Jay'sAnalysis Podcast Summary

Episode: Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, Empty Man & More! (Half)
Host: Jay Dyer
Date: November 20, 2024

Overview

In this episode, Jay Dyer takes an in-depth look at the interplay between Eastern philosophies, mind-altering experiences, and their influence on modern culture, philosophy, and esotericism. He weaves together analysis of the film "Empty Man," Timothy Leary's reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and broader themes of spiritual deception, social engineering, globalism, and the spiritual dangers entwined with psychedelic/shamanic experiences.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Globalist Strategy, Smart Cities, & Social Engineering

• Jay opens by revisiting his ongoing themes about the elite's goal to herd populations into controllable mega-cities using both real and manufactured environmental crises.
• Discusses the dialectical strategy: constant engineered social tension as a force to bring about “synthesis,” referencing Manichean, alchemical, and esoteric philosophy.
• Quote:

  "All of these tensions, they are part of a long-term strategy to basically get everybody moved into megacities. ... This is all part of the long term globalist strategy."
  (03:00)

2. Modernity, Political Solutions, and the Primacy of Spirituality

• Jay critiques modern attempts at political solutions, decrying the lack of spiritual foundation and the "neo-pagan concept of political salvation."
• Emphasizes the inversion of traditional hierarchies—how spiritual issues should come before politics and social issues.
• Quote:

  "There is no political salvation for man because man's problems are not essentially political, they're spiritual."
  (05:00)

3. Orthodox Christianity vs. Collectivism & Gnostic/Platonic Philosophy

• Presents Orthodox Christianity as the true foundation for civilization, in contrast to both individualistic biological determinism and collectivist blob-ism.
• Critiques both Platonism and Gnosticism as flawed systems that either deify the state, erase individuality, or invert spiritual truths.
• Quote:

  "In Plato's philosophy, the state is God. It's embodied in the philosopher king. It's basically like pharaoh type stuff, right? Christianity, Orthodox Christianity is the opposition to that."
  (16:00)

4. "Empty Man" Film Analysis: Occultism, Possession, and Metaphysics

Act I: Tibetan Symbolism and Possession

• Empty Man opens with a 1995 story in Bhutan, where Westerners encounter a mysterious force after blowing a bone flute and entering a cave with a deathly skeleton (rich in Tibetan and David Lynch-inspired symbolism).
• The bridge motif symbolizes passage from the material to spiritual world—recurring throughout.
• Eastern chanting/vibrations are related to "planes of existence," aligning with New Age and ancient religious concepts.

Act II-III: Urban Legends, Cult, and Ontological Inversion

• Fast-forward to Missouri, 2018: A haunted, existential detective story unfolds—a cult called the Pontifex Institute teaches reality is a projection of the psyche and promotes dissolution of self and possessions.
• The cult uses motifs of monism, pantheism, “non-being” (void/abyss), and worship of “the Empty Man.”
• Key symbolism: 3-day myth inversion (paralleling Christ’s resurrection), cult initiation, tulpas, and the recurring invocation, “Empty Man made me do it.”
• The film critiques the new age dissolution of self into the “universal,” which Jay interprets as spiritual deception, nihilism, and the ultimate satanic goal—destroying being and identity.
• Quote:

  “Empty Man… you become this vessel. Now the movie is getting more interesting. Non being. So it actually starts to verge into some kind of basic philosophical concepts about ontology, metaphysics, being.”
  (45:20)

Revelation: Mind Control, Tulpa Creation, and the Antichrist

• The protagonist discovers he is not real but a Tulpa, a thought-form created by the cult for an entity (demon/Empty Man) to possess—“mind control” or Antichrist symbolism.
• Satanic nihilism: Cult’s stated goal is to return to “non-being,” the abyss, nihil—a theme Jay tracks across Gnosticism, occultism, and New Age.
• Quote:

  "You are becoming an empty man and opening that gateway. ...These kinds of things, right, they're not totally wrong in the sense of, oh, you never had that experience or you didn't have any spiritual experience. No, you probably had a spiritual experience, but that doesn't mean it was a good spiritual experience or that it was of God."
  (26:54, 1:38:00)

5. Comparative Religion: The Noetic Realm, Deception, and Mystical Experience

• Dissects mystical experiences, dreams, and trip reports: Noting the “noetic realm” (timeless, created, but not divine—includes angels, demons, thought-forms).
• Cautions against the mistake of equating non-material or “light” experiences with God, a confusion prevalent in both psychedelic and Far Eastern practices.
• Orthodox Christianity distinguishes between created and uncreated realities (energies, light, etc.), in contrast to monist or pantheist systems that dissolve all distinction.
• Quote:

  "This is still the created realm. And this confuses people... It's also the location you could say of the geometric forms and mathematical principles. This timeless, intelligible created aeon is not identical to God or the uncreated energies. But because it is a noetic reality and experience, it fools the people who experience it into thinking it is God."
  (1:25:00)

6. CIA, The 1960s, and Social Engineering via Psychedelia

• Jay reasserts the role of CIA and elite patronage in the spread of LSD, the 1960s counterculture (referencing Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Ram Dass, Aldous Huxley).
• The “return of shamanism” in modernity is a managed, elite-driven “archaic revival” to undermine traditional Western civilization.
• Highlights that the solutions offered by psychedelia and the New Age are false dialectics—replacing one type of materialism/emptiness with another.
• Quote:

  “The 1960s were an intentional shamanic initiation of the West… That’s true. I would say he [Pinchbeck] is correct in that analysis. The 1960s were in an intentional shamanic initiation of the West.”
  (2:34:00)

7. Timothy Leary, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, & Psychedelic Apologetics

• Leary presents the LSD/psychedelic experience as a Westernized bardo journey: initiation, ego death, confrontation with thought-forms (demons), and liberation through acceptance and dissolution.
• Jay highlights: Just as in the film, the same errors reappear—mistaking demonic/created spiritual visions as divine, lauding the return to “non-being,” and advocating for ego loss—and thus, anti-humanism.
• Orthodox response: God is personal, transcendent, relational—not dissolvable, not non-being, not accessible via drug-induced ego death or pantheistic merging.
• Quote:

  “Just because it's older doesn't mean it's better. ...the assumption here is that since everything came from no thing, maybe it's better to return to no thing. You see the dumb logic here? This is how stupid it is. And so therefore, there is a sense in which you could say that these religions are worshiping nothing. The great zero in the sky.”
  (2:51:20)

8. Final Reflections & Critiques

• Jay sums up the dangers of psychedelic spirituality:

  • Leads to dissolution of personhood, nihilism, and spiritual deception.
  • Opens the psyche to negative or demonic influence under the guise of enlightenment.
  • Orthodox mysticism is misrepresented—it does not conflate created experience with the divine.
  • The supposed “solution” imported from the East/New Age is rife with the same, or worse, problems as modern materialism.

• Memorable Anecdotes/Quotes:

  • “Dude, this movie is like three different movies...First part is like Tibetan Buddha demon thing, then it turns into teens invoking Bloody Mary, then it turns into a cult, a crazy global cult...I always like movies that just go crazy.” (1:16:00)
  • “If you do hallucinogens...you're opening the doorway to your psyche to be possessed...You are becoming an empty man and opening that gateway. That's particularly why we...do not advocate for people recreationally doing these things.” (2:21:35)

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• On Modernity's Spiritual Inversion:

  "The hierarchy of how man views himself in the world has been inverted. ...we've covered over and over the white papers that actually discussed how to invert and subvert that—Changing Images of Man, things like this." (05:30)

• On Far Eastern Philosophy’s Appeal for Social Engineering:

  "So they're pretty, you know, pretty easy to kind of box together under one overriding kind of metaphysical starting point, typically. ...Very useful from a social engineering perspective for the elite mindset of trying to, you know, get everything into a global glob." (18:10)

• On the Spiritual Dangers of Shamanic/Psychedelic Experiences:

  "Just because you felt good. Right. You can't make subjective states of feeling good or whatever pleasures that. That's not necessarily of God per se. And a lot of these experiences, of course, are accompanied by terrors, right?" (20:40)

• On Nihilism and Non-Being:

  "The final stage is nihilism for the sake of nihilism. Just pure chaotic destruction to destroy being itself because being existence is good. And these Far Eastern religions are ultimately highly duped because they think that they have enlightenment in their desire to destroy or dissolve existence, identity, self, etc." (1:18:30)

• On the Difference Between Orthodox Mysticism and Pagan Mysticism:

  "St. Gregory Palamas says the goal of this prayer process is to become one with a personal God, Jesus. …So it's trinitarian. Nothing like that here." (2:57:31)

Important Segment Timestamps

• Globalism, Smart Cities, and Social Engineering: 00:50–07:00
• Civilizational Models & Orthodox Christianity: 13:38–17:00
• "Empty Man" Film Analysis Begins: 39:00
• On Tulpas and Cult Symbolism: 1:05:00–1:15:00
• Noetic Realm, Dream States, Aeon – Orthodox Perspective: 1:20:00–1:34:00
• CIA, Counterculture & Psychedelics: 1:50:00–1:58:00
• Timothy Leary, Tibetan Book of the Dead, LSD Bardo: 2:34:00–2:59:00

Notable Moments

• Jay’s playful, irreverent humor pervades his analysis. He draws consistent, often satirical comparisons to Twin Peaks, David Lynch, and pop culture while critiquing both "woke wooks" and mainstream materialists.
• He frames "Empty Man" as an accidental anti-hero narrative—a portrait of how mind control cults prey on the modern desire for transcendence and identity, repackaging spiritual destruction as self-discovery.
• Invokes both scholarly Orthodox theology (Lossky, Maximus, Palamas) and pop culture horror tropes to parse out distinctions between genuine spiritual experience and deception.

Conclusion

This episode masterfully blends philosophy, theology, film criticism, and social commentary—offering a warning against both naïve materialist reductionism and the spiritual hazards of psychedelic/new age occultism. Jay Dyer draws out the metaphysical and spiritual errors at play in both elite-driven and mass-consumer expressions of "esoteric" culture, while pointing toward the Orthodox tradition as the enduring answer to man’s existential disorientation.

For the full experience and further insights—including future installments on Timothy Leary’s text—subscribe to Jay'sAnalysis.