Transcript for For the Intuitives (Part 2)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel and space. So, in part one of this episode series, we dove into the historic centrality and total normalcy of visionary experience. How culture is built upon visions, built upon the trembling utterances of oracles. How the body of culture needs those who feel, who see, who receive, whose eyes are flooded with sight and whose ears receive voices and songs, who listen to the river and translate for the river, and sing the song of the river allowed for all who might hear. People whose bodies you could say are the living antenna of culture, sensitive, awake, feeling, and receiving, receiving in states of heightened perception, glimpses into the unfolding pattern of nature. and how that pattern translates into the lives of communities and ecologies. And we spoke about how all across the world traditional cultures have provided a container and ecology for visions. Visions had a place in which to grow, to incubate, to be fostered, to live, and to thrive. And so the intuitive, the visionary was not other, but was woven into the very fabric of culture. What is an ecology in which visions thrive? What does it look like? It looks like iraqueu, dreaming culture. It looks like a chuar culture and colluli culture and the deep ancestral orientation of the cultures of the Solomon Islands. But it also looks like 15th century France. The French province of Lorraine was a fertile place for visions and voices. There were sacred growth There were gatherings in those groves in which stories were whispered ear to ear. And sometimes if the conditions were just right, a saint would pay a visit and speak to someone. A person would hear in their ear the reverberation of sanctified words and feel the sweet stir of sanctified breath upon the breeze. The breath of the saints there in the grove of beach trees because saints were not lofty far off figures. Saints lived in the waters, in the changes in the weather, and in the June blossoming of certain medicinal flowers, and in the charged space that exists between wounds and cure. Saints spoke with river voices and wind voices and sky voices and cavernous voices, and when there is an ecology for it, prophecy is whisper from ear to ear. Into this ecology was born a girl that you've heard of. A girl named Joan. You all know the story, right? The story of the peasant girl from Lorraine. How, at 13 years old, she began receiving visitations in the garden. She heard voices in the garden. Voices that told her she had a role to play in great world events. She, a peasant girl who could barely read, would be instrumental in a great political upheaval that would shake all of Europe.

and like in the villages that's always been the case.

Joan of Arc was born into an ecology that was welcoming to visions that expected and fostered visionary experience in which prophecy flowed like water. And she died a short 19 years later within a larger ecology. that had moved to sight of the away from visions and visitations and voices. That had come to fear the visionary, vilify the visionary, burn the visionary. Her story is a clash of rural and urban of agrarian animism deeply tied to place, and the fluidity of epiphany coming face to face with larger powers that needed to have total control over epiphany. And so the story of Joan as much of a cliché as it has become remains deeply potent. Because in it we see both an ecology that fosters visions and a larger civilizational institutional ecology that vilifies them. And this larger ecology of civilization at odds with the intuitive would come to dominate Western theological and scientific narratives for many years to come. I'm sure you know this, right? That intuitive have been vilified for a very long time. those who hear voices and attune their ears to the roar of far off rivers in a world increasingly deaf to the roar of the river have to deal with a constant stream of discreditation. So this episode is going to explore this on a deeper level. What is the historic preoccupation with discrediting mystic experience? Why is the mystic deployed by religious structures and political structures in mainstream science alike? Why is mystic experience still to this day discredited and predominantly pureton nations? And what happens to the mystic once said a drift? But back to Joan. Church authorities were so desperate to prove that Joan of Arc was a heretic, that her visions weren't actually of God that she was interviewed and interrogated over weeks by a panel of all the greatest theological and medical minds of Europe. All men, of course, whose soul intent was to show that she couldn't have actually been hearing the voices of the saints. And today we can understand pretty easily why a power structure like the church would find Joan threatening. But it didn't end with the church. Why have modern scientists been equally eager to discredit Joan's voices? I mean, it's not like she's still around to be a thorn in their side, right? Why would 21st century psychiatrists deem it necessary to try to prove that Joan of Arc's visions must be the result of a condition, epilepsy, or migraines, or schizophrenia, or bovine tuberculosis induced by unpasterized milk? and this is a real thing. Psychiatrists trying to claim that Joan of Arc's visions were caused by unpasterized milk. Right, you know, the girl who had aged 13 began receiving angelic voices in the garden, who performed widely witnessed miracles, who predicted deaths just before they happened, who predicted her own blood spilling at the Battle of Orleans. who saw as a 13-year-old peasant girl that she had a role to play and reinstating the French dophan and then against all odds did. All of that came from unpasterized milk. And I'll just say you really have to have a pretty clear anti-visionary agenda to attribute years of luminous visions and voices that changed the course of history to unpasterized milk. Why would the modern world still need to discredit mystic experience? Is the mystic the intuitive really that much of a threat these days? Right. I mean, I know there's like, you know, some new age conspiratorial shenanigans going on, but is the mystic that much of a threat compared to the larger threats posed by, I don't know, like, flagrant rage-fueled militarism or AI tinkering or climate chaos? Why is it that the more civilized a country seemingly is, the more it vilifies into it is? Why you, Cassandra, have you not been mocked and squorned enough? Have you not been cast out enough? Why, to this day, focus all that attention on you. Perhaps it's because the mystic vision rubs against deeply held civilizational narratives of agency and control. The vision of human beings as instruments that are constantly being made use of by greater powers contradict some of the very deep tenets of modern Western humanism. As Eric Wargo says, quote, personalities who take comfort in a neat, orderly, well-defined world are bound to be threatened by causal arrows that pierce time in the wrong direction or information that leaks and ways it shouldn't. But the fact is, causality, like nature herself, is not tidy. The voice of the mystic is unsettling. It speaks of predetermined futures of uncontainable solidities of past, strewn with ghosts, and of patterns and unfoldings that we have never foreseen and that have little to do with us. That is profoundly uncomfortable. But there's more to it too, and it has to do directly with the rise of what we call a civilization, and what that really is. because you can trace the rise of civilization concurrently with the rise of the persecution of the intuitive. They're so closely linked. It's almost as if civilization requires intuitive to persecute. As if city walls require a frenzied sear crying outside those walls. Crying allowed that those walls will one day come doubling down. and this civilizational narrative that vilifies intuitive is everywhere, everywhere there's civilization, not just the modern West. In China reports Dr. Mayfary Young There has been a cultural movement away from the Shaman this year, the Oracle, the spirit medium being honored as the intermediary between the living and the dead, the uplifter of the community, the validator of rulers, an exemplary being, to be seen as the worst type of human. Of the Dragon, 30, Swindler, Conning, people out of their money. Quote, when I started field work in Wenzhou in the 1990s, the dominant view in China of shamanism was that it is the lowest and least desirable form of religiosity, earning it the epithets, feudal superstition, and charlatanry for cheating people out of their money. Whether in official discourse or in mainstream urban attitudes, shamans were regarded with suspicion as either people with mental problems or people who fake possession in order to cheat the ignorant folk. Whereas in ancient times, she says, shamanism imparted political authority to rulers and its practitioners were described as persipacious, intelligent, and sagacious. Today, it is associated with old and mentally disturbed women at the lower margins of rural society. In China, this vilification of the Oracle, the Shaman, the Transmedium, goes back to the 17th century to the rise of civilizational industrialization when the Qing dynasty rulers proclaimed this edict, quote, All teachers and shamans and shamans who falsely called down heretical gods write magical charms, make incantations over water, who use the divining plungeet or prey to saints, who disseminate heterodox and deviant arts and techniques, who hide images or statues, burn incense and assemble crowds, who gather at night and disperse it done, pretending to do good deeds. Those who are the leaders will be hanged or strangled. Those who are the followers are to receive 100 strokes of the cane and to be banished 3,000 miles. So, here you have a situation in which shamanism and spirit possession, which originally formed the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine whose animate fingerprint is all over modern acupuncture in martial arts and Chinese philosophy. and is at the heart of the harmonic confusion, relationalities that still form the basis of Chinese statecraft. It's now vilified as charlatanry and deceit, as disreputable behavior. In China, the persecution of spirit possession that began in the 17th century, reached its peak during the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, during which the old, seeing, and healing practices were utterly smashed. in Soviet Russia, quote, shamans were stripped of electoral rights in every election, including at village and district levels. In practice, this meant that such a person was excluded from the collective farming system, and as a result, deprived of all means of subsistence. Tortured, summarily executed, Soviet Russia despised shamans and oracles and intuitive, and after a certain point in history, so did pretty much everyone else. And I want to emphasize what a sea change this is. The oracular traditions that formed and still formed the basis of culture suddenly marginalized. The understanding that any ecstasy, any receiving evisions, any hearing of voices, any irregular state is pathological. This is a seismic shift in a world whose foundation was built on a regular trans. And if we want to try to pinpoint when globally this seismic shift really occurred, we can look a lot of places. But one place, certainly, to look, is the 17th century. The 17th century is when the European witch trials really took off, impacting hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. And it's interesting, right? We tend to refer to the 800s or the 900s or the first couple centuries of the last millennium, we refer to these as the Dark Ages. But if you were an intuitive and herbalist, one whose body was a vessel for greater forces, one who trembled and heard voices, the 17th century was far darker. The height of the persecution of witches of shamans or seers happens not way back in the so-called Dark Ages, but concurrently with the rise of industrialization. concurrently with the rise of the Protestant Reformation, concurrently with the rise of humanism, concurrently with the rise of the scientific method, concurrently with the meteoric rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and concurrently with modern warfare. All of these things were at play in the 17th century, and they are more deeply and directly intertwined with the persecution of intuitives than we might imagine. What do I mean that these things are intertwined? What is this connection? This connection between the rise of humanism and the persecution of Sears? Certainly the rise of humanism was a good thing, right? And sure, humanism brought its benefits in a church-dominated world. But in the very word, humanism is a clue about what happens to the more than human, the forces of nature, the river and the grasses, the spring and the mountain. the ancestor and the descendant, under a regime of humanism. Just look at how we used to live in relation with the dead, and how all of that changed with the rise of humanism. Humanism suggests a world in which all concerns are primarily human and more than human forces are ignored, and in many traditional understandings when more than human forces Spirit forces, ecological forces, ancestral forces, are ignored. They begin 9 at humans. So the 17th century, along with the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Humanism, also brought with it a drastic rise in the number of people dying in wars. The 30-year war alone in Europe brought 8 million dead. The transition from Ming to Qing rulership in China brought millions more, 25 million according to some estimates. This time period also brought with it in both Europe and China, a steep rise in the persecution of locals, of witches, of shamans, of healers, and all types of intermediaries. So tell me if you think these things are related. A sudden precipitous rise in the number of global dead a sudden unwillingness to acknowledge the ancestral dead as a tangible presence that impacts our lives, on whose bones our lives are built, as agents use that must be fed and interacted with. And a sudden vilification of those who actually deal with the dead on a daily basis. I'm not making this connection up. The German witch trials of the 17th century literally arose as a way to explain the brutality of the 30-year war. It was so gruesome it couldn't possibly have been a natural outcome of the reformation, of the enlightenment, of the humanistic road to progress, right? It had to be witchcraft. But of course, the problem wasn't the intermediaries. The problem was the ever-growing mountain of bones that was accumulating on either side of our road to progress. A mountain that was only possible to ignore if we kept our gaze fixed firmly forward, shunning those backward souls who communed with the dead, who fed and spoke with them, and so sought to reconcile past and present, and therefore ensure anything resembling the future. So people often scoff at oracles at spirit mediums because spirit possession transm mediumship is considered backwards, right? This is a telling statement. It's backwards. What does that mean? Does that mean it's primitive or regressive or doesn't mean something else? Perhaps the spirit medium is taboo because they literally look back into the past at the mountain of bones behind us. at the horde of dead, behind us, at all that is incestually forgotten. And in a world that must always relentlessly charge forward, must move forward at all costs. This encouragement towards the backward glance is deeply unsettling, for modernity to look back and witness the unsaciated ancestors howling there, to witness the unacknowledged dead there, for modernity to gaze straight into the yawning chasm of all that we have sacrificed, all that we have left behind, all that we have been separated from. This has implications for the entire project of modernity, and it's relentless forward gaze. And so the more dead accumulate behind us, the more hellbent we become on always gazing forward, not realizing that in doing so, we become vehicles, if some traditions are to be believed, through which the dead express an unsaciated hunger. It works like this, the more dead there are piling up all the roundels, unrecognized unfed, unplicated, the more that humanity's anxious forward momentum grow. And then that forward momentum as it consumes creates more unsaciated dead. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The shunning of the ancestral dead ensures a future littered with bones. For what will the dead feast on? If not on offered songs, if not on stories told around a fire. What will they feast on if not on milk and spirit plates of fruit and grain? If not on mantras and morsels of black sesame and rice, they will feast on our forward-roving hunger. And our forward-roving hunger will feed them relentlessly with nuke dead. How many bodies is enough to feed the great hunger, tom higher in size? In his lament, over the devastation of Gaza, how many bodies is enough to feed the great hunger? Underworld beings, it's said by some, are driven by a great hunger. In the absence of regular offering, they'll gladly take blood. Because blood flows downwards and feeds those who live underneath. And some understandings. In Chinese traditions, the unsacciated, unhonored, dead, returned as earthbound spirits of which there are hundreds of categories. These spirits take hold of people who unwittingly leave themselves open to such possession through their own, roving, unward appetites. How does the possession of earthbound spirits manifest? In these traditions, it can manifest as a perpetual merroseness or anxiety at the state of the world says looming. It can manifest as stuckness as the hardened armor-like shell that paralyzes the faces of politicians, newscasters, and four-star generals. You've seen that stuckness. It can manifest as greater than human ambition. I want more than any human should have. I'm going to be a billionaire who lives forever. That right there is the sign of a culture that does not honor its dead. How can we possibly learn from the mistakes of our past if we ignore the dead? So Hiran says, quote, I will lie down with the bones of my dead fathers. Hold tight the portion of wisdom they passed to me. And sleep the vital sleep in the black watered river. The dead fathers will look with their hollow eyes full of crying, and all bottle those tears to make salt for the meals of the long table, that which I serve my loved ones, my life. Historically, intermediaries, spirit mediums have served this absolutely vital role of dialogue with the dead After the Cambodian genocide, Buddhist monks used traditions forbade them from doing intermediary spirit work. Gave up their monks' files temporarily, long enough to attend to the thousands upon thousands of spirits that needed feeding and clearing. It's vital, animist tradition teaches us to attend to ghosts. Personal, familial, societal, planetary ghosts. But at a certain point on the road to progress, Modernity found it was far easier to vilify those who spoke with the dead than to acknowledge the dead themselves. When we talk about the loss of the animate, the loss of animate vision, how we treat the dead as a huge part of it. The loss of the animate isn't simply the loss of a connection to trees and moss and forest ecosystems. The loss of the animate is disconnection from the ancestral dead, And when we lose that connection, then those who maintain it are easily ridiculed for their backwardness. Those who still dialog with spirit may not even be seen as human at all. Spirit possession says Paul Johnson was purged from European culture after the Reformation, and then projected outward as an anthropological concept and applied to non-Western, especially African cultures. as a sign of primitiveness and backwardness. Since Africa was the main source of slaves in European colonies, spirit possession came to be primarily associated with African cultures, where in the European imagination Africans were, quote, without will and overwhelmed by instinct and passion. In the 17th century, in a world increasingly obsessed with agency and control, the fact that African people's practiced spirit possession was directly used as justification for their enslavement. The French codenwarr of 1685 questioned whether those who become possessed are capable of owning or controlling themselves, and therefore whether they are capable of self-governance. Spirit possession says Mayfariang, quote, disturbs mainstream society, because the idea of the occupied body and spoken through person goes against the development of the rational autonomous self-possessed individual imagined as the foundation of the modern state in enlightenment discourse. Yes, the spirit medium lives in direct contradiction to the Protestant vision of bodies. The humanist vision of bodies, the scientific industrialist vision of bodies, and so science and religion despise the spirit medium equally. The spirit medium arms open to larger breezes. The larger flows, arms open to the river. Here turn towards the river. Tears brimming in the eyes. at the sound of the rush of the river. Stands in direct contradiction to bodies that are meant to exist as individual isolated units in a cosmos that functions as a machine. In the 17th century, there is a seamless hand-off, an unbroken line, a direct continuity from the churches diagnosis of the intuitive as a demonically possessed witch, to the scientific pathologization of the intuitive as hysterical. So direct, in fact, that the first medical text describing hysteria was written by a doctor who was a medical witness at a witch trial. Let that one sink in. So direct that modern psychology inexplicably still spends an awful lot of time trying to retroactively pathologize witches. There are a whole lot of books on what was really wrong with all those mystics, because of course they couldn't have actually just been mystics, right? Seeing today said could not have actually been receiving divine ecstasy as revelations. It must have been a hysteria thing. Christina Mazoni in her book, St. hysteria, says, quote, within the medical profession that generalized consensus is to interpret the mystic as an undiagnosed historic. The BBC recently went a step further and declared that witches never existed at all, because the powers they were accused of possessing weren't real, quote unquote, then there couldn't have been any such thing as witches. So there's a story, right? There's a progress narrative. that says that spirit mediumship and shamanism have dwindled naturally since the rise of humanism, because the rise of modern science made all that obsolete and so primitive practices kind of faded away to live on the fringe. I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson basically say this directly, that the chaman became irrelevant because of science. It's a nice story, but it's nowhere near the full picture. The intuitive didn't just fade away, they were erased. The intuitive, the Oracle, the Seer, the visionary, the neurodivergent, the highly sensitive person, was extricated from the Enlightenment Industrialist body. because their bodies do not fit with what modernity requires of bodies. For what is a body for? In a regime of industrialism? Does a body exist to give voice to the waters? To enact and reflect a great permeability? To dance out the play of great forces all around us? To gesture through fingers and speak it through tongues? to feel, to perceive, through direct revelation, to whale, to keen, to sing of great powers and of passing time. No, a body is to produce, to conform, to sit at the school desk and then the cubicle, and then in the coffin, and anything other, is pathology. Dr. Yang, writing of the change in attitudes towards spirit possession, wrote this. I propose that a possible reason why spirit possession is denigrated today is that it violates modernity's plan for the orderly, industrial, and state discipline body. Boom. Yeah, that's a mic drop for Mayfariang. Yes, the spirit medium's body with its ecstasy, and unpredictability, and constant surrendering, its profound sensitivities, does not fit into the capitalist industrialist division of what bodies are for. Nor does it fit into the communist socialist utilitarianism of bodies, in which, as socialist hero lay fun described, bodies were to serve as common screws of the great machinery of industrialization and state building. Nord is the spirit medium's body fit the wellness community's vision of a whole perfect body actualized through a relentless focus on the self. With its perpetual turning over of agency, its alignment to a larger animacy, rather than an ownership of its own trauma, the spirit medium's body does not fit the psychology world's vision of what individualized well-adjusted bodies should be. The spirit medium's body certainly doesn't fit rogue-nask visions of the reclaimed Bronze Age body, But neither does it necessarily conform to modern feminist visions of what supposedly embodied feminine power looks like either. With its repeated voluntary self-subjugation in favor of greater powers and agency, the spirit medium's body calls into question all modern notions of power. It finds the power in the powerlessness, which is not a very popular thing to do or even talk about these days. In a world in which we are told that what we really want is autonomy and power. The idea that true power might dwell more in the unknowns than the known and that power might flow through bodies without any regard for modern visions of acceptability and control is a threat to any system, rationalist or religious that wants to put human agency at the pinnacle of all creations. It's threatening to the church because it suggests that all people are intermediaries. It's threatening to the scientists because it suggests unprovable, unimperically verifiable forces still govern behavior, that a huge part of the human experience has never been informed by reason and never ever will be. It's threatening to the factory owner because it will not sit and conform. In the garment factories outside Penon Pen Cambodia, young rural peasant women workers have fallen victim to local vengeful spirits called Niatta, whose lands have been disturbed by the factory invasions. These spirits possess some women and bark out orders to others causing mass fainting spells among the overwork female laborers. And widespread work stoppages. Some factory managers have even plaked at the Niatta with animal sacrifices. These days when the acta appear on the factory floor, they are helping the cause of Cambodia's largely young female and rural factory workforce by registering a kind of bodily objection to the harsh daily regimen of industrial capitalism. The shaking bodies of spirit mediums in trans, says young, showing the whites of their eyes are facial grimaces or foaming at the mouth. are not bodies in accord with modern disciplinary culture that has penetrated the world. Yes, there is a clash between the unfettered, expressive and unpredictable spokesperson for the gods and the disciplined industrial or clerical labor. There is a clash between sensitivity and the numbness required to carry out the industrialization project. Because if it's one thing, modernity requires of us,

The forging of the new world required numbness. To subject other human beings to the horror and suffering of slavery requires numbness. To institute large scale environment of destruction requires numbness. to kill on a battlefield with the new impossibly loud and possibly shocking weapons of scientific industrialization requires numbness. To vivisect living beings for the sake of progress requires numbness. To sentence people to a life in the factory requires numbness. To work in the factory requires numbness. Modern culture must become insensate in order to function. Here's what Adam Aaronovich from Healing from Healing has to say about all this.

modernity is the persecution of the sensitive, the felt, the senseate. The walls that civilization places between it and the wilds are walls of numbness. And fluid permeable nervous systems of individual bodies over time internalized those walls and the outer walls of the city become inner walls of numbness. The Seer, Isaiah saw this in a vision long ago, that the dominant culture would, quote, make the heart of the people fat and lead in. And their ears heavy, and it would shut their eyes closed. Do you feel this numbness? In the relentless traffic on the 405, in the anesthetizing glow of fluorescent light, In the bloodstream of a culture that requires 9 billions gallons of coffee a year, just to wake up in the morning and show up for life. A culture in which, as the saying goes, all things are full of weirdness, and there is nothing new under the sun. Don't you long to break free of the numbness? Haven't you had visions in which the culture on mass was uplifted out of its numbness? Haven't you seen us tearing ourselves free of the grave full of skin that has grown over us that has deadened our eyes and hearts? There is no possibility of knownness until the numbness is broken. So the Seer comes to alert culture to its numbness. The Seer describes the state of the cultural mind. The profit, the visionary, the mad, the sear, shouting wild-eyed at the city gates, does not sugarcoat the situation. They do not say that everything is going to be alright, or that if you ask the universe for what you want, it will inevitably provide. They do not come installing wellness, narratives, or propounding the law of attraction, or saying, just hold tight, we're all going to ascend the world. No, they come to announce times of doom and destruction. Times of societal stagnation of untenable systems and odds with nature. Of human ignorance jackbooting its way through history yet again. Of the balance of millions of lives hanging upon the whims of the least capable and most patchyly different men yet again. The seared laments, the numbness that is overtaken culture. How can we do this to each other again this year, Christ? Do we not see? Do we not see? This is the voice. Crying in the wilderness. Jeremiah laments the state of the nation, the state of Israel, the state of the body, the state of the world of world and the throes of great movements. I looked at the earth he says, and low it was waste and void. And to the heavens and they had no land. I looked on the mountains and low they were quaking. And all the hills moved to and fro. The land was waste and void. Sound familiar. Seeing the news recently. Oh, land, land, land, the profit cries, lamenting the state of the body of the culture, lamenting a culture of profiteers, of warmongers, of selfishness, of blindness, of oblivious billionaires gorging and weapons dealers raking it in while children are bombed in the street. Oh, my head were made of waters. and my eyes have found out of tears that I might weak day and night for the daughter of my people, says Jeremiah. The sear, the prophet, is not addressing behavioral problems, says Walter Brugman in the prophetic imagination. He has only the hope that the ache of the divine could penetrate the numbness of history. The prophet serves to offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. The prophet provides a way in which the stone wallet can be ended. So the sear traditionally wakes up the feeling body of a culture. The Seer's sensitivity, their bare feet, their wild hair, their tear-grinned eyes, are a wake-up call to culture. The Seer hopes only that the ache of the divine can penetrate the numbness of history. Have you felt this want? That the aching beauty of nature, the aching beauty of the trembling oak leaf in the sun that golden hour. The aching beauty of all that bleeds and seas, the aching beauty of death, the aching beauty of the living chandelier of stars above. At the aching beauty of the light that pours through in the strangest moments, during deep pauses, during brief glances, could wake us up, could wake the feeling body of the culture up. So in that honest, searing recognition of the state of things, the mad sear offers something besides doom and dismay. They offer an immediacy of rawness and urgency through which love can actually pour through. An invitation to wake up to the reality of this humble existence. That life has always been the most precarious of propositions. In whose maddening play we have never exerted much of what can be called control. But in the midst of all this, in the midst of the pain of a world determined to play out at cycles of anguish yet again. It's a victor and vanquished dramas again and again. A world determined to enact its own failings, its own miseries on another generation of children again. In the midst of all this, we can wake up. We can try in whatever small, seemingly insignificant ways to be conduits for love to pass through. We can feed each other. We can be there for each other. And we can, together, echo the Sears cry that proclaims to the overarching culture, wake up from your numbness. Wake up from your numbness. and feel. Feel. Wake up from your loneliness and feel. Some beams filter through black smoke, breezes, stir, how desperately we long to feel. All of this pain we enact on each other All of this perhaps is us longing, craving, wanting, wanting to truly feel. Everyone knows that the world says Roberto Coloso, always finds a way of making itself felt. And every attempt to avoid its intrusion cannot last long. The world will find a way to make itself felt. We impose a regiment of numbness and bodies break under the pressure and visions start pouring through. We impose normalcy and neurodivergence as flourish. We toxify the world in environmental sensitivity skyrocket. We count reason and suppress the old gods, and then the honor gods bubble forth as war deities. The world will make us feel one way around. And this feeling, this feeling body is a good thing. For most of human history profound sensitivity was a good thing. a sought after quality even. The pathologization, othering and ridicule of sensitivity is a modern thing, an internalization of civilizational walls. Sensitivity seen as emotional instability, as opposed to sensitivity as a profound, cultural asset. So, unothered, unpathologized, sensitivity used to be evenly distributed throughout the culture. Spend time and indigenous traditions in you encounter a lot of very sensitive people, but not sensitive in the way that we're used to thinking of sensitive. Sensitive, hunters, sensitive weaver. The hunter wants sensitivity. The weaver wants sensitivity. It takes sensitivity across the stream with your child on your back and feel out a safe place to sleep for the night. It takes sensitivity to distinguish the edible from the inedible talked to any plant knowledgeable culture, and they'll tell you that plants were navigated not through trial and error, but through sensitivity. Doctors for a long time were the most sensitive of people. In the Ascleapian traditions, doctors had to have fluency and navigating the dream space. Dream navigation was a big part of being a doctor. even the ruler wants sensitivity. They want to feel the realm as their own body. The grail king is wounded and the land is wounded. The reciprocal relationship between king and land, land and king is felt in the sensitivities of the ruler's body. The swordsmith wants to feel the tip of the sword while holding the handle. The firekeeper wants hands that can assess the qualities of the wood by feel. We are sensitive We are run through with the flaming spears of angels and we cry out like Saint Teresa. Unlike Joan, we see blazing visions in the garden. Old stories course through us, you and I. Dreams of times, long past. Echoes in the garden. Do you hear the voices in the garden? Calling in the garden? Archangels in the garden. Do you hear? What are now labeled as hyper vigilance? hypersensitivity in neurodivergence, these are part of a tapestry that used to live and find place and be distributed through the body of a culture. The sensitivities of a culture used to be distributed among all of its people. Now, sensitivity is outsourced to artists and to mental patients. Modernity wants numbness of us, but of course it doesn't want to believe that it wants numbness. So we empower a small subclass of sensitive Modernity wants artists to traverse sensitive other worlds. Yet we want them clearly delineated in their boxes. They're in those boxes we neuter their power. Remove them from sacredness or from true cultural centrality. We enshrine sensitive artists. Yet when their unankered sensitivities get the best of them and they shave their heads in attack paparazzi with umbrellas, I see you Brittany. than we publicly mock their instabilities. And if not mock, we explain away their instabilities. Not as larger driving forces in the body of a culture torn from its own ancestral sensitivities, but instead as pathologies to be rooted out and burned. I ask why it is that the intuitive has been vilified by civilization after civilization? Here's a follow-up question. What would civilization be without intuitive to persecute? For civilization is precisely that which banishes the mysterious, which is perpetually in the act of extricating the mysterious from its body, with its walls and all pervasive lighting and neatly categorized social divides. Civilization is all that is not mysterious. Unmapped geographies are mysterious. Let's map them. Humans are prone to speeding down lonely highways at night listening to mysterious music. Well, we'll make self-driving cars. Civilization is that very force which burns the mysterious thing. It must banish all hidden spaces all suggesting that we are not the ones in control. It must banish greater than human narratives because the only controllable world is a humanist world. Since modernity is the banishing of the animate from day to day concern and consideration, then of course it vilifies those who speak aloud with animate forces. Since modernity cares nothing of ancestry, then of course it vilifies those who channel ancestry. Since modernity runs from death, of course it vilifies those who cross over into the other world. Since modernity defines agency as that which lives within one body isolated from all other bodies, then of course it vilifies those who dwell in a world of higher agencies, multiple bodies beyond our control. And here's where it gets really interesting. If we take colossus words that the world will always find a way to make itself felt, then the persecution of intuitives too is a twisted societal attempt to find that feeling of body. The persecution of the intuitive is simultaneously the attempt to extricate those who feel too much and to restore its own feeling body, because it's gotten so twisted, that it can only feel when it is burning someone. It can only feel when it is bombing someone. Modernity burns those who feel as a way to itself feel. You know, that force that only loves most things because it loves to see them break. It says, someday, you will ache like I am. Feel this, the first accuser, not accused, the first accuser in the Salem witch trials, was a teenage girl who was uncomfortable with things that she was feeling. Itchings, burnings, goose bumps in the night, hidden things awakening. She took that feeling, externalized it and put it on trial. And then how did she feel when she watched the accused burn? What arose that? modernity bands feeling and then finds its own arrows through burning those who feel it finds its arrows through war through trial through the temporary rush of relief brought by shouts and tears and flames in the night so it's easy to say that modernity wants nothing to do with witches but it's not so easy modernity wants witches to burn It wants to repeat the same refrain over and over again about witches and shamans and intuitives and psychics. They are out of control and therefore will topple civilization. This you will topple civilization narrative was at play in the witch and where wolf trials of the 17th century. It was at play in the 1980s heavy metal panic It's very much at play in the collision between the scientific rational and the new age conspiratorial. Those new age conspiracy theorists are a threat that will topple civilization. People scratch their heads at the rise of new age conspiratorialism, but it's extremely simple. Whatever we describe in any given era as civilized, normal, informed, rational behavior, the intuitive, the madman on the fringe that trickster at the gates will be articulating consciously or unconsciously, the hidden feelings underneath. The ghosts of that proclamation, the buried bodies, the subverting narrative. It doesn't matter if those narratives are out there or who are even flat out wrong. They serve a distinct, somatic purpose within the body of a culture. It has to do with how we are with shadow, with sensitivities, with unspoken longing. Have you ever seen a family with buried narratives in which one sibling acts out the hidden sensitivities? Right, they get sick a lot, or they'd self-appoint us the familial sacrifice of the kingdom you ever seen that. This is the same familial dynamic expanded society. So the new age conspiratorialist is not a tumor to be extricated, not an aberration. If we actually believe in taking a whole system's approach to culture, then we have to be willing to see the role that everything plays and what everything is responding to. The fragmentation that are being acted out by what we call the fringe, the imbalances that are being responded to, the unvoiced sensitivities. This is a way that culture processes itself. And the prophet, the seeer, the visionary invites the people into a sensitivity that cannot be quantified by the metrics of civilization. The seeer invites dreams that have no ostensibly rational purpose. and do not fall along scientific narratives of validity or invalidity. The Seer speaks of hidden shadow. The Seer and Acts all we ridicule and despise. They wear camel hair robes when camel hair is distinctly out of style. And all the civilizational narratives can do is point at the Seer and accuse them of being vagabonds, charlatans, fringe, out there, woo, you're taking advantage of the people civilization says. You know, civilization that is utterly built upon taking advantage of the people. You're feeding the people false narratives civilization says. Civilization that is itself built on false narratives, your charlatans says civilization itself constructed by charlatans. See what I mean? Modernity has been accusing intuitives of being charlatans for a very long time. The 19th century in Europe in the United States saw a huge rise in the growth of spiritism, of spiritist traditions in which a regular vision group rapture and speaking with the dead were front and center. Spiritism at that time was hardly fringe. Spiritism drew many, many followers, and influenced not only other spiritual traditions across the New World, but also had a direct impact on modern science. Yes, there were spiritists from all walks of life, including a whole lot of scientists. Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the grandfathers of evolutionary biology and the theory of natural selection was a spiritist. As was chemist and physicist William Crookes, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist and Nobel Laureate Pierre Curie, and of course Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Sherlock Holmes. That's right, the creator of that classic, deductive, rationalist character Sherlock Holmes was himself a spiritist, because shocking, right, there was not such a hard dichotomy between spirit and science then. But what's interesting is that if you look up the word spiritism now in the United States, what you mostly find is cases of investigations of fake sciences. Fake sciences, you know, someone behind a screen makes eerie voices and thumps the floor and people are tricked into thinking they're actually communicating with the dead. Kenneth Brana's recent film, A Haunting Inventus, was all about this. If you open an inquiry into spiritism these days, you might think that spiritism was only fake sayances. But of course, that's not the full picture either. That too is a function of Western cultures, other thing of the intuitive. For if you research a speed atismo in its Cuban context, or a speed atismo in its Brazilian context, you'll find something very different. You'll find descriptions of traditions that form the lifeblood of communities that are practiced far and wide and respected and considered utterly and completely normal. That provide, according to anthropologists, a positive impact on their communities. That give people a means to grieve and be in dialogue and to process communal issues and to heal. So why does the North American mind file spiritism away as factory? Does this mean that there's something different about North American spiritism? That there are more charlatans here that need to be outed? Why do over a dozen states in the United States and several northern European nations still have laws against all forms of divination? For that matter, why are anti-fortune telling laws almost exclusively limited to Puritan nations? For 200 years of the so-called Enlightenment, fortune telling accessing a cult powers, spirit, mediumship was punishable by death in England. The justification for such laws was that impressionable, gullible women needed to be protected against charlatans. Is that really what those laws were for? Protecting women? In 1824, British Parliament revised the law, but still maintained fortune telling, astrology, and spiritualism as punishable offenses. New Zealand and Australia have historically had anti-forge-intelling laws, anti-spiritist laws. In the US states of Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all forms of fortune telling are illegal. And take a look, it's not the Catholic countries, not the Hindu countries, not the European countries. It's very specifically the Protestant countries. Is that because Protestant countries are inherently home to more Charlottes? No, what's different is the ecology. The Puritan response to visions. Modern, Western, puritanically derived culture is much less accepting of anything that is not supported within the very narrow, binary lens of scientific validity. Either something is valid or it's not. How could it be otherwise? Either the science backs it up or it doesn't. Either it's God or the Devil. But my friends, not everything in the universe requires a scientific discussion about real or fake, about valid or invalid. When the shaman pulls a smoking coal or a tooth out of a body, did it really come out of the body? When Sophie Strand says that theatricality is deeply important to healing, what she's talking about? Let's put it this way. What makes an effective sense is very different than what makes a good lab experiment The metrics of a science or a ceremony do not simply fall into valid or not valid. Ritual is an ongoing, enacted dialogue. The theatricality, the enactment, opens a portal to embodied dialogue whether or not you consider the spirit beings at the heart of it, what I'm quote, real or valid or not. In the bodies of communities, in relationships, in ongoing fluid situations between people. The metric is not always valid or invalid. The metric of human feeling and human thriving is not categorized by valid or invalid. And communities ultimately are navigated through feeling. If you want to reach communities, then you do so through the body of residents of feeling, of enacting of ongoing somatic dialogue. Or you can try dismissing entire communities as invalid and see what happens. You can deride communities for seeing things differently and then see if the change that you want happens. See if we get to anything new or different, right? Within the felt experience of communities all across the globe forever and ever, acknowledging and performing the mysterious, the ineffable acting as a crossover between the immediate and the vaster world has had a very specific ceiling roll to play in culture, and the results are tangible. I mean, if you have an actually been to a transposition ritual, then you really have very little to offer the discussion on real or unreal. Because when the music starts rising, and the beat starts pounding, and the chant grows in intensity, And the tremor takes the room. Oh, tremor takes the room. The bodies begin to convulse. And I mean convuls. I mean children convulsing elephant. And yes, Cassandra, the sky rips open as you've seen it 2,000 times. The sky rips open my holy love, the angel's spear all the flame. It would be extremely difficult to somehow categorize what's going on as unreal. And this gets it something important that's going to inform the rest of this episode. Something I mentioned in the first part of the episode as well. The sear is responding to something real. Whether you or I like it or not, whether you or I agree with their conclusions or not, the intuitive is responding to something real. A real need in the culture. A real need in the body. The sear is not simply a charlatan. The sear is meeting the need of ongoing discourse with ancestor. meeting the need of bridging the worlds. The Seer is enacting the sensitivity body of a culture that vilifies sensitivity and not all of those enactments are going to conform to what scientific rationalism wants them to. The Seer is meeting the need of navigating liminal spaces which one day may be very important to the overall culture. Because culture far more often than not, moves towards where seers, where intuitive, where artists and visionaries pointed. And here, I'm going to offer a little parenthesis because it's important to acknowledge the reality of spiritual charlatans and spiritual grift. It's important to acknowledge how unmoored and unankered all this has gotten in the modern world. None of what I'm saying is to say that spiritual grift doesn't exist. Of course it does. Grift, right? You know the word, grift, the con game, the scam. Just to be totally clear, there are false profits. There is plenty of great A certified new age fuckerie out there. Have you seen the HBO series that just dropped Love as one about the Crestone Colorado-based mother-god cult started by a former McDonald's employee and guided by a disembodied fifth-dimensional galactic team including Robin Williams and the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin? Yeah. There are false prophets. Spiritual grift exists. There is plenty of charlatanism and fakery passing the spiritual. And people have practiced spiritual grift for a very long time. In 13th century Baghdad of former spiritual charlatan outlined all the ways that people can get tricked by spiritual grift chapter by chapter. It's called the Book of charlatans. And it includes such gems as quote Expozae of the tricks of astrologers who apply their trade on the highway. Expozae of the tricks of the tricks of the tricks of those who manipulate fire. Expozae of the tricks have pressed the digitators and on and on. That's a whole lot of trickery and there's a whole lot more.

I grew up at the height of the first wave of the new age movement. I'll tell you straight up, I saw a whole lot of grift. I mean, I was criticizing and satirizing new age grift 30 years ago. Here's me at age 22 satirizing new age grift.

Yep, I saw people promising the ascension at least once a year. and then I saw them scramble when the day passed and guess what we were all still here and we still had to unclog the train and do the laundry and John Lennon didn't pick us up on the mothership spiritual grift happens. And this of course is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you draw a false dichotomy between spiritual and rational, you can be sure people are going to live that dichotomy. If you push everything or regular to the side and other it, if you make something fringe, then it will become French. And this is part of why I say that it's more common in Puritan cultures. Because Puritan cultures push spiritualism, push the visionary to the side, and then the visionary goes underground free of context. And once it becomes French, once it becomes unmord from context, anyone can say anything. Anyone can claim anything. Anyone can say, source told me and use it to justify anything that they want to. Like, how convenient, right? Source told me exactly what I wanted to hear. Again, I mean, is it Source or is it more just what you wanted to hear? You know what I mean? Is it Source or is it you removed from context on tempered with communal accountability? You know, Source told me I'm on a divine mission. Source told me I'm infinitely special. Source told me to leave my partner because my true calling is polyamory. I mean, you know, it could happen. I guess Source could tell someone that. But is it Source? Or is it anatomically maybe a little lower down? Like is it Source? Or is it possibly just you wanting to sleep around? In my rock and roll view if you know we just called it sleeping around. Now it's gotta be couched in some larger spiritual terminology, right? Like, I'm composting colonial monogamy narratives in favor of conscious polyamory. Could it be that you're just sleeping around? Don't cancel me Asheville, I still love you. So, yeah, source told me. Source told me the QAnon Truth about teenage mutant Ninja Turtles and somehow it all comes back to pizza. Source told me about direct energy weapons. Source told me poverty as a mindset. Source told me the universe favors me and by everyone else. Source read killed me. Wait, was I read Pilder? Blue Pilder was I? Old Pilder or was I? New Pilder? Was I me Pilder? You Pilder was I totally emptied? Or was I refilled? or is the real question? Why everybody so pillible? Open up the mind, listen to the syllable. Tell me, did I decolonize our DD colonized and inempting the colonial narratives on class culture, gender, and race was I actually empty to anything? Or did another colonial narrative simply take that one's place? Was I, fed, regurgitated horses from the knowledge of all ages past and lands abroad? And before I even took time to grow them into wisdom, I vomited them back up like the parrots of the titary of Upanishad. I saw the best minds of my generation healing from healing says, destroyed by TikTok wellness trend. Source told me I'm lost, wandering, searching, grassland. and wandering the unankered mystic is subject to the other side of visions. Illusions. What healing from healing calls, quote, ego-inflation, delusions of grander, messianic fever dreams and generally ungrounded approaches to sense-making and meaning-making. Cassandra, unmord. In an unankered world, have we forgotten what anchored spirituality even looks like? do we know that it could be anything other than a reinforcement of individual specialness? It's interesting because having studied in Indian tradition quite a bit and spent time in places like cremation grounds and this kind of thing, the overarching message of those spiritualities tends to be one of complete and total self obliteration, which bears no resemblance at all to spirituality exists so that the universe can reinforce my absolutely special place in it.

And look, Everyone's going to navigate the current circus the best they can. Everyone is navigating all this the best they can. I'll just say that I have some concern for the generation raised on digital wellness mixed spirituality. It must be extremely hard to know what the signs of a genuine tradition, a genuine wisdom keeper are in this climate. It must be extremely hard to know the difference between revelation and selling something, between saying all the right wise words and actually being a conduit for wisdom.

But like, the idea that in ones early 20s that one would be able to guide someone else on their life is, yeah, it's preposterous.

value to the stages. I mean, I just spent a year with folks like studying the myths and the very end, very, very end.

And perhaps all that ultimately matters is if you actually have a container to hold any of this knowledge whatsoever. Yeah. It must be hard to know that there actually is such a thing as wisdom, as mastery. as a deliberately cultivated ecology in which mystic experience can thrive. For, for my experience anyway, wisdom has certain hallmarks, certain indicators. And those hallmarks, those indicators are quite often the exact opposite, as the spirituality we see on social media. So, this is fresh for me, right? Because I spent three hours yesterday on a Zoom call with an aboriginal elder talking story. And then I went and I watched Love His One, the documentary about the crestone called, in which completely unmoored and unankered 20-somethings are spewing fifth-dimensional celestial nonsense and thinking that they're God, right? And I'm feeling a little spiritual whiplash. And what it reminded me of and what it makes me want to say is, there's such a thing as good story and bad story. Tyson, young reporter, and I have talked about this. There's such a thing as story aligned with the cycles of nature and story completely unmoored. And there's a reason why wisdom traditions keep coming back to the same understandings over and over and over again. There is such a thing as spirituality that is utterly and completely grounded in the real, the felt experience of the real and how the real unfolds over time, but the real, the real isn't always popular, because to connect to the real takes work. So, and again, all this is my opinion. You can take it or leave it. But from what I've studied, the real, the true wisdom, isn't self-concert. It doesn't broadcast itself. It isn't trying to show anything. So here's a paradox, right? Even in doing this podcast, I might just be showing all the ways in which I'm not yet wise. I mean, if I'd really figured all this stuff out, I wouldn't have to talk about it, right? And so, if I ever slip into the territory of trying to show something, or prove something, and I'm sure I do, because we all do. If ever I'm trying to be mystical, trying to wow you, then those are the exact moments that I've veered from was them. If I'm trying to show you who I am, Maybe I'm showing you going not. What if just what if there were a direct equation between how much we say we know and how little we actually know? And as the doubt-tating says those who tell do not know and those who know do not tell. If I'm wearing the feathers but I haven't earned the feathers, wearing the roads, but haven't earned the roads, wearing the molla but haven't earned the molla. than all I'm showing is everything that I haven't yet grasped. Haven't yet heard. What if true wisdom is invisible to the untrained eye? What if instead of showy, instead of being couched in all the right dormants, all the right paraphernalia, all the right vernacular? What if it is close and transmitted in hidden acts of kindness? and passed on in wordless embraces. What if it is tucked away like an amulet in a hidden drawer? What if it is like the house of Tom Bombadil? In its simplicity, in its simple songs, in its warm, hearth, and its stocked, larder, and its welcoming host. It's home to a magic so deep, it's hard to even see. What if the true mystics are really, really hard to see? And what if to see them we have to change our whole way of seeing. Away from the show and into the real. The word mystic itself means what? It means hidden. That's something worth thinking about in an age when there are a lot of self-advertised mystics on the internet. the mystic that hidden is available specifically to those who are able to hold things and not broadcast them outwards. For sometimes, I'm sure you know the moment you broadcast something out, spill it out, reveal too much. It's lost. And I'm not saying that one has to keep everything secret and everyone who makes a living in the spiritual marketplace or advertises their services is somehow wrong or something like that. not at all. This isn't a judgment, this is an invitation. And what I'm talking about is an energetic thing. Broadcasting something outward is not the same as having actually learned it. Saying something is not the same as living it. Anyone can broadcast all the right wisdom phrases. But when I'm alone, and there's no one for me to show anything to Do I still speak to the winds? Do I still fault my knees before the powers? Do I still attend to the shrine lovingly? Do I still sing your name in the night holy mystery? Do I honor you over and over again? Turn it over to you over and over again? Do I practice? Tell me. How does one come by wisdom? Is there any other answer than through time, through the relentless pulse of life's repetitive fire? But who has time for that? Who has time to actually grow at the pace of change? And so this is perhaps the deeper grift. It's not that spirituality lends itself inherently to grifters. but that like everything else, it's been subsumed completely into the marketplace. It's been sucked into the same market forces it supposedly decrys. For me, a much more valid criticism of the new age has not to do with the fact that it involves irrationality, or that its metrics of success are unverifiable, but that it has become indistinguishable from free market capitalism. and the place of the mystic is now synonymous with the place of the online influencer. The grift is not that someone spoke to the dead or to the unseen forces, people have been doing that forever. The grift is that they immediately started selling a speak to the dead in five easy steps course after one conversation. The grift is that premonition, sensitivity, intuition, must translate into individualist notions of self-improvement and career advancement. that every vision is supposed to yield likes and opportunities to reach new audiences. That creativity must equal, as Scout Wiley says, productivity. This is the larger grift of capitalism. And because of this unmoving, spiritual, new age-grift, intuitive grift becomes inseparable from the larger culture of capitalist grift. So now we get to the real con, the real scam, the real grift. Capitalism, the greatest grift of all. The methodical, deliberate convincing that you are not complete as you are, that you must constantly want more. The life is inherently incomplete without a heine can so frosty that it's beating with moisture. that you alone are the architect of your own isolated self-sufficient salvation. And this grift wraps its tendrils around intuitive forces them into the what am I to do with these gifts, question, and how can I convert this all into a meaningful career conversation that would be irrelevant in a communal culture where those gifts would have context in which to live. Cassandra wanders Through the tides of postmodern detritus, a drift in a sea of merchant swag. Where do I turn, Cassandra has? Where do I turn? Cassandra numbs herself. Cassandra, doom scrolls just to feel something. Cassandra pours lattes eight hours a day and can't even pay the rent. Far from Apollo's temple. Far from the gods, golden feet. Cassandra is lost, victim of the deepest grift there is. So charlatanism and capitalism are closely intertwined. charlatanism is a function of having societal outliers. In an unankered context, the intuitive lives on the fringe and then is prone to that most time-honored of fringe activities. The There's a whole lot of focus right now on spirituality as a con. If you were to listen to some, you might get the sense that all spirituality is a con. And I don't mind a good laugh at the expense of the wackiest aspects of the new age. But there's something about the growing critique, the post-COVID critique of anything that remotely goes against the status quo of anything outside that extremely narrow metric of valid or invalid. That sounds a little like something other than good nature criticism sounds a little different than deep inquiry or an attempt at conversation around what are truly legitimate issues. Some of it is sounding a whole lot like Burn the Intuitive. You know, the implied flip side of trust the science. Don't trust anyone who's not a scientist or does not use scientific rationalism as their primary method of interacting with reality. All who do not get in line with the rationalist group thing will be banished. And let's just make something really clear here. There are a whole lot of grifters out there and only some of them are spiritual. Charlottonism is not in any way limited to intuitive sears or spiritual seekers. It is equal opportunity. It touches every community and has participants from every community. So yeah, there's religious grift. There's also scientific grift plenty of it. both in that there are fraudulent scientists and there are scientists putting all their time and energy and legitimate rationalist science towards fraudulent premises. There is mainstream medical grift. There is insurance company grift. There is pharmaceutical grift. There is political grift. There is military grift. There is academic grift. Pull out of that. There is right wing grift. Absolutely, of course. And there's also possibly left wing grift too. could it be that there's such a thing as anti-racist-grift, straight-grift, gay-grift, and trans-grift, black-grift, and white-grift, every community I've ever encountered has grifters. There are scientists across Korea and China fleasing people with fraudulent backyard gene editing technologies. Google scientific fraud and see what comes up. A whole lot. Sam Keen's book, The Ice Pick Surgeon, details the darker side of scientific history complete with plenty of fraud, backstabbing, falsifying, not to mention human trafficking, unwilling experimentation, you know, grift with real-life consequences. The title character, the ice pick surgeon, lobotomized thousands of women for being hysterics. You know what that means, right? He cut out parts of their brains to numb them to their sensitivities. because of their inability or unwillingness to conform to a numb world, they were numbed permanently. Quote, Walter Freeman called himself the Henry Ford of Psycho Surgery, the man who took lobotomies to the masses. So there's medical grift, a long history of it. That same Persian book, The Book of Charlottes, that outlines all the varieties of spiritual grift, also outlines medical grift. But that was 13th century Baghdad, right? Surely things have changed. Yeah, they have, and they haven't. Medical malpractice claims tens of thousands of lives per year in the US alone. 50,000 is the low estimate. There are estimates that are a lot higher. And that doesn't even count the hundreds of thousands more who are misdiagnosed, or the racial bias that is often implicit in that misdiagnosis, or the two million people abusing prescription opioids, So, a little news flash here. The medical establishment is not the arbiter of all that is true, right, and rational in the world. It has its share of negligence, a fraud, a salesmanship, and grift. In a country in which the entire medical system is deeply bound up in the larger capitalist grift, criticism of the mainstream medical establishment is absolutely 100% unequivocally warranted. Do I agree with all the ways that criticism manifests? All the new age pseudo-cures, all the Ivermectin mania? No, but it's important to remember. The sear is responding to something real. When Jeremiah asks, is there no bomb in Gilead? When he asks, in a country of medicine dealers, why is everyone sick? He's addressing something real. When he asks, is there no doctor? Is there no doctor in the land? He's addressing something real. Even the most conspiratorial of conspiracy theories is seeking ultimately to address something real, fragmentation, disconnect. So there are grifters everywhere the system is a grift. Is there a place to criticize spiritual grift? Absolutely. as long as we remember that grief does not limited the spirituality. That empaths aren't actually the worst people in the world. You know the meme I'm talking about right? I'm actually an empath, says literally the worst person you know. Yeah, that's a pretty good meme. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Like, we've all known that questionable empath, right? We all know smart me, festival dude who talks a big spiritual game and then tries to hit on your partner the minute you leave to go to the bathroom, right? We all know at this point I would assume some of the defining characteristics of new age, grift. But just to set things in their right place a bit, the worst people in the world aren't in fact empath. The worst people in the world are people whose defining characteristic is lack of empathy, like child traffickers, or weapons dealers, or the guy who designs newer and better landmines or cluster munitions or phosphorus bombs, or the guy who bombs children because it's justified. or the lawyer who legally defends Exxon as it poisons huge swaths of Ecuadorian rainforest, and then when pushed to answer why the indigenous people have sky high rates of cancer, proclaims. Well, I don't know. I mean, I do know that they're an unsanitary people. Look it up. Just as a reminder of the three most likely world ending scenarios, the three most probable ways that human beings could offer, You know, the most likely scenarios for human doomsday is guess what they're not being brought to us by mystics and intuitives. They're being brought to us by scientists. The AI scenario, the nuclear war scenario, the climate change scenario, all are a result of relentless scientific innovation free from embodied ethics. And here's a place where it's important to be really playing about the current culture of enshrining scientists as selfless gods. Sure, modern Western science does a tremendous amount of good science makes all this possible 100%. And science has also played a major, major role in getting us into the mess we're in. The planetary environmental consequences that humanity faces right now were brought to us courtesy of Francis Bacon-style rapacious extractive science. The forever chemicals that are poisoning ecosystems were isolated by scientists who never paused to ask, should we? Or is this a good idea? The power to destroy the world four times over was brought to us by scientists. War in the era of industrialization is made possible by scientists. Religious fanaticism gets its weaponry and its destructive capability from technological innovations brought to us through science. So science, when pointed towards the wonder of nature and the selfless search for cures for illnesses and the preservation of ecologies, is wonderful. But science is a methodology, not an end into itself. And that methodology is pointed a whole lot of other places too. As a little reality check, the majority of scientists in the world are not actually climate scientists, tirelessly working to save the planet. There are far more military scientists working to create more efficient ways of blowing other people up than there are scientists who soul objective is to save ecologies. Science serves ideologies, serves mythic narratives, just like everything else does. It serves get rich quick narratives. It serves transcendentalist narratives all the time. It serves extractive narratives and destructive narratives and narratives of violence every single day. The scientific method is a tried and true and wonderful way of arriving at objective truth. But make no mistake as it is practiced today. Within the framework of global capitalism, it too is an ideology. The idea that the most natural thing to do with our lives is to continually extract more information out of the universe. And that that information is to be used for forward moving societal progress. This is an ideology. It's a Promethian ideology. Science when aligned with slow growth ideology, with traditions that understand nature on nature's term. that understand as science is coming to the value of whole systems thinking, the value of ecology and enacted reconnection to it. The value of lighting a candle to the ancestors and the value that all parts of an ecosystem play in the health of the whole. This is beautiful. This is science that can be of good use. But which larger narrative science decides to point itself towards depends on the ability to feel. to seek connections, to feel ethics in one's bones. And this requires realigning science to an ecological, ethical, dare I say mystical heart, that more often asks, how does this feel to work on this? Versus, I'm going to do this regardless of the cost, just because I can. And some won't believe this, but I'm not saying any of this to vilify science or scientists. I'm saying it all to say that when people don't just immediately fall in line to trust the science, there's a reason for it. Remember, the sear is responding to something real. The intuitive is responding to something real. The fringe is responding to something real. They're responding to the hollowness of the refrain trust the experts. in a collapsing world. They're responding to the paralysis the royal stasis that Brutman spoke about. Trust the market, trust the science. The Seer comes to say, really? Cassandra wanders the streets of Troy, barefoot. She can see beyond doubt, beyond words she can see with illuminated fire, finally etched at the edges. The course that all this is taking and all the while what did the voices around her say? Trust the experts, Cassandra. Troy can't fall, look at our achievements, we're indestructible. Can't we learn from the past? Can't we learn from other traditions? Can't we learn from our ancestors that there needs to be a container in which the ecstatic and the pragmatic? The sensitive and the anchored can live together indivisibly. that the science spirit divide is totally pointless. And you know, I really only get into science spirit discourse when I have to. When discourse gets so dichotomized that I feel it needs to be blown open. I only enter this territory when I feel it's absolutely necessary. Why? Because it's so fucking boring. Western discourse around the false dichotomy of science and spirit is boring. I mean, it's kindergarten type stuff. Science or spirit. Rationalism or intuition. The world doesn't work this way. There's no need to divide. History is full of scientists who saw visions of fringe cultural movements that informed scientific revolutions. a vital cultural crossover between the fringe and the mainstream of spiritual sciences, Solomonic sciences, of hermatic wisdoms, of gods that ruled both magic and science at once. It's very well documented that there have been many, many scientists who had visions that informed their scientific work. In fact, there's almost always some type of vision at the heart of a scientific theory. You know about Ramonuja, right? the famous Indian mathematician who received his formulas in vision, in which a goddess inscribed them upon his tongue. Quote, Ramanujan eventually said that the formulas came to him in a dream, presented as mathematical truth by his family goddess, nominating a man. chemist August Kekulei had a, quote, somnalent vision of a snake biting its tail, a dream that revealed the true structure of the benzene ring. He describes it like this. I turned my chair to the fire, and dosed. Again, the atoms were gambling before my eyes. This time, the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eyes rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations. Long rows sometimes more closely fitted together, all twisting and turning and snake-like motion. But look, what was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form world mockingly before my eyes. as if by a flash of lightning I woke in this time, also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. So there are scientific visionaries, yes. And science follows the cultural lead of sears, intuitive, spiritualists, and artists all the time. Ecological science would not be what it is today without the movement of Eastern spiritual traditions and their visions of interconnectedness to the West. The scientific vision of Gaia, arose out of experiences of living ecology that the 60s generation had while in states of anthropogenic rapture. In modern medicine today antibiotics are prescribed far less than they used to be. Why? It's because fringe practitioners have alternative medicine pointed the way for 40 plus years first. Why is organic food mainstream? Because people on the fringe didn't trust the science. The science, you know, that said DDT is fine. Visionaries impact all aspects of culture. All of modern activist culture, all including climate activism. It's all built on the foundations laid by visionary spiritual movements. The entire organizational structure and methodology of modern activist movements is derived from Gandhi and Satjagraha, and MLK's civil rights movement, which was decidedly spiritual. It goes on. AI is a big topic right now, right? AI culture is steeped in at theogenic ceremony. Trust me. Visions obtained in spiritual ceremony are driving AI science just as LSD drove the creation of the internet itself. So, before we undertake a societal purge of all things pseudo, of all things we deem at this extremely limited finite point in time to be quackery, let's remember what Arthur Conan Doyle, that rationalist spiritist said. He said the quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. And he said, the charlatan is always the pioneer. And this gets to something interesting about the critical discourse around spiritual Charlotte andism. Of course we want abusive gurus to be exposed. Of course we want those on the fringe who are fleasing and harming people to face consequences. But it's also good to remember the role that the fringe plays, that movements that specifically ruffle our feathers play in culture. Having people on the fringe is important. For the fringe is the mangrove swamp of culture, where ideas percolate and new life generates. Where fresh and salt water mix and the resultant soup is a womb space for cultural transformation. There's a goddess that rules the espace. Have you heard? Rules the mangrove swamp of culture. She does not conform to narratives of everything neat and tidy in its safe little boxes. She's the ocean itself. It washes away all boundaries. She won't let science stay science or intuition stay intuition. Her song is a song of permeability and transportation of new cultural possibilities emerging from unintentional womb spaces She challenges us directly to let all things in culture flow to let them be Even the things that we sometimes disagree with Imagine a world so bound up in its categorical boxes that it could not imagine how the very perception of reality exists on a spectrum. Scientific studies show that 15 to 20 percent of the modern population are what they term HSPs or highly sensitive people. They literally perceive differently. They gain insights differently. And the study says having a population of HSPs that remains just about that percentile is culturally advantageous. In other words, it's good to have a fringe that sees things differently than you. To expect that people who literally perceive reality differently are always going to see things the way that we want them to, or even vote the way that we want them to. is to be blind to how a college is actually work. Blind to what ecological diversity actually is. Recognizing difference means recognizing actual difference. Diverse ecology is not just people of all races and creates and orientations viewing things exactly the same way and all lining up for the same causes together. Diverse ecology is the dynamics of actual difference. And it used to be that the progressive movement was that which specifically held space for such difference. That used to be the heart of progressivism. Progressivism used to hold space for alternative. Alternative viewpoints, alternative medicine, alternative ways of seeing the world. What is it now, my wonder? In my view, we have to hold space for difference, even if difference challenges us, especially if difference challenges us. Because it's possible that even in those spaces in which things are seen so differently than we see them, something might be unlocked or realized or come to life or come to be that moves culture in a particular direction that holds benefits for future generations. That is the Iranian unpredictability of how culture change happens. It's never been the case that only rationalists are only scientists move culture forward. Nor will it be the case, nor should it be the case. The equations that govern culture are not simply equations of safety and predictability. We are called in an age of rupture to develop a facility a comfort even in the precarity of multiplicity. We have to learn what it is to be more comfortable with expressions that don't look like what we consider normal, safe, or rational. And if the counterpoint is, but those expressions are dangerous, I have some news for you. Life is dangerous. Art is dangerous. Science is dangerous. Technology is dangerous. Your phone is dangerous. Right now you have technology in your pocket that could bankrupt your family and steal years from your life and leave you an agitated broken mess. That's dangerous. Like we're somehow okay with people hearing voices beamed at them andcessantly by corporate marketing departments. But start hearing voices direct from the river or the tree and that's problematic, right? All of it is dangerous. A person could live their whole lives thinking that money brings happiness. That is dangerous. Within this sociocultural culture alternative futures are not going to come from simply trusting the status quo. As Walter Brugman said, quote, in our achieved satiation, we have neither the width nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. Alternative futures are going to come from the edges. from Cassandra's roaming the outskirts of Troy, from marginalized farm girls with angelic visions in the garden, from artists who are not relegated to merely entertain us, nor limited by a list of approved causes, from unlikely Jeremiah's unforeseen paths into the future will spring. So the short form is this. For the intuitive, for the seers, to fully grow into their potentiality, visions must live within an ecology. Time must be spent on the mountain. Time must be spent within the circle of accountability, within the council of elders. Visions must stand the test of how they live within communities and bodies. Vision's serve society best when anchored in context, and that context can only come with time, study over time. And society, you must honor this year. You must honor this year because the sear bears gifts. gifts that can seem weird, or other, but that can shake culture away from its stasis. The visionary has a healing role to play in culture. If we let the visionary do their work, the more the intuitive is pushed to the fringe, the more fringe their ideas become, but make a place for the visionary, and then culture has space to move, and to breathe, and to see. at this precarious juncture in the modern world in which we can't seem to lift our heads beyond next quarter to actually plan for anything resembling a future in which we staunchly refuse to learn from the lessons of the past because we fear and deplore that past and its mountains of bones. We need this year more than ever. To realign us to the flow of time, the flow of history, to exercise the possessing entities of our relentless forward charge. We need one friend said a mass cultural exorcism. The ghosts that are piling up on our road to progress aren't symbols or individual psychological forces. They require actual material recognition. They require food and singing. They ask that we pause right when the whole world wants to rush forward in anxiousness. In a world of sleeplessness, they ask that we dream again and dream with something other than ourselves. The more precarious these times become, the more a Cassandra's will emerge, shouting doom for Troy. The more Jeremiah's will be crying from the mountain tops, calling for a new world to wake. Will we listen? Will we repair broken threads that reach back a thousand generations? Will we make room for revelation? Oh, but we have to make room for revelation. We have to make room for trembling on the mountain top. We have to hold our arms out stretched in the rain. Do we not, my friends? We have to make room for precarious visions that may not fall into categories of valid or invalid, mainstream or fringe acceptable or unacceptable. Rather than focusing all of our discourse on what does and does not constitute acceptable behavior during a time of global cultural collapse. We need to reconnect to this primal ache, this primal longing. Remember this year, That wishes that only the ache of nature, ache of longing, ache of the heart of the mother goddess, might penetrate the numbness of history. Might release this numb, numb world, that this numbness might crack open in the last. At last, at last, that may make feel. At last, that may make feel. Many thanks to Adam Irnavich from Healing from Healing for taking the time to have a discussion that informed much of this episode and the full discussion is available to podcast patrons. Many thanks also to Sophie Strand to Maria Stark and Pia for providing some incredible music for this episode to my friend Char from Round Mountain to Lorraine Kultour for doing research on this episode. Kevin Carr added some shabret pipes for this episode, and you can find out more about Kevin's music at KevinCar.org at C-A-R-R. In this episode, I quote a five-part lecture series by Luming on spirit possession in the Chinese medical traditions. And you can find out more about the work of Luming at daewoncircle.org. That's d-a-y-u-a-ncircle.org. Highly recommended. And as always, this episode contains reference to many books, movies, articles, et cetera. These include the doubt-taching, The 2009 film crewed about Exxon's exploits in Ecuador. The article Shamanism and Spirit possession in Chinese modernity by Mayfariang, the book of charlatans by Jamal Al-Jobari, the leather funnel by Arthur Conan Doyle, time looped by Eric Wargo, saint hysteria by Christina Masoni, This episode contained a sample of mountain moorlands 1965 comedy album that ain't my finger. If you can spot that sample, then you are well versed in your 90s musical lore. The 2023 film, A Haunting and Venice, directed by Kenneth Brana. How shaman's were persecuted in the Soviet Union, an article in Russia Beyond in March 2022 by Yakaterina Senelsekova. From culture to experience, shamanism in the pages of the Soviet anti-religious press by Justine Buck Kehada, writing for the Department of Religion at Wesleyan University, the book The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Colasso, the poetry of Tom Hirons, automatic religion, and spirited things to books by Paul Johnson that I also referenced in the last episode. The prophetic imagination by Walter Brugman, the Bible, that performance piece Katmandu by yours truly, don't bother trying to look it up, you won't find it. The Ice Pick Surgeon by Sam Keane, a century on this math prodigy's formulas are finally unraveled, an article by Amir Ascel in Discover Magazine. The benzene ring dream analysis and article in The New York Times, August 16, 1988 by Malcolm Brown. The music of Kidsea Ghosts, the song Doll Parts by Whole, and of course the HBO documentary series Love has won. Whatever you do, do not fail yourself by making the mother of the universe the worst case of the ever known.