[Music] Hey fellow genters, do those psychos spirituality with a twist. So we are in the middle of one of our little series that we like to do on jin and tantra and we're doing it this particular episode on uh uh a thing called collective effervescence. And who doesn't want more collective effervescence in their life? It's part of like sociology and we're looking at this uh famous sociologist Emil Durkheim and talking about his particular ideas around we're applying it to like cult psychology. So it's part of our way of trying to understand the world and understand like what we felt has happened in the world. So this particular episode is going to focus on using the tools that we think are inspiring to help us figure out the world around us. And in this particular episode it's going to be talking about kind of religiosity. Yeah. Yeah. And howity affects people. So anyway, so that's what we're up to, you know, if you want to help out the pod, you know, and uh contribute to our collective effrovescence, you can like give a like, give us live a little subscribe to us, do all the things that people ask you to do because it helps us out, get the message out to more folks. Labor of love for us and we're trying to get hopefully useful psychological tools, spiritual tools out to people. So all right, that's what we got on the docket. You and I talked a little bit before, Daniel, and we're going to get maybe slightly bit meta about this before we totally dive in. Sure. Just to context for this. So, you know what really struck me about it? I was thinking that during the about this during the week, we had it's one of those phone calls that you'll probably remember, weirdly enough, for like the rest of your life almost talking and it was we were looking at the world around us. This is how we really got to this place of doing even this series on like cult psychology. We were looking at the world around us and we were thinking, well, what's our way of talking about this because of all the chaos in the world in the United States, of course, we have the political situation is just completely off the rails, right? But even in other ways, you know, there's this all of this chaos, right? And we really came up with this answer of really talking about through this concept of like, well, it's cults, right? and maybe that's a tool we could use as a way of kind of contributing to our way of understanding the world and sharing this with others or something. And it's just one of those real powerful conversations. I was just thinking about it. I remember I think I was in the car when we started it and I was like walking up to my place and by the time I got like you know to the door I like stayed on the patio. You know like you have those conversations you're like this [...] ain't done yet. This isn't done. Really talking it through. And um I'll probably remember it. You know, you ask me 20 years from now, I'll probably still remember that. Yeah. He's trying to boil stuff down and eventually say cult. Anyways, I don't know what your impression about that was. Yeah. I mean, that was the conversation was how do we, you know, as a as people, as teachers of, you know, Chinese medicine, but then as doing this podcast, how do we present our view of what's happening currently? Like why is h what's happening? Why is it happening? How has it come to this point from a sort of meta perspective? Right? So something that takes into account not only people's political leanings but they're also their social leanings, human psychological tendencies, uh sort of uh people who are people generally who are bereft of like I could say divine inquiry if that makes sense. I don't want to speak in such like fancy fashion but I you know but people who are not necessarily looking for their own sense of spirituality but finding it in the form of an organized religion which there's nothing necessarily wrong with an organized religion. However, I think it on some level it can have the tendency to disempower people to ask questions of their own internal dialogue in that way. You're almost taught to kind of dis distrust that kind of thing. And even in the East Asian philosophies, you are sort of taught to like look past some of the the general chitter chatter of your mind and get to the deeper places. So I don't necessarily inherently disagree with that, but I do like the drive to push people more deeply inside. And as a consequence of this, we wanted to find ways that we can describe what's going on from our observations from a deep kind of place on the inside. And I said, "Well, what do we do as a podcast?" We talk about East Asian philosophy, a little bit of Chinese medicine, shamanism, and plant medicine, and psychology. This is kind of like our these are our threads that we that we run through. And this to me seemed like psychology looked like it was probably the best way to do this. And what what is what is a a different way of describing group think or social psychology? one that probably has more uh a nefarious tone and that's a cult, right? And that that was that was that was how that that conversation uh arose. And and I think it's right. You know, I think we could look at saying, of course, I think it's right cuz, you know, we came up with it. But like I I still feel as passionately about this today as I did a few months ago when we first started talking about it because it is sort of the only way that I can see that people would be unwilling to criticize, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, unwilling to criticize their own. You know, it's like bending in pretzels to make themselves find rationality or find moral reason to agree with something that could seem pretty reprehensible from just a an overt, you know, viewpoint. And then at the slightest opportunity of even a tad bit of criticism from same side to same side, it's like we give them the keys to the city. They're like, "Oh my god, they criticized their own. and they said they didn't agree on this one tiny little point, you know, oh, oh, they're such an enlightened person and it's just it's disingenuous on a, you know, from a logical perspective when you're arguing with people about certain points. But then from a like a a larger, more spiritual perspective, you look at it and you're like, that's not normal. That's not a way in which you can go about the world. Like, we should be critical of everything. And I just find it to be far more cultlike to not be critical of almost anything so long as it comes from your own dear leader. And that to me is a an extremely toxic trait, one that is found on a mass scale. And that seems to fit the the description of a cult in my mind. Yeah. It's kind of I think like that word or that phrase like it's not normal. Like this [...] ain't normal that's going on. You can you can I'm totally fine with expanding that al across different parts of the political perspect uh uh spectrum. That's fine. Totally. You know, there's something like not normal happening. Like it is not there's something off. And I was okay with that too. And I think on a personal level, it was helpful for me to go like, well, what is this? What is the is there a like a skeleton key or something that can crack this open for me? And it was this there's something cultlike happening and it's like expanded out in this wild way psychosspiritualitywise. You know I was talking with someone today about it and maybe it came up in a couple of episodes here and there but there's a Buddhist tantric teaching called the Kalish chakra the wheel of time and I happen to get that one from the Daly Lama. And one of the points that's made in you know this particular tantric teaching is that people to use the phrase tend like we're smart human beings are smart relatively speaking you know in the whole Buddhist range of you could be any anything almost right that's Buddhist philosophy you can buy it or not buy it but that's the idea so if you compare like human beings to like a gerbal or a hippopotamus or you know whatever I mean any anytime anybody brings a gerbal up you just think of whose ass is it in you know like Oh yeah. Yeah. That's it. There's nothing else. We can't comment on that because that get ridiculously close. You know the story behind that. We do. Yeah. Yeah. Um but you know that whole idea of um you know we're human beings have a certain intelligence. That's part of who we are, right? Beings. But we get to use the phrase high on our own supply a lot. This is uh Elon week that's being talked about a lot. drop that. But in any case, you know, people get high on their own supply and uh we get it so uh enraptured by our own ideas and our own ideologies that we lose our [...] on it. Yeah, totally. And I think that's what we're trying to do here and we're trying to explore it through different again we try to be educational, right? We're not political per se. We're educational and we're trying to give like education around this. So anyways, I think for all these episodes it's good to like get a little meta just to give context for people because you know we have we do have an underlying intention what we're trying to do around this you know. Yeah. Yeah. I found this to be helpful for us trying to understand each other like understand the world right. Yeah. Totally. All right. So our dude of this particular set of episodes it's been a couple of weeks. So if you want to flash back we go a little bit more context behind it but famous French sociologist. So, we're kind of trying to do this through the social sciences, right? It's a guy named Emil Durkheim and we've gotten to the point in talking about him where we're going through this set of ideas from one of his books which is called the elementary forms of religious life and he presents his ideas about I guess how religious psychology works might be a way to look at this. religious psychology andology. And so we'll kind of give you like a little, you know, a quick little mini course on it and, you know, we'll figure out how we're going to apply it maybe to the present day and then what maybe we can do with it in terms of like our own psychospiritual understanding of stuff. So first thing around this to kind of give a feeling for what he's trying to do was he acknowledges the social function of religiosity, right? that functions in this social way and it creates kind of an order and a glue within people to hold them together. Right? Is that all bad? No. I can't I can't we can't say it's all bad for sure. No. Right. No. But there's always of course the danger within that we've been talking about that that that ordering glue goes toxic. Then you have a toxic group and they're being bound together by sticky toxic glue. Okay. So that's part of the idea. Um, and of course for him as a thinker, he's really always thinking about like what holds groups together. So we got to this part of the conversation in cult psychology thinking about this thing called social cohesion, social solidarity, right? So you got these religious aspects of people. I think we both would be okay saying and this is a big conversation now kind of like the psychology of human beings that drawn to religion on some level, right? And we were looking last episode if you want to go and check it out of this idea of called one of his called uh enome where people can feel vulnerable to like chaos and vulnerable to sort of lack of meaning and lack of content, right? Maybe lack of religious content. People could be lost and this fills in the gaps kind of. I'm sorry. It fills in the gaps. But you know what else fills in the gaps when you now that you bring it up and I don't know why I didn't think about it last time. This is conspiracy. I think that's true. I mean, conspiracy in and of itself is a sort of a religion. Yeah. Now, maybe we brought up Q a little bit last episode. We did. You're right. Yeah, I thought we did. And, you know, maybe maybe there's not I mean, not every religion need is well, first of all, not every religion is monotheistic. So, there's not always a central organizing figure as we're probably more used to in the West or I would just say maybe with the Abrahamic religions. Um but there is kind of like a unifying theory of everything whether that's multiple gods or the deep state or you know whatever you want to call it there is an idea of social cohesion community and shared language you know around this kind of thing that around in in the conspiracy in the conspiratorial worlds that is also like I don't know almost esoteric in a sense, you know, and depending how far down you go, it just gets weirder and weirder. Uh just like any uh good conservative religious zealot that the [...] they do just gets weirder and weirder the more you dig past the surface, right? Scientology or something. The more you go, the weirder it gets. Any one of them. I mean, we can we can do it from any one of them. Any that Scientology thing to someone over the weekend, literally, and she was like, "What do they actually think?" And you get to the point where you're like, you go deeper. You go gets weirder and weirder. All of a sudden, you're talking about like uh theans coming from some other planet that's invading into people, polluting their minds and spirits. And you're like, she was like, get seriously like yes. Yeah. And there was the guy who wrote is it million dollar million-dollar baby. First person I heard talk about this, you know, successful screenwriter. I think won an Academy Award for that thing. Scientology thing and eventually he got to the envelope where he opened it up after the I don't know tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars got to that and it just everything crumbled you know and he was like oh my god I can't believe I've spent all these years to get to that. So yeah, right-wing Scientology or like leftwing, whatever it is, you can get yourself in that head space. The deeper you go, right? It was just a poop emoji. Just open it up and just Yeah, exactly. A couple of fingers sticking up. That's right. Middle ones. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I yeah, it's uh that whole thing and like I don't know there's been that whole conversation that like of the anime of the religious vacuum and the cultural surging in to fill that gap and I think that's really in Durkheim's wheelhouse which is part of the reason why we wanted to talk about this, right? Yeah. Yeah. And people feel lost otherwise. And he ties, it's going back to last episode a little bit, but he ties all these problems of anom I feel lost. I feel confused. I feel right. Yeah. Nothing gluing me together to the society and there's nothing holding my meaning of my own life together. Yeah. With uh you know depression. Yes. People like again you write the book called suicide. So yeah, isolation. Yeah. community. Community is the antidote to isolation. And however that community looks, it can either help you or it can harm you. You won't be isolated with the community, but you're you're essentially getting on a train and if you're not conscious of where that train is going, you might not want to be headed to that destination, you know. Yeah. I think at the end of the last episode up, we're doing a little flashback, but by the end of that, we talked our way through it and it was one of those great conversations I really appreciate. Yeah. Thankful for because the end I was like, "Okay, I get it." Some people will feel lost and depressed because they have that emptiness. And some people will feel lost and depressed because they feel crushed. Yes. And they're trapped and they can't get out. You know, I Okay, that diagnostically makes sense to me. And I felt I felt in a good space at the end of that conversation because maybe I wasn't so clear about that in my own mind in that way, you know, but that so Jin and Tantra doing what it's supposed to do, you know? Everybody, right? We all get our own things we get out of this. So, all right. So, that's the idea of like uh the social function of religion of uniting people together in this way and holding a group. In a cult, we're talking about something toxic. Maybe in other situations we could talking we could be talking about SA right as you like to bring up Daniel. Yeah the community that could be the you know the spiritual community that you're part of and that is good right you know but okay there's danger in it but there's positives too. Okay the next thing he gets to is this idea of what he calls collective representations. So once you get a group of people like this, they're going to have things that come to like symbolize the whole group and they become very important objects for that group. They'll tend to imbue those things with all kinds of meaning. Talk a little bit about stuff that would be I think in your wheelhouse, Daniel, like shamanically because some of this might be like uh the like totem figures that might be kind of animal-based or something that you might have in a traditional shamanic setting, right? and the group feels a connection through that or you know whatever it might be. So he does he kind of gets anthropological in a way here but you know I think spiritual in the sense that like you know that might be a thing that pulls all that group together. We unite around our connection to a symbol symbol or force, right? Yeah. Well, that I mean I don't shanic. Yes. But I think that that description might do this a disservice by limiting it to things that have less prevalence in in modern culture. And I get it. You know, so like you could think of a cross, right? You could think of a six-pointed star. You think of a swastika. Uh, and then, you know, for those who are not paying attention, there's swastikas everywhere, right? So, look at the uh the symbol for Chase, Chase Bank. There's a swastika in there. Is there really? Yes, there is. Oh, yeah. uh and you know and so you so these are some simple and then you think about like advertising a Nike swoosh the UA for under arour uh you know I don't know some other whatever ones Northace like you know there's always jinantra podcast swag right you know like all these other kind of things but then you compare that to um something like Islam there is no symbol associate there is one but it's that that came later the the original there is no original symbol associate with Islam because they intentionally didn't want to uh objectify or symbolize something that was beyond symbology just like in Cabala right where they describe God as the endless one or as the endless you know so um the intentional use of symbology towards uh group cohesion is a is a has is and has been a unifying feature for cultures cults I mean cults in culture linguist I Yeah, my notes too. I had this idea of like flags and crosses and things like that. Yeah, totally. Flags. Really good one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you get what he's saying here, it also and we all get this intuitively, but you know, he has a whole theory kind of around this. That's interesting to talk our way through because what he's saying is that those things get imbued with so much meaning, right? Y you don't really understand that. Sometimes you can't understand human action. But if you understand that, then you can really like why people, you know, especially when you get to like I don't want to say it's all culty because it really isn't, but when you get to like a certain group where this is really powerful, you know, it sets people off, right? Oh, yeah. You're getting so deep and he's really Durkheim's trying to get to that point. I was reminded of like two things around this. One was, you know, the NFL had the whole flag thing, right? So, you know, if you're not familiar with this whole aspect of NFL, you know, National Football League history, there was a a point where as a point of protest, there were players that like wouldn't stand up and salute the flag. They weren't going to do it, right? A way of commenting about, you know, problematic aspects of American history, right? Racist aspects and, you know, so the players were just not doing it. And on the one hand you think well that's you know for a lot of us for me that would be a small gesture that didn't that doesn't resonate with me that doesn't mean that much right but if that's a totem for you right if that flag is functioning as a totem well then freaks people's [...] out right oh yeah jerkham is getting that like it's it it incites in this like particular way because of how much that means to that group. Yeah. Yeah. So much psychological energy, right? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Or like way back in the day, and I don't think this is great art at all, but there was an artist who made this um picture called like piss Christ. And what he had done was he had taken uh you know, a cross, you know, Jesus on the cross, and he had put it in some urine, and he had taken a photo of it. Do I think that's great art? I really don't, to be honest. You know, I'm not touchy about art. I'm not touchy about that symbol, but I could look at that and say that's just crappy art. I didn't think that was that profound. Oh, yeah. Not exactly. Yeah. Not finding like shapes in poop, you know? You're like, "Oh, wow. Great." Yeah. And I I don't I mean, people who can find something in that certainly it's provocative if you like that kind of thing. But I was like, "Okay, what?" I saw Elvis in my toast. I went to the Andy Warhol exhibit. You know that artist, right? M and [...] where they would just they would just pee on like pieces of metal and whatever the [...] thing came out that was the art. I'm not impressed with that personal. So I'm like okay whatever bro. But you know I mean when you get to like how deep that is for people that was like an inciting thing you know. Yeah you're trying to purposely provoke people. But I mean what Durkheim is getting to is this idea like once you imbue something like that with that kind of power you know um you know people are going to lose it right. All right. All right. So anyways, you get these collective representations. Now the other part about this which takes us a little bit the way we like to go philosophical is he kind of gets deeper into this in a way because he says eventually in all of these collective groups. What you'll start to get is like just a shared way of looking at the world, right? That goes beyond even the flags and the symbols and so on. He gets to how that group starts to think about all kinds of things, even like very fundamental things like time and space and cause and effect and how you think about nature. And he basically at this point starts to say those are like social understandings on some level, right? We think of them as objective, but actually they're kind of created by whoever that group thinks about them. So would you say that this or from you know from your understanding would you say that this would be something along the lines of like evolution versus creationism? I think that's an example that would like get to part of what he'd be talking about and that's a completely way of thinking about time and what time means exact. Okay. So this kind of like group cohesion also goes into their cognition and that cohesion around a symbol unifies a people around uh something that they can be I they're quickly identified as either they are or they're not that particular thing right and I'm I'm using Christianity in in the moment here but people can certainly replace this with any other religion just slap the symbol on there right um and so you so you're uh identif ified cohesed around a symbol and then you get cohesion around ideology and that ideology is not just about the nature of God but you move it into the more differentiated aspects of reality. So time and you know how the world came to develop and so on and so forth starts to grow beyond just philosophy philosophical talks. Yeah. I'm like to give a different example. I buy the totally the one you're talking about. The one that hit me because I've been doing research for a little podcast here. Yeah. Listening to this book called Cults Like Us and maybe I'll do a little review on it at some point. Right. Sure. overall. Um, and then other things where they're referencing cults like I listening to there's a a journalist who wrote something about like Silicon Valley and really interesting because this word cult is a popping up everywhere now. I mean like we're doing our podcasts on it, you know, but like it's out in the it's out. Oh yeah, we're we're in the wave, baby. We're we're in it in that thing because you go people are trying to understand this and that we're cult all the time. And they were kind of talking about the Silicon Valley cult around this too. What what there's this idea of like the central myth of like western culture, Christian culture, whether this applies to like other aspects of I think anything that's messianic, right, has this where you think of time a certain way. History's unfolding and it's heading towards some end point. Yeah. It's apocalyptic. Yeah. And that's a way of thinking about time and thinking about reality. People are arguing about this, but I think it's persuasive, right? That that so permeates the culture that even when you get out of that religious or obvious religious settings, right? And so on, the big three and all that, you get this this everywhere. And it's just a certain way of thinking about very fundamental aspects of like what's reality, what's time, what's space. And there's just a drive towards apocalypse somehow. The journalist who's I'm forgetting her name now and I'll bring her up some other time and give her credit for this, right? But she's writing about the way AI looks in this tech bro sphere. And I talked with some people I know who are kind of tech bro type folks and they're like, "Oh yeah, it's culty." So it's, you know, not just her opinion. I was like, a lot of people are talking about this. And I asked people personally who are in that AI world. So their idea is they're trying to do something that's has this endgame which is almost like quasiap apocalyptic and some of the folks in that subculture are like no we're making this AI and it's kind of like we're making a devil and that devil may destroy everything and we're doing it anyways. We're kind of compelled to do it but you know it's the dark apocalypse, right? M and then for other people within that subculture, there's almost a religiosity in the sense that they feel like they're making like an uber intelligence that's almost like a divinity and they're going to create that through the AI and it might be apocalyptic in the sense that it'll leave a a lot in its wake, but ultimately it's more utopian or something, you know, but if you put in the context of what we're talking about here, that's a very particular way of thinking about the flow of time. It's very directional. It has an end goal. There's something there's going to be a big explosion at the end or something's going to happen at the end of it, you know. And when we get more into our Asian world, a lot of time is like cyclic. It doesn't end necessarily in that way, right? So, it's like a fundamentally maybe different way of thinking about like very fundamental things like how does unreal reality unfold? What does time mean? and uh you know very core things that are even beyond like the symbols like aspects that are so deep they're kind of embedded there and they're all over the place right even in people who wouldn't identify themselves as being religious in any you know like typical big three way does that make sense what I'm saying oh that makes perfect sense I think that is I think that's that was worth the price of entry right there I mean it's like wild to listen to it and it was like she's using that word cult you know it's like yeah it's like a cult The trippy thing was for me like uh was like some people think they're making the devil, right? Yeah. Some people think they're making God, you know, and there's an ambiguity around that. But you see that you see the problem, right? Yes. It's dual. Oh, it is dual. Yeah. If you want to get Yeah. non-dualistic about it, right? That's the problem. And that God is neither good nor bad. You know, it non they're not it's non-conceptual. I mean, we talked about this before we started recording. You know, people love that people love their logic and they love their rationality, which is fine and there's there's place for that for sure. But then you don't have to you don't always have to be in a place of total logic or rationality. There are deeper truths that are non-conceptual that have to be experienced and understood through through assimilation essentially. however you want to assimilate to them. That's everyone's going to have a different way of doing that. But you can't just uh uh attach a label to something and then believe that you instantaneously understand 100% or 51% which is enough for you to fill the gap in because you don't understand it. You've just heard a little piece of it and you're going to make a snap judgment on either good or bad, right? For me or against me, inroup or outgroup. And so even when we're even when we're talking about like AI which is you know we definitely have the wrong administration right now to be in charge of this growth right important moment in this technological window. Yeah for sure that there is going to be zero I mean now but let's be fair there has not been an administration on on either side of the aisle that really had a grasp. I mean Obama was the youngest president over the last how many president however many presidents so he kind of understood and again they're they're not doing a whole lot but at least he understood I think these you know either one they're too old they're they're too they're too past you know to to understand what's happening at this particular time because because the technology is so emergent that like it almost has to be deified or will raified in a sense on its, you know, importance at this particular time because people don't understand how how it's going to work, you know, like right now it's writing your papers and making weird videos and pictures, you know, so it's kind of like a fun little tool, but you know, I've mentioned this to a couple people before and I'll bring it up on the podcast now and if I've brought it up previously, you know, my apologies for being redundant, but you know, at this moment AI is kind of working for us, but in the way that that's working against us. Not to talk about jobs or anything else like this. Your Google, okay, your search engine, which I'm going to assume is Google because it is from like 90% of people. If you or me look up something, we're going to get two different views on the same subject even though we're googling the same thing. Okay? Or we're going to get different suggestions based on what we are looking up normally. Okay? Fine. That same thing is going to happen and does happen with your AI. Whether you're using chat GPT or whatever, you know, whatever one that you're using, you're going to get curated personalized responses that A are just for you and B are not always correct. We assume that they are right. They're not always right. Googling something. If you Google something that you have knowledge of, you'll realize that the little answer that they give you at the top of the screen is not is a summary of many articles, but it is might not be necessarily correct unless you actually read the articles and extrapolate for yourself what comes from them. So there is um maybe unintentional nefarious um aspects of this for now, but it's sort of like sort of diffused personto person. But when you look at that and as a in a in a cultural millu, it's not exactly without incidence, you know, it's not a neutral thing. It's not just, you know, it's not cologne in a room. It's a fart. It's not objective. For sure. It's Yeah. It can be objectively stinky. Yes. I think um Yeah. So, you know, a lot of what you're talking about is certainly like once you start going down this like say dualistic thing, you're going to get a lot of us versus them. Yep. One of the things that's been weird for me about the time now and there's a number of ways to take what we're talking about and you know, but one of the things that's been like what you end up having is a lot of this thing where people are wrapped up in their own ideologies and they're trying to impose it upon others. Yeah. And it's obvious that people do that. like you know saying that is like duh people are always doing that but like I think from a Buddhist point of view or a spiritual point of view what the [...] is that? Why in the world would you think that you're in the position to really impose your ideology upon a whole bunch of other people and that you're part of that is because you're so imshed in your own understanding of whatever that subgroup is that all of a sudden you want to drag everybody else along along with it. And that can go across in multiple ways, right? Mhm. No, I mean one of the things that you know inspired us to do some of these episodes was all of a sudden it was like like what my friend who is a tech person. He's very AI intensive person, but he was like, "Oh yeah, there's a cult there. There's a tech brocall and they got something going on, you know, and or you know, you we talk about a lot of religious stuff. They're Christian nationalists that are like trying to impose their vision of the world. They want everyone to live by that." And it's just on some level, it's like kind of duh, like, you know, even saying it is like, okay, you know, of course, human beings do that. But there's just something so bizarre about that psychosspiritually when you really dig into it. You know, on the AI point, I'll just bring up the one thing because we haven't had a chance to talk about it, but there was the idea, however this happened, that people were trying to get into the back door of like the Gro Gro. Yeah. [...] with it essentially to make it say things about South Africa and like white genocide in South Africa. Yeah. And that thing freaked out. Yeah. And it almost seemed like it got I don't know, however you want to interpret that, but it got a little like petulant and resistant or something, right? Got like a little passive aggressive to the extent that like if you don't know the story, it all of a sudden started like dropping this stuff randomly into people's searches. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let me tell you about this South Africa thing. You're like, I googled chocolate chips or I was looking up recipes for cookies. kind of I wanted to know what was happening with the Pacers and the Knicks and all of a sudden I'm getting a bunch of stuff about South Africa. Okay. And then it started actually saying things like well I'm supposed to like be objective but someone is sort of making me do this. Yeah. I was a little resistant as far as anyways that's the AI thing but you know this idea of this collective meaning right? Yeah. And um uh and so then like what Durkheim does with this kind of you know pulling this stuff together is essentially you have these truths even things about like what's God what's reality what's divinity who are we these are sort of social concepts we're big on that subject matter right because it's so core to spirituality especially like tantra and dowoism and zen and the kind of things we're into because you're always challenging those ideas right but it's the way that you make the collective meaning that unites people together for good or or ill. And they're very deep things. They're philosophic and you might say epistemological if you like fancy words. Oh, we love I love fancy words or you understand reality, right? Yeah. So, and then he gets to the point and I'll pull the section together and I'll be curious what you think about all this, Daniel. But he says, you know, at a certain point if you don't have those things, then you really don't have meaning. So, this is a way of like a group giving people meaning. we're going to give you meaning, right? And the meaning is so important that without that, you really can't even like act in the world. In some ways, your actions won't have context and meaning. And it's sort of paralyzing not to have that. So, you needed or even give something meaning at all. So, you can function and act, you know, and without that, you're you're I think he's saying without that, you end up with that anom thing again. But no matter what, it's so strong that it starts to permeate everything you're doing or something, right? And it's the thing that gives all the context for better or for worse. And then my favorite sociology people back in the day was Peter Burgerer. And I realized it set me up for Buddhist philosophy kind of and Zen and things like that tantra because his book is called like the social construction of reality you know and you know unless you had that happening you you know it's the group that provides the meaning the group provides the context to action and all that I know you got more on that or you feel like that's good that's good there's a part of it well okay we'll get more into this we'll pull all this [...] together ultimately but all right so then like what Durkheim does next is this idea that you have like the sacred and the profane. These are big things for him. So the minute you start having a kind of a collective identity with the collective symbols and the collective meanings, all of a sudden some of these things come to be sacred objects to the group and they're almost kind of divine within that group, right? Mhm. Probably the more cult you get and I've been using this idea from Durkheim of like um mechanistic group thinking where you're trying to get everybody to be more of the same, right? Like the cogs and the machine or something, right? Where there's high conformity, high pressure for conformity and high potential punishment, right? For lack of conformity and like group shame. You know, once you have these objects, of course, then they have to be treated by reverence with everyone in the group. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of backlash, right? And that's going to be a major problem, right? And these objects have to be surrounded by sort of a ritual and kind of an awe around them. He talks that way. So, that's interesting, I think, for our stuff. The difference between sh sacred and profane, right? You start getting those things. I don't know. What do you think about those words? Do they mean anything to you? I'm trying to think of what sacred and profane means to me, you know, given my psychosspiritual disposition. I think because ritual has been removed from the culture and is even like kind of a weird word that gets associated with paganism that it has been because we're based on a puritanical ideology from the people who founded this country that that is just frowned upon ritual. Yeah. You know, it's sort of a it's it's it's an occult. It's esoteric. It's spiritual. There's, you know, who knows what's involved with this. There's very few rituals even in our society. You know, when you think of rituals, what do you think of? Okay, marriage. That's a ritual. You know, I don't know if you want I mean outside of that, you know, like not everybody has, you know, outside of religion, there's no cultural rituals, right? I guess you're supposed to look people in the eye when you give them a a when you cheers, you toast to something, right? Look somebody in the eye or you have bad sex for seven years or something like that. Whatever it is, you know, I never heard that, you know. Uh and you know, every culture has their own ritual. Yes, everybody everybody has their own little things, but collectively there is there is not that. So I think without ritual sacred and profane don't have a lot of place in the culture generally and like that that subject will be continued for sure right as we go through these sections of what he's trying to say because he does recognize that right as you lose the ritual and you lose the collective feeling of what's sacred and profane it has consequences right and like in the theory of what we're trying to present in terms of this podcast and what's happening in the world around us with cult then a lot of things are trying to fill that space right so you know that's a thing I and like you know we're kind of multitasking in this on the one hand we're talking about cultiness and on the other hand we're just trying to talk about like how these ideas can help us out psychosspiritually overall multiple things we're trying to do and for me I realized like I got something got a little complicated around this that I'm trying to figure out what I think about that I'll talk about just for a second that we can move the subject matter on. But I have like like I like we did a retreat, right? We did our first gin andra retreat and there we did set up an altar, right? And we put things probably say what an altar is, Eric. Yeah, we did it like this is like more in the tandric world, but you usually put some objects there that you think have spiritual meaning, right? It's our own way of doing kind of what we're talking about here, right? And um sometimes it'll be, you know, little statues of some of the the practices that you would do, right? If you did like a white Tara practice, you know, and that was important to you, you could put a little statue of white tara on the on the altar, right? And then symbolically, you can put little offerings if you want to, right? You don't have to, but you could. You can. Yeah. candle, incense, things that have spiritual significance depending on your background. You know, could be feathers or, you know, animal bones just just, you know, it all depends on what whatever you're doing. Yeah. So, it can be, you know, stuff like that. And that has that sacred profane quality to it. Right. We're going to set up a space here, right? Yeah. And uh I brought some of my there's like the tonka paintings in like a Buddhist tantra where you have the paintings of uh you know some of the important they're kind of like in that weird space. They're kind of like divine energies. They're also like things that you meditate on as tools, right? It's interesting big subject matter but you know so I bought one brought one of my favorite tonkas and it was sort of hanging in there. It's pretty, you know, bright red tonka gave a little life to the room, right? And then you do get the feeling and I've had this where, you know, if you meditate around things a lot, you sort of almost empower them in a way, right? With a certain a certain amount of energy just from your spiritual practice. Like you can talk that way in Asian culture, right? And it's kind of all over the place. So there's a kind of a sacred profane thing there. But I'm also there's a part of me that's a little suspicious of those things too if they get taken too far. Sure. I was trying to like figure out like where does that come from? And it's a little bit what you were talking about earlier. You can't imbue those things too much because you can lose the forest for the trees, right? Start putting those objects above the Dao or Allah or something, right? You can't lose sight of that, right? Um, and then also in the Zen world, there's a little part where you purposely sort of have to make sure that you you don't overemphasize the difference between the sacred and profane because yeah, ultimately you want everything to be sacred. Correct. You know, and so if you start dividing up too much, you sort of lose that higher truth. It's throw it out for people to think about because it's kind of interesting. It's not a cult thing, but it's just interesting to think about. Yeah. Well, and I mean, and I think if we're going to move it into a contemporary uh context, you can look at the flag, right? Especially here in the United States, it's a, you know, it's a point of contention that different people will use it for different purposes. But some people will use it and they'll, you know, they'll burn it, right, as a means to display uh discontent with the direction of the country on a, you know, symbolic basis. And some people are super like pissed about this, but what's funny is that like the flag itself represents freedom to burn that flag. This is the ironic part. So like if you're listening to this and it bothers you that that happens, you be happy that you're here that that could be done because there is something that somebody else is doing that another person would find uh not just offensive, but they'll say, "Oh, that's desecrating. that's uh defiling what what I view to be sacred. But the nice part about having a place that you can do that is that you can do that, you know, and so viewing things for as they as they are, right? So two pieces of wood nailed together to form a T can be a T and for someone else, oh that's a holy symbol now, you know, but we give the thing we give it meaning. It has meaning because we imbue meaning upon it. And depending on what we want to imbue our meaning on, it will have a essentially a life of its own because we give it that life, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I I have to acknowledge like you don't always bring it up, but you were in the service, right? You you were in the military and like you know, you do have that understanding that as someone who served, part of what I served for, we've talked about this is like it's about freedoms, right? Yeah. So like for you to have the freedom to to even you know um burn the thing that's a symbol of this because the freedom thing is the bigger question right service of freedom but you know like I guess what Durkhe time is getting to if you imbue a symbol with so much meaning and it becomes so so core [...] out and that's dangerous right part's not healthy you know well they become they become identified with it and it's a piece of them So harming that thing is essentially harming them. Yeah. Yeah. And harming the group if you have a very strong group cohesion. Mhm. Like you're not supporting our group. Okay. Back against the whole group now because you've made that so you've imbued that with so much power over you, right? And so much power over the group, right? And I don't know if if this is a term or not, but like I'm going to coin it now even though we're pretty late in the episode to be dropping uh intellectual we will call them grenades, not bombs. Um but you know, asymmetrical groups and what I mean by this is that you can now be aligned with people ideologically that are outside of your family and view them as closer to you than perhaps your own kin. Right? So just think about we we'll just use like a political divide that some people might be more right-leaning or left-leaning or whatever within their own family and will extricate themselves from their own family members who they've known the bulk of their life because of their political differences. And so now your group is the shape of it has changed to people who you might not even necessarily know well but you believe to be closer to you in mind and heart because you share this viewpoint or these viewpoints that you believe to be parallel with you or or even united with you and this other person who is not your family member. So in my mind that is kind of like an asymmetrical approach to forming new group uh new groups. I mean it's interesting because that's like I mean we're doing the spirituality thing mixed with all the other stuff we're doing and like you know that's part of spirituality like historically right Buddha left his family right Jesus leaves his family if you want to go that route too right so it's happens a lot you know it is a theme and then you re you reconnect with a new family right outside of the kinship bonds you know we've done episodes where this has kind of come up you know But it's kind of finding its way back in kind of an interesting way. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinates me too about what you were saying was and I don't know what you I mean I think the Durkheim thing does explain it. You you imbue something with so much sacredness and you make it so symbolic that it's like an attack on your own person, right? But there always is that irony. The point that you made people talk about that in America and yet at the same time you know like if you do something to the flag it's like an attack on the country. You know, the NFL thing was bizarre. You know, I thought about that. People were so mad about that, right? And it was because there was a disrespect of the symbol that, you know, but you know, the irony of course is what you're bringing up. Supposed to be a symbol of something beyond. So maybe that's something we have to think about too, right? We have to like not get so bunched up with our symbols that we lose the bigger things that those things are supposed to symbolize like freedom. Well, we could even go one level one level more meta. And the problem is identification. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, we go we'll go max we'll go max meta, right? And so it's like identification. Well, what is identification? Identification is the objectifying of a thing that is not an object. Well, what could that mean? Everything. The belief that, you know, and we talk about this a lot in the podcast. I know recently we're sort of you know foraying into uh the kind of a slightly more contemporary topics but still with our lens that like you can make if you believe that things are the way that they appear to be then you are going to be inherently fooled all the time you know and you're going to see things as they are exactly as they are is mundane life is only mundane life that's what it is very materialist but that is not the case this is the Newtonian view of physics Right? Life is like a bunch of Q balls on a pool table that whack into each other and that's the end of it. That's all. And once all the balls go into the holes, no more game. Game over, right? And maybe if you believe in uh some afterlife, then there's pool that gets played in heaven or something like this, right? That's the end of it. However, Newtonian physics is not where the story stops. You know, relative physics is where the next story begins. And that is exactly what we're talking about. It's seeing beyond what life seems to have to offer you. And when you objectifize something, like we talked about earlier, you believe that you have an understanding of this particular thing. And even if you don't, you understand enough of it to fill in the blanks, even if you're wrong. But you do anyways. And so you objectify this symbol as you or this other person as an extension of you or your home as you. And therefore anything that is like against you, you are going to put your defenses up and then you will do whatever it is that you are trained to do or not trained to do. So fight, flight, [...] it, you know, whatever whatever you're going to do. That's what's going to happen. And this just happens continually. And our message from the very beginning has been the same. Understand this. Break the bond. That's it. We don't have to do another podcast episode ever. That's the I mean that's essentially that's that will go on forever. That's it. Understand it. Break the bond. You choose free yourself because then when you can then no nobody can do anything to take you outside of yourself because news flash there is no self. You're that's not you're not who you think you are and you're definitely not attached to a [...] flag or a symbol or anything else like this. It's not to say that those things can't have a cohesive meaning for your life and can add to your existence and what you want to work towards and bettering humanity. I'm not removing compassion from this discussion, but I'm trying to like highlight the the absolute toxic nature and small-mindedness of objectification as an outside thing being viewed as a part of myself and therefore I have to be offended and defend this thing as if it were my own life. Yeah, maybe like this is we're getting to the end of this episode, right? And we'll have one more jerkheim thing left because there's a little bit on this whole collective effrovescence. We never got to it. Sometimes it happens. So, collective effrovescence part two, we'll do it. But, uh, in the series, we're trying to get across to people. But, you know, I think that like I had someone who was asking me like, "Okay, normally you talk about spiritual issues. Now, you're almost in this area where there's little political elements to what you're doing. Like, what's up with that?" And I was like, you know, until like if you get to like the deeper idea of um spirituality that ultimately you want everyone to get to like the enlightened state, right? We'll go deep, right? You want everyone to have freedom. You want everyone to be spiritually fulfilled, psychologically fulfilled, and so on, right? Part of it has to get to the point where we stop trying to like dominate and control one another, right? We have to get to that place. Going back to the beginning episodes, that's the Kala chakra problem, the wheel of time problem in part. We get so bunched up with our own ideas, our own symbols, our own whatever. And then the next thing you know, you're at war with everyone else and you're trying to impose your ideology on everyone else, right? And at some point, you have to be able to transcend that. Otherwise, you can't end human suffering. Right here, now we're getting to the deepest part. Five minutes left. Okay, whatever. But, you know, until you can get to that point, and this is my this is my what I was trying to explain to this person. What does this have to do with everything? Well, until you can get to this point where you start to crack this, well, then you can't free yourself really. And then you also, it's always going to be a problem in terms of human suffering because inevitably you'll have my ideology, my set of ideas clashing with yours. I'm going to try to impose it upon you, right? And crush you underneath it. And like that has to get broken some way or another, folks. Somehow we have to get the [...] out of that, right? As a polar transcendence, it has to happen. Otherwise, this shit's always going to be [...] up, right? Yeah. No matter what perspective you might be coming from on the political spectrum or where you're coming at at ideologically, the minute you're in that, then everything is going to go down the [...] tubes. And like somehow we have to be able to break out of that. And maybe that's the point of something like the Ka level. I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I got a thing across the hall called the shower curtain of wisdom where we have all these great quotes from these different people. And then I can't remember the details. It's it's from one of the shamanic figures and he's kind of going like part of the experience of the medicine in your wheelhouse, right? Iaska in the medicines is to like make you transcend. Mhm. You start realizing what you were saying earlier, Daniel, that the world I see around me isn't as it appears and I have to get that broken somehow, right? So I can transcend. And then in a certain sense, we're doing the the Durkheim deal to kind of present a view on a way to think about this. But the additional project has to be like, okay, this is how it is. We all all of us have to somehow transcend this. Got to get beyond this, you know, otherwise it's always going to be this clashing and that was my answer to the person about like why are we doing this you know we're trying to get to the point of making these kinds of points ultimately an educational part to give a view on it with also the idea like at some point you have to get transcendence of it does that make sense I mean that's what we're doing so yeah no that's exactly what we're doing that's right and if you've made it to this part of the episode your uh attention span is in the top 5% of the entirety of humanity forget just the world now. And as time goes on, you will probably be in the top 1% because people's attention spans are only going one way, shorter and shorter. And there was a song in the '9s that was sort of a dance hit that said, uh, I don't want don't don't want no short man. If you remember that song way back when it was, you know, don't want no short. Anyways, um, attention span now is what that is. Thank you for uh for for watching and for tuning in and for rocking with us. If you've been with us for a minute, you know, uh welcome back. Thank you. If you're uh new to the episodes, thanks for uh for tuning in. You know, definitely hit that uh subscribe button. It helps us, you know, hits the algorithm and uh you know, gets us out to more people. Obviously, we are uh self-funded and uh you know, we don't do any ads or anything else like this and we'll keep it that way, you know, but uh it just it's encouraging for us to get feedback from people. So, please leave a comment in the YouTube section, comment section, or uh send us an email at jin andtraaggmail.com if you like what we're doing or you hate what we're doing or you know, whatever. You know, we we'll take it. You know what I'm saying? Uh or feel free to hit us up on the gram at the Jin and Tantra podcast. For Eric, this is Daniel. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.