Rev Left Radio - On Mysticism: Ego, Suffering, & Love

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

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

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

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

And we wanted to share it with people and have an interesting conversation about something that you don't very often hear people talk about. So first of all, how are you doing, Allison? I am doing good. Everything in my life is kind of in a state of chaos at the moment due to some housing stuff around mold and a shitty landlord. But making it through excited to have this conversation. And yeah, just like honestly, you know, you mentioned it.

I think on like some of our Patreon episodes, we've discussed this with each other briefly. This is a thing that both you and I, I know, have an interest in. But I don't think we've ever really on Red Minis had a real conversation about other than, again, we kind of referenced it on the Blah episode some. But I think it'll be good to kind of dive into it. Definitely. Now, before we get into like the topic at hand, I'm just kind of interested in how you personally got interested in this sort of realm of thought, maybe how you got interested in mysticism in particular, but also how you got interested in religion more broadly. Yeah. So I have had a weird relationship to religion and

mysticism in my life. I was raised an evangelical Christian, which I would actually say is a like shockingly non-mystical religion in many ways. So I was raised within that world. I went to Bible college originally. And it actually is at Bible college that I feel like I really discovered mysticism in interesting ways. I remember reading a lot of, I read most of Plato's dialogues, which I actually think have the seeds of a lot of later mysticism that develops. And Christian mysticism and Islamic mysticism in particular. And I also read the one work that kind of blew my mind at the time was reading Pseudonis, who is this early Christian saint who argues for kind of the fundamental oneness of God and the possibility of human unity would that one.

oneness. So in that context, I think I started to kind of pick up on these strains of mysticism and interestingly kind of left religion for a very long time actually considered myself very much an atheist. I still might consider myself an atheist in some ways we just can do that are very complicated, but really stepped away from that world. But the whole time of kind of maintained an interest in mystical traditions and what I would call monist traditions, like that emphasize oneness and unity. And so, yeah, I kind of came into that through encountering academic spiritual Christian works. And then I've since spent a lot of time studying it outside of that context as well.

Very interesting because there's obviously parallels with me as well in that I have been and still consider myself and have considered myself since I was a teenager, an atheist, maybe an agnostic atheist. If I had to make a bet about how things actually are, I would put my money on atheism. But that does not in any way detract from a deep abiding interest in mysticism, in religious experiences, and really in the possibility of anything being true. Because as I always tell everybody when we get in this conversation, the fact that we're here at all, the fact that we are able to sit here and reflect on the cosmos, that we can have penetrating insights into some laws of nature, the fact that in the chaos of the swirling world, universe and cosmos, there can be little islands of stability where we can sit and enjoy a nice warm day in the sun is already so miraculous, so unthinkable, so hard to explain that anything is on the table. And another thing I come back to, and I've been thinking about recently, is whether you believe in God, whether you're an atheist, whatever your model of the cosmos

is, it always ends in the final contradiction, which is how do we get something from nothing? there are attempts in deep physics to try quantum mechanics theoretical physics to try and grapple with this question perturbations in the quantum field or whatever it may be but regardless of where you stand the truth is that fundamental contradiction is not resolved and is perhaps unresolvable and that that keeps open a huge question mark at the end of any inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and how we got here which is how do you get something from nothing because if you want to posit a god where god come from you want to posit a multiverse where did the multiverse come from you want to posit a quantum field in the void you have to you have to explain where the void came from because what is void it's space space is half of space time so where did space come from right so so the fact that there's always a question mark at the end of this road of inquiry and given the miraculous nature that we exist at all that always leaves the door open for me that anything can

could be true, you know, and that that's kind of scary and also liberating in some ways. But the last thing I wanted to say is it's interesting because while you seem to come to mysticism through the Abrahamic traditions, right, almost entirely, and I came through it almost entirely through the Eastern traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, and the mystical forms of Hinduism, which I got deeply, deeply into all three of those things in my teen years and was synonymous with my sort of spiritual journey. So it's very interesting that going through the east or going through the west, you still can come to these traditions and explore them, and that's fascinating. And the last thing I'll say, just on a definitional point, because as Marxists,

a word that we hear a lot is mystification. And that's a, it's a pejorative connotation, because mystification means that it's sort of an ideological fog, that something is being withheld or obscured, some truth. And mysticism, because it shares the etymological roots with mystification, can sometimes seem like, you know, anti-Marxist, like you mystifying people. But in so many ways, and hopefully it will become clear throughout this conversation, mysticism is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of mystification. It's not intended to obscure. It's intended to get beyond obscurantism, to get to a sort of inner clarity that is, that is sort of, that is sort of a and touch at touch fundamental truths through an inward journey that are actually deeply

clarifying and the opposite of mystification so much of what you overcome in the mystical traditions is you overcome the mystification of your own ego your own identity etc and so i i think that's a point worth making up front yeah no i think that's a really important distinction and i think like you know the the kind of framing that i want to offer for this a little bit too is that I would just encourage being open-minded about these questions when we're getting into this discussion for our audience. I think oftentimes what is hard when talking about this subject is that it can sound like a lot of kind of like pop-wooey sort of nonsense that I think people are right to be very skeptical of. And I think it's important to emphasize that, yeah, there are kind of like pop spiritualities that have drawn on a lot of the language that I think we're going to use here. but those aren't identical necessarily with the traditions that we're talking about. And I think one of the things that you got at that I find just fascinating about the subject, Brett, is that, again, you and I are coming from very different traditions to these very similar conclusions. And I've always felt like the fact that so many traditions reach this same point from remarkably different starting premises is kind of reason enough that it's worth exploring, right? There's kind of a demand built into that to take it seriously. So I hope that that is an effort for,

people at least to understand why this might be something worth talking about and engaging with. Yes. And at its absolute best, it is in some sense, and this is kind of crude, but kind of true, a possibility of a sort of scientific approach to this stuff in that. It's not a third party objective science, right? But it is a sort of inward journey that you must take by yourself that can't be validated by any third person. So that makes it non-science for sure. But you have an experimental aspect to this, that whatever we say is not just stuff we're sitting in an armchair making up, but are things that any human being, I think, could experience or could explore for themselves experientially if they're willing to, quote unquote, run the experiment within themselves, right? And that means to if you're interested in this stuff, and even if you remain skeptical, which I think is healthy and you should be, you have this option to actually try it out for yourself. know, there's different practices. Of course, I come from a more Buddhist-oriented tradition of meditation, which is something I've tested and I can say does fucking work. But there's always

that option. None of this, and actually this is anathema to this, none of this is about believing certain claims about the world as it is. We're not making metaphysical assertions. We're not saying the universe is like this. We're not saying God does or does not exist. We're not making any objective claims about the cosmos. We're making subjective claims about experiences one can have, and humans have had in all traditions going back

millennia, that you could at least try and replicate within yourself to see if there's anything here. And I would argue if somebody sat down, even for two weeks and did 30 minutes of meditation every single day, you're going to discover something. Something is going to

shift within you. Something is going to be revelatory about that. experience that and you're going to see why this stuff is worthwhile and why two i hope you think intelligent people like alison and i are interested in this stuff you know alison and i if you know anything about us you know we're not prone to supernaturalism we're not prone to idealism we're not just sitting back and venting hypotheticals and so hopefully we've established our credentials enough for even the most skeptical listener to come along this journey with us all right well you just want to jump in the first question? Yeah, let's go for it. Okay. So what is your relation to mysticism and spirituality? What do you understand those terms to mean? What is the relationship between those concepts, practices, and organized religion, in your opinion? Yeah. So I wanted to kind of do some like definitional work up front here because I think this is important. You know, like you said, Brat, mysticism as a word sounds very similar to mystification. So I think drawing these things out. And obviously we both come from a

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

the ego that sets ourselves apart and outside from that reality. And I think in a lot of ways beyond just those ideas, mysticism refers to a set of traditions that also have practices that allow people to experience that unity, right? So that can take many different forms. So you take the form meditation in Sufism, Islamic mysticism. We see that in ecstatic dance, actually, in some instances, these various techniques that can be employed in order for an experience of unity to be achieved and for the kind of dualism that we see to fall apart, even if only for a moment. So that's kind of what I'm getting at when I talk about mysticism. And spirituality to me is a much broader term, and it refers, I think, to sort of religious and spiritual practices, which may or may not be mystical in their content.

Mystical practices, I think, often fall within the broad terms of spirituality, but I also think it kind of transcends that category. And when we can actually be very skeptical of the idea of spirituality or a spiritual world, while also embracing mysticism in ways that I think are important to kind of unpack there. Mysticism, in my mind, is actually very compatible with a materialist view of the world and some very interesting. ways. The sort of monism at the core of mysticism, I don't think has to assert what kind of thing it is that fundamentally exists. That could be a material thing even. And there are kind of monistic materialisms that exist as well. So I think it's important to say that while mysticism and spirituality often intertwine with each other, they're not identical to each other. And mysticism does, I think, go beyond those categories in a lot of ways. The final part of the question

that I actually think is really worth wrestling with, too, is that mysticism is distinct from religion in a lot of ways, because organized mainstream religions are often very skeptical of their own mystical traditions in ways that I think are interesting. So again, I come to mysticism largely through the Abrahamic tradition, so having done a fair amount of research and some practice within Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, where within those three religions, you have schools that develop this mystical ideal, which often are in contradiction. or conflict with the broader religion. In Christianity, you have these fascinating histories throughout the Middle Ages of monastic figures who are having these mystical experiences of union with God, who often then end up in almost legal conflict with the church more broadly, who is very skeptical of those experiences. You see this also throughout parts of Jewish history and Islamic history as well. One of the notes that I noted down that I think is like this very interesting example of this that comes up in Islam is this famous, very famous Sufi master, Hussain Mansour al-Halaj, who in, while engaged in ecstatic worship practice, exclaimed,

I am God, which is a really interesting thing for someone to say. And that was met with actual prosecution at the hands of the state because of it being heresy. But within the mystical tradition, that statement isn't understood as an individual exclaiming that they are literally God. It's understood as someone transcending the self, the disillusion of the ego and expressing the fundamental unity with God. And so in that example, I think we can see those tensions that exist between the religion more broadly and the mystical traditions that exist within that religion. In contemporary Islam, there actually is a lot of kind of controversy around this with more slothist and reformist schools of Islam actually seeing Sufist mysticism as a deviation

from the religion and often kind of persecuting it in some way. So for me, I think it's very important to say, yeah, we can talk about mysticism and it can't be cleanly separated from the religions in which it develops, but it can often be in conflict with them in ways that are, you know, important to emphasize. So all that definitional work out there, I will say broadly for me, what my relationship to all that is, is that I personally find mystical experiences to be fascinating. I can account a couple experiences that I have had in my life that I would say had hints of a mystical experience. Some of those due to the help of certain substances that can help one kind of achieve those experiences, not just personal spiritual cultivation. But I think there's

something there within those traditions that I feel like I have at least caught a glimpse of in my life and that people throughout history have caught glimpses of. And that kind of creates the motivation for me to have a relationship to this concept to these traditions and to care deeply about it. So that's kind of how I relate to all of that as well. That's really, really good. Yeah, we have an episode on Sufism with Adnan from Grill History. He did like two years ago, if somebody wants to have a full episode just on the mystical tradition within Islam. And yeah, we'd also discuss how it has historically and continues in some ways to conflict with mainstream religious traditions in the church or whatever it may be. Now, in the Christian, in the Christian

mystical tradition, you have figures like St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart, and I would even include St. Francis to be very much within this mystical tradition within Christianity. St. Francis obviously is a huge figure for me. I have a whole episode of St. Francis of people interested. But also, you know, I see Jesus as a fundamentally mystical figure. Because you said earlier, right, the Islamic mystic who said, I am God. And that creates a huge. huge back last year. What? No, you're not. You know, people flip out about that. I mean, what happened with Jesus Christ? I'm the son of God, right? And you can read a lot of what he says in the New Testament in a mystical, through a mystical lens that I find incredibly fascinating.

The Zen Buddhist Adyashanti has an entire book on Jesus where he walks through the New Testament and the entire life of Jesus Christ and helps you understand it through the mystical lens. And that's coming from somebody with a with a Zen Buddhist background. Right. So I highly recommend that if this, if any of that interested to you. But one thing I did want to ask is you said that you had mystical experiences. I believe I have as well. Do you want to talk about what those mystical experiences were like or felt like or do you feel comfortable doing that? Yeah. So it is kind of embarrassing because I think the most mystical experience I've had has been on LSD. Yeah. Which, you know, has a way of career.

those kind of experiences. And I'm of two minds of this, right? Because I think one thing that is very true of mystical traditions is often an emphasis on discipline and self-cultivation as a part of achieving a mystical experience. And at the same time, it takes very little discipline and self-cultivation to just do a lot of acid. So, you know, I go back and forth on that. But there was a period of my life in which I used quite a bit of acid. And one particular experience that actually stopped me from doing hallucinogens ever again. I just kind of was like, I'm good after that was a trip that I would actually describe as a very bad trip in a lot of ways. I took a bigger dose than I expected to take. I found it very overwhelming. And eventually I did

what is usually the smart thing to do in a bad trip, which is I found the darkest room that I could and I just laid there, right? And tried to reduce my sensory input. And if you've never done a fair amount of acid before. One of the things that's really tough about it is that it's a long trip, right? It can be like 10 hours. And at least for me, it's always had a very kind of energizing side of it and I can never fall asleep on it. So I found myself in this kind of miserable experience of laying on the floor in this room, having a terrible, terrible experience, tripping way too hard and being forced to be conscious through it, which was not fun. But I kind of was laying there and I kind of just let go and decided to go with it. And in a way that I don't quite know how to put

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

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

that I find very meaningful, which is that I'm not my ego. I'm not the voice, an internal monologue inside of my head. It is easy to misidentify myself with that thing, but that is not who I am. And in fact, if I want to define who I am, I probably have to step outside of that thing completely. And for me, that was kind of this experience that really took a lot of these ideas that I had read before and put it into something experiential. And it's something that I've caught hints and glimpses of when attempting meditative practice. But I would say I'm very bad at meditation. So, you know, that is something that where a space where I will have to apply discipline and work to try to achieve something. But that is the experience that really

stands out to me. Again, I can give a rational explanation of that, right? Which is that. that my brain was flooded with chemicals that cause certain hallucinatory experiences and that those experiences were entirely a result of mental and neurological processes taking place within my brain. But I got to say that even after I sobered up, that realization really has stuck with me for the rest of my life in ways that I find hard to attribute to just a change in neurochemistry maybe. Absolutely.

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

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

worth exploring to show the power that psychedelics, the generative power that psychedelics can have. Now, my first mystical experience also came under the influence of psychedelics, but this time, for me, it was psilocybin mushrooms. I told the story many times before, but the quick and brief version is that me and my friend each got 3.5 grams each. My friend backed out. He got, he got too scared. I had no experience with psychedelics, had no clue what was going to happen, just 16. You're just trying to do something fun on a Saturday night. I take his 3.5 and my own reaching a heroic dose of seven grams of mushrooms. And very stupid, but I'm so is the best mistake I ever made because what happened was I was in the parking lot of a movie theater because

we're 16. We don't have a house to go to. We're just in my friend's mom's van. I take all seven grams it comes on incredibly quickly incredibly powerfully and i find myself um i fell to the ground in this little patch of grass and i looked up at the at the stars and i felt this orgasmic euphoric feeling of the subject object distinction collapsing entirely it felt as if the stars were raining into me that's that's the language i used at the time not having any mystical um you know knowledge having no clue that mysticism you asked a 16 year old brett what is mysticism mean i've never heard that word so i had no context no you know pre um idea about what was happening or anything like that but what i realize what i've come to realize is that this was this complete collapse of subject

and object and there was no more me in here and the universe or the stars or the night sky out there it all was one thing and it was absolutely euphoric in a way that i've never experienced since Now, after that, my friends were like, you're making a scene. There's, like, people with their kids walking into the movie theater. They violently grabbed me, ripped me up from the ground, threw me into the van. And that, like, band-aid rip of being in the oceanic oneness and being thrown into the back of a shitty van by other 16-year-old adolescent boys was it took my trip in the opposite direction. So then I had two hours of going through hell where I was vomiting what I thought was blood. I thought there were creatures in my blood.

I saw snakes and spiders coming out of every vent in the van coming at me. And I had like an insane experience, like to the point where my friends were scared. Like we don't know what's happening. Right. But coming out of that, that's what really pushed me in this direction of like, okay, that's one way to do it. A door was certainly opened. Some experience was certainly revealed to me. I'm definitely going to try that again. But over time, it became very clear to me that, okay, yes, you can open the door.

you can peek inside but when the trip ends you might have a couple revelations you can hold on to but there's nothing lasting there and so if you you know the classic analogy is that psychedelics will shoot you on a rocket to the top of the mountain and then bring you back down whereas meditation or these other spiritual practices are a long hike up the mountain and eventually when you get to the top you're allowed to perhaps stay maybe so for that more enduring mystical tradition or experience or journey, if you will, that's going to take these spiritual practices. And psychedelics are really only a kicking open of the door and a slamming of that door shut again. And there have been people, especially in the 60s, who made the error of thinking that

if they just kept doing it, if they just stayed high enough, if they just continued using LSD and mushrooms all the time, that they could somehow reach the stage of enlightenment. And people burned out. People fried their brains. It was obviously a dead end at some point. And and the famous sort of mystic ramdas who was you know used to be richard alpert he was a harvard psychologist wanted to test psychedelics and was actually kicked out of harvard for his use of psychedelics in the in a lab experiment he he went that path he tried psychedelics he said i've done lsd thousands of times there was periods of my life where i was on a psychedelic every single day and eventually it became very clear to me that i was only going to be able to get so far

And that's when he got fired from Harvard and he took this journey to the East and meditated and under the auspices of really advanced teachers in India and so forth, Southeast Asia, and was able to, you know, garner real spiritual understanding through these traditions of the East that were long lasting. He died a few years ago in the ripe age of 90 something. And I encourage people to go check out his life story because I think it's really instructive and really fast. And he's just a really funny, down-to-earth, insightful guy that is fun to listen to. So I encourage people to do that. But that was my first mystical experience. And I have to say, I have had other mystical experiences, not under the influence of any substance whatsoever. And in those instances, which I have talked about before, it wasn't a complete collapse of subject-object dualism.

But what it was was this overwhelming sense, this ego-less sense of love that came as, as, at a sort of pinnacle of existential and spiritual suffering, long periods of suffering, months in my case, in two different instances, of deep internal suffering that peaked and the wave crested in this moment of euphoric love, where you literally feel as if you are loved. There is no more me in there, loving other people out there.

There is just love. And when you get, and it only lasted for me for a few moments, both times I experienced it. but it was like, you know, the cliche of love is everything or something's deep about love or all these mystical traditions talk about love. They use the word love. And if you haven't had these experiences, it does sound kind of trite, kind of like a platitude. But if you've had these experiences of literally feeling as if you are love, a selfless, egoless swamping of the self by love, it's a profound experience. and you look at complete strangers as if they are yourself.

And isn't that what Jesus told us? Love your neighbor as if it was yourself. And that is a profound spiritual, mystical dictate to love a total stranger as much as you love yourself or as much as you love your own children. And to be able to experience that and to touch that, for me, that erased any doubt that there's something of value here to be explored. you know i don't have all the experiences i can't stabilize that feeling i have a lot of work to do but those those acute experiences proved without a shadow of a doubt for me that there is something of real value here and that is that is more or less sort of kept me on the path

i love it so much what do you love i love it so much what do you love so much I love it so much What do you love I love it so much That it takes withholding What do you love I'm not telling What do you hide

Just look at my face And know that I won't tell What do you? you know that I can't say it because the half knows no name and I can't try to display it and there's too much to explain what do you want just hold out your wrist what do you want to just hold out your wrist what do you want with them just to show of hand what will you do I love it so much it takes with holding. Yeah, I'll expand a little bit to, on my experience as well. So beyond the drug use, I think I've mentioned this to you before, Brett.

Like, for me, I feel like I've had moments of insight like this in the context of nature and, like, intense physical expenditure, basically. Which, again, I could explain very easily scientifically, right? As, like, when one is climbing a mountain, there's an incredible. endorphin release, right? That occurs there. That is going to evoke certain emotional stages. But also at the same time, like, I have had experiences of literally standing on top of a mountain where something about the exhaustion and the place has had this incredible, profound experience of my own smallness, in a sense, right? And I think they're, again, not quite a full mystical experience, but these moments of seeing like, oh, my gosh, this whole, for me, it always comes back to this whole ego that I built up around myself that needs to climb a mountain, right, to say that I did that is so stupid once I'm on top of it, because it is so minuscule and meaningless in the broader unity of existence. And the idea that there's this distinction between the me who needs to conquer a mountain and the mountain is meaningless once you're just laying on top of it exhausted and defeated, right? And I think, again, this isn't a full-blum mystical experience. I think what I realized is that what I was chasing through hallucinogens, I had been. eventually started to chase through just encounters with nature in a lot of ways, which has led me to a point in my life of realizing that I probably need something more disciplined and not just chasing these small, little experiences that can be gained in these other ways. But yeah,

I don't know. I think there's these experiences that you can have that once you start to catch glimpses of this thing, it's hard to let go of it, right? And it's hard to not want to devote some part of your life to understanding. And I think as you really got at stabilizing that in some way. Yes. And for me, what makes them so profound is they're not just like really cool experiences. They're not just like, you know, I've had many cool experiences. They're the most deep, enriching, grounding in some sense, but also ungrounding experiences in my entire life. They're the most profound things I've ever felt. And so that right there is like they stand head and shoulders above any other mere experience. And it's precisely that element of the ego

disappearing only momentarily because you know the question of whether or not you can stabilize that over the long term i'm sure some people can it's it's a it's a whole other question but right ever the thing that's unique in all of the situations that alison and i have just described is this dropping away of that little voice inside your head that incessant little chatter the need to cling on to good things to push away bad things to run away from pain to try to hold on to things that you love that that by the nature of them change change and fall away. That creates a whole level of suffering and we carry this burden around with us all the time, this egoic burden, this little sense of self that constantly needs

to be defended, that is constantly being buffeted by the winds of life, that is ultimately unstable and ultimately ends in complete annihilation. And as long as you are identifying with that ego your entire life, you are a tiny, tiny, tiny little being falling through the void. And it's terrifying and of course it is yeah and death horrifies you because what is death but the end of the ego and and you know what what is i forget who says it but uh the you know the the whole point of philosophy is to learn how to die before you die right right and that is the what they're saying is to to let that sense of self die while you're still alive you know so you can experience the liberation from the fear of death which is a fascinating aspect of all this as well

But the one point I wanted to make about nature, one of the best things you could do, whether you're into this stuff or just want to clear your head or whatever, is I find if you spend prolonged periods of time in nature alone, it's really fascinating because you begin to, one, get into tune of how the ebbs and flows of the natural world are, right? Light comes, the sunsets, you know, birds and animals become active at other parts of the day. they're not. You get really in tune with that. But the other important thing is that you're not performing for anybody. When you're in social situations, which we almost all are all the time, you are putting on a mask, whether you know it or not. I'm playing the role of dad. Now I'm playing the role of coworker. Now I'm playing the role of student. Now I'm playing the role at the guy checking out at the grocery store. And I'm talking to the clerk in that sort of dynamic, right? That social dynamic, et cetera. When you're out in nature, there's nobody to perform for. You're out there

long enough naturally your your mind doesn't start quieting down like your mind you'll continue talking to yourself of course but you a sort of more authentic version of you begins to be able to bloom because you're not performing a social role you're completely liberated from any social context you're embedded in nature and that in and of itself can be really conducive to being content but if you're also on a spiritual journey you're also mixing in meditation and spiritual practices in that context, it really amplifies the entire experience and creates a really perfect foundation for you to be able to use those spiritual practices and those techniques in that context. So I find that very liberating in its own right. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to go ahead

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

an objective side has a subjective side. Let's just talk about science before we get into Marxism in particular. Science is this third party attempt, right? Third party meaning that not just one person can come to a scientific conclusion. It has to be tested. Third party, there has to be an arena of people searching for a similar truth that you can bounce your ideas off, run tests, advanced hypotheses, you know, be overturned, have somebody else come with a new hypotheses. But the basic thing of, if it's going to be a scientific fact, it's not going to be,

this culture realizes it versus this culture or this person in this place at time realizes it and this person over here doesn't it has to be true for everybody the you know science are universal truths if the big bang theory is correct it's true no matter what planet you live on no matter what country you live on no matter what culture you come from so that is an investigation of the objective side of reality i truly believe that our sentience our consciousness is the subjective side of the cosmos if it has an objective side that thing you can look out. You can Google right now. What does the Milky Way look like? What is the cosmological model look like? Let me see a picture of the Big Bang. All those things will come up.

I'm sure in your head right now, some of those images are popping up because we've all seen them a million times. We use science. We use physics. We use chemistry. We use biology to explore this objective side of the cosmos to understand our place within it. Our inner lives, our sentience, our consciousness. What can it be, if not the subjective side of the cosmos? there is no differentiation it's not like we are placed into the cosmos from outside of it we bloom and blossom from within it we are just as much part of the cosmos as the rings of saturn or the sun that lights that heats up our solar system or nebula lie far off in the distance there's that objective sense but we subjectively we feel alien subjectively we feel like the cosmos is so big and overwhelming we are just a little thing that was placed inside of it. This is our ego talking, right? Right. With this little vulnerable thing inside of this magisterial domain of complete mystery

and profundity, but we are fundamentally vulnerable and weak and we will be washed away by it. And that leads to a lot of fear and neurosis, etc. But if you can kind of see intellectually and then hopefully experientially that, and this happens when the ego drops away, that you are, and every sentient being across the cosmos is, the subjective side of the cosmos, I think right there we have some, the rubber's hitting

the road. We have something to work with there without having to displace or undermine science in any way. Right. And I think a very similar thing is true with Marxism. When I get into a mystical state, again, as I said in the beginning, I'm not drawing metaphysical conclusions about the way the cosmos is objectively, because now you're applying subjective revelations and experiences and you're trying to project them onto an objective truth about the reality of the cosmos. So what I think is that there's Marxism, materialism, because when we're looking at the world around us, that is by far in a way the best method of analyzing the way that societies evolve over time, the best way of analyzing political and social problems.

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

when i'm engaged in a mystical practice i'm not trying to generate objective claims about the material world i'm looking inwardly and i'm exploring the subjective dimension of my own existence and of the cosmos and there's nothing there's there need not be a contradiction in lessen until you attempt to apply one lens where it doesn't belong then you're making a categorical error you're trying to apply a lens meant for one category in a total different category and you're going to you're going to run into errors so i don't think we need to necessarily piece this whole thing together nor do i think we necessarily have to insist that the mystical tradition is something that marxists have permission to do it is it is it is just you exploring a different side of life you know there's there's um like i've talked about this in the context of psychoanalysis before when you're trying to understand individual psychology maybe you do pick up a tool like psychoanalysis and try to understand what's going on whatever what am I repressing it depends if you're skeptical of that whole field of study or not

I find it to be useful and generative of some interesting insights but you know I need not try to force that square peg into the round hole of Marxism or to make those two things fit together so for me it's like I don't need to encourage Marxists that they need to do this to be a good Marxist this is like outside of that if you're you're a you're also, in addition to being a Marxist in a collective struggle, you're also an individual with your own existential concerns, your own psychology, your own

body and mind, that you can also explore. And now, is there bleed over? I think there's interesting ways in which these mystical and spiritual traditions profoundly humble you that then is useful in a Marxist context, you know? And I think there's ways

that by understanding your own psychology and your own mind at deeper and deeper levels, you come to be able to understand other people, and people at deeper and deeper levels, which makes it easier and more effective for you to engage with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. So there's some overlap and there's some skills that transfer. But at the end of the day, we don't need to try to smash these things together. We can take the subject, object distinction and kind of run with it. But I'm interested if any of that makes sense to you or if you disagree with anything there. No, I mean, I think I agree with all

that. I think that there is, I think you're right to say that these are kind of two different categories. And I think the individual versus collective side of things is important. Because for me, like, you know, when I think about mysticism, it's not something that I am encouraging anyone else to necessarily investigate unless they want to, right? It's not something that I would ever want to be like proselytizing about. It's something that's important to me, right? That I feel like I have to engage with. And that's not something I would demand of anyone else. And then the other thing I think, like you said is yes, like we engage in collective struggles as Marxist, but we are individuals with our own needs, right?

And for me, there are things that I gain as an individual from this, that I actually think any will need to go out and do things better, right? And we can get into that a little bit. But, like, one thing that I think you hint to that, that I feel a lot, is that a lot of the times these insights can really help to have empathy with others, help to respect differences with others, help to be able to just engage with others in more humane and meaningful ways. And so that can be really important.

The other thing that I want to touch on, too, though, is that I think even, like, materialism in, like, the strict ontological sense doesn't have to be at odds with any of what we're talking about, which is what's, to me, always kind of interesting, right? Certainly the mystical traditions that I've discussed within the Abrahamic religions aren't particularly materialist in their orientations. But I do think that even if we take, like, the most kind of harsh ontological materialist view of the world and materialist view of consciousness, where you have a lot of theorists of consciousness who say like consciousness is just an emergent property of matter reaching a level of complexity and some electricity running through it that suddenly it starts thinking right this is kind of like the hardline materialist approach to what consciousness is trying not to posit some sort of soul that might go with it some sort of force that animates it it's just the brain reached a level of complexity there's signals moving through it and oops consciousness emerges out that even if that's true, I think that's fully compatible with everything we've been discussing here, right? Because in that case, I think you are correct. Then yes, consciousness is just the subjective experience of reality, right? The subjective experience of that matter doing its thing in these very complicated ways. And, you know, a book that I've been wrestling through recently is this book called Everything is God by Jay Michelson, which is a very fascinating engagement with both Jewish and Buddhist mysticism in interesting ways. He, practices both traditions. And, you know, he kind of talks about this and he says, there's a way to read the mystical tradition in this very spiritual, like, oh, we're all one with a divine spirit that transcends everything. But you can also read it in this very beautifully materialist way of there just is matter. That is the single thing in the universe and sometimes matter develops consciousness in ways that we may not yet have a good philosophical explanation of. And mystical

experiences can be us realizing that, no, that isn't some unique special soul that I have, which I am above everything else. I am the universe, right? I am that matter having its own experiential process. And so you can read it in both of these ways. And I think for me, that's an important thing for kind of pushing past potential contradictions of the underlying philosophies of Marxism, is that I think I can assert, like, yeah, I would probably call myself an atheist in ways that would make both atheists and theists uncomfortable, perhaps. But I think I can apply that to myself and still affirm a lot of what we're discussing here and a lot of the truce of the mystical traditions, even as they've been articulated by people who absolutely

weren't atheists, right? And I think that's one of the complicated things to kind of unpack and untangle here. Yeah, I think one of the huge benefits of philosophical monism, which is something you mentioned early on, and something that I've always been very sympathetic to, is that it's sort of undermines this need to reduce one to the other, to reduce the subjective to the objective or vice versa, but to rather see them as two sides of the same coin. An objective side needs to have a subjective side, like night needs to have day to make even sense. And so monism, instead of insisting that, I mean, we're talking philosophical, we're talking cosmological, we're not merely talking about how to analyze societies and their evolution over time. I think materialism is clearly

superior in that case. But if you're looking at like the foundations of ontology, what is reality ultimately, a materialist will say, well, all the consciousness, all the subjectivity is ultimately reducible to matter, to material. And maybe that's true. An idealist will say all of this matter, everything, the atoms, the physicality of the world is actually all a projection of whatever, God's mind and is absolutely and ultimately reducible to, to this consciousness or to whatever, this divine spirit etc and so monism is really useful because it says well one we don't know we can't ever know that answer right but it makes much more sense i think to say that they're two sides of the same coin what that ultimate foundation is might not might not necessarily be purely material

nor purely idealist or or consciousness they could come into existence at more or less the same time now now you have to have material arranged in a certain way to generate subjectivity so i think materialist in that sense might have a little advantage there to say well yes subjectivity consciousness is is a feature of the cosmos for sure but that is a downstream effect of matter being organized in a certain way ergo materialism is still ontologically the foundation of reality and that might be the case. But yeah, I think the deep urge to reduce one to the other or to eliminate one side of that coin, I think is always going to result ultimately in error. And philosophical monism allows us to not do that. Another thing I wanted to mention that connects Marxism with my spiritual traditions

that I'm interested in, and this is an argument I've made incredibly explicit, is dialectics. Right. There's a deep dialectical aspect to Buddhism, to Taoism, to these spiritual traditions that I'm personally interested in. I think also to mysticism inherently because it's a lot of what we're talking about, right? Subjective, objective, etc. This interplay, this relational reality, this ever-changing reality. One thing you immediately get beaten to your head if you're engaging with Buddhism, the only constant is change. Everything is relentless cascade of change. And we suffer with. when we try to reject that truth, when we try to cling on to things that we don't want to change in a universe that necessitates their change. We suffer unnecessarily. So I think there's a really interesting aspect there. And I wanted to bounce this off of you, Allison, and see if this comports with your experiences, doing spiritual practices of any sort. But, and this is, you know, a quintessential dialectical image for me is the sort of spiral or the double helix. Right.

Of this thing of like, and I think even Marx has talked about communism as this return to community at a higher level, right? And that that really, really intensifies this image of an upward spiral where you sort of objectively as humanity evolves. We kind of, there's a way in which history rhymes. There's a way in which we deal with the same problems, but there's a way in which we deal with them as we evolve at higher and higher levels. And individually and spiritually, I found that exact mechanism. to be at play because my spiritual engagement comes cyclically it comes sort of seasonality right it comes in a spiral so what i mean by that is i will go and this has been true since i got into this stuff in my teens i will go through a prolonged period of sort of perhaps suffering existential crises

depression whatever it may be a prolonged period of suffering and because of this suffering i'm pushed deeply to go to what I know, which is this meditation practice, these spiritual practices, all of a sudden I'm reading all my books, I'm reading our spiritual books. All the time I'm thinking about meditation practice, deepening it, expanding it, trying to go for, can I meditate for an hour, can I meditate for three hours, can I go camping by myself so I can meditate, right? My whole world is focused on this stuff. And by suffering and by doing these spiritual practices, eventually what happens, and this has

happened several times throughout my life. in these big year-long cycles, a multi-year-long cycles, is eventually that suffering will culminate in some deep spiritual experience, often deeply intertwined with this deep feeling of love and connection and radical compassion for all sentient beings. And that sort of signals the end of this cycle of suffering, right? I'm coming out of winter. The ice is starting to thaw.

And then I'll go into this new period of expanded capacities of expanded wisdom, of expanded depth. I'll spend two to five years, two to three, mostly on average, of not interested. I'm actually no longer really reading spiritual books. I sometimes will set my meditation practice aside for a year or two. I'm not going to retreats, right? And now, but I'm exploring other aspects of myself. So in this last cycle that I went through a couple years ago, it, same thing, long period of suffering.

I was dealing with a lot of loss. COVID was also a huge stress. All these things sort of culminated to this big spiritual crisis I had. I lost a baby. I lost my dad. And all of that culminated in this sensation of love. I talked about being in the target parking lot and being overwhelmed with love for the strangers that I feel. And now, right now, I'm in this spring and summer that followed that winter.

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

exercise, and to my body. So I'm getting out of my mind and I'm getting back in my body. I'm doing sports. I'm playing softball. I'm playing volleyball. I'm weight training four days a week. When you weight train that much, you're deeply interested in nutrition. you're learning nutritional science you know now i have this thing where i'm counting my calories and my

protein to ensure i'm getting the exact amount to maximize muscle growth etc right and then so i'll do that and i have this discipline i never had it in my 20s i've always wanted it never had it all of a sudden it's it's here i don't even have to try for it and then eventually this the summer wears on the deep humid august of my inner life happens and i'm still doing all this outward focus stuff and then eventually these little things start to happen i start to feel the depression coming back on or I start to have a new spiritual or existential question or conundrum or contradiction or suffering that just begins to poke the veil and I'm entering my own autumn and then I go through this cycle again and then I start getting deep I turn

away sort of from the outside world a little bit I get much more into my inner life I'm meditating a lot more etc and the cycle plays again but every time I come out of a dark winter I am elevated in some new way I'm able to love the people in my life better. I'm able to more easily spew what I hope to be wise insights about the human condition. I'm more easily able to understand where other people are coming from and to have a my knee-jerk response is compassion, even for annoying people or people that are, you know, I don't like, quote unquote, to find the thing in them

that makes me love them and I have compassion for their suffering and what made them this way, right? So that's a fascinating experience. The question is, will that cycle ever stop? Will there be a time when I'm unable to navigate the dark winters and I get stuck there? Is there a ceiling to all of those are all unresolved questions? But does that cyclical, spiritual thing? And everybody's different. But does that resonate with you at all?

Yeah, extremely. So I have so many thoughts, actually. I think you hit on so many fascinating things here. So I'm going to try to break it out into a few different things. So first, yes, that very strongly relates. to my experience. So like I said, I was raised Christian, right? So I grew up in religion, like inundated in spirituality. It was built into my education. It was built into everything that I was taught to believe. And as a young adult, when I got to Bible college, my

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

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

read political philosophy, and all I do is engage in essentially a secular life, and then something will come up, usually depression, usually anxiety or some sort of personal crisis. That drives me back to a mean to engage with these things. And it's been weird, right? Like, for me to, I'm certainly not a Christian. I'm not in any way a Christian, but I still engage in reading Christian mystical insights because I think there's something there. And this just kind of returning to these things over and over again is very much the pattern of it. So I definitely relate to that. I think, where do I want to go with this? So the other thought that I have actually, and this is, I think, interesting is that I think that cyclical going back and forth is actually perhaps where we ought to end up in a lot of ways. So we talked about, you know, is it ever possible to stabilize the mystical experience? And one of the things that I think you see in a lot of mystical traditions is that you wouldn't want to even if you could, right? So one of the difficulties is that if mysticism is built around this profound realization of unity and experience of unity and transcendence of duality and the ego, there's

also the fact that we live in a world of duality, right? Whether or not it is ultimately illusory or not, which is a question that I feel like the Eastern traditions engage with much more directly than the Abrahamic traditions. But regardless of whether or not it is all illusory, it is still what we experience and what we are embedded in every day is a world of duality. And so if mysticism becomes a thing that just keeps us forever pulled away from that reality, I think that's a mistake as well, in a lot of ways. I think that, and this is the thing that I've tried to combat in myself, when you have these experiences, you know, you described it as orgasmic earlier, right? And I think that's not wrong, right?

Like, there's something about it that is so profoundly euphoric and you can fall into a state of thinking, that's all I ever want. And I actually think that's an error, right? That, you know, just politically is an abandoning of our responsibility to others, right? It is a running away from a world where suffering does in fact exist and is experienced by people, whether or not the source of that suffering is, you know, whatever we would attribute it to, it does exist. And so in that book that I mentioned by Jay Michaels and everything is God, this is what he kind of argues, where he says, ultimately, the goal of the mystical insight actually needs to be to have the insight, to see the unity, and then to allow us to return to a world of duality with profound compassion. Because now

within all the differentiation that we can see in the universe where dual duality is at least phenomenologically real, we can see the oneness that undergirds all of it, right? And we can start to see difference and others as a manifestation of something that we share with them. And so the cyclical nature of it, I think, is almost has to be a part of mysticism if mysticism is going to be anything of value. In the Buddhist tradition, right, I often think about one of the most beautiful concepts in my mind is the Bodhisattva, right? And you have the bodhisattva figure who chooses to forego personal liberation, right, in order to share the path to liberation with others.

And so if mysticism does have this cyclical going back and forth between, I need to dive into this, I need to see that thing that I caught a glimpse of, and then also stepping away from it and living in the world, I actually think that's the higher form of it that we need to achieve in a lot of ways. Absolutely love that. I completely agree. It is useless. if all these insights and this deep love and compassion is not put into action, you know, then you're just, then it becomes this sort of narcissistic, navel-gazy, I can just go sit in a cave, I have no responsibilities, no. Whenever I have an insight of love and unity, it drives me deeper and more profoundly and more rabidly to go out and help other people. I can't help but want to help.

I had a recent mushroom experience a couple years ago during COVID, actually, I was by myself in a dark basement I set up the whole thing and I remember as the trip got heavier and heavier I had this moment where I collapsed to the ground out of love for all sentient beings

and I was weeping by myself unprovoked and a voice came to me that said it was authoritative it didn't seem like it was my own inner voice but it was also deeply loving and gentle it just commanded me to do more and it just kept repeating that

reverberating throughout my consciousness do more do more do more do more and i i interpreted that as do more do whatever you can to love other people to care for other people to to alleviate their suffering when and where you can not to try to save the world you can't do that but you can help people in your own life every single day there's an opportunity for you to be more compassionate more loving more open and to to take that as like a dictate from on high to love other people and do more so yeah i completely agree this idea that you could, and you do see this in spiritual communities where it becomes an escape from responsibility, where you become solipsistic. It's just about me and my own. This is like

New Age spirituality is so narcissistic. Right. Far from destroying the ego, you have elevated to grotesque heights in a lot of instances. And I think that is the way the spiritual path can completely be aborted and go off to a dark off the rails, deep end sort of thing where you've now lost the plot. But on the other side, that's also true. Because we see people who, even in the Marxist world, right, who have these visions for a better world, who want more equality, etc., but who themselves are often limited in what they can do by their own lack of internal depth, their own lack of internal self-knowledge, their lack of knowledge, their lack of knowledge about other people where other people are coming from, a lack of humanness, a lack of compassion. They're still very, you

know in all these different ways greedy self-absorbed narcissistic and that limits what they can do politically and so i feel like in good balance the middle path if you will is to fully develop both sides of your your being both sides of your uh of your existence and to let them fuel one another um in a positive way yeah this back and forth seems to be an inherent feature and if you find yourself only on one side all the time you are making an error um so i think that's interesting now another aspect of this sort of dialectics and and the zooming in or zooming out aspect is um in hinduism and buddhism there's this funny thing about the self because in hinduism moksha right liberation enlightenment is synonymous with a capital s self where you stop

identifying with lowercase s self little egoic me and you expand to the I am God's statement, right? I am everything. I am the cosmos, the big self. And in Buddhism, that exact same experience is framed as no self, right? The obliteration of the self. In both instances, the lowercase s self is transcended, at least momentarily, is overcome. But whether the self is everything or the self is nothing, it's actually the same thing.

And I've always loved that about Hinduism and Buddhism. And of course, Buddhism comes out of Hinduism, right? Just like Jesus was Jewish and founded Christianity, the Buddha grew up in a Hindu context and created Buddhism. And so I always found that dialectical relationship also fascinating, that continuity and that rupture, fascinating, if you will. And so, yeah, I love all of that for sure. Yeah, definitely. And then I think one other thing that I want to say about the cyclical nature of things, because it strikes me as interesting, actually, is to touch on, like, my personal spiritual. practice some. So again, I was raised Christian. I went through a pretty much completely

irreligious space. I tried as an adult progressive Christianity. I found that I think the connotations of Christianity were a little too tainted for me based on my experiences for that to be something that I could really dive into. Currently, where I am at in my life, my partner and I attend synagogue services through a anti-Zionist synagogue, actually. They do their services online. So that's been a really incredible thing to get to do. And that just looks like, you know, Kabbalat Shabbat service on Friday night, welcoming in Shabbat. And, you know, there's a set of prayers. There's a set of songs that traditionally go with that. And so it's led to this very interesting spiritual practice where every Friday, you know, we set aside an hour. We get

together with other people. We engage in communal spiritual practice. We also engage in our personal spiritual practice here, candle lighting, zan kiddish, blessing the bread, all of these other things, and then also closing out Shabbat on Saturday night with Havdala, which is a little ritual with some spices, wine, and a candle that marks the end of Shabbat in the beginning of the secular week. And one of the really interesting things that I've found is that that spiritual practice introduces a cyclical nature to your wife in a really interesting way, where every week, it's like it's doubling back on itself in this one particular moment where a period of time is set aside for spirituality. I try to on Shabbat, spend time not engaging in the kind of things I would engage in the rest of the week, take time to read theology, take time to study. We go to a Torah study on Sunday morning, or a Saturday morning, take time to engage with these things. And it creates the cyclical pattern that I think is really beautiful in a way where during the rest of the week, it's not.

like I'm not interested in these things. But in the rest of the week, there's organizing work to do. There's work work to do. But there is this time set aside to come back to to really focus on spiritual development. And that spiritual development in that experience, I think is really interesting because it's not separate from the stuff that happens in the rest of the week in a sense, because every day of my life, I want to see capitalism destroyed, right? I want to see imperialism destroyed. I want to see a world without those things. That is true in every mode of my life. But, But a really interesting teaching in Judaism is this idea that Shabbat, so that day, is one-60th of what the world to come will be like. And at the services we go to, this often gets

emphasized, is that on Shabbat, we ought to take the time to recharge and refill and recognize that we want to fight for a world to come without capitalism, without imperialism, without Zionism, without colonialism, without all of these things. And that it can be necessary to have that cultivation and that set-aside cyclical cycle that we go back to over and over again. And I think it represents in my life increasingly that experience of the broader cyclical, oh, I step away from all of this, and then I find myself in a moment of crisis, and I come back to spirituality, where now I have my week that is full of stress, that is full of crisis in so many ways that has been miserable recently.

But there's also a day that I come back to that is forced to be separate from all of that, to be set aside from all of that, and to be something. something generated in a way that that can't be. And I think it's been a really fascinating kind of formalization of that cyclical experience in a lot of ways. I'm sure over time, my feelings will develop on that more clearly. But I do think it's interesting that you emphasize the cycle because I think that practice integrates the cycle into your week as a structure of your life in a really interesting way. Yeah. No, I absolutely love that. And I think there is some, I mean, I love the seasonality and apprehending time cyclically. My favorite cosmological model,

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

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

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

own internal hurt and pain you project it all onto society which in a lot of ways is fair and you seek to change the whole world in order for you to finally feel okay and and that limits your actual ability to change that world because you are of the old world you carry with you the burden of generations of and trauma that is not being dealt with. And then when you go out and try to change the world, that comes along with you. So it feels like these cycles of going inward and going inward and going outward, as you were saying in so many ways, really helps both sides of that spectrum. And for the people out there listening who have rejected traditional mainstream religion, so have Allison and I, right? But it doesn't mean you should shut yourself off to these other possibilities and this

inner work more broadly because this is the empty feeling that we all have and it can be addressed on an individual level by engaging in some of these traditions and and once you engage in those traditions you become better prepared in some ways to create the external world that is actually better but if it's the same old broken people under capitalism trying to create a better world we're going to carry that brokenness with us and so it behooves us on the individual level to do this work and that's also the dialectic between collective and individual oh this this is individualist? Well, yeah. What is a healthy community except a group? What is a healthy community except a group of healthy individuals? And how do you make a healthy individual? You give

them healthy community. These things are inseparable from one another. And so we don't want to dismiss everything that is individual because that's half of life as well. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, it's just you and you. You know, a lot, most of your day, it's just spent with yourself. And so you, to try to say, like, the only thing that matters is collective struggle is like sort of cutting yourself in half and I think it limits possibilities on all side. And another thing I'll say is even in a deeply secular, non-religious society like the one we live in, very much empiricist, very much sensory overload, very much out there, go out and buy things to express yourself, right? Is that my thing I always come back to is

everybody worship something. And just like with ideology, the people who don't think they have an ideology are the most ideological. The people that don't think they're worshiping something worship worse things harder than they know. And one of the things we worship in our society is the self, is the ego. We extend the individual self to a deified status. Our consumption patterns are about expressing ourselves through consumption. Everything is about like go on Instagram, present yourself as a brand, right? Everything is like that. So we do. We, worship the ego and then we feel utterly empty and we wonder why because people that are convinced they don't worship anything worship worse things and so if you're going to worship something which we all

do in one way or another it might as well be the good things with millennia of evidence behind them right like god and love and spirituality and these depths of of inner compassion etc than it is money and status and fame and things right which our society tells us is actually the path to happiness. Capitalism tells you, American capitalism says to be really happy, you got to have a lot of money. You got to have status. You got to have fame. People have to recognize you. People have to validate you. And stemming back to our, you know, Protestant origins, being wealthy is indicative of a good character. And being impoverished is indicative of a bad one. And that's still with us. And it cripples people every fucking day, you know? Yeah. Yeah. No,

I think there's a lot there. And I do you think you're right. conclusion that I came to you is like exactly like you said, my life will have something that I worship in it. And I'd rather get to choose what that is, I think, than let it be something horrible. And in periods of my life, I have felt that be bad things. I felt that be substance abuse at times, right? Or consumption at times. It can be all sorts of different things. And I think being intentional is really what, you know, is the goal at this point. And then I know we are so off of the kind of questions that we had written out. But one thing that you said that I do really want to hit on, because I think for me it hits something important, is that, yeah, you and I think

both went through like a new atheist phase, right? I certainly had a period of time where that was really important for me when I left Christianity and escaped from it. And, you know, I think you said something interesting, right, where it's like, it's easy to look back on that kind of like with embarrassment, but also as something that needed to happen. And I think one of like the most fascinating things, then you actually see this very clearly in Christian mysticism in a way that I find fascinating, is that I actually do feel like, yeah, having that phase was actually really necessary for me to be able to have a healthier spirituality later on. Within, you know, Christianism and the Abrahamic mystic tradition, there's this notion of apathetic theology. So the

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

very related to this is that to truly embrace that mystical vision of God, you almost have to lose God in a certain way. Because at that point, the thing that you're talking about is it some comprehensible being or some big man in the sky, right? It is something that transcends the category of being, actually. It is something that goes so far beyond that. And a thing that you hear in the lives of Christian mystics who wrote about their lives is this experience, like it's called the Dark Night of the Soul, this experience of the loss of God, actually, where after having these profound mystical insights, often coming after moments of union, just a total loss and a disbelief and a sense of disconnection. And there are those of them the mystic tradition who point out that

that is actually the moment. That is the moment. That is the moment. that you've made the breakthrough, right? And that in an interesting way, in order to truly understand what God is, in order to have a theism that's not just idolatry, one has to experience atheism. And atheism, in a sense then, is a prerequisite for any sort of true theism. And again, all of this is in the way that this is always is, sounds like talking in riddles if you're not too methodical about it. But I really think that is a true thing, Which for me to have any sort of relationship with these ideas, now I had to kill the God idea that I had in my head, right? And New Atheism, as a crude tool for that, has many problems.

But in a sense, it was like a very necessary step that I don't see in opposition necessarily to where I've landed now. That's so interesting. I'm just looking up this quote. Yeah. From, you know, the Nietzsche's death of God. Yeah, yeah. You know, we've killed God. Who will get the blood off our hands?

hands, I can't find the exact quote. But it's a very interesting thing that you have to engage with, yeah, traditional religion and then with atheism and then you continue on to a higher level. And Nietzsche is asking us, like, what are we going to do to avoid nihilism? And he himself had this spiritual or this euphoric dimension to his work that often gets overlooked where he's trying to maybe in a half-hearted way or maybe he was limited in his own ways point to this possibility of this higher level of maturity and being cut off from from the daddy and mommy in the sky if you will forces us to grow up yeah we're kicked out of the nest and when you first kicked out of the nest it's scary what the fuck are we going to do nihilism is a problem your

your wings could not work and you could smash into the fucking ground but insofar as you can get those things flap in something something new can happen and um i didn't mean to rhyme there but it works but but i like that i like that idea so much and the dark night of the soul has um a version in buddhism as well which is very interesting of course it comes out of christian mysticism st john of the cross i believe um exactly what alison was saying in the christian context and the buddhist one it's very similar um but minus the god talk right so like you'll you'll have um a deep experience a lot of people what they do is they get in over them head their heads at retreat so they have very little experience in meditation

prior and then for one reason or another they want to get into it or a friend says come with me and then all of a sudden they find themselves in like a 10 day or two week retreat which is just it's like taking 10 grams of mushrooms when you've never even smoked weed like it's just too much and and um people will have these profound these profound opening up experiences and it's precisely when you've opened up so much unexpectedly and then you close off again that you suffer more than ever because you were closed off before you experienced the radical opening and you weren't necessarily overtly having a dark night of the soul. But because you've now had the experience of opening up and then had to close that off,

there's this profound suffering. There's this profound disorientation. Some people have it in the realm of no self where not having a self is radically disorienting. And people fall into these little ruts of like, okay, I have this insane experience of no self. what is there left to do? I feel like I'm just like a disembodied and floating around. Like I, you know, there's no agency anymore and people can really become radically disoriented and suffer what in Buddhism they also refer to, at least in Western Buddhism, um, ushering in this Christian concept of the dark night of the soul in the Buddhist context, but it's very much similar, right?

Instead of like opening up to God and then closing off to God, it's like opening up to this no cell for this profound spiritual, mystical collapse of dualism and, uh whatever and then also having that experience of of not being able to get back there that is very hurtful and disorienting etc so yeah very interesting because the pupil of my eyes a whole there's no inside and there's no out the world isn't me and i am in the world Because my teeth are the visible Because my teeth are the visible A cave in the night is overflowing There's no inside there's no suffocation

Being in the world is having scattered ashes So A cave in the night is overflowing It's so So I kind of want to take it in a little different direction Kind of towards the last, towards the end of this conversation. Totally. Which is these these core concepts that come up again and again in this context.

And three of them that jump out to me are love, suffering, and desire. and maybe we can take them one by one here and I want to offer a vision of love and why it seems to come up over and over and over again in this tradition and see what you think of it first and foremost. Sure. Yeah. So when I think about the importance of love, especially unconditional universal love, right, the sort of love that like Jesus Christ was talking about, is it's fundamentally a unifying

force. And what is mysticism, if not the ultimate unity? the ultimate overcoming of alienation of separation love is this sort of gravitational force that brings things together in the inner spiritual existential world so even on the political level it's it's it's maybe vulgar to say something like this but i think it's also true it's true for me that it's love that is the the gravitational force behind solidarity it is love that makes me want to team up with complete strangers to make a better world for all of us when you feel weeping compassion for a stranger right you're watching something you're watching a child be pulled

out of the rubble of Gaza you don't know those people you don't speak their language their suffering need not impact your life at all and yet you find yourself weeping what is that if not love this bringing together you feel connected with this total stranger and so we're talking about solidarity and politics. We're talking about compassion. We're talking about these mystical experiences. Time and time again, they're defined by love. And it's like love is, whether it's a metaphysical reality or it's the thing that pushes subjectivity forward. It serves this fundamental role in all of this stuff, objective and subjective, that brings people together interpersonally. Right? We are born alone and we die alone. To be an ego in the

cosmos is terrifying. How do we overcome it? We love other people, right? We get in relationships. We have children. We have friends. We go over and have events communally. We're social animals. It brings us together. And if the goal of mysticism, the goal of spirituality and even religion in its proper form is total unity with what is, with God or whatever, that feels like love. Right? And so that's why a seemingly trite platitude like love is everything or love is all you need becomes deeply profound existential and spiritual because it is this sort of gravitational force. And if we didn't have the capacity to feel love, I don't think we'd have the capacity to do any of these other things, to feel compassion, to come together with other people to create a better world, et cetera. And so that's, I think, the fundamental role of love. And to have a mystical experience and to feel nothing but love, not even a self, but to just feel love, I think for me, especially that experience kind of validated that entire concept, that love really is the important thing. And it's way, way, way deeper than our pop culture often tends to allow for.

Right. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot there. And I think, you know, you're hitting at this. It's so hard, right? Because all of this can sound so trite the way that this has been packaged in pop culture and It's so hard to want to push back against that. But yeah, I think love, in the other word that I always come back to that I think you hear a lot actually in the Buddhist tradition is compassion, right? And finding yourself in this place of compassion from mysticism.

And I think that can look like, like you said, like a motivating factor. Why do we engage in the world, right? At the end of the day, one of the things that I always struggle with with Marxism is that I can give you the very determinist scientific version of Marxism, which says the reason this matters is, there's a dialectic playing out whether or not humans matter or not, essentially, and it is going to do its thing, and it is going to resolve in this way, and we get to participate in it. And that's nice, in a sense, but it's not personally or existentially grounding, right? And it also is hard to stay motivated based on that. But something more, something like love, or something like compassion can provide a drive that goes beyond that. And I'm not going to pretend that that means that Marxism is ultimately driven. my love. My engagement with it is in many ways. But it itself, I think, is this more complicated scientific thing. But that doesn't make that subjective part of it irrelevant, right? It doesn't mean that I'm not a human that means to have a motivation. And we shouldn't pretend that it does. And I do think if there's something to take away from mysticism, from spirituality, that is

meaningful. It is that love and compassion, which sometimes can look exactly like you said. When we feel the pain of others and feel compelled to act on it, there is something there. And just even, you know, in the weirdest way, that can penetrate parts of our lives that I think can be almost surprising. One of the things that I really struggle with is I live in Los Angeles where the traffic is very bad and I spend a lot of my life in a car angry at other people, which is not a state that I like to be in. No one really likes to be there. And actually, one of the things that I've really challenged myself to try to do is in those moments, take a second, step back from that anger and say, this is this is, the ego, right? That is what this is. This is maybe the pettiest manifestation of the ego, too. Like, I am mad because I got slowed down going to the grocery store, right? Like, how fundamentally

absurd. And this person that I'm bad at isn't my enemy. They're not someone who I ought to hate. They are someone who is a part of this same incredible universe that I am, right? And I actually ought to in this moment, be able to love them and feel compassion for them in this annoyance, right? And so even in these petty little things, actually, I think we can find this manifestation of love and compassion that hopefully when we are at our best can help us to step back from behaving destructively, from feeling destructively, from engaging in emotional and behavioral patterns that hurt us and other people around us. Right. And I think, you know, if there's something practical, which, you know, I'm skeptical of the idea that these conversations ought to be about practicality. But if there is something practical to take away from all of this, I think I find that. what it is. Yes. Beautifully said, I completely resonate with that. And one of the, one of the capacities I think that you're pointing to right there, and that is part and parcel of the mystical journey, specifically my engagement with Buddhism. This has been deeply true and this is deeply emphasized within Buddhism. And it's sort of whittled down to this one phrase of observe, don't

absorb, which is not a Buddhist phrase, but it just kind of gets to the point, which is when you're, when you have these mental states like anger, like jealousy, like sadness, whatever these these things are like moods come and go like weather patterns right you're never going to get to a state where you're just happy all the time that's just never going to happen um but what happens when you get in these negative mental states is you expect let's just use rage as an example because that's what you put in the table you feel the feelings the emotions of rage of anger and you immediately without even thinking you identify with those feelings i'm angry i'm pissed the fuck off. How dare that asshole cut me off or whatever the fuck? Now I'm going to drive all

fast and I'm going to cut him off and I'm going to escalate and somebody's going to pull a gun. It's not going to go well. But rather than identifying with that emotion, just like rather than identifying with your sense of self, right, that's the ultimate. But these smaller emotional things are practiced for not, no, for disidentifying with the ego, which is to watch anger manifest in your body physiologically, to have that place in your mind where, Instead of immediately identifying with that rage, justifying it and perpetuating it by their justifications, because you get mad and you start saying,

no, he really is an asshole. He really did cut me off. I really am in the right. You know, fuck this guy. You know, now you're off to the races. Instead of doing that, if you can just feel it as a physiological manifestation in your body, which meditation trains you to do because meditation says,

sit with what is. You sit down for 15, 20, 30 minutes an hour, whatever, maybe 10 minutes, five minutes. And you just are, present with what is. You're not trying to change your mood. You're not trying to change your sensations. Maybe you're sitting there and you have pain in your left knee. Instead of immediately moving to escape that discomfort, you start to train yourself to sit there and be able to look at the pain. What does the pain actually feel like? What are the sensations that I'm feeling?

This is all training for, you know, bigger and bigger moments and being able to do that with emotions, negative emotions in particular, but even positive ones, it's also very interesting to do this with to observe them instead of identifying with them that in and of itself is spiritual practice and it also liberates you immediately from being a prisoner of those feelings nothing is worse than being pissed off or being jealous or being in a bad mood knowing intellectually it's bullshit it's not serving you but being unable to get out of it regardless right it truly is a prison and the moment you can shift your consciousness to drop back to stop identifying with those but to watch them with loving curiosity,

then you've made the spiritual move, you've shifted your attention in a positive and productive way, and you are no longer a prisoner of that emotion or mental state. And I think that's crazy. Yeah. In the best way possible. Absolutely. But let me also say something about determinism.

Yeah. This gets very interesting because in Buddhism, it's taken for granted. And I believe this and I've had experiences of this. when there's no self and whether it's momentary or whatever you also immediately realize there's no control there's no will in fact the manifestation of a self is our desperate attempt to control what we cannot and so there is a sense in which these mystical traditions lead to a sort of determinism where i increasingly feel myself and this is it sounds scary it sounds like oh

you don't have free will you're a prisoner of determinism it sounds scary but actually it's fascinatingly liberating to realize that you don't have control that you are not in the driver's seat of anything that if you don't even have a self you surely don't have a self that has a will that you can exert on the world right and so what you begin to feel yourself as and this can lead to a dark night of the soul what i was saying earlier when people lose their self lose their will and they are disoriented by it but the positive side is and this is true for me i genuinely begin to feel myself as a force of nature.

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

life manifests through me and that that actually brings out the true originality of my personality because I'm not trying to force anything I don't have the delusion that I'm in control of anything, I am letting me as a natural force just like a weather storm is a natural force or the tide is a natural force or gravitation is a natural force. This is what this thing that I call Brett is doing here and now. And if you can step aside and let life happen through you, this is very Taoist and this is very Zen Buddhist, you can actually get to a deeper level of authenticity. So far from obliterating your personality or making you a drone or something, you are radically authentic because nature never blooms the same way twice. No two flowers are exactly the

same. No two clouds are exactly the same. No two planets are exactly the same. No two people are exactly the same. You don't need to try to be unique and different. You already are. And when you try to be something you're not, you become less unique. You become more conformist. You're comparing yourself to other people. When you let life and nature flow through you and you feel yourself to no longer be in control, but to be an expression of the whole cosmos, it's a radical feeling of liberation and a true authentic you begins to emerge. And there's a paradox there because there is no you, but there's a more authentic version of you. But yeah, there's no, the flower doesn't have a self, but still it blooms, right? The flower doesn't have control, but still it gives rise to these

exotic colors and it invites the bumblebee to come and do the pollination thing and all this other stuff. You don't need to be in control for that to happen. And the less and less you need control, the more and more willing you are to let go, to surrender to the process, the more authentic you actually are. And the more unique aspects of who you are begin to blossom freely. Yeah. No. And I think that relates to that idea that I was talking about too, right? This is the coming back to multiplicity in a way, right? You can't stay in the obliteration forever, right? And there's a second move that comes after that. And I think it's so easy to lose that, right?

It's so easy to want just the obliteration, I think, just the total loss. But in the end, I think that true authenticity that you're talking about is precisely that idea of we come back to the world, right, after these moments. And that is, I don't know, I think so important to emphasize because I think there's so much error that comes if you forget that part. Definitely. So let me throw something about suffering and desire in your way. Maybe we can end on this if you're cool. Yeah, sounds good. So I made a post the other day, and I got an interesting response, and I responded to that

response, and it's all about suffering and desire. So let's walk through it. So here's the post I posted. I said, and this is on our shoeless Instagram, I said, suffering is the catalyst to inner growth. If you're always comfortable and you're never willing to face your own mortality, your own pain, your own suffering, you become small, limited, and stuck. Let life destroy and rebuild you over and over again. Let your heart be broken by the pain of the world and let your own inevitable death liberate you from doing what others want you to do or caring about what others think of you.

This is the path to true authenticity and depth. No one can walk it for you. So then I got a response from a listener who said, really good question. This is like raising the paradoxes inherent and mysticism and these traditions she said if desire is the root of all suffering and suffering is necessary for growth is desire actually good is it conducive to self-development not to be rejected within ourselves and i love this because this gets at the root of a of a certain sort of paradox right because suffering is often the thing that leads us to this direction but the buddha says we can get rid of suffering desire is the thing that causes suffering so there seems to be some paradox here. And this was my response to her. I said, there are many paradoxes within Buddhism

like this that urge us to embrace the totality of opposites and sit with the contradictions that they generate. One approach is to say that in life, there is necessary suffering and there is unnecessary suffering. When we desire, which is a form of clinging or rejecting, we suffer needlessly. This needless suffering is not generative in the way that necessary suffering is losing loved ones seeing innocent people hurt contemplating our own deaths etc can be if you set your ego aside and embrace that suffering i don't think we should reject desire as much as we should become curious about it explore it sit with it consciously and understand its underlying mechanisms and how they are related to the sense of self there are no perfect answers of course

but that's the direction i tend to take these paradoxes and then i finish with this one thing about desire is that the more you feed it, the more you desire. Instead of seeking to fulfill every desire, which is hedonism, we should strive to investigate and become aware of our desire, which over time reduces our constant desiring and allows us to be content with very little. Ultimately, you find that you are happier by having less desires and suffer more by trying to mindlessly fulfill every one of them. I hope that begins to address your question.

And I think that that's paradoxical in some ways. But there's also this paradox about suffering, which is we want to alleviate it. The idea behind the Bodhisattva is I will not liberate myself until all beings are liberated. But there's this paradox that at the same time suffering pushes people in this direction. And perhaps there are some forms of suffering that are necessary and unavoidable. The Buddha still died, right? You still have pain. You still lose people you love.

that is the sort of necessary unavoidable suffering that is just part and parcel of life this tragic dimension of being a finite self-aware creature in the cosmos is that you suffer but there's this whole other realm of unnecessary suffering that we impose on ourselves and on others either spiritually psychologically you know existentially or politically socioeconomically etc you know suffering is generative when it's necessary and it's the the right sort of suffering but making people just be homeless under capitalism while another guy down the street owns a trillion fucking dollars is unnecessary suffering and obliteration that isn't generative the suffering of the homeless person that can't afford a house or to raise their family isn't generative in the way that

coming to terms with loss can be very generative right and so i think this this paradox that sometimes we think like with the Buddha's four noble truths like you know life is suffering there's a way out of that suffering desire is the driver of suffering etc that we take that to mean that if we do Buddhism enough we could we could never suffer again that will always be in this perpetual state of happiness but Buddhism says everything has changed there is no perpetual state of anything there is no even self to be perpetual inside of that state and so the the real dynamic here is not over overcoming suffering so we can live in a state of bliss for the rest of our lives, but is rather this deep ability to abide and be with change and suffering the ups and downs without being destabilized by it and without being destroyed by it, that you can sit with change, you can sit with discomfort, right? Sometimes you just get pain. Like sometimes you have like raw doubling over pain

for whatever reason. If I went up and shot the Buddha in the stomach, he would fall in the ground and hold his stomach. You know what I'm saying? And so there's no way to meditate your way out of that, but you could still be completely liberated internally. Like the Buddha could still be completely liberated internally, but physiologically, he grabs his side and he yells as he falls to the ground, right? And so I don't know. I think there's some interesting paradoxes there. There's some distinctions to be made. And ultimately, I wanted to push back against this idea that any of these mystical traditions lead to some end permanent state that is for once and for all going to stay the same. It's quite the opposite, right? It's not that it's not that that change stops happening is that

you get radically okay with relentless change. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much there, I think. On the one level, I think your listeners question is so very Nietzchen in a very interesting way, their response, and I kind of appreciate what's happening there. But yeah, so a couple things to unpack. On the one hand, I think the point that you come back to, and this is like such a dialectical point, is this idea that there is a change, right? The idea of reaching a place of stasis is a mistake in and of itself. And outside of Buddhism, I think that is true as well, right? Again, going back to the dark night of the soul, right? After one has the experience of unity, the experience of unification is this

profound loss, right? This profound difficulty, this profound return to the world that is painful, that is suffering in its own way. And so I think to believe that the claim of the mystical tradition is that absolutely all suffering can be escaped is incorrect, right? I think it is a question of how we orient to it. And I'll be very frank, this is one of the reasons that I've always been somewhat skeptical of Buddhism myself, right? Is that I think there is this reductive read of the four truths that you can do that basically has two issues that I sort of have a concern with. One is the issue that your reader raises, which is like that we may mean suffering in our life in a certain way. And the other thing is that I think that there's a kind of crass articulation of that

that can then say, therefore, let's not try to engage the world, right? Therefore, the only thing that matters is the escape from desire. So I think that has always been a concern of mine. And for me, been easier to side step by not being a Buddhist, right? That has always made it somewhat simpler. But I do think that you're making a good distinction there, which is that at the end of the day, there are different kinds of suffering that are going to be experienced. And I think Yeah, I think you make it very concrete. If I get shot, the source of my pain is not my desire in that particular case, right? There will be other kinds of pain and suffering layered upon that experience that would come from desire. So, for example, if I were shot in the stomach right now, I would be scared to die, right? And that fear of death, that comes from desire, I think. That comes from the ego. That comes from clinging and holding on to this thing. But the raw physical pain doesn't. But in that example, I think we can see those two kinds of suffering that are different. There's one that is inevitable, that is there, that I'm going to have an orientation to. And there's another one that I can let go of, right? That I can choose to give up. And I actually think, you know, across the spiritual tradition, going back to something you said very early in the episode, you know, there's this philosophy, I think you said, it's all about learning how to die, right? I think mysticism is about that too, right? Because ultimately, even though we will suffer in life, we will have these forms of suffering. So much of our suffering is about trying to cling on to that ego and cling on to being in this world exactly as we are now, right?

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

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

if I've already let go of my ego, if I've already let go to that holding on to all of the complexes built around that, then I think there's something that makes that a little bit easier. You mentioned Ram Dass earlier, and there's this story that always comes up that I think that he tells that I think really gets at this, which is the classic story of the waves crashing into the ocean, right? And so he kind of explains it like this, that there are two waves that are rushing towards the shore, right? And one wave looks forward and sees all the waves breaking on the shore and disappearing, and then looks at the other wave and says, oh my God, we are going to die, right? And the other wave says to him, well, I can tell you something that is going to alleviate all that fear. now. And so the wave says, okay, what? What is it that is going to alleviate my fear? And the other wave tells him, you're not a wave, you're the ocean. Right? You've misunderstood what you're seeing

here and who you are in relationship to that. And once you realize that, it is easier to give yourself up to these things that are bigger than us in political context, too, to allow ourselves to grow as people who want to engage the world and change the world. And so the weird paradoxical thing is if there's this greater movement for making the world a different and a better place, and it demands that we give ourselves to it, then weirdly the giving up of desire of unnecessary the desire, the escape from the ego, better enables us to do that in a really fascinating way, and to recognize that if I lose myself for that greater thing, oh well, I'm not the wave. And there's this very bizarre thing that I think actually allows us to engage with politics

and the need for change through that giving up. And again, I have my reservations around it. that I am not a Buddhist, but there is some truth there that I think ultimately, again, this weird paradoxical way, there's suffering that is inevitable and that we have to experience, but the suffering that has to be changed can best be changed through that giving up. Absolutely. Yeah, it reminds me of this thing that Mao quoted from like some Han Dynasty historian. He took it in a different direction that I'm going to take it today. But the original quote was, though death befalls all men alike, and

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

You've already let go so much, and there's just this last little thing, and you let go. Whatever comes after death, who knows, but you're letting go in this light way, whereas it's not a catastrophe. If you're clinging to your ego, if you reify your sense of self, your entire life and you never are able to step outside of it, death is the scariest thing in the world. Your death is a desperate crisis moment. it is Mount Thai right it's it's this enormous weighty unwieldy fucking thing that that makes you suffer deeply I remember reading a Leo Tolstoy's death of Ivan Ilish back in the day and that's the perfect and Leo Tolstoy had deep existential crises and dealt with these exact many of these exact things not Buddhism of course but you know mysticism and life and meaning and all this shit

existential crises and the death of Ivan Iliich is like this is the inauthentic way to live a life And so as Ivan approaches death, he's lived his entire life and this persona of his career and his ego and his reputation socially and his little community such that there's no, there's nothing there. So when death comes, he finds everybody else around him to be preoccupied. There's this complete lack of authenticity and his death becomes a torturous, hellish landscape where he realizes he's lived his entire life fraudulently, inauthentically for other people. dominated by the ego and so his death becomes this terrifying incident whereas when the Buddha died it was like the last poof of smoke from a candle right and it was this it's a beautiful way to let go ultimately so I think that's interesting and kind of speaks to what you're saying but on the way here and maybe this is one of the last things we'll say here because we're almost on two hours

of course you have a chance to say any last words but on the way here I was listening to a zen buddhist wrestling with this paradox of suffering you know to to alleviate other people suffering but also realizing that suffering is part and parcel of life and that it's also very generative if navigated in the correct way and he said his quote was obliterating all suffering would be its own form of suffering

and this is sort of the paradox of heaven right because if everything is good all the time then good loses its meaning you can only understand things in contrast so to have a heavenly realm where nothing ever goes wrong nobody ever suffers you're stuck there for eternity

it sounds boring as hell you have to create a hell to put the other side of the coin somewhere so then now you've split ontologically the cosmic realms into heaven and hell because you can't actually separate

the bad from the good the light from the dark etc and so that creates this whole other level of suffering where now these two things are the places you end up when you die depending on how you act a lot of suffering unnecessary suffering

comes from that. So the suffering of paradox is the paradox of heaven and hell. How could you live forever in a state of complete and total bliss? It's just unfathomable to us. So yeah, that made me think of that for sure. But do you have anything to say about that or any last words before we wrap up this conversation? No, I mean, in terms of last words, you know, I think just very thankful to get to have this conversation. It's so funny to me that actually exactly when I think about this topic, always think of that exact same mouth quote. Yeah, which is really interesting to me. And yeah, I don't know. I just, I am so thankful, Brett, that these are the kind of conversations that we can have all the time. I always tell people, I'm like, it's so absurd to me that I get to do a podcast with Brett

because we have so many weird things in common. Absolutely. Both in terms of politics and in terms of, yeah, mysticism and spirituality and these other things. And I think it is such a privilege to be able to get to have these conversations. So mostly I just want to, yeah, I conclude with gratitude for that because I think this has been a really, really, really great conversation to have. And I'm just so thankful to have a comrade who we can talk about these things with. Yeah, I don't think I've ever met another human being that is so much like me in so many ways. And it's just, it happened organically and accidentally. We had that conference. We hung out a little bit. We had this idea. My other podcast ended. And then so I was like, I'm going to start something

else. Allison is the one I want to do something with. And then just organically and just, it seems accidentally, but hindsight is weird because when you look back, it feels like it was serendipitous, that everything was supposed to play out this way. That is too good to be true. Some other mystical hand is at play making us come together to do this sort of work. It really does feel that way sometimes. But I absolutely feel that same sense of like uncanny strangeness when I talk to you. We're from different families, different parts of the country, different upbringings. but somehow we're so damn similar it's shocking sometimes but it's a real pleasure to have this conversation i'm not sure there's many other people i personally know that i could have this

level of deep conversation about a topic like this and then also have an equally deep conversation about marxism and dialectical materialism or philosophy in nietzsche and existentialism so uh we're we have some sort of twin spirit energy going on for sure totally if there is multiple lives we've hung out in many of them absolutely all right everybody that's going to wrap it up for today um next time you hear us alison and i will be covering the 18th premier by marks getting back to our our bread and butter of red menace which is you know exploring these these crucial marxist texts very different episode than this one but i'm so proud of an episode like this i'm so happy to get it out to people and i know it's not going to hit with

everybody but even if like five people listen to this and are as moved as i've been by things that i've listened to like this in the past it will have totally been worth it so we some people get some value out of this. Absolutely. All right. Love and solidarity, everybody. The feeling of being in the mountains is a dream of self-negation to see the world without us how it churns and blossoms

without anyone looking on. It's why I've gone on and on and why I've climbed up alone But actual negation When your person is gone And the bedroom door yawns There is nothing to learn Her absence is a scream

Saying nothing Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about Back before I knew my way around these hospitals I would like to forget And go back into imagining That snow shining Permanently alone could say something to me true and comforting.

I don't know. I'm sorry. You know, I'm Thank you.