Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together

This is a redone episode. You may have to erase the previous download and then reload the new episode to get the correct audio file. The new format is more compact, so less time with more invaluable, perhaps to the point of uselessness, untimely meditations.Freud's notion of the "unheimlich," which was translated into English as "Uncanny," might have more literally been translated as "un-homely," which suggests the eerie sensation of the familiar warping into the unfamiliar. "Uncanny" comes from old Scottish meaning not known or safe or prudent. The uncanny for Freud was something previously known becoming unknowable, so that it was the haunting presence of the past but not the past as intentionally remembered.When nostalgia for the past is the promise of a return to a halcyon Eden when everything was in its right place, then it is the stuff of fascist regimes. But when nostalgia accidentally returns what had been carefully repressed by the primary naivete of innocence, then it becomes unintentional and uncanny.James's nostalgia for the late radio of his youth growing up in the Detroit area isn't nostalgic because it includes what algorithmic radio has repressed. His Midnight Radio project is an open platform where anything can happen because it includes the otherness than algorithms cover-over with averages. Some folks turn on the radio to hear what is familiar and comforting, but others turn it on to encounter the novel as the failure of the familiar. The mystics speak of the "Far-Near," which is when elsewhere speaks locally. Indeed, we are prediction machines whose intentions are to reduce uncertainty, but their is some uncanny drive in us, which Freud morbidly named the "Death Drive," for the irreducible ambiguity of the Other because it is the unpredictability, or the "deterritorialization," of otherness that makes all things new. Radio used to be a place where the far could be brought near. James's Midnight Radio lets elsewhere speak in the clearing that he has made in himself for the Other, so let the otherness in us recognized and the otherness in him, which is the solidarity of twoness rather than of the One.https://youtu.be/wevx36qH2bMhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

What about when we choose our disease? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother.Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are.Check us out at the Desire of Horror podcast by following the link below:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19326558https://youtu.be/QDc0TWDH8nshttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Nostalgia is poison. So why do I like BOC so much? BOC's nostalgia isn't saccharine but complicated.  When remembering is blocked by a nostalgic concept, the past becomes a projection of the rememberer's wish-fulfillment fantasy. The general structure of this sort of fantasy projection is that of the fascist who imagines a past greatness, or a lost Eden, that never was to recover the past from a decadent present. It is a well worn and now all too obvious observation that "Make America Great Again," is a totalitarian dog whistle. But there is a sort of remembering that also enjoys imagining the past, but which includes those parts of the past that the nostalgic concept tries to screen out. The nostalgic concept can be rehabilitated when it is used to present the pass by way of contrast to how the nostalgic concept presents it. This dialectical way of remembering takes the concept and contrasts it with what it tries to repress about the past. BOC's uses of nostalgia are like this latter sort of dialectical remembering that includes the otherness that was previously suppressed by the screen memory of the concept, so that their uses of nostalgic musical concepts and samples highlight the menacing dissonance of their dips back into the "innocence" of childhood. I am reminded of Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" when I think about how BOC does this. Malick created the most convincing depiction of childhood ever to be laid down on film because he allowed the cloudy nostalgia of his subject matter to by vitiated by the lurking, cloudy threat of violence and transgression. James and I are back at again. You're going to want to hear this one.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

James and I discuss Under The Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. We get into whether AI can have an intention other than the ones given to it by our Human intentions. And we wonder whether AI can have the conscious intention to save humanity from itself as a result of the purity of its love for humanity, a purity unlike the yin-yang(y) love-hate of humans that will ultimately be our undoing. Kawakami's AI claims to love human beings in the Positivistic sense of without any negativity; whereas, human love is always tinged with hate. Both James and I agree that love without hate isn't human love, just as human intention is both undermined and generated by the counter-intention of the death drive. But James feels that AI may someday have a different kind of consciousness because it has a different kind of singular intention, singular as in unique as well as in the oneness of a purified positivity, which seems to agree with Kawakami's take on AI. Kawakami's AI fails to keep human beings alive because it fails to cleanse human intention of its negativity. I hold that without this negativity there is no love and no intention of any kind.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

In part two Kevin and I continue to work on Bart D. Ehrman's Book, Heaven and Hell: The History of the Afterlife. We recount some of our life experiences with various doctrines of Hell and the immense suffering that the idea of eternal separation and punishment has wrought in our lives and the lives of others. And then we get into Chapter One: Guided Tours of Heaven and Hell, Chapter Two: The Fear of Death, and Chapter Three: Life After Death Before There Was Life After Death.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

https://youtu.be/JIMQBSi50YwDom and I are reading High Weirdness by Eric Davis together as a part of this reading in recovery project. "Recovery" can mean all sorts of things, but in this episode, it means recovery from the paranoid conspiracy theories that so many of us in the US are so deeply into. We discuss the "Mind F---ery" of Robert Anton Wilson and our own struggles to stay somewhere between naive belief and total skepticism, and the times when we went too far in one direction or the other. We discover, yet again, that in the most general sense, "recovery" is from absolutized or totalizing ways of being in the world that make each day a repetition of the same. We get sober to become more playful and creative, rather than more ridged, self-serious and certain. Therefore, Robert Anton Wilson offers both a cautionary tale about getting caught up in too much pattern recognition and the creative solution to this sort of psychosis, which is the play of humor that lovingly undermining one's tightly held concepts about reality.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Kevin and I have been having conversations about our faith for almost two decades now. While we are both actively recovering from such harmful doctrines as "eternal conscious torment," neither of us reject entirely the Christianity that we were brought up in. We have continued to develop what it means for us to be followers of Christ, so that we thought that the model of "recovery" was a better way of thinking about our faith journey than the currently popular model of "deconstruction." Recovery has both the sense of uncovering or clearing away debris to return to some essential kernel of the faith, but also the sense of getting over a sickness, or getting better from something harmful endemic to the faith tradition that was given to us as children. We are both agreed that the essential kernel worth saving is the Law, specifically the "Law of Love." In this first of our recorded conversations about our faith journey, we discuss recovering our faith by going more deeply into the teachings of love at the center of "The Way" that Jesus seemed to be teaching. We use Bart D. Ehrman's book "Heaven and Hell" as a helpful guide for freeing ourselves from some the misconceptions that we were taught as absolute truths in our religious education.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new."https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_sMy Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure. Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength.If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_sMy podcast in which I develop the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics: https://failureisfreedom.buzzsprout.comhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.This is a crossover episode with the Desire of Horror podcast available on all the major pod-catchers, including apple and Spotify. Come check us out there. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q or you can search "Kitchen Table Conversations: Annihilation"https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

James and I recorded this one in a parking garage for irreducibly ambiguous counter-reasons. All of the expected distractions of the parking garage environment were intended to illustrate the unintentional negativity necessary for a loving encounter with the Other. As two long term sober dudes, we're always looking for new Deleuzian "Lines of Flight" from the toxic positivity of the sort of self-optimization that our drinking used to protect us from. We would like to continue to actively ruin our lives and our time for the mechanisms of capitalistic capture by becoming "imperceptible," even to ourselves, and therefore as non-transactable yet productive as possible. Join us for a truly worthless conversation about the negativity of love, or the "Agony of Eros," as Byung-Chul Han put it. Whatever you're able to discern of the conversation over the noise of the cars passing by and the intense wind storm raging all around us in central Ohio's weirdly, windy clime, will certainly whet your whistle for the suffering gifted to true lovers by eros, not so much in the banal and idiotically positive vein of the Marquis de Sade, but rather in that of the erotic suffering of the negative excess of Georges Bataille "Accursed Share."https://youtu.be/YXn2K8ESb-w if you prefer YouTube, James and I posted the video of us performing this material there, or search Reading Together in Recovery: The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Hanhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Shawn and I discuss Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and its relation to his recovery. Hesse has served as an introduction of Eastern thought to Westerners for over a century now. Hesse has been criticized by some of getting Buddhism wrong, or of "cultural appropriation" in general, or of being too individualistic and naive in his depiction of the spiritual journey as a solipsistic retreat into the balance and harmony of nature from the fallen, hectic world of family and work. While all those accusations may be valid to some degree or another, there is still much that recommends Hesse's version of authenticity or of Jungian "Individuation." Shawn recounts how the text helped him to come to certain essential realizations as he walked the paths of both decadence and recovery. It may be that JD Salinger and other Western authenticity hounds misused Hesse's thought to separate the world into the real ones and the phonies, but Hesse himself doesn't make any such facile categorizations. Shawn demonstrates how Hesse's thought can be understood as a sort of unification of opposites that neither resolves one into the the other nor becomes the sort of whole that Hesse and the great thinker of wholeness Karl Jung were both accused of. Hesse's whole is the wholeness that includes what can't be whole, something like Jung's individuation through the integration of the shadow, and it is this creative contradiction at the center of Hesse's work that still makes reading him worthwhile.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Char and I cross over from our normally audio-only Desire of Horror Podcast to produce this Youtube video. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19031864 https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfsoWe discuss the book Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. The book provides a somewhat obvious but nonetheless useful capitalist critique around the concepts of the Professional Managerial Class or corporate speak; Consumer Culture, especially influencer advertisement techniques; and the toxic positivity of constant "self-maximization." An Ikea-like furniture store is built on the past site of a particularly ignominious prison, and the spirit of its warden and his prisoners emerge from within the vast, deliberately disorientating halls of the "Orsk" furniture store to haunt its circulating corridors, which are already haunted by the gaze of capital and consumption. The former prison was one of Jeremy Bentham's infamous "Panopticons." A Panopticon was a prison designed to require minimal guards because the prisoners always had the sense that they were being watched by the guards who were placed in a watch tower in the middle of the prison complex, so that they were able to see the maximal number of cells from their vantage point. The Panopticon serves as a fruitful metaphor throughout the novel as the horror of the ineluctable, internalized gaze of the Lacanian "Big Other," which for horror fans is something like the incubus always speaking from inside of the possessed's head.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Doug and I discuss Nothing to Grasp by Joan Tollifson. Doug's spiritual journey has been one of continual exploration through his life and in his recovery itinerary. He has recently been getting deeply into nonduality in addition to his Christian practice. Our conversation about Tollifson's recovery sojourn and nondual practice allow us to discuss Doug's insights into being fully present now wherever we find ourself on the path.https://youtu.be/eP3FMtZq15Mhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

There's a lot of hype right now about a "Psychedelic Renaissance." Dom and I get into the first two figures of the Book High Weirdness by Eric Davis, the McKenna Brothers, Terence and Denis. There is on the one hand, the scientific desire for certainty, which we associate with third-person, "objective" verifiability. This sort of inquiry and knowing is inline with what modern neurobiology imagines as the evolutionary design of the brain as a "prediction machine." If we are prediction machines, inquiry is for the reduction of uncertainty in order that we might be able to manipulate and control our environment better to our advantage. However, there is on the other hand, the religious desire to encounter the "Other," or that which we cannot reduce to the categories of scientific understanding and which cannot be reduced to a mere projection of our own intention either. The McKenna brothers encapsulate these two competing, perhaps, contradictory drives to make familiar and / or to encounter what is truly other.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Dom and I discuss High Weirdness by Eric Davis in relation to spiritual experience in general but also to Dom's personal experiences as a psychonaut before getting sober. We are interested in exploring the relation of psychedelic experience to the process of recovery. Of particular interest is the irreducible ambiguity, or weirdness, of psychedelic experience that can either be a nightmare or the ecstasy of release from habitual modes of thinking and being in the world. Infamously, Bill W., the founder of AA was a part of an early research project with LSD to "cure" alcoholics of their "obsession" with alcohol. Does the weirdness of the psychedelic trip have the potential to break one out of addiction's habitual binding, or is it just another form of "low-level" spiritual seeking that contains limiting bindings of its own?https://youtu.be/HpIwJiy_zAwhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Patrick and I discuss My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd in relation to our journey's into sobriety and our mutual ADHD diagnoses. War was a sort of fantasy projection as well as a proving ground for Anthony Loyd, but what he proved to himself and shows to the reader is that almost nothing that is imagined or said about it is true, especially what he was led to believe about war and glory as it was depicted in the stories of his own military family's history. Patrick chose this book because it reflects struggles common to those attempting sobriety. In particular, recovery is a struggle to uncovered one's fantasy projections and to learn how to live without addictions that once helped to cover-over pain for which there where no other strategies at the time.https://youtu.be/_Gn2l13UMzQhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Warning: This discussion contains reference to severe depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and addiction. Tom and I wrap up our three part discussion about William Styron's Darkness Visible. We really get into some of the complexities of having a dual diagnosis, specifically both addiction and depression, and how any underlying conditions of addiction come on stronger than ever after self-medicating with alcohol, and / or one's drug(s) of choice, stops.https://youtu.be/wqxZgj4b4mshttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Warning: we discuss severe depression, suicidal ideation, addiction, and self-harm. In this episode Tom and I discuss Darkness Visible by William Styron. We focus on Tom's experience with severe depression in recovery and Styron's considerations of Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus.https://youtu.be/6qu4dmUZDxchttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Warning: We discuss severe depression, suicidal ideation, and addiction. In this video Tom and I discuss Darkness Visible by William Styron. We relate Tom's struggle with severe depression in recovery to Styron's telling of his extremely difficult circumstances. We especially focus on mystical treatments of the "Dark Night of the Soul" as either a helpful or a dangerous framing of severe depressive states.https://youtu.be/Eax1Oho-jKYhttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

James and I have been fast friends every since we met a couple of years ago. He's the one who talked me into making some of my work public. This podcast is certainly a part of that general move to sharing some of what I study with my fellow citizens. James doesn't like or listen to podcasts. I love them, especially one's about books, like this one. If I send a podcast to him, he probably won't listen to it. And if he does, he'll slow it down to 66 percent, or some BS, and use it to go to sleep. I'm not sure if he thinks their gosh or self-indulgence or just boring. He might listen to this one, but I'm not sure. Convincing him to do this with me was a kind of loving compromise on James's part. We both love books and reading them together. James made a momentous decision recently that's he'd stop being "precious" about the projects that he involved himself in, he's said "no" to some pretty big names, and so we have embarked on this journey together into books!Our first book is an outgrowth of James's book club, of which I'm an original member in good standing. James and I have started many clubs together, adventure club, movie club (possibly defunct), dream club, game club, demonology club, and some others that I'm not remembering right now, but James is the founder and ultimate boss of book club. Piranesi has many of the themes that most interest me: esoteric religious practices, weird alternate worlds, mental disorders, and labyrinths. James didn't love the book, but he kindly brings his keen literary insights to it anyways. Please, enjoy this book talk.James is also responsible for the cool vibes at the beginning and end of all my podcasts. jamesreeves.cohttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

In this video, we conclude our discussion of the introduction to Brook Ziporyn's book, focusing on the concept of "Atheism as Uberpiety." We contrast traditional religious experiences—which attempts to reduce uncertainty by providing cohesive rules and a stable identity—with a more profound, "decentering" religious experience that embraces ambiguity and radical paradigm shifts. We argue that rigid monotheism is stifling because it enforces a single, absolute truth and strict moral categories, thereby preventing individuals from experiencing the richness of multiple, open-ended possibilities. Instead, we suggest that authentic "ecstatic" religious experiences occur when we step outside of our conditioned programming and rigid identities.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Scott and Marty discuss and ultimately reject the philosophical thesis that monotheism was a "necessary stage" in the transition from ancient religiosity to modern secularism, arguing instead—via Brook Ziporyn—that Chinese religions like Daoism and Buddhism achieved concepts of "no-self" and "purposelessness" without ever positing a unified divine intention. They trace the Western history of "demythologizing" the world, describing how the survival instinct to project agency onto nature (animism) evolved into the depersonalized "unmoved mover" of Greek philosophy and the "omni-God" of Israel, before finally being internalized by Kant as the "synthetic a priori" structures of human consciousness. The speakers contend that while this trajectory led to secular humanism, it retained the dangerous flaw of believing in a "single purposeful mind"—whether divine or scientific—which allows for the violent enforcement of a "unified good". Contrasting this with the psychoanalytic reality that human minds are inherently conflicted and ambivalent, they conclude that authentic religious experience lies not in control or purpose, but in embracing "irreducible ambiguity" and the "intentionless void" of the sublimehttps://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

We cover the second two sections of the introduction of Brook Ziporyn's book Experiments in Mystical Atheism, "Preaching to the Choir" and "Let's Assume a Brain Tumor." You can also watch our conversation on YouTube at Adventures in Mystical Atheism: https://www.youtube.com/@ske313/podcastsScott and Marty discuss the limitations of the "symbolic"—the rules, language, and culture used to navigate the world—arguing that it cannot fully contain the "irreducible ambiguity" of reality, which drives humans to seek a "meta-language" or "Big Other" to guarantee coherence and truth. While modern society often elevates scientific discourse to this role, the speakers use the debate regarding transgender identities to demonstrate that science alone cannot resolve questions rooted in deep, extra-rational values. They critique the "New Atheists" (specifically Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) for employing material reductionism and secular humanism as totalizing narratives that attempt to eliminate mystery—such as reducing behavior to genetic survival or meditation to economic productivity—rather than acknowledging the "abyss" of meaning. Drawing on the work of Ziporyn, the discussion concludes by advocating for "inter-subsumption," a state where conflicting perspectives like science and religion coexist without one blotting out the other, allowing individuals to hold intentions loosely and accept the lack of a single, all-encompassing identity.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

We cover the first two sections of introduction of Brook Ziporyn's book Experiments in Mystical Atheism, "The Weird Idea" and "God as Default?". You can also watch our conversation on YouTube at Adventures in Mystical Atheism: https://www.youtube.com/@ske313/podcastsScott and I have been on a journey together for a long time. We met as undergraduates at Indiana University in 1991. We bonded around a love of philosophy and music. Over the past thirty-five years there have been countless late night conversations and warehouse parties (not so great for philosophical conversations), especially at those venues related to the underground Chicago House and Detroit Techno scenes. There have been three culminating events recently out of which this podcast was born: the 2025 Lack Conference, seeing Godspeed You! Black Emperor in a Detroit warehouse, and Brook Ziporyn's book Experiments in Mystical Atheism. The picture that we're using as the podcast's art is of us getting ready to listen to Slavoj Zizek give the keynote at the 2025 Lack Conference, where at 52 I finally presented my first academic paper, which was on the connection between Jacques Lacan's "Real" and Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon." The second event occurred early this Fall when I went up to Detroit to see Godspeed with my partner Charla and my friends James and Candy. Pulling into a ghostly, but now legal, massive warehouse complex "somewhere in Detroit," as the Underground Resistance puts it, brought back so much of Scott's and my history together in the holy temples comprised of dark remnants of the post-industrial collapse of our esoteric, midwestern lives. And Godspeed'salchemical drones and refractory repetitions accomplished for Scott and me the religious ecstasy that this music is designed to produce, without the assistance of any other mind altering substances. As Genesis P-Orridge put it, "music is psychedelic all by itself." Our bodies are indeed "temples," designed to receive, without the containment of an intention, the sacred vibrations of Marion's "Elsewhere," and of Giles Deleuze's "deterritorialized flows of intensities." Scott and I were at Church, and we knew it, the one true, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I wept for most of the show and raised my hands and shouted "glory" and "hallelujah" to whatever it is that Meister Eckhart called the "God beyond God," which is what Scott and I call "love," and what Marion calls the love that precedes God as the "God Beyond Being." The third event was the discovery of Brook Ziporyn's book a few months ago, which has helped us to frame our journey together into a religious practice that is without the intention of a totalizing intention. Ziporyn's presentation of the Daoist concept of "Wu Wei" as "purposeless action" has given us new concepts for a journey that isn't without purpose, or concepts, but without the sort of absolute purpose, or intention, that Western notions of God insist on. Ziporyn's aphorism "No God, but many gods," captures perfectly our unwillingness to throw out the sacred along with the Omni-God. We were born of the unconditioned, unintentional love that proceeded being's intentions, and our holy intention is for the purposeless inclusivity of this groundless ground of love. Join us on our journey into the super-saturated darkness of love. https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

We've updated our introduction to the preface of the book to make it shorter and clearer. You can also see this episode on YouTube at Adventures in Mystical Atheism: https://www.youtube.com/@ske313/podcastsScott and I have been on a journey together for a long time. We met as undergraduates at Indiana University in 1991. We bonded around a love of philosophy and music. Over the past thirty-five years there have been countless late night conversations and warehouse parties (not so great for philosophical conversations), especially at those venues related to the underground Chicago House and Detroit Techno scenes. There have been three culminating events recently out of which this podcast was born: the 2025 Lack Conference, seeing Godspeed You! Black Emperor in a Detroit warehouse, and Brook Ziporyn's book Experiments in Mystical Atheism. The picture that we're using as the podcast's art is of us getting ready to listen to Slavoj Zizek give the keynote at the 2025 Lack Conference, where at 52 I finally presented my first academic paper, which was on the connection between Jacques Lacan's "Real" and Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon." The second event occurred early this Fall when I went up to Detroit to see Godspeed with my partner Charla and my friends James and Candy. Pulling into a ghostly, but now legal, massive warehouse complex "somewhere in Detroit," as the Underground Resistance puts it, brought back so much of Scott's and my history together in the holy temples comprised of dark remnants of the post-industrial collapse of our esoteric, midwestern lives. And Godspeed'salchemical drones and refractory repetitions accomplished for Scott and me the religious ecstasy that this music is designed to produce, without the assistance of any other mind altering substances. As Genesis P-Orridge put it, "music is psychedelic all by itself." Our bodies are indeed "temples," designed to receive, without the containment of an intention, the sacred vibrations of Marion's "Elsewhere," and of Giles Deleuze's "deterritorialized flows of intensities." Scott and I were at Church, and we knew it, the one true, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I wept for most of the show and raised my hands and shouted "glory" and "hallelujah" to whatever it is that Meister Eckhart called the "God beyond God," which is what Scott and I call "love," and what Marion calls the love that precedes God as the "God Beyond Being." The third event was the discovery of Brook Ziporyn's book a few months ago, which has helped us to frame our journey together into a religious practice that is without the intention of a totalizing intention. Ziporyn's presentation of the Daoist concept of "Wu Wei" as "purposeless action" has given us new concepts for a journey that isn't without purpose, or concepts, but without the sort of absolute purpose, or intention, that Western notions of God insist on. Ziporyn's aphorism "No God, but many gods," captures perfectly our unwillingness to throw out the sacred along with the Omni-God. We were born of the unconditioned, unintentional love that proceeded being's intentions, and our holy intention is for the purposeless inclusivity of this groundless ground of love. Join us on our journey into the super-saturated darkness of love. https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com