Rev Left Radio - Religious Mysticism and Political Criticism

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Chase from Faith and Capital and Breht from Rev Left Radio discuss religious mysticism and the maoist method of criticism and self-criticism. In the end, they connect their religious and spiritual traditions to this method forged through revolutionary struggle. Timeline:00:01 -- mysticism 01:02:40 -- criticism and self-criticism 01:32:45 -- Buddhism and Christianity mirroring criticism and self-criticism Follow Faith and Capital on instagram, twitter,  facebook and subscribe to our channel on Youtube. Email: [e-mail]

All right. Hey, everyone. This is Chase from the Faith and Capital podcast. And today we're speaking with Brett O'Shea from Rev. Left on an interesting kind of mishmash of topics, mysticism. And we're also going to talk about criticism and self-criticism, which is a method that we'll get into later that's developed through revolutionary science. So Brett, do you want to introduce yourself real quick before we dive in? Sure, yeah. My name is Brett, and I host Rev Left Radio. I'm a co-host on Red Menace, which is an investigation into political theory and texts. And then I'm also a co-host on guerrilla history, which we frame to ourselves as a sort of reconnaissance report of international proletarian history. And so we kind of do different things, or at least we have different emphasis on each different show, but they all sort of, you know, fill into each other and inform one another. So that's who I am. Yeah. And I can be kind of militantly obsessed with, like, theory and practice. And so I really do want to push Red Menace as one of my all-time favorite podcasts ever out there on Revolutionary Communist Theory. So if you haven't checked out Red Menace yet, please do go check out Brett and Allison's work over there. Really phenomenal. Of course, all the podcasts are sick. But that's just a personal plug. Awesome. Sweet. All right. Brett, you're actually way more into and familiar with mysticism than I am. You know, I did grow up evangelical. I am still a religious person. But, yeah, so I think this is going to be really interesting to dive into. So just a few words up front, because this is a very interesting topic, I think, to be having as communists.

So, yeah, a few words up front before we talk about mysticism. And again, later on, criticism and self-criticism. First of all, I'm not an expert on mysticism. And I personally don't think of myself as a mystic. But I am generally familiar with Christian mysticism in particular. And honestly, I think some aspects of mysticism, I think, can be understood as tendencies of religion and spirituality in general. But mysticism as a tradition that people have practiced consciously also has some particularity to it as well. Secondly, there's this interesting situation that we as religious or spiritual people are engaging,

especially as dialectical materialists in the modern world. So, you know, we live in a modern world completely and utterly dependent upon, science, right, every part of aspect of our life. And because capitalist relations and ideology persists, the masses have yet to develop a new understanding of in relation to religion that materially serves in their interests, as opposed to the world's bourgeoisies and colonizers. So I think it is important to say up front that, for me, a sign of spirituality or what I refer to as faith isn't when someone believes in some other world of gods that coercively intervenes and moves objects in this world, or holds a yoga pose for three hours, or even has a story

of ecstasy to tell. I'm a Christian, a religious person, and I don't believe in some other realm of gods. I can't hold a yoga pose worth shit, and perhaps the closest thing to a revolutionary ecstasy I've ever experienced is a double cheese domino's pizza with my favorite hot sauce on it. So, yeah, now, obviously I'm somewhat joking, somewhat about that last part, but what I want to make clear is that someone who is spiritual and religious isn't necessarily supernatural. Spirituality and religion should enable us to become more aware, more conscious, and more present with that which truly can be known and acknowledged, which I think it'll get fleshed out in our conversation. But because religion is, I think religion is a

form of idealism, I think that's correct to say, as long as it's not consciously linked to a dialectical materialist world outlook, religion as a means of communal narration, collective symbolic language in communal meaning making will tend to mystify that which truly can be observed and justify forces of exploitation and oppression. And the last thing I wanted to throw out here real quick, and Brett would love to hear your thoughts on some of this stuff. Finally, what many might refer to as a reductionistic and vulgar materialism, an atheism incapable of moving beyond the fact that there is no special superpowered God being or

an errant secret meaning of life out there for us to discover and uncover. I think is best understood as a vulgar nihilism, a rejection of our human capacity to make meaning and consciously live responsibly as social beings co-birth from the dust of the earth. So at some point, personally, I think we need to move beyond the reality of our meaninglessness. Okay. Everybody knows. there's no secret meaning out there, and actually begin to consciously make meaning that serves the well-being of all the earth, or for now, serves the interests of proletarians, colonized nations, oppressed groups, and the planet. So, Brett, what are some of your thoughts on those initial thoughts up front? Yeah, I think that's all very, very interesting. You know, when you look up the definition of mysticism or a mystic, you get two very different definitions, two ways that people use the term.

And I think perhaps The colloquial way, the more popular way Is in the sense of mystification Which is to obscure, which is to make opaque the truth And when I say that I'm a mystic or I'm engaged in mysticism I definitely do not mean that The other definition Which is a little more esoteric, I would say

And is the definition that I'm actually talking about Is the experience of unity With whatever the ultimate is. For a religious person, that would be God. For me, you know, I use the language of God in nature interchangeably. I come just so everybody might not know this. I come from a Buddhist perspective. I'm a practicing Buddhist myself.

So a lot of the concepts and way that I orient myself to these experiences is through that, though I'm also very interested and inspired in particular by Christian mysticism, but also other forms of mysticism. So mysticism is the direct visceral experience of unity with, the ultimate, with the eternal. And the way you get to that experience, it can happen accidentally. People often report having no spiritual inclination, no spiritual practice whatsoever, having their heart or their mind cracked wide open suddenly and spontaneously.

Other people might have had experiences on mind-altering substances, particularly psychedelics, which can disorient or disintegrate, at least for a time, the ego, we've all heard of ego death. And the absence of a feeling of ego is just the absence of a feeling, a felt sense that you are separate from the world. I am a bag of skin. My real self is located somewhere up here in my head, behind my eyes and between my ears. I have a body. The world outside of me is fundamentally alien. When I was born, I was put into this world. When I die, I'm going to be taken out of it. That is a set of illusions around a felt experience of separateness that mysticism in all of its forms ultimately seeks to undermine and show you how ultimately that sense of a

separate sense of self is an illusion. So that would be my opening sort of salvo. And I still have more to say on the question of what is mysticism. But I don't really disagree with anything that you've said there. Well, that's super fascinating. And maybe I might even say a very complex and interesting way of thinking about mysticism. And so, yeah, let's go ahead and dive in because I think throughout our conversation, we can flesh out some more of those basic ideas that you've shared. So, first of all, let's start off. What is mysticism? Right. So I kind of put a basic definition down, right? This union, this, and it's really important that we're not thinking of intellectual knowledge, we're not thinking of beliefs, we're not

conceptualizing anything. The actual mystical experiences is one in which those forms of cognition, that sense that you're constantly talking to yourself in your head, that drops away. And with that dropping away, sometimes, and, you know, there's different mystical experiences we can talk about it that run the gamut, but sometimes it can take the form of subject, object dualism collapsing. And my actual first mystical experience was at the age of 16 on a reckless dose of psilocybin mushrooms in which I experienced for the first time the complete disillusion of object, subject dualism, and I was laying on my back staring up at the night sky, and it felt at that. that time, although I had no language, I didn't even know what the word mysticism meant, and it wouldn't be for many more years until I did, but it felt as if the stars were raining down into me, and it was a moment of extreme ecstasy, of extreme sort of orgasmic pleasure in nature, and I was not there at all. I was simply everything, the stars, the cosmos itself, the sense that

I am down here laying in the grass, looking up at something distant and outside of myself, completely fell away. That was only a few brief moments, and then other things happened. My friends picked me up. I was making a scene. The rest of the trip went horrifyingly bad. But what it showed me is, wow, there's something here. Now, I think psychedelics can pull back the veil on some of those experiences, but they in and of themselves cannot get you to any sort of deep wisdom state. They can only sort of like, oop, the curtain is pulled back for a second. You can see that there's something more to consciousness and there's a different way to experience your moment-to-moment existence. But then that veil is closed. You come down. And then you just left with thoughts and memories about that experience. So some people, I think, fry their brains thinking that if they just take enough psychedelics, they can get to something like enlightenment in the Buddhist conception of that term. And I think that's a dead end, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about that later. One thing that I think that kind of helps, and maybe we can use the Christian tradition as an example here,

because your audience would be probably most familiar with that, is, and this is just from my perspective, people can disagree with this. This is just an explanatory tool to help people understand. what mysticism is. But I think in Christianity, you can kind of see three different levels of a Christian. There is like the most popular form of a Christian. What most people on the street mean when they say that I'm a Christian is that they subscribe to a set of beliefs. A set of beliefs about the nature of the world, how it was created, who is in charge, about the divinity of Jesus Christ, et cetera. And if you believe the right set of claims, you know, and you ask for forgiveness,

whatever. You engage in rituals. You go to church. You can go to heaven after you die. And there's lots of nuance there, of course. But that's one layer. And most people in most religions engage with their religion on this level, the conceptual belief level. Then there's a next level. And that is, in the Christian tradition, imitating the life of Christ. So taking seriously, there's the beliefs that I hold that make me a Christian, but also I want to actually orient my life such that I could live in a Christ-like way, a life of love and compassion and justice and truth. Rarer, right? There's less Christians that take on that challenge. But the Christians that I've met who do do that are some of the most beautiful, loving human beings that I've ever

met. And so that's another layer. There's a third layer. And I would argue this is the Christian mystical tradition. This is, you know, the Meister Eckhart's, the St. Francis's, the St. Teresa's, the St. John of the cross, which is, okay, I have the belief. I do believe in the Christian worldview. I'm living my life like Jesus as best I can, whatever that means to them. And then also, I'm seeking unity with God, or I'm seeking unity with Christ in a direct felt sense. And, you know, you can read Meister Eckhart talking about this. You can read some of the mystical experiences of St. John of the cross, where in deep prayer, and again, this will get to what I'm going to say, next about the role of attention in all of this.

In moments of deep prayer or in complete surrender, there is a felt union with God, with perhaps Christ, however you want to put that into language. And so those are those three layers. And that third layer is mysticism. Now, those other two layers are not negated. So somebody like St. Francis, for example, believed in the set of claims that make one a Christian, tried to live a life that was very Christ-like in his love of others and his service and his poverty and his humility, but also had, you know, unmistakably mystical

experiences. And so those things are not necessarily at odds. It's just like adding deeper layers of a relationship with one's religion. Now, the last thing I'll say about mysticism is I think a lot of it is centered around the role of attention. So in our day-to-day lives, what do we usually do with our attention? Well, we're usually talking to ourselves. in our head all day. When you're driving down the street, when you're at a red light, if you're not on your phone, you're not distracting yourself, you're in a moment of more or less silence. If you pay attention, you'll see that what you're actually doing is chattering away in your own head all the time about mostly nonsense. It's very repetitive. It's very meaningless. It can sometimes

be incredibly harsh. Sometimes it's completely fine. It just feels like what is normal. But that veil of constant inner dialogue, that veil of constant inner chatter, is the engine that gives rise to the sense of a separate self. In fact, what you take to be your ego, your separate individual sense of self is actually just a product of thought. When you can focus your attention in a different direction systematically, that that inner dialogue loses its grip and a space opens up within you. And it's this inward exploration that can begin. And that can take, that can take place under many different religious traditions. So, you know, this role of focusing attention is very important. So you have in some traditions chanting. So, you know, the attention gets put on a

very repetitive chant and you're saying it with your words and then the sound is sort of immersive and this rhythmic chanting can often give rise to the silencing of that inner dialogue. In the Sufi tradition in Islam, right, the dervishes, the whirling dervishes. It's the spinning. So this is very rhythmic over and over again spinning, and you place your attention on the felt experience of constant spinning and the ego, this false sense of self, the constant inner chattering can fall away. Obviously in Buddhism and forms of Hinduism, this takes the form of meditating. In Christianity, it takes the form of deep prayer. But in every instance, it is the deep focusing of all of your attention on a single.

object, whether that's prayer, a chant, a spin, a meditation, whatever that may be. In meditation, right, it can start with the breath. That's your individual object. Over time, you expand awareness to include everything inside and outside of yourself, but that's neither really here nor there. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But I hope that paints a picture of basically what we mean when we say mysticism and also points to the fact that this is a long human tradition. This has been around as long as humans have existed. It's often taken in the form of very esoteric knowledge that only a few special people were let in on. But now in the modern world, when information is everywhere and you can transcend time and

space and culture just by logging online, a lot of this previously esoteric stuff is becoming more and more open and accessible to regular everyday people. And so, yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah. And I think, you know, and what you just share with us, there's a lot of things in there that I would say that's pointing towards the potential of mysticism. And then there's also some things where, as you're naming in the very end there, those are some of the major failures and critiques we should make of mysticism.

And just because mysticism has been one thing in the past, we don't have to repeat its failures. Mystics today, I don't think, have to, again, reproduce this supernatural stuff, this rejection of, say, dialectical materialism or this emphasis on some other secret truth out there that only a select few can access and such. So that's helpful. And one of the things I think you emphasize that I think is really important is this, this quieting of the mind, the quieting of the noise, especially here in the 2022 when that's all we have. Everywhere we go, we just constantly are racked

with noise and it's maddening for a lot of us. And I do think that mysticism should be about reorienting ourselves, reorienting our actual attitudes, our actual habits. Our actual habits. It's even our conceptions and perceptions of others in the world and our relations. Because the goal for me, basically for everything, including my own personal faith, is about transformation. And from a religious perspective, it should be, you know, communal transformation that involves, you know, personal participation in community. But I think mysticism should be about a very similar goal, right? A transformation of our conceptions and perceptions, but primarily how we actually, understand the world

and then how we truly live in the world. Exactly. Yeah. And when we get to at the end when we talk about some of the pitfalls of these paths, I will specifically talk more about that. Cool. So introduce us a little bit to how does it manifest in different religious

traditions because mysticism doesn't belong to one religious tradition. It literally belongs to dozens, but yeah, go ahead and share with us. Sure. Yeah, it exists in religious traditions and it exists outside of them. intermingle, they co-exist. There's forms of mysticism that are wholly outside of established religious traditions and forms that are wholly inside of religious traditions. But the important

thing here is that every major religious tradition has a mystical branch. And this was sort of, when I first figured this out, when it first really dawned on me, I was like, oh, everybody always talks, and it's almost cliche, that, you know, all the religions are getting at something. They're all pointing towards the same basic truth. And that can kind of feel, yeah, okay, what is it exactly? then they don't really have an answer. But when I realized that every religious tradition has a mystical branch, I sort of found one really good answer that clarifies that old cliche. And it was sort of, it took me personally by surprise because I was so naive to that

reality that when it fully clicked, I was like, whoa, that makes a lot of sense. But these mystical traditions have often been in conflict with the more exoteric or institutional forms of their religion. Not always. There have been times when the institutional and exoteric could get along with and be engaged with the non-institutional and the esoteric forms of that religion. But oftentimes you can see how, you know, that could give rise to calls of heresy or, you know, blasphemy. If somebody says, I am God, right?

And what they're really saying is I'm having an experience of unity with that which I call God. But if you're in an exoteric institutional form of religion, you haven't had those experiences, that sounds utterly blasphemous. And so, you know, you could have crackdowns on those sorts. of people. So that's always been a tension, right? But let's just go through some of the tradition. So in Islam, you have Sufism. Many people might be familiar with the, as I mentioned, the whirling dervishes.

That's one form that Sufism can take, but this is a beautiful millennia long tradition within Islam that is very inspiring and beautiful. In Judaism, there's many forms. I'm not actually as up to date and informed on the

Jewish forms of mysticism, but there's messianic forms of mysticism. There's Kabbalah, specifically in Judaism, which is probably the most famous form of mysticism inside Judaism. In Christianity, long tradition, we've already mentioned some of them, Meister Eckhart, St. Francis, St. John of the Cross, the whole Gnostic Christianity, theosophy, the gospel of Thomas, right? You can see there's some challenges here. There's some things that are or are not accepted by mainstream Christianity, but this tradition is alive and well, and has really always been there. Some would argue there are mystical elements within the gospels themselves, and some even

argue, and I have this personal perspective, I'm personally not necessarily a Christian, although I love Christianity and I have deep respect for that tradition. But some perspectives would say Jesus himself was actually a mystic. And if you can listen to his language and interpret it through some mystical experiences of your own, there can be a sort of making sense that that before it might not have made total sense, it sort of clicks in a certain way. I don't want to push that too far. I don't want to step on anybody's toes as far as like, well, no, you know, that mystical interpretation of Jesus is wrong.

This is a literal interpretation of Jesus' life and divinity, et cetera. Just worth saying. Go ahead. Yeah, Christologies have always been plural. And I would say if you are a mystic, well, then you should definitely connect your mysticism to the life of Jesus, particularly as if you were a Christian mystic, right? And before you, if you are a Buddhist mystic and you want to see a mystic way of being in Jesus, then have at it, right? I'm personally not a mystic and the community that I practice with, you know, we're not mystics, but so we don't, you know, see that.

But guess what? That's part of kind of moving away from this obsession with, wow, the world is meaningless or perhaps what you were hinting to earlier, that there's all these different choices and who knows, like, what's right. and also maybe they're all a little bit right that that kind of agnostic tendency but just like just choose something, commit to something, understand that it's a complete and partial and then just interpret the world through that lens while we understand it. It's only a lens.

Right. Absolutely. And something I wanted to add to the Christian tradition is some of my studies there focused on the experience of women and specifically women mystics in the mid-eval era often claimed access to truth into God, beyond the boundaries, though, of feudal and patriarchal church through personal visions and experiences. And so there's been a great expression of social, political, and even

kind of class resistance, particularly from women mystics. And just to name a few, you got St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa of Avala, Hildegard, von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and many others. And anyone familiar with Christian mysticism will be, you know, familiar with those. want to throw out that if you haven't and you are interested in Christian mysticism, look to those folks because their material conditions that they were living in really do speak to their spiritual direction. That's really fascinating. Yeah, I'm actually listening to a long lecture course right now on mysticism in the three Abrahamic religions and I'm just about to get to the lecture about women mystics in the medieval period. So that's fascinating. Just to kind

of flesh this question out a little bit more. So we've talked about the major three religions, but in indigenous communities there's shamanic traditions they go under different names you know different parts of the world etc but this idea that there is a sort of mediator within a tribe between

the eternal and the people in that tribe is something that has been long existing and there have been plenty of examples of these traditions giving rise to what we would call mystical experiences so again this is as deep as humanity itself

it goes back very very far in philosophy, right, we talk about the perennial philosophy, sort of in that tradition itself, not even a religious tradition, but there are these insights and this mysticism that is like sort of a neoplatonic approach to the world, right?

So, and that could dovetail with Christianity and other forms as well. So that would be an example of a secular form of mysticism that comes kind of out of philosophy. But the basic idea of perennial philosophy is like, this is a human philosophy. It's flourished in every culture through time, you know, virtually every culture throughout time,

and this is a very human thing. It gets filtered through cultural, religious institutions and language and ways of being. But the experiences themselves are sort of beyond that, those things. And it's a shared human tradition. So there's that. And then, you know, with the Eastern traditions, I would almost argue that while they certainly have their exoteric and institutional forms, Buddhism and Hinduism, et cetera, that mysticism has sort of been built in in a really interesting. way. So like in Zen Buddhism, for example, I mean, it's very hard to say that that's, that that could

even be seen as like a religious, um, institutional thing where you go and you believe in like an afterlife and you pray to a Buddha or something. There are Buddhists that do that, but like Zen Buddhism, for example, is just mysticism. It's like, you know, it's, it's like here are the practices Zazen sitting meditation. We want to confuse the intellect with koan. So it finally gives up trying to figure everything out and can directly experience, um, the moment to moment, uh, you know, reality that's happening right now, et cetera. So in an interesting way, that stuff is really built in specifically to something like Buddhism. In Hinduism, there's the Advaita Vendanta tradition, and that is a very mystical tradition

within Hinduism itself. But we all know Hinduism can be very institutional. We can look at the Modi government. We can look at Hindu nationalists. It's probably safe to say that many of them are not engaging in deep meditation to eradicate the ego necessarily, right? It can just be an institutional thing where this is my identity. I believe in these things.

I'm against the Muslims because they don't believe in my faith, et cetera. That's a very human thing as well. So, yeah, I would say in the Eastern traditions, they're sort of more melded. I think in the West, in America, you could be a Christian for 80 years of your life and never even hear about the mystical Christian tradition. And I think that's a little less tenable in these Eastern religions because it is more built in. So that's how it would manifest in different religious traditions as well as outside of religious traditions. As soon as you started to say that, I thought of Orthodox Christianity, who a thousand years ago, there was a massive split with the church, then was birthed the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

And the Western Orthodox Church, they emphasize experience. And so truth was to be experienced, whereas the Roman Catholic tradition, which is the branch, which I came from Protestantism, emphasized up in our head, the thought processes, the beliefs. So that actually makes a lot of sense. And I never, I never knew that. Cool. Yeah, with Eastern Orthodoxy, it's very interesting. I would definitely say that there's like a sort of inbuilt mysticism there, and I think it centers around kind of what you were saying, but this idea that they placed such a value, like, you know, during that split and after on beauty, on beauty within the tradition, like beauty is almost synonymous with truth. And so if you look at a lot of the aesthetics of Eastern Orthodoxy, it really is a beautiful tradition.

And there is a sort of mysticism, I wouldn't say always built in, but it seems to at least be a little bit more naturally mystical than perhaps, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, for example, or various forms of mainstream Protestantism, et cetera. But again, even in Protestantism and definitely within Catholicism, those traditions exist. Yeah, right on, right on. Well, cool. All right. So before we wrap up this section on mysticism with some potentials of mysticism and then also some critiques of it, let's go ahead and dive into mystical experiences and their functions. Sure.

Yeah. So I can, I've talked a little bit about how it is this direct visceral experience with God, nature, eternity, the absolute, whatever language you have. And in fact, language itself kind of breaks down. There's not a colloquial shared language around very, you know, previously esoteric, direct, first person experiences right and language is often um for communication between people and so like even in buddhism like in zen buddhism in particular uh there's a cautioning against over intellectualizing and the co-on within zen buddism is precisely as i alluded to earlier uh a mechanism to frustrate the ego and frustrate the intellect because what the intellect wants to do is understand things to pin

things down what is what do you mean by enlightenment well let me try to talk to myself in my head and figure it out with my intellect. Let me read a bunch of books. Let me think very deeply. Let me write essays and try to figure this out. And that, when you're up here talking to yourself, intellectualizing, thinking, cognizing, conceptualizing, you're not in touch with the moment-to-moment experiences of here and now. And so, you know, a lot of the Zen tradition and the koan tradition is built around frustrating that intellect so that it eventually gives up, I don't have the answer to this question. I don't know. And in that giving up a sort of surrendering, of that pathway of understanding because it has to drop away for you to have that visceral

felt direct experience with with with everything you know the unity of with the cosmos itself so so we we know what mysticism is we know sort of the traditions that it exists in but what is it is its function what does it actually do I would say ultimately and different traditions will speak about this in different ways what in Sufism it's the it's the it's the they talk about the annihilation of self in God, right? Annihilation of self, annihilation of ego of an individual sense of self so that I can merge with the one, with God himself, itself, with creation. So the function is to obliterate in some sense, sometimes suddenly, but often I think gradually, every aspect

of oneself that is not real, that is not true. Identifying with that chattering voice in your head is an illusion. That voice in your head is not really you. Thoughts are what the brain does. The brain spits up thoughts all day long. That's what the brain does. When you identify with that, that stream of thought, when you take yourself to be the thinker of those thoughts or even the author of those thoughts, you are reaffying this separate sense of self. So you want to see, if we take as a premise that that's an illusion, then you want to see through it. And these mystical paths, these wisdom paths, these contemplative paths, these mystical paths are ways of doing that. Literal practices that you put into your life such that you begin to see through this particular illusion

and the illusions that come with it. And it's a radical shift of identity away from ego and toward identification with that highest of the high, with that absolute. So that in Buddhism, for example, you know, you're identified as a separate sense of self through many, many years of meditation practice. That starts to weaken you're chipping away. You're pulling back the layers of the false sense of self. And when you get to the bottom, I do not claim to be enlightened, by the way.

So this is from an intellectual understanding, not necessarily my direct enlightened experience. But it is that behind all of that is a pure, loving awareness that is before thought, before feeling, before concept, that is the sort of spotlight that is always with all of us. And identifying with that background luminosity, that background awareness, as opposed to identifying with the contents of that awareness right there's consciousness and then there's the contents of consciousness thoughts feelings sensations anything at all any experience at all we identify with that flow of content and that makes us feel very insecure very vulnerable when we can start to disidentify with that and start identifying with the pure consciousness that illuminates all of those contents and it stands before and behind them as prior to them that radical shift of identity is is the

the spiritual practice, broadly speaking. You can talk about it as a process of purifying oneself, of waking up from the delusion of separateness, shedding delusion altogether, and mystical experiences are sort of like, I would say that they're punctuations on that spiritual path. You don't want to cling to these experiences. There's not like, you don't have a mystical experience of union and then you just like are so immersed in the oceanic feeling of oneness that you're not functional in your day-to-day life, right? So these experiences come and go.

The point is not to cling to them. The point is not to try to necessarily ratchet and desperately try to get back to those experiences, but let them arise and fall away, and in their arising and the falling away, they take away some delusion. And it's a process that has to happen over and over and over and over again. So it's more like a spiral than a straight linear path. so so so those are like the the intellectual way of understanding some of these and it's very hard to try to communicate intellectually if you've never had the experience because these are before language themselves these experiences are after the fact when you look back on that experience your mind tries to make sense of it and that comes in language that comes in concepts you try to put it into the the whole pattern of your life and try to make sense of it okay but the experience of itself at least in that moment you are free of time You're free of birth and death.

You're free of the illusion of a separate sense of self. Now, those mystical experiences, they can be, there's a long spectrum of them. One of the experiences that I can talk about that I personally have is what I would call the sacred heart of Christ. Again, this is a sort of grab bag of terminology here. I like this framing. And I kind of talk about like cultivating the pure mind of the Buddha and cultivating the sacred heart of Christ. So the experience of the sacred heart, I feel it after specifically times of protracted spiritual suffering, existential crises that I've had periodically throughout my life.

At the end of those periods of protracted suffering, there's a breaking open of my heart. And what it feels like is that every single being that I lay eyes on, I literally love them like my own child, which is an insane thing to say. You're a father. You know how special and unique your love is of your children. You would fight, kill, and die to protect them. You would do anything for them. And when you see a stranger in the street, you don't feel those feelings. You might hope they have a good day.

As a Marxist, you're like, I want you to be liberated from that particular struggle, all these things, right? But do you really love them like you love your own, more than you love yourself? We talk about loving your neighbor like yourself. It's even harder to love your neighbor like you love your kids because a lot of us are harsh on ourselves. We don't really find it always easy to love ourselves. We don't always have compassion for ourselves, even if we have it for everybody else. But your kids, you definitely do have that. And so I've had these experiences, particularly after protracted periods of suffering,

where my heart completely opens up and phrases like, love your neighbor like yourself, or like the picture, if you Google right now, Sacred Heart of Jesus, it's this picture we've all seen a million times of Jesus, sort of like, where his chest is, is this heart. And it's often in flames. has a crown of thorns around it right and even when he's being crucified what does he say forgive them they know not what they do there's this deep love that christ has for everybody he hangs out with the most marginalized the most vulnerable and he literally feels love for them he feels god's love for them

and so i've had these moments they're fleeting they're brief they close up after a few moments the longest they've lasted is probably several minutes and then it sort of you there's an opening radical opening it's tenuous it's tenuous and then it closes but when it's open i literally will weep i will fall to the ground weeping um deep weeping of in love and caring of total strangers complete strangers the last experience of this i had um was i was in a target parking lot and it was just i was just going to run some errands get some baby formula people coming out of the stores i'm like you know trying to find a parking space and i am just weeping in love for every individual I see.

I feel like I love them as much as my kid. That's a mystical experience. In that moment of love and compassion, there is no separate self. That person that I'm looking at across the way is me, and I am them. And only when I start reflecting on the experience, does the division reappear? Only in memory, only when I start conceptualizing that experience to myself, does the experience itself end? And then that separation resumes. and I can talk about me and them, and that's how I felt, and that's where they were, right?

But in the moment, there is no inner talking. It is 100% feeling. Now, that's just one experience, and we could talk about many others. But in layman's, in like, general terms, it is the dropping away of a sense of separateness, and that can come in the form of love, that can come in the form of unity, you know, that can come in the form of a feeling of great light and luminosity. it hits different people different ways and everybody's experience of the mystical path is intrinsically different because every individual is intrinsically different and so the blossoming of the flower

blossoms in unique ways depending on the person and their path and who they are at the deepest levels so that's what I would say is a mystical experience yeah yeah and one thing I want to really emphasize that I hear from you is that these experiences that you have they're drawing you to the world, right? They're leading you to your neighbor, not away from them. And it's an intense new stage of love, a new capacity for compassion and solidarity that perhaps you hadn't had the weeks before, the years before. And so this development, this process of expanding our love and reorienting our whole lives towards whoever that we may have had that experience, too. Yeah, so I really like that. I think your experiences, again,

are moving against daily nation, moving against separation, moving against individualism, and those are all very important for us, I think, today in our world. The other thing I wanted to name about mysticism is, I think there are two general themes of mysticism, and they are widely known as the apathetic tradition and the cataphytic tradition. And these two themes seem to have split mysticism, and so, yeah, I want to throw these out there and see perhaps which one you might personally identify. So the apathetic mystic says the divine or God or the mystery or existence itself is so unfathomable and beyond our ability to comprehend. Therefore, we should say as little as we can about it or or just, you know,

posture ourselves in openness and humility and silence, acknowledging our finitude and smallness and significance in the face of such great transcendence and ultimacy. Whereas As the cataphatic mystic says, all right, even though we are finite and small and such a tiny speck of dust and a universe of incomprehensible complexity, we should try and speak of the ultimate, the divine, as much and in as many ways as we possibly can, and acknowledge that our depictions and depictions shared with us by others are fundamentally partial and incomplete lenses of that, which we could never fully or completely grasp. But again, our endless partial depictions for the cataphaatic mystic are better than no depictions at all. So where do you see kind of yourself allying with? That's very interesting. Yeah, that distinction is interesting. I would say, I kind of view it just sort of as seasons.

There's a time for everything. So I think it is very, it's very good to practice the former type of realizing the immensity, realizing the inadequacy of language, and immersing your son. submitting yourself, surrendering yourself to silence, you know, to not try to lay on top of these pre-linguistic or post-linguistic experiences, layers of concepts and language. At the same time, specifically if you want to help other people along their paths, you have to try almost to put it into language to communicate it in some way. It's a very human urge to communicate our deepest life experiences to one another, right?

so that urge is always going to be there and the mystical experience conceived as an opening and closing it shows that there's different times for different things when you're in the middle of a perhaps a mystical experience of any sort the last thing you're really concerned with is putting words to it understanding it conceptually debating it right that all seems profane after the fact it's a natural thing for you to try to put language to it and understand it but you do it as you acknowledge this is a thing. I'm trying to put language to it. It's ultimately an impossible task, but I can try to use language

to clarify, to help others learn and to spark this and others, because the way it was sparked in me, this mystical path, partially the experience, but I still didn't have any conceptual understanding of what that was. I thought it was kind of a fluke, right, that early 16-year-old mushroom experience. But it was after I got

lecture series from a Zen philosophy. type that he started putting into words some of this stuff and then I started reading books and I started studying Buddhist sutras and stuff right and so there's a whole world of language and concepts around these experiences but you do it humbly knowing that this is an imperfect way to capture the immensity of reality in the fishing net of language and so I think there's a time for both of those things and I think there's a wisdom in knowing when is the proper time to to revel in silence and when is the proper time to it at least try to understand it for yourself or to try to help others understand it themselves. Yeah, I lean cataphaatic. And so I've always tried to emphasize that my need to develop an apathetic practice and such. And the few times where I've had communal practices where we've actually collectively sat in silence for 30 minutes, formative for me. Because, again, I lean catafatic.

I wanted to depict my experiences or what other people are experiencing or reality in a million different ways. And those moments where I've actually just sat down and shut up, those have been really formative for me. Absolutely. Well, cool. Let's go ahead and move to potentials and some critiques that we have of narcissism. It's just really cool so far. So, yeah, do you want to get us rolling with some potentials? Sure, yeah.

So, like, what is the use? Like, what, you know, why would anybody want to set out on a spiritual path? What's the point? Oh, some cool experiences. You know, I can get those doing drugs or going on a roller coaster. But I think it is much deeper than this. ultimately I think what we're searching for whether we know it consciously or subconsciously or we projected onto certain external objects we're looking to feel truly whole I think I think as an individual human beings we want to feel at home in the world and in our own skin and and we want to feel as if we belong as if I'm not separate from you I'm not separate from the natural world I'm not separate from the cosmos you know I there's no outside from which I could come into the universe.

I bubble up out of it. I am it. And these practices don't just give us the intellectual knowledge. Here's a new philosophy that you can try on for size and talk to yourself about. They give you a direct experience to that sense of feeling truly union with everything, with the other, with yourself, because we're split ourselves, right? We know how we're alienated from one another. We know how we're alienated from nature.

We are alienated from ourselves. Inside of all of our psyches is conflict and contradiction. And there's a part of me that wants to do this, but this other part is conflicted and wants to do this. And there's really not a singular, when you really start looking, you find there's not a singular abiding permanent self in the flow of experience. There are actually a multitude of different little voices, snippets, contradicting each other, conflicting with each other, etc. And that's one of the first revelations, I think, of a spiritual path, is to see that fact. quite clearly. So, you know, by engaging in these things, you, I feel like I am deepening my heart. I am evolving as a human being. I'm contributing to something deeper. Sometimes I feel

as if when this is acting through me that when I become a vessel for nature or God or whatever, that I am doing my own little humble contribution to the evolution of our species. Because right, left, and center, the human mind is a disorganized chaotic mess. people have a lot of pain a lot of unseen pain pain they don't honor suffering they don't think through or they can't sit with because it's too hard and so what happens on a collective level is so much of that pain and that suffering of being a human being gets projected outward onto the other and that is a destructive process if i can take all the dark shadowy sides in me not look at them as part of me but project them onto the other my political enemy my religious enemy whatever my interpretive personal enemy and then I can go out and destroy them, you know, then I can maybe find some relief, but you find out that that's just a cycle of more suffering. There is no relief to be found in that because it's the delusion of ego, once again, not seeing itself for what it is. So I think to get to feel unity, to get past your ego, in Buddhism we talk about uprooting the three defilements

of delusion, ill will, and greed, systematically turning them in to their opposites through these practices. This is a growing up of sorts. It's a waking up of consciousness and the heart, and it's a growing up of morals and ethics. It's a universalizing of love and compassion to encompass more and more and more beings, sentient beings. So for me, it's the most important part of my life. It is the deepening of who I am. It is a lifelong journey and a path that I am on, and it revitalizes my entire existence. And so I think that's what it can offer. Now, what are some, what are some critiques? What are some warnings? There's lots. You've mentioned earlier the, the dead end of individualism. And in a lot of spiritual communities, there is this hyper individualism that can take

the form of these practices are for me. I'm recoiling from the world. Politics is messy and gross. I want to go sit in a cave or sit in my nice little decorated upper middle class. I'm home and do some chanting and some yoga because I want to feel better. That, I think, is at best a half-developed spirituality and is a reflection of the hyper-individuality in our culture. When the self falls away and you feel connection with everybody else, one of the ways that that manifests is a deep yearning to alleviate the suffering of others, which is a deep yearning for justice, for the liberation of all oppressed people from their oppression, the liberation of all sentient beings from their suffering, whether that's possible or not, that urge to do that,

to be a healing force in the world can happen, but that has to be engaged collectively. So for me, when I talk about this, there's a skepticism of the collective on the spiritual side. Lots of spiritual communities are all about the self, and it's actually like reifying the self, not breaking it down. And on the political side, there I think is legitimate skepticism of this stuff. Talk to a Marxist, hey, I don't care about inner transformation. or your heart opening up and feeling love for all beings. We have a political struggle.

Get your shit focused on that and stop talking about your inner experiences. I think both of those are one-sighted. I think we want outward material transformation. We want to transform the world to be a place of equality and love and justice and truth. But I think that also requires something of us as individuals. And I think that requires us to attempt to transform ourselves because we've been conditioned by capitalism. We've been conditioned by colonialism.

You know, I come from, my ancestors come from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. I have a ancestral line that has shaped me, that has conditioned me, to think the thoughts that I think, to understand the world in a certain way. And that needs to be sort of seen through for your transformation inwardly so that you could actually be a better vessel for outward transformation. That's my opinion. People can disagree. Some other things, some other critiques in one.

mornings, there's this thing called the dark night of the soul. It actually comes out of St. John of the Cross, out of Christianity, mystical Christianity. And I think some people say St. John of the Cross had a dark night of the soul that lasted 40 years, which is harrowing to say the least. But one way of talking about it, especially post-psychoanalysis, this is a way of talking about it. So I'm not trying to say this is the way of talking about it. This is one way of talking about it. By engaging in these spiritual practices, whatever they may be, you are pulling back layers of the false self and part of that is the unconscious material stuff that you don't face you project onto others you repress you look away from you escape we all have this we have individual

unconsciouses and some people would say we have familial unconsciouses we carry the sadness and the burden and the pain of our ancestral lines intergenerational trauma and we have a collective unconscious this is more union union thought that we have some core human experiences that go back to the earliest days of our evolution as a species that give rise to, you know, in his way of seeing things archetypes, but that we basically share a collective unconscious. Two-year-olds will have nightmares about scary animals they've never seen. Where does that come from? Well, it's a human experience that goes back generations and generations to, you know, us on the Savannah and Africa. So you're bringing all of this up as you're pulling back the layers of the false

self, and that can give rise to dark nights of the soul. These periods, of prolonged, I would say, existential or spiritual suffering. It takes the form of terror, of dread, of anxiety, of deep, dark depressions that don't have an obvious cause or cure, and they are byproducts of the spiritual path. So anybody who wants to get on any sort of spiritual path and any tradition needs to understand this is not a nice gradient upward of a linear path of getting happier and happier and better and calmer. In fact, it throws into upheaval everything you thought you were. There are periods of protracted growth and development and expansion where you feel like my heart's opening up,

my mind's opening up, but those are almost always followed by deep periods of suffering. You can think of Christ in the desert, right? You can think of the Buddha under the tree being attacked by the forces of Maya, of Mara, of illusion, of greed, and all the temptations, right? Satan tempting Jesus, et cetera, these protracted periods of spiritual suffering. So if you're going to get on a path, you have to understand this is a lifelong journey, and it is not an easy, smooth walk up a hill. It is a spiral of expansion and contraction, and the contractions hurt more and more as you have more experience with expansion. So go into the practice knowing that. And then the last thing that I would say is a huge dead end in any spiritual practice is what in the Buddhist

tradition we call, and this is a misleading term for Marxists, but it's called spiritual materialism. But we shouldn't really think of it in Marxist terms or even scientific materialist terms. Think about that term as meaning the ego's co-option of your spiritual path. You see people start on a spiritual path. They might have one or two experiences. Then they start wearing long robes and growing their hair out and talking in an affected way and wearing certain bracelets. They want the world to know, hey, I'm spiritual. You know? That is the ego grabbing that spiritual path and co-opting it. And I think there's a parallel to liberal co-option of revolutionary energies and movements.

There's this genuine search for truth and transformation in the political and economic and social sphere. And there's this overarching liberal domination and hegemony that allows it to co-opt a lot of those energies and funnel it back into the maintenance of the liberal status quo. In a very parallel process, the ego does that with spirit. attainments and can co-opt those spiritual attainments and funnel them back into the maintenance and the reification of the ego of the false sense of self and that can give rights to like psychopathy to a lot of these abuses within certain religious movements that turn very quickly into cults underdeveloped spiritual practitioners masquerading as experts teaching their confusion to others and using it to dominate their authority to boost them up above others right

and there's a long list of like gurus that have been incredibly abusive and and shitty and so that's that's another dead end another cul-de-sac and you have to work past that so lots more to say there but those are some critiques and warnings this is not all rainbows and lollipops yeah yeah and three interconnected themes that kind of jumped out from what you shared with us are in which I think is really important if we are going to commit ourselves to mystic practice if we are going to be spiritual and religious in whatever religion that you are participating in. The first one was connectedness, that our spirituality, our faith, our mystic practice should lead us to a greater sense, an actual way of being, of being connected, of being interrelated, of developing and expanding our social and planetary responsibility. I don't know, the word responsibility just has been on my mind lately, and especially with the destruction of the planet and imperialism's crisis right now. I think really moving towards a greater level, a greater sense and actual changing our daily habits, practices, attitudes, towards

living more socially and planetarily responsibly. It is really important. And I think that's something that we can walk away with mysticism, spirituality, religion. The other one, not unrelated, as you pointed out, was moving towards internal reflection, really doing that hard work of internal criticism and becoming more aware of the self. And this isn't a being obsessed with our individuality or thinking of ourselves as being disconnected from everyone. But I do think in order to really understand our connectedness and our interrelativeness, you have to turn inward and you have to connect our inward reflection and our kind of inward criticism, as we may talk about later on, to a development, a transformation of the self. So if you're committed to

class struggle, I think you should also be committed to struggling with who you are personally, spiritually, or, you might say, as a person in general. And then not unrelated, again, was the Dark Night of the Soul. And the Christian tradition, we often talk about picking up your cross, carry your cross and follow me. This is Jesus' very, just really depressing request of Christians, right? He, in the text, he points it to the disciples, but as readers, as people living 2,000 years later, that's actually, that's being targeted at us. And it's such a heavy burden to take on. The cross is not some kind of bloody tool that a mean God was like, well, I'm going to kill humanity. How can I kill humanity? Well, I'll kill my son. That's not what I'm

talking about. The cross is really a sense of burden, carrying the weight of the world. It actually should move us to greater degrees of solidarity, greater degrees of connectedness, to say, no, if these other people are experiencing it, then that's on me. You know, I should be there. I should be with them. And I know that could be like really heavy and tense. And perhaps there is actually a certain degree that we can individually carry and shoulder the burden in the weight of the world. But I do think that our faith traditions, our spiritual practices should guide us deeper to these levels of solidarity and true compassion and just mourning with people you've never even met before. Yeah, I think that's really important because that can push away and reject our tendency to try and save ourselves and protect our immediate, you know, nuclear families at the expense of everyone else.

Yeah. So excellent. Really beautifully said just a couple of things. follow-ups really quick. We, and, you know, this is why it matters for the left. We see, you know, leftists using that term very broadly. You know, survey the horizon of leftists. Go online for five minutes.

And what you'll see is like, although they might have ideas that we're all sympathetic with, a lot of them are egoic, narcissistic, greedy. They want to one-up other people, prove that they're smarter. That limits what the left broadly can do, what the revolutionary left, what socialists, what communists can do. if we're only focused on the outside and not the inside. And that's a basic fact of dialectics as well. You don't ever take anything in isolation.

You don't separate the outside from the inside. You investigate and you transform both simultaneously. And if we're not willing to do that rigorous inner work, at the very best, limits what we can accomplish on our outer work. And in the worst case scenarios, prevents us from doing anything at all and actually makes liberal co-option quite easier because capitalism and liberalism, it runs. on ego. It's all about desire and consume and express yourself and be better and get more money than that guy and dominate that other person.

So if those are our mindsets, which again we've all been conditioned into and we don't do any work on those and we think we can just focus on the outward and neglect the inner, that's a recipe for disaster. And I think a lot of the weakness of the modern left is a testament to that exact

unequal development, if you will. And then like, yeah, when you say like when the heart opens up and you love every human being, that has social implications. That means that that person that I see where I really feel in my bones, like I love them, like my child, in Palestine being brutalized or in Iraq being brutalized or anywhere in the world being brutalized, everything within you says no, no. And that requires the responsibility to get the fuck up off of your little spiritual meditation map. Go out into the world and try to put this shit into practice. Don't go live in a cave. That's the easiest shit ever

because you don't have any pressure on you. If I want to go into, you know, do my spiritual practices, but I don't want anybody to mess with it. I don't want to have to wake up at 4 in the morning to feed my kid. I don't want to deal with inequality in our society. I don't want to confront the imperialist machine. I just want to get good with myself. You know, even if you reach enlightenment,

it's going to be an uneven, unequal, one-sided sort of enlightenment that is narcissistic and sort of self-inclined in the sense that when you go out into the world again, you find that you're knocked off balance so easily because you've not actually been in the fiery back. baptism of trying to put these things into practice in the real messy external world. So these things go deeply together. And that's what I'll stop there.

But yeah, we agree on that 100%. Well, said. Beautiful. Well, let's go ahead and move on to criticism and self-criticism, which I think for some people may seem like, well, that's a major jump. But it's actually not. You know, you were just talking about this deep critique of the self. And I was thinking, yeah, I have a lot of shitty tendencies within me.

You know, I was raised to put myself before. others to, I mean, I'm also, like, I'm a white settler in the United States. So I was raised with, with, in white ideology and settler ideology. And these are, these are things within me that I might have to struggle with for the rest of my life. I'm never going to not be treated as someone who's not white, at least as long as we're under capitalism. I'm never going to be seen as someone who's, who's not a settler colonizer. And I'm also going to be treated as a man, someone who, who for some reason might be like superior to women. And so even though I might do all of this internal reflection, until the conditions are transformed, until the class relations are transformed, we are really going to have to do some serious internal work battling and resisting everything that's being imposed upon us and never stop.

So criticism and self-criticism, I think, is one way that we can really take on this immense task of deeply doing the hard work, criticizing ourselves, criticizing others. and so forth. So real quick, I just want to say criticism and self-criticism was forged through revolutionary struggle with revolutionary science and was developed for revolutionary organizations and movements led by a communist party, right? But I also think that if properly understood, I think it could be utilized within communities and between friends and loved ones. And so while I think it's most important to formalize processes of criticism and self-criticism in revolutionary organizations and movements, I also think it serves our cultural revolution to practice it within our communal spaces, right? Even faith communities and within our more intimate

relationships. And a lot of the wisdom and the understanding I have of criticism and self-criticism A comes from just studying Mao's works in general, but particularly there's a book called Constructive Criticism, A Handbook by Gracie Lyons. You can find out on Marxist.org, maybe we can link it in the show notes. And even though it's a hand, it says a handbook, it is a very readable text, very reader-friendly. And I really want to encourage listeners after this conversation to go check that out. So let's go ahead, dive in. Brett, if you want to start us off, what's the overall goal of criticism and self-criticism?

And what are some of its various functions that it serves? Sure. Well, yeah, let's start out in the Marxist tradition with Marx himself, who talked about the ruthless criticism of all that exists. So right now, you know, you're coming from. a critical standpoint, Marxist criticizing capitalism, criticizing the industrial revolution, the world around him, the depravity, and the rapaciousness of capital, right? So the whole Marxist tradition is obviously rooted in critique, rooted in criticism. And, you know, really, I think, although it's formulated under Marxist-Leninist terms, I think it takes its fullest expression

and is really brought to the highest level under Mao and the communist, uh, revolution in China. So, you know, part of this, and from Mao's perspective, for example, you know, Mao started to see the stagnation of the Soviet Union. He, you know, famously rejected this idea that Stalin had that, you know, class struggle stops after the revolution and it need not take place within the party after a successful revolution, right? Mao saw that as wrong and actually limiting for what they can do. Mao wanted to avoid this error as well as what it led to, which is the bloated, bureaucratic, Soviet state and party that over time seemed to increasingly be unmoored from the masses. And after a certain point, certain forms of criticism were no longer really allowed in the Soviet Union within the party, etc.

And this led to, among many other things, revisionism and weakness. So you have to understand Mao being able to see a few decades of the Soviet experiment, seeing some beautiful things that he wanted to be continuous with, and some things that he wanted to correct and rupture from, if you will. So, you know, by wanting to avoid these errors, there's a new emphasis placed on the importance of criticism within the party, and as we'll see with Mao's entire, you know, 10 year, with the cultural revolution, critiques of the party from the outside of it, which was anathema to somebody like Stalin, right?

So we see this development of revolutionary science, of Marxist science, and this criticism playing a very important role specifically in that Maoist transition. Now let's look at some quotations from Chairman Mao where he talks about the importance of criticism. I think, you know, Mao talks in such succinct and clear ways that there's no point in summarizing them.

You can just read it. It's unbelievably beautiful. It really is. It's a profound talent that he had. So these are some quotes a little long, but I'll make a point after everyone. I think it's important because it really helps, you know, sort of anchor this conversation.

So Mao says on, criticism he says conscientious practice of self-criticism is still another hallmark distinguishing our party from all other political parties as we say dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly our comrades minds and our parties work may also collect dust and also need sweeping and washing the proverb running water is never stale and a door hinge is never worm eaten means that constant motion prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms, to check up regularly on our work

and in the process develop a democratic style of work, to fear neither criticism nor self-criticism, and to apply such popular Chinese maxims as, say all you know and say it without reserve or blame not the speaker, but be warned by his words, this is the only effective way to prevent all kinds of political dust and germs from contaminating the minds of our comrades and the body of our party. so that's the first quote he's talking about what criticism actually does what is its function within the party and he uses it through these analogies and these metaphors of like cleaning up your room this is essential to avoid stagnation there's a constant motion in the socialist revolution and the experiment and that requires a constant criticism and a constant reflection as you go to be able to make sense of it and to correct for errors on the go and to dissuade criticism to say that no after the revolution

class struggle ceases, there's no more need to criticize. In fact, now you're just weakening us. It can be true in some circumstances, but within the party, within a principled cadre, that criticism is absolutely essential to prevent stagnation. So another quote, opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the party. This is a reflection within the party of contradictions between classes and between the new and old in society.

If there were no such contradictions in the party, and no ideological struggles to resolve, to resolve them, the party's life would come to an end. Again, dialectics, everything's in motion, stagnation is death. And these criticisms are natural emergencies of the contradictions that still exist within the party between the new world and the new world trying to be built in the old world that is in the process of dying. And therefore, criticism is essential in this context. Another quote. A couple more.

I'm sorry, but these are really good. he's really helpful yeah he mouse says we stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight every communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon of ideological struggle but liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace thus giving rise to a decadent philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the party and revolutionary movement so right here this idea that liberalism rejects ideological struggle. That's often true. And in fact, we can see it in ourselves. We all being conditioned into liberalism and bourgeois individualism, there's lots of us that have a certain conflict-averseness, that we would rather have an unprincipled peace than a principal disunity. And that manifests in all areas of our life. But when you bring in a bunch of individualistic, liberally conditioned people into a revolutionary party, you can see how that go along to get a long attitude that

hey everybody has something to say everybody has something to offer man let's all you know like we can all speak our truth sort of thing hinders weakens and disintegrates political movements we've seen that over and over and over again next quote only two more they're very short if we have shortcomings

we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticized because we serve the people anyone no matter who may point out our shortcomings if they are right we will correct those mistakes if what they propose will benefit the people, we will act upon it. So here he's saying, we serve the people. We serve the people. Therefore, criticism, even from outside of our organization, specifically criticism from the masses,

needs to absolutely be taken into account and dealt with. No matter where that criticism comes, if it's valid, it needs to be taken account of because that strengthens us. It strengthens our connections to the masses, and it keeps us on a right track. Very last quote, the main task of criticism is to point out political and organizational mistakes. Right. So, the main task of criticism is to point out these mistakes as to personal shortcomings on the other hand unless they're directly related to political and organizational mistakes there's no need to be overly critical or the comrades concerned will be at a loss as to what to do so at the end here he's talking about the function the function of criticism is to point out these mistakes in our political and organizational capacity so we can correct them but let's not take that to mean

we can criticize personally our comrades right especially when those criticisms are totally unrelated to the political and organizational forms that we're trying to advance because by doing this if you take this idea of like we should all be critical hey Bob you're kind of an asshole like that doesn't really help us it makes people get in their heads about it

creates interpersonal breakings and that can actually dissolve an organization because the criticism although present is not principled and not focused on the political and organizational structure and form and movement itself, but it's actually interpersonal and is based on my feelings about you. And so in all of these instances, you see Mao putting together the answer to your question, why it's important and what functions it serves and what errors we often make in trying to over-apply this or apply it in the wrong way.

So again, Mao is 100% on point and is as accessible and clear as any other thinker there is. Absolutely. That's super brilliant. And if I if I can summarize your readings of but perhaps in different words, because as I said earlier, I'm more cataphaffatic than I am apathetic. You know, the overall goal of criticism self-criticism is to strengthen the people's party to strengthen the masses movement and transition to communism and to strengthen the individuals committed to the immense task ahead of us. So that's the broad-stroked goal. why we do criticism and self-criticism. And in my understanding, two of the main, perhaps there are more,

but two main functions of criticism and self-criticism is first to clarify and correct our knowledge and our practice by distinguishing whose class interests an idea or a habit or an attitude serves. So it's a method of engaging the correctness and incorrectness, the question of who does our attitude or our strategy or our practice or an idea serves. And the second function that really stands out to me in this method, the second purpose of criticism is to develop ideological unity. Now, we need to struggle through and against a movement guided by a mishmash of analyses, programs, strategies, and tactics, right? Here in the USA,

it feels like we got an eclectic buffet of contradicting theories and ideologies. Because without ideological unity, the people's struggle against all exploitation and oppression in unnecessary suffering will be weak and perhaps guaranteed even to fail. And so I think in the U.S., ideological struggle, it's not like on the top three things that Marxists here really enjoy and love to do. But from Mao's developments and his contribution of criticism and self-criticism, I really do think a historical analysis of the struggles, particularly within the USSR, within the socialist transition in China, and then between the two, right, they have this massive split. And then within the international communist movement in the 20th

century, we can see the value and the importance and the necessity of engaging in criticism and self-criticism. Absolutely. Yeah, and just really quick, we see like in formations like the early I always use this as a go-to example. I don't want to particularly pick on them, but the early Occupy movement was exactly this sort of unprincipled. everybody has a right to say whatever they want. We all vote. A majority goes. Everybody has their own opinion. Open up time and everybody gets up and talks about their own ideas and their own thoughts. And that's all nice and dandy, but it doesn't lead anywhere. It actually weakens the organization. You have libertarians next to Marxists, next to anarchists, and everybody's like, well, don't worry, we can make it work. What happens? It falls apart. It can't stand up to the pressure of the state, etc. It can't move, it can't advance the ball in a real material way.

So, you know, that's one example of an error. And I think another error is taking this to mean that ideological struggle can happen even completely outside of any sort of movement or party. And while sometimes it certainly can, I think a lot of people will be online all day arguing for their sectarian version of what communism or socialism means, but completely unmoored from any party, any movement, any masses, organizations. anything at all. And so that criticism is just free-floating and isn't applied to anything in particular.

So there's too little criticism, ideological incoherency, weakness, and dissolution. And then over-criticism, completely unmoored from any movement, is criticism for its own sake, which also gets nowhere at all. And actually boosts up the ego because then it becomes being right online, not we have a concrete material struggle and we need an ideological line to guide us. towards that towards our goals right so those are two things to look out for absolutely that's a great transition into our next question here so an organization or or a community or even a friendship can only practice criticism and self-criticism if there is an established basis of unity

or a common ground for struggle so why is having an established basis of unity a prerequisite and can you share perhaps an organizational or personal example that demonstrates this necessity absolutely great question so a basis of unity is essential because it really creates a shared goal around which we're all committed we might disagree on how to get there we might disagree on you know how to navigate this particular situation or that particular situation that's where criticism comes in but we share the goal of you know communism liberation justice equality etc so we have to be very clear about what our goal is are we trying to reform capitalism we're trying to challenge you right so you have to you have to get that basis of common ground and unity established first, and then criticism can come in as a way to get us more and more towards that goal. So in that context of a shared goal of a basis of unity, criticism then becomes a mechanism to correct errors on the go. You don't necessarily need the hindsight of 2020 to say, oh, we made that mistake. Criticism allows you, and self-criticism within a principled

organization, specifically a principal movement, allows you to ideally correct those errors as you're in a constant state of motion, which is another core truth of dialectics. Everything always is in emotion. There's no stagnancy. There's no bourgeois metaphysical categories that stand above space and time and material reality. Everything is a fluid, ongoing movement.

Everything is in a constant state of change. And we have to be able to exist in that cascading flow of change and be able to analyze and operate within it without waiting for things to settle down to look back and make sense of them, right? or coming into a fluid situation with a priori commitments that are like trying to fit a square block through a circular hole of reality. We don't want to come into it with like our ideas are already established and we're just going to try to apply them to a fluid situation and we don't want to make that other error, right? But without a basis of unity, if we don't have shared goals, then without, you know, shared values and goals,

criticism really serves no other purpose than to prove oneself to be right or to kind of show on the other person. And so, for example, me and a conservative, Trump supporter, you know, millionaire guy, he's a libertarian conservative with reactionary impulses and like a white ethno sympathy or whatever. There's no basis of unity right there. So criticism in this sense, you should still criticize, right? You should still point out that they're full of shit and you can do all that. But there's no basis of unity. There's nothing you're going to with them together to aim for. So it's not as essential.

Really, this criticism and self-criticism is like within a principled movement amongst people who share a similar goal, this is an engine that continues to correct errors as we go. But broadly, without that basis of unity, there's really, in this sense, no reason, you know, criticism and self-criticism falls apart because you don't share a goal with the fascist or the conservative or whatever. Not to say you can't try to win them over, but, you know, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, so one easy example is I'll just go with an interpersonal example. example, and this is in a romantic relationship, for example, right? You have the basis of unity and that you want the relationship to succeed, whatever that means to you. You know, you want to continue to strive and make this thing work. So that's your basis of unity. And then within that, you can see how criticism and self-criticism, or we could talk about radically open and honest

communication in a relationship is essential to making that relationship work, even though it involves facing hard truths about yourself, about the other person, being able to talk about challenging and difficult things, being able to admit, hey, I was wrong when I did that, that, and that. So put your ego aside. It's not about defending yourself against critique or accusation. It's about working together to figure this fucking thing out. And it makes sense in interpersonal relationships, in communities, as well as organizations.

Yeah, absolutely. So criticism is going to look, differently in a broad coalition, say, for housing justice compared to criticism in a Marxist Landisland and a Maoist organization. Not every organization in a housing coalition may be historical materialists or even communist. And so what can be struggled over will be fairly narrow. For example, a broad housing organization in the U.S. may not be able to find unity on important questions like settler colonialism or U.S. imperialism. But in a Maoist cadre organization, The ideological unity is much tighter, or even in a, take a step back, like a Black Panther type community organization made up of Leninists and malists that arms the masses and educates them on how to collectively protect themselves from cops, you know, white fascists, and even neighbors who fall to the path of violating the community's well-being.

In that kind of organization, the grounds for struggle are much wider because the ideological unity is much tighter. And these kinds of organizations could more easily address things like racism, chauvinism, misogyny, transviolence, and then generally errors in thinking, attitude, and practice. And then also, yeah, from a more personal space, you know, I have family who have thrown out the possibility of common ground with me. And so their criticisms of me are neither objective or concrete, nor are they based on any mutual aim, a mutual goal. And so that's an example where personally, you know, criticism cannot be had. Whereas criticism, say, from my wife or my genuinely good friends or my daughter in the future when she's not a little baby who needs her sweet, precious toes kissed every night, right? You know, there, in those relationships, we will be able to have criticism because we've established a basis of unity. For example, just the other day, last week, a friend of mine and I went on a long walk and he criticized me.

And I was open to his criticism. I pushed back on what I thought he was wrong about, but his objective criticism enabled me to come to a clear understanding of myself and of the issue we were discussing, which led me, it produced the possibility of me developing an action plan moving forward. Yeah, I love that. Those are great. Those are great examples, absolutely. Yeah. Let's move forward. How does dialectical materialism in the malleysmal.

principle of one divides into two guide in shape our criticism and self-criticism. Okay, big question. This is a great question. So one divides into two is very important. It's very important within Maoism, but the phrase itself can be found actually, or the phrase is derived from the Lenin quote in his philosophical notebooks where he said, quote, the splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of diet. dialectics. Okay, so you have a unity, a totality, the splitting of it, the breaking down of it, the analyzing of its different contradictory parts is a core pillar of dialectics. That makes enough sense, right? For those of us that have at least a cursory understanding of dialectics.

So the one divides into two really comes into the Chinese communist revolution in particular and some of the struggles that were happening. This idea that two things confuse into one, it underlied a certain revisionist idea. And this can be a problem. applied in a bunch of different ways, but one of the ways that lots of us can can immediately relate to because we still see it today. And the reason why this idea of two fusing into one is wrong is we can see that there's this idea out there, as one example, that socialism and capitalism can be united into one. What we really need is a little bit of socialism and a little bit of capitalism, the best of both, and they can be united into one, right? So that's taking two

things and thinking you can do it into one. And we can see why that, in that particular case, would lead to a whole bunches of confusion, to liberalism, to revision, and to the breaking down and weakening of any movement that takes that idea seriously. So a million different ways you could give examples of this, but that's a huge one. That's political that all of us immediately relate to. We've all heard somebody in our life say that exact fucking phrase. Okay, so that's wrong. And I think it comes from, in part, an incorrect interpretation of the Higalian idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Because in that, and we have a whole episode I did, I had on Todd McGowan to talk about his, his work on contradiction and Hagle over at Rev. Left.

So if you want to hear a full discussion of why that Hagalian formulation is technically incorrect, I would point you over to that conversation. It was really wonderful. But you can see how that gets into this idea of two fusing into one. because you have thesis, which is one thing, antithesis, which is the second thing. By pushing them together, they form a synthesis, a new thing. So that idea, that interpretation of dialectics is wrong and it gives rise to other wrong ideas. But one divides into two, on the other hand, argues in the opposite direction. It is fundamentally ruptural, not synthetic, meaning it ruptures from a singularity.

It doesn't try to combine two different things. So, you know, you know, Mao, for example, said class struggle continues and heightens after the rev and within the revolutionary movement. We know this now. Mao says it, points it out as very clear. So you have a communist party, you know, you have contradictions that emerge. Class struggle is still taking place. So within the party itself, which is an apparently singular entity, right, the communist party, line struggles and criticisms produce splits. So that is one dividing into two, the one being the communist.

Party, an apparently singular entity, with line struggle and criticism, you find fault lines, you find splits, you find left adventurous or right opportunists, capitalist rotors, etc. The class struggle is not over in the formation of the Communist Party. It is, as Mao says, intensified. So you don't mix correct and incorrect ideas into some sort of eclectic combination, right, two things into one. Rather, correct and incorrect ideas struggle against one another until one wins, out and the other is discarded

one divides into two and so like with the end of feudalism the rise of capitalism immediately it's not that you know the proletarian and the bourgeoisie as two distinct entities were out there in the world and they come to combine

and fight one another and maybe have like a little bit of capitalism and socialism come out of it rather with the establishment of the bourgeoisie that exact moment there is the the parallel emergence of its opposite, the proletariat. And so in this sense, one divides into two immediately.

And so this is, I think, a more correct way to understand dialectics. And it can be very helpful when trying to understand criticism and self-criticism because that is precisely the engine, again, that can operate in a communist organization or whatever it may be, to fuel this one divides into two, right? through criticism and self-criticism, the seeming agreement of an organization or party actually is revealed to be hiding some serious disagreements, and you have to face up to those disagreements and work through them, and by working through them, you will create correct and incorrect ideas. And I think that is very crucial to understand, and that one divides into two formulation is a really essential pillar of dialectics and understanding struggle.

brilliant that's incredibly well said and if i can kind of dive us a little bit into you know criticism and self-criticism so generally as brett just shared with us both dialectical materialism and this mouse principle of one divides into jew enables us to see the plurality and the contradictions within all ideas programs people even a party and especially including ourselves. And this understanding can then help us resist one-sidedness, mechanical thinking, right? This is the dialectical side and dogmatic attitudes. So let's start with criticism and then do self-criticism. In terms of criticism, if you reject dialectical materialism in this mouse principle, you may tend to make more subjective criticisms as opposed to objective and concrete criticisms.

And you may also be more one-sided and mechanical as opposed to, dialectical and able to see the two aspects of the one idea or attitude that truly does need criticized. So, for example, while it's correct to name democratic socialism as revisionist and reformist, it's entirely subjective and mostly unhelpful if that's what you're going to tweet on Twitter. But if you're going to ask a Democratic socialist friend to sit down with you and struggle over the ideas, programs, and practices, and in that conversation you critique with concrete examples and such, then you're being much more objective and, quite frankly, helpful. And in the same conversation, you should say what is right and wrong about the intention of

good faith democratic socialists, as well as what is right and wrong about their ideas and practices. So that is what it means to divide one into two rather than treat everything as purely one. And in terms of self-criticism, I would say, on one hand, there's someone who self-deprecates and beats themselves up in a meeting for not understanding something or failing at an assignment or a task is someone who is being one-sided toward themselves. And this one-sightedness prevents them from developing in their understanding and practice. But on the other hand, one-sidedness can even swing a person in the other direction, leaving them unable to receive another's critique. So instead, happens is they lash out and reject criticism, right, out of fear of being wrong and the dogmatic

need to be on the defense about everything. So hopefully, yeah, that if we center consciously dialectical materialism in the mouse principle of one divides into two, it can really unleash and empower and kind of advance our both criticism, criticism of others, receiving a criticism from others, and then our self-criticism. Beautifully said, yeah, absolutely on point. Well, cool. Brett, this has been great. I'm wondering if people are still listening by now, because this has been a long conversation, but I've really enjoyed learning from you today. And to wrap this up, actually, I think I want to bring mysticism and criticism and self-criticism together. So we'll start with Buddhism, and then I want to hear your thoughts on Christianity, and I might be able to make some suggestions as well. But what Buddhist principles, ideas, or practices mirror criticism and self-criticism? Yeah, for sure. Great question. Okay, so right away we can see no matter what sphere we're talking about, political, interpersonal, spiritual, that criticism and self-criticism are already putting pressure on the ego. If you have a very strong ego that cannot take criticism, that needs to push back, that immediately goes into defensive mode whenever there's any critique made against you at all, that is going to prevent you from being able to take criticism, to be able to engage in self-criticism, etc. Now, there are ways to lessen your ego or to see through it or to set it aside that do not involve spirituality at all that are just

sort of basic, you know, emotional maturity, you know, principles and abilities. You're like, you know what? I'm going to not react in the way that my ego wants me to. I'm going to listen and you figure out that they actually have something important to say and you can open yourself up and be a little vulnerable and say, you know what? That's right. I did do that wrong. I should improve at this, etc. You can see why that's a more mature way to approach things. But with these deep spiritual practices, and I'm going to talk about Buddhism because that's my personal tradition, it's the, it's the obliteration of all forms of the ego. So while one may be able to set aside the ego at certain times, identifying with it will inevitably spark

insecurities will inevitably spark defensiveness, et cetera. So to dismantle it or to see through it or to not identify with it any longer, it's like a deeper version of that, being able to able to set aside one's ego. So deep Buddhist practice is in simple terms, in the terms that we're using throughout this episode, a really ruthless inner search for truth. Who am I? You know, what am I? What's really here? Am I a thinker that has thoughts or is there just thoughts? Am I a fueler with feelings or is there only feelings? You're inquiring into the deepest parts of your emotions, your thoughts, your consciousness itself. The ego or the false sense of self is a product and a driver of delusion, and in order to strip back the layers of the false sense of self

and find the true self or the non-self at the core of experience, it is this long, protracted, arduous, and challenging process. As I spoke earlier about the bringing up of hurtful, painful, unconscious content into the full light of conscious awareness and how that can be a very challenging process. And it's a process that requires one to be incredibly vulnerable, to be really shattered, to have every delusion that you've been conditioned into since birth liberated one by one. It truly is a painful but necessary and elevating and beautiful process. And in Buddhism, you're not criticizing from the ego, which is an important distinction here.

You investigate the ego from an awareness that is prior to it. And this investigation is ruthlessly critical, but it's not critical in this harsh super ego way, right, where there's like that part of it. you that is in your head it's like you know you're overweight you're not smart enough nobody will love you you're unworthy you know you fail because you're you're miserable and you're not good at any right there's that's a super ego sort of criticism the internalized voice of our parents in society telling us that we're not good enough we don't quite you know match up to the the standards that we hold for ourselves or that others hold from us that is a self-destructive process you know

this is not that um rather it's the sacrificing of the false sense of sense of with its most manic egoisms and its deepest insecurities on the altar of a deeper truth and a deeper identity. And so the entire process of Buddhist spiritual practice of meditation itself is one that is deeply rooted in the ability to clearly and without delusion criticize yourself, criticize others to not take anybody else's truth as your own. but even when you're listening to spiritual teachers to have that part of you that is skeptical that says, okay, I hear them say this, but let me try it for myself.

Let me investigate this for myself. If it turns out that my own experiences and my own investigation lead me somewhere else, then I'm willing to let that go. So this is true of Buddhism, but I think this is true of any deeply spiritual life, any deeply religious life. If you want to have an authentic spiritual or religious life, these principles of criticism and self-criticism are going to be. absolutely essential to that inner transformation.

Yeah, that's beautiful. One of the main core concepts that I've heard from you regarding with Buddhist mysticism is the ego. And it seems like one of the most powerful potentials of practicing Buddhist mysticism would be this movement toward transforming the self toward greater levels of awareness and consciousness and right relationship with others, right? Right relationship with others with the self and creation. So I really appreciate how you.

you've articulated your mystic perception and practice. And I think that as Christians, we can certainly expand our capacity to do this very just and important goal. So I really appreciate what you've shared. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you want to talk about Christianity really quickly? Because I have something very short on that.

Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, why don't you go ahead and start us off and then I can wrap us up? Cool. Perfect. Yeah. So this is the question, what Christian principles, mere criticism and so. criticism. There's lots of directions one could take this question, but I really like this command

to love your neighbor as yourself. What does it mean to take this idea seriously? What would it require of us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves? Or as the way I framed it earlier, love your neighbor like you would love your own children? What sinful parts of us are confronted by this demand? Our pride, our greed, and our sense that we are separate from God and his creation. So in just that one command to love your neighbor as yourself, a whole ecosystem of criticisms and self-criticisms and confrontations and investigations and inquiries are sort of required of somebody who really wants to get to the root of that demand and to transform themselves into such a being that could more easily and more readily and more automatically carry out that command because you're coming from a place not of ego, not of separateness, but of love, of compassion. and of deep, deep underlying connection. Excellent. So I guess I want to say that in response of, you know,

what Christian principles, ideas or practices mere criticism and self-criticism, yeah, I'd want to add that there's a practice of communal and personal confession in the tradition of Christianity that I truly think can help us acknowledge our failures, our errors, and our shortcomings. And I think that's, you know, perfectly aligned with criticism and self-criticism. then there are more theological ideas and theological language is symbolic right there's no inerrant immovable meaning to any of our theological concepts and so the concept of judgment a lot of people might be like oh gross judgment you know i i grew up with that shit and that was really

fucked up but perhaps we might kind of reinterpret it and use it in a new way and i think perhaps the the concept of judgment can help us resist avoiding conflict and confrontation right we should love one another, as you were saying, in the community and creation enough to actually do the hard work of making critiques when they need made and not to put one's own self-interest and personal gain and desire to be liked in front of the collective good. Another concept would be conversion. So conversion basically means to turn around or to turn in direction. And this reminds me of how we've once acknowledged our errors or, you know, we might

say our sin, we can rectify those mistakes that were made. Another example might be grace and forgiveness. Grace and forgiveness assumes that we are committed to the possibility that our thinking and practices can be wrong and then made right and that other people's thinking and practices can be wrong and then made right. And finally, especially if you're from like a Wesleyan tradition, you know, the words of sanctification or generally, you know, you might use the word salvation. These can be reinterpreted as perhaps processes of development or being made new through criticism and self-criticism and struggle. So yeah, I think both traditions and obviously tons of other traditions can creatively engage criticism and self-criticism, first understand it as it was forged through revolutionary struggle and revolutionary science, and then creatively adapt it to our different communities and cultures so that it can further take root. not just in our organizations, but in our communities, us individually, and we can strive for

cultural revolution. Yeah, beautifully said, I actually love all of those examples. And just to end it here, like to reiterate this idea that there's this deep dialectical relationship between critiquing another and critiquing yourself. And I think, like, you have to kind of get comfortable and okay with compassionately critiquing yourself in order to be able to generate the capacity to to compassionately critique another. And I think if you want to, you don't want to become one-sided where you're, you have no problem critiquing everybody else, but, you know, you haven't done the work to be open and vulnerable enough to accept criticism yourself.

And so that can be very one-sided. It can be hypocritical and it can undermine the entire process. So, you know, cultivating and sharpening the capacity to do both simultaneously, I think is really helpful if one is going to try to cultivate these things within themselves.