For the Intuitives (Part 2)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is The Emerald, currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast we explore in ever changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story and imagination. In the Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. So in Part 1 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 aloud 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 Iroquois dreaming culture. It looks like Achoir culture and Calouli 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 groves, 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 and 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 cures. Saints spoke with river voices and wind voices and sky voices and cavernous voices. And when there is an ecology for it, prophecies 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. As Sophie Strand tells us. You know, Joan was actually not atypical. There were many, many different

visionaries of that time period. Marie-Rope, the Christine of Marquette, Marjorie Kemp. We had so many different visionaries. It wasn't actually considered a neurobiological issue. Like we do now, it was considered something that a lot of people had access to. And like in the villages, that's always been the case. Yeah, so there was also a culture of prophecy where there was, you

know, people sometimes say like, oh my god, I can't believe a peasant girl did this. But there was a prophetic social belief system that already existed where people were kind of expecting this. There was a beach forest behind her house, her father's house. And the custom was to go to this old oak tree that was in the beach forest and that it was the fairy tree. And there were lots of different like mating festivals and children would go there and play and have miracles happen.

And the story goes is that Joan had her first vision there. That she backformed and said that her visions came and her father's garden or at the church. But it seems as if her first experiences of the divine were in front of this tree. And so it's so interesting that one of the things that dams for his relationship to this and this fairy tree. 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 decidedly 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 cliche 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 deplored by religious structures and political structures in mainstream science alike?

Why is mystic experience still to this day discredited in predominantly Puritan nations? And what happens to the mystic once said a drift? But back to Joan. Church authorities were so desperate to prove the 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 unpasturized milk? And this is a real thing. Psychiatrists trying to claim that Joan of Arc's visions were caused by

unpasturized milk. Right, you know, the girl who at age 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 Orleon, who saw as a 13 year old peasant girl that she had a role to play in reinstating the French no fine and then against all odds did. All of that came from unpasturized 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 unpasturized 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 intuitive? Why you, Cassandra, have you not been mocked and squandered 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 in 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 fluidities 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 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 intuitives to persecute, as if city walls require a frenzied seer crying outside those walls, crying aloud that those walls will one day come tumbling down. And this civilizational narrative that vilifies intuitive is everywhere, everywhere there's civilization,

not just the modern west. In China reports Dr. May Ferryong, there has been a cultural movement away from the shaman, the seer, 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 being seen as the worst type of human, of the dragiled, dirty, swindler conning people out of their money.

Quote, when I started field work in Wenzhou in the 1990s, Yang says, the dominant view in China of shamanism was that it is the lowest and least desirable form of religiosity, earning it the epiphets' futile superstition, and charlatanry for cheating people out of their money. Whether in official discourse or in mainstream urban attitudes, shaman's 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, shamanism imparted political authority to rulers and its practitioners were described as persepacious, intelligent, and segacious. 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 shaman's and shamanesses who falsely call down heretical gods, write magical charms, make incantations over water, who use the divining plunge-ed or pray 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 at dawn, 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 and 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, shaman's 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 shaman's and oracles and intuitives, 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 form the basis of culture suddenly marginalized, the understanding that any ecstasy, any receiving of visions, any hearing of voices, any oracular state is pathological. This is a seismic shift in a world whose foundation was built on oracular trance. 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 shaman's 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 seers? 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 nying 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 oracles 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 is a tangible presence that impacts our lives, on whose bones our lives are built, as agencies 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, transmutorship 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 does it 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 ancestral for God. 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 unsociated 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 its relentless forward gaze.

And so the more dead accumulate behind us, the more hell bent 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 unsociated hunger. It works like this, the more dead there are piling up all the roundings, unrecognized, unfed, unplakated, the more that humanity's anxious forward momentum grows, and then that forward momentum as it consumes creates more unsociated 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 unoffered 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 new death.

How many bodies is enough to feed the great hunger Tom Hirons asks 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, in some understandings. In Chinese traditions, the unsaciated, unhonored dead return 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, unmoored appetites. How does the possession of earthbound spirits manifest? In these traditions, it can manifest as a perpetual marousness or anxiety at the state of the world, says Lumic. 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 ambitions. 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 Hirons says, quote, I will lie down with the bones of my dead fathers. Hold tight the portion of wisdom they pass 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 at the long table at 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 whose traditions forbade them from doing intermediary spirit work, gave up their monks fows temporarily, long enough to attend to the thousands upon thousands of spirits that needed feeding and clearing. It's vital animus 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 dialogue with spirits

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 peoples practiced spirit possession was directly used as justification

for their enslavement. The French code noir 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 Mepharyong, 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, larger flows, arms open to the river, ear 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 handoff, an unbroken line, a direct continuity from the Church's 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? St. Teresa could not have actually been receiving divine ecstasy and revelations. It must have been a hysteria thing.

Christina Mazzoni in her book St. hysteria says quote, within the medical profession the generalized consensus is to interpret the mystic as an undiagnosed hysteric. 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 shaman 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 wail, 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 toward 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 disciplined body. Boom. Yeah, that's a mic drop for me, Farion. Yes, the spirit medium's body with its ecstasy and unpredictabilities 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 layfung described, bodies were to serve as common screws of the great machinery of industrialization and state building. Nor does 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 traumas, 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 Roganesque 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 knowns, 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 creation. 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. Quote, in the garment factory is outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, young rural peasant women workers have fallen victim to local vengeful spirits called Nyiakta,

whose lands have been disturbed by the factory invasions. These spirits possess some women in bark out orders to others causing mass fainting spells among the overworked female laborers, and widespread work stoppages. Some factory managers have even placated the Nyiakta with animal sacrifices. These days when Nyiakta 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 trance, says Yong, showing the whites of their eyes or facial grimaces or foaming at the mouth, are not bodies in accord with the modern disciplinary culture that has penetrated the globe. Yes, there is a clash between the unfettered, expressive and unpredictable spokesperson for the gods

and the disciplined industrial or clerical laborer. 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, it's numbness. 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 environmental destruction requires

numbness. To kill on a battlefield with the new impossibly loud impossibly 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.

We become aware that our sensitivity is not necessarily a virtue in the modern world and that if we're not able to numb down the life in Western society becomes unbearable. It is not a coincidence that emotional literacy amongst Western men is so low that there is a very deep lack of emotional

literacy that is by design. It's not a bug, it's a feature. When you think about hyper-capitalist extractive societies, the only reason how a system bays an exploitation and colonization and imperialism and all the different isms are leading the world or at least humanity towards possible extinction. We are living through the sixth mass extinction that has been facilitated by a society

that requires people to disconnect from their sensitivity and be able to operate. It would be possible to do what we do to the world and to each other if we hadn't been taught that feeling should be pathologized. 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 internalize 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 ledden 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 billion 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 weariness 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 noonus until the numbness is broken. So the seer comes to alert culture to its numbness. The seer describes the state of the cultural body. The profit, the visionary, the mad seer 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 extoling wellness narrative or propounding the law of attraction or saying just hold tight we're all going to ascend tomorrow. No, they come to announce times of doom and destruction. Times of societal stagnation of untenable systems and odds with nature of human ignorance jack booting its way through history yet again.

Of the balance of millions of lives hanging upon the whims of the least capable and most petulant of men yet again. The seer laments the numbness that has overtaken culture. How can we do this to each other again the seer cries. 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, a world in 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 light. 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? Seen the news recently. Oh land land land the prophet 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 enough tears that I might week day and night for the daughter of my people says Jeremiah. The seer 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 walling can be ended. So the seer traditionally wakes up the feeling body of a culture. The seer's sensitivity, their bare feet, their wild hair, their tear-brimmed eyes are a wake up call to culture.

The seer hopes only that the ache of the divine could 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 at golden hour. The aching beauty of all that bleeds and sees the aching beauty of death, the aching beauty of the living chandelier of stars above. That 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 seer offers something besides doom and dismay. They offer an immediacy, a rawness, an 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 its cycles of anguish yet again, its 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 us. We can feed each other, we can be there for each other, and we can together echo the seers cry that proclaims to the overarching culture, wake up from your numbness, wake up from your numbness, and feel, feel, wake up from your numbness and feel. Sunbeams 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. I feel free. I feel free. Everyone knows that the world says Roberto Colazo always finds a way of making itself felt, and every attempt to avoid its intrusions cannot last long. The world will find a way to make itself felt. We impose a regimen 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 sensitivities skyrocket. We doubt reason and suppress the old gods, and then the unhonored gods bubble forth as war deities. The world will make us feel one way or another. 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 in indigenous traditions and you encounter a lot of very sensitive people, but not sensitive in the way that were used to thinking of sensitive. Sensitiv, hunters, sensitive weavers. The hunter wants sensitivity.

The weaver wants sensitivity. It takes sensitivity to cross 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. Talk 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 Ascleepian traditions, doctors had to have fluency in 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 and king is felt in the sensitivities of the ruler's body. The sword Smith wants to feel the tip of the sword while holding the handle. The fire keeper 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 and like 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, hyper sensitivity 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 who traverse sensitive other worlds. Yet we want them clearly delineated in their boxes. There in those boxes we neuter

their power. Remove them from sacredness or from true cultural centrality. We enshrine sensitive artists. Yet when their unanchored sensitivities get the best of them and they shave their heads and attack paparazzi with umbrellas I see you Brittany. Then 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 intuitives 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 suggestion 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 Colasso's words that the world will always find a way to make itself felt then the persecution of intuitive two is a twisted societal attempt to find that feeling 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 ache. 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 itching burning scoops 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 then? Modernity bans 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 it play in the witch and werewolf 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, the 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 or 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 shadows, 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 itself appoint us the familial sacrifice victim you ever seen that. This is the same familial dynamic expanded societally. So the new age conspiratorialist is not a tumor to be

extricated, not an aberration. If we actually believe in taking a whole systems 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 seer, the visionary invites the people into a sensitivity that cannot be

quantified by the metrics of civilization. The seer invites dreams that have no ostensibly rational purpose and do not fall along scientific narratives of validity or invalidity. The seer speaks of hidden shadows, the seer in 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,

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 and the United States saw a huge rise in the growth of spiritism, of spiritist traditions in which oracular 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 grandfather's 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 Invenous was all about this. If you open an inquiry into spiritism these days, you might think that spiritism was only fake sciences. But of course, that's not the full picture either. That too is a function of Western culture's othering of the intuitive. For if you research a speedy tismal in its Cuban context or a speedy chismal 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 fakery? 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 occult powers, spirit-medium ship 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-fortune telling 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 charlatans? 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's she talking about? Let's put it this way. What makes an effective saiyans is very different than what makes a good lab experiment. The metrics of a saiyans are 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, unquote, 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 resonance 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 vast world, has had a very specific healing role to play in culture, and the results are tangible. I mean, if you haven't 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 and the bodies begin to convulse, and I mean convulse. I mean children convulsing on the floor, and yes, Cassandra, the sky rips open as you've seen in two thousand times. The sky rips open my holy love, the angel's spear all aflame. It would be extremely difficult to somehow categorize what's going on as unreal.

And this gets at 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 seer 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 seer is not simply a charlatan. The seer is meeting the need of

ongoing discourse with ancestors, 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 point it.

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 unanchored 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

grade A certified new age fuckery 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 Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin? Yeah, there are false profits. 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, a 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, expos A of the tricks of astrologers who apply their trade on the highway. Expos A of the tricks of spirit conjurers. Expos A of the tricks of those who manipulate fire. Expos A of the tricks of Prestidigitators and on and on. That's a whole

lot of trickery. And there's a whole lot more. Well, I think we're seeing, you know, when you try and press the river down, it's going to shoot up somewhere. And I think we're seeing a lot of quote unquote visionaries on Instagram right now. Right. And new age spirituality. Yeah, I think that everybody's claiming to be a channel of the lumerians at this point, as far as I can tell. 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. And I'm ready. I'm ready for the consciousness shift. I've said my mantras. I've cleaned my colon. I got Mary's message. I'm hip to 11, 11. I've been abducted 37 times. I received the high architerian enema. So I'm clean, man. And it's going to

happen soon. Any day now. Any day now. Any day now. The dolphins will arise from the great pink ocean and resume their forms as beings of light and teaches the secrets of fifth-dimensional sex and sublime ascension. And Rose Quartz dildos will rain down from the heavens. And Santa they will rise up off the earth and be joined as Sedona by a huge rainbow bridge. And what I have to communicate with Crystal and the Acasic records will be always playing on the great cosmic

gift box up in the sky. And we won't have to eat. No, we'll just drink Amethyst syrup. Because we won't have bodies. We'll abandon this rotting pus bag and just float upwards like intergalactic surfers riding waves of pink champagne. No pain. No pain. 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 grief 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 oracular to the side and other it, if you make something fringe, then it will become fringe.

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 fringe, once it becomes unmoored 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, untempered 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 youth, you know, we just called it sleeping around. Now it's got to 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 is a mindset. Source told me the universe favors me and above everyone else. Source read, pilled me. Wait, was I read, pilled or blue pilled? Was I old, or was I new, pilled? Was I me pilled or you pilled? Was I totally emptied? Or was I refilled? Or is the real

question why everybody's so pillable? Open up the mind and listen to the syllable. Tell me, did I decolonize or dd colonize and in emptying the colonial narratives on class culture gender and race was I actually emptied of anything or did another colonial narrative simply take that once place? Was I fed regurgitated morsels 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 titular Upanishad. I saw the best minds of my generation healing for me. Link says, destroyed by tiktok wellness trans. Source told me I'm lost, wandering, searching, grasp it. And wandering the unanchored mystic is subject to the other side of visions. Illusions. What healing from healing calls quote ego inflation, delusions of grand or mesionic fever dreams and generally ungrounded approaches to sense making and meaning making. Cassandra unmoored. In an

unanchored 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? You know it's interesting because having studied in indian tradition quite a bit and spent time you know 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. Yeah exactly. I mean the solipsism I think is central to the western like new spirituality like that idea

that everything. I'm the only real human and everybody has just an actor or an NPC some extent in my movie but it sounds this kind of weird epistemology that is derived from I guess experiences with dimethyltriptomy and that are not properly integrated extrapolated with you know movies like the Matrix and also different mythology that are derived from kind of the solipsistic world views whereas everybody feels themselves to be neo inside the mid-strips

and everybody else is just abrupt. Yeah and kind of a misinterpretation of non-dualism I think. Yeah okay because non-dualism in context was really anchored in communal activity and responsibility and years and years and years of navigating dualism before you got to experience those non-dual states and if we just jump straight to it's all one and so and I'm God and you know everything that I do is divine and nothing really matters since it's a good term for it. The term that I like is

Annar and the Wisdom. Well like the so long Wisdom that is not necessarily an earned through lived experience and the root in anything other than just got like a couple of experiences perhaps that gave the impression or the illusion of wisdom whereas that's not necessarily something that

is really embodied in the being of the person. An earned wisdom I think is one of the main problems with modern kind of junk food fast food express spiritual practices that people you know at least the thing that people mistake for spiritual practices like going to an abasca ceremony and mistaking that for having a spiritual practice or you know even even practicing asana every day and mistaking that just having a spiritual practice without really delivering into all the

aspects that are integral to the yogic system. 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. Which is another thing that amazes me coming from Indian tradition you know and like and I realized like when I talk like this I can risk sounding like you know the old like curmudgeon or something like that 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. I mean I definitely think there is a correlation between lived experience and wisdom. I mean this is the kind of thing that you cannot bypass. So I mean again I'm not advocating necessarily for like gatekeeping or you know putting various games between people and wisdom but just more humility when it comes to assessing what it is that actually you know we can offer others in this path. Well and the that the

initiatory process might be important and there is in fact value to the stages. I mean I just spent a year with folks like studying the myths and the very end very very and I told a certain story and that story wouldn't have had the same impact if I had told it on the second day. Exactly. These days like insights aren't in short supply like there's a flood of insights.

Flood of insights available anywhere you go you can go to your local bookstore you can buy like the secret teachings of all the ages you know if you can go on Instagram and there's a lot of people spouting regurgitated quotes from this kind of thing. Yeah. And perhaps all that ultimately matters is if you actually have a container to hold. Yeah. 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. Okay. 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 has won the documentary about the crest own cult in which

completely unmoored and unanchored 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 Yonka Porta 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 the true wisdom isn't self-concerned 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 veered from wisdom if I'm trying to show you who I am maybe I'm showing you who I'm 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 douté ching 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 robes but haven't earned the robes wearing the mala but haven't earned the mala then all I'm showing is everything that I haven't yet grasped haven't yet earned what if true

wisdom is invisible to the untrained eye what if instead of showy instead of being couched in all the right adornments 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 and its warm hearth and its stocked louder 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 aid 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 you know 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 outwards 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's 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 it's metrics of success or 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 wily says productivity

this is the larger grift of capitalism and because of this unmooring 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 hinekin 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 merch and swag where do I turn cassandra asks where do I turn cassandra numbs herself cassandra doom scrolls just to feel something cassandra pours latte's eight hours a day and can't even pay the rent far from a polo'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 unanchored context the intuitive lives on the fringe and then is prone to that most time honored of fringe activities the

con 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 natured 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 think 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 charlatanism 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 to 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 flasing people with fraudulent backyard

gene editing technologies google scientific fraud and see what comes up a whole lot sam keens book the ice pick surgeon details the darker side of scientific history complete with plenty of fraud backstabbing falsifying not to mention human trafficking on willing

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 psychosurgery 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 charlatans 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 of fraud of 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 pseudocures all the ivermectin mania no but it's important to remember the seer is responding to something real when Jeremiah asks is there no balm and gilliad 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 grift is not limited to 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 smarmy 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 empaths 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 a 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 exon 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 ourselves

you know the most likely scenarios for human doomsday 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 frances bacon style repacious 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 to 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 then there are scientists who

sole 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 Promethean ideology science when aligned with slow growth ideology with traditions that understand nature on nature's terms 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 see 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 seer 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 Brugman 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

wild what did the voices around her say trust the experts Cassandra Troy can't fall look at our achievements were 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 f**king boring western discourse around the false dichotomy of science and spirit is boring I mean it's kinder garden type stuff science or spirit rationalism were intuition the world doesn't work this way

there's no need divide history is full of scientists who saw visions of fringe cultural movements that informed scientific revolutions of vital cultural crossover between the fringe and the mainstream of spiritual sciences solomonic sciences of hermetic wisdom 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 ramanujan right the famous Indian mathematician

who received his formulas and visions 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 truths by his family goddess Namagiri Yalan chemist August Kekwole had a quote

somnolent vision of a snake biting its tail a dream that revealed the true structure of the benzene rig he describes it like this i turn my chair to the fire and dovet 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 in snake like motion but look what was that one of the snakes that ceased

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 seers

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 gaya arose out of experiences of living ecology that the sixties generation had while in states of entheogenic rapture in modern medicine today antibiotics are prescribed far less than they used to be why it's because fringe practitioners of alternative medicine

pointed the way for forty 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 satya gara and mlk's civil rights movement which was decidedly spiritual it goes on a i is a big topic right now right a i

culture is steeped in etheogenic ceremony trust me visions obtained in spiritual ceremony are driving a i 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

charlatanism of course we want abusive gurus to be exposed of course we want those on the fringe who are fleecing 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 a new life generates where fresh and salt water mix and the resultant soup is a room space for cultural transformation there's a goddess that rules these spaces have you heard

rules the mangrove swamp of culture she does not conform to narratives of everything neat and tidy and its safe little boxes she's the ocean itself that 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 wound 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 at 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 ecologies 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 creeds 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

points alternative medicine alternative ways of seeing the world what is it now i 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 benefit 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 and

excessively 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 socio-cultural cauldron

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 wits 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 sears 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 visions serve society best when anchored in context and that context can only come with time study overtime and society you must honor the sear you must honor the sear because the sear bears gifts gifts that can seem weird or woo or other but that can shake

culture awake from its stasis the visionary has a healing role to play in culture if we let the visionaries 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 in its mountains of bones

we need the sear 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 accessness in a world of sleeplessness they ask that we dream again and dream of something other than

ourselves the more precarious these times become the more Cassandra's will emerge shouting doom for Troy the more Jeremiah's will be crying from the mountaintops calling for a known 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 mountaintop we have to hold our arms outstretched 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 main stream 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 the seer that wishes that only the ache of nature

ache of longing the 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 at last at last that we might feel at last at last that we might feel

many thanks to Adam Arnavich 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 Kultur for doing research on this episode Kevin car added some chabret pipes for this episode and you can find out more about Kevin's music at Kevin car dot org at ca r r in this episode I quote a five part lecture series by

looming on spirit possession in the Chinese medical traditions and you can find out more about the work of looming at da you on circle dot org that's d a y u a n circle dot org highly recommended and as always this episode contains reference to many books movies articles etc these include

the doubting the 2009 film crude about exons exploits in Ecuador the article shamanism and spirit possession in Chinese modernity by meferion the book of charlatans by jimal al jobari the leather funnel by Arthur Conan Doyle time loops by Eric Wargo saint hysteria by christine masoni this

episode contained a sample of mantin morland's 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 yacatarena senel sekova from culture to experience shamanism in the pages of the Soviet anti religious press by jistine buc kihata writing for the department of religion at wesley and university the book the celestial hunter by Roberto colasso the poetry of tom hyrens

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 the performance piece katman du by yours truly don't bother trying to look it up you won't find it the ice pick surgeon by sam keen

a century on this math prodigies formulas are finally unraveled an article by amir acel in discover magazine the benzene ring dream analysis an article in the new york times august 16th nineteen eighty eight by melcom brown the music of kidsey 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 a dea ever known and besides when i was doing my weekly descent into the primordial subconscious shamanic underworld the other day i had this strange terrible vision