TrueLife - Dr. David Salomon - Mysticism, Mystics, & Metaphors

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Today we begin our journey into the mystic tradition with an incredible individual Dr. David Salomon. Mysticism is popularly known as any kind of ecstasy or altered states of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning, but may refer to becoming one with God or the Absolute. It also refers to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.http://www.davidasalomon.com/https://davidsalomonblog.wordpress.com/https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Sins-Influenced-Middle/dp/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only David Solomon. Some of my guests out there have been telling me, David, more David Solomon. You may find that hard to believe, but I can send you the proof. I told you, George, I said no one in my entire life has ever requested more David Solomon.

So this is an anomaly. Like you said, things are getting interesting. This may be a sign of the apocalypse. I don't know. Or a little slice of heaven. Well, maybe, maybe. Fantastic. Well, I have been enamored.

And I have been on a quest to find more information. And some part of me has always been attracted to this idea of mysticism, David. I don't know if it's this question of why that people always ask, or if it is tragic events that happen in your life or the not knowing or the seeking of something greater than yourself that has led me down this path. But I am so excited to talk to you today. What can you tell me maybe your ideas of medicine, and how you got attracted to it? Sure.

I mean, and I think my interest in it is similar to yours. I, my journey has been a spiritual one, more than a religious one. And once I got into graduate school, I started reading the medieval mystics, just as part of classes that I was taking, and I was just really amazed by their writing. In particular, Richard Roel is one that I, an English mystic 14th century, who I was really taken by his very, his little book called The Fire of Love, which is kind of an autobiography, is just absolutely a brilliant piece of work. And what I went on to do then was I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on Catholic mystics in 16th century England. I was a Renaissance scholar. And when I first proposed this, the initial response that I received from my advisors was there wasn't any.

This is the time of the Protestant Reformation. And it appears that Catholicism, never mind Catholic mysticism, had disappeared from England by the late 16th century. But stubborn as I was, I said, well, no, I'm not buying that. believe it's still there somehow. And what I eventually came to discover and get involved in was the study of what's called recusant history, which is English Catholics who remained in England during the Protestant Reformation, late 16th century, and continued to attempt to keep the faith alive in a very underground kind of network. And the one that I latched onto,

I became very interested in the Jesuits, is a Jesuit named Richard Parsons. And Robert Parsons, excuse me, Robert Parsons. Robert Parsons was a Jesuit, an English Jesuit, who traveled between the continent and England, went back and forth

and wrote several very popular works, one of which is called the Christian director, which is basically a how-to book on how to maintain Catholic spirituality at the time. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic of it. And what I got involved with during those years was I was very interested in what I came to call the academic study of mysticism. and I separated that from the so-called popular study of mysticism. So I wasn't interested in, you know, crystals and the kind of stuff that you found in the New Age section at the bookstore. Marion Williamson, I wasn't interested in that stuff.

I was interested in the academic study of mysticism going back to, really, before the Greeks. And so when I was in graduate school, I actually began an online list serve, if anybody's old enough to remember those, called Mystic L. And it was the academic discussion of mysticism. And we had members from all over the world who were academics, who were interested in discussing aspects of mysticism from that perspective, not from necessarily a devotional one. I have continued that really, I think, throughout all of my work and my study and my teaching, most recently with my interest in Carl Jung and his work on archetypes and symbols. And one of my favorite quotes from Jung, which is I start my course on Jungian archetypes by reading this quote. comes from a small work of his from 1937. It's called the autonomy of the unconscious mind.

It's in a very little book called Psychology and Religion. And he said very simply, he said, it's an almost ridiculous prejudice to assume that existence can only be physical. Wow. There's got to be more to it. There's got to be more to it. And I just, I love that statement because it's just, it's so simple. He says it's basically, it's ridiculous to think that this is all there is.

There's got to be something more. And I think for many of us, yourself included, George, you know, we have taken that as a kind of a gauntlet and said, yeah, I agree. And we look to see what that is, to see indication of that in this world and how we can better understand that in this world. And oftentimes that comes into play through things like metaphors and symbolism and archetypes. So that's the 35 cent answer. That's a great answer.

It's a great answer. And the quote from Young would serve as a good definition for the word mysticism. Yeah. I mean, the word mysticism, it comes from the Greek mysticose, which means hidden. Right. And so if something is mystical, by definition, it's hidden to physical view. You can't see it with a physical eye. And the tradition of mysticism, a mystical tradition dates back, I mean, thousands of years.

It's not Christian. It's not even Jewish. It dates back to the Greeks and has developed over time. kind of morph to fit different traditions, or I should say traditions have morphed mysticism to fit in its own world. And I think people are very interested in this today in what is what is hidden, what is unknown, what we can't understand. I mean, you know, really what Jung is saying is we can't understand everything that happens rationally. And we are a very rational society.

We're rational beings by nature, and we want to, quote, unquote, make sense of things. And if we can't, the most rational of us dismiss those things and say, well, that's just nonsense then. Whereas others say, well, there must be something more. and, you know, how can I discover that? So I think there's kind of two paths that you take, you know, the strictly rational, scientific, where, you know,

if it tests out in scientific method, I'm with you, if it doesn't, then it's just, it's junk, get rid of it. And that in many ways defines the difference between, in very broad terms, the humanities and the sciences, right? Absolutely. Yeah, if we can go back for a moment to the etymology of it, I think there's some derivatives of the word, there's some derivatives of the word mysticism that also mean the initiate or the, it's amazing to me. And I think the first place that I saw and mentioned was either in Euripides or in Heraclitus, I think.

But it's so amazing how far back it goes. Oh, yeah. And to think that it is, it may be describing the hidden, the initiate. And then we talk about how we're trying to find this thing that we can't see that makes us whole. The etymology to me is so amazing because it tells the whole story right there. Maybe not the whole story, but it uncovers maybe the path to start the story. Well, the mystic goes on a journey, right? And the journey is, as it so often is, more about the trip than it is about the destination.

And the fact of the matter is that the mystic oftentimes realizes that he or she may never see the destination. But as many of us go along in life, it doesn't mean that you don't continue to try to reach it. You know, I always, I used to teach a course on spirituality and mysticism. It was a very basic humanities course. And it was funny because I would start off the first day. by telling my students that we were not doing this kind of wasn't I'm not interested in your personal journey that's not what we're doing here right I mean I always joked with them and said you know you saw you saw Jesus in a tortilla last night I'm happy for you that's not what we're doing here

we're doing a study of this and you know our personal journey of course is very important but But I think the problem is a lot of people get that kind of confused with the study of it. So, you know, I mean, my own experiences have little to do with my academic work. They intersect in some way, but I would never try to do some kind of an academic study of my own experience. that said, I would often say to students in that class as well, when we were discussing the mystical journey, is that really no one who would be defined as a mystic would put that down as their occupation on their tax form. Because that is, that just, it contraindicates the whole nature of being a mystic. because the mystical experience comes not because you're inviting it,

it comes rather out of the blue. That's the nature of the experience. And so it's not like you wait around and say, well, you know, I aspire to be a mystic and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z in order to fulfill that. It's probably not going to happen. Now, that said, you know, if you look at the, like the yoga tradition and gurus, that's a little bit of a different line, because there's such a distinction between Western, Eastern thought on these things.

And most of what I've studied has been Western mysticism. Personally, I'm interested in Eastern mysticism. My study has been Western. I think I called myself in my last book in the introduction, I called myself a Judeist, right? Born Jewish and really Buddhist now. So it is a really interesting journey. And that's why I think the connection with Mystic being an initiate. It is your beginning.

You're initiating the journey. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I know that what I'm about to say has been debated, but I'm curious to get your point on it. It seems to me that there were scholars that for a while were, thinking about mysticism as like the perennial spirituality. It's probably more of a constructionist mindset, but what is your take on that? I mean, I suppose that in some sense, it's one of those Venn diagrams, right?

All mysticism is spiritual, but all spirituality is not mysticism. And I think about, you know, one of the great scholars of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, Her book just titled Mysticism was a landmark study. And she was the one who really kind of indicated that there were stages to this journey that you would achieve. And I really do believe that it is only described in retrospect. It isn't something that you map out. It's something that you look back at. Wow, yeah.

And so for so many of the medieval mystics with whom are most familiar, but even with folks like Thomas Merton and, you know, even Alan Watts, for that matter. I do think that oftentimes the element of surprise when something occurs is really kind of interesting. I mean, Richard Roel and his writing is just absolutely stunned. when he has this experience. And this experience is the nature of the experience is that it is, it is a glimpse behind the veil. It's a glimpse of what's hidden. It rarely is sustained.

It really is sustainable. And it oftentimes is not even repeated, which can be, I think, frustrating for some people. just that notion that you get this one moment. Because for the true mystical literature, what you're looking for is union. That's the final stage, right? Union with the divine, whatever the divine might be. And these writers are not fooling themselves into thinking

that that's going to happen while you're still in this flesh and body. It can't. That that union with the divine is something which is spiritual and which your soul is going to experience. And for almost all of them that I know of, the only way that that's finally going to happen is at the demise of the physical body at death.

But what they have in the course of living this life is glimpses of that, glimpses of what that might be like. And I suppose for so many of us, I mean, that's what probably keeps us going day to day is those glimpses. And they can be glimpses in any sense. I mean, you know, we're talking metaphors and symbols here, right?

I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, I saw Jesus and he came down and sat on my bed and had a conversation with me last night, which is what happens to Julian of Norwich. It might just be that you have a glimpse of the ultimate good in something that someone did. And you say, okay, there it is. Right. I mean, it's that question of what you believe the divine is.

it doesn't have to be God, quote unquote, right? I mean, we have our own personal spiritualities. Sometimes those fall in line with traditional theology and conventional religion. Most often these days, they don't. And I think that that provides for some really interesting opportunities to, to achieve this kind of state. You know, Carl Young talks about it, right? And he mentions in his sort of autobiography,

one of the last things that he wrote, he doesn't think he ever achieved the kind of individuation that he's talking about in his work, which is basically a mystical journey to find the self. He doesn't really believe he ever achieved it. And it's funny because when I tell my students that, they say, well, what the hell are we doing then? What's the point? Right? It seems

pointless. And it really is important to explain that it is like the nature of a pilgrimage, right? Pilgrimage is more about the journey than it is about the destination, right? I mean, the Canterbury Tales, which is about a journey at Pilgrimage to Canterbury, I mean, you know, they don't get there because Chaucer never finishes it. And that's beside the story. the point because that's not the point of the stories. Even modern day pilgrimages, folks who go on pilgrimages to Santiago to Campostela or to Jerusalem or to Rome the three big pilgrimage sites for Christianity or to Mecca, a lot of it is about the journey and not what happens when you get there.

And, you know, it just, it reminds me of. of, you know, Moses standing on the one side of the Jordan in Exodus and not being allowed to go to the promised land and looking at it across the water. And, you know, it's funny because I joke my office on campus here. I have a big window that looks right out over the very large and beautiful, majestic administration building. And people come in and say, oh, you've got a great view. And I say, yeah, I can see the promised land. I may never get there, but I can see it.

You know, it's kind of like that. I'm talking too much, George. Not at all. It's amazing to me. It's amazing to me. You should put up that quote right by the window so people can read that when they look out. You know, when I think about Young, I think about the Red Book, and I try to read it. You know, I might have to buy the companion book.

I know. I can't read. I can read the translation, but even still, like, I'm not, I don't have. what he had. And I can, I can come up with some sort of flicker of maybe insight. But when I think of that red book and I see some of the ideas that are in there and I see some of the pictures. And then I begin to think about maybe some of the other mystical visions that were talked about and some of the, you know, be it the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or stuff like that. It makes me realize that the mystic, I don't, I think words fail when it comes to the mystical experience.

I don't think there's words to describe it. And it just, it goes to show like that's, that's what it is. It is a journey. There's no linguistic pathway on that journey. That's one of, that's one of the curiosities about it is that the, it, the nature of describing the experience seems to be ineffable, right? You can't put it into words. And a lot of this comes from, um, there's been,

some really great contemporary work done in theology and philosophy on the names of God and naming God and how can we name God? How can that be put into actual words? And then also looking at the various religious traditions where God isn't named, right? I mean, intentionally for a variety of reasons. And part of that being the fact that maybe it can't be put into words. but I think that that that's frustrating for at least that's frustrating for somebody like me who makes this living off of words right just to say that you've got an experience and you can't articulate what it is but I'm reminded of and it's a big leap here but of stroke patients so several years ago my gosh it's

It would be probably at least a dozen years now. I fell on my front porch on ice, black ice, something you never have in Hawaii. It was a nasty fall. I hit my head on the steps. And I was in the neuro ICU for a couple of days. And I was laying there, and there were seven other patients in this ICU unit. And you could hear everything that was going on because it was one big room. cordoned off with just curtains so the nurses could get to everybody and there were two guys

older men who were sitting were in beds next to mine i never saw them could only hear them and every hour the nurse would come in and do the usual what's your name who's the president what year is it that kind of thing and the one guy both of them had strokes for the one guy the stroke had affected his speech. And so she would ask him the questions and he appeared to know the answers. He could not articulate it. The other guy, it had not affected his speech. It had affected a different part of his brain. And so asked him who was the president of the United States and he said, John F. Kennedy. He could speak fine. It just was wrong. And I'll never forget laying there thinking, you know, which

if you had to do one or the other, it's like Sophie's choice, which one would be more tolerable, which one would be less tolerable, to be able to speak but not really know what's going on, or to know what's going on and not be able to speak. And it reminds me of this, the kind of ineffable nature of these experiences. The fact that somebody like Marjorie Kemp in the 14th century,

one of the most famous English mystics, had her experiences and by her own admittance was illiterate. So she finally told her experiences to a priest who wrote them all down. And since then, lots of debate about how much of this is hers and how much of it is her writers. The book was only discovered in the 1930s, I believe, and is basically credited as the first autobiography in English. But in the book of Marjorie Kemp, I mean, she describes these experiences, but I always have to remind my students that those aren't her words.

Those are somebody else's words. Because she had what used to be called an Emanuensis, a secretary, right? The priests served as a secretary. She told him what happened. He wrote it down. Well, it's like the game telephone that we used to play when we were kids. right? Who knows whether or not what he's writing down is actually what she said. And so the frustration of not being able to get across the experience that you've had using human language.

And so oftentimes what will happen, as Jung does in the red book, is you use art. And so Young's favorite motif is the Mandela. And to use that as a way of somehow conveying that experience. And oftentimes we see that occur in, through art. Hildegard of Bingen did the same thing, German mystic 11th century. Her illuminated manuscripts, her illuminations are probably as famous, if not more famous than her writing. And the writing, she explains and describes what she went through. And then she has these incredible illuminated manuscripts that depict what she went through.

And they've actually given us more than we would know about her without them. There's one in particular that has caused scholars to believe that she may have actually struggle with migraine headaches because in the one illumination she has the image, the revelation comes to her head. and it looks like fire coming into her head. And, I mean, if you've ever had a migraine headache, you know, you look at that and you go, there's a migraine. That is.

But the same thing with Marjorie Kemp. I mean, Marjorie Kemp was very, very ill at one point in her life, very ill. I mean, so ill that they called in and gave her last rights. And modern physicians just in the last, oh, I don't know, 30, 40 years have read through more carefully her book. and said she had appendicitis. And so, you know, but again, we're back with science and trying to come up with a rational explanation for something. It can't be that she had a vision of God.

She had appendicitis. Yeah. And in a weird way, the same way, well, let me ask because I don't know this for sure, but it seems to me the same way mysticism was tried to be rooted out by maybe monotheism, maybe science today is kind of trying to do the same thing. Like, no, no, no, no, this God is better than that God, you know? Is that what happened in the, when you spoke about the mysticism of the Catholics in the medieval ages and the Jesuits that were going around?

Yeah. Was it at that time, were they trying to maybe change the way religion was done so they no longer on mysticism? The Protestant church was, you know, very anti-mystic, if you know, you will. I mean, and that kind of experience, they did not endorse. And it's clear that anything that resembled that kind of experience was going to be looked down upon. And, you know, it's the nature of Protestantism and Catholicism being so, you know, different when it comes to issues, particularly issues relating to ritual, right? Which is what I think makes it the most

interesting. Yeah. Would you say that ritual is sort of a group mysticism, where everyone gets to participate in the rituals, they can become part of the mystic tradition? It definitely can be. I mean, you know, the group experience is so interesting because there's clearly something sociological about that. But by the same token, it's very clear that in a lot of spiritual traditions, if not

religious traditions, being on your own and praying or, you know, engaging in the divine is fine. You know, this idea that we've all got to come together. Now, on one level, I suppose, yes, I mean, it does, you know, it makes sense when we're together. I'm thinking about what you Jung writes about the mass, the Catholic Mass. He writes a lot about the Catholic Mass, about what goes on during the administering of communion, during when the Eucharist turns into the body and the blood turns and the wine turns into the blood. And that transformation, he's so eloquent about the transformation and the symbolism of that. And not necessarily that it actually occurs, but that we need to believe that it does. We need those symbols. We need those symbols.

And I would argue that for many of us, we need symbols in our life, regardless of what they are. I mean, you know, if you were to look around my office, I mean, it's filled with chotchkes, right? random junk, but it's all symbolic to me. It has symbolic meaning to me. And I think that increasingly, as we are in a more and more antiseptic world, in every sense of that word, we look more and more for those symbols to hold on to, whether it's where, wearing across or a mizzoa around your neck or or or having something that sits on your desk that is a reminder of something those symbols are are incredibly important and young is so eloquent about why we need them yeah the the sterile world of words seems to disinfect all of us from

emotion and and just takes away that which is ineffable or unexplainable. You know, when I, for some reason, lately my favorite symbol has been the yin and the yanksy, but I've been seeing it everywhere. You ever have that experience where like you notice something? And then all of a sudden you notice it everywhere. And I keep, like I can't, every time I see it, like my brain starts firing with like all these new things. Like that, that is my life right now. Like right now I'm the white dot. Now I'm the black paisley, you know, and I can feel that I'm moving in this circular motion and I have all this bent up frustration, but I do have this glimmer of light that sits inside of me that gives me the drive that I need to move forward. And I, you know,

in one single picture, here is the world in which I live. And there's so many of those symbols. It almost, it takes me back to when we were talking about mysticism and Euripides and Heraclitus. Wasn't the ancient Greeks a world in which people spoke in verse and poetry? And there There wasn't a whole lot of people writing. Maybe that is something that brings about the mystic tradition and the experience of mysticism is getting away from those sterile world of words. Well, and it's also about engaging in our imaginations. Yes.

I mean, I would argue that the Yin and Yang symbol and the fact that you keep seeing it and keep feeling that you're in different parts of it, it's about energy. Yeah. I mean, that's energy. Yeah. And these symbols, I think, have energy for us. and when they cease to have energy, they cease being important symbols.

And that's why, you know, these things can be so personal. I mean, you know, I've got a piece of sweetgrass in my office here, braided sweetgrass. Nice. And I've always had it here. In fact, I just bought a new one for the first time in many years. I've got it sitting here in my office.

Because the smell of sweetgrass is a very strong trigger for me. to some very, very happy memories. It's symbolic. It's pure symbol. And if somebody were to look at that piece of sweetgrass sitting here, I mean, it's, what are you doing? What is that? You know, so I think symbols have an energy,

and they have an energy that engages our imagination. And that's what makes them so powerful. And, you know, for a lot of people, when the Yin and Yang symbol, it's, you know, something that's on a sweatshirt, right? you know, they put it on t-shirts. But if it becomes a personal thing where you feel energy from it, and you're receiving energy from it, then that's really important.

Yeah, I have a book that I'm halfway through by Terrence Deakin that calls us the symbolic species. And it talks about the way in which we communicate with each other is that we are one of the only species that we think in symbols. Like our words create a symbol, which leads us to another symbol, which means us to try and describe a symbol to somebody else. Yeah, the nature of language itself, which is, you know, which I mean, and there are varying theories about that, right? About how we come up with words and, and, you know, do I look at something and say that it's a cup because there's something cupy about it? No, I mean, it's just, that's the word that we've assigned to it. But, you know, in theories of language, you come up with explanations for what. Well, how did I learn that that was a cup?

You know, I mean, what brought me to that point? And are we just mimicking what we hear, or is there something more to it? I mean, of course, you know, somebody like John Milton in Paradise Lost, I mean, Adam and Eve, you know, Adam names the animals and Eve names the birds. And Adam is able to name the animals just because he inherently knows. what the animals are. He looks at it and he says elephant. You know, he gets the, the nature of the thing. That certainly is not the case for most people, but you know, that's a whole other area that's outside of my my world in linguistics and how we how it is we we pick up language. It's a fascinating topic to think about. And in ways, I think it does tie to mysticism. And, you know,

If you look at, I think it was Philo-Judeus who said the more perfect logos would be a language to be beheld. Is that not a symbol if you can behold the language? Wouldn't that do so much to get us away from the problem of, you know, interpretation means translation or translation means interpretation? And even though you and I can talk about something that we say is the same word, we can behold two different contrasting ideas of what that is. If you just look at today's world of climate change, people just talk right past each other. Right. And if we had some sort of symbol or mystic tradition where we cared about the things that everybody cares about, that might go a long way to change. But we're back at the basic problem, the fundamental divide between objectivity and subjectivity.

Right. It is, you know, we can't really see anything in the world objectively because we see everything through our eyes. and that's subjective. Right? I mean, the way that I see something is not the way that you see something. And, you know, there's that curiosity that, you know,

the French philosopher Merleau-Ponte calls the phenomenology of perception, right? How it is that we perceive the world. It's a curiosity. I mean, you know, I was talking with students a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about the fact that we still don't really understand

with all the research that's been done about the way the brain works. You know, I mean, we don't understand. We were talking about reading and how the brain understands words on the written page and how we read. And there's been some really interesting neuroscientific work done on this

in the last couple of years, but, you know, we're still nowhere near a definitive explanation. So I think a lot of it does come down to that objective versus subjective. And yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if we could all look at something and agree? But the flip side to that is, life would be pretty boring if that were the case, wouldn't it? You know, I mean, yeah, it would be nice if we could come to agreement on certain things like climate change that seem on the surface to be what they are.

but you know we don't we don't want to get into politics i mean you know there people see things that just it's just like really that's what you're seeing um come on it blows my mind and so you know when i when i think about the divide objective subjective you know and you read about the brain and i'm not a i am not a neuroscientist or anything like that however i've i've read some fascinating articles that talk about the right brain seems to be the place in which we hold concepts. The left brain seems to be the part of the brain where we come up with the words to describe those concepts. We work in conjunction with each other. And it blows my mind to think that, you know, as above so below, like right in our heads might be the map we need in order to

communicate more effectively with each other. But you know what? It brings me to the point. We've spoken a little bit about some of the mystic traditions in the past. How do you think pop culture has kind of changed this idea of mysticism around? Well, I don't know. I'm going to create a word here. It's goofish. It's made it goofy. It's made it silly.

And it's made it very, very unscientific. and non-physical to the point where you would say, well, no one else would be able to experience that. I'm thinking about some of the things in movies of the last couple decades that have looked at this. For some reason, the movie that came from mind is Michael, the John Travolta movie, Michael's the Angel. Oh, yeah, yeah.

You know, I mean, the whole premise of the film is that a magazine a la The National Enquirer, sends a reporter out there to basically debunk this fact that this guy says he's an angel. And no one believes it. But then these strange things start happening. And you as a viewer start looking at it and start wondering, maybe he is. And of course, by the end of the film, I think you're pretty convinced that he is. But at the beginning, you are as skeptical about it as the reporter is.

But then by the end of the film, you've embraced it. But it's only through experiencing with him in the film what he goes through. And I think that's what's so good about reading some of these. I mean, even if you read Seven Story Mountain, the Thomas Merton book, right, which, I mean, it's a really incredible book about his life. and you learn about his experiences as you follow them along, they become real. Now, I don't know if it's because he believed them, and so you're believing them at some point. I mean, I certainly have had that experience backfire on me. I remember I taught years ago.

I was taught a course on South Dakota where I was teaching out there. excuse me and um i forget what the course was but i thought you know what i'll have them read annie dillard pilgrim at tinker creek have you ever read annie dillard i have not no it's a little thin little book i think it won the politzer or the national book award when it came out was early 70s it's a book it's a it's a it's a book about nature and and and being out in nature and and i was teaching in the in the black hills south dakota i thought these kids loved to hike they will love this book. They hated it.

They called her a tree hugger because she was a spirit. It was about her spirituality and her spiritual connection to nature. And for most of these kids, they didn't see it that way. They went for a hike in the Black Hills because they want to go for a hike, not because they were getting any kind of spiritual nourishment from it. And it's interesting that you can experience something the same thing. in such different ways.

You know, when I was out there, I was talking, I talked to a Lakota medicine man. And he brought me to the res to do the sweat lodge a couple of times. And it's really interesting. I mean, these experiences that on the one hand, you're like, oh, have you ever? Oh, I lost you right there. Have you ever done a sweat lodge?

I have not. I've been in a sauna, but I have never been in like a spiritualistic ceremony. Everybody says, oh, it's like the sauna. It's the sauna times 10. It's very different. But, you know, so going for a hike up in the mountains. I mean, you know, the vision quest in Native American culture, right? That's different from going to a hike in the mountains.

You can go for a hike in the mountains. You can go on a vision quest. You know, on paper, they look like the same thing. But the outcome is going to be very different. Right. Yeah, there's so much that, you know, I think that that's one of the things that gets lost in translation is the purpose of the ritualistic ceremony or the purpose of the sweat lodge or the vision quest. And it seems to me that when you are part of a ritual, when you are part of ceremony,

it's something that not only points towards the ultimate, but allows you to participate in the ultimate. ultimate. And when you can see yourself simultaneously from different points of views, that in itself is a trip or an interesting feeling of, you know, togetherness, but also separateness. Like, you experience them together. And we're back at the loss of language, but it's, it's, it's, there's there. Well, I mean, it, it, it, it brings me back to the, to the, to the mass again, to communion. Yes. Yeah. Catholic Mass. I mean, the, the, the priest, it's, it's, it's, conducts that ceremony in Latin silently when he blesses the wafer and the wine and it transubstantiates into the body and blood of Christ. And I don't know what that means, not being a Catholic, about the congregation participating in that, because they don't participate in that.

aspect of it. And again, Jung writes about this in that piece on the transformation of the mass and the ways in which those physical things, as I say, I mean, in Catholicism, transubstantiate, right? I mean, the actual substance of them changes. And Catholics believe in that moment, the wafer becomes the body of Christ. And of course, that was the, you know, so much of the basis of the Protestant Reformation, right? Where as Protestants generally do not believe in transubstantiation, it remains

a symbol of. And so, I too am very interested and have always been very interested in ritual, in the nature of ritual, in all traditions. In all traditions. And in all aspects of life, in the traditions, in the ritual tradition that we have of commencement at the university.

I mean, there are rituals involved in that. You know, I wonder if, I wonder if that group of mass on some level that their consolidated belief or their choice to believe in the transfiguration isn't somehow changing the environment. I've done experiments or probably people have seen experiments where everyone will have like a blue tile and someone new will come in the room and they'll say that's a yellow tile. The person that's blue and everyone is like, nope. You know, you can see that person is almost brought into this weird reality where they're like, you guys are all crazy. Or if you look at something like Jonestown, I was going to drink this Kool-Aid or they're going to go meet the mothership and put on their purple Nikes, you know, like on some level, whether you believe you can or you believe you can, either way you're right. And if you have a group of people believing that this thing is happening, some more than others, I've got to think that that at least changes the idea of the official from thinking is a part of God or a representative of God to actually becoming that.

Yeah, I mean, it's the participatory nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting because that may be true, but it is also very possible for the Catholic priest to conduct that service. ceremony alone with no one there. So, you know, I'd be interested to read more about that. I haven't, and I'll see what I can find on the role of the congregation in the transubstantiation. I'm sure Aquinas probably said something about it. He said something about everything, so I want to let you go.

But that is an interesting, interesting issue about the. the participatory nature and really in all traditions, even if you think about being in a Jewish synagogue and the role that the congregation has, I wonder about that, because I've also been in Buddhist temples where the people who are there, I hesitate to call them a congregation, are not really participating in an interactive way,

at all with what's going on. It's a different type of ritual. Maybe the word, maybe the word ritual is incomplete. Maybe there's something more encompassing. You might be right. Yeah. But it's a fascinating idea to think about it.

It's part of the mystic tradition, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, well, and there certainly are rituals when it comes to the mystical tradition. You know, there are, there is a way of preparing oneself. I mean, Underhill in her book refers to the first stages as being, you know, the awakening and the purgation, of preparing yourself for the experience.

And one of the steps is you have to go through that purgation, the purgative, where you are purging yourself of all of the nasty things that would get in the way, of making a connection with the divine. But they're always going to come back. I mean, because we're physical beings. Yeah. And Richard Roll runs into this at one point in his book, in The Fire of Love, he describes an experience where he was tutoring a young woman.

And as he describes it, he, he overcomplemented her dress. And that was a bad thing. And then apparently another experience where I believe he reached out and attempted to touch this woman's breast. And the woman has a great response. She really puts him in his place. And she basically says, you're nothing but a boy. But it just reminds me of, you know, as far along as we've,

might be on that journey, the fact that we are still subject to the physical being and physical desire oftentimes gets in the way. And monks deal with this nuns deal with this even today in monastic life. I can remember a story one of my graduate school advisors told of his uncle who was a Benedictine monk in Minnesota. And when he was a little kid, the class took a class, trip to the monastery and the monk was telling them all about how terrible it was to see the naked body and nudity was back in the 60s and nudity was just horrible and you shouldn't and and one of the poise i think they were 10 raised his hand and said what do you do you take a shower and he said yes he said well don't you see yourself naked and the monk's response was just perfect he said

said, well, I don't look down there. It's how we deal with what we have experience. But we have the physical, we're physical beings. And that's what the mystic's most frustrating thing is. In the mystical literature, the most frustrating note from mystics who write first person narratives is, they're trying to get out of the body. I mean, that's what ecstasy is, right? Exta.

Yeah. The Greek is out of body. You're trying to get out of the body. You're trying to have an ecstatic experience. But that can't sustain. Right. Because we are physical bodies when we're alive. Yeah.

And that brings us back to their being more than the body. If the mystical experience, if the shamanic ecstasy or just the ecstasy with union is on a higher plane and you must go to a sweat lodge or you must purge or you must somehow purify the body to be initiated into this experience. You know, it's, it, it just begs the question, is there more? There has to be. And it also seems like, it also seems similar to me that you can only experience the most high and you must come back to the body, the same way you must purge the body. Like you, you, you are tied to the body for a time being, but there are other states that you can access or potentially participate in if you do these ceremonies. If you

understand, be it a mystic tradition or a religious tradition. And I think that that's, that is just, it's, it's all about gaining access to that other, other plane, if you will. Yeah. And some do it through ritual. Yep. Some, I'm thinking about Timothy Leary, LSD, right? I mean, drugs will allow you to do that to some extent, right? Allow you access to that other, some other plane. But it is, it is so subjective that, you know, I'm reminded of a funny bit where somebody says,

you know, we're going to access all that stuff in the afterlife after death. And he says, well, how do you know? We don't have any reports from the field. So, you know, nobody's come back to tell us. And so, you know, that's the mystery of faith, right? And I'm not talking now about purely religious, you know, every Sunday in the Pugh's faith. I'm talking about just having faith. I mean, you know, when I used to teach philosophy and we talked about faith and philosophy, it has nothing to do with religion and say, I'd lean up against the wall and say, I have faith that this wall is going to hold me.

I'm not going to the wall, it's not going to crumble. And I said, you know, what gives me that faith? What reason do I have to believe that? And when it comes down to it, we are much more comfortable, I think, with a faith which is anchored in some kind of, experience that at least we have had. And, you know, I can remember some years back my aunt died. And she lived in California. And I hadn't seen her in some years, but we were very close when I was younger.

And we still would talk. And she was a very, I want to say she was a very spiritual person. She loved art and poetry. And when she died, I remember the next day, I was walking on campus back to my office. And a butterfly flew down and flew next to me as I walked for about 20 feet. And then it flew off. Now, symbols, I interpreted that and said, that was her. She came to say goodbye.

Now, for anybody else, they'd say, oh, you're out of your mind. It was a butterfly. But the nature of symbols is that very personal interpretation, right? I mean, it would not be the same interpretation for anybody else. But I would think that if I were to convey that, as I just did, I mean, there are some people who will say, yeah, that was your aunt coming to say goodbye. But, you know, the more rational will say, that was a butterfly. What are you talking about? Butterflies do whatever they want to do.

You happen to be there. I'm one of the ones that would say that was her coming to say goodbye. I know you are. That's why we're talking. There's so much there. And, you know, on some level, to anyone who's never thoroughly been through a life-changing tragedy, you know, it's very difficult to understand the nature of, of what happens after that tragedy until you've been through one yourself. And in some ways, something you love dying, something you love more than anything in the

world that dies is sad and as tragic as it is, it's an area where you are going to have a new rebirth because this big area of love that you had has been removed from you. And while it may seem dark and worthy of contemplating your own death, And soon something beautiful there grows and blossoms. And it allows you to see, it's like almost as if one of the scales is pulled from your eyes when something you love dies. And you begin to see things differently, whether it's a butterfly or whether it is someone else about to go through that same tragedy. I think it going through tragedy gives you the sight to see it happening to other people. And I would argue that that's the purpose of tragedy.

The purpose of tragedy is because there is something in this world. that believes you are strong enough to not only go through this or you're ready to go through it, but you're strong enough to come out the other side and begin helping other people. That's a very cyclical and very hopeful view, right, as opposed to a much more linear view, which would say, you know, and again, this is in some sense

the distinction between Western and Eastern, right? I mean, the Eastern is much more cyclical, think Yin and Yang, whereas the Western is much more linear, you have a beginning, you have an end. Yeah. And so, you know, it doesn't really look at, that's why, you know, reincarnation is not something which is, you know, traditionally subscribed to in most Western traditions.

But it's a big part of Eastern traditions, so many of them. So it's this like this coming back around, right? The rebirth, as you say, the feeling coming out of the ashes. Yeah. It's true. back. I'm curious. If you look at like Jewish mysticism,

would that be considered an Eastern, tradition or more of a Western tradition or something in between? Something in between, I mean, because Kabbalah and Johan mysticism are interesting things in themselves. Right. And they almost are beyond the traditional Judaic theological construct. They really, I mean, even the texts are outside of mainstream.

Judeic texts, you're not going to find much about mysticism in the Talmud. But you know, you've got to look at the Kabbalistic texts in order to find that. So, yeah, I would think so. Yeah, it seems like such a rich source of ideas and wisdom and knowledge and history that is unfortunately not explored enough, I don't think. It isn't. Because it really, that aspect of Judaism, study has been for centuries closed off to most people, intentionally so.

And so it's only recently that people have become, you know, and God love her, maybe Madonna was partially responding to it. I don't know. I'll get more interested in Kabbalah, you know, beyond wearing the little red bracelets. But really looking at combalistic texts, I have to admit, I haven't done much of that, but there certainly is a long tradition, even in the writings of the rabbis, from back centuries that is about mystical experiences. Yeah. Does that, do you think that some of that Kabbalah leads back to the ideas of the Egyptians?

I'm sure that there's a connection there. you know, there has to be. Right. Of course, the Egyptians were so interested in the nature of symbols. Yeah. And what comes afterwards, right? I mean, the symbology of Egyptian religion is just mind-boggling. It really is. It really is.

Dr. David Solomon, I cannot tell you how much fun this is for me. I really enjoy these conversations. I can't believe an hour has gone by. I wish I had some more time because I could probably talk to you for another two hours. I got, I'm going to be headed out to work, but can you do me a gargantuan favor and tell people where, what you're, what you got coming up, where they can find you and what you're excited about. Yeah. So my website is David A. Solomon and it's S-A-O-M-O-N dot com.

And you can find my books there, links to my blog, links to my other. appearances on Georgia's show and the like. And what I've got coming up is I am at the moment working on a new book with my wife on Angels and Demons and Pop Culture, which has been going very slowly, unfortunately, but COVID really threw a monkey wrench into it. But we're hoping it will be done in about a year. But I am working myself on this ongoing project of looking at Carl Jung and Augustine. I'm very interested in the relationship of the two and how the two are so similar. And in reading, for example, Jung's autobiography and reading Augustine's confessions,

I think that there's a lot of parallels there. But I'm teaching my museum studies class this semester and preparing for another study abroad trip next summer to London to go to museums of London this time. That sounds absolutely fascinating. So you know what? Can I hold you for one more second? I have a guest that has some questions here. We have Eric Crawford.

Thank you very much for coming on and listening to us. He started off talking about there's no way to avoid symbolism in this life and that the individual translation of similar symbols tends to be an interesting point of view. And let me just put this one up here. I can show you. And I'll just kind of throw that out at you. And you can respond in a way to his ideas about symbolism.

We all will in some are just more interested in meaning of what comes after. And those are the ones processing before that off button is pushed. What would you say to Eric Crawford on the topic of symbolism? Yeah, to be sure. I mean, well, I think that's very interesting in thinking about what comes after. And of course, there are different approaches to this. And I think some people are more interested in that question about what comes after and look for symbols to indicate what comes after. But there's certainly, I mean, entire portions of humanity that think that this is it.

This is all there is. And, you know, I'm thinking back to to the atheistic existentialism of somebody like Jean-Paul Sart. it. You know, this is it. There is no afterlife. There's nothing, you know, and part of the reason that I think that's interesting is it gives a really good argument for living an ethical life. It's, it's you do good because it's the right thing to do, not because you're going to be rewarded afterwards. But I think, you know, you're probably right, Eric, that those who are processing that now, as you say, before the off button is pushed probably are not only more interested in that meaning, but are more imaginative and more interpretive and come up with more interesting insights about it. I say that probably

preaching to the choir here, but, you know, I think we are a more interesting species. Are we not? George, George, Eric, and myself, we were starting a club. We are clearly. the ones who are, you know, tapped into this. But I, you know, there is something about engaging in thinking about this that makes us, I think, much more than one-dimensional, right? And tends to give, and tends to give our lives meaning, which is what we do. Yeah, I agree. I think that the meaning is all around you. And you can decide, you know, in life, you can't really control what event happens to you, but you and you alone get to control the meaning of that event. And that is some really rich territory right there.

And you can do a lot of growing and you can learn and understand and even create a framework for going forward if you're willing to have the courage to decide what that meaning is. Yeah. I completely agree. And it does take courage. Yeah. Because the interpretation of that is oftentimes going to be, you know, look down upon or dismissed by other people. Right. I mean, what happens so often in this tradition of mystical literature is these mystics, these people who have these experiences, do not want to share them because they realize

that if they do, they're probably going to be persecuted for it. Yeah. Yeah. At the very least, laughed out of town and maybe burned at the stake, you know. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's, it takes courage. But that's, you know what, maybe we should, that's a good spot to leave on. And life takes courage. But the more you're willing to get up and face the day and do it with a smile, even if the world around you seems to be dark, you know, I heard a quote that said, if everything around you is dark, maybe you're the light. So it's a beautiful way to look at life. I'm sure that's the case with you, George. So. Well, it takes one to no one, my friend. That's what we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, and what,

maybe did you want to tell people what your blog was about this this week? You know, I don't even remember what the last blog was about. I'm sorry. That's all right. We'll set it up for the next week since I posted it. I'm going to try to post more frequently, but it's been difficult with classes beginning. Yeah.

So that's what we got, ladies and gentlemen. I'll put all the links below. And if you haven't read David Solomon's last book, The Seven Deadly Sense, I would highly encourage you to do it. It is much like our conversation, today. It is rich, it is rewarding, and it is decorated with footnotes, and you'll come out a better person on the other side. Thanks, George. Absolutely. And I will go ahead and

end our broadcast.