The Taproot Podcast - 🪞🔀When the Inner World Mirrors the Outer; with Julian Walker of the Conspirituality Podcast♻️

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Julian Walker, one of the trio that makes up the Conspirituality Podcast, delves into the intersections of yoga, meditation, psychadelics, psychology, science, and culture, offering a critical lens on the blend of conspiracy theories with spirituality. His background, originating from Zimbabwe and South Africa and transitioning to Los Angeles since 1990, enriches his exploration of New Age spirituality, cult dynamics, and the psychological underpinnings of yoga and meditation practices. Alongside co-hosts Derek Beres and Matthew Remski, Walker dissects the dangerous confluence of New Age cults, wellness frauds, and conspiracy theories through the Conspirituality Podcast, aiming to dismantle the exploitative narratives that merge spiritual beliefs with paranoia. Julian Walker's Projects and Contributions: Conspirituality Podcast: Co-hosted with Derek Beres and Matthew Remski, this platform critiques the merger of conspiracy theories with spirituality, focusing on its impact on public health and the exploitation of spiritual beliefs. The podcast is a blend of journalism, cult research, and philosophical skepticism aimed at understanding and addressing the cultic dynamics within the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality realms. Conspirituality Podcast Writing: Walker is an avid writer, contributing to platforms like Elephant Journal and Medium. His articles delve into cults and gurus, spiritual bypassing, the neuroscience behind yoga practices, and the impact of quantum pseudoscience in New Age circles. His thoughtful explorations contribute significantly to the discourse on spirituality and wellness. Julian Walker on Medium Yoga and Teacher Training: Beyond his critical work, Walker is deeply involved in the practical aspects of yoga and meditation. He conducts yoga classes and teacher training programs in Los Angeles, embodying the practices he often scrutinizes in his writings and discussions. This hands-on experience enriches his critiques with practical insights into yoga and meditation. Bodywork and Dance Facilitation: Walker extends his expertise to bodywork and ecstatic dance, offering a holistic approach to wellness that integrates physical movement with psychological and spiritual health. His Dance Tribe events in Los Angeles are a testament to his commitment to exploring the healing aspects of movement and dance. Explore Julian Walker's Work: Conspirituality Podcast - A comprehensive exploration of the nexus between conspiracy theories and spirituality. Julian Walker on Medium - Articles and essays on cult dynamics, New Age spirituality, and the science of yoga and meditation. Freedom Becomes You - Walker's personal project focusing on the intersections of yoga, science, and personal growth. The art work behind Mr. Walker was made by Benjamin Cziller @ https://www.saatchiart.com/cziller       Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

The real people went away I'll find a better way Someday Leaving only me And my dreams All right, this is Joel Blackstock with the Taproot Therapy Podcast coming to you with Julian Walker of the Conspiratuality Podcast. And I'm in Birmingham, Alabama, not in Birmingham, England. No, so no Peaky Blinders impressions today.

Did you almost say Peaky Bastards? You'd think that'd be a line in that show somewhere. I don't know. Is it Brum? I think it's the nickname for Birmingham because occasionally... Brummy. Yeah, it's a Brummy accent. And the funny thing about it is I'm from South Africa.

It actually has some overlaps with... There's a little bit of a South African similarity. Is that because of how English is taught to foreign language speakers or because enough English people go and I'm always interested in that stuff, but I don't know a ton about it. Yeah, no, it's more just the sort of random ways that different dialects and accents develop in different parts of the world. And sometimes you you just have similar like there's actually some similar vowel sounds in Brummie which is Birmingham England in South Africa and in New Orleans and it's you know it's kind of sort of like the flat some of the flatter vowel sounds wow yeah I guess that makes sense like a convergent um evolution of language like it goes back to a similar place that it's already departed from yeah can you hear

me okay this mic is new um yeah it sounds great okay perfect well i um yeah we we've had like a phenomenon where it happened it was happening a lot i don't know if airlines got better at catching it but it was people who were on vacation either in the caribbean or like in california from england would try and fly home and buy a ticket to birmingham alabama and then be like what and then like after uh and the city put up like the first two couples as like a tourism thing and was like oh funny you know like yeah go do this stuff yeah and then it happened like five more times and they're like oh we're not doing this every time you guys don't read the rest of the stuff yeah well for people not familiar with your podcast or your book, and you've got other

projects too, before we like get into the topic, could you just give us kind of a brief overview of that? I mean, I'd like to introduce, I don't want to introduce it wrong, but I've listened to it for a long time and y'all also wear a lot of hats. So it's not, it's not an easy thing to, and you have different perspectives, know different yeah people yeah so i am part of a trio who produces something called the conspirituality podcast conspirituality is sort of a portmanteau a combination of two different words conspiracy and spirituality it's not a term that we coined it was coined by academics uh back in 2011 and has been used by different people in different ways.

But we came together at the start of the pandemic, all three of us, my colleagues are Derek Barris and Matthew Remsky, all three of us knew each other online and had been involved in different website and book and blogging sort of projects over the course of about 10 years, where we each were yoga teachers. We each had been involved in the sort of yoga and wellness marketplace and career and communities for a long time, for like probably each of us for about 30 years, 20 to 30 years. But we had a critical eye towards a lot of the aspects of it that were more pseudo-scientific that were uh could be characterized as spiritual bypass that could be characterized as depoliticized and sort of wanting to transcend the mere world of like real human concerns well you get projection like anytime anyone's sitting around with a bunch of intuitive feelers really cultivating an inner world i think there's this inevitability that some people are like, yeah, we're talking about the inner world when

we're using this language. People start to go, no, I'm magic. This is everything. And that's where you get certain places where things come to a head in yoga and spiritual communities. But I think that happened a lot during 2020 for a lot of reasons. Yeah. So what we observed, and that's exactly right. And I'd love to talk further with you about that. What we observed in early, in 2020, as the pandemic was just sort of becoming a reality, was that on our social feeds, we started seeing all of this conspiratorial material. And to some extent, we were not surprised, but the scale of it and the ubiquity of it was kind of stunning well for me it was that some of the people used to be people who i kind of liked like um charles michael eisenstein

or is it michael is it charles eisenstein he had like uh some stuff that i liked and when i was in college that was a guy critical of economy and looking at like he had some interesting thought experiments and he was part of i guess what you'd call like the peak oil adjacent bubble like peak oil was kind of falling apart as a conspiracy theory but those guys still were like but the system's not sustainable for other reasons even if we could end life on earth before we run out of oil we probably should just not do that and i thought some of those guys were lucid and coherent, and then it just started to go somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, Charles Eisenstein is sort of an interesting character.

We've looked at many, many figures that we refer to as conspiritualists who tend to be sort of very influential online. They tend to have a kind of spiritual or New age orientation, but they have become, and it could go in either direction, right? They could be new age in their initial orientation, they become gradually more conspiratorial, and eventually more right-wing has been the typical trend. Not uniformly, but it's very common. Or it's the other way around, where they start off more in some kind of either right-wing or conspiracy theorist mode, but also sort of like bro science, like all the people who are clustered around Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss and Dave Asprey and those sorts of folks who then start weaving some sort of spiritual set of

metaphysical beliefs about what's going on through a conspiratorial lens. So we just started noticing all of this happening. And because we've known each other for a long time, we said, hey, let's do a couple of podcast episodes where we just break this down, because we're finding a lot of friends and colleagues and students and people around us are just saying, hey, have you noticed this? What the hell's going on? So we started talking about it with each other and it just took off. And it turned into this podcast that it was sort of right place, right time. We very quickly started to get a lot of people listening to us and sharing our stuff and writing to us and saying, hey, could you cover this? And could you look at that? And have you heard of this person? And it became this sort of community phenomenon for us.

And that's been four years now. And in 2022, we got a book deal through Random House and Hachette. We published a book last June called Conspiratuality, how new age conspiracies became a health threat. And yeah, we've gotten, we've been in the New Yorkork times and rolling stone we've been on npr we've been on bbc i was interviewed for new zealand radio you know we've been on cnn it

really became the thing that we were talking about early that a lot of different news outlets started cottoning onto and going oh this this is an interesting story like you normally associate the yoga wellness new age world with being hippie, with being multicultural, with being interested in Eastern spirituality, with being kind of mellow. And the idea that this world could be sort of a breeding ground for say, interest in QAnon was kind of mind blowing for a lot of people and continues to be like every six months or so we'll encounter some new reporter who's saying wait what and i think that's kind of waned at this point but that was the case for a good three years yeah it was a it was an interesting time i mean we

still are in interesting times but everything lots of different uh cultural bubbles kind of came to the surface at once there um and so, you know, I remember a long time ago, a guy was, when I was asking about yoga or something, he was like a yoga instructor in Tuscaloosa. And he was like, look, there's all these books and they're great, but just stop reading them when they get to the part where they're telling you that yoga is not just stretching, that you have to align with some kind of planetary aura, because that is where you can read it if you want, but just don't pay attention to that and i thought that was kind of interesting uh whereas some people you know do um i'm not

sure on all the kinds but one of them is like more has to do with spiritual transformation and different different things but there's a lot of people that do feel like they have a spiritual awakening during yoga or something i mean you you kind of come from that world how did you conceptualize it or did you think about it until you had to, you know, some people we don't think about our mythology. Typically that's kind of what it is. I think that for me, having, when the podcast started, I'd been teaching yoga for, you know, 20, 20 plus years. I've been in and around the community for probably close to 30 years. I'd been a spiritual seeker since I was a teenager. I'd experimented with psychedelics as an older teenager and a young adult.

I had done tons of therapy. I had done tons of, you know, sort of experiential, less run-of-the-mill therapy, including psychedelic therapy and breath work and intense body work. And the yoga teacher that I had was very focused on how yoga could be about working with trauma in the body, sort of for better or for worse. There were some good things about that. There were some things about that that were a little bit dodgy. But yeah, I'd always been thinking about these things. And I'd always had a critical eyebrow raised towards a lot of what I saw in the yoga world as being a little too supernatural, a little too convinced of claims of gurus being divine or having paranormal abilities or having perfect insight into the nature of reality. reality that's just that subtle little implication that i'm not telling you for sure but if you keep working on this stretching i'm gonna imply that it will make you have magic powers eventually yeah i'm gonna imply that i have without quite saying that uh-huh yeah yeah so it's it's it's

an incredibly loaded topic look we like we have to acknowledge the the western interaction with eastern spirituality and especially yoga is sort of the most prominent uh version of this or or topic. Look, we have to acknowledge the Western interaction with Eastern spirituality, and especially yoga is sort of the most prominent version of this or iteration of this. There's a lot, there's Orientalism, there's colonialism, there's the sense of, you know, white Europeans coming to the Indian subcontinent and oppressing and dominating people who they saw as, you know, lesser than them, and kind of wanted to civilize them, but then also sort of becoming fascinated with their spiritual practices, right? And over time, there, so there was that phenomenon where you had these English noblemen

who essentially were saying, oh, I have discovered, you know, the secret esoteric truths of the ancient Indian traditions, and I'm now going to write books about it and give speeches about it but then you did also have i think that you had a dynamic going the other direction where there were uh very educated and charismatic and eloquent uh indian proponents of yogic philosophy especially like vivekananda speaking at the world uh parliament of churches i think it's called back in the in the early 20th century and and then the the the wave of gurus that started heading uh to the u.s because they realized oh there's a there's a big market of people who are interested in this starting in the 70s and only accelerating as you get all the way through into the 90s and you know for again for better or for worse, some of these were very sincere and trustworthy teachers of a noble tradition. Some of the

beliefs of which we may take issue with in today's conversation, and some of them were, you know, really opportunistic charlatans. How many of those beliefs, though, were implied by that culture to be a metaphor or an allegory that became literalized and sort of concrete when it was removed from its native context and brought to the west and i don't know i have an answer to that question you know i think it's a very very interesting question and i would tell you that as a as a spiritual seeker who was very curious about all of this from a from a quite intellectual and psychological point of view as a young man uh really interested in jung really really passionate about joseph campbell um

really interested were you in the generation that looked up to terence mckenna a lot it seems like a lot of people that were more gen uh just a little bit more gen xy than yes we're really yeah more Genesi than I was. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I also was very influenced by that whole wave of boomers who, who were really unique in their, in their generation who were willing to go to India, to go to Burma, to go to Nepal, to, to pursue their fascination. And of course, very often they were quite privileged Wetzners who were able to do that kind of spiritual tourism and then come back and say, oh, I've spent, you know, like Jack Kornfield, I've spent, what is it, six years, eight years

in a Buddhist monastery. And here's what I've learned. And here's what I'm going to teach you about. There was a whole, so Ram Dass is part of that, really one of the early ones. You have people like Jack Kornfield, John Wellwood, John Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein. There's a whole group of them who were, Alan Watts actually is a huge one, right? And maybe he's even a little bit older. But essentially what they were doing is going to countries like India, studying these traditions, studying Zen Buddhism, studying yoga, going and doing Vipassana for extended periods of time, finding teachers who they found to be really compassionate and really wise. And then they were translating it in a kind of more secular, more intellectual, often more psychologically oriented way for a

Western audience. So I definitely had the position to go back to your question. I espoused the point of view for a very, very long time that essentially all of these deep, longstanding, sophisticated mystical philosophies and practices really had the distinction between metaphor and literal statements about reality, that they really had that figured out in a way that accorded with my Western intellectual sort of point of view and over time i've come to see that that may have been sort of the next wave of orientalism where where there was this this idealizing of a kind of oh this is so much better than uh western literalist uh or it's a perennial philosophy. Exactly. So you're saying, and I think that's one of the reasons why you have people who make a hard switch from the hard right to a hard left is because unconscious intuition really is just avoidance and it looks the same.

So if I'm saying, I don't need to change my family structure. I don't need to learn anything. I don't need to stand up and communicate better. I just need to turn it over to Jesus, right? What's the difference in that? And, oh, no, no, that's wrong. I'm going to go Eastern now. This amethyst will cure my scrofula, but I don't need to do anything or change anything. You know, there's the same giving up of your own locus of control to this other thing. And so you do see people, you know, the choice is kind of aesthetic in a way that I think we forget.

It's what are they really saying? What's the point? Yeah. Yeah. And so you bring up something that maybe we can get into in a little bit, too, which is about whether or not the approach and the community has a process orientation. And how do you? How do you have something in religion that says or, you know, I think other communities that are about growth and changing that you need these rules now, but then you let them go. And it's not a hierarchy because it's not a cult. It's a giving up and having a deeper understanding.

How do you tell the difference between somebody who's done that and somebody who's gesturing at it? You know, because the language is the same. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the, you know, I know that you talk about cults a great deal too. So do we. So one of the really telling things for me about the American intersection with Eastern spirituality is that early on, one of the most popular and sort of most recognized Indian religious groups that became popular and got a lot of Western subscribers was the Hare Krishna movement, right? The Krishna consciousness movement. Would you like a flower? Say again?

Would you like a flower? Would you like a flower at the airport? Yeah. And so when you look at that, I think initially, and this kind of goes to our project too. Initially, when you look at that, you sort of say, well, look at these hippies. They look at these hippies. They've dropped out of society. They've had an acid trip, and they've decided that, you know, hidden spirituality is the truth. And they've got this funny haircut, and they've got the forehead streak, and they're wearing these clothes, and they're dancing around like happy clappers in the airport and trying to convert us but really that particular sect is incredibly authoritarian it it has way more in common with fundamentalist christianity than it does with the kind of

eastern mysticism that i think folks like you and i may have been drawn to at some point and nationalism just a different kind of nationalism absolutely absolutely it's it's very and it's also very puritanical it's very um it's very sort of um anxiously preoccupied with trying to focus the mind on on not having impure thoughts on on staying focused on on krishna doing the the counting of the beads the devotional practice and it's very authoritarian and this is this for me is the beads, the devotional practice, and it's very authoritarian. And this, for me, is the problem with the whole guru tradition, is that it is actually, at its core, profoundly authoritarian, and the claim of authority is based on divine revelation in a way that is common to multiple different fundamentalist religious traditions.

And a literal and controlled hierarchical divine revelation. You not having a direct experience you're being told what that is and i think that's one of the ways that um you being able to tell the difference between something bad and something good in that kind of mythology and religious space philosophical space is so hard is that if you're a rigid egoed kind of person who needs to grow and is holding onto something unhealthy, like alcoholism, like very rigid thinking, like, you know, a philosophy that's not working for you. And then somebody says, Hey, let go and just feel and be, and I'm going to help take you somewhere. And that feels so great. How do I know if what I'm being brought into is a process that puts me in control and lets me feel my authentic self?

Or if somebody is going to just supplant, you know, that with, oh, no, let go, but then give over this control to this authority. And that feels pretty good, too, because I don't have to sit with uncertainty and responsibility and all this stuff. You know? Yeah. I think certainty is that thing. When someone says, I don't know, you're supposed to sit with the uncertainty. You're supposed to be anxious. Then that's me that I'm trying to find.

And when somebody says, oh, you're mistaking, that's just your trauma. You need to listen to Rajneesh. You know, like this, that's, that's different. Yeah. And not only would they say, that's just your trauma. They would say, that's just your ego. Your ego is resisting surrendering to the guru because your ego is terrified of surrendering to the great mystery. Surrender to the guru first,

turn over your control, turn over your bank account, you know, do whatever the guru tells you. Oh, and then it's like Rajneesh is a great point, a great example. Then, if you have any uneasiness about the fact that the guru wears a $100,000 watch and has a fleet of Rolls Royces, well, don't you have some issues that you need to work through that you're so conflicted about materiality? Or, you know, actually, the guru is totally free. This is one of the arguments they would make rajneesh is completely free he can have all of those things but he stays enlightened but for you that would be a problem that's why we're having judgment about it this is a huge aside i don't want to go too far off the course but i am just curious from someone who has more kind of experience with that time than i do but with the rajneesh's if he had

gone through with his plan um and hadn't been stopped and none of the problematic elements were exposed and they might not have ever been that really kind of dethroned him if he had gone through with his plan of saying that he ascended and basically he was going to kill himself and then and then his followers stopped him and then got kicked out. That was an incredibly fast-growing religion. Do you think that that would be like a cultural force that would have continued to expand if he had martyred himself to himself, basically? I don't know.

That's a hinge point in history that is interesting because that thing was spreading like wildfire, and it stopped right when that group split up. Yeah, it's hard to say i mean the the rajneesha ashram still exists in puna i have been there i've spent uh i spent a couple months there in my early 20s um they still make a lot of money which was really the purpose of that organization and they still have a lot of sincere seekers who come from all over the world and and have amazing experiences there and do their thing. I think it's a lot less problematic than it used to be, a lot less abusive and exploitive,

actually, like, probably hardly abusive and exploitive at all anymore. It's just another retreat center where you can go and do stuff and where people might believe some kooky things, and maybe there's some stuff that is negative as a result of that. But at the time of Rajneesh's life and real power and fame, there were people who were having their arms broken. People were being, you know, there was a lot of non-consensual sexual stuff going on. There was a lot of the guru telling who should sleep with who. And it's just bizarre things um i the reason i express hesitation about whether or not it would have continued to grow is that it was a very particular

demographic that that appealed to you know who was who was really looking to drop out of society and get involved with a group that was very focused on free love that was very focused on free love, that was very focused on a kind of cathartic, intense, just express everything, put everything out there. That's a type of person, I think, who's drawn to that, that maybe is not as common in the broader society. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Well, so I mean, a lot of your work with internal practices, I think what we had planned on talking about is this idea that, you know, and I'm going to use my language and then you use your language, you know, because we're probably coming from two different perspectives. But, you know, intuition to me is this ability to be able to, or if you look at like an MBTI, what intuition is describing as this phenomenon of being able to see very complex patterns that you are not aware of consciously, you know, and so some people describe it as this gut feeling. We know now with QEG and some of the new ERPs that are coming out and about how brains work, that that's also where

trauma is stored. So traumatized people tend to be very intuitive, but then the intuition is unconscious. And so that gut feeling may not be that this is an important thing for me to do. I may just still be afraid of men in wedge sweaters and need to deal with that. You don't know until you treat the trauma. Um, but when you're, you know, psychotic, you lose the ability to see what's real. You know, if you're having a chemical induced psychosis, psychotic like thing through, you know, psilocybin or something, you're partially losing that. But being able to see those patterns is really important to be a creative and to have a vision because you really need to almost think about more than you can actually think about, if that makes sense. And one of the problems with

being an intuitive person and an introvert or having an experience that temporarily puts you there is that you can lose perspective on what that means. You know, some people are like, that's the brainstem. That's the part of the brain that is beneath language. That's beneath time. Um, and that's the part of the self that is older, maybe from our evolutionary legacy. Other people say, no, there's a spiritual thing that's God, or, you know, there's some crystal resonance. The pineal gland is turning into an antenna and you can hear the universe. I don't pretend to know how that works.

I'm a therapist, not a priest. But there is an experience you can have. And I'm remembering when Dennis McKenna was talking about Terrence McKenna when they first discovered these Amazonian mushrooms and they were bringing them back. They were tripping basically, but they saw this crazy stuff. And then they were like, we need to do enough mushrooms to bring something from there out into the real world. And then people will believe us, which seems like such a crazy thing to say. But if you're coming from a 1950s white picket fences community, where you're never exposed to psychoanalysis, never exposed to Carl Jung, never exposed to yoga, never exposed to any of these things, and then you eat something and you start seeing stuff. There is this loss of reality and that maybe this stuff is just a real thing. You know,

I don't know. Could you say something about that inner versus the outer world and how you conceptualize that relationship? I think there's a through line between a few different topics that you've brought up over the last 10 minutes or so. You know, one, one aspect of that through line is altered states, right? So there are altered states that you answer into when you meditate. There are altered states that you answer into when you do yoga or you do certain kinds of breath work. There is an altered state, I think, that often is hard for us to track that you enter into when you engage, when you are engaged by a charismatic leader figure who is really, really good at things like prolonged eye contact, at things like cold reading,

what's going on with you, at things like picking up on how you respond in the moment. There's a powerful transference that I think is evoked by someone who has those particular charismatic abilities and that their bread and butter is based on being good at that. And their ability actually to get their narcissistic supply from a large group of people is based on that skill set. And I think often that's underestimated. So that's also a kind of open state. But when you get to psychedelics, I think there's something about how completely immersive and how powerful psychedelics are in terms of just like your whole brain chemistry is so radically, radically altered that it's like going into a different world it's like going into a different world and there are aspects of being in that different world that are profoundly mythopoetic

that are profoundly mystical um that have all sorts of overlap with with religious language and imagery that we may be familiar with i think it opens up the part of the psyche where that stuff comes from anyway but the the the fascinating thing about that is there's also at the same time, significant overlap with psychosis, with ways of interpreting causality and with ways of perhaps hallucinating or hearing voices or what have you. Now, how you then interpret that, I think becomes really, really important, how you integrate that experience, what you come to believe that experience represents. And for me, psychedelics are this incredibly powerful doorway into an aspect of inner exploration and work that otherwise remains very hard to access. And so having a guide who is able,

who is psychologically aware and trained and is able to stay really grounded and neutral and hold space for what's going on and on the other side of the experience, sort of work it through and talk about it and highlight or tease up to the surface some of the more psychological, symbolic, metaphorical interpretations of what's... It's like having a very powerful waking dream, essentially. And so you can either relate to that waking dream as, oh my God, this actually proves all of these

supernatural beliefs that I want to believe for whatever reason. I think it's also very inflating. There's a very common experience that a lot of people in the psychedelic literature have written about, of a kind of psychedelic inflation, a sense of I have now had the revelation, I am now something like a prophet, I now know these things about life after death, or about the existence of a spirit world, or i've had some deity come and directly tell me what my mission in the world is all of that i think is profoundly fascinating if you see it as a waking dream and potentially profoundly derailing on multiple levels if you take it as being a literal experience of some ontological reality that you've discovered.

I think that's true. And I'm not a psychedelic guy, so I can't really speak a lot about those experiences. We do some psychedelic-like types of therapy. I mean, some people who have done a lot of psychedelics have told me when they do brain spotting or SLT or something like, this is the part of that that is helpful. I'm underneath everything. And so there's some overlap. It's not the same thing.

And we do also work with an IV ketamine clinic, even though we don't do the ketamine. People going in that experience is also, I think, probably more helpful than what they think ketamine is doing with serotonin. I think a lot of times it's just treating the trauma. It's why the needle moves on depression but it seems like hold on are you saying that in your in your clinical practice you are working with with people who go and do the ketamine therapy and then come back and you we work with an iv ketamine provider and so the they were not able to administer that i want none of the red tape of that and i'm not set up to do it so they they go to a doctor who provides that, and then they're doing their preparation. It's kind of shamanistic.

You don't lean too much into that language with insurance companies, but you're preparing them for what might be unlocked, and then they're feeling that. Yeah, and then you're doing integration work with them on the other side. Before and after. Yeah. You have to be careful with IV ketamine, just if anyone is listening, because a lot of those clinics don't tell you, but what they're doing is they're mixing the ketamine with a

sedative. And if you request your medical records, you'll see that, but they don't tell you they're doing that. And if they're doing that, it's easier for them because it means that you may not have a be loud or have kind of traumatic re-experiencing. And research also says that you're probably worse off than you hadn't tried the ketamine when they do that. So it's not really an ethical thing, but that is something you want to look at if anyone's listening to this anywhere and is wanting to look at it, especially in America, you'll run into that. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So in terms of that, you know, thinking about inner world versus outer world, you know, how to hold intense waking dream type experiences, I think that that, for of continuum with regard to how much is this based on an actual practice and how much of this is just based on a set of metaphysical claims that

are offered a priori, right? The way in which the practice is held as a process of discovery again there's a continuum there versus on the other side of the continuum um a way of a way of um affirming a set of preconceived metaphysical or supernatural claims to me that's that's really a huge deciding factor as to whether or not I personally, and this is a normative claim, I see certain forms of spiritual practice and community as being healthy and others as being unhealthy in terms of, are they taking you more in the direction of integration, of self-awareness, of emotional intelligence, of relational fluency, of being able to live in the world

in ways that are likely to lead to more happiness and more wholeness and more harmony, as well as an honest sort of engagement. Maybe you're having more harmony in your personal life, but you're engaging in a more activist way with the political world because that's valid too. Models of therapy do that too that are not great. Largely cognitive and behavioral models

that got big after insurance to corporatize healthcare. But what they're doing is they're moving the anxiety from here to here. So like if you go into somebody who is, and there's great CBT therapists, but if there's somebody who's just doing manualized CBT by the book and you say, I'm drinking six beers, they'll just move the anxiety over here and say, we'll play six games of Monopoly now. And now, okay, you're cured. Now the slider's gone down, you know, because you're trying to turn everything empirical and you're only concerned with behavior that you can measure in a number um and and so i think saying like like an example of what you're talking about the nexium where they lowered all these ocd symptoms with these people

yeah because they had them having this rigid inner obsession that was damaging physiologically you know but their family saw it and said okay well you're not counting the cracks on the door as much so this must be good yeah yeah never mind the fact that you're being indoctrinated into a into a cultish group that ultimately is going to take away your agency and have you be hyper focused on your body weight and you know be grooming you for some sort of weird uh snm sex cult like well it seems like the groups that understand that the rules are there to get you to the experience and not the rules are there to worship the rule are the ones that work better you know as just philosophies it doesn't have to be a religion and that there is this kind of when you have an allegorical or a metaphorical language well like what you were

saying about how you go into this profound waking dream, basically with psychedelics, and that it's dangerous when you come back and you say, I have the information and no one else has the information. And I know all of these esoteric things that make me special. That is dangerous when you come back and say, this is an experience that lays dormant within all of us that can teach me these things. And I could share this with anybody, right? Like that, that is, that is a different framework than I've made. I've, I've had, now I have an evidence base of experience for all of these metaphysical beliefs that I want to be real, um, is not. And, but in the middle, you know, which is probably where a lot of therapists have a hard time and coaches and things have a hard time staying, is that Messiah complex of I know that the other people need this thing.

And I have to convince them because they don't know that they need it. But also, I have to have some perspective within that because I'm not the Messiah. I'm just a dude. And these problems go back to the Bronze Age. And they are bigger than being. Yeah, that's right. And I think that there's enough similarities with what it's like talking to someone who has had an intense manic episode that I think it's worth pausing and saying, okay, hold on. I know you're very excited about this and you've gotten these inspired revelations that you believe are the answer to all of

humanity's problems, but let's slow down a little. And for me, this is where you get into the conversation of spiritual bypass. So in the eighties, people like John Wellward and Jack Kornfield, and there were some others as well, who I'm probably not mentioning, who deserve credit, who sort of were observing that like within, especially communities of people that were seeking out meditation, these, you know, the people I'm mentioning tended to be people who had done a lot of Buddhist meditation and study, but who also had gotten PhDs in clinical psychology and were working as therapists. And they were really trying to figure out, okay, how do we integrate these things? How do we integrate what at the time they were talking about as like Eastern psychology and Western psychology? And how do we recognize that, okay, Eastern psychology or Eastern practices and philosophies have something to offer that at this point,

our Western psychology maybe is lacking in, but then also maybe there's a two-way street there, maybe vice versa, there are aspects of Western psychology that, you know, can really do that. One of the places where, that I think is really fascinating, where there's a strange overlap and often disjunction there is around the word ego, right? So there's a whole, there was a trend for a long time of translating eastern philosophical spiritual texts into english using freudian language especially around the word ego so so so this the the particular freudian association with with or or way of thinking about ego sort of got it got imported into these ideas about meditation that in a way that i think ultimately was kind of confusing you want to know a weirder thing that that like even so you know freudian the ego and the unconscious is the subconscious is pretty

hierarchical whereas jungian therapy is not you know and that's the split as freud says no it's not the subconscious it's not less than it's just another part of self. It's the unconscious. It's just the not conscious. So you have kind of right-wing conspiracies that sometimes affect Jungian analysts who are supposed to be the people who know the shadow, but a lot of, especially men, which I want to check myself because I lean that way, just kind of go nuts at the end of their life. But a lot of it is that they're reverting to these freudian assumptions not even though they hate freud and they're going on about freud because they're reading western they're reading the translations of the eastern gurus and integrating it into their jungian practice

and then then taking a freudian assumption out of. And I've got tapes going back to the 70s of these guys that died in the 90s, like listening to it. And you can see it happening. And it's like I know what they're reading and they're saying they found this thing. And it's like, oh, man, like, I don't know. I think that's such a strange phenomenon. But it really you can watch it happen. It's fascinating. And it is very tricky. With spiritual bypass, I think you get

into this place where, okay, the ego becomes a stand in for critical thinking, it becomes a stand in for being honest about your trauma, it becomes a stand in for any kind of quote unquote, negative emotion, or judgment, right, or resistance of the guru, or that, you know, when you, when for some people you get into very expansive meditative states and that actually becomes disorganizing and a little bit destabilizing. Oh no, no, that's just your ego holding on. You need to meditate more. You need to push harder. Maybe you need to take more psychedelics and actually that probably may not be so great for that individual. the spiritual belief system meant that all suffering was an illusion. That was just the ego. That any kind of critical thinking or judgment or reliance on scientific evidence was just

sort of a lower level of consciousness that was afraid of the higher truth that can be realized through intuition, right? Through mystical experience, through coming into your heart. Yeah. Coming into your heart and getting out of your head. Yes. That, that, that sort of hierarchy of, of knowledge claims that, that, and therefore that we have found the answer. The answer is transcendence. The answer is discovering the, the, that there is no self that, that non-dual consciousness is all that exists. You know, even though these are,

these are interesting philosophical and experiential practices to explore, the moment you start hearing those strong claims, which become essentially vehicles for denial about anything in our human experience that is vulnerable, in which we feel helpless, in which we have to deal with ugly and just things that we wish were

different about the world. To me, that was always a red flag. And that's where the more psychological orientation came in. It's like, no, no, no, we have trauma. We have painful emotions. We have dysfunction in our families. Some of this is going to be loose ended for a really long time. There isn't going to be some solution that just makes you feel good always. There's a red flag there. Life is hard. It is supposed to be hard. If you think that you're going to be able to control all of reality and make it easy with something you do in your heart, you're getting scammed. That's the kind of promise that a lot of authoritarian cult leaders offer. Then what happens is there's a built-in kind of bait and switch, like you said, or inversion that starts to happen where I have promised you that you can be happy all the time. You can transcend.

You can be in touch with God. You can realize the ultimate enlightening truth of the universe. When that doesn't happen because my promises are empty and out of accord with the reality of human existence, in fact, unable to hold human existence in a really dignified and compassionate way, when it doesn't happen, it's your fault. And it's because of your ego getting in the way. And it's because you're not surrendering to me sufficiently. You're not doing enough service work and you're not becoming a slave enough within the system. And maybe I need to hurt you a little bit

in order to really teach you that you letting that hurt you is your fault. I tell patients when somebody tells you that the ego is the source of all suffering, you know, wait till course number six and you're going to hear that you are the reason. It's really your fault. Vulnerability is bad.

You should hate yours. You should repress that. And you should hate it out here. It's their fault too. And that's that right wing shift, you you know halfway through the indoctrination even if the aesthetic is lefty you're going to get to that point with a keith rainier you're going to get to that point with a um you know a lot of them a lot of them yeah that's right because ultimately it's very individualist while at the same time being very authoritarian. And the reason why it's individualist and authoritarian at the same time

is that there is no kind of communal egalitarian way of discovering what's true and way of actually working through emotions and conflicts and correcting power imbalances. All of that has to be suppressed in order for this power structure to remain. And so then if it's individualistic, then it's just your fault. It's not the fault of for this power structure to remain and so then if it's individualistic then it's just your fault it's not the fault of the of the authoritarian power structure or the faulty metaphysical claims now where this becomes relevant in terms of me sitting here talking to you because i'm not a i'm not a you know phd psychology expert or anything like that i've just been me neither

my whole life where i think i have some legitimacy in terms of being on the microphone right now is in terms of what we've studied over the last four years with conspirituality all of those same kinds of trends all of those same landmarks that have to do with spiritual bypass or with authoritarianism or with inflated claims about the the ability of the intuition to tell you the ultimate truth, we started to see, oh, wow, here's someone like Christiane Northrup, who's been a beloved, somewhat feminist OBGYN who has, you know, so many women from a more liberal counterculture kind of demographic have found to be heroic because she's saying listen to your bodies and we and who and she's accurately saying we've been under a patriarchal medical system for centuries and and so here are the ways to take better care of yourself and here are some practices

that might help you to de-stress and might help you to love your body more and be more in touch with your intuition and your feminine wisdom. Like, okay, like all of that sounds good, but ultimately more and more through the course of the pandemic, we saw the tendencies that were already there because she was already an anti-vaxxer and she was already very susceptible to promoting pseudoscience cures for her own profit motive and out of a claim of being holistic. their spiritual prophetic intuitive kind of cosmic grand scheme of things philosophy with ideas that actually were q anon ideas yeah and with with um an agenda that actually was about getting trump back into office and seeing anything that was more progressive as being part of the you know pedophile satanic cabal so it was wild it almost was a set of inevitabilities that all these people were on then one hierarchical cult where they were black belt i mean everyone q anon such a big thing like i've had people who

tell me that they believe in q anon i'm like okay what do you believe and they tell me a list of five things that i believe that i think are true i don't identify as believing in q anon but i'm like well yeah those things did happen um and you're right it isn't talked about all right let's talk about one of the five things one of the five things you know and then there's some of it is just so out there like somebody's like you know there's a five million high ice wall all around the world that q's trying to let us know about you know follow the money and i'm like i don't see where the money is going here but you know all of those things that were kind of in the water, like the through lines that you see in these cults, like the colloidal silver and, um, the obsession with like enemas. I mean,

some of these go back a ways. I mean, people were doing this with evangelical movements in the 1800s, you know, charismatic, um, preachers and things on that were, would do things like recommend enemas and things. Why does it that all of these groups who don't have is there a perennial you know cult aesthetic you know why were why were the first four g's not as threatening you know then then this last one yeah good question how come it's only 5g that is the problem yeah look i am, I should out myself as being really, really fascinated with art and poetry and mythology and contemplative practice, all that whole aspect of what it is to be human. I'm absolutely passionate about in my daily life and in the work I do in the world. And at the same time, I have a profoundly skeptical attitude towards any kind of paranormal or supernatural claim. And I actually don't find that those things are contradictory. rewards a way of thinking about what it is to be human that sees greater freedom and greater

clarity once free of the paranormal and supernatural beliefs. That's just me. A lot of people disagree with that. So for me, I look at it and I say, okay, there's any religious or or spiritual organization that relies on a certain kind of epistemic obfuscation, where you're you, you are muddying the waters about the basis on which you can make truth claims about the nature of reality, well, then they're going to find common cause with a lot of different things, including pseudoscientific claims about medicine, right? Including models of the body about why we get sick and how we can be healthy, which may include things like you're going to do enemas and you're going to, you're going to be like. Some kind of outsider self-reliance, rugged individualism that you can just do it yourself. And that's always going to be a appeal.

And then what's interesting about that in terms of our project is that when you find that there is no good scientific evidence for colloidal silver actually being the panacea that is the answer to all pathogens, all viruses, all bacteria. And should be something that rips cell walls apart, like killing the bacteria when you eat it is not the only thing that it's doing exactly exactly so so when you actually look at the science that has been done on whether or not the claims being made about the pseudoscience um remedy are true if you are locked into and identified with and have spiritualized those claims, then it's very easy to fall into a conspiratorial mindset where you say, well, the powers that be don't want you to know the truth because they're making money on the competitor to colloidal silver,

seeing as we're using that as the example. And so therefore, you can't actually trust what the evidence says because it's all bought and paid for. And so we're going to keep taking our colloidal silver. Thank you very much. And we end up like Amy Carlson, completely blue and dead of malnutrition and silver poisoning at a young age.

I believe me, if insurance companies could pick between paying for cancer treatments and colloidal silver, they would be buying colloidal silver. If there was any way to make a study to pretend that that worked, that is the cheaper option. Very well said. Very well said. When you're talking about separating the objective from the mystical, I mean, that's it for me is it's like, I think, does mystical experience exist? You know, like, are there perennial philosophies? Can I understand exactly everything about these experiences and why they are in a way? No, I can't. But what I, and what I do is use them to reflect, but I don't

do is pretend that the things that I want to believe, you know, in those States or in that part of mind, it actually gives me any control over material reality. I mean, when you're saying my intuition is telling me that this medicine is best, that isn't the role of intuition, you know? So this for me is actually intuition, emotional process, somatic ways of being and paths of self-discovery, imposing that kind of objective lens that says this tells us something either paranormal or supernatural or transcendent about the nature of reality, to me, it's actually evidence of a devaluing of the inner life, a devaluing of all of those kinds of processes.

It's a false certainty instead of a sitting in the uncertainty, which needs to be the point of maturity and intuition and growth. And to me, the more one actually engages in that kind of path and in those kinds of processes and experiences and maturation and healing and integration and individuation, the more that that is happening, the more the immense value in and of itself of that dimension of what it is to be human is appreciated. And it doesn't have to be translated into what I actually see as a quite superficial and flat way of presenting it. Because it's projection.

It's projection. It's not an identification. Yeah. Yeah. And so related to that then is these two kind of giveaways, right? One is this idea that you can somehow find a way to have control over so many things that actually as human beings, we don't have control over. And really any kind of psychological work is coming to terms with that. I don't have control over that. Other people don't have control over those specific things. How do I cultivate greater compassion, greater acceptance, greater humility in the face of something that has just always been and always will be part of the human experience? The other is this idea that I can, and it's related to control, but it's even more the sense that I can manifest, right? And through manifestation, through getting focused enough with the power of intention, and sometimes they'll bring in mangled quantum physics to explain this,

right? It's somehow I can, I can make the world in my own image through this kind of spiritual awakening where now I'm manifesting everything as I want it to be. And then of course, if I'm, if that's not working, it must be,

I must be to blame, not the fact that we live in, you know, an exploitive capitalist system or what have you, we don't have adequate health care or that or that you know that it's just a fact that you know here i am and i have limitations and there was one other thing that's connected to all of that um i'm trying to remember what it was it'll'll come to me. It'll come to me. Sure. Well, maybe an example of what you're saying, and maybe this will jog your memory to me, is tarot, which I do a lot of work with archetypes.

And a lot of people go to a tarot reader. I don't think most people do, but some people go to a tarot reader and they feel like the tarot reader is going to tell them what happens in the future you know or what choice to make to take this responsibility away um you know when i do that i i'm shocked sometimes by the coincidences that come out or i mean it does feel magical sometimes especially when you've got kind of an intuitive person who's helping you with it but what i see is a part of myself that i don't understand that i could have avoided or a conflict between two parts of self. And then I understand myself better and I know what to do, which is the real control that I actually can have. If I thought that was magic and it was just telling me what to go do, that's giving up the control that I have had there.

That's the irony. And when I do archetypal work with someone, what I'm saying, you know, do you understand that this queen archetype is this, you know, it's a, it's a maternal energy, but it's, it's not actively getting power. It's the power behind power.

If it's shadow, it's manipulative, but it can also, whatever. If they're praying to the queen, God, for the thing, that's this externalization that is not helping them say, oh, I see, I feel this within me. I feel where it's helping me. I feel where it's not. I see what I'm trying to do here. You know? That's a perfect example of the distinction, Jolie. I think that's beautifully said, right? And it is the irony that you believe that you have kind of perhaps fooled yourself into thinking you have more control, but you're actually putting the control out there somewhere. The other thing I was going to say had to do with apophenia. So apophenia is this tendency to see patterns that are not really there and to think that those patterns have

meaning when actually they don't. And again, it's this flat landing phenomenon where there are meaningful symbols and metaphors that can be discovered. Often they have meaning specific to us. There may be a sort of a wider, more universal sphere of archetypal meanings, but they still have to be referenced through the individual life and the individual experience in order for the juice really to be squeezed from whatever that fruit is. And with apophenia, it's again, this very, you know, whether it's numerological or it's, you know, you saw this a lot with QAnon, people would like take a tweet from President Trump and they would like draw circles around all the different things. Oh, he used the number 13 here. See, he's referencing Q.

Oh, he said this thing here. That's actually the date that in 1846, this aspect of the Constitution was, you know, they just go. Look at this secret picture I unveiled with Photoshop hidden within the, uh, exactly. And so, so, you know, it, it makes, when I was in my twenties and I was, I was sort of growing up within spiritual subcultures, you know, I w I would have friends who would, they would go and look at a new, a new apartment to live in and they would factor into their decision whether or not they wanted to rent that apartment what the numerology it was of the

street address you know or they would they would go to the they would go to the co-op to buy their groceries and they would be doing muscle testing on every they would be in the store for three hours because they were having to muscle test every single thing that they were considering buying to see if it was going to be right for their energy. And I would always look at that sort of thing and say, you think this is giving you a secret pathway towards what the universe really wants you to do next but this actually just looks like an obsessive anxious you know attempt to externalize uh something that's going to tell you what to do to have certainty in a place where it's not really mature to look for it um you know i told somebody one time that was

doing like ghost hunting you you epiphany like you get a bunch of random data on a thermal projector static and then you look for a pattern in it and you know like i think so many of those things like cut us off from real human spiritual traditions that even as somebody who's a secular materialist we need you know you don't have you can believe in whatever spirituality you want wherever that comes from i don't care but i'm saying we need a ritual we need a myth we need a grounding and a lot of times these things are shortcuts that stop us from going there. Like I had this person who is listening to all this static and trying to hear the ghost's voice through the static. And I was like, you know, this ritual that you're doing, it doesn't look like it's feeding you. And if there is any capacity that you have, you know, whatever this means to hear the voice of the dead in your life, you're not going to hear it here. And you're listening in the wrong place. And, you know,

whether that's reflecting on what my granddad did and his good parts and his bad parts and his legacy, or feeling like I do have some ability to communicate or feel a presence or something, I don't care, but it's real. And it's, and's real and it's faith and intuition in a way that is more grounded, I think, than a lot of these kind of parlor tricks, essentially, that we make up to feel like we have control or we have certainty. Yeah, I think that's very, very well said. What I hear, and you've come back to this a few times in terms of uncertainty, in terms of being, you know, it's like, how do we hold a compassionate and honest space for the anxiety and the fear or the authoritarian or the cultish or the conspiratorial thing that's being sold to you, which is increasingly the case in our online and social media sphere, that we're serving things up that are very, very well crafted based on our past online behavior in terms of what our needs are, even needs that we're unconscious of, right?

To me, the self-awareness of exploring what are these deep needs, how do i get them met in ways that are actually beneficial and authentic and and and you're human in their sort of imperfection um that's that's huge and you know in in my daily life i continue to teach yoga classes i continue to hold ecstatic dance events you know i am in the world all the time valuing and offering to people the possibility of let's gather in community. Let's be present in our bodies. Let's explore what's going on on an inner level. are without any of the unrealistic promises or claims or attempts to control. And with an understanding that I'm just facilitating this as someone who works for you right now. I don't have some special enlightened insight into all of this.

This is just what I've done as a career. And so, yeah, I have some knowledge I can share, but I'm not claiming infallibility in any way. Yeah, in my own life, I find myself continuously seeking to make those distinctions and value how we explore and get those needs match in ways that are sustainable. So I'm right there with you. Well, this is a beautiful conversation. I really appreciate your time, but I want to be respectful of it also. And we would really like to promote your website and your podcast and any other

projects that you've got in the show notes. Is there anything that you want to tell people about? And I can include all of that links to get to all that stuff really quickly. Yeah, I think for the purposes of a conversation like this, conspirituality.net is the website. You can find Conspirituality Podcast on anywhere that you might listen to podcasts. And yeah, anyone who might be curious about what I'm talking about with regard to yoga and meditation and ecstatic dance, that kind of thing, you can find me at julianwalkeryoga.com. And yeah, that's pretty much it. You know, I've written over the years on different websites,

there's stuff out there in the world. I wrote an article called The Red Pill. Oh gosh, I'm forgetting the name of it because it's right at the beginning of the pandemic. I wrote an article for Medium about the red pilling of New Agers back in early 2020. That is probably my most read piece out on the web, so you can seek that out as well. Okay. We'll,

we will link to that. Yeah. One thing about this wild, wild country takes a strong, strong, strong, strong. strong it breaks a strong strong line but anything less anything less makes me feel like i'm wasting my time