I think are, like, political enemies are operating from this, like, profound sense of, you know, like fear, this profound sense of, like, instability that they don't know how to relate to. I mean, honestly, he'll never listen to this episode, so I don't feel bad mentioning it. But, like, my dad, I think, is a very good example of this. My dad is, like, a right-wing Trump supporter. He's very much someone I would consider a reactionary. And, and, And as I've been thinking about him recently, I've started to realize, like, oh, man, this is a person who lives their life in, like, a constant state of fear, who wants an ideology that brings order to a disordered world, who wants black and white, who wants things to be clear, who wants, you know, very easy and obvious to see divisions, and who has latched on to this, like, profound, evil, hateful thing because it provides that. And, you know, the thing, and this just sounds like such hippie shit as I say it.

It truly is the thing that I'm trying to accept is that, like, for me to respond to that back with hate, would in no way actually undermine the hate of that ideology? And would in no way undermine the hellishness of it in which, you know, that fear is so overwhelming and so controlling for him that has caused him to invest in this violent and evil ideological system. And so even though I, you know, I really, I really, like, I do feel this sense of hate, I want to overcome that hate, and I want to be able to say, no, there's a tragedy to what you are caught in, and I can feel compassion towards it. And even while opposing the system that you've turned to out of fear, I also want you to be liberated from that fear, from that need for black and white, for that need from holding on, and to be able to overcome that and to experience liberation yourself. And so I think we can still fight against these harmful ideologies.

We can still fight and do these things. But at the same time, we ought to want the people who are invested in them because of their own desperate clinging to certainty and permanence to be liberated from that as well. And whether or not that will happen, you know, that's a several question from politics, I think. But we ought to be able to hold that. And I think that is what we see in that moment of the crucifixion, certainly. I think that's a profound insight that that's so much reactionary politics, deep, deep down, even beyond the awareness of the person. and engaged in those politics is a fear and fear that is ego-based. It's a need for certain, as you were saying, a need for certainty, a need for control,

a need for stabilization in a world and a cosmos that is fundamentally unable to give you that. Right. You will never have certainty. You will never have control. The cascade of change never stops, never ceases. And the ego wants, delusionally, it wants stability. It wants to feel safe.

And so, and there's almost a tenderness in your heart when you realize that even the most despicable people, somewhere deep, deep down, they're scared and they want to be safe, you know? And if you could just like, if you could, like, put on like a helmet that just made them feel nothing but feelings of safety and kind of like you could see their politics change in real time. So people, you know, and that's the thing. You still got to fight them. but if you're fighting them out of hatred and anger and the need for revenge, and I see this on the left all the time, and it's an understandable set of emotions for sure to fucking have, and I'm susceptible to them all the time. But if you're fighting and operating from that perspective, you can never build the world you say you want to build because the world that you say you want to build

has to be built on something firmer and more stable, really and robust of a foundation than hate, revenge, jealousy, anger could ever actually create. It has to be built on love, ultimately. And love is like, you know, it sounds sort of silly and hippy when you just say it like that, but it really is true. We have to come from that perspective because when you're operating out of hate, anger, jealousy, all these things, you are fundamentally reactive. We talk about reactionaries politically.

Well, you don't want to be reactive in your own life, meaning that you are dominated by these emotional and psychological states that you're in and you automatically identify with. You want to be responsive and intentional. And in order to be like that, you can't be caught in the spider web of these emotions. There has to be a part of your awareness that can stand outside, watch those things want to emerge, and still not be taken in by them. And that is a higher state of being from which you can operate that can actually build the world that we want to build, right? class society, I mean, what would you expect a billion or eight billion or five billion egos to create? Take five billion egos and say, hey, create a world.

You're going to create a world of class stratification and division. You're going to create a world of war and domination and oppression because people want to feel safe and secure. The Germans and the Nazis and, you know, Hitler and shit, what did they, what, at the deepest part of their being, they, they were in a, period of deep economic and social tumult. There is deep insecurity about economics and the future of their society. And you can see their politics as a deep, hateful, insane reaction and ego reaction to that instability and insecurity. Right. And it doesn't mean that you don't fight them. It doesn't mean you don't take out a bullet and put it in the head of Hitler, if you had the chance, right? Because you are standing up for, you're defending innocent life. And there's no moral paradigm

that makes sense to me where you would you would allow people to hurt innocent people without standing up and i guarantee you that buddha or the jesus if you had a person coming at another person trying to do harm on them for no reason right that they would step up and sacrifice themselves to protect the innocent so so this limp-risted sense of hyper-passivism that sometimes you see cultivated is like actually its own form of escapism i would argue that like this radical pacifism is like this liberal moral escapeism masquerading as like moral high-mindedness and superiority. But it really is this escape from reality, escape from imminence in a retreat into an abstraction. That doesn't actually make sense in the real world situation that you find yourself in.

And in order to actually engage with the world as it is, it takes courage, it takes a willingness to face reality as it is and to not escape into those abstractions. So I think that is also something we have to keep in mind, none of this negates the fight, but it negates, it negates fighting from a certain psychological perspective that undermines the fight itself. Yeah, very well put. My idea that I've articulated is like this revolutionary bodhisattva, right? This combination of somebody who is genuinely interested in radical revolutionary change of the outworld social, economic, and political world. This is the revolutionary politics of Marxism, socialism, communism, right? That's the revolutionary part. The Bodhisattva part is this inner transformation, this inner path of

liberation, this inner revolution that seeks to dethrone the ego as the automatic source of identification in the psychological mind. And if you can engage in both of these activities at the same time, if you can fight outwardly, organize outwardly for political change while at the same exact time, dialectically doing that process inwardly of your own psychology, I think that puts us in the best position possible to actually see through the external revolution that we want. If we are still operating from ego, if we're still operating from fear and insecurity and the need for stability and certainty and control, then even their highest ideals, our most beautiful utopias, will never be able to actually come to be in this world because the psychological

state that we're operating from fundamentally undermines it. And this is actually not an idealist retreat into consciousness. This is a dialectical approach that understands that inward and outward transformation don't happen separately or exclusively. They happen as part of the same exact fucking process. And we've already actually experienced that. If you are somebody that can look at the injustice imposed on Palestinians and weep hot, noble tears, you are somebody that, you know, has had their ego humbled to some extent,

that has had that illusion of me over here and them over there broken down. And you see all the people in your life that don't have that, that can't emotionally relate whatsoever to the obvious injustice going on, that they really can't open their heart up and feel that injustice in the way that you might be able to feel it. They're kind of still ossified. And their ego is protecting them from the pain of opening up their heart. And there is pain. To love is to feel pain.

You know, I said in a recent episode that grief is the echo of love. If you love somebody in this life, when they die, you will be rolling around on the ground in torturous grief. And you could never, you could never get to that state if you didn't love them in the first place. So that's the price you paid to love. And in a similar way, opening up our heart hurts deeply. The ego wants to close down. The ego can't face.

The ego is too small. But if you can find that part of you, and that's what I'm saying, this is not some esoteric, hard-to-reach place. a lot of you already have it. You've already seen glimpses of it. The heart wants to open. The mind wants to expand. It's a natural process. Like if you put a flower and soil,

give it water and give it sunlight, it wants to bloom. So this is not something you need to impose on your own mind. It's a natural process that you simply kind of get out of the way of and let unfold. And by getting into these meditative states,

by becoming aware of awareness, however you want to put it, you are kind of providing the sunlight for a flower to bloom. You're not wrenching open the pedal. the ego wants to wrench open the petals. What happens if you try to do that to an actual flower? The flower falls apart.

You rip the pedals off and it's a disaster. The ego can't get in there and rip it open. That's control. That's the need to dominate. It's actually a passiveness where your ego gets out of the way. And if you do that enough, then the flower naturally unfolds. And so I kind of want to make that point. I want to assert the revolutionary Bodhisattva archetype that we will all fall short of,

but we can still strive to embody in our various ways. And the question I want to pose to you, Alison, as we wrap this up, and you can take any of that too and comment on it, of course. But the question I had as an endpoint to this conversation is, what would it mean to be a Christian or more precisely a follower of Christ if this interpretation that we're offering is correct? Like, what would that now mean? And I'll let you take that wherever you want.

Yeah, I think that's a good question. So I think first I'll say something cautiously about what it doesn't mean, which is that I think, like, you know, if you happen to be listening to this and to be a relatively Orthodox Christian, I don't think this means you need to abandon that. So I'll start with that. I think you could, you know, participate in fairly Orthodox Christianity. You can participate in the sacraments. You could engage in it and still adopt this view as well. So I don't think it means rejecting that. But I do think it means going, a level beyond that and taking the contemplative tradition, which already exists within Christianity, serious alongside the ritual traditions, which you probably already take seriously, and alongside the ethical traditions, which we all struggle to take seriously, I think. But I think what the implication would be is that it is not enough to just, like, serve others, even though serving others is necessary. One has to cultivate the ability to identify. One has to cultivate the ability to identify with others in this deeper way that comes from that ego dissolution. And to really identify in the

Christian tradition, I would say with God, and to identify God with others as well. This permeating unification of God that is so important in the mystical traditions within Christianity. So I think that then following Christ takes on a lot of the dimensions that a lot of Christians are already comfortable with about becoming a servant to all, about participating in the world in a way that is based on care, taking care of each other, caring for the poor, all of these things. But in an additional dimension of that of also trying to cultivate that inward approach that Jesus talks about and that we've argued Jesus is clearly talking about in the teachings that we have associated with him. And so, yeah, I think it requires developing some of those practices.

Now, I'll say, I think the Christian tradition has those practices in it already. You don't have to go externally to it if you don't want to go external. there are incredible contemplative traditions. And I would recommend reading from those traditions, reading the Christian mystics, learning their experiences, and finding ways to engage there. But if you don't find something helpful there, I think the other implication here is that you do need to start that development and that cultivation that is necessary. And there are a lot of tools that are available for that. I think Brett and I have both found value in Buddhist practices and that those can help begin that cultivation of the non-egoic perspective. And so,

So it would require some intentionality around that, and it would require taking Christianity, again, like you said, Brett, from a propositional set of beliefs to something that also is experiential. And from that experiential perspective can then be cultivated as a way of living in the world very directly. And so that's kind of what I would read into that. And I think that if you undertake that, that does lead to this perspective of empathy and compassion that has profound political import. And I think that that is why Christians who have gone in this direction tend to also have an incredible voice in decrying injustice, this orientation towards violence in the world that is unjust and structural in nature where they want to see it overcome and undone. And so it would have that political dimension to it.

I think there are both. In my mind, you know, the output or the outcome of trying to get past the ego does have political meaning. and that might be controversial because a lot of contemplative traditions lean towards quietism on the political question, but I just think that it does. And so to follow Christ in the sense that we've tried to develop in this reading would have political import, it would require you to serve, not just in like feeding the poor, but in trying to eliminate the conditions of poverty structurally and get to a world where those do not exist. And so it would have that bigger meaning.

That's kind of my best shot at trying to take, you know, a basic answer to that very, very big question. Yeah, no, I agree with all of that. And, you know, to be a follower of Christ is to trying to cultivate that sense of love, that outrage at injustice, the refusal, you know, as much as we're militating against literalist interpretations and all these things, we're also militating against, as Allison said, the quietism of a lot of, of a lot of spiritual approaches that see their spirituality as a retreat from the messiness of the world and a retreat. from the confrontations inherent in politics. And we reject that. To live a full, well-rounded life is to you have to deal with your world as it actually is. You have to go out in the world and influence it.

And at the same time, you have to open your heart and try to operate from this higher state of consciousness. And there are many spiritual practices. If you are a Christian, there's many figures in your tradition. But Thomas Merton is a really interesting figure who was, of course, on the side of progressive politics who brought in Buddhist meditation to his Christianity and his Christianity was made all the better for it. He has many books out there you can read and look into. This is somebody that I think, you know, perhaps imperfectly as we all are, but manifests the sort of thing that we're trying to talk about. He was engaged in the political struggles of his day. He was

engaged in these spiritual practices taking seriously these other religious traditions while not at all deviating or condemning his own religious tradition, but operating very much within it to make it better. And that, I think, is really important. And we're living at a time where the reactionary right is trying to sell us on this idea of toxic empathy. And why would they be doing that? Yes, there's a petulant or naive form of supposed empathy or false empathy that can sometimes manifest on, like, the wagging of your finger, moralizing liberal left or whatever. but really what they're trying to do is undermine the foundations of love as a serious thing in politics, even as they pretend to be carriers of the message of Christ.

Nick Fuentes is somebody who has a politics of hate and reaction so clearly, but is always trying to at the same time say that because he's a Catholic, that he has to lead with love. And actually we love everybody and all these things. And then goes on to say the N-word or call, you know, be misogynistic towards women. or, you know, call gay or trans people mentally ill or whatever. It's like, how do you bridge that contradiction that you're claiming to be a follower of Christ while at the same time sowing hatred and division in the way that your politics necessitate?

You know, that is just, that is rank hypocrisy and it should repel anybody. So, you know, pursue the path that Allison and I are laying out. Do not turn away from the world, go out into it, but also understand the importance of cultivating this mindset in this, really this, this heart. And that is actually a life worth living. Our society says that a life worth living is to worship, what is our society actually worship for all the talk of the Constitution and a Christian nation? What is this country actually worship? It worships the self and it worships money. And it tells you that to have a meaningful, happy life, you need to do the same in the form of status games, try to get as much outward seeing status and success as you can and hoard as much wealth

and resources as you possibly can. It's a game of all against all, really. And so it's pretences to worship different things. The truth is it worships self and it worships money. It's an ego game. And to extract yourself from that from the inside out to dismantle your own ego desiring machine is a revolutionary act as long as it's also coupled with explicit political work in the world around you. And if you want to live a meaningful life, don't pursue status and success and money. pursue service live for something bigger than yourself give up what the ego wants and live from a higher space of loving awareness and live for something that will outlive you live to try to build a better world and literally engaging with the spiritual path making that a dimension of your life adds such

depth to your existence in a in a society where everything is alienated and commodified and flattened and meaningless to actually actively pursue this spiritual dimension to your life and make it a real priority of yours is is I swear to God is a beautiful way to live your life and a serious thing that you can do that adds real depth to your life and eventually to your moment by moment experience of your own life. And that's what we're seeking. Like we want to feel whole. We want to feel like we're present for our own lives. We understand that our life is constantly slipping away and our ego keeps us out of the present. It's always fixated on the future, trembling and worry or anxiety. It's always ruminating on the past. It's always

retreating into conceptual abstractions. And when our life is actually the thing that's here and now, and if we can't orient ourselves to here and now really profoundly, then we're literally letting our life slip through our hands like sand or water. And then by the end of your life, you will feel like what was that just flew by like what did i what was it all for a lot of people are on their deathbed thinking that why because they live their whole life as schopenhauer said in at interim you know as as a as a means to the next moment looking over the shoulder of the present moment to get to the next thing to get to the next thing if i get this then i'll be happy if i just keep doing this then eventually this will happen and i'll finally be happy it's always leaning forward forward

and that you're just leaning forward into the grave. So you have to orient your life to the here and now. And this spiritual practice, this set of spiritual practices, is a real concrete way that you can actually do that. And your life will have a dimension of depth that you previously thought impossible if you do pursue this. So I would put that out there as well. Yeah, yeah.

I think the last thing that I'll say to kind of on my end is like, you know, I for so long put off developing these kind of practices, honestly, and was like very intellectualizing about mysticism and all of this. And like there are, you know, as breathed said, there are practices you can do to try to cultivate this way of living and this way of being. And like, you know, for the longest time when I heard people talk about this kind of stuff, it did just sound like kind of like woo abstract stuff. But you can just like kind of try it. You know what I mean? And if you don't find anything in trying to develop these practices and trying to cultivate

this within yourself, then you don't have to keep going with it, but it doesn't hurt to try it. And I know the thing that I found in my life was when I just sucked it up and said, I'm going to get past the fact that all this sounds like kind of overly abstract, metaphysical stuff and tried to develop some of these practices, is that it was transformative. And I'm so glad I made that decision. So I imagine the number of more skeptical people in our audience listening to this who, if you made it all the way through this while being that skeptical, like props to you from that. But if you are still sticking with us, just kind of try it is sort of what I'm going to say. Try to develop some of these practices.

Try to take that inward turn and experience it and see if there's something there and we're not just talking out of our ass, you know, because I think there is. I think it's worth trying. So I want to like give that kind of just experimental option for those who feel more skeptical. Absolutely. Absolutely. It is sort of an experiment you run on yourself. Yeah. And but I would just argue that you just can't do it once or twice and quit, right? There's so many people that sit down and just say, hey, my mind isn't for meditation. It's just not for me or whatever. It has to be something you actually try. Like if you want to learn a new instrument, you can't just strum a guitar three times and give up. You got to kind of commit to it. And in a very similar way, like just make it a thing.

maybe just even set a time like, you know, four months or for six months, I'm just going to, every morning I wake up, I'm going to give myself 15 minutes, maybe listen to guided meditations at first to get into the habit of it. And I'm just going to give this thing a shot. And I'm going to try to, I'm going to actually try to throw myself into this a little bit and see what happens. And if you do it sincerely and you, you know, and you strive to learn about the thing and you don't just expect to just be whisked away by some magical experience, but you realize that you have to actually kind of put in some effort here and learn about what you're, you're doing and try to do it correctly, it will pay off. It just will. And I truly believe that.

And that comes not from an abstract reading of somebody else's thoughts, but from my own direct experience, having tried this and done this for many, many years. And it's still something I struggled to keep the discipline to do. Often, I'm in times I wake up and I want to do anything else but sit down quietly for 20 minutes. But it really, really does pay off if you can stick to it. And yeah, again, it adds a whole new dimension to your life that I think is sorely needed in our modern world. All right. Well, that's an over two-hour episode. I hope people found that interesting.

Perfect timing for Christmas. So we're putting that out there with love. And, you know, maybe it doesn't connect with everybody. But for those it does connect with, if you listen to this and you feel something stir within you, even if you can't articulate it, even if it's vague and opaque to your own self, that tends to be a, a signal that that you may very well be ready to kind of explore this terrain of your life. If you listen to it and within the first 15 minutes, you say, this is stupid bullshit and turn it off. It's totally valid too.

You know, it's just, it's not right for you, I guess. And that's that's totally cool. But if you're still here, it's almost certainly indicative of the fact that there's something here that is speaking to you, even if you can't quite make sense of it. And there's a path ready for you to begin to follow if you're so inclined. So we urge you to do it. All right, with love and solidarity. Merry Christmas.

Happy holidays to everybody. We'll talk to you in the new year.