> _K: Where’d you want to start?_ R: I’m not sure yet. When you ask me that, the two things that come up are spirituality and mystery. There are things I feel pretty solid about in both of them, but I also feel a connection between them I’m more tentative about. Not sure if I want to get into it. > _K: How about you start with the stuff you’re solid on, and then if you still have anything to say on the rest —_ R: Spirituality. The main thing there is that I’ve gotten really averse to it. I get almost a disgust reaction lately. > _K: Oh, that’s kind of hilarious. You’re one of the main people that comes to mind when I think of spirituality. My impression is that you mean you’re disgusted by it in a different way than others would. Like if I asked some random project manager or car salesman. If they told me they were disgusted by spirituality, they’d mean something very different than you do._ R: Almost definitely, yeah. The way most people mean it, spirituality has been — ugh I don’t even want to use the word. The religious impulse? Sacredness? Truth? Whatever it is. It’s been a big part of my life since I started serious practice around 2015. Then it’s been the main thing in my life since maybe 2020. And it’s been the only thing in my life since the end of 2023. From most people’s perspective, it’s only becoming increasingly important to me as time goes on. So it’s a little ridiculous to say I’m averse to it. Oh, and actually, even before all this, I was born and raised in a pretty hardcore evangelical community and sent to church schools the whole way through. My elementary school was a trailer behind my parents’ church. We moved across the state so my brother and I could attend a high school that prepared us to be pastors. It had daily chapel, Bible class, church history class, doctrine class — the works. So really, I only had a couple years of my life — a sort of atheist, rationalist, rebellion phase — that wasn’t dominated by the religious impulse. And actually, even then, I spent all my time reading up on comparative religion, psychedelic shamanism, textual histories of various holy books, sociology of religious communities, art and essay and philosophy on the nature of being and how to live... Okay, so realistically, there hasn’t been a second of my life that wasn’t completely immersed in the religious impulse. I don’t imagine that’s going to change. So what am I talking about here? > _K: Forget whatever ideas you might want to say. When you feel this thing you’re calling 'aversion to spirituality,' what do you feel?_ R: A bit of hopelessness. Disgust. Oh, some embarrassment. There’s a story that sort of blooms inside me: if I keep going in the direction I’ve been going, there are predictable outcomes. I write a couple books. I run some retreats. I work with one-on-one clients or students. Oh, there’s a big aversion to “having students.” But this story comes up as like, the standard direction ahead. I’m an itinerant mystic. My whole world fell apart a couple years ago, then kept falling apart ever since. I’ve been wandering from country to country, carrying everything I own with me, studying with this guru and that Buddha, spending months living outdoors in India, months at a time in Ayurvedic hospitals, purging my body and mind, waking up in the middle of the night and dancing under the moon — blah, blah, blah. I’m exhausted just describing it in a way that highlights this 'mystic journey' narrative. And of course, I secretly-not-so-secretly love it. I revel in the myth I’ve been living out. As much as the lived experience feels nothing like the romantic vision of it, there is something satisfying about living the actual experience of it. And now I’ve had a lot of truth revealed to me. Ugh. I hate the languaging here. Is there a non-douchey way to say that I’ve had a lot of truth revealed to me? > _K: if you say the part of it that feels important to you without worrying how it sounds, what’s that version?_ R: …I think I can be an incredibly beneficial presence to the people around me and the systems we’re embedded in if I find ways to embody what’s been made clear to me. > _K: There’s still a weird tension in my throat listening to you — like you’re dancing around something, or leaving it out._ R: That feels true. And functional. I don’t think the move is to blurt everything out, any more than the move is to just hold it in. Feeling through it right now, it feels like the move is just holding things for myself and not needing to verbalize them for others, but definitely needing to embody them for myself. They can be unsaid if they’re felt. Until I embody them, I’m actually not even capable of saying them correctly. > _K: Your voice changes when you say that. It feels good. At least in me, it feels like I relax when I hear your voice change like that._ R: That reflection helps. Thanks. I think we have a very literal verbal culture that assumes we have to say everything or it isn’t real. But there’s a lot of stuff that, when you say it, it de-potentiates the real thing — the driving force under the words. Or people’s preconceptions about the words get in the way. They stop hearing the thing under the words. And what’s under the words is precious to me here. I don’t like taking risks with it. > _K: That sounds very reasonable. You were saying something about the story you’ve been living and the aversion to it — or to spirituality._ R: Yeah. I was just thinking we’d gotten off track. But when you ask that, I actually think we’re exactly, exactly on track now. This fear, disgust, embarrassment reaction to the projected future I see for myself in the spiritual world — where I write some books, do some retreats, that scene. It feels like it feeds into and feeds on this illusion that the verbalizing, explanatory, explicitness orientation is where things happen. And I think that’s a lie. Or at least the view has become so inflated and common and unquestioned that its current shape is a lie. Feeling that lie feels itchy in my organs. It’s like I imagine living that life and I want to tear my skin off and escape it. Bloodletting. Contamination. Purging. I want it out of me. I want me out of it. > _K: Jesus._ R: I’m surprised by the intensity. It really feels that way. Such an intense cellular *no* response. > *K: Is there a yes response somewhere?* R: It’s quieter. I think because the thing I’m a yes to doesn’t quite exist yet — or at least doesn’t exist to me. It doesn’t feel real to me. I feel like it doesn’t exist out there either, but that’s not a real signal one way or the other. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, from inside myself. But I do feel that way. Like it doesn’t exist. > _K: What is it?_ R: Can I get permission to be potentially oblique and poetic and sideways, and maybe do nothing but talk in circles around it? > _K: I love you, and I mean this with love: if I wasn’t down to listen to you talk in circles, we wouldn’t still be friends._ R: A.) ouch. But B.) Awww. I’m a no to the unmitigated verbal, explicit, making-legible thing. When I talk about it, I hear people say, “Hey, our tradition accepts and teaches this too. That the finger pointing at the moon isn’t the moon. That those who speak don’t know and those who know don’t speak. That silence is golden and truth is beyond understanding, and all that." And on the one hand, yes, the teaching is there, in lots of places. My immediate objection is that even this teaching is taught as explicitness and verbalization. It’s caught up in the illusion it’s trying to undermine. It’s very “do as I say and not as I do,” which isn’t how any learning works — especially not learning on these subtle embodied levels. Like I know all the times I've heard it, I often thought I understood what it meant, and I had no clue. Words were incapable of giving me a clue. And I can hear myself saying it and feel others hearing it, and sense the same dynamic — these words giving someone the illusion that they know the thing under the words. But the real thing is nowhere in my words here, I can feel it not breaking through. It's like you can only feel the thing yourself, and then after that, you can recognize the words that people drape over it. But you can't go the other direction, from hearing the words draped over it to recognizing the thing they're draped over. Everything is like this. The words are just veils. They only mean anything if you've already experienced the thing under them. Otherwise it's just syllables. Also, side note, but actually the main note: the people who talk about these teachings to me, or who I watch on video talking about this, almost uniformly talk about it from a spot like, two inches above and in front of their heads — exactly where the meta-everything verbalization explicitness virus lives. That’s its home base. > _K: While you’re saying all this, you feel where it’s coming from—where you’re speaking from._ R: Ha, yeah. I’m not speaking from that spot exactly, but I’m not miles away from it either. More like a cloud in and around my head and shoulders, based toward the front of my body — less grounded in the back. > _K: I think I want to hear you talk about this from like six inches behind the base of your spine, somewhere around there._ R: …I’m a *yes* to something deeply embodied and deeply casual, but something that feels hard to get to. The image I get is that I’m out in space, far out in the cosmos, skating, ice skating or rollerblading, through endless cosmos. There’s something out there just past the horizon of the universe, something I’m trying to get to. I can feel it. All my particles of my body are entangled with all the particles of its body. I need to get to it. It’s like love as a form of gravity or magnetism. But between me and it, there are a thousand hypermassive suns, black holes, and galaxies. Each one has an incredible gravitational pull. If I skate just a little too close this way or a little too slow that way, I fall into a gravity well that feels like it is The Thing — because it’s so natural and easy to fall into. But it’s not the actual Thing I’m entangled with, the actual Thing calling me. I have a lot of fear about that. The word *specious* keeps coming up. It means seemingly correct, but actually not correct. That’s the thing, maybe. I’m remembering Ecclesiastes: I look around at spirituality, and my whole being goes: "specious, specious — all is specious." It’s all so very seemingly correct, or it has a strong enough pre-existing attractor basin that it can make me think it’s correct. Why else would I feel so drawn to it? Why else would I fall so naturally into its gravity well? This is my distrust of religious traditions in general: I’ve studied and spent time in their sociology, their history, the way decisions get made, how canons get formed, and the political considerations that drive doctrine. The Bible includes an erotic poem because of what group held political sway when the canon was formed. The first, well, third, but first, Dalai Lama made an alliance with a warlord, and that's why his school of Buddhism became the dominant one in tibet. The institutions that survive and thrive and pass down their teachings don’t survive by being the truest. They survive by accruing gravity — by becoming enough of an attractor that people fall in over and over again and add more mass to the gravity well. This can be political power, cultural power, countercultural power, financial power... They might have a lot of truth, or they might not. They need enough truth to gain an initial gravitational momentum to pull people in, but after that, it’s kind of close to irrelevant. > _K: Well, the teachings have to improve people’s lives to a certain degree, or people just leave, right? The gravity falls apart._ R: Do they? It feels like people literally let their religions tear their lives and families and countries apart into pure hell, and they still don’t leave. > _K: I guess I was still thinking of practice-based spirituality — Buddhism and meditation and the like._ R: Even that, I think there’s a lot of flexibility. This thing that James Hillman said: "our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche." Oh god, this feels like its own whole rabbit hole. But something I perceive to be happening sometimes is that these meditation and inner-work traditions’ first step is to convince you that your mind has a certain structure and works a certain way, without ever admitting that they’re trying to convince you. They tell you that they’re just pointing out truths you can notice for yourself. But of course, exactly that action is an incredibly effective type of hypnotic suggestion. It can reconfigure you while making you feel like you’re just seeing something that was already there. Like if I tell you, “Take a deep breath and relax your shoulders.” It’s very different from if I go very soft, very slow, and tell you, “Let yourself inhale as deeply as your body wants. Then exhale as slowly as your body finds pleasurable. Do that a couple times. Now notice, as you do this, how your neck and shoulders are already relaxing, how they're already softening. It happens naturally. They just keep letting go." Both times, I’m convincing you to relax your shoulders. But in the more effective version, I’m acting like it’s simply a thing that’s happening — nothing to do with you or me, just an objective fact you can notice or not. And it is pleasurable and reinforcing to notice. I think this same dynamic goes way, way further than any of us can really realize. Our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche. If you can get people into a mode where they’re suggestible and open, while you emphasize real aspects of reality —and tell them that the thing you're emphasizing is more real than other things you could notice — there’s basically nothing you can’t get them to do or believe. No limit to the way you can reconfigure them. Our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche. So if you get someone to accept the idea that their psyche is such and such a shape, and you have a whole system that knows very well how to work with that shape, you’re in a very good position. Tell them that every mind works on kleshas and skandhas or a specific list of vices and virtues, or particular organs of energetic perception, whatever it is. Their being starts to organize more and more into that pattern. The idea about how the psyche works affects how the psyche starts to actually work. This is what I mean, in one way, by gravity and attractor basins: they can take you out of the natural trajectory of your soul, bring your soul into another trajectory, and from that trajectory, they know how to work with you. But something gets lost. You fall into the black hole and can’t get back from the event horizon. The thing you’re truly entangled with — off beyond the galactic horizon — remains unmet. You don’t actually get there. > _K: Just to check the story you’re telling here: something like... your pet rabbit is sick. You take it to a vet. The vet doesn’t know how to treat that rabbit, but she does know how to treat a cat. So she turns your rabbit into a cat and treats it. Which is great. You now have a healthy cat, but some rabbitness has been lost._ R: Yeah, that feels close. I don’t want to get too tied to the sickness model, though, because I think a lot of what is lost is more like a blooming — like an evolution, a profusion of evolved life. Imagine a forest where everything evolves super fast. You might be born a tadpole and die a leopard. Your grandkids might be trees made of light, or boars with flowers for fur, anything. Every evolutionary path is a possibility for the fullness of expression of the being who is evolving. It’s not just random mutation; it’s an unfolding of who you are. Most creatures kind of settle into a form early on and never evolve from that. Some are still mid-evolution when death catches up to them. A forest like this has endless possibility, endless potential — good and bad. The best-case scenario is every creature deeply invested in their own unfolding and the unfolding of everyone around them, the unfolding of the forest itself. But everyone recognizes that’s not going to happen, creatures are selfish and immature a lot of the time. So they have to accept being a little more defended, a little more ugly, a little more brutal than they would otherwise, just to get by, just to survive. And there turn out to be like a half-dozen default forms that basically everyone can evolve into if they want. Those forms are safe, stable, fine. They’re not really ideal or the fullest expression of almost any particular creature, any specific individual, but they’re good enough. If most creatures default to one of those templates, the forest doesn’t really hit any catastrophically bad territory. It also never gets especially vibrant or beautiful, but that’s the trade-off. You can keep things kind of in the middle zone. It’s like that. We can have a world that’s a forest of unfolding co-creative individual journeys unfolding into amazement. Or we can have a horrifying arms race of wretched beasts clawing one another for every scrap of life. Or we can protect against the latter possibility by giving up the former and end up with a forest that’s mostly a bunch of boars and oaks and pigeons and beetles. > _K: We’ve wandered off into parables, and I think I hear you, but I want to reorient. I feel like we were going somewhere and got lost._ R: I feel pulled back to where is my yes. > _K: Okay. If the literal verbal monocrop thing is a no — if spirituality is aversive to you — where’s the yes? Back from that spot in your gut and spine and behind your lower body, answer from there again._ R: I’m a yes to you. And I’m a yes to me. And I’m a yes to Sarah and Tom and Ritu and Ji Yeong and the thousand thousand individuals skating towards their own entangled horizons. I’m a yes to the exhilarated wayfinding — real deep trust in following the compass in your cells and using what you find, whatever you recognize, when it’s clearly recognized as the move that’s needed. But I’m a no to ten billion Buddhists or Christians or Jungians or psychonauts or whatever else. Any place where you go and are given a vision of reality to "notice" and reconfigure yourself around. It’s not necessary. It’s often harmful. It has this aspect of cheating off of someone else’s quiz when they are actually just given a different quiz than you are. > _K: Do you see any value in these traditions? Consolidating materials and having roadmaps and so on? I feel like a lot of people find that helpful, especially people who, like you said, your whole life is dominated by the religious impulse. Not everyone has that._ R: Yeah, there’s something I’m standing up for here, but I'm doing it clumsily. I'm not trying to stand against everything else. I'm standing up against the default dominance that these traditions often claim or want. I’m not standing up for the dominance of the thing I'm talking about, just it's right to exist. To exist proudly. I should be careful here. I often feel shocked by how something feels inside me when I say it, and how people hear it when they listen. I think the traditions serve a lot of functions, and for many people, those functions are what they’re looking for in their spirituality or in their spiritual lives. Churches have a social function, community. Meditation traditions have some omnibus function, collecting many things into one place to be referenced. They have a stabilizing function, bringing in people who are suffering and can’t find a source of meaning, and they help people manage suffering and feel meaning. There’s also a community regulation function, providing shared moral codes and vocabulary of values and so on. All of these are legitimate things to want and need from spiritual life. And there are other things people want from it that I’m less comfortable with, more on guard against. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re evil; it just means I’m less here for them. I’m standing up for something here, a vision of spirituality that many pay lip service to. People say the words, even if it’s from a couple inches above and in front of their heads, but they have zero patience for anyone to actually do the thing I'm talking about. I’m standing up for individual paths, for people to have room to let their lives unfold naturally in their own ways, not being told that years of meditation are necessary for them, or that devotional practice is essential for them, or that they have to run, not walk, to the nearest therapist or chiropractor or psychic or monastery. Not showing people some supposed answer page at the back of the book and saying "you're supposed to act like this, get started today." I'm standing up for people to look around at all of those dynamics, quietly decide "fuck that," and just follow the path that lives inside them, even when it looks weird and wrong and when it goes off on weird side-quests that may or may not turn out to have been entirely essential. This is something many will nod along to, but almost no one can actually imagine what it really looks like. And when it shows up in front of them, they’ll try to fix or manage it — turn it into a cat instead of a bunny, or instead of a seven-eyed neon moss elephant — because they don’t know what the fuck to do with that except turn it into a cat. > _K: This is making more sense, yeah. What I’m hearing here is, well, to be frank, you’re a neon moss elephant, yeah? I don’t think you or your life make much sense to most people you meet._ R: That matches my impression. > _K: And they try to turn you into a cat?_ R: Yeah. Or no — more accurate to say that they just assume that I *am actually* a cat, and that I’m just doing it wrong — so wrong that I got massive and neon and grew too many eyes, and they want to fix it. > _K: Maybe it's just the vet imagery, but I’m hearing 'fix' as 'neuter' here._ R: For sure. It feels like that — like they want to snip off my life force so I become something that they know what to do with. So I'll stop doing weird things that their spiritual books don't have a chapter for. > _K: Do you know people who accept you as the neon elephant thing?_ R: A few, yeah. Mostly, yeah. If people stick around over the long term, especially, they seem to start to see that there's a coherence and progression to the thing that I am. That I’m not just doing some other thing super wrong. And I want that for other people. …Actually I want more of it for myself too. Feeling this right now, I’m not satisfied with the degree of it that I receive, or the degree of it that I give, or the degree of it that’s present anywhere I look. > _K: We can cut this if you don’t want me psychoanalyzing you, but from what you’ve told me about growing up evangelical, it seems like this was a dynamic in your childhood, too, right? No one seeing or appreciating who you actually are — just seeing you as a faulty version of something they wanted you to be._ R: Definitely a core wound here, yeah — and something very precious at the center of that wound. It's like... this might be wishful thinking, but it feels true, it's like as the wound gets more healed, it keeps pulling in healing energy from the rest of me, and directing it outward, like the wound made a channel for it to flow outward. Like it’s not just trying to heal me, it’s trying to heal that type of wound wherever it is, whoever has that wound around me. And I get a really strong protective urge on behalf of others, on behalf of the path. There’s some way that my own defenses can get recruited to defend things that really matter. When I can really do the conscious version instead of the unconscious version. I think a lot of defenses are like that. Not that I’m especially healed or integrated in this, obviously. It’s definitely a messy area for me. But I think when our defenses get more conscious, less conditioned-reflexive, they can serve a really beautiful function, defending things and people that truly do need defending. That are healed by having someone defend them. By being treated like they matter enough to defend. > _K: Back to the original thing to wrap up: spirituality, your aversion to it, while also clearly having it as a core of your life. Does anything feel clearer about that now?_ R: I think, actually, yeah. Part of what feels clear is that there’s something in here about weird soul-led individual paths that feels very worth defending to me. And I don’t see room for those in religion, and I don’t see room for them in spirituality. I see maybe more room for them there, but not much, and not much guidance to do them without losing yourself to either psychosis or gravity wells or pure lostness. There’s something important to me here. And I’m noticing that we never got close to the second topic I wanted to talk about: mystery. And this actually feels clearly connected to mystery now, we’ll definitely need to pick that up next time. And to be clear, actually, the way I’m saying 'mystery' here is way closer to the fiction genre than to the usual spiritual connotation. > _K: Oh, well, that didn’t even occur to me. Now I can’t wait to see how that ties in. Anything you want to sign off with for now?_ R: Just that this conversation feels kind of messy, and I was thinking about how I’d want to clean it up for publishing. But I actually am thinking right now that I want to do minimal cleanup. Something about the messy process leading to slow clarity feels right.