Guest: Jody from Guruphiliac, @Kalieezchild on Twitter
In part 2, Jody gets personal about his history with gurus. The significance of significance and the red herring of ego dissolution. Magick and imaginal spirituality. Psychedelics. Jody’s path to realization. Oprah. The Aquarian Age. Climate change anxiety. The Church of the Subgenius. And burnt almonds: the secret of life, the universe, and everything.
The Alan Watts talk I reference is on YouTube, or you can read the transcript at AlanWatts.org.
Want to listen to Part 1?
Closing track is “For R & S” by Density & Time.
Transcript
Opening
Jeremy: This is Enlightened As Fuck, Part 2 with Jody the Guruphiliac. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I urge you to go back, listen to Part 1, then come back, listen to this part. It’ll make a lot more sense that way. I think.
I dunno. It’s up to you. Be a rebel if you want to. Start with Part 2. I don’t care. It’s your life, man.
Okay, episode, here we go!
Conversation with Jody
Jeremy: Do you have much of a preference for vocabulary? Do you like “enlightenment” or “awakening” or it’s something else?
Jody: Those words have so much baggage, so much baggage. I mean we can talk for 10 hours on the baggage if those words have . I think it’s better to say “realization,” you know, or “recognition” because you’re recognizing something. You’re realizing something that’s true about your own awareness right now. Your own ordinary awareness right now. And then with that comes the skill you, you kind of can keep going back to that.
It’s not a vision, you know? It’s just seeing something. Right? You know, I’m sitting here talking to you, there’s all kinds of things in my vision. Now I’m seeing the water bottles over there, right? I wasn’t really seeing them before, even though they were in my vision. It’s the same kind of a thing. I would describe it that way: you see it, you know? Now maybe that’s because I’m a visual thinker.
I think um, that kind of always existing, ongoing nature, always right in front of you is kind of a really important aspect to keep in mind, rather than, you know, chasing peak experiences because you think that’s going to get you there or satsang experiences or, you know, hopping around between different gurus. I think that’s a pretty common phenomenon is, you know, people are looking for something.
I mean, it really, it’s pretty psychological. I think people are looking for acceptance. Often, I mean our, I’m going to say that about myself, and it may be, it’s grandiose for me to say this is true of other people, but I’m going to say it. I think a lot of people are looking for self-acceptance, that they lack a certain self acceptance for whatever reasons, most probably some kind of childhood emotional trauma. and so they’re feeling incomplete, have insecurities, et cetera, et cetera. And then that acceptance of the guru who is more than just a regular person. It’s not like acceptance from your teacher as much as this acceptance from God, you know it. It’s like this much higher source of acceptance, I think for a lot of people.
You know, honestly, I think that’s why I got into it and you know, met a guru and tried really hard to impress them and then realize that, you know, what kind of bullshit and telling him that and then getting manipulated, you know, he attempted to manipulate me and that was kind of the beginning of it. You know? Actually the beginning of it was before that, it was when I had critical thoughts about the whole situation. Now this was within the organization. I started out in a yoga organization in Southern California that had a, a retreat center in the mountains of San Diego. And so I volunteered to live there for two years, and it was great for the first six or eight months. And then, uh, you know, I, I had a breakup with my girlfriend and, and, you know, started doing a lot of rock climbing.
There was an event that this friend of mine, my rock climbing buddy, made some bookcases for the guru. He had a house up there and the guru rejected the bookcases and I went and looked at the bookcases and I thought, these are fine. Maybe they’re are not museum quality bookcases, but they are definitely guru on a limited budget adequate bookcases, and that was my opinion. And so then I began to question the guru’s enlightenment because of his opinion about the book cases. And to be honest with you, it wouldn’t necessarily question his enlightenment or his understanding. It would just be an indication of his sense of taste, right? So this may be an unfair evaluation and judgment I was making at the time. Uh, but you know, it kind of opened the door to questioning. And then when I started to question within that group that lived up there, I had tremendous pushback. You know, being told I was going to have bad karma for 5,000 lifetimes or 10,000 lifetimes, and there was a lot of drama initially and actually went through these phases. There were these phases.
So first the woman that ran the business operation of the org. She unloaded on me about bad karma and you know, millions of lifetimes. And then, uh, the org had a lawyer who was close to the guru and I had a meeting with the lawyer, and because I’d signed something that said two years, he said, well, you know, you make, you signed the document that said two years. And I told him, well, you could sue me because I don’t have anything. It doesn’t matter. I mean, I’ve basically given everything up to live there.
The final sort of gauntlet is, was the interview with the guru. He basically tried to manipulate me. He said I was doing really good, that I was making great progress, et cetera. That it would be really good for me to stay. You know, that that was in my best interest. He was telling me what was in my best interests and I couldn’t really allow that. And I told him that. I said, well, you know what? I would have to accept your opinion as being the best thing for me. If I’m not able to accept, my opinion as being the best thing for me than I’m lost. And so I said, so I’m going to leave. I’m not going to stay here. I have to listen to my own sense of what I should be doing in this moment. And he said, “Oh, you’re sick. You’re really sick and I feel really sorry for you.” I always interpreted that as a kind of manipulation in a way. A kind of like wanting me to respond by saying, “I’m not sick. I’ll show you I’m not sick, I’ll stay here.”
But I left. Didn’t lose interest in Vedanta and devotional Shaktism. And so I basically stayed with that and then shifted over to the Vedanta Society, which in many ways, it’s more like a church, which I guess you can argue a church is a cult. But it’s much more like a church than what we traditionally think of as cults. In a lot of ways it’s a really great org. You know, there’s swamis and people think the swamis are holy and stuff like that. And you know, maybe there’s some problems with that, but they’re generally pretty cool about it. You know, they’re, they’re not claiming to be God or anything like that. All the glory goes to the progenitor of the movement, Ramakrishna. You know, they’re just passing it along to Ramakrishna or to their gurus or something like that.
And in a way, I think the org is very noble. I mean, that’s where I got my initiation and spent a lot of time meditating there. But, you know, ultimately they’re kind of like, I think they’re a bit right-wing now. You know, I think they kind of support the BJP. I mean, it’s a Hindu organization, even though Ramakrishna’s teaching was really about all religions being true. It was one of his fundamental teachings was as many faiths, so many paths. And that’s really what I take from it more. ‘Cause his teachings on sex are nonsense, complete and utter nonsense. So you got the good and you got the bad, and the good was “all religions are true.” And I would even go a step further and go, your religion is always true. if you’re true to your religion.
So when I started realizing that it was a little more right wing around there, I mean, there’s a lot of native Indians, expatriate Indians . God bless everyone, including people from India, but I think the atmosphere got a little more politically charged. And so I basically was asked to leave, which is fine because, really, for me, it was pretty frustrating to be around those ideologies. You know, the holiness, the magic saint and again, not, not the local swamis that are there, but the progenitors, the Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and all the basic fathers of the movement.
So, yeah. So I’ve had experience with orgs… One that was pretty good, mostly good one, one that was bad. I went to a couple Ammachi satsangs. I’ve gone to see other gurus. I’ve developed this, I would say, understanding, you know, others might say misinterpretation, but my position is adequate.
You know, and I’d argue it with anyone. Any of these gurus that I criticize, I’ll meet ’em at a Starbucks with a an iPhone set to video and talk about it with them and just say, hey, see what they say? You know? I mean, they can’t come with 20 devotees. It’s just gotta be us and maybe one other person.
Jeremy: That’s fair.
Jody: But I dunno, maybe something could happen out of that. But that’s just a fantasy I have about it. I’m not, I’m not like gunning for that or anything, but I’d be willing to do it. Especially with guys like Mooji, especially the ones that claim to be God, that claim to be special, or the ones that allow others to make those claims for them. That’s really what pisses me off is this idea that what’s so normal and ordinary, really, makes you, something entirely different than everyone else.
Jeremy: I would watch the shit out of that though. I hope we can make that happen somehow. That sounds like a dope YouTube channel or something. How can we set you up with Mooji?
Jody: I would totally do it, I’m telling you, but really in any of these gurus that I’m critical of, I mean, to be honest, it is not in their best interest to engage with me. And it’s not because, you know, I know what’s right. I believe I know it’s right. You know, I believe in what I want to say. I just think it’s better for them to do their own thing and stay in their own lane and, you know, let people like me, snipe at ’em, right? engaging me only raises my profile in their community. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s only giving me power to change some minds. I don’t, I’m not looking to have that power. I’m just looking to, you know, express myself and, and let people change their own minds.
I think the smart gurus, they don’t pay attention to me. I’m a pipsqueak, you know, I’m just some little gnat on the back of an elephant and, uh, you know, I’m perfectly happy being that.
Jeremy: You’ve incurred the wrath from time to time of some guru fanboys, though.
Jody: At the beginning, and I think a lot of it was one person whose name was Gerald Joe Moreno. He was a Sai Baba devotee. Sai Baba, the guy that materialized watches and diddled young boys. Both of them are dead now. But this guy, from what I’ve heard, because I don’t think I’ve ever communicated with him directly… I communicated with somebody else that was the subject of this guy’s blogging, and he basically created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and created a bunch of blogs that attacked me or made up stuff about me. I think there may have been a couple people, but it was right at the very beginning, right when I started doing the blog.
Gerald joe Miranda was very thorough. He went back through hundreds of posts I made in these different email groups and Usenet groups. Cause that’s where it all started on Usenet and alt.meditation and alt.yoga. And, you know, use a lot of stuff that I’d said against me.
It actually also incurred the wrath of a woman…
For a long time, I was on an email list called Guru Ratings. That’s kind of where all this came about. You know, we’re all in this Yahoo group list called Guru Ratings, basically criticizing each other, criticizing gurus. It was, you know, the internet, you know, a free for all in a way. A lot of animosity, even if most of it was kind of a fake animosity.
But there was one woman that claimed to be God, that claimed to have special powers. She was some kind of professional dominatrix. I basically said, “you’re so full of it, lady.” And, she was one of those people that if you know, if they feel attacked, they’re coming at you with everything they have. And she just happened to have a bunch of people, I think, or few people, but a few industrious people that supported her and they created some content against me too. And it really kind of freaked me out back then. And you know, I’ve worried that it’s kept me from getting jobs, et cetera, which would be giving them a victory. But I’m, you know, gainfully employed now. So, I guess it wasn’t the problem that I thought it was. And thankfully now in the Google rankings, they’re kind of falling down in the rankings, but it’s still there. Doesn’t seem to be a problem now.
I mean, there’s just a much bigger community of people that are kind of looking at these guys critically. And the same thing happens to them too . Be Schofield, it happened to her. It’s just a common phenomenon on the Internet, I think, when you take a position against these spiritual authorities that have followers who are willing to do something about it,
Jeremy: Is Oprah a guru?
Jody: I think so. I mean, she’s definitely been a curator, a poor curator of gurus. I think. I think her best choice was a Adyashanti, but I think I just Adyahsanti really sullied himself by doing that. Honestly, it’s like, dude, come on. You know, he made a lot of money doing it, and again, people were probably helped by it, but you know, did he aid in people’s search for enlightenment? I would say no. I would say no. He just gave him a bunch of tropes out of the folk theory of enlightenment.
This is something I’ve kind of wanted to talk about is enlightenment is always associated with sweetness and light and warm fuzzies. And I’m not saying it’s not, well, I am saying it’s not, it’s not associated with anything. But you can’t sell that, you know, you can’t say, oh, it’s the most common thing about your awareness. That’s what enlightenment is. It’s the most common thing about your awareness. You can’t say that and sell it to people! You really got to make it into something. And it’s this warm and fuzzy thing, and that’s definitely what I saw Adyashanti doing in how he was portrayed and how he portrayed himself and his teaching on Oprah. It’s very common. I mean, they’re pretty much all doing it.
So, Oprah, yeah. I would meet with Oprah at Starbucks too. Russell Brand, you know, he’s got podcasts where he’s talking about this guru and that guru, and it’s just all the folk theory based stuff.
One of the really insurmountable problem here is, is everyone’s doing this to be helpful. Oprah’s not doing it to hurt people, right? I mean, she’s doing it to make money, but she’s trying to help people while she makes money. I honestly, believe that. I honestly believe, not all the gurus, but some of them, you know, have that same attitude. They’re honestly trying to help. They just can’t see that they aren’t helping because they’re working from within that old frame.
Does it help more than it hurts? That’s a hard, I don’t know how to answer it. If it’s an answerable question, it’s probably not an answerable question, but I think that there’s a better way to present these ideas. A much better way. A much more simple and mundane way. And that’s the whole problem with it is it is mundane and mundane doesn’t sell.
Jeremy: It’s not sexy.
Jody: No. It isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get you a new car or better job. Although really, honestly though, I think it can help in your life, you know, you just, you just have access to unattachment, really. You know? It’s like, you have this well of unattachment. You can go somewhere and not be attached to something. But you know, the attachment invariably comes back for whatever reason .
Jeremy: Wait, the attachment, it comes back?
Jody: Well, I’ll talk about myself and again, this is maybe proof that I’m not enlightened to people, but you know, sometimes I have to remember to not be upset about something, you know? I’ll get upset.
Hell, in my car driving home when there’s traffic… I mean, I don’t do any road rage or anything like that, but I’m cussing and swearing in the car a little bit and I think about it and I’m going, man, this is so fucking unenlightened. And it’s just like, okay. But that’s just me right now. There’s a function, there must be some kind of function for it. You know, maybe it’s a way that I deal with stress. It’s not hurting anyone unless you believe in vibrations, right? If you believe that, you know, thoughts are vibrations that travel away from your head, then yeah, I’m being bad. But I mean, I’m not wishing anyone harm. I’m just like, “You idiot! Why’d you do that?” It’s stuff like that in a way, you’re caught up and being an individual whose progress is being impeded by another individual. And in a way, that’s the definition of totally unenlightened.
But at the same time, if I’m upset about something, I can just kind of like put my attention on non-conceptual awareness, and that’s all — it’s just not conceptual awareness, you know? There’s nothing really to say about it, except that you’re not this person that’s having this negative emotional experience. There’s a recourse there that comes with it. I think it makes it worthwhile. But that’s different than saying, Oh, you’ll be one with God and all your thoughts will come true. It’s just this kind of like, yeah, it’s cool but don’t go overboard about it. Because by going overboard about it, you’re distracting yourself from it.
Jeremy: Well, there are various models of levels and stages of enlightenment, right? Few people claiming they’re Arhats. Unless you’re Daniel Ingram, I suppose.
Jody: Yeah. And all that stuff… I don’t, I don’t accept it, you know? I would argue against it. I’ll meet them all at Starbucks and we can talk about it. You know? I really think it boils down to very simple terms: attention on the non-conceptual aspect of awareness. I think that’s all it is. That’s all it is.
You know, we haven’t talked about mystical experiences yet. I mean, in some ways it’s 98% of what we’ve been talking about for most people. The mystical experience, you know, the like meditation experience, the feeling one with everything, all these experiences that are confused with enlightenment. And then we can talk about the unconscious again. Those experiences come from the unconscious, there is a role that significance plays in these experiences that we as individuals, as egos, the big bugaboo, egos, we give this significance to these experiences.
You know, I hate using the word ego, but your attachment to your individual sense of self, it gets inflated by the spiritual experiences. And I would argue every single mystical experience could be ignored. And you know what? I got that from Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. I mean, that was one of the great things about my interpretation, at least, of what they taught, was that it’s not about the experiences. Ignore the experiences. I mean, I’ve had experiences meditating and like feeling energy and like, you know, swooping around and all this sensate stuff that’s happened within the context of sitting in meditation. I don’t know what it was. I really don’t. You know, it happened. It usually felt pretty cool. I mean, it was never unpleasant. But it’s just stuff. It really is. It’s like noise, I would say. It’s like noise. And it happens to people when they first start meditating, and then…
You know, we haven’t really talked about Kundalini so much. There is, there is some kind of neurological event. It happened to me. I remember when it happened to me. I happened to meet somebody. We made a connection, and suddenly it was like, oh my God, this shit is what I’m all about now. You know, it happened like that fast, it was a little insane, really. There’s a kind of a neurological event that that constituted, you know, there was something that kind of, when off in me and. And then I was all about it. And then I was reading all these books, mostly Western mysticism, the “I Am” movement, you know, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, that was my introduction. This is his Elizabeth Clare Prophet. These weird, goofy Western mystics. Shasta Mountain, aliens under the Shasta mountain kind of stuff. Ascended masters stuff. Theosophy. Although I saw through it pretty quick . yeah. Um, you know, I was reading those books and having those experiences, so it all became very real.
I’ve heard the word signpost used, right? But the problem with “signpost” is there’s a couple problems to signpost. It adds a significance to the experience, and it puts the path of awakening on a timeline. The signpost, it’s a monument of advancement and now we’re getting into the “higher is better” metaphor again. There’s a relationship there, I think. There’s a correspondence there. I don’t think those ideas are helpful . I think it’s more helpful to say, yeah, one of these days I’m going to see what’s always right in front of me. And today’s maybe not that day, so I’m just going to go about doing what I do and not worry about it.
Jeremy: I’m flashing back to the burnt almonds thing, and I think it was Aldus Huxley after he tried nitrous oxide for the first time, if I’m recalling the anecdote right, he was like the secret of the universe or whatever, the big thing, the thing is burnt almonds, or the smell of burnt almonds.
Jody: I dunno what burnt almonds smells like, so…
Jeremy: I don’t either, but it was significant to significant to him!
Jody: So actually now that I think about it it was almost like he was creating a little distraction for people from having ideas about what it is. I mean, was he being ironic in his use of the term burnt almonds? If he was, then okay, I see the wisdom in that because what does burnt almonds smell like? And even if you know what the smell of burnt almonds smells like what does that have to do with the big secret of the universe? You know it’s it’s kind of non-sequitur you know It doesn’t really hold together. So if that’s what he was saying or why he was saying it then yeah that was that was really cool
Jeremy: I mean I I like the idea that he was doing that intentionally but to me I just flashed to like really significant dreams or dreams I’ve had that felt incredibly significant And then I come out and I try to explain what happened and it’s as sensical as burnt almonds. It just falls apart the minute you try to translate it into some kind of story or takeaway or something like that.
Jody: Right because… That’s… Hmm. Like I said, dreams haven’t been my thing. But I have dreams, and you know, there’s a kind of dream logic in the dreams and … I think it can happen to people on psychedelics. You know, they could be at a certain place in their experience with the psychedelic and like have that sense of knowing it all. And then they come down and they don’t know it all anymore or they just can’t put it into words.
Significance, I think it’s a very important term and I’ve written about it a little bit. It’s almost like if you look at our mind, it’s a collection of ideas and information, behaviors, et cetera. Let’s call it that. Ideas have different levels of significance. That significance is like a tag that goes on ideas that are resident in memory. If you take all that significance as a body within a human mind, it’s kind of like the structure of your personality. And I dunno if there’s a way you could ever measure it, and I’m being totally speculative, but I do believe in this this idea that significance is really important and it’s really the source of attachment. You know what we find significant is what we’re attached to.
Significance is significant. There’s a role for significance in our neuropsychology. It’s basically what we’re most attached to. And as a result it kind of forms the core of what we call the personality or the ego or whatever.
I think a big mistake people make about realization is that when you have realization and you recognize your identity in that non-conceptual aspect of your awareness that that goes away. And it doesn’t. At least in my experience, which maybe means that I’m not enlightened. But it doesn’t go away. I’ve never seen evidence that it’s gone away in everyone. In fact, just the opposite. I feel like it’s easily recognizable. Anyone that communicates communicates by the agency of what we’re talking about, this personality or this ego or whatever. And so you know they can be enlightened as fuck and still they’re going to be a personality talking to you via that method.
What there is is not being attached to it and being able to recognize where identity really comes from. People think that it’s ego that’s getting in the way, that that’s the problem that you have to transcend your ego. Again, now we’re going up again. “We have to transcend our ego.” You know, “we have to disassemble our ego, dissolve our ego…” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ego. And I think that’s a complete misdirection. That’s a red herring because the ego is just these areas of significance that have, you know, resulted from the course of your life and how you’ve interacted with it. It’s a problem of noticing. It’s not a problem of becoming something else or losing something. It’s a problem of noticing something that’s always there
Jeremy: There’s a lot to take in, man. You know? I gotta, I gotta, like, parse this all through my ability to try to make sense of it as someone who hasn’t experienced that noticing. Or hasn’t noticed that I’ve noticed it rather?
Jody: Yeah, yeah. I mean that’s the crux. That’s the crux. And I don’t have anything for that, you know? I mean, in my case I would say I was lucky. You know? I had a good therapist I was able to recognize it and then I had a dream and then it all came together for me. Did it have anything to do with a dream? I would definitely say it has something to do with the therapist helping me with it. It did have something to do with the dream but there was a there was like a sequence of events that I had no control over.
You know, everyone’s trying to do it under their own volition, right? It’s like I’m on the path and I’m climbing the mountain, going up again, you know? And yeah, it was pretty haphazard. I would say there was something very haphazard about it. Lucky, I would say almost, you know? I’d probably say that. but I still think you can always trust it’s right there. It’s just right there and, you know, pray for luck.
Jeremy: Hmm. Okay. So I have a not super related question but on this whole topic of spirituality and I’m interested in what your perspective on this would be. But it seems like in Western maybe non-monotheistic or at least non-traditional Judeo Christian spirituality there’s almost a tension between the whole New Thought magic/wish/ will/ vibrate, whatever, yourself into better material circumstances or find some technology to vibrate good things your way, and then this non-dual kind of tendency in some groups, some schools of thought, of like a letting go and noticing the thing that’s always there kind of thing. Is there anything to the magickey stuff? I mean you’ve talked about vibration in kind of almost mocking or disparaging terms but is there anything to New Thought or that whole chaos magic or trying to will material circumstances to be different? And is that opposed to the realization?
Jody: No, I wouldn’t say it was opposed to the realization unless you believe that realization will bring a greater power to perform chaos magick. I think at that point, it’s not true. And I’m not an expert. I mean, I, for a while I was kind of part of the industrial music scene in San Francisco and the Temple ov Psychick was prominent.
Jeremy: Yeah,
Jody: And actually I went to some Temple ov Psychick Youth events and I was actually super inspired by record cover liner notes that Genesis P-Orridge wrote. I don’t remember what the record was. It was a Psychic TV record. So I thought, man, I like these ideas. When I met him I wasn’t as impressed. He seemed a little bit of a huckster to me.
But, you know I kind of had that experience, knew a lot of people that were, you know, kind of of that persuasion I guess. And I think it’s imaginal technology I would call it imaginal. There is imaginal spirituality That’s what we’re talking about now. I mean, pretty much most of the spirituality it’s imaginal. You’ve got, you know, “I believe in Jesus. He died on the cross for my sins.” That’s all imaginal. You have to believe all that. To be in a religion, you have to believe it.
So, you know, taking you back to this imaginal engine and the unconscious, you know, you sort of throw that belief in the unconscious cranks out some experience as a result of that. Some people are very talented at having those experiences. Some people don’t really get experiences and maybe they eventually become agnostic or atheist because they don’t have experiences. Other people get a lot of experiences and maybe some of them are crazy but some of them aren’t, you know, they’re just really talented and having these confirming experience.
There’s something to be said for all of that, even though I’m super critical. You know, the idea that by thinking you can change your reality, that isn’t true. By improving your outlook you can make your experience of reality easier. And maybe some people would interpret that as changing your reality, but no, you’ve just changed the way you interact with reality. I don’t really think you can change reality.
But, you know, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean I’ve had some synchronicities happen that were like oh my God, amazing coincidence, blah blah blah. But nothing that I couldn’t explain with luck, really. So I’m not a proponent of any of that. I think it can be really distracting. The idea that I want to present this is the mundaneness, the ordinariness of what they’re calling enlightenment. You know, just trying to pop the bubble, basically.
My whole devotional experience is an experience of imaginal spirituality. You know, I imagine the universe is Kali and I imagine I’m having this experience of relationship. You know, maybe I interpret events in my life as being demonstration of that belief, the veracity of that belief. But, you know, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say I’m in that camp.
Jeremy: So your imaginal experiences of Kali, and the way that you conceptualize that, the kinds of experiences that you,, I guess load into your unconscious… Do you feel like there’s these two different lenses that you’re looking through — one with Kali and Kali acting and experiencing Kali and one that’s more rational materialistic kind of thing or are you always operating out of that Kali zone? Does that make any sense?
Jody: Yeah, it does make sense. It’s… I’m employing the idea of Kali to create more favorable internal conditions, I guess you could say. And I think that’s what all religion is We employ this idea of God, whichever idea of God we choose, and then hopefully that creates better internal conditions, better adjustment to life, better reactions to what happens to you, you know more positive outlook, etc. You know, there’s comfort there.
Something that I say a lot is life always points to comfort. It’s always going to point to comfort. And you can say Oh what about the person that runs out in front of the train to save the little kid? I would say it was that person’s greater comfort to save that little kid. And I will say I know personally that these ideas about God provide comfort to me. I have a warm and fuzzy feeling from it. I can feel it right now. And that’s something that’s maybe related to but also kind of different from recognizing this non-conceptual aspect of my awareness. I think that comfort’s available to anyone who would be sincere in their devotional experience, really seriously believing in their idea. But for myself personally I can still understand that it’s just an idea. I would never posit there was a real Kali out there.
I mean, sometimes I like the word “Maha Shakti”, which is like all the energy in the universe considered to be one organism. That’s my interpretation of that word. And that exists right You could say all the energy in the universe in the moment exists. So then, yeah, have a relationship with that.
Jeremy: That’s interesting. Earlier when you were talking about like rolling your own cult or your own religion or mythology or however you want to do that and creating your own guru, you’ve talked about sincerity, needing to bring a kind of sincerity to it in order to get the juice out of it. But it also sounds like you can be sincere but also not put it in the same category of reality as the table, your mountain bike, what have you.
Jody: Exactly. Exactly. You know, I’m frustrated with the the fact that a lot of the ideas of imaginal spirituality have spilled out into the cultural landscape, you know, it forms like a body of ideas — a meme-scape — about what enlightenment or realization is. And mostly it’s folk theory, as I’ve tried to point out. But it persists because all those ideas can be successful when applied individually, when applied by an individual in the context of what they believe. They develop this relationship with their unconscious through those ideas.
As a way to look at the world, I think they fail because if gurus could transmit enlightenment just proximally because it’s an energy that radiates like radio waves… That’s a very common folk theory. Super common! It drives a lot of satsangs. If that was actually true, there’d be a shit ton more enlightened people. In fact, it would be like coronavirus. So everyone around this guru would get enlightened and then all those people would go out to the rest of the world and spread it. It just doesn’t work that way at all in my opinion. But what does work is people believe they’re having experiences because they’ve been primed with the idea that it can happen because they’ve heard that it happens to other people and because the idea of the guru being this enlightened holy magic divine being supports the future of that experience that they have.
Jeremy: Yeah, I can’t help but notice it doesn’t appear that we’ve entered any kind of Aquarian age. And yet how cool it must’ve been to have believed that we were on the cusp of some Aquarian age. Like, having the experience of being about to enter an Aquarian age must have been amazing.
Jody: Totally! In the late eighties, that’s when I had my phase of that. I was going to school in a program called interdisciplinary consciousness studies. I was meeting all these cool people that had taught at Esalen and… A really important book back then was called the Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson, and it, it, you know, it was one of the drivers, in my opinion, of kind of this New Thought, as you call it. And so, yeah, we were all fired up about it. I was really fired up about Peter Russell’s idea of the global brain and I think that idea is still has a lot of veracity. And I think that’s what all of this media exchange functions as, a kind of global brain. We’re this kind of neuron and we pass information to each other. It’s questionable as to whether we’re acting cohesively that it’s a more chaotic brain, you know, that maybe we’re schizophrenic or something. But I was really super inspired by that idea back then. So yeah, right on the cusp of this New Age.
And then the rave scene started. We totally believed that in the rave scene, that, in the early nineties, the beginning of the rave scene in San Francisco, that yeah, we’re on the start of this big thing. This is going to get huge, and now everyone’s going to be into it. We’re bringing peace and love to the world. I mean, it hasn’t hurt. I don’t really think it’s hurt. And you go to a festival and that spirit is still there at a big music festival. The essence of raves, the spirituality of raves, has been preserved, but there’s been a lot more party added to it, and the party’s always been there.
We haven’t really talked about psychedelics too much. I think psychedelics are hugely important but the efficacy happens at the beginning of your experience with them. Those first few times. Because it makes all those new connections.
I think it’s fairly well established that psychedelics cause parts of your brain that don’t normally talk to each other to talk to each other and, in some cases, overstimulate your brain, in some cases, shut your brain down. Whatever. It makes this completely different experience for you, or novel experience for you, and those cross-connections, those cross schema, let’s call them schema, those cross schema connections, those schema don’t normally talk to each other. They have functions. They don’t need each other to do their thing, but you take LSD and suddenly they’re talking to each other. Well you have this tremendous experience and it loosens things up. And I think that could be super-duper helpful. The problem is, as soon as people get woke, they fall in all this new thought about reality, and I think that’s unhelpful for them. They kind of get lost in it. There’s this tremendous body of distraction for them.
Jeremy: So one thing that we like to talk about a bit on this podcast is the whole climate crisis. Do you have any spiritual or otherwise insights about big level fate of the species, fate of the planet kind of thing?
Jody: Well, it’s important to everyone, I think, even though a lot of people might not understand that yet. I mean, there’s so much we could be doing that nobody’s doing. You know, if, if we’re able to get the right people in there that are going to do something about it, then I think we’ll be in much better shape, but in the meantime, whether something can be done about it or not, we’re along for the ride.
And I’m actually a weather buff. You know, I did some storm chasing when I lived in New Mexico and it’s definitely changed the weather. I mean, I’ve been noticing the changes, gradual sort of changes. You know, I’m in Arizona, so it might get too hot here to live in the summer. And that might be coming for us. I mean, it wasn’t too hot to live here last summer, but it might be different this summer. So. Yeah. We’re all going to be affected in different ways, I think.
Definitely this is the wicked problem of our era. You know, hope for the best and maybe plan for the worst. You know, be glad you don’t live on an island if you get swamped in a hurricane like Puerto Rico.
Jeremy: is it something that stresses you out ever, or are you kind of along for the ride? Is that more descriptive of your emotional response to it as well?
Jody: Yeah, I think I’m more along for the ride. There’s a kind of resignation. And just general, you know, a resignation to the conditions that are in front of me.
I mean, I love to ski and, and yes, I would get sad to think that there would be no more snow to ski on. So I guess, you know, I do have emotional involvement in it. But no, I don’t have an anxiety about it. I mean, like I said, I like the weather. I’m not saying I like global warming, but I’m always going to like weather phenomena and global warming is, you know, a weather phenomenon.
Jeremy: So one of the conceits of the podcast right now is that we’re tongue-in-cheek starting a doomsday cult because looking at the climate crisis and what we’re facing, it seems like just a fun piece of LARPy performance art to act like, oh, well now’s the time to start a doomsday cult. So the question is, because it’s a concern that’s come up before, is how do we stop it from like going awry? You know what I mean? How do we stop someone who is charismatic from deciding we should all now take it seriously, we should all now like listen to one person, or we should all like act as if it’s truly the most important thing in the world, or something like that?
Jody: You just had all your solutions in, in your description of the problems. You know? You don’t listen to just one person. You make your own decisions. You know, maybe you curate the people you listen to. You curate the information that you’re taking. We all do it anyway.
I just read today that Fox News, they’ve done an analysis and 60% of it was untrue. And there’s a problem with that, right? But the real problem was with people that are taking it as truth, you know? And those are people that lack the curation skills. That’s what we need are these information curation skills. I mean, the press, I, you know, I’ve kind of believed in the press most of my life, but now you see, they’re going so hard against Bernie. The press is biased against Bernie Sanders. Whether you believe in Bernie Sanders or not, that isn’t what the press is supposed to do. Although, you know what, I’m being hypocrite right now because I don’t mind the press being biased against Trump. But, you know, I will say that there’s a lot more material there then with Bernie Sanders, and really it’s just… Now I’m getting political and I’m not really political.
Umm. You know, I mean, we’re all political now because of the way things are.
Jeremy: Yeah, you kinda have to be.
Jody: I think with the cult, you just said it all. You need to remember what the definition of a cult is and then you need to circumvent those patterns. And so the Church of the Subgenius I think is a great example.
You know, I’m on this group on Facebook called Spiritual Slack or something like that and it’s just all tongue in cheek. It’s just all funny. But at the same time, you know you see a picture of Bob and there is a kind of like Jesus-like quality to it you know. And there’s, there’s, at least in my mind, there’s an equation you know it’s like Oh Jesus and Bob, you know? There’s the kind of like… Bob is a reflection of Jesus through ironic semi-modern culture or something like that I don’t know. ‘Cause Bob’s also kind of represents this ideal 50s ethos or something to me just just the look of the photograph you know definitely represents a kind of subversion of the establishment by presenting as the establishment. And there’s something really viral about that, you know? Viruses get into cells because they present to something else. And the cell says, oh we need this and then, boom, that cell’s gone. So there’s something kind of viral about it. But at the same time it’s harmless and it’s silly in a way, but there’s a cohesion to it. There’s a bit of a zen. It has a little bit of a zen, I think.
Jeremy: Totally, yeah. Also a early Discordianism is another kind of inspiration for me. They have kind of a similar thing going on. Just like, dudes getting together fucking with themselves and each other about… It has kind of like a Zen vibe going through it. But it’s all very silly and intentionally so.
Jody: I mean you can’t really be a cult leader if you don’t take yourself seriously. I mean, you have to take it seriously but at the same time you can’t take yourself too seriously I guess, you know?
Jeremy: Word.
Jody: There there has to be a certain, you know, just way to kind of take the piss out of yourself, I guess. I kind of don’t take myself seriously. I believe in my ideas and stuff I mean I’m trying to present this way of looking at things. But, you know, the world’s gonna spin without me.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Jody: A doomsday cult, we’re all in it together… I mean it’s kind of like, party on a boat. We’re all on a boat. It’s going to sink, so we may as well party. Just do what we can with what we have. I mean that’s what it is. Let’s do what we can with what we have. You can’t really change the fact that we might actually be heading toward a doomsday and it makes more sense to frame it that way than it does to deny it. You know?
Closing
Jeremy: You can follow Jody’s work at Facebook.com/Guruphiliac, Twitter.com/Kalieezchild.
Closing track is “For R & S” by Density & Time.
Thank you so much for listening. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Be your own guru. I’ll see you on the other side.
Oh, so the burnt almonds thing was from an Alan Watts talk. I don’t think it has anything to do with Aldous Huxley. I think I combined it with some other anecdote I heard.
Alan Watts: “Everything in the universe is the smell of burnt almonds.
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“I suppose that all sensible and hard-headed people would agree that this is just the sort of inanity to which all these mystical revelations ultimately boil down.
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“We might settle for this kind conclusion if some of us had not had the same sensation, not under drugs or hypnosis, but when very wide awake.
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And I, for one, will not quarrel with the smell of burnt almonds as the key to the mystery. For its very banality, its very consequential silliness, brings out the real significance of the experience in question.”