AEWCH 150: THE SPIRITUAL POLITICS OF THE DEAD

[Music] Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex spiritual, political, and philosophical ideas and their intersections in an engaging and accessible way. I can't believe that this is the hundred and fiftieth episode of this show. I'm going to just talk for a while on this episode and I'm going to go pretty in-depth about the occult view of the dead, dying death. It's political importance, all that. Obviously, we are living in a time where there's a kind of mass consciousness about death and the dead that's permeated our everyday actions, our laws, the political sphere. I wanted to lay the rest just for this episode, the podcast as it is with a guest, with a living, and so instead have the dead as guests on the show. Now, I'm not going to do a Ouija board. In fact, I'm going to speak out against that a little bit towards the end of the episode. But this is more about inviting the dead in, understanding the dead, the presence of death in our psyche, and talking with the dead, and how all that is the most important or one of the most important tasks of our time. There are multiple layers to this, of course. On the one hand, you could turn to the death-positive movement to understand some of this, which has been spearheaded by my good friend, Caitlin Doty, who's been on the show multiple times. Think about how differently we would have handled disaster and corpses and funeral rights and rituals and regulations throughout the past year if we had a different feeling about death. Or you can think about death from a psychoanalytic perspective, Peter Rollins, Todd McGowan, Elliot Morgan, people who have been on the show certainly do that. And we can think about the ways our politics and everyday lives would be changed if we accepted the Freudian concept of the death drive or the Lacanian concept of the death drive and the lack, excepting the presence of absence and the longing for absence in our lives. That probably would have changed things in the past year. But I want to present here a partial picture of death from a non-materialistic and occult perspective. One that is at once loving and warm, I hope, but also urgent. So the dead. The view that I'm going to present is brought together by understanding occultism and cult text, but also my own experiences with death and the dead, direct teachings from spiritual thinkers and philosophy and critical theory. This is probably as close to a sort of theology as I'll come on the show. I try to be as clear as possible, but I can, of course, imagine a response to this that takes it as absurd or stupid or whatever. But I hope instead that even if it sounds kind of nuts to you, that it is at least provocative, at least interesting, and at least that there are new directions here for any of you listening. We're going to take a few steps here. Those steps are first, just addressing the difficulty of the path ahead in this episode. Second, thinking through what life is first before we discuss death. Third, what happens when we die both for the dead and the living according to an occult perspective. Fourth, what the relationship between the living and the dead can be. And fifth, what this means for our politics and philosophies, which will extend into, I guess, sixth, how to interact with the dead. So the difficulty first, the path here, you know, one of the main missions of this show is to spiritualize our understanding of forces we consider to be worldly, political forces, cultural forces, economic forces. To try to present what those would look like if we had a genuinely non-materialistic view. And it's important to do this in a way that expresses a bridge between the materialistic worldview. Because I find, first of all, that a lot of people that listen to the show have a materialistic worldview. So it's important to have a bridge or a ladder there for that purpose, but also because I find so much value in the materialistic and scientific worldview. I don't think we should throw them out. I think we should learn from them, accept their limits and move on. You know, if I, if what I present is simply just to be believed, I don't think that that would be useful. I think that having a sort of jump from, okay, you have a genuinely materialistic worldview. Now, believe in all this stuff I'm saying, I don't think that that's really helpful. I also think that we have to create this bridge with the deficiencies of the magical worldviews and pagan worldviews in mind, specifically, I mean, neo-pagan worldviews because they represent, I think, too often, a kind of fuzzy materialism. What would a real non-materialistic view mean? So it's a bit like making a bridge with holes in it or a terrain with holes in it. There has to be materialism in the expression here, but there also have to be these positive voids of spirituality as I proceed. It's, it's to give you all the option to sort of have the solid ground to sit on as we go forward and also to shout into the void every once in a while if you need to. Yeah, so that's just my concession to anybody that would not go along this path with me on their own without some footholds in the world that they're used to. Okay, I think I've apologized enough for everything that's about to come. Now, about life. To express something about death, one has to start with an expression of life. What I'll do to express this is to talk about something I'm going to refer to again and again this episode as the constitutive forces. What do I mean by that? Let's start with an egg corn. You know, when you plan an egg corn into the ground, it doesn't just become a tree on its own. It is recognized as a point of emphasis. I plant the egg corn and the soil forces. The wind and rain forces, the sun and shade forces come to play. It says if these forces turn a kind of attentiveness to the point, the egg corn becomes a point of emphasis that unfolds in conjunction with those forces into becoming a tree. Now, let's take that on a human level. I'm going to tell you about one of my experiences. I talked about this a bit on episode 116 with the cultist and veterinarian and acupuncturist. Those are great credentials. Are a torsion. That's one of my favorite episodes of the show. So go listen to it if you haven't yet. I'm going to talk about an experience I had when I was in Vietnam. I was sitting in the hotel room and I saw a gecko on the wall. I was just looking at it. Suddenly, it was very quick and very intense. I was looking back towards where I was sitting through the eyes of the gecko. But more than that, it wasn't just that I was looking through the eyes of the gecko. I began to kind of become inside of or identified with or whatever. Everything in the room, the floor beneath me, the seat I was sitting in, the air around me, the light and the way it was cast across me and the objects that were obfuscating it or creating obstacles to its passage. The walls of the room, the space outside the room, the sounds, and they were all turned towards the place where I was sitting and apprehending it as a kind of a point of emphasis like that egg corn. Now, I say this happens suddenly, but of course this is also happening after decades of spiritual practice. And I had had similar events like this in the past, but this one was quite specific and I think it goes the furthest to explain what I'm talking about. Suddenly, everything was attending to where I was. Here's another way of saying this. We are addresses. In the words of my mentor, or Lin Marguerite's, the biologist, geoscientist, etc., identity is not an object. It is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves. Identity is not an object. It is a process with addresses. Now I'm going to take that further and say that we are addresses. So this is true scientifically, but it's also true spiritually. So often science can reflect the deeper spiritual truth. We are addresses. All these constitutive forces reaching towards this point of emphasis that is us, like that egg corn. Of course it's much more complex because of the interiority of our lives, the ways we move and what we contain within us and the kinds of relationships we have. So what happens to the address of those constitutive forces? What happens when we de-condense in death? In other words, when those forces stop attending to us because we die. And something happens to our physical body, but what happens to the rest of us? Well let me talk about what happens for the living first when somebody dies. And so that's the side of death we're all on until that one that we get individually later, that death. When someone dies, what they were becomes available to everyone else. That is the person disperses back into those constitutive forces. More on that in a bit. But when they do so, we encounter that dispersal as an inner event. That inner event is grief. That is the feeling we experience when someone dies and is being made available to us. Reef is the inner event of the de-condensing of the address of a human being. Of course, we don't feel grief at every single death in the world. The closer we are to someone, the more available they become to us. So the more we experience that inner event of grief. Let's talk about this a little more. So it makes a little more sense. The de-condensing of that address of the forces and then the letting go. It's like the same way we weep when we let go of a tightly held thought. Have you ever had that? Just some pressure that's just in you. So long, it's like a clenched fist and it opens and it releases the pressure and then suddenly you just cry. And you're like, "Fuck, I didn't know. That was so intense or that was so condensed in me." That was really in there. When we cry, when we let go, the same thing with an individual when they die, there's an intensity to what they are that condenses them, contracts them into having this human form. And then it lets go. And we experience that when the other person dies. Okay, so one more time. Greef is the emotion of the human being, being woven back into the constitutive forces. Here's an expression of this from the end of a poem called "Four Greef" by the great Irish writer, priest, philosopher, and poet, John O'Donnelly. This is the end of that poem. Gradually you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. So that's I think a good bridge between what happens for us when someone dies and now I'm going to talk about what happens to the one who dies. Plenty occurs there and it will occur for all of us. That is the most meaningful experience we ever have. It is the loss of all conditions we know. It is the loss of the conditions of the concentration of the address that we are. And it is also at the same time the gaining of all conditions of the entire world. When you die, you become the forces that once made you. To put it in the words of Rudolf Steiner, the universe constitutes our organs. When we die, the universe constitutes our organs. When this first happens, when we die, we experience how all those constitutive forces relate to each other. So we'll turn to Vic and Stein here. So the Vic and Stein, the philosopher, he expresses how everything relates to everything else. And it's like you can't pull one Django tile out without the whole tower collapsing. There be no way to. Everything depends on everything else. And that includes us. Everything is needed to exist. When we die, we first we experience that radical contingency. So this is why, you know, account after account after account of near death experiences. What they say is they experience this pure love, this absolute love. And then they come back and they're like, oh, fuck, I'm in a hospital room or lying on the side of the road or whatever. But they experience this pure love. That pure love is the experience of the contingency. Everything needed us to be for it to be as well. So we experience that unconditional love that is the sign of our absolute neededness. The philosopher, Jill D'Luz, wrote, "Under the sign of death, everyone exists as non-substitutable and cannot have himself replaced. And this precisely is the universality of death. In the same way, life is that reality wherein the universal and its proper negation are one." Now, maybe that's a little wordy, but I feel that this can be seen in a sense to speak to something similar here. We were never apart from the constitutive forces, by the way. We were just brought together in our lives in a way that added the feeling of being apart from them. So when we're alive, we have this added thing. It's this unique feature of life. It's the addition of a feeling of separation. Now as the process goes on after death, we also encounter some resistance. Depending on how we lived, there can be a sort of a shell, a kind of resistance to fully be re-woven back into those forces. And that resistance is the expression of the density of our desires when we live. So our desire that we hold on to, it becomes expressed as something that appears hard to us when we die. Now these are physical terms, hard, you know, whatever. But longing for the physical experiences that we once had blocks the passage of being re-woven into those constitutive forces. But our body is gone, our entire body is gone. So the way that we would satisfy those desires is absent. That encasement of desire, we become stuck in this desire. There's an esoteric system in fact that refers to this as a shell hell. You know, this is worn against in many ways by all different religions, sometimes gently, sometimes really overly harshly. But that encasement of desire is kind of like a wall that we move through very slowly. Or even some occult practitioners that say things like, you know, people who are really adept in spiritual practice have to go into the kingdom of the dead and tell people that they've died. Tell them that actually they don't have bodies anymore because they're so holding on to these desires. But with no way to fulfill it. And so they're constantly also exhausting themselves by protecting themselves from experiencing the loss of the ability to fulfill any desire, even pursue it. This is one of the many ways in which the living can help the dead, but we'll get back to that toward the end. Let's take an example of how this can occur and what it means. So let's take suicide, for instance, because me having struggled with suicidal depression for much of my life, one huge blow against my ability to act to take my own life was when I understood, I mean, I really only understood on an intellectual level. But when I understood that, suicide, which I think really is every person's right to get off the ride to paraphrase a mandipolmar whenever they like. Suicide is mostly just a confusion of the body for the spirit. The thought is if I end the body, the pain will disappear. But all that happens is the removal of the vessel through which one can overcome suicidal intensities. So you actually get rid of the one thing that could maybe help you go through it. I realize that might even bring more despair. But we'll talk about this a little more. I mean, it's a despair I myself had to encounter. So I feel I have some breathing room to discuss it. The same goes for all our desires. But the more powerful blow against suicide for me was actually encountering the dead. When I encountered the presence of a dead person, I knew what it was. I experienced the healing presence of the proximity of the dead. See because the dead dissolve materialism. You realize that materialism is not a real thing when you start encountering the dead in this way. All illness, mental, physical, whatever relates itself to a struggle between materialism and the spirit. So the proximity of real spirit is healing. It's healing. There's actually a whole body of literature of people who stop being depressed when they started seeing ghosts essentially. This is really intense and I wish this were explored a bit more. But of course, also people completely changed their lives when they have near death experiences and so on and so forth. But again, I digress. I should go on. But we should see here what's happening politically and philosophically as we travel through this passage into death that we're doing right now. So for instance, we can see how this renders Camus question or position where Albert Camus, the writer says, there's only, there's but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. There's a lot less serious of a philosophical problem or at least it's serious for different reasons when you understand some of this stuff about death from the occult perspective. In fact, the presence of life after death and then before birth because we're going to talk about reincarnation and rebirth renders a lot of philosophical questions if not unsuriused then significantly less serious. Sometimes it just renders the questions in dire need of transformation. So for example, what do we do with Ernest Becker's concept that the fear of death as a motivator for behavior really like controls so much of what we do? I mean, that concept is so intertwined with the way we think about things now. How they're just, you just don't want to think about death. You're avoiding death. You're not doing all these things to boy, but what if we don't think of death not because we're afraid of it, but because we actually have a deep knowing that we don't die. And the only thing we fear really is the intrusion of the narrative of death as an end. Because we sense when that narrative arises, that there's the presence of a completely anti-human narrative or entity or being or whatever. Like we actually just dislike the arrival of that narrative of death as the end because it is an anti-human narrative. Just something to consider. I'm totally I'm happy also with people that use Ernest Becker to create a death positive world. Like I said, one of my closest friends does that. And I think that it can be made really useful, but I think it's worth considering as well. This other version of it. Now, sorry, back to the process. In the words of Daniel Joseph, who was a guest on episode 67, "Dath reveals a much larger range of the circle of possibilities for us." That's part of the meanfulness of death. Being woven into the constitutive forces takes time in terms of the living understanding of time anyway, because time and space are different for dead people. But just like the corpse, you know, the most material aspect of the living being decays. So too do the other aspects of the person take time to integrate into the forces. I won't go into all of that here. There are all these stages and levels and they've been sort of examined again and again by different occult schools and all that kind of stuff. But what's important to say is that when we become these constitutive forces, this is probably the most complicated thing that I'll say on this episode as if you're not already like what the fuck are you talking about. But let me try again. When we become these constitutive forces, we are still carrying the mark or the resonance of our condensed address with us. So as we go, as we become diffuse in a way, even though spatiality doesn't exist, but as we're becoming diffuse, we are changing the constitutive forces as we are woven into them. So just like our actions change the physical realm when we're alive, right? Like you can do something and change your environment. Who we are gets woven into the forces. So we disperse, but the resonance comes with us. So it's not just who we are that enters, but then there's also an affinity between all the sort of particles of who we are as we're dispersed. So it's almost as if when we die, we create a sort of infinite constellation of our own being in the constitutive forces. Oh gosh, sorry if I sound like some broken down French philosopher here, but I think that this is already important stuff. So I hope it's coming across clearly to everybody. This version of things, and this is not to cancel out any other version, but I think it's important to consider this one. So what else just keeps saying? All the experiences we have then are diffuse and happen in tones of pleasure and pain of attraction and repulsion, but in sort of non-materialist forms. So there's no material stuff happening to us while we're in the constitutive forces, because we're in forces, not matter. So everything that happens, all the experiences happens in this kind of, like if you feel inwardly, if you feel joy or warmth or hatred or fear or whatever, that's what it's like all the time to be dead. It's not like that's an interiority. Since we are those forces, since we're dispersed into them, yes, our personality might kind of go. You're not the same as you were before. It's not like you go to heaven and you're walking around with the same self and you remember in the same way we remember now, like your car and your pet and the bands that you like and all that kind of stuff. But who you are and all that stuff does get dispersed out into it and there is still a self if you can accept that. It's not the same sort of self. It's not the self that sort of is indwelt or sort of hovers above our bodies when we're alive. It's diffuse. It's a self that exists in fluorescence, fluorescizes, like a fluorescing of resonances and tone. Without a body, without space, without time, even. These resonances, if we were to look at them with time in mind, this is where it gets confusing even for me, these resonances begin to seek each other again. So if you can sort of imagine like a bunch of lights. So imagine sort of a dark plane above your head and you see all these like tiny lights all over the place. And some of the lights are blue, some of them are red, some of them are yellow, some of them are green. The ones that are green are resonating with each other, right? There's a kind of similarity that they're pulsing with. I'm just trying to come up with a visual image even though this is inadequate. Those resonances, they sort of know each other. And they begin to seek each other again to form a new beam. So the green lights start to seek the green lights amongst all the other colored lights. That's sort of how we can view it. Like all these resonant aspects of view that have been woven into the forces start to seek each other again. And they seek and seek and then this is where reincarnation comes in. The agreement of reincarnating follows from the resonating and dispersed aspects gathering all that has been experienced from life. life after death and the life before it. In other words, the experience is in the in-between existence come with you too. They gather and come back into being. So there's the dispersal into these forces. It brings life, the life that you lived with it into those forces, and then there's an experience within those forces, and then it starts to come back and condense and to be born again. We must remember, here I think it's important to say, we must remember we have all been dead. You have been dead many times. You are the dead. When you pass through death, the aspects of your being become subtly integrated into the world and its constitutive forces. So I'm going to talk about the connection between the living and the dead. Now, but before I do, you might ask, okay, so you're talking about reincarnation. You're talking about sort of being cast out into the forces and then reassembled and then brought back into the world again. If reincarnation exists, if I was dead many times, and this is a principle that is, of course, accepted by millions of millions of people who are alive now, that reincarnation is real. If that's true, then how can we talk to the dead anyway? Aren't they back here on earth? Well, when we're woven into those forces, the constitutive forces, are sort of, for lack of better word, imprint stays there. We've changed them, and we've changed them in ways that are resonant. So it's not just the little green lights that come back together and reincarnate as a person. There's also a kind of afterimage of the green lights in those constitutive forces. So the same way is like, you look at, I think I might get this wrong, but it's like if you look at a red dot against, for a really, really long time, without closing your eyes and then you close your eyes and then you look at a white wall real quickly, you see a green afterimage. There's a kind of afterimage there. And that afterimage has a kind of coherence to it as well. So after the person is reincarnated, we end up talking to a presence, a presence of a sort of afterimage. And so that's when it stops being like, you should talk to your pal, who died, and start understanding that there's a presence there that you're talking to. And that presence is really valid to talk to as well. And I'm going to discuss talking to the dead directly at the end of all this and how to think about it and how to consider it. But first, the relation here between the living and the dead, to the extent that we accept the presence of the dead, we change our understanding of life. So if we accept the presence of the dead, if we accept being incarnation, if we accept the death is not the end, and therefore we have a complex puzzle before us, which I'm trying to break down, bringing in tools of philosophy, occultism, anthropology, so on and so forth, we change our understanding of life. We bring the dead with us everywhere we go. And we of course can understand this in a materialist way. There should be no disagreement about that, even if you're a total materialist. The fuel we use, the materials that we build with, the food we eat, the ground we stand on, the art we encounter. I mean, it's just the dead are constantly pouring forth for us in materialist ways. And we can also understand it in a psychoanalytic way. Like, you know, in psychoanalytic terms, we are our own deaths. Our death is our project. Each step we make, according to our unconscious, is an agreement to die in a certain way. So we can understand even here a link between one of those bridges with holes in it, between esoteric Christianity and psychoanalysis. We carry our deaths inside of us. That's something that both psychoanalysis and occultism says. But the dead are also present always, always, in a more real way, not just figurative, and we must remember also that we have been many times dead. You can think of the realm of the dead and the living as having, you know, like a window, maybe one of those two way mirrors where it's like a mirror on one side in a window on the other, like, you know, when you're standing inside your house and you have the lights on and you can't see what's outside when it's dark. That's probably a better metaphor than the two way. Mirror, you have the lights on so you can't see what's in the darkness. But what's in the darkness can see into you. You're illuminated for it, right? When you're living, you're in that lit up room, but you can't see all the activity in the dark, but it can see you. The dead are so close and able to experience us, but we can cut ourselves off from them by pretending that there's nothing outside that window, that we shouldn't go up to that window and cup our eyes with our hands to look out into that darkness to see who's there. I guess that sounds kind of creepy, like there's a peeping tom out there or whatever, but let's just pretend that it's creepier to be in the house with the lights on. The dead appear in our thoughts. So when people say after someone they know and love has died, you know, he is in my heart, she's in my heart. This is true. When we think of the dead, because they're in the constitutive forces, they arrive. The constitutive forces, you see, like the constitutive forces can't be material because they events themselves as and through material. So every time we consider the dead, they arrive. They're woven into each moment that they are considered. The truth, though, really is that they're always present. It's just that when we think about them, we reveal their presence. And when we think about them and reveal their presence, that creates a different kind of relationship for us than when we're not thinking about them. If someone's sitting in a room at a party and they see you, but you ignore them, obviously, that's different than if you talk to them. The consequences of ignoring the dead, if not talking to that person at the party or looking outside your window or turning the lights off, to create an affinity between you and what's outside, or worse mistreating the dead, well, you can see some of this in horror movies, right? Like stories of graveyards, the developers, built-on or the Foggrae's, whatever. You can see what happens in those narratives, but maybe that's a little too dramatic. What sort of world, or maybe not dramatic enough, what sort of world will we live in if we forgot the dead? The people have been murdered in war and by the police. That's one version of it. But this is not just a question of a count of ability. It's not just that we have to remember who is murdered or harmed or whatever to hold the living accountable. We have to remember the dead because they're present and formative always. Walter Benuine, who's essay, Theses of the Philosophy of History, which is that's one of the sort of foundational texts, I suppose, when I was starting this podcast, and I still pull on it from time to time. He wrote, "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past, who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins." Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. Benuine has always straddled this line between the living and the dead, between theory and occultism. Basically, this is a call to consider the dead and the fact that they rely so much on us and are regard for them because they are in and with us. We should be in touch with them and see what we can learn. There are lessons from the dead that are directly political, I think. For instance, reincarnation renders death relevant in the political field again in a new way. Reworth Steiner describes reincarnation in this way. It's like, as if you're standing on a balcony and you drop a flower pot and then you run down as quickly as you can and let the pot fall on your head. It gives you amnesia, of course, but it also creates the damage that you yourself inflicted at all the problems and consequences of it. With reincarnation and that passage of death into afterlife, in between life and then into rebirth, that means that we are our own children. We don't die. There is no death. Death is not the end. And therefore there is no escape. The terror, therefore, in the political field, is not that we will die. I mean, that's bad enough, of course. And, of course, suffering is altogether different matter. But the terror is that life would continue and continue and continue. This is actually one of the most horrifying things about the singularity, pros of transhumanism and stuff like that, that we would continue to live. But it also means that we don't get. And it also means that that is the terror. That is something that's present. We don't ever get to get out of the loop. So we have to make it better. It means that nuclear war is not the worst thing. That's almost too easy. Like nuclear war would obliterate everything and then we would come back. Somehow, even if it was just in a sort of disembodied form or the last few people all waiting in line to incarnate on the ten people that lived, the ten bodies that reappear and reemerge here, I mean, it would just be awful. So we don't have a choice except to fix things. Even death won't give us the answer of relief from the political horrors that we inflict on each other. Also, true community, this is another political lesson, true community, where in the separation we feel via the individualized body is gone. So, let me back up and just say, people rail against the individual all the time. Individuals are bad, bad, bad, bad because of the capitalist conception of the individual and the collective matters, the community matters, all that kind of stuff. I don't totally agree with that, but there is an aspect of it which I think is really important. That separation of individuation through the body, which lends itself, I mean, there's both capitalist and socialist cultures have a kind of picture of property of the body, my body, my choice. This is my body, all that kind of stuff. All that, and I realize if your socialists don't yell at me for using liberal talking points about my body, my choice, I'm just saying that that discourse has entered into and merged with some leftist discourses. Well, but anyway, all that dissolves when we die. Because when we die, we experience something that is much more like a true Communism. In the comingly and of pleasure and pain that happens after we die, we truly begin to apprehend that we are the other. We become, you know, this, we have a self, but it's the self of resonance at differing addresses and the cosmos. The materialistic version of this is the thought that we must be a communal and collective, but that doesn't even begin to grasp the true nature of Communism which can only occur in death. We become part of the forces. We become part of each other. We recognize each other. We experience immediately the kinds of tones of pleasure, pain, attraction, repulsion that are in the forces of the spiritual economy of the world. Communism is a death science that doesn't understand itself. I don't mean death science in a bad way. I mean that there's a deep truth, a spiritual truth in Communism, if we move past the opaque materialistic specter, that's always haunting it. And we look at the constitutive forces. We should speak to the dead. We should speak to the dead we love. We should speak to the dead we don't understand. We should speak to the long and recent dead and even the dead that we were. There's a lot of ancestral healing stuff going on. Have you noticed that? It's been going on all over the place. I've been noticing it pop up and even in leftist discourse. But we don't even have to go that far into ancestral healing. It's important, I think, if done well. We all communicate with the dead already. Like we talk to them, if we know somebody, we'll talk to them, we'll get to the grave and talk to them. We'll read the works of dead authors, we'll walk into buildings made by dead architects. But moving towards that more consciously, doing so more directly brings us closer to the spiritual realm. One way people do this, which is a bad way to do it, which I'm not advocating for is sayons. So let me just, I just want to say that. I said I was going to say something about Ouija boards, but the sayons is like, sayons is a way to trap the dead. They're not usually good. There are some practitioners who understand how to do a really correctly run sayons, but they are few and far between as is the case with a lot of these sort of magical ritualistic things that people do. Think about it this way. It's like you're condensing in a fragment of the dead person into an aspect and like forcing it to speak. So, like, how do I explain this to you? Maybe it's sort of like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to take you on the subway to where you need to go, but just stick your hand in the door. You door will close on your hand and you have to run along with the subway to get to where we're going. It's kind of like that or like, you know, yeah, it's like it tears at their being by subjecting them to the forces of the vehicle that they're forced into in the sayons and through mediumship. You have to navigate the entire inner world of the person that's trying to force them to speak to others instead of encountering them inwardly in a spiritual way. I think I have another example of this that I can give, but let me before I tell you what that is. I can go on and say maybe a few other things about how the dead speak. When, yeah, a few principles speaking with the dead. When you're speaking with the dead person, you know, if it's someone you know, first of all, offer a feeling of, I'm grateful to you. I'm grateful for who you are, what you did for me, not come back, come back. If someone you know has died recently and it is important that it be recent because that's when these interactions are the most potent, this particular interaction. At night, before bed, consider them saying something to you, a meaningful phrase, a meaningful word. Remember a time that they said something encouraging to you and hear it in their voice saying it to you. Even maybe it's just a time when they looked at you and smiled if you have to, but try to hear their voice in your head. And then read to them inwardly a holy text or a book of poetry or a book that was meaningful to them. When you read inwardly, you're co-mingling meaning with them since they exist and appear in that thought world in your heart. You're co-mingling that meaningfulness of the text with them and your love for them. You're giving without hoping to receive. When you speak with them, though, consider that they have a reverse manner of speaking. This is very confusing to people. The dead speak through us and the words they inspire us. So in other words, the questions we ask them are the dead speaking. When we ask them a question, that's them speaking. And the things, so the things we say to them are them speaking. The things they say to us are our own thoughts. That's a tricky thing that people don't get. You know, why might this be so? Without a body, they are evoked in the formative forces, the constitutive forces. And those aren't merely willed in to action. They're apparent. So, my gosh, this is just a lot of stuff to give people in one episode. But I don't care. I wanted to talk about the dead today. It's the 150th episode. Here we go. We're almost at the end anyway. So, when the dead speak, when we hear their voice or when we hear them talking to us, that's us talking to them. Because they events. And when we talk to them, that's them speaking to us. Because we events their presence inwardly. So they appear through a combing lane with our psyche. So, again, like this is why sounds can be really terrible. There's an attempt to reverse this flow to make the dead speak directly. It's like the organs of the dead are being made to function backwards. If you want to know what that's like, like a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of it is like, "Sveegi, nin-nin-inward breath." That's such a gross. You probably all thought it was like going crazy. Speaking in an inward breath. Do that for 10 minutes. It fucking hurts, right? Now try to do that with every organ of your body. Just reverse it. Listen. I am just becoming aware of how much is here in this episode. already. So thank you for joining with me through all of this. Thank you. I hope there's something here for you. The next time you read a book by a dead author, think about the dead, or the next time you think about your own death, consider these processes. Consider the world around you as the kingdom of the dead, or the next time you consider a truly bodyless communist community without private property, think of the dead, or maybe you'll be listening to this, and I will be dead when you listen to it, or maybe you're listening to this and I'm alive, but the dead are present right now, and they're experiencing the feelings and attentiveness that have arisen you as you listen to this, and they're connecting to you through it right now. All right, thanks for listening.