[music] Hey fellow G&T, those of us like our spirituality with a twist. So we're starting up another one of our little series as we like to do at our little Jin and Tantra podcast again in a bigger context part of our year-long series 2025 America. What the hell? This time we're addressing questions around like Christianity. And part of this has to do with the more dangerous parts of Christianity that happen to be in the United States, but also what Daniel and I decided to do as part of like maybe a bigger educational thing because we like to be an educational podcast, a bigger educational project on the incredible diversity within Christianity just at the core. And it's a really fascinating subject. Um, in some ways you might say Christianity is more diverse than even maybe most other traditions. You can see what you think by the end of this because it's pretty wild just the amount of stuff here.

I would agree.

Yeah, totally agree. And it's fascinating, right? But before all of that, we'll promise we'll get to it. But we're going to ask you first to do all the things that people ask you to do at the beginning of every podcast you ever listen to or watch, which will be do the liking and the subscribing. Send it to a friend, do all the little things that people ask because obviously it helps people out. So, thank you so much. And without further ado, I guess we'll get on into it. Any like preliminary things you want to say about any of this stuff, Daniel, or should you just start start doing it? Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. How did we get to this? Well, part of it is part of this thing we've been asking questions about what's going on in the world. And this is the the real question of like Christian nationalism, right? And the idea that there are potentially the more problematic Christianities that we'll try to explore as we go along. For me, my first kind of exposure to this way of thinking goes back, and I've brought him up a couple of times in uh episodes here and there, was uh Chris Hedges, or is Chris Hedges. So, he was a journalist who got in trouble for writing negative things about the Iraq war when the Iraq war was still considered to be like such a patriotic and positive thing. and he basically you know was one of the rare journalists that was willing to write negative things about that back in like the as right but you know he wrote a book called American Fascists and I think like I said in the previous episode I was looking through and I kind of remembered he had done a book on Christian nationalism but I didn't remember the title I had it in my little audio book thing and I was like searching it back out again I was like oh wow okay so that was the name of the book and it's part of a um other things I guess we can recommend around this. Uh there's the really famous book Jesus and John Wayne which we might make reference to. I definitely like the book Star Spangled Jesus which it gets into these kinds of questions and uh I think Daniel and I are both like finding our way through separation of church and hate by John Fugles.

Yes.

So we got to like we're doing the research for you [laughter] at the the G&T podcast. That's our public service. But anyways, so there's I think for me it's something that I've has been on my mind for you know the last 20 years or something almost right after hearing people pointing out this is as a real problem and the Chris Hedges thing has felt more and more sort of prophetic you know as time has gone on because there is like there's again Christianity is so diverse and [clears throat] what we're going to try to do is cover the diversity of it but it's also the truth that there are what you might call problematic Christianities. You have anything to say about that, Daniel? The whole idea of like a problematic Christianity in the midst of all of its diversity or should I should we keep going through?

No, I think we can keep going through because I mean the the the reason for that's the preamble and then you'll talk about why that's the case. So,

um yeah,

we'll get into all kinds of stuff around this.

All right. If you're not as familiar with, you know, what would be a problematic Christianity or what's really going on here, I think one of the great ways to illustrate this is there's a thing called the seven mountain mandate. And it's a a theological idea in kind of the right-wing again more problematic aspects of the Christiani the United States Christianity. And the whole idea is it's that this evangelical minority uh population of Christians have a kind of a mandate to like essentially take over the society. I laugh because it's so bizarre. And eventually the world, right? The seven mountain mandate. And the seven mountains refer to these different parts of the society that there's this divine mandate for this group of people to start to like take over and in and this sort of authoritarian style. So if you're not familiar with it, you know, it's again it's it's part of the jargon within these circles. And if you if you never been in these spaces and again I've been spending a little bit more time in these spaces over the last year just because we've been trying to talk about this for our pod and for my own education you know it's like quite a thing. So the seven mountains are taking over the family and dictating how the family is supposed to be taking over religion taking over education taking over media taking over arts and entertainment. So the entertainment business taking over business as a business and then taking over the government. But it seems wild to think that there are people who would have this but it's a bizarre factoid that there's a disproportionate number of people who are like in positions of authority in the United States that this is the underlying philosophy. So like uh uh Russell vote who's like part of the government is a big person with this. It's Mike Johnson who's the head of the house of representatives right? He's one of these people. Pete Hedzek is one of these people who's our Department of Defensew uh you know so it's like a [clears throat] it's a real thing and it's again if you're not familiar with it it's very eyeopening to you know all of a sudden go into a part of the world that you're not familiar with and you're like oh wow this is like something that's truly believed in this segment of the culture that otherwise I'd have no exposure to. So if you look at the stats on it, as many as 41% of American Christians hold this belief. Apparently when you look at some of the stat statistics around this, you see different numbers. Obviously, that's not a small group of people. I've also heard it said that it's 30% of the population overall and there's 13% that are really hardcore on this and there's another 27% that are kind [clears throat] of like mostly in. So it's not a small thing. And um obviously this is sort of a dangerous aspect of the tradition Christian tradition though like what we'll get to ultimately is Christianity is like astonishingly astonishingly diverse. And so part of what the goal in the episode for me is to start expressing like the incredible diversity within this and also with the feeling like this is a minority kind of aspect. It just happens to be a very highly motivated and potentially dangerous group of people.

Yeah. But keep in mind about probably 66% of the country is Christian.

So you get 40 41% of the 66.

And the other part of it is like if you get 30% who are really into it and they all pile into one of a two-party political system.

Correct.

They're dangerous. Yeah.

Well, and remember we learned from uh Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point. It's that rule of three. you know that that 30 anything over 30% is a you know is a quorum essentially enough to swing

uh a vote in a boardroom uh enough to create

you know I guess secondg guessing in in any large enough sample and so that this is that number that's that number

yeah if as we've been doing the episodes over the course of the year though I have been a little bit heartened I guess I would by how strong the reaction back has been. There really is a strong reaction happening back.

Cuz I mean, and this is a it's a very interesting thing because there's a like in listening to people who study this stuff and I've been willing to do that my own interest but also for our episodes like there's a certain understanding like okay we're not going to be a popular thing.

So it's really a question of like what can we do by force you know

who's we? the people within the Christian nationalist movement. They sort of know like, okay, it's not like we're going to win over hearts and minds. This has to be done in some ways by force.

That's kind of like the project 2025 thing

as far as it goes, just to finish this section off. And like it'll be interesting to see what we want to do about this. But there's this thing called the New Apostolic Reformation. This is like another like Christian movement in the United States which is kind of overlapping and they have a lot of this stuff going on. So maybe as we talk about we're going to do a history lesson around this because it's fascinating, right? Just to see like wow this Christianity is amazing in terms of like all the things that it spawns

is unbelievable. Um but when we do get maybe when we get to things in the United States there's this new apostolic reformation I I've been learning about over the last year and it's sort of these smaller they're not small but they're not part of the mainline what they call the mainline churches. They're independent churches. They're evangelical and they're very political, right? And as an example of someone like that, there's uh Paula White who's the personal the personal pastor to the president. She has her office in the White House and she's pretty wild, right? And it's these highly political kind of actors. So that's I guess kind of the description of like the problematic part of the situation that's like I guess always going to be something that is going to have to be addressed. I mean again you look at Chris Hedges he's writing about this in the context of the Iraq war a couple of decades ago right and the problem is going to be kind of an ongoing one but the way I think about this is the more awareness there is around this more people can be proactive to address what is like a subpopul of a of a spiritual tradition that has a toxicity at the core of it

is that how you feel about too Daniel? Yeah. I mean, so I I we have we didn't talk about this, but I want to do an episode and we're going to do one maybe next time on uh accelerationism.

Oh, yeah. I think we should do techbroch Christianity, too.

Well, I mean, acceleration runs runs the gamut for both both parties. So, I I like I like, you know, I have a thing laid out, but I'm going to I'm going to put this here for now because it fits with what we're talking about, right? But you you had the idea like acceleration in terms of like the tech bro kind of philosophy of acceleration.

It's not just them. It's not just them that there that's that's the right side of the aisle. There's a left side of the aisle accelerationism that exists as well. But for here

Oh, they're using this term in a different way. Okay. So, it's cool. You'll explain what me and we'll talk about it when we get the episode. Yeah. I associate with like the tech world that they want to it push everything forward, right? Technology,

right? that but that doesn't come that doesn't come from them you know that that that they don't they're essentially like not super useful in society like yeah we have who gives a [...] Facebook whatever I heard this the other day someone was like oh if they let you use something for free what are they getting out of it you know what I'm saying so in a

we have to debate that I think those people are pretty dangerous so that's

no no they're dangerous I'm saying useful I didn't say not dangerous

oh yeah yeah

useful no

you're making a distinction yeah

not useful but um The the scary part about like religiosity is the orthodoxy.

Is the power and and simultaneously the the the fragility of it because anything that is actually most things in my opinion that are strong don't seek to uh disempower others in attempts to keep their own strength. You have strong inherently in in what it is that you believe. So why do you need the why do you feel the need to subjugate others in order to prove your strength?

I think it's a fascinating part about the whole history of like if we're talking about this particularly in Christianity, we'll talk about orthodoxy overall.

But it's interesting because these traditions splinter around these points. Right. Yeah.

Then you get the hyperthodox ones and those are the ones that are more dangerous. Yeah.

Correct. And that is and and and unfortunately that is what bleeds this is what is an extension of those ideas. Right? The the far out ideas are what sticks around. So anyways, this idea of accelerationism, right? And so I kind of had this prepared already. So um acceleration can be seen as a collective nervous system disregulation strategy. Instead of reducing stimulation, it proposes learning into the forces that feel overwhelming, speed, technology, capitalism, and cultural fragmentation uh until a breakthrough or a breakdown essentially. And so on a on a cultural level, that's what this is. But where does this come from? Well, this comes from

basically every at least Abrahamic tradition that is uh messianic in its practice. And I don't mean they believe in a messiah. I mean they believe the Messiah is going to return.

And so this is part of the acceleration concept, the way that you're using it. Yes.

Okay. I haven't heard this idea. Okay. Go ahead. Lay it on me. And so basically from the beginning, like even going back to like John the Baptist, he obviously was Jewish, right?

Mhm.

He was a an end times person. He was a, you know, revelations believer practitioner. Now maybe if we fast forwarded it today and we would say, "Oh, he's a conspiracy theorist, right? But the world is going to come to an end. Fire and brimstone. Get ready. It's happening." Well, they're kind of like uh you know, like evangelical Christians now. That thing exists all the time. End times Christianity hasn't gone away.

Because it's like you can trace it back to the roots of it in some ways. That's always kind of been hanging around. But yeah, go ahead.

And no, right. And it's present in Judaism.

It's present in Islam and they all have their and there's many sects that get broken up over how they view this.

Really, really interesting in that because you bring it up and this is like outside my knowledge zone that I'd be curious just to hear. I was like looking [clears throat] at the obviously there's a there's a Judaism aspect of this and it's actually in the book of Daniel. So I was like okay book of Daniel but I don't know as much about that how that's handled in Islam. You want to give people like a 30 second primer on that. Is that something you can do know that tradition?

I'm not going to do it justice. What I'm going to say is that

okay save for some other time then maybe.

Yeah but there it's you know so Sunnis and Shia and and and people who are watching this feel free to dunk on me. I don't have you know this is just off the top of my head they are uh there's discrepancies as to when and who the prophet will be when they return if they have returned. Okay, so this is how those things are how the those ideas are broken up. But again, it's broken up around these these ideas of accelerationist these accelerationistic ideas, right? And so that being put forth as as this belief system way back when, 2,000 plus years ago is still influencing where we're at now. The difference is the people who have influence now are have far more influence than they've had before over a much larger swath of people. Now, we can argue and say, well, what do you mean the Romans had over a huge control over people? Yeah, they did. They did, but I I think that their aims, I don't think, definitely their aims were different than now. So they might have been accelerationists, but news flash, the Romans weren't really practicing Christianity. That was for the peasants. That was for the

Yeah, you can kind of like think about those questions for sure.

They, you know, they they really weren't. I mean, even even the messages of Paul were not of Jesus's words. They never met.

Yeah, that's something to like get through when you talk about the subtypes of Christianity as we go through it. Correct. So you have, you know, Christianity as an ideology that was used to um, I don't know, enliven servants, workers, you know, give them something. Oh, don't worry about being poor in this lifetime. As soon as you go to heaven, man, you're going to have everything you possibly could want. Which is one of the things that we that that the West will dunk on Islam for.

For for the people who, you know, blow themselves up. Obviously, they're not, you know, taking life is never good, whether it be your own or somebody else's, right? But they say, "Oh, they're going to they promise them things in heaven." Really? That's oddly familiar. Isn't that

like across the board? Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? But so they all they all share a similar source. And so this but this idea this kind of like you know dare I say sort of perverse idea of end times and let's usher ourselves to this end times is present in in you know in the tech oligarchy kind of thing in the evangelical kind of thing in uh orthodox Judaism there they want this and

so but the best way of using accelerationism is to say like we're pushing together we're pushing towards some goal that we want realized that has semiaapocalyptic kind of vibe to it at some level. Yes, exactly.

That's how you're using it. Okay, I get it. And there's a truth to that.

Yeah. I was thinking about this and we'll do it in different ways as we go. It'll be a loose and free and easy conversation as we like to say in our Dowist world. We'll free and easy wander our way through

uh Dowist saying, but um yeah, I was thinking like when you translate this stuff forward, a lot of these things are like in the modern the modern Christianity, but the threads are back there. even in the earliest seeds of it. It's kind of again,

I don't know. I find this [...] fascinating.

Oh, this this fascinates me. Yeah.

So, I mean, so hopefully other people listening will also ultimately find it fascinating, too. Yeah.

But I feel like you really learn a lot when you sort of see the context of this. It's kind of mind-blowing, actually.

Yeah. Um, well, I mean, maybe before we totally move on, I did look at our our new friend for the pod, John Fugosang, the comedian who wrote this separation of church and hate.

And he he says this, I think, in a very nice way. So, I thought I would just share his checklist of what he thinks happens once you have orthodoxy taking over.

I kind of like the way you're saying it, Daniel. This might be orthodoxy in a Christian sense or in a Muslim sense or in a uh in the big three Judaism or really anything that you might get that goes orthodox whether you're in India or other parts of the Asian world you can always have potentially this problem and he has like kind of a a kind of a checklist of the things that you see so I thought I would share it but

sure yeah go I just wanted to say that you know even orthodoxy the term orthodoxy is a spectrum

everything is everything is a spectrum. So, you know, someone could be more, you know, left-leaning uh politically, but they may not hold the same beliefs as somebody else who is even further left than they are. Or same thing on the right side. So, even the term orthodoxy, you don't automatically believe that everything that everybody else who considers themselves quote unquote orthodox believes. I just wanted to make that uh that distinction.

Yeah, I'm using part of my source for this and I had different people I sourced out. They like to kind of like do a little research for what we're doing. And there's a scholar on the New Testament named Bartman. And he basically has a line he uses over and over again, which is like orthodoxy is like my doxy.

My doxy is orthodoxy and your docy is not orthodoxy. If you don't agree with me and all of a sudden you're heterodox or you're heretical if I want to go even further.

That's correct. Yeah.

Yeah. So, all right, we'll explore it because it's again I think this is, you know, I I don't know if we get this education on these subjects in our culture and it's mind-blowing.

Well, you don't

we can even question why we don't get it. Suspicious even why we don't.

Correct. And I was going to say because that pulls at the fabric of the culture itself. It pulls at the foundation of how it is that we exist as as a as a system of learning, you know, just just generally overall like Christianity and uh you know or really like you know Catholics, right? Roman Catholics that that was used as a measure of control and influence for hundreds and hundreds of years and they were devel Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it really never, you know, they say the Roman Empire never really collapsed. It just morphed into capitalism, you know. It's like

Philip Philip K. Dick has the line, the sci-fi writer, the Roman, the empire never ended, right?

Yeah. It really didn't. And so, you have this sort of weaving together and and some people might be bothered by this. Some people might think, oh, that's the power of quote unquote Christ or God or whatever, you know, but you have a essentially a teacher in Christ who preached about taking care of the poor, helping the stranger, focusing on your own divine spark, right? Um, freedom, equality, and using your money for to help people, not to be rich. Not not at all actually. And in comparison to how that got changed, it's the opposite, you know, talking to people and if you look on, you know, you look online or, you know, whatever, have discussions with people, they quote, and this is probably super inside baseball, but like you'll hear far more quotations from Paul out of the New Testament than you will like Jesus's words. And why? It's because his message doesn't fit. If you're going to try and systematize those teachings, how can you systematize people being free beings and make them into better workers or you can't scare people by saying, "Hey, you you infinite soul that are going to last forever and keep keep learning and reincarnating and whatnot, you know, like that is not motivating for people to work harder and that's not a you can't systematize that. You can't create a structure out of that." So they took the teachings that you know he learned or that he shared and they made them into something that was more palatable that's something they could make into a government. And uh

well the weird thing is like it splinters in like the very beginning. It's kind of a wild story like it splinters like right out the gate whatever that means. And it's like a weird story to tell, but like it just so something happens. Whatever happens in those early years, you know, couple thousand years ago, something happens and the whole thing splinters. And there's I know what you're saying though. There is like this definitely dichotomy which will break it apart as we go through the splintering like of like Paul versus like

what you would happen if you read the gospel or something depending on how you want to read those books, right? Because they're not simple books either. It's a wild story. Yeah.

I mean his People often forget that like Jesus had a brother.

Yeah. James,

right? And James actually took over his work cuz that's his brother. [laughter]

James and Paul don't get along.

Not at all. Which is very strange.

One would argue that Paul might have had James, you know, axed. I don't know if that comes up in the books of axe, people being axed or not,

right?

I don't know. But anyways, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a wild story. It's a wild story.

Yeah. Uh all right. Well, I'll do the John Fukusen stuff and then we'll like keep like breaking it through because it's it's definitely wild. Anyways, he makes these points. I like the idea of like, okay, we say something is orthodox and it's problematic. What do we really mean by that? Right. Mhm.

And um okay, so here's the features. If you want to know you're dealing with orthodoxy, here's a checklist, right? And maybe this applies like across the board. So one of the things like is could be pointed out here is like a literalism that you take whatever you're you're being exposed to and you don't read it symbolically or you don't read it poetically. You read it like absolutely literal, right?

And then once you've read it literal, the idea is that you want that to be imposed upon other people. So, I read it literal and then I'm not I'm going to take my literal interpretation and I'm going to make you follow it. Right.

What's that term again, Eric?

Uh, he uses literalism for this.

Okay. Then the other point he makes about it is a little phrase low empathy, high certainty. Once I have the certainty, then my empathy falls. But we've kind of used this phrase before sometimes in like again when you get to this more problematic Christian circles in the United States, they talk about like toxic empathy,

right? But what they're getting to in a way is this idea of we've decided how this is supposed to be interpreted in this literal way and then we all have to follow it to the letter. So if you're not following it to the letter, you don't deserve any empathy. That's sort of how the equation ends up working itself out, which again I find really fascinating that it plays out that way, right? So then you get like high punishment systems. So as opposed to like and this is well when you talk about like Jesus too again Dan like you were talking about before. We're not talking about forgiveness.

No,

we're talking about a crackdown, right?

You don't follow our way of doing things. And of course that can happen in Christianity. That can happen in any of these. Yeah.

Yeah. This goes all over the world potentially.

Yeah. This can go ugly all over the place. So I like it so far. It seems like it speaks to the problem of it. Um and then he talks about kind of knowledge resistance. The minute you have something invested in an orthodoxy, you know, and it's literal, then anything that would challenge that becomes instantly panicinducing, right? So then you have to be in a certain sense anti-science or like anti-nowledge almost in general

because your ideas have a fragility to them, right? You're reading something literal that should probably be read poetically, right?

Or probably should be read more loosely. you're so invested in this little literal interpretation and so much is hanging on it that it's just fragile and so you can't let new information come in which I think is very kind of a a wise observation as well.

Yeah. Then the other part is and I'm kind of condensing the way this gets talked about but hierarchy right is a dominant thing which inevitably gets tied into like patriarchy as a problematic thing which inevitably leads to like oligarchy. M

so one way or another you end up with these ideas piling on top of one another where you have to hierarchy out the the the society that you're looking at right

you have to impose a hierarchy and that again happens all over the world and I guess when you get into the dowist world or the tandric world or our home bases you're intrinsically against that like that's a problem like right at the core right and this has come up in different episodes along the way

and then it's tied into patriarchy and we've done episodes on that too over our little podcast history where we've tried to address that question in a more immediate way, you know. So, that's a problem. But eventually, I what I found interesting is eventually collapse into like an oligarchy. You're going to have to get some people on the top of that hierarchy and they're going to want to dominate everyone else. So, it's there's certain a certain inevitability in that all way whole way of thinking. I think it's profound again, right? And that can happen across any uh any authoritarian orthodox system. superiority

for sure

in the sense of like we're the people who are saved and you are not

and sometimes it's you are the people who are [...] and we're the people who are saved therefore we have superiority right I think but I don't know if it's always framed in terms of the saving thing obviously Christianity has that kind of language does that happen in Islam in that same way do you feel like that lang I don't know if I know I like the Sufi parts of Islam I don't know if I know

as well how those things are phrased in the more orthodox parts of Okay. Yeah. When I touch that it's a hard thing unless we really prepped it up, right?

Yeah. All right. Anyway, so those kinds of things. And so then the next idea and we can discuss it through is that whenever you get to the more fundamentalist parts of any of like tradition like this, the argument goes this is always going to be the angriest people, right? It's anger inducing for whatever the set of reasons are around that. creates a kind of a an anger and a hostility towards others. It's usually aggressive and violent in kind of an interesting way in the sense that the violence gets more and more justified from our side

because we are the ones who have the right view and we are the superior people and therefore

we're justified somehow. There's that sort of instant like magical justification thing that happens,

right? which on the one hand can lead to things like uh xenophobia.

Oh yeah.

And the hatred of the outsiders, right, will happen naturally out of that. And this came even when we were doing the social psychology stuff of this, right?

The minute you get that inroup, you have hostility towards the out group, right? And they're threatening.

Um and then like the ability, I guess, from the people who are more at the top of the hierarchy to direct that animosity and hatred like it's able to be targeted or something, you know? It's kind of wild to me and you know we don't have to dwell on it too much but I was talking with a couple of students you know uh uh Latino students you know and we were just having a like a longer conversation just about like how wild it is that all of this animosity got targeted this time on that group of people like that was the group that really got all the target right so heavily on them though it's broad it's broadspread hostility But like even the groups that are like still I remember back to like if we go back 10 years or something it was a lot of hostility to like the Muslim world right that was still sort of

the target was directed in different places at different times right

and sometimes the anti-semitism was out there too in that same time period the Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville but it's wild how that's directable right you can just kind of shift that around

it's kind of like social psychology fascinating you can just move

you can just move the target.

Those are lemmings. Those are lemmings. Lemmings. Lemmings. And if that bothers you, good.

But I think in any spiritual context, and you know, we're doing these things, but we're putting it in the context of like the spiritual traditions we believe in, you can't have that kind of thing, right? You can't have a moving target in a true spirituality where you're just going to like. So, I think that's fine to call out. And as an individual, if you're going to spiritually progress as an individual, you can't have these features. They have to go. We all have to transcend these things ultimately, right?

I mean, the ten commandments, man, it's not that, you know, the golden rule is

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to do the if you want to do the Jesus Jesus,

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's it's really not it's not very difficult. It really it it really isn't,

you know.

It's confounding on some level at the same time, right?

No, but how easy it is to move that around.

People want to be led, dude. That's that's just it. It's much easier to be led. It's much easier to not think. It's much easier to give your head away and you know just follow.

I think that's Oh, yeah. Sorry.

No. Like I mean I know it's simple thing but like I don't have Twitter. You know why? There's only one reason why. There's literally only one reason why. I ain't following no [...] body anywhere [laughter] follow me. Nope. I don't even know what it was I think it was like 2008 or nine and I was working for some company and the guy who was I guess my supervisor or boss at the time he's like oh you should follow me on Twitter and I was like where he's like oh I post what I got going on I was like we're talking right now tell me what do you have going on he's like well no you know just whatever and I was like bro you're you're tripping no I ain't following [...] [laughter] you know so that's just my own particular thing but I think on a mo for the most part people want to be they don't want to Tell me what time to be there. Tell me what we're eating. I don't want to Why would I have to think for myself? That means I have to be responsible for my actions. That means I have to maybe not listen to everything that everybody tells me and believe it as 100% truth. That there might be something that's partly true and something that's not partly true. And I'm going to have to make my own decisions and decide what do I actually believe? And you have to put the onus back on the self. these are the you know these are some of the teachings of of the person that the religion is named after that they have no desire to actually teach you know

yeah no it's fascinating because I think in the things that we're trying to advocate here you know which is like for us home bases might be like Buddhist tantra or dowist things or Zen things or sufi things or whatever that theme has to go all the way through

I have to be an independent being I can't be a follower I have to be independent right

mh Mhm.

In order to express my own independent spiritual authenticity, it has to be that way. There's like no way around.

Um, so within the context of like being able to direct this, then there becomes this idea of like sort of you can always claim a kind of bizarre perpetual victimhood.

Which is fascinating in that too. Like no matter who you are, you still claim that you're the victim of like other people. And this is toxic right at the core. If you want to get to some spirituality around this, I think all the traditions we're talking about, but this is especially mentioned in like the cabala, right? You can't go through and take on a victim mentality because it'll bring out the worst parts of your spiritual being,

the worst part of the psyche. The minute you're in that victim mindset, you should be very wary of that,

right? You go victim mindset, you know, it always leads to these ugly places. you know, it has a darkness to it, that victim mentality. And you can see that it can then lead to this like let's pivot the the target around to like different people when you can kind of able to kick that in on a mass scale.

Very true, I think. Right.

Yeah. And uh again, it doesn't matter how much power you have, it's some weird psychological thing that you can still sort of say we're the disempowered group, right? I guess it's the grieving c grievance culture things and all that,

but you know, very true. Wherever you have like orthodoxy, it happens. I think April Aoy who I've been mentioning here and there in episodes who wrote Star Spangle Jesus when she looks back at it she said that was astonishing how much that was part of our psychology right this constant like feeling that we were the victims of like other people no matter how much power and security we had that was always a flip that could be switched you know and it's you know again psychospiritually fascinating or is a capper for us maybe as a tandric podcast too is the idea of like being kind of like anti-women and antisexuality.

Not us, these other people. [laughter]

Yeah. Not us. We're against that.

We're anti- anti-women. We're anti-antisex.

Yes. But like how often that's played too, you know, that you get a kind of a theme of like

these features and then some of these again we were talking about the new apostolic uh revelation or whatever that yeah reformation sorry you know like um there'll even be these bizarre conversations about like women shouldn't have the independent vote and it should just be under the control of the man who's the head of the household. They talk that way. It's like Pete Hegs pastor,

you know, uh like it's kind of bizarre. So, you know, that is part of the features of this. And then, you know, sexuality itself is always going to have this stigma around it, you know,

particularly when you get like like uh uh women asserting sexuality or anything that like has homosexuality within it, like that's always going to be a problem. So, okay. So that's like the I think like a little mini checklist of like orthodoxy as it goes, right?

I thought it was important to do it just because like we were talking about earlier, you can spread that around to any orthodox tradition

and just have it as a thing. And then once you see that, you can go, okay, well these are the features of orthodoxy. And I think we're intrinsically arguing whether you talk on a social level or an individual level, these things have to go

in order to make spiritual progress as an individual or as a community or as a society or whatever it is. Yeah.

You know, Eric and and you know talking about like you know uh disempowering women and sexuality. It's also the disempowerment of of pleasure specifically.

That's true. And you know as tantric practitioners that is the drive that's one of the main drivers you know so just like on a on a base level like meditation practice right and again I had a talk with a client today he's like I just can't do it man my mind just goes everywhere I can't turn it off I was like yeah don't don't try like leave it

just talking about the sexuality aspect

no no just about meditation in general you know he was like uh I I said just sit down and see who shows up just that's good enough for right now you Um but the so people to you know for people to practice there has to be some motivation for anything exercise writing music whatever going to work doesn't matter there's an aspect of discipline and that can move you for sure people some but some people are not disciplined they're just like it's just hard for them to find this however if you enjoy doing something if you actually like it it's pleasure for you you'll do it on a regular basis And so this kind of motivation is is pulled out of of many of these traditions because of how puritanical they are that they look at the you know as object at objects of desire as the influence of Satan you know the influence of evilness and and I don't know where this came from but I've been uh looking into uh a man by the name of uh Jacob Frank who is uh

Oh yeah yeah yeah Right.

Magic cobalistic magic person.

Yes. Very very interesting. Now listen, they are they are into all the pleasure rituals and things like this and their wife swapping and they're uh incestuous and you know so I'm not I'm not on that front. However, he gave a quote that said something along the lines of like Elohim made wanted a servant. And so he talked with his saints and they're like well you should make them flesh and spirit. So they're like us. And then Elohim, which is like the high god, was like

the gods. Yeah.

Yeah. He was like, "No, I want to make them of flesh only, you know, so they can experience more more pleasure essentially, and they're going to have the opportunity to sin." Why? Because that they're going to learn. They're going to have the ability to do things that we are unable to do. And I just I I I love that. And I love how it fits right here, which is why I'm sharing it because so much of what you were talking about, you know, victimhood and and women and and like literalism and orthodoxy and heterodoxy, a lot of that is is all based around very hard lines, very strong structure of what's right and what isn't right, following in the the quote unquote the way of how it should be. This is what orthodoxy is. Then whatever someone believes something should be there is everything else is how it isn't and why that is wrong. And you know what's interesting about this character Jacob Frank is that like he just flips everything upside down. He's like no yeah whatever we shouldn't be whatever we should not do we should do that.

That's exactly

there is those traditions that are like that. I mean we're going to do a little bit on the gnostics when we get there and it's like hey they told you that story. I'll flip all the characters around for you. The snake's the good guy. this guy's the bad guy in the garden of E. Like Eve did the right thing. Everyone who told him not to do it was wrong.

That's the flipperoo around that, right?

Yeah. And it's the, you know, specifically in tantric practice, it's the use of pleasure that can alternate uh someone's mind. I I had a session with somebody, you know, some years ago, and um the first thing that she said to me, and she had some good abilities, you know, was like, um, can we make an agreement today? And I said, what's that? She goes, yeah. She goes, "You don't have to have all of your lessons being the hardest ones possible. Maybe we can use another another method for your learning in this lifetime."

Oh, yeah. That's true.

Something like maybe something more pleasant, you know?

Yeah. You know, we never know where these episodes are going to go and this will probably be close to our ending of this particular one, but it's really true. You know, like when I first started doing Zen, I was, you know, we're both raised

Christian Catholic, right? That's still somewhere within us, right? doing this zen and it would be painful and there was a part of me that was like okay good [laughter]

because I got to earn it right

if a little painful and not earning it that little kind of Catholic thing still like floating around in there right and I did learn a lot and zen was wonderful it certainly can be painful but it was wonderful too and there were moments of like ecstasy within it that I was also finding and we talked about in previous episodes I also would sometimes do meditations that were a little bit more dowist a little bit more trying to get the good sexual energy going. And so I was kind of cheating, [laughter] not pure, but it was like learning that question like, okay, this doesn't have to be all harsh, right?

And it was sort of like again, it's very interesting. Maybe we can all contemplate this. You look at a list like that and maybe you're raised Catholic, you know, and you're not maybe not even the most Orthodox Catholic in the world, but you can still pick pieces out of that where you know, yeah, that is an issue. I can remember that from my past or maybe you can kind of use a little microscope on ourselves and go there's still a little of that [...] that floats around, right?

You know, um, and I think it was a big deal for me. It happened in stages. I think, you know, my Chinese mentor, Dr. Wong, Master Shani Wong, made a big point about this. And I don't know if he was influenced by coming from China and being here. I think he already had these ideas a little bit brewing from his Chinese teachers. But I think part of what he felt like was, man, these people don't know how to experience happiness or pleasure. There's something blocking them,

you know,

and he really had that strong feeling. We talked about in different episodes here and there, but you know, it still fits here.

If I look at my own history, it was, oh yeah, there was like something in me, a little little seed of something orthodox, you know, we want to frame it that way that was going to block that. And then it was like kind of like if I think about my own we all have our own stories were going on our own ways of what we feel are our spiritual progresses that we made and the things that we tried to work through and part of that really did have or maybe even to the present day to some extent still had to do with that thing of being open to the idea like no pleasure is okay on the spiritual path is okay

we did a little thing where we were meditating with some of the people who were part of our retreat that we ran earlier in the year you know our first jin and tantra meditation retreat and that coming up in those conversations too,

you know, and each of us in our own way was trying to say like this can be pleasurable.

You know, you can use pleasure as part of your spiritual path.

But to the extent that you have a like orthodoxy hidden there, you know, within the religion that you've been exposed to or maybe just hidden in the culture overall, right? Like kind of what you're talking about in the very beginning of the episode. Whether you feel that you're Christian or not, you're living in a Christian culture.

Absolutely. You were raised to be Christian whether you know it or not.

You are. This is why I think these episodes are fascinating

because we can talk through all of this stuff and it gives us all of us a chance to really reflect on like

to what extent that's true and I think we would both argue that it's really true.

Yeah. And so you can kind of like hunt those kind kind of things out. So we were talking about it in the podcast. Sorry, we were talking about in the thing we did over the weekend. We ran a kind of little mini meditation session for everybody, right? We kind of like had a like a little retreat reunion. We did one of these things which was great. And that subject matter was coming up, right? And it got me thinking afterwards about my own life. And I think about this a fair amount. Okay. I came from this orthodox thing had a lot of that feeling of like no pain, no gain,

you know, uh, okay, it hurts a little bit. That's probably for the good, right? I'll learn like what you were talking about. I'll learn everything the hard way,

right? and that moving away from that into things like again my Chinese mentor being more daist or being into like again ultimately the tantras and things like that. No, let's flip this switch around. Flip this switch [clears throat] around and make it more about using the pleasure as an ultimate spiritual kind of goal, right? And in the end like what is like what is like spiritual progress if you want to go all the way to enlightenment or what's the spiritual going to be? It's going to be pleasurable, right? So, in the tantras, part of the idea as we wrap up the episode, well, you know, that's interesting it went this way, you know, is going to be like that pleasurable experience is a simulation, a hint, a guide to what the spirit really feels like or what the experience of God would really feel like or what the experience of the Dao

or, you know, the pure ground of being. It's going to feel blissful, right? It's not going to feel like uh, you know, some cut off boxed in negative, you know, uh, unpleasant thing,

All right. Anyway, so interesting. Okay. You never know where these are going to go.

We don't.

We don't, [laughter]

but good path. Yeah.

Right. And so we'll we'll continue as we uh as we go along on here unpacking things.

Yep.

Yep. And it's, you know, right on time for uh the return of the sun, as they say. Yeah. Yeah.

In the uh pagan tradition or Jesus's birthday. Oh, wow.

Yeah. This will be out like around that time, right?

Surprisingly, how uh close those things are related, huh?

Interesting.

Suspiciously close for our Wiccan friends out there. Boy, that seems to have to do with some, you know, astrological astronomical stuff going on there. Yeah.

Diabolical, if you will.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Eric, as always. Thanks so much. Yeah.

Yep. Audience, thanks for tuning in. Hit us up, jinantragmail.com. Uh you could leave a comment here or find us on the on the gram at uh the Jin and Tantra podcast. Like, comment, subscribe, share our work. Uh you know, whatever, man. We love it. Take care. Peace.