Michael Tsarion Existentialism & the Search for Meaning

(0:00 - 0:15) Coming up in this episode… We are heading away from individualism at a frightening, frightening rate. In order to understand our world, you've got to realize that selfhood is not valued or loved at all. The one thing people are morbidly antipathetical to is selfhood. (0:16 - 0:23) They're lovers of death, not lovers of life. And once this is fully grasped and understood, you're no longer able to be fooled. You are the sage. (0:23 - 0:38) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth Podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Here for the Truth Podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti. (0:38 - 0:58) I've got my co-host Yerasimos with me as always. And today, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Michael Tasarian back to our platform. For anyone that knows our origin story, Michael, David Whitehead, who was a previous guest, and their podcast, Unslaved, played an absolute crucial role in the formation of our own podcast. (0:58 - 1:12) In fact, Yerasimos and I would never have met, and this podcast probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the work that they are doing. Me first hearing and coming across Yerasimos through an Unslaved podcast back in 2021. So always a pleasure to host Michael. (1:13 - 1:39) Definitely one of the most prominent researchers, deepest researchers, deep thinker, one of the greatest minds in this overarching, entire truth-seeking world that we find ourselves immersed in over a number of decades now. He's been at this. And today, we're diving into existentialism, which is at the core of his latest book, Existentialism and the Search for Meaning. (1:39 - 1:59) And I think this is a concept, when properly fleshed out and properly understood, can definitely impact you and will change you and will affect the way that you show up in the world and show up for yourself. So I really hope you guys enjoy this conversation. Michael Tasarian returns for the sixth time to Hear for the Truth. (1:59 - 2:32) He's an author and researcher renowned for his profound investigations into ancient civilizations, occult history, psychology, hidden power structures, and so much more. He co-hosts the podcast Unslaved with David Whitehead, who we've also had on the show multiple times, which definitely remains an absolute treasure vault for any sincere seeker on the path. And today's conversation is inspired by his latest book, Existentialism and the Search for Meaning, which I believe is available exclusively through his sub stack at the moment. (2:32 - 2:37) Michael, good to see you again. Hey, guys. Thank you so much. (2:37 - 2:41) It's great to see you both. Great to be back on. Oh, yeah, absolutely. (2:42 - 3:14) I know we chatted briefly just before, but I guess just for the audience sake, how's things going with you and the evolution, continued evolution of your work, I guess? Oh, everything's really busy right now. We're in the middle of a series called the Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, and we're just in the process of uploading part four, which is an epic mammoth. You could think of the first three as introductory, actually, but setting that introduction, we're well on our way now, and there could be another three, four. (3:14 - 3:39) I don't know. We don't have an exact plan of how far we're going to go, but it's absolutely massive. I'm relying on, it's one of the hardest projects I've done podcast wise, because it's very demanding, and I'm digging out files that maybe are 10, 15 years, been sitting on the shelf and repurposing those, because I've just learned so much done through the years. (3:39 - 4:08) I don't stop learning. So we're at a point now where it's just become so massive, but I found a thread through this great mystery, and yeah, we're enthused, and it's a very, very inspiring series that we're doing right now. That's why it gets me through, because there's so much information there to process, but it's inspiring, and very educational. (4:08 - 4:13) So yeah, we're right in the middle of that. Amazing. Unslaved. (4:13 - 4:23) Yeah, looking forward to checking that out for sure. It sounds very interesting. And I just want to reflect, I love how inspired you remain when it comes to your work. (4:24 - 5:06) Can you speak a little bit into that process, and what this work, what pursuing your interests and passions and diving deep, what that does for your vitality generally, as you continue to, I guess, progress through life? Because it's something that's really meaningful to me, just seeing how inspired you continue to be on this path. Well, Joel, as we've talked before, this is not a matter of recreation or occupation for me, it's been vocational from day one. And that means that all sorts of other avenues that could have made me a lot more money, you know, including music, and a lot of other things have all sort of taken, they either haven't manifested, or I've willfully, you know, turned away. (5:07 - 5:29) And vocation is something you don't do, it's something that does you, it owns you. It's more connected to duty in a way, although there's some very not good, you know, sort of applications of duty. But no, in the purest sense, in the purest, highest sense, it is a duty. (5:30 - 6:00) To what? I don't know. Earlier in my life, I thought, in terms of, you know, mankind, humankind, you know, I've lost all the coordinates of that, I just perform like a robot. So, it's all in the rear view mirror, whether it's pleasure, whether it's pain, whether it's satisfying me, whether, oh, tomorrow, you know, what's going to happen tomorrow? Will we be trending? Will we not be trending? Will I be more popular? This is all long, it's so far in the rear view mirror, I don't even remember those days. (6:00 - 6:04) It's just pure function, pure duty. Yeah. And so, yeah. (6:04 - 6:11) And, but yes, to answer your question, I just live for the next project. Yeah. And almost nothing else. (6:11 - 6:22) My life is entirely about, you know, see, remember there was decades of the research and then you get this little window to come on and talk to people. So, although people go, you've been around for a long time. No, to me, it doesn't seem like that at all. (6:22 - 6:37) And there's still so much work to do. So, all of that research, I'm just going to do it and let it sit on the shelf. No, this window is, so this is why I get the passion because I've just been given this little moment to get it out to a worldwide audience. (6:38 - 6:51) Man, you can't help but being enthused by that because there's so much brilliant research there to bring out. And I get totally thrilled when I know I'm sharing that with other people, you know, on podcasts just like this. Love it, Michael. (6:51 - 7:07) Well, speaking of projects, you know, you released a recent book, Existentialism and the Search for Meaning. You've been talking about existentialism for a while. What inspired this new iteration? Oh, it started in 1993. (7:08 - 7:20) Had done some philosophy before that, but wouldn't lean on that. A couple of night class type things, you know. But in 1993, I was checking into some, it was really poetry. (7:20 - 7:38) I was studying at the time, just left for America in September of 89. And one book I had by a German poet. And again, the usual story, loving it, loving the poetry, but not understanding a fucking word, right? I mean, you know, this is the way it is. (7:38 - 7:50) And this had been since I was six years old, reading William Blake, same thing. Pretty, very pretty words, tiger, tiger, burning bright and all that stuff. What does it mean, right? No, sorry. (7:50 - 8:15) Big fucking, big, big, big, big strike through there, right? So it was the same in 93, loving what I was reading, but under no clue where to go. You can't go to other poets, because even though the other poets might be influenced by such and such, you know, Rilke or Hölderlin or Schiller or whatever, their poetry isn't helping you explicate. It's just more poetry. (8:15 - 8:34) T.S. Eliot could be influenced by what, William Blake, right? Or the American Wallace Stevens or, you know, somebody like that, or Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes. They can be influenced by a previous poet, but you're not going to find in their work an explanation of the poet. That's what I'm looking for. (8:35 - 8:45) I'm looking for an explanation, but you don't look to other poetry for that. They're influenced by it, but they're not going to tell you anything. They're not going to give you an insight into the meaning of the poetry. (8:45 - 9:14) So where do you turn for that? Philosophy. I didn't know that at the time, right? But it became obvious that philosophy, what? What? But yeah, the deeper poets, and for goodness sake, particularly William Blake, every line, you know, and then he was down on the philosophers of his own time. He was always firing darts at John Locke and Isaac Newton and Boyle and Hobbes and any of these materialists. (9:15 - 9:27) So I'm thinking he's already not in favor of philosophy. Ah, but he has a philosophy of his own, you see. So in 1993, now I'm tackling this German stuff, this German poetry, and I'm back in the same hole. (9:28 - 9:44) Oh, no, don't tell me I got to go to philosophy. But it was, there's nothing you can do, right? So this is, you know, to answer your question, Eurasmus, is how it started. I didn't want to, believe you, me, and it's been a struggle for 30, 32 years since that point, but it was inevitable. (9:45 - 10:10) If you really love the poetry, you're going to have to dig very deep because there's something extraordinary about that poetry. And to really know it, I'm afraid to have it explicated didactically, yeah, I'm afraid you do need to then, you know, go to the German philosophers or people like that. And what I did, yes, it came very, very slowly, right? But it came. (10:11 - 10:38) This is the most important thing. And so then that inspired me, you know, and then later on, taking notes, you know, doing a lot of articles that you may have seen through the years, but finally it became obvious that, you know, probably should write a book on it. Who was the first existentialist that you came across? We, in 1988, I took a basic class and I took it the following year in Ireland and Belfast. (10:38 - 10:56) And we studied Nietzsche, who, although not an existentialist, is loosely considered a proto-existentialist because he toys with some of the ideas. You know, technically speaking, it's Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. And maybe he, yeah, in the 18th century, he started it. (10:57 - 11:06) And technically, you know, if you stretch it, then there's a guy, the famous mathematician, Blaise Pascal, and both men were Christians. We should note that. Both men were Christians. (11:06 - 11:30) There's a large myth out there that existentialism is all about absurdity and bleakness and atheism, you know, and that's the way, of course, the public has received it. But as a matter of fact, over 80%, and this includes Fyodor Dostoevsky and people like that, you know, these people were Christians, amazingly. So, again, there's a huge myth about that. (11:30 - 11:49) But yeah, I wasn't really paying attention, but the Nietzsche stuff that we studied in that class would have been about the first, you know, yeah. And then I don't know how it got to Heidegger in 93. I guess this connection I was telling you about, about you're not going to understand the poetry that you're reading. (11:50 - 12:11) I don't know how I heard this, but I heard that, you know, Heidegger was deeply into these people and in his works, you'd find this scene, like a gold, gold digger, you would find this scene of rich ore, and then you'd have it, and that was intriguing, you know. So, there was a lot of obstacles. Yeah. (12:12 - 12:23) I got fired from many jobs because all I would do would read all day, you know, in these places at work and whatever, it was terrible. But we won't go into all of that. But again, as I say, very gradually, it started to come. (12:23 - 12:31) It started to fall into place, but it was meticulous. It was extremely meticulous and hugely dedicated through the years. Cool. (12:31 - 12:53) I guess for a listener who has no idea about this term existentialism, how do we begin on a basic level to flesh that out? Like, i.e., what is existentialism? Maybe we can start there. Oh, well, the main thing to think about is the word existence, you know. We rarely think about it. (12:53 - 12:57) We're in it. We do it. And, but we don't think about it. (12:57 - 13:07) It's invisible by proximity. We exist, but we've never unpacked that phenomenologically. So, that's what it's about. (13:07 - 13:30) It's heavily based in individualism and the question of whether that's even a sound basis of life, you know, and that's all weighed up because it may not be. It may not be, hey, we came out of tribes. What about mother nature where the individual doesn't appear to have any role at all? It's all about the genus and the species and all of this. (13:31 - 13:48) So, okay. What about that? So, a great deal to do with the one against the many. And this is what, for me anyway, I don't know if that's a good definition of what existentialism is, but for me, that was the intriguing thing because I came to existentialism through Ayn Rand, a very non-existential person. (13:48 - 14:02) But there's a tiny little bridge between her work and it's a very valuable one. And it's this thing about the one against the many. Now, she wouldn't like to be called an existentialist because existentialism tended in her mind to be left-wing and that was a big no-no. (14:02 - 14:12) You know, she'd grown up in Soviet Russia and was highly spooked by anything collectivistic, socialistic. And that's right. I am too. (14:12 - 14:18) I agree with that. And I'm not left-wing either. But because things are sometimes left-wing doesn't stop me studying it though. (14:20 - 14:38) They may have something very interesting to say about life and I think they do, right? But as I said, it's wrong to consider existentialism just purely a left-wing and political in that way. Some of the top existentialists were that. There's no question about that. (14:38 - 14:44) But many, many, many more were not. So, that has to be borne in mind. But it's about existence. (14:44 - 14:52) It's about death. Largely, right? And it's non-metaphysical, I suppose, would be another way to look at it. They're suspicious. (14:52 - 15:05) This did come out of Nietzsche, by the way. This is where Nietzsche comes in, as I mentioned earlier, and even Schopenhauer to that degree. They were suspicious of large, abstract questions that philosophy seemed to have been preoccupied with for 2,000 years. (15:06 - 15:27) And even materialism, it sounds like a paradox, but it's true. Materialism is interested in some of the larger metaphysical questions that the existentialists said they can't even be answered. So, why are you bothering with it? I can give you an example in a minute if you want, but there's these big, big questions and they can't be answered. (15:28 - 16:03) So, why are you guys all relying on reason all the time? You know, science stroke reason, right? Of course, we know that you could easily rebut that. You could easily come back and go, what would happen if we didn't have science? What's wrong with you people? Are you anti-scientific? No, it's not about that. It's about what have you done to sell yourselves to religion, to science, that something may have fallen by the wayside of your humanity, your essential existence that remains forever unseen to you, right? While you commit to these paradigms. (16:03 - 16:32) Of course, nobody could understand what it's all about, right? The religious person couldn't understand it anymore than the science group. They went, what is all this gobbledygook, you know? And so, the existentialists said, look, you scientists have thrown away God, haven't you? And they went, well, okay, we concede, yeah, we've kind of, we've thrown away God. They go, all right, what's so good about that? And then they turned to the religious guy and goes, you've thrown away nature. (16:34 - 16:57) You too are responsible for throwing out huge chunks of what it means to be alive. And now you want to get in my face? So that, they came in with a secret left hook that nobody knew about, right? And they said, well, let's further explore that. But the other thing that was important about existentialism is that it caught on. (16:58 - 17:11) No philosophical movement ever had caught on amongst painters, writers, poets, and musicians, but existentialism did. In fact, many people know it through plays. Some of them were even playwrights. (17:11 - 17:24) Like, as I just mentioned, Fodor Dostoevsky, one of the greatest novelists that ever lived. Gabriel Marcel was a poet, musician, and playwright, exceptional. Even the left-wing Jean-Paul Sartre wrote novels. (17:24 - 17:45) Albert Camus wrote novels. And many other quasi-existentialists went out and wrote novels. My God, in fact, you can't even count the amount of influence that it had over surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, and all the other movement, even reaching to America. (17:46 - 18:06) Yeah. So when someone defines themselves as an existentialist, what are they saying about themselves? What are the characteristics that might make someone an existentialist? Is it simply that their primary focus is on being and existence as opposed to... Yes, yes. What separates them? It's thinking. (18:08 - 18:28) What is unique about me? I have a very short life to live. How am I making my mark? Am I just going along to get along? Or am I doing something that expresses myself? This is why it caught on amongst the younger generation in those days and was films. Yeah. (18:28 - 18:44) I mentioned a few of the best in the book, but there are hundreds of black and white films, and even modern day film, Blade Runner. The whole thing ends on an existential note in that final conversation on the rooftop. That's pure existentialism. (18:45 - 18:59) And it's there in many other movies, you would be amazed. So, yeah, it's just this idea of differentiation. Because I'm born of a mother and I'm in a family constellation. (19:01 - 19:17) Isn't there something very odd about that? If I'm born out of the cells of my mother's body, when I'm a child in the womb, that's called cloning. And if my mother has two or three other children, we should all be robots. We should be all clones of her. (19:17 - 19:29) We're literally built, our physicality is built out of the cells and even you would say even some of the consciousness of the mother. But guess what? I'm born an individual. All right. (19:29 - 19:53) So where did this angel, where's this moment where this invisible angel came along, went bing and made me what I am that's totally different than my brothers and sisters and not even remotely like my mother? Yeah. That's not a mystery to you? The physicality, the materialist can't explain this, right? So that's why it's not materialism. And these atheist existentialists, they're way off the mark. (19:53 - 20:06) I don't know what they think they are. So don't judge, don't judge what existentialism is by those twogs. I come out of a womb in which I should just be a clone in every sense of the word. (20:06 - 20:22) And yet I'm not, how do I account for that? You know, so that would be the kind of thing that look at no metaphysics, no abstract and if that comes in, it's really downstream. It may come in, but it's downstream. I want to look at the actual concrete facts of my life. (20:23 - 20:34) And then if I do commit to science or I do commit to religion, what are the consequences of that? It's not that I don't do it. Hey, maybe I have a leaning towards being an engineer or an electrician. I'm not going to stop that. (20:34 - 21:03) Maybe I like chemistry and I want to do it, but I'm going to do it with this other level of reflections, what Gabriel Marcel calls secondary reflection. The primary reflection is just when you're this close up, you're melded and welded with the life that you experience every day. And there's no detachment, no separation where I'm looking at everything I do, but in this sort of detached, but deeply meaningful perspective. (21:03 - 21:10) How do I fit into a larger context? Most people don't do that. So whatever existentialism is, it doesn't matter. The whole human race couldn't be concerned. (21:10 - 21:28) They're in only primary reflection and they don't have this quality of stepping back and seeing themselves in more of the whole, the way the movie say fearless with Jeff Bridges, you know, portrays or Paris, Texas or something like that. They don't, you know, this is different, but there is that perspective. It does exist. (21:29 - 21:48) It doesn't stop you being part of the crowd or part of society, but it's a slightly different perspective that you're taking whilst you're admitted. Yeah. Michael, we talk about this mystery of what makes a person individual and that they're born in a family and yet they come out differently. (21:48 - 22:14) Like you're a student of and a teacher of the hermetic arts and more esoteric things out there. I'm into human design, astrology. Like what role do these systems play in like the existentialism as well? Like the, what does it mean to be alive and to be unique, to be an individual? Can you comment on that? Yeah, I've never, I don't think there is a connection really on the whole. (22:14 - 22:24) Those things would be looked at, I guess, suspiciously, you know, or they just are bracketed. They don't play a direct role. If anything, they would come under the same rubric as religion. (22:26 - 22:35) They'd get the same treatment. They'd be saying, well, this, these are occult practices. This is a form of religious belief, you know, and yeah, we can look at that, whether it's meaningful or not. (22:37 - 22:47) But it wouldn't play a direct role, especially for these Christian existentialists I was talking about. You can imagine, right? They wouldn't want anything much to do with that. Yeah. (22:48 - 23:07) It makes sense because I think to be a great artist, you have to be a great rebel at heart. And it kind of makes sense that the artists and the playwrights and the great novelists would be drawn to this because it is the rebellious path, in a sense. It is, you know, it is like, I'm not into the status quo. (23:07 - 23:18) I'm not into what the crowd is doing and where they're going. For me to really bring something forth that is unique and great, I have to consider what others aren't considering. And that is, I guess, the question of my being. (23:20 - 23:22) Definitely. Definitely. This is exactly right. (23:23 - 23:43) Heidegger went so far as to say that there's something repulsive. Mankind has found something repulsive in the question of being. And the whole philosophical tradition decided way back, you know, the time of Aristotle, to simply not deal with it. (23:43 - 23:47) Of course, he had to prove that. He had to make his case. Not everybody believed that. (23:47 - 24:13) But he seemed to make a strong case that the question of being is simply not being asked. And that philosophy went in a different direction. I can summarize it by, as I do in the book, by saying that the metaphysician, from Aristotle's time onwards, start preoccupying himself with the whatness of things. (24:13 - 24:25) What are they? Whereas the real question of the existentialist is that they are. So it's not what things are. It's that they are. (24:25 - 24:43) Why are they there as opposed to not there? And there was this famous aphorism that was used multiple times in the past. And then Heidegger reprised it in one of his works, one of his talks that was transcribed into his book. And he said, why is there something rather than nothing? It had been asked by Leibniz. (24:44 - 24:59) It had been asked by Schelling, the famous German idealist, specifically. But then here comes Heidegger and makes it central to his teachings. Why is there something rather than nothing? And there's a lot that hangs on that question. (25:00 - 25:11) And what it is doing is trying to explicate that something exists. Now, again, it sounds abstract. But wait a minute, doesn't it apply to you? Well, Heidegger said it damn well does. (25:11 - 25:19) Why am I here? I didn't elect to be born. But I find myself thrown into this world. And then I'm lumbered with it. (25:20 - 25:32) Now, I do see myself getting along with it, just like my son or daughter when I give birth. They seem to be just climbing the walls, right? There's this efficacy. They don't shrink back and hide, right? Yeah. (25:32 - 25:46) They are full-blown adjusted somehow, despite their physical and mental inferiority. They're reaching out to the world. So we do have that. (25:46 - 26:02) But the thing is, I didn't elect to be born. So that's a huge mystery right there. What if it's possible that we did elect to be born? Is that a possibility? Oh, of course it is. (26:02 - 26:10) I mean, again, remember, we're talking about some of these people being deeply religious. Naturally, they would say it's from God. But see, the thing is that that is such a cliche. (26:11 - 26:30) That's such an obvious label that you can rely on, right? The existentialist is trying to pull away from these collectively accepted standard quotient. Yeah, it could be. We're not saying throw it away, abandon it forever. (26:30 - 26:57) We're just parking. We're just bracketing it and saying, yeah, but if that's not the case, would that then describe? Because if it was the case and we knew it, why are we drenched in anxiety? The anxiety that's there underneath, you know, the normal flow of life kind of doesn't really work that way, right? We're drenched in it. So then we want to now study, shift the game to studying this anxiety, which no philosophy had ever done. (26:59 - 27:08) This, what they call ontological dread. So ontology is stuff that you don't choose. Like I just give you one example, right? We're thrown into the world without choice. (27:08 - 27:16) That's ontological. Death is another one. No matter what science is out there, no matter what religion says, our individual private personal life ends. (27:18 - 27:27) That's ontological. Nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it, even God. We're gone, right? People die all around us, sometimes violently, sometimes very young. (27:27 - 27:51) What? You see? So these are ontological. So this became very important to the existentialists. If there's some two, if we've isolated two ontological states, maybe there's more, you know, so they start looking for, and then they come up with facticity, you know, and a few other things that become very, very important to their philosophy. (27:51 - 28:20) And one of the things that they came up, there's more an element of choice in this one, but it's still somewhat, it's on the alignment between the ontic and the ontological is this immersion in the crowd. Crowd consciousness and this immersion in the everyday, the gray everyday anonymous became a huge part of it and was very, very attractive to, as I say, these artists and these filmmakers and poets, this part. It's only one part of existentialism, but it became very, very, very important. (28:21 - 28:25) And of course it did. Look at the industrialization of Europe at the time. Look at the world wars. (28:26 - 28:36) Look at the mass mind. And then along comes media, the television. And one of the most painful things was commercials, you know, the whole advertising nightmare. (28:37 - 29:12) And so this had to be addressed in modernity, you know, questions of modernity. Where is the individual fit in all of this? Can I determine who I am amid all of this panoply of images of who I should be? And Joseph von Sternberg, you know, the list goes on of the fantastic directors who were adamantly wanting to portray this anonymity of the human being and then being overwhelmed, you know, by it all, all the images of what you should be. Then who the hell am I actually became a massive and still really still is there. (29:12 - 29:24) It's in the underground still, you know, so there's all these things came to bear. Yeah. Can you talk more about the anxiety element of this? Yeah, yeah. (29:24 - 29:44) You know, I know you talk about like fear of death versus the anxiety that comes from just like, what does it take to be a true self, an authentic individual? Well, that is connected to death. See, the word authenticity, you can't separate it from what Heidegger called being toward death. It's ontological again, since death is a reality. (29:44 - 29:58) Oh, and another one would be time, the very movement of the three moments of time. He called it the three ecstasies of time based on the Greek meaning of the word. But we don't need to get into all of that, right? These three stages of time, past, present, and future, they're ontological as well. (29:59 - 30:07) And using his theories of time, he was able to get that crowbar underneath most metaphysics. It's what he wanted to do. And this was his means of doing it. (30:07 - 30:27) So I'm glad you asked about that. But specifically to what you're talking about, he said that the human being, no other animal can do this, is project their mind forward. It's called protention, in time, out of where we are now. (30:27 - 30:47) And his word for this was transcendence. See, outside of its religious and spiritual, this is why it was so like, whoa, whoa, what? It's like ice water over everyone, right? He spoke of transcendence, but not in any religious connotation. The transcendence that man enjoys is definitely a real thing, but it's temporal transcendence. (30:47 - 31:02) We are the beings who can step out of our now, project our minds forward to a not now, in the future, and see what that beholds. And for him, the most important tense is the future. It's everything. (31:02 - 31:17) And no one had ever spoken of this before. A little bit, maybe Henri Bersan, the French philosopher, but nobody as deeply as Heidegger did. But of course, one thing that happens when you project your mind forward comes this possibility that you're not going to be around for very long. (31:18 - 31:34) One day, everything that you're engaged in, in this extremely existential, phenomenological, embedded way, those are possibilities that you dare for, and that you enjoy, and that you're welded to. One day, that's going to stop without your election. So there's another source of anxiety. (31:35 - 31:45) We have a podcast called, I think, The 10 Forms of Anxiety. When you do a deep dive into existentialism, you come out with like 10, 11, I don't know. We try to cover them all. (31:45 - 32:07) I'm just talking here about one or two of them. The anxiety of feeling thrown into the world does give you a pause, even though children quickly seem to overwrite it. No, underneath that, there is this apprehension of the fragile soul that's sort of like, where the hell am I? What is all this? So there's an anxiety from that, a mood of anxiety. (32:08 - 32:23) Then, of course, the contemplation of death. In the middle between those two, there's others, like your will clashing against other wills causes anxiety. There's more than two or three of these. (32:23 - 32:36) But the mega one is this temporal finitude, being toward death. But back to the point, there can be no authenticity. It's just a word. (32:36 - 32:53) It's just a fashion statement, unless the person squarely faces up to this finitude and rebounds from the future back to the present as a different person. So imagine it's like an elastic band or a time machine. The authentic person must project his mind into the future. (32:56 - 33:11) He must squarely face the fact of his non-existence and the inevitability of this nothingness outside of any religious stabilizers. Come back. And when he comes back, he's not the same. (33:12 - 33:43) Again, it's like a movie Fearless, like a step-by-step breakdown of this. Fantastic film, right? Is the point that in our contemplation of death, sincerely, we become more authentic because the social norms, the everydayness that Heidegger called it, it becomes intolerable, in a sense, as we contemplate the finite. Yes, it becomes intolerable to the point of we are catapulted out of it. (33:44 - 34:02) Just by the simple exercise of realizing how brief things are, something in me, and its conscience is what it is, now will not allow me to go along to get along like one of the fish in the shoal, one of the sheep in the field. It just doesn't. And my field would be my family, my surroundings. (34:02 - 34:29) So this can have a tremendous seismic and very, in one way, destructive feel. It can make me feel very fragile and dissociated and disenfranchised, therefore more anxiety. But like Ayn Rand indicates, and Heidegger would agree, hey, shouldn't you be in anxiety if you've thrown away your soul? Forget about death. (34:29 - 34:42) Your immersion in the collective as a non-entity, a gray, anonymous being, what the hell? You should be deeply anxious from that alone. Yeah. Yeah. (34:42 - 34:57) That's why you keep seeing all the distractions, all the alcohol abuse, all the drug abuse, all the sex addiction. Everything is to keep that reality from coming up to the surface to even face it. The root is down here, but we flee it. (34:58 - 35:32) I mean, okay, yeah, my book will adopt a slightly tangential aspect of this, because although Heidegger was adamant that this thing we've just described, projecting into the future and coming back will make a person authentic, we look around us all the time and don't find anybody doing it. The thing we just mentioned just now about you having anxiety by being immersed in the crowd, yeah, but we don't see too many people radically becoming authentic because of that. So wait a minute. (35:32 - 36:08) Does this mean that you throw existentialism out? Or is there something we've misread? Or there's a fresh... That's why I thought I wrote my book for, right? That maybe there's a new perspective that some of these other guys may have missed or didn't explore as much. You know, and so I come at it like that. I'll explain the party line, you know, and the textbook definition of authenticity, which we've just done, but then it leaves a clever person to say, but I don't see any of it. (36:08 - 36:13) Death is surrounding us. Other people we know die. But I don't see no authenticity. (36:14 - 36:21) I don't see anybody rattled by that. The closest we would know to it is a funeral, but they all can't wait to get back and have a booze-up. Yeah. (36:22 - 36:30) And turn over the channel. And you can do this for all the other forms of anxiety. None of those forms of anxiety seem really to do the trick. (36:30 - 36:46) What the hell is going on? Well, that's a legitimate question. And so, you know, my book explores new angles. They're quasi existentialistic, you know, but I bring in a lot of other thinkers to try and dig deep on that and work that out. (36:47 - 36:55) And it's for each reader to think, you know, to themselves after they've read it, to see whether this makes sense or not. But it's an ongoing thing. You know, existentialism is not dead. (36:57 - 37:18) Postmodernism and progressivism and what have you, you know, critical theory may have got the headlights, the limelight, but these existential matters haven't gone away. Michael, so often you hear the term authentic, authenticity, authentic self, authentic path. I know it's something that we talk about. (37:18 - 37:41) Like, what is that to you? Like, what is an authentic person to you? Well, to me, it's just somebody, again, who's done this work, who is very, very preoccupied by the brevity of their existence, that I will not be. That the ones I love, when they're gone, they're gone forever. They never return. (37:44 - 38:27) What does this reverberate, you see, through my life? And then I watch myself going, because this is so dreadful, impactful, what do I do? Do I become a Buddhist? I watch this. You see, I watch the whole movement. Am I driven to the local church or the local? What do I do? Do I want to join the Mormons now or, you know, the one percenters or something? You know, do I read some new age books now? Do I start thinking about life after death and NDE? And, you know, what am I doing? And then where's the judgment? Am I self-judging that? Do I not do it? You know, so a real self-observation comes in. (38:28 - 38:41) And if you have this self-observation, then obviously, many other things that people are involved in are no longer your interest. You're a very meditative person. You think deeply. (38:41 - 39:11) And your relationships with others are going to drastically upgrade because you understand the miracle of it, how brief it is. This whole Hegelian thing, you know, where most relationships start at just a master-slave level, you've just broken through that, mate. I don't know if Hegel worked that out, but you will not want master-slave primitive relationships with people when you are fully aware of this uniqueness. (39:13 - 39:44) And the things that we've just discussed, you will self-transcend and you will be much more meditative and contemplative and not so embedded and welded into those things that are inauthentic like science and religion for all their benefits. You will not be immersed in those things to such an extent. And the wonder and the awe of life, you know, again, just like the movie Fearless shows, that you will become more of an artist, if anything, than these other things. (39:44 - 39:59) Doesn't mean you park them forever and they're not there. They are there, but they're no longer preoccupying your attention because you're no longer trying to use them to flee away from self, from individuality, which the collective, of course, is the primary way that that's done. Yeah. (39:59 - 40:19) And it's an interesting kind of paradox because it seems to me like the only way that someone comes to genuinely value these things that we're talking about is through immersion in the mundane and in the menial and in the grey and in the everydayness and becoming sick of it. Right? Right. This can happen as well. (40:20 - 40:28) And usually is one of the ways that people will move towards something. It will sing to them. You know, it will be very attractive. (40:29 - 40:32) Yeah. Oh, yes. There's no question about that. (40:32 - 40:38) But you're right. It comes from then a certain fatigue with the everyday. There's no question about that. (40:38 - 41:05) Das Man, the one, he transforms into Dasein, which is being there, right? Being here, a greater sense of grounding in the here and not allowing his mind. And again, I think what happens really, the way I define it is that the self-deceptiveness, which is rampant, decreases in the authentic person. His penchant for self-deception that we just explained one of them. (41:05 - 41:15) Hey, I really want to lose myself in the collective, but that looks bad optically. So I say I'm a scientist. I'm working for the best of betterment of the human race. (41:15 - 41:19) Oh, fucking brilliant. Did it. I'm not a collectivist. (41:19 - 41:22) I don't think like anybody else. I'm a scientist. I'm trying to help the human race. (41:23 - 41:36) And they have these window dressings and camouflage to the skies, what's under it, which is existential. But I know that that sounds bad or my conscience berates me. It floods me with a form of, you know, anxiety, legitimate anxiety. (41:36 - 41:47) Can't have that. So I'll create this mask where I'm, you know, I know I'm a benevolent humanitarian philanthropist. I'm selflessly working to cure cancer. (41:48 - 41:54) Well, there you go. Look at me in my white coat. You see all this fucking chicanery, all of this shit. (41:55 - 42:08) And the fact that some of it yields benefits that only helps the inauthentic person. Because the moment that you broach this question, they can be pointing to the umpteen things that do come out of it good. But the existentialist is not fooled by this. (42:09 - 42:20) He knows that it can be based on self-deception. That's why half the fucking scientists are all alcoholics and deeply lonely people. They become to rely on the institution. (42:20 - 42:28) They become institutionalized. And it's no different with the religious types. They have their own, you know, balloon animals to worship and their own hobby horses. (42:29 - 42:58) But the existentialist is interested in peeling away these falsities. Another one would be psychiatric, seeing through that lie, you know, big pharma and all that. Do you think like, sorry, do you think all these side paths that people take, whether it's scientism or new ageism or whatever it might be, are a symptom of the individual not having sincerely contemplated death? Like they've turned to face death and they've gotten scared from it. (42:58 - 43:06) And so they're looking for a multitude of ways to kind of skirt or tacitly avoid it. Sure. And we even know that science is doing that. (43:06 - 43:09) They're all into all this transhumanism. Yeah. Oh, yes. (43:09 - 43:24) Once you've got that piece, I don't know, some people smile at it, you know, rightly so just, you know what it is. So you're smiling at it and others are like reeling in tragedy. Oh my God, is that what it's all about? So I don't know, I can't, I can't for anybody's reaction. (43:24 - 43:35) Maybe it's a bit of both. And most of us are like, you have to smile and you have to cry at the same time when you see all of this inauthenticity. But the main thing is to be notice it in yourself and how you raise your children. (43:38 - 43:50) Because this is a ubiquitous parent, you know, this ties into parentism. I've written books on that. And this is where a lot of the problems start because there's a need to overcome and crush the individualism of children. (43:50 - 44:07) But again, that will be done through self-deceptive means. You know, nobody who's a tyrant like that, except the most grotesque versions of it, most people have the tyranny, but they've window dressed it just like in the same way I'm talking about. And they'll lie to themselves, they'll lie to the public, they'll lie to their children, you know, about why it's being done. (44:08 - 44:33) So again, this needs to be, you know, they think that they're using the children to process their own anxieties that we've just spoken of, you know, because this anxiety has to go somewhere. And if it's not going into the authentic, self-transformative form, right, which you should do, well, it's going to go somewhere. And, you know, where do you think it goes, right? Into all the dysfunction that we know in the family unit is based in it. (44:33 - 44:48) Yeah. A parent can yo-yo a child and make them feel so anxious. A tyrannical type of parent can use the fact that children have this ontological anxiety and they can add to it, giving love, pulling it away, giving love, pulling it away. (44:49 - 45:01) All this caper. We could have hours and hours and hours to talk about that. Hey, Michael, do you think it's, let's say, a prerequisite to have an intimate relationship with nature? Oh, yeah. (45:02 - 45:17) To, I guess, escape from the crowd, das man into das ein. And when I say intimate, I mean, like, more of a relationship as opposed to, oh, I'm just going in there to have some fun. No, no. (45:18 - 45:37) It's a central motif in Heidegger and in Marcel and others, central. In fact, you see, they have bandanas, a trinity. And eigenwelt is the self, mitwelt is the world at large, you know, the society, what we would call society and culture. (45:38 - 45:47) And then there's one called umwelt, around world. And that's nature, which couches the others. You see? And so man is a trinity. (45:49 - 46:12) And the incarceration that we have in not just cities, but really ugly environments. Yeah, this is something that Heidegger found unimaginably horrific, you know, really grotesque and is a symptom, a thing to look for about how nature is treated, is a symptom. And he was not in favor of technology, you know, and these kinds of things. (46:14 - 46:36) So yes, you're right, absolutely, for sure. Well, and also too, like if you have that deeper intimate relationship with nature, it's hard to escape contemplation of death because it's around you, you know, even if you're understanding the seasons and you're a gardener or whatever the case may be, like it's right there in front of you. So I feel like that impacts you on a deep level. (46:37 - 47:09) I argue in the book, you see, that it's so important because when we talked about this existential anxiety, is there actually medicine for it? And I say there is. It's the natural world. The umwelt and our relationship to the beauty of the world, you know, from an artistic point of view, is one of the, it is the only thing that really can equalize and make sense of the suffering that comes from the anxiety. (47:10 - 47:28) I'm not doubting that certain relationships with people can, but as we know, relationships with people can ramp up the anxiety, if anything. Mostly that's what we see, right? So don't know about that, right? I'm not discounting that some relationships can lower anxiety, but come on, come on. We know that mostly it's the opposite. (47:28 - 47:39) But with nature, it's very different. There is something in nature of an apothecary, you know, to pick up your point. And yes, Heidegger knew this too. (47:39 - 47:54) I think any of the same guys did as well. And they knew that anxiety will always be with us. But when you live in close proximity to nature, there's something now at least to countermand it, something to put on the other pan, you know, to help you equalize it. (47:54 - 48:07) So you're not drenched in it. But urban man, one dimensional man, institutionalized man, he's going to be swallowed by it like being swallowed by a dragon, a monster. Eventually, he will subdue. (48:07 - 48:15) That's where Big Pharma comes in. Remember, we talked about that earlier. Big Pharma comes in knowing that this is the case in most people that the anxiety levels are off the charts. (48:15 - 48:34) So they step in with their artificial happiness. So to that point, you know, and it seems as though obviously Heidegger is very central to existentialism. He's kind of removing the barrier between subject and object, right? And so like being becomes inseparable from nature in that sense. (48:38 - 48:57) Yeah. A lot of his early work and fame came from this attack on dualism, Cartesian dualism, Kantian dualism of this hard subject versus object metaphysical sort of paradigms, you know, which he didn't like. You're right. (48:58 - 49:18) However, having said that, I argue in one of the chapters that he was himself a dualist. If you grasp the essential movement of his life where he was into being and nothingness, isn't that dualism right there? Where you have being, you must have nothingness. So those people who harp upon this non-dualistic thing, they're right only to a point. (49:18 - 49:41) He wanted to get rid of all the other, you know, lesser important iterations of dualism so he could get around to the heart of it to explore the stuff we've been talking about, you know, so strange paradox there. Yeah. Michael, if I can ask you, like, how do you personally cultivate your own relationship with nature? Yeah. (49:42 - 50:01) Well, growing up in Belfast, you know, I was closer to nature than you mostly get in other places, you know, although of course the tragedy of it is that the Irish couldn't care less about it and they've been tearing it up. There's nothing left. But in the early days, you know, we grew up really close to nature. (50:02 - 50:19) And so I think that that's about it. You know, we had parks and also just very deeply into poetry and art. So yeah, a lot of it came naturally, probably, you know, responsible. (50:19 - 50:39) I don't know if it was where we lived or I just was always very, very close to nature. And if I had my choice, I would be, you know, even more involved in it. Sometimes it becomes difficult, you know, if you don't have your own garden or you don't have access to it. (50:40 - 50:51) But yeah, I've always tried to get away to the ocean or a natural place that's not too trammeled. It's getting more and more difficult. A lot of people are noticing that. (50:52 - 51:13) Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious, you know, as we continue on this path, how as we become more urbanized, you know, what tools or, you know, what strategies people have to kind of maintain that connection and keep that up full, you know, particularly as we continue to advance, quote unquote. (51:13 - 51:26) Yeah. Well, I think I totally believe that the more that you're in nature, the more authentic you will be. You know, and as I said, there's a big theory there that whatever comes out of your relationship with nature is a counterbalance. (51:26 - 51:41) It's a antidote to the anxieties, plural, you know, you see, it's all about the damage we do to ourselves. It's very related into self sadism. Most of these anxieties, by the way. (51:42 - 52:07) So if you're in nature and living more languidly and you're close to water and animals and the open sky, I mean, what's the point of being self sadistic? You're probably going to let go of that. You know, you're going to put distance between you and your upbringing and your family and these other images of mankind that the media, you know, put into your mind about who you should be and what you should be like and how you should be beating yourself up all the time. You know, these things will obviously fade away. (52:07 - 52:42) You're not going to give a damn because you're fulfilled by tilling the soil, by growing things, looking after animals, you know, and all of this, there's going to be something more wholesome comes out. And I think that you'll be much more attuned to the voice of your conscience rather than the voice of your anxiety and the voice of your superego. Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel ever since Sophie and I moved from Santa Monica to Topanga and I've kind of taken on a personal relationship with bringing life back to the land and getting into gardening and permaculture and having chickens and, you know, even more animals here and cats. (52:43 - 52:58) It's just, I can't imagine. It's non-negotiable for me now, you know, especially like working online, you know, we have an online business and we spend a lot of time online, which is great. Technology allows us to have this conversation, technology allows us to impact people around the world. (52:58 - 53:31) But like, that's my space, you know, when I'm outside to get my fingers in the dirt and to feel the wind against my cheek and to plant a seed and to see it grow. I mean, I get so excited just to see things sprouting from the ground, especially, you know, this is our fifth year here and starting to have a more intimate relationship with the seasons too. And understanding the process that they go, like the plants and the fruit trees and everything goes through is just, it adds such a value to my life and it inspires contemplation just by being there. (53:32 - 53:39) I can't not contemplate like being in nature. That's just my personal experience. Oh, absolutely. (53:40 - 53:51) I very much envy that. When I came to America in 89, I'd been there before, but for the longest day was in 89. And of course, I made a beeline for the California coastline. (53:51 - 54:22) We have to work full time, but any moment we got off, a friend of mine, we would drive to Half Moon Bay, you know, in the Pacific coast road and try to swim. And even in the middle of winter, you know, because, okay, there was nature in Ireland to a certain degree, but there was also terrible violence. Remember, I grew up during the troubles and effectively this meant that nobody was out in the streets after seven o'clock at night in those days. (54:22 - 54:31) It was really rough. People could never imagine it. So your access was slightly cut off, you know, because of the danger there. (54:31 - 54:48) If you were walking in the street, the police and army might've thought you were an IRA guy or something up to no good, you know, and you could even be arrested. So it was tricky. Or you might even run into a gang and get your head kicked in, which is more frequent than you could possibly imagine over there, you know? So, yeah. (54:48 - 55:04) So when I got to America, I went, great, you know, let's head up to the Hills, let's go to the forests. So it was kind of a liberating experience to be in California at that time. And I made nature very, very important, you know, prominent. (55:05 - 55:32) I can never get enough of it. Can you speak more into Heidegger's ideas in being and time? Because I feel like many people that go to grasp Heidegger and it can be complex, but also feel like it can be quite simple. So I'm just wondering if there's any further comments you have in terms of Heidegger's central work in terms of being and time and like, what is time? What is being? What is perception? Things like that. (55:32 - 56:01) The way I usually come at it is, remember we talked about the deconstruction of the previous metaphysical teachings and even materialism. Let me go into that maybe. You see, running down through that strain before existentialism came online was this materialism versus idealism, that, you know, dyad in which the materialists said that the mind is blank and anything in it is put there by the world. (56:02 - 56:15) Tabula rasa is the Latin, blank slate, blank mind, right? And they proved it because they said, try to find in your mind something that isn't found also in the world. And we couldn't do it. So this lent them a bit of credence. (56:15 - 56:23) They went, well, everything in my mind, even if it's called a fantastical, it's still made up of stuff that's in the world. Okay. It looks like you guys might be right. (56:23 - 56:36) And that launched empiricism, materialism, you know, scientism, all of that got launched at this time. The idealists are going, we're not buying that. We believe in innate ideas. (56:37 - 56:52) In Latin, it's a priori content, that the mind doesn't come in blank. It comes in with certain categories and structures that help us organize the world. Sensual stuff coming in through the senses gets organized conceptually. (56:52 - 56:59) So we have these conceptual, they're called transcendental. It's a word that shouldn't be confused with transcendence that we used earlier. They're not the same. (57:00 - 57:13) Transcendental are these categories of the human mind that help us structure the world that we know, the world we get. Now, these are the two opposing schools. And even to this day, they've never been properly reconciled. (57:15 - 57:32) But to get to Heidegger, you've got to go through a guy called Edmund Husserl and the philosophy that's known as phenomenology. It has its own history. We won't get into that, right? But Heidegger was the secretary of Edmund Husserl, the chief brain behind this phenomenology. (57:33 - 57:41) What? Right? And they parted company later. You know, Heidegger developed it, moved away from it into his own thing. So to answer your question, this is the steps I usually go into. (57:42 - 58:02) But back to this thing between the materialists and the idealists, which one is right? But Heidegger's going, you're never going to answer. What? Because these are questions about the nature of the mind. But why is it that no one's seen the answer? The mind itself cannot decide one way or the other. (58:03 - 58:25) Everybody went, holy shit. How did we miss this? You can never find out with your own, even though these are questions about your mind, your mind can only speculate and only ever speculate. No matter how many millions of years go by, I will never know in my mind, whether I'm blank slate or I'm not. (58:26 - 58:45) And any statement one to the other is pure speculation. There's no concrete, definitive, penitent board, factual, conclusive knowledge to be had from these things that they've been dilly dallying with. You mean to tell me that this is philosophy? Nobody noticed this before. (58:46 - 59:28) But of course, moving forward, the Heideggers were going, well, now that since we've pointed it out, I'm just giving you a metaphorical story here, but it pertains to what they're doing. They said, well, since the reason, this thing that you all have exalted, cannot decide even on this most mundane point, can never do so, why are we putting, why is philosophy so focused on the reason? And everyone was just stunned, right? It was just like, what the hell? This is the modern age beginning. And so they said, instead of thinking, being the center of philosophy, we should make it experience. (59:28 - 59:50) And then everyone, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's get around this concept. You know, they had to be walked through this because for decades, for centuries, what are we talking about? Only one thing had been done, exalt the reason, exalt thinking. And it was this that became the nexus of all world philosophy. (59:51 - 1:00:01) And Heidegger is literally telling you, oh no, I see the flaw. And I'm just giving you an illustration. It's not his illustration, but this is a shorthand way of showing you what was going on there. (1:00:02 - 1:00:24) My mind poses questions about its own identity, only to find out that after meticulously forming these wonderful questions and massaging the question so that they're nicely, you know, languaged and framed, uh, it's a big nothing burger at the end. I can sit back forever and say, yeah, it was blank slate. My mind's blank slate nailed. (1:00:24 - 1:00:33) Okay. How does that change the world? And the same other guy can go, we come in with innate categories. My mind already has these innate Kantian categories. (1:00:34 - 1:00:43) Okay. So what? How has that changed anything? And can you really prove it? Big nose, you know, nothing there. Right. (1:00:43 - 1:01:03) So then something radical had to change. And this is where Heidegger then comes in because he's saying, get rid of thinking as the center of philosophy and let's turn back to the things themselves. And people, it took decades, it took years for this to become, you know, solid. (1:01:03 - 1:01:53) Really to tell you the truth, I don't think it's even caught on that much, but to those few that it did catch on, it absolutely transformed art at a transcendent point. The poets and the artists were more likely to listen to him than the philosophers who mostly rejected all of this and went straight back to materialism, scientism, and all the rest of it, or they get the idealists on the other side, you know, or maybe if there was a third version, it's this highly deconstructive, sarcastic, Nietzschean, burn it all down, iconoclastic perspective that Heidegger did not buy into as well. He saw through the lie of that too, you know, which was this disdainful muck slinging at philosophers with nothing really to offer in this place. (1:01:54 - 1:02:16) You could say that of Schopenhauer, you could say that of Nietzsche. That's not the answer, says Heidegger, you know. He was much more genteel and thoughtful than all of this noisy, obstreperous, Nietzschean palaver that the world also, you know, Nietzsche is usually, as you know, successful and loved by the young. (1:02:17 - 1:02:24) They don't see any of the flaws, you know, they go for it. And that's fine, because he was a great writer. He was physically a brilliant, brilliant, expressive writer, as was Schopenhauer. (1:02:24 - 1:02:40) So again, their philosophy is monumentally incoherent and contradictory, but the way that they wrote it attracted readers. It's so powerful in its expression. You have to really give them that. (1:02:41 - 1:02:53) Yeah. So Heidegger's saying being presupposes everything, which basically shoots arrows at, you know, Descartes, I think, therefore I am. Yes, it definitely, definitely does. (1:02:53 - 1:03:14) Yes. He deconstructed that beautifully and elegantly to show you that this is, he replaced it with his concept of being in the world, a very, very embedded relationship between, again, mind, right? He's leaving out mind. He doesn't even use the word consciousness, because he wants to get away from it. (1:03:14 - 1:03:32) As I said, he doesn't want to get into thinking as a central issue. It's a beingness. And he wanted to flesh that out for people and, in a way, show that there's an immersion that you have, a deep entanglement with world, whatever world is. (1:03:33 - 1:03:57) And this was picked up by, you know, Merleau-Ponty that had a whole philosophy of body, soma. It connects with a lot of things that you do, because now it blends over into the role of the body, which Heidegger opened the door for that, but didn't quite follow it himself. But Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty picked this up. (1:03:57 - 1:04:08) He was an existentialist in France. And he picked it up. And then through a thing called existential psychology, this also got more traction. (1:04:09 - 1:04:26) They were looking to Heidegger for this. And it did end up being important to somatic therapists because it's embodiment, right? Rather than this thing up here in the head. No, your physical embodiment in the world now takes on. (1:04:26 - 1:04:48) So Feldenkrais, you know, Ida Rolfe, they're all Germans, right? They're going to be influenced by Heidegger, no end. They're going to see a lot in Heidegger that they liked and Merleau-Ponty that they liked. So there's definitely a tie-in to some of the, you know, Willem Rai, believe you me, there's plenty of tie-in between Heidegger and those people, the somatic therapists. (1:04:48 - 1:04:53) They may not admit it, but it's there. It's there for anybody who's intelligent to see. Yeah. (1:04:54 - 1:05:08) Yeah. One of my favorite concepts, even from, I guess, someone like Gurdjieff is this idea of self-remembering, you know, just even throughout the day, remembering that you are a self, remembering that you exist, remembering that you are here. And it feels like this is kind of connected to this beingness as well. (1:05:09 - 1:05:16) It's like, oh, but I'm here also. Like that just self-remembering as a form of meditation and contemplation. Yeah. (1:05:16 - 1:05:33) Remember we talked about Marcel's secondary reflection? It's identical to what you just said. That detachment, right? That I'm walking amongst other people in the crowd, but I'm not like them. I am omni-plastically, you know, I'm omni-directional. (1:05:34 - 1:05:46) I'm looking at my life in the greater context of why am I here? The bigger questions matter to me. They're very palpable. I'm not just immersed in primary reflection. (1:05:47 - 1:05:53) There's this sort of standing back and observing. I'm still engaged though. See, it's the outsider is still engaged. (1:05:53 - 1:06:01) This is the most extraordinary thing because it's really about attitude, not a physical posture. When it becomes a posture, it's fashion. Hey, I stand out. (1:06:01 - 1:06:03) I'm a goth. I'm an emo. Right. (1:06:06 - 1:06:13) I'm a new ager. This is the self-deception. The actual authentic outsider will sit amongst you. (1:06:13 - 1:06:21) You'll never, ever spot him, but you'll never know what's going on there. Because he's not performing. It's not a performance for him. (1:06:21 - 1:06:24) Yes, exactly. And he could be anywhere. He could be anywhere. (1:06:24 - 1:06:31) He could literally be a corporate executive. And he's 10 times more authentic than anyone around him. This is the way it is. (1:06:31 - 1:06:43) This is why it's so off the charts and unusual. It could be a guy working a machine all his life, but he's there. Oh my God. (1:06:43 - 1:06:48) He's there. He knows he has to live. He can't shrink away from it. (1:06:48 - 1:07:06) He knows he's cooperative with other people, but you can cooperate with people without being a collectivist, right? If I have a bad tooth, don't I need to go to the dentist? But is that collectivism? Hell no. Because the man who became the dentist did so because of an individual choice. Yeah. (1:07:07 - 1:07:17) Just in the same way that if I look closely at nature, it's not uniform. It's all individual leaves, trees, clouds. Well, if I look close at mankind, it's individualism that made the technician. (1:07:17 - 1:07:25) It's individualism that made the surgeon. It's individualism that made the dentist that I go to. And it's only a bunch of nut balls. (1:07:25 - 1:07:32) We need each other with a collective. No, no, no, no, no. You've got your wires crossed here. (1:07:33 - 1:07:45) The collective is the, well, it's like AI today. AI, you and I, we've all talked, the three of us, about Julian James's theories, you know, about the bicameral mind. Yeah. (1:07:47 - 1:08:07) AI is an attempt to send us hurtling back out of individualism, out of subjective consciousness, back to this, you know, robotic, mindless, I just hear voices and do what I'm told. The human race has been dying under the burden of selfhood, something it hates with a passion. I talk about this in the book. (1:08:08 - 1:08:30) Now, the halfway point to that voice of the God in your head is collectivism. Why is this? Because if you read Julian James correctly, he says that the voices in the head that, you know, auditory hallucinations that directed your every move only worked well when communities were very small. In tribes that were basically microscopic. (1:08:31 - 1:08:37) As towns and cities grew bigger, the voices faded. Right. So let's follow that thread for just a second. (1:08:39 - 1:08:45) We can never get rid of the many. So that means the bicameral period is fucked, right? It's over. Never to be seen again. (1:08:46 - 1:09:08) Oh no, no, no, that's not what he says. Because if I can collectivize the myriad, the multitude, aren't I simulating the small, right? See, most of these parallels we're talking about wouldn't be seen by anybody, but they are. If I can gather together like a fucking herd, then I have the gray, I have the one, I have Dasman. (1:09:09 - 1:09:21) There may be physically many, but they're all thinking and acting the same. The bicameral voice is liable to come back now. Whereas the first reading said won't come back because people are too many. (1:09:22 - 1:09:41) But if that many can be corralled and herded into one small unit of thought, hey, bicameral instruction returns. Now the apotheosis of this, of course, is full-blown AI in your head where you are now every single thing that you're doing is you're directed. That's the goal. (1:09:42 - 1:10:02) We're heading hurtling toward it. But I believe that what we call collectivism, and thank you for giving me a moment to unpack that, collectivism is mankind's beloved decision, coveted decision to say, well, we're halfway there. We want to go back to that tribal small village where we can hear the voices of instruction. (1:10:02 - 1:10:10) So we don't have to be selves. It's monumental what we're talking about here. So the individual goes, oh, I'm not having none of that. (1:10:10 - 1:10:18) I don't want no machine in my head or auditory hallucination telling me what to do. So I got to run the hell out of here. I got to break the consensus. (1:10:18 - 1:10:27) I got to do whatever I need to do. Say the alphabet in reverse. I got to think totally different because I'm not in lockstep with all of you people. (1:10:27 - 1:10:44) I know where this leads. So there's that dimension of it too that I think needs to be plugged in. Well, it seems like a key thing that arises out of a sincere understanding of existentialism, regardless of what you're doing in the world, is that there's more intentionality behind what you're doing. (1:10:44 - 1:10:59) You can commune with the collective, but regardless of what it is, it's not just being herded along. It's a choice that one is making as a result of contemplating death, remembering one's being, et cetera. Sure it is. (1:11:00 - 1:11:14) You're the only creature that can do it, that can make yourself important in an authentic way. And you're the only one who can force your mind, throw your mind forward in time to see that one day it's over. Yeah. (1:11:15 - 1:11:22) And there's no way out of that. And it doesn't even affect other questions of religion or spirituality. It doesn't. (1:11:22 - 1:11:29) It's separate. It's a separate, because the religious man may live his whole life and never do what we're talking about. Yeah. (1:11:30 - 1:11:38) And the atheist man might do it. So this cuts across. That's what Fearless is all about, that movie. (1:11:38 - 1:11:44) I mean, you could be an ice cream salesman. You could be nobody of any real importance. You could be completely nondescript as far as the world goes. (1:11:44 - 1:11:53) But you may have done this experiment one day, sitting on a bus, and instantly you're transformed as a person. You're not the same. Yeah. (1:11:54 - 1:12:06) It's kind of interesting how, on a surface level, existentialism seems to get lumped in with nihilism and atheism, but it's not that at all. No. No. (1:12:07 - 1:12:25) These are, again, mostly products of self-deception, for the most part. They're window dressing to prove that you're something you're not. Or they're there, you know, as bromides to quell the anxiety that you're feeling, but you don't know how to go about quelling it properly, because you have never been taught that there's legitimate anxiety and neurotic anxiety. (1:12:25 - 1:12:44) See, the parenting, the education is so pathetic that none of these points are made clear to you, so you can't tell the difference between, you know, the anxieties that are rising up. And some of that anxiety is the very thing that's there to make you human, and it's not the stuff you want to get rid of, for goodness sake. You don't want to take a pill and quell it. (1:12:44 - 1:12:53) That's the worst thing. That's why we get nothing but zombies walking around today. And there's very few teachers out there to, you know, warn, put out the warning. (1:12:53 - 1:13:14) All we got is advertisements and Prozac smiles and artificial happiness and everybody going for it, thinking, oh, if I ever, you know, do feel real existential suffering, I know I go, you know, how to knock out on the head. And I don't see the consequences. We dealt with this in Architects of Control and other programs that I've done years and years and years ago. (1:13:15 - 1:13:29) We did a whole small series on it, actually, you know, in the times past. But the time wasn't right then, you know, to write the book or anything, you know, everything in its own time, I think. Yeah. (1:13:30 - 1:13:59) Can you talk into the relationship between, like, psychology and philosophy? Well, for me, right, the connective between them two, this is one of them. Because a couple of men that Heidegger knew personally, he corresponded, he met them, he knew them well, was Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss and their people. And they were absolutely enamored by, you know, Heidegger and the things that we're talking about. (1:13:59 - 1:14:28) They were also big fans of a guy called Otto Rank that I've done, you know, plenty of programs about on Onslaught. And, oh yeah, you know, Kierkegaard would have been a big one for them as well, you know, so they said, we don't like the kind of psychiatry and psychology that's out there, you know, in terms of Freud, Jung and the popular ones. But we think that Heidegger, although Heidegger, he seems to like, not like psychology, he never talks about it. (1:14:28 - 1:14:37) And he, he seems to frown on it. We, we, we feel we have the right to create a new kind of psychology. And that's what they did. (1:14:38 - 1:14:50) And so Heidegger did correspond with him. He even knew Viktor Frankl. Another really towering, great mind, you know, the very first person that Heidegger went to visit when he came to Vienna was Viktor Frankl. (1:14:50 - 1:15:09) And Viktor Frankl is the psychologist who came up with the theory of will to meaning, you know, to counterbalance Nietzsche's absurd will to power, Balava. And I find it absolutely fascinating, you know, that those two met and talked. So there's that. (1:15:09 - 1:15:34) And so when some psychologists like Adler and others took a more Nietzschean, atheistic slant, there was a school, it's very unknown now. And then this brings us to another reason why I wrote my book. Sadly, existential psychology and existentialism itself is now in the hands of the uber woke. (1:15:36 - 1:15:49) So I was just incensed by that. You know, they've hijacked a lot of things, right? We know that. They've hijacked politics, ecology, sociology, and now they've hijacked existentialism. (1:15:50 - 1:15:59) You know, post-modernism, right? They hijack philosophy. But they got their hands on existentialism. And it's just awful what's happening right now. (1:15:59 - 1:16:19) So I try to write my book, you know, for people who might be interested in it, but not politicized. So they can, like we're doing right now, we can talk about it in this very common sense way, neutrally, you know, without any political statement. I think it's vital now because it's in the hands of the enemy right now. (1:16:19 - 1:16:43) How does it look, you know, to take existentialism and existential psychology and have it be woke-ified? Like, how is that showing up in the world? Well, they, they don't want to know any of the teachers we've mentioned because they were white and European. Okay. It's so banal. (1:16:43 - 1:17:00) It's so infantile because Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre, hell, they don't even want to talk about the left wing guys because they were white. That's what I mean by uber woke. Woke would say, we love Sartre. (1:17:00 - 1:17:02) We love Camus. We love de Beauvoir. We love Foucault. (1:17:03 - 1:17:19) They're Marxist like us. No, they don't even want to talk about those people, left wing as they are, because they're white and European. Okay, where's the exit? How do I get out of here? Yeah, come on. (1:17:19 - 1:17:26) Come on. Does this tie into Germanophobia at all? A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. (1:17:27 - 1:17:41) There's this underlying Germanophobia that has always been there in British thinking. Maybe we could talk for hours about how it began. It actually goes back to the early 1800s, but it wrapped up around 1909. (1:17:42 - 1:18:00) Well, of course it would, right? You had first world war, second world war. So by even 1950, German is not particularly friendly and Heidegger happens to be writing exactly at this time. So naturally there's definitely that sort of penchant to misrepresent. (1:18:01 - 1:18:13) But the ideas were overthrowing the entire metaphysical tradition. Heidegger is well known to have thrown English positivistic books across the room. Thought it was all rubbish. (1:18:14 - 1:18:20) So they hated him in return. So yeah, there is this element as well. Absolutely. (1:18:20 - 1:18:24) Yeah. You'd be surprised. And I think that when they found, they wanted replacements. (1:18:25 - 1:18:43) So when they found Foucault, the Frenchman, and when they found Derrida, the Frenchman, they went all the, they bankrolled those two guys in order to shut down Heidegger. I can mention those two for a start. There were others and there were good voices as well that came to try and help Heidegger. (1:18:44 - 1:18:58) His mistress Hannah Arendt did a lot for him in America. She was Jewish. And others, many Jewish pupils that he had tried to write books to celebrate his work. (1:18:59 - 1:19:16) But unfortunately in his class, he also had Herbert Marcuse. So he had some of the worst in his class, and he had some of the other ones that were so much more moderate and rational. So he was a great teacher and had a very, very interesting career. (1:19:16 - 1:19:25) Because he was a Jesuit Catholic early in his life, but he rejected that. Him and his wife rejected Catholicism. So he had quite an interesting existence. (1:19:25 - 1:19:37) He had a dalliance for a short time with the Nazis. Well, that one, that deteriorated very fast. And the Nazis had disowned him as a very bad choice on their part. (1:19:38 - 1:19:49) And also he got worldwide censure for that short-term flirtation with Nazism. It basically did ruin his reputation. So people didn't want to know about his philosophy. (1:19:50 - 1:20:04) Because of all sorts of things like this, that the muck slinging that took place. Yeah. So Heidegger is proposing a deep immersion between being and world. (1:20:05 - 1:20:25) Yeah. So if you take the opposite stance in terms of a hard separation, is this kind of where many Gnostic ideas are also born from? I am not of the world. And so I need to conjure up all these ideas to separate myself from it, consider how I'm going to live forever, consider why the world might be a simulation, why it might be this, et cetera, et cetera. (1:20:25 - 1:20:32) Because there's this separation between oneself and the world. Oh, great question. And you're absolutely right. (1:20:32 - 1:20:41) To understand Heidegger properly, you've got to think of him as about as far away from Gnosticism as you could possibly get. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. (1:20:42 - 1:20:56) It's not sometimes obvious because of the extreme, you know, complexity of his ideas and the way he wrote, but this is what it breaks down to. Yeah. He was about as anti-Gnostic as you could possibly get. (1:20:57 - 1:21:14) And his understanding of man's embeddedness in the physical world is the central piece, you know, and it takes time to unpack that. It's what I was noticing in these poets, but couldn't understand. I liked it. (1:21:14 - 1:21:46) See, I liked it, but I didn't know what wellspring are they drawing from? What is this thought, this Germanic thought of the modern age? So by getting into Heidegger, it's the, what do they call it? It's the, what's that word? The motherlode. It was the motherlode. When you're finding Heidegger, this mystery that I carried through for years about not understanding these bloody poets, you can understand them now. (1:21:47 - 1:22:01) You know, it's like you've got, it's like an old manuscript that you can't decipher, but then you find the Rosetta Stone and you put the Rosetta Stone here and you put the manuscript there and you go, oh, all right, it's painstaking. It's slow, but yeah, I'm checking the list off. For me, this is what it was. (1:22:02 - 1:22:11) Yeah. It took 32 years to today of nonstop doing it, but that's what it takes. Yeah. (1:22:13 - 1:23:00) We might've already covered this in certain side pieces, but just to hit it more directly, what is the role of time in Heidegger's work and existentialism? Like what is time? Well, it's everything in his work, right? Because through it, he got the crowbar under Hegel, under the metaphysical tradition, under Descartes, under Kant, and he threw them all over. It's through his concepts of time. See, he looked at these three ecstasies of time, past, present, future, and he looked at it in this existential context, temporal to a human being's own life and how they project their mind along this timeline. (1:23:01 - 1:23:21) As we said, the future is important, right? But he said, because these other philosophers had missed this, they made several mistakes. One of them was to take this thing called time, and in order for them to understand it, they kind of inflated it in a metaphysical way. One example that he would have used is Hegel. (1:23:22 - 1:23:40) Hegel's fascinating concepts of history. You know, time starting thousands of years ago and then moving to where we are now and then continuing on as if it's almost like the spirit, Geist. The word Geist in German means both mind and spirit. (1:23:40 - 1:23:58) So it's a catch-all. You can think of it atheistically by just the movement of human consciousness, but if you're spiritual, Hegel works for you too because you can say, well, the same word means spirit, you know, and this is the movement of God or Geist. So he's able to incorporate both the two sides, you know, in his theories. (1:23:58 - 1:24:25) But the temporal aspect of this constant movement down through time of a kind of a consciousness is the center of Hegel's work, and that was picked up by a lot of other people and made into, you know, what time is. This was the idea. And that what we call history is the sort of terrestrial living out of the movement, the different stages of the Geist. (1:24:27 - 1:24:51) And therefore, and of course, there's a lot of sense to this because every single thing around us is a product of history, even the clothes or, you know, machine-made clothes. There's a whole history behind every t-shirt, every weave, right back to the first needle and thread, for God's sake, right? These microphones, everything has a history. And Hegel said, so do our thoughts. (1:24:53 - 1:25:09) We are always at a certain place in time based on antecedent processes that need to be analyzed, and that's what his philosophy does. Hegel is looking at all of this and other iterations of this as well with other philosophers. He's going, you got it all wrong. (1:25:10 - 1:25:31) The movement of time is not this larger, inflated world movement. It's this individual temporal movement, much smaller, much more close to home. But in order to try and escape temporal finitude, you purposely, in an act of self-deception, projected it up and out. (1:25:32 - 1:25:39) And he did this with all these philosophers, right? He did this with Kant. He did it with Hegel and the big boys. And he did it with Descartes. (1:25:40 - 1:25:55) And he showed how and why their philosophies come about. And it's all a means of avoidance of this real time, which is temporality. Another way to look at it is he said that the time that you know, the clock time, is another escape. (1:25:56 - 1:26:11) It doesn't exist. It's called ontic or vulgar time. And it's the time we love to live in, you know, calendars and fixed dates and fixed festivals and 12 hour clocks, 12 months. (1:26:11 - 1:26:33) All of this is fake. This is the regular kind of time that stabilizes us when we're shocked by the existential threat of, you know, our death. Is it fair to say that time in that sense is like the form of human life? Well, it is the defining characteristic of man, yes. (1:26:33 - 1:26:43) Because he's the one who knows that it's happening. Oh, yes. It's that important, right? And it's one of the sources of this deep, deep anxiety. (1:26:44 - 1:26:58) That is the only thing that can make you authentic. So of course, when you're talking about authenticity, then time is the catalyst. The brevity of your time or the loss of somebody, you know, you only need to read Tennyson's In Memoriam. (1:26:58 - 1:27:19) It can really, really dwell. And they can be shocked out of their complacency. And they believe that each person needs to look at this squarely and sincerely and realize that one day all the things they care about, all the things that our lives are filled with immersion, with tools, you know, and equipment to facilitate. (1:27:19 - 1:27:26) It's like a man building a house, right? Everything we do is for the tomorrow. It's for the sake of something. We are very future orientated people. (1:27:28 - 1:27:49) And so it comes as a counterintuitive thing to know that one day everything I've, everything I'm doing now is contextualized by tomorrow. But at the end of my tomorrows, it's the possibility that all my other possibilities are shut off. So the authenticity then is the returning from that state to say, I better look hard at the possibilities I have. (1:27:49 - 1:27:55) I can't just choose them all. I'm not like a child in a candy shop. I've got a very short time. (1:27:56 - 1:28:25) So what do I prioritize? What becomes of value? Remember, we talked about the plugins of Ayn Rand. Heidegger's got his own way of coming around to this by saying, well, you'll soon find out what you value when you know it's all going to be taken away. You will not allow yourself to be immersed and absorbed in trivia, at least prominently, right? You won't live your whole life in this, in this inauthentic manner. (1:28:25 - 1:28:44) And believe you me, this had a huge ripple effect into the world, not so much with philosophy, but with art, artists and poets, playwrights and musicians and filmmakers. It really did catch on for that time, you know? Yeah, it's a gateway to true presence, you know, even beyond teachings of presence. Yes, it is. (1:28:44 - 1:28:56) And we still do use it. It's there, right? It's definitely there. Because some of our greatest directors, people who've changed the world with their movies, they were all into this, by the way, make no mistake about it. (1:28:56 - 1:29:12) Peter Weir, Nicholas Roeg, Ridley Scott. We're influencers, whether we like it or not. Who's the guy who made the Truman Show? Nicholas, it was Peter Weir, right? So yeah, it's there. (1:29:12 - 1:29:19) And then the copycats of those, you know, will try to reprise these existential themes. They're still there, all right. But it's a taste. (1:29:20 - 1:29:37) Some people like it, some people don't. Rasmus, do you have anything? It seemed like you were going to interject there, and I jumped the gun. No, I was just gonna highlight things that kind of relate to what we're talking about. (1:29:37 - 1:29:54) We've had this conversation before about memento mori, you know? That's right. The death contemplation, you know, when I first came across that concept, it changed my life. And even recently, Sophie and I have been just sitting with her and being like, you know that this is all gonna just be like, I'm not gonna know you one day. (1:29:54 - 1:29:58) Yeah. You're gonna be gone. I'm gonna be gone. (1:29:58 - 1:30:06) That's it. You know, and I like thinking about those things. I mean, I don't live with it all day, like, oh, in this dark, morbid sense. (1:30:06 - 1:30:15) But it just, it really highlights the delicacy and the beauty of existence. Yeah. You know? That's right. (1:30:15 - 1:30:56) Well, there's a deep vulnerability that arises, which I don't think can be separated from this word authenticity, you know? Well, Heidegger said that in the house that he had with his wife, he went poetically into the table in the kitchen where him and his wife sat making the greatest decisions of their life. And he said, isn't this table important? See, it's a new way of thinking, right? The table is important because you and I have sat at this table in these incredibly important moments, but normally it would be invisible. It would be something we just throw in the junk heap once it's over and done with. (1:30:56 - 1:31:06) And that's okay. There's something that's all right about that. We don't need to become hoarders, but we also should notice the world of the inanimate around us if we're looking from the eyes of an artist. (1:31:07 - 1:31:16) Yeah. And all he was doing was giving an illustration of exactly what you're talking about. These numinous moments in which, you know, you are having the secondary reflection. (1:31:17 - 1:31:41) Of course, we know that it's very rare to have it in the company of another. I mean, we can have it, you know how many lonely people are sitting right now in a garret somewhere or a little apartment? They're doing this, but they don't have anyone near them that's doing it too. So be very, very conscious of the fact that if you're doing it and someone you love is doing it, that is absolutely unique. (1:31:43 - 1:32:08) You know, there's something extra ordinary about that. It's a very great gift that two people on the same path or road, you know, can be courageous enough to walk with that and be in that state of, they also call it the great nostalgia is another term for it, you know, but it's this state of gratitude. Yeah. (1:32:08 - 1:32:28) And Heidegger did notice that in etymology, the word for thinking, denken, is etymologically similar to the word for thank you or gratitude, danke, danken. Now, why he said are those two words? So he said, you know, they're the same. It's because real thinking is gratitude. (1:32:29 - 1:32:34) So when somebody said, he didn't come up with no answers. I wanted answers and I didn't get nothing. Oh, no, no. (1:32:34 - 1:32:36) He came up with answers. All right. They're just too subtle for you to get. (1:32:38 - 1:33:06) He was talking about the thinking should be a deep state of gratitude for what we do have in front of us, you know, and I really related to that. These are the kind of things that just were like mind boggling to me. So, yeah, I would say the funeral, you know, I know that your father passed away not too long ago and your mother's probably still reeling with that, you know, dealing with that. (1:33:06 - 1:33:14) You guys are. Yeah, we just moved. We just sold our house in New Jersey 45 years last month and moved my mom out here to live with us. (1:33:14 - 1:33:23) Well, look at that. Think of that, right? Think of that. And then there's the what Heidegger beautifully called thoughtful memory. (1:33:25 - 1:33:32) You know, he didn't want people shrugging this off and just moving on. He also talked about the past and about thoughtful memory. We have it for a reason. (1:33:33 - 1:33:53) It's an attribute that is falling by the wayside as people don't memory, you know, have memory. They don't allow themselves to think deeply about who they were in the past, what their aspirations were. What, as we said, what were your aspirations for your own future? You see? And then you checklist to say, yeah, I've achieved those things. (1:33:54 - 1:34:04) I've achieved some. In fact, life may have even offered me better things, you know, than what I even hope to have today. Life is moving so fast. (1:34:04 - 1:34:26) We barely have the moment to even think about that and assess and take an inventory or really be grateful for the meaningful relationships that we have, that we value. So there's another area where I and Ryan's work does have parallels to something that on paper has no connection. But I find these connections, the whole question of gratitude. (1:34:26 - 1:34:38) She'd agree with every word that Heidegger is talking about. Yeah, of course, because I mean, love for her was an incredibly selfish act. And with contemplating existentialism and one's death, everything becomes a selfish act. (1:34:38 - 1:35:08) Everything becomes a personal priority. I always say in my work that personalism is the inevitable end game, you know, of existentialism for all the reasons we've talked about, because all the things we've talked about, it doesn't matter how another person handles it, contemplates it, and the conclusions, right? It passed through their little gray cells, not yours. So what they come up with is fine for themselves. (1:35:08 - 1:35:26) It has no bearing on your cogitation of it, you know. But that comes with a responsibility, you see, and that responsibility seems too heavy for everybody else who knows, relying on the expert, you know. I really mean it. (1:35:26 - 1:36:14) We are heading away from individualism at a frightening, frightening rate. AI is, activism was another one, right? It was an invention to try and simulate tribal thinking so that we will be able to unseat the case for individualism, and AI is that. Maybe people don't see that on the surface because they haven't read their Julian Jaynes and they don't know that for how many thousands and thousands of years we lived as non-subjective persons, we just were robotic, and we want that again. (1:36:15 - 1:36:39) The burden, in order to understand our world, you've got to realize that selfhood is not valued or loved at all. Despite all the window dressing and the fashion statements, the one thing people are morbidly, necrophilously antipathetical to is selfhood. They're necrophilous rather than biophilous. (1:36:39 - 1:37:11) They're lovers of death, not lovers of life, and once this is fully grasped and understood, you can now move like Nostradamus, you know, in the middle of the whole of the fucking lie of it. You're no longer able to be fooled because you've got this. Although this is a painful fact to understand, once you understand it, you are the sage, and many things that would be impenetrable for you to understand now start falling into place, and this includes philosophies. (1:37:11 - 1:37:39) Why did certain philosophies happen? Are they part of the self-deceptiveness? Are they part of this abstraction, the need for abstraction? We've already proven that thinking, reason, we reach a limit, and if I reach that limit, what do I do? Carry on saying, well, science will have a chip. Yeah, you're right about that. The mind can't answer a couple of questions, you know, some very important questions, but it will tomorrow. (1:37:40 - 1:37:43) Excuse me. It will tomorrow. Oh, okay, then. (1:37:43 - 1:38:04) You mean like after I'm gone, dead? That's right. We'll sort it out. Isn't that a collective statement? Who's this we? If I'm not going to be here for it, and you're telling me my children won't be there for it, who's this anonymous we that's going to benefit from a discovery in science 2,000 years from now? You see how fucking self-deceptive that is? I'm here now, pal. (1:38:04 - 1:38:08) I want to know now what the answer to this is. Oh, no, no. It'll come in time. (1:38:08 - 1:38:20) Give them more money. And I'm satisfied with it, as most people are. Or some religion that takes you off world to some abstract supernaturalisms. (1:38:22 - 1:38:38) And expect me to, you know, believe that. And we do. You see, because having these limited choices, we say, well, and then there's this, you know, just blind atheism or hedonism in the middle. (1:38:38 - 1:38:43) I can choose not to think about it at all. Just get on TikTok. Just follow P. Diddy and the Kardashians. (1:38:46 - 1:39:01) You know, I'm not going to think at all, which is what most people are doing. Movies have predicted this, like Equilibrium and V for Vendetta and so many others we could mention, right? These are all chimeras. Science is going to solve it. (1:39:03 - 1:39:32) Tomorrow we'll have a new leader who'll get up there with just the right talismanic terms and we are only too happy, you know, to follow it. But have I done any real cogitation myself? Is my own life of value? Because if my own life is not of value, how can I really say that I value anybody else? And then if I'm drenched in dread and drenched in anxiety, I fucking deserve to be. Because I have not opened a dialogue with my own conscience. (1:39:33 - 1:39:41) I've thrown away my conscience. I've thrown away myself. And it goes without saying, I mentioned it in another podcast, then you should be unwell. (1:39:42 - 1:39:58) I want you to, I think this is the perfect, and I would say it for myself. If I've done the dirty and I've thrown away selfhood, what the hell? I should be stapled. Yeah, the main problem would be if you weren't feeling anything at that point, like there'll be a way to go. (1:40:00 - 1:40:03) Right. And that is the problem. Look at this artificial happiness cult. (1:40:04 - 1:40:22) Well, but just like movies like Dune have showed, we're getting to a point of critical mass that when this dread of life, you know, gets to a point where it's unbearable, they'll have the super pill. They will have a super drug. These movies like Equilibrium and all, they are absolutely on the button. (1:40:24 - 1:40:39) We will cry out for it. It won't be something they force on us. You know, it'll come in the form of a chip or it'll come in the form of some headset, or it'll come in the form of a pill, or maybe a combination of all. (1:40:40 - 1:40:52) And we will be glad. We will be free of freedom, freed of the burden of being a self. That's the secret of secrets. (1:40:53 - 1:41:02) And once you understand it, you'll know what people are all about and be on guard at least. You'll have the edge. And you'll have the edge on the other side. (1:41:02 - 1:41:14) You'll be able to tell an authentic person who's not falling into that category. You'll have a greater gauge to see somebody who's fucking sincere. And who, like yourself, is not okay with this at all. (1:41:14 - 1:41:30) And they'll have a vital interest in the reading, in what they watch, in what they do every day. They won't stomach triviality. And most likely they're going to be vocational as well. (1:41:31 - 1:41:39) Not just recreational and occupational and satisfied with that. You have to do those things. I'm not saying you shouldn't have those dimensions in your being. (1:41:39 - 1:41:48) Of course you should. But a certain point comes where you can put those aside. They're no longer satisfying to your own being. (1:41:50 - 1:41:57) And you being vocational will then take over. And it might mean big sacrifices. You might have to shut up shop. (1:41:57 - 1:42:01) Like many of your guests say, I just give that up. I had a great job in the corporate world. Fuck it. (1:42:01 - 1:42:04) I told them to go fuck themselves. I'm out of there. I had to do something different. (1:42:04 - 1:42:15) Right? You know, I had to write that book. I had to go to the ends of the earth. I had to go cold turkey for a while. (1:42:15 - 1:42:22) I had to renounce. You'll be able to plot that and go, yeah, oh, that's good. That's a step of an authentic person. (1:42:22 - 1:42:27) I can see what you're reading, what you're studying, the music you listen to. All of these things come to bear. You know, it's a big help. (1:42:28 - 1:42:45) As opposed to the somebody who's putting on a performance, as you said earlier, a fashion statement of being unique, you know, and all this. The world is absolutely excellent at that. The world's full of hysterics doing exactly what we've just talked about putting on. (1:42:45 - 1:42:52) And there'll be more. There'll be more acts of fake authenticity as we go. The human race is absolutely brilliant at that. (1:42:53 - 1:42:57) Don't know what's coming next. Curious. Yeah. (1:42:58 - 1:43:12) Thank you so much, Michael. This has been absolutely incredible just to absorb this information and unpack this philosophy and this idea in a deeper level. And no doubt, I see the immense power in this, for sure. (1:43:12 - 1:43:19) And I hope that listeners have received that as well. And yeah, thank you so much, as always. Thank you for giving me a chance. (1:43:19 - 1:43:28) I mean, we went quite far, actually. You know, rather than just an introductory, we touched on some of the deeper issues there, which is really, really good. Yeah. (1:43:29 - 1:43:34) I don't get that chance that many. Don't get that chance a lot. Well, we love having you on, man. (1:43:34 - 1:43:40) And we love going deep with all the stuff that you're working on. So yeah, much appreciated. Michael, you started a Substack recently. (1:43:41 - 1:43:53) Was it in the last year? You want to tell our audience how they can find you and support you and what you got going on there? Well, I believe the book is exclusively on Substack, too. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And other articles pertaining. (1:43:53 - 1:44:01) Yep. My website just got so jam-packed, it became hard to navigate. With articles, so we repurposed it. (1:44:02 - 1:44:10) Substack's good because it's growing and it's easy for people to share data. So if you like an article, it's easy. Boom, you know, you can email it to your friends and share it. (1:44:10 - 1:44:22) I like that. And it's a kind of a media that's different than other social media platforms because it's about for writers, you know, and there's good ways to promote your work. So it worked for me. (1:44:22 - 1:44:29) Maybe I'll change tomorrow into something else. But right now it worked just fine to organize the book. A lot of work went into it. (1:44:29 - 1:44:39) You can imagine after 32 years, what chapters to put in, where, how to pare it down. And it was a lengthy introduction. So Substack helped me put that together. (1:44:41 - 1:44:47) Is the full book on there now? Are you releasing it little by little? No, no, it's all done now. It was all done in April. Great. (1:44:48 - 1:44:54) Cool. And what is your Substack, Michael, just for those that are listening? How do they find it? Michael Tesarian. Perfect. (1:44:55 - 1:45:01) And Unslaved is there as well. So you can go to either Unslaved. But if you want the book and other articles, go to Michael Tesarian. (1:45:02 - 1:45:06) Cool. We'll grab those specific links and put them in the show notes for people for sure. Yeah, great. (1:45:07 - 1:45:09) Cool. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. (1:45:10 - 1:45:31) Hope you enjoyed this conversation and we'll see you next time. Take care. Heart-opening perspectives and the kind of content that hopefully makes you go, whoa, I never thought of it that way. (1:45:31 - 1:45:42) Our Friday drops like having coffee with that friend who always blows your mind. Except this friend shows up right on schedule and never asks to borrow money. So if you want to join our truth-seeking tribe, it's super easy. (1:45:43 - 1:46:01) Just hop over to hereforthetruth.com forward slash Friday and hit that subscribe button. No spam, no fluff, just pure unfiltered goodness delivered weekly. 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