🔥🌎💒 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking Blasphemy

All approaches are religious, including the anti-religion approach. Since being anti-religion is also a kind of religion, I beg your pardon, Richard talking. You can't get rid of this stuff because getting rid of it is what bad religion is about. It's about getting rid of the nasty bit in social space.

So the way you get rid of religion is usually in the key of religion. It's like Anderson that looked through the looking glass, she'd run away from the house and she's always coming back. So just face it, we're living in religion space. So we might as well get it right.

Let's have a nice religion space, right? Greetings Future Fossils and welcome to episode 223 of the podcast that explores our plates in time. I am your host, Michael Garfield, and today we are speaking about royalty, I guess. You know, the agglomeration of sub-sendant junior holons.

We are speaking with a fellow ontological, they, Timothy Morton, about their wonderful new book, Hell in Search of a Christian Ecology, which I feel absolutely blessed to have received in the mail as an advanced reader's copy, which suggests that I have arrived as a pot-chaster. Finally, Tim is somebody I have been following for years and years and years and whose work as any regular listener of this program will know, has influenced and informed mine very deeply, in particular their prior book, Hyper Objects, which I constantly cite in my eldritch explorations of what it means to live in a world where we are often painfully aware of the greater structures and processes in which we play apart. Tim is also part of the wonderful, seniorist of Rice University, along with Jeffrey Criple, and the vector for our introduction, Eric Davis, who received his religious studies, PhD under Criple. And so there's something really weird and wonderful going on there, other than hurricane season right now.

And actually, because of that, let's just talk a little bit about this amazing book before we get started. Hell is a marker of a profound shift in Morton's being. They've always been interested in the topic of climate change or global warming, white bother using a euphemism. And in this book, as we explore in this conversation, they talk about how their own initiation through physiological hardship led to a midlife religious conversion from which this book erupts as kind of an anthem for new, ecstatic, radically weird, post-modern Christianity that I simply adore as someone standing with one foot in the waters of mystery and the other in the quantitative headspace of science and technology.

So, yeah, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. And I just want to warn you on two fronts, the first being a legitimate trigger warning that we talk about a lot of really emotionally challenging and horrifying stuff in this conversation with our eyes open and our hearts open. I'm wearing my old tour t-shirt right now from the 2006 Love Without End tour, for those of you watching, as a way of reminding myself of the vibe that Morton is putting through here. The other warning is that this is probably the most comprehensive and intense episode of Future Fossils I've ever recorded, which is to say that I am grateful that we managed to touch on just about every one of the topics that I love to address in this show.

And it was actually kind of hard for me to make it a Future Fossils episode instead of the first episode of the new series, Humans on the Loop, about agency and automation, because a huge piece of this book is an investigation of AI as a kind of interface with our own sin and evil, and crucially, the transcendence through imminence that we experience by bottoming out in the Project of Modernity. Again, those who have been listening for a while know that one of the big themes here is that the success of Dominion over the living world as a project has radically backfired and plunked us into a domain of epistemic humility and indeterministic or at least non-computable experience and life and contingency and weirdness. And yeah, so this is all stuff that we cover in this episode, and I am immensely grateful for it. And I hope that you love this and that you share it wildly, widely, and there's the glitch, there's the comedic failure there for you that we also talk about the way that in the fall that we can embrace in the limits of our bodies and our material circumstances, therein lies the sacred.

And so with that, I feel completely justified in passing the tray right now for future fossils and for the upcoming work I'm doing. If you like this show, if you like me as a person, if you like Tim, please support future fossils on Subsac or on Patreon. I'm newlywed, I got kids to feed. And as Tim says beautifully in hell, sacredness is the feeling of biology.

You know, what else can we do but embrace this flawed and tragic joyous thing? So I want to take a moment to thank new and enhanced subscribers, people who have raised the level of contribution over the last little while, while I was off getting married, Caleb Meredith, Frank Crooks, Tristan W, Kendall Jensen, Tae Am, Pamela Shapiro, and the hundreds of other people whose continued donations cover my expenses. Enjoy this discussion and I've got plenty of other wonderful conversations in the mix for you in the weeks and months that come, including the books across the room, but I'm really excited to be getting Robin Sloane, author of Moonbound on the show here soon, and just an absolutely delightful fantasy sci-fi crossover novel that I think you'll love. So anyway, I think that's all the news that's fit to print.

Oh, but actually to get you in the spirit of all of this, I wanted to read you a quote my friend Tristan Gullifer recently sent me from Jim Carrey, which I think puts you in the right headspace and heartspace for the conversation that is about to transpire. I used to be a guy who was experiencing the world, and now I feel like the world and universe experiencing a guy. So there's kind of been a shift. You can join the game, fight the wars, play with form all you want, but to find real peace, you have to let the armor fall.

You will only ever have two choices, love or fear. Choose love and don't ever let fear turn you against your playful heart. We have a lot of fun playing in this conversation, friends, and here we go. Thank you.

I hope that this conversation inspires you to citizens arrest the exon, CEO, or whatever, you know, being the biosphere, enjoying itself. Well, Jim, this is wonderful. First of all, getting offered to talk about hell with you by your publisher was kind of a dream. I come true because I first found you on Eric Davis's podcast, Expanding Mind Back in the Day and Eric's show deeply inspired me and got me into podcasting in the first place.

And in this book is sort of like a tour of everything that I want to talk about on future fossils and like all of the major themes of this show. So I was thinking about this and I was like, my God, do I just stop future fossils after this interview? Is this it? Are we done?

Have we said everything we need to? So anyway, thanks for being here. It's a pleasure and an honor, Michael. I'm very grateful to you for having me on.

So, okay, I just kind of want to, I mean, we've booked ourselves a nice long slot here. And I feel like maybe the right way to do this is just to go through this book in more or less linear order, which means starting with your exordium, what the hell. And this provides some really useful context and access kind of an overture for everything you have to say in here. So why don't you lead us in?

Oh, sure. Here. Yeah. So, Michael is the preface.

Now, normally a preface would be, I don't know, eight or nine pages long. I'm writing another one for another edition of book I wrote called Being Ecological. We're re-printing it and I'm writing a preface right now for the American edition. And it's supposed to be a teenage age as long.

Yeah. Then you've got the introduction, which can be a little bit long, maybe I don't know, 20, 30 pages. But this exordium is pretentiously called an exordium to make people read it. The original title was a preface you really ought to read or something like that.

Every other chapter, I'm saying, if you remember to read this yet. And that plus the introduction is a good hundred pages. And it's almost half the book. It's just the preface, which is very memoir-like and kind of first person.

And the intro, which is very kind of content-based and it's kind of pointing at what we're going to be talking about in the book a bit more. But, okay, so they say I'm a philosopher. I never would have described myself this way. This is, it's, it's, it's, it's like an insult.

Gary Snyder just said that I wrote philosophy and I'm a friend of a friend. He's a friend of a friend and they said, hey, Gary Snyder said this. Okay. Okay.

And people do expect me to do it, but sort of what is it? Yeah. Well, if you look at the word, philosophy is really two emotions. Yeah.

You've got philosophy, which is love. It's about easy. But you've got Sophia, which is wisdom. And it's the DOM part of that word, Michael, that really sells out the fact that it's a feeling or a feel, as we might say now, rather than a set of ideas.

It's not just a sort of set of instructions on a fortune cookie. It's a quality of being wise. If you're going to have to choose binaries and a feeling on ideas, it's a feeling. So there's no ideas in the word philosophy.

It's not about having ideas actually. Literally, it's about feelings. And in fact, it's a little bit like this. And I say this as a 50 plus philosophy guy now, Aristotle says you do your best philosophy and you're in your 50s class.

And I think I need the reason why I think it's that you realize at some point that philosophy is about trying to not have ideas. You spend the first few years doing a thing. I've got to come up with some great ideas and I did this concept called hyper objects and so on. And then you sort of settle into, I don't dislike any of those things I came up with.

But basically, the part of me that was trained into construction, the part of me that studied a lot of Buddhism a lot, decades of it and so on, kind of started to get a bit louder. And I started to think about it this way. You're driving the love car down the wisdom street. That's what you're doing with philosophy, it's the love of wisdom.

So the love car's going down the wisdom street. And the lamppost are like the ideas. And you don't want to point your car at the lamppost, otherwise you're going to crash into the idea. The idea is to glide through.

And so what does this mean? It means you've got to trust your feelings a little bit, Obi-Wan. You've literally because actually this feeling versus idea, duality is a fake duality. And I would suggest that it's part of this whole subject versus object, active versus passive, also most of versus slave, which is the main template, the main one that's screwing everything else up right.

So if you don't like most of versus slave, you might not like idea versus feeling. And it's more like the repolarity. So a feeling is an idea from the future. A feeling is an idea that you haven't had yet.

Like why else do you do something like therapy? Right? You'd be having a feeling, but you can't understand it. You've got to put some words on it.

The more intense philosophy you want to do, the further in you want to go, the more feelings you're going to be dredging out of whatever that is. I mean, in a way it's yourself, but in another way it's like everything you ever did and everybody you ever talked to and thinking is always a team sport and so is feeling right and so is living. Right? Nevertheless, you're kind of dredging it out of something.

There's a lot of, if you're going to be honest about it, you want to go to, you want to sort of spell on or bungee jump into something quite heavy. If you want to go further with your thinking process and I wanted to go further with my thinking process because since I can only take responsibility myself for the world that I see around me in a straight place, clearly I'm not doing enough. I'm right about ecology and the world is bursting into flame and not every American has decided, hey, you know what? Solving global warming is the sexiest, most amazing, most fantastic thing I ever thought of doing in my life.

I think I'm going to do it for Tim so he doesn't even have to get out of bed. And I'm Magga guy, but Tim persuaded me to do it. Like, how come that hasn't happened because I didn't do it yet. Right?

Like, let's reverse engineer from the ultimate goal, which will be Magga guy, gets out of bed and does it for me and citizens arrest the directors of Exxon for me, so I don't have to do it. Right? What was I doing wrong? Well, one thing I was doing wrong, one thing I was doing wrong, I wasn't inspiring people enough.

I wasn't inspiring people enough. Accidentally or possibly deliberately, I was making people feel paralyzed and kind of stupid. Right? And it's not hard to do because these are very overwhelming issues.

These are overwhelming, huge, big issues. These are issues that, because their planet scale issues literally make us feel small, relative to how physically big they are. Right? And the last time we felt like that was only for tiny babies.

And so here we are feeling like tiny babies, super, super regressive. We've got to act like the most adult we've ever done in our life and get a planet scale movement together. Right? So you've got to kind of, it's not just walking and chewing gum, it's feeling like a baby and having to act incredibly mature at the same time.

Right? I understand this actually because I'm a survivor. I'm as soon as I just come out and say, I'm so nobody else has to be right. I'm a mad old sexual abuse survivor person for a lot of actual literal crime in my family.

And beyond and unbelievably, God today was connected to London, mafia, crime syndicates. And I wrote this at memoir about my life with just objects, unquotes, like inanimate things. And it was like, what a relief. It's called the stuff of life.

And I know it's going to believe the real stuff. But then I had this surgery last year, and it was like, Lasik for my soul. They cut my stomach open about five different ways. And you know, like how your eyes reset when they cut your eye.

Well, it was like that when they cut my stomach open, they just go with five hernias in there. And they just hit the reset button on me. And within a couple of days, I was writing this thing, which luckily hasn't been published yet. I read a hundred thousand words in 10 days and I write, that's it.

I'm getting my own back. So I did this thing. And this tornado of revenge. Gradually widened its radius into a big old circle of mercy.

Yeah. And then other stuff happened, right? But my point, my big point is that we're watching grownups in the shape of oil corporations, committing crimes on our actual bodies and our kids' bodies and other life-arms' bodies. Right?

And we're really tiny. What does this remind you of? Do I need to spell it out? There's a huge taboo against even mentioning it.

My mum was a social worker and she's constantly a very high up social worker. She's constantly having to train her people to make sure they knew when they saw just one instance of something funny. It was everywhere in that family. You're only going to see the tip of the iceberg, but if they let you see the tip of the iceberg, it's everywhere.

Yeah. It's everywhere in social space, but we don't talk about it. Right? So you've got to get through some inhibitions here.

And what are we dealing with? What are we dealing with? We're dealing with the basic boundaries between my body and my world. Right?

The thing called narcissism. Right? The guy who was the previous president had disordered narcissism. Everybody needs a little bit of not.

That's my buddy's speech he used to say. Everyone needs a little bit of relaxation. Everyone needs to feel good about it. The previous guy feels terrible.

Right? The previous guy is still at that stage, just desperately wanting to imprint on somebody. But somebody over the age of about five doing that is kind of really scotz alien, which is called narcissistic personality disorder. Right?

Religion is the thing that deals with this. The thing called religion, whatever you think religion is, spirituality, whatever that is. Deep therapy, right? Massage body work.

Grief work is dealing with the deep interface between something like my body, but also something like a squirrel's body, but also something like an oak tree's body, but also something like a single-selled organism's body. It's very interesting that when Freud has to describe the thing, he calls the death drive. He actually breaks it down to a single-selled organism. I do actually think since sentience is a thing that goes all the way down to a plant.

This is an issue that literally is a religious issue, but that means it's also a squirrel issue. I mean, it's also a tree issue, a single-selled organism issue. It's an ecological issue because it's to do with the interface between the body and the bias that it grew out of, right? And these incredibly basic searching things.

There's nothing to do with some lovely nice, hippie painting of nature from a while ago. This is real, and it's horribly visceral, and it's disgusting. And it involves horrible feelings of objection and contamination and being always in it. Stuff that we really don't want to go.

But we've got to go there. And so the funny thing is, religion's holding a lot of pieces to help us with this. But of course, religion's also sucking really badly. Like we all know how religion is sucking, especially in the good old US of A, because when you get it wrong, that level is to do with inclusion versus exclusion.

Right? The default of any human group is that that group is a narcissistic personality disorder entity, right? Unless you do some really hard work, the group is going to be Donald Trump, right? And this means like in a group of over three or four people, that little group is an narcissist, right?

That means that we've got to get a planet scale action together and work really hard on not making it inclusion, exclusion, right? Religion also luckily is like that, right? Like love your neighbor. The guy's giving you the granular how to not create an narcissistic group.

And the guy let himself be scapegoated. He's also my favorite hobby. Every by every possible group, I love to get paid for it. I feel to say the wrong thing in public.

I'm probably saying it now. I also do it accidentally. I have this scurvy of enthusiasm ability to say the wrong thing and the very action of trying to say the right thing. And so it's kind of, I know this.

And why do I know? Because I'm a survivor of deep, deep from my past stuff. And I've been included, excluded in horrible groups as a kid. So I know what this feels like.

I know what it feels like to be realized, like a lot of Christians in this country. And I'm realizing, oh my word, I'm stuck in a horrible topsy group. Like you could call it cult, but it's better to say a group that hasn't a group that still is an narcissistic group, right? A group that is about inclusion, exclusion.

A group that makes you feel like you're full of poison and tries to kick you out if you are the bad one, right? If you're being treated as the scape. There's a lot of people now, they call themselves ex-fangentical, which is a wonderful word to make. They're talking about literally, they say deconstruction, which is the thing that I actually do.

So I actually, I said, you wrote a book for you guys. I didn't know that you existed until I was in the middle of writing this book. And I also wrote this book for these British people. The reverse is happening in Britain, interestingly, the place where there really is a national church, and you go for what you wish for, Christian nationalist, because you can end up with the Church of England.

It's going to end up being really boring. It's going to be all about cake. It's going to be boring. Yeah, boring and oppressive.

But there's a lot of people actually getting into the Christianity precisely because of ecological issues. And I actually only wrote a book for them as well, because I didn't know that when I was writing it. And my big point here is, where's that feeling, the good bit, the good feeling, the good feeling, we've all had this feeling, whether it be some kind of a vicarious, I'm coming up on MDMA feeling or some kind of revelatory feeling, or I'm having a beautiful dream, and it's that feeling of Maslow peak experience. You've had that, hopefully, a little bit of the slice of falling in love, that kind of feeling, right?

Where's that? Right? Why do people like me spend most of our time making ourselves and everybody else feel paralyzed and depressed and evil? Page one of the newspaper, it says, be horrible fat, but you didn't know X.

And you're like, no, I just opened the heart and the heart and the soul and my family is a terrible thing. 10, what? 50,000, what? Now what?

Right? So already you've got this hangover mind. Like, oh, God, what was I drinking, right? And it's actually also accidentally in the key of religion, the bad one, it's in the key of the book of Revelation, accidentally the science in its very science, in its under-delta-rated, seemingly unfiltered rawness is saying the same thing as giant dragon emojis from boiling ocean.

I said, what am I supposed to do with this? Well, I'm not supposed to do this. So page one makes you feel stupid and tiny. Then you open up to the middle of the newspaper and somebody who I'm going to call Eor for libel reasons and slander, but also because it's a type, it's not anybody in particular, it's like a fate.

Well, it could be actually someone in particular, but like Eor, you're doing it wrong. You're thinking about this wrong. You're a bad person. You're not doing enough.

The all the government is evil. Everything's over evil. Everything's wrong. Your world is wrong.

Everything. You're a holy person, but your world is wrong. Right? So page one, stupid.

Editorial evil, stupid and evil, stupid. Did Martin Luther King stand up in front of a million people in Washington DC? And so you have no idea how racist you are. You have no idea how paralyzed you are.

We're never going to get this done because you guys suck. No, he didn't. He said, I have a dream. Right?

He opened up the future. But when you say I have a dream, you've already won. Because you're making people visualize the possibility that things can be different. Also, as a skillful minister, Dr.

King knows that I have a dream. Also is the intimacy, right? In public. Like when's the time you hear someone say that?

It's when your best person wakes up next to you and they're like, I'm having a dream. Or they're just falling asleep. I'm having a dream. It's a very vulnerable moment.

They're going into or coming out to sleep paralysis. If you're a psychic, you could kill them. They can't move. They're having a dream.

It's the intimacy, right? And Dr. King was brave enough and trained enough to beat internet with millions and millions of people around him and in the future being filmed saying, I have a dream. This, where's that?

Where is that? Because that would get me out of bed, actually. That feeling of, oh my word. Yes.

Solving global warming is the set. And plus also, it's so intimate and personal and it doesn't delete my little house and it doesn't delete my little family and it doesn't delete my little street. Like so many so much environmental writing is like, your little world is meaningless. Your little world means nothing, right?

Because the other problem is that again, if this big group is a big bad group and it's obviously bigger and and better than your group and it swallows your group like back. Right? It's a bigger narcissist, right? This is that is, this fascist holism.

Unfortunately, we've all been trained to say, the whole is greater than the song of its parts. But is it just this funny thing we like to say to sound good? But is it really, right? How do you put be like ecological at planet scale without thinking my little life is worthless, right?

That's what Donald Trump's trying to make you think like that the fascism is a Latin from a Latin with a fast case, right? It's like a bundle of sticks and the stick is only strong and a bunch, right? We're a gang or a criminal gang, right? Ecological politics, don't be about that.

So I wrote this preface that's very personal because I need to go there first so other people feel like, okay, to go there. So I went there, like I'm going to go in there. I'm going to talk about all the horrible disgusting nasty stuff and how I use it, right? Then we're going to drop in the religion stuff, right?

From the top level, right? And by the time you've done all that, it's like a roller coaster going slowly up the slope. And then the remaining traptists, we down to the blame. Yes.

Okay. So there's, yeah, in the sense that this exordium is an overture, I feel like we've already danced around much of what I want to discuss with you. And I just want to touch on a couple of things and highlight them before we move on, one of which is how tickled I was that you brought up the Geekers Alien in this. It's a, it's part of my own inner dreamscape.

It stands as a symbol of the biomechanical hell that I find myself trying to reckon with at all times. And it's going to come back in this conversation, especially being as we are on the cusp of Disney's first alien movie this year. And having talked about childhood, weird childhood shit, I grew up in a Disney family, like my dad worked for Disney for 20 years. So like the fact that this is, yeah, so growing up inside the machine of the insane mechanized capitalist monster.

But one of the things I love about this book is the, the non duality, the through full feeling of being in the, okay, let me just say I have a trash can outside of our house. For the first time in my life, I have a mortgage and it bothers me immensely because I'm an itinerant, nomadic soul. And yet in order to raise a family, I've had to make a compromise and the compromise was to work in a scientific institution, the Santa Fe Institute, and in so doing, although I didn't last, but I lasted for a while, in so doing, getting a house, and on the trash can outside of our house, the serial number for the trash can includes 666. And I thought for a while, I was like, you know, maybe I should, should I take a marker and make it 888?

Like it bothered me. But I was like, I have to just sit with this. And then of course, there's Michael Schneider's fabulous coffee table book, Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe talks about the symbolism of each of the decimal numerals and how six, six is associated with the beast and the body because it's about being in three dimensional space. And that's the honeycomb, it's the cells of soap bubbles as they're pushed together.

And so that there is this thing in that you, this is something I just want to highlight in the conversation moving forward, or which is the emphasis, as you mentioned, this thing about subsidence, about the parts being greater than their, the holes. I think, so let me kind of all over the place, but it's hard after reading a book intensely not to speak from a place where everything you've said is connected to every other thing. So just forgive me, oh listener, for making no sense here. But this book starts in a rave, and you've got the rave poster by David Doral as the frontispiece of this book with the Our Lady and Love.

And it's been interesting to me how there's like a specific kind of ecstatic religious thing that springs up in groups that you point to that is found in the laser and smoke and techno spectacle of ecstasy, fuel dance halls. And then also I think back to college and my first experience with MDMA and how I remember realizing I'd smoked weed before, but I was like, Oh, no, this is the first time this is a drug, like I am made of chemicals. And there's something that anyone who has that experience, almost anyone I would imagine, maybe not everyone. Most people I know either get stuck in a kind of nihilism, or they become these sort of materialist pharmacist type people who decide that we are nothing but and therefore end up sort of chasing this peak experience manipulating themselves in a way that like you talk about the the body is the slave.

And I am I am the demon writing this body. And so I am going to feel good. And but then there's this other thing which is the vulnerability and more and more reading this book, you reminded me of one of my favorite all time books Darwin's Pharmacy Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Nose Fear by Richard Doyle. He's somebody else I found through Eric actually.

So I don't know, you've probably read it. If you haven't, it's a book about the way that he has reconciled evolutionary theory with literary criticism of psychedelic trip reports and advice of Adanta. And so he's got this whole thing about how what he calls the eco-delic experience because the words we use function as the language functions as an algorithm that programs your trip. And so what's really going on, it's not just the psychedelic, it's the eco-delic.

It manifests the way that the self is appears. It troubles or complicates the idea of there being a subject and an object that things fold over into one another. And we realize that this is this the self is not fixed in order to hear or there. And yeah, so yeah.

Yeah, please. I'd love to go that I'd love to go right into the psychedelics for the benefit of our listeners here. And what you're saying is absolutely right, of course, that where people go, if they go into a kind of nihilistical materialistic space, isn't necessarily the chemicals fault. It's sort of ideologies fault, right?

It's that in our world, we've got subject versus object, which is master versus slave. And it's very hard to kind of unthink that stuff. Now I've done like 30 plus years of serious Buddhism. Yeah.

And one of the things I discovered in Buddhism doing esoteric, right? Vajrayana and so on. And the thing you discover, actually, is the thing that Hindu and Chinese and Tibetan medicine calls the subtle body, the yoga thing that Nadi Prana and Bindu, you can say mindfulness in my line of work, it's stated in university, you can say mindfulness. And it's okay.

But you can't say prana. You can't say Nadi. You can't say Bindu when you do is, oh, how quaint, or you think you're a crazy person now and you're going to lose your job. But why?

Because of this subject versus object and Nadi Prana and Bindu are transpersonal, physical, and yet, it's why they call it the subtle body, right? And I personally, I know they're real, right? People check themselves into mental hospital all the time having Kundalini without knowing what it is. Yeah.

There's a book by Stonislav Graf called Spiritual Emergency about this. I've got this energy coming up through my spine and it's going out of my head. And it's the transpersonal aspect of it that it's you didn't cook it up. And it's going out the top of your head.

Oh, you know, when you take a psychedelic, this becomes very obvious. I would argue that acid is like a vicarious experience of what is called power in a Tibetan Buddhism. How to eject right the video tape out of the video recorder when you die, right? You eject your consciousness out of the head.

And so you can pop it into another video recorder. And like, that sense of I'm not in my outer body because you never were in your body. Yeah, that kind of thing in your body, unquote. And then I think it's quite right.

So it's quite right that the US Army decided MTM is a PTSD drug. And somebody with I did just have a PTSD, I have complex PTSD, continuing horrible abuse. Just I'm just a big old mess. I sound like I'm not.

Or actually I sound like I'm not. Anyway, as a PTSD drug, it gives you a vicarious experience of being okay. And what that is in yoga or Chinese medicine terms is all your channels are nice and clear and aligned and your prana is all nice and the prana is the energy flow, right? According to this, part of you's made up a little droplets of energy called binder is a little wave packet or binder is right.

The way they flow around is called prana and the vector, the direct reality is called nutty, the channel. And NDMA gives you a vicarious experience of like, Oh, this is what it would be like to have not to have not in my nuddies. This is what yoga is all about. And I'm not my nuddies and that will enable me to connect to the divine as yoga means yoking.

Right. And the result of yoga is that it's not that you know how to bend yourself into a pretzel is that you are able to click to the divine. Yeah, because your nuddies are all nice and aligned and straight, unquote straight, and your energy flows all nice. 99% of the stuff in your brain in a way is to subtle body activity.

If you're a very intellectual person, I'm just going to say this for the benefit of people here. Might to bend but it's nature so you can remember to this point interrupt the conversation. So you've got to tell them about the upwardly moving wind Tim, right? But it's this prana that circulates around just below your navel and it should be just kind of rotating around like an engine.

But if you're an intellectual person brought up in an anxious modern culture, it you can make it kind of come up your central channel. And if it gets to your heart, you have major anxiety, if it gets to your throat chakra, you start to hallucinate, if it gets in your brain. Yeah. And so the key never teaches people advanced stuff, but the advanced stuff just happens by itself.

If you're able to get this prana down below the navel again. And so you can finally went to a teaching of his in Berkeley. Oh, yeah, that I know that I'm already on SSRIs to help that and MDMA is a super hyper SSRI amongst all that floods your brain with serotonin. Oh, wow, more than normal.

I can let go. Yeah. And this is what you're saying about inside outside and self-other. In a way, this is why the word psychedelic hasn't done us a favor.

Right? They coined the word psychedelic when they gave a bunch of alcoholics LSD and they saw gods and then they didn't drink alcohol again. And they it was a little bit in the I don't know who would thought this after whatever, but in the idea itself is a little bit you've been punished. You've been punished by having your reality ripped away and now you're revealing your soul.

He's the delosses reveal the psyche is the soul. Right? It's a little bit hinting at this mind body dualism that can really mess you up. And you cling to that idea, my brother has schizophrenia.

He took a lot of assets for a lot of years and a lot of other things. And he got schizophrenia and actually funny enough, people with schizophrenia are in a way people who really believe in dualism a little bit too much. Right? They're like, the voices coming out of the others things and I don't like it.

Well, actually the voice, if there isn't a you for your voice to come out of, that's normal. But you know, in a funny way, people with schizophrenia on that there's a lot of lineization of it, but it's not a cool thing. Speaking of the long term brother about song with long term, real bad schizophrenia. Anyway, the word I prefer is not psychedelic.

It's all dyslexia, it's word for narrow time. I don't know if anyone's heard this word for narrow time, but the fanro bit means appearing or display. And the thine bit comes from my very favorite Greek word, thumas. And this book is a lot about this concept of thumas, which is life, right?

Not life as a concept of the beos versus whatever is this thing alive, it's life, Jim, but not as we know it. Right? That's beos, it's biology. And it's not zoe as in zoo as in this thing should be in a zoo.

And this thing should be looking at the thing in the zoo. This thing has a right to live and this thing doesn't have a right to live. It's a juridical concept about distributing bodies in social space. Right?

This is thumas, which also applies to subatomic particles. It's the liveliness, it's vibration quivering. It's the last syllable of the word rhythm. Right?

It means pulsation or palpitation. So the narrow time literally means life display, right? Display of life. You take the fanarathym, it's an MDMA.

And life itself, as a kind of quivering vibrating, transpersonal, whatever that is, is revealed. I think that's a much more benevolent word for it than it's why it's healing, right? Or potentially peeling. It's not like a fish being taken suddenly out of the water.

It's like a fish being plunged back in and realizing, Oh, wait, I'm not a land animal at all. Oh, as is water. Wow. I'm thinking of it right now like this a little bit.

I saw, I just going to say, I did see God talking psychedelic and I'm going to contradict myself and odd because since at that march of last year, I'd be having this ongoing subtle body experience of being a born again, though I'm so sorry, I'm connecting these things that are normally not connected together. Born again, Christian and guy who can talk about acid is not normal. Yeah, but like I said, I'm not a normal guy. And I know Crindellini, I've had Crindellini since 2008, it just happened because I'm meditating with Rimpertchik and I can tune into it and make it kind of be uncoated, get stronger, but it doesn't.

It's just like you're tuning in to this little pilot light. It's always on, right? I know what that is. And then this other stuff is happening in my body.

Like I tell you, I've used people have a lot of funny experiences, right? But then they sort of go crazy because they're having all these funny experiences. Luckily, I can put words on these experiences, right? But anyway, where was I?

The thing about this thing about the narrow thing is that it's as if a lot of quote unquote religion is saying this, right? It's the flatland thing. So everything that you do, everything you experience, happy, sad, good, bad rage, irritation, revelation, everything is happening to a stick figure in 2D. But you are actually 3D, right?

And something like LSD will show you, hopefully, that you are 3D. And knowing that your 3D would provide a wonderful way to cope with planet emergency, planet death, possibly mass extinction, where you could go to know 3D, whether you call it transcendence or whatever you want to call it, right? Radical immanence. I didn't even care what the word is.

Jesus, I don't care anymore. I don't care. In a way, since all approaches are religious, including the anti-religion approach, since being anti-religion is also a kind of religion, I beg your pardon, Richard talking to you. You can't get rid of this stuff because getting rid of it is what bad religion is about.

It's about getting rid of the nasty bit in social space. So the way you get rid of religion is usually in the key of religion. It's like, Alison, look through the looking glass, trying to run away from the house and she's always coming back. So just face it, we're living in religion space.

So we might as well get it right. Let's have a nice religion space, right? Let's talk about a nice religion space. And the nice religion space for me would be, I was just in Julian of Norwich as a meditation heart.

So in Norwich, I was doing a book launch in Norwich UK, Julian of Norwich as a woman from the later Middle Ages and she's like, brilliant. You haven't read Revelations of Divine Love. You're in for a treat. Jesus is your mum.

And the universe is this little hazelnut in your hand. She has his vision. She's holding this little hazelnut. God is saying that's everything.

Everything that ever was, including yourself. You're holding it in there. I'm like, imagine if you could get up in the morning and do ecological action knowing that every single problem with it was just a little hazelnut in your hand and you could feel it. You could feel it.

So this book is an ad slash somewhat desperate attempt for feeling it. I'm feeling it. And let me just say before I even get going on the next thing that I totally welcome you and I to establish as protocol what we stumbled into just a moment ago. And I'll just riff until you find some moment to interrupt me.

That's great. I like that. Okay. So, yes, core theme of this show since the very beginning, my friend Evan Snyder, who's a producer of electronic music as him.

I, although in a different way, who produces under the name Skytree, my original co-host is very interested in geology and crystals and is now using crystals as part of the circuit in modular synthesizers and measuring things with radiation for control voltage effects and so on. And then I'm somebody who went to school for evolutionary biology and then got into guitar looping and like thinking about guitar looping explicitly. I talked about this with Carl Hayden Smith who works on hyperhumanist cyborg stuff in London. And we were talking about that famous quote from origin of species about the entangled bank and cybernetic feedback loops and this boundary between the analog and digital.

And so it was natural for us to start this podcast in the first two episodes as a kind of diasal, sisal conversation about chronos and chyros. So this whole thing that you've got here about Thumos and as part of the etymology of rhythm and paying attention to, you know, as you did in hyper objects, also talking about oscillation and pulsation. And now it makes more sense knowing that a lot of this is coming from an electronic dance music sort of origin story. But yeah, so there's time and your remarks on time and actually also your remarks on futurality were really big in what I was left with after reading hyper objects also.

So I was glad to see you explore this more. It's interesting because there's something that was sand in my pants until the very latest, like the last page of this book because there's like a question I wanted to ask you and I don't want to spoil the prestige here. But it was about this tension that I feel in your work between saying things like you do at the very beginning, the past sucked just look around you. So we had better make a future world.

Jesus is all about the future being better than the past. And then talking about the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting, perhaps forgetting is one of the things that makes humans lovely. You say elsewhere at the end of this, sorry, you said, do you like the idea of the future being different from the past? It's really about the absolute contingency of a genuinely future future in which one can be genuinely surprised.

And so yeah, this notion of ecstatic revelation as an understanding of contingency and or like a feeling of contingency, a feeling of the cosmic creativity. And elsewhere later, much later in the book, you talk about rhyming as a kind of prison, as like that, that which binds one line to the next and poetry constrains the possibility space. And it's interesting because I've had, I've had evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris on future fossils once upon a time. And Conway Morris is paleontological work other than being like everyone talks about the Cambrian explosion now.

It's a hot word. So he worked on that. And in part of that, he got into this argument with Stephen J. Gould about whether the history of life is primarily a story of convergence, of the fact that life is happening on this planet under particular physical constraints.

And therefore, if you run the tape of life as it goes back again, then you get something like what we have now, or whether it's dominated by contingency. And this is why I brought up non duality first, because there are times in this book where it seems like you are saying that, again, with the 666, that the physics of constraints, the scaling laws that bound Jeffrey West's biophysical scaling, where we can draw a plot and say, mice and whales both have 1.5 billion heartbeats, that this is the prison, that the rhymes, the regularities as David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute would say, the regularities is what we're seeking in science. In that respect, it's ultimately a demonic, we're like an aramonic exercise that through the pursuit of this, we have made it to a point where it's gotten very Westworld, or Blade Runner. We see the living body as a a tangle of mechanical algorithms and so on.

And yet also, that same scientific frame is about thermodynamics and an arrow. And boy, do you go on in this book with just a riotous anti-teliological energy against the arrow? And it's funny because when you started this conversation, you started talking about what it is that you did wrong, where you've gone wrong. And yet in the book, you talk about you have depressive stuff, I have to, and the depression is, as Jonathan Malaysia talks about in his book, the end of Burnout, the occupational burnout, is exist in the gap between what people thought they would be doing with their lives and what they are doing in their jobs, in the workplace.

I wanted to be a doctor and all I'm doing is filing paperwork. So this is just one area where I feel like we can really explore this thing about time and isolation between seeing time as one damn thing after another, seeing time as cyclical, the flaw in the idea that we are approaching perfection and all of the horrors that that kind of ideology allows us to perpetrate on ourselves and on each other. And then also the fact that ideas are in their own way, part of the hell that by feeling completely, we are able to transmute into something else. Very well said.

But I'd love to turn this piece of sound in your pants into a pearl, if I may, by exuding some of the greasy lube of my thoughts. So kind of dancing around and within what you just said is Gnosticism. You said Aramanic, you said Blade Runner, the idea that you're a puppet is very attractive. And believe me, as an abuse survivor, this Gnostic feeling that you're a puppet of some demonic force is a thing that you feel.

It didn't have dark teas, feel, and unfortunately a lot of people who are abductees and who've had spiritual expenses also abuse survivors, they can never quite tell which bits of real and who was the author and by the stuff my lovely friend Jeffrey Kreibel writes about this all the time. But you mentioned Gnosticism, so I'm going to just expound what this book is, which is flipped Gnosticism. But that going Gnosticism unfortunately has this master slave thing. Namely, we are spiritual beings trapped in a prison of matter.

Yeah, we've been enslaved. We're trapped in a creation of this idiot God. This idiot who's trying to copy the real creation, I made this bungled nasty alien resurrection version of it. Yeah, well, I think it's the other way around.

We are beautiful, fragile, flawed, physical beings, including the thoughts that come out of our brains, mind, whatever that is, trapped in a universe of horrible ideas. And at some level, every idea is horrible. That's just God's incompleteness theorem. But a more benevolent way of saying it is not that they're horrible.

It's that they're finite, right? Now, this is not the same as counting up to three, but you could really count up to four, seeing this much of a fractal pattern, but really, you can see that much if you opened your mind, right? It's not the same as you let's think a million years ahead rather than two years ahead. The finitude in this sense is there is a lovely relieving, refreshing opacity about things as they are.

If you want this opacity to smell like something, for me, it would be petrical that the smell of dust off to rain. There is a lovely wet clay quality to the universe. And this whole thing that Alan Watts mocked as the ceramic model is actually rather nice. This, when you think of it this way, not as a static object that's been produced by, he's got this all the wrong, it's this movement, right?

And inside the movement is this opacity, right? It's fundamentally moving isn't going anywhere. Fundamentally moving is just quivering, right? Mechanical motion, which is going somewhere because you got pushed or are pushing is secondary to be phenomenal to the quantum vibration, but grand state, right?

And when I talk about arrow being unfortunate, it's a science arrow. It's a really bad idea. Arrow science in a way is about how to always be ripping the ideas apart or seeing through the ideas, right? When Einstein writes equals MC squared, he knows that's going to be untrue or less true tomorrow or 200 years from now or too many years from now built into the built into his genius understanding of that is a fragility that I'm talking about is this opacity.

Yeah. And Kurt Goedall is saying that within the structure of truth itself, let alone the fact that things are made out of little squiggles and meanings made out of signifies me forget that inside of truth space itself is this opacity, right? There are some things that are true that cannot be proved. Every possible logical system can say things that are true, but can't be proved.

Yeah, it's not just that logical systems break down somewhere and can talk nonsense is that within the truths that they say are opaque qualities, beautiful, right? And what the mathematician is what a science person is, what a good contemporary person is, or a good neighbor is what a good lover is somebody who's ready to just be with the other person or the equation or the whatever that is, it's opacity. I teach literary criticism for my job, and I'm like, the first thing I'm going to teach you guys actually now we're in the age of QAnon is how to not read the poem. Yeah, QAnon knows what it means already.

QAnon knows that I'm a pedophileist from space who drinks babies blood. There's enough of that there's enough meaning in life. We don't need more meaning. We don't need people to get to the meaning as quickly as possible.

As you say, break it down to nothing but which is a beautiful I don't know if you've heard Alan Mott talking about acid, but he has a whole thing. It's very hard to get hold of him talking about LSD, but he could have a series of talks on it a few hours worth. He talks about a nothing but idea. It's a materialism where he describes it as nasty porridge at the bottom of the pan sort of theory of the universe.

And how desperately important it is for some people to get it down to nothing but, you know, reductionism, you can't reduce the world according to Gurdle and according to the thing that I like, which is the other one, also according to deconstruction, which I also love this, you can't reduce the world one way to say it in your terms. And I've listened to your work on this podcast and I really love it about Kairos and Chronos. You cannot reduce Kairos to Chronos, right? You can't reduce time to the measurement of time.

That's the measurement of time. When someone says, take show me time, they'll usually point to the clock, you know, that's just a piece of metal going around another piece of metal. That's not time. That's an LED display, counting the numbers.

That's not time. Same with rhythm, right? When you say, what is rhythm? You go, well, it's the measurement of the rhythm.

It has to be a very recursive circular thing that is being said there because people don't know. People don't know because they've lost touch because why? Because we're stuck in pretty much a one size fits all measurement systems, starting with mass versus slave, which is like parcel of the world into mass versus slaves, a basic sorting algorithm. Then we'll have subject and object and massive and feminine and passive and active.

And you're here and you're here and you're here and you're here and you're here and you're here and you're here and it's now in fossil fuels to keep this going. Oh, planet death, right? Like it started about 6,000 years ago, or whatever. The birth of civilization, it's just enslaved a lot of people.

Then some people took it really seriously called British English people actually. They started settler colonialism. Let's treat the whole world like it's our slave. Yeah.

Let's treat the world like a slave. Well, the problem with treating the world like a slave is it starts to become Satan. Think about it this way. God, according to this, the master slave model is like this perfect master who can never serve properly.

So you have religion to patch the gaps, right? You never to be screw up to go back and do the ceremony again and patch it up again and do it again. Right? That's the kind of vanilla idea of God, right?

Now imagine the opposite, right? Imagine the perfect servant. This servant does everything you tell him to do over a thing, including all the untended consequences that you didn't specify, right? Every story you've ever heard about selling a soul to the devil is about this, right?

But also everything about the biosphere, right? You wash your hands and anti-bacterial soap, it makes the bacteria worse. You buy an avocado from Chile, you just use a lot of jet fuel, right? In other words, this model, this sorting algorithm is turning the world into the perfect servant, right?

Right? What could go wrong? Let's create the perfect servant. Every story about the devil is telling you, don't try to make the perfect servant.

And this whole American thing of how can we get out of it? How can we get something else to do it? How can I get Chachi PT to do it? How can I get my plantation of slaves to do it for me?

How can I get? There's a whole kind of beg your pardon, guys, but there's a masculinity conformance that happens when I do exams, right? It doesn't happen quite as much now, but in the 90s when I first came to the stage, I was amazed by the inevitably male student who would rush through the exam with contempt and then run out of the door and slam the door because they were above being enslaved to this exam. They were humiliated by having to be in this close from following these orders, right?

It's the red legacy of slavery. We've all got PTSD from this thing. There's also real slavery going on right now still happening. And we've got this horrible PTSD from it.

And so everything gets crushed down into this, right? And so there's another way out, there's another way. But this is why we confuse time with the measurement of time. This is why, because when you're stuck in one person's timeframe, it's called oppression, right?

When you're stuck in like some axi-motor is going to kill you and they've tied you up in the basement, you're on their time, right? Some conquistadors enslaved you and you've got to do the thing otherwise you'll be executed. You're on their time, right? The druids, right?

We've got the biggest, most accurate clock in the world. Therefore, we're in charge of you now. You are our slaves indigenous people of Britain. You will now go to Wales and hear this rock out of the mountainside and you're going to make this clock for us.

We're going to call it Stonehenge, but you're going to jump into the clock and we're going to kill you because we are the druids and we've got the most powerful measuring device in the world. And that's just every colonial story right there. It's something that we've got a more accurate, more powerful measuring system than you, which we're going to impose on you didn't have a document that we would read from the Vatican. I could read this Latin thing and be like, works you didn't get it.

Okay, so now we have to punish it. It was built into it was in a way a lot in Christianity, we call the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, right? Howard Thurman, who is Martin Luther King's teacher, calls white Western Christianity, right? I'm just going to come out and say it because I'm not a theologian.

So many theologians are like, oh, there's lots of different types, neither is it. The white European one is the war against the Holy Spirit in the form of so-called, and this is a pejorative term, animism. The belief, unquote, that unquote and unquote objects are alive and that darks and fish are people. But this is reality, actually.

So this view keeps coming up like the grass through the concrete. It just keeps on coming, because why? Because it's made out of movement. Movement is intrinsic to things.

If you want to talk about where the spirit is in life, it's all the way down to the quantum ground state level, where there's just this hovering wafting vibrating as you think about genesis in those terms, right? The stories of God hovering over the waters is actually saying the universe was in a ground state. And there was just this quantum zero level quivering, which you can't get rid of that energy. It's just sort of there.

And like, rhythm is really that. It's really, for the first syllable of rhythm comes from the same word as diarrhea. It means body fluids, right? Means to flow, rain and to ray, heraglysis, everything flows.

And then the firm is the moss. So it's the pulsing of the body fluids is what rhythm is, right? Without the measurement, it's just the way your body is going. My daughter had this terrible heart condition that she got it got fixed.

She has a little extra node at the bottom of her heart and she believes it's too much electricity. And it got removed. And they to do this, they made an echocardiogram, right? And it was beautiful to watch them do it.

It was really moving. And when you get up close to the heart, it's always palpitating. It's black hole where if you're going to talk about arrows, the revenge is suspended a little bit. You've been in the middle of a fight where you just like, wait a minute.

Why am I doing this? What's going on? I even wonder whether that hesitation is itself. A huge big thought o'graf of some quantum phenomenon because thoughts coming from quantum events in your brain, right?

That actually thought itself is saying something true about the universe, which is that thought there's a kind of fundamental hesitation, right? You have to think when something malfunctions, wait a minute, where are my car keys here? So thought is an effect of a basic kind of opacity of the world to go back to this opacity thing. But fundamentally, things can't function perfectly.

Things are always a little bit mal, which from a kind of Western point of view is creepy, which is like the Plato idea, or the world itself is a bit evil. It's going to stand at Benel and Austists as an idea like, oh, it's evil because it's this thing that happens to you without your consent, it's demonically bad. It's just happening. It's just happening all by itself without having to do anything.

Like, that's the big problem for white people is that the world is just happening without them having to flip the on switch, right? And the whole violence is coming from the determination to make it big. No, this is really just a machine that we switched on. Bink, bink, see, I can switch it on.

There's just a story in America now because there was a black president. Yeah. Okay. So in oscillating between your comments in this conversation and in the book on master slave AI as the perfect servant.

And yeah, like you say in the copy, I'm sure that pagination is different, but I can't think of a better analogy than summoning a demon or praying for devastating revenge. You quote, Kirstie and Clay Barker's Hellraiser, hell was what he wanted, hell was what he got. And then elsewhere, an algorithm is a servant that carries out one's commands perfectly. So be careful what you wish for.

And so yes, like there is, this is actually like the premise for this whole new project that I'm trying to take on, which is to weave opacity into this, this issue of how the realization of the modern project, I think about like Zigman Baumann's book Liquid Modernity in which he says that modern era is defined by conflicting values, a value of transformation and value of control. And so in becoming ever more capable of measuring and modifying at will, we have arrived at a place where we have brought ourselves full circle back to a pre modern kind of condition, which is one in which the Google can't tell you why when you ask Google AI for help up to with your depression, it tells you to jump off a bridge, which is funny because you actually cite this as the voice of your own satanic doppelganger in a dream that you had at the end of this book that it's like, oh, just jump off a bridge. This is interesting play between contingent again and deterministic that when we allow ourselves to become subservient to the opaque algorithms, and actually again, not Eric Davis, who is the first person to point this out to me, that basically machine learning has brought us full circle to, we have priests consulting a giant black cube that the joke is as far as I'm concerned, and this is where I would kind of prompt not to use that word in the vulgar sense, I guess, prompt you to talk about your work on humor, and as it shows up in this book, humor and contingency and stupidity and accident, but when we prompt this opaque thing, then it sends us off into something that surprises us. So I just want to button this with a reference to this paper that I love that kind of launched me off on this whole thing, which was a machine learning paper called hallucination is inevitable, where it's like actually what we're doing with language models is we are creating again these lossy compressions of unfathomably rich, deep, multi dimensional reality that then spit out things that we would, working in a way like, and again, Doyle talks about this too, and Roland Fisher and the perception hallucination continuum, that like in a way the waking, waking consciousness is dream bound by the senses, and that noise and hallucination are fundamental to consciousness.

And so we've done this thing whoops, in our efforts to make a perfect slave, if we insist on a kind of a master's slave thing, then we've done what they what Delos Corporation of Westworld did, which was to turn the human being into slaves of the machine, or there's another way of seeing it, which is that we have unwittingly, in a comedic sense, a strictly comedic sense, we have unwittingly given birth to something that is putting our face in the ineradicable liveliness of our world, and the joke for me in studying complex system science for five years in an institutional setting, is that it cemented my animism. The like the information theory of life is one in which you accept that you can't say, okay, this is the origin of life, there is no origin of life, there are moments where you have an apparent emergence of particular characteristics that we have come to associate with living systems, but information requires a feeling, right, there is an observation of the difference between signal and noise, and so this whole thing bottoms out in the opacity and the humility and the incompleteness theorem of all this stuff, and yeah, so I guess, just hearing you riff on AI, yeah, I would love to go to the human place here, right, because you see, let me start with a little humorous phrase that I just popped in my head yesterday, everything AI can do, you can do matter, and the thing I can do, you can do matter, is the inverse, right, because why actually, because you, why is Gudel correct, yeah, why is Gudel correct that within the structure of truth, there is opacity, which is his way of proving why cantor is correct, right, that within infinity, there are things that are bigger than vanilla, infinity, transphinites, yeah, Russell and White, who logic hates this, logic hates this stuff, right, but math is better than logic, I'm sorry, math is from the future, logic is from the past, logic is like folding your laundry, and math is like wearing clothing, you don't need to fold your laundry to wear your clothes, yeah, and in the end, math is like being with the opacity of the thing, I don't care if I die, and I never solve this equation, I'm just going to sit there, so the same thing is looking at how am I, I don't care if I die, and I never get this job and the Hopkins bone together properly, I never get it, I don't care because I'm being in love, I don't care if I never get this person, I don't care if I never understand, in fact, if I understand them completely, it's kind of it's over, if I think I can understand them completely, right, you can't build an algorithm powerful enough ever at all to determine whether every other algorithm will go or not into an infinite loop, that's the Turing proof of Goedles incompleteness theorem, you can't find a police officer with an off-authority in the Monty Python argument sketch, to arrest every single other police officer and everybody else in the argument sketch, because once they've arrived in the sketch, they're in the sketch, that's the Monty Python proof of Turing's proof of Goedles incompleteness theorem, right, there is something intrinsically funny about the attempt to fold the laundry, because there's always going to be, I'm just believing I just did, it's always going to be like a sock, missing, there's no laundry folding mechanism is perfect, that's another way of saying the Turing, right, no way of figuring out social space is going to work, right, no way of, is there a way to get it completely right and maybe try to get it completely right, might involve a lot of vibes, yeah, it's nice to arrange things, it's nice to have folded laundry, it's nice, logic is nice, right, in the beginning was the logos, it's in the beginning was the way things hang together and it was nice, yeah, it's nice for things to hang together, it's not nice to have horrible big piles, it's nice to have some arrangement, and it's nice to have a bomber as the president and not Donald Trump, it's nice to have a normal, ediful, irritating dad, it's nice to have a normal, irritating, political system that you can hate, it's not nice to have fascism, it's not nice to have the horrible, entrenched religious culprit, but fascism is someone who knows that they're the goody, they're the goody, right, all these people who are in tight, they're capable building on the sixth January, they knew that they were the goody, announcey Pelosi is the baddie, right, but you can't be sure that you're the goody because why, you can never find a police officer with an awful authority to arrest all the other police officers and all the other people in your body by the argument sketch, because when they come in the sketch, they're in the sketch, right, you can't, you just can't, you can't, at some point, the world falls silent, yeah, at some point, you can smell the smell of dust off the rain, yeah, you can just stop at any point, and notice that, right, you can just stop, you can just stop and notice, I'm a Zulchan student who is a nature of mind is everywhere, it's in it, you can be irritated, you can be having a fight, you can be running away from the enemy, you can recognize the nature of mind, you can be dying, it doesn't get destroyed by anything, in the same way that the third dimension doesn't get destroyed by anything that happens in flat land, doesn't destroy or contaminate 3D, when God says King of Kings, it doesn't mean the ultimate mafia boss with the biggest oozy who's going to hurt everybody the worst, right, the biggest baddest 2D thing imaginable, it means the King of the whole idea of Kings, right, the police officer of the whole idea of police officers, in other words, laughing, at the cosmic joke, that, I repeat, you can never find a police officer with an authority to wrestle, get a la la la la, multiply the argument sketch, right, the fundamental fact that we live in a comedy universe, not a tragic one, right, a lot of global warming and anxiety is in the key of tragedy and the night, why am I going to get to the comic, not laughing at it, but comedy is like a nice habitat that can contain all the emotions, right, anger, fear, jealousy, hate, love, laughter, ridicule, but they're not hurting each other anymore, right, tragedy breaks it down to 2, well, 2, like fear and pity, right, tragedy is kind of like the fundamental religious and a bad way mode, right, like you see the tragic hero, like you see the Catholic priest, it's going through the notions, so you don't have to, there's already a problem, there you are watching this guy, and I thank God I'm not this guy, the basic feelings, I think, I know it could happen to me, but thank God it isn't, right, you watch a comedy, oh that happens to me every day, I am that person, already there's a four four collapse every five seconds because the thing will last you, when you watch one person going through the notions, so you don't have to, what are they doing, they try to extricate from the web of fate, only to find that the extrication process makes it worse, which is what we've been talking about, the attempt to transcend our material conditions worsens those conditions, yeah, the attempt to create the ultimate antibacterial soap creates drug resistant bacteria by definition, it's nice to be free of disease, it's nice to have nice folded laundry, it's nice to have civilization, it doesn't work, you know, it's like there's a brilliant little picture of a window in Amsterdam from a few weeks ago, the basically said, democracy doesn't exist but we're really gonna miss it when it's gone, it's that idea, yeah, when you watch one person try extricate only to find a make it worse, it's called edabus, right, when you watch eight people doing it, it's called friends, or code your enthusiasm, right, tragedy is just a little twisted region of comedy space, yeah, and religion is also in the key of comedy, right, where there's a little bit of a coder at the end, there's just a little bit extra that you didn't quite bargain on, but the story isn't all nice and neat and wrapped up in a bow, there's this extra bit that just pops out of the end, yeah, or in the middle or everywhere, and I think we live in a fundamentally comic universe because, and I agree with my friend, Yonganar, Yonganar was the mayor of Reykjavik in the late 2000s after the financial crash, Yonganar and I both agreed that getting a joke or making a joke and having an idea are exactly the same thing, why? Because in both cases, there's a kind of Eureka moment, otherwise there's a lot of people laughing, I mean it's a joke, where a thing you didn't know, aka an unconscious thing, gets joined to a thing you didn't know, and that's the energy, there's like an engineering efficiency right there with the releases energy in the fall, wow, yeah, right, moving something true, suddenly, wow, I solved the equation, what five-year-old, one plus one is two, 40-year-old, yeah, the amount's lost there, am I can prove it, suddenly sometimes the wall goes transparent, right, the opacity becomes, well, true, but it's this fragile, beautiful, delicate, true, and it's moving like a laughter, right, and that's the universe we live in, where genuinely new things can happen, and for example, you can create a quantum random number, right, this is because of quantum theory, you can theoretically generate a number that no algorithm can predict ever, not even if they run for two or trillions of years longer than the time of the universe, but as it means, the future is fundamentally not captured by the past, different things can happen, in other words, we live in a world where genuine accidents can happen, and at some level, the word accident and the word miracle are the same word, yeah, we live in that kind of universe, where genuine miracles can happen, and life-forms are a wonderful, huge big, life-o-graph, biograph, model of that, right, and what's interesting about human beings is that human beings far from being very different from other life-forms, I hear this all the time from, Hegelian Marxists stuck in some weird, 19th century thing, as you ever noticed that human beings create such own environment, well, I'm sorry, Slavoy, have you ever seen an ant? That's what antist that's what antist that all single-cell organisms do according to this information theory of life, right, and that's what life is in a way, the thing that can create its own environment, right, Bateson?

Yeah, that just is life, right? What's interesting about humans is they exemplify this, why? It turns out, from studying the research on the research for decades, that human beings, amongst every animal, have got the strongest incest taboo, in other words, despite what I just said, there's a big old taboo on murdering and raping your kids, sorry to put it this way. What does it mean?

You're allowing the future to be different. Human beings allow the future to be different, and I just said that life is a place in the universe where the future is allowed to be different, because life is chemical, it's having mercy on themselves, and what's special about humans is that they exemplify this, actually, and so therefore, what's special about this feeling of mercy, the basic atomic structure of religion, I'm not going to kill you, I'm not going to do it that way, I'm just going to hesitate, I'm not going to, the basic Buddhist just don't do any harm, just don't foot-case about being enlightened, just don't hurt people, right, the basic bit is like the conserving, preserving, enhancing life, because surely through blue whales, it's nice to be alive, so killing them would suck, right, like surely if we extract a lot of chemicals from the ground and burn them, we can easily turn the world into a kind of lovely mechanical motorized hell and turn this lovely comic habitat back into a kind of inevitably tragic, it's fascist and thinks of itself as this tragic inevitability, but the white man's burden, we could easily keep doing that, it's created a lovely boring predictable world of chemistry, but I want to conserve this lovely unpredictable world of accidentality, right, and like life as an expression of that, and funnily enough, an incredibly freaky, weird way, a religion like Christianity, despite the fact, these guys can't have it, these fascists can't have it in a funny way that child appropriate to precise it because it isn't that, right, it isn't that, it's naked, pulsating, sort of object, life squishing around, if they vote for this guy, unfortunately they voted for him because he was a criminal moron, not in spite, right, because unfortunately that's the myth of Parsifol, Parsifol is the European Jesus, Parsifol saves the grail knights, this is why Monty Python aimed at that thing like a laser beam, because they knew what it was, right, the proto-fascist started a solution, yeah, Parsifol saves the grail knights from the wound, in the vlognate, and vlogn, right, what is the wound, it's based just being alive, just being alive, right, everything about you was a kind of a wound, like Steve Jobs had designed these ears, they would just be pin-crakes, because they can do exactly like my iPhone, uh, my microphone doesn't have to look like this, it doesn't, there's no reason for it to be, there's funny lumpy, but yeah, it's just because evolution is so wonderfully beautifully cheap, and evolve through accidents, right, random genetic mutation that is random with respect to currently, accidental encounters between life forms, there's a bit of the basis of comedy, stuff happens to you, right, just random shit happens, and you've got to get used to it, and that's the, then another comedy is over, yeah, and symbiosis which is random encounter, and sexual display which is admiring beauty for no reason, which goes all the way down, at least with beetles and then also to flow out, it's right, there's no real directionality there, there's nothing to do with having to reproduce, you think evolution restricts liking peacock-stales to female peacocks with you, have you ever liked a peacock's tail? I rest my case, if the beauty is a totally trans, the nomin and unfortunately, we live in this wonderful queer universe that is actually beautifully described by Christianity and these bastards can't have it. There's a lot there, so I'm just going to pick a vector here, and the vector will loop into something, and I guess that's the point, although there isn't a point.

It's actually, it's funny because I have the uncorrected proof of this book, and I don't know if it's, I mean, I imagine that this book is out now, it's been fixed, it's probably hasn't been riddled with errors, because ironically Michael, I cared about this book so much, me and my editor Wendy, we revised this book five times, because I wanted to get the sound right, I wanted to get it to feel right in your head, and so funnily enough, I wasn't concentrating quite enough on the little details, and I'm looking through going, oh you're kidding me, this, this, because I thought, because both of me feels, if you're going to say something outrageous, you have to say it in a beautiful suit, beautifully done, I'm with no dandruff, so people can't sort of pick a hole in it. Well, I laughed out loud when I read this, it's on my page 216, you're talking about hubris, you say, as a logical system, every algorithm is incomplete, if I run the application for long enough, I will expose it's glitches, although it's spelled G-L-I-T-H-C-E-S. Glad itself contains a glitch, and I know, ever so luckily we did fix that one Michael, so I'm glad that you're bringing it up, but we did actually fix that one, but there was something we didn't fix. I love it, I love it, but yeah, and then elsewhere you talk about the star of Bethlehem as an anomaly, which for folks who enjoy this particular inquiry, you go back to episode 186, which is my manifesto for Weird Science, where I love everything you said about Dawkins in this book, Dawkins famously in Unweaving the Rainbow talks about Our Lady of Fatima, the apparition that appeared to Portuguese farmer children over 100 years ago, and how it's not the onus of science to explain this.

I'm like, actually, my scientific impulse is to go headlong into anything that looks that strange, 100,000 people saw the sun fall out of the sky? Actually, no, I think that's the highest, that's like our responsibility to at least tilt after that question. But yeah, so you say about the star of Bethlehem, it's an astrological anomaly, fresh data that doesn't fit the facts. Now, the star is a disaster, a malfunctioning, unfixed star, a comet that defies the taller makes fears.

Silly out of place like the newborn in the shed with the cows, a silly scientific star. So again, just to press on this particular thing about the mutation as an accident and the radical contingency of life, that's funny because I think maybe this is the sand that was in my pants the whole time I was listening to this book, which is that I saw a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute in 2018 on a research paper on simplification in interaction based or network based evolution. And he's saying that the more two genes are expressed at the same time due to an organism's behavioral interaction with the environment, the closer they end up becoming on the genome until they fuse so that there is, at least it may not be everything, but there is an argument that at least some mutation is based on the same kind of fire to wire, heavy and learning that we see joining clusters of neurons in the brain, that there is a kind of gradient descent or hill climbing. If I may, so another was I clearly my extrusion of liquids has not yet turned this grain of sand into a pole, but I think I'm beginning to understand why and this might remain an issue, right?

I might need to just remove these bands for a minute because I think they're system theory pants. And I think unfortunately for me as a lifeline devotee of Jacques Girida, there is a fundamental problem with system theory. The idea that you can get meaning for nothing, you can't get meaning from nothing, you can't create meaning, x-nillow, in fact that, x-nillow idea is ever so suspiciously similar to the medieval Catholic, like God to do anything because God was omnipresent, therefore God could create something for nothing, therefore God did create something for nothing and if you don't believe it, there is a whole Hindu way of saying this which just definitely gets into that virilla naturana space, right, where you can suddenly create information amid all the noise and I said, but no, you have to have already my Jacques Girida kicks in, right? Jacques Girida and Algerian Jewish guy go figure, right?

He's like, already that has to be a binary there between meaning and unmeaning. Think about it another way. At what point does a letter turn into a squiggle, right? At what point does just calligraphic gesture turn into something that looks like a letter?

You can't determine that in advance, you've got to have a system there in place already. There's a kind of infinite regress here and I see this machination that people do who are determined for systems theory to be a thing, I beg your pardon, I'm so sorry, but my solution is now I'm not going to make the poem, I'm just going to burn the parents and take the parents and put them on the fire and burn them, right? I personally think that a much nicer, more economical theory of creation is the heretical, multonic one of ex-deo creation. The universe is made out of God, the universe isn't made out of nothing, it's not made out of something else, it's made out of God themselves, all you need for this is God, right?

And all God needs to do to create the cosmos is to shut the fuck up. Because the devils and the angels in a way are just ideas floating around in God's crazy head, right? And clearly they didn't work very well and in a way ideas just are demonic or angelic, they don't really have a body, they last forever, all you have to do is hit, read, read, read, don't them, you can't destroy them, if this constant Hannah, errant struggle against the nasty ones, it just end us, right? But physical beings have a saving grace, they're fragile and mortal and they don't do that to you, yeah?