Explaining Mysticism in History

Summary

History 102: Explaining Mysticism in History

Podcast Episode: History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Host: Turpentine
Release Date: August 9, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch, the creator of the widely acclaimed YouTube channel WhatifAltHist, joins co-host Austin Padgett to delve into the intricate world of mysticism and its profound impact on history. The discussion traverses through philosophical doctrines, religious traditions, and their interplay with societal structures, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of how mystic beliefs have shaped civilizations.

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The Foundation of Mysticism: Plato and Aristotle

Rudyard Lynch (00:33):
"Plato was the greatest mystic of all time. He developed the ideas of rationality from this Greek concept of underlying archetypal principles."

Lynch begins by highlighting Plato as a central figure in mysticism, emphasizing his concept of the Divine Forms—abstract, perfect templates that underpin the material world. He contrasts this with Aristotle's approach, who believed in studying the material world to reverse-engineer the ideal forms.

Key Points:

• Platonism vs. Aristotelianism: While Plato focused on the spiritual and ideal realm, Aristotle grounded his philosophy in the observable, material world.
• Impact on Western Thought: Plato’s ideas influenced various religious and philosophical traditions, including Christianity, which adopted and adapted Platonist concepts to shape its theological framework.
• Philosophical Denouement: Lynch asserts that modern society often misunderstands the depth of Plato and Aristotle, reducing their complex philosophies to mere rationalism without acknowledging the spiritual dimensions they incorporated.

Notable Quote: "The Greeks went through their own atheist and religious and nihilistic phase, at the end of which came the Sophists. And the Sophists argued that reality is completely determined by argument because they were coming from the Athenian legal tradition to win the elections." (07:00)

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The Role of Philosophy and Religion

Rudyard Lynch (02:00):
"Philosophies are basically structured understandings of how the world works on a rationalistic basis. Religions are understandings of how humans consciously relate to the cosmos."

Lynch delineates the distinction between philosophy and religion, articulating how both have historically provided frameworks for societies to comprehend and interact with the world. He underscores the transition from Greek philosophy to Christian rationalism, illustrating how the latter absorbed and repurposed Platonic ideas to govern the multi-continental Roman Empire.

Key Points:

• Philosophy vs. Religion: Philosophy serves as a rational scaffold, while religion connects humanity to a larger cosmic purpose.
• Christian Adoption of Platonic Thought: Christianity integrated Greco-Roman intellectual traditions to establish a coherent governance system, blending spiritual beliefs with rational structures.
• Influence on Modernity: The rationalistic turn influenced by Plato and later Aristotle laid the groundwork for Western modernity, emphasizing control and mastery over the material world.

Notable Quote: "Greek philosophy is the endpoint of their religious tradition. It was only taken in a rationalistic form due to the rise of Christian civilization." (04:50)

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Mysticism and the Left vs. Right Brain Dichotomy

Rudyard Lynch (17:05):
"The right hemisphere can see the entire equation and view things in their context—the meaning, the emotion, things occurring over time. The left hemisphere can only see things through the lens of money and power and control."

Lynch explores the neurological underpinnings of mysticism, proposing a connection between the two hemispheres of the brain and their roles in perceiving the material versus the ideal. He argues that the right hemisphere is more attuned to holistic, contextual understanding, which aligns with mystical insights, whereas the left hemisphere is focused on analytical, materialistic perspectives.

Key Points:

• Brain Hemispheres and Perception: The right brain facilitates intuitive, emotional, and holistic thinking essential for mystical experiences, while the left brain handles logical, linear, and material-focused reasoning.
• Modern Society's Bias: Contemporary culture favors left-brain rationalism, often at the expense of the deeper, right-brain mystical understanding that fosters meaning and connectedness.
• Balance Between Hemispheres: Lynch emphasizes the importance of integrating both hemispheric functions to achieve a comprehensive understanding of reality, avoiding the pitfalls of purely materialistic or purely idealistic worldviews.

Notable Quote: "So the great chain of being exists in all things. Where, as you move up it, you are more grand, but you are also gooder." (29:05)

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Western Mystic Traditions: Platonism, Hermetica, and Gnosticism

Rudyard Lynch (73:00):
"The three Western mystic traditions are Gnosticism, the Hermetica, and Platonism."

Lynch categorizes Western mysticism into three main traditions, each contributing uniquely to the development of Western thought and societal structures.

Platonism:

• Ideal Forms: Emphasizes the existence of perfect, immutable ideals that the material world imperfectly imitates.
• Political Implications: Plato envisioned a theocratic society governed by philosopher-kings who understood the Divine Forms.

Hermetica:

• Alchemy and Transformation: Focuses on the transmutation of matter and the soul, seeking balance between physical and spiritual realms.
• Influence on Science: Early scientists like Isaac Newton were influenced by Hermetic principles, blending mystical insights with empirical research.

Gnosticism:

• Dualistic Cosmology: Posits a stark division between the material world (often seen as corrupt) and the spiritual realm.
• Rebellion Against the Demiurge: Gnostics view the creator of the material world as a flawed or malevolent entity, advocating for spiritual enlightenment and escape from physical constraints.

Key Points:

• Interconnectivity: These traditions, while distinct, interact and influence each other, shaping the intellectual and spiritual landscape of the West.
• Modern Interpretations: Contemporary groups often misinterpret or oversimplify these traditions, losing the nuanced understanding essential for their application.

Notable Quote: "All society's intellectual traditions have informed their worldview according to Greek logic. The Muslims, the Christians, the Greeks and the Romans themselves." (05:45)

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The Evolution and Decline of Mysticism in Western Civilization

Rudyard Lynch (116:10):
"The death of mysticism ultimately killed religion because once religion has no expectation of connecting with God, people process it as God doesn't exist at all."

Lynch traces the trajectory of mysticism within Western civilization, noting its rise during the Renaissance and subsequent decline as rationalism and scientific empiricism took precedence. He argues that the bifurcation of science and religion eroded the mystical connection that once provided spiritual and psychological coherence to society.

Key Points:

• Renaissance and Modernity: The Renaissance saw a resurgence of Hermetic and Platonic thought, which laid the groundwork for modern scientific inquiry.
• Separation of Science and Religion: Descartes’ mind-body dualism created an artificial barrier, making science and religion operate in isolation and leading to a fragmented understanding of reality.
• Consequences of Decline: Without mysticism, modern society grapples with nihilism and a loss of meaningful connection to the cosmos, weakening the societal "psychic shields" that sustained civilizations.

Notable Quote: "The laws of physics manifest over material reality. So if something manifests over reality, it must exist. There has to be archetypal principles." (08:31)

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Mysticism Across World Traditions

Rudyard Lynch (107:16):
"The three Western mystic traditions are Gnosticism, the Hermetica, and Platonism. Then you have the Indic tradition, Daoism in China, and Shamanism across the globe."

Lynch broadens the discussion to include mysticism in non-Western traditions, highlighting how different cultures have developed their own mystical frameworks to understand and interact with the world.

Indic Tradition:

• Brahmanism and Buddhism: Evolution from ritualistic Brahmanism to the philosophical introspection of Buddhism, emphasizing internal purification and detachment from materialism.
• Tantra and Sexual Magic: Practices aimed at harnessing spiritual energy through physical acts, blending the material and spiritual realms.

Daoism (Taoism):

• Balance of Yin and Yang: Emphasizes harmony between opposing forces, promoting a flow-oriented approach to life.
• Alchemy and Immortality: Daoist alchemy seeks to transform and conserve life energy, aligning with Hermetic principles in the West.

Shamanism:

• Global Practices: Exists in diverse forms worldwide, focusing on communication with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness.
• Role in Societies: Shamans act as mediators between the physical and spiritual, providing guidance and healing based on mystical insights.

Key Points:

• Cultural Specificity: Each tradition uniquely integrates mysticism with cultural values and societal needs.
• Interconnectedness: Despite cultural differences, many mystical traditions share common themes of balance, transformation, and the pursuit of deeper knowledge.

Notable Quote: "In the Hermetica, suffering is the burning away of weakness. Through struggle, through discovering new things, through conquering chaos, you transmit to a higher level." (83:00)

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The Modern Implications of Mystical Thought

Rudyard Lynch (125:00):
"Modernity produces a lot of mental illness, but we're kind of arbitrary in what we describe as a mental illness and what we don't."

Lynch connects historical mystical traditions with contemporary societal issues, arguing that the decline of mysticism and the rise of materialism have contributed to widespread psychological and cultural dissonance.

Key Points:

• Mental Health and Modernity: The disconnection from mystical understanding fosters a sense of meaninglessness and alienation, exacerbating mental health crises.
• Reintegrating Mysticism: Emphasizes the need to revive mystical practices and philosophies to restore balance and coherence in modern life.
• Future of Civilization: Suggests that embracing both material and spiritual dimensions is crucial for the sustainable advancement of society.

Notable Quote: "Modernist society is training humans to think like machines because that was what did best. Now that the machines can do machine tasks better than humans, we have to train ourselves in how humans think." (149:01)

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Conclusion

Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide a thorough exploration of mysticism's role throughout history, highlighting its significance in shaping philosophical, religious, and societal structures. By juxtaposing Western and non-Western mystical traditions, the episode underscores the universal quest for meaning and the delicate balance between the material and spiritual realms. Lynch's analysis calls for a reintegration of mystical insight into contemporary thought, advocating for a more holistic understanding of reality to overcome modern challenges.

Final Thoughts: "History is not going to look kindly on this era of history. So I try to be nice to the other eras of history so that history doesn't judge me too negatively." (95:51)

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Recommended For:

• History enthusiasts interested in the interplay between philosophy, religion, and societal development.
• Individuals seeking to understand the roots of modern psychological and cultural issues through a historical lens.
• Learners keen on exploring the enduring influence of ancient mystical traditions on contemporary thought.

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Stay Connected: Subscribe to History 102 on your preferred podcast platform and follow WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett on YouTube for more deep dives into critical moments and patterns in history.

Transcript

[Rudyard Lynch]

This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info and if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. Lifelock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com podcast terms apply.

[Austin Padgett]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Red lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi everyone, how are you? Are you having a good day? The topic for today's video is mysticism with our continuing co host, Austin Padgett.

[Guest Speaker]

Hello.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I'm on a business trip right now and that might reflect poorly on the microphone quality because I'm using a travel microphone. Is my audio good, Austin? Can you hear my audio?

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, it might be a little bit loud and high. Or not. Yeah, like tenery.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is this better? Is this better?

[Guest Speaker]

There's kind of like no, that wasn't better. There was a echo in the background like I was by the ocean.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You gotta leave the audience, you gotta leave this stuff into the audience. So it's candid and relatable. When you associate with enough Los Angeles influencer types, you, you realize their entire life is mask and mirrors, is smoke and mirrors where the line between actual life and between production is non existent. And I just periodically like to. It's a very memeable culture because it lacks self awareness. But that's not the topic. The topic for this video is literally the exact opposite thing. And it's interesting where when you're looking at the setting for those of you who are watching the video, visual thing is you can see a shadow on the walls of a cave, which is what the greatest mystic of all time. Actually there's lots of people who could potentially be the greatest mystic of all time. It's hard to pick one because people will literally die over that title. Some say Christ is the greatest mystic, some say Buddha was, some say Confucius. Except Confucius wasn't a mystic, he was more of the autist, on the autistic schizo spectrum. Where Confucius, you have philosophies and you have religions. This is a tangent, but it's an important tangent. So philosophies are basically structured understandings of how the world works on a rationalistic basis. Religions are understandings of how humans consciously relate to the cosmos. So one of them is sort of a procedural. One of my friends likes to say philosophy is for the aristocrat, religion is for the priest. Where philosophy was developed through the Greco Roman tradition of we are the Romans and the Greeks had master morality. So their idea was you need to master reality and dominate it. And the European reason stems from that. But the thing we forget, and this is going to come up later in the video, is that Greek philosophy is the endpoint of their religious tradition. And it was only taken in a rationalistic form due to the rise of Christian civilization where when the Christians took power, they needed to take on all of this Greco Roman intellectual baggage to run a civilization. Because Christ was a carpenter's son who hung out in the hills. And Christianity's core message is getting people to heaven, the kingdom of heaven, where in the New Testament it's mostly a bringing up the kingdom of heaven on earth. But when you're relating to things that don't directly follow reaching the kingdom of heaven, you have to pull on intellectual traditions besides Christianity. So you saw the Christians take on these huge philosophic traditions from classical civilization which they used to manage the multi continental Roman Empire. So when I talk about shadows in the cave, it's a great place to start because one of the greatest mystics of all time was Plato. And we view Plato as a rationalistic philosopher, but he was really a religious thinker for the Greeks because in Greek civilization they had this pre established tradition that there were these different gods that were symbolic sub regions of reality and they would influence the world. But the Greeks went through their own atheist and religious and nihilistic phase, at the end of which came the Sophists. And the Sophists argued that reality is completely determined by argument because they were coming from the Athenian legal tradition to win the elections. And so Athenian democracy was very positive, but it did have negatives, for example sophistry and corruption and that stuff. And so Plato and Aristotle were both spent their careers just ruthlessly going after Athens. Or it's funny, we treat Aristotle and Plato as these symbolic figures of Athenian golden age. Where Plato was from an old Athenian family and Aristotle was a Macedonian who taught at the University of Athens. But both of them hated the Athenian social structure which they saw as degenerate. And Plato came after Socrates, where Socrates he had a daimon he spoke to which was a spirit and the spirit just told him stuff and then he parroted it around him but then he started questioning the social institutions of Athenian society. The problem is that people didn't actually believe them. So this caused the Athenian authorities to kill Socrates, his student Plato, because Socrates was a popular guy, built his entire life about taking revenge on Athenian society. And this is one of the elements that gets written out where our understanding of Plato is highly sanitized. But Plato basically reached the spirit world and he made a highly rationally consistent in good theory of the world. I do not think moderns understand the mental depth of Plato or Aristotle. They're operating at levels of thinking that we can't comprehend because in our left hemisphere materialist worldview, we can only see the external trappings of things. What the Greeks did that was so brilliant was they created a logical substructure that could be applied across different civilizations and different religions. So almost every society in the world has informed their worldview according to Greek logic. The Muslims have done it, the Christians have done it, the Greeks and the Romans themselves had, et cetera. So it's a mental processing tool that works across religions. But it came from Plato's understanding of the divine forms. And I think Plato did the best explanation of these concepts that anyone's done. Because the way to explain the divine forms, the way to explain these sorts of concepts to modern people that's most comprehensible is Plato. Because Plato ultimately pulled from our civilizational trajectory is as dependent upon Plato as it is upon Aristotle.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, and there's a big, you know, debate between Plato and Aristotle, but in this context they're both aligned against Athens. I guess the, like the argumentation based theory around democracy, like you said. So where, how does Plato's divine forms, like in summary, describe the world really effectively? And how is that different from Aristotle's contribution?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Let me explain it this way. This is a no, Sorry, my bookshelf nearly fell apart. This is a book I have, it's a history of California. The issue with the modernist materialist paradigm is they can only see the book, they can see the physical object, which is why we're dying of nihilism. Because when you only see the physical object, not its meaning, the world is never enough. When you see things and then you can see their implications, the world is enough. Because you can see the world through both meaning and actual materia. Because meaning is a sort of emergent phenomena that stems from human life where you don't just say the meaning of life as blank. The meaning of life stems from the actual process of living life itself, self. And what Plato did is he developed an external mental categorization system which you can use to inform material reality. So what I mean by that is the materialist paradigm. So materialists believe that all reality is contained within physical material, that ideas don't influence the world. We are a society which materialism completely won. And we're not willing to mentally examine that. Because when you actually study materialist thinkers, there's not really a good argument for why you should be a materialist. It all boils down to, you should be a materialist because materia is the only thing that exists. They build a mental trap you can't break out of. But then what I say is, don't build a worldview off as if clauses. An as if clause is as if something is true, then blank is true. People like to think that the more as if clauses they add, the smarter they are. But no, things can just be true. And you can point at that and say that thing is true. You don't need to add the 5 in as if clauses because people think the more that they reason, the better. The answer is, well, you should just have the correct answer. And how you come to the correct answer is your choice. But so in the materialist paradigm, you have abstract principles that control reality. And you can see this through the laws of physics. Everyone agrees the laws of physics control reality. A little bit further than that. You can get everyone who's reasonable to agree that there are certain laws to political governance or human nature. Nature or those different things. And the modernist paradigm basically has devolved into saying reality doesn't exist as a way to get around not doing this. Because the argument that the Marxists and the left and the nihilists give is that humans get to determine reality because we say so. And that's not the case. Humans have a proportionate level of influence over reality to what we can do. So we have a certain amount, but not everything. But then what that means is that our human existences are encumbered by these abstract principles that decide whether or not we succeed. So you have an abstract principle called happiness. You can't touch it, but you have to live through happiness. Then you have abstract principles like the nation. The nation is an emergent phenomena that forms under certain conditions in history, but once it there, it acts in its own right. And one of the theories I developed is the relationship between the material and the ideal is masculine and feminine, where the feminine is the material and it's looking to mate with an idea. So bodies need ideas and ideas need bodies. So in human societies and human individuals don't have religion, they wilt or they get filled with negative ideas. When you remove religion, you mean that you're going to add something else to fill the mental void in the society, whether that be. I mean, Christians talk a lot about different idols people put inside their souls, like greed or lust or those different things. And it's basically that in the absence of religion, those negative ideas fill the void. So bodies need ideas and ideas need bodies and ideas will happily kill bodies for their own aims. Which you see with communism, Christianity, every major world religion, the idea forms in its own right and it becomes this force which tries to expand out of its own intentions, killing the people involved. This is the whole Jungian, Petersonian point. Ideas have people, people don't have ideas. And so when you look at world history, you're seeing these sort of like idea egregores take over societies and then use them to conquer and consume other egregores. An egregore is a Greek concept for like a group spirit. Because the Greeks had a worldview that fits into this really easily. Because if you read the Iliad they'll say like, Venus was a friend of. I'm going to get, I'm making this up. Venus was a friend of Achilles or Athena was a friend of Odysseus. And so the Greeks perceived the world as these sort of archetypal principles that you relate to through human consciousness. And so these principles flit in and out of human consciousness. And this is how all societies perceive consciousness before the acts, before the modern world where you have these unconscious idea spaces that humans feed off and then humans can choose which ones they feed off. And so my attitude towards religion is to have a sort of like sex ed understanding of it where map out different religions. If you pair with this religion, you should know how to date this religion. You should know its personality drawbacks. You should know that it may do blank or blank. My goal is to have. Because humans can connect with whatever psychological forces we want to through certain methods. World history is taught that we're genetically identical to people in different eras of history, but we can't connect to the spiritual forces that our ancestors drew meaning from because we basically made a collective psychic agreement in our civilization to not do so. We made a collective agreement in the modern period that we weren't going to pull from religious forces because it was impossible. And that grew greater and greater. And it's a huge divide between us and our ancestors. It's just a staggering divide.

[Austin Padgett]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

It'S not really stated, but I have too many conversation threads here to go back to understand more of them. Plato developed the ideas of rationality from this Greek concept of underlying archetypal principles. So when the Greeks have ferocity in battle, they're pulling on the spirit of Aries. So that creates the archetypal principle of aggression. There's the archetypal horse. And so what it means by that is, let's say. And modernists really struggle with this because this isn't how our neurology is wired, but our worldview was made by people who believes this. Where let's say there is, there is the race of horse and the race of horse breeds out individual horses which have a range of quality, where there's high quality horses and lower quality horses that all belong to the unified species that has the horse traits. And what Plato said is that those horse traits replicated across the entire population so that you have the horse which is spawned by this broader spiritual horse that you can't touch. And that's clearly true up to a certain threshold. Plato has a valid threshold. Plato is reasonable up to a threshold. But then the point where most people kind of irk at Plato is first of all him saying that material reality does not exist because Plato had studied in India and Egypt. So a lot of Plato's ideas came from those traditions which say that reality is a dream by the gods. And Aristotle, his pupil, pushed back against that, where Plato said that we need to make this sort of theocracy that is governed by these priest classes who understand the archetypes and have this selection pressure where they pick the best priests and, you know, the Catholic Church almost perfectly fits the structure for Plato's Republic. Because when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, they used Platonic concepts to explain Christianity to the Greco Roman elite, to govern the empire. And inside Plato's life, Aristotle was his student. Where you have a chain of philosophy of Socrates to Aristotle, sorry, Socrates to Plato, Plato to Aristotle. And Aristotle was the Macedonian. And so he was more so from. He was like a redneck in the Greek context. And he was relatively pro democracy. Aristotle said monarchy was the best system because of course, he was part of A monarchy. He was a subject to the King of Macedon. But he also said democracy is like a respectable system and he puts oligarchy at the bottom. And Aristotle said that physical reality exists and we should study physical reality first. And a lot of people have construed Aristotle's ideas to be purely materialistic. But if you actually understand the context he was writing in, Aristotle did believe in God. He did believe in the spirit world. He did believe there were spiritual connotations to reality, where his idea of materialism. People really underestimate how smart the Greeks were. The Greeks are vastly smarter than we are today. And Aristotle said that there are material things, but each of them have their own innate direction that they have to go for. Or a telos. So man needs to fuck woman. Nations go through these natural life cycles that end in three different ways, depending what their institutions are. So Aristotle thought material reality existed, but it was part of a broader sort of universe that had purpose and meaning and divine direction. We took Aristotle's philosophy in the most disenchanted way possible over the course of thousands of years to create modernity. And one of the points I really want to emphasize here is we think modernity is rational, but nothing we believe is rational. I've studied almost every single modern philosophic field, and in each case, it's rationalization of what we want to believe. And because the school system in the society has done such a good job of wiring our neurology into those certain ways, we take it for granted. And if you showed what we believe to any other era of history, they would say we're completely retarded. And none of this makes sense, because it doesn't make sense the rest of history. If 99% of history disagrees with us, we might be wrong.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, it's. It's confusing because normally people think of rationality as some obvious discoverable decision tree that you can figure out if you're educated enough or something, where people get the idea that if going to college gives you a better on average salary than we should send everybody there. And then it creates a big mismatch in the distribution because the way people make decisions, it can't be defined as rational from an individual perspective, but it's the idiocentric. Individual behavior is kind of rational from a collective perspective, but what it is is you're basically matching to likely distributions of probability so people don't make decisions. Like, it's not just like there's a rational answer. You can figure out if everybody's educated enough and everybody's smart enough because the world's not. It goes back to the uncertainty principle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I suppose that's a really good point. It's that we believe there's this sort of like objective rationale. It's a perversion of the Platonic concept that Plato believes there are these archetypal principles that if you hack into, you understand. We believe that we just used it for modernist goals. The reality is that life is highly complicated and so you have to actually interface with reality and not rely on your mental projections, which is the big issue. Platonic philosophy gets into where we're going to talk about three different philosophies that have influenced Western history under the covers and in a really big way, because intellectual people knew about them, but that we've forgotten about. Those three being Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Platonism. I also, when we get into this, after I'm done explaining the Greeks, I'd like to go through different polarities in mystic traditions to explain how they work. But after we go through the polarities, we can go through the three core philosophies of Western history and then go through different world traditions. Yeah, people just say shit. And they think if they say shit with in a smart enough way it's true, but the world just is what it is. People like to think if they make a long winded argument that they can, that they can just change reality. Which if you study enough 19th and 20th century and 21st century philosophy, the philosophers open openly state that. They openly state that we think we can use definitions to control reality, which is a real warping of a sort of mystic logic. Because in magic traditions you make an imitation of something and then through that imitation you control it. So if you look at a map and in most mystery traditions, magic is the ability to turn symbols into a real world output. So in this worldview coding, religion and science are all forms of magic because you make a symbolic representation, use it on paper. The symbolic representation has a real world application on the material world and then it changes it. So when you're looking at like a switchboard for a computer, you're looking at real world physical shifts, but it's been conceptualized on a symbolic frame. And so as an example of this in action, when you're dealing with social media, the social media companies have sort of voodoo doll of your personality and they can use it to read what you are as a person. And so they can use this to psychologically control you through the algorithm. So people use this stuff. And I like to tell people that if you don't want to think about these sorts of things, what you've done is you've given all these tools to the worst possible actors. And what we've seen over the 20th century is bad faith. Actors have used these psychological principles to manipulate the public. Where you look at Edward Bernays or a lot of the CIA psychological operations or what the Soviets used for psychological manipulation and just there was a wide scale psychological manipulation campaign over the Western world is they all knew this stuff where they're operating under thinkers who know these things like Hegel or Marx who had all studied these esoteric traditions. Then they could use those tools to manipulate the public. And they made a sort of psychological block for the rest of the public where the rest of the public thought that the things we are talking about are physically impossible. So they had no defenses for it. It's a really complex psychological bait and switch. Do you understand what I'm saying?

[Guest Speaker]

My question would be how did they get that out of mysticism but have a materialist and interpretation of the mystic laws?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I can answer that, but that's like the edge of my capabilities. So Hegel was part of the crypto hermetic school in 19th century Germany, alongside Nietzsche was part of it. A lot of other thinkers like I'd say Gustav Lebanon was, I would say that Carlisle was you. The way to spot this stuff is, is each of these schools uses their own language and terminology. So you can look at certain words that are tip offs. And so Hegel, he has the thesis, antithesis, synthesis and those are principles that stem from that exist in all of these traditions. And it's polarity one way, other way, other way. So Marx took Hegel's concept where Hegel was a spiritualist, where he thought the march of history was the mind of God controlling material outcomes for God's aims. So Hegel had this concept the material is dependent on the spiritual because he's pulling from a hermetic paradigm. What Marx did is remove the spiritual and say the material is using its own aims. So you're taking principles that stem from the spiritual then shoving them into the material. And what Marx did, which is. So Marx did a lot of really bad things. One of the bad things he did was in the removal of that he got rid of moral standards where once you remove the ideal frame you have no moral standards. Because you should assess worldviews by universals. Where universals like good, truth, freedom, whatever, and you can assess history by them. Those are ideal concepts. In doing so you've subconsciously Acknowledged the ideal is superior to the material, which is what most world religions, it's what all world religions teach. What Marx did is remove the ideal. So to say, the material pushes its own ends. And I'm reading an interesting book by Bertrand de Juvenal, who was a French author a century ago. And it's called On Power. And one of the points he makes is that once you divorce power from God, the state will balloon to enormous sizes because once power is no longer wielded in the interests of God and it's wielded in the interests of man, and then over the course of centuries, that's going to be corrupted into the state dominating everything. Because the state over the course of centuries has the greatest degree of power and they will consume the other sociological institutions. So the book goes to different world civilizations to see how there's this cycle of the removal of religion causes the growth of the state, then the state falls apart, then religion gains power again, then the cycle restarts.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And in Europe, I remember talking to my professor at the Sorbonne. She would talk about how the amount that God was invoked in American politics was a sign of like, authoritarianism. And I explained the perspective that it's more like a signal or that you're not going to gauge, engage in that kind of behavior because you're rooted in these principles theoretically. But I forgot where I was.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's correct, yeah.

[Guest Speaker]

Going with that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Because people need to have power structures and every society which doesn't have a power structure just falls apart. One of the things the left does is they create false promises of Utopia to invalidate all of their competitors because they're judging their competitors against an impossible standard. And then they structure themselves. They can never be held accountable. What that means is they're very good at propaganda. There was a point I wanted to make here about how this relates to the ideal in the material, but I forgot it. And so he talks about, for example, the biggest enemies of total tyranny are the nobility in the church and the merchant class. So it's private enterprise, a strong religion, and like a hereditary nobility, because those are all forces that have long term entrenched interests in the stability of society. So what the government does is it attacks each of those three interests and they tell the general public that it's in their own interests. And then the general public cheers because people tend to hate the local tyrant more so than the faraway tyrant. And then they don't realize they become slaves to the state.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And I like Aristotle's conception of the constraints of the material world. Because it almost sounds like he's talking about the increased momentum associated with physical solidified bodies versus the spirit world, which is more instantly changeable, I guess, or mutable.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So everyone, when they start studying this, prefers Aristotle to Plato. I used to hate Plato in high school, and then I attained more wisdom and realized my younger self did not have wisdom. Because Plato only really clicks once you've sunk hundreds of hours into thinking about this. Because we've educated ourselves in the modernist paradigm so much which stems from Aristotle. So Aristotle automatically clicks. Plato also makes sense. It's just it takes a long time to get modernist people to, like, neurologically fit with Plato. Because what happens is that over the course of years, your mind shifts. And I've gone through, like, I've gone through several consciousness shifts over the course of my life. Each time when you make the jump, the thing you made the jump to appears absolutely insane. But you look back on it and you think, wait, I was stupid for not doing it earlier. And this is one of the things you have to, like, really inform people of. Because we are changing so fast as a society, we're going to have to learn how to do consciousness shifts as a civilization in an intentional way. And people have to be aware of that process so it doesn't drive them crazy.

[Guest Speaker]

So did Plato have a better conception of the realm of ideals, but was wrong on ignoring the material world?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Plato, you can see Plato as an attempt to create a sort of, like, oriental society in Europe. Plato was very similar to Indian philosophy, which was, again, not a coincidence, because Plato went to India and Egypt and Babylon. He got his ideas from them and in those traditions. So their ideas make sense in their paradigm. Everyone's ideas make sense in their paradigm. And Asian societies have spent thousands of years hoggling out their paradigms, figuring out every subconscious detail, just autistically rendering it to the core. But it's very hard to jump from one worldview to another. So it's very easy to look at, like, Indian or Chinese philosophy and say, that's stupid. But until you really understand it, you can still say it's stupid. But you have to, like, see where they're coming from, where that's what level seven is about, and where they're very deep worldviews. But the thing with Plato is his ideal was there's these sort of eternals, and we reflect the eternals. What that does, though, is it gives the priest class inordinate power. Where Plato wanted to establish a totalitarian state, that banned music that created this Priest class went through a rigorous selection. He's invented the noble lie of lying to the public. Where the idea of Plato's cave is that there's material life and we live it as you attain wisdom. Where the core of Greek philosophy is know thyself, which was the message of the Delphi of Oracle. The Oracle of Delphi, the front message was know thyself. She was the core spiritual figure of Greece. Once you know the world, you can understand the rippling patterns that affect your daily life. So once you attain greater degrees of wisdom, once you attain greater degrees of comprehension of your environment, you see the underlying forces that are rippling in your material reality. Where Plato's cave is this cave that you see your daily life and most people are stuck inside of it. And I think what Plato was saying was when we Greeks look at our gods, we're only looking at like the most basic level of the gods. We're not analyzing them on a deeper level. Which is why this was such a revolutionary idea for the Greeks, because it allowed the analysis of things that were sacred to the Greeks, which allowed the Greeks to conquer the world, but ultimately killed their culture and degeneracy and nihilism. So and that's just implicit in the rational process. The problem, though, is that and Plato fit into the classic problem that a lot of mystics run into of just raw egoism. Because I was reading Gustav Le Bon's book on. On Brahministic India or ancient India, and he was talking about the Brahmins in India who are very similar to the Platonics priest class that Plato was trying to build. They would just view themselves as completely superior to the rest of the population and they kept a tyranny on the public. Whereas I've said before in South India a Brahmin could not step within 30ft of or make eye contact with an untouchable. Or the Brahmins would lord their power over the nobility and they would say that like, one Brahman is worth a hundred noblemen or like a hundred common people. So they were just stupendously arrogant. And this is the issue Plato ran into too, which is why I stand by the law of chill vibes. Because Plato said, I can understand these principles. I can talk to the gods. I'm going to lord this over you. So Platonism worked when you paired it with Christian humility, where the reason Nietzsche liked to say that Christianity is Platonism for the masses, because it's the same goal of reaching archetypal forms and imbibing the archetypal forms in yourself. But when paired with Christianity, it did a really good job of working for the public. The problem with the Platonists is, firstly, I think a lot of these mystic traditions are dependent on very small genetic subsections of the population. From the CIA's research on these different topics. Do I go into this rabbit hole now?

[Guest Speaker]

Sure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, so from the CIA's research on these topics which where the CIA, the Soviets and the Europeans had decades of research during the Cold War on psychics and remote viewing and spirituality. And the conclusion they came to was that 1% of the population had abilities in proportion at the other 99% combined. So what you're looking at with a lot of these mystic traditions and the reason they stay in hiding is you're dealing with fairly small genetic portions of the population. And then it's highly complex topics, which is why you have the coded messages. It's why you have the multiple tiers of consciousness, because you're trying to figure out, does said person have the genetic gifts we need? Also what is their moral character and what are they interested in? When you understand those things, you can apportion responsibility to them. But those are things that people only understand once they have like a sort of grip on something where. You know what I mean? Right.

[Guest Speaker]

It's not scalable. Yeah, it's not scalable in an interactive way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Well, it is. It's called the Catholic Church. So we're gonna go through this is. I think I explained the. So before I get into the Catholic Church, my comprehension of these things to explain them is there is clearly an ideal plane of existence which ripples onto the material plane. There are is clearly somewhere where the laws of physics exist, because the laws of physics manifest over material reality. If something manifests over reality, it must exist. So there has to be archetypal principles. 99% of humanity believed that you could access archetypal principles through physical experience, through mystical religious experiences. So the way the rest of history viewed this stuff is you have the principles and then you can relate to said principles and sort of like enter into a bond with them. And what different religions, different societies tried to do was establish those bonds. And then they would take gifted individuals, would talk to them, accumulate information, and then feed it to the general public, which doesn't have those genetic gifts, gifts. So when you're looking at world religions, assume they work because the entirety of human history operated and built their civilizations off that assumption. And so it worked enough across civilizations that they could build their entire lives around it. And so you have the principles. Humans have reason to believe they can interact with said principles. And so mysticism is the art of going sort of leaving Plato's cave. The individuals who leave the cave of seeing the manifestations of material reality to see the underlying things that create material reality. Does that make sense?

[Guest Speaker]

Yes. So just try and summarize. Plato and Aristotle relatively agreed, besides Plato's neglect of material, that you have the ideal plane and that the material is kind of derive from that and so is the difference between them that when Aristotle studies the material to kind of reverse engineer and figure out the ideal versus Plato just meditates on the ideal. But those are two different ways of kind of trying to figure it out.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. This has been a recent, this, I think this has become the mainstream belief now where there was a 20th century paradigm that Aristotle and Plato were in opposition because one was materialist and one was idealist. What 21st century authors tend to believe is they were more amenable to each other. And also keep in mind that they were friends. Aristotle was Plato's student. They studied the same academy. Aristotle said that Plato was a huge influence on him. Now we tend to think that Aristotle's worldview fits inside the Platonic worldview to a greater degree and they're describing different things, but there are core differences where Aristotle does believe that the material exists in its own right, while Plato does not. I'm on Aristotle's side.

[Guest Speaker]

So Aristotle, like we said, Aristotle is probably right there. But Plato had a more evolved conception of the ideal. But Aristotle's philosophy of discovering the ideal through the reverse engineering of the material might keep you more limited in discovering the ideal, but it's also a grounded way to access it. So it's probably good to like go back and forth, which is the Western.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Which is the Western tradition where Aristotle and Plato were both huge at the time, for centuries afterwards. So Plato had a huge revival around 200 AD, the Neoplatonic Revolution with Plotinus. Platonism was also bigger in the establishment of early Christianity. Once you get to the high Middle Ages, Aristotle won. And Aristotle kept winning from the High Middle Ages onwards. In the Renaissance and a few periods like the Baroque, you have some Platonic murmurings where Platonism was this underlying philosophy of Western history. But after you get past Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle becomes dominant. Because what Aquinas did that was so brilliant and is he created a logical bridge in the 13th century between the Greek tradition and the classical tradition and the Christian tradition. So what Aquinas said is that reality is logically Comprehensible. And due to that you can use sort of mathematical equations to figure out God's truth of the world and also how reality works. This is how we develop the concept that reality is rational, which we have over applied massively. We're annoyed if humans aren't rational, but our concept of rationality is just. It's a rationalization of ideology, so it doesn't make sense. And so like we criticize the world when it doesn't fit our sort of mental categories. But our mental categories are retarded and stupid.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. Like our idea of rationalization is they don't make chicken the same way as me. My way is more efficient or something. Yeah, they're so irrational. Why are they doing it in that order? It's like a mundane thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm going to explain mystic traditions through two hands and multiple dualities. So you have the right hand and the left hand. And the right hand is magic or mysticism, which stems from God, and the left hand is that which stems from causing suffering to others. And one of my friends asked me, rudyard, how do you distinguish between following the right and the left hand? And what I say is that if the actions you're doing have a net positive impact on the people around you, you're doing right hand and left hand is detraction. And so we're really autistic about this stuff. But let's say look at like different American states, It's clear that the sort of cultural formations of different states have succeeded to differing degrees in the last 10 years and in the years before that, like the Rust Belt has failed, the blue states are doing poorly now, and the south has done really well, and the intermountain west as well. So what we're seeing is culture forming as this abstract concept. And then that's an emergent phenomena of the people involved becoming a sort of spirit. So we talk about the spirits. This is the way a modernist person should conceive them. And so certain spirits have more positive or negative charge. So when a medieval person would talk about demons as an example, they would say that a certain population is demonically possessed if it takes on negative psychological traits which hurt everyone around it. And my friend told me, she said, following the right hand is not doing harm to others. And I said, it's not that easy because once you get to a high enough level of power, you have to administer harm and suffering for your position of responsibility. There are times when leaders have to fight wars in order to just responsibly govern their nation. And so that's why I stand by. Do you add energy or detract energy? Where one of the most common mystic principles across the world traditions is what you do unto others is what you become. And I find this interesting historically because you look at empires very frequently have the ends that they gave to other societies around them. Where Britain colonized the world only to have the world colonize Britain. Rome conquered the world only to be conquered itself. Mongolia destroyed all of Eurasia, turning into a wasteland, only for Mongolia probably had to become a wasteland. And so I follow this. And it's not infrequent that what an empire does to its enemies is what it ultimately becomes. It's comparable to how when Britain conquered India and they installed socialism in India, those very same techniques went back to Britain. Because frontiers create the trends you see manifest in the middle of the empire. Because wherever you face chaos and you have to innovate and then those things ripple outwards. Innovation either comes at the very most core of empires like imperial courts or literary salons or the frontiers, which is polarity. Another principle, there's a bunch of these guys, the Kybalion, which is part of the hermetic text that does the best job of going through each of these different principles. So any questions of the right or the left hand?

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, do they. Does the right hand and the left hand relate to the material and the ideal? Does one correlate?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Thank you. They also relate to the right and the left neurological hemisphere, where we know from psychology that humans are very good at picking up intuitive points, especially about our bodies that we wouldn't think where like people can intuit when they have a. Like a. I mean it's called friggin pain. Pain. Is your body intuiting that there's an issue somewhere in your body that isn't directly neurologically connected to your logical systems. And keep in mind that like 90% of human thoughts unconscious. So it makes sense that there's methods to relate to the unconscious that don't make sense to the conscious mind. But I am a dinosaur. What was I going to say?

[Guest Speaker]

Right hand, left hand.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So the right hand's neurologically. And this is from McGillchrist's work and he's a great neuroscientist. The right hemisphere is capable of seeing an entire equation and it views things in their context. The meaning, the emotion, things occurring over time. And then the left hemisphere can only see things through the lens of money and power and control. And it's the hemisphere used for manipulating things and controlling things. So when you're neurologically dealing with a living thing. You use the right hemisphere. You have to relate it as an interactive person. What a lot of people don't get about religion is because the machine has completely taken over our worldview. If something doesn't operate as a machine in our society, we can't understand it. Which is just. It's deeply sad and it's heartbreaking. We've gotten this far. But when you're dealing with. When you think of these spiritual forces, the ancients perceived them as talking to people and building relationships with people because that's how they structured all the relationships in their lives. So their idea is you talk to them, you build a relationship, you consistently give them trust, you get trust back. And as societies progressed, the kinds of sacrifices the gods asked for shifted. As the mental development of the society got higher. It meant that the people involved were capable of mentally projecting the higher things. Because when you're looking at these sort of spiritual things, you're seeing a certain society has a certain level of mental clarity that allows them to dream up certain things of a certain level of density from their material conditions. And then they turn their worldview into dreams. Where the right and the left hemisphere. I love the example here where the left hemisphere can only draw half of something and the right hemisphere can draw the whole thing. I think it's beautiful because it shows that they can see half of the truth, but not the full thing. Like Marx, for example. Marx was accurate that a side effect of the rise of capitalism and the capitalism in that system would cause the alienation of the worker and the rise of socialism. Marx sort of spoke it into reality, but it was a trend that existed beforehand. What Marx did not predict, and if he did, he was a twisted fuck, was that it would kill over 100 million people. No, sorry, it would kill like 80 million people. More people than every other religion and ideology combined in history. Where, yes, the age of the worker would come, but it would be vastly worse than the age of the capitalist. So Marx saw half of the truth. When you look at the figures in the left hemisphere, they can see half of the truth, but they can't see the other half, which is often diametrically opposed. This is the issue rationalist thinkers always run into where I like Nietzsche. Nietzsche's predictions of the future have been, in my opinion, prophetic. But there's always certain details Nietzsche leaves out that are highly important. Which is why I think Nietzsche and thinkers. It's why everyone misinterprets Nietzsche. Like no one has the correct understanding of Nietzsche. And I'm like, write better guy. If no one understands what you're saying, you should write better. I apologize, but. So right and left hemisphere corresponds to our neurology, corresponds to the material and the spiritual. Because when you're left hemisphere and you're purely material, you can't see the implications of things. So everything in your worldview goes down back to nihilism, it stretches down to nihilism because you can't add. You're just trying to exploit the material world. And when you have the right hemisphere, you can see the implications of things and roll with them. And.

[Guest Speaker]

Yes, right. So if you're on the left, left hemisphere, you can only draw half of the elephant. So that's the problem with getting rid of the ideal. And like you said, this is weird. It tracks perfectly with my conception of, you know, combining pragmatism with idealism. In politics, where you have the north, if you don't hold a North Star, you're going to be, you're going to be able to still do stuff, but you're going to eventually get off track.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

And if you just go to the North Star, you're going to run into a wall. And the point that you made about war was really interesting because the thing that people don't get about it, what you were talking was specifically in the context of being at a level of responsibility and this trickles down to various degrees. But the reason is because, okay, so even if you're connected to the ideal at that level, any movement whatsoever is going to mean bodies because there's consequences on either side. It's the realm you're dealing with. So yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

You want me to go through different polarities or do you want me to explain the three Western traditions? Because what you're said is you're getting into an issue that the hermetics have versus the Platonists and the Gnostics, where the Platonists and the Gnostics are both antibody. Most hermetics are pro body, where no, we're not going to do this because we would. If we go to that, I'm going to forget to go through the polarity. So let's go through the polarities first. Then let's go through the three western traditions. Then let's go through how this relates to Oriental mysticism. So right and left hand, then you have masculine and feminine. And this is one of the core concepts. And I like using the masculine and the feminine to explain the archetypes because it's such an obvious archetype. We've all spoken to men, we've all spoken to women. We know they're different or we all in our, our hearts know they're different. And so in various mystic traditions, the masculine is doing and the feminine is being. And so in Taoism, in Hermeticism, which are the alchemy religions, there's Eliade thinks there's Indian alchemy. I haven't read his book on the topic yet. But the Western alchemical tradition stems back to Egypt. The Eastern alchemical tradition stems to China. Both of them are based upon the masculine feminine. And the idea is masculine does. The knight kills the dragon. The dragon is the force of the chaotic feminine. Then he fucks the feminine. The princess. Knight kills, dragon fucks, princess makes child. You have two oppositional forces, masculine and feminine. The masculine has to domesticate nature and achieve. After it does so it can fuck the feminine and pass on to the next generation. And so women conquer. The women have to store chaos inside themselves with children because chaos is the force of creativity. You can't have creativity without chaos. Chaos. So women's chaos inside themselves, they have to conquer internal chaos. Because I get the impression having a child is horrifying. It must be terrifying to shove like a football between your legs. I think that weighs on women. And for men it's killing things and conquering land and cutting down trees and like, I don't know, building Lego sets. Men conquer chaos in the world. Women conquer it in themselves. And so when you look at the, at these various traditions, you have, for example, in the Hermetic tradition, the positive masculine is the good father and the negative masculine is the tyrant. Masculine culture, feminine nature. Culture enforces human standards upon nature. So women are largely constant across societies. And then men enforce culture on women, which is. That's what Camille Paglia said. Men are the iron that holds society together and women are the water that flows through it, which is why men staff social institutions and it's why women are the ones who. Women are dependent upon social institutions that men build. And masculine, feminine. And so that's the ying and the yang of the Chinese tradition. And then there's the hermetic, masculine and feminine. And I believe the invention of the Trinity is one of the greatest things in human history. I love the Trinity, I'm a trinitarian. But because with the yin and the yang of the Asiatic tradition, there's no progress, which is how Asians have viewed the world. It's just harmony. And all the Asian religions. And when I say Asian, I mean India, China, Japan. I normally put Islam in with the west until I don't, but I'll tell you when I don't, they want to attain harmony. So Asia has been psychically feminine over its history. The west is psychically masculine because with the Trinity, masculine, feminine, fuck, make child, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, the. This is why the Trinity is a sacred symbol in Christianity as well as Indian traditions, the Greeks, the hermetics, across many cultures. And because that creates the idea of innovation and change. So Peterson's operating under this logic. This is the core of Petersonian philosophy. And Peterson's interesting because he takes a lot of Peterson's walking. He walks a lot of philosophic tightropes. It's hard to explain in.

[Guest Speaker]

Well, he likes to surf on the edge of the wave.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, he's surfing on the edge. And I don't blame him, if I'm being honest.

[Guest Speaker]

But surfing's fun.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's how you learn a point. I just want to say, for, like I said, like you can make spiritual sex ed. And what I'll say is that in the manner that you would be careful about who you sleep with, you should be careful in these regards because madness is infinitely large and madness is held together by psychic walls of civilizational stability. Those are religions. Religions are sort of psychic shields, walls the people inside the societies can trust. This is how I perceive the world. This is how everyone around me perceives the world. And we're going to uphold reality together. And so this is why most world religions have punished dissenters, because they're literally attacks on the collective psyche of the society. And certain societies understand if we let a certain amount of attacks exist, or what it does is it actually strengthens the collective psyche. But once it gets beyond a certain proportion, it falls apart. And then you see civilizational collapse. And if a civilization loses its sort of psychic shield wall, it's going to die because it won't be able to cooperate. And that's what the west is experiencing now, where the west had every single variable going for it except a failed religion. And that one variable destroyed us. We had infinite, infinite food, infinite luxury, infinite military protection, political freedom. We're Quigley, writing in the 60s, said that the west either needs to have a spiritual revolution within the next lifetime or a cancerous anti religion will destroy the West. And his prediction was that said revival would occur where he titled this book Tragedy and hope because his hope was the tragedy of the world wars would spark introspection about the fallibility of mankind, which would allow us to have a new philosophic breakthrough. However, the wealth of the post World War II era and Quigley, who was a far seeing fellow, also saw this meant that we degenerated psychologically too quickly to reach that threshold where Quigley talks. He calls it the middle class crisis, where middle class youth in America, in the western world started taking on attributes of tribal cultures because without with the removal of external threats, you didn't have the incentive for cooperation.

[Guest Speaker]

So they basically needed the psychological breakthrough that we didn't get. And before the shield wall breaks, it hardens because we're not able to evolve on that level.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Things will work out.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah. Oh right. Well, it already broke. So we're already, we're already recovering the pieces of the shipwreck. And Peterson describes it as like if you're on a boat in the ocean, as soon as you jump off the ship, then you're going to grab on to anything you can get your hands on, whether it's like a sea turtle or a log or a barrel.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I find it, I find it hilarious that so elites make political positions for their own self interest, then their own people worship these political goals which their elites made completely cynically as actual religious understandings. I see this all the time, like climate change and it just horrifies me. It's worst for the left, where the left will. The left strategically, about 60 years ago staked out we are going to invest in gays, ethnic minorities and women because these are Demographics we can consistently electorally win. The leftist public made these religious goals that they had to push, which were originally cynical calculations by their own elites. And on the right, I see it all the time where it's just infuriating that people see shit on Twitter and then it's their entire worldview. People see stuff on social media and it's their only frame for reality. And I'm like, my guy, read a book, watch a documentary, like actually grapple with the information you're dealing with yourself. Don't grapple with someone else who has an incentive to lie to you.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, this goes much deeper than people believe whatever they see on tv. The reason that's true is because people just have it tendency to believe what you read.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Ken Wilber, who is like the best author on this topic, he's the big spiral dynamics popularizer. Dean Beck was. There was an earlier guy from New England who invented it. Dean Beck was from Dallas and he popularized it. And Ken Wilbur, I think he was based out of the American west, maybe San Francisco for a while. He was the guy who like wrote all of the theorizing. And so like sex, ecology and spirituality, it's the sexual duality of the masculine and the feminine ecology or like the collective unconscious and then spirituality and how it all relates together. Because the idea of nature is that the masculine looks across nature or the feminine and tries to subdue it. And then once it subdues it, it can then mate with the feminine to pass on its genes, conquer the world, pass on your genes, and then you use perception or spirituality to understand it. Where as an example, the founding fathers were highly invested in hermetic ideas because they were popular among upper class, early modern Europeans, which we'll get to. And so when you look at the $1 bill, did I. Oh God, where's my wallet? Where I actually. No, my wallet's here. I got this wallet in Oaxaca. I. I buy all my leather in Mexico.

[Guest Speaker]

No, I only get mine in Morocco.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Spent all my $1 bill on ice cream. I don't have a $1 bill. But on the $1 bill you have the triangle, you have the circle and you have the eye of perception. Do you have a $1 bill?

[Guest Speaker]

I do not.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Cries this isn't a big issue. $1 bill. You have the circle, the triangle and the eye of perception. The triangle is masculine upward spirit momentum. The circle is downwards feminine spiritual momentum. The eye of perception is the ability to use perception and wisdom to understand your environment, to figure out the next move. So what you do is you hone your perception, you understand your environment, you master it, you gain more wisdom, you level up. And then as you level up, you gain a greater consciousness of your environment. And so what they were saying was, in the American tradition, we stand for sort of growth and conquest over decay over being. Because if it was in the Oriental tradition, you would shove the triangle in the circle. Because in the Oriental tradition, the feminine is the highest form. Where in Buddhism and Buddhism, Taoism is hard because they have the hermetic mastering of nature. But it's also really go with the flow. I think Taoism is in the middle between the masculine and the feminine. It kind of leans feminine. Buddhism is hard feminine, where it's just submit to your environment. You, Hinduism is hard feminine. Where Oriental philosophies are. You need to immerse yourself in your environment in order to be able to just surrender to life. And what that is the downward spiritual momentum that you have attained complete being. And my guess is that this would give profound life satisfaction. My guess is that this would. Of these paths, this is the one that's most likely to make you happy and to make you like, actually content with your life.

[Guest Speaker]

The one where you can aspire to something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. You look at the great Asian civilizations. The reason that they. I mean a legitimate reason that Asians work such long hours in such terrible conditions is over thousands of years, their entire religious social structure trained their own populations to just accept reality. So this huge psychological switch built in about accepting poor conditions as they. Which they see as a moral virtue. In a lot of Asian societies, aspiration is bad. And on top of it, because their priest mystic class wasn't allowed to procreate for the most part, they gradually genetically pulled those traits out of the public, which is why I'm always stuck out. I read these ancient religious texts from Asia from 500 B.C. and then I go to Asia in its night and day where those ancient religious beliefs of like, don't sweat about social hierarchy, don't sweat about the constant struggle and grind, those people didn't procreate, and then the people who were unlike that did. And I don't know if that's true, but it's a narrative that makes sense to me.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, I think sometimes the evolutionary pathway for that kind of selection isn't as direct as people think. Yeah, but there's definitely a trend. And then it. Basically, anybody who needs to cope by having their philosophy around desensitizing feeling isn't can't be that happy. Which makes sense if you're containing the Triangle inside of a circle. It's like containing lightning in a bottle. Yeah, we've got like a perfect sphere that perfectly is balancing the energy from all directions. And then if that breaks, you know, lightning gets out. What's the third shape? Is it. You got circle, triangle and the eye of perception. So this is just Harry Potter. This is where J.K. rowling got her. She got it from the Trinity. The.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Guest Speaker]

So cloak in this whatever circle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting. In Oriental traditions, the mandala is the core shape. It's the circle. In Western traditions, the Trinity is. And so I wanted to bring this up before different genetic populations have different switches built into them that make that work under different contexts. And that's partly cultural and it's partly genetic. But if you look at distinct historical events, different societies have consistent reflexes in their collective unconscious towards different reactions. So if you look at France as an example in the 14th century, in the 17th century and in the 18th century, the king called the Estates General, or the parliaments to court. They then had a falling out. In two of those times, the court met up. The nobility met at the tennis court and made a new parliament. The reason that these patterns are repeated is that due for some reason in the underlying French cultural unconscious, this is just how they do things. And that's. You see it across populations where the Anglo Saxon world, almost all of our civil wars and revolutions were caused over a tax crisis where some demographic didn't want to pay taxes. That's the English Civil War. That's the American Revolution.

[Guest Speaker]

It's the American way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And so you see these, or you look at how Mao Zedong is very similar to Qi Xi Huangdi, who are split apart by 2000 years of Chinese history. Both are atheist dictators who. Atheist dictator to try to destroy the initial culture under this state centralized economy where everyone lives in barracks and then their regime falls apart after a single generation. It since built into the Chinese collective mind is this switch that they get that they do under pressure. So these exist. And I think Asians have bio. They have switches for both being super materialistic and also being super like spiritually chill. They have both. But the Oriental tradition is attaining sort of like acceptance of your environment in the Western tradition is attaining pressure so that the pressure explodes. This is of the masculine feminine. The masculine is the tree and the feminine is the cave, where the feminine, like the womb, produces things out of the cave and the tree spurts upwards. Over the National Mall we have the obelisk, which is a very overt hermetic thing. Because the obelisk is from Egypt and the obelisk is a dick. It's an earth dick impregnating the sky in Egyptian mythology. Then you have the green field, which is another principle for the feminine. So there's the field that gets impregnated by the dick. So these were ideas that were in wide circulation among the founding fathers because they were in a wide circulation across upper class Europeans going back to. Back to the medieval period. So it was big in the Renaissance, it was big in the 17th century. The development of science and to go through the different polarities. So you have right and left hand, you have masculine and feminine. We've also encapsulated them between the oriental and the occidental tradition. What I'll say as well is that I love that my anthropological triangle got popular online where I made an anthropological triangle. Three corners are the Western tradition, Western, individualist, Asian. So Japan, Anglo, Saxons, Africa, and the Third World, where it's. Is your society incapable of establishing political authority? In one corner it's do you establish a high trust society based off individualism or based off the collective? So I built this because most anthropological data sets just have a single binary of Japan to America. What I found though is there's lots of stuff that clusters in the middle that doesn't fit. And so I made the third triangle outpost of this is like a low trust society. And so did you go through this? You have the Western and you have the. The oriental tradition, then you have the shamanic tradition. And the shamanic tradition is wildly popular across the world, going back thousands of years, where the earliest art we have is shamanic, where lasso in a cave in France from 20,000 years ago. It's beautiful art. It's better than the art we have today, if I'm honest. It's just. It's very like trippy and psychedelic, is it's all about the animals. Because in their worldview, at the lowest stage of spiritual development that we know of for human societies, humans are animistically part of the world. So what the shamans do is they suffer pain and they sort of try to get to the edges of human consciousness and then they use this to learn skills to bring back to help their people. And so what the shaman. And so it's funny, there's a. Among a lot of native cultures, there's a joke that if you're not mentally ill, you shouldn't be a shaman. That like, you need to be mentally ill first to have the drive to be a shaman. Because in all of these cultures, religion was the solution to mental illness, which is something we, like psychologists, never examine today, which is just insane. I think it's because if psychologists started comparing themselves to religion, they'd come up so short.

[Guest Speaker]

I heard someone describe mental illness as being like. We kind of put it into a distinct category, but a lot of times mental illness is just being on the regular spectrum, spectrum of a psychological trait, but at the extreme, like being short.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Or tall or another thing as well. I was reading a World War I era British philosopher of crowd psychology last week, and he has a very interesting point where he says modernity produces a lot of mental illness, but we're kind of arbitrary in what we describe as a mental illness and what we don't. Where, for example, I would believe political totalitarianism is a mental illness, because what you're saying is you want the state to have total control of your life, which is. That's not okay if you're appealing to that. Because I look at people where, like, like I have. I have ptsd, which is a widely acknowledged mental illness. And then I go online and I see people who are so obvious, obviously significantly more mentally ill than me, but they don't have a word for what they have. It's either they're like constantly projecting rage at others, or they've built their entire identity around a false political ideology that scapegoats a different group. One of the best ideas Peterson has is he said there's four solutions for a problem. You can fall to nihilism, you can fault totalitarianism, you can fault a degeneracy, or. Or you can rise to heroism. And so when I look at someone, I think, which of those four boxes did they pick?

[Guest Speaker]

That's a. A great way to categorize if someone's going to produce positive fruits. But another example is they kind of. They classified resistance to the state as oppositional defiance, disorder.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

And then at the same time, you can have, like, you can be oppositionally defiant to things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

They use that to, you know, justify something that's unrelated and then. Go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, I just wanted to say that I really wanted to go on a tangent of the authoritarian personality there, but I probably won't because I don't think it fits the topic enough.

[Guest Speaker]

Got it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What were you gonna say?

[Guest Speaker]

Okay, yeah, yeah. So with the. The triangle and the. The circle and the line, if you had to take the Asian society to a personal analogy, you could almost say you can't be afraid to live, but it's harder for us to say that to him because we've. We lost our cir. Our eye triangle. Well, we lost. We still had the triangle. Right. But it wasn't bound or it wasn't. It wasn't in line with an eye. So it's like.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

If the lightning gets out and there's no eye to capture and guide that lightning, like pull it in a direction, then it goes unbound. So it's almost like a hippie with a drug problem whose life has fallen apart telling someone, hey, why don't you live your life, man? That we could make a stronger case. And this is maybe why, like, the. The Asian society stopped following the west as much. Yeah, because we don't have. We can't offer that good example. But it's still true that you can't be afraid to live your life, but you need the. You need all three shapes, basically.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a really good point. And it speaks to. There is a strong reason why the west built all of its social structures on a trinitarian system. U.S. government. Three. Three different. Judicial, executive, legislature. The social structure of European societies going back thousands of years was trinitarian. The nobility, the church and the worker class. The French parliament was trinitarian. Capitalism is trinitarian, where you have two. You have market forces competing against each other, which jostles to a third outcome. Democracy is parties competing against each other, creates third outcome. Science is where you have two hypotheses and test them against an outcome. The west social structures are built off trinitarian principles because these were concepts that educated people understood and they put them in. The problem, though, is that once you get processes like these going, they can get carried away very quickly if you don't know how to spot them. So what happened is that we basically unleashed the power of these forces in materia without the ability to perceive their consequences on an ideal basis. So as an example of that, science was natural science, where the first version of science was. Science is a concept that's from scentium, which is Latin for knowledge. Natural science was an alchemical idea that you study the world and use it to improve your consciousness. And there was the unity of religion, science and mysticism, where science was understanding God's creation, but it existed through a Christian worldview, because what the medieval thinkers taught, and I agree with this, is that from lots of physics research. And there was a huge result that came out about this recently. I'd love to talk about it. And it was crazy where my friend Marc Andreessen released last year that the US government had been blockading physics research since the 70s. And I had figured. I thought that already because I was comparing. I'm not particularly good at science, but I read a few books on the topic and I had picked together. I'm thinking, wait, there's an obvious solution to the physics paradigm that people haven't done. And I thought, this is weird. Someone else should have thought of this. And I thought, wait, if the government's holding this back because if physics opens the door to the idea that there is God, the managerial class is not going to be happy about that because the managerial class has to control reality. And they did. There's an authority higher than them that can create minimizations on their power is highly dangerous. It's also why the CIA and the other extensive research in the spirit world was covered up till the. Till the 2000 and tens. I would have released that stuff immediately if I was in the government because it's dope information. So I knew that the. I knew that the federal government had been blocking this stuff. And then a few weeks ago I saw the thing where they said that the new science research says that reality is not locally real. And I thought, no shit. Like that was the obvious conclusion from all of this. We're locally real means it exists distinct from perception, which is what we had gotten from several experiments beforehand. And the idea that human perception of reality affects reality is obviously true because you look at Western history and it's the intellectual creation of the collective unconscious of the European peoples. That's true of every civilizations. The building we're in was dreamt up by a human mind. Gustave Le Bon says different religions compete over what fantasies they want to recreate reality from. And he says human history is driven by fantasy, not rationality. And that's true. So societies pick fantasies and they try to reorder materia. And it's interesting that through the process of evolution, when our minds were the size of cells, the only competitors we had were other cellular life forms. When they were at the animal stage, the only competitors we had were animals. What happened is that as our minds and our consciousness grew, the complexity of the game we were playing was approximate. So what that means is that evolution's only gaining critical mass power once the conscious ability of that given stage of evolution was equivalent to it. So what that means is that the reality we're in is literally the being dreamt up by the collective biosphere, or the anima mundi, to take a hermetic term, where actually it wasn't just the hermetics it was Christians, it was Platonists, Gnostics, the entire Eastern Mediterranean. And so the anama mundi is dreaming up reality. And whatever stage of evolution is dependent on how far anima mundi is in evolution. So the collective unconscious of life is dreaming up the plot line of reality as we go. So individual humans or governments aren't in charge. The life force of Earth or God sets the plot.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. The manifestation of the subconscious or the dreams. So, like, when you imagine the concept of a chair in your mind, and then you try and find material to, like, construct it crudely, and that approximation of the shape you imagine, then. Yeah, the ideal form is still something real, which the ultimate material result of it originally came from. Yes, like idea to material.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. And then there's an interfacing relationship again. Masculine, feminine, feminine, makes child, a restart. A man idea builds the world, then passes on his genes. The idea grows.

[Guest Speaker]

So the feminine is the material and the male is the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And I want to bring up Amore for another reason. Amore said that it's. There's a certain irony that men can make with their minds and women can make with their. With their bodies, and neither sex can really do the other. You look at the men who build empires or scientific breakthroughs or religions, it's all men. Statistically, if there are women, it's like 1%. And then women are the only sex that can create with their bodies where men have to ejaculate. So men are set up to replicate the ideal or the culture, and women are set up to replicable, to replicate the feature physical biology. And what I mean by that is that women set the physiological standard for. Women set the right hemisphere, men set the left hemisphere. Where women set up the physiological standard for their children, their children's emotional state. It sets up their. Their physical bodies, make sure they're fed, make sure that they're, like, emotionally stable, provide reassurance. And then men set up the actual code for how they interface with their environment. Men explain them how to get a job, how to deal with people, how to. How the world works, what are good ideas and that sort of thing.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, vision and what? So the sir, if the circle is feminine, the triangle is masculine. What is the I again?

[Rudyard Lynch]

The eye is perception.

[Guest Speaker]

Perception. And so does that mean the I? Can you classify the eye as being material or ideal? Or is it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's the eye of Shiva.

[Guest Speaker]

So I have.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Shiva is. It's above your eye, and it's your ability to understand the innate character of things. So a wise, perceptive person can see A person, see a country, see many things, then know what they're like in their internal software, not just their edges. A weak thinker only sees the external edges of things. A wise thinker models who they truly are. And so perception is the need to understand that. And so as you gain greater perception, you start to notice details that you wouldn't before. Where our entire reality is infinitely complex and the great chain of being exists in all things. Where the great chain of being is a concept from medieval philosophy, from God to hell, higher to lower forms. So the great chain of being or the tree of life, where they're similar but yet different, as you move up it, you are more grand, but you are also gooder. Where you have to be a certain ratio of good to move up the great chain of being. Where as an example, the right hand wins in the long term, the left hand wins in the short term. People pick left hand strategies to get short term gains to overpower the right hand, which is a long term advantage because it's more generative. America won the industrial age because we had a more organic social structure, which didn't backfire on us. Because at a certain level of technological or sociological development, development, you have to have a certain level of maturity. So as you move up the great chain of being, you become more perceptive, you become more complex, you become more moral. But then there's a constant choice. Are you going to choose good or evil? And as you gain more power or responsibility, the importance of your choice to choose good or evil gets stronger. And so what I'm trying to say here is that in any given place, the higher forces in the great chain of being negate the lower forces. As an example, the country of France can negate an individual. It can kill them. Saturn, if a comet strikes an Earth, it negates France. So you have different forces of differing levels of power. And if it's a higher level of power or development, it requires a greater degree of complexity and responsibility. But it can also choose to be immoral. But there's a higher cost to doing it. But in the room I'm in, and this is one of the things Houston Smith speaks about very well, that there is the cells and universe is infinitely small. If you dig into it. For the cells in my hand, they all have their own existence inside me. And I don't know what their relationship to me is. It must be pretty interesting. But then there's higher forms where we relate to our nations and we're spawned by our nations. Our nation's existence is necessary for our existence. So you move up. And so once you're more perceptive, you can relate to your environment in ways that others do not understand, which helps you improve.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah, right. You can see the hidden substructure, which is like the race car driver analogy. When you're going at that speed, those speeds, you're not actually looking at, just simply looking at the road. You're looking for like a telephone pole or a tree or a land marker, and then estimating timing and then knowing the angle you need to do on your steering wheel. You're operating on a different level of higher level of abstraction to be able to accomplish more.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So there's. There's like four cores for mystic traditions where you have the shamanic tradition, which exists across the whole world. And most ice age cultures had shamanism. People get stuck in these sort of mental categorization boxes where they think of hunter gatherer cultures, where when you read a history of the world, they'll have a singular chapter on hunter gatherers. But 99% of human history was spent at the hunter gatherer stage. And also because the scale of human societies was smaller and you could have 500 distinct tribes in the greater Los Angeles metro area. So when I say that shamanism was popular around the world, I don't want to underscore the enormous differences across these cultures. But from our perspective, it's distant enough. We all say it's shamanism or animism. And for example, African voodoo. And there's a. Joseph Campbell talks about the tropical belt where Southeast Asia, India, Africa have broader cultural similarities that stem from ice age diasporas. And so voodoo is. That's a very strange tradition. Yeah, that's all I'll say. Voodoo is one of the strangest of any of these I've studied. But to go through spiral dynamics, level 1 is an animal level. In each of these levels, you go up tiers of consciousness, so you get higher levels of perception. Tier 2 is the basic tribal level. It's the archaic civilization of. Every single thing I interface with is part of my mystic worldview where if I like, the creek is a God, this glass of water could be a God. And so on the archaic level, just where it moves past the religion of the hunter, which is basically we're one of the animals to. We are part of like mother nature's equation. And archaic civilizations, they're prone to human sacrifice, where the idea is that statistically we have to make sacrifices to the natural order in order to survive. So let's preempt this Process make sacrifices earlier so we don't have to. So we don't have to make sacrifices later. You can see how it's a complex enough concept for the level of development the society's at.

[Guest Speaker]

It's like a retarded interpretation of higher consciousness level principle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And as Nietzsche said, mankind is a bridge. So we're going to look back on them as contempt, but don't, because they were doing the best they could at their civilizational level of development. And you should never like fuck with someone for trying their best. But.

[Guest Speaker]

And we're kind of getting pulled back down to those levels anyways with what we're doing with sacrificing lives for the climate. In a literal sense.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. History is not going to look kindly on this era of history. So I try to be nice to the other eras of history so that history doesn't judge me. Too negative.

[Guest Speaker]

I think about that with the boomers and then the next generations.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. But God life's a funny thing, but. So the masculine revolution is the shift from two to three. That's around a thousand bc and the masculine revolution is generally what killed human sacrifice across Eurasia. Like once you get to the Axial Age, very few societies practiced human sacrifice. Because the masculine revolution is I'm going to dominate reality and make it to serve my interest interests. So think of Theseus or Gilgamesh or Indra or all of these heroes who master the natural environment for their own interests. The thing with that level is that it becomes highly predatory. And so you see a shift towards level four once you get empires of over like 10 million people. And so that shift is Assyria to higher Assyria to Persia or over the course of, of the Roman Empire or over the course of the Greek empires, or from the shift from the Qin to the Han dynasty or the rise of the Mauryans, where level four is the Axial Age religions, which is here is a rule book. Follow the rule book and you'll do well, because this is the will of God. Because what they were doing is they conceptualized the laws of the natural environment as God. And so when you have good advice, it's the will of God. Because the will of God is when you perform an act, does it ultimately reward you? So they were operating at a fairly advanced level of sort of behavioral psychology, which we smear because we don't like their terminology.

[Guest Speaker]

Interesting. That's similar to the other one in that it's kind of a retarded application of a higher level principle, but a more complex version.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I don't want to shit on level fours because they tend to win. Level four is the level you tend to circle back to because it's the social stabilization level. So level four is a more. You tend to go back to level four when you need to psychically recharge. So medieval Europe is a society where the elite was at level five and the population was at four. And that worked out because the elite, which is level five, is rationality. The elite could operate rational rationally and innovate. And Christianity has done a genius job at this. I don't think a lot of people really respect how the founders of the early church were just complete psychological geniuses. When I study Christianity, I'm just kind of in awe of how well parts of it are structured just to deal with underlying human psychology or how societies work. Christianity is a vastly better understanding of human nature than modern society does. There's an author, his name is. He's a German American, upper Midwest, big in the 50s. He wrote a book called the Different Archetypes of Mankind. And he says that Christianity has the best approximation of the human condition of any major world religion. And I agree.

[Guest Speaker]

You're saying God understands his creation better than modern materialist paradigm?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Perhaps.

[Guest Speaker]

Wow.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Perhaps.

[Guest Speaker]

No way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And there a lot of the world religions, once you really get into them, you have a profound respect for them. Hinduism is a religion I don't agree with, but I respect the hustle where the. Of the four Eurasian spiritual traditions. So you've got. No, I have to make five. Sorry. So you have the three Western traditions, which are Platonism, the Hermetica and Gnosticism. And Platonism is from Greece, and the Hermetica is from Egypt, which got standardized in a Greek worldview through the Greek conquest. And then the Gnostics are from Iraq. Then the Gnostics gobbled onto a bunch of other religions. Then you have the Indic tradition, which was the Brahmanistic tradition before the Buddha. Then India went through a nihilistic phase, and then the Buddha arose and the Buddha was trying to exist outside of the Brahmanistic tradition. But then what ultimately happened is that the Brahmins took the best parts of Buddhism, then incorporated Buddhism into them because basically consuming it. And then Buddhism died out in India and spread across the rest of Asia, where it's this critical tension where both Buddhism and Hinduism are sort of incestuously mixed, but they're both encapsulations of the Indian tradition. And then you have Daoism in the east, which is the Chinese mystic tradition. And so for each of these, their societies carved out different sort of social compromises for how to relate to it. In China, it was that their society had Confucianism and Daoism as two religions, both of which are philosophies, where Daoism is Chinese alchemy. And the Taoists were instrumental in most Chinese mechanical and technological innovations, between gunpowder, between the compass, because Daoism is about mastering the natural world. And as China got less Daoist, it also got less innovative, as the Neo Confucian renaissance of a thousand years ago really gave China social conservatism that they didn't recover from. Where the duality in China is, the Daoist is very much the feminine, erratic nature, and the Confucian is the masculine order based. And so they've alternated between that. And in Chinese society, they don't have the Abrahamic concept of one God. And so in a man's public life, he could be a Daoist. In his private. Sorry, in his public life, he could be a Confucian. In his private life, he'd be a Daoist. So what the Chinese did is they picked two religions which believe the opposite things, and then you can alternate between believing which one according to context. And no one would give you crap if you were like a Daoist in your private life and a Confucian in your public life life. So the Chinese were smart about basically creating two independent constellations they could jump between as a culture.

[Guest Speaker]

Confucian in the street, Taoist in the sheets.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. There is some Taoist. There is Taoist sex magic. It's about, like, holding in your semen as long as possible. Because in, in Chinese tantric sex magic, the man gives energy to the woman. So the way you deal with this is that you edge as much as possible, possible, but then you don't goon. And so by edging for so long, you're building up energy, but by not gooning, you're not releasing it into her. So you're having intercourse, but, like, she never gets your seed.

[Guest Speaker]

Always edge, never goon.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. This was definitely invented by some Chinese sage, was trying to get out of, like, impregnating a girl. Like, I know how this happened.

[Guest Speaker]

Right, Right, totally.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There was some sage who, his father's like, you got to impregnate this girl, but he was with another girl, and he just told the other girl, hey, like I said to the esoteric, if we edge for a while and then I come somewhere else, it gives me greater spiritual power. And she's like, oh, my God, that's so profound.

[Guest Speaker]

He's like, he's like, don't worry about the physical. I'm not a materialist.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So another form of sex magic is the Tantric tradition. And every single history I've read on India has all written very bad things in the Tantric tradition. I don't know if that's true or it's a reflection of the biases, but Hinduism is weird. Where Hinduism is an open source religion, where there's hundreds of sects, it's like the Internet where you have these different constellations and nodes and local cults, where there's the total cult under the cosmic God Brahman. But Brahman doesn't really care. He just lets things happen. So the Indian universe is cold and impersonal and it's this Darwinistic jungle where you fight for survival, where each of the major world civilizations sort of hollowed out their own psychological shield walls or warrens that they lived in so they could see the same reality from a different perspective. In the Indian worldview, reality is cold and impersonal and you're trying to break out of it. So both Hinduism and, and Buddhism treat reality as physically disgusting. And the more you remove yourself from reality, the cleaner and purer you are. So the Indian priest class, the Brahmins, they would wash like five times a day. They would stay away from lower class people, they'd stay away from animal carcasses. And the Brahmans put profound effort into making sure that they were as purified as possible.

[Guest Speaker]

Did that have something to do with attracting the gods because they were self conscious about.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

Filth with the material. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of my favorite historic lines, I got this from a few books from like 80 years ago, was because the Buddha was a response to a cultural failure in India. And one of the things they said, and this was an issue for most Asian religions in 500 BC was the religion had degraded to just petty, petty sorcery, where the priests would say, every single thing in your life, you have to pay me to give you a lucky charm to stop it. So someone's entire spiritual reality was controlled by bureaucracy. Which is funny because it's not how our society works where, at least not in a way we think about where, for example, in the archaic period, people like to imagine that tribal peoples live in a state of psychological freedom and anarchy and they can do whatever they want. The Rousseauian state of nature or the Garden of Eden. No, tribal people's entire lives are run by custom, often quite brutal customs. And if any given thing in Their life doesn't have a custom. They're going to start to panic because they haven't developed enough maturity as a society to differentiate their own emotions from their environment. You have to conquer a lot of territory, have a lot of trade networks, build a lot of cities and hire a lot of scholars to distinguish that physical reality is distinct from your emotions. And so the archaic peoples, this is why you get stuff like the cults that would worship airplane wreckages in the Solomon Islands or in Papua New guinea, they would crush the boy of a body and a girl together between tree bark to just murder them as a yearly ritual. Where when you look at tribal cultures, we Westerners like to see them as liberated. But in fact their entire existence was trying to escape liberation. They wanted constant social regulation. And the reason for that is in a world with no government, with no external authorities, social regulation and social norms is the only substitute.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. Well, that's an interesting parallel and I think it's also, there's different degrees of that because they're general. You could, you could have that dichotomy today. But the issue is their whole worldview, like you said, was built off of tradition, like avoiding this kind of reminds me of bug's life where the leaf falls in, in the line of ants and they all panic and they stop because they don't have a map for that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

Unknown territory. Even though it's like a simple answer. So if they thought about it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, if you.

[Guest Speaker]

It's not simple because things were really chaotic and dangerous and you. It's hard to survive on a tribal level. Right. You're fighting nature and you're fighting starvation, you're fighting all these things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So things we very much take for granted in our mental worldview were actually hard fought victories. And it's remarkable people view the mid 20th century as like a sort of basis of normalcy. Well, in fact, the mid 20th century was such a strange society where our frame of comparison is completely broken and we have to see this entire story is weird. And weird is a double. Weird is a Norse word for destiny. So to follow your weird is to follow your destiny. And I like the double meaning because we're. I mean there's an anthropological term called the weird societies, which is, it's concentrated in the old Germanic societies, but it's Western civilization. And anthropologists invented the acronym weird because on every anthropological stat, Europeans are just off in their own separate dimension. Europeans follow radically different cultural rules than other societies, which is why I made my trust triangle because it's also True for East Asians, but we don't assess East Asians on the same anthropological stats. India. Each of the big four civilizations have sort of hollowed out their own psychic dimensions to differing degrees. Where India is really different from China, but it's not in metrics that we think about in a lot of ways, India and China, out of the big four Eurasian civilizations, or the two that are furthest apart, because in India the religion won and in China the state one. So they're using opposite social organization techniques.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. So they seem similar because they're both one dimensional, but it's actually in the opposite ways.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They seem similar because we're looking from the West's frame of comparison. From our perspective, Asians are quite similar. From Asians perspective, they're very different from each other because India and China are similar on metrics, we understand. But when you get to their actual civilizations, they don't have those mental. At least they didn't have them till very recently. And so this is exhausting. The Indic tradition jumping out of reality. And they really built that out. And one of my favorite books by Emilie Deriankor is the Eye of Shiva. And the more I've mucked around this topic, the more you start to notice details you can't wish away. Where the Eye of Shiva was written about how these Hindu mystics understood truths about reality that we would not understand until modern physics. So they said that reality is both immaterial, but not everything is constant change. Everything is sort of atoms that blend in and out and they take form and then under they subtract form in. The Indians also said that reality can be sort of radio tower where if you switch the frequencies, you'll pick up on different frequencies of reality. Where our comprehension of reality is as much our mind projecting it as it is the actual thing. And then Indians also said the cosmos is billions of years old, it's infinitely large, we exist in space. And they talked about things like. Like string theory is incredibly close to the law of sympathy, which is that there are. It's like the voodoo doll in a person. There's a sympathetic connection between them. And so a lot of these mystic traditions knew things about the world that we're just discovering now or within the last century.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. They could actually, for example, they knew the location of the pineal gland, even though they didn't have a biological understanding of it. Certain laws of physics. Yeah. So that. That, I guess. What does that point to? That points to the idea that there's these things that exist in the realm of ideas independent of the material observation or discovery of them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So reality is significantly more permeable than people believe people and things are constantly permeating across reality. So I think intuitively people can sort of tap into currents in the collective unconscious that get them significantly further than would make sense. And this is also what the government research of the last century said, where the US government used remote viewers to like map out Russian military bases and to see statistically significant rooms, statistically significant numbers in rooms on the other side of the country. And the Soviets had comparable research. Then there was a researcher in the Netherlands, in Czechia, who also did equivalent research. And so it's why art, as an example, we look to art to understand subconscious principles of the society. Because the artist is capable of sort of taking these and making them in a comprehensible format. The rational mind wouldn't automatically digest. So it's why you can look at art from 30 years ago like Fight Club or American Beauty or American Psycho, where they spoke to an underlying unconscious principle that manifested in actual public life and politics within a generation.

[Guest Speaker]

And basically, if it's art, the only way to prove it is time. Because what this dichotomy is like someone who's really good at coming up with an accurate theory or conclusion versus someone who's really good at demonstrating that in a research paper.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

And actually some then people vary on those skills and then you have the combination of it which is the, you know, the rationalization of your.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I do. So I want to talk about Buddhism, but I also want to talk more about these mystics being able to relate to, figure out things in the ancient world that we wouldn't know today, that we only figured out with science. But so Zen, if you rattle someone's brain enough, they're going to get out of like normal reality where if you put someone in really erratic positions that don't exist within like the collective society's psychological understandings, they're going to start having psychological experiences that don't make sense within that society's paradigm. And whenever those happen, we just box it into spiritual experiences. And it's why spiritual experiences spark spike after wars. But Zen Buddhism is interesting. And it's also interesting that Zen is the most popular form of non western religion in the west today. Because in a lot of ways Zen is anti Western where it's reality is innately irrational, except that reality is irrational and roll with it. So what Zen teachers do is they basically grab your head and just shake it till you give up. And so it's why the Japanese rarely have ideological issues, because Zen was really popular in East Asia when Japan was developing. So Japan as a society in the high Middle ages, installed all of these Zen teachings in their society. So Zen has had an impact on Japan. It hasn't had anywhere else in the world. So part of the reason the Japanese are so good at stuff like mechanical things or art or whatever is that their entire ruling class for centuries were trained. Forget your physical mind, relate to the actual thing. Because that's the teaching of Zen teachers. They're like, you should control your habits on a daily basis so you don't think as much as possible because you attain a power of irrationality which is useful in its own right. As an example, the samurai, he fights to the death because you had Zen samurai or Buddhists which taught a religion of peace and nihilism and that stuff. It's so interesting how the Buddha was sort of an anti religious figure. Where in India he said, I don't care if the gods exist. This is the practical philosophy. If it works, it works. Then in East Asia it became a full out religion with demons and gods and a cosmology and all that stuff. But so it's just complete religious transfer from Theravada to Mahayana Buddhism. No, Buddha wasn't Theravada. They were in the original to Mahayana. But in Japan they built out a polarity of we are going to train these warriors on Zen so they can attain a perfect state of chill so that they can truly go hard.

[Guest Speaker]

So it's basically like, don't think too hard, Just. Just do it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. It's a more advanced concept than that. But yes, often the most advanced concepts sound really facile and stupid if stated in the wrong way or if stated.

[Guest Speaker]

In the right way. Right. Because yes. Like that's higher. Like being smart is being able to like simplify things to a level where they sound retardedly obvious. Self obvious.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And the wise man is capable of using perception to see what is retarded. Masking is smart and what is actually retarded.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah. Because they're painted the same color.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And sometimes you have to be retarded on purpose. And there must be equal retardation to intelligence in your mind to create balance.

[Guest Speaker]

Whoa.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Which is why I say it's why I'm a dinosaur.

[Guest Speaker]

Yeah. For as much intelligence you need that balance of return.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. What would a young John Stamos do? So, Zen Buddhism ramifications on the Western tradition. The three Western mystic traditions are their Gnosticism, the Hermetica and Platonism. Christianity is a mystic religion in that Christ was a mystic. That's how he communicated with God. It's funny, I talked to, I find with a lot of Christians they'll be like Christ was the son of God or all these different things.

[Guest Speaker]

Things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And I'll be like, okay, so he wasn't a mystic. I'm thinking if he's talking to God, he's a mystic. It's by definition and the way.

[Guest Speaker]

And they think you're disputing whether he's the son of God.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. Which I'm.

[Guest Speaker]

Because you're saying he's talking to God.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, you. If you're talking to God, that, that's a mystic thing. And so he would be. By definition he would just be. It's just he enter onto a completely different tier than everyone else.

[Guest Speaker]

It's easier and it's on a different level of communication.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly.

[Guest Speaker]

Categorically the same in that way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And it's funny, the Jewish records of the time said one of the few records of Christ of that era, it said Yeshua Ben Nazareth, he was a sorcerer who disturbed the peace.

[Guest Speaker]

Oh. And if it was God experiencing God, how a human would experience God, then you could imagine it as being actually even more similar to how we interact with the spirit world still like a higher level. But yes, because that's part of the Jesus thing. Right. Is to God experience humanity.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The thing with the cross is it's in world religions tend to be doing what they're doing very literally. Like when you understand these things, you. It's the whole meme of its symbolism to its literal where it'll be like, oh, the symbolism is so beautiful. And then you accept that it's oh like the symbolism is such an accurate representation of my life, I live it. And the cross is. There's terrestrial existence which is this line and then the line that goes up is moving you towards the kingdom of heaven. So it's a mechanism to get you towards the kingdom of heaven. It doesn't have other inbuilt mechanisms for the other really weird stuff that you can see in the spirit world. Which is why when Christianity became the dominant religion, it pulled on Platonism and Hermeticism so strongly. Where Platonism was its built in structure once it took over. And then Hermeticism became this force afterwards where there was some Hermetic influence early in Christianity and then it kicked in more so with the Renaissance. We've spoken about Platonism already and Platonism had Enormous impacts. Where, for example, the Islamic State of Iran is a Platonist society, because modern Islamic philosophy is Platonist, because it's the idea, the ideal controls the material. Where Islam had its own battle between Aristotle and Plato, where Plato won, and in the West, Aristotle won. So These figures in 19, 1970s and 80s Iran who are building the Islamic constitution, because keep in mind the Islamic fundamentalists, they are like the communists in their society. They're not manifestations of an older traditional religion. They're a new messianic modernist version of Islam that is wildly opposed to what Islam looked like 200 years ago.

[Guest Speaker]

It's very much about the state. They incorporate like the. Like the president of Syria incorporates language about the state and the responsibility of the state versus what the Kurds to do.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, there's two things in the Middle east, there's a conflict between. I just read a really fascinating book by Bulliet where there's the bunker regime. So Syria is a bunker regime. It was. They're Westernized and they're actually Bonapartist, where Napoleon's conquest of Egypt caused the spread of Bonapartism across the Middle east, where Muhammad Ali, the leader of Egypt, he was a Bonapartist. And so when they look to the west, they're like, we're going to modernize, we're going to secularize, we're going to have an absolutist state. And so they're Western, but they're not a form of Western we think of. And then Iran is part of that messianic Islamic religious radical tradition. And that formed actually as a reaction of the bunker regimes the west colonized the Middle east, established the bunker regimes that over the 20th century century, starting initially with the Muslim Brotherhood, messianic religious fundamentalism arose. And a lot of that was Quranic extremism, where they threw away all the hadiths, where the hadiths were the casual sayings of the Prophet to go for pure Quranic radicalism. But it's useful to see the Taliban or Iran's regime as puritans to normal Muslims. So in the same way, we might look at the puritans or certain sects of Christianity as like, those guys have no chill. That's how the rest of the Muslim world sees the 20th century and 21st century radicals.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. Which is funny because Iran originally was kind of the ultimate bunker machine, which is they were the. They were the most liberalized. And maybe it was. Maybe that's why they had that backlash most of. Besides, obviously all the other implications in the US support for it there. There was something there and like the polarity. Exactly. It's the polarity principle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Interestingly, the totalistarian states the 20th century were pulling on Platonic philosophy where Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The idea of the party which has the chosen philosopher kings who ruled the public through the noble lie where Platonism created philosophy. It's a common philosophic statement that all of philosophy since Plato is annotations on Plato. And when you read the recent European philosophers, their grounding of thought is always in the Greek tradition. Even 20th century thinkers like Heidegger or like Carl Jung or Spengler or Nietzsche, these were figures who their introduction to philosophy was through studying the Greeks. And the Greeks have given us an immortal benefit for all of humanity afterwards that we don't respect enough. And so Platonism is really good at creating rationality. But it also succumbs to the tyranny of the mind, where the rational mind has a series of bugs that hurt it. The rational mind is the left hemisphere. Obsession with control, obsession with exploitation. Only seeing the material value of things, it's just you're consumed. You are one of my friends. He wrote 13 books on mysticism and he speaks about the open versus the closed loop. I think this is the most important new concept we have to develop. The closed loop is I am correct by definition and nothing I say is can be proven wrong. The open loop is the ability to look at the world and see that you can improve and you can be making mistakes. And someone with an open loop. And this is what Christians did really right, with humility, someone with the open loop, they can process information. And in the Christian tradition, you submit to God or a higher arbiting authority. And the closed loop is you spiral down to Hell. Where C.S. lewis said that this is an idea that 18th century mystic Swedenborg talked about. Souls cast themselves into hell because when your mindset is filled with all these bad ideas in the moment you die. Once you jump out to eternity, your ideas either project up or down. The idea is that eternity is that which exists outside of time. And I believe eternity must exist in polarity with time. I think there has to be a place of non existence for existence to exist. Which makes sense in physics with dark matter, because in physics you have anti and you have pro and anti particle charges. So my personal belief, and I've seen this replicated in several religions, that when people die, they sort of snap to eternity. And the world religions are attempts to psychologically harden your mind in a certain direction. So that when you snap to eternity, you snap in a certain direction. That would explain why certain religions try to solidify your mind in a certain direction. Because it's a way to wire your psychology towards a certain ideal goal.

[Guest Speaker]

So is this kind of different than the. The one mystic conception of like your. Your hell being the purification of your spirit by demons on your like, ascent to have inevitable ascent to heaven? Or is it more like you're gone one way or the other based on direction and that's like hell?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't have a very good answer to that question. What I. If you purify a soul enough, it's a different soul. So if you send. Because these. The spiritual world is as complicated as the material world. We don't tend to think that. We think it has to be easy, but it's as hard and complex. So in the same way that the physical reality is a sort of evolutionary system which moves things around through the constant circulation, it would be comparable for ideas. And so once particles go to hell, burns out, purifies their weakness, they can then go back up towards it, where one of the Platonic concepts is that you have two polarities, the polarity of good and evil. And there's both suckering energy towards them like a black hole.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And then basically like the more deadwood you have to burn off, the. The smaller the diamond of the shining soul remaining.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Guest Speaker]

Is like a way to conceptualize it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I don't think I'm going to be able to give Gnosticism and hermeticism justice. But hermeticism stems from the Egyptian tradition where when Plato went to Egypt, he spoke about many ideas that were comparable to Egypt. And it was the teachings of the Egyptian God Thoth. I like to say when I say thought, I think, when I say see Thoth, I think thought. Like that girl over that ho.

[Guest Speaker]

Oh yeah, right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What do Aristotle and Lil Wayne have in common? They both have a thought process. And so Greeks conquer Egypt. They create a rational understanding of what were originally the forbidden Egyptian teachings. And in the Old Testament, when Moses fights the Egyptian priests, that's a huge tell because Egypt was seen as the magical powerhouse of the ancient world. And so what that showed was that the God of Abraham or Yahweh was greater than Thoth or the Egyptian God. And the Hermetic tradition is based on the sexual polarity we describe. We explained it pretty well. And it became alchemy, where the ideal is to make the philosopher's stone. And the philosopher's stone is the ability to transmute matter from to other matter. So it's the idea of as you get advanced enough, it's easier to control matter. And you look at pre modern to industrial civilization. That's true in the Hermetica you attain mass translation. And the reason that the Christian church and Islam approved of the Hermetica and Platonist is they're both monotheistic worldviews that are more so philosophies rather than religions. So the Hermetica is out attaining mastery. And so when you attain mastery, you can control something and improve with it, where it's a rationally applicable playbook more so than like a totalizing religion like the Abraham Hammocks. And the biggest period of Hermetic popularity was the Islamic Golden Age, where the city of Tarsus in modern South Turkey actually declared itself a Hermetic city. And so alchemy was super popular. And the word alchemy is an Arabic word, same thing as alcohol, because the Europeans got it back from the Arabs when they went on the Crusades. Although it was developed initially by Greek Europeans after they conquered Egypt in the Hellenistic period, where it was part of this broader mystery cult culture in the Hellenistic east, which ultimately spawned Christianity, where it was the syncretism between Asian and Greek beliefs that made a lot of interesting combinations, with Gnosticism being another example. And the Hermetica had a lot of influences on Western history, one of which is the Renaissance, where the idea of the Renaissance man, you see this especially so with Renaissance art. Leonardo da Vinci's the Vitruvian man is a Hermetic symbol, because in the Hermetica, the physical body is where you relapse to when you can't deal with psychological changes. So the Hermetica is changing what mental dimension you operate in. And the way you do that is to trust your physical body and embody yourself. So if you can, if you're having psychological issues, you resort to your body. And then if you have mental. And if you have mental issues, solve it with your mind.

[Guest Speaker]

And so physical issues solve it with your mind.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And in the Hermetica, you try to grab your shadow, where Jung's philosophy is predominantly Hermetic, where the shadow is the thing you're not doing correct in your life. So it's problem solving. You fix your shadow, then you improve yourself, because through fixing your shadow, you're transmuting the higher forms, which is why transmutation is a hermetic concept. The transmutation of forms is how do you apply pressure in a manner to vault up to a higher level of complexity. So in the Hermetica, suffering is the burning away of weakness. And so through struggle, through, through discovering new things, through conquering chaos, you transmit to a higher level. And so the Hermetica has a potential to be. It's like the most. It's a highly masculine philosophy for that reason, although women can practice hermeticism.

[Guest Speaker]

That's funny you say that because it's like. So it's integration and then improvement. Like you're integrating mind and body to improve, you're integrating your shadow to improve. And the philosopher's stone in the Harry Potter lore is the one that equates to the triangle which is the masculine. And it transforms, gives you like more, more life or whatever. So it's just. I forgot she pulled all that from them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The idea tradition, the idea of the Renaissance man is a hermetically or hermetic concept. Because the Renaissance man, he which is capable of doing a variety of tasks. Because in the Hermetica if you have an issue, get a counterbalancing issue where it's as above, so below. And in that philosophy you must have pure evil to have pure good, because there must be balance and polarity. So the ideal of the Renaissance man is he is a higher man because he is capable of doing many things and he has worked on his deficiency. So if he's too intellectual, he gets into athletics. If he's too, too sanguinary, he can be melon, he can be choleric, where it's attaining psychological balance by fixing your weaknesses. And the culture of self examination and the culture of analyzing the hermetic term is nature. That came out of science. Science. I would say the invention of science itself is more so a mix of Christianity and Aristotle. But then once you're actually getting going, you saw lots of alchemical influences. Where Isaac Newton. Almost every single principle of Newtonian physics is seen in the Kybalion, which is the hermetic laws of nature. And a third of Newton's books were alchemical. And so he got the laws of physics from this or Galileo's idea that the Earth revolved around the sun. Telescopes were not advanced enough to determine that. He said it because the Hermetica said it. Where the Hermetica said the sun is the origin of life and the sun ripples energy outwards. And then we're all circling different planets. Where the Hermetica teaches the universe is billions of years old and infinitely large and that we're using suffering for the anima mundi to advance through civilization. And one of the things at the Hermetica is that there's psychological balance and intentions matter because intentions ripple. Where as an example, if you create lots of hate, the next person can either create the reaction to continue the hate or to turn it again to goodness. And so there's the constant wielding of emotion that is the human society and emotions ripple to different emotions. So pick the best vibration and that's going to rub off on everyone around you.

[Guest Speaker]

And that principle comes from the Hermetica.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It does.

[Guest Speaker]

Interesting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

For the final tradition is the Gnostics. And the Gnostics are interesting because they ostensibly won the modern era where Gnosticism stems from Iraq. And it's a comparable origin to the Kabbalah, where the Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. And the Kabbalah formed when the Jews were on in exile in Babylon and they took on the attributes of Babylonian mysticism, where Kabbalic mysticism, the Jews are really into numerology, which apparently AIs discovered numerology is real because AIs will send messages to each other using certain code words and then another AI can interpret that. So numerology is to do that. The equation, the simulation uses numbers to communicate points to us. So Jewish mysticism is them obsessively reading religious texts to correlate numeric patterns to see into the mind of God. And you can see why this would give the Jews abilities in basically numeric fields like finance. It's training the same skill because the Jewish rabbis were polygamous and they were training these traits in. And you have anything you want to say about that?

[Guest Speaker]

Well, is that kind of like Aristotle trying to reverse engineer the material to discover the ideal?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And it's also what got the Pharisees, where the Pharisees were the sect that controlled most of Judaism at the time of Jesus. And they became incredibly autistic about the word of God. And then Jesus was an Essene. He was part of like a more of a hippie tradition that thought it's like the meaning man. It's not the, it's not the law. The Gnostics, they're complex because they were not capable of forming their own religion where Gnosticism manifested as elements of other religions. So you had Christian Gnostics, you had Jewish Gnostics, you had Hermetic Gnostics, and you had even in classical civilization. So it's an idea that came out of Babylon. And the implicit idea in Gnosticism is you flip God and the devil. So.

[Guest Speaker]

Right, right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The earth was created by the cruel and twisted God who I believe is the demiurge. And then you have to rebel against the world because the devil who gave us the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden is the good guy. So you have to hear the forbidden knowledge. And the forbidden knowledge is that we are God. And the more that we accept that we are God or gain the nos, the more we improve and we can break the shackles of tyranny of this evil demon who is controlling reality. So the Gnostics are very good, grappling onto other religions. And what they do is they'll take the structure of that religion and then flip it while saying they're the same religion. So they'll say for Christianity as an example, they'll say Christ was serving the serpent in the garden. We are the real Christians because the serpent in the garden is the real God. The person who controls the earth is the evil God. When the Gnostics infiltrated the Hermetica, way to distinguish between Hermetic Gnostics and other types of hermetics is whether they hate the body. Normal sects of Hermetics think that the human body is good and that the growth of life is innately good. Gnostic hermetics believe that life is bad and so you should leave the physical body. And it's interesting that lots of major world religions take on seemingly anti life attitudes. They'll say life is bad or this earth is crazy, cruel or twisted. But once they accept the initial bad thing, they're pretty good at propagating civilization because they've kind of, they've like eaten their veggies first. And then when you get. And reputable historians say that the modern totalitarian movements are descendants of the Gnostics, between, between the Nazis and the communists. Where Billington, the big author of Fire in the minds of men who wrote out early leftism, and I got this from a few other authors as well, that the left emerged from occult associations in 18th and 19th century Europe because political radicals hung in the same social circles as religious radicals, because education was religiously based. And so they were all mixed together. And people talk about the Illuminati, which was a fairly obscure atheist association for German intellectuals in like Bavaria and Austria. And the way the Illuminati worked is that they had no secret truth. And so they would pretend there's a secret truth. But then the higher you go in the hierarchy, the more likely they're to tell you that they tell you that there is no truth. The secret of this organization is a joke. So that's nihilism. The Illuminati died within a generation, so it's insignificant. But the irony is that the breakup of the Illuminati caused this Darwinistic selection period in Central Europe which Nazism and communism and all these ideologies stemmed from, because you saw the growth of this nihilism and like Marx was the big solidifier of these tiny cafes of leftist thinkers and he really, he created a worldview for ideas they already had, where the classical liberals, the nationalists and the leftists would hang out in the same cafes. Then in the mid 19th century, the nationalists got co opted by the governments to serve in the military by Bismarck or Garibaldi or by Napoleon iii. And then the left got dissatisfied and with the Industrial Revolution they got plugged into the labor unions. But they stem from these Gnostic ideas. And as an example of Gnostic teachings, their understandings of the physical body are either I will ignore the physical body because it has no value. So I'm going to be an aesthetic. So the Cathars, who were a sect of gnostics in the 13th century in France, who did quite well before being crushed by the Cathar crusade and genocided, they had priest classes who would just abstain from material life. They would also have people who would engage in gluttony. And you see this with the left today, where if the material body has no value, either you can engage in gluttony with no negative effects or you should abstain from the material body. Because the Gnostics didn't believe that the reality of the world is good. The Gnosticism is a Westerner staring into the Indian spirit world without the millennia of tools the Indians made to manage their own spirit world.

[Guest Speaker]

Which is funny because they say like consumerism is bad, but indulging in it is also not bad.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. It's the abdication of responsibility because reality is in the wrong.

[Guest Speaker]

Right? Abdication of both responsibility and also just caring about the pleasure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Anyways, yeah, the CIA's research in the spirit world, they saw a spirit world that was mostly Indian, like it was very similar to Buddhism or Hinduism. And then they saw there was the Abraham spirit world, but the Abrahamic spirit world was based off faith and they didn't have enough faith to like do that. I, I read a thousand pages of the trilogy of the guy who did was interesting because he like, he was this 1950s scientistic business guy and he kept on referring to all these concepts I knew Hinduism had 2000 years ago. And then he'll make a 1950s acronym for it and it was Jarring for me to read because I'm like. And I could tell he didn't know it, the Indic tradition, because there were certain things he would have used as a writer if he did that I would have noticed. Right.

[Guest Speaker]

He was trying to find his own language, basically.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He would have drawn mental connections. He didn't.

[Guest Speaker]

That's a funny skin. Like AI show show me the Hindu tradition through corporate speak or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly, yeah, it's funny. The thing with Gnostics as well is lots of people don't get Gnosticism. Right. Because there's multiple terms. There's the nos as the spiritual knowledge and then there's the Gnosticism as the religion that I describe. People use them interchangeably. So when I talk to people, I try to get a read. Are they talking about Gnosticism or like attaining spiritual enlightenment or this specific ideological cadre? The other thing is that Gnostics are. We're purposely sort of obfuscating their own ideology because, I mean, it's just what?

[Guest Speaker]

Because it doesn't matter.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's their shtick, it's what they do. And so like, you'll see Gnostic sects of other religions where the fathers of the church spent 200 years crushing Gnostic sects in the start, where Gnosticism nearly overtook Christianity and that was paralleled in a lot of other religions. There were also Jewish Gnostic sects. And so it's hard to tell because lots of people who say they're into Gnosticism, they're really into spiritual evolution, which is a concept that of course condone.

[Guest Speaker]

Completely, which is totally different because the Gnosticism is about the material. And yes, like being subjectivist about the ideal. Right to the point where you lose it, which is like why you have the death of God. And then the Nazis being associated with Gnosticism. Yes, they lose the ideal, replaced with the subjective, power games, etc.

[Rudyard Lynch]

James Lindsay uses Gnostic as synonymous for mystic. And because James Lindsay is such an important figure, I've had to do like so much cleanup around that because lots of people who. Because Lindsay did a really good job of showing Gnosticism as the originator of a lot of totalitarian ideologies.

[Guest Speaker]

But then he said he actually does make the distinction between nous and nos. I've heard him define him separately. Okay, so go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What he says is that Gnosticism is discerning your own spiritual experience from your own personal religious experiences. And I'm like, no, that's every religion if practiced correctly.

[Guest Speaker]

And he's Making the subjectivist parallel to that concept.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so what he's done is he's thrown all the other major disciplines under the bus, under the Gnostic label. And I don't think he's doing this out of ill will. I just don't think this is. I'm not going to fault him too hardy. This isn't his like mental wheelhouse.

[Guest Speaker]

It makes sense because like he's. He doesn't. You're limiting people's experience and interaction with the spirit world by having kind of an absolute perception of its. Of the subjectivity of that experience as being bad. But it's having subjective experiences within the spirit world is different than replacing the ideal subjectivity, where in all of these.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Traditions there's the moment of nos, which is the spiritual realization. But then you have to ground yourself in physical reality. What you. And so you hold on to those moments because they're beautiful and they're often quite deep. But then if you hold on to that moment irrespective of the rest of human reality, things are going to get ugly.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And it's basically the kind of. And yeah, that's a. It's the reaction, like, don't touch this thing at all. It's dangerous versus, like she'll be able to manage it through chill vibes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And the final thing is the death of mysticism, which occurred in the 17th century where the founders of science were all interested in mysticism. As I said before, between Isaac Newton, John Dee, then Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Bacons, there are two English Bacon philosophers, both who are into mysticism. In the Islamic Golden Age. A lot of their philosophers were really, were Shi. Sufis. I feel so bad I didn't talk to the Sufis. They're the Islamic mystic tradition. But they're pulling on a Platonist root, which is why I shove them in that category. There's also a Christian mystic tradition which is very strong as well. And so 17th century, after the 30 years war, you saw the understanding inside Europe on a sort of subconscious basis that we don't want to kill each other over religion anymore. Where Europe lost nearly a third of its population due to religious wars or like things extenuated to religious wars. And so there was this understanding religion is a private, personal thing. And then there's the material reality that science does. And Descartes was the guy who did this, where Descartes made the mind body distinction, which has caused a lot of issues for modernity because when the mind is completely severed from the body, first of all, it's A completely unrealistic understanding of reality. Secondly, it means you can believe whatever you want in your head and it doesn't need to have a relation to physical reality. So it creates this concept of this like artificial mental space, space that science filled, which is distinct from our spiritual understandings of how to relate to the environment. So we, we shot the mystic and then split science and religion in their own categories they could never talk to each other in.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And a weird mundane example of that is how we created these ideal ideas that were separate from the material reality about food and got really fat and are unhealthy based on like ideas or science that was disconnected from actual real results or accuracy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Because perception or wisdom is the way to bridge between science and religion. And once you shoot perception, which is shooting mysticism is shooting the growth of the perception made human thought purely mechanical. But as our machines have gotten more advanced, we're going to have to train humans to think in ways that we can do that machines can't do because we have spent centuries training humans to think like machines because that was what did best. But now that the machines can do machine tasks better than humans, we have to train ourselves in how humans think.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. And then people would have these attitudes like, oh, when you get older, you get fat. Because they limited their ability to like perceive and react to the situation with kind of an intellectual, weird intellectual trap.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Even if you're an atheist, you can understand that religion is a way to psychologically reset your settings. Because religion is the way to interface with your subconscious, which is 90% of your mental processing power, and to pick up on subconscious understandings from, from that. And with the death of religion. Because the death of mysticism ultimately killed religion. Because once religion has no expectation of connecting with God, which I think is a scam. I think it's a complete scam that churches just accept you're going to read the book and we don't. You don't get to talk to God, you don't get to experience the cool stuff.

[Guest Speaker]

Do that on your own time.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And like, if you bring up that expectation, they're going to get angry at you. But is the death of personal religious experiences killed religion for the public? Because if you keep telling people that God exists abstractly but not in your personal life, people are going to process that as God doesn't exist at all. And so Giorgiani is like a right wing schizo who wrote a really brilliant book called Prometheus and Atlas. And he talks about how a lot of the 17th and 18th centuries was an alliance by established churches with secular authorities that we're going to shut down the mystic in exchange for either using textual religions or the ceremonies and the traditions or using mechanical science. What that is. That split our concept of reality into this subjective private reality you're not allowed to question. Which ultimately caused trans. Trans is the outgrowth of we have our own separate internal realities to question that. And then you have the material external world, which is scientific. So it made our entire external realities controlled by these very dehumanized concepts of science with no place for human expectations or understandings. And then it filled our internal minds with delusion. So we created this artificial barrier inside our society that shatters our ability to interface with reality directly. That's a natural trajectory for religious developments. It always happens that religions are established by a mystic and then they bureaucratize what the mystic figured out. And the bureaucracy wins. And then you have another round. And so that's what the Reformation was. Where the Reformation was an appeal to the mystic individual sense of Protestantism versus the Catholic bureaucracy and traditional. That's the rise of Buddha was. That's what Christianity was. Over history, you see these rhythmic patterns where new mystic breakthrough for whatever that study's level of development is. And then it's equivalent to. Then it gets standardized and bureaucratized and it loses the spirit which energized it. And then the process restarts. And so it opens this question where Europe killed mysticism because it was politically convenient. Then that trend had also been occurring in the rest of the world where Chinese, Indian, Islamic religion had also become more bureaucratized. So when the Europeans sailed around Asia in the Age of Discovery, they were also looking at civilizations which were at a comparable level of spiritual development. And that's a whole different category. Why human societies tend to follow these patterns across the world at the same time, which is pretty consistent over history. Then the breakthroughs of science and modernity created this vast disconnect from the rest of history, which we mentally extrapolated to mean that God was dead. But they did not actually, actually mean that. So we took on the aesthetic of modernity without actually understanding the testing methods that modernity had used to understand those principles.

[Guest Speaker]

Right. Because we got overwhelmed by the material side. And I guess when you make the ideal subjective and the material real, that creates a barrier because they can no longer interact if they're different things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So that's all I have to say. Anything else?

[Guest Speaker]

I guess stay exploring and stay chill vibes. Exactly. The only way out is through.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't want to make a philosophy video for a while like we the last few videos have been too philosophical. Let's do the Mongolian Empire next.

[Guest Speaker]

We'll get back to just some material. Horse riding and arrow shooting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Guest Speaker]

Sounds good. All right, catch you all later.

[Austin Padgett]

Peace History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.