Episode 324: Irruption of the Sacred

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do. In the end, you will understand.

0:30The Great Enfoss has spoken!

0:35Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

0:43Who are you? Who are you? I'm a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man.

0:54They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:04Anybody can have a brain.

1:08You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers. Dave, Happy New Year. Happy New Year, Tamler. Trump invaded Venezuela. ICE just assassinated a lady in an SUV in Minneapolis, and a Texas A&M philosophy professor was told to remove Plato readings from his syllabus because of state laws on covering gender and race in the classroom.

1:39Is this a Happy New Year, really? I thought you were going to ask me to rank these in order of greatness.

1:48Which one made America the greatest? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. You know, I didn't have high hopes. I had some hopes that it was going to, like, usher in the new year with a little bit of peace. Based on what? Nothing. Based on absolutely nothing. Just a general optimism. Yeah. I need to get off of Twitter. Like, it's just actually, like, it's actually been sucking my brains out through a straw. It does feel like I've never been in the camp of this is Nazi Germany all over again.

2:21It's a fascist regime. But I'm getting closer to that camp. It feels like every week. I just hope that when it's all over, it will be, like, a quick, like, atomic detonation. Yeah. And we won't even really, we'll all die together and we won't feel it. Yeah. That would be, yeah. I would take that. That could work. The Texas A&M thing is fucked up. Yeah. This is, like, both on your home turf and on your home turf. Like, this is Texas and Play-Doh. Like, two things that are just, like, it's pretty much all about you.

2:53Yeah. I mean, so the reason it's Play-Doh, it's not like you're not allowed to teach Play-Doh at all anymore at Texas A&M. This was a professor teaching contemporary moral issues. And I don't know if it's through a textbook or something, but there's modules. And one of the modules is gender and race ideologies. And, you know, according to the professor, he just presents these readings. And you can talk about how good the arguments are or whatever. But Texas A&M has, their regents have been very strongly out in front of not wanting to run afoul of these laws.

3:28Like, we're told at U of H, I hope I can say this, that as long as it's part of the class, as long as it can be defensible as part of the topic of the course, you can talk about whatever you want. But apparently that's not the interpretation that Texas A&M regents are taking. And, you know, it could just be a matter of time. It could be because Texas A&M is one of the more conservative groups of regents in the state. It's bad times.

3:59It's crazy, though. Like, yeah, obviously the other things we mentioned are more tragic. But when I saw what the letter was that they sent that professor. Yeah. I was like, if I got that letter, like, I think I'm just entitled now, given the sort of comfortable life that we've had of saying whatever the hell we want in class. In your liberal enclave, your bubble. Yeah. But, like, if I got something saying, hey, we looked over your syllabus, everything looks good, just remove this section. I'd be like, motherfucker, what? Like, are you fucking kidding? No, totally. And the reason that Plato is relevant to the gender thing is because of his discussion of, like, the split souls.

4:33Is that right? Yeah. But there's no, like. No, yeah, I know. I'm just. Yeah. That's in the symposium. That discussion. And maybe, I don't know if he's doing Republic, but it's book five of the Republic is where he gets real. Like, women can be soldiers and rulers, too. As long as they're up to it. Yeah. As long as they've been bred properly. So, you know, it seems also just blatantly unconstitutional. And that's what I don't get. Like, it seems like this professor, you know, I'm sure he's already contacted FIRE and various academic freedom organizations, but it doesn't seem like a particularly close case.

5:09It's a public university. If the First Amendment means anything, it means this. Like, we get a lot of defenses from the First Amendment that private universities don't get. Yeah. We get a lot of protection because it's a public university. And so the First Amendment applies in a way it doesn't in a private university. So I really don't understand how this is possible. Maybe it's just, well, do you want to go through the hassle and the expense of suing your own institution and all that that might imply for your career?

5:41I don't know. It's crazy. I mean, we saw Florida go through this shit. But, like, it's sort of unbelievable that we're living in this country, that this is happening. I blame the anti-woke brigade. They drummed up this fucking panic and people bought it. You know, of course they're going to buy it. They already kind of think it. But if, oh, but no, these, you know, these people who are classical liberals, they also think that the universities are just overrun by Marxist gender warriors. And then they find out that, like, their followers are, like, composed of Nazis and they're like, oh, shit, I never meant it this way.

6:15Maybe we should rethink this. Yeah, motherfucker. Oh, man. We are all, as always, though, have been on exactly the right side of history throughout all of this. And that's why people come back to this podcast, to hear us talk politics. Actually, though, we're done with that now, right? Yeah. And to hear us curse. A what? And to hear us curse. That was my segue. I thought you said the anti-heroes curse. Oh, no. I think my hearing is going bad. That's going to be very bad for our podcast, actually. My family seems to think so, too.

6:49Yes, it is the anti-heroes curse. And we are anti-heroes. Yeah, so people tune in to hear us curse. To hear us say, fuck, shit, cunt, motherfucker. We'll do it all. Dickweed, cocksucker. However, what we didn't know until just a couple days ago, and thanks to Josh Weisberg for sending this article to me saying it was right up our alley, swearing improved strength through state disinhibition. I mean, did we really not know this?

7:20Don't you feel a surge of, like, when Popeye swallows some spinach, like when you say motherfucker? Don't you feel, like, your biceps just, like, getting extra deep? Yeah. Well, I was telling you before that, like, a lot of these kinds of papers, and like the Batman one to some degree, the result is interesting but not surprising. It's just when they start talking about the underlying mechanisms that it becomes farce. Yeah, we can talk about that. But let me ask you a couple things. Like, this journal is The American Psychologist.

7:53Yeah. The lead author is named Richard Stevens. I guess he's at Keele University. There's also some Alabama at Huntsville people on the paper. Like, is American Psychologist a good journal, first of all? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Like, American Psychologist is the, like, the official publication of the American Psychological Association. And, like, it's not all empirical articles. Like, it's, in fact, I mean, I haven't read it in a long time. It's usually just people writing general articles.

8:24So I didn't even realize that you could publish data in American Psychologist. But it's good. It's like the flagship sort of publication of the APA. Do you know about this literature on state disinhibition? I mean, a little bit. So, like, yeah. Broadly, there is, like, a theory on behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition. And the idea is that there are two different systems. The one that's dedicated toward, like, approach behavior and activation, like energizing. And then there's the inhibition, the fear, withdrawal, avoidance systems.

8:56And the different brain regions and mechanisms are associated with each of these different ones. And then there's also work on willpower and disinhibition, right? Like, you might think about alcohol disinhibiting. So the finding, I guess, that has been shown before is that cursing increases strength. And, like, this is straightforward enough to do. And they do it here, which is, like, you give one group of people, you tell them that they're going to say a curse word of their choosing. Another group of people, you tell them to say some sort of neutral word. Like, you make them say it at the same, like, volume.

9:28Like, it's not like one of them's screaming or not. And then you give them some strength test. And in this set of two studies, it is pushing yourself up from your chair. So, like, imagine sitting on a chair and putting your palms down on the edges of the chair and, like, lifting up your butt. And seeing how long you can hold that, which I imagine for you is, like, endless. 25 minutes, yeah. And, like, yeah, it's, like, two and a half hours if I can say fuck what I'm doing. And they actually had them stop. I don't remember what the cutoff is, but they had them stopped for their own safety.

10:03Yeah. So they wouldn't overhear them. Because if they got that perfect cocktail of swears, like, they could, like, really fuck up their shoulders. Like, call something, yeah. That would happen to me, actually. Yeah.

10:15They had these people do it, actually, like, online, like, on whatever Microsoft, whatever the Microsoft one is. They had them do it online? Yeah, yeah. And time themselves? No, they were looking at them. Oh, okay. So they had them, like. The Zoom thing? Yeah, exactly. And one of the creepy things that I read in this is that they required them to make eye contact with the researcher as they were doing it. So, like, you're told, like, look straight into the camera. Why? I don't know. I guess, you know, to keep that aspect controlled. Fascism is creeping into the, like, psych studies.

10:49Experimentalism. So can I read this paragraph, which I think is where I found the paper. It's only on page two, but it was like, oh, boy. Okay. So he says, while these effects of swearing appear to be reliable, that it increases strength, the underlying mechanism is less clear. The original theory that motivated research assessing the effects of swearing on physical performance assumed a psychophysiological mechanism linked to autonomic arousal, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, Stevens, which is him, showed that swearing behavior benefited physical performance in the absence of psychophysiological markers of this kind, prompting a shift towards psychological explanation, state disinhibition.

11:32And then he says, state disinhibition can be defined as temporarily tending towards behaviors that are undercontrolled rather than overcontrolled. So, like, this is how I feel with a lot of these psych papers. It's like, once you start talking about the underlying mechanism, you're just making shit up. Like, that's not a mechanism. That's just a term that you made up, state inhibition mechanism. And when you get into the measurement of state and disinhibition, again, not a thing that I'm convinced is real in any kind of scientific sense, then it becomes just, like, this big salad of words and numbers and Crombach alpha or whatever.

12:12Right. So, they measure a bunch of these predicted mediators that are supposed to get at inhibition or disinhibition. Flow, self-confidence. Yeah. And there are literally, like, three-question Likerscale things, mostly. Yes. Oh, distraction is one, which is probably... And distraction. Which is why they probably made them stare into the eyes of the... Except it says that they measured it by asking them, the word distracted me from thinking about other things on a scale of zero to a hundred. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I agree with you in that I think that behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation are things, like, in the sense that some people are inhibited and sometimes you avoid things and sometimes you approach things.

12:53Whether or not you can measure them with a three-item measure of inhibition, I don't believe. But is it a mechanism? State disinhibition? Like, is that a mechanism? No, no, I agree with you. Yeah, yeah, okay. No, I agree with you. Like, I think that it's actually pretty fucking weird that they would say that it's not physiological arousal because, like, it has to be some physiology. Like, you can't really say that this doesn't involve greater muscle activation. Right. Like, it would have to. And I think that they're probably just not measuring the right physiological thing because, actually, it turns out that measuring physiological stuff is noisy and very difficult to do.

13:31Yeah, vexed for a whole bunch of other reasons. A whole bunch of other reasons. Yeah, so that there's these self-report things that are used as mediators. I just don't buy at all. Like, I don't, it's sort of assuming a whole bunch, but one of the things it's assuming is that I have any access to, like, what's making the curse words work. Yeah, well, it doesn't ask you what makes it work. It's trying to get the extent to which the state disinhibition mechanism is firing up. That's right. What I mean, yeah, no, but why this works, why it works to say curse words to make you stronger.

14:02Like, that's the mechanism. But the way they do that, they don't ask you were you disinhibited because that would be too straightforward and probably actually much like, I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous from the get-go. But I think that would be better than measuring psychological flow, self-confidence, humor as a way of determining whether you were disinhibited or not. Yeah. I don't even think, though, that you can get, so, like, the humor questions are, like, saying this word, like, was funny to me. Yeah. So, like, the assumption really is, like, imagine that that's a plausible mechanism, right?

14:36Like, maybe that is actually what's going on. Oh, like, saying the word seems funny to me and that's sort of, like, loosening me up so that, like, I do this better. Yeah. The assumption that I could tell you on, like, some scale that, like, it's funny six out of seven to me and that that would adequately be tracking how funny it actually was and how much that was causing me. And what that connection is to the mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. So, even if some reason, like, this was the actual mechanism, I don't buy at all that you would find it during this kind of study. Right. Even if you're just trying to measure, say, psychological flow to see how much you are in a flow state.

15:10Like, I don't know how much I was in a flow state by, like, when I'm doing push-ups or something like that. No. Like, the only way it makes sense is to have, like, some sort of measure, like, afterwards, say, like, if something about flow means you lose track of time, then I would think, okay, after you're done with the task, I ask you how long did it take that you might be, like, worse off, like, worse at assessing that. Also, I don't think you can get into flow. I don't think anybody who's, like, studies flow would think that you can get into flow by cursing for 60 seconds or whatever, you know.

15:41But maybe in response to these concerns, they did a second experiment which employed a novel means of assessing state disinhibition in the context of swearing, bystander apathy. When I read that, I thought, I must be, like, this must be a misprint. What could bystander apathy tell us about state disinhibition and how are they going to measure that in this context? But they did. So explain this to me. I'll be honest with you. I read, when I got to that part, I read bystander apathy and I kind of stopped, like, honestly.

16:18So, like, as I read it and I was like, this is meaningless. So they had participants read vignettes describing scenarios in which someone needed help and rated their likelihood, speed, and extent of helping. But I don't understand. I don't understand. What does that possibly have to do? I have zero. I mean, I'm sure, without looking at it, because I didn't dig into this either, but without looking at it, he did a previous study that found a correlation between, like, what you say in a bystander apathy vignette and how some bullshit way that he measures state disinhibition.

16:53That's what I would guess. And so now, now they think you can just measure state disinhibition, again, bystander apathy. It's just. No, it makes no sense. They don't even, they don't even describe it. They don't even say why. It's such a short thing where they just say, like, it was hypothesized that it would decrease bystander apathy, state behavioral inhibition, cognitive anxiety, and negative emotion. Wait, that would increase inhibition. So they would be, if they were less apathetic, that means they're more disinhibited?

17:28I guess, because bystander apathy is inhibition. So less apathy is more disinhibition. Anyway, it didn't show an effect. They were wrong. Turns out separate mediation analysis showed no mediating effect for bystander apathy or flow. It's one of the more convoluted. I mean, I know we always say this. I think I've used that word probably 80% of the time. But, like, one of the most convoluted ways to try to measure something that itself might not be real. Certainly not in the way you're conceptualizing it. It's crazy. It's in your good journal that reps your organization, you know, your professional.

18:02They should have left good enough alone. Because if it were just the finding, cursing makes you stronger, and they had, they just all day showed, like, as apparently they did in a previous paper, that's kind of an interesting finding. I would, like, I would report that. I would tell people, you know, I'd tell my mom, like, hey, cursing makes you stronger, so don't knock my, like... And you know that. Think of a guy dunking a basketball and, you know, like, the shit that they say when they're doing that. Or tennis players, as they say. Yeah, like, when you're on, like, the 12th rep of, like, lifting weights or something, you know. Like, of course it helps.

18:32But I think somebody had already done that. Like, they're not going to publish. I think he had. I think he had already done it. But I think even other people had done it. He had done stuff trying to link it to state disinhibition. Or trying to disprove that it was psychophysiological. That it was psychophysiological. I like, though, how the abstract starts. It says, swearing, often dismissed as socially inappropriate.

18:57And then the public significance statement, which is great to make them do. In many situations, we hold ourselves back. And in doing so, limit our opportunities for success. I don't think that's what the story of the disinhibition is. I feel like most of the time, it's that you're probably holding yourself back from doing something pretty bad. Like a, don't hold back, curse. Yeah. To readily available intervention that appears to encourage us to, quote unquote, not hold back. And instead, quote unquote, go for it a little more.

19:27The study shows that swearing can improve physical performance. And it works by helping people feel focused, confident, and less distracted. I think that I'm going to use this as defense of cursing in lectures. Because it makes me feel more confident and less distracted. More focused. Totally. It reminds me of that South Park where Cartman pretends he has Tourette's. That's such a good episode. That was a great episode.

19:56Shit, fuck, cart!

19:58Sorry, it's just my condition. I mean, it is funny because I totally buy it. But again, I didn't need a study that demonstrated it like this. And the theory stuff, anytime they start talking about underlying, has there ever been a study where they've talked about underlying mechanisms, but like psychological mechanisms as he's talking about it, that people feel like, yeah, that's probably right. Like, has that ever happened? I'm sure it has. I'm sure it has plenty of times.

20:29I'll get back to you on which ones. Which ones, yeah. All right. All right. Oh, do we ever say what we're going to talk about in the main? No. Oh, shit. All right. What are we talking about in the main, because this is your jam. Yeah, the main segment we're talking about a chapter from Murcia Eliade's book, The Sacred and the Profane. So some religious scholarship. I'm trying to bring some religion to Tumblr. Yeah, and you know, I remember way long ago, 13 years ago and more maybe, when you created the iTunes description, you said in the description that we were characterized by a marked inability to distinguish the sacred from the profane.

21:10Really a disinhibition problem. Yeah, but we've worked on that by swearing a lot, and we will swear a lot in the next segment just to make sure we're in a flow state and feeling confident. All right, we'll be right back to talk about The Sacred and the Profane.

21:42We'll be right back.

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25:35every month and we will answer it in video form for you, audio form for everybody else. Thank you so much for all of your support, all of the ways you reach out to us. It means so much to us. It's why we do the podcast. Thank you. All right. For our main segment today, we're going to discuss, as we said, the first chapter of this is the only time I'm going to pronounce it this way, Mircea Eliade. Like I looked up the Romanian way. Nice. Because to be honest, I never knew how to say his name. His name.

26:05Mircea Eliade. Mircea Eliade. Yeah, that's right. Romania. So his 1961 book, The Sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion, the first chapter of it, in which he describes sort of this theory of the concept of sacred space and time and how humans relate to the world and experience it as sacred in these two categories, sacred and profane. So just a brief introduction to the man, the scholar. Eliade was a Romanian, like you, historian of religion, scholar of comparative religion.

26:37He also wrote fiction, which I didn't know. Yeah. He wrote a couple of novels or novellas. And he fled Romania after World War II, eventually landing after some stints in Paris and some other places at the University of Chicago. And he really is widely regarded as one of the most influential religious scholars of the 20th century. Like he founded this school of religious scholarship, the University of Chicago. It was one of the key figures at Chicago in religious scholarship. And that's a great school when it comes to religious scholarship. And that work is really foundational to a lot of modern religious scholarship.

27:09I first came across his work in my sociology of religion classes, where there was a discussion of sacred and profane. And I think that's what his work is best known for, this distinction between sacred and profane, which he viewed as two fundamentally different modalities of experience. So in this book, he argues that the experience of what he calls like pre-modern or religious humans or sometimes primitive humans, was one in which the sacred, both sacred space and sacred time, were fundamental aspects of existence.

27:40And according to him, the distinction here is that the sacred is, among other things, ordered, structured, and real. Like the only thing that's truly real. Yeah. It's like an ontological claim that he's making. Whereas the profane, those aspects of the world that are not sacred, is fundamentally disordered, chaotic, amorphous, and less real. And he claims that the religious man lived, or at least strove to live in the sacred, so that they made an effort to always be in the sacred space and time.

28:10And so for him, religious man saw the intrusion of the sacred, so the appearance of sacred everywhere. Whereas us, us modern men, have been desacralized. And for us, the world is nothing but regular old matter. And we've removed ourselves from this sacred dimension and experience. And I think he thinks there are implications to this. Existential implications, implications about meaning, and maybe just fundamental metaphysical implications. He has this line where he says, it must be added at once that such a profane existence,

28:44which you're kind of attributing to us, the moderns, you know, the disenchanted modern people, post-enlightenment. He says that it's never found in the pure state. To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. This will become clearer as we proceed. It will appear that even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of our

29:14religious valorization of the world. But he doesn't really get into that in this chapter. So I'm kind of curious. I don't know if you know, like, what he's referring to there. Yeah, no. So he hints at it in this chapter. So he says, properly speaking, there is no longer any world. There are only fragments of a shattered universe. I love that. An amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society. But then he does say that even for the most, frankly, non-religious man, all these places

29:48still retain an exceptional, a unique quality. So here he's talking about like your birthplace, the scenes of your first love, certain places in the foreign city that you visited in your youth. He says they are holy places of his private universe as it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through ordinary daily life. And he calls it, I love this, crypto-religious behavior. Hmm. Yeah. So what did you think? I thought it was super interesting. There's a couple of things that I really liked about it or ideas that I found provocative.

30:20And, you know, I want to talk about them with you. But certainly this idea of this space that human beings are going around and without any conception of the sacred, they can't orient themselves. There's no direction anywhere. And so they have to consecrate. What's the word that he uses? Hierophany is the turning place from profane to sacred. And, like, these tribes have sticks where they do that. A lot of people build temples or churches or something that makes that area sacred.

30:59And everyone wants to live as close to that. They want to be in that. Because when you have that, now you have directions. You have north, east, south, and west. You have, like, the cardinal directions. But I think also metaphorically you have a way of orienting your life so it's not just chaotic, like, epicurean atoms colliding against each other. So I thought that was really interesting. This idea of it's actually pure being, whereas the profane world is less real, more of an illusion.

31:32Obviously that has a lot of parallels with, you know, Plato. But then also, you know, I think Buddhist thought on this issue. But, you know, the whole thing is very cool. Sometimes I did wonder if ultimately, even though he's talking about all these tribes and it does seem like a more western-oriented way of looking at religion than eastern. But I'm not even sure about that. I think, you know, he says at the beginning that this isn't about the philosophy.

32:05Like, we're not talking about, like, articulated metaphysics of any kind. This is just how, like, ordinary people are. And even if Buddhism, you know, probably would reject a claim that, like, space is different everywhere. Like, I think they think, like, fundamentally everything is space. And it is homogenous. Or at least real space is homogenous. It infuses everything, including the stuff that we misinterpret. But then, you know, that's probably, you know, if you go into the texts, they'll talk like

32:38that. And the philosophy texts will talk like that. But, you know, having been to Japan a couple summers ago, like, there is so many temples you can visit and things that you're supposed to do when you get to a shrine of some kind. I mean, they're everywhere. So it could just be that what he's describing are how people actually live rather than, you know, some kind of underlying theology or cosmology. So, yeah. In that case, I think it's, yeah, it's a really fascinating piece of anthropology.

33:09Yeah. You know, it's very Joseph Campbell-y where, you know, he's using examples from various religions, traditions, like both, you know, some indigenous stuff, like some native Australian tribes, but then also just the religions of, and here's where I'll say, like, it is Eastern in that Israel and Mesopotamia are Eastern, but it's not far. But I mean, like, Judeo-Christian, yeah, in that sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Muslim. So, yeah, but I agree with you that this is, I think, his view of just the relation of,

33:40like, the average, everyday sort of person to the world around them. You brought up, I want to say a couple things about the hierophany or hierophany, I don't know how to pronounce it, which is his word. Like, he made up this word to have a broader term than theophany, which is, like, the appearance of God, because he wants a word for, like, the broader sort of appearance of the sacred. So, he says, every sacred space implies a hierophany, an eruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively

34:13different. And he gives the example of Jacob in his dream of the angels ascending and descending on the ladders. And I like this, like, idea of this, he spells eruption, I-R-R-U-P, eruption of the sacred into the mundane world. How is that different from eruption? Is it like... I don't know. Is it like someone coming or something? Yeah, I don't know. The eruption of the... It's a splooging of the sacred. I mean, there are some cosmogenes that have the gods splooging in order to create the world.

34:46The distinction, too, I was going to say, like, it does resonate, I think, like, with everything that I've learned about some of those ancient Mesopotamian, like, views, and broader. Like, the views that before creation, there was chaos. And he often calls the profane, like, a homogenous space. It's just, like, no direction, no differentiation. It is, like, sort of the chaos, the monsters of the primeval sea, like, the serpent of chaos.

35:16And, like, what the sacred does is it comes in and it orders things. And so long as you're within the sacred space, you have, like, as you were saying before, meaning and direction. But everything outside of it leaves you just not only just uncomfortable, but he thinks... And this is where it starts getting a little confusing to me, like, what he really believes about the metaphysics. But just like he thinks, less real. Yeah, less real. You're living in an illusory world. And that way, there's a lot of consonants, I think, with the kind of Buddhist idea of the

35:47fundamental unreality of much of experience. But at the same time, that's not incompatible with the idea that everything fundamentally is homogenous space. So that's what I don't totally get, is does he think that in this way of looking at it, not his personal beliefs, but in his way of looking at it, is the cosmos the real, you know, is the real ultimately homogenous of something?

36:17But it's, yeah, I guess not, because it's ordered. Yeah, it's ordered. And there's orientation there. So it is something about, to be real, there has to be a center. There has to be a center of, like, location-wise, and I guess, metaphorically speaking, a center too. Yeah, and this is why I think, like, a lot of what he's talking about here, about, like, what a sacred space is, is sometimes described as, like, a portal. Yeah, this is cool. That's cool stuff. Yeah, and I think that it is kind of platonic, or even Kantian, where he thinks that the only

36:52real thing is the forums or the noumena, or the, like, the place where the gods are. And what we are in now is some sort of chaotic existence of the material world. And it is only when we demarcate spaces, and they have to be demarcated by this hierophany. So he says, like, and that really requires either something sacred happening, or there being a sign. Yeah. Or, in some cases, engaging in a ritual. But he really thinks it's not, like, it's not that humans can go around choosing which

37:23spaces are sacred. It is either shown to them by, like, the appearance of the sacred, or a sign pointing to this being sacred. Or, in some cases, you, like, sacrifice. You let the blood of the animal shed, and, like, that marks it as sacred. But even then, it's, like, because the gods kind of told you where to put it. Is that always true? Like, I thought when he's talking about people, you know, settling in areas and consecrating where they are, it is something that they choose. Maybe they don't see it that way. Maybe they feel like there's a sign, but...

37:55I think they think that it's a sign, or at least they're pretending like it is a sign. Yeah. To the point where he gives us an example, this tribe that was, like, so separated from their, was it their sacred pole? Oh, yeah. That, like, they just ended up, like, dying. Like, they just gave up. Yeah, they had this stick that would do this hierophony, you know, it was, like, a ritual. It was, like, the center, yeah. Yeah, and so it could create centers, and then I think it, like, it broke or something, and so they just all laid down and died.

38:26Yeah. Like, I couldn't believe, like, I was, like, I think I wrote, like, is this true? Is that real? I know. This is where it's very Joseph Campbell-y. So I'm just going to read, like, a section where he's talking about the, the sort of the axis of the world. He's talking about mountains. He talks about Palestine, a mountain that was so high that it was protected from the flood. He says, In a number of cultures, we do, in fact, hear of such mountains, real or mythical, situated at the center of the world. Examples are Meru in India, Harabere Zayti in Iran, the mythical mount of the lands in Mesopotamia,

38:58Gerizim in Palestine, which, moreover, was called the navel of the earth. And remember, Campbell talks about the navel of the earth, too. Consequently, the territory that surrounds it and that constitutes our world, quote-unquote, is held to be the highest among countries. This is stated in the Hebrew tradition. Palestine, being the highest land, was not submerged by the flood. According to Islamic tradition, the highest place on earth is the Kaaba, because the pole star bears witness that it faces the center of heaven. For Christians, it's Golgotha. And so, you know, he's tossing in a lot of examples that support, support his view.

39:30But sometimes the method, I'm a little bit like, all right, but what about this? Yeah, I mean, is he cherry-picking or not? It's also not that impressive when they're both Abrahamic religions, you know. But I do buy it completely, like, that there is this. Again, I would say, like, the idea is that when you do that, you proclaim yourself at the center of the world. And I guess that's the biggest divergence that I see if I understand the kind of non-dual traditions in what I'm calling Eastern, but I guess is just Buddhist-Hindu thought.

40:03There is no center. We're centerless. Like, you are trying to get rid of the idea that you're at the center of the world. You're not trying to create a new center because you don't think that there is one. There's just infinite in all directions of wakes-aware space. So, like, that's where I don't know if this is. But again, that might be just metaphysics. That's like using Plato as a counterexample or something like that. Like, it's not how people actually behave. Right. You know, for what it's worth, he knew a lot about the Indian tradition, the Hindu tradition.

40:37He spent a lot of time in India studying. Like, I think that's where he did his dissertation. But we don't get much of it. I think he talks about more in the next chapter, which is about sacred time. And he talks about cyclical time, which is obviously very important in the Hindu tradition. And how he thinks that once we adopted this sort of view of linear time, that we're also kind of alienated from the truth. Oh, I want to read that chapter, too. Yeah, yeah, I know. So, this is also, like, ends up being central.

41:07I don't know if he coins the term here. But later on, he talks in his other writings, he talks about the eternal return. Not in, like, the Nietzschean sense, but what he means is that when humans engage in ritual, what they are doing is they're participating in the cosmogony. Like, they're participating in the acts of the gods. And in that way, that participation is connecting them to it. And the cyclical time for him was a much better way of understanding that. Like, you're repeating things that have happened in the past and that will happen again in the future.

41:40And he thinks that, like, adopting linear time is sort of another way of losing sight of the sacred. Yeah. And, you know, like, to add on the Joseph Campbell stuff, like, we were just doing Marcus Aurelius' meditations. And he has that view of time, too. And I think for similar reasons, you know, and this idea that when we act rationally, we are closer to what the gods are doing. We are more like gods. And that's because of that more real. So, like, I do buy that there is considerable overlap.

42:12And I think this is what people like Jung and Joseph Campbell are kind of pointing at. Yeah. And actually, Eliadi refers to archetypes, not in the union, like in the fleshed out union sense, but that he is referring to sort of like the acts of the gods that we are repeating. You know, there's something that, like, I connected from some other readings I've been doing that is, like, so interesting to me that I wanted to, like, just share. Because it's about the Jewish tradition and the construction of the temple and then the eventual destruction of the temple.

42:45So, in early Israelite religion, or Judahite, the temple was, like, of fundamental importance. But not just the temple, the land. And so, when you look at the early writings, you get Jehovah described as being assigned to these people in this land. So much so that, like, even if you're an Israelite and you're outside of Israel, like the land of Israel, like, you don't have the same rules that apply to you. Or if you're a foreigner and you're not Jewish, if you're in the land of Israel, all the shit applies to you.

43:16But, like, the temple was the center of that. And, like, it was important because of its physical space. Like, it was that spot that mattered, right? And so, here's what happens in, like, the 6th century BCE. There's the Babylonian captivity, right, where the Jews, like, at least the southern kingdom, the ones from Judah, are all taken away from Israel into Babylon. And they spend a lot of time in Babylon separated from Israel. And it's during that time that a lot of what we consider the Bible, like the Old Testament, is written.

43:50And you see this shift because now you have, like, a real just upending of, like, just the basic metaphysics of the religion. Yeah, you've got to be close to the temple. Yeah. They're, like, away from the temple. The temple doesn't exist. They're away from their land. So what happens? The religion of Judaism becomes way more focused on identity markers that are independent of geography and location. And so then you have, like, a focus on diet and a focus on circumcision and a focus on just obeying the law.

44:21And that's what makes you a Jew. Whereas before, that stuff wasn't nearly as important as sacrificing in the temple. Like, you go to the temple and you sacrifice. And then they weren't allowed to sacrifice anymore, right? And so you have, like, this shift. And some people say, early on, what you had was a Yahweh that was the Lord of Israel who ruled over that people and that geography. And now what you get is an abstracter God that rules over everyone. So even though we're now in Babylon, the Lord is the Lord of us and the Lord of this land.

44:53Like, he's actually the Lord of everything. And you get this, like, real push towards monotheism. That's really interesting. Isn't that so fucking interesting? So because of the fucking Babylonians, we had to get our dicks, like, parts of our dicks cut off. If we had just, like, beaten them, like, we could have, like, whole penises. So here's where you have, like, a difference. I mentioned briefly that I learned about this stuff in sociology of religion. But you get a real disagreement between Eliade and the sociologists of religion, even though he was before him, like Durkheim,

45:24who I think was the first person to really talk about sacred and profane in religious scholarship. But you get more modern sociologists of religion, like this guy, Peter Berger, who wrote a book called The Sacred Canopy. I like that guy. Who makes use of this concept. And so in some ways he agrees with Eliade. But what he disagrees about is whether this is really about ontology. What he thinks is what the sacred is is social construction. It's agreement. It is what people decide is important to them. And sometimes that's space and time, and sometimes that's other laws.

45:56And so that can account for why a religion can go, like, the Jewish religion can go from being focused on holy places to being focused on things like other external signs of behavior. Whereas what they would say is for Eliade, it should be, like, kind of just, like, earth-shattering to the religion to be ripped apart from their sacred places. Yeah, right. They should just lie down and die like the people with the sticks. I mean, you could see, I don't know which one of these is right, but this ingenious workaround of maybe at first people did lay down and die when they were.

46:32And then, like, a new theology kind of arises where, as you were saying, like, it's the God is no longer up in everybody's business. And, like, he's a God of everybody and he's kind of receding a little bit. And Jews are characterized by, yeah, these non-spatial markers. And they're also kind of identified as wanderers, you know, like these kind of wandering tribes that are always moving from one place to another. And that's kind of, you know, there is something really kind of captivating about that idea that it's not just kind of a random thing of, well, this just happened to be important to us.

47:12It's a result of all these other factors. Right. And not to bring the modern world into it too much, but, like, it never quite left them that there is the sacred space that is theirs by birth, right? Just as you have Islam and Christianity claiming that these spaces are so sacred, even though our religion might be more abstract and not really, you know, I don't have to be in Israel or I don't have to go to pilgrimage if I can't. You should try. No, no, totally. Like, Israelis used to say to me all the time, you're Jewish.

47:44How come you don't live in Israel? I'd be like, because I don't. Like, my parents are here. I go to college here. Now you can just say the Babylonian fucking captivity. The exile. Yeah, no, but I think that's right. You know, there's actually a big break. There's a big division between Jewish people on that exact question of what importance is Israel. Well, obviously, there are huge consequences to a big group proclaiming a lot of importance to it. And, you know, I'm sure that's true a lot of places. But, you know, there is the Jewish diaspora.

48:16There were people who were anti-Zionist at the time. Like, a whole – like, a very significant percentage of Jews were against this idea because they were comfortable in their identity as – they didn't want to be killed by the Nazis. So, like, there might have been practical reasons, but this idea of we have to live there as Jews, if we are going to be good Jews, that's something that was rejected and continues to be rejected by many of us, many of the chosen. The chosen ones here.

48:48And so the other thing is that, like, a lot of these sacred spaces are, like, deliberately described as kind of microcosms. So, like, the Temple of Israel, he talks about a lot where there is the courtyard. The courtyard is the external world, like the chaotic world. And then you go into the holy place, and that is the actual reality of the world. And then you go into the holiest of holy places, and that is, like, where God actually dwells. And that is both intended to mirror the structure of the real reality, like whatever noumenal realm the gods inhabit.

49:24And it's also, like, this tunnel to the higher plane. Yeah. And then he describes later on often a tunnel to the, like, even more chaotic world beneath it. Yeah. And I don't know if it's more chaotic or if it's, like, also sacred but in a bad way. Yeah. Because I think, you know, if you talk about, like, Hades in the Greek religion, that's, you know, as ordered as Olympus in many ways. It's just, like, you don't, like, it can be very bad to be there. And so I wasn't sure if it's any less sacred than the real, in the way he's understanding sacred.

50:01There might be real orientation there. It's just orientation towards the bad instead of orientation towards the good. Yeah. So as I was thinking about this, like, if this is taken as, like, something deep about our psychology, like, let's set the metaphysics aside, that as he says, even modern humans can't escape this, like, that we're crypto-religious. I had to admit to myself, yeah, I'm very crypto-religious about spaces in this sense. Like, there are some places that I go because I really feel this connection.

50:31Like, I'll give you some dumb examples. I remember going, like, two hours out of my way to the high school that Rod Serling went to and where there's, like, a historical plaque because I was a fan of the Twilight Zone and because it's, like, here in upstate New York. And I was like, I got time. I'm just going to go. And, like, taking pictures and really feeling something. Or another example is, like, I went to this, there's a place in Queens, in Jamaica, Queens, where a tribe called Quest filmed a video. And now there's this huge mural on the side of a wall that's a tribe called Quest.

51:02And I went there, like, just an idiot, just, like, drove to this little fucking neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens, and sat there and just stared at it, like, getting emotional, you know? And it's like, why is the actual physical location important? And, you know, I don't know why, but it feels deep to me. Like, it feels like somebody stood here, you know? I mean, people, and Eliza and I hope to be, you know, join this group of people. They travel across the country to go to the town in Washington where Twin Peaks was filmed and to go to the house, Laura Palmer's house.

51:37And the woman who owns the house has been very welcoming of all these people. You know, she's the person, mild spoiler, won't mean anything to you if you haven't seen it, who opens the door at the end. I remember reading that, yeah. So that's literally a pilgrimage that people make. They call it a pilgrimage. So I think that's one example where I'm like you. But then I also think this is true. If you've lived away from home for as long as I have, you know, and by home here I mean Boston, where I grew up. It was about, I don't know, eight or nine years ago I went back there with my brother.

52:10I hadn't been back there in like 10 or 15 years. I was literally floored, like going in my old neighborhood and seeing all these places. Like I imagine that's what religious like Christians feel when they go into Notre Dame or something like that. Yeah. When they come out of the tunnel and they like to play football in Notre Dame. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, Fenway is a cathedral as well for me, for sure, right? Oh, yeah. I was talking to my cab driver on the way back from the airport in JFK and we were talking, he was just like going off about like how tearing down Yankee Stadium was like this sacrilege.

52:49Yeah, right. It's a sacrilege. It's unholy. I think if people tried to do that, we did that with the Boston Garden and that was terrible. Even though they built a place right across the street, it was – And they kept the floor, right? They kept the floor. Yeah, exactly. This is exactly, I think, the shit that he's talking about, like keeping the floor. Crypto-religious arena. Yeah. I mean, you know, Hall of Fames are our ways of connecting. Like there's so much, I think, where we do it. Now, you could try to do a deflationary kind of explanation. You could say, well, of course you go back home and there's all these memories and, you know, like they're triggering those memories.

53:23I don't have memories of a tribe called – Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, and it is hugely important. I think home has this effect more broadly. Like home, it's just that word evokes the sacred and maybe just is the sacred. And, you know, that's why I think we're so repulsed or repelled by when things go wrong in the home. It just – it feels like it's either been desacralized or been gone from holy to passing through profane into like the hell regions.

53:55Right. So, yeah, I do want to read when he talks about the differences. He has this description of the modern man and he describes it with respect to human habitation because before he had said that, you know, you have the temple and then you have people trying to make their homes also be this reflection of their houses, be this reflection of the cosmology too. And then there's us. They're mezuzahs. Yeah. I mean, yeah, mezuzah is a good example of that, right? Like so he says, for us, let's consider the formula of a famous contemporary architect, Le Corbusier.

54:32The house is a machine to live in. Hence, it takes its place among countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies. The ideal house in the modern world must first of all be functional. That is, it must allow men to work and to rest in order that they may work. You can change your machine to live in as often as you change your bicycle, your refrigerator, your automobile. You can also change cities or provinces without encountering any difficulties aside from those that arise from a difference in climate.

55:04And this is true in so many domains. I feel like it is a good description of how we have transformed these sacred things into something that can just be cogs for the capitalist machine to churn forward. Right. It's cookie cutter. Yeah. And, you know, as much as I think it's important to have public housing for people who can't afford housing, like you when you look at what public housing became, like Section 8 housing in New York, it feels like it's robbing people from having a home in the sense that like they're just randomly assigned to like cookie cutter apartment and don't get to have that specialness of it.

55:45But I mean, we all don't really like it's not like I bought this house and waved a stick over it or, you know, or rented. No, but some people do, you know, have you seen people do like fucking, they do things like sage, you know, they'll burn some sage. We do rituals and like maybe a vestige of it is the housewarming party where people bring you items. Yeah, you're consecrating the house with this gift. Yeah. Or I feel this way, like I'm not really moved in until a specific thing is here. Like in that thing, you know, sometimes it's like my record collection or whatever it might be.

56:16Like then I finally feel like this is my new home. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, I've lived in this house for almost 18 years. It is a sacred space to me now. Yeah. But when I'm first choosing it, we rented it first. Like it was just like, yeah, this is in our price range. It looks like a nice neighborhood. You know, it's not, it's a pretty easy commute to campus. Like great, you know. Right, right. You didn't, you didn't use like a, some sort of divining rod to pick your house. No, and didn't like choose them by like, to what extent they evoked the transcendent or the, you know, the numinous space.

56:50But I do think that like, this is why I'm a little, it's hard for me to distinguish. Like, has it become sacred just because I've lived here for so long? I'm so comfortable in it and I know it inside and out and I have so many memories in it. Like I've seen Eliza go from a four-year-old to almost graduated from college in this house. So like, is that why? And calling it sacred is a stretch. That's what I'm not sure about. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that Eliade might say that just is what sanctifying is for modern man.

57:23Like those memories of Eliza growing up have now made it sacred. Whereas before it would have been some other mechanism or like some, we have like a script, like a religious formula that gives us these answers. Now we have to like create meaning in a way that like, we're not all participating in the same ritual sort of cosmogony that our ancestors were, but we're still finding some way. Because we have to, because otherwise our life has no purpose. Exactly. It's anime. And that's actually what Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy book is about.

57:53It's like, without these social constructions of the sacred, we face anime and sort of existential meaninglessness. Isolation. Total isolation. Isolation, right. Lay down and die at that point, which, you know, like maybe if you talk about like suicide rates and stuff like that, you know, Durkheim also talks about this. Right. But maybe that's our version of that tribe. Yeah, right. By the way, you reminded me of a Dave Chappelle bit where he says, right after he left his show, he went to Africa for the first time.

58:24He just flew to Africa and he said, and as soon as I landed, I finally felt like I was home because there was a McDonald's at the airport. That's funny. Okay. So here's where I think this might have incepted my wanting to talk to you about Twin Peaks because he does rely a lot on sort of native or indigenous stories. And he's talking about, I don't remember what culture he says, but the ritual construction of the space, four doors, four windows, four colors signify the four cardinal points. The construction of the sacred lodge thus repeats the cosmogony for the lodge represents the world.

58:57Yeah, like I think Lynch more broadly, Twin Peaks in particular, is all about these portals, these entryways from one plane to another. Like the lodge is, you know, you have the curtains to get into the lodge. You have the waiting room, which is not clear. Is that part of the lodge or not? You have like Laura's house is clearly a portal to something. And then there's the ring. The ring seems like once you put that on, that opens up some new plane of existence for you.

59:32It's filled with those things. And I think like, yeah, in some ways, probably our world is too. It's like when you go in, you know, if you walk into the tribe called Quest Place or, you know, people just saying something before they walk into a church. When you're on this threshold, that, you know, liminal area, there is something like deep about being in that kind of, you're not fully in the sacred, but you're no longer fully in the profane either. And that's a place that's rich with all sorts of possibilities for you.

1:00:05And yeah, I do think Lynch and Twin Peaks is very much about that. At some point, I would just need to sit and talk to you about like what the cosmogony of Lynch is and where these portals are, which ones are and what they're connecting to. Yeah. You need to watch it again. Like put your kids in like temporary foster care and rewatched. And then, you know, very temporary. You just need to rewatch those 18 episodes and then we can send them to South America. I would actually welcome. Welcome.

1:00:35Yeah. So anything else? I guess we have talked about this, but I really loved this idea when he says, if we should attempt to summarize the result of descriptions that have been presented in this chapter, we should say that the experience of sacred space makes possible the founding of the world. Whereas the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself. The world comes into existence. And this is where he talks about the eruption of the sacred. It affects a break in plane.

1:01:07That is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes, between earth and heaven, and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being into another. And it's such a break in the heterogeneity of profane space that creates the center through which communication with the transmundane is established, that consequently founds the world for the center, renders orientation possible. I mean, we've talked about a lot of that stuff, but I think that's just a beautiful description, expression of those ideas.

1:01:41And I like this idea of the real unveiling itself as you do this. Yeah, I know. I like the eruption of the sacred. I like the view for some reason of like the things we do, the structures we build, or the places that we choose are like ripping open into the actual reality. We're pulling back the curtain, you know, like it's finally going to be revealed. Yeah. Maybe actually, I was going to read another quote that maybe fits earlier when we were talking about houses.

1:02:14Exactly like the city or the sanctuary, the house is sanctified in whole or part by a cosmological symbolism or ritual. This is why settling somewhere, building a village, or merely a house represents a serious decision for the very existence of man is involved. He must, in short, create his own world and assume the responsibility of maintaining and renewing it. Habitations are not lightly changed, for it is not easy to abandon one's world. The house is not an object, a machine to live in. It is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony.

1:02:47Every construction and every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that's true to an extent for all of us, but it's definitely true for people more than for me. Like, you know, here's a good, an example of that for me is if we sold the house and moved to a different city, if they tore down my house to put in some new kind of McMansion-y thing, which has been happening in the neighborhood, that would break my heart.

1:03:18Like, if some other couple is living in this house, like, this is like a hundred-year-old house. Like, I would be really upset, you know? Like, I'd be willing to, like, sell it for lower price if they weren't going to do that, you know? Yeah, on a really similar note, the person I bought this house from, I ended up knowing, a friend of mine from here at Cornell, he had raised his children in this house. And, like, they sort of outgrew it and they got more money, so they moved. But he turned down offers that would have gotten him paid earlier so that he could give it to me, so that he could sell it to me.

1:03:52And when I told Tim Tamler, like, that we were having a daughter and that she was going to be, he started tearing up. Like, he was so happy that I was, like, having a family. Like, it was such a tender moment. I would feel the same way, yeah. Like, this is where we had Eliza when she was four. I know. So, like, I'm happy to share my sacred space with others unless they destroy it. Yeah, because it's like something that you created. Yeah, and it symbolizes the creation of the world. You know, the way he describes the cosmology, this eruption that creates a center, it's very Big Bang.

1:04:26Yeah, right. You know, so you wonder to what extent, like, our physics is, if these are these kind of primal things within us, like, to what extent our physics is just an expression of this, you know, in different forms. Yeah, right. You know what I also, I was also thinking about that, where he's talking about everybody believes that it's the center of the universe. It's, like, in an infinite universe, everything is the center. Yeah. So, like, it's nice to think that nobody's wrong. Right. No, and similarly with the Earth being a sphere, like, yeah, every place is as much a center on the surface of the Earth as anywhere else.

1:05:03Yeah. So, like, we lucked out there, I guess. Yeah.

1:05:09Suckers who live on triangles. Yeah. Like, then everyone's trying to get to the center of the triangle, you know. There's this general thing that I hear in a lot of traditions or that people say that the act of creation of any kind is sort of taking part in divinity. Like, the act of creating something, like, art or even a physical structure, making something from what is chaos, bringing some order out of the chaos, is partaking in that, like, primordial moment of creation.

1:05:42And, like, I just like thinking of that. Yeah. And we're making a podcast, Hamler. Yes, we are sanctifying your ears. We have defeated the serpent of chaos. We are Zeus who has killed Kronos. We've taken the staff.

1:05:59Yeah. So, become a Patreon supporter, you know. Partake in the sacred.