Pill Pod 205 - PlasticPills Discovers Buddhism

After a long hiatus, Pills returns to the main show with some new musings over The Last Samurai, Buddhism and the phenomenology of religion. The Kyoto School and Nagarjuna were mentioned in the episode, but we didn't get into much depth this time round. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
We're recording that.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
We are still recording. You guys are still recording yours.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Right, Yeah, we're good.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
So new news. Russell Brand of course is charged for raping. Mmm,
I want to jump into this space.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
What space is that? The rape space?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
No, No, that is I didn't say that. I did
not say that. I did not.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
I meant Russell Brand's other skill, which is which is
wisdom teaching.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
We need to dress in linen and like.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Bernie Man style.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
Perfect. Okay, I'll talk to this fashion perfect. I love it.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
It's nice.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
It's the podcast and I'm back on it and I'm
not alone.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's uh, hey, you guys too, Eric Victor Diego. And
here we are.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
We are catching up house things. Where was I? I
was dealing with some stuff. We'll call it medical stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:03):
Religious religious issues.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
No one, No one.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Died, but yeah, it's nothing like that.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
But I didn't know that no one was going to die,
So I had like a bit of an emotional crisis.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Makes sense, And that's why he had plastic surgery.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yeah, I had a botched plastic surgery. But then they
just reverted my face. That control zed and now we're.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Back to normal. Yeah, and just took a bit of
time for real.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
When I was I had to drive to the hospital
every day for like a month, and the crisis uncertainty.
This led me down a path that many people follow,
which is they discover religion. So I've discovered religion. I'm
gonna go with Buddhism.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
You already knew about it before, though, but you discovered.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
It in a no. I knew intellectually, but I felt.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
But you didn't know. You didn't need it.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I don't need it exactly. You can know something, Yeah,
you can know something but not have experienced it exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Knowing that knowing how you need to start.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
You need necessary medimum costs for religion to function.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
It's like when you're on when you're on mushrooms and
you look at the stars when you're camping or something,
and you're like, the stars are millions of light years away.
I'm looking back in time and this sounds like very
profound to you at the moment, But then if you
explain it to someone else the next day, they're like, yeah,
I know, I know that. Yeah, but it's not the

(02:32):
same as experiencing it.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
True, something sounds really cool in the moment.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, but I've always liked last Samurai Zen and the
art of motorcycle maintenance.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
So I needed I needed a religion.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
So I just picked up the least offensive one.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
Why Buddhism, can I ask, Well.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
I read a bunch of Buddhist philosophy, which we've never
touched on this podcast because we're afraid it to be racist.
But I think we should just be We'll just do it.
We'll just be orientalists. It's a bad word.

Speaker 4 (03:01):
I'm happy. I mean, I've already come out of the
closet as a pro China propagandist a long time ago,
so I'm already on board.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Call mean, I also I feel like, I mean, maybe
this is wrong, but like my feeling is that like
real Buddhists, by the nature of what Buddhism, Buddhism entails,
would not care about cultural appropriation. It just wouldn't make sense.
It would be impossible to care about that and be
a Buddhist. I think is that maybe that's wrong, but
that feels like that feels true from what I know

(03:30):
about the practice of Buddhism, because it's like that's such
a stupid thing to worry about. It's just like the
most it's like you're going to spend your time being outraged.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
The differences in like Christian denominations where they actually just
fought intercontinental wars over them. Like there's like different denominations
quote unquote of Buddhism, but they don't. They all think
their own is right, but not to the point where
they have to kill anyone who believes different things.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
There have been some fights in like Myanmar and stuff
between like the but that's only because the Buddhists, I think,
get attacked by other religions.

Speaker 5 (04:02):
Maybe no, the Buddhists are killing the Muslims in Oh,
there's like the anti Buddhists or the anti Muslim my
end more. Yes, generally generally peaceful.

Speaker 6 (04:13):
But uh yeah, every weird too.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Is that my imagination? Sorry to be bringing more audio
issues that. Maybe it's normal. Sorry, I mean my imagination
just ignormal.

Speaker 6 (04:25):
Oh maybe not.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Okay, we're fixing there, we go.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Oh that's better.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Okay, Shit, it's okay, guys. Everything is nothing.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
It's not like it's not like it's not like we
did a bunch of episodes without you somehow, and.

Speaker 5 (04:38):
Yeah you came back, you come back, and now all
our settings are fucked.

Speaker 6 (04:41):
This can't be at the incidents.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've gone out to the wilderness.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
I've gone out to the spirit realm, and now I
come back and there's lights flickering.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
The coffee maker wouldn't turn on.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
I'm just fucking up electronics stuff because my my chie
is radiating out here. No, but before, just because just
because Buddhists say they're Buddhists doesn't mean that they're good people.
It doesn't mean that they follow the religion that they follow.
A person's declared religion is is. It doesn't necessarily mean
it's there truly what they believe in any sense.

Speaker 5 (05:16):
Yeah, I've been looking into Buddhism a little bit from
art history perspective, because a lot of well, the ap
art history courses that American high school students might take
involves lots of works of art that are Buddhists, and

(05:36):
Buddhism is well. It's interesting because when you study all
the different kinds of art expressions from Judaism and Islam
and Christianity, and then you look at the Buddhist stuff
like Tibetan Buddhism and how that stuff, you know, they
build these Buddhists that these Buddhist statues that represent the

(05:59):
original Buddha or the transcendent Buddha or and they have
all those hand positions that have all these different meanings,
like calling upon the earth as witness is one of them,
all that fun stuff. So I do have a bit.
I haven't been thinking philosophically about religion and Buddhism on
this level though.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
So but what aspects of Curious Pills did you find awakening?

Speaker 3 (06:24):
I mean just the basic practice stuff. But I want
to make a distinction because it's not like Buddhism the
religion that's particularly interesting. But I was looking at their philosophy,
and because I was no, because I know what Zen is,
I started with looking up Japanese philosophers and we've never
looked at these guys.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
But you know, when you know the.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
What is it the the stories that Heidegger was talking
to Japanese philosophers, maybe jack their shit.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
We're not sure.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
Well, he has that dialogue too, where it's a Japanese
speaker and a German speaker going back and forth.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
One of that guy that Heidiger was talking to is
a member of something called the Kyoto School, and they're
they're trained in like Hegel and husserl And stuff that
was popular in the thirties, forties, fifties, but they kind
of melded it with there with Japanese religion, which is

(07:22):
mostly like zen Zen Buddhism. So there they they they
sound like they're husserl And and Hegel in form, but
the themes are more Buddhists, like nothingness and the non self.
So like Heidiger another similarity. They were writing during while
while Japan.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Was raping, Nanking and all that stuff, So they do
get a little fasci.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
They do get they do get spirit and destiny of
Japan against Vinity.

Speaker 4 (07:52):
The German idealism. Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (07:55):
Yeah, you just read Hegel for one hour and yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (08:02):
The scene of German idealism is like, oh my god,
what was the sentence? The dreams of the dreams of
idealism creates monsters or something like that sounds.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Right, Yeah, I mean I think that. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
I mean I feel the dream of reason creates monsters,
the dreams of reason, I'm crazy monsters.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I feel like Japan had some feth fasci tendencies that
predate uh Hegel.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Shogun, another and another great Orientalist experience.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, there's The Shogun as also a good show.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
This is the definition of orientalism is like, uh, In
the Last Samurai, Tom Cruise is depressed and he's an
alcoholic and he's feeling he's he's feeling guilt from massacring
Native Americans and he goes to the samurai village. If
you haven't seen it, he goes to the samurai village,
watches them do their painting and do their tea and

(08:57):
their archery and swordsmanship and all this stuff, and he
fixes his own life problems. It just requires the sacrifice
of every samurai to make the white man happy with himself.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Again, I ever saw that Tom Cruise.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
That's that's so he was all worth that.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, the Orientals all have to die so that one
white man can stop drinking. This is this is like
two thousand and four movie. It's not it's not that old.
And then they have Showgun is kind of the same,
but not as as overt.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Yeah, it's a similar storyline. And well, I was thinking
about a movie that's somewhat recent that featured Japan and
religion was Silence the But that doesn't really cover But
that was a good one. I think it's Scorsese And
it's like about the about the priests in Japan, about
the expulsion of the of the Christians.

Speaker 5 (09:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that period Christians they were getting
a bit annoying, and Japan wanted to I guess that
was medieval Japan wanted to close off its borders going
into the Tokugawa period.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Was that like nineteenth century or something?

Speaker 1 (10:13):
No, No, this would have been the seventeenth sixteenth, seventeenth sixteenth.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah, isn't that when the shogun moved off a shogun
show takes place.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, because shogun, because the shogun around then Tokugawa took over.
He like he was the one who kind of was like,
all are you Christians? Like we got to stop this.
You guys are wicked annoying, Like let's let's let's get.

Speaker 7 (10:32):
What spoiler oops, your history spoiler treat of where Spain
and Portugal divided the world between the two of them said,
everything on this side it belongs to me.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
Everything on that side belongs to you. But then when
they get to Japan, they get complicated, and since they're
both Christian in a way, it gets like very very messy.
But like can I direct the conversation in a direction?
Do you mind like stating your definition of religion?

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, I put out to two solo episodes on just
that question, and there's more to come. But religion I
combined we read Durkhim. I think it was like last
summer already, this stuck in my craw and it never left.
But for Dirkhime, religion is about divisions. And these divisions

(11:18):
divide up space, they divide up time. But religion always
has a very specific use case, like a physical material,
ordinary ordinary need that it solves it.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
It's a problem solver. It's a social machine that solves
these problems.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
And if you combine this with systems theory, then you
have then you can completely get rid of any universalizing
tendency that religions have. Like this thing that I believe
in is true, It's always been true, it will always
be true in the future. You can just get rid
of that if you understand religion to be a social

(11:56):
problem solver, and then you can also divide between good
and bad religion, because good religion is stuff that still
solves problems. My favorite example is standing in line. It's
not in your best interest to stand in line. If
you're like big, you could push an old lady out
of the way, you could get out of the store
way quicker. But yet everyone still stands in line. This

(12:19):
is a ritual.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's not going anywhere.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
It's not in everyone's best interest as individuals, but it's
in the society, the social best interest of the group.
And what you guys are talking about the other week
about group psychology and Freud's group psychology. I mean I was,
I was humming along, I was nodding alone.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, on lineups. I always remember whenever I go take
like the VA rail train when I go back to
Ottawa or when I'm coming back. I don't know if
you guys have taken via rail, but I don't know.
This is kind of an aside, but people always line
up and I'm like, and I'm always like waiting, and
I'm always just like, but we all have assigned seats,
Like why are you guys lining up and just standing
for I'm just gonna sit down. I'm gonna sit over here.

(13:02):
And it's like being in line doesn't get you any
benefit because like you you have your seat. It's like,
I guess you'll get to your seat, like maybe a
minute or two earlier if you're like at the front
of the line anyway. Funny, like that's an example of
group psychology where like I feel like if you just
think about it for two seconds, you're like, I'm just
gonna fucking sit down. What the hell is the point
of this?

Speaker 3 (13:18):
On the airplane, you line up because you want to
have over yes or overhead storage.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
But is that true on the train too, or is
it just competing?

Speaker 1 (13:28):
I mean the train, there's way more space. It doesn't
matter on the train. Like on the train, it doesn't
like there's no risk of like you missing out on anything. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
There's this friend of mine that is a PhD in's aesthetics,
and he's always said he has this running joke about
creating a perfect society based on a shopping card shopping
card return meritocracy. So we're gonna redesign society based on
who returns the shopping cards because he says there's absolutely
no incentive to do that. So you can judge a

(13:56):
person by by how often does he return it, how
properly he returns the shopping car to the proper space.
And I think it's it's very coincidental to what Pills
is trying to say, So, that's why I wanted to
start with the definition of religion. We need the religion
for people to return the cars to their places.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
Yes, returning your car is a religious activity because it's
not in your it's not in your self interest, it's
not in your best interest, it takes up your time.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yet you do it anyway.

Speaker 4 (14:22):
You don't get punishment if you don't do it, and
you don't get a reward if you do it.

Speaker 5 (14:25):
Create a religion and then say these are the rituals
you must perform to express.

Speaker 6 (14:30):
Your belief in this religion.

Speaker 5 (14:33):
One of them is returning shopping carts. The other one
is lining up for the train.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
So now now my second question, Pills, So what's this
definition of religion by like they saying, Okay, so there's
a there's a societal necessity that in a way necessitates,
sorry for the necessitates religion as the solution for this
societal problem. But it also emerges out of what you
said is material needs. So either we have a problem

(14:59):
or a conflict or something to be solved. And how
does that notion differentiate from, for example, from what we
read from Auto Serrian ideology.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
I think I even said this when we read it.
This is basically just what religion is ideology ideology, but
not ideology in just the like Marxist ideology is bad,
and Marx didn't really say that, but Marxist Marxists tend
to say that, like ideology Twitter Marxists or even some

(15:29):
academic Marxist But most ideology is not capitalist ideology.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
It's just the ideology that gets keeps society.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Functioning on a data day level, like returning the shopping
cart mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
And then like when we get.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
To religion with like Jesus is his own dad, and
he comes from outer space to die and then go
back to outer space, and then you have like the
medieval scholastics trying to deal with the substance, the substance
distinction of like oh yeah, well Jesus and his father
they're the same substance, but they're different modes of the

(16:06):
same substance and all this stuff. The reason Buddhism is
so superior is it's kind of an anti religious religion,
like you don't have to really, you don't really have
to do anything. So we've been talking about this about
Japanese Buddhism, but the best thing that I discovered is

(16:26):
this one guy Indian Indian Buddhist, like two thousand years ago,
I want to say second century, but his name is
Nagarjina And it's hard to read this stuff. But also
when I was in my crisis, like emotionally distraught sense,

(16:47):
the style is much like we read ancient Greeks, like
the Pyrrhonists or the Naxe Mender, where it's poetic, religious
and philosophy before there was any distinction between all those things.
Bringing those things together on a personal level really changed
my attitude towards what we're calling philosophy, because if if

(17:10):
this is true about religion and philosophy, then what we
call religion today is wrong because it doesn't it doesn't
matter at all what we call philosophy in so far
as it's like doing truth tables in your university office.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Like that doesn't it just doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, not even not even wrong, just socially useful.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
So I've been writing poetry and and doing gardening in
a in a new way, and is that in the
art of motorcycle maintenance way, And it feels different. It
feels like I love something again instead of trying to Wow,
trying to solve problems.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
So is that like, but like, it's interesting that it's
like returning to practice. I guess there's like maybe it's
useful to think about some kind of distinction between theory
and practice because it's like the things that you just
mentioned are are like you know, you're pursuing. So I
guess my question this is a bit jumbled, but I'm wondering.
It's like, do you think that that insight that you

(18:11):
had is what allowed you to just like be like, hey,
I'm just gonna do these things right? Or was it
the doing those things that then made you be like
have the insight? You know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
So it's like, oh, yeah, okay, I had I had
a religious experience, I had a spiritual experience. And don't worry,
I'm a materialist. Do you go, don't don't get your
panties at a bunch.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
I haven't said, I haven't set my sentence yet.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
No, this is definitely material conditions because I.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
Why, why why take away the fun from me? Biels?
Why would you do that? Man? I've so much, don't
make me hate you.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
The uncertainty caused me to do something that was completely
out of character. But the religious experience, okay, the spiritual experience,
I should say, a revelation even there's always happens in
a crisis. You don't need a religious experience when everything's
going going well. You don't need religion at all. When
everything's going well. Religion is like the backstop that prevents

(19:10):
society from collapsing in bad times, which is how it gets.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
So warped over time.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
But you know, what I experienced was like this do
you do You know when you stare at a word
for too long, like a single word, and then the
letters start to disintegrate, the meaning goes away. Yeah, Like
this happens to graphic designers all the time because you're
looking at a word and you change the font and
then it just it looks like shapes. Mean this dispelling

(19:40):
of an illusion. This is what happened to me, but
not with a single word. It was like I was
meditating ish but suddenly language just became meaningless, like all
of it. It was like I could see it disintegrating,
just like the shape of a letter integrams. And this

(20:02):
is why, you know, when you're talking about the drug experience,
you can't really explain why this is significant unless you're
experiencing it. So this is the disconnection from that I've
been speaking about for five years. In here, it's structural linguistics.
The sion eclipses the reality. Metaphors are the basic unit

(20:22):
of meeting, not references. Language is differential. I've said all this,
and I know all of this, and I've known it
the whole time, but at a body level, feeling like, yeah,
that's what this spiritual experience was, was suddenly seeing the
illusion as illusion, Like I felt like I felt like

(20:44):
Neo and the matrix when the thing all turns to code.
And then that's when I went to Buddhism Buddhist philosophy
after that to try to figure out this disintegration, because
what I've known about it already is like, in this
meditative state, you enter only a single moment at a

(21:04):
single time. You forget the past, you forget the future,
you disintegrate the suffering really and and focus on one thing.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
But were you meditating purposely, Like yeah, yeah, okay, so
you were, but like not necessarily based on Buddhism. It's
just kind of like a more uh.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
No, I kind of do that all generally all the time,
Like Okay, okay, fifteen minutes, half an hour a day.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
But I didn't I didn't know that.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
It's for anxiety generally, like functionally.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't know that. Cool.

Speaker 6 (21:36):
I think lots of people do that.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, definitely, It's not for me, but I've tried it.

Speaker 5 (21:42):
Well, here's here's an interesting thing. So I did look
a little bit into what Freud is saying about religion,
and he kind of makes some general remarks that fit
in with what you're saying. You know, I think they
fit in because he gives, you know, religion three functions.

(22:03):
One of them is similar to science. It you know,
satisfies our need to know knowledge, you know, So it
talks about origin stories, It talks about the universe, the
order of things, origins of phenomena, It explains things in
it in that function it shares with science, right, it

(22:24):
tries to explain. But and then a function it has
that it doesn't really share with science is to comfort. Right,
what you're saying kind of like it's like a backstop.
And in situations where there's crises and religion acts as
a well, there is there's a comfort function, right, like
God the Father will protect you, you know, and and

(22:46):
ensure that through the ups and downs and bumps of
life it will all end well, like like a mystery
cult or something like that. Right, it promises you wealth
in the afterlife, like the Elosinian mysteries in ancient Greece.
Wealth and prosperity in the afterlife, though not this life,
because this one can go either way. And then then

(23:07):
the third function is the ethical one, like when you're
talking about standing in lines, right, it also you know,
the Father will protect us and God. The Father also
prescribes certain behaviors you have to perform, and if you
perform these behaviors, it's you know, it's it's the the
ethical function, this third function of religion, which again is

(23:30):
not overlapping with science too much. A little bit with
moral philosophy, but with science, the only thing they're going
to prescribe to you is like a method of research,
to how to research things, how to behave in that
sense as a scientist, but not in your daily life
towards other people.

Speaker 6 (23:47):
So much so.

Speaker 5 (23:48):
Freud sees those three sort of general functions, and there's
some distinctions with and philosophy to philosophy doesn't have the
power over tons of people that religion does. Philosophy has
always been for a small echelon of people, and it
tries to present a system, right, like if you look
at the Kantient system or the one I look at
like Charles purs, it tries to present to you this

(24:10):
whole system. Science doesn't seem to care to do that.
It's okay, just investigating phenomena that are fragmentary. I mean,
there is all that theory of everything physicist crap.

Speaker 6 (24:22):
But that's I don't know.

Speaker 5 (24:24):
Maybe that'll go somewhere someday, but not yet, doesn't.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Freud also describe one of the origin points of belief
in God is the oceanic when the aspects of the
world fall away and you kind of see I mean,
this is kind of what I just described, Like everything
seems like one thing and you're in awe. You're in

(24:49):
awe of it, and this produces this is like a
kind of it's a kind of religious experience.

Speaker 4 (24:56):
Sublime in a sense.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (24:57):
He well, he talks a lot about I mean, there's
so many parallels in psychoanalysis between like the development of
an individual person and the development of like civilization as
a whole. Right, So it's like sort of civilization finding
its father figure, separating itself from the mother. Right when

(25:18):
you're a kid and before you've sort of even mentally
developed the capacity to separate, you are part of the mother, right,
You're not separated from the breast. And that that is
a kind of individual equivalent of the oceanic social consciousness,
right where where we don't regard ourselves as separate individuals.
We're all connected somehow spiritually, we are all one, the

(25:43):
oceanic consciousness, which actually I think is more in was
it Christopher Isherwood and the Bag of a Gita and
those sorts of those sorts of kind of non non
Western religious ideas. I guess the Oceanic is coming. I
mean I've read some Christopher isher Would fiction too, and.

Speaker 6 (26:09):
He's into that sort of stuff.

Speaker 5 (26:10):
But anyway, yeah, yeah, Freud ego oceanic. Like there's, yeah,
the separation from the mother stuff that's in there.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
So I'm curious about the like maybe the what is
the concrete content or the more positive content within Buddhism,
because you said you kind of had this like quasi
religious experience or religious experience and then that led you
to Buddhism. So then like when we think about what
actually are the sort of what is the account that
Buddhism gives. I mean, I know a little bit about it,
but like, have you found that additionally useful? And then

(26:42):
I guess another question would be, like how does this
shift sort of change your attitude to maybe like other
philosophy we might we might talk about on the podcast,
like has it changed your attitude or not really towards it,
Like obviously you're still going to think that some philosophy
is a waste of time. I'm just curious about that.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Buddhists don't all agree.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
There's like three major traditions and I don't know anything
about any of them.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
I just like, I just like, but there must be
some shared sort of central claims.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
I just like samurai, you know, because they are they're
good at swords, and they make tea and do calligraphy.
They do this is this is this is well, this
is what will save the young men who are grasping
for meaning in the west.

Speaker 4 (27:23):
And andrew a sword, right, so they like, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
The one I think he's considered pretty much like the
Aristotle of the Buddhist traditions is this guy that I mentioned,
uh Indian Nagarjuna, and he is, Look, I can't I
can't read this except project my experience of philosophy onto it.

(27:49):
So I'm gonna not apologize about it and just do it.
He is the anti Aristotle. He says exactly the opposite
thing of Aristotle, and sounds far more like a post structuralist.
He sounds far more like someone like Dari Da reading
hegel which is the thing that you think is in here,
the thing that you think is holding all of this up,

(28:11):
it's actually it's not there.

Speaker 4 (28:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
So Nagarjuna's his main book is called the Madyamaka. And
I don't think we know anything about like if he lived,
or if he's a real guy, if he's a group
of people.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's that kind of that kind of person.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
But there's a there's the the people who's arguing against
which are I guess the proto Hindu religion, like the Upanishads.
Those those guys, they believe that there's these essences, there's
substance or shit, I don't know what the word is.

(28:49):
That's that's the thing that makes everything what it is.
And you can see, like the Scholastics loved this from
Aristotle because it meant that God, God has put things
all in their place, he had organized everything perfectly. And
then of course that that physical phenomena is explained by
things being things, which is why you know fire goes

(29:12):
up because the fires is up there, and the rocks
go down because the thingness of rock is down there.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Things are things, Yes, exactly, things are things.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
But the Gardona says he actually goes through arguments, so
it's it's not like a religious text, it's an argumentative
text saying there is no It's like Parmenides, right, there's
no there's no movement. If you break things or if
you break things into pieces, there's no movement.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
You can't have an arrow flying. It's impossible. It's that
kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
But he's against Yeah, the Swababa as being an explanation
for what's happening. So he I found like I found
my brother from two thousand years on the other side
of the world. Because he's he's an anti realist. He says,
social codes, they're all fictional, they're all conventional, but you

(30:04):
might as well believe in them anyway.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
Yeah they matter, they're fictional that they matter, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
So this is like you're speaking of my soul. Here
he says the self is an illusion. I've been saying
that from from a post structuralist perspective. This is all
stuff that he's hid two thousand years ago. There are
no substances, there's only change. So all this stuff is,
you know, things I believe, but it's coming from from

(30:30):
second century India.

Speaker 4 (30:31):
I mentioned this a couple of times in the past
episode that you were not here, Pells. But I read
this piece from Freud very late one, the one on
Moses and Monotism. I don't know if if you guys
have any chance to read into it. But what I
find reading you.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Mean Moses, Moses, the Burning Bush, Moses.

Speaker 4 (30:48):
Moses from Judaism.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the guy.

Speaker 4 (30:53):
Moses and Monotism. I read it in Spanish. Sorry if
the translation fails. But what it's cool is that there
was this guy in Egypt Amon, and it was the
first one to propose a monotheistic new structure of belief
in Egypt.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I think we say at Acanatin.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
Is that exactly? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (31:13):
I have no idea he invented monotheism.

Speaker 4 (31:16):
Exactly, that guy. Okay, so he invented monotism for that
he was killed, right he was, then he was, he
tried to escape, and then he tried again to create
monotaism outside. And why I think this story is interesting
in a way is that because religious symbolic order organizes
archiemedian points for truth to be established. So you have

(31:37):
the god of rain, the God of thunder, the God
of but then any any of one of those individual gods.
They act as an archaemedium point to organize the possibility
of truth to exist because they are an outside pivot
point for people to affirm that yes it's raining, Yes,
this is why thunders exist. Yes, this is why are

(32:00):
not growing. Yes, this is why we are attacked by animals. Yes,
this is why we had a plague. So by monotism,
what it does it centralizes everything in one archaemedian point,
in one point that it's able to hold everything else
in its place so that truth can emerge. So it's
weird to see the breathing between monotism and politicism in history.

(32:25):
And and according to me, what I like about your
explanation is that we could do a reading of that
based on necessity, as when we are in need, we
centralize gods that enable truth, like QAnon, Trump, the deep state.
You know, we we we create those gods and we
use them to organize the possibility of truth to emerge.

(32:47):
But if you, if you, if you take a broader
look from outside of it, as you said, if we
apply system theory to it, what we see is that
all of those were always fake, but they were necessary
and their function was even if if the truth they
were asserting was based on a fake god, because they
were all made up in the sense the the the use,

(33:09):
the use they produce on the world was real, like
the effect they produce on the world was real. That
does it make any sense?

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, I think I was.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
I've been trying for years to think of a way
to break left versus right as basically our only political description,
and this one actually does this because Trumpists and trump
Beans and Qanonists, they're not anti society. They are pro social,

(33:37):
just like just like the liberals on the other side
or the communist kids on the internet. Everyone is actually
pro social, that's true. We disagree on who's in there.
We disagree on the type of social you know, we
disagree that that certain people are toxins that need to
be purged with horse de wormer from society or sent
to sent to al Salvador met. Everyone agrees on one thing,

(34:01):
and that's like society is important.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
We need to protect it.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
It's going through a rough time, and we have a
we have to fix this, like this has to be solved.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
So left right, I guess.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
They they're reasonable distinctions, but they concern you know, who
needs to die so that we can have the society
that we need.

Speaker 5 (34:22):
Yeah, but we want Yeah, didn't when Freud was talking
about Moses in Egypt too, wasn't wasn't it that at
that time when monotheism supposedly came about as the Sun
god worship thing. Uh, it was also at a time
of like Egyptian empire imperialism, right, Like it became the

(34:48):
sort of religion of an imperialist kind of nation that
was emerging. And so suddenly you have this sort of
shift from these this pluralist, polytheistic religions to a monotheistic
religion which reflects you know, okay, great, we have this
story now where there's one God and he is the

(35:10):
king over everybody, and that's reflected here on earth where
we want one empire that is the that is you know,
by God whatever wherever it is here now it's in Egypt,
and later it's in Europe wherever it is, because kings
love to think about themselves as divinely ordained and okay,
one global empire kind of model. So like, I mean,

(35:33):
I don't know if there is that connection between monotheism
and empire building. But then Freud's other thing when he's
talking about where where is this all this anti semitism
coming from? Again, that's that's connected there. The shift from
polytheism to an enforced monotheism produced resentment amongst many of

(35:57):
the remaining polytheist peoples, like the I guess the Germanic tribes,
many of whom became monotheistic after the Fall of.

Speaker 6 (36:07):
Rome and whatnot throughout Europe.

Speaker 5 (36:09):
But but yeah, like forced monotheism created this historical resentment
that persisted. And there's a relationship to the guilt as well,
in the attempt of Jesus to come along and expiate
the guilt.

Speaker 6 (36:23):
For the for that.

Speaker 5 (36:24):
But but yeah, there's it's an expression of a kind
of I mean, that's one thing he connects it to
the real the return to paganism as a kind of
lingering resentment over monotheistic religions, whether it's Christianity or Judaism.

Speaker 4 (36:41):
And this we can connect to Nazism because in a way,
what National Socialist Party was trying to do was to
coil back from Christianism into paganism, like into the original
values of the Germanic tribes.

Speaker 5 (36:55):
Yeah, and and what's interesting about even polytheistic, pagan whatever
religions is that even still there's usually one figure. There's
tons of gods, but usually one of them is responsible
for creating everything, but they're just that one's just not
identified as like the supreme god, right like Zeus didn't
create the world, but he is the youngest he's the

(37:17):
youngest child of Chronos, who eventually overthrows him. And then
he figures out a way to stop that cycle of
overthrowing by what was it, like he I think I
had to do with taking Athena inside of himself, giving
birth to Athena himself out of his head in order
to stop the cycle of one of his you know,

(37:38):
someone else having a kid that's going to overthrow him
kind of whatever, whatever the specifics of that. But yeah,
there's usually a creator figure in the polytheistic religions anyway.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
So now that we have established like a cool definition
to discuss about religion and this notion about the necessity
of religion, the difference between religion and ideology. You made
another claim that was very interesting to me. And then
again your preference for Buddhism as the religion that you
will choose, and you made this interesting claim about your
reading of Marisman Ruponti as a Buddhist. How would you

(38:12):
justify that.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
Oh, yeah, we should read this soon, his religious text,
like we've we've read pretty thoroughly, I think on this
podcast of Phenomenology Perception. Yeah, it's like eight hundred pages, but.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
We've done a lot of it, twenty episodes, fifteen.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Twenty probably not that much. We've probably done like maybe
eight to ten.

Speaker 4 (38:34):
And it's pretty good. I think somebody mentioned it on
the chat that is I think it's the one philosopher
where we all the four of us like agree upon yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
But also before he died and I did a patron
video on this like five years ago, but he wrote
a book called uh. I think it's a collection. It's
called The Invisible and the Invisible Or is it a
total or is it a total book?

Speaker 1 (38:57):
I forget, it's an unfinished book.

Speaker 5 (38:59):
I think the chiasmus or the intertwining.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
I felt like the flesh and the chasm.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
Yeah, the intertwining or the kiasm is like it. It's
sounds religious, and this is from like a or it
sounds I don't know, spiritual.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Maybe we should.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
It sounds spiritual, but it's written by a guy who's
like studying bodies and rehabilitation of bodies, and it's it's
where he ends up with that. I think he's on
a similar trajectory of trying to find out, like what
what perception really means, because perception spiritually spiritually and I

(39:35):
mean spiritually not as opposed to material, because that's normally
how we think of spirit material spiritual, the spirit world
is felt false. All that is true, but also the
way that the illusions come together. So we were talking
before about the word that disintegrates in meaning if you
stare at it too long. Now, the disintegration of meaning,

(39:56):
this is like more close to the real state. But
the fact that words have meaning every time we see them,
this is like a This is the spiritual world that
we live in, this world of illusions, and the most
spiritual we can get, I guess is to then de
metaphorize or de abstract the things that we go on

(40:19):
believing all the time, so that you can actually really
believe in them. Because if you find if you realize
that you're just mapping your meaning onto the world and
that it's not really there, that kind of makes the
world a very interesting place and even a more interesting place.
It's worth being curious about everything you see, because you

(40:41):
are seeing your sight of the world rather than the
world itself.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
As if we are comfortable in the illusion, but we
need to recognize that we are in the illusion so
we can properly treat it in the seriousness of the
illusion and the necessity of the illusion.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
We also have to overthrow Catholicism. We've been about overthrowing
capitalism for a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
But JD.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Vance and Denin and the Dimes square kids. I think
the Heglian the Hegelian egleles are doing egle Catholicism now,
I think are they really?

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Don't quote me on that, I think I saw it.
But Buddhism.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Buddhism is the only answer to Catholicism because it says
the substances they're not real, they're just conventions. Thomas Aquinas right,
Thomas aquinas the Catholic philosopher, finish all his ship the
Suma theological and at the end of his life, you
remember what he said, all my works, I consider them

(41:40):
to be as straw my works, My works are nothing.
This is the time in his life that he had
a true insight, but no one takes him seriously as
a primary source on the value of his work because
they're still doing they're still doing Akwinian.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
I mean, I've always felt like the Catholics. I mean,
you know, they freak me out. I mean, I'm telling you,
like all that anti Catholic hatred that was going on
in the in the like the forties and whatever, like
through the in America, Like maybe they were onto something.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah, they had it right.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
These people want to like they're really obsessed with sex
and disciplining the body.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
It's scary, it's freaky.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
I think they're the most dangerous to all. The most
crazy Supreme Court justices in the US are Catholics.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Catholics and converts too.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
The fact that the occident is falling apart and Catholicism
is not being able to hold it together, it's a
living fact that we need to overcome it.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
I'm interested though, pills in this sort of post structuralist
insight that you mentioned that you felt like this sort
of this Indian Buddhist that you discovered. You know, there's
a lot of compatibility, so kind of you know, you're like, Okay,
this is stuff I already believe, but I get I
think what I'm interest and then it led you to
these practices, right, You're like, I want to garden, make art,

(42:53):
write poetry, you know, but I'm curious about.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Like, doesn't that section doesn't that sound so crity?

Speaker 4 (43:00):
It sounds very crazy crazy, It sounds amazing.

Speaker 5 (43:04):
It sounds crazy, it sounds it sounds like a beautiful garden.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
It sounds like a cliche. But but but like hearing
you talk about it, actually it makes me really happy.
It makes me really happy that you're doing that though,
because I know that that if you're doing it, it's
it's it's it's you're getting a lot out of it.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
It is so cliche.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
That's like, oh, white white boy found Samurai shit and they're.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Exactly and then started gardening.

Speaker 5 (43:25):
But but my question another yoga dad, But my question.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
Is like the connection between the sort of post structuralist
insights if any like so you're like, Okay, this is
a religion, and and they believe the things that I believe.
And then how do you leap to the practice? I
guess because it's like, you know, like obviously in Western philosophy,
post structuralists are sometimes accused and are also like not

(43:51):
only skeptical of, but sometimes hostile to like prescriptions. Right,
And I'm not saying you're following any prescriptions, right, it's
but like, you know, how do you, like, what's the
connection between those material those like that description of material
reality or the lack thereof? And therefore I should I
should just chill and just do the things that make
me happy, Like where's the action that follows from it?

(44:14):
If any Like I'm just curious about that.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
How do you how do you invent ritual when you
know the rituals? False?

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
So I mean you just got to do it, yeah,
I mean, if you if you got I can't. I
can't teach like you how I live. But eventually you
get sort of a strategy down and then you realize
what's happening. It's like getting good at a sport. If
you're good at a sport, if you're good at a sport.
You know what's going on everywhere on the floor, you

(44:44):
know what could happen.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
You know it might happen. You don't have to solve
certain problems.

Speaker 4 (44:47):
And this is very much more risma luponia. Yeah exactly,
this is this is.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
My right, Yeah for sure, yeah, exactly. Well the practice
part the action part is connected. But just to you,
like where my question is also sort of coming from
is we've also covered kind of existentialism on this podcast before,
and there's like a whole debate about you know, existentialist ethics, right,
like what comes from it, what action follows from it?
And I think in a way, like I felt like

(45:16):
something similar comes out of it in a way that
it's like, you know, there's nothing, but then you can
you know, it's like in the practice in the action,
but you know, I don't know if it's if there's something,
but like Buddhism itself is pretty ritualistic or it can be,
but I don't know that much about it. So yeah,
I don't know if you wanted to say more about
about about don't.

Speaker 4 (45:35):
Kill people, don't steal shed, don't disrespect the main God.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, it's true, it's it's true.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
That that's what every religion says at bottom. It says
respect society, respect tradition, and don't hurt other.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
People for no reason.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
And you could simplify that even more. I think, to
what Victor's asking, do good and avoid evil? And what
you're asking here, Victor, I think I answer in an
intentionally merely Pontian way, because I know you like that stuff.
But to do good is not a moral charge in Buddhism,
or at least.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
The Zen emphasis in Buddhism. I don't know about the
rest of it.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
But do good does not mean be morally good and
be charitable at all. It means get good at things,
and you will discover peace in those activities. That's why
you have warriors who also do calligraphy and make tea,
and monks who clean and make pottery like they're getting
good at what it means to be human, which is

(46:35):
focus and attention and consciousness basically. And then you can ask, well,
what's the evil to avoid? What's the bad part about
being human? Well, for them, it's being worried, distracted all
the time, getting into fights, causing chaos, dwelling on things
you can't change. That is the evil. To avoid when
you say do good and avoid evil, and obviously this

(46:57):
seems more reletive to us then obviously demons trying to
attack us. The evil is the things that make you
not at peace, and the good is the avenues towards
inner peace, because that is where you're at your most human.

Speaker 5 (47:14):
I always, whenever I think back to Hidegger, you say Buddhism,
I think back to Hidegger's stuff about like sheltering the void,
all right, because this isn't that very if Buddhism has
anything true. Yeah, yeah, it's coming in you know, the
Romantics getting into Eastern mysticism and all that. Yeah, but

(47:34):
I mean the idea of sheltering the void. I mean,
in so far I don't know that this in so
far as Buddhism does have a cosmology, is that not
kind of it though?

Speaker 6 (47:45):
Too?

Speaker 5 (47:46):
There's like a kind of nothingness.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
And that's why I think there's actually overlap with with
Lacinian psychoanalysis too. I think in Buddhism, just like the desire,
like the that's a part, like the perpetual, the repetition. Well,
not just Lacinian, but like psychoanalysis in general. I think
Buddhism is from my limited knowledge good at talking about
the kind of repetitive patterns.

Speaker 5 (48:08):
And I think, as opposed to you know, like the
existentialist primordial choice, freedom seems very different, and it is different,
and the whole idea of existence seems to suggest to
me kind of solid things, embodied minds, Whereas if you're
questioning substance in general, then what the hell is this

(48:29):
embodied practice? What the hell is this body thing that
practice is embodied in. If we're not very if we're sheltering,
if we're walking around sheltering.

Speaker 6 (48:42):
Voids all day, I don't know if that's.

Speaker 5 (48:46):
Probably neither here nor there, but that's the Yeah, the
later hidigary and stuff kind of swings in that direction,
doesn't it.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah, for merlu Ponti, I think Amy doesn't say this directly,
of course, but you can infer from his text that
to be a good human is to find a few
activities and get very good at them. That's when you're
that's when you're most not like a subject, it's when
you're the most in the world. And that's kind of
the thing like one of the busies, Uh, could we.

Speaker 4 (49:18):
Yeah, because there's this there's this book about the concept
of man in Marx and it's from I think it's
it's Eric From. I think it's from Eric From and
he writes about this notion about finding true the true
essence of men in working and like in stuff that
you're good at and you work and you transform nature
and that's the true essence of men.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, chopping down trees, go and fishing, write in philosophy.
But the yeah, the one of the biggest concepts in
Buddhism that I've mentioned here is that the self is
an illusion. But that doesn't mean that you just don't
do you don't be a self, or you don't believe
that other people have selves, because again, conventionally, it's a

(49:59):
very useful.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Thing to believe.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
You need you need to have like laws that are
about protecting people from getting attacked by other people, and
for that you need to assume that there's like a
coherence to a person. But ultimately, you know, you're just
the same stuff that every everything else is, which is
change and movement and particles that come in, particles that

(50:22):
go out. There's no substance even in like the particle
is not a substance, right, the particle is changing the
substance even in Aristotelian like special substance or platonic form.
These are things that can't change. Everything else changes around
those things, whereas this is where you get the Madyamica
is the title of this guy in now Gardina's book,

(50:46):
and it means middle way.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
That's not talking about out of my ass But.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
I'm pretty sure, if I recall correctly from the intro
to his book, that the middle way is through nihilism
on one hand, and through believing that subs since these
are real, on the other hand.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
So he's a.

Speaker 3 (51:02):
Centrist, he's a he's an ontological centrist. But it sounds
really nehilistic to I guess Westerners, because we're we have
a latent belief that there are substances, substances below things
or forms above things, and it's been an assumption of
our philosophy for basically up to the twentieth century.

Speaker 4 (51:24):
Excluding including excluding some thinkers in history.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Yeah, for sure. But one of the biggest things is
like language has meaning. This is something everyone believes in in.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Some way or another.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
But to believe that that meaning is real, that's the
thing that I've been saying with my mind. I don't
believe and that's the thing that like a month ago
I experienced with my body mind.

Speaker 4 (51:48):
Yeah, I think I think I said this the other
day in like in a barbecue or not not even joking,
in a Sunday barbecue, like somebody like I had this
a similar experience to what you describe exactly, because I'm
reading grammatology from dere Da because of the of the
post the post doc, and I was having this conversation
with a friend of mine, and I kept asking for

(52:10):
every definition of every word he was using. But I
was doing it, like not not on purpose, like I
didn't want to annoy the guy, Like I just didn't
want to assume that I knew what he was talking about.
So I kept asking, though, but what do you mean
about what do you what do you mean with this word?
What do you mean with this? And what do you
mean with that? In order to try to make sense,
and and like the guy got really annoyed and he

(52:31):
pushed me back, and like it's so hard to have
conversations with you, and I'm like, dude, like you have
to consider the fact that the meaning of every word
is just another word. But you know, they don't really
they don't refer to anything like words refer to other words.
They don't refer to things. So that's why I'm I'm
trying to make sense of Yeah, it's so sure, I've.

Speaker 5 (52:54):
Got a dictionary.

Speaker 6 (52:55):
I've seen it.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
You're being that.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
You're being a bad friend here because why Because good
means you just accept the illusion and you you deal
with what you have to to get to get on
with it. And you say, I'll talk about this on
the podcast later with people.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
That actually doesn't refer to nothing. It refers to like
the social compact, like it's it's so so it plays
a game in a social compact. It's not just nothing.

Speaker 4 (53:22):
I didn't I didn't say nothing.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Oh okay, okay, well nothing in so far as it's
not substantial.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
It's a conceptual in so far as so the social
has no substance.

Speaker 5 (53:33):
Now now we're get now we're getting into the semiotic territory.
But yeah, the we need a lot, we need a
different vocabulary that like the self being an illusion and
meaning being real, Like what the hell I don't know
about any of that stuff, you know, Okay, the self
could be an illusion in the sense that it's derivative

(53:54):
of a more primary relation, like a chiasm, where it's
more the relation in itself is more primary than the
two things that are related taken individually. That's kind of
a relational way of thinking, which makes sense, I guess
and even ancient I always bring it up. He Sei
Odd's theogony right in the beginning was chaos, and not

(54:17):
chaos in the sense of disorder, but chaos in the
sense of a gap, chasm, chiasm, that kind of chiasmus.

Speaker 6 (54:25):
Right, that's so, there's.

Speaker 5 (54:28):
That, but I mean meaning being real. Right, It's like
with Victor said, it's a compact, right, we agree on
what things mean, and when I use words and you
use words and we think they mean different things, and
we're gonna have trouble talking. First you have to we
have to learn what everyone Like If I agree to
meet you at the store in twenty minutes and in
ten minutes I got go, is that agreement real?

Speaker 1 (54:50):
Like?

Speaker 6 (54:50):
What the hell do I mean by that?

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Does that?

Speaker 4 (54:53):
Know?

Speaker 5 (54:53):
It just means of are we on the same fucking
page about this still? Or are you gonna forget and
go to the mall and forget.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
To meet me?

Speaker 4 (55:00):
With the podcast a couple of times, the.

Speaker 6 (55:02):
Whole Yeah, the whole.

Speaker 5 (55:04):
I and then oh my god, is the podcast real?
I don't start thinking that way, because we need a
better vocabulary to talk about meanings and words and illusions
and fictions and realities and solid things. If only solid
things are real, or is something else real too?

Speaker 3 (55:23):
Like patterns and solid things are solid enough, but you
shouldn't put undying faith in them.

Speaker 5 (55:30):
You can put you can find all the little gaps
inside of the so little solid things, and then in
those gaps are smaller thing. It's like an iHeart Huckebees
kind of argument.

Speaker 4 (55:39):
Yeah. Or the concept of the storm from the loose,
you know, like this notion of like when does the
storm start and when does the storm end? Like how
many of the thunders are part of the storm being considered?
And like the stability of concepts, they vary in time
and most of the time, the way we relate to
the things that we're pretending to mention, it's asynchronicle. But

(55:59):
that synchronicity works like it has a level of stability,
but it's never fully stable.

Speaker 5 (56:05):
Yeah, and all this is why a book called The
Meaning of Meaning came out in the nineteen twenties, and
there's like twenty eight different definitions of the word meaning
that's awesome, because it's because it's a silly word.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
I thought you going to say maps of meaning there.

Speaker 5 (56:23):
No, No, that's a bit. That's a bit.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Later, young and and uh and uh hesiod and I
got maps of meaning awesome. One last thing to say
about this is kind of a callback, but it functions
here well. If you consider monotheism and it's parallel structure
to fascism, we have fear, Dear Leader. Monotheism works functionally

(56:49):
very well because as society grows in complexity, you need
an inverse to how difficult decisions are to make. Like
democracy is very easy in your family if you're like,
where should we go to dinner?

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Well, we'll we'll vote on it. Very easy in that way.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
But if you get a large group of people with
conflicting interests, the the functionally simplest thing to do, which
is kind of the Trump administration's uh debt right now,
is put all the power into one person, and we
can actually get ship done if we if we have
a if we have a system of the fear, basically

(57:29):
we can get things done. But this is I would
I would guess I would speculate that that monotheism emerges
when like, we can't have the God of the Sea
fighting with the God of wisdom anymore because there's there's
too much conflict here.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
We need as as what do you call.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
It, streamline the streamline decision process as much as possible.
And then you get like God of of Judaism yahweh.
I think uh he he used to be a local god,
like just like every local god. I think he was
the god of the Mount Sinai where he came from
something like that. They made a bull statue out of him.

(58:08):
But you know, it's the process of abstraction functionally works Monotheism.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
It's like you had a doge of the gods. It's
like we've got to cut the extra fat here. We've
got to fire all these different gods and just settle
on one.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
It's too inefficient, and Christianity doesn't actually believe in one
god either. It's like the devil's there and the devil's
doing all this stuff. But I guess he's not technically
a god, but he's a he's worthy of consideration for
his for his magical prowess.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
But you know, at all.

Speaker 5 (58:41):
That that kind of ruins the point I was gonna
make but I was kind of just thinking it's funny
how throughout history we tend to project our political systems
onto our religious beliefs, right, so we when we're in
the feudal system, we represent God and the heavens is
like a court with a king and and and that.

Speaker 4 (59:02):
Now.

Speaker 5 (59:02):
Yeah, yeah, okay, I agree with that. Para authoritarianism does
fit more the Christian model, right, Like, what are these democrats?
They're fucking pagans, right, they want to go back to
no bodies in charge, and it's just a bunch of
different gods who are just like voting with each other
now instead of fighting, which that's the big difference.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
But yeah, I.

Speaker 5 (59:23):
Means jokes aside, Yeah, there is there's that tendency to
project our own political system, or an idealized version of it,
onto the religions that are important for us.

Speaker 4 (59:38):
No wonder, liberal democracies are failing everywhere because there as
a religion, they're unable to sustain the decay of the
system itself.

Speaker 5 (59:46):
Yeah, they're trying to go back to the pagans. Not
not the other way, Not the fascists. It's the Democrats
who are the pagans, I guess because they've they've got
a polytheistic model.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
It's as if democracies are polytaistic in the sense that
they're several ideologies that you can plug upon and play
believe and role play that you're defending a set of
values and morals that defends the will of one God
that is supposed to deliver utopia, versus like organizing under
one single rule like no wonder leaders as putting and

(01:00:17):
jishiping are like kicking ass.

Speaker 5 (01:00:20):
Yeah, Like, imagine in a thousand years when all this
disappears and the new religion comes around, and now it's
like a democratically kind of the theology. So now are
our next Bible is going to be about how how
Jesus was elected by the court of the voting body

(01:00:41):
of angels.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
Now our next Bible is going to be written in
Chinese because they're they're going to win.

Speaker 4 (01:00:48):
Actually, I was gonna say that they are mostly they're
they're mostly lost the word the tales. They're not believers,
like in the sense that like Chinese atheists, China doesn't
need religion right now, they're doing so well, why would
they need religion. We need religion because we're losing, we're decaying.

(01:01:09):
We need something to sustain and hold the fibers together.
They're kicking asd like, they're producing a lot, they are
owning technology, they're prospering like religion seems less necessary.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
I think that's a truism, that religion becomes necessary in crisis.
So liberalism just fine, right, as long as as long
as your standards of living expected at the end of
your life are higher than at the beginning of your life,
liberalism totally fine. The second the graph goes down or
all the money is being hoovered up and transferred to

(01:01:42):
the one percent and your quality of life gets worse,
Now you need a religious explanation for why things are
getting worse. So then it's capitalists for people of our persuasion,
or it's immigrants, or it's the moral crisis of the
West because we watch and we don't stick to our

(01:02:02):
assigned gender roles anymore. Yeah, so you need an explanation
for the downturn, and that's yeah, I'm still a materialist,
don't worry about that. It's still originally just a physical
experience of watching your life get worse, feeling it get worse,
being worried, being anxious. Then this has to be turned
into a metaphoric structure, an idiology of why it's happening,

(01:02:26):
and then you have to So liberalism just says, let's
keep going everything's good. As soon as things stop going good,
then you need something a little more extreme.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
You need you need the end of the world. You
need the apocalypse and the profit, the profit who will
bring the end of the world for you.

Speaker 5 (01:02:44):
Yeah, when that myth of progress, when that doesn't hold
up so much anymore. I mean, I mean, I guess
you don't really have another life to compare your life to,
but you do learn about what the world was like
when your parents were younger or somebody from them, and
then you can start to think, oh wow, like sounds
like what I can do and afford is a lot

(01:03:06):
less now.

Speaker 6 (01:03:07):
I thought the next.

Speaker 5 (01:03:08):
Generation was supposed to be better off than the previous ones.

Speaker 6 (01:03:11):
That's what I've always I.

Speaker 5 (01:03:12):
Don't know, you have to get some I mean, abstraction
is just unavoidable in all of these things, right, But
like society is an abstraction, and then you have to
religion and all those those kinds of ideas you were saying.
I think I was listening to your solo diatribe from that,
but it all begins with abstraction, and we're all religious.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
I found this was poignant to say we're all religious
because Dawkins just decided, after being the atheist, the atheist
who debated Christians, who debated Muslims, who warned us against
the evils, just says, yeah, socially, I'm a Christian, and
he's right about that, and socially always all along he's

(01:03:57):
been a Christian or just a religious person, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:04:01):
And he says it's the best one because because it's
it's not inherently violent like Islam, is.

Speaker 6 (01:04:06):
What he's going to say about.

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Like, so, what's the name for the bad kind of religion?
Because if we're all religious, but there's obviously.

Speaker 5 (01:04:12):
Just I just said it. If you're if you're Dawkins,
it's Islam, if you're if you're a lot of if
you're a lot of people, it's Islam. Right now, is
the name for the bad one?

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
I call them real estate religions because they have to
have they have to have an income, and they have
to have enough rules to make sure that they don't
lose their their physical land.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
So that's anyone that owns land.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
As their religion. The bad good who cares. They're just
not doing the religious function anymore. And in that sense,
we are like an atheistic society but still very religious.
Like as soon as you are allowed to just pick
whichever religion you want off the shelf, like I watch last,
I watched last Samuraise, So now I'm a Buddhist.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
Yeah, that's the.

Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
Isn't that like that's kind of an animist.

Speaker 5 (01:05:04):
That's the that's the Japanese ancestor where that's.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
The folk religion.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
Yeah, is that a.

Speaker 5 (01:05:10):
Total it's it's a form of ancestral worship there. Like location,
that's one of the location based things. I mean, I'm
not an expert in any of this, but but in
so far as Buddhism isn't really location based, right, you
can do Buddhism anywhere. There's no mecca, there's no birthplace

(01:05:35):
of Jesus.

Speaker 6 (01:05:36):
That it's it's.

Speaker 5 (01:05:37):
Kind of a if you have a statue and you
can claim that it has antiquity and that it resembles
the real Buddha. The if the what's his name, Shakya
muna Buddha, like the real historical fifth sixth century BCE
Buddha who is founded the religion. You say this is

(01:05:57):
a likeness of that Buddha and it's the best one
in the world. But I mean, every every Buddhist shrine
that has a Buddha in it might make that claim anyway,
but that's that's what gives it the authority. It really
is a likeness of Shakimuna Buddha before pre transcendent. There's
also transcendental Buddhist statues, but the Buddhas shaki Munas are

(01:06:18):
supposed to be the likeness of the actual historical Buddha,
not the transcendent Buddha you see sometimes. But and then, yeah,
Shinto's kind of place based, right, because you'll have you'll
have definite ties to two geographical locations in Japan. That yeah,

(01:06:39):
that are important.

Speaker 6 (01:06:40):
There and that yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:06:42):
And it's interesting how how book culture then develops in
Japan versus how it developed in the Gutenberg West as
a result. But anyway, I'm going off top. I'm doing
my bringing in too many ideas at the end.

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
Thing again, well, I'm down to do Buddhism or and
or the visible and the invisible, back to Ponty. Back
to Ponty, but not not phenomenology.

Speaker 4 (01:07:08):
As an Orientalist podcast, we're gonna lead.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Maurice sorry said we are.

Speaker 4 (01:07:15):
The officially officially orientalists, Save us China.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
Change the sub the subheading of pill Pot an orientalist podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
We already half of it. We already at least half
as I can. I can assure that much. I was
always orientally Actually.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Please please you.

Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Save us, save us from occidental decadentes. Oh my god,
nice to have you back, mister.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Yeah, yeah, it's good to see, and it's good that
I'm happy to hear that you found that spiritual awakening.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
I hope I'm exuding inner peace.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
You are? You look you actually are? You actually do
seem a bit more at peace?

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
You do by my self help book on how to
achieve inner peace.

Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
Sounds like you've been approached by publishers being like, please
write something for us.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Yes, but never on religion.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
I don't know if this stuck in your in your
mind the way it did for me. But this is
all back to like Durkheim saying, religion, God is a
metaphor for society.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
That's that's all you need to know.

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
What a gut punch.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
I love it.

Speaker 5 (01:08:30):
That's an interesting I mean, I'm not going to open
up another vista here, but vista here. You know, well,
I think there is some truth to that story if
you've heard it right, that the that like the I guess,
German idealism, rationalism, whatever, they just they just replaced God

(01:08:52):
with reason and then reason became God basically. And I
was reading first and even Charles Purse, a Victorian era thinker,
I guess, and he said exactly this. You know, faith is,
he says. He says, faith is being prepared to act

(01:09:13):
or conform your behavior to something, but you're not really
sure what it is. And he says, every scientist who
reasons about things has faith that the world is governed
by reason.

Speaker 6 (01:09:25):
He says, aka God.

Speaker 5 (01:09:28):
And I always think, okay, that's like this the deistic
science of the deistic scientists, who you can be Newton
and be totally a physicist, but then just say, oh well.

Speaker 6 (01:09:39):
Math is the language of God, so I'm religious too.

Speaker 5 (01:09:42):
But then the sociologists come in and want to say
something totally different. The Dirkhims and the Freuds want to
kind of say, oh, no, is this has the social function.

Speaker 6 (01:09:52):
Let's look at the social function.

Speaker 5 (01:09:54):
Which I'll admit is more interesting than just saying, oh yeah, God,
reason is now God. What's the next God? Oh, it
was like it's language after the linguistic turn, and and
it's going to be something else in the future.

Speaker 6 (01:10:06):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (01:10:06):
The new God is going to be the Buddhist void.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Well, I don't reason.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
Reason could never actually be a god for the masses,
because the masses love they prefer to be stupid. This
is this is Plato's complaint that there's always going to
be few philosophers. And the reason really is that rationality
and argument are not at all seductive.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
They're not to.

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):
Invoke, to invoke, Master Boudriard, they're not seductive. The king,
the king returning on a horse to fight the dragon
and kill the enemies.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
This is this is seduction, the.

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
The viscerality of your soul being washed in the blood
of the lamb, and the and the the windows and
the ritual. This is what's seductive, and reason is just
quite boring in comparison, which.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Is why absolutely true.

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
It can never become a mass mass adopted.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
Trump putting his arm up after doing that's seductive.

Speaker 4 (01:11:05):
Yeah, turning turning himself to into a jojob is our
adventure any mail opening. But it's strange that in the
era of like a predominant logic of productivity, we need
to be seduced in order not to produce, you know,
like like this disposition that is presented by Prodrigard, that
seduction is opposed to production. And in a way, I think,
like my takeaway from this conversation is that now I'm

(01:11:28):
fully okay with believing. I don't care about no wing anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
I mean, I wouldn't go that far, all right, that
seems like a good place to uh wrap it up.
I have to cut a whole bunch from the beginning
when we're trying to fix our audio. So I'm hoping
that this is long enough, but i think it'll be.

Speaker 1 (01:11:46):
A tight episode.

Speaker 4 (01:11:47):
Yeah, nothing is real.

Speaker 5 (01:11:49):
Natural belief, belief is okay. Knowledge is unnecessary.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
I think philosophy, all philosophy needs to be written as
poetry because it's much more concise. There's material constraints, right,
because paper is expensive two thousand years ago.

Speaker 5 (01:12:09):
Anyway, if religion satisfies that knowledge craving, then maybe we
just need to get rid of that craving.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
Yeah, desire is suffering, see you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
True