[Music] welcome to Gin and Tantra thanks for tuning in in Jin and Tantra in this episode titled what do you think we discuss and to kind of Define biological materialism secular humanism and specifically their takes on the difficulties that we face in this lifetime we asked the question what do you think we also discuss phenomenology which in itself is a fantastic word that I love to say but more specifically we highlight some of the tools that these modern philosophies apply as a salve to ease the wounds of the modern material Matrix we call today enjoy the episode hey belgians here's those of us who like our spirituality with a Twist so after a little short Hiatus Daniel and I are back and we're here to talk about suffering as we've been talking about for weeks but we're really doing something we hope is different normally when you talk about this subject matter you just go through and you kind of present some Buddha stuff which we did but our idea was to also go through and kind of look at like how other School of the thought traditions of thought think about this question because probably in the West for most people Buddhism isn't your introduction to this you've already been thinking about this some way or another relative to other parts of the culture so it seemed like a like a a deeper way to go through this and it does connect to a richer tradition you know uh Buddhist kind of a thing where you go through and you look at like the view and in this case we're not talking about Whoopi Goldberg it's a joint Behar yeah not in that show yeah right like he's gone yeah a much to the disappointment of of her massive audience I'm sure did she get kicked off for some reason I don't know dude yeah we don't know we don't know she got a job working at my pillow I guess I don't know you're not gonna get that information we have we don't have that information um so it's not that like when you talk about the view in uh Eastern thought certainly in like tantric Buddhist thought it's usually like where these um tantric buddhisti folks are going through and they're kind of saying okay here's how people tend to think within this culture right and I want to get the one you know where it's one of the guys from Tibet who went to China well I almost do that before we do our taoism episodes but anyways there's this whole idea of just describing how people think so we wanted to do that go through and look and say okay here's how Christianity might talk about this or here's how Islam or Judaism we did the big three we talked about some new age stuff we did some Gnostic stuff in addition to the Buddhist stuff and today it's I think one of the I think really most important but like as I was trying to like do some prep on it like one of the most confusing things to talk about which is just sort of like biological materialism secular humanism and uh talk about like how that mindset thinks about suffering and I was trying to think about how to prep this Daniel from you know my part and I was like well the thing that's hardest for me was something like first of all how many people have this this point of view and you and I were talking like off mic right before we were starting and it's probably a lot you looked at the stats people who identify it non-religious were like about a third about a third in this country in this country in the United States yeah but like you know then we were also kind of throwing the idea like it might be more people who just you know they wouldn't necessarily say they're atheists or something but they this is if you really scratch beneath the surface this is how people think sure so it's I partially a question of like how many people are we talking about and then like what exactly do people believe you know because if you're going to do a real good description of like what people think and then how they would think about suffering you have to sort of know what people think and it's not that obvious to me what the hell people think right yeah it's so anyways those are my confusions around this island you have some thoughts on that well I could say I mean with you know I think after we're not going to go into it but after the 2016 election we could say that polling data isn't the best anymore you know okay yeah that's fair right okay yeah so we can say that at least at least a third of people are quote unquote non-religious and then based on the ones that are religious you know what percent of them feel some sort of way to just check Christian or whatever based on their parents affiliation you know what I'm saying and don't actually carry that the the any practices or ideology with them but just put down yes I'm religious from this perspective you know but maybe who are never baptized or their kids are never put into any sort of religious affiliation you know I think that number is like kind of like cultural right it's culturally this or that yeah right but you're but for all intents and purposes you're not like praying before you eat and you know I'm saying asking for guidance for from your creator you know wherever that Creator exists so I think it's actually a much larger part of the population uh and I'm looking forward to kind of going into this a little bit because I do think its voice is growing you know even though it may not necessarily have that much of a voice culturally because the religious and we'll I'll just call it the religious right at this point is taking all the room or taking all the air out of the room or maybe putting hot air in the room I don't know but there's a room and there's air and I don't like all of it together you know some of the air is a little stale yeah exactly yeah and so I think some of the conversation has moved in that direction and those who are not on the boat at all are kind of like uh where do we fit in with all of this you know yeah there is kind of a weird feeling of like I know a lot of people are asking this question of where do I fit in now into this these conversations people don't know where they fit in which you know again might be something we'll talk about as a cause of suffering too in a way not knowing where you fit in but um I also think it kind of matters like what people actually believe not even what you might check on a form right for statistical purposes but if you really like because to get the Buddhism of this or to get the psycho spiritual reality of this you have to know like what the person actually thinks yeah not what they just sort of like maybe would put out as like a again a census form thing or you know something like that yeah it really matters like what you actually think and therein lies the issue with the polling you know yeah and trying to like even get to like what the underlying thing that people actually think and believe is kind of hard so I guess in a way my sense of Americans would be something like a lot of them are probably biological materialists without even really knowing what that is or really like you know self-identifying in that way they probably just are just maybe by default or just de facto does that seem fair to say or like what do you think I mean you're gonna get people who are religious religious in the way you know they strongly identify but I think a lot of people when you get underneath the surface they're just sort of like that I would say so I would say it matches my experience especially for a lot of people who would kind of like not think too deeply about these things and and just for our you know I'm gonna do a little definition here right so we can have that as our in our working and our background yeah yeah yeah word of the day so word of the date on materialism is a tradition uh of thought in which all things that exist are made up of matter in some way right so everything is made up of matter matter you know even though matter is a form of energy everything has some component to it you know yeah I don't think people think about the physics energy stuff we've done podcasts about physics and physics is weird I don't think people think about the universe in some weirdo physics way no they don't think about it some way it's it's Newtonian it's Newtonian physics from that perspective I think they're mostly in the Darwinism well there well there's that but either way mostly in the Darwinism material biological materialism is as it sounds right it's made up of stuff stuff is made of stuff and the question from where that stuff is made up of doesn't get asked said stop asking just accept what you see that is the end of it if your eyes cannot perceive it it does not exist oh [...] what's an x-ray never mind yeah how does that work yeah never mind yeah I'm talking on a wireless Black Box you know oh yeah never mind forget about not think about any of those waves and any of those other funky [...] so I don't know it's been kind of a weird thing I'm like uh even with my my son and my daughter I kind of know like underneath the surface just by being raised in this culture this is probably what you're going to think unless you're specifically probably raise Christian or something yeah and some much more intense way so we're probably talking about a big group of people and probably like a view of the world which is not like super well defined like where people probably don't know what they think and you might say well why why have this conversation the thing is like probably if you're just raised and what I again we're looking at America because that's what we know about maybe Western cultural overall yeah if you're just like raised in this culture you probably just sort of think this way just by default some semi-vague sense of like something about Darwin and natural selection and something about a platypus that you know and how it doesn't quite fit right but it still is there and some [...] that you've heard right and your upbringing you're like well okay I guess this is how I think about the world and my cell phone works so science must be true and I don't know whatever you think there's some hodgepodgey way of looking at the world this way yeah well and that's kind of like I think what we were alluding to earlier in terms of the um surveys you know and that like how people think and what they're going to share with the world are not always congruent right number one but then number two you know and we always talk about our mission statement but you know really this is a perfect place for it is to be able to question a lot of this unconscious programming and we don't we we don't really use those words very much because it has a conspiratorial sort of feeling to it so I I know I steer clear of it Eric I don't know if you steer clear but I think it's kind of you know it is unconscious and it is programming it's not inaccurate right right but you know we can say that that like there is unconscious unconscious cultural programming sometimes that cultural programming is great it comes from your mom or your grandma and probably from women more than men I'm gonna just say it you know but you know be kind to people right you know do good things give you know what I'm saying but that that's good social you know programming those things are fine um but there is a lot more that gets learned without words right through advertising through innuendos through subtext you know through slang through just cultural references that are that are in the culture just sort of floating around in people's minds that get passed along and as receivers of information all of us are going to take them in and at some point they I believe anyways I think you agree they take residence in your mind they take residence in your body they take residence in your heart and therefore they take residence in your thoughts and actions much below the level of your awareness actually and so one of the things that we are definitely doing here on purpose is to highlight as many of those things as possible and say is that you is that what you think is that what you believe is that what you want to be inside of you and I say no for now but maybe I'll put it back I think the thing about it in the end would be maybe there's like a joint project to go through and try to figure out like what it is people actually think you know I'm like imagining like these you know Tibetan Old School Scholars or Indian Scholars sitting in some other place that they didn't know and they got their little notepad out and they're trying to write down like what did these people actually think maybe that's the hardest thing to figure out with Americans in a way is what the [...] do we actually think because it's not so obvious on some level it's some kind of weird set of things that you probably think underneath the surface and I imagine you know again you have to like you from a second spiritual point of view from like a Buddhist point of view because where this episode started with the Buddhist sort of theme about yeah and this satisfaction suffering or however you want to translate that um you end up with this question of uh you need to be able to know what you actually think so you can challenge those views and start and developing in ways that might be more healthy correct so maybe that is something that will have to just keep working on this endeavor goes forward because I'm not entirely sure when I look at my brother you know as an example he's obviously a biological materialist if you asked him you know actually maybe even if you didn't ask him if I asked him are you biological materialist I don't even know if he would agree with that but if you were dig around in his mind I'm sure he is you know that's it's strange it's a strange problem so anyway so this is this question of you right it's just this whole thing of what what is this actually like what do people actually believe in me right and I I yeah I don't know if the the tenants are very clear you know I think there's probably a lot of confusion about what people actually think that was my problem in trying to prep this even I was like okay what do people think can we even like say this very clearly and I don't think we can and probably if we were trying to say what people think you wouldn't you'd only capture like a certain number of people you'd Miss other people who don't quite think that or something but there's something weird going on and trying to figure out what it is actually that people think like if I really ask my daughter like what do you actually think I think on some level she'd just be like I don't know well I I think no she doesn't know I and I also think though that the response to that question probably gives more uh creating more I guess insight into someone's mind and they would probably say about what um I mean maybe because I I ask this question all the time what do you think just you know to my friends my partner you know what do you think and they'll be about what I'm like I don't know anything you know and it's always and it's but I mean the thing is right oh man this is even this is even a deeper question is thought relative uh uh relative to what exactly right so it's about what right so if you ask what does someone think that have to about what you know oh I see what you mean do you see what I'm saying I'm going meta on this [...] you know but the thing is like you wouldn't ask me that question because you know I would answer right it's gonna be a long answer and you probably don't even want to like dude I do a whole [...] podcast with you I didn't hear any more of this but I mean that's because I actually like uh I spent a certain amount of time trying to figure out what it is that I think um but I mean and I think if I ask my daughter she'd be like uh she'd feel defensive what do you mean what do you mean probably like I don't think like you would probably be part of the answer I'd be like okay that's cool you know it's I don't know it is something it was that was the that was the hiccup and like you know for my part of the prepping of this I was like I don't know if I know it how to describe what people actually think well this is a great this is a great thought experiment for people listening you know yeah just just to think about the question what do you think not what do you think about what do you think well it's kind of this is kind of like well like what do you think this place is what are you up to and like what's the meaning of it you know that's what we're asking yeah and they could have all kinds of answers right well because in part of the question is of what do you think is how do you think yeah yeah you know and based on your personality probably astrological signs you know genetic makeup upbringing education experience people are going to have different ways of thinking and thereby that's probably going to inform how they think thereby moving us to our question what do you think about what exactly the thing is like what you're trying to figure out from like um uh you know Buddhist tantric point of view or Asian philosophical point of view or however you want to frame this is like what is your view right right like what is your view you know and that's gonna that the reason they do that is because it's going to change everything it's like digging underneath the surface to go okay so what do you actually believe in so how how would you know based on some based on The View um or the the we'll say the pursuit the pursuit of The View what are some things that that they might mention in the the tantric text or some of the Buddhist texts that you've read that are I don't know like techniques of viewing how you how or techniques of finding how one would be in the perspective of viewing you know viewing the world doing themselves you know I mean I we you know there's mindfulness there's all these kind of meditations this is this is like I mean if you want to use a fancy philosophical word this is what you would call phenomenology oh you know and I have like a psych background so you know what you try to do is you try to figure out okay how does this person actually think like not like maybe they're like passing thoughts about things you know people have all kinds of passing thoughts but if you had to like kind of dig into the the uh substructure yes of their mind or their psyche here's how they actually see things yeah and um so that's kind of what this is and so then what and what has been done you know in a lot of these old Indian books and Tibetan books and so on has been to go through and say okay this is kind of how these people phenomenologically see their world right and so that's what you're trying to describe Beyond like even like what you know the person's like mindfulness is and what their thoughts are of the moment the fact that you happen to be thinking uh boy do I want to continue to keep watching stranger things or does this season actually suck that's a thought you could have but you know you might be like well you know that doesn't tell you that much about your view of everything yeah you know um it's something else it's something you're trying to figure out like what's the underpinnings of how this person actually kind of sees their world I I as I had a definition here of nominology which I quite like it it says uh an approach of study that concentrates on the study of Consciousness and the objects of direct experience yep it could be how you experience things in your environment but especially how you experience your own mind and your own emotions but like a lot of times in the cycling short you're trying to figure out is how does a person with like schizotype or personality disorder experience their world and you can like write a whole long thing about that going okay here's probably what how they experience and think about things just to describe it and so the part of like the the Buddhist part that was so interesting to me is they were kind of doing something similar I was like okay this is a kind of a psychology this is how a Taoist thinks you know the weird part for me with the biological materialist part is some of the people that I've talked to who are definitely biological materials when I've asked them they get slightly offended of course because you just have word but it's not offensive it's a description it's a description but I've noticed that people don't want to be called that they don't like to be called that and I'm like okay why is it the materialist part that you don't like no it's the biologic how dare you I've noticed that too if you tell someone of your biological material because I have friends who are who are definitely this yeah you know and you go like okay so you're biological materialist that's cool and they get like very like edgy well I don't I'm anxious and they don't want to just say that's what they are I think people just think too but I think I think no matter what you would tell somebody unless they chose to be that thing on purpose then they are probably going to have some kind of reaction to anybody telling them what they are well if that's the truth then then part of the phenomenology would be that you didn't choose that on purpose you got kind of like backed into that and when someone actually tells you that that's what your actual thing is if you get offended then that's meaningful now that was worth a hundred dollars [Laughter] an hour of work that's right because that was a success that is the truth right that is the truth that that this this sentence this part of our conversation now highlights the exact reason why we have these conversations right the exact reason because if someone says something I believe personally to that exact point if someone says something about you that might be true but you haven't consciously chosen it and again it is you you are going to feel as if it is foreign to you and therefore I am putting something upon you that is not you and therefore you are going to feel rejection no that is not me well then my question is why do you act as if it is that's a very that's a very uh interesting question because if someone came up to me and said oh you're very Zen I'd be like oh thank you mm-hmm thank you very much you're very like tantric uh person very controversed person like oh thank you I think it's a compliment I would like it they said they were I'm Dallas I'd be like awesome thanks you know that's great you know but uh so I own those things I like them now keep things I kind of like myself but if I went to my daughter and I said you're a biological material she'd be like she wouldn't like it though I think she probably is and and I don't even I'm not even judging keep in mind we are we are not labeling external appearance we're not discussing external uh appearance labels you know we're talking about what I believe is deeper right because external is the last thing that is the first thing that we see but the last thing that is manifested you know I'm what I'm referring to is someone's habituations someone's Tendencies towards thinking and acting and responding and being in the way that they're um in the way that they are being in the world actually like a substructure of how the person actually yes kind of is wired and how they find yes yes I don't want I don't want anybody to misconstrue us and say oh well this person dresses this way you know therefore blank biological materials are like serial killers they look just like everybody else isn't that the old joke that's a big joke I think it's from the end family or something like that um uh you could just go out like on your Halloween costume just normal clothes and you're a serial killer because you won't be able to tell you just get somebody else um okay yeah I mean like you know you can't tell from the surface like you know so it isn't that question for sure right I wouldn't know like how uh idiosyncratically interesting fascinating peculiar your view of the world is just from your T-shirt and AD right I've been able to tell that no yeah just like everybody else so but that's the but the you know so what we're trying to I guess where we're trying to guide people is back towards the contents of their own thinking processes and on one level but then on a on another on the next sort of level not just the processes but like the act of all the processes interacting together you know what maybe like this moment where you take a second you go like okay what do I actually think like you ask yourself ask yourself that question like what do I actually think what do I like for reals can I describe what it is I think and believe maybe try to do it because I think it's confusing for people and we're and you know and this goes back to our you know earlier point about there's so much that influences what and how you think I mean yeah this is your unconscious programming yeah what what what which of those aspects have you agreed to right what have you said yes to not even knowing you really did it yeah and and and which and which ones have you consciously said yes to you know so if you take uh you took a you said you have a psych background you have consciously agreed with your materials and your teachers and yourself to say okay I'm going to approach the world with this as part of my lens and how and the way that which I see it you know but for I don't know how many people have have actually done that in outside of you know the agreeance in their own cultural references you know what their parents have given them what TV shows have given them or you know outside conversations influences you know and I think it's really important actually because without that we are we are automatons in in a sense you know like there's a danger of that yeah so yeah and not like you know go ahead go ahead well you know what's interesting in terms of like self-esteem too if you get to psychology because like if someone says to me something like if you went to the psychology thing and someone says oh you really sound like you're like you like you like Carl Rogers or something I'm like yes I do and I feel like good about that like that label doesn't make me feel bad about myself and I don't feel a need to resist it or something like that so I wonder if it doesn't change people's sense of self-esteem somehow I don't know it would seem to be that at least in my in my way of thinking that like the more things that you would agree to that you would be empowered by those things because you believe that they have value so you're allowing those things to infuse your body mind heart soul whatever with um with value and thereby all the actions that you have are coming from places of value not places of kind of like confusion let's read about that too maybe would be something like if someone came up and said well your biological materialist in the neoliberal and like a kind of like a consumer capitalist aren't you I'd be like no and most people you said that to them they'd be like no right I'm not that but like secretly that might be the most accurate description of what you're like correct if that's the case in terms of suffering you probably have a problem because it's the most accurate way of describing you makes you feel really bad about yourself then you get a problem does that make sense what I'm saying yeah no I agree yeah it's something hmm okay so anyway I guess we did the best we could with this we did and maybe the thing in the end is just like maybe asking the question of like okay let me take a step back and see what it is I actually think yeah okay so what about suffering in this View um uh all right so I had a what I've been trying to do with this a little bit is to ask like an archetypal person who holds this kind of way of seeing things to say to ask them like what do you think suffering is about or what's your reaction what would you say I did this for someone I know who self-identifies as Taoist so I will say that for our taoism conversation but people will you know people have answered you know so I asked a friend who would probably identify as like secular humanist and he's a big fan of like the writer Kurt Vonnegut who wrote like uh Slaughterhouse Five and uh cat's cradle if you know these books anyways and so he's probably like a famous like sort of like secular humanist writer and really good writer if you've never read a music while reading yeah he's very creative kind of a little sci-fi some of it and a little fantastic but like really creatively done so anyways if you haven't recorded finally get my something worthwhile over that but in any case he like he sent me this Kurt vinegar quote that he felt kind of captured his way of looking at things so he was kind of using like Kurt vinegar's words and Kurt vinegar has this thing where he says hello babies Welcome To Earth it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter it's round and wet and crowded on the outside babies you've got like probably about 100 years here pops there's only one rule that I know of babies God damn it you've got to be kind that's the Kurt Vonnegut View and I thought okay well that's a nice way to put that and that probably does reflect my friend's way of seeing the world so what's happening here and when I kind of went was well there's a way of looking at the world where you kind of see like in a biological materialist way where there's kind of no particular reason why things happen in any deeper sense things happen because of cause and effect but in kind of a rando way you know there's sort of like a a kind of a rando quality to Natural Selection which thing survives which things go you can sort of figure out why something survived in the end but there's obviously chance and Randomness is a big part of this way of seeing the world do you agree with that too Daniel yeah it's pretty random now as it turns out this kind of thought was already present in Ancient India long ago and it's it's interesting to see this that this is not like a new thing that people decided now just within the last you know however many years of the Scientific Revolution or something like that people have been thinking that's for a long time there's always been people who've been going well there's just nature nature just kind of like does weird [...] and uh you know sometimes you know things are Pleasant and sometimes things are shitty and things just go up and down in kind of random ways it's it's a lot of times unexpected and unpredictable and that's just how it goes so that's I think part of this way of thinking does that make sense to you too Daniel I think something like that yeah because anything it's not like a a tightrope you know it's encompassing and um you know you could do things that are proactive to try to like make your [...] better it's not like you're completely powerless or something but a lot of the things are going to happen or because are going to have this kind of like um Randomness to it but I think my friend would say this through humanism people can learn to alleviate suffering for themselves and others and that would be via things like increasing knowledge medicine technological advances uh societal improvements psychological insights things like that so I guess I would see when I was thinking about this that's what sort of seemed to me to be sort of like a secular humanist View you know that you would see the world this way you would go well you know things are kind of random evolution is random what happens is kind of random but on the other hand I can be a proactive person and I can try to make the world a better place for myself and others I think that's the underlying message that the Kurt Vonnegut quote if I were to sum it up does that seem fair I think that seems good okay accurate description as accurate as I can for the purpose of this conversation okay so but we I think we I think we you can agree with that though right regardless yeah regardless of your stance well so the thing that hit me about this and um it's come up a couple of times but I got the one initiation from the Dalai Lama you know I I made this promise and when I was in the Dalai Lama's Monastery in uh New York that I would go if he ever did this initiation and it's a thing to do a two thing called the college chakra tatra Dalai Lama does this one a lot and one of the things in the color chakra Tantra is the idea that as a tantric Buddhist person using that as kind of like the discussion Point here but I'm sure as a Taoist or other Traditions too you try to learn as much as you can about the world around you and whatever people understand in the most contemporary way too not just in some other traditional ways but you're supposed to understand everything as best you can because then you're going to be able to be in a better position to alleviate more of the immediate causes of human problems difficulties and sufferings stuff like that so that is like you know again specifically part of the college chakra I think it's fair to say that you know that you're supposed to like try to do that so I think I would agree just because of that I could still have my you know Todrick way of seeing things but um I don't have any problem with any of those ideas that all sounds pretty good to me yeah yeah okay so we agree so then um so then what about suffering specifically then and the thing that occurred to me next was just okay so part of the way of handling suffering is probably like within like Mental Health and how the culture tries to deal with suffering there and the only thing I could the only the thing that jumped out most clearly to me then the talk about was probably like Pharmaceuticals a little bit and a lot of the way the suffering is trying to be dealt with now some of it through like talk therapy through and through other ways but a lot of it's sort of like through like pharmaceutical cures then because you go through when you medically investigate and like one of the dominant things that's happened is just this explosion of trying to like medicate people out of suffering so I think that's something that has to be talked about here and I was looking to try to find the percentages of people on uh you know like antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds post-pandemic and those are kind of hard numbers to find you know it's weird they're not as readily available as what you would think I've tried to look and you just get different figures about increases and decreases and they didn't look very consistent from like source to source but in any case we know that it's gone up over the time of the pandemic and it was pretty high anyways so you saw it seems like you're looking now yeah I'm just looking yeah you know I thought it would be hard to get like something you'd figure it would just pop up and you get some very clear thing because I've seen like figures that go as high as 40 percent of American women in their 40s and above are on antidepressants for various reasons right always just for depression sometimes those things are used off label but do you think it's fair to bring up this issue because I think like that's one of the dominant ways of trying to handle human suffering now I think well dominant ways is trying to medicate people out of it yeah so I I don't know in this way of thinking I don't even know yeah no in this way of think in a biologic materialist way of thinking this is the I think one of a few ways of intervention we're going to say intervention as a means of therapy for um I don't know the society's attempt to alleviate suffering right so you can do like certain kinds of like Psychotherapy still but Psychotherapy is kind of dead on some level it is but a weird way it's more like shorter term interventions cognitive behavioral stuff maybe you try like PTSD treatment some people or something and then you try to medicate people out but I would I I wouldn't I don't know isolate mental health as it's as its own animal I'm gonna just put Health together because to me they're not I that there it's still an issue of patient and practitioner relationship and how it is that you're going to go about and alleviating their I don't know discomfort you know dissatisfaction in a sense right because the same gets done with pain right and it's far more popular now um yeah you know with all of the the opioid addiction and all the over prescription which to me is the same the same bat you know we're talking the same batch of not same batch of people but physical suffering mental suffering and what's the way through a pill and what does this pill do it varies on person to person but this is the mode in which they are trying to work through and it this for me if you need it you take it there's no judgment that's how you know if you have pain you had injury you have surgery you have whatever you take what you need to take in order to get through it however there is no now there's not no but there is not a readily available other step after that you know everything else requires effort from the person and the system doesn't make the person's effort uh it doesn't I don't think it does it doesn't reflect the person's efforts very easily so if you want to get physical therapy you have to get a referral and then you have to go there and you got to do it yourself it's the the ease of prescription right convenience is very high and unfortunately I think the response from it is also very low because it doesn't it doesn't cause a person to to put willpower into the thing after after the initial kind of bump is after the initial high is gone or the initial bump of whatever pharmaceutical you're taking is gone even on Mental Health you know I have a bunch of friends who are a couple friends who are psych nurses you know and so they have to administer medications for some of their patients who really need them you know yeah it's not like a way of like saying that to people who need medications they should take it no definitely take it but then like okay once you're quote unquote stable you're back to you know within normal limits as we use in the medical terms you know okay now what you know like actually the therapy matters more now moving forward than it did even before because you have to try and integrate your your new sort of way of thinking your New Perspective with real life work and I don't think it's that easy for people so I I to me this is the failure right write it write it at this line you know that they the and this is a biological so now we kind of crap on it you know we've talked about it in a good way but now we can now we could dump on it you know and that like part of their thing right is to make improving Society by creating a medicine and that's good it helps but it doesn't change the person intrinsically you know and that is to me that is something that I don't think a materialist would really invest in actually well this is why this was such a weird little part of this whole set of conversations to try to like put together because eventually you're thinking okay so what exactly is being said here you know and it is confusing because in part I could actually what you were talking about you could either go to like sort of the psych Med part of this but you're right it's better to frame it as like a total solution and the total solution is let's medicalize something right which can be both positive and negative for the people who need that stuff which can be very positive but obviously this is a tendency to medicalize everything in this way right and pharmaceuticalize everything and obviously there's major Financial interests in doing that yeah so you know if you want to put the whole thing together but I like I couldn't get away from that is that the next is like that seems logically to be the next thing to talk about you have to talk about the medicalization of things yeah and the like this is when you kind of like analyze it practically I guess this is sort of how this has played itself out right and it's not so much like again there are still you know other therapeutic approaches that aren't pharmaceutical and you know these medical interventions at this type but this does seem to be the dominant way to try to solve the problem within the culture if you'd have to ask like well how are you going to solve the problem of suffering in American culture you're going to try to like like drug it away we're going to try and grow it and try to drug it away I think that's probably true does that seem fair or am I being over there no I think that's right and and thereby this is for me this is how you know you're in a biological materialistic view of society because you're using biological materials to improve other biological materials yeah I think that's right and and now sometimes that works and sometimes that's what they need but not but not everybody needs the same thing right and sometimes it is not a biological material problem sometimes it is a spiritual problem and the biological materials do not address in my opinion majority of the time a spiritual problem you have to approach it in in other ways and then for and then you can often have a material effect after you've done the the kind of energetic approachers a spiritual approach or even the psychological approach I'll put that in kind of like a middle ground you know because I feel like like the old school psychology was more secular humanist in the sense of the Kurt vinegar quote or something deeper there was something deeper in Psychology like back in the day which was like that's how people figure out who they really are and if we can help people figure out that's the Carl Rogers psychology that I sometimes bring up in the episodes Let's help people figure out who they really are and then they'll feel less anxious and they'll feel less depressed because they know who they really are right which is obviously a different solution than like let's just drug this [...] away right and I feel like in the in the contests between these two approaches I think the druggie approach one that's just the truth of it and I don't know I can't see it any other way which made this a really weird thing to try to put together because it felt like okay how is suffering supposed to be addressed you're right if it's physical suffering we're supposed to like drug it away some way or another and if it's psychological suffering we're supposed to like drug it away some way or another that's probably the dominant idea so I guess we agree on that right yeah and so I don't know I was trying to figure out like well so how how much of this is being done and obviously it's been done a lot but it's been very hard to tell like post pandemic like even what's happening but I did stumble across this thing from Boston University School of Public Health excuse me they basically said depression among adults in the United States tripled in the early 2020 months of the global coronavius pandemic jumping up from 8.5 before the pandemic to a staggering 27.8 percent during the pandemic okay now they continued the research and they said the new research from Boston University School of Public Health reveals that the elevated depression excuse me has persisted into 2021 and even worsened climbing to 32.8 percent and affecting one in every three American adults okay so you know what are the sources behind and this is like where we have the little interlude of this culture sucks which is like one of my favorite themes well I snuck it in there again but when they were doing the analysis they were kind of talking about I mean problems that are hard to drug away yeah like you're broke you're just flat out broke it's hard to drug you out of your Brokenness correct you just don't have any money you know or you're just lonely maybe because you're broke you know you're also lonely but you're lonely and you're isolated it's hard to drug that away and the isolation but that is the solution is you're supposed to drug it out so I don't know it's weird well it it I will in in defense of this method you know which I I don't want to do it but I will do it so that people could say we're Fair yeah I mean you're trying to remotely affect as many people as possible thereby what's the way in which you can do that well here take this thing it's going to change the way you think feel experience the world okay goodbye you know like that's the way I can do it but I think that because that it's so prevalent that people think that that's the stop that's the stopping point as opposed to that's being the beginning point the entry point you know it's like okay this pill is should hopefully fingers crossed balance you but once you have that balance you're only balancing the state that you're in now you're not balancing the totality of your existence you know unless you just sends your symptom we're pressing right and you're like okay your knee is bad so we gave you something so that you don't feel so shitty that could be as bad but like your knee is still going to be bad correct once you stop taking this [...] and and you know from a medical perspective um they often prescribe strong antidepressants for people with chronic pain yeah fibromyalgia patients are correct right they'll give them you know they give them strong and you know tricyclic vessels yeah exactly yeah exactly and well and you know the question is why is that all it works well on pain does it hmm I don't know or does it numb people you know yeah you know what I'm saying yeah yeah no that becomes really part of the question and and are we and are we thereby saying well I can't find something wrong with you quote unquote wrong with you therefore I think it's all in between your ears you know and I'm gonna give you this thing to shut off whatever that that is and it's not validating for someone's experience number one and it doesn't help that person learn so like you said if someone has a torn ligament in their knee I can give them some ibuprofen they won't feel as bad about their their needle feel better but the ligaments are still torn it's not that you know what I'm saying and I know we you know we could talk about the body in terms of ligaments and tendons but we don't often refer to the mind as having you know your your psyche that has a sprained this or that but right but but it does it it totally does you know yeah that's why it's such a weird thing to try to think about because I was thinking okay what is actually happening here and it looks to me you'd have like okay we have this biological way of thinking about things I think that's the predominant way of thinking in the culture of one way or the other and you're like well how do you solve like what you were saying I think you put it very eloquently how do I solve a biological problem I put a biological solution what's my biological solution I give you something that will like change the way your biological system is functioning by making your system flood with serotonin or something like that which will stabilize your mood or whatever the hell it is I'm trying to do right and I was like I guess that's the answer right then and then maybe you can do other things that are biologically rooted like you know try to get people to deprogram from traumatic experiences to unravel the nervous system or something and those might be like more alternative or Progressive interventions even that's alternative though very I'll tell you even like saying I'll try to rewrite your nervous system a little bit by doing therapeutic approaches that like that just has to be considered alternative and and you know fortunately um there are more people who are taking the the body approach to their mental health which I hope that Trend continues you know in terms of trying to unlock somatic you know body repressed emotions feelings experiences because they may not be stored in the mind they're they're stored in the body there's a book that I always recommend my patients read if they have this kind of thing I think it's called the body keep score or something the body keeps the score or something like that yeah you know and it's just it's a great read for people who have this kind of physical pain or mental pain you know emotional pain that has been not been alleviated by you know talk therapy or whatever it might be in the body I mean for me you know I love the way that my teacher on my yoga teacher Andre talks about this stuff is that like the body is the hardware the Mind Spirit energy is the software you know but like there's stuff on your hard drive man you know like that's how it works genetically one there's one way there you know like you didn't think oh I need nipples so I better grow some you know like they were there and they have things that are associated you know so um I just I know it's tough the whole thing is tough I don't you know we're not shooting I'm trying to do is like like trying to get to like the underlying way that the culture kind of thinks which is going to be how the people in the culture are going to kind of think yeah the answer is somehow that they do something to medicate myself out of things which is probably what the dominant approach is within this and that can be either like you know pharmaceutical or it could be even if you're doing like smoke a bunch of weed or whatever you're trying to meditate yourself out of something right there is so there's only two countries in the world who they direct market drug Pharmaceuticals to the United States and strangely enough New Zealand come on come on kiwis you know better than that no don't do it don't do as we say not as we do right right but because I think because of that it's a very clear example that like they are telling you ask your doctor about this why you know why do I that my doctor should know what I need you know based on what I'm telling him why do I need to make recommendations to not him but they're dumb ass you know like oh I didn't know about that medicine you want it oh yeah here you go you take it like I don't think that should I don't think this should be occurring but my point in saying that is they'll talk about that they'll market drugs but they don't market for alternative therapies there's no Big Marketing for like self-work there's no marketing for Psychotherapy or you know psychology you know psychological not as much to sell not as much to sell so thereby the the material approach is the predominant approach it's just it's just I know it's so it's hard to talk about for me on some level but it is the truth right I think it's the truth so okay so the other thing I would bring up about this I want to say one of the things about other thing about antidepressants which is just to throw that as a thought experiment to see what you think here too Daniel which is it's it's based on sort of a funny psych researcher it's probably something we'll talk about more later on at some other time too but one of the things she says is that on some level you know you can look at dopamine and serotonin as related to people's personalities and she'll still say you have dopamine type people and you have serotonin type people yeah I've heard of this before and so the serotonin the dopamine type person maybe it's better to start there it's sort of a like we might call like a more young type if we were using like Chinese medical language they're probably out like they're probably out doing more stuff they want new experiences they're probably more exploratory there's a sort of a dopamine type personality type they actually say dopamine people are also attracted to other people who are kind of dopamine as part of this Theory so people who are kind of like outgoing explorative want to like they tend to be drawn to other people who are like this but then they talk about the serotonin type person and the serotonin type person is more we might say Yin they're more stable but they're also somehow probably in a way more conservative you know and they uh they don't look for as much change dynamism new experience you know they kind of like have a stability but the stability stability has a kind of like a constancy to it so the theory of this would be something like to my mind when you're giving people a lot of these serotonin reuptake Inhibitors you're flooding their brain with serotonin you're knocking them into these more Yin States they're going to be more and more that way as part of a cultural solution you just put people into more and more Yin states of being where they get less questioning they want less experience they want more they want less dynamism they want less change they get knocked into this other state of being and you're kind of doing that maybe through like a neurotransmitter kind of way of inducing this kind of more Yin state which has a stability so in that sense the person's internal World fluctuates less and they go through less of the maybe the internal torments of the instability of the internal World which can be good for people if they need it no judging but on the other hand what I have noticed in people who kind of keep taking this and we're talking about people who take these things for like decades as they keep trying to induce this and these drugs tend to burn themselves out you can't take these things forever you have to keep either increasing dosages or trying other ways of inducing the same effect with like different possible changes in medication right I mean this is just how this will tend to practically play itself out my secular humanist friend sent me an article that was basically pointing out that eventually antidepressants stopped working you know and there's like research showing that you know so there's a point of like kind of diminishing returns within this unless you do what you were talking about Daniel do something else try to fix this but I couldn't I just want to bring that point up because it does mean that in the way of trying to solve psychological suffering you're just making people more and more Yin and you're kind of driving them more and more into these kind of internal states of being yeah that are more Yin right but it's harder to question it's harder to challenge it's harder because you just your mind is being skewed in the way not to want to do those things I think the right word another not the right word but another word is is sedation right you're being put in a more sedative type State you know yeah we're not saying Ian is is not good or you know young is better it just it's uh it's less of an outward movement we're kind of semi saying that at least I am in the sense that you need some kind of fire sure you need young you need inner fire there's not it's not a coincidence that like wisdom in the tantric tradition is associated with Yang and fire because that's how you develop that you need a little burning you know to get this and then sometimes they say like looking for wisdom is you feel like you've um swallowed a hot iron filing and it's just in you kind of burning that's what makes you want to like learn and do things you have to feel some fire to do that if you medicate this out like where are you I mean does that seem true to you though have you noticed that like I've noticed people who've been taking these things for years one of my observations about them would be like they just get more and more flat and they get more and more kind their personality is not the same person as they were before now maybe they're more internally stable but they're not they're not they're young they lost their fire I would say people who that you know that I've treated that that have been taking these for a while I would agree with you on people who probably should be taking that medication because they need it you know that that could be the case that that I've seen that to be the case like they probably really need it not just because like they had a rough patch or I don't even want to go that far if I could edit this thing I would edit that out but you know I'm talking that's what it is people who are definitely more on the mentally unstable side dislike taking these medications for this very reason they feel muted is the word that I've heard before well like um I know like you know people who have Mania will talk that way yeah yeah and so I think that that's a it's a more gross example the subtle the more you talk about like lithium and [...] like that then there's obviously talking about ssris necessarily yeah anyways because that's a medical conversation it's a medical conversation because the dosing it's dosing dependent it's lifestyle dependent you know all these there's a lot of other factors but I think overall I agree it just it's just to the the degree to which I agree is going to be dependent on the strength and dosage of their medication but that's the point right is to get the patient back into their life so that they can produce and pay taxes and buy [...] and you know that's the point I mean like like yeah if you want to like be blunt about it then we tend to be blunt yeah there's part of the you know that's what you're trying to solve to get the person to back to like kind of be a productive member of society equipment correct that's right that's the thing about this is It's I didn't bring up patience because patience is kind of hard to judge because you don't really know that patients like long-term uh personality all the time you just know them as they come and see you now right my feeling is I've had the experience of people I've known for years where I've been like okay I feel like this person's personality is changing and sometimes they know it too on some level you know and they're in this kind of weird um I know spiral or vicious cycle or something like they're in this thing they need this for this internal stability and maybe they do need it on some level but it's also skewing their personality yeah to become more and more kind of sedate and maybe that also means compliance on some level I'm throwing it out there so all right tough conversation do you have to you have to Boogie yeah about two three minutes okay so then I guess the the thing that gets to this if we just summarize this section yeah on this conversation before we bolt okay so we're trying to have a card a hard conversation part of it's about like okay what is it that people actually think and that's kind of a question mark too and maybe what we're asking the listeners to do uh and the viewers is to go and say okay maybe do the exercise of trying to figure out what it is that we actually think it's only by doing that we're going to know like what's underneath the surface so we have to probably explore that that's I think one of the things we're trying to say right and another part would be if we take it apart and if it's sort of like a biological materialist way of looking at the world what you were saying Daniel most of these Solutions are going to be biological material which means you're going to get a lot of this kind of stuff yeah and then maybe what were the question that we're asking is something like well maybe it's worthwhile looking to see how are these things actually affecting me both in the positive in a negative sense right if you need them you need them But ultimately there's also a reasonable question to say well how is this going to how is this affecting me in my long term I guess that's what I have in mind about this what do you think about it is that is that a fair summary yeah no I think it's a fair summary I mean I I feel like we've we've done our due diligence I got I got like one person who always I'm trying to go personal I had like two people sure that I always think about with this who've been on antidepressants for like extended periods of the time that I've known them and I've watched them change I've watched them stop being the young Lively vibrant people they used to be and I can remember like this is like pre-pandemic even being out with one of them and she said to me you've known me a long time and I said yep and then she said is my spirit dead like very sincerely asking me and I said well I don't know I know you when I see you here and I know that you love your child and I know that there are things that you still feel things about so I would say uh you know no I'm not going to tell the person their Spirits said that'd be a [...] weird thing to do yeah I think yeah there's a door nail you're dead on the inside for sure yeah you're a corpse sorry complete black hole I don't even know why I associate with you no I'm not gonna say that but I was kind of like yeah okay I guess that this this obviously she has some recognition of something that's changing right and I've seen it for a couple of people so anyways I guess that's part of what occurred to me and I was in prepping this on a personal level I was just thinking about people I know who are in the midst of this yeah all right anyways so I think you know maybe top episodes yeah and I guess I mean my kind of summation of this part of the episode because this is going to be the second part we're gonna I'm gonna cut these in two because they're just our conversations are related but not exactly on top of each other yeah that this part you know will be titled biological problems and solutions okay and and for me I think you can have a biological Pro biological problem meaning the the being right the structure and you could but you can also have a spiritual problem or we could say an energetic problem which to me is is psychological in nature also you know now there could be some physical structures that's wrong you know that that maybe you got into an accident or you were born in a certain you know genetic influence or whatever you know so there's this middle ground right that it's both and you know however if you only apply one solution right if you're only applying an energetic problem to somebody that has Trump like trauma in their life that may not yield them what they need at a moment maybe their trauma for them is like pushing them over the edge making them hyper reactive and depressive and all different things they need some some assistance they might need some assistance something to even them out but then they have to go back and do work right then they have to go back and kind of approach the psychological aspect maybe do some work with their somatic body right and I think for me this this society and it's probably Western Society I don't think it's just the United States in this particular conversation doesn't provide the conversation for for a more uh holistic view a more holistic approach even the term holistic from my perspective being you know kind of outside of the Western Medical system as are you almost has a woo-woo kind of like connotation to it part of the problem is if there's if you if like if you have a biological material way of framing things there's nothing [...] else besides that that's it that's it so there's nothing else to talk about there's nothing I can really do is just frame everything in terms of these ways correct and then you know you can get sort of like the college chakra benefits of these things but you're always going to be just in that once correct because there's no place else to go right yeah right and and and news flash you know there is more colors than black and white you know yeah yeah and so there this is my issue with this approach is that there is not open conversation for other other methods that may be more appropriate actually or at least valid in conjunction with take this go home and that that's just not going to do it like I'll say this then we can whatever like I was they had the guy I think there's a show I forgot what it's on it's on Hulu and it's about the the pharmaceutical company I think Purdue and they you know giving the you know all the opioids knowingly to people saying they weren't addictive when they knew they totally were you know so they had the maker the creator of this uh tv series was on Bill Maher and he was talking I forgot how the conversation came up um but he was saying that like people know they knowingly gave people these medications that were bad for them that were addictive even after they were this was known to be a problem hospitals would put pressure on doctors to consistently prescribe these medications knowing the downsides okay why so they wouldn't get bad reviews oh really they wouldn't get bad reviews otherwise the patients would get them bad reviews online oh Jesus Christ that's back to your like social media sucks things so this it's it's this kind of thing right that there's just always something you know there's always something to it that like okay well then maybe you got to deal with it you know not everybody's gonna love their physician and sometimes medicine is difficult right the the best medicine often doesn't taste good that's why they made the song A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine so downtown right because it's gross and that's how it should be Mary Poppins right yeah yeah Mary Kay Poppins which you know aka the red Papa that's right so you know I'm just I'm saying all this because it the the balanced approach is is rarely given to people rarely given to people and the fact that that conversation is lacking in the Lexicon of treatment or or understanding of how treatment should be for people from my perspective is the problem with this View yeah I mean like as we get yeah I don't I agree with all of it and I I have to say in you know in the closing of the episode in all honestly this is one of the hardest ones for me to prep yeah like for whatever reason this is hard [...] for me to figure out how to talk about because I think if I look at it honestly I think it's just it's like there's a culture of confusion around all of this it's very confused and confusing and therefore even when you're trying to like explicate it and talk about it it ends up being like and some level obvious like yeah there's a lot of money to be made from drugging to share that other people yep right obvious yeah but there's some other part that's like just full of this obfuscation confusion and something it's really weird so anyways that's that's I've been talking about this the whole episode and I still feel that way you know we clarified the parts that are clarified we clarified but yeah just a little confession as we'd like to confess on uh on this GNT thing like uh yeah this is a very confusing subject matter I think yeah it's a hard culture to talk about and it's like no okay we're doing our best we're doing our best yeah we're doing our best two questions Daniel like good good conversation in it trying to like trying to explicate it I knew it was gonna be like this it'd be like us struggling through going okay what what do we even think about this well you know I thought we did a pretty good job yep yep good job by us if I do say so myself okay so good yeah awesome yeah well it's it's a it's a holiday thing yeah uh Eric as always thank you so much for coming on thank you to our listeners you know whatever podcast application you are using to listen to us uh we definitely appreciate all of the feedback we appreciate the listens if you're checking us out on Apple please leave us a review it helps to show to grow uh if you're watching the video on YouTube or on Spotify what up um you know and uh for everybody else however you're taking us in please feel free to share and in fact don't just feel free feel encouraged I feel even compelled yeah even compelled yeah um so yeah that's it as always thank you everybody for listening for Eric this is Daniel we'll catch you in the next one peace